Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  Most ships went away. But one day three Arab ships from Rashid appeared and begged safe harbor, and were denied. Now there was plague on those three ships, with many of their crew dead or dying; and being turned away from every harbor in their course, their food and water were gone and some among them were starving and dying of thirst. Thus the three ships risked the fireballs to approach the harbor and beg that casks of water and food be set adrift to float out to them on the receding tide—but the people of Tekirdag, fearing the air surrounding the ships to be unclean, answered their pleadings with fire and burned two of the ships, and all aboard were burned alive or drowned.

  Then the Master of the third ship, when he saw this, was seized with anger, and ordered his own catapults to be manned, and ordered his ship to be brought about and driven deep into the harbor; and he filled his catapults with newly-plague-dead corpses, together with multitudes of rats that were gnawing on them, and hurled them over the city walls, as many as a hundred corpses, before fire destroyed his ship too.

  And then it was, according to the account of Giovanni of Montealbano, that plague struck the people of Tekirdag with unheard-of ferocity, and within a month the living city was reduced to a tomb. . . .

  The first light of a wintry sun came through the office window, and Ted left his writing to stare out at the street below. And so The Plague made its slow steady way across Asia Minor and Europe in the Year of Our Lord 1357, he thought. There had been no hurry about it, in those long-dead days; it moved sluggishly but implacably. Only in the coastal cities did it strike swiftly. Farther inland, it inched along from farm to farm, following the cow paths and rutted mud roads, from one tiny village to the next, from one baronial castle to the next—never moving more swiftly than a horseman could gallop. It had taken months and years—decades—for that plague to sweep across the populated world. Ample time for men to have stopped it, even in those days, Ted mused, if only they'd had some inkling how. But not today: Today we have a different sort of plague, and time is running out.

  The tall, gray-haired man sighed and walked back to his desk. More and more these days he found himself thinking about those ancient plagues, and the dreadful ironies of the past and present. Even when they had known how to slow it down, it hadn't done them any good. Like that little town in Tuscany, back in the mid-1600s—-as early as then, level-headed public-health authorities had had some ideas about plague that had been close to the target. They'd isolated the sickest ones. They had sent out orders barring large public meetings and fairs, ordering people to stay in their homes, even to avoid daily attendance at church—and then sent out an emissary to see to it that the orders were followed. An exercise in futility, of course, because the orders were simply ignored. The priest demanded church attendance in defiance of the authorities. The people went to the fair in the neighboring town whether the emissary liked it or not, and the emissary found himself enmeshed in the solution of a long series of deliberately created petty squabbles, ridiculous court cases and night brigandries instead of enforcing orders to save people from the plague. Bloody-minded people, as the British would say, mule-stubborn to the point of self-destruction in the face of a terrible disaster, going out of their way to defeat the public-health authorities and everyone else around, themselves included, because things were not going precisely to their liking. It was the pattern in those days long past, and the pattern repeated in Savannah, and the ever-growing pattern everywhere in these terrible weeks since Savannah.

  Certainly these days he felt strangely akin to that hapless emissaiy of three and a half centuries ago. He needed this one hour of peace and solitude each morning in order to face it at all. Where order and obedience and tight organization were needed, he spent endless days squabbling over legalities, as order disintegrated, obedience was ignored and organization became totally impossible. Each day brought fourteen to sixteen hours of pressure, fielding disaster messages from bloody-minded people, taking reports, relaying orders, solving fights, suggesting approaches, sometimes begging, sometimes blackmailing, sometimes shouting and screaming until Mandy said, "You're getting loud, Boss," and he calmed it down and got a new grip on himself and started over. Each day brought long hours on the telephone to Washington, witnessing the steady growth of panic there, the slow but clearly perceptible crumbling of authority, with the higher-level public health authorities there wrangling constantly with Senators and Congressmen and whole brigades of White House aides, trying to maintain some semblance of order, some sense of balance, while whole echelons of national leadership steadily faltered and floundered, losing direction, losing control, subtly retreating day by day from an earlier stance of keeping things firmly in hand, with directives and decisions coming forth as needed, and moving steadily day by day, toward a new stance of merely wanting desperately to be bailed out. Ted Bettendorf watched it happening, a little more each day, the whole vast juggernaut of national leadership painfully grinding to a halt and turning more and more to him as the man who was expected to do the bailing. Well, an hour of solitude, early in the morning, was not too much to ask. One hour each morning could restore the soul and build up the strength to face another murderous day which would, he knew before it even started, somehow manage to sink to a slightly lower level of effectiveness than the day before or the day before that.

