The White Plague by Frank Herbert
Only then could he attempt to sleep, knowing it would be short and that he would be up within the hour.
Actually, he slept only twenty-five minutes, bouncing off his cot to write a series of memos to the mysterious NSC questioners. The first memo suggested they ask this Peard to hunt down the religious nut, McCrae, reminding the Irish that they would need women to test whatever their laboratories produced.
On the Doheny question, he said: “Ask the Irish, for God’s sake.” This was the closest he came to revealing his anger.
On the Soviet question, he said merely: “Will do.”
On the question of where O’Neill might hide, Beckett said: “Try Ireland or England. He’ll want to watch the effects of his revenge. Doubtful he speaks Arabic. Libya unlikely. Otherwise, he may merge into some city population here, possibly as a bereaved derelict. Will raise this question with full Team.”
On the artificial insemination question, he asked: “What is meant by this question? What do you want us to consider?”
Finally, Beckett wrote: “Anything new on how O’Neill spread his disease? If not, intend to raise this question soonest with full Team.”
Having finished, Beckett reread his memos, reflecting on the questions that had prompted them. There was a sense of disorganized panic in the questions, a random groping for leads.
We need organization, he thought. And we need it damn fast.
In the way his mind often did, as Beckett’s thought focused on this urgent need, he had a sudden flash of insight about Danzas, the organized man.
Danzas was a man born, not out of his time, but out of place. By rights he should have been born in northern New Hampshire or in Maine. He was a Down Easter in French disguise – cantankerous, suspicious, close-mouthed, using his accent as a shield more than as a help in communication. Or it could be argued that Danzas had been born in exactly the right place, and similarities to a Down Easter were the product of a social coincidence. Brittany, Beckett had heard, was noted for these selfsame characteristics – an insular place keeping itself to itself, trusting only its own ways, quick to identify and make common cause with its own people – accent, manners, attitudes revealed in regional quips, jokes that often revolved around the confounding of tourists and other strangers.
The insight told Beckett how best to work with Danzas, where the man’s strengths would be found and how to employ them.
No small talk. Share his prejudices. Put him in charge of organizing key elements of our project.
I’ll have to find out what his food preferences are, Beckett thought.
Without consciously focusing on it, Beckett had begun marshaling his forces, assembling The Team into a working pattern to get the best out of all its members – the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Glory O! Glory O! to the bold Fenian Men.
– Ballad by Peadar Kearney
TWO WEEKS before the Achill demonstration, John was ready to leave his Ballard hideaway. He knew he would have to cover his tracks carefully. The search would be massive and international. The very size of the search meant they probably would find his place quickly. The pressures on anyone who had any contact with him, even his instructor in forgery in St. Louis, I guaranteed that no secrets would be kept for long. There were no illusions in his mind about governments obeying his orders not to seek him out.
The new passport was made with extreme care. He made it from Mary’s passport, taking the document from her passport case, which contained John O’Neill’s passport and the separate ones for the twins. Why he chose Mary’s passport he could not say, but he carefully hid the unused passports in the lining of his suitcase.
As he worked on the forgery, he remembered Mary saying that it would make the twins feel important to have their own passports.
The memories were oddly displaced. He felt like an eavesdropper, someone peering into the secret joys of a fellow human, prying without permission into private matters. But he could remember the twins’ delight, comparing their pictures, showing off their ability to read and write, signing their own names importantly on the proper lines.
When he had completed the chemical erasure of Mary’s passport, he felt that he had removed her even more from the world of the living. He went to the secret compartment in the suitcase and looked at the three blue-bound booklets with their golden embossing. The passports were real. But how much of the real person was contained in them? If he erased all of them, did that actually make the people unreal? He peered closely at the coded perforations on Mary’s passport. The laughter and happiness at the arrival of the passports were part of that movie playing in his skull. He could see Mary handing a passport to each of the children, Kevin first and then Mairead.
“They’re individuals and now they have the documents to prove it,” she said.
How wise she is.
He restored the three unused passports to their hiding place and returned to the forgery. He felt feverish and wondered if he had picked up something from his work down in the laboratory. No. He had been very careful about his own body. That was part of his total purpose.
It was as though only this purpose kept him alive. All else receded into projections and the strange movie-memory. It was only the urgency making him feverish. He could feel time pressing at him. The fateful letters were almost ready to be mailed. He turned on the lights in the narrow stairway off the kitchen and took Mary’s erased passport down to the lab. The stairs creaked as he descended and he wondered what time it was. Dark outside. No matter. There was a spiderweb within the exposed studs where the stairs turned.
How many times have I come this way?
He felt that he had always lived here, had always known the creaking stairs. This was the only place where John McCarthy had ever lived, and the basement laboratory restored his sense of being. It had become a basic part of his life – the white-painted bench with its three gas burners, the homemade centrifuge in the corner, the autoclave built out of a pressure-cooker, the oven with its precision thermostat for the controlled environment, the electron microscope, the petri dishes stored sterile in Tupperware boxes… He could hear the paint-compressor pump cutting in to prime the vacuum system, which was mediated by the scuba pump.
