by Jerry
Janith Nordheimer chuckled. “But he would be blasted, too.”
“That’s right,” the captain admitted, “but he is at Exotic Disease Control. The doctors of the Public Health Service ordered here are conditioned to expect death. It is part of their duty. I’m sure the doctor would rather die by a neutron blast than by a disease he is sure to get from some derelict from the outer nuclei.”
The Nordheimers looked at him with new-formed respect in their widened eyes. “We’ll go to Immigration,” Nordheimer said hastily. He whirled on Dave. “Understand one thing, you mention one word of this conversation officially and I’ll have your job.”
“Why, Mr. Nordheimer,” Dave hoped his expression showed astonished wonder, “I didn’t know you needed employment.”
The last thing he heard as he started down the corridor to the lock was Janith’s taunting laugh and her sneering admonition he had better be very, very careful from now on.
He told the doctors and the chief about the scene. “The Old Boy is a power,” Dr. Nissen pointed out in a worried voice. “He has lots of rocks in the sky, he can control Planetary Congress and they dictate to the Chancellor.”
“But they are all afraid of the public.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Well, there’s nothing to do about it now. Let’s go on to Blackbern’s patients.” He stopped, placed a hand on Nissen’s shoulder. “Of the two personalities, I admire Blackbern’s stupid ruthlessness much more than the calculating cruelty of the Teutonic-minded Nordheimer.”
Dave was in the A & R checking welds in his armor when Operations summoned him on the phone. “Get on the closed channel, the Director of the Inner Port wishes to speak to you privately.”
Dave made the contact in his office. “This is Munroe, Exotic Disease Control. Duty Officer requested I contact you on the closed channel.”
“Can your side be seen or heard in?” the director asked cautiously. Dave read off his settings. The director seemed satisfied, for he said at once, “Nordheimer is mad at you. He put pressure on the Chancellor, the cabinet met in secret session and is drafting a bill to limit the power of the Public Health Service. Nordheimer said he’d just be satisfied if they get rid of you. What happened?”
“I made him wait while I took care of some sick patients from a freighter.”
“He’s spreading some nasty tales about you. Something about accepting a bribe and insulting his daughter and calling his medical officer an incompetent fool—”
Dave laughed. “The last part is true. However, when I went aboard I was wearing an open wrist phone, everything that was said is a matter of record. I sent it to the Earth Office with my own comments.”
“If they can’t get you legally, he’ll do it some other way.”
“I’ve been expecting something,” Dave admitted. “But all they can do is kill me.”
“Don’t be so resigned,” the director snapped.
Three days later as the setting Earth was casting long shadows across the crater floor his dread was crystallized into reality.
He was standing by the ramp talking with the senior medical officer of an exploring battleship which had just slid out of the velvety sky to unload a pet for bacterial evaluation.
He laughed as the brontosaurus-like creature in its glassite cage was wheeled down the freight ramp. A thought flashed through his mind, amusing in its perversity. Nordheimer should have such an animal for his doctor.
The gong of the phone in his helmet was startlingly explosive. “Duty Officer on Operations Channel.” He muttered a hasty excuse to the doctor, walked over to the portable screen, plugged his phone jack.
“Duty Officer speaking. The Marston, a freighter, lost for over two years, has been found out near Pluto. The ship is owned by Astrosphere, one of the Nordheimer companies. Nordheimer requests a complete inner examination of the ship.
“The Public Health Service said an emphatic no. They could see no reason for risking valuable personnel. The company officials went to the Secretary of Spatial Commerce, stated the Marston had been sent on a voyage of commercial exploration and it was essential that not only the log be secured but the condition of the cargo be determined and the salvage possibilities of the ship. You’d have to go deep inside and make a determine. This order is for the public.”
Dave flicked off the phone with a wry grin. So this is how Brother Nordheimer acts when he’s crossed. He realized with cold objectivity this action on Nordheimer’s part was essential if he wished to continue in economic power.
