The Trouble with Sempoanga

Начало книги

When Helmet Schweid decided to go to Sempoanga for his holiday, he knew the risks, but of course he assumed they didn’t apply to him. “You’ll pick up a dose of zanjak and never get out of quarantine,” his friends told him. Helmet laughed. He was a careful man, especially with his body. He would avoid getting zanjak by avoiding going to bed with women who had zanjak: that was simple enough to manage, wasn’t it?

By common agreement Sempoanga was the most beautiful planet in the galaxy. See one sunrise on Sempoanga, everyone said, and you won’t care if you never see anything else anywhere. The trouble with Sempoanga was the dismal parasite its humanoid natives harbored. There was only one way to transmit that parasite—by making love. Since the natives of Sempoanga are a good deal less attractive to humans than its sunrises, it is not easy to understand how any human could ever have caught it, but somehow someone had, and it had adapted nicely to human bodies, thriving and multiplying and making itself remarkably contagious, and in the past few years a good many human visitors to Sempoanga had passed it around to one another, with horrendous results. Biologists were working on a cure and hoped they might see results in just a few more years. But meanwhile no one went home from Sempoanga without undergoing tests and if you caught zanjak, you stayed quarantined there indefinitely, because the parasite’s effect on the human reproductive system was so startling that the future of the entire species might be in jeopardy if it were allowed to spread to the other civilized worlds.

Читать дальше →