Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

Wheatville, Kansas, didn't amount to a great deal: a couple of stores, a gas station, a grain elevator, all dark and deserted. They drove on north to the junction with State Route 603, then north again across more undulating country. It was nearly 4:00 a.m. Presently the pickup slowed as a white barn and willow trees appeared at a country road turnoff up ahead. Dog winked his tailiights twice and drove on through, disappearing over a slight rise in the land. Frank eased the van off onto the shoulder, idled the motor and sank back with a sigh. "Well, kid, now we find out."

  "Dog's going on to Willow Grove?"

  "Right. There's no reason he should be detained—nobody knows him, and the pickup's empty—but he's got good eyes even if he isn't stopped. If everything's clear right through to the clinic in Willow Grove, he should be back here to give us the word within an hour and a half, even allowing time for a flat tire:"

  "And if everything isn't clear?"

  "Then he won't be back. No news will be bad news."

  "So what do we do in that case?" >

  Frank grinned. "You just keep your eyes open. We're going to get this stuff to Willow Grove whether he comes back or not. It's just a matter of how. For the time being, we just wait—but not out here on the highway."

  He turned the van up the country road past the barn. All that could be seen in the darkness was the hard-frozen lane in the headlights and two or three distant farm lights. In a mile or so the road rose, then dipped down a gulley to follow a small stream, with willows and elms crowding in on either side. They followed the creek for a couple of miles. Then the road turned back up onto the rise again. Monique saw a fence and an open gate flash into view, then some ramshackle abandoned farm buildings in the headlights. Frank drove the van to the edge of a large open barnyard and killed the motor and the lights. "Good place to wait," he said laconically. "Not much traffic."

  Cold began seeping into the van the moment the engine stopped. Frank pulled Monique over to him, kissed her and pulled a big puffy sleeping bag around them. They sat in silence for a long while. Icy stars glinted like cold sparks in the black sky. Now and then Frank snapped on the dashboard lights to check his watch.

  "Frank?"

  "Mmmm?"

  "You don't really think Running Dog is coming back, do you?"

  "Nope."

  "Why not?"

  He sighed. "I had a long talk with Maclvers on the phone about a week ago. He was almost certain that Haglund, the public-health man, had something up his sleeve. Seemed to him that Haglund was bad-mouthing the plan to everybody in sight, especially some of the town fathers, consulting a lot with the local police, doing his best to get people nervous about it. Haglund insisted he was with us, but all he seemed to talk about was how maybe he could spring some vaccine loose from somewhere in time to do some good, and that was really all he wanted to plan on. Trouble was, no vaccine was turning up. Well, I saw Haglund when I took my trip up there. I know he was at Canon City, and I'm almost certain he was one of the CDC people there. I'd cover any bet you could name that he's been on the line to somebody in Atlanta about what we're planning here, and that they don't like it."

  "How can you be so sure?" Monique frowned. "If they took it seriously, it would get to Ted Bettendorf. He's reasonable enough—and right now he might be glad for any help he could get anywhere."

  "Then why hasn't Maclvers heard from him? Had some offer of cooperation? Honey, you know CDC better than I do, but nice guy or not, Bettendorf could never go for this. At the very best he'd have to assume we were ignorant meddlers, and at the worst, bloodthirsty profiteers with a dangerous product to sell."

  "But we're not either one."

  "We know that, but CDC doesn't. They could feel obliged to block us any way they could, using local police or state patrol or even federal men if there's any office functioning out here anymore. Even if they thought Tom's drug might be worth something, they couldn't let us do what we're planning. We're not working through them, and we're totally outside the Food and Drug regulations. We're just not doing it the right way."

  "But God, Frank! If something can help, how can there be any wrong way? CDC has put all their money on the cities and lost every dime. The FDA is dead at the switch—the only move they've made at all in the last six months has been to give the go-ahead to the wrong people to distribute the wrong drug. Other than that they haven't done anything but sit there fibrillating and getting in the way. I know, I was so close to it at Fort Collins I wanted to sit down and cry. So we're trying to do something in a different way. Trying to move around them and make something work. How can that be wrong?"

