The White Plague by Frank Herbert
– Jost Hupp
RUPERT STONAR, political watchdog on Huddersfield’s plague research, stood directly under a spotlight in Hupp’s working lab. Light glistened off glassware on the table beside him; it picked out lines of red in his unruly sandy hair. His expression had been carved in rock.
It was past midnight but Hupp did not know how much past. He had left his watch on his bedside table when answering the summons and had not been given time enough even to glance at it. A tough Royal Marine, someone Hupp had never seen before, had escorted him to the lab and left him about a pace from Stonar. There was no one else in the room. Hupp felt at a disadvantage in a bathrobe.
As the Royal Marine left, Stonar said: “Post a guard and let no one else in here.”
“Yes, sir!”
Hupp decided he did not like the disdainful stare in Stonar’s pale blue eyes. There had been a great many military types around in the halls and on the grounds – and Hupp did not like that, either, but he kept his feelings to himself.
“What is happening?” Hupp asked.
“You are at a critical stage in your researches,” Stonar said. “How critical?”
How had Stonar found out? Hupp wondered. He said: “Wouldn’t it be better if you talked to Wycombe-Finch or Doctor Beckett?”
“Why do you not suggest I talk to Doctor Ruckerman? After all, has he not recently made a thorough study of the work at this facility?”
So Stonar also knew what Ruckerman had brought, Hupp realized. This could get sticky. He said: “Ruckerman would be a good choice. Where is he?”
“He’ll be brought to me when I’m ready for him.”
“But why me?” Hupp asked.
“I must be certain to get the truth. Your family is closer and more accessible to us. Consequences of a lie would be extremely painful to you.”
All of this was uttered in a flat monotone, knotting Hupp’s stomach with fear. Genine! The boys! Hupp knew only too well how precarious was their safety in the Dordogne Reserve.
“What have you achieved?” Stonar asked.
“We are approaching a precise biochemical description of the plague,” Hupp said.
“Would you stake your life on that?”
“Yes.” Hupp stared back at Stonar, thinking how appropriate was the man’s nickname: Stoney. Those eyes had been chipped from sapphire.
“Does this mean that presently you will be able to reproduce the plague?”
“Or an… antidote.”
“Convince me.”
Hupp glanced down the length of his cluttered lab. Not a chair in sight. This was not the place he would have chosen for an interview – too much evidence of his own volatility.
“It’s quite complex,” Hupp said.
“Simplify it.”
Hupp groped in his robe pocket for his glasses, anything for a prop. The Royal Marine had not allowed him time to dress and now Hupp remembered that his glasses were with his watch on the bedside table. His feet were cold, protected only by slippers from the hard floor.
“The intertwining helix bends back and forth on itself,” Hupp said. “You see this, for example, in the gene for botulinus or cholera toxin, and even for ordinary enteric organisms.”
“Enteric?” Stonar asked.
“Things that can live in the small intestine.”
“Are you saying O’Neill could have changed an ordinary organism into something like cholera?”
“Could have… yes. But he didn’t. The plague is no ordinary viral genome. It is something nature could not have produced without human intervention. Do you understand the general recombinant DNA procedure?”
“Assume that I know nothing.”
Hupp blinked. Stonar must know quite a bit about the recombinant process by now. He shrugged, then: “It’s a kind of cut-and-paste procedure using enzymes mostly. You cut up the plasmid DNA and introduce foreign DNA before reinserting the plasmid in the host. A plasmid is a kind of miniature chromosome, a circlet of double-stranded DNA present in bacteria in addition to the bacteria’s main, single chromosome. The plasmid replicates each time the cell divides.”
“Go on.”
Hupp started to speak but was interrupted by a disturbance in the hall outside. He recognized Wycombe-Finch’s voice and someone else saying: “Leave or you will be removed bodily.”
Stonar seemed not to notice. He asked: “What does the new genetic material do to the host?”
“It carries new information, permitting the cell to do new things, but it isn’t essential to the cell’s life except under unusual circumstances.”
“As in the plague.”
“Exactly. O’Neill created an exquisitely balanced set of genes that enter an ecological niche never before occupied by a disease organism.”
“You have not completed your biochemical description and you already know this?”
“We deduced it quite a ways back. The plague not only binds up bodily mechanisms that might battle such an invasion, it also blocks vital enzymes, creating a very swift, pseudo-aging process. And most terribly, it locks itself in place.”
“That zipper idea.”
“Something like that.”
Stonar glanced around the lab – messy damned place! It was from just such a place that this hideous plague had originated. He returned his attention to Hupp, a man he considered to be a wily little frog. They all lied!
“Can it be disengaged from its locked position?” he asked.
“We’ll be able to answer that question more definitely once we know its exact shape but we’re already pretty sure it can be.”
“You’re not really sure,” Stonar accused.
“Mister Stonar, these things are strings of amino acids. Each string ends in a single chain, a condition not generally found in nature because the reproduction process would tend to weed them out.”
“Why is the plague not weeded out?”
Hupp took a shallow, trembling breath. He longed for Beckett’s presence. Bill was much better at this sort of thing.
