"Norman Spinrad - JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

As a retrovirus, it would write itself into host genomes, so that when it expressed itself during cellular reproduction, it would invade two more cells, a process that would continue until all suitable host cells were infected.
If an invading retrovirus should be encountered during the expression phase, it would destroy the active core and wrap itself in the "dead" antigen coat. If the host already had antibodies to these antigens, that variant would die. If not, it would eventually write itself back into a host genome, shedding the antigen "shell" in the process.
Thus, when a retrovirus invaded the host, the host bloodstream would become saturated with empty invader antigen coats, to which the host immune system would eventually form antibodies, conferring immunity to the invader precisely in the manner of a "killed virus" vaccine.
It not only conferred immunity to all strains of the Plague virus, it would automatically immunize the host against all retroviruses. And, like the Plague, it would spread via sexual contact.
That was what my molecular analysis predicted. It remained only to test the dreadnaught. But there was a stringent law against introducing into human hosts a live, genetically tailored organism capable of reproduction outside the lab, even for test purposes. It would take congressional legislation to allow me to begin human tests, and even then it could be years before the dreadnaught received FDA certification.
And I had only five days. In five days, I was up for ID card updating. If I tested out black, which I would, I would lose my job and be dumped unceremoniously into the San Francisco Quarantine Zone, and all would be lost.
I had only one chance to keep my blue card long enough to see the whole process through. I myself would have to be my first test subject. If it didn't work, all was lost anyway. If it did--and I was convinced it would--no one ever need know that I had violated the FDA regulations.
So I injected myself with the dreadnaught culture. Three days later, my body was free of the Plague. I took some of my blood and exposed it to other Plague strains as well as a variety of other retroviruses. My dreadnaught killed them all.
I called Harlow Prinz, the president of Sutcliffe, and asked for a special meeting of the board of directors, at which I promised to present the greatest advance in medicine in the last fifty years and then some. I could all but hear him drooling.
The Nobel for medicine seemed a certainty.
And, seeing as how the dreadnaught would spread itself by sexual contact without the need for economically prohibitive mass inoculation, it could eliminate the Plague from the festering Third World as well, so a second Nobel, this one for peace might not be beyond the bounds of possibility.

WALTER T. BIGELOW

Elaine refused to have interface sex with me at all. She refused to sleep in the same bedroom with me. She took to disparaging my manhood. Meals were undercooked, overcooked slovenly prepared. Her housekeeping deteriorated. She kept insisting that I introduce Billy to the sex machine parlors and called my righteous refusal "un-Christian."
I no longer knew the woman I lived with. Elaine was now acting like a woman with a secret life, indeed like a woman hiding an adulterous relationship. Was it possible? How long had it been going on? Had she been making a fool of me all these years?
Of course I had the necessary resources to find out. I had her followed. But what the reports revealed was no human lover.
There were written accounts. There were still photos. There was even an ingeniously obtained clandestine video.
Elaine was a sex machine addict.
Almost every day when I was away at work, she visited one of several sex machine parlors, and stayed for at least an hour, engaging in machine sex perversions of which I had previously been unaware, which I had not even previously believed possible.
When I confronted her with the evidence, she defiantly admitted that she had been doing it secretly for years. "You just haven't been satisfying me, Walter."
"Adulteress!"
"Adulteress? Just the opposite! I've been doing it to keep from becoming an adulteress!"
"It's against God's law!"
"Show me anything in the scriptures against it!"
"It's the sin of Onan!"
"Good Lord, Walter, it's the Plague, can't you see that?"
"Of course I can see that! God is testing us, and you've failed Him."
"I've failed Him? Or has He failed us?"
"Blasphemy!"
"Is it?" she insinuated. "Can it be Jesus's God of Love who has taken natural love itself away from us and forced us into all these perversions? Look what's happened to us! Look what's happened to Billy! Where is God's Love in all that?"
"It's the Devil tormenting us, not God, Elaine!"
"That's what I'm telling you, Walter Bigelow! The Plague is the work of the Devil, not God. So anything that helps us survive Satan's torment--the interfaces, the sex machines--must be God's mercy. Jesus loves us, doesn't He? He can't want us to suffer any more than we have to!"
And then I knew for certain.
Not the Prince of Liars for nothing.
My Elaine had neither the evilness of spirit nor the cunning of mind to say these things to me. She was clearly possessed by the Devil.
Christian and husbandly duty coincided.
I placed Elaine under clandestine house arrest.
And began consulting exorcists.

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

They were all there--Harlow Prinz, the president of Sutcliffe, Warren Feinstein, the chairman of the board, and the entire board of directors. They all had dollar signs in their eyes as I began my presentation. They listened with rapt silence as I proceeded, a silence that grew rather ominous and eerie as I went on.
And the conclusion of my presentation fell into a deathly graveyard hush that seemed to go on forever. I finally had to break it myself.
"Uh . . . any questions?"
"This, ah, dreadnaught virus is a self-replicating organism? It will reproduce by itself outside the lab?"
"That's right."
"And it spreads like the Plague?"
"It can easily enough be made pandemic."
"Who has had access to this information?"