“Ben,” said Sally’s voice in the darkness. It was strained. “The Thing is back! It’s . . . it’s on the leg of your chair.”
He looked. But it was on the arm of his chair. He poked his finger experimentally at it. There was no sensation. He touched it. It vanished. But his hand glowed. Both hands glowed. He gave off a faint, whitish luminosity. Just what Sally had had. But it contracted swiftly. He saw the reflection of his face and head in the glass of a dial. They shone brightly. The rest of him was dark. And he felt vague, formless pluckings at his brain. Something was probing hopefully. It was utterly alien, the Thing that probed for his thoughts. There could be no real contact of minds. He could never communicate with the Thing. But he felt its emotions. It was hopeful, and somehow terribly eager. But there was a dawning of disappointment. Somehow, he knew it was because it could not read his brain. Then he felt the formation of resolve; of a determined, - restless patience.
His face ceased to glow. His hand shone brightly. He held it out and looked at it. The glow quivered, as if impatiently. He put his hand down ~n his navigating instruments. There was the impression of a flash of luminosity over all the instruments for the least possible part of a second. Then it was gone.
And then Sally made a queer sound. He looked at her. He saw her clearly, even though the control cabin of the cruiser was in darkness. Her face and throat and arms glowed whitely. Even through her clothing diffused faint light showed. The Geiger counter clattered— “I’ve . . . got- the Plague again,” said Sally, her voice thin. “I realize now. I’ve got the feeling I . . . had before. The feeling like there is something . . . inside me somehow . . . contented - . . and eager, and waiting for something, but. . . almost purring while it waits.”
Ben Sholto licked his lips. The fact that the luminous Thing had left Sally to rove inquisitively about the ship had made it seem merely one of the curious life-forms of Lore. But now, abruptly, he realized the truth. A plague doesn’t go into the back of instrument-boards, or shine on the frame of a metal chair, or put probing tendrils of alien thoughts into one’s brain. An ordinary plague doesn’t. But this plague did. The plague on Pharona wasn’t a disease whose lethal effects were the result of toxins secreted by multitudes of submicroscopic organisms or viruses. The plague on Pharona was—Things. They flowed into the tissues of women as they flowed through metal. But they fed, somehow, upon the life-force of women. And the women died.
Ten million women and girl-children had died on Pharona because of Things brought back from Lore. The things couldn’t have come on one spaceship in numbers great enough to accomplish such slaughter—not if women lived from two days to two weeks after their bodies began to glow. No. The Things must multiply somehow. The patience, the resolution to wait for something, which both Ben and Sally had felt—that might be the Thing deciding that for some reason it must remain solitary for a while.
But Sally was the habitation of a Thing, one of those which had wiped out half the human race on Pharona. It interpenetrated her body. It waited eagerly for something. And it purred soundlessly while it waited.
The Universe rolled on. The Galaxy paid no attention. The Administrative Service Appeal Board, sitting on Arcturis II, denied a petition signed by more than three hundred million people inhabiting four planets of Algol. They asked permission to present their grievances directly to the Galactic Commission itself, since the Administrative Service was inextricably tied up in its own rulings and red tape. But the Board ruled that the petition asked action by the Board for which there was no precedent, and which, therefore, was automatically beyond the Board’s discretion.
A sub-sub-commissioner on Phryne VII married the daughter of a subcommissioner, and traveled in state on a Rim-class battleship to his new post.
A clerk of the Administrative Service unearthed the fact that the charter of the Allioth Colonization Co-operative lacked two commas and a semi-colon, and that seven million people, therefore, lacked legal title to the cities, factories, and installations they had built, and that they could be displaced by anybody who filed a new application for colonists’ rights on the planet. The clerk was regarded as a coming man in the Administrative Service.
A fleet captain in the Space-Navy resigned his commission rather than carry out orders commanding him to depopulate the planet Quenn “by any and all practical means,” and was ordered under arrest. The order was carried out by subordinates, who affected to believe that the only practical means was to carry the inhabitants elsewhere. (It was later discovered that a clerical error had sent an order, intended for the Migration-Directive Bureau, to the Space-Navy Bureau. The order was meant to command the repopulation of Quenn by any and all practical means, because it had lost much of its population by emigration. The clerk responsible for the mistake was disciplined, but none of the higher officials who had counter-signed it.)
And there was a plague on Pharona which was receiving very little attention, but an entire sub-sector battle fleet was being mobilized to capture a small sports cruiser of space which had defied official orders.
The GC phone muttered and muttered, its volume turned down low. The detectors clanged twice as the little ship hurtled on, but once it was the outermost screen which barely wavered into alarm-intensity, and the second time it was a Navy cruiser coming head-on along the sports-cruiser’s course. It was coming fast, but Ben was going fast. He had kept the converter going at full capacity for days past, and the bracelet had been converted into kinetic energy—with other materials besides—of which a reasonable percentage had been imparted to Ben’s little ship. Half an ounce of pure energy had been converted into speed. So the small ship smashed into the Navy cruiser’s screens and through them. Had the passage been at a reasonable distance—say, five thousand miles or so—it might have been just barely possible for the automatic beam-pointers of the cruiser to range him, compute his course and speed in three dimensions, and fire ahead of him so a positron beam would hit squarely.
But the two craft actually passed within twenty miles. The passage would have been closer yet but for the flaring of energy into the Navy ship’s meteor-diverters, which flung both Space-Navy cruiser and sports cruiser of the void aside from all danger of a collision. Such incomputable movements could not be anticipated by range finders. The giant projectors flared, and on the vision screen straight ahead they were visibly higher in the spectrum than was normal. The relative velocity of the two ships was an appreciable fraction of the speed of light itself.
Then the little ship was away, and once beyond screen-detection range, Ben began to decelerate at as violent a rate as he had before accelerated. The Navy now had the line of his flight, and it could compute his maximum acceleration. He would be expected to swerve aside, after his escape from the hunting ship, in any possible direction. But he would be expected to continue to flee.
A vast dragnet of the fleet would assemble, combing an expanding mushroom of space for the outlaws who carried with them the plague that had killed half of Pharona. The pomposity. of a brass hat had caused the plague, but all the power of the Galactic Commission would be used pitilessly to stamp it out. Giant battleships of space would be entering sub-ether tubes for faster-than-light journeying to the scene of emergency. Monstrous motherships carrying destroyers and scouts would be vanishing in curiously wrinkled diminishment at spots parsecs away, and appearing nearby, reeling quaintly, to spout their brood of stingers to hunt for the sports cruiser which contained one sunken-eyed man and a white-faced girl. There were more than half a million men and thousands of spacecraft engaged in the search for Ben and Sally within twenty-four hours after their narrow passing by the Navy ship. And brass hats had a field day, giving pompous, arbitrary orders and requiring acknowledgements in triplicate.