Part 1

Righteous Plague

By Robert Abernathy

Complete Novelet of Uncontrolled Weapons

It was a virus, against which the enemy could make no defense--but a virus does not distinguish between friend and foe. And immunity to what became known as the righteous plague could exist anywhere, or nowhere at all....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Science Fiction Quarterly May 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

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.