Quarantine World

II

Murgatroyd made the first comment. It was an indignant, protesting, "Chee-chee! Chee-chee!"

He was accustomed to the sensations of going into overdrive and out of it again. He didn't like them. Nobody did. Murgatroyd endured them for the sake of being where Calhoun was, being petted by Calhoun, drinking coffee with Calhoun, and on occasion engaging in long, leisurely discussion to which Murgatroyd contributed his shrill voice and stubborn conviction that he was actually conversing. Now, though, he protested. Before breakout there was normally an hour-off warning, then a five-minute warning, and then a solemn tick-tock-tick-tock until a gong sounded and then a voice counted down to zero. Murgatroyd had learned that this was the routine for breakout; but just now the extremely unpleasant sensations had happened with no warning whatever. It was upsetting. It was a violation of the accepted order of things. He said, "Chee-chee! Chee-chee!" even more indignantly.

Calhoun stared at the star-speckled screens. He was entirely incredulous. The red light on the control-board was notice of something solid nearby in space. But that was impossible! The Med Ship was in between-the-stars, light-years from Lanke. In between-the-stars there is nothing more solid than starlight. Solidity in this emptiness would be even more unlikely than a ship breaking out of overdrive strictly on its own decision. However, the limit of improbability was reached when not only a ship broke out of itself, but the near-object warning flashed simultaneously.

Calhoun stared at the screens. It didn't make sense, unless a highly theoretic happening had occurred. In theory, two overdrive fields might affect each other. Nothing else could. For extremely abstract reasons, it had been determined that if two ships passed close to each other, and if they were of nearly the same size, and if both overdrive-fields units were nearly of the same strength, either or both fields could blow out. For this reason a circuit-breaker was included in all overdrive designs. The odds against such a thing were ten plus a handful of zeros to one. It had never before been known to happen. Now it had.

Calhoun slipped into the pilot's chair. He threw switches. Overdrive off. It had gone off by itself. Circuit-checker on. A special instrument verified all contacts and connections. This instrument stuttered for an instant and then flashed the signal, "Go." A circuit-breaker had operated, but it was now reset. It was the one in the overdrive circuit. Calhoun barely noticed that the G.C. speaker had come on also and now relayed the crackling and hissing noises that would-be poets call, "the small-talk of the stars." Calhoun found himself gazing unbelievingly at the screens.

A second-magnitude star winked out and back to brightness. A less brilliant nearby star followed. Calhoun swung the radar and looked incredulously at what it reported. There was something in between-the-stars no more than four hundred miles away. With hundreds of thousands of cubic light-years of space to move about in, something in overdrive had passed within four hundreds miles of Aesclipus Twenty. Two circuit-breakers had operated, and—there they were! The radar blip said the other object was a trifle smaller than the Med Ship, and it appeared to be practically motionless, moving only enough to occult two nearby stars within a few seconds.

Murgatroyd said yet again, and even more indignantly, "Chee!! Chee!!!"

"I didn't do it, Murgatroyd," said Calhoun abstractly. "Quiet for a minute!"

He threw another switch and the electron-telescope came on. He searched with it. He made fine adjustments for focus. Then his face expressed blank unbelief.

The telescope screen showed another ship floating in the starlight. It was not much like any other ship Calhoun had ever seen. At first it seemed a freak; not alien but eccentric, not of a non-human design, but like something made by men who'd never seen a real spaceship. There was a pipelike object sticking out of its bow.

He pressed the G.C. call-button; but first he cut off the lens that would transmit a picture of himself. He called.

"General Call!" he snapped. "General Call! Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty making general call! What ship's that?"

There was no answer. He frowned. Only minutes since he'd discovered himself very definitely condemned to death by an unfamiliar plague germ. A little earlier he'd been thrown off the planet Lanke for discovering too much. Before that he'd seen a dead man who couldn't come from anywhere. This extremely unusual ship couldn't come from anywhere, either.

He suddenly heard murmuring voices. There seemed to be several persons speaking in low tones near an open microphone. They were in disagreement. One voice raised itself above the others but the words were still indistinct.

"Hello!" said Calhoun sharply. "I hear your voices! Who the devil are you and what's going on?"

It occurred to him as odd that, with a plague on him and the end of all his responsibilities drawing near, he still spoke authoritatively as a Med Service man and a citizen of the galaxy to persons whose actions required to be explained. He repeated sternly, "What's going on?"

The other ship was incredible. It was patched with patches on top of patches. It was preposterous. The electron telescope could not give the finer details in mere starlight, but it was rusty and misshapen and no spaceport would ever lift it off the ground! Yet here it was.

A voice rasped from the G.C. speaker overhead, "Look! What do you think you're doing?" As Calhoun blinked, it said pugnaciously, "What d'you think you're doing to us? You . . . know what I mean!"

