The White Plague

by Frank Herbert

  “So much murder,” Godelinsky murmured.

  “I heard about Brittany,” Lepikov said. “Is that the trouble you mention in France?”

  “There is more,” Danzas said. “Certain prefectures are isolating themselves in the Swiss manner. Units of the military have defected from Central Authority to support the… uhhhhh…”

  “Fragmentation,” Hupp said.

  “Washington, D.C., did the same thing and so did New York,” Beckett said. “It’s ruthless but it seems to be effective.” He looked at Lepikov. “What’s happening in the Soviet Union?”

  “They do not inform us,” Lepikov said. “They ask that we search diligently for the Madman.”

  “And what do we do if we find him?” Godelinsky asked.

  “I’m sure Sergei refers to the search for the Madman’s persona,” Hupp said, trying to set a new tone of familiarity.

  “We must know him as we know ourselves,” Lepikov said.

  “Oh, better than that, I hope,” Foss said. Her bosom quivered as she chuckled.

  Lepikov forgot himself and stared at her breasts, fascinated. A magnificent giantess!

  In Russian, Foss said: “Sergei Alexandrovich, you presume on my maternal instincts.”

  Godelinsky sneezed to cover a laugh.

  Beckett, who sensed a return of open animosity between Foss and Lepikov, said: “Knock it off, Ari. We have work to do. I want us to examine the terrorist references in the Madman’s letters. If it’s O’Neill, that’s where we’ll find the most heat.”

  “My colleague and I have extracted those references,” Hupp said. “Bill is right. The passages are significant.”

  “Let’s hear it, Joe,” Beckett said.

  Hupp smiled. This was exactly the tone he wanted. Bill and Joe. It should become Ari, Sergei and Dorena. He glanced at Godelinsky. Dorie, perhaps? No, the Godelinsky was not a Dorie, except, perhaps, in bed.

  Danzas slipped a blue folder from the stack in front of him. “This is the gist,” he said.

  Lepikov raised an eyebrow at the thickness of the folder and murmured: “Gist?”

  Danzas ignored him. “We take the original words out of context for the purposes of our analysis.” He cleared his throat, adjusted a pair of glasses to his nose and bent forward to read in a clear voice with just a trace of British accent to betray where he had learned his English.

  “Their cowardice is masked in lies and guile.” Danzas raised his head. “That is from his second letter. We juxtapose a passage from his third letter where he says” – again, Danzas lowered his attention to the page – “They (the terrorists) seduce the people into belief in violence, then abandon the people to every retaliation that such blind and random action can attract.”

  “Accent on cowardice,” Hupp said. “Interesting. Does the Madman think his own revenge cowardly? Does he employ guile and tell us lies? Does he even consider himself a terrorist?”

  “I recall a number of places where he refers to cowardice,” Foss said. “Could his own conscience be speaking to us there?”

  “Here is another quotation,” Danzas said. “They (the terrorists) commit only crimes that require no true courage. Terrorists are like bomber pilots who need never look upon their tortured victims, never see the faces of people who pay in anguish. Terrorists are kin to the rack-renting landlords who – “

  “What is that?” Godelinsky interrupted. “What is a rack-renting landlord?”

  “An interesting bit of Irishness,” Hupp said. “It’s from the early days of English domination there. The choicest lands were given to English landlords, who appointed overseers to squeeze as much rent out of the peasants as possible. Rack-renting.”

  “I see,” Godelinsky said. “Excuse the interruption.”

  “But the Madman knows his Irish history,” Beckett said.

  Danzas bent over once more to his pages: “. . . the rack-renting landlords who never once stared face-to-face into the countenance of a starving peasant.”

  “He displays an implicit sympathy for victims of violence,” Foss said. “For our purposes, that is a weakness.”

  “It suggests a kind of schizophrenia,” Godelinsky said.

  “Either that, or his ideas of an appropriate revenge are being fleshed out in his letters,” Foss said.

  “Exactly!” Hupp said.

  Danzas said: “Elsewhere, our Madman describes terrorists as having the guilt of Pilate.”

