Silence. A long silence. The growling voice rasped:
"What's that? Repeat it!"
Calhoun repeated it. He switched off the phone and unpacked the throat-swabbings he'd made at the four children's shelters in turn. He opened up his laboratory equipment. He put a dilution of one throat-swabbing into a culture slide that allowed living organisms to be examined as they multiplied. He began to check his highly specific suspicions. Presently he was testing them with minute traces of various antibodies. He made rough but reasonably certain identifications. His expression grew very, very sober. He took another swab sample and put it through the same process. A third, and fourth, and fifth, and tenth. He looked very grim.
It was sunset outside when there was a hammering on the ship's hull. He switched on a microphone and speaker.
"What do you want?" he asked flatly.
The angry voice of young Walker came from the gathering darkness. The screens showed a dozen or more inhabitants of Canis III milling angrily about him. Some were of the young-warrior age. They engaged in bitter argument. But the younger Walker, and four or five with him, faced the ship with ominous quietness.
"What's this nonsense about quarantine?" demanded Walker harshly, from outside. "Not that we've space-commerce to lose, but what does it mean?"
"It means," Calhoun told him, "that your brave new world rates as a slum. You've kept kids quiet with psych circuits, and they haven't eaten properly and haven't exercised at all. They're weak from malnutrition and feeble from not doing their own playing. They're like slum children used to be in past ages. Here on Canis you're about ready to wipe yourselves out. You may have done it."
"You're crazy!" snapped Walker. But he was upset.
"In the four shelters I visited," Calhoun said drearily, "I spotted four cases of early diphtheria, two of typhoid, three of scarlet fever and measles, and samples of nearly any other disease you care to name. The kids have been developing those diseases out of weakness and from the reservoir of infections we humans always carry with us. They'd reached the contagious stage before I saw them—but all the kids are kept so quiet that nobody noticed that they were sick. They've certainly spread to each other and their nurses, and therefore out into your general population, all the infections needed for a first-rate multiple epidemic. And you've no doctors, no antibiotics—not even injectors to administer shots if you had them."
"You're crazy!" cried the young Walker. "Crazy! Isn't this a Phaedra trick to make us give in?"
"Phaedra's trick," said Calhoun more drearily than before, "is an atom bomb they're going to drop into this landing grid—I suspect quarantine or no quarantine—in just two days more. Considering the total situation, I don't think that matters."
VI
" . . . 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 beachheads 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 wildfire. 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 microanalysis—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.