by James Blish
"No," Wagoner said. "Not even partially, I'm afraid. Not any longer."
Corsi sat down and leaned forward, his elbows on his knobby knees, staring into the dying coals. "Then I have two pieces of advice to give you, Bliss. Actually they're two sides of the same coin. First of all, begin by abandoning these multimillion dollar, Manhattan District approaches. We don't need a newer, still finer measurement of electron resonance one-tenth so badly as we need new pathways, new categories of knowledge. The colossal research project is defunct; what we need now is pure skullwork."
"From my staff?'
"From wherever you can get it. That's the other half of my recommendation. If I were you, I would go to the crackpots."
Wagoner waited. Corsi said these things for effect; he liked drama in small doses. He would explain in a moment.
"Of course I don't mean total crackpots," Corsi said. "But you'll have to draw the line yourself. You need marginal contributors, scientists of good reputation generally whose obsessions don't strike fire with other members of their profession. Like the Crehore atom, or old Ehrenhaft's theory of magnetic currents, or the Milne cosmology you'll have to find the fruitful one yourself. Look for discards, and then find out whether or not the idea deserved to be totally discarded. And don't accept the first 'expert' opinion that you get."
"Winnow chaff, in other words."
"What else is there to winnow?" Corsi said. "Of course it's a long chance, but you can't turn to scientists of real stature now; it's too late for that. Now you'll have to use sports, freaks, near misses."
"Starting where?"
"Oh," said Corsi, "how about gravity? I don't know any other subject that's attracted a greater quota of idiot speculations. Yet the acceptable theories of what gravity is are of no practical use to us. They can't be put to work to help lift a spaceship. We can't manipulate gravity as a field; we don't even have a set of equations for it that we can agree upon. No more will we find such a set by spending fortunes and decades on the project. The law of diminishing returns has washed that approach out."
Wagoner got up. "You don't leave me much," he said glumly.
"No," Corsi agreed. "I leave you only what you started with. That's more than most of us are left with, Bliss."
Wagoner grinned tightly at him and the two men shook hands. As Wagoner left, he saw Corsi silhouetted against the fire, his back to the door, his shoulders bent. While he stood there, a shot blatted not far away, and the echoes bounded back from the face of the embassy across the street. It was not a common sound in Washington, but neither was it unusual: it was almost surely one of the city's thousands of anonymous snoopers firing at a counteragent, a cop, or a shadow.
Corsi made no responding movement. The senator closed the door quietly.
He was shadowed all the way back to his own apartment, but this time he hardly noticed. He was thinking about an immortal man who flew from star to Star faster than light.
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
THE PARADE of celebrities, notorieties, and just plain brass that passed through the reception. room of Jno. Pfitzner & Sons was marvelous to behold. During the hour and a half that Colonel Paige Russell had been cooling his heels, he had identified the following publicity saints: Senator Bliss Wagoner (Dem., Alaska) chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Space Flight; Dr. Guiseppi Corsi, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a former Director of the World Health Organization; and Francis Xavier MacHinery, hereditary head of the FBI.
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. Horsefleld, 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 blackletter:
tbev ben ob tt hem xaut1ein eb,atb%en!
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 coleslaw." 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 antitrust 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 pliofilm 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 3V 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 runaround. 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 z
ero 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 overripe peach one of our detail men picked up from a peddler's stall in Baltimore!"
"I see the point," Paige said reluctantly. "What's ascomycin, 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 spacemen 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, lb 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 areas 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. 'Waksman, the discoverer of streptomycin, laid down the essential procedure decades ago.
We aren't even the first firw to use it on a large scale; one of our competitors did that and found a broad-spectrum antibiotic called chloramphenicol 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 shortbreathed "ahla, ahla, ahla," 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 babysitting 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 doubletake. 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"
