The Bladerunner

by Alan E Nourse

  Moments later Billy Gimp was out on the street, clutching a computer-printed sheaf of instructions regarding the function and inviolability of the transponder. The rules were all there, plainly written; any attempt to tamper with the seal or remove the device without authorization was an automatic felony offense, and would generate an alarm signal that would be picked up by the nearest police copter or other police unit and bring swift investigation. The purpose of the transponder was surveillance and crime prevention, and Billy could be observed as closely as Health Control desired for a period of six months or more. Frightened and confused at the sudden turn of events, Billy took a ground-bus, disembarked within a few blocks of his room, and soon turned into the familiar Lower City street.

  No wonder the Health Control man had been smiling, Billy thought. He had been outmaneuvered from the start, and Health Control had been certain of the outcome from the moment Billy had been arrested. They had led him along, and now he was trapped in an electronic web from which there was no appeal, and from which he could not even risk momentary contact with Doc. Indeed, on the surface it seemed that Health Control had clamped down hard on Billy. Yet something deep in his mind was still insisting that it was not him they really wanted. If they had wanted him and him alone they could have placed him incommunicado in a prison cell until an accelerated jury trial could have been arranged.

  Only one thing seemed possible: that Health Control was really basically interested in trapping Doc, yet for some reason could not move directly against him; and that consequently they were using Billy, Doc’s bladerunner, in some scheme to entrap him. And that meant that somehow, in some way, he had to warn Doc that grave trouble was brewing, transponder or no transponder.

  Back in his room, Billy found it was 3:30 A.M.; he had been at the police station for over two hours. Following a hunch, he crossed the room and lifted the sweater from the floor. As he suspected, the bug was gone. He looked at the transponder on his wrist and sank wearily down into a chair.

  Of course the bug was gone. They really didn’t need it anymore.

  PART TWO

  DOC’S

  STORY

  I

  It had all happened to swiftly that Doc had already reacted before he had time to think. One moment he and Billy were stepping from the elevator onto the darkened rooftop of the Merrimans’ apartment and walking across to board the waiting heli-cab; the next moment Doc had heard Billy’s warning cry, and the roof was ablaze with light from the police spotlights. Already climbing into the heli-cab, Doc had boosted himself the rest of the way in, slammed the door behind him and thrown the fast takeoff switch. A moment later he had heard the idling motor surge into a roar as the heli-cab rose swiftly into the air.

  It had been self-preservation and nothing more, a lesson he had learned years before in the jungle fighting around the little field hospital in the south of China where he had been stationed during the Great Eastern War in the late 1980s, and learned again during the Health Riots of ‘94, when angry torchlit mobs had swept through cities and suburbs, fire-bombing clinics and hospitals and tossing tear-gas grenades into the buildings to drive the doctors and nurses out. That Doc had survived those frightening days at all was a credit to his physical agility and his uncanny sense of precisely when to move, and how, in order to save his own skin. And now the lesson had come back full force as he coded the Health Control Hospital address — the first he could think of — into the auto-pilot computer and sent the little cab banking into a long curve to the north, fully expecting hot pursuit by the police. As the cab turned away from the rooftop, he had seen Billy’s figure down below, running for the stairwell, then tripping and falling spread-eagled on the roof as two or three dark figures pounced on him and the flight bag that had been thrown from his hand in the fall. It was not until the heli-cab was moving steadily to the north, with no sign of any pursuit, that Doc began thinking and recognized what had actually happened. Obviously Billy had made a sacrifice move; if he, too, had tried to clamber into the heli-cab, the police would have nailed the vehicle to the roof, or at best followed in swift pursuit. Billy had gone down deliberately to give Doc a chance to get away — a chance that Doc had seized without question or hesitation.

