The Scarlet Plague | Page 9

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 tuberculosis, 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 bacteriologists 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. 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 anything; 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 continued 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 bacteriologists 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
invisible 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.
[Illustration: Granser, you make me sick with your gabble 071]

"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 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