Briefly, the situation appeared like this: The spread of the disease had accelerated, so had the course of it. Mostly people were dying quickly once the sores started; there were some recoveries but the death toll was very high, more in some areas than others, and was worse in the Home Counties and the Midlands than elsewhere. This was hardly surprising in view of the concentrations of population. In London almost all non-essential shops and offices had shut down indefinitely, the rest — food shops and the like — were keeping going as best they could and would continue so doing for as long as humanly possible. If they should all be forced to shut, plans were in readiness for men of the three armed services to rush food into all regions and issue it from centralized depots under military control. There would, of course, be rationing — a localized form of this was already being operated by shopkeepers and supermarkets in the worst-hit areas. There was virtually a complete shut-down of public transport except in the remoter country areas — the London tubes were at a total standstill and just a handful of buses running — and it had become difficult in many areas to find garages open for the sale of petrol. Private motoring for pleasure had been banned and all car-owners had been advised that their vehicles were subject to requisition if and when it became necessary for the movement of essential supplies or of the sick or dead. There was a macabre warning that the supply of coffins had already run out in some areas but that the bereaved could rest assured more would be rushed in as soon as they became available. The Government was remaining in London, so was the Monarch. A State of Emergency had been proclaimed, parliament itself had been prorogued so that the members could attend to their constituencies, and the country would for the time being be governed by Orders in Council. There had been a few incidents — mob violence in the East End, looting of shops, mainly food shops, something that sounded like a near-progrom against coloured people in the Midlands, and windows broken in Whitehall and Downing Street. An effigy of the Health Minister had been constructed, set light to, and hurled flaming into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. Arrests had been made — no more trouble was expected. The announcer sounded as if he really believed that. At last there was a total clamp-down on incoming holidaymakers; and most other countries had announced a ban on entry by anyone from, or through, Britain except on the most urgent and strictly supervised grounds. Thus all airports and seaports were at a standstill.
The whole of Britain was at a standstill. Perhaps that, and that alone, was what Fesse wanted to achieve. Well — he had. It was victory. It was victory even though Radio Four ended its announcement with an assurance that everything possible was being done and that everything would remain fully under control.
*
The itch started, all over.
We couldn’t even scratch, Jagger and I. All we could do was to roll from side to side and try to ease that itch on the rough blanket thrown over the operating table beneath our bodies. That made it worse, after a while. Even so, the urge to scratch was irresistible, and we rolled again from time to time until I overdid it and the damn table rocked sideways and went down, with me underneath it. It wasn’t heavy, but it was uncomfortable until someone who had noted the collapse on the telly came in and put me right again — wearing rubber gloves up to his elbows and washing these very carefully in a basin before he left the room. Soon after that the sores took over and the itch began to lessen. Looking across at Jagger, looking down at my own naked chest and stomach, I saw those sores form, and bleed, and spread, and begin to suppurate. They hurt, especially when they formed on my back and buttocks, and along the underside of my thighs and legs. Uncleanliness was the least of the things I felt. I would never feel clean again. I’d had my go of chicken-pox as an adult, and until now I’d felt there could be few things worse than to have chicken-pox after childhood days. But this … this was a million times worse, and I knew it was a killer.
