The Golden Age Of Science Fiction Vol I Part 59

"If you feel a little rocky there's a bottle of Scotch in my desk. I'll split a drink with you when we get out of here."

"Thanks," Mary said. "I think I could use one."

"Barton! Where is the MacNeal stain!" Kramer's voice came from the lab. "I left it on the sink and it's gone!"

"It's with the other blood stains and reagents. Second drawer from the right in the big cabinet. There's a label on the drawer," Mary called from the office. "If you can wait until I finish filing these papers, I'll come in and help you."

"I wish you would," Kramer's voice was faintly exasperated. "Ever since you've organized my lab I can't find anything."

"You just have a disorderly mind," Mary said, as she slipped the last paper into its proper folder and closed the file. "I'll be with you in a minute."

"I don't dare lose you," Kramer said as Mary came into the lab. "You've made yourself indispensable. It'd take me six months to undo what you've done in one. Not that I mind," he amended, "but I was used to things the way they were." He looked around the orderly laboratory with a mixture of pride and annoyance. "Things are so neat they're almost painful."

"You look more like a pathologist should," Mary said as she deftly removed the tray of blood slides from in front of him and began to run the stains. "It's my job to keep you free to think."

"Whose brilliant idea is that? Yours?"

"No--the Director's. He told me what my duties were when I came here. And I think he's right. You should be using your brain rather than fooling around with blood stains and sectioning tissues."

"But I like to do things like that," Kramer protested. "It's relaxing."

"What right have you to relax," Mary said. "Outside, people are dying by the thousands and you want to relax. Have you looked at the latest mortality reports?"

"No--"

"You should. The WHO estimates that nearly two billion people have died since Thurston's Disease first appeared in epidemic proportions. That's two out of three. And more are dying every day. Yet you want to relax."

"I know," Kramer said, "but what can we do about it. We're working but we're getting no results."

"You might use that brain of yours," Mary said bitterly. "You're supposed to be a scientist. You have facts. Can't you put them together?"

"I don't know." He shrugged, "I've been working on this problem longer than you think. I come down here at night--"

"I know. I clean up after you."

"I haven't gotten anywhere. Sure, we can isolate the virus. It grows nicely on monkey lung cells. But that doesn't help. The thing has no apparent antigenicity. It parasitizes, but it doesn't trigger any immune reaction. We can kill it, but the strength of the germicide is too great for living tissue to tolerate."

"Some people seem to be immune."

"Sure they do--but why?"

"Don't ask me. I'm not the scientist."

"Play like one," Kramer growled. "Here are the facts. The disease attacks people of all races and ages. So far every one who is attacked dies. Adult Europeans and Americans appear to be somewhat more resistant than others on a population basis. Somewhere around sixty per cent of them are still alive, but it's wiped out better than eighty per cent of some groups. Children get it worse. Right now I doubt if one per cent of the children born during the past ten years are still alive."

"It's awful!" Mary said.

"It's worse than that. It's extinction. Without kids the race will die out." Kramer rubbed his forehead.

"Have you any ideas?"

"Children have less resistance," Kramer replied. "An adult gets exposed to a number of diseases to which he builds an immunity. Possibly one of these has a cross immunity against Thurston's virus."

"Then why don't you work on that line?" Mary asked.

"Just what do you think I've been doing? That idea was put out months ago, and everyone has been taking a crack at it. There are twenty-four laboratories working full time on that facet and G.o.d knows how many more working part time like we are. I've screened a dozen common diseases, including the six varieties of the common cold virus. All, incidentally, were negative."

"Well--are you going to keep on with it?"

"I have to." Kramer rubbed his eyes. "It won't let me sleep. I'm sure we're on the right track. Something an adult gets gives him resistance or immunity." He shrugged. "Tell you what. You run those bloods out and I'll go take another look at the data." He reached into his lab coat and produced a pipe. "I'll give it another try."

"Sometimes I wish you'd read without puffing on that thing," Mary said.

"Your delicate nose will be the death of me yet--" Kramer said.

"It's my lungs I'm worried about," Mary said. "They'll probably look like two pieces of well-tanned leather if I a.s.sociate with you for another year."

"Stop complaining. You've gotten me to wear clean lab coats. Be satisfied with a limited victory," Kramer said absently, his eyes staring unseeingly at a row of reagent bottles on the bench. Abruptly he nodded. "Fantastic," he muttered, "but it's worth a check." He left the room, slamming the door behind him in his hurry.

