baffled as Jack was, and would have welcomed help from anyone who could offer it.
And, ironically, the first glimpse of the truth came from the direction they least expected.
From the very beginning Fuzzy had been watching the proceedings from his perch on the swinging platform in the control room. If he sensed that Dal Timgar was ignoring him and leaving him to his own devices much of the time, he showed no sign of resentment. The tiny creature seemed to realize that something important was consuming his master’s energy and attention, and contented himself with an affectionate pat now and then as Dal went through the control room. Everyone assumed without much thought that Fuzzy was merely being tolerant of the situation. It was not until they had finally given up in desperation and Tiger was trying to contact a Hospital Ship for help, that Dal stared up at his little pink friend with a puzzled frown.
Tiger put the transmitter down for a moment. “What’s wrong?” he said to Dal. “You look as though you just bit into a rotten apple.”
“I just remembered that I haven’t fed him for twenty-four hours,” Dal said.
“Who? Fuzzy?” Tiger shrugged. “He could see you were busy.”
Dal shook his head. “That wouldn’t make any difference to Fuzzy. When he gets hungry, he gets hungry, and he’s pretty self-centered. It wouldn’t matter what I was doing, he should have been screaming for food hours ago.”
Dal walked over to the platform and peered down at his pink friend in alarm. He took him up and rested him on his shoulder, a move that invariably sent Fuzzy into raptures of delight. Now the little creature just sat there, trembling and rubbing half-heartedly against Dal’s neck.
Dal held him out at arm’s length. “Fuzzy, what’s the matter with you?”
“Do you think something’s wrong with him?” Jack said, looking up suddenly. “Looks like he’s having trouble keeping his eyes open.”
“His color isn’t right, either,” Tiger said. “He looks kind of blue.”
Quite suddenly the little black eyes closed and Fuzzy began to tremble violently. He drew himself up into a tight pink globule as the fuzz-like hair disappeared from view.
Something was unmistakably wrong. As he held the shivering creature, Dal was suddenly aware that something had been nibbling at the back of his mind for hours. Not a clear-cut thought, merely an impression of pain and anguish and sickness, and now as he looked at Fuzzy the impression grew so strong it almost made him cry out.
Abruptly, Dal knew what he had to do. Where the thought came from he didn’t know, but it was crystal clear in his mind. “Jack, where is our biggest virus filter?” he asked quietly.
Jack stared at him. “Virus filter? I just took it out of the autoclave an hour ago.”
“Get it,” Dal said, “and the suction machine too. Quickly!”
Jack went down the corridor like a shot, and reappeared a moment later with the big porcelain virus filter and the suction tubing attached to it. Swiftly Dal dumped the limp little creature in his hand into the top of the filter jar, poured in some sterile saline, and started the suction.
Tiger and Jack watched him in amazement. “What are you doing?” Tiger said.
“Filtering him,” Dal said. “He’s infected. He must have been exposed to the plague somehow, maybe when our little Bruckian visitor came on board the other day. And if it’s a virus that’s causing this plague, the virus filter ought to hold it back and still let Fuzzy’s molecular structure through.”
They watched and sure enough a bluish-pink fluid began moving down through the porcelain filter, and dripping through the funnel into the beaker below. Each drop coalesced in the beaker as it fell until Fuzzy’s whole body had been sucked through the filter and into the jar below. He was still not quite his normal pink color, but as the filter went dry, a pair of frightened shoe-button eyes appeared and he poked up a pair of ears. Presently the fuzz began appearing on his body again.
And on the top of the filter lay a faint gray film. “Don’t touch it!” Dal said. “That’s real poison.” He slipped on a mask and gloves, and scraped a bit of the film from the filter with a spatula. “I think we have it,” he said. “The virus that’s causing the plague on this planet.”
The Boomerang Clue
It was a virus, beyond doubt. The electron microscope told them that, now that they had the substance isolated and could examine it. In the culture tubes in the Lancet’s incubators, it would begin to grow nicely, and then falter and die, but when guinea pigs were inoculated in the ship’s laboratory, the substance proved its virulence. The animals injected with tiny bits of the substance grew sick within hours and very quickly died.
The call to the Hospital Ship was canceled as the three doctors worked in feverish excitement. Here at last was something they could grapple with, something so common among the races of the galaxy that the doctors felt certain that they could cope with it. Very few, if any, higher life forms existed that did not have some sort of submicroscopic parasite afflicting them. Bacterial infection was a threat on every inhabited world, and the viruses—the tiniest of all submicroscopic organisms—were the most difficult and dangerous of them all.
And yet virus plagues had been stopped before, and they could be stopped again.
Jack radioed down to the planet’s surface that the diagnosis had been made; as soon as the proper medications could be prepared, the doctors would land to begin treatment. There was a new flicker of hopefulness in the Bruckian’s response, and an appeal to hurry. With renewed energy the doctors went back to the lab to start working on the new data.
But trouble continued to dog them. This was no ordinary virus. It proved resistant to every one of the antibiotics and antiviral agents in the Lancet’s stockroom. No drug seemed to affect it, and its molecular structure was different from any virus that had ever been recorded before.
“If one of the drugs would only just slow it up a little, we’d be ahead,” Tiger said in perplexity. “We don’t have anything that even touches it, not even the purified globulins.”
“What about antibodies from the infected people?” Jack suggested. “In every virus disease I’ve ever heard of, the victim’s own body starts making antibodies against the invading virus. If enough antibodies are made fast enough, the virus dies and the patient is immune from then on.”
“Well, these people don’t seem to be making any antibodies at all,” Tiger said. “At least not as far as I can see. If they were, at least some of them would be recovering from the disease. So far not a single one has recovered once the thing started. They all just go ahead and die.”
“I wonder,” Dal said, “if Fuzzy had any defense.”
Jack looked up. “How do you mean?”
“Well, Fuzzy was infected, we know that. He might have died too, if we hadn’t caught it in time—but as it worked out, he didn’t. In fact, he looks pretty healthy right now.”
“That’s fine for Fuzzy,” Jack said impatiently, “but I don’t see how we can push the whole population of 31 Brucker VII through a virus filter. They’re flesh-and-blood creatures.”
