"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers
didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It
worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were
still eating out of hydroponics tanks."
"It worked," said Max to Len. "You're a plant geneticist and a tank
culture expert. There's a job for you."
"Uh-_uh_!" Len backed away. "It sounds like a medical problem to me.
Human cell control--right up your alley."
"It is a one-way street," Pat warned. "Once it is done, you won't be
able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it
just for the taste."
Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. "Three of the twelve test
hamsters have died," he reported, and turned to Pat. "Your people carry
the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were
injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We
can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they
object?"
"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs," Pat smiled. "Anything for
safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first."
The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the
hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle
with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before
returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on
the hour or run the risk of disease.
* * * * *
Reno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a
mechanic for the expedition. "This gives me a chance to study their
mores." He winked wickedly. "I may not be back for several nights."
They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over
to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.
Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;
the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he
entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a
hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three
were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but
recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive
and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the
attack.
June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.
They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to
dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose
of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was
hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.
"We can find no micro-organisms," George Barton said. "None at all.
Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia.
Fever only for the ones that fought it off." He handed Max some
temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.
June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her
field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with
laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall,
then abruptly lightened.
Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous
Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man.
It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon
and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous
vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero
out of the pages of a book--Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.
She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join
them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual
lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.
"Hello, June," said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they
passed he lightly touched her arm.
"Oh, pioneer!" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile,
and knew that he had heard.
* * * * *
That night she had a nightmare. She was running down a long corridor
looking for Max, but every man she came to was a big bronze man with
red hair and bright blue eyes who grinned at her.
The pink hamster! She woke suddenly, feeling as if alarm bells had been
ringing, and listened carefully, but there was no sound. She had had a
nightmare, she told herself, but alarm bells were still ringing in her
unconscious. Something was wrong.
Lying still and trying to preserve the images, she groped for a
meaning, but the mood faded under the cold touch of reason. Damn
intuitive thinking! A pink hamster! Why did the unconscious have to be
so vague? She fell asleep again and forgot.
They had lunch with Pat Mead that day, and after it was over Pat
delayed June with a hand on her shoulder and looked down at her for a
moment. "I want you, June," he said and then turned away, answering the
hails of a party at another table as if he had not spoken. She stood
shaken, and then walked to the door where Max waited.
She was particularly affectionate with Max the rest of the day, and it
pleased him. He would not have been if he had known why. She tried to
forget Pat's blunt statement.
June was in the laboratory with Max, watching the growth of a small
tank culture of the alien protoplasm from a Minos weed, and listening
to Len Marlow pour out his troubles.
"And Elsie tags around after that big goof all day, listening to his
stories. And then she tells me I'm just jealous, I'm imagining things!"
He passed his hand across his eyes. "I came away from Earth to be with
Elsie.... I'm getting a headache. Look, can't you persuade Pat to cut
it out, June? You and Max are his friends."
"Here, have an aspirin," June said. "We'll see what we can do."
"Thanks." Len picked up his tank culture and went out, not at all
cheered.
* * * * *
Max sat brooding over the dials and meters at his end of the
laboratory, apparently sunk in thought. When Len had gone, he spoke
almost harshly.
"Why encourage the guy? Why let him hope?"
"Found out anything about the differences in protoplasm?" she evaded.
"Why let him kid himself? What chance has he got against that hunk of
muscle and smooth talk?"
"But Pat isn't after Elsie," she protested.
"Every scatter-brained woman on this ship is trailing after Pat with
her tongue hanging out. Brant St. Clair is in the bar right now.
He doesn't say what he is drinking about, but do you think Pat is
resisting all these women crowding down on him?"
"There are other things besides looks and charm," she said, grimly
trying to concentrate on a slide under her binocular microscope.
"Yeah, and whatever they are, Pat has them, too. Who's more competent
to support a woman and a family on a frontier planet than a handsome
bruiser who was born here?"
"I meant," June spun around on her stool with unexpected passion,
"there is old friendship, and there's fondness, and memories, and
loyalty!" She was half shouting.
"They're not worth much on the second-hand market," Max said. He was
sitting slumped on his lab stool, looking dully at his dials. "Now
_I'm_ getting a headache!" He smiled ruefully. "No kidding, a real
headache. And over other people's troubles yet!"
Other people's troubles.... She got up and wandered out into the long
curving halls. "I want you June," Pat's voice repeated in her mind.
Why did the man have to be so overpoweringly attractive, so glaring a
contrast to Max? Why couldn't the universe manage to run on without
generating troublesome love triangles?
* * * * *
She walked up the curving ramps to the dining hall where they had eaten
and drunk and talked yesterday. It was empty except for one couple
talking forehead to forehead over cold coffee.
