The Death Gods (A Shell Scott Mystery) (7 page)

He flipped the pages of a
desk calendar. “Two days under two weeks, or twelve days ago, they
were basically normal, healthy. They were for nine weeks past,
negative to all standard tests for presence of the virus of
so-called IFAI, and had become energetic, pink-cheeked, filled with
forces of life once again. There remained only some residual damage
in the lungs, and injuries being repaired in the heart, liver,
spleen, other areas of little interest to you. But plenty to the
Vungers. The prognosis was for complete recovery, one-hundred
percent repair and rejuvenation of those organs and areas harmed by
excess of retained toxins. I am very concerned by their
non-appearance troubled by this—”

“
Doctor, Hank, I must have
missed something along the way to here. Everybody knows IFAI is
incurable, not curable, it is invariably fatal. Hell, that’s what
it’s called: Invariably Fatal Acquired Illness. But it sure seems
to me you just said yes, they both had IFAI, and you cured
them.”

“
Of course,” he said
mildly. “It is what I did. For them, and also for twenty-six...no,
twenty-seven others. All of whom are, how you say, Happy Campers
now. So?”

That tore it. My earlier
questions, those nagging suspicions, came back and joined and
multiplied. I felt suddenly lousy. I really did.

It was clear enough now. I
had not only gotten myself involved with, and promised to help, a
nut-cake and fruit-case and basket-kook but something even worse
and more dangerous than all of those dingdongs put
together:

A real quack.

CHAPTER FOUR

I sat in my chair before
Hernandez’ desk, wondering how much I believed of what he’d just
said. I already knew I liked this old geezer, and wanted to believe
he was decent, honorable, truthful–not some kind of unprincipled
medical con-man. Even this soon after meeting him, I knew I enjoyed
his company, and actually got a kick out of his rapid-fire ravings.
If that’s what they were.

But curing IFAI? Curing
the incurable?

Until now, like
practically everybody else in the country, I had simply accepted
the fact that this new and virulent disease–which was said to have
killed several thousand people already—was invariably fatal, and a
potential victim’s only hope was not to “catch” it because once you
had it you’d had it.

More accurately, that was
what I, along with the rest of the country, had heard repeated with
increasing frequency and intensity and finally near hysteria during
the last three years, and I simply hadn’t questioned all of those
experts, mainly because I hadn’t thought a whole lot about it. I’ve
had so many large ugly hoodlums try to kill me that I’ve just never
believed any dinky little bug could get me.

But now here was Hank, a
medical doctor, casually saying he’d just cured a bunch of people
struck down by the Invariably Fatal. Which, of course, was not
possible. I was so involved in asking myself questions without
getting sensible answers that I hardly noticed Hank speaking into
the intercom, getting up, saying “Excuse me a little moment” as he
walked past me. But then I heard the door close behind him, and I
was alone in his office.

So, while waiting for him
to return, I thought some more about doctors and quacks and
diseases and the curable and incurable, and what I knew about the
history of that curious word: IFAI.

Both the word and the
disease seemed to have appeared suddenly out of nowhere, like a
diabolical bogey-man leaping at us from the darkness. Until about
four years ago, nobody had ever heard the curious and clumsy name.
And even during that first year, reports of a previously unknown
and virulent virus which appeared to cause an “invariably fatal
illness,” were confined to medical journals read by physicians and
a few science writers but ignored by the lay public. In July of the
second year, the definitive–and now almost notorious–article about
the new disease had appeared in the prestigious and widely-read
JAMA, or Journal of the American Medical Association, which to many
physicians was what the Pope is to Catholics. In that JAMA article
the small but unquestionably already-ominous threat was defined,
clarified, and emphasized, and the new disease was for the first
time identified by the name and acronym which ever since had become
synonymous with a slow-but-sure sickening of the victim, followed
by precipitous decline and death: Invariably Fatal Acquired
Illness: IFAI.

