The Jupiter Plague

3

Killer outdid himself. He knew that the patient was desperately ill and that the sooner he was in the hospital where all its complex facilities could be marshaled to aid him the better his chances were — but this circumstance was only the trigger. As the ambulance’s turbine whined up to speed he saw that the police had opened a lane for him directly to the highway, which had been completely cleared of all traffic. When the speedometer hit one hundred he kicked in the overdrive and kept his foot on the floor, screaming the heavy machine down the center of the concrete roadway. Green and white police copters paced him on both sides and another copter dropped down between them: sunlight glinted from a lens in the side window and he knew that the scene was going out on television to the world, they were watching him. He gripped the wheel tighter as they hit the turn at

Flushing Meadows, keeping speed and turning sharply so that they broadsided into it, skidding sideways through the arc of road and leaving long streaks of black rubber on the white surface. Television!

In the rear of the ambulance the man from space was dying. The antipyretic was controlling his temperature, but his pulse was fluttering and growing steadily weaker. Sam turned the UV light onto the patient’s chest, but the furunculosis made it impossible to read the medical history invisibly tattooed there.

“Isn’t there something else we can do?” Nita asked helplessly.

“Not now — we’ve done all we can until we know more about the mechanism of this disease.” He looked at her strained face and twisting fingers: she was not used to the dark presence of approaching death. “Wait, there is something we can do — and you’ll do it much better than I could.” He pulled over one of the equipment boxes and unlatched the lid. “Your pathology department will want blood and sputum samples, you might even prepare slides from those suppurating boils.”

“Of course,” she said, straightening up. “I can do it now and save that much time after we get to the hospital.” While she spoke she was laying out the equipment with automatic efficiency. Sam made no attempt to help since right now work was the best therapy for her. He leaned back on the bench, swaying with the motion of the hurtling ambulance, the only sounds in the insulated compartment the hoarse breathing of the patient and the sighing of the air filters.

When Nita finished taking her samples he snapped the oxygen tent over the stretcher, sealing it tight and putting a filter over the exhaust outlet.

“This will cut down the chance of contamination, and the increased oxygen tension should ease the load on his heart.”

The hydraulic motors hummed briefly and the rear door swung wide onto the empty and silent receiving platform. “I can give you,a hand with the stretcher, Doc,” Killer said over the intercom.

“There’s no need, Killer, Dr. Mendel and I can do it ourselves. I want you to stay in the cab until the decon team is finished with the ambulances. And that’s an order.”

“I always do what the doctor says—” His voice cut off as the circuit clicked open.

Sam wheeled the stretcher toward the elevator while Nita watched the patient. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw the waiting technicians in sealed plastic suits carrying spray tanks on their backs. One of them lifted his hand briefly and Sam realized that McKay himself was leading the team, the head of the Department of Tropical Medicine decontaminating an ambulance.

“This elevator is on remote,” a voice said from a speaker in the wall when they had pushed the stretcher in. The door closed behind them, then opened again on the sixtieth floor. The corridor was also empty and all of the doors were shut and sealed, waiting for the decon men to follow them up. Ahead of them the first of the thick, vault-type doors of the tight quarantine ward swung open, then sealed itself behind them. The inner door opened.

“Onto the bed first, then get those samples through to the lab,” Sam said, and recognized a tone of relief in his voice. The man was still his patient, but the physicians in the hospital would soon be monitoring the case and advising him. Guiltily, he realized that his relief came from the sharing of responsibility: If the patient were to die now the blame would not be all his.

While Nita sealed the samples into the delivery capsule for the lab he took the telltale instruments that were waiting on the bedside table and he attached them one by one. The sphygmornanometer and thermometer were combined in a black instrument no larger than a poker chip. He fixed it to the unconscious man’s wrist with surgical glue and it began transmitting at once as the internal thermal switch turned on. It was self-powered and its microminiaturized transmitter broadcast to an aerial in the frame of the bed; Sam checked its operation on the inset monitor screen. Bad, very bad. Connecting the electrocardiograph and the electroencephalograph was more exacting, but he did it swiftly, then the pH and serum analyzer. All of the information, besides being displayed on the monitor screen, was appearing on the screen in the consultation room. Sam clasped his hands tightly, unconsciously, waiting for the report.

The call signal pinged and Dr. Gaspard’s face swam into focus on the telephone screen.

“No diagnosis yet. Dr. Bertolli,” he said, “other than our agreement that the disease appears to be completely unknown. There is one thing, the patient has been identified by the Space Commission as Commander Rand, Second Officer of the ‘Pericles.’ His medical history will be on your monitor screen in a moment, it’s just coming in from their record section.”

