I looked over the case file again before going in. “How’s it look in there?”

“He’s awake. Looks like he has a hangover. Very quiet, though.” I nodded, and the guard released the first door. I opened it and went in, first hearing the click as the door locked behind me, then hearing the click of the lock ahead. I opened the door and went in. The man sitting on the edge of the bed looked up at me, but I saw no signs of aggression.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Morning, but I wouldn’t say it was good.”

I sat down on one of the chairs at the table and invited him over with a wave, “Do you know where you are?”

The man shrugged, “Looks like a rubber room. Hospital? Prison?”

“Prison, for now. I am here to evaluate you.”

The man nodded.

“Do you know why you are here?” I asked.

“Because I must have failed,” his smile was rueful.

“What were you trying to do?”

“Kill the beast,” he sighed.

“What beast was that?”

“It’s a long story. Do you mind if I stand up and pace? It helps me think.”

I had the sleepgas-switch concealed in my left hand and moved my thumb a little closer, “Go ahead, if that helps you.”

He rose and paced the room a few times before he started talking, “I grew up out on the Edge. It was on a planet that had only been settled about a hundred generations ago, two to three thousand Earth years. Shortly after the planet was settled, a disease started. The doctors could find no cause, no pathogen. The only thing they ever figured out was that it seemed to be transmitted if a person heard the name.”

“Heard the name? Of what?” I asked.

“Of the beast. We used ‘the beast’ as a euphemism for the disease. If we said the name, we might catch the disease.” He must have seen my look of skepticism, “I know, it sounds crazy, but my people lived with it for a hundred generations. On the other hand, we built up more and more of an immunity to it over the generations. Just hearing the beast’s name once might not spread it, or might not spread it immediately as happened with most of the first generation of settlers on the planet.

“The doctors put us under quarantine, and that’s where our planet and population remained for a hundred generations.

“The first symptom that someone was infected by the beast was that they could no longer manage to say proper nouns. If asked their name, they would give the name of the beast. If asked where they lived, they would give the name of the beast instead of a settlement or street name. From there, it gets horrible,” he shook his head with a haunted look in his eyes.

“So, you’re saying that the disease is spread through hearing the name, and the first symptom is that the infected individual starts saying the name over and over to everyone he meets?”

The patient/detainee nodded, “By the time I was born, most people did not show symptoms until they were forty or so. Then they might live another ten years with the disease progressing. A hundred generations of selective pressure had gotten us only that far.

“Do you want to know the truth?” he suddenly asked.

“Sure. What is the truth?”

“I thought it was all in our heads and in our culture. I thought it was a hundred generations of crazy that had been selected for, not a hundred generations of resistance against something real. I didn’t believe in the beast as a real thing. It made no sense. Just for the ultimate question, if it were real and were transmitted by saying its name, how did anyone ever hear that name in the first place? It’s not like there was an alien race on the planet when my forebears landed there. There was nobody waiting there to pass on the name of the beast. No. It just started about a year after the landing.

“With a hundred generations, there was a lot of folklore about the beast. Some said that it was really a malevolent force that would take you over if you heard its name. What sort of force? Again, it makes no sense, and I never believed in it.”

“But you believe in it now?” I asked.

He nodded, “I was a young man and full of myself, and I wanted to escape from the craziness of my home planet. Although we were quarantined, we had some ships that came, but their crews were all deaf. They could not hear the name of the beast, so they could not be infected and pass it on. They would bring supplies and luxuries and take our products to far markets.

“I stowed away. I stayed out of sight. I managed to keep hidden until I landed on another planet and sneaked out. Then I signed up on another tramp ship taking cargoes hither and yon through the galaxy, traveling with no set path. I saved my money, and eventually bought my own ship.”

“Did they find out you had stowed away?” I asked. “Did they do anything about your having broken quarantine?”

“I don’t know for certain. Five years later, I heard that the planet had been destroyed. Part of the progression of the beast is a madness that can make the individual very destructive. Somehow, someone had managed to shift the planet out of its orbit and into its star. All of my family was gone.”

