Drunkard's Walk

CHAPTER XV

Throughout the city and the world there were scenes like the one in front of Med Centre, as a populace panicked by the apparition of pestilence - vanished these centuries! - scrambled for the amulet that would guard them against it. Hardly one man in a hundred was seriously ill, but that was enough. One per cent of twelve billion is a hundred and twenty million - a hundred and twenty million cases of the most deadly, most contagious ... and least excusable... disease in medicine. For smallpox can infallibly be prevented, and only a world which had forgotten Jenner could have been taken by it unawares ... or a world in which the memory of Jenner's centuries-old prophylaxis had been systematically removed.

In the highest tower of Port Monmouth the eight major television networks shared joint transmitter-repeater facilities. Equatorially mounted wire saucers scanned the sky for the repeater satellites. As each satellite in its orbit broke free of the horizon, a saucer hunted and found it. That saucer clung to it as it traversed the sky, breaking free and commencing the search pattern for a new one as the old one dipped beneath the curve of the earth again. There were more than sixty satellites circling the earth which the repeaters could use, each one specially launched and instrumented to receive, clean, amplify and rebroadcast the networks' programmes.

Sam Gensel was senior shift engineer for the all-network technical crew at Port Monmouth.

It was not up to him to go out and get the pictures, to stage the shows or to decide what image went out on the air. Lecturing math professors, dimple-kneed dancers, sobbing soap-opera heroines - he saw all of them on the banked row of monitors in his booth. He saw all of them; he saw none of them. They were only pictures. What he really liked was test patterns, as they showed more of what he wanted to see. He watched for ripples of poor phasing, drifts off centre, the electronic snowstorm of line failure. If the picture was clear, he hardly noticed what it represented ... except tonight.

Tonight he was white-faced.

'Chief,' moaned the rabbity junior engineer from Net Five, 'it's all over the country! Sacramento just came in. And the relay from Rio has a local collect that shows trouble all over South America.'

'Watch your monitor,' Gensel ordered, turning away. It was very important that he keep a clear head, he told himself. Unfortunately the head that he had to keep clear was aching fiercely.

'I'm going to get an aspirin,' he growled to his line man, a thirty-year veteran whose hands, tonight, were trembling. Gensel filled a paper cup of water and swallowed two aspirins, sighed and sat down at the coffee-ringed desk in the office he seldom had time to use.

One of the monitors showed an announcer whose smile was desperate as he read a newscast: '—disease fails to respond to any of the known antibiotics. All persons are cau-

tioned to stay indoors as much as possible. Large gatherings are forbidden. All schools are closed until further notice. It is strongly urged that even within families personal contact be avoided as much as possible. And, above all, the Department of Public Health urges that everyone wait until an orderly programme of immunization can be completed...'

Gensel turned his back on the monitor and picked up the phone.

He dialled the front office. 'Mr Tremonte, please. Gensel here. Operational emergency priority.

The girl was businesslike and efficient (but did her voice have a faint hysterical tremor?). 'Yes, sir. Mr Tremonte is at his home. I will relay.' Cick, click. The picture whirred, blurred, went to black.

Then it came on again. Old man Tremonte was slouched at ease in a great leather chair, staring out at him irritably; the flickering light on his face showed that he was sitting by his fireplace. 'Well? What's up, Gensel?'

That queer, thin voice. Gensel had always, as a matter of employee discipline, stepped down hard on the little jokes about the Old Man - he had transistors instead of tonsils; his wife didn't put him to bed at night, she turned him off. But there was something definitely creepy about the slow, mechanical way he talked; and that old, lined face!

Gensel said rapidly, 'Sir, every net is carrying interrupt news bulletins. The situation is getting bad. Net Five cancelled the sports roundup, Seven ran an old tape of Bubbles Brinkhouse - the word is he's dying. I want to go over to emergency procedure. Cancel all shows, pool the nets for news and civil-defence instructions.'

Old man Tremonte rubbed his thin, long nose and abruptly laughed, like a store-window Santa. 'Gensel, boy,' he rasped. 'Don't get upset over a few sniffly noses. You're dealing with an essential public service.'

'Sir, there are millions sick, maybe dying!'

Tremonte said slowly, "That leaves a lot who aren't. We'll continue with our regular programmes, and Gensel, I'm going away for a few days; I expect you to be in charge. I do not expect you to go over to emergency procedure.'

I never got a chance to tell him about the remote from Philadelphia, thought Gensel despairingly, thinking of the trampled hundreds at the Municipal Clinic.

He felt his warm forehead and decided cloudily that what he really needed was a couple more aspirin ... although the last two, for some reason, hadn't agreed with him. Not at all. In fact, he felt rather queasy.

Definitely queasy.

At the console the line man saw his chief gallop clumsily towards the men's washroom, one hand pressed to his mouth.

