by Jerry
At the communication’s console, he said weakly,
“This is System’s Specialist Carl Burrell, acting Captain of the Horizon. The rest of the crew is dead. I will be joining them in that state soon.”
“This is Clancy Wenger, Captain of the medical frigate Mercy’ was the reply after a short pause. “We are prepared to rendezvous as planned.”
“That won’t be possible. Captain. The disease is far too deadly for me to allow that. It is highly contagious and kills in days. Our biofilters were useless, and I know yours are no better. I have altered our path to take us into the sun. I repeat that all ships should remain clear of Gamma 19 sector at all costs. There will be no further need for communication between us.”
As Wenger started to protest, Burrell cut the link, then turned the communication equipment off.
“Why did you tell them everyone else was dead?” I asked, curious but not offended.
“It gives them less reason to think of coming over here. Not as much chance of being heroes.”
“You think they might try, even after what you’ve said?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. I hope they’re smart enough to leave us be, but man’s need to know everything sometimes overpowers caution.”
We sat in silence for a long time, each of us dozing on occasion when exhaustion overtook pain, neither with the energy to return to quarters. I started to feel part of the seat I was in, and realized with grim amusement that I would likely die in this Navigator’s chair I had so desperately wanted to occupy. I heard Burrell get sick twice, but didn’t turn to look. I hoped he did the same when my body expelled some of its leaking internal fluids. When I was alert, I numbly watched the blazing yellow ball of fire, at first a small spot, but growing larger all the time. I hoped I would be gone before we arrived at our final destination.
I had been asleep again—how long I can’t say—when I was awakened by a shout from Burrell.
I thought he was crying out in pain, but when I turned to see, I saw him madly race across the bridge toward a pair of people in full protective gear, the red medical insignias apparent on both arm and chest. They were carrying the limp form of our Biologist, Henri LeBlanc. The way his flesh hung made me hope he was long dead.
Burrell’s scream was a battle cry. He charged at them, wielding the maxitool like a sword, blood streaking from his nose and mouth. His targets seemed stunned and at loss for how to fight and keep a respectful grip on the man they bore. The hesitation cost the first doctor his life.
I tried to scream at Burrell, but accomplished nothing more than forcing myself to cough up a bit more blood.
The second person, a woman, dropped her half of LeBlanc and reached for something on her utility belt, too late. She managed to get an arm up in time to ward off Burrell’s blow, at the cost of having it broken. Her suit muffled her scream better than the sickening crack of the bone being split.
Burrell pressed the attack while I tried to rise, finding at first that I lacked the strength, and not knowing what I could do anyway. Burrell was a berserker in a killing rage, and if I moved anywhere near him, I was sure the maxi-tool would find my skull as well. Still, I couldn’t just watch other humans murdered in cold blood. I yelled for Burrell to stop, forced myself to stand, and started ambling toward them.
Burrell ignored me and took two more vicious swings with the maxi-tool. The first was a glancing blow to her shoulder, the second a miss as she had gathered herself and managed to dodge it. When the miss threw him slightly off balance, she kicked him in the chest, sending him sprawling toward me and leaving a slick streak of blood behind to mark the trail back to her.
I reached down and tried to help him up and hold him at the same time, but he roughly pushed me away. He turned on me for an instant, his eyes insane, and at that moment I was sure he was mad.
I raised my arms to fend off the blow I thought was coming, but he turned away and stalked back toward the wounded doctor.
She hesitated just a second, then, likely seeing what I had in his eyes, fled. He went after her, his sickened gait reminiscent of Quasimodo in the old holos of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I wasn’t surprised when he came back alone.
He looked once at the two dead men—the doctor and LeBlanc—with his features still contorted by rage.
He turned away, hurtling the maxi-tool against the wall. The action seemed to take his remaining strength, and he slumped against the wall and slid to the floor.
“Burrell?” I finally ventured.
“I had to!” he snapped.
“I had to try to stop them.
They didn’t believe us.
Wouldn’t listen. Fools!”
“The woman . . .?”