“Are there any suggestions for treatment?”

“Just supportive as you have been doing—”

He broke off as the alarm sounded from the monitor screen where a pulsing red light now glowed over the ECG reading.

“Fibrillation!” Gaspard said, but Sam had already torn open the cabinet drawer and removed the coronary stimulator. Weakened by disease and strain, Rand’s heart was running wild as the muscles contracted in uncontrolled spasms, no longer pumping blood but shuddering like a dying animal.

Once, twice the strong electrical current penetrated the convulsive heart muscles, stopping the uncontrolled tremors. Then, slowly, it began to beat again and Sam turned back to the instrument cabinet. Nita was already there, taking out the cardiac pacemaker.

“You’re sure to need this,” she said, and he nodded agreement. As he made the incision in Rand’s heaving chest to connect the terminals fibrillation began again. This time he made no attempt to restart the weakened heart by shocking it, but raced to make the connections to the pacemaker.

“Power on!” he said, looking at the waxy skin of the unconscious man. Behind him the life-giving machine hummed quietly, sending out the carefully spaced microcurrents that duplicated the nerve signals that were no longer reaching the damaged heart. It began to beat again, timed by the artificial stimulation, and blood once more surged out through Rand’s arteries.

This was the beginning of the end; from this point onward the spaceman’s life slipped away from him and he never regained consciousness. It was hours before he died — officially died — but it was clear all this time that there could be no hope for recovery. Only a miracle could have saved him and the watching physicians neither expected nor received this. Sam, with Nita assisting, labored with all the machines and drugs available to them, but it was useless. The antibiotics had no effect on whatever organism was causing the disease and it spread through the entire system with frightening speed. From the symptoms many — or indeed all— of the man’s organs seemed to be affected and renal failure and necrosis pushed him closer to that invisible border. Sam was not looking at the monitor screen so that he missed the moment and did not know it had arrived until Dr. Gaspard’s weary voice caught his attention.

“There is no longer a reading on the EEC, Doctor. Thank you, you and Dr. Mendel have done everything possible. I don’t think — it is clear now — that from the very beginning there was really very little that could have been done.”

The screen went blank. Sam slowly, one by one, turned off the battery of machines that had by heroic measures been producing a simulation of life, then stared down at the dead man. For long seconds he stood like this before he was aware of what he was doing, aware enough to force himself to think, to take the next steps. The patient was dead. Finis. Now to the living.

“There’s nothing more we can do here,” he said to Nita, holding her arm and drawing her away from the bed. She would not take her eyes from the dead man’s face until he pulled the sheet over it.

“Into the decon chamber, Doctor,” he said. “All of your clothes, everything including shoes and underclothing, go into the incineration hopper, then a complete scrub. The directions are on the wall if you haven’t done it before.”

She walked toward the door, slowly stripping off the gauntlet-length isolation gloves, then stopped.

“No, you’ve handled him the most — you should go before I…”

“I have some things to do first,” he said, urging her on. This time she did not protest.

By the time Nita emerged from the decon chamber wearing a sterile surgical gown and cotton scuffs the room had changed. The bed had been stripped and even the mattress removed. There was no sign of the body until Sam pointed to the square stainless-steel set into the wall.

“Orders — he’s in there. It’s not an ordinary morgue setup; if needed it can be chilled by liquid nitrogen. This will make dissection more difficult, but that was the decision upstairs. But of course— you work in pathology, you must know all about this. Will you take over please, while I scrub? The last word from the council upstairs was that we were just to stand by here until we had further instructions.”

Nita dropped into the chair; without the pressure of responsibility she was suddenly aware of how tired she was. She was still sitting there when Sam came out. He went over to the equipment cabinet, sliding open drawers until he found the recording telltales.

“We should have done this earlier because if we are going to catch… anything… we’ll want to know about it as soon as possible.” She fastened one to her wrist as he went into the pharmacy and began rummaging through the shelves. “I’m filling a prescription, Doctor,” he called out and held up a bottle of clear fluid. “Do you know what this is?”

“C₂H₅OH.”

“Ethyl alcohol, correct. I see we both went to the same school. There are many formulas for the preparation of this universal solvent but considering the patients‘—our — need of instant medication I favor the simplest and most effective.”

“Subcranial injection?”

“Not quite so drastic.”

He had extracted a container of orange juice from the kitchen refrigerator and was mixing it half and half with the alcohol: then he poured two healthy beakerfuls. They smiled and drank and neither of them glanced at the shining door in the wall though it was foremost in their minds. Instead they sat by the window and looked out over the towers of the city: it was dusk and the lights were coming on, while behind the dark spires of the buildings the sky was washed with sweeps of red, verging into purple in the east.

