The Bladerunner

by Alan E Nourse

  Sitting down together, they went over Billy’s list name by name. “You know some of these guys, and they’ll all get code calls from me,” Parrot said. “When I’ve got that done I’ll get on to some of the other suppliers and see if I can get them moving, at least passing the word to the bladerunners working out of their shops. When you’ve hit these guys, check back with me and I’ll get you some more names. Meanwhile we can see if there’s been any feedback from the Clinics, and you can let me know what you’ve heard from Doc.”

  It had taken three hours, enlisting Parrot’s aid, but it had been time well spent. With a last cup of coffee Billy gulped down one of Doc’s capsules and a couple of aspirin; moments later he was outside, flagging a ground-cab, Parrot’s list in his hand. Some of the addresses were tenement flats like his own. Others were a variety of Lower City hangouts where bladerunners tended to gather in their off hours, some familiar to Billy, some foreign. The cabbie was unenthusiastic about the rounds he was asked to make, the cluttered slum streets and the unguarded streetcorner waits while Billy was inside, but money brightened his eye, and Billy started his rounds. At one place, a dirty restaurant-pool hall in one of the unreclaimed slum areas of a nearby section of the Lower City, he found three bladerunners he knew, youngsters like himself, huddled over food and watching him suspiciously as he talked, convincing them finally, grudgingly, at least to contact their docs and canvass their own patient lists. At another place he ran into a sometime friend who took to the story more warmly and agreed to contact two other runners he lived with to see if they couldn’t contact more. With the more commonly frequented local watering holes covered, Billy moved farther afield, running up flights of stairs and pounding on doors of individual rooms, apartments and tenements, waking some of the runners from dead sleep, interrupting others in planning stages of cases, moving as swiftly as he could and talking feverishly to every one that would listen. At one place a surly bladerunner on Parrot’s list flatly refused to have anything to do with Billy’s scheme; at another place the occupant of a room, more irritable than others, talked only through a door opened a crack, sounding unconvinced until Billy told him to check back either with Parrot or with his own supplier to confirm the story.

  Another place was different, a tiny darkened room at the end of a broken-down tenement hallway, a place where melting snow was dripping through the roof and a wet, greenish mold had worked its way through the aged and rag-tag wallpaper, a place smelling of garbage and vomit, with rats the size of cats skittering into darkened corners as Billy passed. Inside the tiny room, curtains all pulled, a skinny youth of about fourteen lay huddled in a filthy bed, shivering, gesturing weakly to Billy to find some place to sit. “I’m sick, man,” the boy groaned. “Goddam flu, I think, I can’t stop shaking — ”

  Billy worked to get his attention, told him the story, but soon the boy was interrupting him with irrelevant questions, and it was clear that he wasn’t going anywhere or doing anything. Billy felt his forehead, hot and dry, and heated up some soup for him, the only food he could find in the place. “You’re sick, all right,” Billy said. “Probably the same thing we’re trying to get stopped. Can you reach your doc?”

  “Don’t have a doc now,” the boy said. “I got fired two weeks ago, and things have been tight.”

  “You need some medicine, all the same. You could get it free at a Clinic, like I’ve been telling you.”

  The boy groaned. “I could never make it,” he said. “Couldn’t hardly get the shades pulled down this morning.”

  “Well, then take some of these,” Billy said, dumping a pile of his own white-and-brown capsules out on a chair beside the bed. “Here, gulp down two of them right now. I’ll try to get a doc to you some way, but this may help in the meantime. I’m not feeling so hot myself.”

  In point of fact he was feeling more exhausted and confused by the minute, but he went on as the afternoon hours wore along and darkness came, clinging to his list and doggedly checking off the names one by one. His head was aching again, and now his chest was getting tight, as if a steel hoop was shrinking around it, and from time to time a paroxysm of coughing left him gasping for breath. Things beyond the checklist drifted hazily out of his mind; he remembered vaguely that he was supposed to check in with Doc at some hour or another, but he couldn’t remember when, and when he finally tried it from a public booth he couldn’t get through for some reason. It was hours later when he thought to try again, and he sat in a booth then for almost half an hour with his head on his elbow against the plastic door before a contact was finally made and he heard Doc demanding why he was so late and what he’d been doing, and he reported his conference with Parrot and the long day of contacting bladerunners.

