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pushed himself erect, eyes staring, and shouted: "Graveyard of the galaxy!
Starchild! Beware the trap! Beware your heart's desire!" Then Quarla was back
with a spray hypodermic. Her father took it from her, pushed her out of the
room again, and quickly injected the man.
Zafar slumped back onto the examining couch, eyes closing, still mumbling to
himself.
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The doctor watched him for a second, then came toward the group at the door.
"He'll sleep for a while," he said. "Nothing else to do at this moment. We've
got to see how he responds to the drug."
The man who had brought him said, "Doc, what is it? Are we all going to . . ."
But Dr. Snow was shaking his head.
"I can't answer your question," he said. "I don't know what it is. But I don't
think you're in any danger. I've seen only one other case like this, three
years ago. But I was exposed, and so was my daughter, and several others  and
no one was infected."
He hesitated, glancing at Gann. Then he said abruptly, "The other case was
Harry Hickson, Mr.
Gann. It killed him."
Boysie Gann started to speak, then nodded. "I understand."
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"Do you?" Dr. Snow's voice was heavy with irony. "I don'tl I don't understand
at all. Let me show you something then tell me if you understand!" He stood
away from the door, reached out a hand, and switched off the lights in the
emergency room. "Look!" he cried. "Do you understand that?"
The four in the doorway gasped as one. "Father!" cried Quarla, and the men
swore softly. Inside the emergency room, in the semi-darkness Dr. Snow had
brought about, Mohammed Zafar's leather-
colored skin was leather-
192
colored no longer. Like the spilled blood of the spaceling Gann had seen
murdered, Zafar's skin was bright with a golden glow! His face shone with the
radiance of a muted sun. One wasted hand, dangling out of the sheets, was
limned in a yellowish, unsteady light like the flicker of a million flashing
fusorians.
Quarla choked, "It's . . . it's just like Harry, Father!"
The doctor nodded somberly. "And it will end the same way, too. Unless there's
a miracle, that man will be dead in an hour."
He sighed and reached to turn the light on again, but there was an abrupt
hissing, swishing sound and something darted past them, over their heads.
"What the devil!" cried Dr. Snow, and turned on the lights.
Something was on the dying man's head, something that scuttled about and
glared at them with hot red eyes, like incandescent shoebuttons.
"Father! It's Harry's I mean, it's the pyropod! The one Boysie and I brought
back!" cried Quarla
Snow.
Gann said tightly, "Look! He broke the chain." Then he laughed shakily. "Harry
would be pleased,"
he said unsteadily. "At last the thing's learned how to fly."
Machine Colonel Zafar lived longer than the hour Dr. Snow had promised, but it
was obvious that the extra time would not be very long. He was sinking.
For.minutes at a time.he seemed hardly to breathe, then roused himself Jong
enough to mumble incoherent phrases like "The Starchild! But the
Swan won't help him ..."
Snow was working over his laboratory equipment in the corner of the room,
pausing every few minutes to check his patient's breathing, and shake his
head. He summoned Quarla and Gann to him and gestured to a microscope.
"I want to show you something," he said, his face somber and wondering.
"Look." And he stepped aside.
Quarla looked into the slim chromed barrels of the microscope, then lifted her
head to stare questioningly at her father. He nodded. "You see? Mr. Gann,
look."
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Slowly Boysie Gann took her place. "I'm not a scientist, Doctor," he
protested. "I won't know what to look for."
But then he was looking through the eyepieces and his voice stopped. He did
not need to be a scientist. The spectacle before him, standing out clear in
three dimen-
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sions in the stereoscopic field of the microscope, was nothing he had ever
seen before.
Straw-colored erythrocytes and pale eosinophiles floated among colonies of
benign microorganisms that live in every human's blood. Rodlike and amoeboid,
radial or amorphous, all the tiny bacteria were familiar, in a vague,
half-remembered way, to Gann.
AH but one.
For dominating the field were masses of globular bodies, dark and
uninteresting-looking at first, but bursting under his eyes into spurts of
golden light. Like the luminous plankton of Earth's warm seas, they flared
brilliantly, then subsided, then flared again. It was like tiny warning lights
signaling disaster in the sample of the sick man's blood hundreds of them,
perhaps thousands so many that the field of the microscope was brilliantly
illuminated with a flickering golden glow.
"Great Plan!" whispered Boysie Gann. "And this is what made him sick?"
Dr. Snow said slowly, "It is the same thing I saw in Harry Hickson's blood.
Just before he died."
He took his place at the twin eyepieces and glanced for a second at the tiny
golden spheres.
"Fusorians," he said. "It took me a month with paper chromatography and
mass'spectrograms to verify it in Harry's blood, but that is what they were.
Colonies of fusorian symbiotes gone wild.
They're killing him."
He stared blankly at the microscope, then roused himself and hurried back to
his patient. Machine [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]