Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (59 page)

Tim Larramee and the other Eagles mustered their Scouts and took over the waiting room of the clinic to help with the stupefyingly dull task of counting out twelve capsules and putting them in envelopes, one envelope for each citizen, stapling the envelopes shut and rubber-stamping them with directions made from one Scout's toy printing set; running to the stationers for staples and inking pads and more envelopes and still more envelopes. Once a supply of envelopes was ready the town police delivered Scouts and others willing to serve as delivery boys carrying boxes full of envelopes to block after block of homes, each delivery boy armed with a felt marker to leave a clearly marked X on each door where delivery had been made, along with the number of envelopes delivered to that house— "Use the red markers," Sally insisted; "we might as well make it symbolic while we're at it." By noon the first loads of envelopes were going out, and feedback said that most folks were getting the message, if not directly from the radio, then from the next-door neighbors who were, at Sally's broadcast suggestion, going out on their front porches and shouting next door or beating on a dishpan until somebody looked. By 5:00
p.m
. most of the downtown residences had been covered and some of the more peripheral areas were being penetrated. Squad-car policemen not. actually depositing Scouts on street corners were patrolling the streets themselves, looking for unmarked houses, delivering envelopes in person. By midnight, with virtually everyone involved facing exhaustion, the stockpiles of drug had dwindled sharply, and street maps were checked, and outlying village maps were checked, and there came a point of consensus that just about everybody had been covered who could be covered and there was nothing more now but to go home to bed . . .

That night in his mind's eye Ted Bettendorf saw the Horseman, riding the streets and byways of Willow Grove, Nebraska, pale and naked, bony legs clasping the flanks of his nightmare steed, pale as its rider, its shoulders pouring sweat, great nostrils flaring, fearsome eyes blazing with death, the great and spiral horn spearing up from its heavy forehead. Silent hoof-beats clattered through the streets and alleys and across the rooftops, and behind the Horseman his ragged, filthy hell-child rode, clinging fiercely to his master. Was there something different tonight? The pale steed seemed nervous, pausing now and then, changing direction slightly at no urging from the Horseman, dancing a nervous death-dance at the street corners, looking, turning before dashing off. Did the beast sense something different tonight? Did the Horseman? No matter; still they rode through the frozen night.

... to bed, yes, but not to sleep. Long hours, wide-eyed, staring into the darkness. Too exhausted for talk, too much tension to sleep. A waking nightmare of waiting.

And at dawn, more waiting. Too early to know anything, far too soon. Frank and Monique found Maclvers pacing his waiting room at 7:00
a.m
., already taking the day's calls. More new cases, ignoring all directions, waiting until seven to call the doctor. Contacts written down, medications confirmed; yes, keep taking them. Frank and Monique drank coffee in glum silence, hearing the doctor's gravelly voice. No point even looking for Bettendorf, he would have nothing to tell them. By noon Maclvers was showing signs of cracking, his voice tense as piano wire on the telephone, fairly snarling answers—Frank caught Monique's glance, nodded, took the little doctor's arm—"Come on. There's a little gas in the van. Let's take a ride."

They rode out to the edge of town, down along the river gorge, through the willows, the little city park, empty of people, up the grade on the other side. No words, and after a while Sam Maclvers turned his face to the window and covered his eyes with a hand and began crying, very quietly. Frank drove on out through the open fields of wheat stubble, let him get it over with, and presently he stopped. Sam turned back, looked out through the windshield. "Dumb country," he said gruffly. "Stupid country, some people think, even people who live here, but it's beautiful, beautiful. Made to support life. Good rich land, good people. Too many tornadoes in the summer, but that's all right, too, they pass."

Back in town, back at the clinic, Sam said, "Thanks," and Frank nodded, watched the little men sprawl out on a waiting-room couch and sleep like a baby for three hours while he manned the phone.

Later they went to find Bettendorf, but Ted just shook his head. "There's nothing yet," he said. "Too early; you want too much too soon. Sam called in his figures—the new cases are the same, perfectly flat curve. Not going up, that's something. Recovery curve is a little better, but it was getting better before we started this. When will we have a hint?" He shook his head. "I don't know. It takes twenty-four hours to establish an effective blood level; we have no real handle on the
in vivo
sensitivity of the bug. I can't tell you when. Maybe tomorrow . . ."

