by Jerry Sohl
"No, Hal. Something's got into me. The whole thing's a challenge now. I could pull out, sure, but I want to be in on the finish."
"You'll be in on the finish all right. Your finish. You said you were in the house. What about catching this plague? If nine people have it like you said, you could be the next."
Travis grinned. "And maybe you're being exposed right now, sitting next to me like this.
Hal blew out a cloud of smoke. "Your idea of humor?"
"Look, Hal." Travis was serious. "We talked to the wives of the first three men who went to the hospital. We didn't find out anything about their actions because the wives weren't around when they could have gone into the Winthrop house. Now there is a way we could find out—"
"We could find out!" Hal glowered at him. "Since when are we conducting this investigation of yours? I only helped you out this afternoon as a special favor. I got a job, remember?"
"O.K., chum. I'll change it to 'I.' If I could see these guys in the hospital I could get the information firsthand. I think that's important, whether or not they ever got into the house. If they did get in, then they must know something about what was in there and what was going on."
"And if they didn't?"
"They must have got in. I don't think germs are so airborne they go around a whole neighborhood like that. No, they must have visited the house some time or other."
"Now you're going to interview these guys. What about that girl? Aren't you going to report that this babe who tried to kill the old man took a pot shot at you in the alley?"
"Supposing I did? You know what Captain Tomkins would say?"
"Sure. 'It's a pity she didn't hit you.'"
"Something like that. No, I'm not going to report the girl. Maybe we'll meet again sometime. Maybe then the shoe will be on the other foot . . ."
Hal put down his cigar, looked at his companion meaningfully. "Know what I think? I think you'd like to meet her again. I think you kind of go for her. I think—"
"Make it two out of three right, Hal, That third thought of yours, whatever it might have been, probably was in error, anyway."
Later Hal slid the car to a stop in the parking lot in the rear of Union City Hospital.
"I still don't think it's a good idea," he said. "You've been exposed at the house. Now you're just asking for it."
"Three things I want to know," Travis said, opening the car door and stepping out under the courtyard light. "First, did they go in the house? Second, why? Third, what did they see?"
"Go ahead, poke around among a lot of people with the crud. It's only me. I just have to drive you home, that's all. And when I do, you can interview me."
"Aren't you coming in?"
Hal shook his head. "Got to finish my cigar. It's good for half an hour or so."
Travis walked up to the ambulance entrance door and opened it. A policeman barred any further entrance into the hospital. It was a policeman Travis did not know.
"What's the big idea?" Travis asked.
"Some mighty sick people in here. What do you want?"
"I wan to see Dr. Collins."
The policeman took a house phone off its hook.
"There's a man down here wants to see Dr. Collins," he said. Then he turned to Travis. "Your name?"
"Is that necessary?"
You want to see him?"
"Gibson Travis."
The policeman relayed this information. There was a slight buzzing of a voice at the other end, but Travis could not make out what it said.
"Yes, sir," the policeman said, hanging up. "You're to go to room ten."
"Is that where Dr. Collins is?"
"Just be a nice boy and go to room ten."
"How about briefing me on this? What's it all about?"
"Room ten is up the stairs and turn left."
Travis walked by him, up the stairs and through a glass swinging door on the first floor of the hospital. Another policeman barred his way.
"Say, what is this?" Travis said. "A hospital or a prison?"
"Where you bound for?"
"Your buddy says I'm bound for room ten."
"Ten? You can't go in there."
"Thanks." Travis started to go down the hall.
"Hey! Where you going?"
Travis stopped. "Just out the front way, that's all. I just found out it's after visiting hours."
"Maybe we better go to room ten after all."
"Well, if you think it's all right, maybe we better. Only I think I can find it all right I'm neither blind nor helpless."
"I better see you get there."
The policeman walked with him down the corridor, turned to a door and ushered Travis into a reception room. He knocked on an inner door.
A heavy-set man with bushy eyebrows and a bald head opened the door. "Yes?"
"Were you expecting this man, sir?"
"Oh, yes. You're Gibson Travis?"
Travis nodded.
