by James Blish
"No signs of war," Spock said.
"Pestilence?" McCoy suggested. As if by agreement, both were whispering.
By the dust-choked fountain near which Kirk stood, another antique object lay on its side: a child's tricycle. It too was rusty, but still functional, as though it had been indoors during much of the passage of time which had worn away the larger vehicles. There was a bell attached to the handlebar, and moved by some obscure impulse, Kirk pressed his thumb down on its lever.
It rang with a kind of dull sputter in the still air. The plaintive sound was answered instantly, from behind them, by an almost inhuman scream of rage and anguish.
"Mine! Mine!
They whirled to face the terrible clamor. A humanoid creature was plunging toward them from the shell of the nearest building, flailing its arms and screaming murderously. It was moving too fast for Kirk to make out details. He had only an impression of dirt, tatters, and considerable age, and then the thing had leapt upon McCoy and knocked him down.
Everyone waded in to help, but the creature had the incredible strength of the utterly mad. For a moment Kirk was face to face with it—an ancient face, teeth gone in a reeking mouth, contorted with wildness and hate, tears brimming from the eyes. Kirk struck, almost at random.
The blow hardly seemed to connect at all, but the creature sobbed and fell to the pocked pavement. He was indeed an old man, clad only in sneakers, shorts, and a ripped and filthy shirt. His skin was covered with multicolored blotches. There was something else odd about it, too—but what? Was it as wrinkled as it should be?
Still sobbing, the old head turned and looked toward the tricycle, and an old man's shaking hand stretched out toward it. "Fix," the creature said, between sobs. "Somebody fix."
"Sure," Kirk said, watching intently. "We'll fix it."
The creature giggled. "Fibber," it said. The voice gradually rose to the old scream of rage. "You bustud it! Fibber, fibber!"
The clawing hand grasped the tricycle as if to use it as a weapon, but at the same time the creature seemed to catch sight of the blotches on its own naked arm. The scream died back to a whimper. "Fix it—please fix it—"
The eyes bulged, the chest heaved, and then the creature fell back to the pavement. Clearly, it was dead. McCoy knelt beside it, running a tricorder over the body.
"Impossible," he muttered.
"That it's dead?" Kirk said.
"No, that it could have lived at all. Its body temperature is over one-fifty. It must have been burning itself up. Nobody can live at that temperature."
Kirk's head snapped up suddenly. There had been another sound, coming from an alley to the left.
"Another one?" he whispered tensely. "Somebody stalking us... over there. Let's see if we can grab him and get some information ... Now!"
They broke for the alley. Ahead of them they could hear the stalker running.
The alley was blind, ending in the rear of what seemed to be a small apartment house. There was no place else that the stalker could have gone. They entered cautiously, phasers ready.
The search led them eventually to what had once been a living room. There was a dusty piano in it, a child's exercise book on the music rack. Over one brittle brown page was scribbled, "Practice, practice, practice!" But there was no place to hide but a closet. Listening at the door, Kirk thought he heard agitated breathing, and then, a distinct creak. He gestured, and Spock and the security men covered him.
"Come out," he called. "We mean no harm. Come on out."
There was no answer, but the breathing was definite now. With a sudden jerk, he opened the door.
Huddled on the floor of the closet, amid heaps of moldering clothing, old shoes, a dusty umbrella, was a dark-haired young girl, no more than fourteen—probably younger. She was obviously in abject terror.
"Please," she said. "No, don't hurt me. Why did you come back?"
"We won't hurt you," Kirk said. "We want to help." He held out his hand to her, but she only tried to shrink farther back into the closet. He looked helplessly at Yeoman Rand, who came forward and knelt at the open door.
"It's all right," she said. "Nobody's going to hurt you. We promise."
"I remember the things you did," the girl said, without stirring. "Yelling, burning, hurting people."
"It wasn't us," Janice Rand said. "Come out and tell us about it."
The girl looked dubious, but allowed Janice to lead her to a chair. Clouds of dust came out of it as she sat down, still half poised to spring up and run.
"You've got a foolie," she said. "But I can't play. I don't know the rules."
"We don't either," Kirk said. "What happened to all the people? Was there a war? A plague? Did they just go someplace else and accidentally leave you here?"
"You ought to know. You did it—you and all the other grups."
"Grups? What are grups?"
The girl looked at Kirk, astonished. "You're grups. All the old ones."
"Grown-ups," Janice said. "That's what she means, Captain."
Spock, who had been moving quietly around the room with a tricorder, came back to Kirk, looking puzzled. "She can't have lived here, Captain," he said. "The dust here hasn't been disturbed for at least three hundred years, possibly longer. No radioactivity, no chemical contamination—just very old dust."
Kirk turned back to the girl. "Young lady—by the way, what's your name?"
"Miri."
"All right, Miri, you said the grups did something. Burning, hurting people. Why?"
"They did it when they started to get sick. We had to hide." She looked up hopefully at Kirk. "Am I doing it right? Is it the right foolie?"
"You're doing fine. You said the grownups got sick. Did they die?"
"Grups always die." Put that way, it was of course self-evident, but it didn't seem to advance the questioning much.
"How about the children?"
