Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (30 page)

Somewhere in the distance there was a vast muffled boom and the floor jolted under their feet. Carlos looked up, startled.

"Just a gas-station storage tank," Jack said, his face grim. "Or maybe a riot-squad ammo truck. They've been blowing things up out there ever since the Ice House fire. You mean you haven't heard it?"

"Not that I noticed—until this morning."

"Then you must be stone deaf. Half the streets in the center city are blockaded off. Goon squads with lead pipes and Beret-tas wandering around at night smashing store windows and looting. Now it's going on in the daytime too." Jack Cheney looked back over his shoulder at the vast expanse of sick and dying people sprawled across the floor of the great room. "Yes, I guess we'd damned well better get over there and make some plans while there's still something left of this city to save."

41

In the second-story tenement flat in south-side Chicago, Sidonia Harper heard her mother's footsteps coming up the stairs with the groceries, down the hall to the door and on into the kitchen. Siddie hunched down in her chair, facing the TV set, uneager for her mother to come in and complain about her watching that stuff—and this time, her mother didn't. Sidonia reached out and changed the channel to the beginning of another newscast, and leaned forward to watch it, absorbed. She'd been watching newscasts all day, all the things happening down in Georgia, the epidemic and the riots. It was like film clips she'd seen so many times before of one war front or another, hideous and hypnotizing, so horrible you couldn't take your eyes away from the screen. And sometimes, it seemed to her, those things took on far more reality in her life than her bed and her wheelchair and the dull, unchanging life that she lived. . . .

In the dim room she became aware that her baby sister Tessie had come into the room and settled down on the bare floor beside the right wheel of her chair. She shook her head and frowned—eight years old was too young to watch this sort of thing, people smashing windows and burning buildings and wandering the streets with two-by-four planks in their hands. "Tessie, get out of here. Go get a book to read. You shouldn't watch this stuff."

"Mamma's sick," Tessie said.

With her attention on the screen, it took a minute to get through. "What's that? What you sayin'?"

"I think Mamma's sick. She not cookin' dinner. She just sittin' on the bed."

Sidonia Harper snapped off the set and turned her wheelchair sharply to the door. "Mamma?" she called. She wheeled through, into her mother's bedroom.

Mamma was sitting on the edge of the bed, her shoes off, leaning forward, hands bracing herself on the edge of the mattress. Her eyes were closed and she seemed to be breathing hard.

"Mamma?"

Her mother's eyes held a baffled look when she opened them. "I'm feelin' poor, Siddie," she said. "Couldn't hardly make it up those stairs. Can't hardly breathe, right now." She looked at Sidonia as if she were having trouble focusing. "Best you get some supper for us, girl. I think I'm gettin' sick. You may have to do for us, for a day or two."

Fiddle-de-dee, fiddle-de-dee, the fly has married the bumblebee,
Sally Grinstone thought, stretching luxuriantly in the darkness. Well, not hardly
married,
exactly, she reflected, that would be far beyond the call of duty, but close enough, close enough. She shifted in bed in the dark room, feeling immensely pleased with herself as she heard Tom Shipman snoring softly beside her, just a few inches north of her left ear.
Said the bee, said she, I'll live under your wing, and you 'It never know that I carry a sting. . . .

So far it had worked out beyond her fondest dreams. She had followed him from the hotel dining room, leaving exact change on the table, sans tip, and stuffing a half-eaten steak into her handbag as he got up to depart with the sour-faced men and the old crone who had accompanied him in. The best Sally had hoped for that evening was a look at the terrain, with the outside chance of a bar pickup later, she'd fully expected to have to sit through some of the next day's scientific sessions in order to catch his eye and nail his toe to the floor—but then, quite unexpectedly, the opportunity had presented and Sally Grinstone was nothing if not resourceful. Outside the dining room he had fallen behind the others to step into the newsstand off the lobby. Sally had followed, perusing the magazines side by side with him and selecting a copy of
Good Housekeeping
with just the slightest protrusion of her tongue. Then, as he turned away from the cash register, she collided with him, hard, tripping and collapsing at his feet with a little scream and dumping her handbag on the floor three feet away.

Profuse apologies, solicitude, assurances that she wasn't injured as he helped her to her feet, started brushing off the seductive dress, stopped rather abruptly and helped her retrieve the handbag instead, with sudden appreciative attention to her and the seductive dress and the convention name badge. "You're sure you're all right?"

"Oh, it's nothing, really, I'm just so clumsy—"

"No, I should look where I'm going." Pause. "Sally New-combe from San Diego," he added, reading the name badge. "American Cyanamid—what kind of work do you do?"

Sally smiled as only Sally could smile. "Electrochemical analysis," she said, hoping this might be a blind spot for an organic chemist. "Trace metals, mostly, zinc, rhodium, platinum—you know."

He didn't, particularly, but seemed willing to overlook the fact. "Your party just get in tonight?"

"/just got in," Sally said with a rueful smile, "and I'm my party, I'm afraid." She looked helpless and bewildered as only Sally could. "I'm just very new at these meetings, you see, I don't know a soul in the place."

"That's easy to handle." Shipman introduced himself. "Now you know one soul. You're all checked in and everything? Registered—yes, of course. Well, you've started off right. I owe you something, after knocking you down. A drink maybe? There's a lounge across the lobby with a pretty good band. What say?"

"Sounds lovely," Sally said, "but first I should really, um . . ."

"So should I." Tom glanced over his shoulder. "In fact, I've got some bodyguards to shake off, they're afraid I might give away state secrets. Why not meet me over there in twenty minutes?"

He was actually quite a bit longer than that, and Sally was beginning to think she'd lost him when he finally reappeared and joined her at the table she'd selected toward the rear of the lounge. "Sony to hold you up," he said. "They really
did
want to hear me snoring."

