Leo Frankowski - CONRAD'S QUEST FOR RUBBER

I had sent a company of my best men out on an ill-thought-out mission, and because of me, most of them were dead. Far worse still, I had been responsible for introducing all of the diseases of Europe into the New World, and native Americans were dying by the whole villageful!

Killing in time of war has never bothered me, but this horrible thing I had done was something far worse than that! It is one thing to kill fighting men who invade your country, and quite another to go to someone else's land and sicken every man, woman, and child there with deadly diseases!

It was undoubtedly still going on. The damage was still being done. People were still dying. We had no way to stop those diseases from spreading throughout half the world.

Maude came into my office and stood in front of my desk. She wasn't smiling.

"Josip sent me a message. He says he cannot come home. He says that if he did, he might spread diseases here in Europe."

"Yes, Maude. That, too, is another of my sins."

"You must not sit there and cry. You must talk to your cousin Tom. Tom knows about diseases. Tom knows all about living systems. If you ask him, he will help you. He will help Josip. You must talk to Tom."

"Tom has helped me out several times before, but I have never asked for help before," I said.

"You must talk to Tom. He will help you."

"You are right, of course. People are dying as we speak. This is no time for stupid pride." I looked up at the ceiling and said, "Tom! Help me, Tom! I need your help! If this disease problem isn't solved quickly, I am going to have to stop the entire exploration program! You will never see a worldwide culture! I won't be the cause of making things worse than they already are! I won't be responsible for bringing plagues and the Black Death all across the globe! If I have to, I'll build a ten-story concrete wall all around Europe, I swear I will!"

A door that hadn't been there before opened up in the wall behind me, and my cousin Tom, dressed in T-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes, walked into the room. He had a handwritten Polish manuscript in one hand and three test tubes in the other.

"All right! All right! You don't have to start making threats!" He surprised me by speaking in Polish. I'd never heard him do that before. Thinking about it, I had called to him in Polish.

He set the manuscript on my desk, turned to me, and held up one of the test tubes.

"Okay. This is part one. What it does is mark every cell in the body as being human. It must be given at least twelve hours before the next part is administered. That's six of your hours. We call it the butter, because that's what it looks like and tastes like. You can take it as often as you like, and for your regular troops, we recommend a pat of it every morning. That way, the treatment can be started immediately in the event of illness. Also, it doesn't spoil, and it's cheaper than real butter. You can make it even with your primitive technology. You just mix a sample of it with any fresh mammalian milk, and let it set for a day. That's also how you make the other two parts of this system.

"This second part is called the cheese, for obvious reasons. The dosage is nine grams per hundred kilograms of body weight, plus or minus twenty percent. It's a deadly poison, and will kill anything alive except for human cells that have been, protected by part one, the butter. The person treated is poisonous to all other life-forms for the next six of your hours. Keep the patient away from plants and pets during that time period. That includes neohorses, wenches, and all the other bioengineered critters.

"The third part, the oil; replaces all of the body's symbionts that were killed off by part two. You drink a few grams of it the day after you take the cheese and rub about twice that amount on the skin.

"Now, nothing is perfect. When you use this system, all of your stomach flora are killed and you are in for a serious case of the runs. There are a few rare types of brain tumors that this system can't cure. The worst problem is that in the case of very large tumors, the tumor is killed, but sometimes having a big, dead mass in your body overloads the body's cleanup system, and that can kill the patient. The best way to be sure this doesn't happen is to go through the treatment every half year. That way, really big tumors don't have time to grow. Also, life spans and general health are increased with regular use.

"In the case of communicable diseases, the system will cure the patient, but then sometimes the patient will contract the same disease again. In that case, just repeat the cure. Eventually, given enough time, the body will develop a natural immunity to that particular disease.

"Any other questions you might have are answered in the manual I brought. You ought to read it thoroughly before you try using this stuff."

"Tom, thank you. This stuff sounds like magic!"

"By your standards, I suppose it is. One man's magic is another man's technology. This project consumed over nine million high-quality man-hours, which is good, since they needed something interesting to do. Anything else you need, ask for it. Within reason, of course, and as long as you don't ask me to violate causality. Well, hang in there."

"Thanks again, Tom."

He left my office by the same doorway that he came through, after which the door disappeared. Maude never left the room, and Tom never acknowledged her existence, which was typical of him.

I glanced at the other, normal door into my office and saw Baron Piotr and my secretary looking in with their mouths open.

"Your grace, you have some very strange relatives!" Piotr said.

"How long have you two been standing there?" I asked.

"Ever since we heard you shouting at the ceiling," Zenya said. "You called for help."

