Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (28 page)

"I don't want to gig anybody," Sally said. "All I want is some information. When did they lay you off?"

"Three weeks ago, when they closed down Tom Shipman's lab."

"Closed—did you say
closed down?

"That's right. One day I was there and the next day the lab was locked up tight and I was sent down to wash bottles in the production department. A week of that and they gave me the boot. Overstaffed, they said. Pick up your check."

"You're sure it was Shipman's lab?"

"I ought to know," the man said. "I was working there."

"But why close it down?"

Bob King didn't know. He'd thought Dr. Shipman was on the track of something very hot indeed, a new antibiotic. A real barn burner—at least eveiybody from the R&D people to the sales staff seemed to be excited about it, and all of a sudden, whoppo, they cut if off. Shipman himself? The man laughed. "You think / was pissed, you should have seen him. He was fit to be tied. Went around like a madman, banging on doors and screaming at people. They put him on some other project, a real dead-ender, some chemotherapeutic they'd had on the shelf for ten years because they couldn't get the glitches out of it, and I swear he was ready to kill somebody. But as for why they cut it off—I just plain don't know. Whatever the reason, they sure moved fast ..."

Sally rang off and sat back, fairly quivering. It looked like

the key, all right—but the key to what? She knew then she wouldn't get it from other people. Shipman himself was going to have to tell her, and it sounded like he might be ready to spill if only she could find a way to hit him. But how? Slowly, carefully, she went back over the heaps of notes she'd been making. Not much personal data here, not much to get hold of. Long work hours, lots of reading of chemical literature when he got home to his nice little three-room apartment in Indianapolis. Listened to lots of music, opera and classics, but didn't even own a TV set. Took most of his meals out, same little restaurant near his apartment, probably had the same dinner every night— she snorted. There had to be an approach—what could she do? Go take a job at Sealey and work it from there? Never, that would take far too much time and she knew now she had to move fast. What's more, if it was really something hot, the bastards might just shoot her. Go plant herself at his table at the restaurant? She'd just get thrown out. Follow him and see if he ever hit a bar? Time, time, time—even assuming he ever
did
hit a bar, which maybe he never did. Take the apartment next to his and scream for help? Oh, hell, Sally, come
on—

The phone rang suddenly, and it was Roger Merritt at the American Chemical Society. "How's your digging coming along?"

"Twenty feet under and still going," Sally said sourly. "By now I know more about the guy than he does—but I can't find a fast way to touch him. I'd have to set something up for months, and I haven't
got
months."

"Have you got three days?"

"I might have—if I can convince a couple of editors that I'm going to bring them Sealey Labs on a platter."

"If you've got three days, I know how you can nail him. It . just dawned on me ten minutes ago. There's an American Chemical Society regional meeting at the Chase Park Plaza in St. Louis starting tomorrow, two thousand chemists turning up there. Our registration file says Tom Shipman is going with a few others from Sealey."

Sally sat bolt upright. "Is he giving a paper?"

"Now that's a funny thing: he's not on the program. He almost always gives two or three papers at one of these confabs, but not a thing this time. The point is—I did a little confidential digging, and it seems that Shipman loosens up quite a bit at these big Chemical Society affairs. He hits the cocktail parties, and one source says he usually ends up very cozy with some unattached female before the conference is over. He never seems to follow up, it's just fun and games while the party's going, but you might find an opening there. I thought you'd like to know."

"Like to know! Roger, you're a one hundred percent doll. When this is all over, I'm coming down there and make you as happy as you've made me. Now I've got to ring off and get packing. Do you know his room number? Good. And Roger-get me a press registration, but have them give me an ordinary member's ID card, okay? See you later, dummy."

For a long moment she sat back and marveled—her prescient nose had been right. The rough part was over, and now she was on her own ground.
Fun and games while the party's going,
she thought, and tipped her glass in an imaginary toast.

Fun and games, indeed.

39

In Brookdale, Connecticut, on the day after the Ice House fire, Jack Dillman sat in a silent house in the cool of his upstairs studio and carefully airbrushed in the finishing touches on the dust-jacket layout he was just completing. He sat back, cocked his head and tilted the light over his shoulder onto the drawing board, started to add a final stroke, then shook his head and set the airbrush aside.

For a long time he looked at the artwork spread out before him. Then neatly, almost ceremonially, he began closing the paint pots and ink bottles, setting them back in their places, carefully cleaning the brushes and pen nibs before storing them away. It was almost five in the afternoon, and not a sound from down below all day.
"Shopping" again,
Jack thought sourly.
And later every time. Doesn 't the bastard's wife ever walk in on them? Or where do they go?
Not that it mattered that much. With good old Hal Parker, one bed was as good as another.

Jack walked downstairs, made himself a drink, extra long and extra strong.
A job wrapped up calls for a celebration, he thought.
The house was very still and still smelled of Pine-Sol from yesterday's cleaning lady. An antiseptic smell, more like a clinic than a home. He drifted from room to room uneasily— she wasn't usually so damned late. As always, the thoughts drifted to his mind:
Bad traffic: suppose there was an accident? Maybe she didn 't even carry her purse—who would they call?
He shrugged the thought aside, disgusted with himself for worrying. Finally he sat down in front of the Eye and flipped on the TV news.

Savannah, again, top of the evening.
God
was he sick of hearing about Savannah—why in hell didn't the Health Service get cracking and
do
something down there, for God's sake, instead of all this sackcloth-and-ashes stuff? Surely there was
something
they could do—

The screen caught his attention, a helicopter news clip—what the
hell
Big fire, huge building going up, and rioting. The camera zoomed in on riot police behind portable shields, facing off a huge mob of angry black people—he watched, shaking his head. Then, after a while they went to something else, and he snapped off the set.

