TO MAKE A HERO
By RANDALL GARRETT
Illustrated by EMSH
Fraud? Larceny? Murder? All in a days work
to Leland Hale—the savior of Cardigan's Green!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity October 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Randall Garrett got to wondering, recently, what kind of stories the "true adventure" magazines of the future would publish. To Make a Hero is his own answer to the question. It's science fiction told from a historian's viewpoint—an attempt to set the "record" straight on one Leland Hale, a hero who is guaranteed to fascinate you, even if you hate him!
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"One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero; numbers sanctify the crime."—Porteus
CHAPTER I
History, by any reckoning, is a fluid thing. Once a thing has happened, no instrument yet devised by man can show exactly what it was in minute detail. All of the data simply cannot be recovered.
In spite of this, if Man were an intellectually honest animal, it wouldn't be too difficult to get a reasonably accurate picture of the past. At least the data that could be recovered and retained would show a reasonably distinct picture of long gone events and their relationship to the present.
But Man isn't that kind of creature. Once men discovered the fact that the events of tomorrow are based on what is happening today, it didn't take them long to reach the conclusion that changing the past could change the present. Words are magic, and the more cleverly and powerfully they are connected together, the more magic they become. The ancient "historians" of Babylon, Egypt, Israel, Sumeria, Judea, and Rome did not conceive of themselves as liars when they distorted history to conform to their own beliefs; they were convinced that if what they wrote were accepted as true, then it was true. Word magic had changed the past to conform to the present.
Now, one would suppose that, as methods of recording and verifying the contemporary happenings of a culture became more and more efficient and more easily correlated, the ability to change the past would become more difficult. Not true. The actual records of the past are not read by the average man; he is normally exposed only to biased, carefully selected excerpts from the past.
Granted, with a few thousand civilized and tens of thousands semi-civilized planets in the occupied galaxy, the correlation of data is difficult. But, nonetheless, errors of the magnitude of the one made in the history of Cardigan's Green shouldn't be committed.
The average man doesn't give two hoots in hell about historical truth; he would much rather have romantic legends and historic myths. The story of Cardigan's Green is a case in point.
Call this a debunking spree if you wish, but the facts can be found in the archives of the Interstellar Police and the Interstellar Health Commission; and the news recordings on several nearby planets uphold the story to a certain extent, although the beginnings of the distortion were already visible.
Time and space have a tendency to dilute truth, and it is the job of the honest historian to distill the essence from the mixture.
The story proper begins nearly a century ago, just before Leland Hale landed on Cardigan's Green, but in order to understand exactly what happened, it is necessary to go back even farther in time—a full three centuries. It was at that time that the race of Man first came to Cardigan's Green.
Exactly what happened is difficult to determine. It is likely that the captain of the ship that brought the colonists to the planet actually was named Cardigan, but there is no record of the man, nor, indeed, of the ship itself. At any rate, there was a ship, and it carried five hundred colonists, if the ship was representative of the colonial ships of the time. Evidently, they tore the ship down to make various other equipment they needed, which, of course, marooned them on the planet. But that was what they wanted, anyway; it is usual among colonists.
And then the Plague struck.
The colonists had no resistance whatever to the disease. Every one of them caught it, bar none. And ninety per cent of them died while the rest recovered. Fifty people, alone on a strange planet. And, as human beings always do, they went on living.
The next generation was on its way to adulthood when the Plague struck again. Seventy-five per cent of them died.
It was over a hundred years before the people of Cardigan's Green received another visit from the Plague, and this time less than twenty per cent died.
But, even so, they had a terrible, deep-seated fear of the Plague. Even another century couldn't completely wipe it out.
And that was more or less the way things stood when Leland Hale snapped his ship out of infraspace near the bright G-2 sun that was Cardigan's Green's primary.
Leland Hale looked at the planet that loomed large in his visiscreen and his eyes narrowed automatically, as they always did when he was in deep thought. The planet wasn't registered in the Navigator's Manual or on the stellographic charts. The sun itself had a number, but the planet wasn't mentioned.
Hale was a big man; his shoulders were much wider than they had any right to be, his arms were thick and cabled with muscle, and his chest was broad and deep. Most men who stand six-feet-six look lean and lanky, but Hale actually looked broad and somewhat squat. At one standard gee of acceleration—1000 cm/sec2—he topped three hundred pounds. There was just enough fat on his body to smooth the outlines a little; his bones were big, as they had to be to anchor tendons solidly; and he had the normal complement of glands and nerves to keep the body functioning well. All the rest of him seemed to be muscle—pounds and pounds of hard, powerful muscle.
His head was large in proportion; a size 8 hat would have suited him perfectly—if he'd ever troubled to buy a hat. His face was regular enough to be considered handsome, and too blocky and hard to be considered pretty. His dark hair, brown eyes, and tanned skin marked him as most likely being of late-migration Earth stock.
He looked from the visiscreen to the detector plate. There wasn't a trace on it. There hadn't been for days. The skewed, almost random orbit he had taken from Bargell IV had lifted him well above the galactic plane, and he was a long way, now, from where he had started.
If the yellow light from Bargell's Sun could have penetrated the heavy clouds of dust and gas that congregated at the galactic center, it would have taken it more than seventy thousand years to reach Cardigan's Green.
No trace on the detector. Good. There was one advantage in stealing a fully equipped Interstellar Police ship; if his pursuers couldn't be detected on their own equipment, they couldn't detect him either—they were out of range of each other.
There were certain disadvantages in stealing an IP vessel, too. If he hadn't done it, the IP wouldn't be after him; his crime on Bargell IV hadn't come under their jurisdiction. Unfortunately, stealing the ship had been the only way to leave Bargell IV. Hale shrugged mentally; it was too late to worry about such trivialities now.
The empty detector plate meant something else. If there were no interstellar ships at all in the area, it was likely that the planet below was an isolated planet. There were plenty of them in the galaxy; when the infraspace drive had combined with Terrestrial overcrowding to produce the great migration, many of the pioneers had simply found themselves a planet, settled themselves into a community, dismantled their ship, and forgotten about the rest of mankind.
Well, that was all to the good. At top magnification, the view-screen showed what appeared to be small villages and plowed lands, which indicated colonization. At least there would be someone around to talk to, and—maybe—a little profit to be made.
But the first thing he'd have to look for was a place to hide his ship.
The Peniyan Range is a bleak, windswept series of serrated peaks that crosses the northern tip of the largest continent on Cardigan's Green. Geologically young, craggy, and with poor soil, they are uninhabited, for there is too little there to support life in any great numbers; the valleys and low hills to the south are more inviting and comfortable for humanity. Until the press of numbers forces it, there will be no need for the inhabitants of Cardigan's Green to live in the mountainous wasteland.
Finding a place of concealment in those jagged mountains ought to be fairly easy, Hale decided. He settled the spherical vessel gently to the ground at the bottom of a narrow gorge which had been cut out by a mountain freshet for a first look-around.
Grand larceny, fraud, and murder are first-magnitude crimes, but they are far more common than police statistics would lead one to believe. The galaxy is unbelievably vast, and the universe as a whole unthinkably vaster. The really adept criminal can easily lose himself in the tremendous whirlpool of stars that forms the Milky Way. Hale knew he had eluded the IP ships; therefore, unless he were found by the sheerest accident, he would be perfectly safe from the police for a long time to come.
