The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  The nurse pulled a large trash can into the room and positioned it by the door. She pulled off her gown and gloves, threw them in the trash, and left quickly. Ann and Mrs. Schumberg came back in dressed in the hot plastic. Ann told Mr. Schumberg and me, her voice muffled through the mask, that they’d taped a contamination warning next to the door and hospital policy about the use of protective gear when entering the room, instructions on how to take it off when leaving the room so as not to spread what might be inside, and warnings to visitors and staff.

  “Will plastic protect people from your nanomachines?” I asked Mr. Schumberg.

  Mr. Schumberg hit his call nurse button. The head nurse stepped back to the doorway.

  “Plastic is no protection,” Mr. Schumberg told her. “You should use cotton. The hydrocarbons in plastic will attract the nanomachines much faster.”

  “Your company advised us that this was a possibility,” the nurse said. “But who has disposable cotton gowns anymore? I’m not sure we could even buy them. None of us will wear the gowns or masks very long. We’ll take them off and leave them in the trash in your room, which Sanitation will remove and burn each hour. Fire will apparently destroy any nanomachines on the plastic. The masks at least are cotton. It’s the best we can do.”

  The nurse left, and the room grew suddenly quiet as the air-conditioning went silent. They apparently did not want the air from this room recirculating.

  Mr. Schumberg reached out for his wife’s hand. She stood up and put her gloved hand in his. “Get out of here,” he told her. “You and Ann – go now and pray you don’t already have them.”

  “I’m not leaving you, Bernie,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “There were other projects, more dangerous. If my nanos escaped, so did theirs. If all those nanos work together, God knows what they’ll build. This is a level ten.”

  Mrs. Schumberg put her hand over her mouth when he said that.

  “What’s level ten?” I asked.

  Mrs. Schumberg looked at me. “Possible contamination not just of the local area, but of the entire world.”

  Oddly, I didn’t feel tears in my eyes over any of this. I was starting to get very, very angry. “And there’s no reliable way to turn off your machines?” I said. “You built something that could contaminate the world – and you did not first design a way to turn it off?”

  “There’s a way,” he said. “We always kept a failsafe. We never thought it would come to this.”

  Ann and Mrs. Schumberg were gathering up their things.

  “Hydrogen bombs,” he went on. “You can only stop a level ten in the early stages. The military observers back in the lab must know what happened.” He looked at his wife with tears in his eyes. “Get out now.”

  But it was already too late. Hospital security turned back Ann and Mrs. Schumberg at the elevators. No one was leaving the hospital, or at least this floor, for now. Ann and Mrs. Schumberg regowned and gloved and masked and sat quietly back in their chairs. None of us talked. They did not even turn on the television. In that quiet, I could hear nurses and other patients coughing. Granted this was a pulmonary ward, but it seemed to me that I was hearing more coughing than before, especially among the staff. Ann and Mrs. Schumberg both coughed a little now, too. It was impossible not to imagine Mr. Schumberg’s nanomachines fanning out to find what they needed in the local environment, a determined little plague gobbling up the dust between the tiles and the dirt tracked in on people’s shoes and when that wasn’t enough looking for what they needed in other places. They had clearly learned that they could find what they needed in human lungs. Mr. Schumberg’s and my lungs had taught them that.

  A team of nurses arrived to prep Mr. Schumberg for surgery. They untangled him from all the IV lines, but not the oxygen feed. That would go with him. He looked over at me. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I did not know what to say. He’s worked on a project that could contaminate the world and that only hydrogen bombs could control, but he was sorry. His apology rang a little hollow to me. I ended up not saying anything in reply.

  The nurses pulled a transfer bed alongside Mr. Schumberg’s bed.

  “Can you sit up?” one of the nurses asked.

  He tried, but he could not sit up. Apparently he was suddenly too weak to move. “It hurts to move,” he said, and he coughed and coughed.