“Back on the medical ship,” he cried. “They were both dead anyway. That’s why I killed him, and would have killed her. Now she’s dead, and so is everyone else on that frigate.” He coughed harshly, choking on his own fluids. “You have to stop them, Stenstrom,” he said sternly, giving an order. He coughed again, shuddered twice, then fell silent, blood running lazily over his lips and chin and down the front of his suit.
“I can’t believe you killed a man like that,” I said in a whisper, knowing he couldn’t hear regardless. Sending the Horizon and its doomed crew into the sun was one thing, but smashing a doctor’s skull, when he had come to help . . .
I turned away and looked at the sun, always closer but still an hour away. I studied my trembling hands, noticing less the shaking and more the deepening shade of gray and the way the flesh, sickly and thin, seemed to be melting off the bones. It wouldn’t be long now, I was glad that my exertions had sped the process. Maybe I would cheat the sun’s fire yet.
I put my head on the control panel for a few moments, trying to ignore what Burrell had done and said, waiting for death’s strong arms to gently enfold me. When I heard the Mercy fire her engines, I lifted my head slowly, as if awoken in the middle of the night.
I pushed away thought of my own doom long enough to consider what was happening. The Mercy was leaving, probably heading back to Earth. Inside the ship, waiting to race through the populace, was THE DISEASE, a faceless reaper ready for a bountiful harvest.
They’re already dead,” I said aloud, trying to convince myself, like Burrell had apparently been able to do when he used the maxi-tool. I hesitated, trying hard to think clearly, my eventual killer muddying my mind. Maybe they could solve this mystery, maybe the best medical minds and the best equipment, if given enough time . . . No. They didn’t know THE DISEASE like I did, weren’t intimate friends with it. The people on that ship were already dead.
I changed the view on the screen to aft and watched the Mercy beginning its retreat, noting as I did that my eyesight was beginning to fade. Like most medical ships, it was small, smaller than the Horizon or even its shuttle.
That brings me to now. One trembling forefinger waits, poised over a button on the control console like an executioner’s hand on the electric switch. The button activates the tractor beam that guides the shuttle into the docking bay. With my other hand, I reduce the beam’s power, such that it won’t draw in the Mercy, but will simply hold the ship in place, dragging it into the sun’s cleansing fire along with the Horizon.
I can feel my head spinning as the last vestiges of strength drain from my body. The blindness is now swiftly overtaking me, and the background noises from the ship I had grown used to have blended into a gentle buzz as my hearing starts to fail. THE DISEASE is ready to claim me, but I can accomplish one last thing, take one last stubborn stab at it. I should probably think myself a hero, saving the world from a horrible fate, but I can only think myself a murderer, condemning innocent people to a fiery death. “God forgive me,” I say.
I push the button.
TAKEOVER
Dwight V. Swain
When Dwight Swain died in 1992, a writing career spanning more than fifty years came to an end—but he did leave behind a small inventory of unpublished science-fiction stories, includin
g the one that appears below.
Dwight was a regular contributor to Amazing Stories and its companion magazine. Fantastic Adventures, in the early 1940’s. He published occasionally in the SF/fantasy field thereafter, but became better known for his work with educational films and his books about the craft of writing, including Techniques of the Selling Writer and Creating Characters: How to Build Story People. In 1991, he was named a grand master by the Oklahoma Professional Writers’ Hall of Fame.
Aging was a worrisome thing, John decided. Not just on account of the speed with which your mind seemed to lose its edge, or the way you ached for what might have been when you looked from your wife to your lab assistant. Worse by far was your vulnerability to self-doubt. Blacks and whites shaded into gray. You came to see both—all—sides too easily, on every question, till uncertainty rode like an albatross on your shoulder and you lost your capacity for decisive action.
Like here, like now. Your head told you to force the issue, before Redding left. But still you hung back, hesitating, cringing at the thought you might be wrong and so hurt someone’s feelings.
So Redding rose and took his leave, striding sure-footed down the walk to the Ferrari. Briefly, bleakly, John envied him his ruthlessness, his resolution. But that was the kind of thing you couldn’t do anything about, any more than aging or the limitations of your own talent. You simply had to make do with what God gave you.
