“ On the face of it, it’s very reasonable. Such a clear succession of areas of incidence is rare in a disease.”

  “ All right, then, I’ll notify the police.” Kent mused for a second as they walked towards the hall, and then went on, “ Damn it, it’s infernally convincing, that idea that it may be deliberately planted ! Did you know that they’ve appealed to the World Health Organisation for the country to be declared an area of menace ?”

  “ Have they now ? Whose idea was that ?”

  “ It was in the news this morning. The Ministry of Health is sending a delegation to New York to see the Secretary of the directions committee tonight.”

  “ Well, that has its points. It means we get all the emergency medical teams we need—”

  “ Yes, and into the bargain quarantine for emigrants, no tourists, robot loading of ships and aircraft, a ban on space travel—you know the provisions ?”

  “ I certainly do,” said Clifford grimly. “ It may make it hard on us. This will be the first time an entire country has gone under ban, won’t it ?”

  “ I believe the biggest previous one was the blackwater fever belt in Central Africa, and they licked that inside a month. The Plague won’t be so easily got rid of.”

  They had reached the door of Kent’s office now, and on glancing at the receptionist he caught her eyeing his companion sympathetically. He wondered for a moment whether he should stay and comfort his friend, but he was forced to admit that he should go home and get some rest. His duty to his patients outweighed even such a long friendship —he and Ron Kent had been in medical school together until Kent gave up medicine to take over his father’s pharmaceuticals firm and build it up into one of the best in Britain, and he had been his best man when he married Leila.

  Who is now dead, he remembered with a pang.

  He found Kent looking at him diffidently, plainly unwilling to ask him to stay with him, and he tried to smile. “ Ron, you know I would keep you company if I could. But I’m dead tired, and I’ve got to be back at the hospital by six to-morrow morning.”

  Kent nodded, his eyes still on the other’s face. Then he said abruptly, “ Why have you never got married, Cliff ? Was it perhaps because you were afraid of something like this ?”

  He turned and went abruptly back into his office, leaving Clifford staring sombrely at blank polished panels.

  No, he told the wood silently. No, that wasn’t the reason.

  After a moment he turned on his heel and walked away.

  IV

  The shrilling of the bedside phone roused Clifford from the last stages of a comfortable night’s rest. Thinking at first that it would be the call he had ordered to wake him in time to reach the hospital, he stretched languidly. He had been asleep since nine last night, and he felt enormously better.

  But as he turned in the bed, his eye was caught by the luminous dial of the night clock, and he started. It was only half past three— much too early for his own call. Expecting an emergency, he reached hastily for the receiver.

  It was an emergency, but not of the kind he had been looking for.

  “ Clifford here,” he said, fully awake now.

  “ This is Ron Kent,” his caller announced in a dead voice. “ Listen, Cliff, the police have just told me that someone broke into the lab block tonight, knocked out Jezzard, who was on duty in the culture room, smashed up all the specimens, and wrecked the K39 series beyond recovery. They’ve got a description of the man out of Jezzard, and it sounds like this man Borghum who was at my offices this afternoon. Jezzard’s got hold of the idea that he’s trying to prevent us using chrysomycetin against the Plague.”

  “ Good Lord ! ” said Clifford, sitting upright.

  “ God, it’s terrible, Cliff 1 All our work gone to hell. Look, the reason I called you is that I can’t get hold of my receptionist, Marjory, who’s the only other person who saw Borghum and can confirm my description. The police say our warning system doesn’t appear to have been tampered with, and they want to know if he actually did leave the building, or whether he hid inside until midnight and then got away after the alarms were turned off to let the police in.”

  “ I saw him leave,” said Clifford. “ He might have come back. Tell you what—I don’t have to be on duty till six. Would you like me to come down and make a statement ?”