"The onlies? Of course not. We're here, aren't we?"
"More of them?" McCoy put in. "How many?"
"All there are."
"Mr. Spock," Kirk said, "take the security guards and see if you can find any more survivors,.. So all the grups are gone?"
"Well, until it happens—you know—when it happens to an only. Then you get to be like them. You want to hurt people, like they did."
"Miri," McCoy said, "somebody attacked us, outside. You saw that? Was that a grup?"
"That was Floyd," she said, shivering a little. "It happened to him. He turned into one. It's happening to me, too. That's why I can't hang around with my friends any more. The minute one of us starts changing, the rest get afraid... I don't like your foolie. It's no fun."
"What do they get afraid of?" Kirk persisted.
"You saw Floyd. They try to hurt everything. First you get those awful marks on your skin. Then you turn into a grup, and you want to hurt people, kill people."
"We're not like that," Kirk said. "We've come a long way, all the way from the stars. We know a good many things. Maybe we can help you, if you'll help us."
"Grups don't help," Miri said. "They're the ones that did this."
"We didn't do it, and we want to change it. Maybe we can, if you'll trust us."
Janice touched her on the side of the face and said, "Please?" After a long moment, Miri managed her first timid smile.
Before she could speak, however, there was a prolonged rattling and clanking sound from outside, as though someone had emptied a garbage can off a rooftop. It was followed by the wasplike snarl of a phaser bolt.
Far away, and seemingly high up a child's voice called: "Nyah nyah nyah nyah. NYAH, Nyah!"
"Guards!" Spock's voice shouted.
Many voices answered, as if from all sides: "Nyah nyah nyah nyah NYAH, nyah!"
Then there was silence, except for the echoes.
"It seems," Kirk said, "that your friends don't want to be found."
"Maybe that's not the first step anyhow, Jim," McCoy said. "Whatever happened here, somewhere there
must be records about it. If we're to do anything, we have to put our fingers on the cause. The best place would probably be the local public health center. What about that, Miri? Is there a place where the doctors used to work? Maybe a government building?"
"I know that place," she said distastefully. "Them and their needles. That's a bad place. None of us go there."
"But that's where we have to go," Kirk said. "It's important if we're to help you. Please take us."
He held out his hand, and, very hesitantly, she took it. She looked up at him with something like the beginnings of wonder.
"Jim is a nice name," she said. "I like it."
"I like yours, too. And I like you."
"I know you do. You can't really be a grup. You're—something different." She smiled and stood up, gracefully. As she did so, she looked down, and he felt her grip stiffen. Then, carefully, she disengaged it.
"Oh!" she said in a choked voice. "Already!"
He looked down too, already more than half aware of what he would see. Across the back of his hand was a sprawling blue blotch, about the size of a robin's egg.
The laboratory proved to be well-equipped, and since it had been sealed and was windowless, there was less than the expected coating of dust on the tables and equipment. Its size and lack of windows also made it seem unpleasantly like the inside of a tomb, but nobody was prepared to complain about that; Kirk was only grateful that its contents had proved unattractive to any looters who might have broken into it.
The blue blotches had appeared upon all of them now, although those on Mr. Spock were the smallest and appeared to spread more slowly; that was to have been expected, since he came from far different stock than did the rest of the crew, or the colonists for that matter. Just as clearly, his nonterrestrial origin conferred no immunity on him, only a slight added resistance.
McCoy had taken biopsies from the lesions; some of the samples he stained, others he cultured on a variety of media. The blood-agar plate had produced a glistening, wrinkled blue colony which turned out to consist of active, fecund bacteria strongly resembling spirochetes. McCoy, however, was convinced that these were not the cause of the disease, but only secondary invaders.
"For one thing, they won't take on any of the lab animals I've had sent down from the ship," he said, "which means I can't satisfy Koch's Postulates. Second, there's an abnormally high number of mitotic figures in the stained tissues, and the whole appearance is about halfway between squamous metaplasia and frank neoplasm. Third, the choromosome table shows so many displacements—"
"Whoa, I'm convinced," Kirk protested. "What does it add up to?"
"I think the disease proper is caused by a virus," McCoy said. "The spirochetes may help, of course; there's an Earthly disease called Vincent's angina that's produced by two micro-organisms working in concert."
"Is the spirochete communicable?"
"Highly, by contact. You and Yeoman Rand got yours from Miri; we got them from you two."
"Then I'd better see that no one else does," Kirk said. He told his communicator: "Kirk to Enterprise. No one, repeat, no one, under any circumstances, is to transport down here until further notice. The planet is heavily infected. Set up complete decontamination procedures for any of us who return."
"Computer?" McCoy nudged.
"Oh yes. Also, ship us down the biggest portable bio-computer—the cat-brain job. That's to get the live-steam treatment too when it goes back up."
"Captain," Spock called. He had been going through a massed rank of file cabinets which occupied almost all of one wall. Now he was beckoning, a folder in one hand. "I think we've got something here."
They all went over except McCoy, who remained at the microscope. Spock handed the folder to Kirk and began pulling others. "There's a drawer-full of these. Must have been hundreds of people working on it. No portable bio-comp is going to process this mass of data in anything under a year."
