The Nirvana Plague (9 page)

She jogged across campus, carrying her bag in one hand, and her phone in the other, dodging the students thronging between classes. She headed for the Technology Institute building. He liked to go there and wander about. She still knew some of the Tech faculty, and knew it made them uncomfortable to have their former colleague lurking about the hallowed halls of science with his intellect in ruins, but she didn’t care. As for Roger, he seemed to take no notice of his friends or his enemies.

Her phone kept ringing in her hand, but she knew it wasn’t Roger calling her back. She wondered what the nice Board-of-Health man wanted with Roger. She wanted to think there was no connection between this and Carl Marley going out of town, but the timing was too pat. Or was she getting paranoid? Roger had lost his paranoia. Had he shifted it to her?

She trotted and skipped along the west side of the Tech building, trying to see over everyone else. She hoped he wasn’t inside. The place was immense — miles of corridors.

She wondered if the students coming out knew him. Maybe she should ask them if they’d seen him. “You know the one? The nutcase with the black bag and the old boots without laces? Used to teach here long ago, back when you were still a virgin? Have you seen him?”

Then she remembered that it sounded like he was outside when she’d called him. She remembered the footsteps passing the phone, crunching like they were on pavement, not terrazzo floors. She headed around toward the Shakespeare Garden. He liked to go and sit there. Sometimes, when it was warm, she’d bring a sandwich at lunch time and find him there, and they’d sit and eat on the long bench.

But he wasn’t in the little park. She couldn’t get the image out of her head that Roger was dead. That was the reason the phone fell on the ground. Maybe that’s why “they” were looking for him. They’d found out that whatever he’d caught in the hospital was actually deadly. But it was already too late. Whatever he’d caught had just killed him, five minutes ago.

Fear swept her along through the garden. Panic and dread together. And as always, as in every pathetic crisis that she chased him through, there came that shameful little wish, the secret hope that maybe this time was the last time, that maybe now it would all at last be over and she could breathe again.

But it wasn’t over.

The C-20 that flew them to Andrews was big enough for over a dozen passengers, but they had it all to themselves. The two aides stretched out in the back of the cabin and dozed. Marley and his new boss sat up forward in a quad of facing seats.

Benford came from the galley with two cold bottles of water and gave Marley one. She loosened her tie and put her feet up on the seat next to him.
Now we’re buddies, see, I’m relaxing.
She indicated his tablet, and said, “You’ll want to soak up as much of that material as you can. I need to catch up on messages.”

Marley fell to his studies. An enormous volume of documentation had been amassed by the previous panel, far more than he could review in the next few hours. He decided to ignore the conclusions and analyses and go straight to the source materials. He sorted it all chronologically and starting working his way backwards through time.

3 March 2027. 0530h LT, 1430udt.

Vanala, Kashmir, India.

Operation Broad Reach.

Cpt Jas. Caldwell.

Delta Co. 2nd Mech Infantry.

Unknown psychiatric disorder continues to affect frontline personnel. Cpl Petifer affected last night, began to exhibit typical symptoms — disorientation, passivity, confusion, failure to follow or understand command orders. Maj Dr. Wharmby took him off line 0100h LT. Delta’s force now stands reduced by 30%.

Enemy emplacements continue artillery barrage hourly from multiple locations. Intelligence on their positions and movements extremely low reliability. Shelling is intense but ineffective. Nightsmoke agent makes our surveillance and nightvision equipment useless. Delta has been able to hold but not advance.

Status: Unable to continue effective operations. Dr. Wharmby advises evacuation and quarantine of affected personnel. Command affirms request. Advised: Delta is undermanned. Replacement personnel required to continue operations. If current conditions continue, it will be impossible to hold.

There were dozens of Situation Reports like this one from COs and field doctors in various theatres, from Argentina to Pakistan. Medical reports from forward hospitals gave the symptoms in more clinical terms, but not much more useful detail. Subsequent psychiatric evaluations from base hospitals shed little additional light. He read through a few of the patient charts carefully, comparing the daily notes and observations against the conclusions and diagnoses. Symptoms and observations clearly supported the conclusions drawn. He didn’t get it.

Benford read the skepticism in his face. “You don’t look too impressed.”

“I mean, these cases look like pretty straightforward stress reactions to me. Though the incidence is pretty high.”

“Extraordinarily high, don’t you think?”

“Even so, I don’t see how you’re making the connection.”

“With IDD?”

“Yes.”

“What are you looking at now?” She tapped into his screen from her own and glanced at what he’d been reading. “Yeah, this stuff is no good. None of these doctors think they’re dealing with anything out of the ordinary. They’re just seeing what they’re used to seeing.”

“Maybe. But that doesn’t mean they’re seeing wrong.”

She pointed him to another container in the database and popped it open. “Take a look at some of that stuff.” She turned her attention back to her own work.

Marley saw that she’d led him to a folder full of videos — recordings of patient interviews. Over a hundred of them. He wished he’d spotted these before — before he called her judgment into question. Sticking a bean-size earphone in his ear, he punched one up at random. Almost as soon as it started, he began to see things Benford’s way.

The video showed a young woman being interviewed in a clinical setting. The similarity to his IDD cases was unmistakable. The same halting, hesitant speech patterns, drifting unfocused attention, indifference to the interviewer’s concerns, and sudden startling outbursts of sharp commentary.