Thank God he wasn't down
there.
Riots and looting and nobody doing anything to help. But suppose it was here. If you were down there, you'd get
out,
sure, but here? Get out to where? He thought of some other film clips he'd seen last week, sick people sitting alone in empty houses down there, and long lines of garbage trucks heading out toward the swamps. . . .

People alone in empty houses. Suddenly the thought was not very nice, not nice at all, and he stirred, glanced out the front windows toward the driveway. Something like that happen here, you wouldn't want to be alone.
But suppose she'd decided she wasn 't coming back?
Suddenly, faced with a possible reality, he felt a chill, bone deep, and sweat broke out on his forehead.

Another drink helped, but not too much. He was well into his third when she finally turned into the driveway.

40

For Carlos Quintana the first real hint of a breakthrough came four days after the Ice House fire. He had checked in early at the pro tern CDC headquarters, an old restored office building on Lafayette Street, to pore over the morning public-health reports—new cases reported, deaths, hospital reports, statistical data, the same old ever-worsening story that was grinding him into the ground day by day—when somebody called out, "Hey, Carlos, front and center! Your boss is here. ..."

It was Ted Bettendorf in the flesh, looking tall and gaurit and gray and tired, with a cardboard parcel tucked under his arm and a cadaverous smile on his face. He looked around at the crowd of people milling in the room, manning telephones and desks, and then at Carlos buried under piles of papers and reports and readouts and raised his eyebrows. "You're looking a little ragged," he said mildly.

Carlos leaped up and swept papers off a chair onto the floor so Ted could sit down. "I'm feeling ragged. Hoo, boy, you might say so! Ragged isn't the word."

"What are you up to?"

"Same thing I was up to yesterday morning, and the morning before that, only it's a little worse every day. We're just now getting more firm casualty figures on that Ice House debacle—"

"Well, set that aside for a minute," Ted said. "I got you a present and decided I'd hand-deliver it." He handed the parcel to Carlos.

"What's this?"

"The new preventive vaccine. By special courier from Lilly's stockpile. I thought you'd be pleased to see it."

"You mean the new vaccine we can use to immunize people to this mutant organism so they don't get infected?"

"That's right. It's made from the mutated strain of plague organisms, right from Monique's original cultures. I've been twisting arms for all I was worth, and it takes forever to make— they only have tiny quantities of it finished—but Lilly's control people are finally satisfied that what they have tests out safe enough, at least for emergency use. The injections are painful, but the antibody titer against the bug is measurable in as little as a week. The bug is antigenic as hell—which means that people will have
some
immune protection from the bug within four or five days after receiving the vaccine."

"Wow!" Carlos sat straight up, his eyes bright, his mind already revising his immediate field plans. "Let me tell you, my thin friend, it's just about time. At least we can get some of our field workers protected, if there's enough here. How much are they sending? Just this little box?"

"No, no. They've been producing it all during the testing, and slow as it is to manufacture, they can let you have five thousand doses off the top of the pile. They should have them to you here by tomorrow morning. What's more, they have four others labs cooperating, making it under license, so there should be more very soon."

"Good. Most exceedingly good." Carlos paced excitedly. "We may even have a chance to do something good down here yet. Tell them to just get it to Savannah airport—we'll have a truck waiting. We're using one of the warehouses down on River Street, Factor's Walk to be exact, for storage supplies-hospital goods, pharmaceuticals, everything, right handy to the center of activities here. That'll do fine, and it's a fast shot in from the airport by freeway. Warehouse 14—have them mark that on the consignment, so we don't have some idiot truck driver hustling it all through the city streets." Carlos turned back to Ted, his face suddenly sober. "This will be great to protect some uninfected medical workers from future infection—if they stay clean long enough for the vaccine to build up an immunity—but what can we do for some twenty thousand people who are already infected and dropping dead for want of treatment? The vaccine won't help them. What we need is the new Sealey antibiotic, that 3147 stuff we used in Colorado."

"I've got help coming there too," Ted said. "I just got word this morning that Sealey Labs is going to release a supply of the 3147 antibiotic for you to use on people that you will certify have active plague. That stuff should be turning up here in just a few days."

"That's the same stuff we were using in-Colorado?"

"Exactly. The antibiotic that Sealey's Mancini was talking about withdrawing because of its side effects."

"So what made them change their minds? Did you get an Act of Congress?"

"No Act of Congress. They've made some kind of funny deal with the administration—I don't know what it is, and I can't seem to find out—but they're springing a field supply of the stuff loose at a perfectly staggering price and with some kind of outrageous liability guarantee. As part of the deal, it's only for use under your direct control, and only here in Savannah, nowhere else."

Carlos sat staring at the older man. "What about the outlying areas we talked about on the phone yesterday? I mean, this movement out of the city we're beginning to see—"

"That'll be up to you to decide," Ted said. "On your own responsibility."

"I see." Carlos bit his lip. "Well, hanged for a sheep—what the hell, we've all got to die sometime, might as well go down in a blaze of glory. We'll worry about that when we hit it. At least we'll have something to work with—Christ! Tell them yes, a thousand times yes. Spring all of it you can piy loose and get it down here while there's still somebody around to treat. . . ."

For Carlos it was the first real ray of hope that had appeared since the Savannah plague had started. From the very start it had been a steady downhill progression from bad to worse, with the very worst possible always all too clearly in sight up ahead. It wasn't just that the chance to pull things together and establish control had been lost before they'd even started—as it most certainly had. It was the plain, blunt, agonizing fact that they had had so terribly little to work with, so little of anything that could help, so little that accomplished anything. And as night followed day, the situation had deteriorated step by step, without a single way in the world to prevent it.