The Sudden Star (17 page)

"Jeri's all right," Aisha said.

"I don't care if she is or isn't. She already told us there was some bad feeling toward us. I don't feel like waiting until someone decides we've done something worth shooting us for."

"Maybe when they get used to us, they won't shoot us."

"Have you gone crazy?" He stuffed some bread into his mouth and chewed it vigorously. "It doesn't matter. Haven't you noticed? Almost everyone we've seen here is old, almost all of them are going to die damn soon. And that means that eventually somebody'll find out there's food to be had here, and buildings to live inside, and they'll take it, whoever's left won't be able to fight them off."

She sighed. "You're right."

He stared at Aisha. He hadn't really thought about how he felt about the girl. He hadn't had time. She was a companion, it was better than traveling alone. She'd done what she was told and didn't complain. She had fled from René because she was afraid of Kathleen Ortega, which certainly showed good sense. He smiled when he thought of that; the old man who had handed him over to the police was probably dead.

He leaned over and reached for her, pressing her back to the sofa. She pushed him away and sat up. "I'm just wondering," she said, "what's going to happen to me. In Miami."

"Worry about it when you get there." He put a hand on her shoulder and she shook it off.

"I'm thinking about it now. You know people there. I don't."

"I'll help you," he said impatiently. "We'll figure out something. You can always do what you did before, there's a market for it there."

She glared at him, shaking her head. "I don't want to go back to that," she said. "I couldn't stand it."

"Well, maybe you can find something else." He didn't want to take on her problems at the moment. Once they were there, they could go their own ways, and it wouldn't be his worry anyway. "Right now, let's just look for a way to get out of here."

"We don't even have knives, we can't even protect ourselves."

"Don't
worry
.” He leaned toward her again. She suddenly rose and walked toward the bedroom. "Good night," she said. She went in and closed the door.

He lay back on the couch, folding his hands behind his head, trying to sort out his thoughts. He felt depressed, worrying about what was ahead. He had to stop it; trying to plan ahead was what had got him into trouble in the first place, all his plotting, doing illegal medical work on the side. He had nothing to worry about. He'd lasted this far.

He was tired. Looking back on it now, he wondered how he had journeyed this far; he had made it only because he had lived through each day, watching for opportunities, not thinking of the future. Had he thought of the journey's obstacles—the suspicious farmers, the armies of the north and south, the areas which, according to local legends, were covered with wastes from nuclear power plants and had to be avoided, adding days to his trip—and, worst of all, the overgrown forests, swamps, and meadows, thick with life, vines which he had to hack at with a knife before they cut into his foot, bright flowers so thick with perfume he would retch, the birds waiting for him to stumble—had he thought of it all, he would have stayed in prison.

He thought of the Boleyn farm, the lonely white house on the hill, the pasture, the vegetable garden, surrounded by the thick greenness which threatened it on all sides, guarded by the army which could as easily decide to raid it and take everything. The people there thought it was a refuge. He knew better; there was no refuge. He would not find one. At best, he would find a place where it might be a little easier to live from day to day and take a bit of pleasure out of it.

He rolled over on the couch, too tired to get up and make his way to a bed, and fell asleep.

"You can sit up now," Ved Reese said.

Simon sat up on the examining table, rubbing his arm. The room was white, almost too white, and seemingly sterile, like the other rooms he had seen in this building. He hadn't seen many. Most of the offices were closed off, deteriorating silently behind the doors. This room, and the adjoining laboratories, intimidated him; he could not identify most of the equipment. Even stethoscopes were hard to come by in New York, and syringes and needles had to be guarded and reused. He could recall being without a stethoscope in medical school, having to press his ear to a patient's chest. There was wealth in these rooms; even one bag of equipment and medicines would be valuable.

His stomach rumbled. He hadn't yet eaten; Reese had said they would be fed after the examination. "I'd guess you're in good shape," Reese was saying. "You could be anemic, though I won't know for sure until I finish the blood series, and of course I want to see if Stanford-B is present, just as a precaution. I didn't mention that to the others, but I might as well tell you, since you're a doctor."

Simon, in the presence of Reese and his lab, felt more like an unlicensed healer. "Stanford-B?" he asked.

"You must know what I mean. When we still had some communication with the outside world, I picked up quite a bit of information. A medical team from Georgia was on its way here to do some research with me, years ago, but apparently they were ambushed, because they never arrived." Reese sighed. His gray eyes were cold. "I can only hope that someone somewhere is working on it, I can't by myself. I was hoping someone in New York might be working on it."

"I never heard of Stanford-B."

"Toward the end, the victim goes mad. The team coming here had indicated that victims die even when sedated and kept quiet, because the lost bodily fluids can't be replaced rapidly enough. The fever literally burns them—"

"Mura's Syndrome," Simon said. "That's what you mean. I didn't understand."

Reese looked startled. "Mura's Syndrome." He chuckled joylessly. "They would call it that." He sat down in a chair near the counter where the blood samples, neatly labeled, stood. "Then you do know something."

"Not very much. It's on the list." Reese looked puzzled; his tanned forehead wrinkled. "There's a list of diseases we're not allowed to treat or research. That's one of them."

The bald man's eyes narrowed. "Not allowed! So that's the state of medicine in New York. I wondered, that probably explains why you—" Reese did not finish the sentence.

Simon, defensively, tried to explain the list to Reese and the reasons for it. Reese scowled as Simon rambled on. "You have to understand, I had questions about that list," Simon appealed, extending his right hand, palm up. Reese frowned more fiercely. "For one thing, I wasn't sure about why Mura's Syndrome was listed, since the other diseases all involved genetic defects." Reese raised an eyebrow. "And I was opposed to the list anyway. I mentioned that to that woman Chapman. I told her I'd been arrested for illegally practicing medicine. I was treating people the law said I shouldn't, so you see, I didn't agree with it. I disapprove of it as much as you do." He looked Ved Reese in the eyes.

