Alan E. Nourse - The Bladerunner (9 page)

Two frustrating dead ends—but that was not all that was bothering Doc. Deep in his mind there was another worry, far more ominous, yet strangely undefined, chipping away stubbornly at his subconscious. It was something quite aside from Billy Gimp or the Hardy boy—a cold, relentless sense of impending disaster that Doc could neither shake aside or identify. Billy and his arrest were part of it, yes, and so was the boy with meningitis —yet somehow Doc sensed that they were only tiny pieces in a much larger puzzle, a frightening pattern of events that doggedly eluded definition. There were other pieces to the puzzle, too: the dangerous game he was playing with his legitimate work at the Hospital, the nightly demonstrations and near-riots occurring outside the Hospital doors, the sense of imminent crisis he felt so strongly as he walked the wards and corridors of the vast medical center—

He shook his head wearily as the little ground-cab moved swiftly south through the city. Thinking about it now was pointless; he was too bone-weary at this point to think about
anything
coherently. Perhaps with a few hours of sleep the elusive pattern that was dogging him would come clear in his mind. Maybe by morning the sick boy would have been brought to the Hospital so that he could do something there. At the very least, by then, he should have heard from Billy, so that the two of them together could formulate some sort of plan.

And it was then, in the depths of his weariness, that it dawned on him fully and for the first time how very much any plan that he might contemplate was going to depend on Billy Gimp.

• II
  
• IV
  
• IV
  

II

There were no messages from Billy on Doc's apartment phone, however, and no messages waiting in his box at Hospital No. 7 when he arrived there at a little after 7:00 in the morning. There had been little rest when he had reached home; after an hour or so of fitful dozing, intermixed with unpleasant dreams, he had gotten up, showered, and then read surgical journals before taking a ground-cab to the Hospital. Now as he flipped the IN sign by his name at the call desk and walked across the lobby he felt raw-eyed and groggy. Pushing through the lines of patients already queuing up for the 8:00 outpatient clinics or morning admissions, he made his way to the staff canteen behind the banks of elevators and found coffee and doughnuts, the only breakfast he ever ate. Armed with a full cannister of coffee, he took an elevator to the twenty-eighth floor, hopped a jitney to the north wing, and a few moments later was letting himself into the welcome solitude and privacy of his own Hospital office.

Sitting down behind his desk, he activated his computer console and studied his day's schedule as it appeared automatically on the screen. Fortunately it was an easy day, starting at 9:00 with the Mabel Turner heart case in the neuropantograph recording suite, then monitoring an emergency appendectomy that had been slipped into the schedule at the last minute, to be done by a pantograph-programmed robot, and ending with a cardiac transplant originally planned for noon but now rescheduled for 1:00. Pouring himself more coffee, he knew he should be using the available time to review the charts of the two heart patients; but after a half-hearted attempt to become interested, he cleared the console screen in disgust and sat back to stare out the window at the gray dawn.

He had counted on word from Billy by now, and the absence of any message at all was alarming. Breaking a long-standing agreement that they not communicate with each other directly in the Hospital, Doc called the operator to page Molly Barret in the Operating Suites on 17 Central. A moment later Molly appeared on the screen, looking as weary as Doc felt. "Word from Billy?" she said. "No, nothing. Haven't you heard from him yet? Doc, I'm worried."

"So am I," he said. "But I don't dare try calling him until I know he's clear." He looked at her. "Did you check Records for those figures on meningitis?"

"Yes," the girl said, "and that's another funny thing. They wouldn't give me the data."

"Wouldn't
give
it to you?"

"That's right. They said it was Hospital-classified, and I'd have to have a special authorization code from the Administrator. I wasn't sure what you'd want to do, so I cancelled the request. I hope that was right."

"Yes, that was certainly right. But
classified?
Molly, there's something very strange going on. Didn't they say anything else?"

"Not a thing."

