“How sure can you get? There is no question about it. I was told that I had had nine-day fever, that I had been sick with it when Pete and Frisco found me. I nursed other cases later and I never caught it again. I remember what their faces looked like when they were ready to die—just like my own face in the record. Anyone who has ever seen a case never forgets it and could not possibly mistake it for anything else. What more do you want? Fiery letters in the sky?” I have never seen Mary so close to losing her temper—except once. I said to myself: look out, gentlemen, better duck!
Steelton said, “I think you have proved your point, dear lady—but tell me: you were believed to have no memory of this period and my own experience with you leads me to think so. Now you speak as if you had direct, conscious memory—yes?”
Mary looked puzzled. “I remember it now—I remember it quite clearly. I haven’t thought about it in many years.”
“I think I understand.” He turned to Hazelhurst. “Well, Doctor? Do we have a culture of it in the laboratory? Have your boys done any work on it?”
Hazelhurst seemed stunned. “Work on it? Of course not! It’s utterly out of the question—nine-day fever! We might as well use polio—or typhus. I’d rather treat a hangnail with an ax!”
I touched Mary’s arm and said, “Let’s go, darling. I think we have done all the damage we can.” As we left I saw that she was trembling and that her eyes were full of tears. I took her into the messroom for systemic treatment—distilled.
Later on I bedded Mary down for a nap and sat with her until I was sure she was asleep. Then I looked up my father; he was in the office they had assigned to him. The green privacy light was already on. “Howdy,” I said.
He looked at me speculatively. “Well, Elihu, I hear that you hit the jackpot.”
“I prefer to be called ‘Sam’,” I answered.
“Very well, Sam. Success is its own excuse; nevertheless the jackpot appears to be disappointingly small. The situation seems to be almost as hopeless as before. Nine-day fever—no wonder the colony died out and the slugs as well. I don’t see how we can use it. We can’t expect everyone to have Mary’s indomitable will to live.”
I understood him; the fever carried a 98-percent plus death rate among unprotected Earthmen. With those who had taken the shots the rate was an effective zero—but that did not figure. We needed a bug that would just make a man sick—but would kill his slug. “I can’t see that it makes much difference,” I pointed out. “It’s odds-on that you will have typhus—or plague—or both—throughout the Mississippi Valley in the next six weeks.”
“Or the slugs may have learned a lesson from the setback they took in Asia and will start taking drastic sanitary measures,” he answered. I had not thought of that; the idea startled me so that I almost missed the next thing he said, which was: “No, Sam, you’ll have to devise a better plan than that.”
“I’ll have to? I just work here.”
“You did once—but now you’ve taken charge. I don’t mind; I was ready to retire anyhow.”
“Huh? What the devil are you talking about? I’m not in charge of anything—and don’t want to be. You are head of the Section.”
He shook his head. “A boss is the man who does the bossing. Titles and insignia usually come after the fact, not before. Tell me—do you think Oldfield could take over my job?”
I considered it and shook my head; Dad’s chief deputy was the executive officer type, a “carry-outer”, not a “think-upper”. “I’ve known that you would take over, some day,” he went on. “Now you’ve done it—by bucking my judgment on an important matter, forcing your own on me, and by being justified in the outcome.”
“Oh, rats! I got bull-headed and forced one issue. It never occurred to you big brains that you were failing to consult the one real Venus expert you had on tap—Mary, I mean. But I didn’t expect to find out anything; I had a lucky break.”
He shook his head. “I don’t believe in luck, Sam. Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius.”
I placed my hands on the desk and leaned toward him. “Okay, so I’m a genius—just the same you are not going to get me to hold the sack. When this is over Mary and I are going up in the mountains and raise kittens and kids. We don’t intend to spend our time bossing screwball agents.”
He smiled gently as though he could see farther into the future than I could. I went on, “I don’t want your job—understand me?”
“That is what the Devil said to the Deity after he displaced him—but he found he could not help himself. Don’t take it so hard, Sam. I’ll keep the title for the present and give you all the help I can. In the meantime, what are your orders, sir?”
XXXI
The worst of it was, he meant it. I tried to correct matters by going limp on him, but it did not work. A top-level conference was called late that afternoon; I was notified but I stayed away. Shortly a very polite little WAC came to tell me that the commanding officer was waiting and would I please come at once?
So I went—and tried to stay out of the discussion. But my father has a way of conducting any meeting he is in, even if he is not in the chair, by looking expectantly at the one he wants to hear from. It’s a subtle trick, as the group does not know that it is being led.
But I knew. With every eye in the room on you, it is easier to voice an opinion than to keep quiet. Particularly as I found that I had opinions.
The meeting was largely given over to moaning and groaning about the utter impossibility of using nine-day fever against the slugs. Admitted that it would kill slugs—it would even kill Venerians who can be chopped in two and still survive. But it was sure death to any human—or almost any human; I was married to one who had survived—death to the enormous majority. Seven to ten days after exposure, then curtains.
“Yes, Mr. Nivens?” It was the commanding general, addressing me. I hadn’t said anything but Dad’s eyes were on me, waiting.