That night Frank slept, with nightmare dreams. Slept late, actually, had a long breakfast with Monique. Called in to confirm with the radio-station manager that the station was still broadcasting directions, reminding people to take their capsules, each mealtime and at bedtime, don't miss a dose. Call in if you didn't get the medication, call in if you dumped some down the toilet by accident. Stay home. Wait. The station manager sounded weary; yes, he'd been up all night, spelling the regular announcers and manning the phone. "Calls? God, yes, we've been getting calls—referred them all over to the clinic. Lots of them, last night; Dr. Fox was fielding them until four in the morning. Yes, mostly new cases, I guess."

No word from the basement of the First Methodist Church. No point dogging Bettendorf, Frank knew; he'd let them know when there was anything to know. It was as if, with enormous effort and every ounce of strength available, they had rolled the blunderbuss cannon to the top of the hill, given it the final push to get it over the hump and now could only watch, totally helpless, as it bounced and rattled and crashed its way down, watching in horror that it might veer from its path, strike a bump and shoot off course, and there would be nothing, not one thing in God's world, to steer it back if it did. . . .

The next day—the third—Sally Grinstone confronted Bettendorf in the church basement early in the morning. "We talk," she said.

Head shaking helplessly, Bettendorf spread his hand. "I can't tell you anything. We haven't even got the night's figures yet."

"Doesn't matter," Sally said. "If we lose this one we're washed up anyway, so we assume we're going to win and we plan for that, okay? Call it fantasy, call it wish fulfillment, I don't give a damn, we plan just the same. Tom Shipman called me earlier, and Dog is on his way south again—there's more drug to pick up. We're going to have Willow Grove covered for ten days, by the skin of our teeth. But if we win here, one man working one little production line in Wichita isn't going to fill the bill. We're going to need factories churning out that stuff everywhere we can plant them, chemists to work them, personnel, plenty of raw materials. Priority lists of where it goes first, where next, where after that. Financing. Transport. Communications. There'll be nothing else in this country that matters but grinding this stuff out and dumping it down people's throats. Right?"

"Right. That, and vaccine to follow it up. If we win here. God, yes, if we
win. ..."

"So we plan. We start now and pretend. Now I happen to have a rough flow sheet and a few ideas that I've been working out—" And Sally pulled out a sheaf of yellow legal-tablet sheets covered from top to bottom with her weird spidery scrawl and she began telling Ted Bettendorf in some small detail how
she
had figured out that it was going to have to work, after the battle of Willow Grove, Nebraska, was history.

One of the computer men tapped Ted on the shoulder some hours later. "Won't it keep?" Ted said irritably.

"No. Come take a look."

He took a look, a long, detailed look, checking and recheck-ing. Then he tore sheets of readout from the machine and snatched the roughed-in graphs from the statistician's hand and ran for the door. "Keep writing," he shouted to Sally over his shoulder, "for Christ sake, keep writing, I'll be back in no time—"

—Plunged across the street at a dead run, papers flapping under his arm, realizing as he ran that they would already know, they would
have
to know, because the telephone calls would have dwindled to a standstill.

Frank was holding the door for him. "The new case curves?"

"They've fallen off the cliff. Not some little decline— they've sunk like a stone." Bettendorf looked at people standing frozen around the room.

"You mean we're winning," Dr. Sam Maclvers said hoarse-

iy.

"We're not winning," Bettendorf said. "We've already won. We have already stopped it dead in its tracks. It's not going
anyplace
from here."

The Horseman felt the great beast shift under his bony body, fell the change, saw the horse throw back its head, rolling its wild eyes, rearing its forequarters with a whinnied scream of fear. A moment before, clear riding, but now, looming immediately ahead, a barrier, impenetrable, unscalable—

Flank it, flank it then! Something wrong here, to the right flank, away! The pell-mell clatter of hoofbeats, the Horseman peering ahead, something fogging his vision like mist in the cold night air. And again, looming up, the barrier. Left flank, swiftly! But again the barrier. On all three sides, a dead end, with an incomprehensible barrier and the sides closing in. No way to go—except back.

