The Minister for Health stared at Calhoun. His face went literally gray. He tried to speak, and could not.
Calhoun added again, as unemotionally as before:
“I left Dr. Lett unconscious in his laboratory, knocked out by a low-power blaster bolt. He knows he’s a para. The President is a para, but with a supply of ‘vaccine’ he can deny it to himself. By the look on your face you’ve just found out you can’t deny it to yourself any longer. You’re a para, too.”
The Minister for Health made an inarticulate sound. He literally wrung his hands.
“So,” said Calhoun, “I want to get back to my ship and see what I can do with the ‘vaccine’ I took from Dr. Lett. Do you help me, or don’t you?”
The Minister for Health seemed to have shriveled inside his garments. He wrung his hands again. Then a ground car braked to a stop five yards away. Two uniformed men jumped out. The first of them jerked at his blaster in its holster on his hip.
“That’s the tormal!” he snapped. “This’s the man, all right!”
Calhoun pulled the trigger of his blaster three times. It whined instead of rasping, because of its low-power setting. The Minister for Health collapsed. Before he touched ground the nearer of the two uniformed men seemed to stumble with his blaster halfway drawn. The third man toppled.
“Murgatroyd!” said Calhoun sharply.
“Chee!” shrilled Murgatroyd. He leaped into the ground car beside Calhoun.
* * * *
The motor squealed because of the violence with which Calhoun applied the power. It went shrilly away with three limp figures left behind upon the ground. But there wouldn’t be instant investigation. The atmosphere in Government Center was not exactly normal. People looked apprehensively at them. But Calhoun was out of sight before the first of them stirred.
“It’s the devil,” said Calhoun as he swung to the right at a roadway curve, “to have scruples! If I’d killed Lett in cold blood, I’d have been the only hope these people could have! Maybe they’d have let me help them!”
He made another turn. There were buildings here and there, and he was hardly out of sight of where he’d dropped three men. But it was astonishing that action had been taken so quickly after Lett regained consciousness. Calhoun had certainly left him not more than a quarter of an hour before. The low-power blaster must have kept him stunned for minutes. But immediately he’d recovered he’d issued orders for the capture or the killing of a man with a small animal with him, a tormal. And the order would have been carried out if Calhoun hadn’t happen to have his own blaster actually in his hand.
But the appalling thing was the over-all situation as now revealed. The people of Government Center were turning para and Dr. Lett had all the authority of the government behind him. He was the government for the duration of the emergency. But he’d stay the government because all the men in high office were paras who could conceal their condition only so long as Dr. Lett permitted it. Calhoun could picture the social organization to be expected. There’d be the tyrant; the absolute monarch at its head. Absolutely submissive citizens would receive their dosage of vaccine to keep them “normals” so long as it pleased their masters. Anyone who defied him or even tried to flee would become something both mad and repulsive, because subject to monstrous and irresistible appetite. And the tyrant could prevent even their satisfaction! So the citizens of Tallien Three were faced with an ultimate choice of slavery, or madness, for themselves and their families.
Calhoun swerved behind a government building and out of the parking area beyond. Obviously, he couldn’t leave Government Center by the way he’d entered it. If Lett hadn’t ordered him stopped, he’d be ordering it now. And Murgatroyd was an absolute identification.
Again he turned a corner, thrusting Murgatroyd down out of sight. He turned again, and again.… Then he began concentratedly to remember where the sunset-line had been upon the planet when he was waiting to be landed by the grid. He could guess at an hour and a half, perhaps two, since he touched ground. On the combined data, he made a guess at the local time. It would be mid-afternoon. So shadows would lie to the northeast of the objects casting them. Then—
He did not remain on any straight roadway for more than seconds. But now when he had a choice of turnings, he had a reason for each choice. He twisted and dodged about—once he almost ran into children playing a ritual game—but the sum total of his movements was steadily southward. Paras were turned out of the south gate. That gate, alone, would be the one where someone could go out with a chance of being unchallenged.
