The White Plague (65 page)

“Ahhhhhh,” Father Michael said, smiling at Doheny, who was looking fixedly at the floor. “At last we find a line of inquiry which cannot be allowed. Here is a truth we dare not confront!”

Kevin looked at Herity, who now lifted a bleary expression to the room. “Do you hear what he says, Joseph? Will you not speak up?”

“It gnaws at you like a worm, Joseph,” Father Michael said. “You’ll not set that burden down.”

Herity got unsteadily to his feet and leaned on the table. “We’ll foll-follow any… any lu-lunacy so long as it… it has dash! Dash is what we… we love.” His face solemn, Herity looked at Father Michael. “We don’t say… say aud-audacity. We say… we say audashity! That has… has both shit… shit and dash In it!” He began to laugh weakly, then sobered, turning his gaze to Kevin. “You put something in me drink, Kevin. What’d you put in me drink?”

“You’re drunk, Joseph,” Kevin said, smiling.

“Not so drunk that I’ve lost all reason.” He slumped back into his chair. “M-m-me legs! Th-they d-d-d-don’t w-w-work!”

Abruptly, Herity’s head lolled to the right. His mouth opened. He gasped once and was still.

Peard darted out from the side and mounted the platform. He pressed a hand against Herity’s neck, looked up at Kevin, then: “He’s dead!”

“I knew the drink would get him eventually,” Kevin said. “Well, leave him be. The triumvirate is still present.”

Father Michael moved to approach Herity.

“Stay where you are!” Kevin shouted. He lifted a pistol from beneath the table. 

“Pistol justice is it?” Father Michael asked.

“Back to your place, Priest,” Kevin said, waving the gun.

Father Michael hesitated.

“Do it,” Doheny said.

Father Michael obeyed, sinking into his chair. The boy pressed close to his side.

Kevin put his pistol on the table in front of him and looked at Doheny. “Thank you, Mister Doheny. We must keep order. Will you speak now to O’Neill’s guilty knowledge?”

Doheny swept his gaze past the dead figure of Herity. He gestured Peard off the raised platform. Peard returned to his place at the stacks.

“O’Neill employed guilty knowledge of medical matters,” Doheny said, sounding as though he recited a memorized piece. “Guilty knowledge is anything that should have been suppressed at conception. When such things infiltrate our peaceable lives, the guilt is obvious.”

Father Michael opened his mouth and closed it, realizing this was something Kevin had ordered Doheny to say. What devil’s pact had been signed between those two?

Kevin was staring at the priest.

Father Michael got to his feet, pushing the boy aside. “What was this guilty knowledge? A medical matter, perhaps? The sole province of medical doctors? Then why do doctors publish? Is it their illusion that only they understand the language of their discoveries?”

“Anyone who uses guilty knowledge is guilty!” Kevin roared.

“And O’Neill learning about such matters confirms his guilt?” Father Michael asked.

Kevin nodded, grinning.

That man should know better than to argue with someone trained by the Jesuits,
Father Michael thought.

He turned to the jurors and asked: “What happens when we suppress such discoveries? Think about the various means of suppression and who may be permitted to employ such means. Immediately, you must face a disturbing realization. Suppressors are required to know what it is they suppress. The censors must know! You have, in fact, suppressed nothing! You have only confined the knowledge to a special elite. I ask you: How do we select that elite?”

Father Michael turned and smiled at Kevin.

“It is an unanswerable question,” Father Michael said. “Do we suggest that O’Neill conspired with guilty knowledge to bring down our world?”

“That’s it!” Kevin snapped. “He conspired!”

Father Michael looked at Doheny, but the latter had turned away and was watching John. John had returned his attention to the head in the jar, cocking his ear toward it, nodding as though the head spoke to him.

“Let us remind you of the Latin that you appear to have forgotten,” Father Michael said. “Conspire! That Latin which law loves so much says conspire means ‘to breathe together.’  There was no breathing together here! He did it alone!”

Father Michael turned on his heel to face the jurors, giving them time to absorb this.

His voice almost inaudible, Father Michael repeated it: “Alone.” Then louder: “Can you not grasp the awesome significance of that singular fact?”

