Five minutes later, or possibly ten, Calhoun went out to where the
Minister for Health paced miserably up and down the corridor outside
the laboratory. The Minister looked white and sick, as if despite
himself he'd been picturing the demonstration Lett would have given
Calhoun. He did not meet Calhoun's eyes. He said uneasily:
"I'll take you to the Planetary President, now."
"No," said Calhoun. "I got some very promising information from Dr.
Lett. I want to go back to my ship first."
"But the President is waiting to see you!" protested the Minister for
Health. "There's something he wants to discuss!"
"I want," Calhoun observed, "to have something to discuss with him.
There is intelligence back of this para business. I'd almost call it
demoniac intelligence. I want to get back to my ship and check on what
I got from Dr. Lett."
The Minister for Health hesitated, and then said urgently:
"But the President is extremely anxious----"
"Will you," asked Calhoun politely, "arrange for me to be taken back
to my ship?"
The Minister for Health opened his mouth and closed it. Then he said
apologetically--and it seemed to Calhoun--fearfully:
"Dr. Lett has been our only hope of conquering this ... this epidemic.
The President and the Cabinet felt that they had to ... give him full
authority. There was no other hope! We didn't know you'd come. So ...
Dr. Lett wished you to see the President when you left him. It won't
take long!"
Calhoun said grimly:
"And he already has you scared! I begin to suspect I haven't even time
to argue with you!"
"I'll get you a car and driver as soon as you've seen the President.
It's only a little thing----"
Calhoun growled and moved toward the exit from the laboratory. Past
the sentries. Out to the open air. Here was the wide clear space which
once had been a park for the city and the site of the government
building of Tallien Three. A little distance away, children played
gaily. But there were women who watched them with deep anxiety. This
particular space contained all the people considered certainly free of
the para syndrome. Tall building surrounded the area which once had
been tranquil and open to all the citizens of the planet. But now
those buildings were converted into walls to shut out all but the
chosen--and the chosen were no better off for having been someone's
choice.
"The capital building's over yonder," said the Minister, at once
urgently and affrightedly and persuasively. "It's only a very short
walk! Just yonder!"
"I still," said Calhoun, "don't want to go there." He showed the
Minister for Health the blaster he'd aimed at Dr. Lett only minutes
ago. "This is a blaster," he said gently. "It's adjusted for low power
so that it doesn't necessarily burn or kill. It's the adjustment used
by police in case of riot. With luck, it only stuns. I used it on Dr.
Lett," he added unemotionally. "He's a para. Did you know? The vaccine
he's been giving to certain high officials to protect them against
becoming para--it satisfies the monstrous appetite of para without
requiring them to eat scavengers. But it also produces that appetite.
In fact, it's one of the ways by which paras are made."
The Minister for Health stared at Calhoun. His face went literally
gray. He tried to speak, and could not.
Calhoun added again, as unemotionally as before:
"I left Dr. Lett unconscious in his laboratory, knocked out by a
low-power blaster bolt. He knows he's a para. The President is a para,
but with a supply of 'vaccine' he can deny it to himself. By the look
on your face you've just found out you can't deny it to yourself any
longer. You're a para, too."
The Minister for Health made an inarticulate sound. He literally wrung
his hands.
"So," said Calhoun, "I want to get back to my ship and see what I can
do with the 'vaccine' I took from Dr. Lett. Do you help me, or don't
you?"
The Minister for Health seemed to have shriveled inside his garments.
He wrung his hands again. Then a ground car braked to a stop five
yards away. Two uniformed men jumped out. The first of them jerked at
his blaster in its holster on his hip.
"That's the _tormal_!" he snapped. "This's the man, all right!"
Calhoun pulled the trigger of his blaster three times. It whined
instead of rasping, because of its low-power setting. The Minister for
Health collapsed. Before he touched ground the nearer of the two
uniformed men seemed to stumble with his blaster halfway drawn. The
third man toppled.
"Murgatroyd!" said Calhoun sharply.
"_Chee!_" shrilled Murgatroyd. He leaped into the ground car beside
Calhoun.
* * * * *
The motor squealed because of the violence with which Calhoun applied
the power. It went shrilly away with three limp figures left behind
upon the ground. But there wouldn't be instant investigation. The
atmosphere in Government Center was not exactly normal. People looked
apprehensively at them. But Calhoun was out of sight before the first
of them stirred.
"It's the devil," said Calhoun as he swung to the right at a roadway
curve, "to have scruples! If I'd killed Lett in cold blood, I'd have
been the only hope these people could have! Maybe they'd have let me
help them!"
