Jack L. Chalker - A War of Shadows

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This book is for Eva C. Whitley, so loving a completist that she not only has all my writings, but she

married me, too.

A WAR OF SHADOWS

An Ace Science Fiction Book / published by arrangement with

Baronet Publishing Company

PRINTING HISTORY

Ace edition / 1979

Second printing / November 1984

Cover art by Royo

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: Baronet Publishing Company,

509 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022.

ISBN: 0-441-87196-8

Ace Science Fiction Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

ONE

The shadow of death passed through Cornwall, Nebraska, but it was such a nice day that

nobody noticed.

The sign off Interstate 80 simply read "Cornwall, next left," and left it at that. If you took it you

were immediately taken onto a smaller and rougher road that looked as if it had last been maintained

in the days of the Coolidge administration. Avoiding the potholes and hoping that your own vehicle

wasn't too wide to pass the one coming toward you, you finally passed a small steak house and bar

and were told by a smaller sign that you were in Cornwall, Nebraska, Town of the Pioneers,

population 1160, together with the news that not only did they have Lions and Rotary, but when

they met as well.

The town itself was little more than a main street composed of a few shops and stores, an old

church, the inevitable prairie museum, and a motel which had never seen better days, as much

maintained by pride as by business.

There wasn't very much business in Cornwall; like thousands of others throughout the great

plains states the town existed as a center for the farmers to get supplies and feed, and to order

whatever else they needed from the local Montgomery Ward's or Sears catalog store.

It was stifling hot on this mid-July afternoon. The ancestors of these people had settled in

inhospitable Nebraska because they had lost hope of Oregon; trapped with all their worldly

possessions, they had made the land here work—but they had never tamed it.

Three blocks down a side street, a woman gave a terrified shriek and ran from her front door out

onto the sidewalk, down toward the stores as fast as she could. Rounding the corner, she ran into

the small five-and-ten and screamed at a man checking stock on one of the shelves.

"Harry! Come quick! There's somethin' wrong with the baby!" She was almost hysterical.

He ran to her quickly, concern on his face. "Just hold on and calm down!" he said. "What's the

matter?"

"It's Jennie!" she gasped, out of breath. "She just lies there! Won't move, won't stir, nothin'!"

He thought frantically. "All right, now, you get Jeb Ferman—he's got some lifesavin' trainin'. Did

you call the doctor?"

She nodded. "But he'll be fifteen, twenty minutes coming from Snyder! Harry—please come!"

He kissed her, told her to get Ferman and join him at the house. Jeb had once been a medic in the

Army, and was head of the local volunteer fire de-partment.

In a few minutes, they were all at the house.

It wasn't that the child was quiet; in many circum-stances parents would consider that a blessing.

Nor was she asleep—her eyes were open, and seemed to follow Jeb Ferman's finger.

She just didn't move otherwise. No twitching, no turning, not even of the head. Nothing. It was

as if the tiny girl, no more than ten weeks old, was totally paralyzed.

Jeb shook his head in confusion. "I just don't un-derstand this at all," he muttered.

By the time the doctor arrived from two towns over, Jennie was no better, and her eyes seemed

glazed.

While they all clustered around as the man checked everything he could, the concerned mother

suddenly felt dizzy and swooned almost into her husband's arms. They got her onto the sofa.

"It's just been too much for me today," she said weakly. "I'll be all right in a minute. I've just got

this damned dizziness." Her head went back against a small embroidered pillow. "God! My head is

killing me!"

The doctor was concerned. "I'll give her a mild sedative," he told her husband. "As for

Jennie—well, I think I'd better get her into a hospital as quickly as possible. It's probably nothing,

but at this age almost anything could happen. I'd rather take no chances."

Harry, feeling frantic and helpless now with two sick family members on his hands, could only

nod. He was beginning to feel pretty rotten himself.

It would take a good forty minutes to get an am-bulance, and the patient was very small, so the

doc-tor opted for a police car. He and the father got in the back, carefully cradling the young and

still mo-tionless infant, and the car roared off, a deputy at the wheel, siren blaring and lights

flashing.

Not far out of town the car started weaving a lit-tle, and the deputy cursed himself. "Sorry,

folks,"—he yelled back apologetically. "I don't know what happened. Just felt sorta dizzy-like."