Not that he intended to stay on Cardigan's Green for the rest of his life; far from it. He had five and a half million stellors in negotiable notes in the hold of his ship, and he would eventually want to get back to one of the civilized worlds where he could spend it. But that meant waiting until the scream for Leland Hale's blood had become submerged again in the general, galaxy-wide cry against a thousand million other marauders. Eventually, there would be other crimes, more recent, and therefore more important because they were still fresh in the public mind.
Leland Hale would wait.
For the first two weeks, he had plenty to do. He had to hide the ship well enough to keep it from being spotted from the air. It wasn't likely that the IP would find him, but if the colonists of this world had aircraft, they might wonder what a globe of metal was doing in their mountains.
He finally found a place under an overhanging monolith—a huge, solid slab of granite that would have taken an atomic disruptor to dislodge. Then he began piling rocks and gravel around it, working steadily from dawn until daylight—a goodly stretch of labor, since it was summer in the northern hemisphere and the planet made a complete rotation in a little less than twenty-eight hours.
It didn't bother Hale. His powerful body was more than a match for ordinary physical labor, and he liked to have something to do to stave off boredom.
That was Hale's big trouble—boredom. Inactivity and monotony made him frantic. So it wasn't surprising that after the first two weeks, when the ship was finally well hidden, he strapped a pack on his back and went exploring.
He had a good reason for it. Leland Hale never did anything without a good, logical reason. He could never say to himself: "I'm bored; I'll just go out and look over the countryside to have something to do." He could not say it, even to himself, because it would be admitting to himself that he actually did not like his own company. And Hale was convinced that he was, in all respects, a thoroughly likable fellow.
His reason for exploration was a need for food. He had plenty in the ship, of course, and the synthesizer could use almost any organic material to make food as long as it had an energy source. But Hale didn't like synthetics, and he didn't want to draw on his power reserves, so he decided to see what kind of menu the local countryside had to offer.
The plant life he found in the mountains wasn't much. There were a few dry, hard bristly bushes, and a tough, gray-green growth that clung to the rocks—a mosslike lichen or a lichenlike moss, take your pick. Neither looked in the least edible.
So Hale headed down the mountains toward the south.
Some days later, as he approached the foothills, he found queer-looking bushes that bore purple berrylike things on their branches. He opened one, and, to his disgust, a white, wormlike thing writhed and squirmed in his hand until he crushed it and wiped his palms on a rock. Every berry he opened behaved the same way. He decided they were none too savory a fare.
He came at last to a warm sea near the foothills of the mountain range. The crags almost seemed to rise out of the water. Hale couldn't see across the body of water, but he knew what its shape was, having seen it from high altitude when he came in for a landing. It was actually a wide channel that cut off a large island from the mainland on which he stood. He narrowed his eyes at the horizon and fancied he could see a shadow of the island, but common sense told him it was an illusion; the island was at least forty miles away.
The water of the channel was quite warm—Hale estimated it at about seventy degrees—and filled with life. Each wave that surged up to the shore left wriggling things behind it as it retreated, and ugly, many-legged things scuttled across the pale blue sand.
It was the blue sand that decided Hale against trying any of the larger sea animals as a meal. The sand was coral sand, and the color indicated a possibility of copper or cobalt. If the animals themselves had an excess of either element in their metabolic processes, they might not be too good for Hale's system.
He shrugged, shouldered his pack, and headed south along the beach. He was in no hurry to find food. He had plenty of concentrate on his back; when exactly half of it was gone, he would head back towards his ship.
Cardigan's Green has no moons, and the relatively mild tides caused by the planet's sun are almost imperceptible, but Hale could see that the broad beach had been built by some sort of regular change in the level of the water—probably a seasonal wind shift of some kind. At any rate, he decided that, soft as it was, the sand was no place to spend the night.
Instead, he slept on a high cliff overlooking the sea. In the mountains, he had slept in his insulation jacket for warmth, but here the heat of the sea and the warm breeze that came from it precluded any need for the jacket, so he used it for a pillow.
Sometime near midnight, the wind changed. The chill wind from the mountains swept downward, and, meeting with the warm, moisture-laden air from the sea, blanketed the coast with a chilling fog.
Leland Hale, untroubled by anything so prosaic as a conscience, and justifiably tired from his long journey on foot, didn't notice the dropping temperature until the fog had actually become a light drizzle. He awoke to find himself shivering and wet and stiff. He put on the insulation jacket immediately, but it took time for his body to warm up and generate enough heat inside the jacket to make him reasonably comfortable. There was absolutely nothing on that rocky coast that could be induced to burn, especially since the rain had begun, so Hale had to forego the primitive comfort of a fire.
Just before dawn, the wind changed direction again, and the fog slowly dissipated under the influence of the sea breeze and the heat of the rising sun. Hale stripped off his clammy clothing and put it on a rock to dry, but he already had the sniffles and sneezes.
Leland Hale was nothing if not determined; his record shows that. Once he had decided on a course of action, only the gravest of obstacles could block his path. Most of them could be surmounted, flanked, or, in case of necessity, smashed through by pure brute strength.
Once, on Viyellan, he set up a scheme for selling a piece of bogus artwork to a wealthy collector. He had spent months of loving care in constructing an almost indetectable phony, and his preliminary contacts with the collector had been beautifully successful.
Hale insisted on cash for the artwork, which was to be delivered on a certain date. But the day before the appointed time, Hale's accomplice, thinking he could make a better profit elsewhere, absconded with the imitation.
Hale, knowing that the collector had drawn half a million stellors in cash, burgled his home that night. Then he had the temerity to show up the next morning to complete the agreement. When the collector discovered that there was no cash on hand to pay for the "artwork," Hale indignantly refused to sell, on the grounds that the collector had reneged, was unethical, and not to be trusted in any way.
A week or so later, Hale finally traced his errant accomplice to the small hotel where he was hiding. The next day, the accomplice was found mysteriously dead. On that same day, the wealthy collector, having pleaded with Hale to be given another chance, was forgiven, and he gratefully parted with another half million stellors for Hale's bogus tidbit. Hale was never seen again on Viyellan.
Leland Hale, therefore, was not the kind of man to let a little thing like a runny nose or a slight cough stop him. He put on his clothes when they had dried, adjusted his pack and headed on southwards.
CHAPTER II
Human beings are notoriously rapid breeders. Give a group of men and women a chance, and, with plenty of room to spread, they will nearly triple their population in each generation. Many will die, if the circumstances are adverse, but many more will live. Thus, in spite of the depredations of the Plague, the population of Cardigan's Green when Hale landed was well over thirty thousand souls, scattered thinly across the rich farmland near the coast of the channel.
On the coast itself, near the edge of a rocky outcropping which sheltered a tiny harbor, was the fishing village of Taun. The colonists of Cardigan's Green had learned quickly enough which of the local fauna and flora were edible and which were not; it was a case of learn or die. Those sea denizens which could be eaten were in great demand, and commanded a fairly large price; those who were successful in catching them were affluent men of position in Taun.
Such a one was Yon the Fisher.
The Fisher was well thought of in Taun; he was a hard worker and a hard dealer in business, but one had to be in order to live on Cardigan's Green. Yon the Fisher had lived in Taun all his life; his father and his father's father had been Fishers before him. He possessed great wealth, as was attested by his ownership of a great many Crystals, which had, in twelve short years, become the medium of exchange on Cardigan's Green. He was the owner of five magnificent twenty-foot fishing smacks and a large, two-story house. The house was of stone, but this, in itself was not a sign of affluence; large trees were rare on Cardigan's Green, and had to be used to build ships, not houses.
