The state Health Department was notified almost immediately. Again, there was initial shock and disbelief, but they moved. The Governor mobilized appropriate Guard trucks and facilities, not just to aid in handling the patients but also to cordon off the entire area around the town.
Less than fifteen minutes after the network newsmen had it, a report went in to the National Disease Control Center in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside Washington. Field representatives were dispatched from Omaha and the University of Nebraska within the hour.
In a small but comfortable apartment in the city of Fairfax, a phone rang.
Dr. Sandra O’Connell had just walked in and hadn’t even had time to take off her shoes when the ringing began. She picked up the phone.
“Sandra O’Connell,” she said into it.
“Dr. O’Connell? This is Mack Rotovich. We got another one, Red Code, same pattern.”
Oh, my God! she said to herself. “Where?” “Small town in western Nebraska, Cornwall I think it is.”
“Symptoms?”
“Catatonia, looks like,” Rotovich informed her. “’Things are still more than a little sketchy. It just broke a few hours ago.”
She dreaded the next question the most. “How many?” she asked.
“Six hundred forty or so to this point,” Rotovich told her. “Maybe more now. Hard to say. Got a few elsewhere, seemed to hit about the same time, and there’s a lot of people out in the fields yet. We’re sending the Guard in on a roundup.”
She nodded to herself. “Have you sent the Action Team in?”
“Of course. That’s the first thing I did. Blood and tissue samples should be coming within the next two, three hours. Want to be down here when they come in?”
She was tired; bone-weary, her father used to call it. It had been a long day and a long week and she needed sleep so bad she could taste it.
“I’ll be down in an hour,” she said resignedly and hung up the phone. She stood there for half a minute, trying to collect herself, then picked the phone up again. Carefully, she punched out a full twenty-two digits on the pushbuttons, including the * and # twice. There was an almost unbelievably long series of clicks and relays, then an electronic buzz which was immediately answered.
“This is Dr. O’Connell, NDCC,” she said into the phone. “We have another Red Town. An Action Team is en route. Please notify the President.”
TWO
Mary Eastwicke had thought that being press officer for the National Disease Control Center would be a fairly nice, easy job. Nobody was very interested in NDCC, most of the time, except for an occasional science reporter doing a Sunday feature, and the pay was top bracket for civil service. But now, as the trim, tiny businesslike woman walked into the small briefing room bulging with reporters, IN lights and cameras, and into the heat generated by it all, she wondered why she hadn’t quit long ago. With the air of someone about to enter a bullring for the first time, she stepped up to the cluster of micro-phones.
“First, I’ll read a complete statement for you,” she said in a. smooth, accentless soprano. “After, I will take your questions.” She paused a moment, apparently arranging her papers but actually giving them time to get ready for the official stuff that would grace the news within the hour.
“At approximately 3:10 this afternoon, Eastern Daylight Time, the town of Cornwall, Nebraska, first began showing symptoms of an as-yet unknown agent, said agent causing most of. the town to come down with varying degrees of paralysis. The symptoms showed first in the young, then quickly spread to upper age groups. We have been as yet unable to fully question any victims, but there appears from hospital and doctor records of the past few weeks to have been no forewarning of any sort, although the malady struck every victim within a period of under three hours.” She paused to let the print journalists catch up and check their little shoulder recorders, then continued.
“So far there are fourteen confirmed fatalities—seven infants, two persons in vehicles which crashed, and the others elderly. Another forty-six are considered in critical condition. Federal, state, and local authorities are currently on the scene, and NDCC is at this moment running tests on samples from several victims, as well as two bodies of the dead. At the moment this is all we know. I’ll take questions.”
There was a sudden tumult, and she waited patiently for the mob scene to calm down.
“Please raise your hands,” she said professionally when she thought she could be heard over the din. “I’ll call on you.” That settled them, and she pointed to a well-known network science editor.
“Have there been any signs of this affliction spreading to other localities?” he asked in his famous cool manner. “We have some reports of it hitting in other areas.”
“So far we have had a number of cases outside the area,” she said. “Twenty-six, to be exact. All but three are known to have been in Cornwall within the last few days. Except for four people in a truck stop on I-80 and two truckers in West Virginia who passed through there three days ago, no other victims. And, no, we can find no sign of any spreading of the affliction by these people to others with whom they’ve come in contact, except perhaps at the truck stop.”
Another question. Did the disease affect animals in the town, and did it spare any people?
“Yes to both,” she said. “That is, many people seem to have had such a mild case there appears to be no question that they’ll recover with no serious effects. As to the animals, some pigs were affected, but not cows, horses, chickens, or other animals. Some dogs seem to exhibit slight signs, but there are no totally paralyzed ones that we’ve found.”
“Is there any connection yet between this disease and those that struck Boland, California, Hartley, North Dakota, and Berwick, Maine, in the past few weeks?” That was the Post man.
She shrugged. “Of course, they are all small towns, and in each case the mystery ailment struck suddenly and with no prior warning. However, the symptoms were far different in those other cases, even from each other. If you remember, Boland’s population went blind, Hartley’s became severely palsied, and Berwick…” She let it hang and they didn’t pursue it. Everyone in Berwick, to one degree or another, had become rather severely mentally retarded.
“It’s almost like somebody’s trying to kill off small-town America,” a reporter muttered. Then he asked, “All of these maladies are related to attacks on various centers of the brain and central nervous system, aren’t they? Isn’t that a connection?”
She nodded. “It’s the only connection, really. We are still running a series of tests on the earlier victims, you know. Our teams are working around the clock on it. If, in fact, it’s a disease of the central nervous system and/or brain, though, how is it transmitted? There is no apparent link between the afflicted areas. And why hasn’t it shown up elsewhere? Unless someone else is prepared to answer those questions, we must assume we are dealing with different diseases here.”
“Or a new kind of disease,” a voice said loudly.
It went on for quite a while, with even the crazies having their turn. Any flying saucers reported near these places? No. Is the Army back into biological warfare experimentation? No, not the military. Somebody who’d just seen The Andromeda Strain on the Late Show asked about meteors, space probes, and the like, but again the answer was no, none that had been found.