Making his way back to his office, Clifford was angry with himself for having considered the idea seriously. He determinedly reminded himself that there must be a rational every-day explanation, and if anyone found it it would be the police.

  It turned out to be the police who wanted him. It was a constable whom he vaguely remembered seeing that morning at Kent’s. As he invited the visitor into his office, he caught a surprised look on the face of the ward sister. The sudden and continued interest of the law in him was probably the major topic of conversation in the nurses’ quarters.

  He settled behind the desk, tossed the plate of now-cold stew into a disposer, and said, “ Yes, officer ?”

  “ Farquhar’s the name, sir. I’ve been told to come and advise you that we checked on this man Borghum, who was suspected of the business at Kent Pharmaceuticals last night,” the constable stated.

  “ Was ? You mean he’s been cleared ?”

  “Yes. When the Gloucester branch visited his home this morning, they found that he returned home from London at eight o’clock last night. They have lie detector confirmation from three witnesses that he was still there at a quarter to twelve. He couldn’t possibly have made the trip from there to London in the time.”

  “ Except—” began Clifford, and immediately caught himself. What was this ridiculous obsession with the idea of a matter transmitter ? It sprang from a resentment against the destruction of the culture room at Kent’s, and in turn that came from the ruining of the one thing which showed a chance of beating the Plague, and then—from the death of Leila Kent. He shut a clamp down on that memory.

  “ Yes, sir ? Except what ?” Farquhar’s bright eyes made him feel like a specimen under a microscope.

  “ Nothing,” he muttered. “ A silly idea I had.”

  Well,” the constable went on, dismissing it. “ We just thought we should notify you in case you mentioned it to anyone. I understand Mr. Borghum has threatened a slander action against anyone who puts it about that he was responsible.”

  “ Very well, officer. I won’t talk about it.”

  “ Thank you, sir. That’s all.” The other rose to go, but Clifford stopped him.

  “ I don’t suppose you’d know, would you, what’s being done about tracing the carrier who may be spreading the Plague without knowing it ? Mr. Jezzard suggested the possibility yesterday.”

  Farquhar shook his head. ‘ ‘ That’s not in my line, sir. I’m with the lie detector and electronics squad. Anything to do with tracing’would be handled by Missing Persons.”

  “ Yes, I know Inspector Jaffry in that section. You’re with electronics, you say ? Didn’t I see a Bloodhound being brought to Kent Pharmaceuticals this morning ?”

  The policeman looked uncomfortable. “ Yes, sir, you might have.”

  “ Did it find anything ?”

  “ Er—in confidence, yes. It’s rather disturbing. We found the characteristic aroma of Mr. Borghum in Mr. Kent’s office and also in the laboratory. But though the Bloodhound followed the trail which was made much earlier from the pavement to and from the office' it couldn’t detect the more recent spoor in the laboratory further than to a spot in the passage just outside the airlock.”

  He had the air of a person confessing that he had just discovered an untenable proposition in his religious beliefs. To him, Clifford realised, the failure of an electronic device was almost that bad.

  “ You mean it simply stopped—vanished into thin air ?” he inquired wonderingly.

  “ Apparently, sir,” nodded Farquhar. He added hastily, “ Of course, you know that the Bloodhound is still not regarded as evidence ki a court of law, just as the lie detector used not'to be.”

  Clifford disregarded the last remark. “ Well, I’ll be—” he said musingly. “ Thank you, officer. You’vev been very helpful.”

  “ Thank you, sir,” insisted the constable, plainly feeling that something had gone obscurely wrong somewhere. He went out.

  Feeling slightly blank himself, Clifford sat for a while after the door closed behind Farquhar, staring at the wall. He had come near t* letting slip the idea of a matter transmitter, which he had earlier dismissed as stupid. Since it was the only explanation which fitted the facts, one of the facts must be wrong. Probably it would be found that the so-perfect electronic devices of the ‘ burglar-proof ’ Kent building were as fallible as the Bloodhound.

