CHAPTER ONE: New York

In the newer media of communication ... the popularization of science is- confounded by rituals of mass entertainment. One standard routine dramatizes science through the biography of a hero scientist: at the denouement, lie is discovered in a lonely laboratory crying 'Eureka' at a murky test tube held up to a bare light bulb.

-GERARD PIEL

He had seen also a number of other notables, of lesser caliber, but whose business at a firm which made biologicals was an equally improper subject for guessing games. He fidgeted.

At the present moment, the girl at the desk was talking softly with a seven-star general, which was a rank nearly as high as a man could rise in the army. The general was so preoccupied that he had failed completely to recognize Paige's salute. He was passed through swiftly. One of the two swinging doors with the glass ports let into them moved outward behind the desk, and Paige caught a glimpse of a stocky, dark-haired, pleasant-faced man in a conservative grosse-pointilliste suit.

"Gen. Horsefield, glad to see you. Come in."

The door closed, leaving Paige once more with nothing to look at but the motto written over the entrance in German black-letter:

Lider ben Tod ist kein Krautlein gewachsen!

Since he did not know the language, he had already translated this by the If-only-it-were-English system, which made it come out, "The fatter toad is waxing on the kine's cole-slaw." This did not seem to fit what little he knew about the eating habits of either animal, and it was certainly no fit admonition for workers.

Of course, Paige could always look at the receptionist- but after an hour and a half he had about plumbed the uttermost depths of that ecstasy. The girl was pretty in a way, but hardly striking, even to a recently returned spaceman. Perhaps if someone would yank those black-rimmed pixie glasses away from her and undo that bun at the back of her head, she might pass, at least in the light of a whale-oil lamp in an igloo during a record blizzard.

This too was odd now that he thought about it. A firm as large as Pfitzner could have its pick of the glossiest of office girls, especially these days. Then again, the whole of Pfitzner might well be pretty small potatoes to the parent organization, A. 0. LeFevre et Cie. Certainly at least Le Fevre's Consolidated Warfare Service operation was bigger than the Pfitzner division, and Peacock Camera and Chemicals probably was too; Pfitzner, which was the pharmaceuticals side of the cartel, was a recent acquisition, bought after some truly remarkable broken-field running around the diversification amendments to the anti-trust laws.

All in all, Paige was thoroughly well past mere mild annoyance with being stalled. He was, after all, here at these people's specific request, doing them a small favor which they had asked of him-and soaking up good leave-time in the process. Abruptly he got up and strode to the desk.

"Excuse me, miss," he said, "but I think you're being goddamned impolite. As a matter of fact, I'm beginning to think you people are making a fool of me. Do you want these, or don't you?"

He unbuttoned his right breast pocket and pulled out three little plioflim packets, heat-sealed to plastic mailing tags. Each packet contained a small spoonful of dirt. The tags were addressed to Jno. Pfitzner & Sons, div. A. 0. LeFevre et Cie, the Bronx 153, WPO 249920, Earth; and each card carried a $25 rocket-mail stamp for which Pfitzner had paid, still uncancelled.

"Colonel Russell, I agree with you," the girl said, looking up at him- seriously. She looked even less glamorous than she had at a distance, but she did have a pert and interesting nose, and the current royal-purple lip-shade suited her better than it did most of the starlets to be seen on 3-V these days. "It's just that you've caught us on a very bad day. We do want the samples, of course. They're very important to us, otherwise we wouldn't have put you to the trouble of collecting them for us."

"Then why can't I give them to someone?"

"You could give them to me," the girl suggested gently. "I'll pass them along faithfully, I promise you."

Paige shook his head. "Not after this run-around. I did just what your firm asked me to do, and I'm here to see the results. I picked up. soils from every one of my ports of call, even when it was a nuisance to do it. I mailed in a lot of them; these are only the last of a series. Do you know where these bits of dirt came from?"

"I'm sorry, it's slipped my mind. It's been a very busy day."

"Two of them are from Ganymede; and the other one is from Jupiter V, right in the shadow of the Bridge gang's shack. The normal temperature on both satellites is about two hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Ever try to swing a pick against ground frozen that solid-working inside a spacesuit? But I got the dirt for you. Now I want to see why Pfitzner wants dirt."

The girl shrugged. "I'm sure you were told why before you even left Earth."

"Supposing I was? I know that you people get drugs out of dirt. But aren't the guys who bring in the samples entitled to see how the process works? What if Pfitzner gets some new wonder-drug out of one of my samples- couldn't I have a sentence or two of explanation to pass on to my kids?"

The swinging doors bobbed open, and the affable face of the stocky man was thrust into the room.

"Dr. Abbott not here yet, Anne?" he said.

"Not yet, Mr. Gunn. I'll call you the minute he arrives."

