Thorsen tipped up the bottle and let several swallows pour down his leathery neck. The stuff brought tears to his eyes. He blinked them away and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "All right, public guardian, I'll tell you. It's pretty obvious, and other medical men will think of it pretty quick, I suppose--when they find out the cause of the punctures they are treating. This fever is just more of the same. Peritonitis. Only it's caused by particles so small that you can't even feel when they penetrate the skin. They're large enough to poke holes in your intestines, though. Large enough to make microscopic passages for bacteria. So, you see, for every bleeding patient, there will be hundreds, thousands, coming down with peritonitis--infection of the body cavity from within. Without drugs the inflammation spreads in hours, and the temperature goes up and up. It's fatal." I could almost feel the pain in my belly and the fire in my veins as he spoke. Doc Thorsen took another drink and handed me the bottle. "You look a little pale, Gene. Have a jolt and see if _your_ guts leak." Durstine and I both had a drink, and the chief said, "I see what you meant. I wish you'd kept your mouth shut." I said, "Dammit, we've got to do something." "Like what?" Durstine asked bitterly. "Like quarantining the schools and the playgrounds?" Thorsen nodded grimly. "And the parks? And all back yards and front yards?" Durstine picked it up again. "And empty lots and all sidewalks and streets and public buildings and the whole damned outdoors plus the indoors?" The enormity of the problem began to sink into my tired brain. In the space of weeks, more than 30 million i-Guns were sold in the United States alone. Multiply that figure by the number of times each was fired. Ten? Fifty? A hundred times? Only God knew how many billion nails, tacks, screws and rivets were launched into limbo, and were now just beginning to return--invisible at first--to skewer the American people. Wherever kids had played--and that was virtually everywhere--death was hidden. And the semi-visible particles would keep emerging for weeks, in the order that they were shot into the other dimension. Worse yet, at the slow rate of emergence, it would be months or years before the metallic flotsam returned completely and dropped to earth! A man could protect himself only by remaining motionless. But society was geared to motion, fast, space-covering motion. The nation would starve to death, if everyone didn't go insane first and tear themselves to pieces running around. "We've got to get the secret of that extractor out of Calvin Baxter," I said. "If we can discover the principle, we can build large models, like a vacuum cleaner--" * * * * *