Chris. Finally the young doctor stopped Chris outside the fifth house.
"These are my patients, Dr. Ryan. I left the Lobby because I didn't
believe colonials were mere livestock. I still feel the same. I
appreciate your help in diagnosis and methods of treatment. But I can't
let you handle my patients this way."
"Dan!" She swung around with eyes glazing. "Dan, are you going to stand
for that?"
"I think you'd better wait in the tractor, Chris."
He was lucky enough to catch the kit she threw at him before its
precious contents spilled. But it wasn't luck that guided his hand to
the back of her skirt hard enough to leave it stinging.
Her face froze and she stormed out. A moment later they heard the
tractor start off.
But Doc had no time to think of her. He and Harkness split up and began
covering the streets, house by house, while he passed on the word to
abandon the metabolism switch and go back to Mars-normal.
Jake sent two other doctors to relieve them late in the evening. Things
were somewhat quieter at GHQ as Doc reported the events at Marconi.
"Where's Dr. Ryan?" Jake asked at last.
Doc exchanged glances with Harkness. "She isn't in the lab?"
"Wasn't there an hour ago."
Doc cursed himself for letting her go. With the knowledge that the radio
in the mike was disabled, she'd obviously grabbed the first chance to
report back. And with her had gone news of the only cure they had found.
Jake took it as philosophically as he could, though it was a heavy blow
to his hopes. They spent half the night looking for her tractor, on the
chance that she might have gotten lost or broken down, but there was no
sign of it.
She was waiting in the laboratory when he returned at dawn. Her face was
dirty and her uniform was a mess. But she was smiling. She got up to
greet him, holding out two large bottles.
"Infant plasma--straight from Southport. And if you think I had it easy
lying my way in and out of the hospital, you're a fool, Dan Feldman. If
the man who took my place there hadn't been a native idiot, I never
would have gotten away with it."
The things he had suspected could still be right, he realized. She could
have reported everything to the Lobby. It was a better explanation than
her vague account of bullying her way in and out. But she'd had a rough
drive, and he wanted the plasma. Curiously, he was glad to have her back
with him. He reached out a hand for the bottles.
She put the bottle on the table and grabbed up a short-bladed knife.
"Not so fast," she cried. Her eyes were blazing now. "Dan Feldman, if
you touch those bottles until you've crawled across the floor on your
face and apologized for the way you treated me the last few days, I'll
cut your damned heart out."
He shook his head, chuckling at the picture she made. There were times
when he could almost see why he'd married her.
"All right, Chris," he gave in. "I'll be darned if I'll crawl, but
you've earned an apology. Okay?"
She sighed uncertainly. Then she nodded and began changing for work.
XIV
Immunity
They worked through the day in what seemed to be armed truce. There was
no coffee waiting for him when he awoke next, as he'd come to expect,
but he didn't comment. He went to where she was already working,
checking on the results of the plasma on the cultures.
The response had been slower than with the mouse blood, but now the bugs
seemed to be dead. The filaments were destroyed, and there were no signs
of the big cells. It seemed to be a cure, at least in the culture
bottles.
"We'll need volunteers," he decided. "There should be animals, but we
don't have any. At least this stuff isn't toxic. We need a natural
immune and someone infected. Two of each, so one can be treated and the
other used for a control. Makes four. Not enough to be sure, but it will
have to do."
"Two," Chris corrected. "You're not infected, I am."
"Two others," he agreed. "I'll get them from Jake."
Most of GHQ was out on the street, but Doc found Jake inside the big
schoolroom where he enjoyed his early morning bracky and coffee. The
chief listened and agreed at once, turning to the others in the room.
"Who's had the jumping headache? Okay, Swanee. Who never had it?" He
blinked in surprise as three men nodded out of the eight present. "I
guess you go, Tom."
The two men stood up, tamping out their weeds, and went out with Doc.
Chris had everything set up. They matched coins to decide who would be
treated. Doc noticed that Chris would get no plasma, while he was
scheduled for everything. He watched her prepare the culture and add the
accelerator that would speed development and make certain he and Tom
were infected, then let her inject it.
That was all, except for the waiting. To keep conditions more closely
alike, they were to stay there until the tests were finished, not even
eating for fear of upsetting the conditions. Swanee dug out a pack of
worn cards and began to deal while Doc dug out some large pills to use
as chips.
