The Chase

THE LAB CHIEF WHO WAS DISINTERESTED 

IN ANTHRAX LEPROSY DELTA. 

He later cracked up and wrote letters to the newspapers attacking the entire chemobiological warfare program of the United States Government. Spent the last seventeen years of his life receiving treatment in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., occupying the same quarters that once housed the ingenious poet Ezra Pound. His rantings were taken seriously in certain places, especially among some leftward-leaning fellow scientists, but the Vice-President described them to the press as "the  despondent demagogy of a paranoid pedant." A sample of the man's delusions, from a letter to the three top television networks (never quoted on newscasts because it was too controversial) : "The boast of the 19th century was its conquest of these accursed plagues that attack men, women, and helpless infants indifferently. What shall be said of the 20th century, which has recreated them, at great expense and through the efforts of thousands of brilliant but perverted scientific minds, and then stored them live in installations throughout the country, where it is virtually certain, statistically, that an accident will unleash them upon an unsuspecting public, sooner or later?" (Loonies often harbour morbid fears of that sort.) The poor man never responded favorably to any of the efforts of his psychiatrists, even though they gave him ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) so often that his brain was practically fried to the crispness of a Howard Johnson omelette by the time he finally died. 

ANTHRAX LEPROSY DELTA. 

A life form that could exist only 

by destroying other life-forms; 

in this respect, it was 

like many of us. 

The first of the products of Charlie Mocenigo's fertile genius, it could boast only of being ten times as deadly as ordinary anthrax. Insofar as it had Consciousness, in a vague and flickering way, it was like that inhabiting a subway train at 5 P.M., concerned only with getting where it was going and then eating. The other strains were much the same, up to Anthrax Leprosy Pi.