"And that is"

"That the time you're counting on just doesn't exist. My leave expires in ten , days. If you think you can make a planetary ecologist out of me in that length of time, I'll do my part."

"Good," Gunn said. "Anne, get to work." He bolted through the swinging doors.

The two looked at each other for a starchy moment, and then Anne smiled. Paige felt like another man at once.

"Is it really true what you said?" Anne said, almost shyly.

"Yes. 1 didn't know it until I said it, but it's true. I'm really sorry that I had to say it at such a spectacularly bad moment; I only came over to apologize for my part in last night's quarrel. Now it seems that I've a bigger hassle to account for."

"Your curiosity is really your major talent, do you know?" she said, smiling again. "It took you only two days to find out just what you wanted to know even though it's about the most closely guarded secret in the world."

"But I don't know it yet. Can you tell me here or is the place wired?"

The girl laughed. "Do you think Hal and I would have cussed each other out like that if the place were wired? No, it's clean, we inspect it daily. I'll tell you the central fact, and then my father can give you the details. The truth is that' the Pfitzner project isn't out to conquer the degenerative diseases alone. It's aimed at the end product of those diseases, too. We're looking for the answer to death itself."

Paige sat down slowly in the nearest chair. "I don't believe it can be one," he whispered at last.

"That's what we all used to think, Paige. That's what that says." She pointed to the motto in German above the swinging doors. "Wider den Tad in kein Krautlein gewachsen." "'Against Death doth no simple grow.' That was a law of nature, the old German herbalists thought. But now it's only a challenge. Somewhere in nature there are herbs and simples against death and we're going to find them."

Anne's father seemed both preoccupied and a little worried to be talking to Paige at all, but it nevertheless took him only one day to explain the basic reasoning behind the project vividly enough so that Paige could understand it. In another day of simple helping around the part of the Pfitzner labs which was running his soil samples help which consisted mostly of bottle washing and making dilutions. Paige learned the reasoning well enough to put forward a version of it himself. He practiced it on Anne over dinner.

"It all rests on our way of th1bktng about why antibiotics work," he said, while the girl listened with an attentiveness just this side of mockery. "What good are they to the organisms that produce them? We assumed that the organism secretes the antibiotic to kill or inhibit competing organisms, even though we were never able to show, that enough antibiotic for the purpose is actually produced in the organism's natural medium, that is, the soil. In other words, we figured, the wider the range of the antibiotic, the less competition the producer had."