to her in time," he said. "The plague is tough. Now I guess
there's nothing for us to do but wait, maybe for quite a while."

I felt shaken beyond all recognition.

* * * * *

"Pop, you old caveman detective!" I burst out. "When did you get that
idea for a steel hospital?" Don't think I was feeling anywhere near that
gay. It was reaction, close to hysterical.

Pop was taken aback, but then he grinned. "I had a couple of clues that
you and Alice didn't," he said. "I knew there was a very sick woman
involved. And I had that bout with Los Alamos fever I told you. They've
had a lot of trouble with it, I believe--some say its spores come from
outside the world with the cosmic dust--and now it seems to have been
carried to Atla-Hi. Let's hope they've found the answer this time.
Alice, maybe we'd better start getting some water into this gal."

After a while we sat down and fitted the facts together more orderly.
Pop did the fitting mostly. Alamos researchers must have been working
for years on the plague as it ravaged intermittently, maybe with
mutations and ET tricks to make the job harder. Very recently they'd
found a promising treatment (cure, we hoped) and prepared it for rush
shipment to Atla-Hi, where the plague was raging too and they were
sieged in by Savannah as well. Grayl was picked to fly the serum, or
drug or whatever it was. But he knew or guessed that this lone woman
observer (because she'd fallen out of radio communication or something)
had come down with the plague too and he decided to land some serum for
her, probably without authorization.

"How do we know she's his girlfriend?" I asked.

"Or wife," Pop said tolerantly. "Why, there was that bag of woman's
stuff he was carrying, frilly things like a man would bring for a woman.
Who else'd he be apt to make a special stop for?

"Another thing," Pop said. "He must have been using jets to hurry his
trip. We heard them, you know."

That seemed about as close a reconstruction of events as we could get.
Strictly hypothetical, of course. Deathlanders trying to figure out what
goes on inside a "country" like Atla-Alamos and _why_ are sort of like
foxes trying to understand world politics, or wolves the Gothic
migrations. Of course we're all human beings, but that doesn't mean as
much as it sounds.

* * * * *

Then Pop told us how he'd happened to be on the scene. He'd been doing a
"tour of d