A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  The OIC standing over us wore a sanitary oxygen mask through which he screamed, “Oh, hell! That’s all these guys need right now, a good old-fashioned case of pneumonia.” He turned to me, and I could see he was wearing a star on each shoulder. “Orderly,” he commanded, pointing at Solly, get that goddamned orderly out of here and put him on report!”

  I grabbed Solly by the arm and hustled him back upstairs where Solly shook my hand from his arm. He said, “Thanks for the tow job, but what are you trying to do?”

  “You heard the Officer In Charge,” I said. “I’ve got to put you on report.”

  “The oik was exceeding his authority. We’re not in the military. If you report me to the super I’ll have to punch out on the time clock before the extra shift is over and I’ll get docked.”

  “This is all true,” I said, “but you did sneeze in the ward, and I think this is pretty rotten . . . to bring a cold into a roomful of guys already dying of God knows what.”

  “I haven’t got a cold!”

  “You sneezed. Why?”

  “Well, not on purpose, for damned sure. Maybe some pollen these guys brought back with them.”

  The patients had already been through scrubdown, so this was highly unlikely. I said as much.

  Solly jutted his jaw into my face. “Look, Nick, we’ve been friends. But if you report me you are going to lose my friendship and several front teeth, and I don’t think you want that to happen.”

  I admitted, “This is also true, and come to think of it, I’d be just plain squealing, wouldn’t I? Since, as you say, we’re not in the military.” He relaxed. “Yeah, like I said. And since we’re banished for the moment we might as well get a bite to eat. I’ll buy you a burger.” Before we were through eating Paul and Harry came into the cafeteria. As they sat down with us Solly asked, “You guys allergic to work, too?”

  Harry said, “No. Just ice. We sneezed in the ward.”

  Paul added, “Real excitable oik down there. He told us to put each other on report, but we thought we’d have a bowl of chili first.” His grin spelled out their lack of intent to engage in mutual recriminations to the superintendent.

  I was still worry-warting. “Suppose some of those men do come down with a cold on top of—” Paul said, “Who’s got a cold? I haven’t heard so much as a sniffle in our hut for days.”

  Solly turned to me. “Nick, will you forget it? That oik has more on his mind than clobbering a few slob orderlies for sneezing, when we were risking our necks in that quarantine hell-hole to begin with. Hell never think of us again unless we are stupid enough to put ourselves on report.”

  Solly was wrong.

  In the weeks remaining before I was to return to college, my conviction grew that Astronaut Toivo Leskinenn, recently in space, had contracted and passed on to me something very contagious that I could only name a condition of perfect health. Even more: A compulsion to preserve my physical perfection. Even as Solly had given up drinking, I no longer had any use for tobacco. Even as Paul had trimmed off his burdensome overweight, Skinny Harry and I filled out to an optimum padding of firm flesh.

  For all four of us the syndrome included a periodic day of enormous appetite followed by a morning-after unexplainable explosion of a sneeze or sneezes.

  But how do you catch a condition of health, when the only definition to date was the absence of disease? Where Solly, Paul and Harry had been wrong was in assuming that the OIC at their little sneezing party in Ward C was just some hysterical nut, and that nothing they had done was of enough consequence that the oik would bother to follow through with his intended discipline.

  About two weeks after the incident we were all called to the “pentagon”, as we called the penthouse atop the decontam building, where Solly was summarily fired, and the rest of us were chewed out Sneezing was not the charge. It was for insubordination in not carrying out orders.

  Nurse Roark was the one to catch the dirty duty. She concluded her tirade with, “Solly, you should have known better.”

  Solly was shook. He said, “You mean they’re blaming us for the fact that all but three patients in Ward C finally died?”

  “No. The fever did that. It just turns out that the medical officer whose orders you all disobeyed that night happened to be the surgeon general himself.”

  “He had a mask on,” Solly explained, more to himself than to anyone else. “The dice have gone cold on me lately, too.”