The line man grinned. Fifteen minutes later, though, he was not grinning at all. That was when the Net Three audio man came running in to report that the chief was passed out cold, breathing like a broken-down steam boiler, on the washroom floor.

Cornut, with black coffee in him, was beginning to come back to something resembling normal functioning. He wasn't sober; but he was able to grasp what was going on. He heard Rhame talking to Locille: 'What he really needs is massive vitamin injections. That would snap him right round - but you've seen what the Med Centre looks like. We'll have to wait until he sobers up.'

'I am sober,' said Cornut feebly, but he knew it was untrue.'What happened?'

He listened while they told him what had been going on in the past twenty-four hours. Locille's brother dead, Egerd dead, plague loose in the land ... the world had become a different place. He heard and was affected, but there was enough liquor still in him and enough of the high-pressure compulsion exercised by the immortals so that he was able to view this new world objectively. Too bad. But - he felt shame - why had he failed to kill himself?

Locille's hand was in his, and Cornut, looking at her, knew that he never wanted to let it go again. He had not died when he should have. Now ... now he wanted to live! It was shameful, but he could not deny it.

He still felt the liquor in him, and it gave the world a warm, fresh appearance. He was ashamed, but the feeling was remote; it was a failure of his childhood, bad, but so long ago. Meanwhile he was warm and comfortable. 'Please drink some more coffee,' said Locille, and he was happy to oblige her. All the stimuli of twenty-four full hours were working on him at once, the beating, the strain, the compulsion of the immortals. The liquor. He caught a glimpse of Locille's expression and realized he had been humming.

'Sorry,' he said, and held out his cup for more coffee.

Around the texas the waves were growing higher. The black barges tossed like chips.

Locille's parents braced the wind-blown rain topside to witness the solemn lowering of their son's casket into the black-decked funeral barge. They were not alone - there were dozens of mourners with them, strangers - and it was not quiet. Dwang-g-g went the bullroarer vibration of the steel cables. Hutch-chumpf, hutch-chumpj the pneumatic pens in the tower's legs caught trapped air from the waves and valved it into the pressure tanks for the generators. The noise nearly drowned out the music.

It was the custom to play solemn music at funerals, from tapes kept in the library for the purpose. The bereft were privileged to choose the programme - hymns for the religious, Bach chorales for the classicists, largos for the merely mourning. Today there was no choice. The audio speakers played without end, a continuous random selection of dirges. There were too many mourners watching their children, parents or wives being awkwardly winched on to the tossing barges, on their way to the deep-sea funerary drop.

Six, seven ... Locille's father carefully counted eight barges lying along the texas, waiting to be loaded. Each one held a dozen bodies. It was a bad sickness, he thought with detachment, realizing that the mourners were so few because, often enough, whole families were going to the barge together. He rubbed the back of his neck, which had begun to hurt. The mother standing beside him neither thought nor counted, only wept.

As Cornut sobered, he began to view his world and his past day in harsher, clearer perspective. Rhame helped. The policeman had the scraps of paper Cornut had left and he was remorseless in questioning. Why must you die? Who are the immortals? How did they make you try to kill yourself - and why didn't you just now, with every chance in the world?'

Cornut tried to explain. To die, he said, remembering the lesson that had come with the beating, that is nothing; all of us do it. It is a victory in a way, because it makes death come to us on our terms. St Cyr and the others, however—

'St Cyr's gone,' rasped the policeman. 'Did you know that? He's gone and so is his bodyguard. Master Finloe from Biochemistry is gone; and his secretary says he left with Jillson and that old blonde. Where?'

Cornut frowned. It was not in keeping with his concept of immortality that they should flee in the face of a plague. Supermen should be heroic, should they not? He tried to explain that, but Rhame pounced on him. 'Super-murderer, you mean! Where did they go?'

Cornut said apologetically, 'I don't know. But I assure you that they had reasons.'

Rhame nodded. His voice was suddenly softer. 'Yes, they did. Would you like to know what those reasons were? The aborigines brought that disease. They came off their island carrying active smallpox, nearly every one of them; did you know that? The worst active cases were brought, the well ones were left on the island. Did you know that? They were given injections - to cure them, they thought, but the surgeon says they were only cosmetic cures, the disease was still contagious. And they were flown to every major city in the world, meeting thousands of people, eating with them, in close contact. They were coached,' said Rhame, his face working, 'in the proper behaviour in civilized society. For example, the pipe of peace isn't their custom; they were told it would please us. Does that add up to anything for you?'

Cornut leaned forward, his head buzzing, his eyes on Rhame. Add up? It added up; the sum was inescapable. The disease was deliberately spread. The immortals had, in their self-oriented wisdom, determined to move against the shortlived human race, in a way that had nearly destroyed it more than once in ancient days: they had spread a fearsome plague.

Locille screamed.

Cornut realized tardily that she had been drowsing against his shoulder, unable to sleep, unable, after the sleepless night, to stay fully awake. Now she was sitting bolt upright, staring at the tiny glittering manicure scissors in her hand. 'Cornut!' she cried, 'I was going to stab you in the throat!'

