* * * * *

I go to work, re-examining all the recent work on tobacco virus and
similar plant killers. New studies on the key protein chains of the
genes were the foundation stones of my plan. The disease had to be
highly specific and deadly. I couldn't risk even the remotest
possibility of harming food plants in a hungry world.

But, as I've said, with no false modesty, I'm no slouch in my field of
biochemistry. I took a harmless poppy rust from our California flowers
here, and treated its genes with certain chemicals. It was a matter of
six months, and well over eighty tries, but finally I came up with a
virus that killed the opium poppy like smallpox wiped out the Sioux. No;
more than that. Some Indians were, or became, immune to the disease,
just as insects build up resistance to the most potent poisons. But with
my virus that's simply not possible. I won't get technical here, but to
become immune to this stuff would be like a man's developing anti-bodies
against his own tissues. It couldn't happen without killing the organism
faster than the virus does. Once this epidemic began, not a poppy would
survive.

So far everything was fine, except that, as usual, I lost my job. I got
fifty term papers behind. It didn't bother me, because there wasn't a
student in my three classes who knew any more biochemistry than a
baboon. In the first paper I'd found this gem: "It is well known that a
mammal reproduces by suckling its young." Faced with more of the same,
it was a pleasure to be fired.

Now, in any really civilized society, they'd have my statue on top of
the capitol building, and with neon lights to boot. But in our
bureaucratic wilderness of Washington, with a thousand government-hired
cretins running interference for each big, appointed super-cretin, my
troubles had just begun.

I took some sample poppies to the H.E.W. offices. They were in
vacuum-sealed plastic envelopes, because I knew that once my virus
spores got loose in the atmosphere, they'd spread all over the world
like radioactive dust, or faster. I hoped to see the Commissioner of
Narcotics, Myron P. Bishop, but His Magnificence was harder to reach
than the whole College of Cardinals. It was impossible to put my point
across. Plants, was it? That way to the Department of Agriculture. Oh,
poppies. Pamphlets on wildflowers could be had from Documents.

I wrote countless letters, pulled what few wires were within my reach,
and