I have a vice.
I like post-apocalypse books (set after the destruction or near-destruction of civilization). Enjoying such novels is, I suppose, part of the same impulse that leads one to enjoy Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children books: the idea of starting fresh, with little or none of the intractable problems which we face.
So naturally I read The Stand. There were parts of it that I liked. However, my reason for reading post-apocalypse books is not to get some kind of kick out of all the suffering and death, so I literally skipped the middle third or so of the book, which was the plague itself. And the whole Dark Man and Mother Abigail thing seemed sort of unnecessary.
In post-apocalypse books, modern technology is often still around, to some degree, but King did more than most to draw out the implications of that, like the need to go through all the houses and turn off or unplug the appliances, and the fact that the bad guys didn’t just have access to guns; they had access to nukes. So I liked that part of it.
However, the beginning of the novel really, really bothers me. Not because it is anti-U.S., but because it does not make sense on its own terms. It’s even worse in the movie, incidentally.
In both book and movie, the researchers in a U.S. military establishment have developed a biological weapon, a form of flu, which gets loose and kills them all. It kills them so fast that they all collapse in the middle of their work, or in the middle of a meal. In the movie, one dies in the middle of a ping pong game. In the movie, the commanding officer observes that those who got their masks on died in twelve minutes, while those who didn’t died in five.
Now contemplate that for a moment. What use is a biological weapon that kills people in five minutes, or twelve at most? The whole point of using a biological weapon is that those who are exposed carry the disease back to others who spread it yet further. If the disease kills people so fast that they can’t spread it to others, it would be easier and cheaper to use a chemical weapon. So this instant-kill effect cannot have been intended by the developers.
Furthermore, we’re talking about a virus. A virus does not produces toxins on its own. It doesn’t do anything on its own. This virus would float around until someone inhaled it. Then it would float around in the lungs until it landed on a vulnerable cell, at which point it would release its DNA* into the cell. The DNA would have to be picked up by the cell, transcribed, and used to create more DNA and the necessary protein coat so it could go out and infect other cells. All of those processes take time. I strongly doubt that it is even possible for a virus infection to get going in five minutes, much less to kill the patient.
You might argue that the release actually took place considerably earlier, all the researchers were infected at once, and they all keeled over at once. That is contradicted by the movie, of course — if they were all infected well before the alarm went off, then putting on masks would make no difference. (Also the movie doesn’t show anyone with masks, but that’s because if they wore masks, you couldn’t admire the “horribly dead person” makeup). Even the book contradicts it, though “The accident had occurred almost perfectly between shifts”. That implies that the moment of the accident was known and the deaths occurred immediately thereafter.
Moving on, one guard, Campion, realizes the bug is loose, grabs his family, and runs. But he’s already infected, so he carries the plague to the rest of the world. But — wait —
Campion was infected by the leaked bug. But the bug must have mutated, right, since he didn’t die immediately? But his family didn’t die until later either. Maybe his family got it from him? That would imply that the bug didn’t leak into the base at large, wouldn’t it? But then why wasn’t his escape noted promptly? The only logical reason that his escape wasn’t noted is that everyone else died immediately. But that in turn means that he and his wife and his daughter each independently got a mutated strain that no one else got. And that makes no sense.
In fact, if you actually think about the disease and the way it is released, you have to conclude that it was not the result of human action or human negligence at all; it was produced by demonic interference. Since a demon shows up later, that’s a perfectly plausible conclusion.
I mentioned previously that I didn’t think a virus infection could even get started in five minutes. Of course the virus could be inhaled in just one unprotected breath, and then give rise to an infection, but I meant that the process of the virus getting into a cell, hijacking the cellular machinery, and putting it to work churning out new virus particles would take more than five minutes.
With that out of the way, the second point that really bugs me is the response of the military. Yeah, this is a paranoid post-Vietnam Cold War book and the U.S. military is irredeemably evil, but still, the military really isn’t stupid.
The Truthers claim that President Bush planned or allowed the attacks on September 11 so that he could invade Iraq. One of their pieces of “evidence” is that the military had plans already laid for that invasion. Sensible people pointed out that of course they had such plans; if you dug around enough, they likely have plans for invading Canada, and for fighting off extraterrestrials. It’s their business to try to plan for all the wars that might happen, because they know that trying to plan in the middle of a catastrophe tends to lead to bad plans. So in The Stand, they should have had a plan for managing an accidental release of their superflu.
But apparently they didn’t, or not one that covered such an extensive release. So they fell back on a cover-up: deny everything even as the nation and then the world die around them. This is explained in the book by the thoughts of the General in charge: the Corps is your father and your mother; above all else, defend the honor of the Corps.
Yeah, well, that’s stupid. Defending the honor of your mother and father by blindfolding them and then leading them over the edge of a cliff, along with everyone else in the family, is completely stupid. Insane, in fact. Especially when there’s no need.