Carefully, he bent to the forgery, delicate movements, precision in each tiny action. The master forger had been right. He was good at this. And there it was, a new identity. Only the ache in his back told him there had been a significant passage of time. He looked at his wrist, remembering that he had left his watch beside the kitchen sink. It didn’t matter. The feverish sense of urgency had gone.
John Garrett O’Day had just been born. There he was on the forged passport – a bald man with a toothbrush mustache, dark eyes that stared directly out of the square photograph.
John stared back at his new self. John Garrett O’Day. He already felt like John Garrett O’Day. There had been O’Days on the O’Neill side of the family. And there he was in the photograph. John felt that he had receded farther back into the ancestry, farther away from John Roe O’Neill, cutting that man off even more sharply.
There would be searchers after O’Neill, and perhaps even more searchers after what John McCarthy had done. But those men were gone. O’Neill and McCarthy. Only O’Day remained and soon O’Day would be far away.
A hunger pang struck him. He turned to the airlock, crawling out and sealing the lab behind him. It was daylight outside. His watch on the drainboard showed 9:36 and he knew it must be morning. It had been dark when he entered the lab. Yes, Saturday morning. In only two weeks, Achill would awaken to its horrible day of reckoning. Then the letters of explanation and warning would start to arrive. His soldiers were on the march. That was how he thought about the things he had sent to Ireland, Britain and Libya.
Soldiers.
The irrevocable thing had been done. There could be no turning back.
He heard children shouting in the alley and thought suddenly of the neighbors around this Ballard hideawa
Time to leave.
He felt something strange about the house then. Was there something he had forgotten to do downstairs? He strapped on his wristband and hurried back down to the lab, crawled through the airlock hatches, leaving them open. No need for lab security anymore. John McCarthy’s meticulous habits could be abandoned.
As he stood up in the first safe room, his gaze fell on the side bench and the kitchen heat-sealer bolted to it. He thought then that the simple kitchen device, a thing made to preserve food, set the style for his entire lab. Investigators might marvel over the inspired adaptations here, the machines and devices put to uses for which they had never been intended.
Now, he remembered what he had forgotten to do, the thing that had sent him hurrying back down into the lab. The thermite bombs! Of course. He moved carefully around the lab, setting the timers, then out into the basement where there were more devices.
Back up to the kitchen then and a bowl of dry cereal. The food made him sleepy and he set about brewing coffee, but decided he would rest his head on his arms at the kitchen table for a few minutes first. He had until night to leave.
When he awakened, it was 12:11 and still daylight. He felt rested, but his back was sore from sleeping bent over the table. He could still hear children playing in the alley.
That’s right. It’s Saturday.
He splashed cold water on his face at the kitchen sink, dried it on a dishtowel, then went into the bedroom and completed his packing. He took his suitcases down to the power wagon and began climbing back up the stairs to the kitchen, intending to brew the coffee he had left unfinished. At the landing, he stopped, frozen in shock at the loud sound of something crashing in the kitchen.
A burglar!
That had been John McCarthy’s constant fear during the project.
Rage engulfed him. How dare they? He charged up the final flight into the kitchen and almost tripped over a softball. The sink held a jumble of broken glass. Only a few shreds remained in the frame over the sink.
He could hear a woman’s voice shouting in the alley behind his house: “Jimmeeeee! Jimmeeeee! You come here this instant!”
Relief drained him.
“Jimmeeee! I see you there!”
A vague sense of amusement came over him. He picked up the softball and went out onto the back porch. A young woman in a blue housedress came through his gate from the alley and stopped in the backyard. She held the right ear of a boy about ten. The boy, his mouth contorted with pain and fear, his head twisted to accommodate the force holding him, pleaded:
“Ma, please! Please, Ma!”
The woman looked up at John and released the boy’s ear. She glanced at the broken window and back to John, then to the softball in his hand. The boy sheltered himself behind her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “We’ll get you a new window, of course. I’ve warned him time and again, but he forgets. My husband will get the window on his way home. He’s good at fixing things.”
John forced a smile. “No need, ma’am. I guess I owe for a few windows from my own childhood.” He tossed the softball into the yard. “There you go, Jimmy. Why don’t you kids play in that empty lot at the end of the block? It’s safer than the street or the alley.”
Jimmy darted from behind his mother and retrieved the ball. He held it close to his chest, looking up at John as though he could not believe his good fortune.
The woman grinned in relief.
“How very nice of you,” she said. “My name’s Pachen, Gladys Pachen. We live just across the alley from you on Sixty-fifth. We’ll be glad to pay for the window. It shouldn’t…”
“No need,” John said, holding tightly to his good-neighbor pose. The last thing he needed right now was intrusions by neighbors. He spoke easily: “You just make sure Jimmy prepares himself to pay for the window some other youngster breaks when he’s my age. We men pass along the cost of broken windows.”