  “ Would you really ?” The gratitude in Kent’s voice was almost pathetic. “ If I can get someone to confirm my identification, the police say they’ll raise a warrant for him. We’ve had an Assistant Commissioner out of bed, and he’s been raising Cain—seems he lost his son to the plague a few days ago—”

  Kent’s voice was on the edge of breaking, and Clifford interrupted reassuringly. “ Don’t worry, Ron. I’llbedownjustassoonaslcan.” He rang off and threw back the bedclothes. He did not bother to dress properly, but pulled on slacks and a Jersey and ran downstairs to fetch his car from the garage. The traffic at night was light in this part of town; he passed a few taxis cruising on the look-out for fares, and once he saw a police patrol car, but he flashed his DOCTOR sign at them and they did not stop him for exceeding the speed limit. Otherwise the streets were deserted until he reached Kent Pharmaceuticals. Here there was chaos.

  He recognised a lie detector squad unloading their equipment from a van; someone was assembling a Bloodhound—an electronic tracking device—on the pavement, by the light of a portable searchlamp; and there were four patrol cars near the entrance. He recognised Kent’s car parked beyond them.

  At the gate a constable flagged him down, and he explained his presence and was waved on. He pulled up and got out.

  In the reception hall he found Kent standing by the door of his office, and called out to him.

  “ Thank God you made it,” said Kent fervently. “ Come in here.” “ In here ” was his own office. There were five people present: Spencer and Jezzard he knew—the latter looked sullen and defiant, and there was a bruise on his jaw; and Clifford guessed that he had propounded his theory of sabotage and found it meet with a cold reception. There were also the two constables putting the finishing touches to the lie detector on the desk, and a detective sergeant holding a portable tape recorder.

  “ Is this Dr. Clifford ?” he inquired of Kent, and on receiving a nod, went on, “ Would you sit down, doctor ? We shall be ready to take statements in a moment.”

  The constables asked Jezzard to take his place at the lie detector, and pressed suction cup terminals like those Clifford was used to on an electroencephalograph against his wrists, temples and palms.

  “ All right, Mr. Jezzard,” said the sergeant. “ Please tell us what happened.” He clicked the switch on his recorder.

  With the air of someone explaining the fundamentals of arithmetic to a backward child, Jezzard began to speak in a low tone. He had been on the point of calling Spencer, he told them, who was sharing the overnight watch in the culture room with him, and who was to be woken at midnight for his spell of duty. He had gone to the airlock to find it already cycling, and thinking that Spencer had got up by himself, had stood back. Instead of Spencer, however, a stranger had appeared in the doorway, and on seeing Jezzard had knocked him out without more than a few seconds’ hesitation and before he, Jezzard, could call for help. He had not recovered until half an hour later, when Spencer had come to see why he had not been called at midnight and had found him lying there. When they cheeked to see if any damage had been done, they discovered that the intruder had apparently operated all the handling mechanisms at random and had thrown the culture dishes in the sealed room on the floor, breaking them and ruining their value.

  Kent shook his head slowly. “ It’s such a senseless crime !” he said savagely.

  Jezzard seemed to be on the point of making a remark in pursuance of his deliberate infection theory, and then compressed his lips and thought better of it.

  Spencer had little to add, except that he described the chaos more accurately and lamented the loss of the chrysomycetin—Clifford began to understand just how effective the unknown’s act could be if it were sabotage.

  Then Kent made his deposition about Borghum, and at last Clifford took his place and looked expectantly at the sergeant.

  “ I believe you saw someone leave the building when you called to see Mr. Kent this evening ?” said the policeman.

  “ That’s right. It would have been about four-thirty. I came to express my sympathy to Mr. Kent over the loss of his wife.”

  The sergeant glanced up. “ I didn’t know about that,” he said. “ I’m sorry, Mr. Kent.”

  Kent muttered and turned away.

  “ Can you describe this man you saw leaving ?”

  “ He was about fifty, I should say. His hair was black, going grey at the temples and nape. He was about six foot two or three tall, with a dark complexion and a pronounced hook to his nose. He might be Arabic or Jewish. He bore himself with a military air.”

