by Robert Reed
wiping her nose with a pink facial tissue . “All their little childred
starvig to death .”
“Say, you have got a cold,” said Phillip, sniffing. “You’ve got on
enough perfume to fell an ox .” He wiped away tears and grinned at
her. “Come on now, fix your face. Dinner at the Driftwood? I hear
they have marvelous lamb chops .”
It was a mellow evening . The lamb chops were delectable—
the tastiest lamb chops he had ever eaten, he thought, even being
blessed with as good a cook as Ellie for a spouse . Ellie dripped and
blew continuously, but refused to go home until they had taken in a
movie, and stopped by to dance a while . “I hardly ever gedt to see
THE COFFIN CURE, by Alan E. Nourse | 1294
you eddy bore,” she said . “All because of that dasty bedicide you’re
givig people .”
It was true, of course . The work at the lab was endless . They
danced, but came home early nevertheless . Phillip needed all the
sleep he could get .
He awoke once during the night to a parade of sneezes from his
wife, and rolled over, frowning sleepily to himself . It was ignomini-
ous, in a way—his own wife refusing the fruit of all those months
of work .
And cold or no cold, she surely was using a whale of a lot of
perfume .
He awoke, suddenly, began to stretch, and sat bolt upright in bed,
staring wildly about the room . Pale morning sunlight drifted in the
window . Downstairs he heard Ellie stirring in the kitchen .
For a moment he thought he was suffocating . He leaped out of
bed, stared at the vanity table across the room . “Somebody’s spilled
the whole damned bottle—”
The heavy sick-sweet miasma hung like a cloud around him,
drenching the room . With every breath it grew thicker . He searched
the table top frantically, but there were no empty bottles . His head
began to spin from the sickening effluvium.
He blinked in confusion, his hand trembling as he lit a cigarette .
No need to panic, he thought . She probably knocked a bottle over
when she was dressing . He took a deep puff, and burst into a parox-
ysm of coughing as acrid fumes burned down his throat to his lungs .
“Ellie!” He rushed into the hall, still coughing . The match smell
had given way to the harsh, caustic stench of burning weeds . He
stared at his cigarette in horror and threw it into the sink . The smell
grew worse . He threw open the hall closet, expecting smoke to come
billowing out . “Ellie! Somebody’s burning down the house!”
“Whadtever are you talking about?” Ellie’s voice came from the
stair well . “It’s just the toast I burned, silly .”
He rushed down the stairs two at a time—and nearly gagged as
he reached the bottom . The smell of hot, rancid grease struck him
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like a solid wall . It was intermingled with an oily smell of boiled
and parboiled coffee, overpowering in its intensity . By the time he
reached the kitchen he was holding his nose, tears pouring from his
eyes . “Ellie, what are you doing in here? ”
She stared at him . “I’b baking breakfast .”
“But don’t you smell it?”
“Sbell whadt?” said Ellie .
On the stove the automatic percolator was making small, promis-
ing noises . In the frying pan four sunnyside eggs were sizzling; half
a dozen strips of bacon drained on a paper towel on the sideboard . It
couldn’t have looked more innocent .
Cautiously, Phillip released his nose, sniffed . The stench nearly
choked him . “You mean you don’t smell anything strange?”
“I did’t sbell eddythig, period,” said Ellie defensively .
“The coffee, the bacon— come here a minute .”
She reeked—of bacon, of coffee, of burned toast, but mostly of
perfume . “Did you put on any fresh perfume this morning?”
“Before breakfast? Dod’t be ridiculous .”
“Not even a drop?” Phillip was turning very white .
“Dot a drop .”
He shook his head . “Now, wait a minute . This must be all in
my mind . I’m—just imagining things, that’s all . Working too hard,
hysterical reaction . In a minute it’ll all go away .” He poured a cup
of coffee, added cream and sugar .
But he couldn’t get it close enough to taste it . It smelled as if it
had been boiling three weeks in a rancid pot . It was the smell of cof-
fee, all right, but a smell that was fiendishly distorted, overpower-
ingly, nauseatingly magnified. It pervaded the room and burned his
throat and brought tears gushing to his eyes .
Slowly, realization began to dawn . He spilled the coffee as he set
the cup down . The perfume . The coffee . The cigarette .…
“My hat,” he choked . “Get me my hat . I’ve got to get to the labo-
ratory .”
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It got worse all the way downtown . He fought down waves of
nausea as the smell of damp, rotting earth rose from his front yard in
a gray cloud . The neighbor’s dog dashed out to greet him, exuding
the great-grandfather of all doggy odors . As Phillip waited for the
bus, every passing car fouled the air with noxious fumes, gagging
him, doubling him up with coughing as he dabbed at his streaming
eyes .