Gladys Pachen laughed, then: “I must say you’re being so very, very nice about this. I never… I mean… we didn’t…” She broke off in confusion.
John maintained his smile with effort. “I guess I must’ve seemed pretty mysterious all these months. I’m an inventor, Mrs. Pachen. I’ve been working pretty steadily on… well, I guess I can’t talk about it just yet. My name’s…” He hesitated, aware that he almost had spoken of himself as John Garrett O’Day, then, a self-conscious shrug: “John McCarthy. You’ll be hearing that name, I think. My friends call me Jack.”
That was well done, he thought. Plausible explanation. A smile. No harm in giving out that name.
“George will be delighted,” she said. “He fiddles around a lot in the garage, too. He has a little shop there. I… you know, the next time we have a barbecue, you’ll have to come over. I won’t take no for an answer.”
“That sounds wonderful,” John said. “I do get tired of my own cooking.” He looked at the boy. “You investigate that lot, Jimmy. That looks like a good baseball lot.”
Jimmy nodded his head twice, quickly, but didn’t speak.
“Well, Gladys, no harm done,” John said. “No real harm, anyway. Good way for me to get a clean window over the sink. I have to get back to work now. Got something brewing.”
He waved casually and let himself back into the kitchen. An inspired performance, he thought, as he set about putting a temporary sheet of plastic over the sink window. No need to replace the glass. It would all go up in flames tonight anyway.
Gladys Pachen returned to her own kitchen, where she invited her neighbor, Helen Avery, over for coffee.
“I saw you talking to him,” Helen Avery said as Gladys poured the coffee. “What’s he like? I thought I’d die when I saw Jimmy’s ball smash that window.”
“He’s kind of sweet,” Gladys said. “I think he’s very shy… and lonely.” She poured her own coffee. “He’s an inventor.”
“Is that what he does in that basement! Bill and I have been wondering – the lights on there at all hours.”
“He was so nice to Jimmy,” Gladys said as she sat down at the kitchen table. “He wouldn’t let me pay for the window, said he owed for a few broken windows from when he was Jimmy’s age.”
“What’s he inventing? Did he say?”
“He wouldn’t say, but I’ll bet it’s something important.”
There was never a greater anti-Irish bigot than Shakespeare. He was the ultimate Elizabethan jackanapes, a perfect reflection of British bigotry. They justified themselves on the grounds of religion. The Reformation! That’s where they began their policy of exterminating the Irish. Back then we learned the bitter truth: England’s enemy is Ireland’s friend.
– Joseph Herity
“WE ARE to concentrate on how he spread the disease,” Beckett said. “They still haven’t solved it.”
It was The Team’s third afternoon and they had moved their meeting to the small dining room off the DIC’s main cafeteria. It was closer to the lab facilities, had brighter walls and lighting, a smaller table. Coffee or tea could be delivered via a pass-through with a sliding panel from the kitchen. Security had objected and there was a certain amount of crockery clatter to contend with, but it was a more comfortable setting for all of them.
“Is anyone asking does our Madman act alone?” Hupp asked. He moved aside slightly as a white-aproned waiter finished clearing away the dishes from their lunch.
“A conspiracy?” Lepikov asked. He looked at the departing waiter. “Are those waiters in your army, Bill?”
Foss answered: “It’s our most carefully guarded secret, Sergei. Two years of this duty and they’re guaranteed to be insane killers.”
Even Lepikov joined in the wry chuckle at Foss’s wit.
Danzas said: “Infected birds. We have the precedent of parrot fever. Could he have modified psittacosis?”
“Somehow that doe
Hupp closed the folder and looked up at Lepikov across the table from him. “We must assume that this is not an empty threat. I do not think this man bluffs. On that assumption, we must also assume that he has more than one way to spread his arsenal. Because if we find the way or ways he did it in the present instance, we could close off that channel.”
“Could we?” Beckett asked.
Lepikov nodded to agree that he shared this doubt.
Godelinsky leaned forward, sipped her tea, then: “He infected specific areas. The fact that his plague has spread, this can only mean human carriers are involved in some way.”
“Why is that?” Danzas asked.
“The way everything is being sprayed, no insect could be doing it,” she said. Godelinsky rubbed her forehead and frowned.
Lepikov said something to her, low-voiced, in Russian. Foss caught only part of it, but turned to peer sharply at the other woman.
“Is something amiss?” Hupp asked.
“Only a headache,” Godelinsky said. “I think it is the water change. Perhaps I could have some more tea?”
Beckett turned to the panel behind him, opened it and confronted a face bent close on the other side, a bland, smiling blond man with white teeth. “Anyone else want something from the kitchen?” the man asked.
“Bumpkins!” Lepikov said.