“How come that suit?”
“We brought you from Piedmont. There was a disease in Piedmont. You are now in an isolation chamber.”
“You mean I’m contagious?”
“Well, we don’t know for sure. But we must–”
“Listen,” he said, suddenly trying to get up, “this place gives me the creeps. I’m getting out of here. I don’t like it here.”
He struggled in the bed, trying to move against the straps. Hall pushed him back gently.
“Just relax, Mr. Jackson. Everything will be all right, but you must relax. You’ve been a sick man.”
Slowly, Jackson lay back. Then: “I want a cigarette.”
“I’m afraid you can’t have one.”
“What the hell, I want one.”
“I’m sorry, smoking is not allowed.”
“Look here, young fella, when you’ve lived as long as I have you’ll know what you can do and what you can’t do. They told me before. None of that Mexican food, no liquor, no butts. I tried it for a spell. You know how that makes a body feel? Terrible, just terrible.”
“Who told you?”
“The doctors.”
“What doctors?”
“Those doctors in Phoenix. Big fancy hospital, all that shiny equipment and all those shiny white uniforms. Real fancy hospital. I wouldn’t have gone there, except for my sister. She insisted. She lives in Phoenix, you know, with that husband of hers, George. Stupid ninny. I didn’t want no fancy hospital, I just wanted to rest up, is all. But she insisted, so I went.”
“When was this?”
“Last year. June it was, or July.”
“Why did you go to the hospital?”
“Why does anybody go to the hospital? I was sick, dammit.”
“What was your problem?”
“This damn stomach of mine, same as always.”
“Bleeding?”
“Hell, bleeding. Every time I hiccoughed I came up with blood. Never knew a body had so much blood in it.”
“Bleeding in your stomach?”
“Yeah. Like I said, I had it before. All these needles stuck in you–” he nodded to the intravenous lines– “and all the blood going into you. Phoenix last year, and then Tucson the year before that. Now, Tucson was a right nice place. Right nice. Had me a pretty little nurse and all.” Abruptly, he closed his mouth. “How old are you, son, anyhow? You don’t seem old enough to be a doctor.
“I’m a surgeon,” Hall said.
“Surgeon! Oh no you don’t. They kept trying to get me to do it, and I kept saying, Not on your sweet life. No indeedy. Not taking it out of me.”
“You’ve had an ulcer for two years?”
“A bit more. The pains started out of the clear blue. Thought I had a touch of indigestion, you know, until the bleeding started up.”
A two-year history, Hall thought. Definitely ulcer, not cancer.
“And you went to the hospital?”
“Yep. Fixed me up fine. Warned me off spicy foods and hard stuff and cigarettes. And I tried, sonny, I sure did. But it wasn’t no good. A man gets used to his pleasures.
“So in a year, you were back in the hospital.”
“Yeah. Big old place in Phoenix, with that stupid ninny George and my sister visiting me every day. He’s a book-learning fool, you know. Lawyer. Talks real big, but he hasn’t got the sense God gave a grasshopper’s behind.”
“And they wanted to operate in Phoenix?”
“Sure they did. No offense, sonny, but any doctor’ll operate on you, give him half a chance. It’s the way they think. I just told them I’d gone this far with my old stomach, and I reckoned Id finish the stretch with it.”
“When did you leave the hospital?”
“Must have been early August sometime. First week, or thereabouts.”
“And when did you start smoking and drinking and eating the wrong foods?”
“Now don’t lecture me, sonny,” Jackson said. “I’v6 been living for sixty-nine years, eating all the wrong foods and doing all the wrong things. I like it that way, and if I can’t keep it up, well then the hell with it.”
“But you must have had pain,” Hall said, frowning.
“Oh, sure, it kicked up some. Specially if I didn’t eat. But I found a way to fix that.
“Yes?”
“Sure. They gave me this milk stuff at the hospital, and wanted me to keep on with it. Hundred times a day, in little sips. Milk stuff. Tasted like chalk. But I found a better thing.”