But, in spite of his wealth, Yon the Fisher did not have enough. He wanted more. He dreamed of the stars.
Twelve years before, an interstellar ship—the Morris—had cracked up near the farm of Dornis the Fat. It had not been a bad accident; the crewmen had been able to repair it, and were almost ready to leave before the Plague had killed them all. Now, no one would go near the ship, in fear of the Plague. It was a shunned and taboo place—to all except Yon the Fisher. Yon simply didn't believe the Plague stayed around places where people had died of it—and, in a manner of speaking, he was perfectly right.
There had been a period when the crew of the downed ship had needed help in repairing their vessel, the like of which had not been seen on Cardigan's Green for two centuries. The crewmen had paid off in Crystals and in small machines that did various things. After the crew had died of the Plague, Yon the Fisher had waited for fifteen days; then, in the dead of night, he had entered the ship. The hold had been almost entirely full of Crystals.
Yon the Fisher was not an uneducated man; the books which had been brought with Cardigan's ship, two hundred years before, had been carefully preserved and used in spite of the heavy death toll of the Plague. The Crystals alone meant nothing to him; what he wanted was the Morris itself. But the Crystals could be used—they represented wealth.
The Commander, the elected head of Cardigan's Green, liked jewels, and the beauty of the Crystals had caught his eyes, as they had everyone else's, and that made them valuable. If Yon played his cards right, he could become one of the wealthiest men on Cardigan's Green.
Eventually, the old Commander would die, and Yon intended to get himself elected in the Commander's place. Then he would finish repairing the spaceship.
He had dreams—big ones. He would rule Cardigan's Green. He would have a spaceship, all his own. He would have....
There would be no limit to the things he would have.
That was Yon the Fisher—intelligent, shrewd, and an excellent politician. He had a knack for making people like and respect him. He was wealthy, but he was not greedy for anything material. He wanted only one thing—power.
He, then, was a part of the second factor that entered into this phase of the history of Cardigan's Green.
The third factor was a hospital ship of the Interstellar Health Commission, the IHCS Caduceus.
The ship was en route from Praxilies to Aldebaran, but she had to go off course to avoid an ion storm. A star went supernova in the Skull Nebula, and for six months or so the whole area was full of cosmic ray particles and mesons, which blocked the regular route.
Lieutenant Riggs Blair, the sub-radio operator, picked up a very weak distress call as they were making the loop around the Skull Nebula. He listened to it as it was repeated twice and then called the ship's commander, Captain Doctor Latimer Wills.
"Captain, I've got a distress signal. The freighter Morris developed generator trouble four weeks ago, when they got caught in that storm. Ruined their infraspace drive and fouled up their subspace radio—almost no power left."
"Put a call through to the police," the captain replied. "Just relay it through, that's all. Why bother me with something as simple as that?"
"There's more to it, sir; the men are dying. They're sick with some sort of disease."
"What are the symptoms?" the captain asked. There was a marked change in the tone of his voice. This was his meat.
Lieutenant Blair tried to raise the Morris again, but got no response.
"Very well," said Captain Doctor Wills, "call Health Central, tell 'em what's happened. We're going down."
"I can't call Central, sir," the lieutenant objected. "That ion storm is between us. I'll try to relay it around."
"Good. We're going down, anyway."
It is a matter of record that the call never reached Health Central. Exactly where it got lost on the way isn't known, but a century ago such losses were by no means unusual.
Lieutenant Blair had pinpointed the spot where the Morris had landed within a hundred miles. The Caduceus hovered over the area and then settled slowly towards a fairly large offshore island, some forty miles from the mainland.
"There's a level area there," the captain said. "It would be the logical place for them to come down. If they didn't, we'll use the air ambulances to look the place over."
It had taken them twenty days to reach Cardigan's Green since they had heard the distress call.
Yon the Fisher saw the ship in the air. It was only a dot, fifty miles away, but it seemed to be dropping too slowly and too regularly to be anything natural. He was standing on the deck of one of his fishing vessels, looking toward the east, when the ship gleamed suddenly in the rays of the setting sun. Yon watched it for a moment, then he grabbed a small brass telescope. It was a ship—no doubt about it!
Were they coming to rescue the other ship? Whatever it was, they were up to no good, and Yon didn't like to see the vision of his future power go glimmering. He didn't know exactly what he could do, but he knew he'd have to do something.
He turned and bellowed to his first officer: "Prepare to cast off! We're heading for Stone Island!"
Precisely what happened in the next ten days isn't too clear. The crew of the Caduceus was in no condition to record it, and their memories were evidently not too good.
This much has been established: Yon the Fisher visited the ship and offered his help. It took the doctors a little time—an hour or so—to decipher his strange dialect, but they finally found that the help offered was worthless. Yon professed no knowledge of the wrecked Morris. He was dismissed, and he returned to the mainland. Within the next week, every man jack aboard the Caduceus was down with the Plague.
Yon returned, in force, to try to capture the ship. He nearly succeeded, but the crew of the hospital ship fought him off, weak as they were. Yon had not counted on their being ill, evidently, or he would never have gone near them. It was lucky for him they were, or his whole force would have been wiped out.
Yon and his men managed to gain entrance into the ship, and the fighting raged for twenty minutes or so before he and the sailors with him were driven off.
The physicians aboard the Caduceus were not in the unfortunate position that the men on the Morris had been. They were able to use the medical supplies they had aboard, and came through with less than ten per cent dead, in spite of the Plague.
But the battle between the crew and Yon's men had done irreparable damage to the ship. It could neither leave nor communicate with the outside. The crew of the Caduceus was stranded.
They could hold off any attacks; they had plenty of power. But they couldn't, they didn't dare, leave the island. If the Plague struck again—and they had no way of knowing whether it would or not—they would not have enough medicine to be effective.
Stalemate.
And thus it remained for twelve long years, until the day that Leland Hale came plodding along the beach toward the little village of Taun.
CHAPTER III
Hale did not feel well at all. He kept putting one foot in front of the other, pushing himself through the blue sand, but he would much rather have crawled into the shade and gone to sleep. His brow was feverish, and his arms and legs and neck felt stiff. It had been two days since he had been caught in the rain, and his sniffles and sneezes had developed into congested lungs and a stopped-up nose. He felt like hell.
The sun was low in the evening sky, but the air was warm and soothing. He was quite a distance from the mountains now, and there was no longer much of a fog at night.
Hale squinted his eyes at the sun.
"Dab it," he said aloud, "I'm dot godda walk eddybore today! I'b godda sit dowd ad relax."
Fever, plus loneliness, plus acute boredom, had started him in the relatively harmless pastime of talking to himself. He had come a long way on the hard-packed blue sand—which was easier to travel over than the rocky shelf above it—and his food had almost reached the halfway point.
He sat down in the shelter of the cliff, unstrapped his pack, and rummaged inside. Where the hell was the blasted aspirin? There. He took out the bottle and gave himself a massive fifteen-grain dose. Maybe it would make him feel better. He didn't like to use medicine; it made him seem weak in his own eyes. But there are times when necessity is the mother of prevention.
He ate, although he wasn't hungry. He was grateful for only one thing: the synthetics were absolutely tasteless. The head congestion had taken care of that.
