Classic Audiobook Collection - Ribbon in the Sky by Murray Leinster ~ Full Audiobook [scifi]

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

Ribbon in the Sky by Murray Leinster audiobook. Genre: scifi Calhoun is a Med Service man, trained to carry medicine and public health to far-flung human worlds, and he is proud of doing a job where mistakes can cost lives. Then a simple human blunder in the navigation system punches his small ship off course into uncharted space, leaving him and his sharp-tempered, tree-climbing companion Murgatroyd with no clear route home. Their forced landing drops them onto a bleak colony world where a strange, glowing ribbon stretches across the sky, warming a narrow band of habitable land like an artificial sunrise. The settlers below are not united by their miracle of survival: they are split into rival communities, sealed off by terror of infection and obsessed with keeping outsiders away. As Calhoun investigates, he finds that the real danger is not only physical illness but a creeping social sickness born of isolation, rumor, and panic. When a desperate young couple tries to cross forbidden boundaries, Calhoun is pulled into a volatile clash of fear, medicine, and politics, and must use science, empathy, and nerve to keep a fragile world from breaking apart. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 01 (00:20:35) Chapter 02 (00:50:25) Chapter 03 (01:23:40) Chapter 04 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ribbon in the Sky by Murray Leinster Part 1 An error is a denial of reality, but mistakes are mere mental malfunctions. In an emergency, a mistake may be made because of the need for precipitate action. There is no time to choose the best course. Something must be done at once. More mistakes, however, are made without any such exterior pressure. One accepts the first imagined solution to a a problem without examining it, either out of an urgent desire to avoid the labor of thinking,

or out of impassioned reluctance to think about the matter at hand when prettier and more pleasurable other things can be contemplated. The Practice of Thinking, Fitzgerald It turned out afterward that somebody had punched the wrong button in a computer. It was in a matter in which mistakes are not permissible. But just as nothing can be manufactured without an ordinary hammer, figuring somewhere in the making of or the making ready to make, so nothing can be done without a valable human operating at some stage of the proceedings. And humans make mistakes casually, off-handedly, with impartial

lack of malice and unpredictability. So, Calhoun heard the tape speaker say, When the gong sounds break out will follow in five seconds. Then it made solemn ticking noises while Calhoun yawned and put aside the book, the practice of thinking, that he'd been studying. Study was a necessity in his profession. Besides, it helped to pass the time in overdrive. He went to the control desk chair and strapped in. Mergatroyd, the turmoil, uncurled his tail from about his nose,

and stood up from where he was catching twenty-drive. He patted to the place under Calhoun's chair where there were things to grab hold of, if necessary, with four black paws and a prehensile tail. Chee, said Bergeroy conversationally in his shrill trouble. I agree, Calhoun told him bravely. Stone walls do not a prison make, nor midship holds a cage, but it will be good to get outside for a change. The tape speaker ticked and talked and ticked and talked.

There was a sound of a gong, a voice said measurately. Five, four, three, two, one. The ship came out of overdrive. Calhoun winced and swallowed. Nobody ever gets used to going into overdrive or coming out of it. One is hideously dizzy for an instant, and is stooped. stomach has a brief but violent urge to upchuck, and no matter how often one has experienced it, it is necessary to fight a flash of irrational panic caused by the two sensations together.

But after an instant Calhoun stared about him as the vision screens came to life. They showed the cosmos outside the Med Ship. It was a perfectly normal cosmos, not at all the cosmos of overdrive. But it looked extremely. extremely wrong to Calhoun. He and Murgatroyd and the Med Ship were in emptiness. There were stars on every hand, and they were of every conceivable color and degree of brightness. But every one of them was a point of light and a point only. This obviously was not what he'd expected. These days, ships do not stop to view the universe from the monstrous loneliness which is between the stars. All ships go into overdrive as near

their port of departure as they can. Usually it is something like five or six planetary diameters out from the local spaceport. All ships come out of overdrive as near their destinations as computation makes possible. They do not stop to look at scenery on the way. It isn't good for humans to look at stars when there are only stars to see. The site has a tendency to make them feel small, too small. Men have been known to come out of such an experience jibbering. Calhoun scowled at the sight of Between the Stars. This was not good.

But he wasn't frightened, not yet. There should have been a flaming sun somewhere nearby, and there should have been bright crescents or half-discs or mottled cloudy planets swimming within view. The sun should have been the star, Merida, and Calhoun should land in commonplace fashion on Merida, too, and make a routine planetary health check on a settled, complacent population, and presently he should head back to Med headquarters,

with a report containing absolutely nothing of importance. But he couldn't do any of these things. He was in purely empty space. It was appalling. Murgatroy jumped up to the arm of the control chair to gaze wisely at the screens. Calhoun continued to scowl. Murgatroyd imitated him with a turmoil's fine complacency in duplicating a man's actions. What he saw meant nothing to him, of course, but he was moved to comment.

Chee! he said shrilly. To be sure, agreed Calhoun distastefully. That is a very sage observation, Murgatroyd. But I deplore the situation that calls for it. "'Somebody's bilged on us.' Murgatroyd liked to think that he was carrying on a conversation. He said zestfully, "'Chee, chee, chee, chee, chee, chee.

No doubt, conceded Calhoun, but this is a mess. Hopped down and let me try to get out of it.' Mercutroyd disappointedly hopped to the floor. He watched with bright eyes as Calhoun, annoyedly, went to the emergency equipment locker, and brought out the apparatus designed to take care of a state of things like this. If the situation wasn't too bad, correcting it should be simple enough. If it was too bad, it could be fatal.

The average separation of stars throughout the galaxy, of course, is something like four or five light years. The distance between salt-type stars is on an average very much higher, and with certain specific exceptions, habitable planets are satellites of of Saul-type suns. But only a fraction of the habitable planets are colonized, and when a ship has traveled blind in overdrive for two months or more, its pilot cannot simply look astern and recognize his point of departure. There's too much scenery in between. Further, nobody can locate himself by the use of star maps unless he knows where something on the star map is with reference to himself, which makes a star map not always useful.

But the present blunder might not be serious. If the Med Ship had come out into normal space no more than eight to ten light years from Merida, Calhoun might identify that sun by producing parallax. He could detect relative distances for a much greater range, but it was to be hoped that his present blunder was small. He got out the camera with its six lenses for the six vision screens which showed space in all directions. He clamped it in place, and painstakingly snapped a plate. In seconds he had everything above third magnitude faithfully recorded in its own color,

and with relative brightness expressed in the size of the dots of tint. He put the plate aside and said, Overdrive coming, Murgertroid. He pressed the short hop button, and there was dizziness and nausea and a flash of fear, all three sensations momentary. Murgatroyd said, Chee, in a protesting tone, but Calhoun held down the button for an accurate five minutes.

He and Murgatroyd gulped together when he let up the button again, and all-space whirled, and nausea hit as before. He took another plate of all the heavens, made into one by the six-lensed camera. He swung the ship by 90 degrees and pressed the short-hop button a second time. moored as innocent panic and digestive revolt. In five minutes it was repeated as the ship came out to normal space yet again. Chee-chee!

protested Murgatroyd. His furry paws held his round little belly against further insult. I agree, said Calhoun. I don't like it either. But I want to know where we are, if anywhere. He set up the comparator and inserted the three plates. Each had images of each of the six vision screens. When the instrument word, each of the plates in turn was visible for part of a second.

Extremely remote stars would not jiggle perceptibly, would not show parallax, but anything within twenty light years should. The juggling distance could be increased by taking the plates still farther apart. This time, though, there was one star which visibly wavered in the comparator. Calhoun regarded it suspiciously. "'Where heaven knows where,' he said dowerly. "'Somebody really messed us up. The only star that shows parallax isn't Merida.

In fact, I don't believe in it at all. Two plates show it as a saw-class sun, and the third says it's a red dwarf. On the face of it, such a thing was impossible. A sun could not be one color as seen from one spot and another color seen from another, especially when the shift of angle is small. Calhoun made rough computations. He handset the overdrive for something over an hour's run in the direction of the one-star

image which wobbled and thereby beckoned. He threw the switch. He gulped, and Mercutroyd acted for a moment as if he intended to yield unreservedly to the nausea of entering overdrive, but he refrained. There was nothing to do but killed time for an hour. There was a micro-reel of starplates showing the heavens as photographed with the same galactic coordinates from every visited Saul-class star in this sector of the galaxy. Fewer than one in forty had a colonized planet, but if the nearest had been visited before

and if the heavens had been photographed there, by matching the stars to the appropriate plate, he could find out where he was. then a star map might begin to be of some use to him. But he had still to determine whether the error was in his extrication unit or in the data fed to it. If the first, he'd be very bad off indeed. If the second he could still be in a fix. But there was no point in worrying while in overdrive. He lay down on his bunk and tried to concentrate again on the book he'd laid aside.

human error, moreover, he read, is never purely random. The mind tends to regard stored data as infallible and to disregard new data which contradicts it. He yawned and skipped. So each person has a personal factor of error which is not only quantitative but qualitative. He read on and on only half absorbing what he read. But a man who had reached the status of a med ship man in the interstellar medical service hasn't finished learning. He's still a way down the ladder of rank.

He has plenty of studying ahead of him before he gets very far. The tape speaker said, When the gong sounds, break out will be five seconds off. It began to tick-tock slowly and deliberately. Calhoun got into the control seat and strapped in. Mercutroyd said previously, Chi, and went to position underneath the chair. The voice said,

5, 4, 3, 2, 1. The little med ship came out of overdrive and instantly, it's emergency rockets kicked violently, and Mercotroid held desperately fast. Then the rockets went off. There had been something unguessable nearby. Perhaps commentary. debris at the extreme outer limit of a highly eccentric orbit.

Now there was a starfield and a sun within two light hours. But if Calhoun had stared earlier when there was no sun inside at all, now he gazed blankly at the spectacle before him. There was a sun off to starboard. It was the yellow sun, a sol-type star, with a barely perceptible disk. There were planets. Calhoun saw immediately one gale. giant, near enough to be more than a point, and a sliver of light which was the crescent of another

more nearly in the line toward the sun. But he gazed at a belt, a band, a ribbon of shining stuff, which was starkly out of all reason. It was a thin curtain of luminosity circling this yellow star. It was not a ring from the breakup of a satellite within Roche's limit. There were two quite solid planets inside it, and nearer to the star. It was a thin, wide, luminous, golden ribbon which looked like something that needed a flat iron to smooth it out. It looked something like an incandescent smoke ring. It was not smooth. It had lumps in it.

There were corrugations in it. An unimaginable rocket with a flat exhaust could have made it while chasing his tail around the sun. But that couldn't have happened either. Calhoun stared for seconds. Now, he said, I've seen it. seen everything. Then he grunted as realization came. And we're all right, Mergatroyd. It's not our computers that went wrong. Somebody fed them wrong data. We've arrived where we aim for, and there'll be a colonized planet somewhere around. He unlimbered the electron

telescope and began a search, but he couldn't resist a closer look at the ribbon in space. It had exactly the structure of a slightly wobbly wrinkled ribbon without beginning or end. It had to be a complex of solid particles, of course, and an organization of solid particles cannot exist in space without orbital motion. But orbits would smooth out in the course of thousands of revolutions around the primary. This was not smoothed out. It was relatively new. It's sodium dust, said Calhoun, appreciatively. Or maybe, potassium, hung out there on purpose. Particles small enough to have terrific surface and reflective power, and big enough not to be pushed out of orbit by light pressure. Lever-mergagiod?

Now to guess it'd have to be put out to take care of the climate on a planet just inside it, which would be there. Let's go look. He was so absorbed in its admiration that the almost momentary overdrive hop needed for approach went nearly unnoticed. He even realized, his appreciation increasing, that this cloud of tiny particles accounted for the red dwarf appearance on one of the plates he'd taken. Light passing through widely dispersed and very small particles turns red. From one position he'd photographed through this dust cloud. The ribbon was a magnificent idea, the more magnificent because of its simplicity. It would reflect back otherwise wasted sun heat to a too cold planet, and make it warmer.

There was probably only an infinitesimal actual mass of powder in the ring at that. Tens are scores of tons, in all, hardly more. The planet for which it had been established was the third world out. As is usual with Salklaas systems, the third planet's distance from the sun was about a hundred twenty million miles. It had ice caps covering more than two-thirds of its surface. The sprawling white fingers of glaciation marked mountain-chains and highlands nearly to the equator, but from there was blue sea, and there was green vegetation in a narrow belt of tropicality. Calhoun jockeyed the Med Ship to position for a landing call. This was not Merida, too,

but there should be a colony here. That glowing ribbon had not been hung up. out for nothing. Med ship S. Clippus 20, he said, confidently into the space phone, Mike, calling ground, requesting coordinates for landing, my mass is 50 tons, repeat, five O tons, purpose of landing to find out where I am and how to get where I belong. There was a clicking. Calhoun repeated the call. He heard murmurings which were not directed into the transmitter on the planet. He heard and agitated how long since the ship landed.

Another voice was saying fiercely, even if he doesn't come from two-city or three-city, who knows what sickness! There was a sudden silence as if a hand had been clapped over the microphone below. Then a long pause. Calhoun made a standard call for the third time. Mad ship is chuppus twenty,

said the space phone speakers, grudgingly. You will be allowed to land. Take position. Calhoun blinked at the instructions he received. The coordinates were not the normal galactic ones. They gave the local time at the spaceport and the planetary latitude. He was to place himself overhead. He could do it, of course, but the instructions were unthinkable. Galactic coordinates had been used ever since Calhoun knew anything about such matters, but he acknowledged the instructions. Then the voice from the speaker said truculently, Don't hurry. We might change our minds.

And we have to figure settings for an only 50-ton ship anyhow. Calhoun's mouth dropped open. A med ship was welcome everywhere these days. The Interstellar Medical Service was one of those overworked, understaffed, kicked-around organizations which is everywhere taken for granted. Like breathable air, nobody thought to be grateful for it, but nobody was suspicious of it either. The suspicion and the weird coordinates and the ribbon in space combined to give Calhoun a highly improbable suspicion. He looked forward with great interest to this landing.

He had not been ordered to land here, but he suspected that a med ship landing was a long, long time overdue. I forgot to take star pictures, he told Murgatroyd, but a ribbon like this would have been talked about if it had been reported before. I doubt star pictures would do us any good. The odds are my only chance to find out where we are is to ask, that he shrugged his shoulders. Anyhow, this won't be routine. Gee! agreed Murchardtroid profoundly. End of part one. part two of ribbon in the sky by murray langster this libri fox recording is in the public domain part two an unsolvable but urgent problem may produce in a society as in an individual

an uncontrollable emotional tantrum an emotional denial of the problem's existence or purposive research for a solution in olden days the first reaction produced mass tantrum then called wars. The second produced frenzied dogmatic ideologies. The third produced modern civilization. All three reactions still appear in individuals. If the first two should return to societies such as The Practice of Thinking, Fitzgerald. The descent, at least, was not routine.

It was nerve-wracking. The force feel from the planet's giant steel lens, ending grid reached out into space and fumbled for the Med Ship. That was clumsily done. When it found the ship it locked on, and that was awkwardly handled. The rest was worse. Whoever handled the controls aground was hopelessly inept. Once the Med Ship's hull temperature began to climb, and Calhoun had to throw on the space phone and Yelp for caution. He did not see as much of the nearing planet as he'd have liked. At 50 miles of height, the last trace of blue sea vanished around the bulge of the world. At 20 miles, the mountain chains were clearly

visible, with their tortured, winding ice rivers which were glaciers. At this height, three patches of green were visible from a loft. One directly below was little more than a mile in diameter, and the landing grid was its center and almost its circumference. Another was streaky and long, and there seemed to be heavy mist boiling about it and above it. The third was roughly triangular. They were many miles apart. Two of them vanished behind mountains as the ship descended. There were no cities in view. There were no highways. This was an ice world with bare ground and open. and water at its equator only. The spaceport was placed in a snow-ringed polar valley.

Near landing, Calhoun strapped in because of the awkwardness with which the ship was lowered. He took Murgertroid on his lap. The small craft bounced and wobbled as unskilled hands, let it down. Presently Calhoun saw the angular girders of the landing grid's lattice top rise past the opened ports. Seconds later, the Med Ship bumped and slid and slid and and bounced heart-stoppingly. Then it struck ground with a violent jolt. Calhoun got his breath back as the little ship creaked and adjusted itself to rest on its landing fins after some months in space.

"'Now,' said the voice in the space-phone speaker, but it sounded as if it were trying to conceal relief, "'Now, stay in your ship. Our weapons are bearing on you. You may not come out until we've decided. decided what to do about you." Calhoun raised his eyebrows. This was very unusual indeed. He glanced at the external field indicator.

The landing grid field was off, so the operator bluffed. In case of need, Calhoun could blast off on emergency rockets and probably escape close-range weapons, anyhow, if there were any. And he could certainly get around the bulge of the world before the amateur at the grids controlled could hook onto him again. Take your time, he said with irony, I'll twiddle my fingers. I'm nothing better to do.

