The White Plague by Frank Herbert
“But why send this to Huddersfield, sir?”
“After we get it to Beckett we’ll spread it around to our own facilities, but I don’t have much confidence in them. Atlanta is a bunch of plodders. They couldn’t find water if they crawled out of a submerged submarine. And Bethesda!”
“They’re trying hard, sir.”
“Trying and plodding aren’t enough. You have to be inspired. Beckett’s my man. I can smell a solution, Jimmy. Always could. Which is why we’re making sure this thing gets to Beckett at Huddersfield. There’re those who’d try to prevent this, Jimmy. And Ruckerman’s the right messenger. He’s savvy with computers.”
“I know, sir. He’s been trying to get the Rocky Mountain Facility to shift over to a –”
“I saw the report. Damn! I saw the report and didn’t even tumble to… Well, we’re doing it now!”
“How much do I tell Ruckerman?”
“You tell him to keep his damn mouth shut! He talks only to Beckett. Ruckerman’s cover is that he’s there to make an on-site inspection and report to me. We’re sending him because he was accidentally contaminated.”
“Yes, sir, but…”
“So he’s got to be accidentally contaminated! And that will be as soon as possible after DA briefs him, which briefing will take place right here in my study. Details I will leave to you but I have a suggestion. There’s a young pilot named Cranmore McCrae living in Woodbridge just outside our perimeter. He’s contaminated. He has made several requests that we allow him to fly to Ireland, where he has an uncle. The uncle’s some kind of a nut but rich as hell and still powerful, apparently. I’ve had a full report on young McCrae. A fairly bright boy. He flew with the CIA air force in Vietnam and did a few other jobs for us. Resourceful and reliable.”
“Why wouldn’t this McCrae just go to Ireland once he was outside our…”
“We tell the Canuck admiral to shoot him down unless he goes directly to England. After he drops Ruckerman, then he can go to Ireland, where Barrier Command will do the usual with his aircraft.”
“But what if the English won’t –”
“They will cooperate because you will tell them it would anger us exceedingly if they don’t. If he fell into Irish hands, they might just cut his throat. The English are a bit more cautious.”
“If you say so, sir.”
“What have they got to lose? I mean, my God! He’s one of my science advisors!”
Saddler’s mouth felt as though it were filled with sawdust. All of this cloak-and-dagger intrigue! He felt like a nonperson in the White House. The President trusted him but this was not why he had entered government service! He thought then of the pressures he would have to put on Ruckerman and it made his stomach turn sour.
As though he read Saddler’s mind, Velcourt said: “You’re Ruckerman’s closest friend here, Jimmy. I think you’re the only one who could get him to do this.”
“It’s not as though he had his family right here,” Saddler said. “His wife’s caught out there in the Sonoma Reserve, you know.”
“I know.”
“I’ll have to tell him quite a bit, sir.”
“I don’t really care how much you tell him; just make sure Turkwood doesn’t get wind of it. It’d go right straight to Shiloh. I don’t trust those bastards at all. I mean, Jimmy, Shiloh’s people are a bunch of real nuts. Let me tell you – their latest thing is they want to kill the pope!”
In the long sweep of history, revenge is such a bore. The insane and the young idealists get caught up in it, though. The young want the Old Man to be guilty. That makes it easier to depose him. Young idealists are a danger in every age because they act without looking deeply enough into themselves or into the problems they address. They’re driven mostly by their own hot blood. It’s largely a sexual thing. They want control of the breeding stock. And the tragedy lies in the fact they mostly perpetuate new dreams of revenge for the next generation of young idealists… that, or they create a super madman, a Hitler or an O’Neill.
– Fintan Craig Doheny
“YOU UNDERSTAND,” Doheny said, “that we are necessarily concentrating a great deal of our effort on sex chromatin bodies.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” John said. “I presume you have facilities for fluorescent microscopy?”
“Oh, yes.”
They sat in Doheny’s office high in the administration wing of Kilmainham Royal Hospital. It was a white-walled room about six meters square. Framed photographs of country landscapes and city scenes decorated the walls. John paid little attention to them after a first glance. Doheny sat in a comfortable chair behind a large desk. He was a wispy-haired troll with eyes that pinned down whatever they saw.
John sat in a wooden chair across from Doheny. There was a yellow settee with a coffee table against one wall of the room. A bookcase filled the wall behind Doheny. Two windows on John’s right looked out across the park-like grounds to Kilmainham Jail where, he was told, Kevin O’Donnell had gone, that being his headquarters.
They had come down to the city in armored cars – Father Michael, the boy, Herity and Kevin O’Donnell riding in one, John and Doheny alone with a driver and one guard in the other. The cars had parted on Inchicore Road, the one carrying John turning to sweep under the arch into the hospital grounds. Doheny had led John up a short flight of steps, moving swiftly for such a heavy man. They had gone down a long hall of closed doors into an elevator and up three stories, down another hall to this glistening white room. A small man in a green smock had followed them inside and had taken John’s fingerprints.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Doheny had asked.
That had been almost an hour ago.
