"No animals, Warren. We never found any animals. A world like this and nothing moving in it. It's a dead world. Something got it. Something lives here, in the soil, something in the air; something grew here, something fell in out of space—and it got all the animals. Every moving thing. Can't let it go—"
"Sir—sir, we don't know the rest of us would have died. We don't know that. Youmay not, and I may not, and what are we going to do, sir?"
"I'm sorry, Warren. I'm really sorry. It's not a chance to take—to go like that. Make up your own mind. I've done the best thing. I have. Insured us against weakness. It can't leave here."
" Captain-"
Silence. A soft popping sound.
"Captain!" Warren pushed away from the wall, scrambled for the lift and rode it topside, ran down the corridor toward the bridge. He thrust his card into the lock.
It worked now. The door slid. And Burlin was there, slumped at the com station, the gun beneath his hand. The sickroom stink was evident. The fever. The minute hemorrhages on the hands. Blood pooled on the com counter, ran from Burlin's nose and mouth. The eyes stared, reddened. Warren sat down in the navigator's chair, wiped his face, his eyes, stared blankly, Finding it hard to get his breath. He cursed Burlin. Cursed all the dead.
There was silence after.
He got up finally, pulled Burlin's body back off the com board, punched in the comp and-threw the com wide open, because the ship was all there was to talk to. " Anne," he said to comp.
"Pseudosome to bridge. Body. Dispose."
In time the lift operated and the silver pseudo-some arrived, leisurely precise. It stood in the doorway and surveyed the area with insectoid turns of the head. It clicked forward then, gathered up Burlin and walked out.
Warren stayed a time, doing nothing, sitting in the chair on the bridge, in the quiet. His eyes filled with tears. He wiped at one eye and the other, still numb.
When he did walk down to destruct to push the button, the pseudosome was still standing beside the chamber. He activated it, walked away, left the robot standing there. It was planetary night outside. He thought of Sax out there, crazed. Of Sax maybe still alive, in the dark, as alone as he. He thought of going out and hunting for him in the morning. The outside speakers.
He went topside in haste, back to the bridge, sat down at the com and opened the port shields on night sky. He dimmed the bridge lights, threw on the outside floods, illuminating grass and small shrubs round about the ship.
He put on the outside address.
"Sax. Sax, it's Paul Warren. There's no one left but us. Listen, I'm going to put food outside the ship tomorrow. Tomorrow, hear me? I'll take care of you. You're not to blame. I'll take care of you. You'll get well, you hear me?"
He kept the external pickup on. He listened for a long time, looked out over the land.
"Sax?"
Finally he got up and walked out, down to the showers, sealed his clothes in a bag for destruct. He tried to eat after that, wrapped in his robe, sitting down in the galley because it was a smaller place than the living quarters and somehow the loneliness was not so deep there; but he had no appetite. His throat was pricklish. . . exhaustion, perhaps. He had reason enough. The air-conditioning felt insufficient in the room.
But he had driven himself. That was what.
He had the coffee at least, and the heat suffused his face, made him short of breath. Then the panic began to hit him. He thrust himself up from the table, dizzy in rising, vision blurred— felt his way to the door and down the corridor to the mirror in the showers. His eyes were watering. He wiped them, tried to see if there was hemorrhage. They were red, and the insides of the lids were red and painful. The heat he had felt began to go to chill, and he swallowed repeatedly as he walked back to the galley, testing whether the soreness in his throat was worse than he recalled over the last few hours.
Calm, he told himself. Calm. There were things to do that had to be done or he would face dying of thirst, of hunger. He set about gathering things from the galley, arranged dried food in precise stacks beside the cot in the lower-deck duty station, near the galley. He made his sickbed, set drugs and water and a thermal container of ice beside it.
Then he called the pseudosome in, walked it through the track from his bed to the galley and back again, programmed it for every errand he might need.
He turned down the bed. He lay down, feeling the chill more intense, and tucked up in the blankets.
The pseudosome stood in the doorway like a silver statue, one sensor light blinking lazily in the faceplate. When by morning the fever had taken him and he was too weak to move coherently, he had mechanical hands to give him water. Annewas programmed to pour coffee, to do such parlor tricks, a whim of Harley's.
It wished him an inane good morning. It asked him How are you? and at first in his delirium he tried to answer, until he drifted too far away.
"Assistance?" he would hear it say then, and imagined a note of human concern in that voice.
"Malfunction? Nature of malfunction, please?"
Then he heaved up, and he heard the pseudosome's clicking crescendo into alarm. The emergency Klaxon sounded through the ship as the computer topside registered that there was something beyond its program. Her lights all came on.
"Captain Burlin," she said again and again, "Captain Burlin, emergency." 2
The pulsing of headache and fever grew less. Warren accepted consciousness gradually this time, fearful of the nausea that had racked him the last. His chest hurt. His arms ached, and his knees. His lips were cracked and painful. It amazed him that the pain had ebbed down to such small things.
"Good morning."
He rolled his head on the pillow, to the soft whirr of machinery on his right. Anne's smooth-featured pseudosome was still waiting.
He was alive. No waking between waves of fever. His face felt cool, his body warm from lying too long in one place. He lay in filth, and stench.
He propped himself up, reached for the water pitcher, knocked it off the table. It rolled empty to Anne's metal feet.
"Assistance?"
He reached for her arm. "Flex."
The arm bent, lifting him. Her motors whirred in compensation. "Showers." She reoriented herself and began to walk, with him leaning on her, his arm about her plastic-sheathed shoulder, like some old, familiar friend.
She stopped when she had brought him where he wished, out of program. He managed to stand alone, tottering and staring at himself in the mirror. He was gaunt, unshaven, covered with filth and sores. His eyes were like vast bruises. He swore, wiped his eyes and felt his way into a shower cabinet.
He fainted there, in the shower stall, came to again on the floor, under the warm mist. He managed to lever himself up again, got the door open, refused a second dizziness and leaned there till it passed. " Anne."
A whirring of motors. She planted herself in the doorway, waiting.
She got him topside, to the living quarters, to his own compartment door. "Open," he told her hoarsely; and she brought him inside, to the edge of his own unused bed, to clean blankets and clean sheets. He fell into that softness panting and shivering, hauled the covers over himself with the last of his strength.
"Assistance?"
"I'm all right."
"Define usage: right."
"Functional. I'm functional."
"Thank you."
He laughed weakly. This was not Anne. Not she. It. Annewas across the living quarters, in controls, all the company there was left.