"But you'll keep me sitting at least another ninety minutes," Paige said flatly. Gunn looked him over, staring at the colonel's eagle on his collar and stopping at the winged crescent pinned over his pocket.

"Apologies, Colonel, but we're having ourselves a small crisis today," he said,- Smiling tentatively. "I gather you've brought us some samples from space. If you could possibly come back tomorrow, I'd be happy to give you all the time in the world. But right now—"

Gunn ducked his head in apology and pulled it in, as though he had just cuckooed 2400 and had to go somewhere and lie down until 0100. Just before the door came to rest behind him, a faint but unmistakable sound slipped through it.

Somewhere in the laboratories of Jno. Pfitzner & Sons a baby was crying.

Paige listened, blinking, until the sound was damped off. When he looked back down at the desk again, the expression of the girl behind it seemed distinctly warier.

"Look," he said. "I'm not asking a great favor of you. I don't want to know anything I shouldn't know. All I want to know is how you plan to process my packets of soil. It's just simple curiosity-backed up by a trip that covered a few hundred millions of miles. Am I entitled to know for my trouble, or not?"

"You are and you aren't" the girl said steadily. "We want your samples, and we'll agree that they're unusually interesting to us because they came from the Jovian system-the first such we've ever gotten. But that's no guarantee that we'll find anything useful in them."

"It isn't?"

"No. Colonel Russell, you're not the first man to come here with soil samples, believe me. Granted that you're the first man to bring anything back from outside the orbit of Mars; in fact, you're only the sixth man to deliver samples from any place farther away than the Moon. But evidently you have no idea of the volume of samples we get here, routinely. We've asked virtually every space pilot, every Believer missionary, every commercial traveler, every explorer, every foreign correspondent to scoop up soil samples for us, wherever they may go. Before we discovered ascomycin, we had to screen one hundred thousand soil samples, including several hundred from Mars and nearly five thousand from the Moon. And do you know where we found the organism that produces ascomycin? On an over-ripe peach one of our detail men picked up from a peddler's stall in Baltimore!"

"I see the point," Paige said reluctantly. "What's as..comycin , by the way?"

The girl looked down at her desk and moved a piece of paper from here to there. "It's a new antibiotic," she said. “We'll be marketing it soon. But I could tell you the same kind of story about other such drugs."

"I see." Paige was not quite sure he did see, however, after all. He had heard the name Pfitzner fall from some very unlikely lips during his many months in space. As far as he had been able to determine after he had become sensitized to the sound, about every third person on the planets was either collecting samples for the firm or knew somebody who was. The grapevine, which among space-men was the only trusted medium of communication, had it that the company was doing important government work. That, of course, was nothing unusual in the Age of Defense, but Paige bud heard enough to suspect that Pfitzner was something special-.something as big, perhaps, as the historic Manhattan District and at least twice as secret.

The door opened and emitted Gunn for the second time hand-running, this time all the way.

"Not yet?" he said to the girl. "Evidently he isn't going to make it. Unfortunate. But I've some spare time now, Colonel—"

"Russell, Paige Russell, Army Space Corps."

"Thank you. If you'll accept my apologies for our preoccupation, Colonel Russell, I'll be glad to show you around our little establishment My name, by the way, is Harold Gunn, vice-president in charge of exports for the Pfitzner division."

"I'm importing at the moment," Paige said, holding out the soil samples. Gunn took them reverently and dropped them in a pocket of his jacket. "But I’d enjoy seeing the labs."

He nodded to the girl and the doors closed between them. He was inside.

The place was at least as fascinating as he had expected it to be. Gunn showed him, first, the rooms where the incoming samples were classified and then distributed to the laboratories proper. In the first of these, a measured fraction of a sample was dropped into a one-litre flask of sterile distilled water, swirled to distribute it evenly, and then passed through a series of dilutions. The final suspensions were then used to inoculate test-tube slants and petri plates, containing a wide variety of nutrient media, which went into the incubator.

"In the next lab here-Dr. Aquino isn't in at the moment, so we mustn't touch anything, but you can see through the glass quite clearly-we transfer from the plates and agar slants to a new set of media," Gunn explained. "But here each organism found in the sample has a set of cultures of its own, so that if it secretes anything into one of the media, that something won't be contaminated."

"If it does, the amount must be very tiny," Paige said "How do you detect it?"

"Directly, by its action. Do you see the rows of plates with the white paper discs in their centers, and the four furrows in the agar radiating from the discs? Well, each one of those furrows is impregnated with culture medium from one of the pure cultures. If all four streaks grow thriving bacterial colonies,- then the medium on the paper disc contains no antibiotic against those four germs. If one or more of the streaks fails to grow, or is retarded compared to the others, then we have hope."

