The Bowdler Strain

James Lovegrove

 

 

The Bowdler Strain escaped from the MoD research facility at Chilton Mead in Gloucester­shire, at 7:30pm on Thursday June 18th.

 

The point of origin was the facility’s Ideative Manipulation laboratory. The initial vector was none other than the head of Ideative Manipula­tion, Professor Hugo Bantling.

 

Scientists, as a race, tend to be sober, serious, even reticent individuals, not unduly prone to vul­garity. Professor Bantling was no exception.

 

Thus it wasn’t until past ten that evening, when he was preparing his nightcap of cocoa and the milk boiled over, that the professor had cause to realize that he had been exposed to one of his own logoviruses.

 

By then, of course, it was too late.

 

* * * *

 

On his way home, Professor Bantling had spoken to:

 

one of his assistants, Dr. Roxanne Quest;

 

a janitor, Tom Wells;

 

a colleague, Professor Cyril Prudhomme, Head of Communicable Allergy;

 

the guard at the facility’s main gate (he/she must remain nameless for security reasons);

 

the attendant at the Texaco garage on the A481 between Chilton Mead and High Leversham, Miss Kylie Bracewell;

 

the proprietor of the One Stop Foodstore and Off-Licence in High Leversham, Mr. Vijay Latif;

 

and his housekeeper, Mrs. Barbara McCartney.

 

To each of these Bantling had offered no more than a couple of dozen words; in the case of the janitor, the security guard, Kylie Bracewell, and Vijay Latif, no more than a “thank you” and a “good evening.” Each, nonetheless, was immedi­ately infected, and proceeded to infect numerous others over the course of the rest of the evening, and they in turn infected still others, and so on. So the logovirus was already out of control, effective­ly an epidemic, long before Professor Bantling became aware of its presence in his own neural system.

 

When the milk boiled over, sousing the hob in seething white, the professor instantly and reflexively swore. Inattention was to him the greatest sin that anyone—but particularly a man of science— could commit.

 

The irony here is obvious, for it was the swear­ing that alerted Bantling to the fact that he or one of his team may have recently committed a far more serious sin of inattention than merely taking your eye off a saucepan of milk for a moment.

 

“$#!†,” said Bantling.

 

He blinked.

 

He frowned.

 

He repeated the epithet, slowly this time and low-voiced.

 

“$#!†”

 

He clasped a hand to his mouth. A groan escaped him.

 

Half a minute later he was on the phone to the laboratory.

 

Half an hour after that, he was back at Chilton Mead, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

 

* * * *

 

Colonel James Nutter, Chief of Operations at Chilton Mead, had had to endure taunts about his surname since kindergarten. It was this, more than anything, which had burned out of him the toler­ance of others’ foibles that each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is born with. Nutter was a tough­ened shell of a man, almost devoid of empathy. The one thing in life he truly loved was the army, not least because now that he had attained high rank, nobody ever poked fun at him anymore.

 

It was two o’clock in the morning. Chilton Mead was on a state of high alert. Colonel Nutter had just come off the phone to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister was not a happy person. Neither, consequently, was Nutter.

 

“What the Fµ˘« happened, professor?” he demanded of Bantling, who had been summoned to the colonel’s office in a manner that did not anticipate refusal.

 

“Who is responsible for this Fµ˘«!^§ mess? And how is it that I can’t ßż°°đĄ well swear without my voice going all peculiar?”

 

The professor was no less tired than Nutter, and no less tetchy. “In reply to your last question, colonel, do you not read the reports I send out to all senior administrative personnel? Because if not, I have to wonder why I bother with them. They take up an awful lot of time that I could otherwise devote to more fruitful pursuits.”

 

Nutter went red in the cheeks, both angered and embarrassed. “I’m a busy man, professor. What goes on at this facility is less important to me than the fact that it can continue to go on free from external intervention, be that in the form of ter­rorist action or government prying. I do know that you scientist chaps are up to some pretty bizarre stuff here. Much more than that, I don’t need and don’t want to know.”

 

“But you must have some idea, mustn’t you, of the basic principle of Ideative Manipulation.”

 

“Some. It’s a kind of mind control, right?”

 

“Put extremely crudely, yes. In this day and age, the military is looking for ways of disabling enemy nations swiftly and harmlessly, keeping damage to infrastructure and human life to a minimum, pos­sibly to zero. Of course we can knock out electronic communications using EMP bombs, computer viruses, and the like. But what about communication? What about people? That’s what I’ve been working on. If we can render people within a nation incapable of interacting with one another at the basic verbal level, then that nation will be helpless, all but paralyzed.”

