Гарри Гаррисон - The Jupiter Plague

“Is that all, Dr. Perkins?” Sam asked, no signs of his anger showing.

“That’s all. You stick to your job and I’ll stick to mine.” The phone whirred and he sat down to answer it. They left.

They said nothing until they had gone down the hall and were waiting for the elevator. Nita looked worriedly at his tightly clenched jaw and could feel the knotted muscles in the forearm when she touched it.

“Sam — please, don’t let it bother you so. The others will see…”

“The others will see nothing if he doesn’t show the report to them! He’s playing politics again, don’t you realize that? Don’t rock the damned boat — what a wonderful way to practice medicine!”

“Yet he’s right in a way, as long as things are going smoothly outside and they’re bringing the cases under control…”

“But they’re not going smoothly, I’ve seen enough of what’s going on to realize that. And that’s not the point. Smooth or not, we must take the right measures or this plague will spread to every corner of the world.”

As the elevator doors opened before them its loudspeaker broke into life and was echoed by the other speakers in the hall behind them.

“Dr. Roussell, Dr. Christensen, Dr. Bertolli, Dr. Invar. Will you please report to the Emergency Room. Dr. Roussell, Dr. Christensen…”

“What can it be?” Nita asked, looking at him with worried eyes.

“More trouble. The boat is being rocked in spite of Dr. Edward Perkins. Look, Nita, don’t wait for him to make up his mind — send a copy of your findings to Professor Chabel at World Health.”

“I couldn’t, that would be going over his head!”

“Try not to be so sweet and civilized, that’s a luxury we are going to have to forego for a while. Let Chabel know.” He stepped inside the elevator as the doors closed, then was gone from her sight. “Sam Bertolli, I just don’t know what to make of you,” she said to herself as she rang for the next elevator. It was a civilized world and a well-ordered world, and he just didn’t seem to fit into it at times. When the elevator arrived she saw that there were stains on the smooth white walls and drops of fresh blood on the gray floor. She shivered. Perhaps the world was not as ordered and civilized as she supposed.

“Another riot, that’s all I know,” Roussell said. “Move your big dirty feet, Chris — this is my last pair of whites.” Dr. Christensen, who was sprawled on his back occupying most of the room on the stretcher, only rattled a guttural snore in answer. The other three interns looked at him enviously, rocking back and forth as the ambulance raced through the deserted streets. They had all been on continuous duty longer than they cared to remember.

“What’s the city like now?” Sam asked. “I’ve been out in the woods all day running down a supposed cure for Rand’s disease.”

“No cure?” Invar asked.

“No disease. Boils. The doctor was old, enthusiastic, nearsighted and should have been put out to pasture thirty years ago.”

“The city’s falling apart,” Roussell said. “People think we’re lying when we tell them they can’t catch Rand’s from each other but only from birds. So everything is closed up tight. Rioting, violence, break-ins, rape, religious nuts, drunks. It’s just lovely. Anyone have a benny? It looks like another night without sleep.”

“It’s fear,” Invar said. “People are afraid to leave their homes so the normal city life has broken down. The military is keeping most of the essential services like electricity and phones going, and they have been trucking in food, but they can’t keep it up forever — not in a city this size. Tension is building and there has been a constant run of new cases of the plague — people can see that and their nerves are getting rubbed raw — and the ban oft all traveling is the last straw. It makes good epidemiological sense but to the guy in the street it looks like he is going to be trapped on this rock until he dies.”

“He may be right,” Sam said, thinking of Nita’s experiment with the dog.

“No depressing thoughts, Doctor!” Roussell said, raising his eyebrows. “We must be brave, clean, reverent—”

“That’s for boy scouts, not physicians. Neither rain nor hail nor gloom of night—

“And that’s for postmen,” Christensen mumbled, rolling over on the stretcher. “Now will you bunch of old women kindly shut up so I can get some sleep.”

A police car passed them with a wail of its siren and in the distance they heard the warbling wail of a fire engine. In the background, growing louder and more ominous, a roar like distant breakers.

“What the hell?”

“A mob, Doctor, the citizens of our fair state showing their resentment of constituted authority.”

“They sound like animals.”

“They are,” Christensen said, opening his eyes and groaning. “We all are. Just below the surface the red-eyed beast lurks. So into battle, Doctors. What was it old Shakespeare said? ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends!’ ”

The ambulance lurched to a stop and when Sam threw the rear door open the harsh roar of a multitude of voices poured in. The bantering, the moment of good-natured attempt to forget the world outside was ended. As their expressions changed, firmed, they were physicians again. They climbed down as the driver hurried around to help them unload the stretchers.

It was a nightmare scene. The ambulance had stopped under one of the soaring arches of an approach to the Koch Bridge on Twenty-third Street. It rose above them, its three wide levels brightly lit but empty of traffic, stretching out across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Around the maze of entrances and exits a dark crowd had gathered, screaming with a single voice of hatred, their faces blue-lit by the mercury vapor lamps or ruddy from the torches they carried. Behind them a row of old warehouses was burning. Shots snapped over their heads from the beleaguered forces of police and Army and were drowned in the roaring splash of the fire hoses. Knots of uniformed defenders could be picked out by the glare of the battle lamps they had put behind the barriers of trucks and metal drums thrown across the roadway. This was the setting, the shifting backdrop to the emergency dressing station that had been set up here, boldly lit by the piercing light of the battle lamps. In harsh black and white the huddled bodies of the injured lay waiting for treatment; behind them were those to whom treatment would never come, the newly dead.

“Doctor, can you help me— Doctor!”

Sam heard the words clearly through the thunder of back-ground noise and turned to see a young medical corpsman waving to him: he shouldered the emergency bag and threaded his way toward him through the sprawled figures.

“They just brought her over, Doctor, I don’t know what to do—”

The corpsman was young, hardly out of his teens, and he had never seen anything like this before. He had practiced in training and he had probably treated gunshot and puncture wounds — but never a woman who had one leg and her entire side burned, crisped black, with clothing and flesh charred together. His pressure can of burn foam had run out before he had done her leg as high as her knee and he just looked at it with staring eyes, pressing the useless button.

“I’ll attend to this,” Sam said, noticing the woman’s fixed expression and gaping mouth. “Take care of that policeman there, pressure bandage for the bullet wound.” As the corpsman turned away Sam pressed his telltale to the woman’s arm, knowing the results in advance. Massive fourth-degree burns, shock, then death. He pulled a blanket over her and turned to the next case.

Lacerations, gunshot wounds, broken bones, fractured skulls. Most of the injured were soldiers or policemen, the few civilians were those who had been trampled or crushed in the attack. The rioters were using any weapons they could lay their hands on in their hysterical attempts to flee the city.