Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (45 page)

The first and most pernicious breakdown, in almost every instance, was in communications at all levels. In city after city, at the approach of the Horseman, local telephone communications fell into chaos. Contingency plans crumbled within twen-(y-four hours; switchboards were tied into knots, backed up for days. Everyone was on the telephone at once, jamming and overloading every circuit. Within hours it was impossible to prioritize local and distant calls, simply because every single caller regarded his call as first priority, whether it was to call out the fire squad or to check on Aunt Mabel, and there was no one with wisdom and authority to slash through the urgency and panic and say, "These caiis must go through, these must wait, iliese you forget about." By and large, major trunk lines or satellite connections were kept open, at least part of the time, sometimes too open. In cities like New York it became easier to direct-dial Hong Kong than to get through to a party six blocks iicross town. Calls placed to a local hospital in Scranton mysteriously reached Sioux City, Iowa. Thus in most communities, large and small, and more so in the larger than in the smaller, i he telephone as an instrument of communication or defense became virtually useless within hours or days. Only the person with endless time, endless patience or endless determination could get through to anybody.

Public communications media fared as badly or worse. Endless power failures slowed newspaper printing to sporadic outbursts, and distribution was impossible. Such news as there was was garbled, unedited, unverified, and usually self-contra-dictoiy. Television and radio—the anchor in the chain of public notices and the transmission of directives, orders, advice and vital information, upon which virtually every preplanned contingency program depended to get the right word to the people fast—became an outright laughing stock. Directives and advice that were three days old were broadcast and rebroadcast mindlessly in the absence of anything new to say. Unverified reports fed sensationalism and panic, and became the order of the day. And for all their lifelong dependence on television and radio for input, people were not totally stupid: they very quickly learned that even when some TV news announcer told them something in utmost urgency and earnestness, it was probably either two days out of date or totally false; radio announcers talked nonsense to fill time and competed for listeners with "on-the-spot reports" of things that never happened anywhere, or were grossly misinterpreted. In the end, almost always, the sets got turned off, or simply babbled endlessly in the night. Local mimeographed or photocopied newssheets were far more likely to have
valid
news, and these appeared by the millions in city blocks or residential areas, handed out free by small running boys or tacked up on telephone poles to gather graffiti.

With communications unreliable or nonexistent, there was no way to get health information distributed. Clinics and hospitals became mob scenes; officials with bullhorns would broadcast information and directions from emergency-room roofs to mobs piling in below, usually blaring out directions people didn't want to hear, such as Go Home, Listen to Your Radio for Word of Medications, Boil All Your Dishes and Clothes, Stay Away from Crowds, Stay Home—unpopular, those bullhorns. Ambulances in full siren inched through crowds of people who imagined, almost always incorrectly, that they contained precious medical supplies. . . .

Not only could the health services not function well—and public power services only sporadically—but food supplies also began to falter. Ancient cities such as Rome and Constantinople were limited in their ultimate size and population by the length of time it took to bring fresh food from the countryside into the heart of the city. No such problem had existed in modern cities, with trucks and freight cars following fast, established delivery routes. But as supplies in the countryside dried up and as trainmen and truckers parked their trains and cabs outside "dangerous" areas and refused to move into the cities, food began to vanish. People with well-stocked shelves and freezers and refrigerators managed to eat—until the power went off long enough for the frozen food to melt and spoil . . . (attempts were made to distribute such food while it was still good, some successfully, some not). . . . When cooking power failed, people ate their food raw, and when fresh foods dwindled they ate dried macaroni and chewed uncooked rice, soaked overnight into a soggy sort of softness.

And throughout it all, worse some places than others, there was the panic, the looting, the rioting, the burning (though not so much burning, so often—Savannah had been a dreadful lesson that hit home to most people), the slow strangulation and crumbling of the great and small population centers, and—ever-present—the gathering heaps of dead and the clustering of the dying for warmth and comfort and sharing of misery.

In multitudes of places, for multitudes of people, it was a winter of nightmare and horror—yet somehow, in some places, good spirits hung on for dear life. Sometimes good things happened that might never have happened otherwise, and heroism in small, increasingly meaningful things, appeared in strange places. If too many people surpassed themselves in compounding the growing misery around them, in venality and cruelty and sheer blind raw selfishness, other people far surpassed themselves, rose far above themselves, in selfless acts and kindness to others and compassion.

55

Siddie Harper's turf was unpromising land for heroism. Through the endless, broken slum streets of Chicago's South Side the Horseman had taken his hideous toll with the sureness of a surgeon's blade in the face of little or no opposition at all. Unlike so many other major-city slums, there had been no rioting there to speak of, little violence, little looting, little response that could be characterized precisely as panic. It seemed, in many ways, that the scourge had sliced its way through tens of thousands there like a knife through softened butter. Partly, of course, it was the long, long tradition of submission to utter grinding poverty so characteristic there, basically unrelieved in the slightest by the welfare checks or the child-support money or the food stamps nobody could buy or the huge, ineffective-health-care institutions nobody would trust or the vast, towering, barren, strife-torn urban renewal projects erected there to rot or the endless preachings of the endless Jesse Jacksons. The yawning gulf of poverty there, entirely comparable to the barrios of Rio or the drought-starved Sahel, sucked them all in and gulped them down without the faintest residual trace that they had ever come and gone, despite all the publicity and the political posturings, leaving tens and tens of thousands no better off and probably worse, with little will or human spirit left to fight anything with anything.

