Plague (36 page)

Dr. Petrie
stopped retreating. He raised the rifle to his shoulder and took a bead on the nearest
picket. The men stayed where they were, silent and threatening, but he could
sense that they were uncertain.

He said, slowly
and loudly, ‘You have ten seconds to turn around and get out of here.

Then I start
shooting, and I don’t care what I hit.’

The pickets
stayed where they were. For one terrible moment, he thought they were going to
call his bluff, and make him open fire. He could feel the sweat running down
inside his collar, and his hands were shaking.

‘Do you hear
me!’ he shouted. ‘Ten seconds!’

A man with a
fire-ax took a pace nearer. Dr. Petrie swung the rifle around and aimed at his
head, and the man stopped.

‘Eight
seconds!’

The pickets
looked at each other. One of them said, ‘Aw fuck it, we’ll get him later,’ and
threw down his chair-leg. One by one, the others did the same.

Quickly, Dr.
Petrie took Adelaide by the arm, and led her down the corridor to the stairs.
He didn’t trust elevators, with the power the way it was.

‘Can you climb
four flights?’ he asked Prickles. Prickles, white-faced and frightened, gave a
nod.

They found Dr.
Murray in a cluttered office on the fifth floor, talking on the internal
telephone, and drinking black coffee out of a plastic cup. He was a
gray-haired, intense-looking man, with big fleshy ears and heavy hornrimmed
spectacles.

‘Dr. Murray?’
said Petrie, putting out his hand. Dr. Murray shook it limply.

‘You’d better
take a seat,’ said Dr. Murray mournfully. ‘Just move those papers – there’s a
chair under there someplace.’

They sat down.
Dr. Petrie self-consciously propped his rifle against the side of Dr. Murray’s
desk, but Dr. Murray didn’t register surprise or concern.

‘Now,’ said Dr.
Murray, ‘what is it you wanted to see me about?’

‘It’s the
plague,’ explained Dr. Petrie. ‘It started in Miami, and I saw some of the
earliest cases myself, and treated them.’

‘With any
success?’ asked Dr. Murray, dourly.

‘None at all.
The only thing we discovered was that it was
related to Pasteurella pestis, but that it didn’t respond to the usual
antibiotics or serums.’

‘I know that,’
said Dr. Murray. ‘So what are you trying to tell me?’

Dr. Petrie
coughed. ‘I’m trying to tell you, Dr. Murray, that even though it’s a
fast-breeding bacillus with no known antidote – a bacillus that has wiped out
almost the entire population of the Eastern seaboard in one week -I haven’t
caught it.’

‘I can see
that.’

‘You don’t
understand,’ insisted Dr. Petrie. ‘I haven’t caught it for a reason. My
daughter hasn’t caught it for a reason. My girlfriend hasn’t caught it because
she has stayed almost exclusively with us, and we’re never going to get it.’

Dr. Murray
opened a drawer in his desk, took out a pack of stale Larks, and unsteadily lit
one up. He kept the cigarette in his mouth, puffing smoke out sideways like a
poker player.

‘What you’re
trying to tell me, Dr. Petrie, is that you know why you, haven’t caught it?

Is that it?’

‘Exactly.
We haven’t caught it because we’ve been exposed to
radiation. In my case, it’s X-Rays. In my daughter’s case, color television. I
believe now that my daughter did get a mild dose of plague, but because she was
kept away from other carriers, she recovered.’

Dr. Murray took
off his spectacles. ‘I don’t understand you, Dr. Petrie. How can radiation
possibly have any effect on a plague bacillus?’

‘It can have an
enormous effect. It’s my supposition that, somehow, radiation reached the raw
sewage that was dumped off the Long Island
coast,
and
that within the radioactive sewage, the common plague bacillus mutated into a
fast-growing and very virulent super-plague. Perhaps further doses of radiation
can mutate it further into a harmless form, or slow down its incubation. I
don’t yet know. I was hoping that you and some of your doctors here could help
me find out.’

Dr. Murray
thought this over. Then he said, ‘Dr. Petrie, I think you have a very
interesting notion, there. But what I am not is a research bacteriologist. I am
trying to run a metropolitan casualty department here, and at the moment, what
with the strike and the plague, I’m not making much of a go of it. What you
need is a man who can turn your theory into scientific facts – if it’s a theory
that’s any good.’

