Case and the Dreamer (41 page)

Breaking the news in this way was a stroke of genius. The ink was still wet on the first printing when Dr. McCambridge’s phone rang. It was an attorney suggesting himself as Dr. McCambridge’s counsel in a lawsuit against the paper for malicious defamation. McCambridge suggested that the attorney go back to chasing ambulances; he was out of his league. And after that no one called Dr. McCambridge on the subject of the epidemic for three days. The news was soaking up from below; so many believed nothing that ‘scandal sheet’ ever printed that the truth came to them gradually. By the time the wire services began to be aware of the story, by the time city editors got around to sending out reporters, by the time broadcast news directors got their writers banging out their scripts on the big-type typewriters, more than half the population knew.

After the three days, of course, it was trickle to flood to deluge. McCambridge gave interviews to the top three newsmagazines, two wire services, three women’s magazines, and the raunchiest pornography monthly on the market (on the grounds the porn mag would reach all the readers the other magazines did not). Thereafter he dictated a cassette (which he rephrased every forty-eight hours, calling each an ‘update’), left standing orders not to be disturbed by anyone, particularly doctors and politicians, and hid in his lab, ostensibly in search of a cure—which was a lie.

It was pretty wild at first: a rush to the churches and temples, sometimes by the most improbable people; a flood tide of aggression against persons, against nations, quelled almost immediately by a larger tide of sobriety, reflection, self-examination. Acquisition—of goods, companies, funds—went to unheard-of peaks and then plunged as more and more people began to wonder if it were really useful to own such a lot for such a little. Regrettably, there were some suicides, but the overall suicide rate began to decline; why accelerate the inevitable?

McCambridge called Szigeti in. The young reporter was sallow, drawn; if he continued to carry whatever it was that burdened him, he would not be called ‘young’ very much longer.

“I’ve been thinking about a cure,” said McCambridge.

“Who hasn’t?” said Szigeti dolefully.

“And I wanted your thoughts.”

“You wanted
my
thoughts?”

“Get off the ‘awe’ bit,” McCambridge said testily. “I like the way your head works and I don’t think it works like mine. So throw mine and yours into the same hopper and we’ll turn the handle; something new might grind out.”

Szigeti leaned back, closed his eyes. “Thoughts about a cure.” He was silent for a time. He opened his eyes. “We need it; that’s the bottom line.” He paused. “Maybe the planet doesn’t need it; it gets along fine with extinct species.” (McCambridge nodded approvingly.) “But we damn well do.” He paused again. “One thing I’ve been lying awake with is if we could choose among a whole variety of cures, which would be the best one? I mean, I know that if one can be found right now, we grab it, whatever it was to go but suppose we had a choice? And what got to me, from what I’ve learned about this rotten species that I … love so much, man the destroyer, man the builder … hit me if I get poetic, Doctor.”

“Why on earth should I? Go on.”

“I think if we had a choice of cures, some pretty powerful effort would be made to see to it that the cure went only to the right kind of people. White people, say. Or Jews. Or rich people. Or Baptists.
I guess I knew this before, but it wasn’t until the epidemic that I really
knew
what I’ve always sort of known: that faced with real disaster, we tend to hang together, but as soon as the heat is off, it takes only seconds for ‘Me First’ to show up. So.…” Another long closed-eyes pause. “So if there ever is a cure, I would hope it was something available to everybody everywhere, rich, poor, emerging, whatever. Not something secret and owned by somebody who wanted to be paid for it. Not something that needed high technology processing … Not that I wouldn’t want to see that kind of cure, or any other cure.”

“I understand. You’re talking optimums. This is sort of a weird coincidence, you know.”

“What coincidence?”

“Every bit of our research points to a single possible treatment that could reverse the viroid effect that’s behind this thing. Nothing known will attack the viroid directly—not without bombing everything around it. The only approach is to create an environment in which it can’t replicate. The only thing that can do this is a very complex protein that is at one stage lethal, and at another, nutritious. Example: the akee.”

“The what?”

“Akee. It’s a handsome fruit that grows wild in Jamaica particularly, though it is happy to grow anywhere with that climate. It’s a strange looking thing, bright red-orange, with a shiny black pit that is half inside and half outside the rind. It looks ripe before it is ripe. When it is ripe it’s delicious, cooked with salt fish—it’s practically a Jamaican national dish. But if you eat it before it’s ripe it can kill you.

“Another vegetable with the right characteristics, also a protein poison, is the fava bean, and this one will grow virtually anywhere that anything will grow. Eaten raw, it’s pretty deadly. Cooked, it’s very sustaining, with trace minerals and vitamins, and a really efficient protein and a good measure of carbohydrates and oil.

“Every test we can devise—and we devise a lot around here—indicates that at the exact stage at which these poison proteins turn into real food, they are in an intermediate, interface stage. Catch it
there, screen it out, and feed it to someone with the plague, and it will create an environment that—well, to avoid the gobbledygook—that coats the viroidal DNA with glue. It doesn’t kill it or remove it; the viroidal DNA just can’t
do
anything, and it dies. It’s replaced by what it’s used to—the original DNA structure. An ovum fertilized at that time will be normal and will come to term.”

Szigeti had begun to breathe hard and irregularly, like a hurt child about to cry. “I think … you’re telling me … that there is a cure.”

McCambridge leaned back and beamed at him. “Yup. And that’s your scoop for today.”

Szigeti had a new clean handkerchief. Did he change them twice a day? McCambridge waited until he had put it away and then said, “ ‘Cure’ is a peculiar name for it, but it can spread fast like any other four-letter word.”

“I’ve got to know more. Are there any side effects?”

“Damn it!”
McCambridge roared. “You’ve just pushed my number one crusade button.
There are no side effects
, you hear that? There are no side effects! ‘Side effects’ is a piece of semantic wizardry, a brainwashing trick, foisted on the world by the marketing people in so-called ‘ethical’ drug companies. I could write an ad, medical-journal style, for the Pill, with a big headline—F
OR
S
WOLLEN
A
NKLES
, B
LOOD
C
LOTS
, A
ND
N
AUSEA
—and a long list in small print of side effects: among them,
it may act as a contraceptive
. You get what I’m saying? Compound a drug, you put in big words what you want to do, and in little words all the other things it does, and you call all those other things side effects.
There are no side effects!
You get that? They’re only
effects
. From now on, any time you find yourself saying ‘side effects’—bite your tongue!”

“Wow!” said Szigeti admiringly.

McCambridge relaxed, leaned back and laughed, wiping his brow with a tissue. “I do go off bang sometimes, don’t I? Well: effects. The vegetable protein I described can be prepared in quantity very cheaply from akees and fava. Fava especially can be grown anywhere and harvested quickly. The only precision part of the process is to get the transitory stage out of the product and isolate it, but that can be done with automatic machinery. What you come up with is a
gray-green paste that tastes kind of good until you realize it’s going to be your sole sustenance for two months or more. And I mean sole sustenance; anything else, even salt, with it and you’ve diluted or canceled it. And it won’t work.

“And that isn’t the only
effect
. The nutritious protein sustains the patient adequately, but there’s enough of the poisonous protein left in it to make the patient feel nauseated a lot of the time, with occasional dizziness, double vision, and the like.
And
some of the hair will fall out and the skin will get scaly and dry.”

“Both men and women?”

“Only women. Men would have the same symptoms, but there’s no immunity. The viroid’s too widespread; it just wouldn’t do any good.”

“You mean people will have to go through this every time they want a child?”

“They will. Of course, the ultimate reward is that they will have a child. Also,” he added, “the hair will grow back better than before and the skin will recover without fine wrinkles, really renewed.”

“But surely medical technology can get to a one-shot treatment. You’ve done it before.”

McCambridge snorted. “How long has it taken medical technology to find a one-shot cure for rabies—the very first disease subject to a miracle treatment? No, my friend, not with this bug. It’s the nature of the beast. We’ll keep trying, of course, but this is another one like the rabies cure; we’re stuck with a primitive, painful course of treatment for years and years to come. But Szigeti—we’ll have those years now and we’ll have them for everybody. Go write it, boy; it’s all yours. And—my regards to your wife and kid. Kids.”

