The Jupiter Plague

“You should know, Con, we were out in the meat wagon together.”

“I lost track of you after we got to the bridge, what a night it was! What happened?” The doors closed and Roussell punched his floor, the twenty-third Sam noticed, the residential floor above his own.

“A lot’s been happening. For one thing Nita — Dr. Nita Mendel has Rand’s.”

“The hell you say! The girl with the red hair that was with you at the ‘Pericles’?” They came out of the elevator, walking together.

“Yes, that’s the one. Everything is going to pieces and the end is nowhere in sight. Do you have any Surital? I’m going to try and get a few hours’ sleep.”

“Sure, in my room — but don’t you have any in your bag?”

“Empty. And I’m not up to trotting along to the pharmacy for more.”

Sam closed the door as Roussell unlocked the wardrobe and took out his bag and rummaged through it. “Are you sure you don’t want Noctec or something like that?” he asked, coming up with the charged hypodermic needle.

“I drink that like mother’s milk,” Sam said, taking the needle. “A few cc’s of this and I’ll sleep like a babe.”

“Take more than six and you’ll be under for twenty-four hours,” Roussell said, turning away. Sam slapped Roussell with the needle, right through his shirt, and emptied the barrel into his arm.

“Sorry, Con,” he said, holding the man until he stopped struggling and sank to his knees. “This way you’ll be in no trouble for aiding and abetting — and you’ll get a good night’s sleep, which you need.”

He quickly dragged the other intern to the bed, then locked the door. By happy chance both of them were almost the same size and the clothes would fit well enough. Sam stripped and dressed in a one-piece blue suit with a little leather-string necktie, which was so popular these days. It was still raining so he put a raincoat envelope into the black bag before he picked it up and went out.

While he dressed he had been thinking, making his mind up as to which would be the safest way out of the giant hospital. More than twenty minutes had elapsed since he pushed over the cop, time enough to alert all the guards at the main entrances. But there were other entrances, to the clinics and kitchens, that were normally neither guarded nor locked. But which one? More police would have arrived by now and would be assigned to the various entrances as fast as they could be checked off on the floor plan of the hospital. That meant he could use none of them safely, but must find a way to leave that they would not think of until they had sealed all the doors.

He knew where he was going, and was sure he could get out that way, and he could be caught only if he met someone who both knew him by sight and was aware that the police were looking for him. To minimize the chances he went through the new X-ray clinic, not opened yet to the public, and down a back stairs in one of the older buildings. There was no one in sight when he reached the hall on the first floor, slipped on the raincoat, then eased the window open. A few weeks earlier some children had pried this window open and broken into the hospital, and when they had been caught, had told how they had got in. The window faced on an alley and was not too far above the ground. No one saw Sam as he swung his legs over the sill, closed the window behind him, then dropped carefully to the ground below.

Now he was out — but what was he to do? His plans didn’t extend past this moment; everything he had done had been almost instinctive flight until now. They had tried to capture him and he had resisted, knowing that they were wrong and that the ship had to be investigated. The “Pericles,” that was still the most important thing, and there was one man who could help him.

General Burke, UNA.

The rain was still falling in steady sheets, blown into eddies on the windy corners, and he was grateful to it since the streets were almost deserted and it gave him some cover. He hurried down Thirty-fourth Street — the rain was also a good excuse for his haste — and turned into the first open bar. It was one of the new, automated, we-never-close kind and, though empty of customers, it had not been shut down. The door opened automatically for him and he headed toward the phone booth in the rear.

“Good morning, sir. A little wet out today, isn’t it.”

The robot bartender behind the bar nodded toward him, industriously polishing a glass, the perfect picture of the pink-jowled and bald bar-keep — though if you leaned far enough over the bar you could see that it was only a torso that ended at the waist. Research had proven that customers, particularly the more inebriated ones, preferred even an imitation man to a flat-faced machine.

“A double Scotch whiskey,” Sam said, stopping at the bar. Now that the hurried escape was over he was feeling the fatigue again. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept: alcohol would carry him a bit longer.

“Here you are, sir, a double it is.”