He made another turn. There were buildings here and there, and he was
hardly out of sight of where he'd dropped three men. But it was
astonishing that action had been taken so quickly after Lett regained
consciousness. Calhoun had certainly left him not more than a quarter
of an hour before. The low-power blaster must have kept him stunned
for minutes. But immediately he'd recovered he'd issued orders for the
capture or the killing of a man with a small animal with him, a
_tormal_. And the order would have been carried out if Calhoun hadn't
happen to have his own blaster actually in his hand.
But the appalling thing was the over-all situation as now revealed.
The people of Government Center were turning para and Dr. Lett had all
the authority of the government behind him. He was the government for
the duration of the emergency. But he'd stay the government because
all the men in high office were paras who could conceal their
condition only so long as Dr. Lett permitted it. Calhoun could picture
the social organization to be expected. There'd be the tyrant; the
absolute monarch at its head. Absolutely submissive citizens would
receive their dosage of vaccine to keep them "normals" so long as it
pleased their masters. Anyone who defied him or even tried to flee
would become something both mad and repulsive, because subject to
monstrous and irresistible appetite. And the tyrant could prevent even
their satisfaction! So the citizens of Tallien Three were faced with
an ultimate choice of slavery, or madness, for themselves and their
families.
Calhoun swerved behind a government building and out of the parking
area beyond. Obviously, he couldn't leave Government Center by the way
he'd entered it. If Lett hadn't ordered him stopped, he'd be ordering
it now. And Murgatroyd was an absolute identification.
Again he turned a corner, thrusting Murgatroyd down out of sight. He
turned again, and again.... Then he began concentratedly to remember
where the sunset-line had been upon the planet when he was waiting to
be landed by the grid. He could guess at an hour and a half, perhaps
two, since he touched ground. On the combined data, he made a guess at
the local time. It would be mid-afternoon. So shadows would lie to the
northeast of the objects casting them. Then--
He did not remain on any straight roadway for more than seconds. But
now when he had a choice of turnings, he had a reason for each choice.
He twisted and dodged about--once he almost ran into children playing
a ritual game--but the sum total of his movements was steadily
southward. Paras were turned out of the south gate. That gate, alone,
would be the one where someone could go out with a chance of being
unchallenged.
* * * * *
He found the gate. The usual tall buildings bordered it to left and
right. The actual exit was bare concrete walls slanting together to an
exit to the outer world; no more than a house-door wide. Well back
from the gate, there were four high-side trucks with armed police in
the truck-bodies. They were there to make sure that paras turned out,
or who went out of their own accord when they knew their state, would
not come back.
He stopped the ground car and tucked Murgatroyd under his coat. He
walked grimly toward the narrow exit. It was the most desperate of
gambles, but it was the only one he could make. He could be killed, of
course, if anybody suspected him of attempting exit at any gate.
He got out, unchallenged. The concrete walls rose higher and higher as
he walked away from the trucks and the police who would surely have
blasted him had they guessed. The way he could walk became narrowed.
It became a roofed-over passageway, with a turn in it so it could not
be looked through end to end. Then--he reached open air once more.
Nothing could be less dramatic than his actual escape. He simply
walked out. Nothing could be less remarkable than his arrival in the
city outside of Government Center. He found himself in a city street,
rather narrow, with buildings as usual all about him, whose windows
were either bricked shut, or smashed. There were benches against the
base of one of those buildings, and four or five men, quite unarmed,
lounged upon them. When Calhoun appeared one of them looked up and
then arose. A second man turned to busy himself with something behind
him. They were not grim. They showed no sign of being mad. But Calhoun
had already realized that the appetite which was madness came only
occasionally, only at intervals which could probably be known in
advance. Between one monstrous hunger-spell and another, a para might
look and act and actually be as sane as anybody else. Certainly Dr.
Lett and the President and the Cabinet members who were paras acted
convincingly as if they were not.
One of the men on the benches beckoned.
"This way," he said casually.
Murgatroyd poked his head out of Calhoun's jacket. He regarded these
roughly dressed men with suspicion.
"What's that?" asked one of the five.
"A pet," said Calhoun briefly.
The statement went unchallenged. A man got up, lifting a small tank
with a hose. There was a hissing sound. The spray made a fine, foglike
mist. Calhoun smelled a conventional organic solvent, well-known
enough.
"This's antiseptic," said the man with the spray. "In case you got
some disease inside there."
The statement was plainly standard, and once it had been exquisite
irony. But it had been repeated until it had no meaning any more,
except to Calhoun. His clothing glittered momentarily where the spray
stood on its fibres. Then it dried. There was the faintest possible
residue, like a coating of impalpable dust. Calhoun guessed its
significance and the knowledge was intolerable. But he said between
clenched fists.
"Where do I go now?"
"Anywheres," said the first man. "Nobody'll bother you. Some normals
try to keep you from getting near'em, but you can do as you please."
He added disinterestedly. "To them, too. No police out here!"