She turned and wandered down the long easy spiral of corridor to
the pharmacy and dispensary. It was empty. George was probably in
the test lab next door, where he could hear if he was wanted. The
automatic vendor of harmless euphorics, stimulants and opiates stood
in the corner, brightly decorated in pastel abstract designs, with its
automatic tabulator graph glowing above it.
Max had a headache, she remembered. She recorded her thumbprint in the
machine and pushed the plunger for a box of aspirins, trying to focus
her attention on the problem of adapting the people of the ship to
the planet Minos. An aquarium tank with a faint solution of histamine
would be enough to convert a piece of human skin into a community of
voracious active phagocytes individually seeking something to devour,
but could they eat enough to live away from the rich sustaining plasma
of human blood?
After the aspirins, she pushed another plunger for something for
herself. Then she stood looking at it, a small box with three pills in
her hand--Theobromine, a heart strengthener and a confidence-giving
euphoric all in one, something to steady shaky nerves. She had used it
before only in emergency. She extended a hand and looked at it. It was
trembling. Damn triangles!
While she was looking at her hand there was a click from the automatic
drug vendor. It summed the morning use of each drug in the vendors
throughout the ship, and recorded it in a neat addition to the end of
each graph line. For a moment she could not find the green line for
anodynes and the red line for stimulants, and then she saw that they
went almost straight up.
There were too many being used--far too many to be explained by
jealousy or psychosomatic peevishness. This was an epidemic, and only
one disease was possible!
The disinfecting of Pat had not succeeded. Nucleocat Cureall, killer of
all infections, had not cured! Pat had brought melting sickness into
the ship with him!
Who had it?
The drugs vendor glowed cheerfully, uncommunicative. She opened a
panel in its side and looked in on restless interlacing cogs, and on
the inside of the door saw printed some directions.... "To remove or
examine records before reaching end of the reel--"
After a few fumbling minutes she had the answer. In the cafeteria at
breakfast and lunch, thirty-eight men out of the forty-eight aboard
ship had taken more than his norm of stimulant. Twenty-one had taken
aspirin as well. The only woman who had made an unusual purchase was
herself!
She remembered the hamsters that had thrown off the infection with a
short sharp fever, and checked back in the records to the day before.
There was a short rise in aspirin sales to women at late afternoon. The
women were safe.
It was the men who had melting sickness!
Melting sickness killed in hours, according to Pat Mead. How long had
the men been sick?
* * * * *
As she was leaving, Jerry came into the pharmacy, recorded his
thumbprint and took a box of aspirin from the machine.
She felt all right. Self-control was working well and it was pleasant
still to walk down the corridor smiling at the people who passed.
She took the emergency elevator to the control room and showed her
credentials to the technician on watch.
"Medical Emergency." At a small control panel in the corner was a large
red button, precisely labeled. She considered it and picked up the
control room phone. This was the hard part, telling someone, especially
someone who had it--Max.
She dialed, and when the click on the end of the line showed he had
picked the phone up, she told Max what she had seen.
"No women, just the men," he repeated. "That right?"
"Yes."
"Probably it's chemically alien, inhibited by one of the female sex
hormones. We'll try sex hormone shots, if we have to. Where are you
calling from?"
She told him.
"That's right. Give Nucleocat Cureall another chance. It might work
this time. Push that button."
She went to the panel and pushed the large red button. Through the
long height of the _Explorer_, bells woke to life and began to ring
in frightened clangor, emergency doors thumped shut, mechanical
apparatus hummed into life and canned voices began to give rapid urgent
directions.
A plague had come.
* * * * *
She obeyed the mechanical orders, went out into the hall and walked in
line with the others. The captain walked ahead of her and the gorgeous
Shelia Davenport fell into step beside her. "I look like a positive hag
this morning. Does that mean I'm sick? Are we all sick?"
June shrugged, unwilling to say what she knew.
Others came out of all rooms into the corridor, thickening the line.
They could hear each room lock as the last person left it, and then,
faintly, the hiss of disinfectant spray. Behind them, on the heels of
the last person in line, segments of the ship slammed off and began to
hiss.
They wound down the spiral corridor until they reached the medical
treatment section again, and there they waited in line.
"It won't scar my arms, will it?" asked Shelia apprehensively,
glancing at her smooth, lovely arms.
The mechanical voice said, "Next. Step inside, please, and stand clear
of the door."
"Not a bit," June reassured Shelia, and stepped into the cubicle.
Inside, she was directed from cubicle to cubicle and given the usual
buffeting by sprays and radiation, had blood samples taken and was
injected with Nucleocat and a series of other protectives. At last she
was directed through another door into a tiny cubicle with a chair.
"You are to wait here," commanded the recorded voice metallically. "In
twenty minutes the door will unlock and you may then leave. All people
now treated may visit all parts of the ship which have been protected.
It is forbidden to visit any quarantined or unsterile part of the ship
without permission from the medical officers."
Presently the door unlocked and she emerged into bright lights again,
feeling slightly battered.