“What was that?”
“Aspirin,” Jackson said.
“Aspirin?”
“Sure. Works real nice.”
“How much aspirin did you take?”
“Fair bit, toward the end. I was doing a bottle a day. You know them bottles it comes in?”
Hall nodded. No wonder the man was acid. Aspirin was acetylsalicylic acid, and if it was taken in sufficient quantities, it would acidify you. Aspirin was a gastric irritant, and it could exacerbate bleeding.
“Didn’t anybody tell you aspirin would make the bleeding worse?” he asked.
“Sure,” Jackson said. “They told me. But I didn’t mind none. Because it stopped the pains, see. That, plus a little squeeze.”
“Squeeze?”
“Red-eye. You know.”
Hall shook his head. He didn’t know.
“Sterno. Pink lady. You take it, see, and put it in cloth, and squeeze it out…”
Hall sighed. “You were drinking Sterno,” he said.
“Well, only when I couldn’t get nothing else. Aspirin and squeeze, see, really kills that pain.”
“Sterno isn’t only alcohol. It’s methanol, too.”
“Doesn’t hurt you, does it?” Jackson asked, in a voice suddenly concerned.
“As a matter of fact, it does. It can make you go blind, and it can even kill you.”
“Well, hell, it made me feel better, so I took it,” Jackson said.
“Did this aspirin and squeeze have any effect on you? On your breathing?”
“Well, now you mention it, I was a tad short of breath. But what the hell, I don’t need much breath at my age.”
Jackson yawned and closed his eyes.
“You’re awful full of questions, boy. I want to sleep now.”
Hall looked at him, and decided the man was right. It would be best to proceed slowly, at least for a time. He crawled back down the tunnel and out to the main room. He turned to his assistant:
“Our friend Mr. Jackson has a two-year history of ulcer. We’d better keep the blood going in for another couple of units, then we can stop and see what’s happening. Drop an NG tube and start icewater lavage.”
A gong rang, echoing softly through the room.
“What’s that?”
“The twelve-hour mark. It means we have to change our clothing. And it means you have a conference.”
“I do? Where?”
“The CR off the dining room.”
Hall nodded, and left.
***
In delta sector, the computers hummed and clicked softly, as Captain Arthur Morris punched through a new program on the console. Captain Morris was a programmer; he had been sent to delta sector by the command on Level I because no MCN messages had been received for nine hours. It was possible, of course, that there had been no priority transmissions; but it was also unlikely.
And if there had been unreceived MCN messages, then the computers were not functioning properly. Captain Morris watched as the computer ran its usual internal check program, which read out as all circuits functioning.
Unsatisfied, he punched in the CHECKLIM program, a more rigorous testing of the circuit banks. It required 0.03 seconds for the machine to come back with its answer: a row of five green lights blinked on the console. He walked over to the teleprinter and watched as it typed:
MACHINE FUNCTION ON ALL CIRCUITS WITHIN RATIONAL INDICES
He looked and nodded, satisfied. He could not have known, as he stood before the teleprinter, that there was indeed a fault, but that it was purely mechanical, not electronic, and hence could not be tested on the check programs. The fault lay within the teleprinter box itself. There, a sliver of paper from the edge of the roll had peeled away and, curling upward, had lodged between the bell and striker, preventing the bell from ringing. It was for this reason that no MCN transmissions had been recorded.
Neither machine nor man was able to catch the error.
18. The Noon Conference
ACCORDING TO PROTOCOL, THE TEAM MET EVERY twelve hours for a brief conference, at which results were summarized and new directions planned. In order to save time the conferences were held in a small room off the cafeteria; they could eat and talk at the same time.
Hall was the last to arrive. He slipped into a chair behind his lunch– two glasses of liquid and three pills of different colors– just as Stone said, “We’ll hear from Burton first.”