  Nurse Roark was not a bad scout at all. She simply had a nasty job to do, and she tried to make up for it. Knowing that being fired from the Cape on such a charge would blacklist Solly from coast to coast, she tipped him off to an orderly job in India. It seemed things were getting out of hand over there again, and we were lend-leasing some more birth-control clinics to dispense information and be pills. Solly’s thanks was a stolid nod of acceptance and a giant sneeze right in Nurse Roark’s face.

  While he was packing his bag that night, Solly said, “I can’t imagine what an orderly does around a place like that, but at least it’s out-patient.” And we appreciated what he meant. No more bedpans.

  The last week of school vacation the three of us remaining spent in a special decontam isolation of our own while we underwent rigid tests to be sure we weren’t packing anything to the inner world of civilization that we’d caught from the astronauts.

  On the second day of our tests all hell began to come loose at the seams. It started after lunch when a security officer questioned us for three hours straight in an obvious try to discredit our identities. He worked remotely through a video screen. Then we had to press our thumbs to a camera for live inspection of our prints. Next our eyeballs were subjected to long scrutiny. No answers to our demands for explanations.

  After her duty shift Nurse Roark phoned us in a hushed voice. I said, “How are you?”

  She whispered, “I’m fine. Too fine, in fact. But what the devil are they grilling you guys about?”

  I replied, “You tell me. We sure don’t know.”

  She hesitated. Then, “Well, it’s something important. The surgeon-general is flying down from Washington again, and you guys are the subject matter. I’ll see what more I can find out. You sure you haven’t any clues?”

  I said, “None to speak of,” and I meant just that. By now I was positive that, like Toivo Leskinenn, I was the carrier of some contagious and powerful life-force, and so were Harry and Paul, and so, probably, was Nurse Roark.

  On the morning of our third day of isolation I awoke with the now-familiar ravenous appetite. Paul watched me pack away the giant breakfast I had ordered. He commented, “And to think I used to eat that way every meal!”

  At about ten the surgeon-general appeared on our screen, eyeing us with tenseness almost as great as I remembered the night of Solly’s fateful sneeze. Without the sanitary mask to conceal it, his gray, military mustache bunched visibly over puckered lips. He began firmly if informally, “Now, Nicholas, we want answers.”

  It turned out that what they really wanted was explanations for our answers. The polygraph had shown that we apparently thought we’d been answering truthfully. But why had I insisted that I had had surgery for the removal of my appendix . . . also the removal of a large cyst at the base of my spine?

  I said, “I’ll show you! I checked in with this scar and I’ve still . . .”

  But by now I had jerked out my shirttail and made half a liar out of myself.

  “Yes, when you checked into Decontam an appendectomy scar was recorded in the records of the man you claim to be,” said the s.g. “What have you done with it?”

  A surgery scar on your belly is not something you examine daily like you might your fingernails. I was unprepared for the question.

  In the silence the s.g. continued, “And you, Harry. You had a pattern of pigmented moles on your back. They are gone. Any ideas why?”

  Harry was staring at his still bare belly. He said, “I’ll take your word about my moles, and the answer is no. What
has been going on with us guys, Nick?”

  I turned to Paul. “You got any theory?”

  He shook his head. “All I know is that I’ve been feeling terrific since I took off all that weight. Not even a cold.”

  I turned back to the video where the s.g. was staring at us with cool patience. As ridiculous as I sounded to my own ears I started speaking the thoughts that had been gathering for weeks. “Sir,” I began respectfully, “I think I have been spreading an epidemic of—of health!”

  Oddly enough the s.g. did not find this statement more than he could field. “It’s a cinch you’re not spreading the chickenpox,” he observed. “But why do you say you have been spreading it? Why not the others?”

  “Because they didn’t start it. As a matter of fact I don’t think I started it, either. But we’ve all probably been spreading it.”

  “Then who did start it?” the s.g. demanded.

  “I suspect Captain Leskinenn,” I confessed.