He got them to the hospital, pulling up to the emergency entrance with an abandon reserved for

police, and stepped out.

And fell over onto the concrete.

The doctor jumped out to examine him, and a curious intern, seeing the collapse, rushed to help.

"Hey! Harry! Get Jennie inside!" the doctor snapped. "I got to take care of Eddie, here!"

The intern took immediate charge, and the two men turned the deputy over and looked at him.

There were few scrapes and bruises from the fall, and he was breathing hard and sweating

profusely.

"I'll get a stretcher," the intern said. He turned and looked back at the police car, seeing Harry

still sitting in it, holding the baby.

"Harry!" he yelled. "I told you to get Jennie inside!"

There was no reply, no sign that he had been heard at all. The doctor jumped up swiftly and

leaned back into the car.

Harry sat there stiff as a board, only his panicked eyes betraying the fact that he was alive.

The doctor ran inside the emergency room entrance.

"We got us some kind of nasty disease!" he snapped. "Be careful! Isolation for all of them, full

quarantine for the staff. Admit me, too—I'll assist from inside, since I've been in contact with them.

And get another ambulance over to Cornwall fast! I think we got a young woman there with the

same thing!"

Tom Scott and Gordon Martin had driven am-bulances over half the roads of Nebraska in the six

years since they'd started, and were hardened, prepared for almost anything—but never for driving

into Cornwall that late July afternoon.

There were bodies all over. A couple of cars had crashed, but that was only part of it. People lay

all over the place, in odd positions. Inside the cafe, hamburgers were frying to a crisp while

customers sat motionless in the booths; the cook, fallen onto the grill still clutching a spatula, was

frying too. Down at the service station a stream of gasoline trickled into the street as an attendant,

leaning against a car as unmoving as the driver behind the wheel, continued to pump gas into a tank

that had obviously been full a long time.

"Jesus God!" Scott reached for the radio. "This is Unit Six to dispatch," he said, trying to sound

calm and businesslike.

"Dispatch, go ahead Six." A woman's cool, pro-fessional tones came back at him.

"We—I—I don't know how to tell you. Get ev-erybody you can over to Cornwall, full protective

gear, epidemic precautions. Everybody in this whole damned town's paralyzed or dead!"

"Say again?" The tone was not disbelieving; it was the sound of someone who was sure she'd

misun-derstood.

"I said the whole town's frozen stiff, damn it!" he almost screamed, feeling the fear rise within

him. "We got some kind of disease or poison gas or something here—and I'm right in the middle of

it!"Within minutes four doctors were airlifted to Cornwall by State Police helicopters; troopers

blocked the entrances and exits to the town except for emergency vehicles. It was a totally

un-precedented thing, and there were no contingency plans for it, but they acted swiftly and

effectively, as competent professionals. Nearby National Guard vehicles were pressed into service

as well, and a fran-tic hospital tried to figure out where and how to deal with the huge number of

patients. It was a 150-bed hospital; they already had forty-six patients. Appeals went out to

hospitals and doctors as far away as Lincoln, and the CAP was asked to provide addi-tional airlift

capability.

The state Health Department was notified almost immediately. Again, there was initial shock and

dis-belief, but they moved. The Governor mobilized ap-propriate Guard trucks and facilities, not

just to aid in handling the patients but also to cordon off the entire area around the town.

Less than fifteen minutes after the network newsmen had it, a report went in to the National

Dis-ease Control Center in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside Washington. Field representatives

were dispatched from Omaha and the University of Ne-braska within the hour.

In a small but comfortable apartment in the city of Fairfax, a phone rang.

Dr. Sandra O'Connell had just walked in and hadn't even had time to take off her shoes when the

ringing began. She picked up the phone.

"Sandra O'Connell," she said into it.

"Dr. O'Connell? This is Mack Rotovich. We got another one, Red Code, same pattern."

Oh, my God! she said to herself. "Where?" "Small town in western Nebraska, Cornwall I think it

is."

"Symptoms?"

"Catatonia, looks like," Rotovich informed her. "'Things are still more than a little sketchy. It just

broke a few hours ago."

She dreaded the next question the most. "How many?" she asked.

"Six hundred forty or so to this point," Rotovich told her. "Maybe more now. Hard to say. Got

a few elsewhere, seemed to hit about the same time, and there's a lot of people out in the fields yet.

