Physicians -- Fiction; Science fiction, American; Short stories
Except for the smells, of course. They'd hoped that they might,
presently, get used to them. They didn't. Every day it grew a little
worse. They began smelling smells they never dreamed existed--noxious
smells, cloying smells, smells that drove them gagging to the sinks.
Their nose-plugs were rapidly losing their effectiveness. Mealtimes were
nightmarish ordeals; they lost weight with alarming speed.
But they didn't catch cold.
"_I_ think you should all be locked up," Ellie Dawson said severely as
she dragged her husband, blue-faced and shivering, out of an icy shower
one bitter morning. "You've lost your wits. You need to be protected
against yourselves, that's what you need."
"You don't understand," Phillip moaned. "We've _got_ to catch cold."
"Why?" Ellie snapped angrily. "Suppose you don't--what's going to
happen?"
"We had three hundred students march on the laboratory today," Phillip
said patiently. "The smells were driving them crazy, they said. They
couldn't even bear to be close to their best friends. They wanted
something done about it, or else they wanted blood. Tomorrow we'll have
them back and three hundred more. And they were just the pilot study!
What's going to happen when fifteen million people find their noses
going bad on them?" He shuddered. "Have you seen the papers? People are
already going around sniffing like bloodhounds. And _now_ we're finding
out what a thorough job we did. We can't crack it, Ellie. We can't even
get a toe hold. Those antibodies are just doing too good a job."
"Well, maybe you can find some unclebodies to take care of them," Ellie
offered vaguely.
"Look, don't make bad jokes--"
"I'm not making jokes! All I want is a husband back who doesn't complain
about how everything smells, and eats the dinners I cook, and doesn't
stand around in cold showers at six in the morning."
"I know it's miserable," he said helplessly. "But I don't know how to
stop it."
He found Jake and Coffin in tight-lipped conference when he reached the
lab. "I can't do it any more," Coffin was saying. "I've begged them for
time. I've threatened them. I've promised them everything but my upper
plate. I can't face them again, I just can't."
"We only have a few days left," Jake said grimly. "If we don't come up
with something, we're goners."
Phillip's jaw suddenly sagged as he stared at them. "You know what I
think?" he said suddenly. "I think we've been prize idiots. We've gotten
so rattled we haven't used our heads. And all the time it's been sitting
there blinking at us!"
"What are you talking about?" snapped Jake.
"Unclebodies," said Phillip.
"Oh, great God!"
"No, I'm serious." Phillip's eyes were very bright. "How many of those
students do you think you can corral to help us?"
Coffin gulped. "Six hundred. They're out there in the street right now,
howling for a lynching."
"All right, I want them in here. And I want some monkeys. Monkeys with
colds, the worse colds the better."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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