Merely the four-letter
word now, four years after those first few cases became known, was
enough to at least unsettle, if not panic, those who heard it
spoken–and they heard it spoken over and over and over again on
television, on radio, in solemn pronouncements from medical experts
and political experts and research scientists working fruitlessly
to find a vaccine to prevent it or a drug to cure it. Because to be
told “You have IFAI” was to hear “You are dying, you are
dead.”

The concerned family
physician resting his hand on a hopeful patient’s shoulder and
saying, “I’m sorry, but your blood test came back positive for IFAI
antibodies” was a sentence of death no less chilling and final than
the whisper of a hooded executioner’s axe.

For nobody was safe. There
was no defense. Even I knew–everybody with eyes and ears knew–that
the virus, which attacked its victims indiscriminately, lived and
multiplied all around us in the very air we breathed. It wasn’t a
phenomenon of criminal cells gone mad and devouring their host’s
body if they were not quickly executed, as in the case of usually
incurable cancer; or the result of sex or dirty-needle intravenous
injection of drugs, as in the ugliness of incurable AIDS; or even
the failure to promptly employ clean-needle intravenous injection
of antibiotic drugs into the bloodstreams of victims of various
life-threatening, or uncomfortable, infections. No, IFAI was
airborne, all you had to do was breathe to get it.

It was not difficult to
believe–and many experts were at last reluctantly beginning to
assert–that, if the burgeoning epidemic was not stopped, in time
every man and woman and child upon the earth might be at risk,
indeed, said some. All were at risk now.

It was an ugly, even a
terrifying thought, because all of us had seen, again and again,
the pathetic photographs and films of dying victims: wasted men,
women, and recently children, shriveled and shrunken and gaunt,
many totally hairless as a result of one cosmetic side effect of
the disease, bones pressing against the typically thin and shiny
skin, and each of them with those enormous staring eyes that
reminded us all of starving and hopeless prisoners once confined in
concentration camps.

Almost as appalling as
those photographs of people struck down by IFAI was the speed with
which the horror had grown. In that first year, thirty-six
individuals afflicted with a debilitating illness later diagnosed
as IFAI were discovered, given the most advanced medical treatment
available on earth, but died anyway. Not all at once, but the
entire thirty-six were dead within a couple of years, despite
continuing “aggressive” treatment by their doctors. By then, the
epidemic was known to have begun.

Thirty-six cases the first
year, then a jump to 399 in the second year, 4,401 in the third
year, and this year–already, and it was only October–there were an
estimated total of nearly 50,000 “carriers” of the IFAI virus in
the United States alone, representing “what is now, clearly, a
virulent epidemic out of control”–this in the words of the U.S.
Surgeon General himself.

Some claimed that many
cases of hepatitis, influenza, and even iatrogenic skin rashes were
being temporarily misdiagnosed as IFAI, thus improperly inflating
the statistics. But those tiny picky voices were drowned in
thundering pronouncements, emanating from a dozen medical societies
claiming to represent half a million physicians, which
pronouncements were phrased in a dozen different ways but made
essentially the same point: modern medicine was now so scientific,
and employed for diagnosis and healing so many large
multi-million-dollar scientific machineries, that misdiagnoses were
almost as rare as purple daffodils or auks in zoos.

This gave rise to
considerable merriment in some quarters, and even hyperbolic
reports of earth movements in several cemeteries, but such
irresponsible merriment died when the highest official of the
authoritative Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in
Atlanta, Georgia appeared in prime time on national television,
including ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and the Disney Channel and solemnly
revealed that:

“
Our Chief Statistician at
the CDC has discerned and mathematically proved that, from its
deceptively simple beginning, the incidence of IFAI has multiplied
each year by a factor of eleven; and at this rate–even should there
be no catastrophic increase in the rate-of-spread of this
invariably fatal infection then within a mere five more years from
now there will be nearly eight billion human beings infected. Thus
it is now unmistakably clear beyond any peradventure of doubts that
the war against IFAI–the continuing twenty-four-hours-a-day race to
find a vaccine to prevent IFAI or a drug to cure IFAI–is the most
important war ever waged by the human race. As we all know, there
are only approximately about six billion souls in existence upon
this entire planet. So if it is projected that nearly eight billion
people will at the present rate get this invariably fatal disease
within five years, this obviously means....”