John glanced down at the dark ink that solvent had failed to remove from his fingers. Why had they taken his fingerprints? John could feel the stirring of O’Neill-Within. Danger here!
He had felt immersed in peril since the encounter on the road above Dublin. Doheny had been the man with Kevin O’Donnell – a curly fuzz like baby hair covering his round head. The face was benign – wide blue eyes, a short and thin nose, rather flat lips with smile creases. Jolly, that was the word for Doheny, but he radiated threat.
Kevin O’Donnell had been the first to speak.
“I see you found warm clothing, Yank. Permit me to introduce Fintan Craig Doheny. Doctor Doheny is here to decide whether you live or die.” Doheny had remained silent.
Not looking at Kevin, John had pressed his lips together tightly to keep them from trembling. Herity and the others stood back, silent observers.
“We know who you are,” Kevin said.
For an instant, John thought his heart had stopped. He kept his attention on Doheny. The latter studied John with bland intensity. John understood then: Doheny was the hunter waiting at the water hole, gaze unwavering, every sense concentrated on the kill. What bait had he staked out here?
“Have you nothing to say?” Kevin asked.
John found his voice, an astonishingly level tone emerging from icy calm. “What am I supposed to say?” He allowed himself to look at Kevin and met an eager stare. “Of course you know who I am. You saw my passport.”
“You’re John Roe O’Neill!” Kevin accused.
John created a smile, forming it with exquisite slowness, his lips turning up, mouth slightly parted.
“Would you be telling us what you find humorous?” Kevin demanded.
John took a deep breath. He could hear it in Kevin’s voice: bluff, all of it. There was no bait at this water hole.
“A lot of things have become clear to me,” John said.
“You’ll be explaining those words,” Kevin said.
John glanced at Herity standing there with a quizzical expression on his face, Father Michael looking withdrawn and pained, the boy huddled against the priest, then back to Doheny. “Let’s not play stupid games. You’ve had Herity interrogating me all this time and you –”
“He’s a heavy-handed fellow, our Josep
“I’m just relieved to understand finally what’s been going on,” John said.
Kevin leaned forward on the balls of his feet. “Then you’re denying…”
“You’re all being stupid!” John said. “Ireland’s the last place in the world the Madman would come.”
Kevin looked squarely at John. “We’ve thought on that. Were I the Madman, I should want to play God. I should want to see what I had wrought. This is the Madman’s seventh day, this is. How can he not come here and admire his work?”
“That’s mad,” John said.
“And aren’t we talking about a madman?” Kevin asked.
As John started to respond, Doheny raised a hand for silence. John understood then: Doheny was the Grand Inquisitor. Someone else put the questions and applied the pain. Doheny observed and judged.
John studied the man. What was his judgment?
For the first time in this encounter, Doheny spoke, a deep and compelling voice. John was surprised at the gentleness of it – velvet, that voice.
“Let’s bring him along,” Doheny said. “I’ll need his fingerprints and we’ll want a dentist to look in his mouth.”
John felt his mouth go dry. Fingerprints and dental pattern! O’Neill-Within could be felt squirming. What evidence did the Irish Inquisitor possess? Nothing had been left at the college. Surely not at the house. Had it? Panic Fire had been used there. He had heard it on the news while still in France.
From that point, John had allowed himself to be moved along like a puppet, concentrating on presenting a bland expression – bored. Long-suffering.
The first half hour in Doheny’s office had been bad. Waiting… waiting. What would the fingerprints reveal? When would they take him for a dental examination? Then a telephone had rung. Doheny had lifted it from a hook beside his desk, speaking one word into it.
“Doheny.”
He listened, then: “Thank you. No… nothing else.”
The charade had been played out, Doheny thought as he replaced the phone on its hook. This John Garrech O’Donnell had not broken. He now understood Herity’s confusion. What was it about this John O’Donnell?
Doheny swiveled his chair and looked out the window toward Kilmainham Jail. Should the suspect be turned over to Kevin? The jail was a slippery place where men had died for no better reason than a whim. The present regime was only reinforcing that reputation. Why did we choose that place for a seat of government? Doheny wondered. A terrible place, a monument to uncounted griefs. He knew the answer.
Because it’s large enough and small enough. Because it’s in Dublin. Because we had to bring ourselves back together. Because we needed a symbol. And there’s one thing to be said for Kilmainham: It’s a symbol.
“You say you’re a molecular biologist?” Doheny asked.
“That’s right.”
For about twenty minutes then, John submitted to questioning about his knowledge, particular emphasis on recombinant DNA. Doheny displayed a considerable knowledge of the subject, but John had sensed the limits quite early when the questions lapsed into the area of educated guesses. John detected easily the areas where his own knowledge went far beyond Doheny’s, especially when they got onto synthesis interphases. The trick was to limit what was revealed in the answers.
Doheny tipped back in his chair, hands behind his head. “Where would you consider yourself most valuable?”
“My micromethodology is considered to be very good.”
“That’s what you concentrated on at this University of Washington?”
“Among other things.”
Without tipping his head, Doheny lowered his gaze to his bare desktop. “You’ve had experience with mitotically active small lymphocytes?”
“Oh, yes.”
