at one moment he thought of the kitten his father had given him when he was six, and he opened his arms to embrace the scuttling gray tribe that bit at his flesh and turned his hands into raw bloody strings.
'Paston?' he said hoarsely.
There was no answer — He heard a squeaking, pattering noise that he didn't understand.
'Paston?' he said again.
No answer.
'Paston?'
After the hideous chaos of the night, the morning was gray and silent. The rain stopped, and a smeary sunlight filtered across the East River and into the broken streets. Uptown, fires still burned in Harlem, and the black carcasses of buses and cars were littered all over the streets of the midtown hotel district, smoldering and smashed. The sidewalks were glittering with powdered glass, and amongst it, like frozen explorers caught in a strange kind of snow, were the bodies of plague victims and riot casualties.
One or two police cars patroled the streets slowly and cautiously, driving over rubble and bricks and debris. The cops all wore respirators and goggles, and were heavily armed. There were still a few stray looters around, and they had orders to shoot to kill.
The rats were still in evidence — swarming into abandoned delicatessens and restaurants, and over the corpses that lay huddled up in every street.
Every office block and apartment building was locked and guarded and under siege. But even if the residents were able to keep out the looters and most of the rats, they couldn't protect themselves from the plague. During Monday morning, the fast-breeding bacilli brought painful death to thousands of New Yorkers, transmitted by minute specks of infected saliva. It only took a word of encouragement to pass the plague on, or the touch of a hand in friendship.
Some people died slowly, in prolonged agony, while others succumbed in two or three hours. By midday, almost seventeen thousand people were dead, and several apartment buildings had become silent, pestilent mortuaries. As the People collapsed, the rats scurried in, devouring food and flesh in a suffocating orgy of self- indulgence.
Other people, trapped in elevators since Sunday by the power failure, began to collapse from exhaustion, thirst and lack of air. There was no one to rescue them, and they died in a squalid confusion of darkness and urine.
In the subways, imprisoned in darkened trains, people moaned and cried and waited for the help that would never arrive. Old people and invalids sat in their apartments in front of dead televisions, waiting for nurses who didn't dare take to the streets. Drug addicts, shivering and sweating, haunted the Lower West Side looking for fixes.
Dr. Petrie, up on the sixteenth floor of Concorde Tower, stared down at the city for almost an hour. Adelaide and Esmeralda had taken Prickles to meet the Kavanagh children on the floor below, and Ivor Glantz was locked in his study, laboriously working out the mathematical probability of destroying the plague with radioactive rays. Dr. Petrie drank coffee and tried to relax. He had slept badly, with nightmares of travelling and suffering and violence, but he felt better than yesterday. He was just wondering how long they could survive on the sixteenth floor, without food supplies, or any guarantee that their water or power would hold out.
He was going to pour himself another cup of coffee when there was a rap at the door. He walked across the sitting-room and switched on Ivor Glantz's closed-circuit TV. The building super was standing outside, looking agitated. Dr. Petrie opened the door.
'Hi,' said the super. He remembered Dr. Petrie from the night before, when they had banged on the glass doors of Concorde Tower and shouted to be let in. He was a thin, nervous man with greasy hair and a neatly-clipped mustache. 'Can I come in?'
'Sure. Professor Glantz is working right now, but if it's urgent — '
The super worriedly chewed at his lip. 'It's getting pretty serious, to tell you the truth. I got assistants going round the whole building, informing everyone.'
'What's the problem?'
'Well,' said the super, 'we got quite a crowd outside. You know — people who were caught on the streets when the power went off. They want us to let them in, and they've started cracking the front doors already.'
'How many are there?'
'Well, it's hard to tell, maybe a couple of dozen. I took a look off the roof, and the same thing's happening to other condos, too. I guess quite a few people got caught out last night, and now they want to get back inside.'
'You can't let them in — you know that, don't you?' Dr. Petrie said. Even if they're residents, they may have plague. This whole apartment building could be wiped out in an afternoon.'
'Well, yes, sir, I know that. But I was tryin g to figure how to keep them out. They're smashing down the doors, and some of them have guns.'
There was another knock at the door. Dr. Petrie turned around, to see a stocky, bristle-headed man standing in the doorway, wearing a turtle-neck sweater, plaid pants and bedroom slippers. His face was bruised, and he had a magnificent black eye.
'I hope I'm not interrupting you people,' said the man. 'But I was thinking we ought to get together and have ourselves a pow-wow.'
'Good morning, Mr. Garunisch,' said the super.
'My name's Kenneth Garunisch,' said the new arrival, walking in and holding out his hand to Dr. Petrie.
'How do you do. I'm Leonard Petrie. Dr. Murray at Bellevue said I should blow a hole in your head.'
Kenneth Garunisch chuckled. 'That sounds like Murray, all right. Are you a doctor, too? I guess I'm not too popular with doctors. What's the matter, Jack? You look like you ate something that disagreed with you.'
The super nodded. 'I was telling this gentleman here, Mr. Garunisch. We got a pretty mean crowd of people down on the street, and they're trying to break their way in.'
Kenneth Garunisch took out a cigarette and lit it. 'You got top security locks and doors down there, haven't you? That should keep 'em out.'
'For a while, I guess. But they look like they want to get in real bad.'
'Do you want some help?' asked Kenneth Garunisch. 'I have an automatic, and some rounds.'
'I've got this rifle here,' said Dr. Petrie, pointing to the automatic weapon he had left in Ivor Glantz's umbrella stand.
Kenneth Garunisch said, 'I think we ought to get ourselves together and form a defense plan. Is Professor Glantz around? Maybe we can rope him in, too.'
'Wait there,' said Dr. Petrie. 'I'll go see.'
He walked across to Ivor Glantz's study and rapped gently, on the door. There was a pause, then Glantz said, 'Come in!'
The study was dense with cigarette smoke. The walls, papered in dark brown art-deco wallpaper, were covered in graphs and diagrams and illustrations of radiography equipment. Ivor Glantz was bent over a large walnut desk, with a slide-rule, log tables, dividers and a cramful ashtray. His shirt was crumpled and stained with sweat, and he was frowning at columns of figures through a thick pair of reading glasses.
'How's it going?' asked Dr. Petrie.
'Slow,' said Glantz. 'This problem has to have fifteen million permutations. Without a computer, it's like trying to write the Bible in two days.'
'Do you think it's going to take you that long?'
Ivor Glantz took off his spectacles. 'Two days, you mean? Not a chance. It's going to take longer. The trouble is, I don't have any expert help. I need someone to double-check these figures, and give me some different angles and ideas. This could take months.'
'Then do you think we ought to take the theory straight to Washington, and let them work it out?'
Ivor Glantz shook his head. 'It wouldn't wash. If we turned up in Washington with that kind of theory, they'd laugh in our faces. They don't have any bacteriologists on the government payroll with any imagination or style, and this theory would sink into the swamp of professional jealousy like a goddamned brick.'
'But there are lives at stake, for Christ's sake! We have people dying in thousands!'
Ivor Glantz stood up. 'Dr. Petrie,' he said, 'I know people are dying but it's no use. What you forget is that Washington, right at this moment, is being inundated with theories and ideas and schemes for stopping the plague.
