What’s Eating You?

Astounding Science Fiction May 1957

(1957) Randall Garrett

It’s not enough to pay attention to Truth, to Facts or to Now. But how can you get people who think only in terms of Facts to see that? To see that “mere fantasies” are deadly important …

“The unchanging face of the moon,” they called it. In a way, it was. Seen from Earth with the naked eye, it certainly didn’t look any different than it had for the past fifty million or so years. But a fairly good-sized telescope would reveal littl e dots and blotches here and there that represented change. You had to know where to look, but it wasn’t too hard to find the dots that represented the buildings erected by Man in his plunge toward the stars.

There were the Atomic Products Plants, for in stance; they had solved the problem of atomic waste disposal —moon craters don’t mind being dumped full of the stuff, and there’s no air or water to carry it away. There were the big interplanetary spacefields and, on the side of the moon away from Earth, where they would be untroubled by Earthlight, were the two Lunar Observatories.

But, to the public mind, the most mysterious and controversial of all these installations was the Lunar Quarantine Station of the Stellar Exploration and Colonization Adminis tration. It housed men and women who had risked their health, their sanity, and their lives to explore and chart new planets for Mankind —men and women who were now prisoners in solitary confinement. Some of them had not been near another human being fo r more than five years.

Alex Zavacki was one of these. It had been four years since he had kissed his fiancé e good-by; it had been three years since he had been out of his sealed apartment in the Station.

He. had two years to go.

His first inkling th at the so-called average man was more interested in the SEACA Quarantine Station than might normally have been the case came when he was checking over a list of neologisms that had been coined on Purvis, one of the oldest of the nineteen colonized extra-s o lar planets.

Zavacki was a linguist, and a good one. He had seen that there was a job to be done, and he had sacrificed six years of his life to get it done. In the eight decades that had passed since the first colony had been established, the English la nguage had begun to shoot off in twenty different directions, and Zavacki wanted to check and record the divergences.

His notes were spread on the desk before him. He studied them carefully, occasionally transcribing notes from one sheet to another, cros s-checking meanings and pronunciations and derivations, completely oblivious to the comfortable surroundings of his apartment.

It was one of a hundred similar apartments —well-lit, comfortable, almost luxurious. It was built to make one man as happy in isolation as possible.

A soft ping! ping! came from the solidiphone signal.

Zavacki looked up, scowling. Oh, goodie! I have friends, he thought sourly as he tapped the contact plate. Would people never learn not to call while he was working?

The wall on the other side of the desk vanished, and the heavy body of Division Chief Baedecker was suddenly seated on the other side of the desk. The expression on his round face was that of a badly worried man.

Before he could say anything, Zavacki said: “Deck , if you’ve come to unload some of your worries on me, you can just trot them off to someone else. I’ll listen to them tonight after work, but not now. I’m not a psychologist or an Advice-to-the-Lovelorn columnist.”

“This is business,” Baedecker said in his growling, rumbling baritone. “And if you can’t be civil, be quiet. Or I’ll fire you.”

Zavacki couldn’t help grinning. “Gee! Such a threat strikes fear into the very depths of my miserable and penitent soul. All right; if it’s business, I’ll listen.”

Baedecker smoothed a palm over the top of his balding head, wiping off the beads of perspiration that glittered under the overhead lights. He was a gross man, palpably, ballooningly, bulgingly fat. On Earth, the rolls of flesh would have sagged under the gravitational pull, sagged into ugly, baglike gobbets of dough. But the meager pull of Luna left him round and plump, like an exagger ated rubber kewpie doll inflated to the limit.

“Have you been reading or listening to the speeches of Delegate O‘Dowd?”

Zavacki pulled black, bushy brows over black, deep eyes. “No. I don’t pay any attention to Earth news. Why?”

“That’s the trouble,” Baedecker said, sighing gustily. “Nobody here has any time for anything but their own projects. O’Dowd is trying to get t he Stellar Exploration Laws revised.”

“What’s this got to do with linguistics?” Zavacki slapped his desk top.

“If you’ll be quiet, I’ll tell you. O’Dowd has been jumping on quarantine for a month or so now. We’ve been sending out press reports replying to his charges, but nobody pays any attention to them after O’Dowd gets through with them.

“A while back, he was saying that the men here are ‘imprisoned against their will.’ They are poor, downtrodden heroes who, after giving their all for humanity, ha ve been locked up for nothing they have done.”

Zavacki chuckled softly. “So what’s he saying now?”

“Well, we sent down a press report —an interview, sort of. We said that most of the Primary Explorers were perfectly happy here and liked their job. He ta lked around it for a while, but now he’s portraying the boys as a bunch of loafers who are sitting around drawing fantastic wages for doing nothing —wasting the taxpayers money and so on.”

Zavacki shook his head. “I could have told you that approach wouldn’t work.”

“Probably you could have,” Baedecker said. “That’s why I’ve come to you now. I have some more press releases; I thought you could reword them so that they’ll have more impact on the public, if you see what I mean.”

“I see what you mean ,” Zavacki told him, “but it’s not my job. It isn’t linguistics; it’s mob psychology. Put a psych man on it.”

Baedecker closed his eyes and pursed his lips. For a second, he didn’t speak. When he did, his voice brought out the words in slow, measured cadences, reminding Zavacki of the determined, ponderously powerful tread of an elephant moving toward a known goal and brooking no opposition whatever.

“Now, you listen to me, Alexander Dubois Zavacki. I just happen to be Division Chief and Permanent Su pervisor of Lunar Base. I do not like to shove my weight around, but”—he shifted slightly in his chair, and it creaked under his hundred and seventy-odd kilograms of mass —-“but I have plenty to shove around if necessary.”

His eyes came open again, and th ere was a steely glitter in them. “The SEACA has been my life for thirty years, and I expect it to be my life for another thirty or forty, until I get too old to think clearly or I get bored with the job. Right now, I ‘m neither, and I ‘m not going to sit pat and let some wild-eyed demagogue like Delegate Daniel O’Dowd pull my job to pieces. I’ll use every weapon at my command to fight him. You are one of those weapons —perhaps my best one.”

Zavacki waited quietly. Baedecker obviously meant what he said. And, in spite of his huge body, he did stand a good chance of living well past the hundred mark. On Earth, his huge mass would put a strain on his heart that might do him in early, but there on the moon, it hardly made any difference.

“And don’t give me any guff about getting a psych man on the job,” Baedecker continued. “Mob psychology is an art, not a science, and you know it.” He closed his eyes again and waved a hand.

“On November 18, 2084, at the Linguistics School of Berlin Poly-tech, a demonstrat ion was staged —a student uprising protesting a proposed ruling by the Board of Regents. The main leaders of the demonstration were suspended, but they were eventually reinstated, and the rule was never passed.

“The one thing that the Board never knew wa s that the guiding genius behind the whole operation was one Alex Zavacki.” Again Baedecker’s eyes opened, small dots of eyes in a huge round face. “And then again, in Omaha, in 2091—”

Zavacki raised both hands. “Please, Deck; I surrender! Spare me the f ollies of a misspent youth.”

“All right, then. Will you take a look at these press releases and see what you can do with ‘em?”

“Send ‘em through, Deck; I’ll see what there is to do. And if you have any of O’Dowd’s statements, send them over, too; see t hat they’re all dated so that I can correlate ‘em.”

Baedecker nodded and broke the contact. The wall became a wall again as the Leinster projectors behind it ceased to function.

Within minutes, the reproducer on Zavacki’s desk was quietly pushing out f acsimiles of the press releases and the statements by O’Dowd and other related material.

An hour later, Alex Zavacki was staring out of the huge window of his apartment, looking at what might aptly be termed the Solar System’s busiest bottleneck. On a dome in the distance, large block letters proclaimed: LUNAR QUARANTINE STATION. And, below that, in smaller letters: Five Year Section.

Beyond it, the slender prows of interstellar vessels pointed skyward. There weren’t many such vessels in existence; o nly a few were needed as yet, and they were highly valuable and very expensive. The Interplanetary Engineering Corporation of North America made them, as it had built so many of the fleets of interplanetary vessels that moved outward to Venus and Mars. Bu t there was no need for fleets of faster-than-light ships —not yet.

Above everything hung the shining globe of Earth, bigger and brighter than any harvest moon, shedding its Earthlight over the Lunar landscape.

Very pretty; very imposing. And about as bleak a place for a man to spend five years of his life as could be imagined.

Zavacki thought of the others imprisoned in this section.

Raoul Jackson, the strange, lonely man with the piebald skin —part brown, part white —who couldn’t stand the sight of his particolored face in a mirror. He’d been born that way, and he hated himself for it. He spent his time working on a perfect weapon for alien beings, he said, but Zavacki had a hunch he was sublimating a desperate hatred for humanity.

Then there was Jack Wessler and his wife, the only team in the Section. They had gone out together for their year of exploration, and had c ome bac k and gone into quarantine together. They hadn’t wasted any time, e ither; in the past four years, they had produce d three daughters —charming, wonderful kids.

And then he thought of Jennifer. Sweet, warm, incredibly lovely Jennifer.

Had he been wrong to leave her behind on Earth while he went out, wild -goose ch asing across the galaxy? Six years is a long ti me to ask a girl to wait; she would be nearly twenty-seven by the time he returned. Would it have been better to ask her to come with him?

He shook his head. Jennifer Sterling was not Lana Wessler. Jen was no coward, and she wasn’t weak, but exploratory work on a violent, uninhabited planet just wasn’t her cup of tea.

No; the six years would have to be waited out. There had never been any question of either releasing the other, but Zavacki had had to go. He’d been assigned his planet and done his job on it in order to gain access to the records of the nineteen colonies. His work in linguistics, covering a unique situation, was worth almost every sacrifice. But not the sacrifice of Jen.

Because some of the explorers never came back. The one-man ships we re equipped with robotic return devices; if an explorer didn’t come back to his ship within the specified time, the ship automatically retraced its path through space to the Solar System, bringing back the recorded statements of the explorer. Each man car r ied at all times a radio with a beam locked to the ship; the throat mike picked up every word and recorded it.

Some men had died violently. Hearing those sudden, agonizing screams from the tapes was chilling. But others died of disease, and their words w ere sometimes even worse.

The word “disease” is like the word “insanity”; they both cover a multitude of afflictions which aren’t necessarily related to each other at all. A man is “insane” if his mind is malfunctioning to a marked degree, regardless of what the cause of that malfunction may be. If his body goes wrong, it may be classified as a “disease.”

Pneumonia, measles, arthritis, angina pectoris, chronic hiccoughs, appendicitis, cataract, leukemia, cancer, gangrene, and hives can all be lump ed under the same heading for no other reason than the fact that they are all malfunctions of various organs and tissues of the body. Something has gone wrong, and the body has reacted to it in a particular way which is detrimental to the life expectancy o f the organism. But, in that case, why aren’t mosquito bites, ingrown toenail, and sunburn “diseases”?

Well, they just aren’t, and that’s that. Such are the vagaries of language.

Up there, in the blackness of the lunar sky, was Earth. On that isolated globe, life had been evolving for something like two thousand million years. During that vast span of time, billions upon billions of organisms had acted and reacted, fought, killed, and died for the right to live. And during that time, a vast check-and-b a lance system had been worked out. Not a static system, but a dynamic one, a system that was always changing, shifting, and yet always the same.

