Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  As June, the traditional mating month, wore into July, national statistics were assembled to reveal that marriages were occurring at almost double the highest previous rate, that the trend was accelerating rather than diminishing.

  Jewelers and wholesale diamond merchants chalked up fabulous increases in the sale of engagement and wedding settings. Clergymen and qualified public officials were swamped with requests for religious and civil marriage ceremonies.

  Parks, beaches and drive-in theaters were jammed with mooning and/or honeymooning couples, and amusement parks began expanding their over-patronized tunnel-of-love facilities.

  The boom in houses, furniture, appliances and TV was on, and last year's glut of consumer goods for the home was rapidly turning into a shortage.

  All was not good news, however. The divorce courts reported their calendars stacked months ahead of time, and an increasing number of lurid headlines were devoted to the love-triangular troubles of the rich, famous and notorious. Love-nest exposés and bigamous marriages rocketed in number.

  The whole world, adolescent and adult, was falling in love, with the inevitable unrequited infatuations, the jealousies, infidelities and the bitter-sweetness of wholesale, illicit, impossible love situations in which vulnerable people found themselves increasing astronomically.

  Writers of popular newspaper psychology columns attributed the rampaging emotional fire to everything from mass-hysteria, caused by sunspots, to the paternalism of a government that gave increased income-tax deductions to married people.

  * * * * *

  Dr. Murt's growing interest was not entirely academic. His bachelorhood was no accident of fate, but rather a carefully contrived independence, for which he paid the price of eternal vigilance. As the world supply of eligible bachelors diminished sharply, his wariness increased, and he became more and more curt with nurses and female technicians at the hospital.

  He revealed the depth of his leeriness one afternoon at the scrub-up sink, where he and his assistant were washing after a messy dissection. Phyllis Sutton remarked, "Holly, down in Personnel, showed me a tabulation she ran off for her own curiosity today, Doctor. Do you realize that in this whole hospital there are only eight unmarried female employees?"

  Murt threw water droplets from his bare arms and muttered, "Yes, and every one of them's giving me the eye--to say nothing of half the married ones."

  His aide dried her long arms and slender hands and looked at him with a crooked smile. "Not to underestimate your good looks, Doctor, but I am one of the unmarried females. I trust I'm not giving you too much trouble?"

  He looked up, startled. "Yes--no, no--of course not. I'm referring to the nurses and the technicians. What's got into them? The whole lot seems to be on the make!"

  Phyllis combed out her short dark hair and looked at him in the mirror. "I assure you the males are just as bad. These interns and four of the male nurses give me a physical with their eyes every time I happen to meet them."

  "I suppose this ties in somehow with your pantie-raid theory."

  "Well, what do you think?"

  "I don't think. I just dodge. You'd do well to do the same," Murt told her, putting on his jacket and adjusting his tie.

  She sat down in his oak swivel-chair and crossed her slender ankles. "Are you aware of the problem they have downstairs in the out-patient clinic?"

  "Hadn't heard," Murt said.

  * * * * *

  She removed a file from her purse and touched up her short nails. "The outlying clinics are sending their overflow to us. They can't seem to diagnose the odd symptoms they're getting."

  "I had noticed the large number of negative test results coming out of the lab," Murt acknowledged. "Haven't followed any of them through, though."

  "I have," Phyllis said with a little frown. "Seems to be a psychosomatic nightmare down there."

  "What are the symptoms?"

  "Mostly neurotic," she said. "Listlessness, loss of appetite, palpitations, cold sweats and absent-mindedness."

  "Why don't they go to the psychiatric clinics?"

  "Overloaded. They're sending patients here."

  "What age groups?"

  "From puberty to senility. I'd like your permission to do a little special work on blood samples."

  "Another theory?" he asked caustically.

  "Yes. Will you give me your permission to test it?"

  Murt adjusted his Panama straw in the mirror and noticed that the nostrils of his straight nose were flared for some reason. "Your time is your own after three P. M. every day. If you want to take time out from your thesis research, that's your business."

