"There isn't any," Doc said, annoyed. "Didn't you read my report?"
"All right," the skipper said, not looking at him. "I can't do
everything. I naturally assumed these people breathed."
"If they did, it wasn't air," Doc said.
"Bring back all you can, Maraffi," the skipper said. "But leave them
outside the ship. Everybody on the detail takes double decontamination.
And we'll put you down for hazard pay."
"Aye, aye, sir. We're on our way."
* * * * *
"They're androids," Doc said. He'd gone out in a protective suit to the
grisly pile. "These must be the false starts."
The other technicians watched him on a closed-circuit hook-up from
inside the ship.
"Are they like us?" Ernest asked. "They look it from here--what there
is of them."
"Damn near," Doc said. "Smaller and darker, though. Rosco, you were
right about the communication. There's a tiny transceiver built into
their skulls. Those that have heads, that is."
"If that's the case," Rosco said, "then why weren't these--stillbirths,
whatever you want to call them--turned to dust like the others?"
"Because they'd never been activated," Doc said. "You can't blow a
fuse if it isn't screwed in. Skipper, I've seen about all my stomach
can stand for now. I suppose I'm a hell of a queasy sawbones, but
these--things--are too much like human beings for me to take much more
of them at the moment."
"Come on back," the skipper said. "I don't feel too sturdy myself."
* * * * *
Ernest Hotaling was writing verse in his cabin when the lieutenant
intercommed him. He had just written, in free translation:
_A girl is scarcely long for the road
If passion'd arms make her corrode._
Ernest wasn't entirely satisfied with the rhyme, though he felt he'd
captured the sense of it. The lieutenant's call interrupted his
polishing. He touched the 'com and said: "Hotaling."
"Patrol's back, Mister Hotaling. You'll want to see what they found."
"Another heap of false starts? No, thanks."
"Not this time. They found some people. Two live people."
"Alive! Be right there."
He raced down, then fretted as he waited for Doc to fumigate the people
as they came through the airlock. Ernest saw them dimly through the
thick glass. They were quite human-looking. But how had they survived
whatever had turned thousands of their fellows to dust? Or were
these--a man and a woman, elderly and fragile-looking--the rulers who
had dusted the others?
"How much longer, Doc?" he asked.