Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (26 page)

"It isn't going to hold together, Ted."

"It will if you stay on top of it, Carlos. So stay on top. Jack will help."

"But the death toll, Ted. There's no end in sight, and I
can't fight without weapons. ..."

"You're fighting, Carlos. Keep fighting. I'll help you as much as possible." And Ted was off into the air to Atlanta, and Carlos went back to find Jack and spend another night trying to figure out what might help the next day.

The matter of the public broadcasts was one of the earliest and most flagrant examples of everything going wrong at once. Threatened by a deadly epidemic, people needed a constant, accurate, reliable source of information—yet the public broadcasts Carlos had originally tried to set up speedily degenerated into chaos. First an early tropical storm swept through, leaving the public information station standing in six feet of swampland water with no drainage. Then when the commercial stations stepped in to fill the gap, Carlos soon found that vital announcements were tucked into time-corners when most people were sleeping, or else were edited so heavily and creatively that the important part of most messages was lost altogether.

The problem was expanded by ten orders of magnitude by the simple fact that there were multitudes of messages to be passed on from a dozen different sources, and rather than coordinating efforts, each source shut its eyes to anyone else's needs and plunged ahead in its own private direction. This meant, of course, that information from one source was almost always in direct contradiction to instructions from other sources, but still were broadcast end-running on the same radio station.

The inevitable upshot was that virtually nothing got done properly, or in time, or even at all, and this was what tormented Carlos Quintana the most. A dribble of the new vaccine would reach the city, and a vaccination center would be manned at a certain location to provide at least minimal protection for certain groups of people living in certain areas of the city—and when the appointed time came, nobody appeared to be vaccinated. Why not, for God's sake? Word was out over all the radios—ah, but Doctor, the date was scrambled up. Everyone turned up
yesterday,
and of course there was no vaccine here yesterday. Attempts to distribute antibiotics in particularly high-incidence areas of the city came to similar ends. The actively ill would come, not the healthy family breadwinners as was planned—and the more chaotic the communications became, the less cooperative the people, crammed up in their hot, rancid little rooms, hiding from the street and the scourge, and watching helplessly as the scourge came right in after them.

Ultimately a less obvious—and far more dangerous—result began to appear as the chaos in communication continued: people who once had paid attention and tried to do things right began throwing up their hands, first merely impatient of the authorities, then resentful, and finally downright angry. They had enough on their hands just trying to cope, without the confused communications, so they began tuning it out and not listening at all. A pox on
me,
then a pox on
them,
was the growing attitude, and people began hardening into this posture more steadily day by day.

It was this attitude of desperate bloody-mindedness that was responsible, in large part, for the first real spark of violence to flare in the city when, two weeks into the plague, the great Central Ice House ran out of ice.

For many decades the four-story Ice House, occupying a full city block just south of the densest tenement area, had been as much an institution in the city of Savannah as the great antebellum mansions or Factor's Walk. People still remembered the horse-drawn ice wagons clip-clopping through the streets, dripping cold water from every crack, the iceman with the fearsome-looking tongs, the four-sided signs tucked up in the windows to indicate orders. Even today many tenement homes still had their old iceboxes standing ready and waiting, and although the horse-drawn wagon was a thing of the past, many a small black boy could still be seen any hot summer day, scuffing dust in the street and lugging a cardboard carton and a blanket, on his way to the Ice House.

During heat waves the ice was vital for far more than just food preservation. Air conditioning was all well and good for those who could afford it, but for the poor homes the universal substitute was a block of ice sitting in a large pan on the floor with a small electric fan blowing over it into your face.

Now, with fear of plague keeping people indoors, and with the longest, most murderous late-summer heat wave on record in Savannah, the Central Ice House was jammed daily from morning until night. For ice, at least, people would go out, however briefly, some walking, some driving, some parking and
then
walking, as queues to the ice delivery chutes grew longer. It was not a cheerful gathering of people at the Ice House those dismal days. Nobody wanted to be there. Everybody had news of death in his mouth, and little good to talk about. Little groups of kin would huddle together, muttering in private monosyllables. Moods were sullen, fights often broke out, and as the days passed, the prevailing attitude of bloody-mindedness took over more and more.