“O’Neill created a living factory,” Hupp said. “It reproduces his pathogen and is dependent upon that reproduction for its continued existence.”
“Are you telling me that you will not be able to answer my question until the very moment when you can reproduce this plague?”
“I warned you it was complex!”
“And I warned you to simplify it.” There was death in Stonar’s voice. Hupp tried to swallow in a dry throat. He said: “The genetic information for a protein that can be made in one kind of cell must be transferred to another kind of cell. Before O’Neill, we believed we could change only a few characteristics by recombinant procedures, nowhere near enough to achieve a dramatic new disease such as the plague. We thought we could only remake old disease in new guises. O’Neill’s pathogen is no ordinary spinning-out of a simple amino acids strand. The enzymic and other splitting procedures are extraordinary. We are learning remarkable things from him. Remarkable.” Hupp’s voice trailed off into a musing tone, then: “I don’t think he realized.”
“What didn’t he realize?”
“Our discoveries may be of far greater value than… they may far outweigh the effects of the plague.”
Stonar regarded Hupp with a baleful stare, then: “Of course, your family is still among the living.”
Hupp was brought up short by realization of how much Stonar must have lost to the plague. He spoke quickly. “I don’t mean to make light of the plague. I’m trying to take a longer view. Humankind has taken an agonizing step. I’m saying the gigantic nature of that step has yet to be recognized.”
“You’re not suggesting history may look back on the Madman as a hero!”
“Oh, no! But he has led us into a new understanding of genetics.”
“Fahhh!” Stonar said.
Hupp, lost in his musings, did not hear. “We have been lifted to new horizons. I am in awe of what I see.”
“You scientist types scare the bloody hel
Hupp heard this and was shocked to an abrupt remembrance of the power in Stonar’s hands. Hupp said: “I must point out, sir, that it was not scientists who drove O’Neill insane. A violent extension of politics unfortunately struck a man who was competent… Mother of Christ! What an inadequate English word! Not competent, but unusually gifted in this dangerous field.”
“You’ll let me know when you’re ready to admit O’Neill to your august ranks?”
Now alert to the tones in Stonar’s voice, Hupp heard the derision.
“Pandora’s box has been open for a long time,” Hupp said. “There’s no way to prevent such things as this plague unless we find a way to prevent political insanity – including insane terrorism and the injustices of police states.”
“You haven’t the vaguest idea of the extent to which government can go in suppression,” Stonar said. “However, I did not come here to discuss political philosophy. I think that’s beyond your competence.”
“You believe you could have prevented an O’Neill by some… some kind of… of surveillance?”
“We will return to the matter at hand,” Stonar said. “Which is your description of this plague. How do you achieve this?”
“It’s based on a lot of clues, some supplied by the Irish and others…”
“Brought here by Doctor Ruckerman.”
“He’s helped, yes,” Hupp admitted. “As I said earlier, the intertwined helix of DNA bends back and forth upon itself. This bending is extremely interesting. We have now discovered that the shape of submolecular elements in the DNA can be inferred from these bends and twists. It dawned on us that O’Neill had developed a new field desorption mass spectrometer technique, a soft technique for analysis of the products from the pyrolysis of DNA.”
“What?”
“He used stereoisomers – left- and right-hand. He… he burned them, superimposed the spectrometer images and deduced the submolecular shape from the… from the… It’s like seeing a shadow on a shade and deducing the shape that must have projected that shadow.”
“You see?” Stonar said. “You can simplify when your life depends on it.”
Hupp did not reply.
“Doctor Ruckerman has told his President that you are almost ready to do amazing things,” Stonar said. “Does Wye agree?”
“Doctor Wycombe-Finch?” Hupp scratched his head, stalling for time in which to think. “I think he’d like to give us carte blanche to explore the disease template we’re producing.”
“But he has other people and their projects to consider?”
“That’s about it. We’re already taking about half the available computer time.”
“You’re sure you can’t yet tell me whether your plague… ahh, template, will lead to a cure?”
Hupp shrugged, a gesture that Stonar found offensive.
“You don’t know?”
“We’ll be able to answer that after we’ve achieved our biochemical description of the plague.”
“Would it help if you had more of this facility’s resources at your disposal?”
“Perhaps, but only after we’ve –”
“Achieved your description of the plague! Yes! Understand me, Hupp. I don’t like you. You’re the kind of person who created this disaster. You –”
“Sir!”
“It is not my suggestion that you are insane enough to try following in O’Neill’s steps. At any rate, you’ll be carefully watched and that will not be allowed. I consider it unfortunate that we need you at all. I caution you not to overestimate the extent of that need.”
You are the undoubted son of a Montmartre whore! Hupp thought. He remained silent.
A faint smile touched Stonar’s lips and was gone. He turned on a heel and went to the door. Opening the door, he said: “Bring in Ruckerman.”
Will Ruckerman had been awakened in much the same way as Hupp, but he had been allowed to dress and then had been held under guard in an equipment storage room across from Hupp’s lab.
Something had gone wrong, Ruckerman knew, but he could not guess what. The increased military presence on the Huddersfield campus had been inescapable, however. In spite of the chill in the little storage room, he had perspired heavily, a fact noted by his unresponsive guard.
