Produced by Greg Weeks, Dave Lovelace, Stephen Blundell
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
https://www.pgdp.net









_PANDEMIC_

_BY J. F. BONE_


        _Generally,
          human beings don't do
      totally useless things
        consistently and widely.
    So--maybe there is
            something to it--_


"We call it Thurston's Disease for two perfectly good reasons," Dr.
Walter Kramer said. "He discovered it--and he was the first to die of
it." The doctor fumbled fruitlessly through the pockets of his lab coat.
"Now where the devil did I put those matches?"

"Are these what you're looking for?" the trim blonde in the gray
seersucker uniform asked. She picked a small box of wooden safety
matches from the littered lab table beside her and handed them to him.

"Ah," Kramer said. "Thanks. Things have a habit of getting lost around
here."

"I can believe that," she said as she eyed the frenzied disorder around
her. Her boss wasn't much better than his laboratory, she decided as she
watched him strike a match against the side of the box and apply the
flame to the charred bowl of his pipe. His long dark face became half
obscured behind a cloud of bluish smoke as he puffed furiously. He
looked like a lean untidy devil recently escaped from hell with his
thick brows, green eyes and lank black hair highlighted intermittently
by the leaping flame of the match. He certainly didn't look like a
pathologist. She wondered if she was going to like working with him, and
shook her head imperceptibly. Possibly, but not probably. It might be
difficult being cooped up here with him day after day. Well, she could
always quit if things got too tough. At least there was that
consolation.

He draped his lean body across a lab stool and leaned his elbows on
its back. There was a faint smile on his face as he eyed her
quizzically. "You're new," he said. "Not just to this lab but to the
Institute."

[Illustration: ILLUSTRATED BY BARBERIS]

She nodded. "I am, but how did you know?"

"Thurston's Disease. Everyone in the Institute knows that name for the
plague, but few outsiders do." He smiled sardonically. "Virus pneumonic
plague--that's a better term for public use. After all, what good does
it do to advertise a doctor's stupidity?"

She eyed him curiously. "_De mortuis?_" she asked.

He nodded. "That's about it. We may condemn our own, but we don't like
laymen doing it. And besides, Thurston had good intentions. He never
dreamed this would happen."

"The road to hell, so I hear, is paved with good intentions."

"Undoubtedly," Kramer said dryly. "Incidentally, did you apply for this
job or were you assigned?"

"I applied."

"Someone should have warned you I dislike clichés," he said. He paused a
moment and eyed her curiously. "Just why did you apply?" he asked. "Why
are you imprisoning yourself in a sealed laboratory which you won't
leave as long as you work here. You know, of course, what the conditions
are. Unless you resign or are carried out feet first you will remain
here ... have you considered what such an imprisonment means?"

"I considered it," she said, "and it doesn't make any difference. I
have no ties outside and I thought I could help. I've had training. I
was a nurse before I was married."

"Divorced?"

"Widowed."

Kramer nodded. There were plenty of widows and widowers outside. Too
many. But it wasn't much worse than in the Institute where, despite
precautions, Thurston's disease took its toll of life.

"Did they tell you this place is called the suicide section?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Weren't you frightened?"

"Of dying? Hardly. Too many people are doing it nowadays."

He grimaced, looking more satanic than ever. "You have a point," he
admitted, "but it isn't a good one. Young people should be afraid of
dying."

"You're not."

"I'm not young. I'm thirty-five, and besides, this is my business. I've
been looking at death for eleven years. I'm immune."

"I haven't your experience," she admitted, "but I have your attitude."

"What's your name?" Kramer said.

"Barton, Mary Barton."

"Hm-m-m. Well, Mary--I can't turn you down. I need you. But I could wish
you had taken some other job."

"I'll survive."