Ambrose Beirce defined edible as: “Capable of being eaten, as a worm to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.”

Occasionally, one type of organism gained on another, and a whole species would die because they couldn’t adapt fast enough. And the judgment of the rest of Nature was: “It served them right; those who cannot keep themselves alive deserve to die.” A harsh judgment, perhaps, but nevertheless valid during most of the struggle.

Man was one of the myriads of organisms that had evolved in that aeon-long struggle for supremacy, and Man had fought grimly, doggedly, not only to hold on to his pos ition, but to push his way up. Individuals, failing, fell by the wayside, killed by their environment, but the survivors learned from those failures and pushed on, still climbing.

The bigger animals were soon conquered. A whale can be harpooned; a rhinoc eros can be trapped; an elephant can be shot; a wolf can be kicked to death; and a leopard can be strangled.

But the smaller animals are more numerous and more elusive. Mice and rats remained dangerous to man long after the tiger had become a sporting ta rget and the gorilla had to be protected from hunters. And flies, lice, ticks, and mosquitoes hopped and flew to bite and chew their victims even yet.

A forty-five caliber automatic will stop a charging bull in its tracks. Ever try to shoot a housefly wi th one?

And the most dangerous of all were the microorganisms —the amoeba, the fungus, the bacterium, and the half-living virus.

Zavacki shifted his eyes to look past Earth at the stars beyond. What might be waiting out there? What thing might be bid ing its time, waiting for Man to find it, so that it could destroy Man?

And the gobble’uns ‘ll git you, ef you don’t watch out!

Man had clawed and bit and stabbed and shot and poisoned his way to supremacy on Earth. But Earth was not enough for Man; he had more grandiose plans than that. He still had the Universe to lick.

Unless, Zavacki thought, some utter fool like Delegate O’Dowd leaves us wide open for anything that comes along.

He turned from the window and went back to the papers on his desk, leafing through them without rereading them.

What was O’Dowd up to? And why?

Zavacki considered his linguistic work to be of immense long-range importan c e. But Delegate O’Dowd wa s of more immediate importance.

He picked up a pencil and began makin g notes in the margins of the papers. Two hours later, he read them over carefully, tossed them into a file basket, turned on his recorder, and began dictating: “Press releases from Lunar Quarantine, 27 October 2106—”

All Saints’ Day had dawned over Greater New Orleans with only the faintest traces of wispy cloud in the sky, and by noon even these had disappeared, leaving the heavens a warm, spotless dome of blue.

Jennifer Sterling strolled along the second level walkway, breathing in the rich autumn air with heady pleasure. It was a wonderful day! A beautiful day! Even here, in the City, it was spicy and spine-tingling.

For a moment she thought nostalgically of Vermont. What must it be like up there now? Would the trees have lost all their y ellow-and-red beauty? Would they be just naked things, holding their gnarled arms to the sky, standing ankle-deep in their discarded clothing? Or would they still be decorating the New England countryside with stationary clouds of gold and vermilion?

Sho uld she fly up and see for herself? It was a lovely idea, but she discarded it almost at once. She had work to do, and New Orleans was beautiful in its own way.

Below her, on the traffic level, the cars moved through the streets in humming streams, and a bove her the tall buildings speared up toward a clear, clean sky.

It was nearly a mile from St. Philip’s to her apartment, but she had walked all the way down, and was now walking all the way back.

Her mouth curved in a soft smile as she thought of the story about the carrier pigeon who had arrived seven hours late with a message.

“It was such a beautiful day,” he’d said, “that I thought I’d walk.”

There was a soft buzz from the bracelet at her wrist. She lifted her arm and pressed the little stud o n the bracelet.

“Jennifer Sterling here,” she said.

“There is a communication from Luna for you. Can you be at a solidiphone within the next fifteen minutes?”

“From Luna?” There was excitement in her voice. “I’ll be home in five minutes!”

She to ok off at a sprint, heading for the nearest aircab landing.

She made it well within the promised five minutes. She took the drop from the roof to her apartment, unlocked her door, threw her hat into a chair, and ran for the solidiphone. After identifying herself, she waited for the call to be put through. Then, suddenly, the wall faded and Alex was sitting there.

“Hi, honey,” he said, a faint huskiness in his voice.

“Alex … oh, Alex.”

And then, for a long moment neither of them said anything.

Sh e was tall and slender and delicately-boned. Her oval face was finely molded, a perfect setting for the large, warm hazel eyes. Her dark brown hair was brushed back from her face like a glossy helmet of some dark and deeply polished wood, but with a softn e ss no wood ever had.

At times, when it suited her, she could look coldly beautiful —regal and untouchable. At others —like now —she was warm and soft and loving and a thousand times more beautiful than anything he had ever seen before.

His hands and arms ached to touch her, but he held them rigidly on the desk that seemed to separate them. Because more than a desk separated them; years of time and thousands of miles of empty space were between them.

And yet, the image from the Leinster projectors was so real that it almost hurt him to look at her.

“I love you, Jen,” he told her for the thousandth time.

And for the next few minutes, their conversation was a soft babble of words. Soft words, meaningful words, emotional words. Sweet sounds that conveyed only love and tenderness.

Then, finally, Jennifer said: “It was wonderful of you to call, Alex, but —the expense. Luna-to-Earth calls aren’t cheap.”

“Official call,” Zavacki said. “I need a spy.”

“A spy? What on earth for?”

He grinned. “What on Eart h for? I don’t need one on Luna, so —”

“Alex! Don’t be silly! Get to the point.”

“O.K. Have you read any of the press statements or heard any of the speeches made by Delegate O’Dowd?”

Jen shrugged slightly. “Some of them. He’s trying to speed up inter stellar colonization. Relieve congestion on Earth and that sort of thing,”

“That’s right. Free land. Two farms in every pot. Clear out the crowded areas.”

She nodded. “And he’s trying to save the taxpayer’s money. Something about cutting the budget on the Interstellar Program —but I don’t see how he can do that and still speed up the Program.”

“Oh, he’s got a method,” Zavacki said, a trace of irony in his voice. “Now, we’re trying to fight him. A few days ago, I sent out some press releases refut ing some of the things he’s been saying. This afternoon, he’s broadcasting his reply. I want you to listen to it and read all his statements of the past month. I want to know what the general public reaction to his position is. Got me?”

Jen reached for h er notefile. “Sure. Too bad you can’t take a poll, like the Agency does —a Public Reaction Test.”

“I haven’t got that kind of money. Call me back collect as soon as you get any data.” He smiled. ” ‘Bye, baby.”

She managed a small smile. “Bye.” They cut the circuit without another word.

Jen simply sat there for a moment, looking at the screen. Then she shook herself and reached for a cigarette from the dispenser. She puffed it alight and then leaned back in her chair —smoking, staring at the ceiling, and thinking.

It shouldn’t be hard to get the reactions to O’Dowd. It was the sort of work she’d been trained for. Four years before, when Alex had taken his position with the Interstellar Program, she had taken a job with Continental Advertising. She ha d to have something to do during the long years they would be apart.

A degree in psychology was just what Continental wanted. In order to determine the mass reaction to their advertising campaigns, it was necessary to test and tabulate —dig into the p sychology of the “average” mind —to see exactly what sort of advertising would sway the public.

The question at hand, then, was similar. How much had O’Dowd impressed himself on the public mind? How good was his advertising campaign?

She dropped her cig arette into the disposer and dialed the public communicator one-way. The tank came on. A blonde was singing a torch song in a throaty voice. Jen twisted the selector switch to Channel D-62, and the throaty blonde gave way to an impossibly distorted little character who bounced around singing, to the tune of “Three Blind Mice”: Try Magna-Vita! Try Magna-Vita!

Oh, to be a bicentenarian, You will find that it’s certainly very un-Necessary to be vegetarian!

Try Magna-Vita!

Jen winced. After eighty y ears of being obsolete, the singing commercial was coming back again. Evidently, there was a certain segment of people to whom it would always be effective. And, after all, the gooney-looking little tri-di cartoon man was kind of cute.

She waited through the commercial and the station break.

Then, eight-inch high letters floated glowingly in the tank.

MEET THE PEOPLE!

She lit another cigarette and leaned back to watch.

Delegate Daniel O’Dowd was a barrel-built man inclining slightly to fa t. His face was broad and blue-jawed and darkly handsome in an odd way. His hair was almost blue-black, wavy, and receding slightly from his forehead. He was in his mid-forties, but looked younger. He sat easily in a chair, a friendly, almost benign smile on his face, while the interrogator made his little speech.

“Delegate Daniel O’Dowd, First Class Delegate to the Congress, has consented to appear before us today to explain some of the purpose behind a bill he has recently introduced to the Congress. I have some questions here which have been sent in by accredited news analysts in regard to the recent press releases from the Lunar Station, but before we go into that, Delegate O’Dowd will give us a little background on the subject. Delegate O’Dowd.”

O’Dowd leaned forward slightly in his chair. “This bill, as most of you know, concerns something that is vital to all of us —Man’s Conquest of Space.” His voice was smooth and easygoing, but with just the right touch of urgency behind it.

“A little over a ce ntury ago,” he continued, “the Bell-Kimball drive took mankind to the stars. I’m sure you’ve all heard the story of Project Elsewhere.

“Now, at that time, the Stellar Exploration Laws were enacted. These laws were enacted to safeguard the populace of Earth against life-forms that may exist —somewhere —out there.” His hand gestured upwards.

“Please understand, my friends: those laws were perfectly sound legislation —for their time. Let’s see what they are.

“Back then, they knew less of disease than we do today, so they provided for the quarantine of any man returning from an extra-solar planet —a quarantine of five years for men returning from previously unexplored planets, and lesser quarantines for planets which have been partially explored but not c o lonized.

“Then, if the planet has been proven safe after extensive exploration, a selected group of colonists is landed, supplied with all the needs that the Service feels is necessary for them on that planet. And then —for two full generations!—they are cut off from contact with Earth. Except”—and here he made a deprecative gesture —”of course, for semiannual subradio reports.”

He spread his hands. “As I have said, those laws were all right a century ago. But, my friends, times change. As we learn more and more about the science of medicine and the conditions on extra-solar planets, we must adjust those laws to fit our knowledge. We cannot —we must not —allow ourselves to be hampered by laws a century out of date.”

He narrowed his eyes slightly and held up a finger. “And make no mistake! We are being hampered.

“Our Preliminary Survey groups are finding livable, Earth-type planets all the time. In the past century, nearly a hundred have been charted and explored. But only nineteen of them have been colonized.

“After the preliminary survey —which is done from space —the explorers go in. They stay a year, and then return to Luna, their job finished. And what happens? They are imprisoned for five more years!”

The delegate paused for just long enough, then went on.

“My friends, there are better than four billion people on Earth. We’re crowded, and getting more crowded. Many of you, I know, are the tough, pioneering type of people; the kind of men and women our ancestors were. We need these new lan ds; these planets must be opened up to the people.

“It’s not a deadly struggle for existence out there; it’s good land and plenty of it, with all the aid and comfort that Earth’s manufacturers can give you. That land belongs to you —and I intend to see th at you get it!”