"Then we'll feed the stuff to the ship's computer by communicator," Kirk said. He looked down at the folder.
It was headed:
Progress Report
LIFE PROLONGATION PROJECT
Genetics Section
"So that's what it was," Janice Rand said.
"We don't know yet," Kirk said. "But if it was, it must have been the galaxy's biggest backfire. All right, let's get to work. Miri, you can help too: lay out these folders on the long table there by categories—one for genetics, one for virology, one for immunology, or whatever. Never mind what the words mean, just match 'em up."
The picture merged with maddening slowness. The general principle was clear almost from the start: an attempt to counter the aging process by selectively repairing mutated body cells. Aging is primarily the accumulation in the body of cells whose normal functions have been partly damaged by mutations, these in turn being caused by the entrance of free radicals into the cell nucleus, thus deranging the genetic code. The colony's scientists had known very well that there was no blocking out the free radicals, which are created everywhere in the environment, by background radiation, by sunlight, by combustion, and even by digestion. Instead, they proposed to create a self-replicating, viruslike substance which would remain passive in the bloodstream until actual cell damage occurred; the virus would then penetrate the cell and replace the damaged element. The injection would be given at birth, before the baby's immunity mechanism was fully in action, so that is would be "selfed"—that is, marked as a substance normal to the body rather than an invader to be battled; but it would remain inactive until triggered by the hormones of puberty, so as not to interfere with normal growth processes.
"As bold a project as I've heard of in all my life," McCoy declared. "Just incidentally, had this thing worked, it would have been the perfect cancer preventive. Cancer is essentially just a local explosion of the aging process, in an especially virulent form."
"But it didn't work," Spock said. "Their substance was entirely too much like a virus—and it got away from them. Oh, it prolongs life, all right—but only in children. When puberty finally sets in, it kills them."
"How much?" Janice Rand asked.
"You mean, how long does it prolong life? We don't know because the experiment hasn't gone on that long. All we know is the rate: the injected person ages about a month, physiological time, for every hundred years, objective time. For the children, it obviously does work that way."
Janice stared at Miri. "A month in a hundred years!" she said. "And the experiment was three centuries ago! Eternal childhood ... It's like a dream."
"A very bad dream, Yeoman," Kirk said. "We learn through example and responsibilities. Miri and her friends were deprived of both. It's a dead end street."
"With a particularly ugly death at the end," McCoy agreed. "It's amazing that so many children did survive. Miri, how did you get along after all the grups died?"
"We had foolies," Miri said. "We had fun. There wasn't anybody to tell us not to. And when we got hungry, we just took something. There were lots of things in cans, and lots of mommies."
"Mommies?"
"You know." Miri wound her hand vigorously in mid-air, imitating the motion of a rotary can-opener. Janice Rand choked and turned away. "Jim . . . now that you found what you were looking for... are you going away?"
"Oh no," Kirk said. "We've still got a great deal more to learn. Your grups seemed to have done their experiments in a certain definite sequence, a sort of timetable. Any sign of that yet, Mr. Spock?"
"No, sir. Very likely it's kept somewhere else. If this were my project, I'd keep it in a vault; it's the key to the whole business."
"I'm afraid I agree. And unless we can figure it out, Miri, we won't be able to identify the virus, synthesize it, and make a vaccine."
"That's good," Miri said. "Your not going, I mean. We could have fun—until it happens."
"We still may be able to stop it. Mr. Spock, I gather you couldn't get close to any of the other children?"
"No chance. Th
ey know the area too well. Like mice."
"All right, let's try another approach. Miri, will you help us find some of them?"
"You won't find any," Miri said positively. "They're afraid. They won't like you. And they're afraid of me, too, now, ever since..." she stopped.
"We'll try to make them understand."
"Onlies?" the girl said. "You couldn't do it. That's the best thing about being an only. Nobody expects you to understand."
"You understand."
Abruptly Miri's eyes filled with tears. "I'm not an only anymore," she said. She ran out of the room. Janice looked after her compassionately.
Janice said: "That little girl—"
"—is three hundred years older than you are, Yeoman," Kirk finished for her. "Don't leap to any conclusions. It's got to make some sort of a difference in her—whether we can see it yet or not."
But in a minute Miri was back, the cloudburst passed as if it had never been, looking for something to do, Mr. Spock set her to sharpening pencils, of which the ancient laboratory seemed to have scores. She set to it cheerfully—but throughout, her eyes never left Kirk. He tried not to show that he was aware of it.
"Captain? This is Farrell on the Enterprise. We're ready to compute."
"All right, stand by. Mr. Spock, what do you need?"
Miri held up a fistful of pencils. "Are these enough?"
"Uh? Oh—we could use more, if you don't mind."
"Oh no, Jim," she said. "Why should I mind?"
"This fellow," Spock said, fanning out a sheaf of papers on the table, "left these notes in the last weeks-after the disaster began. I disregarded these last entries; he said he was too far gone himself, too sick, to be sure he wasn't delirious, and I agree. But these earlier tables ought to show us how much time we have left. By the way, it's clear that the final stages we've seen here are typical. Homicidal mania."