  He crossed to the door and was opening it when he became aware that he had had no answer. He looked back at the profile of his assistant's body, which was now stretched out full length, suspended at three points--her higher-than-practical heels on the linoleum tile, her spine and curved hips using only an inch of the chair's edge, and her head tilted over the chair's back. She inhaled from a king-size filter-tip cigarette and blew a feather of smoke at the ceiling.

  "Yuh!" she said finally. Her flat abdomen jumped at the exhaled syllable, and so did her generous breasts under the soft emerald-green street dress.

  "Good night!" Murt closed the door behind him quickly and became aware of a sharp stab of what he defined as pure rut--the first he had suffered in fifteen years.

  II

  He taxied downtown to the athletic club, where he maintained his three-room apartment. The 20-story building was a citadel of masculinity--no females allowed--and recently it was an especial relief to enter the lobby and leave behind the world of turbulently mixed sexes.

  The small but lush entry chamber had a deserted air about it this afternoon. At the room desk, Crumbley, the clerk, handed him his key with a pallid hand and returned to sigh over a colored picture in Esquire--it was the "fold-out" page, featuring a gorgeous blonde reclining at full length. Crumbley's expression, however, was far from the loose-lipped, lecherous leer that he normally exposed to such art. His eyes had a thin glaze over them, he breathed shallowly and, if Dr. Murt had not known the little man's cynically promiscuous nature so well, he'd have sworn Crumbley was in love.

  Upstairs, Murt donned rubber-soled gym shoes and sweat clothes and rode the elevator back down to the gymnasium. Three times a week, he put his muscles through the whole routine-work on the bars, rings, the leather horse, the rope climb and a twenty-lap jog around the balcony racetrack. Afterward, he showered, took a dip in the swimming pool and retired to the health service department for a rubdown and some sunlamp.

  Throughout the whole routine, he encountered not a single other member. While Charlie, the husky blond masseur, hammered and kneaded his muscles, Murt reflected on the abating interest in athletics at the club.

  "Are we losing members, Charlie?" he asked.

  "You'd think so from how dead it is up here," Charlie replied. "But Crumbley says we aren't. The guys just aren't exercising. Can't figure it, Doc. Even with the usual summer slump, it's never been this slow."

  When he had absorbed all the punishment he could stand, Murt rolled off, went into the ultraviolet room, set an alarm clock and lay down by himself on one of the paper-covered tables. He adjusted the dark goggles and reflected thankfully that he didn't have to go to the beach for his sun and have sand kicked in his face by a procession of predatory females, ogling his long limbs and trying to attract his attention.

  The clean smell of ozone was pleasant, the warmth of the lamps relaxed him, and he dozed off. He dreamed that he heard someone else come in and lie down on the next table and, when he raised his head to see who it was, was amazed to discover his assistant, Dr. Phyllis Sutton, stretched out like himself, wearing only shower-sandals and goggles.

  The alarm clock wakened him from the disturbing dream. He was sweating profusely and took another shower, using the cold water at full needle force to dispel his shock at his subconscious.

  * * * * *

  W
rapping the robe around him, Murt returned to his apartment to dress for dinner. As he snapped the paper laundry band off a clean shirt, he caught himself wondering how old Phyllis Sutton was. Twenty-eight? Thirty? She appeared younger, but she was in her last year of residence to gain her specialty of pathology. That meant over eleven years of school and practice. She was a lovely creature, but she was no child.

  He had half an impulse to phone her for dinner, then became lost in studying his own reaction to the thought. Pulse over a hundred, respiration quickening, irregular. There was a tensing of the abdomen, a faint burning in the pit of his stomach.

  He remembered the urge at the office, the dream in the sunroom, the sudden sweat that had required five minutes under the cold needle shower.

  After so many years of deliberate, scholarly celibacy, what was happening to him?

  He stared at the phone. With six motions of one finger, he could dial Phyllis Sutton's face into view, and suddenly he yearned to do that very ridiculous thing.

