Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  He left them then, and went into another room and telephoned triumph to Ted Bettendorf in Atlanta.

  The excitement was palpable the next day as Sally Grinstone flew down to Colorado Springs from Denver in a plane carrying a whole squadron of CDC people coming in to relieve some of the ones who had been running a long string of twenty-two-hour days in Canon City. It was from them that she learned that the main headquarters in this plague fight was in Canon City, not Colorado Springs, and that one Dr. Carlos Quintana was the man to see for a news story, if there was going to be any story. It was also from the relief workers that she learned that Terry Linder was dead, subliminally the real reason she'd decided to come out here at all—God, that man should win a posthumous Pulitzer for those plague stories he wrote, the greatest piece of medical reporting she'd seen in half a lifetime, and that was not excluding her own. . . . And finally it was from the relief workers that she learned that a new antibiotic drug had surfaced just in time in Canon City, and helped the CDC people finally pull the fat out of the fire down there, or so the rumor went. Having picked their brains by the time they had reached Colorado Springs, Sally crowded her luck still further and cadged a ride down to Canon City with several of the CDC crowd in a rented Chevy, and thus arrived half a day sooner than she had expected.

  Not that it did her any good, in the long run. Wherever Dr. Carlos Quintana might have been, he was not immediately available, and he wasn't holding press conferences nor giving exclusives to investigative reporters from the Philadelphia Inquirer, especially female reporters. In fact, one of his aides made it quite clear that Dr. Quintana currently had a thing going about reporters, especially female reporters; he'd already locked horns with one during this current Colorado plague business and was definitely taking the attitude of once burned, twice shy.

  Well, Sally reflected, it wasn't the first time she'd run into a stone wall. She did get to talk to a dozen or so of the Shoeleather crowd who had been working with the good doctor there, and pulled out enough background from a few of them to make at least a back-page or supplement story—maybe a good retrospective summary piece, if it really was true that things out here were finally coming under control. ... »

  It was all very workaday and ordinary for Sally Grinstone, and she gave it half a day's time and then headed back toward Denver in disgust. And indeed, the trip might have been a total loss, from her viewpoint, except for that flight back to Denver, when she happened to trip over the foot of a heavyset man in a gray suit with a heavy black five-o'clock shadow—a man whose grim face, even at her fleeting glance, seemed strangely familiar; in fact she'd seen it very recently in some other place—where was it? And then it clinked down in place: Mancini. Indianapolis and a drug-company press conference. Production man from Sealey Labs. And then the obvious question: Why here? with no answer forthcoming. And beneath that unanswered question a less obvious but plainly disquieting thought: God. If those plague fighters are counting on Mancini and Sealey Labs for anything what-so-ever, the fat could really be in the fire. . . .

  There was one thing to be said: nobody quit. The crest of an epidemic was just that, the high point, the point of control or containment. The campaign continued full force, as if the brush fire were in full flame, despite the now-encouraging word carried on national radio and television. A week after the crest Monique and a couple of her people came down from Fort Collins and joined Carlos and Frank and Roger Salmon and a few of the public-health people and they all went out for an evening's bash, but it was a restrained sort of bash, and that was about all the celebration there was. New cases were dropping very swiftly to the zero line; projections said it would be another month before the whole thing was past and gone. Monique had asked Atlanta, and received the go-ahead, to stay at Fort Collins long enough to pursue her study of the mutant organism with the setup she had, and long enough for Atlanta to prepare the Maximum Security Lab down there for her to use when she came back, especially for new antibiotic testing in vivo in rodents and small primates. Frank, his usefulness fast drawing to an end, had negotiated a transfer to a Rocky Mountain regional Forest Service unit to monitor dead rodents and to train and dispatch personnel to other forested areas to try to determine the spread of the mutant Yersinia in the wild. And Carlos was replaced by a junior CDC man from Atlanta so he could go back for several weeks' debriefing and preparation of a detailed report of this first major skirmish with plague in the United States since 1904.

  Mopping up. It was great to have hit it and killed it right here. Mopping up was an anticlimax.