  “Isn’t that where he calls terrorists adrenalin addicts?” Beckett asked.

  “You remember correctly,” Danzas said. “These are his words: They create agony, then wash their hands in false patriotism. Their true desire is for personal power and the internal kick of an adrenalin high. They are adrenalin addicts.”

  “Does he get this kick?” Hupp asked.

  “A diatribe,” Foss said. “It’s O’Neill raging against the murderers of his family.”

  “The legitimate uses of violence,” Godelinsky murmured.

  Lepikov shot a startled look at her. “What?”

  “I quote Comrade Lenin,” Godelinsky said. “He approved ‘the legitimate uses of violence.’”

  “We are not here to debate ideology,” Lepikov snapped.

  “But we are,” Hupp said. “The Madman’s ideology should occupy our every waking moment.”

  “Do you suggest Lenin was mad?” Lepikov demanded.

  “That’s not at issue,” Hupp said. “But understanding one madman throws light on others. There are no sacred cows in the laboratory.”

  “I will not follow the capitalist herring,” Lepikov growled.

  Hupp grinned. “The original expression, Sergei, was ‘red herring.’”

  “The color of a fish does not make it less fishy,” Lepikov said. “I make myself clear, Joe?” There was no familiarity in Lepikov’s tone.

  Hupp chose to enjoy the sally, laughing, then: “You are right, Sergei. Absolutely right.”

  “The issue is how does this Madman think of himself,” Beckett said.

  Foss agreed: “Does he act with courage and honor? He seems hipped on that.”

  “There is a passage worthy of note,” Danzas said. He leafed through his pages, nodded at something he found, then read:

  “Terrorists always assault honor, dignity and self-respect. Their own honor is the first to die. You should recognize that the IRA Provos have abandoned Irish honor. Under Erin’s old Brehon Law, you could kill an enemy only in open battle, each equally armed. The better man earned the respect of all. A warrior was generous and fair. Where was the generosity and fairness in the bomb that killed the innocents at Grafton Street?”

  “Grafton Street, that is where O’Neill’s wife and children were killed by the bomb,” Godelinsky said. “This is either O’Neill or an extremely clever disguise.”

  “Perhaps,” Danzas said. Once more, he bent to his notes and read from a letter:

  “These Provisional IRA murderers remind me of the boot-licking lackeys who served Dublin Castle in the worst days of Ireland’s degradation. Their methods are no different. England ruled with torture and deadly violence. The self-serving Provo cowards learned that lesson well. Having learned it, they refuse to learn any other lesson. So I give them a lesson no one will ever forget!”

  “These Provisional IRAs, these Provos, they are the ones who set the bomb at Grafton Street?” Foss asked.

  “Our Madman singles them out but he apparently makes little distinction between terrorists,” Hupp said. “Regard that he blames Great Britain and Libya equally and he warns the Soviet Union because of alleged complicity with Libya.”

  “A lie!” Lepikov said.

  “Francois,” Foss said, leaning forward to stare directly at Danzas. And she thought: He calls me by my given name. How does he take to the same familiarity?

  Danzas appeared unoffended. “Yes?”

  “Do you and Joe see this as more than a schizoid diatribe?”

  Hupp answered: “These are words of outrage wrench
ed from an agonized human being. It is O’Neill, of that I am sure. The question before us is: How does he view himself?”

  “Here are his own words,” Danzas said, returning to his notes.

  “Every tyrant in history is marked by indifference to misery. That is a clear way to identify tyranny. Now, I am the tyrant. You must deal with me. You must answer to me. And I am indifferent to your misery. Out of this indifference, I ask you to consider the consequences of your own violent actions and violent inactions.”

  “But is he really indifferent?” Beckett asked.

  “I think he is,” Hupp said. “Otherwise, he could not do this thing. You see the pattern? Real outrage, which comes from an agonized sensitivity and then, on the other hand, the indifference.”

  “But he calls himself Madman,” Godelinsky murmured.

  Hupp said: “Ah, Dorena, you have it precisely. This is his defense. ‘I am mad,’ he says. This is in the dual sense of anger and of insanity. Justification and explanation.”

