Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (14 page)

The workers went on their way, gathering their data. Carlos dispatched Monique north to the Fort Collins CDC installation up near Estes Park by army helicopter with instructions to move as fast as possible—"Until you've got this bug pinned down in all dimensions, we're really flying blind down here." With her on her way, he worked far into the night with Roger Salmon and Bob Romano from Albuquerque getting the Canon City fieldwork organized and moving.

Next morning at daybreak he ahd Frank Barrington, now officially on loan to the CDC from the Forest Service after a little high-level interdepartment finagling, took off to the forested slopes to the west of Canon City in a little Forest Service Jeep Frank had commandeered, carrying a large, oddly shaped bag that Carlos hoisted into the back end, in search of dead rodents. As Frank turned up a steep canyon road through scrub pine and bramble, he said, "The whole concept of dead rodent counts really evolved from the fact that you don't ordinarily find any dead rodents in the wild."

"None at all?" Carlos said.

"Not very often. For one thing, most wild rodents never die a natural death. They're caught and killed by predators-hawks, eagles, coyotes, weasels, martens—and immediately eaten. The few that do die on the ground are devoured within hours by those same predators and a few others—ravens, buzzards, bobcats. Even a cougar won't turn his back on a nice, crunchy one-bite meal if he finds one. So the only time you find any dead rodents around to speak of is when there's been an overwhelming kill of rodents by something that doesn't immediately eat them."

"I see," Carlos said thoughtfully. "But how do you find them when they
are
there? Just walk out in the woods and look around?"

Frank shook his head. "Not quite. Your best bet is to cruise a line, follow a compass course through likely country for so many miles, watching for anything you see along your way. Then you run a second line, parallel to it, and then a third, and then extrapolate for a square-mileage area. Much the same way that we counted tussock moths on Douglas fir up in Washington and Oregon some years ago when they were killing so many trees—you couldn't go out and count each moth. Or the way the Game Department estimates how many deer there are in a given area."

"You mean you walk a line through the woods for so far, and count the deer you see, and then multiply it by some factor?"

Frank laughed. "You wouldn't get much of an answer that way. I mean, you might see some deer, but your extrapolated number wouldn't mean anything. Even the most crafty hunter in the world going through the woods is going to spook a lot of the deer off ahead of him without ever seeing them, and walk right past a whole lot more that he also never sees. No, to estimate the deer in an area, you have to look for something that can't just sneak away while you're looking."

"So what do you count if you don't count deer?"

"You count piles of droppings. Fresh piles that don't look more than twenty-four hours old. They tell you beyond question that the deer have been there, and roughly how many, whether you see any deer or not. You'll see what I mean, up ahead here. But what we're going to be looking for are dead rodents, and they'll either be just freshly dead, or they'll be gone."

He picked an area of pine timber interspersed with dense patches of buck brush, running along a ridge with a long, gentle rise. Carlos packed the large bag he'd brought over his shoulder; Frank carried a day pack. They plodded, climbed, scrambled and sweated for four long hours as the August sun got higher and hotter, trying a multitude of areas, and finding nothing. "Maybe we'd better go higher," Frank concluded as they finally made their way back to the Jeep. "There may just be too many scavengers at this level. You're game to keep going?"

"Oh, yes. Yes. We've got to do this."

A few miles higher into the mountains hardly seemed any better, except that there was less brush and bramble underfoot. Sometime after noon, discouraged, they stopped for lunch in a little grove of pines, sitting on a downed log to munch their sandwiches. Flies buzzed and the warm air was rich with pine resin. Carlos looked drowsy and disheveled. Then Frank said, "Speak of the devil," and pointed.

Twenty feet away from them a sick chipmunk was struggling feebly in the dusty turf a few feet from cover. "He's not quite gone," Frank said, "but he's getting there."

He started to his feet, but Carlos caught his wrist with an iron grip. "Just stay put," he said. "I'll take care of this."