He freed himself from his chair and went to a port to sea. He regarded the landscape about him with something like unbelief. The landing grid itself was a full mile across and half as high. It was a vast circular frame of steel beams reaching heavenward, with the curiously curving copper cables, strong as they had to be to create the highly special force field which made space transportation practical. Normally such gigantic structures rose in the center of spaceport cities. They drew upon the planet's ionosphere for power to lift and land cargo ships from the stars,

and between times they supplied energy for manufacturers and the operation of cities. They were built necessarily upon stable, bedrock formations, and for convenience were usually located where the cargoes to be shipped would require least surface transportation. But here was no city. There was perhaps a thousand acres of greenness, a mere vague rim around the outside of the grid. There was a control room building to one side, of course. It was solidly built of stone, but there had been an agglomeration of lean-to's added to it with slanting walls and roofs of thin, stratified rock, and there were cattle grazing on the green grass. The center of the grid was a pasture. Say for the clutter about the

grid control building, there were no structures, no dwellings, no houses, or homes anywhere in view. There was no longer even a highway leading to the grid. Calhoun threw on the outside microphones, and there was no sound except a thin keening of wind in the steelwork overhead. But presently one of the cattle made a mournful bellowing sound. Calhoun whistled as he went from one port to another. Murgatroyd, he said meditatively on his second round. You observe, if you observe, one of the consequences of human error. I still don't know where I am because I doubt that's.

starplates have ever been made from this solar system, and I didn't take one for comparison anyhow. But I can tell you that this planet formerly had a habitability rating of something like 0.0, meaning that if somebody wanted to live here, it would be possible, but it wouldn't be sensible. But people did come here, and it was a mistake. He stared at a human figure far away. It was a woman dressed in shapeless, badly draping garments. She moved toward a clump of dark-coated cattle and did something in their midst. The mistake looks pretty evident to me, added Calhoun, and I see some possibilities I don't like at all. There is such a thing as an isolation syndrome, Murgatroyd.

A syndrome is a complex of pathological symptoms, which occur together as a result of some morbid condition. To us humans, isolation is morbid. You help me to endure it, Murgatroyd, but I couldn't get along with only your society, charming as it is, for but so long. A group of people can get along longer than a single man, but there is a limit for any small-sized group. Chee, said Murgatroyd. In fact, said Calhoun, frowning, there's a specific health problem involved, which the Med Service recognizes. There can be partial immunity, but there can be some tricky variations. If we're up against a really typical case, we have a job on hand. And how did these people get that dust ring out in space? They surely didn't hang it out

themselves. He sat down and scowled at his thoughts. Presently he rose again and once more surveyed the icy landscape. The curious green pasture about the landing grid was highly improbable. He saw glaciers overhanging this valley. There were giant ice rivers which should continue to flow and overwhelm this relatively sheltered spot. They didn't. Why not?

It was more than an hour before the space phone clattered. When Calhoun threw the switch again, a new voice came out of it. This was also a male voice, but it was high-pitched as if from tension. "'We've been talking about you,' said the voice. It quivered with agitation, which was quite out of reason. "'You say your med service. All right, suppose you prove it.' The landed Metship should be proof enough for anybody, but Calhoun said politely. "'I have regular identifications. If you'll go on vision, I'll show you my credentials.'

Our screens broken, said the voice suspiciously, but we have a sick cow. It was dumped on us night before last. Cure her and we'll accept it as identification. Calhoun could hardly believe his ears. This was an emergency situation. The curing of a sick cow was considered more convincing than a med shipman's regular credentials.

Such a scale of values hinted at more than a mere isolation syndrome. There were thousands of inhabited worlds now with splendid cities and technologies which most men accepted with the same bland confidence with which they look for sunrise. The human race was civilized. Suspicion of a med ship was unheard of, but here was a world. Why, certainly, said Calhoun blankly, I suppose I may go outside to visit the patient. We'll drive her up to your ship, said the high-con. tense voice. And you stay close to it, then it said darkly. Men from two cities sneak past our sentries to dump it on us. They want to wipe out our herd.

What kind of weapons have you got? This is a med ship, protested Calhoun. I'm nothing more than I might need in an emergency. We'll want them anyhow, said the voice. You said you need to find out where you are. We'll tell you if you've got enough weapons to make it worthwhile. Calhoun drew a deep breath. We can argue that later, he said. I'm just a trifle puzzled. But first things, first, drive your cow. He held his head in his hands. He remembered to throw off the space phone and said, Mergertroid, say something sensible. I never ran into anybody quite as close to coming apart at the seams as that. Not lately. Say something rational. Murgatroyd said, Chee? in an inquiring tone.

Thanks, said Calhoun. Thanks a lot. He went back to the ports to watch. He saw men come out of the peculiar agglomeration of buildings that had been piled around the grid's sturdy control building. They were clothed in cloth that was heavy and very stiff, to judge by the way it shifted with its wearer's movements. Calhoun wasn't familiar with it. The men moved stolidly on foot across the incredible pasture

which had been a landing space for ships or space at some time or other. They reached a spot where a dark animal form rested on the ground. Calhoun hadn't noticed it particularly. Cattle, he knew, folded their legs and lay down and chewed cuds. They existed nearly everywhere that human colonies had been built. On some worlds there were other domestic animals, descended from those of earth. Of course, there were edible plants and some wholesome animals which had no connection at all with humanity's remote ancestral home, but from the beginning, human beings had been adjusted

to symbiosis with the organic life of Earth. Foodstuffs of non-terrestrial origin could supplant earth food, of course. In some cases, earth foods were the supplements and local non-terrestrial foodstuffs, the staples. But human beings did not thrive on a wholly unearthly diet. The clump of slowly moving men reached the reclining cow. They pulled up stakes which surrounded her and coiled up wire or cordage, which had made the stakes into a fence. They prodded the animal. Presently it lurched to its feet and swung his head about foolishly.

They drove it toward the Med Ship. Fifty yards away they stopped, and the outside microphones brought the sound of their voices muttering. By then Calhoun had seen their faces. Four of the six were bearded, the other two were young men. On most whorls men prided themselves that they needed to shave, but few of them omitted the practice. These six moved hastily away, though the two younger ones turned often to look back. The cow, deserted, stumbled to a reclining position.

It lay down, staring stupidly about. It rested its head on the ground. "'I go out now, eh?' asked Calhoun. mildly. We're watching you, graded the space phone speaker. Calhoun glanced at the outside temperature indicator and added a garment. He put a blaster in his pocket. He went out the exit port.

The air was bitter cold, after two months in a heat metered the ship, but Calhoun did not feel cold. It took him seconds to understand why. It was that the ground was warm, radiant heat, kept him comfortable, though the air was icy. Heat elements underground must draw power from somewhere, the grid's tapping of the ionosphere, and heated this pasture from underneath so forage plants could grow here. They did. The cattle fed on them. There would be hydropodic gardens somewhere else, probably underground. They would supply vegetable food in greater quantity.

But in the nature of things, human beings had to have animal food in a cold climate. Calhoun went across the pasture with the frowning, snowy mountains all about. He regarded the reclining beast with an almost humorous attention. He did not know anything about the special diseases of domestic animals. He had only the knowledge required of a med ship man, but that should be adequate. The tense voice had said that this beast had been dumped to wipe out the local herd, so there would be infection and there would be. would be some infective agent. He painstakingly took samples of blood and saliva.

In a ruminant, certainly any digestive tract infection would show up in the saliva. He reflected that he did not know the normal bovine temperature, so he couldn't check it, nor the respiration. But the interstellar medical service was not often called on to treat alien cows. Back in the ship, he diluted his samples and put droplets in the usual nutrient solutions. He sealed up droplets in those tiny slides which allow a culture to be examined as it grows. His microscope, of course, allowed of inspection under light of any wavelength desired, and so yielded information by the frequency of the light, which gave clearest images of different features of the microorganisms.

After five minutes of inspection, he grunted and hauled out his antibiotic stores. He added infinitesimal traces of cillin to the culture, media. In the microscope he watched the active microscopic creatures die. He checked with the other sample. He went out to the listless, enfeebled animal. He made a wry guess as to its body weight. He used the injector. He went back to the Med Ship. He called on the space phone. I think, he said politely, that your beast will be all right in 30 hours or so. Now, how about telling me the name of this sun? The voice said sharply.

There's a matter of weapons, too. Wait till we see how the cow does. Sunset will come in an hour. When day comes again, if the cow is better, we'll see. There was a click. The space phone cut off. Calhoun pulled out the log, Mike. There was already an audio record of all ship operations and communications.

Now he added comments. A description of the ribbon in the seat. sky, the appearance of the planet, and such conclusions as he come to. He ended. The samples from the cow were full of a single caucus which seemed to have no resistance to standard antibiotics. I pumped the beast full of Cillin and called it a day. I'm concerned, though, because of the clear signs of an isolation syndrome here. They're idiotically suspicious of me and won't even promise a bargain, as if I could somehow overreach them because I'm a stranger.

