The Mammoth Book of Terror

by Stephen Jones

  A good record, as Dr Thackeray had observed. And no reason why it should not continue to shine. Metzger’s previous research work – extending back to his undergraduate days and assuming considerable stature during his residency – had led to numerous publications and no little acclaim. Clearly he was a man who was going places, and the Center was quite proud when he accepted their extremely generous offer. They had given him a free hand in a superbly equipped lab in their newest research facility, with a position as attending physician on the medical staff. And they had made it plain that this was merely a start for him, that there shortly would be important vacancies in the hierarchy of the Center . . .

  Yes, it had been a damn good move.

  Geoff grimaced and crumpled his Styrofoam cup. And one of the first additions to his lab equipment was going to be a private coffee urn.

  II

  “Did you notice that ring Sid Lipton had on last night?” asked Gwen.

  “What?” Geoff, a persistent headache reminding him of the cocktail party at Trelane’s the night before, was trying to watch the morning news.

  “Sid had on a sort of signet ring,” Gwen persisted. “Did you notice?”

  “What? No, guess I didn’t.”

  “It was an ornate silver ring with a large black onyx, I think. Into the onyx was set a kind of silver medallion or seal. It looked like a fraternity ring or something, but I couldn’t place it. I thought maybe you knew what it was.”

  “Haven’t noticed it. Dr Lipton’s usually scrubbed for surgery whenever I see him – or always looks that way. Don’t think I’ve ever seen him wear anything on his hands but rubber gloves.”

  “Want some more orange juice? Well, it was strange, because when I went to the girls’ room I passed Sid and Brice Thackeray in the hall, and Brice seemed like he was upset or something because Sid had on the ring.”

  “Upset?”

  “Well, maybe not. But they were talking over something in a not-very-casual manner, and it seemed like the ring was part of it. They stopped when I walked by and moved back in with the party. Did you see that slutty dress Tess Gilman had on?”

  “Huh? No.”

  “I’ll bet. A see-through blouse with her figure! You could see where her body stocking had padded inserts. And all you men ogling her like she was Raquel or somebody.”

  “Gwen, I’m trying to listen to the news.”

  Her face tightened. “Screw the news! You spend all day between the hospital and your damn lab, and when you do get home in time to talk, all you do is tell me about the hospital, tell me about your research. Damn it, you might at least try to pay a little attention to me over the breakfast table!”

  “Sweetheart, they’re talking about Senator Hollister. He had a CVA last night and died. Forgive me if I find the death of the front-running liberal candidate for the next Presidential election of somewhat greater interest than your rehash of the highlights of another boring cocktail party!”

  “Well I’m sorry if you find spending an evening with your wife boring!” she returned hotly.

  The news moved on to the latest catastrophe in Pakistan.

  “Gwen, honey, that wasn’t what I meant.”

  “Well, goddamn it, Geoff! You don’t have to brush off everything I say. I put up with that miserable last year of Harvard, and then your internship in that filthy city – gone all the time, and home every other nightjust to sleep. Then that endless residency period, when everything was supposed to get better and you’d have more free time – but you didn’t, because you were doing work on your own in that lab. And Jesus, that miserable stay in the heartland of coal mines and grits while you played the medical missionary! And all this was supposed to lead up to when you could be the big man in the big medical complex, and name your own hours, and pay some attention to me for a change. Remember me? I’m your wife! Would you like to stuff me away with some of those damn virus cultures you’re forever playing with!”

  I’ve heard this before, thought Geoff, knowing that he would hear it again. And she wasn’t being all that unfair, he also realized. But he was running late, and this lingering hangover left him in no mood to talk things out again.

  “Honey, it happens that I’m at a crucial stage right now, and I really have to keep at it,” he offered by way of reconciliation. “Besides, we went to the cocktail party at Trelane’s last night, didn’t we? We were together then, weren’t we?”

  “Big deal,” Gwen sniffled. “It was a lousy party. All you talked about was medicine.”