* * * *
He found the gate. The usual tall buildings bordered it to left and right. The actual exit was bare concrete walls slanting together to an exit to the outer world; no more than a house-door wide. Well back from the gate, there were four high-side trucks with armed police in the truck-bodies. They were there to make sure that paras turned out, or who went out of their own accord when they knew their state, would not come back.
He stopped the ground car and tucked Murgatroyd under his coat. He walked grimly toward the narrow exit. It was the most desperate of gambles, but it was the only one he could make. He could be killed, of course, if anybody suspected him of attempting exit at any gate.
He got out, unchallenged. The concrete walls rose higher and higher as he walked away from the trucks and the police who would surely have blasted him had they guessed. The way he could walk became narrowed. It became a roofed-over passageway, with a turn in it so it could not be looked through end to end. Then—he reached open air once more.
Nothing could be less dramatic than his actual escape. He simply walked out. Nothing could be less remarkable than his arrival in the city outside of Government Center. He found himself in a city street, rather narrow, with buildings as usual all about him, whose windows were either bricked shut, or smashed. There were benches against the base of one of those buildings, and four or five men, quite unarmed, lounged upon them. When Calhoun appeared one of them looked up and then arose. A second man turned to busy himself with something behind him. They were not grim. They showed no sign of being mad. But Calhoun had already realized that the appetite which was madness came only occasionally, only at intervals which could probably be known in advance. Between one monstrous hunger-spell and another, a para might look and act and actually be as sane as anybody else. Certainly Dr. Lett and the President and the Cabinet members who were paras acted convincingly as if they were not.
One of the men on the benches beckoned.
“This way,” he said casually.
Murgatroyd poked his head out of Calhoun’s jacket. He regarded these roughly dressed men with suspicion.
“What’s that?” asked one of the five.
“A pet,” said Calhoun briefly.
The statement went unchallenged. A man got up, lifting a small tank with a hose. There was a hissing sound. The spray made a fine, foglike mist. Calhoun smelled a conventional organic solvent, well-known enough.
“This’s antiseptic,” said the man with the spray. “In case you got some disease inside there.”
The statement was plainly standard, and once it had been exquisite irony. But it had been repeated until it had no meaning any more, except to Calhoun. His clothing glittered momentarily where the spray stood on its fibres. Then it dried. There was the faintest possible residue, like a coating of impalpable dust. Calhoun guessed its significance and the knowledge was intolerable. But he said between clenched fists.
“Where do I go now?”
“Anywheres,” said the first man. “Nobody’ll bother you. Some normals try to keep you from getting near’em, but you can do as you please.” He added disinterestedly. “To them, too. No police out here!”
He went back to the bench and sat down. Calhoun moved on.
* * * *
His inward sensations were unbearable, but he had to continue. It was not likely that instructions would have reached the para organization yet. There was one. There must be one
. But eventually he would be hunted for even on the unlikely supposition that he’d gotten out of Government Center. Not yet, but presently.
He went down the street. He came to a corner and turned it. There were again a few moving figures in sight. There might be one pedestrian in a city block. This was how they’d looked in the other part of the city, seen from a ground car. On foot, they looked the same. Windows, too, were broken. Doors smashed in. Trash on the streets.…
None of the humans in view paid any attention to him at all, but he kept Murgatroyd out of sight regardless. Walking men who came toward him never quite arrived. They turned off on other streets or into doorways. Those who moved in the same direction never happened to be overtaken. They also turned corners or slipped into doors. They would be, Calhoun realized dispassionately, people who still considered themselves normals, out upon desperate errands for food and trying hopelessly not to take contagion back to those they got food for. And Calhoun was shaken with a horrible rage that such things could happen. He, himself, had been sprayed with something.… And Dr. Lett had held out a plastic container for him to smell.… He’d held his breath then, but he could not keep from breathing now. He had a certain period of time, and that period only, before—
He forced his thoughts back to the Med Ship when it was twenty miles high, and ten, and five. He’d watched the ground through the electron telescope and he had a mental picture of the city from the sky. It was as clear to him as a map. He could orient himself. He could tell where he was.
