The Jupiter Plague

“Yes, Doctor, of course. Right through there. I’m very glad to see you, very glad indeed; I’ve been up two days and a night and I’m not used to be doing that any more. But Hadley in there phoned me, very frightened, and he should have been, because I recognized Rand’s disease when I walked in and he knew himself that he had it. I’ve been treating him here alone ever since, and I have the fever licked and he’s on the mend…”

“Do you mind if I have that curtain opened?” Sam asked. The room was dark and the man on the bed only a dim outline.

“Surely, of course, just resting Hadley’s eyes.”

The sergeant pulled up the curtain and Sam stood next to the bed, looking down at the middle-aged man with the red boils on his face: he put the telltale against his wrist.

“How are you feeling, Mr. Hadley?” he asked.

“Hadley’s my first name. And I felt a whole lot better in my time, I tell you. Felt worse until the doc came.”

Sam opened Hadley’s pajama jacket — there were one or two boils scattered on his chest— then palpated his armpits: the lymph nodes were swollen.

“That hurts,” Hadley said.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be all right.”

“Then he is cured,” Dr. Stissing said, his words tumbling one over the other. “I knew it, I told him, these new antibiotics. The plague, I mean Rand’s disease…”

“Hadley’s a lucky man,” Sam said tiredly, “he never had Rand’s disease. This is common furunculosis complicated by a lympathic infection which the antibiotics have brought under control.”

“But Rand’s disease, the symptoms, the fever, all the same. I’ve been practicing long enough…”

“How long have you been ill, Hadley?” Sam asked.

“Couple of days. Fever hit me right after the rocket landed, like I told the doc. Felt like I was dying.”

“That was the fever part — but how long have you had the boils?”

“Came at the same time. Of course I felt them coming on a few days earlier. Then the fever hit and I knew I had the plague…”

“Not the plague from space, Hadley,” Dr. Stissing said, sitting down heavily on the wooden kitchen chair by the head of the bed. “Just a bad case of the boils. Boils and a fever. I’m… sorry, Doctor, about getting you up here from the city—”

The sudden crackle of small arms fire sounded from outside the house, from the front, broken by the heavy boom of a recoilless handgun. The sergeant ran from the room, drawing his pistol as he went; Sam was right behind him.

“Stay here!” Sam shouted over his shoulder to the bewildered doctor. He reached the parlor just as the sergeant threw open the front door. A hail of small arms fire splintered the door frame and punched holes in the floor. Sam had been under fire before, often enough to have developed all the correct instincts: he dived and rolled at the same time, out of the line of fire through the door. The sergeant lay crumpled in the doorway, his fingers still outstretched toward the bulk of the recoilless pistol, which lay on the porch outside. A few more shots splattered around the door as Sam grabbed him by the leg and pulled him away from the opening. The right shoulder of his uniform was spotted with blood and Sam tore it open: there was the entrance hole where a small-caliber bullet had penetrated. It must have been a magnum because the hydrostatic shock had knocked the sergeant out and, as Sam rolled him over to look at the exit wound, also small and bleeding only slightly, the sergeant opened his eyes and tried to sit up. Sam pressed him back.

“Take it easy — you’ve been hit.”

“The hell you say!” The sergeant pushed Sam’s hand away and struggled to a sitting position. “What’s happening out there?”

Sam looked quickly from the side of the window, shielded by a curtain, and pulled his head back before the shots crashed through the glass. It was long enough for him to see the dark forms of the men who were running toward the copter, and to see the body of the pilot hanging halfway out of the doorway.

“Don’t try nothing!” A voice called from outside. “You don’t shoot at us and we’re not going to shoot at you.” Sam rose behind the curtain and the sergeant struggled up next to him. The men had pushed the limp pilot to the ground and were climbing in. One of them, the one who had been talking, held a young girl by the arms, shielding himself behind her body. She was in her twenties and the way her head hung and the way her clothing was torn left no doubt as to what had happened to her.

“Try anything I’ll shoot the girl,” the man shouted. “So help me I’ll kill her. We don’t want no more trouble, we just want to get away from the plague. Andy here can fly your whirly, learned in the Army, and we’re going to take it and get out. Be smart and no one’s going to get hurt.”