  Geoff sighed, and glanced at his watch. “Look, I don’t want to make this sound too dramatic, but what I’m working on now could be big – I mean big. How big it might be I haven’t even told my colleagues – I don’t want to look like a fool if it doesn’t work out. But, honey, I think it is going to work out, and if it does, I’ll have made a breakthrough like no one since . . . Well, it will be a breakthrough.”

  “Swell! You mean you’ll have discovered a whole new way to implant zits on a monkey’s navel, or some other thrilling discovery that all the journals can argue about!” Gwen was not to be placated.

  Giving it up, Geoff bent to kiss her. She turned her face, and he got a mouthful of brown curls. “Baby, it really could be big. If it is, well, things could get a whole lot different for us in a hurry.”

  “I’ll take any change – the sooner the better,” she murmured, raising her chin a little.

  “Trust me, sweetheart. Hey look, you were fussing about your party dress last night. Why don’t you go out today and pick out a new one – something nice, whatever you like. OK?”

  “Mmmff,” decided his wife, letting him kiss her cheek.

  “What news today?”

  Geoff glanced up from his stack of electron photomicrographs. “Oh, hi, Dave.” And to atone for the trace of irritation in his voice, he added, “Have a cup of coffee?”

  “Muchos grassy-ass,” his visitor replied, turning to the large coffee urn Geoff had inveigled for his lab. He spooned in half a cupful of sugar and powdered cream subsititute, and raised the steaming container immediately to his lips – one of those whose mouths seem impervious to scalding temperatures.

  “Don’t know why it is, but even when you brew your own, it ends up tasting rancid like all other hospital coffee,” Geoff commented, half covering his pile of photographs.

  “Unh,” Dr Froneberger acceded. “Know what you mean – that’s why I gave up drinking it black. Rot your liver if you don’t cut it with powdered goo. I think it’s the water. Hospital water is shot full of chemicals, rays, gases, dead bugs. Very healthfully unhealthful.

  “What you got there, Geoff?” he queried, moving over to the desk.

  Reluctantly, Metzger surrendered the photomicrographs. Froneberger’s own lab was at the other end of the hall, and it would be impolitic to affront his neighbor. Still, he vaguely resented the frequent contacts that their proximity afforded. Not that Dave was any more than ordinarily obnoxious, but the other’s research with influenza viruses impinged closely enough on some areas of his own work to raise the touchy problem of professional jealousy.

  “Unh,” Froneberger expounded, tapping a hairy finger across several of the photos. “Right here, buddy. I can see it too. You got that same twisted grouping along the nuclear membrane, and on these two you can definitely see the penetration. And you can make a good argument with this one that here’s the same grouping on the chromosome. Hey, this is good stuff you’re getting here, Geoff buddy.”

  “I think I’m making some progress,” offered Metzger testily, rankled at the other’s appropriation of data he had spent countless hours working toward. It would never do for Froneberger to insinuate himself into this thing with matters such as they were.

  “Where’s it leading you, buddy? Got anything backing this besides what the editors like to brush off as ‘artifacts of electron microscopy’?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Geoff replied evasively. “I’m getting some new data off these labeled
cultures that may lead somewhere.”

  “May, and again may not, that’s the way it always is. I know the feeling, believe you me. Been a few times, buddy, when I damn near thought I . . . But, hell, maybe all the cherries will roll up for you this time, you never know. Looks impressive so far, my fran. Could be we’re hearing the Nobel boys sniffing outside the door.”

  “I think that’s your telephone.”

  “Shit, it is that. And my secretary’s on break. Better catch it. Chow!” He lumbered off.

  “Damn!” Geoff breathed, resorting his photographs with fumbling touch.

  III

  “Too late for you to help him, eh?”