  Frank shrugged. "By definition, pushing a wildcat drug in the middle of a plague is wrong, honey. Ask any epidemiologist. Hell, suppose you were responsible and you heard about something like this—you'd try to stop it too. You couldn't risk having some irresponsible idiot, however well meaning, piling dead on top of dead. Of course, we know the stuff we've got is good—or at least we think we do, and unlike some other nuts who might be operating, we've got some reasonably solid reasons to think we're right. But they aren't going to take our word for that. We're going to have to make an end run clear around them and make Tom's stuff work in the field, under fire, in order to prove we're right."

  Monique was silent for a long while, staring out at the icy darkness. "You didn't tell Sally and Tom about this little phone talk with Maclvers," she said at length.

  "There didn't seem to be any point," Frank said. "Sally's jittery enough as it is. She's totally exhausted, and there's nothing more she can do at all until we see what happens at Willow Grove, and she's frantic enough to climb walls. But for planning and organizing the next step, if there is a next step, Sally Grinstone is our ace in the hole. We can't afford to have her falling apart at this point."

  "I'm not hanging together so well myself," Monique said sourly.

  "Ah, but you've done this kind of battle before, you see. Sally hasn't. And that makes all the difference. Anyway, you're not going to have to hold yourself together too much longer. My watch says Dog is already overdue."

  "So what do we do now?"

  "Give him another hour."

  "And then what? Frank, you're not seriously going to try to plow through a roadblock with this stuff!"

  He grinned at her. "You just watch," he said.

  They waited—thirty minutes, forty minutes, a full hour. From time to time Frank got out, walked around the van, stamping his feet. Monique watched him through the windshield. Then in the darkness she saw him stop, cock his head to one side as though watching the sky. A moment later Monique sensed an almost subliminal vibration that gradually emerged into a crescendo rumble and then the familiar chuff-chuff-chuff of a chopper's rotor.

  Frank fairly leaped back into the car and pulled the headlight switch on. "Here comes our end run," he said. "Grab that other flashlight on the dash and come on out."

  A moment later Frank picked up the chopper in his flashlight beam, wig-wagged it and stepped back as the little craft swooped down, hovered, and then touched ground on its own landing lights. The instant the rotor stopped a door popped open and a lean young man in dungarees hopped down. "Barring-ton?"

  "Right."

  "Your canine friend made it in, all right, but he didn't want to come back. They've got the highway blocked at the border. Sam says there's no time to screw around—I'm supposed to bring you and the cargo both."

  "Better take a look at the cargo first," Frank said. "You're Dr. Fox?"

  "That's me."

  "What's the score in town?"

  The young doctor paused and looked at him. "You mean the clinical picture? Lousy. Two confirmed cases yesterday morning, seven more identified for sure by last evening, and Sam has been up all night. I'd say maybe twenty-five cases with at least two hundred contacts. Except for that bastard Haglund we'd have called twelve hours earlier." Fox stuck his head in the van along with a flashlight and whistled. "Good God, how much have you got here?"

  "About thirty tho
usand individual doses," Frank said.

  "Wow. Maybe I can get it all crammed in and still lift, but 1 can't take you."

  "Just take the drug and jump. We'll get there on our own."

  It took precisely ten minutes to unload the van and cram the chopper full of cartons. The young doctor grinned and climbed aboard, waving them back from the rotor and slamming the door. A moment later he lifted and headed in a long sweep north. Frank gave Monique a hug as the chuff-chuff-chuff faded into the darkness. "Okay, kid, hop in," he said. "Let's go give those border cops a look at an empty van."

  When they finally arrived at the Family Health Clinic in Willow Grove a little after 7:00 a.m., the parking lot looked like a major disaster scene, crowded with local squad cars, state patrol cars, an Aid Car from the fire station and half a dozen other vehicles, including Running Dog's pickup.

  Their trip across the border had not been totally uneventful. They had been flagged down by State Patrolmen a hundred yards north of the border, invited to step out into the biting cold while their identification was examined, their persons and the van thoroughly searched by a couple of very unenthusiastic officers. One of them even got down on the frozen pavement and examined the van's undercarriage with a big flashlight, while the other quizzed them about their origins and destinations, questions that Frank answered as noncommittally as possible with as much patience and forbearance as possible. "They said it would probably come through in a van," the first one muttered, climbing back to his feet, "but there's no goddam dope or anything in this rig." Frank and Monique had climbed into the car again and started the motor while the two police continued to confer interminably, one shrugging his shoulders and the other spreading his hands until finally, with most obvious total reluctance, one of them motioned them on and they drove on north.

