Murray Leinster (8 page)

General Vladek’s nostrils distended.

‘Ah-h-h-h!’ he said with deadly softness. ‘It is no normal plague! It is biological war! Too cowardly to fight as honorable men fight, your nation—’
^s
There is no war between our countries,’ said Surgeon General Mors, prosaically, ‘and you invaded our country like a brigand, making your own rules for attack. So we made our own rules for defense. If you surrender the troops under your command, there is a good chance that we can save their lives. Have you given thought to the matter?’

General Vladek’s cheeks twitched. His hands shookwith hate. ‘Tell me the truth,’ he said hoarsely, ‘and I will have you shot. I will concede so much! I promise that I will have you shot! But if you do not—’

‘I think you are being absurd, General,’ said Mors stolidly. ‘As I recall the details, death occurs on the third day after infection, usually within a few hours of the appearance of the first noticeable symptoms. Sulfa, streptomycin, and penicillin are ineffective against this particular strain, which was especially bred up to be resistant to such drugs. Also, from my recollection, the patient is infectious almost from the instant of his own infection. I think you understate your losses. Moreover, in an epidemic of this sort, the death rate should mount geometrically until natural immunes and the lack of susceptibles lower it.’

Mors paused, and said inquiringly,
^s
You have ordered your men to abstain from all contact with the civil population?’

General Vladek panted with fury.

‘I suspected intention when the plague began! My medical corps insisted that since only my men were infected, its cause must be contaminated supplies from home! I ordered my troops to subsist on local supplies and distributed our rations among the people - for revenge in case your spies in our supply system were responsible! But the rate of infection tripled! And your people do not die! My men die! Only my men.’

Surgeon General Mors nodded. His eyes were somber, yet very resolute.

‘That is natural,’ he observed. ‘Our population is immune.’ Then he said explanatorily. ‘We have immunized practically our entire population against certain formerly prevalent diseases. And included in the injection given to each citizen was a fraction of a very interesting formula which produces immunity to diplococci in a quite new fashion.’

The dapper General Vladek sat frozen and speechless, in a rage so murderous that he seemed almost calm.

‘It makes symbiosis possible,’ said Surgeon General Mors, in an interested tone. ‘It produces a condition under which the human body and the entire series of diplococci can live together. It does not produce the relationship. That requires the organisms, too. It merely makes the relationship possible. We have had practically no diplococci infections in our country for years back. Such diseases happen to be very rare among us. But the inoculation makes it possible for any of our inoculated citizens to establish a truly symbiotic relationship in case he encounters them. It is like the adjustment of intestinal flora and colon bacilli to us. They do not harm us, and we do not harm them. You follow the reasoning?’

General Vladek’s voice was quite inhuman. ‘How were my men infected?’ he demanded. His voice cracked. ‘Tell me, how were my men infected? My medical corps says—’

‘We did not infect them,’ said Surgeon General Mors calmly. ‘We infected only our own population. On the morning of your invasion we spread the infection in the drinking water, in the food. We infected our own people - who could not be harmed by it - and then I came to you and warned you to keep your soldiers aloof from our people. I also advised you to get your troops out of our country for their own safety, but you would not believe me. Because you see’ - his tone was absolutely commonplace - ‘every citizen of our country is now a carrier of the plague of which your soldiers die. A carrier. Not suffering from it, but able to give it to anyone not immunized against it. You have heard of typhoid carriers. We are a nation of carriers, bearers of the plague which is destroying your army.’

General Vladek looked like an image of frozen, despairing rage. His face was gray. His cheek twitched. He had led an invading army triumphandy into this province.

Then without one shot being fired, his army had ceased to be an army, and a sentry lay dead on the street before his headquarters.

