The White Plague by Frank Herbert

signatures of officials at the bottoms. He bought a dark wig, toned his skin olive and all the while kept watch through the newspapers for a school immunization date. It came within the week, announcement of an immunization program in West Seattle Junior High School for the following Monday. 
    Wearing a white jacket with stethoscope protruding from a side pocket and a name tag on his lapel identifying him as John Vicenti, M.D., he showed up early at the school. It was a cold winter morning and the halls were crowded with students bundled into heavy jackets. He moved through the shouting, jabbering throng without attracting more than casual notice. In his left hand he carried a carefully arranged wooden kit box containing racks of sterile slides and covers and all of the neatly assembled tools for blood sampling. In his left hand was the briefcase with his authorizations.
    He bustled officiously into the school nurse’s office, noting her name on the door: “Jeanette Blanquie.”
    “Hi,” he said, all innocence. “I’m Doctor Vicenti. Where do I set up?”
    “Set up?” Nurse Blanquie was a slender blond young woman with a permanently harried expression. She stood behind a long table upon which the immunization kits were set out in orderly rows. There was an empty chair at the far end of the table with two stacks of forms in front of it. The wall behind her displayed a calendar and two bowdlerized anatomical charts, one labeled “male,” the other “female.”
    “For the blood samples,” he said. He put his wooden box and briefcase on the table and showed her his identification and authorizations. Nurse Blanquie merely glanced at them while her expression became even more harried.
    “Blood samples,” she muttered.
    “We’re supposed to get them right along with your immunization program to minimize the upset of school routine,” he explained.
    “I was supposed to have two clinical technicians here this morning to help me,” she said. “One of them just called in sick and the other one has some kind of emergency at Good Samaritan. Now you. This is all I need. What are your samples for?”
    “We’re doing a genetic typing nationally to see if we can identify correlations with certain diseases and immunities. I’m supposed to use your ID numbers, no names. All I need in addition is whether the sample is from male or female.”
    Her voice sounded tired. “Doctor Vicenti, nobody’s told me a thing.” She gestured at the table. “And I’m supposed to process two hundred and sixteen students today, more tomorrow.”
    He gritted his teeth. “Damn! That’s their second slip-up in two weeks! Somebody in that office should be fired.”
    Nurse Blanquie shook her head in sympathy.
    He said: “Well, what can I do to help you? Could we get a student in to handle the paperwork?”
    “I’ve already asked for one,” she said. She looked at the table in front of her. “Could you set up here beside me? What kind of samples will you take?”
    He opened the kit box, displaying the ranked slides, the swabs and alcohol, lancets, everything neat.
    “Oh,” she said. “Well, that shouldn’t delay us much, Doctor. I guess between the two of us we can handle it.” 
    When he returned to Ballard that evening, “Doctor Vicenti” had two hundred and eleven blood samples, each with a tiny pinch of skin cells deftly included.
    There will be specific differences , he told himself as he removed his disguise in the bathroom, which still smelled of stale tobacco. The genetic information for every biological function – including whether the person is male or female. There is a pattern here into which I can lock a virulent destroyer.
    The positive intermolding effect of the double helix chains, each side able to reproduce its opposite number, his clues lay in there. In the peptide bonds, perhaps, and in the singular tails that trailed out of the helix.
    He took the samples down to his lab. The answers had to be in here, he