Sam Gensel was senior shift engineer for the all-network technical crew at Port Monmouth.
It was not up to him to go out and get the pictures, to stage the shows or to decide what image went out on the air. Lecturing math professors, dimple-kneed dancers, sobbing soap-opera heroines - he saw all of them on the banked row of monitors in his booth. He saw all of them; he saw none of them. They were only pictures. What he really liked was test patterns, as they showed more of what he wanted to see. He watched for ripples of poor phasing, drifts off centre, the electronic snowstorm of line failure. If the picture was clear, he hardly noticed what it represented ... except tonight.
Tonight he was white-faced.
'Chief,' moaned the rabbity junior engineer from Net Five, 'it's all over the country! Sacramento just came in. And the relay from Rio has a local collect that shows trouble all over South America.'
'Watch your monitor,' Gensel ordered, turning away. It was very important that he keep a clear head, he told himself. Unfortunately the head that he had to keep clear was aching fiercely.
'I'm going to get an aspirin,' he growled to his line man, a thirty-year veteran whose hands, tonight, were trembling. Gensel filled a paper cup of water and swallowed two aspirins, sighed and sat down at the coffee-ringed desk in the office he seldom had time to use.
One of the monitors showed an announcer whose smile was desperate as he read a newscast: '—disease fails to respond to any of the known antibiotics. All persons are cau-
tioned to stay indoors as much as possible. Large gatherings are forbidden. All schools are closed until further notice. It is strongly urged that even within families personal contact be avoided as much as possible. And, above all, the Department of Public Health urges that everyone wait until an orderly programme of immunization can be completed...'
Gensel turned his back on the monitor and picked up the phone.
He dialled the front office. 'Mr Tremonte, please. Gensel here. Operational emergency priority.
The girl was businesslike and efficient (but did her voice have a faint hysterical tremor?). 'Yes, sir. Mr Tremonte is at his home. I will relay.' Cick, click. The picture whirred, blurred, went to black.
Then it came on again. Old man Tremonte was slouched at ease in a great leather chair, staring out at him irritably; the flickering light on his face showed that he was sitting by his fireplace. 'Well? What's up, Gensel?'
That queer, thin voice. Gensel had always, as a matter of employee discipline, stepped down hard on the little jokes about the Old Man - he had transistors instead of tonsils; his wife didn't put him to bed at night, she turned him off. But there was something definitely creepy about the slow, mechanical way he talked; and that old, lined face!
Gensel said rapidly, 'Sir, every net is carrying interrupt news bulletins. The situation is getting bad. Net Five cancelled the sports roundup, Seven ran an old tape of Bubbles Brinkhouse - the word is he's dying. I want to go over to emergency procedure. Cancel all shows, pool the nets for news and civil-defence instructions.'
Old man Tremonte rubbed his thin, long nose and abruptly laughed, like a store-window Santa. 'Gensel, boy,' he rasped. 'Don't get upset over a few sniffly noses. You're dealing with an essential public service.'
'Sir, there are millions sick, maybe dying!'
Tremonte said slowly, "That leaves a lot who aren't. We'll continue with our regular programmes, and Gensel, I'm going away for a few days; I expect you to be in charge. I do not expect you to go over to emergency procedure.'
I never got a chance to tell him about the remote from Philadelphia, thought Gensel despairingly, thinking of the trampled hundreds at the Municipal Clinic.
He felt his warm forehead and decided cloudily that what he really needed was a couple more aspirin ... although the last two, for some reason, hadn't agreed with him. Not at all. In fact, he felt rather queasy.
Definitely queasy.
At the console the line man saw his chief gallop clumsily towards the men's washroom, one hand pressed to his mouth.
The line man grinned. Fifteen minutes later, though, he was not grinning at all. That was when the Net Three audio man came running in to report that the chief was passed out cold, breathing like a broken-down steam boiler, on the washroom floor.
Cornut, with black coffee in him, was beginning to come back to something resembling normal functioning. He wasn't sober; but he was able to grasp what was going on. He heard Rhame talking to Locille: 'What he really needs is massive vitamin injections. That would snap him right round - but you've seen what the Med Centre looks like. We'll have to wait until he sobers up.'
'I am sober,' said Cornut feebly, but he knew it was untrue.'What happened?'
He listened while they told him what had been going on in the past twenty-four hours. Locille's brother dead, Egerd dead, plague loose in the land ... the world had become a different place. He heard and was affected, but there was enough liquor still in him and enough of the high-pressure compulsion exercised by the immortals so that he was able to view this new world objectively. Too bad. But - he felt shame - why had he failed to kill himself?
Locille's hand was in his, and Cornut, looking at her, knew that he never wanted to let it go again. He had not died when he should have. Now ... now he wanted to live! It was shameful, but he could not deny it.
He still felt the liquor in him, and it gave the world a warm, fresh appearance. He was ashamed, but the feeling was remote; it was a failure of his childhood, bad, but so long ago. Meanwhile he was warm and comfortable. 'Please drink some more coffee,' said Locille, and he was happy to oblige her. All the stimuli of twenty-four full hours were working on him at once, the beating, the strain, the compulsion of the immortals. The liquor. He caught a glimpse of Locille's expression and realized he had been humming.
'Sorry,' he said, and held out his cup for more coffee.
Around the texas the waves were growing higher. The black barges tossed like chips.
Locille's parents braced the wind-blown rain topside to witness the solemn lowering of their son's casket into the black-decked funeral barge. They were not alone - there were dozens of mourners with them, strangers - and it was not quiet. Dwang-g-g went the bullroarer vibration of the steel cables. Hutch-chumpf, hutch-chumpj the pneumatic pens in the tower's legs caught trapped air from the waves and valved it into the pressure tanks for the generators. The noise nearly drowned out the music.
It was the custom to play solemn music at funerals, from tapes kept in the library for the purpose. The bereft were privileged to choose the programme - hymns for the religious, Bach chorales for the classicists, largos for the merely mourning. Today there was no choice. The audio speakers played without end, a continuous random selection of dirges. There were too many mourners watching their children, parents or wives being awkwardly winched on to the tossing barges, on their way to the deep-sea funerary drop.
Six, seven ... Locille's father carefully counted eight barges lying along the texas, waiting to be loaded. Each one held a dozen bodies. It was a bad sickness, he thought with detachment, realizing that the mourners were so few because, often enough, whole families were going to the barge together. He rubbed the back of his neck, which had begun to hurt. The mother standing beside him neither thought nor counted, only wept.