you've decided your precious Lobby won't save you?"
She dropped her eyes, then raised them to meet his defiantly. "I'm not
just scared and selfish. Dad caught it, too, and it must be close to the
time for him. He switched to Mars-normal when he was a liaison agent and
never changed back. Dan, are we all going to have to die? Can't you save
him?"
Feldman was out of his suit and at the control panel. There was a manual
lever, which Chris must have used before. It might work out here where
there was room to maneuver and nothing to hit. But trying to make a
landing was going to be different.
"Dan?" she repeated.
He shrugged. "I don't know. They've started research too late and
they'll be under so much pressure that the real brains won't have a
chance. The topsecret stuff looks bad for research. Maybe there's a
cure. It works in culture bottles, but it may fail in person. When I'm
convinced I'm safe with you, I may tell you about it."
"Oh." Her voice was low. Then she sighed. "I suppose I can understand
why you hate me, Dan."
"I don't hate you. I'm too mixed up. Tomorrow maybe, but not now. Shut
up and let me see if I can figure out how to land this thing."
He found that the fuel tanks were nearly full, but that still didn't
leave much margin. Mars must have been notified by Everts and be ready
to pick the raft up. He had to reach the wastelands away from any of the
shuttle ports. They had no aspirators, however, and they couldn't cover
much territory in the spacesuits they would have to use. It meant he'd
have to land close to a village where he was known.
He jockeyed the ship around by trial and error, studying the manual that
was lying prominently on the control panel. According to the booklet,
the ship was simple to operate. It was self-leveling in an atmosphere,
and automatic flare computers were supposed to make it possible for an
amateur to judge the rate of descent near the surface. It looked
reassuring--and was probably written with that in mind.
Finally he reached for the control, hoping he'd figured his landing
orbit reasonably well by simple logic. He smoothed it out in the
following hours as he watched the markings on Mars. When they were near
turnover point, he began cranking the little gyroscope to swing the
ship. It saved fuel to turn without power, and he wasn't sure he could
have turned accurately by blasting.
He was gaining some proficiency, however, he felt. But now he had to
waste fuel and ruin his orbit again. There was no way to practice
maneuvering without actually doing so.
In the end, he compromised, leaving a small margin for a bad landing
that would require a second attempt, but with less practice than he
wanted.
He had located Jake's village through the little telescope when he
finally reached for the main blast control. The thin haze of Mars'
atmosphere came rushing up, while the blast lashed out. Then they were
in the outer fringes of the sky and the blast was beginning to show a
corona that ruined visibility.
He turned to the flare computer and back to what he could see through
the quartz viewport. He was going to land about half a mile from the
village, as nearly as he could judge.
The computer seemed to work as it should. The speed was within
acceptable limits. He gave up trying to see the ground and was forced to
trust the machinery designed for amateur pilots. The flare bloomed, and
he yanked down on the little lever.
It could have been worse. They hit the ground, bounced twice, and turned
over. The ship was a mess when Feldman freed himself from the elastic
straps of the seat. Chris had shrieked as they hit, but she was
unbuckling herself now.
He threw her her spacesuit and one of the emergency bottles of oxygen
from the rack. "Hurry up with that. We've sprung a leak and the
pressure's dropping."
They were halfway to the village when a dozen tractors came racing up
and Jake piled out of the lead one to drag the two in with him.
"Heard about it from the broadcasts and figured you might land around
here. Good to see you, Doc." He started the tractor off at full speed,
back to the wastelands, while Doc stared at the armed men who were
riding the tractors.
Jake caught his look and nodded. "You're in enemy territory, Doc.
There's a war going on!"
XII
War
Sometimes it seemed to Doc that war was nothing but an endurance race to
see how many times they could run before they were bombed. He was just
beginning to drop off to sleep after a long trip for the sixth
consecutive day when the little alarm shrilled. He sighed and shook
Chris awake.
"Again?" she protested. But she got up and began helping him pack.
Jake came in, his eyes weary, pulling on the old jacket with the big
star on its sleeve. Doc hadn't been too surprised to learn that Jake was
the actual leader of the rebels. "Shuttles spotted taking off this way.
