The Apes' Dissemination of the Plague was a deliberate biological attack that turned a known vulnerability into a civilization-destroying epidemic. By infecting nuts with diseases found among wild Sub-men, the Apes spread microbes through Asia; the Second Men, more vulnerable to those diseases, lost pioneering settlements and most of their population, and their civilization fell apart.

Background and Conflict

The Second Men had already discovered how dangerous diseases carried by Sub-men could be. An earlier epidemic had been stamped out only through rigorous quarantine, leaving the Second Men with reason to fear renewed exposure. Meanwhile, conflict with the Apes had grown over their harsh treatment of Sub-men, whom they forced to labor and subjected to cruelty. When the Second Men protested, the Apes could not understand the objection: they regarded the Sub-men as cattle whose purpose was to serve supposedly superior beings.

The dispute sharpened other frictions. The Apes coveted metal, hoarded it, and treated it as sacred; proposals to turn their ingots into weapons were rejected because using the metal for any practical purpose was considered base. In this strained relationship, the Second Men's protests against cruelty added to the Apes' wish to rid themselves of the invaders. Revenge was one motive for the attack, but the Apes were also drawn to the malicious reversal of using the Second Men's own vulnerability against them.

The Infected-Nut Attack

A palatable nut grew in a remote part of the country. The Apes had been bartering it for extra metal, while Second-Men pioneers planned to send caravans of the nuts into their own territory. The Apes exploited that trade: they infected large quantities of nuts with diseases rampant among wild Sub-men, then the caravans carried them across Asia. The attack turned an ordinary food shipment into a means of transmitting disease across the Second-Men settlements.

The consequences were sharply unequal. The Sub-men had become adapted to the microbes and even reproduced more rapidly in their presence. The Second Men, described as more delicately organized and wholly unfamiliar with them, were devastated. Pioneering settlements were wiped out, most of the species died, and within a few generations Asia held only scattered, diseased, and often crippled survivors. Civilization disintegrated under the epidemic.

Recovery and the Apes' Decline

The disaster did not permanently extinguish the Second Men. Within a few centuries, they had overcome the infection and begun climbing toward civilization again. After another thousand years, pioneers crossed the mountains into Africa and encountered no opposition. The account links the Apes' disappearance not simply to the epidemic but to their growing fixation on metal: burdened by its possession and by the obsession it fostered, they were eventually overthrown by the Sub-men they had enslaved.

The episode thus reverses the local hierarchy without presenting the Apes' victory as lasting. Their attempt to secure freedom from the invaders destroys Second-Men civilization for a time, but the Apes' own society later falls to the people it had treated as inferior. Meanwhile, the Second Men survive the epidemic and resume their historical ascent.

Historical Significance

The plague is a turning point in the Second Men's history because it makes biological vulnerability decisive: the attack requires neither a conventional battlefield nor a lasting occupation, only the movement of infected food through planned trade routes. Its effects reach beyond the settlements directly struck, bringing down civilization across Asia and reducing a flourishing species to scattered survivors.

The account places this catastrophe within a longer pattern of civilizational collapse. Elsewhere, the downfall of the First World State is also attributed immediately to the use of microbes, though there the consequences include an epidemic of insanity and declining intelligence. Across the history of the human species, civilizations repeatedly rise and collapse for varied reasons; the infected-nut attack stands out as a case in which an intentional act of biological transmission exploits unequal resistance and makes recovery a matter of centuries.