The White Plague (48 page)

“We have a toe in the door,” Beckett said.

The director knew this expression, but wondered at its accuracy. He filled his pipe and lighted it, watching the coal as it glowed under his lighter.

“Are we certain there are no women available for tests in all of England?” Danzas asked.

“Too early to face that problem, don’t you think?” the director said. He looked at Beckett, pulse quickening at this turn. How close was this team?

“We’ll need test subjects eventually,” Beckett said.

“No women we can safely get at, I’m assured,” Wycombe-Finch said. “Some will be provided, I’m certain, when the time comes. The Americans, perhaps? I’m told they have quarantine stations staffed with…”

“We dare not ask,” Lepikov said.

Danzas stroked his long nose with a forefinger and nodded agreement.

“We’ve discussed this at some length,” Hupp said. “The United States, the Soviet Union, China… there is nowhere we dare turn. They would know immediately that we had achieved a breakthrough.”

“I’m familiar with that theory,” Wycombe-Finch said, speaking around his pipe stem and a long curl of blue smoke. “But how close are we?”

Hupp shrugged.

“A toe in the door doesn’t mean we’ve made the sale,” Beckett said.

The director removed his pipe from his mouth. “Let us say that I do as you suggest, increase your access to computer time… by how much we will not estimate for the sake of this hypothetical consideration. But let us say I do it. What then?”

“If you give us enough time at the computer, you’d better start arranging immediately for test subjects,” Beckett said.

“What about that woman in the tank at Killaloe?” Hupp asked. “Her husband called me recently, you know. I didn’t raise the question with him, but it crossed my mind.”

“Just exactly what is it you fear from the major powers?” Wycombe-Finch asked.

Beckett cast a long-suffering look at Hupp. They had been through this several times with the director. The man was stalling, weighing his options.
Hypothetical consideration!
It was one of Wycombe-Finch’s more irritating characteristics: He refused to act swiftly and decisively.
Another damned bureaucrat!

“If we let it be known that we have solved the plague,” Hupp said, “the world’s major powers would face several attractive choices, arguing from their individual and selfish viewpoints. First, each would assess how well its female population was protected from conventional attack. Once the females are immunized, they can be considered a national asset to be sequestered in protective custody.”

“Under circumstances that would have been considered most unacceptable in preplague times,” Danzas said.

“We could expect commando-style attack right here,” Beckett said. “They’d want to control us.”

“Even if they learn that we’ve achieved something,” Lepikov said, “we cannot broadcast the solution widely. It must be confined to this facility.”

“You’re really serious about this,” Wycombe-Finch said, a faint querulousness in his tone.

“The Soviet Union would consider the statistical advantage in knocking out existing and potential adversaries,” Lepikov said. “If you can cure the plague, and especially if you understand the other implications in this, the first-strike becomes an exceedingly attractive option. Certainly, this establishment becomes immediately expendable.”

Wycombe-Finch looked at Beckett. “You share this opinion?”

“Any atomic power becomes exceptionally dangerous to us under these circumstances,” Beckett said. “It hinges on something we here cannot possibly know: how well they have protected their female populations.”

“Any other population segment could be freely sacrificed,” Lepikov said.

Hupp leaned forward. “They’ve already taken such losses that they’re all operating from a reserve position. People backed against a wall tend to make dangerous decisions.”

Wycombe-Finch scratched his jaw with his pipe stem.

“Military thinking,” Lepikov muttered. “It is the same everywhere.”

As was his pattern, Danzas cleared his throat and looked at each person at the table, signaling that he was about to make a pronouncement. “You must also consider what might be done by a nation such as Argentina or India, a nation whose potential for disastrous decisions does not have what Bill would call ‘a sufficient track record’ from which to predict behavior. Such a nation might ignite conflict between superpowers, hoping to sit on the sidelines and pick up the pieces.”

Wycombe-Finch picked a fleck of tobacco from the outside of his pipe bowl. “An interesting theory. Mad.”

