Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman Read online

  "How do you mean?"

  "Well, no offense meant, but it was kind of strange. I mean, those guys are usually pretty gung ho when somebody's in trouble, you take it for granted they'll help you, but this guy I got on the phone was definitely not gung ho about anything. Said all their vehicles were in service at the moment, and anyway they didn't have any night crew, and I should just call the ambulance and get these people moved to a hospital when they got down. He didn't even want to take my name, as if he might have to do something if he wrote it down."

  Frank nodded sourly. "I suppose I can see it," he said. "So you called an ambulance?"

  "Finally got one from Wenatchee, packed the five sick ones in as soon as they got down. Terry and Peter Toomey rode along with them, and the rest of us followed in cars."

  "To Wenatchee General?"

  "No. To Harborview in Seattle. We figured we should be close to Sea-Tac airport, since we figured we'd be shipping those sick ones home just as soon as possible. Well, things don't always work out the way you figure. Bob was dead by the time we reached the hospital—he must have died about the time they hit Interstate 5 north of Seattle. Janie lasted about three hours after arrival and a third one died twelve hours later. The fourth one, the Edstom kid, went into intensive care and started to rally. He may well still be there, for all I know, his dad came up from Boulder to relieve me so I could get the other kids home. In fact, I didn't learn much at all, the docs at Harborview were very close-mouthed about everything, said they'd caught a 'typical pneumonia' or something like that."

  "Atypical pneumonia," Frank murmured.

  "Well, whatever it was. They sure didn't want any publicity. I started rounding people up to get them home, and then we couldn't find Terry Gilman, he didn't show at the airport when he was supposed to. Far as I can tell, he just got on a flight for Denver on his own and took off, Continental had his used ticket—but he never got home to Colorado Springs."

  "This was the one who had his arm around Comstock all the way down the trail?"

  "Right. I suppose he'll show, sooner or later. He's kind of a crazy kid anyway." The man looked up at Frank. "So that's all I know, and I don't understand it. Do you?"

  "I'm not sure," Frank said. "It looks like you people got hit with a very vicious infection. You may have gotten it from the patrol girl—I happen to know she was very sick when she came over to your camp that night." Frank looked at the little plumber. "The trouble is, I'm not sure it's all over yet, as far as your crowd is concerned. The boy you call Peter Toomey is sick in bed at home here in Canon City. If you should happen to turn up with a chest cold or a fever, you should get to the best hospital there is here and do it fast. What / need is more detail about the others—the names, addresses and phone numbers of every one of them that was up there with you—and it might help if you'd call them all before I reach them and tell them to talk to me. So far all I've gotten is slammed doors. Then if I find out anything, I'll try to let you know."

  Frank pulled a pad and pen from his pocket and started writing as Jerry Courtenay began reciting names.

  Six hours later, with the long summer twilight finally fading to darkness over the mountains, Frank Barrington returned to his little motel room and unloaded his pockets of a dozen scribbled, crumpled note sheets. Though he hadn't eaten since breakfast, the thought of food turned his stomach. What he did need was a drink, so he pulled a bottle of bourbon out of his suitcase, poured a glassful, cut it with a little cold water and threw himself onto the lumpy bed. As his hand quit shaking and his stomach settled down a little, he sat staring into the gathering darkness of the room, reviewing the results of his factfinding mission, since he'd left Jerry Courtenay.

  He had made just five contacts from Jerry's list so far, and already he was appalled. Four dead for sure, from that one party of twenty-one people. That included the missing Terry Gilman, who had died in the emergency room of the Rampart Valley Community Hospital up north of Colorado Springs— Terry's parents had just gotten word as Frank walked in the door. Three more here in Canon City were actively infected with something. Maybe the one left behind at Harborview in Seattle had made it and maybe he hadn't—there was no one at his address.

  And how many more were already sick or getting sick? He didn't know. He wasn't a doctor, either, and there was no way to guess whether the picture of contagion he was piecing together made medical sense or not. One thing was certain: nobody else in Canon City was piecing that picture together, at least not yet—and that was what was really scary. . . .

