"Stanley G. Weinbaum - Margaret Of Urbs 01 - The Black Flame" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

Old Einar waved his hand so that the wind of it brushed the youth's brown cheek. "Air is a gas," he
said. "They knew how to poison the air so that all who breathed it died. And they fought with diseases,
and legend says that they fought also in the air with wings, but that is only legend."

"Diseases!" said Hull. "Diseases are the breath of Devils, and if they controlled Devils they used
sorcery, and therefore they knew magic."

"There is no magic," reiterated the old man. "I do not know how they fought each other with
diseases, but Martin Sair of N'Orleans knows. That was his study, not mine, but I know there was no
magic in it." He re-sumed his tale. "So these great fierce nations flung them-selves against each other, for
war meant more to them than to us. With us it is something of a rough, joyous, dangerous game, but to
them it was a passion. They fought for any reason, or for none at all save the love of fighting."

"I love fighting," said Hull.

"Yes, but would you love it if it meant simply the de-stroying of thousands of men beyond the
horizon? Men you were never to see?"
 "No. War should be man to man, or at least no far-ther than the carry of a rifle ball."

"True. Well, some time near the end of their twentieth century, the ancient world exploded into war
like a powder horn in a fire. They say every nation fought, and battles surged back and forth across seas
and con-tinents. It was not only nation against nation, but race against race, black and white and yellow
and red, all em-broiled in a titanic struggle."

"Yellow and red?" echoed Hull. "There are a few black men called Nigs in Ozarky, but I never
heard of yellow or red men."

"I have seen yellow men," said Old Einar. "There are some towns of yellow men on the edge of the
western ocean, in the region called Friscia. The red race, they say, is gone, wiped out by the plague
called the Grey Death, to which they yielded more readily than the other races."

"I have heard of the Grey Death," said Hull. "When I was very young, there was an old, old man
who used to say that his grand-father had lived in the days of the Death."

Old Einar smiled. "I doubt it, Hull. It was something over two and a half centuries ago. However," he
re-sumed, "the great ancient nations were at war, and as I say, they fought with diseases. Whether some
nation learned the secret of the Grey Death, or whether it grew up as a sort of cross between two or
more other diseases, I do not know. Martin Sair says that diseases are living things, so it may be so. At
any rate, the Grey Death leaped suddenly across the world, striking alike at all people. Everywhere it
blasted the armies, the cities, the countryside, and of those it struck, six out of every ten died. There must
have been chaos in the world; we have not a single book printed during that time, and only legend tells
the story.

"But the war collapsed. Armies suddenly found them-selves unopposed, and then were blasted
before they could move. Ships in mid-ocean were stricken, and drifted unmanned to pile in wreckage, or
to destroy others. In the cities the dead were piled in the streets, and after a while, were simply left
where they fell, while those who survived fled away into the country. What remained of the armies
became little better than roving robber bands, and by the third year of the plague there were few if any
stable governments in the world."