With an overwhelming lassitude, making his arms and legs seem to weigh tons, he left the chair by the control-board. He stayed on his feet almost half the way to the air-lock, by leaning heavily against the wall. Then his knees buckled under him and the rest of the way he crawled. At the inner air-lock door he reached up and by pure habit pushed the succession of buttons which opened both the inner and the outer doors. They rumbled wide, unsealing themselves. Air came in. There was the smell of mud and vegetation and unfamiliar life. There was also one particular odor which should have been unpleasing, but that it was so faint it seemed only strange.
"There!" said Calhoun. He waved his hand feebly. "There you are, Murgatroyd! There's a world for you. You'll be lonely, and maybe you'll die or be killed by some local predator, and maybe I'm doing you a dirty trick. But my intentions are of the best. Shoo! Get out so I can close the ports again."
Murgatroyd said, "Chee!" in a bewildered tone. It was not customary for Calhoun to crawl on his hands and knees and urge him out the air-lock. Calhoun was behaving strangely. Murgatroyd looked at him apprehensively.
"Chee!" he said. "Chee-chee!"
Calhoun did not answer. He felt himself slipping down to the Med Ship's floor. He was intolerably weary and weak. He was wholly confused. The sane part of his consciousness relaxed. He'd finished the task he'd set himself. If he rested, maybe he'd get back enough strength to close the air-lock door. It didn't really matter. It was annoying that he hadn't been able to get word of the Lanke situation to headquarters, but the plague had been on Lanke before. The doctors knew it. They were terrified by it, but maybe . . . maybe . . .
Wryly, at the moment he believed his moment of death, Calhoun conceded to himself that he'd done the best he could. It wasn't good enough.
III
When Calhoun awoke, or at any rate regained consciousness, Murgatroyd was saying, "Chee-chee! Chee-chee!" in his high-pitched voice. He sounded unhappy. There were smells in the air. Calhoun was not on the floor, but in his bunk. He heard footsteps and the sound of wind blowing. There were cracklings which were the sounds of the G.C. speaker reporting normal shortwave broadcasts from a nearby sun. There were other and unidentifiable sounds.
Calhoun opened his eyes. This instant, instinctive effort to sit up achieved nothing whatever. He was almost wholly without strength. He did manage to make a croaking sound, and someone came to the door of his sleeping cabin. He didn't even see clearly, just now, but he said in a fretful tone and with extreme exertion, "This is the devil! I've got a plague of some kind, and it's horribly infectious. You've got to set up some sort of quarantine around me. Get a doctor to the air-lock—don't let him come in!—I'll tell him about it."
A voice—a girl's voice—said evenly, "That's all right. We know about the plague. This is Delhi. We should know, shouldn't we?"
Murgatroyd hopped up on the bunk on which Calhoun inexplicably lay. He said agitatedly, "Chee! Chee-chee!"
Calhoun found his voice improved. He said as fretfully as before, "No doubt. No doubt. But—this is the devil!"
A surpassing bitterness filled him. There were people here where he'd landed. Inhabitants. He was a Med Ship man and he'd brought plague here! Quite automatically, he assumed that in some moment of unrealized confusion he must have set up the wrong course and drive-time in the Med Ship's automatic-pilot. He'd had four courses and timings at hand to give to the other ship encountered in space. He must blindly have used the wrong one when setting course for Delhi . . .
The girl's voice had said this was Delhi. But it couldn't be! No ship had ever gotten home from Delhi. It couldn't be colonized. It had been tried, and there were ruins to prove it, but there was something wrong with it, something yet unknown but utterly fatal. No ship had ever returned . . .
He couldn't stop to think of such things now. He'd brought plague here!
"Get a doctor to the air-lock door," he commanded as fiercely as his weakness would allow. "Quick! I've got to tell him . . ."
"We haven't any doctors," said the girl's voice, as evenly as before, "and you don't need one. This is Delhi. There's no use in having doctors on Delhi. Not for the plague. You're all right!"
He saw, with clearing eyes, that a figure bent over him. It was a girl with dark brown eyes. She lifted his head and gave him a drink from a cup.
"We heard your rockets, Rob and I," she said in a tone from which all warmth had been removed. "We could tell you were landing. We hurried, and we got here before anybody else. We found you halfway out of the air-lock with a tame little animal crying to you to wake up. So we brought you inside and Rob's watching now to see if anybody else heard you land. You can hope nobody did."
Calhoun decided that he was delirious again. He struggled to clear his brain. Murgatroyd said anxiously, "Chee-chee?"
"I suppose so," said Calhoun drearily. Then he said more loudly, "There has to be a quarantine! I'm carrying contagion . . ."
The girl did not answer. Murgatroyd chattered at him. It sounded as if, relieved now, he were scolding Calhoun for not having paid attention to him before.
Calhoun fell, tumbled, dropped, back into slumber.
It was a very deep sleep. A dreamless sleep. He came out of it an indefinite time later, when he could not tell whether it was day or night. There was silence, now, except for the tiny background noises from the tape. The air-lock door was evidently closed. Murgatroyd was a warm spot touching Calhoun's leg through the bed covering. Calhoun noted that his brain was clear. His fever was gone. Which could mean either that it was burned out, or that he was. In the latter case, he was experiencing that clear-headedness sometimes granted to people just about to die.
He heard a peculiar small sound. Someone—a girl—was weeping while trying not to make a noise. Calhoun blinked. He must have moved in some other fashion too, because Murgatroyd waked instantly and asked, "Chee-chee? Chee-chee-chee?"
There was a stirring in the control-room. The girl who'd given him a drink came in. She looked as if she'd been crying; Calhoun said, "I feel very much better. Thanks. Can you tell me where I am and what's happened?"
The girl tried to smile, not very successfully. She said, "You're on Delhi, to stay. We've locked the air-lock doors and nobody can get in. They've only banged and called, so far. Rob's looking over the ship now, trying to find out how to smash it so it can't possibly be repaired. He says you can't lift anyhow. The ground here is swamp. Your landing-feet have sunk in the mud and you can't possibly get clear. So that's all right for the time being."
Calhoun stared at her. He ignored the statement that the Med Ship was permanently aground.
"Delhi—locked doors—" He said incredulously, "Look! Delhi's not inhabited. Its air's wrong, or something. No ship that's ever landed on Delhi has ever gotten home again. Delhi doesn't have people . . ."
"There are a good two thousand of them outside just now," said the girl as detachedly as before. "And every one of them will tear this ship apart with his bare hands rather than let you leave without taking them. But the swamp has taken care of that." Then she said abruptly, "I'll get you something to eat."
She went out and Calhoun groped for meaning in this addition to the improbabilities that had started on Lanke. They'd begun with a dead man who apparently came from nowhere, and the terror he evoked in the medical profession of Lanke. There'd been the plague Calhoun contracted from the most cursory examinations of that dead man, and the patched-up life-boat quite impossibly encountered in space. It also couldn't have come from anywhere. Above all there was the plague, which on Lanke was horribly dreaded, but which this girl disregarded. Now there were two thousand inhabitants on the uninhabited planet Delhi who wouldn't let the ship leave without them, and there was somebody—his name was Rob?—who intended to wreck the Med Ship so it couldn't leave at all.