The White Plague

by Frank Herbert

  Charles Turkwood, the President’s personal aide and confidant, stood just across the desk from where Prescott sat. The Oval Office was very quiet, not even the sound of someone typing in one of the outer offices. That was one of the things that had happened – not as much typing. More was being done in direct telephone conversation, as just now with Bergen.

  Turkwood was a short, saturnine man with close-cropped black hair. Widely set cold black eyes looked out over a rather short nose. The lips were thick, chin wide and blunt. He knew himself for an ugly man, but power had its compensations. He often thought of himself as a perfect counterpoint to Prescott’s tall, gray-haired dignity. Adam Prescott had the look of a kindly and benevolent soap opera grandfather. His voice was a gentle baritone.

  “He went for it, eh?” Turkwood asked, deciphering the half of the telephone conversation he had heard.

  Prescott did not answer. He bent over the desk reading a copy of one of the Madman’s letters. Turkwood, perfectly capable of reading upside down, glanced at what had caught the President’s attention. Ah, yes – O’Neill’s atomic warning:

  “You will think of using atomic sterilization upon the targets of my revenge. Don’t do it. I will turn against you if you do. The plague must run its course in Ireland, Great Britain and Libya. I want the men to survive and to know what it was I did to them. You will be permitted to quarantine them, nothing more. Send their nationals home – all of them. Let them stew there. If you fail to expel so much as a babe in arms who belongs in one of those nations by reason of nationality or birth, you will feel my anger.”

  O’Neill said it plainly enough, Turkwood thought.

  The President finished reading, but remained silent, staring out the window toward the Washington Monument.

  It was one of the President’s more disconcerting habits, maintaining a long silence after a statement or a question by a subordinate. It was assumed during such periods that the President was thinking, which he often was. But a silence unduly prolonged allowed considerable time for an underling to speculate about what the President might be thinking. Even unimaginative people can imagine very dark things under such conditions.

  Of all his close associates, only Charlie Turkwood guessed that this was a deliberate mannerism, cultivated for precisely the effect it achieved.

  “He went for it,” Prescott said finally, swiveling to face Turkwood. “We’ll have to watch carefully now. It’s entirely a United Nations thing and we’re just going along for the ride.”

  “What’ll he want in return?” Turkwood asked.

  “In due time,” Prescott said. “All in due time, Charlie.”

  “Sir, did the secretary-general try to bring up the question of who has ultimate control over Barrier Command?” Turkwood asked.

  “Not a word. Bergen understands that we handle only one hot potato at a time whenever that’s possible.”

  “Barrier Command’s a dangerous power base, sir. I can’t emphasize enough how…”

  “Easy does it, Charlie. They have one job right now and only one: Quarantine the infected regions – Ireland, Great Britain and North Africa. If they try to go beyond that mandate, there’ll be time enough later to deal with them. We have to hold things together, Charlie. That’s our main job: hold it together.”

  It plows up the wild hair of the sea,

  I have no fear that Viking hosts

  Will come over the water to me.

  – “The Guardian Storm,”

  an eighth-century Gaelic poem

  A LIGHT cruiser of Barrier Command challenged the little sloop off Courtmacsherry Bay while the small boat was on a reach for the Old Head of Kinsale. The sailboat, driving close-hauled in the dull gray light of early evening, found the blustery wind cut off by the light cruiser’s towering metal side. The warship, built on the Clyde for the South Africans in the days before apartheid isolation, flew the United Nations flag from its jackstaff. It had held the small boat on radar for almost an hour while it approached and while signals flashed back and forth between it and the headquarters of Admiral Francis Delacourt, the Canadian who headed Barrier Command from his base in Iceland.

  “Warn him off,” Barrier Command ordered. “A PT boat is being sent to escort him away.”

  “Probably the press,” one of Delacourt’s aides had said. “Stupid bastards.”