Afterwards, he impatiently took another ten grains of aspirin, and, still feeling terrible, he curled up to sleep.
He woke up when something prodded him. He was instantly awake, but he didn't move except to open his eyes.
Standing over him were two men dressed in long gray-brown robes which were tied at the waist with braided ropes. One of them was pointing a tube at him that looked suspiciously like a missile weapon.
They were heavily bearded, but the beards were neatly trimmed, and their hair was brushed back and cropped reasonably short.
The man with the gun said something in a commanding tone of voice and gestured with his free hand. Hale didn't understand the command, but the gesture plainly meant "Get up!"
Leland Hale was never a man to argue with a gun. He stood up slowly.
As he did, the expressions on the faces of the two men altered slightly. Hale couldn't understand the new expressions at first, hidden as they were by the beards. Then, as they backed away a little, he understood. The men were no more than five eight; he towered a good ten inches above them.
The armed man spoke again, waving the gun. Hale interpreted this as "All right, let's go." He complied. He didn't know where they were taking him, but almost anything was better than being alone. He wasn't too worried; he'd been in plenty of tight spots before. Jailbreaking was nothing new to Leland Hale.
It was just barely dawn. The sky was light, but the edge of the sun had not quite shown itself over the eastern horizon, far out to sea.
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The trio walked along silently for a couple of miles, then they topped a little rise and went up a long slope to the top of the cliff. Below him, Hale saw a village. Taun. He realized that if he had been walking along the ridge instead of on the shore, he would have seen the town the night before.
Down the slope they went, heading for the little cluster of houses surrounding the small bay.
There weren't many people in the streets of the small town, although there seemed to be plenty of activity around the docks. Hale could see tilled fields to the west of the settlement, where there were people already at work.
A third man in a gray-brown robe met them in the middle of one of the cobblestone streets and asked something of Hale's guards. They stopped, and a long conversation followed. Hale strained his ears to catch the words.
At first, it was complete gibberish, but Hale knew what key words to listen for, and gradually he picked up more and more.
As on every inhabited planet of the galaxy, the language of Cardigan's Green was derived from Terran—basically English, with large additions of Russian, Chinese, and Spanish. Hale had traveled a great deal in his life—partly by choice and partly because often he had no choice. He had heard and spoken a hundred different dialects of Terran, and the assimilation of a new derivation was almost automatic.
The two guards were telling the new man that they had found a stranger on the beach, and describing in detail how it had come about. They were, it seemed, going to take him to the Village Officer—whoever that might be.
The third man told them that the Officer was away somewhere—Hale didn't catch it.
The guard who carried the gun said that Hale would be taken to "the brig" to await the Officer's pleasure.
The third man nodded and hurried off, while Hale was prodded onward.
"The brig" proved to be a small building with a heavy iron door and thick iron bars at the windows. Hale didn't like the looks of the place, but he didn't like the feel of the missile weapon at his back, either. In he went.
He took his pack off and submitted to search. Then the guards went outside, taking the pack with them. The heavy door rang like a bell when they slammed it. A second clang indicated a bar across the door.
"I'll be damned," said Hale softly. "I run seventy thousand light years to stay out of one jail and walk right into another."
He listened to his own voice and noted with satisfaction that his congestion was clearing up.
There were voices outside. Hale strolled over to the window to listen.
"What is he? An Islander?" asked a voice. Hale hadn't heard it before; obviously another seeker after knowledge—a local busybody.
"He's an Islander, all right," said one of the guards. "He wears their clothing." Hale was wearing a standard spaceman's zipsuit and his insulation jacket.
"But what would an Islander want to come here for? None of them have left the Island since their ship landed, twelve years ago."
"Isn't that obvious? Their Captain Doctor wants to make a deal with the Fisher."
Hale listened patiently, and gradually the situation became clearer.
Out on the island across the channel was a ship. From the title "Captain Doctor," he gathered that it was an IHC ship. It had been there for twelve years.
Hale kept his ears open as more information trickled in. Several more of the townspeople joined the discussion group, and the conversation became livelier. Hale drank it all in, filing and indexing it in his mind. Some of the words used weren't clear at times, but the context helped.
Now, a confidence man is an opportunist; no successful con man can afford to be anything else. He must, above all, be able to talk his way out of, or into, anything. Leland Hale's record speaks for itself; killer, thief, yes—but he was also a damned good con man. As Interstellar Police Commander Desmon Shelley remarked some years later: "Leland Hale could have sold antigravity belts to the crew of a ship in free fall at double price—and even then he would have cheated by leaving out the energy units."
Slowly, an idea began to form in his mind. Someone called the Fisher wanted to make a deal with the people on the island. If he played his cards right, Hale might be able to make a little profit, one way or another.
It was several hours before the Village Officer showed up, and by then Hale had the set-up pretty well in mind. His information was far from complete, but he knew enough to enable him to run a bluff.
The Village Officer was a taller man than the other villagers, though nowhere near as big a man as Hale. His full beard was slightly touched with gray, and there was a streak of silver at each temple. His eyes were dark, and a hawkish nose protruded from his face, almost overshadowing the beard.
"I am Yon the Fisher," he announced. "And you?"
He stood outside the iron door, looking in through the open grillwork.
"Leland Hale. I've come here to hear your terms."
"They are the same," said Yon. "Repair my spaceship. Use replacement parts from your own, if necessary. In return, I and my men will take you to a planet where there is a space-port."
"Your spaceship?" Hale asked pointedly.
Yon's bearded visage smiled a little. "Mine. I bought it legally from Dornis the Fat ten years ago. It fell on his land, therefore, by law, it was his to sell."
"What about the crew?" Hale asked. "It was their ship."
"True. Unfortunately, they died—ah—intestate. The property therefore reverted to our legal government. But our aged Commander would have nothing to do with it, so he ruled that it was the lawful property of Dornis the Fat."
"Very neatly done," said Hale in honest admiration. "All legally sewed up." He knew the claim wouldn't stand up in a court of interstellar law, but he recognized the machinations of a fellow con man when he saw them.
"Thank you," said Yon the Fisher. "Now let's get down to business. You came here for a reason, I assume. Is it a deal, or isn't it? I can be patient; I am on my own home planet. You, on the other hand, have been virtually prisoners for twelve years."
"True," agreed Hale. "I think we can make some sort of agreement along those lines. I was sent to look at your ship."
Yon the Fisher pondered this for a moment, then countered with: "Why?"
"We have to know how badly it's damaged. If it can't be repaired, there's no sense in making any kind of deal, is there?"
"I see. Very well. We will go to my ship. However, we will have to take precautions. You understand, I'm sure."
"Naturally," Hale said.
Hale's hands were bound behind him, and the guard with the gun followed directly behind him.
There are no animals fit for riding purposes which are native to Cardigan's Green, and eking out a bare living from the planet left the colonists no time to develop mechanical aids to transportation. They walked.
Several hours later, Leland Hale was inside the hull of the freighter Morris. Under the watchful eye of Yon and his myrmidons, Hale went over the whole vessel, saying as little as possible, and evading the questions that were put to him. When he was finished, his face wore a speculative look, but inside he was feeling positively gleeful. In an hour, at the very most, he, alone, could put the vessel in working order! The original crew of the Morris had almost finished their work when they succumbed to the Plague.
Surely there must be some way he could turn this to his advantage!