  This morning, like every other morning, Ted thought again of Carlos, with the now-familiar wave of pain and bitterness that came with it. Like having his own right arm torn off at the shoulder, losing Carlos, such a needless, useless waste, and so much of it Ted's own fault. He should have hauled Carlos out of that snake pit weeks before the end; he'd known beyond doubt that he was going to need him a million other places, that the battle was lost there anyway. Hell, Carlos himself should have seen the handwriting and hauled himself out of there while there was still time—but that had never been Carlos's style. He had never been able to see the danger anywhere he went, only the challenge, the work that had to be done. He would never have left except under duress as long as anyone else was still fighting down there. The truth was, of course, that none of his people had left in time, not one of them that Ted had any knowledge of. Two hundred and forty-seven good people lost in a single hideous night, never heard from again, their bodies never even identified, consumed in the pillar of fire that consumed the city of Savannah. Missing and presumed dead.

  The thought of them was torment enought to Ted—but even worse was the thought that always followed: that Carlos and all the others might well have died fighting a war already long lost before they ever got to Savannah. And when, precisely, might the war have been irrevocably lost? It was a terrible question to ask in the quiet of one's mind, an unthinkable question in this grim business of disease-fighting; one simply could not allow oneself to consider that the war might ever be lost, when your whole purpose for being here was to see that it was not. And yet—and yet— He glanced at the desk full of dispatches, one single night's listings of American cities and towns newly afflicted, never mind all the afflicted cities and towns elsewhere in the world, and his mind came back to the unthinkable question again as he groped helplessly for origins: at what precise point, back along the trail, had the war already been irrevocably lost?

  Maybe before we even knew it had started, he thought. Maybe as early as that. Maybe the very day that cursed girl walked up that cursed mountain trail, the war was already lost. Maybe even then. Or maybe just a few hours later, when that boy in Seattle unwittingly administered the death blow. The boy had come down the mountain, already deathly sick, delirious, confused, out of contact with reality, wanting only to get home. An airplane ticket in his pocket. Hours spent in Sea-Tac airport, waiting for a flight, more hours on the plane itself, coughing the air full of bloody corruption. And how many others had been in that airport that day, in contact with the boy? Maybe a thousand? And how many on that plane? Maybe a hundred? And how many of them infected? Perhaps two dozen? With how many final destinations? Ten, perhaps, or fifte
en? In-eluding one or two, perhaps, coming to rest in New York, or London, or Moscow, or Tel Aviv—or in Savannah? And at each destination, how many had met and greeted those infected ones as they stepped off their planes? And scattered to what other distant places? Who could say when the war had been irrevocably lost?

  And so, Ted thought, they had won the Battle of Canon City, a proud and decisive victory, except that the war had already leaped beyond them, like a metastatic cancer, the original dirty thing already spread to a dozen distant sites and organs, each to become a source of further spread—and the dispatches came in. Today half a dozen new cities and towns on the list, tomorrow dozens more, next month thousands. And slowly, slowly, everything they had to fight with falling apart—

  The intercom chirped and Dr. Ted Bettendorf stirred himself, shaking the horror from his head, and flipping the switch. "Mandy? Yes, I'm here. What's the lineup?"

  "They're starting early, Boss. Four people on hold already. There's the Mayor of St. Louis demanding special courier service on that vaccine you ordered for them yesterday, and a very angry Mr. Mancini from Sealey Labs about some things you said at the press conference yesterday, and you're supposed to stand by with a clear line at eight a.m. for a conference call from HHS, and—"

  Ted Bettendorf took a deep breath and punched the button for line one.