Watching the chipmunk constantly, Carlos opened his bag and brought out the oddest assortment of equipment Frank had ever seen: a large, heavy-gauge polyethylene bag with a strange-looking tie around the top, a pair of shoulder-length rubber gloves, and a long pair of collapsible tongs that looked like stainless steel. Carlos opened the polybag and set it on the ground near the barely moving creature, keeping well away from it. Then he stripped on the long gloves and pulled the tong handles out to full length, about a yard or more. Very quietly he edged toward the chipmunk, tongs in his right hand. Then he extended the pincers to either side of the rodent and snapped them together sharply, crushing the creature with clinical precision. He lifted it into the open mouth of the polybag and brought the bag top closed with the tongs. Then he tossed them well aside and backed away. "Matches in my breast pocket," he told Frank.

Frank, who had been staring at him, bemused, fished the matches out and handed them to him. Approaching the bag, Carlos struck a match to the tie around the top. Frank saw something flare and run around the bag top, puffing black smoke, exactly like a long fuse on a firecracker. When the thing stopped Carlos went forward again and peered critically at the bag.

"Fine," he said. He moved the bag and tongs twenty feet away from where the chipmunk had been. "Now, you'll find a bottle of murky-looking soup there in my bag, Frank. Toss it to me."

Carlos caught the bottle, sloshed the long gloves liberally, then treated the tongs the same way before collapsing the handles again. At last he pulled off the gloves and stowed them and the tongs in another plastic bag, which he also heat-sealed. Finally he took another deep breath and sat down on the log with a wan smile. Frank saw that his hands were trembling.

"Now, what the
hell
was all that about?" Frank said.

Carlos looked up, startled. "About?"

"All the hocus-pocus."

The little doctor shrugged. "Look, my large friend. A flea can jump four feet or more if it feels like it. That chipmunk's fleas could be carrying some very nasty customers around with them—I didn't want them jumping on
me.
If you want to go up and fondle the next little beast, that's
your
problem. Not me, thanks."

"Sorry," Frank said. "But that's a pretty fancy setup."

"A couple of our EIS recruits down in New Mexico worked the system out, mostly for collecting trapped rats, to minimize any possibility of getting a plague-infected fleabite. It's not foolproof, but it beats bagging them up bare-handed. You think you could work the system?"

Frank nodded. "If you'll run through it again and explain exactly why I'm doing what."

"Good. We'd better get back to town now, but I'll give you a lesson with a catnip mouse tonight."

"You want me to look for more of these?"

Carlos nodded. "I can't spend more time up here, I've got things to do down in town, but we need as many dead rodents as you can find in the next few days. Take a crew with you, but you handle the dead ones. Try to get them from different places, high and low elevation, north and south. You know where to look, you be in charge. But believe me, this is no game—it's critical. Our little friend in the bag here could be a major key."

21

As the battle was joined, those first few days, there were far more troubles than triumphs for Carlos and his crew of workers. Four new cases were spotted in Canon City the first two days; three of them were dead of pneumonic plague within forty-eight hours despite swift and vigorous antibiotic treatment, while the fourth lingered on in a coma, with spiking fever and chills. ("A brain abscess, maybe? Those sputum plates and blood cultures are
clean.")
Out of the blue, two cases were reported in Gunnison, 120 miles to the west, no identifiable contact with Canon City, EIS people raking over reports item by item and finding nothing, and then another case down in Walsenburg, a town located between a north and south segment of the San Isabel National Forest, again with no identifiable contacts. "Brush fires," Carlos said, shaking his head and staring at the reports. "Brush fires, all over. Where are they coming from?" and teams were dispatched to both places in hopes of stopping the spread. City fathers in Pueblo were vocally alarmed, Colorado Springs officials next to irrational, the State Attorney General's office in Denver very, very quietly investigating the possible legal ramifications of imposing selective roadblocks on certain state, county and local highways without precisely declaring a state of emergency and scaring everybody in Colorado to death. . . .