  The s.g. turned off camera to ask an aide, “Who the devil is Leskinenn?” and was told after a brief pause that Captain Toivo Leskinenn was long since back in space. Then the s.g. remembered. “Oh, yes. He’s that albino Finn. Of course. Only he’s always been in perfect health. Saw him in a service weight-lifting match once.”

  The off camera voice reported, “But he came back from a planet in the 9th System with black hair and brown eyes.”

  After a moment of silence the s.g. addressed himself to our camera again. “And you, Nicholas, think you caught this, this . . . whatever the condition . . . from Captain Leskinenn. Did you have direct contact with him in Decontam?”

  “He sneezed in my face, sir.” Then I hurried on to put meat on the skeleton of my theory by recalling the night the s.g. had put Solly, Harry and Paul on report for sneezing in Ward C.

  Again he startled me. “Yes, yes, of course. Don’t you think I correlate such happenings? Three healthy men sneezed and three out of forty-two dying men lived.”

  “Are they really all right now, sir?” I blurted.

  But the s.g. was here to get information, not give it. The screen blanked out.

  Harry said, “He looked like he was about to call a red alert for the whole Cape.”

  Paul shook his head at me, “Geez, Nick, if we’ve got some kind of outer space bug that makes people get well and well people feel better, what’s all the flap about?”

  “The uncertainty,” I guessed. “We don’t know that it’s just a bug.”

  The s.g.’s voice came back to us. The video was on again. “We are going to find out and quick. We want the next one of you who feels a sneeze coming on to do it at this petri dish.” He held up a flat, shallow glass pie-pan with straight sides. In it were perhaps fifty little swatches of assorted culture media, pasty little patches of glutinous combinations, each ready to provide a happy home for some vagrant microbe or virus. A glass lid kept the field sterile.

  A pre-dawn blastoff awoke me, and the first thought I had was that I was about to sneeze. I snatched the lid off the petri dish and did so, infecting, I’m sure, every culture patch there.

  Still drunk with unfinished sleep, nevertheless I slipped the cover back on the dish and dutifully shoved the affair through the designated slot in the door and went back to sleep.

  Nothing much happened until Nurse Roark phoned me that evening. “Which one of you guys did the sneeze?”

  “Me,” I said. “Why?”

  She breathed into the phone three times before answering. Then, “Congratulations! You are the father of NASA’s first serious colonization plan.” She sounded bitter, and I told her so.

  She said, “Look, Nick, I’m not mad at you, or I wouldn’t have bothered calling you. I’m just mad at everything. I was born on this earth and I want nothing more than to stay on this earth and be buried on it. And things aren’t working out that way.”

  I said, “Roark, what are you trying to tell me?”

  “We’re all going bye-bye,” she whisper-shouted into the phone.

  “Where? Why?” I asked bewildered.

  “Where, I cannot tell you. Why, is because the virus-microbe you and your buddies—to say nothing of me and a few dozen other victims—are carrying has been identified as alien . . . and totally immune to every known attack. This damned bug is invincible!”

  “So what has it done wrong?” I whisper-shouted back at her. “What’s so terrible about a bug that goes around curing post-nasal drip and saving the lives of astronauts who catch other things out there?”

  “Nick?” Nurse Roark sobbed softly into the phone. “Nick, we haven’t contracted a disease. We have become the host for an alien civilization. A sub-microscopic civilization.”

  “You mean an intelligent parasite?”

  “No!” she said quickly. “Not the way the brass interpret it. We have been trapped into a symbiotic relationship with an invisibly small orgasm we can’t even identify except by its actions on the culture media and the symptoms of infected humans.”

  I said, “Nurse Roark, why don’t you get up here and explain? If we’ve all got the same bug, what do you have to lose?”

  She replied, “Come to think of it, there’s no sense sitting out here in a phone booth and whispering myself hoarse.” Ten minutes later to the dot she unlocked our cell and walked in with two fifths of booze and a jar of cigars, one of which she lit before opening her mouth for other reasons.

