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

introduced by either side in over ten years now. Against all
the known ones, we have immunization techniques, anti-sera,
antibiotics, and so on. I suppose you get your shots every six
months like all the rest of us; we should all be very hard to
infect now, and such infections as do take should run mild
courses." Carson held the Under Secretary's eyes grimly.
"Now, answer me this question: why is it that, despite all
these protections, every single person in an opened city
dies?"
"I don't know," Hamelin said, staring at each of them in
turn. "By your showing some of them should recover."
"They should," Carson said. "But nobody does. Why?
Because the very nature of disease has changed since we all
went underground. There are now abroad in the world a
number of mutated bacterial strains which can by-pass the
immunity mechanisms of the human body altogether. What
this means in simple terms is that, should such a germ get into
your body, your body wouldn't recognize it as an invader. It
would manufacture no antibodies against the germ. Conse-
quently, the germ could multiply without any check, andyou
would die. So would we all."
"I see," Hamelin said. He seemed to have recovered his
composure extraordinarily rapidly. "I am no scientist, gentle-
men, but what you tell me makes our position sound perfectly
hopeless. Yet obviously you have some answer."
Carson nodded. "We do. But it's important for you to
understand the situation, otherwise the answer will mean
nothing to you. So: is it perfectly clear to you now, from what
we've said so far, that no amount of re-educating a man's
brain, be he soldier or civilian, will allow him to survive on
the surface?"
"Quite clear," Hamelin said, apparently ungrudgingly.
Carson's hopes rose by a fraction of a millimeter. "But if you
don't re-educate his brain, what can you re-educate? His
reflexes, perhaps?"
"No," Carson said. "His lymph nodes, and his spleen."
A scornful grin began to appear on Hamelin's thin lips.
"You need better public relations counsel than you've been
getting," he said. "If what you say is trueas of course I
assume it isthen the term 're-educate' is not only inap-
propriate, it's downright misleading. If you had chosen a less
suggestive and more accurate label in the beginning, I wouldn't
have been able to cause you half the trouble I have."
"I agree that we were badly advised there," Carson said.
"But not entirely for those reasons. Of course the name is
misleading; that's both a characteristic and a function of the
names of top secret projects. But in this instance the name
'Re-Education,' bad as it now appears, subjected the men
who chose it to a fatal temptation. You see, though it is
misleading, it is also entirely accurate."