The Scarlet Plague | Page 8

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
ultramicroscopes, 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
ultramicroscopes 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 anthracis; there was the micrococcus; there was
the Bacterium termo, and 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 audience, 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 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 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