They've sentries out, they said somebody sneak past them, against what, I imagine, must be two-city and three-city. I'm an impression that the sentries are to enforce a quarantine rather than to put up a fight. It is probable that the other communities practice the same tactics, plus biological coal-war if somebody did bring a sick cow here to infect and destroy the local herd. These people may have a landing grid, but they've an eye. isolation syndrome, and I'm afraid there's a classic Caruso health problem in being. If that's so, it's going to be nasty.

He cut off the log. The classic Caruso problem would be extremely awkward if he'd run into it. There was a legend about an individual back on old earth who'd been left isolated on an island by shipwrecked for half a lifetime. His name was given to the public health difficulties, which occurred when accidental isolations occurred during the chaotic first centuries of galactic migration. There was one shipwreck to which the name was first applied. The ship was missing, and the descendants of the crew and passengers were not contacted until three generations had passed.

Larger scale and worst cases occurred later, when colonies were established by entrepreneurs, who grew rich in the establishment of the new settlements, and had no interest in maintaining them. Such events could hardly happen now, of course, but even a Caruso condition was still possible in theory. It might exist here. Calhoun hope not. It did occur to him that the affair was not his business

because he hadn't been assigned to it. He belonged to the med service, and the physical well-being of humans everywhere was the concern of that service. If people lived by choice in and, an inhospitable environment, that was not a medman's problem, but anything which led to preventable deaths was, and in a Caruso colony there were plenty of preventable deaths. He cooked a meal to have something to occupy his mind.

Murgatroyd sat on his haunches and sniffed blissfully. Presently Calhoun ate, and presently darkness fell on this part of the world. There were new noises, small ones. He went to look. The pasture inside the landing grid was faintly lighted by the glowing ribbon in the sky. It looked like a many times brighter Milky Way. The girders of the landing grid looked very black against it. He saw a dark figure plodding away until he vanished.

Then he reappeared as a deeper black against the snow beyond the pasture. He went on and on until he disappeared again. A long time later, another figure appeared where he'd gone out of sight. It plotted back toward the grid. It was a different individual. Calhoun had watched a changing of centuries. Suspicion, hostility. The least attractive qualities of the human race brought out by isolation.

There could not be a large population. here since such suspicions existed, and it was divided into, most likely three again isolated communities. This one had the landing grid, which meant power, and a space phone but no vision screen attached to it. The fact that there were hostile separate communities made the situation much more difficult from a medical point of view. It multiplied the possible ghastly features which could exist. Merkertoy ate until his furry belly was round as a ball, and settled to stuffed slumber with his tail curled around his nose.

Calhoun tried to read, but he was restless. His own time cycle on the ship did not in the least agree with the time of daylight on this planet. He was wakeful when there was utter quiet outside. Once one of the cattle made a dismal, lowing noise, twice or three. three times, he heard cracking sounds like sharp detonations from the mountains. They would be stirrings in the glaciers. He tried to study, but painstaking analysis of the methods by which human brains defeated their own ends and came up with wrong answers was not appealing.

He grew horribly restless. It had been dark for hours when he heard rustling noises on the ground outside, through the microphones, of course. He turned up the amplification and made made sure that a small party of men moved toward the med ship. From time to time they paused, as if in caution. Mergatroyd, he said dryly, we are going to have visitors. They didn't give notice by spacephone, so they're unauthorized. Murgatroyd blinked awake. He watched as Calhoun made sure of the blaster in his pocket and turned on the log bike,

he said. All set, Murgatroyd? Mercutroyd said, Chee, in his small, shrill voice, just as a soft and urgent knock sounded on the exit lock door. It was made with bare knuckles. Calhoun grimaced and went into the lock. He undogged the door and began to open it

when it was whipped from his grasp and plunging figures pushed in. They swept him back into the Med Ship's cabin. He heard the lock door close softly. Then he faced five, roughly, heavily-clothed men, who wore cloaks and mittens and hoods, with claws stretched tightly across their faces, below the eyes. He saw knives, but no blasters. A stocky figure with cold gray eyes appeared as spokesman.

"'You're the man who got landed today?' he said in a deep voice, and with an effect of curtness. "'My name's Hunt, Two-city. You're a med ship, man?' "'That's right,' said Calhoun. The eyes upon him were more scared than threatening, all but the stocky man named Hunt. "'I landed to find out where I was,' he added. The data card for my estrogator had been punched wrong. "'What—' "'You know about sickness, eh?' demanded the stocky man evenly.

"'How to cure it and stop it?' "'I'm a med shipman,' admitted Calhoun, for whatever that may mean. You're needed in Two City, said the Deep Voiced Hunt. His manner was purest resolution. We came to get you. Get your medicines. Dress warm. Load us down, if you like, with what you want to take.

We've got a sleigh waiting. Calhoun felt a momentary relief. This might make his job vastly easier. When isolation and fear brings a freezing of the mind against any novelty, even hope, a medical man has his troubles. but if one community welcomed him. Chee, said Mercutroyd indignantly from overhead. Calhoun glanced up, and Mercutroid glared down from a pahole near the ceiling.

He was a peaceable animal. When there was scuffling, he got out of the way. But now he chattered angrily. The masked men looked at him fearfully, but their deep-voiced leader growled at them. Just an animal. He swung back to Calhurt. We got a need for you, he repeated. We mean all right, and anything we got you can have if you want it, but you're coming with us.

Are your good intentions, asked Calhoun, proved by you're wearing masks? They're to keep from catching your sickness, said the deep voice impatiently. Point to what you want us to take. Calhoun's feeling of encouragement vanished. He winced a little. The isolation syndrome. was fully developed. It was a matter of faith that strangers were dangerous. All men were assumed to carry contagion. Once they'd have been believed to carry bad luck. But a regained primitiveness

would still retain some trace of the culture from which it had fallen. If there were three settlements, as the pasture lands seen from space suggested, they would not believe in magic, but they would believe in contagion. They might have. or once have had good reason. Anyhow, they would fanatically refrain from contact with any but their own fellow citizens. Yet, there would always be troubles to excite their terrors. In groups of more than a very few, there would always be an impulse against the isolation, which seemed the only possible safety in a hostile world. The effectiveness of the counter-instinct would depend in part on communications, but the urge to exercise.

Sogamy can produce ghastly results in a small culture gone fanatic. I think, said Calhoun, that I'd better come with you, but the people here have to know I've gone. I wouldn't like them to heave my ship out to space in pure panic because I didn't answer from inside it. Leave a writing, said Hunt's deep voice as impatient as before. I'll write it. Make them boil, but they don't dare follow us. No?

Think one city men? asked a stocky man scornfully. Will risk us toppling avalanches on them? Calhoun saw. Amid mountain country in a polar zone, travel would be difficult at best. These intruders had risked much to come here for him. But they were proud of their daring. They did not believe that the folk of lesser cities, tribes, groups than theirs, had courage like theirs. Calhoun recognized it as a part of that complex of symptoms which can begin with an epidemic and end with group madness.

I'll want this and this and that, say Calhoun. He wouldn't risk his microscope. Antibiotics might be useful. Antiseptics definitely. His med kit, that's all. Your blankets, said Hunt. You'll want them too. Calhoun shrugged.

He closed. himself for the cold outside. He had a blaster in his pocket, but he casually and openly took down a blast rifle. His captors offered no objection. He shrugged again and replaced it. Starting to take it was only a test. He made a guess that this stocky leader, Hunt, might have kept his community just a little more nearly sane than the group that had set him up to the cure of a sick cow. He We hope so. Mergertroid, he said to the Tormall, still clinging up near the control room's top, We have a professional call to make.

You'd better come along. In fact, you must. Mergertoyd came suspiciously down and then leaped to Calhoun's shoulder. He clung there, gazing distrustfully about. Calhoun realized that his captors, callers, whatever they were, stayed huddled away from every object in the cabin. They fingered nothing, but the scared eyes of most of them proved that it was not honesty which moved them to such meticulousness.

It was fear. Of contagion. They're uncouth, eh? said Calhoun sardonically. But think, Murgatroyd, they may have hearts of gold. We physicians have to pretend to think so in any case. Chee, said Murgatroyd resentfully, as Calhoun moved toward the lock. End of Part 2 Part 3 of Ribbon in the Sky by Murray Leinster.

