by William Tenn
In the midst of this, with both the Soviet Union and the United States of America going ahead full-blast with rocket research and space travel techniques—to the end that when the time came for the bombs to be delivered, they would be delivered with the maximum efficiency and dispatch—in the midst of this, India made her proposal public. Let the two opposing giants cooperate in a venture which both were projecting, and in which each could use the other’s knowledge. One had a slight edge in already-achieved space travel, the other was known to have developed a slightly better atomic-powered rocket. Let them pool their resources for an expedition to Mars, under an Indian captain and under Indian auspices, in the name of humanity as a whole. And let the world find out once and for all which side refused to cooperate.
It was impossible to refuse, given the nature of the proposition and the peculiarly perfect timing. So here they were, O’Brien decided; they had made it to Mars and would probably make it hack. But, while they might have proven much, they had prevented nothing. The spastic political situation was still the same; the world would still be at war within the year. The men on this ship knew that as well, or better, than anybody.
As they passed the air lock, on the way to the control room, they saw Belov squeezing his way out of his space suit. He hurried over clumsily, hopping out of the lower section as he came. “What a discovery, eh?” he boomed. “The second day and in the middle of the desert. Wait till you see my pictures!”
“I’ll look forward to it,” O’Brien told him. “Meanwhile you better run down to the engine room and report to the captain. He’s afraid that you might have pressed a button that closed a circuit that started up a machine that will blow up all of Mars right out from under us.”
The Russian gave them a wide, slightly gap-toothed smile. “Ghose and his planetary explosions.” He patted the top of his head lightly and shook it uneasily from side to side.
“What’s the matter?” O’Brien asked.
“Alittle headache. It started a few seconds ago. I must have spent too much time in that space suit.”
“I just spent twice as much time in a space suit as you did,” Smathers said, poking around abstractedly at the gear that Belov had dropped, “and I don’t have a headache. Maybe we make better heads in America.”
“Tom!” O’Brien yelped. “For God’s sake!”
Belov’s lips had come together in whitening union. Then he shrugged. “Chess, O’Brien? After lunch?”
“Sure. And, if you’re interested, I’m willing to walk right into a fried liver. I still insist that black can hold and win.”
“It’s your funeral,” Belov chuckled and went on to the engine room gently massaging his head.
When they were alone in the control room and Smathers had begun to dismantle the computer bank, O’Brien shut the door and said angrily, “That was a damned dangerous, uncalled-for crack you made, Tom! And it was about as funny as a declaration of war!”
“I know. But Belov gets under my skin.”
“Belov? He’s the most decent Russky on board.”
The second assistant engineer unscrewed a side panel and squatted down beside it. “To you maybe. But he’s always taking a cut at me.”
“How?”
“Oh, all sorts of ways. Take this chess business. Whenever I ask him for a game, he says he won’t play me unless I accept odds of a queen. And then he laughs—you know, that slimy laugh of his.”
“Check that connection at the top,” the navigator warned. “Well, look, Tom, Belov is pretty good. He placed seventh in the last Moscow District tournament, playing against a hatful of masters and grandmasters. That’s good going in a country where they feel about chess the way we do about baseball and football combined.”
“Oh, I know he’s good. But I’m not that bad. Not queen odds. A queen!”
“Are you sure it isn’t something else? You seem to dislike him an awful lot, considering your motivations.”
Smathers paused for a moment to examine a tube. “And you,” he said without looking up. “You seem to like him an awful lot, considering your motivations.”
On the verge of anger, O’Brien suddenly remembered something and shut up. After all, it could be anyone. It could be Smathers.
Just before they’d left the United States to join the Russians in Benares they’d had a last, ultra-secret briefing session with Military Intelligence. There had been a review of the delicacy of the situation they were entering and its dangerous potentialities. On the one hand, it was necessary that the United States not be at all backward about the Indian suggestion, that before the eyes of the world it enter upon this joint scientific expedition with at least as much enthusiasm and cooperativeness as the Russians. On the other, it was equally important, possibly even more important, that the future enemy should not use this pooling of knowledge and skills to gain an advantage that might prove conclusive, like taking over the ship, say, on the return trip, and landing it in Baku instead of Benares.
Therefore, they were told, one among them had received training and a commission in the Military Intelligence Corps of the U. S. Army. His identity would remain a secret until such time as he decided that the Russians were about to pull something. Then he would announce himself with a special code sentence and from that time on all Americans on board were to act under his orders and not Ghose’s. Failure to do so would be adjudged prima face evidence of treason.
And the code sentence? Preston O’Brien had to grin as he remembered it. It was: “Fort Sumter has been fired upon.”
But what happened after one of them stood up and uttered that sentence would not be at all funny... .
He was certain that the Russians had such a man, too. As certain as that Ghose suspected both groups of relying on this kind of insurance, to the serious detriment of the captain’s already-difficult sleep.
What kind of a code sentence would the Russians use? “Fort Kronstadt has been fired upon?” No, more likely, “Workers of the world unite!” Yes, no doubt about it, it could get very jolly, if someone made a real wrong move.
