If ever Boysie Gann had needed all the wits and wiles that had been drummed into him in the spy school on Pluto, now was the moment. "Dangerous," the reef rat who had brought Zafar had called him. He was more than dangerous; he spelled a strong probability of disaster for Boysie Gann. Zafar of all people would know him—and if, as Gann was morally certain, Zafar and M'Buna had been joined in some anti-Plan scheme on Polaris Station, Zafar would surely now know that Gann was no simple radar tech.
He dared not risk Zafar's recovering consciousness and identifying him. Yet his every loyalty to the Plan of Man demanded that he take every chance to learn more about Zafar from the colonel's disjointed ravings.
Dr. Snow made it easy for him, without knowing it. "You, boy!" he snapped. "Stay out of here. Quarla too! May be contagious . . . But stay where I can find you if I need you," he added, bending over his patient.
The two of them stood at the door of the emergency room, Quarla's hand, forgotten, in Boysie Gann's. "He's bad, Boysie," she whispered. "Don't know what it is. I haven't seen anything like that since Harry—" Then she stopped, and went on, in a different tone, to the men who had brought him: "You'd better wait until my father's examined him. You might have been exposed."
In the emergency room Dr. Snow was lifting a bimetal thermometer out of Zafar's slack, mumbling mouth. Boysie Gann strained to hear what the man was saying, but all he could catch were words like ". . . trap for minds . . ." ". . . living dust and lying dreams . . ."
Dr. Snow's expression was serious. "High," he muttered, then glanced toward the group at the door. "Quarla!" he called. "You'll have to compound an injection for me. Standard broad-spectrum antibiotics, afebrilium, analgesics. Call his weight—let's see—ninety kilos. And make the dosage maximum."
Quarla nodded and hurried to the pharmacy room, while Snow bent back to the man. Even at this distance, Gann could see that the former Machine Colonel's face was contorted in agony and fear. There was more than sickness in Zafar's wild muttering; there was terror. He pushed himself erect, eyes staring, and shouted: "Graveyard of the galaxy! Starchild! Beware the trap! Beware your heart's desire!" Then Quarla was back with a spray hypodermic. Her father took it from her, pushed her out of the room again, and quickly injected the man.
Zafar slumped back onto the examining couch, eyes closing, still mumbling to himself.
The doctor watched him for a second, then came toward the group at the door. "He'll sleep for a while," he said. "Nothing else to do at this moment. We've got to see how he responds to the drug."
The man who had brought him said, "Doc, what is it? Are we all going to . . ." But Dr. Snow was shaking his head.
"I can't answer your question," he said. "I don't know what it is. But I don't think you're m any danger. I've seen only one other case like this, three years ago. But I was exposed, and so was my daughter, and several others—and no one was infected."
He hesitated, glancing at Gann. Then he said abruptly, "The other case was Harry Hickson, Mr. Gann. It killed him."
Boysie Gann started to speak, then nodded. "I understand."
"Do you?" Dr. Snow's voice was heavy with irony. "I don't! I don't understand at all. Let me show you something—then tell me if you understand!" He stoofl away from the door, reached out a hand, and switched off the lights in the emergency room. "Look!" he cried. "Do you understand that?"
The four in the doorway gasped as one. "Father!" cried Quarla, and the men swore softly. Inside the emergency room, in the semi-darkness Dr. Snow had brought about, Mohammed Zafar's leather-colored skin was leather-colored no longer. Like the spilled blood of the spaceling Gann had seen murdered, Zafar's skin was bright with a golden glow! His face shone with the radiance of a muted sun. One wasted hand, dangling out of the sheets, was limned in a yellowish, unsteady light like the flicker of a million flashing fusorians.
Quarla choked, "It's . . . it's just like Harry, Father!"
The doctor nodded somberly. "And it will end the same way, too. Unless there's a miracle, that man will be dead in an hour."
He sighed and reached to turn the light on again, but there was an abrupt hissing, swishing sound and something darted past them, over their heads. "What the devil!" cried Dr. Snow, and turned on the lights.
Something was on the dying man's head, something that scuttled about and glared at them with hot red eyes like incandescent shoebut-tons.
"Father! It's Harry's—I mean, it's the pyropod! The one Boysie and I brought back!" cried Quarla Snow.
Gann said tightly, "Look! He broke the chain." Then he laughed shakily. "Harry would be pleased," he said unsteadily. "At last the thing's learned how to fly."
Machine Colonel Zafar lived longer than the hour Dr. Snow had promised, but it was obvious that the extra time would not be very long. He was sinking. For minutes at a time he seemed hardly to breathe, then roused himself long enough to mumble incoherent phrases like "The Starchild! But the Swan won't help him. .
Snow was working over his laboratory equipment in the corner of the room, pausing every few minutes to check his patient's breathing, and shake his head. He summoned Quarla and Gann to him and gestured to a microscope.
"I want to show you something," he said, his face somber and wondering. "Look." And he stepped aside.
Quarla looked into the slim chromed barrels of the microscope, then lifted her head to stare questioningly at her father. He nodded. "You see? Mr. Gann, look."
Slowly Boysie Gann took her place. "I'm not a scientist, Doctor," he protested. "I won't know what to look for."
But then he was looking through the eyepieces and his voice stopped. He did not need to be a scientist. The spectacle before him, standing out clear in three dimensions in the stereoscopic field of the microscope, was nothing he had ever seen before.
Straw-colored erythrocytes and pale eosinophiles floated among colonies of benign microorganisms that live in every human's blood. Rodlike and amoeboid, radial or amorphous, all the tiny bacteria were familiar, in a vague, half-remembered way, to Gann.
All but one.
For dominating the field were masses of globular bodies, dark and uninteresting-looking at first, but bursting under his eyes into spurts of golden light. Like the luminous plankton of Earth's warm seas, they flared brilliantly, then subsided, then flared again. It was like tiny warning lights signaling disaster in the sample of the sick man's blood-hundreds of them, perhaps thousands—so many that the field of the microscope was brilliantly illuminated with a flickering golden glow.
"Great Plan!" whispered Boysie Gann. "And this is what made him sick?"
Dr. Snow said slowly, "It is the same thing I saw in Harry Hickson*s blood. Just before he died."
He took his place at the twin eyepieces and glanced for a second at the tiny golden spheres. "Fusorians," he said. "It took me a month with paper chromatography and mass spectrograms to verify it in Harry's blood, but that is what they were. Colonies of fusorian symbiotes gone wild. They're killing him."
He stared blankly at the microscope, then roused himself and hurried back to his patient. Machine Colonel Zafar was gasping for breath, his eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling, his fingers working aimlessly, his whole skin suffused with that golden glow.
"Quarla!" rapped Dr. Snow. "Seal the room! We'll give him a positive partial pressure of oxygen! ... It won't save his life," he added wearily, "but it may prolong it—by minutes, at least."
The girl hurried to close the door tightly against its resilient seals, while her father adjusted valves on his mediconsole. Boysie Gann heard a "white" sound of hissing gas and felt a quick increase of pressure in his ears. He swallowed and heard Quarla's voice, queerly distant, say, "Father! He's-he's trying to get up!"