dials. “They’re jamming our electrical system somehow. I can’t get any turn-over.”
“Try it again,” Tiger said. “We’ve got to get out of here. If they break in, we’re done for.”
“They can’t break through the screen,” Dal said.
“Not as long as it lasts. But we can’t keep it up indefinitely.”
Once again they tried the radio equipment. There was no response but the harsh static of the jamming signal from the ground below. “It’s no good,” Tiger said finally. “We’re stuck here, and we can’t even call for help. You’d think if they were so scared of us they’d be glad to see us go.”
“I think there’s more to it than that,” Dal said thoughtfully. “This whole business has been crazy from the start. This just fits in with all the rest.” He picked Fuzzy off his perch and set him on his shoulder as if to protect him from some unsuspected threat. “Maybe they’re afraid of us, I don’t know. But I think they’re afraid of something else a whole lot worse.”
*
There was nothing to be done but wait and stare hopelessly at the mass of notes and records that they had collected on the people of 31 Brucker VII and the plague that afflicted them.
Until now, the Lancet’s crew had been too busy to stop and piece the data together, to try to see the picture as a whole. But now there was ample time, and the realization of what had been happening here began to dawn on them.
They had followed the well-established principles step by step in studying these incredible people, and nothing had come out as it should. In theory, the steps they had taken should have yielded the answer. They had come to a planet where an entire population was threatened with a dreadful disease. They had identified the disease, found and isolated the virus that caused it, and then developed an antibody that effectively destroyed the virus—in the laboratory. But when they had tried to apply the antibody in the afflicted patients, the response had been totally unexpected. They had stopped the march of death among those they had inoculated, and had produced instead a condition that the people seemed to dread far more than death.
“Let’s face it,” Dal said, “we bungled it somehow. We should have had help here right from the start. I don’t know where we went wrong, but we’ve done something.”
“Well, it wasn’t your fault,” Jack said gloomily. “If we had the right diagnosis, this wouldn’t have happened. And I still can’t see the diagnosis. All I’ve been able to come up with is a nice mess.”
“We’re missing something, that’s all,” Dal said. “The information is all here. We just aren’t reading it right, somehow. Somewhere in here is a key to the whole thing, and we just can’t see it.”
They went back to the data again, going through it step by step. This was Jack Alvarez’s specialty—the technique of diagnosis, the ability to take all the available information about a race and about its illness and piece it together into a pattern that made sense. Dal could see that Jack was now bitterly angry with himself, yet at every turn he seemed to strike another obstacle—some fact that didn’t jibe, a missing fragment here, a wrong answer there. With Dal and Tiger helping he started back over the sequence of events, trying to make sense out of them, and came up squarely against a blank wall.
The things they had done should have worked; instead, they had failed. A specific antibody used against a specific virus should have destroyed the virus or slowed its progress, and there seemed to be no rational explanation for the dreadful response of the uninfected ones who had been inoculated for protection.
And as the doctors sifted through the data, the Bruckian they had brought up from the enclosure sat staring off into space, making small noises with his mouth and moving his arms aimlessly. After a while they led him back to a bunk, gave him a medicine for sleep and left him snoring gently. Another hour passed as they pored over their notes, with Tiger stopping from time to time to mop perspiration from his forehead. All three were aware of the moving clock hands, marking off the minutes that the force screen could hold out.
And then Dal Timgar was digging into the pile of papers, searching frantically for something he could not find. “That first report we got,” he said hoarsely. “There was something in the very first information we ever saw on this planet....”
“You mean the Confederation’s data? It’s in the radio log.” Tiger pulled open the thick log book. “But what....”
“It’s there, plain as day, I’m sure of it,” Dal said. He read through the report swiftly, until he came to the last paragraph—a two-line description of the largest creatures the original Exploration Ship had found on the planet, described by them as totally unintelligent and only observed on a few occasions in the course of the exploration. Dal read it, and his hands were trembling as he handed the report to Jack. “I knew the answer was there!” he said. “Take a look at that again and think about it for a minute.”
Jack read it through. “I don’t see what you mean,” he said.
“I mean that I think we’ve made a horrible mistake,” Dal said, “and I think I see now what it was. We’ve had this whole thing exactly 100 per cent backward from the start, and that explains everything that’s happened here!”
Tiger peered over Jack’s shoulder at the report. “Backward?”
“As backward as we could get it,” Dal said. “We’ve assumed all along that these flesh-and-blood creatures down there were the ones that were calling us for help because of a virus plague that was attacking and killing them. All right, look at it the other way. Just suppose that the intelligent creature that called us for help was the virus, and that those flesh-and-blood creatures down there with the blank, stupid faces are the real plague we ought to have been fighting all along!”
Dal Breaks a Promise
For a moment the others just stared at their Garvian crewmate. Then Jack Alvarez snorted. “You’d better go back and get some rest,” he said. “This has been a tougher grind than I thought. You’re beginning to show the strain.”
“No, I mean it,” Dal said earnestly. “I think that is exactly what’s been happening.”
Tiger looked at him with concern. “Dal, this is no time for double talk and nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense,” Dal said. “It’s the answer, if you’ll only stop and think.”
“An intelligent virus?” Jack said. “Who ever heard of such a thing? There’s never been a life-form like that reported since the beginning of the galactic exploration.”
“But that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be one,” Dal said. “And how would an exploratory crew ever identify it, if it existed? How would they ever even suspect it? They’d miss it completely—unless it happened to get into trouble itself and try to call for help!” Dal jumped up in excitement.
“Look, I’ve seen a dozen articles showing how such a thing was theoretically possible ... a virus life-form with billions of submicroscopic parts acting together to form an intelligent colony. The only thing a virus-creature would need that other intelligent creatures don’t need would be some kind of a host, some sort of animal body to live in so that it could use its intelligence.”
“It’s
