In the story, the high-spirited rantings of a bacteriologist about the terrible power of cholera microbes in the presence of a strange visitor are a bright satire on the philistine scientists who, by their activities, prepare the emergence of dictators building their dominance over the deaths of millions of people. A man who is called to fight illnesses not only enjoys the terrible pictures of the consequences of the epidemic that arise in his imagination, but also when he expounds the prospect of the possible death of mankind before the anarchist, induces him to do anti-humane action.
Pointing to a test tube with a liquid, he suggests: "here is the pestilence imprisoned. Only break such a little tube into a supply of drinking water, say to these minute particles of life: "Go forth, increase and multiply and replenish the cisterns” – and death - mysterious, would be released upon the city.” The further narrative of the abduction of the test tube by a maniac who wished to avenge the world for his own insignificance by the spread of the cholera bacillus, and the pursuit of the scientist is extremely dramatized. Accidentally breaking the test tube, but not wanting to give up his plan to become famous, the kidnapper drinks the remaining liquid and goes "towards the Waterloo Bridge, trying to hit as many pedestrians as possible with his bacilli body." The consciousness of a close death left an imprint of dignity on all its appearance, and in these words one can hear unconcealed irony.
The peculiarity of the method of depicting characters in this story is in the combination of satirical elements with tragicomic ones. At the end of the work the comic discrepancy of the bacteriologist's frightening speeches about the danger of the drug being demonstrated to the true state of things is being clarified. In recognition of this amateur, to speculate, in the presence of a patient listener, he exercises in eloquence, holding in his hands a test tube with a new kind of bacteria, the danger of which was only that it changed the color of the swallowed. As an unhappiness of universal scale, an enlightened philistine perceives the loss of this, in fact, useless drug, and puzzles over the search for opportunities to obtain a new culture.
The image of an anarchist preparing for death is also tragicomical, with the thought that it will cause the death of mankind, and not suspecting that he himself was a victim of a bacteriologist inclined to rhetorical exercises, and that in the worst case he is in danger of getting stoned from the action of a drunk liquid . So in the story, a type of aggressive bourgeois is debunked, making an attempt to destroy the world in the name of his own glorification. According to Wells, megalomania is inherent not only extraordinary, but also quite ordinary personality, which also can bring a lot of harm to mankind.
