The White Plague

by Frank Herbert

  Father Michael looked down the table at Gannon, caught by the sharpness in the man’s voice.

  “Mister Gannon is about to favor us with his grand opinion,” Herity said.

  “You listen when the professor talks!” Murphey bridled.

  It was then that Gannon first revealed his Trinity College background.

  “I knew I’d seen you someplace,” Father Michael said.

  “We’re beyond apathy,” Gannon said.

  Herity sat back, smiling. “Then would you tell us, Perfesser, what’s beyond apathy?”

  “The women are gone forever,” Gannon said, his voice heavy. “The women are gone and nothing… nothing! will bring them back. The Irish Diaspora is ended. We have all come home to die.”

  “There must be women somewhere.” That was the older boy, Kenneth, who sat beside his father.

  “And wise men like Mister O’Donnell here will find a cure for the plague,” Murphey said. “Things will come back to an even keel, Professor. Depend on it.”

  “While we was still in Cork,” Kenneth said, “I heard there was women in the old Lucan castle – all safe and protected there by guns.”

  Through this exchange, Gannon merely stared down at his plate.

  “Lots of those stories going around,” Herity agreed. “I believe what I see.”

  “You’re a wise man, Mister Herity,” Gannon said, looking up at him. “You see the truth and accept it.”

  “And what might that truth be?” Herity asked.

  “That we are moving inexorably toward an edge where we’ll drop off into nothing. What’s beyond apathy? This thing some of you think of as life – this is already death.”

  “Welcome to Ireland, Yank!” Herity said. “There’s this Ireland the perfesser has just described for us. Then there’s the Ireland of the literary fancies. Was it one of those you thought you’d find, Mister O’Donnell?”

  John felt turmoil in his breast. He fell back on the pretense that had shielded him thus far: “I came only to help.”

  “I keep forgetting,” Herity said. “Well, this is Ireland, Mister O’Donnell, what you see around us right now. It may be the only Ireland there ever was, and it suffering from a thousand years of agony. I welcome you to it.”

  Herity bent once more to his eating.

  Gannon got up, went to a cupboard and returned with a full jug of clear poteen. The acrid alcohol smell wafted over the table when he pulled the cork. John already had tasted this brew from the bit left in the bottle the boys had brought down from the ridge. He waved a hand to deflect Gannon from pouring him a glass.

  “Now, John,” Herity said. “Would you be turning down the poteen the way you did the Guinness? You’ll not be wanting us to drink alone!”

  “There’s plenty to drink with you,” Father Michael said.

  “And you among them?” Herity asked.

  Father Michael looked across the table where the silent boy was regarding him with alarm. Stiffly, the priest shook his head. “No… I’ll not be having any, thank you, Mister Herity.”

  “Is it a temperance priest you’ve become?” Herity asked. “Faith! What a terrible thing to happen.” He accepted a glass of the poteen from Gannon and sipped at it, smacking his lips in elaborate appreciation. “Ahhh, it’s the milk of the little people, it is.”

  Gannon slid the bottle down the table toward Murphey, who took it greedily, pouring himself a large glass of it.

  Seating himself once more at the table, Gannon looked at Father Michael. “Do you have family in these parts, Father?”

  Father Michael shook his head from side to side.

  Herity took a long swallow of the poteen, put down the glass and wiped his lips on the back of his hand. “Family? Our Father Michael? Don’t you know that all priests come from great huge families?”

  Father Michael cast a stricken look at Gannon. “I’ve two brothers living.”

  “Living!” Herity said. “Now, didn’t you hear the perfesser? This is not living.” He lifted his glass. “A toast. Give Mister O’Donnell a glass. He’ll drink the toast with us.”

  Gannon splashed some poteen into a glass and slid it across to John.

  “To bloody Ireland!” Herity said, raising his glass high. “May she rise up from the dead and smite down the devil who injured us! And may he suffer a thousand deaths for every one he caused.”

