A strain of killer microbes 5,000 years old? Well, why not? Before you can think too hard about this question, Dr. Frank G. Slaughter has you aboard the hospital ship Mercy off the coast of Peru in a climate thick with Petri dishes, Bunsen burners, agar cultures, radio-carbon dating and other scientific stuff.

[In "Plague Ship,"] Dr. Grant Reed, ace epidemiologist, is racing against time to cook up a vaccine for a plague that his late brother, an archeologist, has loosed from an ancient tomb in the Andes. The epidemic spreads quickly, people die wherever in the world the Mercy has sent its contaminated mail, and the natives are restless enough to cut the disabled vessel loose from its moorings. At the end of the trail for Dr. Reed is a possible Nobel Prize and the love of his lab assistant. ("The warmth of her kiss told him that...