  He roused himself as an idea struck him, and picked up the telephone to call Kent.

  “ This is Cliff,” he said when he was answered. “ Ron, is anyone else testing chrysomycetin against the Plague ?”

  “ No one else has it,” said Kent shortly. “ What was destroyed last night represented practically all we have. We’re driving ourselves up the wall trying to. breed the mould which secretes it.”

  “ I see. Is there any other firm which is having such success with its work ?”

  “'Not to my knowledge. We’d have been informed if there were. There isn’t a manufacturer in the country who isn’t ready to go into mass production of anything that looks as if it’ll knock out the Plague.” His voice suddenly sharpened. “ Why do you ask, anyway ?”

  “ I just wondered if anyone else was due for a visit like the one you had last night.”

  “ For their sakes, I hope not,” said Kent grimly. “ It’s heartbreaking, Cliff. We’ve had to start right from scratch.”

  “ It’s even worse for me, remember,” said Clifford. “ I have to sit and watch people die.” A part of his mind which had been submerged for many years suddenly cried out; it had been aroused when Kent asked why he had never married. Now, within the space of a second, he lost all the protective barriers he had set up against it and admitted to himself that he had been in love with Leila Kent.

  Through a rush of black sorrow he heard Kent say something, but he did not catch the words and asked him to say them again.

  “ You were right about Jezzard,” he heard. For a second he could not place the name.

  “ How do you mean ?” he said at length.

  “ You’ve heard the news this morning, I suppose ?”

  “ Not a chance. This lunch-hour is my first free time. People are being admitted every few minutes with fresh cases of Plague.”

  “ They’ve got it on the Continent and in America. There are a dozen cases in Paris and Berlin, and New York had put in a claim to W.H.O. even before our delegation got there this morning. If they’re going to declare anywhere an area of menace, they’ll have to make it the planet itself.”

  “ What has this to do with Jezzard ?” “ I told him this, and he declared it was a false alarm to distract attention from the attack on Britain. I had to send for Chenelly, and Jezzard turned violent and had to be put under sedation. It may take a month or more to cure him.”

  “ I thought he was headed for a nervous breakdown,” said Clifford sombrely. “ I’m sorry you’ve lost his services.”

  Kent shrugged ; the sound of his jacket moving on his shoulders was audible over the phone. “ What can we do ?” he asked emptily. “ The strain gets everyone in the end. Chenelly isn’t happy about Spencer, either ; he seems to have taken the wrecking of the culture room as a personal affront.”

  “ That’s almost worse. But we’re having that kind of difficulty here, too. One of my nurses turned up this morning with an hysterical obsession about the Plague—thought she was going to catch it. I had to send her off duty.”

  There was a long silence. Eventually he said goodbye and dropped the receiver. There was nothing more to say—for the time being.

  VI.

  The fresh cases continued to pile in throughout the rest of the day. By four o’clock every available bed was full, and he spent twenty minutes ringing the other hospitals with which they had exchange agreements, only to find that none of them had foreseeable vacancies.

  Finally he had to ring the Ministry of Health and obtain a ruling from a friend of his there that as a rule of thumb cases which seemed obviously, on the mend should be sent home where possible. He had seen too many sudden relapses like Leila’s (would he never get that out of his head: the beautiful, wasted face, the dark hair spread out on the pillow ?) to be entirely happy about it. Some of the apparent convalescents might be the one case in ten where nothing could save life. But it was best that could be done, for the flood continued.

  When he finally got away, he was more exhausted even than the day before, and the next day promised to be worse—and the next—and the next. He snatched a meal and seven hours’ sleep and came straight back, to be met with the most cheering news he had heard in days— the World Health Organisation had sent in a trouble-shooting team from the American Mid-West.

  Their wagons, which he knew would have been driven ready-loaded straight on and straight off their six-engined globe-girdling transport aircraft, were being unpacked in the yard before the main entrance when he arrived back at four a.m.

