Plague

MURRAY LEINSTER

PLAGUE

“...By the YEAR 2075—Earth Style—it was clear that merely the admin­istration of intersolar and interplanetary affairs would soon absorb the entire attention of the Galactic Commission, so the formation of an ad­ministrative service was a necessity. It was not then realized that adminis­trative services in the past had had the good fortune to be tested contin­ually by emergencies and conflicts with other administrative services. (See WARS.)

The Galactic Administrative Service had, however, a monopoly in its field, and had necessarily vast authority. Individuals, to whom authority per se is an ambition crowded into its ranks, fought bit­terly among themselves for promotion, and unfortunately ultimately attained high posts. But individuals of this sort are unable to dis­tinguish between authority and intelligence, subservience and sub­ordination, or between protest and rebellion. After a hundred years with no emergencies or conflicts to reveal its faults, the Administrative Service was an ironclad, fossilized bureaucracy in which high place was an end in itself, pomposity a tradition, and red tape the breath of life. Red tape, alone, kept three solar systems from all contact with the rest of humanity for more than thirty years. Certain key documents had been misfiled, and without them no person had authority to give clearance to spaceships for those solar systems. Therefore, no ships could land on any planet of the three suns—not even Space-Navy ships! The accidental dis­covery of the situation by a member of the Galactic Commission led to the dismissal of the officials responsible, but the Service did not reform itself.

The Electron Plague of 2194 (SEE (1) LORE. (2) LIFE-FORMS. (3) ENTITIES—ImmateriaL) which threatened the entire human race came about because of bureaucratic stupidity alone. The Bazin Expedition had cleared from Pharona. After landing on Lore it was discovered that three Out of more than six hundred documents then required to be filed by an exploring expedition had been improperly made out. The Expedition was ordered to return to Pharona to remedy its error. Scientists of the expedi­tion, already at work, reported that strange life-forms on Lore made return inadvisable until they had been further studied. The sub-commissioner on Pharona took the protest as a defiance of his authority and ordered a naval spaceship to bring in the expedition under arrest. This was done and within two months more than ten million women, girls, and infants—half the population of Pharona—died of the plague unwillingly brought back by the Bazin Expedition. The scientists of the Expedition were under arrest for defiance of authority, and the plague had every chance of wip­ing out the entire human race throughout the Galaxy . .

(Article, “ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICE, Reform of,” in the Con­densed Encyclopedia, Vol. 31, Edition of 2207, E.S.)

Ben Sholto was in the very act of getting up an extraordinary fine fix on a sethee bird in its elaborate nuptial dance, when the Reserve bracelet he was wearing nearly tore his arm off. It felt like that, at any rate. The electric shock tensed his muscles, threw the three-dimensional camera into an ungraceful wabble which wrecked the recording, and his sudden and violent movement revealed his presence. The sethee bird and her mate vanished with a thin whistling of wings to take up their matrimonial status, most likely, with a lack of ceremony their fellows might deplore.

Ben rubbed his arm vigorously and swore. He hastily dried the skin under the bracelet so that the order to follow would be less painful. It was sharp enough, at that—the series of long and short electric shocks which solemnly ordered him to get in touch with Reserve Headquarters for this sector at once.

“What do those brass hats think I’ll do after an active-status warning?” Ben grumbled sourly.

He started through the jungle back toward his’ small space cruiser. He was a Reserve officer. He had been Space-Navy, and he had been ordered from on high to do something which was completely idiotic and would cost lives. He accomplished the mission in a simpler fashion, without losing any men at all. His report curtly stated that he had not followed instructions exactly because they seemed to have been issued through an error—and he was called up for court-martial, on the basis of his report that he had not obeyed his written orders. After his witnesses had testified, however, the court-martial was hastily dropped by order of the brass hat who had ordered it. If Ben had been convicted and had appealed, the magnificent imbecility of the orders he’d sidetracked would have become apparent to the local brass hat’s superiors. So the brass hat ordered Ben transferred to the Reserve, which could not be appealed. There was a certain amount of pay attached to Reserve status, though, and it allowed Ben to knock about in his own cruiser wherever he pleased. In this par­ticular section of space the privilege was valuable. So he roamed about, taking three-dimension pictures of flora and fauna for the feature-casts, and mourned his Space-Navy career and the romance that seemed to have gone glimmering with it. The romance had been named Sally, and it was her father who was the fatuous brass hat. But Ben missed her very much.

His cruiser rested in a leafy screen beside a particularly prismatic brook. He went in and to the GC—General Communication—phone. He stabbed the special Reserve Headquarters button and watched the screen without expression.

“Ben Sholto reporting for orders,” he said curtly when it lighted.

A fat officer nodded uninterestedly.

“Acknowledged. Stand by.”

The screen faded, Ben waited. And waited. Nothing happened. Half an hour later his Reserve bracelet nearly tore his arm off again. He seethed, and jabbed the button once more. The same officer appeared on the screen after a leisurely interval.

“Ben Sholto reporting for the second time,” said Ben angrily. “I got a second set of shocks from my bracelet.”

“Stand by,” said the fat officer indifferently.

After almost half an hour, Ben opened the back of his bracelet and put his wrist in a basin of water. He felt a bare tingle when the third call came. He grinned. That would blow something at Headquarters.

The screen lighted. The fat officer scowled.

“Say, what are you trying to do?”

“Get my orders,” said Ben. “What’s the emergency? Simulated mobiliza­tion against mythical enemy force from another galaxy, or what? That’s the standard, I think."

The fat officer said curtly:

“You Reserve men think you’re smart! There’s been a quarantine de­clared on Pharona, next System. Somebody’s trying to break it. You’ll be assigned guard duty. Plug in your writer and get written orders.”

Ben threw the switch and prepared a meal. As he sat at the table, and before he threw his dishes in the fuel bin which would feed them to the converter as fuel—considerably more than a mere sports cruiser would ever need—the writer buzzed. He glanced at his orders.

You are to lie out in space and watch for a possible vessel breaking quarantine on Pharona trying to reach the planet on which you now are. Contact other Reserve watchers and divide the area surrounding your planet among you. If the vessel should be contacted by you, identify it, secure a list of crew and passengers, and destroy it. This order is not to be questioned.

Ben whistled, scowled, and then said furiously, “Pompous fatheads!” Then he shrugged philosophically.

He took off. There wasn’t any other Reserve officer on this planet. It was uninhabited. The sports cruiser whistled up through thin air. Then there was empty space. Ben went out and established a casual orbit, set his detector screens, and settled down with a good book. He expected nothing at all to happen. Simply, he would draw active-status pay while on this so-called emergency duty, plus pay for the use of his ship. Since he had been robbed of a career—and a romance—by a brass hat, he felt no qualms at letting the same brass-hat mentality throw a few credits his way now and then.

He read until he was sleepy. Then he went to look at the instrument board before he turned in. The farthest screen of all was being nibbled at. The needle of its dial trembled almost imperceptibly. The alarm bell rang sharply.

He settled down in the pilot’s chair and followed the detector-screen line on out. There was that odd, dizzying sensation at the beginning which always comes of a total-acceleration field taking hold. The little ship went hurtling through emptiness. As technical lieutenant, he knew atomic drive rather thoroughly. The Navy drive is in several essentials much above the commercial drive, though it requires more competent attention. Ben could give it, and he’d altered the drive of his small craft to Navy quality.

In ten minutes he’d sighted the craft of which his detectors had told him. It drove on for the very minor planet he had just left. He signaled by space-phone, but got no answer. The sharp, authoritative “Identify your­self immediately” dot-dash signal is known to all space craft. To fail to answer it is to confess illegality.

Ben pushed the Headquarters’ button again. There was a long delay before the screen lighted. He had time to reverse his acceleration and match course with the unresponsive ship, at a distance of no more than ten miles. The fat officer looked annoyed.

“Ben Sholto reporting,” said Ben. “I have located a vessel, on course apparently from Pharona. It refuses to reply to signals.”

The fat officer said “Stand-by” and became efficiously busy. A vast, bureaucratic dither went on behind the phone-screen focus. From time to time the fat officer answered some question put to him. At long last he turned to the screen again, pompously.

“No authorized vessel is in your locality. Destroy it.”

“With what?” asked Ben mildly. “I’ve a positron-beam pistol, but that’s all. This is a Reserve Auxiliary ship.”

“Then . . . er . . . accompany the suspicious vessel,” said the fat man, frowning portentously. “A destroyer will be sent to blast it.”

Ben punched the cut-off button. He felt rather wry. There was no need to report his own position, of course. The same force that could make his Reserve bracelet give him senselessly severe electric shocks could cause it to radiate direction-waves by which he could be triangulated upon— even without his knowledge—from an incredible distance.