He only watched a couple of minutes of it, then flipped to a different recording. The next one was with three enlisted men at a field hospital. Attached notes specified that they’d all begun manifesting symptoms on the same shift. One of them was wounded, but not seriously. Again the echoes of IDD were readily apparent.

Benford tapped his knee, and he looked up.

“See what I mean?”

“Yes,” he confessed. “But.”

“What?”

“But how you did you make the connection to my write-up in the
Journal
? Looking at these videos, it’s clear to
me
there are similarities. But how—”

“How did
I
catch on? Well, you’ve seen how many cases? Five? I’ve seen over a hundred. Frankly, we’ve been waiting for it to appear in the civilian population. We were looking for it.”

“We?”

“Those who think, as I do, that there’s more to this than garden-variety stress reaction.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Including myself, there’s one.”

“But somebody believes it enough that they authorized you to put together this taskforce.”

“Just barely. Basically, the only reason why they were willing to authorize me to pursue this thing is that they don’t like the answers they got from the original investigation. That’s what I was telling you in the car earlier. The JCS wants a better answer.”

“Better?”

“More politically palatable. Nobody wants to attribute these incidents to cowardice or weakness.”

“They wanted a better answer, so you got the job.”

“I asked for the job.”

“That’s what I don’t understand. You’re not a psychiatrist or psychologist, right? So—”

“No, I’m not. That’s why you’re here. I’m just a lowly Health Affairs officer. My specialty is epidemiology. But I started out as an Army field medic in the Middle Eastern theatre. — It’s all in there. You have dossiers on everyone on the team, and they have yours, of course. You should familiarize yourself with them before we get started in the morning.”

“All right. But what made you disagree with the panel’s conclusions? What made you think they’d got it wrong?”

“A gut feeling. The gut feeling you get when you talk to these people that’s there’s something broken there. You know what I mean.”

“The other doctors on the panel interviewed them too, didn’t they? Did any of them agree with you?”

“Let’s just say no one else was willing to go out on that limb with me.”

“And what if your hunch turns out to be wrong and the politically unpalatable conclusion is right?”

“Let’s just say that Chicken Little never made general.”

Karen found Roger east of the garden, near the observatory. He was standing perfectly still, looking up at the old observatory’s silver dome. Students passing on the sidewalk gave him a wide berth. But swarms of pigeons milled about his feet, strutting and cooing.

She waded through the pigeons to him and touched his elbow. She felt the hard cast on his arm inside the baggy coat. She’d bought the oversized coat for him at a used clothing store near campus, the day she brought him home from the hospital, three weeks ago.

“Roger!” she said. Out of breath, she had almost no voice.

He looked down at her. “Karen.”

“Where is your phone?”

He smiled. “My phone.” There was no question mark in his tone.

“Did you drop your phone?”

“Well…”

She waved her hands to shoo the pigeons. They fluttered heavily away in all directions, revealing the discarded phone on the pavement. Turning back to Roger, she found him staring up at the dome again. She shoved his phone into his pocket, and he looked at her again and smiled again. “What are you looking at up there?” she said.

“It’s a signal,” he said.

“What is?” She looked up. It was a brilliant day, and the sunlight glinting off the silver hemisphere was too bright to look at directly.

“It’s a beacon,” he said.

“A beacon.”

“Like a mirror.”

“Yes, I know what a beacon is.” But she didn’t see how a beacon was like a mirror.

Roger kept watching the dome, as if it might be about to open.

“When I was a kid,” Karen said. “In Terre Haute, there was this little school called Beacon Hill. It was a special school for retarded kids. It was really just a big old white house someone had converted into a private school. Beacon Hill School. So, among us normal kids, if you wanted to really insult somebody you called them a ‘beacon’.”

Roger showed no reaction, just stood there watching the dome.

“You know, there was also a psychiatric hospital in Terre Haute called ‘Katherine Hamilton’s’. So everyone called it ‘Crazy Kate’s.’ And if you wanted to call another kid crazy, you’d call them ‘Kate.’ Beacon meant idiot. Kate meant crazy. We were vicious little trolls.”

Roger looked down at her. In a different tone he said, “Don’t feel bad.”

And somehow she felt he understood about the secret wish. “OK,” she said, ashamed. “Now, let’s go home.”

The pigeons had scattered only a few yards away, and were already cautiously waddling back, closing in around them.

“Were you feeding the birds?”

He was watching the dome again. “No. They like to come around.”

“You mean, to come round you?”

“Everything flows toward its comfort. Mmm.”

She liked that. “Is that Aristotle?”

“I don’t know,” he said, still studying the dome. “Comfort is the name for the way things go.”

That was how he talked now, since three weeks. Not like before. The old aggressive impatience had vanished. She had called it “the burn.” The burn of his thoughts, consuming his mind, slowly and inexorably metabolizing the crystalline brilliance of his personality into an ash heap. Now the burn was gone. Now there was just this weird charm and a kind of deep innocence — not like a child’s bland innocence, the innocence of ignorance and inexperience. This was something else, something subtler. It was as if he’d just realized that his madness had only been a nightmare. The trouble was that he had not awakened into the old world again, where Karen was. He was still somewhere else, in some other dream. But now and then, just for an instant, she’d catch a whiff of the breeze coming from wherever he was, and it was good. She caught one now and in that moment felt her anxieties magically lifted.