Sutton nodded thoughtfully. “It was too late—or too early, perhaps. We’ll have to talk that over.”
Westover finished the brief account of his coming to dwell on the monster’s back. The other grinned happily.
“You began with the practice, where I worked out the theory first.”
“I haven’t got so far with the theory,” said Westover, “but I think I’ve got the main outlines. Until the monsters came, man was a parasite on the face of the Earth. Fundamentally, parasitism—on the green plants and their by-products—was our way of life, as of all animals from the beginning. But the monsters absorbed into themselves all the plant food and even the organic material in the soil. So we have only one way out—to transfer our parasitism to the only remaining food source—the monsters themselves.
“The monsters almost defeated us, because of their two special adaptations of extreme size and ability to cross space. But man has always won the battle of adaptations before, because he could improvise new ones as the need arose. The greatest crisis humanity ever faced called for the most radical innovation in our way of life.”
“Very well put,” approved Sutton. “Except that you make it sound easy. By the time I’d worked it out like that, things were already in such a turmoil that putting it into effect was the devil’s own job. About the only ones I could find to help me were the Preacher and his people. They have the faith that moves mountains, that has made this self-moving mountain inhabitable.”
“It is inhabitable?” Westover’s question reflected no doubt.
SUTTON GESTURED at the bubbling device behind him. “That thing is making air now, which we’re going to need when the monster’s in space. It was when we were still trying to find a poison for the beasts that I hit on the catalyst that makes their blood give up its oxygen—that’s its blood flowing through the filters. We’ve got an electric generator running by tapping the monster’s internal gas pressure. There are problems left before we’ll be fully self-sufficient here—but the monster is so much like us in fundamental makeup that its body contains all the elements human life needs too.”
“Then,” Westover glanced appreciatively around, “it looks like the main hazard is claustrophobia.”
“Don’t worry about a cave-in. We’re surrounded by solid cystoid tissue. But,” Sutton’s voice took on a graver note, “there may be other psychological dangers. I don’t think all our people—there are fifty-one, fifty-two of us now—realize yet that this colony isn’t just a temporary expedient. Human history hasn’t had such a turning-point since men first started chipping stone. Spengler’s Mensch als Raubtier—if he ever existed—has to be replaced by the Mensch als Schmarotzer, and the adjustment may come hard. We’ve got to plan for the rest of our lives—and our children’s and our children’s children’s—as parasites inside this monster and whatever others we can manage to—infect—when they’re clustered again in space.”
“For the future,” put in the Preacher, who had watched benignly the biologists’ reunion, “the Lord will provide, even as He did unto Jonah when he cried to Him out of the belly of the fish.”
“Amen,” agreed Sutton. But the gaze he fixed on Westover was oddly troubled. “Speaking of the future brings up the question of the idea you mentioned—your monster-killing scheme.”
WESTOVER FLEXED his hands involuntarily, like one who has been too long enforcedly idle. In terse eager sentences he outlined for Sutton the plan that had burned in him during his bitter wandering over the face of the ruined land. It would be very easy to accomplish from an endoparasite’s point of vantage, merely by isolating from the creature’s blood over a long period enough of some potent secretion—hormone, enzyme or the like—to kill when suddenly reintroduced into the system. “Originally I thought we could accomplish the same thing by synthesis—but this way will be simpler.”
“Beautifully simple.” Sutton smiled wryly. “So much so that I wish you’d never thought of it.”
Westover stared. “Why?”
“Describing your plan, you sounded almost ready to put it into effect on the spot.”
“No! Of course I realize—Well, I see what you mean—I think.” Westover was crestfallen.
Sutton smiled faintly.
“I think you do, Bill. To survive, we’ve got to be good parasites. That means before all, for the coming generations, that we keep our numbers down. A good parasite doesn’t destroy or even overtax its host. We don’t want to follow the sorry example of such unsuccessful species as the bugs of bubonic plague or typhoid; we’ll do better to model ourselves on the humble tapeworm.
“Your idea is dangerous for the same reason. The monsters probably spend thousands of years in interstellar space; during that time they’ll be living exclusively on their fat—the fuel they stored on Earth, and so will we. We’ve got a whole new history of man ahead of us, under such changed conditions that we can’t begin to predict what turns it may take. There’s a very great danger that men will proliferate until they kill their hosts. But imagine a struggle for Lebensraum when all the living space there is is a few thousand monsters capable of supporting a very limited number of people each—with your method giving an easy way to destroy these little worlds our descendants will inhabit. It’s too much dynamite to have around the house.”
Westover bowed his head, but he had caught a curiously expectant glint in Sutton’s eyes as he spoke. He thought, and his face lightened. “Suppose we work out a way to record my idea, one that can’t be deciphered by anyone unintelligent enough to be likely to misuse it. A riddle for our descendants—who should have use for it some day.”
