Righteous Plague

The Giants Return by Robert Abernathy is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. Righteous Plague

Righteous Plague

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 hopelessness 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 inoculations 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 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."

Novik's clear eyes dwelt briefly on his superior's face, a look of sympathetic understanding for the haggard pallor, the tired lines about the older man's mouth. "Right," he nodded crisply.

"I'll be back by the time you're ready," said Euge. "Right now I have a chore to do."

"The Dictator's here?"

Euge frowned. "How did you know?"

"It's plain in your face.... What are you going to tell him?"

"Tell him? Why, what he's come to hear."

The Dictator was as usual splendid in uniform. His was not a garish or offensive splendor, but beautifully tailored, pointed up with harmonizing gleams of bright metal, like the tasteful chromium ornaments of the luxurious modern cars and aircraft. The uniform made his somewhat stocky figure the epitome of the new age, ruled by the stars of technical perfection, beauty, and above all harmony. The Diktatura was the first government which had dared to assume total power over and total responsibility for the lives and happiness of its people. Under the sway of its master plan, guided by its ultimate ideology, all men and things harmonized, cooperated and coordinated; dissonances were forbidden. And the vast harmony of a nation found its summit and symbol in this one man, the almighty father of his people. Without his knowledge no sparrow fell to the ground in his borders, and in his files all the hairs of his subjects' heads were numbered.

The great Dr. Euge was only one among hundreds of millions whose work and rewards and recreations and very thoughts were arranged for their own benefit; but at the same time he was something more. As long as the Diktatura was not world-wide, there would be groups and nations in the clashing chaos beyond the frontier which plotted with envious hatred to destroy it. The earthly paradise must be defended; Euge's position as a top scientist in a field vital to defense elevated him almost to the level of the politico-economic planners.

The Dictator greeted Euge with a man-to-man warmth he did not use toward those to whom he was something much like a god. "Well, doctor, how is the health of your virus? And of those who have sampled it?"

The scientist said quietly, "Of the sixteen specimens you sent me, all but one died within ten days after inoculation."

"Ah? And the one?"

"That is the strange thing. It would seem that—the virus has some preference in victims."

The Dictator blinked, his most marked expression of surprise. "Explain!"

Euge's face was unreadable. "Before I go into details," he suggested, "let us consider the nature of the perfect biological weapon."

"Perhaps you have discovered the perfect weapon?" The Dictator frowned; "you are being obscure."

"Then," said Euge stolidly, "suppose I put it negatively. What is wrong with most biological weapons?"

"They are treacherous."

"Exactly. Virus RM3 was our best development up to now; it has a contagion index and mortality rate of 100, with the psychological advantage of bringing about death in a rather repulsive fashion; it is easily produced and distributed, and there is no known counteragent. So it cannot be used as a weapon; it is too dangerous to the user."

"We were over that before," said the Dictator. They had been, and he had found it hard to stomach. Especially when he reflected that the enemy, while it was improbable they had duplicated the creation of RM3, might have equally deadly weapons, which similar considerations would deter them from using—unless driven to suicidal retaliation. It was known, though, that the enemy had been fortunately slow in developing the technique of disease mutation—the methods of irradiation, centrifugal selection and automatic scanning which could produce and analyze thousands of cultures at a time, compress millions of years of micro-organic evolution into weeks or days.

"The single case of immunity to RM4," said Euge drily, "had no bases that became evident either at once or on the closest comparison of the physiological data, both pre-inoculation and post mortem. I was on the point of giving up and deciding to repeat the experiment, when it occurred to me to contact the Political Police and ask for their dossiers on all the specimens. After a little delay, my request was granted—"

"I know," said the Dictator impatiently; "I approved it myself."

"Well—the fifteen men who died of RM4 were run-of-the mill criminals and political offenders—malcontents stupid enough to express themselves antisocially. But the survivor was a Witness of the Lord—a religious maniac, arrested for overstepping the limits of toleration in an impromptu sermon. A man of scanty intelligence, barely above the euthanasia level.

"Those facts, however, were less interesting than the letter attached to the dossier. It stated that, after a review of the case inspired by my particular interest in it, the Political Police had concluded that the man's arrest had been a mistake. You know that those fanatics, though not our most desirable elements, are mostly harmless and even useful, with their 'whatever is, is right' theology. This one's loyalty seems to have been beyond question."

