“It’s too old,” said Morgan. “A good ten years too old. You can’t use old serum. You see, it might …”
“Stop chattering,” commanded Warren, sharply. “The serum is too old, you say. When did you find this out?”
“Just now.”
“You mean this very moment?”
Morgan nodded miserably.
Warren pushed the papers to one side very carefully and deliberately. He placed his hands on the desk in front of him and made a tent out of his fingers.
“Tell me this, doctor,” said Warren, speaking cautiously, as if he were hunting in his mind for the exact words which he must use, “how long has this expedition been on Landro?”
“Why,” said Morgan, “quite some time, I’d say.” He counted mental fingers. “Six weeks, to be exact.”
“And the serum has been here all that time?”
“Why, of course,” said Morgan. “It was unloaded from the ship at the same time as all the other stuff.”
“It wasn’t left around somewhere, so that you just found it? It was taken to your tent at once?”
“Of course it was,” said Morgan. “The very first thing. I always insist upon that procedure.”
“At any time in the last six weeks, at any given moment in any day of that whole six weeks, you could have inspected the serum and found it was no good? Isn’t that correct, doctor?”
“I suppose I could have,” Morgan admitted. “It was just that…”
“You didn’t have the time,” suggested Warren, sweetly.
“Well, not that,” said Morgan.
“You were, perhaps, too pressed with other interests?”
“Well, not exactly.”
“You were aware that up to a week ago we could have contacted the ship by radio and it could have turned back and took us off. They would have done that if we had let them know about the serum.”
“I know that.”
“And you know now that they’re outside our radio range. We can’t let them know. We can’t call them back. We won’t have any contact with the human race for the next two years.”
“I,” said Morgan, weakly, “I…”
“It’s been lovely knowing you,” Warren told him. “Just how long do you figure it will be before we are dead?”
“It will be another week or so before we’ll become susceptible to the virus,” Morgan said. “It will take, in certain stubborn cases, six weeks or so for it to kill a man.”
“Two months,” said Warren. “Three, at the outside. Would you say that was right, Dr. Morgan?”
“Yes,” said Morgan.
“There is something that I want you to tell me,” Warren said.
“What is it?” Morgan asked.
“Sometime when you have a moment, when you have the time and it is no inconvenience to you, I should like to know just how it feels to kill twenty-five of your fellow men.”
“I,” said Morgan, “I…”
“And yourself, of course,” said Warren. “That makes twenty-six.”
Bat Ears Brady was a character. For more than thirty years now he had been going out on planetary expeditions with Commander Ira Warren, although Warren had not been a commander when it started, but a second looey. Today they were still together, a team of toughened planet-checkers. Although no one on the outside would have known that they were a team, for Warren headed the expedition and Bat Ears cooked for them.
Now Warren set out a bottle on his desk and sent for Bat Ears Brady.
Warren heard him coming for some time before he finally arrived. He’d had a drink or two too many and he was singing most obscenely.
He came through the tent entrance walking stiff and straight, as if there were a chalked line laid out for him to follow. He saw the bottle on the desk and picked it up, disregarding the glasses set beside it. He lowered the bottle by a good three inches and set it back again. Then he took the camp chair that had been placed there for him.
“What’s the matter now?” he demanded. “You never send for me unless there’s something wrong.”
“What,” asked Warren, “have you been drinking?”
Bat Ears hiccupped politely. “Little something I cooked up.”
He regarded Warren balefully. “Use to be we could bring in a little something, but now they say we can’t. What little there is you keep under lock and key. When a man gets thirsty, it sure tests his ingen … ingen … ingen …”
“Ingenuity,” said Warren.
“That’s the word,” said Bat Ears. “That’s the word, exactly.”
“We’re in a jam, Bat Ears,” said Warren.
“We’re always in a jam,” said Bat Ears. “Ain’t like the old days, Ira. Had some he-men then. But now…”
“I know what you mean,” said Warren.
“Kids,” said Bat Ears, spitting on the floor in a gesture of contempt. “Scarcely out of didies. Got to wipe their noses and…”
“It isn’t that kind of a jam,” said Warren. “This is the real McCoy. If we can’t figure this one out, we’ll all be dead before two months are gone.”
“Natives?” asked Bat Ears.
“Not the natives,” Warren told him. “Although more than likely they’d be glad to do us in if there was a chance.”
“Cheeky customers,” said Bat Ears. “One of them sneaked into the cook tent and I kicked him off the reservation real unceremonious. He did considerable squalling at me. He didn’t like it none.”
“You shouldn’t kick them, Bat Ears.”
“Well, Ira, I didn’t really kick him. That was just a figure of speech, kind of. No sir, I didn’t kick him. I took a shovel to him. Always could handle a shovel some better than my feet. Reach farther and…”
He reached out and took the bottle, lowered it another inch or two.
“This crisis, Ira?”
“It’s the serum,” Warren told him. “Morgan waited until the ship had got too far for us to contact them before he thought to check the serum. And it isn’t any good—it’s about ten years too old.”
Bat Ears sat half stunned.
“So we don’t get our booster shots,” said Warren, “and that means that we will die. There’s this deadly virus here, the … the—oh, well, I can’t remember the name of it. But you know about it.”
“Sure,” said Bat Ears. “Sure I know about it.”
“Funny thing,” said Warren. “You’d expect to find something like that on one of the jungle planets. But, no, you find it here. Something about the natives. They’re humanoid. Got the same kind of guts we got. So the virus developed an ability to attack a humanoid system. We are good, new material for it.”
“It don’t seem to bother the natives none now,” said Bat Ears.
“No,” said Warren. “They seem to be immune. One of two things: They’ve found a cure or they’ve developed natural immunity.”
“If they’ve found a cure,” said Bat Ears, “we can shake it out of them.”
“And if they haven’t,” said Warren, “if adaptation is the answer—then we’re dead ducks for sure.”
“We’ll start working on them,” said Bat Ears. “They hate us and they’d love to see us croak, but we’ll find some way to get it out of them.”
“Everything always hates us,” Warren said. “Why is that, Bat Ears? We do our best and they always hate us. On every planet that Man has set a foot on. We try to make them like us, we do all we can for them. But they resent our help. Or reject our friendliness. Or take us for a bunch of suckers—so that finally we lose our patience and we take a shovel to them.”
“And then,” said Bat Ears, sanctimoniously, “the fat is in the fire.”
“What I’m worried about is the men,” said Warren. “When they hear about this serum business…”