The Jupiter Plague

16

“Dr. McKay sent me,” Eddie Perkins said when Sam turned around. He was surprised to find that there were at least a dozen people in the room with him.

“Here,” Sam said, handing him the hypodermic needle. “Take this and the capsule the general is holding — keep it upright — and get them to the team at once. Tell them this is the cure for Rand’s disease. Be careful with it, I don’t know what it is and there is no more where it came from, at least not right now. Microanalysis — they’ll know what to do. I’ll call Dr. McKay and tell him what has happened.”

“He’s under sedation, you’ll have to wait until the morning. We were afraid of the strain he… he was quite forceful in arranging that you be let out of the ship.” Perkins started away cradling the hypo and the capsule in his cupped hands, but he halted for an instant at the door and turned. “Listen, Sam… thanks…” He hurried out.

Nita was sound asleep and Sam was washing the dye from his hands and face when the general reappeared.

“You have five minutes,” he said. “I’ve had a call from Dr. Yasumura at the ship and he wants us out there right away. I’ve had enough of the police for one day, thank you, so I sent for my own transportation and it’s on the way up here from the fort now. Is this going to work, Sam?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, toweling himself dry. “The Jovian gave us the cure all right — you saw how it worked with Nita — but there’s not enough in that capsule to treat fifty people, and there must be fifty thousand cases by now. It’s all up to the team in the lab. If they can analyze it, break it down and build it up again on their own then the plague is over. I certainly hope they can.”

“What are the odds?”

“No odds at all — or a billion to one. All we can do is wait and see. And go back to the ‘Pericles’ and try and make some sense out of the Jovian conversation. Did Stanley say what he wanted?”

“I didn’t talk to him. Just got the message to come at once.”

When they came out on the copter platform Sam was surprised to see that it was already light, the last stars were fading in the west and the sky had that clean-washed look that you only see after a rain. A rumble of heavy engines sounded from the south and grew to a roar as a flight of five heavy VTO craft thundered overhead. They began to circle as one of them dropped straight down toward the hospital below, aiming for the platform where the two men waited.

“When you said transportation I thought you meant a copter,” Sam shouted above the roar of the propellers. “Those vertical-take-off things aren’t even supposed to land here.”

“I know all that, but being a general has its compensations. And I’m still not in love with those police at the airport so I thought a little waving of the big stick might quiet them down…”

His words were drowned in the howel of the engine as the plane touched the platform lightly, then settled down onto its landing gear. The blast of sound died to a mutter as the canopy slid open and the pilot leaned out. “They told me you wanted this, sir,” he said, passing down the belt and holster with the long-barreled, chrome, teak-handled pistol in it.

“Now that’s more comfortable,” General Burke said, settling it into place on his thigh before he climbed up into the plane.

Sam followed him. It was a tight squeeze with the three of them in the cockpit, and as soon as the canopy was shut the plane hurled itself into the air. The other VTO planes closed in around it while it was still rising and they all swung over into horizontal flight in a practiced maneuver and headed eastward toward Kennedy Airport. They came in high and first swung in a rapid circle above the towering projectile of the “Pericles” before settling down slowly next to it. The blunt nose slid by and the length of the scarred gray hull as they grounded together near the base. This time the stares of the police were not as menacing as they walked through the gap that had been opened in the barbed wire, to the landing ramp pushed up below the open air lock.

“Has anyone entered this ship?” the general snapped at the two policemen who were on guard at the base.

“No, sir — we’ve had orders that—‘

“That’s fine. No one is to enter.”

He pushed by before he had a chance to hear what the orders were and stamped up the metal steps: Sam followed him through the air lock and into the elevator. Stanely Yasumura was slumped down in the captain’s chair on the bridge and waved them over when they entered.

“It’s all on the record,” he said. “The log was kept right up to the very end; the men who manned this ship had guts, but really.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked.

“The ‘Pericles’ was trapped right after they landed, something to do with a magnetic field that the Jovians’ generated. I skipped over the early part fast but you can go back and hear it for yourself. Then the natives contacted the crew, learned English and killed the captain — just like that, opened him up and called it talking.”