The Dictator's eyes glowed with a sudden energy. "When the Popo admits a mistake, there's really been one!" His breath whistled between his teeth. "I—begin to—see." He started pacing up and down the room. "The perfect weapon—an intelligent virus!"

"Not intelligent," denied Euge heavily. "The day we develop a thinking virus here—a thing I do not believe possible—I will call for an atomic bomb to be dropped on the laboratory. RM4, evolved from an encephalitic measles strain, attacks primarily the brain—as it seems now, only certain types of brains. Of course, the data are insufficient. Some of the lower animals tested were immune—but you can't draw safe analogies between animals and men. I'll need more human material."

"You'll get it!" The Dictator halted and stood very straight, glittering impressively in his uniform. "How many—"

"This time I will need a control...."

3

So twenty-five healthy privates of the Dictator's Honor Guard, handpicked for courage, rigid honesty and selfless loyalty to the leader, were hospitalized and injected with potent doses of viciously lethal culture RM4-2197. They were told that it was a new immunization which would soon become regulation throughout the armed forces. And twenty-five prisoners, likewise healthy save for the twist in their minds that made them seditionists and rebels instead of Honor Guardsmen, received the same injection and were told the same story.

The results were almost fantastically satisfactory. The twenty-five convicts died, one and all, with the uncontrolled spasms and twitchings, lapsing into stupor, that told of the virus' progress in the higher nerve centers. Their isolated barracks, together with the unimportant orderlies who had cared for it and the victims, were sterilized, almost obliterated by caustic chemicals and flame. Meantime the Honor Guard in their separate quarantine rolled dice and exchanged dirty jokes and felt no ill effects.

The Dictator had commanded that he be first to know the outcome; he, who fancied himself as a poet of human destiny, also liked to think that he had a scientific mind, and in this matter, on which the world's future might hinge, he wished to make his own observations and draw his own conclusions. But promptly after receiving the news he visited Euge again to shower him with jubilant congratulations.

"Now," he announced fervently, "we must have a final experiment, to be wholly sure. One on a far grander scale than before—than any experiment ever was before! I want a large supply of Virus RM4, in sealed cylinders of five or six liters each, under pressure. Prepared as for military use, you understand. The rest I will take care of."

Euge bowed his head in acquiescence, and refrained from mentioning his mice.

Long rows of glass cells where mice lived and died by ones and twos and threes, were in the contagion laboratory, where by Euge's orders only he and Novik worked now. Less flamboyantly than the Dictator, Euge liked to be sure, and he repeated his experiments doggedly until the statistical results leveled off at well-defined norms.

Infected mice, segregated in solitary confinement, developed symptoms and died in the ratio of sixty-five out of a hundred. Among similarly exposed animals distributed two to a cage, the mortality averaged somewhat over eighty-seven per cent. In threes, ninety-six per cent. And when he tried isolating a hundred mice, four to a cage, all of them died. In every case, if one mouse in a group took the disease, so did the rest.

That was not unreasonable. Re-exposure by contact with more susceptible specimens.... But Euge played with his apparent immunes. He rigged a number of cages so that the occupants, their food and their water were constantly under a fine mist of virus poison. And only a couple of them died. Then, with difficulty and some danger, working in armor, he opened the cages and shifted the living mice about, breaking up groups and creating new ones. In the next few days, the immunes' mortality rate was better than forty per cent.

And in an adjoining storeroom, cleared for the purpose, Euge set up another and cruder experiment. Mice that had survived exposure to RM4 were imprisoned in sealed glass runs, and in the room at large were let loose the half-dozen lean alley cats that Novik had procured. The cats roamed hungrily about, mewed and clawed at the glass and had difficulty understanding that there was no way of getting at the mice. And the mice, likewise deceived, ran and squeaked in terror—and quickly succumbed to the convulsions and lethargy of encephalitis.

But when he provided opaque shelters, where the mice could conceal themselves part of the time, most of them remained immune.

The cats, Euge determined, were wholly immune; massive injections of the virus did no more than infuriate them. Sleeping fitfully in the small hours, he had nightmares in which the carnivora inherited an Earth from which men and rodents had vanished.