We're sending the Guard in on a roundup."

She nodded to herself. "Have you sent the Action Team in?"

"Of course. That's the first thing I did. Blood and tissue samples should be coming within the

next two, three hours. Want to be down here when they come in?"

She was tired; bone-weary, her father used to call it. It had been a long day and a long week and

she needed sleep so bad she could taste it.

"I'll be down in an hour," she said resignedly and hung up the phone. She stood there for half a

minute, trying to collect herself, then picked the phone up again. Carefully, she punched out a full

twenty-two digits on the pushbuttons, including the * and # twice. There was an almost

unbelievably long series of clicks and relays, then an electronic buzz which was immediately

answered.

"This is Dr. O'Connell, NDCC," she said into the phone. "We have another Red Town. An

Action Team is en route. Please notify the President."

TWO

Mary Eastwicke had thought that being press of-ficer for the National Disease Control Center

would be a fairly nice, easy job. Nobody was very in-terested in NDCC, most of the time, except

for an occasional science reporter doing a Sunday feature, and the pay was top bracket for civil

service. But now, as the trim, tiny businesslike woman walked into the small briefing room bulging

with reporters, IN lights and cameras, and into the heat generated by it all, she wondered why she

hadn't quit long ago. With the air of someone about to enter a bullring for the first time, she stepped

up to the cluster of micro-phones.

"First, I'll read a complete statement for you," she said in a. smooth, accentless soprano. "After,

I will take your questions." She paused a moment, ap-parently arranging her papers but actually

giving them time to get ready for the official stuff that would grace the news within the hour.

"At approximately 3:10 this afternoon, Eastern Daylight Time, the town of Cornwall, Nebraska,

first began showing symptoms of an as-yet unknown agent, said agent causing most of. the town to

come down with varying degrees of paralysis. The symp-toms showed first in the young, then

quickly spread to upper age groups. We have been as yet unable to fully question any victims, but

there appears from hospital and doctor records of the past few weeks to have been no forewarning

of any sort, although the malady struck every victim within a period of under three hours." She

paused to let the print journalists catch up and check their little shoulder recorders, then continued.

"So far there are fourteen confirmed fatalities—seven infants, two persons in vehicles which

crashed, and the others elderly. Another forty-six are con-sidered in critical condition. Federal,

state, and local authorities are currently on the scene, and NDCC is at this moment running tests on

samples from several victims, as well as two bodies of the dead. At the moment this is all we know.

I'll take questions."

There was a sudden tumult, and she waited pa-tiently for the mob scene to calm down.

"Please raise your hands," she said professionally when she thought she could be heard over the

din. "I'll call on you." That settled them, and she pointed to a well-known network science editor.

"Have there been any signs of this affliction spreading to other localities?" he asked in his

fa-mous cool manner. "We have some reports of it hit-ting in other areas."

"So far we have had a number of cases outside the area," she said. "Twenty-six, to be exact. All

but three are known to have been in Cornwall within the last few days. Except for four people in a

truck stop on I-80 and two truckers in West Virginia who passed through there three days ago, no

other vic-tims. And, no, we can find no sign of any spreading of the affliction by these people to

others with whom they've come in contact, except perhaps at the truck stop."

Another question. Did the disease affect animals in the town, and did it spare any people?

"Yes to both," she said. "That is, many people seem to have had such a mild case there appears

to be no question that they'll recover with no serious effects. As to the animals, some pigs were

affected, but not cows, horses, chickens, or other animals. Some dogs seem to exhibit slight signs,

but there are no totally paralyzed ones that we've found."

"Is there any connection yet between this disease and those that struck Boland, California,

Hartley, North Dakota, and Berwick, Maine, in the past few weeks?" That was the Post man.

She shrugged. "Of course, they are all small towns, and in each case the mystery ailment struck

suddenly and with no prior warning. However, the symptoms were far different in those other

cases, even from each other. If you remember, Boland's population went blind, Hartley's became

severely palsied, and Berwick ..." She let it hang and they didn't pursue it. Everyone in Berwick, to

one degree or another, had become rather severely mentally retarded.

"It's almost like somebody's trying to kill off small-town America," a reporter muttered. Then he

asked, "All of these maladies are related to attacks on various centers of the brain and central

nervous system, aren't they? Isn't that a connection?"

