Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman

by Alan Edward Nourse

  Bettendorf in Atlanta on a crash-emergency-must-do-now basis, and he got it onto the Telex to Washington within minutes with his must-approve authorization—and do you know what happened? It sat on some bureaucrat's desk for three solid weeks without so much as an acknowledgement despite three-times-a-day telephone calls for immediate action, and when Ted finally bludgeoned his way through to the President personally, all the President could do was moan and wring his hands about the terrible things that were happening in Pittsburgh, and demand that Ted do something to get some extra drug shipments out there. It seemed that some minor functionary in HHS hadn't assigned my request sufficient priority to get it anywhere near the Joint Chiefs, to say nothing of the President, so there it sat on the bottom of the pile on some desk in Washington."

  "And you're still waiting?"

  "Don't be ridiculous. I gave them four days, and when I didn't have an answer by then I broke the codes without authority and started work. I daresay they could put me in jail if they wanted to, but I don't think that they're going to put me in jail. They need the vaccine.'' She looked up as Barnaby brought the steaks and potatoes. "Not that breaking the code did me any good. The gene-splicing technique isn't working. These are weird bacteria. I'm getting a vaccine, but it's taking six weeks or more to build up a veiy low level of immunity."

  "In other words . . ."

  "Forget it. It was a good try, but it's not going to solve any problem whatsoever. We need a vaccine that works fast, and we haven't got one. Right now I'm just playing around, trying DNA recombinations in old strains of Yersinia, but I haven't even got the antigens identified." She fluttered her hands. "I don't really even know what I'm doing. Nothing is working, not even things I'm absolutely sure have to work according to all the experience I've ever had. I don't even know why I'm hanging around anymore. Maybe we should just get out of here. Go find a ranch somewhere with some good strong fences and some cows to eat."

  Frank took a bite of his steak. "Funny you should mention that," he said thoughtfully. "I had a visitor yesterday. A man Hew all the way from San Francisco out to Laramie, of all places, just to talk to me. He didn't say how he knew I was in Laramie, but he did. And he came to make me an offer I almost can't refuse."

  Monique put her fork down. "A job offer?"

  "Right."

  "What man was this?"

  "An old friend of mine, used to be in the Forest Service. Name of Shel Siegler. Deschutes National Forest, working out of Bend, Oregon, when I talked with him last summer—just after Pam went. Only he's not working for the Forest Service anymore, not by a long way. A very sharp fellow, Shel, the sort of guy who always ends up on top. Quite a joker, too, but yesterday he wasn't joking."

  "Who is he working for now?"

  Frank looked at her. "For Lord Chauncey Sparrow, once and future King of Mendocino County, California, and all points north, south and east that he thinks he can lay his hands on."

  "Oh, Frank. Good Lord."

  "Listen, kid, Shel had a very well-thought-out, legitimate proposal to make. They've got almost a thousand people up there, dug into the mountains and armed like Cuba. They've got four years' worth of food and water and ammo, and lots of plans for expansion, along with quite a few delusions of grandeur. They want an epidemiologist who knows the wilderness, knows how to move around in the bush, travel cross-country, high country, any kind of country. They want somebody with plague experience—somebody who knows what to look out for, to spot trouble coming and warn them so they can stop it before it gets to them. Shel thinks I'm the man for the job. He wants me to come out there and look the scene over, see what I think of it."

  Monique's eyes were huge with horror. "Frank, those people are crazy. I mean crazy."

  "Of course they are."

  "When they get hit with it—and they will surely get hit— they'll go down just like Laramie did."

  "Of course they will." Frank took another bite of steak.

  "So what are you talking about? Honey, if you're ass enough to go out there and 'look the scene over,' as you put it, you'll never come back. They won't let you."

  "Of course they won't," Frank said. "Matter of fact, in order to present me with a convincing argument to induce me to take the job, Shel was forced to tell me a whole lot of things that would make it politically inconvenient—to them—for me to refuse their offer. If I do, it will unfortunately become necessary for them to shut me up. Just quietly shoot me. Some sort of bizarre accident. To get down to specifics, I now have about twenty-four hours left in which to say yes."

