Horowitz spread his hands. “Q.E.D.”
“Oh,” she said, “how awful.”
At that point somebody kicked the door open.
Horowitz sprang to his feet, livid. A big man in an open, flapping topcoat shouldered his way in. He had a long horse-face and a blue jaw. His eyes were extremely sad. He said, “Now just relax. Relax and you’ll be all right.” His hands, as if they had a will of their own, busied themselves about pulling off a tight left-hand glove with wires attached to it and running into his side pocket.
“Flannel!” Horowitz barked. “How did you get in?” He stepped forward, knees slightly bent, head lowering. “You’ll get out of here or so help me—”
“No!” Iris cried, clutching at Horowitz’s forearm. The big man outreached and outweighed the biologist, and certainly would fight rougher and dirtier.
“Don’t worry, lady,” said the man called Flannel sleepily. He raised a lazy right hand and made a slight motion with it, and a cone-nosed needier glittered in his palm. “He’ll be good—won’t you, boy? Or I’ll put you to bed for two weeks an’ a month over.”
He sidled past and, never taking his gaze from Horowitz for more than a flickering instant, opened the three doors which led from the laboratory—a bathroom, a bedroom, a storage closet.
“Who is he? You know him?” Iris whispered.
“I know him,” growled Horowitz. “He’s Heri Gonza’s bodyguard.”
“Nobody but the two of them,” said Flannel.
“Good,” said a new voice, and a second man walked in, throwing off a slouch hat and opening the twin to the long, loose topcoat Flannel wore. “Hi, chillun,” said Heri Gonza.
There was a long silence, and then Horowitz plumped down on his pile of Proceedings, put his chin in his hands, and said in profound disgust, “Ah, for God’s sake.”
“Dr. Horowitz,” said Heri Gonza pleasantly, nodding, “and Dr. Barran.”
Iris said shakily, “I th-thought you were doing a sh-show.”
“Oh, I am, I am. All things are possible if you only know how. At the moment Chitsie Bombom is doing a monologue, and she’s good for two encores. After that there’s a solido of me sitting way up on the flats in the left rear, oh so whimsically announcing the Player’s Pub Players. They have a long one-acter and a pantomime. I’ve even got a ballet company, in case this takes that long.”
“Phony to the eyeballs, even when you work,” said Horowitz. “In case what takes that long?”
“We’re going to talk.”
“You talk,” said Horowitz. “Quickly and quietly and get the hell out of here. ‘Scuse me, Dr. Barran.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she murmured.
“Please,” said the comedian softly, “I didn’t come here to quarrel with you. I want to end all that. Here and now, and for good.”
“We’ve got something he wants,” said Horowitz in a loud aside to Iris.
Heri Gonza closed his eyes and said, “You’re making this harder than it has to be. What can I do to make this a peaceful talk?”
“For one thing,” said Horowitz, “your simian friend is breathing and it bothers me. Make him stop.”
“Flannel,” said Heri Gonza, “get out.”
Glowering, the big man moved to the door, opened it, and stood on the sill. “All the way,” said the comedian. Flannel’s broad back was one silent mass of eloquent protest, but he went out and shut the door.
Deftly, with that surprising suddenness of nervous motion which was his stock in trade, Heri Gonza dropped to one knee to bring their faces on a level, and captured Iris’s startled hands. “First of all, Dr. Barran, I came to apologize to you for the way I spoke on the telephone. I had to do it —there was no alternative, as you’ll soon understand. I tried to call you back, but you’d already gone.”
“You followed me here! Oh, Dr. Horowitz, I’m sorry!”
“I didn’t need to follow you. I’ve had this place spotted since two days before you moved into it, Horowitz. But I’m sorry I had to strongarm my way in.”
“I yield to curiosity,” said Horowitz. “Why didn’t my locks alarm when you opened them? I saw Flannel’s palm-print eliminator, but dammit, they should have alarmed.”
“The locks were here when you rented the place, right? Well, who do you think had them installed? I’ll show you where the cutoff switch is before I leave. Anyhow—grant me this point. Was there any other way I could have gotten in to talk with you?”
“I concede,” said Horowitz sourly.
“Now, Dr. Barran. You have my apology, and you’ll have the explanation to go with it. Believe me, I’m sorry. The other thing I want to do is to accept, with thanks from the bottom of my heart, your very kind offer of the prize money. I want it, I need it, and it will help more than you can possibly realize.”
“No,” said Iris flatly. “I’ve promised it to Dr. Horowitz.”
Heri Gonza sighed, got to his feet, and leaned back against the lab bench. He looked down at them sadly.
“Go on,” said Horowitz. “Tell us how you need money.”
“The only two things I have never expected from you are ignorance and stupidity,” said Heri Gonza sharply, “and you’re putting up a fine display of both. Do you really think, along with all my millions of ardent fans, that when I land a two-million-dollar contract I somehow put two million dollars in the bank? Don’t be childish. My operation is literally too big to hide anything in. I have city, county, state and federal tax vultures picking through my whole operational framework. I’m a corporation and subject to outside accounting. I don’t even have a salary; I draw what I need, and I damn well account for it, too. Now, if I’m going to finish what I started with the disease, I’m going to need a lot more money than I can whittle out a chip at a time.”
“Then take it out of the Foundation money—that’s what it’s for.”
“I want to do the one thing I’m not allowed to do with it. Which happens to be the one thing that’ll break this horrible thing—it has to!”
“The only thing there is like that is a trip to Iapetus.”
To this, Heri Gonza said nothing—absolutely nothing at all. He simply waited.
Iris Barran said, “He means it. I think he really means it.”
“You’re a big wheel,” said Horowitz at last, “and there are a lot of corners you can cut, but not that one. There’s one thing the government—all governments and all their armed forces—will rise up in wrath to prevent, and that’s another landing and return from any place off earth—especially Iapetus. You’ve got close to four hundred dying kids on your hands right now, and the whole world is scared.”
“Set that aside for a moment.” The comedian was earnest, warm-voiced. “Just suppose it could be done. Horowitz, as I understand it you have everything you need on the iapetitis virus but one little link. Is that right?”
“That’s right. I can synthesize a surrogate virus from nucleic acids and exactly duplicate the disease. But it dies out of its own accord. There’s a difference between my synthetic virus and the natural one, and I don’t know what it is. Give me ten hours on Iapetus and half a break, and I’ll have the original virus under an electron mike. Then I can synthesize a duplicate, a real self-sustaining virus that can cause the disease. Once I have that, the antigen becomes a factory process, with the techniques we have today. We’ll have shots for those kids by the barrel lot inside of a week.”
Heri Gonza spread his hands. “There’s the problem, then. The law won’t allow the flight until we have the cure. We won’t have the cure unless we make the flight.”