He regarded the hurtling ship some ten miles to one side. It was trimly streamlined, as if intended for at least occasional use as a yacht in atmos­phere. It headed straight in for the planet now only a few thousand miles distant. It decelerated swiftly, and went into an orbit about the planet. Ben matched speed and course with the precision of long practice. Then he happened to glance at the phone board. There was a tiny bluish haze over to the left of the telltale tube, which reports the wave lengths of all broadcasters in operation, so that one may select. Curious, Ben tuned in that wave. It was a reflection-wave coming back from the planet’s heavi­side layer while most of the signal went through.

“Ben!” said a girl’s voice desperately. “Ben! If you’re down there, signaL me quickly! Please, Ben! Please!”

Ben’s heart leaped crazily and then seemed to cramp itself into knots. Because this was the girl who was the romance he’d been cheated of by a brass hat, and she was in the spaceship he’d been ordered to destroy, and there was a Navy ship coming now to blast it out of space— “Sally!” he cried fiercely into the transmitter. “I’m here! I’m in the ship alongside!”

The visiphone screen lighted. And Sally Hale stared at him out of it, pale and hunted to look at. She tried to smile. Then she toppled from view. She had fainted.

Within this same hour, Galactic time, a sub-commissioner on Thallis II forbade the colonization of the planet’s largest moon by arbitrary edict, which could not be gainsaid. The only reason ever discovered for the order was that the sub-commissioner enjoyed the hunting on that tiny planet, and it would be spoiled if the crowded population on Thallis II were admitted to colonists’ rights. Simultaneously, four spacelines in the Denib sector applied for permission to discontinue operations. They asserted, and offered to prove, that the cost of supplying required reports to the Administrative Service had grown to be the greatest single item of their operating costs, and made operation impossible save at a loss. (They were forbidden to discontinue operations.) And on the same Galactic day on Foorph—the solitary planet of Etamin—a crack express-liner from the Algol sector was refused landing and ordered to return to its port of departure. Of the more than eighteen hundred documents covering its voyage and cargo, exactly one lacked a sub-sub-clerk’s indorsement. The Administrative Service was behaving exactly as usual.

But Ben Sholto was not behaving as a properly subordinate officer in the Naval Reserve. Half an hour after seeing Sally on the vision-screen, he cut loose the grapples and the tiny air lock hissed shut. The yacht seemed to swerve aside, but it was actually the little sports cruiser which abruptly altered course. Dead ahead, the blue-white sun of this minor solar system burned terribly in emptiness. The long, slim space yacht which had come so far sped on and on. The smaller ship curved away and drove hard to get orbital speed. Ben went to the GC phone. He stabbed at the Headquarters’ button again. The fat officer thrust out an under lip.

“Well?” he demanded challengingly.

“Reporting,” said Ben woodenly. “The ship from Pharona did not re­spond to repeated calls. It seemed to be heading straight for the sun, here. I have pulled away from it now, because on its present course it will either hit the sun or pass so close that nothing could possibly live on it. I suggest that the entire crew must be dead.”

“Watch it,” said the fat officer.

Ben clicked off the phone. He went back to the single stateroom in his sports cruiser. Sally Hale said faintly, “Really, Ben, I’m all right. Just ... just you were the only person in the world I could appeal to. I’m hunted.”

“Not any more,” said Ben. “You’re safe now!”

“I . . . broke the quarantine on Pharona,” said Sally. “It . . . it was terrible, Ben! They’re. .. dying there by. . - by millions. Women. Only women. And girls. And nobody knows why. Their bodies give off cosmic rays, and they die. That’s all. There’s no real night on Pharona, you know, only twilight, so it was only the day before I left that they . . . discovered that women who have the plague glow, too. They get. . . phosphorescent. They don’t feel badly, only oppressed. They get fever, and cosmic rays come from them, and in the dark they shine faintly, and they get weaker and weaker, and then they die. And men are immune, and they are going crazy! Their wives and sweethearts and daughters and mothers dying be­fore their eyes. And they’re not even in danger—”

“Don’t tell me now if you don’t want to,” said Ben.

“I. . . think I’m all right. I must be!” said Salty. “I was twelve days on the way. If. . - if I’d had the plague I’d have died, wouldn’t I? At least I’d be sick by now! But I’m not. Only. . . I couldn’t sleep much, Ben. I was all alone on the yacht, and four days out I heard the alarm g-go out for me, and I’ve been hearing the GC phone organizing a hunt for me—”

“Maybe you’d better eat something, and take a nap,” said Ben. “But how’d you come to pick this place to run to?”

Sally flushed a little.

“You were here.” She looked at him pleadingly. “I . . . couldn’t help it that my father. . . acted as he did. You know that after . . . well after my father got so angry with you, I felt badly. I went to Pharona to visit my uncle. And the Bazin Expedition came, and left for Lore, and the sub­commissioner ordered it back, and it came, protesting all the way, and

in four days the plague broke out. 1 was away over on the other side of the planet. The plague came back with the Bazin Expedition. We heard about it, and the quarantines that were clapped down, and finally the whole planet was quarantined. My uncle thought I would surely be safe, because his estate is so isolated. And then one of the maids got the plague. She’d been home visiting, and Uncle had put Geiger counters at the gates, so she didn’t enter the grounds, but . . . it was time for me to get away. So he sent me off in the yacht. All by myself. He gave me my course. He stayed behind, with all his servants and staff. He. - . said he’d report I’d died. I couldn’t have been exposed. Not possibly. I hadn’t been within a mile of any woman who’d had the plague, or any man who’d been near any woman who had it. But if I stayed I’d die, so he sent me off. That was right, wasn’t it?”

“Surely!” said Ben quietly. “Go on—”

“You see,” she said pleadingly, “I hadn’t been exposed, and. . . nobody was missing from the estate, because I was supposed to be dead. It seemed like it was perfect. But they. . . must have gone to seal the engines of the yacht so nobody could use it, and they found it gone, and thought some­body had stolen it—”

“So you’re officially dead,” said Ben. “All right. Go to sleep. You’re safe. I’ve reported that the yacht didn’t swerve from its course and dived into this sun. It’s actually diving there now. Its not very probable that any spaceship coming out of interstellar space would hit a star by accident. It would take good piloting! But it may be just improbable enough not to seem like a made-up yarn.”

Ben went out of the stateroom and forward to the control cabin. His face was set. In olden days, perhaps, a human being could move about freely. But in these days of the Galactic Commission and the brass hats under it, there was a vast amount of red tape about everything. The brass hats, of course, were the administrative officials under the Commission, and they climbed to authority by seniority and a pious avoidance of any­thing which could not be justified by written rules. They were a sort of galactic civil service, surrounded by pomp and power. Some of them were decent enough, but a deplorable lot were stuffed shirts and brass hats. Fortunately, they had no control over the surface of planets, but they su­pervised all traffic in space with a fussy particularity which was maddening. Any ship capable of space flight had to be registered and licensed, and all space-flights conducted under checks and double-checks which made spacemen utterly disrespectful.

“The question,” said Ben wryly in the control room, “appears to be serious. Sally isn’t legally alive. I have, in fact, official orders to kill her. I’m not going to do it. So, just how am I going to manage things?”

Every spaceship is inspected minutely at every spaceport it enters. He could not take Sally into any inhabited planet without questions he could not answer. He could not— He pushed the CC button again. The screen lighted. The fat officer said boredly:

“What’s the matter? A destroyer’s on the way.”

“The vessel 1 reported has vanished in the corona of this sun,” said Ben smoothly. “This is a dwarf blue-white, as you may remember. The strange ship made an apparent grazing impact and is melted down to a blob of metal if it isn’t vaporized by now. I was taking some pictures back yonder. May I be released from Reserve duty?”

“You will await orders—”

The fat officer began to speak with pompous indignation. Then there was a scream behind Ben. Sally came stumbling out of the stateroom, her face like chalk.

“Ben!” she choked. “I’ve . . - got the plague—”

Ben’s left hand slammed off the CC phone, but it was too late. He knew it was too late. He’d seen the fat officer’s eyes widen blankly. Sub-ether phone communication does not operate by ether waves, and no time-lag has ever been detected even between the two rims of the Galaxy. Already the fat officer at headquarters had seen Sally and heard her cry.

Ben was very white. Within minutes the whole Space-Navy of the Galaxy would have on their recorders the description of himself and his sports cruiser, with orders to hunt him down and blast him out of space on sight. Ten million dead on Pharona, and a case of the plague at large to start it up again— Of course!

He said hoarsely, in an effort to be reassuring:

“Don’t be silly, Sally! You can’t have it—”

Her teeth chattered.

“B-but I havel I t-turned out the light to try to sleep, and . . . and I saw my hand glowing. And I got up and looked in the mirror, and rn-my face—”

She reached out and turned off the light switch in the control room. The instrument dials glowed faintly. But so did Sally. Her features and her throat and arms were faintly visible in an ethereal light which made her—rather than frightening—look like an angel. And from within the thin garments in which she had meant to sleep there came a faint efful­gence, too.

Ben’s throat made a queer sound.

