"Norman Spinrad - JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

LINDA LEWIN

San Francisco was not what I had expected. I'm not sure what I had really expected, a foul Sodom of ruins and rotting zombies, maybe, but this was not it.
The streets were clean and the quaint buildings lovingly cared for. The famous old cable cars were still running and so were the buses. The restaurants were open, the bars were crowded, and there were cabarets and theaters. There were even friendly cops walking beats.
Food and various necessities were allowed in through the Daly City Quarantine Line and sterilized products allowed out, so the city did have an economy connected to the outside world. The place was poor, of course, but the people inside it held together to see themselves through. Food was expensivein the restaurants but artificially cheap in the markets. Housing was crowded, but the rents were kept low, and the indigent or homeless were put up in public buildings and abandoned BART stations.
Oh yes, there were many horrible Condition Terminals walking around, but many more people who could have easily melted into the underground life outside. And there was something quite touching about how all the temporarily healthy deferred to and showed such tender regard for the obvious Living Dead, something that reminded me of dear old Max.
Indeed his spirit seemed to hover over this doomed but fatalistically gay-spirited city. Of necessity, everyone was forced to be a Saint Max here, and although the Lovers of Our Lady did not exist as such, everyone here seemed to be doing the Work.
No one here had to worry about Getting It, or being carded, or picked up by the SP. All of that had already happened to all of them. So, while there were more open gays here than I had ever thought to see in my life, stranger still to say, there was less . . . perversion in San Francisco than anywhere else I had ever been.
No meatbars as such, for every bar was a meatbar. Hardly any sex machine parlors, for the people of San Francisco, already all under sentence of death, could give one another love freely, like what natural men and women must once have been. Even the obviously terminal had their needs tenderly cared for.
No place I had ever been seemed more like home.
Only the pall of Plague that hung over the city marred the sweetness of the atmosphere, and that seemed softened by the fogs, pinkened by the sunsets, lightened by the deathhouse gaiety and wistful philosophic melancholy with which the citizens confronted it. "Everyone's born under a death sentence anyway," went the popular saying. "Here at least we all know it. There is no tomorrow sooner or later, so why not live and love today?"
Uncertain of what to do next, I began doing the Work of Our Lady in the usual manner, offering myself to anyone and everyone, spreading the dreadnaught slowly, but unsure as to whether or when to spread the glorious news.
I would have been happy there--indeed the truth of it was that I was happy-even while I sorrowed for poor Richard.
Richard, though, was like a little child whom I had to lead around like a creature in a daze. All his energy and motivation seemed to have vanished with his wife and son. I could understand his grief and guilt, but this couldn't last forever.
"We've got work to do, Richard, glorious and important work," I kept telling him. "We've got to spread the dreadnaught among these people."
Mostly, he stared at me blankly. Sometimes he managed a feeble, "You do it."
After a few days of this, I decided that I could no longer wait for Richard to come around. I had to make the fateful decision on my own.
This spreading the dreadnaught by myself clandestinely was just too slow. If there were evil men out there intent on stopping the dreadnaught, they'd be tracking us down. I needed to infect thousands, tens of thousands, before they could act, and the only way that could happen would be if the people of San Francisco knew what they were spreading and set out to do it systematically.
First I began revealing myself as Our Lady to my lovers and in the bars, and there were enough people in San Fransico who had once done the Work on the outside--even some I had once known in my circuit-riding days--so that my claim gained credibility.
In one sense, the people of San Francisco had always been doing the Work of Our Lady, of Saint Max, but in another sense, the legend had never been central here. In San Francisco, the people did the Work of Our Lady to please one another and themselves, not because they believed they were serving the species' only hope.
But then I began recruiting an army of Lovers of Our Lady and I did it by proclaiming the glorious truth.
That the shattered man I sheltered in my rooms was a great scientist and an even greater hero. That he had developed the dreadnaught organism. That through him I had been infected with the gift of life. That I could infect anyone I had meat with with the cure, that anyone I had meat with would also become infectious. That the Plague Years, through Richard Bruno's instrumentality and at horrible personal cost to himself, were now coming to an end.
That all we had to do was what we were doing already--love one another.
There were more skeptics than believers at first, of course.
"Bring me your Terminals," I told them. "Let them have meat with Our Lady. When they're cured, the whole city will see I'm telling the truth."

WALTER T. BIGELOW

Satan himself seemed to be speaking through Harlow Prinz when I confronted him, laughing his final laugh, for what the president of Sutcliffe finally admitted under extreme duress was worse, far worse, than what I had originally feared.
Bruno had been working on some sort of Plague-killer virus. But he had been building it around a Plague variant and something went wrong. He had created instead a Plague variant that mutated randomly every time it reproduced. That was invisible not only to all current tests short of full-scale molecular analysis, but would remain so to anything that could be devised.
There had been a Condition Black, but only inside the lab, and there were plenty of reports to prove that Sutcliffe had followed proper procedure, as well as a mountain of legal briefs supporting the position that such internally contained Condition Blacks need not be reported to the SP.
"We had no idea Bruno was infected," Prinz claimed. "Isn't that right, Warren?"
Warren Feinstein, Sutcliffe's chairman, who had sat there silently all the while with the most peculiar expression on his face, fidgeted nervously. "No . . . I mean yes . . . I mean how can we be so sure he was infected . . . ?"
"The man's wife and son were infected, now weren't they, Warren?" Prinz snapped. "You heard the director. Extreme measures must be taken at once to contain this thing!"
"But--"
Wait a minute!" I cried. "Surely you're not suggesting the man . . . had meatsex with his wife and . . . and his son knowing he was infected?"
"Let's hope so," Prinz said. "At any rate, we have no choice but to act on that assumption."
"What?"
"Because if he didn't . . ." Prinz shuddered. "If he didn't, then we may all be doomed. Because if Tod and Marge Bruno weren't infected sexually, then this new virus has to be what we've always feared most--a Plague variant that doesn't need sexual or intravenous vectors, an ambient version that spreads through the air like the common cold."
"Oh my God."
"You have no alternative, Mr. Director," Prinz went on relentlessly. "You must obtain the necessary authority from the president and have San Francisco sterilized at once."
"Sterilized?"
"Nuked. Condition Black procedure, admittedly on a rather extreme scale."
"That's monstrous, Harlow!" Feinstein shouted. "This is going too far! We've got to--"
"Shut up, Warren!" Prinz snapped. "Consider the alternative!"
Feinstein slumped over in his chair.
"If this thing is ambient, we're all doomed anyway, so what's the difference?" Prinz said in Satan's cold, insinuating voice. "But if it isn't, and if Bruno's spreading it in San Francisco . . . "
"You can't kill a million people on the supposition that--"
"Shut up, Warren!" Prinz snapped. "You can't afford to listen to this sentimental fool, Mr. Director. You've got to be strong. You've got to do your duty."