The White Plague

by Frank Herbert

  “Terrence Gannon,” said the man in the house. A thick hand was extended toward Herity.

  Herity took the hand and jerked Gannon out of the house, deflecting a shotgun’s muzzle while he spilled the man and removed the weapon from him. Gannon lay sprawled in the yard, Herity’s pistol at his head.

  “All right in there!” Herity called through the open door. “One move out of you and I blow the head off poor Terry Gannon here. My Yank friend is up there on the ridge with a machine gun if you’ve a mind to make the sacrifice.”

  A thin, older man with gray hair and a pinched face, wearing green suspenders over underwear tops to hold up his brown woolen trousers, came out of the cottage with his hands over his head.

  “Well now,” Herity said. “The two of you will be lying here on your faces, if you please?” He picked up the shotgun and threw it over the wall of the yard.

  When both men were stretched out on the ground in front of the door, Herity lifted his head toward John’s vantage place. “You heard him call, Yank! There’s more of ’em here.”

  “Only two little boys,” Gannon said, his voice muffled against the ground.

  “They’re in the rock right below me,” John shouted, “and that’s where they’ll stay.”

  “That’s grand!” Herity called. Turning with his pistol at the ready, Herity entered the house. He emerged presently and strode around the side toward the other cottage. There was the sound of a door being slammed open and, in a moment, Herity reappeared herding a teenage boy whose round face was a pale mask of terror framed in loose black hair.

  “That’s the lot of ’em!” Herity called. “This one was in there playing with hisself! For shame!” Herity laughed loudly.

  John stood, seeing Father Michael and the boy emerge from the trees along a narrow farm track off to the right. Father Michael waved a cheery hand, then stopped as he saw Herity recovering the shotgun from the ground, the two men still stretched out near the door.

  “Now, what’ve you done, Joseph Herity?” Father Michael demanded.

  “I’ve just made certain sure we were not walking into the hornet’s nest, Father.” He glanced at the two men on the ground. “You and your friend can be standing now, Mister Gannon. And I pray you’ll forgive me cautious ways.”

  Gannon climbed to his feet and dusted himself off before helping the other man to stand. Gannon was a heavyset man with long black hair. He had a broad chin and wide, thick-lipped mouth. His eyes, when he looked up at John, appeared withdrawn into hopeless defeat.

  John peered over the edge of the rock into the declivity beneath him. “You boys down there – come out. No one’s going to hurt you.”

  That was true, John thought. O’Neill-Within had withdrawn to some silent place, content to watch and enjoy the fruit of his revenge.

  Two tow-headed boys – one about ten and the other slightly younger – emerged from beneath John and peered up at him.

  “Which of you is Burgh?” John asked.

  The younger one raised a hand.

  “Well, Burgh,” John said, “if there’s any more in that bottle I’d be grateful if you’d bring it down to the cottage.”

  Human societies have seldom been accustomed to long-range planning, reluctant to think of the generations. The unborn, the unconceived do not vote on current affairs. We conform our researches to immediate conviction, our projects to immediate desires. Where is the voice of the yet-to-be? Without a voice, they will never be.

  – Fintan Craig Doheny

  IT WAS half past lunch and too long to dinner. Stephen Browder prowled the steel-walled quarters that confined him with Kate, aware of her sitting in the corner there reading, aware that she knew of his restlessness.

  There was a visible mounding of her abdomen – evidence of the child forming there. And Peard had yet to produce a priest!

  Browder knew what had happened at Maynooth, but surely there must be a trustworthy priest available in all of Ireland. A real priest. There were enough fakes around, he knew, that Peard and his people had to be cautious, but somewhere there must be a priest to marry the two plague prisoners.

  He stopped at the tiny table where he had laid out some of his books and a stack of reports on the progress of plague research. Should he begin clearing away this mess in preparation for the table’s use at dinner? No. Too early.