Doheny leaned forward, elbows on the desk, hands clasped loosely in front of him. “I suspect you’re more conversant with the subject than I am. We have made some discoveries, however.”
John felt his pulse quicken. There was a sense of questioning from O’Neill-Within.
“I’m anxious to know about your progress,” John said.
“I want to caution you about your approach to this plague,” Doheny said. “As a medical researcher you will tend to have a bias about disease. The plague ignites a particular susceptibility to that mistake.”
John took a moment to respond. What was Doheny saying? Was he stalling? Had the Irish discovered nothing significant after all this time?
When John failed to speak, Doheny said: “You are required to face absolute termination immediately. To the traditional researcher, diseases are things that run their course. Life goes on even if a particular case is not cured.”
John nodded and held his silence.
“We expect immunities to develop,” Doheny said. “Or we expect some other natural process to intervene. But the plague will terminate mankind unless we solve it.”
O’Neill-Within whispered in John’s mind: They’ve found out about the long dormancy phase.
It came to John then that Doheny was still probing, subtly and expertly seeking after O’Neill. As he thought this, John felt O’Neill withdraw, deep within. Doheny was more dangerous than Herity. What had happened to Herity, the priest and the boy?
“Quarantine will not work forever,” Doheny said.
John found that he was taking short, shallow breaths. He tried to breathe deeper but his chest pained him.
“Have you confronted the fact that we may face an unsolvable problem?” Doheny asked.
John shook his head. “There has to be a… solution.” He thought about his own words. It had never occurred to him that O’Neill’s revenge might be an ultimate failure for mankind. Every problem could be solved! He knew how the plague had been created. The form of it lay there in his mind, an internal movie that he could play at will. No cure? That was insane!
“Have you noticed that we’re not creating any hopeful new myths here in Ireland?” Doheny asked.
“What?” Doheny’s words bounced around in John’s awareness. What was the man saying?
“Only the old myths of death and destruction,” Doheny said. “It’s fitting we should originate the Literature of Despair.”
“What has that to do with…”
“What greater proof of ultimate defeat?”
“Have you given up?”
“That’s not the point, John. May I call you John?”
“Yes, but… what are…”
“Recognizing ultimate defeat does terrible psychic damage, John. Bitter, bitter consequences…”
“But you yourself just suggested…”
“That we may have to swallow the bitter pill.”
John stared at the man. Was he insane? Was this a variation on the mad priest at the clothing hut?
“What do you say to this, John?” Doheny asked.
“Where’re Herity, Father Michael and the boy?”
Doheny looked startled. “What’s your concern about them?”
“I… just wondered.”
“They’re not Ireland, John.”
Yes they are! John thought. They’re my Ireland.
Revenge had created them, shaped them like clay on a potter’s wheel. The silent boy loomed large in his mind. What would the boy be if there were nothing fragile or pathetic about him? There must be strength in him somewhere. John tried to visualize the boy maturing – those faun’s eyes. A heart-breaker should any mature female ever get to know him. But that would never happen if Doheny’s suspicions proved true!
No more agony for that boy, John thought. It’s enough. O’Neill-Within is content.
“We’re not defeated,” John said.
“And that’s what I’m warning you about, John. Look around you. Defeated people always try to compensate with myths and legends.”
“We’re not talking about myths and legends!”
“Oh, but we are. We’re talking about the retrospective curtains that hide
“No more hope,” John said, his voice low, remembering Grampa Jack and the magic stories beside the fireplace.
“The devil’s own truth,” Doheny said. “Imagine it, John. Everything in our history conspired to strengthen the Irish faculty for the heroic myth to soften defeat.”
“Tell that to Father Michael!”
“Michael Flannery? Aw, now, even the Church did stalwart duty with its myths. Defeat reduced to divine justice, God’s revenge for past misbehavior. The English even had a hand in this. With a kind of unwitting perversity, they outlawed our religion. Prohibition always strengthens what it bans.”
John’s thoughts whirled in confusion. What lay behind Doheny’s words?
Doheny patted his bulging stomach. “The starvations were a peculiar Irish trauma, a lesson we’ve never forgotten. Compulsive eating is our most common response to adversity.”
John decided this must be mad rambling. No real point in it, no reasoning behind it.
“I’m one of the few fat men in Ireland these days,” Doheny said.
“Then you haven’t given up.”
“I may be the only mythmaker left to us,” Doheny said. “Inspired research, that’s what we need right now.”
John shook his head, uncomprehending.
“I’ve been sitting here composing a myth about John Garrech O’Donnell,” Doheny said. “Garrech.” He rolled it out in that velvet voice. “John Garrech O’Donnell, a fine old Irish name. It demands a special myth, it does.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about John Garrech O’Donnell, a Yankee descendant of strong Gaelic stock. That’s what I’m talking about. You’ve come back to us, John Garrech O’Donnell. You’ve brought us a sensational new approach to the plague! You’re a vision of hope, John Garrech O’Donnell! I’ll put it about immediately.”
“Are you nuts?”
“People will admire you, John.”
“For what?”
“For your vision. The Irish always admire vision.”
“I’ll not be a party to…”