Alan E. Nourse - The Bladerunner (23 page)

Before leaving the Hospital, however, he stopped at a public phone in the lobby and placed a code call to Parrot, waiting for the receiver to be lifted and then punching out the musical number-and-letter sequence he always used to tell Parrot he was coming to his shop so that no voice-print record could be lifted from a phone tap. In this case, after a moment's hesitation, he added a special code signal to indicate that he had to see Parrot urgently and in person, and then held the line open until, at last, Parrot's "come ahead" signal came through.

It was, in effect, a peremptory demand for an audience, and he knew that Parrot wouldn't like it, but there was nothing else to do. As far as Billy could still think rationally, it seemed to him that he had to start with Parrot. If he couldn't convince Parrot of the urgency of the crisis, and enlist his active help—Parrot, who had known him and dealt with him for all these years and who probably trusted him about as far as Parrot trusted anyone—there would be no point in going any further. With Parrot's help there was a slender outside chance that he might conceivably be able to contact and convince others that he had to convince. Without Parrot's help he would be in a hopeless—and exceedingly dangerous—situation.

And, at a distance, convincing Parrot seemed plausible. But an hour later when he was facing Parrot in person, in the basement storage room of Parrot's own shop, with the fat little man's cold, untrusting eyes stabbing at Billy over his grotesque little half-glasses, Billy's confidence of convincing Parrot of anything vanished like a fever-dream. Billy talked, and realized as he talked that what he was saying could only sound insane to Parrot. If Billy's own distrust of aiding and abetting a Health Control-sponsored scheme in any way had been dogged and pervasive in spite of the urging of Doc and Molly, Parrot's was positively monolithic. At first he virtually turned off everything Billy was saying, scowling and shaking his head and drinking cup after cup of the scalding black coffee from his back burner, but Billy was persistent and presently Parrot, still scowling and shaking his head, at least began to listen. There had, after all, been rumors, a singular increase in emergency calls filtering through Parrot's hands, and the words "meningitis" and "epidemic," seldom before bandied about in his circles, had been turning up spontaneously and with disquieting frequency lately. Little that occurred in the world of underground medicine escaped Parrot's ears for long, with the sweeping breadth of his contacts and involvements, and certain items he had heard and passed off as unlikely or plainly false before struck an oddly familiar note now, coming from Billy. Parrot listened, and scowled, and pulled on his fingers as Billy, huddled and shivering on a stool across the coffee bar from him, told him everything that Doc had recounted in detail, and toward the end Parrot was still scowling as blackly as ever, but now nodding his head from time to time instead of shaking it. "And you believe all this?" he said when Billy finally finished.

"I don't know. I guess so. I don't trust Health Control for anything, but Doc seems to, in this case."

"And there was no question on the computer analysis?"

"I guess not."

Parrot pulled his lip. "All tight, go through this all again, right from the start." He poured Billy more coffee, and then listened intently as Billy sipped and shivered and repeated himself, emphasizing the odd pattern of the infection, the prodromal flu-like symptoms, the period of apparent recovery from the flu ("Doc says in most cases it's about a week, but sometimes it's only a day or so of apparent partial recovery before the meningitis starts") and then the later secondary symptoms of headache and stiff neck and spiraling fever. As Billy talked, Parrot hoisted himself from his chair, nodding to keep him talking, and began riffling through a large circular card file, jotting occasional notes on a sheet of paper. "If it were a severe, alarming infection right from the beginning, there would be less problem," Billy said. "People would seek out medical help of
some
kind, legal or illegal, right away, but that hasn't been happening. It just acts like a minor flu bug at first, and then by the time the secondary symptoms begin the fat's already in the fire."

"And what's the meningitis mortality?" Parrot prompted. "Forty percent?"

"Not that much, but it's close to thirty, from the Hospital records, and Doc said the Health Control man confirmed it, said it might be even higher, depending on the individual victim's age and general condition and other things."