  "Frank, you can't go out there and leave me here—"

  "No chance of that, kid." Frank gave a harsh laugh. "I couldn't do that even if I'd consider it, which I wouldn't. Fact is, you are very much a part of their bargain. These people are organized. They want a vaccine, and they want an effective antibiotic. They've checked you out from top to bottom, honey. You've been on their grab list for quite some time. They'll provide you with a fully equipped lab, better than the one you've got right here, dug down deep into a mountainside and secure as a tomb. You just give them your list of specifications, and (lien all you have to do is go to work and make them an effective vaccine and a magic-bullet antibiotic, real fast. They feel certain that with the proper incentives, you'll find a way to come through."

  "They're insane."

  "Of course they are—but there's a wild sort of rationale behind it all. Right now, Lord Chauncey merely wants his group to survive the plague. Then later on he plans to end up controlling all of California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and Arizona. The entire Iraser, Columbia, Snake and Colorado river drainages, to be specific. The Mormons can have Utah as long as they pay him icnt. But first he's got to survive. To survive, he's decided he needs both of us, badly. He has some, uh, commensurate rewards in mind for us, also."

  "You mean like not shooting you, right yet."

  "That's one."

  Monique pushed her unfinished steak aside and sat in gloomy silence for a while. "So what are you going to tell them,

  I''rank?"

  "What can I tell them? I just don't know. I mean, I really don't. But I tell them nothing, without you. That comes first."

  "You think this is survival?"

  "Of course not. Maybe in the short run, but not for very long. I mean, suppose these thousand-odd people do survive in the short run. Suppose they fight off all challengers—and there are a dozen other Lord Chaunceys running around loose in those hills, all of them armed just as well as he is. But suppose he wins. He ends up with total control of a third of a continent of dead land with a few thousand demented survivors wandering around. So what does he have? He can't govern; he can't protect all that space; he can't provide necessary services for anybody. All he can do is seize and exploit. Very, very soon he personally would be shot and gutted out like a hog and his head put on a stake, and somebody else would take over for a few weeks, and then somebody else, and so on into the next century. You call this survival? I'm not so sure. But then, what else do you see coming down the pike, besides the Horseman?"

  "Suppose I told you there was something else," Monique said slowly. "An alternative."

  "Like what?"

  "Buy me another drink, and get yourself one too. Happens that I had a call from an old friend today, too, and she made us an offer we almost can't refuse."

  "What old friend?"

  "Sally Grinstone. That odd little person from the Philadelphia Inquirer who came out here and picked our brains one night about Sealey 3147 and why it looked so good in the lab and then turned out a little different in the field. Remember her?"

  "Yeah. The kewpie doll with the ponytail. Funny kid, really."

  "Well, there's been no dust gathering on Sally Grinstone since the night she was here. She took what she learned from us, and then went and did her homework, including some intensive dirt-digging, and found out just why Sealey 3147 worked so well in the lab and then turned out so bad in th
e field.''

  Frank nodded. "I remember some articles. A big newspaper series on it. Sealey switched drugs on us because they couldn't make any money on the good one."

  "That was Sally."

  "Then I heard that some Select Congressional Committee was going to investigate Sealey for fraud or something—and that was the last I heard. They're probably still at it."

