She was startled by a knock upon her door. She admitted two Telfan men
and a Telfan woman. The woman she knew.
"Yes, Thuni?" she asked the woman.
"Sandrake," announced the woman, putting the Telfan pronunciation on
the Terran name, "These are Orfall and Theodi, both of whom are among
the leading medico-physicists of Telfu. They desire your help."
Sandra reflected quickly. After all, this ability to be of assistance
did give her a sop to her vanity. The fact that as little as she really
knew of Terran science she could assist, and at times direct, gave her
first feeling of real self-assurance.
"I shall, if I can," she told them.
"You, in spite of your untrained mind, have been extremely valuable,"
Orfall said simply. "While you do not know the details, you at least
have some knowledge of the channels of Terran science, and you may, and
have, explained down which channel lies truth, and along which line of
endeavor lies but a blank wall. That in itself is valuable."
"Another item of interest," said Theodi, "is the fact that the books
left us by the _Haywire Queen_ are ponderous and often obscure; they
assume that we have a basic knowledge which we have not. You have been
able to direct us to the proper place in them to find the proper answer
to many of our questions."
"I see," said Sandra. All too seldom had anyone told her she was
valuable and interesting. It had been more likely a statement of her
headstrong nature, her utter uselessness, and her nuisance value.
"As you know, we of Telfu are slightly ahead of you in chemistry.
Yet there are things in chemistry that can not be solved without an
advanced knowledge in the gravitic spectrum that Terra has exploited.
Perhaps it was the lack of a channel in the gravitic that drove us into
higher chemical development; but we are planet-locked until your people
return to remove the block."
"Go on," said Sandra impatiently. "I gather that you are in trouble of
some sort?"
"We are, indeed. A plague of ... ah, there is no word for it in
Terran"--he switched to Telfan, "Andryorelitis," and back again
to Terran--"which is an air-borne disease of the virus type. No
inoculation has been discovered, and no immunity zone can be
established. Telfu is in danger of halving the population."
"Bad, huh?"
"It is terrible. It strikes unknown. Its incubation period is several
days, and then the victim gets the first symptoms. Nine days later, the
victim is dead. Unfortunately, the victim is a carrier of andryorelitis
during the incubation period, and therefore isolation is impossible."
"Sounds like real trouble to me," said Sandra. "Will examination reveal
it?"
"Of course," answered Orfall. "But what planet can examine the
population daily?"
"I see the impossibilities. Then what do you hope? We have nothing
that will combat it; knowing nothing of it in Sol would preclude any
possibility. What can we do?"
"To return to chemistry," said Theodi, "I will explain. Our
chemico-physicists have predicted the combination of a molecule which
will combat the virus selectively. It is a complex protein molecule of
unstable nature--so unstable, unfortunately, that it will not permit us
to compound it. We have used every catalyst in the book, and nothing
works. Follow?"
"I think so," said Sandra. "What keeps it from forming?"
"As I said, it is very unstable. The atomic lattice appears to be
structurally unsound. That happens in a lot of cases, you know. At any
rate, we can make this molecule--and have made it successfully. But its
yield is less than four ten-thousandths of one percent, and the residue
precipitates out in an insoluble compound that can not be reprocessed."
"Otherwise you would keep the process going until completion?"
"Precisely. If reprocessing would work, we could leave the batch to
cook until all of it went into combination. Or we could add fresh 'mix'
to the processing batch and make the process continuous. But the stuff
is not re-processable. We must complete each batch, and then go on a
long process of fractionation to distill the proper compound out of
the useless residue."
"I can see that a process of that inefficiency would be bothersome,"
said Sandra.
"Not bothersome, Sandrake. Impossible. Imagine going into a project
giving about .000,37% yield for two hundred-fifty billion Telfans.
The required dose of the antibody is forty-seven milligrams. Call it
fifty, for round numbers, Sandrake, and you get a total figure of
one trillion, two hundred-fifty billion milligrams, or one million
two hundred fifty thousand kilograms. At four ten-thousandths of one
percent yield, we'd have to process something like three hundred
billion kilograms of raw material and then rectify it through that
long and laborious process of fractional crystallization, partial
electrolysis, and fractional distillation--with a final partial
crystallization. Processing that much raw material would be a lifetime
job at best. Doing it under pressure, with the planning and procurement
problems intensified by the certainty of the few short weeks we
have ... ah, Sandrake, it is impossible."
