Final Winter

Victor weaved a bit on his tired feet, looking through the Doc Savage magazines, and he remembered one particularly fantastic aspect of Doc’s world: the man believed in the ultimate goodness of humanity and thought that it was diseased minds that created criminals. Doc had a secret medical facility in upstate New York where criminals he had captured were operated upon, to correct the imbalance in their minds and thereby allow them to become useful, productive and law-abiding citizens.

Poor Doc. Victor went to another bin of magazines. Doc never realized — as Victor had, during his first residency at an ER in an inner-city hospital in Atlanta — that some men (and a few women, to be honest) liked hurting people, liked killing people, liked being evil, and there was no miracle operation in existence that could change that. He remembered a bull session with Monty Zane late one night, when Monty had said, ‘You know, when it’s all said and done, the best way to protect this nation is to locate a certain number of men out there who hate us, and dispatch them with a nine-millimeter round to the forehead. Problem is, of course, knowing who they are and where they are.’

How true. Victor rubbed his fingers across the clear plastic, remembered the joy in reading these pulps in those few hours available to him, early on in his medical career. He wished for the simplicity of that time, wished he had never heard of the CDC or weaponized anthrax or any other damnable thing. At the moment he thought it would have been a fine thing to enter the Public Health Service and end up as a small town MD in rural Arkansas or something, married to some local gal who’d worship him because of his education, and where he could haunt the used-magazine and book dealers on the Internet.

What a life that would have been, instead of the nightmare he was in now. A nightmare that was going to get worse, for Victor had no doubt that details of the Final Winter immunization program would most certainly become public, if not this year then next.

And he had already planned that as part of a plea agreement for quickly cooperating with the government, he’d be sent to a minimum-security facility, and be able to bring his collection of pulps with him.

It would only be fair.

~ * ~

Darren Coover sat in a comfortable easy chair in his apartment, the Bose Wave radio in the room set to a local classical station, as he worked on a New York Times crossword puzzle from 1950 while his laptop hummed away at his elbow on a portable desk. He looked over at the laptop, saw that the program he was running was doing its business, quietly surfing sex sites on the Internet — with an emphasis on busty women — and went back to his puzzle. He had long ago lost interest in doing contemporary crossword puzzles — he usually finished the Sunday New York Times one in under an hour -but he did love the challenge of solving posers and he found that doing old puzzles was a hell of a nice challenge.

For one thing, there was a whole universe of cultural phrases and words that were a half-century old that one had to ruminate over before completing a fifty-year-old puzzle, which was a delight. Darren subscribed to a special service that recovered old puzzles from the New York Times microfilm records and mailed them out to subscribers around the world. It was one thing to solve a puzzle involving a play on words; it was something else when you had to remember the name of a Broadway star from the late 1940s.

Remembering. Darren looked up at the laptop, merrily moving along the program that he had sent into its innards. The line from his Dell laptop was linked with a cable modem, and he spent a few moments just imagining the intricacy of sending those packets of information back and forth, back and forth, along the cable line. One cable here out to a utility pole to a switching station to… another memory, this time of a lecture being given back at the NSA campus — known as Crypto City — when a lecturer from MIT came in and stood in a secure conference room, yapping about something. Darren had sat at the rear, idly listening to the guy drone on, when the man had said something interesting. The lecturer asked, ‘How many computer networks are out there in the world today?’ There had been a low murmur and Darren knew it was a trick question, and he had kept his mouth shut until the lecturer had triumphantly said, ‘One. There is just one computer network in the world.’ Everything else was just a subset of this huge network. There had been a low titter of laughter, and the lecturer had just let it slide right over his pointy head.