The story in three movements
After each movement, answer from memory before revealing the response. The turn remains hidden until you commit to a prediction.
1 · A private demonstration
The visitor was a thin man with restless hands. He sat at the bacteriologist's table and listened with such fierce attention that the scientist found himself talking more freely than usual.
On the table stood glass dishes, sealed tubes and small bottles in which nothing appeared to be alive. To the visitor they looked harmless. That, the bacteriologist explained, was precisely the danger.
“A city may fear guns and soldiers,” he said, holding a tube towards the light, “yet this little speck could pass through its defences unnoticed.”
The visitor leaned closer. He asked what would happen if such an organism entered a water supply. He wanted to know how quickly illness would spread and whether anyone could stop it. The questions came too eagerly, but the bacteriologist was pleased by the effect of his knowledge.
Ordinarily he would have answered with professional caution. Today vanity was stronger. He described invisible armies multiplying in warm water and whole districts falling ill before a doctor understood what had happened. Each detail pulled the visitor further across the table.
At last he unlocked a cabinet and took out a small blue-green vial.
“Here is living cholera,” he said. “Enough, perhaps, to frighten half London.”
The man's pale face brightened. For a moment he looked almost joyful.
Then the door opened and the bacteriologist's wife called her husband from the room. The scientist apologised and followed her. He was away for less than a minute.
When he returned, the visitor had gone. So had the vial.
Answer from memory
What does the scientist assume about the visitor, and which detail should make him question that assumption?
2 · Three cabs through London
The visitor was already at the end of the street. He climbed into a cab, pushed money into the driver's hand and ordered him towards the centre of London. Inside his coat, the stolen tube felt no heavier than a pencil.
Behind him came a shout. The bacteriologist ran out of the house without a hat and with only one shoe. He saw the cab turn the corner, stopped another and leapt in.
“Follow that cab! Don't lose it!”
A few moments later his wife appeared carrying his coat, hat and missing shoe. She saw her husband standing wildly in a moving cab and reached the only reasonable conclusion: something had happened to his mind. She took a third cab and ordered her driver to follow both men.
So three cabs drove furiously through the London traffic. The visitor looked back and saw the bare-headed scientist gaining on him. He imagined the police, the trial and the newspapers. He also imagined the city after he had poured the tube into a reservoir. At last the world would learn what one determined man could do.
Pedestrians jumped away from the wheels. A policeman shouted as the cabs cut across an intersection. To the visitor, every startled face already belonged to the future panic; to the bacteriologist, every delay brought the missing culture closer to destruction.
His cab struck a rut. The little vial flew from his fingers and broke against the floor. A drop of liquid shone on the glass.
The visitor stared at it. Then, before fear could defeat pride, he picked up the broken tube and swallowed what remained.
“Long live anarchy!” he cried through the window.
The bacteriologist saw the movement. His face changed. He stopped shouting to the driver and sank slowly back into his seat.
Answer from memory
Why does the visitor drink the liquid, and what does this decision reveal about him?
Stop and predict. Give the most likely ending and the most surprising ending that still fits the evidence.
3 · The colour of the mistake
The second cab slowed. The scientist was no longer interested in catching the thief. Instead, he seemed to be calculating something.
His wife's cab drew beside him.
“What has happened?” she demanded. “Why are you travelling through London dressed like this?”
He looked down at his single shoe as if noticing it for the first time.
“Minnie, I have been very foolish.”
He explained that the visitor had stolen a laboratory preparation. His wife went white.
“You said it was cholera.”
“I said so because I wanted to impress him.” The bacteriologist gave an embarrassed cough. “It was not cholera at all.”
The organism was new and almost completely useless. In experiments it had produced only one remarkable effect: several animals had developed bright blue patches. He had not yet discovered why.
Minnie looked ahead at the distant cab. The thief had drunk the preparation with the expression of a martyr entering history. Somewhere in London he was probably waiting for fever, pain and the collapse of civilisation. The difference between his intention and his probable appearance was too absurd to describe.
Far ahead, the visitor sat proudly in his cab, waiting for the first signs of a glorious death. He did not know that his skin might soon become a scientific curiosity.
Minnie stared at her husband. “Then why were you chasing him?”
The bacteriologist looked genuinely offended by the question.
“My dear, that cultivation took weeks to prepare. Now I shall have to make it all over again.”
Answer from memory
How does the final explanation change the genre of the story?