Nordheimer could not attack him with his secret police; their altercation had been made public now and the mass of the people would rebel against such a militant action. He was doing it cleverly, by seeing that he went into a ship with a high death potential.
He checked his armor minutely. Ran in new air lines, lights, communication circuits, even replaced the bearings on the blowers. He remembered Blackbern’s crack about broken welds; never left his armor alone. He charged his own physiology with every known immune vaccine, serum and bacterin. He spent his free time studying Pyter’s Index of Extraterrestrial Diseases.
When Operations called, announcing the tugs would cradle the freighter within an hour, he felt himself as ready for battle against the Unknown as he would ever be.
Dave armored himself, summoned the various crews who would help him make primary entrance, walked blithely out to the landing cradle.
He was not surprised to see the two armored figures of Dr. Mortimer J. Mortimer and Janith Nordheimer watching him, taunting smiles on their derisive faces. It intrigued him that they would leave off blank helmets to be certain he would see and recognize them; know to the fullness the bitterness of certain defeat at their hands. He would have felt let down if they had not been there.
He hid his galling frustration behind a mask of insouciant laughter. “Hail, Nordheimer. I who am about to die and stuff salute you.” There was mockery in his derisive salute.
“I’ll pull you from this detail if you’ll agree to be conditioned to work for father.” Janith directed her voice on a light beam so it could not be heard by her companion.
“Thanks for the offer,” Dave said quietly. “But you see I’m a physician.”
People from lunar stations were assembling about the cradle in a vast semicircle; gathering with the morbid fascination only impending catastrophe or violent death can induce. Dave looked at them in their varied armor, could not help but laugh at the neuroses which motivated such behavior.
He turned on the open communication circuit so all could hear him. “Now hear this.” He raised his voice, realizing as he shouted that he was betraying tension; instantly channeled his mind into precise, frigid patterns. “Now hear this,” he ordered quietly, as if directing one of his crews. “No one is to cross the limiting lights set by the tower. This order is for your protection.” He looked at Janith and Mortimer. “This order is for you, too. Get back at once.”
He walked to the landing cradle as tugs appeared overhead holding the Maiston in the grip of unyielding tractors. In the bluish Earth-set the vast, insensate freighter was ominously menacing. Dave looked up at its corroded, curving sides and could not help but shudder at the thought of the grisly things he would find in its black interior.
The steri-crew was wheeling up vortex guns, tractor banks, flame generators, acid lines and the tools necessary to make entrance to a derelict. Dave was aware a hush had settled over the crowd. The thin, distant murmur of noise from a thousand communicators had become a portentous silence now.
They were waiting with avid interest for that breathless moment when he opened the locks and entered the ship. They could hardly wait to hear what he would say about his findings. He knew some of them were growling impatiently at his cautious preparations, grumbling at his exterior inspection.
The chief rolled up the portable bacterial wagon. Dave stood still as the medical kit’s tractors and repellers were balanced, brought to focus on his back. He took a few steps to test its dr
ag. “Lighten it by fifty kilos,” he directed. “I might have to climb and, chief, set the automatic neutral so I can step around and back without unfocusing. I don’t want to chase the thing over the lunarscape to find a test tube.”
He walked slowly up the ramp, moved along the blackened, rusted keel. In some distant past the ship had rested on a planet’s earthy surface; frozen earth cracked off at his touch.
Instantly he melted the dirt with a hand torch. A crumb of dust, loaded with an unknown virus, could settle in a joint of his metal shoes, infect the station. He took tweezers, teased off a few clumps, put them in solution, centrifuged, read the organic indicator on the bacterioscope, sighed with relief. The stuff was sterile. The actinic power of solar radiation had killed any organisms clinging to the ship. He took a larger sample for the geologists, turned to the landing room.
He took hold of the recessed handle, turned and pulled. The door was frozen closed. “Set up a vortex, center it on the door, pull the door and as the air explodes out turn to full temp.”
