“None,” Sam said, then let the silence stretch. “As of this present moment the disease is incurable. Anyone who contracts it will die. The only way to prevent it will be to wipe out the reservoirs of infection, to kill every bird within ten miles of New York City, or twenty miles or a hundred or a thousand, whatever is needed to make sure that not a single bird escapes. I know this is a shocking idea, but there is no alternative. To put it very simply — it is the birds or us.”
There were a number of angry shouts, which Dr. McKay ignored, almost turning his back so he would not have to notice the red-faced governor of New York State, who had sprung to his feet.
“We have one person here who is qualified to tell us what must be done, Professor Burger, curator of the New York Zoological Park. Professor Burger…”
Burger was a slight man with a pink, bald head covered by a few carefully placed strands of white hair. He spoke with his face lowered and he was difficult to hear until the hall grew quiet.
“… patterns of flight and normal roosting and homing behavior of various species. I have worked out the maximum area of possible infection, representing, we might say, a diseased bird of one of the more free-ranging species being infected and flying until unable to continue, then infecting another and so forth. I would therefore say—” He shuffled through the papers before him and a muttering grew in the audience. “I beg your indulgence, gentlemen,” he said, raising his head, and it could be seen that his eyes were wet and tears marked his cheeks. “I have just come from the zoo, where we have killed, poisoned all of our birds, all of them — yes, here are the figures. A radius from Manhattan of one hundred miles in all directions, slightly more on Long Island to take in Montauk Point, should be satisfactory. Though this area may have to be extended depending on later reports.”
“That’s impossible,” someone shouted. “That will be an area of nearly ten thousand square miles, it would take an army!”
“It will need the Army,” Burger said. “The UN Army must be called on for help. It will need gas, poison bait, shotguns, explosives…”
Slowly, through the following uproar, Professor Chabel’s gavel could be heard, banging for attention. He continued until his voice could be heard.
“This is a problem of World Health, which is why I was selected to chair this meeting. I believe we have heard all that is necessary to make a decision and I call for an immediate vote.”
There were more complaints at this which died away even more slowly. The vote, when it was finally counted, was no landslide, but the effective measures had been passed. The Army would move in and the slaughter would begin at dawn.
6
“I saw on TV where the beach on Coney Island was covered with dead seagulls, washed up during the night so they closed the whole beach off, not that anyone is breaking their neck to go swimming anyway.”
Killer talked around his half-chewed toothpick while he drove, tooling the big ambulance down the center of the deserted crosstown street. All the cars were parked and locked and there were no pedestrians in sight.
“Slow down,” Sam said. “Remember we’re cruising and not on the way to a ruptured appendix.” He was sitting on the right, looking into all the doorways and areaways that they passed. So far he had seen nothing. It was crowded on the front seat with the three of them there. The third man was a UN soldier named Finn, a tall Dane bulking like a pack mule in his full field equipment and forced to lean forward because of the flamethrower on his back.
“There under — under the car,” the soldier broke in suddenly, pointing at a delivery truck. “I think I saw something there.” They braced themselves as Killer hit the brakes and squealed to a stop.
Sam was first out, shouldering the emergency bag as he went; the contents of this bag was one of the measures that had been outlined at the meeting the previous evening.
Finn had good eyes. The dark shadow huddled against the rear wheel of the truck was a young man who tried to crawl further under when they approached. Sam knelt down and, even in the bad light, he could see the characteristic flushed skin and incipient boils of Rand’s disease. He took a pair of elbow-length isolation gloves from the bag and pulled them on.
“Let me help you out from there,” he told the sick man, but when he reached under the man scrambled further away, eyes wide with fear. Sam grabbed his leg, warded off one feeble kick, then slowly pulled him out into the street. The man struggled briefly, then the whites of his eyes rolled up as he passed out; this would make handling him a good deal easier.
The gas mask was an ordinary can respirator type from the fire department stocks, and had been modified quickly by coating the inside with a biocidal cream. When Sam had seated this firmly on the patient’s face he took a pressurized container of antiseptic from his bag and soaked the man’s clothes and skin, then rolled him onto his side so he could do his back. Only then did he strip off the gloves and begin treatment, sure that any Rand-beta virus on his skin or clothing had been killed. He took off the gas mask and prepared an injection of interferon, still the only treatment that had any effect on the disease. The UN soldier came back and stood frowning down at them and fingering the handpiece of his flamethrower.
“There are no birds near here, none; I searched very carefully. Have you asked him where he could have touched a bird?”
“He’s unconscious, I didn’t have a chance.”
Killer had backed the ambulance up and opened the rear door, then wheeled out the stretcher. He tilted his head to one side and the other, frowning down at the unconscious man’s face.
“Don’t he look sort of Italian to you, Doc?”
“He could be — but what difference would that make?”
“Maybe nothing, but you know there’s plenty of pigeon fanciers in this neighborhood, racers and homing pigeons, and a lot of them are Italian. They keep hutches on the roofs.“
They both looked up automatically as he said it, just in time to see a flick of white on the edge of the parapet high above.
“No — not my birds, didn’t have anything to do with my birds…” The sick man shouted, trying to struggle to his feet.
Sam ripped the end off a riot shot — a disposable, one-shot hypodermic of powerful sedative that was self-powered by a cartridge of compressed gas — and pressed it to the struggling man’s arm. It hissed slightly and the patient fell back, unconscious.
“Roll him onto the stretcher and get him into the ambulance. Finn and I will see what’s on the roof.”
Killer protested. “You could use me there to—”
“I could use you here to watch the patient a lot better. On the job, Killer.”
They went as far as the top floor in the elevator, then headed toward the stairs, the soldier first. Doors slammed shut as they approached and they knew that they were being watched all the way. At the head of the stairs was the roof door, closed and sealed with a large padlock.
“The rights of private property must always be observed,” Finn observed gloomily, rattling the lock. “However, paragraph fourteen of our emergency commission reads…” The rest of his words were drowned out as he raised his steel-shod, size-fifteen boot and kicked hard against the lock. Screws squealed as they tore from the frame and the door swung open.
Ahead of them stood a large and freshly painted dovecote above which two pigeons were circling. Clearly visible on the floor inside were a dozen more lying on their sides, some feebly beating their wings.