The Brain Eaters

Chapter 18

The headline that appeared in the Thursday edition of the Herald read: SCIENCE BAFFLED BY BRAIN EATERS. The impact was everything Corey Macklin had hoped for. The story was picked up by AP and UPI with full name credit to Corey. The news departments of all three television networks were trying to reach him before the ink was dry.

A major publisher offered a generous advance on a book. Corey declined. Agents from both coasts were suddenly eager to represent him. Corey refused to take their calls. Celebrities, crackpots, government officials, and just plain folks jammed the telephone lines to the Herald. Everybody wanted to talk to Corey Macklin, but Corey was not talking. Not yet.

Wednesday night, when they had returned to the office from St. Bartholomew’s, Corey had offered to share the by-line on the brain eaters story with Doc Ingersoll. “After all,” he said, “it was your connection that got us into the autopsy. And most of the medical input comes from you.”

Doc had fallen into a coughing spasm and come out of it shaking his head. He slapped his pockets until he found a fresh pack of Camels, stuck one in his mouth, and lit it.

“No, thanks,” he said. “I’m happy with things as they are. It feels good to be involved in a real story again, and I’ll stick with it as long as you want me to. But you can leave my name off of it. I don’t want to be famous. And that’s what you’re going to be, buddy, like it or not.”

“I think I’ll like it,” Corey said.

Doc squinted at him through the smoke of a freshly lit Camel. “Maybe.”

Doc Ingersoll proved to be a prophet. After the early Thursday edition of the Milwaukee Herald and the wire-service pickups of his story, Corey Macklin became at least semifamous. And if his name was not yet in the Woodward-Bernstein category, his coinage was rapidly becoming a household term. Health officials tried hard to come up with another, less threatening name for the deadly parasites, but it was “brain eaters” that caught the public imagination.

There were the inevitable jokes — Hear about the Polish brain eater that starved to death? — but they did not last long once the seriousness of the situation became known.

During the taping of his show Thursday afternoon, Johnny Carson included a reference to brain eaters in his monologue. Actually, the mention came during an ad-lib exchange with Ed McMahon. By the time the show was aired that night, reports of the latest wave of seizures were coming in from all over the country. Switchboards at NBC were inundated with protesting calls, and the network was forced to insert an editorial apology into the show. For the later broadcast to the West Coast, the offending exchange was bleeped out.

NBC’s was not the only switchboard jammed with incoming calls on Thursday. Telephone lines into the Milwaukee Herald were blown out as the number of callers wanting to speak to Corey Macklin overloaded the circuits. To his own surprise, Corey was suddenly recognized as the “authority” on the brain eaters. While the phone company worked to unsnarl the lines, Corey, along with City Editor Porter Uhlander, was isolated above the furor in the rarely used top-floor office of Nathan Eichorn.

The diminutive publisher was not his usual dapper self. There was a scuff on one of his lizard-skin boots, the collar of his shirt was wilted, and there was a patch of whiskers on his jaw that the razor had missed. He pulled his tie loose and unbuttoned the collar as he paced to and fro on the thick office carpeting.

While he paced, Eichorn kept his eyes on a television set that was built into the wall. On the screen a network anchorman was talking to field reporters in various cities around the nation. The volume was turned down to a murmur, but the on-screen activity had an air of great urgency. The network news people had that look of somber elation they reserve for the reporting of disasters.

Porter Uhlander stood next to the window and followed Eichorn with his eyes, avoiding the events on the television screen. The city editor looked as though at any moment he might throw himself through the double pane of safety glass to the concrete twelve stories down.

Corey Macklin was the calmest of the three in the room. He stood with his arms folded, leaning against the publisher’s desk while he tried to catch his name from the turned-down sound of the television set.

Every few steps Nathan Eichorn would stop his pacing, turn from the television screen, and glare in turn at Uhlander and Corey. He would mutter “Brain eaters” under his breath, shake his head, and resume his travels. Finally, he planted himself in front of the city editor, glared up at the taller man, and said in tightly controlled tones, “Brain eaters. How in the name of all journalism did you let that abomination get into our headline?”

“I didn’t know,” Uhlander admitted. “It wasn’t cleared through me.”

“I’m responsible,” Corey said. “I got the story late yesterday and had to go straight to composing with it. The headline was my idea.”

Eichorn turned and regarded him sadly. “Brain eaters. Not only did you insist on following this story despite everything I said; you stick a head on it that belongs in the National Enquirer. Balls.”