  Nurses walked to either side of the bed and tried to lift Mr. Schumberg forward, but they could not do it. They could not budge him from the bed, either. He coughed and coughed and moaned.

  One of the nurses pulled back the blankets. There were no restraints, if that was what she was looking for, but there was blood slowly seeping out from around Mr. Schumberg’s back.

  Mrs. Schumberg gasped, and Ann stood up. The head nurse went for towels to staunch the blood with. They tried to turn Mr. Schumberg onto his side, but they could not move him.

  “Stop!” Mr. Schumberg said. “Just let me lie here for a minute.”

  “We have to stop the bleeding,” the head nurse said. She started feeling underneath Mr. Schumberg’s back. “Call Dr. Adams!” she said after a moment. “Stat.”

  Adams was one of the three doctors I’d seen conferring on Mr. Schumberg’s case. He came on the run, as did the resident intern in charge of the floor that afternoon.

  “For God’s sake gown and mask first!” the head nurse shouted at them when they rushed into the room.

  They went back out and did as she asked, then she had them feel under Mr. Schumberg’s back. “Something’s hooking his back to the mattress. It’s gone through the sheets and into the plastic padding.”

  Dr. Adams felt under Mr. Schumberg’s back. There was more and more blood oozing onto the bedding. Dr. Adams knelt to look under the bed. “Just wheel him to surgery in this bed,” he ordered. “Now. I’ll call the OR to advise them.”

  After they left, I lay alone again in the darkening room. But I did not lie there for long. I sat up so that my back could not touch the bed. I looked behind me for signs of blood on the bedding, but there were none.

  Yet.

  I felt around my back for odd bumps, but there were none, either. Still, I did not lie back down.

  I sat there, thinking. It what Mr. Schumberg had said were true, there were people I needed to warn to get out of the city. It being late afternoon on a Tuesday, I reached lots of answering machines. I left messages telling my old friends to leave town – to call me for details if they wanted, but that they had better trust me on this one, especially if they couldn’t reach me at the hospital for some reason. The only person I found at home was my cousin Alyson in Magna.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were in the hospital?” she asked.

  “That’s not important,” I said. I tried to explain what was happening and that she should take her kids and leave now.

  She was quiet for a time. “Look,” she said. “Are you all right? I mean, this isn’t making sense.”

  She probably thought my dementia had gotten worse. “It will make sense,” I said. “I just hope it’s not too late for you when it does.”

  She said nothing.

  “It must be making news,” I said. “Is there anything odd on the channels about Salt Lake?”

  We both turned on the same twenty-four-hour news channel. Five minutes later they ran a story about the closure of the Salt Lake City International Airport. An early spring heatwave had buckled so many of the runways, they claimed, that no flights could take off or land. Since Salt Lake is a Delta hub, this was big news – hundreds of flights had to be rerouted. Officials did not know when the problem would be resolved, especially if each runway had to be resurfaced. Of course, the day’s high temperature had only been sixty-seven, but they interviewed an expert who explained why sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit was high enough on a sunny day to buckle runways.

  “Oh my God!” Alyson said slowly as she read between the lines.

  “Go now before they close the roads,” I said. />
  We wished each other luck and hung up. Maybe they had already closed the roads, I thought. I’d have to wait until five o’clock and the local news for cleverly disguised stories about that. The airport story, however, made it clear that somebody was quarantining these valleys. I realized, of course, that no responsible government could let people fly all over the world and spread Mr. Schumberg’s nanomachines. Still, I was surprised that it was happening so fast. It was almost as if they had had a plan for this in place. On a whim, I pulled the telephone book out of the top dresser drawer and looked up the number for the bus station. I called them just to see if buses were moving. I asked if I could buy a ticket to Denver that night.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the attendant said. “We are unable to book any tickets at this time. Please call back in the morning.”

  She would not give me a reason for her inability to sell tickets. I could only get a recording at the train station.