That had been the end of
the high official’s statement. Apparently he’d wished his millions
of viewers/listeners to draw their own conclusions. And draw them
the nation did. Once it was realized that the very existence of all
mankind depended upon doctors and other dedicated scientists
finding a cure for their imminent kaputness, the American people
responded generously, as they always had in time of grave crisis,
and gave: Money. Lots and lots of money. So much money that nobody
ever really counted it accurately, or discovered where it all
went.

Suffice it to say that the
volume of serious reportage expanded until nobody except the stone
deaf or the already deceased had escaped having the horrors of IFAI
boomed and banged and thundered at them and all around them and
into them many thousands of times, so many thousands of times that
even when unspoken the message continued to be whispered again and
again upon their inner ear in the seductive and silken voice of
Death.

Even I—and I am not a
doctor, and thus can’t know for sure about such things—understood
that civilization must be face-to-face with its greatest peril
ever, nothing less than the possible extinction of all life upon
the planet except maybe cockroaches.

But here was an old
geezer, Henry Hernandez, M.D., pretending that he, all by himself,
was capable of saving the world? No, not all by himself. I was
supposed to help him.

That was the moment when
Dr. Henry Hernandez came back inside, sat down behind his desk
again and said, “My absence, please excuse, Sheldon. I must see my
next patient in ten minutes. Before then, is there more you wish
from me?”

“
Well, yeah,” I said,
slowly bringing my thoughts back from where they’d been. “While you
were gone, I was thinking of what you said. About IFAI, I
mean.”

I paused, looking at Henry
Hernandez, M.D., that last word, the acronym for Invariably Fatal
Acquired Illness seeming to reverberate faintly in the room. Thin
shafts of filtered sunlight slanted through latticed draperies
hanging over a window behind him, fell on his straight gray hair
and made it look like combed steel threads, brightened one shoulder
of that vivid blue jacket he was wearing. The dark blue tie, snugly
knotted, was neat against the crisp white of his shirt. He sat
quietly, waiting for me to continue, one arm bent at the elbow,
finger stroking a pointed end of his gray mustache.

Hank was really quite a
handsome old duck–unfortunately, “duck” automatically made me think
of “quack”–sharp and brainy enough, perhaps considerably more than
merely brainy. It had been pleasant sitting in his office, talking
to the man, a nice sort of warm break in the day, as though simply
his presence–or maybe what some of the spaced-out New Agers might
have called his aura–filled the room and made it feel unusually
comfortable, homey, almost healing. Probably, I thought, it was
merely the subtly sensed impression of special caring and concern
that penitents and patients feel, or imagine they feel, in the
presence of the richly-robed and pale-cheeked priest, or the
godlike physician, who is going to forgive all their sins. Or,
maybe my oatmeal lumps were fermenting.

Finally I said bluntly,
“I’ve decided either everybody else is crazy and you’re the
remarkably sane exception, or you’re absolutely nuttier than a
walnut farm. Until a few minutes ago I never heard anyone say IFAI
could be cured. For three years now, everybody–including all the
researchers and experts, the best doctors, government spokesmen and
even the Surgeon General, committees of scientists, everybody–has
said the disease is incurable, it’s always fatal, that’s all I’ve
heard for the last three–”

“
Heard? HEARD?”

Hank had almost lunged
forward, leaning against his desk and with both hands pressed flat
on its top, staring–no, glaring at me. “That is wonderful,
magnifico!” he bellowed. “Now I know how to inform you of truth. If
all you use is ears instead of brains, use your intelligent ears to
hear this: There is no human disorder that is not curable! Hear it
again, simply: NOTHING IS INCURABLE!”