Sally sat quietly in her chair, staring at Ben through eyes that were very steady now. He regarded a Geiger counter. It clicked busily. His face went gray.
“You’re giving off cosmics,” he said dry-throated. “That’s the sign of the plague. There’s nothing else known that will make the human body give off cosmics.”
“I’ll be dead in . . . two or three days,” said Sally, unsteadily. “Sometimes women live a week. Sometimes ten days. M-mostly when the plague first starts, and there are a lot of women about. In the cities, at the beginning, the women lived even two weeks. But in small places they die quickly. And I’m the only woman here—”
“In two weeks,” said Ben harshly, “doctors should have worked out some serum, some protection.”
“They’v’~. . . never seen the germ, Ben. Not even the electron microscope shows anything. Just. . . the women die—”
“But you’re not going to!” said Ben fiercely. ‘Why couldn’t I be a doctor or something useful!”
“You, can be. .. comforting,” said Sally bravely. “I. . . gave my whole life to you when I ran to you, Ben. There aren’t but a few days, instead of . . . of years, but—”
He bent over her groaning. The clatter of the Geiger counter stopped abruptly. It had touched her arm. She shivered a little.
“Broken, I guess. But it was ticking my life away. Let’s forget it.”
Ben ground his teeth. He moved to thrust the instrument out of his way. It clattered briefly, and stopped again. It dangled from his hand by the cord to its electric connections. It clattered, and stopped, and clattered again. Ben stared down at it. It was not pointing at Sally. He swung it about. It clattered steadily when pointed at the instrument panel. It was mute when it pointed at Sally. It was mute when it pointed at anything else but the instrument panel. No. It was mute when it did not point to the GC phone. No. It clattered only when it pointed to the course-computer— It clattered only— “Wait a minute!” said Ben harshly. “There’s something funny here!”
He turned out the lights again. The instrument dials glowed as before. Sally did not! But there was a whitish luminosity at the top of the pilot’s chair. It seemed spread along the metal frame. It was not phosphorescence. It was white, not bluish. Ben moved toward it. The Geiger counter chattered when Ben pointed it at the luminosity. Then, abruptly, the luminosity was not on the chair. A dial glowed whitely, as if a stronger light were behind it. The Geiger counter clattered when pointed at that dial. Ben swung the counter upon Sally. It was mute.
“Listen!” said Ben in a strained voice. “You say women with the plague give off cosmics. You’re not giving them off, so you haven’t it. But you did, so you did have it. My pilot’s chair was giving off cosmics. Did it have the plague? Now the gravitometer is giving off cosmics. Has it got the plague?
Sally drew in her breath quickly. There was silence in the cabin of the little sports cruiser of the void. The only sound anywhere was a tiny humming. That was the converter, turning Ben’s Reserve bracelet and the refuse of his last meal into power—efficiency 99.9999. . . 9 percent— to drive the little craft with an insanely mounting velocity away from its last known position.
The whitish glow reappeared suddenly. It was in the metal rim about the control ceiling light. It vanished, and reappeared on the handle of a metal door. It vanished yet again— “The strange life-forms of Lore,” said Ben, his voice rough in the darkness. “The Bazin Expedition didn’t want to go back to Pharona. It said its return would be dangerous until it understood those life-forms. It was forced to go back, and it carried the plague. At a guess, this is one of the life-forms of Lore. It seems to stick to metal. It didn’t move into the glass of the ceiling light, but stayed on the metal rim which holds it.”
He swung the Geiger counter. Carefully. It clattered.
“It’s somewhere in the stern. Engine room, most likely—”
Sally said unsteadily: “I . . . haven’t got the plague, then—”
“No, you haven’t got it.” Ben’s voice softened. “You’re dead officially, my dear, but now it looks like you’re going to stay actually alive for a long time. We’d better do some planning for ourselves. At the moment, I’m going to change course. We’ve got all the Fleet in this part of space hunting us right now. I was talking to Headquarters when you yelled— and we’ve got to hide. And I don’t know for how long.”
Sally said slowly, as if incredulous of hope: “I. . . don’t care. I’ve gotten you into terrible trouble. The least I can do is.. . anything you tell me to.”
He put his hand lightly on her shoulder.
“There’s a meteor-stream,” he said. “What we want is time and peace in which to make our plans. I’ll dive into that stream and match up with it. We’ll be one of several million small objects heading out to aphelion in the track of a comet nobody’s ever seen. With our drive off and a little care, there’s no faintest danger that we’ll ever be picked up. I’ve supplies for a long enough time. We’ll be beyond the outermost planets before we put the drive on again, and then we’ll start for . . . where shall we go, Sally? Sirius? Ri-gel? I’ve heard there are some new colonies out beyond Rigel where things are rough and tough and the brass hats haven’t yet been able to sit back with their tummies sticking out with dignity to regulate everything to justify their feeling of importance.”
He moved to the pilot’s seat, not bothering to turn on the lights again. He swung the little ship about. The converter was still working on the bracelet he had shoved into the feed. It was crushed and being extruded into the converter-chamber as an infinitesimally fine wire. The efficiency of the converter and the drive was high. In theory, with one hundred percent efficiency, the mass of fuel needed to give a spacecraft a given velocity in empty space is the mass the spaceship will gain because of that velocity. In practice, of course, much more is needed. To attain a speed of a hundred miles a second from rest, in space, the fuel consumption is actually about a milligram of disintegrated matter per ton mass of the ship. In anything like a sports cruiser, the fuel for merely interplanetary jaunts is supplied by the carbon remaining after the air-purifier has broken down the carbon dioxide from the breathed air. Ben used his dirty dishes—and the fuel pin periodically overflowed, though he drove the cruiser hard. His bracelet had weighed two ounces. Something like six thousand milligrams. The electrical mechanism of the bracelet ‘was now smashed irreparably, but as waste it would more than accomplish an -interplanetary trip if he chose to coast.
He was not coasting. The position of the dwarf blue-white star of this solar system, and of its several planets, was accurately before him on the naviboard. There was a transparent map of the meteor-streams, with their inclination to the ecliptic. With such a map and a divider it was simple enough to navigate, especially when you used detector-screens to find out your results. He worked in the half-light of the instrument dials. He punched the computer and set the motor controls.
“Ben,” said Sally’s voice, shaken, behind him.
“Yes?”
He was thinking unhappily. He felt awkward. Sally could never return to civilization or her friends. He, himself, had to vanish completely. The brass hats would go into a monstrous pother of offended dignity, based upon the real fact that Sally had broken quarantine on a planet where ten million people had died of plague. Sally and Ben were outlaws, now. Forever. Unless they lived isolated for the rest of time, they would have to take new names and new identities-and new names and identities are not easy to acquire on civilized planets. They wanted to be married. The ceremony was somehow essential to the way Ben felt about Sally. And he was going to have to find some way to make a living, which did not involve space-navigation or the technical equipment of a technical lieutenant of the Space Navy, because all such persons were very rigorously checked.