C5 V

.................. AT THE HOSPITAL, HE WENT directly to the “zoo” in the basement. A knot of personnel, including Phyllis, Peterson, the toxicologist, and Feldman, opened to admit him to the cage under their inspection. A quick glance at the control cages showed no change in the undoctored monkeys. Males and females were paired off, huddling together miserably, chattering and sadly rubbing their heads together. Each couple eyed the other couples suspiciously. Even here, the overpossessiveness was evident, and Murt cringed from the pitiful, disconsolate expressions.

The cage before him, however, appeared normally animated. The monks were feeding and playing happily. Feldman was grinning. “Had to try a new derivative, Sylvester, but the sulfa series was the right approach.”

Murt stared at the cage, redeyed. “Hadn’t realized you succeeded in producing the symptoms in monkeys.”

Phyllis said, “Why, I gave you that report yester—” She broke off with an understanding glance.

Peterson was exclaiming, “I never saw such a rapid-acting remedy! And so far, there’s no evidence of toxic effect.”

“It must absorb directly into the gland tissue,” Feldman added. “Hardly had time to materially reduce the virus content significantly.”

Murt murmured words of congratulations to them, turned on his heel and stalked out. Phyllis followed him to his office.

“Get me some of the stuff and notes on the dosages they administered,” he ordered.

“Certainly,” she said. “But why didn’t you ask— Dr. Murt, you aren’t going to try it on yourself? “

“Why not?” he barked hoarsely.

“It’ll be weeks before we can determine if it’s safe,” she protested, horrified.

“We haven’t got weeks. People are falling apart. This thing’s contagious.”

Even while Murt said it, he felt it was the wrong approach. He knew his own perspective was shot, but Phyllis would probably try to protect him against himself.

She did not. Instead, her face softened with sympathy and something else he refused to identify. She said, “I’ll be right back.”

The pressure in his head throbbed down his neck into his body. He wanted her so much, it was difficult to resist following her out into the hall. She returned in a few minutes with a 500-cc glass-stoppered reagent bottle half full of a milky fluid.

“Oral administration?” he asked.

She nodded. “Fifteen cc for the monkeys.”

She secured a small beaker and a tapered graduate from the glassware cabinet and set them before him. He poured 50 cc into the graduated measure and transferred it to the beaker.

“What do they call it?” he asked.

“Sulfa-tetradine,” she replied. “One of a series Peterson was testing. There is no physiological data on it yet. All he knows is that it inhibited the virus in culture. So they tried it on the monkeys.”

Murt raised the beaker to his lips. It was against every sensible tenet of scientific procedure. He was amazed that Phyllis was silent as he swallowed the bland, chalky fluid. He heard a clink. Turning, he saw her raising the graduate to her lips. In it was a like quantity of sulfa-tetradine.

“What are you doing?” he half-shouted. “We don’t need a test-control!”

“I’m not a control,” she said softly, touching her lips with a scrap of gauze. “I’ve had the virus for months.”

He stared at her unbelievingly. “How do you know?”

“One of the first test samples was my own blood,” she said. “You saw it. It was one of the twelve positive.”

“But the symptoms—you don’t show a sign of—”

“Thanks,” she said. “I started to break down yesterday, but you didn’t notice. You see, you are my fixation and when you told me that you had it, too, I—”

“ Your fixation!” The beaker slipped from his fingers and smashed to the tile. “ You’re in love with me? “

Her arms hung loosely at her sides and tears rimmed her eyes. “Pathologically or otherwise, I’ve been a case since before I started the blood tests.”

They moved together and clung to each other. “Phyl, Phyl—why didn’t you tell me?”

Fiercely, she closed his lips with her own, and her fingers dug deeply into his shoulders. His arms pulled her closer yet, trying to fill the void in him that was greater than the Universe. For a long minute, the knowledge of her love and physical contact with her straining body dispelled the bleak loneliness.

When their lips parted, they gasped for breath.

It was no good. It was like tearing at an itching insect bite with your fingernails. The relief was only momentary, and it left the wound bleeding and more irritated than ever. Even if they were married—look at Peter at the club—Peter and his wife, mutually in love and completely miserable. It wasn’t normal love. It was the damned virus!

As well argue with gravity. He tried to tell her, but he couldn’t make her understand. Her restraint had been magnificent, but when the dam broke, it was beyond stopping the flood of her emotion. And now he couldn’t believe it himself. Nothing this wonderful could be destroyed by mere misunderstanding. He cursed the years of his celibacy. All that time wasted—lost!

It was six o’clock before they reached her apartment. The License Bureau had been a mob scene. Hours more, upstairs in the City Hall waiting for the judge, while they held hands like a pair of college sophomores, staring into each others’ eyes, drinking, drinking the elixir of adoration with a thirst that wouldn’t be sated.

Phyllis weakened first. In the cab, after the ceremony, she released his hand and wiped her damp forehead.

Then, in the elevator, Murt felt himself relaxing. The alchemy of sustained passion had exhausted them both, he decided.

As Phyllis slipped the key in the door, she looked up at him in surprise. “Do you know, I’m hungry. I’m starved—for the first time in months.”

Murt discovered his own stomach was stirring with a prosaic pangful demand of its own. “We should have stopped to eat,” he said, realizing they had forgotten lunch.

“ Steaks! I have some beauties in my freezer!” Phyllis exclaimed. They peeled off their coats and she led him into the small kitchen. She pointed at the cupboard and silverware drawer. “Set the table. We’ll eat in five minutes.”

Slipping into an apron, she explored the freezer for meat and French fries, dropped them into the HF cooker and set the timer for 90 seconds. When it clicked off, she was emptying a transparent sack of prepared salad into a bowl.

