"What," repeated Calhoun doggedly, "is a para?"
The Health Minister said unhappily:
"Paras are ... beings that once were sane men. They aren't sane any longer. Perhaps they aren't men any longer. Something has happened to them. If you'd landed a day or two later, you couldn't have landed at all. We normals had planned to blow up the landing grid so no other ship could land and be lifted off again to spread the ... contagion to other worlds. If it is a contagion."
"Smashing the landing grid," said Calhoun practically, "may be all right as a last resort. But surely there are other things to be tried first!"
Then he stopped. The ground car in which he rode had reached the spaceport gate. Three other ground cars waited there. One swung into motion ahead of them. The other two took up positions behind. A caravan of four cars, each bristling with blast weapons, swept along the wide highway which began here at the spaceport and stretched straight across level ground toward the city whose towers showed on the horizon. The other cars formed a guard for Calhoun. He'd needed protection before, and he might need it again.
"Medically," he said to the Minister for Health, "I take it that a para is the human victim of some condition which makes him act insanely. That is pretty vague. You say it hasn't been controlled. That leaves everything very vague indeed. How widely spread is it? Geographically, I mean."
"Paras have appeared," said the Minister for Health, "at every place on Tallien Three where there are men."
"It's epidemic, then," said Calhoun professionally. "You might call it pandemic. How many cases?"
"We guess at thirty per cent of the population—so far," said the Minister for Health, hopelessly. "But every day the total goes up." He added: "Dr. Lett has some hope for a vaccine, but it will be too late for most."
Calhoun frowned. With reasonably modern medical techniques, almost any sort of infection should be stopped long before there were as many cases as that!