Burton shuffled to his feet and in a slow, hesitant voice outlined his experiments and his results. He noted first that he had determined the size of the lethal agent to be one micron.
Stone and Leavitt looked at each other. The green flecks they had seen were much larger than that; clearly, infection could be spread by a mere fraction of the green fleck.
Burton next explained his experiments concerning airborne transmission, and coagulation beginning at the lungs. He finished with his attempts at anticoagulation therapy.
“What about the autopsies?” Stone said. “What did they show?”
“Nothing we don’t already know. The blood is clotted throughout. No other demonstrable abnormalities at the light microscope level.”
“And clotting is initiated at the lungs?”
“Yes. Presumably the organisms cross over to the bloodstream there– or they may release a toxic substance, which crosses over. We may have an answer when the stained sections are finished. In particular, we will be looking for damage to blood vessels, since this releases tissue thromboplastin, and stimulates clotting at the site of the damage.”
Stone nodded and turned to Hall, who told of the tests carried out on his two patients. He explained that the infant was normal to all tests and that Jackson had a bleeding ulcer, for which he was receiving transfusions.
“He’s revived,” Hall said. “I talked with him briefly.”
Everyone sat up.
“Mr. Jackson is a cranky old goat of sixty-nine who has a two-year history of ulcer. He’s bled out twice before: two years ago, and again last year. Each time he was warned to change his habits; each time he went back to his old ways, and began bleeding again. At the time of the Piedmont contact, e was treating his problems with his own regimen: a bottle of aspirin a day and some Sterno on top of it. He says this left him a little short of breath.”
“And made him acidotic as hell,” Burton said.
“Exactly.”
Methanol, when broken down by the body, was converted to formaldehyde and formic acid. In combination with aspirin, it meant Jackson was consuming great quantities of acid. The body had to maintain its acid-base balance within fairly narrow limits or death would occur. One way to keep the balance was to breathe rapidly, and blow off carbon dioxide, decreasing carbonic acid in the body.
Stone said, “Could this acid have protected him from the organism?”
Hall shrugged. “Impossible to say.”
Leavitt said, “What about the infant? Was it anemic?”
“No,” Hall said. “But on the other hand, we don’t know for sure that it was protected by the same mechanism. It might have something entirely different.”
“How about the acid-base balance of the child?”
“Normal,” Hall said. “Perfectly normal. At least it is now.”
There was a moment of silence. Finally Stone said, “Well, you have some good leads here. The problem remains to discover what, if anything, that child and that old man have in common. Perhaps, as you suggest, there is nothing in common. But for a start, we have to assume that they were protected in the same way, by the same mechanism.”
Hall nodded.
Burton said to Stone, “And what have you found in the capsule?”
“We’d better show you,” Stone said.
“Show us what?”
“Something we believe may represent the organism,” Stone said.
***
The door said MORPHOLOGY. Inside, the room was partitioned into a place for the experimenters to stand, and a glass-walled isolation chamber further in. Gloves were provided so the men could reach into the chamber and move instruments about.
Stone pointed to the glass dish, and the small fleck of black inside it.
“We think this is our ‘meteor,’ ” he said. “We have found something apparently alive on its surface. There were also other areas within the capsule that may represent life. We’ve brought the meteor in here to have a look at it under the light microscope.”
Reaching through with the gloves, Stone set the glass dish into an opening in a large chrome box, then withdrew his hands.
“The box,” he said, “is simply a light microscope fitted with the usual image intensifiers and resolution scanners. We can go up to a thousand diameters with it, projected on the screen here.”
Leavitt adjusted dials while Hall and the others stared at the viewer screen.
“Ten power,” Leavitt said.
On the screen, Hall saw that the rock was jagged, blackish, dull. Stone pointed out green flecks.
“One hundred power.”
The green flecks were larger now, very clear.
“We think that’s our organism. We have observed it growing; it turns purple, apparently at the point of mitotic division.”