She was in the clinic. A few men sat on the edge of beds and looked
sick. One was lying down. Brant and Bess St. Clair sat near each other,
not speaking.
Approaching her was George Barton, reading a thermometer with a puzzled
expression.
"What is it, George?" she asked anxiously.
"Some of the women have slight fever, but it's going down. None of the
fellows have any--but their white count is way up, their red count is
way down, and they look sick to me."
She approached St. Clair. His usually ruddy cheeks were pale, his pulse
was light and too fast, and his skin felt clammy. "How's the headache?
Did the Nucleocat treatment help?"
"I feel worse, if anything."
"Better set up beds," she told George. "Get everyone back into the
clinic."
"We're doing that," George assured her. "That's what Hal is doing."
She went back to the laboratory. Max was pacing up and down, absently
running his hands through his black hair until it stood straight up. He
stopped when he saw her face, and scowled thoughtfully. "They are still
sick?" It was more a statement than a question.
She nodded.
"The Cureall didn't cure this time," he muttered. "That leaves it up
to us. We have melting sickness and according to Pat and the hamsters,
that leaves us less than a day to find out what it is and learn how to
stop it."
Suddenly an idea for another test struck him and he moved to the work
table to set it up. He worked rapidly, with an occasional uncoordinated
movement betraying his usual efficiency.
It was strange to see Max troubled and afraid.
She put on a laboratory smock and began to work. She worked in
silence. The mechanicals had failed. Hal and George Barton were busy
staving off death from the weaker cases and trying to gain time for Max
and her to work. The problem of the plague had to be solved by the two
of them alone. It was in their hands.
Another test, no results. Another test, no results. Max's hands were
shaking and he stopped a moment to take stimulants.
She went into the ward for a moment, found Bess and warned her quietly
to tell the other women to be ready to take over if the men became too
sick to go on. "But tell them calmly. We don't want to frighten the
men." She lingered in the ward long enough to see the word spread among
the women in a widening wave of paler faces and compressed lips; then
she went back to the laboratory.
Another test. There was no sign of a micro-organism in anyone's blood,
merely a growing horde of leucocytes and phagocytes, prowling as if
mobilized to repel invasion.
* * * * *
Len Marlow was wheeled in unconscious, with Hal Barton's written
comments and conclusions pinned to the blanket.
"I don't feel so well myself," the assistant complained. "The air feels
thick. I can't breathe."
June saw that his lips were blue. "Oxygen short," she told Max.
"Low red corpuscle count," Max answered. "Look into a drop and see
what's going on. Use mine; I feel the same way he does." She took two
drops of Max's blood. The count was low, falling too fast.
Breathing is useless without the proper minimum of red corpuscles in
the blood. People below that minimum die of asphyxiation although their
lungs are full of pure air. The red corpuscle count was falling too
fast. The time she and Max had to work in was too short.
"Pump some more CO_{2} into the air system," Max said urgently over the
phone. "Get some into the men's end of the ward."
* * * * *
She looked through the microscope at the live sample of blood. It was a
dark clear field and bright moving things spun and swirled through it,
but she could see nothing that did not belong there.
"Hal," Max called over the general speaker system, "cut the other
treatments, check for accelerating anemia. Treat it like monoxide
poisoning--CO_{2} and oxygen."
She reached into a cupboard under the work table, located two cylinders
of oxygen, cracked the valves and handed one to Max and one to the
assistant. Some of the bluish tint left the assistant's face as he
breathed and he went over to the patient with reawakened concern.
"Not breathing, Doc!"
Max was working at the desk, muttering equations of hemoglobin
catalysis.
"Len's gone, Doc," the assistant said more loudly.
"Artificial respiration and get him into a regeneration tank," said
June, not moving from the microscope. "Hurry! Hal will show you how.
The oxidation and mechanical heart action in the tank will keep him
going. Put anyone in a tank who seems to be dying. Get some women to
help you. Give them Hal's instructions."
The tanks were ordinarily used to suspend animation in a nutrient bath
during the regrowth of any diseased organ. It could preserve life in
an almost totally destroyed body during the usual disintegration and
regrowth treatments for cancer and old age, and it could encourage
healing as destruction continued ... but they could not prevent
ultimate death as long as the disease was not conquered.
The drop of blood in June's microscope was a great, dark field, and in
the foreground, brought to gargantuan solidity by the stereo effect,
drifted neat saucer shapes of red blood cells. They turned end for end,
floating by the humped misty mass of a leucocyte which was crawling on
the cover glass. There were not enough red corpuscles, and she felt
that they grew fewer as she watched.
She fixed her eye on one, not blinking in fear that she would miss what
might happen. It was a tidy red button, and it spun as it drifted, the
current moving it aside in a curve as it passed by the leucocyte.
Then, abruptly, the cell vanished.