He went back to the bench and sat down. Calhoun moved on.
* * * * *
His inward sensations were unbearable, but he had to continue. It was
not likely that instructions would have reached the para organization
yet. There was one. There must be one. But eventually he would be
hunted for even on the unlikely supposition that he'd gotten out of
Government Center. Not yet, but presently.
He went down the street. He came to a corner and turned it. There were
again a few moving figures in sight. There might be one pedestrian in
a city block. This was how they'd looked in the other part of the
city, seen from a ground car. On foot, they looked the same. Windows,
too, were broken. Doors smashed in. Trash on the streets....
None of the humans in view paid any attention to him at all, but he
kept Murgatroyd out of sight regardless. Walking men who came toward
him never quite arrived. They turned off on other streets or into
doorways. Those who moved in the same direction never happened to be
overtaken. They also turned corners or slipped into doors. They would
be, Calhoun realized dispassionately, people who still considered
themselves normals, out upon desperate errands for food and trying
hopelessly not to take contagion back to those they got food for. And
Calhoun was shaken with a horrible rage that such things could happen.
He, himself, had been sprayed with something.... And Dr. Lett had held
out a plastic container for him to smell.... He'd held his breath then,
but he could not keep from breathing now. He had a certain period of
time, and that period only, before--
He forced his thoughts back to the Med Ship when it was twenty miles
high, and ten, and five. He'd watched the ground through the electron
telescope and he had a mental picture of the city from the sky. It was
as clear to him as a map. He could orient himself. He could tell where
he was.
A ground car came to a stop some distance ahead. A man got out, his
arms full of bundles which would be food. Calhoun broke into a run.
The man tried to get inside the doorway before Calhoun could arrive.
But he would not leave any of the food.
Calhoun showed his blaster.
"I'm a para," he said quietly, "and I want this car. Give me the keys
and you can keep the food."
The man groaned. Then he dropped the keys on the ground. He fled into
the house.
"Thanks," said Calhoun politely to the emptiness.
He took his place in the car. He thrust Murgatroyd again out of sight.
"It's not," he told the _tormal_ with a sort of despairing humor,
"that I'm ashamed of you, Murgatroyd, but I'm afraid I may become
ashamed of myself. Keep low!"
He started the car and drove away.
He passed through a business district, with many smashed windows. He
passed through canyons formed by office buildings. He crossed a
manufacturing area, in which there were many ungainly factories but no
sign of any work going on. In any epidemic many men stay home from
work to avoid contagion. On Tallien Three nobody would be willing to
risk employment, for fear of losing much more than his life.
There there was a wide straight highway leading away from the city but
not toward the spaceport. Calhoun drove his stolen car along it. He
saw the strange steel embroidery of the landing grid rising to the
height of a minor mountain against the sky. He drove furiously. Beyond
it. He had seen the highway system from twenty miles height, and ten,
and five. From somewhere near here stolen weather rockets had gone
billowing skyward with explosive war heads to shatter _Esclipus
Twenty_.
They'd failed. Now Calhoun went past the place from which they had
been launched, and did not notice. Once he could look across flat
fields and see the spaceport highway. It was empty. Then there was
sunset. He saw the topmost silvery beams and girders of the landing
grid still glowing in sunshine which no longer reached down to the
planet's solid ground.
He drove. And drove. Government Center might put a road block to the
spaceport, just in case. But they'd really believe him still hiding
somewhere in Government Center with no hope of--actually--accomplishing
anything but his own destruction.
* * * * *
After sunset he was miles beyond the spaceport. When twilight was
done, he'd crossed to another surface road and was headed back toward
the city. But this time he would pass close to the spaceport. And two
hours after sundown he turned the car's running-lights off and drove a
dark and nearly noiseless vehicle through deep-fallen night. Even so,
he left the ground car a mile from the tall and looming lacework of
steel. He listened with straining ears for a long time.
Presently he and Murgatroyd approached the spaceport, on foot, from a
rather improbable direction. The gigantic, unsubstantiated tower rose
incredibly far toward the sky. As he drew near it he crouched lower
and lower so he was almost crawling to keep from being silhouetted
against the stars. He saw lights in the windows of the grid's control
building. As he looked, a lighted window darkened from someone moving
past it inside. There was an enormous stillness, broken only by faint,
faint noises of the wind in the metal skeleton.
He saw no ground cars to indicate men brought here and waiting for
him. He went very cautiously forward. Once he stopped and
distastefully restored his blaster to lethal-charge intensity. If he
had to use it, he couldn't hope to shoot accurately enough to stun an
antagonist. He'd have to fight for his life--or rather, for the chance
to live as a normal man, and to restore that possibility to the people
in the ghastly-quiet city at the horizon and the other lesser cities
elsewhere on this world.
