Pheromone

Pheromone

fiction
edward w pritchard

The unthinkable had happened and China and India, the two most populous countries in the World, were about to go to war along their joint borders. The War being deemed bad for business worldwide by the US and European stock exchanges, myriad peaceful solutions were proposed and floated to try to prevent the terrible outbreak of violence and destruction that was about to occur.

Mutual cultural associations between China and India, such as Buddhism, respect for philosophy in general, and their superior and ancient cultural heritages were repeated over and over in the various Western Presses;in an attempt to beguile the belligerents to settle their differences. At length all such slanted propaganda failed to appease the situation and two extremely large armies massed at the joint borders of India and China.

One night a few days prior to the first armed conflict individual soldiers began to display communal and group behavior of a type never before witnessed by Scientists in humans. Investigation uncovered that soldiers and civilians of both sides in coming confrontation between China and India were identifying and massing to protect their own kind based on the sense of smell. Scientists identified that a pheromonal response was driving the Chinese to irrationally love and protect Chinese people and the Country of China and the same pheromonal response among the people of India was causing them to do likewise toward their own kind. Even civilians far from the battlefields and borders were acting the same way. No amount of discussion, calls to logical, religious, or historical example would be listened to or even heard by either side in the coming conflict.

As two gargantuan armies lined up along the joint borders of India and China, religious leaders prayed, politicians talked and raised money and taxes, and scientists throughout the world rushed to develop a pheromone that would duplicate the jingoism toward their appropriate group in their own Countries. As individual Scientists everywhere puttered about their labs dissecting insects and doing other such related research on pheromones the two belligerent armies instinctually prepared for battle.
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