Heard all over the world, in many languages:

“If you think for one minute I’m going through that just have your kid, buster, you better think again.”

“I know I don’t have to take the treatment with you, Sue, but I want to. I want to go through what you go through.” “You can’t.” “Why can’t I?” “Because you can’t have a baby, and I can. Because I’m a woman, Eve’s curse, you know. And even if I get bald and
crinkly, I don’t want a lover with his dear hair falling out.” “Oh, I love you.”

“I saw one of them today, she wore a veil over her whole head and face. And everyone stood aside for her, like she was something holy. Because she would have a baby.”

“Sell your rubber stock and get into akee orchards. There’s a classic buck in akee orchards.”

A long time later.

“Hello … Dr. McCambridge?”

“Hello … Wacky? Whickter?”

“Dr. Whickter here, yes.”

“Why the formality?”

“Because this may be the last word I ever speak to you. I wouldn’t even go this far but for a sense of fairness. I need my suspicions confirmed, and I want to know if you can possibly explain your motives. Or defend them.”

“Oh my, oh my, you are on a high horse. What wickedness do you think I’ve committed?”

“What wickedness?…” (hard breathing.) “… Let me put it this way: What would a man have to be to concoct a dangerous disease and bring the whole world to the brink of ultimate extinction, just to snatch it back again at the last moment?”

“He’d have to be damned accomplished,” said McCambridge gleefully. “He might even have a cure first.”

“I’m in a special position to figure this out,” said the telephone. “I’ve known a man like that for very long time. Very well. He would have to have almost unlimited funding. He’d have to have a profound background in genetics and biology and molecular theory. He’d have to have been a top consultant on population growth, and have traveled all over the world for many years where he saw the very worst effects of exploding populations. He’d have to have a special group of loyal undergraduates of every ethnic variety to touch off a manufactured plague simultaneously in so many places that the source could never be discovered. And he’d have to be an obsessive, arrogant son of a bitch.”

“Oh, you forgot a couple of things, Wacky. He’d have to have a pheromone so ingeniously compounded that it would make his operative irresistible to women—but only to women who were ovulating.”

“There is no such thing.”

“You’re right. But let’s hypothesize that there were. Let us recall that all female mammals undergo a period of estrus, heat, rut. When that happens there are glandular changes of many kinds affecting the animal and its surroundings and behaviors in many ways.”

“But not human females.”

“Not human females. Yet at the time of ovulation there are certain traces of that phenomenon. Mittelschmerz, the sharp abdominal pain some women feel at the moment a ripe ovum moves out. Certain changes of mood, of body and breath odors, of susceptibility—like and dislike—of external odors. More women surrender to seduction and even rape when they are ovulating than when they are not. Granted these things are almost disappearingly subtle, the fact is that they are there, buried in the complexities of the white brain and the endocrines. Vestigial they might be, but so is the abductor minimi digit muscle on the outside of your foot, and it can be brought back by the right stimulus, or even by concentration. So! If such an agent is armed with a pheromone so designed that it totally reactivates estrus in the highest, brainless, gland-driven form, and if he has a second weapon in its way just as powerful, it would not be difficult at all to scatter the seed in the most efficient way. Of course,” he added quickly, overriding the sputtering from the telephone, “such a supreme aphrodisiac does not exist, if it ever did. An ethical person would see to it that it was destroyed utterly, beyond discovery or recovery.”

Whickter’s snortings revealed an inner conflict; then: “What second weapon?”

“I don’t know, of course, but I was told about it a long time ago by an old college chum. It’s a line, a single sentence. I was told that the student who used it batted a thousand. He would simply say, at the right tender moment, “I want an experience. I do not want an affair.” He used to say that there were millions of women just aching
to hear someone say that; who had many fantasies but who were afraid to go for them for fear of involvement and entanglements.”

“You really are a son of a bitch,” said Whickter; but he laughed. He then said sententiously, “But I still can’t see any decency in a man’s bringing about worldwide terror just to satisfy an obsession about overpopulation.”