Then he started out. And stopped. He looked around and looked carefully from man to man. “O’Brien,” he said at last. “You come up with me.”
Well, at least, the navigator thought, as he followed, at least it’s even now. One Russian and one American. If only it stayed that way!
Schneider glanced in at the hospital and nodded to himself. “Smothers,” he commented. “He’s reached the second stage. Fastest-acting damn bug ever. Probably finds us excellent hosts.”
“Any idea what it’s like?” O’Brien asked, finding, to his surprise, that he was having trouble catching up to the little doctor.
“Uh-uh. I spent two hours with the microscope this afternoon. Not a sign. I prepared a lot of slides, blood, spinal fluid, sputum, and I’ve got a shelf of specimen Tars all filled up. They’ll come in handy for Earthside doctors if ever we— Oh, well. You see, it could be a filterable virus, it could be a bacillus requiring some special stain to make it visible, anything. But the most he was hoping for was to detect it—we’d never have the time to develop a remedy.”
He entered the control room, still well ahead of the taller man, stood to one side, and, once the other had come in, locked the door. O’Brien found his actions puzzling.
“I can’t see why you’re feeling so hopeless, doe. We have those white mice down below that were intended for testing purposes if Mars turned out to have half an atmosphere after all. Couldn’t you use them as experimental animals and try to work up a vaccine?”
The doctor chuckled without turning his lips up into a smile. “In twenty-four hours. Like in the movies. No, and even if I intended to take a whirl at it, which I did, it’s out of the question now.”
“What do you mean—now?”
Schneider sat down carefully and put his medical equipment on the desk beside him. Then he grinned. “Got an aspirin, Pres?”
Automatically, O’Brien’s hand went into the pocket of his jumper. “No, but I think that—” Then he understood. A wet towel unrolled in his abdomen. “When did it start?” he inquired softly.
“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.
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.