hyllis 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.

[Illustration]

"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,