Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (12 page)

"Not really. But it seemed pretty common-sense to me. You find somebody sick with a contagious disease, you try to trace back to find out who he got it from, and then trace ahead to see who he might have given it to."

"Yeah. Where I come from we call it epidemiology," Carlos said wryly. "You've had no medical training at all?"

"I had two years in medical school, four or five years ago, before I had to drop out."

Carlos looked up. "Oh, really? What happened? If I'm not too nosy."

"Nothing terrible. My father came down with a bad cancer. Somebody had to mind the farm, and I was elected. By the time he died, we had to sell out to meet debts and expenses, and by then the idea of being a doctor had kind of lost its charm anyway—I'd seen enough for a lifetime, with Dad. A spot with the Forest Service came open and I grabbed it."

"Well, this is very good work you've done down here. It's going to give us a running start, and I want you to stick around, if you can. But right now the burning question is what happened to Pam Tate—and how in hell it could have happened."

"You mean so fast?"

"Exactly," Carlos said. "Ordinarily an infectious disease behaves in certain characteristic ways that you learn to recognize. That's one of the ways that you tell Disease A from Disease B. Of course, Monique's little bacteria cultures are a big help, too—but clinical patterns may be more important. Take leprosy, for instance—an infectious disease that normally spreads directly from person to person, but only after longstanding, very close physical contact with someone who's infected. Even after the organism invades the new victim, it often takes from five to fifteen
years
of incubation before it really starts to move. It's a deadly disease, all right, but very slow, very indolent. Plague has a characteristic pattern, too, but it's totally different from leprosy. Plague doesn't normally spread from person to person. The usual pattern is Rat gets sick, Flea bites Rat, Flea bites Man, Man gets sick. Then once the organism gets in the human body by this complex infective chain, it normally takes some three to five days to grow in there before fever or any other signs of illness appear." The doctor looked up at Frank. "Compared to leprosy, it's really explosive, it's so fast, but we're still talking about three to five
days
as a sort of minimum. Not twelve
hours.
Not even forty-eight hours. Which brings us to your Pamela Tate and the absolutely incredible report I have on her from our Shoeleather men up there."

"Pam Tate went fast," Frank said.

"If the story's true," Carlos said, "she went faster than I ever
heard
of anybody going, with plague. Look at the timing. From the story I have, she started up that mountain in full good health about four
a.m
. on a Monday morning. By Monday evening she was symptomatic—coughing, feverish, feeling sick. By then she was actually spreading infection to others by casual respiratory contact—it was the only contact she had with these Colorado people. By sometime on Tuesday—Day Two— up at Lancelot Lake, she was violently ill, and she died of pneumonic plague sometime before dawn of Day Three, and other people later contracted virulent infection just from contact with her body." Carlos sighed. "Well, my friend, for classical plague that story just doesn't hang together. Some vital piece is missing. I'm hoping you can fill it in."

Frank shook his head. "The story you just outlined is exactly what happened. Except that she did have contact with some dead rodents that first day."

The doctor looked up. "How do you know that?"

"She wrote it in her log. The little journal she kept." Frank produced Pam's notebook from his pocket.

Carlos took it to a window, opened it in the bright morning sunlight and began reading, very slowly, very carefully, stopping now and then to take notes of his own. After a long while he handed it back to Frank. "Well, there are the rats and the fleas, as far as Pam was concerned. Amazing. But she couldn't have passed the fleas on to all those other people. To one or two of them, maybe, but not all of them." He got up and paced for a moment. "You know, this business about the dirty, ragged boy is very strange."

"I can't make any sense out of that," Frank said.

"Oh, I can," Carlos said. "That's why it's so strange. One of the oldest persisting folk tales in histoiy involves some kind of a demon-creature who always appeared just before the plague. The story turns up again and again. Ted Bettendorf, my boss in Atlanta and a major scholar of plague, has written papers about it. As far back as 100
a.d
. Apollonius of Tyana was writing that the plague in Asia Minor was always preceded by the appearance in crowded places of a man whose eyes flashed fire—how about that? Philostratus, his biographer, confirmed the story five hundred years later. And then there was a thirteenth-century text—Ted has actually seen this one—written by some medieval chronicler called Gunther of Brandenburg who wrote, 'Never yet has the plague come but one has first seen a ragged, stinking boy who drank like a dog from the village well and then passed on. . . .' "

"You don't actually
believe
that, do you?" Frank said.

"Please. Of course I believe it. I mean, I believe it was believed. True or not—I couldn't say."

"I don't believe it," Frank said.

"Ah, well. Would you believe in the Day of the Dead in old
Mexico
? No, you probably wouldn't. Little candy skulls with your name on them. But / do." Carlos shrugged eloquently. "There's the difference between you and me. But let's come back to the present. Tel! me about this town you live in, this Leavenworth, Washington. No connection with the prison, I presume?"

"No, it's just a little mountain village. The town fathers prettied it up with an Alpine Village theme a few years ago— Swiss false fronts on the main street, German names, knack-wurst for breakfast, all that sort of stuff. Turned it into a modest tourist attraction, very beautiful location at the foot of the mountains, good fishing, and it's close to a lot of trailheads leading to the Central Cascades."

"Nice and clean? Good sanitary facilities?"

"They work overtime at it. Clean and pretty as a Dutch girl's nose."

"No rats around, I suppose."

"Well, sometimes pack rats get into people's attics in the winter," Frank said.

"No,T don't mean pack rats. I mean the big brown rats with the long naked tails." Carlos held his hands apart. "The big humpbacked bastards that measure two feet from nose to tail tip and hang around alleys and sewers and waterfronts."