It was an hour later when the pain began. Doc had just won the pot of
fifty pills and opened his mouth for the expected gloating. He yelled as
an explosion seemed to go off inside his head. Even closing his mouth
was agony.
A moment later, Tom began to sweat. It got worse, spreading to the whole
area of the back of the head and neck. Doc lay on the cot, envying Chris
and Swanee who had already been infected naturally. He longed
desperately for bracky, and had to keep reminding himself that no drugs
must upset the tests. It was the longest day he had ever spent, and he
began to doubt that he could get through it. He watched the little clock
move from one minute to nine over to half a minute and hung breathless
until it hit the nine. There was no question about whether the infection
had taken. Now they could dull the agony.
Chris had the anodyne tablets already dissolved in water, and Swanee was
passing out three lighted bracky weeds. It took a few minutes for the
relief of the anodyne, and even that couldn't kill all the pain. But it
didn't matter by comparison. He sucked the weed, mashed it out and began
dealing the cards again.
They had a plentiful supply of the anodyne and used it liberally during
the night. The test was a speeded-up simulation of the natural course of
the disease, where painkiller would take time to get for most people
here, but would then be used generously.
Precisely at nine in the morning, Chris began to inject Swanee and Doc
with plasma.
Now there was no thought of cards. They waited, trying to talk, but with
most of their attention on the clock. Doc had estimated that an hour
should be enough to show results, but it was hard to remember that an
hour was the guess as to the minimum time.
He winced as Chris took a tiny bit of flesh from his neck. She went to
the other men, and then submitted to his work on herself. Then she began
preparing the slides.
"Feldman," she read the name of the slide as she inserted it into the
microscope. Then her breath caught sharply. "Only dead cells!"
It was the same for Swanee and Tom. Each had to look at his own slide
and have it explained before the results could be believed. But at last
Chris bent over her own slide. A minute later she glanced up, nodding.
"What it should be. It checks."
Tom whooped and went out the door to notify Jake. There was only plasma
for some two hundred injections, but that should yield sufficient proof.
Once salvation was offered, there should be no trouble convincing the
people that blood donations from their children were worthwhile.
Later, when the last of the plasma had been used, they could finally
relax. Chris slipped off her smock and dropped onto the cot. A tired
smile came onto her lips. "You're forgiven, Dan," she said. A moment
later she was obviously asleep. Doc meant to join her, but it was too
much effort. He leaned his head forward onto his arms, vaguely wondering
why she was calling off the feud.
It was night outside when he awoke, and he was lying on the cot, though
he still felt cramped and strained. He stirred, groaning, and finally
realized that a hand was on his shoulder shaking him. He looked up to
see Jake above him. Chris was busy with the coffee maker.
Jake slumped onto the cot beside Doc. "We took Southport," he announced.
That knocked the sleep out of Doc's system. "You what?"
"We took it, lock, stock and barrel. I figured the news of your cure
would put guts into the men, and it did. But we'd probably have taken it
anyhow. There wasn't anything to fight for there after Earth pulled out
and the plague really hit. Wilson mistook last-minute panic for fighting
spirit. The poor devils didn't have anything to fight about, once the
Lobby stopped goading them."
Doc tried to assimilate the news. But once the surprise was gone, he
found it meant very little. Maybe his revolutionary zeal had cooled,
once the Lobby men had pulled out. "We'll need a lot more plasma than
there is in Southport," he said.
"Not so much, maybe," Jake denied. "Doc, three of the men you injected
were shot down as runners. Your plasma's no good."
"It takes time to work, Jake. I told you there might be a case or two
that would be too close to the edge. Three is more than I expected; but
it's not impossible."
"There was plenty of time. They blew after we got back from Southport."
Jack dropped his hand on Doc's shoulder, and his face softened.
"Harkness tested every man you injected. He finished half an hour ago.
Five showed dead bugs. The rest of them weren't helped at all."
Doc fumbled for a weed, trying to think. But his thoughts refused to
focus. "Five!"