Then, late in the week, JTLM-TV News Denver laid its little egg, and the fat was really in the fire. Under the able guidance of announcer Marge Callum and a team of cameramen and reporters, and despite all CDC efforts to maintain a news brownout, JTLM-TV News preempted Thursday-night primetime to air their own thirty-minute special, engagingly entitled "Plague in Colorado" and done with all the stops pulled out. They had everything possible in it and much, much more. There were shots and stills of the Enchantment Lakes Plateau in the Washington Cascades and shots of a Forest Service chopper in the air, ostensibly hauling Pam Tate's body out. Somehow or other they had gotten footage of the interior of the Harborview Hospital morgue in Seattle, with four early victims on view on their slabs, the shots made all the more grisly due to the graininess and bad quality of the black-and-white film—it looked like the ovens at Buchenwald. Next they focused on the Rampart Valley Community Hospital, still closed up tight, featuring a hair-raising through-the-window interview with the young doctor there, apparently filmed after he was good and sick but somewhat before he died. And then, homing in on Canon City, there were interviews with parents and friends of victims, with vivid descriptions of how the infection struck and killed. For wrap-up, a scathing attack on the "do-nothing attitude" of the Centers for Disease Control, a rousing "citizens' call" for action, a demand that Canon City be isolated completely "to see that this horror does not move beyond its boundaries. ..."

The show had impact, all right. The town councilmen of Canon City howled exploitation, while the ACLU screamed foul at the very suggestion of isolating a community—"This is not medieval Italy"—and the CDC people in Canon City gritted their teeth and very carefully refrained from responding at all, much as they might have liked to, on orders from Carlos

Quintana, who held the fatalistic conviction, reinforced by long and bitter experience, that howling at JTLM-TV News Denver would be considerably less fruitful than howling at the moon— and a great deal more dangerous to their mission.

In Atlanta, Ted Bettendorf fielded the howls officially and— unlike Carlos—decided that action was demanded. Within an hour of the broadcast he had a senior PR man on a plane for Denver with three legal men in tow, their major mission to abort any reruns of the show that might be planned. Then, after a half-hour phone conference with the Secretary HHS in Washington, Ted got an assistant commissioner of the FCC on the line. "Damon, for God's sake! This kind of broadcast has got to stop, this is absolutely intolerable. We can't work with this kind of light in our faces."

"Ted, I can certainly sympathize, I guess the show was a little raw, but I don't know what we can do about it. We can't precensor those producers, you know."

"Maybe not," Bettendorf said, "but you can knock them across the room later, can't you? This is a clear and present public danger, what they're doing. They didn't bother to check one single fact. They've taken a few cases of infection in one isolated region and blown it up into a raging epidemic."

The FCC man was vastly apologetic. "I'll do anything that's legal, Ted, you know we want to cooperate with you guys, but the laws are pretty tight."

"Well, you can keep the damned thing off the air elsewhere, can't you? It's not prior censorship once it's been shown."

"We can't block it unless the station voluntarily pulls it, Ted. The freedom-of-speech people are watching us like hawks these days, and believe me, you're going to have more press, not less, if you try to get rough. Why don't you have your man out there just pat the producer's ass and see if he can't talk him into cooperating?"

The PR man didn't do any ass-patting when he arrived in Denver. The show's producer and the station manager of JTLM-TV were both intransigent. They weren't the public conscience; they didn't care if the special was less than precisely accurate in fact or implication; and they scoffed at the notion that false or distorted data in a TV show might threaten human lives. Let the CDC worry about that, that was what they were paid for. JTLM-TV had sponsors to worry about, and they happened to have some great footage, the script was a real heart-tugger, great TV, viewed by twenty-four percent of the audience on the Boulder-Denver-Colorado Springs-Pueblo axis, and they already had it scheduled for rerun on primetime Saturday night. Biggest hit they'd ever produced, and the networks were interested. . . . The PR man and his lawyers walked out of there in mid-tirade, heading across town to the federal courthouse, but knowing already that the chance of getting a restraining order or injunction was practically zero on the kind of evidence they were authorized to supply, and there were reporters to face at the courthouse too. . . .