 

“I don’t see how not being able to swear could leave a nation all but paralyzed. đ@Ж^€đ annoyed, yes, but not paralyzed.” Nutter gave a despairing gasp. “I can’t even say ‘đ@Ж^€đ.’“

 

“Any word or phrase delivered with invective intent is off-limits. You can say ‘sod’ if you mean a piece of turf but not ‘$°đ’ if you mean something, as it were, earthier. That’s the Bowdler Strain’s spe­cific effect, the negation of profanity. All swearing comes out as garbled nonsense. As such, Bowdler represents an important step on our way to the creation of a kind of universal language-negation logovirus. We’re not there yet, but the process of development has, as we see, turned up some inter­esting side-products.”

 

“Just tell me, professor,” Nutter said, “how did it get loose? And how do we contain it?”

 

“We’re working on the containment part, colonel. As for how it got loose... Why don’t you come with me?”

 

* * * *

 

The Ideative Manipulation lab was classified as a Biosafety Level 1 environment. Strictly speaking, protective biohazard suits were unnecessary. They were worn anyway, largely so that everyone who worked here would always bear in mind that they were dealing with materials potentially as danger­ous as any neurotoxin or necrotizing bacillus.

 

The lab comprised two rooms, a research area, and a specimen chamber. In the former, Bantling’s five-strong team were milling around like ghosts in white plastic, agitatedly discussing various options for combating the escaped logovirus. They fell silent when the professor and Colonel Nutter entered.

 

“Roxanne,” said Bantling, “I need to show the colonel the specimen chamber.”

 

“Of course, professor.” Dr. Quest produced her security clearance card. Bantling did the same, and together, one on either side of the door to the spec­imen chamber, they inserted the cards into electronic locks and tapped out key codes on the number pads. The door undamped itself and slid heavily open.

 

The chamber housed a dozen soundproofed cells in twin rows of six. Everything was white here, and silent, like the morning after a deep snowfall. Bantling led Nutter along to the second door on the right and invited him to look in through a triple-glazed spy hole.

 

Inside a cube that an average-sized dog might have considered cramped quarters sat a man—a hunched, hunkered, sad-sack man, who was mut­tering to himself and every so often would succumb to a violent twitching spasm, his hands thrusting forth and dancing spider-like over the floor, the wall, or a part of his body. Other than the hospital-style gown he was wearing, the man looked like the archetypal tramp. His hair was stringy and unkempt, his beard likewise; his skin was flaked and reddened from years spent out­doors in all weathers; his face showed the weight and defeat of hard living.

 

“This,” said Bantling to the colonel, “is Gerry. Gerry is a Tourette’s sufferer. His compulsion to swear is uncontrollable. Or rather, it was till we got our hands on him. He still swears now, but none of it comes out intelligibly. I suspect he finds this a little distressing, although he may have adjusted, I’m not sure.”

 

“Where did you get him from?” said Nutter. “Or should I not ask?”

 

“Perhaps you’d best not ask. Suffice to say that our test subjects are chosen very carefully. Each is the kind of person whose disappearance from soci­ety will not be noticed.”

 

Nutter glanced sidelong at the Professor and saw the same eerie placidity in his face that he heard in his voice. Nutter wasn’t squeamish, God no. He had in his time had to make hard decisions involving men’s lives, and indeed their deaths, and he knew that there were no moral absolutes in this world. Nonetheless, he found it a little disconcerting, the way Bantling could talk so clinically about Gerry, as if this human lab rat was of no more consequence than an actual, rodent-style lab rat. Nutter was in no doubt that Gerry’s “disappearance from society” had been any­thing but voluntary. He was sure too, that there would be no return to society for Gerry once he had outlived his usefulness at Chilton Mead.

 

But it was not a matter he could permit to trou­ble him. His concern, right now, was the rogue logovirus.

 

“So the cell is soundproofed,” he said. “And you presumably take every conceivable precaution when entering it.”

 

“Correct. Ear plugs and ear defenders are mandatory for anyone coming into direct contact with the test subjects. The only time we ever hear their voices is when listening to recordings we’ve made of them. Which is what I was doing this evening. I was running through today’s recordings, checking for any anomalies in the verbal symptom patterns. They fluctuate, you see. It’s a phenomenon we haven’t quite pinned down yet, although we think it has something to do with the brain trying to counteract the logovirus by reorganizing synaptic pathways, as the brains of stroke victims sometimes do in order to compensate for the neurological damage. Or perhaps the mind has its own antibodies, just as the body does. Psychic antibodies. One for the metaphysicians there. Either way—”

 

“You’re saying,” Nutter interrupted, “that some­one listens to these people’s voices every day?”

 

Bantling nodded.

 

“Then, probably a stupid question, but why hasn’t anyone been infected before?”

 

“Because until today none of the logoviruses has been transmittable via recording or any other arti­ficial means. They only work interpersonally. Direct from mouth to ear, as it were.”

 

“Then what changed?”

 

Bantling stroked his thumb tip up and down the groove of his philtrum. “My guess is, the logovirus mutated.”

 

“What?”