"I think it can be done," he said judiciously. "There's not a lot of work to be done, but there are parts missing and so forth.... Hmmmm...." He looked around the control room in which they were standing. It looked like a mess. All the paneling had been taken off the circuit housings to work on the control systems. In the engine section, the refractor domes were still off. The ship didn't look in tip-top shape, but all that would have to be done was a half hour's work on the generators and another half hour to close everything up.
"I don't know how long it will take, though," said Hale.
"I've kept it sealed and kept it clean," said Yon. "I'm no engineer, so I kept my hands off of everything."
"Can you pilot her?" Hale asked.
"Easily. I have the piloting instructions that were left in Cardigan's ship, and I have the astrogation charts from this one." He smiled. "I have had twelve years to study."
Hale had to agree that Yon was probably right. A spaceship practically guides and runs itself when it's in working order. An elementary knowledge of astrogation and a good ship can get a man almost anywhere in the galaxy.
"In that case, Yon," said Hale, smiling his best smile, "I think we can get along. Let bygones be bygones."
"Excellent." Yon was trying hard to conceal his excitement and almost succeeding. "Come; let's go back to Taun and I'll buy you a dinner."
CHAPTER IV
Yon the Fisher felt expansive. At last, after twelve long years of waiting, he would have his spaceship! Of course, he had no intention of taking the crew of the Caduceus anywhere; he wanted no spaceship but his own on Cardigan's Green. But now that a part of his dream was about to come true, he felt like making a grand gesture. He would throw a party. He was the second most important man on Cardigan's Green now, and eventually the old Commander would die, and Yon the Fisher would be elected.
He would really throw a party then, but now he would do a good job. He would entertain this Islander in the grand manner.
The entertainment was held in a large stone hall. It was poorly lighted and almost bare of ornamentation. By the time everything was ready, the sun had set, and the hall was illuminated by oil torches set in sconces along the walls.
It was strictly a stag affair, which, as far as Hale was concerned, made it a very dull party indeed. There were speeches galore, and Yon the Fisher made about every third one.
Hungry as he was, it took a little time for Hale to work up enough courage to try the food placed before him. He had eaten foods on half a thousand different planets, but a thing like a pickled centipede had never been set before him before, and its pale blue-green color and translucent body did nothing to endear it to him. He finally tried one, after closing his eyes seraphically, as though he wanted to enjoy it to the fullest. It was delicious.
The beverage was a purplish, sour-tasting ferment that produced a nice glow. Hale drank three cups of it before he thought to wonder if it were made from the purple berry with the white worms inside. He wisely refrained from asking, and, after a few more cups, it ceased to worry him at all.
As the night went on, the party became more and more boisterous. Everyone had plenty of the purple ferment, and the conversation became more and more interesting as it made less and less sense.
It must have been rather early in the morning when the incident occurred that both shocked Hale back into sobriety and gave him a new zest for life.
As is usual in parties of that sort, the host somehow managed to underestimate the amount of liquor that would be consumed. The supply ran out, and Yon the Fisher had to send out for more.
"La!" he cried as he turned up the last earthenware jug, only to find a bare half-cupful within. "Out of juice! Are we all out? No more?" He gazed around, as though he expected any full jugs to stand up and announce themselves. None did. "Look around!" he bawled. "There must be another."
The whole group of thirty-odd men began turning jugs upside down. One of them had a little in it, but the man who turned it had failed to provide a receptacle, and it splashed on the floor. There were no full jugs.
"Ferek! You, Ferek!" Yon called loudly. One of the men stood up and came toward him. "Ferek, go get us some more. Wake up Lan the Brewer. Here—take this." He opened a leather bag that hung at the cincture of his robe and spilled out a handful of sparkling, blue-white stones. He selected one and handed it over. "And mind you make it snappy, Ferek; we're all thirsty!"
Ferek turned on his heel and fled, but Leland Hale did not watch his departure. Hale was staring at the handful of stones in Yon the Fisher's palm.
Diamonds! Perfect, blue-white octahedrons! He knew what they were; the vital tuning crystals for the subspace radio. So that was what the Morris had been carrying! The little crystals that were worth more than all the rest of a subspace radio, including installation. And they were using them as a medium of exchange!
Hale mentally rubbed his hands together, and the glitter of promised profit gleamed in his eyes.
When Ferek came back with the purple juice, fourteen jugs of it, Hale was ready for the fun to begin.
He woke up the next morning with a head that felt the way it deserved to feel. He vaguely remembered being courteously escorted back to "the brig" and ceremoniously locked in with the best of good wishes. He'd felt fine then; he didn't now.
He sat up, wishing he had his pack back so that he could get a couple of aspirin tablets.
Then the noise came to his ears—an excited muttering outside the window. He got to his feet carefully and walked over to the barred opening.
Outside, a group of men were standing across the narrow street from his cell. They seemed to be staring at the window, and when Hale's face appeared, they moved back a little, almost as though he'd struck at them. At the same time, the muttering ceased.
"What's going on out there?" he asked in his heavy baritone voice.
"It's the Plague," said one of them. Hale recognized him as the gun-wielding guard of the day before.
"The Plague?"
"That's right. Yon the Fisher has it. Seven others. I think you may have it."
"Don't be silly!" Hale snapped. "I feel fine. What kind of a plague is this?"
"Why—it's just the Plague."
"I mean, what are the symptoms?"
"Cough. Watery eyes. Nose runs. Then a fever and you die."
"And you say Yon the Fisher has it?" Hale felt things were going even better than he had expected. But if the Fisher were to die, the whole deal might fall through. "Look here," he said, "I've got some stuff in my pack that will fix those boys up in no time. Just let me out of here, and I'll—"
The muttering in the crowd began again, and the guard said: "I can't let you out without permission from Yon the Fisher."
"Now, look here," Hale began.
Hale had a persuasive tongue. Even in a strange dialect, he could, given time enough, work men around to his way of thinking. Some years before, according to the court records of the Supreme People's Court of Vega VII, one Leland Hale had been indicted for kidnap-murder, a crime which can only be tried on Vega VII by the SPC. Five learned judges, wise in the law, heard the case. At the same time, a full tape transcript was made. The prosecution presented its case and amply proved motive, opportunity, and identity. Hale defended himself, using the charts and evidence presented by the prosecution.
No logic robot would have accepted the defendant's testimony for more than the first paragraph, but the five learned judges listened carefully, believing that they were weighing both sides impartially.
When it was over, the vote was three-two in favor of acquittal. The majority opinion apologized to Mr. Hale for inconveniencing him by bringing him to trial. There was no minority opinion; the other two judges merely abstained from voting.
When Hale's defense was subjected to semantic analysis, it was discovered that his statements, taken at face value without the emotional content, were a confession and admission of guilt!
The press had a field day. The three judges of the majority were forced to resign by public opinion, and the other two left the bench soon after. The entire judicial system of Vega VII was revamped in a frenzied flurry of legislative activity.
But it was too late to do anything about Leland Hale—he was three sectors away by that time, and the law couldn't touch him anyway.
Hale was glib, clever, and persuasive. Within fifteen minutes, he was heading towards the home of Yon the Fisher with his pack on his back and a goodly crowd following well behind.
Hale rapped on the door and announced himself. A feminine voice from within said: "Go away! The Plague is here!"
"Never mind! I've had it! I'm immune! Let me in!" He tried the door and found it unlocked. He stepped in—and stopped.
Before him, staring wide-eyed, was the most beautiful honey-blonde he had ever seen.
