Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  Teeming with Yersinia. Monique went back to her motel room, sweat-soaked, drenched from the skin out, underwear, outer clothes, hair, forehead. Teeming. She took a fast shower and fell into bed and dreamed of an imaginary Pamela Tate she had never met. Her last conscious thought before sleeping was: Soon we will know.

  Each day brought new rodent specimens to process. On the third day, while the first answers they sought were still cooking—Monique profoundly hoped—in nutrient flasks, with the computer programmed and ready to handle an expanding volume of microbiological genetic data when finally it was ready, Frank Barrington appeared to hand deliver yet another specimen, a golden-sided ground squirrel in one of Carlos's bags, catching Monique just as she was leaving the lab for the evening. "I've been walking ridges and gullies for five days now," he said, "up in the mountains, watching the ground, and I decided a break would be a smart idea."

  "Oh, good," Monique said. She took the bag, peered at it. "Where is this one from? It's important we have samples from a wide area."

  "Each one has been from a different region. We got this one about noon today from the Red Feather Lakes area just a few miles north of here, near the Wyoming border."

  "Ah, so. And I thought you'd come all the way up from Canon City just to see me." She smiled at him. "You're staying over tonight?"

  "Right. Then tomorrow we'll hit the lower reaches of Estes Park."

  "Sounds good. And what's going on down south? I've barely heard from Carlos since I got here."

  Frank spread his hands. "They're going crazy down there. New cases in seven different communities so far, including Colorado Springs, but mostly in Canon City. Twenty new ones just yesterday, the last I heard. It's getting way ahead of them just trying to track down new contacts, and Carlos is looking kind of gray. Parke-Davis doesn't seem to believe the amount of chloramphenicol he wants, they keep shipping half-orders, and he's using streptomycin on suspect cases now, right from the first." The forester shrugged his big shoulders. "They're short on data, that's the real problem. They're floundering around blind, don't really know what they're dealing with." He looked at her. "You'd better realize they're waiting for you to pull a rabbit out of the hat up here."

  "I know." She sighed. "But I can't create answers overnight. And right now, if I don't get out of this place for a few hours and forget about this whole hideous thing, I'm going to start smashing windows and climbing walls. Look, this little fellow in the bag here has to be taken care of right away, that's four hours' work at least, but maybe I can sweet-talk the guys from Stanford into doing it for me. Let me drop it in their laps and go back to change, and then you take me out to dinner— would that be nice?"

  Frank hadn't planned it that way, uncertain as he was of her lab hours or the demands on her time, but he had certainly thought often enough of this tall, oddly beautiful girl with the violet eyes and red-blond hair, as he had walked the ridges and searched the ground for his quarry. Certainly Monique was as totally different from Pam as night from day, and the wound of Pam's loss was far too raw and immediate for him to turn his mind seriously to anything but the pain and emptiness. Yet there were odd moments when Monique's expressions and gestures and way of speaking evoked Pam as sharply and bitterly as Pam herself had; justification or not, he somehow felt that Pam would approve this slender, hard-driving woman—at least approve what she was doing and the intensity she was bringing to the job. So Frank was both pleased and relieved at Monique's proposal, pleased at the prospect of her evening company, half relieved that she had made the first move—as Pam would have done. He agreed to pick her up at her motel room in an hour, and then departed for his own simple lodgings out at the edge of town to shower and shave and dress. When he arrived to pick her up she was still in a slip, doing interesting things to her hair, but she waved him toward an ice bucket and some good bourbon and he settled down to an hour's contemplative wait. "You won't mind in the end, I betcha," she shouted through the bathroom door. "I haven't worn anything but jeans and a T-shirt for a solid week, and I'm damned if I'm going out looking raggy, so just drink up and be patient. ..."

  She did not, in the end, look raggy; she looked almost painfully lovely. They took Frank's Forest Service Jeep, found a modest but respectable steak house in town, and ordered another drink before tackling the menu. Frank lifted his glass and touched hers. "Eat, drink and be merry," he said.

  She winced. "Any more of that, and I get up and leave," she said. "Graveyard humor I can't take right now. Nor lab talk. Nor plague talk."

