At the end of a week the phrase sounded like a curse, a vile term hurled at an enemy in the heat of anger. Pink leaflets were scattered by the tens of thousands in every town lying within a certain radius of the Mississippi, were thick like discolored snow along the river highways and the blocked bridges.
Rock Island, Illinois, untouched by a single bomb and suffering from nothing more than fright, was sealed off from its sister city of Davenport across the river by army order. Contamination and quarantine. Rock Island looked across the one whole bridge spanning the river and stared into the loaded muzzle of an armed tank squatting in the roadway. Rock Island's fifty-five thousand population was fast becoming a special police problem because transportation had stopped and food was no longer moving in. Davenport, under martial law and supplied and controlled by the army, was almost its normal self. A tank waited on the bridge, facing east. Rock Island and the eastern third of the nation must wait out the quarantine.
At the end of a week some few radio stations were straggling back onto the air on both sides of the rivet, the surest sign that the military considered the danger of invasion to be over, to be averted or perhaps never attempted by the enemy. The types of bombing had made the possibility of an invasion a remote one for the contamination could strike friend and foe alike. In an isolated instance or two, in widely scattered interior towns, a voice on the air revealed that some life still existed there, some sort of electrical power had been harnessed despite the bombing. The lone voices haltingly took the air in search of news, aid, encouragement. Gary listened stonily to their broadcast appeals for help, their frantic quest for information about the rest of the country. He turned his eyes across the river and wondered if they were listening to the voices.
At the end of a week he had grown weary of listening to impassioned pleas and desperate arguments, to proposals and rejections between two cities facing each other across the dividing river.
And by the end of a week he had explored the state from the Wisconsin border south to the Kentucky fields across another river, to find the quarantine prevailed everywhere. He was trapped in Illinois unless he got away from the river, unless he drove eastward along the muddy Ohio searching for an undamaged bridge. The army engineers had methodically blown up all those structures which had escaped enemy destruction, all except a single span every few hundred miles along the river of demarcation; these remained intact but heavily guarded, intact for some purpose of their own. And everywhere they sowed pink leaflets, coldly explaining the necessity as they saw it, faintly hoping the quarantine might be lifted… someday.
Every day for a week Gary stopped someone, anyone, who might have a grain of information, who might know or guess at the nature of the catastrophe, with out success. The guesses were wild and unreasonable and he rejected them, knowing from experience the cities had not undergone the fantastic poison gases said to be released by the falling bombs; realizing by the application of common sense that the places he had lived in and passed through had not been doused by atomic radiation, mists, dusts. People and dogs still lived there, some people and dogs were still slowly dying there and his observations of the near-dead did not fit into any lesson he had learned. There had never been a mention of bodies turning blue, or purple as death came. Not from atomic radiation.
Finally he had caught a snatch of conversation on the air that led him to the answer. Rock Island was pleading for an open bridge, pleading its mounting distress, pointing out that pestilence and death had been spared the city. A brusque voice of authority in Davenport maintained a steadfast no, bluntly told the sealed city its fate was still to come. Travelers from the bombed cities were undoubtedly moving through Rock Island and those travelers were spreading the plague, sowing the deadly contamination as they moved.
“What plague?” Gary shouted aloud at the radio, and heard Rock Island echo his question with a dull passivity which belied knowledge.
The authoritative voice in Davenport answered in a tone of painful repetition, spoke of two distinct types which had been identified, added that only God knew how many others had been thrown at them. The voice repeated the names of the two, pneumonic plague and botulism, and passed on to the unswerving no. Gary listened for many minutes longer but there was no more mention of the diseases, no explanation of them. He switched off the radio and drove in a frenzy along the highway seeking someone who might have knowledge of the terms, stopping strangers at gun point if they would not stop otherwise, stopping armed men who patrolled their towns or farms, demanding answers of them.
They had no answer. And at the end of a week he found out another way.