  He spent the next two hours touring the wards with a group of soft-spoken coloured doctors and nurses, none of whom seemed to have realised the true nature of the Plague before. That was hardly surprising ; up to now they had managed to contain it within the British Isles. He felt his companions would have paled if they had been able to as he described in dispassionate and accurate detail the course of this most unpredictable of diseases, but their mere presence was comforting. The implication of world-wide organisation behind the fight against disease was awe-inspiring. One had only to remember that six hours before these people had been whisked out of their regular beat in their own country, flown across the Atlantic and dropped straight into the middle of the worst-hit Plague area, and one saw how much the modern world could do against its most subtle enemies.

  When he had finished his tour, they adjourned to the house surgeon’s room for a cigarette. Looking around the group, he addressed their leader, a thin man called MacCafferty, with the scars of a gland operation prominent on his throat.

  “ Well, what do you think of it ?”

  “ Nasty,” said the negro succinctly. “ Why didn’t you holler for help before ?”

  Clifford shrugged. “ It’s only got really bad in the past week. You know it’s spread to Europe and the States now ?”

  “ Do we not 1” said the prettiest of the nurses, flicking ash into a tray on the desk. “ You’re lucky to have got us, I’m telling you. The next call after the one that fetched us was for Brooklyn, New York. They’ve just been hit with nearly two hundred cases in a day.”

  “ That’s not all,” put in'MacCafferty. “ I have it unofficially that they’ve programmed a hundred teams for China and Russia. They’ve had it six weeks without telling anyone and lost almost a half million people. They don’t seem to have noticed it before.”

  There was mild contempt in his voice. No, not contempt—halfhearted annoyance, as if to say, “ What can you expect from those guys ?” It reminded Clifford of Jezzard, for some reason, and he stubbed his cigarette angrily.

  He said, “ Well, are you ready to go ?”

  MacCafferty made a ring of his thumb and forefinger. “ All set,” he agreed.

  Clifford’s visions of day after day of hard and unremitting toil had been postponed for a while, at least. With the aid of their special equipment which kept rolling in all day, the W.H.O. team lightened the load on the back of the regular staff by almost half. By noon they were coping with the rush; by afternoon the first of the field hospitals had been set up in Hyde Park and St. James’s Park, and delivery wagons co-opted by the police as emergency ambulances were filling them with patients. He found time to ring Kent in the course of the morning, and he was unexpectedly jubilant. A flying lab had put down at London Airport and was going over to the mass production of chrysomycetin with a brand-new forced breeding technique.

  He even managed to read a newspaper, though that was far from reassuring. The editorial had been driven to seek comfort in the fact that so far no cases of Plague had been reported from Mars or the Moon. There was an article on the sterile remote handling equipment which was being used to load supply rockets for the bases in space until the danger was over.

  The halcyon period lasted just twenty-four hours. Then there came two episodes right on top of one another—the fake W.H.O. team, and the wrecking of the flying lab.

  The W.H.O. team—so called—turned up at a hospital in the Midlands, whose tired and overworked staff overlooked the fact that they had not been notified to expect anybody and joyfully accepted their aid. The team stayed there for just fifteen hours—long enough for the regular staff to re-organise so that for a while at least their presence was indispensable. Then they vanished.

  When the incredulous doctors discovered that they had really gone, the death rate for the hospital was the highest in Britain, and the town it served was the blackest spot on the Plague map.

  The flying lab had received the entire remaining stock of Kent Pharmaceuticals’ precious chrysomycetin moulds, to be put through the new forced-breeding process. Within twenty minutes of the stuff’s arrival the aircraft caught fire and was burnt out. One of the attendant biologists was dragged back from the flames mumbling incoherently about there being a man in the culture compartment which he had just sealed off, but when firemen fought their way in they found nobody. What they did find was the shell of a phosphorous grenade.

  Clifford heard about both episodes as he was dressing to go to the hospital, over the early morning radio news bulletin. Panicking, he rang his own office to confirm that his W.H.O. reliefs were not going to disappear into thin air. He came back from the phone with his mouth set in a grim line. Someone must be sabotaging the programme against the Plague, and whoever it was must be extremely afraid of chrysomycetin. But who was doing such a thing ? And why ?

