The White Plague (35 page)

Gannon turned the knob. The radio went silent with a snap.

“We should save the batteries,” he said.

“For what?” his brother-in-law asked, his words slurred from the drink. “To hear the fucking news? Why? There’s no future in it!”

The stranger came and tried to teach us their ways. They scorned us for being what we are.

– “Galway Bay,” an Irish ballad

I
N LESS
than an hour there was to be a working dinner in the small private dining room off the White House Mess, and President Adam Prescott knew he had not the slightest handle on a new approach to their problems. He knew, though, that he would have to appear confident and full of purpose. Leaders were supposed to lead.

He sat alone in the Oval Office, the history of the place thick around him. Momentous decisions had been made here and something of that seemed to cling to the walls. The desk in front of him had been given to Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria. The painting over the mantle across from him, by Dominic Serres, showed the battle between the
Bonhomme Richard
and the
Serapis
. John F. Kennedy had admired it from this very position. The pier table behind him had been ordered and used by James Monroe. The chair beneath Prescott had been part of the same order.

The chair felt like a prison to Prescott. And his back ached despite the chair’s fine design by Pierre-Antoine Bellange.

A stack of reports lay on the leather-bound green blotter in front of him, their tabs fanned out for him to read and extract what suited him. He had read them all and they had succeeded only in amplifying his dismay.

Information
, he thought.
What good is it?

Prescott thought it all carried a grandiose power of inflation, automatic importance. If it was for the President’s eyes, it must be not only important but very important. Presidents must never be bothered with trivia.

Information. Not facts, not data, not truth. It was accumulated out of human observations. People had seen the thing or heard it or felt it and a digested version found its way to this desk that Rutherford B. Hayes had admired.

Prescott glanced at the tabs protruding from the report folders.
Breakouts
. New plague pockets were being called “Hot Spots” by the media. There no longer was any question of evacuating people. Where could they go? Strangers were dangerous. People who had been away from home were dangerous. Good friends returning from far places no longer were good friends. Railroad lines were being torn up. Airports were strewn with wreckage to block the landing strips. Roads were blockaded and guarded by armed men. Bridges were blown down.

A report in front of Prescott said every curve of spaghetti overpass and rerouting on the A-11 from Paris had been dumped onto the highway by expertly placed charges of explosives and the lack of transport was creating starvation pockets. The Maquis had remembered what they learned for another war but they had forgotten that food traveled the highways, too.

It was no better at many places in the United States. Men dared not go foraging and food was a serious problem in cities and even in the countryside. New York was getting by on what it grew along the fire barrier, thankful for a reduced population and warehouses stocked with canned goods. Washington, D.C., had an estimated two years before the belt tightened. It was getting by on emergency reserves stockpiled against atomic attack plus gardens planted on its lawns and open spaces.

Washington and its ring of bedroom communities remained plague-free largely because General William D. Caffron had acted on his own to spread a flamethrower cordon around the city, backed by tanks and infantry with orders to shoot and burn intruders. He had sent suicide squads then against every contaminated pocket his ruthless methods could ferret out. Quarantine stations had been installed at all entry points, all served by women volunteers flown in from regional prisons and constantly observed by remote TV.

Prescott slid the report tabbed “Tribute” from the pile on his desk and opened it.

Weird, that was the only word for it.

No doubt this was an outgrowth of the Barrier Command’s “free boats” policy, sending in supplies to the Irish Finn Sadal and the English Border Beaters. The free boats had seemed a good idea at the time – small, self-propelled, radio-guided craft dispatched into Kinsale, Howth, Liverpool and other port stations by the Barrier Command, carrying newspapers, food, liquor, small arms, ammunition, clothing… A simple radio signal destroyed the boats when they had completed their mission.

Finn Sadal.

Border Beaters.

Prescott shuddered at some of the things he had heard about Finn Sadal behavior. But… tribute?

Dublin was threatening to remove the Finn Sadal from its guardian posts along the beaches and to mount an active attempt to infect other regions
outside
their borders if their demands were not met.

Prescott scanned the page in front of him. Ireland wanted the Viking plunder returned. All of that priceless accumulation from the museums of Denmark, Norway and Sweden was to be brought back and sent in on the free boats.

“All of the wealth stolen from us by the barbarians will be interred at Armagh,” the Irish said.

Interred?

They spoke of plans for a great ceremony full of pagan overtones.

Norway and Sweden had signaled immediate agreement but the Danes were showing reluctance.

“If they ask this now, what might they demand next?”

Damned greedy Danes!

Prescott scribbled a note on the margin of the page: “Tell the Danes they’ve been outvoted. They comply or we’ll do it the hard way.” He signed it.

The order would have to be expressed more diplomatically, of course, but the Danes were good at sensing the iron intentions behind diplomatic doubletalk. Small nations learned that sensitivity very early.

England’s demands were even stranger at first glance. Although coming after the Irish broadcast and couched in more urbane terms, they were backed by a similar threat.

Libraries.

“When this time is only bitter memory, we wish to be the nation of published treasures – books, manuscripts, charts and religious documents, artists’ sketches and paintings. We want the originals from wherever they may now be. You will be allowed to make suitable copies.” 

His security analysts called this “canny.” Civilized nations would think long and hard before incinerating such treasures… should it come to that. The trouble was, this was no longer a civilized world.

Prescott turned to the tribute section of England and at the top wrote a single word: “Comply.” He initialed it.

Libya had not joined this new game, but there remained a question whether Libya had any sort of central government at all. Satellite observation said the country lay in ruins and the population might have been reduced to a scant fraction of its former numbers… and what had that been? Three million? All of North Africa was a shambles. Sterilization squads, “the new SS” they were being called, had put the torch to every population center bordering Libya and across the land from the Suez to Cap Blanc, moving in ahead of the cobalt barrier that now ringed the doomed land.