  Herity downed his glass and thrust it out for a refill.

  “I’ll drink to that!” Murphey said and emptied his own glass, taking the jug from the table and refilling his own and Herity’s.

  Kenneth, whose age John estimated at fourteen, glowered at his father. The boy pushed his chair back with a harsh scraping and stood. “I’m going outside.”

  “You’ll sit there in your chair,” Herity said. He gestured at the chair with his glass.

  Kenneth looked at his father, who shook his head.

  Sullen, Kenneth sank back onto his chair but did not pull it up to the table.

  “Where was y’ going, Kenneth?” Herity asked.

  “Outside.”

  “Out to the byre, it being full of soft straw? Out there to dream of rolling in the straw with a young woman of your choice?”

  “Leave him alone,” Murphey said, his voice mild.

  Herity glanced at him. “That I will, Mister Murphey. But it being almost night outside and us not having found the perfesser’s rifle nor your pistol, I like to see everyone gathered around me.” Herity drank deeply of his poteen, looking over the rim of his glass at Murphey and then at Gannon.

  Father Michael said: “Joseph! You’re a bad guest. These good people mean us no harm.”

  “Nor do I mean them harm,” Herity said. “But sure and it’s a caution how much harm you miss when you’re careful about weapons.”

  Again, he drank deeply of his poteen.

  Murphey tried to smile at him but managed only a twitch of the lips, his gaze fixed on the machine gun at Herity’s chest. Gannon merely looked at his plate.

  “Mister Gannon?” Herity asked.

  Not looking up, Gannon said: “We will collect the other guns after the news.”

  “After the news?”

  “It’s time,” Gannon said. “I’ll get the wireless. It’s just behind me in that cupboard by the sink.” He stood.

  Herity turned in his chair, watching as Gannon went to the cupboard and returned with a battery-operated radio, which he placed in the middle of the table.

  “We’ve a store of batteries,” Murphey said. “Terrence planned well when he came here.”

  Gannon turned a knob. The click was loud in the suddenly silent kitchen. Everyone was looking at the radio.

  It emitted a blat, then a soft humming followed by a man’s voice: “Good evening. This is Continental BBC with our special edition for Great Britain, Ireland and Libya.” The announcer’s voice had the tones of Eton.

  “As is our custom, we are beginning with a silent prayer,” the announcer said. “We pray for a quick solution to this disaster that the world may find new strength and a lasting peace.”

  The humming of the radio seemed loud to John, filling the space around them with its reminder of other people and other places, many minds focused on prayer. He tasted a sourness in his throat and glanced around the table. All heads were bowed except his own and Herity’s. The latter winked when he met John’s gaze.

  “Did y’ take notice of the order?” Herity asked. “Great Britain, Ireland and Libya. They may speak it first, but Britain’s not great anymore.”

  “It is the BBC,” Gannon said.

  “And from France now,” Herity said. “Not an Englishman in the lot, though I grant they all sound like Oxford dons. Americans, Frenchies and Pakistanis, so I’m told.”

  “What does it matter?” Gannon asked.

  “It matters because it’s a fact that no man of reason can deny! Those Yanks and Pakkies and Frenchies has been brrrain-washed. England’s first, then Ireland and then the heathens.”<
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  “May our prayers be answered quickly,” the announcer said. “Amen.” His voice went on briskly. “And now to the news.”

  John listened raptly. Istanbul was being put to the Panic Fire. New “hot spots” were identified. Thirty-one cities, villages and towns in Africa were named, Nairobi and Kinshasa among the confirmed. Johannesburg remained a radioactive ruin. In France, the loss of Nimes was confirmed. A mob in Dijon had lynched two priests suspected of being Irish. In the United States, they were still trying to save “most of New Orleans.” The Swiss had retreated behind something they called “the Lausanne Barrier,” announcing that the rest of their country remained free of contamination.

