Read Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman for Free Online Page B

the Forest Service, working trails, after the medical-school thing had fallen apart. A great joker, Shel, but very sharp. Suddenly something jelled in Frank's mind, the right question to be asking, and he sat up straight. He checked a number in Bend, Oregon, and dialed the phone. Moments later he heard Shel Siegler's nasal Brooklyn voice on the line. "Frank, you old son of a bitch! Long time no hear. How they hangin'?" .
    "Pretty low, right now," Frank said.
    "Oh, yeah? Well, you don't want to let 'em drag in the dust. The Super handin' you a heap of shit or something?"
    "No, no, it's personal. But Shel, I've got a funny question to ask you."
    "Yeah, that's all I get these days, is funny questions. You'd think I was Henry Youngman or somethin'. So what's your funny question?"
    Frank braced himself. "I wonder if you guys down there have taken a dead rodent count in Deschutes lately."
    There was a long, long silence. When Shel finally spoke there was no trace of humor in his voice. "Odd that you should ask," he said. "Why?"
    "I need to know, Shel."
    "Okay, Frank, this is off the record, you got that? Okay. We've been doing dead rodent counts every week for the last six months. The counts have been high, and getting higher every week. Frankly, some of us are scared, and we don't quite know what to do about it."
    "Have you had any actual plague?"
    "Three cases, down in Sisters, about six months ago. First cases in Oregon in years. All three of them died before we had time to get a diagnosis."
    "What kind of plague?"
    "Pneumonic. All we could do was send sputum samples and a couple of dead squirrels—talk about a nightmare, baggin' them up—down to Atlanta, Centers for Disease Control. They pinned the diagnosis, very much post-mortem. I mean, those people went like a brush fire. So CDC sent a guy named Quin-tana up here, Mexican chap, and he looked around a bit and said, 'Very interesting, don't pat any ground squirrels,' and caught a plane back to Atlanta. Of course, like he said, he didn't have anything to work with, the cases were all six feet under long before he got here, and we didn't have any tissue samples for him. Our medical people wrote it off as some weird kind of pneumonia at first and didn't even take cultures, since the people were dead, and no new cases were turning up, and Quintana was a busy man, so you couldn't blame him going back to Atlanta. Nice guy, in fact, but he was just in and out. Suggested we start doing dead rodent counts, so we did." Siegler paused. "Now, why all the questions? You got some cases up there?"
    "Just one," Frank said. "So far."
    "What does the Super have to say?"
    "He doesn't even know. I'm not so damned sure / know, not sure enough to get the whole state of Washington stirred up. What I need is some hard data about what's going on in the woods."
    "Well, shit, man," Shel Siegler said. "Don't just talk to me. Get hold of—what's his name?—Kessler in the Humboldt in northern Nevada and Tad Okito down in the Big Sur. Then there's Murph Miller over in the Salmon in Idaho, and Don Whitney up in the Kootenai. Get on the horn and find out what's going on in the woods. It may be pretty raw data, but if we've got dead rodents down here and you've got a funny case up there, even just one, somebody better find out what's happening. Keep me posted, and if you need any help, any way at all, give me a buzz, okay? And Frank . . ." The man paused. "Did you have any contact with that case up there?"
    Frank sighed. "You might say so."
    "Then take some medicine. Don't wait to get hit in the head."
    Frank set the phone down and found that his hand was shaking. Dead rodents in Deschutes, lots of them, and three cases of plague. Nobody had done a rodent count up here since that rabbit hunter from Ellensburg died eight years ago. Everybody had thought it was tularemia and only confirmed bubonic plague on autopsy later. They'd counted dead rodents like mad then, for a while, and found nothing. AH of the