  Peard and his associates, thinking it would relieve tensions in the isolation chamber, had sent in a small fax machine. It produced regular copies on what the various research centers were reporting. From these reports, Browder achieved a fragmented picture of work all over the world. He could picture countless white-coated figures carefully distributing loops of culture, the incubation chambers meticulously adjusted to thirty-seven degrees centigrade, the impatient waiting through the mandatory two days of incubation for each test.

  And I’m confined here. No facilities. Only these damned books and these stupid, frustrating reports. What can I do to help?

  Was Peard deliberately withholding a priest, as Kate accused?

  Idly, Browder picked up the top report on his table – a double-folded sheet off the fax printer. It was a copy of recent material from Huddersfield. And what use was it? So some people over there in England thought the zipper theory was faulty!

  He let his mind play with the theory, knowing that the Japanese were convinced of it – two strands of the helix chained together by chemical bonds, replicating each other like the closing of a zipper. What was wrong with that idea? The Russians liked it. Doheny himself said it was “a useful concept.” Why would some people at Huddersfield begin to doubt it?

  He let the fax sheet drop back to the table.

  The plague intervenes in the body’s enzyme systems. That was one fact emerging clearly all over the world. Very little ammonia in the bacterial cultures. The amino acids were being used for both structure and energy… but the energy was being bound up in structures that inhibited enzyme systems. Without enzymes, death intervened. But which systems? Structural function was being virtually stopped somewhere. Inhibited. Agglutinins were not forming in the presence of antibiotics.

  The structure! They had to know the structure!

  The plague inhibited the oxygen-carbon-dioxide cycle.

  By simple deduction, they knew that the DNA pattern for women had to be somewhere distinctly different from that for men. The deaths and severe illnesses of hermaphroditic individuals only confirmed this fact.

  Was the clue in the hormone systems, as the Canadians asserted?

  There had to be an interlocking virus-to-bacteria line of transmission in the plague. Had to be. Then what was the shape of the bacteriophage vector? Here was a pathogen that had been shaped to resist antibiotics. And the Americans were convinced that O’Neill had created a form of free DNA that searched for a place in the helix and locked itself there.

  “Grows rapidly in culture medium,” the Americans said.

  If they actually were looking at the plague pathogen, the rapid growth in itself was alarming. Other man-made recombinants did not do this.

  The shape… the structure… what was it?

  He thought about the double molecule, one chain twined around the other in helical form, one chain fitted to the other in an elegant fashion, the adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine each determining a link on the opposite chain.

  It was like an elegant Maypole, Browder thought. A Maypole without the central pole, the ribbons held together by their interlocking placement in the…

  Browder froze, seeing this shape in his mind.

  “Is something wrong, dear?” Kate asked.

  He looked at her wild-eyed.

  “They’re right,” he said. “It’s not a zipper.”

  He could visualize the helix itself winding upon itself, ribbon upon ribbon – a chain of chains, locked into shape by the way it twisted.

  Browder began scrambling in the papers on his table, looking for a particular page. He found it and spread it flat, studying
it.

  “The thing is like a spiral staircase with only four structural parts.”

  Those were the words of someone at Huddersfield named Hupp, a man obviously trying to simplify the picture of the DNA helix, allowing him an entry point in visualizing what O’Neill had done.

  “The RNA transmitter and the DNA result may have another relationship. Could this be what the Madman means when he refers to superimposition? One set off against the other could reveal that relationship.”

  Browder looked up, thinking, aware that Kate was watching him with worry on her face.

  Maypole, he thought. A twisted, convoluted Maypole!

  Explicitly coded instructions with only four letters in the code, but the four together in any combination represented another codon series… and then another… another…

  The Maypole! The combinations!

  Kate put her book aside and stood up.

  “Stephen! What’s wrong?”

  “I must talk to the people at Huddersfield,” he said. “Where is Adrian?”

  “He’s gone to Dublin again. Don’t you remember?”

