Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  “Better set up beds,” she told George. “Get everyone back into the clinic.”

  “We’re doing that,” George assured her. “That’s what Hal is doing.”

  She went back to the laboratory. Max was pacing up and down, absently running his hands through his black hair until it stood straight up. He stopped when he saw her face and scowled thoughtfully. “They are still sick?’ It was more a statement than a question.

  She nodded.

  “The Cure-all didn’t cure this time,” he muttered. “That leaves it up to us. We have melting sickness, and according to Pat and the hamsters, that leaves us less than a day to find out what it is and learn how to stop it.”

  Suddenly an idea for another test stuck him, and he moved to the work table to set it up. He worked rapidly, though an occasional uncoordinated movement betrayed his usual efficiency.

  It was strange to see Max troubled and afraid.

  She put on a laboratory smock and began to work. She worked in silence. The mechanicals had failed. Hal and George Barton were busy staving off death from the weaker cases and trying to gain time for Max and her to work. The problem of the plague had to be solved by the two of them alone. It was in their hands.

  Another test, no results. Another test, no results. Max’s hands were shaking, and he stopped a moment to take stimulants.

  She went into the ward for a moment, found Bess, and warned her quietly to tell the other women to be ready to take over if the men became too sick to go on. “But tell them calmly. We don’t want to frighten the men.” She lingered in the ward long enough to see the word spread among the women in a widening wave of paler faces and compressed lips; then she went back to the laboratory.

  Another test. There was no sign of a microorganism in anyone’s blood, merely a growing horde of leucocytes and phagocytes prowling as if mobilized to repel invasion.

  ~ * ~

  Len Marlow was wheeled in unconscious, with Hal Barton’s written comments and conclusions pinned to the blanket.

  “I don’t feel so well myself,” the assistant complained. “The air feels thick. I can’t breathe.”

  June saw that his lips were blue. “Oxygen short,” she told Max.

  “Low red corpuscle count,” Max answered. “Look into a drop and see what’s going on. Use mine; I feel the same way he does.” She took two drops of Max’s blood. The count was low, falling too fast.

  Breathing is useless without the proper minimum of red corpuscles in the blood. People below that minimum die of asphyxiation although their lungs are full of pure air. The red corpuscle count was falling too fast. The time she and Max had to work in was too short.

  “Pump some more CO2 into the air system,” Max said urgently over the phone. “Get some into the men’s end of the ward.”

  She looked through the microscope at the live sample of blood. It was a dark, clear field, and bright moving things spun and swirled through it, but she could see nothing that did not belong there.

  “Hal,” Max called over the general speaker system, “cut the other treatments, check for accelerating anemia. Treat it like monoxide poisoning—CO2 and oxygen.”

  She reached into a cupboard under the work table, located two cylinders of oxygen, cracked the valves, and handed one to Max and one to the assistant. Some of the bluish tint left the assistant’s face as he breathed, and he went over to the patient with reawakened concern.

  “Not breathing, Doc!”

  Max was working at the desk, muttering equations of hemoglobin catalysis.

  “Len’s gone, Doc,” the assistant said more loudly.

  “Artificial respiration, and get him into a regeneration tank,” said June, not moving from the microscope. “Hurry! Hal will show you how. The oxidation and mechanical heart action in the tank will keep him going. Put anyone in a tank who seems to be dying. Get some women to help you. Give them Hal’s instructions.”

  The tanks were ordinarily used to suspend animation in a nutrient bath during the regrowth of any diseased organ. It could preserve life in an almost totally destroyed body during the usual disintegration and regrowth treatments for cancer and old age, and it could encourage healing as destruction continued . . . but it could not prevent ultimate death as long as the disease was not conquered.

  The drop of blood in June’s microscope was a great dark field, and in the foreground, brought to gargantuan solidity by the stereo effect, drifted neat saucer shapes of red blood cells. They turned end for end, floating by the humped, misty mass of a leucocyte which was crawling on the cover glass. There were not enough red corpuscles, and she felt that they grew fewer as she watched.

  She fixed her eye on one, not blinking, in fear that she would miss what might happen. It was a tidy red button, and it spun as it drifted, the current moving it aside in a curve as it passed by the leucocyte.

  Then, abruptly, the cell vanished.

  June stared numbly at the place where it had been.

  Behind her, Max was calling over the speaker system again: “Dr. Stark speaking. Any technician who knows anything about the life tanks, start bringing more out of storage and set them up. Emergency.”

  “We may need forty-seven,” June said quietly.

  “We may need forty-seven,” Max repeated to the ship in general. His voice did not falter. “Set them up along the corridor. Hook them in on extension lines.”

  His voice filtered back from the empty floors above in a series of dim echoes. What he had said meant that every man on board might be on the point of heart stoppage.

  June looked blindly through the binocular microscope, trying to think. Out of the corner of her eyes she could see that Max was wavering and breathing more and more frequently of the pure, cold, burning oxygen of the cylinders. In the microscope she could see that there were fewer red cells left alive in the drop of his blood. The rate of fall was accelerating.