"But what's the infection rate? How many people get the thing at all?"

"Nobody's sure," Billy said. "There aren't any underground statistics at all, and the Hospital statistics only show the top of the iceberg, but they think probably the flu is hitting twenty-five to thirty percent of the general population, about the same as an ordinary flu epidemic, and that thirty percent of them are coming up with the meningitis later."

Parrot whistled softly. "Lord, you know what that could do if it ever really hit?"

"It could wipe out Health Control," Billy said.

"And everything else too, including us. Talk about health riots—there wouldn't be a doctor or bladerunner or supplier left alive, if it's really true and isn't stopped. Okay, first we check things out. If it's true here, it's true elsewhere too, and others have the story. You just sit tight awhile."

Billy sat, still shivering, while Parrot huddled over the telephone, a husher obscuring his words but not the gray expression on his face. Half an hour passed, then another, as Parrot talked, pausing now and then to re-dial, occasionally scribbling a note. Finally he turned back to Billy. "You say that Health Control is willing to treat everybody, whether they're qualified or not?"

"That's what Doc said. No questions asked. For the flu itself a hefty dose of injectable Viricidin will stop it cold. Those exposed but without symptoms should get immune globulin along with the Viricidin. Even the meningitis can be stopped with Viricidin in massive doses if it's given early enough, but they'll hospitalize people for support if they have to. At least that's the story Doc got."

Parrot nodded. "It jibes with some other sources just enough to believe it. The trouble is, a whole lot of people won't go in for treatment, infection or no infection. They just won't trust the government."

"I know, but if the bladerunners can get the word out to their suppliers, and other bladerunners and their docs, really get a hot rumor going, not just piecemeal stuff but a real underground rumble, and then each one canvass all the patients he knows, a lot of people will at least see their docs on the underground."

"And Health Control is not going to jump these people, or the bladerunners, or the docs? Not in any way?"

"That's supposed to be the deal. Nothing official, but there's supposed to be no surveillance, no questioning for qualifications. The Hospital personnel will be instructed to just turn their backs on the questions and give the medication wholesale, and supplies will be provided for the underground at every Hospital. The problem is to contact every bladerunner we can, and every supplier we can, just as fast as we can."

Parrot returned to his card file thoughtfully. "I can reach some of these people best and quickest myself. But some of the bladerunners you can hit better than I can, especially if I flag them first with code calls so they won't be too suspicious when they see you. You're going to have to do some fast talking, though, with all the hard data you can give them. They're not going to want to believe you." He added more names, addresses, and phone contacts to a lengthening list and thrust it across to Billy. "Whatever you do, don't let this out of your hands," Parrot warned. "And for both our sakes, let's hope your information is straight. We could both be in very bad trouble if this is even a little bit phony."

"I know," Billy said wearily. "But we should know

within twelve hours if Health Control is really opening up the Clinics and the underground supplies. If they aren't, we'll just have to pull back and take our chances."

Sitting down together, they went over Billy's list name by name. "You know some of these guys, and they'll all get code calls from me," Parrot said. "When I've got that done I'll get on to some of the other suppliers and see if I can get them moving, at least passing the word to the bladerunners working out of their shops. When you've hit these guys, check back with me and I'll get you some more names. Meanwhile we can see if there's been any feedback from the Clinics, and you can let me know what you've heard from Doc."

