3
So twenty-five healthy privates of the Dictator's Honor Guard, handpicked for courage, rigid honesty and selfless loyalty to the leader, were hospitalized and injected with potent doses of viciously lethal culture RM4-2197. They were told that it was a new immunization which would soon become regulation throughout the armed forces. And twenty-five prisoners, likewise healthy save for the twist in their minds that made them seditionists and rebels instead of Honor Guardsmen, received the same injection and were told the same story.
The results were almost fantastically satisfactory. The twenty-five convicts died, one and all, with the uncontrolled spasms and twitchings, lapsing into stupor, that told of the virus' progress in the higher nerve centers. Their isolated barracks, together with the unimportant orderlies who had cared for it and the victims, were sterilized, almost obliterated by caustic chemicals and flame. Meantime the Honor Guard in their separate quarantine rolled dice and exchanged dirty jokes and felt no ill effects.
The Dictator had commanded that he be first to know the outcome; he, who fancied himself as a poet of human destiny, also liked to think that he had a scientific mind, and in this matter, on which the world's future might hinge, he wished to make his own observations and draw his own conclusions. But promptly after receiving the news he visited Euge again to shower him with jubilant congratulations.
"Now," he announced fervently, "we must have a final experiment, to be wholly sure. One on a far grander scale than before—than any experiment ever was before! I want a large supply of Virus RM4, in sealed cylinders of five or six liters each, under pressure. Prepared as for military use, you understand. The rest I will take care of."
Euge bowed his head in acquiescence, and refrained from mentioning his mice.
Long rows of glass cells where mice lived and died by ones and twos and threes, were in the contagion laboratory, where by Euge's orders only he and Novik worked now. Less flamboyantly than the Dictator, Euge liked to be sure, and he repeated his experiments doggedly until the statistical results leveled off at well-defined norms.
Infected mice, segregated in solitary confinement, developed symptoms and died in the ratio of sixty-five out of a hundred. Among similarly exposed animals distributed two to a cage, the mortality averaged somewhat over eighty-seven per cent. In threes, ninety-six per cent. And when he tried isolating a hundred mice, four to a cage, all of them died. In every case, if one mouse in a group took the disease, so did the rest.