We made our super-orbital injection around the Gas Giant just as I had planned it. The banded atmospheric clouds of the Giant exerted just the right amount of dynamic braking to our ship, so getting into Harvey's gravity well was like dropping a marble into a funnel. I've always had a partial attraction to gas giants. If you've ever seen one up close, you know they're fascinating to watch. The fluids of the atmosphere aren't like the clear skies and clouds of earth, or any of the other inhabited planets you may be familiar with. One band of clouds will scream around the planet in one direction, while the next band moves along just as fast in the opposite direction. The boundaries of these bands, as you might expect, are in constant, violent turmoil. They're fascinating to watch. There's a raw power in them, usually pushed along by the planet's immense internal heat engine, that makes our space craft seem pretty puny and helpless in comparison.

This time around the planet, I didn't have much time to gaze out the window, however. I had to be sure the density and viscosity of the upper atmosphere were close to what I had calculated. If the air was too thin, we would not brake enough and we'd go sailing out past Harvey's world. We could always fire up the ion jets and correct almost any navigation problem, but it would chew up our fuel safety margin, and more importantly to me, add another couple of weeks before we'd get into orbit at Harvey's. More serious would have been if the atmosphere was thicker than I had calculated. Even a minor error here would have slowed us too much and forced us to spiral into the Gas Giant's gravity well. Once again, I probably could have fired the ion jets and brought us up, at the cost of time and safety fuel. If I had made a major error underestimating the density of the Giant's atmosphere, the consequences would have been much more dire. It would have increased the total friction on our hull and completely burned away the thin ablative coating that protects us. We would have died a fiery, unpleasant death.

We swung around the Gas Giant, never actually going into a true orbit. First we skimmed the outer atmosphere during our initial pass. Then we sped on by, arcing high into aphelion far beyond the Gas Giant on the opposite side from Harvey's World. The Giant had us firmly in its grasp however, because we slowed to almost a dead stop on its far side, then accelerated again as we fell back around the other side of the Giant forty-two hours later. Our second pass across the Gas Giant also brought us into the outer atmosphere and further shed our kinetic energy, slowing us to a relative crawl.

As it turned out, my orbital calculations were pretty darn good. I had predicted that we would lose 78% of our ablative coating, and the final number came in at about 72%. Our orbital path was almost dead on, so I guess the real problem was that the heat coating on our ship was stronger than the manual said it was. They build these ships pretty tough.

This maneuver had the effect of slowing our velocity, turning us around 180 degrees, and pointing us to Harvey's World, where we simply fell into its gravity well. We got into orbit around Harvey's World with almost no problem then, and it wasn't long before I had us in a geosynchronous orbit over Explorer and completely shut down the ion drive. Finally, we had pure heavenly electrical silence. Janet sent the normal "we got there" message home. They'd get it in a few weeks at Deep Star. I tacked the ship's logs onto the message, including all the data we'd gotten from the Lookout. I think Mother included some other stuff that I was not able to decode. I quizzed Mother about this. She claimed ignorance of the message, but I know she appended a couple of terabytes of data to the end of our transmission. I never trusted Mother. To me, she's a cross between a psychiatrist, a cop, and a fundamentalist Baptist minister. My guess is that she included a full psychological assessment of us for the brain doctors back home to analyze. If I were the bosses back home, that's what I would have done. I'm sure that they are at least as sneaky and devious as I am, and maybe a tad more so.

With the ion drive down, I got full control over the Lookout. We have a lookout too, but since the Explorer's was still fine, I left ours in its pod. Heck, we might need it later for something and I didn't want to abandon it prematurely on Harvey's World.

George wasted no time establishing a good medical link with Explorer. We didn't see his smiling overbuilt physique for twenty-four hours while he absorbed, if not digested, every single binary digit of medical information the Explorer and the transponders had to offer. Janet spent most of her time watching and reading the logs, although there wasn't much to read since they had only been on the surface a short time.

I divided my time evenly. Fifty percent of my time was spent shutting down our ship after the year in space. I had to be sure that it would start up again. Like I said, the ion drive is a marvelous thing, but it hates to stop and start. Build it, fill it with water to use as a source of alpha particles, turn it on, and it purrs like a kitten. Turn it off, and all heck can break loose. It can be more cantankerous to start back up than a seventy-five year old whore. Another fifty percent of my time was spent analyzing the Explorer itself. I had to understand how it ran, and see if the ship was still space worthy. I didn't think we'd need it, but I'd hate to be stranded on Harvey's World with two dead ships. I've always been a "belt and suspenders" kind of guy. Having only two space-worthy ships at my disposal strikes me as being about half of the prudent number. Heck, even Columbus used three ships on his exploration. Of course, Columbus had better funding than we did. I guess sleeping with the boss's wife has its advantages.

Another fifty percent of my time was spent making sure George and Janet got all the stuff they needed. Neither of them was fully adept at extracting data from the Explorer's Mother, so I frequently had to bludgeon the dead ship's computer into coughing up the needed info. Yet another fifty percent of my time was spent listening in on the logs that Janet was reading, and eavesdropping on George's telemetry results. I had to be sure they got everything they needed from the Explorer, and that the data wasn't garbled in any way.

The final fifty percent of my time was spent watching Survivor Number One. Our guys were still there. Somehow, they were still alive. I was not about to lose them now.

Oh, I guess I also may have slept a minute or two, but I'm not really sure.

Janet called on the intercom, "George. Chief. We'll have a general status review at oh-four-hundred. Be ready."

At 4:00 A.M. we were all sitting at the conference table. As per protocol, I started. "We are in a geosynchronous orbit around Harvey's World, directly over Explorer," I announced as if nobody knew it. "We have successfully made contact with Explorer and the Lookout. All requested data from the Explorer have been uploaded to Mother. Our ion drive is shut down and safely sleeping. I need to open the reactor chamber sometime next week and check for warpage of the damper plates, but anticipate no problems and don't see any reason why we won't be able to blast out of here whenever we want. Explorer's mechanical systems are all green. Previously noted imbalance of the hydrogen injectors has been confirmed, but still presents no problem. Except for the smell," I glanced at George, "Explorer could take us home if we needed it."

I paused, looking at some of the papers I had on the table before me. "I have detected no mechanical problems which put our mission at risk. I've started a gigabyte data stream toward home with all of our pertinent findings. At this distance, that's about the highest data rate we can make, so no real-time video data is being sent. Also Mother, bless her soul, is adding enough info to keep our keepers apprized of our general emotional deviancy." Janet threw me another dirty look.

"I've scouted landing sites," I continued. "We can set our ship down any time, and any where we like. Since all of Harvey's World is so darn nice, we can take our pick of landing sites. If and when we do go down, we have two optimum locations to choose from, depending on what you decide, Captain. We can land practically on top of Explorer if we want. The land is level and smooth for at least a kilometer around Explorer. The best closest point would put us three-hundred meters from the Explorer's main hatch. Alternately, we could land on another smooth patch of ground three kilometers away, just on the other side of a gentle hill. We'd be out of sight of Explorer, and could land and walk up to her probably undetected. Explorer's Lookout is working fine, so I recommend not deploying our Lookout."

I paused, and looked at Janet, expecting her to start her report. Instead, she figuratively passed the baton to George with a commander's glance. Whatever it was she had heard on the logs, she didn't want to talk about it yet. Based on what I heard while I listened in to make sure her connection was working, this is not surprising. George, who had not expected to have his turn yet, snapped to a sudden attention. Then he had to go through an even bigger sniffle regimen than normal. A half hour later, he finally began.

"We've got full biological telemetry, and full histories for all the crew members," he said. "The results are interesting, and very confusing. First, I've been able to confirm the four surviving crew members. We had seen three of them at Survivor Number One. I found the fourth there too, but he's mostly hidden in the satellite images. Here," George said pointing to a small spot on the satellite image of SN1. "He's tough to see in the satellite photos, but I found a bit of him sticking out. You can just see the tip of his boot sticking out from under this patch of off-white vegetation. His name is Hasbrough. He was officially a botanist also, but has advanced degrees in archeology and medical physics. His medical signals are the most desperate.

"The signals from Greer, Sarco, and Jones have not changed much in the last few weeks, although Hasbrough's have weakened significantly. His body temperature now follows the ambient air temperature perfectly. Brain activity, as measure by EEG readings, continues off the scale, while his endorphin levels also are several times above the maximum normal level. If anybody is at risk on Harvey's World, it's he.

"I got histories on everybody, and they all are fairly similar. I'll walk you though what happened to Captain James. Everybody else met their fate in almost the same way, and since he made the most log entries, his experiences may give us the best overall perspective on what happened here.

But first, lets discuss the MIAs. One of them was the botanist as we had suspected. His medical transponder was shut off en-route following his death by natural causes. There is no mystery with him. Streptococcus cardiosis is generally fatal under these conditions. He probably would have survived had he happened to have his attack while standing in the waiting room of the emergency cardiac surgery ward of some major metropolitan hospital, but otherwise he didn't have a chance. The other MIAs are actually DOAs. I've got morbidity histories on all of them. They follow the same pattern as Captain James.

"And now let's get back to Captain James," George said, and this triggered another round of sniffles and coughs. Despite my aversion to seeing people die before my eyes, I was beginning to think it might be worth it to never hear George blow his empty nose into his handkerchief again. Finally, after we had passed several days in Harvey's orbit, George pulled himself together and continued. "Captain James had been in near-perfect physical condition during the trip. In fact, from what I can tell, he was kind of a fitness nut." George glanced at Janet, and she nodded.

I added a quiet dig at George by saying, "Imagine having one of those on a space ship" under my breath. George and Janet both were smart enough to ignore me most of the time, and they confirmed my faith in their judgements by ignoring me this time too.

"Captain James' exercise period was scheduled and logged on the Explorer," Janet said, "just like everybody else's. His logs show he forced all members of the crew to exercise regularly to ward off zero-g dystrophy." Well, so much for my theory of them being as weak as kittens.

George continued, mercifully without his coughing preamble. "Captain James' medical telemetry was almost textbook perfect for the entire trip. He had a minor sodium elevation, caused by a genetic disposition to maintain a lower than average body fluid level. He had broken a leg in his early 20's but it did not seem to limit his mobility. There had been some signs of early arthritis in his left knee joint, presumably triggered by the broken leg, but again it was nothing to concern anybody. In short, Captain James could probably have taken us all on during a bar fight and won without much trouble.

"Everything continued to look normal on the Explorer until the landing. The medical telemetry indicates that the landing was soft, with no abnormal physical stresses." George looked at me and I spoke up. "Yeah, their landing went smooth as silk. No problems at all," I said.

George went on. "Just after landing, I noticed a slight adrenaline spike in James. This could have been a precursor to problems, or it may have been the excitement of finally making landfall on Harvey's. They had not yet breathed any of Harvey's air, so any infectious agent probably could not have gotten to them yet.

"Eight hours after landing, they left the ship, and the 'shirt' hit the fan." George stopped. I think we all tensed up around the table. I felt my bowels contract, and I noticed the Captain sat up more erectly in her chair. "Bosko was the first one out. He wore a standard environmental isolation suit, with complete breathing and fluid/vapor barriers. As you know, all the initial biological assays had been negative, so there was no reason to suspect any biological concern, but Bosko still followed protocol and wore the isolation suit. Theoretically, this would prevent contamination from anything larger than a DNA molecule. Bosko was out for four hours that day. Looking at his bio-telemetry, I noticed a couple of funny readings which probably weren't detected by the ship's medic."

"What were the readings?" Janet asked.

"Well, his adrenaline level was elevated. In fact, everybody's levels were high. Again, this might have been due to the excitement of landfall, but I don't think so. Typically, adrenaline levels jump up in response to stimulation, then decline slowly. In fact, all of our adrenaline levels jumped when we did our loop-de-loop around the Gas Giant, but then quickly fell to normal once we learned that the Chief had performed his usual magic and we had survived the maneuver. Our guys had the opposite curve: the levels slowly rose to an elevated level. Maybe this is an effect due to prolonged time in space. The Explorer's crew spent fourteen months in space, which is a pretty long time, but no other colonization reports I've seen have ever shown even a hint of this adrenaline profile. It's the type of thing which would have been documented in the reports and made it into the scientific literature. Yet every member of Explorer's crew showed similar patterns in their adrenaline levels.

"The other strange thing about Bosko was his endorphin level. He wasn't stoned on endorphins, but he was definitely feeling a rush. Once again, elevated endorphins are a natural reaction under some conditions, especially during 'great' [George formed quotation marks with his fingers] emotional moments. Mountain climbers get a rush reaching a mountain peak, sky divers get it when they jump out of the plane, and it floods your system after sexual orgasm. Rarely does trudging around in an e-suit on a new planet provide this much fun; there's too much work to do. Remember, Bosko was the scout, purposely looking for trouble. His job was to decide if it were safe for the rest of the crew to disembark. Adrenaline makes sense in his blood, endorphins might make sense, but only if he was super gung-ho. And I checked his psych profile. He was cautious, and somewhat pensive as a rule. He was not the kind of guy to get a natural high from walking on a new planet."

Janet said, "so he was unusually tense, but somewhat euphoric while he walked around."

"Yeah--" George started to say, but then I interrupted him.

"I don't get it, George. What does all this mean?" I asked irritably. I think the place was already starting to get to me, and we hadn't even made landfall yet.

"I don't know what it means," George shot back. "It's totally bizarre. I can't think of a good explanation for it, pathological or benign. Even if you accept that his environmental suit had failed, and some type of local biological infection had gotten to him, I can't even think of a pathological mechanism which would have caused these readings. There's only one potential explanation, and it scares me almost as much to think about it as it does not knowing what caused the problems."

He stopped. We sat there in a pregnant pause, then Janet said softly. "Ok George, what's the scary cause?" I knew what Janet had been worried about. As I said, I had listened in on the logs she had been listening to in order to be sure she had been getting them Ok. I know, my dedication to my job and this mission is phenomenal; It's just the kind of dedicated guy I am.

"Maybe they were drugged." he said softly.

"But even that doesn't make sense," George added, louder than before. "I've checked with Mother. There are no drugs on file which produce these symptoms. There are a couple of them that were produced for psychoanalytic experimentation over the last fifty years that produce symptoms that are a similar in some ways, but nothing that gets you anxious and euphoric at the same time. And even if there were such a drug, why use it? Or better yet, if you were going to dope the entire crew with it, how would you deliver it in nice measured, even doses to the crew? No, I don't buy it," he said flatly. "Something else got them."

"What if Mother wasn't allowed to tell you what she knew?" I asked somewhat quietly.

Janet burst in with "That's paranoid bullshit and you know it, Chief. Now you guys are getting my adrenaline up, and I can testify that my endorphins are not peaking and I'm not enjoying it. Get back with your report, Mister Wendt."

"Yes Captain," George replied sharply, and then got stuck in that whole sniffle/cough reflex again. Seventeen days later, after our fusion reactor had exhausted its supply of hydrogen atoms and our ship had made a spiral-in crash onto Harvey's World, George finally continued. "Bosko returned to the ship. As far as I know, all the correct anti-contamination procedures were followed. Bosko's blood chemistry remained stable throughout the next day. Captain, can you verify that Bosko followed decontamination procedures?"

"Yeah, George. I've watched the video logs of Bosko's entire excursion, including the decontamination at the end. The external surface temperature of his e-suit hit two thousand degrees and burned off the outer two microns. There are no known organic molecules that can stand that temperature. I also looked closely to see if he might have been sloppy and missed something, like the bottoms of his feet or something. Bosko was a pro. He got it all."

"But what about contamination from something smaller than DNA?" I demanded. "Could a single small molecule have penetrated his suit?"

"It would have to be really small, Chief. Trust me on this. There are no known molecules so small that they could pass through an e-suit and still have any pharmacological effect. That's too far out."

"You're the weight-lifting biologist," I quipped. "I'm just trying to keep my mind open."

Janet interjected, "Ok, Ok. I guess it's time for me to start with my info. I'll begin with Bosko's logs. Then, we'll let George go back to talk about Captain James. Bosko's logs suggest he was everything George mentioned. You get no sense that he's some wild-ass cowboy out to have a great time on Harvey's World. In fact, when he first suits up, you'd think he was doing his ten thousandth training exercise, he's that cool. He followed protocol very well, and always had his e-suit camera active so we can follow along. I made a summary of the recordings of his first excursion. Let's watch it."

We all turned our heads to the monitor on the wall. We saw and heard Bosko matter-of-factly getting into his e-suit. We saw him check its functioning, then step outside the double-doored airlock onto Harvey's World. We listened to his color commentary as he methodically wandered around outside the ship. His first task was to look the entire ship over to be sure it was in good condition, which it was. Then he started walking in a large circle around the ship, forty meters in diameter. He'd stop often, zooming in on the grass or insect life on the ground. Everything looked just fine; All you had to do was spread a blanket and lay out the picnic basket.

He expanded the radius to fifty meters and continued around the ship. This brought him to within about ten meters from one of the cows. He stopped and spent a considerable amount of time describing it's form. The cow paid him absolutely no attention; It kept its head lowered and slowly grazed on the grasses at its feet. Occasionally, Bosko would look away from this cow and zoom in on some distant animal to compare them. He was able to identify a clear dimorphism in the cows, which everybody guessed to be proof of their sexuality. Occasionally, Janet stopped the video and made a few comments, like how skin patterns varied between individual cows, and how nobody ever got any kind of reaction out of the cows, even after physical contact. "They don't even seem to notice when you pet them," she said.

At one point, Bosko zoomed in on one of those clumps of off-white vegetation that was about four-hundred meters away from the ship. Lying next to it, were a half dozen sleeping cows. Bosko made some comment about how he was going to try napping in one if he got a chance, since the cows sure seemed to enjoy them.

We heard the intercom traffic between Bosko and the rest of the crew. It all seemed pretty normal. I've never been on one of these first explorations, and had always wanted to. But if this was how exciting it got, I'll stay home and snooze.

We then saw how Bosko returned to the ship and dutifully performed his decontamination sequence. It's pretty weird to see the skin of the e-suit burn away like that. I hate to admit it, but George was right. There was no way any biological agent could have survived decontamination.

"As you can see," Janet continued when the video stopped, "It was a textbook first excursion. Bosko's soil and air samples didn't show anything unusual. They cultured the microbes in them and got the same data as they got from atmospheric sampling. Harvey's could have been the picnic capital of this corner of the galaxy. It actually amazes me that they didn't abandon protocol and all stream out in their space fatigues the very next day, but they maintained discipline and Bosko went out alone again."

George interjected, "Oh and by the way, Bosko's medical condition did not change much over night. His endorphin levels dropped a tad, but mostly remained elevated. Ditto on his adrenaline. My guess is he didn't sleep very well that night."

"That checks with his logs the next day, George," Janet said. "As I said, Bosko went out again the next day. This time, he made a one hundred-meter radius around the ship. I'm not going to bother playing it for you, since nothing unusual happened. On the afternoon of the second day is when it got interesting."

Janet paused here, and we all looked at her expectantly. "After noon local time on the second day, Captain James allowed the crew to disembark without quarantine. No e-suits, no breathing apparatus, nothing. He wasn't reckless however. Everybody had to stay with at least two other crew members, so nobody was ever alone. Each person leaving the ship had to be fully stocked with side arms, communications, and survival gear. They had to report back to the ship two hours prior to local sunset. Finally, they had to stay within a kilometer of the ship. Frankly, although this seems a little reckless in hindsight, I think I would have done the same. It was that afternoon that things got a little weird.

"Since nobody was in an e-suit, nobody had full automatic video logging going on, but all radio traffic was recorded by the Explorer's Mother, and I've been able to listen to it. There were a couple of occasions when somebody in the field recorded video when they wanted to show something to somebody in the ship. Mostly we don't know exactly what happened to each crew member, so we can't correlate any specific event on the surface to the weird stuff that happened." She paused. I could see the worry in her face. I think Janet would have made a heck of a Jewish mother. I know she feels a strong responsibility for George and me, but I also saw the look that said she felt responsible for the Explorer crew too. I guess our bosses back at Deep Star knew how to pick a rescue crew, or at least it's captain.

"Captain James was a real 'by-the-book' kind of guy," Janet continued. "He recorded extensive logs, at least at first. Let me play you some of his tapes."

We turned to the monitor with Janet as she started the playback. We saw Captain James' talking head fill the screen. He said "Since Bosko's report is so benign, and the biological assays are all negative, I'm thinking of letting everybody out of this tin can. I know I want to get out. If I tried to keep them in here, I'd probably have a mutiny in a couple of days anyhow. I'm even going to go outside, stretch my legs and find out how if feels to breathe real air again."

"Pretty normal stuff," Janet said stopping the playback. "The guys had been cooped up in Explorer for over a year. They wanted out."

"He wasn't serious about the mutiny was he?" George asked. I looked at him. Sometimes I think George must be the dumbest guy on this ship, or at least the second dumbest.

"No, of course not," Janet said. "That was just his normal way of speaking."

"Interesting," said George. "Because at the time he said that, his adrenaline levels were twenty percent above normal, just like everybody else on the ship. He was tense. I'm trying to figure out why."

"But listen to what he sounded like that afternoon," Janet said. "He recorded this just after getting back into the ship after a forty-five minute excursion. As far as I know, he never got more than about one hundred meters from the ship." She played the video and we all looked at the screen.

"I just had my first trip outside today," the talking head began. The easy confidence that James had previously radiated was gone. We saw worry and confusion on his face. It scared the heck out of me. "Ornstein is really starting to piss me off," he said. Janet stopped the playback and explained that Ornstein was one of the mechanical engineers. He had also been outside the ship. She restarted the video.

"I told him that I didn't want to hear about his girlfriend," Captain James continued. "But he just wouldn't stay off the comm channel. I'm putting a notation in his jacket about it. We've got to keep some kind of discipline on the comm channels. Well I'm not going to put up with this crap. Ornstein is going to have to learn that he's a member of this crew."

"Gee Captain," I said. "I thought you were tough." Janet and George ignored my smart aleck comment, as usual.

Janet stopped the playback. "I listened to every transmission made that day. Ornstein hardly said anything over the radio, although I gather that he tended to be a little talkative normally. I had Mother double check me to be sure I hadn't overlooked something, but this is the only time he mentioned his girlfriend. This is Ornstein here." We listened as Janet played the audio-only radio transmission. ". . . going to walk up that small hill over there. I bet my girlfriend would have liked to see this. Come on guys!"

George said, "Captain, at the time this was recorded, Captain James had blood levels of cortical steroids that were sixteen percent above normal. His blood pressure was hovering around 230 over 190. Something was wrong."

"What about the rest of the guys?" I asked. "What about Ornstein? or Bosko?"

George answered, "Seventy percent of the crew were showing similar symptoms. The severity of the symptoms were generally worse for those outside the ship. Although there were exceptions." George shuffled some papers in front of him, pulled one out and handed it to me. "Ornstein, for example," he said, "was actually showing minimal effects."

Janet said, "Bosko sounded bad too. Let me play something he said just before sundown."

"Wait a minute," I said. "I thought everybody was supposed to be back at the ship two hours before sunset."

"They were supposed to be back, but Bosko ignored the order, and James never called him on it. In fact, six crew members in a single party never returned to the ship at all. Let me see if I can get the Bosko recording." She pressed a couple of buttons on the panel next to her.

"As you know, normal protocol is for the public comm channels to remain clear. James was right about the excess chatter on the comm channels, but Ornstein was never the culprit. Bosko in fact, was one of the worst offenders. He apparently thought he was recording personal log data, when in fact he was broadcasting to the whole crew. Listen to this."

Bosko's voice came out of the speaker. ". . . plant life seems mostly narrow-leafed with a single tubular support structure. The slightly blue color tinge tends to indicate a relatively primitive chloroplast, but I'll have to take another look under the microscope to be sure. The absence of RNA in the plants was a surprise, so the mechanism of genetic replication will have to be studied further. I'm not sure why some vegetation displays no chlorophyll at all, unless the clumps I see are actually just the flowering part of this grass I'm standing on. Perhaps it's kind of like the Century Bush of New Earth where a single organism can take up several square kilometers and have a massive reproductive organelle. If it wasn't so darn dark all of a sudden I could tell more about the . . ."

Janet stopped the playback. "That was the first recorded mention of darkness," she said. "I double-checked the time stamp on this file, and checked the Lookout's orbital image recorded just a couple of minutes before hand. It was mid afternoon when Bosko made this recording, with almost no visible cloud cover. It was so bright that Bosko should have been wearing sunglasses, which I don't think he was."

I got a chill up my spine that did not want to let go. It's bad enough listening to dead guys. But crazy dead guys were worse.

"Captain," I asked, "what about the group that did not come back that night?"

Janet swallowed. This was going to get worse. "It was a single group of six. They were the fourth party out of the ship that day. They didn't make many transmissions during the day, so we don't know exactly what they were doing. The best I can tell, they were just out for a nice stroll. The first hint of trouble came an hour before sunset. You'll have to listen to this, because my description could not do it justice. The voice you'll hear is Morgan. She was a biologist. I guess she was kind of your equivalent George. She also doubled as the crew's assistant medical officer. Doc Peters had remained in the ship, as per protocol. Here it is."

The voice sounded panicked. I've heard people talk like this. I heard it in that empty fuel tank I got trapped in when my ship got damaged. The best I can tell, the universe is a fair place in some type of cruel and insane manner, and it lets you know when your end is near. I could tell that on some visceral, unexplainable level, Morgan knew they were about to die. Morgan had that sound. I know that sound. At least, if it weren't for my Space Fairer's Amnesia, I would know that sound. It's funny the psychiatrists never asked me about this. It's one of the things I would have asked about if I were a psychiatrist.

Janet played the recording. ". . . supposed to stay near each other. Where are you guys? We should have gone back to the ship before it got dark. Christ, I can't see a thing. Joe? Joe? Where the hell are you? I'm going back. I'm not going to--" Suddenly she screamed. Morgan's scream was worse than anything I ever heard in that fuel tank. I've heard the sound a person makes at death. I've heard the sound of total panic. I've heard the sound of total desperation. I've heard the sound of total capitulation. I've never heard this sound before. Her scream came from the deepest, oldest, most primitive parts of her mind, parts that had remained dormant in every member of mankind for the last ten million years. But she found that hidden portion of animal intellect, and we heard it in her voice. Her scream was the sound of entire planets dying in a supernova. Her scream was the loss of an entire race, lost across an entire galaxy. I felt myself die with her in that scream. I hope my amnesia was still working. I was going to need it.

We all sat there for a long time. At one point, George started to try to talk but was thankfully choked off by his coughing reflex. I think I saw the crows feet at Janet's eyes transform into canyons, and the rest of her auburn hair turn grey. And she had already heard this before. I'm glad I'm not captain. I wouldn't want to hear it again.

