"I'm so sorry, John," she said weakly. "I guess I wrecked my own plans for having your baby when I got careless with that ferret. Now I'm probably sterile."
She began to cry silently, the big tears rolling slowly on to the pillow.
I stroked her damp hair back from her forehead and kissed her eyes gently. "Maybe you aren't sterile," I said hopefully, "and even if you are it doesn't matter. I love you, and I'll always love you, whether we have children or not."
"I wonder how many years we'll have to spend cooped up in here?" I said, half-seriously to Dr. Hallam later that night. Pat was sleeping soundly under the influence of a capsule of sodium amytal he had given her. We had cooked a steak dinner and now we sat, weary but relieved, over our coffee.
"Lord alone knows," he said. "We'll have to stay here now until we see if you and I are going to catch this thing and what the effects will be. I hope for the sake of our research project we do get it, although I'm not happy about being a guinea pig. Even if it proves to be a suitable weapon we still have to come up with a cure for it, or rather a vaccine to prevent it, so our own people and our allies are protected."
"Why include the allies?" I said, merely for the sake of argument. "Won't that increase the risk of the Reds learning our plans?"
"It will, unless we take a calculated risk. I believe we should manufacture vaccine and stockpile it, not to be issued until the disease is actually causing epidemics in Russia. Then we can fly the vaccine all over the world and let our friends use it. Some people may catch the disease, but not too many. We might even offer some to the Russians, to allay their suspicions, making sure it's too late to help much."
"But don't you think they'll get wise?"
"Of course! But if we do it right I believe they won't dare to use open aggression any more than we are doing."