“But, back to the story and bringing us to today, I was twenty-five when I stowed away. I’ve been bouncing around the galaxy for another fifty years. I thought this was proof positive that the beast was just a madness spread by belief, rather than a real disease. I was seventy-five and had never had a symptom. But it turned out that I was just unusually resistant, a hundred generations of my ancestors had been weeded out and culminated in me, the most resistant to have ever lived. But the beast was real,” his voice faded to silence.

“You started having symptoms?”

He closed his eyes and nodded, “My first mate asked where we were headed next. Instead of saying the name of the planet, I said the name of the beast, which I had heard a few times in my youth. I was calm about it. I thought, well, if it is a madness, I was exposed in my youth. If I were going senile in my old age, that would be the form it took. I tried to write out the proper name but found I could not. Finally, I pointed on a list of planets so he could read it for himself.

“I passed it off as my having a hereditary disease, and I was very careful to avoid saying or trying to write proper nouns. I thought that I might be going around the bend, but it would not affect others. He had never heard the name before and never heard of the disease. I didn’t believe it was really contagious even when I started showing signs.”

He chewed his lower lip in silence.

“So, then what happened?”

“He did not have a hundred generations of immunity against the beast built up. He was infected by the one time I said the name of the beast. Within a few days, he started showing symptoms, including saying the name of the beast in front of other crew members, also infecting them. I tried to downplay what was happening. I didn’t think it would spread. I didn’t think it was real.”

“And that was when you decided to kill them?” I prompted.

“I didn’t kill any of them. It was the beast. They did not have my partial immunity. It spread rapidly and progressed quickly. They became violent. I tried to restrain them, but it all happened too fast, and I was in denial that it would happen. They wound up killing each other. Some committed suicide. The beast is a horrible disease, and it progressed quickly among them.”

“Yet, you were going to pilot your ship into our star, which would have destabilized it and destroyed our planet, not to mention killing the billions of people living here?”

He shook his head, “It was not my intent. I didn’t know it was an inhabited system until your patrol ships cut me off. I just wanted to destroy the beast. It was a way to shortcut my own suffering and progression through the disease. I knew I was no longer safe to be around people.”

“How could you not know where you were? You’re an experienced astrogator.”

“The beast,” he shrugged. “When one can no longer hold proper names and designations in one’s mind, one cannot navigate. One does not know a star is inhabited when one only knows it as the name of the beast. I’m sorry. I wanted to stop its spread.

“Please, do something to finish me off before I spread the name of the beast again.”

“I’m only here to evaluate you, not to execute you for murder. My job is to decide if you are fit for trial.”

“Fine, tell them I plead guilty to capital offenses. Just have them execute me quickly. Stop the beast before it spreads again,” he pleaded.

“I’ll pass that on.” I looked again at the file, “Did you know that one of your crew members survived?”

“No. No, I didn’t.” He closed his eyes looking as if he was concentrating. I readied my hand over the switch in my left hand in case he was going to try something, but his expression cleared. “It is hard with the beast since I can no longer distinguish and count by names. They all have the name of the beast in my head. It is hard to remember who died and who was missing. Who survived? And is he or she infected?”

“It is a woman, a Miss Troussitch.”

His eyes got wide and his mouth dropped open as he stared at me.

“What is wrong?”

“I didn’t have any crew members by that name. That is the name of the beast. You must isolate everyone who has heard that name immediately. Everyone! You must quarantine them. Quarantine the entire planet until everyone who heard that name is identified.” His face and limbs were starting to twitch.

“Calm down,” I soothed. “We’ll take care of it. I shall go put in an order for quarantine right now.”

I was lying, of course. While he had been calm for most of the discussion, there were a few signs that this was all in his head. We also had physical evidence from his ship and the testimony that contradicted his by Miss Troussitch, who seemed perfectly sane. I got the man calmed down again without resorting to sleeping gas.

As I started to leave, he said, “By the way, doctor, you didn’t introduce yourself. What is your name?”

I closed off the evaluation folder and prepared to enter the lock.

“Troussitch,” I replied.