Free Hidden Variables by Charles Sheffield

act.
    Poindexter had given me a rudimentary knowledge of how and when the engines had to be fired to bring us close to Phobos Station. I never did manage to get the communications equipment working, so I was unable to send or receive messages for additional instructions. I strapped myself into the pilot's seat, sent a prayer off into the abyss, and began to play spaceman.
    It would have helped a lot if I had thought to confine Waldo and the Empress to the cargo hold before I began maneuvers. They liked my company, and now that I was the only human on board, I let them follow me about. However, the accelerations and changes of direction excited them. They whizzed around the bridge, squealing and honking with pleasure, as I attempted the delicate combination of thrusts needed to bring us close to Phobos. The video camera, unbeknownst to me, was switched on, and I gather that the staff of Phobos Station watched goggle-eyed as the two pigs zipped in and out of view. When the thrust was off, and I was trying to determine the next piece of the operation, the Empress would hover just above my head, nuzzling my ear and grunting her approval of the new game.
    Engines off at last, after the final boost. I collapsed. We weren't perfect, but we were good enough. Phobos filled the sky on the left side of the Deimos Dancer. I, Henry Carver, a lawyer with no space experience to speak of, had successfully flown a spaceship from inside the orbit of Mercury to a satellite of Mars. That had to be a solar-system first, so I wasn't in the least surprised when I saw a large crowd of welcoming figures at Phobos Station as we were drawn in and landed by tractor beam. As the three of us disembarked, I began to compose the few modest words in which I would describe my feat.
    The crowd's enthusiasm was tremendous. They surged toward me, shouting and cheering. Then, ignoring me completely, they grabbed Waldo and the Empress and bore them away in triumph, crying, "Penelope! Pomander! Penelope! Pomander!"
    The only person left to talk to me was a young, rude reporter from the Martian Chronicle, followed by a whole warren of health officials. I dismissed the reporter with a few unfriendly words, but the health people attached themselves like leeches. I had to describe everything that had happened on the Deimos Dancer from the moment that we left parking orbit around Earth. The ship was quarantined, and I was placed in solitary confinement until the incubation period for the plague was over. I explained my theory of my immunity because of living in with the pigs, and at last a tall string-bean official took enough time out from asking me questions to answer a few. He dismissed my theory with a shake of his head.
    "That's not the answer, Mr. Carver. Penelope and Pomander were carrying plague vaccine all right, as an in vivo culture. That's a very common way of safely transporting a large quantity of a vaccine culure, and that's what Vladic was trying to tell you with his dying words. But just living in with the pigs couldn't protect you from the plague unless you had actually had a vaccination prepared from them. You were saved by something else—something we discovered ourselves only after Vladic had left Mars. When we burned Willis City to stop the plague's spread, we unfortunately destroyed part of the evidence. Here, take a look at this."
    He snapped a holo-cube into the projector and switched on. I gasped and shrank back in my seat as a great crustacean sprang into being in front of me, blind, chitinous, rust-red, and malevolent.
    "That's the villain of the piece, Mr. Carver. One of man's old friends, but one we've been ignoring for the past hundred years. Order Anoplura, species Pediculus humanus capitis —I'm showing it to you at twenty-five hundred times magnification."
    I couldn't stretch my college Latin far enough to make any sense of the names he was giving me. The horrible creature in front of me absorbed my attention completely.
    "In short,