That was only one of his nightmares. He was as phlegmatic as a man need be in his line of work, but now his peace of mind had gone glimmering, and he was at odds with his world. From the time when mature reflection had replaced the last sparks of youthful rebellion in him, he had been a faithful and coddled servant of the Diktatura, but now he was increasingly certain that his failure to make known his new data was treason. A fatalistic streak tried to comfort him, whispering that even if he spoke it would make no difference.

Of only one thing was he sure: he wanted to know....

The Dictator took some time in the preparation of the experiment. A city of twenty thousand people had to be isolated temporarily from the rest of the country, and unobtrusively surrounded with troops, guns and bombers, in case things went disastrously wrong.

The isolation was accomplished, by means of a complete embargo on land and air transportation out of the test area, only an hour before a few small planes droned over the city, trailing an impalpable and invisible mist of virus-laden solution. The published and broadcast reason for the emergency measures was truthfully plausible—a threatened outbreak of disease, understood to be sleeping sickness. The difference in symptoms between ordinary encephalitis lethargica and that produced by RM4 was so slight that few if any of the doctors who were shipped into the city recognized anything peculiar in the cases they treated, apart from the high—100%—fatality. It was not necessary that they know any better, since they were only a part of the ardently pursued campaign to allay public suspicion and anxiety and prevent an undesirable panic.

The soothing propaganda and example of the authorities, and the diligence of the Popo agents who swarmed in the stricken area, were so successful that no mass plague-terror reared its head, though the death toll during the three weeks it took for the epidemic to run its course climbed to almost a thousand.

Several doctors and a couple of secret policemen contracted the disease, and, of course, died. That was fair enough, but a far more untoward incident came near marring the Dictator's pleasure in his experiment.

Chaber, the Popo chief, crossing the country on one of his frequent incognito tours, happened to be caught in the test city's railway station by the travel interdict. It took him more than an hour to convince the distracted officials in charge of enforcing the ban that a man in his position was above such things, so that he and his aides were still there when the virus-carrying planes did their job.

The Dictator, receiving belated word, was furious. A flying squad of Honor Guardsmen intercepted Chaber's private train, ran it onto a siding and held the police chief and his staff there in something very like arrest. True, the Dictator sent a message to assure Chaber that the quarantine was a purely temporary result of someone else's mistake, and that matters would soon be cleared up....

For Chaber they never were. He died eight days later in the coma of RM4 infection. Most of his aides preceded or followed him by a day or so; and when the last radioed reports indicated that the contagion was spreading to the Guards, the Dictator gave horrified orders and the plague-infested train was set on fire by incendiary bombs.

About the same time, past one o'clock in the morning, Dr. Euge was dragged out of bed and haled unceremoniously before the Dictator.

The scientist listened dispassionately to his first news of Chaber's misfortune and to excited demands for an explanation. He was more at peace with himself now than he had been for long; he was prepared to lie coldly and directly, to ensure the unfolding of events to their logical conclusion. But no lie seemed to be needed yet.

"I would suggest," said Euge calmly, "that you impound the deceased's papers and personal effects, and subject them to rigorous examination. You may find the reason for his death—about which I know no more than you."

Euge cooled his heels under house arrest for twenty-four hours before he was summoned again to the Dictator's presence. The leader was himself again; he greeted Euge with that warm smile which had made more impressionable men fall at his feet in adoration.

"You were right, doctor. The man was, if not an actual traitor, at least a potential one; he was slyly subverting the loyalty of his immediate subordinates, with the idea of making himself paramount in the government. His death becomes a striking demonstration of your virus's value." A new shadow passed over the Dictator's face as he recalled how he had trusted Chaber. "I think," he mused aloud, "we will prepare RM4 injections for all the more strategically placed personnel of the Political Police and—yes, the Guards too. Eventually, it would be a good idea to blanket the whole country with the virus." The Dictator brightened again. "For the rest, the results of the large-scale test were highly gratifying."

"Indeed," said Euge without surprise.

"You can study the figures if you like. Comparison of the death-list with police files shows that the vast majority of the affected were people with criminal records or known deviationist tendencies. A city rid of human vermin at one stroke! Now nothing can stop us."

"No," said Euge.

The Diktatura worked fast. The new mass-production forced-culture techniques obviated the difficulties of producing great quantities of the new virus within a short period, and when the armed forces received the order for the minor operation of occupying two small, ideologically hostile countries on the border, there was already enough RM4 on hand for a major war.