  The next day, Carlos's last one in Colorado before he caught the evening plane from Denver to Atlanta, he ran into Frank in one of the field stations, clearing out some of his personal gear. "You going today too?" Carlos said.

  "Right. I'll be stationed at Golden, just out of Denver."

  "Well, I wish you luck," Carlos said. "You've been one hell of a help, and it's been a bitter fight."

  "Not my kind of a fight, if I had a choice," Frank said. -

  "Nor anybody else's kind of a fight. All dirty. But when you have to, you fight that kind of fight." Carlos looked up at the big man. "So now you're going to Golden, and I'm leaving tonight. And I hope and trust that you will be taking very special care of Monique."

  Frank turned sharply. "Don't worry," he said. "Look, Carlos, believe me, I'm sorry about—what happened up there."

  Carlos blinked at him. "You're sorry? Whatever for?"

  "For moving in on you, there. Believe me, I wasn't trying to crowd you out, personally. There didn't seem to be anything I could do, it just happened."

  "Ah." Carlos looked at him quizzically. "It was just—what would you call it?. . . Fate, maybe? In the stars, so to speak?"

  "Well, maybe. In a way. Only I don't think you believe that."

  Carlos smiled. "I merely believe you don't know too much about women, my friend. Not that Monique is not a very exceptional woman in every imaginable way, because I truly believe she is. But at the root of it all, she is a woman."

  Frank frowned. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that Monique is a very crafty and skillful engineer of her own best interest. And let me tell you something, my friend, before you begin to get angry with me. I have known Monique for a long time, and I truly believe that she is one of those rare people who can often foresee certain broad aspects of the future. If I believed in ESP, which I do not, I would say that she was very definitely prescient. I think she has in the past foreseen times and events in the future that I could not foresee. And being a woman, she instinctively moves in the directions she foresees as best for her. And I think she has known for some time that something is happening, and she is going to need a man to help and protect her, a man to cleave to, and she knows that I am not that man, because she knows that I have, shall we say, obligations. So much for Fate—and for your apology for what you have done. I hold no grudge. Just keep her well and closely as long as she will be kept, that's all I ask. ..."

  Later, as the plane rose high above Denver, heading east, Carlos thought again of his oddly stiff conversation with Frank before they had clasped hands and taken leave. She knows that I am not that man, because she knows that I have, shall we say, obligations. Yes, of course—but she knew all that before. Long before. So what else might she have foreseen? He turned aside from the thought, listened to the motors roar, bone weary, too weary to think. He had a double bourbon, savored it in the first real moment of relaxation he had had in over six weeks, ate one bite of the dry sandwich offered for a midnight snack, dozed for a couple of hours. Awakening, he was disoriented—where could the plane be? Over what city, what village? Somewhere over Missouri, the cabin attendant told him when he finally attracted her attention, St. Louis far to the northeast. He ordered another double bourbon, then sipped it as he took out pencil and paper and began outlining the lengthy report he would inevitably be called upon to write. A vicious outbreak of plague, sudden and unexpected, now broken. The work his people
had done to accomplish that. He scribbled on. Summer nights were short, flying east. It was clear dawn as the plane began its descent into Atlanta. There would be no wife to meet him there, he disapproved of wives meeting airplanes. Good Spanish wives stayed home, they did not meet their husbands in public airports. A swift pass by the baggage port, a taxi, and soon enough he would be home to greet his wife, to have a meal, to rest and rest and rest before reporting for duty. ...

  Up the ramp and through the crowds, heading for the baggage claim, when someone took his arm and he found Ted Bettendorf beside him, tall and gaunt and gray, his face haggard. "Carlos, thank God. I was afraid you might have dawdled somewhere."

  "Dawdled?"

  "Never mind. We've got to get you down to Delta Gate 24 in ten minutes and it's twenty minutes' walk in this antediluvian airport." Bettendorf flagged another CDC man. "Call down and hold that plane, and then be sure his baggage gets aboard—"

  Carlos stopped dead. "Hold it. What's this Delta Gate 24 business? Where are you packing me off to? 1 am dead on my feet, man, I haven't seen my wife, my family. ..."

  "Easy," Ted broke in. "It's necessary. I'm sorry, but there's nothing else we can do."

