Murray Leinster

“ It was not likely that the invaders would ascribe the finding of unconscious, stertoriously breathing members of their number to Calhoun. Making men unconscious was not the kind of warfare a plague-refugee would use. Still more certainly, it was not what the invaders themselves would practice. To devise and spread a plague, of course, was not beyond them. That had been done. But they would not disable an enemy and leave him alive. They would murder him or nothing. So when men of their group were found in something singularly close to the terminal coma of the plague, they'd think them victims. ”

“ For dying folk to wash themselves, when even such exertion calls for enormous resolution, is not exactly rational. To help each other try to die with dignity was much more a matter of self-respect than of intellectual decision. But as a Med Ship man, Calhoun viewed them with some warmth. They were the type that has to be called on when an emergency occurs and the wealth-gathering type tends to flee and the low-time-sense part of a population inclines to riot or loot or worse. ”

“ Calhoun lay in his bunk and read Fitzgerald on "Probability and Human Conduct" as the little Med Ship floated in overdrive. In overdrive travel there is nothing to do but pass the time away. Murgatroyd, the tormal, slept curled up in a ball in one corner of the small ship's cabin. His tail was meticulously curled about his nose. The ship's lights burned steadily. There were those small random noises which have to be provided to keep a man sane in the dead stillness of a ship traveling at thirty times the speed of light. ”

“ Here the few doomed physicians awaiting the city's population had worked desperately against the plague. Calhoun saw the trays of cultures they'd made—dried up and dead, now. Somebody had turned over a chair. Probably when the laboratory was searched by the invaders, lest someone not of their kind remained alive in it.
He found the storeroom. Murgatroyd watched with bright eyes as he rummaged.
"Here we have the things men use to cure each other," said Calhoun oracularly. "Practically every one a poison save for its special use! Here's an assortment of spores—pathogenic organisms, Murgatroyd. ”

“ That was the city of Maris III, which had been built to receive colonists from Dettra and relieve the population-pressure there. It had been planned as the nucleus of a splendid, spacious, civilized world-nation to be added to the number of human-occupied worlds. From its beginning it should hold a population in the hundreds of thousands. ”

“ The invaders of the city were immune. Quite possibly the same antibodies Murgatroyd had produced were responsible for their safety. Somewhere, somebody had very horribly used the science of medicine to commit a monstrous crime. But the science of medicine—
A savage idea came to Calhoun. Its practicality might depend on the number of men in the city. But his eyes burned.
He heard a movement across the glade. He reached for his blaster. Then he saw where the motion was. It was Kim Walpole, intolerably weary, trudging with infinite effort to where Helen Jons lay. ”

“ You people have a hitherto unknown plague here. That's one emergency. The present inhabitants of the city haven't got it. That's another. So since I have authority and reason to exercise it if I can, I'm going to the city to take a little action."
"You'll be killed," said Kim.
"Possibly," admitted Calhoun. "But the number of chance happenings that could favor me is very much greater than the number of breaks that could favor the invaders. And there's the matter of colonists. Prospective colonists. You're being hunted so hard that they must be about due. ”

“ Naturally, the local bacteria couldn't compete with the strains we humans have learned to live with. They couldn't symbiotize. So there wasn't anything unknown. There wasn't any cause of the plague."
Calhoun began to work the filter plunger, by the wavering light of the torch. The piston was itself the filter, and on one side a clear, mobile liquid began very slowly to appear.
"Mutated standard bug? Still, if your doctors did cultures and couldn't reproduce the disease—"
"They could pass it," said Kim bitterly, "but they could never find what carried it! No pure culture would!" ”

“ Calhoun swore softly. He ran. He reached the door before which a ground-car stood. He wrenched it open and set the paint gun at work firing a steady stream of vortex rings into the interior. He drew his blaster and faced the outside world.
There was a crashing of glass. Somebody had plunged out a window. There were rushing feet inside. They'd be racing toward this doorway from within. But the hallway—anteroom—foyer—whatever was immediately inside the door would be filled with dextrethyl vapor. Men would gasp and fall.
A man did fall. Calhoun heard the crash of his body to the floor. ”

“ But Calhoun was much more interested in the ground-car he found waiting on the highway, hard by a tiny bridge under which the brook he followed flowed.
The key he'd taken from the hunter fitted. He got in and put Murgatroyd on the seat beside him.
"These invaders, Murgatroyd," he observed, "must be in a bad way. A newly-built city which was never occupied will be like an empty house. There's no amusement or loot to be found in prowling it. They were sent to take over the planet, and they've done it. But they've nothing to do now, except hunt refugees—until their colonists arrive. ”

“ The vision screens of a ship are very carefully fused against over-load burnouts, because there is nothing in all the cosmos quite as helpless and foredoomed as a ship which is blind in the emptiness of space. ”

“ He swerved and roared into dense shrubbery, jerked Murgatroyd free despite the tormal's clinging fast with all four paws and his tail, and dived into the underbrush.
He ran, swearing and plucking solidified droplets of still-hot metal from his garments and his flesh. They hurt abominably. But the man who'd fired wouldn't believe he'd missed, followed as his blasting was by the instant wrecking of the car. The man who'd fired would report his success before he moved to view the corpse of his supposed victim. But there'd be other cars coming. ”

“ Two hundred miles. He saw the thin bright line of sunshine at the limb of the planet. Down to one hundred. He cut the rockets and let the ship fall silently, swinging it nose up.
At ten miles he listened for man-made radiation. There was nothing in the electromagnetic spectrum but the crackling of static in an electric storm which might be a thousand miles away. At five miles height the nearest-object indicator, near the bottom of its scale, wavered in a fashion to prove that he was still moving laterally across mountainous country. He swung the ship and killed that velocity, too. ”