  "Sorry. Really. I just wasn't thinking."

  They talked about other things, inconsequential things, new-acquaintance things, as the meal came and went. She clearly wanted to talk, and he let her, sensing the sharp undercurrent of tension in her voice. She's tight as a wire, he thought, tight to the breaking point—from what? From what she's fearing that I don't know enough to fear? He guided the talk to herself, who she was, where she had come from. Two more different people might never have been found, except that both were rebels in their own odd ways. Monique Jenrette, only child of a wealthy New Orleans architect representing very old money, sent to a highly selective finishing school for Young Southern Ladies in Baton Rouge. They had nearly finished her then and there, but she had been pretty resilient even then. Bowing to her father, she had spent a year at Smith as an English major, where she lost a little of her thick New Orleans drawl and acquired a thoroughly curious overlay of Back Bay Massachusetts nasal that she never entirely weeded out—together with a bitter hatred of northern winters. Perversely, then, she had transferred to Duke, sweet-talking her father into tolerating it if not liking it, and graduated magna cum laude in biological sciences. Well, medical school was at least respectable, and she had gone on to Emory in Atlanta with medicine in mind, but an uncanny knack for thinking her way through complex and labyrinthine biochemical problems and then finding insanely simple, practical laboratory techniques for solving them, got her sidetracked from the medical mainstream within a year and a half. She had never really wanted to palpate bellies and examine tonsils; what she came to want was to find ways to make microorganisms do what she told them to do and nothing else, and she soon was concentrating her total attention on the arcane and mysterious world of cutting-edge microbiology. For her Ph.D. thesis she had worked two additional years to compare the natural mutational behavior of three exotic families of bacteria, among them the family of Yersinia. With that accomplished, and with a small but growing reputation for somewhat outre thinking about bacterial genetics and mutations, and a positive flair for creative laboratory techniques, she had left the multicolored stone walls of Emory to move six blocks up the street to the Centers for Disease Control, with their microbiological laboratories unequaled anywhere in the world, and their endless succession of microbiological problems to be solved.

  Through all this, of course, Monique being Monique, there had been men, two of them almost serious enough for her to have thought of marriage, but not quite serious enough, with neither man quite capable of accepting the notion that this rather frail-looking, willowy girl might have a will of iron and a driving ambition and an acknowledged national name in a field of science they could barely understand at all, so nothing ultimately happened. And then, of course, there was Carlos. Yes, indeed, Carlos.

  Frank Barrington contributed bits of his background.as Mo-nique's torrents of words slowed, a simpler and briefer background and a total counterpoint except for the common thread of an abortive entiy into medical school years before. Only son of a self-educated farmer, born and raised on a wheat ranch in the Palouse country of southeastern Washington. Taught to read at the age of four at his mother's knee, with freedom of the rather surprising family library that made up for the lack of any public or school library whatever anywhere within reach. Long hours and days and months and years in the blazing sun, helping tend the farm; attendance at a tiny one-room grade school taught by a teacher with a tiny one-room mind, then on to a slightly-less-tiny
high school, created to grant obligatory diplomas, but nothing to trigger a hungry mind beyond the books at home.

  The natural science of field and stream, heritage of any farm boy, had appealed to Frank early and led to a solid interest in biology and, later, medicine. He started college in a forestry major, graduated in a zoology major, and moved on to medicine, uncertain that he wanted it but willing to try. Family tragedy broke that up: his mother's sudden and shocking death from pneumonia, and then, in the same year, the pancreatic cancer that took his father, the loss of the farm, of all funds, and of the ambition for medicine. . . .

  A forest fire in Idaho late that terrible year triggered something else. Frank went over as a volunteer to help fight the blaze and spent two weeks digging fire lines, hauling hoses, filling tank trucks from natural springs and breathing smoke and ash. As a result, he was offered a job with the Forest Service the next summer on a first-strike fire crew, and that work blossomed into a full-time appointment. He went back for night courses in forest management, evolving a strong conservationist attitude toward the local logging practices that somebody in the Forest Service in western Washington liked; there was room there for someone willing to fight for real, rational management of the forests and to oppose the pressures to cut them all down as fast as possible and ship the logs to Japan. In the logging industry he wouldn't have lasted long; in the Forest Service there was a chance to be heard as he entered into what he clearly conceived might be a lifelong battle.

