Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

Horowitz: Bring him pictures of little girls?

Flannel: Girls, boys . . . but pretty ones. I got to know just the ones he would like. He liked to use ‘em on his show.

Iris and Horowitz lock glances for one horrified second, and then pounce all but bodily on Flannel.

Iris: Did you ever show him a picture of any child who later contracted the disease?

Flannel: (startled) Wh ... I dunno.

Iris: (shouting) Think! Think!

Horowitz: (also shouting) You did! You did! The Tresak girl—that photograph of her was taken before she had the disease!

Flannel: Well, yeah, her. And that little blond one he had on the telethon that din’t speak no English from Est’-onia, but you’re not lettin’ me think.

Horowitz: (subsiding) And you didn’t know what it was you had on him that he considered dangerous.

Flannel: What?

Kearsarge:I remember that little blond girl. I flew her from Esthonia.

Iris: Before or after she had the disease?

Kearsarge: (shrugging) The kind of thing I never noticed. She . . . she looked all right to me. Real pretty little kid.

Iris:How long before the telethon was that?

Kearsarge: Week or so. Wait, I can tell you to the day. (He rises from the chess table and goes to a locker, from which he brings a notebook. He leafs.) Here it is. Nine days.

Iris: (faintly) He said, on the telethon, three days . . . first symptoms.

Horowitz: (excitedly) May I see that? (Takes book, riffles it, throws it on the table, runs to lab, comes back with cardboard file, fans through it, comes up with folder.) Iris, take Kearsarge’s book. Right. Now did he fly to Belem on the ninth of May?

Iris: The sixth.

Horowitz: Rome, around March twelfth.

Iris: March twelfth, March—here it is. The eleventh.

Horowitz: One more. Indianapolis, middle of June.

Iris: Exactly. The fifteenth. What is that you have there?

He throws it down in front of her.

Horowitz: Case files. Arranged chronologically by known or estimated date of first symptom, in an effort to find some pattern of incidence. No wonder there was never any pattern. God in Heaven, if he wanted a clinic in Australia, cases would occur in Australia.

Flannel: (bewildered) I don’t know what you all are talkin’ about.

Kearsarge: (grimly) I think I do.

Iris: Now do you think you’re worth murdering—you who can actually place him on the map, at the time some child was stricken, every single time?

Kearsarge: (huskily) I’m worth murdering. I. . . didn’t know.

Flannel: (poring over the case file) Here’s that one I seen in Bellefontaine that time, she had on a red dress. And this little guy here, he got his picture in a magazine I found on the street in Little Rock and I had to go clear to St. Louis to find him.

Kearsarge hops up on a chair and kicks Flannel in the head.

Flannel: (howling) Hooo—wow! What you wanna hafta do that for? Ya little—

Horowitz: Cut it out, you two. Cut it out! That’s better. We don’t have room for that in here. Leave him alone, Kearsarge. His time will come. Heaven help me, Iris, it’s been in front of my nose right from the start, and I didn’t see it. I even told you once that I was so close because I could synthesize a virus which would actually cause the disease—but it wouldn’t maintain it. I had this idée fixe that it was an extraterrestrial disease. Why? Because it acted like a synthetic and no natural terran virus does. Serum from those kids always acted that way—it would cause a form of iapetitis which would fade out in three months or less. All you have to do to cure the damn thing is to stop injecting it!

Iris: Oh, the man, the lovely clever man and his family all over the world, the little darlings, the prettiest ones he could find, whom he never, never failed to visit regularly. . . . (Suddenly, she is crying) I was so s-sorry for him! Remember the night he . . . tore himself open to tell us he c-couldn’t have k-kids of his own?

Kearsarge: Who you talking about—Heri Gonza? For Pete’s sake, he got an ex-wife and three kids he pays money to keep ‘em in Spain, and another ex-wife in Paris, France with five kids, three his, and that one in Pittsburgh—man, that comedian’s always in trouble. He hates kids—I mean really hates ‘em.

Iris begins to laugh. Probably hysteria.

Dissolve to black, then to starry space. To black again, bring up pool of light, resolve it into:

Burcke, sitting at desk. He closes log book.

Burcke: This is, I regret to say, a true story. The Fafnir 203 came in at night six days ago at a small field some distance from here, and Dr. Horowitz phoned me. After considerable discussion it was decided to present this unhappy story to you in the form written up by the four people who actually experienced it. They are here with me now. And here is a much maligned man, surely one of the greatest medical researchers alive—Dr. Horowitz.

Horowitz: Thank you. First, I wish to assure everyone within reach of my voice that what has been said here about iapetitis is true: it is a synthetic disorder which is, by its very nature, harmless, and which, if contracted, will pass away spontaneously in from two to twelve weeks. Not a single child has died of it, and those who have been its victims the longest—some up to two years—have unquestionably been lavishly treated. A multiple murder was attempted upon my three companions and myself, of course, but it is our greatest desire to see to it that that charge is not pressed.

Burcke: I wish to express the most heartfelt apologies from myself and all my colleagues for whatever measure of distress this network and its affiliates may have unwittingly brought you, the public. It is as an earnest of this that we suffer, along with you, through the following film clip, taken just two days ago in the I.F. clinic in Montreal. What you see in my hand here is a thin rubber glove, almost invisible on the hand. Fixed to its fingertips is a microscopic forest of tiny sharp steel points, only a few thousandths of an inch long. And this metal box, just large enough to fit unobtrusively in a side pocket, contains a jellied preparation of the synthetic virus.

Fade to:

Wild hilarity in a hospital ward. Children in various stages of iapetitis, laughing hilariously at the capering, growling, gurgling, belching funny man as he moves from bed to bed, Peep! at you, peep-peep at you, and one by one ruffling the little heads at the nape, dipping the fingertips in the side jacket pocket between each bed.

Dissolve, and bring up Burcke.

Burcke: Good night, ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls . . . and . . . I’m sorry.

The lights came up in the projection room. There was nobody there with Heri Gonza but Burcke: all the others had quietly moved and watched the last few scenes from the doorway, and slipped away.

“You did air it?” asked the comedian, making absolutely sure.