  The cruiser came from upwind, turned and backed all engines. It swung ponderously above the sailboat while a rating with a loud hailer braced himself at the opening of a midships loading port. The electric amplifier carried his voice with clipped mechanical tones to John at the sailboat’s helm.

  “You are in interdicted waters! Sheer off and set course to the south!”

  John stared up at the rust-streaked steel sides of the ship. He could see the United Nations flag snapping sharply in the wind but could not hear the snapping over the surge of waves against the light cruiser’s hull. Deprived of its wind, the sloop rocked precariously. He could hear water washing in the bilge under his feet.

  Only eight meters long, the sloop had cost him sixty thousand dollars at Brest – forty thousand for the vessel and twenty thousand in bribes. After the placing of one hundred and forty thousand dollars in a numbered Luxembourg account, he had thought his reserves ample for the rest of his plan. But the sloop had taken a large bite out of those reserves and he had been forced also to contend with other complications. Chief among these had been a fifteen-day relapse, endured at a relais in the outskirts of Brest, during which he had longed for Consuela’s muscular ministrations. By the time he was well enough to move around, the world had entered the first throes of his white plague and the cost of everything had mounted at an astonishing rate. It had not helped that negotiations for the sloop and the port clearance had been protracted by the French awareness of urgency in him. The faster he wanted them to move, the slower the French had been and the higher the prices had gone.

  It was day forty-nine of the white plague before he reached the fifty-degree latitude mark for his turn northward into the Irish Sea and neither the weather nor his balky little radio direction finder had cooperated. The sloop had been designed for protected waters, not for the open ocean or the Irish Sea. The RDF worked only on some time schedule of its own, which might be an hour or more without malfunction and then again only a minute or so until he had to open it and check the connections and the batteries.

  Not until he picked up the light at Fastnet Rock far off aport in the early morning hours had he been sure of his course. Dawn had revealed the hills of Ireland rising out of the coastal mists, not another vessel in sight, and he had thought he might make it to landfall without a confrontation.

  But here was the damned Barrier Command guardian trying to deny him passage. Rage filled John as the rating repeated his command.

  “Sheer off or we shall be forced to sink you!”

  John lifted the small loud hailer he had readied the moment he had seen the light cruiser. He thumbed the switch and pointed the horn at the rating, who was a doll figure up there in the wide hatch. In his best Irish accent, John demanded: “Would y’ have me go back to the mobs?”

  That should give them pause. Stories of mobs attacking Irish and British nationals in Europe were prominent on the news broadcasts. Libyans, although fewer, were not faring any better.

  The rating turned and spoke to someone behind him, then once more faced John with the loud hailer.

  “Identify yourself!”

  It was an effort to lift his own loud hailer. John still did not feel fully recovered from whatever disease had stricken him. The long, almost sleepless sail from Brest had left him weak and easily angered. He let the anger come out in his voice.

  “I’m John Garrech O’Donnell of County Cork, y’ bloody fool! I’m coming home!”

  Apparently responding to someone behind him, the rating bellowed: “These waters are prohibited!”

  “And so’s the rest of the world, y’ Limey asshole!” John said. “Where e
lse can an Irishman go but Ireland?”

  He lowered his loud hailer and stared upward at the open hatch. The little sloop’s erratic bobbing and tipping unsettled his stomach, but he forced himself to ignore this. No time to be sick. And there was something ludicrous about this encounter – Lilliput brought up to date. He could hear the rumbling of the light cruiser’s engines as it maintained its position upwind of him. The wave action coming around the ship’s bow and stern put the sloop in a nasty cross-chop.

  The rating once more turned his back on John and there obviously was a consultation going on up there. Presently, the rating’s loud hailer once more presented itself to John like a strange mechanical flower protruding from the man’s mouth. “I’m authorized to tell you that we are South Africans, you Irish bog-trotter! You are ordered to lower your sails!”

  John lifted his loud hailer. “Me engine’s not all that good, y’ secondhand Limey!”