  “Bill,” Godelinsky said, “what other agencies pursue this O’Neill?”

  Beckett shook his head. The question bothered him. There was no room for mistakes. Godelinsky’s question went directly to that concern. “I don’t know what other agencies.”

  “But you know others seek him?” she insisted.

  “Oh, yes. Depend on it.”

  “I hope it is being done with the utmost delicacy,” she said.

  “You begin to see him as I see him,” Hupp said.

  “How do you see him?” Foss asked.

  Hupp leaned back and closed his eyes. This gave him a curiously childlike appearance marred only by the thick glasses. “O’Neill, I am certain. Irish ancestry. Very well educated here in the States. Perhaps I should say superbly educated. Intimate knowledge of Irish history. Probably acquired young from his family. Think on it. He carried through a difficult project in molecular biology under what were undoubtedly adverse circumstances. A minimal laboratory, we can be sure.”

  “Why can we be sure of that?” Foss asked.

  “If it’s O’Neill,” Beckett said, “the FBI estimates he went into hiding with about a half million dollars.”

  Lepikov sat up straight. “So much? How could an ordinary citizen acquire so much wealth?”

  “Not an ordinary citizen,” Beckett said.

  “That is it precisely,” Danzas said, his tone remote and clipped. “Doctor Hupp and I are agreed upon the extraordinary situation of this Madman.”

  Hupp opened his eyes at mention of his name but appeared unconcerned by Danzas’s formality. He said: “Francois has it in a nutshell. Our Madman is an extraordinary human being who has suffered great spiritual anguish, a wrenching of the soul. From this, he achieves a fanatic’s motivation to make others share his anguish. Would we not agree that he has been successful in this regard? Not one human female alive on Achill Island and… you’ve all seen the reports from Ireland and Great Britain. The latest reports from North Africa…” Hupp let his voice trail off.

  Beckett summed up: “With some reservation, we agree that O’Neill is our Madman. He is schizoid in a particular way…”

  “Not fragmented in the conventional sense,” Hupp said. “Split, but aware of the split. Aware, yes. That is it.”

  “No one answers my question about this man,” Lepikov said. “He is extraordinary? How does this acquire for him the five hundred thousand dollars?”

  “He inherited part of it with a family business,” Beckett said. “And he had a good job and he made good investments.”

  “Not to mention what he inherited from his wife,” Foss said.

  Lepikov grunted, then: “He was a capitalist, yes; now, I see. And look what it has brought us. One wrong move on our part and he gives us new diseases, perhaps even worse ones.”

  “Sergei is right,” Hupp said. “Given the ability that O’Neill has demonstrated, he could have a disease that would, say, kill only people with Oriental ancestry.” Hupp stared at the slight epicanthic fold in Lepikov’s eyes.

  “He must be stopped!” Lepikov said.

  “And now we understand why the number-one priority is to understand him,” Foss said. “We cannot make even one mistake. He is too dangerous an opponent.”

  “Dear lady,” Lepikov said, looking at Foss, “the mind of this Madman may be too subtle for us to understand.”

  “We have to do it anyway,” Beckett said, barely concealing his anger at such defeatist talk.

  “This could not have happened in the Soviet Union,” Lepikov said.

  A short, harsh laugh escaped Godelinsky. “Of course not, Sergei. There is no injustice in the Soviet Union.”

  Lepikov shook a finger at her. “That is dangerous talk, Dorena.” In Russian, he added: “You know well that we do not allow uncontrolled experiments.”

  “He says they don’t allow uncontrolled experiments in Russia,” Foss translated.

  Godelinsky shook her head. “Sergei is right that there is much internal spying in our homeland, but he is wrong all the same. He is forgetting that one man alone did this thing in the privacy of his own home. Even in the Soviet Union we do not know everything done by one man alone in such privacy.”

  Beckett ate dinner with Foss and Hupp that first night. The others begged off, saying they preferred dining in their own quarters. Danzas had shuddered at the menu.