"That man!" Mary murmured. "He'd drive a saint out of his mind. If I wasn't so fond of him I'd quit. If anyone told me I'd fall in love with a pathologist, I'd have said they were crazy. I wish--" Whatever the wish was, it wasn't uttered. Mary gasped and coughed rackingly. Carefully she moved back from the bench, opened a drawer and found a thermometer. She put it in her mouth. Then she drew a drop of blood from her forefinger and filled a red and white cell pipette, and made a smear of the remainder.

She was interrupted by another spasm of coughing, but she waited until the paroxysm pa.s.sed and went methodically back to her self-appointed task. She had done this many times before. It was routine procedure to check on anything that might be Thurston's Disease. A cold, a sore throat, a slight difficulty in breathing--all demanded the diagnostic check. It was as much a habit as breathing. This was probably the result of that cold she'd gotten last week, but there was nothing like being sure. Now let's see--temperature 99.5 degrees, red cell count 4-1/2 million. White cell count ... oh! 2500 ... leukopenia! The differential showed a virtual absence of polymorphs, lymphocytes and monocytes. The whole slide didn't have two hundred. Eosinophils and basophils way up--twenty and fifteen per cent respectively--a relative rise rather than an absolute one--leukopenia, no doubt about it.

She shrugged. There wasn't much question. She had Thurston's Disease. It was the beginning stages, the harsh cough, the slight temperature, the leukopenia. Pretty soon her white cell count would begin to rise, but it would rise too late. In fact, it was already too late. It's funny, she thought. I'm going to die, but it doesn't frighten me. In fact, the only thing that bothers me is that poor Walter is going to have a terrible time finding things. But I can't put this place the way it was. I couldn't hope to.

She shook her head, slid gingerly off the lab stool and went to the hall door. She'd better check in at the clinic, she thought. There was bed s.p.a.ce in the hospital now. Plenty of it. That hadn't been true a few months ago but the only ones who were dying now were the newborn and an occasional adult like herself. The epidemic had died out not because of lack of virulence but because of lack of victims. The city outside, one of the first affected, now had less than forty per cent of its people left alive. It was a hollow sh.e.l.l of its former self. People walked its streets and went through the motions of life. But they were not really alive. The vital criteria were as necessary for a race as for an individual. Growth, reproduction, irritability, metabolism--Mary smiled wryly. Whoever had auth.o.r.ed that hackneyed mnemonic that life was a "grim" proposition never knew how right he was, particularly when one of the criteria was missing.

The race couldn't reproduce. That was the true horror of Thurston's Disease--not how it killed, but who it killed. No children played in the parks and playgrounds. The schools were empty. No babies were pushed in carriages or taken on tours through the supermarkets in shopping carts. No advertis.e.m.e.nts of motherhood, or children, or children's things were in the newspapers or magazines. They were forbidden subjects--too dangerously emotional to touch. Laughter and shrill young voices had vanished from the earth to be replaced by the drab grayness of silence and waiting. Death had laid cold hands upon the hearts of mankind and the survivors were frozen to numbness.

It was odd, she thought, how wrong the prophets were. When Thurston's Disease broke into the news there were frightened predictions of the end of civilization. But they had not materialized. There were no ma.s.s insurrections, no rioting, no organized violence. Individual excesses, yes--but nothing of a group nature. What little panic there was at the beginning disappeared once people realized that there was no place to go. And a grim pa.s.sivity had settled upon the survivors. Civilization did not break down. It endured. The mechanics remained intact. People had to do something even if it was only routine counterfeit of normal life--the stiff upper lip in the face of disaster.

It would have been far more odd, Mary decided, if mankind had given way to panic. Humanity had survived other plagues nearly as terrible as this--and racial memory is long. The same grim patience of the past was here in the present. Man would somehow survive, and civilization go on.

It was inconceivable that mankind would become extinct. The whole vast resources and pooled intelligence of surviving humanity were focused upon Thurston's Disease. And the disease would yield. Humanity waited with childlike confidence for the miracle that would save it. And the miracle would happen, Mary knew it with a calm certainty as she stood in the cross corridor at the end of the hall, looking down the thirty yards of tile that separated her from the elevator that would carry her up to the clinic and oblivion. It might be too late for her, but not for the race. Nature had tried unaided to destroy man before--and had failed. And her unholy alliance with man's genius would also fail.

She wondered as she walked down the corridor if the others who had sickened and died felt as she did. She speculated with grim amus.e.m.e.nt whether Walter Kramer would be as impersonal as he was with the others, when he performed the post-mortem on her body. She s.h.i.+vered at the thought of that bare sterile room and the s.h.i.+ning table. Death was not a pretty thing. But she could meet it with resignation if not with courage. She had already seen too much for it to have any meaning. She did not falter as she placed a finger on the elevator b.u.t.ton.

Poor Walter--she sighed. Sometimes it was harder to be among the living. It was good that she didn't let him know how she felt. She had sensed a change in him recently. His friendly impersonality had become merely friendly. It could, with a little encouragement, have developed into something else. But it wouldn't now. She sighed again. His hardness had been a tower of strength. And his bitter gallows humor had furnished a wry relief to grim reality. It had been nice to work with him. She wondered if he would miss her. Her lips curled in a faint smile. He would, if only for the trouble he would have in making chaos out of the order she had created. Why couldn't that elevator hurry?

"Mary! Where are you going?" Kramer's voice was in her ears, and his hand was on her shoulder.

"Don't touch me!"

"Why not?" His voice was curiously different. Younger, excited.

"I have Thurston's Disease," she said.

He didn't let go. "Are you sure?"

"The presumptive tests were positive."

"Initial stages?"

She nodded. "I had the first coughing attack a few minutes ago."

He pulled her away from the elevator door that suddenly slid open. "You were going to that death trap upstairs," he said.

"Where else can I go?"

"With me," he said. "I think I can help you."

"How? Have you found a cure for the virus?"

"I think so. At least it's a better possibility than the things they're using up there." His voice was urgent. "And to think I might never have seen it if you hadn't put me on the track."

"Are you sure you're right?"

"Not absolutely, but the facts fit. The theory's good."

"Then I'm going to the clinic. I can't risk infecting you. I'm a carrier now. I can kill you, and you're too important to die."

"You don't know how wrong you are," Kramer said.

"Let go of me!"

"No--you're coming back!"

She twisted in his grasp. "Let me go!" she sobbed and broke into a fit of coughing worse than before.

"What I was trying to say," Dr. Kramer said into the silence that followed, "is that if you have Thurston's Disease, you've been a carrier for at least two weeks. If I am going to get it, your going away can't help. And if I'm not, I'm not."

"Do you come willingly or shall I knock you unconscious and drag you back?" Kramer asked.

She looked at his face. It was grimmer than she had ever seen it before. Numbly she let him lead her back to the laboratory.

"But, Walter--I can't. That's sixty in the past ten hours!" she protested.

"Take it," he said grimly, "then take another. And inhale. Deeply."

"But they make me dizzy."

"Better dizzy than dead. And, by the way--how's your chest?"

"Better. There's no pain now. But the cough is worse."

"It should be."

"Why?"

"You've never smoked enough to get a cigarette cough," he said.

She shook her head dizzily. "You're so right," she said.

"And that's what nearly killed you," he finished triumphantly.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm certain. Naturally, I can't prove it--yet. But that's just a matter of time. Your response just about clinches it. Take a look at the records. Who gets this disease? Youngsters--with nearly one hundred per cent morbidity and one hundred per cent mortality. Adults--less than fifty per cent morbidity--and again one hundred per cent mortality. What makes the other fifty per cent immune? Your crack about leather lungs started me thinking--so I fed the data cards into the computer and keyed them for smoking versus incidence. And I found that not one heavy smoker had died of Thurston's Disease. Light smokers and nonsmokers--plenty of them--but not one single nicotine addict. And there were over ten thousand randomized cards in that spot check. And there's the exact reverse of that cla.s.sic experiment the lung cancer boys used to sell their case. Among certain religious groups which prohibit smoking there was nearly one hundred per cent mortality of all ages!

"And so I thought since the disease was just starting in you, perhaps I could stop it if I loaded you with tobacco smoke. And it works!"

"You're not certain yet," Mary said. "I might not have had the disease."

"You had the symptoms. And there's virus in your sputum."

"Yes, but--"

"But, nothing! I've pa.s.sed the word--and the boys in the other labs figure that there's merit in it. We're going to call it Barton's Therapy in your honor. It's going to cause a minor social revolution. A lot of laws are going to have to be rewritten. I can see where it's going to be illegal for children not to smoke. Funny, isn't it?

"I've contacted the maternity ward. They have three babies still alive upstairs. We get all the newborn in this town, or didn't you know. Funny, isn't it, how we still try to reproduce. They're rigging a smoke chamber for the kids. The head nurse is screaming like a wounded tiger, but she'll feel better with live babies to care for. The only bad thing I can see is that it may cut down on her chain smoking. She's been worried a lot about infant mortality.

"And speaking of nurseries--that reminds me. I wanted to ask you something."

"Yes?"

"Will you marry me? I've wanted to ask you before, but I didn't dare. Now I think you owe me something--your life. And I'd like to take care of it from now on."

"Of course I will," Mary said. "And I have reasons, too. If I marry you, you can't possibly do that silly thing you plan."

"What thing?"

"Naming the treatment Barton's. It'll have to be Kramer's."

Contents