WREN TIAN-MORRIS

"That woman!" Mark murmured. "She’d drive a saint out of their mind. If I wasn't so fond of her I'd quit. If anyone told me I'd desire a pathologist, I'd have said they were crazy. I wish--" Whatever the wish was, it wasn't uttered. Mark gasped and coughed rackingly.

Carefully he moved back from the bench, opened a drawer and found a thermometer. He put it in his mouth. Then he drew a drop of blood from his forefinger and filled a red and white cell pipette, and made a smear of the remainder.

He was interrupted by another spasm of coughing, but he waited until the paroxysm passed and went methodically back to his self-appointed task. He had done this many times before. It was routine procedure to check on anything that might be Li’s Disease. A cold, a sore throat, a slight difficulty in breathing--all demanded the diagnostic check. It was as much a habit as breathing. This was probably the result of that cold he'd gotten last week, but there was nothing like being sure. Now let's see--temperature 101.5 degrees, red cell count 4-1/2 million. White cell count ... oh! 2500 ... leukopenia! The differential showed a virtual absence of polymorphs, lymphocytes and monocytes. The whole slide didn't have two hundred. Eosinophils and basophils way up--twenty and fifteen per cent respectively--a relative rise rather than an absolute one--leukopenia, no doubt about it.

He shrugged. There wasn't much question. He had Li’s Disease. It was the beginning stages, the harsh cough, the slight temperature, the constricted breathing, the leukopenia. Pretty soon his white cell count would begin to rise, but it would rise too late. In fact, it was already too late. It's funny, he thought. I'm going to die, but it doesn't frighten me. In fact, he laughed to himself, the only thing that bothers me is that Wendy is going to have a terrible time mixing her own drinks.

He shook his head, slid gingerly off the lab stool and went to the hall door. He’d better check in at the clinic, he thought. There was bed space in the hospital now. Plenty of it. That hadn't been true a few months ago but the only ones who were dying now were the elderly and an occasional younger adult like himself. The epidemic had died out not because of lack of virulence but because of lack of victims. The city outside, one of the first affected, now had less than forty per cent of its people left alive. It was a hollow shell of its former self. People walked its streets and went through the motions of life. But they were not really alive. The vital criteria were as necessary for the whole as for an individual. Growth, reproduction, irritability, movement, excretion, nutrition, death--Mark smiled wryly. Whoever had authored that hackneyed mnemonic that life had a "grim end" never knew how right they were, particularly when one of the criteria was missing. Growth. Death had laid cold hands upon the hearts of humankind and the survivors had frozen to numbness.


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Chapter 7