Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (55 page)

She gulped them down. He took largely the same things himself and swallowed them. Watched her closely, then after a while checked his own pulse thoughtfully. "Nothing happened yet."

He wrapped up in a blanket and sat down Indian fashion beside her. She stared up at him, wonderingly. "We really going to keep on taking those things?"

"Bet your ass we are. Every four hours. When the chips are down, kid, you gotta use whatever you've got. If those don't help, you got a lot more Of them upstairs to try—"

Suddenly she was laughing, roaring with laughter in spite of herself, tears rolling down her face. "Oh, Jack, you crazy idiot," she said. "Did I ever tell you what a silly nut you are?"

"I'm crazy as a fox," he said, pulling herto him and holding her close. "You sleep now, while you can. Just close youreyes and let me be crazy. It's just like you've been saying right along—we're going to beat this thing, or we're going to die trying. ..."

In Willow Grove, Nebraska, Ted Bettendorf did what he said he would: he really did back off and leave them alone. He flew in two medical statisticians and a small Hewlett Packard computer from what was left of the public-health operation in Omaha, which was not much, and set up shop in the basement of the First Methodist Church just across the street from the Willow Grove Family Health Clinic. Sunday services didn't interfere; on the first afternoon Sam Maclvers had buttonholed the Reverend Dr. Paul McFarland and said, "Sorry, Paul, but there won't be any Sunday services for the duration; have your people do their praying at home—but for God's sake see that they
do
some praying at home." (Unfortunately, the good Dr. McFarland took Maclvers's admonition perhaps more literally than intended and, ignoring all embargoes to the contrary, made daily rounds of his parishioners to make certain they did their praying at home, neglecting either to call his own burgeoning symptoms to anyone's attention or take the capsules Maclvers had forced on him, and falling dead of plague on the fourth day, bringing his short-lived emergency ministry to an untimely halt; at which news Dr. Sam Maclvers almost muttered, "So much for praying" within somebody's earshot, but bit his tongue in time and didn't.) The basement of the church was an excellent place for Bettendorf and Co. to work, since figures could flow across from the clinic on an hourly basis as they came in, and twice a day Frank Barrington or Sam Maclvers or Monique could run across to pick up printouts to study. From the beginning, Bettendorf directed the statistical work, but offered the emergency workers not a single word of advice. "If you people are running the show," he said stonily to Frank the second day, "then you're running the show. All 1 am is an innocent bystander. A very
interested
bystander, I assure you, but a bystander just the same. You want rope to hang with, you've got it. . . ."

The basic idea they pursued seemed sound enough. In a community like Willow Grove and its surrounding villages, with their aggregate of thirty-thousand-odd people, communications could be maintained one way or another—by local radio run by gasoline generators, by local TV, by mimeographed handbills, by runners where necessary, leaving the telephone lines open for vital messages that
had
to get through. Nobody had to check on Aunt Mabel because after that first day Aunt Mabel was home where she belonged and didn't go out again until she was told to. There were neighbors to keep an eye on Aunt Mabel and see that she was doing okay without exposing either her
or
the watchful neighbors to more than minimal risk. Nobody
had
to use the telephone except for certain specific things, and the switchboard
had
to be kept open for those specific calls—and miraculously enough, in Willow Grove, Nebraska, in direct confrontation with the long-ingrained American instinct to get on the phone the moment anything interesting or out of the way happened, most people did
not
get on the phone, and the telephone switchboard remained mostly open and functional for vital emergency use most of the time.