Then back, and be damned! The great beast whirled and plunged back the way they had come, head down, a great roaring gallop, echoing from the sides and the rear—but now, vision keen again, the Horseman saw what lay waiting this way, far in the distance but already looming up, soon to be upon them, the barrier closing off their retreat.

He seized the pale horse's mane, brought the beast to a halt, pawing the ground, stared around him. Something tore from his throat then, a scream of rage and frustration and unbridled malice. For one instant he was frozen there, straddling the beast, fist raised, and then the earth was parting beneath their feet and the only way was down.

Every time, throughout all history, the barriers had always been there, finally, sooner or later, and every time the Horseman had fallen short of his mission. This time, with new weapons and new speed, he had nearly made it; he had never been so close. Well, so it was, then. Another time would come in its season. And time, he knew, was on his side.

67

For Ted Bettendorf there was little time for rejoicing, far too little time for the staggering job ahead. There were resources to be mustered, and precious few sources to muster them from. Paradoxically, the mountain came to Mohammed; Atlanta was a corpse, whereas Willow Grove, Nebraska, was a living, breathing community. Those few that were left in Atlanta who could help him found themselves summarily shipped west. It may have seemed like going to Siberia, but then, as it were, Siberia was where the action was. Very swiftly Willow Grove was transformed, in its moment of glory, into a
de facto
national headquarters for the Centers for Disease Control. A team of excellent chemists, all high on Tom Shipman's want list, moved in to take over the operation in Wichita, buried under tons of tetracycline, and Shipman came north to rejoin Sally and take a desperately needed rest and put his head together with the others who had already formed such a spectacularly effective team. Bettendorf knew how badly he needed that team, and he was not taking any chances of it dispersing or losing momentum
now.
Within two weeks a second factory was established in Novato, California, and a third in Knoxville, while what was left of the Justice Department in what was left of Washington, D.C., started emergency injunction proceedings to condemn and then commandeer the Sealey Laboratories establishment in Indianapolis under martial law; arrest, convict and execute the members of the Sealey management responsible for the fraud, summary executions by burning becoming rather commonplace in areas of civil trouble or in cases per

ceived as profiteering, while a new production team got the new antibiotic pouring out of there on a proper scale under Tom Shipman's supervision. Meanwhile teams of sociologists, biomathematicians and statisticians began building a priority list of isolated, medium-sized rural communities for saturation bombing as soon as drug enough was available, while others scrambled frantically to establish transport and distribution teams so that not an hour was lost when the stockpiles began to build. And as winter moved into long, cold spring, the machinery slowly began turning.

In Brookdale, Connecticut, Carmen Dillman staged a slow recovery. There was a day when Jack Dillman was certain she was gone, and another day when he knew she would make it but didn't know when, and another day when he woke up and heard her banging pots in the kitchen, and an early spring sun was coming in the window, and she complained bitterly about the accumulated filth in the place. It was not until that day that either of them put their head outside their door, and then cautiously began exploring, and then, unbelieving, began searching, and discovered that they were two of seven people who remained in the entire community. Jack himself never did get sick, and he carefully never asked himself why. . . .

At the Grizzly Creek Freehold, as winter passed into spring, the toll was not as bad. Harry Slencik, of course, became desperately ill twelve hours after Amy was buried, and Ben fought a six-week battle over him; no one ever knew why he made it, and nobody every asked; such questions were regarded as Bad Medicine at Grizzly Creek. Nor did anyone ask why or how Ben himself escaped, and he himself had no serious answers. What was clear was that the program he had conceived and executed at the Freehold helped cut the losses, however imperfect the program may have been. When it was finally over and supplies of the new drug finally reached Bozeman and surrounding areas, of the 163 people living at the Freehold when Jennie Ozmovitch took sick, 110 had become clinically ill; 62 of them had died and 48 walked out of the Sick Bam. And that, Ben Chamberlain thought, was not such a bad record.