About the only exceptions are the kids who seem to
get it between the ages of two and three. Eighty-seven out of
ninety-one!"
He stared at the figures sickly. Most of the village not only had the
plague but must be near the end of the incubation period. It looked as
if most of the village would be dead before another year passed.
"Bad?" Jake asked.
"The first symptom of Martian fever."
The old man whistled, the lines around his eyes tightening. "Must be
me," he decided. "I'm the guy who must have brought it here, then. I
used to spend a lot of time with Durwood at his diggings!"
There was a constant commotion all that day and the next as runners went
out to the villages and came back with reports. The variation from
village to village was only slight. Most of Mars seemed to have advanced
cases of Martian fever.
Without animals for investigation and study, real research was
difficult. Doc also needed an electron microscope. He was reasonably
sure that the disease must travel through the nerves, but he had found
no proof beyond the hard lump at the base of the neck. There it was a
fair-sized organism. Elsewhere he could find nothing, until the black
specks developed.
His eyes ached from trying to see more than was visible in the
microscope. The tantalizing suggestions of filaments around the nuclei
might be the form of plague that was contagious.
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