“I. . . thought,” gasped Sally pitifully, “that we. . . could be happy because . . . no one could ever forbid us to be together if I w-was sup­posed to be dead. But I didn’t think I was going to die a-after I’d joined you—’

Ben took her in his arms, helplessly. For an instant she thrust away from him, but then she clung close.

“You c-can’t catch it, anyway,” she sobbed. “Please hold me close, Ben. I d-don’t want to die, when I’d j-just run away so I could never I-leave you—”

At this time the members of the Galactic Commission, itself, were press­ing the investigations which were later to make intergalactic exploration and colonization practical. They had set aside whole planets for research stations, and far out beyond the Galaxy’s rim there were those infinitely hazardous laboratories where men extended the knowledge of stellar physics so that we who follow them have already circumnavigated the uni­verse and some day may even understand it. The members of the Com­mission also directed the investigation of that endocrine balance which is youth, so that age is now a measure merely of time, and the word “senility” is now marked “obsolete” in the dictionaries. But on this same day the mines on Thotmes II had to be shut down despite their usefulness. An Administrative Service clerk had discovered a flaw in the charter of the space line which ran to Thotmes II. It was not authorized to carry mineral products. Therefore it had to be subjected to heavy fines, and it was driven into bankruptcy, and one hundred and twenty thousand miners were isolated from the rest of humanity by the breaking of their only transportation link.

And on this same day the Galaxy’s greatest mind in medicine was re­fused space-transportation. He wanted to go to Pharona, but the sub­commissioner in residence on the planet on which he lived was a hype­chondriac, and wished adequate medical attention to be available for his nervous stomach-aches.

And another sub-commissioner, on Pharona, diverted attention from his own stupidity—which had caused a plague with ten million victims-by pompously indignant demands for Ben Sholto’s destruction.

Ben Sholto, however, paid no attention. The light was on in the control room again. His face was white and set. The Reserve bracelet was off his wrist, now. It had signaled violently for him to report to Headquarters. For answer, he’d hacked it in half and smashed its mechanism, and then thrust it down into the very tip of the fuel bin, pushing until he felt dizzy as the heavy metal of the bracelet turned into energy for the motors and the total-acceleration field. With metal for the converter to work on, the small craft surged ahead under an amount of power only armored cruisers normally developed.

Sally sat quietly in her chair, staring at Ben through eyes that were very steady now. He regarded a Geiger counter. It clicked busily. His face went gray.

“You’re giving off cosmics,” he said dry-throated. “That’s the sign of the plague. There’s nothing else known that will make the human body give off cosmics.”

“I’ll be dead in . . . two or three days,” said Sally, unsteadily. “Some­times women live a week. Sometimes ten days. M-mostly when the plague first starts, and there are a lot of women about. In the cities, at the begin­ning, the women lived even two weeks. But in small places they die quickly. And I’m the only woman here—”

“In two weeks,” said Ben harshly, “doctors should have worked out some serum, some protection.”

“They’v’~. . . never seen the germ, Ben. Not even the electron micro­scope shows anything. Just. . . the women die—”

“But you’re not going to!” said Ben fiercely. ‘Why couldn’t I be a doctor or something useful!”

“You, can be. .. comforting,” said Sally bravely. “I. . . gave my whole life to you when I ran to you, Ben. There aren’t but a few days, instead of . . . of years, but—”

He bent over her groaning. The clatter of the Geiger counter stopped abruptly. It had touched her arm. She shivered a little.

“Broken, I guess. But it was ticking my life away. Let’s forget it.”

Ben ground his teeth. He moved to thrust the instrument out of his way. It clattered briefly, and stopped again. It dangled from his hand by the cord to its electric connections. It clattered, and stopped, and clattered again. Ben stared down at it. It was not pointing at Sally. He swung it about. It clattered steadily when pointed at the instrument panel. It was mute when it pointed at Sally. It was mute when it pointed at anything else but the instrument panel. No. It was mute when it did not point to the GC phone. No. It clattered only when it pointed to the course-com­puter— It clattered only— “Wait a minute!” said Ben harshly. “There’s something funny here!”

He turned out the lights again. The instrument dials glowed as before. Sally did not! But there was a whitish luminosity at the top of the pilot’s chair. It seemed spread along the metal frame. It was not phosphorescence. It was white, not bluish. Ben moved toward it. The Geiger counter chat­tered when Ben pointed it at the luminosity. Then, abruptly, the lumin­osity was not on the chair. A dial glowed whitely, as if a stronger light were behind it. The Geiger counter clattered when pointed at that dial. Ben swung the counter upon Sally. It was mute.

“Listen!” said Ben in a strained voice. “You say women with the plague give off cosmics. You’re not giving them off, so you haven’t it. But you did, so you did have it. My pilot’s chair was giving off cosmics. Did it have the plague? Now the gravitometer is giving off cosmics. Has it got the plague?

Sally drew in her breath quickly. There was silence in the cabin of the little sports cruiser of the void. The only sound anywhere was a tiny humming. That was the converter, turning Ben’s Reserve bracelet and the refuse of his last meal into power—efficiency 99.9999. . . 9 percent— to drive the little craft with an insanely mounting velocity away from its last known position.

The whitish glow reappeared suddenly. It was in the metal rim about the control ceiling light. It vanished, and reappeared on the handle of a metal door. It vanished yet again— “The strange life-forms of Lore,” said Ben, his voice rough in the darkness. “The Bazin Expedition didn’t want to go back to Pharona. It said its return would be dangerous until it understood those life-forms. It was forced to go back, and it carried the plague. At a guess, this is one of the life-forms of Lore. It seems to stick to metal. It didn’t move into the glass of the ceiling light, but stayed on the metal rim which holds it.”

He swung the Geiger counter. Carefully. It clattered.

“It’s somewhere in the stern. Engine room, most likely—”

Sally said unsteadily: “I . . . haven’t got the plague, then—”

“No, you haven’t got it.” Ben’s voice softened. “You’re dead officially, my dear, but now it looks like you’re going to stay actually alive for a long time. We’d better do some planning for ourselves. At the moment, I’m going to change course. We’ve got all the Fleet in this part of space hunting us right now. I was talking to Headquarters when you yelled— and we’ve got to hide. And I don’t know for how long.”

Sally said slowly, as if incredulous of hope: “I. . . don’t care. I’ve gotten you into terrible trouble. The least I can do is.. . anything you tell me to.”

He put his hand lightly on her shoulder.

“There’s a meteor-stream,” he said. “What we want is time and peace in which to make our plans. I’ll dive into that stream and match up with it. We’ll be one of several million small objects heading out to aphelion in the track of a comet nobody’s ever seen. With our drive off and a little care, there’s no faintest danger that we’ll ever be picked up. I’ve supplies for a long enough time. We’ll be beyond the outermost planets before we put the drive on again, and then we’ll start for . . . where shall we go, Sally? Sirius? Ri-gel? I’ve heard there are some new colonies out beyond Rigel where things are rough and tough and the brass hats haven’t yet been able to sit back with their tummies sticking out with dignity to regulate everything to justify their feeling of importance.”

He moved to the pilot’s seat, not bothering to turn on the lights again. He swung the little ship about. The converter was still working on the bracelet he had shoved into the feed. It was crushed and being extruded into the converter-chamber as an infinitesimally fine wire. The efficiency of the converter and the drive was high. In theory, with one hundred percent efficiency, the mass of fuel needed to give a spacecraft a given velocity in empty space is the mass the spaceship will gain because of that velocity. In practice, of course, much more is needed. To attain a speed of a hundred miles a second from rest, in space, the fuel consump­tion is actually about a milligram of disintegrated matter per ton mass of the ship. In anything like a sports cruiser, the fuel for merely interplane­tary jaunts is supplied by the carbon remaining after the air-purifier has broken down the carbon dioxide from the breathed air. Ben used his dirty dishes—and the fuel pin periodically overflowed, though he drove the cruiser hard. His bracelet had weighed two ounces. Something like six thousand milligrams. The electrical mechanism of the bracelet ‘was now smashed irreparably, but as waste it would more than accomplish an -inter­planetary trip if he chose to coast.

He was not coasting. The position of the dwarf blue-white star of this solar system, and of its several planets, was accurately before him on the naviboard. There was a transparent map of the meteor-streams, with their inclination to the ecliptic. With such a map and a divider it was simple enough to navigate, especially when you used detector-screens to find out your results. He worked in the half-light of the instrument dials. He punched the computer and set the motor controls.

“Ben,” said Sally’s voice, shaken, behind him.

“Yes?”

He was thinking unhappily. He felt awkward. Sally could never return to civilization or her friends. He, himself, had to vanish completely. The brass hats would go into a monstrous pother of offended dignity, based upon the real fact that Sally had broken quarantine on a planet where ten million people had died of plague. Sally and Ben were outlaws, now. Forever. Unless they lived isolated for the rest of time, they would have to take new names and new identities-and new names and identities are not easy to acquire on civilized planets. They wanted to be married. The ceremony was somehow essential to the way Ben felt about Sally. And he was going to have to find some way to make a living, which did not in­volve space-navigation or the technical equipment of a technical lieutenant of the Space Navy, because all such persons were very rigorously checked.

