Calhoun squinted through the glass tube of the filter at the sputtering torch.
"Almost clumped," he observed. Then he said, "Did you ever hear of a man named Pasteur? One of his first discoveries was that one could get an effectively pure culture of a pathogenic organism by giving the disease to an experimental animal. Better ways were found later, but one still expects a pure culture in a patient who has a disease really badly. What did the lab turn up?"
Kim shook his head.
"Nothing. The bacteriological survey of the planet had been thorough. Oral and intestinal flora were normal. Naturally, the local bacteria couldn't compete with the strains we humans have learned to live with. They couldn't symbiotize. So there wasn't anything unknown. There wasn't any cause of the plague."
Calhoun began to work the filter plunger, by the wavering light of the torch. The piston was itself the filter, and on one side a clear, mobile liquid began very slowly to appear.
"Mutated standard bug? Still, if your doctors did cultures and couldn't reproduce the disease—"
"They could pass it," said Kim bitterly, "but they could never find what carried it! No pure culture would!"
Calhoun watched the clear fluid develop on the delivery side of the filtering piston. The job got done. There was better than twelve cubic centimeters of clear serum on the delivery side, and an almost solid block of clumped blood cells on the other. He drew off the transparent fluid with a fine precision.
"We're doing biochemistry under far from aseptic conditions," he said wryly, "but the work has to be done and we have to take the risk. Anyhow, I'm getting a feeling that this isn't any ordinary plague. A normal pathogenic organism should have been turned up by your doctors."