At last Sutton smiled. “That’s better. You’ve thought it through to the end, I see . . . This phase of our history won’t last forever. Eventually, the monsters will come to another planet not too unlike Earth, because it’s on such worlds they prey. A tapeworm can cross the Sahara desert in the intestine of a camel—”
His voice was drowned in a vast hissing roar. An irresistible pressure distorted the walls of the chamber and scythed its occupants from their feet. Sutton staggered drunkenly almost erect, fought his way across the tilting floor to make sure of his precious apparatus. He turned back toward the others, bracing himself and shouting something; then, knowing his words lost in the thunder, gestured toward the Earth they were leaving, a half-regretful, half-triumphant farewell.
1951
RIGHTEOUS PLAGUE
It was a virus, against which the enemy could make no defense—but a virus does not distinguish between friend and foe. And immunity to what became known as the righteous plague could exist anywhere, or nowhere at all . . .
THE UGLY, high-backed truck splashed heavily through the puddles of the weedy road. Just before it reached a curve, it swayed and slithered as the brakes locked suddenly. A man had come stumbling from the rain-wet bushes; he paused now, stared dully at the halted, angrily grumbling monster.
An officer heaved himself out of the seat beside the driver, cursed irritably, flung open the door and swung out onto the running board—a malevolently superhuman figure in his panoply of snouted mask and rubberized armor. His gloved hand lifted, sliding a long-barreled automatic from its worn holster, aiming. At the shot’s crash the man from the thicket stiffened and toppled into the mud, where he writhed painfully. Two more bullets, carefully placed, put a stop to that.
The officer slid back into the seat and sighed with a sucking sound inside his mask. Without being told, the driver turned the truck cautiously off the road; tilting far over, left wheels deep in the slippery ditch, it ground in lowest gear past the motionless body, keeping several feet away.
In the back of the truck, five oddly-assorted civilian men and one woman huddled together and exchanged vaguely curious glances over the stop, the shooting, and the detour. Then, as the machine climbed back onto the roadbed and they could see the corpse sprawled in the way behind, the interest left their faces; they reflected only the emptiness of the gray sky, the hopelessn
ess of the sodden fields and woods they passed. The prisoners might have found the weather appropriate for death. They did not speak of that, because they knew they were on their way to die.
But the masked and armored soldiers who sat nervously watching them, rifles clutched between their knees, did speak of death, and made sour jokes about it. They did not know they themselves were going to death—that when the execution was done and reported by radio, a plane would be overhead inside two minutes to bomb them.
That would take place by order of the Diktatura, that is: by the sovereign will of the People, expressed by its Executive Council, which was responsible directly to the Dictator.
Naturally it was the People’s will that no one come out of a plague spot, for the People feared death.
Joseph Euge said as much to the pale, underfed-looking young man who crouched beside him in the bed of the truck. “The gasproof clothing,” he added, “protects nothing but morale, and these men’s morale needs to last only until—their job is done.”
The young man looked at him fixedly, seeing gray hair, a firm-lined face, and a suit that had been expensively respectable. They did not know each other’s names. All the trials had been separate; each prisoner had been told that the others—whom, for the most part, he had never heard of—had confessed the whole plot.
“What makes you think so?”
“I know a good deal of the Dictator’s ways,” said Euge quietly; “I used to be well acquainted with him.”
“You were close to him—who are you?”
“My name is Joseph Euge.”
“Doctor Euge.” The pale young man’s eyes widened as he repeated the name the way the newspapers had printed it so often; he edged a little away from the other, jostling the woman beside him. She, too, stared with haunted eyes, and her lips framed the name in a whisper; the rest of the condemned—a large rough man in a workman’s faded blue, a little Jew with twitching hands, and another youth who, like Euge’s neighbor, had evidently been a student—looked at him also, with an expression compounded of wonder, fear, and hate.
BEHIND THEIR MASKS, fixed eyes and bayonets gleaming, the guards sat stony-faced. They were trained to be blind, deaf, and dumb—and on occasion oblivious of smells—in the stern fulfillment of duty.
“You are the Dr. Euge?” whispered the woman with a flicker of interest. “The man who loosed the plague on the world?”
He nodded and stared at his knees. “It is true,” he said slowly, “that I was a military bacteriologist—one of the best; it is only an accident that I was anything more. I have made my share of mistakes. Most of us have been patriots at one time or another, else there could have been no Victory.” Euge noted wryly how strong the indoctrination of his mind was, relegating the word ‘war’ to the realm of obscene taboos, and leaving only ‘victory’ permissible. “But—” he lifted his gray head and looked candidly into their faces, “when I ‘loosed the plague’, as you put it, I was not being a patriot and I do not think I was making a mistake.”
They stared at him with bleak eyes. Euge said almost pleadingly, “I believe you are all members of the Witnesses of the Lord, who are proscribed for maintaining that the plague is a punishment decreed against a sinful world. From that standpoint, surely I am not to blame for having acted as an instrument of divine justice.” It was as if he appealed for judgment to these strangers, to whom he was united in the intimate community of a grave that must be shared.
“He’s right,” said the Jew, and smiled a little, even then, with pleasure at a point well made. “We’re inconsistent if we blame him.”
There was a lightening in their wan, drained faces, mostly of relief at being told that they need not spend those few last minutes in hating.
