“Everybody hates somebody on this ship. And they all feel they have good reasons. Hopkins hates Layatinsky because he claims he’s always snooping around the communications room. Guranin hates Doctor Schneider, why, I’ll never know.”
“I can’t buy that. Kolevitch has gone out of his way to annoy me. I know that for a fact. And what about Smathers? He hates all the Russians. Hates ’em to a man.”
“Smathers is a special ease. I’m afraid he lacked security to begin with, and his peculiar position on this expedition—low man on the I.Q. pole—hasn’t done his ego any good. You could help him, if you made a particular friend of him. I know he’d like that.”
“A-ah,” O’Brien had shrugged uncomfortably. “I’m no psychological social worker. I get along all right with him, but I can take Tom Smathers only in very small doses.”
And that was another thing he regretted. He’d never been ostentatious about being absolutely indispensable as navigator and the smartest man on board; he’d even been positive he rarely thought about it. But he realized now, against the background glare of his approaching extinction, that almost daily he had smugly plumped out this fact, like a pillow, in the back of his mind. It had been there: it had been nice to stroke. And he had stroked it frequently.
A sort of sickness. Like the sickness of Hopkins-Layatinsky, Guranin-Schneider, Smathers-everyone else. Like the sickness on Earth at the moment, when two of the largest nations on the planet and as such having no need to covet each other’s territory, were about ready, reluctantly and unhappily, to go to war with each other, a war which would destroy them both and all other nations besides, allies as well as neutral states, a war which could so easily be avoided and yet was so thoroughly unavoidable.
Maybe, O’Brien thought then, they hadn’t caught any sickness on Mars; maybe they’d just brought a sickness—call it the Human Disease—to a nice, clean, sandy planet and it was killing them, because here it had nothing else on which to feed.
O’Brien shook himself.
He’d better watch out. This way madness lay. “Better start talking to myself again. How are you, boy? Feeling all right? No headaches? No aches, no pains, no feelings of fatigue? Then you must be dead, boy!”
When he went through the hospital that afternoon, he noticed that Belov had reached what could be described as Stage Four. Beside Smathers and Ghose who were both still in the coma of Stage Three, the geologist looked wide awake. His head rolled restlessly from side to side and there was a terrible, absolutely horrifying look in his eyes.
“How are you feeling, Nicolai?” O’Brien asked tentatively.
There was no reply. Instead the head turned slowly and Belov stared directly at him. O’Brien shuddered. That look was enough to freeze your blood, he decided, as he went into the engine room and got out of his space suit.
Maybe it wouldn’t go any further than this. Maybe you didn’t die of Belov’s Disease. Schneider had said it attacked the nervous system: so maybe the end-product was just insanity.
“Big deal,” O’Brien muttered. “Big, big deal.”
He had lunch and strolled over to the engine room porthole. The pyramidal marker they had planted on the first day caught his eye; it was the only thing worth looking at in this swirling, hilly landscape. First Terrestrial Expedition to Mars. In the Name of Human Life.
If only Ghose hadn’t been in such a hurry to get the marker down. The inscription needed rewriting. Last Terrestrial Expedition to Mars. In the Memory of Human Life—Here and on Earth. That would be more apt.
He knew what would happen when the expedition didn’t return—and no message arrived from it. The Russians would be positive that the Americans had seized the ship and were using the data obtained on the journey to perfect their bomb-delivery technique. The Americans would be likewise positive that the Russians …
They would be the incident.
“Ghose would sure appreciate that,” O’Brien said to himself wryly.
There was a clatter behind him. He turned.
The cup and plate from which he’d had lunch were floating in the air!
O’Brien shut his eyes, then opened them slowly. Yes, no doubt about it, they were floating! They seemed to be performing a slow, lazy dance about each other. Once in a while, they touched gently, as if kissing, then pulled apart. Suddenly, they sank to the table and came to rest like a pair of balloons with a last delicate bounce or two.
Had he got Belov’s Disease without knowing it, he wondered? Could you progress right to the last stage—hallucinations—without having headaches or fever?
He heard a series of strange noises in the hospital and ran out of the engine room without bothering to get into his space-suit.
Several blankets were dancing about, just like the cup and saucer. They swirled through the air, as if caught in a strong wind. As he watched, almost sick with astonishment, a few other objects joined them—a thermometer, a packing case, a pair of pants.
But the crew lay silently in their bunks. Smathers had evidently reached Stage Four too. There was the same restless head motion, the same terrible look whenever his eyes met O’Brien’s.
And then, as he turned to Belov’s bunk, he saw that it was empty! Had the man got up in his delirium and wandered off? Was he feeling better? Where had he gone?
O’Brien began to search the ship methodically, calling the Russian by name. Section by section, compartment by compartment, he came at last to the control room. It, too, was empty. Then where could Belov be?
As he wandered distractedly around the little place, he happened to glance through the porthole. And there, outside, he saw Belov. Without a space-suit!
It was impossible—no man could survive for a moment unprotected on the raw, almost airless surface of Mars—yet there was Nicolas Belov walking as unconcernedly as if the sand beneath his feet were the Nevsky Prospekt! And then he shimmered a little around the edges, as if he’d been turned partially into glass—and disappeared.
“Belov!” O’Brien found himself yelping. “For God’s sake! Belov! Belovi”
“He’s gone to inspect the Martian city,” a voice said behind him. “He’ll be back shortly.”
The navigator spun around. There was nobody in the room. He must be going completely crazy.
“No, you’re not,” the voice said. And Tom Smathers rose slowly through the solid floor.
“What’s happening to you people?” O’Brien gasped. “What is all this?”
“Stage Five of Belov’s Disease. The last one. So far, only Belov and I are in it, but the others are entering it now.”
O’Brien found his way to a chair and sat down. He worked his mouth a couple of times but couldn’t make the words come out.
“You’re thinking that Belov’s Disease is making magicians out of us,” Smathers told him. “No. First, it isn’t a disease at all.”
For the first time, Smathers looked directly at him and O’Brien had to avert his eyes. It wasn’t just that horrifying look he’d had lying on the bed in the hospital. It was—it was as if Smathers were no longer Smathers. He’d become something else.
“Well, it’s caused by a bacillus, but not a parasitical one. A symbiotical one.”
“Symbi—”
“Like the intestinal flora, it performs a useful function. A highly useful function.” O’Brien had the impression that Smathers was having a hard time finding the right words, that he was choosing very carefully, as if—as if—. As if he were talking to a small child!
`That’s correct,” Smathers told him. “But I believe I can make you understand. The bacillus of Belov’s Disease inhabited the nervous system of the ancient Martians as our stomach bacteria live in human digestive systems. Both are symbiotic, both enable the systems they inhabit to function with far greater effectiveness. The Belov bacillus operates within us as a kind of neural transformer, multiplying the mental output almost a thousand times.”