“Mr. Eichorn, I didn’t create the story. It was happening whether I wrote it or not.” Corey could not resist a small grin. “As for ‘Brain Eaters,’ it sold papers. We couldn’t keep them on the streets.”

“Why not. If you put ‘fuck’ in a headline, it would sell papers, too.” Eichorn dropped into the tall chair behind his polished mahogany desk as though he were suddenly exhausted. He frowned at a smudge on one shirt cuff, then licked the ball of his thumb and rubbed at it. “Did you know there are maybe a hundred people downstairs looking for you? That’s not counting all the crazies trying to get through on the telephone.”

“Looking for me, you say?” Corey found it impossible to hide his pleasure completely.

“Yes. Most of them seem to expect you to tell them how to escape the brain eaters.”

“How the hell should I know that?”

“Why not? As far as they’re concerned, you invented the little suckers, and now you can call them off.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Of course it is, but that has nothing to do with public behavior.”

For the first time, Corey lost some of his composure. “All I did was write the story.”

“I know that, Corey.” The publisher seemed to shrink even smaller in the high-backed chair. “You’re a professional newspaperman. Overambitious, maybe, but still a pro. I was wrong in trying to pull you off the story. I didn’t know then what we were up against. You see, there was pressure being put on me, too.”

“Pressure from where?” Corey said.

Eichorn looked up at him sharply. “This has to be off the record.”

Corey nodded.

The publisher grinned without mirth. “I never thought I’d have to say that to one of my own employees. The pressure came from Washington. Maybe you know that the Justice Department has been building an antitrust case against me for about eighteen months.”

“I’ve heard,” Corey said.

“Well, the people back there let me know that the whole thing would be dropped if the Herald would back away from this story. The story you wouldn’t let go of.”

“What were they hoping to accomplish?” Corey asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I’ve worked long and hard to build up what I have, and I’d have done almost anything to keep it from being taken away.” He slumped even deeper into the heavily padded swivel chair. “Now I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Porter Uhlander cleared his throat. “How do you want it handled from here on, Mr. Eichorn?”

The little publisher threw up his hands. “What choice do we have? Pandora’s box is open. The story’s out. Keep on it. Maybe the brain eaters will get us all and it won’t make any difference.”

While the Herald was besieged by people clamoring for more information about the brain eaters, the Biotron plant outside Appleton was having its own problems. The announcement was made on Friday morning that all labs and offices would be closed at the end of the shift and would remain closed until further notice. No explanation was offered.

There was no organized protest by the nonunionized employees of Biotron, just a sort of stunned confusion. They were assured that the plant would reopen as soon as possible; they should hold themselves in readiness to return to work.

After she read Corey’s by-lined story in the Thursday Herald, Dena Falkner tried without success to reach Dr. Kitzmiller. When she heard the announcement of the plant closure, she tried again. However, there was still no response on his private extension, and when she went in person to his office, she found it locked and a company security guard outside.

“Is Dr. Kitzmiller inside?” she asked the guard.

“Sorry, miss, I have no information.”

“It’s vital that I talk to him.”

“If you want to leave a message — ”

Dena did not wait for the rest of the brush-off. She walked through the building to the office of Jimmy Lohnes. The usually genial PR man was hunched behind his desk when she arrived, seemingly fighting off an angry pair of telephones that were ringing without letup. As Dena hesitated in the doorway, Lohnes swept an arm across the desk, knocking the instruments flying. They hit the carpeted floor with a muffled clang and were silent at last.

“Nice backhand,” Dena said.

Lohnes gave her a pained half grin. “Oh, hi, Dena. Excuse the outburst, but those damn things were giving me a world-class headache. Everybody seems to think I’m the man who can explain why the plant is closing. Hell, I just got the news the same time as everybody else. I haven’t a clue as to what’s going on. What can I do for you?”

Dena looked at him sideways. “As a matter of fact, I thought you might explain why the plant is closing.”

“That figures,” Lohnes said, massaging his temples. “What does the grapevine say?”

“That it has something to do with the brain eaters.”

“That’s not bad, as rumors go. Still, I haven’t seen anything about us in the news.”

“I have a feeling you will.”

“Do you know something I don’t, Dena?”

“Nothing important.”

Lohnes’s secretary entered looking distraught. “Excuse me, Mr. Lohnes, but there seems to be something wrong with the tele — Oh!”

“They fell on the floor,” he explained.

Dena left the public-relations chief picking up his telephones and returned to her own office. There she found Carol Denker searching through desk drawers.

