Philip Jose Farmer

The Biological Revolt

The world now enters a new cycle, that of the antibiotics and wonder medicines. Good as these scientific remedies are, scientists already warn us that the human body is beginning to manufacture new bacteria, new microbes, which, in turn, create unknown virulent diseases. Man now eats more chemicals than ever before. Our daily bread is loaded with chemicals; the fowl, beef, and particularly pork we eat are all loaded with antibiotics.

In his eagerness to make money, man stops at nothing. When will the human body revolt and break out in new, loathesome diseases? This is a serious problem for today's health scientists. The problem is world wide.

1

'The dark lines of a man's head and shoulders cut across the brightness. The silhouette hung in the frame and then bent forward to look into the room.

The figure turned so he would not block the shine. He looked upon that part of the bed lit by the moon and upon a woman who slept.

"Barbara," he whispered.

"Barbara!" His voice trembled with loneliness.

The woman jumped from bed, scooped up a gown and slid it on. As she tied the strings across her bosom, she wheeled upon the man outside. Her voice was shrill. "Go away, Bill! Go away!"

The recent presence of another man was obvious -a shirt and a necktie hung on the door knob. The piney odor of pipe tobacco remained in the air.

"Barbara, I'm sick. Very sick. I need you."

She stepped backwards from him, slowly. "There's nothing I can do for you. If you were dying, I couldn't even hold your hand."

"It's not true, Barbara." His voice was lower and more controlled, and his eyes were red and hot. "You could at least take one shot of anti-asp. You could talk with me without being affected."

"No, the anti-asp shot is just a trick of yours. If you loved me, husband dear, you'd not ask me to take one shot for you. You know how terrible the asp is! Do you want me to suffer, too?"

"Barbara! If you knew how lonely I am."

Trembling, she said, "Besides, how could you want me now?" She glanced at the door where the man, Travers, had left.

He gripped the sill tighter, as if the house were whirling and he didn't want to fall off.

For the first time, she stepped toward him. She yelled, "Do you think you are the only one who's lonely?"

"No, no--I understand. But remember, Barbara, we said, `for better or worse, till death do us part.'"

She screamed, "Get out, Bill. I wish you were dead! You are dead, to me! Get out before I kill you ... Or myself!" She turned and ran through the door.

2

The man walked alone.

His passage from the house through narrow woods was marked by solitude and terror. Mosquitoes, thirsty, swooped toward him. Closer, they suddenly angled off and flew away. They wanted none of his stench. A frog, sitting apart from the path flopped away panicked through the weeds. A coon, clinging to a branch and complacently watching the man, suddenly sniffed. It scuttled up the tree and clung to the bending tip. This man, Bill Ogtate, was the Asp.

The terror he breathed and sweated with every second was his curse. Victim of man's revenge and ingenuity, he was doomed for eight years to imbue with the asp all who came close. His free will had been violated, but the horrified world could not help him. Their sympathy and aid came from a distance; nobody could hold his hand or call him brother.

The Asp was impregnated with that giant protein molecule called the asp. It was forcibly injected into his bloodstream where it spread to every part of his body. Utilizing the electromagnetic field of the body cells, the asp attached itself to each cell so that the host must "share" its field with the uninvited guest. Many of Ogtate's cells inhospitably refused, and the commensals secured a foothold only on about an eighth of the total.

Bill Ogtate's weight increased with the swarm of semivirus. The demand for more energy aroused his appetite. His metabolism accelerated, and his body, to control the increased energy-output, released it in heat and sweat as in exercise. The internal body temperature thus remained normal and constant.

Ogtate's skin was the primary transmitter of the "bite," as this emanation came to be called. Asps radiated continuously from him, although the rate varied according to reproduction. When asps attached to a certain organ built up to a certain bulk, the host was unable to endure any more accretion. They threw the switch, so to say, cut off some power, and weakened the link between the negative and positive poles of host and guest. Though some asps always clung, others were kicked off and thus emitted from the Asp. They left his body via breath, skin, and other means of voiding. They floated through the air to be breathed or otherwise absorbed by whatever living thing happened to be near.

Ogtate himself was immune to the reaction his presence induced in others. Though burdened by the giant molecules, his sympathetic nervous system and adrenal glands, which were particularly affected in others, were quite indifferent to the asps. They were injected into his blood along with an antibody. The antibody depended upon the closed field of the adrenals for reactivation. Although it could not, unfortunately, kill the asps, it kept them from stimulating the adrenals. It did not, however, deaden these organs to other vital stimuli.

Ogtate breathed and sweated as a man must. The invisible miasma put out long fingers through the air and plunged then into the lungs and skin of any living creature that came near. In a short time the fingers felt the blood. They wrapped themselves around the medulla, the inner portion of the adrenals, and they squeezed.

The effects were immediate. Adrenalin poured out, activating the sympathetic nervous system, attached closely to the glands. The person thus "bitten" felt at once the hardbeating heart, the shallow and jerky breaths, cold sweat and rising body temperature, shaking of body and paling of skin, standing-up of hair, halting of digestion, loosening of muscles, dilation of pupils.

Above all he felt suspension of reason.

Added together, the symptoms characterized one dominant emotion.

Fear.

There was but one thought body and mind had: Get away fast.

Actually, there was no chance for permanent damage to those who were affected, as long as they went away before their systems were overstimulated. The asps attacked only briefly before being excreted. To get a hard grip upon the cells, they had to be suspended in a nourishing fluid and injected into the blood. The nutrient gave them strength to hook into the host's electromagnetic field.

Although the Asp's bite was at times strong, at others weak, according to the rhythm of their reproduction, he always radiated enough that he could never be approached by unvaccinated people.

If he were a rabbit, he could safely have hopped through a den of hungry lions.

But he was a man who would have welcomed even the company of a lion.