"I'd like to help," he said.
"Very funny." She was vicious, enjoying the whip of her words. "Every
man is dying because you're a carrier, and you want to help."
* * * * *
He stood nervously clenching and unclenching his hands. "A guinea pig,
maybe. I'm immune. All the Meads are."
"Go away." God, why couldn't she think? What makes a Mead immune?
"Aw, let 'im alone," Max muttered. "Pat hasn't done anything." He went
waveringly to the microscope, took a tiny sliver from his finger,
suspended it in a slide and slipped it under the lens with detached
habitual dexterity. "Something funny going on," he said to June.
"Symptoms don't feel right."
After a moment he straightened and motioned for her to look.
"Leucocytes, phagocytes--" He was bewildered. "My own--"
She looked in, and then looked back at Pat in a growing wave of
horror. "They're not your own, Max!" she whispered.
Max rested a hand on the table to brace himself, put his eye to the
microscope, and looked again. June knew what he saw. Phagocytes,
leucocytes, attacking and devouring his tissues in a growing incredible
horde, multiplying insanely.
_Not his phagocytes! Pat Mead's!_ The Meads' evolved cells had learned
too much. They were contagious. And not Pat Mead's.... How much alike
_were_ the Meads?... Mead cells contagious from one to another, not
a disease attacking or being fought, but acting as normal leucocytes
in whatever body they were in! The leucocytes of tall, red-headed
people, finding no strangeness in the bloodstream of any of the tall,
red-headed people. No strangeness.... A toti-potent leucocyte finding
its way into cellular wombs.
The womblike life tanks. For the men of the _Explorer_, a week's cure
with deep melting to de-differentiate the leucocytes and turn them back
to normal tissue, then regrowth and reforming from the cells that were
there. From the cells that _were_ there. _From the cells that were
there...._
"Pat--"
"I know." Pat began to laugh, his face twisted with sudden
understanding. "I understand. I get it. I'm a contagious personality.
That's funny, isn't it?"
Max rose suddenly from the microscope and lurched toward him, fists
clenched. Pat caught him as he fell, and the bewildered stretcher
bearers carried him out to the tanks.
* * * * *
For a week June tended the tanks. The other women volunteered to help,
but she refused. She said nothing, hoping her guess would not be true.
"Is everything all right?" Elsie asked her anxiously. "How is Jerry
coming along?" Elsie looked haggard and worn, like all the women, from
doing the work that the men had always done.
"He's fine," June said tonelessly, shutting tight the door of the tank
room. "They're all fine."
"That's good," Elsie said, but she looked more frightened than before.
June firmly locked the tank room door and the girl went away.
The other women had been listening, and now they wandered back to
their jobs, unsatisfied by June's answer, but not daring to ask for
the actual truth. They were there whenever June went into the tank
room, and they were still there--or relieved by others; June was
not sure--when she came out. And always some one of them asked the
unvarying question for all the others, and June gave the unvarying
answer. But she kept the key. No woman but herself knew what was going
on in the life tanks.
Then the day of completion came. June told no one of the hour. She
went into the room as on the other days, locked the door behind her,
and there was the nightmare again. This time it was reality and she
wandered down a path between long rows of coffinlike tanks, calling,
"Max! Max!" silently and looking into each one as it opened.
But each face she looked at was the same. Watching them dissolve and
regrow in the nutrient solution, she had only been able to guess at the
horror of what was happening. Now she knew.
They were all the same lean-boned, blond-skinned face, with a
pin-feather growth of reddish down on cheeks and scalp. All
horribly--and handsomely--the same.
A medical kit lay carelessly on the floor beside Max's tank. She stood
near the bag. "Max," she said, and found her throat closing. The canned
voice of the mechanical mocked her, speaking glibly about waking and
sitting up. "I'm sorry, Max...."
The tall man with rugged features and bright blue eyes sat up sleepily
and lifted an eyebrow at her, and ran his hand over his red-fuzzed head
in a gesture of bewilderment.
"What's the matter, June?" he asked drowsily.