In the cool dampness of the late November dawn Dr. Ted Bettendorf let himself into his second-story office at CDC-Atlanta and deposited his topcoat and muffler in the little corner closet. Chilly, these early mornings, a warning, he thought, of another unseasonably wet, cold winter. The office was spacious but untidy, the wall shelves piled high with jumbles of books and journals, the desk stacked with unfinished business and the nightly collection of dispatches, the newly installed eight-line telephone and the vital intercom to Mandy’s desk outside — God, how he was leaning on Mandy these days! Through the window he could see the familiar view of this charming section of Atlanta, the huge old trees dipping their branches in early winter greenery. It was barely past 5:00 A.M., an hour before Mandy would be coming in, at least an hour before the first calls from the West Coast would be coming through, but for Ted Bettendorf it was the one quiet hour he could count on all day, an hour before the murderous pressure began once again, an hour between the nightmares of the slow-passing night and the raging nightmares of the day about to begin …
He sat at the desk, pushed the dispatches aside and took out a yellow legal pad. For a while he just stared at it, deliberately forcing the present out of his mind, fleeing back to the historical past he loved so dearly. Presently he began to write.
According to the account of Giovanni of Montealbano, in the Year of our Lord 1357 the city of Tekirdag on the western shore of the Sea of Marmara, between the Aegean and the Black Sea, had been spared the terrible plague that had ravaged other eastern Mediterranean lands; but rather than rejoicing in their good fortune, the people of Tekirdag lived each passing day in fear and trembling lest the plague should even then appear. Because of the terror in which they dwelt, the people closed the harbor — their major source of commerce — and fortified the city, allowing no ship to enter there, and catapulted huge fireballs aboard any ship which defied them and ventured too close to their shores.
Most ships went away. But one day three Arab ships from Rashid appeared and begged safe harbor, and were denied. Now there was plague on those three ships, with many of their crew dead or dying; and being turned away from every harbor in their course, their food and water were gone and some among them were starving and dying of thirst. Thus the three ships risked the fireballs to approach the harbor and beg that casks of water and food be set adrift to float out to them on the receding tide — but the people of Tekirdag, fearing the air surrounding the ships to be unclean, answered their pleadings with fire and burned two of the ships, and all aboard were burned alive or drowned.
Then the Master of the third ship, when he saw this, was seized with anger, and ordered his own catapults to be manned, and ordered his ship to be brought about and driven deep into the harbor; and he filled his catapults with newly-plague-dead corpses, together with multitudes of rats that were gnawing on them, and hurled them over the city walls, as many as a hundred corpses, before fire destroyed his ship too.
And then it was, according to the account of Giovanni of Montealbano, that plague struck the people of Tekirdag with unheard-of ferocity, and within a month the living city was reduced to a tomb …
The first light of a wintry sun came through the office window, and Ted left his writing to stare out at the street below. And so The Plague made its slow steady way across Asia Minor and Europe in the Year of Our Lord 1357, he thought. There had been no hurry about it, in those long-dead days; it moved sluggishly but implacably. Only in the coastal cities did it strike swiftly. Farther inland, it inched along from farm to farm, following the cow paths and rutted mud roads, from one tiny village to the next, from one baronial castle to the next — never moving more swiftly than a horseman could gallop. It had taken months and years — decades — for that plague to sweep across the populated world. Ample time for men to have stopped it, even in those days, Ted mused, if only they’d had some inkling how. But not today: Today we have a different sort of plague, and time is running out.
The tall, gray-haired man sighed and walked back to his desk. More and more these days he found himself thinking about those ancient plagues, and the dreadful ironies of the past and present. Even when they had known how to slow it down, it hadn’t done them any good. Like that little town in Tuscany, back in the mid-1600s — as early as then, level-headed public-health authorities had had some ideas about plague that had been close to the target. They’d isolated the sickest ones. They had sent out orders barring large public meetings and fairs, ordering people to stay in their homes, even to avoid daily attendance at church — and then sent out an emissary to see to it that the orders were followed. An exercise in futility, of course, because the orders were simply ignored. The priest demanded church attendance in defiance of the authorities. The people went to the fair in the neighboring town whether the emissary liked it or not, and the emissary found himself enmeshed in the solution of a long series of deliberately created petty squabbles, ridiculous court cases and night brigandries instead of enforcing orders to save people from the plague. Bloody-minded people, as the British would say, mule-stubborn to the point of self-destruction in the face of a terrible disaster, going out of their way to defeat the public-health authorities and everyone else around, themselves included, because things were not going precisely to their liking. It was the pattern in those days long past, and the pattern repeated in Savannah, and the ever-growing pattern everywhere in these terrible weeks since Savannah.
