72.
"Did you touch it?" came the next obvious question.
"Yes, sir," was the answer. "I picked up a couple and looked at them."
"O.k. Take it easy," North assured him. Seeing the doctor and the Commandant were still talking, North hurried into another room and found another communicator. He quickly contacted Cargo Transfer on Haven. In about ten minutes his suspicions proved right. The fruit was from Colony Four. It was just about to be landed at High City Spaceport. North quickly told the cargo master to keep the pod locked and quarantine its crew.
"By whose authority?" the man asked.
"By The Academy's Commandant," said North. "You'll have his official order within twenty minutes."
The cargo master nodded and quickly signed off. North returned and found the doctor preparing an injector. The Commandant still watched from the screen.
"Where did you go, North?" he asked.
"I had to stop a cargo, sir, from coming planet-side. It's that fruit we were carrying yesterday. It's from Colony Four and must be infected with the disease. The cargo master's holding it on my word that you'll order it quarantined for sterilization."
"Good man!" cried the Commandant. "I'll take care of it. The doctor's ordered a track-down of everyone that got any of that bad vaccine and everybody else is getting boosters just to be safe. Get some rest, North. You've earned it."
The Commandant signed off, and North felt something on his arm. The injector hissed, and in a few seconds his arm felt like lead.
"Hey!" he said, "What was that?"
"Like the man said, boosters and antibodies from storage. You've been exposed, remember?"
North rubbed his arm and nodded. In a few hours the doctor allowed him to go home. Three more cases showed up, but thanks to North keeping the infected cargo from being dispersed, it was held in Academy, and the four infected people received treatment fast enough to pull through.
In their final year, the cadets with their instructor, took their first flight on a Class A vessel. This trip almost proved North's last. The journey was to a newly discovered world in the early stages of its formation. The cadet's mission was to set up scientific observatories to register what happened as this world cooled down. The scientiests of Haven were very interested because the mass orbit and sun of this world matched theirs almost exactly. It would give them a great deal of information on how their own world had formed.
The cadets were not to beam down to a reeiving station, but directly to the planet's surface. Being cadet officers, North and Morn, with an instructor and two other cadets, would beam down first. All