Nordenfeld asked carefully conversational-sounding questions. Kathy
Brand, now aged ten, had been taken by her father to live in a big room
without any windows. It hadn't any doors, either. There were plants in
it, and there were bluish lights to shine on the plants, and there was
a place in one corner where there was water. When her father came in to
talk to her, he came up out of the water wearing the funny suit with
glass over his face. He went out the same way. There was a place in
the wall where she could look out into another room, and at first her
mother used to come and smile at her through the glass, and she talked
into something she held in her hand, and her voice came inside. But
later she stopped coming.
* * * * *
There was only one possible kind of place which would answer Kathy's
description. When she was six years old she had been put into some
university's aseptic-environment room. And she had stayed there. Such
rooms were designed for biological research. They were built and then
made sterile of all bacterial life and afterward entered through a tank
of antiseptic. Anyone who entered wore a suit which was made germ-free
by its passage through the antiseptic, and he did not breathe the air
of the aseptic room, but air which was supplied him through a hose, the
exhaled-air hose also passing under the antiseptic outside. No germ
or microbe or virus could possibly get into such a room without being
bathed in corrosive fluid which would kill it. So long as there was
someone alive outside to take care of her, a little girl could live
there and defy even chlorophage.
And Kathy Brand had done it. But, on the other hand, Kamerun was the
only planet where it would be necessary, and it was the only world
from which a father would land his small daughter on another planet's
spaceport. There was no doubt. Nordenfeld grimly imagined someone--he
would have had to be a microbiologist even to attempt it--fighting to
survive and defeat the chlorophage while he kept his little girl in an
aseptic-environment room.
She explained quite pleasantly as Nordenfeld asked more questions.
There had been other people besides her father, but for a long time
there had been only him. And Nordenfeld computed that somehow she'd
been kept alive on the dead planet Kamerun for four long years.
Recently, though--very recently--her father told her that they were
leaving. Wearing his funny, antiseptic-wetted suit, he'd enclosed her
in a plastic bag with a tank attached to it. Air flowed from the tank
into the bag and out through a hose that was all wetted inside. She
breathed quite comfortably.
It made sense. An air tank could be heated and its contents sterilized
to supply germ-free--or virus-free--air. And Kathy's father took an axe
and chopped away a wall of the room. He picked her up, still inside the
plastic bag, and carried her out. There was nobody about. There was no
grass. There were no trees. Nothing moved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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