Alan E. Nourse - The Bladerunner (24 page)

"Did you call Doc?" Parrot said immediately. "What did he have to say?"

"Not much that I remember, except that he's working."

"Well, some of the other docs are too, I've heard, so
something
must be getting through. And we've had at least one real break. I finally got Brown convinced of the story—you know Brown? He supplies a whole big area around Hospital Number Eleven, west of here, must work with forty or fifty bladerunners and their docs—and he's going to get things moving on his end. He got smart, called Hospital Number Eleven Central Supply and asked them for immune globulin and Virici-din supplies, and in one-half hour they had a whole truckload of injection packs on his doorstep. He's up to his ears in them—so they must mean business. Okay, he's got a list of runners he'd like you to see, he isn't exactly popular with his boys, always clipping them too much, but he'll back you up if you'll make the contacts. Just swing by here and get the list. And the feedback is starting to come in from the Clinic at Hospital Number Seven that people are getting Viricidin shots with no questions asked; they're not even taking names or IDs. So if we can get the word around that Health Control is really looking the other way, I think we can get a lot of these people to go in to the Clinics and save the docs many steps. No bad feedback yet, either, Billy . . . Billy? Hey, are you there?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm here," Billy said dully. "No negative feedback, that's great."

"Okay, now, you come by for Brown's list when you finish the one you've got—and you'd better move. From what I've been hearing, there are thousands of people who have had this flu and just rode it out,
thousands
of them. Some of them are listening and accepting treatment and some are not, but it's going to take days, maybe weeks, to contact them all. There isn't any time to lose."

"Yeah, well, Ill be moving. See you later tonight or tomorrow." Billy hung up and sat looking at the list in his hand. Five, six, seven more to see, all strangers, the same long job of arguing, pleading, convincing with each one. He sighed and went back out to the waiting cab again. It was over four hours later before he was finally climbing the stairs to his own room, barely able to raise one foot ahead of the next. The light hurt his eyes, and the thought of food stirred no interest; coat and all, he collapsed on his bed and closed his eyes. He knew he had to rest, at least an hour or two, if he hoped to go on —and the new list from Parrot looked like three days' work. If he could relax a bit now perhaps his head would stop hurting. Moments later he drifted off, and slept for fourteen unbroken hours.

III

It did not take weeks, nor even days, however, before the results of the warning campaign began to show. Within twelve hours of Billy's departure from Doc's office there was an upsurge in patient visits to the emergency room clinics at Hospital No. 7, as indicated in the routine half-daily patient census, and by the following morning patients were queuing up by the hundreds at the Clinic treatment rooms inquiring about the flu shots they had heard were supposed to be available. Triple shifts of nurses were assigned to the treatment cubicles, and questions were deliberately limited to specific data which was necessary to guide the treatment. Had the patient had any symptoms of the Shanghai flu? If so, what symptoms and when? Was there fever or illness now? Any other members of the family exposed? Friends or other contacts? These and a few other questions—allergic history, for example, or past reactions to antibiotics—made up the specially tailored mini-history, and in any case in which "flu" was mentioned there was a notable absence of interest in names, identifying numbers or Health Control qualifications. The appropriate medications were dispensed, data on possible contacts was taken for special telephone crews to tackle later, and each treated patient was earnestly exhorted to pass the word to anyone—anyone at all—known to have been exposed to the flu to come in for free protective shots with the greatest dispatch possible. People young and old shambled into the Clinics, people who had not darkened the door of a Health Control facility in twenty years, and each one, after receiving treatment, was enlisted as urgently and emphatically as possible as a bearer of the word to others.

True to the plan Mason Turnbull had outlined, there were no panic-inducing headlines from the Department of Health Control, no blanket announcements of amnesty from the qualification laws—but on the first day Health Control did release a low-key news announcement that a "possibly widespread" epidemic of Shanghai flu was "expected" in the city, and that "highly effective" preventive treatment could be obtained without charge at any regular Health Control facility. The following day Turnbull himself held a brief but well-covered press conference in which he mentioned reports "from some areas" of late-appearing meningitis-like symptoms believed to be related to the Shanghai flu, and again urged all who had had flu-like symptoms or had even had contact with influenza victims to present themselves at Health Control facilities for preventive and therapeutic treatment. It was a masterpiece of news manipulation, carefully geared both to stimulate action and defuse panic, and although Turnbull was rumored to have gone into total nervous collapse when the conference was over, the results of the broadcast were salutary. Health Control switchboards were flooded with calls and the queues at the Clinics and Hospitals lengthened.

Much of the influx of patients at Hospital No. 7 was ascribed to these announcements, but there was no question that underground rumors were contributing even more heavily. For Doc and Molly the first day had been spent telephoning multitudes of underground patients that they had treated in the past, urging them to come forth, and compiling a growing list of those who were too suspicious to come to the Hospital, even at Doc's urging, but pleaded that he—or somebody—get them the protective medicine via underground channels. By evening Doc had apportioned these calls between himself and Molly Barret; after Billy's long-overdue call had come in, Doc and Molly set out on their respective ways on night-long rounds to catch those recalcitrant patients and urge them to pass the word to others they knew to come into the emergency rooms for care. And the lines grew longer.

Next morning Doc was back at the Hospital at seven, after two hours of stolen sleep, and met a hollow-eyed Molly in his office to compare notes. Over a hundred new calls were awaiting answers on his telephone recorder; even Molly was receiving calls from underground patients long since forgotten. It was clear from the doctors' call board in the Hospital lobby that other staff doctors were straggling in late or not at all—a reflection, Doc assumed, of their efforts to reach their own underground patients. Each- of the staff had found a special notice from Dr. Katie Durham in his box the day before, announcing that the Hospital was going on Emergency Routine until the epidemic work was under control. Routine admissions were canceled, all but emergency surgery was canceled, and special Clinics, staff meetings, and teaching rounds were all canceled. What was more, it was made clear that there would be no formal inquiry as to where staff doctors might be and what they might be doing in the hours they were freed from the normal hospital routine. If they had underground patients to see, the notice seemed to imply, this was their opportunity to see them, and the earlier the better.

Briefly Doc and Molly went over their lists, agreeing who should see whom. Both kept a nervous eye on the phone, hoping for a call from Billy, but no call came. Finally Molly was paged for Emergency Room relief service, with another room being opened for administering Viricidal and immune globulin, and Doc started off for morning rounds on his recovering post-surgical patients. Both would be busy at the Hospital all morning, but would be free by midafternoon to get back to their lists of underground patients.

On the surgical wards one problem led to another, and it was hours later when Doc started back toward his office, feeling a bone-weariness he hadn't felt for months. Katie Durham, emerging from an office in the Computer Section, saw him boarding the elevator, and joined him. Her face was flushed, but there were lines of weariness about her eyes. "I don't know, John," she said as they stepped off the elevator and started down the corridor toward his office, "we're catching thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands by now, in the various Clinics—we've opened four of the specialty clinics to immunizations and protective shots—but the admission curve on the meningitis is still climbing. We're nearly out of isolation beds by now, and there are more coming in every hour. I wish we'd started all this ten days ago."

"Well, we didn't. But with all the activity now the curve is bound to show a drop pretty soon."

"Maybe so. If it doesn't, I don't know what we're going to do. These people coming in for shots are on the thin edge. It wouldn't take much to trigger a panic, and a lot of them are actively sick—" Her voice trailed off and she regarded him solemnly. "Do you have any idea what's happening on the underground end of this?"

"Hard to say yet," Doc said. "Molly Barret and I must have seen over two hundred people between us in the past twenty-four hours. Most of the other staff have been doing the same thing. How many contacts per doctor is hard to guess, but if each of the four hundred and fifty staff people have seen as many as we have, that adds up to ninety thousand contacts. It's probably not that good, but it could be close. The problem isn't contacting people, right now, it's getting supplies. My supplier is going to be down to bare shelves tonight unless I miss my guess."

"So are we. Central Supply is very low, but we have a special shipment coming in from Chicago this afternoon. We seem to be further into this thing than other sectors of the city or country, the Health Control expediter tells me that they're mobilizing other areas somewhat more slowly, and that there's less urgency elsewhere. Which is fine, I guess. As long as panic stories don't start spilling out of here, we may just be in time." Katie looked up at him. "What do you hear from your boy?"

"Too little for comfort. I was just going to check." Doc flipped his console switch, scanned the list of calls that had come in while he was gone, and shook his head. "Nothing. I haven't heard from him since last night, and I don't like it. He said he was touching every base he could as fast as he could, but he's sick himself, sounded just terrible last night. He was supposed to check in again this morning, but he hasn't."

"Is there anything I can do?" Katie said.

"No, not at this point. He may just be out of reach of a phone, I don't know. From the lines downstairs, though, it looks as if the word is getting around somehow. You just see that there are enough supplies for us to dip into when we need to."

"I'll check with Central right now, but I think they'll be all right again by this afternoon. And John"—Katie paused on her way out—"don't
you
get too worn out. We don't want you sick too."

"Nor you." Doc looked up at her and smiled. "You know, it seems strange, the two of us being on the same side of the fence all of a sudden. Maybe when this is all over—if it ever gets over—we could have ourselves a night on the town. Dinner, a good show, not a word about medicine or Health Control."

"I haven't heard anything that's sounded so good in months," Katie said. "It's a date, John—when all this is over." She hesitated a moment more, then turned and disappeared down the hall.

His desk was piled high with unfinished Hospital work, but Doc turned to the telephone and tried Billy's number for the third time that morning. As before, it rang and rang with no response. He left a tape message urging Billy to call back without delay, and turned back to his desk. There were heaps of patient records to review, X-rays and cardiograms to read for permanent recording, robot-operated cases to analyze and criticize, correspondence to answer. Doc buzzed for a sandwich to save time and dug into the pile, working steadily through the afternoon. At one point Molly checked in, about to leave the hospital to resume underground calls. Over coffee they studied her list, and she agreed to check back by early evening for new calls that would be accumulating.

With Molly on her way, Doc returned to his desk work, but he couldn't get his mind off Billy. As afternoon wore into evening there was still no word. Twice he tried calling Parrot with the code number Billy had given him, but although a connection was made each time, he heard only a recorder tape humming, and neither call was returned. With growing uneasiness Doc joined the evening crowd in the Hospital cafeteria, noting the almost complete absence of the usual clots of staff doctors around the table. He ordered a steak and black coffee, then returned to his office, and began systematically returning query calls that had piled up from underground patients during the afternoon. Now he found that people were noticeably more receptive to his urging that they come in to Hospital facilities for protective shots; only a few could not be convinced, and when Molly checked in about 9:00 p.m. he had only half a dozen additional names for her. "They just aren't as suspicious as they were yesterday," Doc told her. "Mostly they just want to be reassured that the rumors they've heard are true."

"The important thing is they're hearing rumors," Molly said. "And that must mean that the bladerunners are getting the word around." She paused. "Have you heard from Billy?"

"Not a word."

"Doc, something's got to be wrong. He could have gotten hit on the head or almost anything—that's a rough crowd of people he's been trying to track down."

"I know it, but that's not what scares me. He was really in no shape to go out at all, and if he's forgotten to take those capsules—" Doc sighed. "Molly, I'm going to have to go find him. You get these names cleared and go home. I'll see you in the morning."