"Help me get him on his bunk," he ordered. "Strip and wash him and then you can operate."
"Me?"
"You have the skill," said Dumarest. "And the knowledge. The way you put him out-a trick taught to the monks of the Church of Universal Brotherhood. A pressure on sensitive nerves, as good as an anesthetic if applied with skill. You've had medical training, Charl. You deny it?"
The plump man shrugged. "A few years in a medical school, Earl, in which I gained a few elementary facts and some basic knowledge. Then something happened-a woman, but there is no need to go into detail. Just let me say that it became imperative to travel." He looked at his hands. "But I have never operated since that time."
"Then it's time you began. Tell me what you need and I'll see if it's in the ship. If it isn't you'll have to make out the best you can."
"You'll help me?"
"No, I'm going to see the captain."
Crouched like a spider in its lair, Captain Remille sat in his great chair and dreamed. Around him the web of electronic, impulses searched space and hung like a protective curtain about his ship. From an outside viewpoint the shimmering field of the drive would have turned the scarred vessel into a comet-like thing of beauty but inside where he sat only the glow of tell-tales, the brilliant glory of the screens, relieved the gloom.
A buzz and he tensed, a click and he relaxed. The warning had been taken care of. The ship had made a minute correction in its headlong flight and a scrap of interstellar matter, perhaps no larger than a pea, had been safely avoided.
Sinking back, he looked at the screens. Always he enjoyed the spectacle of naked space, the blaze of scattered stars, the sheets and curtains of glowing luminescence, the haloed blotches of dust clouds, the fuzz of distant nebulae. Stars uncountable, worlds without end, distances impossible to contemplate with the limited abilities of the mind.
Remille didn't try it. More than one captain had been driven insane by contemplation of the cosmos, fantasies born in distorted minds, the product of wild radiations and wilder rumors. Things lived in space, or so it was hinted, great beings with gossamer wings which caught the light of suns and carried them like drifting smears of moonlight across the voids. And other creatures which no one living had ever seen. Ravenous beasts which lurked in space as great fish lurked in seas, waiting to rend ships and men.
The proof had been found in wreckage ripped plates bearing unnatural scars, crews which had vanished without apparent cause, empty hulks which had been gutted and robbed of life. If living entities hadn't done such things then what had?
Questions asked by old men in taverns, echoed by romantic fools. Space, to Remille, was something to be crossed. Dangers to avoid. All he had in life was the ship-he could do without imagination. "Captain?"
"What is it?" Remille turned to stare at Dumarest. "Trouble?"
"A man is sick." The truth even though Remille must think it other than what it was. "Fren Harmond."
"The one with the bad leg?"
"Yes."
"A fool, one almost as bad as the old woman with her noise." Remille made an impatient gesture. "Well, you know what to do. Complete isolation."
None to get too near to another, a thing he and the navigator had followed from the first hint that disease could be aboard. Haw Mayna was in his cabin now, probably locked in a drugged sleep, there was little for him to do once the course was set.
"I've attended to it," said Dumarest. "Captain, are you still heading for Malach?"
"That's our destination."
"They could be waiting. Word could have been sent ahead, but you must have thought of that. Do you think they will permit us to land?"
Remille bared his teeth, yellow bone which looked as if covered with oil in the light from the screens.
"I'll land. How the hell can they stop me?"
"And?"
A thing Remille had thought of, a problem for which he had found no answer. A suspected ship was unwanted on any planet and Malach was not a gentle world. If he carried disease and tried to land the ship would be confiscated, himself and the others placed in six-month quarantine, heavy fines and penalties ordered against him. At the end he would be worse than ruined.
"You carry no cargo," said Dumarest. "No one will have reason to complain if you don't reach Malach."
"The passengers?"
"I'll take care of them. They can be compensated and found passage on another ship." Dumarest added, quickly, "That can be arranged, surely?"
"Passages cost money."
"And so does delay. They won't want to be quarantined with all the cost that entails. Charl Tao will agree and the woman can be persuaded."
"And Harmond?"
"As I told you, Captain, he's sick." Dumarest paused, waiting, then relaxed as Remille, coming to a decision, nodded. "Tell the navigator to report to me at once."
Mayna didn't respond to the knock at his door. Dumarest knocked again then tested the lock. The door opened as he pressed to reveal the man sitting cross-legged on his bunk. His eyes were rimmed with pus, veined with red, the pupils contracted to pin-points. Before him, lying on the cover, was a paper covered with a lewd design.
Dumarest folded it, held his hand before the staring eyes, moved it from side to side. The pupils remained stationary, looking at the point where the paper had lain. In imagination the navigator was a living participant in what the design had portrayed. Until the drug he had absorbed had been neutralised or had run its course he would remain deaf and blind to external stimulae.
From the door Charl said, "Earl, there is something you should see."
"It must wait. The captain wants Mayna to report to him immediately. Did you provide him with his amusement?"
"A simple thing, Earl, and harmless. Life can be hard and lonely for those who live in space and who can begrudge them a dream? You care to try one? I have patterns and compounds to induce illusions of love, of adventure, of unbridled luxury and domestic bliss. Oddly the latter is the one in greatest demand. A loving and faithful wife, children, the sweetness of contained passion. Or-"
"Get him out of it."
"Earl, I can't! The dream must ran its course." Charl leaned forward and touched the man's temple, the great arteries in the throat. "It won't be long now. The acceleration of the heart, the growing warmth of the skin-soon it will be over and he will wake. But this I can do." His plump hands moved with sure dexterity as he scrawled a message with a crayon on the back of the pattern. "There, when he wakes he will see it and obey. Now, Earl, please come with me."
"Harmond?"
He lay supine on his bunk, his face relaxed, his body naked from the waist down. Bandages covered his ankle and the air held the taint of charred flesh. A drain had been set in the lanced swelling of his groin; a thin, plastic tube held with sticky tape to permit the escape of accumulated fluids. The thing had a professional look about it as did the bandage.
"Did you have to burn deep?"
"Almost to the bone but I think we caught it in time. But that's not what I wanted to show you." Charl lifted the edge of the shirt and drew it upwards over the stomach and the lower ribs. "There, Earl. There!"
Dumarest followed the guide of the pointing finger, seeing a small, ebon blotch, a patch of velvety darkness rimmed with a thin band of angry red.
Chapter Six
Throwing back her hair Dephine said, "So Fren's got it. Well, I guess we can't all be lucky. How bad is it, Earl?"
"It's too early to tell."
"And you were close to him. Earl-you fool!"
"Charl was there too."
"I don't give a damn about Charl! You're different. I need you."
"Why?"
"Why?" Her voice rose as she echoed the question. "How big a fool are you that you can't guess that? Who else on this ship can I turn to? Who-Earl!"
"Stay away from me!" He backed as she came towards him, arms extended in open invitation. "Dephine!"