"Five out of two hundred. That's about average. And what about Tom? He
was jumping around after the test last night, telling how you'd cured
him, how he'd seen the dead bugs; but he never had the jumping headache,
and you never gave him the plasma! He's got dead bugs, though. Harkness
tested him."
Doc let his realization of his own idiocy sink in until he could believe
it. Jake was right. Tom had never been treated, yet Chris had reported
dead bugs. They'd all been so ready to believe in miracles that no one
had been able to think straight after the long wait.
"There was a bump on his neck--a small one," he said slowly. "Jake, he
must have caught it, even if he seemed immune. If he was taking anodyne
anyway for something--or unconscious--"
"He was up in Northport six years ago for a kidney operation," Jake
admitted doubtfully. "We had to chip in to pay for it. But you still
didn't treat him, and he's cured. Face it, Doc, that plasma is no good
inside the body."
His hand tightened on Doc's shoulder again. "We're not blaming you. We
don't judge a man here except by what he is. Maybe the stuff helps a
little. We'll go on using it when we get it; tell everybody you were a
mite optimistic, so they'll figure it's a gamble, but have a little hope
left. And you keep trying. Something cured it in Tom. Now you find out
what."
Doc watched him go out numbly, and turned to Chris.
"It can't be right," she said shakily. "You and Swanee were cured. Maybe
it was the accelerator. It had to be something."
"You didn't have the accelerator," he accused.
"No, and I've still got live bugs. I was never supposed to be cured, so
I expected to see just what I saw. How I missed the fact that Tom should
have been like me, I don't know. Damn it, oh, damn it!"
He's never seen her cry before, except in fury. But she mastered it
almost at once, shaking tears out of her eyes. "All right. Plasma works
in a bottle but not in an adult body. Maybe something works in the body
but not in a bottle."
"Maybe. And maybe some people are just naturally immune after it reaches
a certain stage. Maybe we ran into coincidence."
But he didn't believe that, any more than she did. The answer had to be
in the room. He'd taken a massive dose of the disease and been cured in
a few hours.
Outside the room, the war went on, drawing toward a close. The supposed
partial cure was good propaganda, if nothing else, and Jake was widening
his territory steadily. There was only token resistance against him. He
had the Southport shuttles now to cover huge areas in a hurry. But
inside the room, the battle was less successful. It wasn't the
accelerator. It wasn't the tablets of anodyne. They even tried sweeping
the floor and using the dust without results.
Then another test in the room, made with four volunteers Jake selected,
yielded complete cures after injections with plain salt water in place
of plasma.
The plague speeded up again. About four people out of a hundred now
seemed to have caught the disease and cured themselves. They accounted
for what faith was left in Doc's plasma and gave some unfounded hope to
the others.
Northport fell a week later, putting the whole planet in rebel hands.
Jake returned, wearier than ever. He'd proved to be one of the natural
immunes, but the weight of the campaign that could only end in a defeat
by the plague left him no room to rejoice in his personal fortune.
This time he looked completely defeated. And a moment later, Doc saw why
as Jake flipped a flimsy sheet onto the table. It bore the seals of
Space and Medical Lobbies.
Jake pointed upwards. "The war rockets are there, all right. We knew
they'd come. Now all they want for calling them off is our surrender and
your cure. If they don't get both, they'll blow the planet to bits. We
have two days."
The rockets could be seen clearly with binoculars. There were more than
enough to destroy all life on the planet. Maybe they'd be used
eventually, anyhow, since the Lobbies wanted no more rebellion. But with
a cure for the plague, he might have bought them off.
Chris stood beside him, looking as if it were a bitter pill for her,
too. She'd risked herself in the hands of the enemy, had cooperated with
him in everything she'd been taught to oppose, and had worked like a
dog. Now the Lobbies seemed to forget her as a useless tool. They were
falling back on a raw power play and forgetting any earlier schemes.
"Maybe they'd hold off for a while if I agreed to go to them and share
all my ideas, specimens and notes," he said at last. "Do you think your
Lobby would settle for that, Chris?"
"I don't know, Dan. I've stopped thinking their way." She seemed almost
apologetic for the admission.
He dropped an arm over her shoulder and turned with her back to the
laboratory. "Okay, then we've got to find a miracle. We've got two days
ahead of us. At least we can try."
But he knew he was lying to himself. There wasn't anything he could
think of to try.