It was night, and outside the high arch of the Bridge was a line of colour, the lights of the speedy monotracks and private vehicles making a moving row of dots.

On one of the monotracks the motorman was half listening to a news broadcast: 'The situation in the mid-west is not as yet critical, but a wave of fear has spread through all the major cities of Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. In Omaha more than sixty persons were killed when three heli-buses bearing emigrants collided in a bizarre mid-air accident, apparently caused by pilot error in one of the chartered planes. Here in Des Moines all transportation came to a halt for nearly ninety minutes this morning as air-control personnel joined the fleeing throngs, leaving their posts unattended. In a statement released—'

The motorman blinked and concentrated on his controls. He was fifty years old, had held this job and almost this run for more than half his life. He rubbed the sensor collar irritably; he had worn it nearly thirty years, but tonight it bothered him.

The collar was like a dead-man's switch, designed to monitor temperature and pulse, electronically linked to cut the monotrack's power and apply the brakes in the event of death or serious illness to the motorman. He was quite used to wearing these collars and appreciated the need for them; but tonight, climbing the approach ramp to the Bridge in third speed, his throat began to feel constricted.

Also his head ached. Also his eyes itched and burned. He reached for the radiomike that connected him to the dispatcher's office, and croaked, 'Charley, I think I'm going to black out. I—' That was all. No more. He fell forward. The sensors around his neck had marked his abnormal pulse and respiration for minutes, and reacted as he collapsed. The monotrack stopped dead.

Behind it another one drove catastrophically into its tail.

The motorman of the second unit had been feeling queasy for more than an hour and was anxious to get to the end of his run; he had been overriding the automatic slow-down controls all the way across the Bridge. As he passed the critical parameters of sensor monitoring, his own collar switched off the power in his drive wheels; but by then it was too late; the wheels raced crazily against air. Even the sensor collars had not been designed to cope with two motorman-failures in the same second. White sparks flew from Bridge to water and died - great white sparks that were destroyed metal. The pile-up began. The sound of crashing battered at the campus of the University below. The Bridge stopped, its moving lights becoming a row of coloured dots with one great hideous flare of colour in the middle.

After a few moments distant ambulance sirens began to wail.

Cornut held the weeping woman, his face incredulous, his mind working. Locille trying to kill him? Quite insane!

But like the other insane factors in his own life, it was not inexplicable. He became conscious, rather late, of faint whispering thoughts in his own mind. He said to Rhame. 'They couldn't reach me! They tried to work with her.'

'Why couldn't they reach you?'

Cornut shrugged and patted her shoulder. Locille sat up, saw the scissors and hurled them away. 'Don't worry, I understand,' he said to her, and to the policeman, 'I don't know why. Sometimes they can't. Like in the refectory kitchen, just now; they could have killed me. I even wanted them to; but they didn't. And once on the island, when I was blind drunk. And once - remember, Locille? - on the Bridge. Each time I was wide open to them, and on the Bridge they almost made it. But I stopped in time. Each time I was fuddled. I'd been drinking,' he said, 'and they should have been able to walk right in and take possession...' His voice trailed thoughtfully off.

Rhame said sharply, 'What's the matter with Locille?'

The girl blinked and sat up again. 'I guess I'm sleepy,' she said apologetically. 'Funny...'

Cornut was looking at her with great interest, not as a wife but as a specimen. 'What's funny?'

'I keep hearing someone talking to me,' she said, rubbing her face fretfully. She was exhausted, Cornut saw; she could not stay awake much longer, not even if she thought herself a murderer, not even if he died before her eyes. Not even if the world came to an end.

He said sharply, 'Talking to you? Saying what?'

'I don't know. Funny. "Me softspeak you-fella." Like that.'

Rhame said immediately, 'Pidgin. You've been with the aborigines.' He dismissed the matter and returned to Cornut, 'You were on the point of something, remember? You said sometimes they could get at you, sometimes not. Why? What was the reason?'

Cornut said flatly: 'Drinking. Each of those times I had been drinking!'

It was true! Three times he had been where death should have found him, and each time it had missed.

And each time he had been drinking! The alcohol in his brain, the selective poison that struck first at the uppermost level of the brain, reducing visual discrimination, slowing responses ... it had deafened him to the mind voices that willed him to death!

'Smellim olefella bagarimop allfella,' Locille said clearly, and smiled. 'Sorry. That's what I wanted to say.' Cornut sat frozen for a second.

Then he moved. The bottle he had carried with him, Rhame had thriftily brought back to the room. Cornut grabbed it, opened it, took a deep swallow and passed it to Locille. 'Drink! Don't argue, take a good stiff drink!' He coughed and wiped tears from his eyes. The liquor tasted foul; it would take little to make him drunk again.

But that little might save his life ... Locille's life ... it might save the world's!