  "About what?"

  "There's plague in Savannah. Lots of it, and all over. Five days ago there was one identified case, one single case. Today we have over thirty confirmed and about two thousand suspected. We're shipping you to Savannah with all the support we can scramble. That's about what."

  Carlos walked along with him, benumbed, unable to grapple the man's words, down ramps, down escalators, up stairs, down corridors toward the Delta Airlines gates, and for the first time in his life Carlos Quintana was fully, consciously and crushingly aware of the full ugly weight of the imminent presence of Death.

  -—III---

  SAVANNAH IS BURNING!

  Savannah, Georgia—pearl of the southeastern seaboard. Stately, graceful, beautiful Savannah, most gracious of all the antebellum cities of the South. The first, deepest and most lasting impression upon visitors is the sense of otherworldly grace: streets deeply shaded from summer's heat by tall, subtropical trees; whole blocks and miles of splendid ancient mansions, well painted and restored, many dating back to the 1700s; rich greens of foliage and flashing blue of sky of a drowsy afternoon; and the quiet restfulness of the flowered, shaded landscaped plazas. A sizzling, steamy Savannah, in these late summer days, yet an overall sense of coolness and long sweet drinks and sumptuous food and gracious living in the Old City spreading south from the busy riverfront.

  James Oglethorpe, surveyor and architect and gentleman of England, was the leader of the Georgia colony and founder of this first truly successful southern colonial settlement. Wily and far-seeing, he chose a site for the city several miles inland from the coast, safe from the hurricanes that occasionally struck, yet near the spreading coastal plain with soil so rich for the husbandry of cotton. He sited Savannah on the southern bank of a broad channel of the Savannah River, which then divided into many estuaries on its way on out to the sea, some of which were navigable for the ships that came in for the rice and indigo for England and later, for the cotton bales for the textile mills to the north. The climate was paradise forEnglanders, hot and steamy in the summer, springlike in winter, with the southern sun prevailing all year round. A flat lowland terrain, of course—no

  rolling moors, no highlands—but what could you ask of a warm coastal plain?

  Oglethorpe himself designed the city in detail before a stick of wood was laid. The design was unique and brilliantly imaginative: a settlement planned around forty-three large, handsome plazas; each to form an island of green in the heart of the city. Twenty-eight of those plazas actually were built and still existed at the time when Carlos Quintana came to Savannah, forming green oases every few blocks, with the main thoroughfares dividing to go around them. Each plaza was planted differently, yet each was now set with tall, ancient thick-leafed trees, shrubs and flower beds; each had a central monument, crisscrossed walkways of old brick, and iron benches; some boasted fountains of cool water. A slow, stately traffic passed around those plazas in the old days; now fast-moving cars squealed their tires and geared down for the corners, but the plazas remained islands of quiet delight and Savannah was a city for walkers. On each plaza Oglethorpe had provided space for a public building on one side and space for a church on another. In the remaining spaces, and on the streets between the plazas were erected the fine town houses of the wealthy burghers and plantation owners of Savannah, the cotton factors and the traders, great three-and-four-stoiy houses of brick and frame, the outsides handsomely kept, the interiors finished with oaken parquet floors and dark glossy walnut paneling, vast dining rooms, reception halls, master bedrooms. Household slaves were quartered in the lower regions of the houses, field slaves on the outlying plantations.

  In those early days of the Old South Savannah waxed and grew prosperous. The ultimate source of wealth lay in the two-mile-long row of huge brick cotton warehouses built along the riverfront in an arching curve. These mammoth buildings, with their foot-thick brick walls and iron reinforcements, their iron lattice supports for each weight-bearing floor, were footed at river level and rose up four, five or six stories in front of the riverbank escarpment rising behind them. In the space between buildings and riverbank, a strange arrangement of haphazard ramps, narrow stone staircases, driveways, tunnels and bridge-ways were built, so that each floor of each warehouse building could somehow be reached from behind with carts laden with baled cotton. One of those buildings had the first approximation of an elevator to be built in America (it was still there when Carlos arrived in Savannah)—an open wooden platform held plumb by iron poles and run up and down from floor to floor on a crude ratchet powered by an enormous hand-turned wheel. That elevator was an exception, however; most of the cotton was hauled to successive floors and stored by way of the ups and downs and burrows and bridgeways of Factor's Walk, the name given the ramp system on account of the cotton buyers and traders and brokers who worked there, directing what cotton should go where, for what ship and what market. Sometimes donkeys dragged the carts of cotton bales up the ramps and bridgeways for storage; sometimes slave teams hauled them. And by the end of each harvest the warehouses were stuffed and crammed with cotton bales and dirt and dust and rats.