  “Oh… yes. Well, could they patch me through with our telephone? Who’s outside there?”

  “Only Moone, I think. There’s influenza going around and they’re short-handed.”

  “Moone could do it! He’s clever with electronics. Have you heard how he bugged the Paras’ HQ?”

  Browder strode to the phone on its stand beside the little wall desk. “Moone! Hey, out there! I’ve got a job for you, Moone, and you the only man in all of Ireland who could do it!”

  The history of English government, especially in Ireland, is a history of playing off one prejudice against another. Divide and exploit! The British ruling class has made this a way of life. And you Yanks learned it at their knees!

  – Joseph Herity

  “A PERFESSER of philosophies!” Herity said in an exaggerated country accent.

  Terrence Gannon had just reaffirmed over after-dinner tea of wild herbs that he had been a faculty member at Dublin’s Trinity College.

  They sat on stiff furniture in the formal front parlor of the upper cottage. It was coming on to full dark outside, cloudy and hesitating on the edge of rain, and three candles had been lighted on saucers. They gave a spectral appearance to the traditional parlor with its framed photographs and heavy wooden furniture. A peat fire hissed in the narrow fireplace, giving little heat but emitting puffs of pungent smoke when the wind backed on the chimney.

  Herity was showing some signs of unsteadiness from Gannon’s poteen, but they had left the jug at the kitchen table when they went outside to collect the household’s hidden weapons and had not brought the liquor into the parlor. The guns, a rifle and a pistol, lay unloaded on the floor at Herity’s feet.

  Gannon’s voice had taken on the stillness of a man speaking in a haunted place the minute he entered the parlor, although he moved with old formality to make sure his guests were comfortable.

  “We fled here to my family’s old place when it was no longer possible to stay in Dublin,” he explained. “My brother-in-law there, he came up from Cork, it being no time to keep children in a city.”

  The brother-in-law, Wick Murphey, had brought his two surviving sons, Terry and Kenneth. Two daughters and a housekeeper had died before they left. His wife, Gannon’s older sister, had died at the birth of Terry. Family history had come pouring out of Murphey’s narrow mouth in relief at the discovery that Herity’s party was merely being cautious and was not “some of those terrible mean ones roaming about.”

  John had taken a low stool and placed himself with his back against one side of the fireplace. The peat smell was stronger there but the tiles at his back were warm.

  Father Michael and the children had taken a lantern and gone down to visit the graves in their little stone enclosure below the cottages.

  Murphey, somewhat drunker than Herity, sat on a rocking chair that creaked at his every move. He had the contented look of a man who had eaten and drunk well and whose life was no worse than it had been the day before.

  Herity sat alone on the parlor settee, the machine gun suspended at his chest by a thin leather strap around his neck. He appeared amused by this all-male domesticity and had been full of praise for Gannon’s cooking.

  Gannon appeared to bear no resentment of Herity’s rough treatment, but he had that look in his eyes of a man who could never again play in a game he was sure to lose. His shotgun had even been on safety when Herity took it from him.

  He is a man waiting only to die, John thought.

  Supper had been fresh pork and greens with marrows from the kitchen garden cooked in eggs. Herity and John prowled the area around the cottages and had inspected the byre while Gannon cooked.

  “That look in Gannon’s eyes, we call that the suicide look,” Herity had said.

  “How did these cottages escape?” John asked. He looked at the yellow light in the window of Gannon’s kitchen. The burning and destruction appeared to have stopped at least a mile away. In the gloom of a cloud-covered evening, there was not a light to be seen in the entire valley.

  “In the tumult of these times ‘tis a miracle,” Herity said, his voice low. “But I do not think it was a Church miracle. It may be that nothing was ever broken in Gannon’s house. The faeries are liking that. There are strange things in this land, let them say what they will.”

  “I don’t like that brother-in-law,” John said. He watched for Herity’s reaction to this.