  The sergeant looked satisfied. “ That certainly seems to bear out our ideas,” he said. “ But did you actually see him leave ?”

  “ I saw him walk out of the hall, yes. And when I left myself a car which had been parked next to mine was no longer there.”

  “ Can you describe the car ?”

  “Yes, it was a new Hunter convertible with rotors and stub wings retracted, in black and red. I think the registration mark began with 9G, but I’m not sure.”

  The sergeant looked at the men on the lie detector, and they nodded in unison. One of them said, “ All correct, sergeant. It looks as if this Borghum is our man.”

  “ Good. Get on to the Gloucestershire branch and find out if he really does come from Balmforth Latimer, and if he does to find his home and arrest him when he gets back, if he isn’t already there. He should be by now if he went straight there.”

  “ Shouldn’t we wait for a check with the Bloodhound ?” suggested the constable tentatively.

  “ Take too long. By the time they’ve sorted out all the spoors in the building he could be out of the country.”

  “ But surely he can’t have gone straight back ?” said Kent suddenly. “ You said he must have lurked in the building until after you arrived.”

  “ We daren’t overlook any possibilities, sir. I know the system of alarms you have here, and they’re as near perfect as any in use, and they don’t show signs of tampering. But someone got in, and it certainly looks like Borghum. Excuse me, gentlemen.” The sergeant suddenly appeared to remember that his tape recorder was still running, and bent to cut it off.

  Outside in the hall again, Clifford turned to Kent, who was worriedly gazing at the small procession of detectives going to and from the lab block. “ What’s ail this about your alarm system ?” he demanded.

  Kent did not look at him. “ This is a danger area,” he said. “ We aren’t so much concerned with safeguarding our property as with preventing some damned fool from getting in and infecting himself with one of our cultures. The perimeter is covered by an electric eye network which is turned on whenever the day shift moves out. There are also infra-red detectors which map movement of any warm object within the grounds. In addition to setting off alarms in the culture room—someone’s always on duty there-=-they ought to alter the readings on the paper tapes connected to the circuit. The tapes are driven by clockwork, so that even if someone shorted out the alarms, a blank space should be left on the tape by the removal of the pens. The record shows a completely unbroken line.

  “ What it boils down to is that somehow this man got in without crossing the perimeter, burrowing from underground or dropping from the sky. And the only warm bodies shown on the tapes were in the culture room and the room where Spencer was asleep. It’s not only that that’s impossible—it’s senseless !”

  “ I think so too,” Clifford told him. “ If I hadn’t seen the lie detector confirm what Jezzard said, I could imagine him wrecking the lab himself to support his idea of this afternoon—yesterday afternoon, rather.”

  “ You think he did ?” Kent looked at him sharply.

  “ I didn’t say that. But you left medical school before psychology year, didn’t you, Ron ? It’s a pity. Jezzard is a thoroughly unstable character. He doesn’t regret the damage done to your culture room— not basically. He believes it was inevitable, and only kicks himself for not recognising that it would happen. That’s an insane compulation. It was neither foreseeable nor avoidable. If you take my advice, you’ll have him examined. Who’s your company psychiatrist?” “ A man called Chenelly.” Kent was staring now. “ Do you really mean that, Cliff ?”

  “ I really do. I think he’s apt to become more of a liability than a help any time now. He’s going to break down under the strain. And I for one don’t want to be around when it happens.”

  “ Thanks for the warning,” said Kent soberly. “ I’ll do as you say.” “ That’s good.” Clifford shot his wrist out of his jersey to look at his watch and found that he had forgotten to put it on when he left home in such a hurry. “ What’s the time, Ron ?”

  “ Twenty to six.”

  “ I must run, then. I mustn’t be late at the hospital. I’ll see you later.” He broke away and departed at. a run.