‘Can you
suggest anyone?’

Dr. Murray
reached for his desk diary, and leafed through the pages.

‘There are two
very good men,’ he said. ‘At the moment, they’re both fighting each other in
court, as I understand it, over some new technique of theirs. But they both
have good repuations, and they’re both interested in radioactive mutation of
bacilli.

Here we are –
Professor Ivor Glantz – and Professor Sergei Forward.’

‘I’ve heard of
Glantz,’ said Dr. Petrie.
‘A bit of a lone wolf, if I
remember.’

‘Brilliant,
though,’ said Dr. Murray. ‘If there’s any foundation to your theory at all, he
can find it.’

‘Where do I
find him?’

‘You’re very
fortunate. He lives on First Avenue, in Concorde Tower. He’s a rich man.’

‘I didn’t know
research bacteriologists got rich.’

‘They do if
their fathers are bankers, and they take out a patent on self-aborting bacilli
for the brewing industry.

‘Ivor Glantz
devised the bacillus that made Milwaukee not only famous but extremely
profitable.’

‘I see. Perhaps
you and I are in the wrong branch of science, Dr. Murray.’

Dr. Murray
ignored him. ‘I can let you have a note to take to Glantz, on hospital paper.
They won’t let you into the tower otherwise. Right now, they won’t let you into
any place at all unless you’re known.’

‘Thank you,’
said Dr. Petrie, as the older man unscrewed his pen and scribbled a letter. ‘I
just hope that we can do something to make your job easier.’

Dr. Murray
grimaced. ‘There is one thing. When you’re up at Concorde Tower, you can take
that rifle of yours and make a large hole in Kenneth Garunisch.’

‘That reminds
me,’ said Dr. Petrie. ‘Is there another way out of this place? I kind of
unsettled the medical workers’ pickets on the way in.’

Dr. Murray
nodded. ‘We’ll get you out. Would you care for some coffee before you go? My
secretary will make you some next door. Right now, I have to get back to the
wards.’

When Dr. Murray
had left, they sat for half an hour by the window of his secretary’s office,
sipping hot coffee and staring out over the darkened city. The windows were
soundproofed, but they couldn’t keep out the endless howling of sirens, and the
crackle of shots. The city was black and shadowy, lit here and there by
sparkling orange fires. It looked like a medieval vision of the devil’s
kingdom; a place where demons and beasts roamed in echoing darkness. Not even
the stars looked down on the twentieth-century city that had become, at last,
the realization of a fifteenth-century nightmare.

Ivor Glantz had
just come out of the shower. He was wrapped up in a white toweling bathrobe,
and he dabbed his perspiring forehead with a succession of tissues pulled from
a Kleenex box.

‘Dr. Petrie,’
he said, assiduously gathering up sweat, ‘I have to say that I admire your
courage.
You and your lady, and your little girl.’

Dr. Petrie,
shaved and smelling of Braggi, was sitting on the wide cream-colored 1930s
settee, with a large Scotch in his hand. For the first time this week, he felt
clean and civilized. Prickles had been dressed up in one of Ivor Glantz’s
pajama jackets and put to bed in the small bedroom, while Adelaide and
Esmeralda were talking in the kitchen, and making supper.

‘It wasn’t
courage,’ said Dr. Petrie, smiling tiredly.
‘Far from it.
It was survival. They burned down Miami, and we had to get out,’

‘You think they
did that deliberately?’ asked Glantz.

‘Set fire to
the city? I don’t know. I don’t understand the way the federal government have
handled this thing from the very beginning. Down in Miami, we were all
beginning to feel like sacrificial lambs.’

Glantz smiled.
‘You did well to get out of it, anyway. If you want to stay here for a few
days, you’re welcome. We have our own power in this building, and we’re very secure.
This block was designed as a maximum-security project. You saw how tight
they’ve got it defended downstairs.’

Dr. Petrie
sipped his Scotch. He was suddenly beginning to realize how utterly exhausted
he was. He didn’t even know if he was going to be able to stay awake for
supper.

‘Have you
thought about my theory?’ he asked.

Ivor Glantz
nodded. ‘Sure. I was thinking about it in the shower.’

‘And how does
it grab you?’

