22-07-2023

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  It would seem that the human body has a tendency over a long

  period to adjust itself against injected serums used to nullify

  known diseases and fevers. As one illness is conquered in the

  laboratorv so a completely new one takes Its place. A deliberately

  induced, plague would be a terrible scourge for Mankind to try

  and overcome—it would undoubtedly alter history.

  A

  G

  E

  By John Bnumer

  Illustrated by QUINN

  I.

  Clifford waited a long moment before he could admit it to himself, looking down at the wasted face in which the old beauty was even yet discernible, at the dark hair spread across the pillow. His eyes suddenly began to sting with tears, and he blinked them back in annoyance. That was ridiculous.

  In illogical anger with himself, he motioned to the nurse to draw the sheet over the dead woman’s face, and she did so. He turned away and began to gather his instruments, and found that the ward sister was eyeing him with a questioning but sympathetic gaze. He felt impelled to explain.

  “ She—she was the wife of one of my best friends,” he said gruffly, and the sister nodded understanding^. She made no protestation of regret, and he was thankful for it. This was neither the time nor the place.

  “ Disease—especially this one—doesn’t take much account of personal feelings,” he went on after a moment. “ If you’ll make out the certificate, I’ll sign it before I go home.”

  He cast a lingering backward glance at the still form on the bed, and then moved heavily on to the next patient. There were sixty beds in this ward alone, each divided from the next by the little folding screens, and every last one contained a victim of the Plague.

  “ There’s only number forty-seven for you to look at now, doctor,” he heard the sister say from behind him. Mechanically, he looked about him and headed towards the numbered cubicle. Forty-seven ? He searched through his mind. Oh, yes. That was Buehl, the spaceman, weak but recovering, although he had gone ten days without treatment before his condition was identified. Clifford wondered sourly whether the drugs and antibiotics he had given had actually had any effect. They had worked—apparently. And yet he had tried the same combination on Leila Kent, and she was dead.

  He shut the thought determinedly out of his mind. A doctor could not start questioning the foundation of medicine in that way. But the fact which prompted the idea remained. Sometimes the Plague killed, about one in ten of its victims, and nothing worked ; at other times a therapy which had failed elsewhere would produce a miraculous cure in a matter, of days.

  The man in Bed 47 looked up and grinned, and Clifford forced an answering smile on to his face. “ Well, Buehl ?” he said. “ How’s it going ?”

  The spaceman folded the technical magazine he had been reading and lay back, un-zipping his jacket. “ Better, I think, doc,” he said, barely managing to finish the words before opening his mouth wide to admit the bronchioscope.

  “ It certainly looks like it,” Clifford agreed. His fingers directed the probing instrument cautiously, and his mind compared the visible state of the man’s throat with his memory of its condition yesterday. There was no doubt about it; Buehl was well on the way to recovery.

  He snapped the bronchioscope shut. “ You’re improving,” he told the patient. “ We should be able to let you go in another three or four days. You’ll be back aboard your rocket inside the month.” “ Odd, you know, doc,” said Buehl musingly, stretching out his arm for the prick of the haemometer. “ This article I was reading just now. I used to think a rocket was just about the perfect kind of transport. That’s why I went in for the space service, I guess. An efficient way of getting about. Now here’s, a chap at General Electric saying we’ve never even come near having a real kind of transport.”

  The haemometer clicked, and figures mounted across the face of its dial. Clifford noted the information: blood count rising, oxygen utilisation within five per cent of normal. He dropped the end of the probe into the steriliser and began to attach the terminals of the electroencephalograph. “ What does he mean by that exactly ?” he inquired, pressing the little suction cups down on the patches of shaven scalp hidden among Buehl’s brown hair.

  “ Oh, he says the perfect way of getting about would be instantaneous, for one thing. You just step in here and you’re there, boom ! All our cars and planes and space ships waste time in moving. He says that’s wrong.”

  In the midst of concentrating on the wavering greenish glow which indicated Buehl’s brain rhythms, Clifford found time to notice that something had happened to the spaceman. Up to now he had been confining his. conversation to food, drink and women. He said absently, “ I’m afraid I don’t know much about that sort of thing. Close your eyes, will you ?”

  Buehl obeyed, and a corresponding change appeared in the green glow.

  “ Now hold your breath.”

  The pattern was normal again. The irregularity produced by bodily malfunction was steadily vanishing. He said, “ Okay, you can come to life again,” and reached for the terminals to pull them off.

  “ I thought they’d been kicking that idea around for a long time,” he added. “ The matter transmitter, isn’t it ? You scan the molecular structure of the thing you want to ship and pipe it down a radio beam.”

  “ You can’t get a big enough band-width to do that.” The spaceman tapped the upturned back of his magazine. “ This Wiseman’s talking about something entirely different. He means identifying two volumes of space. He says if he can make two places exactly similar, and force them to try and remain so, the introduction of a solid body into one of the locations will tend to force it into the other one and preserve the balance,”

  Clifford hooked the flexes' back into place and played the ultraviolet steriliser over the suction cups on their tips. “ It’s all Greek to me,” he said. “ But it sounds interesting if he can make it work.”