  V

  He was thinking over that dialogue while he ate his lunch, snatched hastily in the house surgeon’s room at the hospital. There had been thirty-six new admissions in the course of the morning—thirty-five of them Plague and one appendicitis. The Plague situation was rapidly approaching saturation point. If W.H.O. didn’t move in some troubleshooters, there just wouldn’t be enough doctors in Britain to cope with the rush.

  But he found himself less worried by that, which would affect himself, than by the problem he knew Kent was having to face—how a man had got into the burglar-proof premises of his firm. He remembered suddenly that the reason for it was the conversation he had had with Buehl the day before. He would have been reminded earlier if they hadn’t shifted him out of the main ward into the convalescent section.

  A matter transmitter, that was it. It seemed like the only possible explanation of Borghum’s entry. Nonetheless it was fantastic. Matter transmitters belonged to the future, not to an age in which spaceships still relied on fallible rockets and long periods of coasting to drift them to Mars or the Moon.

  Or did they ?

  He pushed aside his paper plate, still half full of the tasteless stew which was the best they had been able to provide for lunch—apparently about half the staff of the meat distribution centre at Smithfield had gone down with Plague, and the health officers had banned delivery of what might be infected food.

  “ Sister !” he called out, and she answered him from the room next door. “ Where did they put that man Buehl ? The one I said could be moved last night ?”

  “ Ward 29,1 think,” she called back. “ Did you want to see him ?”

  “ I’m just going down to see how he is.”

  He left the office and walked briskly down the passage. Buehl had said that he was going to check the math of this fellow Wiseman. He wondered if they had managed to find him the computer he had asked for.

  Apparently they had, for when he entered Ward 29, he found the spaceman figuring busily on an already closely written scratchpad, and punching equations by touch on the keyboard of a small wheeled calculator beside his bed. He looked up on hearing Clifford approach, and broke into a grin.

  “ Hullo, doc !” he said. “ Come to make sure I won’t trouble you again ?”

  Clifford forced a smile at the rather morbid joke. He shook his head. “ I’m afraid not,” he replied. “ Do you remember telling me about this matter transmitter of Wiseman’s yesterday ? You said you were going to check the math.”

  “ That’s right. I am. I had a hard job getting to sleep last night. The nurse wouldn’t let me stay up to finish the equation I was working on, so I had to rim it in my head, and believe me my grey cells are no match for a machine.” He hunted for a sheet of paper somewhere among the pile on the blankets.

  “ Does it work ?”

  Buehl shook his head emphatically. “ Gh, I can’t find anything wrong with the idea. It would work—but we just can’t do the things he wants us to.”

  He settled himself more comfortably in the bed. “ You know, it’s like the problem of the marble. Fifty or sixty years ago, Banach and Tarski proved that you could take a marble to pieces—five pieces, I think—and re-assemble them to form a globe as big as the Earth. Conversely, you could pack the Earth, properly divided, into a space the size of a marble. It’s sound enough reasoning. The only hutch is you just plain can’t do it.”

  He rapped the top of the calculator with the stylus he had in his hand. “ Same thing applies here. Wiseman’s quite right in saying that if you could find two identical places and force them to stay that way, something introduced into one would appear in the other, and if you could cut the power keeping them identical at the right moment, you could make it stay there. What he can’t tell us is how to create two identical locations. He wants a perfect square wave as a start, if I follow him—”

  The P.A. speaker in the corner of the ward beeped and cleared its throat. “ Dr. Clifford, please. Will Dr. Clifford come to the house surgeon’s office ?” It clicked off.

  Clifford muttered a few ripe curses under his breath. “ So at the present moment at any rate no one could build a matter transmitter?” Buehl grinned and shook his head. “ What do you want one for, anyway ? To save you walking back to your office ?”

  “ No,” said Clifford. “ I’m just trying to solve a burglary.”

  “ Well, I can tell you this straight, doc,” said Buehl with mock seriousness. “ If anyone had a matter transmitter right now, it wouldn’t be a burglar. Someone that clever would choose a less risky kind of occupation—like mine.”

 

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