Free The White Plague by Frank Herbert Page B

Now, listen carefully. It seems this plague kills only women. It’s one hundred percent fatal so far. Now, it occurred to me that you and your friend are at the cottage and we’ve that lovely tank in the barn. A woman in that tank with positive pressure in there would be in a pretty effective isolation. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    “Certainly I understand, but I don’t see how…”
    “I’ve no time to argue. I’m just asking that you do this thing on my request.”
    Stephen glanced over at Kate, who was standing looking at him.
    “I don’t know if she’d… I mean, you’re asking me to…”
    “I must be going, Stephen. Do whatever you must to get her in that tank. Get in with her if necessary. Connect the telephone. I’ll call you there later. Will you do it?”
    Stephen took a deep breath. “This plague…”
    “It’s already killed a number of women. We don’t know where else the madman may have spread it. Get your friend into that tank!”
    Peard broke the connection.
     

 
Violence endured too long leads to moral anesthesia. It degrades even religious leaders. Society is separated into sacrificial lambs and those who wield the knives. High-sounding labels mask the bloody reality: phrases with words such as “Freedom” and “Political Autonomy” and the like. Such words have little meaning in a world without morality.
– Father Michael Flannery
     
     
    A LL BUT twenty of John Roe O’Neill’s letters had been mailed before FBI agents entered the Los Angeles drop with a warrant. The drop was a tiny office room in a brick building on Figueroa near downtown LA. It was operated by a Miss Sylvia Trotter, a bony woman in her fifties with hair of a wild henna and heavily rouged cheeks. The two young agents, as alike as clones in their neat blue suits, flipped open their wallets to give her a flashing glance at the identification cards then, like synchronized dancers, returned their wallets to their pockets and demanded to know about the O’Neill letters.
    What had been her contact with the author of those letters? Had she seen the contents of any of the letters? Not even one letter? What address had the author of those letters given her?
    They examined her records and took away a copy of her ledger, leaving Miss Trotter in damp and nervous confusion.
    The agents, trained as both accountants and lawyers, were disgusted with Miss Trotter’s laxity. She had not even photocopied the check from the Henry O’Malley who had set up this arrangement! O’Malley, with a false address in Topeka, Kansas, had paid by cashier’s checks on a Topeka bank. Even before they investigated, the agents knew Topeka would be a dry well. There was no one at the bank who even remembered this O’Malley’s appearance!
    The twenty letters they collected with Miss Trotter’s ledger included five that suggested the author had anticipated an official visit from investigators. The five were addressed to prominent religious leaders and were headed: “Warning to the authorities!”
    They explained that the Madman was hooked to a “dead-man switch” that would automatically flood the world with more and different plagues should “anyone interfere with me.”
    Photocopies of all the letters from the Madman were among the first pieces of evidence studied at the Denver Isolation Center by The Team, as they came to be known. The Team’s first meeting came twenty-nine days after the Achill demonstration, a delay caused by political indecision in high places, an indecision which was put aside only after chilling developments worldwide.
    O’Neill’s disease, now being called the white plague because of the pallor of its victims and white blotches that appeared on the extremities, obviously was not being contained in Ireland, Britain and Libya. Looseness of the first quarantine had been largely evaded or ignored by high officials, by the wealthy trying to get their loved ones to safety, by financial messengers,