“Did they have a war?” Alice asked. “Did they kill each other off?”
“No where did you come across that idea?” Gromozeka was amazed.
“We re doing the history of the Middle Ages.” Alice answered.
“No, there wasn’t any war there.” Gromozeka said. “If there had been such a terrible and destructive war, even a hundred years later we would have found traces.”
“Well, maybe they used poison gas.” I asked. “Or atomic bombs? What if they started a chain reaction?”
“You are an educated person.” Gromozeka said. “But you are spouting nonsense. Why do you presume the team of experienced archaeologists, specialists in our fields, which I have the honor of heading, capable of penetrating the ground and seeing each earth worm, would have failed to detect such traces?”
Gromozeka shook his head and rolled his eyes so terribly that I sneaked a glance at Alice: had my best friend managed to frighten her yet?
But Alice wasn’t afraid of Gromozeka. She was thinking.
“We are left with but one suspicion.” Gromozeka said. “But it is a secret.”
“They were attacked.” Alice said.
“By whom?”
“By space pirates, of course. I’ve seen them.”
“Non-sense!” Gromozeka answered and burst out laughing, all his tentacles shook and he knocked one of the flower vases down of the window sill.
I pretended not to notice, and Alice did the same. We both knew that Gromozeka would have been very upset at what he had done.
“Space Pirates could not destroy an entire planet. And anyway, there are no such things as Space Pirates.”
“Then what destroyed the planet Coleida?”
“That is a question I came to Earth to answer.” Gromozeka said.
Alice and I were silent and put forward no more questions. Gromozeka was also silent. He was waiting for us to ask him, and I wanted to hold out asking him for as long as possible.
The result was that the three of us were silent or about two minutes. Finally, Gromozeka became quite angry with us.
“I see you are uninterested.” He said.
“No, certainly not.” I answered. “I’m dying to learn, but since you don’t want to talk about it I’m not asking you…”
“Why do you say I don’t want to talk about it?” Gromozeka shouted. “Who told you any such thing?”
“You did.”
“I did? Impossible!”
Then I decided to tease my friend, who was clearly dying from his desire to tell us everything.
“And anyway, Gromozeka, you’re getting ready for a good twelve hours sleep. We’ll move the dining room table to one side and you can have the rug. Alice, go do your homework.”
“Alas for me!” Gromozeka said. “That I should have such ‘friends.’ I hurry to them across the entire Galaxy to bring them the most interesting news, and them right away pack me off to bed they are so bored with me! I bore them. There is nothing to be done… Just lead me to your bath tub so I can wash off my tentacles.”
Alice looked at me pleadingly. She was desperate to ask Gromozeka.
But Gromozeka had already taken himself to the bath tub, dragging his tentacles all over the furniture and walls.
“Why aren’t you asking him, Papa?” Alice whispered when Gromozeka left. “He really does want to tell us.”
“Then he shouldn’t mince words.” I said. “If we were to ask him or show interest, then he’d drag this out for two hours or more before we found out anything at all. But now he’ll tell us on his own. You can bet on it.”
“It’s a bet then.” Alice agreed. “But what do we wager? I say that Gromozeka is very angry and won’t tell us a single thing.”
“And I say that he is very angry, and precisely because he is angry he is going to tell us everything!”
“For an ice cream cone?”
“For an ice cream cone.”
So we set our wager. Before we even had a chance to shake hands on it the hallway’s walls shook. Gromozeka was coming back.
He was wet; water dripped down his shell, and the tentacles left long wet ribbons behind on the floor. The house robot walked behind our guest, wiping the floor with a mop.
“Pardon me, Professor.” Gromozeka said. “But where is your soap?”
“The soap?” I was surprised. “The soap is on the shelf. Isn’t it there?”
“It is.” Gromozeka started to laugh. “I came here especially to have a little joke on you. No doubt you thought I had rushed here for no other reason than to tell you the secret. And, no doubt, you told your daughter: there goes that idiot Gromozeka, who wants to share his secret with us so much he forgot to wipe his tentacles. Didn’t you?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
But Alice gave it all away immediately.
“We even placed a bet on it.” She said. “I said that you would keep the secret.”
“Oh well.” Gromozeka sat down again on our floor and spread out like a flower with his wet tentacles the leaves. “Now I am satisfied. You were having a joke at my expense, as I was having one on you. We’re even. So listen up, my friends. Do you remember the epidemic of Space Plague?”
2
Of course we remembered the epidemic. Or more precisely, I remembered it, and Alice had read about it. About fifteen years ago an expedition had returned to Earth from Galactic Sector Seventeen. Following the protocols then in place all long range expeditions returned, not to Earth directly, but to the base on Pluto for quarantine. That, and that alone, had saved our planet.
Two members of the crew had fallen sick with an unknown illness. They were placed in isolation. But despite the best medical science in the Solar System, they continued to decline. On the next day the rest of the crew were showing symptoms, and two days later the infection had spread to the entire base.
The whole Earth was frightened, and a specialized medical ship lifted for Pluto. For the next few days the struggle for the lives of the starship crew and the people of Pluto base continued. It ended with a defeat for the doctors. Not only had they been unsuccessful in treating those who fell ill, the medical ship’s crew had, despite the extreme measures they had taken to prevent infection, fallen ill themselves in turn.
Since that time the disease in question had been called Space Plague.
A quarantine was declared, and patrol ships kept watch in orbit around Pluto to ensure that no one landed there by accident. At the same time the best doctors on Earth and other planets attempted to decipher the secret of the illness. It turned out that there was no medicine against the disease and no means to stop it. No medicines could cure it, nor could the thick walls of an isolation lab prevent its spread.
And only after three months, at an enormous price in victims and the efforts of thousands of scientists, was the cause of the disease determined and did they learn how to overcome it.
Finally, they concluded that the disease was so difficult to cope with because it was carried by viruses which exhibited two remarkable characteristics: in the first place they were able to mask themselves as known viruses the bodies of the infected had already developed immunity to and were thus harmless and thus it was impossible to find them in the blood stream, and, secondly, en mass they were a rational, thinking being.
Individually, none of the viruses were capable of thought or taking decisions, but, when some billions of them congregated in the blood of an infected individual, they achieved a strange, evil rationality. As a result, whenever the doctors were finally about to close in on the virus, the plague, as a rational entity, ordered all its constituent viruses to change their forms, designed a counter agent to the medicines, and found new ways to kill people.
When the scientists discovered what was going on they attempted to establish a reasoned dialogue with the virus. But the virus had no desire to communicate with people. Or it could not. All its thoughts, all its ingenuity, was directed only at destruction; it was unable to create anything.