Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  Sally sat bolt upright. "Is he giving a paper?"

  "Now that's a funny thing: he's not on the program. He almost always gives two or three papers at one of these confabs, but not a thing this time. The point is—I did a little confidential digging, and it seems that Shipman loosens up quite a bit at these big Chemical Society affairs. He hits the cocktail parties, and one source says he usually ends up very cozy with some unattached female before the conference is over. He never seems to follow up, it's just fun and games while the party's going, but you might find an opening there. I thought you'd like to know."

  "Like to know! Roger, you're a one hundred percent doll. When this is all over, I'm coming down there and make you as happy as you've made me. Now I've got to ring off and get packing. Do you know his room number? Good. And Roger-get me a press registration, but have them give me an ordinary member's ID card, okay? See you later, dummy."

  For a long moment she sat back and marveled—her prescient nose had been right. The rough part was over, and now she was on her own ground. Fun and games while the party's going, she thought, and tipped her glass in an imaginary toast.

  Fun and games, indeed.

  39

  In Brookdale, Connecticut, on the day after the Ice House fire, Jack Dillman sat in a silent house in the cool of his upstairs studio and carefully airbrushed in the finishing touches on the dust-jacket layout he was just completing. He sat back, cocked his head and tilted the light over his shoulder onto the drawing board, started to add a final stroke, then shook his head and set the airbrush aside.

  For a long time he looked at the artwork spread out before him. Then neatly, almost ceremonially, he began closing the paint pots and ink bottles, setting them back in their places, carefully cleaning the brushes and pen nibs before storing them away. It was almost five in the afternoon, and not a sound from down below all day. "Shopping" again, Jack thought sourly. And later every time. Doesn 't the bastard's wife ever walk in on them? Or where do they go? Not that it mattered that much. With good old Hal Parker, one bed was as good as another.

  Jack walked downstairs, made himself a drink, extra long and extra strong. A job wrapped up calls for a celebration, he thought. The house was very still and still smelled of Pine-Sol from yesterday's cleaning lady. An antiseptic smell, more like a clinic than a home. He drifted from room to room uneasily— she wasn't usually so damned late. As always, the thoughts drifted to his mind: Bad traffic: suppose there was an accident? Maybe she didn 't even carry her purse—who would they call? He shrugged the thought aside, disgusted with himself for worrying. Finally he sat down in front of the Eye and flipped on the TV news.

  Savannah, again, top of the evening. God was he sick of hearing about Savannah—why in hell didn't the Health Service get cracking and do something down there, for God's sake, instead of all this sackcloth-and-ashes stuff? Surely there was something they could do—

  The screen caught his attention, a helicopter news clip—what the hell Big fire, huge building going up, and rioting. The camera zoomed in on riot police behind portable shields, facing off a huge mob of angry black people—he watched, shaking his head. Then, after a while they went to something else, and he snapped off the set.

  Thank God he wasn't down there. Riots and looting and nobody doing anything to help. But suppose it was here. If you were down there, you'd get out, sure, but here? Get out to where? He thought of some other film clips he'd seen last week, sick people sitting alone in empty houses down there, and long lines of garbage trucks heading out toward the swamps. . . .

  People alone in empty houses. Suddenly the thought was not very nice, not nice at all, and he stirred, glanced out the front windows toward the driveway. Something like that happen here, you wouldn't want to be alone. But suppose she'd decided she wasn 't coming back? Suddenly, faced with a possible reality, he felt a chill, bone deep, and sweat broke out on his forehead.

  Another drink helped, but not too much. He was well into his third when she finally turned into the driveway.

  40

  For Carlos Quintana the first real hint of a breakthrough came four days after the Ice House fire. He had checked in early at the pro tern CDC headquarters, an old restored office building on Lafayette Street, to pore over the morning public-health reports—new cases reported, deaths, hospital reports, statistical data, the same old ever-worsening story that was grinding him into the ground day by day—when somebody called out, "Hey, Carlos, front and center! Your boss is here. ..."