“Ben,” said Sally’s voice in the darkness. It was strained. “The Thing is back! It’s . . . it’s on the leg of your chair.”

He looked. But it was on the arm of his chair. He poked his finger ex­perimentally at it. There was no sensation. He touched it. It vanished. But his hand glowed. Both hands glowed. He gave off a faint, whitish luminosity. Just what Sally had had. But it contracted swiftly. He saw the reflection of his face and head in the glass of a dial. They shone brightly. The rest of him was dark. And he felt vague, formless pluckings at his brain. Something was probing hopefully. It was utterly alien, the Thing that probed for his thoughts. There could be no real contact of minds. He could never communicate with the Thing. But he felt its emotions. It was hopeful, and somehow terribly eager. But there was a dawning of dis­appointment. Somehow, he knew it was because it could not read his brain. Then he felt the formation of resolve; of a determined, - restless patience.

His face ceased to glow. His hand shone brightly. He held it out and looked at it. The glow quivered, as if impatiently. He put his hand down ~n his navigating instruments. There was the impression of a flash of luminosity over all the instruments for the least possible part of a second. Then it was gone.

And then Sally made a queer sound. He looked at her. He saw her clearly, even though the control cabin of the cruiser was in darkness. Her face and throat and arms glowed whitely. Even through her clothing diffused faint light showed. The Geiger counter clattered— “I’ve . . . got- the Plague again,” said Sally, her voice thin. “I realize now. I’ve got the feeling I . . . had before. The feeling like there is something . . . inside me somehow . . . contented - . . and eager, and waiting for something, but. . . almost purring while it waits.”

Ben Sholto licked his lips. The fact that the luminous Thing had left Sally to rove inquisitively about the ship had made it seem merely one of the curious life-forms of Lore. But now, abruptly, he realized the truth. A plague doesn’t go into the back of instrument-boards, or shine on the frame of a metal chair, or put probing tendrils of alien thoughts into one’s brain. An ordinary plague doesn’t. But this plague did. The plague on Pharona wasn’t a disease whose lethal effects were the result of toxins secreted by multitudes of submicroscopic organisms or viruses. The plague on Pharona was—Things. They flowed into the tissues of women as they flowed through metal. But they fed, somehow, upon the life-force of women. And the women died.

Ten million women and girl-children had died on Pharona because of Things brought back from Lore. The things couldn’t have come on one spaceship in numbers great enough to accomplish such slaughter—not if women lived from two days to two weeks after their bodies began to glow. No. The Things must multiply somehow. The patience, the resolu­tion to wait for something, which both Ben and Sally had felt—that might be the Thing deciding that for some reason it must remain solitary for a while.

But Sally was the habitation of a Thing, one of those which had wiped out half the human race on Pharona. It interpenetrated her body. It waited eagerly for something. And it purred soundlessly while it waited.

The Universe rolled on. The Galaxy paid no attention. The Administra­tive Service Appeal Board, sitting on Arcturis II, denied a petition signed by more than three hundred million people inhabiting four planets of Algol. They asked permission to present their grievances directly to the Galactic Commission itself, since the Administrative Service was inex­tricably tied up in its own rulings and red tape. But the Board ruled that the petition asked action by the Board for which there was no precedent, and which, therefore, was automatically beyond the Board’s discretion.

A sub-sub-commissioner on Phryne VII married the daughter of a sub­commissioner, and traveled in state on a Rim-class battleship to his new post.

A clerk of the Administrative Service unearthed the fact that the charter of the Allioth Colonization Co-operative lacked two commas and a semi-colon, and that seven million people, therefore, lacked legal title to the cities, factories, and installations they had built, and that they could be displaced by anybody who filed a new application for colonists’ rights on the planet. The clerk was regarded as a coming man in the Administra­tive Service.

A fleet captain in the Space-Navy resigned his commission rather than carry out orders commanding him to depopulate the planet Quenn “by any and all practical means,” and was ordered under arrest. The order was carried out by subordinates, who affected to believe that the only prac­tical means was to carry the inhabitants elsewhere. (It was later discovered that a clerical error had sent an order, intended for the Migration-Directive Bureau, to the Space-Navy Bureau. The order was meant to command the repopulation of Quenn by any and all practical means, because it had lost much of its population by emigration. The clerk responsible for the mis­take was disciplined, but none of the higher officials who had counter-signed it.)

And there was a plague on Pharona which was receiving very little attention, but an entire sub-sector battle fleet was being mobilized to cap­ture a small sports cruiser of space which had defied official orders.

The GC phone muttered and muttered, its volume turned down low. The detectors clanged twice as the little ship hurtled on, but once it was the outermost screen which barely wavered into alarm-intensity, and the second time it was a Navy cruiser coming head-on along the sports-cruiser’s course. It was coming fast, but Ben was going fast. He had kept the con­verter going at full capacity for days past, and the bracelet had been con­verted into kinetic energy—with other materials besides—of which a rea­sonable percentage had been imparted to Ben’s little ship. Half an ounce of pure energy had been converted into speed. So the small ship smashed into the Navy cruiser’s screens and through them. Had the passage been at a reasonable distance—say, five thousand miles or so—it might have been just barely possible for the automatic beam-pointers of the cruiser to range him, compute his course and speed in three dimensions, and fire ahead of him so a positron beam would hit squarely.

But the two craft actually passed within twenty miles. The passage would have been closer yet but for the flaring of energy into the Navy ship’s meteor-diverters, which flung both Space-Navy cruiser and sports cruiser of the void aside from all danger of a collision. Such incomputable movements could not be anticipated by range finders. The giant projectors flared, and on the vision screen straight ahead they were visibly higher in the spectrum than was normal. The relative velocity of the two ships was an appreciable fraction of the speed of light itself.

Then the little ship was away, and once beyond screen-detection range, Ben began to decelerate at as violent a rate as he had before accelerated. The Navy now had the line of his flight, and it could compute his maxi­mum acceleration. He would be expected to swerve aside, after his escape from the hunting ship, in any possible direction. But he would be ex­pected to continue to flee.

A vast dragnet of the fleet would assemble, combing an expanding mushroom of space for the outlaws who carried with them the plague that had killed half of Pharona. The pomposity. of a brass hat had caused the plague, but all the power of the Galactic Commission would be used pitilessly to stamp it out. Giant battleships of space would be entering sub-ether tubes for faster-than-light journeying to the scene of emergency. Monstrous motherships carrying destroyers and scouts would be vanishing in curiously wrinkled diminishment at spots parsecs away, and appearing nearby, reeling quaintly, to spout their brood of stingers to hunt for the sports cruiser which contained one sunken-eyed man and a white-faced girl. There were more than half a million men and thousands of space­craft engaged in the search for Ben and Sally within twenty-four hours after their narrow passing by the Navy ship. And brass hats had a field day, giving pompous, arbitrary orders and requiring acknowledgements in triplicate.

But the assumption was that Ben was running away. Actually, he was cutting down his velocity as fast as his converters could manage it. He reached the meteor-stream he had headed for at a bare crawl, and worked the little ship into it, and began to drift out and out toward the aphelion point of an unknown comet at a gradually diminishing rate, surrounded by pebbles and boulders and masses of inchoate matter ranging from pin­points to quasiasteroids in size. This, while the Navy hunted for a tiny ship in headlong flight. -

“They’ll have quite a time finding us now,” said Ben tiredly, when he Cut off the drive at last. “How do you feel’?”

“I’m . . . all right, I guess,” said Sally, thinly.

She was sitting in a chair Ben had insulated from the floor. At regular intervals, Ben took a Geiger counter reading. Always the counter clattered. The metabolism of the Thing involved -the production of cosmic rays. Electric metabolism. The Thing was, in fact, an organization of electric charges. Since electric charges are essential to cellular life—such as human life—the Thing was not impossible. Electric charges in association with matter produce Terrestrial life, and the removal of the charges leaves merely dead matter. The first elucidation of ball lightning showed that energy alone can achieve organization and self-determined dimensions. So a creature which was merely an electrical pattern was not incredible.

Therefore the insulated chair. For hours after the first exploratory de­parture of the Thing from Sally’s body, they had hoped it would repeat its excursion. It had seemed curious about apparatus. Ben insulated the chair and brought out piece after piece of apparatus-everything from his cameras to the hand positron-beam projector which was the only weapon on the ship. He had Sally go near them. He had her touch them. He hoped that curiosity would lure the Thing into a second journey of in­vestigation. But there was no sign. The Geiger counter aimed at Sally’s body clattered at the same rate, neither greater nor less. She said, her voice shaking a little, that she felt a sensation within her as of something which was eager, but very patient, and very contented despite its eager­ness. Purring.

