Martin and Terry began to produce pneumonia in their monkeys and to treat them, and they had success which caused them to waltz solemnly down the corridor. They could save the monkeys from pneumonia invariably, when the infection had gone but one day, and most of them on the second day and the third.
Their results were complicated by the fact that a certain number of the monkeys recovered by themselves, and this they allowed for by simple-looking figures which took days of stiff, shoulder-aching sitting over papers . . . one wild-haired collarless man at a table, while the other walked among stinking cages of monkeys, clucking to them, calling them Bess and Rover, and grunting placidly, "Oh, you would bite me, would you, sweetheart!" and all the while, kindly but merciless as the gods, injecting them with the deadly pneumonia.
They came into a high upland where the air was thin with failures. They studied in the test-tube the break-down products of pneumococci—and failed. They constructed artificial body fluids (carefully, painfully, inadequately), they tried the effect of the derivative on germs in this artificial blood—and failed.
Then Holabird heard of their previous success, and came down on them with laurels and fury.
He understood, he said, that they had a cure for pneumonia. Very well! The Institute could do with the credit for curing that undesirable disease, and Terry and Martin would kindly publish their findings (mentioning McGurk) at once.
"We will not! Look here, Holabird!" snarled Terry, "I thought you were going to let us alone."
"I have! Nearly a year! Till you should complete your research. And now you've completed it. It's time to let the world know what you're doing."
"If I did, the world would know a doggone sight more'n I do! Nothing doing, Chief. Maybe we can publish in a year from now."
"You'll publish now or—"
"All right, Holy. The blessed moment has arrived. I quit! And I'm so gentlemanly that I do it without telling you what I think of you!"
Thus was Terry Wickett discharged from McGurk. He patented the process of synthesizing his quinine derivative and retired to Birdies' Rest, to build a laboratory out of his small