The woman’s reaction was strongest; she leaned forward, eyes suddenly feverish: “Do you believe as we do, then? Did you know you were guided, when—”
The scientist said wearily, “I have seen no visions, I have heard no voices. Still I do not feel responsible for what has come on the world through me. In the plenum Of probabilities, what may be will be . . .”
“Doctor, beyond your universe of probabilities there must be a power that chooses among them.” The young student spoke with the quiet conviction of a man in whom knowledge and faith are at peace. “We must accept that power—or the logic by which it chooses among the possible worlds—as good, the definition of good. You should see that—now, if never before.” He quoted Goethe. “. . . denn nur im Elend erkennt man Gottes Hand und Finger, der gute Menschen zum Guten leitet.”
Euge looked out through the rear of the truck, at the gray landscape rumbling away, and guessed that the journey’s end was still fifteen minutes ahead; unless his knowledge of how the Dictator’s mind worked failed him, the place would be near the wreckage of his one-time laboratory, leveled from the air on the naive theory that some devilish device there was broadcasting the seeds of plague . . .
Aching minutes that had to be soothed with words. Words—God, fate, hope, hereafter—are man’s last support when everything else has given way. “So you accept the plague as good? I saw one of your propaganda sheets with the phrase ‘Judgment Virus’. An apt name. But it does not judge as men do; it has its own peculiar standards, that virus I found.” Euge’s voice was level, colorless; he did not look at the others to hold their attention or to see if they were listening. “I will tell you what it is . . .”
2
EUGE WAS busy in the microscope room, examining tissue from the last run of test animals, when the communicator buzzed and told him that the Dictator had arrived and wanted to see him at once.
He left the room by way of an airlock, in which—Dictatorial summons notwithstanding—he spent full five minutes under a spray of disinfectant chemicals and radiations; after the lock had cleared he stripped off the airtight armor he wore without touching any of its outer surfaces, and left the chamber quickly.
The Dictator’s visit was a signal mark of Euge’s importance, or at least that of his virus research; there was no doubt that Euge was highly thought of and trusted. His dossier was that of a man who extended his scientist’s worship of “Truth” even into the very different field of human relations. The Diktatura could use such men.
Euge knew his status, had given it little thought for years. It was his private social contract, the working agreement by which the powers that be gave him the priceless opportunity to do research, in return for the—to him—worthless byproducts of same.
Now, he thought as he went up in the elevator, the Dictator would be impatient—or at least eager—to hear the results of the newest experiments. The first tests of the new strain showed promise, by inocculations of a monkey, Macacus rhesus. The last series of experimental animals had belonged to another primate species. Homo sapiens. That was the crucial proof, whether men infected with Virus RM4-2197—R for rubeola, or measles, M4 for fourth-stage mutant, the rest the classification number of the culture—would die swiftly, surely, with a minimum of fuss. That was routine, too, but the results were not.
The results had kept Euge lying awake for some nights now. Awake, open-eyed, face to face with himself as he had not been within his memory.
He turned briskly into the contagion laboratory, deliberately making delay, explaining to himself that it would be best to have all the data on the new culture at his fingertips. The big room was a jungle of sealed glass cases where beady-eyed mice tumbled over each other, where healthy rabbits nibbled lettuce cheek by jowl with rabbits whose bodies seethed with mutant microbes. At the most crowded end of the room was Novik, brightest of the skilled young men assigned as assistants and apprentices to the great Dr. Euge, busy now with pencil and notebook, counting dead mice.
EUGE LOOKED OVER Ed Novik’s shoulder at the tallies. They were many. He asked, “What does it come to?”
“So far,” said Novik, “I’ve only been over the direct and remote cages. But—” he gestured at the remaining glass compartments on his right, “I�
��d be willing to bet the results of the delayed exposures are the same. Contagion, one hundred per cent; mortality, one hundred per cent. The only difference is, that where infected and healthy mice have a screen between them, the healthy ones get it slower—a few cases at first, then it runs right through them.”
“Mmm,” said Euge without enthusiasm. The figures proved nothing new—only that the mutant virus bred true; for that matter, the 100-100 ratio of infections and deaths to exposures had been achieved already with RM3.
Euge turned toward a double tier of cages along the side wall. These were small, built to contain one animal apiece, ten above, ten below. They were segregation cages; the lower tier was wired to a wall plug through a transformer and a mildly remarkable device, consisting of two slowly revolving, eccentric wheels and a relay, which insured that the metal floor of the ten cages should be slightly electrified at irregular intervals.
“Mmm,” said Euge again, surveying the victims of his unorthodox experiment. Of the ten mice in the bottom cages, not all were dead; they had been exposed to Virus RM4 somewhat later than those in the large cases, after the first tests on human beings; but those that still lived were obviously breathing their last. In the upper tier, though, seven mice were still bright-eyed and alert; two were dead, and a third lay on its side, panting and bedraggled.
Euge swung back to Novik. “Set up fifty more segregation cages. Clear the wired set for a repeat test. And get me half a dozen cats. And—” he hesitated, “don’t mention these experiments to the others if you can help it; we two can handle all the necessary work.”
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 42