He stepped back, turned on his suit to full reflection so as to avoid external heating. The crew aimed their whirling flames at the door, tractors penciled at the handle, the door tore open with a grinding vibration, felt even through his cushioned shoes. Air expanded out, was caught in the whirling vortex, heated instantly to its ultimate limit.
Dave stood on the deck of the entrance lock. He flashed his light on the rusting bulkheads, on winches oxidized by time, on armor, long since obsolete. He looked at the ship’s design on the wall, studied the passages, corridors, location of offices and holds. He went back out, picked up a power cable, plugged it into the ship’s emergency line. The ammeter showed a tremendous drain, but no lights flashed in the compartment, nor did his own circuits break with overload.
He pushed the handle of the winch to see if he had power there, but the handle crumbled to flaky dust in his grip. He took a scalpel from his mobile kit, scraped at the door and the metal cracked and peeled with brittle weakness. “The interior metal is about as strong as tin foil.” He made the announcement surprised at his own calmness. “Call for the consulting metallurgists.”
He found the automatic log, the device which recorded all the captain’s orders, messages and directives to his crew, unfastened it from its niche, dropped it in a sterilizing bath, handed it out to Thurman. “I noticed their last entry was they were leaving the Cepheus nucleus. That’s a hard white area, so we can expect a most virulent type of organism. Flame before opening.”
“Are you really going inship?” Thurman asked anxiously.
“I must, it is orders.”
He pushed on the door leading inship and the panel crashed inwards. The metal had the tensile strength of decayed wood.
Curiosity had not erased his natural fear or conquered his vague apprehension.
As he walked gingerly up the long corridor he had the spine-tingling sensation that someone was watching him and that at any moment one of the panels would slide back and someone would step out and ask what he was doing in their ship.
“I feel crazy,” he said aloud.
“You all right, sir?” It was Thurman’s voice, it sounded faint, alarmingly faint.
He shivered with expectation as he rounded the corridor and started up the ramp towards the fifth deck. He felt the tug of the kit behind him suddenly slacken and he whirled abruptly to see his mobile unit careening madly back down the ramp. It hit the bulkhead, crashed through its friable metal, vanished into the cave it created.
At the same instant he was aware that his light was growing steadily dimmer and the air in his suit was stifling. He looked at the instruments on his left wrist. He could feel the pulsating throb of laboring motors in his shoes. They were pulling current, acting as though they were being shorted out.
That was what had happened to his kit. The tubes had blown from an unexpected surge. Every instinct told him he should go back and tell the Director General of the Public Health Service to shove his activity into deepest space and keep it there. The discipline that came from years of training was greater than instinctual protective mental mechanisms.
He stopped in the center of the corridor to adjust his air machine. He turned off his laboring motors and set the emergency bellows in his suit’s flanks. As long as he walked they would circulate air, but he couldn’t stand still.
Then his lights went out.
He stopped, petrified with fearful, startled surprise. He started gropingly to retrace his steps, trying to remember each turn he had made when he became conscious that the bulkheads, the overhead, even the deck were emitting a faint golden glow and as his eyes became dark-adapted he discovered that he could see perfectly well. He forced himself to continue up the ramp and through the corridors.
He came to it!
The panel he dreaded, hoped to reach. The entrance to the crew’s quarters.
He pushed through the friable panel. Stopped! Abruptly!
Sweat oozed from his brow, dripped down his back. Sweat formed on the palms of his hands, made them damp in their sheathed gloves. Nausea gripped him. The crew, all of them, were here!
They weren’t the macabre, decayed sight he had expected to find, actually hoped to find. They laid in their plastic bunks and their unclothed bodies were semitransparent and they glowed with a lambent flickering radiance. Their features were vaguely discernible. He experienced the eerie sensation they were turning their heads, observing his every action.