 

“Gerry’s brain was attacking it, trying to expunge it. Like any good virus, the Bowdler Strain adapted, and kept adapting, and now it’s achieved a form in which it can be transmitted non-interpersonally. In other words, electronically.”

 

“ßµ§§€® me.”

 

“Well, quite,” the professor said, with the thinnest of smiles.

 

* * * *

 

The Bowdler Strain proliferated throughout the night, like a bad rumor. Person talked to person talked to person, innocently spreading the conta­gion. In the small hours, doctors and hospitals began to receive calls from worried individuals who thought they might be afflicted with an aneurysm or a brain tumor or even cancer of the tongue. They just couldn’t get their words out right. Friends woke friends, relatives relatives, spouses spouses, to ask if their voices sounded funny. Most often the reply was no, since not all of those infected had made the connection between the incomprehensibly misshapen syllables that emerged from their mouths and the expletives which generated them, and they weren’t swearing while expressing their befuddlement to their loved ones. Those who did perceive that a certain seg­ment of their vocabulary was translating itself, of its own volition, into what appeared to be Serbo-Croat or Mongolian or Tagalog, or some other equally unfamiliar lingo, swore all the more vehe­mently as they attempted to vent their anger and bewilderment by verbal means. They only found themselves, of course, emitting further streams of gibberish, which angered and bewildered them even more, so that they swore even more, and on and on in a vicious circle, until all that was left to them was to lapse, livid-faced, into silence and mutely fume and fret, denied the cathartic satisfac­tion of even the mildest of blue language or the most moderate of blasphemies—or else they hit things. There were some, not necessarily of a reli­gious bent, who believed they had acquired the ability to speak in tongues. There were some, usu­ally of a religious bent, who through habitual abstinence from profanity had no idea they had been infected at all. The Bowdler Strain twisted and turned its way through the mazes of human interaction, and would have done so a great deal more rapidly had the outbreak occurred during daytime. As it was, by dawn the next morning a significant percentage of Gloucestershire was affected, and there were many more clusters else­where in the country, courtesy of the national telephone network.

 

And as the sun rose and people rose, the logovirus’s exponential growth accelerated.

 

* * * *

 

Professor Bantling’s team and Colonel Nutter had brainstormed through the night and made lit­tle progress toward a solution. It was given that the Bowdler Strain was wildfire, inextinguishable, unstoppable. At best estimate, it would blanket the country within two days. Total population satura­tion would be achieved in under a week. There was no question of isolating each and every out­break, setting up perimeters, creating hot zones, issuing denials. Standard operational procedure for all kinds of similar emergencies was inapplica­ble in this instance. There was no alternative but to devise a means of neutralizing the logovirus. An anti-logovirus vaccine would have to be devel­oped, and if it could be created and implemented swiftly enough, then maybe, just maybe, Bowdler could be eradicated, and the outbreak downplayed and dismissed as a bout of public hysteria.

 

Nutter expressed the view, several times in sev­eral different ways, that it was not a little astounding that a vaccine had not already been prepared for just such a contingency as this. For the most part, the scientists ignored him when he made the observation, acting as experts tend to when a layman draws attention to a glaring over­sight in their methods—with disdain. On one occasion, Bantling did acknowledge the colonel’s point, but all he said was, “It’s not that simple.”

 

Otherwise, it was proposal and counter­proposal, thesis and antithesis, theory and refutation, and lots of strong coffee. And in the end, the only conclusion the group could reach was that there was no quick and easy fix. Cultivating and implanting a logovirus took weeks, so even if they were able to design one that specifically remedied Bowdler symptoms—and logoviral engineering was not an exact science— then it wouldn’t be available for use until long after the whole of the UK was infected.

 

“Is that really so bad?” said the youngest person in the room, Edwin Chao. After a night of futile debate, he was trying to look on the bright side. “I mean, no one can swear properly—so what? It’s not as if it’s fatal, right? No one’s really going to suffer on account of Bowdler.”

 

Bantling said, “I agree that of all the things that could have escaped from Chilton Mead, a logovirus is far from being the worst. One of the race-specific killers from the Applied Genetics lab, for instance, or that lethal self-replicating graffito the chaps in Visual Memetics have been working on...” He mimed a shudder that was not entirely ungenuine. “But the fact remains that we’re look­ing at potential countrywide panic. We’re looking at a frightened population, unaware what’s hap­pened to them, knowing only that something very strange is going on. We’re looking, maybe, at civil unrest, rioting, a breakdown in the rule of law.”

 

“That’s very much worst-case,” said Dr. Quest, wanting to reassure everyone, including herself. “I doubt it’ll get that bad.”

 

“Bad?” said Nutter. “Civil unrest and rioting isn’t bad. I’ll tell you what bad is. Bad is if the Bowdler Strain is somehow traced back to here. Bad is the public finding out the sort of thing you lot get up to in these laboratories of yours.”

 

“Then, colonel,” said Professor Bantling firmly, “as Chief of Operations you’d best do all you can to ensure that that eventuality never comes to pass.”