“There’s something I should have remembered,” Sam said, staring unseeingly at the darkening sky.

“What do you mean? There’s nothing more we could have done—”

“No, it has nothing to do with poor Rand, at least not directly. It was something at the ship, just before we left.”

“I don’t recall anything; we were alone, then the vertijets came just as we left—”

“That’s it, something to do with them!” He turned so suddenly his drink sloshed onto the floor but he didn’t notice it. “No, not the copters— the birds, don’t you remember the birds?”

“I’m sorry…”

“They were on the ground near the ship; I saw them just before I closed the ambulance door. Starlings. There were a few of them that appeared to be injured in some way, I remember at the time I thought they had been hurt when the ship landed — but that’s not possible. They weren’t there when we came, don’t you remember that? They settled down after we stopped the ambulance.” He was running to the phone while he was still speaking, thumbing it into life.

Professor Chabel was in conference but broke off at once to take Sam’s call. He listened silently while Sam told him about the birds and the worried cleft between his eyes deepened.

“No, Dr. Bertolli, I have had no report on these birds. Do you think there is a connection…?”

“I hope not.”

“The ship has been cordoned off and is being guarded. I’ll have men in isolation suits go in there and see if they can find anything. You’ll get the report of whatever they discover. In the meantime— will you hold on for a moment…” Professor Chabel turned away from the phone and had a brief conversation with someone out of range of the pickup. When he came back on the screen he was holding a sheaf of photographs in his hands.

“These are from the electron microscope, prints are on the way to you as well. What appears to be the infectious agent has been isolated, a virus, in many ways it resembles Borreliota variolae.”

“Smallpox! But the symptoms—”

“We realize that, different in every way. I said it is just a physical resemblance, in reality the virus is unlike anything I have ever seen before. In the light of this I would like to ask you and Dr. Mendel to aid me.”

Nita had come up silently behind Sam and was listening in; she answered for both of them.

“Anything we can do we will, of course, Dr. Chabel.”

“You will both be in quarantine there for an unlimited time, until we can learn more about the nature of this disease. And you have the body of Commander Rand there…”

“Would you like us to perform the postmorten?” Sam asked. “It would lessen the risk of moving the body and exposing others.”

“It is really a job for World Health, but” in the circumstances…“

“We will be very glad to do it, Professor Chabel. There is very little else that we can do in quarantine. Will you want to record?”

“Yes, we will have the pickups on remote, and we will tape the entire process. And we will want specimens of all the tissues for biopsy.”

Even with the ultrasonic knives dissection of the frozen body was difficult. And depressing. It was obvious from the very beginning that Rand’s life could never have been saved since his body was riddled by the pockets of infection; there were large cysts in every organ. Sam did the gross dissection and Nita prepared slides and cultures for the waiting technicians, sending them out in sealed containers through the evacuated tube system with its automatic sterilization stage.

There was only one interruption, when Professor Chabel reported that the dead birds — an entire flock of starlings and a seagull — had been found near the ship. The bodies were being taken to the World Health laboratories for examination.

It was midnight before they were finished and all of the equipment was sterilized. Nita came out of the decontamination chamber, her still-wet hair up in a towel, to find Sam looking at a photographic print. He held it out to her.

“This just came in from World Health, from their lab. Those dead birds filled with cysts—”

“No!”

“—and this is what the virus looks like. It appears to be identical with the one that killed Rand.”

She took it and wearily dropped into the couch under the window. In the thin cotton gown, it barely came to her knees when she tucked her legs up beside her, and with her face scrubbed clean of makeup she was a very attractive woman with a very little of the doctor left. “Doesn’t it mean…?” she asked fearfully and couldn’t finish the sentence.

“We don’t know what it means yet.” He was very tired and knew she must be feeling even worse. “There are a lot of questions here that are badly in need of answers. Why did the ship stay so long on Jupiter — and why did Commander Rand return alone? How did he contract this disease— and does it have any connection with the birds? There has to be a connection, but I can’t see it. If the disease is so virulent — the birds must have died within minutes of contracting it — how is it that, well, we haven’t been stricken yet.” He was sorry the instant he said this, but the words were out. Nita had her head lowered and her eyes closed and he realized they were filled with silent tears that welled out on her face. Without reasoned thought he took her hand in his, it was human need in the face of oncoming darkness, and she clutched it tightly. She settled back onto the couch and the photograph dropped from her fingers and slid to the floor: he realized suddenly that she was asleep.

