“—where, under the stimulus of bacterial attack, the phagocytic factories rush extra cells into the blood stream.”
He let the book drop forward into his lap and it slipped off, his legs and thumped down on the rug.
It was getting harder and harder to fight, because no matter what he read, there was always the relationship between bacteria and blood affliction. Yet, all this time, he’d been letting contempt fall freely on all those in the past who had died proclaiming the truth of the germ theory and scoffing at vampires.
He got up and made himself a drink. But it sat untouched as he stood before the bar. Slowly, rhythmically, he thudded his right fist down on the top of the bar while his eyes stared bleakly at the wall.
Germs.
He grimaced. Well, for God’s sake, he snapped jadedly at himself, the word hasn’t got thorns, you know. He took a deep breath. All right, he ordered himself, is there any reason why it couldn’t be germs?
He turned away from the bar as if he could leave the question there. But questions had no location; they could follow him around.
He sat in the kitchen staring into a steaming cup of coffee. Germs. Bacteria. Viruses. Vampires. Why am I so against it? he thought. Was it just reactionary stubbornness, or was it that the task would loom as too tremendous for him if it were germs?
He didn’t know. He started out on a new course, the course of compromise. Why throw out either theory? One didn’t necessarily negate the other. Dual acceptance and correlation, he thought.
Bacteria could be the answer to the vampire.
Everything seemed to flood over him then. It was as though he’d been the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, refusing to let the sea of reason in. There he’d been, crouching and content with his iron-bound theory. Now he’d straightened up and taken his finger out. The sea of answers was already beginning to wash in.
The plague had spread so quickly. Could it have done that if only vampires had spread it? Could their nightly marauding have propelled it on so quickly?
He felt himself jolted by the sudden answer. Only if you accepted bacteria could you explain the fantastic rapidity of the plague, the geometrical mounting of victims.
He shoved aside the coffee cup, his brain pulsing with a dozen different ideas. The flies and mosquitoes had been a part of it. Spreading the disease, causing it to race through the world.
Yes, bacteria explained a lot of things; the staying in by day, the coma enforced by the germ to protect itself from sun radiation.
A new idea: What if the bacteria were the strength of the true vampire? He felt a shudder run down his back. Was it possible that the same germ that killed the living provided the energy for the dead?
He had to know! He jumped up and almost ran out of the house. Then, at the last moment, he jerked back from the door with a nervous laugh. God’s sake, he thought, am I going out of my mind? It was nighttime. He grinned and walked restlessly around the living room.
Could it explain the other things? The stake? His mind fell over itself trying to fit that into the framework of bacterial causation. Come on! he shouted impatiently in his mind. But all he could think of was hemorrhage, and that didn’t explain that woman. And it wasn’t the heart…. He skipped it, afraid that his newfound theory would start to collapse before he’d established it.
The cross, then. No, bacteria couldn’t explain that. The soil; no, that was no help. Running water, the mirror, garlic… He felt himself trembling without control and he wanted to cry out loudly to stop the runaway horse of his brain. He had to find something! Goddamn it! he raged in his mind. I won’t let it go!
He made himself sit down. Trembling and rigid, he sat there and blanked his mind until calm took over. Good Lord, he thought finally, what’s the matter with me? I get an idea, and when it doesn’t explain everything in the first minute, I panic. I must be going crazy.
He took that drink now; he needed it. He held up his glass, it was shaking. All right, little boy, he tried kidding himself, calm down now. Santa Claus is coming to town with all the nice answers. No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.
He snickered at that, and it relaxed him. Colorful, he thought, tasty. The last man in the world is Edgar Guest.
All right, then, he ordered himself, you’re going to bed. You’re not going to go flying off in twenty different directions. You can’t take that any more; you’re an emotional misfit.
The first step was to get a microscope. That is the first step, he kept repeating forcefully to himself as he undressed for bed, ignoring the tight ball of indecision in his stomach, the almost painful craving to plunge directly into investigation without any priming.
He almost felt ill, lying there in the darkness and planning just one step ahead. He knew it
He grinned in the darkness, feeling good about the definite work ahead.
One thought on the problem he allowed himself before sleeping. The bitings, the insects, the transmission from person to person—were even these enough to explain the horrible speed with which the plague spread?
He went to sleep with the question in his mind. And, about three in the morning, he woke up to find the house buffeted by another dust storm. And suddenly, in the flash of a second, he made the connection.
Chapter Eleven
The first one he got was worthless.
The base was so poorly leveled that any vibration at all disturbed it. The action of its moving parts was loose to the point of wobbling. The mirror kept moving out of position because its pivots weren’t tight enough. Moreover, the instrument had no substage to hold condenser or polarizer. It had only one nosepiece, so that he had to remove the object lens when he wanted any variation in magnification. The lenses were impossible.
But, of course, he knew nothing about microscopes, and he’d taken the first one he’d found. Three days later he hurled it against the wall with a strangled curse and stamped it into pieces with his heels.
Then, when he’d calmed down, he went to the library and got a book on microscopes.
The next time he went out, he didn’t come back until he’d found a decent instrument; triple nose stage, substage for condenser and polarizer, good base, smooth movement, iris diaphragm, good lenses. It’s just one more example, he told himself, of the stupidity of starting off half-cocked. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he answered disgustedly.
He forced himself to spend a good amount of time familiarizing himself with the instrument. He fiddled with the mirror until he could direct a beam of light on the object in a matter of seconds. He acquainted himself with the lenses, varying from a three-inch power to a one-twelfth-inch power. In the case of the latter, he learned to place a drop of cedar-wood oil on the slide, then rack down until the lens touched the oil. He broke thirteen slides doing it.
Within three days of steady attention, he could manipulate the milled adjustment heads rapidly, could control the iris diaphragm and condenser to get exactly the right amount of light on the slide, and was soon getting a sharply defined clarity with the ready-made slides he’d got. He never knew a flea looked so godawful.
Next came mounting, a process much more difficult, he soon discovered. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t seem to keep dust particles out of the mount. When he looked at them in the microscope, it looked as if he were examining boulders.
It was especially difficult because of the dust storms, which still occurred on an average of once every four days. He was ultimately obliged to build a shelter over the bench.
He also learned to be systematic while experimenting with the mounts. He found that continually searching for things allowed that much more time for dust to accumulate on his slides. Grudgingly, almost amused, he soon had a place for everything. Glass slips, cover glasses, pipettes, cells, forceps, Petri dishes, needles, chemicals—all