If all their women look like this, Hale thought, it's no wonder they keep them at home!
"Where is Yon the Fisher?" he asked aloud.
"In—in the bedroom," she said softly, pointing.
Hale strode in. Yon was lying on a pallet of the same rough gray-brown material that his robe was made of, his breath heavy and rasping. "You should not have come here, Leland Hale," he said. "You'll get the Plague and die."
"Rot," said Leland Hale. "Here, take these." He gave Yon twenty-five grains of aspirin, two hundred milligrams of thiamine hydrochloride, and five hundred milligrams of ascorbic acid. He made the Village Officer swallow them with a good slug of the purple ferment and told him to relax. For good measure, he put two capsules of a powerful laxative on a dish beside the bed. "Take one of those in two hours, and the other one four hours later." He turned to the woman, who had followed him into the room. "Don't give him any solid food for two days—just soup."
He looked the girl up and down again, then turned back towards the pallet. "I forgot one pill," he said. He gave Yon the Fisher half a grain of narcolene.
"What about Caryl?" asked Yon, indicating his wife. "Will she catch the Plague?"
"Don't worry, Yon," Hale assured him. "I'm going to fix her right up."
He gave her ten grains of aspirin and made her wash it down with a full cup of the purple liquor. Then he gave her ten more, which also had to be followed by a full cup of juice. After that came ascorbic acid, chased with a third cup of liquor.
"Now just sit down a minute while that takes effect," he said ambiguously. She sat down on a stone bench near a big slab of stone which served as a table.
"Will Yon really be all right?" she asked. "Really?"
"I guarantee it," Hale said. Over on the pallet, Yon slowly closed his eyes.
"And I won't catch it?" There was a note of fear in her voice.
"If you do, it will be mild," Hale said. From the pallet came the sound of soft snoring. The narcolene had taken effect.
And something else was taking effect. Caryl looked up at him and blinked. "I feel queer," she said. As Hale had suspected, drinking was strictly For Men Only on Cardigan's Green.
"It's just the medicine," Hale told her.
"Mr. Hale," she said softly, "you're a very brave and very wonderful man. I don't know how I can ever repay you for what you've done for us."
Succinctly, Hale told her.
She looked at him, wide-eyed. "But—"
"Precisely," said Leland Hale.
CHAPTER V
There were others in Taun to be cured. When Yon the Fisher awoke later in the day, he was still a little weak, but his pains were gone, and he declared that he was much better. As soon as word got around, the other seven men who had been stricken begged him to come.
Hale came, but he explained that—naturally—the medicine cost money. Crystals would do.
Had Yon the Fisher paid?
Yon the Fisher had paid a very great price, indeed, Hale assured them. But, of course, Yon was a very wealthy man. Those who had less would be charged less. It would balance out.
Hale charged just a fraction less than the traffic would bear.
When Yon the Fisher heard of this, he was even more grateful to the "Islander." He knew perfectly well he hadn't given Hale a single Crystal.
By the end of the second day, Hale's supply of drugs was running dangerously low, although his collection of diamonds was becoming pleasingly large. He decided to take the whole planet in hand.
The grateful Yon was very happy to lend Hale a boat and crew to get him back to the Island whence he was presumed to have come.
"I'll have to get more medicine," Hale explained. "I'll come back, never fear."
"But will your people let one of my boats land? How will they know you're aboard?" Yon propped himself up on his pallet. "Several boats which have tried to land—peacefully, of course—have been blown out of the water."
"Don't worry, Yon, old friend. All that is over, now that we have come to terms."
Yon lay back again, a smile beneath his beard. "Good. Take the boat, then."
Hale strode out. Caryl held the door open for him. She kept her head bowed and didn't look at him, but there was the faintest trace of a smile on her lips. Hale ignored her.
The trip across the channel, even with a good breeze, took nearly half a day because of the adverse currents. Hale spent the time thinking.
The IHC ship evidently still had plenty of power, even after twelve years, if they could blow a fishing smack out of the water. It took power to use a space gun in an atmosphere.
But why did they want to keep the people of Cardigan's Green away? Surely they weren't afraid of a raid—or were they? There must be some way to contact them, or Yon the Fisher could not have made the offer that Hale had so cavalierly accepted.
Two of the crew developed the sniffles on the trip, and Hale, with great magnanimity, dosed them for free.
At last, the Island loomed out of the sea. It was a continuation of the mainland mountains, and looked it.
The Peniyan Range, half a million or so years ago, was a solid chain, connecting the offshore island with the mainland. Indeed, what is now the Island was once merely the tip of the old Peniyan Peninsula. But, between earthquake and sea action, a lower section vanished beneath the sea, leaving the jagged cliffs of the Island.
There is only one decent landing place, a beach near the flat plateau of the Island's top. All the rest of the perimeter is composed of sheer cliffs that drop straight into the surf. The lower cliffs at the southern end of the Island have since been blasted away to make a harbor, but at that time only the small beach afforded an approach.
The sailors of the fishing smack dropped anchor a good hundred yards offshore. Above them, on the flat of the plateau, loomed the huge, weatherstained bulk of the IHCS Caduceus.
"This is the prescribed distance," said Yon's First Officer, who was now in charge of the little vessel. "I wouldn't want to go in any farther, even with you aboard."
"I wouldn't want you to," Hale assured him honestly.
"You will row in by yourself?" asked the First Officer.
"Naturally," said Hale, although the thought hadn't crossed his mind. He climbed into a little rowboat, was lowered over the side, and propelled himself toward the blue sand of the beach.
Suddenly, a voice boomed out from a loudspeaker in the big hospital ship. "Don't beach that boat! Who is it?"
Hale let the boat drift a few yards from the shore and stood up in it. They must have a directional pickup on him, or they wouldn't be asking questions; he was too far away from the ship for a shout to carry clearly.
"Lieutenant Doctor Leland Hale, Interstellar Health Commission!" he called out. "What ship are you?"
Although they had challenged him in the dialect of Cardigan's Green, Hale answered in Standard Terran.
There was a choking sound from the loudspeaker. Then, for a full half minute there was only silence. Finally: "My God—we're saved!" Another short silence ensued before the voice said, "Lieutenant Hale, this is the IHC Ship Caduceus."
Hale put surprise into his voice. "The Caduceus? Good heavens! Why, you were wiped off the slate ten years ago!"
"We—we know." The voice was choked with emotion. "Just a minute, Lieutenant Hale; Captain Doctor Latimer Wills wants to talk to you." Another silence.
"Lieutenant Hale," said a different voice from the speaker, "this is Captain Wills."
"A pleasure, sir. I've heard a great deal about you. I—I hardly know what to say. Imagine—meeting a man who has practically become a legend in the IHC."
Leland Hale had never heard of Wills before; he didn't know if the man had ever done anything in his life. But it's a good bet that a man doesn't become the commander of an IHC hospital ship without doing something noteworthy—or at least something that he, himself, thinks is noteworthy.
"Lieutenant," said the captain doctor, in a tone that was strangely husky, "we have been marooned on this planet for twelve years, fighting for our very existence. It is you, not I, who are a hero."
Leland Hale had said nothing about heroism, but he let it pass. "May I come into the ship, sir? I have something important to talk to you about."
"Well—ah—" This time, the silence was strained. "Ah—Lieutenant Hale—ah—do you know anything about the Plague?"
"The Plague? I don't understand, sir."
