"I suppose I'm showing my ignorance," Anne said, "but it sounds idiotic to me. All those millions and millions of dollars that we could be saving lives with!" "If the choice were mine," Paige agreed, "I'd award the money to you, not to Charity Dillon and his crew. But then, I know almost as little about the Bridge as you do, so perhaps it's just as well that Fm not allowed to route the check. Is it my turn to ask a question? I still have a small one."

"Your witness," Anne said, smiling her altogether lovely smile.

"This afternoon, while I was in the labs, I twice heard a baby crying and I think it was actually two different babies. I asked your Mr. Gunn about it, and he told me an obvious fairy story." He paused. Anne's eyes had already begun to glitter.

"You're on dangerous ground, Colonel Russell," she said. "I can tell. But I mean to ask my question anyhow.

When I pulled my absurd vivisection threat on you later, I was out-and-out flabbergasted that it worked, but it set me to thinking. Can you explain and if so, would you?"

Anne got out her compact again and seemed to consult it warily. At last she said: "I suppose I've forgiven you, more or less. Anyhow, I'll answer. It's very simple: the babies are being used as experimental animals. We have a pipeline to a local foundling home. It's all only technically legal, and had you actually brought charges of human vivisection against us, you probably could have made them stick."

His coffee cup clattered into its saucer. "Great God, Anne. Isn't it dangerous to make such a joke these days especially with a man you've known only half a day? Or are you trying to startle me into admitting I'm a stoolie?"

"I'm not joking and I don't think you're a stoolie," she said calmly. "What I said was perfectly true -oh, I souped up the way I put it just a little, maybe because I haven't entirely forgiven you for that bit of successful blackmail, and I wanted to see you jump. And for other reasons. But it's true."

"But Anne why?"

"Look, Paige," she said. "It was fifty years ago that we found that if we. added minute amounts of certain antibiotics, really just traces, to animal feeds, the addition brought the critters to market months ahead of normally fed animals. For that matter, it even provokes growth spurts in plants under special conditions; and it works for poultry, baby pigs, calves, mink cubs, a whole spectrum of animals. It was logical to suspect that it might work in newborn humans too."

"And you're trying that?" Paige leaned back and poured himself another glass of Chilean Rhine. "I'd say you souped up your revelation quite a bit, all right."

"Don't be so ready to accept the obvious, and listen to me. We are nor doing that. It was done decades ago, regularly and above the board, by students of Paul Gyorgy and half a hundred other nutrition experts. Those people used only very widely known and tested antibiotics, drugs that had already been used n literally millions of farm animals, dosages worked out to the milligram of drug per kilogram of body weight, and so on. But this particular growth stimulating effect of antibiotics happens to be a major clue to whether or not a given drug has the kind of biological activity we wantand we have to know whether or not it shows that activity jn human beings'. S we screen new drugs on the kids, as fast as they're found and pass certain other tests. We have to."