He walked away. Dillman didn't follow. He walked back to the chart room
and sat down in the shock chair. Beyond the port, Mars was large and
waiting.
Caffrey thought seriously for the first time in many years. He wanted
to get the ship to Mars. Maybe the doctors could help them. And maybe
not.
They might infect others. The disease might spread, and if no one knew
how to handle it ... he didn't want to think about that.
Doc hadn't known what to do. Doc was a good man, medically. He had been
a little run down, a little second-hand, because of his seedy deals and
his need of money and his operations on women in dirty back alley rooms
on a hundred worlds. But Doc couldn't stop it.
And sometime, Caffrey thought, alone and facing himself at last, a man
has got to stop being tough. You can't live with yourself forever and
be tough. Just once you've got to do something for your self-respect.
He knew it, and all the cursing and shouting could not cover up the
fact that he knew it.
There was a chance for them. But the chance might be deadly, more than
deadly, to Sol's worlds. The androids didn't matter. They were pieces
of metal and plastic and skin, constructed to get sick, but they didn't
matter.
Caffrey laughed. _They didn't matter._ But they mattered when you
thought of Doc being shaken to pieces in agony. Too perfectly made,
they were. He laughed out loud at the tremendous mighty irony of the
joke.
Dillman came in the door.
"What are we going to do, Captain?"
Caffrey stood up and sighed. He walked to the com system. He opened
it. He spoke into it for a few moments. He shut it off. He turned to
Dillman.
"That's what we're going to do," he said.
Dillman began to yell. He hit Caffrey, pummelled at him, screamed in
fear. Caffrey had to knock him down on the floor and hit him with his
cane. None of the other men gave him trouble.
Carefully, he moved to the course computer.
He made corrections in the directional tape. The ship began to groan.
It swung into a new course. Caffrey took one final look at Mars,
thinking of the quiet days shuttling people to the Temple Ruins west of
Red Sands, of the liquor and the warm, laughing women. But no more.
The sun lay dead ahead.
Caffrey sat down and poured himself a drink. Then he remembered
something. If the disease hit him, he might alter the course.
He smashed the machinery, ripping it apart with his great hands,
tearing it, so that the course could never be changed. Wires lay
severed and bare all over the floor.
He picked up the bottle for another drink. The sun was a living ball of
flame. He could not look at it.
The green sign went crazy. EXERCISE PERIOD, it blinked, EXERCISE....
Caffrey tried to throw the bottle at it. His hand twitched. The bottle
fell to the floor and broke. Caffrey looked at his hands, at the hairs
whitened with sun glow. The hand twitched again. Dillman stirred where
he lay. His leg flapped once or twice.
Caffrey sat there while the heat began to melt the walls. He felt his
body writhing, but it did not matter, in the heat. There was only
a blinding whiteness all around. He thought about the androids. He
thought about Skolnik. He thought, at last, about Mars.
He was still thinking about Mars when the ship fell into the burning
maw of the sun.