"That's what the natives call it. They're deathly afraid of it, although they have no need to be. It killed off great numbers of them at first, but the survivors are descendants of those who were immune. The present population is not susceptible to it; they are carriers. It's a virus of some sort; we haven't been able to do much research on it with our limited facilities here, but we've established that in the body of an immune it just lives in semi-symbiosis, like Herpes simplex."
"I see, sir." Hale had no idea what Herpes simplex was, but he got the general idea.
"It strikes within twenty-four hours after exposure, and kills eighty-five to ninety per cent of a normal population." Pause. "Ah—Lieutenant, how long have you been here?"
"Just forty-eight hours, sir. But there's nothing to worry about. I'm immune." He knew he must be. If he hadn't caught it yet, he never would.
"Immune? Good heavens, man! How do you know?"
"Lagerglocke's serum, sir. Developed seven years ago. Confers universal immunity to any foreign protein substance." Hale hoped it sounded convincing.
There was a stunned silence. "But—but what about the allergy reaction?"
Hale took a breath. "I'm not sure exactly how it works, sir; I'm not an immunologist. I believe that the suppressor is one of the Gimel-type antitoxins."
"Oh." The captain doctor's voice sounded sad and tired and old. "I'm afraid medical technology has passed me by in the last twelve years, Lieutenant. I imagine all of us will have a great deal to learn."
"Yes, sir." Hale sat down again in the boat. Standing up in a rocking skiff is tiring, even if one has excellent balance. "May I ask, sir, why you haven't been sending out distress signals?"
Wills explained in detail what had happened twelve years before. "So you see," he finished, "we've been holding them off all this time. Yon the Fisher has been trying to get us to repair the Morris, but we've refused steadily. In the first place, if we exposed ourselves, we'd be dead before we reached another planet. In the second place, we wouldn't dare give these people interstellar ships; if the Plague ever began to spread through the galaxy, it would mean the end of civilization as we know it. Every planet would be like Cardigan's Green. Mankind would have to start all over again from the lowest barbarian stage."
"You mean your sub-radio is wrecked, sir? Completely inoperative?"
"Completely," said the captain doctor. "Oh, it's not wrecked, but we lack a diamond tuning crystal."
Well, well, well, said Hale to himself. Well, well, well, well, well.
"Of course," said Captain Wills, with more heartiness in his voice, "now that you're here, we can call Health Central and—and get off this—this—" His voice choked.
Hale took a deep breath. This was it. "I'm afraid it's not as simple as that, sir. You see, I landed my ship here not knowing that the—ah—natives were hostile. I landed near their village. They pretended to be friendly, so I went out to meet them. They overpowered me and went into my ship. They smashed my sub-radio and took away parts of my drive unit." He paused for effect. "I'm afraid, sir, that their ship will be ready to go shortly, and we have no way to contact Health Central."
The sudden tumbling of a gigantic house of cards was marked by an awful roar of silence.
Hale waited. He had plenty of time.
When it finally came, the voice of Captain Doctor Latimer Wills was distorted with frustration, anger, fear, and despair. "Then that's the end. It—it isn't your fault, of course, Lieutenant Hale. You couldn't have known." It was obvious that his first emotional reaction had been violently against "Lieutenant" Hale, and he had suppressed it with effort.
"Nevertheless, sir, I feel that it's my responsibility," Hale said nobly. "And I think I see a way out."
"What? What? A way out? How?" Wills didn't dare let himself hope again.
"Well, sir, the Plague seems to have broken out again on the mainland. There are more than fifty down with it in the village now, and it seems to be spreading."
"What? Ridiculous!" The captain doctor was almost sputtering. "Lieutenant, I assure you that they're immune! The population of Cardigan's Green can't have an epidemic of the Plague! Oh, I'll admit that an individual might be conceived now and then without the immunity gene intact, but the foetus would never come to term! An epidemic is impossible!"
"Nevertheless, sir," said Hale complacently, "we have a major epidemic on our hands." He knew he was treading on thin ice at that point, so he turned and called loudly to the boat in the local dialect. "Tell Captain Doctor Wills why we are here!" Then, to Wills: "Will your directional pickup reach that man, sir?"
"I think so. Yes."
The first officer of the fishing smack was shouting: "The Plague is here, good sir! Please help us! Give us the medicine!"
Hale snarled under his breath. He wasn't ready to say anything about the medicine yet. Oh, well—water over the dam, spilt milk and all that.
"I'm afraid I don't understand, Lieutenant Hale," said the captain doctor. "How will this help us get off Cardigan's Green? And what's all this about medicine? We don't have any medicine that will cure the Plague."
"Let me ask you a question, sir. What size frequency crystal do you need for your sub-radio?"
There was a murmured consultation from the speaker. Evidently, the ship's commander was conferring with his communications officer.
"We need a point oh nine seven five," Wills said at last. "Why? What's that got to do with—"
"Just as I thought, sir!" Hale interrupted. "The crystal in my radio happens to be a point oh nine seven five!" It wasn't, but he had several of them in his pack. "Now, my ship is guarded by several armed natives, and they won't let me in again. They think I have a weapon hidden inside. However, my crystal is intact; it was the modulator section they smashed.
"Now; we can do one of two things. We can wait until the Plague has thoroughly decimated the population and they give up guarding my ship, or we can cure them of the Plague and earn their gratitude."
Wills thought that one over. "I'm afraid it will have to be the former, Hale; we have nothing on board to cure that disease. As a physician, I hate to do it, but we'll simply have to let those people die."
"I think not, sir. How much acetylsalicylic acid do you have aboard?"
"Aspirin? Oh, a hundred thousand five-grain tablets, I should imagine, but—"
"How about vitamin C—ascorbic acid?"
"In the pure form? Why, our food synthesizer could be adjusted for almost unlimited amounts of that, but—"
"And you could adjust for thiamine, too?" Hale persisted.
"Of course, but—"
"Excellent, sir. Then we can whip this thing!"
"Now, see here, Hale! Don't tell me you're going to cure the Plague with aspirin and vitamins!" Wills was almost angry.
"Of course not, sir! That's merely to relieve the patient and build up resistance. I happen to have on hand a fairly good supply of Doppeltreden's vaccine."
"Doppeltreden's vaccine?"
"I'm sorry, sir; I keep forgetting you've been away for so long. That's the vaccine that gave Lagerglocke the basis for developing his universal immunity serum. The vaccine works on the E-37 linkage, which is found in every virus; it temporarily suspends the life processes of the virus—any virus—and during that period, the natural body functions take over."
"I see. It seems to me I read something about that back in—But that's neither here nor there, Lieutenant. I'll see that you get what you need." There were more mutterings from the speaker. Wills was giving the orders. "We're giving you a good supply of the other vitamins, too, Lieutenant. Might as well do the job right."
"Very good, sir," said Hale gratefully.
"And—ah—Hale—would you like to come on in? I'd like to talk to you about the newer advances in the field."
"I don't think it would be wise, sir," Hale said promptly. "Although I'm immune to the Plague, I still might be a carrier. I have two very sick men on board the ship; I really ought to be out there taking care of them."
"You're right, of course. Very well, Lieutenant Hale; carry on. We'll do our part."
"Thank you, sir. Just put the stuff on the beach; the fishing crew and I will pick it up." And with that, he began pulling at the oars, rowing back out to the boat. He had no desire to talk any longer with Captain Doctor Wills; the next slip might be his last.