  Inside the clinic building the waiting room and reception desk were both jammed with people. Dr. Sam Maclvers, looking sour as vinegar, was hunched over the reception desk talking on the telephone; young Dr. Whitey Fox, still in dungarees, was at another phone. Police and civilian-clothed people milled around the waiting room, drinking coffee; in the far corner Frank saw Running Dog's fat form sprawled in a chair, sleeping. Near the center of the room was the man Frank recognized as Perry Haglund, short and chubby and red-faced, talking intently and gesticulating with vehemence to a town policeman with sergeants' stripes on his sleeve. But the center of attention seemed to be a tall, gray-haired man at the side of the room, surrounded by several others—a round-shouldered tired-looking hawk of a man with lines of infinite weariness on his face. Frank heard Monique's sudden intake of breath beside him as she saw the man standing there, and then the man looked up and saw her and raised his head sharply, staring at her. "Good God, it's Monique," he bellowed, striding across the room to her. "I've been trying to track you down for weeks. What in the name of God are you doing here?"

  "I'd ask you the same, except I already know," Monique said. "Frank, this is Dr. Ted Bettendorf, Carlos's old boss, head of the Uncommon Diseases Section of CDC in Atlanta. Ted, this is Frank—"

  "—Barrington," Bettendorf interrupted. "That's got to be it. You were with Carlos in Canon City. I never got out there— you guys were sure you had it whipped right here. Oh, boy. And then there was Savannah, and Carlos was gone, and we've never stopped running since. ..." His voice trailed off and he looked at Monique again as if trying to focus on her face and not quite making it. "But why here? What are you doing here? We're trying to stop these idiot doctors from using a batch of bathtub antibiotic that hasn't had the breath of a clinical test, and it's gotten here somehow, but we can't even get our hands on a sample of the damned stuff, and then you walk in, of all people—"

  Across the room Sam Maclvers reared his head back and clapped a hand over the telephone mouthpiece. "Hey, would you people mind canning it over there? I've got a sick woman on this telephone. Frank, glad you're here. Get the other line, will you? Everything you can learn, write it down." The doctor turned back to the phone again as if the rest of the room had ceased to exist. "Okay, Janie, give me that again, we've got a bunch of people interfering with us right now. You say his fever is a hundred and three since he woke up? Chest tight and he's coughing. No blood? Good. Now listen, this is important. First thing is don't panic—you're going to have to hang together and lay down some law. Don't let him go to work, don't even let him get out of bed, have you got that? None of you even go out the door, and don't let anybody in. Get your husband water or juice to drink, make sure there's some ventilation. We'll get some medicine over to you just as fast as we can with a sheet of instructions for using it. You and Shari right along with Pete, start it as soon as you get it. Yeah, one of the Scouts will bring it over. Don't ask him in the house—just nobody in or out of the house, and I'm not kidding—"

  Frank caught the other telephone jangling on the reception desk. There was a frantic woman's voice on the line. "Dr. Sam, this is Susan Lemmon. I don't know what's going on, but Jake and I went bowling last night, you know, the Blue Devils' tournament, and this morning we're both sick as dogs, he can hardly breathe and I feel like somebody's been beating me with hammers—Dr. Maclvers?"

  "I'm one of the doctor's aides," Frank said. "He's on another phone. I'll tell him if you'll tell me—how long since you thought something was wrong?"

  "He started coughing about three in the morning and couldn't stop, and I nearly fell on my face when I got out of bed, and I'm scared to death it's this plague—"

  "If it is, we'll get you treated," Frank said, "but first we need information." He scribbled as she gave him her name, address, telephone number—"Dr. Sam knows where it is." He passed on the basics he and Maclvers had worked out, simple short instructions, brief enough to take only a couple of minutes on the telephone, simple enough that they didn't need repeating. Then: "Now this is very important, Mrs. Lemmon. How many people were bowling with you last night?"

  "Gee, there were—there must have been eight couples in the tournament and quite a few others along to watch—"

  "Okay, Dr. Sam needs to know who they were. Just give me their names." Frank scribbled furiously on a scratch pad as the woman started listing names, phone numbers when she knew them offhand. The list lengthened—eighteen, nineteen, twenty people including the ones who were running the bowling alley.

