The Scarlet Plague | Page 9

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-Up 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 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 dispatches--"
Hare-Up spat loudly his disgust, and Granser hastened to make amends.

"We talked through the air in those days, thousands and thousands 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 dispatches--that is, not permitting the word to go forth to
the rest of the world that London had