CONTAGION
By KATHERINE MacLEAN
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a
thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food,
perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.
It was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. Theforest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and awind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leafshadows.
The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, gunsready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar criesof strange birds.
A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun hadbeen fired.
"Got anything?" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried hervoice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of theforest.
"Took a shot at something," explained George Barton's cheerful voicein her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Bartonstanding peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. "It lookedlike a duck."
"This isn't Central Park," said Hal Barton, his brother, coming intosight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against thebronze and red forest. "They won't all look like ducks," he saidsoberly.
"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon,June," came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. "Not while I stilllove you." He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, andtouched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barelyvisible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck agreenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.
They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorertowered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people ofthe ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight andclouds, and they longed to be outside.
But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death,for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might belike Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough tobe impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonieshad vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of shipswhich had touched on some plague planet.
The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtightspacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.
The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through thealien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among thecopper and purple shadows.
They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darkerbrowns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind hersomeone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a holein the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.
This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful,humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head tallerthan any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stoodbreathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hunga sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung