ions and
threats that reminded him of the only fight they'd ever had during their
brief marriage.

When she ran down, he finally met her eyes. "You're a helluva doctor,"
he told her harshly. "You spend all your time fighting me when there's a
plague out there that may be worse than any disease we've ever known.
Take a look at what lies under the black specks on your corpses. You'll
find the first Martian disease. And maybe if you begin working on that
now, you can learn to be a real doctor in time to do something about it.
But I doubt it."

She fell back from him then. "Research! You've been doing unauthorized
research!"

"Prove it," he suggested. "But you'd be a lot smarter to try some
yourself, and to hell with your precious rules."

He followed Jake out to the tractor.

Surprisingly, the old man was sweating now. He shook his head at Doc's
look, and his grin was uncertain.

"Matthews is an incompetent," he said. "They could have had you, Doc.
That charter is so sloppy a man can prove anything by it, and building a
hospital here did bring in Earth rules. Wilson went out on a limb in
letting you go. But I guess we got away with it. Let's get out of here."

Doc climbed into the tractor more soberly. They had escaped this time.
But there would be another time, and he was pretty sure that would be
Chris' round. He had no intention of giving up his research.

VII

Plague

Dr. Feldman leaned back from his microscope and lighted another bracky
weed. He glanced about the room and sighed wearily. Maybe he'd been
better off when he had no friends and couldn't risk the safety of others
in an effort to do research that was the highest crime on two worlds.

The evidence of his work was hidden thirty feet beyond his former
laboratory in Jake's village, with a tunnel that led from another
root-cellar. The theory was the old one that the best place to avoid
discovery was where you had already been discovered. If their spies had
identified his former hangout, they'd never expect to have him set up
research nearby. It was a nice theory, but he wasn't sure of it.

Jake looked up from a cot where he'd been watching the improvised
culture incubator. "Stop tearing yourself to bits, Doc. We know the
danger and we're still darned glad to have you here working on this."

"I'm trying to put myself together into a whole man," Doc told him. "But
I seem to come out wholly a fool."

"Yeah, sure. Sometimes it takes a fool