r goats, or squash the mosquitoes
that light on you. The bacteriologists--"

"But, Granser, what is a what-you-call-it?" Edwin interrupted.

"You, Edwin, are a goatherd. Your task is to watch the goats. You know a
great deal about goats. A bacteriologist watches germs. That's his
task, and he knows a great deal about them. So, as I was saying, the
bacteriologists fought with the germs and destroyed them--sometimes.
There was leprosy, a horrible disease. A hundred years before I was
born, the bacteriologists discovered the germ of leprosy. They knew all
about it. They made pictures of it. I have seen those pictures. But
they never found a way to kill it. But in 1984, there was the Pantoblast
Plague, a disease that broke out in a country called Brazil and that
killed millions of people. But the bacteriologists found it out, and
found the way to kill it, so that the Pantoblast Plague went no farther.
They made what they called a serum, which they put into a man's body and
which killed the pantoblast germs without killing the man. And in 1910,
there was Pellagra, and also the hookworm. These were easily killed
by the bacteriologists. But in 1947 there arose a new disease that had
never been seen before. It got into the bodies of babies of only ten
months old or less, and it made them unable to move their hands and
feet, or to eat, or anything; and the bacteriologists were eleven years
in discovering how to kill that particular germ and save the babies.

"In spite of all these diseases, and of all the new ones that continued
to arise, there were more and more men in the world. This was because it
was easy to get food. The easier it was to get food, the more men
there were; the more men there were, the more thickly were they packed
together on the earth; and the more thickly they were packed, the more
new kinds of germs became diseases. There were warnings. Soldervetzsky,
as early as 1929, told the bacteriologists that they had no guaranty
against some new disease, a thousand times more deadly than any they
knew, arising and killing by the hundreds of millions and even by the
billion. You see, the micro-organic world remained a mystery to the end.
They knew there was such a world, and that from time to time armies of
new germs emerged from it to kill men.

"And that was all they knew about it. For all they knew, in that
invisible micro-organic world there might be as many different kinds of
germs as there are grains of san