It was a disappointment. But the problem was not one of orthodox medicine, of ultra-microscopic organisms and the intricate interplay of enzymes, cells, and all the innumerable compounds of the body. This was a problem of a Thing. So Sally sat in an insulated chair. For three days.

“I don’t know how intelligent it is,” said Ben grimly, on the second day. “I doubt if its IQ could be estimated. But it has curiosity, it makes de­cisions, and it has emotion. Maybe some superorthodox scientist would say we still haven’t proof that it’s really alive, but I’ll let it go at that. The Thing is a form of life which can exist apart from any specific bit of matter, but it is not independent of matter. It has to inhabit some bit or other. It prefers you to a bar of metal, or to me. You will die if it stays in your body long enough. Then it will doubtless hunt for another body. That must be what happened on Pharona. And it must reproduce, because it’s alive. But on your journey from Pharona here it didn’t. It doesn’t seem to be now—because this is a long time. Maybe it realizes that you’re the only woman here, and if you die— It looks like it somehow feeds on the vital energy of your body. It can’t get that energy from me or from metal. It’s. . . cannibalistic. It is life which feeds on other life. Your life. I wish it would try to take mine!”

Sally spoke very wearily from the insulated chair.

“I think it’s hopeless,” she said in a low voice. “There’s only one of the Things, but it’s going to kill me. We can’t stop it. I could put on an insulated spacesuit—it can only move through a conductor—while I’m in this chair. It would be imprisoned, then. I could walk about, and it couldn’t escape me. And I could go out the air lock and—the Thing could never harm anybody. But we. . . we couldn’t ever land anywhere with this Thing alive. We couldn’t loose a plague on another planet like the one which was loosed on Pharona! I. . . was there, Ben!”

Ben said fiercely:

“Do you think I’d let you walk out of the lock? Do you think I’d leave you in space?”

“I’d like it,” she said humbly, “if you’d turn a positron beam on me instead.” -

“I’m waiting to use the positron beam on that Thing,” said Ben grimly. “How do you feel?”

“All right, I guess. But I’m not comfortable. The Thing isn’t quite as contented.”

He nodded. His jaw set.

“Maybe we’re getting somewhere. It must be a pattern of free electrons, bound into an organization which is alive. It can’t be anything else! But its metabolism involves the production of cosmics rays. Making cosmic rays involved the production of positive charges. Insulated as you are, you’re accumulating a positive charge that sooner or later is going to try to bind some of the free but organized electrons this Thing is made of. Maybe it’ll die without knowing what is happening. It acts as a disease to humans. Maybe we’ve concocted a disease or a poison for it.”

Ben could not touch Sally, lest he discharge. the positive potential they were building up—or allowing the Thing to build up for its own destruc­tion. They were trying to kill it by the product of its own metabolism; to suffocate it by the positive electricity it created, just as a human being will suffocate in the carbon dioxide he must exhale.

But Sally seemed to shrink into herself. She spoke rarely, and then in a strained voice. At last, on the third day, she spoke in a sudden gasp.

“I’m.. . sorry, Ben, but I can’t stand it any longer. The Thing is suffer­ing and it’s making me suffer. I can’t stand any more!”

Ben reached out to touch her wrist. On the instant her wrist glowed. The Thing gathered itself together, it concentrated itself to escape. It was visible even in the lighted cabin. At the touch of Ben’s finger a tiny spark jumped. That was all. But Sally almost fainted with relief. She tried to smile a wobbly smile.

“It’s.. . gone,” she said unsteadily. “We drove it out. We. . . exorcised it, Ben.” -

Ben turned off the light. Sally vanished into the blessed darkness. He heard her sigh with relief so sharp that it was almost a sob.

“For the second time,” she said, valiantly trying to be flippant, “I haven’t got the plague. How quaint!”

“Sit still,” said Ben savagely. “We’ll watch for it. Positive electricity is poison to it. We know that, anyhow! And I’ve got my positron pistol here. Watch for it!”

There was silence. The CC phone muttered, and muttered. There was one voice which was much louder than the rest. The muttering died away. The sound of Sally’s breathing grew steady and even. Presently she sighed deeply, and went on breathing evenly.

Then the bronze doorsill of the control-room door glowed whitely. The Thing, driven out of Sally’s body, was suddenly there. It was a patch of whitish luminosity which almost but not quite filled the whole length of the sill. In case of accident, an air-tight door would snap shut across the opening, sealing the ship into separate compartments. Ben raised the posi­tron pistol. Tiny radium dots marked the sights, but his hand trembled with hatred. He took both of them to steady his weapon. He pulled the trigger.

There was a reddish glow from the pistol. No noise. Nothing else. That was all.

But the white luminescence on the doorsill flared unbearably. Ben had an extraordinary sensation, as if he had heard a soundless scream. And the Thing went mad. It was here and there and everywhere. Every particle of bare metal in the control room seemed to flash as the Thing raced with incredible speed in a crazy, frenzied rush over every metallic path it had traversed before. It could not be seen as an area of light, but it seemed as if all bare metal in sight emitted a wavy, lunatic glow.

Ben started suddenly. He raised the pistol. And abruptly there was no glow anywhere. The control room was normal. The dials of the instru­ments were visible, of course, but Sally could not be seen. -

“If I’d pointed this beam anywhere at all and held it on,” said Ben bitterly, “the Thing might have run into it. But I didn’t think of it in time. -

He turned on the light again. Sally was asleep in the insulated chair in which she had endured for three days and nights. She was utterly relaxed. She looked unspeakably weary and pathetic, sleeping in the aban­doned confidence of a child.

Ben looked down at her, and his face softened.

“Maybe it’s dead,” he told her quietly, “and maybe it’s not. But it’ll never get to you again!”

He went into the stateroom. He carefully and elaborately insulated the bunk there from any possible electrical connection with floor or side walls. He put on insulating shoes. He picked Sally up in his arms and carried her, still sleeping, and laid her on the bunk. He covered her. He kissed her very gently.

In the control-room a pale white glow appeared on the metal of the pilot’s chair. It rose to the top and stayed there. It was motionless, but it wavered in intensity. It seemed to throb a little. If Ben had been in the room—why just as he had felt a little while since that he felt a soundless scream of agony, now he would have felt hatred so terrible that the hackles at the back of his neck would have stirred.

He started back into the control room. The glow slid alertly down the metal parts of the chair. It was gone when he came through the door. Then it appeared suddenly in the stateroom. It went restlessly, ragingly, back and forth upon the metal walls. And the stateroom seemed to be filled with hatred also.

A space cruiser resignedly took up post in an orbit about the dark star Lamda Boötes. It would circle that star for six months and be relieved. Forty years before, a sub-commissioner had intended to change cruisers at that place, and commanded that one be here to meet him. He had later changed his plan of travel, but there was no order to withdraw the cruiser posted at the rendezvous. The first cruiser asked for relief after six months of utterly useless waiting. It was relieved by a cruiser under orders to take its place. Seventy-eight cruisers, in turn, had uselessly swung about the dark star for six months each because of an order given forty years before and never rescinded.

Highly unofficial gossip, told behind official palms, informed the sub-commissioner of the Formaihaut sector that the sub-commissioner of the Markhab sector had said he was a fool. The sub-commissioner of the Formalhaut sector, in indignation, ordered that no clearances be issued to spaceships to Markhab or from it. All space lanes in that part of the Galaxy passed through the two sectors. In consequence, the economic system -by which eight hundred millions of people lived was brought to a standstill.

The small sun Mu Aquila showed definite.signs of instability—signs which by the McPherson-Adair formula indicated an imminent internal explosion. There was no office of the Administrative Service on any of its planets, which altogether had a bare five million inhabitants. Notification of the impending nova-flare was sent to the nearest sector office, with the usual request for evacuation of all the planets which would be destroyed or made uninhabitable. A clerk, recently transferred to that sector and desirous of distinguishing himself, observed an error in the drafting of the request. He returned it for re-preparation before forwarding it for action. He failed to mark it “Urgent Official,” which meant that it went by ordinary mail and would not reach its destination for two months. Of course, the McPherson-Adair formula indicated that the explosion would take place in six to seven weeks. -

There was a plague on Pharona, and a quarantine prohibited any psi­vate or commercial ship to land on or leave it. But an Administrative Service vessel landed, bringing dispatches, and left again after taking all normal sanitary precautions. It landed on Galata, and cases of the plague were observed there within twelve hours.

And Ben Sholto still defied the Space Navy, the Administrative Service, and presumably the Galactic Commission itself by remaining alive.

