"Syndrome Johnny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)
Katherine MacLean
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COMMENT ON SYNDROME JOHNNY
Evolution is a Good Thing. But EvolutionТs method of improving a race is usually violent death or sterility, or some unpleasant partial mixture of the two, as a way of pruning off inferior branches.
Assuming you approve of Evolution and hope for a better future for mankind, how would you feel if confronted by someone who wanted to commit evolution on you?
Are you an idealist? Evolution is a source of intelligence and beauty. Deers and wolves have evolved large shining eyes, keen senses, swift muscles, and ready emotions, in the race against each other. Back in the depth of time they would all have remained gophers if one kind of gopher had not started chasing another with the intention of catching an easy meal. When viewed from a distance, when viewed across the sweep of centuries, evolution is a wonderful process.
How about viewing it up close? The current population explosion came from well-meant separation of sewage and drinking water, cutting down water-carried diseases, increasing the life-chances of children in crowded lands. It has left the people of the poor lands up to their necks in children; too busy trying to feed and care for the hordes of young ones to listen to any birth control information, too busy to learn to read, too busy to teach the children, too poor to buy devices either for birth control or for time saving, too poor for farm gadgets that might relieve the constant work and increase the food supply. This kind of crisis can destroy a thousand years of civilisation in two generations. But NatureТs answer to this kind of crisis has traditionally been the plague. Striking at the most crowded and hunger-weakened places, the epidemic takes one person out of two, or two out of three and leaves the survivors enough land to raise food, enough room in the houses to sit down, a little time to rest, to think, to remember and learn, ways to keep that desperate hunger from coming again.
A virus which kills half a population might be a blessing to the survivors and their descendants, but a man who aids such a virus to kill is a murderer, breaking the human taboo that we must not be made to fear each other.
I decided to write about such a man. His intentions were good.
KATHERINE MACLEAN
SYNDROME JOHNNY
The blood was added to a pool of other blood, mixed, centrifuged, separated to plasma and corpuscles, irradiated slightly, pasteurised slightly, frozen, evaporated, and finally banked. Some of the plasma was used immediately for a woman who had bled too much in childbirth.
She died.
Others received plasma and did not die. But their symptoms changed, including a syndrome of multiple endocrine unbalance, eccentricities of appetite and digestion, and a general pattern of emotional disturbance.
An alert hospital administrator investigated the mortality rise and narrowed it to a question of who had donated blood the week before. After city residents were eliminated, there remained only the signed receipts and thumbprints of nine men. Nine healthy unregistered travellers poor enough to sell their blood for money, and among them a man who carried death in his veins. The nine thumbprints were broadcast to all police files and a search began.
The effort was futile, for there were many victims who had sickened and grown partially well again without recognising the strangeness of their illness.
Three years later they reached the carrier stage and the epidemic spread to four cities. Three more years, and there was an epidemic which spread around the world, meeting another wave coming from the opposite direction. It killed two out of four, fifty out of a hundred, twenty-seven million out of fifty million. There was hysteria where it appeared. And where it had not appeared there were quarantines to fence it out. But it could not be fenced out. For two years it covered the world. And then it vanished again, leaving the survivors with a tendency towards glandular troubles.
Time passed. The world grew richer, more orderly, more peaceful,
A man paused in the midst of his work at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Commission. He looked up at the red and green production map of India.
УJust too many people per acre,Ф he said. УAll our work at improving productionЕ just one jump ahead of their rising population, one jump ahead of famine. Sometimes I wish to God there would be another plague to give us a breathing spell and a fair chance to get things organised.Ф
He went back to work and added another figure.
Two months later, he was one of the first victims of the second plague.
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