Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  "Surely not all of that will happen to you."

  "Don't snow me, please. With a high enough dosage, it's a derby to see what gets you first."

  "Go ahead then," he grumped. "Tell me what's on your mind."

  "Well, I thought, since that blast of radiation passed through me yesterday, all those broken molecules and dead cells are probably sloshing around inside me right now. Isn't there some way to wash them out? Some way to at least take the burden off my lymph nodes and kidneys?"

  Harper was staring at her with a cold eye.

  "I mean," she stammered, "if I'm going to be dead anyway… And those people out there…"

  "There is a treatment," the doctor began slowly. "They tried it in the early part of the century. Whole blood transfusion and a complete reseeding of the bone marrow. But first we have to be sure your own marrow is completely dead, so we have to reradiate you to a known level. That's the dangerous part, because we don't know what kind of body burden you may already be carrying——

  "The technique is also contraindicated, because it may not be necessary in the first place. We don't know where the electromagnetic pulse came from, or how exposed your position was. You weren't at Copernicus, where the gamma and x-ray bursts were detected. And even there they were not measured—"

  "Come off it, Doctor. You said we had equipment damage here, too. Whatever the rem dosage, I was out in it the longest—me and Mr. Carlin, that is."

  "All right, you and Carlin." He made a note. "But I still don't like to treat until I know there's disease in the first place."

  "I can feel it in me!"

  "Nonsense! You're reflecting a psychosomatic—"

  "It's not your body we're gambling with, remember?" Gina said stubbornly. "Okay, you burn out my bone marrow and replace it, along with my blood—wait a minute! I thought a marrow transplant took matching against something like twenty or thirty thousand prospective donors. Do you have that many candidates here on the Moon? Or are your medical records that good?"

  "The candidate is sitting right here. We take a sample of your own marrow, type it for DNA damage, isolate a healthy cell, and clone it and reinject it to begin the regrowth. Blood is easier—we only have to type and fill from stores. Then we can go after tissue damage with a viral-encapsulated DNA carrier, effectively reinfecting damaged cells with your own genetic pattern."

  "When can we begin?" she said resolutely.

  "Whoa there, Gina. I haven't told you the downside."

  "Sure, it may not be necessary, and you may over-radiate me. What else is there to talk about?"

  "You'll feel weak as a child and be sick for weeks. With your immune system dormant and your white-cell count down, you'll be subject to every garden-variety bug that comes along. Just keeping you alive will be a major undertaking. You could easily die of this treatment."

  "Or die anyway without it."

  "We'll know more in seventy-two hours," he assured her.

  "By which time I'll be chock full of poisons and halfway dead already."

  "I'm your doctor, Gina."

  "And I'm a free woman, Doctor. Give me a release form, and I'll sign it. I'd rather be fighting this thing tonight than sitting around hoping it'll go away."

  Harper stuck out his lower lip. He looked truculent, but Tochman could see he was actually gnawing his upper lip with his bottom teeth.

  "All right," he said finally. "You're in for a load of pain that may not be necessary."

  "I've got that coming anyway."

  "Go in the next room and take off your clothes. I'll be with you in two minutes to do the preliminary typing."

  Tochman stood up, then paused. "What about the others, Doctor? What about Carlin? What are you going to tell them?"

  "That's what I'm giving myself two minutes to decide."

  Chapter 20

  Awakening the Dead

  Gurneys

  Stretchers

  Sleeping Bags …

  Facing Chairs

  Chatham County Medical Center, Savannah, Georgia, March 21, 8:01 p.m. EST

  The flow of patients radiated out into the corridors adjoining the Emergency Room. Their inert and sometimes lifeless bodies lay on whatever was handy, whatever would keep them off the bare floor and maintain some semblance that this was a hospital and not a battlefield aid station. Of course, the center had run out of four-way adjustable gurneys in the first half-hour of the crisis.

