June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own
description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,
like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly
humorous blue eyes.
"In other words," she said, "everyone on the planet looks like you and
me?"
Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.
"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think
that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit
so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I
suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside
down!" He laughed and sobered. "But then why wear spacesuits? The air
is breathable."
"For safety," June told him. "We can't take any chances on plague."
Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the
wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take
off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.
Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.
"Plague," Pat Mead said thoughtfully. "We had one here. It came two
years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead
families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all
related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way
people can look."
_Plague._ "What was the disease?" Hal Barton asked.
"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting
sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to
do about it."
"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for
some." A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.
Pat Mead explained patiently, "Our ship, with the power plant and all
the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,
and never came back. The crew must have died." Long years of hardship
were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone
and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace
them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife
and bow.
"Any recurrence of melting sickness?" asked Hal Barton.
"No."
"Any other diseases?"
"Not a one."
Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching
awe. "Do you think all the Meads look like that?" he said to June on
the intercom. "I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!"
* * * * *
Their job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to
the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing
now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting
sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.
The polished silver and black column of the _Explorer_ seemed to rise
higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry
blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the
trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.
"Nice!" said Pat. "Beautiful!" The admiration in his voice was warming.
"It was a yacht," Max said, still looking up, "second hand, an old-time
beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board
and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it
brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years.
Plenty good enough."
The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that
he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never
experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.
* * * * *
"May I go aboard?" Pat asked hopefully.
Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet
of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.
"Tests first," Hal Barton said. "We have to find out if you people
still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe
you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be
no good as a check for what the other Meads might have."
Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and
hypodermics.
"Are you going to jab me with those?" Pat asked with interest.
"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!" Max grinned at Pat Mead,
and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the
tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a
stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being
smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.
"Lie down," Max told him, "and hold still. We need two spinal fluid
samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the
arm."
Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed
and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine
nerve surgeon on Earth.
High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship
and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,
it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from
their earphones:
"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?" He
banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could
see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.
Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and
pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew
away over the odd-colored forest.
"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got
through to us," Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max
dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles
without exposing them to air.
"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still
carry melting sickness," Max added. "You might be immune so it doesn't
show on you, but still carry enough germs--if that's what caused it--to
wipe out a planet."
"If you do carry melting sickness," said Hal Barton, "we won't be able
to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease."
"Starting with me?" Pat asked.
"Starting with you," Max told him ruefully, "as soon as you step on
board."
"More needles?"
"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in."
"Rough?"
"It isn't easy."
A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit
decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in
glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and
compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.
In the _Explorer_, stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers,
was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes
so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused
chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing
could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to
the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.
But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had
been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human
treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and
interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding
against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.
Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and
around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall
by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered
to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given
solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic
blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being
directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized
and injected with various immunizing solutions.
Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme
dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were
dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.
All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of
allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.
* * * * *
June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped
off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a
wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....
"I've got a good figure," she said thoughtfully.
Max turned at the door. "Why this sudden interest in your looks?" he
asked suspiciously. "Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally
get something to eat?"
"Wait a minute." She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully,
using a combination from the ship's directory. "How're you doing, Pat?"
The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled
chuckle. "Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go
jump in the lake?"
"Are you hungry?"
"No food since yesterday."
"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out," she told Pat and
hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which
made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.
They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing
hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of
Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of
antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system
would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human
blood cells, and fight back against them violently.
One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,
so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human
cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.
"How ya doing, George?" Max asked.
"Routine," George Barton grunted absently.
On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a
viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the
horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther
away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green
where there were fields.
Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been
there a long time--Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. "It looks like
Winnipeg," she told them as they paused. "When are you doctors going to
let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look," she pointed. "See that
patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through
it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?"
* * * * *
Reno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and
began circling lazily.
"Sooner than you think," Max told her. "We've discovered a castaway
colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living
here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it."
"People on Minos?" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with
excitement.
"One of them is down in the medical department," June said. "He'll be
out in twenty minutes."
"May I go see him?"
"Sure," said Max. "Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets
out. Tell him we sent you."
"Right!" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a
fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half
of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces,
the sound of unfamiliar voices.
* * * * *
They climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich
subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria
was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship
had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had
the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound
absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each
table where people leisurely ate and talked.
They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June
could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of
conversation.
"--new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in.
He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman."
The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three
heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in
the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose
tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four
different desserts, and assorted beverages.
Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a
table. Brant St. Clair came over. "I beg your pardon, Max, but they are
saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages,
for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?"
Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the
shy Canadian. "He's back already. We just saw him come in."
"Oh, fine." St. Clair beamed. "I had an appointment with him to go out
and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have
you seen Bess? Oh--there she is." He turned swiftly and hurried away.
A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly
talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,
alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even
larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward
their table.
"Look!" said someone. "There's the colonist!" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled
woman, followed and caught his arm. "Did you _really_ swim across a
river to come here?"
Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all
directions. "Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with
us. Let me help choose your tray."
Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist
and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting
wild animals with a bow and arrow.
"He needs to be rescued," Max said. "He won't have a chance to eat."
June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and
escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be
claiming the hero of the hour.
* * * * *
Pat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost
voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He
ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked
around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said
nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.
"When we build our town and leave the ship," June explained, "we
will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and
cocktail bars that used to be inside."
"Oh, I'm not complaining," Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to
the music, and tried to locate its source.
"That's big of you," said Max with gentle irony.
They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a
day.
Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,
and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave
of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about
crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm
animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth
seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.
There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and
drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think
of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed
that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center
of interest.
Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.
June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions
more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his
jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces,
eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most
chimingly of all.
June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a
man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment
more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening
to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked
almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had
forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly
aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's
end of the table.
"That guy's a menace," Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting
another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. "What's eating you?" he
added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.
"Nothing," she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat
Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man
she loved. Or--was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.
They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their
lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet
the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of
guilt.
Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the
mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a
question. Now he was saying, "I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like
you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!" He
glanced at them, looking puzzled. "See if you two can make anything of
this. It sounds medical to me."
Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.
"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it."
Len turned back to him. "You people live off the country, right? You
hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of
those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?"
* * * * *
"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry."
"Why?" Len was aggrieved.
"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different
amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the
carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until
you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then
you'd starve to death on a full stomach."
Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays,
but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one
side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.
"Test-tube evolution?" Max repeated. "What's that? I thought you people
had no doctors."
"It's a story." Pat leaned back again. "Alexander P. Mead, the head of
the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality
and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle
of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the
face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided
that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did
it all right.'"
"Did which?" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.
"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells--"
* * * * *
She listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the
explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to
Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and
hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells
have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence,
hunting, eating and reproducing alone.
Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes.
He put them through the hard savage school of evolution--a thousand
generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien
indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the
cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.
"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution
in six months," Pat Mead finished. "When they reached to a point where
they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he
had taken them from."
"What was supposed to happen then?" Max asked, leaning forward.
"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about
it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering
ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his
neck at the age of eighty."
"A character," Max said.