extract, spraying themselves and every
inoculated monkey they could get their hands on with the vile-smelling
stuff. Not a sneeze. They injected it hypodermically, intradermally,
subcutaneously, intramuscularly, and intravenously. They drank it. They
bathed in the stuff.

But they didn't catch a cold.

"Maybe it's the wrong approach," Jake said one morning. "Our body
defenses are keyed up to top performance right now. Maybe if we break
them down we can get somewhere."

They plunged down that alley with grim abandon. They starved themselves.
They forced themselves to stay awake for days on end, until exhaustion
forced their eyes closed in spite of all they could do. They carefully
devised vitamin-free, protein-free, mineral-free diets that tasted like
library paste and smelled worse. They wore wet clothes and sopping shoes
to work, turned off the heat and threw windows open to the raw winter
air. Then they resprayed themselves with the live cold virus and waited
reverently for the sneezing to begin.

It didn't. They stared at each other in gathering gloom. They'd never
felt better in their lives.

Except for the smells, of course. They'd hoped that they might,
presently, get used to them. They didn't. Every day it grew a little
worse. They began smelling smells they never dreamed existed--noxious
smells, cloying smells, smells that drove them gagging to the sinks.
Their nose-plugs were rapidly losing their effectiveness. Mealtimes were
nightmarish ordeals; they lost weight with alarming speed.

But they didn't catch cold.

"_I_ think you should all be locked up," Ellie Dawson said severely as
she dragged her husband, blue-faced and shivering, out of an icy shower
one bitter morning. "You've lost your wits. You need to be protected
against yourselves, that's what you need."

"You don't understand," Phillip moaned. "We've _got_ to catch cold."

"Why?" Ellie snapped angrily. "Suppose you don't--what's going to
happen?"

"We had three hundred students march on the laboratory today," Phillip
said patiently. "The smells were driving them crazy, they said. They
couldn't even bear to be close to their best friends. They wanted
something done about it, or else they wanted blood. Tomorrow we'll have
them back and three hundred more. And they were just the pilot study!
What's going to happen when fifteen million people find their noses
going bad on them?" He shuddered. "Have you seen the papers? People are
already goi