The jurors were looking at him now, no signs of boredom in their faces.

Father Michael almost sang it to them: “He did it alone. How do we manage our affairs in the light of such knowledge? How do we judge our own behavior now? Where is the guiltless to hurl the first stone?”

“This is bootless!” Kevin said. He rapped on the table with his pistol. “Mister Doheny, would you put these matters to rest?”

Doheny looked at the pistol in Kevin’s hand, knowing that no mistake would be permitted now.

His voice sad, Doheny said: “We have identified the author of our misery. We do not need his admission or denial. This is O’Neill.” Doheny pointed, then lowered his hand. “He makes all previous murderers appear amateur. Warfare becomes a minor affliction. The priest finds it interesting that I refer to the plague in terms of war? Is he saying that every Irish soldier who fired a shot in anger is guilty?”

Shockingly, John tittered and shook an admonitory finger at the head in the jar.

Doheny crossed to stand in front of the jurors, intensely aware that Father Michael was above and behind him. Why had Kevin done that, placed the priest at a higher level?

“O’Neill is amused,” Doheny said. “He is not embarrassed. He is not penitent. He is defiant.” He turned and stared at John. “Look at him.”

John’s gaze was fixed on the head in the jar. The head spoke: “How do you like Mister Doheny’s defense?” The head emitted a banshee scream that John felt echoing in his own skull. John pressed his palms against his ears.

“He does not want to hear,” Doheny said. He turned back to the jury with what he hoped was a look of sincerity. This was not a pleasant role, but the need was great. “The priest says O’Neill did it with provocation. I agree. You find that surprising? The act says he was provoked. But how did he select the targets for his plague? The priest says we declared war on O’Neill. I do not recall such a proclamation, but no matter. Perhaps war needs no proclamation. The priest asks us to be clear-headed, though. What does he mean by this? Should we be remote, cool and, perhaps, detached about our misery? Are we to anticipate a defense on the issue of sweet reason?”

The jurors chuckled.

Doheny thought then about the points he and Herity and O’Donnell had gone over before assembling here. Had he touched them all? Insanity… reason… justified provocation. Doheny decided he had said enough. There remained only the confrontation with the boy. That could be held to the end. He walked back to his position near John, passing his gaze over Herity’s body. Why did no one question Joseph’s death? Was everyone terrified of Kevin and his killers? Poison, it must’ve been. Herity had been a man who could hold his drink.

Doheny’s glance fell on John. The Madman was staring once more at the head in the jar. What did he find so fascinating about poor Alex’s head? It was just one more death in a room full of it!

The head was speaking to John: “Why do they question? All the answers are in the letters.”

“But I was only trying to silence O’Neill’s screaming,” John said. Father Michael leaped to his feet. “Did you hear that? He was trying to subdue O’Neill’s agony!”

Silence settled over the room.

Father Michael sighed. He turned and looked at the jurors. What was the sense talking to more death’s-heads? he wondered. Might just as well address Alex’s head there in that terrible jar. He had to try, though.

“There is a pattern here,” Father Michael said. “A clear pattern woven inextricably into other patterns – into the Battle of the Boyne, into the Penal Laws, into Caesar’s heavy foot on Britain and even in the fact that the wind did not blow when Rome’s galleys met the Celtic fleet off Gaul.”

These were Irishmen, Father Michael thought. They would know Celtic history.

“Are you summing up?” Kevin asked.

“If you want to call it that,” Father Michael said. He rubbed the side of his nose as he swept his gaze along the six jurors. “I speak of a pattern which ranges from Stalingrad to Antioch, from Bir-sin-aba to Mai Lai, and much farther because it is not always found in momentous battles, but sometimes in very small conflicts. Ignore this pattern and we slay this world finally with ignorance. Recognize it and our values change. We will know then what to preserve.”

Father Michael fell silent for a moment and glanced back at the boy, who stood staring at him with a look of wonder. Could that young lad understand? Was this the only mind in the room worth addressing?

