ree days in October: wheezing like steam shovels,
snorting and sneezing and sniffling and blowing, coughing and squeaking,
mute appeals glowing in their blood-shot eyes. The researchers dispensed
the materials--a single shot in the right arm, a sensitivity control in
the left.

With growing delight they then watched as the results came in. The
sneezing stopped; the sniffling ceased. A great silence settled over the
campus, in the classrooms, in the library, in classic halls. Dr.
Coffin's voice returned (rather to the regret of his fellow workers) and
he began bouncing about the laboratory like a small boy at a fair.
Students by the dozen trooped in for checkups with noses dry and eyes
bright.

In a matter of days there was no doubt left that the goal had been
reached.

"But we have to be _sure_," Phillip Dawson had cried cautiously. "This
was only a pilot test. We need mass testing now, on an entire community.
We should go to the West Coast and run studies there--they have a
different breed of cold out there, I hear. We'll have to see how long
the immunity lasts, make sure there are no unexpected side effects...."
And, muttering to himself, he fell to work with pad and pencil,
calculating the program to be undertaken before publication.

But there were rumors. Underwood at Stanford, they said, had already
completed his tests and was preparing a paper for publication in a
matter of months. Surely with such dramatic results on the pilot tests
_something_ could be put into print. It would be tragic to lose the race
for the sake of a little unnecessary caution....

Peter Dawson was adamant, but he was a voice crying in the wilderness.
Chauncey Patrick Coffin was boss.

Within a week even Coffin was wondering if he had bitten off just a
trifle too much. They had expected that demand for the vaccine would be
great--but even the grisly memory of the early days of the Salk vaccine
had not prepared them for the mobs of sneezing, wheezing red-eyed people
bombarding them for the first fruits.

Clear-eyed young men from the Government Bureau pushed through crowds of
local townspeople, lining the streets outside the Coffin laboratory,
standing in pouring rain to raise insistent placards.

Seventeen pharmaceutical houses descended like vultures with production
plans, cost-estimates, colorful graphs demonstrating proposed yield and
distribution programs. Coffin was flown to Washington, where conferences
labored far into the