“I think there has been a lot of despair voiced at this session,” I said, “and a lot of opinions given that were based on assumptions. The assumptions may not be correct.”
“Yes?”
I did not have an instance in mind; I had been shooting from the hip. I continued to do so. “Well…for example—I hear constant reference to nine-day fever as if the ‘nine-day’ part were an absolute fact. It’s not.”
The boss brass shrugged impatiently. “It’s a convenient tag—it averages nine days.”
“Yes—but how do you know it lasts nine days—for a slug?”
By the murmur with which it was received I knew that I had hit the jackpot again.
A few minutes later I was being invited to explain why I thought the fever might run a different time in slugs and, if so, why it mattered. I began to feel like the after-dinner speaker who wishes he had not gotten up in the first place. But I bulled on ahead. “As to the first point,” I said, “according to the record I saw this morning in the only case we know about the slug did die in less than nine days—quite a lot less. Those of you who have seen the records on my wife—and I gather that entirely too many of you have—are aware that her parasite left her, presumably dropped off and died, long before the eighth-day crisis. One datum does not fair a curve, but if it is true and experiments show it to be, then the problem is very different. A man infected with the fever might be rid of his slug in—oh, call it four days. That gives you five days to catch him and cure him.”
The general whistled. “That’s a pretty heroic solution, Mr. Nivens. How do you propose to cure him? For that matter, how do you propose to catch him? I mean to say, suppose we do plant an epidemic of nine-day fever in Zone Red, it would take some incredibly fast footwork—in the face of stubborn resistance, remember—to locate and treat more than fifty million people before they died of the fever.”
It was a hot potato, so I slung it right back. I wondered as I did so how many “experts” made their names by passing the buck. “As to the
second question, that is a logistical and tactical problem—your problem, not mine. As to the first, there is your expert.” I pointed to Dr. Hazelhurst. “Ask him.”
Hazelhurst huffed and puffed and I knew how he felt. Insufficient former art…more research needed…experiments would be required…he seemed to recall that some work had been done toward an antitoxin treatment but the vaccine for immunizing had proven so successful that he was not sure the antitoxin had ever been perfected. Anyway, everyone who went to Venus nowadays was immunized before leaving. He concluded lamely by saying that the study of the exotic diseases of Venus was necessarily still in its infancy.
The general interrupted him as he was finishing. “This antitoxin business—how soon can you find out about it?”
Hazelhurst said he would get after it at once, there was a man at the Sorbonne he wanted to phone.
“Do so,” his commanding officer said. “You are excused.”
Hazelhurst came buzzing at our door before breakfast the next morning. I was annoyed but tried not to show it when I stepped out into the passage to see him. “Sorry to wake you,” he said, “but you were right about that antitoxin matter.”
“Huh?”
“They are sending me some from Paris; it should arrive any minute now. I do hope it’s still potent.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Well, we have the means to make it. We’ll have to make it, of course, if this wild scheme is used—millions of units of it.”
“Thanks for telling me,” I said. “I know the general will be pleased.” I started to turn away; he stopped me.
“Uh, Mr. Nivens—”
“Yes?”
“About the matter of vectors—”
“Vectors?” At the moment all the word meant to me was little arrows pointing in various directions.
“Disease vectors. We can’t use rats or mice or anything like that. Do you happen to know how the fever is transmitted on Venus? By a little flying rotifer, the Venerian equivalent of an insect—but we don’t have such here and that is the only way it can be carried.”
“Do you mean to say you couldn’t give it to me if you tried? Even with a jugful of live culture?”
“Oh, yes—I could inject you with it. But I can’t picture a million paratroopers dropping into Zone Red and asking the parasite-ridden population to hold still while they gave them injections.” He spread his hands helplessly.
Something started turning slowly over in my brain…a million men, in a single drop. “Why ask me?” I said. “It seems to be a medical problem.”
“Uh, yes, it is of course. I just thought—Well, you seemed to have a ready grasp—” He paused.
“Thanks.” My mind was struggling with two problems at once and beginning to have traffic problems. How many people were there in Zone Red? “Let me get this straight: suppose you had the fever and I didn’t; I could not catch it from you?” The drop could not be medical men; there weren’t that many.
“Not very easily. If I took a live smear from my throat and placed it in your throat, you might contract it. If I opened a vein of mine and made a trace transfusion to your veins, you would be sure to be infected with it.”
“Direct contact, eh?” How many people could one paratrooper service? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Or more? “If that is what it takes, you don’t have any problem.”
“Eh?”
“What’s the first thing one slug does when he runs across another slug he hasn’t seen lately?”
“Conjugation!”
“‘Direct conference’, I’ve always called it—but then I use the sloppy old slug language for it. Do you think that would pass on the disease?”
“Think so? I’m sure of it! We have demonstrated, right here in this laboratory, that there is actual exchange of living protein during conjugation. They could not possibly escape direct transmission; we can infect the whole colony as if it were one body. Now why didn’t I think of that?”
His words roused out a horrid memory, something about, “Would that my subjects had but one neck—” But I refrained from quoting it. “Don’t go off half cocked,” I said. “Better try it first. But I suspect that it will work.”