"What is this trouble specifically?"
"The final addition of silicon. It will not enter the compound, but
forces something less active from the combination."
"Making it useless?"
"Right."
"You've tried it?"
"And it works," nodded Orfall.
"And knowing that you of Terra have some wonders in science, we would
like to know--"
"You see," interrupted Orfall, "they've figured that the catalyst would
be less than sixty-one percent efficient, if we could combine the
silicon with it and let it replace into the other compound. That would
work. But again we are stuck. The catalyst is stable as it is. What has
Terra done to assist in forcing combination in unstable compounds?"
"Must be something," said Sandra, thoughtfully. "May I have a moment to
think?"
"Certainly."
"And one thing more. Haven't you anything that even resembles tobacco
on this sterile planet?"
"I'm afraid not," said Theodi. "Believe me, we have sought it."
"Thanks," said Sandra. "I know it was for me. But, fellows, I think
better with a cigarette."
"We have analyzed the one you gave us, and haven't found a similar
weed--"
"O.K., I'll do my thinking in a higher plane," smiled Sandra.
* * * * *
A thought, fleeting as the touch of a moth's wing, crossed Sandra's
mind. She fought to reclaim it. It had some association with an
experience--some experience in which she had failed, somewhere.
Recently? It might have been.
Long ago?
Sandra didn't think so.
She sat there silent, and the Telfans left with a short statement to
the effect that she might be able to think better alone. They would
return later.
It had to do with something highly scientific; something of a nature
that staggered her imagination. It was coupled with something vast,
something deep, something complex.
Her eyes fastened on a spot of brilliant light, reflected from a
polished and silvered glass vase at her bedside, and as she sat there
with her eyes unseeing, deep in concentrated thought, her mind focused
upon the one thing of vastness that she had been involved in.
Sandra's mind was good, in spite of her inferiority complex. It was
sharp, retentive, and above all, imaginative. It is a point for
speculation whether the imaginative qualities might not have been
responsible for her antics; certainly her escapades were the result
of some imaginative desire to excel. At any rate, she fastened her
eyes on the spot of light, and concentrated herself into a partial
self-hypnosis. The train of thought went on before her unseeing eyes
with the vividness of a color moving picture, and she was not living
the scene, but seeing herself live through a train of events that
seemed to jump the unimportant parts like a well-planned motion picture.
Her semihypnotized mind seemed to know the right track, though Sandra's
wide-awake mind either ignored the key to the problem or was not
certain of the right path to follow.
She was in a room of steel. Steel and machinery and gleaming silver
bars. There was some chaos there, too. The silver busbars had lost
their die-straightness, and in one place, a single lamination of the
main bus hung down askew. It was about a foot wide and one inch thick,
and the nine-foot section that hung from the ceiling was slightly lower
than the top of her head.
There was blood on the sharp corner, and Sandra looked down to see the
red splotch on the floor. She shuddered.
Cables ran in wriggly tangles across the floor. Some were still smoking
from some overload, and others, still new from their reels, were
obviously part of a jury-rigged circuit. Boxes of equipment were broken
open and their contents missing, though the spare parts in the boxes
were intact. The whole scene spelled--
Trouble!
The floor was not level; a slight tilt made standing difficult, until a
man from some other room shouted:
"The mechanograv is working--hold on!"
And the floor rotated until it was the usual, level platform. The huge
busbar swung gently on its loose mooring like a ponderous, irresistible
mass.
And there was a man who came striding in. His contempt for her still
hurt, and Sandra winced. Even in that motion-picture dreaming, wherein
the girl in the picture seemed apart from Sandra Drake, the ire vented
upon the red-headed image made Sandra writhe in sympathy.
And then she heard the words come from the man's lips. They were clear
and concise, and seemed to come from the man himself instead of from
within her own memory:
"The electronic charge is great enough to force an inert
element--xenon--to accept an additional electron in its ring-system.
This permits combination with active elements such as bromine. When
xenon-bromide forms, we know that our intrinsic charge is highly
electro-negative. See?"
* * * * *
The scene within Sandra's mind dissolved, and she shook her head. It
cleared, but the words remained.
"Orfall," she called. "Theodi! Thuni--bring them here!"