  “How’s that?” Geoff looked up from his evening paper and turned toward the man who was seating himself opposite him. It was Ira Festung, who busily rearranged his cafeteria tray, smiling cheerfully as he smothered his hospital pot roast in catsup. He should have taken the paper back to the lab to finish reading, Geoff reflected. He had promised Gwen he would be home before too late, and he could lose half an hour trying to break away from the garrulous epidemiologist.

  “I noticed you were reading the headlines about the Supreme Court Justice,” said Dr Festung, doing nothing to clarify his greeting.

  “I was,” Geoff admitted, glancing again at the lead article, which told of Justice Freeport’s death from cancer that morning. “Freeportwas a good man. The second justice to die in the last few months, and both of them liberals. They’ll have a hard time replacing them – especially with the Administration we have right now.”

  Festung snorted into his ice water. “Oh, they’ll probably find another couple Commies to fill their seats. Don’t see how you can seriously regret Freeport and Lloyd, after the stands those leftists took on socialized medicine. Sure it sounds great to be the bleeding-heart humanitarian, but tell me how much of this fancy research you’d be doing as a salaried pill-pusher. Hell, look at the disaster in Britain! Is that the kind of medical care you want to dish out to the public?”

  If this got started again, Geoff knew he could plan to spend the whole evening in the hospital cafeteria. And afterward he’d have a sore throat, and his grey-haired colleagues would shake their heads condescendingly and despair of his political judgment.

  “What did you mean by what you said when you sat down?” he asked instead, hoping to steer the epidemiologist away from another great debate.

  “That?” Festung wiped catsup from his full lips.

  Whiskers, and he’d look like President Taft, Metzger decided.

  “Well, Freeport had multiple myeloma, and from what I hear, aren’t you about to come up with the long-sought breakthrough in cancer?” Festung’s watery eyes were suddenly keen.

  Goddamn that sonofabitch Froneberger! Geoff fought to hold a poker face. Let word go around that the Boy Wonder thought he had a cure for cancer, and he’d be a laughingstock if this research didn’t pan out!

  “Oh, is that the scuttlebutt these days?” He smiled carefully. “Well, I’m glad to hear somebody has even greater optimism for my project than I do. Maybe I ought to trade notes with him.”

  “If we didn’t have rumors to play with, wouldn’t this medical center be a dull place to live,” Dr Festung pronounced.

  Geoff laughed dutifully, although he had his own opinion of the back-stabbing gossip that filled so many conversations here.

  “Waste of time trying to cure cancer anyway,” the epidemiologist continued. “Nature would only replace it with another scourge just as deadly, and then we’d have to begin all over again. Let it run its course and be done, I say.”

  “Well, that’s your specialty,” Geoff said with a thin smile, uncertain how serious his companion meant to be taken.

  “Common sense,” confided Festung. “Common sense and simple arithmetic – that’s all there is to epidemiology. Every Age has its deadly plague, far back as you care to trace it.

  “The great plagues of the ancient world – leprosy, cholera, the Black Death. They all came and went, left millions dead before they were finished, and for most of them we can’t even say for certain what disease it may have been.”

  “Those were primitive times,” Geoff shrugged. “Plagues were expected – and accepted. No medicine, and filthy living conditions. Naturally a plague would go unchecked – until it either killed all those who were susceptible, or something like the London Fire came along to cauterize the centers of contagion.”

  “More often the plagues simply ran their course and vanished.” Dr Festung went on in a tone of dismissal. “Let’s take modern times, civilized countries, then – after your London Fire (actually it was a change of dominant species of rat) and the ebbing of the bubonic plague. Comes the Industrial Revolution to Europe, and with it strikes smallpox and then tuberculosis. A little later, and you get the picture in this country too. OK, you finally vaccinate against smallpox, but what about TB? Where did TB come from, anyway? Industrialization? No sir, because TB went on the wane at the height of industrialization. And why did it? Biggest killer of its day, and now it’s a rare disease. And you know medicine had damn little to do with its disappearance. Then influenza. Killed millions, and not just because medical conditions weren’t what we have now. Hell, we still can’t do much about the flu. Froneberger tells me his research indicates there are two or three wholly new influenza strains ‘born’ (if you will) each year – that we know about. Hell, we still aren’t really sure what strain was the great killer at the early part of the century. And talk about confusion, why, when you say ‘flu,’ you can mean anything from several bacteria to any number of viral strains and substrains.”

