The Supreme Progress by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford [Stableford, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2012-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

Charles Epheyre: Professor Bakermann’s Microbe

A Tale of the Future

(1890)

In the latter days of the months of December 1935 Professor Hermann Bakermann returned joyfully to his lodgings, striding through the streets of the little town of Brunnwald as rapidly as his generous girth would permit.

He was rubbing his hands as he walked, a sign of profound satisfaction—a legitimate satisfaction, for, after long labor, Professor Hermann Bakermann had finally found the means of creating a new microbe, more redoubtable than all the known microbes.

It will doubtless be remembered that in the last half-century, microbial science had made extraordinary progress. In the mid-19th century, a celebrated Frenchman, Louis Pasteur, had proved that certain minuscule creatures exist, which penetrate surreptitiously into the bodies of humans and animals. He had called these perfidious parasites “microbes.” He had even indicated ingenious methods of recognizing them, collecting them and cultivating them. Now, in 1935, the works of Pasteur had been long surpassed. Obedient to the impulse provided by the master, all the scientists of Europe, America, Australia, and even Africa, had set to work. Thanks to them, the most difficult problems had been clarified, the most obscure problems resolved; there was no longer any disease that did not have its microbe, labeled, classified and stored. The forms, the behavior, the habits and the tastes of all terrestrial, marine and airborne microbes were known, and microbial science had become the basis of medicine in all the universities.

In Germany, as elsewhere, mores had changed considerably in the last 30 years. The reign of the spiked helmet had finally come to an end. The professors and the scientists had resumed their place in the sun; they no longer trembled before a beardless corporal, and the ancient German customs, honest and peaceful, had succeeded the regime of the saber.

That was why the noble town of Brunnwald possessed a brilliant university, sumptuous laboratories and excellent professors. Now, none of these masters had more zeal or talent that the celebrated Hermann Bakermann. At an early age he had flung himself impetuously into microbial science; later, having become a professor, he had been able to construct the laboratory of his dreams. It was there that he spent his life. Disdainful of his patrons, he lived amidst his flasks and his culture media, surrounded by the most powerful and most deleterious viruses.50 In order not to be infected by his poisons, however, he had taken all the necessary precautions. By means of a skillfully graduated series of vaccinations, he had eventually rendered himself almost invulnerable, with the result that his health did not suffer at all for that existence passed entirely amid the germs that afflicted poor humankind.

However, as not everyone in the world was as well-protected as he was, Professor Bakermann had taken care to construct, at the extremity of his laboratory, a special room, to which he jokingly referred as the “infernal chamber”, which he did not permit any other human being to enter at first. This little room, heated and lit by

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