And what about Israel?

Prescott pushed the folder tabbed “Brazil” aside, deciding to take it with him to the dinner session. North Africa remained a primary concern. Survivors were massing in Chad and Sudan, their intentions obvious. There was a new jihad about to begin.

Neutron bombs!
Prescott thought.
The only answer.

The area was outside that proscribed by O’Neill. And what difference did it make now whether O’Neill prohibited atomics in Libya? That nation no longer existed.

The anchorman on the previous night’s “final news” had not been privy to Prescott’s satellite information, but he had obviously heard.

“We have only a terrible silence from that land.”

Prescott put the tribute folder aside and stared sourly at the spread of tabs – words on paper. Could any of it really touch the core of this disaster?

China appeared to have the India problem in hand but there remained that bitter schism between China and the Soviets. That had to be a key subject at this working session. He glanced at his watch: a half hour yet. A war in the Far East could be the final disaster – refugees, loss of central control, no way to impose a tight system of observation and quarantine on the movements of large groups.

The fragility of the human condition felt overwhelming to the President. He experienced a tightness in his chest, his breathing short and quick. The tabs on the reports took on a life of their own, the letters large and burning, each one conjuring new potentials of extinction.

“Denver… Ulan Bator… Peronne… Omsk… Tsienpo… Luanda…”

Slowly, the tight feeling subsided. He considered calling in his doctor but another glance at his watch told him there wasn’t time before the dinner session. Blood sugar problem, probably.

His eyes focused on a folder: “Success question.”

Yes, that was one of the more serious concerns. What assurance did they have that Ireland or England would share any discovery? What if they found a cure and blackmailed the rest of the world? And if that Madman O’Neill were really hiding in England or Ireland…

The question would have to be raised at this dinner. And the agents they had managed to place in both countries were not enough. Some other means of on-sight surveillance had to be found.

The buzzer beneath the desk sounded: two peremptory calls. They would be standing out there, waiting.

Putting both hands on the desk, he heaved himself to his feet. As he stood, a band of agony encircled his chest. The room wavered like a scene underwater, whirling and whirling around him. He heard a distant hissing ring that filled his awareness. There was no sensation of falling, only the blessed rise of unconsciousness that took away the terror, the agony and the view under the side table beside his desk, a brass-footed and fluted wood pillar deeply scratched where one of Andrew Johnson’s spurs had gouged the rosewood.

Violence and piety cannot conjoin. They are not of the same stuff. Nothing binds the two: not joy, not suffering, not even the living death that some mistake for peace. The one comes from hell, the other from heaven. In piety you find grace; in violence you are forever graceless.

– Father Michael’s sermon

F
EELING ODDLY
displaced, John went to sleep that night in an upper bedroom of Gannon’s cottage, clean sheets and a lumpy mattress. He had one short stub of a candle to light him to the room, which smelled of soap and some flowery perfume. There was a single wooden chair, a low dresser and a standing wardrobe that reminded him of the one in the Hotel Normandy.

O’Neill-Within had become quiescent, moving deeper, more remote and… John felt it: satisfied.

He had seen what he had seen.

While preparing for bed, John thought about the drinking session at the supper table. It had resumed in the kitchen after the herb tea in the parlor – Herity and Murphey seated across from each other, drinking glass for glass, staring at each other with strange intensity.

Father Michael had sent the silent boy to bed and had taken a position at the end of the long table as far as he could get from the drinkers, but his eyes were on the glasses of poteen, not on the men. Gannon had sent the other children off to their beds and had busied himself cleaning up at the sink.

John, bringing his cup from the parlor, had handed it to Gannon and seated himself near the priest. Looking at the branded forehead, he thought about the question of the priest’s family.

“Where are your brothers, Father Michael?”

Father Michael turned a hunted look toward John.

“You said you have two brothers.”

“I’ve not heard of Matthew since the plague, but he lived in Cloone and that’s a ways off. Timothy… Little Tim has built a hut beside his wife’s grave at Glasnevin and that’s where he sleeps now.”

Murphey cleared his throat, his attention on the empty jug that Gannon was removing to the sink. “We’ll solve it, by God! I know we will!” He cast a bleary glance around the table. “Where’s my Kenneth?”

“Gone to bed,” Gannon said.

“I’ll yet dandle me grandson on me knee,” Murphey said.

“Everyone clings to a dream such as that,” Gannon said, leaning against the drainboard. “Until something overwhelms them. It’s the dream of personal survival – a victory over Time. Some submit to religion or make a daring assault on ‘the secrets of the universe,’ or live in hope of genie-chance. It’s all the same thing.”

John could visualize Gannon standing in front of a classroom delivering those portentous phrases, and in that same pedantic tone. Gannon had said that same thing many times and in those same words.

Murphey looked admiringly at his brother-in-law. “The wisdom in that man!”

Herity chuckled. “You know what the Yanks call your perfesser’s ‘genie-chance’? They call it… they call it the blond in the Cadillac automobile!” Laughter set his hand trembling, spilling some of the poteen from his glass.

“It has other variations,” Gannon said. “The magic number, the winning ticket on the Sweeps, the treasure that you stumble upon in your own backyard.”

“Such things happen,” Murphey said.

Gannon smiled sadly. “I think I’ll go down to the graves. Where did you leave the lantern, Wick?”

“On the back stoop.”

“Would you care to accompany me, Father Michael?” Gannon asked.

“I’ll wait for morning and bless them then,” Father Michael said.

“He’s no mind to visit graves in the night, Father Michael hasn’t,” Herity said. “The ghosts now! And them ranging across the whole land in these parlous times.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Father Michael said. “There’s spirits…”