Samswope’s face grew livid and he screamed, “Shut up! Just shut up and let Curran talk! We don’t want to die on this ship. You may like it, you little tin god, but we hate it here! So shut up and let him talk!”

Curran spoke rapidly then: “If you allow us to send a medical detachment up here to use you as blood donors, I have the word of the System Central that you will all be allowed to land on Earth and we’ll have a reservation for you so you can live some kind of normal lives again —”

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Bedzyk again burst in, trying vainly to speak over the hubbub from the corridor. “Can’t you see he’s lying? They’ll use us and then desert us again!”

Samswope growled menacingly, “If you don’t shut up I’ll kill you, Bedzyk!”

Bedzyk faltered into silence and watched the scene before him. They were melting. They were going to let this rotten turncoat Earthie blind them with false hopes.

“We’ve worked our allotments around so there is space for you, perhaps in the new green-valleys of South America or on the veldtland in Rhodesia. It will be wonderful, but we need your blood, we need your help.”

“Don’t trust him! Don’t believe him, you can’t believe an Earthman!” Bedzyk shouted, stumbling forward to wrest the rasp-pistol from Samswope’s grip.

Samswope fired point-blank. First the rasp of the power spurting from the muzzle of the tiny pistol filled the drive room, then the smell of burning flesh, and Bedzyk’s eyes opened wide in pain. He screamed thinly, and staggered back against Curran. Curran stepped aside, and Bedzyk mewed in agony, and crumpled onto the deck. A huge hole had been seared through his huge chest. Huge chest, huge death, and he lay there with his eyes open, barely forming the words “Don’t … you can’t, can’t t-trust an Earth-mmm …” with his bloody lips. The last word formed and became a forever intaglio.

Curran’s face had paled out till it was a blotch against the dark blue of his jumper. “Y-y-y …”

Samswope moved into the drive room and took Curran by the sleeve, almost where Bedzyk had held it. “You promise us we can land and be allowed to settle someplace on Earth?”

Curran nodded dumbly. Had they asked for Earth in its socket, he would have nodded agreement. Samswope still held the rasp.

“All right, then … get your med detachment up here, and get that blood. We want to go home, Mr. Curran, we want to go home more than anything!”

They led him to the lock. Behind him, Curran saw three mutants lifting the blasted body of Bedzyk, bearing it on their shoulders through the crowd. The body was borne out of sight down a cross-corridor, and Curran followed it out of sight with his eyes.

Beside him, Samswope said: “To the garbage lock. We go that way, Mr. Curran.” His tones were hard and uncompromising. “We don’t like going that way, Mr. Curran. We want to go home. You’ll see to it, won’t you, Mr. Curran?”

Curran again nodded dumbly, and entered the lock linking ships.

Ten hours later, the med detachment came up. The Discards were completely obedient and tremendously helpful.

It took nearly eleven months to inoculate the entire population of the Earth and the rest of the System — strictly as preventative caution dictated — and during that time no more Discards took their lives. Why should they? They were going home. Soon the tug ships would come, and help jockey the big Discard vessel into orbit for the run to Earth. They were going home. There was room for them now, even in their condition. Spirits ran high, and laughter tinkled oddly down the passageway in the “evenings.” There was even a wedding between Arkay (who was blind and had a bushy tail) and a pretty young thing the others called Daanae, for she could not speak herself. Without a mouth that was impossible. At the ceremony in the saloon, Samswope acted as minister, for the Discards had made him their leader in the same silent way they had made Bedzyk the leader before him. Spirits ran high, and the constant knowledge that as soon as Earth had the Sickness under control they would be going home, kept them patient; eleven months.

Then one “afternoon” the ship came.

Not the little tugs, as they had supposed, but a cargo ship nearly as big as their own home. Samswope rushed to synch in the locks, and when the red lights merged on the board, he locked the two together firmly, and scrambled back through the throng to be the first to greet the men who would deliver them.

When the lock sighed open, and they saw the first ten who had been thrust in, they knew the truth.

One had a head flat as a plate, with no eyes, and its mouth in its neck. Another had several hundred thousand slimy tentacles where arms should have been, and waddled on stumps that could never again be legs. Still another was brought in by a pair of huge empty-faced men, in a bowl. The bowl contained a yellow jelly, and swimming in the yellow jelly was the woman.

Then they knew. They were not going home. As lockful after lockful of more Discards came through, to swell their ranks even more, they knew these were the last of the tainted ones from Earth. The last ones who had been stricken by the Sickness — who had changed before the serum could save them. These were the last, and now the Earth was clean.

Samswope watched them trail in, some dragging themselves on appendageless torsos, others in baskets, still others with one arm growing from a chest, or hair that was blue and fungus growing out all over the body. He watched them and knew the man he had killed had been correct. For among the crowd he glimpsed a bare-chested Discard with huge sores on his body. Curran.

And as the cargo ship unlocked and swept back to Earth — with the silent warning Don’t follow us, don’t try to land, there’s no room for you here — Samswope could hear Bedzyk’s hysterical tones in his head:

Don’t trust them! There is room for us anywhere! Don’t trust them!

You can’t trust an Earthman!

Samswope started walking slowly toward the galley, knowing he would need someone to seal the garbage lock after him. But it didn’t matter who it was. There were more than enough Discards aboard now.

Wanted in Surgery