She nodded. "It's the only connection, really. We are still running a series of tests on the earlier

vic-tims, you know. Our teams are working around the clock on it. If, in fact, it's a disease of the

central nervous system and/or brain, though, how is it transmitted? There is no apparent link

between the afflicted areas. And why hasn't it shown up elsewhere? Unless someone else is

prepared to an-swer those questions, we must assume we are dealing with different diseases here."

"Or a new kind of disease," a voice said loudly.

It went on for quite a while, with even the crazies having their turn. Any flying saucers reported

near these places? No. Is the Army back into biological warfare experimentation? No, not the

military. Somebody who'd just seen The Andromeda Strain on the Late Show asked about

meteors, space probes, and the like, but again the answer was no, none that had been found.

They left with lots of scare headlines and nasty suppositions, but nothing more. Page one again,

to scare the hell out of the population, but the truth was that nobody really knew what was going

on.

Mary Eastwicke made her way wearily back to her office feeling as if she'd worked ten hours in

the last seventy minutes. Several staffers were looking over papers, telexes, and the like. She sank

into her chair.

"I need a drink," she said. "Anything new?"

A young assistant shook his head. "Nothing more. The toll's 864 now, with eighty-six deaths. In

a couple hundred cases they'd be better off dead, though. A hundred percent paralyzed. Stiff, too.

You can bend 'em in any position and they'll stay that way. Most of the rest are nasty partials. That

town was wiped out as surely as if you dropped a bomb on it."

Mary sighed, and decided she was going to get that drink no matter what. It was going to be a

long night; no going home for them or anyone else this time.

She prayed that the folks upstairs would come up with something solid on this one. She thought

of that comment from that reporter to the effect that it was as if somebody was wiping out the small

towns of America.

She wondered how the tests were going.

Dr. Mark Spiegelman was about fifty, and usually looked forty, but by 5:00 A.M. looked seventy

instead. He sank wearily down in Sandra O'Connell's office and gulped his thirty-sixth cup of

strong black coffee as she read the reports and looked at the photos.

"Did you ever dream of a nice little VA hospital job someplace?" he asked her. "You know, the

kind where they give you some patients with known ail-ments and ask you to do your best to help

them? I do. Lord! I'd settle for a nice bubonic plague someplace. But this!"

She nodded. "Same sort of thing as the others. These motor areas of the brain were burned,

actually burned! It's as if some nice, normal cells just sudden-ly decided to stop producing the nice

normal acids they need and suddenly devoted their time to pro-ducing sulfuric acid or something.

How's it possible, Mark? How's it possible for just a few cells in a par-ticularly critical spot, all in a

group, to suddenly produce a destructive series of chemicals for a peri-od, do their damage, then

let the surviving ones return to normal? Even cancer, once it starts, keeps doing what it's doing.

This was triggered only in a few centers of the brain, critical centers, within a couple of hours in just

about everybody in that town, then stopped. How is that possible, Mark?"

He shrugged wearily. "You tell me. You know LSD, though?" She nodded, wondering what he

was getting at. "It's a catalyst. Does just about nothing itself. You take it, it goes through the brain,

trips a few wrong switches, then leaves, either in body waste or skin secretion. It's almost out of the

system by the time you get the full effects."

She frowned. "You think we're dealing with something like that here? A catalytic agent?"

He nodded. "It's the oddballs that give it away. Remember in every case we had not only the

town zapped, but also a number of people in other places who'd merely been in that town? Well,

the magic number is three days, and maybe with a little more work we can pin it down to certain

hours within those three days. At least we have a couple of people who were in Berwick in the early

morning and left and didn't come down with their disease, and we have a few more from Boland

who were in town three days earlier, getting there late in the day, and didn't get it, either. I bet we

find those truck drivers who were in Cornwall were there within certain hours."

"I'll go along with the catalytic agent," she said, "but how does that explain those truck stop

people? If we're dealing with a chemical, whether natural or artificial, how'd those others far from

the town catch it?"

Again Mark shrugged. "If any of them pull through, and we can establish any sort of

com-munication with them, maybe we'll find out they sipped some of the driver's coffee or

something. Back in the late sixties—before your time, I know—the young crazies who thought LSD

was the greatest thing since sliced bread often dumped it secretly in cafe coffee urns and the like."