  He knew he had to talk to somebody, somebody who could help, somebody who knew something. Even if it made him look like a meddling ass, he had to unload what he was thinking to somebody. And the horrible part was that Pam must have been the spark. Whatever it was that hit her, she must have passed it on at least to Comstock and the girl. Maybe they infected others in their party in turn—if whatever it was moved just ungodly fast—

  And then he thought of something else, and sat bolt upright on the bed, sweating. If Pam had infected Comstock, who else had she infected? What was it the Super had said when Frank called him after going through Pam's diary? Something about Doc Edmonds not feeling well? And the other two who had helped him bring Pam out? With his heart pounding, Frank leaped across the bed to the telephone, got the operator, rang the Super's home number in Leavenworth. . . .

  It rang ten times before the Super answered. "Oh, Frank? I was wondering when you'd call. Are you okay? Well, that's something, at least." His voice sounded strained and distant. "You're in Canon City, Colorado, you say? Wherever that is. Checking out that camping party." There was a long, long pause. "Did you know that three of them died at Harborview? Big ruckus up here. Fourth one's just hanging on by his fingernails. Nobody's sure what's doing it, it's weird. How are those people down there?"

  Frank told him, briefly. Then: "How is Doc Edmonds doing?"

  "Doc? Oh, he's gone, of course." The Super sounded very strange, almost out of contact. "Dead. Night before last. So is Fred, the guy who flew the chopper in to get Pam, and Barney, who went along to help bring her down. Both dead. The public-health people called in the Centers for Disease Control, but they kept insisting that it isn't plague. They say it couldn't be, it doesn't act like plague. It's moving too fast, with too much person-to-person spread, bypassing the fleas altogether—you know what I mean?"

  "Well—sort of," Frank said.

  "They think it's some new, unidentified bug, don't know what it is, exactly, but they think it's definitely not plague. Plague just doesn't move that fast. . . ."

  They talked a little more, but the Super was definitely not with it, he sounded half delirious, drifting in and out of coherence, so Frank promised to call back next morning, and then signed off. He got another drink, trying to puzzle out what the Super had said. If not plague, then what else? he thought. Not that it matters much, it's killing people like plague. And speaking of that, shouldn 't I keep talcing those little white capsules?

  He got up, took two more in the bathroom, then paced the floor.

  It was plague, it had to be, and he needed help, not just incoherence. On impulse, he picked up the telephone again, got long-distance information and then placed a call to Atlanta.

  He got a woman on the line and started to tell her where he was and what he wanted, but she cut him off abruptly and gave him another party. This one, another woman, at least listened; she even asked him to spell his name. "You say you have information on cases of plague in Canon City, Colorado? Are these cases you're treating, Doctor?"

  "I'm not a doctor. I'm a forester."

  "A forester?" Vague confusion. "I think you'd better talk to our Chief in the Uncommon Diseases section, Mr. Barrington. One moment . . ."

  It was a long moment; he almost thought they'd been cut off. Then a deep voice came on the line. "Ted Bettendorf here. Plague, you say? In Canon City? That's just south of Springs, isn't it? Yes, I've got it here. And you say you've been tracing a party o
f twenty-odd people who've been exposed?" A long pause. Then, very carefully: "That—doesn't really seem veiy likely, Mr. Barrington. We haven't had but two or three confirmed cases of plague in Colorado in the last five years, and to have twenty people suddenly involved out of the blue with a flea-vector disease doesn't add up—uh, hold it a minute! Did you say that the contacts were made in Washington State'? Okay, there has certainly been some puzzling illness going on up there, we are still digging it out—but these people are now in Colorado, you say? And that's where you are right now?" Another long pause, longer than the last. Then: "Mr. Barrington, I think I'd very much like to have you talk to our Dr. Quintana. He's had a great deal of field experience with plague."

  "Fine. Put him on," Frank said.