  46

  "Harry, did you get those oil drums like you said you were going to?" Amy Slencik fixed her husband with a no-nonsense look through her gray-tinted glasses.

  "Yeah, I threw six of them in the back of the pickup last night," Harry said. "Old Peachy ain't gonna be happy when he finds them gone, but I got them, all right."

  "Well, you just back the pickup into the garage and keep your mouth shut," Amy said. "Peachy'll never know who took 'em, and we can haul them over to the cabin this weekend." She looked around at the small group of people gathered in her tiny Bozeman living room that evening—Mel Tapper, who lived on the little five-acre farm behind their place on Grizzly Creek; Doc Chamberlain, who was living year-round now just down the creek from them; Rod Kelley, with the cattle ranch right below Doc's place; Mel's huge son Tom, looking like some rawboned modern-day Paul Bunyan in his heavy beard and his Tractor Town baseball cap; her own two strapping sons Garth and Elmer, with their two pregnant wives whispering to each other in the background; and an uncomfortable-looking Harry sitting off to the right of her. "If we're going to store gas, we've got to have oil cans to store it in," she said, "and I say we've got to start storing gas—five gallons extra for the cans every time anybody hits the gas station. I'm telling you guys, if we're going to make our move out there at the creek, we'd better do it now, because tomorrow's liable to be too late. This plague thing hasn't hit Bozeman yet, but it's going to, sure as God makes the moon come up. It's all over the place down in Wyoming, from what I hear, and lots of people down there are doing just what we're planning to do—the ones that are lucky enough, that is."

  "You mean holing up and hiding," Mel Tapper said glumly.

  "Well, you can call it whatever you want to, Mel," Amy said impatiently. "I call it covering ourselves, and covering our kids, while we've got the chance. Between us we've got the land and the resources to make it work, if we move fast enough. Self-sufficiency is what we need—just as much self-sufficiency as we can manage, so that we don't need anything from anybody, and we don't owe anybody anything, and we can stay clear of anybody carrying a lot of bugs around with them. But I think we've got to move, because we haven't got much time left."

  "You're sure right about that," Ben Chamberlain spoke up, a little unexpectedly, since he hadn't had much to say about the whole idea so far. "If we're going to do anything at all, we'd better fish or cut bait. I'm not so sure the whole thing is going to hang together—I'm not even sure it's legal—but I guess we can fight that out when the time comes."

  "Why wouldn't it be legal?" Amy demanded. "What's illegal about people pooling their land and their labor and setting up a little freehold for themselves and their kids, way out of harm's way? We own the land, don't we? Free and clear? No mortgages, nobody else's fingers on it? Mel?"

  "Mine's bought and paid for. Deed's in the box in the bank."

  "Your taxes all paid up?"

  "Every year."

  "All right, Mel's got five acres nobody can take away from him. Good rich soil for hay, grain or vegetables. Good possibilities for irrigation as long as the creek runs, and it doesn't show any sign of going dry that I can see. Mel's got two horses that could drag a plow if they had to, and chickens, and two pigs and all Martha's goats, and God, do those goats make more goats. What's more, Mel's a crack shot with that old open-sight .30-.30 of his. I don't know how he ever hits anything with it, but he's the best darned still-hunter in this part of the state, and you all know it. If we end up having to poach some venison, Mel can do it up brown."

  Amy sat back and looked around the room defiantly. "So Mel's got plenty to offer, and a wife and a boy to take care of. Harry and I are in the same boat: resources to offer, and a family to protect. We've got nine acres between Mel's farm and the creek, easy to clear of brush and plow and plant and irrigate. We've got Harry's backhoe and loader and drag blade to do heavy work, if we can lay in enough diesel fuel to run them. We've got a good stand of fir timber up the hill there, as well as cottonwood till hell won't have it, down on the creek bottom for firewood. Hany can wire anything that needs wiring and fix any piece of machinery that lets out a squeak, and Mel can too—between them they can keep things running. And we've got two boys with strong backs and pregnant wives. If it was just me and Harry alone, I guess we'could take our chances in town, but we sure do want to see those grandchildren. We want these kids of ours to have something left when it's all over."

