Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  "I am. I will. I promise." Tom looked at her, stricken. "Sal, stop packing that damned bag. I don't know what I'd do if you took off now."

  "Took off? She followed his eyes to the suitcase and then suddenly her face melted and she was in his arms, hugging him to her fiercely, her face buried in his neck. "Oh, Tommy, you dummy, you dum-dum-dwm/ny, can't I get a little pissed off at you when you're so stupid and blind and gray and won't think? I'm not leaving. I've got to take a little trip, that's all. I've got to get you back on the track and working first, but then I've got to get away and do my part of it—but I'm not taking off. I need you more than you need me. Times like these, everybody needs somebody, even somebody stupid and blind. Nobody just takes off. But dummy, you've got to get off this gloomy kick and get working, that's all. Quit worrying about sticks in the wind, just do what you can do as fast as you can, and I'll do what I can. You keep that fluffy green powder coming down into the pan, and tell me what you need, and I'll get it. Just start building that stockpile up—"

  "But I need a million things," Tom said, "and I need them all now. I need help, just plain hands, if I'm going to turn that pilot line into production. I need help with the quality control. I need lab animals for testing, some really sophisticated lab equipment, a million other things. I need a hot lab with some live plague cultures and a microbiologist to work with them, somebody who really knows what he's doing with those bugs. You don't just make stuff like this in the kitchen and turn it loose on people."

  "Well, maybe you do, right now," Sally said. "Maybe for now we've got to do things all the wrong way because we haven't time or facilities to do them right. But remember, that green powder had some testing at Fort Collins. Maybe we're going to have to count on that. And maybe I've got to go recruiting, get you some people—I've got some ideas." She told him about the spaniel-faced Indian with the shotgun. "You've got to grab what comes to hand and try to work with it," she said. "He may turn out to be a thief and nothing more, but maybe not—his heart wasn't in it, and he had kind eyes." She sat down on the bed. "Well, he might be a start. I haven't just been lying on my back wagging my tail all this time, I've been thinking about what we might do when the pilot line was finished and the stuff started coming down into the pan, and I've got some ideas. First we cover ourselves and anybody that's helping us—we don't need testing for that, and if we go, it all goes. Then we've got to find someplace, some small place, for a real test. We'll need help, we'll need cooperation, we'll be illegal as hell, we may have to fight our way through mobs, but if we can get this stuff moving, somehow, and stop the damned thing cold in one small place, just one—God, Tom, can't you see what that would mean?" She kissed him and gave him a shove. "Now go unload that van before somebody steals it. I've got to go see a couple of doctors in a little burg up north of here, and I'd just as soon get up there before it starts snowing. I'll just be gone a day or so. And meanwhile, for the help you're talking about, I think I know what our next step has got to be—and I think you're going to like it."

  49

  Harry Slencik was driving his old red pickup out the Grizzly Creek road, coming back from Bozeman with another ten cases of coffee for the hoard, when he saw the light flickering down on the creek in a brushy area just below Ben Chamberlain's place. It was almost seven in the evening, and daylight was failing rapidly.

  Harry pulled his pickup over, snapped out his lights and

  peered through the brush. A campfire—he could see somebody moving. Too late for hunters, the season was over. There was an old logging road that went in to the creek a short way back, and he thought he'd seen fresh tire tracks. . . .

  Harry pulled his shotgun off the gun rack and stepped down to the road. He loaded a shell into the chamber of the gun with a loud clack and pushed two more into the magazine. Then he walked back to the logging road. His flashlight picked up the tire tracks; a little farther on it glinted on the side of a small camper backed into the brush. Wyoming plates, and Harry made the connection. Someplace down there—was it Laramie?—had been hit real bad with plague, just about wiped out the town. This could be somebody that got out of there.

  Up ahead a campfire was flaring, throwing mottled yellow light through the brush. For a moment he thought he heard a woman's voice. Then he stepped into the open along the creek, shotgun resting in the crook of his arm. He pushed his ten-gallon hat back on his head and cleared his throat.

  A man was leaning over tending the fire. He leaped back and turned to face Harry. Behind him a woman sat on a rock clutching an old Pendleton shirt around her shoulders; she was shivering in the chill evening air. Beside her, two small children were wrapped in sleeping bags with just their noses sticking out. Harry saw no weapon, and relaxed his grip on the shotgun a little. "Nice evening," he said.

  The man by the fire nodded. "Yeah." There was a long pause. "We were, ah, just fixing up a little supper. Ran out of bottled gas for the stove in the camper. You probably saw it sittin' there, back in the brush." He paused again. "Care to join us?"

  "No, the wife'll have something ready when I get home, up the road a bit." Harry studied the people closely. The man was about thirty-five, Hany judged, short and stocky, solidly built, with a pointed nose and a shock of black hair over his eyes. The woman might have been pretty once; right now she looked utterly exhausted, dull-eyed and pallid. They both looked cold and hungry and tired, but otherwise healthy enough. "You just come up from Wyoming?" Harry said.

  "Yeah. From Casper, before the trouble hit there." "That's right, I heard about Casper. Laramie too. Both of them damned near wiped out."