  After staring at her, off and on, for the six months since she had transferred to High Dawn to complete her residency, now he wanted to see her face outside of working hours for some inexplicable reason.

  Call her up, date her, take her dancing, proposition her--get this silly feeling off your chest!

  Suppose she was busy or refused to go out with him? Suppose she already had a boy friend?

  This last thought deepened the burn in the pit of his stomach, and he finished dressing listlessly. To hell with it! This was poker night. If he did succeed in dating his assistant, they'd inevitably talk shop. That was why he enjoyed a night of cards with his six non-medical brother clubmen, once a week. It was refreshing to break away from the professional point of view.

  No, he wouldn't sacrifice that for any woman.

  * * * * *

  He ate alone, read the paper, joined the poker party at seven o'clock, played six hands of stud, cashed in his chips and returned to his room. In a mood of deep irritation, he found Phyllis Sutton's home phone number and rang it four times with no result.

  He thought to try the hospital. She answered from the lab extension on audio only, but her voice and its frankly curious tone sent vertically polarized chills through him.

  "I--I wanted to apologize for my rudeness this afternoon," he said with difficulty from a suddenly dry mouth.

  There was a brief silence. "Have you been drinking, Dr. Murt?" He noticed that she did not call him Sylvester. Why was he so damned thirsty for some little sign of warmth and friendliness from her?

  He cleared his throat. "No, I'm serious. It occurred to me that your interest in the out-clinic problem was commendable, and that I was rather short in my remarks to you."

  "Oh! I take it I have your permission to work my project in during the day, then?"

  "That's right, so long as it doesn't interfere with the routine." He sounded stuffy to himself, but he was entirely out of practice in speaking to please a female.

  "Thanks," she said wryly, and the conversation ended.

  Somehow, the brief talk with her restored his perspective. Once again she was his assistant, and the significance of her as a woman faded. She was a dedicated physician like himself. In another few years, she would find a residency of her own. She had no more inclination to knock off and become a woman than he had to squander his time and energy on attaining the status of family man.

  * * * * *

  It was with mounting admiration that he followed her new project in examining blood samples. As they came up from the clinic, she sorted the specimen tubes at once, putting a tiny snip of yellow Scotch tape under the label of each sample that belonged to a patient with the new undiagnosed disorder.

  Then, after the requested hemoglobin, blood sugar and other standard tests had been run, she retrieved the samples from the technicians, grouped them in a special rack and devoted every spare minute to further examination.

  She centrifuged, precipitated, filtered and stained over and over, using every qualitative procedure in the book. Murt signed her requisitions for exotic reagents and rare stains. He helped her balance out the large centrifuge to get the maximum r.p.m. from it. He let her use the most costly of the fine-porosity filters.

  He had little hope of success, but it was good practice for her. She was required to identify every organism she found, bone up on its known effects, then determine that it could not cause the symptoms reported.

  She did all this without impairing her usefulness to Murt. When he needed her, she was at his side, dissecting, taking down notes, preparing delicate sections and checking slides before they came to him.

  In several weeks, she exhausted all known tests on the first samples. After lunch one day, she turned her palms up. "Nichts da!" she said, pulling a mashed cigarette from the huge pocket of her white smock.

  He glanced at her and swiveled to stare out the window. It was part of his tight campaign to prevent a disastrous recurrence of the emotional tempest he had suffered the day she had begun this research.

  "It was a nice brush-up on your bacteriology," he said. "Have you saved the filtrates?"

  "Yes, of course. Did I overlook anything?"

  "Nothing that we could do here, but there's an electron microscope downtown at Ebert Industrial Labs. How about photomicrography? Could be a filtrable virus."

  He knew that she was aware of the possibility, and also that she was reluctant to ask him for additional funds to go into a virus hunt with the expensive piece of equipment.

  "Wonderful!" she told him. "I did hate to ask you, but it would be a shame to waste all that immaculate filtrate."

