The White Plague

by Frank Herbert

  “Think back,” he said.

  She closed her eyes, then: “Ahhhh, no.”

  “What?” He bent close to her mouth.

  “It couldn’t have been,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “Day before yesterday I woke up horny as hell.”

  He leaned back and scribbled in his notebook.

  “You writing that down, too?” she whispered.

  “Anything at all could be important. What else?”

  “I took a bath and… Jesus! My gut aches.”

  He made a note, then: “You took a bath.”

  “It was odd. The water never seemed hot enough. I thought it was the damn conservationists, but there was lots of steam and my skin turned red. Felt cold, though.”

  “Sensory distortion,” he wrote, then: “Did you run any cold water over yourself?”

  “No.” She moved her head slowly from side to side. “And I was hungry. God, I was hungry. I ate two breakfasts. I thought it was just all this upset and… you know.”

  “Did you check your pulse?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t remember. God, it bothered me, eating that much. I’m always worried about gaining weight. Where’ve you got Dorena?”

  “Just down the hall. We’ve rigged a UV gantlet and antiseptic sprays in a passage between the two rooms. We thought it was a good idea… just in case…”

  “In case one of us makes it and the other doesn’t. Good thinking. I don’t think I’m going to make it, Bill. What’s that stuff in the IV?”

  “Just fluid. We’re going to try some new blood in a few minutes. You need white-cell stimulation.”

  “So it hits the marrow.”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “When I saw that spot on my instep, Bill, I think I knew right then. My guts felt like a block of ice. I didn’t want to think about it. You notice the spot on Dorena’s hand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do a good autopsy,” she said. “Find out everything you can.” She closed her eyes, then snapped them open. “Was I unconscious very long?”

  “Just now?”

  “No! When you brought me in here.”

  “About an hour.”

  “It hit like a ton of bricks,” she said. “I remember you sitting me on the edge of the bed to help me into the gown, then – whap!”

  “Your blood pressure went way down,” he said.

  “I thought so. What about the other women in the DIG? Is it spreading?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Shit!” She was silent for a moment, then: “Bill, I don’t think your antiseptic gantlet will be much use. I think men are the carriers.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right.” He cleared his throat.

  “How much fever?” she asked.

  “First high and now it’s low-grade – ninety-nine point seven.” He looked up at the monitor. “Heartbeat’s one forty.”

  “You going to try digitalis?”

  “I’ve ordered some lanoxin but we’re still debating it. It didn’t do much for Dorena.”

  “The autopsy,” she whispered. “Look for fibroblasts.”

  He nodded.

  “Got a hunch,” she said. “Liver feels like a used football.”

  Beckett made a note.

  “You try interferon… Dorena?” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “Might as well have been water.”

  “Noticed my nurse was male,” she said. “How bad is it with the other women?”

  “Bad.”

  “What’re you doing?”

  “We closed the isolation doors. We’re lucky this whole damned complex was designed to resist the spread of radioactive contamination.”

  “Think any of ’em will make it?”

  “Too early to tell.”

  “Any idea how it got in here?”

  “Any of us could have brought it in. Lepikov thinks it was him. He says he can’t make any contact with his home in the Soviet Union.”

  “Danzas is from Brittany,” she whispered.

  “But he hasn’t been there for a long time.”

  “Lepikov,” she said. “He got all kinds of briefings before being sent over here. Godelinsky complained about it. Specialists, envoys…”

  “Lepikov believes he had a low-grade infection.”

  “You have any symptoms?” she asked.

  “A small case of the sniffles and a slight fever, but that was five days ago.”

  “Five days,” she whispered. “And already I’m dying.”

  “We think the incubation period may be as little as three or four days,” he said. “Perhaps even shorter. It may take a couple of days for a man to become an active carrier.”

  “Benign in men, fatal in women,” she whispered, then stronger: “That Madman is one sick son-of-a-bitch! They still think it’s O’Neill?”

  “Nobody doubts it anymore.”

  “You think he’s a carrier, too?”

  Beckett shrugged. No sense telling her about Seattle and Tacoma. She had enough on her plate. “I’d like to cover your symptoms one more time.”

  “One more time may be all we have.”

  “Don’t give up, Ari.”

  “Easy for you to say.” She fell silent for almost a minute, then: “Loose bowels that morning I felt so horny. Then thirst. Dorena have that, too?”

  “Identical,” he said.

  “The headache. Jesus, it was bad for a time. Not so bad now. You giving me any painkiller in that IV?”

  “Not yet.”

  “My nipples ache,” she said. “Did I tell you to do the best damn autopsy of your life?”

  “You told me.”

  Danzas tiptoed in and whispered to Beckett: “Dorena just died.”

  “I heard that,” Foss said. “That’s another thing, Bill. Acute hearing. Everything’s so goddamn loud! Can you get me a rabbi?”

  “We’re trying,” Danzas said.

  “A fine time for me to go back to… Damn! My fucking stomach’s on fire!” She stared past Beckett at Danzas. “That Madman’s a dirty sadist. He must know how much agony he’s causing.”

  Beckett considered telling her what they had discovered, that most women lapsed into coma and died without waking. He decided against it. No sense revealing that the efforts to keep Ariane alive were prolonging her pain.