In that lightning trial campaign, the new weapon was still used sparingly and with caution. In combination with more conventional offensive measures, it proved itself nobly. The Diktatura's shock troops rolled into cities of the dead, saw whole countrysides unpeopled almost overnight by the mutant plague. Few of the invaders, picked, loyal men that they were, succumbed; but even after the guns had fallen silent, the pestilence continued to stalk unchecked and uncheckable among the subjected peoples.

The Dictator weighed the reports that piled up on his desk. The plague's existence and origin were no longer secrets to anyone whose knowledge or lack of it mattered. The Diktatura's most potent rival had already closed its borders and begun a formidable mobilization. The time for a public announcement had arrived; the enemy would fear to believe it, but the revelation of the invincible weapon would do wonders for home morale.

Novik walked the streets in a daze, torn by recurring doubts. He had left the laboratory and flown to the capital without Dr. Euge's knowledge, but now the image of the gray scientist, his approval of Novik, his trust in Novik, rose up to torment him. He could not even guess at Euge's motives, but he felt morally certain they were against the nation's interests. And the nation, he knew as everyone knew today, was on the threshold of war. Of Victory. That was the word that had been given them for years with their food and drink, held shining before them upon the straight and narrow way....

The air was filled with Victory. It blared and glared from the public television screens on the street corners, in brazen anthems, in a familiar voice that swelled in triumphant oratory, battered its phrases into Novik's numb consciousness.

"Announcement to the people ... the day, the hour are at hand ... Victory! Against the corrupt and vicious barbarians, the slimy foes of progress, the enslavers of humanity ... Victory!"

From all the corners, from the big screens, glittered the Dictator, above the crowds that gathered and shoved each other and hurrahed his words. Novik stared with smarting eyes; his head buzzed and he could not assemble his thoughts. He turned away and plodded on, and on the next corner met again the voice and gestures of the leader, his compelling gaze from the glowing screen.

"History demands that we prevail. If any fresh proof of that fact were needed—as all of you know that it is not—it would be provided by the new scientific discovery which at the same time reaffirms the fundamental, objective truth of our way of life and thought, and provides us with the ultimate weapon for enforcing our way on the backward regions of the world....

"Only evil men, warped minds oppose us. The virus attacks such minds and completes the ruin which their own perversion has begun. Those who are clean and upright in thought and deed, loyal to their fatherland and the great idea of the Diktatura, have nothing to fear from it; they are immune. Therefore we can use it as a weapon without apprehension or compunction, for we shall only be wiping out the vermin of the Earth...."

Novik started to run. Heart thudding, breath rasping in his throat, he shouldered through the ecstatically listening crowds. In their ears he screamed: "It's not so! We mustn't use it!"

They stared after him, some shouted "Stop him!" but no one wanted to miss the Dictator's epoch making speech.

It was over a mile to the Dictatorial palace, and Novik ran all the way. He was reeling with exhaustion when he got there, and he had to lean against a pillar and wrestle with nausea for a time before he was able to produce his wallet and show the card in it to the tall Guardsman at the gate.

The Guardsman raised his eyebrows; the disheveled and panting young man before him didn't look much like a Popo agent.

Beyond the gates, though, Novik encountered officials who knew him, and in a remarkably short time he was led before the Dictator. Since Chaber's demise, the leader had appointed no successor to the post, taking care of the most important police matters himself. Now he was still flushed from his speech to the people and delighted by the first reports of the people's reaction.

Novik faced the Dictator, holding himself erect with an effort. He said thickly, "Agent Novik reporting, sir, in the case of Dr. Joseph Euge...."

"What's the matter with you?" The Dictator stared at him from under knitting brows. "Are you drunk?"

"He is a traitor," said Novik. "He has withheld information ... vital to defense...."

"Eh? You mean Euge? What information?"

"His experiments ... the mice. Been doing them for months."

"For months? Then why haven't you reported it before?"

"Another traitor," mumbled Novik. He swayed unsteadily on his feet, caught himself with a peculiar jerk; his eyes were somnolent. Before them the Dictator blurred in a bright painful glitter of metal. Two Dictators, shining and terrible here at the end of the world. "The virus ... not a weapon. Not to be used, because ... it's death. It's ... fear...."

The Dictator recoiled, recognizing the red-rimmed vacant eyes, the twitching face of the young man. He opened his mouth to say too much, and held his breath; then he stiffened and ordered harshly: "Take him! Take him away!"