Were I in charge of such a situation, I would call the President as soon as we realized that Campion had gotten away. I would tell him something along these lines:
MPs from Blue Base, a secret army research station (researching something legal) picked up a trespasser. They took him back to base, and since he seemed sick with some kind of flu, they put him in the Base hospital. The next morning Campion and family left on a scheduled vacation. Hours later, the trespasser died without saying a word, and since he had no identification, we have no clue where he came from. Then everyone on the Base started coming down with it; they started to die and the Commander locked it down. But Campion is off on vacation somewhere, and we don’t know if he was exposed. Meanwhile, the victims in Blue Base (those still alive) have barricaded themselves inside and are shooting at anyone who approaches; they seem to believe they are fighting off zombies. So this disease may cause psychosis, and who knows what Campion might say or do when picked up.
Now the President is primed for action. This looks like an attack with a biological weapon. We don’t know where the trespasser came from, but he’s not Army; indeed the Army is to be commended for catching him before he got into a metropolitan area. Where did he come from? We have no idea and it isn’t safe to publicly speculate. Right now we need to find Campion and his family and make sure either that he doesn’t have it, or that we contain the disease if he does.
With the President’s backing, maybe Campion could be caught before he came down with it or infected others. If not, the President could declare martial law in Texas and make a personal appeal to everyone to stay in their homes and stay off the phones except for emergencies. Despite the low opinion which Yankees have of Texans (and vice versa), this might very well have the effect of quarantining the disease until it burned out. If not, the President could do the same nationwide. Eventually we’d have to deal with the issue of “who made this virus?”, but we could finesse that: maybe lone terrorists, maybe an actual natural mutation, maybe even aliens. If the disease were shut down quick enough, it really could be put off on a natural mutation (hey, maybe it wasn’t flu at all; maybe it was an airborne Ebola variant).
The absolute worst thing to do is to reassure people that there’s no danger and that they should just go about their everyday lives, exposing themselves to infection. And that of course is what the authorities do.
Demonic influence is the only explanation.
But there are yet further issues in the book that bother me.
Even if we grant a deranged General who decides to cover up the epidemic instead of fighting it sensibly, how could he do that? His soldiers are human beings, not myrmidons or sown dragon’s teeth. They have spouses, children, parents, siblings, friends, former classmates, and they talk to each other. It would be impossible to conceal from them that they were “quarantining” (i.e., massacring) larger and larger portions of the nation. It would be impossible to keep them from warning each other and their loved ones that there is a deadly disease on the loose, and once their loved ones were warned, it would be impossible to keep the news under wraps. Even in the long-ago pre-Internet days, people had phones. It would be impossible to prevent the news from spreading except by cutting off the phone system, and once you did that to a few areas, it would be obvious that the phones were being cut off, thereby confirming the rumors. And then too, there are ham radios.
Speaking of the soldiers, there aren’t that many in the Army. Not enough to lock down the whole country (especially not if they’re trying to be subtle about it), and many of them are posted overseas. How do you get them back without attracting attention? And given that there still won’t be enough to lock down the country, you need to mobilize the National Guard. Then they’d have to be deployed locally (or else you have all kinds of cross-country troop transportation, which itself will attract attention, not to mention spread the disease), which only increases the odds of them warning their loved ones.
Furthermore, there’s the dramatic description of the cars full of dead people in the Holland Tunnel, cars that were trapped there because soldiers were guarding the New Jersey side and shooting at those trying to escape New York. Um … why? That’s no way to conceal what was happening in New York, since some people would see what was happening ahead, get out, flee back down the tunnel on foot, and spread the word back in New York, at which point you’ve got the phone and ham radio problem. Besides that, there are lots of people on the New Jersey side who could see what was happening; how do you keep them quiet? And why bother? If the situation was bad enough that people were trying to flee New York, you can bet the situation was equally bad on the New Jersey side.
And speaking of the tunnel, there’s a major problem of innumeracy in the book.
There is a principle in mathematics called the Pigeonhole Principle. Informally it is, “If there are more pigeons than pigeonholes, some of the pigeons will have to double up.”
That is, if there are 100 pigeonholes and 101 pigeons, we know for sure that at least one pigeonhole contains at least two pigeons. This does not mean, however, that if there are 100 pigeons and 100 pigeonholes, each pigeonhole must contain exactly one pigeon. On the contrary, it may be that the whole flock has crammed itself into a single pigeonhole. If we assign pigeons to pigeonholes at random, it is in fact quite probable that some pigeonholes will have more than one pigeon and others will be empty; we would not expect random assignment to place exactly one pigeon in each hole.
What does this have to do with The Stand? Glad you asked.
Stephen King seems to be under the impression that random assignment would place one pigeon in each pigeonhole. More specifically, he is under the impression that random survival in a plague does not “clump”; if only one person in a hundred survives the superflu (which is stated late in the book), then he seems to think that each survivor is surrounded by a ring of dead people. When one couple shows up in Boulder claiming to be husband and wife, no one really believes them because they don’t (or rather Stephen King doesn’t) believe two members of a family would both be survivors.
