The White Plague by Frank Herbert
Should the report on Broderick be shared with Velcourt? Bergen was not free of the suspicion that the President might somehow be involved with Shiloh Broderick. They said the two hated each other, but that was an old ploy. Broderick might be a very handy tool to people such as Velcourt. No matter. Knowledge that the secretary-general of the United Nations knew about Broderick’s latest incursion might put a damper on further violence from that source. And Bergen knew he had an upbeat note on which to end the exchange.
Save the animals.
Bergen reached for the red telephone in his desk drawer and had actually touched the phone when a change in the noises outside his office caused him to hesitate. Something crashed out there. He could hear a difference in the human sounds – shouts, distressed cries… some of them cut off abruptly. He removed his hand from the red telephone and stood up, was standing there undecided when his door burst open.
A man in a dark ski mask and carrying a silenced machine gun stood there. The burst of bullets that cut across Bergen’s chest stitched a pattern of holes in the window behind him.
The gunman uttered a wild cry, the last human sound that Bergen’s ears reported: “Imsh Allah!”
O King that was born
To set bondsmen free,
In the coming battle
Help the Gael.
– old Irish prayer
IT WAS three horsemen racing along the lough from the south – black movement in the fading light. John saw them at a distance, hearing at the same time the movement of many heavy vehicles on the hills above the Facility. The horses were lathered, he saw, but still responding to the crop. John watched them from a position on the lawn fronting the lough where he had gone to be alone after a harried day. He knew he was not really alone; there were men watching from a doorway behind him. He did not have enough emotion left even to resent this. He felt drained, incapable of any strong movement.
Questions… questions… questions…
There had been hardly a moment this day when someone was not picking at him. And the answers poured from his mouth without conscious volition – another voice, another personality, which acted from within, rising out of an alarming source of independence.
Was it O’Neill-Within?
He could not even be sure of that.
The horsemen were still at some distance but not slackening their pace. John noted that the riders did not look back, which he interpreted as meaning they were not someone’s quarry. The urgency of their movement struck him then. Something about them… He felt the coldness of impending disaster.
The sound of approaching vehicles had grown louder but he could hear the beat of the horses’ hooves now. His chest felt tight. Then he recognized two of the riders – Oh, God! It was Kevin O’Donnell and Joseph Herity beside him, a stranger close behind. The horses plunged onward against a backdrop of stone-pocked hills, a landscape that darkened by the second as the sun dipped toward the western hills.
Why were Kevin O’Donnell and Joseph Herity coming here… and on horseback? He watched the men gallop past him up the lawn. Herity gave John a devil’s grin as he passed but the others did not even turn. They drew up at the courtyard formed by the two lakeside wings of the building, dropped their reins and strode inside past John’s watchers without a word.
Arrival on horseback: Why should that be threatening? John wondered. As the sun dropped behind the hills, leaving his world in the long twilight, it grew colder. John shivered. He had been nine weeks here, seeing the slow shift from senseless industry to a new vitality. They had the best equipment in the world, all of it sent in on the free boats via the Finn Sadal, and it was beginning to focus correctly at last. John had felt the excitement all day, another reason he was drained.
They had kept him in the south wing most of the day, introducing lab technicians to advanced computer techniques, showing them how to bring automation into their efforts. Another week, two at the most, and they would have the plague pathogen in their hands.
After that… what?
Once during this day, John had thought he glimpsed Doheny at a distance across the grounds. There had been a great deal of activity over there at the old castle structure, the central core of this complex. A big flatbed truck had backed into a newly made hole in a brick wall there. It had emerged after a time with a large black tubular thing lashed to its bed. It had looked to John like a big steel tank. The truck had been joined by armored cars and a whole convoy, which had taken the turn for the road to the northeast. He had been told earlier that Kells was in that direction and Dundalk on the Irish Sea, places he knew he probably would never see.
Old Moone came in then and asked John to come along to the culture lab and check the setup for its automation changes.
Moone was a fixture around the Lab, John realized. The old man shuffled along in his decrepit way, purposeful but lacking a necessary elan. Many of the researchers here had shown that same lack of vital independence until John’s revelations had fired them. Perhaps Moone did not know what was happening at the tiled benches and esoteric equipment he passed by so often. The man betrayed no awe of the scientist. If anything, he seemed disdainful toward all around him.
It was an old pattern, John thought. Scientists earned this response. He recalled the few famous scientists he had met, realizing how different they had seemed from ordinary mortals. The minds of scientists differed from the minds of other humans, John thought. The scientist rode at a higher elevation. He saw farther across the landscape. People expected from such men the behavior of the cavalier, of the romantic leader.
John looked out across the lough where everything had gone to gray. I was a scientist, he thought.
It was a strange thought, foreign, forcing him to reassess these differences he had sensed. Those differences were far more telling than the old romances would have it, he realized. He had worked with a narrowed vision, that was it. Even the near reaches were denied him. It was a gaze that could sweep past the individual without a change of focus.
Abstract dedication to the project.