“Lose something?” Dena asked.

“I was sure I had aspirin in here somewhere. You haven’t got any, have you?”

“Sorry.”

“Damn. My head feels like there’s a spear through it. If they hadn’t closed up the plant, I’d probably have had to go home anyhow.”

“Migraine?”

“If it is, it’s a first. I’ve never had one like it before.”

Headache. Dena thought of Corey’s description of the bartender in Milwaukee who complained of a two-day headache just before trashing his own tavern. She thought of the carefully worded story in the Herald about the tiny parasites that ate into your brain. Suddenly, she could no longer look at Carol Denker. She was seized by a sudden violent shudder.

Carol looked up from her search of the desk. “Something wrong?”

Dena shook her head. “I guess somebody walked over my grave.” Twenty minutes later she was driving grimly toward Milwaukee.

Eddie Gault did not go to work Thursday, so he did not get the message and witness the confusion that resulted. Eddie Gault had the flu. So he thought.

He lay in bed shivering under the blankets while Roanne Tesla brought him soup and felt his forehead and fed him a mixture of honey and wheat germ. When she had the television set on in the living room, she kept the volume turned way down. In his present condition, it would not do Eddie any good to hear about the brain eaters. She did not much like to think about them herself. Probably, she reasoned, it was just another instance of national paranoia.

Two thousand miles away, in San Francisco, the four-man delegation claiming to represent Soviet agriculture was glowering at a hapless assistant to the manager of the airport. The assistant, an earnest young man named Henderson, was sweating profusely as, in the absence of his chief, he passed along the orders he had been given to these dangerous-looking Russians.

“This is outrageous!” Viktor Raslov stormed. “We are emissaries of the Soviet Union, traveling on diplomatic passports.”

“I’m very sorry, sir, but there has been a delay in your flight.”

“Delay? What kind of delay?”

“Uh, well, mechanical, I believe.” Henderson was not a good liar. As he well knew, the delay in the Russians’ flight was prompted by a call from the San Francisco office of the FBI. Henderson wished fervently that the local agents would arrive as promised and take him off the hook.

“I want to speak to the Soviet consul,” said Raslov.

“Yes, sir,” Henderson said, relieved to be taking action, any action. “If you will come with me, you can use the telephone in my office.”

The public concern over the brain-eater scare had brought crowds far above normal to the airport — people looking to get out of the city or coming to meet friends who were fleeing from some other locale. By the time Henderson had steered his group through the crowd and upstairs to his office, it was discovered that the foursome had become a threesome. Anton Kuryakin was no longer with them.

By Friday night nobody was making jokes about the brain eaters. The wave of new seizures that began on Thursday grew to a flood on Friday. Hospitals were filling rapidly not only with bona fide victims of the parasites but with almost everybody who had a headache, or thought he did. Some medical personnel were reluctant to treat the people brought in as rumors spread about the contagious nature of the brain eaters.

The public, now afraid and confused, clamored for action. Health authorities were urged to do something. Anything. A quarantine was suggested. The health authorities would have been happy to oblige, but they had no idea where to start. From the original concentration of attacks around New York, Milwaukee, and Seattle, the seizures had spread to all parts of the country. The authorities could do little more than issue calming reports that calmed no one.

It soon became evident that the parasites could strike anyone, regardless of age, sex, race, economic circumstances, or geographic location. Nevertheless, with the dearth of hard facts, rumors sprang up like toadstools in manure. Calamity is easier to face when there is someone to blame it on.

The homosexual community was an early target. Remembering the recent AIDS scare, groups of men marched on gay bars and community centers with guns, clubs, axes, torches, and fists. They did not stop to ask themselves how beating up a few homosexuals would protect anybody from the brain-destroying parasite.

In Detroit the blacks blamed the Jews. In Los Angeles the Jews blamed the Arabs. In Berkeley a feminist leader blamed men. In St. Louis the conservatives blamed the liberals. In Miami the Jews, blacks, Cubans, Haitians, and WASPs blamed one another.

Before the weekend was over, hardly a group had not been accused by some other group of bringing the new plague upon the nation. Communists, Hare Krishnas, Orientals, union members, meat eaters, nuclear plants, Indians, doctors, politicians, poor people, the media, and visitors from space had all taken their share of heat from a frightened and frustrated populace.

Throughout the weekend the appalling stories continued.

In Manchester, New Hampshire, a Sunday school teacher broke off in mid-sentence, ripped a wooden chair apart, and attacked his class with the jagged legs. Two of the children were killed and six injured severely before the teacher was subdued by half a dozen men from an adult class in the next room.