He forced himself to the side of the bunk. Pushed out his sheathed hand, touched one of the things. Instantly he felt a shock. A shock as though an intense surge of pure energy had leaped through his entire organism and stultified his brain. It was painful in its intensity, exquisitely pleasant in its cortical suggestion.
But the touch itself had done something of unutterable wonder to the body.
The light playing through the human remains flickered violently, vibrated with intense nervous energy as though his touch had disturbed a primal balance. Then, the body vanished in a flash of coruscating fire and a tiny ball of flame, almost microscopic in size, burned on the plastic bed frame.
He touched another body, watched it coalesce into condensed living energy, felt the same orgiastic sensation ripple through his brain. He started to laugh, was aware that he was laughing, looked at his hand, giggling at the flame which leaped from the metal sheathing his fingers.
“The ultimate bacterial form; the pure electric protein. I’ve found it,” he shouted. “Bacteria of pure energy.” He jumped up and down, clapping his hands in joyous abandon at the concept of his thought, distantly aware of his euphoric insanity. He knew, too, that what he had found was a long-anticipated discovery.
It was a mathematical certainty it would be found. The medical physicists had expected to find such a life form as soon as they realized the verity of atomic energy. A life principle that by-passed the usual organic methods of existence, took their energy, without clumsy digestion, absorption, detoxification and evacuation, directly from the primal source. It was the ultimate of bacterial evolution.
He knew in the deep wells of his mind that his actions now were a result of short circuits in the thalamic synapses, that the pyramidal cells of his cortex were being subjected to an intense radiation. Just as it had drained the current from his motors, shorted out the intricate hookups in his medical kit, it was even now destroying the delicate fabric of his mind.
The living neutrons of coalescing flame whirling in semiorganic patterns were absorbing the energy pouring into the ship. They were multiplying in number, growing in strength. They would ooze forth through the metal their activity had decayed, fall on the landing platform and there, subjected to the intense solar radiation, they would utterly destroy his station and all that it meant.
Through the cloying mist forming through his mind the basic pattern of normal conduct was still able to assert itself. He remembered the public!
Dave stared down incredulously at the lambent
flame eroding the fresh metal of his armored hands. He experienced a rising fury that a sentient bacterium should so fog his mind. Thalamic rage, instinctive rather than intuitive, surged through him.
He pulled the steri-gun from its sheath, pointed its needle muzzle at the deck, squeezed the grip. Livid flame struck the deck, splashed about his feet, tore through the friable metal, volatilized girders weakened by disease, tore through the next deck, fountained on the one beneath that, burned out through the ship to volcano on the metal landing platform, in a burst of energy that lit up the lunarscape.
He looked down through the gaping hole, turned his tortured vision to the flaming erosion of his hand. Slowly, deliberately, as though he were drunk and had to carefully reason out each motion, he transferred the gun, pointed it at the infected arm and convulsively fisted the hilt.
There was a long, long moment of unbearable pain, of agony so great it taxed his wavering sanity to experience the tremendous burst of impulses bombarding his mind. The dark curtain of shock was shrouding his brain as he leaped into the hole he had blasted.
He opened his eyes into instant, alert consciousness. He turned his head, integrating himself with his surroundings. Dr. Nissen with a corps of nurses were watching him with that professional detachment which comes from years of practice. Nissen slowly came over to his bed, withdrew an infusion needle from his leg.
Then he experienced the impact of memory. He raised his arms, looked down at the right hand. He had not expected it to be there, was actually surprised to see it. He flexed the fingers, rubbed their tips across the coverings of the bed.
He knew then it was a cleverly grafted prosthesis, as good, well almost as good, as his own arm and hand had been.
“How long?” He was surprised at the timbre of his voice.
“Three weeks,” Nissen replied. “We did the surgery at once; kept you out until we were sure the grafts took.”
“Grafts?”
“You burned your feet off with your steri-pistol.”
“Oh—”