And I still can't find where the leak is. They haven't missed our
location once this week. Here, give me that."
He took the electron mike that had been among Doc's' possessions, but
Chris recaptured it. "I can manage," she told him, and headed out for
the tractor where Lou was waiting.
Doc scowled after her. He and Jake had been watching her. She was too
useful to Doc's research to be turned away, but they didn't trust her
yet. So far, however, they had found nothing wrong with her conduct.
Still....
He swung suddenly into Jake's tractor. "Just remembered something. How'd
they find me that time I stopped in the tractor to use the mike? I was
pretty well hidden, and no tracks last in the sand long enough for them
to have followed. But they were there when I came to. Somehow, they must
have put a radio tracer on me."
Jake waited while they lighted up, his eyes suddenly bright. "You mean
something you got from her house was bugged? It figures."
"And I've still got all the stuff. Now they find wherever we set up
headquarters, though they've always managed to miss my laboratory, even
when they've hit the troops around us. Jake, I think it's the
microscope." Doc managed to push enough junk off one of the seats to
make a cramped bed, and stretched out. "Sure, we figured they sent her
because they want to keep tabs on what I discover. They've finally
gotten scared of the plague, and she's the perfect Judas goat. But they
have to have some way to get in touch with her. I'll bet there's a
tracer in the mike and a switch so she can modulate it or key it to send
out Morse."
"Yeah," Jake nodded. "Well, she does her own dirty work. I might get to
like her if she was on our side. Okay, Doc. If they've put things into
the mike, I've got a boy who'll find and fix it so she won't guess it's
been touched."
Doc relaxed. For the moment, there would be no power in the instrument,
nor any excuse for her to use it. But she must have handled some secret
arrangement during the work periods. She used the mike more than he did.
The switch could be camouflaged easily enough. If anyone detected the
signal, they'd probably only think it was some leak in the electrical
circuit.
Far away, the shuttle rockets had appeared as tiny dots in the sky. They
were standing on their tails a second later, just off the ground,
letting the full force of their blasts bake the area where headquarters
had been.
Jake watched grimly, driving by something close to instinct. Then he
looked back. "Know anything about a Dr. Harkness?"
"Not much, except that he protested sealing off the villages. Why?"
"He and five other doctors were picked up, trying to get through to us.
Claimed they wanted to give us medical help. We can use them, God knows.
I guess I'll have to chance it."
They stopped at a halfway village and hid the tractors before looking
for a place to rest. Doc found Chris curled up asleep against the
microscope. He had a hard time getting her to leave it in the tractor,
but she was too genuinely tired to put up any real argument.
Jake reported in the morning before they set out again. "You were right,
Doc. It was a nice job of work. Must have taken the best guys in
Southport to hide the circuit so well. But it's safe now. It just makes
a kind of meaningless static nobody can trace. Maybe we can get you a
permanent lab now."
Doc debated again having Chris left behind and decided against it. The
Lobby was determined to let him find a cure for them if he could. That
meant Chris would work herself to exhaustion trying to help. Let her
think she was doing it for the Lobby! It was time she was on the
receiving end of a double cross.
"It's a stinking way to run a war," he decided.
Jake chuckled without much humor. "It's the war you wanted, remember?
They forced our hand, but it had to come sometime. Right now the Lobby's
fighting to get their hands on your work before we can use it; they're
just using holding tactics, which helps our side. And we're hoping you
get the cure so we can win. With that, maybe we'll whip them."
It was a crazy war, with each side killing more of its own men than of
the enemy. The runners were increasing, and Jake's army was learning to
shoot the poor devils mercifully and go on. They knew, at least, that
there was no current danger of infection. In the Lobby towns, more were
dying of panic in their efforts to escape the runners.
Desert towns had joined the villages, reluctantly but inevitably, to
give the rebels nearly three-quarters of the total population. But the
Lobby forces and the few cities held most of the real fighting equipment
and they were ready to wait until Earth could send out unmanned rockets,
loaded with atomics, which could cut through space at ten times normal
speed.
There were vague lines of battle, but time was the vital factor. The
Lobbies waited to steal a cure for the plague and the villages waited
until they could announce it and demand surrender as its price.
