Гарри Гаррисон - The Jupiter Plague

“They will never get through,” the captain said, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a pained expression. “The New Jersey police have barricaded and blocked the other end of this bridge solidly and are waiting for them. They killed my men — I wish they could get through!”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked.

“I mean that we have no orders to shoot or defend ourselves, as do the New Jersey police. But there is a ring further away, I don’t know how far out, and they are determined to keep this plague inside of it. They have bulldozed buildings and plowed this ring clear and are putting up barbed wire all along it.” He looked away from his dead men and mastered his anger with a tremulous sigh, and when he spoke again it was with a weary sadness. “And they have orders, I saw them… that anyone who enters the ring and attempts to cross the wire is to be shot.”

There was little sound from the mob now, other than the trample of running feet, as they surged through the opening in the barricade. It was a mile to the other end of the bridge and they needed their breath. Above the thud of their footsteps sounded the whistling flutter of a copter and when Sam looked up he could see the riding lights coming toward them down the river. The pilot must have seen the military copter behind the barricade because he swung out in a circle and began to descend, lifting once when the people streamed by below, then dropping again when the flow lessened and moved away. When the copter entered the glow of the bridge lights Sam saw that it had the Connecticut State Trooper’s insignia on its side.

Rioters were still coming in the gap, though not in the solid mass as at first. The captain pushed his way angrily through them and Sam followed: there would be injuries on the other side of the barricade. As they passed the copter, its blades still swinging slowly, the pilot slid his window open and called down to them.

“Listen, I’m just down from Waterbury and I don’t know this town — can you help me?”

“I’m from Karachi and I know less about it than you do,” the captain said, moving on by.

“Where do you want to go?” Sam asked, glancing around at the same time to see if there were any casualties.

“Bellevue Hospital — do you know where it is?”

“Yes, that’s my hospital. What is it you want there?” For no reason at all Sam had a premonition, a chilling sensation that brushed the length of his spine.

“Delivery to make; can you show me the way to their heliport? I got a dog in the back, a dead dog, all wrapped up in plastic.”

The chill was a cold hand now that clutched at Sam as he threw back the piece of canvas that covered the dog and turned his flashlight down on its body, dimly seen through the many layers of sealed polythene.

But it was not so well concealed that he couldn’t see the raw, ugly, red boils that covered its skin.

Darkness filled the laboratory, pierced only by the blue-green light from the TV screen that glowed above the workbench, throwing its ghostly illumination over Sam’s face and accenting even more the lines of fatigue and the dark shadows under his eyes. He looked at the image on the screen and hated it. The jumbled and fearfully twisted rods of Rand’s virus sprawled across the face of the tube, transmitted from the main virology lab, glowing in room after room of the great hospital like some duplicated and demonic icon. Sam yawned and forced his eyes away from it: he should sleep, he was tired enough surely, but sleep would not come. Outside the window a grayness was beginning to seep through the rain that had been falling most of the night. He should have slept. Nita had leaned her head forward onto her arm while they had been talking and just that easily and quickly had been asleep, the wealth of her hair spread out on the table. She breathed lightly, her half-turned face lovely in its composure.

An announcing signal pinged and the scene on the screen shifted and changed, yet did not change. The latticework of thin rods still stretched from edge to edge: the speaker hummed.

“Identification is positive, the furuncles of the specimen, the dog, sent in from Connecticut, contain the virus of Rand’s disease, it’s on the screen now. Until further tests have been run on the viability of this virus in other mediums and hosts we are tentatively assigning it the title of Rand-gamma…”

Nita sat back in her chair, straightening her hair while she listened intently to the voice, blinking a bit with her sleep-filled eyes at the image on the screen.

“It came too fast,” Sam said, his fists clenched in impotent anger. “There should have been more time before the change took place, before the disease passed through seven different hosts. It’s been less than a week now.”

“Yet it is happening, we can’t escape the fact—”

“There are a lot of facts we can’t escape, right out there in the city.” Sam was on his feet, pacing the length of the room, tired but too angry to sit still. “The entire plague area is falling apart, sliding back to savagery; I’ve been watching it happen. I’ve never realized before what a thin veneer civilization is — it has taken us centuries to develop but only days to lose.”

“Aren’t you being unfair, Sam? People are just afraid.”

“Of course I know they’re afraid, I’m afraid myself and I have more to fear because I know just how easily Rand’s disease is spread and how helpless we are against it. But I also know what they seem to have forgotten, that not our strongest but only hope is our brains, our ability to think before acting. Yet out there people are acting without thinking and in doing it they are condemning themselves to certain death and trying to drag the rest of the world down with them. They riot and they get killed. They ignore the sound advice given to them and shelter their miserable chickens and parakeets. Wait until we try and kill their dogs! Not my old Rex, my dear old friend! — when Rex is really the damned enemy now who is going to catch a disease that will kill him and his idiot master. But before they die they are going to panic. I’ve been watching it and it’s a disgusting sight because there are no people in a mob, just animals. I’ve watched them rape and kill and try to get away and eventually someone will escape, we won’t be able to stop it. Someone will break out of the quarantine zone, or an infected dog will get through and the disease will keep spreading. People!”

Her voice was as quiet as his had been booming.

“You can’t blame people for having emotions, Sam — it’s only human—”

“I’m as human as the next man,” he said, stopping in front of her, “and I have just as many emotions. I know how those people out there feel, because I hear the same little lost simian screaming in my own heart. But what do we have intelligence for if we can’t use it to control or guide the emotions?”

“Just like a man to talk about guiding emotions while you’re stamping up and down the floor in a rage.”

He opened his mouth to answer, then stopped and smiled instead.

“You’re right of course. All my raging isn’t going to accomplish a thing. It’s the times I suppose, with all our emotions laid bare and exposed like a raw nerve. The next thing you know I’ll be telling you how lovely you look sitting there in the blue light of Rand’s virus with your hair all in a tangle.”

“Does it look awful?” she asked worriedly, trying to pat it back into position.

“No, leave it,” he said and reached out to take her hand away. When his skin touched hers something changed and she glanced up at him quickly and he saw a reflection of what he was feeling mirrored in her eyes. When he pulled at her hand to draw her to her feet he found that she was already rising.