  Doc sounded mollified then, almost pleased. “Okay, I’ve been working all day too, and I’ve got a list of calls a mile long for tonight,” Doc said. “I’m sending Molly out alone on the ones in the Upper City, shell be safe enough there, and I’ll take the Lower City names and some in the intermediate levels. How are you holding up now?”

  “Okay, I guess, but I’ve still got a string of contacts to make.”

  “Well, don’t crowd it, you can’t work around the clock in your condition. Why don’t you go get some sleep now? I’ll check back with you in the morning.”

  “Okay, I’ll quit for a while. I’ve just a couple more of these names to contact first.” Billy rang off, then sat wondering for a moment what Doc had just said. He saw the list of names in his hand, and placed a call to Parrot.

  “Did you call Doc?” Parrot said immediately. “What did he have to say?”

  “Not much that I remember, except that he’s working.”

  “Well, some of the other docs are too, I’ve heard, so something must be getting through. And we’ve had at least one real break. I finally got Brown convinced of the story — you know Brown? He supplies a whole big area around Hospital Number Eleven, west of here, must work with forty or fifty bladerunners and their docs — and he’s going to get things moving on his end. He got smart, called Hospital Number Eleven Central Supply and asked them for immune globulin and Viricidin supplies, and in one-half hour they had a whole truckload of injection packs on his doorstep. He’s up to his ears in them — so they must mean business. Okay, he’s got a list of runners he’d like you to see, he isn’t exactly popular with his boys, always clipping them too much, but he’ll back you up if you’ll make the contacts. Just swing by here and get the list. And the feedback is starting to come in from the Clinic at Hospital Number Seven that people are getting Viricidin shots with no questions asked; they’re not even taking names or IDs. So if we can get the word around that Health Control is really looking the other way, I think we can get a lot of these people to go in to the Clinics and save the docs many steps. No bad feedback yet, either, Billy … Billy? Hey, are you there?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m here,” Billy said dully. “No negative feedback, that’s great.”

  “Okay, now, you come by for Brown’s list when you finish the one you’ve got — and you’d better move. From what I’ve been hearing, there are thousands of people who have had this flu and just rode it out, thousands of them. Some of them are listening and accepting treatment and some are not, but it’s going to take days, maybe weeks, to contact them all. There isn’t any time to lose.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll be moving. See you later tonight or tomorrow.” Billy hung up and sat looking at the list in his hand. Five, six, seven more to see, all strangers, the same long job of arguing, pleading, convincing with each one. He sighed and went back out to the waiting cab again. It was over four hours later before he was finally climbing the stairs to his own room, barely able to raise one foot ahead of the next. The light hurt his eyes, and the thought of food stirred no interest; coat and all, he collapsed on his bed and closed his eyes. He knew he had to rest, at least an hour or two, if he hoped to go on — and the new list from Parrot looked like three days’ work. If he could relax a bit now perhaps
his head would stop hurting. Moments later he drifted off, and slept for fourteen unbroken hours.

  III

  It did not take weeks, nor even days, however, before the results of the warning campaign began to show. Within twelve hours of Billy’s departure from Doc’s office there was an upsurge in patient visits to the emergency room clinics at Hospital No. 7, as indicated in the routine half-daily patient census, and by the following morning patients were queuing up by the hundreds at the Clinic treatment rooms inquiring about the flu shots they had heard were supposed to be available. Triple shifts of nurses were assigned to the treatment cubicles, and questions were deliberately limited to specific data which was necessary to guide the treatment. Had the patient had any symptoms of the Shanghai flu? If so, what symptoms and when? Was there fever or illness now? Any other members of the family exposed? Friends or other contacts? These and a few other questions — allergic history, for example, or past reactions to antibiotics — made up the specially tailored mini-history, and in any case in which “flu” was mentioned there was a notable absence of interest in names, identifying numbers or Health Control qualifications. The appropriate medications were dispensed, data on possible contacts was taken for special telephone crews to tackle later, and each treated patient was earnestly exhorted to pass the word to anyone — anyone at all — known to have been exposed to the flu to come in for free protective shots with the greatest dispatch possible. People young and old shambled into the Clinics, people who had not darkened the door of a Health Control facility in twenty years, and each one, after receiving treatment, was enlisted as urgently and emphatically as possible as a bearer of the word to others.