  "I can't. He's in flight right now to Denver. There's a case he's checking out up north of Colorado Springs, and you could contact him while he's out there. I can reach him and have him call you if you have a number."

  "Any hour," Frank said. "I'll be here." He gave the motel room number and hung up. It didn't occur to him right then to wonder what the Chief of the Uncommon Diseases section was doing in his office at two-thirty in the morning, Atlanta time.

  He sat down on a chair, staring at the blank TV screen across the room. First Pam, Then Comstock and his niece. Then Doc Edmonds and the chopper crew. Terry Gilman. Peter Toomey. Two others in Seattle, maybe more, and now Christ alone might know how many more down here. All in four days.

  Something was happening, he reflected. Somthing fast. Something bad. Something big, far bigger than just Pam. And it had to be some sort of plague. It couldn't be anything else.

  As he sat in the gloom, trying to grapple with the reality of what was happening, his eye fell on a Gideon Bible on the bedside stand. Something stirred then, deep in his mind. He remembered reading something in there once, years before, when they'd had the plague scare with the rabbit hunter. What was it? Something about horsemen. There were four of them—yes, of course. Heralds of the end of the world. He'd seen pictures too; sometimes they were depicted riding wild-eyed, hellish unicorns. The first one was Conquest, riding a white horse. The second was War, on a blood-red horse, the third, Famine, on a black horse. . . .

  And the fourth? He racked his memory. Somewhere there in the Revelation of St. John the Divine, the most hideous horseman of them ali. . .

  He picked up the Bible, searched through the back end of it. Yes. Sixth chapter of Revelation, seventh verse:

  And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the third beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

  Death. Pestilence. Plague. Mounting his pale steed, digging in the great spurs, leaping forth at full gallop and sweeping across the land. Two thousand years ago they knew him, and knew what he meant, Frank thought. Long before that, they knew him well. And now, he thought, now, in modern day when it couldn't happen, it was beginning again.

  Impossible! But impossible or not, here, today, the Horseman had mounted his pale beast, with hell following after.

  In the early morning heat of Atlanta in August, Dr. Ted Bettendorf stopped to pick up the folder of Telex reports from communications on the first floor of the CDC building annex and then, ignoring the elevator, walked up the fire stairs to his second-floor office, leafing through the folder as he went. He was a long, lean, cadaverous man with iron-gray hair and a face like Boris Karloff, a quiet, soft-spoken, unflappable man who always looked amazingly fresh and crisp even on days, like this one, when he had spent the whole night before sweating out an alert. At the front desk he nodded a good morning to Mandy, who kept his office running, and ducked into the small, book-lined inner sanctum he maintained for himself in the back.

  The Telexes were from the offices of the Washington State Epidemiologist in the Smith Tower in Seattle, and Ted skimmed them, hoping for the detail he was waiting for, not finding it, and finally went through the reports line by line. He had a thoroughly bad feeling about these incidents in Seattle and now, it was beginning to appear, in Colorado as well, and all interconnected. Pamela Tate, Wilderness Patrol, Enchantment Lakes Wilderness Area in western Washington. There was not much mystery about that one, Ted reflected, except for the almost unbelievable swiftness with which it hit. It was Yersinia, plain and simple, confirmed by the cultures done in Wenatchee, now being repeated in Seattle, and she was an almost classical index case for plague. High in those western mountains the rodents were there, and the fleas were there, and she was there; there was even some mention here of confirmed contact with dead rodents. He didn't know quite how they'd gotten that little item but he was very sure they weren't making up fairy tales. It just closed the circle nicely. The girl died of plague, obviously, pneumonic, and the doctor and the chopper crew were contaminated, and that made sense. The others, turning up at Harborview in Seattle, didn't, at least not from the data he had. He puiied at his lower lip. ...

  With a conscious effort he pushed the Seattle cases aside in his mind and went back to Pamela Tate again, to the little snag in that story, the place where the circle didn't quite close.

  It was the timing. It was too fast. Carlos had remarked on that before he took off for Denver—it was all far too fast. It didn't fit the classical picture of plague. Unless there is something else very unclassical involved . . .