Great, jagged, rocky fragments floated in space between the stars. In between the greater pieces were innumerable smaller bits. The little spacecraft wallowed in a stream of cosmic flotsam, sharing its motion. The blue-white sun of this solar system was far away, now, and very faint. But even with the naked eye, from a port on the little sports cruiser, one could see half a dozen huge and irregularly-shaped masses within a matter of miles. This was the thickest part of the meteor-stream. This was, perhaps, the remnant of what had been the nucleus of a comet. Some of these great stones were half a mile by three-quarters. One needlelike mass was at least a mile and a half in length, but nowhere more than four hundred yards through.

Ben surveyed his surroundings carefully. A tiny electron telescope am­plified even starlight upon cold stone to any desired degree. The CC phone muttered and muttered and muttered. Someone, somewhere, had fired a positron beam. A Space-Navy receiver had picked up the radiation involved—and positron-beam bursts do not occur in nature. Naval craft were concentrating to hunt for the source of the blast. It had been, of course, the shot Ben had fired at the Thing on the doorsill, and the co­ordinates on it were not as close as they might have been, because nobody had expected a fugitive to be so foolish. Even so, however, the hunt would have been much more deadly if spacemen had been conducting it, instead of being completely fettered by pompous orders issued by one brass hat, altered by another, and changed by a third in strict order of seniority.

Ben turned on a low trace of his space drive. Its force could almost have been measured in dynes, rather than in the milpos—millions of foot-pounds—commonly spoken of in engine rooms. The little spaceship swam slowly among the crowded bits of cometary debris. It came to rest close beside the flank of the largest of all the masses of matter in sight. He maneuvered until no more than fifty feet separated the small vessel from the great mass of metal and rock. There would be mutual gravitation between them, of course. They would tend to fall together. But the acceleration of that gravity was so slight that it might take a month or more for the sports cruiser to fall just fifty feet.

For two days, now, Sally had remained on the insulated bunk, except when she donned an insulated spacesuit with the helmet left off, to move about the little ship. The Thing could not reach her. She was recovering from the terrific ordeal she had endured—and now Ben swore at himself for what he considered stupidity. Instead of allowing the Thing - itself to build up a positive potential, he could have made one artificially. If by any chance the Thing found a way to return to Sally, he felt confident that he could drive it Out again, now, in minutes rather than days.

He knew that the Thing still existed. The Geiger counter revealed its presence from time to time. Sally had seen it, glowing balefully in the darkness of the stateroom, when she woke after infinitely restful sleep.

The little sports cruiser lay close beside a monstrous and misshapen hunk of stone and metal. It went drifting Out and out from the blue-white sun. Destroyers and cruisers and even battleships hunted for it, bedeviled by authoritative brass hats in swivel chairs. The CC phone muttered and muttered. Without detector-screens, which were useless anyhow because of the meteor-stream all about, Ben could not even es­timate the nearness of his pursuers, but he felt safe. They could not ex amine every one of the countless millions of objects in a cometary orbit. Not possibly.

He made a careful visual examination with the electron telescope, and grinned at Sally.

“Picking us out at even a thousand miles would be a miracle,” he told her. ‘We can go in for conversation and such things until the Navy decides that somebody was mistaken or we are dead. Meanwhile I’m go­ing to see if I can make that Thing a little more uncomfortable still.”

The Thing was in the metal fabric of the ship. It could move any­where that a conductor existed. But it was not, apparently, possible for it to extract subsistence from metal. It was cannibalistic—life which lived by devouring life. For some reason the life force in a male body—a man’s body—was not suitable for it. It could only derive nourishment from the vital force in the cells of a woman’s tissues. Yet its metabolism continued. It gave off cosmic rays in metal, as in human flesh. It must be that it lost energy while in nonliving matter, and regained energy—fed—in living stuff. If it could be kept from any access to Sally for a long enough time, it might starve, simply because it had radiated away in cosmic rays all the energy it possessed.

Sally smiled at Ben. They were bound to each other not only by feeling, but by the fact that they stood together literally~ against the universe. All the power of all the nations upon all the planets of all the suns of the Galaxy was opposed to them. They defied the pomposity of the brass hats of the universe simply by remaining alive. All authority demanded their death. Thousands of ships, with their number constantly increasing, and hundreds of thousands of men were- devoting their every effort to the discovery of a sixty-foot space cruiser designed for sport, in which Ben Sholto and Sally Hale carried a plague which had wiped out ten million people. And fat men in swivel chairs grew purple with rage as stinging rebukes passed from higher to lower officialdom.

“Conversation?” said Sally, smiling. ‘We’ve been together—how long, Ben? We’ll be together all the rest of our lives. Maybe only we two, hiding through all the years to come!”

“Maybe,” admitted Ben, grinning, “in that case we’ll hold hands.”

She put her hand in its insulating glove upon his shoulder. She bent -down. He kissed her. And then he started, as if startled by a flash of light.

She straightened up, her face stricken and pale.

“It’s . . - back!” she said in a queer, -racked voice. “Oh, Ben! It’s back! I can . . . feel it! And it’s raging! It’s crazy with hatred! It’s . . . it’s . . . oh, -it’s terrible!”

Ben swung the Geiger counter. Pointed at Sally, it clattered. No, it did not clatter. It roared. The cosmic rays created by the Thing, as shown by the counter, were many, many times more than any previous amount. It seemed as if the Thing were starved, and tore at the life force of Sally’s body with a terrible voracity.

“I’m going to pack you full of positive charges,” and Ben, frantically, “and get that Thing out again, and I’m going to kill it.”

He worked savagely. Sally sat down. In the insulated spacesuit the Thing could not leave her, though that was what they most desperately desired. Ben swiftly put together a static generator. It was old-fashioned. It was archaic, but it was what the only possible theory called for. He worked it by hand and touched its electrode to Sally’s cheek. The existence of a high potential was instantly evidenced. Sally’s hair stirred and tried to stand out from her head.

“How does it like that?” demanded Ben fiercely.

Sally babbled. And Ben had worked so swiftly and so concentratedly that he had hardly looked at her. Her face was flushed. Her eyes were bright but vague. She showed every sign of fever; high fever; fever pro­ducing delirium. But the Thing had fled, before, when the positive charge was vastly less than this.

Ben touched her cheek. A spark leaped, and she quivered a little.

“W-water, please.” she babbled. “I’d like a drink of water with lots of ice and pink roses in it—”

But the Thing should be out, now. Ben turned off the lights to look at her. And she still glowed. The Thing had not come out.

A battered space-tramp was ordered blasted out of space as a “dan­gerous object” by a sub-commissioner when in defiance of orders not to land in the Beta Cetacia solar system it dived toward the surface of an uninhabited planet. It had reported desperately that its crew was nearly out of food and the air-supply would last for only four more days. But it could show no proper clearance from its last port-of-landing, and was sus­pected of smuggling. The Navy ship which trailed it did not destroy it until it had landed and its crew had escaped, and was ordered to return to port for arrest and disciplinary action.

Three thousand colonists were refused landing-permits on Thetis IX, because of missing papers they swore they had turned over on the day of their arrival. (The papers were found months later in an under-clerk’s desk drawer. He had forgotten to forward them. For the credit of the Service they were destroyed and the affair hushed up.)

The sub-commissioner on Axcturis V issued an order forbidding criti­cism of the Administrative Service until criticized conditions had been reported to and passed upon by the Administrative Service Board of Ap­peals. On the same day he denied four requests for appeals to the Admin­istrative Service Board of Appeals.

On Sirius II, one Arthur Matheson was ordered arrested for making scientific experiments endangering the authority of the Galactic Commis­sion. The experiments were those which led ultimately to the Matheson Matter-transmitter.

And it was reported to Reserve Headquarters that Ben Sholto’s position had been approximately determined and his capture was a matter of hours.

But Ben was frantically fighting the intangible Thing which occupied Sally’s body. Three times he charged Sally, in the insulated spacesuit, with the highest potential the static generator could produce. Three times he drove the Thing to frenzy. And three times he released the charge. The number of Things which roved triumphantly about the metalwork of the small ship increased visibly. There were at least a dozen. But Sally’s body continued to glow. The Geiger counter continued to make a roaring noise rather than a clattering. The Thing—somehow Ben assumed that it was the original one—remained, tearing at the life which remained in Sally, consuming it and raking revenge for the hurt it had suffered.

The CC phone muttered and muttered. Once or twice it spoke loudly and distinctly. Some one of the searching ships was very near. Then there came the blasting tone-signal of a General Order, and Ben automatically touched the volume-control, half-crazed as he was -by the urgency of the problem the Thing presented.

He had fired a single positron-blast at the Thing. The radiation from that blast had been picked up. The co-ordinates on it were not accurate but now someone used that very inaccuracy in - a statistical method of making it impossible for Ben to escape from a closing-in mass of ships. It had to be assumed that Ben would listen in on Navy orders, and he had dodged past one Space-Navy cruiser by passing too close to it, too fast for its ranging devices to operate. This order forestalled any chance of his doing such a thing again. The order commanded every Navy ship within certain fixed classifications-at least two thousand ships in all—to assume the co-ordinates of the positron-beam blast to be no better than approxi­mate, and to use random mathematics to alter them within certain fixed limits. Each ship was then to head for its arbitrarily chosen—but nearby— destination at maximum acceleration.

