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.
"Why is he naked?" he snapped at the attendants.
"He was like that when they picked him up, Doctor."
"Well, they might have put something on him...." He turned back to the attendants. "What are you standing there for? Get out! And you, Nurse, what are you gawking at? Order a bed in isolation."
His temper was always evil when he ran over like this, but right after a shot he could be nice in a dead, fishy way. The doctor turned back to the boy on the bed. His duty as a physician was clear—Hippocrates pointing sternly to the sheet. "Well, I suppose I have to look at the little naked beast." He folded the sheet down to the boy's knees. The boy had an erection. The genitals and areas adjacent were bright red like a red bikini.
The doctor leaped back as he would from a striking snake, but he was too late. A gob of semen hit the back of his hand right on the skinned knuckles. He wiped it off with an exclamation of disgust. He recalled later that he felt a slight tingling sensation which he didn't notice at the time, being that disgusted with the human body—he wondered why he had chosen the medical profession. And this dirty child was delaying his fix. "You filthy little beast!" he snapped. The boy sniggered. The doctor pulled the sheet up to the boy's chin.
He was washing his hands when the nurse came in with a stretcher table and an orderly to take the boy to isolation. The doctor sniffed. "My God, what's that smell? ... I don't know what this is, Nurse, but it's rather disgusting. He seems to be in some state of sexual delirium. He also seems to be giving off a horrible odor. Order the broad spectrum ... cortisone, of course—it may be an allergic condition red-haired animals are especially liable to—and the usual antibiotics....If the sexual condition continues, do not hesitate to administer morphine." The doctor gasped and clasped a handkerchief in front of his mouth and nose. "Get it out of here!" (He always referred to a patient as "the disease.") "Do you have a typhoid bed in isolation?" he asked.
"Not now we don't."
"Well it can't stay here."
He had barely settled in bed after his fix when the phone rang. It was the super. "Seems we have an epidemic on our hands, Pierson. All staff report back to the hospital immediately."
Could it be that dirty little boy? he thought as he dressed and picked up his satchel and walked to the hospital. He saw there was a police line around the entrance.
"Oh, yes, Doctor, Right over there for your mask."
"I'll help you put it on, Doctor." A brisk young girl in some sort of uniform rubber her tits against him in a most offensive manner. And before she got the mask on, he smelled it and he knew: it was that dirty little boy.
Inside was a scene from Dante: stretchers side by side in the corridors, sperm all over the sheets, the walls and the floor.
"Be careful, Doctor." A garrulous old nurse caught his arm in time. "Just put one foot solidly in front of the other, Doctor, that's right....It's terrible, Doctor, the older patients are dying like flies."
"I don't want to hear any generalities, Nurse ... take me to my ward."
"Well, Doctor, you can take the northeast wing if you want—right here."
Every sort of copulation was going on in front of him, every disgusting thing they could think of. Some of them had pillow-cases and towels wrapped around each other's necks in some kind of awful contest. As these crazed patients seemed in danger of strangulation (and here the doctor almost slipped in shit), he ordered attendants to restrain them, but no attendants were available. "We'll start with morphine and a curare derivative, Nurse."
"Sorry, Doctor, the morphine stocks are exhausted on the older patients. They go into the most awful spasms at the end, Doctor."
The doctor turned pale as death at this terrible pronouncement. He slumped to the floor in a faint, his face covered with red blotches. By the time they got his clothes off, his body was also affected, and spontaneous orgasms were observed.
Doctor Pierson subsequently recovered, because of his addiction, and went to work for the pickle factory on a sensitive biological project.
Politics here is death
Muted remote boardroom. Doctor Pierson sits at the head of the table with notes in front of him. He speaks in a dry flat academic voice.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the Board, I am here to give a report on preliminary experiments with Virus B-23.... Consider the origins of this virus in the Cities of the Red Night. The red glow that covered the northern sky at night was a form of radiation that gave rise to a plague known to be the etiological agent.
"Virus B-23 has been called, among other things, the virus of biological mutation, since this agent occasioned biologic alterations in those affected—fatal in many cases, permanent and hereditary in the survivors, who became carriers of the strain. The original inhabitants of these cities were black, but soon a wide spectrum of albino variations appeared, and this condition was passed on to their descendants by techniques of artificial insemination which were, to the say the least, highly developed. In fact, how some of these mutant pregnancies were contracted is unknown to modern science. Immaculate or at least viral conception was pandemic and may have given rise to legends of demon lovers, the succubi and incubi of medieval folklore."
Doctor Pierson continues: "The virus, acting directly on neural centers, brought about sexual frenzies that facilitated its communication, just as rabid dogs are driven to spread the virus of rabies by biting. Various forms of sexual sacrifice were practiced ... sexual hangings and strangulations, and drugs that caused death in erotic convulsions. Death during intercourse was a frequent occurrence and was considered an especially favorable circumstance for conveying the viral alterations.