Then he leaned back in his chair. “I believe you had some questions?” he said to the news interrogator.

“Yes, Mr. Delegate,” the interrogator said, pulling up another chair.

(My! How cozy! thought Jennifer.) “I understand,” said th e personable young man, “that you intend to make two changes in the Stellar Exploration Laws; would you mind telling us what they are?”

“Actually, there are three,” O’Dowd said, “although the first two are very closely linked.” He held up a hand and bega n ticking them off on his fingers.

“One: Limit the isolation period on newly-colonized planets to one generation. Two: Take the limit off the quotas for colonization after the isolation period. And Three: Reduce the quarantine period of the primary explo rers from five to three years.”

“Wouldn’t that last change subject Earth to greater danger from extraterrestrial disease?”

The delegate shook his head. “Not at all. The record shows that any extraterrestrial disease shows up within the first year. Most of them show up within the first month. None has ever shown up after the second year. Three years is a perfectly safe margin.”

“What effect would such a change have on interstellar exploration, Mr. Delegate?”

“Let’s take a look at it. In the first pla ce, the Primary Exploration Division is terribly understaffed. Only a few men are willing to be locked up in an isolation ward for five years after exploring a single planet. There are more men in the Secondary Division —a great many more. Why? Because the y don’t have to stay locked up as long.

“Besides, there’s the money angle. During those five years, the men aren’t doing anything productive. I don’t mean that they don’t deserve the money; they do. But wouldn’t it be better for them —and for us —if they w ere locked up for only three years and then given their year’s vacation on Earth? That way, each man could make an exploration every four years instead of every six, increasing the number of explorations by one third, and, at the same time, attracting mor e men to the service.” He tapped his palm with a finger to emphasize. “When this bill passes, every man up there who has passed his third year in isolation will be able to start home immediately for his year’s vacation.”

There was more. There were other q uestions, other answers. But Jennifer Sterling didn’t hear any of them too clearly; her mind just held one thing.

If O’Dowd’s bill passed, Alex would be home within four months!

Alex Zavacki hurled an ashtray and shouted: “Why, you dumb, bird-brain !”

The ashtray bounced harmlessly off the invisible wall of the communicator tank and clattered to the floor. The image of Delegate O’Dowd smiled while the interrogator thanked him for his time. Zavacki cut off the beamcast and the wall regained its visu al solidity.

Then, his anger somewhat molli fied he bent over and picked up the ashtray. His anger came back when he found that the disposal mechanism inside was ruined.

He almost drop-kicked it across the room, but his better judgment slapped some reason into him, and he put it gently on the desk.

Then he sat down and got Baedecker on the communicator.

“Did you hear him, Deck?” he said, as soon as the fat man solidified across the desk.

Baedecker nodded heavily. “I heard him. Didn’t pay one b it of attention to your press releases, did he?”

“Sure he did!” Zavacki snapped. “He paid close attention! He studied ‘em! There’s no other way he could have waltzed around the facts so easily!”

Baedecker nodded again. “Just like I said. The boys and I have been trying to get people to notice us for the past month or so. I’d hoped maybe you could do better.” He sighed gustily.

Zavacki’s jaw set. “I will. I’m mad, now.” He didn’t sound angry; he sounded cold, grim. “Do you know what’s the matter? Ninet y-nine per cent of the population of Earth hasn’t got the slightest idea of what we’re up against or what’s going on here. I’m going to tell ‘em. I want you to give me a free hand —let me do it my way, without trying to tell me what to do. Will you do that ?”

Baedecker blinked. “Wellll —” He blinked again. Then: “That’s a pretty big order, Alex. I don’t think —”

“Maybe you don’t, Deck,” Zavacki interrupted. “Maybe you don’t think, and maybe that’s what’s the matter.”

The fat man shifted his weight in his chair, and his eyes became colder. “Look here, Zavacki; I’ve worked on this problem for two months, ever since O’Dowd first opened his mouth.

“The trouble is, we haven’t got anything to fight with. We know that the five-year quarantine is the shortest t ime we can possibly use. Diseases like cancer can recur in that time. But —we haven’t yet contacted an extraterrestrial disease that has waited that long. We’ve tried to fight him with facts, but we don’t have any evidence.

“We’re facing a problem similar to the one atomic physicists of a century and a half ago faced. They knew cumulative radiation could be dangerous to the gene plasm, but they had no way of proving it experimentally. We know the answer to that now, but do we have to go through that sort o f thing again?

“We just don’t have any evidence, Zavacki.”

“You just don’t know how to fight,” said Zavacki. “Look, do you happen to know why O’Dowd wants to change the law? I mean, What’s his personal reason?”

Baedecker’s heavy brows came down over his eyes. “I don’t know; I never thought of it. Why?”

“He has one,” Zavacki said posi tively. “The O’Dowds of this or any other world always have a personal reason. Power, money, prestige. They don’t try to bull something like this through for the sa ke of the great masses.

“Now, if we can find out what he, personally, is getting out of this, we may have something to work on. The first thing to do is get your men busy looking into his connections. You have agents, on Earth —use them.

“Find out if h e’s being bribed. It won’t be easy, and it probably won’t be enough evidence to use in court, but-we still might be able to use it ourselves. Figure out who would benefit if the bill is passed, and then see if they ‘ve been helping to line O’Dowd’s pocket.

“Meanwhile, I’m looking into an other angle. I have a hunch that O’Dowd wouldn’t object to being Prime Delegate. If he’s doing this for popular support, we may be able to attack him from that angle.”

The fat man was silent f or a full thirty seconds. Th en he nodded his head slowly and said. “O.K., Zavacki. Handle it your way. Maybe you’ve got weapons I don’t even know about.”

Alex Zavacki grinned lopsidedly. “Deck, you don’t have weapons; you make ‘em.” Then he slapped the cutoff.

Be sure you’re r ight —then go ahead. Jen Sterling wasn’t quite sure who’d said it —some politico, she supposed —but she liked the sentiment behind it. It had taken her two hours of hard self-searching to be sure she was right. Now she was going ahead.

She didn’t like what she was going to have to do, but, having made the decision, she knew she could carry it through without a hitch.

It took nearly two days to make the proper connections, but the proper use of her connections with two government officials, plus the judicio us use of her beauty and powerful personality had cut through about five parsecs of very red tape.

On the morning of the third day, she took the nine o’clock strato shuttle to Long Island, five hours later, she was in Switzerland.

She t ook an airtaxi to the World Organization Building and took the drop chute down to the office of Delegate Daniel O’Dowd.

O’Dowd looked much as he had on the tank; the Leinster projectors had duplicated him perfectly . He looked just a little more rum pled than he had on the news broadcast, but he’d been hard at work all morning, which excused his appearance.

He waved Jennifer to a seat and smiled his most engaging smile. Jennifer took it and out-smiled him with a flash of white teeth.

“I understand , Miss Sterling,” he said, “that you are deeply interested in seeing my bill on the Stellar Exploration Laws pass. However”—he tapped a flimsy on his desk —”your radiofac isn’t too explicit.”

The girl raised an eyebrow a fraction of an inch. “I didn ‘t think it would be very smart to let it out over the radiofac network.”

“You could have called —”

“And have it tapped?” She shook her head. “No thanks.”

O’Dowd frowned. “Really, Miss Sterling, I see no reason for this secrecy. The bill is perfectly hon est and above board.”

The look on Jennifer’s face suddenly became one of trusting innocence. As O’Dowd softened, she said: “Oh, I know that! But, you see ... well, I have a personal interest in getting that bill passed.”

“Oh?” Noncommittally.

She sai d nothing for a moment, pausing to glance around at the metallic austerity of the office —so similar to the room in which Alex worked, the room in which she had sun him so many times in the past three years, but never touched him.

“Very well, Miss Sterlin g,” the delegate said after a moment, “I shan’t pry into your personal affairs. If you are backing my bill, that’s good enough for me. If you would write —”

She shook her head quickly. “Mr. Delegate, do you know anything about popular opinion sampling?”

“Polls? Some, certainly. Most members of the Congress try to keep their fingers on the public pulse; they’d be very poor representatives of their constituents if they didn’t.”

Again the headshake. “I’m not talking about that,” Jen said. “Look here; do y ou know anything about advertising?” She didn’t wait for him to say anything, but rushed on. “Let’s say you’re advertising a product like … oh … breakfast food or toothpaste. You’re not interested in whether the public likes your product; you want them to buy your product.”

O’Dowd’s eyes narrowed just the slightest. “I see the distinction; go on.”

“You do your best to make it as good as possible and then you advertise it. Take toothpaste. As long as it cleans teeth, tastes good, and contains one of the really efficient anti-cavity compounds, that’s about all you can do with it. What more do you want?” She paused for effect.

“You want to sell it. And that will depend on the advertising —the packaging, the communicator ads, that sort of thing.

“Now, it’s rather easy to check on how good your advertising is; it’s a function of your sales. If your initial sales are low, then you want to change your advertising.

“But which way? How? To what extent? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”

O’Dowd’s eyes had become even narrower, and a faint, flickering smile played around his mouth. “I don’t believe I’d ever thought of it quite that way.”

“Yes, you have,” Jen said candidly. “Politicians have been doing it since the beginning of time, and you are a very good politician. But you do it by feel —by guess. How long do you think a modern businessman would last if he used advertising that way?” She snapped her fingers with a dainty flick of her wrist. “Or, at least, not much longer.”

“I’m following you, Miss Sterling.”

“Good. Advertising, today, is something like medicine. It’s a scientifically based art. Because of advertising, we know more about mass psychology today than any other type of psychology. About the individual, we can predict almost nothi ng; but with a population of four billion, we are approaching the Asenion psychomathematical formulas in accuracy. The Asenion formulas only work perfectly with an infinite population, of course, just as the gas laws only work perfectly with an ideal gas, but —”

“Just a minute, Miss Sterling.” The delegate held up a hand. “I’m not acquainted with, the formulas you’re talking about; I don’t understand that sort of thing at all. But am I to understand that, through advertising, you could definitely swing the passage of this bill?”

“Yes. With … say … an assurance of sixty-five to eighty per cent of the votes in your favor.”

O’Dowd began chuckling; a deep, rumbling laugh that came from his chest. “I can see it now! A singing commercial: ‘Don’t be bullie d, don’t be cowed; Vote with Delegate O’Dowd!’ ” And, after another burst of laughter: “No, Miss Sterling; I’m afraid it’s out of the question.”

Jen waited patiently until he was through laughing, then said: “I’m afraid you misunderstand, Mr. Delegate . We know perfectly well that that kind of thing won’t work with political advertising. A lot of commercial-type advertising is used, as you well know. Such things as: ‘Vote for So-and-so,’ and the ‘It’s Your Duty to Vote,’ but the kind of advertising I’m talking about is just the kind that you are using at present.

“What you need, you see, is some kind of check on the effectiveness of your speeches. You want to know how you can say what you have to say so that it will influence the most people in your di rection. And that’s what I meant by popular opinion sampling.

“What we can do is find just exactly the kind of tone, expression, and rhetoric you should use in your speeches and press releases, just as we can find out what kind of package and singing com mercial to use to sell toothpaste.”