If that, in itself, was the First Miracle of Willow Grove, it was only the first of many. The message that went out to thirty thousand people by way of every communication channel that anyone could dream up was a marvel of bald simplicity, calm enough but deadly serious, as bluntly devoid of euphemism and false cajolery and political puffery and ambiguity as Frank Bar-rington and Dr. Sam Maclvers and half a dozen others (including Sally Grinstone, who had actually written the draft text weeks before) could make it:
Every soul in thi.\ town is in mortal peril; this plague will give you no warning; it moves like the wind and it kills quickly. Unless you are specifically called upon for help, freeze in your tracks. Stay home. Keep your family home. Don't visit anybody. Don't go anywhere. If you see anybody wandering around without Scout neckerchiefs or red armbands, call the police and report them—they may inadvertently kill you if you don't. If you develop fever, nausea, pain, coughing, bruises or anything else that doesn't seem right, call any of seven medical numbers and report it without a minute's delay. Medicine will be brought to you with instructions for use. Use it as directed because it may be the only thing that can save your life. In addition, if you develop symptoms, report the names of anyone you contacted face-to-face within thirty-six hours previously, and then try to phone them and tell them you are sick and they should contact a medical number themselves. If you need food, water, help, call the same medical numbers; otherwise stay off the phone. Above all else, stay home, stay home, stay home—help will come to you.

Nobody can give orders like that to thirty thousand people and expect all of them to obey and get things straight and do what they are told for long—but the message hung together well for seventy-two hours, and that was the Second Miracle of Willow Grove, Nebraska. That was long enough to get the organization working. Seventy-two precious hours to get telephones manned, to get vital functions organized, to find out what they were starting with, how deep the knife had already plunged. Within twenty-four hours there were 103 known or suspected cases, 4 known deaths, over 1,000 identified contacts. By seventy-two hours known or suspected cases had risen to 430, with almost 100 dead but another 100 not yet dead that should have been, and the contacts fell sharply by proportion, only another 900 contacts. Initial plans to try to isolate known cases in the high-school gymnasium were debated and redebated and discarded—treat them in their homes, treat
everybody in each afflicted home,
treat every reachable contact as soon as the fact of contact became known, and treat each contact of the contact if the contact became ill, with full therapeutic doses of the Ship-man drug. The Scouts were tireless, moving packets of capsules through town on foot or bicycle, sticking them in doors and turning and bolting like the devil was nipping at their heels. Within forty-eight hours, with people largely off the street, all the local police and the fire-department volunteers had joined the distribution team getting medicine, messages and supplies where they were needed and when. One phenomenon, miraculous in itself, went totally unremarked until much, much later because everyone had simply taken it for granted: there were no gangs roaming the streets of Willow Grove, no looting, no violence, hardly even a parking violation. Nobody thought this was particularly remarkable.

By the fourth day the numbers of afflicted were still rising inexorably—the sick, the dead, the contacts—but not on the deadly curve that had become the nightmare of every health official in the nation. On the fifth morning Ted Bettendorf met Frank with hands shaking so hard he could barely hang onto the printout sheets, and looked at Frank with an odd light in his eyes. "Something's happening," he said hoarsely. "I've been working at it all night long and something statistically significant is going on. That drug is doing something the Sealey drug has never done. ..."

Frank, red-eyed and bleary, just blinked at him and looked at the readout, looked at the curves, and grunted. "Our control of things is also beginning to fall apart," he said. "You can only hold people rigid for so long, and it all begins to unravel. Tomorrow is going to be a bad day. . , ."

It was. An upsurge in new cases, the highest number for one twenty-four-hour period yet, and an alarming rise in the contact curve. People who hadn't been hit were getting bold. They were getting bored, going next door to talk to the neighbors, thinking things weren't really that bad, gravitating back toward normalcy. Several shopkeepers opened their stores, defied the police to send them home, claiming the whole thing was blown up out of proportion. They found out, soon enough, but by then others were breaking discipline. Another day, another big rise in new cases and a doubling of contacts. Running Dog was dispatched south for another vanload of medicine—with all highways rigidly blocked around the plague town, there wasn't enough gasoline left to take a chopper down for it.

Monique took the Community Hospital pathology department for her lab, handled all the samples for culture and identification, directed the hospital lab people in keeping running checks on blood pictures and liver-function and renal-function tests on people taking the drug. The drug was working, there were no side effects except a little diarrhea here or there—but the toll kept mounting.

