“Oh. Sorry. Well. That a disease could be said to be discovered. Of course all that’s usually meant is that they’ve isolated a particular virus. But I mean, if you think about it the virus must have been there all along, mustn’t it? And I should have thought that people, well, you know, natives, had been coming down with the bloody thing since ages. I mean, when Leif Erikson, or whoever, was discovering your States, some poor devil must have had all the symptoms of Lassa fever, even dying from it, too, very probably, without ever knowing that that’s what was killing him because the disease had never been named, you see. Now it has. Officially, I’m only the ninth case — oh yes, I’m in the literature — but I’ll bet populations have died of it.”
“I don’t think I understand what—”
“Well, only that I know where I stand, don’t I? Just as you, if you were right about yourself, know where you stand. Is that an advantage? I wonder. Quite honestly I don’t know. Yes, and that’s strange, too, isn’t it, that I know things but don’t know what to make of them? Incubation period one week. Very well. Weakness? Check. Myositis? Check. And the fever of course. And ulcerative pharyngitis with oral lesions. Yellow centers and erythemystositic halos. Rather like one of your lovely Mister Softee concoctions rather. Myocarditis, check. Pneumonitis, pleuritis, encephalophitathy, hemorrhagic diathesis? Check. Well, check some, most. What the hell? Check them all. Sooner or later they’ll come. I mean I expect they will. Gibberd’s been very straight with me. I think it pleases him how classic my case has been. Yet one can’t tell, can one? I mean, what about the sleeplessness? I sleep like a top. I was sleeping when you were brought in, wasn’t I? It was only your racket woke me. Well, what about the sleeplessness? Or the slurred speech? One has some things but not others. There was the headache and leg rash and even the swollen face, but where was the leg pain? And this is the point, I think: What I have is incurable and generally fatal. Generally fatal? Generally? Fatal? Will this classic condition kill me or not? Incurable. Always incurable. But only generally fatal. Oh, what a hopeful world it is! Even in hospital. So no more racket, you understand? No more whimpering and whining. Be hard, Mister Softee!”
“All right,” Ben said.
“Yes, well,” his roommate said. “Are you ambulatory? I couldn’t really tell. I saw you stand. But I saw Sister help. Are you? Ambulatory?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, good. I wonder if I could trouble you to come back of the screen. One is rather in need of help.”
“You want me to come back there?”
“If you would. If it isn’t too much bother. Oh, I see. The contagion. Well. There’s nothing to fear. Lassa can’t be contracted from anyone who’s had the disease for more than thirty-two days. One’s had it a year and a half.”
One could call the nurse, Ben thought. I have been orphaned and I have been blinded. I am Mister Softee here and Chicken from the Colonel there. Godfathers have called me to their deathbeds to change my life and all this has been grist for my character. I am in one of the go-ahead tropical medicine wards in Rapid City, South Dakota, and a Lassa fever pioneer needs my help. Oh well, he thought, and left his bed and proceeded down the long empty ward toward the screen at its rear. He stood by the screened-in sick man.
“Yes?” Ben said.
“What, here so soon? Well, you are ambulatory. Good show, Mister Softee! I’m Flight Lieutenant Tanner incidentally. Well then, could you come back of the screen, please just?”
“Come back of it.”
“Yes. Would you just?”
Flesh went behind the screen. The Englishman was seated beside his bed in a steel wheelchair. Heavy leather straps circled his weakened chest and wrapped his flaccid legs to hold him upright in it. Flesh looked down meekly at the mandala of spokes, then at the Englishman’s bare arms along the chair’s wide rests. They were smeared with a perspiration of blood. Tiny droplets of blood freckled the man’s forehead, discrete reddish bubbles mitigated by sweat and barely deeper in color than blown bubble gum. A sort of bloodfall trickled like tears from the hollow beneath his left eye and out over the cheekbone and down his face.
“Leukopenia, check,” the Englishman said.
“My God, you’re bleeding all over.”
“No. Not actually bleeding, old fellow. It’s a sort of capillary action. It’s complicated rather, but the blood is forced out the pores. It’s all explained in the literature. Gibberd told me I might expect it. It was jolly good luck your happening to be by. There’s a box of Kleenex in that nightstand there. Would you mind? If you’ll just tamp at the bloody stuff. Oh, I say, forgive that last, would you just? I should have thought to think that would do me rather nicely.”
“Maybe I’d better call the nurse.”
“She’s rather busy, I should expect. There are people who really need help, for whom help is of some help, as it were. As I don’t seem to be one of them — incurable, generally fatal, I’m taking the darker view just now, old boy — I should think you would have thought we might work this out between ourselves.”
“Yeah, between ourselves,” Ben said. “Pip.” He took the Kleenex and began to dab at the man’s skin.
“There’s a good fellow. That’s got the arm, I think,” the Englishman said.
“This never happened before?”
“No no. Absolutely without precedent. I say, do you realize?”
“What?”
“That if this disease really was discovered in 1970—well, it was, of course, but I mean if it didn’t exist before 1970—why, then I’m only the ninth person to have experienced this particular symptom. We’re breaking freshish ground here, you and I.”
Ben, working on the bloodfall at its headwaters just under the Englishman’s left eye, started to gag. He brought the bloodied Kleenex up to his lips.
“Be firm, Mister Softee.” Ben swallowed and looked at him.
“I think that’s it, rather,” Ben said quietly.
“Yes, well, it would be, wouldn’t it, except that the insides of my thighs seem a bit sticky.”
“No no. I mean that’s it. Generally fatal. I’m taking the lighter view. I’m calling the nurse.”
“Mister Softee.”
“What?”
“We’ve the same doctor.”
The same spring that Ben Flesh lay in the tropical medicine ward of Rapid City General — the prime interest rate was 63/4 percent — a record heat wave hit the northern tier of the central plains states. Extraordinary demands on the energy supplies caused breakdowns and brownouts all over. The hospital had its own auxiliary generator, but the power situation was so precarious that the use of electricity, even there, was severely cut back, if not curtailed entirely. There was no electricity to run the patients’ television sets, none for air conditioning in any but the most crowded wards, or in those rooms where the heat posed a threat to the lives of the patients. It was forbidden to burn reading lights, or to play radios that did not run on batteries. All available electricity was directed toward keeping the lights and equipment in good order in the operating theaters, maintaining the kitchens with their washers and driers, their toasters and refrigeration units (even at that Flesh suspected that much of what he ate was tainted or turning), to chilling those medications that required it, to operating the laundry services (though the sheets were changed now every third or fourth day instead of daily), and to keeping the power-hungry instruments going that analyzed blood and urine samples and evaluated the more complicated chemistries and tests. The X-ray machines, which required massive doses of electricity, were now used only for emergencies and only the dialysis machine and iron lung, top priorities, were unaffected by the brownout. Even electroshock therapy was suspended for all but the most violent cases, and Flesh was kept awake nights by the shrieks and howls of the nearby mad, people so far gone in their terror and delusion that even powerful tranquilizers like Thorazine were helpless to calm them.