  The news bulletin had moved on to a report of Plague in Malaya and Indo-China, when the phone rang and he went back to answer it. It was an unfamiliar voice.

  “ Is that Dr. Clifford ?” “ Speaking. Who is that ?”

  “ My name is Chenelly, doctor. I’m the company Psychiatrist to Kent Pharmaceuticals.”

  “ Oh, yes. Ron Kent mentioned you to me.”

  “ You were a friend of his, I believe,” the tinny voice went on after a pause, and Clifford caught at the important word.

  “ Were ? You mean he’s—dead ?”

  “ I’m afraid so, Dr. Clifford. Late last night.”

  “ Oh, how awful ... It was the Plague, of course.”

  “ No, not the Plague. He committed suicide. He took poison.” The voice sounded bitter and self-reproachful. “ I blame myself for not seeing it coming, but I was so distracted by the case of Jezzard, who had just broken down completely, that I must have been blinded to the more serious possibility. He left a note addressed to you. The police took possession of it, of course, but—” apologetically “—I took the liberty of memorising it when it was shown to me. He said that the destruction of the chrysomycetin supplies proved to him that someone was deliberately spreading the Plague, and that he felt he could not go on if all his work was to be wasted. You were not to hold yourself to blame in any way.”

  Clifford listened in passionless silence.

  “ That was the gist of it, at any rate. I may say, doctor, that though I knew Kent was profoundly disturbed by the loss of his wife I had pegged him as too stable a personality to resort to suicide. I think we can discount the suggestion of a deliberate biological-warfare attack on us, which no doubt had its source in a distorted understanding of the—uh—Typhoid Mary hypothesis which Jezzard held.”

  Clifford hated doctors who insisted on carrying over their jargon into private conversation. He said acidly, “ I don’t think we can discount it, doctor. I happen to agree with it myself. Thank you for letting me know.”

  He hung up before Chenelly recovered from his amazement, and stood in bleak thought for a minute. Somewhere in the depths of his mind a cold intellectual hate began against the inhuman monsters who had taken from him first the woman who, all unknowingly, had prevented him from ever getting married, and now had added to their score his best and oldest friend. He felt unutterably, intolerably depressed.

  VII

  “ Dr. Clifford !”

  Clifford looked up from the draft chart on which he was trying to duplicate Jezzard’s research into the sequence of response of the Plague bacterium from the hospital case records. “ What is it, sister ?” he said.

  “ You remember you asked us to let you know as soon as any of those unidentified patients came in ? We’ve got another.”

  Clifford shuffled his papers together and got up from his desk. “ Usual pattern ?” he asked. “ Unconscious—well dressed—money in his pocket and nothing else ?”

  The sister nodded. “ This one was found in a train at Paddington half an hour ago. He looks far gone.”

  “ I want to see him,” said Clifford, making a decision. It was not a kindly dne, but it had to be taken by someone, and he felt that he needed to be that someone.

  He followed the sister into what had been the casualty reception unit until it too had had to be turned over to the rush of Plague-stricken victims, and they found MacCafferty bending over the form of a man with a characteristically wasted face breathing stertorously through his congested windpipe, sucking in oxygen that his lungs could no longer pass to his blood. The negro looked up at his approach.

  “ I don’t get this, Cliff,” he said wonderingly. “ The guy must have been barely able to walk. He should have been hospitalised a couple of weeks ago.”

  Clifford examined the stranger swiftly. As he did so, he insisted to the sister, “ He had absolutely no identification ? What was he carrying ?”

  “ Loose change, a couple of notes and a single ticket to London. Not even a handkerchief.”

  Clifford took a deep breath and made his decision irrevocable. “ Right. I want you to ring the Missing Persons department at Scotland Yard and get hold of Inspector Jaffry—got that ? Tell him that we have one of his mystery cases here,and he’d better come down right away if he’s interested.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6