Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (43 page)

Mandy nodded. "You've got him. I don't know how good a guy he is; after Haglund ran for home we lost seven CDC people in Lincoln in one fast week waiting for your Mr. Mancini to produce, but maybe his conscience is bothering him now or something—"

"So what did he want?" Ted pushed open the commissary door, stood aside for Mandy.

"He just wanted us to know that a couple of weird con artists are trying to set up some kind of phony drug sale in Willow Grove, Nebraska, and he's been rung in on it, and he wants to know what he should do."

"Phony drug sale?"

"Some kind of homemade antibiotic."

"In Willow Grove, Nebraska?"

"Right."

Ted wolfed down half a sandwich. "I would laugh, except I don't think you think I should laugh." He looked at her. "Look, I'm trying to goose Sealey Labs into springing enough 3147 to help get the city of Pittsburgh off the ropes, and you want me to worry about somebody peddling snake oil somewhere in Nebraska. Why?"

Mandy shrugged. "According to this Haglund guy, these people are operating very strangely. So far, Willow Grove has had no plague, but they don't think it's going to be long before they have it. Willow Grove is a county seat, about twenty thousand people, but there are a whole bunch of little nearby towns where everybody's kind of holed up, following Haglund's advice about no public meetings, no church services, everybody stay home and eat out of the freezer and so on. So this woman turned up from somewhere down in Kansas and went straight to the local doctors, there are two of them, pretty sharp guys, and she also went to Haglund as the nearest semblance of a public-health officer around, and she set them up that she has a way to keep Willow Grove and all those other little towns free of plague."

"By magic or by willpower?" Ted said.

"She says her partner is whomping up some new antibiotic that's supposed to stop the plague in its tracks. They want to supply Willow Grove with all they can use—before the plague gets there."

"I see," Ted said. "And what's the asking price on this new antibiotic?"

"They don't want to sell it. They just want to trade it for all the plain tetracycline these doctors and the local pharmacies can lay their hands on."

Ted scowled. "Well, that's a new wrinkle. But it's still just a con, Mandy. Or else they're a couple of nuts."

"Maybe so. They're sure claiming the world for the new drug—and nobody has any except them."

"I see. And they want to run a nice little clinical test on Willow Grove, Nebraska—is that it?"

Mandy leaned toward him. "Ted, that's
exactly
it. Haglund called because that was
exactly what they told the doctors.
But they also told them that it had
already been tested.
In our own CDC facility at Fort Collins. They say it's the drug that Sealey buried and ran 3147 in as a ringer. The exact same drug. And these people say they can make it in quantity

"And kill everybody in Willow Grove, Nebraska. God! Remember that guy peddling the fake vaccine to half the people of Joplin, Missouri? You know what happened to all
those
people—" Bettendorf stood up very suddenly. "Look, maybe I'd better do something. Let's get back to a phone. I can damned well check with Fort Collins and find out why nobody around there denied that newspaper expose about a phony drug switch after the first tests—Monique Jenrette did the testing, she should know, and she's still out there."

Back at the office, he turned to the girl. "Where's this Haglund's number? Okay, fine, let's hope a couple of trunks are open all the way. It should be eleven in Colorado. You get me Fort Collins and get Monique on the line for me first. Just Monique, nobody else. Then you go downstairs and stall Sealey Labs. I'll come rescue you as soon as I can."

Back in his inner sanctum, Ted tried to clear his head, bring back in focus that newspaper story that had raised such a fuss. Sealey and Mancini had denied it fiercely, but Fort Collins had never denied it, and then he had simply lost track of following it up. He was not a superstitious man and he seldom paid attention to hunches, but something crawling up his spine was telling him veiy loudly that there was something more to this odd story than a cpuple of snake-oil peddlers trying to make a fast buck out in the ding-weeds. If some kind of kitchen-stove outfit was busy making some kind of rump drug that might wipe out twenty thousand people, and were dragging Fort Collins CDC into it as their backup—well, CDC's rep was not faring too well anywhere at all these days, and a bad grassroots scandal could be a terrible albatross—

The phone buzzed. Ted grabbed it. "Monique? Ted Bettendorf in Atlanta—"

He heard Mandy's voice. "Sorry, Ted, you're not going to get Monique. She's not there anymore." "Not
thereV

"She hasn't turned up for a week, they say, and they went out to her place and she's nowhere around. It looks like she and her boyfriend have just quietly packed up and gone west. Or some other direction."

"Okay, go on downstairs and hold the fort. I'll be along in a minute." He dropped the phone on the hook and sank into his desk chair, shaking his head. Monique just bagging it at a time like this?
Monique?
He couldn't believe it. Monique was too solid—and the boyfriend she was with was solid too—or at least Carlos had once thought so. For a moment he had a shaky feeling, as though stable underpinnings were shifting subtly, as though stability were an illusion and
nothing
was holding still— but it passed in a wave. Tired, he was getting tired, too tired. He took out the telephone memo Mandy had handed him, then reached for his private line and slowly began dialing Perry Haglund's number.

53

It was almost pitch dark on Grizzly Creek when Ben Chamberlain got back to his house and found a note pinned to his back door, written in Amy Slencik's spidery hand:
ben—drop over after dinner, we've got to talk.

The old doctor tucked the note in his pocket and let himself in with a sigh. He saw that there was a huge new camper parked out behind his barn this evening, a great big thing covered with mud. Also two big motorbikes that hadn't been there that morning. Amy must have brought them down here to park during the day, and then stopped by to leave him the note.

He looked at it again, then crumpled it up and tossed it in the fireplace.
So this is going to be it,
he thought gloomily.
Well, better now and get it over with than sometime later in the dead of winter.
He'd known it was coming all along; he'd felt it in the air around Amy, getting thicker every day as the wind got colder and the daylight shorter. Hell, it was really his own damned fault, he should have brought it right out front and center long ago, but she'd never really said anything specific yet and he was getting too old to go hunting up confrontations.