Sandra smiled slightly at the flattering "before your time" remark, and wished it were so.

"So what do we have?" she asked rhetorically. "We have a catalytic agent that is somehow

admin-istered to an entire population within a few-hour pe-riod, sends a signal somehow to the

brain to have certain vital cells malfunction for a short period three days later, after it's too long

gone for us to trace. A nice chemical agent, but show me a coffee urn, anything, that a whole town

uses!" She had a sudden thought. "You checked the municipal water supplies?"

He nodded. "We checked everything, and we'll do it again. A lot more chemicals than there

should be in some cases, but nothing unusual, and certainly nothing to cause this. No, it has to

come from something they all touched or consumed. I'm positive of it."

She slammed the stack of papers down hard on her desk. "Then why haven't we found it, damn

it!" she snapped angrily. "If it's a chemical it's common to all the towns, and it should still be

there!"

"They're taking everything apart piece by piece and brick by brick," he said wearily. "If it's there,

we'll find it. But I won't, at least not tonight—er, this morning. I, my dear, am going to go down the

hall, enter my office, stretch out on that couch of mine, and if ten more towns go under I will not

awaken until at least noon." He got up slowly, with a groan, and stopped at the door. "Care to join

me?" he asked with a leer.

She smiled weakly. "Some pair we'd be." She chuckled. "Asleep in ten seconds."

Mark returned the smile. "Shame on you for such dirty thoughts," he said, and walked out. She

didn't see or hear him go.

Dr. Sandra O'Connell was sound asleep in her big padded chair.

THREE

The alarm clock woke them. He reached out, fumbled for the stud that would silence it, and

final-ly succeeded. He opened his eyes, still holding the clock, and brought it in front of him so he

could see it.

He stared at it in wonder, trying to figure out why. He held the clock for the longest time, looking

at it curiously, as if it were some strange new thing. He felt confused, adrift, wrong somehow.

He looked around the room, and it didn't help. Nothing was familiar, nothing looked like

some-thing he'd seen or known before. He felt a shifting next to him, and for the first time he was

aware that he was not alone in the bed.

She was still asleep. She was middle-aged, a bit dumpy, with a few touches of gray, in an

aqua-marine-blue nightgown.

Who the hell was she?

He strained, tried to remember, and could not. He was a blank, a total blank—it was as if he'd

just been born.

He got out of bed slowly, carefully, so as not to wake the woman. He felt odd, giddy,

light-headed, but with a dull ache that started in his head and spread throughout his body.

He walked dully out into the hall, an unfamiliar hall still masked in shadow, and looked up and

down. He tried one room, then another, before final-ly finding the bathroom. He had to go, he knew

that much.

He walked in, searched for and finally found the light switch, and turned it on.

He almost jumped. A man's face stared at him, and he started to address it, to apologize or

whatever, when he realized suddenly that it was his re-flection.

His? Someone he'd never seen before?

He stared at it until he just had to go, and did. After, he didn't flush for fear of disturbing the

quiet and that woman in the bedroom.

He switched out the light and stood there in the semi-darkness, wondering what to do next. Get

dressed and get out of here, he decided. That first of all.

He crept back into the bedroom, but stepped on a loose floorboard, and the woman awoke with

a start, sat up, and stared at him, an expression not unlike that on the face in the mirror's on her

own features.

"Who—who are you?" she asked timidly, a bit fearfully.

He shook his head. "I don't know," he said help-lessly. "Who are you?"

Her mouth was open, and she shook her head slowly from side to side. "I don't know," she said

wonderingly. "I can't remember."

The sound gonged at her from beyond her subconscious, beating in, like a lot of little hammers.

It seemed to be demanding entrance. She struggled against it, but it kept on, insistent, and slowly

turned from a series of poundings into an insistent ringing.

Dr. Sandra O'Connell awoke. Like a contor-tionist, she was twisted and bent in the chair, and

she'd obviously slept hard for quite some time. Her right arm and upper calf were both asleep, and

she could hardly move them. She tried shifting, and pain shot through her.

Cursing, using sheer willpower, she managed to get both feet on the floor and somehow grab the

ringing telephone, bringing the receiver to her.

