Langley slipped the slide under the focal beam while Chard kept his eyes glued to the photoscreen.
An image leaped into clear, true definition on the photoscreen, an image that changed and flowed only with the activity of life itself. He was looking at a world that no man had ever before seen, the world of infinitesimal micro-organisms and filterable viruses. Sick and appalled at what he saw, the blood pounding through his veins and head till he thought they would burst, stricken into momentary silence and paralysis, he stared at the screen. The mystery of The Whisperers had been solved.
They were living, breathing, organized, intelligent entities! On an inconceivably infinitesimal scale, in an evolutionary pattern alien to everything known to man, they had developed a strange, fantastic civilization. The whisper audible to human ears was the combined sound of trillions and trillions of micro-beings who talked and flourished and evolved through an existence that was time-extended to centuries and cycles for them, but which was time-foreshortened to moments and hours in the universe of man.
The screen was a blur of such frenzied activity that Chard could merely guess at much that happened. He caught glimpses of micro-beings of feathery outline. He had fleeting impressions of an incredible life urge. The incalculable hosts of The Whisperers lived, struggled, and died for the basic driving impulses of multiplication and colonization, and for ulterior purposes beyond comprehension. Hordes of them shot from the screen. Their vanishing offered to Chard a reason for the astonishing speed with which the plague had spread. They must have passed easily, with or without the aid of devices assembled of body materials, from the partially oxygenic medium of blood to the impurely oxygenic medium of air.
Langley stared in the fascination of horror at the screen of teeming, sub-human life that poured through the cycles of an extra-terrestrial evolution. He realized far less than Chard what was happening, but the little he understood made him ill. He experienced a crawling sensation as though every molecule became separately conscious of the parasytic legions that it nourished. The Whisperers -- multiplying and swarming through his body in numbers that could be expressed in no less than astronomical units --
His scalp prickled. In almost inaudible tones, he mused, "Knowledge! Lord, I'd rather live in ignorance the rest of my days."
The sound of his voice broke Chard's spell of inertia. Langley had done his work and succeeded brilliantly. Without it, Chard could have made no progress. Now the physician thought in terms of the unpleasant realities that always accompany medical analysis. The facts were at hand. The facts must be interpreted. His mind worked with concentrated power to solve the problem. A pathologic condition existed. A great number of potential counteragents were known. Which of them would be most likely to neutralize the condition in the briefest time?
Chard looked as if about to speak, but ducked out of the lead chamber instead. He ran to the telephone and talked for several minutes. When he hurried back, he found Langley by the shelf of narcotics.
The physicist asked wearily, "Morphine or cocaine?"
Chard stated, "Neither. I just called the Television News Bureau and the Department of Public Health. The voice of The Whisperers will be silent within a week. You and I are going to get drunk!"
The physicist looked puzzled. "Have you lost your mind? In the first place, I don't drink, and -- "
"Nevertheless, you are going to be saturated with alcohol by drinking, by intravenous injection, or by any other method you prefer! Narcotics would be as efficient, but the world supply isn't large enough and the cure would be as bad as the disease.
"Alcohol is rapidly absorbed through the lining of the stomach, enters the blood stream, and circulates to every part of the body. I'll give the world a headache and hangover, but all except weaker constitutions will survive. The point is that temporary intoxication to man will be permanent oblivion to The Whisperers. Their existence and spread depend on rational processes. Paralyze their ability to think, eat, or act, and they are done for. A night of revelry for us will be a century of death for them!"
The truth and fulfillment of Chard's prophecy are now familiar matters. It has been regretted that the remedy required extermination of The Whisperers before the secret of their enigmatic civilization was solved. It may never be known whence they came, or whether they themselves constructed the projectile that brought them. The later uses of Langley's invention, and the vast new worlds of knowledge that it enabled man to explore have a value that can not be estimated. The Whisperers are gone. Only a few slides exist upon which their dead, inert forms are preserved, but the sound of their voices is a memory that can never be forgotten.
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