"Well, all right, listen. I'll be in surgery most of the day, but if you hear anything from Billy, anything at all, leave me word on my office tape. I need to reach him as soon as I possibly can. And Molly—don't worry a lot. There's really not much they can do to him, the way I see it, and Billy's been on this griddle before. Hell make out all right." Doc rang off then, wishing he felt as confident as he had tried to sound.

Classified. Doc poured himself some more coffee and sat back in his recliner, frowning. All she had asked for was a statistical rundown from Medical Records on any and all cases of meningitis admitted to Hospital No. 7 in the past month—the type of infection, sex of the patients, age curves, pattern of symptoms, duration of illness, other medical history or contributing factors, a complete biomathematical profile of the sort that any doctor might need for any type of illness he might be treating. The Hospital's Medical Records department filled hundreds of such requests each day, searching out statistical profiles as routinely as they recorded blood counts and X-ray reports; it was a basic part of modern medicine's technological weaponry, and for such a profile to be Hospital-classified and withheld from review was virtually unheard of. Of course, he could go to the Hospital Administrator for authorization—but the less of Dr. Katie Durham's attention he drew right now, he decided, the better he liked it.

He pulled a pipe out of his desk, filled and lighted it. There was another way to do it, too. He could pull the admission rosters for each separate day during the last month, pick out the patients with admitting diagnoses of acute meninigitis, and pull their records one by one, compiling a statistical profile as he went. But such a procedure could take days, maybe weeks, of his time, and deep in his mind was a sense of urgency that told him that days or weeks might be too long.

Finally, disgusted, he activated his console and called for the admission roster of new patients admitted to the Hospital from the previous midnight on. When the list appeared on his screen, he went through it carefully, name by name. Just as he feared, no Hardy was listed on the roster, although four other patients with tentative diagnoses of acute meningitis had been admitted during the night and confined to the Hospital's isolation wards. Along with the roster was a flagged notice directing all Hospital personnel to report to the Public Health and Immunology Department on 8 West for gamma globulin shots as short-term protection against an unclassified viral meningitis diagnosed in "several admitted patients," and a long notice from Immunology describing efforts to prepare a multi-valent vaccine against all currently active strains of viral meningitis in the eastern sector of the country. Doc coded in a request for a print-out of the notices to be placed in his box. Then, never entirely trusting the computer-compiled admissions roster, Doc called the Admitting Office and asked them to check for a Hardy on the night's admission cards.

After a five-minute wait, Admitting came back and said no, no Hardy had been admitted. Doc flipped off the console and sat back with a sigh of defeat. It had been too much to expect, after all. He had been hoping against hope that the fact that the Hardys had violated their Naturist convictions to the extent of calling in a doctor in the first place might have led them to follow his urgings and have the boy admitted. Yet he could also see how impossible, how unthinkable, this might be for them, considering the fanatical zeal with which the whole Naturist movement, from Randall the Martyr on down, hated and despised doctors and medical care in general, and treatment in government Hospitals in particular. This was no lipservice dedication, and never had been; from the very first the Naturists had followed the tenets and teachings of Randall Morganson with a single-minded devotion more reminiscent of fixed religious conviction than of mere social or ethical policies.

In fact, Doc reflected, the really surprising thing was that the Hardys had decided to call a doctor at all, for the Naturist movement had always been marked more by zeal than by judgment. Randall the Martyr was as much alive today as he was before his death some twenty years before, and the cult of fanatics he had founded and led had continued to grow with each passing year despite all the government's efforts by force or by guile to silence its voice. It had been Randall Morganson who had led the movement through the bloody Health Riots of '94, flailing mobs of people into mindless, incandescent frenzy and sending them out to break into hospitals, burn down clinics and drive doctors and nurses into the streets for angry public confrontations, whippings, or worse. His capture, of course, had been inevitable; some said he was purposely daring the authorities to stop him, forcing them to move against him, knowing that his incarceration would merely fan the flames of violence and determination among his followers. Nor was the man without his own deep-seated personal conviction that the Naturist way was the only way, as events later proved. Whatever else he may have been, Randall the Martyr was no fraud. Perhaps it was mere coincidence—or ironic fate—that it was while he was waiting trial during the heat of the riots that he developed the first symptoms of the disease that was destined to kill him as swiftly as flames or gas chamber: the ravenous appetite, the unquenchable thirst and the increased urination that marked the onset of acute diabetes mellitus.

Physicians later concluded that Randall Morganson, at the age of twenty-seven, was suffering the belated onset of the virulent, fast-moving juvenile form of the disease, uncontrollable without vigorous medical intervention—and Randall flatly rejected medical aid of any kind. Throughout the rapid, downward course of his illness, his condition was followed daily by every newspaper in the country, and his flushed face, thinning cheeks and overbright eyes became familiar fare on every household TV screen. When his trial was accelerated by a government fearful that he might die before he could be convicted, no one was surprised that he was rescued from the courtroom at gunpoint by a squadron of his Naturist followers, all wearing the half-shaven head and beard that Randall himself had worn as a symbol since accidentally burning off half his hair escaping from a fiercely burning clinic building he and his lieutenants had fire-bombed. And from the day of his escape onward, the course of Randall Morganson's illness in a hideaway in Mexico remained a front-page newspaper story: the encroaching blindness, the episodes of diabetic coma staved off by rigorous dietary control, the gangrene of the extremities, the kidney failure, survived, some said, only by the overwhelming power of the man's will alone, and finally the ultimate martyrdom in a diabetic coma so profound that no measures whatever, medical or otherwise, could have reversed it.

Randall the Martyr dead was as much a firebrand as he ever had been while living, and even today he stood revered by the hardcore of Naturist followers who opposed any medical treatment for any form of illness, who attacked the government's Eugenics Control Program and the Sterilization Clinics as supreme blasphemy, and who died as Randall had died, of infections or other diseases rather than submit to the federalized system of medical care which had finally emerged from the Health Riots. True, there were Naturists who called in underground doctors for care. In some circles they were vilified as unbelievers, but there were others who quietly condoned the practice, claiming that it revealed the corruption of the government's programs in such bold relief that even the doctors could not live with them. As for Randall Morganson himself, it was in a way a supreme irony that he should have died of untreated diabetes, of all things, for it was an intense scrutiny of the increasing incidence of this ancient disease in the general population that led to the bloody Health Riots of 1994, and ultimately to the very health care programs that the Na-turists hated and resisted so fiercely.

Somewhere down the twenty-eighth floor corridor, a loudspeaker paged an intern, and occasional footsteps sounded past the office door; otherwise the place was very quiet. Doc walked to the window, peered down at the vast complex of buildings that composed the Federal Hospital and Medical Center No. 7 and the tier upon tier of Upper City apartment buildings that surrounded it on all sides. A gray winter rain was falling now, and the ground-cabs' lights were on as they moved up and down the busy thoroughfare fronting on the Hospital. A gray day, precisely the same kind of day some eighteen-odd years ago when the Health Riots in the space of a few brief hours had changed his own life so irrevocably. In a way he was surprised that the bitterness was still there, but probably it would always be there; even after all this time the memory of that horrible night was almost unbearably painful, mental images passing like a fiery tableau: the chanting, furious mob that had materialized without warning outside their quiet surburban home just as his wife had put the baby down and they were preparing for bed; the cutting of phone and computer wires as preparations were made to put the place to torch; the rising flames as four of them smashed the door and dragged him out at gunpoint to the torch-lit gauntlet of jeering, angry faces; his wife and the baby blocked at the door of the burning building by sniper fire until the billowing smoke blotted everything out. The police and fire trucks had come, finally, but as usual in those days, too late and with too little; the hour-long pitched battle that raged leaving half a dozen of the mob dead and a dozen more wounded, and he himself held forcibly in the squad car by a brawny police sergeant as the flaming roof collasped just as the fire hoses got started. . . .