Nordenfeld drank half his drink and said unpleasantly, "There were
thirty million people on Kamerun when the chlorophage appeared. At
first it was apparently a virus which fed on the chlorophyll of
plants. They died. Then it was discovered that it could also feed on
hemoglobin, which is chemically close to chlorophyll. Hemoglobin is the
red coloring matter of the blood. When the virus consumed it, people
began to die. Kamerun doctors found that the chlorophage virus was
transmitted by contact, by inhalation, by ingestion. It traveled as
dust particles and on the feet of insects, and it was in drinking water
and the air one breathed. The doctors on Kamerun warned spaceships
off and the Patrol put a quarantine fleet in orbit around it to keep
anybody from leaving. And nobody left. And everybody died. _And_ so did
every living thing that had chlorophyll in its leaves or hemoglobin in
its blood, or that needed plant or animal tissues to feed on. There's
not a person left alive on Kamerun, nor an animal or bird or insect,
nor a fish nor a tree, or plant or weed or blade of grass. There's no
longer a quarantine fleet there. Nobody'll go there and there's nobody
left to leave. But there are beacon satellites to record any calls and
to warn any fool against landing. If the chlorophage got loose and was
carried about by spaceships, it could kill the other forty billion
humans in the galaxy, together with every green plant or animal with
hemoglobin in its blood."
"That," said Jensen, and tried to smile, "sounds final."
"It isn't," Nordenfeld told him. "If there's something in the
universe which can kill every living thing except its maker, that
something should be killed. There should be research going on about
the chlorophage. It would be deadly dangerous work, but it should be
done. A quarantine won't stop contagion. It can only hinder it. That's
useful, but not enough."
Jensen moistened his lips.
Nordenfeld said abruptly, "I've answered your questions. Now what's on
your mind and what has it to do with chlorophage?"
Jensen started. He went very pale.
"It's too late to do anything about it," said Nordenfeld. "It's
probably nonsense anyhow. But what is it?"
Jensen stammered out his story. It explained why there were so many
passengers for the _Star Queen_. It even explained his departure from
Altaira. But it was only a rumor--the kind of rumor that starts up
untraceably and can never be verified. This one was officially denied
by the Altairan planetary government. But it was widely believed by the
sort of people who usually were well-informed. Those who could sent
their families up to the _Star Queen_. And that was why Jensen had been
tense and worried until the liner had actually left Altaira behind.
Then he felt safe.
Nordenfeld's jaw set as Jensen told his tale. He made no comment, but
when Jensen was through he nodded and went away, leaving his drink
unfinished. Jensen couldn't see his face; it was hard as granite.
And Nordenfeld, the ship's doctor of the _Star Queen_, went into the
nearest bathroom and was violently sick. It was a reaction to what he'd
just learned.
* * * * *
There were stars which were so far away that their distance didn't
mean anything. There were planets beyond counting in a single star
cluster, let alone the galaxy. There were comets and gas clouds in
space, and worlds where there was life, and other worlds where life was
impossible. The quantity of matter which was associated with life was
infinitesimal, and the quantity associated with consciousness--animal
life--was so much less that the difference couldn't be expressed.
But the amount of animal life which could reason was so minute by
comparison that the nearest ratio would be that of a single atom to
a sun. Mankind, in fact, was the least impressive fraction of the
smallest category of substance in the galaxy.
But men did curious things.
There was the cutting off of the _Star Queen's_ short-distance drive
before she'd gotten well away from Altaira. There had been a lift-ship
locked to the liner's passenger airlock. When the last passenger
entered the big ship--a little girl--the airlocks disconnected and the
lift-ship pulled swiftly away.
It was not quite two miles from the _Star Queen_ when its emergency
airlocks opened and spacesuited figures plunged out of it to emptiness.
Simultaneously, the ports of the lift-ship glowed and almost
immediately the whole plating turned cherry-red, crimson, and then
orange, from unlimited heat developed within it.
The lift-ship went incandescent and ruptured and there was a spout
of white-hot air, and then it turned blue-white and puffed itself to
nothing in metallic steam. Where it had been there was only shining
gas, which cooled. Beyond it there were figures in spacesuits which
tried to swim away from it.
The _Star Queen's_ control room, obviously, saw the happening. The
lift-ship's atomic pile had flared out of control and melted down the
ship. It had developed something like sixty thousand degrees Fahrenheit
when it ceased to flare. It did not blow up; it only vaporized. But
the process must have begun within seconds after the lift-ship broke
contact with the _Star Queen_.
In automatic reaction, the man in control of the liner cut her drive
and offered to turn back and pick up the spacesuited figures in
emptiness. The offer was declined with almost hysterical haste. In
fact, it was barely made before the other lift-ships moved in on rescue
missions. They had waited. And they were picking up castaways before
the _Star Queen_ resumed its merely interplanetary drive and the
process of aiming for a solar system some thirty light-years away.
When the liner flicked into overdrive, more than half the floating
figures had been recovered, which was remarkable. It was almost as
remarkable as the flare-up of the lift-ship's atomic pile. One has
to know exactly what to do to make a properly designed atomic pile
vaporize metal. Somebody had known. Somebody had done it. And the other
lift-ships were waiting to pick up the destroyed lift-ship's crew when
it happened.
The matter of the lift-ship's destruction was fresh in Nordenfeld's
mind when Jensen had told his story. The two items fitted together with
an appalling completeness. They left little doubt or hope.
* * * * *
Nordenfeld consulted the passenger records and presently was engaged in
conversation with the sober-faced, composed little girl on a sofa in
one of the cabin levels of the _Star Queen_.