A ground car came to a stop some distance ahead. A man got out, his arms full of bundles which would be food. Calhoun broke into a run. The man tried to get inside the doorway before Calhoun could arrive. But he would not leave any of the food.
Calhoun showed his blaster.
“I’m a para,” he said quietly, “and I want this car. Give me the keys and you can keep the food.”
The man groaned. Then he dropped the keys on the ground. He fled into the house.
“Thanks,” said Calhoun politely to the emptiness.
He took his place in the car. He thrust Murgatroyd again out of sight.
“It’s not,” he told the tormal with a sort of despairing humor, “that I’m ashamed of you, Murgatroyd, but I’m afraid I may become ashamed of myself. Keep low!”
He started the car and drove away.
He passed through a business district, with many smashed windows. He passed through canyons formed by office buildings. He crossed a manufacturing area, in which there were many ungainly factories but no sign of any work going on. In any epidemic many men stay home from work to avoid contagion. On Tallien Three nobody would be willing to risk employment, for fear of losing much more than his life.
There there was a wide straight highway leading away from the city but not toward the spaceport. Calhoun drove his stolen car along it. He saw the strange steel embroidery of the landing grid rising to the height of a minor mountain against the sky. He drove furiously. Beyond it. He had seen the highway system from twenty miles height, and ten, and five. From somewhere near here stolen weather rockets had gone billowing skyward with explosive war heads to shatter Esclipus Twenty.
They’d failed. Now Calhoun went past the place from which they had been launched, and did not notice. Once he could look across flat fields and see the spaceport highway. It was empty. Then there was sunset. He saw the topmost silvery beams and girders of the landing grid still glowing in sunshine which no longer reached down to the planet’s solid ground.
He drove. And drove. Government Center might put a road block to the spaceport, just in case. But they’d really believe him still hiding somewhere in Government Center with no hope of—actually—accomplishing anything but his own destruction.
* * * *
After sunset he was miles beyond the spaceport. When twilight was done, he’d crossed to another surface road and was headed back toward the city. But this time he would pass close to the spaceport. And two hours after sundown he turned the car’s running-lights off and drove a dark and nearly noiseless vehicle through deep-fallen night. Even so, he left the ground car a mile from the tall and looming lacework of steel. He listened with straining ears for a long time.
Presently he and Murgatroyd approached the spaceport, on foot, from a rather improbable direction. The gigantic, unsubstantiated tower rose incredibly far toward the sky. As he drew near it he crouched lower and lower so he was almost crawling to keep from being silhouetted against the stars. He saw lights in the windows of the grid’s control building. As he looked, a lighted window darkened from someone moving past it inside. There was an enormous stillness, broken only by faint, faint noises of the wind in the metal skeleton.
He saw no ground cars to indicate men brought here and waiting for him. He went very cautiously forward. Once he stopped and distastefully restored his blaster to lethal-charge intensity. If he had to use it, he couldn’t hope to shoot accurately enough to stun an antagonist. He’d have to fight for his life—or rather, for the chance to live as a normal man, and to restore that possibility to the people in the ghastly-quiet city at the horizon and the other lesser cities elsewhere on this world.
He took infinite precautions. He saw the Med Ship standing valiantly upright on its landing fins. It was a relief to see it. The grid operator could have been ordered to lift it out to space—thrown away to nowhere, or put in orbit until it was wanted again, or.…
That was still a possibility. Calhoun’s expression turned wry. He’d have to do something about the grid. He must be able to take off on the ship’s emergency rockets without the risk of being caught by the tremendously powerful force fields by which ships were launched and landed.