  For a moment, then, he was half tempted to turn back and try something wild and foolish, a bravado rescue attempt or some such thing, but he instantly vetoed the idea, much as he felt guilty at leaving Billy in the lurch. He and Billy had long since agreed on the policy to follow in the event of an ambush such as this. If one were captured, they had agreed, the other should flee while he could, and then wait for the other to contact him when things were clear. Doc had recognized an unspoken obligation never to knowingly lead the law or Health Control forces to Billy or his bladerunning activity, and Billy had agreed never to knowingly implicate Doc in his medical underground activities, should he be apprehended. And in practice they had followed this policy before. Billy had been picked up more than once in police or Health Control dragnets thrown out as a result of underground medical blunders or disasters — all too common these days — but the blunders had never been Doc’s, and Billy had always been released again after minor interrogation had cleared him in such cases.

  What was more, Doc realized, there were others involved in this case than just Billy. Molly Barret was still in the Merrimans’ apartment with the two recently treated children. Without some direction it would be all but impossible for the police to search the whole apartment complex just for a Health Code violation — but any attempt on Doc’s part to interfere with Billy’s capture could easily lead to just such a search. Overall, he decided, there was nothing to do but let Billy face the police alone, at least for the moment.

  He could, however, warn Molly. As the heli-cab headed north Doc lifted the mobile phone receiver, dialed the Merrimans’ number, identified himself when John Merriman answered, and asked for Molly. A moment later the girl’s face appeared on the screen.

  “Doc! Where are you? What’s wrong?”

  “How are you doing, Molly?”

  “Oh, the kids are coming alone fine. The parents were just going to bed.”

  “Well, the police hit us on the roof just now,” Doc said. “They must somehow have followed us. I got away in the heli-cab, but they caught Billy.”

  “Oh, no! He couldn’t get away?”

  “No, they were right on him.”

  “Well, at least Billy would never tell them where we were working … I mean which apartment.”

  “No, he wouldn’t. But the police might keep the building staked out for a while. You’d better stay where you are until rush hour in the morning — they couldn’t possibly screen people then — and get the monorail to the Hospital.”

  “Well, all right, if that’s best,” Molly said. “But what about Billy?”

  “They probably take him in and book him. They caught him with that bag full of junk.”

  “And we can’t help at all?”

  “Not right now. For the moment, just don’t leave the building. You can reach me on my belt radio if you need me.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “I don’t know. Home, I guess. No, I’ve got that other call that Billy picked up from Parrot, a very sick youngster. I suppose I’d better stop. You take care, now, and don’t forget to check that data at the Hospital first thing.”

  He rang off and settled back in his seat as Molly’s face faded from the tiny communication screen. Slowly, now, he felt himself coming back to reality. The little cab’s radar screen picked up an occasional helicopter moving off at odd angles or across his flank, but there was no pattern suggestive of pursuit. If the police had broadcast the cab’s license number for pickup, there was certainly no sign of it in the air; the best move, Doc decided, would be to go directly to the address Parrot had provided and send the cab back to its home station empty on the auto-pilot. There was a certain risk that if the police had known enough to spring a trap at the Merrimans’ building they
might also know of this additional call, but that seemed improbable to Doc. More likely they had merely followed Billy without knowing where he was bound, and correctly assumed that the stop at Apartment Complex 861 Trenton Sector involved illegal medical work.

  At any rate, the chance had to be taken. Doc found the address card in his pocket, coded it into the computer and then settled back as the small airship obediently changed course, veering to the northeast and slowly losing altitude. As he stared down at the city lights passing below, Doc turned this emergency call over in his mind. It was not the first such call he had made in recent weeks; in fact, it seemed to him that there had been a sharp influx of calls involving high fevers, blinding headaches, stiff necks and delirium — all characteristic of some kind of infectious meningitis. Of course, he had seen only severe cases on his underground rounds. Minor infections seldom brought calls for clandestine medical help these days; the risk of detection was too high, to say nothing of the cost of such care. But in the cases he had seen, or had heard other doctors discussing, there had been an ominous pattern: first a bout of the Shanghai flu that had been sweeping the nation in recent months, usually untreated because the illness seemed so mild and transitory; and then, when recovery seemed almost complete, the sudden onset of high, spiking fever, headache, stiff neck and prostration. If this was another such case, the outlook could be grave indeed, because increasing numbers of victims of this syndrome were proving beyond medical help when they were finally seen.

