I ain’t gonna touch you.
You aiming to scrounge in Houston?”
Paul began to advance.
“Yeah, I figure people got out so fast that they must have left plenty of canned goods and stuff behind.”
“Mmmm, there’s a mite here and there,” said the cracked voice in a tone that implied understatement.
“Course, now, you ain’t the first to figure that way, y’know.”
Paul slacked his pace, frowning.
“You mean… a lot of people are coming back?”
“Mmmm, no—not a lot.
But you’ll bump into people every day or two.
Ain’t my kind o’ folks.
Rough characters, mostly—don’t take chances, either.
They’ll shoot first, then look to see if you was a dermie.
Don’t never come busting out of a doorway without taking a peek at the street first.
And if two people come around a corner in opposite directions, somebody’s gonna die.
The few that’s there is trigger happy.
Just thought I’d warn ya.”
“Thanks.”
“D’mention it.
Been good t’hear a body’s voice again, tho I can’t see ye.”
Paul moved on until he was fifty paces past the voice. Then he stopped and turned.
“Okay, you can get back on the road now.
Start walking north.
Scuff your feet until you’re out of earshot.”
“Taking no chances, are ye?” said the old man as he waded the ditch. “All right, sonny.”
The sound of his footsteps hesitated on the pavement.
“A word of advice—your best scrounging’ll be around the warehouses.
Most of the stores are picked clean.
Good luck!”
Paul stood listening to the shuffling feet recede northward.
When they became inaudible, he turned to continue his journey.
The meeting had depressed him, reminded him of the animal-level to which he and others like him had sunk.
The oldster was obviously healthy; but Paul had been chased by three dermies in as many days. And the thought of being trapped by a band of them in the fog left him unnerved.
Once he had seen a pair of the grinning, maddened compulsives seize a screaming young child while each of them took turns caressing the youngster’s arms and face with the gray and slippery hands that spelled certain contraction of the disease—if disease it was.
The dark pall of neuroderm was unlike any illness that Earth had ever seen.
The victim became the eager ally of the sickness that gripped him.
Caught in its demoniac madness, the stricken human searched hungrily for healthy comrades, then set upon them with no other purpose than to paw at the clean skin and praise the virtues of the blind compulsion that drove him to do so.
One touch, and infection was insured.
It was as if a third of humanity had become night-prowling maniacs, lurking in the shadows to seize the unwary, working in bands to trap the unarmed wanderer.
And two-thirds of humanity found itself fleeing in horror from the mania, seeking the frigid northern climates where, according to rumor, the disease was less infectious.
The normal functioning of civilization had been dropped like a hot potato within six months after the first alarm.
When the man at the next lathe might be hiding gray discolorations beneath his shirt, industrial society was no place for humanity.
Rumor connected the onslaught of the plague with an unpredicted swarm of meteorites which had brightened the sky one October evening two weeks before the first case was discovered.
The first case was, in fact, a machinist who had found one of the celestial cannon balls, handled it, weighed it, estimated its volume by fluid-displacement, then cut into it on his lathe because its low density suggested that it might be hollow.
He claimed to have found a pocket of frozen jelly, still rigid from deep space, although the outer shell had been heated white-hot by atmospheric friction.
He said he let the jelly thaw, then fed it to his cat because it had an unpleasant fishy odor.
Shortly thereafter, the cat disappeared.
Other meteorites had been discovered and similarly treated by university staffs before there was any reason to blame them for the plague.
Paul, who had been an engineering student at Texas U at the time of the incident, had heard it said that the missiles were purposefully manufactured by parties unknown, that the jelly contained microorganisms which under the microscope suggested a cross between a sperm-cell (because of a similar tail) and a Pucini Corpuscle (because of a marked resemblance to nerve tissue in subcellular detail).
When the meteorites were connected with the new and mushrooming disease, some people started a panic by theorizing that the meteor-swarm was a pre-invasion artillery attack by some space-horde lurking beyond telescope range, and waiting for their biological bombardment to wreck civilization before they moved in upon Earth.