The Jupiter Plague

“This is a problem of World Health, which is why I was selected to chair this meeting. I believe we have heard all that is necessary to make a decision and I call for an immediate vote.”

There were more complaints at this which died away even more slowly. The vote, when it was finally counted, was no landslide, but the effective measures had been passed. The Army would move in and the slaughter would begin at dawn.

6

“I saw on TV where the beach on Coney Island was covered with dead seagulls, washed up during the night so they closed the whole beach off, not that anyone is breaking their neck to go swimming anyway.”

Killer talked around his half-chewed toothpick while he drove, tooling the big ambulance down the center of the deserted crosstown street. All the cars were parked and locked and there were no pedestrians in sight.

“Slow down,” Sam said. “Remember we’re cruising and not on the way to a ruptured appendix.” He was sitting on the right, looking into all the doorways and areaways that they passed. So far he had seen nothing. It was crowded on the front seat with the three of them there. The third man was a UN soldier named Finn, a tall Dane bulking like a pack mule in his full field equipment and forced to lean forward because of the flamethrower on his back.

“There under — under the car,” the soldier broke in suddenly, pointing at a delivery truck. “I think I saw something there.” They braced themselves as Killer hit the brakes and squealed to a stop.

Sam was first out, shouldering the emergency bag as he went; the contents of this bag was one of the measures that had been outlined at the meeting the previous evening.

Finn had good eyes. The dark shadow huddled against the rear wheel of the truck was a young man who tried to crawl further under when they approached. Sam knelt down and, even in the bad light, he could see the characteristic flushed skin and incipient boils of Rand’s disease. He took a pair of elbow-length isolation gloves from the bag and pulled them on.

“Let me help you out from there,” he told the sick man, but when he reached under the man scrambled further away, eyes wide with fear. Sam grabbed his leg, warded off one feeble kick, then slowly pulled him out into the street. The man struggled briefly, then the whites of his eyes rolled up as he passed out; this would make handling him a good deal easier.

The gas mask was an ordinary can respirator type from the fire department stocks, and had been modified quickly by coating the inside with a biocidal cream. When Sam had seated this firmly on the patient’s face he took a pressurized container of antiseptic from his bag and soaked the man’s clothes and skin, then rolled him onto his side so he could do his back. Only then did he strip off the gloves and begin treatment, sure that any Rand-beta virus on his skin or clothing had been killed. He took off the gas mask and prepared an injection of interferon, still the only treatment that had any effect on the disease. The UN soldier came back and stood frowning down at them and fingering the handpiece of his flamethrower.

“There are no birds near here, none; I searched very carefully. Have you asked him where he could have touched a bird?”

“He’s unconscious, I didn’t have a chance.”

Killer had backed the ambulance up and opened the rear door, then wheeled out the stretcher. He tilted his head to one side and the other, frowning down at the unconscious man’s face.

“Don’t he look sort of Italian to you, Doc?”

“He could be — but what difference would that make?”

“Maybe nothing, but you know there’s plenty of pigeon fanciers in this neighborhood, racers and homing pigeons, and a lot of them are Italian. They keep hutches on the roofs.“

They both looked up automatically as he said it, just in time to see a flick of white on the edge of the parapet high above.

“No — not my birds, didn’t have anything to do with my birds…” The sick man shouted, trying to struggle to his feet.

Sam ripped the end off a riot shot — a disposable, one-shot hypodermic of powerful sedative that was self-powered by a cartridge of compressed gas — and pressed it to the struggling man’s arm. It hissed slightly and the patient fell back, unconscious.

“Roll him onto the stretcher and get him into the ambulance. Finn and I will see what’s on the roof.”

Killer protested. “You could use me there to—”

“I could use you here to watch the patient a lot better. On the job, Killer.”

They went as far as the top floor in the elevator, then headed toward the stairs, the soldier first. Doors slammed shut as they approached and they knew that they were being watched all the way. At the head of the stairs was the roof door, closed and sealed with a large padlock.