In the succeeding laboratory, antibiotics which had been found by the disc method were pitted against a whole spectrum of dangerous organisms. About 90 per cent of the discoveries were eliminated here, Gunn explained, either because they were insufficiently active or because they duplicated the antibiotic spectra of already known drugs. "What we call 'insufficiently active' varies with the circumstances, however," he added. "An antibiotic which shows any activity against tuberculosis or against Hansen's disease-leprosy-is always of interest to us, even if it attacks no other germ at all."

A few antibiotics which passed their spectrum tests went on to a miniature pilot plant, where the organisms that produced them were set to work in a deep-aerated fermentation tank. From this bubbling liquor, comparatively large amounts of the crude drug were extracted, purified, and sent to the pharmacology lab for tests on animals.

"We lose a lot of otherwise promising antibiotics here, too," Gunn said. "Most of them turn out to be too toxic to be used in-or even on-the human body. We've had Hansen's bacillus knocked out a thousand times in the test-tube only to find here that the antibiotic is much more quickly fatal in vivo than is leprosy itself. But once we're sure that the drug isn't toxic, or that its toxicity is outweighed by its therapeutic efficacy, it goes out of our shop entirely, to hospitals and to individual doctors for clinical trial. We also have a virology lab in Vermont where we test our new drugs against virus diseases like the 'flu and the common cold-it isn't safe to operate such a lab in a heavily populated area like the Bronx."

"It's much more elaborate than I would have imagined," Paige said. "But I can see that it's well worth the trouble. Did you work out this sample-screening technique here?"

"Oh, my, no," Gunn said, smiling indulgently. "Wakeman, the discoverer of streptomycin, laid down the essential procedure decades ago. We aren't even the first firm to use it on a large scale; one of our competitors did that and found a broad-spectrum antibiotic called chioramphenicol with it, scarcely a year after they'd begun. That was what convinced the rest of us that we'd better adopt the technique before we got shut out of the market entirely. A good thing, too; otherwise none of us would have discovered tetracycline, which turned out to be the most versatile antibiotic ever tested."

Farther down the corridor a door opened. The squall of a baby came out of it, much louder than before. It was not the sustained crying of a child who had had a year or so to practice, but the short-breathed "ah-la, ah-la, ah-la," of a newborn infant.

Paige raised his eyebrows. "Is that one of your experimental animals?"

"Ha, ha," Gunn said. "We're enthusiasts in this business, Colonel, but we- must draw the line somewhere. No, one of our technicians has a baby-sitting problem, and so we've given her permission to bring the child to work with her, until she's worked out a better solution."

Paige had to admit that Gunn thought fast on his feet. That story had come reeling out of him like so much ticker tape without the slightest sign of a preliminary double-take. It was not Gunn's fault that Paige, who had been through a marriage which had lasted five years before he had taken to space, could distinguish the cry of a baby old enough to be out of a hospital nursery from that of one only days old.

"Isn't this," Paige said, "a rather dangerous place to park an infant-with so many disease germs, poisonous disinfectants, and such things all around?"

"Oh, we take all proper precautions. I daresay our staff has a lower yearly sickness rate than you'll find in industrial plants of comparable size, simply because we're more aware of the problem. Now if we go through this door, Colonel Russell, we'll see the final step, the main plant where we turn out drugs in quantity after they've proved themselves."

"Yes, I'd like that. Do you have ascomycin in production now?"

This time, Gunn looked at him sharply and without any attempt to disguise his interest. "No," he- said, "that's still out on clinical trial. May I ask you, Colonel Russell, just how you happened to—"

The question, which Paige realized belatedly would have been rather sticky to answer, never did get all the way asked. Over Harold Gunn's head, a squawk-box said, "Mr. Gunn, Dr. Abbott has just arrived."

Gunn turned away from the door that, he had said, led out to the main plant, with just the proper modicum of polite regret. "There's my man," he said. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut this tour short, Colonel Russell. You may have seen what a collection of important people we have in the plant today; we've been waiting only for Dr. Abbott to begin a very important meeting. If you'll oblige me—"

Paige could say nothing but "Certainly." After what seemed only a few seconds, Gunn deposited him smoothly in the reception room from which he had started.

"Did you see what you wanted to see?" the receptionist said.

"I think so," Paige said thoughtfully "Except that what I wanted to see sort of changed in mid-flight. Miss Anne, I have a petition to put before you. Would you be kind enough to have dinner with me this evening?"

"No," the girl said. "I've seen quite a few spacemen, Colonel Russell. and I'm no longer impressed. Furthermore, I shan't tell you anything you haven't heard from Mr. Gunn, so there's no need for you to- spend your money or your leave-time on me. Good-by."

"Not so fast," Paige said. "I mean business-or, if you like, I mean to make trouble. If you've met spacemen before, you know that they- like to be independent-not much like the conformists who never leave the ground. I'm not after your maidenly laughter, either. I'm after information."

