“... The most difficult of enterprises is to secure the co-operation
of others in enterprises those others did not think of first....”
_Manual, Interstellar Medical Service._ P. 189.
Calhoun worked all night, tending and inspecting the culture incubators
which were part of the Med ship’s technical equipment. In the
children’s shelters, he’d swabbed throats. In the ship, he’d diluted
the swabbings and examined them microscopically. He’d been depressingly
assured of his very worst fears as a medical man--all of which could
have been worked out in detail from the psych circuit system of child
care boastfully described by Fredericks. He could have written out
his present results in advance from a glance at the child Jak shown
him by the younger Walker’s wife. But he hated to find that objective
information agreed with what he would have predicted by theory.
In every human body there are always germs. The process of good health
is in part a continual combat with slight and unnoticed infections.
Because of victories over small invasions, a human body acquires
defenses against larger invasions of contagion. Without such constant
small victories, a body ceases to keep its defenses strong against
beach-heads of infection. Yet malnutrition or even exhaustion can
weaken a body once admirably equipped for this sort of guerilla warfare.
If an undernourished child fails to win one skirmish, he can become
overwhelmed by a contagion the same child would never have known about
had he only been a little stronger. But, overwhelmed, he is a sporadic
case of disease--a case not traceable to another clinical case. And
then he is the origin of an epidemic. In slum conditions a disease
not known in years can arise and spread like wild-fire. With the best
of intentions and great technical ingenuity, the younger-generation
colonists of Canis III had made that process inevitable among the
younger children who were their last-imposed burden. The children were
under-exercised, under-stimulated, and hence under par in appetite and
nutrition. And it is an axiom of the Med Service that a single underfed
child can endanger an entire planet.
Calhoun proved the fact with appalling certainty. His cultures
astounded even him. But by dawn he had applied Murgatroyd’s special
genetic abilities to them. Murgatroyd said “_Chee!_” in a protesting
tone when Calhoun did what was necessary at that small patch on his
flank which was quite insensitive. But then Murgatroyd shook himself
and admiringly scowled back at Calhoun, imitating the intent and
worried air that Calhoun wore. Then he followed Calhoun about in high
good spirits, strutting on his hind legs, man-fashion, and pretending
to set out imaginary apparatus as Calhoun did, long ahead of time for
what he hoped would occur.
Presently Murgatroyd tired--a little quicker than usual--and went to
sleep. Calhoun bent over him and counted his respiration and heart
beat. Murgatroyd slept on. Calhoun gnawed his fingers in anxious
expectation.
He’d come on this assignment with some resentment because he thought
it foolish. He’d carried on with increasing dismay as he found it not
absurd. Now he watched over Murgatroyd with the emotional concern a
medical man feels when lives depend upon his professional efficiency,
but that efficiency depends on something beyond his control. Murgatroyd
was that something this time--but there was one other.
The _tormal_ was a pleasant little animal, and Calhoun liked him very
much. But _tormals_ were crew-members of one-man Med ships because
their metabolism was very similar to that of humans, but no _tormal_
had ever been known to die of an infectious disease. They could play
host to human infections, but only once and only lightly. It appeared
that the furry little creatures had a hair-trigger sensitivity to
bacterial toxins. The presence of infective material in their blood
streams produced instant and violent reaction--and the production
of antibodies in large quantity. Theorists said that _tormals_ had
dynamic immunity-systems instead of passive ones, like humans. Their
body-chemistry seemed to look truculently for microscopic enemies to
destroy, rather than to wait for something to develop before they
fought it.
If he reacted normally, now, in a matter of hours his blood stream
would be saturated with antibodies--or an antibody--lethal to the
cultures Calhoun had injected. There was, however, one unfortunate
fact. Murgatroyd weighed perhaps twenty pounds. There was most of a
planetary population needing antibodies only he could produce.
He slept from breakfast-time to lunch. He breathed slightly faster than
he should. His heart beat was troubled.
* * * * *
Calhoun swore a little when noon came. He looked at the equipment all
laid out for biological micro-analysis--tiny test tubes holding half
a drop, reagent flasks dispensing fractions of milliliters, tools and
scales much tinier than doll-size. If he could determine the structure
and formula of an antibody--or antibodies--that Murgatroyd’s tiny body
formed--why synthesis in quantity should be possible. Only the Med ship
had not materials for so great an amount of product.
There was only one chance. Calhoun threw the spacephone switch.
Instantly a voice came from the Speaker.
“... _ing Med Ship_ Esclipus Twenty! _Phaedra fleet calling Med Ship_
Esclipus Twenty!”
“Med ship answering,” said Calhoun. “What is it?”
