Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (17 page)

He drove the Jeep toward the setting sun along the valley floor, then turned west on a road into the steeply rising mountains. Half an hour later they found a turnout on a high viewpoint ridge. To the west the sun was setting behind the high peaks of the Rockies in Estes Park, splattering the sky and clouds with reds and oranges and pinks and yellows and blues and blacks as an evening thunderstorm came billowing up. To the south and east the lights of Fort Collins were coming on in multicolors, the freeway strip to the east a shimmering golden necklace.

They got out of the car and walked out on a promontory to take in the panorama. There was a chill breeze from the west; Monique shivered in her summery dress and Frank slipped his down jacket over her shoulders and held it in place with his arm. "You're still not relaxing," he said.

"1 can't," she said after a long silence. "I can't get away from that lab. The world looks so beautiful from up here, but I have to work with ugliness."

"You don't have to. You could go back home and many a rich New Orleans lawyer and be a society lady."

She gave him a brief look. "I'm not precisely a lady. And New Orleans society is a screaming bore. So are most rich New Orleans lawyers. Anyway, I can't run away from what I'm doing—not now. I'm really into it up to my ears, and there you are."

"You personally?"

"Somebody personally has got to do it. I'm equipped, and I'm on the spot. People are dropping dead while I fool around with culture plates. We need to know which way this evil wind is blowing, and I haven't got the answers yet." She shivered in spite of the jacket. "Let's go back, Frank."

They drove in silence back to town. Her place was a second-story room with an outside entrance. He opened her door and turned and kissed her, tentatively. She returned a different kiss, long and deep and yielding. When he started to tum away she said, "Frank Barrington, don't you dare walk away from me tonight."

He looked down at her pale face, the wide-set, frightened eyes looking up at him like a doe terrified at the approaching fireline, and he couldn't move.

Suddenly her arms were around him, clinging to him fiercely, and her face was buried in his chest and he realized she was weeping. "Hey, hey," he said gently, stroking her hair. "Take it easy—"

"I can't take it easy, Frank. I'm scared. You just don't know how scared I am." She looked up, holding him with her eyes. "Stay and help me not be scared tonight."

24

The really sick people in the poverty ghettos of the great cities never find their way to the free clinics and charity wards for examination and treatment. Those places are packed with the ones who have the minor or nonexistent aches and pains, the ones with nothing whatever else to do, who look forward to the daily or biweekly clinic visit as a major social event and grand diversion from dullness. For the really sick ones, the desperately ill, these places are torment. The crowded corridors, the hard benches lining the walls,, the endless waits while their eligibility numbers are transmitted and approved, the longer waits for the nurse, the doctor, the laboratory, the X ray, the other doctor, the third and fourth and fifth doctors—these things they know are in store for them are literally more than they can stand. They stay home in bed, the desperately ill, unexamined and untreated, getting sicker, and if they die, well, after all, they could have gone to the clinic, couldn't they? But since they didn't, that's one less we have to be bothered with. . . .

For Althea Willis, the tall black cabin attendant on the flight from Denver to Atlanta, things might conceivably have been different, but they weren't. The culture and background and habit she could not escape defeated her in the end. Her contract with Eastern Airlines provided her not only a modest salary, much of which she had salted away for later college expenses, but also an excellent prepaid private health-care plan. When she became ill, she could have gone to any private physician in Savannah. She
knew
she could have done that, but she didn't. It would have meant no expense to her, and only a modest wait for the doctor, and she knew that too, but she didn't go. For one thing, it all came on so terribly fast she couldn't believe what was happening. One hour she felt fine. An hour later she was feverish and chilling, the next hour delirious. And the sicker she became, the more her buried, bone-deep ghetto background rose up to control her mind and body. The modern, liberated Althea Willis she thought she had become vanished from sight in the first few hours of trial. The old Althea Willis went to bed and took age-old remedies her frightened sisters brought her, and grew violently sicker.

When she finally died and lay in state in a ragged bed in a shambling, rotting frame house in center-city Savannah, neighbors and friends and curious acquaintances by the dozens came through to pay their respects and to grieve with her mother, and then pass on and go back to their own ragtag frame tenements west of Forsythe Park, until at last the long black car of the funeral director, one of their own, came to take her away, and no one thought for a minute that anything different might have happened.

25

And throughout those first five days, six days, seven days, in Colorado, as the growing list of sick was counted and contacts were relentlessly traced down, and isolation techniques were tightened, and word of some kind, any kind, was awaited from Fort Collins, Carlos Quintana moved through it all like a thin omnipresent wraith, working eighteen-hour days, looking grayer every day and somehow keeping in daily personal contact with virtually every one of the hundred-odd people who were working with him now. He was a ramrod, demanding hard, perfectionist labor, but he was a gentle ramrod, ready with a wry grin or a word of encouragement whenever he sensed the need of it. He wanted results, not fights, and he did not make the tempting mistake of blaming his crew for the steadily climbing count of newly infected cases, up well over 150 in the first week alone and still climbing, including five of his own people. The mortality rate was over eighty-three percent among those first cases, a horrendous figure that only barely began leveling off as they poured in all the antibiotic resources they had available. He maintained to each of his workers the same repeated point, made over and over again, relentlessly: don't look at the short term, it had a terrible start on us, but we're surely closing the gap. The work we're doing now will catch up if we do it well and meticulously and thoroughly, it
has
to catch up, and the thing will peak and begin to drop off, and new data will help with that when we have it. Keep digging. . . .

Yet through it all there was an odd, fatalistic air about Carlos Quintana that others could sense but not quite identify. True, he breathed confidence that this present battle would be contained sooner or later—but he was clearly under no illusions but that other and worse battles would face them at other times and other places. It was not just his long professional acquaintance with the history of the black killer facing him here; far more, it was his own, personal, deep-grained cultural heritage—an ever-present awareness of the imminent presence of death.

