The White Plague

by Frank Herbert

  “Has been monitored by us,” Stonar said. “By amazing, did you mean they will produce a cure?”

  “How can we tell until we have the complete picture?” Ruckerman asked.

  Hupp nodded.

  “Stay out of this, frog,” Stonar warned.

  But Ruckerman now had the clue he needed. Hupp had not let the cat out of the bag, not to this turd!

  “You are not helping our efforts by this attitude,” Ruckerman said. “There is a high likelihood that we will be able to produce a… cure, if you will.”

  “But you used the word amazing.”

  “The President is impatient,” Ruckerman said. “And it’s my informed guess that we will succeed. As a scientist, however, I cannot tell you flatly right now that we will be able to nullify the plague. All I can say for sure is that we’ll have a complete picture of it quite soon.”

  “How soon?”

  Ruckerman glanced at Hupp as though to say: “This is too much.” Hupp shrugged. “Weeks, perhaps,” Ruckerman said, a sigh in his voice. “And maybe only days. We are tracing out an extremely complicated organism for which there is no precedent. It is absolutely new, man-made.”

  “You told your President that you’ve given Hupp and his team ‘a complete picture.’ A complete picture of what?”

  “I brought with me some new software, a computer search program, which has speeded up our efforts remarkably. The President knew I was bringing this.”

  “Why didn’t you inform us of this immediately?”

  “I didn’t think you would understand it,” Ruckerman said. “I was given to understand that only Beckett’s team was sufficiently advanced to employ this software effectively.”

  “Given to understand? By whom?”

  “By Beckett himself, among others!”

  “And the reports of your spies!” Stonar accused.

  “Mister Stonar,” Ruckerman said, “the search program is in Huddersfield’s computer system where anyone can have access to it. If you wish to examine it, please feel free.”

  Stonar glared at him. The bastard, Ruckerman! He knew computer software was beyond the inspector’s competence! Scowling, Stonar stepped to the door and opened it. “Send in General Shiles.” Stonar waited to one side of the open door.

  Presently, a brigadier general in a superbly tailored field uniform strode into the room. He nodded once to Stonar. Shiles was a tall, skinny figure, monocle in right eye, swagger stick under left arm. He had weathered skin and a hawk’s-beak nose above a tight little mouth and square chin. The eyes were pale blue and the one behind the monocle gave off a glassy sheen.

  “You heard the entire conversation, General?” Stonar asked.

  “Yes, sir.” Shiles’s voice was brusk and clipped.

  “I must be getting back to base immediately,” Stonar said. “I’ll leave you to lay out the conditions to everyone here. You can start with the frog and his friend, the spy.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Stonar passed a baleful stare across Hupp and Ruckerman but did not speak. Turning, Stonar left the room. A uniformed hand reached in from outside and closed the door.

  “I have a full brigade plus the original guards in position around this establishment,” Shiles said, speaking to a position between Hupp and Ruckerman. “No one from here will be permitted to leave. No more going down to the village pub of an evening. There will be no outside communication without my personal permission. Do you understand?”

  “Sir,” Hupp said. “I think I can…”

  Ruckerman placed a hand over Hupp’s mouth and shook his head. Shiles regarded Ruckerman with astonishment. Lifting a notepad and pencil from Hupp’s lab table, Ruckerman scribbled a few words and passed the tablet to Shiles.

  Time for the carrot, Ruckerman thought. The stick sure as hell would not work with this man.

  Shiles gave him a momentary cold appraisal before taking the tablet and reading what Ruckerman had written. The monocle dropped out of Shiles’s eye. He replaced it before finding the pencil and writing beneath Rucker-man’s message: “How can this be?”

  Ruckerman took the next page in the tablet and wrote: “What we have discovered leaves no other conclusion.”

  Shiles glanced at the door through which Stonar had gone, then at Ruckerman.

  Ruckerman shook his head, took the tablet and wrote: “He can deliver death; we can deliver life.”