This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Part 3 Civilization is based upon rational thought applied to the purposes of men. Most mistakes occur in the process of thinking, but there can be a deep and fundamental error about purposes. It is simply a fact that the purposes of human beings are not. not merely those of rational animals. It is the profoundest of errors to believe otherwise, to consider, for example, that prosperity or pleasure or even survival cannot be priced so high

that their purchase is a mistake. The practice of thinking Fitzgerald. There was a sheet of paper fastened outside the combination lock of the Med Ship's exit port. It said that Calhoun had been taken away by men of two-city to tend some sick person. It said that he would be returned. The latter part might not be believed, but the Med Ship might not be destroyed. The colony of the landing grid might try to break into it, but success was unlikely. Meanwhile, it was an odd feeling to cross the grassy pasture land with hoar-frost crunching underfoot. The grid's steel girders made a harsh lace of blackness against the sky, with its shining ribbon slashing across it.

But Calhoun found himself reflecting that the underground heat applied to the thousand-acre pasture had been regulated with discretion. There was surely power enough available from the grid to turn the area into a place of tropic warmth, in which only lush and thick-leaved vegetation would thrive. But a storm from the friggin mountain would destroy such plants. Hardy, low-growing, semi-artic grass

was the only suitable ground cover. The iciest of winds could not freeze it so long as the ground was warmed. Tonight's wind was biting. Calhoun had donned a parka of synthetic fur, on which frost could not congeal at any temperature, but he was forced to draw fur before his face and adjust heated goggles before his eyes would stop watering. Yet in the three-quarter-mile trudge to the edge of the snow, his feet became almost uncomfortable, comfortably warm. That, though, ended where a sleigh waited at the edge of the snow. Five men had forced themselves inside the med ship. A sixth was on guard beside the sleigh.

There had been no alarm. Now the stocky man, Hunt, urged him to a seat upon the sleigh. I am reasonably able-bodied, said Calhoun mildly. You don't know where we're going, or how, growled Hunt. Calhoun got on the sleigh. The runners were extraordinarily long. He could not see small details, but it appeared that the sleigh had been made of extreme length to bridge crevasses in a glacier.

There were long, thin, metal tubes to help. At the same time, it looked as if it could be made flexible to twist and turn in a narrow or obstacle-strewn path. The six clumsily clad men pushed it a long way while Calhoun frowned at writing. Then Murgatroyd shivered, and Calhoun thrust him inside the parka. There Murgatroyd wriggled until his nose went up past Calhoun's chin and he could sniff the outside air. From time to time he withdrew his nose, perhaps with frost crystals on it,

but always he poked his small black snout to sniff again. His whiskers tickled. Two miles from the pasture land the sleigh stopped. One man fumbled somewhere behind Calhoun's seat, and a roaring noise began. All six piled upon the long, slender snow vehicle. It began to move. A man swore. Then suddenly the sleigh darted forward and went gliding up a steep incline.

It gathered speed. Twin arcs of disturbed snow rose up on either side, like bow waves from a speeding water skimmer. The sleigh darted into a great ravine of purest white, and the roaring sound was multiplied by echoes. For better than half an hour, then Calhoun experienced a ride which, for thrills and beauty and hair-raising suspense, made mere space travel the stodgiest of transportation. Once the sleigh shot out from beetling cliffs, all icy and glittering in the light from the sky, and hurtled down a slope of snow so swiftly, that the wind literally whistled about the bodies of its occupants.

Then the drive roared more loudly, and there was heavy deceleration, and abruptly the sleigh barely crawled. The flexibility of the thing came into operation. Four of the crew, each controlling one segment of the vehicle, caused it to twist and writhe over the surface of a glacier, where pressure ridges abounded, and pinnacles of shattered, squeezed up ice were not uncommon. Once they stopped sharp, and slender rods reached out and touched, and the sleigh slid delicately over them, and was itself a bridge across a crevasse in the ice that went down

unguessably. Then it went on, and the rods were retrieved. Minutes later the sleigh motor was roaring loudly, but it barely crawled up what appeared to be a mountain crust. There were ranges of mountains extending beyond seeing in the weird blue and golden skylight, and then there was a breathtaking dash and a plunge into what was incredibly a natural tunnel beside the course of an ice river, and abruptly there was a vast valley below. This was their destination. Some thousands of feet down in the very valley bottom, there was a strange, two-mile-long patch of darkness. The blue-gold light showed no color there, but it was actually an artificially warmed pasture land like that within and about the landing grid.

But from this dark patch, vapors ascended and rolled and gathered to form a misty roof, which was swept away and torn to tatters by an unseen wind. The sleigh slowed and stopped beside a precipitous upcrop of stone, while still high above the valley bottom. A voice called sharply, "'It's us,' growled Hunt's deep voice. "'We got him. "'Everything all right?'

"'No,' rasped the invisible voice. "'They broke out. He broke out and got her loose, and they run off again. "'We should have killed him and had done with it.' "'Everything stopped. "'The men on the sleigh seemed to become still in the shock of pure disaster, pure frustration. "'Calhoun waited. "'Hunt was motionless. "'Then one of the men on the sleigh spat elaborately.

"'Then another stirred. "'Had your work for nothing?' "'Rasped the voice from the shadow. "'The trouble that started goes for nothing, too.' "'Cowhoun asked crisply. "'What's this? My special patience ran away?' "'That the madman we heard about.' The invisible speaker was almost derisive with anger.

"'Sure, they run off all right. "'Man and girls together. "'After we made trouble with three-city by not killing him, and one city by sneaking over to get you. Three city, middle come boiling over? The voice raised in pitch, expressing scorn and fury. Because they fell in love. We should have killed him right off or let them die in the snow like they wanted in the first place.

Calhoun nodded almost imperceptibly to himself. When there is a syndrome forbidding association between societies, it is a part of society's interior struggle against morbidivism. that there shall be forbidden romances. The practice of exogamy is necessary for racial health, hence there is an instinct for it. The more sternly a small population restricts this human contacts to its own members, the more repressed the exogamic impulse becomes. It is never consciously recognized for what it is,

but especially when repressed, other than customary contacts trigger it explosively. The romantic appeal of a stranger is at once a wise provision of nature, and a cause of incredible furies and disasters. It is notorious that spaceship crews are inordinately popular, where colonies are small and strangers infrequent. It is no less notorious that a girl may be destitute of suitors on our own world, but has nearly her choice of husbands if she merely saves the ship fair to another. Calhoun could have predicted defiances of tradition and law and quarantine alike as soon as he began to learn the state of things here.

The frenzied rage produced by this specific case was normal. Some young girl must have loved terribly and some young man been no less impassioned to accept expulsion from society on a world, where there was no food except in hydroponic gardens and artificially warmed pastures. It was no less than suicide for those who loved. It was no less than a cause for battle among those who did not. The deep-voiced hunt said now in leaden, heavy tones. Cap it. This is my doing.

It was my daughter I did it for. I wanted to keep her from dying. I'll pay for trying. They'll be satisfied in three-city and in one alike if you tell it's my fault, and I've been drove out for trouble-making. Calhoun said sharply, What's that? What's going on now? The man in the shadows answered, by his tone,

as much to express his disgust as to give information. His daughter, Nim, was on sentry duty against three city sneaks. They had a sentry against us. The two of them talked across the valley between us. They had walkies to report with. They used them to talk. Presently, she sneaked a vision screen out of store. He probably did, too.

So presently they figured it was worth dying to die together. They run off of the hotlands. No chance to make it, of course. The hotlands could hardly be anything but the warm equatorial belt of the planet. We should have let them go on and die, said the stocky hunt, Dr. but I persuaded men to help me bring them back. We were careful against sickness, and we—I locked them separate, and I—I hope my daughter mightn't die of the three-city sickness. I even hoped that young man wouldn't die of the sickness they say we have, and that we don't notice, and they die of.

Then we heard your call to one city. We couldn't answer it, but we heard all you said, even to the bargain about the cow. and we'd heard of med men who cured sickness. I hoped you could save Nym from dying of the three cities' sickness or passing it on to our city. My friends risked much to bring you here, but my daughter and the man have fled again. And nobody's going to risk any more,

rasped the voice from the shadow of the cliff. We held a council. It's decided. They're gone, and we got to burn out the places they was in. No more. You don't have the council anymore either. We decided that. And no medman. The council ruled it. Calhoun nodded yet again. It is a part of fear elaborately to ignore everything that can be denied about the thing feared, which includes rational measures against it. This was a symptom of the state of things which constituted a med-service emergency because it caused needless deaths. Hunt made a gesture which was at once commanding and filled with despair.