4

During the speech to the people, the first rockets had already risen from their scattered launching sites and were soaring at ten, fifteen, twenty miles per second over continents and oceans. The enemy was not unprepared; his immensely complex and expensive systems of warning and defense, radar-eyed, electric-nerved and robot-brained, were fully on. But that defense setup, which laced a whole nation and concentrated bristlingly over the great cities, was designed primarily to detect, deflect and destroy projectiles with atomic warheads, which must approach within a few miles of their targets to do damage. The bombardment rockets of the Diktatura burst quietly high in the stratosphere, before very many of them were met and annihilated by the interceptor barrage. Their cargoes dispersed earthward in a rain of little protective plastic globes, which, as they fell through the warm restless levels of the troposphere, darkened and shriveled in a fantastically swift chemical decay, and spewed their liquid contents in a fine spray into the air.

Six days before—the virus' average incubation period—the code word had been sent out to the spies and the native fifth columnists who served the Diktatura for pay or loyalty's sake. It was their mission to distribute the small quantities of Virus RM4 which had been smuggled to them, in such a way as to make the plague's initial onslaught as paralysing as possible. The enemy's total destruction in the end was foregone; but his power to strike back must be cut down to a minimum.

The broadcasts and the headlines continued to proclaim to the nation that this was Victory Day.

Euge had cleared away the remains of his experiments methodically. There was nothing more to be learned that way, and most of the establishment was converted now to helping in the mass production of Virus RM4. Euge locked up the contagion laboratory and settled down by his private televisor to observe the progress of the ultimate experiment, whose laboratory was the world.

Guessing as he did the reason for Novik's failure to return, he was little surprised or alarmed when a half-dozen booted Guardsmen clumped in on him, and their leader informed him that he was again confined to quarters.

"If the Dictator wishes to see me—" began Euge politely.

"The Dictator's busy," said the squad leader. "He'll talk to you in due time."

"I understand," Euge nodded resignedly, and turned back to his newscasts.

His own name was repeated in them with considerable frequency, and recorded pictures of him were broadcast. He was understood to be a modest hero of science, with a passion for anonymity. In the Dictator's due time, Euge realized, he might receive the accolade of a martyr to science.

He passed over the mentions of himself impatiently. Once he had rather liked the modicum of glory and the comfort that the Diktatura granted him in return for his work, but now he was down to basic motives, and his desire to live was largely a product of his avid curiosity to see what the offspring of his curiosity would do to mankind's world.

The picture emerged but slowly from behind the bright parade of censored reports; only for one like Euge, who had some experience of the government's inside ways and who, moreover, knew better than any other living man what to expect, did it emerge at all.

It was evident before long that the enemy's resistance was greater than anticipated. Easy to say "according to plan", but it was impossible to ignore or gloss over the news when enemy atomic rockets leaked through the defenses, and a city here or there puffed skyward in a pillar of smoke and flame. Or when highflying enemy machines sowed the seeds of a controllable, but extremely nasty epidemic, which touched even the capital.

The fifth-column offensive must have failed miserably. Naturally, the first to die in the enemy's country would have been those entrusted with spreading the plague. Euge wondered if the Dictator had found that out, and if so, what he thought about it.

Never acknowledged, but quickly apparent to the expectant Euge from certain veiled illusions, denials and instructions that came over the air, was the beginning spread of RM4, in its active and lethal form (the latent infection must be almost universal now), among the people of the Diktatura. In his head Euge kept a map, in which the increasing areas that the newscasts never mentioned were represented by creeping splotches of blackness. When he examined and revised it, he was wont to lean back with closed eyes, on his lips a faint smile that made his guards look uneasily at one another.

Immured, Euge had no means of learning directly what spirit was abroad in the masses. But he could make shrewd deductions from the changing tones of the propaganda directed at them. Within the space of less than a month, it shifted from paeans of celebration for a quick and easy conquest to the harsh task of inspiring a fiercely realistic, do-or-die determination, to which Victory was once again a far wandering fire, beckoning out of storm and darkness ahead.

Realism went as far as an admission that the initial biological attack had failed to fulfill the hopes pinned on it. The plague had taken hold and spread slowly, but, on the bright side, it was doing its work now all the more thoroughly.... There followed a map, showing the estimated extent of plague areas in the enemy lands, and an extrapolation by noted pathologists of the time that must pass, the time that must be endured with courage, fortitude and hard work, before the foe would be blotted from the face of the Earth.

