"Too fast. Bowman charts it as geometric progression."
Stone scratched his jaw as a lone pink pseudopod pushed out on the floor
toward him. Then he leaped forward and stamped on it, severing the
strand from the body.
The severed member quivered and lay still for a moment. Then it flowed
back to rejoin the body with a wet gurgle.
Stone looked at his half-dissolved shoe.
"Egotropism," Jenkins said. "Bowman played around with that, too. A
severed piece will rejoin if it can. If it can't it just takes up
independent residence and we have two _hlorgs_."
"What happens to it outside the ship?" Stone wanted to know.
"It falls dormant for several hours, and then splits up into a thousand
independent chunks. One of the boys spent half of yesterday out there
gathering them up. I tell you, this thing is equipped to _survive_."
"So are we," said Green Doctor Stone grimly. "If we can't outwit this
free-flowing gob of obscenity, we deserve anything we get. Let's have a
conference."
They met in the pilot room. The Black Doctor was there; so were Bowman
and Hrunta. Chambers, the physiologist, was glumly clasping and
unclasping his hands in a corner. The geneticist, Piccione, drew symbols
on a scratch pad and stared blankly at the wall.
Jenkins was saying: "Of course, these are only preliminary reports, but
they serve to outline the problem. This is not just an annoyance any
longer, it's a crisis. We'd all better understand that."
The Black Doctor cut him off with a wave of his hand, and glowered at
the papers as he read them through minutely. As he sat hunched at the
desk with the black cowl of his office hanging down from his shoulders
he looked like a squat black judge, Jenkins thought, a shadow from the
Inquisition, a Passer of Spells. But there was no medievalism in Black
Doctor Neelsen. In fact, it was for that reason, and only that reason,
that the Black Service had come to be the leaders and the whips, the
executors and directors of all the manifold operations of Hospital
Earth.
* * * * *
The physicians of the General Practice Patrol were fledglings, newly
trained in their specialties, inexperienced in the rigorous discipline
of medicine that was required of the directors of permanent Planetary
Dispensaries in the heavily populated systems of the Galaxy. On outlying
worlds where little was known of the ways of medicine, the temptation
was great to substitute faith for knowledge, cant for investigation,
nonsense rituals for hard work. But the physicians of the Black Service
were always waiting to jerk wandering neophytes back to the scientific
disciplines that made the service of Hospital Earth so effective. The
Black Doctors would not tolerate sloppiness. "Show me the tissue,
Doctor," they would say. "Prove to me that what you say is so. Prove
that what you did was valid medicine...." Their laboratories were the
morgues and autopsy rooms of a thousand planets, the Temples of Truth
from which no physician since the days of Pasteur and Lister could
escape for long and retain his position.
The Black Doctors were the pragmatists, the gadflies of Hospital Earth.
For this reason it was surprising to hear Black Doctor Neelsen saying,
"Perhaps we are being too scientific, just now. When the creature has
exhausted our food stores, it will look elsewhere for food. Perhaps we
must cut at the tree and not at the root."
"A frontal attack?" said Jenkins.
"Just so. Its enzyme system is its vulnerability. Enzyme systems operate
under specific optimum conditions, right? And every known enzyme system
can be inactivated by adverse conditions of one sort or another. A
physical approach may tell us how in this case. Meanwhile we will be on
emergency rations, and hope that we don't starve to death finding out."
The Black Doctor paused, looking at the men around him. "And in case you
are thinking of enlisting help from outside, forget it. I've sent
plague-warnings out for Galactic relay. We have this thing isolated, and
we're going to keep it that way as long as I command this ship."
They went gloomily back to their laboratories to plan their frontal
attack.
That was the night that Hrunta disappeared.
* * * * *
He was gone when they came to wake him from his sleep period. His bunk
had been slept in, but he wasn't in it. In fact, he wasn't anywhere on
the ship.
"But he couldn't just vanish!" the Black Doctor burst out when they told
him the news. "Maybe he's hiding somewhere. Maybe this business was
working on his mind."
Green Doctor Stone took a crew of men to search the ship again, even
though he considered it a waste of precious time. He had his private
convictions about where Hrunta had gone.
So did every other man on the ship, including Jenkins.
The _hlorg_ had stopped eating. Huge and round and wet and ugly, it
squatted in the after-hold, quivering gently, without any other sign of
life.
Surfeited. Like a fat man after a turkey dinner.
Jenkins reviewed progress with the others. No stone had been left
unturned. They had sliced the _hlorg_, and squeezed it. They had boiled
it and frozen it. They had dropped chunks of it in acid vats and covered
other chunks with desiccants and alkalis. Nothing seemed to bother it.
A cold environment slowed down its activity, true, but it also
stimulated the process of fission. Warmed up again, the portions sucked
back together again and resumed eating.
Heat was a little more effective, but not much. It stunned the creature
for a brief period, but it would not burn. It hissed frightfully and
gave off an overpowering stench, and curled up at the edges, but as soon
as the heat was turned off it began to recover.
In Hrunta's lab chunks of the _hlorg_ sat in a dozen vats on tables and
in sinks. Some contained antibiotics, some concentrated acids, some
desiccants. In each vat a blob of pink protoplasm wiggled happily,
showing no sign of discomfiture. On another table were the remains of
Hrunta's (unsuccessful) attempt to prepare an anti-_hlorg_ serum.
