I Won the Lottery and Went Back in Time!?!

Leon started on the four hundred and thirty-sixth day and gave himself two days to write down what he actually knew, and it took an hour and a half, and that was the first bad moment.

Mould. A green mould, on bread or fruit, of a kind with a name he can spell and has never seen under anything. It kills some bacteria and not others. A Scotsman found it by leaving a plate out. It took a war and about thirty people in a laboratory to turn the finding into a thing you could give a man.

Then the second column, which is the one that mattered.

He does not know which mould. There are hundreds and most of them do nothing and a good few of them will poison you, and they are not distinguishable by eye, and the only reason anybody on Earth ever knew which was which was that somebody looked at them at four hundred times.

He cannot grow a pure one. Everything he could put it in has ten other things already living in it.

He cannot get it out of the broth once it is in there. That is solvent work — an acid, a solvent, a change of acidity to make it come back — and he has no solvent, no way to measure acidity except his tongue, and nothing cold to keep any of it in.

And the yield of the wild mould is so low that the first patient on Earth to get it was dosed with his own recovered urine, and still died, because they ran out.

He sat with that for a while.

***

Nayra found him at the works on the second afternoon with four pages of it on the bench and read his face rather than the pages.

"You have found out you cannot."

"Ei."

"Then say the part you can, and stop looking like a man at a burial." She sat down on the bench, which she does not usually do. "You have been telling me for a year that a thing you cannot do yet is not the same as a thing that cannot be done. Say it to yourself."

What he could say, once he stopped feeling sorry for himself, was smaller and better.

He does not need to make the drug. He needs to find out whether anything growing within a day’s walk of this terrace does what the box does, and there is no reason at all to assume the answer is no, because every antibiotic anybody on Earth ever found was found growing in dirt, and this is a whole planet of dirt that nobody has ever looked at.

Nayra put it back to him in three words. "So look."

"That is the problem. I cannot look."

***

He laid it out that evening for the four of them, and it took him a while, because the difficulty is not obvious until you try to build it.

To find out whether a thing kills what turns a wound, you have to put it against the thing that turns a wound.

He cannot see what turns a wound. Nobody here can. It has no name and no shape and the only instrument anybody has for detecting it is a person getting worse.

"So the test is a person." Vethra had gone very still.

"Ei."

"Na." She said it flatly and did not soften it. "We wrote four lines on that platform eleven days ago and one of them was mine. You are not going to walk in here with a jar of scrapings and a sick child."

"I know."

"Say you know it in front of Nayra."

He said it in front of Nayra.

What he had instead was a poor thing, and he presented it as a poor thing, which Doran said afterwards was the only reason anybody agreed to it.

Meat broth goes bad. Everybody knows that; it is why the racks exist. Broth goes bad because things grow in it — not the same things that turn a wound, not even close, but things of the same kind, and they are visible, in the sense that a jar that has gone cloudy and stinking has told you something and a jar that has stayed clear for nine days has told you something else.

So: forty small jars, boiled, filled the same day from the same pot, and into each one a different thing. A scraping of green mould from the store. A different green mould from the wet rock above the seep. Ash. Bark liquor. The harsh soap. Six kinds of leaf Vethra will choose because Leon cannot tell any of them apart. And four jars with nothing in them at all.

Nayra was ahead of him before he got to the four.

"Because if I do not have jars with nothing in them, I will not know whether the clear one is clear because of what I put in it."

"Ei."

"You gave me that on the sixth day." She held his eye. "With a pebble."

"Na," Leon said. "You gave it to me. I have the notes."

He wrote the honest part on the page as well, because a page that only says what a method can do is a page that will get somebody killed eleven days from here.

A thing that keeps broth clear may do nothing at all inside a person, and a thing that does nothing to broth may still work in a wound. This test does not tell you a thing works. It tells you which forty things are worth the next question.

Then he wrote the next question underneath, and did not have an answer for it, and left it there anyway.

And the next question is a person, and we have not worked out how to ask it.

***

Vethra took forty jars because Vethra takes anything that is written down and checkable, and it is her hands that will do most of it, and she said so.

But it was Nayra who stayed at the works afterwards, in the dark, with one jar in her hands, turning it over.

"How long."

"For the forty? Nine days."

"Na. For the rest of it. For a thing I could put in a person and not be guessing."

Leon considered lying to her and had learned somewhere in the last year not to bother.

"If everything goes well and nobody dies of anything stupid and the children keep learning, and somebody who is now seven spends her whole life on it — perhaps then."

"Not you."

"Not me. I do not know enough and there is not enough of me."

Nayra put the jar down on the bench and lined it up with the others, square, the way she lines everything up.

"Then we had better be good about writing things down," she said, "because the only part of this I am going to see is the part where we start."