The Whisperers

by Donald Wandrei

  The doctor had put in a hard afternoon's work at a free clinic, but he toiled until late at night on his researches into the realm of the filterable viruses. Chard had no more conception of what one of these submicroscopic organisms looked like than any one else did. He could, however, pursue certain lines of investigation with practical results.

  Experimentation with drugs and chemicals, toxins and antitoxins, frequently led to valuable discoveries in controlling or counteracting the ravages of filterable viruses. Such successes did not in the least satisfy him. He never would be satisfied until he could see and describe one of these micro-organisms, and until he could watch them in the midst of their deadly work.

  To most people, the coming of The Whisperers was a catastrophe of such unparalleled importance that it drove every other thought from their minds. To Chard and Langley, among a mere handful of men throughout the world, The Whisperers served as a tremendous stimulus to the activity which they were already pursuing.

  The confident prediction of the Soviet government had been premature. It was being tragically refuted at the very instant that it flashed to other parts of the globe. The Whisperers had not been halted. Isolation had proved a failure. In one respect, the fears of the government proved correct: every individual who had been isolated contracted the whispering fever. But so did countless individuals who had been in the vicinity of the sufferers. And not only the prisoners, but their guards, and the military police who had made the arrests, and friends or unwary strangers, walked to the accompaniment of an appalling whisper within a day.

  On April 8th, 64 new cases developed, chiefly in Moscow and Zelingrad. These victims were detained as a precautionary measure. On April 9th, over 600 additional cases made their appearance in Moscow alone. On April 10th, the number leaped to more than 10,000, with new cases developing in such vast numbers that hospitals, physicians, and undertakers were swamped. By April 11th there were 300,000 patients in Moscow, and there was no longer any attempt to bury the dead. They littered the streets, and were left there, for evacuation of the capital had been going on for two days by the terror-driven populace, and the universal thought was flight from this dreadful scourge.

  The inconceivable rapidity with which the malady spread and the terrifying whisper that marked its inception were but two of the factors that created panic. The malady itself was comparatively painless and devoid of those excruciating symptoms that had made previous plagues agonizing. The main characteristics were the fever, followed by a prickling sensation over the entire body, then a gradual feeling of drowsiness, then the end, suddenly and without warning. The malady ran its course in two days or less.

  Doctors were helpless to combat it because they caught it and died before they had an opportunity to analyze blood specimens. Extraordinary hemorrhages accompanied death -- hemorrhages of the brain, the internal organs, the arterial system, as if the lining of every cell and the walls of every gland, organ, and artery suddenly dissolved. Death seemed horrible because of the lovely colors that rippled in iridescent mockery over the skins of the corpses.

  To the living, the most horrible aspect of The Whisperers was the low, murmurous sound that marked the incubation of the plague. That sound, like the voice of death, as if the maggots were already swarming in the flesh that was soon to be theirs, drove hundreds of patients to suicide and brought raving madness to others. There was no escape from it. It sounded from homes and clung like an invisible presence to crowds. It filled the air with a monotonous and mournful sound.

  By airpland and stratoplane, by car, train, bus, or any other available vehicle, the refugees streamed from the city. They poured out in all stages of dress, abandoning houses and property, deserting machines, work, everything in the urgency of departure. The situation had got utterly beyond control, as the government admitted in its early frantic appeals for assistance. After the first few days, however, there was no government left. The officials had precipitately scattered to all points of the compass.

  The main response of neighboring nations was a vain effort to close their frontiers as if that desperate action would miraculously halt the progress of the plague. The thunder of guns sounded from the Black Sea to the Baltic, and airplanes and stratoplanes flamed from the skies like showers from exploding rockets. The staccato of machine guns and the crackle of electric barrages roared along the frontiers. The dead accumulated in heaps until ammunition ran out, and still the refugees swarmed on by land and sea and sky. The laws of chance alone would have enabled a few lucky stragglers to penetrate the deadliest barriers ever devised by man in years of preparation. Here there had been no time for careful planning; and while the speed of modern communication permitted swift, concentrated mobilization, that same speed broadcast the messengers of death.

  Perhaps if the projectile had fallen in the old days on the spot where it was found, if it had fallen in the Nineteenth Century, it might have wiped out Kutsk and spread no farther. Kutsk was more than three hundred miles from Zelingrad. But the projectile fell in the Twenty-first Century, and the marvelous speed of modern communication that every one praised was the real menace which gave the apparent menace of the whispering fever a pyramiding and accelerating velocity.

  The pilot who brought Aleighileff to Zelingrad had chatted with fellow pilots at the landing field. He was one of the 64 persons detained, but during his isolation, those fellow pilots of the Siberian air lines were winging their way to the Far East, and southward to India, and westward to Moscow, and toward many points of the compass.

