Well, that chance was gone—what they could dig out of Mary had better be the answer. Assuming that some infection peculiar to Venus was fatal to slugs but not fatal to humans—at least Mary had lived through it—then the thing to do was to test them all and determine which one. Just dandy!—it was like examining every grain of sand on a wide beach to locate the one with square edges!
The problem was somewhat simplified by there being no need to check the Venus diseases known to be fatal to Earthmen. Perhaps it had been one of such, but, if so, no matter; we could as well use smallpox. But the list of diseases native to Venus which kill Earthmen is surprisingly short and the list of those which are not fatal but merely nastily annoying is very long—from the standpoint of a Venerian bug we must be too strange a diet to suit his taste. If a Venerian bug has a viewpoint, which I doubt, McIlvaine’s silly ideas notwithstanding.
The problem was made harder by the fact that the types of diseases native to Venus which were represented by living cultures on Earth were strictly limited in number, i.e., the grain of sand we sought might not be on this beach. To be sure, such an omission could be repaired—in a century or so of exploration and research on a strange planet.
In the meantime there was beginning to be a breath of frost in the air; Schedule Sun Tan could not go on forever.
They had to go back where they hoped the answer was—into Mary’s brain. I did not like it, but I could not stop it. She did not appear to know why she was being asked to submit, over and over again, to hypnotics—or perhaps she would not tell. She seemed serene, but the strain showed—circles under her eyes, things like that. Finally I went to the Old Man and told him that it had to stop. “You know better than that, son,” he said mildly.
“The hell I do! If you haven’t gotten what you want from her by now, you’ll never get it.”
“Have you any idea of how long it takes to search all the memories in a person’s mind, even if you limit yourself to a particular period? It takes exactly as long as the period itself. What we need—if it’s there at all—may be subtle.”
“If it’s there at all,”‘ I repeated. “You don’t know that it is. See here—if Mary miscarries as a result of this, I’ll break your neck personally.”
“And if we don’t succeed,” he answered gently, “you will wish to heaven that she had. Or do you want to raise up kids to be hosts to titans?”
I chewed my lip. “Why didn’t you send me to the USSR as you planned to, instead of keeping me around?”
“Oh, that—In the first place I want you here, with Mary, keeping her morale up—instead of acting like a spoiled brat! In the second place, it isn’t necessary, or I would have sent you.”
“Huh? What happened? Did some other agent report in?”
He stood up and started to leave. “If you would ever learn to show a grown-up interest in the news of the world, you would know.”
I said, “Huh?” again, but he did not answer; he left.
I hurried out of there and brought myself up to date. My one-track mind has never been able to interest itself in the daily news; for my taste this dinning into the ears and eyes of trivia somewhere over the horizon is the bane of so-called civilization and the death of serious thinking. But I do miss things.
This time I had managed to miss the first news of the Asiatic plague. I had had my back turned on the biggest—no, the second biggest—news story of the century, the only continent-wide epidemic of the Black Death since the seventeenth century.
I could not understand it. Communists are crazy, granted—but I had been behind the Curtain enough to know that their public health measures were as good as ours and even better in some ways, for they were carried out “by the numbers” and no nonsense tolerated. And a country has to be, quite literally, lousy to permit the spread of plagues—rats, lice, and fleas, the historical vectors. In such respects the commissars had even managed to clean up China to the point, at least, that bubonic plague and typhus were sporadically endemic rather than epidemic.