The Sickness Read online

  “It must have started near the end of the lecture, but I was too busy to notice it. I first felt it just as I was leaving the mess hall. A real ear splitter at the moment. No, keep away!” he shouted, as O’Brien started forward sympathetically. “This probably won’t do any good, but at least keep your distance. Maybe it will give you a little extra time.”

  “Should I get the captain?’

  “If I needed him, I’d have asked him along. I’ll be turning myself into the hospital in a few minutes. I just wanted to transfer my authority to you.”

  “Your authority? Are you the—the—a”

  Doctor Alvin Schneider nodded. He went on—in English. “I’m the American Military Intelligence officer. Was, I should say. From now on, you are. Look, Pres, I don’t have much time. All I can tell you is this. Assuming that we’re not all dead within a week, and assuming that it is decided to attempt a return to Earth with the consequent risk of infecting the entire planet (something which, by the way, I personally would not recommend from where I sit), you are to keep your status as secret as I kept mine, and in the event it becomes necessary to tangle with the Russians, you are to reveal yourself with the code sentence you already know.”

  “Fort Sumter has been fired upon,” O’Brien said slowly. He was still assimilating the fact that Schneider had been the MI officer, Of course, he had known all along that it could have been any one of the seven Americans. But Schneider!

  “Right. If you then get control of the ship, you are to try to land her at White Sands, California, where we all got our preliminary training. You will explain to the authorities how I came to transfer authority to you. That’s about all, except for two things. If you get sick, you’ll have to use your own judgment about who to pass the scepter to—I prefer not to go any further than you at the moment. And—I could very easily be wrong—but it’s my personal opinion, for whatever it may be worth, that my opposite number among the Russians is Fyodor Guranin.”

  “Check.” And then full realization came to O’Brien. “But, doc, you said you gave yourself a shot of duoplexin. Doesn’t that mean—”

  Schneider rose and rubbed his forehead with his fist. “I’m afraid it does. That’s why this whole ceremony is more than a little meaningless. But I had the responsibility to discharge. I’ve discharged it. Now, if you will excuse me, I think I’d better lie down. Good luck.”

  On his way to report Schneider’s illness to the captain, O’Brien came to realize bow the Russians had felt earlier that day. There were now five Americans to six Russians. That could be bad. And the responsibility was his.

  But with his hand on the door to the captain’s room, he shrugged. Fat lot of difference it made! As the plump little man had said: “Assuming that we’re not all dead within a week…”

  The fact was that the political setup on Earth, with all of its implications for two billion people, no longer had very many implications for them. They couldn’t risk spreading the disease on Earth, and unless they got back there, they had very little chance of finding a cure for it. They were chained to an alien planet, waiting to be knocked off, one by one, by a sickness which had claimed its last victims a thousand thousand years ago.

  Still—he didn’t like being a member of a minority.

  By morning, he wasn’t. During the night, two more Russians had come down with what they were all now refering to as Belov’s Disease. That left five Americans to four Russians—except that by that time, they had ceased to count heads in national terms.

  Ghose suggested that they change the room serving as mess hall and dormitory into a hospital and that all the healthy men bunk out in the engine room. He also had Guranin rig up a radiation chamber just in front of the engine room.

  “All men serving as attendants in the hospital will wear space suits,” he ordered. “Before they reenter the engine room, they will subject the space suit to a radiation bath of maximum intensity. Then and only then will they join the rest of us and remove the suit. It’s not much, and I think any germ as virulent as this one seems to be won’t be stopped by such precautions, but at least we’re still making fighting motions.”

  “Captain,” O’Brien inquired, “what about trying to get in touch with Earth some way or other? At least to tell them what’s hitting us, for the guidance of future expeditions. I know we don’t have a radio transmitter powerful enough to operate at such a distance, but couldn’t we work out a rocket device that would carry a message and might have a chance of being poked up?”

  “I’ve thought of that. It would be very difficult, but granted that we could do it, do you have any way of ensuring that we wouldn’t send the contagion along with the message? And, given the conditions on Earth at the moment, I don’t think we have to worry about the possibility of another expedition if we don’t get back. You know as well as I that within eight or nine months at the most—” The captain broke off. “I seem to have a slight headache,” he said mildly.

  Even the men who had been working hard in the hospital and were now lying down got to their feet at this.

  “Are you sure?” Guranin asked him desperately. “Couldn’t it just be a—”

  “I’m sure. Well, it had to happen, sooner or later. I think you all know your duties in this situation and will work together well enough. And you’re each one capable of running the show. So. In case the matter comes up, in case of any issue that involves a command decision, the captain will be that one among you whose last name starts with the lowest letter alphabetically. Try to live in peace—for as much time as you may have left. Good-bye.”