  When the Soviet government issued its first warning, superstitious Chinese were fleeing from a merchant through whose body devils had begun to speak in Hankow. While the acrid fumes of burned powder were accompanying thunderous, earth-shaking explosions and the slaughter of refugees along the Russian border, the excitable citizens of Paris were listening in puzzled silence to a man seated at a sidewalk café who body gave off a curious vibration like the hum of distant conversation.

  More disastrous than any war ever fought, more deadly than any pestilence of history, instantly contagious and sweeping with a speed that paced the word of their coming, The Whisperers advanced. Contact with a victim seemed unnecessary to contract the fever. Mere presence in his general vicinity appeared to be all that was required. then the progress was mathematical. A dozen friends or chance observers caught the plague from the original victim. Each of that dozen, before the whispering became audible, and frequently before he was aware that the dread scourge lodged within him, passed it on to a dozen others. And still no one knew the nature of The Whisperers, or the cause of that mysterious whispering, or how it could spread with such terrifying rapidity.

  During the most virulent and malignant phase of previous pestilences, when they raged at their worst, there was always a percentage of people who proved immune to the disease or who survived its effects. There had been no such exceptions in the cas of the whispering fever.

  No one proved immune. Not a single victim had recovered. It incubation and development proceeded invariably from fever to death within two days of inception. By April 14th, it was estimated that the dead numbered upwards of 3,000,000 in Russia alone, with the number of cases anybody's guess at from one tenth to nine tenths of the total population. The staggering toll of the dead, unwatched and unburied, lying where they had fallen in streets, homes, buildings, cars, stores, and conveyances, gave off no longer the murmurous whisper but now the intolerable stench of decay. The only reason that diphtheria, typhus, tetanus, and other epidemic diseases did not rage unchecked was that The Whisperers left nothing but corpses in their wake.

  Bulletins had stopped coming from Moscow or anywhere else in the U. S. S. R. by April 14th, but newspapers in other countries dismissed the lack simply by printing the fact that news had stopped coming from Russia.

  By April 14th, the exodus from Paris had begun, the evacuation of Hankow and Shanghai and Tokyo had started, the desertion of every large capital and every spot where The Whis
perers mad their appearance. Humanity was attempting the impossible feat of running away from itself. The same scenes of flight, the same fierce scramble for exodus, the same terrible swiftness of contagion, the same pyramiding of cases in mathematically progressive leaps, the same increase of the abandoned dead in buildings and streets was now occurring in so many places and countries now on so rapidly expanding a scale that the magnitude of the catastrophe dwarfed its localized appearance.

  As a result of geographic position, the two Americas and Australia had thus far reported no instance of the fever. Australian authorities were unaware that their bomb carriers and pursuit planes had not reached the lonely north coast until after several air transports of Japanese had flown across the wilderness and landed at various points. A majority of the fugitives were detected and killed, but the damage had been done.

  The case for survival far outweighed the humanitarian appeal. The Americas declared an absolute blockade. No ships arrived after the middle of April, because crews and passengers died before they had half completed the voyage. The derelicts drifted at the whim of wind and water in the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But plane after plane was shot down, and for a while it was believed that the mobility, quality, and quantity of American defense armaments might enable the continents to escape; but the same speed of modern communication which had proved a curse to Europe and Asia brought The Whisperers to America by way of a stratoplane that eluded watchers and landed in New Jersey. The passengers deemed themselves to have escaped the whispering fever, but shortly after landing, several of them began to run temperatures, and in a matter of hours the fatal whispering, like the rustle of swarms of maggots, but without visible agency or known source, made itself heard.

  While the whispering fever raged on through those hideous days of April, two tired, unshaved, and half-starved scientists worked incessantly, ate briefly, slept little, and kept on working in the laboratory of the O. I. S. Co. They lived there, worked there, slept there, and begrudged even their allotted four hours of sleep per day. The moment the gravity of the whispering fever became apparent, Chard had joined forces with Langley. Since it was easier to transport the tools and supplies of medicine than budge Langley's complex invention, most of the drugs and chemicals known to science now filled a large part of the laboratory. The goals of Langley and Chard had achieved world importance. They got what they wanted for the asking.

  Langley made minute adjustments of his photo-micrographic magnifying apparatus. He watched tensely as blurry, unrecognizable images swam across the photoscreen. He slumped in nervous fatigue. "Another failure," he muttered. "What's the latest news?"

  Chard said, "I dropped down to the front office television set a few minutes ago. There's a report that a stratoplane got through the blockade and landed somewhere in Jersey."

  Langley was already making minute new changes in his invention. "That gives us only two or three days more, if the report is true. How are you making out?"