"Come in, then."
Travis went into a room filled with clouds of cigar and cigarette smoke. A half dozen men who stopped talking when he entered sat staring at him. Dr. Collins was not there.
"I guess I was misunderstood," Travis apologized. "I was-looking for Dr. Collins. I don't want to break into your meeting."
"Sit down, Mr. Travis," the bushy-browed man said. "I'm Dr. Stone, resident physician here. Dr. Collins is busy upstairs." He took Travis's arm and led him to a vacant chair. "This is Mr. Travis, gentlemen. Mr. Travis, this is Dr. Seabright, Dr. Shearing, Dr. Witkowski, Dr. Wilhelm and Dr. Leaf. Dr. Seabright is with the local health department. Dr. Shearing and Dr. Witkowski are members of the hospital staff and Dr. Wilhelm and Dr. Leaf are with the state health department."
Travis nodded to each in turn. None of them seemed particularly friendly, except possibly Dr. Leaf, who had sort of a wry smile on his face. He didn't like Dr. Wilhelm's glaring black eyes, lowered eyebrows and stern mouth. It was he who spoke.
"So you're the fellow who saw the girl," he said. "What has she got to do with this?"
"I'm afraid I don't understand—"
"Come off it, Mr. Travis. We've been trying to get hold of you all afternoon and evening. Captain Tomkins said you saw the girl. What does she look like? . . . Never mind, don't bother, it isn't really important. The point is: do you know anything about her?"
"No."
"Well, then, how about the diagram?"
"What diagram?"
"The diagram at the Winthrop house, damn it," he snarled. "Do you realize there is an epidemic here, young man? Captain Tomkins said you were at the house with him when it burned. He said you pointed out the diagram to him. Now you don't even know what I'm talking about. I don't think you're telling the truth!"
Travis stood up. "You've got your wires crossed, Dr. Wilhelm. Why should I answer any of your questions at all? I hardly expected a representative of the state health—"
"He's right, Doctor," Dr. Leaf said. "We're all upset, we've been so occupied with this thing . . ."
"Mr. Travis," Dr. Wilhelm said, standing and moving around a desk to come over to him. "Did you get a look at the diagram on the wall at the Winthrop house?"
"Since you put it that way, sir, yes, I did."
"I don't suppose you could tell us anything about it."
"No, I'm sorry. I know very little about electricity—"
"Neither does Captain Tomkins, or anybody else who happened to be at that house yesterday before, it burned down. Nobody has eyes, nobody has a memory—"
"I'm sorry I didn't get my degree in nuclear physics, Dr. Wilhelm," Travis replied.
"What makes you say that?" Dr. Wilhelm was a large man. He came within a foot of Travis as he asked the question.
"I don't see what you want with me, anyway," Travis said. "I'm just somebody who came in to see Dr. Collins."
"I'm not so sure you don't know something," Dr. Wilhelm said. "Why do you want to see Dr. Collins?"
"Well, if you must know, I wanted to interview some of the
patients."
"Morbid curiosity?"
"I want to find out if any of them had been in the Winthrop house, that's all."
Dr. Leaf came up. "I think I can answer that question for you. We have questioned the whole twelve of them— those who are still capable of answering, that is. None of them had been inside the house."
"There are twelve cases now? Well, then, how do you account for—"
"You come with me and I'll show you something," Dr. Leaf said, going to the door. "I'll be back after a bit, gentlemen." He and Travis walked out of the office.
"Don't mind Dr. Wilhelm, Mr. Travis," Dr. Leaf said as they walked down the corridor. "He's in charge and has a tremendous responsibility. He has to make his reports to the state office, you know. Negative reports just don't go."
"I suppose he does have a lot on his mind."
"If only it were something simple like a virus—of course it may be, you know. Viruses are part-living, part-dead bits of matter, too small to be seen under ordinary microscopes, so tiny they slip right through filters that hold back the smallest body cells.
"Little protein molecules they are—the most complicated compound in nature—and a nucleic acid. If these viruses could attack all the body's cells at once, as they might be doing here, they could consume the cells in no time reproducing themselves. Each patient upstairs could be a breeding ground for billions of viruses. It's a wonder it hasn't happened before, if it is happening now.
