Free Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman by Alan Edward Nourse Page B

cadaverous man with iron-gray hair and a face like Boris Karloff, a quiet, soft-spoken, unflappable man who always looked amazingly fresh and crisp even on days, like this one, when he had spent the whole night before sweating out an alert. At the front desk he nodded a good morning to Mandy, who kept his office running, and ducked into the small, book-lined inner sanctum he maintained for himself in the back.
    The Telexes were from the offices of the Washington State Epidemiologist in the Smith Tower in Seattle, and Ted skimmed them, hoping for the detail he was waiting for, not finding it, and finally went through the reports line by line. He had a thoroughly bad feeling about these incidents in Seattle and now, it was beginning to appear, in Colorado as well, and all interconnected. Pamela Tate, Wilderness Patrol, Enchantment Lakes Wilderness Area in western Washington. There was not much mystery about that one, Ted reflected, except for the almost unbelievable swiftness with which it hit. It was Yersinia, plain and simple, confirmed by the cultures done in Wenatchee, now being repeated in Seattle, and she was an almost classical index case for plague. High in those western mountains the rodents were there, and the fleas were there, and she was there; there was even some mention here of confirmed contact with dead rodents. He didn't know quite how they'd gotten that little item but he was very sure they weren't making up fairy tales. It just closed the circle nicely. The girl died of plague, obviously, pneumonic, and the doctor and the chopper crew were contaminated, and that made sense. The others, turning up at Harborview in Seattle, didn't, at least not from the data he had. He puiied at his lower lip. ...
    With a conscious effort he pushed the Seattle cases aside in his mind and went back to Pamela Tate again, to the little snag in that story, the place where the circle didn't quite close.
    It was the timing. It was too fast. Carlos had remarked on that before he took off for Denver—it was all far too fast. It didn't fit the classical picture of plague. Unless there is something else very unclassical involved . . .
    He sat back, letting his mind wander for a moment. If it didn't fit the classical rules, it did fit, in a way, Ted Betten-dorf's own private concept of this ancient and terrible disease. His personal picture, unproven but perfectly reasonable, evolved from his own long years of studying and writing about the pestis. Only now the microbiologists and geneticists were coming up with exactly the pieces he needed to fill the holes in his picture, the missing pieces that had hung up the progress of the scholarly work he had been writing, the thick bundles of manuscript piled on the shelves behind him. . . .
    Pamela Tate was only one of multimillions that this ugly Thing, this pestilential disease, had slaughtered down through the ages in its murderous fight for survival on Planet Earth. She was not even the first in modern times to be struck down. But just suppose, Ted reflected, that she really were the first human being to suffer the effects of some slight change in an ancient pattern of survival, some tiny interior genetic change in the organism, almost undetectable, occurring by blind chance, triggered by the natural radiation in the earth, or some happenstance direct-hit by a cosmic ray, or just by the organism's natural tendency to shift its genetic arrangement spontaneously. Suppose that somehow, for some reason or no reason, three tiny amino acid fragments on a certain spiral of DNA had gotten displaced, maybe traded places with three different amino acid fragments, while three others dropped off altogether, and the change somehow improved the survival qualities of that one organism over its brothers, led to slightly different infective qualities given precisely the right host—and suppose the change was then passed on to successive generations. It could be so simple, and so deadly. A minor step in an