  It was Ted Bettendorf in the flesh, looking tall and gaurit and gray and tired, with a cardboard parcel tucked under his arm and a cadaverous smile on his face. He looked around at the crowd of people milling in the room, manning telephones and desks, and then at Carlos buried under piles of papers and reports and readouts and raised his eyebrows. "You're looking a little ragged," he said mildly.

  Carlos leaped up and swept papers off a chair onto the floor so Ted could sit down. "I'm feeling ragged. Hoo, boy, you might say so! Ragged isn't the word."

  "What are you up to?"

  "Same thing I was up to yesterday morning, and the morning before that, only it's a little worse every day. We're just now getting more firm casualty figures on that Ice House debacle—"

  "Well, set that aside for a minute," Ted said. "I got you a present and decided I'd hand-deliver it." He handed the parcel to Carlos.

  "What's this?"

  "The new preventive vaccine. By special courier from Lilly's stockpile. I thought you'd be pleased to see it."

  "You mean the new vaccine we can use to immunize people to this mutant organism so they don't get infected?"

  "That's right. It's made from the mutated strain of plague organisms, right from Monique's original cultures. I've been twisting arms for all I was worth, and it takes forever to make— they only have tiny quantities of it finished—but Lilly's control people are finally satisfied that what they have tests out safe enough, at least for emergency use. The injections are painful, but the antibody titer against the bug is measurable in as little as a week. The bug is antigenic as hell—which means that people will have some immune protection from the bug within four or five days after receiving the vaccine."

  "Wow!" Carlos sat straight up, his eyes bright, his mind already revising his immediate field plans. "Let me tell you, my thin friend, it's just about time. At least we can get some of our field workers protected, if there's enough here. How much are they sending? Just this little box?"

  "No, no. They've been producing it all during the testing, and slow as it is to manufacture, they can let you have five thousand doses off the top of the pile. They should have them to you here by tomorrow morning. What's more, they have four others labs cooperating, making it under license, so there should be more very soon."

  "Good. Most exceedingly good." Carlos paced excitedly. "We may even have a chance to do something good down here yet. Tell them to just get it to Savannah airport—we'll have a truck waiting. We're using one of the warehouses down on River Street, Factor's Walk to be exact, for storage supplies-hospital goods, pharmaceuticals, everything, right handy to the center of activities here. That'll do fine, and it's a fast shot in from the airport by freeway. Warehouse 14—have them mark that on the consignment, so we don't have some idiot truck driver hustling it all through the city streets." Carlos turned back to Ted, his face suddenly sober. "This will be great to protect some uninfected medical workers from future infection—if they stay clean long enough for the vaccine to build up an immunity—but what can we do for some twenty thousand people who are already infected and dropping dead for want of treatment? The vaccine won't help them. What we need is the new Sealey antibiotic, that 3147 stuff we used in Colorado."

  "I've got help coming there too," Ted said. "I just got word this morning that Sealey Labs is going to release a supply of the 3147 antibiotic for you to use on people that you will certify have active plague. That stuff should be turning up here in just a few days."

  "T
hat's the same stuff we were using in-Colorado?"

  "Exactly. The antibiotic that Sealey's Mancini was talking about withdrawing because of its side effects."

  "So what made them change their minds? Did you get an Act of Congress?"

  "No Act of Congress. They've made some kind of funny deal with the administration—I don't know what it is, and I can't seem to find out—but they're springing a field supply of the stuff loose at a perfectly staggering price and with some kind of outrageous liability guarantee. As part of the deal, it's only for use under your direct control, and only here in Savannah, nowhere else."

  Carlos sat staring at the older man. "What about the outlying areas we talked about on the phone yesterday? I mean, this movement out of the city we're beginning to see—"

  "That'll be up to you to decide," Ted said. "On your own responsibility."

  "I see." Carlos bit his lip. "Well, hanged for a sheep—what the hell, we've all got to die sometime, might as well go down in a blaze of glory. We'll worry about that when we hit it. At least we'll have something to work with—Christ! Tell them yes, a thousand times yes. Spring all of it you can piy loose and get it down here while there's still somebody around to treat. . . ."