Not even hope was allowed, only the immediate result.
John began to see a new sense in the things Doheny had said back at Kilmainham. No more myths? The people here had been wandering through their own despairs until John’s arrival. They had gone through the paces out of habit. Training had given them patterns they could follow but the patterns would not deviate from known tracks.
Can they really use what I’ve given them? John asked himself. It was a desperate thought rising from that lost place within him. He could reconstruct the plague. He knew that. But the cure?
He turned back toward the buildings and, picking up his watchdogs, made his way up to his room. Supper sat heavy in his stomach and he knew he would not sleep soon, but he was glad to hear them throw the bolt and seal him into this place. He left the lights off and watched the darkness settle over the lough.
There was a pounding somewhere – clump! Clump! As though awakening from a dream, John realized the pounding was feet running along the hallway. His door was flung open and Doheny darted into the room, blinking at the gloom after the brightness of the hall. He turned on the overhead light, closed the door and stared at John.
“You must listen to me very carefully and do what I say,” Doheny said. “We haven’t much time.”
There was shouting outside the building and more sounds of heavy vehicles. John stared at Doheny.
“It’s the curse of Ireland,” Doheny said. “We are doomed to repeat ourselves endlessly.”
“What’s happening?”
“Kevin O’Donnell has seized control over this region,” Doheny said. “I’ve known for two days he was going to do it. Alex warned me…” Doheny shook his head. “Kevin and Joseph have worked some devil’s agreement between them and they’ve come to see it done.”
“But why have you come running in here like this? What’s this have to do with me?”
“They’re interrogating the priest
John felt a constriction in his chest.
“If they threaten the boy,” Doheny said, “Father Michael will break the seal of the confessional. I know him. What will he tell them, John?”
John opened his mouth but could not speak. His voice refused to perform.
“Kevin and Joseph are the same kind of man,” Doheny said. “Extremists and fanatics! It’s all the same, anything’s an excuse for getting high on their own adrenaline. It’s a dope and they’ll do anything for a fix. They’ll keep after the priest until they’ve emptied him and filled themselves.”
John closed his mouth, still unable to speak.
“Who are you, John Garrech O’Donnell?” Doheny asked. “Who are you, really?”
“I’ve told you,” John gasped. The words hurt his throat.
“Did you tell the priest, as well?”
John hunched his shoulders, leaning forward. The pain in his chest and throat demanded relief.
“They’ve found his fingerprints and dental charts in the States,” Doheny said.
“Whose…” It was all John could speak.
“O’Neill’s, of course. They’re playing it cagey, the bastards, but we’ll have them in time. What will those fingerprints and dental charts show us, John?”
John shook his head from side to side, once more mute. He could not feel O’Neill-Within. He could only feel a great emptiness there.
“You’re a queer specimen and that’s no mistake,” Doheny said. “Do you have real feelings?”
John stared back at Doheny, locked in place by those questioning eyes.
“We’re that close to victory,” Doheny said. “That close.” He held up thumb and forefinger of his right hand, a tiny gap between them. “And now this!”
John managed a whisper. “What’s… happening?”
“The thing that always destroys us,” Doheny said. “Victory. We cannot take victory. It sets us against each other, a victory does. Like dogs over a bone. That’s what every Irish victory becomes – a bone polished by our own teeth! And no meat left on it at all. In the end, we throw it away for the useless thing it is.”
John’s lips once more formed the words: “What’s happening?” There was no voice behind it.
Doheny cocked an ear toward the door. There was a faint slamming sound in the distance. He said: “The truth is, we Irish, preferring to make epics out of disasters, could find no victory to serve the same function. We may say otherwise, but our actions give the truth to my words. We prefer disasters.”
John backed away from Doheny, stopped by the side of the cot. His knees trembled.
“You’re going to be put on trial, John,” Doheny said. “And they’ll have me along afterwards to stand in their dock.” He grinned. “Because I’ve denied to Kevin the real prize he sought here – little Katie Browder!”
Feet could be heard running in the hallway.
“Listen to me, John!” Doheny said. “You must demand Father Michael for your defense counsel.”
John found a hoarse whisper with which to speak. “Defend me from what?”
“Promise me, you fool!”
John’s head nodded agreement on its own.
The door behind Doheny was slammed open with such force that it crashed into the wall.
John stared out at a cluster of armed men framed in the open doorway. Joseph Herity stood in the forefront grinning at him.
Rachel, Rachel, I’ve been thinking
What a fine world this would be
If the girls could be transported
From beyond the deep blue sea.
– Songs of the New Ireland
FOR KATE O’GARA Browder, the flight from the research facility was a nightmare from beginning to end. Doheny had given them little time to think or question his decision.
“It’s for your own safety.”
“But where are we going?” Stephen had asked. He had peered out at Doheny through the same small port where Father Michael Flannery had stood the previous morning to perform the marriage ceremony.
“To Dundalk for now,” Doheny said.