  "True, but Laramie got it first. Some people must have brought it up from Colorado. We got nervous a month or so ago, figured Casper was going to be next—just about any town could get hit—so we stuffed everything we could into the camper and got out of there."

  "Just been roughin' it ever since, huh?" Harry said.

  "You might say that." The man tossed more driftwood onto the fire.

  "Well, better not plan to stick around here," Harry said. "Cook up your supper, sure, but when you finish that, you'd better move on."

  "Wouldn't hurt to let us sleep a few hours, would it?"

  "I don't think we'd like that. Makes the wife kind of nervous."

  The man glanced at the woman behind him. "You own this land?" he asked Harry.

  "Me and a few neighbors. We didn't like the looks of Bozeman too much, and we've got a pretty good chunk of land between us up here along the creek, so we kinda went together on it. We figure we can make out."

  "It's a nice place."

  "Right. No sick people around. Plan to keep it that way, too, so we can't welcome strangers."

  "I see." The man gave a bitter laugh. "Especially strangers that just came up from Casper, where everybody dropped dead last week. Look, I already told you—we got out of there three weeks before it hit. We had no contact at all—"

  "Well, better safe than sony."

  "I suppose you've got a point." The man pulled a grill out of a pack sitting nearby, carefully set it up over the fire, supported by rocks on either side. "By the way, I'm Dan Potter. This is my wife Ellen."

  Harry nodded, but he didn't move forward to shake hands. "Harry Slencik," he said.

  The man regarded him gravely. "Just out of curiosity, Mr. Slencik, how long do you people plan to stay out here? Just this fall? Going back to town for the winter? Or next spring?"

  Harry shook his head. "We're not so damned sure there's going to be any town left to go back to," he said. "Nor any country left, either, for that matter. So this is where we are, and this is where we're stay in'."

  "Sort of an independent Freehold kind of thing," Potter said.

  "You could call it that."

  "I guess there's a whole lot of them popping up, here and there. People get together, pool their land and resources, everybody contributes something important, like that. I suppose you plan to be, um, sort of self-sustaining."

  "You got th
e idea," Harry said. "Completely self-sustaining."

  "So you'll have gardens and grain and hayfields, run some stock, that sort of thing." Potter was watching Harry closely. "Lot of work to be done."

  "Three or four of us got pretty good backs," Harry said. "We'll manage."

  "I didn't mean just strong backs," Potter said. He chewed on his lower lip for a minute. "Pretty dry country around here. You're going to have to irrigate to grow anything."

  "We know that. We've got the pumps and pipes all set up."

  "Gasoline pumps, I suppose?"

  "No way. Electric."

  "So what do you do when the power goes off?"

  Harry laughed. "We're way ahead of you, man. We've got two big gasoline generators, turn out enough power to light up this whole valley."

  "Well, that's great, you're all set up." Potter dipped a pot into the creek, set it on the grill and began cutting up potatoes into it. "So what do you do when the gas runs out? Way things are going, one day the man ain't going to bring any more, sure as God made little apples."

  Harry stirred uneasily. "So maybe we convert the generator to steam and burn wood," he said. "But that's a long time ahead. Hell, we can haul the water by hand then if we have to."

  "For irrigation? Great system. They've been doing that in India for four thousand years. And look at India. And you've got to irrigate how many acres?"

  "About sixty."

  "Wow." Dan Potter pursed his lips, threw some beef bones into the pot and started stirring. Suddenly he turned to Harry.

  "Listen, Mr. Slencik, let me talk straight out for a minute. We're none of us sick, or anything, but I'm sure as hell in trouble. I need someplace to go. I've got a wife and two kids here and they're getting hungry and we're about to the end of our rope. We can't keep moving on much longer. But I know we can't just come and freeload someplace, either. If I want a place to stay, I've got to be able to earn my keep, right?"

  "That figures."

  "Okay, now let me tell you something. I can give you people something you need, if you can let us stick around."

  Harry tipped his hat back. "You can give us four more mouths to feed, all right. Why do we need that?"

  "Because you're going to be stone dead for irrigation water to feed anybody by next spring, and that's going to be the end of your little Freehold, unless you find a way around it."

  "We could have some problems. We know that. So what can you do about it?"

  "Maybe a whole lot. When we first drove in here today, I walked up the road to the dead end. I saw what you've got going here. I saw how much water you were going to need. I also took a rough guess at the drop in the creek through your land, and I knew right then I could solve your water problem for you."

  Harry Slencik frowned. "Like how, exactly?"

  "Falling water is energy," Potter said. He pointed to the creek. "See that pool out there? See that big rock at the edge with the water running over it and dropping into the next pool? Go stick your hand in the stream down below that rock. Go ahead, try it."

  Harry walked over to the creek and reached down below the rock. The water struck his outstretched palm, spreading his fingers and splashing all over.

  "Feel it push?" Potter said. "That water's heavy, and when it's running downhill naturally like that, you can use the weight. Listen to me: I can build you a ramjet pump on this creek that won't take any outside power whatever to run, just the energy of the falling water. No electricity, no gasoline— ever. It'll deliver enough to irrigate your sixty acres till your back teeth are floating, push water uphill if you want, put it exactly where you want it when you want it, and never cost a penny. I can engineer a whole system of pipes and valves and ditches for you, and then I can maintain it, so you've always got water—including all the household water you can use. And I can build it so it won't ever freeze up, too."

