Seawater flowed into the cracks, the scab shuddered, and on top of its thin skin, the even thinner layer of water that clung to it churned just a little. Whenever this happened, many living creatures drowned. If a drop of water that had formed from cooling steam and fallen from the upper reaches of the atmosphere were given only slightly greater volume, it could shear off a part of that scab, wash away many living creatures, and bury them with landslides. As the earth spun round and round, its four billionth or so revolution was completed. Throughout the soft, thin atmosphere that enveloped the sphere, levels of carbon dioxide and water vapor would increase, then decrease just slightly, and the temperature at the surface would rise and fall by plus or minus ten degrees Centigrade. Each time this happened, periods of cold or heat came, and terribly large numbers of plants and animals died. And then occasionally a species of some creature would multiply out of control, causing its prey to go extinct, and eventually leading to the predator’s own extinction. This dynamic repeated itself hundreds of millions of times.
The sphere revolved another hundred some-odd million times. The temperature at the sphere’s surface had fallen just a bit, and here and there parts of it had become covered in ice. Huge numbers of gargantuan, wonderfully developed, and powerful life-forms had died. Over the scant few million revolutions that followed, the ice came three times, and each time this happened, wondrously refined, giant creatures that had come to be during the intervals between these ice ages went extinct. The earth’s axis of rotation shifted, and even the North Pole’s minor shift from the present location of the South Pacific Ocean to the equatorial zone was enough to end almost all life. Already, only a tiny number of descendants of the creatures of antiquity still remained. When the ice receded for the second time, the scrawny, pathetic, ratlike creatures that had lived on the sidelines of the previous age grew larger, experienced increased brain development, and in some cases even began to stand on two legs. However, that cranial development, when compared against the tusks of the mammoth or the fangs of the saber-toothed tiger, was neither impressive nor particularly strong consolation. Even if they could use some kind of tool to hunt prey with, there was as great a difference between their strength and that of the regal Tyrannosaurus of a previous epoch as there was between a snapping turtle and the moon.
The temperature fell again, and again it rose. The earth revolved around the sun another paltry twenty or thirty thousand times. Savage, giant animals died off yet again, and the little ones walking around on two legs survived and began to form groups. Another ten thousand revolutions, and these life-forms had attained a degree of power on the surface of the earth’s thin crust. Even so, in terms of both numbers and power, they were as nothing when compared to the other group-oriented animals. However, during the next few thousand revolutions, the bipeds quickly multiplied and began to organize themselves in ways somewhat similar to those of insects such as ants and bees, though not nearly as thoroughly or logically. Just as ants raise aphids, these two-legged mammals began to raise cattle, and just as another kind of ant cultivates mushrooms, they began farming crops. Groups of allied individuals began to kill and plunder one another. They transmitted imperfect signals from one to the other, but try as they might, they could not succeed in elevating incomplete personal thoughts into a group-oriented way of thinking.
The earth revolved around the sun another several thousand times. By the time a total of five billion revolutions had been completed, these life-forms, which had suddenly begun to increase in number, were scattered—however thinly—across every corner of the globe. Various cultures had taken shape and various races had been exterminated through mutual killing or had died out thanks to disease. Every time the earth experienced a mild tic in its thin skin, they died. After another five thousand rotations since the time that these life-forms first learned to count them, they had also learned to travel all the way around the earth on its watery surface. Afterward, the plunder and group-oriented mutual killings commenced once again. More or less perfect communication between the life-forms on the surface came three or four hundred revolutions afterward. However, the custom of groups killing one another and pillaging—which until several tens of thousands of years prior had been carried out using clubs and stone axes—still persisted to a great degree. Although they had moved from clubs to slightly more advanced tools such as bows and arrows, the killing and the plundering continued on without any change.
Culture? Scarcely ten thousand years had passed since something resembling it first appeared. “Culture” you say, even though in terms of generations, no more than four hundred of them had yet come and gone. Why, just four or five thousand years ago, wasn’t the vast majority of the human race—around ninety percent of it—being terrorized by famine and disease and enemies and natural disasters? Hadn’t they been clothed in rags, ridden with lice, sleeping on the earthen floors of rough shanties, stealing or killing at every chance? Had they not been malnourished, chronically parasite-ridden, living like beasts with the fear of having to find their own food for tomorrow in order to stay alive?
Culture? Hadn’t they just learned about punishment a few hundred years ago? What percentage of the world could read letters? What about the madness of the Crusades? The sacrifices to gods? The slaughter of newborns? The massacre of noncombatants by warring states? The actions of the conquistadores toward Central and South America? The slaughter of heretics? The Inquisition? The hunts for African slaves? The Untouchables? The two world wars of just a few decades ago? Weapons of mass slaughter, the purges, the forced incarcerations, Auschwitz? To what degree had the human race of the twentieth century escaped its inner Neanderthal to have “culture”? What was the fundamental difference between the jaws of Tyrannosaurus Rex, the fangs of the saber-toothed tiger, the stinging, symbiotic cnidoblasts of the Portugese man-of-war, and the modern weapons of today? Was it that they killed in self-defense? That they killed to steal from others? That they killed out of hatred? No, there was no great difference on such points. The human race was still too young to have anything in itself worthy of being called “culture.”