"Not interested," the girl said. "Save your breath.

"MacHinery is here," Paige said quietly. "So is Senator Wagoner, and some other people who have influence. Suppose I should collar any one of those people and accuse Pfitzner of conducting human vivisection?"

That told: Paige could see the girl's knuckles whitening. "You don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"That's my complaint. And I take it seriously. There were some things Mr. Gunn wasn't able to conceal from me, though he tried very hard. Now, I am going to put my suspicions through channels-and get Pfitzner investigated-or would you rather be sociable over a fine flounder broiled in paprika butter?"

The look she gave him back was one of almost pure hatred. She seemed able to muster no other answer. The expression did not at all suit her; as a matter of fact, she looked less like someone he would want to date than any other girl he could remember. Why should he spend his money or his leave-time on her? There were, after all, about five million surplus women in the United States by the Census of 2010, and at least 4,999,950 of them must be prettier and less recalcitrant than this one.

"All right," she said abruptly. "Your natural charm has swept me off my feet, Colonel. For the record, there's no other reason for my acceptance. It would be even funnier to call your bluff and see how far you'd get with that vivisection tale, but I don't care to tie my company up in a personal joke."

"Good enough," Paige said, uncomfortably aware that his bluff in fact had been called. "Suppose I pick you up—"

He broke off, suddenly noticing that voices were rising behind the double doors. An instant later, General Horsefield bulled into the reception room, closely followed by Gunn.

"I want it clearly understood, once and for all," Horsefield was rumbling, "that this entire project is going to wind up under military control unless we can show results before it's time to ask for a new appropriation. There's still a lot going on here that the Pentagon will regard as piddling inefficiency and highbrow theorizing. And if that's what the Pentagon reports, you know what the Treasury will do-or Congress will do it for them. We're going to have to cut back, Gunn. Understand? Cut right back to basics!"

"General, we're as far back to basics as we possibly can get," Harold Gunn said, placatingly enough, but with considerable firmness as well. "We're not going to put a gram of that drug into production until we're satisfied with it on all counts. Any other course would be suicide."

"You know I'm on your side," Horsefield said, his voice becoming somewhat less threatening. "So is General Alsos, for that matter. But this is a war we're fighting, whether the public understands it or not. And on as sensitive a matter as these death-dopes, we can't afford—"

Gunn, who had spotted Paige belatedly at the conclusion of his own speech, had been signaling Horsefield ever since with his eyebrows, and suddenly it took. The general swung around and glared at Paige, who, since he was uncovered now, was relieved of the necessity for saluting. Despite the sudden, freezing silence, it was evident that Gunn was trying to retain in his manner toward Paige some shreds of professional cordiality-a courtesy which Paige was not too sure he merited, considering the course his conversation with the girl had taken.

As for Horsefield, he relegated Paige to the ghetto of "unauthorized persons" with a single look. Paige had no intention of remaining in that classification for a second longer than it would take him to get out of it, preferably without having been asked his name; it was deadly dangerous. With a mumbled "at eight, then," to the girl, Paige sidled ingloriously out of the Pfitzner reception room and beat it.

He was, he reflected later in the afternoon before his shaving mirror, subjecting himself to an. extraordinary series of small humiliations, to get close to a matter which was none of his business. Worse: it was obviously Top Secret, which made it potentially lethal even for everyone authorized to know about it, let alone for rank snoopers. In the Age of Defense, to know was to be suspect, in the West as in the USSR; the two great nation-complexes had been becoming more and more alike in their treatment of "security" for the past fifty years. It had even been a mistake to mention the Bridge on Jupiter to the girl-for despite the fact that everyone knew that the Bridge existed, anyone who spoke of it with familiarity could quickly earn the label of being dangerously flap-jawed. Especially If the speaker, like Paige, had actually been stationed in the Jovian system for a while, whether he had had access to information about the Bridge or not.

And especially if the talker, like Paige, had actually spoken to the Bridge gang, worked with them on marginal projects, was known to have talked to Charity Dillon, the Bridge foreman. More especially if he held military rank, making it possible for him to sell security files to Congressmen, the traditional way of advancing a military career ahead of normal promotion schedules.

And most especially if the man was discovered nosing about a new and different classified project, one to which he hadn't even been assigned.

Why, after all, was he taking the risk? He didn't even know the substance of the matter; he was no biologist. To all outside eyes the Pfitzner project was simply another piece of research in antibiotics, and a rather routine research project at that. Why should a spaceman like Paige find himself flying so close to the candle already?

He wiped the depilatory cream off his face into a paper towel and saw his own eyes looking back at him from the concave mirror, as magnified as an owl's. The image, however, was only his own, despite the distortion. It gave him back no answer.