  “Cauliflower with cheddar cheese? What is this, a new American poison? There is not even wine.”

  Foss was gloomy all through the meal, staring around the small antiseptic dining room, a white-walled space off the larger DIG kitchen facility where the technical staff, mostly female, ate. Beckett had introduced his party to the staff as they passed through to the smaller room. The technical people had returned looks that mixed awe and a kind of cynical fear.

  Perhaps that’s what made her gloomy, Beckett thought. That and that damned Lepikov!

  Once she was seated at the table, Foss confirmed this: “Sergei’s right. We have to understand this man perfectly. How can we do that?”

  “I do not understand the electron,” Hupp said. “But I can use electricity safely.”

  “Ain’t science wonderful!” Foss said.

  After dinner, Beckett returned alone to his private quarters, a sterile little room with adjoining bath. The cot was cantilevered from the concrete wall. There was a single straight chair and a desk but the wall beside the desk carried a document safe whose combination was known only to Security and Beckett. His first task each night was to examine the safe and check whatever new material had been left for him.

  Beckett sighed as he saw the thick package of papers sitting neatly in the opened safe. He sat down at the desk and began leafing through them, wondering as he did so what system of selection Security was using. Were the priorities determined at a higher level? He thought that probable. The top document carried the presidential seal. The covering page had two red-bordered “overnight transmittal” stamps, one marked “Pentagon Liaison” and unsigned. The other carried the NSC stamp of the National Security Council and was signed with a scrawl that was almost undecipherable, but that Beckett thought might be something like Turkwood.

  He read the enclosures carefully, more and more puzzled as he went. First was a verbatim transcript of a radio broadcast received at a military listening post, purportedly from someone in Ireland identifying himself as “Brann McCrae.” It struck Beckett as the worst kind of religious nonsense, obviously the work of a crank. McCrae asked the world to return to tree worship, naming the rowan as “the most sacred witness of holiness.” His broadcast contained an appeal to a nephew, Cranmore McCrae, in the United States, to “take your airplane and fly to me. I shall make you high priest of the rowan.”

  McCrae’s broadcast claimed “the rowan guards my women.”

  At the bottom of the transcript’s last page was an unsigned scribble that Beckett thought might be the writing of the President himself. It read:

  “Locate this
Cranmore McCrae. Has Brann McCrae isolated a female population in Ireland?”

  Next in the package was another transcript, this an official communication to the White House from “The Killaloe Facility” in Ireland. The sender was identified as “Doctor Adrian Peard.” The transcript carried a list of “equipment requested for immediate shipment with highest priority.”

  Beckett scanned the list carefully. It was what would be expected at a good DNA research center. At the bottom of the list, in that same unsigned scribble, was the terse comment: “Ship it.” then: “Beckett – anything else they might need?”

  Beckett wrote directly below the question: “A reliable source of stereoisomers.”

  The message from Doctor Peard concluded with the information that a Doctor Fintan Craig Doheny had been appointed chief of the “Plague Research Section.”

  The scribbler asked, “Who’s this Doheny?”

  Beckett wrote beneath the scribble: “Unknown to me.” He signed it with his full name and title.

  Beneath this page was another page bearing the presidential seal. It was addressed to Beckett and bore only an NSC stamp at the bottom, no name. It read:

  “Try to find out from Godelinsky or Lepikov why the Soviet Union has sealed off certain areas beyond the Urals. Satellite confirmation of this but no response from Moscow to our questions.”

  Beneath this was another similar page with the terse question:

  “Where will O’Neill most likely hide?”

  So they’re convinced it’s O’Neill, Beckett thought.

  The final page, also stamped with the unsigned NSC cartouche frame, asked merely:

  “How on artificial insemination?”

  Now what the hell is that supposed to mean? he wondered.

  There was no doubt in Beckett’s mind that the authorities had hidden away other female populations. He knew of at least one at Carlsbad. Was the government considering repopulation schemes? How many women were really dying out there in the United States?

  The more he thought about it, the angrier Beckett became. He scrawled across the final page: “What does this question mean? What’s going on out there?”