"Leinster, Murray - Plague" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

Within this same hour, Galactic time, a sub-commissioner on Thallis II forbade the colonization of the planet’s largest moon by arbitrary edict, which could not be gainsaid. The only reason ever discovered for the order was that the sub-commissioner enjoyed the hunting on that tiny planet, and it would be spoiled if the crowded population on Thallis II were admitted to colonists’ rights. Simultaneously, four spacelines in the
Denib sector applied for permission to discontinue• operations. They asserted, and offered to prove, that the cost of supplying required reports to the Administrative Service had grown to be the greatest single item of their operating costs, and made operation impossible save at a loss. (They were forbidden to discontinue operations.) And on the same Galactic day on Foorph—the solitary planet of Etamin—a crack express-liner from the Algol sector was refused landing and ordered to return to its port of departure. Of the more than eighteen hundred documents covering its voyage and cargo, exactly one lacked a sub-sub-clerk’s indorsement. The Administrative Service was behaving exactly as usual.
But Ben Sholto was not behaving as a properly subordinate officer in the Naval Reserve. Half an hour after seeing Sally on the vision-screen, he cut loose the grapples and the tiny air lock hissed shut. The yacht seemed to swerve aside, but it was actually the little sports cruiser which abruptly altered course. Dead ahead, the blue-white sun of this minor solar system burned terribly in emptiness. The long, slim space yacht which had come so far sped on and on. The smaller ship curved away and drove hard to get orbital speed. Ben went to the GC phone. He stabbed at the Headquarters’ button again. The fat officer thrust out an under lip.
“Well?’ he demanded challengingly.
“Reporting,” said Ben woodenly. “The ship from Pharona did not respond to repeated calls. It seemed to be heading straight for the sun, here. I have pulled away from it now, because on its present course it will either hit the sun or pass so close that nothing could possibly live on it. I suggest that the entire crew must be dead.”
‘Watch it,” said the fat officer.
Ben clicked off the phone. He went back to the single stateroom in his sports cruiser. Sally Hale said faintly, “Really, Ben, I’m all right. Just .
just you were the only person in the world I could appeal to. I’m hunted.”
“Not any more,” said Ben. “You’re safe now!”
“I . . . broke the quarantine on Pharona,” said Sally. “It . . . it was terrible, Ben! They’re. .. dying there by. . - by millions. Women. Only women. And girls. And nobody knows why. Their bodies give off cosmic rays, and they die. That’s all. There’s no real night on Pharona, you know, only twilight, so it was only the day before I left that they . . . discovered that women who have the p’ague glow, too. They get. . . phosphorescent. They don’t feel badly, only oppressed. They get fever, and cosmic rays come from them, and in the dark they shine faintly, and they get weaker and weaker, and then they die. And men are immune, and they are going crazy! Their wives and sweethearts and daughters and mothers dying before their eyes. And they’re not even in danger—”
“Don’t tell me now if you don’t want to,” said Ben.
“I. . . think I’m all right. I must be!” said Salty. “I was twelve days on the way. If. . - if I’d had the plague I’d have died, wouldn’t I? At least I’d be sick by now! But I’m not. Only. . . I couldn’t sleep much, Ben. I
was all alone on the yacht, and four days out I heard the alarm g-go out for me, and I’ve been hearing the GC phone organizing a hunt for me—”
“Maybe you’d better eat something, and take a nap,” said Ben. “But how’d you come to pick this place to run to?”
Sally flushed a little.
“You were here.” She looked at him pleadingly. “I . . . couldn’t help it that my father. . . acted as he did. You know that after . . . well after my father got so angry with you, I felt badly. I went to Pharona to visit my uncle. And the Bazin Expedition came, and left for Lore, and the subcommissioner ordered it back, and it came, protesting all the way, and
in four days the plague broke out. 1 was away over on the other side of the planet. The plague came back with the Bazin Expedition. We heard about it, and the quarantines that were clapped down, and finally the whole planet was quarantined. My uncle thought I would surely be safe, because his estate is so isolated. And then one of the maids got the plague. She’d been home visiting, and Uncle had put Geiger counters at the gates, so she didn’t enter the grounds, but . . . it was time for me to get away. So he sent me off in the yacht. All by myself. He gave me my course. He stayed behind, with all his servants and staff. He. - . said he’d report I’d died. I couldn’t have been exposed. Not possibly. I hadn’t been within a mile of any woman who’d had the plague, or any man who’d been near any woman who had it. But if I stayed I’d die, so he sent me off. That was right, wasn’t it?”
“Surely!” said Ben quietly. “Go on—”
“You see,” she said pleadingly, “I hadn’t been exposed, and. . . nobody was missing from the estate, because I was supposed to be dead. It seemed like it was perfect. But they. . . must have gone to seal the engines of the yacht so nobody could use it, and they found it gone, and thought somebody had stolen it—”
“So you’re officially dead,” said Ben. “All right. Go to sleep. You’re safe. I’ve reported that the yacht didn’t swerve from its course and dived into this sun. It’s actually diving there now. Its not very probable that any spaceship coming out of interstellar space would hit a star by accident. It would take good piloting! But it may be just improbable enough not to seem like a made-up yarn.”
