<h3>Plague</h3>
<p>Dr. Feldman leaned back from his microscope and
lighted another bracky weed. He glanced about the
room and sighed wearily. Maybe he'd been better off
when he had no friends and couldn't risk the safety of
others in an effort to do research that was the highest
crime on two worlds.</p>
<p>The evidence of his work was hidden thirty feet beyond
his former laboratory in Jake's village, with a
tunnel that led from another root-cellar. The theory was
the old one that the best place to avoid discovery was
where you had already been discovered. If their spies
had identified his former hangout, they'd never expect
to have him set up research nearby. It was a nice theory,
but he wasn't sure of it.</p>
<p>Jake looked up from a cot where he'd been watching
the improvised culture incubator. "Stop tearing yourself
to bits, Doc. We know the danger and we're still
darned glad to have you here working on this."</p>
<p>"I'm trying to put myself together into a whole man,"
Doc told him. "But I seem to come out wholly a fool."</p>
<p>"Yeah, sure. Sometimes it takes a fool to get things
done; wise men wait too long for the right time. How's
the bug hunt?"</p>
<p>Doc grunted in disgust and swung back to the microscope.
Then he gave up as his tired eyes refused to
focus. "Why don't you people revolt?"<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>"They tried it twice. But they were just a bunch of
pariahs shipped here to live in peonage. They couldn't
do much. The first time Earth cut off shipments and
starved them. Next time the villages had the answer
to that but the cities had to fight for Earth or starve,
so they whipped us. And there's always the threat that
Earth could send over unmanned war rockets loaded
with fissionables."</p>
<p>"So it's hopeless?"</p>
<p>"So nothing! The Lobbies are poisoning themselves,
like cutting off Medical service until they cut themselves
out of a job. It's just a matter of time. Go back
to the bugs, Doc."</p>
<p>Doc sighed and reached for his notes. "I wish I knew
more Martian history. I've been wondering whether this
bug may not have been what killed off the old Martians.
Something had to do it, the way they disappeared.
I wish I knew enough to make an investigation of those
ruins out there."</p>
<p>"Durwood!" Jake had propped himself on an elbow,
staring at Doc in surprise.</p>
<p>Doc scowled. "Clive Durwood, you mean? The archeologist
who dug up what little we know about the
ruins?"</p>
<p>"Yeah, before he went back to Earth and started living
off his lectures. He came here again three years ago
and dropped dead in Edison on the way to some other
ruins. Heart failure, they called it, though it was more
like the two old farmers who ran themselves to death
last month. I saw him when they buried him. His face
looked funny, and I think he had those little specks,
though I may remember wrong." He grimaced. "Mars
is tough, Doc; it has to be. Some of the plant seeds
Durwood found in the ruins grew! Maybe your bugs<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</SPAN></span>
waited a million years till we came along."</p>
<p>"What about the farmers? Did they meet Durwood?"</p>
<p>Jake nodded. "Must have. He lived in their village
most of the time."</p>
<p>Doc went through his notes. He'd asked for reports
on all deaths, and he finally found the account. The
two old men had been nervous and fidgety for weeks.
They were twins, living by themselves, and nobody
paid much attention. Then one morning both were
seen running wildly in circles. The village managed to
tie them up, but they died of exhaustion shortly after.</p>
<p>It wasn't a pretty picture. The disease might have an
incubation period of nearly fifteen years, judging by
the length of time it had taken to hit Durwood. It must
spread from person to person during an early contagious
stage, leaving widening circles behind Durwood
and those first infected. When matured, any other sickness
would set it off, with few symptoms of its own.
But without help, it still killed its victims, apparently
driving them madly toward frenzied physical effort.</p>
<p>He studied the culture on a slide again. He'd tried
Koch's method to get a pure strain, splattering the bugs
onto a native starchy root and plucking off individual
colonies. About twenty specimens had been treated
with every chemical he could find. So far he'd found a
few things that seemed to stop their growth, but nothing
that killed them, except stuff far too harsh to use
in living tissue.</p>
<p>He had nearly forty cases of deaths that showed
symptoms now, and he went back over them, looking
for anything in common that went back ten to twenty
years before death. There were no rashes nor blisters.