It was on that thought that John turned back to the three women.
They were an oddly assorted group: Orpha, his wife, loose-skinned and lumpy as an aging hippopotamus. His lab assistant, Sybil Pellegrini, brisk efficiency in a cool blonde package. Astrid Undahl, Orpha’s pleasant-faced, gray-haired social worker friend, aglow with professionally nonjudgmental cordiality.
Yet now that he was alone with them at last, he found himself at a loss as to how to take hold of the problem.
Miss Undahl stepped into the breach: “You’re upset, Mr. Greer . . .”
John grunted. “You’re so right.”
“Perhaps if you could verbalize it . . .”
Her manner irked John even more than usual. “It’s very simple, Miss Undahl. I object strenuously to being played for a patsy.”
Miss Undahl’s eyes stayed round and innocent as blue marbles. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Don’t put me on, Miss Undahl. A patsy is a dull-witted clod maneuvered into the role of scapegoat.”
“Mr. Greer—”
“Don’t put me on, I said!” John leaned forward angrily now, in spite of all his resolutions. “I’m the link that binds the three of you together. You’re significant others where my emotional investments are concerned, if you want to put it in that gobbledygook you social workers love so well. So when you try to hold out on Redding, I’m stuck behind the eight ball too.”
“But there’s really no reason why you should feel disturbed, Mr. Greer.” No slightest crack showed in Miss Undahl’s poised politeness. “After all, Orpha and Sybil and I were picked as part of Dr. Redding’s random sample—guinea pigs to help him check his work in computer-based medical diagnosis. You didn’t have anything to do with it.”
For a long, long moment, John sat silent.
“You’re wrong,” he said at last.
“What—?”
“The three of you are anything but a random sample. Redding’s tests were my idea.”
The looks that pulsed from woman to woman crackled with voltage. “Perhaps you’d better explain yourself, Mr. Greer,” Miss Undahl said abruptly.
From the start, this had been the moment John had dreaded. But now he had no choice but to speak bluntly. Turning to his wife, he said, “Orpha, it starts with you. A month or so ago, after years of imitating an iceberg, you suddenly started wanting to play bed-bunny.”
Orpha’s face went scarlet to the wattles. Her hands moved in small, nervous, flapping gestures.
John switched his gaze to Miss Pellegrini. “Sybil, in addition to being a paragon among lab assistants, you’re the kind of woman men drool over. But as you made plain when I hired you, you don’t play games—especially not with fifty-year-old geneticists. So I confess to being taken aback—that’s a gross understatement—when you tried to corner me in the supply room a couple of days after my episode with Orpha.”
It was Sybil’s turn to go red. Her lovely lips moved, but no words came.
Hastily, John looked away. He had a feeling he was even more embarrassed than she was. To cover it, he focused on Miss Undahl. “As for you, Miss Undahl—I didn’t even know your name was Astrid, till the night you asked me to pick up that book at your apartment.”
Miss Undahl joined Orpha and Sybil in their confusion. John felt a bit less uncomfortable.
“I’m big on pattern,” he observed. “When I run into a deviation, it grabs me. So I set it up to have Dr. Redding check you out at the Center, with the most comprehensive diagnostic exam he could program.” For a moment, there was silence. Then, in a choked voice, Miss Undahl asked, “What did Dr. Redding find?”
John shrugged. “More deviations. Diagnostic discrepancies.”
“What kind of . . . discrepancies?”
John ticked off fingers. “Item one, a woman’s heart normally functions at the rate of about eighty beats a minute. With you three, it averages out at thirty-five.
“Item two, the sedimentation rate in humans runs about ten millimeters in sixty seconds—higher in abnormal cases. You all hold steady at five.
“Item three, science has typed about fifteen hemoglobins. You three show one not on the list.
“Item four, all of you register exactly the same alpha rhythms on your EEGs. Ordinarily, that’s found only in identical twins being tested under controlled conditions.
