Alice: The Girl From Earth

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.

Later, when Space Plague was long conquered, they were able to find mention of this virus in the archives of other planets.

It turned out that the Sol system was not the first place this plague had appeared. The virus had managed to exterminate whole planets and entire stellar systems. And if we had not succeeded in finding a means to overcome the disease, the virus would not have rested until it had destroyed everything living on the planet. Then, having exterminated the people, plants and animals, the fish, and the bacteria, the plague viruses would either change and return to space like a swarm of bees, where they could where they could infect some passing space ship or fall on some other planet, or remain in place and enter hibernation.

The astronautical archaeologists from the expedition Gromozeka was leading had therefore decided that, most likely, the planet Coleida had died from Space Plague. The inhabitants of the planet had found no means of dealing with the epidemic.

Thus, in order to determine with absolute certainty that this is what happened, Gromozeka had flown here to Earth. Earth had the Time Institute. Its researchers could travel into the past, and Gromozeka had decided to ask the Institute to send one of its machines to Coleida, and send someone into the past to determine if indeed it was Space Plague that had exterminated the planet’s inhabitants.