  Then when the ships came, the waterfront swarmed with black slaves pouring sweat in the murderous sun, loading deep holds with bales of cotton bound for England and France and Norwalk and New Haven and New Hampshire, and what wasn't sold was stored for later sale, and the rats scrambled for scraps and invaded the slave quarters and plundered the wharves and docks for food and dug their grottoes in the beams and supports and cubbyholes of Factor's Walk and moved up into the city only when times were lean. And the city of Savannah itself grew rich and beautiful (at least to the fortunate) and complacent, a languid, flourishing flower of the Southland.

  A terrible war changed all that: the War of the Rebellion, according to arrogant Yankee invaders, the War for Southern Independence, according to the Confederate gentry, an ordeal by fire according to history, the Civil War. There came a time late in that war when General William T. Sherman's Union Army, having utterly destroyed Atlanta, marched eastward across Georgia and South Carolina toward the sea, burning everything in its path. It was perhaps the world's first cold-eyed experiment in Total War, not War against an Army but War against a People, since no one needed that land, and there was no significant defense for the cities in Sherman's path. His purpose was to break the back of a People, once and for all, to strike such terror that resistance everywhere would melt. Flames and long rifle fire and mocking songs from Sherman's men: Peas, peas, peas, peas, eatin' goober peas; goodness, how delicious, eatin' goober peas! while the Union men scorched crops and pillaged larders and the defenders starved on rotten peanuts. One by one, in that sweep toward the sea, the cities and towns and villages of Georgia were sacked and burned, one by one by one.


  It was almost Christmas of 1864 when Sherman approached Savannah, literally sniffing the salt air, but at Savannah something different happened. The city fathers approached him in the field under appropriate guarantees. They did not want their beautiful city burned, and to spare it that fate they offered to yield the city and everything in it without dispute or bloodshed. Sherman himself could have the finest mansion in the city for his residence and headquarters. And if that were not enough, he could have those two miles of riverfront warehouses—stuffed with cotton.

  General Sherman was no fool. Fire would bum cotton as well as wood. Thanks to the northern blockade, the cotton here was piled high, while the North was starving for cotton. That year, as a Christmas present, General Sherman presented President Lincoln the intact city of Savannah—and several hundred thousand bales of cotton. The price to the city was high—but Savannah did not burn.

  The old days of languid prosperity never came back, of course. With the slaves gone and the plantations ruined, cotton production moved to the plains farther west, where machinery could do the work. Railroads and Mississippi riverboats carried the bales north, and northern ports transshipped it. Savannah's warehouses stood empty; Factor's Walk fell quiet. The stately old mansions stood empty, too, quietly decaying. Freed slaves came to live in huge board-windowed tenements forming a vast ghetto around the Old City. For almost a century Savannah was dormant, a quiet sleepy out-of-the-way backwater town on the Georgia coast, forgotten by time. But bit by bit other industry came, drawn by low taxes and plentiful labor. People of wealth and taste began buying up the old mansions for peppercorn prices and then restoring them. Factor's Walk came alive again as architects and lawyers established offices in the upper stories of the warehouses; riverfront levels were developed into boutiques, craft shops, pleasant restaurants and bistros. Hotels came in, and tourists, and the city grew—now a city of 300,000 souls, Carlos Quintana learned, when he arrived late that steaming morning in early September, totally exhausted by the long flight from Denver and the long struggle in Colorado, to help Savannah face an ordeal nobody in the city had ever even dreamed of. Beautiful Savannah did not burn in 1864—but now the conflagration was riding nigh on a pale horse.