The Space-Navy would close in on the section of space in which Ben’s little ship was, of course. But it would not come in in any pattern. The courses of the ships would be unpredictable. They would come together, but in a manner and at intervals and speeds none could compute. If Ben had been planning flight, he would have recognized its hopelessness. He might have dodged or crashed through any orderly arrangement of en­globing ships, but this plan made evasion mathematically impossible. And, moreover, the General Order commanded the moving up of other thousands of ships behind the globe. Ben’s positron-beam blast had been within or near the orbit of a meteor-stream. With all the might of the Galactic Commission behind the search for him, that meteor-stream would be examined. Every stony mass would be inspected. The task, of course, would be quite the most gigantic task ever undertaken even by the Galactic Fleet, but it ended, absolutely, any trace of hope for Ben and Sally.

But Ben had other, grimmer, more immediate reason for despair. Sally burned with fever. She had been rested, and she had been relatively strong. But now the Thing devoured her life.

Bitterly, he saw the flaw in the process which had driven the Thing out the first time. He had made Sally’s body painful for it to inhabit. The first time, the Thing had fled at its first opportunity. But it had fled. It had not been forced out—it had been frightened out. And the Thing was intelligent. Now it realized that Ben would have to release the positive potential which caused it suffering, and that then it would cease to suffer. It endured the discomfort he created in order to work its re­venge.

“I need,” said Ben desperately, while the Galactic Navy moved to destroy him and Sally babbled in delirium, “to make something that will drag the Thing around! Drag it! Physically! And it isn’t matter! It’s just a pack of negative charges bound together. It’s a bound charge. A bound charge—”

Electrons. A complex of electrons. It was energy on the verge of be­coming matter, or matter past the verge of becoming energy. What can you do to an electric charge? How can you make it move, save by its own tension? What can you do to a bound charge? -

“Bound charge. . . bound charge—” muttered Ben, with sweat bead­ing his forehead. “Sally’s dying, and I’m thinking about bound charges— the stuff kids learn in kindergarten! What’s a bound—Ah-h-h-h-h!”

He plunged at his instrument board. - He dragged ruthlessly at the CC phone. He pulled off the front panel by main strength and jerked fiercely at certain wires within it. He wanted plate-current and condensers and a tiny rectifier capsule. The condensers and rectifier went into a unit hastily built up on an insulated handle. The device terminated in a ball-contact. There was a single, long, flexible lead to the plate-current terminal of the last of the amplifying tubes of the CC phone. He worked madly, and when it was done he set the originating circuit in the phone to oscillating, and pushed the oscillation frequency up to a hundred million per second. But his take-off was from the plate of the last tube, which did not yield oscillating current, but merely pulsating. It was current which varied in voltage—but not in direction of flow—a hundred million times a second. And the variations in voltage were a thousand volts or more. He checked his device, sweating, and went over to Sally. He was shaking with hope and hatred and terror. He turned off the ceiling light. Sally glowed ter­ribly. The multiplied metabolism of the Thing made her seem almost white-hot. Ben touched the ball-contact to Sally’s cheek. He pressed the contact which let the pulsating plate-current flow into his condenser. The glow of Sally’s flesh vanished.

It was just as simple as that.

Ben raged at himself for not having done it earlier. It is taught almost in kindergartens that when one plate of a condenser is charged with positive electricity, and the second plate connected to an insulated body, that free—negative——electrons in the insulated body will be drawn into the condenser. If the condenser is taken away, it will carry those electrons with it. If its capacity and applied voltage are high enough, it will leave no free electrons in the insulated body. And the Thing was a complex of free electrons.

But it had will. It was alive. It had intelligence, and it could hate. And such an entity could resist, could figuratively dig in, could sym­bolically sink its teeth and claws into the body it inhabited and resist the drawing power of applied voltage, even the maximum that Ben could apply. But one can resist a steady pull where an intermittent one is ir­resistible. The pulsations of the plate-current, as Ben had now arranged it, caused no steady pull, but instead a series of fierce and wrenching jerks at the resistance of the Thing. The current now shook the Thing. It tore at it like a dog at the throat of a rat. The Thing was brutally torn at, and brutally released, one hundred million times in every second. Nothing, material or immaterial, could withstand such a mauling. The Thing’s grip was broken, its will shattered, its resistance made impossible—perhaps it was rendered unconscious! It flowed into the condenser, and the rectifier capsule prevented its return. It was imprisoned in the small device in Ben’s hand—and an unholy triumph filled him.

He turned on the lights and put the condenser-device very carefully down. He made sure to put it on an insolantite surface—an insulator of practically infinite resistance. He put on insulatiuig boots. He stood before the Geiger counter, and it gave no sign. He picked up Sally and carried her for the second time to the bunk he had insulated from the floor. He laid her there. She still babbled, and her eyes were fever-bright, but the cause of that fever was gone. She would return to normal—but probably terribly weak—within a very little time.

Ben returned to the control room. His eyes burned more brightly with hatred than Sally’s had burned with fever. He regarded his device with a vengeful satisfaction. He cut off the switch and discharged the positive plate. The knob he had touched to Sally’s cheek began to glow fiercely, even though the lights were shining. There was more than one Thing in the condenser. Freed-from the electric bondage Ben had contrived, but with no path by which to escape to the metal skin of the ship, there was a fierce glowing of the compressed, intolerably crowded Things.

He turned the Geiger counter upon the knob. It clattered furiously. He turned it away.

“Ah-h-h-h!” he said thickly. “You’re there, eh? And you know you’re caught!”

He seemed to feel waves of pure hate enveloping him. He grinned savagely.

“You’d kill Sally, eh? You’re smart! Maybe you can understand me, and maybe you can’t, but you know what’s going to happen, don’t you?”

He took out the little positron-beam pistol. He put it within inches of the knob of metal which glowed with pulsating, hating light. He pulled the trigger. There was a reddish glow from the pistol. There was a sear­ing, intolerable light from the knob. There was an unhearable, unbearable shriek—the feeling of anguish and rage and insupportable hatred.

Then the knob- was merely a bit of metal attached to a condenser and an electric cord. It did not affect the Geiger counter. Ben licked his lips, his rage unappeased. He turned out the lights once more. There was a glow on the pilot’s chair. He stalked it, and touched the knob to it with the plate-current on. The glow vanished. He turned off the switch and discharged the positive plate. The knob glowed. More faintly, to be sure. There was but one Thing trapped this time. Ben laughed without mirth. He gave the Thing a blast of the positron beam. It screamed soundlessly and died.

Sally’s babbling ceased. She called faintly. Ben went to her, all savagery and hate. He gave her water.

“I’m killing them!” he said thickly. “I’ll get all of them! I’ll kill every one! They made you suffer. They’d have killed you! I’ll get every one—”

Sally smiled tiredly at him. She was utterly exhausted, and she was very weak indeed.

“We’ll have to send word somehow, so they’ll know what. to do if the plague ever shows up anywhere else—”

Ben remembered. Sally was thinking in terms of hope, but there was no hope. He was killing the Things because they had karmed Sally. But the orders he’d overheard a little while back made anything he could do a mere futility. And worse, the plague had already spread from Pharona. A newscast, hours since—he’d hardly noticed it at the time—reported that a Galactic Commission cruiser had landed on Pharona with dispatches for the local sub-commissioner. He could not be cut off from his regular flow of documents to sign! It observed all sanitary precautions. But it did not think to prevent any possibility of bound electric charges entering its metal fabric. So when it went on to Galata it carried the plague, and women were now dying by thousands, and other women by more thou- -sands glowed faintly with cosmic rays coming from their bodies.

Ben told her, his face savagely stern.

“We must tell,” she insisted. “Even if we die, Ben—”

“My dear,” said Ben bitterly, “you know the brass hat mind. The in­stant we open communication, every ship that’s hunting us will come bouncing here to blast us Out of space. And they’ll find us. If we can get our information to them and on their recorders before we’re killed

why . . . sooner or later, after maybe millions more lives have been lost, the information we’ve given will be passed on as the result of bril­liant investigation under the supervision of brass hat so-and-so. But we’ll be dead and disreputable. And we’ll stay disreputable after we’re dead, so that some pompous ass can claim credit for what we’ve found out and get a few more decorations to hang on his fat tummy.”

“Maybe hers,” said Sally. She lay there in the bunk, looking up at Ben with soft eyes. “Some brass hats are women, and a woman brass hat is even worse than a man. You can’t blame them, Ben. They’re important people. They have important posts. So they get dignified and pompous and stupid. If they could only feel that its their work instead of them that’s important—”

“But they never will,” said Ben grimly. “So we die. I pulled down the GC phone to get rid of the Things. I’ll kill off the rest and put the -phone back together. Then I’ll broadcast my stuff, and we’ll sit down and hold hands until we’re killed.”