"Hello?" she answered groggily, still half asleep. There was no reply, and it took a few seconds

before she realized she had the thing upside down. Turning it right, eyes still only half-open, brain

only partially there, she tried again.

"Dr. O'Connell," she mumbled.

"Sandy? This is Mark." It was the voice of Dr. Spiegelman. "Better wake up in a hurry. Another

town's been hit."

This brought her mentally awake immediately, although the rest of her body didn't seem to want

to cooperate.

"What? So soon? Where?"

"Little town on the Eastern Shore, not seventy miles from here," he told her. "We're getting a

team up from here and Dietrick now. Want to come along?"

Her mind raced. "Give me a moment," she pleaded. "My god! How are you getting there?"

"Choppers. One's here now. Two more due any minute. Get yourself together, grab your kit, and

get up to the roof. I'll bring you some coffee in the heli-copter."

"I'll be right there," she said, wondering if she could really do it.

She managed to get up, almost falling on the tin-gling leg, but worked it out as best she could.

The wall clock in the outer office said 9:10; the light com-ing in from the windows said it was in the

morning.

Four hours, she thought, resigned. At least I got four hours' worth of sleep.

Four out of forty.

It would have to do.

She knew she looked a mess, but whatever repairs could be made in the helicopter would be all

that would be done. She got her purse, reached inside for some keys, and unlocked the right

double drawer of her desk, removing a doctor's bag. Her smaller purse fitted into it on clips, and

she hoisted the whole thing and put the strap over her shoulder.

She was almost to the hall before she realized that she was going barefoot. With the carelessness

of someone in a hurry she knocked over a couple of things getting back, unlocking, getting in,

getting the shoes, and leaving again. She put them on while waiting for the elevator, which seemed

to take forev-er to come.

Speigelman was waiting for her on the roof, along with a number of technicians, lab men, and

some other department heads. A "hit" this close to home was irresistible to them.

She had little time to get any details before the second helicopter swung into view and came over

the roof, blowing dirt, dust, hair and everything else around it as it settled gently onto the large

painted cross.

They lost no time in piling in; it was a large craft, but it already carried a number of people from

Dietrick and a lot of technical gear. She scrunched into a hard seat next to her fellow NDCC doctor

and had barely fastened the seat belt when they were off.

It was tremendously noisy, and she strained to be heard over the whomp! whomp! whomp! of

the over-head rotors and the whine of the twin jets to either side.

"What have we got?" she screamed at Spiegelman.

He shook his head. "McKay, little town on the Chesapeake Bay in Talbot County. Just about

ev-erybody seems to have woke up this morning with total amnesia."

She frowned. "How big's the town?" she yelled.

"Twenty-three hundred," he told her. "Pretty much like the others. First reports said it wasn't a

hundred percent, either, as usual. Bet we find out most of the exceptions weren't in town during

some period about three days ago."

"You think it's the same thing, then?"

He nodded. "Remember our talk last night? A catalyst that struck a particular and very limited

part of the brain, creating an odd sort of stroke. You know most total amnesia victims have some

kind of clotting cutting them off."

She nodded. It wasn't her specialty, and she had been more administrator than doctor anyway

these past few years, but she'd heard of rare cases. It made sense. It matched with the others.

Which meant it didn't match at all.

The agent, whatever it was, was pretty consistent, though. She wouldn't take Spiegelman up on

his bet. But what sort of agent could appear in such widely separated communities, rear its ugly

head for only a brief period, then vanish without a trace?

Suburban Washington vanished quickly beneath them, replaced by the sandy soil and dense

forests of southern Maryland, a place curiously little changed from its earliest beginnings,

geographically or cul-turally.

As she checked herself out in a mirror and tried to become as presentable as possible they

crossed the ancient Patuxent River and the fossil-strewn cliffs of Calvert with its incongruous

nuclear reac-tors and LNG docks stuck somehow in the middle of wilderness, and out over the

broad, blue bay.

Within twenty minutes they were angling for a landing. The town was a pretty one, almost a

picture-book type. The families here were old and deep-rooted, mostly involved in the shellfish

trade as their ancestors had been for centuries; the town was neat, almost manicured, with a strong

eighteenth century look to it.

But now there were helicopters landing, and swarms of vehicles on the ground, while Maryland

State Police on land and sea blocked access to the curious.

They touched down with a slight jar, then quickly unloaded personnel and gear.