  “O’Neill,” she whispered. “I wonder if his wife felt any…” She closed her eyes and fell silent.

  Beckett put a hand to the artery in her neck. He nodded toward the monitor above her bed: Blood pressure sixty over thirty. Pulse dropping.

  “Every antibiotic we tried on Dorena only worsened her condition,” Danzas said. “But perhaps we could try some chemo –”

  “No!” It was Foss, her voice surprisingly loud and shrill. “We agreed… shotgun for Dorena, nothing for me.” She turned a glazed stare toward Beckett. “Don’t tell my husband about the pain.”

  Beckett swallowed past a lump. “I won’t.”

  “Tell him it was easy… very quiet.”

  “Would you like some morphine?” Beckett asked.

  “I can’t think with morphine. If I can’t think I can’t tell you what’s happening to me.”

  A male nurse in army blues with a white jacket entered the room. He was a young man with flat, pinched features. His name tag read “Diggins.” He stared fearfully at Foss’s still figure.

  Beckett looked up at him. “You find a proper blood type with a low-grade infection?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s a confirmed bladder infection. He’s already on bactrim.”

  “White-cell count?” Beckett asked.

  “Doctor Hupp said it was high enough. I don’t have the numbers.”

  “Then get him in here. He just volunteered to give blood.”

  Diggins remained standing in position. “Is it true, sir, that we’re all carriers of this thing? All the men down here?”

  “Likely,”
Beckett said. “That donor, Diggins.”

  “Sorry, sir, but there’re a lot of questions being asked out there… the doors being sealed and all.”

  “We’ll just have to sweat it out, Diggins! Are you going to get that blood donor in here?”

  Diggins hesitated, then: “I’ll see what I can do, sir.”

  Diggins turned on one heel and hurried from the room.

  “Discipline’s going to hell,” Foss said.

  Beckett looked at the monitor: Pulse eighty-three, blood pressure fifty over twenty-five.

  “What’s my blood pressure?” Foss asked.

  Beckett told her.

  “Thought so. I’m experiencing some breathing difficulty. I’m cold. Are my feet trembling?”

  Beckett put a hand on her right foot. “No.”

  “Feels like it. You know, Bill, I’ve figured out something. I’m not afraid of death. It’s dying scares the shit out of me.” She fell silent, then weakly: “Don’t forget, pal – the best damn’ autopsy…”

  When she did not continue, Beckett looked up at the monitor. He could feel her pulse slowing under his hand. The monitor read ten beats per minute and dropping. Blood pressure was diving. Even as he looked, he felt the pulse under his hand stop. The monitor emitted a shrill and continuous electronic shriek.

  Danzas went around the bed and turned off the monitor.

  In the sudden silence, Beckett removed his hand from Foss’s neck. Tears were running down his cheeks.

  “Damn him! Damn him!” Beckett muttered.

  “They’re arranging for us to do the autopsies in the OR,” Danzas said.

  “Oh, fuck off, you bloody French prig!” Beckett shouted.

  I have always felt a certain horror of political economists, since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good.

  – Benjamin Jowett, master of Balliol, Oxford

  “SURELY, MISTER PRESIDENT,” the secretary-general said, “some way could be found to save what’s left of your DIC team. They seem to be so remarkably well met.”

  The secretary-general, Huls Anders Bergen, was a Norwegian educated in England. He had played a number of golf games with the man on the telephone and, on those occasions, they had been Hab and Adam. But Adam Prescott was firmly seated in his office as President of the United States today. There was no camaraderie in his voice.

  What is troubling him besides the obvious? Bergen wondered. It was something that Prescott did not want to say without elaborate preliminaries. The President appeared almost to be rambling. Why should he be talking about the procedures for sterilizing infected areas, and in the same breath as the tragedy at Denver? Those procedures had been worked out and accepted by all parties. Could it be something new in the costs?

  “I agree, sir, that the economic realities are a prime consideration,” Bergen said.

  He listened then while Prescott played out this gambit. The costs, although now thousands of times greater than for any other disaster in human history, were clearly only a part of the President’s immediate concern.

  Could he be thinking of sterilizing the Denver complex? Bergen wondered.

  The thought set his hand trembling with the telephone against his ear.

  Bergen, a man who could talk bluntly when it was required of him, asked the question straight out.

  “The facilities, not the people,” Prescott said.

  Bergen heaved a sigh of relief. There was too much death already. This meant, however, that the rumored Colorado Plague Reservation was a reality. Infected men were to be isolated there. Why couldn’t the DIC team be sent there, then?

  “Could The Team work effectively without the DIC facilities?” Bergen asked.

  Prescott did not think so.

  Bergen weighed this factor in his mind. Obviously, Prescott and his advisors needed the Denver military facilities. The DIC complex there could be sterilized and made useful once more for the military. But what of The Team?

  “They saved us days in identifying how the plague was spread,” Bergen said. “And now that we’ve confirmed it was O’Neill, surely the four men…”

  The President interrupted. He did not want to isolate such brilliant minds. But what was to be done with them when the DIC was put to the fire? There was no comparable facility available in the Colorado Reservation.

