"Aw, Polly, I don't want to hear that mush," I kidded her, "Why don't you sell it to True Love Confessions magazine?" "You shut your big mouth, man, and open your ears." "Go ahead Polly. Never mind funny boy here," Pat said. "Harry says they have a big lab set up in the main hospital in Victoria ... that's the city on the island, Hong Kong itself, and they're working shifts, twenty-four hours a day, to try to attenuate the measlepox virus." "Brother! What a job!" I exclaimed. "One mistake and you've had it." "Too right, you have!" the Chief said feelingly, his long forgotten Australian slang coming to the surface. "They had to get out of Kowloon, he says because the refugees sneaked through the barriers into the New Territories and spread the disease. It was terrible because there were about three million people crowded in there. Now most of them are dead and the police patrol all around the island, day and night, to keep others from landing. He says almost all the British, except soldiers, have left. They send them to some small island first and then, if they haven't got any disease, they can go home to England. The research team is behind barbed wire and almost nobody is allowed in or out--but their quarters are comfortable." "Hot and cold running maids, I suppose," I said. "If you were there they'd be running, all right." "Shut up, John. Go on Polly," Pat said and pinched my arm. "They haven't succeeded in weakening the virus yet and if they kill it with formalin or one of the usual methods it won't work as a vaccine." "What ways have they tried?" Hallam said. "He doesn't say. There's one thing I don't like," she said thoughtfully. "He has an idea that if they went into China they might find survivors of the pox in areas where the disease has almost died down and get some serum from them, or perhaps find that the measlepox is weakened in those areas and could be used." "It's too bad our agents didn't get enough vaccine for testing," I said. "It would have saved exposing our men to that sort of danger." "One of his ideas is to give volunteers serum from recovered cases and then let them get the measlepox." "You mean like giving children gamma globulin shots after they've been exposed to measles so they'll get just a mild case of the disease and be protected for life?" Pat asked.