O’Dowd was looking thoughtful again. “Why haven’t other politicians used this?”

“Quite simple,” Jen said, “the trouble is money. To put on a really scientifically successful advertising campaign runs into money. That ‘s the reason advertising is the most scientific branch of psychology today —because the businessman was willing to put plenty of money into it for research. A project like that takes the kind of money that only a gov e rnm ent or the pooled resources of several big commercial concerns can afford to spend. It still costs money; if it didn’t, every little two-bit concern that went into business would immediately be successful.”

“Oh? You can guarantee it that closely?”

“If the product is worth while, ye s. And your bill is.”

“Well, yes, but I’ve swung bills before without any special backing,” O’Dowd said.

“Have you tried swinging one like this? What about the opposition you’re getting from the Stellar Exploration Commission?”

O’Dowd was silent.

“And,” Jen went on, “how about the average little guy who’s going to be scared witless over some horrible disease from space?”

“I’ll admit there is some lobbying,” O’Dowd said quietly. “Just how much would this cost?”

Jen named a figure. O’Dowd raised his brows in surprise, but said nothing.

“1 think you’d find it worth it, Mr. Delegate,” Jen said.

O’Dowd glanced at his wrist watch and stood up. “I have an appointment in a few minutes, Miss Sterling. I want to thank you for your interest; if I fe el your suggestion has any merit, I’ll let you know.”

Five minutes later, she was on the roof, waiting for an aircab. And wondering.

Alex Zavacki stared at the image of the girl across the desk from him.

“You told him? Jen!” He groped for more words and couldn’t find them.

“I told him,” she repeated. “I gave him a line of gobbledegook a mile long and twice as thick.”

“But —why?”

She tried to keep her voice steady —and succeeded. “I thought about it for a long time, Alex. Please don’t interrupt; l et me explain.

“I didn’t realize what O’Dowd was doing. I didn’t know that if his bill passed you’d be home in. a few months.

“At first, it hurt me to think that you’d fight such a bill. It seemed to me you’d jump at a chance to see … to see me as so on as you could.”

Zavacki forced his half-paralyzed throat to speak. “Jen, Jen, baby! I do want to come home! But, can’t you see, this thing is —”

“I know, Alex, I know! Please, let me finish. I know it’s important to you —and you believe it’s important to everyone. You can let personal considerations go by the board.

“But I’m a woman, Alex. I can’t think like that; I can’t understand it, completely. As long as there’s nothing wrong with you, I want you here, with me.

“On the other hand, I couldn’t wo rk against you. If getting that bill passed is the wrong thing, I’d hate myself; I couldn’t live with it.

“So I had to see that the job was done right. This project needs thorough research —polling that I can’t do alone. It’s got to be run through the big gest and best computers Continental has. It’s got to be done right.

“If this bill is passed, and Earth is exposed to danger, it will be one of the greatest mistakes we’ve ever made; But I don’t know … I’m not sure that the quarantine has to last five y ears. If such long quarantines really aren’t necessary, they should be reduced.

“Since the polls are necessary, Delegate O’Dowd —or whoever’s backing him —should pay for it.”

“What did you tell him?” Zavacki asked quietly.

She explained exactly what she had told the delegate.

“I see,” he said. “In other words, he’s going to expect to get advice from you on how to conduct his campaign most effectively. We’ve got both ends of the game under control. We can tell him exactly what to say —almost. We’ve go t him right where we want him, and he’ll have to accept our advice because he’s paying for it.”

Then he stopped, looking at her face.

“Oh,” he said very softly. “I see.”

Her voice was only a trifle strained as she said: “I can’t let you do that, Alex . If he gets bad advice from Continental Advertising, he’ll ruin them. And he won’t have to get a bill passed to do it. I don’t give two hoots about my job, but I won’t jeopardize an outfit that has been good to me.”

He nodded. When Jennifer talked like that, she meant every word she said.

“You did the right thing, anyway,” he said. “Give him the best advice we know how —and see if he trips himself up.”

“There’s just one thing, Alex.” She paused and took a deep breath. “You’re going to have to figure o ut the best thing for him to say and do, yourself. You know the Asenion equations are meaningless for less than a hundred quadrillion people.”

He nodded slowly. “I know; I know.” He lifted his eyes and looked past her. The broad window of her apartment l et in the sparkling sunlight of autumn, making a gleaming yellow rectangle on the rug.

She had given him both sides of a chess game and expected him to play both sides honestly. He had to handle Baedecker and O’Dowd —yes, and even Jen. But, worst of a ll, he would have to handle himself.

It was almost as though she could hear his thoughts. “Alex, Alex, I know you can do it!”

It was almost frightening to see what tremendous confidence the girl had in him. And he knew he could not betray that confiden ce —ever.

But one slip —one little slip —is all it would take. He half hoped that O’Dowd wouldn’t take her proposal.

“Don’t look that way, Alex —please! It’ll be all right in the end!”

And then, quite suddenly, his smile came back. That was it! If a pro blem is handled with equal ethics on both sides, whichever side is right —in an absolute sense —will come out on top.

He said: “I’ll handle it, honey —and thanks.”

But when he cut off a few minutes later, his only thought was: Please, God, help me to do it right!

It didn’t take long for Delegate O’Dowd to bite. The undeniable fact that Jennifer Sterling was a warmly beautiful woman may have had something to do with it, but O’Dowd was too shrewd a politician to allow something like that to sway him too much. Like any good political man who is even moderately successful, he had his own sources of information. It didn’t take him long to find out that Jennifer actually held the position she claimed she did with Continental Advertising. Nor did it take him long to discover that the man she loved was quarantined on the moon.

He knew that good advertising was successful, and he had no reason to believe that the line Jennifer had given him was just so much hokum. After all, he was used to relying on the w ord of expels, and this woman was obviously an expert. Jennifer Sterling was a graduate psychologist, held an important position with a top-flight advertising agency, and, so far as O’Dowd was concerned, she had a fine motive for doing her best.

That, he thought, was all he needed to know.

All the arrangements with Continental were made strictly under. cover. No one could possibly have proved that Delegate Daniel O’Dowd had paid out the huge sum of money Jennifer had demanded, nor could he or his und erlings have been legally connected with the project in any way.

Continental Advertising didn’t mind. All they were being asked to do was conduct a private poll, not get out and stump for O’Dowd. They were being paid handsomely for it, and that was all t hat mattered. What O’Dowd did with the information was strictly his own business.

When Jennifer told Alex that the bill had been paid in a lump sum, Zavacki whistled softly to himself and put in a call for Baedecker. “Any news on who’s backing O’Dowd, Deck?”

The fat man shook his head slowly. “Nope. Any one of a dozen companies could be sinking money into it. Besides, it looks to me as though he’s trying for Prime Delegate. He wants to run the Congress —not just be a member of it. That means he’s proba bly not asking for more than expense money —which wouldn’t be much.”

“Suppose I told you that he’s sunk half a million into a harebrained scheme that’s never been tried before and might not work. That he’s willing to risk that much on an outside gamble.”

Chief Baedecker’s eyes narrowed. “Where’d you get that information? And what’s the scheme?”

Zavacki grinned and shook his head. “Oh, no, Deck. You gave me this job and told me to handle it.

I’m doing just that. I don’t ask you where you get your info rmation, do I?”

Baedecker shrugged. “O.K. I have a policy; when you delegate authority —delegate it, and don’t meddle.” He shifted himself in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Half a million, eh? That means there’s real money behind this —big money. Could be a group of corporations.”

“Huh-uh,” Zavacki said emphatically. “Conning a group of corporations takes longer than just talking one out of the money —even if it comes to more money. I’m betting on one of the Big Three.”

Baedecker continued to l ook at the ceiling. “Could be. Atomic Products, Interplanetary Engineering, or General Power. Why not all three?”

“Maybe. I doubt it, though. It takes too much book juggling. One company can cover up; three companies are a little tough to handle. The Wor ld Criminal Investigation Division would be on their necks too fast.” Zavacki thought for a moment longer, then: “No. It could be, but there’s no need playing our cards that way. If we find one, and there are others involved, fine. But just look for one.”

Baedecker looked down from the overhead and rubbed his fleshy nose with three sausagelike fingers. “How about getting the WCID on their tails? Might not prove anything, but it might scare ‘em off.”

“It’s too late for that. All they’d do is stop handing money out to the delegate —and he’s got enough to swing the job right now. No, just find out who’s backing him, that’s all.”

Baedecker nodded heavily. “All right. I’ve got a few feelers I can put out. I’ll let you know.” He cut the circuit.

Zavacki sto od up, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and puffed it alight. He paced carefully back and forth across the room; under Lunar gravity, pacing has to be done carefully or not at all. Finally, he threw the half-smoked cigarette into an ashtray, snarled, and h e aded for the centrifuge for his daily spin. Some men, like Baedecker, never bothered to keep themselves in shape —they never intended to go back to Earth, anyway. But Zavacki did, and he spent an hour a day in the spinner at one point two gees, keeping him s elf in condition.

And while he exercised, he thought. And thought.

Raoul Jackson cursed mildly and stuck his finger in his mouth. It wasn’t a bad burn —hardly even painful —but Raoul Jackson detested sloppy work, and a man who burned himself with a we lding gun was, in his opinion, sloppy.

Finger still in mouth, he stood back from the maze of silver and crystal that stood on the wide bench before him. The silver busbar he had just welded faded rapidly from bright red to black as the head was dissipate d through the mass of metal. Raoul flipped the light shield up from his eyes and gazed at the apparatus almost fondly.

“Brother,” he said, “you are the most haywire piece of junk I have ever laid my eyes on.” But his rich, baritone voice was softly pater nal as he said it.

Almost unconsciously, he lifted the heavy welding gun and looked at it. He pulled the trigger.

At the very tip of the “muzzle,” a white, blazing ball of supernal fire appeared —a little ball, no bigger than the tip of his finger. He r eleased the trigger, and, as the ball of light winked out, he glanced back at the “haywire piece of junk.”

The original idea had come from the welding gun. The little welder generated enough heat in that little ball of light to weld together a couple of three-inch silver busbars; weld them neatly and rapidly before the silver itself could conduct the heat away. The field of force which surrounded the ball held in most of the radiant heat; only a very small percentage of the energy could escape as useless radiation.

The gadget Raoul was working on was based on the same principle, but it was for an entirely different purpose. If it worked —and Raoul could see no reason why it shouldn’t —it would generate a tremendously hot, controlled, and easily focused be am of energy, a beam that could cut its way through a foot-thick slab of steel armor plate in a fraction of a second. A bigger model, with more power behind it, should be able to make quick work of even cast tungsten.

Raoul Jackson had one obsession. Some day, somewhere, Mankind was going to run into another intelligent race. Out there, waiting, might be something with a brain and a high level technology. And Man had better have the weapons to defend himself.

Of course, there were times when Raoul Ja ckson wondered if he’d complete it in time for installation on his own ship. He’d been working on it for four years, and there was only a year left of his quarantine. And there were plenty of bugs in the thing yet —plenty of them. So far, the thing would on ly put out about three per cent of th e theoretical yield of useful energy required, but things would straighten themselves out in time. If it wasn’t ready for the next trip, it would certainly be ready for the one after that.

