Free The Infinite Moment by John Wyndham Page B

me. "You speak of a full life, and your instance is some unfortunate woman hugging her chains in a suburban villa. Full life, fiddlesticks! But it was convenient for the traders that she could be made to think so. A truly full life would be an exceedingly short one, in any form of society."
    And soon...
    At length, the little parlourmaid reappeared to say that my attendants were ready to leave when it should be convenient. But there was one thing I very much wanted to know before I left. I put the question to the old lady.
    "Please tell me. How did ithow could ithappen?"
    "Simply by accident, my dearthough it was the kind of accident that was entirely the product of its time. A piece of research which showed unexpected, secondary results, that's all."
    "But how?"
    "Rather curiouslyalmost irrelevantly, you might say. Did you ever hear of a man called Perrigan?"
    "Perrigan?" I repeated. "I don't think so, it's an uncommon name."
    "It became very commonly known indeed," she assured me. "Doctor Perrigan was a biologist, and his concern was the extermination of ratsparticularly the brown rat, which used to do a great deal of expensive damage.
    "His approach to the problem was to find a disease which would attack them fatally. In order to produce it he took as his basis a virus infection often fatal to rabbits or, rather, a group of virus infections that were highly selective, and also unstable since they were highly liable to mutation. Indeed, there was so much variation in the strains that when infection of rabbits in Australia was tried, it was only at the sixth attempt that it was successful; all the earlier strains died out as the rabbits developed immunity. It was tried in other places, too, though with indifferent success until a still more effective strain was started in France, and ran though the rabbit population of Europe.
    "Well, taking some of these viruses as a basis, Perrigan induced new mutations by irradiation and succeeded in producing a variant that would attack rats. That was not enough, however, and he continued his work until he had a strain that had enough of its ancestral selectivity to attack only the brown rat, and with great virulence."
    "In that way he settled the question of a longstanding pest, for there are no brown rats now. But something went amiss. It is still an open question whether the successful virus mutated again, or whether one of his earlier experimental viruses was accidentally liberated by escaped "carrier" rats, but that's academic. The important thing is that somehow a strain capable of attacking human beings got loose, and that it was already widely disseminated before it was tracedalso, that once it was free, it spread with devastating speed; too fast for any effective steps to be taken to check it.
    "The majority of women were found to be immune; and of the ten per cent or so whom it attacked over eighty per cent recovered. Among men, however, there was almost no immunity, and the few recoveries were only partial. A few men were preserved by the most elaborate precautions, but they could not be kept confined for ever, and in the end the virus, which had a remarkable capacity for dormancy, got them, too."
    Inevitably several questions of professional interest occurred to me, but for an answer she shook her head.
    "I'm afraid I can't help you there. Possibly the medical people will be willing to explain," she said, but her expression was doubtful.
    I mancuvred myself into a sitting position on the side of the couch.
    "I see," I said. "Just an accidentyes, I suppose one could scarcely think of it happening any other way."
    "Unless," she remarked, "unless one were to look upon it as divine intervention."
    "Isn't that a little impious?"
    "I was thinking of the Death of the Firstborn," she said, reflectively.
    There did not seem to be an immediate answer to that. Instead, I asked: "Can you honestly tell me that you never have the feeling that you are living in a dreary kind of