Гарри Гаррисон - The Jupiter Plague

But when he looked back at the telltale he saw that her temperature had dropped to one hundred and five.

It was unnatural the way it happened, and completely impossible. Yet so was Rand’s disease. As they watched, in a matter of a few minutes, the disease was destroyed. Within five minutes her temperature was normal and within fifteen the flushed swellings had changed color and begun to subside. Her breathing steadied, became smooth and deep.

When she opened her eyes she looked up at them and smiled.

“Sam, darling… whatever are you doing with your face painted up like that?”

“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.”