He looked at her with faint admiration in his greenish eyes. "Perhaps
you will," he said. "All right. As to your duties--you will be my
assistant, which means you'll be a dishwasher, laboratory technician,
secretary, junior pathologist, and coffee maker. I'll help you with all
the jobs except the last one. I make lousy coffee." Kramer grinned, his
teeth a white flash across the darkness of his face. "You'll be on call
twenty-four hours a day, underpaid, overworked, and in constant danger
until we lick Thurston's virus. You'll be expected to handle the jobs of
three people unless I can get more help--and I doubt that I can. People
stay away from here in droves. There's no future in it."

Mary smiled wryly. "Literally or figuratively?" she asked.

He chuckled. "You have a nice sense of graveyard humor," he said. "It'll
help. But don't get careless. Assistants are hard to find."

She shook her head. "I won't. While I'm not afraid of dying I don't want
to do it. And I have no illusions about the danger. I was briefed quite
thoroughly."

"They wanted you to work upstairs?"

She nodded.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I suppose they need help, too. Thurston's Disease has riddled the
medical profession. Just don't forget that this place can be a death
trap. One mistake and you've had it. Naturally, we take every
precaution, but with a virus no protection is absolute. If you're
careless and make errors in procedure, sooner or later one of those
submicroscopic protein molecules will get into your system."

"You're still alive."

"So I am," Kramer said, "but I don't take chances. My predecessor, my
secretary, my lab technician, my junior pathologist, and my dishwasher
all died of Thurston's Disease." He eyed her grimly. "Still want the
job?" he asked.

"I lost a husband and a three-year old son," Mary said with equal
grimness. "That's why I'm here. I want to destroy the thing that killed
my family. I want to do something. I want to be useful."

He nodded. "I think you can be," he said quietly.

"Mind if I smoke?" she asked. "I need some defense against that pipe of
yours."

"No--go ahead. Out here it's all right, but not in the security
section."

Mary took a package of cigarettes from her pocket, lit one and blew a
cloud of gray smoke to mingle with the blue haze from Kramer's pipe.

"Comfortable?" Kramer asked.

She nodded.

He looked at his wrist watch. "We have half an hour before the roll tube
cultures are ready for examination. That should be enough to tell you
about the modern Pasteur and his mutant virus. Since your duties will
primarily involve Thurston's Disease, you'd better know something about
it." He settled himself more comfortably across the lab bench and went
on talking in a dry schoolmasterish voice. "Alan Thurston was an
immunologist at Midwestern University Medical School. Like most men in
the teaching trade, he also had a research project. If it worked out,
he'd be one of the great names in medicine; like Jenner, Pasteur, and
Salk. The result was that he pushed it and wasn't too careful. He wanted
to be famous."

"He's well known now," Mary said, "at least within the profession."

"Quite," Kramer said dryly. "He was working with gamma radiations on
microorganisms, trying to produce a mutated strain of _Micrococcus
pyogenes_ that would have enhanced antigenic properties."

"Wait a minute, doctor. It's been four years since I was active in
nursing. Translation, please."

Kramer chuckled. "He was trying to make a vaccine out of a common
infectious organism. You may know it better as _Staphylococcus_. As you
know, it's a pus former that's made hospital life more dangerous than it
should be because it develops resistance to antibiotics. What Thurston
wanted to do was to produce a strain that would stimulate resistance in
the patient without causing disease--something that would help patients
protect themselves rather than rely upon doubtfully effective
antibiotics."

"That wasn't a bad idea."

"There was nothing wrong with it. The only trouble was that he wound up
with something else entirely. He was like the man who wanted to make a
plastic suitable for children's toys and ended up with a new explosive.
You see, what Thurston didn't realize was that his cultures were
contaminated. He'd secured them from the University Clinic and had, so
he thought, isolated them. But somehow he'd brought a virus
along--probably one of the orphan group or possibly a phage."

"Orphan?"

