Syndrome Johnny
BY CHARLES DYE
Illustrated by EMSH
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The plagues that struck mankind could be attributed
to one man. But was he fiend ... or savior?
The blood was added to a pool of other blood, mixed, centrifuged,separated to plasma and corpuscles, irradiated slightly, pasteurizedslightly, frozen, evaporated, and finally banked. Some of the plasmawas used immediately for a woman who had bled too much in childbirth.
She died.
Others received plasma and did not die. But their symptoms changed,including a syndrome of multiple endocrine unbalance, eccentricities ofappetite and digestion, and a general pattern of emotional disturbance.
An alert hospital administrator investigated the mortality rise andnarrowed it to a question of who had donated blood the week before.After city residents were eliminated, there remained only the signedreceipts and thumbprints of nine men. Nine healthy unregisteredtravelers poor enough to sell their blood for money, and among them aman who carried death in his veins. The nine thumbprints were broadcastto all police files and a search began.
The effort was futile, for there were many victims who had sickened andgrown partially well again without recognizing the strangeness of theirillness.
Three years later they reached the carrier stage and the epidemicspread to four cities. Three more years, and there was an epidemicwhich spread around the world, meeting another wave coming from theopposite direction. It killed two out of four, fifty out of a hundred,twenty-seven million out of fifty million. There was hysteria whereit appeared. And where it had not appeared there were quarantines tofence it out. But it could not be fenced out. For two years it coveredthe world. And then it vanished again, leaving the survivors with atendency toward glandular troubles.
Time passed. The world grew richer, more orderly, more peaceful.
A man paused in the midst of his work at the U.N. Food and AgricultureCommission. He looked up at the red and green production map of India.
"Just too many people per acre," he said. "All our work at improvingproduction ... just one jump ahead of their rising population, one jumpahead of famine. Sometimes I wish to God there would be another plagueto give us a breathing spell and a fair chance to get things organized."
He went back to work and added another figure.
Two months later, he was one of the first victims of the second plague.
In the dining hall of a university, a biochemical student glanced upfrom his paper to his breakfast companion. "You remember Johnny, themythical carrier that they told about during the first and secondepidemics of Syndrome Plague?"
"Sure. Syndrome Johnny. They use that myth in psychology class as atypical example of mass hysteria. When a city was nervous and expectingthe plague to reach them, some superstitious fool would imagine he sawSyndrome Johnny and the population would panic. Symbol for Death orsome such thing. People imagined they saw him in every corner of theworld. Simultaneously, of course."
It was a bright morning and they were at