“What’s there to know?” Framy picked at a broken toenail. “My buddy died of it, back on—never mind. He stopped over to settle a score on some planet and didn’t know the chill was going around. Didn’t know he had it himself, until it was too late. I thought sure I’d catch it from him, and I couldn’t no more go to the doc’n he could. He just got colder and colder and he died.”

“There was an epidemic on Hvee—that’s my home—back in ’305,” Aton said, since he saw the signs that Framy had already been hooked and would pay the toll. It came in the first month of the year. My great-grandfather Five was orphaned by it. Wiped out a third of the planet.”

“Pandemic, not epidemic,” Hastings said. “Did you know that it occurs in regular cycles just over 98 years apart, and that just about half the worlds of the human sector have been struck by it at one time or another? That it is not contagious? That Earth itself is being struck right now?”

Framy’s silence in the face of each artfully posed question had been determined but his resistance broke at last. His weakness was that he couldn’t bear to have anybody know something that he didn’t, even if the subject had no inherent interest for him. “You been here longer’n me!” he exclaimed. “You don’t know nothing about Earth.”

Hastings settled back comfortably. “But it seems that I know something about the chill.” And waited smugly.

“I already know about the chill. My buddy died of it. If there’d been a doc who’d keep his mouth shut—”

“There is no cure for the chill,” Hastings said. Aton frowned at this.

“You’re lying,” Framy said without conviction. “Lots of people been saved. They got to catch it in two days, though.”

“Even then, there is no cure.”

Inevitably, after desperate rear-guard action, Framy lost his garnet, the others gathered around to swell the audience, and the flow of news began.

“Man,” Hastings said, adopting the tone that made the standing listeners find seats, “leapfrogged light to plant colonies hundreds and thousands of light-years from his home. But he was caught unprepared for the chill. In §25 a brand-new colony almost 700 light-years toward the galactic center (no point in going into proper galactic coordinates here: that will be saved for another garnet) reported the first case. A young laborer on the cultivating squad stopped at the clinic with a complaint of sudden shakes. They had lasted only a minute or two, he admitted, but surely he was coming down with something. The medic aimed a thermal gauge at him, found no fever, and packed him back to the field. Colonization was rough work and the indolent were not to be coddled. The matter was duly entered in the record and forgotten.