Glantz tapped
ash off his cigarette. ‘It grabs me pretty well, if you want to know the truth.
It’s one of those theories
that’s
wacky enough to
work. You see, most epidemic diseases are sparked off by a particular
combination of historical and environmental circumstances. Sometimes the
circumstances are so absurd and unusual that you could never predict they were
going to happen. But we’ve had all the ingredients for this epidemic in
American society for years, and it only took a couple of odd happenstances to
get the whole thing going.’

Glantz got up,
walked across to the drinks cabinet, and poured himself a large whiskey.

‘Ingredient one
is
plague
itself,’ he said. ‘We have had plague in the
United States throughout the twentieth century, and every single year –
particularly in the Western states – we suffer plague fatalities. It’s endemic
in squirrels and rats in the West, and there have beeri cases reported in
Florida, as you probably know.

‘Ingredient two
is the raw sewage – the medium in which plague bacilli were incubating beneath
the ocean. The sewage, if you like, was the laboratory in which the
bacilli was
mutated.

‘Ingredient
three is the radioactivity. Well – we don’t have any proof where the
radioactivity comes from, but I can guess that radioactive waste might well be
dumped into the ocean from industrial processes, or maybe atomic-powered ships
and submarines have offloaded uranium fuel in the area where the raw sewage was
lying.

‘Given those
three ingredients, all it took was an unusual climatic situation, with reverse
currents and changeable winds, and the epidemic was served up to us on a
plate.’

Glantz sat down
again, and puffed his cigarette. ‘It’s a classic epidemic situation, Dr. Petrie,
and that’s why I believe your theory is right.’

Dr. Petrie
nodded wearily.

‘The problem
is,’ said Ivor Glantz, ‘that even if it’s right, we have to prove it’s right,
and even when we’ve done that, we still have to find a way to communicate our
information to the federal government, and make sure they act on it.’

‘Is Manhattan
completely cut off?’

‘As long as the power is out, yes.
They were flying
helicopters out of here for most of the day, but I should think they’ve all
been commandeered by now. The same goes for boats. And as long as we’ve got
plague in the city, there isn’t anyone who’s going to fly in here to bring us
out.’

‘What are we
going to do, then?’ asked Dr. Petrie. ‘It looks like I wasted my time.’

Glantz
shrugged. ‘I don’t think so, Dr. Petrie. I don’t have any test facilities here
at home, but I can work out the probability graphs and all the mathematics. I
guess we can check your theory to the point where we’re sixty-five percent sure
about it, and I think that should be enough to convince the government. What we
need to discover is the critical level of radioactivity which renders the
plague harmless, and then we’re all set. Anyone who hasn’t caught it already
could be given a dose of X-Rays, and they’d be protected.’

‘What about
pregnant women?’ asked
Petrie.
‘We couldn’t give
X-Rays to them. The last thing we want to do is cure the plague and wind up
with a whole generation of deformed children.’

Ivor Glantz
shook his head. ‘I don’t think the dosage is sufficiently high to make it a
problem. But we’ll check. Once we’re reasonably sure, we can get a message to
Washington, or wherever the President is hiding himself, and they can do the
basic practical research outside of the plague zone.’

‘You seem very
confident,’ said Dr. Petrie.

‘I’m not in the
least confident,’ Glantz replied. ‘But it’s the only theory we’ve got, and we
might as well make the best of it.’

‘Do you think
there’s a chance?’

‘Oh, sure.
Of course there’s a chance. There is no bacillus
in my long and varied experience that can’t be destroyed or mutated into
complete harmlessness by the correct application of radioactivity. The same
goes for humans, if you must know.’

Dr. Petrie
finished his Scotch. ‘How long will it take?’ he asked. ‘The mathematics, I
mean.’

Ivor Glantz
shook his head.
‘Hard to say.
Two or
three days.
Maybe less, maybe more.’

‘And meanwhile,
the whole of New York just dies?’

‘I can’t help it,
Dr. Petrie. As soon as I’ve eaten, I’m going to sit right down there and start
work, and that’s a promise. But I can’t work miracles.’

Dr. Petrie
stood up and walked over to the window. Sixteen floors below, the streets were
dark, blind and chaotic. He saw red flashing police lights and ambulances, and
the smoke from a smoldering store rising almost invisibly into the rainy night
sky.

‘I sometimes
wish it were true,’ he said quietly.