  He sat back, letting his mind wander for a moment. If it didn't fit the classical rules, it did fit, in a way, Ted Betten-dorf's own private concept of this ancient and terrible disease. His personal picture, unproven but perfectly reasonable, evolved from his own long years of studying and writing about the pestis. Only now the microbiologists and geneticists were coming up with exactly the pieces he needed to fill the holes in his picture, the missing pieces that had hung up the progress of the scholarly work he had been writing, the thick bundles of manuscript piled on the shelves behind him. . . .

  Pamela Tate was only one of multimillions that this ugly Thing, this pestilential disease, had slaughtered down through the ages in its murderous fight for survival on Planet Earth. She was not even the first in modern times to be struck down. But just suppose, Ted reflected, that she really were the first human being to suffer the effects of some slight change in an ancient pattern of survival, some tiny interior genetic change in the organism, almost undetectable, occurring by blind chance, triggered by the natural radiation in the earth, or some happenstance direct-hit by a cosmic ray, or just by the organism's natural tendency to shift its genetic arrangement spontaneously. Suppose that somehow, for some reason or no reason, three tiny amino acid fragments on a certain spiral of DNA had gotten displaced, maybe traded places with three different amino acid fragments, while three others dropped off altogether, and the change somehow improved the survival qualities of that one organism over its brothers, led to slightly different infective qualities given precisely the right host—and suppose the change was then passed on to successive generations. It could be so simple, and so deadly. A minor step in an evolutionary chain that made one organism and all its progeny subtly and horribly more capable of survival—and murder. The organism wouldn't know or care—it couldn't, for it had no sentience. All it had was an implacable, mindless need to survive. . . .

  Ted ran a hand through his thick gray hair and pursed his lips. Sheer speculation, of course, but the notion was sobering—and from his own studies, he was convinced there was supporting evidence from history. One thing was certain: the organism of plague was a tough survivor from way back. Nobody knew when it had first made its appearance on earth-surely long before the beginning of recorded history. Probably it had evolved geological ages ago in the warm, salty seas at the same time that other one-celled creatures first appeared. Maybe many bacteria evolved at the same time—nobody knew for sure. But unlike other free-living, motile protozoan water creatures, unlike the algae and Euglena and diatoms and other free-living one-celled plants, the bacteria were never free, com
plete forms of plant life. They were always cripples. They needed help. They mostly depended on decay for their nourishment. Many became useful symbiotes with other life forms: they released nutrients and fixed nitrogen from dead matter for plants and animals to use. They fermented rock into sand and then soil so that the land plants and aninials could survive. They were the garbage men of the planet, busy seeing that nothing was wasted in the great cycle of evolving life.

  Many were benign and helpful, but not all. Some attacked and destroyed living things—and these survived along with all the rest, tiny capsules of death, crippled and malignant half-cells. They too grew and evolved, Ted thought, and now millions of years later they were still picking their hosts, their favorite victims, destroying life in order to survive, and creating jobs for people like him. . . .

  From the best accounts he knew, that ugly Thing that had slaughtered Pamela Tate first made its appearance in recorded human history in the ancient city of Athens in 753 b.c. One day in that unhappy year, without warning, people in a great and civilized city began dying. Many people, and many rats. No one then saw any connection. For the people, the dying was horrible: fever, prostration, great purple-black welts appearing under the skin, huge festering painful lumps of swollen flesh appearing in the armpits and neck and groin and finally, after days of agony, a death that must have been a welcome relief. They called it "The Pestilence" or "The Death" in those days, and if The Pestilence was really caused by angry gods, as the people believed, the gods must have been appeased because The Death finally went away. And none too soon, either. Ten thousand people died in that wave of Death, and since the mighty Athens of those days probably had no more than thirty thousand inhabitants, as much as a third of the population was wiped out. Another third suffered the infection and recovered. Including, of course, some of the rats. And the fleas that fed upon the rats.