The Project Gutenberg EBook of Prologue to an Analogue, by Leigh Richmond

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Title: Prologue to an Analogue

Author: Leigh Richmond

Illustrator: Schoenherr

Release Date: October 13, 2009 [EBook #30242]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROLOGUE TO AN ANALOGUE ***

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction June 1961.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright
on this publication was renewed.

PROLOGUE TO AN ANALOGUE

By LEIGH RICHMOND

_Finnagle's Law shows that many times we don't get the effect
we planned on. But ... there's an inverse to that famous law,
too...._

Illustrated by Schoenherr

* * * * *

The IWC program was a newscast by Bill Howard, and the news was
particularly vicious that night.

Bill, his big homely face leaning across a desk toward the viewer,
talked in horrified tones of the "pest-sub" that had reputedly got
stuck in the Suez and spread epidemic across Cairo.

It was easy to assume, Bill told his audience, that the nations most
interested in creating a crisis in the world right now had put the sub
there to make an excuse to accuse us of the terror. It was undoubtedly
really there, and was undoubtedly really of American make, and the
epidemic was undoubtedly very real indeed, he said. The United Nations
investigating team, due to go into the Canal Zone the next day and
make their report to the world, would find that the epidemic was
caused by laboratory-developed bacteria, carried in by an
American-made sub. It would be at least as bad, if not worse, than
reported.

The question before the world, Bill said, was not whether
bacteriological warfare had started, but who had started it--and the
fact that the sub carried United States markings and was of United
States make did not at all answer the question.

Bacterio