  III

  A week passed, during which a bulletin from the Government Health Service announced official suspicion that the human race was suffering a mysterious, pandemic affliction which was as yet undiagnosed. Although the symptoms, as reported by hundreds of clinics, were relatively mild, the effect on the nation's economy was growing serious.

  Industry and business reported unprecedented absenteeism. Factory supervisors and insurance companies were frantic over the upsurge in accidents. It was estimated that almost fifty per cent of the population exhibited the symptoms of depression, absent-mindedness, insomnia and loss of appetite.

  Negligent driving was increasing the highway toll sharply. Educational institutions reported classroom discipline rapidly vanishing. Armed forces headquarters cautiously admitted a new high in desertions and AWOLs.

  The consensus among psychiatrists and psychologists was that the condition stemmed from pathogenic causes.

  Dr. Murt raised his eyebrows when he read this. Perhaps Phyllis Sutton was right, after all.

  The bulletin continued, "All clinical pathologists are requested to be alert to the presence of any unusual organisms discovered in body fluids or tissues examined. Please report your findings to the U. S. Public Health Service."

  Murt found Phyllis Sutton at the microtome, finishing a wax section, and showed her the bulletin.

  "Score one for woman's intuition," he smiled. "Federal Health Service tends to agree with your theory."

  "Now I am eager to see those pictures," she said.

  * * * * *

  Less than two hours later, a messenger brought the photomicrographs, and the two pathologists bent over them together. Phyllis had submitted eighteen samples, six of which were controls taken from healthy, unafflicted subjects. Per her instructions, smears of the specimens in various degrees of dilution had been photographed through the great electron microscope.

  Murt muttered to himself as they compared the controls with the "infected specimens." The "healthy" samples were relatively clear, except for minute protein matter. Conversely, all twelve suspect specimens swarmed with shadowy six-sided dots.

  Phyllis' eyes widened. "There is something there! Do you suppose it could be the Love Bug?"

  "Love Bug?"

  "Certainly. That bulletin didn't go into the psychologists' findings. The diagnosticians downstairs sa
y that the symptoms appear to be no more than complaints of the lovesick."

  "Are you back on the pantie-raid theme again?"

  "I've never been off it," she replied. "From the first, I've had a notion that some organism was increasing glandular activity. Excess emotionalism often originates in overstimulated glands."

  "Of course, but mental attitudes can trigger the glands, and they are interacting. How do you separate the effects? How could you guess that an organism was responsible?"

  She shrugged. "It was a possibility within our specialty, so I set out to prove or disprove it. From the appearance of these photographs, I don't think we have disproved it."

  It was a properly cautious statement that pleased Murt. They were a long way from proving that their newly discovered virus was the culprit, but the research had definitely produced a question mark.

  Murt ordered copies of the photomicrographs from Ebert Industrial Labs and arranged for a complete dossier to be forwarded to the U. S. Health Service.

  That night, he was startled by a headline and lead story that quoted the government bulletin. The science editor had a field day, tying in speculation that "Doctors Suspect Love Bug Epidemic."

  * * * * *

  The next day, three reporters called upon him, each with the same query. "It's rumored that you are doing research on the Love Bug, Dr. Murt. Anything to report?"

  He shooed them out angrily, after learning that someone at Ebert Labs had given them the tip. Phyllis smiled at him as he slammed the door after the last reporter.

  "You still discount the Love Bug idea, don't you?" she asked.

  "I dislike sensationalism in a matter like this," he said. "Even if their assumptions were true, I wouldn't like it."

  "You can't blame the papers. They're starved for some explanation. I pity your passion for anonymity if your virus proves to be the causative factor."

  "My virus?"

  "Certainly. The whole project is under your auspices and direction."

  "See here, Phyl, you did the work."

  "Don't you dare mention my name," she said. "You're my superior and senior pathologist and it's your duty to protect me against the press. I don't want columnists popping out of my bathroom any more than you do."