As for the rest it was only a burring; the sound of seven million people hungry for sleep or love or money.
He observed, “Oh, rats, I guess Lee’ll have gone to bed by now,” and felt his way back to the laboratory.
A detective, hunting the murderer of bacteria, he stood with his head back, scratching his chin, scratching his memory for like cases of microörganisms committing suicide or being slain without perceptible cause. He rushed up-stairs to the library, consulted the American and English authorities and, laboriously, the French and German. He found nothing.
He worried lest there might, somehow, have been no living staphylococci in the pus which he had used for seeding the broth—none there to die. At a hectic run, not stopping for lights, bumping corners and sliding on the too perfect tile floor, he skidded down the stairs and galloped through the corridors to his room. He found the remains of the original pus, made a smear on a glass slide, and stained it with gentian-violet, nervously dribbling out one drop of the gorgeous dye. He sprang to the microscope. As he bent over the brass tube and focused the objective, into the gray-lavender circular field of vision rose to existence the grape-like clusters of staphylococcus germs, purple dots against the blank plane.
“Staph in it, all right!” he shouted.
Then he forgot Leora, war, night, weariness, success, everything as he charged into preparations for an experiment, his first great experiment. He paced furiously, rather dizzy. He shook himself into calmness and settled down at a table, among rings and spirals of cigarette smoke, to list on small sheets of paper all the possible causes of suicide in the bacteria—all the questions he had to answer and the experiments which should answer them.
It might be that alkali in an improperly cleaned flask had caused the clearing of the culture. It might be some anti-staph substance existing in the pus, or something liberated by the staphylococci themselves. It might be some peculiarity of this particular broth.
Each of these had to be tested.
He pried open the door of the glass-storeroom, shattering the lock. He took new flasks, cleaned them, plugged them with cotton, and placed them in the hot-air oven to sterilize. He found other batches of broth—as a matter of fact he stole them, from Gottlieb’s private and highly sacred supply in the ice-box. He filtered some of the clarified culture through a sterile porcelain filter, and added it to his regular staphylococcus strains.
And, perhaps most important of all, he discovered that he was out of cigarettes.