Badge of Infamy

by Lester Del Rey

  XII

  War

  Sometimes it seemed to Doc that war was nothing but an endurance race tosee how many times they could run before they were bombed. He was justbeginning to drop off to sleep after a long trip for the sixthconsecutive day when the little alarm shrilled. He sighed and shookChris awake.

  "Again?" she protested. But she got up and began helping him pack.

  Jake came in, his eyes weary, pulling on the old jacket with the bigstar on its sleeve. Doc hadn't been too surprised to learn that Jake wasthe actual leader of the rebels. "Shuttles spotted taking off this way.And I still can't find where the leak is. They haven't missed ourlocation once this week. Here, give me that."

  He took the electron mike that had been among Doc's' possessions, butChris recaptured it. "I can manage," she told him, and headed out forthe tractor where Lou was waiting.

  Doc scowled after her. He and Jake had been watching her. She was toouseful to Doc's research to be turned away, but they didn't trust heryet. So far, however, they had found nothing wrong with her conduct.Still....

  He swung suddenly into Jake's tractor. "Just remembered something. How'dthey find me that time I stopped in the tractor to use the mike? I waspretty well hidden, and no tracks last in the sand long enough for themto have followed. But they were there when I came to. Somehow, they musthave put a radio tracer on me."

  Jake waited while they lighted up, his eyes suddenly bright. "You meansomething you got from her house was bugged? It figures."

  "And I've still got all the stuff. Now they find wherever we set upheadquarters, though they've always managed to miss my laboratory, evenwhen they've hit the troops around us. Jake, I think it's themicroscope." Doc managed to push enough junk off one of the seats tomake a cramped bed, and stretched out. "Sure, we figured they sent herbecause they want to keep tabs on what I discover. They've finallygotten scared of the plague, and she's the perfect Judas goat. But theyhave to have some way to get in touch with her. I'll bet there's atracer in the mike and a switch so she can modulate it or key it to sendout Morse."

  "Yeah," Jake nodded. "Well, she does her own dirty work. I might get tolike her if she was on our side. Okay, Doc. If they've put things intothe mike, I've got a boy who'll find and fix it so she won't guess it'sbeen touched."

  Doc relaxed. For the moment, there would be no power in the instrument,nor any excuse for her to use it. But she must have handled some secretarrangement during the work periods. She used the mike more than he did.The switch could be camouflaged easily enough. If anyone detected thesignal, they'd probably only think it was some leak in the electricalcircuit.

  Far away, the shuttle rockets had appeared as tiny dots in the sky. Theywere standing on their tails a second later, just off the ground,letting the full force of their blasts bake the area where headquartershad been.

  Jake watched grimly, driving by something close to instinct. Then helooked back. "Know anything about a Dr. Harkness?"

  "Not much, except that he protested sealing off the villages. Why?"

  "He and five other doctors were picked up, trying to get through to us.Claimed they wanted to give us medical help. We can use them, God knows.I guess I'll have to chance it."

  They stopped at a halfway village and hid the tractors before lookingfor a place to rest. Doc found Chris curled up asleep against themicroscope. He had a hard time getting her to leave it in the tractor,but she was too genuinely tired to put up any real argument.

  Jake reported in the morning before they set out again. "You were right,Doc. It was a nice job of work. Must have taken the best guys inSouthport to hide the circuit so well. But it's safe now. It just makesa kind of meaningless static nobody can trace. Maybe we can get you apermanent lab now."

  Doc debated again having Chris left behind and decided against it. TheLobby was determined to let him find a cure for them if he could. Thatmeant Chris would work herself to exhaustion trying to help. Let herthink she was doing it for the Lobby! It was time she was on thereceiving end of a double cross.

  "It's a stinking way to run a war," he decided.

