Doctor by Murray Leinster (large screen ebook reader txt) 📖

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.

Jensen said thinly, "Then the story about the landing was true."

"Yes. The authorities isolated her, and then shipped her off on the Star Queen. Your well-informed friends, Jensen, didn't know what their government was going to do!" Nordenfeld paused, and said more coldly still, "They didn't handle it right. They should have killed her, painlessly but at once. Her body should have been immersed, with everything that had touched it, in full-strength nitric acid. The same acid should have saturated the place where the ship landed and every place she walked. Every room she entered, and every hall she passed through, should have been doused with nitric and then burned. It would still not have been all one could wish. The air she breathed couldn't be recaptured and heated white-hot. But the chances for Altaira's population to go on living would be improved. Instead, they isolated her and they shipped her off with us—and thought they were accomplishing something by destroying the lift-ship that had her in an airtight compartment until she walked into the Star Queen's lock!"

The skipper said heavily, "Do you think she's brought chlorophage on board?"

"I've no idea," said Nordenfeld. "If she did, it's too late to do anything but drive the Star Queen into the nearest sun.... No. Before that, one should give warning that she was aground on Altaira. No ship should land there. No ship should take off. Altaira should be blocked off from the rest of the galaxy like Kamerun was. And to the same end result."

Jensen said unsteadily; "There'll be trouble if this is known on the ship. There'll be some unwilling to sacrifice themselves."

"Sacrifice?" said Nordenfeld. "They're dead! But before they lie down, they can keep everybody they care about from dying too! Would you want to land and have your wife and family die of it?"

The skipper said in the same heavy voice, "What are the probabilities? You say there was an effort to keep her from contagion. What are the odds?"

"Bad," said Nordenfeld. "The man tried, for the child's sake. But I doubt he managed to make a completely aseptic transfer from the room she lived in to the spaceport on Altaira. The authorities on Altaira should have known it. They should have killed her and destroyed everything she'd touched. And still the odds would have been bad!"

Jensen said, "But you can't do that, Nordenfeld! Not now!"

"I shall take every measure that seems likely to be useful." Then Nordenfeld snapped, "Damnation, man! Do you realize that this chlorophage can wipe out the human race if it really gets loose? Do you think I'll let sentiment keep me from doing what has to be done?"

He flicked off the vision-phone.

The Star Queen came out of overdrive. Her skipper arranged it to be done at the time when the largest possible number of her passengers and crew would be asleep. Those who were awake, of course, felt the peculiar inaudible sensation which one subjectively translated into sound. They felt the momentary giddiness which—having no natural parallel—feels like the sensation of treading on a stair-step that isn't there, combined with a twisting sensation so it is like a spiral fall. The passengers who were awake were mostly in the bars, and the bartenders explained that the ship had shifted overdrive generators and there was nothing to it.

Those who were asleep started awake, but there was nothing in their surroundings to cause alarm. Some blinked in the darkness of their cabins and perhaps turned on the cabin lights, but everything seemed normal. They turned off the lights again. Some babies cried and had to be soothed. But there was nothing except wakening to alarm anybody. Babies went back to sleep and mothers returned to their beds and—such awakenings being customary—went back to sleep also.

It was natural enough. There were vague and commonplace noises, together making an indefinite hum. Fans circulated the ship's purified and reinvigorated air. Service motors turned in remote parts of the hull. Cooks and bakers moved about in the kitchens. Nobody could tell by any physical sensation that the Star Queen was not in overdrive, except in the control room.

There the stars could be seen. They were unthinkably remote. The ship was light-years from any place where humans lived. She did not drive. Her skipper had a family on Cassim. He would not land a plague ship which might destroy them. The executive officer had a small son. If his return meant that small son's death as well as his own, he would not return. All through the ship, the officers who had to know the situation recognized that if chlorophage had gotten into the Star Queen, the ship must not land anywhere. Nobody could survive. Nobody must attempt it.

So the huge liner hung in the emptiness between the stars, waiting until it could be known definitely that chlorophage was aboard or that with absolute certainty it was absent. The question was up to Doctor Nordenfeld.

He had isolated himself with Kathy in the ship's hospital compartment. Since the ship was built it had been used once by a grown man who developed mumps, and once by an adolescent boy who developed a raging fever which antibiotics stopped. Health measures for space travel were strict. The hospital compartment had only been used those two times.

On this voyage it had been used to contain an assortment of botanical specimens from a planet seventy light-years beyond Regulus. They were on their way to the botanical research laboratory on Cassim. As a routine precaution they'd been placed in the hospital, which could be fumigated when they were taken out. Now the doctor had piled them in one side of the compartment, which he had divided in half with a transparent plastic sheet. He stayed in that side. Kathy occupied the other.

She had some flowering plants to look at and admire. They'd come from the air room and she was delighted with their coloring and beauty. But Doctor Nordenfeld had put them there as a continuing test for chlorophage. If Kathy carried that murderous virus on her person, the flowering plants would die of it—probably even before she did.

It was a scrupulously scientific test for the deadly stuff. Completely sealed off except for a circulator to freshen the air she breathed, Kathy was settled with toys and picture books. It was an improvised but well-designed germproof room. The air for Kathy to breathe was sterilized before it reached her. The air she had breathed was sterilized as it left her plastic-sided residence. It should be the perfection of protection for the ship—if it was not already too late.

The vision-phone buzzed. Doctor Nordenfeld stirred in his chair and flipped the switch. The Star Queen's skipper looked at him out of the screen.

"I've cut the overdrive," said the skipper. "The passengers haven't been told."

"Very sensible," said the doctor.

"When will we know?"

"That we can go on living? When the other possibility is exhausted."

"Then, how will we know?" asked skipper stonily.

Doctor Nordenfeld ticked off the possibilities. He bent down a finger. "One, her father took great pains. Maybe he did manage an aseptic transfer from a germ-free room to Altaira. Kathy may not have been exposed to the chlorophage. If she hasn't, no bleached spots will show up on the air-room foliage or among the flowering plants in the room with her. Nobody in the crew or among the passengers will die."

He bent down a second finger. "It is probably more likely that white spots will appear on the plants in the air room and here, and people will start to die. That will mean Kathy brought contagion here the instant she arrived, and almost certainly that Altaira will become like Kamerun—uninhabited. In such a case we are finished."

He bent down a third finger. "Not so likely, but preferable, white spots may appear on the foliage inside the plastic with Kathy, but not in the ship's air room. In that case she was exposed, but the virus was incubating when she came on board, and only developed and spread after she was isolated. Possibly, in such a case, we can save the passengers and crew, but the ship will probably have to be melted down in space. It would be tricky, but it might be done."

The skipper hesitated. "If that last happened, she—"

"I will take whatever measures are necessary," said Doctor Nordenfeld. "To save your conscience, we won't discuss them. They should have been taken on Altaira."

He reached over and flipped off the phone. Then he looked up and into the other part of the ship's hospital space. Kathy came out from behind a screen, where she'd made ready for bed. She was beaming. She had a large picture book under one arm and a doll under the other.

"It's all right for me to have these with me, isn't it, Doctor Nordenfeld?" she asked hopefully. "I didn't have any picture books but one, and it got worn out. And my doll—it was dreadful how shabby she was!"

The doctor frowned. She smiled at him. He said, "After all, picture books are made to be looked at and dolls to be played with."

She skipped to the tiny hospital bed on the far side of the presumably virusproof partition. She climbed into it and zestfully arranged the doll to share it. She placed the book within easy reach.