Did it want to drug him? That seemed to simple. Always unpredictability, the stories said, and sometimes a subtlety out of hell.
He went on with the game. “I have all that is necessary. Be warned that my attention will hardly waver from my control panel. Soon I will place a tissue sample in the airlock for you.”
He opened the ship’s medical kit, took two painkillers, and set very carefully to work with a sterile scalpel. He had had some biological training.
When the small wound was bandaged, he cleansed the tissue sample of blood and lymph and with unsteady fingers sealed it into a little tube. Without letting down his guard, he thought, for an instant, he dragged the fallen pilot to the airlock and left it there with the tissue sample. Utterly weary, he got back to the combat chair. When he switched the outer door open, he heard something come into the lock and leave again.
He took a pep pill. It would activate some pain, but he had to stay alert. Two hours passed. Carr forced himself to eat some emergency rations, watched the panel, and waited.
He gave a startled jump when the berserker spoke again; nearly six hours had gone by.
“You are free to leave,” it was saying. “Tell the leading life-units of your planet that when I have refitted, I will be their ally. The study of your cells has convinced me that the human body is the highest creation of the universe, and that I should make it my purpose to help you. Do you understand?”
Carr felt numb. “Yes. Yes. I have convinced you. After you have refitted, you will fight on our side.”
Something shoved hugely and gently at his hull. Through a port he saw stars, and he realized that the great hatch that had swallowed his ship was swinging open.
This far within the system. Carr necessarily kept his ship in normal space to travel. His last sight of the berserker showed it moving as if indeed about to let down upon the airless planetoid. Certainly it was not following him.
A couple of hours after being freed, he roused himself from contemplation of the radar screen, and went to spend a full minute considering the inner airlock door. At last he shook his head, dialed air into the lock, and entered it. The pilot-machine was gone, and the tissue sample. There was nothing out of the ordinary to be seen. Carr took a deep breath, as if relieved, closed up the lock again, and went to a port to spend some time watching the stars.
After a day he began to decelerate, so that when hours had added into another day, he was still a good distance from home. He ate, and slept, and watched his face in a mirror. He weighed himself, and watched the stars some more, with interest, like a man reexamining something long forgotten.
In two more days, gravity bent his course into a hairpin ellipse around his home planet. With it bulking between him and the berserker’s rock, Carr began to use his radio.
“Ho, on the ground, good news.”
The answer came almost instantly. “We’ve been tracking you, Carr. What’s going on? What’s happened?”
He told them. “So that’s the story up to now,” he finished. “I expect the thing really needs to refit. Two warships attacking it now should win.”
“Yes.” There was excited talk in the background. Then the voice was back, sounding uneasy. “Carr—you haven’t started a landing approach yet, so maybe you understand. The thing was probably lying to you.”
“Oh, I know. Even that pilot-machine’s collapse might have been staged. I guess the berserker was too badly shot up to want to risk a battle, so it tried another way. Must have sneaked the stuff into my cabin air, just before it let me go—or maybe left it in my airlock.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“I’d guess it’s some freshly mutated virus, designed for specific virulence against the tissue I gave it. It expected me to hurry home and land before getting sick, and spread a plague. It must have thought it was inventing biological warfare, using life against life, as we use machines to fight machines. But it needed that tissue sample to blood its pet viruses; it must have been telling the truth about never having a human prisoner.”
“Some kind of virus, you think? What’s it doing to you, Carr? Are you in pain? I mean, more than before?”
“No.” Carr swiveled his chair to look at the little chart he had begun. It showed that in the last two days his weight loss had started to reverse itself. He looked down at his body, at the bandaged place near the center of a discolored inhuman-looking area. That area was smaller than it had been, and he saw a hint of new and healthy skin.
“What is the stuff doing to you?”
Carr allowed himself to smile, and to speak aloud his growing hope. “I think it’s killing off my cancer.”
For most men the war brought no miracles of healing, but a steady deforming pressure which seemed to have existed always, and which had no foreseeable end. Under this burden some men became like brutes, and the minds of others grew to be as terrible and implacable as the machines they fought against.
But I have touched a few rare human minds, the jewels of life who rise to meet the greatest challenges by becoming supremely men.
STONE PLACE
Earth’s Gobi spaceport was perhaps the biggest in all the small corner of the galaxy settled by Solarian man and his descendants; at least so thought Mitchell Spain, who had seen most of those ports in his twenty-four years of life.
But looking down now from the crowded, descending shuttle, he could see almost nothing of the Gobi’s miles of ramp. The vast crowd below, meaning only joyful welcome, had defeated its own purpose by forcing back and breaking the police lines. Now the vertical string of descending shuttle-ships had to pause, searching for enough clear room to land.
Mitchell Spain, crowded into the lowest shuttle with a thousand other volunteers, was paying little attention to the landing problem for the moment. Into this jammed compartment, once a luxurious observation lounge, had just come Johann Karlsen himself; and this was Mitch’s first chance for a good look at the newly appointed High Commander of Sol’s defense, though Mitch had ridden Karlsen’s spear-shaped flagship all the way from Austeel.
Karlsen was no older than Mitchell Spain, and no taller, his shortness somehow surprising at first glance. He had become ruler of the planet Austeel through the influence of his half-brother, the mighty Felipe Nogara, head of the empire of Esteel; but Karlsen held his position by his own talents.
“This field may be blocked for the rest of the day,” Karlsen was saying now, to a cold-eyed Earthman who had just come aboard the shuttle from an aircar. “Let’s have the ports open, I want to look around.”
Glass and metal slid and reshaped themselves, and sealed ports became small balconies open to the air of Earth, the fresh smells of a living planet—open, also, to the roaring chant of the crowd a few hundred feet below: “Karlsen! Karlsen!”
As the High Commander stepped out onto a balcony to survey for himself the chances of landing, the throng of men in the lounge made a half-voluntary brief surging movement, as if to follow. These men were mostly Austeeler volunteers, with a sprinkling of adventurers like Mitchell Spain, the Martian wanderer who had signed up on Austeel for the battle bounty Karlsen offered.
“Don’t crowd, outlander,” said a tall man ahead of Mitch, turning and looking down at him.
“I answer to the name of Mitchell Spain.” He let his voice rasp a shade deeper than usual. “No more an outlander here than you, I think.”
The tall one, by his dress and accent, came from Venus, a planet terraformed only within the last century, whose people were sensitive and proud in newness of independence and power. A Venerian might well be jumpy here, on a ship filled with men from a planet ruled by Felipe Nogara’s brother.