But now it was out of order, obviously, with the fur brushes worn down until they could generate almost no static against the rod. He groped into the supplies, hoping there would be replacements.
Ames caught his arm. “Cut it out, Adams. You’re in no shape for this. Hey, how long since you’ve eaten?”
Bill thought it over, his head thick. “I had coffee before I landed.”
Doctor Ames nodded quickly. “Vomiting, dizziness, tremors, excess sweating—what did you expect, man? You put yourself under this strain, not knowing what comes next, having to land with an empty stomach, skipping meals and loading your stomach with pills—and probably no sleep! Those symptoms are perfectly normal.”
He was at the tiny galley equipment, fixing quick food as he spoke. But his face was still sober. He was probably thinking of the same thing that worried Bill—an empty stomach didn’t make the itching rash, the runny nose and eyes, and the general misery that had begun the whole thing.
He sorted through the stock of replacement parts, a few field-sistors, suit wadding, spare gloves, cellophane-wrapped gadgets. Then he had it. Ames was over, urging him toward the cot, but he shook him off.
“Got to get the dust out of here—dust’ll make the itching worse. Moon dust is sharp, Doc. Just install new brushes.... Where are those instructions? Yeah, insert the cat’s fur brushes under the.... Cat’s fur? Is that what they use, Doc?”
“Sure. It’s cheap and generates static electricity. Do you expect sable?”
Bill took the can of soup and sipped it without tasting or thinking, his hand going toward a fresh place that itched. His nose began running, but he disregarded it. He still felt lousy, but strength was flowing through him, and life was almost good again.
He tossed the bunk back into its slot, lifted the pilot’s stool, and motioned Ames forward. “You operate a key—hell, I am getting slow. You can contact Luna Base by phone, have them relay. There. Now tell ‘em I’m blasting off pronto for Earth, and I’ll be down in four hours with their plans.”
“You’re crazy.” The words were flat, but there was desperation on the little doctor’s face. He glanced about hastily, taking the microphone woodenly. “Adams, they’ll have an atomic bomb up to blast you out before you’re near Earth. They’ve got to protect themselves. You can’t....”
Bill scratched, but there was the beginning of a grin on his face. “Nope, I’m not delirious now, though I damn near cracked up. You figured out half the symptoms. Take a look at those brushes—cat’s fur brushes—and figure what they’ll do to a man who was breathing the air and who is allergic to cats! All I ever had was some jerk in Planning who didn’t check my medical record with trip logistics! I never had these symptoms until I unzipped the traps and turned ‘em on. It got better whenever I was in the suit, breathing canned air. We should have known a man can’t catch a disease from plants.”
The doctor looked at him, and at the fur pieces he’d thrown into a wastebin, and the whiteness ran from his face. He was seeing his own salvation, and the chuckle began weakly, gathering strength as he turned to the microphone.
“Cat asthma—simple allergy. Who’d figure you’d get that in deep space? But you’re right, Bill. It figures.”
Bill Adams nodded as he reached for the controls, and the tubes began firing, ready to take them back to Earth. Then he caught himself and swung to the doctor.
“Doc,” he said quickly, “just be sure and tell them this isn’t to get out. If they’ll keep still about it, so will I.”
He’d make a hell of a hero on Earth if people heard of it, and he could use a little of a hero’s reward.
No catcalls, thanks.
Syndrome Johnny, by Charles Dye
The blood was added to a pool of other blood, mixed, centrifuged, separated to plasma and corpuscles, irradiated slightly, pasteurized slightly, frozen, evaporated, and finally banked. Some of the plasma was used immediately for a woman who had bled too much in childbirth.
She died.
Others received plasma and did not die. But their symptoms changed, including a syndrome of multiple endocrine unbalance, eccentricities of appetite and digestion, and a general pattern of emotional disturbance.
An alert hospital administrator investigated the mortality rise and narrowed it to a question of who had donated blood the week before. After city residents were eliminated, there remained only the signed receipts and thumbprints of nine men. Nine healthy unregistered travelers poor enough to sell their blood for money, and among them a man who carried death in his veins. The nine thumbprints were broadcast to all police files and a search began.
The effort was futile, for there were many victims who had sickened and grown partially well again without recognizing the strangeness of their illness.
Three years later they reached the carrier stage and the epidemic spread to four cities. Three more years, and there was an epidemic which spread around the world, meeting another wave coming from the opposite direction. It killed two out of four, fifty out of a hundred, twenty-seven million out of fifty million. There was hysteria where it appeared. And where it had not appeared there were quarantines to fence it out. But it could not be fenced out. For two years it covered the world. And then it vanished again, leaving the survivors with a tendency toward glandular troubles.
Time passed. The world grew richer, more orderly, more peaceful.
A man paused in the midst of his work at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Commission. He looked up at the red and green production map of India.
“Just too many people per acre,” he said. “All our work at improving production ... just one jump ahead of their rising population, one jump ahead of famine. Sometimes I wish to God there would be another plague to give us a breathing spell and a fair chance to get things organized.”
He went back to work and added another figure.
Two months later, he was one of the first victims of the second plague.
In the dining hall of a university, a biochemical student glanced up from his paper to his breakfast companion. “You remember Johnny, the mythical carrier that they told about during the first and second epidemics of Syndrome Plague?”
“Sure. Syndrome Johnny. They use that myth in psychology class as a typical example of mass hysteria. When a city was nervous and expecting the plague to reach them, some superstitious fool would imagine he saw Syndrome Johnny and the population would panic. Symbol for Death or some such thing. People imagined they saw him in every corner of the world. Simultaneously, of course.”
It was a bright morning and they were at a window which looked out across green rolling fields to a towering glass-brick building in the distance.
The student who had gone back to his paper suddenly looked up again. “Some Peruvians here claim they saw Syndrome Johnny—”
“Idiotic superstition! You’d think it would have died down when the plague died.”
The other grinned. “The plague didn’t die.” He folded his newspaper slowly, obviously advancing an opening for a debate.
His companion went on eating. “Another of your wild theories, huh?” Then through a mouthful of food: “All right, if the plague didn’t die, where did it go?”
“Nowhere. We have it now. We all have it!” He shrugged. “A virus catalyst of high affinity for the cells and a high similarity to a normal cell protein—how can it be detected?”
“Then why don’t people die? Why aren’t we sick?”
“Because we have sickened and recovered. We caught it on conception and recovered before birth. Proof? Why do you think that the countries which were known as the Hungry Lands are now well-fed, leisured, educated, advanced?