Nobody else seemed to notice anything wrong at all .
The bus ride was a nightmare . It was a damp, rainy day; the inside
of the bus smelled like the men’s locker room after a big game . A
bleary-eyed man with three-days’ stubble on his chin flopped down
in the seat next to him, and Phillip reeled back with a jolt to the job
he had held in his student days, cleaning vats in the brewery .
“It’sh a great morning,” Bleary-eyes breathed at him, “huh, Doc?”
Phillip blanched . To top it, the man had had a breakfast of salami . In
the seat ahead, a fat man held a dead cigar clamped in his mouth like
a rank growth . Phillip’s stomach began rolling; he sank his face into
his hand, trying unobtrusively to clamp his nostrils . With a groan of
deliverance he lurched off the bus at the laboratory gate .
He met Jake Miles coming up the steps . Jake looked pale, too
pale .
“Morning,” Phillip said weakly . “Nice day . Looks like the sun
might come through .”
“Yeah,” said Jake . “Nice day . You—uh—feel all right this morn-
ing?”
“Fine, fine.” Phillip tossed his hat in the closet, opened the in-
cubator on his culture tubes, trying to look busy . He slammed the
door after one whiff and gripped the edge of the work table with
whitening knuckles . “Why?”
“Oh, nothing . Thought you looked a little peaked, was all .”
They stared at each other in silence . Then, as though by signal,
their eyes turned to the office at the end of the lab.
“Coffin come in yet?”
Jake nodded . “He’s in there . He’s got the door locked .”
“I think he’s going to have to open it,” said Phillip .
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RE, by Alan E. Nourse | 1297
A gray-faced Dr. Coffin unlocked the door, backed quickly to-
ward the wall . The room reeked of kitchen deodorant . “Stay right
where you are,” Coffin squeaked. “Don’t come a step closer. I can’t
see you now . I’m—I’m busy, I’ve got work that has to be done—”
“You’re telling me,” growled Phillip . He motioned Jake into
the office and locked the door carefully. Then he turned to Coffin.
“When did it start for you?”
Coffin was trembling. “Right after supper last night. I thought I
was going to suffocate . Got up and walked the streets all night . My
God, what a stench!”
“Jake?”
Dr . Miles shook his head . “Sometime this morning, I don’t know
when . I woke up with it .”
“That’s when it hit me,” said Phillip .
“But I don’t understand,” Coffin howled. “Nobody else seems to
notice anything—”
“Yet,” said Phillip, “we were the first three to take the Coffin
Cure, remember? You, and me and Jake . Two months ago .”
Coffin’s forehead was beaded with sweat. He stared at the two
men in growing horror . “But what about the others? ” he whispered .
“I think,” said Phillip, “that we’d better find something spectacu-
lar to do in a mighty big hurry . That’s what I think .”
Jake Miles said, “The most important thing right now is secrecy .
We mustn’t let a word get out, not until we’re absolutely certain .”
“But what’s happened?” Coffin cried. “These foul smells, every-
where . You, Phillip, you had a cigarette this morning . I can smell it
clear over here, and it’s bringing tears to my eyes . And if I didn’t
know better I’d swear neither of you had had a bath in a week . Every
odor in town has suddenly turned foul—”
“Magnified, you mean,” said Jake . “Perfume still smells sweet—
there’s just too much of it . The same with cinnamon; I tried it . Cried
for half an hour, but it still smelled like cinnamon . No, I don’t think
the smells have changed any .”
“But what, then?”
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“Our noses have changed, obviously.” Jake paced the floor in
excitement . “Look at our dogs! They’ve never had colds—and they
practically live by their noses . Other animals—all dependent on
their senses of smell for survival—and none of them ever have any-
thing even vaguely reminiscent of a common cold . The multicentric
virus hits primates only— and it reaches its fullest parasitic powers
in man alone!”
Coffin shook his head miserably. “But why this horrible stench
all of a sudden? I haven’t had a cold in weeks—”
“Of course not! That’s just what I’m trying to say,” Jake cried .
“Look, why do we have any sense of smell at all? Because we have
tiny olfactory nerve endings buried in the mucous membrane of our
noses and throats . But we have always had the virus living there,
too, colds or no colds, throughout our entire lifetime . It’s always
been there, anchored in the same cells, parasitizing the same sensi-
tive tissues that carry our olfactory nerve endings, numbing them
and crippling them, making them practically useless as sensory or-
gans . No wonder we never smelled anything before! Those poor
little nerve endings never had a chance!”
“Until we came along in our shining armor and destroyed the
virus,” said Phillip .