  Monique had listened closely as they devoured their steaks, skipped dessert, sipped coffee and finished their wine. He touched only briefly on the direction his work had been taking him in the time he had free from slash fires—-for example, his plans for simple but supremely logical small-scale studies to document the permanent environment-changing effects of logging at the forest-desert margin. "Where the forest in the foothills comes down in fingers into semiarid land, there isn't enough water for any recovery if the trees are taken," he said. "The ones that are there are scrubby, hardly worth harvesting, but they may be hundreds of years old, marginally surviving because they have enormously deep tap roots and themselves hold water in the soil. Cut them out, and little ones will never grow back, and the desert will creep up the mountainside, acre by acre. I can't do anything big with it, of course. But with luck and a little work I can maybe get a few reports published in Science, small-scale studies, and maybe catch somebody's attention."

  "And Pam fit into that plan," Monique said.

  "Oh, yes. She fit into the whole Forest Service kind of life." Frank was silent for a moment. "Lots of women wouldn't. There's no money in it, ever, and you're off and away three-quarters of the time, and there are—very real hazards." He grimaced.

  "I'm sorry," Monique said, touching his hand across the table. "I shouldn't have mentioned it."

  "It doesn't bother me that much. Not now. It already seems like a long, long time ago."

  "The mind's a remarkable mechanism. It works like lightning to protect itself from too much pain. Sometimes it works almost indecently fast. But then, sometimes remembering and talking can help."

  "Maybe. There's not that much to talk about, with Pam. She turned up out of nowhere, one day, and then she disappeared, like the girl in the Keats poem. We only had three months together, not even that—what can you say about three months? That for me it was a whole other lifetime? A sort of dream world, come and gone? Maybe so, but that lifetime is over. It's not ever coming back. End of story." He looked up at her sharply. "Not for you, of course. You do have your Carlos."

  Monique glanced aside. "Yes, I have my Carlos, and he is a very lovely man, sweet and gentle and smart and capable, a man any woman could love. And Carlos is also very, very married to a proud and exquisitely beautiful woman from a proud upper-class Mexican family, and his background is so deeply entrenched in him that that marriage is never going to change. Carlos behaves himself in the way the men in his culture are permitted to behave, and his wife conducts herself in the way such wives are required to conduct themselves, and that is that. Another dream world." She gave Frank's hand a squeeze and pushed her chair back from the table.' 'Why don't we go see the sights before it's totally dark out there?"

  He drove the Jeep toward the setting sun along the valley floor, then turned west on a road into the steeply rising mountains. Half an hour later they found a turnout on a high viewpoint ridge. To the west the sun was setting behind the high peaks of the Rockies in Estes Park, splattering the sky and clouds with reds and oranges and pinks and yellows and blues and blacks as an evening thunderstorm came billowing up. To the south and east the lights of Fort Collins were coming on in multicolors, the freeway strip to the east a shimmering golden necklace.

  They got out of the car and walked out on a promontory to take in the panorama. There was a chill breeze from the west; Monique shivered in her summery dress and Frank slipped his down jacket over her shoulders and held it in place with his arm. "You're still not relaxing," he said.

  "1 can't," she said after a long silence. "I can't get away from that lab. The world looks so beautiful from up here, but I have to work with ugliness."

  "You don't have to. You could go back home and many a rich New Orleans lawyer and be a society lady."

  She gave him a brief look. "I'm not precisely a lady. And New Orleans society is a screaming bore. So are most rich New Orleans lawyers. Anyway, I can't run away from what I'm doing—not now. I'm really into it up to my ears, and there you are."

  "You personally?"

  "Somebody personally has got to do it. I'm equipped, and I'm on the spot. People are dropping dead while I fool around with culture plates. We need to know which way this evil wind is blowing, and I haven't got the answers yet." She shivered in spite of the jacket. "Let's go back, Frank."

