"They think well of me," said Calhoun. "I hope I'm as dangerous as Doctor Lett now believes." Then he said crisply, "You say you're a para. I want the symptoms; how you feel and where. Then I want to know your last contact with scavengers."
The intentions of the police outside could be ignored. It wouldn't matter if the Med Ship were heaved out to space and abandoned. Calhoun was in it. But it couldn't happen. The grid operator had brought away certain essential small parts of the grid control-system. Of course the ship could be blown up. But he'd have warning of that. He was safe except for one thing. He'd been exposed to whatever it was that made a man a para. The condition would develop. But he did have a thick-glass container of grayish fluid, and he had a plastic biological-specimen container. One came from Doctor Lett's safest pocket. It would be vaccine. The other came from the culture-oven in the Doctor's laboratory.
The thick-glass phial was simply that. Calhoun removed the cover from the other. It contained small and horrible squirming organisms, writhing in what was probably a nutrient fluid to which they could reduce human refuse. They swam jerkily in it so that the liquid seemed to seethe. It smelled. Like skunk.
The grid operator clenched his hands.
"Put it away!" he commanded fiercely. "Out of sight! Away!"
Calhoun nodded. He locked it in a small chest. As he put down the cover he said in an indescribable tone:
"It doesn't smell as bad to me as it did."
But his hands were steady as he drew a sample of a few drops from the vaccine-bottle. He lowered a wall-panel and behind it there was a minute but astonishingly complete biological laboratory. It was designed for micro-analysis—the quantitative and qualitative analysis of tiny quantities of matter. He swung out a miniaturized Challis fractionator. He inserted half a droplet of the supposed vaccine and plugged in the fractionator's power cable. It began to hum.
The grid operator ground his teeth.
"This is a fractionator," said Calhoun. "It spins a biological sample through a chromatograph gel."
The small device hummed more shrilly. The sound rose in pitch until it was a whine, and then a whistle, and then went up above the highest pitch to which human ears are sensitive. Murgatroyd scratched at his ears and complained:
"Chee! Chee! Chee!"
"It won't be long," Calhoun assured him. He looked once at the grid operator and then looked away. There was sweat on the man's forehead. Calhoun said casually, "The substance that makes the vaccine do what it does do is in the vaccine, obviously. So the fractionator is separating the different substances that are mixed together." He added, "It doesn't look much like chromatography, but the principle's the same. It's an old, old trick!"
It was, of course. That different dissolved substances can be separated by their different rates of diffusion through wetted powders and gels had been known since the early twentieth century, but was largely forgotten because not often needed. But the Med Service did not abandon processes solely because they were not new.
Calhoun took another droplet of the vaccine and put it between two plates of glass, to spread out. He separated them and put them in a vacuum-drier.
"I'm not going to try an analysis," he observed. "It would be silly to try to do anything so complicated if I only need to identify something. Which I hope is all I do need!"
He brought out an extremely small vacuum device. He cleaned the garments he'd just removed, drawing every particle of dust from them. The dust appeared in a transparent tube which was part of the machine.
"I was sprayed with something I suspect the worst of," he added. "The spray left dust behind. I think it made sure that anybody who left Government Center would surely be a para. It's another reason for haste."
The grid operator ground his teeth again. He did not really hear Calhoun. He was deep in a private hell of shame and horror.
The inside of the ship was quiet, but it was not tranquil. Calhoun worked calmly enough, but there were times when his inwards seemed to knot and cramp him, which was not the result of any infection or contagion or demoniac possession, but was reaction to thoughts of the imprisoned para in the laboratory. That man had gobbled the unspeakable because he could not help himself, but he was mad with rage and shame over what he had become. Calhoun could become like that—
The loud-speaker turned to outside frequencies muttered again. Calhoun turned up its volume.
"Calling headquarters!" panted a voice. "There's a mob of paras forming in the streets in the Mooreton quarter! They're raging! They heard the President's speech and they swear they'll kill him! They won't stand for a cure! Everybody's got to turn para! They won't have normals on the planet! Everybody's got to turn para or be killed!"
The grid operator looked up at the speaker. The ultimate of bitterness appeared on his face. He saw Calhoun's eyes on him and said savagely:
"That's where I belong!"
Murgatroyd went to his cubbyhole and crawled into it.
Calhoun got out a microscope. He examined the dried glass plates from the vacuum-drier. The fractionator turned itself off and he focused on and studied the slide it yielded. He inspected a sample of the dust he'd gotten from the garments that had been sprayed at the south gate. The dust contained common dust-particles and pollen-particles and thread-particles and all sorts of microscopic debris. But throughout all the sample he saw certain infinitely tiny crystals. They were too small to be seen separately by the naked eye, but they had a definite crystalline form. And the kind of crystals a substance makes are not too specific about what the substance is, but they tell a great deal about what it cannot be. In the fractionator-slide he could get more information—the rate-of-diffusion of a substance in solution ruled out all but a certain number of compounds that it could be. The two items together gave a definite clue.
Another voice from the speaker:
"Headquarters! Paras are massing by the north gate! They act ugly! They're trying to force their way into Government Center! We'll have to start shooting if we're to stop them! What are our orders?"
The grid operator said dully:
"They'll wreck everything. I don't want to live because I'm a para, but I haven't acted like one yet. Not yet! But they have! So they don't want to be cured! They'd never forget what they've done . . . They'd be ashamed!"
Calhoun punched keys on a very small computer. He'd gotten an index-of-refraction reading on crystals too small to be seen except through a microscope. That information, plus specific gravity, plus crystalline form, plus rate of diffusion in a fractionator, went to the stores of information packed in the computer's memory-banks somewhere between the ship's living-quarters and its outer skin.
A voice boomed from another speaker, tuned to public-broadcast frequency:
"My fellow-citizens, I appeal to you to be calm! I beg you to be patient! Practice the self-control that citizens owe to themselves and their world! I appeal to you—"
Outside in the starlight the Med Ship rested peacefully on the ground. Around and above it the grid rose like geometric fantasy to veil most of the starry sky. Here in the starlight the ground-car communicators gave out the same voice. The same message. The President of Tallien Three made a speech. Earlier, he'd made another. Earlier still he'd taken orders from the man who was already absolute master of the population of this planet.
Police stood uneasy guard about the Med Ship because they could not enter it. Some of their number who had entered the control-building now stood shivering outside it, unable to force themselves inside again. There was a vast, detached stillness about the space-port. It seemed the more unearthly because of the thin music of wind in the landing-grid's upper levels.