Things were turning gray, but I remember the chief catching me by the shoulder and jerking me around. Too late I remembered about his little Jerry and the agony my words must have carved in his heart. I wished he'd slug me, but he didn't. He looked at me for a long minute and said something I don't remember, because the fog closed in--a hot, dry fog that swept into my brain and blacked out the light. I don't even remember falling. The last thought I had was, _the fever! I've got it. And Thorsen said there were no more antibiotics or drugs left in the city._ * * * * * Some weeks later it was a surprise but no pleasure, to discover I was still alive. Through the smoke of my unfocussed eyes I could tell that my "private" room was occupied by at least a dozen other patients. Some were on cots and some, like me, simply lay on the floor with a blanket over them. I had one 30-second visit from the doctor before Durstine came to take me away. The doc said simply, "You're a lucky man, Lieutenant. We didn't save many 'fever' patients after the drugs ran out." The chief brought a couple of boys in blue with a stretcher to haul me out. I was amazed to discover that automobiles were still moving about the streets--not many, but a few. I was too sick and exhausted to talk during the ride. Durstine rode in back with me, a hand on my shoulder. "Don't worry, Gene," he said. "You're going to be all right. And we've got this thing pretty well licked." He looked into my eyes and read the question I was too weak to speak aloud. "No," he said, "we didn't figure out Baxter's extractor. But we do have a successful detector, and all we have to do now is use it--then hang a tin can or an old ketchup bottle on each speck of metal for a marker. Yeah, the country's going to be cluttered up like a hanging garbage dump for a long time, but if you can see 'em you can dodge 'em." A detector? Why, they'd have to equip every person in the country with one! And surely nothing less than an electronic, radar-type gadget could detect the microscopic particles as they first began to emerge--the kind that had riddled my intestines and given me the fever without even leaving a mark on my skin. "I know what you are thinking," Durstine said. His face was gray and drawn, but he wore a faint smile. "It was simple when somebody thought of it. What would be cheap enough to distribute universally, yet effective enough to give you positive warning? You see, these tiny particles are so fine at first that you can fan the air with a plank and never know when one passes through." He raised me up from the stretcher and let me look out the window of the police ambulance. Through squinted eyes I made out a strange sight. A thin scattering of pedestrians was moving slowly on the sidewalks, winding their ways among a random collection of floating tin cans and inverted bottles.