  Dr. Norman Filchner walked those corridors now, stepping over a skewed arm here, a cocked leg there. He studied the slack faces of the patients. He smiled into the tense faces of the relatives whom the administration had bent all rules in letting in to tend their loved ones. These volunteer nurses cradled heads, wiped drool, and held up drip bags to maintain pressure in the IVs after the hospital had run out of rolling stands.

  Filchner was baffled. Since early afternoon they had been coming in, hundreds of comatose patients, all shocked into a deep state of near-catatonia. He and his fellow doctors and technicians had drawn blood, checked for pupil dilation, and questioned friends and family about possible allergic reactions, drug taking, and histories of nervous disorder.

  Bitby bit a familiar pattern had begun to emerge. Every one of the patients had in some way been connected into the national communications net when the burst of interference took it down. Most of the people Filchner was seeing here were gamers, people who locked themselves into a room, put on a helmet and gloves, and went off adventuring. The tragedy, of course, was that no one found them for hours after the primary seizure. Filchner shuddered to think ofthe thousands more—maybe even tens of thousands in this city alone—who were now drooling on the floor. Multiply that by all the cities and towns of this country, and you were left with millions of people in dire medical condition with no help in sight.

  Not that Filchner had a lot he could offer these patients.

  If it had been a simple drug overdose, then he could pump out their stomachs, apply measured doses ofthe correct countervailing stimulant or depressant, put them gently to sleep, and hope they would wake up twelve hours later. But not with these cases, where the central nervous system had taken a hit whose dimensions Filchner could not fathom. Was it electrical shock? Sensory overstimulation? Induced psychosis? What?

  The irony was that, at about this point in the diagnosis Filchner would normally be putting on his own helmet and having a long heart-to-heart with the medical intelligence at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. But, of course, the cybers had gone down in the same wave of atmospheric static, and no one could say just when they might come back on line. So Filchner and his associates were reduced to the level of medicine men shaking their rattles over the supine bodies. The most Filchner could do was keep them quiet, keep them hydrated, and wait for an outcome.

  He stopped beside one body, lying on a mattress covered with a sheet. The drip bag was taped to the wall above one arm. The wrist bracelet said this was "Kozinski, Jerry, WM 17 yrs." That was about all the medical history his mother or uncle or whoever would have left after bringing the boy in. Oh, yes, there was the second line: National Medical Identification Number KB702-41659-53427-02.

  Filchner laid one finger along the boy's neck to check the pulse. It was strong and steady—not thin and reedy like some of the others. Maybe this one had gotten a lighter dose of whatever it was that had knocked them all out. The doctor rested his hand on the dry forehead. The skin was warm to the touch, but not actively feverish.

  "Unh!" the boy gasped, and shook Filchner's hand off.

  The doctor cupped the young shoulder to give some reassurance.

  "The dog!" Kozinski croaked. His eyes never opened, and now they squeezed tight with pain.

  "What about the dog?" Filchner asked quietly.

  "It's… eating me!" He brushed ineffectually at the drip needle stuck into the crook of his elbow. "My arm! He's eating my arm!" Kozinski clawed at the tubing.

  Afraid the boy would break the needle off under the skin,
Filchner grabbed at the wrist and pulled the reaching fingers away. The arm with the drip in it came up in a defensive gesture, and the doctor snared that wrist, too, in his other hand. Down on his knees in a hospital corridor, Norman Filchner wrestled with a comatose kid.

  "Trapped… can't breathe!" the boy moaned. And still his eyes never opened.

  "Nurse!" Filchner called. He had a sleepy-patch in his pocket, but with both hands occupied he had no way to get at it and apply the sticker to Kozinski's neck.

  Before any of the orderlies could respond, however, the spasm passed and the boy's writhing quieted. In another minute, he was lying still again.

  Filchner got off the floor, looked up and down the hallway. And there were millions of these people all over the North American continent.

  Christ, what a mess!

  CH4… 16-1/4

  CH4… 16-1/2

  CH4… 17-3/8

  CH4… 18-1/8

  Western Board of Trade, Chicago, March 21, 7:11 p.m. CST

  For the last four hours, ever since the North American Commodities Market reopened after the glitch or whatever that had shut it down, Lexander Bartels had been digging himself out of a hole.

  Natural gas for October delivery had been lunch for the bottom-feeders over the past three days. And October was the month that the Titan Cartel had scheduled for release of product from its mammoth solar-sailing tanker. Every stratagem Bartels had tried—from taking anonymous positions in the market to publishing doubtful opinions by condescending experts regarding the tanker's speed and capacity—had failed to jar the downward trend in methane.

  This morning everything had looked like a disaster. The sunjammer was on schedule and almost parked in Earth orbit The price of its product was at a record low. And the Titan Cartel, which had put Bartels under an exclusive trading commission, which he now bitterly regretted, was howling for him to do something, anything.

  Then the market had gotten sandbagged by a technical failure of some sort. The board's chairman—with concurrence of the ministers of commerce from all participating governments—had clocked all quotes back to their position as of midnight. And natural gas had lost the half a point it had actually recovered in the wee hours of the morning. That fractional point arguably represented three days' hard work by Lexander Bartels.

  Now, with the quote numbers slithering horizontally across the lower horizon of his left eye and the news analyses and summarized announcements of the whole trading world flashing in his right eye, Bartels grasped at straws.

  Could he invent a pipeline accident? With all the confusion following the trading glitch, stories were still getting scrambled. Many of the items passing his right eye were missing their source attributions. He could float a bogus story, leave his code off it, and it was even money that Quotrix, the artificial intelligence which refereed the flow of marketable information, would pass it unchallenged. Further, it was a good bet that many of the buyers would believe it and punch up the price of gas. Not a lot, maybe, but enough to recapture that half a point

  It would be something to offer the Cartel boys while they were screaming for his head on a platter.

  As Bartels pondered this scheme, wondering if he could get away with something so patently illegal, the flow of blue numbers in his left eye took an upward slant. The movement was gradual at first, rising only by eighths and quarters, but it held.

  What was this?

  Lexander pumped his right cheek muscle, forcing the pace of the news flashes that flickered in that eye.

  Nothing about gas.

  Nothing about pipelines.

  Nothing about the Cartel's precious tanker.

  Whoops! There it was. And God damn it—!

  TITAN CARTEL SPACE TANKER CRASHES IN DOCKING ACCIDENT… HARMLESS IMPACT AGAINST MOON… 7.5 BILLION M3 METHANE GAS LOST… CF 032181TITAN CRASH…

  Bartels looked up the referenced text of the complete story—and wasn't "Titan crash" one hell of an ominous condensation?—to see if any of the details possibly held good news. They didn't.

  He skimmed the five meager paragraphs, which were fully attributed to the prestigious Earth-Moon News Agency. The story included a lot of checkable specifics, down to and including the name and personal history of the sole human casualty in the accident, Tod Becher, who had piloted the docking tug. Considering the disordered state of the international news services at even this remove from the communications blackout, it was a pretty full account

  Bartels began to wonder if he and the market weren't the victims of an elaborate hoax. Could someone, most likely a newspeaker in the Titan Cartel's own bureaucracy, have planted this story in hopes of forcing the price of its product back up? It was the sort of subterfuge Lexander Bartels had been thinking of trying—if he had the courage and didn't mind that, within five seconds of the ruse being discovered, Quotrix would issue a warrant for his arrest that would slap him in a maximum-security jail alongside a bunch of minimum-sociability felons.

  Still, the lie—if it was one—had gotten results. The price of gas was undeniably rising, up to 20-5/8 by now.

  But the truth—if that was what it was—would be infinitely worse. Who cared where the price of methane for October delivery went, if the Cartel's solar-sailing tanker actually had crashed into the Moon? They didn't have another one coming anytime soon—or not soon enough to make a coup in this rising market

  Lexander Bartels wondered whether he should laugh or cry.

  Then he thought of the positions he could take in the market for himself. Whether the Cartel had lost its shirt or not, there was always money to be made in a technical upswing. Bartels put away his ruminations and suspicions and began issuing buy orders, fast, on his own behalf.

  Beep…

  Beep…

  Beep…

  Beep…

  Victoria General Hospital, British Columbia, March 21, 5:26 p.m. PST

  "The alpha rhythm is stronger, Doctor."

  The voice came from a great distance. Winston Qiang-Phillips tossed on a sea of cold mist, washed by a chill fogthatseeped and creeped through his head. It blew in and out of the holes that a clutch of white fingertips had once punched in his skull, when they took hold of it and twisted.

  Lacking any better course, he began swimming toward that voice.

  "Yes, the persistent delta is fading now. Hmm…"

  Another voice pulled at him, coming from another distance, in a direction opposite the first voice. Winston treaded the mist with his useless, flipper-like hands and tried to decide which way he should swim. Deciding was hard because his head, which was still full of round, white holes, wasn't working either.

  As he was not moving in any direction, Winston slowly began to rise. Up through whiter and colder banks of mist he went, drowning in vapor. He opened his mouth to breathe.

  He opened his eyes.

  Winston was looking into a layer of white foam with a hard stripe of white light banded on it. He thought he was looking up at the underside of the ocean's surface, with the sun marking a long, wavering ribbon of reflection. Then his eyes cleared and the foam became the acoustic tile of a low ceiling. The light became a fluorescent tube baffled by a pane of tiny facets, like a paving of gemstones.

  Two dark shapes loomed above him, like walruses surfacing to inspect his soaked body.

  "How are you doing?" asked the walrus on his right side. "That was a near thing for you."

  No, it was a far thing, Winston Qiang-Phillips thought He had gone so far, for so long.

  He raised a hand. It came up weakly, stiffly, feeling like a dried-out stick. He touched his forehead and cheekbones, probing for the holes which the white hand had made. The solid flesh of his face dimpled and then pushed back against his fingertips.

  "Have a headache, do you?" the walrus asked, running a bony, human knuckle back and forth under its mustache. "That's not surprising.”

  "Shall I get him a pain pill, Doctor?" asked the other walrus, which was smaller and did not happen
to have a mustache. Its teeth, however, seen from this low angle, were long and flattened and yellow.

  "Four hundred milligrams ibuprofen."

  "Right away." The second walrus left his side.

  "How do you swim without moving your hands?" Winston asked, hearing his voice come out in a husky whisper.

  "What?" the first walrus replied. "Oh, you have a mild hallucination, is all—it will pass quickly. You're in a hospital, Mr. Qiang. They brought you in with neural feedback trauma after the Exchange went down this morning."

  "What happened?"

  "Some kind of freak electromagnetic storm. Other than that, my dear chap, no one knows. We've had speculations, of course. Some say it was a high-altitude atomic bomb, or perhaps an old fission pile that detonated upon reentry. Either would produce that kind of wide-ranging electromagnetic pulse. Other people claim it was a shower of particularly intense cosmic rays, possibly the residue of some nearby and as-yet-undiscovered supernova. A third opinion says it was the result of a computer glitch in the worldwide communication net. It would have to be some sort of replicating programming error, similar to a virus, they say. Though, personally, I can't swallow that, given the number of antibody screens at work in the system today."

  The walrus, who wore the white coat of a doctor, looked extremely smug in its conclusions.

  "But what happened to me?" Winston insisted.

  "Oh, that! Call it a temporary neural overload. When the communication net failed, your brain was hooked into a virtual reality processor—as you may remember. In a period of time shorter than the normal synaptic impulse, you took on a sudden burst of information, mostly compressed images and active sense data. Your brain was quite unable to cope with it all and so retreated. You gave us a rather good impersonation of catatonia there for a few hours. The chaps from the Exchange were wringing their hands over you and the others. They all thought you were brain dead."

  "And am I?" Qiang-Phillips asked fearfully.