XV
Decision
Two days was never enough time for a miracle. Doc decided as he packed
his notes into a small bag and put it beside his bundle of personal
belongings. He glanced around the room for the last time, and managed a
grin at Jake's gloomy expression.
"Maybe I can bluff them, or maybe they'll string along for a while," he
said. "Anyhow, now that they've agreed to take me and my notes in place
of the cure we're fresh out of, I've got to be on that shuttle when it
goes back to their men at orbital station."
Jake nodded. "I don't like selling friends down the river, Doc. But it
wouldn't do you any more good to blow up with the planet, I reckon. They
won't call off the war rockets when they do get you, of course. But
maybe they won't use them, except as a threat to put the Lobbies back
in, stronger than ever."
He stuck out one of his awkwardly shaped hands, clapped the aspirator
over his face and hurried out. Doc picked up his bags and went toward
the little tractor where Lou was waiting to drive him and Chris back
toward Southport and the shuttle rocket that would be landing for them.
They hadn't mentioned Chris in their demands, but her father must expect
her to return.
After they had him, he'd be on his own. His best course was probably to
insist on talking only to Ryan at Medical Lobby, and then being
completely honest. The room here would be kept sealed, in case the
Lobby wanted to investigate where he had failed. And his notes were
honest, which was something that could usually be determined. Chris
could testify to that, anyhow, since she'd kept a lot of them for him.
At best, there would be a chance for some compromise and perhaps some
clue for them that might eventually end the plague. They had enough men
to work on it, and billions in equipment. At worst, he should gain a
little time.
"Cheer up, Chris," he told her as he climbed through the little airlock.
"Maybe Harkness will turn up the cure before our negotiations break
down. He has the whole of Northport Hospital to play with. They haven't
tried to chase him out of there yet. After all, we almost found
something with no equipment except wild imaginations."
She shook her head as the tractor began moving. "Shut up! I've got
enough trouble without your coming down with logorrhea. Don't be a
fool."
"Why change now?" he asked her. "Everything I've done has been because I
am a fool. I guess my luck lasted longer than I could expect. And I'm
still fool enough to think that the solution has to turn up eventually.
We know it has to be in that room. Damn it, we must know it--if we could
only think straight now."
She reached over and touched his hand, but made no comment. They had
been over that statement of desperation too many times already. But it
kept nagging at him--something in the room, something in the room!
Something so common that nobody noticed it!
They passed a crowd chasing down a runner. Something in that room could
have saved the unlucky man. It could have saved Mars, perhaps.
He growled for the hundredth time, cursing his fatigue-numbed mind. Too
little sleep, too much coffee and bracky....
He reached for the package of weed, realizing that he would miss it on
Earth, if he ever got there. Like everything here on the planet, he'd
begun by detesting it and wound up finding it the thing he wanted to
keep forever. He lighted the bracky and sat smoking, watching Lou drive.
When the first was finished, he lighted another from the butt.
She put out a hand and took it away. "Please, Dan. I can stand the
stuff, but I'll never like it, and the tractor's stuffy enough already.
I've taken enough of it. And it keeps reminding me of our test--the
three of you stinking up the place, puffing and blowing that out, while
I couldn't even get a breath of air...."
She was getting logorrhea herself now and--
The answer finally hit him! He jerked around, making a grab for Lou's
shoulder, motioning for the man to head back.
"Bracky--it has to be! Chris, that's it. Jake picked out the second
group of men from his friends--and they are all cronies because they
hang around so much in their so-called smoking room. The first time, it
killed the bugs for all of us who smoked--and it didn't work for you
because you never learned the habit."
Lou had the tractor turned and the rheostat all the way to the floor.
She was sitting up now, but she wasn't fully satisfied. "The percentage
of immunes seems about right. But why do some of the smokers get the
disease while some don't?"
"Why not? It depends on whether they pick up the habit before or after
the disease gets started. Tom must have got his while he was in
Northport. They wouldn't let him smoke there--if he had the habit
before, for that matter."
She found no fault with that. He twisted it back and forth in his mind,
trying to find a fault. There seemed to be none. The only trouble was
that they couldn't send a message that bracky was the cure and hope that
Earth would prove it true. No polite note of apology would do after
that. They had to be sure. Too many other ideas had proved wrong
already.
