Schneider rose and rubbed his forehead with his fist. “I’m afraid it does. That’s why this whole ceremony is more than a little meaningless. But I had the responsibility to discharge. I’ve discharged it. Now, if you will excuse me, I think I’d better lie down. Good luck.”

On his way to report Schneider’s illness to the captain, O’Brien came to realize bow the Russians had felt earlier that day. There were now five Americans to six Russians. That could be bad. And the responsibility was his.

But with his hand on the door to the captain’s room, he shrugged. Fat lot of difference it made! As the plump little man had said: “Assuming that we’re not all dead within a week…”

The fact was that the political setup on Earth, with all of its implications for two billion people, no longer had very many implications for them. They couldn’t risk spreading the disease on Earth, and unless they got back there, they had very little chance of finding a cure for it. They were chained to an alien planet, waiting to be knocked off, one by one, by a sickness which had claimed its last victims a thousand thousand years ago.

Still—he didn’t like being a member of a minority.

By morning, he wasn’t. During the night, two more Russians had come down with what they were all now refering to as Belov’s Disease. That left five Americans to four Russians—except that by that time, they had ceased to count heads in national terms.

Ghose suggested that they change the room serving as mess hall and dormitory into a hospital and that all the healthy men bunk out in the engine room. He also had Guranin rig up a radiation chamber just in front of the engine room.

“All men serving as attendants in the hospital will wear space suits,” he ordered. “Before they reenter the engine room, they will subject the space suit to a radiation bath of maximum intensity. Then and only then will they join the rest of us and remove the suit. It’s not much, and I think any germ as virulent as this one seems to be won’t be stopped by such precautions, but at least we’re still making fighting motions.”