A War of Shadows

TWO

Mary Eastwicke had thought that being press officer for the National Disease Control Center would be a fairly nice, easy job. Nobody was very interested in NDCC, most of the time, except for an occasional science reporter doing a Sunday feature, and the pay was top bracket for civil service. But now, as the trim, tiny businesslike woman walked into the small briefing room bulging with reporters, IN lights and cameras, and into the heat generated by it all, she wondered why she hadn’t quit long ago. With the air of someone about to enter a bullring for the first time, she stepped up to the cluster of micro-phones.

“First, I’ll read a complete statement for you,” she said in a_. smooth, accentless soprano. “After, I will take your questions.” She paused a moment, apparently arranging her papers but actually giving them time to get ready for the official stuff that would grace the news within the hour.

“At approximately 3:10 this afternoon, Eastern Daylight Time, the town of Cornwall, Nebraska, first began showing symptoms of an as-yet unknown agent, said agent causing most of_. the town to come down with varying degrees of paralysis. The symptoms showed first in the young, then quickly spread to upper age groups. We have been as yet unable to fully question any victims, but there appears from hospital and doctor records of the past few weeks to have been no forewarning of any sort, although the malady struck every victim within a period of under three hours.” She paused to let the print journalists catch up and check their little shoulder recorders, then continued.

“So far there are fourteen confirmed fatalities—seven infants, two persons in vehicles which crashed, and the others elderly. Another forty-six are considered in critical condition. Federal, state, and local authorities are currently on the scene, and NDCC is at this moment running tests on samples from several victims, as well as two bodies of the dead. At the moment this is all we know. I’ll take questions.”

There was a sudden tumult, and she waited patiently for the mob scene to calm down.

“Please raise your hands,” she said professionally when she thought she could be heard over the din. “I’ll call on you.” That settled them, and she pointed to a well-known network science editor.

“Have there been any signs of this affliction spreading to other localities?” he asked in his famous cool manner. “We have some reports of it hitting in other areas.”

“So far we have had a number of cases outside the area,” she said. “Twenty-six, to be exact. All but three are known to have been in Cornwall within the last few days. Except for four people in a truck stop on I-80 and two truckers in West Virginia who passed through there three days ago, no other victims. And, no, we can find no sign of any spreading of the affliction by these people to others with whom they’ve come in contact, except perhaps at the truck stop.”

Another question. Did the disease affect animals in the town, and did it spare any people?

“Yes to both,” she said. “That is, many people seem to have had such a mild case there appears to be no question that they’ll recover with no serious effects. As to the animals, some pigs were affected, but not cows, horses, chickens, or other animals. Some dogs seem to exhibit slight signs, but there are no totally paralyzed ones that we’ve found.”

“Is there any connection yet between this disease and those that struck Boland, California, Hartley, North Dakota, and Berwick, Maine, in the past few weeks?” That was the Post man.

She shrugged. “Of course, they are all small towns, and in each case the mystery ailment struck suddenly and with no prior warning. However, the symptoms were far different in those other cases, even from each other. If you remember, Boland’s population went blind, Hartley’s became severely palsied, and Berwick…” She let it hang and they didn’t pursue it. Everyone in Berwick, to one degree or another, had become rather severely mentally retarded.

“It’s almost like somebody’s trying to kill off small-town America,” a reporter muttered. Then he asked, “All of these maladies are related to attacks on various centers of the brain and central nervous system, aren’t they? Isn’t that a connection?”

She nodded. “It’s the only connection, really. We are still running a series of tests on the earlier victims, you know. Our teams are working around the clock on it. If, in fact, it’s a disease of the central nervous system and/or brain, though, how is it transmitted? There is no apparent link between the afflicted areas. And why hasn’t it shown up elsewhere? Unless someone else is prepared to answer those questions, we must assume we are dealing with different diseases here.”

“Or a new kind of disease,” a voice said loudly.

It went on for quite a while, with even the crazies having their turn. Any flying saucers reported near these places? No. Is the Army back into biological warfare experimentation? No, not the military. Somebody who’d just seen The Andromeda Strain on the Late Show asked about meteors, space probes, and the like, but again the answer was no, none that had been found.

They left with lots of scare headlines and nasty suppositions, but nothing more. Page one again, to scare the hell out of the population, but the truth was that nobody really knew what was going on.

Mary Eastwicke made her way wearily back to her office feeling as if she’d worked ten hours in the last seventy minutes. Several staffers were looking over papers, telexes, and the like. She sank into her chair.

“I need a drink,” she said. “Anything new?”