"Viruses don't have respiratory systems or circulation. They don't respond to stimulation. Ridiculous of me to talk like this. It probably isn't a virus, anyway. But if it were, at least we'd know what we're fighting. Ah, here we are."
They stopped before the admissions desk. To one side of it was a large map of Union City covered with glass
"See all those black dots we've made?" Dr. Leaf said. "Here's the house on Winthrop Street." He pointed to a red dot. "Now look at the black dots."
Travis studied the map. Twelve dots surrounded the red dot about a block and a half in as many directions.
"Well," he ventured, "they're all confined to a small area around the house."
"Yes, they are. It doesn't seem to make much difference which direction from the house. That then crosses off sewage, wind and other means of conveying harmful bacteria, including animal carriers, insects, flies and so on, which would have followed either specific lines or resulted in cases far removed from the source."
"What could cause such a distribution, then?" Travis asked.
Dr. Leaf smiled He was a middle-aged man, a middleweight mart who could have passed anywhere as a successful hardware merchant or banker. His eyes snapped with intelligence, his perpetual smile was contagious.
"Back in there," Dr. Leaf said, jerking his thumb in the direction of room ten, "you upset Dr. Wilhelm by mentioning nuclear physics because that's just what we had been talking about before you came in. He was in hopes you might be able to remember something about the diagram since Captain Tomkins and some of the others didn't. The police captain didn't know whether or not you knew anything about electricity. Dr. Wilhelm asked the policeman to have you drop in as soon as you could. And then you never came in, until just now. He had pinned some hopes on your saying something."
"1 just came in with one idea in mind and then ran into this other stuff," Travis said. "Why all the policemen?"
Dr. Leaf walked over to a lobby couch and sat down, offering a cigarette to Travis. Travis took it.
"Until we learn more about the disease we've got to be careful about it. We've kept everyone out, including newspaper people. By the way, I understand you're a newspaperman."
"I happen to be on a sort of sabbatical leave right now."
"Dr. Wilhelm was saying a little while ago he should have taken the leave he had planned. Then he wouldn't be stuck with this case. All very understandable, of course, except to Springfield, which expects results no matter what you're up against."
"No different from the newspaper business."
"Well," Dr. Leaf said, "I've mentioned virus. Now ordinarily a disease will attack some specific area or give a combination of symptoms or perhaps a general skin eruption as in childhood diseases. This thing we have here seems to be unselective. It hits a man all over, both inside and out.
"Dr. Wilhelm offers a possibility that the people in the laboratory were working with some kind of atomic material, something radioactive. Whatever they were doing may have caused some sort of radiation. Perhaps the experimenters did not realize the deadly effect such radiations would have and when the old man suddenly came down with what he did they knew what they were in for, so,they cleared out. The whole thing of operating with atomics is illegal, anyway. All the more reason to smash everything and then burn the house down. The old man might have been one of the experimenters himself."
"You figure then it's radiation?"
"It sounds a lot more reasonable than inventing a new, deadly virus. We theorize it this way: The old man is experimenting. He gets the full dose because he's closest to the work. He comes down with the effects of exposure first. People in the neighborhood don't come down with it until later, since they were removed from the site of the experiments. Sound logical?"
Travis shook his head. "If it's just radiation, why didn't the doctors diagnose it here at once? They ought to have known enough about radiation." -
"There you have us," Dr. Leaf said. "It's not the accepted kind, roughly speaking. What I mean is nobody ever heard of this kind, if we're going to throw the virus theory overboard. The two dead men and all in the hospital now give no evidence of radiation poisoning. Yet we have administered hexametaphosphate, the antidote for uranium poisoning, just in the hopes it might somehow make some improvement, in case the uranium-carbonate complex has the phosphate in its grip in the kidneys and keeps sending the stuff through the blood stream and not letting it be eliminated. There has been no effect. The reason for that is that it just isn't radiation poisoning."