Jagger began moaning and I cursed at him savagely, unfairly and stupidly. Then I heard another moaning cry overlaying his and I knew it was my own. I tried to clamp down on that, tried as hard as I knew how. Without any movement of my own I felt my flesh crawl, crawl as if with living things, little worms and maggots, as the sores spread. On my stomach, looking at it against my will in a morbid fascination, I saw faintly reddened areas of skin begin to bubble up in tiny pin-pricks of clear matter, and then burst, and redden more, and acquire a hard edge and then merge into the sores behind them. Soon I felt the formation around my neck. I was sweating like a pig by this time, and I dare say that hastened the process. I knew I smelt, too, and that Jagger smelt — with a revolting mousey smell. I started to shiver soon after that, though I was still sweating, and I felt sick in the guts, mortally sick so that I began a dry retch. Blood seemed to fill my head to bursting point and all my blood vessels were on fire. But mentally I was as clear as a bell for some hours. Then I grew fuzzy, and before everything went into a fuzz, I remember thinking that at any moment from then on I was going to die. I was scarcely conscious of someone coming quietly into the room and I certainly didn’t recognize him as Fesse until he spoke. His voice seemed to come from a hell of a long way off and I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I believe he stood there for some time and I felt, vaguely enough, his rubber-gloved touch on parts of my body, and his fingers gently pulling my eye-lids about and opening my mouth for a long look. Then the fuzzy outline of him moved away and I heard him tinkering about in the bottle cabinet and when he came back I felt another needle jab into me, this time in my right thigh.
10
FESSE’S voice seemed to come from a long way off and I found his outline still blurred as well. Frankly I don’t think I was entirely sure he was really there; I seemed to be deep in a kind of nightmare even though I knew I was not asleep. It was a very odd and unnerving feeling. I listened to that distant voice, speaking quietly while its owner’s outline bulged and contracted as though I were seeing an image in a distorting mirror. Fesse was telling me that I, and Jagger too, had just been given an injection of the antidote and was assuring us that this appeared to have successfully brought about a cure in Jane Airdrie, whose sores were now drying up.
The voice said, “I am quite hopeful that soon the skin will start to grow again. I shall be interested to see how the injection affects you and your friend. We must give it time, of course, but not a long time. In the case of the young girl, the disease-process was quite quickly reversed.” I asked, and my own voice sounded pretty distant too, “Why did you have to do that to her, Fesse?”
“She is a guinea-pig,” he answered. “Simply that. It came to my knowledge that she had contracted the first of the symptoms, the itching. And, you see, there was this mouse that Hartinger had taken with him on the airliner. The link between Miss Jane Airdrie’s itching symptoms and the fact of Hartinger’s presence aboard the aircraft was too obvious to be neglected … and I found it very easy to trap her and to bring her here.”
“Why bother? She wasn’t your only human guinea-pig, was she?”
“No,” Fesse admitted. “But she was the only direct link with the aircraft and Hartinger — no-one else among the passengers had come out with any symptoms. The Customs men …” He shrugged, and his outline bunched grotesquely. “That did not have to come from the American arrival. On the other hand Miss Airdrie’s connexion could have become too obvious — as indeed, it seems, it did to you. On that I congratulate you. But you can perhaps understand now why I needed to remove her from the daily scene in case she was questioned further.”
“Removing her could have been risky too, couldn’t it? When people disappear, they tend to get looked for, don’t they?”
He laughed, almost indulgently. “The proof of the pudding is, as ever, in the eating. Yes, she has been looked for no doubt, but she has not been found, except by you of course, and that has made little difference to me.”
“Yet.”
“I am in no sense alarmed by that little word, yet. You cannot get away from here, my dear Shaw, you mu
st realize that for yourself. Neither will it help you if the unlikely should happen and this place be found.”
“Oh?”
Fesse leaned forward towards me, smiling, complacent. He said in that harsh, throaty voice, “I do not need to tell you that all this tunnel is below the loch. I think the rest can safely be left to your own imagination, do you not agree?”
He got up then and went away and the door was locked and bolted behind him. He had been right in what he had said about my imagination. I could see the whole thing very vividly. Death by drowning when Fesse opened the floodgates and let in Loch Cuillart. With our deaths, he would also destroy the evidence, at least for quite long enough to suit himself. No-one would be able to sort out a submerged tunnel in the time it would take Fesse to get himself in the clear — backed as he was by WUSWIPP, he’d be out of the country before the first frogman was past the door from the entry chamber. In any case, it was still as unlikely as ever that anybody was going to find the tunnel at all.
Things looked dead hopeless.