 

* * * *

 

The first news report about the outbreak was a short piece in a local current-affairs TV program, aired on the evening of Friday, July 19th. The item came at the end of the program and was pitched at the same level as a funny-animal or bizarre-charity-stunt story, with the reporter adopting a jocular, ironic tone as he described the peculiar condition that pensioner Ron Squires had come down with, apparently overnight. Ron, a resident of High Leversham, had, it seemed, lost the power to swear.

 

“I’m not a big one for cursing, never have been,” said Ron, with a nervous flash of his dentures. “But you know, every once in a while you just can’t help a naughty word slipping out, can you? Only, last night I dropped my bag on the way home from the off-license and broke a bottle of stout, and what came out of my mouth then didn’t sound like no swearing I ever heard before.”

 

“And what did you say, Ron?” asked the reporter. “Bearing in mind that this will be going out before the watershed.”

 

“Well, I’ll tell you exactly what I said, because I’m pretty certain none of your viewers will be able to understand it. ‘ßµ§§€®!^§ #€żż’ is what I said. See? What does that sound like? And all my other swear words—it’s the same. Ш@^«. @®$€. ˘µ^†.”

 

The opinion of Ron’s GP was sought, and she pronounced herself mystified. “I’ve never seen anything like it before in my career,” said Dr. Annette Murray. “Ron has always been in very good health. I can only assume that the shock of the beer bottle breaking triggered some sort of psychosomatic stress-response that has affected his speech patterns. It’s all very strange, and I have referred him to a specialist.”

 

“You don’t think Ron is putting this on some­how?” said the reporter.

 

“Oh no. Why would someone put on a condi­tion like this?”

 

The reporter delivered his concluding remarks to camera. “So there you have it. A mystery ailment that has left one man’s life blighted. Ron Squires is lost for words. You could say he’s been sworn to silence.”

 

Within minutes, the TV station was inundated with phone calls from viewers who had watched the item and were suffering from the same prob­lem as Ron. Some of them had had the problem before the item aired, others claimed the problem had started immediately afterward. Telephone operators at the TV station were treated to exam­ples of the choicest epithets that the English language has to offer, all rendered meaningless by the Bowdler Strain. Eventually the switchboard was overloaded by the vast numbers of people ringing in, and it packed up. By then, the telephone operators were themselves swearing hard. Unintel­ligibly, of course.

 

The story made the main news later that night, coming second in the running order to the failure of the latest Middle East peace initiative. Incidences of “swearing disorder” were being reported all over the country. Hospital A and E departments were swamped by people demanding to know what was wrong with them. The emergency serv­ices were receiving twenty calls a minute, only one of which was from someone in genuine need of the police, an ambulance, or the fire brigade, the rest coming from alarmed citizens who had contracted the strange and perturbing speech impediment. A chief constable implored members of the public not to dial 999 unless it really was an emergency. Meanwhile, a government spokesman, interviewed outside the Commons, had the following state­ment to make: “The Prime Minister has been apprised of the situation and is monitoring it close­ly. At the present time, there is no clear explanation for the difficulties that a very few peo­ple, and I stress a very few, seem to be experiencing with their voices. The matter is being looked into with the utmost urgency, but there is no cause for concern. None at all. We expect that whatever is happening will run its course in a couple of days or so. That’s all I have to say for now. No questions. Thank you very much.”

 

All of Saturday’s papers carried the story on their front pages. The broadsheets talked of “an extraordinary phenomenon reminiscent of the ‘sleeping sickness’ outbreak during the First World War” and claimed that experts in neurolinguistics were “baffled.” The tabloids took a predictably more bumptious approach. “F*** ME! WHERE ARE MY SWEAR WORDS?” was the headline run by one red-top, while another contained a fea­ture article entitled “Expletives Deleted—Your Cut-Out-And-Keep Guide To The Best Of British Bad Language,” which offered lists of “clean” alternatives to the most popular modern-day pro­fanities.

 

The mood of the nation was febrile that day. Torn between fear and a sense of wild absurdity, people tried to go about their weekend business as normal, but shops and streets were nowhere near as full as they might have been, roads and motor­ways carried considerably less traffic than usual, and the beautiful sunny weather was enticing very few visitors to zoos, amusement parks, seaside resorts, and the great outdoors. Football fixtures were cancelled. Airports reported a sharp decline in passenger numbers. With well over half the pop­ulation stricken with Bowdler, there was an almost instinctive desire among the affected and unaffect­ed alike to minimize contact with others. It wasn’t public knowledge that the swearing disorder could be passed on like the flu, or for that matter that tel­evision, radio, and telephones were playing a part in its dissemination. It simply seemed sensible, to a broad cross-section of the Great British public, to stay at home.

 

Children found it irresistibly amusing that they could utter forbidden words in front of their par­ents and not get told off for it. They learned to insert the words into strings of made-up nonsense. Their parents knew they were swearing, but where was the proof?