  Suddenly the heli-cab veered slightly and began descending toward a cluster of tightly packed high-rise apartments in the Plainfield Sector of the city, and Doc turned his attention to the ground below. Plainfield was a tacky, rundown area of the city; many of the buildings were decades old and not equipped with helicopter landing pads. Doc watched as the heli-cab approached a rooftop bearing the building number he was looking for, scanning for a landing signal to guide it down. When none appeared, the cab merely hovered, allowing Doc to disembark. Once he was on the roof, the cab rose again on its auto-pilot and moved swiftly off to the north again.

  Doc scanned the rooftop suspiciously. At first it appeared deserted. Then a small figure detached itself from the shadow near a stairwell and a boy’s voice called out, “Doctor?”

  “Who’s that?” Doc returned.

  “Jerry Hardy, Will Hardy’s boy. My brother’s sick. We’ve been expecting you.”

  “Okay,” Doc said. “Show me the way.”

  He followed the boy, a skinny ten-year-old, who led the way down the stairwell into the dilapidated apartment building. The corridors, once carpeted, now had only worn-out fragments of rug, and the dim light above the elevator door only indicated half the floors. They waited and waited as the elevator came clanking up the shaft and finally wheezed open. “It’s okay,” the boy said when he saw Doc hesitate. “It’ll take us both. T’other one only takes one, remember that when you come back up.”

  The elevator stopped at a floor halfway down the building, and the boy led Doc along a maze of corridors to a remote apartment. The door was opened a crack and a middle-aged woman peered out. “Yes?” she said.

  “I’m Doctor Long. I got word that you wanted help.”

  “Oh, yes!” The woman opened the door, and led Doc through a shabby living room to a bedroom at the rear. She was very thin and pale, her face lined with concern. “It’s my oldest boy, Doctor, he’s just awful sick. Came down all of a sudden, three days ago, and it’s been getting worse and worse. My husband’s with him now.”

  She opened the bedroom door and Doc stepped inside, then stopped short. An adolescent boy lay in the bed, actively chilling. Beside the bed, standing helplessly, was a man with half his hair and beard shaved off.

  “Hold it,” Doc said. “If you folks are Naturists, are you sure you want a doctor?”

  “We’ve got to have help, Doc,” the man said, coming forward. “We just didn’t dare stick it out any longer. And none of us are qualified for hospital care. They wouldn’t let us through the clinic door.”

  “No, I suppose they wouldn’t.” Doc crossed the room, turned on the bed light and looked closely at the boy. He was sixteen or seventeen, with his hair half shaved just like his father. But there was a feverish glow to his cheeks and he lay stiffly in bed, chilling, with his head thrust back and his body bowed forward. Doc sat down, attached a temp-clip to the boy’s ear, read it a moment later. “One hundred and four degrees,” he said. “Massively elevated white count, mostly segmented neutrophiles, and a hemoglobin reading way below normal — how long has he been sick?”

  “Three days,” the man said. “Not bad the first two, just a headache and a sore throat. Then his neck got stiff yesterday and his fever went clear up and wouldn’t come down.”

  “Any sickness before this?”

  “Nothing to speak of,” Will Hardy said. “He had the Shanghai flu a couple of weeks ago, just like the rest of us, but he seemed to be getting over that just fine when this turned up.”

  “I see,” Doc said. Methodically he went about examining the boy, checking ears, throat, heart and lungs, abdomen. The boy was so dehydrated that his skin felt like dry parchment between Doc’s fingers. “He hasn’t been taking fluids?”

  “Not for twenty-four hours. That’s what got us so scared. He tries and tries but he can’t hold no fluids down. Can’t hold nothin’ down.”

  “What about the rest of you?”

  “Oh, we’re okay,” the man said. “I’ve got a little headache, and the younger boy’s had a fever tonight, but he feels okay, don’t you, Jerry?”