  Harry stared at the man for a long while. "You never told me your line of work, Dan."

  "Engineering," Dan Potter said. "Hydraulic engineering. I can't make dandelions grow, but I can sure build water systems, and when I build 'em, they work. You want references, you're out of luck, but I can show you what I can do quick enough."

  "And you could build that kind of a system here?"

  "No sweat."

  "I suppose you'd need a lot of materials."

  "A little plastic pipe. Some two-by-sixes. Couple of hardware-store valves. A good set of tools to work with. Beyond that, I could improvise a whole lot of it." Potter checked his dinner, decided it was ready to eat. His wife was getting out plates and cups. "Of course, you might just want to take your chances with those gas generators."

  Harry set his hat squarely on his head and sat down on a rock. "Go ahead and eat," he said. "Maybe when you finish we can drive up to the place and talk a little bit."

  50

  For Frank Barrington the trip back from Laramie to Fort Collins was long, miserable and gray—as gray as the desolated place he had left behind him. The old Jeep was leaking oil badly, so he had to stop every sixty miles or so to fill up the crankcase, and as he drove south into Colorado he had hit a cold November drizzle that wouldn't stop. For having been away for just seven days, he was missing Monique achingly, not even a single phone contact in all that time, with the Laramie telephone system a hopeless tangle—one whole solid day wasted just trying to get a single call through to CDC in Atlanta, for God's sake—and through it all, the nagging fear that the devastation that had taken him to Laramie in the first place might have moved south to Fort Collins before he got back. The whole trip to Laramie had been Roger Salmon's idea, and a good enough idea, too—that he and a few already up there might somehow draw a line and break the onrushing wave. It hadn't worked, of course, the wave had moved too fast and far for any line to hold. A week of hard, horrid work and nothing to show. . . .

  The drizzle turned to downpour as he finally hit the outskirts of Fort Collins. He drove straight to Barnaby's Grill, left the Jeep in ankle-deep mud in the parking lot out back, and leaned into the rain to get inside. It was almost nine p.m., but Monique wasn't there yet; he took the booth they especially liked in the rear corner, brushed the rain out of his hair and settled back to wait.

  When she finally came in she looked absolutely awful—gray-faced, bone tired, her eyes dull. She leaned across the booth to kiss him and he caught the inevitable whiff of lab disinfectant that she couldn't ever seem to scrub off anymore. "God, it's good to see you," she said, collapsing in the booth across from him. "It seems like six months."

  "I know." He frowned in alarm. There were lines of weariness around her eyes and mouth, all signs of the old familiar sparkle gone. "What's been happening?" he said. "You look like you've been whipped."

  "You're not so far off." A shrug of one shoulder, just a tired hint of the old, wry smile. Drinks came and she put down half her Scotch and water neat. "This is getting to be the only good part of the day, anymore." She looked up then. "So how was Laramie?"

  "Dead on its feet," Frank said. "I might just as well have stayed here. The ranchers all are boarded up on their ranches eating their cows, and the people in'the town are dead or dying fast. The ones that can still move are packing out any way they can. Don't ask me where they're going. They sure don't know, and there's an awful lot of that country with nothing in it."

  Monique shrugged. "At least you helped some, maybe."

  "Precious little. There was nothing we could do. Not enough vaccine to cover the medical workers, much less anybody else, and the 3147 we were promised there never turned up. When I finally got through to Ted Bettendorf in Atlanta, he figured that hell was likely to freeze before anything got to Laramie, including any more manpower to help. Everything available is going to the big cities. Tough luck, Laramie."

  "Oh, God." Monique shook her head. "Where's the man's head? Atlanta is doing everything just exactly backwards. They're going to lose the cities anyway, they already know that, there's not one thing on God's earth they can do for the c
ities— and they still keep dumping everything they've got into the cities. It's the Laramies and Fort Collinses and all the other little isolated places where they could really help if they only would—"

  "It's not Ted's fault," Frank said. "He tries to be even-handed, but the pressure is impossible. All he can do, in the end, is what the administration tells him to do, the best he knows how. The administration sets the policies, and the pressure all comes from the cities."

  "Pressure from whom?" Monique's voice was bitter. "From dead people? And what administration policies? The administration doesn't have any policies. The administration is quietly disintegrating, that's what the administration is doing. Frank, CDC should be making its own policies and telling the administration to go chase itself—but it's not. Ted should have grabbed the rudder months ago, but he's just dithering." She sighed. "You don't know what a mess it is, out there. Listen, a month ago I needed emergency authorization to break some very secret codes we have sequestered in the vaults here at the lab—some top-secret biological warfare codes—to get some data I needed desperately to do some gene-splicing work on a new vaccine. Well, those codes are potentially very dangerous. You don't break them unless you have to have them, and they aren't supposed to be broken without specific written authorization from the Joint Chiefs of Staff countersigned by the President himself. So I wired my request and justification to Ted