The White Plague (21 page)

“One man alone did it,” Beckett said, nodding.

He glanced out at the Mirage III beyond his left wingtip, then back to Hupp. “A police state could…”

“Sergei thinks not. He has been thinking very hard about this matter. He even suspects his masters have a plan to kill off some scientists once they have…”

“What if they miss the wrong one?”

“Yes. What if there is another plague, a mutation? And they have no resources with which to meet this threat? Or what are your neighbors doing with
their
scientists? Oh, no! This tiger has a long tail.”

Beckett put the Lear on autopilot and announced this to their escort. He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head.

“The airplane flies itself?” Hupp asked, a touch of fear in his voice.

“It flies itself.”

“English has this valuable reflexive form,” Hupp said. “My thought is expressed better in English – that we ourselves created this Madman. We have done this thing to ourselves. We are both action and object.” 

“You’ve been thinking about this for some time,” Beckett said.

“I think I know what kind of world our children will inherit.”

“I only hope they’ll inherit any kind of world.”

“That is the first order of business, yes.”

Beckett glanced sideways at Hupp. “You were serious about marrying your sons to my daughters.”

“I am serious. We will find a need to arrange marriages across the new borders. Exogamy is not a new device, Bill.”

“Yeah, we’ll have to keep expanding the gene pool.”

“Or suffer genetic deterioration.”

Beckett lowered his hands and scanned the instruments. He made a course correction. Presently, he said: “We not only need a cure for the plague, we need a medical technique for dealing with the general problem.”

“Medical?” Hupp asked. “Only medical?”

“I see what you mean, Joe. Public medicine has always had its political hurdles, but this one…”

“We think there should be strategically placed centers around the world, tight communications links, a complete computer interchange without regard to national boundaries, voice and video, no censorship. Scientists should join hands with no regard to nationality.”

“You’re dreaming, Joe.”

“Perhaps.”

“Our families are hostage to our good behavior, dammit!” 

“And the rest of our world is hostage to its good behavior.”

“What if some research establishment in the Soviet Union solves it before we do?”

“It makes little difference as long as many of us know the solution.”

“Christ! You’re talking about a conspiracy of scientists!”

“Exactly. And any researcher who thinks this thing through will come to our conclusions.”

“You really think so? Why?”

“Because there’s enormous power in it… and anything else is chaos.”

“Sergei goes along with this?”

“Sergei has a fine appreciation for personal power. And he has friends in strategic places within the Soviet Union.”

“He agrees to plot against his bosses?”

“He suggests we call it among ourselves the ‘Foss-Godelinsky Cabal.’  “ Hupp cleared his throat. “Your friend Ruckerman…”

“He’s in Washington and I’m here.”

“But if the opportunity arose?”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“Think long and hard, Bill. Think about all the good things that could be done with this knowledge. Think of the value in such knowledge.”

Beckett stared at him. “You surprise me, Joe.”

“I surprise myself, but I think this is a logical answer to giving our children a world they will want to inherit.”

“Francois, what does he say about it?”

“You value his opinion?”

“On this sort of thing, yes.”

“In a way, you’re alike, you and Francois. You are conservatives. It is that which convinced Francois. He wishes to conserve certain values in our world.”

“Well, the politicians have sure as hell made a mess of it.”

“Francois said something similar, but then he has not admired a politician since de Gaulle.”

“Another general,” Beckett said.

“Like Eisenhower?”

“Touché.”

“Then you will think about this?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Where is the autopsy summation? I saw you with it before we left the DIC.”

“It’s in my flight bag right behind me.” Beckett gestured with his elbow. “Right on top. It’s open.”

Hupp leaned across the console and slipped a sheaf of papers from the bag behind Beckett’s seat. As he did so, he glanced back into the aircraft.

“Sergei and Francois are asleep,” he said. Hupp straightened and flattened the papers on his lap.

“Best thing they could do,” Beckett said. He pulled up a sectional chart and took an RDF bearing for his position.

“Where are we?” Hupp asked. He looked down, seeing cloud cover bright in the sunlight.

“We’ll be crossing Mansfield, Ohio, pretty soon. We have to head north there to miss Pittsburgh.”

Hupp looked at the autopsy report in his lap. “Is it true, Bill,” he asked, “that you cried when Ariane died?”

“Is that what Francois said?”

“He said you cursed him and you cried, and he said it was an admirable thing in you. The passing of a friend should not go unremarked.”

“That lady had balls,” Beckett muttered.

If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for myself alone, who am I?

– Hillel

H
ULS
A
NDERS
B
ERGEN
turned off all of his office lights and strode to the window, knowing the way even in darkness. New York street lights from the United Nations Plaza far below filled the foggy night with a faint glow, an underlighted silvery movement, vaporous and mysterious. Although he knew the temperature had not changed in the office, he felt suddenly cold.

For more than an hour he had been going over and over in his mind that afternoon’s press conference. The well-known Kissinger admonition was much in his thoughts:

“It is a mistake to assume everything said in a press conference is fully considered.”

But all of his staff had agreed that something had to be said to the reporters. He had chosen to make it a background briefing, something they could credit to “a high official of the United Nations.”

Too many delicate unknowns complicated the world scene. There was too much secrecy. He had chosen to part the veils slightly.

There had been the preliminary report of the archaeologists who had been called in to sift the ashes of the burned-out house in Seattle.
There was a touch of brilliance in that decision
, he thought. Archaeologists! Brave men. They had known they could not return to their families.