“Madness is contagious,” Hupp said, “as contagious as the plague itself. O’Neill has loosed a second plague upon our world – this madness.”

“Governments are sure to think in terms of rebuilding the world’s gene pool from their own stock,” Beckett said. “And once they know how to manipulate the DNA the way O’Neill did…” He shook his head.

“More plagues?” Wycombe-Finch asked.

“Why not?” Hupp countered.

Danzas nodded his head, a curiously angular motion like the bobbing of a child’s toy.

Wycombe-Finch reached behind him to a small side table and brought a large ashtray there into position before him. He knocked out his pipe in it and refilled the pipe. “What if it is O’Neill in Ireland?” he asked.

“And the Irish get him to cooperate?” Beckett asked, his voice weary.

“Indeed,” the director said. He lighted his pipe and puffed at it.

“You heard my conversation with Doheny,” Beckett said. “I say the odds are strongly against them getting O’Neill to cooperate… if that’s really O’Neill. I mean, my God! They’ve had him how long? Four months?”

“But what if it is O’Neill and he has arranged other plagues for us?” Wycombe-Finch asked.

“The world will need facilities such as this more than ever,” Lepikov said. “Why do we not recognize our worth, our great value?”

Wycombe-Finch said: “That seems to me the decisive argument against any attack upon us. What I fear is that someone else may achieve a cure before us.”

“That’s a different game, all right,” Beckett said. He had been hoping the director would be the one to raise this possibility. “What about our computer time?”

Wycombe-Finch exhaled a cloud of blue smoke and stared down at his pipe. He had not reached his present position without understanding the interplays of political power, but the uses of that power had always filled him with disquiet. He knew such things as were being discussed here could occur… did occur. His own particular regimen, however, had always been to offer no threat to those immediately superior to him and, at the same time, to operate within a circle of steady, consistent achievement. He thought of this as the essence of the scientific method. Intuition, imaginative leaps – all such things he saw as threatening to the orderly march of science. Wycombe-Finch did not like to contemplate a disorderly world, but this, he realized, was unfortunately the nature of the world at present. O’Neill had thrown a spanner into the works. True men of science could only hope to restore order.
And something would have to be done to limit the disruptive consequences of scientific discoveries, something none of the others at this table had even considered
, he thought.

The members of the DIC team stared at him expectantly.

“I shall announce new apportionments of computer time in the morning,” Wycombe-Finch said. He looked at Beckett. “We must proceed in an orderly fashion, old boy. Give me a night to study the situation.” He gestured with his pipe at the computer printouts on his desk. “I daresay there’s some food for cogitation in that lot.”

Beckett sighed. It was not what he had hoped for but it was something. The director would give them a bone – more time in some form. It looked like the ball was in Ruckerman’s court, though. Could Ruckerman do it without tipping their hand?

The spider is curtain-bearer in the palace of Chosroes. The owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.

– Saadi

T
HE THIRD
week out from McCrae’s, Herity stopped them at nightfall beside a small, one-room cottage hidden from the road by a hillock. They reached it on an overgrown track through the inevitable granite walls. John found himself pleasurably anticipating walls and a roof overhead. They had spent the previous night fireless, crouched in an abandoned hay shed while wind drove the rain around them.

Inside, the cottage smelled of mildew, but the windows remained unbroken and the door sealed tightly. Herity came back from scouting the area to report there was no fresh food, not even chickens wandering in the yard to lead them to a nest of eggs.

A broken-leg table propped by a length of green limb stood in front of the fireplace. Father Michael found dry peat in an adjoining shed, kindling on a shelf beside it, and soon had a fire going.

“I haven’t seen any signs of pursuit,” Herity said, his tone pensive. “No assurance in that. We’ll mount guard again tonight.”

Father Michael went to his pack in a corner near the fireplace and extracted a package wrapped in plastic. “Here’s that piece of pork,” he said.

The boy sat down on the floor beside the fire and extended his hands toward the warmth. Herity put his pack next to John’s beside the door, glanced at the machine gun propped against it and smiled. He looked around the room: no loft, only this one small enclosed space.

