Starman's Quest Part 5

"We haven't had a chance for fluorination yet. Our s.h.i.+p was built before they started fluorinating the water supplies, and somehow we never find time to take the treatment while we're on Earth. But is that all that's wrong with me?"

"All that I can spot just by examining the diagnostic tape. We'll have to wait for the full lab report to come through before I can pa.s.s you out of quarantine, of course." Then he noticed Rat perched in the corner. "How about that? I'll have to examine it, too."

"I'm not an _it_," Rat remarked with icy dignity. "I'm an intelligent extra-terrestrial ent.i.ty, native of Bellatrix VII. And I'm not carrying any particular diseases that would interest you."

"A talking rat!" The medic was amazed. "Next thing we'll have sentient amebas!" He aimed the camera at Rat. "I suppose I'll have to record you as a member of the crew," he said, as the camera began to hum.

After the medic had gone, Alan tried to freshen up at the washstand, having suddenly recalled that a dance was on tap for this evening.

As he wearily went through the motions of scrubbing his face clean, it occurred to him that he had not even bothered to speak to one of the seven or eight Crew girls he had considered inviting.

He sensed a curious disturbed feeling growing inside him. He felt depressed. Was this, he wondered, what Steve had gone through? The wish to get out of this tin can of a s.h.i.+p and really see the universe?

"Tell me, Rat. If you were me----"

"If I were you I'd get dressed for that dance," Rat said sharply. "If you've got a date, that is."

"That's just the point. I _don't_ have a date. I mean, I didn't bother to make one. I know all those girls so well. Why bother?"

"So you're not going to the dance?"

"Nope."

Rat clambered up the arm of the pneumochair and swivelled his head upward till his glittering little eyes met Alan's. "You're not planning to go over the hill the way Steve did, are you? I can spot the symptoms.

You look restless and fidgety the way your brother did."

After a moment of silence Alan shook his head. "No. I couldn't do that, Rat. Steve was the wild kind. I'd never be able just to get up and go, the way he did. But I've got to do _something_. I know what he meant. He said the walls of the s.h.i.+p were pressing in on him. Holding him back."

With a sudden impatient motion he ripped open the magnesnaps of his regulation s.h.i.+rt and took it off. He felt himself changing, inside.

Something was happening to him. Maybe, he thought, he was catching whatever it was Steve had been inflamed by. Maybe he had been lying to himself all along, about being different in makeup from Steve.

"Go tell the Captain I'm not going to the dance," he ordered Rat.

"Otherwise he'll wonder where I am. Tell him--tell him I'm too tired, or something. Tell him anything. But don't let him find out how I feel."

_Chapter Four_

The next morning, Roger Bond told him all about the dance.

"It was the dullest thing you could imagine. Same old people, same dusty old dances. Couple of people asked me where you were, but I didn't tell them anything."

"Good."

They wandered on through the heap of old, ugly buildings that composed the Starmen's Enclave. "It's just as well they think I was sick," Alan said. "I was, anyway. Sick from boredom."

He and Roger sat down carefully on the edge of a crumbling stone bench.

They said nothing, just looking around. After a long while Alan broke the uncomfortable silence.

"You know what this place is? It's a ghetto. A self-imposed ghetto.

Starmen are scared silly of going out into the Earther cities, so they keep themselves penned up in this filthy place instead."

"This place is really old. I wonder how far back those run-down buildings date."

"Thousand years, maybe more. No one ever bothers to build new ones. What for? The starmen don't mind living in the old ones."

"I almost wish the medical clearance hadn't come through after all,"

said Roger moodily.

"How so?"

"Then we'd be still quarantined up there. We wouldn't be able to come down and get another look at the kind of place this really is."

"I don't know which is worse--to be cooped up in quarantine or to go wandering around a dismal hole like the Enclave." Alan stood up, stretched, and took a deep breath. "Phew! Get a lungful of that sweet, fresh, allegedly pure Terran air! I'll take s.h.i.+p atmosphere, stale as it is, any time over this smoggy soup."

"I'll go along with that. Say, look--a strange face!"

Alan turned and saw a young starman of about his own age coming toward them. He wore a red uniform with gray trim instead of the orange-and-blue of the _Valhalla_.

"Welcome, newcomers. I suppose you're from that s.h.i.+p that just put down?

The _Valhalla_?"

"Right. Name's Alan Donnell, and this is Roger Bond. Yours?"

"I'm Kevin Quantrell." He was short and stocky, heavily tanned, with a square jaw and a confident look about him. "I'm out of the stars.h.i.+p _Encounter_, just back from the Aldebaran system. Been in the Enclave two weeks now--with a lot more ahead of me."

Alan whistled. "Aldebaran! That's--let's see, 109 years round trip. You must be a real old-timer, Quantrell!"

"I was born in 3403. Makes me 473 years old, Earthtime. But I'm actually only seventeen and a half. Right before Aldebaran we made a hop to Capella, and that used up 85 years more in a hurry."

"You've got me by 170 years," Alan said. "But I'm only seventeen myself."

Quantrell grinned c.o.c.kily. "It's a good thing some guy thought up this Tally system of chalking up every real day you live through. Otherwise we'd be up to here in confusion all the time."

He leaned boredly against the wall of a rickety building which once had proudly borne the chrome-steel casing characteristic of early 27th Century architecture, but whose outer surface was now brown and scaly from rust. "What do you think of our little paradise?" Quantrell asked sarcastically. "Certainly puts the Earther cities to shame."

He pointed out across the river, where the tall, glistening buildings of the adjoining Earther city shone in the morning sunlight.

"Have you ever been out there?" Alan asked.

"No," Quantrell said in a tight voice. "But if this keeps up much longer----" He clenched and unclenched his fists impatiently.

"What's the trouble?"

"It's my s.h.i.+p--the _Encounter_. We were outs.p.a.ce over a century, you know, and when we got back the inspection teams found so many things wrong with the s.h.i.+p that she needs just about a complete overhauling.

They've been working her over for the last two weeks, and the way it looks it'll be another couple of weeks before she's ready to go. And I don't know how much longer I can stand being penned up in this Enclave."