Certainly these days he felt strangely akin to that hapless emissary of three and a half centuries ago. He needed this one hour of peace and solitude each morning in order to face it at all. Where order and obedience and tight organization were needed, he spent endless days squabbling over legalities, as order disintegrated, obedience was ignored and organization became totally impossible. Each day brought fourteen to sixteen hours of pressure, fielding disaster messages from bloody-minded people, taking reports, relaying orders, solving fights, suggesting approaches, sometimes begging, sometimes blackmailing, sometimes shouting and screaming until Mandy said, “You’re getting loud, Boss,” and he calmed it down and got a new grip on himself and started over. Each day brought long hours on the telephone to Washington, witnessing the steady growth of panic there, the slow but clearly perceptible crumbling of authority, with the higher-level public health authorities there wrangling constantly with Senators and Congressmen and whole brigades of White House aides, trying to maintain some semblance of order, some sense of balance, while whole echelons of national leadership steadily faltered and floundered, losing direction, losing control, subtly retreating day by day from an earlier stance of keeping things firmly in hand, with directives and decisions coming forth as needed, and moving steadily day by day, toward a new stance of merely wanting desperately to be bailed out. Ted Bettendorf watched it happening, a little more each day, the whole vast juggernaut of national leadership painfully grinding to a halt and turning more and more to him as the man who was expected to do the bailing. Well, an hour of solitude, early in the morning, was not too much to ask. One hour each morning could restore the soul and build up the strength to face another murderous day which would, he knew before it even started, somehow manage to sink to a slightly lower level of effectiveness than the day before or the day before that.
This morning, like every other morning, Ted thought again of Carlos, with the now-familiar wave of pain and bitterness that came with it. Like having his own right arm torn off at the shoulder, losing Carlos, such a needless, useless waste, and so much of it Ted’s own fault. He should have hauled Carlos out of that snake pit weeks before the end; he’d known beyond doubt that he was going to need him a million other places, that the battle was lost there anyway. Hell, Carlos himself should have seen the handwriting and hauled himself out of there while there was still time — but that had never been Carlos’s style. He had never been able to see the danger anywhere he went, only the challenge, the work that had to be done. He would never have left except under duress as long as anyone else was still fighting down there. The truth was, of course, that none of his people had left in time, not one of them that Ted had any knowledge of. Two hundred and forty-seven good people lost in a single hideous night, never heard from again, their bodies never even identified, consumed in the pillar of fire that consumed the city of Savannah. Missing and presumed dead.
The thought of them was torment enought to Ted — but even worse was the thought that always followed: that Carlos and all the others might well have died fighting a war already long lost before they ever got to Savannah. And when, precisely, might the war have been irrevocably lost? It was a terrible question to ask in the quiet of one’s mind, an unthinkable question in this grim business of disease-fighting; one simply could not allow oneself to consider that the war might ever be lost, when your whole purpose for being here was to see that it was not. And yet — and yet — He glanced at the desk full of dispatches, one single night’s listings of American cities and towns newly afflicted, never mind all the afflicted cities and towns elsewhere in the world, and his mind came back to the unthinkable question again as he groped helplessly for origins: at what precise point, back along the trail, had the war already been irrevocably lost?
Maybe before we even knew it had started, he thought. Maybe as early as that. Maybe the very day that cursed girl walked up that cursed mountain trail, the war was already lost. Maybe even then. Or maybe just a few hours later, when that boy in Seattle unwittingly administered the death blow. The boy had come down the mountain, already deathly sick, delirious, confused, out of contact with reality, wanting only to get home. An airplane ticket in his pocket. Hours spent in Sea-Tac airport, waiting for a flight, more hours on the plane itself, coughing the air full of bloody corruption. And how many others had been in that airport that day, in contact with the boy? Maybe a thousand? And how many on that plane? Maybe a hundred? And how many of them infected? Perhaps two dozen? With how many final destinations? Ten, perhaps, or fifteen? Including one or two, perhaps, coming to rest in New York, or London, or Moscow, or Tel Aviv — or in Savannah? And at each destination, how many had met and greeted those infected ones as they stepped off their planes? And scattered to what other distant places? Who could say when the war had been irrevocably lost?
And so, Ted thought, they had won the Battle of Canon City, a proud and decisive victory, except that the war had already leaped beyond them, like a metastatic cancer, the original dirty thing already spread to a dozen distant sites and organs, each to become a source of further spread — and the dispatches came in. Today half a dozen new cities and towns on the list, tomorrow dozens more, next month thousands. And slowly, slowly, everything they had to fight with falling apart —
The intercom chirped and Dr. Ted Bettendorf stirred himself, shaking the horror from his head, and flipping the switch. “Mandy? Yes, I’m here. What’s the lineup?”
“They’re starting early, Boss. Four people on hold already. There’s the Mayor of St. Louis demanding special courier service on that vaccine you ordered for them yesterday, and a very angry Mr. Mancini from Sealey Labs about some things you said at the press conference yesterday, and you’re supposed to stand by with a clear line at eight A.M. for a conference call from HHS, and — ”
Ted Bettendorf took a deep breath and punched the button for line one.