He plucked a brand of burning resinous stuff from the campfire. He handed it to the gaunt young man and led the way. Murgatroyd ambled complacently after him. Calhoun stopped under one of the unoccupied shelters and got out his lab kit. He bent over Murgatroyd. What he did, did not hurt. When he stood up, he squinted at the red fluid in the instrument he'd used.
"About fifteen CCs," he observed. "This is strictly emergency stuff I'm doing now. But I'd say that there's an emergency."
The gaunt young man said:
"I'd say you've doomed yourself. The incubation-period seems to be about six days. It took that long to develop among the doctors we had in the office staff."
Calhoun opened a compartment of the kit, whose minuscule test tubes and pipettes gleamed in the torchlight. He absorbedly transferred the reddish fluid to a miniature filter-barrel, piercing a self-healing plastic cover to do so. He said:
"You're pre-med? The way you talk—"
"I was an interne," said Kim. "Now I'm pre-corpse."
"I doubt that last," said Calhoun. "But I wish I had some distilled water—This is anticoagulant." He added the trace of a drop to the sealed, ruddy fluid. He shook the whole filter to agitate it. The instrument was hardly larger than his thumb. "Now a clumper—" He added a minute quantity of a second substance from an almost microscopic ampule. He shook the filter again. "You can guess what I'm doing. With a decent lab I'd get the structure and formula of the antibody Murgatroyd has so obligingly turned out for us. We'd set to work to synthesize it. In twenty hours, lab time, we ought to have it coming out of the reaction-flasks in quantity. But there is no lab."
"There's one in the city," said the gaunt young man hopelessly. "It was for the colonists who were to come. And we were staffed to give them proper medical care. When the plague came, our doctors did everything imaginable. They not only tried the usual culture tricks, but they cultured samples of every separate tissue in the fatal cases. They never found a single organism—even in the electron microscopes—that would produce the plague." He said with a sort of weary pride, "Those who'd been exposed worked until they had it, then others took over. Every man worked as long as he could make his brain work, though."