The Plague, Pestilence & Apocalypse MEGAPACK™

by Robert Reed

  the most wonderful achievement of our tremendous civilization was

  food—its inconceivable abundance, its infinite variety, its marvel-

  lous delicacy . O my grandsons, life was life in those days, when we

  had such wonderful things to eat .”

  This was beyond the boys, and they let it slip by, words and

  thoughts, as a mere senile wandering in the narrative .

  “Our food-getters were called freemen . This was a joke . We of

  the ruling classes owned all the land, all the machines, everything .

  These food-getters were our slaves . We took almost all the food they

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  got, and left them a little so that they might eat, and work, and get

  us more food—”

  “I’d have gone into the forest and got food for myself,” Hare-Lip

  announced; “and if any man tried to take it away from me, I’d have

  killed him .”

  The old man laughed .

  “Did I not tell you that we of the ruling class owned all the land,

  all the forest, everything? Any food-getter who would not get food

  for us, him we punished or compelled to starve to death . And very

  few did that . They preferred to get food for us, and make clothes for

  us, and prepare and administer to us a thousand—a mussel-shell,

  Hoo-Hoo—a thousand satisfactions and delights . And I was Profes-

  sor Smith in those days—Professor James Howard Smith . And my

  lecture courses were very popular—that is, very many of the young

  men and women liked to hear me talk about the books other men

  had written .

  “And I was very happy, and I had beautiful things to eat . And my

  hands were soft, because I did no work with them, and my body was

  clean all over and dressed in the softest garments—

  “He surveyed his mangy goat-skin with disgust .

  “We did not wear such things in those days . Even the slaves had

  better garments . And we were most clean . We washed our faces and

  hands often every day . You boys never wash unless you fall into the

  water or go swimming .”

  “Neither do you Granzer,” Hoo-Hoo retorted .

  “I know, I know, I am a filthy old man, but times have changed.

  Nobody washes these days, there are no conveniences . It is sixty

  years since I have seen a piece of soap .

  “You do not know what soap is, and I shall not tell you, for I am

  telling the story of the Scarlet Death . You know what sickness is . We

  called it a disease . Very many of the diseases came from what we

  called germs . Remember that word—germs . A germ is a very small

  thing. It is like a woodtick, such as you find on the dogs in the spring

  of the year when they run in the forest . Only the germ is very small .

  It is so small that you cannot see it—”

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  Hoo-Hoo began to laugh .

  “You’re a queer un, Granser, talking about things you can’t see .

  If you can’t see ’em, how do you know they are? That’s what I want

  to know . How do you know anything you can’t see?”

  “A good question, a very good question, Hoo-Hoo . But we did

  see—some of them . We had what we called microscopes and ultra-

  microscopes, and we put them to our eyes and looked through them,

  so that we saw things larger than they really were, and many things

  we could not see without the microscopes at all . Our best ultrami-

  croscopes could make a germ look forty thousand times larger . A

  mussel-shell is a thousand fingers like Edwin’s. Take forty mussel-

  shells, and by as many times larger was the germ when we looked at

  it through a microscope . And after that, we had other ways, by using

  what we called moving pictures, of making the forty-thousand-times

  germ many, many thousand times larger still . And thus we saw all

  these things which our eyes of themselves could not see . Take a

  grain of sand . Break it into ten pieces . Take one piece and break it

  into ten . Break one of those pieces into ten, and one of those into

  ten, and one of those into ten, and one of those into ten, and do it

  all day, and maybe, by sunset, you will have a piece as small as one

  of the germs .” The boys were openly incredulous . Hare-Lip sniffed

  and sneered and Hoo-Hoo snickered, until Edwin nudged them to

  be silent .

  “The woodtick sucks the blood of the dog, but the germ, being

  so very small, goes right into the blood of the body, and there it has

  many children . In those days there would be as many as a billion—a

  crab-shell, please—as many as that crab-shell in one man’s body .

  We called germs micro-organisms . When a few million, or a billion,

  of them were in a man, in all the blood of a man, he was sick . These

  germs were a disease . There were many different kinds of them—

  more different kinds than there are grains of sand on this beach .

  We knew only a few of the kinds . The micro-organic world was an

  invisible world, a world we could not see, and we knew very little

  about it . Yet we did know something . There was the bacillus anthra-

  cis; there was the micrococcus; there was the Bacterium termo, and

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  the Bacterium lactis—that’s what turns the goat milk sour even to

  this day, Hare-Lip; and there were Schizomycetes without end . And

  there were many others .…”

  Here the old man launched into a disquisition on germs and their

  natures, using words and phrases of such extraordinary length and

  meaninglessness, that the boys grinned at one another and looked

  out over the deserted ocean till they forgot the old man was babbling

  on .“But the Scarlet Death, Granser,” Edwin at last suggested .

