Frank Barrington liked Dr. Sam MacIvers from the moment he saw him on that sunny winter morning in Willow Grove, Nebraska. The dour little sandy-haired man, senior physician of the two-man Willow Grove Family Medical Clinic, was not really all that senior — maybe forty-four or forty-five, Frank thought — but he had that certain wiry agelessness about him, the look of having stood out in the wind and weather too long, so common to many Scots. MacIvers had a long crooked nose and a face like a prune, which could wrinkle into a wry smile once in a while, and a pair of tired gray eyes that looked as if they might have been watching far too many less than pleasant things for far too many years at far too close quarters. No flies sitting on this one, Frank thought, five minutes after he met him, and if I’m going to have to have some people on my side up here, this man looks like a mighty good one for openers. And aside from first impressions, there was something else that Frank liked: there was no possible doubt, after the first ten minutes together, that Dr. Sam MacIvers saw with utter bleak certainty just exactly what was coming down the pike toward Willow Grove, Nebraska, and was damned well ready to do anything necessary to stop it.
Frank had driven up from Wichita that morning on frigid, snow-packed roads through endless miles of flat winter-stubbled wheat country, the monotony of the trip broken only on occasion when the road dipped down into small creek or river valleys, probably verdant enough in summer but now lined with tall, skeletal leafless trees and small towns that looked battened down for a long, cold winter, lights on behind frosty windows in the late morning dawn, woodsmoke curling from chimneys and rich in the air. Willow Grove lay in one such river valley, bigger and more sprawly than other towns, a pretty place as the sun broke through, many evergreens planted among the stark elms and oaks and sycamores.
Frank found the small, neat clinic building with no trouble, following Sally Grinstone’s directions. He paused with MacIvers just long enough for a fast cup of coffee before they took off together in the doctor’s well-worn Chevy. “I’m free for the day,” MacIvers told him, “as long as I stop at the hospital and check an OB who may be going to do something. So you tell me what you want to see.”
“Everything,” Frank said. “The lay of the town, where things are, the medical facilities, the countryside around. The broad geography, so I can snoop myself later. Things like what the school gymnasium looks like and where the telephone office is and where the power company keeps their boom trucks — ”
“Yes, if you’re going to be the commissar of this little operation, I guess you’ll need to know where things are located.”
“Aren’t we going to pick up the public-health man first?”
“You mean Perry Haglund?” MacIvers frowned. “That was the plan, but he called me an hour ago and said he couldn’t make it.”
“I see,” Frank said. “That’s not so good. Maybe we can catch him later in the day.”
“Afraid not. He said he’d be out of town for a couple of days. He didn’t say where. I’ll just have to brief him when he gets back.”
It was a typical southern Nebraska town, flat as a pancake except for the little dip down to the river, a major Main Street on the old highway, now broken up in the main shopping area to form a grid of one-way streets and angle parking, some care in the planning, pleasant-looking even in winter. The usual roadside sprawl at either end, and the inevitable grain elevators standing like giant sentinels — ”the Nebraska Rockies,” MacIvers called them. Neatly kept homes on the side streets, some looking very old, and a couple of 1910-vintage buildings downtown, restored and well kept. A look of quiet prosperity about the place. Kids on bicycles, pickup trucks parked in driveways alongside the little Toyotas and other compacts. Not many Cadillacs or Lincolns that Frank could see, and that added up, too. Too damn smart to buy Cadillacs, he thought, or too tight. “Any sign of infection yet?” he asked the doctor.
“Not yet, and it’s not that we haven’t been watching, either. The usual round of bronchitis and flu for this time of year, and a couple of cases of measles that we don’t like to see, mostly in the older school kids. We thought we had that stopped. As far as plague is concerned, we’ve just been dead lucky, so far. Of course, this isn’t exactly a world trade center, it’s pretty dead during the winter. Not much traffic in and out. No place much to go, except for vacations to Mexico, and there hasn’t been any enthusiasm for that this year, believe me.”
“How many people?”