At least, they did in all but one respect: Fesse’s antitoxin injection worked. Jagger and I gradually improved throughout the next few hours. The nausea went, so did the muzzy feeling, and the actual sores. We were left raw and tender and mostly skinned, which was painful enough, but there was no doubt that the disease had receded. Green-gowned orderlies, or male nurses, came in to observe us from time to time, and then Fesse came back and examined us. He seemed very pleased, and gave some instructions to the orderly, who applied an ointment to our bodies which soothed our suffering quite a lot. In view of what was to happen to us ultimately this tender concern seemed in a sense unnecessary, but I supposed Fesse wanted to satisfy himself that a saved sufferer could grow a new skin.
*
That was what we did — grew new skins.
That new skin first appeared as an all-over thin, transparent covering and this gradually, during the next few days, thickened and toughened. We were still tender but at least we were whole again and felt well. Even my leg was almost a hundred per cent again. Fesse kept us well fed and watered and when he came in one day to pass our skins as completely okay I asked him if the ointment also came from the moon.
“It is partly so derived,” he said. “Certain constituents of the moon samples are used in very minute quantities, but the ointment is conventionally based and is largely nothing more startling than lanolin.”
“But it’s the moon derivatives that achieve the effect?”
“This is my belief, yes.”
“You’ve made quite a series of discoveries, haven’t you? What about telling us the score, Fesse? What’s it all for?” He frowned, seemed to consider, then nodded and sat down in the hard chair by the side of me. He said, “You know, of course, what the aims of WUSWIPP are. Peace and progress. Progress in scientific knowledge and in technology —”
“Yes,” I interrupted. “I know all that. It’s the biggest lie I’ve ever been faced with, but we’ll let that pass for now. If —”
“It is no lie,” Fesse said solemnly. “No lie at all. Progress, as we all know, must be made and cannot be stopped by those who wish to stay for ever in the mud of the past. It must be made in peace — when there is war, all progress ceases except insofar as more effective means of making war are devised —”
“More effective means of killing? Isn’t that what WUSWIPP has always been out to achieve?”
“By no means. That is incidental.” He was going into the double-talk now, which again was what I had learned to expect from WUSWIPP. Those boys hated the truth, hated to see themselves plain. I wondered why. If I was a villain I doubt if I would hide it from myself. But then I suppose you never can tell, until a thing has happened. Fesse went on. “We naturally do not attempt to deny our political affiliations — we are Socialists, and —”
“Communists, you mean.”
Fesse spread his hands. “Use the term if you wish. Certainly we are based in the political East. Now, it follows from this, does it not, that any progress we achieve is apt to come into sharp conflict with your Western aspirations and so —”
“Come to the point, for God’s sake,” I said. “You mean you want to rub us all out by some gigantic master-stroke. You’ve tried it often enough. That dump of High’s, out in the South Pacific. Weiler’s pet scheme of nuclearizing the Antarctic. Peace and progress my foot, Fesse! What you’re after currently is the complete destruction of Britain, isn’t it? If this filthy disease goes on for much longer, we’re going to be wiped out economically. Your boys know quite well what even flu and rheumatism does to man-hours and the export target! Why not turn over a new leaf and be honest?”
Fesse said patiently, “We do not wish to bring about what you say. It is not important to us.”
Well, I’d had the same thought earlier. Britain really didn’t count for much now; our collapse wouldn’t make all that much difference to any world power balances, though there might be economic repercussions on the dollar. So maybe Fesse was being honest after all. He got into his stride again. “A blunder has been made,” he said. “Yet not a blunder, perhaps … an error of judgment. What has happened was unintentional.”
“An expensive error, Fesse.”
“Yes. Let me explain. The disease was released in certain selected areas, all of them country ones — that is, not the big industrial conurbations — so that I could make a field test. That was all.”
“You mean the thing spread faster than you thought it would?”
“Yes, this is so, I am afraid. There is the error of judgment, Shaw. I did not at that time know quite enough about the disease and — this I admit — it passed beyond my control.”