 

Disgruntled employees who had their bosses’ private phone numbers rang them and denounced them vehemently, knowing that as long as they restricted themselves to certain ribald terms and coinages their voices would be almost impossible to identify.

 

The presenter of a kids’ morning TV show, having ingested more than his fair share of cocaine in the dressing room beforehand, went a little mad and started calling his co-presenters, the program’s producer, and even the Director General of the network all sorts of foul names, thinking that because of swearing disorder he would be safe to do so. Unfortunately for him, he hadn’t actually contracted Bowdler yet. The live transmission was interrupted with a test card and the presenter was summarily sacked.

 

Performances of a David Mamet play in the West End had to be cancelled until further notice.

 

The same fate befell a one-man show from Steven Berkoff.

 

That evening, a broadcast of the movie Scarface, starring Al Pacino, garnered extraordinary ratings. Viewers tuned in simply to hear the kind of ver­biage they themselves could no longer employ. Tony Montana’s prolific cursing brought a tear to many a wistful eye.

 

Meanwhile, at Chilton Mead, someone had come up with an idea.

 

* * * *

 

“Windbag,” said Edwin Chao.

 

“Are you mad?” said Adrian Gold, the Ideative Manipulation team’s semantics guru.

 

“Set a logovirus to catch a logovirus. Release Windbag.”

 

“That’s the stupidest Łµ˘«!^§ idea I ever heard.”

 

Chao’s confidence crumbled. Blushing, he fum­bled with his spectacles and murmured that it had only been a suggestion.

 

Professor Bantling was thumb-stroking his philtrum. “As a matter of fact, Edwin...”

 

* * * *

 

It took a while to convince Nutter. With one logovirus already on the loose, unleashing another seemed to him, at the very least, rash. Yet eventu­ally Bantling’s arguments began to make sense.

 

“I’ll run it past the PM,” Nutter said, and picked up the phone. “A moment’s privacy?”

 

Bantling had to wait outside Nutter’s office for a quarter of an hour, during which time several of his colleagues passed by. All of them subjected him to frosty stares, and one even congratulated him sarcastically on putting everyone’s jobs on the line. When he was at last invited back in by Nutter, Bantling found the colonel looking markedly more haggard than when he had left him.

 

“The PM has such a saintly image, doesn’t he?” Nutter said. “But I tell you, get him away from the cameras and in a bad mood, and he could give a Glaswegian navvy a run for his money. If it wasn’t for Bowdler, the receiver would probably have melted in my hand. Anyhow... the good news is, he bought it. We can give the Windbag Strain a shot.”

 

“The bad news? I assume there is some.”

 

“Leave me to worry about that. What do you need? A company? A regiment?”

 

“How big is a regiment?”

 

“Three companies, three hundred men. With ancillary staff, say a thousand in toto.”

 

“Do you think that would be enough?”

 

“I think that’s about the most we can reasonably commandeer.”

 

“Then a regiment will be fine.”

 

* * * *

 

At midday on Sunday 21st, a blue Transit van with blacked-out windows drove onto the parade ground of Her Majesty’s 11th Bayoneteers. Assem­bled to meet the van, in neat ranks and full uniform, was the entire complement of the regi­ment.

 

The van halted, and from its passenger-side door out stepped Colonel Nutter. He was greeted with a salute by Colonel Atkins of the Bayoneteers, and he returned the salute with a vigor and crispness undiminished by his eight years behind a desk at Chilton Mead.

 

“Thank you for the use of your men, Atkins.”

 

“Not at all, Nutter. Believe me, we want to help as much as we can. Have you heard about our RSM?”

 

“No.”

 

“Hospitalized.” Colonel Atkins twirled a fore­finger beside his temple. “That sort of hospitalized. Can’t swear, and it’s driven him bonkers. A sergeant major lives by his bad lan­guage, doesn’t he?”

 

“Awful. My sympathies.”

 

“Well, quite. It means, at any rate, that the men have a vested interest. They’re mad keen to get their own back on this... this thing.”

 

The van’s rear doors opened, and Professor Bantling climbed out, followed by Edwin Chao. Both were carrying ear defenders, as was Nutter. The professor turned and beckoned, and from within the van’s darkened interior a man ventured forth hesitantly. He was dressed in the same type of hospital-style gown worn by all the test subjects at Chilton Mead, and the lower half of his face was encased in an elaborate-looking surgical gag.

 

The daylight dazzled him. As Bantling and Chao helped him down from the van, he held a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun’s glare. Barefoot, he stood on the parade ground tarmac, swaying tremulously, blinking hard, apparently unsure where he was or what he was doing there.

 

“That’s him, eh?” said Atkins.

 

“That’s him,” said Nutter. “Now listen. Do you want a set of these?” He held up his ear defenders. “For when he speaks? There are spares in the van.”