  “What a grand and glorious thing!” Herity exulted. “The whole world become Swiss! An antiseptic world with featherbeds and them soft as a young breast, eh, Kenneth?” Herity stared at the boy, whose face became deep red.

  John felt only wonderment at the extent of what had been set in motion. It went far beyond expectations, although he could not say what those expectations had been and, when he thought about this, he felt the stirring of O’Neill-Within. Still, he felt no remorse, only a sense of awe that Nemesis could enter the ranks of natural disasters.

  The announcer’s list of places where the plague had struck seemed interminable. John realized then that this must be the most important part of the news – places to avoid. How close is it coming? He was aware of the restrictions on travel – special passes validated by the United Nations Barrier Command being required to cross most borders… and those borders no longer merely national ones.

  The Soviet Union announced no new hot spots, but satellite observation released by the United States reported evidence of new Panic Fires in the region southeastward from Omsk almost to Semipalatinsk – “many towns and villages visibly burning, but Omsk appears as yet intact.”

  The announcer interrupted this section with a late bulletin on the destruction of Istanbul, which he said had been “successfully purified in a closed circle of attrition.”

  “So many new euphemisms for violence,” Gannon muttered. He swept his gaze around the table, as though seeking something or someone not there. “Did the Madman think he was bringing peace and an end to violence?”

  John looked down at his hands. Peace had never been part of it, he thought. There had only been O’Neill’s need to strike back. Who could deny the bereaved man that? John felt somehow like O’Neill’s psychiatrist, understanding the man, neither condemning nor absolving.

  In the little notebook where Herity jotted the notes for his reports to Dublin, Herity would write that night: “If O’Donnell is the Madman, he seems thunderstruck by the extent of disaster. Did he know how far his plague would range? Did he care? No signs of remorse. No indications of guilty conscience. How could he not react if he is O’Neill?”

  Mid-broadcast, there was a telephone interview with Doctor Dudley Wycombe-Finch, director of the Huddersfield Research Establishment in England. Wycombe-Finch could report “no significant advances in the search for a cure,” although there were “promising lines of endeavor upon which I hope to report later.”

  Asked by the announcer to compare this plague with “similar historical disasters,” Wycombe-Finch said he thought it served no useful purpose to make such comparisons, adding:

  “Such mass destruction of people has not been seen for a very long time. This is destruction on a new scale, whose influence upon our descendants – if we are fortunate enough to have any – cannot be fully measured. In simple financial terms, there is no precedent, nothing with which to make valid comparison. In human terms…”

  Here, he fell into obvious sobbing.

  The BBC let it continue for a time, obviously milking it for effect, then: “Thank you, Doctor. We quite understand your reaction. We pray that your deep and obvious emotion will only strengthen your determination at the Huddersfield Establishment.”

  “Strengthen your determination!” Herity sneered, his voice thick with poteen. “The English tears could end a drought, I think.”

  “How can they even think of the financial cost?” Gannon demanded.

  It was the first spark of near-anger John had seen in the man.

  “The game between God and Mammon having been called on account of half the players leaving,” Herity said.

  John looked at Father Michael, noting tears running down his cheeks. The branded forehead was a red smear in the lamplight.

  The BBC announcer was concluding his broadcast with another prayer: “That we may find it in our hearts to forgive all past injustices, setting the stage for a world in which mankind will find that true brotherhood and mercy which every religion exhorts from us.”

  This prayer was provided by courtesy of the Buddhist Overseas Mission Church of San Rafael, California.

  Gannon turned the knob. The radio went silent with a snap.

  “We should save the batteries,” he said.

  “For what?” his brother-in-law asked, his words slurred from the drink. “To hear the fucking news? Why? There’s no future in it!”

  The stranger came and tried to teach us their ways. They scorned us for being what we are.

  – “Galway Bay,” an Irish ballad

  IN LESS than an hour there was to be a working dinner in the small private dining room off the White House Mess, and President Adam Prescott knew he had not the slightest handle on a new approach to their problems. He knew, though, that he would have to appear confident and full of purpose. Leaders were supposed to lead.