Ben went out of the stateroom and forward to the control cabin. His face was set. In olden days, perhaps, a human being could move about freely. But in these days of the Galactic Commission and the brass hats under it, there was a vast amount of red tape about everything. The brass hats, of course, were the administrative officials under the Commission, and they climbed to authority by seniority and a pious avoidance of anything which could not be justified by written rules. They were a sort of galactic civil service, surrounded by pomp and power. Some of them were decent enough, but a deplorable lot were stuffed shirts and brass hats. Fortunately, they had no control over the surface of planets, but they supervised all traffic in space with a fussy particularity which was madden-
ing. Any ship capable of space flight had to be registered and licensed, and all space-ffights conducted under checks and double-checks which made spacemen utterly disrespectful.
“The question,” said Ben wryly in the control room, “appears to be serious. Sally isn’t legally alive. I have, in fact, official orders to kill her. I’m not going to do it. So, just how am I going to manage things?”
Every spaceship is inspected minutely at every spaceport it enters. He could not take Sally into any inhabited planet without questions he could not answer. He could not— He pushed the CC button again. The screen lighted. The fat officer
said boredly:
“What’s the mattei? A destroyer’s on the way.”
“The vessel 1 reported has vanished in the corona of this sun,” said Ben smoothly. “This is a dwarf blue-white, as you may remember. The strange ship made an apparent grazing impact and is melted down to a blob of metal if it isn’t vaporized by now. I was taking some pictures back yonder. May I be released from Reserve duty?”
“You will await orders—”
The fat officer began to speak with pompous indignation. Then there was a scream behind Ben. Sally came stumbling out of the stateroom, her face like chalk.
“Ben!” she choked. “I’ve . . - got the plague—”
Ben’s left hand slammed off the CC phone, but it was too late. He knew it was too late. He’d seen the fat officer’s eyes widen blankly. Sub-ether phone communication does not operate by ether waves, and no time-lag has ever been detected even between the two rims of the Galaxy. Already the fat officer at headquarters had seen Sally and heard her cry.
Ben was very white. Within minutes the whole Space-Navy of the Galaxy would have on their recorders the description of himself and his sports cruiser, with orders to hunt him down and blast him out of space on sight. Ten million dead on Pharona, and a case of the plague at large to start it up again— Of course!
He said hoarsely, in an effort to be reassuring:
“Don’t be silly, Sally! You can’t have it—”
Her teeth chattered.
“B-but I havel I t-turned out the light to try to sleep, and . . . and I saw my hand glowing. And I got up and looked in the mirror, and rn-my face—”
She reached out and turned off the light switch in the control room. The instrument dials glowed faintly. But so did Sally. Her features and her throat and arms were faintly visible in an ethereal light which made her—rather than frightening—look like an angel. And from within the thin garments in which she had meant to sleep there came a faint effulgence, too.
Ben’s throat made a queer sound.
“I. . . thought,” gasped Sally pitifully, “that we. . . could be happy
because . . . no one could ever forbid us to be together if I w-was supposed to be dead. But I didn’t think I was going to die a-after I’d joined you—’
Ben took her in his arms, helplessly. For an instant she thrust away from him, but then she clung close.
“You c-can’t catch it, anyway,” she sobbed. “Please hold me close, Ben. I d-don’t want to die, when I’d j-just run away so I could never I-leave you—,,

At this time the members of the Galactic Commission, itself, were pressing the investigations which were later to make intergalactic exploration and colonization practical. They had set aside whole planets for research stations, and far out beyond the Galaxy’s rim there were those infinitely hazardous laboratories where men extended the knowledge of stellar physics so that we who follow them have already circumnavigated the universe and some day may even understand it. The members of the Commission also directed the investigation of that endocrine balance which is youth, so that age is now a measure merely of time, and the word “senility” is now marked “obsolete” in the dictionaries. But on this same day the mines on Thotmes II had to be shut down despite their usefulness. An Administrative Service clerk had discovered a flaw in the charter of the space line which ran to Thotmes II. It was not authorized to carry mineral products. Therefore it had to be subjected to heavy fines, and it was driven into bankruptcy, and one hundred and twenty thousand miners were isolated from the rest of humanity by the breaking of their only transportation link.
And on this same day the Galaxy’s greatest mind in medicine was refused space-transportation. He wanted to go to Pharona, but the subcommissioner in residence on the planet on which he lived was a hypechondriac, and wished adequate medical attention to be available for his nervous stomach-aches.
And another sub-commissioner, on Pharona, diverted attention from his own stupidity—which had caused a plague with ten million victims-by pompously indignant demands for Ben Sholto’s destruction.
Ben Sholto, however, paid no attention. The light was on in the control room again. His face was white and set. The Reserve bracelet was off his wrist, now. It had signaled violently for him to report to Headquarters. For answer, he’d hacked it in half and smashed its mechanism, and then thrust it down into the very tip of the fuel bin, pushing until he felt dizzy as the heavy metal of the bracelet turned into energy for the motors and the total-acceleration field. With metal for the converter to work on, the small craft surged ahead under an amount of power only armored cruisers normally developed.
Sally sat quietly in her chair, staring at Ben through eyes that were very steady now. He regarded a Geiger counter. It clicked busily. His face went gray.
“You’re giving off cosmics,” he said dry-throated. “That’s the sign of the plague. There’s nothing else known that will make the human body give off cosmics.”
“I’ll be dead in . . . two or three days,” said Sally, unsteadily. “Sometimes women live a week. Sometimes ten days. M-mostly when the plague first starts, and there are a lot of women about. In the cities, at the beginning, the women lived even two weeks. But in small places they die quickly. And I’m the only woman here—”