John went to one of the two windows opposite the door and stared westward at the darkening sky. Sunset through the clouds filled the air with a dim yellow light that disappeared even as he watched. Distant forks of blue lightning danced under the clouds like shapes drawn by children. The lightning appeared unreal until he heard the crumping detonation of the thunder. He counted the seconds between flash and thunder – ten and crump! The next count was shorter. The storm was approaching fast.

Father Michael opened his plastic package on the table. “It’s cozy with a fire,” he said.

Herity picked up his machine gun and, leaving his pack, ducked out the door.

“Now where’s he off to?” Father Michael asked.

“Only one door in this cottage,” John said. “He doesn’t care for that.”

“Windows on three sides,” Father Michael said. “I suppose it’s still a trap. Do you suppose, John, that he really killed Liam?”

John merely looked at him.

Father Michael sighed. He rummaged once more in his pack and brought out some of Gannon’s cheese. “I’d not want Joseph’s sins on my soul,” he muttered.

There was a decayed, rancid odor from the pork, John noticed. Spoiled, no doubt of it. Didn’t the priest know?

“I wish Mister Gannon and his little family well,” Father Michael said. “I’ll pray for them tonight.”

John thought of Gannon. That single pistol shot. Suggestive. Gannon had been a man ready to die, anxious for it even. Too sensitive and deep for these times. How had Gannon judged the four strangers who’d taken over his household so abruptly and then left him?
Did he see a group personality in us?

Father Michael went to stand near the boy, both of them staring into the orange glow of the peat fire.

Why are we together?

John tried to visualize Herity, the priest, the boy and himself as Gannon had seen them. Groups were supposed to have a social identity. A philosopher would try to fathom that identity.

Lightning struck nearby, the thunder close and loud. The darkness outside seemed thicker, more dense afterward.

They were four different people bound together for different reasons, John decided. The lack of symmetry in the group bothered John. There was a dangerous disparity here. Was it Herity-the-hunter who did not belong? It felt no better with him outside.

Rain began to pour onto the cottage roof. A leak near the wall opposite the fireplace produced a steady drip-drip-drip that splashed toward the packs by the door. John moved them under one of the windows, resting the machine gun firmly on the pack that Herity had taken from Liam.

It came to John that each of them was being carried along by an obsession.
I must do O’Neill’s bidding
. The boy had his vow of silence. Herity was a hunter. And Father Michael, yes… the priest was looking for his religion.

The thing holding this party together contained something unnatural, John decided. Was it supernatural? He felt that it was important to fathom what held them all together.

The rain had become very loud on the roof but the thunder and lightning were moving off to the northeast. John recorded this with only part of his awareness.
His musings were no idle fantasy
, he thought. The old uncanny of this land, the supernatural of little folk and faeries upon which Herity constantly harped, were gone. They had been replaced by something inescapably real, naturally super.

I did that. I did it for O’Neill
.

“Where is that Joseph Herity gone to?” Father Michael asked, a whine in his voice.

“Waiting out the rain in some shelter probably,” John said.

“The rain seems to be slackening a bit,” Father Michael said. “It’s a mild winter. Should we wait for him before we eat?”

“If you wish.”

Silence settled over the room with only the faint hissing of the peat fire in the background, the rain on the roof reduced to a light pattering. John became conscious of a second leak dripping near the first one. The boy snuffled loudly.

Abruptly, the door burst open and Herity entered swiftly, closing the door behind him. He wore a light poncho, which dripped a wide wet stain on the floor. There was a wild look in his eyes. He shook wetness off his green cap. 

“We’re not followed,” he said. He slipped the poncho over his head, dropping the cap to the floor with a damp plop. Under the poncho, the machine gun hung by its neck sling but their attention was caught by a string bag slung from Herity’s left shoulder. It contained three white plastic bottles and a jumble of canned food, the preplague commercial variety with bright labels.