“Item five—”
“There’s no need to go on.” Miss Undahl was frowning. “What . . . what does Dr. Redding make of all this?”
“He doesn’t—yet.”
“You mean . . .?”
“Redding’s a computernik, not a physiologist. He still can’t fit the pieces into a picture. But he knows something’s haywire, and he’s got an ego that digs out answers. That’s why he came here today—at which point, you three sat here like so many clams, giving him the kind of yes-and-no bits a lawyer pries out of unfriendly witnesses.”
Again the women exchanged crackling glances. “What else could we do?” Miss Undahl demanded.
“It’s not as if there was anything we could tell him,” Sybil Pellegrini echoed.
John snorted. “You could at least have headed him off in the wrong direction.”
More glances. Acutely nervous glances, now.
“Are we to assume,” inquired Miss Undahl, “that you too think we’re concealing something?”
“Think, hell,” John said tightly. “You’re talking to a man who knows.”
“Who . . . knows . . .?”
“Of course.” John gestured his irritation. “After all, I’ve spent my working years as a geneticist of sorts—a second-rate, corn-hybridizing, State Department of Agriculture-type geneticist, maybe, but still a geneticist.”
“Go on.”
“Give Redding one thing: he’s nothing if not thorough in his testing. So, I can tell you definitely, you’ve got all forty-six chromosomes, just like any human. Your dominant genes are normal.
“But it’s a different story with your recessive genes. They’re of an unknown type. And your red blood cells have nuclei.”
“And you interpret this to mean . . .?”
“My guess is you’re not really Orpha and Sybil and Astrid at all. They’ve been replaced by doppelgangers—copies, imitations.”
A stiffness came to Miss Undahl’s face. “You’re being ridiculous, you know.”
John shook his head. “I don’t think so. On the basis of the evidence already at hand, I’d class you as of a different genus—assuming you fall within the limits of our classification system at all. The best term I can find for y
ou is hybrids.”
“Just as Astrid said, you’re being ridiculous,” Miss Pellegrini clipped tartly.
“Yes, ridiculous!” echoed Orpha.
“Maybe,” John said, nodding. And then, as an automobile engine roared outside, he added, “At least, I certainly hope so, for your sakes.”
“For our sakes?” Twin vertical lines appeared in Miss Undahl’s brow. “Why do you say that?”
“Why?” John’s lips pursed with the sourness of the moment. “Why, I hope so because that sound you just heard was unmistakably the engine of Dr. Edward Redding’s Ferrari. My bet is that he’s been hiding somewhere within earshot, listening to every word that’s been said here.”
They found Dr. Redding at the Center, and that in itself surprised John a little. However, the reason for his presence there soon became apparent.
“Every man wants something,” Redding observed, once the group was seated. “In my own case, the issue is vindication. For years the medical profession has lectured me like a schoolboy on the variables and subtleties of sophisticated judgment involved in differential diagnosis. A succession of pompous idiots have told me how impossible it is to computerize the process. Actually, that’s hot air. Diagnosis reduces itself to a matter of elimination, in the last analysis. It’s a problem in programming; nothing more. Even this present project maintains data continuity in spite of the tangle of units I’ve tied together. No individual diagnostician could possibly correlate such a mass of information. Yet the results remain devastatingly accurate.” He turned to Miss Undahl. “Right, my dear lady?”
A pallor came to her face. “Then . . . you did hear . . .”
“Of course.” Redding’s smile was anything but warm. “Are you ready to answer my questions now?”
Miss Undahl didn’t even make a show of smiling back. “What is it you want to know?”
“Do I assume correctly that the other species involved in this hybridization John talks about is alien—not of Earth? That the whole operation could be classed as invasion by infiltration?”
Miss Undahl lost further color. “True. One of our parent species is . . . not known on Earth.” She gestured down Redding’s attempt to interrupt. “But invasion’ is totally a misnomer. Intellectually, scientifically, ethically—oh, in any number of ways, this other species is infinitely superior to the human race. The whole object of this current contact is to help mankind; to improve the breed, not to destroy it.”