Georg Letham (67 page)

We could not rest satisfied with what we had achieved. We had to strive to approximate the truth as closely as we could.

Before long I would once more be bringing to bear my old energies and joy in my work (it was a true, wholehearted joy, and it remained my only one); Carolus had yet to turn to account his very considerable financial means and his name, his standing, his military rank, his impeccable past. He did so now without hesitation.

One might have thought the government would have done all it could to support our endeavor. No. The post of governor was still vacant. No one would say yes, no one would say no. The penal administration had its own public-health officers. The men in the bureaucratic back rooms held mysterious conclaves, the top public-health director in the penal administration produced a report on the most recent wave of the Y.F. epidemic, including statistics worthy of old Carolus. But this
man pridefully took no notice of us. He had lived and worked here for twenty years and had found nothing to speak of. So what did we think we were trying to do?

Without the old rivalry between the colonial administration (Ministry of the Interior) and the penal administration (Department of Justice), and had Carolus not played them against each other, they would have put paid to our work. We would have been not only not encouraged, but stymied. But when Carolus put his considerable financial means into the hat on top of everything else and certainly used part of them for “diplomatic purposes,” that is to say, for a kind of bribery, the way became clear once more.

Without wasting time we began–to act? No, to think in earnest. We drafted a comprehensive new work plan that would enable us to achieve definitive results that could not be disputed by any objective person. Good.

I will give as brief an account as possible of our next experiments, with which we intended to bring our research to a provisional close. These experiments were in part novel ones, in part replications of the old “controls,” as they are called.

The difficulties are not easy to describe simply. Anything that can be found
without
difficulty today, now that science has already discovered all the easy things, is usually wrong. One must therefore keep a sharp eye on oneself, check everything down to the last detail, be suspicious to the point of pathology, and yet retain the ability to believe as one perseveres.

There was a bit of a delay at the beginning: the money that Carolus wanted to use had to be transferred from home. This was done by wire, but still took some days.

Meanwhile we located the site for the experiments. It was a place between two warehouses. A plot of land that had been cleared by the convicts over a period of years, treeless, covered only by the brambly scrub that grows in these regions, with no water source nearby. That is to say, as far away as possible from the habitat of the insects known as
Stegomyia fasciata
. It had a small tent camp on it, consisting of five tents, plus two little cottages. We could be cut off from the rest of the world, almost as isolated as my father and his companions had been on the polar sea; it was not easy to think of everything we would need to study the transmission of Y.F. there.

The administration let us have the property free (no great sacrifice!), and also provided gratis the barbed wire that is available in great quantities in a penal colony. So the administration and the government were occasionally good for something after all! Still more important was money. We needed money to buy test subjects, in the form of people. People cost money.

But there are also people who will, that word again, sacrifice themselves for nothing in a cause they believe to be important. The best case–no cost. And among them were some marines from the shore batteries whom Walter had known when he was an army doctor. Carolus offered them a sum of money that was comparatively large by their standards. But to our surprise, they responded: “Herr Brigadier General, our only condition is that we receive no compensation whatever for our voluntary service.” Carolus blushed, a phenomenon I had never before
observed in the leathery old medical statistician. He wasted little time in thanking them for this generous gesture. He accepted it and treated the youths as the gentlemen they were.

One of the fine marks of our time is that generosity has become an untranslatable foreign word, I said once. Obviously I was wrong again!

Just the fact that people of this uncommon type existed in our mean old world at all lightened the load I had to bear, which was frequently not easy to do now without my friend March. But why speak of myself? My personal fate was now bound up with the success or failure of our experiments. This is all I want to report on in the end. Incidentally, two criminals also came forward, lured as much by the hard cash as by the chance of an early parole, and they were newcomers to C. like us: they had been on the transport that had brought me. One of them was Suleiman, who had been so lamentably worked over on the
Mimosa
, whose face still bore highly disfiguring scars from his wound, and who wept day and night; that is to say, the torn nasolacrimal duct continually discharged aqueous matter with the chemical properties of tears. He recognized me immediately, even though he was half blind, asked, laughing an uncouth, teary laugh, after “precious March,” and furtively proposed to share the promised payment with me if I would set up the experiments “mercifully.”

I said no. He understood yes.

He, Suleiman, could not believe that venality had limits. Thus he awaited the experiments with great equanimity, convinced in his heart that I would exempt him from actual infection so as not to pass up my thirty pieces of silver. And he was deeply determined to cheat me out of the money he had promised me. He took me for one of his own, and
with one of his own he thought all was permitted. But I was a different kind of criminal. I had killed. But not trafficked in human flesh as he had. He wanted to swindle the swindler, but it did not come to that.

This time we began the experiments at the “negative end.” To be demonstrated was Axiom I, that Y.F. can be transmitted
only
by mosquitoes.

Only transmissible by
Stegomyia fasciata
means
not
transmissible any other way.

Does this help? At that time it was still widely believed that Y.F. was communicable by contact with a sufferer's clothes, bedding, and other articles. Or the culprit was even thought to be bad air (“mal-aria”), or rainwater and cistern water used for drinking.

We were going to investigate and solve the problem in the two cottages. Each was four meters long, six wide. One entered through a double door set up in such a way as to keep mosquitoes out. The cottages had two south windows, on the same side as the doors, to eliminate drafts. Then a small wood-burning stove was installed, which ensured that the temperature never fell below twenty-one degrees centigrade, even now, in the cooler season, or at night. Water tanks kept the air as suffocatingly humid as in the rainy season in the midst of the jungle, in the heart of the primeval equatorial forest. Into this cottage two volunteer assistants from the shore batteries (whose heroism was sorely tested by having to watch the first experiments) brought some tightly sealed crates. Then the two convicts, Suleiman and his crony, were taken into their nasty accommodations with the bad air. In their presence the pillows, blankets, and sheets were taken out of the crates, soiled with . . . But why spell this out? The two convicts were prevailed upon to undress, put on the dirty pajamas, lie down on the stained sheets. You'll
stay here now! Eat here! Sleep here–and die here? Could we mean it? Suleiman threw me appalled glances. I made no comment on these preparations. During the days that followed we had nothing else to do but keep watch like veritable Cerberuses on these men in their horribly hot, evil-smelling cell.