I'll take the madman back so one city can use him if they dare and not blame you for me taking him. I'll have to take the sleigh, but he's used it so it'd have to be burned anyhow. You men be sure to burn your clothes. Three city will be satisfied because I'm lost to balance for their man lost. bed man will tell one city I drove out. You've lost me, and my daughter, two, and three cities lost a man. One city will growl and threaten, but they win by this. They won't risk a showdown. Silence again. As if reluctantly, one man of the party that had abducted Calhoun moved away from the sleigh and toward the abysmally deep shadow of the cliff. Hunt said harshly,

Don't forget to burn your clothes. You others, get off the sleigh. I'm taking the madman back and there's no need for a war, because I made the mistake, and I'm paying for it. The remaining men of the kidnapping party stepped off the sleigh into the trampled snow just here. One said clumsily. Sorry, Hunt. Luck.

What luck could I have? Asked the stocky man, wearily. The roaring of the scornful. The sleigh's drive, which had been a mere muffled throbbing, rose to a booming bellow. The snow vehicle surged forward, heading downward into the valley with the dark area below. Half a mile down, it began to sweep in a great circle to return upon its former track. Calhoun twisted in his seat and shouted above the roar. He made violent gestures.

The deep-voiced hunt, driving from a standing position behind the seat, slowed the sleigh. It came nearly to a stop and hissing noises from snow passing beneath it could be heard. What's the matter? His tone was lifeless. What do you want? Two people have run away, said Calhoun, vexedly. Your daughter Nim and a man from Three City, whatever that is. You're driven out to prevent fighting between the cities.

Yes, said Hunt without expression. Then let's go get the runaways, said Calhoun irritably, before they die in the snow. After all, you got me to have me save them, and there's no need for anybody to die unless they have to. Hunt said without any expression at all. They're headed for the hotlands, where they never get. It's my meaning to take you back to your ship

and then find them and give them the sleigh, so Nim will keep on living a while longer. He moved to shift the controls and set the sleigh again in motion. His state of mind was familiar enough to Calhoun, shock or despair so great that he could feel no other emotion. He would not react to argument. He could not weigh it. He made a despairing conclusion that he was lost to all thought beyond carrying it out.

His intention was not simply a violent reaction to a single event, such as an elopement. He intended desperate means by which a complex situation could be kept from becoming a catastrophe to others. Three cities had to be dealt with in this fashion, and one city in that, and it was requisite that he die himself, not only for his daughter, but for his community. He had resolved to go to his death for good and sufficient reasons. To get his attention to anything else, he would have to be shocked into something other than despair.

Calhoun brought his hand out of his pocket. He held a blaster. He'd pocketed the weapon before he went to examine the cow. He'd had the power to stop his own abduction at any instant, but a medical man does not refuse a call for professional service. Now he pointed the blaster to one side and pressed the stud. A half acre of snow burst into steam. It bellowed upward and went writhing away in the peculiar blue-gold glow of this world at night.

I don't want to be taken back to my ship, said Calhoun firmly. I want to catch those runaways and do whatever's necessary so they won't die at all. The situation here has been thrown into my lap. It's a med-service obligation to intervene in problems of public health, and there's surely a public health problem here. Merkishroid wriggled vigorously under Calhoun's porker. He'd heard the spitting of the... the blaster and the roaring of exploded steam. He was disturbed. The stocky man stared.

What's that? He demanded blankly. You pick up. We're going to pick up your daughter and the man she's with, Calhoun told him crossly. There's an isolation syndrome in what looks like a Caruso problem here. It's got to be dealt with as a matter of public health. The stocky hunt stared at him. Calhoun's intentions were unimaginable to him. He floundered among incredible ideas. We medics, said Calhoun, made it necessary for men to invent interplanetary travel because we kept people from dying and the population on old earth got too large.

Then we made interstellar travel necessary because we continued to keep people from dying and one solar system wasn't big enough. We're responsible for nine-tenths of civilization as it exists today because we produced the conditions that make civilization necessary. And since on this planet, civilization is going downhill, and people are dying without necessity, I have the plain obligation to stop it. So let's pick up your daughter, Nim, and this sweetheart of hers, and keep them from dying, and get civilization on the upgrade again.

The former leader of the kidnappers said hoarsly, You mean? Then he stammered. They're headed for the hotlands. No other way to go. Watch for their tracks. The drive engine bellowed. The sleigh raced ahead.

And now it did not complete the circle that had been begun to head back to the landing grid. Now it straightened and rushed in a splendid roaring fierceness down between the sides of the valley. It left behind the dark patch with its whirling mists. It flung aside bow waves. of fine snow which made rainbows and the half-light which was darkness here. It rushed and rushed and rushed, leaving behind a depression which was singularly permanent proof of its passage. Calhoun cringed a little against the wind. He could see little or nothing of what was ahead. The sprayed wings of upflung snow prevented it.

Hunt standing a wreck could do better. Mergatroyd, inside the parker, again wriggled his nose out into the stinging wind and withdrew it precipitantly. Hunt drove as if confident of where to go. Calhoun dowerly began to fit things into the standard pattern of how such things went. There were self-evidently three cities or colonies on this planet. They'd been named and he'd seen three patches of pasture from the stratosphere. One was plainly warmed by power applied underground, electric power from the landing grid's output, the one now falling behind was less likely to be electrically heated. Steam seemed more probable because of the vapor veil above it. This sleigh was surely fuel-powered. At a guess a ramjet drove it. Such motors were simple enough to make

once the principle of air inflow at low speeds was known. Two-city, somewhere to the rear, might operate on a fuel technology which could be based on fossil oil or gas. The power source for three-city could not now be guessed. Calhoun scowled as he tried to fill in the picture. His factual data was still limited. There was the misty golden ribbon in space. It was assuredly beyond the technical capacity of city suffering from an isolation syndrome.

He'd guessed that hydroponic gardens underground, there was surely no surface city near the landing grid, and the city entrance they'd just like. left was in the face of a cliff. Such items pointed to a limited technical capacity. Both also suggested mining as the original purpose of the human colony or colonies here. Only mining would make a colony self-supporting in an Arctic climate. This world could have been colonized to secure rare metals from it.

There could be a pipeline from an oil field or a gas well field near a landing grid, local technological use of gas or oil to process ores might produce ingots of rare metal worth interstellar freight charges. One could even guess that metal reduced by heat chemistry could be transported in oil suspension over terrain and under conditions when other forms of surface transportation were impractical. If the colony began as a unit of that sort, it would require only very occasional visits of spacecraft to carry away its products. It could be a company planet, colonized and maintained by a single interstellar corporation. It could have been established a 150 or 200 years before when the interstellar service organizations were in their infancy,

and only operated where they were asked to serve. Such a colony might not even be on record in the medical service files, and that would account for everything. When, for some reason, the mines became unprofitable, this colony would not be maintained. The people who wished to leave would be taken off, of course, but some would elect to stay behind in the warmed, familiar cities they and their fathers had been born in. They couldn't imagine moving to a strange and unfamiliar world. So much was normal reasoning. Now the strictly technical logic of the Med Service took over to explain the current state of things.

In one century or less, an isolated community could lose absolutely its defenses against diseases to which it was never exposed. Amarins were without defense against smallpox back on earth. A brown race scattered among thousands of tiny islands was nearly wiped out by measles when it was introduced. Any contact between a long isolated community and another, perhaps itself long isolated, would bring out violently any kind of contagion that might exist in either. There was the mechanism of carriers. The real frequency of disease carriers in the human race had been established less than two generations ago.

A very small, isolated population could easily contain a carrier or carriers of some infection. They could spread it so freely that every member of their group acquired immunity during infancy. But a different isolated group might contain a carrier of a different infection and be immune, but distributive of it. It was literally true that each of the three cities might have developed in their first century of isolation, a separate immunity to one disease, and a separate defenselessness against all others. A member of one community might be actually deadly to a member of either of the others whom he met face to face.

With icy wind blowing upon him as the sleigh rushed on, Calhoun wily realized that all this was wholly familiar. It was taught nowadays that something of the sort had caused the ancient, primitive human belief that women were perilous to men, and a man must exercise great precaution to avoid evil mana emanating from his prospective bride. When wives were acquired by capture and all human communities were small and fiercely self-eastern, isolated, why each unsanitary tribal group might easily acquire a condition like that assumed in cities one, two, and three. The primitive suspicion of woman would have its basis in reality

if the women of one tribe possessed immunity to some deadly microbe, their skin or garments harbored, and if their successful abductors had no defense against it. The speeding sleigh swerved. It leaned inward against the turn. It swerved again, throwing monstrous sheets. of snow aloft. Then the drive jet lessened its roar. The shimmering bough waves ceased. The sleigh slowed to a mere headlong glide. Their trail! Hunt cried in Calhoun's ear. Calhoun saw depressions in the snow. There were two sets of pear-shaped dents in the otherwise virgin surface. Two man-beings, wearing oblong frames on their feet, criss-crossed with cordage to support them atop the snow. It tried to have to head. It

tried to head there through the gold-blue night. Calhoun knew exactly what it happened. He could make the modifications the local situation imposed upon a standard pattern and reconstitute a complete experience leading up to now. A girl in heavy, clumsy garments had mounted guard in a two-city sentry post above a snow-filled mountain valley. There were long, bitter-cold hours of watching, in which nothing would ever happen.