CHAPTER VI
The next several weeks Hale spent in going from village to village on the mainland, dispensing the drugs he had received from the Caduceus. There were seven major villages, including the capital, where the Commander of Cardigan's Green lived, and twelve smaller ones which were not much more than little clots of houses scattered over the countryside. He had to walk every foot of it, but he didn't mind; it was worth it.
The disease spread like ink on a blotter as Hale tramped from town to town. He took with him three men who had recovered from the epidemic; they carried the drugs while Hale strolled along unburdened. But they didn't mind; it was an honor to help the man who fearlessly helped to stem the tide of the awful Plague.
But in spite of his best efforts, three thousand people, nearly a tenth of the total population, succumbed to the terror. Hale, perhaps, could have sent others around to administer the panacea, but he insisted that only he knew how to do it.
And only he—but of course—collected the diamonds for his services. Those who were really poor were treated for nothing, but those who had Crystals were soaked—but good.
And then, at last, it was over; it had burned itself out. The people of Cardigan's Green could relax once again.
Hale wended his way back to Taun, which had become the new capital. The old Commander had died, and Yon the Fisher, backed by Hale's word-of-mouth propaganda and his own reputation, had been elected to the position.
"Yon, old friend," said Hale when he had been admitted to that worthy's august presence, "we are, I think, ready to do business."
"Business?" asked the new Commander.
"In the matter of your spaceship," Hale reminded him.
They were sitting in the same modest stone house that Yon had always lived in; he had not yet had time to build a larger, more sumptuous home—a home fit for a Commander.
Caryl, her eyes demurely lowered, served them cups of the purple ferment as they sat at the stone table.
"Oh, yes; the spaceship. Are your people ready to go back to the stars, then?" Yon asked shrewdly.
"As a matter of fact, no," Hale said. "Actually, we've grown used to Cardigan's Green in the past twelve years. We've decided to stay. Now that we have medicines which will stop the Plague, we feel we should move to the mainland—under your benevolent Commandership, of course."
Yon looked pleased for a moment, then his eyes narrowed. "But what about the spaceship?"
"Oh, you'll get that, naturally. But it will have to be paid for in Crystals." He named a figure.
Yon's eyes grew wide. "But that's almost half of my total wealth!"
"That's true. But there are so many of us aboard the Caduceus, and none of us has any of the new coin of the realm. Oh, a little, perhaps, from the sale of our drugs, but we asked so little. And of you, we asked nothing at all to save your life."
"He's perfectly right, Yon," Caryl said suddenly. "We both owe him our lives."
"Besides," persisted Hale, "you have Crystals coming from the estate of the previous Commander. He certainly had plenty." Hale didn't mention that the previous Commander had given him almost all of his diamonds in return for Hale's futile attempt to save his life.
"That's true," Yon agreed, brightening perceptibly.
"Furthermore," Hale continued inexorably, "my people will, of course, spend this money, which will be divided evenly among us. I think a man of your proven ability will be able to get most of it back in a short time."
In the end, the bargain was sealed. Hale walked out to the ship and spent two days doing nothing while Yon looked on. Finally, Yon got bored and went home to Caryl, and Hale wrapped up the repair job in short order—plus one little addition of his own.
Then he lifted the ship on its antigravs and flew to Taun to collect his bill.
Yon paid promptly. He was overjoyed. He positively bubbled. He learned to control it in the atmosphere very quickly, and Leland Hale decided to end the whole job as rapidly as possible.
"I suggest we fly out to the Island," he said. "I'll tell my people that they can move to the mainland, and give them their share of the Crystals."
It was Yon who did the piloting. He did a very creditable job of settling down to the plateau near the Caduceus. Hale asked him to remain with the ship while he went to the hospital ship.
Hale stepped out of the ship, and he hadn't gone more than ten paces when the speaker called: "Halt! Stop or we fire!"
Hale identified himself. "You can let me in now," he called. "The Plague has been completely whipped."
Captain Doctor Wills met him at the airlock of the Caduceus and wrung his hand. "I'm glad to see you carried it off!" He had once been a tall, strong, lean man; now he was merely lean and bent.
"I haven't much time to talk, sit," Hale said rapidly. "I've got the diamond—here. Call the Health Center as soon as I leave and tell them what's happened."
"Why—why—What's the matter?"
"Can't you see? That ship is the Morris—they've repaired it!"
"But I thought you said the Plague had been eliminated!"
Hale shook his head. "Not completely, sir. They're still carriers. I'm not a carrier, myself; I checked that on my own instruments. But these people are; only the virulent phase has been stopped."
"What are you going to do, Lieutenant?"
Hale drew himself up. "The only thing I can do, sir. I'll have to blow up that ship before it reaches an inhabited planet. They insist that I go with them, but they'll leave without me if I stay here too long."
"But you! If you're aboard—"
"I can't see any other way, sir," Hale said bravely. "It's my life against hundreds of thousand—perhaps millions." He stopped and a look of wild hope came into his eyes. "Of course, if you've got enough power to shoot it down now, sir—"
The captain doctor, visibly shaken, said: "No. Not after twelve years. If we were in space, perhaps, but the atmospheric ionization—"
"I understand, sir. Goodbye, sir." He grasped the captain doctor's hand warmly, then turned and ran back to the Morris.
"Take her up, Yon. Head toward the mountains."
"The mountains? The Peniyan Range?" Yon looked puzzled.
"That's right. I want to see how she'll do at higher altitudes."
They flew back and forth over the range until Hale had spotted the place where his own ship was hidden. Then he turned to the new Commander of Cardigan's Green.
"Yon, old friend, I think you're ready to fly her solo. All by yourself."
Yon the Fisher beamed. "Really? Well, perhaps I am."
"Set her down on that level space there." Hale pointed below.
When the ship was grounded, he opened the airlock and climbed out. "Now here's what you do, Yon. Take her up to thirty thousand feet and fly level, due south. Now, don't try to leave the atmosphere; you're not ready for that yet. Go south for fifteen minutes, then make a one-eighty degree turn and come back. Got it? Fine. Now, be careful; don't get yourself hurt."
He stepped out and watched the ship lift and head south. Ten minutes later, he heard a muffled sound, like distant thunder. Smiling with satisfaction, he headed for his own ship with a fortune in diamonds in his pack.
Captain Doctor Wills sent out the full story as he knew it. Health Center received it and so did most of the galactic news services. Hale was a hero who had sacrificed his life for medicine and humanity. When Health Center found they had no Leland Hale on their register, there was an investigation and an attempt to quash the story, but it was too late.
The fact that Hale himself had knowingly spread influenza across the face of Cardigan's Green meant nothing to anyone; no one even suspected it. Blowing up the Morris with his "old friend" Yon the Fisher inside was not an act of altruism; Hale didn't care what happened to the rest of the galaxy, but he could not make a fortune from empty planets, and he couldn't have spent it on worlds decimated by disease.
He didn't care for people in general, but he thought Leland Hale was a nice guy.
And the people of Cardigan's Green agreed with him. He had given his all for them and died with their Commander in trying to free them from their planet.
Even today, standing in the central square of the city of Taun on Cardigan's Green, the populace (long since rid of the virus that caused the actual Plague) can see a heroic statue of a nobly visaged man in a zipsuit and insulation jacket, hands on hips, staring at the sky with narrowed eyes.
On the base of the statue, the inscription reads:
Leland Hale
Who Risked His Life That
Others Might Live