  For Carlos it was the first real ray of hope that had appeared since the Savannah plague had started. From the very start it had been a steady downhill progression from bad to worse, with the very worst possible always all too clearly in sight up ahead. It wasn't just that the chance to pull things together and establish control had been lost before they'd even started—as it most certainly had. It was the plain, blunt, agonizing fact that they had had so terribly little to work with, so little of anything that could help, so little that accomplished anything. And as night followed day, the situation had deteriorated step by step, without a single way in the world to prevent it.

  Standard procedures had been of little help—it had never even remotely been a standard problem. From the very beginning, geographic containment of the plague had been the essential priority —and a totally unachievable goal. First of all, the disease had to be contained within the city, and disease-free areas of the city had to be identified and kept disease-free. Only then could disease-affected areas be identified, blocked off and treated in order to reduce plague areas to smaller and smaller segments. It was simple enough in principle: knock it down where it exists and don't let it spread. But how to achieve this? At every step of the way the "simple" principle had fallen apart. You needed tight civil control—but there was no way in the world to establish it. You needed resources, but the resources didn't exist. You needed an organized army of experienced field workers. You needed a million things you didn't have.

  Nor did breaking the problem into segments prove any more fruitful. You needed rodent control immediately and desperately—but how to achieve it on a crash basis in a swarming, superheated city like Savannah? It was worse than useless to try to evacuate rat-infested tenement blocks and then kill the rats—the infected fleas would simply hop off the dying rats and lie in wait, fully virulent and ever more hungry, for the people to return, or the dogs, or the cats or anything else the fleas might feed on. To accomplish anything at all, the rat warrens first had to be sprayed to kill the fleas, and then sprayed again a week later, to hit the fleas' hatching nits. Meanwhile, the rats, not pleased at being sprayed, moved out of the target areas in droves, only to pick up new infected fleas in the adjacent unsprayed areas. The city's Rat Squad tried throwing up crude barriers to prevent this defeating migration, but the barriers were promptly torn down each night by the people inside who wanted the rats outside; some adventurous rats scaled the barriers like ladders, while others took to the sewers to turn up in other, disease-free portions of the city. An army of 100,000 experienced rat fighters working diligently night and day with unlimited resources and holding large segments of the population at gunpoint might conceivably have made some inroads into the problem—but a Rat Squad of five hundred volunteers with ten spray trucks and no real authority whatever to demand and obtain either obedience or compliance from an ever more sullen and surly populace were—literally—whipped before they started. The very best results they could manage were along the immediate waterfront where nobody actually lived except drunks and vagabonds, killing rats by the thousands and hoping forlornly that the fleas from those rats would not find their way to where people did live. And on the waterfront, those thousands of rats were the merest drop in the bucket. . . .

  Holding down the disease in infested areas was equally unsuccessful. The tiny supplies of the old vaccine were used, but the effectiveness was barely noticeable as far as Carlos could tell from such muddled statistics as he could rally. Correct the figures for this and correct them for that and very soon you had corrected the life out of your data and you didn't know what was what. And further to this, another thing soon became certain: attempts to contain the plague within the city itself clearly were not working. Especially after the Ice House riot, people began leaving the city by the thousands. Some left in cars and pickups and flatbeds loaded with household goods and bedding and rats, often with one or two family members already sick and others fast on their way. Many, many more left the city on foot—mothers and fathers, and barefoot kids straggling along the edge of the road, loaded up with nothing more than what they could carry on their backs or in crude two-wheel carts, drinking the mud-yellow ditchwater, eating peanuts and beans and sugar and what little else they could cany, easing the kids' hunger pangs with stale Twinkies stolen from neighborhood groceries as they passed.