He slipped the light shield over his eyes and again applied the welding gun to the busbar. As it flared into incandescence, the face shield darkened, automatically compensating for the increase in brilliance.

The solidiphone signaled.

Jackson ignored it for a few more seconds while he finished welding the busbar. When he was through, he released the trigger of the welder, flipped up his shield and turned to look at the solidiphone.

Why did people have to call him? Why couldn’t they leave him alone? They were trying to be nice , sure; trying to be friendly. But they didn’t have to. It wasn’t necessary for them to look at him; he’d rather they wouldn’t. It was bad enough that he had to put up with his mottled, piebald face; why should others be forced to put up with it? Or, eve n worse, force themselves to do it?

He carefully put down the welding gun and walked over to the solidiphone. He sat down and cut in the circuit. The image solidified on the other side of the now-invisible wall. It was Jack Wessler.

“Busy?” Wessler ask ed. His ever-present grin spread across his wide face, showing white, slightly crooked teeth.

Raoul nodded. “Yes; I’m busy. What is it?”

Wessler kept smiling, taking no offense. People knew enough not to bother Raoul too often, and not to get offend ed when they found it necessary to call him.

“I hate to interrupt you, Raoul, but I was wondering if you knew about this O’Dowd business.”

“O’Dowd? Who is O‘Dowd?”

Jack Wessler explained.

Raoul’s oddly discolored face became hard. “What’s he trying to do? I’ll never finish my project if I have to go out again now. I signed up for one trip every sixth year, and that’s the way it’s going to be.”

“Not if they change the law, it won’t. Besides, there’s talk now of subpoenaing some of us for a Congress ional investigation.”

Jackson’s frown deepened. “Is it that serious?” Then: “They wouldn ‘t get me down there for anything! They couldn’t drag me back! Not with —” He launched into a blistering denunciation of Earth, its Congress, its inhabitants, and its general, all-around despicability.

He didn’t notice Wessler’s eyes narrowing in speculation, nor the slight fading of his grin.

“Say!” Wessler broke in, “are your pickups O.K.?”

Jackson ignored him. “… Think it’s funny! Me, all I ask is to be let a lone —by O’Dowd and everybody else!”

“You feel all right, Raoul?”

Jackson stopped his torrent of words suddenly, as though they had been dammed up. The muscles at the hinges of his jaw bunched for a moment, then relaxed. “Yeah, I feel all right; little headache is all. From looking at the welder. I … I’m sorry, Jack. I’m not feeling too well, I guess. Nervous. Trying to finish my project. You know.”

“Sure,” Wessler said placatingly. “Sorry I bothered you. But Zavacki said that if any. of us came up w ith any ideas to pass them along to him. O.K.?”

“Yeah. I … I’m glad you called. Thanks.” And his hand reached out and cut off the circuit.

As Jack Wessler’s image collapsed, Jackson looked at his blotchy hand. Part of it was dark brown; part of it wa s pinkish. Raoul hadn’t looked in a mirror in years, but he knew how his face looked —the same as his hand.

He buried his face in his hands.

Oh, Lord, Lord, why couldn’t I have been all one color? Why did You have to make me an ugly, discolored monster? Why?

Jack Wessler stared at the wall where Jackson’s image had been only a few seconds before. Was there something wrong with Jackson’s pickups? Or was there something wrong with the color balance of the Leinster projectors? Or was it imagination?

Or was there really something happening to Jackson’s skin?

He stood up, still wondering, and walked into the kitchen.

Lana, his wife, was looking at the code book and dialing her choice for dinner from the autochef. She looked up as he came in. “Dear, will you call the girls while —Jack! What’s the matter?”

When Jack Wessler wasn’t smiling, there was something seriously wrong.

“You know Raoul,” he said.

“What about him?” She had stopped dialing and was looking at him curiously.

“I don’t know for sure. He’s touchy about the way he looks, you know; most of us don’t call him up often.”

Lana smiled. “You don’t call up much of anyone.”

He grinned back. “Why should I? I’m the luckiest guy in quarantine.”

“Let’s get back to Raoul,” she said.

“His face looks funny —as though the dark blotches were lighter. And he doesn’t look well —said he had a headache.”

“If he’s sick, you’d better call Dr. Fleishmann. How long has it been since Raoul had his last checkup?”

Jack frowned a little. “I don’t kn ow; couple of weeks, I guess. Still, he might have something.”

They looked at each other for several seconds.

“You’d better call Fleishmann,” she said at last. “I’ll get the supper ready. “When you’re through calling, get the girls from the playroom.”

Jack nodded and headed back to the solidiphone. Lana looked back at the autochef and realized she had forgotten how far she had dialed. She punched the canceler and s tarted over.

Jennifer Sterling watched Moe, the computer, chew over the figures tha t were being fed into it from the major trunk lines that spread out to every large city in the world.

She knew about computers and robots in general only in the broadest terms; she knew nothing of the detailed operation of them. But somehow, the big, hum ming, brooding things fascinated her. So she watched Moe as he digested his data and upchucked his answers on photo-facsimile tape.

The girl who was operating the machine, an impish blonde named Tess, kept an eye on the indicator panel, where the banks o f flickering lights told her things that meant nothing to Jen.

“It beats me,” Tess said. “I mean, honestly, Jen, this is the weirdest job I’ve ever seen.”

“How so?” Jen asked.

“Well, whoever heard of an advertising agency doing polling work on a poli tico? Why didn’t he just go to one of the big polling companies?”

“Maybe he wants a different approach,” Jen said.

“Maybe. I wonder whose bright idea it was?”

Jen shrugged coolly. “O’Dowd seems to know what he’s doing.” Tess hadn’t seemed to have dir ected the last remark at her, but —was she aware of anything?

“Frankly,” Tess said, r unning expert lingers over the bank of keys at the control console, “I think O’Dowd ‘s a pompous ass, but I don’t blame you for wanting that bill to pass. How long h as it been since you’ve seen that good-looking man of yours?”

“Four years,” Jen said in a flat voice. “And it’ll be two more before I see him again.”

“Not if O’Dowd’s bill passes.”

“No. Not if the bill passes.” Did Tess know anything? Impossible . No, she was just trying to make con versation.

“When does the vote come up?” Tess asked. She was still running her hands over the keys.

“January first,” Jen said. “Right after Year Day.”

“Mm-m-m.” She tapped two more plates, stepped back, and brushe d her long blond hair back with a quick gesture. Then she flashed a smile at Jen. “I’m with you, honey. I hope Alex is home by Easter.”

Jen forced a smile to her face. “Yeah. I hope so, too.”

Moe made humming noises, with a background of faint grumbl es.

“He’s going to work now,” said Tess.

“He?” Jen said, jumping on a chance to change the subject. “Why call it he?”

Tess grinned. “Moe reminds me of a man. You know —sits back, chews over all the facts, and comes up with an answer. And then looks so smug about it.”

The indicator lights flickered; a buzz began somewhere inside, and the photoprinter began putting figures on the facsimile film. It rolled out in a long, wide ribbon. There was a final click. The indicator lights stopped and the machine became silent.

“See what I mean?” Tess said.

Jen nodded as she took the printed roll. There was something smug about the big machine.

“I’ll have more for you later,” Tess said. Then she winked. “And I’ll pull for O’Dowd.”

Jen thanked her and headed for her office. She went to her desk, threw the photofac on the top of it, sat down in her chair, and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes.

She thought of the ancient story of Philip Nolan —the Man Without A Country.

Daniel O’Dowd! she thoug ht. I hope I may never hear the name of Daniel O’Dowd again!

But she knew that, unlike Nolan, she wouldn’t get her wish.

When Jen’s call came in from Earth, Zavacki did his best to keep it as businesslike as possible. He wasn’t too successful at fi rst; it took a full minute to get around to the reports, in spite of the full knowledge that each word of endearment only made his inner torture that much greater.

But finally, he said: “Well —what’s new?”

And then they both had to laugh at the inanity of the remark.

Jennifer spread the printed facsimile sheet out on the desk. “I’ll send you a detailed analysis later, but I can give you the essentials now. Up until today, it looked as though O’Dowd had general public sympathy. They seem to want to ope n up the planets as soon as possible. In general, the wealthier groups feel that the poor should be given a chance to colonize —get them out from underfoot, so to speak. The poorer groups agree with them, oddly enough, but, of course, they don’t phrase it t he same way.

“The middle classes form a spectrum in between.

“City dwellers seem to be more in favor of the bill than country people; they seem to feel it would relieve congestion. Most of them don’t want to go themselves, but they think other people w ill. Some of them actually want a little home in the country —a few light-years away.

“While the farm vote isn’t necessarily in favor of the bill, it isn’t against it, either. Farmers don’t seem to care, one way or the other.

“The industrial bloc —inc luding the World Labor Federation —seems to be …”

Zavacki listened as she read, taking notes and asking an occasional question.

It looked bad. Most people actually didn’t care, but there was a sizable minority that favored the new bill for one reason or another. A small minority —very small —saw the danger in the change.

The trouble was that this wasn’t an election; it was a Congressional vote. That meant that those who were apathetic wouldn’t even write to their delegate. The anxious minorities would. A delegate goes by what he gets in the mail, and the pro-O’Dowd faction outnumbered the cons by about twelve to one. That meant the bill would pass unless something drastic was done.

Zavacki felt an inward shudder. If one man —just one —ever got to Earth with an epidemic disease that Mankind had never been exposed to, civilization could be destroyed. Not the race itself, perhaps; if Mankind were lucky, a few might survive. But a handful of people can’t keep a modern civilization going.

Man had been hit b efore —hard. The Europeans’ first contact with syphilis in the early Sixteenth Century; the Black Death in the Seventeenth; influenza in the first half of the Nineteenth; and the mutated virus that had caused the deadly cerebral poliomyelitis nearly eighty years ago. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the medics had known of its existence and prepared an immunizer before it struck, cerebral polio might have wiped out a quarter of the human race.

Jen said: “That brings us up to the press release from Luna this morning. So far, we haven’t got all the leads in yet, but it looks as though it might be effective. Still, it isn’t conclusive.”

Zavacki looked up, frowning. “What press release?”

Jen looked startled. “The one about Raoul Jackson. Didn’t you send it out?”

“No. What does it say?”

She riffled through a pile of papers on her desk. “I’ve got it right here … yes, here it is.” She held it in front of her and began to read.

” ‘Medical technicians on the moon today announced that Primary Explore r Raoul Frank Jackson, after four years of quarantine, displays symptoms of dermal demelanosis, in which the normal pigmentation of the skin is slowly destroyed. Mr. Jackson, who returned four years ago from the primary exploration of an Earth-type planet of Spica, is the first quarantine resident to display any untoward symptoms after the second year. The cause of the strange disease is as yet unknown.’ “

She looked up from the sheet. “It sounds as though it might do the trick. Is it true?”

Zavacki lo oked angry. “I don’t know, Jen—but I sure intend to find out!” He reached for the cutoff.

“Wait!” said Jen. “What do I tell O’Dowd?”

“The truth. Tell him you’ve got the trend analysis, but you haven’t doped out a counterattack yet. I’ll call you back as soon as I get something worked out.”

