rks.

The effects of the pest plane, of the pest bombs, were the most
vicious that could be developed in the laboratories of bacterial
war--and they put to shame the naturally-occurring epidemics that have
scourged mankind throughout his history.

And the effects were spreading with the speed of a prairie fire before
a high wind.

The entire area was quarantined, and daily the quarantine was
extended. No plane could land and take off again. No ship could enter
and leave. An airlift of supplies dropped by parachute was being
organized.

Bacteriologists and doctors jetted to the area were dying with the
rest, caught in disease for which there was no answer.

The propaganda attempts to make it seem as though cures were near were
flatly not believed. Suez was remembered, but was remembered as a
hoax--and the country had had its complete fill of hoaxes.

Randolph had a number of what he referred to--and reported--as "crank
calls," asking Witch to try its might. He arranged for every call that
reached him to be traced immediately. He remained in seclusion.

Oswald had a few of the "crank calls" and reported them as such.

Bill Howard had a number of calls, and didn't report them.

Bill Howard worried, and added two and two, and sweated, and reported
the details of Formosa each night. The details giantized in
gruesomeness until their very content was too much for the airways,
and he had to censor them as he gave them out.

Bill Howard sweated in the cold January weather, and each day he
ferreted further, seeking out the realities behind the censorship that
lay heavy now even over the wires. By phone, by gossip, by hearsay and
by know-how he got the stories behind the story--the real horrors that
he couldn't broadcast.

Sometimes he rebelled at the censors and himself as one of them, but
he knew better than to rebel. It's facing us all, he thought. We each
have the right to know.

This is the way the world ends, he thought. With a whimper that comes
after the agony, when agony is too great.

And he kept remembering a little girl walking towards a camera with
big eyes.

If I were a physicist, he told himself, if I were a physicist instead
of a newshawk, I could get a computer to tell me the probability ratio
of whether I hold an answer.

That probability ratio is probable ten billion to one, he told
himself.

That probability ratio is zero.

Witches are for burning, he told himself.

He told himself a lo