It looked as if both sides were doomed to disappointment, however. He
and Chris had put in every spare minute between moving and the minimum
of sleep in searching for something that would check the disease. It
couldn't grow in an Earth-normal body, but it didn't die, either. And
there wasn't enough normal food available to permit the switch-over for
more than a handful of people. Even Earth was out of luck, since eighty
percent of her population ate synthetics. There were ways to synthesize
Earth-normal food, but they were still hopelessly inefficient.
Jake had ordered one of the villages to rebuild their plant for such a
purpose, while another was producing the enzyme that would permit
switching. But it looked hopeless for more than a few of the most
valuable men.
"No progress?" Jake asked for the hundredth time.
Doc grinned wryly. "A lot, but no help. We've found a fine accelerator
for the bug. We can speed up its incubation or even make someone already
infected catch it all over again. But we can't slow it down or stop it."
The new laboratory was still being fitted when they arrived. It had been
dug into one of the few real cliffs in this section of Mars. The power
plant had been installed, complete with a steam plant that would operate
off sunlight in the daytime through a series of heat valves that took in
a lot of warm air and produced smaller amounts hot enough to boil water.
"I'll see you whenever I can," Jake said. "But mostly, you're going to
be somewhat isolated so they won't trace you. Let them think they goofed
with the shuttles and hit you and Chris. Anything you need?"
"Guinea pigs," Doc told him sarcastically. It was meant as a joke,
though a highly bitter one. Jake nodded and left them.
Doc opened the cots as Chris came in, not bothering to unpack the
equipment. "Hit the sack, Chris," he told her.
She looked at him doubtfully. "You almost said that the way you'd
address a human being, Dan. You're slipping. One of these days you'll
like me again."
"Maybe." He was too tired to argue. "I doubt it, though. Forget it and
get some sleep."
She watched him silently until he got up to turn out the light. Then she
sighed heavily. "Dan?"
"Yeah?"
"I never got a divorce. The publicity would have been bad. But anyway,
we're still married."
"That's nice." He swung to face her briefly. "And they found the radio
in the microscope. Better get to sleep, Chris."
"Oh." It was a quiet exclamation, barely audible. There was a sound that
might have been a sniffle if it had come from anyone else. Then she
rolled over. "All right, Dan. I still want to help you."
He cursed himself for a stupid fool for telling her. Fatigue was ruining
what judgment he had. From now on, he'd have to watch her every minute.
Or had she really seen the value of the research by now? She wasn't a
fool. It should have registered on even her stubborn mind. But he was
too sleepy to think about it.
She had breakfast ready in the morning. She made no comment on what had
been said during the night. Instead, she began discussing a way to keep
one of the organic antibiotics from splitting into simpler compounds
when they tried to switch it over to Mars-normal. They were both
hopelessly bad chemists and biologists, but there was no one else to do
the work.
Chris worked harder than ever during the day.
Just after sundown, Jake came in with a heavy box. He dropped it onto
the floor. "Mice!"
Doc ripped off the cover, exposing fine screening. There were at least
six dozen mice inside!
"Harkness found them," Jake explained. "A hormone extraction plant used
them for testing some of the products. Had them sent by regular
shipments from Earth. Getting them cost a couple of men, but Harkness
claims it's worth it. He's a good man on a raid. Here!"
He'd gone to the doorway again and came back with another box, this one
crammed with bottles and boxes. "They had quite a laboratory, and
Harkness picked out whatever he thought you could use."
Chris and Doc were going through it. The labels were engineering ones,
but the chemical formulae were identification enough. There were dozens
of chemicals they hadn't hoped to get.
"Anything else?" Doc finally asked as they began arranging the supplies.
"More runners. A lot more. We're still holding things down, but it's
reaching a limit. Panic will start in the camps if this keeps on. But
that's my worry. You stick to yours."
Several of the new chemicals showed promise in the tubes. But two of
them proved fatal to the mice and the others were completely innocuous
in the little animal's bodies, both to mouse and to germ. The plague was
much hardier in contact with living cells than in the artificial
environment of the culture jars.