There were plenty of blankets and he made no attempt to move her, but he did put a pillow under her head so that she could rest comfortably and covered her with a blanket. He was exhausted, though not sleepy, so he turned off the overhead lights and lay back on one of the beds with another glass of ethyl-orange juice. What was this plague from space? His thoughts chased themselves in circles and he must have dozed off because the next thing he noticed was the sunlight coming in through the window over the empty couch. It was going to be another warm day. He glanced quickly at his telltale — it registered normal.

“Going to sleep forever?” Nita asked from the diet kitchen, where she was making dish-rattling noises. “It’s six-thirty already.” She brought him a cup of coffee and he saw that she had her hair combed and tied back and had applied a touch of lipstick; she looked as bright as the new day.

“I was going to call the World Health lab, but decided to wait until you woke up,” she said, and turned to the phone. He stopped her.

“Not yet. The news can wait until after breakfast — if there is breakfast that is…”

“A delicious, home-cooked, handmade breakfast of farm sausages and new laid eggs — it’s defrosting right now.”

“Show me where it is!”

There was an unspoken agreement that they would hold the world at bay for just a little while longer, enjoying the breakfast in the early sunlight that poured across the room. Until they touched the phone they were cut off and alone in these sealed rooms high above the city, in a private universe of their own. She poured more coffee and they sipped it slowly, looking out at the clear sky and sharp-edged, reaching towers of New York.

“Are you from here, from the city?” Nita asked. He nodded.

“Born, bred and abided here ever since, except for the nine years in the UN Army.”

“Nine years! I thought that you looked, well… a little…” She broke off, a little unsure of herself, and he laughed.

“I look a little old to be an intern? Well, you’re perfectly right.”

“I didn’t mean to…”

“Please, Nita — if I was ever sensitive about the fact that I was ten years older than all my fellow students in medical school I’ve long since developed a thick hide. Neither am I ashamed of the time I put in the Army; I wanted to make it my career and I was a captain before I finally decided to leave.”

“Was there a — particular reason for the decision?”

“In the very end there was one positive fact that made my mind up, but the idea was a long time growing. I was always happy enough with what I did, though always with some doubts. Guns are fun to play with when you’re young, but they are really made to kill people. The UN Army is a very good idea, don’t misunderstand me, but after a certain time I began to feel that I, personally, could do better helping the world in some manner other than with a gun. That was when I met Doctor Percy Dharmatilake. He was large, black, mostly Tamil, though he was from Ceylon. No one could pronounce his first name, but he had been to school in England and had a very posh British ac-cent and didn’t mind at all when everyone called him Percy. He was our medical officer, and probably the best friend I ever had. When I watched him work, little by little, I began to have the feeling that there was more sense to his job than to mine. He never propagandized me, but he did answer all of my stupid questions with infinite patience. Even let me stand around and watch when he was operating. Yes, more coffee, thanks.”

He sipped silently, looking out of the window, and Nita knew from his expression that he was looking at something other than the New York skyline.

“It was a mine,” he said, “a bad one. Blew up one of our troop carriers and an entire squad. I knew every one of them. I was with Percy when the medics brought them in. Some were dead, others just, well, butchered. But he saved them, the ones he could. And I helped, he made me. He just assumed that I would because there was no one else there. I held clamps for him, passed him instruments, did a lot of things that I was not qualified to do and should not have done. But it worked. They were my friends — and I helped them. It was, well, the greatest feeling I had ever had. He gave me some medical books and I started thinking seriously about medicine, maybe surgery, as a career. What finally decided me was what happened in a little village in Tibet. We had been airdropped in during the night to get between the Indians and the Chinese who were having a disagreement. You had to wonder why. This place was off the main roads, off the main roads of civilization as well. I had never seen poverty or disease like that before. Looking at it, I had to wonder if guns were the only things that we could bring them. Instead of soldiers we should have airdropped a medical team — and a lot of plumbers. Their water supply was something right out of the stone age…”

The wasplike buzz of the phone cut across his words and he turned quickly to the kitchen extension and turned it on. Dr. McKay’s face swam into focus on the screen. His Department of Tropical Medicine must have worked through the night and it was apparent from the dark shadows under his eyes that he had worked along with them. He was brusque.

“How are you both feeling? Have there been symptoms of any kind”

Sam glanced at the dials of his own telltale, then at Nita’s. “All readings are normal and there are no symptoms. Have there been other cases—?”

“No, we’ve had none, I was just concerned since you both had been exposed.” He closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed at his knotted forehead, “so far there have been no other cases of what is now unofficially known as Rand’s disease, at least not among human beings.”

