"Blish, James - To Pay the Piper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

both sides dictated avoiding weapons with a built-in backfire;
no cobalt bombs were dropped, no territories permanently
poisoned. Generals still remembered that unoccupied territory,
no matter how devastated, is still unconquered territory.
But no such considerations stood in the way of biological
warfare. It was controllable: you never released against the
enemy any disease you didn't yourself know how to control.
There would be some slips, of course, but the margin for
error ...
There were some slips. But for the most part, biological
warfare worked fine. The great fevers washed like tides around
and around the globe, one after another. In such cities as had
escaped the bombings, the rumble of truck convoys carrying
the puffed heaped corpses to the mass graves became the only
sound except for sporadic small-arms fire; and then that too
ceased, and the trucks stood rusting in rows.
Nor were human beings the sole victims. Cattle fevers were
sent out. Wheat rusts, rice molds, corn blights, hog choleras,
poultry enteritises, fountained into the indifferent air from
the hidden laboratories, or were loosed far aloft, in the jet-
stream, by rocketing fleets. Gelatin capsules pullulating with
gill-rots fell like hail into the great fishing grounds of New-
foundland, Oregon, Japan, Sweden, Portugal. Hundreds of
species of animals were drafted as secondary hosts for human
diseases, were injected and released to carry the blessings of
the laboratories to their mates and litters. It was discovered
that minute amounts of the tetracycline series of antibiotics,
which had long been used as feed supplements to bring farm
animals to full market weight early, could also be used to
raise the most whopping Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes
anybody ever saw, capable of flying long distances against the
wind and of carrying a peculiarly interesting new strain of the
malarial parasite and the yellow fever virus. . . .
By the time it had ended, everyone who remained alive was
a mile under ground.
For good.
"I still fail to understand why," Hamelin said, "if, as you
claim, you have methods of re-educating soldiers for surface
life, you can't do so for civilians as well. Or instead."
The Under Secretary, a tall, spare man, bald on top, and
with a heavily creased forehead, spoke with the odd neutral
accentuntinged by regionalismof the trained diplomat,
despite the fact that there had been no such thing as a foreign
service for nearly half a century.
"We're going to try to explain that to you," Carson said.
"But we thought that, first of all, we'd try to explain once
more why we think it would be bad policyas well as
physically out of the question.
"Sure, everybody wants to go topside as soon as it's possible.
Even people who are reconciled to these endless caverns and