  General Shiles tore off the used pages of the tablet and stuffed them into a side pocket. He tapped his left thigh with his swagger stick. Ruckerman could see decision forming in the man. That was a rich carrot displayed on the pages of the tablet. A long, long life and perfect health. And Shiles was a man to believe in scientists. Were they not the ones who had given him atom bombs and rockets? He must know this prize was worth the gamble. He would want to control it.

  “Damme!” Shiles said. “It would appear I’ve been given charge over the golden egg.”

  “Remember what happened when the farmer killed the goose,” Hupp said.

  “You’re quite bright for a frog,” Shiles said. “Just don’t forget that I’m the farmer.”

  “I presume you will use discretion,” Ruckerman said.

  “Indeed,” Shiles said. “I will leave you two to your scientific devices now. I trust you’ll explain the new rules to your teammates? Leave Wycombe-Finch to me.”

  Ruckerman waved a cautionary finger.

  “Yes, quite,” Shiles said. “The fewer who know the better.” Turning on one heel, he strode to the door, flung it open and left them.

  Hupp heard heels clicking outside and imagined the snappy salutes. The British were very good at snappy salutes.

  “It could be worse,” Ruckerman said.

  Hupp nodded agreement. Ruckerman had been right to silence him. There were listeners behind every wall. And Ruckerman was correct to bring Shiles into the picture. There was plenty of power to go around. Shiles had the look of a man who enjoyed power, the more power the better.

  “Wycombe-Finch is off the hook and we’re on it,” Ruckerman said.

  Perhaps our greatest crime was this devotion to violent fanaticism. It led us to kill off or otherwise silence moderation. We destroyed our moderates, that’s what we did. And look what it brought us!

  – Fintan Craig Doheny

  JOHN TOOK an instant dislike to Adrian Peard at the Killaloe Facility. The man was all decked out in lovat green tweeds, standing at the entrance to greet the new arrivals. He was a caricature of the great seigneur, that brown face under the courtyard’s intense lighting.

  The Lab had been visible in the fading light as John’s armored car had come down out of the hills. It was not actually at Killaloe, their driver had explained, but farther north. The name was a deliberate bit of confusion, which they were not to expose. The facility was a large stone building that once had been a castle. The daub-gray stone lay within the crooked arm of a hill like a malignant growth that had extruded several feelers toward the nearby lakeshore.

  “It doesn’t belong there, that’s what you’re thinking,” the driver had said. “Everyone thinks that. But it’s better inside. From the inside, you cannot see the place.”

  “Welcome to the Killaloe Facility,” Peard said after introducing himself. His handshake was dry and perfunctory. “Your fame has preceded you, Doctor O’Donnell. We’re all quite excited.”

  John felt anger. Doheny had made good his threat to create a John O’Donnell myth! Father Michael and the boy were assigned a guide and directed to “the other wing.” The priest avoided John’s eyes as he left. Father Michael had been silent and withdrawn ever since John’s confession. O’Neill-Within had ceased howling, though, and John felt somewhat calmer. Confession had helped. The mental confusion that had followed confession lay in a walled-off limbo. All John wanted now was food and rest, a time to think.

  “We’ve laid on a small meeting of top staff,” Peard said. “Hope you feel up to it. Time presses.”

  John bl
inked at him, anger suspended in fatigue.

  Peard thought the man looked tired and confused, but Doheny had said to give no time to reflect. Keep him off balance. Still… this was supposed to be O’Neill?

  The courtyard air smelled of lake dampness and mildew with overtones of exhaust fumes from the departed armored cars. John was glad to leave it. Peard escorted him inside the great double doors, all the time keeping up a bright patter of conversation. They went down a long hall, many doors, some standing open with people visible inside at various occupations – computer terminals, a centrifuge whirling, the hiss of steam from a sterilizer. John recognized blue laser light in one room. The impression was of well-intentioned but largely senseless industry. There was much bustling about, intent examination of culture dishes and test tubes and even an electron microscope. The hum of a powerful electric motor came from behind one closed door.