"Huh. I suppose I did. Well, don't talk about all this, all right? But for now, we've got work to do. Piotr, get this manuscript down to the print shop. I want six thousand copies run off by yesterday. This takes precedence over everything, including sleep. Got it? Then move!

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski

WRITTEN MARCH 1, 1255, CONCERNING MARCH 1251 TO APRIL 1254

I HAVE a few days of idle time before the next semester starts, so I might as well bring my autobiography up to date.

As I was lying in the hospital at Brazylport in 1251, the surgeons were saying they would probably have to amputate my infected left foot, when the Atlantic Challenger steamed in with a company of volunteers, two dozen milk cows, and the Cure. I was eating breakfast when a new doctor, fresh off the boat, came to see me.

"Don't worry about a thing," he said. "This won't be nearly as bad as what you've heard about."

I said I hadn't heard anything at all about the new medicine, but his last statement had indeed started me worrying.

"Really, there's nothing much to it. I went through it myself a week ago, when we crossed the sector line." When he saw the quizzical expression on my face, he continued. "They have divided the world up into thirty-three sectors, to contain communicable diseases. Every passenger and crew member on every ship that passes between two sectors has to take the Cure, all at the same time, to stop the spread of diseases between areas. Then they fumigate the whole ship, just to beon the safe side. It's a bother, but considering the number of deaths that were caused on both sides when your crew came to Brazyl, you have to admit that it will be worth it."

I agreed with him, and told him I was ready to start.

"You already have. The butter on the toast you just ate was the first part of it. I'll be back this evening to administer the second part, a piece of cheese. Good day."

I grumbled a bit about being medicated without my permission. Certainly, I had never done such a thing back when I was a corpsman. Still, I observed no noticeable change in myself, except for the way my foot was continuing to painfully rot away.

That evening, the doctor had me stripped naked and propped upright on a toilet by a beefy male nurse who had also taken some of the magical butter in the morning. Five other seriously ill patients were already sitting on the other toilets in the latrine. Armed guards at the doors kept any unauthorized personnel strictly out, since we were shortly to become very poisonous individuals.

The doctor then placed a carefully weighed slice of cheese on each of our tongues with a pair of tongs. It looked and tasted very ordinary, but he was treating it like the host, so I took it seriously as well.

In about a quarter hour I started itching. We were told that this was caused by the death of all the tiny animals that had previously taken up residence on our skins, and that shortly it would no longer concern us.

This turned out to be perfectly true, since I was soon vomiting and shitting great spews of unmentionable fluids from both ends of my person with such rapidity that I was usually unable to decide which end I should point at the toilet, and with such force that such of it as was reasonably aimed generally overshot the toilet and splattered on the wall behind. I managed all this while hopping around on my right foot, the left one being still blackened, rotten, and painful.

True to the doctor's promise, I hardly noticed any itching during this phase of my cure.

The worst of it was over by midnight. Sitting weakly on the toilet, I noticed a mosquito that landed on my hand, but I was too exhausted to shoo him away. It started to sting me, then stopped and fell over. Dead.

After a bit, my fellow patients and I were taken to the showers and washed, while another crew hosed down the latrine to ready it for the next batch of victims.

My left foot, which was, after all, the object of this exercise, looked worse than ever when they finally took me back to my room.

I felt much better in the morning, and even better yet after an attractive female nurse gave me the last part of the Cure, which included an all-over body massage with a special oil. I was walking again in three days, and my foot was completely healed in another week.

Amazing stuff, the Cure.

I was promptly put on the planning committee that was working on a program to stamp out the plagues we had started among the Brazylians. The areas we had stopped at were fairly well-mapped, and we knew the dates when each place was visited. We had to make some very uneducated guesses as to how fast the diseases would spread among the native populations. We then drew circles on the map with their centers at the points of contact and their radiuses proportional to the time the diseases had had to spread. These overlapping circles covered a depressingly large area.

We then set up two teams of workers. The A team was to contain the diseases, and stop them from spreading across the continent. They would surround the contaminated areas by making contact with all the native tribes on the periphery, convincing them of the seriousness of the threat, and giving the entire tribe the Cure. We would then give the Cure to the native doctors, teaching them how to use it and how to make more. The lack of milk animals among the natives was not a serious problem, since our tests had proven that mother's milk worked as well as any animal milk, and there was always a lactating woman about.

Once the contaminated areas were completely surrounded, the A team would start moving inward until they met up with members of the B team.

The B team would start at the points of contact and work outward, following the diseases through the jungle until the newly introduced diseases were wiped out. Actually, we would be eradicating most of the local diseases as well, so we would be partially compensating the natives for the damage we had caused them.