  “Well, how about polio?” challenged Metzger, digging for a cigarette. Festung hated tobacco smoke.

  “Polio? Exactly. Another killer plague that appeared from nowhere. Sure, this time we came up with a vaccine. But so we know where it went – where did polio come from, though? Each generation seems to have its nemesis. When I was your age, the big killer was stomach cancer. Like bad weather, we talked a lot about stomach cancer, but nothing much was ever done, and it faded into the background just the same. Instead, we had heart disease. Now there’s the number one killer for these many years – the reason for billions of government dollars doled out for research. And what have we really done about it? Dietary fads, a few ghoulish transplants, and a pile of Rube Goldberg gadgetry that can keep things pumping for a few extra years. Sum total: too close to nothing to bother carrying. But that’s all right too, because now heart disease is on the way out, and for now our great slayer of mankind is cancer.

  “History and figures tell the story, young man. Cancer is here for the moment. And maybe all your research will do something aboutit, then more likely it won’t. But it doesn’t matter in the long run, because cancer will have its heyday and fade like its predecessors at the scythe handle, and then we’ll find something new to die of. Wonder what it’ll be.”

  “Someone else’s worry that’s what it’ll be. I suppose, as they say, you got to die of something.” Geoff pushed his chair back from the table. “Meanwhile I’ll chase after today’s problems. And one of the most immediate concerns a scintillation counter run that ought to be gone through by now. See you, Ira.”

  “Sure. Hey, how about leaving that paper, if you’re finished reading it.”

  Dr Thackeray was waiting in the lab when Geoff returned. The Great Man was leaning over Metzger’s desk, idly looking through several days’ loose data and notes. A long white lab coat, stylishly ragged after the Center’s peculiar snobbery, covered his sparse frame. A little imagination and he could make a good Hallowe’en phantom, mused Geoff, watching the blue cigar smoke swirl about his hawklike face.

  Geoff stepped into his office alcove. “Keeping late hours, Dr Thackeray?” The Chairman of Medicine has no first name within the walls of his domain.

  “Good evening, Dr Metzger,” returned his superior. “No, not particularly. I wanted to see how things were going with you, and I felt
it likely you’d still be here. Your devotion to your work has caused some comment – even among our staff. Most commendable, but I hope you aren’t working yourself into an early grave.”

  “I’ll manage,” Geoff promised. “I feel like I’m really getting somewhere right now though, and I hate to let up.”

  “Yes. I see you’ve made progress, Dr Metzger.” His eyes black in the sterile glare of the fluorescents, Dr Thackeray let his gaze gesture about the crowded laboratory. “Very significant progress in the year you’ve been with us here at the Center.”

  Geoff framed his words with care. “I don’t like to put myself down as saying – even off the record – just how far what I’m doing here might lead, Dr Thackeray. You’ve seen what I’ve accomplished so far, read the preliminary reports. But in the last few months I’ve . . . well, made a few unexpected breakthroughs. I think I know what it will mean, but I want absolute evidence to substantiate my findings before I speculate openly with regard to what I’ve learned. Forgive me if this seems melodramatic, but I’ve no desire to be labeled a fool, nor would I care to bring derision upon the Center.”

  “Again commendable, Dr Metzger. I appreciate your position, naturally. As you know, there’s been some speculation among the staff relating to your most recent work – enough that some of us can understand what you’re trying to lead up to.”

  “I’m making no preliminary claims,” Geoff repeated. “Between the two of us, I feel certain of my ground. But too many over eager researchers have gone off half cocked and regretted it when their errors were immediately apparent to more careful workers.”