A few had had apparent colds, but such were too common
to mean anything.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>Only one thing appeared, about fourteen years before
their deaths. The people interviewed about the victims
might be vague about most things, but they remembered
the time when "Jim had the jumping headache."</p>
<p>"Jake," Doc called, "what's jumping headache? Most
people seem to have it some time or other, but I haven't
run across a case of it."</p>
<p>"Sure you have, Doc. Mamie Brander's little girl a
few weeks ago. Feels like your pulse is going to rip
your skull off, right here. Can't eat because chewing
drives you crazy. Back of your head, neck and shoulders
swell up for about a week. Then it goes away."</p>
<p>Then it goes away—for fourteen years, until it comes
back to kill!</p>
<p>Doc stared at his charts in sudden horror. It was a
new disease—thought to be some virus, but not considered
dangerous. Selznik's migraine, according to medical
usage; you treated it with hot pads and anodyne,
and it went away easily enough.</p>
<p>He'd seen hundreds of such cases on Earth. There
must be millions who had been hit by it. The patent-medicine
branch of the Lobby had even brought out
something called Nograine to use for self-treatment.</p>
<p>"Something important?" Jake wanted to know.</p>
<p>Feldman nodded. "How much weight do you swing
in other villages, Jake?"</p>
<p>"People sort of do me favors when I ask," Jake admitted.
"Like swiping those medical journals from
Northport for you, or like Molly Badger getting that
job as maid to spy on Chris Ryan. Name it and I'll do
my best."</p>
<p>Doc had a vague idea of village politics, but he had
more important things to think of. Most of his foul
mood had disappeared with the clue he'd stumbled on,<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</SPAN></span>
and his chief worry now was to clinch the facts.</p>
<p>Feldman considered the problem. "I want a report on
every case of jumping headache in every village—who
had it, when, and how old they were. This place first,
but every village you can reach. And I'll want someone
to take a letter to Chris Ryan."</p>
<p>Jake frowned at that, but went out to issue instructions.
Doc sat down at a battered old typewriter. Writing
Chris might do no good, but some warning had to
be gotten through to Earth, where the vast resources
of Medical Lobby could be thrown into the task of
finding the cause and cure of the disease. The connection
with Selznik's migraine had to be reported. If something
could blast the Lobby into action, it wouldn't matter
quite so much what they did to him. He wasn't
foolish enough to expect gratitude from them, but he
was getting used to the idea that his days were numbered.
The plague was more important than what happened
to him.</p>
<p>The letter had been dispatched by the time Jake returned.
"Here's the dope for this village. Everybody
accounted for except you."</p>
<p>"Never had it, Jake." Feldman went down the list.
"Most of it fourteen years ago. That fits. About the
only exceptions are the kids who seem to get it between
the ages of two and three. Eighty-seven out of ninety-one!"</p>
<p>He stared at the figures sickly. Most of the village
not only had the plague but must be near the end of
the incubation period. It looked as if most of the village
would be dead before another year passed.</p>
<p>"Bad?" Jake asked.</p>
<p>"The first symptom of Martian fever."</p>
<p>The old man whistled, the lines around his eyes tight<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</SPAN></span>ening.
"Must be me," he decided. "I'm the guy who
must have brought it here, then. I used to spend a lot
of time with Durwood at his diggings!"</p>
<p>There was a constant commotion all that day and the
next as runners went out to the villages and came back
with reports. The variation from village to village was
only slight. Most of Mars seemed to have advanced cases
of Martian fever.</p>
<p>Without animals for investigation and study, real research
was difficult. Doc also needed an electron microscope.
He was reasonably sure that the disease must
travel through the nerves, but he had found no proof
beyond the hard lump at the base of the neck. There
it was a fair-sized organism. Elsewhere he could find
nothing, until the black specks developed.</p>
<p>His eyes ached from trying to see more than was
visible in the microscope. The tantalizing suggestions
of filaments around the nuclei might be the form of
plague that was contagious. They might even be the
true form of the bug, with the bigger cell only a transition
stage. There were a number of diseases that involved
complicated changes in the organisms that
caused them. But he couldn't be sure.</p>
<p>He finally buried his head in his hands, trying to do
by pure thought what he couldn't do in any other way.
And even there, he lacked training. He was a doctor,
not a xenobiologist. Research training had been taboo
in school, except for a favored few.</p>
<p>The reports continued to come in, confirming the
danger. They seemed to have the worst plague on their
hands in all human history; and nobody who could do
anything about it even knew of it.</p>
<p>"Molly reports that your letter got some results,"
Jake reported. "Chris Ryan brought home one of the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</SPAN></span>
electron microscopes and a bunch of equipment from
the hospital pathology room. Think she'll get anywhere?"</p>
<p>Doc doubted it. Damn it, he hadn't meant for her to
try it, though she might have authority for routine experiments.
But it was like her to refuse to pass on the
word without trying to prove her own suspicion of
him first.</p>
<p>He tried to comfort himself with the fact that some
men were immune, or seemed so; about three out of a
hundred showed no signs. If that immunity was hereditary,
it might save the race. If not....</p>
<p>Jake came in at twilight with a grim face. "More
news from Molly. The Lobby is starting out to comb
every village with a fault-finder, starting here. And this
hole will show up like a sore thumb. Better start packing.
We gotta be out of here in less than an hour!"<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</SPAN></span></p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<h2><SPAN name="VIII" id="VIII"></SPAN>VIII</h2>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />