"No, and I've still got live bugs. I was never supposed to be cured, so
I expected to see just what I saw. How I missed the fact that Tom should
have been like me, I don't know. Damn it, oh, damn it!"

He's never seen her cry before, except in fury. But she mastered it
almost at once, shaking tears out of her eyes. "All right. Plasma works
in a bottle but not in an adult body. Maybe something works in the body
but not in a bottle."

"Maybe. And maybe some people are just naturally immune after it reaches
a certain stage. Maybe we ran into coincidence."

But he didn't believe that, any more than she did. The answer had to be
in the room. He'd taken a massive dose of the disease and been cured in
a few hours.

Outside the room, the war went on, drawing toward a close. The supposed
partial cure was good propaganda, if nothing else, and Jake was widening
his territory steadily. There was only token resistance against him. He
had the Southport shuttles now to cover huge areas in a hurry. But
inside the room, the battle was less successful. It wasn't the
accelerator. It wasn't the tablets of anodyne. They even tried sweeping
the floor and using the dust without results.

Then another test in the room, made with four volunteers Jake selected,
yielded complete cures after injections with plain salt water in place
of plasma.

The plague speeded up again. About four people out of a hundred now
seemed to have caught the disease and cured themselves. They accounted
for what faith was left in Doc's plasma and gave some unfounded hope to
the others.

Northport fell a week later, putting the whole planet in rebel hands.

Jake returned, wearier than ever. He'd proved to be one of the natural
immunes, but the weight of the campaign that could only end in a defeat
by the plague left him no room to rejoice in his personal fortune.

This time he looked completely defeated. And a moment later, Doc saw why
as Jake flipped a flimsy sheet onto the table. It bore the seals of
Space and Medical Lobbies.

Jake pointed upwards. "The war rockets are there, all right. We knew
they'd come. Now all they want for calling them off is our surrender and
your cure. If they don't get both, they'll blow the planet to bits. We
have two days."

The rockets could be seen clearly with binoculars. There were more than
enough to destroy all life on the planet. Maybe they'd be used
eventually, anyhow, since the Lobbies wanted no more rebellion. But wi