  “ I don’t know about making it work," said Buehl judiciously. “But, doc, could you let me have a computer and some scribbling paper ? I want to check his math.”

  Clifford had been on the point of telling the ward sister to arrange for Buehl to go out into a convalescent ward. The request brought him back with a start. He had always found it hard to think of BuehL as an intelligent man, though he knew that anyone who made the requirements of the space service was pretty good. “ Why—I should think so,” he answered. “ Are you really up to that sort of standard ?”

  Buehl grinned. “ I should be, doc. I can run celestial mechanics in my head when I have to. I did have to once, when a pebble knocked out our nav computer on the Mars run.”

  Clifford turned to the sister again. “ See that he gets what he wants, will you ?” he asked. “ I should think the statistics people could loan him a portable keyboard computer. And he’s doing fine. You can put him into one of the convalescent rooms now.”

  And the bed can be used for a serious patient, his mind ran on. Lord knows there’s no shortage of them, with the Plague running through the country like a forest fire.

  That finished his rounds for the evening, and he had never been so heartily glad of the fact. He had been on since six a.m., and it was-now past four, and in the course of the day he had signed nine death certificates—all from the Plague.

  Tiredly, he left the ward, stripping off mask and gown in the anteroom and sending them for destruction. Then he went into the showers and spent five minutes scrubbing himself with germicidal soap, and changed into his day clothes again. He was fit to face the world now—he hoped. By all accepted standards he was as clean as he could be, but accepted standards had been going by the board with dismaying rapidity since the inception of the Plague.

  When he looked in at the house surgeon’s office to await the arrival of the certificate for Leila Kent, he found his night relief already there and on the point of going to change. He summed up the state of the more difficult cases for him briefly, and they chatted desultorily for a few minutes until the sister arrived with the papers.

  He was almost out on his feet by now, but he sat down determinedly and read through them all with care from sheer force of habit rather than because he expected to find any errors. He signed and thumb-printed them and handed them back.

  As she took them, the sister said hesitantly, “ There’s a policeman waiting outside, doctor. He’s been here for about half an hour. He says he’d like to speak to you personally.” “ Damn the man,” said Clifford wearily. “ Oh, well. I suppose you’d better send him in.”

  She nodded and went out. A moment later a man in an inspector’s uniform with Metropolitan Constabulary badges looked round the door and then entered. He was a big man with fair hair and a harassed look in his eyes, which gave Clifford a momentary twinge of sympathy. He recognised the parallel to his own outward appearance of worry.

  “ I’m sorry to bother you, doctor,” the visitor began, but Clifford cut him short.

  “ That’s all right, Inspector. Sit down, won’t you ?”

  “ Thank you. My name is Jaffry, and I’m from the Missing Persons department. I expect you can tell what it is I want to see you about.”

  Clifford shook his head, trying to smile. “ I’m too tired for guessing games.”

  “ Of course. I’m sorry. Well, you attended one of the first cases of the —uh— the Plague, didn’t you ? I don’t know the official name for the disease.”

  “ Nobody’s had time to christen it yet,” said Clifford. “ Plague’s as good a name as any.”

  Jaffry nodded. “ The case I’m referring to is that of an unidentified man who was brought in by a lorry pilot who gave him a lift from Maidenhead. A stout man of about fifty or sixty. You know the one I mean ?”

  “ Yes, I remember. He was already unconscious when he arrived and didn’t speak before he died. We’ve had several such cases. Didn’t we do right to notify you to trace the relatives ?”

  “ You did quite right, naturally. That’s our trouble. When you say there’s been several such cases, you’re understating the facts. There have been over one hundred in the Greater London area up to how—people either hitch-hiking and passing out in the vehicle or taking a train or ’copter and being found unconscious on arrival.”

  “ I see. What can we do about it ?”

  “ Half a minute, please.” Jaffry raised a hand. “ All the cases I’m talking about have one thing in common. They weren’t ordinary vagrants—which are few and far between nowadays. They were well-dressed, and most of them had fair sums of money in their pockets. But not one of them bore any sort of identification.”

  “ That does sound odd,” Clifford agreed.

  “ It’s not odd, doctor. I can assure you from my own experience that it’s unheard-of. How many things does the average man carry which give his name ? Health card, national insurance card, driving licence, flying licence, often some personal letters. Even if it’s only the laundry mark on his clothes, we usually find something. We normally dispose of ninety per cent of the missing persons cases we handle. Occasionally one might turn up that had no distinguishing marks, but not a hundred within a few weeks.

  “ Well, we’re not unnaturally worried. So it occurred to us to ask you, who have incidentally reported more of this type of case than any-other doctor in London, whether you think it possible for the Plague to so derange them that they deliberately destroyed their identification?”

  Clifford laughed without humour. “ Inspector, I wouldn’t be telling the truth if I said categorically it could not. We don’t even yet know enough about the Plague to say what it can and cannot do.

  I should say it was highly unlikely. I daren’t go further. Even if it did, though, surely someone would miss them and report their absence ?”