June stared numbly at the place where it had been.
Behind her, Max was calling over the speaker system again: "Dr. Stark
speaking. Any technician who knows anything about the life tanks, start
bringing more out of storage and set them up. Emergency."
"We may need forty-seven," June said quietly.
"We may need forty-seven," Max repeated to the ship in general. His
voice did not falter. "Set them up along the corridor. Hook them in on
extension lines."
His voice filtered back from the empty floors above in a series of dim
echoes. What he had said meant that every man on board might be on the
point of heart stoppage.
* * * * *
June looked blindly through the binocular microscope, trying to think.
Out of the corner of her eyes she could see that Max was wavering and
breathing more and more frequently of the pure, cold, burning oxygen of
the cylinders. In the microscope she could see that there were fewer
red cells left alive in the drop of his blood. The rate of fall was
accelerating.
She didn't have to glance at Max to know how he would look--skin pale,
black eyebrows and keen brown eyes slightly squinted in thought, a
faint ironical grin twisting the bluing lips. Intelligent, thin,
sensitive, his face was part of her mind. It was inconceivable that
Max could die. He couldn't die. He couldn't leave her alone.
She forced her mind back to the problem. All the men of the _Explorer_
were at the same point, wherever they were.
Moving to Max's desk, she spoke into the intercom system: "Bess, send
a couple of women to look through the ship, room by room, with a
stretcher. Make sure all the men are down here." She remembered Reno.
"Sparks, heard anything from Reno? Is he back?"
Sparks replied weakly after a lag. "The last I heard from Reno was a
call this morning. He was raving about mirrors, and Pat Mead's folks
not being real people, just carbon copies, and claiming he was crazy;
and I should send him the psychiatrist. I thought he was kidding. He
didn't call back."
"Thanks, Sparks." Reno was lost.
Max dialed and spoke to the bridge over the phone. "Are you okay up
there? Forget about engineering controls. Drop everything and head for
the tanks while you can still walk."
June went back to the work table and whispered into her own phone.
"Bess, send up a stretcher for Max. He looks pretty bad."
There had to be a solution. The life tanks could sustain life in a
damaged body, encouraging it to regrow more rapidly, but they merely
slowed death as long as the disease was not checked. The postponement
could not last long, for destruction could go on steadily in the tanks
until the nutritive solution would hold no life except the triumphant
microscopic killers that caused melting sickness.
There were very few red blood corpuscles in the microscope field now,
incredibly few. She tipped the microscope and they began to drift,
spinning slowly. A lone corpuscle floated through the center. She
watched it as the current swept it in an arc past the dim off-focus
bulk of the leucocyte. There was a sweep of motion and it vanished.
For a moment it meant nothing to her; then she lifted her head from
the microscope and looked around. Max sat at his desk, head in hand,
his rumpled short black hair sticking out between his fingers at odd
angles. A pencil and a pad scrawled with formulas lay on the desk
before him. She could see his concentration in the rigid set of his
shoulders. He was still thinking; he had not given up.
* * * * *
"Max, I just saw a leucocyte grab a red blood corpuscle. It was
unbelievably fast."
"Leukemia," muttered Max without moving. "Galloping leukemia yet! That
comes under the heading of cancer. Well, that's part of the answer. It
might be all we need." He grinned feebly and reached for the speaker
set. "Anybody still on his feet in there?" he muttered into it, and
the question was amplified to a booming voice throughout the ship.
"Hal, are you still going? Look, Hal, change all the dials, change the
dials, set them to deep melt and regeneration. One week. This is like
leukemia. Got it? This is like leukemia."
June rose. It was time for her to take over the job. She leaned across
his desk and spoke into the speaker system. "Doctor Walton talking,"
she said. "This is to the women. Don't let any of the men work any
more; they'll kill themselves. See that they all go into the tanks
right away. Set the tank dials for deep regeneration. You can see how
from the ones that are set."
Two exhausted and frightened women clattered in the doorway with a
stretcher. Their hands were scratched and oily from helping to set up
tanks.
"That order includes you," she told Max sternly and caught him as he
swayed.
Max saw the stretcher bearers and struggled upright. "Ten more
minutes," he said clearly. "Might think of an idea. Something not right
in this setup. I have to figure how to prevent a relapse, how the thing
started."
He knew more bacteriology than she did; she had to help him think. She
motioned the bearers to wait, fixed a breathing mask for Max from a
cylinder of CO_{2} and the opened one of oxygen. Max went back to his
desk.
She walked up and down, trying to think, remembering the hamsters. The
melting sickness, it was called. Melting. She struggled with an impulse
to open a tank which held one of the men. She wanted to look in, see if
that would explain the name.
Melting Sickness....
Footsteps came and Pat Mead stood uncertainly in the doorway. Tall,
handsome, rugged, a pioneer. "Anything I can do?" he asked.