 

“Not me, old chap. What’s good enough for the men is good enough for me.”

 

Nutter gave a respectful nod. “Very well. Then shall we get on with it?”

 

At an order from a sergeant, the regiment was brought from at-ease to attention. “All right, you lot,” the sergeant yelled. “You know what you’re here for, but in case any of you haven’t been paying attention, which wouldn’t surprise me, I’ll go through it again. It’s really very simple. When required, you will be asked to listen. That’s all. Just listen. In my experience not all of you are very good at listening, but never mind. I’m sure you’ll manage. If anyone does not hear that fellow over there with the gag when he speaks, say so immediately. I sus­pect the gentleman will be addressing you somewhat more quietly than me, which I know is hard to believe, seeing how dulcet my tones are. However, there is a chance his voice may not reach those of you at the back. I repeat, if this is the case, say so immediately. It is imperative that every one of you hears him talking. Have you got that? All right.”

 

The sergeant stamped over to Colonel Atkins, saluted, and said, “Regiment ready to listen, sah.”

 

“Very good. Colonel Nutter?”

 

Nutter turned to Bantling and indicated that he should proceed. Bantling and Chao lodged their ear defenders firmly on their heads, and Nutter did the same. As Bantling moved behind his test sub­ject to undo the gag, Nutter pressed the ear defenders hard against his skull to make the soundproof seal tight and absolute.

 

For a long time the test subject said nothing. His mouth, freed from the gag, hung open in a bleary gape. His name was Alan Lloyd-Jacobs, he was fifty-two, and until three years ago he had been a classics teacher at a top public school, until an unfortunate incident—a misunderstanding, real­ly—had brought about a spectacular fall from grace. Lloyd-Jacobs was still not quite sure how it had happened. The boy had been willing, hadn’t he? That was the distinct impression he had got. Willing, if a tad nervous. Perhaps it was the language he had used in his overtures toward the lad, all that talk of concupiscent sodality and the Hel­lenic tradition. Lloyd-Jacobs had always prided himself on his elaborate and often abstruse turn of phrase. Pupils used to tease him about it, but it made him different, individual, memorably eccentric, and that was what being a schoolteacher was all about, wasn’t it? Making an impression on impressionable minds? He could not help thinking, however, that had he not been such a confirmed sesquipedalian, the boy might have apprehended his intentions sooner and thus things would not have traveled as far down the fatal road of no return as they did. In the event, Lloyd-Jacobs had been hounded out of his job, out of his home, out of his life, and had ended up broke, haunting a rancid bedsit somewhere in Plaistow and drinking far too much cheap alcohol—had become human detritus, the jetsam of an uncomprehending and unforgiving world. And then some men had grabbed him one night and he had been taken off to a white cube, where he had been subjected to all manner of strangeness and indignity. And now this.

 

“Say something,” Professor Bantling urged him, speaking too loudly on account of the ear defend­ers.

 

Lloyd-Jacobs gazed around at the soldiers, row upon row of them, all sharp creases and strong chests and smooth chins. What could he say? What did everyone expect of him here?

 

“Come on,” said Bantling.

 

After several failed attempts, Lloyd-Jacobs final­ly found his voice. “In the Spartan army,” he said, “sexual affiliation between soldiers was deemed acceptable, nay positively encouraged. It cemented comradeship. It fostered loyalty. A man was far more likely to lay down his life for a brother-in-­arms if he had first lain down with that brother-in-arms. Indeed—”

 

At this point, Bantling hurriedly reapplied the gag, and Lloyd-Jacobs was bundled back into the van.

 

Among the ranks of Her Majesty’s 11th Bayoneteers there was a certain amount of puzzlement, and not a little consternation as well. Had that man really just started to deliver a lecture on the subject of sex between soldiers? What in heaven’s name was the brass up to, ordering them to listen so attentively to that?

 

Confusing though this was, it was nothing com­pared with the orders the Bayoneteers received next.

 

* * * *

 

It had already been decided, in an emergency session of the Cabinet, that soldiers should be put on the streets.

 

“Purely a precaution,” the Prime Minister said at a press conference. “Nothing to be alarmed about. There are people who might try to take advantage of the prevailing situation of uncertain­ty, and a high-profile military presence will discourage them from doing so. Looters, rioters, and other troublemakers need to know that their behavior will not be tolerated.”

 

“Prime Minister,” asked one journalist, “is this a declaration of martial law?”

 

“Of course not,” came the reply. “If it was a dec­laration of martial law, I’d have said so, wouldn’t I?”