  By now Harry and Paul were up to date on the subject and just as much mystified. The next thing Nurse Roark did was to crush out her cigar, stare at the cigar jar, whisky and us in turn and say, “Aren’t you guys glad to see me?”

  “You, yes,” I said. “But the booze and tobacco, no. It seems to be a common symptom of our affliction to lose our taste for stuff like that.” Roark screwed up her mouth and spat delicately into the farthest corner. “I will confirm that. And it makes sense. It fits. This Alien lives in our liver and brain and kidneys and lungs. It knows what chemicals are inimical to our survival. And since we are the captive hosts at this tea party, we get to give up what our guests declare unwelcome to them.” I said, “If you don’t believe it, have a drink of your own booze.” Roark shook her head. “Since you bring it up, I gag to think of it.”

  I said, “You’re not really serious about this colony bit?”

  Roark flopped down on the bunk across from me.

  “The s.g. himself has put himself into quarantine, and if he develops the symptoms he’ll lead the expedition. What’s more, I saw him sneeze into a petri dish this very morning, so we’ll know by tomorrow.”

  I asked, “If the bug isn’t identifiable in culture, how do you know when you’ve sneezed one?”

  “By the way the culture behaves,” she said. “It draws in on itself until it looks like a small bean, then it explodes like a firecracker. Or would you prefer, sneeze?”

  Harry took his head out of his hands. “All right We have a sub-microscopic alien that treats a human individual like a planet, and he’s going to do everything he can to protect this planet against the exterior forces that tend to destroy it. Right?”

  “I guess so,” said Roark.

  Paul came to life. “And it wants to proliferate, so it builds up a little excess population in a given human host and then tickles his nose into a sneeze. To him our noses must appear as pretty great launching silos. And who needs rockets when you have bellows like our lungs at your command?”

  I said, “It sounds to me like we should be happy to have such an antibody around.”

  Roark grabbed one of the whisky bottles, uncorked it and shouted to the ceiling, “Should a body love an antibody, a-comin’ through the sky,” and upended the bottle for three long gulps, shuddering every moment. Then she added half under her breath, “Sorry, you guys, but I didn’t deserve what you did to me.” I stared at her. “Roark, do you want to tell us what brought that on?”

  She replied, “Nick, you are unmarried. Have you ever been pregnant?”

  I said
, “From your question I have to gather that you are both unmarried and pregnant, and that you are about to blame this on the little bitty invaders.”

  She took another tug on the whisky bottle and gagged. “I’m a grandmother three times over, and a widow for two years. Pregnancy in a woman my age is not something to be sneezed at. Would you accept my condition as a thing I wouldn’t have risked at any cost?”

  “Oh, now—” Paul started to object.

  “You forgot to take your pill?” Harry suggested.

  “Parthenogenesis!” I said aloud but not very. Roark heard and nodded.

  She said, “Now, do you see why everyone under quarantine on the base is going bye-bye to NASA’s first space colony? Just when we thought we had the population explosion licked!”

  I boggled at the thought of trying to trace every track of possible contamination. “They must have most of Florida roped off,” I said.

  Roark shrugged. “I hope so. We’ll need quite a few obstetricians out there right off the bat.”

  I asked, “How’s that?”

  “Because to my personal knowledge, every nurse in Decontam is with child.”

  “What about the pill?” Harry wanted to know. “Isn’t it working?”

  It was more of a sigh than a word, but I managed to make out Roark’s reply to be a wheezy, boozy, “No.”

  I thought it would take them at least a couple of years to prepare for such a colonization expedition to the planets of the Ninth System where Toivo Leskinenn was to guide us under the supreme medical supervision of the ex-fcg., but they did it in under eighty days. Kept incommunicado as we were.

  I had no part of the plans for the venture, nor voice to cry out the warning to the poor, overcrowded planet we were leaving behind I did manage to get one postcard mailed past the censors. Probably it got by because of its entirely innocent content. It read merely, “Dear Solly, I hope your sniffles are better. Give my best to Mother India.”

  END

  1969