"Helen Jons," she said wearily.
He held the mike of his pocket recorder to pick up her answers. Occupation, statistician. She'd been a member of the office force which was needed during the building of the city. When the construction work was finished, most of the workmen returned to the mother-world Dettra, but the office staff stayed on to organize things when colonists should arrive.
The plague appeared among the last shipload of workmen waiting to be returned to the mother world. There were about a thousand persons in the city altogether. The disease produced, at first, no obvious physical symptoms, but those afflicted with it tended to be listless and lackadaisical and without energy. The first-noticed symptom was a cessation of gripes and quarrelings among the workmen. Shortness of breath appeared two days later. It was progressive. Deaths began in two weeks. Men sank into unconsciousness and died. By the time the transport-ship arrived from Dettra with colonists to be landed ... it was to take back the workmen ... the physicians on the planet were grim. They described the situation by space phone. The transport returned to Dettra without removing the workmen or landing the colonists. The people left in the city on Maris III were self-quarantined, but they expected help.
It was two months before another ship arrived. By then fewer than two hundred of the original thousand remained. More than half those survivors were already listless and short-breathed. A good ten per cent were in the beginning of that marked lethargy which deepened into coma and ended fatally. A desperate, gaunt, plague-stricken few still manned the landing grid.
The ship came down. Men disembarked. There was no crowd to greet them. The survivors still in the city had scattered themselves widely, hoping to escape the contagion by isolating themselves in new and uncontaminated dwelling-units. But there was no lack of communication facilities. Nearly all the survivors watched on vision screens in contact with the landing grid.
The newcomers did not look like doctors, nor act like them. Visiphone contact with the landing grid was immediately broken. It could not be restored. So the isolated groups spoke agitatedly to each other by other visiphone contacts, exchanging messages of desperate hope. Then, new-landed men appeared at an apartment whose occupant was in the act of such a conversation with a group in a distant building. He left the visiphone on as he went to admit and greet the men he hoped were researchers, at least, come to find the cause of the plague and end it.
The viewer at the other visiphone plate gazed eagerly into his friend's apartment. He saw a group of the newcomers admitted. He saw them deliberately murder his friend and the survivors of his family.
Plague-stricken or merely terrified people—in pairs or trios widely separated through the city—communicated in swift desperation. It was possible that there had been a mistake—a blunder; an unauthorized crime had been committed. But it was not a mistake. Unthinkable as such an idea was, there developed evidence that the plague on Maris III was to be ended as if it were an epizootic among animals. Those who had it and those who had been exposed to it were to be killed to prevent its spread among the newcomers.
A conviction of such horror could not be accepted without absolute proof. But when night fell, the public power-supply of the city was cut off—communications ended. The singular sunset hush of Maris III left utter stillness everywhere—and there were screams which echoed among the city's innumerable empty-eyed, unoccupied buildings.
The scant remainder of the plague-survivors fled in the night. They fled singly, carrying the plague with them. Some carried members of their families already stricken. Some helped already-doomed wives or friends or husbands to the open country. Flight would not save their lives. It would only prevent their murder. But somehow that seemed a thing to be attempted.