The American MI officer could be Smathers. Especially after that last crack of his. O’Brien decided he’d be far better off not replying to it. These days, everyone had to be very careful, and the men in this ship were in a special category.
Although he knew what was eating Smathers. The same thing, in a general sense, that made Belov so eager to play chess with the navigator, a player of a caliber that, back on Earth, wouldn’t have been considered worthy to enter the same tournament with him.
O’Brien had the highest I.Q. on the ship. Nothing special, not one spectacularly above anyone else’s. It was just that in a shipful of brilliant young men chosen from the thick cream of their respective nation’s scientific elite, someone had to have an I.Q. higher than the rest. And that man happened to be Preston O‘Brien.
But O’Brien was an American. And everything relative to the preparation for this trip had been worked out in high-level conferences with a degree of diplomatic finagling and behind-the-scenes maneuvering usually associated with the drawing of boundary lines of the greatest strategical significance. So the lowest I.Q. on the ship also had to be an American.
And that was Tom Smathers, second assistant engineer. Again, nothing very bad, only a point or two below that of the next highest man. And really quite a thumpingly high I.Q. in itself.
But they had all lived together for a long time before the ship lifted from Benares. They had learned a lot about each other, both from personal contact and official records, for how did anyone know what piece of information about a shipmate would ward off disaster in the kind of incredible, unforeseeable crises they might be plunging into?
So Nicolai Belov, who had a talent for chess as natural and as massive as the one Sarah Bernhardt had for the theater, got a special and ever-renewing pleasure out of beating a man who had barely made the college team. And Tom Smathers nursed a constant feeling of inferiority that was ready to grow into adult, bell
igerent status on any pretext it could find.
It was ridiculous, O’Brien felt. But then, he couldn’t know: he had the long end of the stick. It was easy, far him.
Ridiculous? As ridiculous as six cobalt bombs. One, two, three, four, five, six—and boom!
Maybe, he thought, maybe the answer was that they were a ridiculous species. Well. They would soon be gone, gone with the dinosaurs.
And the Martians.
“I can’t wait to get a look at those pictures Belov took,” he told Smathers, trying to change the subject to a neutral, non-argumentative level. “Imagine human beings walking around on this blob of desert, building cities, making love, investigating scientific phenomena—a million years ago!”
The second assistant engineer, wrist deep in a tangle of wiring, merely grunted as a sign that he refused to let his imagination get into the bad company that he considered all matters connected with Belov.
O’Brien persisted. “Where did they go—the Martians, I mean? If they were that advanced, that long ago, they must have developed space travel and found some more desirable real estate to live on. Do you think they visited Earth, Tom?”
“Yeah. And they’re all buried in Red Square.”
You couldn’t do anything against that much bad temper, O’Brien decided; he might as well drop it. Smathers was still smarting over Belov’s eagerness to play the navigator on even terms.
But all the same, he kept looking forward to the photographs. And when they went down to lunch, in the big room at the center of the ship, that served as combinaton dormitory, mess hall, recreation room, and storage area, the first man he looked for was Belov.
Belov wasn’t there.
“He’s up in the hospital room with the doctor,” Layatinsky, his tablemate, said heavily, gravely. “He doesn’t feel well. Schneider’s examining him.”
“That headache get worse?”
Layatinsky nodded. “A lot worse—and fast. And then he got pains in his joints. Feverish too. Guranin says it sounds Iike meningitis.”
“Ouch!” Living as closely together as they did, something like meningitis would spread through their ranks like ink through a blotter. Although, Guranin was an engineer, not a doctor. What did be know about it, where did he come off making a diagnosis?
And then O’Brien noticed it. The mess-hall was unusually quiet, the men eating with their eyes on their plates as Kolevitch dished out the food—a little sullenly, true, but that was probably because after preparing the meal, he was annoyed at having to serve it, too, since the K.P. for lunch, Dr. Alvin Schneider, had abruptly been called to more pressing business.
But whereas the Americans were merely quiet, the Russians were funereal. Their faces were as set and strained as if they were waiting to be shot. They were all breathing heavily, the kind of slow, snorting breaths that go with great worry over extremely difficult problems.
Of course. If Belov were really sick, if Belov went out of action, that put them at a serious disadvantage relative to the Americans. It cut their strength almost fifteen per cent. In case of a real razzle between the two groups .. .
Therefore, Guranin’s amateur diagnosis should be read as a determined attempt at optimism. Yes, optimism! If it was meningitis and thus highly contagious, others were likely to pick it up, and those others could just as well be Americans as Russians. That way, the imbalance could be redressed.
O’Brien shivered. What kind of lunacy—
But then, he realized, if it had been an American, instead of a Russian, who had been taken real sick and was up there in the hospital at the moment, his mind would have been running along the same track as Guranin’s. Meningitis would have seemed like something to hope for desperately.
Captain Chose climbed down into the mess hall. His eyes seemed darker and smaller than ever.
“Listen, men. As soon as you’ve finished eating, report up to the control room which, until further notice, will serve as an annex to the hospital.”
“What for, Captain?” someone asked. “What do we report for?”
“Precautionary injections.”
There was a silence. Chose started out of the place. Then the chief engineer cleared his throat.