  Granser recollected himself, and with a start tore himself away

  from the rostrum of the lecture-hall, where, to another world audi-

  ence, he had been expounding the latest theory, sixty years gone, of

  germs and germ-diseases .

  “Yes, yes, Edwin; I had forgotten . Sometimes the memory of the

  past is very strong upon me, and I forget that I am a dirty old man,

  clad in goat-skin, wandering with my savage grandsons who are

  goatherds in the primeval wilderness. ‘The fleeting systems lapse

  like foam,’ and so lapsed our glorious, colossal civilization . I am

  Granser, a tired old man . I belong to the tribe of Santa Rosans . I

  married into that tribe . My sons and daughters married into the

  Chauffeurs, the Sacramen-tos, and the Palo-Altos . You, Hare-Lip,

  are of the Chauffeurs . You, Edwin, are of the Sacramentos . And you,

  Hoo-Hoo, are of the Palo-Altos . Your tribe takes its name from a

  town that was near the seat of another great institution of learning . It

  was called Stanford University . Yes, I remember now . It is perfectly

  clear . I was telling you of the Scarlet Death . Where was I in my

  story?”

  “You was telling about germs, the things you can’t see but which

  make men sick,” Edwin prompted .

  “Yes, that’s where I was. A man did not notice at first when only

  a few of these germs got into his body . But each germ broke in half

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bsp; and became two germs, and they kept doing this very rapidly so that

  in a short time there were many millions of them in the body . Then

  the man was sick . He had a disease, and the disease was named after

  the kind of a germ that was in him . It might be measles, it might be

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  influenza, it might be yellow fever; it might be any of thousands and

  thousands of kinds of diseases .

  “Now this is the strange thing about these germs . There were

  always new ones coming to live in men’s bodies . Long and long and

  long ago, when there were only a few men in the world, there were

  few diseases . But as men increased and lived closely together in

  great cities and civilizations, new diseases arose, new kinds of germs

  entered their bodies . Thus were countless millions and billions of

  human beings killed . And the more thickly men packed together, the

  more terrible were the new diseases that came to be . Long before

  my time, in the middle ages, there was the Black Plague that swept

  across Europe . It swept across Europe many times . There was tuber-

  culosis, that entered into men wherever they were thickly packed .

  A hundred years before my time there was the bubonic plague .

  And in Africa was the sleeping sickness . The bacteriologists fought

  all these sicknesses and destroyed them, just as you boys fight the

  wolves away from your goats, or squash the mosquitoes that light on

  you . The bacteriologists—”

  “But, Granser, what is a what-you-call-it?” Edwin interrupted .

  “You, Edwin, are a goatherd . Your task is to watch the goats .

  You know a great deal about goats . A bacteriologist watches germs .

  That’s his task, and he knows a great deal about them . So, as I was

  saying, the bacteriologists fought with the germs and destroyed

  them—sometimes . There was leprosy, a horrible disease . A hundred

  years before I was born, the bacteriologists discovered the germ of

  leprosy . They knew all about it . They made pictures of it . I have seen

  those pictures . But they never found a way to kill it . But in 1984,

  there was the Pantoblast Plague, a disease that broke out in a country

  called Brazil and that killed millions of people . But the bacteriolo-

  gists found it out, and found the way to kill it, so that the Pantoblast

  Plague went no farther . They made what they called a serum, which

  they put into a man’s body and which killed the pantoblast germs

  without killing the man . And in 1910, there was Pellagra, and also

  the hookworm . These were easily killed by the bacteriologists . But

  in 1947 there arose a new disease that had never been seen before .

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  It got into the bodies of babies of only ten months old or less, and

  it made them unable to move their hands and feet, or to eat, or any-

  thing; and the bacteriologists were eleven years in discovering how

  to kill that particular germ and save the babies .

  “In spite of all these diseases, and of all the new ones that contin-

  ued to arise, there were more and more men in the world . This was

  because it was easy to get food . The easier it was to get food, the

  more men there were; the more men there were, the more thickly

  were they packed together on the earth; and the more thickly they

  were packed, the more new kinds of germs became diseases . There

  were warnings . Soldervetzsky, as early as 1929, told the bacteriolo-

  gists that they had no guaranty against some new disease, a thousand

  times more deadly than any they knew, arising and killing by the

  hundreds of millions and even by the billion . You see, the micro-

  organic world remained a mystery to the end . They knew there

  was such a world, and that from time to time armies of new germs

  emerged from it to kill men .