“Darling!” said Sally wistfully. ‘Would you mind kissing me? You haven’t kissed me but twice since we’ve been together—”

He bent down. He kissed her. And then they clung, suddenly. The little sports cruiser had reeled. Something had hold of it. With a tractor­beam. Ben fought against a savage acceleration, applied from without, and then- there was a violent impact. They had been drawn violently against the hull of a much larger vessel. Tools worked instantly on the air lock, and before Ben could do more than reach the door of the stateroom with his positron-pistol in his hand, he found himself looking into the muzzles of other positron-guns. Navy men faced him.

“You’re under arrest, Sholto,” said a voice crisply. ‘We were ordered to burn you down on sight, but since the plague’s hit Calata, we’ve got instructions to do it before a visiphone screen as a warning to anybody else who has the idea of breaking a planetary quarantine. Come along!”

Brass hat: an idiom accepted as Auxiliary Basic since Circa 2126 Earth Style. It originally referred to the headgear used to distinguish “staff officers” in an army (See ARMY) who gave orders without re­sponsibility for their result, and which they were required to justify only by precedent, “political necessity” or “strategic reasons,”—terms which have no discoverable exact meaning. Costly blunders by officers of the mental pattern AF-IQ-R.37 and its derivatives—(to whom the career of a “staff officer” was irresistibly attractive in time of war)— led to the use of the term “brass hat” to indicate persons of those now-recognized mental patterns. It is an interesting case of instinctive popu­lar recognition of mental patterning before personality analysis emerged from charlatanry.

(Dictionary of Auxiliary Basic Words and Idioms. Cephus, Antres VII. 2215 Earth Style.)

Ben grinned. There was no particular mirth in it, but it was the only possible expression of the way he felt.

“Ah-h-h!” he said softly. “The brass-hat mind in action! The order undoubtedly ended, ‘this order is not to be questioned.’ But try and carry it out! You can kill me, of course. But I’ve a pistol in my hand, too. Try and drag me to a visiphone! And you’ve got a boarding-mike with you, haven’t you? Ah, yes! Everything I say will be recorded and goes through all the ranks of brass hats up to the Galactic Commission, if necessary. Very well! This is a plague ship. I have a girl here who has had the plague and has been cured of it. I know how to cure the plague. But the ship is infected—and so is yours, now! If there are as many as a dozen women on board it, you’ve got a dozen cases of plague in your ship’s company, and you’ve only to set a Geiger counter in front of any one of them—or stand them in the dark—to find it out! What I’ve said is recorded! Now kill me and go and land on any planet in the universe!”

The boarding officer said uncertainly:

“I have orders to take you to a visiphone screen and blast you before it.”

“Try it!” said Ben savagely.

He shook - with fury. Because it seemed that every hope was gone, not only of his own life and Sally’s, but of being able to get past the wall of pompous stupidity brass-hattism had erected. The Space-Navy and all interstellar traffic suffered intolerably from a policy which assumed that infinite wisdom lay in any person with authority to issue an order, and that only blind obedience should be practiced by inferiors.

He raged at himself, too. It was his use of the positron pistol to kill the Things which had led this Navy cruiser directly to him. Pulling Out the GC phone to get its condenser had left him unaware of demands for surrender. His screens had been off. And now he would be killed, and the plague would go all through the galaxy. Because, of - course, brass hats would refuse to believe anything they did not already know, and they would solemnly remove themselves from infected planets-with all sanitary precautions, of course—to exercise their authority elsewhere, and they would spread the plague themselves.

The boarding-officer’s helmet phone hummed. His uncertainty van­ished.

“Very good, sir,” he said to the air. To Ben be said, “Your first state­ments have been checked. Four cases of plague have been found already. You say you can cure them. They will be brought here. The order for your execution is suspended for the time being.”

“I’ll do it,” said Ben curtly, “in the control room.” -

People crowded through the air lock and into the control room. There were four women and a stout and pompous individual with the brass tabs of an under-commissioner. Of brass hat rating—and brass hat mentality.

“You are incredibly insolent!” he puffed. “You have defied the au­thority of the Galactic Commission! It is unheard of!”

“Also,” said Ben grimly, “I’ve found out how to cure the plague. If you can’t think of anything but my defiance -of authority, you’re a fool!”

The brass hat purpled and gasped. But Ben turned out the lights. The four women, in Space-Navy Auxiliary uniform, stood out starkly in the darkness. Their faces and throats and hands glowed with a pale white light. Ben picked up his condenser. He touched it to the cheek of the first woman, whose features were working convulsively. The glow van­ished from her. The little knob glowed instead. Ben held it out and gave it a momentary positron blast. There was the feeling of a soundless scream. He touched the second woman. She no longer glowed. A second blast. A second unheard shriek. The third. When he had drawn the Thing from the fourth woman he did not use the blast upon it. Instead, he turned on the lights.

“Those four cases of plague are cured,” he said shortly.

The brass hat puffed.

“In that case,” he said querulously, “there is nothing more to be done. Regulations have to be obeyed. You will carry out your orders, lieutenant?

The boarding-officer’s jaw dropped.

“You mean, sir—”

“He’s been ordered to be executed,” said the brass hat, indignantly. “Hasn’t the Navy learned yet that orders are to be obeyed first and questions asked afterwards?”

Ben released the last Thing into the fabric of the ship.

“But the plague isn’t finished,” he said, his eyes burning. “I inform you—and all my words are recorded—that if you land on any planet without my having cleaned your ship of the plague, you will start the plague again wherever you land.”

“But—that’s blackmail!” cried the brass hat.

There were sounds. Three more people came through the air lock.

-Two were the ranking officers of a Space-Navy cruiser. The third was a white-haired woman in a gray cloak. She had alert, intelligent eyes.

“Ma’am,” bellowed the brass hat. “This man has insulted and tried to blackmail the Galactic Commission! I have ordered him blasted!”

It would be unthinkable, of course, to carry out a death sentence in the presence of a member of the Galactic Commission itself. The white-haired woman said gently:

“More immediately important, I am afraid, is the fact that he called you a fool.” She looked at Ben. “I am Myra Thorn. I am one of the Galactic Commission. I was on my way to Galata, where the plague has broken out, to try to press its investigation. Within the past five minutes it appears that I have developed the plague myself. I feel that there is something within me, but separate from me, which gloats in triumphant hate. A Geiger counter verifies my diagnosis. And... I glow in darkness. The plague - is a form of life, is it not? An entity which is not quite matter?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Ben. He regarded her from beneath frowning brows. “It is an organized form of electron gas.”

“I wish,” said the white-haired woman, “that you would broadcast— through the cruiser’s CC phone, since your own is dismantled—all the information you have on these entities, and the method you have devised for destroying them.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Ben. He still regarded her- steadily.

“Then, at your convenience,” she said quietly, “you may clean the cruiser alongside, and last of all—but I must be last—you may cure me of the plague.”

“Easy enough,” said Ben grimly.

“Very well—” -

The brass hat bleated:

“But ma’am, there is an official order that he shall be blasted imme­diately upon his capture if not on sight! It is irregular! It is unheard of! A Commission order—And he has defied the Commission! He tried to blackmail it!”

The white-haired woman said meditatively:

“To be sure. Formalities must be observed. So I formally annul his sentence. And, by the way, I order you under arrest for courtmartial. The charge will be stupidity, incompetence, and arrogance. I have to make a charge,” she added mildly, “so we can have a psychometrist make a com­plete chart of your personality. Really, we must make regulations to keep your sort from having authority, hereafter. You do too much damage.” She turned again to Ben. “Now, what will you need?”

“Five minutes with your technical officer,” said Ben briefly. “Then he can do anything I could. But ma’am, I have a girl on board. She’s been officially reported dead, and sentenced to death afterward. I would like—” -

“A pardon? Of course!”

“No, ma’am, a wedding,”- said Ben. He grinned.

(Formal announcement by the Galactic Commission, Sitting in Executive Session, January 26, 2195.)

“The Galactic Commission makes it known that it recognizes that the plague upon Pharona, and its very great threat to the entire human race, cannot be blamed upon anything but certain ill-advised actions of mem­bers of the Administrative Service. Members of the Commission, having discovered this fact, have discovered other and further evidences of extra­ordinary incapacity and stupidity among high officials of the Administra­tive Service, and have determined that such persons fall into certain mental patterns which from now on are to be forbidden. Persons falling within patterns. . .“ (Here follows a list of sixteen mental patterns) “are forbidden hereafter to hold any office under the Commission, or any office of authority in any enterprise under the Commissipn’s guidance. The Commission recommends to planetary governments that such patterns be forbidden planetary positions of authority also, but since politics has enor­mous attraction for persons of these types, it cannot expect that they can successfully be excluded from legislative bodies until genetics supplies a means of breeding these strains out of the human race.”