"Who did?"

"My bodyguards."
¹

Sally laughed. "I thought you were joking."

"No joking about it," Tom said soberly.

"Those must be some state secrets you're packing around."

He grimaced. "Sealey is a drug company, and drug companies steal from each other. First job I ever had, the first thing they wanted to teach me was how to steal from the next company's lab. You never know who's safe."

"Even electrochemical analysts?"

He grinned. "For you, I'll take my chances."

The band came on and they finished a drink and had another, and listened to the music, and talked about a dozen different things. At close quarters he seemed far younger, and more attractive, and more responsive than her initial impression had conveyed; he had a boyish grin and an openness of appreciation and a certain sense of candor about him that struck her as immensely refreshing. For a forty-two-year-old entrenched lifelong bachelor, Sally decided, he was one hell of a lot smoother than she had anticipated—but there was nothing remotely furtive about his attention. She didn't have to do a damned thing but lean toward him now and then while he was talking over the band and he was all there, willing but not crowding her. With an inquiring tilt of his head he led her to the dance floor and made the transition from the conversational to the physical with a quiet assertiveness. She could, of course, have walked away, although she had no intention whatever of doing so. What startled her was that she truly didn't want to.

Back at their table he ordered some nibblies and they talked with more intimacy and less testing. Most of the talk, she found, revolved around her and her background, and she had to tiptoe, wishing she had improvised more detail. When she led him, he talked a bit about himself, too, steering rather clear of matters of work and employment, but three or four times there was a reference to Sealey and his connections there, each reference sharply edged with bitterness.

Finally Sally bit the bullet. "Tom—were those
really
bodyguards you were having dinner with?"

"Three of them were." He sat closer, placed an arm on her shoulders. "If they knew that I was not quietly holed up in my room right now, they would be down here in three minutes flat, sitting at the next table over there and conveying to me ever-so-subtly that if I didn't get up and walk out of here very quickly, they would soon carry me out, kicking and screaming if necessary."

"You mean they're not really chemists?"

"No, my dear, whatever they may be, they most certainly are not really chemists."

"But
why?"

"I make antibiotics. Or at least I did. I was pretty good at it, and I've got an awful lot of useful information in my head. Not that anybody around Sealey Labs is letting me use it right now."

"I take it you're having a fight with Sealey."

"Wouldn't you fight if you came to work one morning and found a padlock on your lab door? I've been engaged in a major research and development program there. It's been an exciting scene, and unlike most R&D programs, this one has paid off in
answers.
Without exaggerating too much, I made one of the most important antibiotic breakthroughs of the last twenty years in that lab, a breakthrough that could save a whole lot of lives right now, today, if they'd follow through on it. And then, as soon as I had it nailed down to the floor, they slammed a padlock on my door and put me out to pasture. No reasons, no explanations: Now, how would you feel, in my shoes?"

Sally turned her head and kissed him gently. "I think I'd feel lousy. And mad. I've never heard of such a thing. But can't you just quit? Go somewhere else?"

"I'm locked into an ironclad contract."

"I always thought contracts could be broken."

"Sealey Labs has some—odd—business connections. I don't think I'd be around veiy long if I just quit and went somewhere else."

"Oh, Tom. You must have gotten onto something very important." She looked at him sharply. "You aren't involved with that new 3147 drug I was hearing about on the TV?"

Tom hesitated. "You might say I'm involved. But why talk about that? Let's talk about you. Tell me what it's like in San Diego."

He flagged the waitress for more drinks and they leaned back together to listen to the band, returned to dance very close, on the tiny dance floor, then back to their table, necking playfully at first, then more firmly and seriously, Tom's urgency growing steadily, her own response not in the least feigned until finally she touched his thigh and looked at him with eyebrows raised, and they rose and went out of the lounge together.

They went to the elevators arm in arm and without discussion he guided her to his room. He was an ardent, hungry lover, perhaps not overly skilled, but Sally made up for that in spades. Ultimately, when he had fallen asleep in her arms, she gently disengaged herself and lay flat on her back in the darkened room reasonably sated, thinking very clearly—it was a time when she always thought most clearly—and began sifting away at the pieces of the puzzle, picking at them and picking at them in her mind. And suddenly then, in the clearest simplicity, she saw what the picture had to be, hideous as it was.

Jesus,
she thought.

It took quite a lot to make Sally Grinstone feel sick, but suddenly she found herself feeling sick. She tried to twist it around, add it up differently, but there wasn't any way. The pieces fit too well. They fit everything that had happened in Colorado, and everything she'd heard about Savannah too. It wasn't a question of what had happened, anymore. It was merely a question of
why.

She looked over at Torn Shipman, his profile clear in the dim city skyglow from the window. Christ. So here she was. So now what? For a moment she felt an overwhelming urge to bolt—get up and slap on her dress and grab her handbag and get out of there, but she fought it down and just lay there shivering in the dark.
No good to holt, not until you know the why of it all, straight from the horse's mouth. But how, exactly, do you swing that, from here ? He might be as bad as his bodyguards, Sal. He might just kill you, if he saw a threat. But then again, he might not. They 've hurt him badly. He's naive, hungry for understanding, angry, and they've got him right by the ego. Maybe if you hit him with it right between the eyes, he might open up. It might just work.
She sighed, rubbed her forehead with a hand.
You 're going to have to gamble, that's all. You 're not going to win. if you don't take the risk. . . .

After a while she got up, went into the john, leaving the door ajar. She ran some water and bathed her face. Flushed the toilet a couple of times. Dropped the toilet seat with a whack. It was three
a.m.