"Yes--one that was not a normal inhabitant of human tissues. At any rate
there was a virus--and he mutated it rather than the bacteria. Actually,
it was simple enough, relatively speaking, since a virus is infinitely
simpler in structure than a bacterium, and hence much easier to modify
with ionizing radiation. So he didn't produce an antigen--he produced a
disease instead. Naturally, he contracted it, and during the period
between his infection and death he managed to infect the entire
hospital. Before anyone realized what they were dealing with, the
disease jumped from the hospital to the college, and from the college to
the city, and from the city to--"

"Yes, I know that part of it. It's all over the world now--killing
people by the millions."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Well," Kramer said, "at least it's solved the population explosion." He
blew a cloud of blue smoke in Mary's direction. "And it did make
Thurston famous. His name won't be quickly forgotten."

She coughed. "I doubt if it ever will be," she said, "but it won't be
remembered the way he intended."

He looked at her suspiciously. "That cough--"

"No, it's not Thurston's Disease. It's that pipe. It's rancid."

"It helps me think," Kramer said.

"You could try cigarettes--or candy," she suggested.

"I'd rather smoke a pipe."

"There's cancer of the lip and tongue," she said helpfully.

"Don't quote Ochsner. I don't agree with him. And besides, you smoke
cigarettes, which are infinitely worse."

"Only four or five a day. I don't saturate my system with nicotine."

"In another generation," Kramer observed, "you'd have run through the
streets of the city brandishing an ax smashing saloons. You're a lineal
descendent of Carrie Nation." He puffed quietly until his head was
surrounded by a nimbus of smoke. "Stop trying to reform me," he added.
"You haven't been here long enough."

"Not even God could do that, according to the reports I've heard," she
said.

He laughed. "I suppose my reputation gets around."

"It does. You're an opinionated slave driver, a bully, an intellectual
tyrant, and the best pathologist in this center."

"The last part of that sentence makes up for unflattering honesty of the
first," Kramer said. "At any rate, once we realized the situation we
went to work to correct it. Institutes like this were established
everywhere the disease appeared for the sole purpose of examining,
treating, and experimenting with the hope of finding a cure. This
section exists for the evaluation of treatment. We check the human
cases, and the primates in the experimental laboratories. It is our
duty to find out if anything the boys upstairs try shows any promise. We
were a pretty big section once, but Thurston's virus has whittled us
down. Right now there is just you and me. But there's still enough work
to keep us busy. The experiments are still going on, and there are still
human cases, even though the virus has killed off most of the
susceptibles. We've evaluated over a thousand different drugs and
treatments in this Institute alone."

"And none of them have worked?"

"No--but that doesn't mean the work's been useless. The research has
saved others thousands of man hours chasing false leads. In this
business negative results are almost as important as positive ones. We
may never discover the solution, but our work will keep others from
making the same mistakes."

"I never thought of it that way."

"People seldom do. But if you realize that this is international, that
every worker on Thurston's Disease has a niche to fill, the picture will
be clearer. We're doing our part inside the plan. Others are, too. And
there are thousands of labs involved. Somewhere, someone will find the
answer. It probably won't be us, but we'll help get the problem solved
as quickly as possible. That's the important thing. It's the biggest
challenge the race has ever faced--and the most important. It's a
question of survival." Kramer's voice was sober. "We have to solve this.
If Thurston's Disease isn't checked, the human race will become
extinct. As a result, for the first time in history all mankind is
working together."

"All? You mean the Communists are, too?"

"Of course. What's an ideology if there are no people to follow it?"
Kramer knocked the ashes out of his pipe, looked at the laboratory clock
and shrugged. "Ten minutes more," he said, "and these tubes will be
ready. Keep an eye on that clock and let me know. Meantime you can
straighten up this lab and find out where things are. I'll be in the
office checking the progress reports." He turned abruptly away, leaving
her standing in the middle of the cluttered laboratory.