  Jake chuckled without much humor. "It's the war you wanted, remember?They forced our hand, but it had to come sometime. Right now the Lobby'sfighting to get their hands on your work before we can use it; they'rejust using holding tactics, which helps our side. And we're hoping youget the cure so we can win. With that, maybe we'll whip them."

  It was a crazy war, with each side killing more of its own men than ofthe enemy. The runners were increasing, and Jake's army was learning toshoot the poor devils mercifully and go on. They knew, at least, thatthere was no current danger of infection. In the Lobby towns, more weredying of panic in their efforts to escape the runners.

  Desert towns had joined the villages, reluctantly but inevitably, togive the rebels nearly three-quarters of the total population. But theLobby forces and the few cities held most of the real fighting equipmentand they were ready to wait until Earth could send out unmanned rockets,loaded with atomics, which could cut through space at ten times normalspeed.

  There were vague lines of battle, but time was the vital factor. TheLobbies waited to steal a cure for the plague and the villages waiteduntil they could announce it and demand surrender as its price.

  It looked as if both sides were doomed to disappointment, however. Heand Chris had put in every spare minute between moving and the minimumof sleep in searching for something that would check the disease. Itcouldn't grow in an Earth-normal body, but it didn't die, either. Andthere wasn't enough normal food available to permit the switch-over formore than a handful of people. Even Earth was out of luck, since eightypercent of her population ate synthetics. There were ways to synthesizeEarth-normal food, but they were still hopelessly inefficient.

  Jake had ordered one of the villages to rebuild their plant for such apurpose, while another was producing the enzyme that would permitswitching. But it looked hopeless for more than a few of the mostvaluable men.

  "No progress?" Jake asked for the hundredth time.

  Doc grinned wryly. "A lot, but no help. We've found a fine acceleratorfor the bug. We can speed up its incubation or even make someone alreadyinfected catch it all over again. But we can't slow it down or stop it."

  The new laboratory was still being fitted when they arrived. It had beendug into one of the few real cliffs in this section of Mars. The powerplant had been installed, complete with a steam plant that would operateoff sunlight in the daytime through a series of heat valves that took ina lot of warm air and produced smaller amounts hot enough to boil water.

  "I'll see you whenever I can," Jake said. "But mostly, you're going tobe somewhat isolated so they won't trace you. Let them think they goofedwith the shuttles and hit you and Chris. Anything you need?"

  "Guinea pigs," Doc told him sarcastically. It was meant as a joke,though a highly bitter one. Jake nodded and left them.

  Doc opened the cots as Chris came in, not bothering to unpack theequipment. "Hit the sack, Chris," he told her.

  She looked at him doubtfully. "You almost said that the way you'daddress a human being, Dan. You're slipping. One of these days you'lllike me again."

  "Maybe." He was too tired to argue. "I doubt it, though. Forget it andget some sleep."

  She watched him silently until he got up to turn out the light. Then shesighed heavily. "Dan?"

  "Yeah?"

  "I never got a divorce. The publicity would have been bad. But anyway,we're still married."

  "That's nice." He swung to face her briefly. "And they found the radioin the microscope. Better get to sleep, Chris."

  "Oh." It was a quiet exclamation, barely audible. There was a sound thatmight have been a sniffle if it had come from anyone else. Then sherolled over. "All right, Dan. I still want to help you."

  He cursed himself for a stupid fool for telling her. Fatigue was ruiningwhat judgment he had. From now on, he'd have to watch her every minute.Or had she really seen the value of the research by now? She w
asn't afool. It should have registered on even her stubborn mind. But he wastoo sleepy to think about it.

  She had breakfast ready in the morning. She made no comment on what hadbeen said during the night. Instead, she began discussing a way to keepone of the organic antibiotics from splitting into simpler compoundswhen they tried to switch it over to Mars-normal. They were bothhopelessly bad chemists and biologists, but there was no one else to dothe work.

  Chris worked harder than ever during the day.

  Just after sundown, Jake came in with a heavy box. He dropped it ontothe floor. "Mice!"

