The Steel Spring

by Per Wahlöö

  He sat in silence for a while. Jensen said nothing.

  ‘Once the reactionary forms of the police and military stop functioning for some reason, something happens which is known in the jargon as a revolutionary situation. Somebody has now been kind enough to wipe out the police and the military. We assume it happened unintentionally, and the forms taken by the process were disgusting. Not even the minority among us that went on most eagerly and rabidly about creating a revolutionary situation can be feeling particularly satisfied or delighted.’

  Without warning, he clapped Jensen on the shoulder.

  ‘You’re on your own now, Jensen. Has it sunk in? There’s only you left.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is presumably your last big moment. I don’t want to overshadow it. Is there anything I know that you haven’t worked out yet?’

  Jensen said nothing.

  ‘Ask away. I can at least confirm a few of your assumptions.’

  ‘Assumptions?’

  ‘Conclusions, then.’

  ‘About this illness,’ said Jensen.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s fatal?’

  ‘Yes, invariably.’

  ‘But there is a way of prolonging the patients’ lives?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Transfusions?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘That’s not entirely clear. But it can’t delay the inevitable for very long.’

  ‘Have you been able to chart the course of the illness? Medically?’

  ‘Yes. Essentially. It goes through a series of stages.’

  ‘What stages?’

  ‘The very first symptom is the loss of all inhibition. It affects the central and sympathetic nervous systems of the brain. A centrally-operating nervous system, if you will.’

  ‘Hence the increased sexual activity?’

  ‘Yes. It presumably owes more to the loss of inhibition than to the stimulation of the nervous system. And since people have been schooled by their environment and upbringing to dam up their emotions, the effect is all the more spectacular. Did you get a chance to read those confidential research findings on sexual behaviour that were circulated a few years back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They were extremely depressing. Frequency of sexual intercourse among people of active ages was once a month. Only ten per cent of all adult women had ever had an orgasm.’

  He sat for a moment saying nothing.

  ‘The project was set up because of concerns about the falling birth rate. They were apparently satisfied with the result to the extent that it gave a plausible explanation of why the birth rate was falling. Naturally, no one in a position of responsibility thought to ask why people weren’t having intercourse and didn’t want children. And those who did were advised to hold their tongues.’

  Jensen looked impassively out of the window. He had switched on the headlights and their beams dissolved into the distance in the emptiness of the tunnel.

  ‘And what’s the next stage?’ he asked.

  ‘More psychosis. Normally repressed aggression is let loose, you hit anyone you feel like hitting, kill anyone you feel like killing. Your judgement becomes increasingly impaired. You resort to more and more radical solutions. Say you’re a table tennis player: you might well think the best option was to kill your opponent, to take one very simplified example.’

  ‘And then the physical symptoms make themselves felt?’

  ‘No. We think we’ve worked out that the next stage is a sort of mental rebalancing, a return to normal. The person feels well and behaves as he used to before they got ill. He remembers what’s happened but feels no anxiety about what he may have done in his aggressive period, and doesn’t feel any responsibility for what he did, either. In popular terms we might say that there’s a blank, but that this blank is part of the overall picture of the illness.’

  ‘How long do they remain in that state?’

  ‘A week. Maybe two. Or something in between.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘In the final phase, everything goes very fast. The first symptom is exhaustion. Then come delirium, nausea and, a little later, a persistent headache. The person loses all sense of will and becomes entirely apathetic. Sees everything as if through a pulsating red mist. At the end there’s a feeling of suffocation and intense claustrophobia. A short period of unconsciousness, immediately followed by death.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What happens medically speaking is a rapid proliferation of white blood corpuscles, while the red ones disappear. You could see it as a kind of free-floating tumour. The pathology is similar to what we find in leukaemia, but compressed into a much shorter time frame.’

  ‘And it’s incurable from the outset?’

  ‘As far as I can see. I’m not aware of any effective treatment. Which naturally doesn’t preclude there being some way of halting the course of the disease at an early stage.’

  Jensen drove out of the tunnel. The industrial area was still deserted, but there were lorries and jeeps parked at both sides of the road. There were groups of armed men and women standing round the vehicles. Most of them were wearing denim overalls or green boiler suits. The debris from the roadblocks had been thrown down the gravel embankments.

  ‘Your people?’ asked Jensen without taking his eyes from the road.

  The police doctor nodded.

  ‘We’ll meet a lot of oncoming traffic,’ he said. ‘But it should be a clear run in the direction we’re going. Feel free to step on it.’

  ‘Am I right in thinking the illness has one more stage?’ said Jensen. ‘After the patient has nominally died.’

  ‘Yes. But I’ve got to be more hypothetical on that point. The moment of actual, physical death can be postponed with the help of blood transfusions. They keep the patient not only alive but also in good physical condition. For a time, as I said.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Jensen.

  ‘But it doesn’t stop the illness moving rapidly into its next phase, the stage after death as you so aptly put it.’

