They left with lots of scare headlines and nasty suppositions, but nothing more. Page one again, to scare the hell out of the population, but the truth was that nobody really knew what was going on.
Mary Eastwicke made her way wearily back to her office feeling as if she’d worked ten hours in the last seventy minutes. Several staffers were looking over papers, telexes, and the like. She sank into her chair.
“I need a drink,” she said. “Anything new?”
A young assistant shook his head. “Nothing more. The toll’s 864 now, with eighty-six deaths. In a couple hundred cases they’d be better off dead, though. A hundred percent paralyzed. Stiff, too. You can bend ’em in any position and they’ll stay that way. Most of the rest are nasty partials. That town was wiped out as surely as if you dropped a bomb on it.”
Mary sighed, and decided she was going to get that drink no matter what. It was going to be a long night; no going home for them or anyone else this time.
She prayed that the folks upstairs would come up with something solid on this one. She thought of that comment from that reporter to the effect that it was as if somebody was wiping out the small towns of America.
She wondered how the tests were going.
Dr. Mark Spiegelman was about fifty, and usually looked forty, but by 5:00 A.M. looked seventy instead. He sank wearily down in Sandra O’Connell’s office and gulped his thirty-sixth cup of strong black coffee as she read the reports and looked at the photos.
“Did you ever dream of a nice little VA hospital job someplace?” he asked her. “You know, the kind where they give you some patients with known ailments and ask you to do your best to help them? I do. Lord! I’d settle for a nice bubonic plague someplace. But this!”
She nodded. “Same sort of thing as the others. These motor areas of the brain were burned, actually burned! It’s as if some nice, normal cells just suddenly decided to stop producing the nice normal acids they need and suddenly devoted their time to producing sulfuric acid or something. How’s it possible, Mark? How’s it possible for just a few cells in a particularly critical spot, all in a group, to suddenly produce a destructive series of chemicals for a period, do their damage, then let the surviving ones return to normal? Even cancer, once it starts, keeps doing what it’s doing. This was triggered only in a few centers of the brain, critical centers, within a couple of hours in just about everybody in that town, then stopped. How is that possible, Mark?”
He shrugged wearily. “You tell me. You know LSD, though?” She nodded, wondering what he was getting at. “It’s a catalyst. Does just about nothing itself. You take it, it goes through the brain, trips a few wrong switches, then leaves, either in body waste or skin secretion. It’s almost out of the system by the time you get the full effects.”
She frowned. “You think we’re dealing with something like that here? A catalytic agent?”
He nodded. “It’s the oddballs that give it away. Remember in every case we had not only the town zapped, but also a number of people in other places who’d merely been in that town? Well, the magic number is three days, and maybe with a little more work we can pin it down to certain hours within those three days. At least we have a couple of people who were in Berwick in the early morning and left and didn’t come down with their disease, and we have a few more from Boland who were in town three days earlier, getting there late in the day, and didn’t get it, either. I bet we find those truck drivers who were in Cornwall were there within certain hours.”
“I’ll go along with the catalytic agent,” she said, “but how does that explain those truck stop people? If we’re dealing with a chemical, whether natural or artificial, how’d those others far from the town catch it?”
Again Mark shrugged. “If any of them pull through, and we can establish any sort of communication with them, maybe we’ll find out they sipped some of the driver’s coffee or something. Back in the late sixties—before your time, I know—the young crazies who thought LSD was the greatest thing since sliced bread often dumped it secretly in cafe coffee urns and the like.”
Sandra smiled slightly at the flattering “before your time” remark, and wished it were so.
“So what do we have?” she asked rhetorically. “We have a catalytic agent that is somehow administered to an entire population within a few-hour period, sends a signal somehow to the brain to have certain vital cells malfunction for a short period three days later, after it’s too long gone for us to trace. A nice chemical agent, but show me a coffee urn, anything, that a whole town uses!” She had a sudden thought. “You checked the municipal water supplies?”
He nodded. “We checked everything, and we’ll do it again. A lot more chemicals than there should be in some cases, but nothing unusual, and certainly nothing to cause this. No, it has to come from something they all touched or consumed. I’m positive of it.”
She slammed the stack of papers down hard on her desk. “Then why haven’t we found it, damn it!” she snapped angrily. “If it’s a chemical it’s common to all the towns, and it should still be there!”
“They’re taking everything apart piece by piece and brick by brick,” he said wearily. “If it’s there, we’ll find it. But I won’t, at least not tonight—er, this morning. I, my dear, am going to go down the hall, enter my office, stretch out on that couch of mine, and if ten more towns go under I will not awaken until at least noon.” He got up slowly, with a groan, and stopped at the door. “Care to join me?” he asked with a leer.
She smiled weakly. “Some pair we’d be.” She chuckled. “Asleep in ten seconds.”
Mark returned the smile. “Shame on you for such dirty thoughts,” he said, and walked out. She didn’t see or hear him go.
Dr. Sandra O’Connell was sound asleep in her big padded chair.
THREE
The alarm clock woke them. He reached out, fumbled for the stud that would silence it, and finally succeeded. He opened his eyes, still holding the clock, and brought it in front of him so he could see it.
He stared at it in wonder, trying to figure out why. He held the clock for the longest time, looking at it curiously, as if it were some strange new thing. He felt confused, adrift, wrong somehow.
He looked around the room, and it didn’t help. Nothing was familiar, nothing looked like some-thing he’d seen or known before. He felt a shifting next to him, and for the first time he was aware that he was not alone in the bed.
She was still asleep. She was middle-aged, a bit dumpy, with a few touches of gray, in an aquamarine-blue nightgown.
Who the hell was she?
He strained, tried to remember, and could not. He was a blank, a total blank—it was as if he’d just been born.
He got out of bed slowly, carefully, so as not to wake the woman. He felt odd, giddy, light-headed, but with a dull ache that started in his head and spread throughout his body.
He walked dully out into the hall, an unfamiliar hall still masked in shadow, and looked up and down. He tried one room, then another, before finally finding the bathroom. He had to go, he knew that much.
He walked in, searched for and finally found the light switch, and turned it on.
He almost jumped. A man’s face stared at him, and he started to address it, to apologize or whatever, when he realized suddenly that it was his reflection.
His? Someone he’d never seen before?
He stared at it until he just had to go, and did. After, he didn’t flush for fear of disturbing the quiet and that woman in the bedroom.