  Doc ripped off the cover, exposing fine screening. There were at leastsix dozen mice inside!

  "Harkness found them," Jake explained. "A hormone extraction plant usedthem for testing some of the products. Had them sent by regularshipments from Earth. Getting them cost a couple of men, but Harknessclaims it's worth it. He's a good man on a raid. Here!"

  He'd gone to the doorway again and came back with another box, this onecrammed with bottles and boxes. "They had quite a laboratory, andHarkness picked out whatever he thought you could use."

  Chris and Doc were going through it. The labels were engineering ones,but the chemical formulae were identification enough. There were dozensof chemicals they hadn't hoped to get.

  "Anything else?" Doc finally asked as they began arranging the supplies.

  "More runners. A lot more. We're still holding things down, but it'sreaching a limit. Panic will start in the camps if this keeps on. Butthat's my worry. You stick to yours."

  Several of the new chemicals showed promise in the tubes. But two ofthem proved fatal to the mice and the others were completely innocuousin the little animal's bodies, both to mouse and to germ. The plague wasmuch hardier in contact with living cells than in the artificialenvironment of the culture jars.

  They lost seven mice in two days, but that seemed unimportant; thefemales were already living up to their reputations, nearly allpregnant. Doc didn't know the gestation period, but he remembered thatit was short.

  "Funny they all started at the same time," he commented. "Must have beenshipped out separately or else been kept apart while they were switchedover to Mars-normal. Something interrupted their habits, anyhow."

  A few nights later they learned what it was. There was a horriblesquealing that woke him out of the depths of his sleep. Chris wasalready at the light switch. As light came on, they turned to the mousebox.

  All the animals were charging about in their limited space, their littlelegs driving madly and their mouths open. What they lacked in size theymade up in numbers, and the din was terrific.

  But it didn't last. One by one, the mice began dropping to the floor ofthe cage. In fifteen minutes, they were all dead!

  It was obviously the plague, contracted after having their metabolismswitched. Women were sterile for some time after Selznik's migrainestruck, and the same must have been true of the mice. They must havecontracted the plague at about the same time and reached fertilitytogether. Somehow, the plague incubation period had been shortened tofit their life span; the disease was nothing if not adaptive.

  Chris prepared a slide in dull silence. The familiar cell was there whenDoc looked through the microscope. He picked up one of the littlecreatures and cut it open, removing one of the foetuses.

  "Make a film of that," he suggested.

  She worked rapidly, scraping out the almost microscopic brain,dissolving out the fatty substance, and transferring the result to afilm. This time, even at full magnification, there was no sign of thefilaments that were always present in diseased flesh. The results werethe same for the other samples they made.

  "Something about the very young animal or a secretion from the mother'sorgans keeps the bug from working." Doc reached for a bracky weed andaccepted a light from Chris without thinking of it. "Every kid I'veheard about contracted the plague between the second and third year.None are born with it, none get it earlier. I've suspected this, but nowhere's confirmation."

  Chris began preparing specimens, while Doc got busy with tubes of theculture. They'd have to test various fluids from the tiny bodies, butthere were enough cultures prepared. Then, if the substance onlyinhibited growth, there would be a long, slow test; if it killed thebugs, they might know more quickly.

  Jake came in before the final tests, but waited on them. Doc wasstudying a film in the microscope. He suddenly motioned excitedly forChris.

  "See the filaments? They're completely disintegrated. And there's one ofthe big cells broken open. We've got it! It's in the blood of thefoetus. And it must be in the blood of newborn children, too!"

  Jake looked at the slide, but his face was doubtful.

  "Maybe you've got something, Doc. I hope so. And I hope you can use it."He shook his head wearily. "We need good news right now. A couple of bigrockets just reached the station and they've been sending shuttles backand forth a mile a minute. Nobody can figure how they got here so fastor what they're for. But it doesn't look good for us!"