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Richard Ferber has thrown a matter of ominous mystery into our cruise. 
Last night both Don and Raymond were awakened toward dawn in the cabin they 
share with Richard by moaning or retching from his bunk. Raymond thought it 
was dry heaves from sea sickness or drinking and Don thought only that 
it was moaning. Richard awoke late in the morning and found himself sore 
about the jaws, triceps and trapezius muscles and back muscles in a very 
serious way and very strange way, and slowly decided that this must be from 
having a convulsion. Raymond surmised that he would have bitten his tongue 
and suddenly noticed that he had I Richard has a rather severe peripheral 
bite on his tongue of which he was unaware. Thus, we can only assume that 
he had a grand mal seizure toward dawn of which he is unaware, and which 
the others misinterpreted. He has no bruising elsewhere from the movements. 
Raymond has inquired of the entire crew to make sure that none were retching 
from sickness or a "hang over" in the adjacent lavatory to produce the noises 
he heard. None were. He did not defecate or void. Richard has never had a 
seizure before and has no reason for one now. His WBC is 10,600 with 80% 
polys this afternoon, none of them bands. All we can do is watch and wait 
and advise him to get an EEC and skull films at the NINDS laboratory on Guam. 
Even more uncanny is Don's account of his dream, on falling asleep 
again after he had been awakened by Ferber' s "periodic moaning". He was 
photographing a girl who kept falling into full convulsions each time he 
was ready to pull his shutter, and when she fell "blood gushed from her 
vagina in spurts". All this "convulsive" dreaming upon a late evening when 
we had all seen a rather overdone moving picture on alcoholism in which the 
exaggerated DT scenes were most dramatic: "Days of Wine and Roses". I keep 
hoping that Richard has had a nightmare of unusual Intensity, provoked by 
the film on alcoholism and the graphic presentation of "overdone" DTs, 
in which he simply bit his tongue. The soreness of all his muscles and the 
tongue bite and the dual report of his deep groanings all suggest, however, 
the likelihood that he has had a grand mal seizure in his sleep 1 1 
Radio from Washington says that Ivan is en route to Ponape to join us. 
I am very happy indeed, and disappointed only in that he will be with us 
only in Ponape and Pingalap and that I did not succeed in getting him to the 
New Hebrides and Solomon Islands where he should have been and where we 
needed him 1 1 How I can prolong his sojourn now in the South Pacific so that 
it will be most valuable to him is my problem. 
If only we can get the frozen clots and serum and virus isolation 
specimens (certainly most of the latter are "lost") off to Kirk and to 
NIH successfully this time through Ponape, I shall be most satisfied. We 
cannot ship to Kirk very easily, since I have no airline accounts we can 
use. We must thus ship either back to NIH and from there to Canberra, or 
to Rosen in Hawaii, if he can receive freight collect government shipments, 
and from his laboratory on to Canberra. I am thus trying to telephone NIH 
tonight at midnight from the Alpha Helix , to get answers to these problems. 
We are trying to pack up supplies to have the ship ready for the new 
crew. I step down as Chief Scientist at Ponape, and Carr arrives to take 
charge of "his" expedition, on which Don, Ivan and I are only "hitchhikers". 