  “And that was all they knew about it . For all they knew, in that in-

  visible micro-organic world there might be as many different kinds

  of germs as there are grains of sand on this beach . And also, in that

  same invisible world it might well be that new kinds of germs came

  to be . It might be there that life originated—the ‘abysmal fecundity,’

  Soldervetzsky called it, applying the words of other men who had

  written before him .…”

  It was at this point that Hare-Lip rose to his feet, an expression of

  huge contempt on his face .

  “Granser,” he announced, “you make me sick with your gabble .

  Why don’t you tell about the Red Death? If you ain’t going to, say

  so, an’ we’ll start back for camp .”

  The old man looked at him and silently began to cry . The weak

  tears of age rolled down his cheeks and all the feebleness of his

  eighty-seven years showed in his grief-stricken countenance .

  “Sit down,” Edwin counselled soothingly . “Granser’s all right .

  He’s just gettin’ to the Scarlet Death, ain’t you, Granser? He’s just

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  goin’ to tell us about it right now . Sit down, Hare-Lip . Go ahead,

  Granser .”

  III

  The old man wiped the tears away on his grimy knuckles and

  took up the tale in a tremulous, piping voice that soon strengthened

  as he got the swing of the narrative .

  “It was in the summer of 2013 that the Plague came . I was twenty-

  seven years old, and well do I remember it . Wireless despatches—”

  Hare-Lip spat loudly his disgust, and Granser hastened to make

  amends .

  “We talked through the air in those days, thousands and thou-

  sands of miles . And the word came of a strange disease that had

  broken out in New York . There were seventeen millions of people

  living then in that noblest city of America . Nobody thought anything

  about the news . It was only a small thing . There had been only a few

  deaths . It seemed, though, that they had died very quickly, and that

  one of the first signs of the disease was the turning red of the face

  and all the body . Within twenty-four hours came the report of the

  first case in Chicago. And on the same day, it was made public that

  London, the greatest city in the world, next to Chicago, had been

  secretly fighting the plague for two weeks and censoring the news

  despatches—that is, not permitting the word to go forth to the rest of

  the world that London had the plague .

  “It looked serious, but we in California, like everywhere else,

  were not alarmed. We were sure that the bacteriologists would find

  a way to overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other

  germs in the past . But the trouble was the astonishing quickness

  with which this germ destroyed human beings, and the fact that it

  inevitably killed any human body it entered . No one ever recov-

  ered . There was the old Asiatic cholera, when you might eat dinner

  with a well man in the evening, and the next morning, if you got up

  early enough, you would see him being hauled by your window in

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  the death-cart . But this new plague was quicker than that—much

  quicker .
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  “From the moment of the first signs of it, a man would be dead

  in an hour . Some lasted for several hours . Many died within ten or

  fifteen minutes of the appearance of the first signs.

  “The heart began to beat faster and the heat of the body to in-

  crease. Then came the scarlet rash, spreading like wildfire over the

  face and body . Most persons never noticed the increase in heat and

  heart-beat, and the first they knew was when the scarlet rash came

  out . Usually, they had convulsions at the time of the appearance of

  the rash . But these convulsions did not last long and were not very

  severe . If one lived through them, he became perfectly quiet, and

  only did he feel a numbness swiftly creeping up his body from the

  feet. The heels became numb first, then the legs, and hips, and when

  the numbness reached as high as his heart he died . They did not

  rave or sleep . Their minds always remained cool and calm up to the

  moment their heart numbed and stopped . And another strange thing

  was the rapidity of decomposition . No sooner was a person dead

  than the body seemed to fall to pieces, to fly apart, to melt away

  even as you looked at it . That was one of the reasons the plague

  spread so rapidly . All the billions of germs in a corpse were so im-

  mediately released .

  “And it was because of all this that the bacteriologists had so

  little chance in fighting the germs. They were killed in their labo-

  ratories even as they studied the germ of the Scarlet Death . They

  were heroes . As fast as they perished, others stepped forth and took

  their places. It was in London that they first isolated it. The news

  was telegraphed everywhere . Trask was the name of the man who

  succeeded in this, but within thirty hours he was dead . Then came

  the struggle in all the laboratories to find something that would kill

  the plague germs . All drugs failed . You see, the problem was to get

  a drug, or serum, that would kill the germs in the body and not kill

  the body. They tried to fight it with other germs, to put into the body

  of a sick man germs that were the enemies of the plague germs—”

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  “And you can’t see these germ-things, Granser,” Hare-Lip object-

  ed, “and here you gabble, gabble, gabble about them as if they was

  anything, when they’re nothing at all . Anything you can’t see, ain’t,