Reese stared back, not blinking. Finally he said, "I don't imagine your help came cheap."

"I had to get paid for the risk I took," Simon snapped at him. "The penalties are severe."

Reese slumped in the chair. "It doesn't matter now. Apparently someone in New York did find out something about Stanford-B. The Georgia team, you see, had been in contact with some microbiologists. The microbiologists had discovered that, even before Stanford-B can be detected in the blood, it produces genetic changes. They weren't sure what kind, or what the result might be, since to find that out they would have needed to do a survey of the children of victims." He paused. "There's so much we don't know. I had been hoping that if the victims could survive the fever towards the end, and the dehydration, they could survive permanently, but that apparently isn't possible. Of course many victims don't die of the disease at all, their madness drives them to kill themselves, or someone else kills them first."

"It was caused by Mura's Star," Simon said, "wasn't it?"

"No. It isn't true. Stanford-B was apparently the result of recombinant DNA experimentation at Stanford University. I imagine it was once a harmless virus. Great precautions were taken by the researchers to produce only strains that couldn't survive outside the laboratory." The lines in Reese's face grew deeper; he rubbed a hand over his bald head. "The biologists there, you know, were unable to get a grant to do their work in an orbiting space laboratory, where it would have been a danger to no one." His voice was bitter. "There just wasn't enough money. A severe earthquake struck out there just a few months after the star appeared and damaged the laboratory. The virus escaped. Because travel was more common then, it spread, altered later by fallout from the Sino-Soviet War. That is how we have reconstructed events, in any case."

Simon was silent. He thought of Linda Pura and her suppositions; she had been on the right track, at least. "How is it spread?" he asked. "We could never really be sure. I've been exposed to it myself, but never caught it. Living in a city, you can't avoid it, but not everyone gets it."

Reese shrugged his shoulders. "You may be immune," he responded. "Many people apparently are. We think, that is, I think, and the Georgia team agreed, that you must have prolonged bodily contact with a victim. The symptoms, at least in the early stages, vary, though almost everyone complains of headache."

"I know that."

"Perhaps you don't know that there may be more than one strain of Stanford-B now, or that it apparently sharpens the senses for a time, or that the children of victims may actually carry the virus with no ill effects at all." Reese's eyes stared past Simon. "How impatient I was for that team to get here. Even after a year, I was still waiting, still not willing to give up. I'm not really sure when it was I realized they weren't coming."

Simon tried to think of something to say. "You know," he began, and stopped. He cleared his throat. "You know," he continued, "there were always rumors in New York that the army was doing some research, that they didn't pay that much attention to the list. When I was drafted—all of us had to work in the army's medical service for a while after medical school—I know they always tried to get the ones who looked like good researchers to stay. They had better equipment than most of the civilians, though they usually kept it for the officers. Maybe you could get some army people to—"

"Do you know what the army would do to this place? They're barbarians. They'd sack it and destroy anything they couldn't use."

"I meant the army doctors."

"I wouldn't trust them," Reese said. "They probably report to their superiors."

Simon tugged at his beard. He couldn't afford to have Ved Reese's hostility. "Maybe," he said, trying to smile, "I could assist you here. We could—"

Reese snorted. "Could you really? I'd have to spend time just training you in the use of the lab facilities, and by then—" The old man peered at Simon. He was saying he, Reese, was too old. He might be dead before then. "Anyway," Reese went on, "I've stored as much of what I know as I could. Someday, if it's ever found, those people may wonder what we worried about, they may be immune, or—"

"Where?" Simon said. "Where did you store the information?"

"You can go now," Reese replied, waving a hand. "Jeri's probably wondering what's taking us so long."

Jeri sat underground, in a small windowless room. The room had been built before she came to the space center; she did not know what its original purpose was. It had become a sanctuary, a library, an underground treasure trove, a window into the past. A short tunnel connected it with the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building; the door leading into the tunnel was concealed. Supposedly the room could withstand even the total destruction of the area above it, though, without the elevator shaft and the tunnel, Jeri wondered who would reach it. The room would have to be dug out; they were counting on an archeological expedition.

Jeri often was curious about how many other such facilities existed in the world. Many had probably been destroyed in conflicts. When her world had been larger, and it had still been possible to receive some news of other countries, she had followed, in sporadic broadcasts, the war between Russia and China, a war which, after the destruction of China's major cities, had apparently degenerated into a civil war within Russia itself. Chinese survivors, pushing into Russia's eastern domain, had driven those living there west; at last, Russians had pressed into Europe, seizing everything, leaving only Britain untouched. All those wars had involved nuclear weapons; the devastation and the suffering of those peoples had, Jeri knew, protected her own country. Some of the missiles in the United States had been disabled by rebellious soldiers, but others remained; a few had supposedly been used by Texas against Mexico. That was her world now: kill to survive, one locality against another, state against state, city against city. Maybe, she thought, it was better if everyone remained ignorant, unable to make use of the remaining weapons, better if this underground room was never found. That was the point of keeping things here; only people capable of organizing a cooperative group would find it.

In the room sat what was probably one of the most complex computer minds in the world. It was contained in a small console only eight feet tall and eight feet across. The computer could not only express itself with lettering on the screen, it could also speak, in a toneless but oddly soothing voice. It had remained mute for years. Though information was still communicated to it, no one spoke to it. The computer had been responsible for pushing them toward their present course of action, assigning a higher
probability to the possibility of preserving a record of humankind's accomplishments than to rebuilding. Sometimes Jeri, torn with despair, had wondered if the machine, like the human beings around it, was simply sacrificing others in an attempt to preserve itself.