Calhoun said coldly, "This is Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty. Who are you?"

"Med Ship?" snapped the angry voice, "wha—"

The voice stopped abruptly, as if a hand had been clapped over someone's mouth. There were more murmurings.

Calhoun grimaced. He didn't understand this other ship. He'd cut off his own vision lens because he didn't want anybody to see him with the marks of the plague on him. Whoever spoke from the patched-up other spacecraft didn't want to be seen, either. The murmurings came to an end. The harsh voice snapped, "Never mind that! What'd you do to us? We were going about our business when—whango! Something hit us. And we're here instead of where we were going! What'd you do?"

Calhoun saw a stirring of the radar blip. The other craft was moving toward the Med Ship. Then he felt the edges of everything becoming twinned. His eyes were going bad again. No, he didn't want to mention his own situation. Nothing could be done for him, and dying is a strictly private matter. He felt concern for Murgatroyd, but he was a Med Ship man and there was a certain way he should act. He was impatient. Whoever was piloting the other ship knew nothing about his work. Calhoun felt the indignation of a professional with an inept amateur.

The rasping voice said truculently, "I'm asking what you did!"

"We did something to each other," said Calhoun coldly. "We came too close to each other. Our overdrive units got overloaded. Our circuit-breakers cut them off. Do you want more information than that?"

"What other information have you got?" demanded the voice.

Calhoun felt feverish. The symptoms of this plague were evidently intermittent. They came and they went. They'd probably grow more and more severe until he died of them—but . . .

"I take it," he said coldly, "that you don't know what you're doing or why, because you don't know what's happened. Do you know where you are, or how to get to where you want to go? In other words, do you want help?"

"What kind of help?" The question was asked with suspicion.

"First off," said Calhoun, "you broke out of overdrive. Have you checked your circuit-breaker?"

"We don't call it that," said the voice. "What is it?"

Calhoun could have sworn. Instead, he closed his eyes. He felt a diminishing of his sense of balance. He was annoyed at the prospective loss of dignity, but he said, "A circuit-breaker . . ." Then with his eyes closed he told what a circuit-breaker was, and where it would be in a power line. There should be an indicator saying, "Off." There had to be a circuit-breaker or the other ship would be full of smoke from burned-out insulation.

It occurred to him how the other ship came to be what it was. It was a salvage job. It had been found somewhere and cobbled back to precarious operation by men who had to guess at the functions of what they repaired. They'd lifted off to space with it, probably by rocket. It was hair-raising to think of!

All he could do was give them advice and possibly a course in drive-time so they wouldn't over-shoot, for now . . .

"When you find the circuit-breaker, turn off the overdrive switch in the control-board," he said. "Then—not before!—throw the circuit-breaker back on. Then you can go into overdrive again. How about your fuel? This is a repaired spaceboat, isn't it?"

A strained silence, and then a suspicious assent.

Calhoun had them report on the fuel, the air-pressure and the air-renewal apparatus. His sense of balance began to come back. He called for more and more instrument readings.

"You haven't too much fuel," he said briefly, "but you can get to a nearby spaceport. That's all! Where do you want to go?"

"That's our business!"

"You've only so many possible destinations," Calhoun told them. "Wait a minute."

He worked the computer and the data-retrieval device. He got courses from here to the nearest inhabited planets. There were four that they could reach handily. Calhoun named them and the time in overdrive required to get reasonably close to them—to a distance the Lawlor drive could traverse in a practicable interval. . . . One of the four was Lanke, and Calhoun frankly advised against taking the agglomeration of patches that was a ship to Lanke. His reason was the considerable likelihood that there was plague on Lanke now.

"I've written down the courses and drive-times," he observed. "Write them down as I dictate."

He dictated them. Murmurings. Discussion in the background of the other spacecraft. The harsh voice said, "Those drive-times are pretty long. There's a yellow sun that looks close."

"It's Delhi," said Calhoun, from memory. "It has an Earth-type planet and there may have been a colony on it once. But there's nothing there now! There's something wrong with it and no ship is known to have gotten back to its home spaceport after landing on it." He added conscientiously, "It's near enough. The drive-time's only—" He gave the drive-time and the course. "But I advise you to go to one of the other nearby worlds, go into orbit around it, and call down. They'll land you somewhere. And when they get you down to ground, stay there!"

His eyes were better. He looked at the screens. The freakish, patched-up boat was very, very close, not more than a score or two of miles away. He opened his mouth to protest indignantly. He was practically a dead man. At the moment, to be sure, he felt only feverish. Otherwise, nothing serious seemed to be wrong. However, he knew that a mirror would show his own self with the plague marks he'd seen on a dead man back on Lanke.