  Oh, we were good people, I thought. Everybody was doing what he or she had been told to do, at least for now. I wondered how many people in Salt Lake really knew what was happening. There were three million people in the connected valleys along the Wasatch Front. It would not take long before lots of them were asking questions. I wished Alyson and my friends luck out on the roads.

  The head nurse phoned me to ask for the names of everyone who had visited me in the hospital.

  “Just my doctor,” I said.

  “No one else? No friends came by? No family?”

  I hated answering those questions. “No,” I said. “I have one sister, but she’s in Minneapolis.”

  “All right,” she said, and then she coughed. “Sorry to call you like this. I just didn’t want to pull on one of those hot gowns again. Saves time and gowns.”

  Oddly, after the phone calls, I slept for a time. When I dreamed, I found myself helping to build the wall around the downtown highrises again. The entire cityscape was weirder in this dream. Large sections of the valley seemed to have been flattened to the ground, while among the towers lacy filaments strung with lights danced on the evening breezes. It was so hot down where we were working. Everyone’s shirt was wet with sweat. I wished that I could be twenty stories up to feel the breeze. We could not feel a breath of air where we worked and sweated. I tried to wipe the sweat off my forehead.

  I woke with a start. My doctor was holding my wrist in her gloved hand, taking my pulse.

  “You can still feel a pulse through these gloves,” she said. “Sorry to startle you.”

  “It’s so hot in here,” I said.

  “I asked Housekeeping to bring in a fan. They should be on the way with it. Your temperature’s up. One-oh-four now. Pulse is high, too.”

  I could feel my heart racing.

  “We’re taking you into surgery in two hours.”

  “That late in the day?” I asked.

  “None of us is leaving here, so it’s easy to round up a top-notch team. The entire hospital’s under quarantine. Meantime, the police are tracking down everybody who might have come in contact with Mr. Schumberg or his company, and they’re bringing them here to be checked. Apparently they’ve already turned up six other cases among the people who’ve been calling in sick at his company. Their HMOs were treating them for everything from bronchitis to asthma. They have them down in the ER now as the initial intake area, but they’ll be bringing them up to this floor for care.”

  “How is Mr. Schumberg?”

  “Still in surgery. I’ll be heading down to see what they bring out of him before we start on you. But what you have is much smaller. It will not be so hard to remove.”

  “How do you know that surgery will get it all?” I asked. “Apparently a radio tower can grow from just one nanomachine. How do you know that you won’t have to cut this out of me today, then repeat the procedure again four days later, then again four days after that?”

  “We don’t,” she said. “All I know is that what we can see now must come out. We’ll cross other bridges if and when we have to.”

  I turned my head and covered my mouth to cough and decided to tell her the rest of what Mr. Schumberg had said. “It might be too late for all of us anyway,” I said.

  “Hang in there,” she said. “We’ve been through a lot together, you and me. This is just the latest challenge.”

  “No, you don’t understand. Has anyone told you how the government would control a level ten contamination, and that this might be a level ten?”

  “I’ve heard,” she said. She pulled up a chair and sat down. She looked mostly tired now, not angry. “The rumor mill is working overtime in this town, as you can imagine. We’ve got maybe a quarter of a million people trying to walk over the mountains since every other way out of the valley is closed. The police and the National Guard on the other side are just rounding them up and taking them to camps when they come down through the passes.”

  “But you didn’t try to get out? Surely some are making it through. How can you stay here?”

  “I have patients to care for and more on the way.”

  She stepped to the window and looked out at the city. “I don’t think they’ll drop bombs just yet,” she said. “The medical community in these valleys is working furiously to discover how far the contagion has spread. Surely the government will wait till we’ve at least answered that question. Besides, they won’t let me leave. No one can leave. Plenty of the staff has tried. This place is sealed tight. Believe me, if I could have had you and my other patients evacuated to the hospital in Cheyenne, I would have.”