Carlos Quintana came from hardy Spanish and Indian stock, traceable back for well over three hundred years by the omniscient eye of family tradition, although no written records had ever been kept. In the time of the Great Depression his father had been thrown back across the Rio Grande four separate times before he finally managed to evade the American Feder-ales long enough to reach quiet, unpatrolled saguaro desert and walk to Tucson and thence, on foot or swinging aboard ranch trucks, on east to Albuquerque where family friends sequestered him long enough to teach him rudimentary English. At the time, it had seemed an odd direction to go. If Emiliano Quintana had been an ordinary Mexican peasant or farm worker, he would have made his way west to join the California
hraceros,
or northwest to the orchards of Oregon and Washington, or northeast to the big Kansas harvests, and lived in an eight-by-eight-foot box without a toilet and worked for peppercorn wages when work was there and starved when it wasn't, living only one tiny bit better than any Mexican peasant or farm worker might live below the border.

But Emiliano Quintana was not an ordinary peasant or farm worker. He was a city boy from a Chihuahua slum who had, in his own city, with much hustling and fighting for jobs and reading of manuals, become a singularly excellent seat-of-the-pants truck mechanic. He left Chihuahua only when he could not advance further because the boss's son, and his nephew, and his son-in-law were all in line for the good jobs—but it was Emiliano who had made the truck motors purr, not those others. In Albuquerque his friends found him a job of sorts, a bottom-rung grease monkey at a truck stop, but soon he was full mechanic, and presently shop foreman. One day his boss, well pleased with a mechanic who could make trucks purr the way he could, and not wishing to have him deported, withheld $100 from his pay, and spoke to a certain man in Albuquerque who quite swiftly produced perfectly legal naturalization papers for Emiliano—and then the boss raised his pay to help cover the cost.

Only then did Emiliano Quintana return briefly to Mexico, to the city of Chihuahua, to formally court and many a beautiful woman with large, dark eyes, daughter of a respectable Mexican family, and bring her back to Albuquerque with him. With her,
muy macho,
he conceived three sons—Carlos, Jesus, Ramon—before an endless string of daughters appeared, and all three boys had their mother's large, dark eyes and handsome good looks, and their father's patient drive and willingness to work. They were that commonplace anomaly in the Southwest, the totally American family with ninety-five percent Mexican characteristics. Their food, their religion and their mores were straight from Old Mexico. They spoke Spanish exclusively in the home, but never outside it, and the boys all grew up with perfect English. They lived in a small modest home in an acceptable part of the city, and saved money, and celebrated the Day of the Dead with illegal firecrackers and little skull-shaped candies and cookies made with loving care, and like all Mexican families, death was part of their thinking, always nearby, always imminent.

Carlos was the scholar among the boys, bright and interested and energetic, passing through grade school and high school like a breeze, then on to the University of New Mexico to study biology. When the time came for application to medical school, he could not quite meet the academic level of the prime candidates, he had sown too many wild oats in college instead of studying-—but suddenly (and inexplicably, to his father, who could not understand such things) his status as a Mexican-American worked in his favor: at precisely the right time, certain government regulations left the medical school at the University of Iowa suddenly , desperately searching for one live Mexican-American applicant, never mind his grade-point average as long as he was breathing—and Carlos went to medical school.

The rest followed naturally. The wild oats were over, and he led his class. A growing inclination toward epidemiology carried him on. An internship in the Public Health Service followed, with work in the Epidemic Intelligence Service—one of the Shoeleather Boys. A job with the CDC came next, and presently a special interest in plague, partly because he was fascinated by the disease and partly because nine-tenths of the cases that appeared each year turned up in New Mexico and Arizona among Spanish-speaking people, and he could speak Spanish. He found a strange satisfaction in his encounters with plague, in unmasking it, fighting it, stopping it, in case after case after case. But always, entrenched in his mind and never far from the surface, was a clear recognition that plague was
La Muerte,
death on horseback, and however hard you fought it, it was never going away. . . .

Council of war. On the eighth day after Carlos and Monique's arrival in Colorado, they met with their top people at the Fort Collins CDC installation, purposely trying to keep the meeting small and elite enough that data could be digested swiftly and firm operative plans agreed on without delay. Monique was there with all of her crew except the two who were on duty then and there in the lab. Carlos brought two of his top Shoeleath-er lieutenants, representatives of the Denver and Colorado Springs city/county health departments' epidemiological staffs, a Parke-Davis official who had flown west to try to unsnarl the supply problem with the chloramphenicol, a couple of others. Frank Barrington's presence was a little anomalous, but then his position had been a little anomalous right from the start, and he had proven himself far too useful not to have him around. Carlos had taken one look at Frank and Monique talking quietly and intensely, heads together over coffee in the conference room, and thought whatever thoughts that single look had led him to think, and raised his eyebrows to himself, and kept his mouth shut. Roger Salmon, the project coordinator at Fort Collins, was on the phone to Atlanta a little overlong, but as soon as he joined the group, Carlos nodded and stood up. "Okay, I have the Canon City figures up to last night. Do you want the figures first, or do you want Monique's report first?"

"Let's hear Monique first," the coordinator said. "She may help us make more sense out of the figures." There was a murmur of assent around the room.

"Okay, my dear, you have the floor."

Monique looked exhausted, her face pale, her hair done back carelessly in a bun. "Well, I have good news and bad news," she said. "The good news is that the whole state of Colorado isn't infected yet. The bad news is that it has to be some sort of miracle that it isn't."

"Better enlarge on that," Roger Salmon said.