 

Martial law or not, the army was deployed swiftly, efficiently, extensively, and prominently. By Sunday evening there was a pair of rifle-toting sol­diers on every street corner, it seemed. Naturally their primary role was to keep the peace, and by and large they succeeded, but they had a secondary function as well. Each regiment, prior to being sent out, had been joined by a member of the 11th Bay­oneteers. The Bayoneteers had made a point of talking to everyone they met, and by God, they were a chatty lot! Loquacious in the extreme. And their loquacity, indeed their profuse verbosity, was hard to resist mimicking. In no time at all, almost every member of the British army, from private to commander-in-chief, was exhibiting a facility with and a penchant for elocutionary expatiation of the highest order, seldom using a simple, unornamented sentence construction when something far more fanciful, protracted, and obfuscatory could be employed. The Windbag Strain was taking hold.

 

* * * *

 

At Chilton Mead there was nothing to do but wait and see. Hopes were pinned on Windbag for two reasons. First, its symptoms were less startlingly dramatic than Bowdler’s, and nowhere near as unsettling. Second, by its very nature, Windbag instilled the avoidance of vulgarity. No one who caught Windbag would resort to four-letter words, not while they were so enthusiastically utilizing fourteen-letter words. The full range of the English language was theirs to command, so what need was there to wallow amid the baser idioms when altogether more refined and elegant modes of expression were available?

 

Monday morning saw members of the British public gracefully bidding one another “a pleasant day” and “adieu” as they passed by in the street. At breakfast tables, parents admonished their chil­dren to “exercise vocal desuetude” and “kindly give Godspeed to the milk.” In offices across the land, banter of Wildean caliber was exchanged.

 

Likewise in classrooms, teachers found themselves on the receiving end of waspish taunts, which wouldn’t have displeased Noel Coward. Truckers’ cafes, normally home to the saltiest dialogue known to man, became something akin to literary salons, with the waitresses being complimented on their sizeable embonpoints, even as they were invited to provide refills of that refreshing hot infusion, which slaked the thirst like no other bev­erage. London taxi drivers opened up their fare-wearying homilies with phrases such as “Do you know whom it was my honor to chauffeur just recently?” An on-board train announcement from the conductor could last nearly the entire duration of the journey between stations. Radio DJs man­aged to do without music almost altogether, being so busy introducing songs that scarcely any airtime was left in which to play them. Meanwhile, call centers suffered a marked decline in efficiency because telephone operatives were spending up to five minutes simply greeting customers.

 

Everywhere, garrulousness reigned supreme. A whole nation spoke in polysyllables and periphra­sis, from just-learning toddlers to slowly-forgetting senior citizens. The only place where no one noticed any difference was in the country’s law courts, which had long been havens for orotundity and convolution. There, it was business as usual.

 

For a day, it was amusing. People didn’t mind that some of the words coming out of their mouths were unusually and often unpronounceably ornate. They were so taken with their newfound familiarity with the nether reaches of the dictionary that they forgot all about their loss of invective capacity. Windbag, as Professor Bantling and colleagues had surmised, neutralized Bowdler’s symptoms. It was not a cure but it was a palliation, and that was the best result they could expect, under the circumstances.

 

By Tuesday, however, the British public were rapidly becoming disenchanted. Everyone was say­ing a lot but not conveying a great deal. There were plenty of words flying about but scant action. The country ground to a halt, much as it had on Saturday but, on a weekday, with more severe effect. Businesses were not doing business. Indus­try was not putting out output. The economy was starting to become economized. Precious little was being achieved, because everybody was taking too long giving orders and explaining in precise and abstruse detail what they needed. Concision was hard to come by, and hence so was productivity.

 

Bantling had suspected this might happen, but then the deployment of Windbag was, he had known, only a stopgap measure. It had been intended to give him and his assistants more time to come up with a vaccine, and they had been working round the clock in pursuit of that goal.

 

They had not yet succeeded, however, and Bantling realized that if they didn’t deliver the goods soon, the countrywide panic, which he’d predicted for Bowdler, would manifest as a conse­quence of Windbag instead. Colonel Nutter concurred. For him, there was added pressure coming from the direction of Downing Street, and not just from Number 10, either. At Number 11, concern was mounting over the sudden, sharp fall in trade and manufacturing revenue. Financially as well as socially, Britain was at risk of collapse. Nutter was besieged on two fronts at once. When he wasn’t talking to the PM, he was talking to the Chancellor. They were taking it in turns to phone him and berate him. It seemed the moment one of them put down the receiver, he would bang on the party wall to tell the next-door neighbor to pick up his receiver. Tag-team haranguing. Nutter was reaching the end of his rope.

 

Late on Tuesday afternoon, the politest protest rallies in history occurred. A frightened, bewil­dered populace took to the streets, wielding placards that were inordinately large in order to accommodate the effusive slogans daubed on them. The protestors’ chants too were of signifi­cant length and intricacy. The ringleaders did not simply shout “What do we want?” but “Let us adequately state that object of desire, which is of the utmost importance to our good selves,” and the massed responses to such exhortations could last for anything up to a minute. Shakespearean soliloquies have expressed more in less time. The protestors marched through the centers of all the major cities and voiced their fear and discontent. They pressed their already aching tongues into service, letting the government know that they had stomached a plentiful sufficiency of the current sit­uation and were unwilling to accept yet a further portion.