He crept close to the control building. No voices, but there was movement inside. Presently he peered in a window.
The grid operator who’d been the first man to greet him on his landing, now moved about the interior of the building. He pushed a tank on wheels. With a hose attached to it, he sprayed. Mist poured out and splashed away from the side walls. It hung in the air and settled on the desks, the chairs, and on the control board with its dials and switches. Calhoun had seen the mist before. It had been used to spray instead of burning the bodies of the two men who’d tried to murder him, and their wrecked ground car, and everywhere that the car was known to have run. It was a decontaminant spray; credited with the ability to destroy the contagion that made paras out of men.
Calhoun saw the grid operator’s face. It was resolute beyond expression, but it was very, very bitter.
Calhoun went confidently to the door and knocked on it. A savage voice inside said:
“Go away! I just found out I’m a para!”
Calhoun opened the door and walked inside. Murgatroyd followed. He sneezed as the mist reached his nostrils.
“Ive been treated,” said Calhoun, “so I’ll be a para right along with you, after whatever the development period is. Question: Can you fix the controls so nobody else can use the grid?”
The grid operator stared at him numbly. He was deathly pale. He did not seem able to grasp what Calhoun had said.
“I’ve got to do some work on the para condition,” Calhoun told him. “I need to be undisturbed in the ship, and I need a patient further along toward being a para than I am. It’ll save time. If you’ll help, we may be able to beat the thing. If not, I’ve still got to disable the grid.”
The grid operator said in a savage, unhuman voice:
“I’m a para. I’m trying to spray everything I’ve touched. Then I’m going to go off somewhere and kill myself—”
Calhoun drew his blaster. He adjusted it again to non-lethal intensity.
“Good man!” he said approvingly. “I’ll have a similar job to do if I’m not a better medical man than Lett! Will you help me?”
Murgatroyd sneezed again. He said plaintively:
“Chee!”
The grid’s operator looked down at him, obviously in a state of shock. No ordinary sight or
sound could have gotten through to his consciousness. But Murgatroyd was a small, furry animal with long whiskers and a hirsute tail and a habit of imitating the actions of humans. He sneezed yet again and looked up. There was a handkerchief in Calhoun’s pocket. Murgatroyd dragged it out and held it to his face. He sneezed once more and said, “Chee!” and returned the handkerchief to its place. He regarded the grid operator disapprovingly. The operator was shocked out of his despair. He said shakenly:
“What the devil—” Then he stared at Calhoun. “Help you? How can I help anybody? I’m a para!”
“Which,” said Calhoun, “is just what I need. I’m Med Service, man! I’ve got a job to do with what they call an epidemic! I need a para who’s willing to be cured! That’s you! Let’s get this grid fixed so it can’t work and—”
There was a succession of loud clicks from a speaker unit on the wall. It was an emergency-wave, unlocking the speaker from its Off position. Then a voice:
“All citizens attention! The Planetary President is about to give you good news about the end of the para epidemic!”
A pause. Then a grave and trembling voice came out of the speakers:
“My fellow-citizens, I have the happiness to report that a vaccine completely protecting normals against the para condition, and curing those already paras, has been developed. Dr. Lett, of the planetary health service, has produced the vaccine which is already in small-scale production and will shortly be available in large quantities, enough for everyone! The epidemic which has threatened every person on Tallien Three is about to end! And to hasten the time when every person on the planet will have the vaccine in the required dosage and at the required intervals, Dr. Lett has been given complete emergency authority. He is empowered to call upon every citizen for any labor, any sum, any sacrifice that will restore our afflicted fellow-citizens to normality, and to protect the rest against falling a victim to this intolerable disease. I repeat: a vaccine has been found which absolutely prevents anyone from becoming a para, and which cures those who are paras now. And Dr. Lett has absolute authority to issue any orders he feels necessary to hasten the end of the epidemic and to prevent its return. But the end is sure!”
The Second Science Fiction Megapack Page 22