They lost seven mice in two days, but that seemed unimportant; the
females were already living up to their reputations, nearly all
pregnant. Doc didn't know the gestation period, but he remembered that
it was short.
"Funny they all started at the same time," he commented. "Must have been
shipped out separately or else been kept apart while they were switched
over to Mars-normal. Something interrupted their habits, anyhow."
A few nights later they learned what it was. There was a horrible
squealing that woke him out of the depths of his sleep. Chris was
already at the light switch. As light came on, they turned to the mouse
box.
All the animals were charging about in their limited space, their little
legs driving madly and their mouths open. What they lacked in size they
made up in numbers, and the din was terrific.
But it didn't last. One by one, the mice began dropping to the floor of
the cage. In fifteen minutes, they were all dead!
It was obviously the plague, contracted after having their metabolism
switched. Women were sterile for some time after Selznik's migraine
struck, and the same must have been true of the mice. They must have
contracted the plague at about the same time and reached fertility
together. Somehow, the plague incubation period had been shortened to
fit their life span; the disease was nothing if not adaptive.
Chris prepared a slide in dull silence. The familiar cell was there when
Doc looked through the microscope. He picked up one of the little
creatures and cut it open, removing one of the foetuses.
"Make a film of that," he suggested.
She worked rapidly, scraping out the almost microscopic brain,
dissolving out the fatty substance, and transferring the result to a
film. This time, even at full magnification, there was no sign of the
filaments that were always present in diseased flesh. The results were
the same for the other samples they made.
"Something about the very young animal or a secretion from the mother's
organs keeps the bug from working." Doc reached for a bracky weed and
accepted a light from Chris without thinking of it. "Every kid I've
heard about contracted the plague between the second and third year.
None are born with it, none get it earlier. I've suspected this, but now
here's confirmation."
Chris began preparing specimens, while Doc got busy with tubes of the
culture. They'd have to test various fluids from the tiny bodies, but
there were enough cultures prepared. Then, if the substance only
inhibited growth, there would be a long, slow test; if it killed the
bugs, they might know more quickly.
Jake came in before the final tests, but waited on them. Doc was
studying a film in the microscope. He suddenly motioned excitedly for
Chris.
"See the filaments? They're completely disintegrated. And there's one of
the big cells broken open. We've got it! It's in the blood of the
foetus. And it must be in the blood of newborn children, too!"
Jake looked at the slide, but his face was doubtful.
"Maybe you've got something, Doc. I hope so. And I hope you can use it."
He shook his head wearily. "We need good news right now. A couple of big
rockets just reached the station and they've been sending shuttles back
and forth a mile a minute. Nobody can figure how they got here so fast
or what they're for. But it doesn't look good for us!"
XIII
Susceptibility
Doc could feel the tension in the village where GHQ was temporarily
located long before they were close enough for details to register. The
people were gathered in clusters, staring at the sky where the station
must be. A few were pacing up and down, gesticulating with tight sweeps
of their arms.
One woman suddenly went into even more violent action. She leaped into
the air and then took off at a rapid trot, then a run. Her hands were
tearing at her clothes and her mouth seemed to be working violently. She
was halfway to the top of the nearest dune before a rifle cracked. She
dropped, to twitch once and lie still.
Almost with her death, another figure leaped from one of the houses, his
face bare of the necessary aspirator. He took off at a violent run, but
he was falling from lack of air before the bullet ended his struggles.
The people suddenly began to move apart, as if trying to get away from
each other. For weeks they had faced the horror with courage; now it was
finally too much for them.
Tension mounted as no news came from the cities. Doc noticed that it
seemed to aggravate or speed up the disease. He saw three men shot in
the next half-hour.
He was trying to calm them with word of a possible cure for the plague,
but their reactions were as curiously dull as those of Jake had been. As
he spoke, they faced him with set expressions. At his mention of the
need for the blood of young children, they turned from him, sullenly
silent.
Jake came over, nodding unhappily. "It's what I was afraid might happen,
Doc. George Lynn! Tell Doc what's wrong."