Generally speaking, humans did not even have an overarching consciousness of being a single kind or race. Having not even attained the primitive stage of harmonization at which there is an idea of the “individual” and the “whole” existing within the group, they were still up to their necks in the bestial state from which they had only just begun to break free two thousand years before, biting and eating one another, consumed with the raging blood of mass slaughter.
Had they lived for another hundred thousand years, the human race would have likely come to have something in it worthy of being called “culture.” One hundred thousand years. Anything less would have been hopelessly insufficient.
However, youth also means infinite possibility. The “culture” of bees is already complete and cannot be altered. The human race, exactly because of its rough and violent incompleteness, had the promise of a brighter future.
If it could only survive …
This tiny, rounded, rocky lump—already wizened with age though its mother-star was still young—had revolved around the sun five billion and several tens of millions of times. Although the fact that organic compounds had arisen and flourished on its surface three billion revolutions ago was a sign that it was somewhat different from its planetary brothers and sisters, did the biomass coating its surface have any meaning for this lonely piece of stone? In the course of three billion years, untold millions of species had arisen and gone down to destruction. But what did it mean to that sphere of twelve thousand and several kilometers’ diameter that its crust’s thin surface was thinly overrun with squirming microscopic complexes of organic compounds that rose and fell one after another? Starting about three, four thousand revolutions prior, those life-forms had begun to suddenly increase their numbers. At last, they began to build the shells of collective bodies here and there, rather like coral polyps, and starting several hundred revolutions ag
o, these collective bodies had together entered a second stage of complexity—the species as a whole began to have something like a secondary group will, similar to that of the societies of migratory birds or insects, though far more feeble. However, the idea that the weak existed to be consumed by the strong was still deeply ingrained in these groups via the notion of natural selection. They were a little different from the life-forms that had come before them. As when the first ostracoderm began to swim in the sea, as when the Mesozoic reptile known as pterodactylus became the first large-scale vertebrate to fly through the air, this life-form was the first to use energy from its environment extracted through non-biological means. Viewed in terms of the evolution of organisms, this was as epoch-making as the first nerve, the first lung respiration, the first four-footed beast, or the first wing. However, that was just a mere hundred thousand years ago.
After the earth had begun to approach five billion and several millions, several hundreds of thousands, several tens of thousands, several thousands, several hundreds and several dozens of revolutions, one more microbe suddenly began replicating with ferocious vitality and began to destroy these life-forms and all their kind. There was nothing unusual at all about this to the five-billion-years-old stone sphere. How many thousands, how many tens of thousands of times—no, how many hundreds of millions of times had things like this already happened? One day, some form of life would suddenly begin to increase its numbers rapidly, and the life-forms it preyed upon would go extinct. The exact opposite would happen sometimes too. Sometimes a completely unrelated life-form would be attacked and die out. On a small scale, this was happening all the time. After the rains, a large amount of nutrient-rich river water flows into the sea, causing a red tide, in which the plankton in the seawater for a time multiply with startling vigor. When this happens, the oxygen in the local sea disappears, the fishes’ gills get jammed with plankton, and the fish and shellfish in the area—the same creatures that usually eat plankton—die of asphyxiation. Things like this often happen on a terrestrial scale as well. During the Mesozoic Era, the same thing happened to one genealogical branch of those spectacularly well-developed reptiles. A species of bird here, a species of mammal here—and now this utterly routine occurrence was about to happen again. At a certain point in one of the earth’s countless revolutions, it had begun, and by the time the earth had traveled through barely a third of its orbit, the process was nearly concluded.
2. The Second Week of July
“Why aren’t you resting in the hospital?” the vice president said, his voice harsh from coughing.
“Why aren’t you?” the president replied, his ashen face managing a faint smile. Sitting at the desk in the Oval Office, the president was just barely able to look up at the other man. The clock attached to his desktop calendar told him it was July 15. There were a lot of flies buzzing around the room, and because the cleaning had not been done for quite a long time, dust was everywhere. The flies traced noisy rings around an old fashioned chair near the far wall of the room.
Sitting in that chair was the slouching corpse of an elderly lady with hair the color of iron.
“Wonder if she’s starting to smell already?” the president said through his own congestion. “My secretary died sitting there the day before yesterday. There’s no air-conditioning, so she’ll start to rot right away in this heat. Even if I wanted her taken away, there’s no one to do it, and my joints are so swollen I can barely move my legs anymore.”
“I’ve gotten used to the smell,” the vice president said, at last walking over to another chair and collapsing down into it. “Washington’s a mountain of corpses.”