  "No, they haven't even got a committee together yet. And meanwhile, Sealey is sending this carefully controlled dribble of S-3147 out into the market at highwaymen's prices, and a lot of people who take it are going blind and Parkinsonian, but the FDA figures that may be better than being dead, so under the circumstances they're looking the other way. All perfectly legal, special investigative drug permits and all that to protect Sealey, of course." Monique sipped her drink. "Well, what you didn't read in the paper was that before that story broke, the little chemist at Sealey Labs who was busy developing the good drug that we tested disappeared under mysterious circumstances from a Chemical Society conclave in St. Louis, which is something scientists don't generally do—just gone like the month of May. Sally Grinstone also dropped out of sight about the same time; her muckraking articles won some kind of prize, and all of a sudden the Inquirer couldn't find her to make the award. And that is very strange, for a crack investigative journalist from a top national newspaper to just disappear—" "You talking about foul play?" Frank said. Monique gave a brittle laugh. "There would have been, all right, if Sealey had had their way, but they didn't move in on the little chemist quite fast enough, and they didn't count on the very extraordinary persuasive powers of Sally Grinstone—or else they couldn't believe that anybody would have the almighty nerve to snatch that chemist right out from under their noses. There wasn't any foul play. Sally Grinstone told me all of this, in person, over the telephone last night. She talked for nearly three hours, and Sally is alive and well, believe me. So is the little chemist, Tom Shipman. Alive and raring to go." "Raring to go where? What are these people doingV "Tiying like hell to stay under cover, for one thing, until they have some kind of reliable protection—if they ever achieve that. But what they're doing is setting up shop in an old chemical plant on the wrong side of Wichita and starting to make the antibiotic we tested here in the lab before Canon City. They're already making it by the pound, Frank. They think they can make it by the ton. Sally says you can make a utility grade of the stuff in your bathtub if you have some ordinary tetracycline and some acetic acid and a couple-three other reagents. It's a simple radical substitution and then a precipitation process. Dry it, stuff it in capsules, mix it with simple syrup, stir the powder in coffee if you want to, it doesn't matter. She's talking about mass production and mass distribution and to hell with the FDA; the FDA poeple are barely hanging onto their desks as it is."

  Frank whistled and pushed his dinner plate away. "These people are crazy, too," he said.

  "Yes. But not quite as crazy as your King of California."

  "There's no way they can get anywhere at all, honey."

  "In ordinary times, of course not, but these are not ordinary times. These are times when you start doing anything you can do, however crazy, if you've got wit enough, and don't worry about what happens next because there isn't liable to be any next." Monique's voice was thin and strained, close to tears.

  Frank reached across the table, took one of her thin hands in both of his big paws. "Okay, let's back up a minute. Whatever they're doing, and whatever the odds, I guess that's their business. But why was Sally calling you!"

  "They want us in Wichita. Both of us. Shipman has six other models of the drug he thinks might be more effective than what he's making, but he's just a chemist. He needs a microbiologist, a very capable microbiologist who is also an expert at working with Yersinia. That's me. He also needs a really top-notch genetic engineer to find a way to get the wrong radical into this bug so he can model the antibiotic to the bug, and maybe make a really effective vaccine as a spinoff. He thinks maybe I can recruit somebody like that, if I can't do it myself. That's the scientific and manufacturing side. Then there's the supply and distribution side. From what Sally remembers of you, she's got the idea that you might just be big enough and tough enough and maybe smart enough to move in on that end of it. They want to get a shipment to some little town up in Nebraska as fast as they can—don't ask me why—and they've got a drop for the stuff lined up undercover with a couple of doctors and some public-health man up there. If that works, whatever it is they're setting up, then they plan to spread out. They need unmarked trucks or cars, drivers, somebody with savvy to set them up, route them, troubleshoot them—"

  "You mean somebody to ramrod the operation and ride shotgun, both."

  "Well, she thinks if you knew which end of the rifle to put the shell in, it might be a very definite plus."

  "Wow." Frank sat staring at Monique. "If I'm getting the picture anywhere near right—oh, boy. Look, if that little chemist of hers is actually cranking out a good, solid antibiotic that works from some little rump laboratory and they're planning to go outside the law to distribute it—my God. Half the people left in the country are going to want to get their hands on it—and I'm supposed to ride shotgun? I wouldn't last six weeks. Hell, kid, I might not even last six days."

  "They've got to have somebody, and have him fast."

