Plague

'I can see that.'

'You don't understand,' insisted Dr. Petrie. 'I haven't caught it for a reason. My daughter hasn't caught it for a reason. My girlfriend hasn't caught it because she has stayed almost exclusively with us, and we're never going to get it.'

Dr. Murray opened a drawer in his desk, took out a pack of stale Larks, and unsteadily lit one up. He kept the cigarette in his mouth, puffing smoke out sideways like a poker player.

'What you're trying to tell me, Dr. Petrie, is that you know why you, haven't caught it? Is that it?'

'Exactly. We haven't caught it because we've been exposed to radiation. In my case, it's X-Rays. In my daughter's case, color television. I believe now that my daughter did get a mild dose of plague, but because she was kept away from other carriers, she recovered.'

Dr. Murray took off his spectacles. 'I don't understand you, Dr. Petrie. How can radiation possibly have any effect on a plague bacillus?'

'It can have an enormous effect. It's my supposition that, somehow, radiation reached the raw sewage that was dumped off the Long Island coast, and that within the radioactive sewage, the common plague bacillus mutated into a fast-growing and very virulent super-plague. Perhaps further doses of radiation can mutate it further into a harmless form, or slow down its incubation. I don't yet know. I was hoping that you and some of your doctors here could help me find out.'

Dr. Murray thought this over. Then he said, 'Dr. Petrie, I think you have a very interesting notion, there. But what I am not is a research bacteriologist. I am trying to run a metropolitan casualty department here, and at the moment, what with the strike and the plague, I'm not making much of a go of it. What you need is a man who can turn your theory into scientific facts — if it's a theory that's any good.'

'Can you suggest anyone?'

Dr. Murray reached for his desk diary, and leafed through the pages.

'There are two very good men,' he said. 'At the moment, they're both fighting each other in court, as I understand it, over some new technique of theirs. But they both have good reputations, and they're both interested in radioactive mutation of bacilli. Here we are — Professor Ivor Glantz — and Professor Sergei Forward.'

'I've heard of Glantz,' said Dr. Petrie. 'A bit of a lone wolf, if I remember.'

'Brilliant, though,' said Dr. Murray. 'If there's any foundation to your theory at all, he can find it.'

'Where do I find him?'

'You're very fortunate. He lives on First Avenue, in Concorde Tower. He's a rich man.'

'I didn't know research bacteriologists got rich.'

'They do if their fathers are bankers, and they take out a patent on self-aborting bacilli for the brewing industry.

'Ivor Glantz devised the bacillus that made Milwaukee not only famous but extremely profitable.'

'I see. Perhaps you and I are in the wrong branch of science, Dr. Murray.'

Dr. Murray ignored him. 'I can let you have a note to take to Glantz, on hospital paper. They won't let you into the tower otherwise. Right now, they won't let you into any place at all unless you're known.'

'Thank you,' said Dr. Petrie, as the older man unscrewed his pen and scribbled a letter. 'I just hope that we can do something to make your job easier.'

Dr. Murray grimaced. 'There is one thing. When you're up at Concorde Tower, you can take that rifle of yours and make a large hole in Kenneth Garunisch.'

'That reminds me,' said Dr. Petrie. 'Is there another way out of this place? I kind of unsettled the medical workers' pickets on the way in.'

Dr. Murray nodded. 'We'll get you out. Would you care for some coffee before you go? My secretary will make you some next door. Right now, I have to get back to the wards.'

When Dr. Murray had left, they sat for half an hour by the window of his secretary's office, sipping hot coffee and staring out over the darkened city. The windows were soundproofed, but they couldn't keep out the endless howling of sirens, and the crackle of shots. The city was black and shadowy, lit here and there by sparkling orange fires. It looked like a medieval vision of the devil's kingdom; a place where demons and beasts roamed in echoing darkness. Not even the stars looked down on the twentieth-century city that had become, at last, the realization of a fifteenth-century nightmare.

Ivor Glantz had just come out of the shower. He was wrapped up in a white toweling bathrobe, and he dabbed his perspiring forehead with a succession of tissues pulled from a Kleenex box.

'Dr. Petrie,' he said, assiduously gathering up sweat, 'I have to say that I admire your courage. You and your lady, and your little girl.'

Dr. Petrie, shaved and smelling of Braggi, was sitting on the wide cream-colored 1930s settee, with a large Scotch in his hand. For the first time this week, he felt clean and civilized. Prickles had been dressed up in one of Ivor Glantz's pajama jackets and put to bed in the small bedroom, while Adelaide and Esmeralda were talking in the kitchen, and making supper.

'It wasn't courage,' said Dr. Petrie, smiling tiredly. 'Far from it. It was survival. They burned down Miami, and we had to get out,'

'You think they did that deliberately?' asked Glantz.

'Set fire to the city? I don't know. I don't understand the way the federal government have handled this thing from the very beginning. Down in Miami, we were all beginning to feel like sacrificial lambs.'

Glantz smiled. 'You did well to get out of it, anyway. If you want to stay here for a few days, you're welcome. We have our own power in this building, and we're very secure. This block was designed as a maximum-security project. You saw how tight they've got it defended downstairs.'

Dr. Petrie sipped his Scotch. He was suddenly beginning to realize how utterly exhausted he was. He didn't even know if he was going to be able to stay awake for supper.

'Have you thought about my theory?' he asked.

Ivor Glantz nodded. 'Sure. I was thinking about it in the shower.'

'And how does it grab you?'

Glantz tapped ash off his cigarette. 'It grabs me pretty well, if you want to know the truth. It's one of those theories that's wacky enough to work. You see, most epidemic diseases are sparked off by a particular combination of historical and environmental circumstances. Sometimes the circumstances are so absurd and unusual that you could never predict they were going to happen. But we've had all the ingredients for this epidemic in American society for years, and it only took a couple of odd happenstances to get the whole thing going.'

Glantz got up, walked across to the drinks cabinet, and poured himself a large whiskey.

'Ingredient one is plague itself,' he said. 'We have had plague in the United States throughout the twentieth century, and every single year — particularly in the Western states — we suffer plague fatalities. It's endemic in squirrels and rats in the West, and there have beeri cases reported in Florida, as you probably know.

'Ingredient two is the raw sewage — the medium in which plague bacilli were incubating beneath the ocean. The sewage, if you like, was the laboratory in which the bacilli was mutated.

'Ingredient three is the radioactivity. Well — we don't have any proof where the radioactivity comes from, but I can guess that radioactive waste might well be dumped into the ocean from industrial processes, or maybe atomic-powered ships and submarines have offloaded uranium fuel in the area where the raw sewage was lying.

'Given those three ingredients, all it took was an unusual climatic situation, with reverse currents and changeable winds, and the epidemic was served up to us on a plate.'

Glantz sat down again, and puffed his cigarette. 'It's a classic epidemic situation, Dr. Petrie, and that's why I believe your theory is right.'