  True to the plan Mason Turnbull had outlined, there were no panic-inducing headlines from the Department of Health Control, no blanket announcements of amnesty from the qualification laws — but on the first day Health Control did release a low-key news announcement that a “possibly widespread” epidemic of Shanghai flu was “expected” in the city, and that “highly effective” preventive treatment could be obtained without charge at any regular Health Control facility. The following day Turnbull himself held a brief but well-covered press conference in which he mentioned reports “from some areas” of late-appearing meningitis-like symptoms believed to be related to the Shanghai flu, and again urged all who had had flu-like symptoms or had even had contact with influenza victims to present themselves at Health Control facilities for preventive and therapeutic treatment. It was a masterpiece of news manipulation, carefully geared both to stimulate action and defuse panic, and although Turnbull was rumored to have gone into total nervous collapse when the conference was over, the results of the broadcast were salutary. Health Control switchboards were flooded with calls and the queues at the Clinics and Hospitals lengthened.

  Much of the influx of patients at Hospital No. 7 was ascribed to these announcements, but there was no question that underground rumors were contributing even more heavily. For Doc and Molly the first day had been spent telephoning multitudes of underground patients that they had treated in the past, urging them to come forth, and compiling a growing list of those who were too suspicious to come to the Hospital, even at Doc’s urging, but pleaded that he — or somebody — get them the protective medicine via underground channels. By evening Doc had apportioned these calls between himself and Molly Barret; after Billy’s long-overdue call had come in, Doc and Molly set out on their respective ways on night-long rounds to catch those recalcitrant patients and urge them to pass the word to others they knew to come into the emergency rooms for care. And the lines grew longer.

  Next morning Doc was back at the Hospital at seven, after two hours of stolen sleep, and met a hollow-eyed Molly in his office to compare notes. Over a hundred new calls were awaiting answers on his telephone recorder; even Molly was receiving calls from underground patients long since forgotten. It was clear from the doctors’ call board in the Hospital lobby that other staff doctors were straggling in late or not at all — a reflection, Doc assumed, of their efforts to reach their own underground patients. Each of the staff had found a special notice from Dr. Katie Durham in his box the day before, announcing that the Hospital was going on Emergency Routine until the epidemic work was under control. Routine admissions were canceled, all but emergency surgery was canceled, and special Clinics, staff meetings, and teaching rounds were all canceled. What was more, it was made clear that there would be no formal inquiry as to where staff doctors might be and what they might be doing in the hours they were freed from the normal hospital routine. If they had underground patients to see, the notice seemed to imply, this was their opportunity to see them, and the earlier the better.

  Briefly Doc and Molly went over their lists, agreeing who should see whom. Both kept a nervous eye on the phone, hoping for a call from Billy, but no call came. Finally Molly was paged for Emergency Room relief service, with another room being opened for administering Viricidin and immune globulin, and Doc started off for morning rounds on his recovering post-surgical patients. Both would be busy at the Hospital all morning, but would be free by midafternoon to get back to their lists of underground patients.

  On the surgical wards one problem led to another, and it was hours later when Doc started back toward his office, feeling a bone-weariness he hadn’t felt for months. Katie Durham, emerging from an office in the Computer Section, saw him boarding the elevator, and joined him. Her face was flushed, but there were lines of weariness about her eyes. “I don’t know, John,” she said as they stepped off the elevator and started down the corridor toward his office, “we’re catching thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands by now, in the various Clinics — we’ve opened four of the specialty clinics to immunizations and protective shots — but the admission curve on the meningitis is still climbing. We’re nearly out of isolation beds by now, and there are more coming in every hour. I wish we’d started all this ten days ago.”

