"Well, probably not as bad as you there, below. We've neither tankers here nor contagion," Robert joked in response without thinking and gasped: "What are you talking about, Lully? What kind of infection?"

"I'm not alone today," Lully said, hold her hand out above the screen, and the scale has immediately changed, revealing a crowded control room, in which not only the due group was on duty, but also a lot of strangers. "Mr. Gilels, it's Mr. Vandarli."

"Hello, Mr. Vandarli."

Mr. Gilels was a lean man with a long face, who was sitting on the right of Lully.

"I know that you don't need unnecessary curtsy, so I'll talk about a deal right now," he said after a short pause. "I was in El Paso this morning. There was a quarantine declared there."

Well, Robert thought, his hands are trembling, breathing is loud, and voice is unnatural... It seems, the case really takes an intriguing turn. And there are the kin there, on the Earth...

"From the other side of the Mexican border, in Ciudad Juarez... We faced a queer epidemic," Mr. Gilels continued, nervously picking at the sleeve of his expensive jacket. "Over the last three days, ten thousand people were hospitalized there, and the vast majority of them are children. They all have a trouble with thermoregulation and metabolism. So far, no one has died, but that's all. And this morning the first child has contracted from our side. In short, we need you here. Both of you."

Robert had to work hard to suppress a smile, which began to stretch all over his face. Here it is, a mission! And the Maker's immunity is very funny, but very obedient...

"Mr. Vandarli, we'll send a shuttle for you, it should arrive tonight at twenty-thirty GMT," Mr. Gilels went on, as if the oncoming Maker's visit to the Earth was a trivia and common thing. "Could you get ready by this time?"

"Long donning isn't included in the list of our shortcomings," Robert trifled by inertia.

"Great," Mr. Gilels nodded, then Lully's thin hand again flashed for a moment, and the screen went off.

Robert squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, not believing he had heard. The Earth gave permission! Moreover, the Earth is waiting for him!

"Aha! Lukasz!" he shouted as mad. "How about tequila?! I know a fury lot of ways how to drink it! Where we can buy a quesadilla in Ciudad Juarez?!"

"You haven't money for it," Lukasz remarked from the bath.

***

And then the shuttle from the Earth has arrived to Alpha.

Exactly at twenty-thirty GMT, two silent pilots had neatly and skillfully docked it to the gateway, where Lukasz and Robert had been giving the last instructions on the unaided maintenance of Alpha to the pair of large-headed catta lemurs.

The lemurs were listening, obediently nodding and clasping their thin black paws on their tummies.

Thereby, at twenty thirty two, the pressure-vacuum compound gage had read zero, and the airlock was empty.

***

Florida met them with the sun and the salty wind. For some half an hour along the tenth federal track had flashed Tallahassee, New Orleans, Houston, and appeared El Paso itself, surrounded on all sides by the red hills. It was not at all like a city in panic.

"You've got a hotel room ready and BNY Mellon accounts," Mr. Gilels said from front seat of the Cadillac. "If you manage to cope with the situation, an amount equivalent to the annual salary of a practicing doctor will be transferred to both of you."

In the vicinity of Thomason Hospital everything was calm. The panic was bubbling only near the emergency room.

It was flowing in the air: in the eyes of the counter doctors, in the absence of civilians, not related to medicine, and in the numerous yellow antiplague suits.

"It's a highly contagious airborne virus," the young woman the doctor, who met them, pointed at the sealed infectious disease ward. "This is our first patient."

Robert and Lukasz, for a long time deprived of women's society up in Alpha, now have been touched with thin girl's arms and been melted from the untimely bliss.

And behind the glass, in the sealed ward, lay a small Latin boy, spreading out on the large white bed.

"He's eight years old. He was brought to us in the morning with hypothermia and non-functioning kidneys. The only thing we can do for him is to heat up the incubator to thirty-six and six. We are not even able to give him a dropper, because his vessels walls keep the water in."

Robert and Lukasz exchanged glances. Lukasz had opened his mouth, but Robert got ahead of him.