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.
There was only one chance. Calhoun threw the spacephone switch. Instantly a voice came from the speaker.
" . . . calling Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty! Phaedra fleet calling Med Ship Aesclipus 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. 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—