His hand came down on the plate, and her image vanished.

Before he could dial Baedecker, the chime rang. Zavacki switched on and an image coalesced on the other side of the desk. It was Baedecker.

“I was just g oing to call you,” said Zavacki ominously.

“I dare say,” said Baedecker. “I just now heard about it myself.” Zavacki opened his mouth to say something, but Baedecker patted the air in front of him with a heavy hand.

“Wait a second, Alex. Before you fly off the handle, let me explain. It’s my fault that story about Raoul was released, but I wasn’t deliberately pulling the rug out from under you.”

“Then what happened?” “Fleishmann released it. He was within his rights, and I’d forgotten to tell him t hat all releases should be cleared through you. It just escaped my mind, that’s all.” He shifted in the chair, uncomfortable under Zavacki’s eyes.

“But I heard about it. I just got a call from the Administrative Secretary. There seem to be several delega tes interested in the story.”

“What did you tell him?” Zavacki asked.

“Only what Fleishmann said in the report. I told him I had no further news than that.” He looked down at his pudgy hands; there was an oddly pathetic look on his face. “I told Dr. Fl eishmann that from now on, all medical releases were to be sent to my office before publication. I’ll see to it that you get them immediately.” He shook his head, and his jowls wobbled. “I’m not used to this sort of thing. I don’t know anything about poli t ics.”

Zavacki took a deep breath and forced himself to smile a little. “There’s nothing to worry about, Deck; nothing has been ruined. I was just a little sore that I wasn’t told, that’s all. I’ll talk to Fleishmann and see what the scoop is.”

“Good; g ood. Anything else comes up, I’ll let you know. Thanks, Alex.” And he cut off.

Zavacki stared at the blank wall and swore softly but blisteringly. Not at anyone or anything, but in pure amazement and surprise. It had taken every bit of self-restraint to keep from showing what he had suddenly realized.

Baedecker was frightened. He was willing to let Zavacki take over everything because he knew he couldn’t handle it. If there were a Congressional investigation, if Baedecker got a supoena, he would have to go to Earth. And he hadn’t been to Earth for thirty years.

Zavacki unconsciously wiped his hands on his trouser legs. He had been handed both ends of a stick —and both ends were sticky.

After a moment, he dialed Fleishmann.

The medic was a small, wiry-muscled man in his mid-forties. He apologized immediately for the press release, but Zavacki waved him down. “That’s all right, doctor. Deck explained the whole thing. It’s not your fault, and it’s not his. What I want to know is: exactly what is Ra oul’s condition? How ill is he?”

Fleishmann gave a dry cough. “Not really ill at all, I should say. Slight headache. Skin seems flushed. The melanin content of the epidermis has dropped amazingly, but I can’t find any trace of microorganisms above the vi rus level. We’re working on that now.”

“Seems odd that a virus could lie dormant like that for so long.”

“It isn’t unusual. Herpes simplex, the common fever blister or cold-sore virus, may lay dormant for years before a local irritation makes it break out at a weakened spot.”

“Yeah.” Zavacki chewed at his lip a moment. “Would you say the disease is dangerous at all?”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Fleishmann said. “Frankly, I doubt it. Generally, anything that the body can keep dormant for that long is, lik e the fever blister, relatively harmless. And, too, this looks like a fairly local condition. It’s quite evident on the face and arms and upper torso, but it hasn’t spread below the waist, and the upper back seems unaffected.”

Zavacki nodded slowly. “I g et you. Well, we’ll see how things work out. I don’t know how much harm was done, but it couldn’t be helped. Thanks a lot, doctor.”

“Certainly.” The medic vanished.

Inserting a cigarette between his lips, Zavacki leaned back in his chair and watched cl ouds of smoke float toward the ceiling and then bend suddenly toward the air-conditioning exhaust slots.

Where was he? How did things look? Damn it, he didn’t know! How do you fight a war against an unknown enemy? And especially when, in one battle of th at war, the unknown enemy itself is your best weapon!

What did Raoul have? Nobody knew, really. Still, didn’t it prove that an alien disease could be harbored by the human body, undetected for more than the three-year period O’Dowd was asking for?

How should he advise O’Dowd?

This wasn’t something he could ethically advise O’Dowd on; the delegate would have to make his own decision. The only advice he could ethically give was: “Since it has been shown that your bill is, and could be, dangerous, kill i t.”

But O’Dowd wouldn’t and couldn’t do that.

The next move, then, was up to the delegate.

Several days went by before O’Dowd hit. It took him that long to get the information he needed, but when he got it, the delegate let loose an avalanche.

The newsfax had been carrying the story, of course. Raoul’s illness was news. The news became even more sensational when Raoul’s picture was printed —and it was carefully pointed out that the blotchy brown-and-pink complexion was the one Raoul was born with. For two more days, O’Dowd said nothing; then he was “forced” to answer by some enterprising reporter.

His speech was purposely evasive. He gave the impression that he really didn’t, want to accuse SEACA of chicanery, but it seemed obvious to the public that the big shots of SEACA were trying to keep the appropriation high in order to put a little cash in their own pockets. Raoul’s illness, in other words, was a fake.

Jennifer’s polling results a day or so later were conclusive. Those who were apathetic about the bill had begun to swing over to O’Dowd.

Earthside medics were consulted by a few newsmen, but their opinion was divided, as usual, and the public paid no attention, as usual.

On the day after Thanksgiving, Zavacki got a call from Fleishmann . The wiry little man looked apprehensive.

“You asked me to call if there was any change in Jackson. We’ve had him in his isolation room since we examined him. The skin irritation went away, and for a day or so, his skin looked almost like yours or mine. But now it’s darkening again.”

“Darkening? How come?”

“Well, we couldn’t find anything that even remotely resembled a virus. And, too, the effect remained confined to the chest, abdomen, arms, and face. It looked, frankly, like a queer case of inverte d sunburn.

“So one of the boys got to thinking about it and came up with the answer. You know that heat, projector that Raoul has been working on for the past four years? Well, the force field around it was oscillating. We checked the frequency, it’s jus t right. It breaks down melanin. The irritation of the decomposition products were causing the slight fever and the headache. As soon as we took him away from the projector, his condition cleared up. The melanin is coming back in the same areas where it h a d been before.”

“I see,” said Zavacki. “I was afraid something like this might happen. Have you told anyone else?”

“No. Raoul knows, of course, and so do the rest of us who worked on it. But that’s all.”

“Keep it under your hat for a while; it may he lp if we spring it later.”

“All right.” Fleishmann cleared his throat. “I hate to say it, but what we need is another Vandervere.”

“Vandervere?” Zavacki didn’t recognize the name.

“That was before your time, I guess,” Fleishmann said. “Vandervere cam e back from Sargas IV. Went into quarantine. We looked him over in the preliminary examination; X-rays, blood tests —you know; the works. Found nothing.

“About eighteen months later, he began to develop locomotor ataxia; couldn’t control his hands and fee t. It was pretty obvious that there was something wrong with his brain.

“We X-rayed. The thing looked like a tumor, so we trepanned. It was a worm.”

“A what?”

“A worm,” said Fleishmann. “Or, at any rate, something similar to a worm. We figured that Vandervere must have swallowed or inhaled the egg they’re microscopic. The thing got in the bloodstream and headed for the brain. It took it a little time to grow and become really active. If it had attacked another part of Vandervere’s brain, it might have been six years before we noticed it and that might have been too late.

“Louis Pasteur lived for most of his life with half his brain gone.”

“How did it reproduce?” Zavacki asked. “The worm, I mean.”

“Eggs. Went into the bloodstream and then into t he feces. Stayed dor mant until conditions were right, then went to work looking for another brain.”

Zavacki could see what something like that might do if it were released on Earth, and found himself being very glad that the wastes from the Quarantine St ation were piped through the radioactive wastes from Atomic Products. Radiation of that kind will kill literally anything.

“I see what you mean. If he’d had the thing for more than three years, we might be able to make a case out of it. Having your brain eaten up from the inside like a wormy apple would give most people the cold shivers.

“But we can’t use it.”

Fleishmann cleared his throat. “I had an idea,” he said softly. “It may not be ethical, but something’s got to be done. Medical matters like qu arantine shouldn’t be left up to political forces.”

“What’s your idea, doctor?”

“Well, suppose one of the men were to get really sick. Not enough to hurt him; just enough to be convincing.”

“You’d inoculate him yourself, you mean?”

“Something like that.”

Zavacki thought about it for a full second before he shook his head. “That’s out. It would be an Earth disease. It would have to be a disease we could cure or we wouldn’t dare give it to anyone. If it can be cured, it isn’t dangerous. No, doctor, it’s got to be something that will scare the pants off everyone.”

“I had another objection,” Fleishmann admitted. “What if, by chance, I picked a man who actually did have something wrong? That would be a fine mixup.”

“Yeah. I’m afraid we can’t use it.”

Fleishmann’s shoulders seemed to sag a little. “I’m afraid you’re right. That doesn’t give us much of a chance, does it?”

“I don’t know,” Zavacki said thoughtfully. “I think you’ve given me an idea. Let me stew on it a while, and I’ll see what I come up with.”

Fleishmann nodded and cut off.

Zavacki sat and stewed.

Why don’t I just give the whole thing up? I can’t fight City Hall. That’s not my kind of politics, anyhow. Whatever gave me the idea I could handle anything this big?

Something whisp ered in his ear: Give it up. In a couple of months, you’ll be back on Earth —with Jen. She’d never know you’d given up.

He lifted his head and looked levelly into the hazel eyes of Jen’s picture on. his desk and said aloud: “No. She’d never know. But I wo uld.”

He stood up, walked into his bedroom, and looked at himself in the mirror. “Zavacki,” he said to himself. “You’ve got something simmering inside that feeble mind of yours. What is it?” When there was no answer, he said: “O.K., then; figure it out. Work on it. Think, man, think I THINK!”

“Night” and “day” are relative terms on Luna. The sun rises and sets once a month; two weeks of daylight, two weeks of night. A human being can’t eat and sleep by the sun when he’s on Luna.

Earth isn’t any bette r. It stays in practically the same spot in the sky, and when it’s clearly visible, undim m ed by the bright glare of the sun, it is always broad daylight on the visible part of the planet.

So Man ignores the stars and is left to his own devices. Clocks. Nice, familiar, old-fashioned twenty-four hour clocks, all set arbitrarily to indicate the same hour as the clocks in the little town of Greenwich, England. There are no time zones on Luna. Why should there be? What would be the purpose in it? When it’s m i dnight in Greenwich, it’s midnight on the moon —all over the moon.

When Alex Zavacki woke up at midnight that night, therefore, it is not to be supposed that the darkness was due to the clock. The sun had been creeping below the horizon for two days.

He sat up in bed, aware that something had jarred him from his sleep. What it was, he couldn’t be sure, but he knew it was something unusual. He switched on the lights and prowled around his apartment. Nothing seemed to be wrong. What had it been? He felt v a guely uneasy, but he couldn’t place exactly what it was that was disturbing him.

He walked over to his window and looked out. At first, he saw nothing unusual. The area was illuminated by brilliant lights; high above them loomed the ever-present Earth, s et in a sprinkling of diamond-bright, unblinking stars.

