I had one 30-second visit from the doctor before Durstine came to take me away. The doc said simply, "You're a lucky man, Lieutenant. We didn't save many 'fever' patients after the drugs ran out."
The chief brought a couple of boys in blue with a stretcher to haul me out. I was amazed to discover that automobiles were still moving about the streets—not many, but a few. I was too sick and exhausted to talk during the ride.
Durstine rode in back with me, a hand on my shoulder. "Don't worry, Gene," he said. "You're going to be all right. And we've got this thing pretty well licked."
He looked into my eyes and read the question I was too weak to speak aloud.
"No," he said, "we didn't figure out Baxter's extractor. But we do have a successful detector, and all we have to do now is use it—then hang a tin can or an old ketchup bottle on each speck of metal for a marker. Yeah, the country's going to be cluttered up like a hanging garbage dump for a long time, but if you can see 'em you can dodge 'em."
A detector? Why, they'd have to equip every person in the country with one! And surely nothing less than an electronic, radar-type gadget could detect the microscopic particles as they first began to emerge—the kind that had riddled my intestines and given me the fever without even leaving a mark on my skin.
"I know what you are thinking," Durstine said. His face was gray and drawn, but he wore a faint smile. "It was simple when somebody thought of it. What would be cheap enough to distribute universally, yet effective enough to give you positive warning? You see, these tiny particles are so fine at first that you can fan the air with a plank and never know when one passes through."
He raised me up from the stretcher and let me look out the window of the police ambulance. Through squinted eyes I made out a strange sight. A thin scattering of pedestrians was moving slowly on the sidewalks, winding their ways among a random collection of floating tin cans and inverted bottles.
When we stopped for a red light I watched a young woman in a business suit step between a whiskey bottle head-high, and a bean can about knee-high, and then proceed gingerly waving a colored sphere ahead of her. This sphere, about eighteen inches in diameter, suddenly disappeared. She stopped abruptly and began shouting. Before the traffic light turned green, a man came up with an empty motor oil can and placed it on the sidewalk, under the point she indicated in the air before her.
Durstine explained, "When that speck gets large enough to support it, that can will be hung on it. Meanwhile, other people are forewarned that the air over the can is out-of-bounds, so they won't waste detectors on it."