They are quite wrong. Indeed, given the number of people who end up in Boulder (about thirty thousand), I would expect hundreds to come as couples from before the plague. Indeed, I would imagine most survivors would find someone that they knew before the plague, or at least someone that they had some connection with. It’s easy to calculate how many pre-plague people a survivor would need to know in order to have, say, a 50% chance of having another survivor among his acquaintances given 99% mortality; the answer is sixty-nine (69). Do you know sixty-nine people, counting family, friends, co-workers, and family of co-workers? I do, and I have a very limited circle of acquaintances.
I rather imagine survivors going around checking on family, friends, and co-workers, and thus meeting up with other survivors with whom they feel some connection, a connection which would be the stronger because they were surrounded by so many dead.
Hmm, that rather casts a different light on Boulder and Las Vegas, actually. All of the people who ended up there were isolates, people who had no attachment to anyone else and did not in fact go looking for family, friends, and co-workers who might have survived (except for Harold, who went looking for Fran; maybe that’s why Harold didn’t fit in too well in Boulder). I imagine all the people who were plugged into a social circle staying in their towns and trying to rebuild, while the isolates went off in the thrall of demons (Mother Abigail isn’t supposed to be a demon, but to me she does rather seem like the cat’s paw of a demon).
But I still haven’t explained the problem with the Holland Tunnel.
According to Wikipedia, the current population of Manhattan is 1,585,873 and the area is almost 23 square miles. Rounding things off, that gives us a population of about 107 per acre. Kill off 99% of the population, and you still have about one per acre.
I have a good sense of what one per acre would mean since I live on a lot of a little more than one acre. If one or two people from each house in my neighborhood were to walk out and stand in the driveway, that would give us a density of about one per acre.
Stands in the driveway and looks up and down the street
If one or two people were standing in each driveway, no one would consider this neighborhood deserted.
Of course, there are a lot more buildings in Manhattan, so the one person per acre wouldn’t have an acre of open land around him and Manhattan would look even less deserted. When I lived on the Upper West Side for several years, I calculated that more than a thousand people lived on the one block I lived on, and that wasn’t even what Manhattanites would consider a dense population (only four-story buildings). So you’d expect about a dozen survivors just on that one block.
In fact, you’d expect about 15,000 survivors in Manhattan and a similar number in Brooklyn, not to mention the survivors on Long Island.
And all of those tens of thousands of survivors would want to get away from the millions of dead rotting in the summer sun.
Which brings me to the Holland Tunnel.
There aren’t that many ways to get from Manhattan (and from Brooklyn through Manhattan) to the mainland. Most people would prefer the bridges (certainly I would), but for many it would be a longer hike to a bridge than to a tunnel. In other words, there wouldn’t be just Larry and Rita escaping through the Holland Tunnel; there would be hundreds, maybe thousands of people over a period of a few days.
The streets, bridges, tunnels, and roads would not be totally deserted unless you assume a mortality way higher than 99%. In fact, when I was reading The Stand, I thought the mortality was more like 99.9% (i.e., one survivor in 1,000) or more. Then there would be only about 1,600 survivors in Manhattan and not many escaping through the tunnels at any given time. That would yield a total surviving population of about 250K (given the smaller population when the book was written), of which a large chunk would end up in either Boulder or Las Vegas. But it is stated later that mortality was 99%.
Innumeracy, I tell you.
I will wind up my comments on The Stand with the point that bothered me more than anything else.
At the end of the book, Fran’s baby gets the superflu and survives.
No.
No.
No.
It is firmly established throughout the book that there are only two reactions to the superflu: either you get it and die, or you don’t get it at all. If there were such a thing as partial immunity, that changes everything! If immunity is passed on to children, however the immunity is passed on, and if there were partial immunity then it should have been observed among the hundreds of millions getting sick in the U.S. and the billions worldwide.
The expanded version of the book makes it very clear that there were survivors who had children, some of them many children, and those children were not partially immune; they were not immune at all. Why should Fran’s baby, alone of all the offspring of all the immunes in the world, be half-immune? And then all the children of two immunes turned out fully immune and that makes no sense!
Let’s look at a woman pre-plague. What are the odds that she is immune to the plague? One in a hundred. What are the odds that her significant other was also immune to the plague? One in a hundred. So the odds that both were immune are one in 10,000. Now, considering that there would be something like fifty million couples in pre-plague America, we’d expect about five thousand to be composed of two immunes. And unless there is something very strange about immunes, at least some of those five thousand couples would have children and, according to the end of the book, those children would all be immune.
Furthermore, there’d be about half a million couples where only one was immune, and the children would be half-immune, like Fran’s baby, and some of them should have survived just as hers did.
Given this, not only would I expect to see some pre-plague couples show up together in Boulder, I’d expect whole families to show up — parents and children — and I’d expect a lot of half-immunes who successfully fought off the superflu. The fact that none of this happened implies that immunity is not actually passed on genetically and this is just more demonic meddling. I guess some demon finally decided to do something about the demonic flu and turned it into a natural flu that could be resisted. Or something.
* Or RNA, if it’s a retrovirus.