And then he saw the commotion across the compound.

Spacesuited men were coming out of an air lock, hurrying toward a brightly-lit apartment window. And then he saw the havoc that had been created. The window was broken! Something had smashed the whole window out, ripped out a one-inch slab of welded transite!

The spacesuited figures were running toward the hole, from which little puffs of vapor still occasionally expanded into nothingness.

Some how, Zavacki had always thought that no one lived in that apartment. The window had been polarized, night and day, ever since he had been in quarantine. He realized then that he didn’t know where any of the men lived. What was the use of knowing? He could not go there; he could only contact them by solidiphone.

He ran to the solidiphone and tried to contact Baedecker. No dice. Either Baedecker wasn’t there or there was something wrong with the solidiphone circuits.

He ran back to the window to watch.

Whatever had smashed the window in the other apartment had left a g ood big hole. The air inside had, of course, roared out with hurricane force. As far as he could tell, the interior of the apartment was a shambles; furniture had been blown over a nd smashed by the brief wind, and several articles had been carried out through the hole.

A moon-jeep pulled up, followed by another. There was so much milling around that Zavacki couldn’t tell what was happening. Some of the spacesuited figures were cle aring away debris. A couple of them brought something out of the apartment and loaded it into one of the jeeps. Zavacki thought it was a human figure, but he couldn’t be sure.

He had never felt so helpless in his life. He was scaled into the apartment; t here was no way to get out. His solidiphone wasn’t working —Ping! He turned and ran for the solidiphone.

It was Baedecker.

“Deck! What happened? What’s going on out there?” Zavacki waved toward the window.

“Raoul Jackson,” said Baedecker. His voic e sounded like a hoarse growl. “I just got the report. He evidently looked right down the muzzle of that heat gun of his and burned his head off. The energy of the thing was enough to melt the transite window, and the air blew. That’s all we know so far.”

Zavacki felt sick inside. He hadn’t known Raoul well, but it didn’t seem like a pleasant way to die.

“Suicide or accident?” he asked.

Baedecker spread his hands. “Don’t know yet. They’re taking the body into isolation surgery. The men had to go in th rough the window; air pressure was keeping the door shut.” Something buzzed from Baedecker’s end of the circuit. He turned to look at something out of range of his pickups, then looked back at Zavacki. “More calls. I’ll let you know.”

Zavacki went into t he kitchen and made himself a pot of coffee. Suicide or accident? Zavacki was ready to bet it was suicide. He sat in the kitchen, sipping black coffee, trying to get the thing straight in his mind.

Why would Raoul kill himself? It was obvious. Raoul had hated himself all his life because of the way he looked. Then he’d had a taste of what it would be like to look like a normal human being. When he saw that it wasn’t permanent —that he would look like his old self again shortly —he had taken the fast way ou t.

What repercussions would it cause? What would happen?

By the time he had thought it out clear to the end, Zavacki had finished his first pot of coffee and started on his second. Then —and only then —he swung into action.

His first call was to Jack We ssler. His second was to Dr. Fleishmann. The third was long distance to Earth.

It was eight in the evening in New Orleans when Jennifer Sterling got the call. She had just put her hair into a pony tail when she heard the chime. She pulled her pink sat in robe around her, and went to the solidiphone desk.

When Alex’s image formed, he started talking immediately.

“Jen! Gee, you look wonderful. Look; I think I’ve got it. If I don’t, I never will; it’ll be too late.”

“Alex! Slow down. What are you talking about?”

He told her what had happened to Raoul.

“How horrible! No wonder he became an explorer.” She held one trembling hand over her mouth.

“Yeah, but that’s not all of it; I also found out that our pal O’Dowd was going to subpoena him to a ppear before the Spatial Exploration Subcommittee. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, as it were. O’Dowd was also minimizing the importance of what was wrong with Raoul, if anything. Now that he’s dead, there’s going to be an investigation, a n d you can bet your fuzzy white hat on that.

“There will be hints of murder. If the whole thing was a frame-up, Raoul would have to be done away with —drastically.

“Now, here’s what I want you to do. There’s one man up here who knew Raoul better than any one else. He also has a good reason to want to get home before too long. I won’t tell you who it is, because the less you know, the more O’Dowd will have to dig for his own information, and the more he’ll believe it.

“I want you to suggest that he find o ut who this man is and subpoena him. Got that?”

“Yes, but —”

“Fine. I’ll call you back.” And he was gone.

Jen sat there for a moment, still feeling a little dizzy from the hurriedness of the call. Then she shrugged and began to dress again.

Again O’Dowd bit —harder, this time. It didn’t take more than a week to find out that Jack Wessler was one of Raoul’s best friends —if Raoul could ever have been said to have any friends.

By that time, the Congressional investigation was in full swing. Raoul Jackson’s death had rocked everyone back on their heels. No one was subpoenaed right away, but the World Criminal Investigation Division sent a squad of men to Lunar Quarantine to investigate. The WCID men who were stationed at Lunar Quarantine gave their f indings to the new squad, and they all went over the whole business again.

While O’Dowd was pulling his own strings, Zavacki managed to get some news from Baedecker.

“From all evidence, the company behind O’Dowd is the Interplanetary Engineering Compan y of North America —the boys who make our spaceships. The higher echelons of the corporation want to open up interstellar space the way Mars and Venus were opened up. If they can get plenty of colonies planted and start real interstellar trade in the next f ew years, they can make billions out of building interstellar vessels. They want to start mass pro du c ing them, not doing them individually, by commission.”

“Sounds pretty solid,” Zavacki said. “If they get this bill enacted as a wedge, they’ll have the whole structure of the law twisted to suit them within another ten years.”

“That’s right. No other company’s equipped to build those big babies. Why should they be? We only buy one every seven years or so.”

Baedecker was talking just to hear his mo uth go. He was still scared pink. Zavacki could see it in every move of his fingers, in every twitch of his balloonlike face.

“By the way,” he went on. “O’Dowd’s secretary called again an hour ago; said that Jack Wessler’s solidiphone was still cut off. I told him what you told me to —the solidiphone is still out of order —technical difficulties. He practically accused me of lying —trying to keep Jack from talking.” He chuckled, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“Good. Keep it up, Deck. I want O’Dowd to subpoena Jack before we let him talk to him.”

“What … what if they subpoena me?” There was a faint strangled note in his voice. If Wessler was called before the Congress, he still had the protection of law; he could not be taken from Luna. He could appear by s olidiphone. Baedecker had no such protection; he would have to appear in person. And that meant going to Earth.

“They won’t slap a summons on you unless they slap one on Jack, too,” Zavacki told him. “They don’t want you; they want him. Dr. Fleishmann ca n cover for you —say you’re too ill to make the trip —until after Jack testifies. After that, you won’t be wanted.”

Baedecker relaxed —just a little “I hope you’re right, Alex.” He paused. “Well, I guess there’s nothing else.”

“If there is, let me know.”

“I will. See you later.”

Men like O’Dowd, Zavacki thought, would never understand men like Baedecker or Jackson or Wessler —or even Zavacki.

Heroes? Sure. But most people never understood what a hero is. A job has to be done; a man sees and underst ands why it has to be done; he does it to the best of his ability. He’s a hero if it’s a dangerous job and has a little glory and fame attached to it.

What if he enjoys the job —really gets a kick out of it? Why, then he’s a swashbuckler. A man’s man. A r eal hero. A man who walks smiling into danger. A stupid fool. There were some of those who had become Primary Explorers; they were the ones whose ships had come back empty. A man who enjoys danger, a man without caution, dies easily because he never knows when to stop.

Not all of them had been killed; some had come back. But most of them couldn’t stand the isolation in quarantine. A man who enjoys danger can’t stand the womblike security of a quarantine station. They crack up or they try to escape. And to attempt to escape from Lunar Quarantine was punishable by death. It had to be.

No, a good Primary Explorer, the kind that went out, trip after trip, was a lonely man who liked to be alone. He was willing to risk his neck just to be left alone.

Some were different. Zavacki had his linguistic studies; Wessler had his ambitious colonization project. But these were one-shot men; they were willing to risk everything —once. A man who made one trip and came back alive and healthy had a nice pile of cash wa iting for him when he got out of quarantine. But there weren’t many like that.

Primary Exploration was a tough job. If a man died on a planet, another Primary had to be sent out. One of the planets of Mizar had been named Hell because ten men had land ed on it, none had come back. And yet, number eleven was ready to go. It had to be done, and men did it —but not just any men.

And O’Dowd could not understand that. He could no more have understood, basically, that kind of thinking than Raoul Jackson coul d ever understand why a man would want to make a speech in public.

Raoul’s lack of understanding was extreme, and it had killed him in the end. But O’Dowd’s lack was just as bad, and it was going to trip him up eventually.

A lack of sympathy is sometim es useful in a fight; a lack of understanding is nearly always disastrous, one way or another.

And one of the things that O’Dowd didn’t understand was that most of these men liked their five-year quarantine.

O’Dowd’s Subcommittee finally slapped a s ubpoena on Jack Wessler. There were several others, too, but they were just camouflage; Wessler was the man he wanted. Baedecker didn’t get one, but he wasn’t out of the soup yet.

The first ones to be interviewed were the WCID men. The interrogation wasn ‘t broadcast, but reporters were present, and Zavacki read the news as soon as it came in.

It was established that no one else but Jackson could have been in the apartment at the time of his death. It was established that Raoul had been working on the he at beam for four years. It had been tested by the WCID, and had been definitely identified as the death weapon. It wasn’t as powerful by far as Raoul had wanted it, but it still had plenty of energy to throw.

The medical report had been read into the min utes. Raoul Jackson’s head had been completely destroyed by the beam; the neck had been charred badly enough to prevent bleeding. The cadaver had been absolutely identified by fingerprints.

Was the wound self-inflicted purposely or accidentally? There wa s no definite evidence.

Raoul’s peculiar pigmentation was discussed thoroughly, but inconclusively. The evidence was too conflicting.

It wasn’t until the second week of the investigation that solidiphone connections were made so that Jack Wessler could be brought to testify. Zavacki had had some special cables run into his own apartment from Wessler’s, so that he could watch without being seen.

Mr. John Abel Wessler, Primary Explorer for the Space Exploration and Colonization Administration, was “call ed to the witness stand.” He identified himself and was sworn in.

After a few minor preliminary questions from other members of the Subcommittee (O’Dowd preferred to let the others start the ball rolling), Delegate O’Dowd said: “Mr. Wessler, I understa nd you knew the deceased. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct, Mr. Delegate. I suppose I knew him as well as anyone could.”

“I see.” O’Dowd settled himself back comfortably. “Is there any reason, in your opinion, why Mr. Jackson might have chosen to take his own life?”

Jack’s brow furrowed. “Well, I wouldn’t like to say. It’d only be an opinion … and I’m under oath … and —”

Delegate Vegler, a tall, lean, graying man with the air of a lawyer, said: “Please remember, Mr. Wessler; this is not a court of law. We are not here to pass sentence on anyone, but to determine what changes, if any, in law should be recommended to the Congress. Your opinions, as such, are perfectly permissible.”