  They drove in silence back to town. Her place was a second-story room with an outside entrance. He opened her door and turned and kissed her, tentatively. She returned a different kiss, long and deep and yielding. When he started to tum away she said, "Frank Barrington, don't you dare walk away from me tonight."

  He looked down at her pale face, the wide-set, frightened eyes looking up at him like a doe terrified at the approaching fireline, and he couldn't move.

  Suddenly her arms were around him, clinging to him fiercely, and her face was buried in his chest and he realized she was weeping. "Hey, hey," he said gently, stroking her hair. "Take it easy—"

  "I can't take it easy, Frank. I'm scared. You just don't know how scared I am." She looked up, holding him with her eyes. "Stay and help me not be scared tonight."

  24

  The really sick people in the poverty ghettos of the great cities never find their way to the free clinics and charity wards for examination and treatment. Those places are packed with the ones who have the minor or nonexistent aches and pains, the ones with nothing whatever else to do, who look forward to the daily or biweekly clinic visit as a major social event and grand diversion from dullness. For the really sick ones, the desperately ill, these places are torment. The crowded corridors, the hard benches lining the walls,, the endless waits while their eligibility numbers are transmitted and approved, the longer waits for the nurse, the doctor, the laboratory, the X ray, the other doctor, the third and fourth and fifth doctors—these things they know are in store for them are literally more than they can stand. They stay home in bed, the desperately ill, unexamined and untreated, getting sicker, and if they die, well, after all, they could have gone to the clinic, couldn't they? But since they didn't, that's one less we have to be bothered with. . . .

  For Althea Willis, the tall black cabin attendant on the flight from Denver to Atlanta, things might conceivably have been different, but they weren't. The culture and background and habit she could not escape defeated her in the end. Her contract with Eastern Airlines provided her not only a modest salary, much of which she had salted away for later college expenses, but also an excellent prepaid private health-care plan. Whe
n she became ill, she could have gone to any private physician in Savannah. She knew she could have done that, but she didn't. It would have meant no expense to her, and only a modest wait for the doctor, and she knew that too, but she didn't go. For one thing, it all came on so terribly fast she couldn't believe what was happening. One hour she felt fine. An hour later she was feverish and chilling, the next hour delirious. And the sicker she became, the more her buried, bone-deep ghetto background rose up to control her mind and body. The modern, liberated Althea Willis she thought she had become vanished from sight in the first few hours of trial. The old Althea Willis went to bed and took age-old remedies her frightened sisters brought her, and grew violently sicker.

  When she finally died and lay in state in a ragged bed in a shambling, rotting frame house in center-city Savannah, neighbors and friends and curious acquaintances by the dozens came through to pay their respects and to grieve with her mother, and then pass on and go back to their own ragtag frame tenements west of Forsythe Park, until at last the long black car of the funeral director, one of their own, came to take her away, and no one thought for a minute that anything different might have happened.

  25

  And throughout those first five days, six days, seven days, in Colorado, as the growing list of sick was counted and contacts were relentlessly traced down, and isolation techniques were tightened, and word of some kind, any kind, was awaited from Fort Collins, Carlos Quintana moved through it all like a thin omnipresent wraith, working eighteen-hour days, looking grayer every day and somehow keeping in daily personal contact with virtually every one of the hundred-odd people who were working with him now. He was a ramrod, demanding hard, perfectionist labor, but he was a gentle ramrod, ready with a wry grin or a word of encouragement whenever he sensed the need of it. He wanted results, not fights, and he did not make the tempting mistake of blaming his crew for the steadily climbing count of newly infected cases, up well over 150 in the first week alone and still climbing, including five of his own people. The mortality rate was over eighty-three percent among those first cases, a horrendous figure that only barely began leveling off as they poured in all the antibiotic resources they had available. He maintained to each of his workers the same repeated point, made over and over again, relentlessly: don't look at the short term, it had a terrible start on us, but we're surely closing the gap. The work we're doing now will catch up if we do it well and meticulously and thoroughly, it has to catch up, and the thing will peak and begin to drop off, and new data will help with that when we have it. Keep digging. . . .