‘We did not like to do it,’ said Surgeon General Mors, heavily. ‘But we had to defend ourselves. The soil of our nation is now deadly to your troops. If you murdered and burned every citizen of our country, our land would still be fatal to your men and to the settlers who might follow them. You cannot make use of Kantolia. You cannot make use of any of the rest of our country. And the loot you have sent back has spread infection in your cities. Couriers have carried it back and transmitted it before they died. The quislings you sent to your country to be rewarded for betraying their own - they were carriers, too. The plague must rage horribly in your nation. Other countries will close their frontiers in quarantine, if they have not already done so. Your nation is destroyed unless you let us save it. I beg that you will give us the power.’ Then Surgeon General Mors said very wearily: ‘I hope you will surrender your army, General Vladek. Your men, as our prisoners, will become our patients and we will cure them. Otherwise they will die. Permit us, and we will check the epidemic you created in your own country by invading us. We did not defend ourselves without knowing our weapon thoroughly. But you will have to give us the power to rescue you. You and your nation must surrender without conditions….’

General Vladek stood up. He rang a bell. An officer and soldiers entered.

‘Take him out,’ panted General Vladek hoarsely. Then his voice rose to a scream. ‘Take him out and kill him!’

The officer moved. Then there was a clatter. A rifle had dropped to the floor. One of the soldiers staggered. He reeled against one of the steel filing cases and clung there desperately. Sweat poured out on his face; he was ashen white. He knew, of course, what was the matter. He sobbed. He was already a dead man, though he still moved and breathed. Great tears welled out of his eyes.

The other soldiers wavered - and fled.

Surgeon General Mors stood beside a pigsty and argued patiently with a peasant who so far had stubbornly refused to permit the reinoculation of either his family or his cows. The dumpy little man in the badly fitting uniform said earnestly:

‘It is a matter of living together - what learned men call symbiosis. We defended our country with the other inoculations. Now we must defend all mankind with these! We do not want our people to be feared or hated. We want visitors from other nations to come and live among us in peace and safety, to have no fears about doing business with us. If other nations are afraid of us, we will suffer for it!’

The peasant made fitful objections. Victory over the invaders, and the terms imposed upon them, had made him proud. But Surgeon General Mors’ patient arguments were gradually wearing him down.

‘Ah, but they made wax on us. That was different! We do not want any more wars. When you and your family and your cows have been inoculated, we will be that much further along toward the understanding that nations which are at peace can live together,’ said Surgeon General Mors earnesdy.
Nations which are at war only die together.’

Time travel. A theme that fascinated Leinster, who made it the subject of a number of short stories. A collection of his stories on this theme appeared about sixteen years ago, and it was obvious that Leinster was aware of the paradoxes involved. Some of his
⁵
solutions’ were ingenious in the extreme. In the present story it is the results, rather than the mechanics, of the operation, that are considered.

The
racket came on the air about eight o’clock, and at eight-five the business office of American Broadcasting went up in the air like a gyrocket, making similar shrill screaming noises. The row came from somewhere in Brooklyn, and there wasn’t a vision set in thirty miles - fifteen million customers - that could get anything but crazy streaks on its plate, or anything but a steady rasping noise on audio. It was just before the Melba Hour when Little Angy went on the air, and Little Angy was something the customers couldn’t do without. So when this noise started on the vision channels at this special time, the business office began to shriek and wring its hands, and every locator-car on the prowl went streaking.

The racket wasn’t too hard to locate. Of course, like all short stuff, we had to chase it around corners. Mort and me, we went around one block three times before Mort realized that the whole block was one big warehouse and it had aluminum-foil insulation which was batting the stuff back and forth with a couple of fire-walls and vertical metal signs elsewhere. When we made a bigger circuit around it, we got back on the line and only had to track off three places where it was coming from two directions at once, and one where there were three steady beams of it from as many casual reflectors. But it didn’t help any that

the business office was having hysterics on the car set, telling us that Little Angy would be going on in twenty minutes, in fifteen minutes, that there were already two thousand complaints, the mayor had called up to find out what was the matter and the Pinky-Pank company had already filed a penalty-daim on the ground of loss of coverage, and if something wasn’t done quick— And so on.