  “Well, we didn’t. But with all the activity now the curve is bound to show a drop pretty soon.”

  “Maybe so. If it doesn’t, I don’t know what we’re going to do. These people coming in for shots are on the thin edge. It wouldn’t take much to trigger a panic, and a lot of them are actively sick — ” Her voice trailed off and she regarded him solemnly. “Do you have any idea what’s happening on the underground end of this?”

  “Hard to say yet,” Doc said. “Molly Barret and I must have seen over two hundred people between us in the past twenty-four hours. Most of the other staff have been doing the same thing. How many contacts per doctor is hard to guess, but if each of the four hundred and fifty staff people have seen as many as we have, that adds up to ninety thousand contacts. It’s probably not that good, but it could be close. The problem isn’t contacting people, right now, it’s getting supplies. My supplier is going to be down to bare shelves tonight unless I miss my guess.”

  “So are we. Central Supply is very low, but we have a special shipment coming in from Chicago this afternoon. We seem to be further into this thing than other sectors of the city or country, the Health Control expediter tells me that they’re mobilizing other areas somewhat more slowly, and that there’s less urgency elsewhere. Which is fine, I guess. As long as panic stories don’t start spilling out of here, we may just be in time.” Katie looked up at him. “What do you hear from your boy?”

  “Too little for comfort. I was just going to check.” Doc flipped his console switch, scanned the list of calls that had come in while he was gone, and shook his head. “Nothing. I haven’t heard from him since last night, and I don’t like it He said he was touching every base he could as fast as he could, but he’s sick himself, sounded just terrible last night. He was supposed to check in again this morning, but he hasn’t.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” Katie said.

  “No, not at this point. He may just be out of reach of a phone, I don’t know. From the lines downstairs, though, it looks as if the word is getting around somehow.
You just see that there are enough supplies for us to dip into when we need to.”

  “I’ll check with Central right now, but I think they’ll be all right again by this afternoon. And John” — Katie paused on her way out — “don’t you get too worn out. We don’t want you sick too.”

  “Nor you.” Doc looked up at her and smiled. “You know, it seems strange, the two of us being on the same side of the fence all of a sudden. Maybe when this is all over — if it ever gets over — we could have ourselves a night on the town. Dinner, a good show, not a word about medicine or Health Control.”

  “I haven’t heard anything that’s sounded so good in months,” Katie said, “It’s a date, John — when all this is over.” She hesitated a moment more, then turned and disappeared down the hall.

  His desk was piled high with unfinished Hospital work, but Doc turned to the telephone and tried Billy’s number for the third time that morning. As before, it rang and rang with no response. He left a tape message urging Billy to call back without delay, and turned back to his desk. There were heaps of patient records to review, X-rays and cardiograms to read for permanent recording, robot-operated cases to analyze and criticize, correspondence to answer. Doc buzzed for a sandwich to save time and dug into the pile, working steadily through the afternoon. At one point Molly checked in, about to leave the hospital to resume underground calls. Over coffee they studied her list, and she agreed to check back by early evening for new calls that would be accumulating.

  With Molly on her way, Doc returned to his desk work, but he couldn’t get his mind off Billy. As afternoon wore into evening there was still no word. Twice he tried calling Parrot with the code number Billy had given him, but although a connection was made each time, he heard only a recorder tape humming, and neither call was returned. With growing uneasiness Doc joined the evening crowd in the Hospital cafeteria, noting the almost complete absence of the usual clots of staff doctors around the table. He ordered a steak and black coffee, then returned to his office, and began systematically returning query calls that had piled up from underground patients during the afternoon. Now he found that people were noticeably more receptive to his urging that they come in to Hospital facilities for protective shots; only a few could not be convinced, and when Molly checked in about 9:00 P.M. he had only half a dozen additional names for her. “They just aren’t as suspicious as they were yesterday,” Doc told her. “Mostly they just want to be reassured that the rumors they’ve heard are true.”