At three-thirty, the door to my room opened and in came Scholar Phelps,
complete with his benign smile and his hearty air.
"Well," he boomed over-cheerfully, "we meet again, Mr. Cornell."
"Under trying circumstances," I said.
"Unfortunately so," he nodded. "However, we can't all be fortunate."
"I dislike being a vital statistic."
"So does everybody. Yet, from a philosophical point of view, you have no
more right to live at the expense of someone else than someone else has
a right to live at your expense. It all comes out even in the final
accounting. And, of course, if every man were granted a guaranteed
immortality, we'd have one cluttered-up world."
I had to admit that he was right, but I still could not accept his
statistical attitude. Not while I'm the statistic. He followed my
thought even though he was esper; it wasn't hard to follow anyway.
"All right, I admit that this is no time to sit around discussing
philosophy or metaphysics or anything of that nature. What you are
interested in is you."
"How absolutely correct."
"You know, of course, that you are a carrier."
"So I've come to believe. At least, everybody I seem to have any contact
with either turns up missing or comes down with Mekstrom's--or both."
Scholar Phelps nodded. "You might have gone on for quite some time if it
hadn't been so obvious."
I eyed him. "Just what went on?" I asked casually. "Did you have a
clean-up squad following me all the time, picking up the debris? Or did
you just pick up the ones you wanted? Or did the Highways make you
indulge in a running competition?"
"Too many questions at once. Most of which answers would be best that
you did not know. Best for us, that is. Maybe even for you."
I shrugged. "We seem to be bordering on philosophy again when the
important point is what you intend to do to me."
He looked unhappy. "Mr. Cornell, it is hard to remain unphilosophical in
a case like this. So many avenues of thought have been opened, so many
ideas and angles come to mind. We'll readily admit what you've probably
concluded; that you as a carrier have become the one basic factor that
we have been seeking for some twenty years and more. You are the
dirigible force, the last brick in the building, the final answer. Or,
and I hate to say it, were."
"Were?"
"For all of our knowledge of Mekstrom's we know so very little," he
said. "In certain maladies the carrier is himself immune. In some we
observe that the carrier results from a low-level, incomplete infection
with the disease which immunizes him but does not kill the bugs. In
others, we've seen the carrier become normal after he has finally
contracted the disease. What we must know now is: Is Steve Cornell, the
Mekstrom Carrier, now a non-carrier because he has contracted the
disease?"
"How are you going to find out?" I asked him.
"That's a problem," he said thoughtfully. "One school feels that we
should not treat you, since the treatment itself may destroy whatever
unknown factor makes you a carrier. The other claims that if we don't
treat you, you'll hardly live long enough to permit comprehensive
research anyway. A third school believes that there is time to find out
whether you are still a carrier, make some tests, and then treat you,
after which these tests are to be repeated."