None of the familiar awful symptoms of Y.F. appeared. You should have seen the faces of the two criminals. They rejoiced no less than we. Their steady temperatures, their ascending weight curves, and their thriving appearances announced the disconfirmation of the false hypothesis–hence the confirmation of Axiom I.

After three weeks (which were a torment only in their tedium), this experiment could be regarded as finished.

Next we considered the following question: Was the experiment really absolutely probative? True, neither of the guests in Huts A and B had gotten Y.F. But how could we know if they were susceptible to Y.F. at all? The chaplain in the Y.F. hospital had not been susceptible, it appeared, and very likely Carolus had not been either. Therefore we had to do the counterexperiment whether we wanted to or not, and we did it. Suleiman the weeper had thought himself saved. He was now hoping for release. Not that he had been wasting his time here. He remained the most revolting voluptuary, every bit as filthy in his soul as the Y.F. pajamas that he wore. His comrade was to be pitied.

In the worst case, namely, that in which Suleiman was set at liberty but had to stay on the island, I believe he was going to go halves with the docklands gin-mill proprietor and join with him, another bloodsucking insect, in bleeding the convicts dry. But for that he would have to stay. Behind the barbed wire. Here with us. He had promised, he had accepted a lot of money, we took him at his word. He did not
understand much, but he suspected something. The whole thing was giving him the creeps, but the hard cash, the fat silver coins in little bags, a hundred in each one, that Carolus jingled before his ears, were too tempting. He nodded to the brigadier general. He winked at me. He meant I should not forget our pact. I had not made one.

Using our old methods, Carolus and I placed on one of the two men, namely, Suleiman, mosquitoes that (through the offices of the young resident) had been amply fed on the blood of the sick and dying in the Y.F. hospital. The other man we injected with the infectious blood of a patient in the Y.F. hospital, directly under his skin.

In keeping with the axiom, both became ill, promptly and severely. Suleiman died even before he reached the apyretic period. In his ravings he cursed me and himself and the world. Even a vile human being's suffering could be very touching. I felt sorry for him. But that changed nothing.

The sailors carried him to his grave, hastily getting him under the ground at the edge of Camp Walter. The other man's case was serious, but fate was kind to him and he made it through. Later he received not only his own honorarium but also the money that had been intended for Suleiman, and I suppose he took his place with the gin-mill proprietor too. He still lives here and is healthy and wants to have his family come, if the administration permits it.

We still had to demonstrate the inverse–and attempt to find a cure. To do this we experimented on the sailors who, carefree, idealistic youths that they were, had been generous enough to put themselves at our service.

By then we, Carolus, the sailors, and I, were living together as a sort of family. The boredom was deadly, but nobody died of it. Carolus
told us of his deeds and adventures, or rather those of his children and grandchildren, among which loomed large the droll utterances of the little granddaughter who, with her nanny, had come to the dock to see him off on the
Mimosa
. I neither saw nor heard anything of March. Both Carolus and I were preoccupied with the prospects for our discovery. These were happy thoughts. We pictured a grand future but did not talk about it for fear of tempting Providence, instead just grinning at each other a lot.

We had named our camp Camp Walter, and Walter was in our thoughts, though we did not speak about him. The next experiment used the two sailors, who had been joined by a third, one of their comrades. Two of them were housed in Hut A, which was divided in half by a fine wire mesh. The third was in Hut B by himself. Both cottages had been remodeled. We had had a door made in the north wall, so that each building had two doors. Fresh air could now blow through freely; the two doors were closed only by mosquito-proof netting. The experiment was designed in such a way that Sailor X, freshly bathed, as healthy as the climate permitted, wearing a thoroughly disinfected nightshirt, took up residence at twelve noon in his cell, if I may call it that. A jar containing fifteen female mosquitoes fed on infectious blood had been opened in that area of the cell five minutes earlier.

During the first quarter hour, X received a bite from one of the female mosquitoes. The others had holed up in dark corners. They got busy as soon as the sun went down, and by nine o'clock that night, fifteen to seventeen bites could be counted. His neighbor to the left, Sailor Y (the control), was in equally perfect health, also wore a disinfected
nightshirt, came from his bath just as clean, but the fine wire mesh meant that the female mosquitoes could not gain entry to his cell. Sailor Z was housed by himself in Hut B. He moved in at the same time as the others, but was left unmolested for some days.

For this experiment we had selected the pluckiest and most morally steadfast of the three, a man who never lost his sense of humor. We wanted to hold off from infecting him until Y.F. had appeared in Sailor X. That is, five days after the preliminaries just described.

Z meanwhile remained fit as a fiddle, but had unfortunately lost interest in this tedious bivouac (he was still entirely isolated), suddenly considered it all futile, bloodthirsty tomfoolery, wearied us with complaints and grievances, and demanded to be sent back to the shore batteries. We had been wrong about his character. He was a gentleman, a grand fellow, very funny and witty, knew the best card tricks, and spoke three languages, but we could not discipline him to the most important thing, patience, and in any case we were unable to do as he wished. He thought he deserved special consideration for his generosity in putting his health and his life at our disposal. But this man's past and his present, all the ins and outs of him, were of no interest to us. It was all neither here nor there as far as we were concerned as long as the experiment had not been completed. He, Z, had to submit.