“That’s the same word the Jovian here used— what do they mean by it?”

“I would like to find out the answer to that one myself — I’ve been trying to get through to our specimen, but he won’t answer his phone. Anyway, the men on Jupiter thought that it meant total understanding or total comprehension, or maybe the understanding of basic life processes. The Jovians apparently have no machines and never developed a machine culture — but what they do have is a bioculture. They seem to be able to do whatever they want with living cells. They acted like kids with a new toy when the ship landed with a different life form; they wanted to take them apart to see what made them tick. And they did, one by one, tracked down the crewmen and dissected them…”

“Hell is cold, just as Dante wrote,” General Burke said as he softly stroked the butt of his pistol. “They’re devils right out of the Old Testament, no souls, no feelings. We’re just going to have to outfit this ship again and go back there with a hold full of H-bombs…”

“No, Cleaver, you have it wrong,” Sam said. “They’re a different life form and they obviously think and feel — if they can feel — differently from us. They didn’t ask the crew of the ‘Pericles’ if they wanted to be taken to pieces to be examined, but do we ask laboratory rats if they want to be dissected or do we give the chickens any choice between growing up or being given vile diseases while they are still in the eggs?”

“Nonsense! We can’t ask questions of rats and eggs, nor do we want to…”

“You’re right. So maybe the Jovians can’t ask us the right questions — or maybe they just don’t want to. Perhaps they take each other apart the same way without asking permission, so why should they ask us?”

“That’s what some of them thought on the ‘Pericles' ” Yasumura said. “The first officer, Weeke, he always talked like a stolid Dutchman but he had a real imagination, theoretical physics. He put his theory into the log that the Jovian individuals weren’t really individual but had a single mass mind. If this is true, they wouldn’t care in the slightest if they were killed, as individuals, any more than a fingernail cares when it gets clipped off. And if that’s the only kind of existence they knew, they would automatically assume that we are the same — so they would have started taking us apart with great pleasure.”

“It’s only a theory,” General Burke rumbled.

“But it explains a lot. Either every Jovian is a sizzling genius or there is one mind big enough to handle almost everything. It — or they — learned to speak English just as fast as it could be read to them. And they had never even seen or imagined there would be machines, yet they mastered machine technology in a matter of days, almost contemptuously. They needed to use it to work inside the alien environment of the ship, to build that pressure tank down below and control the ship, so they learned what they had to.”

“Wasn’t there any resistance to all this?”

“A good deal, but all ineffective.” Yasumura turned on the log and began scanning for the entry he wanted. “Maybe in the beginning before the Jovians were established in the ship something might have been done, though it is hard to imagine what. Remember, they couldn’t take off and short of blowing up the ship and themselves with it there was little they could really do. Anyway, here’s how it ended; this is the last entry in the log made by Commander Rand.” He pressed the playback button.

“… May twenty-fourth according to the bridge clock, but we’re not keeping track of the time any more. I shouldn’t say we — they got Anderson a little while ago and he was the last one, I mean outside of me. Those tendril things can go through any kind of metal and they are all through the ship now and there’s no way to cut them. One touch and you’re paralyzed and that’s the end of that. I saw what they did to him too. He’s down on C deck in one of those tanks right next to two of the others. All of them keep getting sick, then getting cured, though they don’t look the same afterward and finally they die. I’ve never seen anything like… they must have mutated the diseases from germs they found in our bodies or I don’t know what…”

There was a rattling noise, then a crash of glass before Rand began speaking again, and his voice was thicker. “If I sound like I have been drinking, I have, because it’s a little hard to bear, you know, with everyone else…” He stopped, and when he continued he sounded much better. “But I’ve broken the bottle because I can’t be drunk to do what I have to do. Listen, whoever you are, I hope you never hear this. I hope I can get through to the engine room and do what I have to do. I’m going to knock out all the safeties and crank up the pile until it blows. That’s just my suicide because the rest are dead or should be dead. Those things out there are smart and they’re going to learn all about us and learn how to fly this ship and then I don’t know what they’re planning to do. But I want to stop them. This is Commander Rand, closing the log, the day is May twenty-fourth and one way or another there are going to be no more entries in this log.” The loud-speaker rustled with background noise but there was nothing else after this.