The foggy curtain outside his window thinned somewhat in a drift of wind, giving him a glimpse of a convoy far below moving out toward the end of the island. That would be their military guardians changing shifts. With its tunnels blocked and the bridges down, Manhattan was now considered a fairly secure bastion. There were still some burned-out pockets within the city and only official traffic moved on the streets at night, but it had shaken down into a new pattern that some were calling “secure.”

It was a false security, Bergen thought.

The military cordon drew a jagged line around the city, extending into New Jersey from near Red Bank west to Bound Brook, swinging northward there along the Watchung Mountains to Paterson; then, growing increasingly erratic, it meandered over the New York-New Jersey boundary through White Plains and out to Long Island Sound north of Port Chester.

“The Flame Wall,” people called it, taking their sense of security from the image of the wide blackened barrier beyond this land, a place where ashes drifted across mounds of ruins and the unburied bodies of those who had perished on that ground.

Bergen did not like to think of the human deaths represented by the Flame Wall, the ones killed in its creation and the ones who had died trying to cross it into the sanctuary of New York.

Barriers
, he thought.

Everything was barriers in this new world. Identity cards and barriers. You could be summarily shot for not possessing a valid identity card.

Barrier Command had set the pattern.

Within the reassurance of that label there lay a nasty sound to Bergen’s ears. He pictured the naval blockade around Ireland and Great Britain, the combined naval and land blockade around North Africa.
Massive
was the only word for it.

The glowing face of Bergen’s wristwatch told him it was only 8:53
P.M.,
less than three hours since he had measured his press-conference performance against the evening’s television reports. The anchorman had parroted the words of the “high official.”

“Essentially, we ignored a crucial thing happening in technology and scientific research. We failed to see the central bearing of this factor on all international affairs. To my knowledge, not a single high official in any government seriously considered that one individual alone could create such devastating chaos as this man, O’Neill, has done.”

The next question had been anticipated and the answer carefully prepared.

“The evidence is overwhelming that it was this John Roe O’Neill and that he acted alone.”

They had not expected him to be open and candid about the findings in Seattle.

“There is virtually conclusive evidence that the Ballard basement is where he concocted his devilish brew.”

“Sir! Brew? Singular?”

That had been a balding reporter from the Post.

“We cannot be certain,” Bergen had admitted.

The conference had moved then into the area that had prompted Bergen to call it, defying the President of the United States and a half-dozen prime ministers.

North Africa and, now, the Saudis.

“Led by the Soviet delegation,” he had told the reporters, “there is pressure for a drastic change of tactics in North Africa and surrounding regions.”

After all of the years of carefully censoring his words, it had felt good to Bergen just to say this, speaking out truthfully and with no diplomatic embroidery.

Let them vote me out
, he thought.

The Rommel campaign had been a clear demonstration that desert patrols could be penetrated. The British had moved in and out of Rommel’s lines. And now, the Saudi problem had to be confronted in the light of that knowledge.

How bad was the contamination?

Israel was threatening atomic sterilization of its “borders,” a clear Talmudic fist being shaken in the direction of Saudi Arabia.

The only thing holding them back was the Madman’s threat. Would this atomic sterilization be considered an act against the targets of O’Neill’s revenge? There had been an untallied number of Libyans among the Mecca pilgrims.

And what about the source of the contamination – North Africa?

The Russians wanted a “ring of fire,” another Flame Barrier. It was their euphemism for a plan to put a linked series of outposts around the land perimeter: flamethrowers, radar, day and night air patrols…

“Damn the cost!” they said. “We’re talking about survival!”

The real question, though, was where would their perimeter be drawn? The Saudi problem threw this issue into high relief. Israel had its own suspicions about where the Soviet Union wanted to install its “ring of fire.”

Hysteria is infectious
, Bergen thought.

The United States wanted a “ribbon track” of cobalt dust around the area, a radioactive moat that no life could cross and survive. This told Bergen, among other things, that the United States had squirreled away a large stockpile of such dust. He had argued that radioactive contamination of the entire Mediterranean basin would be an inevitable consequence. Israel had been outraged.

What choice did they have? the United States had asked. What other decisions made sense now that Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and southern Italy were being written off? Only Israel remained as a fragile island of plague-free land within that contaminated region. And how plague-free were they? No outside observers were being permitted to investigate.

As the French ambassador had said at their morning meeting: “Losses are inevitable. The sooner we accept them the better.”

He had cited Brittany, Cyprus and Greece as his supporting arguments.

All of this Bergen had told the press, speaking plainly and without the usual euphemisms. He had held back only on the heated argument between the French and the Israelis. Name-calling was not a new thing within the United Nations’ walls, but this had transcended past performances.

“You are anti-Semitic animals!” the Israeli had shouted.

Oddly, the Frenchman had responded only: “France, too, is a Mediterranean nation. Whatever we do there will have its effect upon us.”

The Israeli would not accept this: “Don’t think you fool us! France has a long history of anti-Semitism!”

It was understandable that tempers were short, Bergen thought. Somehow, diplomacy had to survive despite this atmosphere. They did not dare go their separate ways.

Could Israel be relocated in the Brazilian heartland, as had been suggested?

A new Diaspora?

It might come to that
, Bergen thought, even though Brazil said it could take no more than half of Israel’s population, and there were a multitude of strings attached to the offer. Brazil, of course, was looking at Israel’s
atomic capability
.

Bergen thought of the Israelis sitting there in their desert oasis, their atom bombs wrapped in the Talmud.
An excitable people
, he thought. There was no telling how they might respond to such an international decision. And Brazil – had it really considered what it might be letting within its borders? It was Bergen’s opinion that Brazil would become the new Israel, that there would be no way to confine such resourceful people.

And there were so many unknowns. What was really going on within Israel’s borders? They would have to permit outside inspection and soon.