Frank shook his head. "I've never seen one of those there. I'm not sure I've ever seen one in my life."

"Count your blessings," Carlos said. "What about the place you and Pam were living? An old building?"

"Brand-new. The builder couldn't sell it because of interest rates, so he gave us a break on the rent for an upstairs apartment."

"No mice around?"

"No."

"Did Pam have a cat?"

'-'Matter of fact, she hated them. We didn't have a dog, either. We just weren't around the place enough to keep a dog, especially with the summer work load."

Monique, busy taking notes, looked up. "Any birds? Budgies, parakeets?"

"No birds."

Carlos chewed on his thumb, then took a deep breath. "Okay, my large friend, now I have to crowd you a little—but it's critically important. You said Pam was in peak physical condition that Monday morning when she started up the mountain. Perfectly healthy in every way. How did you know that?"

Frank flushed. "She sure seemed to be in pretty good shape the night before."

"Okay, like specifically."

"Hell, man, you can't take a woman like that to bed without knowing whether she's sick or not," Frank exploded. "You could tell in a million ways. We were veiy, very close. We were fine-tuned to each other, mentally and physically. Her job demanded top physical conditioning or she just couldn't have hacked it. What's more, she was one of those people who had to be really high on what she was doing or she tended to droop, and she wasn't doing any drooping." Frank took a deep breath. "Everything I remember about her that night and morning spelled exuberant good health to me. That morning, as usual, she got out of bed like she was shot from a cannon when the alarm went off. Then she decided I was too slow crawling out, so she got hold of a foot and started pulling. There was a little horseplay, a little wordplay, a little light fooling around, but I

Finally let her win and rolled out and started helping her stuff her pack. Well, Doctor, that is not a picture of a woman who's
sick."

"No," Carlos said gloomily, "I guess it isn't. But what about earlier? What were you two doing two or three days before that particular morning?"

"The Thursday before, she came down from the Enchantments over Asgard Pass into Colchuck Lake and down Eight Mile creek to the road. Caught a ride, so she got home a little earlier than usual. We'd finagled three days off at the same time, so we went to Wenatchee for dinner and a show, stayed over with some friends, and then went to a country auction on Friday. She found some cheap kitchen cabinets that caught her eye, so we hauled them home and spent the rest of the weekend refinishing them. That was about it."

Carlos regarded the big forester for a long moment. "Could something possibly have happened to Pam on that previous trip, before she came out on Thursday? Dead rodents or anything like that?"

"Not that I know of," Frank said. "She was a sharp girl. If anything had happened, she'd have put it in her logbook, and probably told me as well. She didn't say anything, and when I checked back through the book later I found nothing."

"There were no breaks in her skin that you know of? No scratches? Sores? Flea bites?"

"I guarantee you, she didn't have any flea bites."

Carlos sighed and walked across to rub Monique's shoulder. "Well, there you are, my dear," he said. "You see why I'm nervous."

"Yes," she said. "I certainly see."

"A whole chain of infections, all moving far too fast, with a very high ratio of direct person-to-person contact. No rats, and no fleas in between. And most if not all of these cases traceable to a single totally impossible index case. You know what that adds up to, God help us."

Monique sighed and nodded. "An atypical variant. A wild one that writes its own ticket."

"Well, pinning
that
down is up to you at Fort Collins," Carlos said. "You've got plenty of samples to work on."

"Yes, but they're old samples. Run a bug like that through a few successive culture plates and you don't know
what
you've got."

"Don't worry, the Shoeleather Boys will get you enough new samples. And Frank and I are going out tomorrow to find some of these dead rodents he's been talking about. We'll bring you some fresh meat."

19

Chet Benoliel knew he should have passed up the date, let the girl wait until she got tired and went home, and just forgotten about it. He knew that before he even left the hotel to pick her up, but he pushed it out of his mind. By the time he had checked into his room at the DeSoto Hilton ifi Savannah that morning he was thoroughly sick, coughing almost constantly, baking under that furious overhead sun and suffocating in the swamplike humidity steaming up from the river. To top it off, the air conditioner in his room wasn't working and he was just too sick to call the manager and scream about it—which, for Chet Benoliel, was pretty sick. But Chet had made up his mind that he was going to make it with Shari that night, after that stewardess had given him the chill, and when it came to some things, Chet tended to be very stubborn, not to say downright stupid.

He had thought some sleep might help, and collapsed fully clothed on the hotel-room bed, but eight hours' sleep didn't seem to be the answer. He woke about 5:00
p.m
. pouring sweat, with the afternoon sun beating in his window and the room like an oven. He took a belt from the Scotch bottle in his bag, coughed for three minutes until he got his breath, and then sloshed his face down with cold water in the bathroom. Then he took a long cold shower. His hands were shaking as he sat on the bed and dialed Shari's number at work to be sure she'd be free for the evening.
Not that she wouldn't—unless she had an awfully short memory.

Shari was free, all right, no question about that. Shari was a waitress at the Seafood Express down on River Street, and though the boss didn't like it too much, the job gave her plenty of chances to meet well-heeled young businessmen looking for some plain and fancy evening entertainment. Usually she kept it strictly to after-hours, but not with Chet Baby. She may not have been the brightest twenty-two-year-old working girl in Savannah, she thought, but she wasn't a total idiot. She remembered the last time Chet was in town, three months ago—that great big pool, the palace of a condo, everything clean and neat, and Chet himself. She'd actually enjoyed it, he was one pile-drivin' man, all night long with hardly a rest. And when she got home, she'd found that what he'd stuck in her purse wasn't a couple hundred like she thought, but a thousand-dollar bill with that beautiful picture of Clever Groveland or whoever he was on it.