Yasumura reached out and flicked it off and it was a while before anyone said anything.

“He was right,” General Burke said. “They did bring their hellish disease and try to destroy us all.”

“No, they didn’t,” Sam said. “What they did here looks more like a laboratory experiment than any deliberate attempt to wipe us out. The way they tailor-made a disease to fit earthly conditions, to attack animals they had never seen, to mutate under these conditions, means they have a perfect or almost perfect knowledge and control of biochemistry at every level. We still have no idea of how they spread the virus from the ship, sending it across Long Island in almost a straight line — a physical impossibility by our state of knowledge. If they had wanted to they could have released a plague that would have spread around the world and have wiped us out in a day. But they didn’t.”

“Then what were they trying to accomplish…?” the general started to say, but Stanley Yasumura cut him off.

“Look at those needles jump — there’s juice being fed into the high-power rig, the ultrafrequency radio!” The radio-phone buzzed and he turned to answer it: a uniformed man appeared on the screen.

“This is the tower, what are you broadcasting? We’re getting interference on our navigating frequencies…”

“Not us, but there is a thing in a tank downstairs that has cut into all the circuits. What does the signal sound like?”

“Just a moment, I’ll hook it into this circuit. And see if you can’t do something about cutting it off; it has harmonics that are lousing up almost all of our operating frequencies.”

The voice died and a moment later was replaced by a high-pitched, shrieking moan that set their nerves on edge like a fingernail on glass. The engineer quickly cut the volume down to a sinister mutter.

“What on earth is that?” General Burke asked.

“Better say ‘what on Jupiter.’ In a strange way it sounds something like the Jovian’s voice. Stanley, could that signal get through to Jupiter and be understood there?”

“I don’t see why not — if there is a good receiver out there, that frequency should cut right through the Heaviside layer and be detectable that far out if it has enough power behind it. But, do you mean…?”

“I don’t mean anything, I’m just wondering— Look, those meters just dropped back to zero. What’s happening?”

Yasumura checked them, then other instruments in the room. “No power being drawn at all any more. Wonder what our friend in the tank is up to?”

“Let’s get down there,” Sam said, starting for the door.

The first thing they noticed when they emerged from the elevator was the sharp smell of ammonia that the blowers were laboring to remove from the air; they started to run. The deck near the reinforced wall of the pressure tank was running with moisture as was the wall of the tank itself. The layer of frost had vanished.

“The tank has warmed up…!”

“And the pressurized atmosphere is gone from it too, I imagine,” Sam said, looking at the darkened phone screen.

“Then the thing is dead — it committed suicide,” the general said. “But why—?”

Sam shook his head. “I wonder if we really can call it suicide? That Jovian in there probably never had any intention or desire to return to its own planet. It came here to do a job — or maybe to make an experiment, that might be a better description. Our world was its laboratory and we were the experimental animals. The experiment was finished, it made its report—”

“The radio signal!”

“—when everything was gone. So it died, or disconnected, or whatever you want to call it. Function performed. About as unemotional as an epithelial cell in your skin; it protects your body, dies and falls off.”

“One consolation,” General Burke kicked out at the tangle of cables. “At least it had to report its mission or its experiment a failure.”

“Did it?” Sam asked. “Perhaps it was a social experiment, not a medical one. They certainly knew beforehand how the disease would affect our bodies, so perhaps it was our social grouping or our science they were interested in. How we would combat the disease, what we would do when we found they had caused it. After all, they made no real attempt to hide the fact they had brought it — the log is still here and once the door was opened the Jovian’s presence was obvious. And it had the capsule ready, don’t forget that. Once it understood the threat to cut off all communication it delivered the thing at once…”

There was the sound of running footsteps and they turned to see Eddie Perkins in the doorway.

“I tried to call you on the radiophone but I couldn’t get through,” he said, gasping a bit as he caught his breath.

“What is it?”

“Rand’s… Rand’s disease. The cure. We can duplicate the stuff in the capsule. It’s all over. We have it licked.”