“Couldn’t they use something that everyone is immune to?” I asked. “Take typhoid—everybody has typhoid shots. And almost everybody is vaccinated for smallpox.”
“No good—if the host is immune, the parasite doesn’t get exposed to it. Now that the slugs have developed this outer cuticle the parasite’s environment is the host. No, we need something the host will catch and that will kill the slug, but won’t give the host more than a mild fever or a splitting headache.”
I started to answer with some no-doubt brilliant thought when I saw the Old Man standing in the doorway. I excused myself and went to him. “What was Kelly grilling you about?” he asked.
“He wasn’t grilling me,” I answered.
“That’s what you think. Don’t you know what Kelly that is?”
“Should I?”
“You should. Or perhaps you shouldn’t; he never lets his picture be taken. That’s B. J. Kelly, the greatest scientific criminologist of our generation.”
“That Kelly! But he’s not in the army.”
“Reserve, probably. But you can guess how important this laboratory is. Come on.”
“Where’s Mary?”
“You can’t see her now. She’s recuperating.”
“Is she—hurt?”
“I promised you she would not be hurt. Steelton is the best in his line. But we had to go down deep, against a great deal of resistance. That’s always rough on the subject.”
I thought about it. “Did you get what you were after?”
“Yes and no. We got a great deal, but we aren’t through.”
“What were you after?”
We had been walking along one of the endless underground passageways of which the place was made. Now he turned us into a small, empty office and we sat down. The Old Man touched the communicator on the desk and said, “Private conference.”
“Yes, sir,” a voice answered. “We will not record.” A green light came on in the ceiling.
“Not that I believe them,” the Old Man complained, “but it may keep anyone but Kelly from playing it back. Now, son, about what you want to know; I’m not sure you are entitled to it. You are married to the girl, but that does not mean that you own her soul—and this stuff comes from down so deep that she did not know she had it herself.”
I said nothing; there was nothing to say. He went on presently in worried tones, “Still—it might be better to tell you enough so that you will understand. Otherwise you would be bothering her to find out. That I don’t want to happen, I don’t ever want that to happen. You might throw her into a bad wingding. I doubt if she’ll remember anything herself—Steelton is a very gentle operator—but you could stir up things.”
I took a deep breath. “You’ll have to judge. I can’t.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Well, I’ll tell you a bit and answer your questions—some of them—in exchange for a solemn promise never to bother your wife with it. You don’t have the skill.”
“Very well, sir. I promise.”
“Well—there was a group of people, a cult you might call them, that got into disrepute.”
“I know—the Whitmanites.”
“Eh? How did you know? From Mary? No, she couldn’t have; she didn’t know herself.”
“No, not from Mary. I just figured it out.”
He looked at me with odd respect. “Maybe I’ve been underestimating you, son. As you say, the Whitmanites. Mary was one of them, as a kid in Antarctica.”
“Wait a minute!” I said. “They left Antarctica in—” The wheels buzzed in my mind and the number came up. “—in 1974.”
“Surely. What about it?”
“But that would make Mary around forty years old. She can’t be.”
“Do you care?”
“Huh? Why, no—but she can’t be.”
“She is and she isn’t. Just listen. Chronologically her age is about forty. Biologically she is in her middle twenties. Subjectively she is even younger, because she doesn’t remember anything, not to know it, earlier than about 1990.”
“What do you mean? That she doesn’t remember I can understand—she never wants to remember. But what do you mean by the rest?”
“Just what I said. She is no older than she is because—you know that room where she started to remember? She spent ten years and probably more floating in suspended animation in just such a tank as that.”