“It will, it will!” He started to go, then stopped. “Oh, Mr. Nivens, would you mind very much—I know it’s a great deal to ask—”
“What is? Speak up; I’m getting hungry.” Actually I was anxious to work out the rest of the other problem.
“Well, would you consider permitting me to announce this method of vectoring in my report this morning? I’ll give you full credit, but the general expects so much and this is just what I need to make my report complete.” He looked so anxious that I almost laughed.
“Not at all,” I said. “It’s your department.”
“That’s decent of you. I’ll try to return the favor.” He turned away feeling happy and I turned back feeling the same way. I was beginning to like being a “genius”.
I waited before reopening the door to our cubicle until I had straightened out in my mind all the main features of the big drop. Then I went in. Mary opened her eyes when I came in and gave me that long heavenly smile. I reached down and smoothed her hair. “Howdy, flame top, did you know that your husband is a genius?”
“Yes.”
“You did? You never said so.”
“You never asked me.”
Hazelhurst gave credit all right; he referred to it as the “Nivens vector”. I suppose it was natural that I should be asked to comment, though Dad looked my way first.
“I agree with Dr. Hazelhurst,” I started out, “subject to experimental confirmation as outlined. However, he has properly left open for discussion certain aspects which are tactical rather than medical. While it is true that the entire body of titans might be infected from one contact, important considerations of timing—crucial, I should say—” I had worked out my whole opening speech, even to the hesitations, while eating breakfast. Mary does not chatter at breakfast, thank goodness!
“—require vectoring from many focal points. If we are to save a nominal hundred percent of the population of Zone Red, it is necessary that all the parasites be infected at as nearly the same time as possible in order that rescue squads may enter Zone Red after the slugs are no longer dangerous and before any host has passed the point where antitoxin can save him. The problem is susceptible to mathematical analysis—” Sam boy, I said to myself, you old phony, you could not solve it with an electronic integrator and twenty years of sweat. “—and should be turned over to your analytical section. However, let me sketch out the factors. Call the number of vector origins ‘X’; call the number of rescue workers who much be dropped ‘Y’. There will be an indefinitely large number of simultaneous solutions, with the optimum solution depending on logistic factors. Speaking in advance of rigorous mathematical treatment—” I had done my very damndest with a slipstick, but I did not mention that. “—and basing my opinions on my own unfortunately-too-intimate knowledge of their habits, I would estimate that—”
They let me go right ahead. You could have heard a pin drop, if anybody in that bare-skinned crew had had a pin. The general interrupted me once when I placed a rather low estimate on “X”; “Mr. Nivens. I think we can assure you of any number of volunteers for vectoring.”
I shook my head. “You can’t accept volunteers, General.”
“I think I see your objection. The disease would have to be given time to establish itself in the volunteer and the timing might be dangerously close for his safety. But I think we could get around that—a gelatin capsule with the antitoxin embedded in tissue, or something of the sort. I’m sure the staff could work it out.”
I thought they could, too, but I did not say that my real objection was a deep-rooted aversion to any additional human soul having to be possessed by a slug. “You must not use human volunteers, sir. The slug will know everything that his host knows—and he simply will not go into direct conference; he’ll warn the others by word of mouth i
nstead.” I did not know that I was right but it sounded plausible. “No, sir, we will use animals—apes, dogs, anything large enough to carry a slug but incapable of human speech, and in sufficient quantities to infect the whole group before any slug knows that it is sick.”
I went on to give a fast sketch of the final drop, Schedule Mercy, as I visualized it. “We can assume that the first drop—Schedule Fever—can start as soon as we are sure that we will have enough units of antitoxin for the second drop. In less than a week thereafter there should be no slug left alive on this continent.”
They did not applaud, but it felt that way. The general adjourned the meeting and hurried away to call Air Marshal Rexton, then sent his aide back to invite me to lunch. I sent word that I would be pleased provided the invitation included my wife, otherwise I would be unable to accept.
Dad waited for me outside the conference room. “Well, how did I do?” I asked him, more anxiously than I tried to sound.
He shook his head. “Sam, you wowed ’em. You have the makings of a politician. No, I think I’ll sign you up for twenty-six weeks of stereo instead.”
I tried not to show how much I was pleased. I had gotten through the whole performance without once stammering; I felt like a new man.
XXXII
That ape Satan which had wrung my heart so back at the National Zoo turned out to be as mean as he was billed, once he was free of his slug. Dad had volunteered to be the test case for the Nivens-Hazelhurst theories, but I put my foot down and Satan drew the short straw.
Dad made an issue out of it; he had some silly idea that it was up to him to be possessed by a slug, at least once. I told him that we had no time to waste on his sinful pride. He grew huffy but I made it stick.
It was neither filial affection nor its neo-Freudian antithesis that caused me to balk him; I was afraid of the combination of Dad-cum-slug. I did not want him on their side even temporarily and under laboratory conditions. Not with his shifty, tricky mind! I did not know how he would manage to escape nor what he would do to wreck our plans, but I was morally certain he would, once possessed.