Everything had been going so well! Velcourt’s plan to get him into Huddersfield had worked and not even Saddler had suspected the real reason. Only Turkwood had smelled something wrong and had tried a typical Turkwood response. Ruckerman thought about their arrival in England.
McCrae had grinned at him in the small jet’s cockpit, bringing the plane around in a tight circle over the lake above Aberfeldy in Scotland. “You are about to see an artist at work,” he said.
“Why can’t we find an airport above the…”
“Look up there.” McCrae hooked a thumb at the Barrier Command jets circling high above them. “This is an emergency. If we suddenly go hunting around for another place to set down, they’re going to smell mousie. You can bet they have orders to shoot at the slightest suspicion that all is not kosher here.”
“That lake looks awfully small.”
Ruckerman stared ahead of them at the approaching water. A low mist curled above it.
“The trick is to set us down at precisely the right spot,” McCrae said. “We’ll skim a bit but not much.”
Gently, bucking slightly as it hung on the edge of a stall, the plane dipped down into the valley at the end of the lake and leveled off.
Ruckerman gripped the edge of his seat with both hands. McCrae was going to kill them! Those hills at the far end of the lake were too close!
McCrae was talking as much to himself as to Ruckerman: “Nose up a little.” He pulled the wheel toward his chest. “A little more.”
Ruckerman stared in terror at the hills looming higher and higher ahead of them. There wasn’t room to do this! He started to shout a protest when the tail touched water. He felt it slap, then the nose came down sharply in a shuddering, bucking screech of protesting metal that threw him against his safety harness. Solid water covered the windscreen in front of him, hiding his view of the shore. Something grated and rasped under the nose. Water cascaded off the windscreen. The nose came up and the plane stopped. Ruckerman saw a thin line of leafless trees directly in front of him, a field with sheep cropping the grass beyond.
“Yayhooooooo!” McCrae’s mouth opened wide in a shout of joy. He said something else but it was lost in the thunder of three Barrier Command jets screaming past close above them.
Ruckerman felt deafened by the sound. He was a moment recovering, then something gurgled and creaked behind him.
“Look at that, will you?” McCrae demanded. “The nose is on dry land!” McCrae popped the cockpit’s emergency exit and swung away a triangular section of windscreen beside him. He unharnessed and stood on his seat with his head outside to peer around them. “Let’s get our asses out of here,” he said. He stepped over the edge of the cockpit and slid down the plane’s side to a pebbled shingle with spiky reeds growing through it. Presently, Ruckerman leaned out above him.
“What about our bags?” Ruckerman asked.
“If there’s a bomb,” McCrae said. He shook his head. “Better get out and wait a bit.”
Ruckerman frowned. Probably no bomb at all! Just a grandstand play by this young jerk. Ducking back into the plane, Ruckerman made his way to the rear, wading through water over his ankles. He retrieved his bag and McCrae’s lashed in the seat behind it, then returned to the emergency exit where he tossed both bags to McCrae.
“C’mon!” McCrae said. “Get outa there!”
Moving slowly to emphasize his disdain, Ruckerman followed McCrae’s path to the ground. There he took his bag and followed the pilot up the pebble shingle toward the trees.
“That was a damned fool, harebrained thing to do!” Ruckerman said. “There was no –”
He was interrupted by a thumping explosion at the plane behind them
“One thing you can say for Turkwood,” McCrae said. “He’s neat.”
Ruckerman stared at the scene in gape-jawed horror. My God! What if that had happened in the air? He was still staring at the plane when a Land Rover came growling over the hill above them and sped down to the lake.
“We have visitors,” McCrae said.
As he stared at the military guard in the little storage room opposite Hupp’s lab, Ruckerman thought about poor McCrae. The English were adamant about not sending him to Ireland.
“We’ve no facilities for holiday jaunts,” the regional commander had said as he arranged Ruckerman’s transportation to Huddersfield. Poor McCrae had been shunted off to something called “The Holding Center for Foreign Nationals.”
Someone rapped on the storage room door. Ruckerman’s guard opened the door. Someone outside said: “Bring him.”
Ruckerman found himself presently standing beside Hupp. Stonar regarded them both as though they had been scraped off with slime from the underside of a damp rock. Ruckerman, who had met Stonar only briefly at one of the latter’s regular inspections, knew he was in the presence of Authority and now could complain.
“What is the meaning of this?” Ruckerman demanded. “Do you realize who I am?”
“You’re a spy,” Stonar said. “We’ve been known to shoot spies.” He glanced at Hupp. “The frog here has just told me an interesting story. He will keep his mouth shut now while you answer a few questions.”
Fat’s in the fire! Ruckerman thought. Well, the President had warned him he was on his own at Huddersfield. The United States government could take no official action to protect him.
“We thought your recent report to President Velcourt rather interesting,” Stonar said. “Beckett and his team are going to do some amazing things. What amazing things?”
“They’re very close to a complete description of the plague,” Ruckerman said. He cleared his throat. “I resent being called a spy. Everything I’ve done –”