  There was a curved stairway at the far end of the hall. It took them up to a landing where Peard flung open a heavy oak door and escorted John into a library. Old portraits lined one wall above bookcases and stacks and a wheeled ladder. A small fireplace of Italian marble with carved cherubs decorated the end of an open space where chairs and one heavy table had been set out. The room smelled of pipe smoke and old books. John found himself being introduced to at least ten men. He lost count after the third. They were mostly tweeds and turtleneck pullovers, a few cardigans. There was a Jim somebody, a Doctor Balfour “of whom you’ve heard, of course.” When John had shaken the last hand, a free-standing chalkboard was wheeled out from the stacks and placed near the fireplace.

  Peard gestured at the chalkboard, thinking that his people had behaved quite well. They had been carefully briefed, of course. Their expressions betrayed only anxious curiosity.

  John stared from the people now seated looking at him to the blank surface of the chalkboard. It had been scrubbed clean, not even a hint of what had been written there before. Empty, dark-green surface. What was he supposed to do with it? Abruptly, he recalled the penance assigned him by Father Michael. Would that arouse O’Neill-Within?

  “Doheny says you have a remarkable new approach to the plague,” Peard prompted.

  John reached for the chalk on the ledge below the board. O’Neill-Within did not object. The hand was a fascinating thing to watch: It moved of itself. His body had taken on another life. Turning to Peard and the others with a calm smile, John spoke in a firm voice.

  “Everyone naturally agrees that a virus must have been used as the specialized structure with which to inject the nucleic acid into the cells of this new bacteria. I assume that the phage approach needs no explanation in this room.”

  Several dry chuckles greeted this.

  John turned and stared past the chalkboard for a moment, appearing to gather his thoughts. His gaze fell on the fireplace and a portrait above it: an Elizabethan dandy with form-fitting dark coat and lace at the neck and cuffs, cruel eyes, the face of a predatory bird.

  “Synthetic hereditary information was incorporated into the DNA complement of the virus,” John said, shifting the chalk from one hand to the other and back.

  How intently they listened, hanging on every word.

  “There has to be another necessary characteristic of the phage,” John said. “That the virus in its parasitizing of the new bacteria must possess DNA with only a single chain at its end – an incomplete helix designed to lock into the receptor DNA. It is a complementary message being inserted into the host. I assume that the synthetic DNA must adhere to the viral DNA in such a way that it causes the virus to manufacture more of the desired form.”

  What a remarkable thing his voice was, John thought. It went on almost of itself, steady and informative. Heads were nodding agreement all around him.

  “But what if the phage were created with more than a single dangling chain?” John asked. “Certain human cells have receptors for testosterone, for example. Females have estrogen receptors. There are many similar receptor sites. There also must be a message pattern that determines whether the fetus will be either male or female. The pattern will be different for each sex. The nucleic acid blueprint that directs the creation of proteins must possess a shaping force that can direct substances into locked positions.”

  He turned to the chalkboard and watched that remarkable self-directing hand sketch a series of three-letter combinations:

  UCU – UCC – UCA – UCG

  GGU – GGC – GGA – GGG

  GCU – GCC – GCA – GCG…

  He watched the hand at its work until it stopped after completing five rows of the triplet series, then it went back and added identifying labels opposite each series – Ser, Gly, Ala, Thr, Pro.

  A pipe-smoker in a hand-knit blue pullover at John’s left gestured at the board with his pipe stem. “It’s incomplete,” he said. “Incomplete series.” “I’ll give you the rest of it presently,” John said. “I want you to think in groups of five. Order is important, as you indicate. But the choice of five, I believe, is essential. The transmission code is broken into groups of five, allocations being matched to the available chemical bonds at the receptor sites.”

  “Those sex-determining sites you postulate?” the pipe-smoker asked.

  “Yes. I ask you to imagine flagella, the fibers in a single chain and incomplete, reaching out and locking into living receptors – a penta-plug, you might say, designed for a specific receptacle. It can only be plugged in at a particular site. But when it is plugged in, it will not drop out.” Peard’s staff hitched chairs closer, peering up at John. “Why five?” someone asked.