  She didn’t have to glance at Max to know how he would look—skin pale, black eyebrows and keen brown eyes slightly squinted in thought, a faint ironical grin twisting the bluing lips. Intelligent, thin, sensitive, his face was part of her mind. It was inconceivable that Max could die. He couldn’t die. He couldn’t leave her alone.

  She forced her mind back to the problem. All the men of the Explorer were at the same point, wherever they were.

  Moving to Max’s desk, she spoke into the intercom system: “Bess, send a couple of women to look through the ship, room by room, with a stretcher. Make sure all the men are down here.” She remembered Reno. “Sparks, heard anything from Reno? Is he back?”

  Sparks replied weakly, after a lag, “The last I heard from Reno was a call this morning. He was raving about mirrors, and Pat Mead’s folks not being real people, just carbon copies, and claiming he was crazy; and I should send him the psychiatrist. I thought he was kidding. He didn’t call back.”

  “Thanks, Sparks.” Reno was lost.

  Max dialed and spoke to the bridge over the phone. “Are you okay up there? Forget about engineering controls. Drop everything and head for the tanks while you can still walk.”

  June went back to the work table and whispered into her own phone. “Bess, send up a stretcher for Max. He looks pretty bad.”

  There had to be a solution. The life tanks could sustain life in a damaged body, encouraging it to regrow more rapidly, but they merely slowed death as long as the disease was not checked. The postponement could not last long, for destruction could go on steadily in the tanks, until the nutritive solution would hold no life except the triumphant microscopic killers that caused melting sickness.

  There were very few red blood corpuscles in the microscope field now, incredibly few. She tipped the microscope and they began to drift, spinning slowly. A lone corpuscle floated through the center. She watched it as the current swept it in an arc past the dim off-focus bulk of the leucocyte. There was a sweep of motion and it vanished.

  For a moment it meant nothing to her; then she lifted her head from the microsc
ope and looked around. Max sat at his desk, head in hand, his rumpled short black hair sticking out between his fingers at odd angles. A pencil and a pad scrawled with formulas lay on the desk before him. She could see his concentration in the rigid set of his shoulders. He was still thinking; he had not given up.

  “Max, I just saw a leucocyte grab a red blood corpuscle. It was unbelievably fast.”

  “Leukemia,” muttered Max without moving. “Galloping leukemia yet! That comes under the heading of cancer. Well, that’s part of the answer. It might be all we need.” He grinned feebly and reached for the speaker set. “Anybody still on his feet in there?” he muttered into it, and the question was amplified to a booming voice throughout the ship. “Hal, are you still going? Look, Hal, change all the dials, change the dials, set them to deep melt and regeneration. One week. This is like leukemia. Got it? This is like leukemia.”

  June rose. It was time for her to take over the job. She leaned across his desk and spoke into the speaker system. “Doctor Walton talking,” she said. “This is to the women. Don’t let any of the men work any more; they’ll kill themselves. See that they all go into the tanks right away. Set the tank dials for deep regeneration. You can see how from the ones that are set.”

  Two exhausted and frightened women clattered in the doorway with a stretcher. Their hands were scratched and oily from helping to set up tanks.

  “That order includes you,” she told Max sternly, and caught him as he swayed.

  Max saw the stretcher-bearers and struggled upright. “Ten more minutes,” he said clearly. “Might think of an idea. Something not right in this setup. I have to figure how to prevent a relapse, how the thing started.”

  He knew more bacteriology than she did; she had to help him think. She motioned the bearers to wait, fixed a breathing mask for Max from a cylinder of CO2 and the opened one of oxygen. Max went back to his desk.

  She walked up and down, trying to think, remembering the hamsters. The melting sickness, it was called. Melting. She struggled with an impulse to open a tank which held one of the men. She wanted to look in, see if that would explain the name.

  Melting sickness . . .

  Footsteps came, and Pat Mead stood uncertainly in the doorway. Tall, handsome, rugged, a pioneer. “Anything I can do?” he asked.

  She barely looked at him. “You can stay out of our way. We’re busy.”

  “I’d like to help,” he said.

  “Very funny.” She was vicious, enjoying the whip of her words. “Every man is dying because you’re a carrier, and you want to help.”

  He stood nervously clenching and unclenching his hands. “A guinea pig, maybe. I’m immune. All the Meads are.”

  “Go away.” God, why couldn’t she think ? What makes a Mead immune?

  “Aw, let ‘im alone,” Max muttered. “Pat hasn’t done anything.” He went waveringly to the microscope, took a tiny sliver from his finger, suspended it in a slide, and slipped it under the lens with detached habitual dexterity. “Something funny going on,” he said to June. “Symptoms don’t feel right.”

  After a moment he straightened and motioned for her to look. “Leucocytes, phagocytes—” He was bewildered. “My own—”

  She looked in and then looked back at Pat in a growing wave of horror. “They’re not your own, Max!” she whispered.

  Max rested a hand on the table to brace himself, put his eye to the microscope, and looked again. June knew what he saw. Phagocytes, leucocytes, attacking and devouring his tissues in a growing incredible horde, multiplying insanely.