A young assistant shook his head. “Nothing more. The toll’s 864 now, with eighty-six deaths. In a couple hundred cases they’d be better off dead, though. A hundred percent paralyzed. Stiff, too. You can bend ’em in any position and they’ll stay that way. Most of the rest are nasty partials. That town was wiped out as surely as if you dropped a bomb on it.”

Mary sighed, and decided she was going to get that drink no matter what. It was going to be a long night; no going home for them or anyone else this time.

She prayed that the folks upstairs would come up with something solid on this one. She thought of that comment from that reporter to the effect that it was as if somebody was wiping out the small towns of America.

She wondered how the tests were going.

Dr. Mark Spiegelman was about fifty, and usually looked forty, but by 5:00 A.M. looked seventy instead. He sank wearily down in Sandra O’Connell’s office and gulped his thirty-sixth cup of strong black coffee as she read the reports and looked at the photos.

“Did you ever dream of a nice little VA hospital job someplace?” he asked her. “You know, the kind where they give you some patients with known ailments and ask you to do your best to help them? I do. Lord! I’d settle for a nice bubonic plague someplace. But this!”

She nodded. “Same sort of thing as the others. These motor areas of the brain were burned, actually burned! It’s as if some nice, normal cells just suddenly decided to stop producing the nice normal acids they need and suddenly devoted their time to producing sulfuric acid or something. How’s it possible, Mark? How’s it possible for just a few cells in a particularly critical spot, all in a group, to suddenly produce a destructive series of chemicals for a period, do their damage, then let the surviving ones return to normal? Even cancer, once it starts, keeps doing what it’s doing. This was triggered only in a few centers of the brain, critical centers, within a couple of hours in just about everybody in that town, then stopped. How is that possible, Mark?”

He shrugged wearily. “You tell me. You know LSD, though?” She nodded, wondering what he was getting at. “It’s a catalyst. Does just about nothing itself. You take it, it goes through the brain, trips a few wrong switches, then leaves, either in body waste or skin secretion. It’s almost out of the system by the time you get the full effects.”

She frowned. “You think we’re dealing with something like that here? A catalytic agent?”

He nodded. “It’s the oddballs that give it away. Remember in every case we had not only the town zapped, but also a number of people in other places who’d merely been in that town? Well, the magic number is three days, and maybe with a little more work we can pin it down to certain hours within those three days. At least we have a couple of people who were in Berwick in the early morning and left and didn’t come down with their disease, and we have a few more from Boland who were in town three days earlier, getting there late in the day, and didn’t get it, either. I bet we find those truck drivers who were in Cornwall were there within certain hours.”

“I’ll go along with the catalytic agent,” she said, “but how does that explain those truck stop people? If we’re dealing with a chemical, whether natural or artificial, how’d those others far from the town catch it?”

Again Mark shrugged. “If any of them pull through, and we can establish any sort of communication with them, maybe we’ll find out they sipped some of the driver’s coffee or something. Back in the late sixties—before your time, I know—the young crazies who thought LSD was the greatest thing since sliced bread often dumped it secretly in cafe coffee urns and the like.”

Sandra smiled slightly at the flattering “before your time” remark, and wished it were so.

“So what do we have?” she asked rhetorically. “We have a catalytic agent that is somehow administered to an entire population within a few-hour period, sends a signal somehow to the brain to have certain vital cells malfunction for a short period three days later, after it’s too long gone for us to trace. A nice chemical agent, but show me a coffee urn, anything, that a whole town uses!” She had a sudden thought. “You checked the municipal water supplies?”

He nodded. “We checked everything, and we’ll do it again. A lot more chemicals than there should be in some cases, but nothing unusual, and certainly nothing to cause this. No, it has to come from something they all touched or consumed. I’m positive of it.”

She slammed the stack of papers down hard on her desk. “Then why haven’t we found it, damn it!” she snapped angrily. “If it’s a chemical it’s common to all the towns, and it should still be there!”

“They’re taking everything apart piece by piece and brick by brick,” he said wearily. “If it’s there, we’ll find it. But I won’t, at least not tonight—er, this morning. I, my dear, am going to go down the hall, enter my office, stretch out on that couch of mine, and if ten more towns go under I will not awaken until at least noon.” He got up slowly, with a groan, and stopped at the door. “Care to join me?” he asked with a leer.

She smiled weakly. “Some pair we’d be.” She chuckled. “Asleep in ten seconds.”

Mark returned the smile. “Shame on you for such dirty thoughts,” he said, and walked out. She didn’t see or hear him go.

Dr. Sandra O’Connell was sound asleep in her big padded chair.