in four days the plague broke out. 1 was away over on the other side of the planet. The plague came back with the Bazin Expedition. We heard about it, and the quarantines that were clapped down, and finally the whole planet was quarantined. My uncle thought I would surely be safe, because his estate is so isolated. And then one of the maids got the plague. She’d been home visiting, and Uncle had put Geiger counters at the gates, so she didn’t enter the grounds, but . . . it was time for me to get away. So he sent me off in the yacht. All by myself. He gave me my course. He stayed behind, with all his servants and staff. He. - . said he’d report I’d died. I couldn’t have been exposed. Not possibly. I hadn’t been within a mile of any woman who’d had the plague, or any man who’d been near any woman who had it. But if I stayed I’d die, so he sent me off. That was right, wasn’t it?”
“Surely!” said Ben quietly. “Go on—”
“You see,” she said pleadingly, “I hadn’t been exposed, and. . . nobody was missing from the estate, because I was supposed to be dead. It seemed like it was perfect. But they. . . must have gone to seal the engines of the yacht so nobody could use it, and they found it gone, and thought somebody had stolen it—”
“So you’re officially dead,” said Ben. “All right. Go to sleep. You’re safe. I’ve reported that the yacht didn’t swerve from its course and dived into this sun. It’s actually diving there now. Its not very probable that any spaceship coming out of interstellar space would hit a star by accident. It would take good piloting! But it may be just improbable enough not to seem like a made-up yarn.”
Ben went out of the stateroom and forward to the control cabin. His face was set. In olden days, perhaps, a human being could move about freely. But in these days of the Galactic Commission and the brass hats under it, there was a vast amount of red tape about everything. The brass hats, of course, were the administrative officials under the Commission, and they climbed to authority by seniority and a pious avoidance of anything which could not be justified by written rules. They were a sort of galactic civil service, surrounded by pomp and power. Some of them were decent enough, but a deplorable lot were stuffed shirts and brass hats. Fortunately, they had no control over the surface of planets, but they supervised all traffic in space with a fussy particularity which was maddening. Any ship capable of space flight had to be registered and licensed, and all space-flights conducted under checks and double-checks which made spacemen utterly disrespectful.
“The question,” said Ben wryly in the control room, “appears to be serious. Sally isn’t legally alive. I have, in fact, official orders to kill her. I’m not going to do it. So, just how am I going to manage things?”
Every spaceship is inspected minutely at every spaceport it enters. He could not take Sally into any inhabited planet without questions he could not answer. He could not— He pushed the CC button again. The screen lighted. The fat officer said boredly:
“What’s the matter? A destroyer’s on the way.”
“The vessel 1 reported has vanished in the corona of this sun,” said Ben smoothly. “This is a dwarf blue-white, as you may remember. The strange ship made an apparent grazing impact and is melted down to a blob of metal if it isn’t vaporized by now. I was taking some pictures back yonder. May I be released from Reserve duty?”
“You will await orders—”
The fat officer began to speak with pompous indignation. Then there was a scream behind Ben. Sally came stumbling out of the stateroom, her face like chalk.
“Ben!” she choked. “I’ve . . - got the plague—”
Ben’s left hand slammed off the CC phone, but it was too late. He knew it was too late. He’d seen the fat officer’s eyes widen blankly. Sub-ether phone communication does not operate by ether waves, and no time-lag has ever been detected even between the two rims of the Galaxy. Already the fat officer at headquarters had seen Sally and heard her cry.
Ben was very white. Within minutes the whole Space-Navy of the Galaxy would have on their recorders the description of himself and his sports cruiser, with orders to hunt him down and blast him out of space on sight. Ten million dead on Pharona, and a case of the plague at large to start it up again— Of course!
He said hoarsely, in an effort to be reassuring:
“Don’t be silly, Sally! You can’t have it—”
Her teeth chattered.
“B-but I havel I t-turned out the light to try to sleep, and . . . and I saw my hand glowing. And I got up and looked in the mirror, and rn-my face—”
She reached out and turned off the light switch in the control room. The instrument dials glowed faintly. But so did Sally. Her features and her throat and arms were faintly visible in an ethereal light which made her—rather than frightening—look like an angel. And from within the thin garments in which she had meant to sleep there came a faint effulgence, too.
Ben’s throat made a queer sound.
“I. . . thought,” gasped Sally pitifully, “that we. . . could be happy because . . . no one could ever forbid us to be together if I w-was supposed to be dead. But I didn’t think I was going to die a-after I’d joined you—’
Ben took her in his arms, helplessly. For an instant she thrust away from him, but then she clung close.
“You c-can’t catch it, anyway,” she sobbed. “Please hold me close, Ben. I d-don’t want to die, when I’d j-just run away so I could never I-leave you—”
At this time the members of the Galactic Commission, itself, were pressing the investigations which were later to make intergalactic exploration and colonization practical. They had set aside whole planets for research stations, and far out beyond the Galaxy’s rim there were those infinitely hazardous laboratories where men extended the knowledge of stellar physics so that we who follow them have already circumnavigated the universe and some day may even understand it. The members of the Commission also directed the investigation of that endocrine balance which is youth, so that age is now a measure merely of time, and the word “senility” is now marked “obsolete” in the dictionaries. But on this same day the mines on Thotmes II had to be shut down despite their usefulness. An Administrative Service clerk had discovered a flaw in the charter of the space line which ran to Thotmes II. It was not authorized to carry mineral products. Therefore it had to be subjected to heavy fines, and it was driven into bankruptcy, and one hundred and twenty thousand miners were isolated from the rest of humanity by the breaking of their only transportation link.
And on this same day the Galaxy’s greatest mind in medicine was refused space-transportation. He wanted to go to Pharona, but the subcommissioner in residence on the planet on which he lived was a hypechondriac, and wished adequate medical attention to be available for his nervous stomach-aches.
And another sub-commissioner, on Pharona, diverted attention from his own stupidity—which had caused a plague with ten million victims-by pompously indignant demands for Ben Sholto’s destruction.
Ben Sholto, however, paid no attention. The light was on in the control room again. His face was white and set. The Reserve bracelet was off his wrist, now. It had signaled violently for him to report to Headquarters. For answer, he’d hacked it in half and smashed its mechanism, and then thrust it down into the very tip of the fuel bin, pushing until he felt dizzy as the heavy metal of the bracelet turned into energy for the motors and the total-acceleration field. With metal for the converter to work on, the small craft surged ahead under an amount of power only armored cruisers normally developed.