"Meanwhile," he added, "you'd better not come closer to me."

There was no answer. There were, though, murmurings near the microphone in the other ship. Someone protested against something. The rasping voice growled. There was a click, and the murmuring stopped. The other microphone had been cut off.

Calhoun's eyes improved still more. He looked at the electron telescope image of the other ship. It was turning to face him directly, the pipe at its bow bore exactly.

Suddenly, there was a mad, violent swirling of vapor or gases from the tube at the other ship's bow. Emptiness snatched at it, grasped it, separated it to atoms and threw them away.

The Med Ship was alone. Something minute remained where the preposterous other spacecraft had been. It was very, very small. It was only a moving speck of reflected starlight. Then the electron telescope screen showed it clearly. It was bright metal, it was torpedo-shaped, and it moved with a certain high, fixed velocity toward the Aesclipus Twenty.

Calhoun stared at it. He knew at once what it was, of course, but his reaction was modified by the situation he found himself in. Normally, he'd have been angered by the sending of a missile, probably charged with chemical explosive, to destroy the Med Ship after the attacking vessel had vanished in overdrive. He was acutely aware that he happened to be in one of the remission-periods of the plague which undoubtedly would kill him. If he'd thought of the future as one usually does, he'd have been angry that somebody had tried to destroy him. Now he had no future to be robbed of. If this shell shattered the Med Ship, it wouldn't be doing very much. It would deprive him of one—two—maybe three days of vanishing satisfactions, in which he could accomplish nothing whatever.

It didn't seem to matter. He found himself smiling wryly at the thing that came swiftly to destroy him. Suddenly, he changed his mind. He threw the Lawlor-drive switch and the Med Ship moved. When the explosive missile passed through the spot the ship had occupied, and went sturdily on and on to nowhere, he grimaced a little.

"I dodged that on your account," he told Murgatroyd. "But for you, I'd have no reason to bother. I can't live to reach headquarters, though with warning they could receive me without danger and soothe my final hours. I can't land on a nearer, colonized planet without introducing a plague and being a murderer. So I'll compromise and put you down where you just barely may have a sporting chance of surviving—where if you die, it won't be by starving in this ship. I'll do whatever futile things my condition permits."

He began to set up a course and drive-time on the ship's automatic pilot. A little later he said, "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd!"

There came the intolerable accompaniments of going into overdrive. Vertigo and nausea and all the sensations of an unconscionable, spinning plunge toward oblivion. Calhoun endured them doggedly. He was convinced that presently his eyes wouldn't work again and he'd probably have to crawl to move about on the ship. Anticipation of such undignified behavior was much more annoying than a mere attempt to kill him. He didn't bother to be angry about the missile.

While he felt relatively himself, he readied a meal for Murgatroyd and ate what he could, himself. He viewed with a certain detached amusement the idea that since he couldn't live to reach headquarters, and couldn't land anywhere else without introducing the plague, he was using all the splendid technical equipment of a Med Ship, representing tens of millions of credits and the life achievements of many scientists and inventors, to put a small furry creature aground on an uninhabited world rather than leave him alone in an undirected spaceship.

"This," he told Murgatroyd while the little tormal zestfully ate the food he'd set out, "this is ridiculous! You'll be left alone anyhow and I've no idea how you'll make out—but . . ."

He shrugged. It would be absurd to make a dramatic production out of the business of dying.

"I'm going to put you aground and you'll have to fend for yourself. You'll probably think I'm unkind. You can't imagine my being unable to take care of you. But that's the fact. It's typical. I haven't done anything in particular."

Murgatroyd said cheerfully, "Chee-chee!" and finished his plate.

The Aesclipus Twenty drove on. Presently, Calhoun's eyes went bad again. Later, he lost all ability to distinguish up from down, or sidewise from either. He sat grimly in the pilot's chair, with a cord knotted to keep him from falling out, which for some reason he considered necessary.

He probably slept. He waked, and he was horribly thirsty. He loosened the cord and let himself fall to the floor. With all his senses assuring him that the ship revolved, he made his way on all-fours—with several falls—to where there was drinking water. He drew a glass, and then solemnly poured it out on the way to his lips, which were responsive to the feeling that he had to turn the glass to prevent it from spilling as the Med Ship turned; but the ship didn't turn and the water was wasted.

Finally, he wedged himself against the wall and refused to believe anything but his eyes. He watched the surface of the water and denied all other evidence. He drank. He drank again and again and again.

Abruptly, he slept. Then he awoke, and acute nausea was just past, but dizziness had not woken him, and the feeling of spinning fall was only slightly different from the feelings he had all along. Now, Murgatroyd was plucking at him and chattering agitatedly, "Chee! Chee-chee! Chee!"

