CV

12

Dr. Wallace McNulty, at the age of forty-nine, had had a singular notoriety thrust upon him. A garbled newspaper item about his being elected president of the Santa Barbara County Medical Society, shortly after the death of his wife of twenty years, had been published in The New Yorker, in one of those little quotes they ran at the ends of columns. Instead of just saying that he had graduated from the University of California, the item had gone on to list a whole lot of other states, as if he had graduated from all of them too. Dr. McNulty carried the clipping around in his wallet awhile and showed it to friends, feeling embarrassed but thinking he ought to be a good sport: he found, however, that one out of every three people would read the clipping and then blink at him and say, ‘ Did you really—?” Then he would have to explain that it was a joke, a mistake. He threw the clipping away after a week or two, but whenever he introduced himself to people, there was always a moment when he was waiting for them to say, “Dr. Wallace McNulty? Aren’t you the one who—?” He found that he was becoming suspicious of new acquaintances, and even of his own patients that he had had for years.

The opportunity to join Sea Venture had come along in an almost providential way. A friend of his, Ray Herring, had been hired as director of the medical services there, but at the last minute some family trouble came up and he had to stay in Santa Barbara. Ray asked Dr. McNulty if he wanted the job and Dr. McNulty discovered that he did. He applied and was accepted.

And on the whole, he had never been sorry. He had a little eight-bed hospital on the Upper Deck, the latest in diagnostic equipment, and three cheerful nurses. His work-load was less than it had been at home, but he was making more money, even without counting the free room and board.

One morning when he was in the middle of his usual series of earaches and sore throats, Janice came to him with the phone in her hand. “Doctor, it’s an emergency—somebody collapsed down in the marine lab.”

“Okay, give me that. Will you finish up with Mrs. Omura?” He walked into the next room, talking as he went. “McNulty. What’s the problem?”

A woman’s voice said, “I don’t know. One minute he was okay, the next—”

“Is he breathing? Conscious?”

“Well, he's breathing kind of slowly. His eyes are half open, but he doesn’t seem to hear when we talk to him. I think you’d better come down here.”

“On my way. Cover him up with a blanket or something.”

McNulty put his head into the examination room where Janice was swabbing Mrs. Omura's ears. “I’m going to need a stretcher and a couple of guys. Will you—”

“Already done, Doctor. They’re on their way.”

“Well, hell,” said McNulty, secretly pleased.

When he got to the marine section, he found a little group gathered around a red-bearded man who lay in front of a fish tank, with three or four lab coats thrown over him.

“Okay, who was here when it happened?” McNulty asked, kneeling beside the patient. He checked the airway, began to take a pulse: it was slow and weak.

“I was,” said a dark-haired woman. “We were just standing here talking. He didn’t say anything for a while, and I looked over at him, and he had a funny expression on his face, and then he was going down.”

Later McNulty wrote in his notes: “Randall Geller, marine scientist, age 31. Collapsed in marine lab appr. 9:20 AM, Dec. 29. No evidence of trauma. EEG negative. Chem scan negative. Patient is stuporous, does not respond to stimuli.”

On the following day he had another patient with exactly the same symptoms: Yvonne Barlow, Geller’s boss in the marine lab. She was the dark-haired young woman he had talked to before, the one who had been with Geller when he collapsed.

McNulty was puzzled. He went back down to the lab, looked around and asked questions, hoping to find there had been a leakage of some noxious gas, but nobody had been using any such thing. The fact that Geller and Barlow had been stricken a day apart suggested a communicable disease, but if so, it was not like anything he had ever heard of. His two patients remained stuporous and unresponsive.

Late that afternoon he got a third one, Manuel Obregon, a steward. Obregon had been in the room when Barlow collapsed.

It began to look to McNulty as if he had an epidemic on his hands. He put in a call to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Their computer had never heard of this, either.