"james_alan_gardner_-_three_hearings_on_the_existence_of_snakes_in_the_human_bloodstream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

in makeshift canoes. The only prediction you could safely make was that a
large enough dose of any drug would kill the patient.
On the other hand, better to inject trisulphozymase into SA-positive
people than SA-negative. The chemical reactions that broke down the SA
enzyme also broke down the trisulphozymase -- mutual assured destruction. If
you didn't have the SA enzyme in your blood, the trisulphozymase would build
up to lethal levels much faster, simply because there was nothing to stop
it. SA-positive people could certainly tolerate dosages that would kill a...
Julia felt a chill wash through her. She had created a drug that would
poison SA-negatives but not SA-positives... that could selectively massacre
the Redeemed while leaving the Papists standing. And her research was a
matter of public record. How long would it take before someone on the Papist
side made the connection? One of those men McCarthy had talked about, just
as ruthless and crazy as the senator himself.
How long would it take before they used her drug to slaughter half the
world?
There was only one way out: put all the snakes to sleep. If Julia could
somehow wave her hands and make every SA-positive person SA-negative, then
the playing field would be level again. No, not the playing field -- the
killing field.
Insanity... but what choice did she have? Sign up with McCarthy; get
rid of the snakes before they began to bite; pray the side effects could be
treated. Perhaps, if saner minds prevailed, the process would never be
deployed. Perhaps the threat would be enough to force some kind of bilateral
enzyme disarmament.
Feeling twenty years older, Dr. Julia Grant left the hearing room. The
corridor was empty; through the great glass entryway at the front of the
building, she could see late afternoon sunlight slanting across the marble
steps. A single protester stood on the sidewalk, mutely holding a sign aloft
-- no doubt what McCarthy would call a Papist sympathizer, traitorously
opposing a duly appointed congressional committee.
The protester's sign read, "Why do you concern yourself with the
sleeping creature before you, when you are blind to the serpents in your own
heart?"
Julia turned away, hoping the building had a back door.