  "Oh, yes. They surely do. Wow. Talk about suicide." Frank finished his drink at a gulp and pushed himself up from the booth. "Come on, kid, it's getting late. We'd better get home. I've got to do some thinking before I tackle this one."

  The rain had stopped and a few stars shimmered in the cold night air. Frank turned the Jeep out into the thin traffic. They drove in silence. "You'd be a lot safer right where you are here in Collins," he said finally.

  "Nothing's going to happen here at Collins," Monique said. "I feel it in my bones. The government's falling apart and so is the CDC. All I'm doing here is frittering away precious time."

  "Then we'd both be far safer with the King of California. What this Grinstone babe is talking about is sudden death. With I.ord Chauncey we might at least survive for a while."

  "Maybe. But Frank, Sally Grinstone is trying to do something about this mess. Something that could help."

  "I just don't know." He turned up the canyon road toward the little three-room house they were using now, parked on the hill half a block away for a downhill start to spare his tired battery. He put his arm around her thin waist as they walked together up toward the house, felt her shiver. ' 'Why don't we just sleep on it, for now? We've got till tomorrow to decide."

  He let them into the overheated living room—it was either bake or freeze in there with the wood stove going, nothing in between. He took Monique's coat, slipped off his own jacket, and started into the bedroom with her behind him.

  One step inside the room, he realized too late that there shouldn't have been a light on. The window was open, the casing forced. A small wiry man was crouching across the room, the bed between them, with a very small black poistol pointed straight at Frank's chest.

  Frank tried to stop Monique but he was too late, she was already in the bedroom beside him, hand to mouth, stifling a cry.

  "Hold it right there," the man said. "One move, I kill." Cold little ferret eyes, a prow of a nose, thin lips pulled back from crooked yellow teeth. Like a river rat. "The little lady first. The earrings, over here on the bed."

  She took them off, tossed them to the far end of the bed as Frank stirred. "Don't move, Frank," she said quietly. "Give him whatever he wants."

  "Now the rings. Both your watches. Same place."

  Frank tugged off the black onyx in cheap gold that he wore, tossed it over, along with his Omega. Monique followed suit.

  "Now the little lady's jewelry. Where is it?"

  "Top right dresser drawer," she said, "right there by your hand. No, Frank, please. It doesn't matter."

  The man pawed open the jewel box, scattered the contents with a finger. He spa
t on the floor. "Junk. Where's the good stuff?"

  "Tear the place apart," Frank said. "You won't find any. That's it." He watched the gun, dead steady in the man's hand.

  "Nothing in here?" The man pulled a black case from Frank's side of the drawer, flipped it open, tossed cheap cufflinks and tietacks onto the dresser top. "Junk, all junk. Ah, hold it a minute. Well, well. What have we here?"

  He picked up the small white pasteboard jeweler's box, pried the lid off with his thumb, set it on the dresser. Lifted a thin silvery necklace chain, held it up, saw the tiny star sapphire at the end. "Now that's more like it. That's nice."

  Frank leaped across the bed like a cat, driving head and shoulder into the man's belly, crushing him into the dresser front. The gun fired twice, muffled sounds. Frank grappled, grabbed the gun arm with both hands, slapped the hand against the dresser and saw the gun go flying. Small thin armbones snapped; the man let out a cry. Frank wrenched the other arm up behind the man's back, pressed his body very close, then brought his right paw up under the shoulder and around under the chin in a deadly reverse half nelson. Began pressing the chin back. . . .

  "Frank, stop!" Monique had the gun in hand, aiming at nothing. "It won't do any good. Let him go."

  Frank eased his grip, drove his left fist hard into the man's belly. Then he brought his hand down to his shirtfront and ripped off the greasy clothes, kept ripping until the man was naked except for shreds of undershorts. "You come back again, I kill," Frank told him hoarsely. Then he shoved him bodily out the window. There was a groan, a scrambling sound and then silence. Frank stood straight and turned around. His left shoulder was aching, with warm wetness soaking through his shirt.