egg white. Thank God for the botany lab.” She added four more dishes to the stuff already cooking in the oven. “How’re my patients? You guys doing alright?”
John and I nodded, but were concerned. She was ashen-faced again. “Why don’t you lie down a while longer?” I said. “Maybe eat something?” She took my hand, squeezed it. “Thanks, Chief. I’d like that.”
We fed Joan some toast with honey on it, a glass of water, and eased her back onto the cot. “We’ll take care of everything,” I said. She smiled, eyes fluttering, and was out like a light in seconds.
Four hours later we nearly lost Harry, tackled him at the door of sick bay as he was staggering out. We used up the last of the ice and frost to cool him down. He opened his eyes, grabbed my shoulder. “Water,” he said. “I’m burning up inside, Chief.” I looked around again, but the ice was gone. What the hell, I thought, and dipped a cup of water out of the cold tub. Harry gulped it down and I got another. He drank three cups, and went to sleep like a baby.
I’m no doctor, but Harry going to sleep like that gave me an idea. We fed cold water to the others by the cupful. They seemed to crave it, and one cup of the stuff gave me a cramp. But they all slept peacefully the entire night. So much for modern medicine.
John and I even slept some, and in the morning we got to the mess room just as Doc Joan was shuffling towards the oven. She put her hand on the door handle and turned towards us, face grey. “This is it, guys,” she said solemnly. “Hold your breath.”
She opened the oven, took a close look, and screamed, “Yes!”
She took the little dishes out of the oven one-by-one and put them on the table. The dishes with pieces of peppercorns on them were blank, but the four others were streaked with narrow rows of lemon-yellow fuzz topped with bulbous swellings. I thought of mushrooms in the hydroponic tanks on Roosevelt. “Pretty small for killers, aren’t they?” said Joan, and then she turned around and kissed me right on the mouth. Nice. When she turned to John, he backed away from her quick up against the stove. “We did it! We found them! Now let’s see if we can kill ’em.”
Very excited, she was, and I was still feeling that kiss. She sent John and me for more dishes while she rummaged in her pharmacy, pulling out vials of stuff, rushing back to the botany lab and staying in there the rest of the morning while John and I ate cereal, drank coffee, scraped frost and looked in on the rest of the crew. Some of them were getting restless again. Harry moaned, opened his eyes. He looked like a man near-starved to death. “We aren’t going to make it, are we Chief? We’re all going to die here.” A little tear leaked from one eye.
“We found the bugs,” I said, patting him on a bony shoulder. “Doc is testing now to see what’ll kill them. Hang on just a little longer, Harry. We’ll get ’em. Besides, you’ve got to fly this probe for us.”
“They’re eating me up inside,” said Harry, and moaned again. I have never felt as helpless in my life as I did at that moment, and now the others were moaning, twisting and pulling against the straps we’d used to keep them on their cots. Things were heating up again, next to no ice in the machine and one bucket of frost to work with. I tested the tub water with a finger. In that terrible cold room it felt warm.
Joan appeared in the doorway. “We’re cooking again. The rate that first batch grew we should know something by early tomorrow. How’re you doing?”
“Fevers coming again and the dip is warm. The ice machine can’t keep up with what we need, and I think we’ll need plenty before tonight is over.”
“Hold the fort,” said Joan. “I’ve got one more plate to make with a protease inhibitor I found in the lab. When I do that I’ve tried everything I could find. Okay?”
We nodded grimly, and Joan disappeared.
All the action started an hour later.
Alonzo, our electrician, sat up on his cot with a shout and pulled at his restraints hard enough to bend the one inch tubing of the frame beneath him. Black stuff was oozing from his mouth and he was making bluh-bluh sounds while his body jerked and shook. I grabbed him from behind while John ran for the frost bucket and headed for the tub and I screamed, “No! Bring it over here! We’ll never get the tub cooled down!”
John, bless him, did as he was told. “Now get me a spoon and crush up what ice we have left in the machine. All of it.”
John ran as I relaxed my grip on Alonzo, getting in front of him to wipe that horrible spittle from his mouth. “I’m here, I’m here,” I said, near panic myself when I looked into his fear-filled eyes. “Oh, oh, oh,” he said, over and over again.
John came back with Joan right behind him, handed me the spoon and I started shoveling frost into Alonzo’s mouth and he was swallowing it fast.
“What are you doing?” screamed Joan.
I told her about my ice-water treatment, how it had calmed everyone right down. “I think the bugs are in his belly, and they can’t work in cold. Ice or cold water in the stomach shocks them. That’s what I think. It works, Doc. I’ve seen it.”
Joan had reached for the spoon, but now she stepped back and sighed. “What the hell, try it. We’ve run out of options anyway.”
So I shoveled and Alonzo swallowed and, sure enough, in a few minutes he calmed down and licked his lips. “Better,” he said. “Thanks, Chief.” I eased him back on the cot and turned towards Joan, who was looking broodingly at me.
“Okay, we’ll do it your way,” she said.
And we did. Five more times that night.
* * * *
It was two in the morning. Everyone was resting quietly, but there was no more ice or frost. Joan looked at me, eyes sunken and dark-rimmed with fatigue. “It’s now or never, Carl. If we don’t start a treatment soon we’ll lose all of them and maybe even ourselves. Let’s check those cultures.”
I followed her to the mess room where John was making coffee. She went straight to the oven, took out the little dishes one by one and put them on the table, an expression of gloomy despair growing with each trip. She sat down at the table and rested her chin in her hands. “Well, I tried,” she said softly. “I did the best I could.”
I leaned over her shoulder. The dishes were covered with neat rows of yellow fuzz like ripe grain fields seen from a kilometer above. Healthy, they were, and growing. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Sorry,” I said. “You just didn’t have enough to work with on something new like this. I’d better call Roosevelt and let them know.” I looked at John, but he shifted his gaze to the floor in front of him.
“If only I’d—,” she said, then jerked upright so fast my hand dropped away from her shoulder. “Wait a minute!” She pointed a finger, counting dishes, and then squinting closely at them, reading the little labels telling her which drug she had tried. She counted again. “There’s a dish missing here. I had—oh shit!” She jumped up from the table.
“What?”
“The culture with the actinylprotease, I left it in the botany lab when you had trouble with Alonzo last night. It’s been at room temperature all this time.” She rushed out of the room and I was right behind her all the way to the lab. The dish was where she’d left it, a swivel lamp still burning close over the working area. Joan practically leaped at it, eyes inches from the dish. “I think—yes, look!”
I looked. Same thing, like rows of wheat, only fainter, and something was wrong with two of those rows, like locusts had been at them, eating them to the ground. There were jagged, bare lines in a field of yellow fuzz. There was no life there.
“Killed them!” shouted Joan right into my ear. “There’s no time for a better test, Carl. I have to go with it, and now.” She was making calculations on a piece of paper. “There’s no telling what else it’ll kill in a human. As far as I know it’s only been used on small animals before