Even as he spoke, there had been no turning back. It had begun with the stopping of the air pumps, that constant reassuring noise that told them the chamber’s pressure was higher than the pressure outside, that nothing of the plague might creep into this sanctuary. They had lived with the sound so long by then that they no longer noticed it, but the absence!
“Stephen! The air pumps have stopped!”
He leaped to his feet and dashed to the main porthole, which commanded a view of the enclosing area outside and some of the equipment.
“What do you see?” she demanded, pressing close behind him. A sense of engulfing terror gripped her. Please, God! Not now.
“There’s no one out there,” Stephen said. He went to the communications panel and thumbed the microphone switch. “Hi, out there. What’s going on?”
There was no response.
They heard it then, many footsteps, the sound curiously localized by the speaker above the port. There was a dragging noise with the sound of footsteps… heavy dragging and the sound of metal scraping on stones.
“There’s Doheny,” Stephen said.
She squeezed in beside Stephen to peer out at Doheny. He looked flushed. His fuzzy hair was more disarrayed than usual. Doheny took up the outside phone.
“It’s all right. The pump will not be off long,” he said.
“But what’s happening?” Stephen demanded.
That was when Doheny said they were being moved for their own safety, being taken to Dundalk. Why Dundalk? Kate wondered.
“Be sure to take your supply of the antiseptic in with you,” Doheny said. “And that rope you used for a safety line when we moved you from the barn – rig that again. You may be tossed about a bit.”
Doheny’s instructions were uttered in an intense monotone that they had never before heard from him. They were to take everything they thought they would need and stow it securely in the original chamber from Peard’s barn. Stephen was to paint antiseptic around the tank’s entry port. And hurry! Men with cutting torches were waiting to burn away the metal juncture between the original tank and the one built here.
“We can’t move both of them,” Doheny explained.
“But why are we doing this?” Stephen persisted.
“Because I’ve convinced some friends in the army that we cannot keep Kate alive here!”
“Where’s Adrian?” Stephen asked.
“He’s under guard in his quarters. Adrian’s joined the enemy. Keep your pistol with you, Stephen. Kevin O’Donnell’s coming and there’s no stopping him. He’s insane and he wants Kate.”
“But why Dundalk?” Kate asked.
“Because we hope to get you completely out of Ireland. We’ve enough of the army and others loyal to us that we can get you safely to Dundalk. From there…” Doheny broke off.
“Where?” Stephen demanded.
“To England, we hope. Everything depends on Barrier Command.” Doheny returned to his original instructions then. “And it would not hurt to drench a sheet with the antiseptic. Put it over the inside of the access port after you’ve closed and sealed it.”
“The air pressure,” Stephen said.
“We’ll have a pump going again soon as we put you onto the lorry. You’ll have positive pressure again. Best get into the little chamber as rapidly as you can.”
Nylan Gunn, commander of the Killaloe guard, had come down then to take over from Doheny, telling the latter he was needed in communications. Gunn was a slender, dark Galway man with slightly bowed legs and a face with small features. He had been a commander in the constabulary before the plague.
“Don’t worry, lass,” he told Kate. “We’ll not let the mad O’Donnell have y’.”
Moone had been right behind him “to say goodbye.”
“Trust Fin Doheny and Nylan here,” he said. “They’ll save you. And don’t hav
“What has Adrian done?” Stephen asked. He felt that the ground was being cut away from beneath him. Adrian betraying them? How? What had he done?
“I’ve had a leetle microphone in the bastard’s office for months now,” Moone said. “He was too slick for me! Sure enough, he’s unlocked the door for Kevin O’Donnell to come and lord it over us.”
Stephen had heard the stories of Kevin O’Donnell and the Beach Boys. He glanced at Kate.
“Do what Nylan tells you,” Moone said. “Goodbye, Katie. Have a brave child even if y’ are married.” Chuckling, he left them.
It was all mad movement then, loud conversations and the sound of heavy equipment outside, the outer wall being breached. She and Stephen entered the small chamber finally and Stephen sealed the inner port, drenched a sheet with antiseptic and fastened it over the port. The small space reeked with the acrid smell of the antiseptic.
Kate sat close to Stephen on the bed, clutching him tightly when she heard the burners cutting away the outer chamber, even tighter when the cables went around their container and it swung free to settle with a thump onto an unsteady support on the lorry. The lashing cables rang against the chamber’s steel when they were dropped into place and tightened. The end port gave them a view of the new opening through the bricks that had been put there such a short time ago to enclose their containers.
The sound of the compressor returned, soothing them somewhat. They could hear the generator motor chugging loudly behind them near the lorry’s cab.
The lorry began to move so gently that they did not feel it at first, then they saw the opening into the castle receding and felt a wheel lurch into a rut. There was the sound of other vehicles, several of them. Stephen peered outside. “A lot of armored cars,” he said. “Must be ten or twelve of them.”
Nylan Gunn’s voice came to them then from the little emergency speaker near the head of the bed. “Everything all right in there?”
Stephen found the microphone and keyed it. “It seems to be okay. How long will we be like this?”