  He turned and walked out of the engine room and into the hospital, a thin, dark-skinned man on whose head weariness sat like a crown.

  By supper-time, that evening, only two men had still not hospitalized themselves: Preston O’Brien and Semyon Kolevitch. They went through the minutiae of intravenous feeding, of cleaning the patients and keeping them comfortable, with dullness and apathy.

  It was just a matter of time. And when they were gone, there would be no one to take care of them.

  All the same, they performed their work diligently, and carefully irradiated their space suits before returning to the engine room. When Belov and Smathers entered Stage Three, complete coma, the navigator made a descriptive note of it in Dr. Schneider’s medical log, under the column of temperature readings that looked like stock market quotations on a very uncertain day in Wall Street.

  They ate supper together in silence. They had never liked each other and being limited to each other’s company seemed to deepen that dislike.

  After supper, O’Brien watched the Martian moons, Deimos and Phobos, rise and set in the black sky through the engine room porthole. Behind him, Kolevitch read Pushkin until he fell asleep.

  The next morning, O’Brien found Kolevitch occupying a bed in the hospital. The assistant navigator was already delirious.

  “And then there was one,” Preston O’Brien said to himself. “Where do we go from here, boys, where do we go from here?”

  As he went about his tasks as orderly, he began talking to himself a lot. What the hell, it was better than nothing. It enabled him to forget that he was the only conscious intellect at large on this red dust-storm of a world. It enabled him to forget that he would shortly be dead. It enabled him, in a rather lunatic way, to stay sane.

  Because this was it. This was really it. The ship had been planned for a crew of fifteen men. In an emergency, it could be operated by as few as five. Conceivably, two or three men, running about like crazy and being incredibly ingenious, could take it back to Earth and crash-land it somehow. But one man …

  Even if his luck held out and he didn’t come down with Belov’s Disease, he was on Mars for keeps. He was on Mars until his food ran out and his air ran out and the spaceship became a rusting coffin around him. And if he did develop a headache, well, the inevitable end would come so much the faster.

  This was it. And there was nothing he could do about it.

&n
bsp; He wandered about the ship, suddenly enormous and empty. He had grown up on a ranch in northern Montana, Preston O’Brien had, and he’d never liked being crowded. The back-to-back conditions that space travel made necessary had always irritated him like a pebble in the shoe, but he found this kind of immense, ultimate loneliness almost overpowering. When he took a nap, he found himself dreaming of crowded stands at a World Series baseball game, of the sweating, soggy mob during a subway rush-hour in New York. When he awoke, the loneliness hit him again.

  Just to keep himself from going crazy, he set himself little tasks. He wrote a brief history of their expedition for some wholly hypothetical popular magazine; he worked out a dozen or so return courses with the computers in the control room; he went through the Russians’ personal belongings to find out just for curiosity’s sake, since it could no longer be of any conceivable importance—who the Soviet MI man had been.

  It had been Belov. That surprised him. He had liked Belov very much. Although, he remembered, he had also liked Schneider very much. So it made some sense, on a high-order planning level, after all.

  He found himself, much to his surprise, regretting Kolevitch. Damn it, he should have made some more serious attempt to get close to the man before the end!

  They had felt a strong antipathy toward each other from the beginning. On Kolevitch’s side it no doubt had something to do with O’Brien’s being chief navigator when the Russian had good reason to consider himself by far the better mathematician. And O’Brien had found his assistant singularly without humor, exhibiting a kind of subsurface truculence that somehow never managed to achieve outright insubordination.

  Once, when Ghose had reprimanded him for his obvious attitude toward the man, he had exclaimed: “Well, you’re right, and I suppose I should be sorry. But I don’t feel that way about any of the other Russians. I get along fine with the rest of them. It’s only Kolevitch that I’d like to swat and that, Ill admit, is all the time.”

  The captain had sighed. “Don’t you see what that dislike adds up to? You find the Russian crew members to be pretty decent fellows, fairly easy to get along with, and that can’t be: you know the Russians are beasts—they should be exterminated to the last man. So all the fears, all the angers and frustrations, you feel you should logically entertain about them, are channeled into a single direction. You make one man the psychological scapegoat for a whole nation, and you pour out on Semyon Kolevitch all the hatred which you would wish to direct against the other Russians, but can’t, because, being an intelligent, perceptive person, you find them too likable.

  “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, compartme
nt 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!