flame. Meantime the Honor Guard in their separate quarantine rolled dice and exchanged dirty jokes and felt no ill effects.

The Dictator had commanded that he be first to know the outcome; he, who fancied himself as a poet of human destiny, also liked to think that he had a scientific mind, and in this matter, on which the world's future might hinge, he wished to make his own observations and draw his own conclusions. But promptly after receiving the news he visited Euge again to shower him with jubilant congratulations.

"Now," he announced fervently, "we must have a final experiment, to be wholly sure. One on a far grander scale than before—than any experiment ever was before! I want a large supply of Virus RM4, in sealed cylinders of five or six liters each, under pressure. Prepared as for military use, you understand. The rest I will take care of."

Euge bowed his head in acquiescence, and refrained from mentioning his mice.

Long rows of glass cells where mice lived and died by ones and twos and threes, were in the contagion laboratory, where by Euge's orders only he and Novik worked now. Less flamboyantly than the Dictator, Euge liked to be sure, and he repeated his experiments doggedly until the statistical results leveled off at well-defined norms.

Infected mice, segregated in solitary confinement, developed symptoms and died in the ratio of sixty-five out of a hundred. Among similarly exposed animals distributed two to a cage, the mortality averaged somewhat over eighty-seven per cent. In threes, ninety-six per cent. And when he tried isolating a hundred mice, four to a cage, all of them died. In every case, if one mouse in a group took the disease, so did the rest.

That was not unreasonable. Re-exposure by contact with more susceptible specimens.... But Euge played with his apparent immunes. He rigged a number of cages so that the occupants, their food and their water were constantly under a fine mist of virus poison. And only a couple of them died. Then, with difficulty and some danger, working in armor, he opened the cages and shifted the living mice about, breaking up groups and creating new ones. In the next few days, the immunes' mortality rate was better than forty per cent.

And in an adjoining storeroom, cleared for the purpose, Euge set up another and cruder experiment. Mice that had survived exposure to RM4 were imprisoned in sealed glass runs, and in the room at large were let loose the half-dozen lean 

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