Dr. Joseph Bede, in a tremendously loud sport shirt, jeans, and sunglasses, a three-days’ growth of beard on his face, hardly looked like the supervising doctor in a medical crisis. He looked up, saw her, and waved.
She went over to him. “Hello, Joe,” was all she could say.
“Sandy,” he said. “Hey! Get a chair. This isn’t gonna be too pleasant, but you should be in on this.
“At least no one died this time,” she tried.
He frowned, paused, sat back a moment and sighed. “Well, depends on how you look at it. You’ll see what I mean in a minute.” He turned back around, nodding to a nervous-looking State Police corporal. “Next one,” he ordered softly.
The next one was a middle-aged woman, over-weight, face lined and weathered. She stood there, looking nervous and bewildered.
A young man in casual dress leaned over toward Joe Bede. “Holly Troon,” he said. “Lived here most of her life. That’s her old man, Harry, second row, third one in over there. Part-time cashier, drug store. Three kids—we took ’em on the first bus.”
“Education?” Bede asked.
The young man shrugged. “High school. Nothin’ odd, nothin’ special, neither.”
Bede nodded, then turned back to the woman. “Please have a seat,” he urged in his most calm, soothing manner. She sat, looking at him expectantly.
“I’m Dr. Bede,” he told her. “What do you remember about yourself?”
She didn’t say a word, just shook her head slowly from side to side.
“Tell me the first thing you do remember,” he prodded, gentle as ever.
“I—I woke up,” she stammered. “And—well, I didn’t know where I was. I still don’t know. And then this old man came into the room, and we kind of stared at each other.”
The kindly interrogator nodded sympathetically. “And this man—you had never seen him before, either?”
She shook her head. “I can’t remember anything at all. Nothing.” She looked at him, almost pleadingly. “Why can’t I remember? Why can’t any of there remember?” She gestured at the waiting townspeople, her voice rising slowly and quivering as if bordering on hysteria. He calmed her with that charismatic gentleness he had been born with.
“Take it easy,” he said. “You—all of you—caught a disease. It has this effect—loss of memory. We’re working on it.”
She clutched at the straw. “You mean you can cure me?”
He put on the number twenty-three smile, the one reserved for terminal patients.
“All of your memory’s still up there. It’s just that the rest of you can’t get to it right now. That’s what we’ll be working on. Like a telephone that’s out of order because a wire is broken. Fix the wire and you can use it again.”
It seemed to make her feel better, and she relaxed.
“Now, tell me,” he continued. “When you saw this strange man you weren’t afraid of him? I mean, a woman sees a strange man…”
That brought back a little of it. “You just don’t understand,” she said, shaking a little. “When I woke up I didn’t even know I was a woman.”
His eyebrows went up. “You thought you were a man?”
“No,” she said in frustration. “I wasn’t anything. Then he said, ‘Who are you?’ and I asked him the same thing, and we found neither of us knew. And then we found this closet mirror and looked at ourselves and neither of us recognized ourselves.” She half-pointed to herself. “I never saw this woman in my life before. You understand that?” The hysteria was rising again.
“Just take it easy,” he told her. “Now, I don’t think we’ll pester you any more. We want to get you to a hospital, where they can start to find out how to bring you back.”
The corporal took her arm, genuine pity in his face, and she went meekly with him to the bus.
All around the square the same scene was being repeated, with slight variations. Spiegelman was already handling some.
Joe Bede sighed and turned to Sandra O’Connell. “See what I mean?”
She did. “My god! And they’re all like this?”
He nodded. “There are some gradations, of course. Most are total. Some are so far beyond total they can’t even remember what a telephone is,” he told her. “Even some basic skills have disappeared or diminished. Even the ones with some vague concept of identity can’t remember their pasts.” He turned, looked at the still considerable numbers of people waiting patiently on the chairs. “Notice something else?”
She thought a minute. “The docility,” she asked as much as said.
He nodded. “You can lead ’em anyplace. Not a one of ’em in a rage, or yelling and screaming, or resisting. Almost like sheep. Even if they get close to hysteria, like that poor woman, they are easily diverted. Worst they do, men or women, old or young, is cry softly and hopelessly. And suggestion! Just on a hunch I asked a woman who was still wearing a nightgown and nothing else to disrobe for me, and damned if she didn’t do it, right here in front of everybody!”
Sandra shivered and decided to slightly change the subject. She looked quizzically over at the young man who had provided the identification. Bede got her meaning and both her intents.
“Jim Shoup, this is Dr. Sandra O’Connell, the coordinator for the National Disease Control Center Action Teams,” he said. “Jim’s from Hartley, about ten kilometers down the point here, closer to the main drag. He knows almost everybody.”
Shoup nodded. He appeared to be in his middle twenties, lean and athletic.
“Anybody in Hartley come down with this?” she asked both of them.
Shoup nodded. “A dozen or so. So far,” he added worriedly.
“I wouldn’t worry,” she reassured him. “This thing only strikes once, it seems, like lightning. If you didn’t get it within an hour or two of everybody else, odds are you won’t.”
He scratched his chin nervously. “Well, I hope you’re right. This is really givin’ me the creeps.”
“If I could wake up twenty-four, tanned, and muscular I’d surrender every damned memory I got,” Bede mumbled, and it relaxed the other two. It was almost a miracle that he’d been the first here; he was the best field man NDCC had.
The light, warm wind shifted slightly, and Bede’s pipe smoke blew toward Sandra. She coughed and he tried to shield it. As luck always had it, no matter where he put it the smoke aimed at her.
“I’ll put the damned thing out,” he said apologetically, and knocked it against his foot.
The odor didn’t quite vanish, but seemed to reveal another tobacco smell, fouler by far than his pipe.
“That’s all right,” she said. “I’ve got to go check on the other groups, make sure all the spaces are reserved, and get the labs set up again.” She stood up. The odor persisted. “Lord! This—agent—whatever it is, it gets increasingly bizarre, doesn’t it?”
“Increasingly closer to perfection,” said a sharp, Brooklynesque male voice just behind her.
She turned in surprise and saw a man standing there with a monstrous black cigar in his mouth. He was slightly shorter than she, about 175 centimeters or so, with a pitted, blotched complexion and a nose at least four times too large for his face. Although he was neatly dressed in suit and tie, the clothing hung wrongly on him, and looked like it had been worn by someone completely different for a week before he got it. He was mostly bald, with incongrously long shocks of gray-white hair on the sides and back.
He looks like a mad scientist from an old and bad movie, she thought.