What exactly happened inside the Ice House on that particular day, nobody ever determined for sure. Whatever happened—some breakdown of superannuated, worn-out machinery—it happened all of a sudden at one o'clock of a blazing afternoon, when lineups for ice were at maximum, both at the truck-loading docks on the north side and the individual block-ice dispensers on the east side. There may have been two thousand hot, sullen people there at the critical time, or ten thousand—nobody knew—but however many, there was one weary woman who put her quarters into the dispenser slot, and shoved in the lever, and waited for the ice to come down the chute for her to take. . . .

And waited, as nothing happened. Ten other people at adjacent chutes had paid their money, too, and they also waited, complaining at the slow delivery, their impatient voices joining the rumble and snarl around them.

Then a loudspeaker boomed out overhead. "That's it, y'all. Ain't no more ice. No more ice today. Come back tomorrow."

Silence fell like a sodden blanket. Then: "No more ice? Man say no more ice—" and then, the enormity of it dawning: "No more ice today? Man, what you
mean,
no more ice?"

"Compressor's broke down. Cain't make no more. Now go home, come back tomorrow—"

"But my dollar's in that slot, man—" "Cain't help that, lady. Closed up now. Come back to the office tomorrow and make an application and maybe you'll get it back. No more ice today—"

The anger and outrage in the crowd was palpable, a living thing. Then somebody was shouting, pointing toward the truck-loading docks. "Lookee there! Around there they got ice!"

The crowd split and surged around toward the docks. There a big eighteen-foot wooden panel truck was standing, filled to the scuppers with ice blocks. People swarmed toward it like ants to sugar. "That truck got ice! Let's get it!"

In a moment half a dozen men had climbed up the back of the truck, starting to dump the ice blocks off onto the dusty pavement. The driver started out of the truck cab, got a good look at the throng fast gathering around him and moved back inside. He shouted out the window: "I'm loaded up, man, I'm movin' out. Now
get\"

The motor roared and the truck began slowly pressing away from the loading dock. A woman who had ducked under the rear wheels to retrieve an ice block was the first one crushed;

others went down screaming in front of the cab and still the heavy-loaded truck inched forward. People climbed up on the running boards, trying to tear the doors open, but by now there was no stopping the driver; eyes glazed, he plowed on.

The truck was far too much to stop under power—but not too heavy to turn over. With the superhuman strength of built-up fury, people on both sides began rocking the truck. Somebody slashed a front tire, and the cab sagged on that side, the steering wheel spinning out of the driver's hands. Then the double rear tires went, and the top-heavy vehicle finally went over on its side with an enormous grinding crash, crushing ten more people as it fell.

Some people around the truck grabbed the ice and ran, but others swarmed up onto the loading dock into the Ice House itself. Three squad cars appeared as more people began pouring into the Ice House. The police took one look at the melee, the overturned truck, the bodies strewn on the ground, and radioed for the riot squad. The people storming the Ice House now had picked up any weapons they could lay their hands on—rocks, two-by-fours, ball bats and very sharp knives of all lengths and descriptions. Once inside they found long racks of needle-sharp ice hooks hanging along the walls, choice weapons for close infighting—and the search for ice began.

Of course, there wasn't any ice. The compressors were silent, the great rooms heavy with cold, dead air. Soon the screams and roars of pitched battle were heard up above; the more the mob couldn't find any ice, the angrier it became, the more vindictive and outraged—
They couldn't keep us in ice!
—And then a huge black man with wild eyes and an ice hook in each hand was standing up on a barrel and shouting, "You don't give us ice, we give you
fahr,
mon!" and piles of rubble were suddenly heaped up and fire was struck, and billows of black smoke poured out of the upper-story windows while people up above tried to scurry for escape.

