O’Brien shivered. What kind of lunacy—

But then, he realized, if it had been an American, instead of a Russian, who had been taken real sick and was up there in the hospital at the moment, his mind would have been running along the same track as Guranin’s. Meningitis would have seemed like something to hope for desperately.

Captain Chose climbed down into the mess hall. His eyes seemed darker and smaller than ever.

“Listen, men. As soon as you’ve finished eating, report up to the control room which, until further notice, will serve as an annex to the hospital.”

“What for, Captain?” someone asked. “What do we report for?”

“Precautionary injections.”

There was a silence. Chose started out of the place. Then the chief engineer cleared his throat.

“How is Belov?”

The captain paused for a moment, without turning around. “We don’t know yet. And if you’re going to ask me what’s the matter with him, we don’t know that yet either.”

They waited in a long, silent, thoughtful line outside the control room, entering and leaving it one by one. O’Brien’s turn came.

He walked in, baring his right arm, as he had been ordered. At the far end, Ghose was staring out of the porthole as if he were waiting for a relief expedition to arrive. The navigation desk was covered with cotton swabs, beakers filled with alcohol, and small bottles of cloudy fluid.

“What’s this stuff, Doc?” O’Brien asked when the injection had been completed and he was allowed to roll down his sleeve.

“Duoplexin. The new antibiotic that the Australians developed last year. Its therapeutic value hasn’t been completely validated, but it’s the closest thing to a general cureall that medicine’s come up with. I hate to use anything so questionable, but before we lifted from Benares, I was told to shoot you fellows full of it if any off-beat symptoms showed up.”