The voice went on: “_Calling Med Ship_ Twenty! _Calling Med Ship_
Esclipus Twenty! _Calling_--” It went on interminably. It was a very
long way off, if it took so long for Calhoun’s answer to be heard.
But the call-formula broke off. “_Med ship! Our doctors want to know
the trouble on Canis! Can we help? We’ve hospital ships equipped and
ready!_”
“The question,” said Calhoun steadily, “is whether I can make a
formula-and-structure identification, and whether you can synthesize
what I identify. How’s your lab? How are you supplied with biological
crudes?”
He waited. By the interval between his answer and a reply to it, the
ship he’d communicated with was some five million miles or more away.
But it was still not as far as the next outward planet where the
Phaedrian fleet was based.
While he waited for his answer, Calhoun heard murmurings. They would
come from the control building at the side of the grid. The loutish,
suspicious gang there was listening. Calhoun had threatened to wreck
the grid if they tried anything on the Med ship--but he could do
nothing unless they tried to use a force-field. They listened in,
muttering among themselves.
A long time later the voice from space came back. The fleet of the
older generation of Phaedra was grounded, save for observation ships
like the one speaking. The fleet had full biological equipment for any
emergency. It could synthesize any desired compound up to--The degree
of complexity and the classification was satisfactory.
“Day before yesterday,” said Calhoun, “when you had me aground on
Canis IV, your leader Walker said your children on this planet were
destroying your grandchildren. He didn’t say how. But the process
is well under way--only the whole population will probably go with
them. Most of the population, anyhow. I’m going to need those hospital
ships and your best biological chemists--I hope! Get them started this
way--fast! I’ll try to make a deal for at least the hospital ships to
be allowed to land. Over.”
He did not flick off the spacephone. He listened. And a bitter,
envenomed voice came from nearby:
“_Sure! Sure! We’ll let ’em land ships they say are hospital ships,
loaded down with men and guns! We’ll land ’em ourselves, we will!_”
There was a click. The spacephone in the control building was turned
off.
* * * * *
Calhoun turned back to the sleeping Murgatroyd. There was a movement
about the grid-control building. Sleek, glistening ground-cars hurtled
away--two of them. Calhoun turned then to the planetary communicator.
It could break in on any wave-length used for radio communication under
a planet’s Heaviside roof. He had to get in touch with Walker or some
other of the first-landed colonists. They were still embittered against
their home world, but they must be beginning to realize that Calhoun
had told the truth about the youngest children. They’d find sickness if
they looked for it.
But the planetary communicator picked up nothing. No radiation
wave-length was in use. There was no organized news service. The young
people on Canis III were too self-centered to care about news. There
were no entertainment programs. Only show-offs would want to broadcast,
and show-offs would not make the apparatus.
So Calhoun could not communicate save by spacephone, with a range of
millions of miles, and the ship’s exterior loud-speakers, with a range
of hundreds of feet. If he left the Med ship, he wasn’t likely to be
able to fight his way back in. He couldn’t find the younger Walker on
foot, in any case, and he did not know anyone else to seek.
Besides, there was work to be done in the ship.
Before Murgatroyd waked, the two ground-cars had returned. At
intervals, nearly a dozen other cars followed to the control building,
hurtling across the grid’s clear center with magnificent clouds of dust
following them. They braked violently when they arrived. Youths piled
out. Some of them yelled at the Med ship and made threatening gestures.
They swarmed into the building.
Murgatroyd said tentatively, “_Chee?_”
He was awake. Calhoun could have embraced him.
“Now we see what we see!” he said grimly. “I hope you’ve done your
stuff, Murgatroyd!”
Murgatroyd came obligingly to him, and Calhoun lifted him to the
table he had ready. Again, what he did did not hurt. A tiny patch
on Murgatroyd’s side had been made permanently insensitive shortly
after he was born. Calhoun extracted a quantity of what he hoped was
a highly concentrated bacterial antagonist. He took thirty CCs in
all. He clumped the red cells. He separated the serum. He diluted an
infinitesimal bit of it and with a steady hand added it to a slide
of the same cultures--living--on which Murgatroyd’s dynamic immunity
system had worked.
The cultures died immediately.
Calhoun had an antibody sample which could end the intolerable
now-spreading disaster on the world of young people--_if_ he could
analyze it swiftly and accurately, and _if_ the hospital ships from
Phaedra could be landed, and _if_ they could synthesize some highly
complex antibody compounds, and _if_ the inhabitants of Canis III would
lay aside their hatred--
He heard a tapping sound on the Med ship’s hull. He looked at a screen.
Two youths stood in the doorway of the control building, leisurely
shooting at the Med ship with sporting weapons.
Calhoun set to work. Sporting rifles were not apt to do much damage.