He took infinite precautions. He saw the Med Ship standing valiantly
upright on its landing fins. It was a relief to see it. The grid
operator could have been ordered to lift it out to space--thrown away
to nowhere, or put in orbit until it was wanted again, or....
That was still a possibility. Calhoun's expression turned wry. He'd
have to do something about the grid. He must be able to take off on
the ship's emergency rockets without the risk of being caught by the
tremendously powerful force fields by which ships were launched and
landed.
He crept close to the control building. No voices, but there was
movement inside. Presently he peered in a window.
The grid operator who'd been the first man to greet him on his
landing, now moved about the interior of the building. He pushed a
tank on wheels. With a hose attached to it, he sprayed. Mist poured
out and splashed away from the side walls. It hung in the air and
settled on the desks, the chairs, and on the control board with its
dials and switches. Calhoun had seen the mist before. It had been used
to spray instead of burning the bodies of the two men who'd tried to
murder him, and their wrecked ground car, and everywhere that the car
was known to have run. It was a decontaminant spray; credited with the
ability to destroy the contagion that made paras out of men.
Calhoun saw the grid operator's face. It was resolute beyond
expression, but it was very, very bitter.
Calhoun went confidently to the door and knocked on it. A savage voice
inside said:
"Go away! I just found out I'm a para!"
Calhoun opened the door and walked inside. Murgatroyd followed. He
sneezed as the mist reached his nostrils.
"Ive been treated," said Calhoun, "so I'll be a para right along with
you, after whatever the development period is. Question: Can you fix
the controls so nobody else can use the grid?"
The grid operator stared at him numbly. He was deathly pale. He did
not seem able to grasp what Calhoun had said.
* * * * *
[Illustration]
"I've got to do some work on the para condition," Calhoun told him. "I
need to be undisturbed in the ship, and I need a patient further along
toward being a para than I am. It'll save time. If you'll help, we may
be able to beat the thing. If not, I've still got to disable the
grid."
The grid operator said in a savage, unhuman voice:
"I'm a para. I'm trying to spray everything I've touched. Then I'm
going to go off somewhere and kill myself--"
Calhoun drew his blaster. He adjusted it again to non-lethal
intensity.
"Good man!" he said approvingly. "I'll have a similar job to do if I'm
not a better medical man than Lett! Will you help me?"
Murgatroyd sneezed again. He said plaintively:
"_Chee!_"
The grid's operator looked down at him, obviously in a state of shock.
No ordinary sight or sound could have gotten through to his
consciousness. But Murgatroyd was a small, furry animal with long
whiskers and a hirsute tail and a habit of imitating the actions of
humans. He sneezed yet again and looked up. There was a handkerchief
in Calhoun's pocket. Murgatroyd dragged it out and held it to his
face. He sneezed once more and said, "_Chee!_" and returned the
handkerchief to its place. He regarded the grid operator
disapprovingly. The operator was shocked out of his despair. He said
shakenly:
"What the devil--" Then he stared at Calhoun. "Help you? How can I
help anybody? I'm a para!"
"Which," said Calhoun, "is just what I need. I'm Med Service, man!
I've got a job to do with what they call an epidemic! I need a para
who's willing to be cured! That's you! Let's get this grid fixed so it
can't work and--"
There was a succession of loud clicks from a speaker unit on the wall.
It was an emergency-wave, unlocking the speaker from its Off position.
Then a voice:
"_All citizens attention! The Planetary President is about to give you
good news about the end of the para epidemic!_"
A pause. Then a grave and trembling voice came out of the speakers:
"_My fellow-citizens, I have the happiness to report that a vaccine
completely protecting normals against the para condition, and curing
those already paras, has been developed. Dr. Lett, of the planetary
health service, has produced the vaccine which is already in
small-scale production and will shortly be available in large
quantities, enough for everyone! The epidemic which has threatened
every person on Tallien Three is about to end! And to hasten the time
when every person on the planet will have the vaccine in the required
dosage and at the required intervals, Dr. Lett has been given complete
emergency authority. He is empowered to call upon every citizen for
any labor, any sum, any sacrifice that will restore our afflicted
fellow-citizens to normality, and to protect the rest against falling
a victim to this intolerable disease. I repeat: a vaccine has been
found which absolutely prevents anyone from becoming a para, and which
cures those who are paras now. And Dr. Lett has absolute authority to
issue any orders he feels necessary to hasten the end of the epidemic
and to prevent its return. But the end is sure!_"
The speaker clicked off. Calhoun said wryly:
"Unfortunately, I know what that means. The President has announced
the government's abdication in favor of Dr. Lett, and that the
punishment for disobeying Lett is--madness."
He drew a deep breath and shrugged his shoulders.
"Come along! Let's get to work!"