“Oh, we didn’t destroy it . We merely stripped it of a very slippery
protective mechanism against normal body defences .” Jake perched
on the edge of the desk, his dark face intense . “These two months
since we had our shots have witnessed a battle to the death between
our bodies and the virus . With the help of the vaccine, our bodies
have won, that’s all—stripped away the last vestiges of an invader
that has been almost a part of our normal physiology since the be-
ginning of time. And now for the first time those crippled little nerve
endings are just beginning to function .”
“God help us,” Coffin groaned. “You think it’ll get worse?”
“And worse . And still worse,” said Jake .
“I wonder,” said Phillip slowly, “what the anthropologists will
say .”
“What do you mean?”
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“Maybe it was just a single mutation somewhere back there . Just
a tiny change of cell structure or metabolism that left one line of
primates vulnerable to an invader no other would harbor . Why else
should man have begun to flower and blossom intellectually—grow
to depend so much on his brains instead of his brawn that he could
rise above all others? What better reason than because somewhere
along the line in the world of fang and claw he suddenly lost his
sense of smell?”
They stared at each other . “Well, he’s got it back again now,”
Coffin wailed, “and he’s not going to like it a bit.”
“No, he surely isn’t,” Jake agreed . “He’s going to start looking
very quickly for someone to blame, I think .”
They both looked at Coffin.
“Now don’t be ridiculous, boys,” said Coffin, turning white.
“We’re in this together. Phillip, it was your idea in the first place—
you said so yourself! You can’t leave me now—”
The telephone jangled . They heard the frightened voice of the
secretary clear across the room. “Dr. Coffin? There was a student on
the line just a moment ago . He—he said he was coming up to see
you . Now, he said, not later .”
“I’m busy,” Coffin sputtered. “I can’t see anyone. And I can’t
take any calls .”
“But he’s already on his way up,” the girl burst out . “He was say-
ing something about tearing you apart with his bare hands .”
Coffin slammed down the receiver. His face was the color of
lead . “They’ll crucify me!” he sobbed . “Jake—Phillip—you’ve got
to help me .”
Phillip sighed and unlocked the door . “Send a girl down to the
freezer and have her bring up all the live cold virus she can find. Get
us some inoculated monkeys and a few dozen dogs .” He turned to
Coffin. “And stop sniveling. You’re the big publicity man around
here; you’re going to handle the screaming masses, whether you
like it or not .”
“But what are you going to do?”
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“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Phillip, “but whatever I do is
going to cost you your shirt. We’re going to find out how to catch
cold again if we have to die .”
It was an admirable struggle, and a futile one . They sprayed their
noses and throats with enough pure culture of virulent live virus
to have condemned an ordinary man to a lifetime of sneezing, wa-
tery-eyed misery. They didn’t develop a sniffle among them. They
mixed six different strains of virus and gargled the extract, spraying
themselves and every inoculated mo
nkey they could get their hands
on with the vile-smelling stuff . Not a sneeze . They injected it hy-
podermically, intradermally, subcutaneously, intramuscularly, and
intravenously . They drank it . They bathed in the stuff .
But they didn’t catch a cold .
“Maybe it’s the wrong approach,” Jake said one morning . “Our
body defenses are keyed up to top performance right now . Maybe if
we break them down we can get somewhere .”
They plunged down that alley with grim abandon . They starved
themselves . They forced themselves to stay awake for days on end,
until exhaustion forced their eyes closed in spite of all they could
do . They carefully devised vitamin-free, protein-free, mineral-free
diets that tasted like library paste and smelled worse . They wore wet
clothes and sopping shoes to work, turned off the heat and threw
windows open to the raw winter air . Then they resprayed themselves
with the live cold virus and waited reverently for the sneezing to
begin .
It didn’t . They stared at each other in gathering gloom . They’d
never felt better in their lives .
Except for the smells, of course . They’d hoped that they might,
presently, get used to them . They didn’t . Every day it grew a little
worse . They began smelling smells they never dreamed existed—
noxious smells, cloying smells, smells that drove them gagging to
the sinks . Their nose-plugs were rapidly losing their effectiveness .
Mealtimes were nightmarish ordeals; they lost weight with alarming
speed .
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But they didn’t catch cold .
“I think you should all be locked up,” Ellie Dawson said severely
as she dragged her husband, blue-faced and shivering, out of an icy
shower one bitter morning . “You’ve lost your wits . You need to be
protected against yourselves, that’s what you need .”
“You don’t understand,” Phillip moaned . “We’ve got to catch
cold .”
“Why?” Ellie snapped angrily . “Suppose you don’t—what’s go-
ing to happen?”
“We had three hundred students march on the laboratory today,”
Phillip said patiently . “The smells were driving them crazy, they
said . They couldn’t even bear to be close to their best friends . They
wanted something done about it, or else they wanted blood . Tomor-