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.
She said, "I think my father would say you were very nice, Doctor Nordenfeld, to look after me so well."
"No-o-o-o," said the doctor in a detached voice. "I'm just doing what anybody ought to do."
She snuggled down under the covers. He looked at his watch and shrugged. It was very easy to confuse official night with official day, in space. Everybody else was asleep. He'd been putting Kathy through tests which began with measurements of pulse and respiration and temperature and went on from there. Kathy managed them herself, under his direction.
He settled down with one of the medical books he'd brought into the isolation section with him. Its title was Decontamination of Infectious Material from Different Planets. He read it grimly.
The time came when the Star Queen should have come out of overdrive with the sun Circe blazing fiercely nearby, and a green planet with ice caps to be approached on interplanetary drive. There should have been droning, comforting drive noises to assure the passengers—who naturally could not see beyond the ship's steel walls—that they were within a mere few million miles of a world where sunshine was normal, and skies were higher than ship's ceilings, and there were fascinating things to see and do.
Some of the passengers packed their luggage and put it outside their cabins to be picked up for landing. But no stewards came for it. Presently there was an explanation. The ship had run under maximum speed and the planetfall would be delayed.