  Amy took off her glasses and polished them on her shirttail. "Then there's Ben here—he's got more to offer than anybody. Ben, you've got sixteen acres of good arable land on the creek, enough to produce a surplus of food and run a few head of cattle for meat and milk as well. I could grow more spuds on half an acre of that south meadow of yours than we could eat in ten years. You've also got timber and cover for birds. And best of all, you're a doctor—you could keep us all alive. You can treat glanders, can't you?"

  "Glanders." Ben scratched his chin. "I reckon I could if I had to."

  "Horses get glanders," Amy said firmly.

  "And people get plague."

  "Only they don't have to," Amy said. "That's the whole idea of having our own safe spot. We're not going to get the plague—if there's some kind of medicine to get, Ben can get it for us. And we've got a place we can keep together when everything else falls apart. We've got everything we need, right out there on Grizzly Creek with our thirty-one acres of pooled land and the work each one can contribute. It's a perfect Freehold, everything we all need to take care of ourselves and our families. And if Rod KeMey wants to come in with us with his grazing land down the creek, he's got another one hundred sixty acres right there. Of course, that's mostly desert, but he knows stock-raising and you can sure graze steers on that land if you can get water to it. With that, we could have enough beef to sell or trade for anything we need. It's a natural-made Freehold— and if it comes to that, we've got enough artillery to hang onto it, too."

  Yes, Ben thought, we've sure got the artillery. It was not like the bunches of crazies he'd been reading about down in California, with their stockpiles of submachine guns and automatic rifles and bazookas and mortars and Christ only knew what else—but they had enough iron there on the creek to keep the peace. He alone had his Browning .270 bolt-action rifle, high muzzle velocity and flat trajectory, drop a running bull elk at 450 yards, and his wife's old Remington .30-.06 with a Weaver scope that she'd used when she was still alive. And his Winchester twelve-gauge shotgun, clean pump action, and his wife's Ithaca twenty-gauge. The old World War I Enfield .30-.06 that had been gathering dust in the storeroom all these years, and the snub-nose .38 five-shooter pistol he'd
hardly ever fired except once in a while at a stray grouse. Harry and Amy and their boys all had their hunting weapons, and certainly Mel did, including that damned old muzzle-loader of his that sounded like a cannon going off and nearly broke your shoulder every time you fired it. . . .

  Yes, we've got the artillery. That's not the question. Ben stared thoughtfully at the small, wiry, sharp-nosed woman across the room, with her sly gray eyes behind those gray-tinted glasses. Amy Hyatt Slencik, must be about forty-five now, he figured, if she hadn't been lying on her last birthday. How long had it been since he'd first set eyes on her? Twenty-three years? Twenty-four? Something like that. That was about when she and Harry had first come out to Grizzly Creek, looking for some cheap bottomland to build a summer cabin on, to get away from the Bozeman heat. Young things, then, with the two boys still just babies. Harry was the same now as he was then-big, friendly, easygoing, generous to a fault. But Amy—how she'd changed since those days!

  Ben Chamberlain had pieced the story together, even as he'd watched her changing. Amy Hyatt had been a Missoula girl to start with, only child of a good, solid, upper-middle-class family, at least to all outward appearances. George Hyatt had owned and run the big hardware store there in Missoula and built himself a small fortune from it in spite of a lot of heavy drinking right from the first. They had a big white middle-western house with heavy summer curtains on a tree-shaded street in the fashionable part of town, and two cars and a boat, and Amy had had everything she could ever have wanted, including a lively Appaloosa pony they'd boarded out at a nearby rancher's place. Until she was sixteen years old Amy Hyatt was a pampered, protected baby, friendly with her little clique of girl friends, imperious with the boys, a middling good scholar, with camps and riding school to while away the summer months.

  Then the halcyon days of Amy Hyatt had come crashing to a halt in the course of a single year. First her mother had the stroke, a bad one but not quite bad enough, and Amy discovered the facts about living with and caring for a hemiplegic.