Eternal snows seemed eternally the same, and there was little in life but monotony. But she'd known that across the valley there was another lonely watcher from an alien city, the touch of whose hand, or even whose breath, would mean sickness and death. She'd have mused upon the strangeness that protected her in this loneliness because her touch or her breath would be contagion,

upon him, too. She'd have begun by feeling a vague dread of the other sentry. But presently, perhaps there came a furtive call on the walking frequency used by sentries for communication with their own cities. Very probably, she did not answer at first, but she might listen. And she would hear a young man's voice filled with curiosity about the sentry who watched as he did. There'd come a day when she'd answer shyly.

And there would be relief and a certain fascination in talking to someone so much like herself, but so alien and so deadly. Of course, there could be no harm in talking to someone who would flee from actual face-to-face contact as desperately as herself. They might come to joke about their mutual dangerousness. They might even find it amusing that cities which dared not meet should hate. There come a vast curiosity to see each other. They'd discussed that frankly, because what possible evil could come, if two persons were deadly to each other, should they actually approach?

Then there'd come a time when they looked at each other, breathlessly envisioned screens they'd secretly stolen from their separate city's stores. There could be no harm. They were only curious. But she would see someone at once infinitely strange but utterly dear. and he would see someone lovely beyond the girls of his own city. Then they would regret the alieness which made them perilous to each other. Then they would resent it fiercely. They'd end by denying it.

So across the wide valley of eternal snow, there would travel whispers of desperate rebellion, and then firmly resolute murmurings, and then what seemed the most obvious of truth, that it would be much more satisfactory, to die together than to live apart. And insane plannings would follow arrangements by which two trembling young folk would secretly meet and flee toward the hotlands to be sure, but without any belief that the days before death

while they were together were more precious than the lifetimes they would give up to secure them. Calhoun could see all this very clearly, and he assured himself that he regarded it with ironic detachment. He asserted in his own mind that it was merely the manifestation of that blind impulse to exogaming, which makes spacemen romantic in far spaceports, and invests an outer planet girl with glamour. But it was something more. It was also that strange and unreasonable and solely human trait, which causes one to rejoice selflessly so that his or her own life and happiness is put into its place of proper insignificance in the cosmos. It may begin an instinct, but it becomes an achievement only humans can encompass.

Hunt knew it, the stocky, deep-voiced despairing figure, who stared hungrily for the daughter who had defied him, and for whom he was in exile from all food and warmth. He flew out a mittened hand. "'There!' he cried joyously. "'It's them!' There was a dark speck in the blue-gold night glow. As the sleigh swept close, there were two small figures who stood close together.

They defiantly faced the approaching sleigh. As its drive motor stopped, and it merely glided on, its runners whispering on the snow, the girl snatched away the coal mask which all the inhabitants of this planet wore out of doors. She raised her face to the man. They kissed. And then the young man desperately raised a knife. It glittered in the light of the ribbon in the sky, and Calhoun's blaster made its inadequate rasping noise.

The knife blade turned incandescent for two-thirds of its length. The young man dropped the suddenly searing handle. The knife sank hissing into the snow. It's always thrilling to be dramatic, said Calhoun severely, but I assure you it's much more satisfying, to be sane. The young lady's name is Nim, I believe. I do not know the gentleman, but Nim's father and myself have come to put the technical

resources of two civilizations at your disposal as a first step toward treatment of the pandemic isolation syndrome on this planet, with which the complications that have developed amounts to a Caruso health problem. Merkertoy tried feverishly to get his head out of Calhoun's Parker past his chin. He'd heard a blaster. He sensed excitement. His nose emerged, whiffing frantically. Calhoun pushed it back. Tell them, Hunt, he said irritably. Tell them what we're here for and what you've done already. The girl's father told her unsteadily, almost humbly for some reason, that the jet sleigh had

come to take her and her sweetheart, to be her husband, to the hotlands where at least they would not die of cold. Calhoun added crossly that he believed there would even be food there because of the ribbon in the sky. Trembling and abashed, the fugitives got on the sleigh. Its motor roared. It surged toward the hotlands under the golden globe of that ribbon, which obviously had no rational explanation unless somebody had made a grave mistake. But Calhoun had not. Part 3 Part 4 of Ribbon in the Sky by Murray Leinster

This Libre Fox recording is in the public domain. Part 4 An action is normally the result of a thought. Since we cannot retract an action, we tend to feel that we cannot retract the thought which produced it. In effect, we cling desperately to our mistakes. In order to change our views,

we have commonly to be forced to act. upon new thoughts, so urgent and so necessary that without disowning our former mistaken ideas, we can abandon them tactfully, without saying anything to anybody, even ourselves. The practice of thinking, Fitzgerald. Murgatroyd came down a tree with his cheek pouches bulged with nuts. Calhoun inserted a finger, and Murgatroyd readily permitted him to remove and examine the results of his scramble aloft. Calhoun grunted.

Merkertoyd did have other and more useful abilities in the service of public health, but right here and now, his delicate digestion was extremely convenient. His stomach worked so much like a human's that anything Mercutroid ate was safe for Calhoun to an incredible degree of probability, and Mercutroid ate nothing that disagreed with him. Instead of physician heal thyself, Calhoun observed, It's amounted to physician feed thyself since we got past the frost-line, Mercotry. I am gratified. Chee, said Mercutriot, complacently.

I expected, said Calhoun, only to benefit by the charm of your society in what I thought would be a routine check trip to Meritor II. Instead, some unknown fumble finger punched a wrong button and we wound up here. I'm not exactly here, but near enough. I brought you from the Med Ship because there was nobody to stay around and feed you, and now you feed us, at least by pointing out edible things we might otherwise miss. Chee, said Murgatroy. He strutted. I wish, protested Calhoun, unrily, that you wouldn't imitate that Pat character from Three City.

As a brand-new husband, he's entitled to strut a little. But I object to your imitating him. You haven't anybody acting like Nim, gazing at you rapidly as if you'd invented not only marriage, but romance itself, impassioned falsehoods, and all other desirable things, back to night and morning. Murgatroyd said, and turned to face away from Calhoun.

The two of them, just then, stood on a leaf-covered patch of ground which slanted down to the singularly smooth and reflective water of a tiny bay. Behind and above them reared gigantic mountains. There was snow in blinding white sheets overhead, but the snow line itself was safely 3,000 feet above them. Beyond the bay was a wide estuary,

with more mountains behind it, with more snow fields on their flanks. A series of leaping cascades jumped downward from somewhere aloft where a glacier foot melted in the sun's heat, and everywhere that snow was not, green stuff shone in the sunlight. Nym's father, Hunt, came hurriedly toward the pair. He'd abandoned the thick-felt cloak and heavy boots of Two-City. Now he was dressed nearly like a civilized man,

but he carried a sharpened stick in one hand and in the other a string of authentic fish. He wore an expression of astonishment. It was becoming habitual. Murgatride, said Calhoun casually, has found another kind of edible nut. Terrestrial, too, like half the living things we've seen. Only stuff crowding the glaciers seems to be native. The rest originated on earth and was brought here some time or other. Hunt nodded.

He seemed to find some difficulty in speaking. I've been talking to Pat, he said at last. The son-in-law, observed Calhoun, who has to thither. thank you not only for your daughter and his life, but for your public career in two-city, which qualified you to perform a marriage ceremony. I hope he was respectful. Hunt made an impatient gesture. He says, he protested, that you haven't done anything either to Nym or to him to keep them from dying. Calhoun nodded. That's true. But they should die. Nim should die of the three-city sickness, and three-city people have always said that we had a

sickness, too, that did not harm us, but they died of. Which, agreed Calhoun, is undoubtedly historical fact. Its current value is that of one factor in an isolation syndrome, and consequently a complicating factor in the Caruso health problem here. I've let Nim and Pat go untreated to prove it. I think there's only a sort of mass hypochondria based on strictly accurate tradition, which would be normal. Hunt shook his head. I don't understand. He protested helplessly. Someday I'll draw a diagram, Calhoun told him.