Doheny felt himself deeply moved by the priest’s words. God! The man was an Irish orator from the old tradition. The jurymen were obviously disturbed by him. They had planned this so carefully. Bring in the boy at the end, put it to him: Would he kill O’Neill? There was justice in it. What had that boy ever done to O’Neill? Kevin said the boy had agreed privately: He would pull the trap and do it with a curse. He would light the match, pull the trigger… anything.

The door behind Doheny burst open with a crash. A uniformed member of Kevin’s guard came rushing across the room. “Sir!” he called even before stopping in front of the table. “The word is out that we have O’Neill! We’ve had to close the gates! Thousands of people – there must be ten thousand all around us! They want O’Neill! Listen.”

They all heard it then, a sullen chant from outside the castle grounds:

“O’Neill! O’Neill! O’Neill!”

Abruptly, the Madman roared with laughter, then: “Why don’t you give them O’Neill?”

Despair creates violence and the Brits were past masters at creating despair among the Irish. There’s a widespread belief in England, you know, that the Irish, like women and Negroes, are essentially children, incapable of governing themselves. But no people can be truly free until they rid themselves of their inherited prejudices. The English and their Ulster satellite have been slaves to their Irish prejudices.

– Fintan Craig Doheny

“
H
AVE THEY
been contaminated?” Wycombe-Finch demanded.

“It’s too early to tell,” Beckett said.

It was almost midnight and both men spoke in loud voices to override the construction sounds in the big warehouse where they had brought the pressure chamber containing the Browders. The thum-thum-thum of the chamber’s air pump formed a background noise that intruded irritatingly on the other sounds.

The chamber had been lowered onto a wooden cradle near the center of the warehouse and a space cleared all around it. Tall stacks of canned food and pallets of other supplies had been moved back against the walls. A swarm of carpenters and other volunteers labored near the chamber, building a plywood and plastic room to which the chamber could be attached.

Wycombe-Finch and Beckett stood about six meters from all this activity but they could still smell vomit in the air being cycled out of the chamber. It was a repugnant odor, especially when mixed with the aromas created by the emergency welding, and that had been done hours ago on the landing stage at the coast near Ellesmere.

“Are you sure acids will sterilize the larger chamber?” Wycombe-Finch asked.

“The real problem’s the fumes,” Beckett said. “We’ll have to clear the air in there before letting them enter the new chamber.”

Wycombe-Finch stooped to peer at the new weld under the chamber, then straightened. “It must be hellish in there,” he said. “Have you told them how close you are to a cure?”

“I’ve told them we’re working as fast as we can to produce enough for the mother and baby.” He shook his head. “But you know, Wye, if they’re contaminated… we’ll be lucky to get enough of it in time to treat the baby, let alone the mother.”

“How certain are you really that the serum will be effective?”

“Certain schmertain!”

“Are you suggesting it might not work?”

“It works in the test tube.” He shrugged.

“I see. Well, if it doesn’t perform outside the glassworks, Stoney will be rather put out.”

“Fuck Stoney!”

“You Americans! You’re so gross under pressure. I believe that’s why you’ve produced so few really good administrators.”

Beckett clamped his mouth shut to suppress an angry reply. Abruptly, he strode away from the director, dodging two workmen with a sheet of plywood and coming to a stop at a port on the end of the pressure chamber. It was dark inside, all the lights turned off.
Could they be asleep?
he wondered. He did not see how they could sleep in the presence of all this construction din.

The temporary speaker above the port crackled and Stephen Browder’s voice demanded: “How much longer must we endure this? The baby really needs oxygen!”

“We’re filling a small tank right now,” Beckett said. “We had to find something that would go through the supply lock.”

“But how long?”

“Another hour at the most,” Beckett said. He could see Browder’s face near the port now, a pale shape in the tank’s gloom.

“They’re building with wood?” Browder said. “How can you sterilize…”

“We’ve acids that should do the job.”

“Should?”

“Look, Browder! We’ve identified the pathogen and we’ve killed it outside the human body.”

“And how long before you have the serum?”

“At least thirty-six hours.”

Beckett heard Kate’s voice then demanding: “Stephen! What’re they saying?”

“They’re getting the serum, love,” Browder said.

“Will it be in time?” she asked.

“There’s no certainty you were contaminated, love! They got the weld patch on very fast and the heat, well no germ could live through that.”