Jake saw them coming and came running toward the laboratory, but Lou
stopped the tractor before it reached the building and let the older man
in.
"Get me a dozen men who have the plague. I want the worst cases you
have, and ones that Harkness tested himself," Doc ordered. "And then
start praying that the cure we've got works fast."
Chris was at the electron mike at once, but one of her hands reached out
for the weed. She began puffing valiantly, making sick faces. Now other
men began coming in, their faces struggling to find hope, but not daring
to believe yet. Jake followed them.
"We'll test at ten-minute intervals. That will be about two hours for
the last from the group," Doc decided. One of the doctors Harkness had
brought to the villages was busy cutting tiny sections from the lumps on
the men's necks, while Chris ran them through the microscope to make
sure the bugs were still alive. The regular optical mike was strong
enough for that.
Doc handed each man a bracky weed, with instructions to keep smoking, no
matter how sick it made him.
There were no results at the end of ten minutes when the first test was
made. The second, at the end of twenty minutes, was still infected with
live bugs. At the half-hour, Chris frowned.
"I can't be sure--take a look, Dan."
He bent over, moving the slide to examine another spot. "I think so. The
next one should tell."
There was no doubt about the fourth test. The bugs were dead, without a
single exception that they could find.
One by one, the men were tested and went storming out, shouting the
news. For a minute, the gathering crowd was skeptical, remembering the
other failures. Then, abruptly, men were screaming, crying and fighting
for the precious bracky, like the legions of the damned grabbing for
lottery tickets when the prize was a passport to paradise.
Jake swore as he moved toward the door. "We're low on bracky here. Have
to get a supply from Edison, I guess, and cart it to the shuttle. Enough
for a sample, and to make them want more. It'll be tough, but we'll get
it there in time--by the time the shuttle should be picking you up. Doc,
you've won our war! From now on, if Earth wants to keep her population
up, we'll be a free planet!"
Chris turned slowly from the microscope, holding a slide in her hands.
"My bugs," she said unbelievingly. "Dan, they're dead!"
Jake patted her shoulder. "That makes it perfect, girl. Now come on.
We've got to start celebrating a victory!"
* * * * *
It was the general feeling of most of the heads of the villages when
they met the next day in Southport, using the courtroom that had been
presided over so long by Judge Ben Wilson. It was victory, and to the
victor belonged the spoils. The bracky had gone out to Earth on a
converted war rocket that could make the trip in less than two weeks,
and one packet had been specially labeled for Captain Everts. But Earth
had already confirmed the cure. The small amounts of the herb found in
the botanical collections had been enough to satisfy all doubts.
Harkness, Chris and Doc had been fighting against the desire to rob
Earth blind that filled most of the men here for hours now. Now they had
the backing of Jake and Ben Wilson. And now finally they leaned back,
sensing that the argument had been won.
Bargaining was all right in its place, but it had no place in affairs of
life and death such as this. They had to see that Earth received all the
bracky she needed. It was only right to charge a fair price for it, but
they couldn't restrict it by withholding or overcharging. And they could
still gain their ends without blackmail.
Martian alkaloids were tricky things, and bracky smoke contained a
number of them. It would take Earth at least ten years to discover and
synthesize the right one--and it would still probably cost more than it
would to import the weed from Mars. As long as the source of that weed
was here, and in the hands of the colonials, there would be no danger of
Earth's bombing the planet.
Harkness got up to underscore a point Wilson had made. "The plague lived
a million years, and it won't disappear now. The jumping headache, or
Selznick's migraine, is unpleasant enough to make us reasonably sure
that there will be a steady consumption of the weed. Our problem will be
to keep the children from using too much of it, probably." He pulled a
weed out and lighted it, puckering his face as the smoke bit his
tongue. "I'm told that this gets to be an enjoyable habit. If I can
believe that, surely you can believe me when I say we don't have to
bargain with lives."
The village men were human, and most of them could remember the strain
they had been under when they expected those they loved to die at any
hour. It had made them crave vengeance, but now as they had a chance to
reexamine it, they began to find it harder to impose the horror of any
such threat on others. The final vote was almost unanimous.