  He wedged his feet against the opposite side of the cockpit and kept his attention lifted to the rating far above him. A wind came fretting past the bow of the ship, catching the sloop’s mainsail and luffing it. John pulled the tiller into his stomach and sailed once more into the light cruiser’s lee. When he could return his attention to the ship’s open hatch, the rating was not in view.

  They had little choice up there, John felt. His accent was passable and, under these conditions, might even convince an Irishman. Who else but a plague-driver Irishman would be fool enough to venture out here in this cockleshell? Sending him back to Europe would be sending him to certain death at the hands of a mob. Only a pronounced American accent had kept him free to act at Brest. It had worked well enough as long as he had dollars to spend freely, but he had felt his welcome vanishing toward the end, swallowed up by the flood of bad news and mounting suspicions.

  He did have an Irish name.

  Fair play had never been a French strong point, he thought, but fair play might still exist among English-speaking seafarers. Some of that ancient camaraderie of the sea should hold, especially under present circumstances: the steel-ship sailor’s romantic admiration for the wind sailor. The angry words he had blared at them could be ascribed to his Irishness and the personal tragedy they must believe he had suffered.

  As far as these Barrier Command people were concerned, his condition was simply stated: To hell or to Ireland. And they would not be able to avoid the fact. The unwritten law of the sea would be in their thoughts, at least unconsciously.

  Any port in a storm.

  And when had there been such a storm as the plague shaking their world at this very moment?

  The rating reappeared at the hatch, his loud hailer directed at John.

  “What was your port of departure?”

  The question told John he was winning. “Jersey,” he lied.

  “Have you had contact with the plague?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  John lowered his loud hailer and waited. The rating could be seen bending his head to listen to someone behind him, then: “Stand by one! We are putting over a small boat to tow you into Kinsale.”

  John allowed himself a deep sigh. He felt drained. He restored the loud hailer to its cradle under his seat.

  Presently, a derrick boom tracked out of the hatch where the rating had stood. It carried a motor launch in the same dull gray as the unrusted parts of the ship’s side. The launch swayed crazily, then was steadied by boat hooks. The boom extended to its limit. John heard the faint rumble and whine of the winch as the launch slid downward to stop just above the wave tops. Men appeared on the launch’s deck. They moved purposefully to the cable hooks. Suddenly, the launch plunged into a wave trough. Water splashed around it and the launching tackle swung clear. The small boat surged away from the light cruiser’s side in a widely curved white wake. John watched the coxswain at the tiller. The man shaded his eyes against the spray as he swung his boat into position about thirty meters upwind and dropped the power.

  The launch was a low craft with a trunk cabin. Its sides gleamed with brass-bound ports. A lieutenant came out of the trunk cabin and pointed a loud hailer at John. Men on the bow readied a small rocket launcher with a line.

  “We will shoot a line aboard you,” the lieutenant called. “Keep your distance. Does your engine work at all?”

  John lifted his own loud hailer. “Sometimes.”

  “We will cast you free within the bay,” the lieutenant shouted. “If your engine starts, proceed to the yacht pier in the south arm. Tie up at the pier and leave your boat immediately. We will sink it before returning. If your engine does not work, you’ll have to swim for it.”

  John retrieved his loud hailer and directed it at the lieutenant. “Aye, aye!”

  “When you are under way in tow, drop your sails,” the lieutenant called. “If you fall overboard we will not pick you up. Signify that you understand.”

  “Affirmative.”

  A sailor crouched in the lee of the launch’s cabin steadied himself, raised the launcher, aimed and shot the line neatly under John’s boom. John lashed his tiller and carried the line forward where he made it fast to the bitt. He waited for the towline to pull his boat around, then lowered his sails and lashed them loosely before returning to the cockpit.

  The cold breeze hit him as they swept out of the light cruiser’s protection. In spite of the chill, John felt sweaty. The wind set him to shivering. The surge and pull of the towline had his stomach upset within a mile. He coughed in the stink of the launch’s exhaust. Only the coxswain was visible there standing in the stern, the tiller held in his left hand.