  “Each of these quadratic stacks…” John gestured at the series he had written on the board “… has an open end, a fifth segment that can be allocated as you wish. You shape it to fit.”

  “Good God!” the pipe-smoker said. He gave John a look of awe. “Shuts off the living process. How did you hit on it?”

  “The simplest required form,” John said.

  “Given the plague’s symptoms,” Peard offered.

  “How do you determine the side groups?” someone demanded.

  “Between the DNA and the RNA, the only chemical difference is the fourth base, thymine for one and uracil for the other,” John said. “The different sequences can be determined by comparing the FD mass spectrums, using stereoisomers, of course. The different shapes of the DNA helixes will tell us the submolecular shapes within them.”

  “You’re saying Crick’s Central Dogma is not true,” Peard said.

  John nodded. Peard had a quick mind, anyway. He obviously had leaped ahead to the implications in what had already been revealed.

  Questions began to bombard John from all sides. “… more than one amino acid substitution?… of the peptide bond? Yes! The carboxyl group and the amino group… But doesn’t it have to be a high polymer? Wouldn’t the phage disintegrate?”

  Peard jumped to his feet and waved a hand for silence.

  “There has to be feedback from the cytoplasm,” John said, “just as Doctor Peard suggests.”

  John put the chalk on its ledge and rubbed a hand across his brow, closing his eyes. He had the beginnings of a headache and his shoulders trembled with fatigue.

  Peard touched John’s arm. “Long drive, eh? I’d say a bit of food and rest are indicated.”

  John nodded.

  “Fits, dammit!” someone said. “Makes all sorts of sense.”

  “We’ll meet again tomorrow after Doctor O’Donnell has rested,” Peard said.

  John allowed himself to be led off by Peard. He could still hear the people talking in the library, excited voices, some arguments. Was Doheny right after all? Did it only take inspiration? But he had given them an accurate briefing. The penance demanded it.

  Peard led him into a brightly lighted kitchen where sandwiches and milk were provided by an old man in a white apron. Peard took him then to a small bedroom with its own bath. A single window looked out across the moon-bathed lough. John heard the door clos
e and the snick of a bolt. He tested the door. Locked. He extinguished the room’s lights and returned to the window. There was a stone-enclosed cattle booley next to the lake, boggy ground with high reeds beyond the enclosure.

  I’m a prisoner, he thought. Doheny’s doing?

  He let fatigue rise up within him as he watched the moonlight pour across the lough and the bogs. What did it matter if he was a prisoner? The moonlight out there was a haunted thing, he thought, the light out of lovers’ past pouring itself away where no love could be. Bits and pieces of the long ride to this place tugged at his awareness. They had driven interminably in the long twilight, a timeless, droning eternity.

  When O’Neill’s howling had ceased, he had felt the removal of a weight. The steel slit in the side of the armored car had framed a view of a hilltop bathed in orange sunset, remnant black shadows up there where an ancient ring fort, a rath, had stood. That had been a place of life, he thought. Now, it was a silent relic. He felt that the occupants of the armored car might fade just as easily into empty relics, bones and rusty metal. The ride was far different from the tramp over the countryside.

  Sparring with Herity had become almost an instinctive thing in the months of their slow passage. Doing their laundry in running water, digging food out of buried caches, killing feral pigs and cows. What a land it was! John recalled a small stream at his feet, water winding through reeds, the ground boggy along the edges. The current had tipped the reeds in a careless rhythm – down, up, down, up… It had been movement like their walking feet. There had been freedom in it. Yes – freedom: their possessions on their backs. An odd feeling: He had been liberated there with Herity, the priest and the boy, experiencing a freedom from the things of the world that perhaps only the migratory hordes of the nomad ages had known – those people of foot and horse and tents. Not until oxen and carts had possessions begun to subdue that kind of freedom. It was a thought John felt he would have liked to discuss with Gannon.

  We took only what was useful to a nomad’s life….