In Santa Monica a body builder suddenly began to scream and rush about the gym, attacking people with a forty-pound dumbbell. He caved in the skulls of the gym owner and his best friend, then ran out onto Pacific Coast Highway and threw himself under the wheels of a Gray Line tour bus.

In New Orleans a customer complained to the bartender that the music was blowing his mind, then, without waiting for a response, leaped on the bandstand and killed a seventy-year-old trumpet player with his own instrument as the rest of the band watched in impotent horror.

In Los Angeles a well-dressed woman driving a bronze Mercedes inexplicably swung her car broadside near the junction of the Harbor and Santa Monica freeways, causing an accident involving two hundred cars and tying up traffic for many miles in all directions. When rescuers reached her, they found her face a mass of raw lesions and her throat ripped out by her own hands.

On a Caribbean cruise ship the captain, two crewmen, and a middle-aged woman passenger went berserk at approximately the same time and ran screaming through the ship attacking anyone in their path. The radio operator managed to get off an SOS before his neck was snapped and the ship set afire. By the time a Liberian tanker reached the scene, more than a hundred people were dead.

The list of dreadful seizures continued until a public numbed by horror upon horror no longer responded to fresh stories. Published reactions, official and otherwise, provided little relief.

From Washington came a message from the surgeon general assuring the populace that there was nothing to worry about. He would have had a hard time convincing the crowd of baseball fans watching the Portland Beavers shut out Salt Lake City on Thursday as almost simultaneously a dozen people in the stands and one catcher in the Portland bullpen went berserk and created bloody mayhem in the park.

On Thursday night in Biloxi, Mississippi, Reverend Cadwallader of the New Faith and Final Judgment Church proclaimed it the end of the world and led thirty followers to the top of a nearby hill, the better to be close to heaven when the big transfer began. On Sunday evening they were still waiting.

On Sunday night the president spoke to the nation. Everyone who was still unaffected by the terrible new plague was in front of a television set, tensely waiting for some word of assurance.

“My fellow Americans … without warning our country has been struck by an insidious, invisible enemy. As in the past, when the American people have been threatened and have rallied to defeat those who would destroy us and our way of life, I must call on you tonight to join with me in meeting this new, terrible crisis….”

Corey Macklin, Dena Falkner, and Lou Zachry, the government man, were among the millions watching the president’s telecast. They were wedged with about fifty others into a narrow Milwaukee bar that was built to hold half that many.

“This is a time calling for personal sacrifice as we mobilize all the forces at our command to repel this invader.”

“I don’t believe it,” Corey said. “He’s going to declare war on the brain eaters.”

Zachry gave him a hard look.

“Hush,” Dena said. “Let’s at least hear what the man has to say.”

The president was not reassuring. His usual robust tan seemed to have paled several shades. One eyelid had developed a twitch, and his rich, practiced voice had a quaver that reflected more than his age.

The essence of his message was to remain calm. Local authorities were bringing the situation under control.

“Bullshit,” Corey muttered. Several men standing nearby grunted their agreement. Dena kicked him in the shin.

The people were asked to report all suspected cases of the new epidemic. The president avoided using the term “brain eaters.” Stay out of crowds, they were told. Do not attempt to leave population centers. Stay tuned to radio or television for late developments. Obey law-enforcement officers. Help was on the way. Trust in God.

As the president concluded his short message, Corey swallowed the last of his beer, which had grown warm in the glass. He said, “For a minute there I thought he was going to leave out the Almighty.”

“Like it or not, the Almighty may be our only hope,” Dena said.

“No atheists in foxholes, right?”

“Something like that.”

Back out on the street, Corey, Zachry, and Dena stood in a little protective knot while scattered pedestrians hurried by, eyeing each other furtively.

“I’d like to go out to Biotron tomorrow,” Corey said. “Meet the famous Dr. Kitzmiller.”

Dena made a face. “Lotsa luck. Dr. K can be hard to find when he doesn’t want to be found.”

“He hasn’t had me looking for him. What about you, Lou? Want to come?”

Zachry shook his head. “I’ve got too much to do here. Touch base with me when you get back.”

Corey consulted his watch. “I’d better get up to the city room now and see what Doc’s pulled off the wire. I want a fresh story for tomorrow’s early edition.”

“If you don’t mind, I’ll come with you,” Dena said. “Right now I don’t want to walk the streets alone.”