"We'll take the necessary measures," Nordenfeld told him. "Very quietly
and very efficiently, with neither the crew nor the passengers knowing
that Altaira sent the chlorophage on board the _Star Queen_ in the hope
of banishing it from there. The passengers won't know that their own
officials shipped it off with them as they tried to run away.... And
I was so proud that I'd improvised an aseptic room to keep Kathy in! I
sterilized the air that went in to her, and I sterilized--"
Then he stopped. He stopped quite short. He stared at the air unit, set
up and with two pipes passing through the plastic partition which cut
the hospital space in two. He turned utterly white. He went roughly to
the air machine. He jerked back its cover. He put his hand inside.
Minutes later he faced back to the vision-screen from which Jensen
looked apathetically at him.
"Tell the skipper to call me," he said in a savage tone. "Tell him to
call me instantly he comes back! Before he issues any orders at all!"
He bent over the sterilizing equipment and very carefully began to
disassemble it. He had it completely apart when Kathy waked. She peered
at him through the plastic separation sheet.
"Good morning, Doctor Nordenfeld," she said cheerfully.
The doctor grunted. Kathy smiled at him. She had gotten on very good
terms with the doctor, since she'd been kept in the ship's hospital.
She did not feel that she was isolated. In having the doctor where she
could talk to him at any time, she had much more company than ever
before. She had read her entire picture book to him and discussed her
doll at length. She took it for granted that when he did not answer or
frowned that he was simply busy. But he was company because she could
see him.
Doctor Nordenfeld put the air apparatus together with an extremely
peculiar expression on his face. It had been built for Kathy's special
isolation by a ship's mechanic. It should sterilize the used air going
into Kathy's part of the compartment, and it should sterilize the
used air pushed out by the supplied fresh air. The hospital itself
was an independent sealed unit, with its own chemical air freshener,
and it had been divided into two. The air freshener was where Doctor
Nordenfeld could attend to it, and the sterilizer pump simply shared
the freshening with Kathy. But--
But the pipe that pumped air to Kathy was brown and discolored from
having been used for sterilizing, and the pipe that brought air back
was not. It was cold. It had never been heated.
So Doctor Nordenfeld had been exposed to any contagion Kathy could
spread. He hadn't been protected at all. Yet the potted plants on
Kathy's side of the barrier were marked with great white splotches
which grew almost as one looked, while the botanical specimens in the
doctor's part of the hospital--as much infected as Kathy's could have
been, by failure of the ship's mechanic to build the sterilizer to work
two ways: the stacked plants, the alien plants, the strange plants from
seventy light-years beyond Regulus--they were vividly green. There
was no trace of chlorophage on them. Yet they had been as thoroughly
exposed as Doctor Nordenfeld himself!
The doctor's hands shook. His eyes burned. He took out a surgeon's
scalpel and ripped the plastic partition from floor to ceiling. Kathy
watched interestedly.
"Why did you do that, Doctor Nordenfeld?" she asked.
He said in an emotionless, unnatural voice, "I'm going to do something
that it was very stupid of me not to do before. It should have been
done when you were six years old, Kathy. It should have been done on
Kamerun, and after that on Altaira. Now we're going to do it here. You
can help me."
* * * * *
The _Star Queen_ had floated out of overdrive long enough to throw all
distance computations off. But she swung about, and swam back, and
presently she was not too far from the world where she was now many
days overdue. Lift-ships started up from the planet's surface. But the
_Star Queen_ ordered them back.
"Get your spaceport health officer on the vision-phone," ordered the
_Star Queen's_ skipper. "We've had chlorophage on board."
There was panic. Even at a distance of a hundred thousand miles,
chlorophage could strike stark terror into anybody. But presently the
image of the spaceport health officer appeared on the _Star Queen's_
screen.
"We're not landing," said Doctor Nordenfeld. "There's almost certainly
an outbreak of chlorophage on Altaira, and we're going back to do
something about it. It got on our ship with passengers from there.
We've whipped it, but we may need some help."
The image of the health officer aground was a mask of horror for
seconds after Nordenfeld's last statement. Then his expression became
incredulous, though still horrified.
"We came on to here," said Doctor Nordenfeld, "to get you to send
word by the first other ship to the Patrol that a quarantine has
to be set up on Altaira, and we need to be inspected for recovery
from chlorophage infection. And we need to pass on, officially, the
discovery that whipped the contagion on this ship. We were carrying
botanical specimens to Cassim and we discovered that they were immune
to chlorophage. That's absurd, of course. Their green coloring is the
same substance as in plants under Sol-type suns anywhere. They couldn't
be immune to chlorophage. So there had to be something else."
"Was--was there?" asked the health officer.
"There was. Those specimens came from somewhere beyond Regulus. They
carried, as normal symbiotes on their foliage, microörganisms unknown
both on Kamerun and Altaira. The alien bugs are almost the size of
virus particles, feed on virus particles, and are carried by contact,
air, and so on, as readily as virus particles themselves. We discovered
that those microörganisms devoured chlorophage. We washed them off the
leaves of the plants, sprayed them in our air-room jungle, and they
multiplied faster than the chlorophage. Our whole air supply is now
loaded with an airborne antichlorophage organism which has made our
crew and passengers immune. We're heading back to Altaira to turn loose
our merry little bugs on that planet. It appears that they grow on
certain vegetation, but they'll live anywhere there's phage to eat.
We're keeping some chlorophage cultures alive so our microörganisms
don't die out for lack of food!"