“So—now we are three,” was Ali’s comment. “Where do we set down—Luna City?”
“If they let us,” Dane hinted at the worst.
“But they’ve got to let us!” Weeks exclaimed. “We can’t just wander around out here—”
“It’s been done,” Ali reminded them brutally and that silenced Weeks.
“Did the Old Man set Luna?” After a long pause Ali inquired.
“I didn’t check,” Dane confessed. “He was giving out and I had to get him to his bunk.”
“It might be well to know.” The Engineer-apprentice got up, his movements lacking much of the elastic spring which was normally his. When he climbed to control both the others followed him.
Ali’s slender fingers played across a set of keys and in the small screen mounting on the computer a set of figures appeared. Dane took up the master course book, read the connotation and blinked.
“Not Luna?” Ali asked.
“No. But I don’t understand. This must be for somewhere in the asteroid belt.”
Ali’s lips stretched into a pale caricature of a smile. “Good for the Old Man, he still had his wits about him, even after the bug bit him!”
“But why are we going to the asteroids?” Weeks asked reasonably enough. “There’re Medics at Luna City—they can help us—”
“They can handle known diseases,” Ali pointed out. “But what of the Code?”
Weeks dropped into the Com-tech’s place as if some of the stiffening had vanished from his thin but sturdy legs. “They wouldn’t do that—” he protested, but his eyes said that he knew that they might—they well might.
“Oh, no? Face the facts, man,” Ali sounded almost savage. “We come from a frontier planet, we’re a plague ship—”
He did not have to underline that. They all knew too well the danger in which they now stood.
“Nobody’s died yet,” Weeks tried to find an opening in the net being drawn about them.
“And nobody’s recovered,” Ali crushed that thread of hope. “We don’t know what it is, how it is contracted—anything about it. Let us make a report saying that and you know what will happen—don’t you?”
They weren’t sure of the details, but they could guess.
“So I say,” Ali continued, “the Old Man was right when he set us on an evasion course. If we can stay out until we really know what is the matter we’ll have some chance of talking over the high brass at Luna when we do planet—”
In the end they decided not to interfere with the course the Captain had set. It would take them into the fringes of solar civilization, but give them a fighting chance at solving their problem before they had to report to the authorities. In the meantime they tended their charges, let Rip sleep, and watched each other with desperate but hidden intentness, ready for another to be stricken. However, they remained, although almost stupid with fatigue at times, reasonably healthy. Time was proving that their guess had been correct—they had been somehow inoculated against the germ or virus which had struck the ship.
Rip slept for twenty-four hours, ship time, and then came into the mess cabin ravenously hungry, to catch up on both food and news. And he refused to join with the prevailing pessimistic view of the future. Instead he was sure that their own immunity having been proven, they had a talking point to use with the medical officials at Luna and he was eager to alter course directly for the quarantine station. Only the combined arguments of the other three made him, unwillingly, agree to a short delay.
And how grateful they should be for Captain Jellico’s foresight they learned within the next day. Ali was at the com-unit, trying to pick up Solarian news reports. When the red alert flashed on throughout the ship it brought the others hurrying to the control cabin. The code squeaks were magnified as Ali switched on the receiver full strength, to be translated as he pressed a second button.
“Repeat, repeat, repeat. Free Trader,SolarQueen , Terra Registry 65-724910-Jk, suspected plague ship—took off from infected planet. Warn off—warn off—report such ship to Luna Station.SolarQueen from infected planet—to be warned off and reported.” The same message was repeated three times before going off ether.
The four in the control cabin looked at each other blankly.
“But,” Dane broke the silence, “how did they know? We haven’t reported in—”
“The Eysies!” Ali had the answer ready. “That I-S ship must be having the same sort of trouble and reported to her Company. They would include us in their report and believe that we were infected too—or it would be easy to convince the authorities that we were.”
“I wonder,” Rip’s eyes were narrowed slits as he leaned back against the wall. “Look at the facts. The Survey ship which charted Sargol—they were dirt-side there about three—four months. Yet they gave it a clean bill of health and put it up for trading rights auction. Then Cam bought those rights—he made at least two trips, in and out before he was blasted on Limbo. No infection bothered him or Survey—”
“But you’ve got to admit it hit us,” Weeks protested.
“Yes, and the Eysie ship was able to foresee it—report us before we snapped out of Hyper. Sounds almost as if they expected us to carry plague, doesn’t it?” Shannon wanted to know.
“Planted?” Ali frowned at the banks of controls. “But how—no Eysie came on board—no Salarik either, except for the cub who showed us what they thought of catnip.”
Rip shrugged. “How would I know how they did—” he was beginning when Dane cut in:
“If they didn’t know about our immunity theQueen might stay in Hyper and never come out—there wouldn’t be anyone to set the snap-out.”
“Right enough. But on the chance that somebody did keep on his feet and bring her home, they were ready with a cover. If no one raises a howl Sargol will be written off the charts as infected. I-S sits on her tail fins a year or so and then she promotes an investigation before the Board. The Survey records are trotted out—no infection recorded. So they send in a Patrol Probe. Everything is all right—so it wasn’t the planet after all—it was that dirty old Free Trader. And she’s out of the way. I-S gets the Koros trade all square and legal and we’re no longer around to worry about! Neat as a Salariki net cast—and right around our collective throats, my friends!”
“So what do we do now?” Weeks wanted to know.
“We keep on the Old Man’s course, get lost in the asteroids until we can do some heavy thinking and see a way out. But if I-S gave us this prize package, some trace of its origin is still aboard. And if we can find that—why, then we have something to start from.”
“Mura went down first—and then Karl. Nothing in common,” the old problem faced Dane for the hundredth time.
“No. But,” Ali arose from his place at the com-unit. “I’d suggest a real search of first Frank’s and then Karl’s quarters. A regular turn out down to the bare walls of their cabins. Are you with me?”
“Fly boy, we’re ahead of you!” Rip contributed, already at the door panel. “Down to the bare walls it is.”
Chapter X – E-STAT LANDING
SINCE MURA WAS in the isolation of ship’s sick bay the stripping of his cabin was a relatively simple job. But, though Rip and Dane went over it literally by inches, they found nothing unusual—in fact nothing from Sargol except a small twig of the red wood which lay on the steward’s worktable where he had been fashioning something to incorporate in one of his miniature fairy landscapes, to be imprisoned for all time in a plasta-bubble. Dane turned this around in his fingers. Because it was the only link with the perfumed planet he couldn’t help but feel that it had some importance.
But Kosti had not shown any interest in the wood. And he, himself, and Weeks had handled it freelybefore they had tasted Groft’s friendship cup and had no ill effects—so it couldn’t be the wood. Dane put the twig back on the work table and snapped the protecting cover over the delicate tools—never realizing until days later how very close he had been in that moment to the solution of their problem.
After two hours of shifting every one of the steward’s belongings, of crawling on hands and knees about the deck and climbing to inspect perfectly bare walls, they had found exactly nothing. Rip sat down on the end of the denuded bunk.
“There’s the hydro—Frank spent a lot of time in there—and the storeroom,” he told the places off on his fingers. “The galley and the mess cabin.”
Those had been the extent of Mura’s world. They could search the storeroom, the galley and the mess cabin—but to interfere with the hydro would endanger their air supply. It was for that very reason that they now looked at each other in startled surmise.