Had the Horseman faltered momentarily after the first on-

slaught? Had he paused before unexpected resistance, a barrier he hadn 't met before ? Had he slowed to reconnoiter, regroup his hellish forces, seek another route, a weaker place to break through to ride and ride ? Was there something new in the wind, something different that some vast, malignant, animate sensing mechanism detected? Surely there was a sense of silence and suspended animation, a deathlike winter stillness like a pall of malice hanging over the empty streets of Willow Grove, Nebraska. . . .

Council of war on the eighth day in the basement of the First Methodist Church. Sam Maclvers and Whitey Fox were there, looking gray and weary and vastly dispirited. Avis Rupert was there, the large, quiet, motherly, incredibly competent head nurse from the Community Hospital who almost single-handedly had been Fielding the telephone advice on home care of the sick and exposed, encouraging, supportive, compassionate, sympathetic as the situation demanded, Sam Maclvers's good right arm and merely one of the many townspeople who had risen far above themselves to meet the crisis. Frank and Monique were there, and Ted Bettendorf and the statisticians and a very quiet, thoroughly chastened Perry Haglund.

Ted Bettendorf was not silent now; he had abandoned his cold silent observer status completely by the fifth day and joined in wholeheartedly, which was just as well because it was really he, with his figures and computer readouts and analyses, who held the key to what was actually happening in Willow Grove. Now, meeting the grim, silent faces around him, he started out without preamble. "Something is going on here," he said, "beyond any doubt in the world, something different than anything we've seen anywhere—but I'm not at all sure what it is. Monique, have you found any change in the organism turning up here?"

"None. At least none that I can detect."

"Could you detect it if it were there, with the facilities you've got available?"

Cautiously: "I—I think I could. There are good enough culture facilities, I've got a really quite good Hot Lab, for field conditions;
I
've been able to do a lot of things that should have showed up changes if the bug were different, and I haven't seen them." She hesitated. "On top of that, I don't
feel
anything different with these bugs. That's not very scientific, but I've quit fighting it. I've been living cheek by jowl with these organisms for six solid months now without a break, and 1 swear to God I
feel
them. I
sense
them, and I don't sense anything different here than anywhere else before, and I think I would. The organisms are the same."

"Then we have to rule that out," Bettendorf said. "But we're seeing funny patterns just the same. I'll tell you this: we're using one whale of a good drug—
Christ
, I wish we'd had it six months ago. It's so much faster and more effective than the 3147 that I can't believe it—but it's here on the curves. We're getting far higher rates of recoveries among proven, massively symptomatic plague victims than we've ever gotten anywhere since this started. It's also highly effective at blocking the organism among contacts, once you've tracked them down and stuffed the pills in their mouths. About twenty percent of the people on full therapeutic doses get the trots from it, but we can live with that. We may have some pseudomembranous enterocolitis turning up, too, but we can also live with that. What we can't foresee is long-term or late side effects, and I'm now forced to agree with you that we've just got to live with that—"

"The dead ones don't have to worry about long-term side effects," Frank said.

"That is very true—and by now the dead in this community would be overwhelming without that medicine. The trouble is that there are still too many dead, and I don't know why. It isn't your approach or your epidemiology—so far the organization of everything has been beautiful; control is unraveling now, but we have to expect that, because people are going to behave like people. The trouble is that a certain small amount of unraveling of social controls at this point shouldn't matter that much; with this drug and this degree of organization we should have the cutting edge turned by now—and we don't. We're doing far better here than you were doing at this point in Canon City, Frank—believe me, I'm not being critical—but for some reason it's not cutting it. Put it this way, very simply: we're containing it better than any other place I know of, but we are not controlling it, and we are most certainly not stopping it. As far as I can see at this point, Willow Grove is losing this fight. It's ing it slower than other places by a factor of ten, but it's still losing."