“How is Belov?”
The captain paused for a moment, without turning around. “We don’t know yet. And if you’re going to ask me what’s the matter with him, we don’t know that yet either.”
They waited in a long, silent, thoughtful line outside the control room, entering and leaving it one by one. O’Brien’s turn came.
He walked in, baring his right arm, as he had been ordered. At the far end, Ghose was staring out of the porthole as if he were waiting for a relief expedition to arrive. The navigation desk was covered with cotton swabs, beakers filled with alcohol, and small bottles of cloudy fluid.
“What’s this stuff, Doc?” O’Brien asked when the injection had been completed and he was allowed to roll down his sleeve.
“Duoplexin. The new antibiotic that the Australians developed last year. Its therapeutic value hasn’t been completely validated, but it’s the closest thing to a general cure-all that medicine’s come up with. I hate to use anything so questionable, but before we lifted from Benares, I was told to shoot you fellows full of it if any off-beat symptoms showed up.”
“Guranin says it sounds like meningitis,” the navigator suggested.
“It isn’t meningitis.”
O’Brien waited a moment, but the doctor was filling a new hypodermic and seemed indisposed to comment further. He addressed Ghose’s back. “How about those pictures that Belov took? They been developed yet? I’d like to see them.”
The captain turned away from the porthole and walked around the control room with his hands clasped behind his back. “All of Belov’s gear.” he said in a low voice, “is under quarantine in the hospital along with Belov. Those are the doctor’s orders.”
“Oh. Too bad.” O’Brien felt he should leave, but curiosity kept him talking. There was something these men were worried about that was bigger even than the fear niggling the Russians. “He told me over the radio that the Martians had been distinctly humanoid. Amazing, isn’t it? Talk about parallel evolution!”
Schneider set the hypodermic down carefully. “Parallel evolution,” he muttered. “Parallel evolution and parallel pathology. Although it doesn’t seem to act quite like any terrestrial bug. Parallel susceptibility, though. That you could say definitely.”
“You mean you think Belov has picked up a Martian disease?” O’Brien let the concept careen through his mind. “But that city was so old. No germ could survive anywhere near that long!”
The little doctor thumped his small paunch decisively. “We have no reason to believe it couldn’t. Some germs we know of on Earth might be able to. As spores—in any one of a number of ways.”
“But if Belov—”
“That’s enough,” the captain said. “Doctor, you shouldn’t think out loud. Keep your mouth shut about this, O’Brien, until we decide to make a general announcement. Next man!” he called.
Tom Smathers came in. “Hey, Doc,” he said, “I don’t know if this is important, but I’ve begun to generate the lousiest headache of my entire life.”
The other three men stared at each other. Then Schneider plucked a thermometer out of his breast pocket and put it into Smathers’s mouth, whispering an indistinct curse as he did so. O’Brien took a deep breath and left.
They were all told to assemble in the mess hall-dormitory that night. Schneider, looking tired, mounted a table, wiped his hands on his jumper, and said:
“Here it is, men. Nicolai Belov and Tom Smathers are down sick, Belov seriously. The symptoms seem to begin with a mild headache and temperature which rapidly grow worse and, as they do, are accompanied by severe pains in the back and joints. That’s the first stage. Smathers is in that right now. Belov—”
Nobody said anything. They sat around in various relaxed positions watching the doctor. Guranin a
nd Layatinsky were looking up from their chess board as if some relatively unimportant comments were being made that, perforce, just had to be treated, for the sake of courtesy, as of more significance than the royal game. But when Guranin shifted his elbow and knocked his king over, neither of them bothered to pick it up.
“Belov,” Dr. Alvin Schneider went on after a bit, “Belov is in the second stage. This is characterized by a weirdly fluctuating temperature, delirium, and a substantial loss of coordination—pointing, of course, to an attack on the nervous system. The loss of coordination is so acute as to affect even peristalsis, making intravenous feeding necessary. One of the things we will do tonight is go through a demonstration-lecture of intravenous feeding, so that any of you will be able to take care of the patients. Just in case.”
Across the room, O’Brien saw Hopkins, the radio and communications man, make the silent mouth-movement of “Wow!”
“Now as to what they’re suffering from. I don’t know, and that about sums it up. I’m fairly certain though that it isn’t a terrestrial disease, if only because it seems to have one of the shortest incubation periods I’ve ever encountered as well as a fantastically rapid development. I think it’s something that Belov caught in that Martian city and brought back to the ship. I have no idea if it’s fatal and to what degree, although it’s sound procedure in such a case to expect the worst. The only hope I can hold out at the moment is that the two men who are down with it exhibited symptoms before I had a chance to fill them full of duoplexin. Everyone else on the ship—including me—has now had a precautionary injection. That’s all. Are there any questions?”
There were no questions.
“All right,” Dr. Schneider said. “I want to warn you, though I hardly think it’s necessary under the circumstances, that any man who experiences any kind of a headache—any kind of a headache—is to report immediately for hospitalization and quarantine. We’re obviously dealing with something highly infectious. Now if you’ll all move in a little closer, I’ll demonstrate intravenous feeding on Captain Ghose. Captain, if you please.”
