The Scarlet Plague Page #6

"The Scarlet Plague" by Jack London, published in 1912, is a post-apocalyptic novel set in the year 2073, sixty years after a deadly pandemic—called the Scarlet Plague—wiped out most of humanity in 2013.

• Novel

								

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 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 twenty-seven
years old, and well do I remember it. Wireless despatches--”

Hare-Lip 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 despatches--that is, not permitting the
word to go forth to the rest of the world that London had the plague.

“It looked serious, but we in California, like everywhere else, were
not alarmed. We were sure that the bacteriologists would find a way to
overcome this new germ, just as they had overcome other germs in the
past. But the trouble was the astonishing quickness with which this germ
destroyed human beings, and the fact that it inevitably killed any
human body it entered. No one ever recovered. There was the old Asiatic
cholera, when you might eat dinner with a well man in the evening, and

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