  It began to grow dark as they cleared the Old Head of Kinsale. John noted that there were no lights of habitation along the shore. The light cruiser keeping pace with them farther out was ablaze with light, though, and John could see the radar antenna sweeping around and around.

  John wedged himself into a corner of the cockpit, wondering now how he would be greeted onshore. He had only the O’Donnell identification. It lay in a small shoulder bag just inside the sloop’s cabin, nestling there with a Belgian automatic he had bought in Brest, a spartan supply of dried food, a change of clothing and an emergency medical kit he had bought on the Brest black market.

  To the north, John could begin to see the glow of other ships, their lights bright against the lowering gray darkness. The six-second bunker at Bulman came into view as they rounded the Old Head. A spotlight on the launch’s cabin came on and John could see the signal flashing of it in the glow that bathed the boat’s bow. An answering light came blinking from Hangman’s Point. The launch held to the left directly into the mouth of Kinsale Harbour, picking up speed now as it went with the incoming tide.

  John saw the marker light below the ruins of Charles’s Fort off to starboard, one of the landmarks he had memorized. It was full dark now but a sliver of moon gave enough light to show the dark shoreline sweeping past. He felt the turn as they rounded into the south arm of the bay and there was the light at the Customs quay and the town pier. John stood up, steadying himself against the boom. The tow slackened, almost spilling him. The lights of the launch swept past him on the left and it took up station behind. Abruptly, a long row of brilliant lights came on along the pier.

  The launch’s loud hailer blared: “Clear away the towline before starting your engine.”

  John scrambled forward, hauled in the wet line and left it tangled on the foredeck. Wet and cold, he crawled back to the cockpit and uncovered the engine, working in the dim glow of the single six-volt bulb in the compartment. He could see the tide race sweeping him toward the pier. The former owner of the sloop had demonstrated the engine once. John primed it, set the throttle and choke, then pulled the starter line.

  Nothing.

  He pulled again. The engine balked, backfired, then caught. Exhaust fumes drifted across the cockpit.

  The loud hailer behind him bawled: “Dock at the float below the pier. Make it quick.”

  John ease
d in the clutch and the little engine began to labor, bringing the bow around. It was slow going after the launch but the float was close dead ahead. He realized there were armed men standing along the pier above the float and more armed men on the float. Men caught the sloop as it grated against the landing.

  “Leave your engine running,” one of them ordered.

  “Right.”

  John took his knapsack from the cabin and leaped onto the float. One of the men there grabbed his arm to steady him, but John felt no friendliness in the gesture.

  As though they had done this many times before, the men made fast a line to the sloop’s stern, swung the bow around until it pointed out into the bay. One of the men jumped aboard, lashed the tiller and engaged the clutch. White water surged, washing across the float in a shallow wave, as the man on the sloop returned. As he jumped, another man cut the shoreline with an axe. The sloop surged out toward the waiting navy launch.

  An arc of flame leaped suddenly from the launch to the sloop. With a roar, the sailboat’s bow vanished. Its mast fell backward as the stern tipped up. The propeller could still be seen turning in the lights from the pier. The engine went abruptly silent then and the sailboat slid under the black water.

  The launch made a tight turn over the place where it had gone down, a spotlight armed into the water, then the launch backed and turned with its stern toward the float. Once more the loud hailer blared:

  “There’s one of your own come home to you, boys. We’ll see you next week.”

  “So it’s one of our own, is it?” The voice was a reedy tenor with undertones that sent a chill along John’s spine.

  John turned toward the pier to confront the speaker and found a machine pistol pointed at his chest. The weapon was held by a tall, skinny man in whipcord trousers, a bulky green jacket and a wide-brimmed hat with the left side of the brim turned up Aussie style. He stood at the foot of the ramp leading up to the pier, his figure outlined by the bright lights from above. The shadow of the hat against the glare concealed his features from John.