For an hour, while there was the occasional clanking of a missile
against the ship’s outer planking, he worked at the infinitely delicate
job of separating serum from its antibody content. For another hour he
tried to separate the antibody into fractions. Incredibly, it would not
separate. It was one substance only.
There was a crackling sound and the whole ship shivered. The screen
showed a cloud of smoke drifting away. The members of the grid-guard
had detonated some explosive--intended for mining, most likely--against
one of the landing-fins.
Calhoun swore. His call to the Phaedrian fleet was the cause. The
grid-guard meant to allow no landing. He’d threatened to blow out their
controls if they tried to use the grid on the Med ship, but they wanted
it ready for use as a weapon against the space fleet. They couldn’t use
it against him. He couldn’t damage it unless they tried. They wanted
him away.
He went back to his work. From time to time, annoyedly, he looked up
at the outside. Presently a young-warrior group moved toward the ship,
carrying something very heavy. A larger charge of explosive, perhaps.
He waited until they were within yards of the ship. He stabbed the
emergency-rocket button. A thin, pencillike rod of flame shot downward
between the landing-fins. It was blue-white--the white of a sun’s
surface. For one instant it splashed out hungrily before it bored and
melted a hole into the ground itself into which to flow. But in that
instant it had ignited the covering of the burden the youths carried.
They dropped it and fled. The pencil flame bored deeper and deeper into
the ground. Clouds of smoke and steam arose.
There was a lurid flash. The burden that the young warriors had
abandoned, vanished in a flare that looked like a lightning bolt.
The ship quivered from the detonation. A crater appeared where the
explosive had been.
Calhoun cut off the emergency rocket, which had burned for ten seconds
at one-quarter thrust.
* * * * *
Sunset came and night fell for the second time. He noticed, abruptly,
that some of the ground-cars from about the control building went
racing away. But they did not pass close to the Med ship in their
departure. He labored on. He’d spent nearly thirty hours making
cultures from the specimens swabbed from children’s throats, and
injecting Murgatroyd, and waiting for his reaction, and then separating
a tiny quantity of antibody--which would not total more than the dust
from a butterfly’s wing--from the serum he obtained.
Now he worked on, through the night. Far away--some tens or scores of
millions of miles--the hospital ships of the Phaedrian fleet took off
from the next outward planet. They would be coming at full speed toward
Canis III. They would need the results of the work Calhoun was doing,
if they were to prevent an appalling multiple plague which could wipe
out all the sacrifice the building of the colony had entailed. But his
work had to be exact.
It was tedious. It was exacting. It was exhaustingly time-consuming. He
did have the help of previous experience, and the knowledge that the
most probable molecular design would include this group of radicals
and probably that, and side-chains like this might be looked for, and
co-polymers might--But he was bleary-eyed and worn out before dawn came
again. His eyes felt as if there were grains of sand beneath their
lids. His brain felt dry--felt fibrous inside his skull, as if it were
excelsior. But when the first red colors showed in the east, with the
towers of the city against them, he had the blueprint of what should be
the complex molecule formed in Murgatroyd’s furry body.
He had just begun to realize, vaguely, that his work was done, when
twin glaring lights came bouncing and plunging across the empty center
of the grid. They were extraordinarily bright in the ruddy darkness.
They stopped. A man jumped from the ground-car and ran toward the ship.
Calhoun wearily threw on the outer microphones and speakers.
“What’s the matter now?” The man was the younger Walker.
“You’re right!” called Walker’s voice, strained to the breaking
point. “There is sickness! Everywhere! There’s an epidemic! It’s just
beginning! People felt tired and peevish and shut themselves away.
Nobody realized! But they’ve got fevers! They’re showing rashes!
There’s some delirium! The smallest children are worst--they were
always quiet--but it’s everywhere! We’ve never had real sickness
before! What can we do?”
Calhoun said tiredly:
“I’ve got the design for an antibody. Murgatroyd made it. It’s what
he’s for. The hospital ships from Phaedra are on the way now. They’ll
start turning it out in quantity and their doctors will start giving
everybody shots of it.”
Young Walker cried out fiercely:
“But that would mean they’d land! They’d take over! I can’t let them
land! I haven’t the power! Nobody has! Too many of us would rather
die than let them land! They lied to us. It’s bad enough to have them
hovering outside. If they land, there’ll be fighting everywhere and
forever! We can’t let them help us! We won’t! We’ll fight--we’ll die
first!”
Calhoun blinked, owlishly.
“That,” he said exhaustedly, “is something you have to figure out for
yourself. If you’re determined to die, I can’t stop you. Die first or
die second--it’s your choice. You make it. I’m going to sleep!”
He cut off the mike and speakers. He couldn’t keep his eyes open.