“Around twenty thousand in the town, another ten thousand out in the county and on the farms. Willow Grove is the major grain center for the region, but then we have the little satellite towns scattered around — Plunkett and Metuskie and Dust Bin — that’s no joke, there is a place called Dust Bin — and Wattsville, and Oberon down in Kansas. They account for another few thousand people all together.”
“Sounds very workable. People know each other, I suppose? And work together?”
“Pretty much, and pretty well.” The doctor swung past a school, took Frank in to see the gym and meet the principal. “Matter of fact, everybody knows most everybody, and there’s been a very positive response to the meetings we’ve been holding — lots of families represented by somebody. In town we’re getting the block watches set up, like Sally Grinstone suggested, somebody on every block responsible for people counts and reporting what’s going on, so we should be able to get a picture of what’s happening twice a day. See that church over there kitty-corner from the clinic? Big parish hall there is a natural storage and distribution center for your pneumomycin. People can get in and out without a lot of mingling, and it’s within reach of everybody. We’ve got your tetracycline stored in there — you can take it on back with you if you want to.” MacIvers looked at Frank. “I just wish you’d let us start stockpiling the stuff now instead of waiting until the ax drops.”
Frank shook his head. “We just don’t have it ready yet,” he said, as earnestly as he could. It was a lie, and he found himself feeling bad lying to this little doctor, so he suddenly decided to level. “But that’s not really the problem. The truth is, it’s an arbitrary matter of policy that we’ve had to decide on for right now. Doc, you’re smart enough to see the situation. We are totally extra-legal, and our necks are out there through the noose individually and personally. We’re trying to do something that’s absolutely insupportable, medically speaking, and totally unjustifiable as far as any constituted authority is concerned. We’ve got to test the efficacy of a brand-new drug very quickly on a whole lot of people who are getting sick, and right now Willow Grove, Nebraska, turns out to be our guinea pig. If some higher authority comes in and cuts us off here, we’re cut off, and we’re the only source for the finished drug, right now. We’re trying something wild and crazy, and it’s sink or swim, and to our minds, that means we’ve got to keep it a hundred percent under our own control. If we win on this, and get a really definitive profile of disease control in Willow Grove, it’ll be the first place since Canon City that we’ve stopped this damned thing, and we’ll all smell sweet, and the end will justify the means. At the very worst, we’re pretty sure it won’t hurt anybody, and you must be sold on that, too, or you wouldn’t be playing games with us at all — ”
“We’re playing games with you bacause there’s no other ball game in sight,” the doctor cut in. “I don’t think Perry Haglund is really sold, he seems to keep tossing up horror-story scenarios for us to bat down, but my partner and I don’t foresee any horror story much worse than what’s going to happen when that Horseman finally rides into Willow Grove unless we can do something to stop him. We just wish to hell you’d let us get ahead of him, that’s all.”
“Well, you think it through, Doc,” Frank said. “Suppose you stockpiled the stuff now, right here in town. Everybody would know it, and you know what would happen then. You’d be on the dime, subjectively involved right up to the neck, and I don’t think there’d be a way in the world you could keep from putting the whole damned town on the stuff before the infection even turned up. You’d just inevitably jump the gun. And if you did that, and then nobody got sick, what would we learn? Nothing. Not one damned thing of any use to anybody.”
“What you’re saying is that we’ve got to have some corpses.”
“I’m just repeating it. Sally already told you that.”
“Sounds an awful lot like playing God,” MacIvers said.
“Yes, and it’s not fun. But it’s the only game we can see that has a dream of winning. We had to make some rules, so that’s how we’re going to play it.”
The doctor took a deep breath. “Okay, Commissar,” he said. He grinned crookedly at Frank. “At least I know one thing for sure: you really were at Canon City; I checked that out three ways. So let’s make Willow Grove Canon City number two. Okay, the parish hall is the stockpile, and maybe a good central headquarters, but the clinic has got better communications. You can check that out and see what you think a little later when you meet my partner Whitey Fox. Right now let’s get over to the hospital; you can look around while I see if that OB of mine is ready to sprout or not …”