“Coffee will be ready in 50 seconds, so let’s eat,” she announced.

For minutes, they ate silently, ravenously, face to face in the little breakfast nook. Murt had forgotten the pure animal pleasure of satisfying a neglected appetite, and so, apparently, had his wife.

Wife! The thought jolted him.

Their eyes met, and he knew that the same thing was in her mind.

The sulfa-tetradine!

With the edge barely off his hunger, he stopped eating. She did, too. They sipped the steaming coffee and looked at each other.

“I—feel better,” Phyllis said at last.

“So do I.”

“I mean—I feel differently.”

He studied her face. It was new. The tenseness was gone and it was a beautiful face, with soft lips and intelligent eyes. But now the eyes were merely friendly.

And it aroused no more than a casual pleasure in him, the pleasure of viewing a lovely painting or a perfect sunset. A peaceful intellectual rapport settled over them, inducing a physical lethargy. They spoke freely of their sensations, of the hypo-adrenal effects, and wondered that there was no unpleasant reaction. They decided that, initially at least, sulfa-tetradine was a miraculous success. Murt thought he should go back to the hospital and work out a report right away.

Phyllis agreed and offered to accompany him, but he said she had better get a night’s sleep. The next day would be hectic.

After four hours at his desk, he called a taxi and, without hesitation, gave the address of his club. Not until he fell wearily into bed did he remember it was his wedding night.

By mutual agreement, the marriage was annulled the next day.

Feldman and Peterson were gratified at the efficacy of their drug, but both were horrified that Murt had chosen to experiment on himself. As usual, Phyl had insisted on being left out of the report.

After a week of close observation, one of the monkeys was chloroformed and tissue-by-tissue examination was made by an army of histologists. Blood samples showed completely clear of the virus, as did a recheck on Murt’s own blood. No deleterious effects could be detected, so the results were published through the Government Health Service.

It was the day before Christmas before Dr. Sylvester Murt first noticed the approaching symptoms of a relapse, or reinfection—he couldn’t guess which. The past weeks had been pleasantly busy and, as acclaimed authority on Murt’s virus, he had had little time to think subjectively about his experience.

Sulfa-tetradine was now considered the specific for the affliction and was being produced and shipped by the carload all over the world. The press had over-generously insisted on giving him all the credit for the remedy as well as the isolation of the disease virus. He was an international hero.

The warning of another attack came to him at 3:30 in the afternoon, when Phyllis Sutton was leaving. She stuck her head back in the door and gave him an uncommonly warm smile and cried, “Merry Christmas, Doctor!”

He waved at her and, as the door closed, caught his breath. There was the burn in his stomach again. It passed away and he refused to give it further thought.

His own cab wound its way through the heavy Christmas Eve traffic an hour before store-closing time. Finally, the vehicle stalled in a jam. It was only six blocks to his club, so Murt paid off the driver and walked.

Part of his strategy of bachelorhood had been to ignore Christmas and the other sentimental seasons, when loneliness costs many a man his independence. But now it was impossible to ignore the snowflakes, the bustling, package-laden crowds and the street-corner Santa Clauses with their tinkling bells.

He found himself staring into department store windows at the gay decorations.

A pair of shimmering, nearly invisible nylons caught his eye. They were the most impalpable of substances, only their bare outline visible against the white background.

He thought of Phyllis and, on impulse, went into the store and bought a pair. The clerk had to pick a size at random for him. Outside, on the sidewalk, he stared at the prettily gift-wrapped package and finally acknowledged the tremor, the tension and the old ache in the region of his diaphragm.

Relapse!

He plodded three slushy blocks up a side-street before he found a cab. He gave Phyllis Sutton’s address to the driver and sank back in the taxi as a wave of weakness overcame him. What if she weren’t home? It was Christmas Eve. She would probably be visiting friends or relatives.

But she wasn’t. She opened the door under his impatient knock, and her eyes widened cordially.

“Sylvester!” she exclaimed. “Merry Christmas! Is that for me?” She pointed to the package, clutched forgotten in his hands.

“Merry, hell!” he said dispiritedly. “I came to warn you to look out for a relapse. Mine’s been coming on all day.”

She drew him inside, made him take off his coat and sit down before she acknowledged his remark. The apartment was cozy, with a tiny Christmas tree decorated in the window. She returned from the hall closet and sat beside him.

“Look what I did—on impulse,” he said and tossed the package on her lap. “That’s what really turned it on.”

She opened the nylons and looked up at him sideways.

He continued unhappily, “I saw them in a window. Made me think of you, and about that time the seizure began. I tried to kid myself that I was just getting you a little token of—of my esteem, but the symptoms are almost as bad as before already.”

Apparently she refused to accept the seriousness of the situation. Her smile was fatuous, he thought, kissably fatuous.

“Don’t you realize what this means?” he demanded. “Peterson and Feldman turned up a very distressing fact. Sulfa-tetradine deposits out in the endocrines, so a single dose is all a person can take. This relapse of mine means we have it all to do over again.”

“Think, Dr. Murt! Just think a minute,” she urged.

“About what?”

“If the sulfa deposits out in the very glands it’s there to protect, how could you be suffering another attack?”

His arms ached to reach out and emphasize his argument. “I don’t know. All I know is how I feel. In a way, this is even worse, because—”

“I know,” Phyllis said and perversely moved close to him. “My relapse came last Tuesday when I bought you a tie for Christmas. I sent a blood sample over to Ebert Labs right away. And do you know what?”

“What?” Murt asked in a bewildered fog.

“It was negative. I don’t have Murt’s Virus.” She slipped an arm around his waist and put her head on his shoulder. “All I’ve got is Murt himself.”