  Jaffry sighed heavily: “ You’d think so, wouldn’t you ? The fact is, however, we’ve been unable to trace any of them further back than shortly before their last journey. Oh, we’ve turned up people who saw them or who sold them meals in restaurants and things like that, but no one who found out their names. And none of them lived long enough after reaching hospital to help us.”

  “ Is that really all you can find out ?”

  “ Practically all. We’ve started an intensive investigation in the area where they came from—that’s odd, too ; all of them were travelling roughly from west to east across the country. For the most part, the London cases picked up their vehicles in the Slough and Maidenhead area, where the heavy vehicles have to land before going into the centre of the town on the surface. So far, we haven’t had any luck. It looks as if they just dropped from nowhere.”

  Clifford hesitated a moment. He said slowly, “ As a matter of fact, Inspector, that ties in with an idea of mine. You doubtless know that the Plague is completely different from any other disease of its kind ever to hit us. Could they quite literally have dropped from nowhere—I mean from space, without going through quarantine ?”

  Jaffry shook his head, a slight smile curving his Ups. “ That was one of the first ideas we eliminated. You know the motto of the air traffic control section—the unofficial one ?”

  “ ‘ No sparrow shall fall’,” quoted Clifford correctly. “ I see. No unauthorised spacecraft ?*’

  “ Positively not.” Jaffry seemed to be collecting himself. “ Well, doctor, I’ve given you an idea of our problem. What we’d like you to do is notify us of any more such cases immediately you get them in —don’t wait till they’re beyond hope—and particularly let us know if you manage to cure any of them. You needn’t worry about ordinary tramps. It’s the well-dressed ones with ready cash on them that we want to know about. Perhaps if we can learn something from even one of them we’ll have a clue to explain the others.”

  “ Yes, we’ll do that gladly,” consented Clifford, making a note on a memo pad, and Jaffry got up, thanked him, and took his leave.

  For a few minutes after the policeman’s departure, Clifford remained in his chair, brow furrowed. This was another problem to add to the myriads in his own field which the Plague had set them. Its pathology was impossible; its response to treatment was inconsistent; as for its causative organism—well, not for nothing had they slapped the tag bacterium mutabile on it.

  He got up at length and walked out of the hospital and down the road to the park where he had left his car. As he pressed his forefinger to the electric eye of the lock, a newsboy on his scooter rolled up; the placards on the sides of the engine mounting said : PLAGUE — DEATH ROLL MOUNTS.

  “ Paper, sir ? ” said the boy hopefully.

  For a second Clifford was tempted to snap at him, and then he wearily fished in his pocket for one of the elusive tenth-credit pieces. Taking the folded sheets, he shook them out and look distractedly at the headlines. They only repeated and expanded the statement on the placards.

  He slipped into the driving seat, thrusting the paper into a pigeon hole. It could wait. While he waited for the turbine to warm he debated whether he should go straight home and get some rest, but he knew even as he considered the question that the thought was empty; his mind was already made up. He had another errand to run first.

  II

  He parked the car opposite the big sign which told the passers-by that they were now seeing Kent Pharmaceuticals. There was another car just ahead of his own, and despite his tiredness he stopped to admire it. It was a flashy and very new Hunter convertible, done up in black and red. He had always liked to look at fine engineering, and he ran his eyes appreciatively over the smoothly faired cowling which concealed the folded rotors and the retracted stub wings. After a few seconds he realised he was wasting time, and he went into the office block which faced the road. Kent Pharmaceuticals was a wealthy firm, and less than ten years ago had rebuilt its entire premises, making it the most modern in the country. The spacious, almost arid reception hall was empty except for the receptionist at her desk, who wore the haggard look characterising anyone connected, no matter how remotely, with the heart-breaking business of fighting the Plague. She brightened slightly on recognising Clifford.

  “ Good evening, Dr. Clifford,” she said. “ We haven’t seen you for some time. How are you ?”

  “ Busy as all hell,” he said shortly. “ Is Mr. Kent in ?”

  “ Yes, he’s here. He’s got a visitor at the moment, though. Someone from Balmforth Latimer, actually.”

  Clifford frow'ned with the effort of recollection. He was much tireder even than he had thought. “ Balmforth Latimer ? Isn’t that the village in Gloucestershire where they had the first case of the Plague ?”

  “ That’s right.” The girl’s eyes searched his face. “ Doctor, is something wrong ? Is it Mrs. Kent ? She was in your hospital, wasn’t she ?”

  He nodded sourly. “ Was is right, I’m afraid, Marjory,” he said in a thick voice. “ She died about half an hour ago.”

  “ Oh, how dreadful !” The girl waited a moment in formal respect. “ Does—does Mr. Kent know ?”

  “ I expect the hospital has called him by now. I just came to express my regrets. Is his visitor going to be long ?”

  “ I don’t know.” Marjory glanced around, and stiffened slightly. “ Oh, here he comes now.”

  The door of Kent’s office on the far side of the hall opened as she spoke, and a tall man with black hair lightly touched with grey came out, carefully pulling it to behind him. He walked straight across the hall and out of the building, nodding to the receptionist as he passed her. He bore himself with a stiff, rather formal air, and Clifford placed him as a retired military man. With the drastic cutting of armed forces over the past twenty years, they were common.

 

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