Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  The Horseman felt the great beast shift under his bony body, fell the change, saw the horse throw back its head, rolling its wild eyes, rearing its forequarters with a whinnied scream of fear. A moment before, clear riding, but now, looming immediately ahead, a barrier, impenetrable, unscalable—

  Flank it, flank it then! Something wrong here, to the right flank, away! The pell-mell clatter of hoofbeats, the Horseman peering ahead, something fogging his vision like mist in the cold night air. And again, looming up, the barrier. Left flank, swiftly! But again the barrier. On all three sides, a dead end, with an incomprehensible barrier and the sides closing in. No way to go—except back.

  Then back, and be damned! The great beast whirled and plunged back the way they had come, head down, a great roaring gallop, echoing from the sides and the rear—but now, vision keen again, the Horseman saw what lay waiting this way, far in the distance but already looming up, soon to be upon them, the barrier closing off their retreat.

  He seized the pale horse's mane, brought the beast to a halt, pawing the ground, stared around him. Something tore from his throat then, a scream of rage and frustration and unbridled malice. For one instant he was frozen there, straddling the beast, fist raised, and then the earth was parting beneath their feet and the only way was down.

  Every time, throughout all history, the barriers had always been there, finally, sooner or later, and every time the Horseman had fallen short of his mission. This time, with new weapons and new speed, he had nearly made it; he had never been so close. Well, so it was, then. Another time would come in its season. And time, he knew, was on his side.

  67

  For Ted Bettendorf there was little time for rejoicing, far too little time for the staggering job ahead. There were resources to be mustered, and precious few sources to muster them from. Paradoxically, the mountain came to Mohammed; Atlanta was a corpse, whereas Willow Grove, Nebraska, was a living, breathing community. Those few that were left in Atlanta who could help him found themselves summarily shipped west. It may have seemed like going to Siberia, but then, as it were, Siberia was where the action was. Very swiftly Willow Grove was transformed, in its moment of glory, into a de facto national headquarters for the Centers for Disease Control. A team of excellent chemists, all high on Tom Shipman's want list, moved in to take over the operation in Wichita, buried under tons of tetracycline, and Shipman came north to rejoin Sally and take a desperately needed rest and put his head together with the others who had already formed such a spectacularly effective team. Bettendorf knew how badly he needed that team, and he was not taking any chances of it dispersing or losing momentum now. Within two weeks a second factory was established in Novato, California, and a third in Knoxville, while what was left of the Justice Department in what was left of Washington, D.C., started emergency injunction proceedings to condemn and then commandeer the Sealey Laboratories establishment in Indianapolis under martial law; arrest, convict and execute the members of the Sealey management responsible for the fraud, summary executions by burning becoming rather commonplace in areas of civil trouble or in cases per

  ceived as profiteering, while a new production team got the new antibiotic pouring out of there on a proper scale under Tom Shipman's supervision. Meanwhile teams of sociologists, biomathematicians and statisticians began building a priority list of isolated, medium-sized rural communities for saturation bombing as soon as drug enough was available, while others scrambled frantically to establish transport and distribution teams so that not an hour was lost when the stockpiles began to build. And as winter moved into long, cold spring, the machinery slowly began turning.

  In Brookdale, Connecticut, Carmen Dillman staged a slow recovery. There was a day when Jack Dillman was certain she was gone, and another day when he knew she would make it but didn't know when, and another day when he woke up and heard her banging pots in the kitchen, and an early spring sun was coming in the window, and she complained bitterly about the accumulated filth in the place. It was not until that day that either of them put their head outside their door, and then cautiously began exploring, and then, unbelieving, began searching, and discovered that they were two of seven people who remained in the entire community. Jack himself never did get sick, and he carefully never asked himself why. . . .

  At the Grizzly Creek Freehold, as winter passed into spring, the toll was not as bad. Harry Slencik, of course, became desperately ill twelve hours after Amy was buried, and Ben fought a six-week battle over him; no one ever knew why he made it, and nobody every asked; such questions were regarded as Bad Medicine at Grizzly Creek. Nor did anyone ask why or how Ben himself escaped, and he himself had no serious answers. What was clear was that the program he had conceived and executed at the Freehold helped cut the losses, however imperfect the program may have been. When it was finally over and supplies of the new drug finally reached Bozeman and surrounding areas, of the 163 people living at the Freehold when Jennie Ozmovitch took sick, 110 had become clinically ill; 62 of them had died and 48 walked out of the Sick Bam. And that, Ben Chamberlain thought, was not such a bad record.

  It would be years, of course, before all the data would be collected; much inevitably would be lost, and in vast expanses of the world, even parts of the "civilized" world, no records were even kept. But in the continental States, as winter moved into spring and spring moved into summer, no one really terribly worried about the data; there was far too much to be done digging out of the chaos. It was enough for the country, one day in midsummer when some semblance of communications networks were being pieced back together again, that someone speculated in official tones that on that morning something on (he order of seventeen million pairs of American eyes had greeted the dawn. Nobody really believed the figure; on the very face of it, it was really pretty unbelievable. And everybody was probably right, too.

  It probably wasn't the right figure.