But I knew. With every eye in the room on you, it is easier to voice an opinion than to keep quiet. Particularly as I found that I had opinions.
The meeting was largely given over to moaning and groaning about the utter impossibility of using nine-day fever against the slugs. Admitted that it would kill slugs—it would even kill Venerians who can be chopped in two and still survive. But it was sure death to any human—or almost any human; I was married to one who had survived—death to the enormous majority. Seven to ten days after exposure, then curtains.
“Yes, Mr. Nivens?” It was the commanding general, addressing me. I hadn’t said anything but Dad’s eyes were on me, waiting.
“I think there has been a lot of despair voiced at this session,” I said, “and a lot of opinions given that were based on assumptions. The assumptions may not be correct.”
“Yes?”
I did not have an instance in mind; I had been shooting from the hip. I continued to do so. “Well . . . for example—I hear constant reference to nine-day fever as if the ‘nine-day’ part were an absolute fact. It’s not.”
The boss brass shrugged impatiently. “It’s a convenient tag—it averages nine days.”
“Yes—but how do you know it lasts nine days—for a slug?”
By the murmur with which it was received I knew that I had hit the jackpot again.
A few minutes later I was being invited to explain why I thought the fever might run a different time in slugs and, if so, why it mattered. I began to feel like the after-dinner speaker who wishes he had not gotten up in the first place. But I bulled on ahead. “As to the first point,” I said, “according to the record I saw this morning in the only case we know about the slug did die in less than nine days—quite a lot less. Those of you who have seen the records on my wife—and I gather that entirely too many of you have—are aware that her parasite left her, presumably dropped off and died, long before the eighth-day crisis. One datum does not fair a curve, but if it is true and experiments show it to be, then the problem is very different. A man infected with the fever might be rid of his slug in—oh, call it four days. That gives you five days to catch him and cure him.”
The general whistled. “That’s a pretty heroic solution, Mr. Nivens. How do you propose to cure him? For that matter, how do you propose to catch him? I mean to say, suppose we do plant an epidemic of nine-day fever in Zone Red, it would take some incredibly fast footwork—in the face of stubborn resistance, remember—to locate and treat more than fifty million people before they died of the fever.”
It was a hot potato, so I slung it right back. I wondered as I did so how many “experts” made their names by passing the buck. “As to the second question, that is a logistical and tactical problem—your problem, not mine. As to the first, there is your expert.” I pointed to Dr. Hazelhurst. “Ask him.”
Hazelhurst huffed and puffed and I knew how he felt. Insufficient former art . . . more research needed . . . experiments would be required . . . he seemed to recall that some work had been done toward an antitoxin treatment but the vaccine for immunizing had proven so successful that he was not sure the antitoxin had ever been perfected. Anyway, everyone who went to Venus nowadays was immunized before leaving. He concluded lamely by saying that the study of the exotic diseases of Venus was necessarily still in its infancy.
The general interrupted him as he was finishing. “This antitoxin business—how soon can you find out about it?”
Hazelhurst said he would get after it at once, there was a man at the Sorbonne he wanted to phone.
“Do so,” his commanding officer said. “You are excused.”
Hazelhurst came buzzing at our door before breakfast the next morning. I was annoyed but tried not to show it when I stepped out into the passage to see him. “Sorry to wake you,” he said, “but you were right about that antitoxin matter.”