Many didn't make it. The old dry wood of the interior went up like flares, the stairways were crammed and packed with struggling humanity, and the heat and smoke and collapsing brick walls got many of the rest. Fire sirens screamed as thousands poured out of the building to join the thousands more outside, all angry, all not giving a damn, venting the pent-up rage and fear of two long, unspeakably horrible weeks, and moving onto the surrounding blocks of buildings, smashing store windows, taking whatever they chose to take in lieu of ice, moving like a headless monster without direction.

The Central Ice House was a pyre before the firemen got hose water pumping. The police finally contained the riot within an eight-block perimeter around the Ice House, using shields and road blocks and riot guns and tear gas, and then waited all night and all the next day for the fire to burn itself out and people to crawl home again, such people as were left. Officials estimated eighteen hundred dead, unknown numbers injured or burned, and the Ice House a heap of smoldering rubble too hot to approach for four solid days.

Some of the people did get home, but something had happened to their minds in the meantime, and madness spread with news of the fire. Those who were there and those who merely heard were different people now, nursing their wounds and sharing their outrage, a people betrayed—
bereft of their ice—
and the plague descended even deeper into evil.

38

On the evening of the day the Ice House burned, Sally Grin-stone was sitting at a remote table at the rear of the main dining room of the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis, staring fixedly at a group of people dining just a few tables away. The object of Sally's attention was a small, balding young man with hornrimmed glasses sitting near the center of the group. Certainly not a handsome man, Sally reflected, but not as unhandsome as she had feared; more than anything, she thought, he looked grossly unhappy, responding to the others' conversation in monosyllables, mostly concentrating on the dinner before him.

And that, too, fit the picture.
Well,
Sally thought,
at least I've found him. Now it's just a matter of the right kind of contact. ...

Sally hardly looked like the same person who had been talking with Monique Jenrette and Frank Barrington just a few busy days before. She was done up in a formal cocktail dress just one thin whisker short of totally indecent, cut deep in front and back and worn without bra, black with no trim. She had left her twin ponytails with the hairdresser in the hotel basement, traded in for a short shag cut, and her owlish glasses were nowhere in evidence. True enough, she couldn't see a thing on the table, but that was okay with Sally; you could always order a steak and French fries without seeing the menu, and she could see the man in the horn-rimmed glasses just as clear as crystal glass, and that was what mattered right now. Of course, the big hotels didn't like having overdressed, underescorted young women they didn't know sitting alone in their dining rooms during big conventions; too many free-lancers killed things for the regular convention whores. The maitre d' had given her a fishy stare when she appeared for dinner and let her cool her heels for thirty minutes while he seated couples and groups. At last, when she didn't go away, he sighed a silent sigh and led her back to a table the size of a cookie sheet in a remote back corner of the place and abandoned her to waiters who were scarcely any more interested; it had taken another thirty minutes just to get the drink she ordered—but in the meantime, luck of all luck, the little balding man had come in to the same dining area with his grim-looking dinner partners.
So fuck you, too,
Sally had muttered under her breath to the maitre d'.
Thanks to the long wait, you've just handed me the game, you ass.

To anyone but Sally Grinstone it might have seemed an impossible task that had faced her after she'd left Monique and Frank: to track down an obscure research chemist employed by a very large, very paranoid drug company in Indianapolis, identify him, somehow contact him in neutral territory, get acquainted with him, get him alone, and then, by hook or by crook, get him to talk about his work under circumstances that were such that the mere mention of the word
reporter
would make him slam shut like the Giant Clam of the Antilles upon encountering a bit of grit. And to accomplish all this
fast
—in three days, maybe four at the most. A formidable task indeed, for anyone else, but as it happened, Sally Grinstone was no slouch at her job. She had half a lifetime's worth of very firm connections in all kinds of unlikely places, connections she had diligently nurtured over the years. She knew what sort of questions had to be asked to spring what kind of information free; she knew the whole netherworld of muckraking like the back of her hand, understood the intricate politics of Finding Things Out, and she was not afraid of the telephone.