  Frank got them all down. "Now, listen," he said. "Do you feel up to doing some telephoning? I mean right now—good. Call as many of these people as you can possibly reach, right now. Tell them that they may have had contact with plague last night through you and your husband. Tell them you've already called the doctor so that they don't need to, but they're in danger. Tell them Dr. Sam wants them all to cancel whatever plans they have and all stay home, not go anywhere, not let anybody in except their own family, until he or Dr. Fox contacts them. We're going to try to get them medicine to prevent the infection—yes, for all of them that you know you contacted. We'll get back to them in a few hours, but you can help them protect themselves and others by staying home if you call now. . . ."

  He was sweating by the time he hung up, saw Dr. Maclvers momentarily off the phone, looking at him. "Somebody else?" the doctor said. Frank nodded, handed Sam the data sheet. Sam whistled. "Twenty of them. Oh, brother. And that's not even thinking about contacts earlier in the day—you think they're not infective until they're symptomatic?"

  "They're infective by droplet contact as soon as the bug's in their lungs," Frank said, "which could be up to eight or ten hours before they actually become aware of symptoms, or as little as three or four hours. Maybe these other bowlers are infected, maybe not. We can only watch and see." He looked up at the doctor's gray face. "You got the medicine cached away?"

  "Ten different places, and so far not many people know where the places are. The stuff is secure enough for a few hours, but we've got to start moving."

  "So what about distribution?"

  "Here comes a major part of the team right now." He nodded toward a
youth coming in the door, about seventeen years old, tall and gangling, and Frank blinked in momentary disbelief—he was dressed, of all things, in full Boy Scout uniform with a red-white-and-blue ribbon and a dangling medal on his chest. Sam motioned him over. "Tim, meet Frank Barring-ton—he's had experience with plague and he's going to help direct this campaign. Anything he tells you is just as if I told you. Frank, meet Tim Larramee. He's one of five new Eagles, we installed them at our big Court of Honor last month, and all five of them are going to help with distribution of the medicine. How many men have you gotten organized, Tim?"

  "Let's see," the youth said, "there's thirteen from my troop, if Johnny Berger's mother lets him do it, and twenty-one from Troop 235, and fourteen from Troop 406—"

  Frank whistled. "Forty-eight runners! You said you thought you could count on them, but I didn't really believe you."

  Sam Maclvers's dried-prune face cracked into a grin. "My Baker Street Irregulars," he said. "Some of them horse around a lot, like any bunch of Scouts you ever saw, but when the chips are really down, they come through. And they've all got feet, and they've all got bikes, a few of the older ones have cars. If we can use the Eagles and older boys for sort of whippers-in, the bunch of them can keep the medicine moving right to people's doors, where it's needed, man the CB radios and carry messages when the telephone company switchboard gets overloaded—they're going to be a major resource. They're all going to wear uniforms, at least neckerchiefs and caps if they don't have anything else, and that's going to be their passports. Not one person in this town is going to interfere with a Scout in uniform—"

  "Not even these cops and patrolmen?" Frank said, gesturing.

  Maclvers looked pained. "Listen, these police are scared shitless already. They've got word from this Bettendorf fellow and a couple of FBI people who came with him that we're moving a dangerous drug and that they have to root out where we've got it hidden and confiscate it, I mean, big federal authority is leaning hard on them right now, and if we hadn't jumped the stuff over them at the border we might be having to fight for it right now or just plain do without—but they know that there's plague in this town now and it's moving fast, Sergeant Davis's own daughter was one of the first to turn up with it, and they're scared, man. Most of the police are local people, even the State Patrolmen, and they don't know this Bettendorf from God's left thumb, but they know me from way back, and I'm telling them that this medicine is the only thing that's going to save this town if anything does, and if they can't help right now they can at least stay out of the road. They don't figure Whitey and I are lying to them, and they don't want to be the ones to be staring the people of this town in the eyes if they've interfered with our supply and distribution of the medicine and then their own townspeople and families start dropping dead like cordwood. Right now they're just in the process of discovering that they're right in the middle of a real crisis instead of lining up with the Good Guys, and this Bettendorf is the one that put them there, and if they look just a little bit shocky, that's what they are. So they're milling around right now watching the town's Boy Scouts move into real action while they're standing here with their thumbs up their asses, and you can figure out how long that's going to last. They're not going to interfere with me and the Scouts, and it won't be too many hours before they're digging in and helping too."