Wessler nodded. “O.K., then. It’s my opinion that he killed himse lf rather than die of the disease he had.”

There was a moment’s silence from the delegates and a faint murmur from the reporters, who were out of pickup range.

Then O’Dowd leaned forward and said: “It has not been established that the deceased had any disease.”

“I know,” said Wessler . “At least the cause of it had not been discovered, to my knowledge.” (This was perfectly true; Wessler hadn’t heard about the oscillating force field.) “But he did say that his skin condition was very painful to him.”

“Do you think it’s normal for a man to kill himself in fear of an unknown, possibly nonexistent disease?” one of the other delegates asked.

“I don’t know,” said Wessler. “I certainly wouldn’t, but, then, mine isn’t painful.”

“Yours?” It was O’Dowd. “You r what?”

“What you just said; an unknown, possibly nonexistent disease.”

“You don’t look like a sick man, Mr. Wessler.”

“I’m not; I feel perfectly fine.”

O’Dowd frowned and shuffled through some papers on his desk while Delegate Vegler said: “Jus t what is this disease, Mr. Wessler?”

“It doesn’t have a name yet.”

O’Dowd found the paper he was looking for. “Mr. Wessler, this is rather ridiculous. As I understand it, your wife and three daughters live with you in quarantine. This is unusual, but not unheard of. Tell me, do any of them feel ill? Do they have the disease?”

“No, they feel fine. If the doctors are right, they couldn’t get the disease anyway.”

O’Dowd snorted. “It hardly seems that a noncommunicable disease which causes no discomfor t to someone who has it can properly be called a disease. Just what is the medical theory on this dreadful malady?”

“I’m not a medical man, Mr. Delegate; I don’t understand it completely. But, as I understand it, it is communicable only between human males, and prevents the conception or birth of male offspring. I only have girls, you know.”

“Let me get this straight,” said another delegate. “You say this disease you have, if it spread, would keep any man who had it from having boy babies?”

“That’s it, yes sir.”

There was general low conversation around the delegates’ table. O’Dowd looked at Wessler with an expressionless face before he began speaking in low tones to Vegler.

It had happened. They’d been suckered in. They’d have to go on with thi s phase of the investigation; the reporters wouldn’t let them break it off at this point.

Finally, O’Dowd said: “In view of the fact that this is properly a medical situation, we will adjourn until tomorrow, at which time, medical experts will be here to discuss this problem.” He hated to say it. He knew he was walking into the situation blind. But there was nothing else he could do.

In a few short minutes, the aim of the investigation had been twisted aside. The death of Raoul Jackson was no longer imp ortant.

In his apartment on Luna, Alex Zavacki took another swallow of hot, black coffee. He still felt tense; it wasn’t over yet, by any means.

The newsfax hit it up big. Headlines in the dozen official languages of Earth were shouted out across the f ace of the globe. People read about the “Mysterious Extraterrestrial Malady” and worried. What would the doctors say?

Dr. Fleishmann was asked to come to Earth. He took the shuttle without waiting for a subpoena. He brought with him a sheaf of papers tha t he and his assistants had spent days in working out.

The Subcommittee called in Dr. Nathan Preston, head of the Department of World Health, and his assistant, Dr. Krishna Chang.

There was a faint note of tension in the air when Jack Wessler’s image a ppeared in the solidiphone.

The first witness called was Dr. Preston. He was a stocky, well-built man with iron-gray hair and an air of determination and competency.

After the preliminaries, Delegate O’Dowd said: “Dr. Preston, I understand that Dr. Fle ishmann of the SEACA has given you some documents, which you and Dr. Chang have read.”

“That’s true, Mr. Delegate.”

“And these documents relate to what?” There was definite tenseness in O’Dowd’s voice, although his face appeared as relaxed as ever.

“They are in relation to a medical theory to explain the so-called disease reported to this committee by Mr. John Wessler. However, rather than explain it myself, I would like to ask Dr. Fleishmann a few questions, if I may.”

O’Dowd’s tension seemed to r elax a little. “Certainly. Dr. Fleishmann has agreed to answer any questions. If you will, Dr. Fleishmann?”

Fleishmann took the stand.

“Go ahead, Dr. Preston,” said O’Dowd.

“As I understand it, Dr. Fleishmann,” Preston began, “you propose that such a disease might be caused by a virus which is structurally similar to the Y-chromosome of the human male. Would you explain this to the committee, please?”

Fleishmann cleared his throat with a dry cough. “Yes. Sex is determined in human beings by two chro mosomes —the heredity units that make up the nucleus of the cells. These are called X and Y chromosomes. The X is recessive, and the Y is dominant. If a human being has two. X chromosomes, that human being will be female; if there is an X and a Y, he will b e a male.”

“What if there are two Y’s?” asked one of the delegates.

Fleishmann looked disgusted. “Impossible. When the sex cells split in the reproductive organs, the chromosomes are divided. A female ovum can only contain X, since that’s all there wer e to begin with. Male spermatazoa can contain either an X or a Y. If a Y unites with an ovum, the result will be a male child; if an X unites with it, the result will be female. Since there can be no Y ova, such a thing as a Y-Y individual is impossible.”

“Oh,” said the delegate.

“Now, to explain the virus theory, I’ll have to back up a little bit,” Fleishmann continued. “It has been known for a hundred and fifty years that one of the best methods of killing any organism is to give it a fatal delusion.

“Some of our oldest drugs —sulfanilamide, sulfathiazole, and others —do just this. The molecules of those drugs are structurally similar to certain chemicals that many bacteria need to survive. Because of this similarity, the bacterium is ‘fooled’ into ac cepting the drug instead of the proper chemical that is necessary for its continued living —or it’s reproduction.”

“In other words,” Dr. Preston said smoothly, “some of these drugs don’t kill the bacterium, they simply inhibit its reproductive abilities.”

“That is correct.”

Preston turned to the delegates. “May I emphasize, gentlemen, that this has been shown to be the case. Modern application of this principle is responsible for many of our best chemotherapeutical processes.” He turned back to Fleishm ann. “Go on, doctor.”

“Well, now, what is a virus? It is a complex chemical, a protein that is, in many ways, similar to certain protein substances in the cells of its host —whatever that may be.

“Now, we believe that this virus —which we call Virus Y—i s structurally similar to the Y chromosome of the human male. It is capable of usurping —taking the place of the Y chromosome in the spermatozoon, thus rendering that particular sperm incapable of fertilizing the female ovum. It has no effect on the X ch romosome, and therefore cannot have any effect on nor be carried by a female. It is in no sense a venereal disease.” He looked at his fingernails for a moment, then looked up at the delegates. “However, no male who has the disease would be capable of havi n g male children.”

Delegate Vegler said: “Have you isolated this virus yet, Dr. Fleishmann?”

“No. Even with modern techniques, it is impossible to check on a virus positively unless suitable test animals are available to check the reaction of the virus.”

Preston looked at him with a faint smile on his face. “Would you explain to the committee why no test animals are available?”

“Because none of them will volunteer,” Fleishmann said testily. “The only possible test animal is the human male.”

O’Dowd had been sitting at his desk, scowling, running his fingers along the line of his blue jaw.

“Now, just a minute,” he said, “you have a theory which might be an explanation for a disease that we can’t even be sure exists. As far as I can see, the only sym ptom is the fact that Mr. Wessler has not had any male children.”

“That is a sign, not a symptom,” Fleishmann said. “But I understand what you mean. Yes, that is perfectly true. We have very little to go on.”

O’Dowd snorted and turned to Dr. Preston. “Does this make sense to you, doctor?”

Preston paused a moment, then nodded slowly. “It does. I would hesitate to make any flat statement about the man’s health until further research is done, but I think that Dr. Fleishmann’s theory is at least a lead in the right direction.”

“I concur with Dr. Preston,” Dr. Chang interrupted.

O’Dowd looked slightly purple. “But thousands of men have had only daughters or only sons —or even no children at all. Nobody ever accused them of having some mysterious disease.”

“That’s true,” said Fleishmann. “However, none of them had been to an alien planet, either. Tell me, Mr. Delegate, would you dare take the chance of releasing this man to society?” And he pointed a slender finger at Jack Wessler.

O’Dowd glanced invol untarily at the image in the solidiphone. He made no answer, but it was written all over his face.

It was another twenty-four hours before Jennifer called Zavacki.

“The results are coming in now,” she said. “There’s no doubt about it now. Over eighty-f ive per cent of the population is violently against the passage of the O’Dowd bill.”

Alex Zavacki looked haggard, but he managed a smile.

“Sure,” he said. “We hit ‘em where they hurt. To any single in dividual, such an affliction wouldn’t hurt a th ing. But if everybody caught it, there wouldn’t be any human race within a century. Unless you girls got together and developed parthenogenesis.”

Jennifer winced. “God forbid.” Then she said: “But that’s an awful thing! What a terrible thing for Mr. Wess ler to have.”

With that, Zavacki burst into laughter. “Good! It worked on you, too!”

“Alex! What do you mean?”

“Honey, that theory has holes in it you could toss a tiger through. For instance, how would such a virus evolve? If the only possible host is the human male, how could it have a host on a planet where there are no human males?”

“And you mean none of those doctors spotted that?”

Zavacki’s smile became grim. “Delegate O’Dowd is a man without ethics and without honesty. Since he has neither, he thinks they’re the same thing.

“He figured we were pulling something on him; he assumed that Fleishmann had a cockeyed theory. So he got the best doctors on Earth to listen to the theory.

“You see, hon, he assumed that because Preston and Chang wer e ethical, they must be honest, and he knew they’d be smart enough to spot any holes in Fleishmann’s theory.”

“Your theory, you mean,” Jen interrupted.

“Partly. I got the basic idea, but it was Fleishmann and his boys who filled in the holes.

“Anywa y, O’Dowd’s mistake was in assuming that Preston would side with him.

“Preston and Chang know what the score is. They know that O’Dowd’s bill is … was … dangerous. O’Dowd was trapped. An incompetent medic would have been fooled by Fleishmann’s theory . A competent one would go along with it. Six one way and half a dozen the other.

“There is a higher ethic than immediate truth; there is long-range truth. And that’s what we were going on.”

“But if O’Dowd and Interplanetary Engineering are unethical, won’t they try again, some other way?”

“Possibly. But not very soon. And within ten years, three new planets will open wide for colonization. That’s enough to take care of everyone, and IECA can start building interstellar liners, which should satisfy th em. Although I do think we ought to see that, some of the other companies get a finger in the pie.”

Jennifer looked at him for a long moment, then: “You’re wonderful, Alex. You know that?”

He grinned a little. “So are you. What do you want for Christma s?”

“Christmas? Good heavens! I hadn’t realized —”

“Creeps up on you, doesn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. I guess it’ll be a pretty Merry Christmas.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Even Baedecker will be happy.”

“What about the Wesslers? They can’t come back to Earth now —not even when the five years are up.”

“They never wanted to. They want to colonize; Jack’s just that kind. Me, I want to come back —to you.”

They talked a few minutes more, but neither of them could stand the strain at that point.

When they cut off, Jennifer Sterling buried her face in her hands and cried.

Alex Zavacki, a quarter of a million miles away, was doing exactly the same thing.

The End