  Not his phagocytes! Pat Mead’s! The Meads’ evolved cells had learned too much. They were contagious. And not Pat Mead’s . . . How much alike were the Meads? . . . Mead cells contagious from one to another, not a disease attacking or being fought, but acting as normal leucocytes in whatever body they were in! The leucocytes of tall, redheaded people finding no strangeness in the blood streams of any of the tall, redheaded people. No strangeness ... A toti-potent leucocyte finding its way into cellular wombs.

  The womblike life tanks. For the men of the Explorer, a week’s cure with deep melting to de-differentiate the leucocytes and turn them back to normal tissue, then regrowth and re-forming from the cells that Were there. From the cells that were there. From the cells that were there . . .

  “Pat—”

  “I know.” Pat began to laugh, his face twisted with sudden understanding. “I understand. I get it. I’m a contagious personality. That’s funny, isn’t it?”

  Max rose suddenly from the microscope and lurched toward him, fists clenched. Pat caught him as he fell, and the bewildered stretcher-bearers carried him out to the tanks.

  ~ * ~

  For a week June tended the tanks. The other women volunteered to help, but she refused. She said nothing, hoping her guess would not be true.

  “Is everything all right?” Elsie asked her anxiously. “How is Jerry coming along?” Elsie looked haggered and worn, like all the women, from doing the work that the men had always done.

  “He’s fine,” June said tonelessly, shutting tight the door of the tank room. “They’re all fine.”

  “That’s good,” Elsie said, but she looked more frightened than before.

  June firmly locked the tank-room door and the girl went away.

  The other women had been listening, and now they wandered back to their jobs, unsatisfied by June’s answer but not daring to ask for the actual truth. They were there whenever June went into the tank room, and they were still there—or relieved by others; June was not sure—when she came out. And always some one of them asked the unvarying question for all the others, and June gave the unvarying answer. But she kept the key. No woman but herself knew what was going on in the life tanks.

  Then the day of completion came. June told no one of the hour. She went into the room as on the other days, locked the door behind her, and there was the nightmare again. This time it was reality, and she wandered down a path between long rows of coffinlike tanks, calling, “Max! Max!” silently and looking into each one as it opened.

  But each face she looked at was the same. Watching them dissolve and regrow in the nutrient solution, she had only been able to guess at the horror of what was happening. Now she knew.

  They were all the same lean-boned, blond-skinned face, with a pin-feather growth of reddish down on cheeks and scalp. All horribly— and handsomely—the same.

  A medical kit lay carelessly on the floor beside Max’s tank. She stood near the bag. “Max,” she said, and found her throat closing. The canned mechanical voice mocked her, speaking glibly about waking and sitting up. “I’m sorry, Max. . . .”

  The tall man with rugged features and bright-blue eyes sat up sleepily and lifted an eyebrow at her and ran his hand over his red-fuzzed head in a gesture of bewilderment.

  “What’s the matter, June?” he asked drowsily.

  She gripped his arm. “Max—”

  He compared the relative size of his arm with her hand and said wonderingly, “You shrank.”

  “I know, Max. I know.”

  He turned his head and looked at his arms and legs, pale blond arms and legs with a down of red hair. He touched the thick left arm, squeezed a pinch of hard flesh. “It isn’t mine,” he said, surprised. “But I can feel it.”

  Watching his face was like watching a stranger mimicking and distorting Max’s expressions. Max in fear. Max trying to understand what had happened to him, looking around at the other men sitting up in their tanks. Max feeling the terror that was in herself and all the men as they stared at themselves and their friends and saw what they had become.

  “We’re all Pat Mead,” he said harshly. “All the Meads are Pat Mead. That’s why he was surprised to see people who didn’t look like himself.”

  “Yes, Max.”

  “Max,” he repeated. “It’s me, all right. The nervous system didn’t change.” His new blue eyes held hers. “My love didn’t, either. Did yours? Did it, June?”


  “No, Max.” But she couldn’t know yet. She had loved Max with the thin, ironic face, the rumpled black hair, and the twisted smile that never really hid his quick sympathy. Now he was Pat Mead. Could he also be Max? “Of course I still love you, darling.”

  He grinned. It was still the wry smile of Max, though fitting strangely on the handsome new blond face. “Then it isn’t so bad. It might even be pretty good. I envied him this big muscular body. If Pat or any of these Meads so much as looks at you, I’m going to knock his block off. Understand?”

  She laughed and couldn’t stop. It wasn’t that funny. But it was still Max, trying to be unafraid, drawing on humor. Maybe the rest of the men would also be their old selves, enough so that the women would not feel that their men were strangers.

  Behind her, male voices spoke characteristically. She did not have to turn to know which was which: “This is one way to keep a guy from stealing your girl”; that was Len Marlow. “I’ve got to write down all my reactions”; Hal Barton. “Now I can really work that hillside vein of metal”; St. Clair. Then others complaining, swearing, laughing bitterly at the trick that had been played on them and their flirting, tempted women. She knew who they were. Their women would know them apart, too.