  He stopped. Jensen said nothing more, but concentrated on the driving. At regular intervals they met columns of lorries on their way into the city. Green-boiler-suited men and women sat closely packed in the backs of the lorries. They were all armed.

  ‘Where did you get the outfits?’

  ‘Abroad. A long time ago.’

  Five kilometres further on, Jensen said:

  ‘I assume all the cases of this illness started at virtually the same time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that the infection or trigger was distributed eleven or twelve weeks before death?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the police doctor.

  A few minutes later he added:

  ‘So that doesn’t leave us much to choose from, does it?’

  ‘No,’ said Inspector Jensen.

  CHAPTER 24

  ‘Why did they amputate his legs?’

  ‘Because they believed their own assertions,’ said the red-haired man.

  ‘Is that a reasonable explanation?’

  ‘Yes. They were basing their calculation on three mistaken hypotheses. Firstly that a vast number of people, including themselves, were suffering from an illness. Secondly that this supposed illness was infectious. And thirdly that it could be cured.

  ‘They kept themselves alive with blood transfusions but knew it was only giving them temporary respite. So they tried out other forms of treatment. They knew the man who brought the woman to the hospital had been in close contact with her, and assumed he was infected.’

  ‘Were they trying to cure him?’

  ‘Yes. Or rather, they used him. Carried out some kind of treatment. He became part of a series of experiments.’

  ‘They meant no harm?’

  ‘Just so. They meant no harm. You’re very precise, Jensen.’

  The police doctor regarded Jensen through bloodshot eyes. Fished a cigar stub from the bre
ast pocket of his boiler suit.

  ‘Exemplary in your precision,’ he said. ‘I think everything that happened was done without meaning harm. That’s the philosophy of the Accord: that no one is to have evil thoughts or malicious intent. No one’s to be worried or distressed or want to hurt anybody or anything. It’s a doctrine that’s been hammered into people’s consciousness for decades. Why should doctors be an exception?’

  Jensen did not reply.

  ‘But they overlooked the fact that if you deny life’s negative sides, then all the positive things start to feel abstract and divorced from reality, too.’

  The police doctor lit his cigar stub, chewed on it and puffed out a cloud of smoke.

  ‘Because there are positive sides even to Accord society, when all’s said and done. But you couldn’t see them. Could you, Jensen?’

  Jensen remained tight-lipped.

  ‘Three months ago when you were coming along this very road, were you curious about what dying would feel like?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Did you wonder whether anybody would miss you?’

  ‘Was the amputation part of the treatment?’ said Jensen.

  ‘The aftercare,’ the doctor said drily. ‘First he was given some kind of prophylactic treatment. They injected mustard gas or something similar.’

  ‘Mustard gas?’

  ‘Yes, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Or at any rate, there’s some kind of rational medical reasoning in the background, even if it’s rudimentary. When the treatment proved disastrous, they did the amputation, presumably to save his life. They were doctors after all, in spite of everything, and a doctor’s job is to prolong other people’s lives. Besides, they were trying to complete in less than a week a series of experiments that might normally be expected to take ten years or a lifetime.’

  ‘So they’re insane.’

  ‘Utterly. The brain damage suffered in the first stage is irreparable. Even so, they acted with a certain logic.’

  ‘They must have killed thousands of people.’

  ‘Yes. Even more than that, probably. But only once stocks of blood plasma had been exhausted. They mounted raids to round up blood donors pretty much the same way you cast a net to catch fish.’

  ‘What does it look like there? In the main hospital?’

  ‘What do you think? A vast hospital, home to a thousand or maybe twice that many deranged doctors, all needing blood transfusions twice a day to stay alive. And working like … well, like crazy to find a way to cure an illness they’re suffering from themselves and can’t understand. Dug in behind fortifications of barbed wire and sandbags that they made the military put up before they let them die. What did those two in the ambulance say to you when they forced you off the road this morning? The very first thing?’

  ‘Asked if I was sick or healthy.’

  ‘Exactly. In their confusion they’ve got all the concepts muddled up. Like so many other mentally ill people, they see themselves as the healthy ones and all the others as sick.’

  The doctor wound down the side window and let the cool breeze fan the interior of the car.

  ‘If only people had listened,’ he said absently.

  ‘What have you done with them?’

  ‘The ambulance crews?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What you should have done with those two this morning. Killed them. We’re going to storm the main hospital in an hour’s time and kill the rest.’

  He shrugged his shoulders and threw the chewed and disintegrating cigar stub out of the window.

  ‘So it was your lot who took the children away?’

  ‘Yes. It was all we could do at that point.’

  Inspector Jensen swung up to the forecourt of the terminal building and parked the patrol car exactly where he had found it sixteen hours before.

  ‘Do you know what, Jensen?’ said the police doctor. ‘There were actually people who missed you.’

  ‘Like who, for example?’

  ‘Like me.’

  CHAPTER 25

  ‘Have you been inside the main hospital precincts?’ asked Jensen.

  The red-haired doctor shook his head.

