Having dumped the now metal colored catch into the freeze, they held a conference.

“No plague—­” Weeks breathed a sigh of relief.

“No proof of that yet,” Ali caught him up short.  “We have to prove it past any reasonable doubt.”

“And how are we going to do—?” Dane began when he saw what the other had brought in from Tau’s stores.  A lancet and the upper half of the creature Queex had killed in the cargo hold.

The needle pointed front feet of the thing were curled up in its death throes and it was now a dirty white shade as if the ability to change color had been lost before it matched the cotton on which it lay.  With the lancet Ali forced a claw away from the body.  It was oozing the watery liquid which they had seen on the one in the hydro.

“I have an idea,” he said slowly, his eyes on the mangled creature rather than on his shipmates, “that we might have escaped being attacked because they sheered off from us.  But if we were clawed we might take it too.  Remember those marks on the throats and backs of the rest?  That might be the entry point of this poison—­if poison it is—­”

Dane could see the end of that line of reasoning.  Rip and Ali—­they couldn’t be spared.  The knowledge they had would bring the Queen to earth.  But a Cargo-master was excess baggage when there was no reason for trade.  It was his place to try out the truth of Ali’s surmise.

But while he thought another acted.  Weeks leaned over and twitched the lancet out of Ali’s fingers.  Then, before any of them could move, he thrust its contaminated point into the back of his hand.

“Don’t!”

Both Dane’s cry and Rip’s hand came too late.  It had been done.  And Weeks sat there, looking alone and frightened, studying the drop of blood which marked the dig of the surgeon’s keen knife.  But when he spoke his voice sounded perfectly natural.

“Headache first, isn’t it?”

Only Ali was outwardly unaffected by what the little man had just done.  “Just be sure you have a real one,” he warned with what Dane privately considered real callousness.

Weeks nodded.  “Don’t let my imagination work,” he answered shrewdly.  “I know.  It has to be real.  How long do you suppose?”

“We don’t know,” Rip sounded tired, beaten.  “Meanwhile,” he got to his feet, “we’d better set a course home—­”

“Home,” Weeks repeated.  To him Terra was not his own home—­he had been born in the polar swamps of Venus.  But to All Solarians—­no matter which planet had nurtured them—­Terra was home.

“You,” Rip’s big hand fell gently on the little oiler’s shoulder, “stay here with Thorson—­”

“No,” Weeks shook his head.  “Unless I black out, I’m riding station in the engine room.  Maybe the bug won’t work on me anyway.”

And because he had done what he had done they could not deny him the right to ride his station as long as he could during the grueling hours to come.