As he left the Science Room, he looked up at the clock over the door.
The red hands had stopped at four-twenty-seven. He wondered what day they had stopped. As he descended the stairs with his armful of books, he wondered at just what moment the clock had stopped. Had it been morning or night? Was it raining or shining? Was anyone there when it stopped?
He twisted his shoulders irritably. For God's sake, what's the difference? he asked himself. He was getting disgusted at this increasing nostalgic preoccupation with the past. It was a weakness, he knew, a weakness he could scarcely afford if he intended to go on. And yet he kept discovering himself drifting into extensive meditation on aspects of the past. It was almost more than he could control, and it was making him furious with himself.
He couldn't get the huge front doors open from the inside, either; they were too well locked. He had to go out through the broken window again, first dropping the books to the sidewalk one at a time, then himself. He took the books to his car and got in.
As he started the car, he saw that he was parked along a red-painted curb, facing in the wrong direction on a one-way street. He looked up and down the street.
"Policeman!" he found himself calling. "Oh, policeman!"
He laughed for a mile without stopping, wondering just what was so funny about it.
He put down the book. He'd been reading again about the lymphatic system. He vaguely remembered reading about it months before, during the time he now called his 'frenzied period'. But what he'd read had made no impression on him then because he'd had nothing to apply it to.
There seemed to be something there now.
The thin walls of the blood capillaries permitted blood plasma to escape into the tissue spaces along with the red and colorless cells. These escaped materials eventually returned to the blood system through the lymphatic vessels, carried back by the thin fluid called lymph.
During this return flow, the lymph trickled through lymph nodes, which interrupted the flow and filtered out the solid particles of body waste, thus preventing them from entering the blood system.
Now.
There were two things that activated the lymphatic system: (1) breathing, which caused the diaphragm to compress the abdominal contents, thus forcing blood and lymph up against gravity; (2) physical movement, which caused skeletal muscles to compress lymph vessels, thus moving the lymph. An intricate valve system prevented any backing up of the flow.
But the vampires didn't breathe; not the dead ones, anyway. That meant, roughly, that half of their lymph flow was cut off. This meant, further, that a considerable amount of waste products would be left in the vampire's system.
Robert Neville was thinking particularly of the fetid odor of the vampire.
He read on
"The bacteria passes into the blood stream, where..."
"--the white corpuscles playing a vital part in our defense against bacteria attack."
"Strong sunlight kills many germs rapidly and..."
"Many bacterial diseases of man can be disseminated by the mechanical agency of flies, mosquitoes..."
"--where, under the stimulus of bacterial attack, the phagocytic factories rush extra cells into the blood stream."
He let the book drop forward into his lap and it slipped off, his legs and thumped down on the rug.
It was getting harder and harder to fight, because no matter what he read, there was always the relationship between bacteria and blood affliction. Yet, all this time, he'd been letting contempt fall freely on all those in the past who had died proclaiming the truth of the germ theory and scoffing at vampires.
He got up and made himself a drink. But it sat untouched as he stood before the bar. Slowly, rhythmically, he thudded his right fist down on the top of the bar while his eyes stared bleakly at the wall.
Germs.
He grimaced. Well, for God's sake, he snapped jadedly at himself, the word hasn't got thorns, you know. He took a deep breath. All right, he ordered himself, is there any reason why it couldn't be germs?
He turned away from the bar as if he could leave the question there. But questions had no location; they could follow him around.
He sat in the kitchen staring into a steaming cup of coffee. Germs. Bacteria. Viruses. Vampires. Why am I so against it? he thought. Was it just reactionary stubbornness, or was it that the task would loom as too tremendous for him if it were germs?
He didn't know. He started out on a new course, the course of compromise. Why throw out either theory? One didn't necessarily negate the other. Dual acceptance and correlation, he thought.
Bacteria could be the answer to the vampire.
One thought on the problem he allowed himself before sleeping. The bitings, the insects, the transmission from person to person--were even these enough to explain the horrible speed with which the plague spread?
He went to sleep with the question in his mind. And, about three n the morning, he woke up to find the house buffeted by another dust storm. And suddenly, in the flash of a second, he made the connection.
Chapter Eleven
THE FIRST ONE HE got was worthless.
The base was so poorly leveled that any vibration at all disturbed it. The action of its moving parts was loose to the point of wobbling. The mirror kept moving out of position because its pivots weren't tight enough. Moreover, the instrument had no substage to hold condenser or polar?izer. It had only one nosepiece, so that he had to remove the object lens when he wanted any variation in magnification. The lenses were impossible.