“It’s strange, isn’t it,” said the president, trying to pick up a cigarette with a trembling hand. “We all know there’s no way to predict the form one individual’s death might take. How many presidents have been assassinated? Regular people should know good and well that usually you can never guess how you’ll die. Appendicitis, a traffic accident, falling down a stairwell, food poisoning … But even so, when it comes to the destruction of the human race, we really were lacking in imagination, weren’t we? Hydrogen bombs, asteroid impacts. Who would’ve ever dreamed we’d be annihilated suddenly by the flu.”
“This isn’t the flu,” said the vice president. “It’s an unknown pandemic disease.”
“Either way, it amounts to the same thing.” The president finally turned his head to look out the window. Beyond a stand of trees, a thick column of black smoke was rising into the sky.
“It’s burning …” the president said. His vacant eyes gleamed distantly from fever. “Wonder what security’s like in the cities?”
“Before a state of panic could set in, everybody died,” murmured the vice president. “It was over in no time. Such a shocking thing. Do our administrative responsibilities still mean anything when one hundred fifty million of the one hundred eighty million Americans have died? Security, and all those things … does it just mean telling them to ‘die in a calm and orderly fashion’?”
“Responsibility is usually an abstraction,” the president said and then fell silent for a time. After quite a long period had elapsed, he finally spoke again, as though letting out a pent-up breath. “If … it weren’t that way … it would be neither … significant nor effective.”
“Still, though … what about the military’s overblown sense of responsibility?” said the vice president. “How about that, eh? The solidarity of the far right critics and the Senate committee members … the saber-rattling generals … they’re still kicking. Remember that proposal that came up about two weeks ago, that looked at this awful disease as an opportunity, urging us to take out the Soviet Union and China in one fell swoop?”
“Don’t those people have eyes?” murmured the president, leaning his head back against the back of the chair. “It’s been only a little bit more than a year since my predecessor, President Silverland, was in office. That insane, anticommunist crusader’s influence on the Pentagon can still be felt. They don’t understand the human race. They believe the world is divided into two kinds of people: scum of the earth and pure, innocent white people. I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead, but thanks to him the history of America—no, of the whole world—has lagged by ten years.”
“At this point, neither road would have made much difference,” the vice president said. “According to reports one week ago, the combined population of the entire world is estimated to be one fifteenth of what it was a few months ago. We’re going to die too, aren’t we? I wonder if a single human being is going to survive this.”
“Antarctica …” the president said. “Three days ago, I got a message from Conway. Antarctica is closed in by ice, and down there, nobody’s gotten sick yet.”
A gunshot rang out from somewhere. Yet another suicide, apparently. Hot, brilliant summer sunshine was pouring down on the grove outside. The once common street traffic was gone, as was the sound of people’s moaning that had since replaced it. There was an almost perfect stillness. Amid the dead silence, only the crackle of the distant fires were faintly audible.
“Jones!” the president shouted suddenly. “Are you there?”
“I’m right here.”
“I can’t see you …” The president slumped forward, and his head struck the desk hard. The vice president staggered to his feet. A cold sweat broke out all over his body, and he felt intense pain in his eyes and throat. The inside of his mouth was dry.
“Ridiculous!” the president said, looking up with his vacant eyes. “We don’t even know the name of this thing, and nothing can be done for even the doctors and families who are dying …”
“I’m here.”
“Bring me water.”
The vice president put out his hand, but only managed to overturn the pitcher. His own breathing was growing more difficult by the moment, and although his heart was becoming as heavy as lead, he was just barely able to keep moving.
“Stay with me, Jones.”
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br /> “I’m with you.”
Suddenly, the president’s eyes shot wide open, and he cried out in a shrill voice like a bird’s, “I don’t want to die!”
“Mr. President …” the vice president finally said.
“No, I didn’t mean to say that …” The president’s leaden forehead was burning up with fever. As though wringing out the last of his strength of will, he tried to remember what it was he had been about to say. “That’s right, there’s something I’d forgotten all about.”
“It’s probably nothing …”
“No. Jones, can you still walk?”
“Somewhat.” The vice president closed his eyes, moving his shoulders to help breathe as he answered. “But I’ll go right after you.”
“Then take the keys out of the hidden safe. You know the combination, right?”
“What keys are you talking about?”
“The ones for ARS.” The president’s windpipe rattled. “You know them, right? Just start the private power generator and the elevator will work. Go to the basement and destroy the power supply for ARS. I think the switch is off, but …”
“Why do you want me to do that?” murmured the vice president, finally discerning the president’s meaning. “Isn’t that like putting a plug in a bathtub on a ship that’s already eighty percent of the way to sinking?”
“Just in case … a week ago, General Garland came here with a strongly worded recommendation. With the missile defense system personnel having died in such large numbers, he’d lost his purpose. So he wanted access to the ARS switch.”
“That crazy fool!” groaned the vice president. “What kind of a nut is he? He wants to rig dead men with dynamite? Is that it?”
Virus: The Day of Resurrection Page 26