  “Murphey, oh! He’s a survivor. Many’s the time I’ve seen his kind. They’ll sell their souls for ten more minutes of the breathing. They’ll sell their friends and steal from the starving. Oh, you’re right, John. That Murphey bears watching.”

  John nodded.

  Herity tapped the Israeli machine gun on its strap around his neck. “He’d like me gun, Murphey would.” Herity looked back at the byre where he had hidden the shotgun up in the attic straw without its ammunition.

  “Did they say who’s buried down there?” John asked, looking down at the graves’ enclosure.

  “That little Burgh’s mother, two neighbor women who took shelter with Gannon, and then there was the daughter of one of them. Gannon’s been here awhile. You noticed the garden? That’s been planted for a spell.”

  John glanced back at the ridge, thinking of the watercourse beyond it where Herity had found a body. “Do they know who it was died up there?”

  “A stranger, so they say. But he was killed with a shotgun.”

  “And they can’t explain that rifle shot we heard,” John said.

  “Now isn’t that a mystery!” Herity said. “Their pig was killed with a rifle and not a rifle to be found.”

  “You’re sure it was a rifle killed the pig?”

  “I looked at it careful like when I was in the byre. Ahhh, you know, John, we Irish learned many a clever way to hide weapons during the English Ascendancy. I’m looking forward to the discovery of this one.”

  “Could it be in one of the cottages?”

  “I assure you it’s not and me being the cleverest searcher me father ever raised. No, John, it’s under the byre, wrapped in oilskins and all safe in the grease. You saw how Murphey watched us from the window when we went out here? And there’ll be a pistol with it. Murphey’s a man who would favor a pistol. Gannon? Now, he was a hunter once or I miss my guess.”

  Herity rocked back on his heels, sniffing the air – the good smells of cooking coming from the open door of the cottage.

  John looked at the machine gun at Herity’s chest, remembering the feeling of it, the power there.

  “I have a curiosity about how you came by that gun,” John said.

  “Curiosity! Aw, that’s what killed the cat.”

  “From a dead man, you said.”

  “This fine weapon was the possession of a political officer with the Paras in Ulster,” Herity said. “What a fine gentleman he was with his little mustache and the blue eyes lik
e silk. We knew all about him, we did. He was one of those English public school quares what caused their fine government so much lovely troubles. This one was left behind when the plague came. I found him hiding in an old barn near Rosslea. He made the mistake of leaving his weapon behind when he went out to get water at the pump. And I slipped into the barn before he saw me.”

  “You told Father Michael he was dead.”

  “That I did. And him coming at me with a billhook! What could I do?” Herity grinned at him and patted the machine gun. “He had a whole bag of ammo for it, as well.”

  At supper, John watched Murphey and Gannon, observing the accuracy of Herity’s assessment.

  How does Herity judge me? John wondered.

  It was an unsettling thought. He looked at Herity seated across from him, busily spooning the marrow into his mouth.

  He trusted me with the machine gun.

  It had been a test, John decided. From Herity’s reactions, John guessed the test had been passed. But it did not do to let your guard down with this man.

  They ate at the long table in the kitchen – a checkered red cloth on it, heavy dishes, water in tall glasses with ridged sides. The pork had been boiled with some wild leafy green that gave it a tart, rather pleasant flavor and cut the greasiness. Gannon had the kitchen manner of someone who had cooked for pleasure and not lost the touch.

  “You’d make somebody a lovely wife,” Herity joked.

  Gannon did not rise to the barb. Murphey had glowered at Gannon, pinched face drawn into a tight scowl, which changed to a smile when Herity looked at him.

  “Have you noticed, John,” Herity asked, gesturing with his table knife, “how the passions are burnt out of the Irish? I do believe the Madman himself could walk into our midst without harm, and him covered with the blood of all those millions. We’d only make room for him at table and ask did he want a drink?”

  “It’s not apathy,” Gannon said. It was his first remark since bringing the food to the table.