"How about these Geiger counters? Wouldn't they detect it?"
"We've had one down at the burned-down house and up in the ward where the twelve men are. It doesn't give a flicker."
"What is it then?"
Dr. Leaf shrugged. "You are asking the impossible. The microtome shows every cell of the bodies of the dead men had undergone the same rate of degeneration, when the thin slices are put under the microscope. Biopsies from the living patients show a similar degeneration, though it is not so far advanced.
"Whatever it is, it's something like getting sunburned all over, inside and out, at the same time. Like cooking a hot dog on one of those high frequency outfits. Like a diathermy machine. There is no known agency for producing anything like this."
They sat in silence for a while, then Travis asked, "These men upstairs. What's going to happen to them?"
"They're going to die. The first three might be dead by now, for all I know. They were pretty low."
"Has anyone showed you that diagram the first patient drew?"
Dr. Leaf laughed. "Yes, we've all seen it and we've all had a crack at it. Figure it out this way: You've got this thing, whatever it is. It's driving you crazy. You're in pain, so much pain, I understand, that it took an awful lot of morphine to get him under and they didn't fill him with enough of it until they got him to the room. Now what would you say about the thing a man in such a condition would draw?"
"Dr. Collins seemed to think he was pretty rational at the time."
"Oh, don't misunderstand. The thing may be the key to the whole problem. I'm not denying that. We've all considered it in that light. Dr. Wilhelm says it's just a downright phallic symbol. Others believe it's a keyhole, the address of a house somewhere or something he may have dreamed. We recognize, of course, it does have scientific significance if the old man were the experimenter. It means female. But female what?
"We've gone through flowers, insects, and animals trying to find some sort of 23X order as he wrote in the circle. It has
no meaning for us so far."
"Dr. Leaf, you mentioned something about the old man being the experimenter. He's the guy that got the full dose and was taken to the hospital. What about the people who wrecked the lab?"
"His assistants may have been luckier," Dr. Leaf said. "It's just one of those things. I tell you there are so many odd aspects of this case—I just don't know what to think. Neither does Dr. Wilhelm or any of the others."
Travis ground out his cigarette, got to his feet.
"If you'll pardon my saying so, Doctor, my faith in the medical profession isn't what it used to be. If a half dozen doctors who are supposed to know what they are talking about can't solve the problem, who can?"
"Don't make a wholesale indictment of the medical world, Mr. Travis. We doctors are the first to admit our knowledge of what makes a body tick is pretty basic. We don't always know what a man dies of. There are mysteries galore in the laboratory, on the dissection table, under the microscope. Actually, the thing is probably pretty simple, whatever this is. It's probably right in front of our noses and we haven't figured it out yet."
"How about my making a suggestion or two?" Travis asked.
Dr. Leaf smiled. "Fine. Glad to hear what you have to say. Who knows? You might hit on the answer."
"I don't expect to do that, Dr. Leaf," Travis said, walking back and forth in front of the doctor. "It's just that I'm wondering about an angle."
"What is it?"
"Well, the thought has been coming up in my mind all the time. There are women living in the neighborhood of 1722 Winthrop Street, aren't there?"
"Of course."
"Well, how come none of them has this thing? Why did none of them turn gray?"
"We have discussed that. It's just as much of a mystery as the rest of it."
"Have you thought of the possibility that women might have something which renders them immune to it?"
"Yes, we have. Female hormones, for one thing. We have been injecting some of the patients with that, as a matter of fact. But it has made no noticeable improvement."
"How about the affected tissue? It turns gray and then black and these red blisters and purple patches show up. Does the flesh inside and out die or what?"
"We've examined the flesh, as I've said. The cells seem to just not want to go on living. They do their jobs halfheartedly and wait for death, and death, of course, does come. What really seems to be happening is that the cell no longer produces the materials it needs in sufficient quantities to carry on certain phases of its metabolism. So it dies slowly, producing the blisters and purple patches in a sort of chaotic lack of control—something like cancer speeded up, a form of melanomatosis, the cancer accompanied by dark pigmentation of the skin. But this goes deeper than that.