Six years ago Dr. Jem Willard had come to Ganymede with his intern, Ed Garth. Willard was trying to discover the cure for the Silver Plague that was wrecking Earth. He would have found it—he had got on the track. But—
An emergency call had come in one night. A native needed an appendectomy. Willard couldn't fly a plane. He had called on Garth, and Garth had been drunk.
But he had piloted the plane anyhow. The crack-up happened over the Black Forest.
That was the last thing Garth remembered, or almost the last. It would have been more merciful if the oblivion had been complete. Months later he staggered out of the Forest into Oretown, alone. The Noctoli poison had almost erased his experiences from his mind. He could remember a bare cell where he and Willard had been prisoned—that, and one other thing.
A picture of Doc Willard stretched on an altar, while Garth lifted a gleaming, razor-sharp knife above his friend's breast.
He remembered that, but no more. It was enough.
The question burning in his brain had nearly wrecked his sanity. He had tried to get back into the Black Forest, to find Willard, dead or alive, to learn what had happened—to discover the answer to his problem. He had failed.
A year later he learned that his fiancée, Moira, had died of the Silver Plague. And he knew that Willard might have saved her, had he lived and continued his research.
After that, Ed Garth hit the skids. He went down fast, stopping only when he reached the bottom.
He killed the bottle and threw it out into emptiness, watching yellow light glint on glass as it dropped.