It had taken three hours, enlisting Parrot's aid, but it had been time well spent. With a last cup of coffee Billy gulped down one of Doc's capsules and a couple of aspirin; moments later he was outside, flagging a ground-~ cab, Parrot's list in his hand. Some of the addresses were tenement flats like his own. Others were a variety of Lower City hangouts where bladerunners tended to gather in their off hours, some familiar to Billy, some foreign. The cabbie was unenthusiastic about the rounds he was asked to make, the cluttered slum streets and the unguarded streetcorner waits while Billy was inside, but money brightened his eye, and Billy started his rounds. At one place, a dirty restaurant-pool hall in one of the unreclaimed slum areas of a nearby section of the Lower City, he found three bladerunners he knew, youngsters like himself, huddled over food and watching him suspiciously as he talked, convincing them finally, grudgingly, at least to contact their docs and canvass their own patient lists. At another place he ran into a sometime friend who took to the story more warmly and agreed to contact two other runners he lived with to see if they couldn't contact more. With the more commonly

frequented local watering holes covered, Billy moved farther afield, running up flights of stairs and pounding on doors of individual rooms, apartments and tenements, waking some of the runners from dead sleep, interrupting others in planning stages of cases, moving as swiftly as he could and talking feverishly to every one that would listen. At one place a surly bladerunner on Parrot's list flatly refused to have anything to do with Billy's scheme; at another place the occupant of a room, more irritable than others, talked only through a door opened a crack, sounding unconvinced until Billy told him to check back either with Parrot or with his own supplier to confirm the story.

Another place was different, a tiny darkened room at the end of a broken-down tenement hallway, a place where melting snow was dripping through the roof and a wet, greenish mold had worked its way through the aged and rag-tag wallpaper, a place smelling of garbage and vomit, with rats the size of cats skittering into darkened corners as Billy passed. Inside the tiny room, curtains all pulled, a skinny youth of about fourteen lay huddled in a filthy bed, shivering, gesturing weakly to Billy to find some place to sit. "I'm sick, man," the boy groaned. "Goddam flu, I think, I can't stop shaking—"

Billy worked to get his attention, told him the story, but soon the boy was interrupting him with irrelevant questions, and it was clear that he wasn't going anywhere or doing anything. Billy felt his forehead, hot and dry, and heated up some soup for him, the only food he could find in the place. "You're sick, all right," Billy said. "Probably the same thing we're trying to get stopped. Can you reach your doc?"

"Don't have a doc now," the boy said. "I got fired two weeks ago, and things have been tight."

"You need some medicine, all the same. You could get it free at a Clinic, like I've been telling you."

The boy groaned. "I could never make It," he said. "Couldn't hardly get the shades pulled down this morning."

"Well, then take some of these," Billy said, dumping a pile of his own white-and-brown capsules out on a chair beside the bed. "Here, gulp down two of them right now. I'll try to get a doc to you some way, but this may help in the meantime. I'm not feeling so hot myself."

In point of fact he was feeling more exhausted and confused by the minute, but he went on as the afternoon hours wore along and darkness came, clinging to his list and doggedly checking off the names one by one. His head was aching again, and now his chest was getting tight, as if a steel hoop was shrinking around it, and from time to time a paroxysm of coughing left him gasping for breath. Things beyond the checklist drifted hazily out of his mind; he remembered vaguely that he was supposed to check in with Doc at some hour or another, but he couldn't remember when, and when he finally tried it from a public booth he couldn't get through for some reason. It was hours later when he thought to try again, and he sat in a booth then for almost half an hour with his head on his elbow against the plastic door before a contact was finally made and he heard Doc demanding why he was so late and what he'd been doing, and he reported his conference with Parrot and the long day of contacting bladerunners.

Doc sounded mollified then, almost pleased. "Okay, I've been working all day too, and I've got a list of calls a mile long for tonight," Doc said. "I'm sending Molly out alone on the ones in the Upper City, she'll be safe enough there, and I'll take the Lower City names and some in the intermediate levels. How are you holding up now?"

"Okay, I guess, but I've still got a string of contacts to make."

"Well, don't crowd it, you can't work around the clock in your condition. Why don't you go get some sleep now? I'll check back with you in the morning."

"Okay, I'll quit for a while. I've just a couple more of these names to contact first." Billy rang off, then sat wondering for a moment what Doc had just said. He saw the list of names in his hand, and placed a call to Parrot.