"No?" snorted Franklen. "Well, if used properly, it can be better than atomics. Why blast a city you hope to add to your list? Why bother? You have to rebuild it. But if you just move in, you're in and you can use the same paper and pencils and desks and even the same clerks."
"May I point out the difficulty of proving such a thing?" asked Winter.
"In the first place, Dr. Shield told me that the ailment was a single-time illness. Your own troops can have it in a mild form before the invasion. Thereafter they are immune. But they are also vicious carriers, and while they're working among the stricken people, they're spreading it among those few who haven't caught it yet."
Winter sighed deeply. "Yes, and even better for Hohmann is the fact that we can prove nothing. You can make enough germ culture in an apartment house to innoculate a city—contrasting, the separation plants of the atomic era. And, Franklen, can you or anybody else make Hohmann admit that his latest acquisitions happened by any other means than an Act of God? A pandemic is considered such."
"I'll get the proof," said Franklen.
"Just stop Hohmann," said Winter. "Then we can all rest!"
Franklen never went to Hohmann's great historic meeting. Three days before it opened, the same plague struck Mexico, and the United States sent its doctors and its nurses and its aids to the stricken neighbor. A good many of them came down with it themselves, but just as it had run in France, it ran itself out in three long, hot, Mexican weeks. American wealth was poured in, and American effort and American efficiency, and Mexico rallied and was grateful. Franklen was a busy man, during those days, and he spent another week in the area after the plague was stopped and the populace well on the road to recovery.