“The birds?”

“Yes, we’ve had men out with lights all night, and since dawn there have been more reports, a plague of birds, dead birds. World Health has already broadcast a warning that ill or dead birds are not to be touched and that the police should be notified at once.”

“Have any other animals been affected?” Nita asked.

“No, nothing else so far, just the birds, for which we are very grateful. And you two, no symptoms at all, that is very hopeful. That is why you must stay in touch with me, let me know at once if there is anything, well, out of the ordinary. Good luck.” He hung up.

Nita sipped at her coffee. “It’s cooled off — I’ll have to heat some more.” She slid two sealed containers into the radar oven. “Everything about this disease is strange, it doesn’t fit any of the rules.”

“Well, should it, Nita? After all it is a disease from space, from another world, and it should be expected to be alien.”

“New but not alien. No matter what an organism is it can only affect the body in a limited number of ways. If the disease were really alien it would have no effect on human beings — if it were, say, a fungus that attacked only silicon-based life

“Or a bacteria that was only viable at twenty below zero.”

“Right! The disease Rand returned with is entirely new to us, but its reactions aren’t. Fever, nephrosis, furunculosis and pyemia. Admittedly the infection was spread through his entire body, but there are other diseases that attack a number of organs simultaneously, so it is just the combination of these factors that is new.”

Sam took the hot container she passed him and filled his cup. “You make it sound hopeful. I had visions of a plague from space sweeping around the world.” Then he frowned in sudden memory. “What about the birds — how do you fit them in?”

“We don’t know if they do fit in yet. They might have the same disease — or something like it. If they do have a related disease it will be a great aid if anyone else does come down with the virus that killed Rand. We’ll be able to manufacture vaccine then, if we can’t come up with a foolproof drug cure first. I wish I could see how the work in the labs is coming.”

“I do too — but we’d better resign ourselves to staying here awhile. You’re the pathologist so you’ll have plenty to keep you busy with those tissue samples. But there is very little work here for an ambulance-riding intern. I think I’ll get on the phone and call a few friends around the hospital, try and find out what is going on in the world outside.”

Nita was busy all the morning in the small but complete laboratory that was an integral part of the isolation ward. She was vaguely aware of Sam’s phone conversations and the hissing chunk of the tube capsules arriving. When she finally took a break near noon she found him bent over a map that he had spread out on the table.

“Come look,” he said, waving her over. “This is all of Long Island — Kennedy Airport is here — and I have had the World Health people sending me over copies of all their reports on dead birds. I’ve entered the location on the map for each report and noted the number of birds found on the site as well. Do you see a pattern?”

Nita ran her finger over the tiny, red-inked numbers. “At first glance almost all of them are along the south shore, with a number of dense patches in Cedarhurst, Lawrence and Long Beach.”

“Yes, they have been found only on the south shore so far; you can see that here in Reynold’s Channel next to Long Beach they recovered over two thousand dead ducks. Now, did you happen to notice which way the air lock on the ‘Pericles’ was facing when it opened?”

“No, I was all turned around, I can’t be sure.”

“I wasn’t certain either, so I checked with the airport. The open port faces almost exactly east southeast — like this.” He took a parallel ruler and laid it across the compass rose, then moved it to intercept the corner of the airport where the grounded spaceship lay. He slashed a red line from the airport across Long Island and into the ocean. When he lifted the ruler Nita gasped.

“It goes right through Long Beach, through the center of most of the numbers. But it just can’t be like that — unless the wind was blowing that way?”

“Almost no wind yesterday you’ll remember, occasional gusts up to two miles an hour at that time, but nondirectional.”

“Are you trying to tell me that the virus that infected these birds came out of that port like a… searchlight beam and just swept across the country infecting everything in the way?”

“I’m not telling you anything, Nita — you seem to be telling me. I’ve just transcribed the figures furnished by the police. Maybe the virus was spread as you said; we might be wrong in thinking that an alien organism would have to conform to our rules of behavior. So far nothing in this whole affair fits the rules.” He paced the floor, unconsciously slamming his fist into the palm of his other hand.

“And while it’s going on I’m trapped in here. If Rand’s disease only attacks birds they could hold us here for the rest of our lives, under observation, never sure but still waiting for us to get sick…” The phone signal cut him off.

It was Chabel from World Health. He had a haunted look and when he spoke his voice was pitched so low that it was barely audible.

“There is a patient on the way up, Dr. Bertolli, please be ready to receive him.”

“You mean—”

“Yes. Rand’s disease. A policeman. He is one of the men who were assigned to collecting the dead birds.”