"You're Kathy Brand, I believe," he said matter-of-factly. "I
understand you've been having a rather bad time of it."
She seemed to consider.
"It hasn't been too bad," she assured him. "At least I've been seeing
new things. I got dreadfully tired of seeing the same things all the
time."
"What things?" asked Nordenfeld. His expression was not stern now,
though his inner sensations were not pleasant. He needed to talk to
this child, and he had learned how to talk to children. The secret is
to talk exactly as to an adult, with respect and interest.
"There weren't any windows," she explained, "and my father couldn't
play with me, and all the toys and books were ruined by the water. It
was dreadfully tedious. There weren't any other children, you see. And
presently there weren't any grownups but my father."
Nordenfeld only looked more interested. He'd been almost sure ever
since knowing of the lift-ship's destruction and listening to Jensen's
account of the rumor the government of Altaira denied. He was horribly
sure now.
"How long were you in the place that hadn't any windows?"
"Oh, dreadfully long!" she said. "Since I was only six years old!
Almost half my life!" She smiled brightly at him. "I remember looking
out of windows and even playing out-of-doors, but my father and mother
said I had to live in this place. My father talked to me often and
often. He was very nice. But he had to wear that funny suit and keep
the glass over his face because he didn't live in the room. The glass
was because he went under the water, you know."
Nordenfeld asked carefully conversational-sounding questions. Kathy
Brand, now aged ten, had been taken by her father to live in a big room
without any windows. It hadn't any doors, either. There were plants in
it, and there were bluish lights to shine on the plants, and there was
a place in one corner where there was water. When her father came in to
talk to her, he came up out of the water wearing the funny suit with
glass over his face. He went out the same way. There was a place in
the wall where she could look out into another room, and at first her
mother used to come and smile at her through the glass, and she talked
into something she held in her hand, and her voice came inside. But
later she stopped coming.
* * * * *
There was only one possible kind of place which would answer Kathy's
description. When she was six years old she had been put into some
university's aseptic-environment room. And she had stayed there. Such
rooms were designed for biological research. They were built and then
made sterile of all bacterial life and afterward entered through a tank
of antiseptic. Anyone who entered wore a suit which was made germ-free
by its passage through the antiseptic, and he did not breathe the air
of the aseptic room, but air which was supplied him through a hose, the
exhaled-air hose also passing under the antiseptic outside. No germ
or microbe or virus could possibly get into such a room without being
bathed in corrosive fluid which would kill it. So long as there was
someone alive outside to take care of her, a little girl could live
there and defy even chlorophage.
And Kathy Brand had done it. But, on the other hand, Kamerun was the
only planet where it would be necessary, and it was the only world
from which a father would land his small daughter on another planet's
spaceport. There was no doubt. Nordenfeld grimly imagined someone--he
would have had to be a microbiologist even to attempt it--fighting to
survive and defeat the chlorophage while he kept his little girl in an
aseptic-environment room.
She explained quite pleasantly as Nordenfeld asked more questions.
There had been other people besides her father, but for a long time
there had been only him. And Nordenfeld computed that somehow she'd
been kept alive on the dead planet Kamerun for four long years.
Recently, though--very recently--her father told her that they were
leaving. Wearing his funny, antiseptic-wetted suit, he'd enclosed her
in a plastic bag with a tank attached to it. Air flowed from the tank
into the bag and out through a hose that was all wetted inside. She
breathed quite comfortably.
It made sense. An air tank could be heated and its contents sterilized
to supply germ-free--or virus-free--air. And Kathy's father took an axe
and chopped away a wall of the room. He picked her up, still inside the
plastic bag, and carried her out. There was nobody about. There was no
grass. There were no trees. Nothing moved.
Here Kathy's account was vague, but Nordenfeld could guess at the
strangeness of a dead planet, to the child who barely remembered
anything but the walls of an aseptic-environment room.
Her father carried her to a little ship, said Kathy, and they talked
a lot after the ship took off. He told her that he was taking her to
a place where she could run about outdoors and play, but he had to go
somewhere else. He did mysterious things which to Nordenfeld meant a
most scrupulous decontamination of a small spaceship's interior and
its airlock. Its outer surface would reach a temperature at which no
organic material could remain uncooked.
And finally, said Kathy, her father had opened a door and told her to
step out and good-by, and she did, and the ship went away--her father
still wearing his funny suit--and people came and asked her questions
she did not understand.
* * * * *
Kathy's narrative fitted perfectly into the rumor Jensen said
circulated among usually well-informed people on Altaira. They
believed, said Jensen, that a small spaceship had appeared in the sky
above Altaira's spaceport. It ignored all calls, landed swiftly, opened
an airlock and let someone out, and plunged for the sky again. And the
story said that radar telescopes immediately searched for and found
the ship in space. They trailed it, calling vainly for it to identify
itself, while it drove at top speed for Altaira's sun.
It reached the sun and dived in.
Nordenfeld reached the skipper on intercom vision-phone. Jensen had
been called there to repeat his tale to the skipper.
"I've talked to the child," said Nordenfeld grimly, "and I'm putting
her into isolation quarters in the hospital compartment. She's from
Kamerun. She was kept in an aseptic-environment room at some university
or other. She says her father looked after her. I get an impression of
a last-ditch fight by microbiologists against the chlorophage. They
lost it. Apparently her father landed her on Altaira and dived into
the sun. From her story, he took every possible precaution to keep her
from contagion or carrying contagion with her to Altaira. Maybe he
succeeded. There's no way to tell--yet."
The skipper listened in silence.