"Mary! Where are you going?" Kramer's voice was in her ears, and his hand was on her shoulder.
"Why not?" His voice was curiously different. Younger, excited.
She nodded. "I had the first coughing attack a few minutes ago."
He pulled her away from the elevator door that suddenly slid open. "You were going to that death trap upstairs," he said.
"With me," he said. "I think I can help you."
"How? Have you found a cure for the virus?"
"I think so. At least it's a better possibility than the things they're using up there." His voice was urgent. "And to think I might never have seen it if you hadn't put me on the track."
"Not absolutely, but the facts fit. The theory's good."
"Then I'm going to the clinic. I can't risk infecting you. I'm a carrier now. I can kill you, and you're too important to die."
"You don't know how wrong you are," Kramer said.
She twisted in his grasp. "Let me go!" she sobbed and broke into a fit of coughing worse than before.
"What I was trying to say," Dr. Kramer said into the silence that followed, "is that if you have Thurston's Disease, you've been a carrier for at least two weeks. If I am going to get it, your going away can't help. And if I'm not, I'm not."
"Do you come willingly or shall I knock you unconscious and drag you back?" Kramer asked.
She looked at his face. It was grimmer than she had ever seen it before. Numbly she let him lead her back to the laboratory.
"But, Walter--I can't. That's sixty in the past ten hours!" she protested.
"Take it," he said grimly, "then take another. And inhale. Deeply."
"Better dizzy than dead. And, by the way--how's your chest?"
"Better. There's no pain now. But the cough is worse."
"You've never smoked enough to get a cigarette cough," he said.
She shook her head dizzily. "You're so right," she said.
"And that's what nearly killed you," he finished triumphantly.
"I'm certain. Naturally, I can't prove it--yet. But that's just a matter of time. Your response just about clinches it. Take a look at the records. Who gets this disease? Youngsters--with nearly one hundred per cent morbidity and one hundred per cent mortality. Adults--less than fifty per cent morbidity--and again one hundred per cent mortality. What makes the other fifty per cent immune? Your crack about leather lungs started me thinking--so I fed the data cards into the computer and keyed them for smoking versus incidence. And I found that not one heavy smoker had died of Thurston's Disease. Light smokers and nonsmokers--plenty of them--but not one single nicotine addict. And there were over ten thousand randomized cards in that spot check. And there's the exact reverse of that classic experiment the lung cancer boys used to sell their case. Among certain religious groups which prohibit smoking there was nearly one hundred per cent mortality of all ages!