Diseases -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction
"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got
through to us," Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max
dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles
without exposing them to air.
"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still
carry melting sickness," Max added. "You might be immune so it doesn't
show on you, but still carry enough germs--if that's what caused it--to
wipe out a planet."
"If you do carry melting sickness," said Hal Barton, "we won't be able
to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease."
"Starting with me?" Pat asked.
"Starting with you," Max told him ruefully, "as soon as you step on
board."
"More needles?"
"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in."
"Rough?"
"It isn't easy."
A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit
decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in
glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and
compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.
In the _Explorer_, stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers,
was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes
so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused
chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing
could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to
the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.
But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had
been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human
treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and
interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding
against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.
Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and
around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall
by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered
to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given
solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic
blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being
directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized
and injected with various immunizing solutions.
Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme
dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were
dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.
All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of
allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.
* * * * *
June stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped
off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a
wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....
"I've got a good figure," she said thoughtfully.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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