He pressed a button in a console next to the chair. The door nearest the central control-panel hummed open. He rose, hands clutching the armrests to steady himself, and stumbled across the room, paused at the door—hands against the jamb. Then wild-eyed and smiling, he staggered down the dimly lit corridor.
“Judanya,” he said.
He pressed a wall button, a second door opened. Twenty sheeted figures, most on mattresses on the floor, lay within the small sickbay. Lieutenant Kahr was near the rear wall, an oxygen tent enclosing her, a sheet tucked neatly under her arms; she was the only one of the dead whose face was uncovered.
The oxygen tent crinkled when he folded back the side. He had been unable to force himself to close her eyelids; she gazed toward him unseeing, his form blackly mirrored within the pupils. With the back of his hand he touched her cold, cold cheek. Her lips were thin; her nose, sharply angular, made her face appear narrow. Except for a Mohawk-like mane of black hair, she was bald. The sight of her head slightly startled him; somehow he had thought death would overtake style, and her hair would grow back as long as it was when she had first boarded the ship two years earlier.
He combed the hair with his fingers. “Judanya,” he whispered. Light shone upon her forehead. He drew the sheet down over her breasts, her abdomen, down over her legs. He looked upon her as he had many times before: wanting her, not wanting her. Though she had sometimes slept with him, she had never loved him. Lengthy cohabitations between officers and enlisted had been discouraged, and she had refused to jeopardize her career for what she considered the insipid emotions he associated with sexuality; she needed orgasms, she had told him once, merely to relax. On his knees as though before an idol, he folded the sheet, overlay upon neat overlay, at her feet. Her pubic triangle looked at him. He bent forward and pressed his lips to her kneecap, his fingertips squeezing the back of her leg. “Judanya.” Tears welled. Back home, he knew, people were dying, laughing, loving. Such was the terror of it all, the terror and the loneliness he had felt within that crowded classroom back in Dutch Harbor: the knowledge that, whatever joy or sorrow he experienced, there existed emotions and happenings beyond his comprehension—people he could neither know nor touch nor even really imagine. Life would go on whether he was alive or not.
Unless, of course, the ship fell into Sarissi hands. Or if the members of an Earth ship contracted the disease and brought it home with them. Then all Earth would know of him, if only to hate. All would die. In a way—perhaps, he told himself, it was the fever—the notion appealed to him. Loneliness had brought him here; here, in death, his loneliness could end.
It was for Judanya—not for himself or humanity—that he would place the charges. For Judanya, who had been all duty and dispassion.
Judanya, who to him was the ship.
He left her, went to the armory for plastic explosives and an armload of looped fusewire, then returned to the control room. He flopped down in the command chair, so exhausted and feverish he could hardly breathe, and sat with his head in his hands. Finally, straightening, he sighed and lifted the vocoder from its cradle in the console. Except for his perfunctory remarks earlier in the day, the log had not been kept for weeks.
“Transcription of First Duty-man Lewis Akklar continuing at…” He glanced at his watch. “Sixteen thirty-one hours. I have just come back from sickbay, having said good-by to my shipmates.”
He paused and for a few moments just sat staring at the blankness of the forward wall. At last he shook himself from his daydreams and resumed speaking.
“The computers analyzed the disease as some sort of virus. How the Sarissi smuggled the agent on board remains a mystery. We took all normal precautions against such a danger, including standard sterilization and quarantine procedures.
“The plague had an extremely long incubation period. The first outbreak was five weeks ago, nearly two months after we began the return trip to Earth. But once it struck, it spread rapidly, killing within a period of forty-eight hours after the first symptoms—fever and a rawness about the eyes—appeared. The reception delegation, including Captain Doria, died first.
“The med scanners failed to isolate the cause of the disease, or to devise a workable cure or preventative. Both of the ship’s doctors died early. Gradually all efforts to combat the disease ceased.”
He stopped suddenly and rubbed his left eye. The pain was growing worse. His hand went to the control panel, and the soft blue lighting dimmed to darkness.
“The damned plague is—seems—unbeatable. After half the crew was dead, Acting Captain Kahr took extreme steps to save the rest of us. She cut the stardrive engines and, retro-firing, slowed us to a stop; then she had the bodies jettisoned. We moved the remaining crew from room to room and opened outside hatches and interior doors, hoping the vacuum would kill the disease. Finally Lieutenant Kahr even jettisoned some of those who had shown symptoms. There was—a mutiny. We killed those who fought. But it was no use. It was all for nothing. All that blood. For nothing.”
He frowned in the darkness as the memories came flooding back. “People just kept dying,” he said. “Maybe the contagion had already spread to everyone during the incubation period. Nearly everyone had had contact with everyone else, at least indirectly, during our return flight. Or maybe it spread through the air ducts, even after we switched to the back-up system. I don’t know. I just don’t know. All the med facilities this ship has—yet nothing worked.”
There was a long silence; Akklar watched the lights blink on and off, listened to the hum of the instruments, smelled the clean, heavy smell of machine. He set the vocoder down carefully on the armrest and looked a final time at the viewscreen filled with stars. “I should close with some… some memorable last words,” he said, not lifting the vocoder but pushing the on-button with his thumb. His voice sounded hollow. “But I seem to have run out of words.” A moment passed, and he looked out into the stars, saw children’s faces, a salmon net, saw the ship within that net, not struggling but hanging by its gills like the time the net had torn and the fishing crew had spent all afternoon taking but one six-pound King. “No,” he said. “I don’t have any final words at all.”
Slowly standing, he walked quietly from the room—passing this time through a door to his left. The door closed behind him with the softest of whispers.
He moved along the corridors toward the ship’s belly, planting plastic explosives in various niches and linking up the fuse wire. He thought he heard fire doors close behind; he told himself it was only his imagination. The fire-control panel along the baseboard began to hiss. By the time he reached the warhead vault, the steam from the panel had turned to foam and lay like giant puffy snakes around his legs.
The vault door opened—halfway, immediately closed again. The hissing grew louder. The foam was now up to his thighs and climbing rapidly. He tried the door button again. Still no response. He found it ironic that the ship was malfunctioning just at the time the last of the crew was about to die. But the fact that the door would not open did not matter anyway. The chain reaction from the plastic explosives would trigger the warheads whether or not the door was open. He mashed a handful of explosive into the corner of the door, jabbed in both the relay and detonator fuses, and stepped back, sloshing through the foam. He paused, trying unsuccessfully to remember Judanya’s face.
The foam was to his chest.
He squeezed the detonator.
A dull, faraway boom echoed through the ship, and back on the bridge all the multi-colored lights on the instrument panels went black. On the main viewscreen, the stars quite suddenly winked out.