Even more, there was the very swiftness with which the fire storm had struck south-side Chicago, a devastating blow that had moved through the tenements and sewers and alleyways like a demon, numbing all facilities at once, offering no chance

for recovery, too vast and relentless for anyone even to imagine where or how to start fighting. And the early, bitter winter that struck the northern-tier states merely contributed a little bit more than usual to the agony, with icy Canadian winds slicing down off Lake Michigan and snow at two-foot depth by early October. Rat-borne plagues of the past had always been slowed in winter, but not this man-borne plague. Inevitably the power outages and fuel-delivery failures and street blockings and commercial stoppages that plagued all of Chicago came first and worst on the South Side and were repaired last, which meant not repaired for weeks at a time as the death count mounted and the people there, for the most part, bowed their heads with almost inaudible wailing and waited with folded hands for any delivery at all.

Sidonia Harper was never one to have much use for folded hands, but then, one might have thought that Siddie had little choice in the matter. Sidonia had sat helplessly and watched her mother die in their little second-floor cold-water tenement flat during the first tidal wave of plague that hit Chicago. There was nothing she could do but sit and watch as her mother, already sick and dispirited, crippled with arthritis, abandoned by her only serious consort four years before in the wake of Sidonia's accident, losing her four boys to drugs or prison or the rolling mills in Gary, barely able to keep Siddie and her younger sister alive, became suddenly and violently ill one night, and abruptly ceased breathing three days later. Her mother had been unwilling, or unable, even to try to travel to the nearest hospital facility twenty blocks away (not that it would have done her any good) and Sidonia was certainly not in a position to drag her. Siddie had nursed her as best she could, understanding all too well exactly what was going on in that tenement block where everyone,
everyone,
suddenly seemed to be getting sick at the same time. Siddie understood, all right; she had a very good mind and a TV set for a teacher. She had done all the right things for her mother the best that she could do them from her wheelchair, and—maybe fortunately for Siddie—it made her postpone thinking or paying attention to anything else, for a while. It was not until her mother was finally breathing no more and the truck had finally, finally come to take her away, that Sidonia had realized in a wave of absolute horror that the tene-

ments on her block had become for the most part empty, and that death and her eight-year-old sister were the only companions she had left.

They waited for days for something to happen, with Siddie's sister in abject terror, unwilling to go out on the street to try to get food until Siddie had soothed and assured and calmed her for hours, and then returning more terrified than before she had gone out; and Siddie, of course, could not go out at all. She had not been out of that second-story flat except rarely at any time during the four years since the terrible hot summer night when a wild-eyed boy she had known and teased at school had broken in the door of the place and brushed her mother aside and backed the fourteen-year-old girl out onto the fire escape to rape her and was stripping her clothes off her when the fire-escape railing gave and Siddie plunged two stories down to the concrete alleyway below and broke her back in three places. After the short hospital visit to make sure she was going to live at all, she had returned home to endless months in traction in the tenement flat as an ill-nourished body slowly, slowly allowed broken bones to heal—but the torn spinal cord would not heal.

Time had ceased to exist for Siddie Harper for part of that four years as her broken body matured and her mind changed. For a while girl friends came by, but they were aliens to Siddie, talking about their "men" and their pushers and their johns, and presently they stopped coming by. Broken bodies made them feel uneasy and so did Siddie's head—she seemed far too old and thought about far too many weird things that didn't really fit
anything
the others knew. They were lonely years, but something happened in Siddie's mind to make the loneliness not too bad; of all people on the block she was the only one who waited for the bookmobile week after week, who wondered about things outside the block, who read and who taught herself to do many little things no one else knew that she
could
do when there was so much she couldn't. She had lived on a timeless island, served and maintained and changing until the sudden, terrible fire storm struck and her mother was gone and Tessie, her sister, was terrified.

She helped Tessie, then, showed her how to do things, instructed her where to go to get what was needed in spite of her

fear and the terrible things happening outside as the fire storm raged. Siddie was by no means helpless; she could get around well enough in the old beat-up wheelchair the state had provided (the state had actually paid for a brand-new chair with all the special features, but the one that had finally arrived at the second-story flat was an old, used, decrepit model with sharp angles and rusty swivels and the stuffing hanging out of the seat). Things would have been much easier for Siddie if her mother could have found—and paid for—a first-floor flat, as the visiting nurse had urged on one of her three visits, but the hard work of searching for a ground-floor place, and the ever-climbing rentals quoted for such flats whenever anybody heard about the wheelchair and smelled welfare money defeated
that;
so Siddie seldom got downstairs. But she managed just the same. Though her legs had withered, her arms and shoulders and pectorals and wrists and hands had become powerful from constantly manipulating her chair, as was the case with so many paraplegics, and she became very capable in many ways. So it was, after Mamma died, that she had been able to show her little sister what to do, and used her strong arms to comfort her, and wheeled herself around the flat to manage the cleaning and the simple cooking that sustained them. As long as they were well, they managed—but then the inevitable day had come when Siddie realized that Tessie was suddenly ill, gray and coughing and shivering violently in the cold flat, and that she herself had suddenly become feverish too, with angry, painful swellings appearing under her arms, and a vicious cough that would not stop.

Like Mamma before her, Tessie also had died, though not quite so quickly. Some person from some clinic, spurred perhaps by some quixotic urge to help the handicapped, had come by with a small bottle of capsules for the girls to use if they got too sick, and Tessie ate the capsules and they seemed to help somewhat, she seemed to improve for a little, but Siddie just got sicker, doing her best to help the child until one evening her sister's breathing stopped and she knew she was comforting the dead and she herself was so sick she could barely ease the body to the floor and move it into the bedroom alcove; then she just sat there, watching over her dead sister, totally alone, waiting for her own time to come, if it was going to.