"Now what am I supposed to do here?" Mary wondered aloud. "Clean up, he
says. Find out where things are, he says. Get acquainted with the place,
he says. I could spend a month doing that." She looked at the littered
bench, the wall cabinets with sliding doors half open, the jars of
reagents sitting on the sink, the drainboard, on top of the refrigerator
and on the floor. The disorder was appalling. "How he ever manages to
work in here is beyond me. I suppose that I'd better start
somewhere--perhaps I can get these bottles in some sort of order first."
She sighed and moved toward the wall cabinets. "Oh well," she mused, "I
asked for this."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Didn't you hear that buzzer?" Kramer asked.

"Was that for me?" Mary said, looking up from a pile of bottles and
glassware she was sorting.

"Partly. It means they've sent us another post-mortem from upstairs."

"What is it?"

"I don't know--man or monkey, it makes no difference. Whatever it is,
it's Thurston's Disease. Come along. You might as well see what goes on
in our ultra modern necropsy suite."

"I'd like to." She put down the bottle she was holding and followed him
to a green door at the rear of the laboratory.

"Inside," Kramer said, "you will find a small anteroom, a shower, and a
dressing room. Strip, shower, and put on a clean set of lab coveralls
and slippers which you will find in the dressing room. You'll find
surgical masks in the wall cabinet beside the lockers. Go through the
door beyond the dressing room and wait for me there. I'll give you ten
minutes."

       *       *       *       *       *

"We do this both ways," Kramer said as he joined her in the narrow hall
beyond the dressing room. "We'll reverse the process going out."

"You certainly carry security to a maximum," she said through the mask
that covered the lower part of her face.

"You haven't seen anything yet," he said as he opened a door in the
hall. "Note the positive air pressure," he said. "Theoretically nothing
can get in here except what we bring with us. And we try not to bring
anything." He stood aside to show her the glassed-in cubicle overhanging
a bare room dominated by a polished steel post-mortem table that
glittered in the harsh fluorescent lighting. Above the table a number of
jointed rods and clamps hung from the ceiling. A low metal door and
series of racks containing instruments and glassware were set into the
opposite wall together with the gaping circular orifice of an open
autoclave.

"We work by remote control, just like they do at the AEC. See those
handlers?" He pointed to the control console set into a small stainless
steel table standing beside the sheet of glass at the far end of the
cubicle. "They're connected to those gadgets up there." He indicated the
jointed arms hanging over the autopsy table in the room beyond. "I could
perform a major operation from here and never touch the patient. Using
these I can do anything I could in person with the difference that
there's a quarter inch of glass between me and my work. I have controls
that let me use magnifiers, and even do microdissection, if necessary."

"Where's the cadaver?" Mary asked.

"Across the room, behind that door," he said, waving at the low, sliding
metal partition behind the table. "It's been prepped, decontaminated and
ready to go."

"What happens when you're through?"

"Watch." Dr. Kramer pressed a button on the console in front of him. A
section of flooring slid aside and the table tipped. "The cadaver slides
off that table and through that hole. Down below is a highly efficient
crematorium."

Mary shivered. "Neat and effective," she said shakily.

"After that the whole room is sprayed with germicide and sterilized with
live steam. The instruments go into the autoclave, and thirty minutes
later we're ready for another post-mortem."

"We use the handlers to put specimens into those jars," he said,
pointing to a row of capped glass jars of assorted sizes on a wall rack
behind the table. "After they're capped, the jars go onto that carrier
beside the table. From here they pass through a decontamination chamber
and into the remote-control laboratory across the hall where we can run
biochemical and histological techniques. Finished slides and mounted
specimens then go through another decontamination process to the outside
lab. Theoretically, this place is proof against anything."

"It seems to be," Mary said, obviously impressed. "I've never seen
anything so elegant."

"Neither did I until Thurston's Disease became a problem." Kramer
shrugged and sat down behind the controls. "Watch, now," he said as he
pressed a button. "Let's see what's on deck--man or monkey. Want to make
a bet? I'll give you two to one it's a monkey."

She shook her head.