  ‘Just outside,’ he said. ‘That’s quite enough for now.’

  ‘Where did you find the man who lost his legs?’

  ‘At the central detox unit. They stopped guarding it yesterday. Not enough manpower, presumably.’

  He paused.

  ‘Maybe you can imagine what it looks like there. It was used as a prison at first. Then, when the main hospital and all the others were overwhelmed by the dead and dying, they started cremating the bodies there. A hygienic precaution, as they saw it. Soon everyone who clearly didn’t have long to live was sent straight there. Except for certain privileged individuals, of course, who were part of the junta, as it were, and allowed to stay at the main hospital and be kept going with blood transfusions, while the darkness claimed their brains.’

  ‘But that man wasn’t even suffering from the complaint, was he?’

  ‘Within a few days it became impossible to carry on burning the bodies, because those doing the cremating ran away or died themselves. But they carried on sending the bodies there, in military trucks. The transports were still going on, as late as yesterday.’

  Jensen nodded.

  ‘I saw a few of them,’ he said.

  ‘Those you saw wouldn’t in the main have been people who died of the complaint, but the blood donors they’d rounded up, and then killed either at the main hospital or one of the help stations. They were also taking all those deemed to be hopeless cases to the central detox unit. Patients who weren’t even worth extracting blood from. The man without legs was one of those.’

  ‘Why didn’t people put up any resistance?’ asked Jensen.

  ‘Because they didn’t listen to us,’ said the doctor. ‘Because they’ve all turned into sheep.’

  ‘An over-simplification,’ said Jensen.

  The red-haired man shot him a look.

  ‘Of course it’s an over-simplification. Besides, a number of people did resist, lots of them hid away and others escaped in a variety of ways. And you must also remember that they had armed sanitation soldiers at their disposal. Trained military units that they kept alive for three reasons: to guard the hospital area, to block off the roads to the evacuated city centre, and to escort the transports of blood donors. But that’s still not an adequate answer to your question.’

  ‘What question?’

  ‘Why people didn’t put up more resistance. The primary reason is that a reactionary elite among the medically trained people in this country has spent years building up and maintaining an inflated, dishonest and artificial authority on the doctors’ part, which they felt gave them the right to treat those seeking help any way they liked, and the opportunity to make scandalous profits from lucrative private practices, while officially devoting their time to their senior consultancies in the state hospital system.’

  Jensen said nothing.

  ‘This system hasn’t just been accepted by the government, it’s been actively encouraged. The doctors have been able to strut round among ordinary folk like richly rewarded gods wielding power over life and death. Officially they’ve been in charge of departments and whole sections of the state hospitals. But while sick people sit in crowded hospital waiting rooms for hours and even days on end to be treated in an offhand way by some medical student or underling, they devote hours to private patients who’re willing to pay for medical care they may not even need.’

  He turned his head and looked reflectively at Jensen.

  ‘And that’s how, for many people, doctors have become universally prevailing symbols of supremacy. Just as the government and the authorities have to an increasing extent become abstract, distant, incomprehensible powers, mercifully allowing their tablets of stone to descend on people like manna from heaven. Tablets inscribed with laws and edicts announcing that things are self-evident or meaningless, an
d ultimately stripping the individual of all spiritual and intellectual autonomy and making him doubt his own reason. There, that’s your answer, I think. To why so few people offered resistance.’

  They were standing beside each other in a room on the second floor of the terminal building. Out on the airfield there was significant activity. The last of the vehicles that had been used to block the runways were just being towed away. Several helicopters and small planes were being prepared for take-off.

  There were groups of figures in green boiler suits standing about on the tarmac. Just below the window were two young women and a man. They were armed and had belts of cartridges slung over their shoulders. Jensen noted they were smoking and chatting. But there was no exuberance in their manner, and their faces were mournful and grave.

  ‘So of course that eventually led to a lot of doctors, in fact most of the junior doctors and medical students, becoming socialists. Partly as a matter of conscience and social awareness, but naturally to a large extent because they were systematically pushed aside and excluded from more lucrative positions.’

  The police doctor wiped the condensation from the window. Outside it was grey and misty, with snow in the air. It would soon be getting dark.

  ‘The reactionary, more established part of the medical profession, who were in the overwhelming majority, viewed us with great disapproval and naturally didn’t neglect to report their worrying observations to the government, which passed them on to the political police.’

  ‘The security services.’

  ‘Well, whatever you want to call them. Hence the wave of arrests just as you were leaving.’

  ‘I know how you got away. But the others?’

  ‘They were taken to the detox unit, where they were reasonably treated to start with. They weren’t subjected to interrogation and there didn’t seem to be any form of investigation in progress. The guards gradually got more brutal, and after that bloody Saturday, the second of November, they began executing the prisoners. Evidently on their own initiative, not on orders. Then my colleagues rioted en masse and staged a break-out. More than half of them got away while the place was in uproar. They headed straight out of the city and away from the surrounding area.’