Cities of the Red Night

his face beaded with sweat. He straightened up and started towards the stream. Yen Lee stopped him: 'Don't drink the water or splash it on your face. The stream runs through the town.'

Yen Lee sat down and looked once again at the town through his field glasses. There were still no villagers in sight. He put his glasses down and conducted an out-of-body exploration of the village—what westerners call 'astral travel.' He was moving up the street now, his gun at the ready. The gun would shoot blasts of energy, and he could feel it tingle in his hands. He kicked open a door.

One glance told him that interrogation was useless. He would get no information on a verbal level. A man and a woman were in the terminal stages of some disease, their faces eaten to the bone by phosphorescent sores. An older woman was dead. The next hut contained five corpses, all elderly.

In another hut a youth lay on a pallet, the lower half of his body covered by a blanket. Bright red nipples of flesh about an inch in height, growing in clusters, covered his chest and stomach and sprouted from his face and neck. The growths looked like exotic plants. He noticed that they were oozing a pearly juice that ate into the flesh, leaving luminescent sores. Sensing Yen Lee's presence the youth turned towards him with a slow idiot smile, arching his body and caressing the flesh clusters with one hand while the other hand slid under the blanket and moved to his crotch. In another hut, Yen Lee glimpsed a scene that he quickly erased from memory.

Yen Lee advanced towards the monastery. Then he stopped. The gun went heavy and solid in his hands as energy left it. His training had not quite prepared him for the feeling of death that fell in a steady silent rain from the monastery above him. The monastery must contain a deadly force, probably some form of radioactivity, perhaps psychic fission. He surmised further that the illness afflicting the villagers was a radioactive virus strain. He knew that top-secret research in the West was moving in this direction: as early as World War II, England had developed a radioactive virus known as the Doomsday Bug.

Returning to his body Yen Lee weighed his observations and surmises. What had he glimpsed and hastily looked away from? Tiny creatures like translucent shrimp feeding at the flesh nipples ... and something else.... He did not push himself, knowing that a biologic protective reaction was shielding him from knowledge he was unable to assimilate and handle. The monastery probably contained a laboratory and the village had been used as a testing ground. How did the technicians protect themselves from the radiation? Could the laboratory be operated by remote control? Or had the technicians been immunized by gradient exposure? Did the laboratory contain a sophisticated DOR installation?

He picked up a walkie-talkie. 'Pre-Talk calling Dead Line....'

'Well?' The Colonel's voice was cool, edged with abstract impatience. Cadets were expected to use their own initiative on patrol and only call in the case of emergency. Yen Lee recounted what he had seen in the village and described the feeling of death that emanated from the monastery. 'It's like a wall. I can't get through it. Certainly my men can't....'

'Withdraw from the village and make camp. A sanitary squad and a health officer are on the way.'

The doctor is on the market

Doctor Pierson was a discreet addict who kept himself down to three shots a day, half a grain in each shot—he could always cover for that. Towards the end of an eight-hour shift he tended to be perfunctory, so when he got the call from emergency he hoped it wouldn't take long or keep him overtime. Of course he could always slip a half-grain under his tongue, but that was wasteful and he liked to be in bed when he took his shot, and feel it hit the back of his neck and move down the backs of his thighs while he blew cigarette smoke towards the ceiling. As he reached for his bag he noticed that he had barked his knuckles. He couldn't remember where or when—that happens, when you are feeling no pain.

'It looks like measles, Doctor.'

The doctor looked a the boy's face with distaste. He disliked children, adolescents, and animals. The word cute did not exist in his emotional vocabulary. There were red blotches on the boy's face but they seemed rather large for measles....

'Well, get it in here, Nurse, whatever it is ... away from the other patients. Not that I care what they catch; it's just hospital procedure.'

The boy was wheeled into a cubicle. His finger cold with reluctance, the doctor folded the sheet down to the boy's waist and noticed that he was wearing no shorts.