Euge closed his eyes and made comparisons with his private map and with his extrapolations from it, and he smiled unpleasantly yet again.

He asked for and received a bundle of newspapers; it was among those there chanced to be an ill-printed pamphlet issued by the Witnesses of the Lord, which stated positively that, had the original experiments been correctly understood, it would have been plain at once that RM4 was the Judgment Virus, come to slay the wicked and spare the righteous, whose lintels were sprinkled with blood....

Euge read the pamphlet through with a sharp quickening of interest, but when he had finished he shook his head sadly.

He was brought before the Dictator for the last time.

The leader's eyes were sunken and spoke of sleepless nights. They rested on Euge with the cold impersonal enmity of a snake's.

"You lied to me," he stated flatly.

"No," denied the scientist. "I let you interpret the data in your own way. It is not my fault that you believed what you wanted to believe."

The Dictator strove visibly to say what he had planned. "I have recalled you, despite grave suspicions, to—to appeal for assistance. Perhaps you have had pacifist sentiments all along—" Euge made a scornful gesture. "In any case, it is no longer a question of making war. The enemy has practically ceased to fight, now it is the plague that must be conquered—"

"I imagine," said Euge softly, "that your statisticians have told you that RM4 will be pandemic in this country as soon as, or before, it is in the enemy's."

The other's mouth twitched. "You performed exhaustive experiments with the plague; you hold the key to its nature and possibly to a remedy."

"It is true that I learned something about the virus' raison d'etre. Novik must have told you about it. There was nothing which pointed to a preventive, let alone a cure, at this stage. I am no immunologist, anyway."

"Novik said," the Dictator's eyes narrowed, "'It is fear!'"

Euge nodded with satisfaction. "He was right. The virus attacks only brains that are already sick with fear. Not—my results with mice indicated—the normal alarm of a healthy organism, which expresses itself in flight or fight, but the pathological anxiety-state that come of an inescapable threat or frustration in the environment, and that turns itself so easily into feelings of guilt or hatred.... The fear of the criminal, the neurotic, the paranoiac."

"Then all that is needed is to stamp out such elements, the focus of infection!"

Euge looked at him with open amusement. "You're welcome to try it. But remember—we are at war now. The psychology of the people is fear, like that of the criminal, the hunted hunter, the hated hater, perhaps the guilty.... As long as there was peace, the Diktatura gave most of us security, reasonable happiness, freedom from fear. The same is true of the enemy's government, however short it may have fallen of ours. But a nation at war is a nation afraid.

"And RM4 is a successful mutation," added Euge didactically. "It creates the thing it feeds on. One of the most basic fears in men or mice—the fear of one's own dead. Thanks to that, the plague is independent now of anything you do or leave undone."

The Dictator stared smolderingly. He spoke with bitter irony, "You awe me, doctor. You are a traitor to your country and to all mankind. Yet you seem to consider yourself justified."

Euge shrugged. "I am a scientist; I deal in questions of what can be done. It is left to you politicians to concern yourselves with what should be."

The Dictator choked, recognizing his own doctrine. "Irresponsibility—science!" His face flamed with finally unleashed passion. "If I survive this, I'll see to exterminating the whole breed of scientists!"

Euge studied him coolly. "You won't survive; you are afraid."

Bent over his desk, the Dictator struggled to compose a speech to the people—one that would reassure, enhearten, inflame the blackening coals of hope.

He wrote: "There is nothing to fear but fear. A way will be found...." He scowled at the shaky hand-writing of the last line, scratched it out angrily and began again.

"A way will be found...." But his fingers twitched convulsively with the pen, and the sentence trailed into a senseless scrawl.

The truck swung round and lurched to a halt not far from the road, and they saw that there would be no grave—only a stretch of wild, rank weeds in a wet meadow.

"So," said Joseph Euge in the same weary monotone, "there will be an end of man—unless somewhere on Earth are found men without fear."

He flinched from the prodding bayonet of a frightened man in a terrible mask, and stumbled stiffly to his feet.

About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books.

This book is part of the public domain. Robert Abernathy (2023). Righteous plague. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/70552/pg70552-images.html

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org, located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.