“ Synergy, in medicine, is a process in which when one substance with one effect is given in combination with another substance with another effect, the two together have the consequences of a third substance intensified to fourth or fifth or tenth power.
"I think," said Calhoun when he'd finished, "that by morning you'll feel better—perhaps cured of the plague and only weak from failure to force yourselves to take nourishment. If it turns out that way, I advise you all to get as far away from the city as possible for a considerable while. I think this planet is going to be repopulated. ”

“ Just as they had a built-in unit in their digestive tract to cause the instant rejection of unwholesome food, their body-cells had a built-in ability to produce antibodies immediately the toxin of a pathogenic organism came into contact with them. So tormals were effectively safe against any disease transmitted by ordinary methods of infection. Yet if a culture of pathogenic bacteria—say—were injected into their blood stream, their whole body set to work to turn out antibodies because all their body was attacked. ”

“ A tall, gaunt young man came out of the brushwood, supporting a pathetically feeble old man, barely able to walk. Calhoun made a gesture of warning as the girl Helen opened her lips to speak. The slowly moving pair—the young man moving exhaustedly, the older man staggering with weakness despite his help—came into the glade. The younger helped the older to sit down. ”

“ Suppose the toxins—the poisonous metabolic products—of two separate kinds of bacteria combined to lessen the ability of the blood to carry oxygen and scavenge away carbon dioxide? It would be extremely difficult to identify the pair, and the symptoms would be accounted for. No pure culture of any organism to be found would give the plague. Each, by itself, would be harmless. Only a combination of two would be injurious. And if so much was assumed—why—if the blood lost its capacity to carry oxygen, mental listlessness would be the first symptom of all. ”

“ The brain requires a high oxygen-level in its blood-supply if it is to work properly. Let a man's brain be gradually, slowly, starved of oxygen and all the noted effects would follow. His other organs would slow down, but at a lesser rate. He would not remember to eat. His blood would still digest food and burn away its own fat—though more and more sluggishly—while his brain worked only foggily. He would become only semiconscious, and then there would come a time of coma when unconsciousness claimed him and his body lived on only as an idling machine—until it ran out of fuel and died. ”

“ Outside, Calhoun said:
"As one medical man to another, maybe I shouldn't have done that! I doubt these invaders have a competent physician among them. But even he would be apt to think that that man had collapsed suddenly and directly into the coma of the plague. That polysulfate's an assisting anaesthetic. It's not used alone, because when you knock a man out with it he stays out for days. It's used just below the quantity that would affect a man, and then the least whiff of another anaesthetic puts him under, and he can be brought out fast and he's better off all around. ”

“ Inside it, Calhoun could see the ship of the invaders. It had been brought down inside the circular structure and was dwarfed by it. It gleamed there.
"And we," said Calhoun, "are going to look for a prosaic, probably messy laboratory which people who make a sport of hunting fellow-humans won't find amusing. Characters like these, Murgatroyd, aren't interested in medical science. They consider themselves conquerors. People have strange ideas!"
"Chee!" said Murgatroyd.
Calhoun spread out his photographs. Kim Walpole had marked where he should go and a route to it. ”

“ Medicine on the skin of a human being rarely has any systemic effect. Medication on mucus membrane penetrates better. Ingested medication—medicine that is swallowed—has greater effectiveness still. But substances injected into tissues or the blood-stream have most effect of all. A centigram of almost any drug administered by injection will have an effect close to that of a gram taken orally. It acts at once and there is no modification by gastric juices.
Murgatroyd had had half a cubic centimeter of the girl's blood injected into the spot on his flank where he could feel no pain. ”

“ The man with the broad dark beard ate with enormous self-restraint. Helen fed the weakest oldest man, between spoonfuls for herself, and Kim Walpole ate slowly, brooding.
Calhoun drew him aside.
"During the night," he said, "I got another lot of serum ready. I'm leaving it with you, with an injector. You'll find other refugees. I gave you massive doses. You'd better be stingy. ”

“ If hunters from the city do track us to our drinking places, I'll know how to get more weapons!"
"Yes," agreed Calhoun, and added, "Murgatroyd made the antibodies that cured you. As a general rule, you can expect antibody production in your own bodies once an infection begins to be licked. In case of extreme emergency, each of you can probably supply antibodies for a fair number of other plague-victims. You might try serum from blisters you produce on your skin. Quite often antibodies turn up there. ”

“ Maris III was an Earth-type planet and circled a Sol-type sun, and given similar conditions of gravity, air, sunlight, and temperature-range, similar organisms should develop. There would be room, for example, for low-growing ground-cover plants and there would also be advantages to height. There would be some equivalent of grasses, and there would be the equivalent of trees, with intermediate forms having in-between habits of growth. Similar reasoning would apply to animal life. There would be parallel ecological niches for animals to fill, and animals would adapt to fill them. ”

“ In the computation of probabilities in human conduct, self-interest is a high-value factor. Children and barbarians have clear ideas of justice due to them, but no idea at all of justice due from them. And though human colonies spread toward the galaxy's rim, there was still a large part of every population which was civilized only in that it could use tools. ”

“ A city man found starved in a remote place might have become lost, somehow. But if this man was lost, he was assuredly not without food.
"If there was a ground-car," Calhoun considered, "it wouldn't mean anything. If he dared go back to the city he might have used it, but he wouldn't have been where I found him if he hadn't wanted or needed to leave the city. ”