 

* * * *

 

Nutter delivered the bleak news to the Chilton Mead boffins on Wednesday morning.

 

“You’ve failed to come up with any results,” he said, “so I have no alternative. I’m informing the PM that he must resort to drastic measures.”

 

“D-drastic?” stammered Bantling. “How dras­tic?”

 

Nutter rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “On Sunday, the PM told me that if Windbag doesn’t do the trick—and I think we can all agree that it hasn’t— he’s going to go to the Americans.”

 

“What do the Yanks have to do with this?” demanded Chao. “What the Łµ˘« business is it of theirs?” By now, the sound of a Bowdlerized pro­fanity was so familiar it passed unremarked.

 

“For one thing,” said Nutter, “the Americans rule the world, like it or not. Everything is their business. But for another thing, their research into logoviruses is considerably more advanced than ours.”

 

“I doubt that,” scoffed Bantling.

 

“Doubt all you want, but it’s true. Some of the stuff they’ve been getting up to in their Nevada facilities makes your lot’s work look positively Stone Age. I’m sorry to be brutal, but that’s just the way it is. Geniuses though you all quite clearly are, you’re back-of-the-room schoolkids compared to them.”

 

“But we share data with the Americans all the time,” Bantling said. “Why, Professor Bergdorf and I are in constant touch by email, tossing ideas back and forth. I feel certain that if he knew something I didn’t, I’d know about it. If you see what I mean.”

 

“That’s what Bergdorf would like you to think, professor. But there are state secrets he’s prohibit­ed from passing on even if he wanted to. He’s been carrying out experiments so classified that he’d be shot just for accidentally mentioning them to his wife.”

 

Bantling opened his mouth and closed it again. Bergdorf? Hiding things from him? Inconceivable!

 

And yet at the same time it was all too conceiv­able. Bergdorf was brilliant in his field, an off-the-scale intellect. Bantling had always been surprised that he treated him, Bantling, as an equal. Flattered, too, but mainly surprised.

 

But then if Bergdorf had merely been feeding him scraps all along, like a dog at the table, and patting him on the head every so often when he did something clever...

 

It made a horrible kind of sense.

 

“What,” he asked Nutter, dry-mouthed, “do they have that we don’t?”

 

“I believe you mentioned a ‘universal language-negation logovirus’ the other day,” replied Nutter.

 

“They...” Bantling could not finish the sentence.

 

Nutter could. “They have.”

 

* * * *

 

The President of the United States took the British Prime Minister’s call at 3pm GMT, on Wednesday, June 24th.

 

Virtually the first words out of the President’s mouth were, “I’ll thank you for not swearing dur­ing this conversation.” He said this as a devout Baptist but also because his scientific advisers had warned him to take such a precaution. By some miracle, the Bowdler logovirus had not spread to any other English-speaking parts of the world, most likely due to extreme regional variations in accent and dialect. This did not mean that all pos­sible preventative care should not be taken, though.

 

The Prime Minister scrupulously avoided even the mildest of oaths as he outlined his request to the President.

 

The President was eventually persuaded to do as asked, but only with extreme reluctance.

 

“We ain’t in the habit of using our weapons on our friends,” he said. “Leastways, not on purpose. But in this case I’m gonna have to make an exception.”

 

“I’m grateful,” said the Prime Minister. “I hope we can chat again sometime soon—although I fear that may not be feasible.”

 

“Been nice talking with you, pal. Always has.”

 

The President opened a military hotline and gave the authorization protocols for an attack on Great Britain.

 

Within the hour, B2 bombers were on their way across the Atlantic.

 

* * * *

 

The Babel Bombs screamed down from the heav­ens, ready to blare their sonic message like the trump of doom on Judgment Day.

 

They detonated above city centers and rural areas alike. They roared at gigadecibel level, each loud enough to be heard fifty miles away. Satura­tion bombardment ensured that there wasn’t a single resident of the British Isles who remained out of earshot. Even at Chilton Mead, the effects of the Babel Bombs were felt, and in some sense were welcomed. Here, after all, was where it had all started. Here, therefore, were the people who least deserved to escape retribution.

 

Bantling and Nutter sat in Nutter’s office, either side of the desk. There had been silence between them for a long while. Now, finally, Nutter spoke.

 

“           ,” he said.

 

Bantling assessed the other man’s body language and decided to agree. With a nod, he said, “      .”

 

“            !” Nutter shot back testily.

 

Bantling realized he had misinterpreted. “      .” he said, in a mollifying tone of voice, and added, “      .”

 

Nutter frowned. “         ?”

 

“           ,” the professor confirmed.

 

“           ,” said Nutter. He let his shoulders rise and fall in a tragic shrug.

 

“           ,” Bantling replied emphatically.

 

And he meant it, as well.

 

* * * *