shack. The normal temperature on both satellites is about two hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Ever try to swing a pick against ground frozen that solid—working inside a spacesuit? But I got the dirt for you. Now I want to see why Pfitzner wants dirt.”
The girl shrugged. “I’m sure you were told why before you even left Earth.”
“Supposing I was? I know that you people get drugs out of dirt. But aren’t the guys who bring in the samples entitled to see how the process works? What if Pfitzner gets some new wonder-drug out of one of my samples— couldn’t I have a sentence or two of explanation to pass on to my kids?”
The swinging doors bobbed open, and the affable face of the stocky man was thrust into the room.
“Dr. Abbott not here yet, Anne?” he said.
“Not yet, Mr. Gunn. I’ll call you the minute he arrives.”
“But you’ll keep me sitting at least another ninety minutes,” Paige said flatly. Gunn looked him over, staring at the colonel’s eagle on his collar and stopping at the winged crescent pinned over his pocket.
“Apologies, Colonel, but we’re having ourselves a small crisis today,” he said, smiling tentatively. “I gather you’ve brought us some samples from space. If you could possibly come back tomorrow, I’d be happy to give you all the time in the world. But right now—”
Gunn ducked his head in apology and pulled it in, as though he had just cuckooed 2400 and had to go somewhere and lie down until 0100. Just before the door came to rest behind him, a faint but unmistakable sound slipped through it.
Somewhere in the laboratories of Jno. Pfitzner & Sons a baby was crying.
Paige listened, blinking, until the sound was damped off. When he looked back down at the desk again, the expression of the girl behind it seemed distinctly warier.
“Look,” he said. “I’m not asking a great favor of you. I don’t want to know anything I shouldn’t know. All I want to know is how you plan to process my packets of soil. It’s just simple curiosity—backed up by a trip that covered a few hundred millions of miles. Am I entitled to know for my trouble, or not?”
“You are and you aren’t,” the girl said steadily. “We want your samples, and we’ll agree that they’re unusually interesting to us because they came from the Jovian system—the first such we’ve ever gotten. But that’s no guarantee that we’ll find anything useful in them.”
“It isn’t?”
“No. Colonel Russell, you’re not the first man to come here with soil samples, believe me. Granted that you’re the first man to bring anything back from outside the orbit of Mars; in fact, you’re only the sixth man to deliver samples from any place farther away than the Moon. But evidently you have no idea of the volume of samples we get here, routinely. We’ve asked virtually every space pilot, every Believer missionary, every commercial traveler, every explorer, every foreign correspondent to scoop up soil samples for us, where-ever they may go. Before we discovered ascomycin, we had to screen
“I see the point,” Paige said reluctantly. “What’s ascomycin, by the way?”
The girl looked down at her desk and moved a piece of paper from
“I see.” Paige was not quite sure he did see, however, after all. He had heard the name Pfitzner fall from some very unlikely lips during his many months in space. As far as he had been able to determine after he had become sensitized to the sound, about every third person on the planets was either collecting samples for the firm or knew somebody who was. The grapevine, which among spacemen was the only trusted medium of communication, had it that the company was doing important government work. That, of course, was nothing unusual in the Age of Defense, but Paige had heard enough to suspect that Pfitzner was something special—something so big, perhaps, as the historic Manhattan District and at least twice as secret.
The door opened and emitted Gunn for the second time hand-running, this time all the way.
“Not yet?” he said to the girl. “Evidently he isn’t going to make it. Unfortunate. But I’ve some spare time now, Colonel—”
“Russell, Paige Russell, Army Space Corps.”
“Thank you. If you’ll accept my apologies for our preoccupation, Colonel Russell, I’ll be glad to show you around our little establishment. My name, by the way, is Harold Gunn, vice-president in charge of exports for the Pfitzner division.”
“I’m importing at the moment,” Paige said, holding out the soil samples. Gunn took them reverently and dropped them in a pocket of his jacket. “But I’d enjoy seeing the labs.”
He nodded to the girl and the doors closed between them. He was inside.
The place was at least as fascinating as he had expected it to be. Gunn showed him, first, the rooms where the incoming samples were classified and then distributed to the laboratories proper. In the first of these, a measured fraction of a sample was dropped into a one-litre flask of sterile distilled water, swirled to distribute it evenly, and then passed through a series of dilutions. The final suspensions were then used to inoculate test-tube slants and petri plates, containing a wide variety of nutrient media, which went into the incubator.
“In the next lab here—Dr. Aquino isn’t in at the moment, so we mustn’t touch anything, but you can see through the glass quite clearly—we transfer from the plates and agar slants to a new set of media,” Gunn explained. “But here each organism found in the sample has a set of cultures of its own, so that if it secretes anything into one of the media, that something won’t be contaminated.”
“If it does, the amount must be very tiny,” Paige said. “How do you detect it?”
“Directly, by its action. Do you see the rows of plates with the white paper discs in their centers, and the four furrows in the agar radiating from the discs? Well, each one of those furrows is impregnated with culture medium from one of the pure cultures. If all four streaks grow thriving bacterial colonies, then the medium on the paper disc contains no antibiotic against those four germs. If one or more of the streaks fails to grow, or is retarded compared to the others, then we have hope.”
In the succeeding laboratory, antibiotics which had been found by the disc method were pitted against a whole spectrum of dangerous organisms. About 90 per cent of the discoveries were eliminated here, Gunn explained, either because they were insufficiently active or because they duplicated the antibiotic spectra of already known drugs. “What we call ‘insufficiently active’ varies with the circumstances, however,” he added. “An antibiotic which shows
A few antibiotics which passed their spectrum tests went on to a miniature pilot plant, where the organisms that produced them were set to work in a deep-aerated fermentation tank. From this bubbling liquor, comparatively large amounts of the crude drug were extracted, purified, and sent to the pharmacology lab for tests on animals.
“We lose a lot of otherwise promising antibiotics here, too,” Gunn said. “Most of them turn out to be too toxic to be used in—or even on —the human body. We’ve had Hansen’s bacillus knocked out a thousand times in the test-tube only to find here that the antibiotic is much more quickly fatal
“It’s much more elaborate than I would have imagined,” Paige said. “But I can see that it’s well worth the trouble. Did you work out this sample-screening technique here?”
“Oh, my, no,” Gunn said, smiling indulgently. “Waksman, the discoverer of streptomycin, laid down the essential procedure decades ago. We aren’t even the first firm to use it on a large scale; one of our competitors did that and found a broad-spectrum antibiotic called chloramphenicol with it, scarcely a year after they’d begun. That was what convinced the rest of us that we’d better adopt the technique before we got shut out of the market entirely. A good thing, too; otherwise none of us would have discovered tetracycline, which turned out to be the most versatile antibiotic ever tested.”
Farther down the corridor a door opened. The squall of a baby came out of it, much louder than before. It was