  "I won't know until your invention works. So far, no one has recovered from or proved immune to the whispering fever. It was sheer suicide on the part of physicians who tried to study it first-hand. All I can do is get everything ready in case the high magnification materializes. There won't be time to consider antitoxins. If a cure or check can't be found in drugs, history ends in about a week."

  Langley focused an invisible beam on an invisible organism, whose existences were registered and controlled solely by micrometric precision instruments. "Who do you suppose ever started this infernal thing? Some crazy scientist? Or some nation that decided to wipe out its enemies?"

  Chard shook his head. "Tommyrot. If any scientist created the whispering fever, he would have been dead before he knew what he had done. No nation would have used the plague unless it had an impregnable defense. The plague has struck everywhere. No one on earth had a part in launching it, except accidentally."

  "Isn't that a rather extreme statement? I know that new diseases have appeared from time to time in the past, and that a theory was long ago advanced that bacteria may have survived interstellar cold and drifted to earth from other regions of space. I know it's been suggested that life may have originated in such a fashion. But the source of the plague was a projectile. Are you implying that inhabitants of another planet deliberately sent the projectile here with the notion of destroying human life before they took over the globe?"

  "Hardly. It's a remote possibility, but highly implausible."

  Langley returned to his calculations. Where the projectile originated didn't matter. Time was precious, and the hours slipped by faster than he cared to think about. Only a matter of days remained, perhaps less time still if the plague had truly reached across the Atlantic.

  Constantly he was on the verge of success, but it always eluded him. He had magnification, now, stupendous magnifications of 100,000,000 to 500,000,000 diameters, but the images were badly distorted and meaningless. He must find a way of correcting the image, of throwing it into clear focus. He went over and over the delicate parts of the mechanism, making microscopic adjustments, working against time and fatigue, seeking the one micromillimetric correction that would give clear definition to the image.

  The afternoon passed, brought nothing but failure. Toward evening, Chard hurried out for a breath of fresh air and for sandwiches. He almost collided with a running stranger as he emerged from the building. "What's the hurry?" he demanded.

  The stranger gasped, "The plague's here! A chap just broke out with it on Fourteenth Street! I heard the whisper!" The white-faced stranger raced on his way.

  Chard felt depressed when he returned to the laboratory. Unless they succeeded soon, this was the end. By dawn, the exodus would be in full force. Mountain tops and mines, wilderness and desert, any spot offering apparent seclusion would in a day or two be black with refugees possessed of the same notion.

  The physician did not tell Langley of his encounter. The physicist was already working at top speed. He paused long enough to wolf a sandwich and hot coffee, before resuming his calculations with worried eyes.

  The room seemed warm, oppressively warm. Chard wiped his forehead. His burning face was sign enough that he needed sleep and rest. But there was no time for sleep and rest. He toiled for hours, as the evening waned, and gradually a vast uproar began to rise above the city, and Chard knew that the panic was on. Flushed and weary, he paid little attention to what went on outside, and sensed the noise as something far away and impersonal. Voices -- the voice of the mob --

  Chard suddenly tensed, every sense alert, listening with a dull feeling of futility to what he had feared he would hear.

  There was a faint murmur in the room. The whisper came from his own body!

  His memory flashed back to his encounter with the fleeing stranger. He recalled the sensation of heat and fever that had been growing on him ever since. The whispering plague dwelt in the laboratory.

  Langley muttered, "If only I could define the image! I'm close to success, so close that I can't see what's wrong, something that would be obvious to any one else."

  Chard felt like blurting, "It doesn't matter now. The end is here. Let's go out and celebrate our last day of life." Instead he looked at the photoscreen where the blurry objects swam and spoke tiredly:

  "If you've got the magnification you want, and can't define the image, maybe the trouble isn't in the invention at all. Maybe it would work perfectly except for some outside influence. Could cosmic rays cause any interference?"

  Langley shouted, "You utter idiot, why didn't you think of that before? Come on, help me get a load of lead sheaths." He ran toward a storeroom, Chard at his heels.

  As they set up the heavy plates around the mechanism, Langley talked excitedly. "That's the source of error. It's so obvious I couldn't see it. Cosmic rays are bombarding us all the time in great numbers, and while they're sub-microscopic, they're large enough and strong enough to affect not only the micro-organisms you're after, but even the se
lenium cells and electrical equipment."

  The Whispering grew louder. "What of it?" Langley exulted. "I must have caught it myself by now, but I'll be satisfied just to see and know what is happening. It's inevitably appropriate that we should make the discovery in a drop of your own blood. Get a slide ready and we'll shoot it under the beam."

  Chard's mood had passed from despondency to eager excitement. In the moment of action he became the cool, skilled physician of old. He pricked his thumb, caught a pin point of blood on a slide, and passed it to Langley. The air was stifling, for they had left an opening only at the floor on one side of the hastily constructed lead chamber.