He picked his way into Bloomington, avoiding the debris and wrecked cars filling the streets, detouring where the sight and smell of a body ahead threatened to turn his stomach, and cruised around and around the business district until he had located the public library. The heavy glass door had to be smashed in. He searched the long high rows of books with a growing impatience, finding nothing that might help him, and after an hour he climbed the stairs to the second floor to see what was stored there. The stairway opened onto an immense reading room heavy with a silence it had never known before, occupied now only by tables, racks of magazines and out-of-town newspapers. At his immediate right was an attendant's dusty desk and just behind the desk were the volumes he sought, an encyclopedia set. He shoved the desk aside and reached for them.
Botulism at first had no meaning as applied to the dead world outside the library door. Botulism was poisoning caused by eating food in which a bacterium had developed. Pneumonic plague was see plague, pestilence, etc. He threw down the heavy volume and reached for another only to find he had misjudged the alphabetical spacing, plague was in the discarded book. Plague was slowly giving him an answer when his impatient eyes skipped over the paragraphs of history and dropped to the bottom of the column. The reference there was see also biological warfare.
Gary abandoned the page he was reading and searched for another volume. That one, with occasional references to the first, provided the startling answer. He carried the tomes to a near-by table and spread them open.
* * *
Biological warfare began in a limited way during the war of 1914 when enemy agents were believed to have injected disease-producing germs into American cattle being shipped abroad. Biological warfare mushroomed into an expensive and heavily classified entity of its own in the war which began for America in December, 1941. During that war the United States poured more than fifty million dollars into new experiments for biological destruction, recruited some three thousand scientists to devise new ways to die. Both offensive and defensive weapons were produced, most important among the former being a poison, the toxin of botulism.
The toxin was successfully isolated in a pure crystalline form and methods were developed for producing it on a large scale. A really large scale wasn't necessary inasmuch as the poison was so deadly one-seventh of a microgram was a fatal dose when taken internally; one ounce was capable of slaughtering a hundred and eighty million people. The military machine thought to introduce this toxin into an enemy's food or water supply by agents, or by spraying from the sky. Unstated, but implied, was the definite possibility of its being introduced by long-range missiles, whether guided or in free flight.
Gary stopped reading, looked up to see sunlight through the windows. He reached for a cigarette, paused to inspect it critically and then put it in his mouth. The following sentence caught his eye: “Among diseases suitable for biologic warfare are pneumonic plague…” He paused again, to reach for the other volume.
Pneumonic plague was a different kind of a killer. The plague was a dark leftover from the Middle Ages when Bubonic swept a countryside and completely decimated a town. Pneumonic plague was so named because the lungs were the organs infected; the disease was freely transmitted by the spray from the mouths and lungs of other infected persons. The infection may spread — he turned the page — to other parts of the body, resulting in septicemic plague. There followed a graphic description of the symptoms of the two, and the statement that one is about ninety-five percent fatal whereas the other is almost invariably so. Time: death as early as the same day on which the symptoms first develop, or as late as two or three days afterward. The final paragraph pulled his attention. The victims assume a deep blue or purple color, typical of the last hours of all forms of plague, due to respiratory failure. The so-called “black death.”
Gary puffed slowly on the cigarette, disliking the taste of it. His gaze wandered back to the brutal line of the other article.
Among diseases suitable for biologic warfare are pneumonic plague, influenza, yellow fever, dengue, glanders… The United States, because of its particular geographic isolation, would be highly vulnerable to biologic attack. Infectious diseases would be spread by air or other means and then freely allowed to propagate themselves; for instance, pneumonic plague, one of the most contagious and highly dangerous diseases known, could readily be spread in this manner.