But no Hrunta.
"He was down there with the thing all day," Bowman said sadly. "He felt
it was his responsibility, really. Hrunta thought biochemistry was the
answer to all things, of course. Very conscientious man."
"But he was in _bed_."
"He claimed he did his best thinking in bed. Maybe he had a brainstorm
and went down to try it out, and--"
"Yes." Jenkins nodded sourly. "And." He walked down the row of vats.
"You'd think that at least concentrated sulphuric would dessicate it a
little. But it's just formed a crust of coagulated protein around
itself, and sits there--"
Bowman peered over his shoulder, his mustache twitching. "But it does
dessicate."
"If you use enough long enough."
"How about concentrated hydrochloric?"
"Same thing. Maybe a little more effective, but not enough to count."
"Okay. Next we try combinations. There's got to be _something_ the
wretched beast can't tolerate--"
There was, of course.
* * * * *
Green Doctor Stone brought it to Jenkins as he was getting ready to turn
in for a sleep period. Jenkins had checked to make sure double guards
were posted in the _hlorg's_ vicinity, and jolted them with Sleep-Not to
keep them on their toes. All the same, he tied a length of stout cord
around his ankle just to make sure he didn't do any sleepwalking. He was
tying it to the bunk when Stone came in with a pan in his hand and a
peculiar look on his face.
"Take a look at this," he said.
Jenkins looked at the sickly brown mass in the tray, and then up at
Stone. "Where did you find it?"
"Down in the hold. Our _hlorg_ has broken precedent. It's _rejected_
something that it ate."
"Yeah. What is it?"
"I don't know. I'm taking it to Neelsen for paraffin sections. But I
know what it looks like to me."
"Mm. I know." Jenkins felt sick. Stone headed up to the path lab,
leaving the Red Doctor settled in his bunk.
Ten minutes later Jenkins sat bolt upright in the darkness. Frantically
he untied himself and slid into his clothes. "Idiot!" he growled to
himself. "Seventh son of a seventh son--"
Five minutes later he was staring at the vats in Hrunta's laboratory. He
found the one he was looking for. A pink blob of _hlorg_ wiggled slowly
around the bottom.
Jenkins drew a beaker of distilled water and added it to the fluid in
the vat. It hissed and sputtered and sent up quantities of acrid steam.
When the steam had cleared away, Jenkins peered in eagerly.
The pink thing in the bottom was turning a sickly violet. It had quit
wiggling. As Jenkins watched, the violet color changed to mud grey, then
to black. He prodded it with a stirring rod. There was no response.
With a whoop Jenkins buzzed Bowman and Stone. "We've got it!" he shouted
to them when they appeared. "Look! Look at it!"
Bowman poked and probed and broke into a wide grin. The piece of _hlorg_
was truly and sincerely dead. "It inactivates the enzyme system, and
renders the base protoplasm vulnerable to anything that normally attacks
it. What are we waiting for?"
They began tearing the laboratory apart, searching for the right
bottles. The supply was discouragingly small, but there was some in
stock. The three of them raced down the corridor for the hold where the
_hlorg_ was.
It took them three hours of angry work to exhaust the supply. They
whittled chunks off the _hlorg_, tossed them in pans of the deadly
fluid. With each slice they stopped momentarily to watch it turn violet,
then black, as it died. The _hlorg_, dwindling in size, sensed the
attack and slapped frantically at their ankles, sending out angry plumes
of wet jelly, but they ducked and dodged and whittled some more. The
_hlorg_ quivered and gurgled and wept pinkish goo all over the floor,
but it grew smaller and weaker with every whack.
"Hrunta must have spotted it and come down here alone," Jenkins panted
between slices. "Maybe he slipped, lost his footing, I don't know--"
They continued to work until the supply was exhausted. They had reduced
the _hlorg_ to a quarter its previous size. "Check the other labs, see
if they have some more," said Stone.
"I already have," Bowman said. "They don't. This is it."
"But we haven't got it all killed. There's still--" He pointed to the
thing quailing in the corner.
"I know. We're licked, that's all. There isn't any more of the stuff on
the ship."
They stopped and looked at each other suddenly. Then Jenkins said: "Oh,
yes there is."
There was silence. Bowman looked at Stone, and Stone looked at Bowman.
They both looked at Jenkins. "Oh, no. Sorry. I decline." Stone shook his
head slowly.
"But we have to! There's no other way. If the enzyme system is
inactivated, it's just protoplasm--there's no physiological or
biochemical reason--"
"You know what you can do with your physiology and biochemistry," Bowman
said succinctly. "You can also count me out." He left them and the
hatchway clanged after him.
"Wally?"
"Yeah."
"It'll be months before we get back to Hospital Earth. We know how we
can hold it in check until we get there."
"Yeah."
"Well?"
Green Doctor Wally Stone sighed. "Greater love hath no man," he said
wearily. "We'd better go tell Neelsen, I guess."
* * * * *
Black Doctor Turvold Neelsen's answer was a flat, unequivocal no. "It's
monstrous and preposterous. I won't stand for it. Nobody will stand for
it."
"But you have the proof in your own hands," Jenkins said. "You saw the
specimen that the Green Doctor brought you."