  Of course these people ran a gauntlet of roadblocks and deterrents. They were warned repeatedly to turn back, that there was nothing up ahead for them, that farmers were driving people off with pitchforks and shotguns—but what were a few state troopers and sheriffs deputies supposed to do, standing on top of their shiny squad cars and shouting into bullhorns as endless streams of ragged people kept coming down the road at them, pausing to mill around the obstructing squad cars and then shuffling down into the ditches to go around them and up onto the road beyond? What were they supposed to do—shoot them? There was no law that said they couldn't go down the road, and the long-promised National Guard hadn't turned up to help yet, at least they might have created a physical barrier, but even then the people would just have scattered out through the fields to go around, and who was going to be the first to shoot kids, for Christ sake?

  The fact was that the plague had already and long since crept out to the surrounding villages and farms anyway. Farmers had hauled their trucks full of dried-up, drought-ruined produce into the city for whatever they could get for it, and came back home carrying an infinitely more spoiled cargo. Nobody had any idea how many sick, dying or dead there might be in these outlying areas because nobody out there wanted to bring their sick into the city, hearing what they'd heard, and the dead were disposed of in shallow graves dug just above ground-water level in remote corners of the back forty. Public-health investigators who tried to check the countryside were greeted by snarling dogs and no information. Meanwhile, the barn rats took their infected fleas on to neighboring farms, and people who hadn't even been near the city at all began falling ill.

  Thus it was that the city refugees who headed away weren't really heading for the outlying farms and villages at all. Even if they hadn't believed the roadblock police, they had soon learned for themselves that the fanners were driving them off with pitchforks and shotguns. Those refugees raided what fields they could raid at night for whatever food they could find as they passed through, but they were not country folk anyway. Though they fled Savannah, they tended to bypass the incomprehensible terrors of the country in favor of the known terrors of the city, heading northward toward Augusta, east across South Carolina toward Charleston, south toward Albany, west toward Macon and Atlanta. And those and other cities, soon aware that they were coming—only a trickle now, but a trickle that could become a deluge later—were slamming their gates and hauling up their drawb
ridges like medieval fortresses.

  Meanwhile, with no real authority yet established to prevent travel, and facing confused directives from a dozen different public-health and law-enforcement agencies, those who had the means to travel did so as they chose. Many truck drivers, more enterprising than sharp-witted, rolled their rigs wherever they wished whenever they felt like it, fighting like longshoremen for what dwindling cargo there was to be hauled into and out of Savannah, cash paid in advance. Some auto drivers were intimidated by the state troopers' roadblocks and threats and turned back, but others refused, and pitched battles at those bottlenecks became ever more frequent. The airlines serving Savannah and Atlanta were far too hungry for fares to come up with any coherent or responsible containment or quarantine policy, and the long-anticipated, long-expected, long-promised federal regulatory injunction on air and ground travel in and out of Savannah and Atlanta which Carlos had believed to be so utterly vital, and had spent days begging and pleading for, never quite seemed to materialize from the quagmire of conflicting directives, regulations, executive orders and proposed procedures emanating from the Corridors of Leadership to the north.

  So containment had failed for so long already that it hardly made any difference anymore anyway. And without vaccine and drugs, even early containment could not have saved Savannah. At least now, Carlos thought, we will have weapons, maybe too few and too late, but something we can work with. He dispatched Ted back to the airport by taxi, completed some calls, and then started on foot down Emery Street in the already hot September morning sun to find Jack Cheney in his improvised public-health field office in the big museum basement just across from the Big Hospital, as everyone was now calling the Performing Arts Pavillion. Jack had proven a solid ally in the battle, a man with a cool, reasonable, practical mind, trying from the beginning to coordinate his very real responsibilities as the Director of the Chatham County Public Health Department with Carlos's often very different responsibilities as emergency epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control. Sometimes Jack had said no when Carlos had said yes, sometimes they had fought it out, and sometimes Jack had prevailed, but throughout the growing horror they had come to respect each other, see each other's viewpoints, and—inevitably-become friends. Carlos knew that Jack would be as delighted as he was at the news of the imminent arrival of the vaccine and the S-3147 supplies. . . .