  On a sudden hunch, Bergen asked: “Could they be sent to that new facility in England?”

  The President was full of immediate and fulsome praise for this brilliant suggestion. Only a genius could have thought of it.

  Bergen took the red phone away from his ear and stared at it, then brought the instrument back to his ear. Praise was still pouring from it. He stared across the office at the paneled wall, the dark wood door. His desk chair was the best the Danes could supply and he leaned back in it, the phone still at his ear. A child could have made the suggestion to send those men to England, but Bergen was beginning to see the President’s political problem.

  If the four infected men of The Team from the DIC were on an airplane, they might crash in an uninfected region. The crash site would require the “Panic Fire.”

  Bergen raised this question with Prescott, listening for subtle hints in the President’s response.

  Yes, it was too bad the press and public would not accept the official label, “Newfire.” The words panic and fire had particularly noxious connotations when used together that way. More was beginning to emerge, however.

  Even if a sealed aircraft did not crash, any new plague outbreak beneath the flight path could arouse powerful suspicions that the occupants had spread the infection, that it had somehow escaped and fallen upon more innocent victims. Demagogues were having a field day and it would not do to provide them and the nut fringe of fanatics with more ammunition.

  “I think the French might be willing to supply an escort of fighter planes,” Bergen said. He looked at the door to the outer officer while Prescott showered him with more praise. The French ambassador was among a group patiently waiting to have lunch with him. A word or two in quiet, perhaps?

  “Mr. President, you are more than generous,” Bergen said, cutting off the new flow of praise. “Can you get volunteers for their flight crew?”

  Again, the secretary-general listened. How fortunate that Doctor Beckett of The Team was a pilot – Air Force Reserve of all things! And Prescott had this knowledge at his fingertips. How well informed he was! And a long-range aircraft could be made ready. The four men would drive themselves to the airport. They would take off, pick up their escort – and their car and its surroundings would receive its bath of Panic Fire.

  Oh, there was one more thing. Could the secretary-general arrange for the four men to receive positions of “useful importance” at the facility in England?

  Useful importance, Bergen mused.

  He decided on a small fishing expedition. “Is it the wisest choice to send them to England? That lab at Killaloe in Ireland sounds impressive, especially with all of the new equipment you’re providing.”

  “But you yourself suggested England,” Prescott said. “I naturally assumed, since it was your first suggestion, that the British facility was the superior one.”

  “England it is,” Bergen agreed.

  It was all very clear now. If anything went wrong, then it was the idea of the secretary-general of the United Nations. It was Bergen, after all, who made the essential arrangements and pushed this project through.

  The red phone at Bergen’s ear had still more tidbits to reveal, however. Prescott had things to say about O’Neill. Bergen looked at his wristwatch while he listened. The hunger pangs were intense. Abruptly, he lifted his chin, startled.

  “They think O’Neill’s in England?” the secretary-general asked. “Why do they think that?”

  As Prescott explained, it made a terrible logic. The victims, if they exposed him, might be afraid to retaliat
e lest the Madman loose an even more terrible disaster upon them. O’Neill had threatened this in one of his letters, after all, and without more certain knowledge, no one could afford the assumption that he was bluffing.

  “Why not Ireland?” Bergen asked.

  Ah, yes. O’Neill’s features were known to some people in Ireland and even if he disguised himself… well, the psychological people thought the Irish more prone to heedless revenge. Surely, O’Neill would have considered this. It was logical that he would want to hide in an English-speaking country where he was little known and where he could blend into the background more easily. And there was England, a certain amount of chaos and disruption. And England was one of his target areas, a place where he had expressly forbidden those Outside to employ atomic sterilization.

  It made terrifying sense, but even more, if accurate, it exposed the workings of a mind that could cut through a problem like the slash of a sword. Bergen had a certain awareness of this quality in himself. Complexities must be reduced to manageable shape and size, even if this involved pulling from a complexity only that which could be managed. Mad, O’Neill might be, but also a genius – a true genius.

  “How much certainty do they attach to this idea?” Bergen asked.

  Ah, yes: the Profile. This was more of the DIC Team’s doing. Prescott and others believed The Team was “getting into the Madman’s mind, learning to think the way he does.”

  Bergen silently agreed. Perhaps they were doing this. Certainly, someone must do it.

  “I will make the preliminary arrangements for the flight to England,” Bergen said. “Someone from my office will call on your people to work out the details.”

  Having achieved his object without ever openly expressing it, the President was willing to let the secretary-general go to lunch. There was even a suggestion that they get together soon for a round of golf and, then, finally, a more somber note.

  “Terrible times, yes,” Bergen agreed. “These are, indeed, terrible times, sir.”

  You’ll be noting the Ulstermen no longer sing “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”

  – Joseph Herity

  AS PRESIDENT PRESCOTT replaced the receiver on his telephone, he reflected on the conversation with Bergen. Quite satisfactory. Yes, quite well done on both sides. Of course, Bergen would be calling in the counter he’d just given. There would be a quid pro quo sometime. Well, that could be an advantage, too. Bergen was too good a politician to ask for something he knew he couldn’t get.