Finally, George said slowly, "What . . . what . . . was . . . the time stamp of that recording?"

Janet looked at him quizzically for a moment, then looked at the operations panel in front of her. "Uh," she said pressing a button or two, "it was 17:25:13 hours local. Why?"

George didn't say anything. Even though this didn't count as a "presentation" for George, at least not as far as I would have thought, George got one of the worst cases of the sniffles I've ever seen. He blew his empty nose a dozen times, and wiped what otherwise would have been a mucus-filled handkerchief all over his face. He stumbled around trying to put the handkerchief back into his pocket, then just as quickly tried to pull it out again, neither operation being completed. This sequence took so long, I could feel the protons in my body decaying into their constituent quarks. He finally coughed a couple of times and said, "At precisely 17:25:09 hours local, our first fatality showed a significant change in body chemistry. That crew member died within twenty-three minutes of the onset of symptoms. By 17:59 hours, virtually every member of the Explorer's crew was showing some clinical sign of Harvey's Syndrome."

Nobody said anything for a few minutes. I could feel my Space Fairer's Amnesia slipping away. The worst part of being in that empty fuel tank was the smell. The ragged hunk of metal that had snagged and bled to death my chief apprentice had been white hot due to an oxidizer fire. When he got stuck on it, I could smell his flesh being burned. For a while I thought he was going to make it, since the wound had been cauterized by the heat. But I was wrong. The cauterization only added to his pain. He bled well enough, only it was hard to tell because the blood just floated next to him in the weightlessness. In a gravity field, you see the blood pour away from wounds, but in space you get a false sense of the benign. My amnesia seemed to be failing me, because I remembered all this. And I thought I had developed my amnesia pretty well with all those trips to the psychiatrist.

I looked at Janet, and then at George. Janet was in her own world too. I don't know the demons that possessed her world, but judging by the look on her face, she knew them all too well and was having some type of deep philosophical discussion with them right now. George too, was in deep conversation with some inner companion, although seemingly less so than Janet or me. More of his time was spent sniffling and coughing. If my amnesia goes out completely, I'm thinking of taking up sneezing instead.

Finally, after an eon, Janet lifted herself out of her reverie and said to George, "George, tell us more about the victims."

I knew what was coming, since I know George pretty well by now. Janet and I endured the mother of all sniffles. I swear the universe stopped expanding, fell back into itself, then was reborn in another big bang while we waited for George to work his way through the entire sniffle/cough/gag reflex of his. Eventually, he pulled himself together and told us the story.

"The first victim of Harvey's Syndrome was Patrick Kalinski. As I had mentioned, everybody's bio telemetry data were showing some crazy changes. Exactly four seconds prior to Morgan's scream, Kalinski's adrenaline level went off the scale. His cardiac telemetry shows severe myocardial disruption which began thirty-five seconds after that. He died within twenty-five more minutes."

Janet asked, "Did you say Kalinski?"

"Yeah," George answered. "Why?"

"Because he was with her; in the same party as Morgan. Whatever it was that scared the bejesus out of her also killed Kalinski."

"Tell us how Kalinski died," I said.

"Well, like I said, everybody's body chemistry had been more than a little strange that day. His adrenaline levels had been high for the previous twenty-four hours, higher than most of the rest of the crew. During the last few hours, this level increased, as did his endorphin levels. He was really sailing. His heartbeat was exceptionally fast, and his blood pressure was around 240 over 198. This was especially high for him, since he had absolutely no history of hypertension. Just when we hear Morgan's scream, we can see a definite spike in Kalinski's EEG readings. Thirty-five seconds later, his heart began fibrillating. I estimate he lost consciousness in about two minutes, and died less than twenty-five minutes later."

"Was Kalinski the only fatality at that time?" Janet asked.

"No," George replied. "Although he was the first, three more crew members succumbed that evening. Two others were stricken shortly after Kalinski. Another was hit about a half hour later. Interestingly, however, (and I don't know what this means) almost everybody had an EEG spike at the same time that Morgan screamed."

"Even those who were not present with Morgan and Kalinski and the others?" I asked.

"Exactly. Even the guys in the ship showed a marked spike in their EEG telemetry. I can't explain it. I'm still not sure that the equipment didn't malfunction on the Explorer, although Mother says everything checks just fine. Maybe you can help me look into that possibility, Chief?"

I nodded my agreement.

"What was the nature of this 'spike'?" Janet asked.