Then he knew that breakout had come, and the vision screens were lighted, and he looked and saw a blazing yellow sun and innumerable stars. The ceiling speaker crackled and whispered as in normal space. The Med Ship had arrived at the solar system of Delhi.

When he was back in the pilot's chair, Calhoun realized how weak he'd become; obviously, the effect of the plague nearing its terminal stage. He heard somebody talking. It was himself, and he paid no attention. He searched for the planet, the planet that was of no use to anybody, from which no ship returned. He found it. It was astonishingly near. One part of his brain labored gravely with the computer and inexpertly made observations while another part talked nonsense, which he resented.

There followed a period of very great confusion. There seemed to be two of him, as there appeared to be two Murgatroyds and two electron telescope screens and two control-boards. One part of his mind considered this improper, but another part gleefully took note that he had two right hands and two lefts, and watched with charmed attention as those hands simultaneously operated twin controls, and something gigantic grew more immense as the Aesclipus Twenty approached it. He was absurdly surprised when it became a monstrous black hole in the universe of stars. The Med Ship had swung around to its night-side in an orbit Calhoun's then-disregarded sane brain-fraction had contrived. He seemed to sleep, and to wake again, and he was extremely thirsty. Suddenly, the sane part of his mind declared loudly, that there was a settlement! It showed on the electron telescope screen! Then the part of his brain that was angry with the fevered part forcibly took charge.

The confusion he experienced did not lessen, to be sure. The part of a man which is his total consciousness, the part that uses brain-cells to store memories and present data for judgment, the part that uses brain-cells to control his body, the part which recognizes the phenomena of consciousness, that part, still functioned. One's brain can become an unreliable instrument, from fever or alcohol, but there is an ego, an id, a something, which struggles to make sane use of it. There were moments when he knew that he was singing and that his body was behaving in a fashion totally irrelevant to his situation and his purpose. There were other moments when he seemed to control his body which was astonishingly feeble, and he was clearly aware that he had turned on the Med Ship's emergency rockets and that it was balancing on a pencil-thin, blue-white flame in midair.

Confusion came again. He was lecturing Murgatroyd on medical ethics. While he lectured, the Med Ship and all its contents turned somersaults, as did the planet outside. Calhoun knew that proper planets do not turn somersaults in their own skies, so he treated this behavior with the dignified contempt it deserved.

More chaotic sensations, so bewildering that they ceased to be impressions. Suddenly, there was a distinct thump, and he was shocked into rationality. He realized that the Med Ship had touched ground. He had cut off the rockets. He stared at the scene the vision screen showed.

The Aesclipus Twenty had landed in a swampy valley bottom among low mountains; there was vegetation outside which swayed gently in a strong breeze. On higher ground he saw white, man-made walls with empty window openings and tree tops showing where there should have been roofs. Close to the Med Ship there was swamp, marsh, stagnant puddles, and indigenous growing things.

Murgatroyd said, "Chee-chee!" in an anxious tone. Calhoun was weary beyond belief, but he roused.

"All right, Murgatroyd," he said dizzily, "I've done a very silly thing, and maybe I've done you no good at all, but if you'll follow me I'll finish it."

With an overwhelming lassitude, making his arms and legs seem to weigh tons, he left the chair by the control-board. He stayed on his feet almost half the way to the air-lock, by leaning heavily against the wall. Then his knees buckled under him and the rest of the way he crawled. At the inner air-lock door he reached up and by pure habit pushed the succession of buttons which opened both the inner and the outer doors. They rumbled wide, unsealing themselves. Air came in. There was the smell of mud and vegetation and unfamiliar life. There was also one particular odor which should have been unpleasing, but that it was so faint it seemed only strange.

"There!" said Calhoun. He waved his hand feebly. "There you are, Murgatroyd! There's a world for you. You'll be lonely, and maybe you'll die or be killed by some local predator, and maybe I'm doing you a dirty trick. But my intentions are of the best. Shoo! Get out so I can close the ports again."

Murgatroyd said, "Chee!" in a bewildered tone. It was not customary for Calhoun to crawl on his hands and knees and urge him out the air-lock. Calhoun was behaving strangely. Murgatroyd looked at him apprehensively.

"Chee!" he said. "Chee-chee!"

Calhoun did not answer. He felt himself slipping down to the Med Ship's floor. He was intolerably weary and weak. He was wholly confused. The sane part of his consciousness relaxed. He'd finished the task he'd set himself. If he rested, maybe he'd get back enough strength to close the air-lock door. It didn't really matter. It was annoying that he hadn't been able to get word of the Lanke situation to headquarters, but the plague had been on Lanke before. The doctors knew it. They were terrified by it, but maybe . . . maybe . . .

Wryly, at the moment he believed his moment of death, Calhoun conceded to himself that he'd done the best he could. It wasn't good enough.