We found it, though. The stuff was coming out of a block of dingy-looking buildings, some of them occupied tenements and some boarded up. It was a pretty bum neighborhood. What always makes it worse is that when you get close enough to short stuff with power behind it, it’s bouncing off every pot and kettle and gives you secondary dispersion-beams. So Mort and me, we piled out of our car and were just starting to work when the other cars came, and we divided up the street. We got started banging on doors with the old line of excuse-me-lady-but - there’s - some - electrical - device - making - television -wavelength - interference - in - this - neighborhood - do - you -know - anybody - who - does - electrical - experimenting - and

- so - on. It ain’t scientific, but it’s usually pretty quick. Meanwhile we had our hand-receivers and were using them frantic.
And
the business office was throwing fits.

Mort ran into a fighting drunk who answered his door and wanted to put up an argument, and I was yelling in a deaf woman’s ear when my hand-receiver got the line; plain and clear, no out-of-phase stuff, all regular, polarized beam. I yelled to Mort. It was next door to the house where we were so we dusted down into the street. Next door was boarded up, and so was the house beyond, so we hauled off some planks and smashed a window and shinnied in, leaving one guy outside to explain to cops if any. Inside, we heard a soft sort of humming sound and we streaked it up the stairs - because Litde Angy would be coming on in ten minutes or less, now - and I saw a sort of glow coming outa a door and I ran there, yelling:

‘Hey, guy! Turn it off! Whatever it is, turn it off!’

And I went to the door to argue further, with Mort and three other guys from the other locator-cars behind me. And there it was.

Nope. No dead man. Not yet. The dead man came later. What we saw when we went in was a four-foot kinda ring of light hanging about a foot under the ceiling. It was a pinkish-bluish light, reasonably bright - you could read by it easy enough - and humming softly to itself. But the thing was that it wasn’t in a tube. It wasn’t hanging on to anything. It was just there, absolutely still and absolutely solid. It looked like a ring of something that - well - it looked more like a ring of red-hot glass than anything else, if you get what I mean. Only there wasn’t any heat and it was just bright regardless, there in midair. And it was still as if it had angle irons and braces holding it. It was fixed in place somehow! But you couldn’t see how.

Mort stared at it, and the other guys too. Then Mort said:

‘This is it, whatever it is. How do you turn it off?’

‘Little Angy’s coming on in five minutes,’ says another guy, to whom the business office was the law and the prophets. ‘We got to do something! We got to turn it off! ’

‘Sure!’ I said. I’d been prowling around it, looking at it from every angle there was. ‘Show me a switch or a wire. This is a job for somebody who knows more than I do.’

We all stared at it. It didn’t move. It was solid! Then Mort said:

‘No wires, no switch, no nothing. We gotta get some foil and beam it up. Let Tech figure it out. Any of you fellas wants to touch it, go ahead. I’m gonna beam it!’

He went out. A couple of the other fellas went with him. I heard ’em running downstairs. They were using flashlights. I heard the crash when they broke out the front door. We rate as emergency maintenance crews, you know, so it’s not burglary or trespassing when we go barging around, any more than firemen or cops.

kilowatts. Mort came racing back with a big roll of paperbacked metal foil and some tape. The other fellas came with folding ladders. We got busy. It’s funny, but nobody thought of touching it, or socking it with something, or trying to short it to a burn-out. It was too simple. Mort hung a sheet of foil to the ceiling, sticking it up with adhesive tape here and there. He strung it a yard from the ring. Another fella was setting up another one. They hung down like curtains, opposite each other. We stuck up two more, working fast. We had a kinda curtain around it, then. Then we swung the bottom edges of the metal-foil curtains toward each other so there was part of a sort of four-sided funnel around the thing. The short stuff it was giving off bounced off the foil and went straight up, and stuff like that goes straight through the heaviside layer. One fella went down to his car and came back.