It is complicated. Did you check with Pat on what three said he knows about the ribbon in the sky? I suspect it accounts for the terrestrial plants and animals here, indirectly. There wouldn't be an accidental planting of edible nuts and fish and squirrels and pigeons and rabbits and bumblebees. I suspect there was a mistake somewhere. What does Pat say? Hunt shrugged his shoulders. When I talked to him, added Calhoun, he doesn't pay attention. He simply gazes at nym and beams. The man's mad. But you're his father-in-law. He asked to be polite to you. Hunt sat down abruptly. He rested.

his spear against the tree and looked over his string of fish. He wasn't used to the abundance of foodstuffs here, and the temperature, Calhoun estimated it at 50 degrees, seemed to him incredibly balmy. Now he thoughtfully separated one fish from the rest, and with a certain new skill, began to slice away two neatly boneless fillets. Calhoun had showed him the trick the day after a lesson of fish spearing, which was two days after their arrival. Children in three-city, growled hunt, are taught the same as in two city. Men came to this planet to work the mines. There was a company which sent them,

and every so often it sent ships to take what the mines yielded, and to bring things the people wanted. Men lived well and happily. The company hung the ribbon in the sky so the hotlands could grow food for the men. But presently the mines could not deliver what they made to the the ships when they came. The hotlands grew bigger, the glaciers flowed faster, and the pipes between the cities were broken and could not be kept repaired. So the company said that, since the mine products could no longer be had, it could not send the ships. Those who wanted to move to other worlds would be carried there. Some men went with their wives and children, but the grandfathers of our father's grandfathers were contented here. They had homes and heat and

food. They would not go. Hunt regarded the pinkish brook trout fillet he just separated. He bent off a mouthful and chewed thoughtfully. That really tastes better cooked, said Calhoun mildly. But it is good this way also, said Hunt. He was grizzled and stocky and somehow possessed of a dignity which was not to be lost merely by eating raw fish. He waved the remainder of the fillet. Then the ship ceased to come. Then sickness came.

One city had a sickness it gave to people of two and three when they visited it. Two city had a sickness it gave to one and three. Three city, he grunted. Our children in two say only two city people have no sickness. Three city children are taught that only three city is clean of sickness. Calhoun said nothing. Merkertoy tried to gnawaping. of the nuts he brought down from the tree.

Calhoun took it and another and struck them together. Both cracked. He gave them to Murgatroyd, who ate them with great satisfaction. Hunt looked up suddenly. Pat did not give a three-city sickness to Nim, he observed. So our thinking was wrong. And Nim has not given a two-city sickness to him. His thinking was wrong.

Calhoun said meditatively, It's tricky, but sickness can be kept by a carrier, just as you people have believed of other cities. A carrier has a sickness but does not know it. People around the carrier have the sickness on their bodies or their clothing from the carrier. They distribute it. Soon everybody is used to the sickness. They are immune. They cannot know it.

But somebody from another city can come, and they are not used to the sickness, and they become ill and die. Hunt considered shrewdly. Because the sickness is on clothing, from the carrier? Calhoun nodded. Different carriers have different sicknesses. So one carrier in one city might have one disease, and all the people in one city became used to it while they were babies, became immune.

There would be another carrier with another sickness in two city, a third in three city. In each city they were used to their own. own sickness. That is it, said Hunt, nodding. But why is Pat not dying? Or nym! Why do you do nothing to keep them alive?

Suppose, said Calhoun, the carrier of a sickness dies. What happens? Hunt bit again and chewed. Suddenly he choked. He sputtered. There is no sickness to spread on the clothing. The people no longer have it to give to strangers who are not used to it. The babies do not get used to it while they are little.

There is no longer a one-city sickness or a two-city sickness or a three. There is, said Calhoun, only a profound belief in them. You had it. Everybody else still has it. And the cities are isolated and put out centuries because they believe in what used to be true. And people like Nim and Pat run away in the snow and die of it. There is much death because of it. of it. You would have died of it. Hunt chewed and swallowed. Then he grinned.

Now what? His deep voice was quaintly respectful to Calhoun so much younger than himself. I like this. We are not fools to believe because it was true. But we are fools if we still believe, because it is not true anymore. How can we make people understand, Calhoun? You tell me, I can handle people when they are not afraid. I can make them do what I think wise when they are not afraid, but when they fear. When they fear, said Calhoun dryly, they want a stranger to tell them what to do. You came from me, remember? You are a stranger to one city and three city.

Pat is a stranger to two city. If the cities become really afraid, Hunt grunted. He watched Calhoun intently, and Calhoun was peculiarly reminded of the elected president of a highly cultured planet, who had exactly that completely intent way of looking at one. Go on, said Hunt. How frightened them into this? He waved his hand about. Calhoun, his tone very dry indeed, told him.

Words would not be enough. Threats would not be enough. promises would not be enough. But rabbits and pigeons and squirrels and fish. Fish that were frozen like other human food and piles of edible nuts. They would not be enough either by themselves. But an isolation syndrome is a neurotic condition and a Caruso problem amounts to neurotic hypochondria.

You can do it. You and Pat. Hunt grimaced. i hate the cold now but i will do it after all if i am to have grandchildren there should be other children for them to play with and we will take you back to your ship you will said calhoun by the way what is the name of this planet anyhow hunt told him calhoun slipped across the pasture inside the landing grid and examined the ship from the outside there had been batterings but the door had not been opened in the light of the ribbon in the sky He could see, too, that the ground was trampled down but only at a respectful distance. One city was disturbed about the Med Ship, but it did not know what to do, so long as nothing happened from it. He was working the combination locked door when something hopped, low down, and near him. He jumped, and Mercutche said,

Chee! Then Calhoun realized what had startled him. He finished the unlocking of the port. He went in and closed the port behind him. The air inside seemed curiously dead after so long a time outside. He flipped on the outside microphones and heard tiny patterings. He heard mildly resentful cooings. He grinned. When morning came, the people of one city would find their pasture land inhabited by small snowshoe rabbits and small and bush-tailed squirrels and fluttering pigeons.

They were to react as two-city and three-city had already done, with panic. And panic would inevitably call up the notion of the most feared thing in their lives, sickness. The most feared thing is always a rare thing, of course. One cannot fear a frequent thing because one either dies of it or comes to take it for granted. Fear is always of the rare or nonexistent. One city would be filled with fear of sickness. and sickness would come. Hunt would call them presently on a walkie-talkie communicator.

He would express deep concern because, so he'd say, new domestic animals intended for Two City had been dumped on one city pasture land. He'd add that they were highly infective, and Two-City was already inescapably doomed to an epidemic which would begin with severe headaches, and would continue with cramps and extreme nervous agitation. and he would say that Calhoun had left medicines at Two City, with which that sickness and all others could be cured, and if the sickness described should appear in one city, why its victims would be cured if they traveled to Two City?

The sickness would appear, inevitably. There was no longer sickness in the three communities. Arctic colonies, never visited by people from reservoirs of infection, become magnificently healthy by the operation of pure natural causes, but an isolation syndrome. The people of one city would presently travel, groaning to two-city. Their suffering would be real. They would dread the breaking of their isolation. But they dread sickness, even sickness they only imagined, still more.

And when they reached two-city, they would find themselves tended by three city members, and they would be appalled and terrified. But Mombo-Jumbo medication by hunting Pat and Nym for the women would reassure them. A Caruso condition requires heroic treatment. This was it. Calhoun cheerfully checked over the equipment of the Med Ship. He'd have to take off on emergency rockets. He'd have to be very, very careful in setting a course back to headquarters to report,

before starting out again for Merida, too. He didn't want to make any mistakes. Suddenly he began to chuckle. Murgatroyd, he said amiably. It just occurred to me that the mistakes we make, that we struggle so hard to avoid, are part of the scheme of things. Gee, said Murgatry, inquiringly. The company that settled this planet, said Calhoun, grinning,

set up that ribbon out in space as a splendidly conservative investment to save money in freight charges. It was a mistake, because it ruined their mining business, and they had to write the whole colony off. They made another mistake by not reporting to Medit Service, because now they've abandoned the colony and would have to get a license to reoccupy, which they'd never be granted, against the population already there. Somebody made a mistake that brought us here, and one city made a mistake by not accepting us

as guests, and two city made a mistake by sending Nim on century duty, and three city made a mistake. Murgertroid, yawned. You, said Calhoun severely, make a mistake in not paying attention. He strapped himself in. He stabbed an emergency rocket control button. The little ship shot heavenward on a pencil-fined stream of fire. Below him, people of one city would come pouring out of underground to learn what had happened,

and they'd find the pasture swarming with friendly squirrels and inquisitive rabbits and cooing pigeons. They'd be scared to death. Calhoun laughed. I'll spend part of the time in overdrive making a report on it. Since an isolation syndrome is mostly psychological, and a caruso condition is wholly so, I managed sound medical treatment by purely psychological means. I'll have fun with that. It was a mistake.

He got back to headquarters all right. But when his report was read, they made him expanded into a book with footnotes, an index, and a bibliography. It was very much of a mistake. End of Part 4. End of Ribbing in the Sky by Murray Leinster. This story recorded by Phil Schenever.