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    Contagion
    Contagion
    Contagion
    Ebook47 pages39 minutes

    Contagion

    By Katherine MacLean

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    About this ebook

    Minos was such a lovely planet. Not a thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food, perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPerennial Press
    Release dateMar 23, 2016
    ISBN9781531259358

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      Book preview

      Contagion - Katherine MacLean

      CONTAGION

      Katherine MacLean

      PERENNIAL PRESS

      Thank you for reading. If you enjoy this book, please leave a review.

      All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

      Copyright © 2016 by Katherine MacLean

      Published by Perennial Press

      Interior design by Pronoun

      Distribution by Pronoun

      ISBN: 9781531259358

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      CONTAGION

      CONTAGION

      ~

      IT WAS LIKE AN EARTH forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.

      The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.

      A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.

      Got anything? asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.

      Took a shot at something, explained George Barton’s cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. It looked like a duck.

      This isn’t Central Park, said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. They won’t all look like ducks, he said soberly.

      Maybe some will look like dragons. Don’t get eaten by a dragon, June, came Max’s voice quietly into her earphones. Not while I still love you. He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.

      They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.

      But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.

      The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.

      The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.

      They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June’s gun into line, and behind her someone’s gun went off with a

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