"It really was a spike," George replied. "It's not like anything I've ever seen before. It's almost as if the victims all received an electrical shock at the same time. The normal EEG readings are there, then all of a sudden there's a blip which overwhelms the normal rhythms, then it's gone. The whole event only lasts about a half second. It's not like an electro shock, however, since there is no evidence of neuronic convulsions in any of the victims. It's just a loud bang. In Kalinski's case, it sent his heart into fibrillation, and it killed him. Other victims seem less effected, but everyone felt it, even the guys in the ship."

We sat there a while. Janet resumed her conversation with her demon. George fiddled with his hands, but mercifully, he did not sneeze. I thought again about my assistant in that fuel tank. God, his flesh stank when it burned. I sniffed again at my sleeve. I could still smell that odor. I don't think I'll ever be able to wash it out.

Finally, Janet pulled herself together and said to George, "Tell us about Captain James."

"Captain James' EEG showed the same spike as all the others, although I think he was inside the ship at the time. His adrenaline levels jumped about thirty percent after the spike, and only drifted downward slightly over the night. I'm sure he didn't sleep that night. The next day, I think he left the ship, although maybe you can tell that from the logs, Captain."

"Yeah, he was worried about the crew members who did not come back. Also, he was pretty agitated. He left the ship. Here, let me play you part of one of his logs."

Janet punched a few controls on the panel, and then we turned to see Captain James' talking head on the wall monitor again. He looked horrible. He hadn't shaved, and it looked like he hadn't slept in about four weeks. I've seen guys look better after heavy-duty bachelor parties. Once again, his self confidence, the thing most captains and explorers have in metric tons, was completely gone. He was scared, and very worried. ". . . last night's exploration team never checked in. I'm . . . I'm thinking of sending another couple of guys out looking for them. I've been trying to figure out why it's so dark this morning, but Mother doesn't seem to know anything today. She hasn't seen Kolowski . . . or, uh, what's his name? Uh, Kalinski. Mother said something about Kalinski. I've got to get the Doc to find out about Kalinski. Mother's been acting kind of strange lately. I'm thinking of sending a couple of guys out today. I've got to find Kolowski. Mother sounded a medic alarm a couple of minutes ago, but now I can't seem to get her on line. I can't see a damn thing with the lights off like this . . ."

"Mother's logs show that James left the ship ninety-five minutes after making this recording," Janet said. "He never returned."

"He fell into our typical coma about an hour or so later," George added. "The third day on Harvey's World was D-day. All but three of the crew members fell into a coma. Eighty percent of those in a coma died before the following dawn. It was a pretty rotten picnic."

"What about those who were not affected?" I asked.

"The three were Alexander, Sarco, and Zweibel. You remember that Sarco is the one in the fully armored e-suit at SN1. Maybe the Captain can fill us in on the details of what happened to him."

We looked at Janet, who had a very pained expression on her face. I had heard enough of Sarco's last logs to know they were not pretty. At least we weren't talking about Zweibel, although God knows it was going to come up soon.

Janet spoke. "Sarco knew something was wrong. I won't play you his last logs, since they really don't make any more sense than the others, but he was trying to rescue the guys at SN1. Despite the darkness, and the stupor he found himself in, he managed to get into the armored e-suit, which is no easy feat even under good circumstances."

This fact, of course, I knew well. I had tried to get somebody into an un-armored e-suit when our ship was damaged. You can practically hit the ground from orbit in one of the armored suits, and it won't even be scratched. Of course, as the content of such a suit, you will be splattered beyond recognition, but the suit itself will be fine, and it will keep your remains nicely contained inside. It also has small projectile armaments, extra oxygen and rations, and enough communication gear to call back to Deep Star. The thing takes about three hours to power up and get into, although the book says you can be safely inside one in about ten minutes. Damn engineers! You can't even read the friggin' introduction in the operating manual in ten minutes. If those things hadn't been so darn complicated, maybe my assistant would have survived our catastrophe. Thank God for Space Fairer's Amnesia!

"I guess Sarco was unsuccessful," I said quietly.

"It wasn't for lack of trying," Janet replied. "Mother reports that he fired twenty-three explosive projectiles. His logs don't show very clearly what he was shooting at. His audio is incoherent, and he kept complaining about the darkness obscuring his vision. The video log shows bright sunshine however, so God only knows what he thought he was shooting at.

"Eventually, he too fell into Harvey's coma, and he has not moved appreciably since that time. He is right now almost exactly where he fell, almost a year ago."

"So we still don't know squat," I said irritably.

Janet answered me, and I could feel the exhaustion in her voice and see it in her eyes. "We don't know squat," she agreed.