Methodically he stuffed his wood stove full of cottonwood and opened the draft, then just as methodically started laying a new fire in the fireplace. Going to be cold tonight, colder than last night. He'd been outside working all day, finally getting all his perennials and the smaller trees mulched and piled high with straw, and none too soon, either. There'd be snow flying pretty soon now, and then the bitter arctic cold. Across the creek, all afternoon, he'd put the finishing touches on the big half-acre garden plot he'd plowed up in what used to be his private deer-and-elk pasture, tilling in the goat manure for the last time and then mulching the whole thing with leaf mold he'd collected all summer.
Old Ben's secret garden,
he'd thought wiyly. Hadn't mentioned it much to anybody, but next summer it would grow potatoes and carrots and peas and tomatoes galore—if he was still around after the cold died out of the ground.

Couldn't knock the approaching winter, though. It ought to help protect them, these next few dangerous months. Traditionally, throughout the centuries, cold weather had always slowed the plague, from everything he'd ever read; now he wondered vaguely why. Rats holing up and not coming out so much? Fleas not so active? Trouble was, from all the reports he'd been hearing, it wasn't working that way this time. So much of it was pneumonic, a staggering eighty percent of it, from one CDC report he'd read, so much direct human-to-human infection, and you couldn't keep human beings from huddling together in the cold with fuel deliveries canceled, power stations failing. Here on the creek they could hope the cold might help them
here
in this little Freehold of theirs, if they played their cards right— but his notion of playing the cards was different from Amy's, and now finally the crunch was coming. . . .

The old man cooked up some dinner, frying some fresh sausage and boiling some fettucini, homemade stuff he'd hand ground out of cracked wheat and bran and mixed up with one of his duck eggs. It turned out to be pretty pasty, thick and coarse, kind of falling apart instead of hanging together like the old semolina stuff used to do.
But edible, at least, and it certainly does fill you up. Probably good for my bowel, too.
He chuckled at himself as he sat down to eat. Even now he knew perfectly well, deep down, that all this back-to-nature do-it-yourself effort was pure sophistry as far as he was concerned, nothing but an intellectual challenge that he played around with the way you'd play around with a hobby. Sure, now he knew that he could make his own cracked-wheat fettucini—and eat it—but he also knew that he didn't really believe in it.

And that, of course, was his problem around here right from the start. He didn't really believe in the Freehold, either. Never had. And the thought came, unbidden:
If only Emmie were still here.
Then at least he wouldn't have to go it alone.

Later, when he made his way over to the Slenciks' cabin, he found the place oppressively warm, with a huge tamarack fire crackling in the fireplace and that goddamned wood cookstove of Amy's throwing heat like a blast furnace. Mel Tapper was there, looking gloomy, and Kelley, the rancher, and Dan Potter, which surprised Ben a little; the little hydraulic engineer was pretty new here to be sitting in the Inner Council. Harry Slencik poured Ben a good slug of McNaughton's and gave him a big friendly grin. "You look like you need something to warm you up," he said."

"Kinda chilly out there," Ben acknowledged.

"Yes, and it's going to get a whole lot chillier," Amy said, looking up through those big gray-tinted glasses.

So here we go.
Ben took the whiskey neat. "So what's the problem?"

He knew that tact was not her long suit, but never before had she been so totally blunt. "The problem is this immigration wave we're having around here," Amy said. "The time has come that it's got to stop before we're up to the neck in stray people."

Ben grimaced. "There's not really that many. We've been through all this before. Another couple turn up today?"

"They sure did. In a Road Schooner half a block long. You know where they blew in from?
North Dakota,
that's where."

Ben shrugged. '' Good a place to come from as any,I guess.''

Amy looked up. "Yeah, well, these folks got four kids and Grandma in that rig with them, and they all eat. The guy is too crippled up with arthritis to work at anything, and the woman doesn't look like she'd know how to do the dinner dishes. There's not one damned thing they've got to offer us here but more mouths to feed, and the one thing they just ran out of in that rig of theirs is food. Oh, and then there's the two bikers that came in this afternoon. You haven't seen them yet, either. They're fresh up from the Bay Area, and they're a couple of
real
beauties. Flies in the sugar bowl, two by two. They've got a poodle as big as a horse that rides sidecar with them, and it also eats. Ben, this has just got to stop; if we don't all catch the plague from them, we're going to be starving to death instead.''

"They won't bring us plague if we just follow the protocol we've set up," Ben said. "Keep your gate locked so they don't drive into the main compounds. Mask and gown when you go out to meet them, simple isolation technique just like I've shown everybody. Send them down to the quarantine spot on the creek and I'll see to it that they keep separate from the others down there for the critical period. Four days will tell us whether they're clean or not, and meanwhile we can assess them, set up work assignments, figure out where to plant them—"

"Ben, it isn't going to
work,"
Amy broke in. "Something's going to slip through our guard, it just isn't that controllable, you yourself admit that."

"It's the best we can do."

"But we don't
need
these people! And I say they're going to kill us. Listen, this new crowd cracked it today, as far as I'm concerned. Harry and I went into Bozeman this morning, regular supply run, and we heard that people are getting sick in Bozeman. Four cases in one week, all in different parts of town. Doc Smythe thinks he's got them isolated and contained, but nobody is sure where it came from, and all they need is about ten more cases and they won't be able to contain it because that burns out the available vaccine and drugs. People are packing up and leaving already, and if some of them head where I think they're going to head for, we haven't seen
nothing
on Grizzly Creek—and they're going to bring the infection here with them."