       *       *       *       *       *

The low door slid aside and a steel carriage emerged into the necropsy
room bearing the nude body of a man. The corpse gleamed pallidly under
the harsh shadowless glare of the fluorescents in the ceiling as Kramer,
using the handlers, rolled it onto the post-mortem table and clamped it
in place on its back. He pushed another button and the carriage moved
back into the wall and the steel door slid shut. "That'll be
decontaminated," he said, "and sent back upstairs for another body. I'd
have lost," he remarked idly. "Lately the posts have been running three
to one in favor of monkeys."

[Illustration]

He moved a handler and picked up a heavy scalpel from the instrument
rack. "There's a certain advantage to this," he said as he moved the
handler delicately. "These gadgets give a tremendous mechanical
advantage. I can cut right through small bones and cartilage without
using a saw."

"How nice," Mary said. "I expect you enjoy yourself."

"I couldn't ask for better equipment," he replied noncommittally. With
deft motion of the handler he drew the scalpel down across the chest
and along the costal margins in the classic inverted "Y" incision.
"We'll take a look at the thorax first," he said, as he used the
handlers to pry open the rib cage and expose the thoracic viscera. "Ah!
Thought so! See that?" He pointed with a small handler that carried a
probe. "Look at those lungs." He swung a viewer into place so Mary could
see better. "Look at those abscesses and necrosis. It's Thurston's
Disease, all right, with secondary bacterial invasion."

The grayish solidified masses of tissue looked nothing like the normal
pink appearance of healthy lungs. Studded with yellowish spherical
abscesses they lay swollen and engorged within the gaping cavity of the
chest.

"You know the pathogenesis of Thurston's Disease?" Kramer asked.

Mary shook her head, her face yellowish-white in the glare of the
fluorescents.

"It begins with a bronchial cough," Kramer said. "The virus attacks the
bronchioles first, destroys them, and passes into the deeper tissues of
the lungs. As with most virus diseases there is a transitory
leukopenia--a drop in the total number of white blood cells--and a rise
in temperature of about two or three degrees. As the virus attacks the
alveolar structures, the temperature rises and the white blood cell
count becomes elevated. The lungs become inflamed and painful. There is
a considerable quantity of lymphoid exudate and pleural effusion.
Secondary invaders and pus-forming bacteria follow the viral destruction
of the lung tissue and form abscesses. Breathing becomes progressively
more difficult as more lung tissue is destroyed. Hepatization and
necrosis inactivate more lung tissue as the bacteria get in their dirty
work, and finally the patient suffocates."

"But what if the bacteria are controlled by antibiotics?"

"Then the virus does the job. It produces atelectasis followed by
progressive necrosis of lung tissue with gradual liquefaction of the
parenchyma. It's slower, but just as fatal. This fellow was lucky. He
apparently stayed out of here until he was almost dead. Probably he's
had the disease for about a week. If he'd have come in early, we could
have kept him alive for maybe a month. The end, however, would have been
the same."

"It's a terrible thing," Mary said faintly.

"You'll get used to it. We get one or two every day." He shrugged.
"There's nothing here that's interesting," he said as he released the
clamps and tilted the table. For what seemed to Mary an interminable
time, the cadaver clung to the polished steel. Then abruptly it slid off
the shining surface and disappeared through the square hole in the
floor. "We'll clean up now," Kramer said as he placed the instruments in
the autoclave, closed the door and locked it, and pressed three buttons
on the console.

From jets embedded in the walls a fine spray filled the room with fog.

"Germicide," Kramer said. "Later there'll be steam. That's all for
now. Do you want to go?"

Mary nodded.

"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 God 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 associate 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 passed 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
space 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 shell 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 authored 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 advertisements 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 mass
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 passivity 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 amusement
whether Walter Kramer would be as impersonal as he was with the others,
when he performed the post-mortem on her body. She shivered at the
thought of that bare sterile room and the shining 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 button.

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 classic 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 passed 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."




Transcriber's Note:

    This etext was produced from _Analog Science Fact and Science
    Fiction_ February 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any
    evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
    Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without
    note.