  * * *

  Having part of your lung removed is no fun. But having it cut out when you have pneumonia is the equivalent of medieval torture. Pneumonia makes you cough, and each cough after my surgery was agony. They kept me heavily sedated, so I did not know much except the pain until the day after the surgery. They had my bed positioned at a ninety-degree angle, so I was sitting when I woke up. There was a different man in the bed next to mine.

  “Who are you?” I asked him, and he told me some name I can’t remember.

  When my doctor made rounds, I asked her what had happened to Mr. Schumberg. She was quiet for a time, then she took hold of my arm. “He died during surgery,” she said. “I didn’t want to tell you till after your own surgery.”

  I did not know what to say. I looked at the lilacs Mrs. Schumberg had brought me.

  “Aren’t you afraid of catching this?” I asked my doctor.

  “Of course. But if I were afraid of catching my patients’ troubles, I would never have become a doctor.”

  I wanted to send Mrs. Schumberg flowers. I imagined that she was still here in the hospital, quarantined like the rest of us. I wondered if the gift shop could find her and deliver them to her, but I felt too sick to call the gift shop then. At least Mrs. Schumberg and Ann were together.

  My doctor showed me a picture of what they had cut out of my lungs. It looked like a black metal rectangle with a knob forming on one end. They’d had it incinerated.

  I knew the hospital had become more crowded – it was much noisier outside my room – but I did not realize just how crowded it was until they took me to Radiology to x-ray my lungs. We could hardly move down the hallways. There were people sleeping in every available chair and others sleeping in sleeping bags on the floors. They had apparently quarantined the entire day and night shifts of doctors, nurses, and interns because many of the people I saw were medical personnel. But there were lots of other people as well just wandering the hallways. They all looked bewildered and tired.

  They took my x-rays, then wheeled me back up to bed. After about an hour, my doctor came in with the x-rays in hand. She looked grim.

  “It’s growing back,” she said. “Surgery is backed up, but I was able to call in a few favors and schedule you for surgery at four o’clock this afternoon.”

  “It won’t stop it,” I said. “You know that now.”

  She sat in the chair next to my bed. “What do you want
me to do?” she asked. “We can’t leave it inside you.”

  I thought for a minute. I imagined all of us with nanomachines consenting to euthanasia and having our bodies burned, but then I remembered something Mr. Schumberg had said. “High dose radiation might stop it,” I said. I told my doctor what Mr. Schumberg had told me.

  “How high is high?” she asked. “Wasn’t he referring to hydrogen bombs?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “But don’t they use radiation in cancer treatment? The equipment must be here to expose me to it. What do we have to lose? Use me as a guinea pig. Find a way to stop this before they do something drastic.”

  She left without saying another word.

  Early the next morning, they covered my head and lower body with lead, then they shot my chest full of radiation. Afterward, back in my room and bed, I had never felt so sick. My body was rigid and hot. For a time, I could not even blink my eyes.

  “He’s going into shock,” I heard my doctor say. “Get more blankets in here. Hurry!”

  I sat there waiting for the blankets, but the very first time I was able to blink my eyes again I threw up. It went everywhere. It was bloody like Mr. Schumberg’s had been.

  A team of cleaning ladies eventually came in, but Maria was not with them.

  “Where’s Maria?” I asked.

  “Who’s Maria?” my doctor asked.

  I explained about the cleaning lady who had helped the night Mr. Schumberg had gotten sick.

  “They’ve been checking everyone who entered this room,” she said. “I’ll make sure they’ve looked at her.”

  But Maria was not in the hospital. She did not answer her telephone. The police found her house empty, some of her things hurriedly packed and gone. She had not come to work the last two days, and even before the quarantine she had not called in to request sick or vacation time.

  But by evening, they knew what had happened. Apparently Maria’s papers had been forged. She had entered this country illegally. The INS had arrested her the morning after the shift during which she had cleaned this room. They had transported her that same day to the Mexican border and handed her over to officials in Nogales.