"Joe Bede got here ahead of everybody and he's coordinating," Mark Spiegelman told her, their

ears just starting to readjust to the lack of steady noise.

Sandra nodded approval. "Joe's a good man. But how did he get here ahead of us?"

Spiegelman chuckled. "He was on vacation, on that boat of his, just up at St. Michaels The call

came over for any and all doctors, he smelled what it was, and got somebody to drive him down.

I'd say he was here inside of thirty minutes from the first reports."

That was good, she thought. A trained NDCC doctor on the scene almost from the start. In a

way she almost pitied poor Joe; he was not only going to lose the rest of his vacation, but stood the

awful chance of being debriefed almost to death in the next few days.

They had the people out in the town square; somebody had set up folding chairs procured from

various restaurants, the church basement, and who knew where else? It was a shock to see them;

they just sort of sat there, seemingly at a loss to do or say anything. But their expressions weren't

blank; there was tremendous fear and tension there, so thick you could smell it.

Several men and women had set up tables and were interviewing the townspeople one by one.

After the interviews, they were taken gently off by troopers to waiting busses. A few would be

flown out to Bethesda and Walter Reed; the rest would be placed temporarily in every local hospital

from Norfolk to Wilmington, and probably a lot more, too.

Dr. Joseph Bede, in a tremendously loud sport shirt, jeans, and sunglasses, a three-days' growth

of beard on his face, hardly looked like the supervising doctor in a medical crisis. He looked up,

saw her, and waved.

She went over to him. "Hello, Joe," was all she could say.

"Sandy," he said. "Hey! Get a chair. This isn't gonna be too pleasant, but you should be in on

this.

"At least no one died this time," she tried.

He frowned, paused, sat back a moment and sighed. "Well, depends on how you look at it.

You'll see what I mean in a minute." He turned back around, nodding to a nervous-looking State

Police corporal. "Next one," he ordered softly.

The next one was a middle-aged woman, over-weight, face lined and weathered. She stood there,

looking nervous and bewildered.

A young man in casual dress leaned over toward Joe Bede. "Holly Troon," he said. "Lived here

most of her life. That's her old man, Harry, second row, third one in over there. Part-time cashier,

drug store. Three kids—we took 'em on the first bus."

"Education?" Bede asked.

The young man shrugged. "High school. Nothin' odd, nothin' special, neither."

Bede nodded, then turned back to the woman. "Please have a seat," he urged in his most calm,

soothing manner. She sat, looking at him expectant-ly.

"I'm Dr. Bede," he told her. "What do you remember about yourself?"

She didn't say a word, just shook her head slowly from side to side.

"Tell me the first thing you do remember," he prodded, gentle as ever.

"I—I woke up," she stammered. "And—well, I didn't know where I was. I still don't know. And

then this old man came into the room, and we kind of stared at each other."

The kindly interrogator nodded sympathetically. "And this man—you had never seen him before,

either?"

She shook her head. "I can't remember anything at all. Nothing." She looked at him, almost

plead-ingly. "Why can't I remember? Why can't any of there remember?" She gestured at the

waiting townspeople, her voice rising slowly and quivering as if bordering on hysteria. He calmed

her with that charismatic gentleness he had been born with.

"Take it easy," he said. "You—all of you—caught a disease. It has this effect—loss of memory.

We're working on it."

She clutched at the straw. "You mean you can cure me?"

He put on the number twenty-three smile, the one reserved for terminal patients.

"All of your memory's still up there. It's just that the rest of you can't get to it right now. That's

what we'll be working on. Like a telephone that's out of order because a wire is broken. Fix the wire

and you can use it again."

It seemed to make her feel better, and she relaxed.

"Now, tell me," he continued. "When you saw this strange man you weren't afraid of him? I

mean, a woman sees a strange man ..."

That brought back a little of it. "You just don't understand," she said, shaking a little. "When I

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ThisbookisforEvaC.Whitley,solovingacompletistthatshenotonlyhasallmywritings,butshemarriedme,too.AWAROFSHADOWSAnAceScienceFictionBook/publishedbyarrangementwithBaronetPublishingCompanyPRINTINGHISTORYAceedition/1979Secondprinting/November1984Allrightsreserved.Copyright©1979byJackL.ChalkerCopyright©197...

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