  “Well, never mind,” Doc said. “Just to be safe we’ll take a look at all of you.” Step by step he began checking the others, taking temperatures and running blood counts. He found that the father already had a stiff neck as well as a headache, and the boy’s temperature was 103°. Only the mother seemed unaffected.

  Shaking his head, Doc took the parents aside. “All right, now, listen closely,” he said. “You’ve got a terrible problem on your hands and you’re going to have to make some hard decisions. This older boy is mortally ill. He almost surely has some kind of meningitis — I can’t tell what kind without doing a spinal tap, and I don’t have the equipment on hand for that. He also needs lab work, at the very least a culture to identify the organism causing the infection and a test to determine which antibiotic will be the most help in stopping this thing. But above all, he’s got to have fast, diligent treatment, including intravenous fluids, in a hospital without delay, because he’s not going to survive this dehydration very much longer.”

  “But, Doc,” Will Hardy said, “I told you — ”

  “That’s not all,” Doc interrupted. “Both you and the younger boy are also ill, and probably with the same thing. There’s been a lot of this turning up recently, and people have been dying from it because they haven’t gotten the right kind of medical help soon enough. The truth is that all three of you need hospital care and treatment starting right now.”

  “Doc, we can’t go to a hospital,” Will Hardy said.

  “You mean you don’t want to,” Doc retorted. “Even unqualified patients can be admitted for emergency treatment, as long as they agree to sterilization as soon as their condition permits.”

  “Doc, it isn’t just that, it’s the whole rotten hospital scene. Look, I may not be a very good Naturist when it comes to a showdown, but I can’t take my kids into a place like that. I hate those places, I couldn’t let my kids near them.”

  Doc shook his head sadly. “You’re the one that has to decide,” he said. “All I can do is tell you what’s needed. I can start treatment here and hope for the best, but I warn you that it may be too little and too late. If the boy dies, I can’t be responsible.”

  The man hesitated, breathing heavily. Then finally he shook his head. “If you can start treatment, at least do that. Do whatever you can do here.”

  “All right.” Doc opened his bag and withdrew syringes, needles, medications an
d other paraphernalia. Then, turning to the boy in bed, he injected an ampul of colorless fluid into a vein, sealing the needle hole with tape. “That’s an anti-emetic,” he told the older Hardy. “It should help prevent upchucking so that he can hold something on his stomach. Now we need fluids — sugar water, orange juice, anything palatable that you have. Let’s get it started.” He went out in the kitchen with the mother, showed her what to prepare and how. A few moments later he gave the boy an ounce of sugar water by mouth, waited a minute or two and gave another ounce. There was no vomiting. “All right,” Doc told the mother, “you keep this up for the rest of the night. An ounce or so every fifteen minutes. I’m also giving him antibiotic and viricidal medicines that may help with the infection, but the dehydration is the biggest threat right now.”

  Turning to the father and the younger boy, he administered antibiotic by injection, then counted out capsules for them to take later. Next he gave the woman a brief lesson in fever control, showing her how to bring the older boy’s temperature down and keep it there. Presently he went out into the living room, sank down in a chair and dozed for a few moments. An hour passed, then another, as Doc intermittently checked the sick one. The boy was keeping fluids down now, and had less fever, but there was little other sign of improvement. Finally Doc shook his head. “I can’t stay any longer, I’ve got to get some sleep,” he said. “There’s nothing more I can do here, anyway. He’s still terribly sick, and I urge you to reconsider and take him to a hospital. If you go to Health Control Hospital Number Seven and give them my name, he’ll be admitted without delay. He’ll have to qualify for care later, but this is a matter of life and death now. I’ll check in the morning to see if you’ve brought him — think it over very carefully. And I’ll have to collect a hundred dollars in markers or a hundred and forty in credit now to pay for this infection kit I’ve used.”

  The family had the money ready. The father remained beside the boy, obviously deeply troubled, as the woman escorted Doc back to the elevators. “I’ll try to talk him into it, Doctor,” she said. “He’s very stubborn about the hospitals, but even he can see how sick the boy is. I’ll do the best I can.”