Lynn was reluctant, but he finally stumbled out his explanation. "It
ain't like you, Doc. Comes from that Lobby woman you got. It's her dirty
idea. We've seen the Lobby doctors cutting open our kids, poisoning
their blood, and bleeding them dry. That ain't gonna happen again, Doc.
You tell her it ain't!"
Doc swore as he realized their ignorance. An unexplained vaccination
looked like poisoning of the blood. But he couldn't understand the
bleeding part until Jake filled him in.
"Northport infant's wing. Each department has its own blood bank and
donation is compulsory. Southport started it a couple months ago, too."
The long arm of the Lobby had reached out again. Now if he ever got them
to try the treatment, it would be only after long sessions of preparing
them with the facts, and there was hardly enough time for the crucial
work!
By afternoon, Judge Ben Wilson reached them. His voice shook with
fatigue as he climbed up to address the crowd through a power megaphone.
"Southport's going crazy." He had to pause for breath between each
sentence. "Earth's pulling back all the important people. They're
packing them into the ships. They're leaving only colonials with no
Earth rights. Those ships left when they decided the plague was coming
from here. They won't let anybody back until the plague is licked. There
won't be an Earth technician on Mars tomorrow."
"No bombs?" someone called.
"No bombs. The ships must have started before you rebelled, maybe meant
honestly to save their own kind. But now it's a military action, and
don't think it won't mean trouble. The poor devils in the city bet on
the wrong horse. Now they can't run their food factories or anything
else for long. Not without technicians. They've got to whip you now. Up
to this time, they've been fighting for the Lobbies. Now they'll fight
you for their own bellies to get your supplies. And they've still got
shuttle rockets and fuel for them. Now beat it. I gotta confer with
Jake."
Doc started after the judge, but Dr. Harkness caught his arm and drew
him aside. Chris followed.
"I've found another epidemic," Harkness told them. "Over at Marconi.
It's kept me on the run all night, and now half the village is down with
it. Starts like a common cold, runs a fair fever, and the skin breaks
out all over with bright red dots...."
He went on describing it. Chris began asking him about what medical
supplies he had brought with him, pilfered from Northport hospital. She
seemed to know what it was, but refused to say until she saw the cases.
Doc also preferred to wait. Sometimes things weren't as bad as they
seemed, though usually they were worse.
Marconi was dead to all outward appearances, with nobody on the streets.
It had been a village of great hopes a week before, since this was where
they had decided to experiment with switching the people back to
Earth-normal. They'd had the best chance of survival of anyone on Mars
until this came up.
Three people lay on the beds in the first house Harkness led them to.
The room was darkened, and a man was stumbling around, trying to tend
the others, though the little spots showed on his skin. He grinned
weakly. "Hi, Doc. I guess we're making a lot of trouble, ain't we?"
Chris gave Doc no chance to answer. "Just as I thought. Measles! Plain
old-fashioned measles."
"Figured so," the sick man said. "Like my brother back on Earth."
The others looked doubtful, but Doc reassured them. Chris should know;
she'd worked in a swanky hospital where the patients were mostly
Earth-normal. Measles was one of the diseases which was foiled by the
metabolism switch. Well, at least they wouldn't have to be quarantined
here.
Chris finished treating the family with impersonal efficiency,
discussing the symptoms loudly with Harkness. "It's a good thing it
isn't serious!"
"No," Harkness answered bitterly. "Not serious. It's only killed five
children and three adults so far!"
"It would, here," Doc agreed unhappily. He led Chris out of the room on
the pretext of washing his hands. "It's serious enough to force us to
abandon the whole idea of going back to Earth-normal. Measles today,
smallpox, tuberculosis, scarlet fever and everything else tomorrow.
These people have lived Mars-normal so long their natural immunity has
been destroyed. On Earth where the disease was everywhere, kids used to
pick up some immunity with constant exposure, even without what might be
called a case of the disease. Here, the blood has no reason to build
antibodies. They can be killed by things people used to laugh at. How
the disease got here, I don't know. But it's here. So we'll have to
give up the idea of switching back to Earth-normal."
He gathered up one of the kits and started toward the other houses. "And
Lord knows how long it will take to get the blood for the other
treatment, even if it works."