“You want us to get out of your sky, is that it? You stinking lousy…” He faltered in fury. He could not finish the sentence, so steeped in anger was he. “You set off too many bombs down there, and eventually some of us with something in our bloodstreams react to it, and we turn into monsters. What do you do…you call it the Sickness and you pack us up whether we want to go or not, and you shove us into space.”
“Mr. Bedzyk, I—”
“You what? You damned well what, Mr. System Central? With your straight, clean body and your nice home on Earth, and your allocations of how many people live where, to keep the balance of culture just so! You what? You want to invite us to leave? Okay, we’ll go!” He was nearly screeching, his face crimson with emotion, his big hands knotted at his sides for fear he would strike this emissary.
“We’ll get out of your sky. We’ve been all the way out to the Edge, Mr. Curran, and there’s no room in space for us anywhere. They won’t let us land even on the frontier worlds where we can pay our way. Oh no; contamination, they think. Okay, don’t shove, Curran, we’ll be going.”
He started to turn away, was nearly down the passageway, when Curran’s solid voice stopped him: “Bedzyk!”
The wedge-chested man turned. Curran was unsticking the seam that sealed his jumper top. He pulled it open and revealed his chest.
It was covered with leprous green and brown sores. His face was a blasted thing, then. He was a man with Sickness, who wanted to know how he had acquired it—how he could be rid of it. On the ship, they called Curran’s particular deformity “the runnies.”
Bedzyk walked back slowly, his eyes never leaving Curran’s face. “They sent you to talk to us?” Bedzyk asked, wondering.
Curran resealed the jumper, and nodded. He laid a hand on his chest, as though wishing to be certain the sores would not run off and leave him. A terror swam brightly in his young eyes.
“It’s getting worse down there, Bedzyk,” he said as if in a terrible need for hurrying. “There are more and more changing every day. I’ve never seen anything like it—”
He hesitated, shuddered.
He ran a hand over his face, and swayed slightly, as though whatever memory he now clutched to himself was about to make him faint. “I—I’d like to sit down.”
Bedzyk took him by the elbow, and led him a few steps toward the saloon. Then Dresden, the girl with the glass hands—who wore monstrous cotton-filled gloves—came out from the connecting passage leading to the saloon, and Bedzyk thought of the hundred weird forms Curran would have to face. In his condition, that would be bad. He turned the other way, and led Curran back up to the drive room. Bedzyk waved at a control chair. “Have a seat.”
Curran looked collegiate-boy shook up. He sank into the chair, again touching his chest in disbelief. “I’ve been like this for over two months…they haven’t found out yet; I’ve tried to keep myself from showing it…”
He was shivering wildly.
Bedzyk perched on the shelf of the plot tank, and crossed his legs. He folded his arms across his huge chest and looked at Curran. “What do they want down there? What do they want from their beloved Discards?” He savored the last word with the taste of alum.
“It’s, it’s so bad you won’t believe it, Bedzyk.” He ran a hand through his crew cut, nervously. “We thought we had the Sickness licked. There was every reason to believe the atmosphere spray Terra Pharmaceuticals developed would end it. They sprayed the entire planet, but something they didn’t even know was in the spray, and something they only half-suspected in the Sickness, combined and produced a healthier strain.
“That was when it started getting bad. What had been a hit-and-miss thing—with just a few like yourselves, with some weakness in your bloodstreams making you susceptible—became a rule instead of an exception. People started changing while you watched. I—I—” he faltered again, shuddered at a memory.
“My, my fiancée,” he went on, looking at his attaché case and his hands, “I was eating lunch with her in Rockefeller Plaza’s Skytop. We had to be back at work in Butte in twenty minutes, just time to catch a cab, and she—she—changed while we were sitting there. Her eyes, they, they—I can’t explain it, you can’t know what it was like seeing them water and run down her ch-cheeks like that, it was—” his face tightened up as though he were trying to keep himself from going completely insane.
Bedzyk sharply curbed the hysteria. “We have seven people like that on board right now. I know what you mean. And they aren’t the worst. Go on, you were saying?”
Such prosaic acceptance of the horror brought Curran’s frenzy down. “It got so bad everyone was staying in the sterile shelters. The streets always empty; it was horrible. Then some quack physician out in Cincinnati or somewhere like that came up with an answer. A serum made from a secretion in the bloodstreams of—of—”
Bedzyk added the last word for him: “Of Discards?”
Curran nodded soberly.
Bedzyk’s hard-edged laugh rattled against Curran’s thin film of calm. He jerked his eyes to the man sitting on the plot tank. A furious expression came over him.
“What are you laughing at? We need your help! We need all you people as blood donors.”
Bedzyk stopped laughing abruptly. “Why not use the changed ones from down there?” He jerked a thumb at the big lucite viewport where Earth hung swollen and multicolored. “What’s wrong with them—” and he added with malice “—with you?” Curran twitched as he realized he could so easily be lumped in with the afflicted.
“We’re no good. We were changed by this new mutated Sickness. The secretion is different in our blood than it is in yours. You were stricken by the primary Sickness, or virus, or whatever they call it. We have a complicated one. But the way the research has outlined it, the only ones who have what we need, are you Dis—” he caught himself “—you people who were shipped out before the Sickness itself mutated.”
Bedzyk snorted contemptuously. He let a wry, astonished smirk tickle his lips. “You Earthies are fantastic.” He shook his head in private amusement.
He slipped off the plot-tank’s ledge and turned to the port, talking half to himself, half to a nonexistent third person in the drive room. “These Earthies are unbelievable! Can you imagine, can you picture it?” Astonishment rang in his disbelief at the proposal. “First they hustle us into a metal prison and shoot us out here to die alone, they don’t want any part of us, go away, they say. Then, when the trouble comes to them too big, they run after us, can you help us please, you dirty, ugly things, help us nice clean Earthies.” He spun suddenly. “Get out of here! Get off this ship! We won’t help you.
“You have your allotments and your quotas for each world—”
Curran broke in, “Yes, that’s it. If the population goes down much more, they’ve been killing themselves, riots, it’s terrible, then the balance will be changed, and our entire System culture will bend and fall and—”
Bedzyk cut him off, finishing what he had been saying, “—yes, you have your dirty little quotas, but you have no room for us. Well, we’ve got no room for you! Now get the hell off this ship. We don’t want to help you!”
Curran leaped to his feet. “You can’t send me away like this! You don’t speak for all of them aboard. You can’t treat a Terran emissary this way—” Bedzyk had him by the jumper, and had propelled him toward the closed companionway door before the Attaché knew quite what was happening. He hit the door and rebounded. As he stumbled back toward Bedzyk, the great-chested mutant snatched the briefcase from beside the control chair and slammed it into Curran’s stomach. “Here! Here’s your offer and your lousy demands, and get off this ship! We don’t want any part of y—”