The Jupiter Plague

There was a rattling noise, then a crash of glass before Rand began speaking again, and his voice was thicker. “If I sound like I have been drinking, I have, because it’s a little hard to bear, you know, with everyone else…” He stopped, and when he continued he sounded much better. “But I’ve broken the bottle because I can’t be drunk to do what I have to do. Listen, whoever you are, I hope you never hear this. I hope I can get through to the engine room and do what I have to do. I’m going to knock out all the safeties and crank up the pile until it blows. That’s just my suicide because the rest are dead or should be dead. Those things out there are smart and they’re going to learn all about us and learn how to fly this ship and then I don’t know what they’re planning to do. But I want to stop them. This is Commander Rand, closing the log, the day is May twenty-fourth and one way or another there are going to be no more entries in this log.” The loud-speaker rustled with background noise but there was nothing else after this.

Yasumura reached out and flicked it off and it was a while before anyone said anything.

“He was right,” General Burke said. “They did bring their hellish disease and try to destroy us all.”

“No, they didn’t,” Sam said. “What they did here looks more like a laboratory experiment than any deliberate attempt to wipe us out. The way they tailor-made a disease to fit earthly conditions, to attack animals they had never seen, to mutate under these conditions, means they have a perfect or almost perfect knowledge and control of biochemistry at every level. We still have no idea of how they spread the virus from the ship, sending it across Long Island in almost a straight line — a physical impossibility by our state of knowledge. If they had wanted to they could have released a plague that would have spread around the world and have wiped us out in a day. But they didn’t.”

“Then what were they trying to accomplish…?” the general started to say, but Stanley Yasumura cut him off.

“Look at those needles jump — there’s juice being fed into the high-power rig, the ultrafrequency radio!” The radio-phone buzzed and he turned to answer it: a uniformed man appeared on the screen.

“This is the tower, what are you broadcasting? We’re getting interference on our navigating frequencies…”

“Not us, but there is a thing in a tank downstairs that has cut into all the circuits. What does the signal sound like?”

“Just a moment, I’ll hook it into this circuit. And see if you can’t do something about cutting it off; it has harmonics that are lousing up almost all of our operating frequencies.”

The voice died and a moment later was replaced by a high-pitched, shrieking moan that set their nerves on edge like a fingernail on glass. The engineer quickly cut the volume down to a sinister mutter.

“What on earth is that?” General Burke asked.

“Better say ‘what on Jupiter.’ In a strange way it sounds something like the Jovian’s voice. Stanley, could that signal get through to Jupiter and be understood there?”

“I don’t see why not — if there is a good receiver out there, that frequency should cut right through the Heaviside layer and be detectable that far out if it has enough power behind it. But, do you mean…?”

“I don’t mean anything, I’m just wondering— Look, those meters just dropped back to zero. What’s happening?”

Yasumura checked them, then other instruments in the room. “No power being drawn at all any more. Wonder what our friend in the tank is up to?”

“Let’s get down there,” Sam said, starting for the door.

The first thing they noticed when they emerged from the elevator was the sharp smell of ammonia that the blowers were laboring to remove from the air; they started to run. The deck near the reinforced wall of the pressure tank was running with moisture as was the wall of the tank itself. The layer of frost had vanished.

“The tank has warmed up…!”

“And the pressurized atmosphere is gone from it too, I imagine,” Sam said, looking at the darkened phone screen.

“Then the thing is dead — it committed suicide,” the general said. “But why—?”

Sam shook his head. “I wonder if we really can call it suicide? That Jovian in there probably never had any intention or desire to return to its own planet. It came here to do a job — or maybe to make an experiment, that might be a better description. Our world was its laboratory and we were the experimental animals. The experiment was finished, it made its report—”

“The radio signal!”

“—when everything was gone. So it died, or disconnected, or whatever you want to call it. Function performed. About as unemotional as an epithelial cell in your skin; it protects your body, dies and falls off.”

“One consolation,” General Burke kicked out at the tangle of cables. “At least it had to report its mission or its experiment a failure.”