“I see.” I wished like hell I had my hands free. I saw young Claire, Jagger’s niece, again, and Morag, and old Tam McFee with that terrible overgrown mouse leering from the corner by his death-bed. “And it’s still out of control. Isn’t it?”
“Not any more,” Fesse said. “You have seen for yourself, I have the antidote now. Miss Airdrie is fully recovered and so are you two. In addition, I now know the rate of spread, which is a thing I did not know before. This, again I admit it, took me by surprise.”
“Could you cure the population, stop what’s going on at this moment? Would that be possible?”
“Possible, yes. Naturally, a tremendous amount of the vaccine would be needed, but the problem of that is far from insuperable. In non-technical terms, a little goes a long way and it is in fact self-productive. It grows — like yeast, it lives and it grows. All the time it is growing, and doubling, and doubling again, and then again.” He paused. “There is still much about it that I do not know, of course. I can produce it, I can use it, but I cannot yet tell what makes it grow, nor indeed what its composition is. We know so little of moon materials.”
“How did you plant it in the first place — the disease itself, I mean?”
“I think you have seen that for yourself, Commander Shaw.”
“Have I? I’ve seen the contagion …” Then I ticked over. “The yellow rain-deposits — of course. Yes, I’ve seen it right enough!”
Fesse nodded. “That was, and will be, the method of dissemination. I prepared the formula in powder form after extracting the micro-organisms from the infected mice … it is a complex process, but fully documented now, and, as in the case of the anti-vaccine, the organisms are self-productive. I had plenty of powder, you see. This I arranged to be puffed into the wind at a time when there was cloud, with rain expected. Anyone who touched that powder contracted the disease to a greater or lesser extent — or failed to do so, according to his own physical properties, his blood and so on, and even his state of general health at the time. Earth humans do in some cases have a resistance to it.” I could tell from the look in his eyes that the point was coming out at any moment. It came when he said, “Especially those with a dark pigmentation. Now do you understand?”
I said, “Not quite. I’m not all that fair myself.”
“True, and in fact you did not have the disease in such a virulent form as if you had been fair. Miss Airdrie suffered much more than you or your friend Mr Jagger. But you are not as dark, Commander Shaw, as a coloured person.”
“Oh,” I said. “So that’s it! Selective death. Kill off the whites and solve the colour problem in reverse! Well, I suppose it’s clever. Don’t the coloured people ever get it?”
“So far as I can say, very seldom. I am sure I am right. The official broadcasts appear to indicate a very small degree of incidence among your coloured immigrant population. I would forecast that you would find on analysis of the deaths that where these have occurred among coloured people in say, the industrial heart of Britain, they have occurred only where there has been white blood in the antecedents of the persons concerned, and that the general severity of the disease has been in direct proportion to the amount of that white ancestry.”
I lay there staring at the ceiling, over which lay Loch Cuillart. My brain reeled. The implications of the man’s words were endless and imponderable. He looked down at me with a superior smile on his heavy face and I asked, “Do you mean to kill off all the white populations throughout the world — except of course the whites in the Eastern power bloc?”
“It is not so straightforward as that,” Fesse said. “The important thing is, as I have said already, that the disease can be used with full selectivity now that it is controllable. We of WUSWIPP do not especially want to see the world entirely populated by the coloured races. There is room for both, as we all know. But we now have a very useful weapon in our hands, insofar as we shall be able, peacefully, to kill off groups of people whenever it suits our purpose politically. You will see how valuable we shall become to certain governments whom I need not name. I shall give you some examples. There is trouble, shall we say, in the West Indies. We puff a little powder into the wind, and most of the white people die, so do those who take their places. The native population remains almost unaffected. The whites are forced to withdraw their claims — and we gain an ally and much goodwill when a mission goes in to take over and remove the island from Western Imperialism.” He shrugged. “This is a small thing, an unimportant example perhaps. Your own intelligence will tell you how else, and more importantly, it can be applied.”
Hartinger's Mouse (Commander Shaw Book 12) Page 13