  He sat alone in the Oval Office, the history of the place thick around him. Momentous decisions had been made here and something of that seemed to cling to the walls. The desk in front of him had been given to Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria. The painting over the mantle across from him, by Dominic Serres, showed the battle between the Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis. John F. Kennedy had admired it from this very position. The pier table behind him had been ordered and used by James Monroe. The chair beneath Prescott had been part of the same order.

  The chair felt like a prison to Prescott. And his back ached despite the chair’s fine design by Pierre-Antoine Bellange.

  A stack of reports lay on the leather-bound green blotter in front of him, their tabs fanned out for him to read and extract what suited him. He had read them all and they had succeeded only in amplifying his dismay.

  Information, he thought. What good is it?

  Prescott thought it all carried a grandiose power of inflation, automatic importance. If it was for the President’s eyes, it must be not only important but very important. Presidents must never be bothered with trivia.

  Information. Not facts, not data, not truth. It was accumulated out of human observations. People had seen the thing or heard it or felt it and a digested version found its way to this desk that Rutherford B. Hayes had admired.

  Prescott glanced at the tabs protruding from the report folders. Breakouts. New plague pockets were being called “Hot Spots” by the media. There no longer was any question of evacuating people. Where could they go? Strangers were dangerous. People who had been away from home were dangerous. Good friends returning from far places no longer were good friends. Railroad lines were being torn up. Airports were strewn with wreckage to block the landing strips. Roads were blockaded and guarded by armed men. Bridges were blown down.

  A report in front of Prescott said every curve of spaghetti overpass and rerouting on the A-11 from Paris had been dumped onto the highway by expertly placed charges of explosives and the lack of transport was creating starvation pockets. The Maquis had remembered what they learned for another war but they had forgotten that food traveled the highways, too.

  It was no better at many places in the United States. Men dared not go foraging and food was a serious problem in cities and even in the countryside. New York was getting by on what it grew along the fire barrier, thankful for a reduced population and warehouses stocked with canned goods. Washington, D.C., had an es
timated two years before the belt tightened. It was getting by on emergency reserves stockpiled against atomic attack plus gardens planted on its lawns and open spaces.

  Washington and its ring of bedroom communities remained plague-free largely because General William D. Caffron had acted on his own to spread a flamethrower cordon around the city, backed by tanks and infantry with orders to shoot and burn intruders. He had sent suicide squads then against every contaminated pocket his ruthless methods could ferret out. Quarantine stations had been installed at all entry points, all served by women volunteers flown in from regional prisons and constantly observed by remote TV.

  Prescott slid the report tabbed “Tribute” from the pile on his desk and opened it.

  Weird, that was the only word for it.

  No doubt this was an outgrowth of the Barrier Command’s “free boats” policy, sending in supplies to the Irish Finn Sadal and the English Border Beaters. The free boats had seemed a good idea at the time – small, self-propelled, radio-guided craft dispatched into Kinsale, Howth, Liverpool and other port stations by the Barrier Command, carrying newspapers, food, liquor, small arms, ammunition, clothing… A simple radio signal destroyed the boats when they had completed their mission.

  Finn Sadal.

  Border Beaters.

  Prescott shuddered at some of the things he had heard about Finn Sadal behavior. But… tribute?

  Dublin was threatening to remove the Finn Sadal from its guardian posts along the beaches and to mount an active attempt to infect other regions outside their borders if their demands were not met.

  Prescott scanned the page in front of him. Ireland wanted the Viking plunder returned. All of that priceless accumulation from the museums of Denmark, Norway and Sweden was to be brought back and sent in on the free boats.

  “All of the wealth stolen from us by the barbarians will be interred at Armagh,” the Irish said.

  Interred?

  They spoke of plans for a great ceremony full of pagan overtones.

  Norway and Sweden had signaled immediate agreement but the Danes were showing reluctance.

  “If they ask this now, what might they demand next?”