Ordinarily a frontier is slowly and surely transformed from rowdy wide-openness into suburban quietude by the increase in population—but population doesn't increase in really dangerous spots; that's why the people of New Kalamazoo worked so hard and so long to make their settlement large enough to merit the establishment of a university. A university would mean laboratories and research facilities to investigate Ricardo's Virus and all the lesser plagues peculiar to Venus, the plagues which took more lives yearly than jungle monsters and murderous Heatwavers combined; and a university would mean an increase in population, and law and order.
But Earth hadn't been interested. The study of Venusian diseases was an exotic subject hardly touched upon in Terran medical schools. Earth had been far too busy manufacturing artificial diseases to supplement atom bombs and hydrogen bombs.
Earth had, however, investigated the Venusian plagues with a view to their use in biological warfare. And out of the investigation, as an accident, as a by-product, had come lobodin. A vaccine, not a serum. No good for Graff right now, for he was almost two full hours into the yellow death.
He worked his left arm around slowly, wincing with each turn, his eyes on the terry above him circling southward in the damp murky sky. At the same time he tried to plant the broad soles of his boots on mud that wasn't quicksand, on rotten twigs that wouldn't crack too loudly. He knew his blood was now completely infiltrated with the obscene little yellow specks.
Pubina was probably trying to force Dr. Bergenson to inject the vaccine into him, ridiculing the old man's protests that all the bottle held was a starter culture, just enough so that with weeks of careful tending they might have sufficient vaccine to immunize the children.
It had been so expensive and difficult for the little colony to send Dr. Bergenson and Greta to Earth where his reputation and connections had enabled him to wheedle a spoonful of the precious stuff out of a government laboratory! Pubina hadn't been able to get it, for all of his bribes and underworld contacts. But the bribes and underworld contacts had served another purpose: Pubina had discovered when the Bergensons were due to return—and that was all he really needed.
Graff noticed abruptly that the terry was falling rapidly back at him. Could he be trying to warn—
A shriek gave him the answer. Less than a quarter-mile away, a brontosaurus squatted its tremendous bulk in a shallow pool and regarded him from the end of an undulating snake-like neck. The animal screamed again and Graff froze.
He watched the incredibly heavy reptile scramble to its feet and desperately tried to think. It wasn't a brontosaurus charge you had to be afraid of, but what usually traveled in its wake. A brontosaurus was herbivorous and, for all its size, extremely timid. It was ridiculous, possibly, but the mountain of living flesh was probably screaming in terror at the sight of him. You only had to control yourself and think while the great beast charged.