Frank Herbert - The White Plague

"You will think of using atomic sterilization upon the targets of my revenge. Don't do it. I will turn against you if you do. The plague must run its course in Ireland, Great Britain and Libya. I want the men to survive and to know what it was I did to them. You will be permitted to quarantine them, nothing more. Send their nationals homeall of them. Let them stew there. If you fail to expel so much as a babe in arms who belongs in one of those nations by reason of nationality or birth, you will feel my anger."

The President finished reading O'Neill's atomic warning...

Berkley books by Frank Herbert

THE BOOK OF FRANK HERBERT

CHILDREN OF DUNE

DESTINATION: VOID (revised edition)

THE DOSADI EXPERIMENT

DUNE

DUNE MESSIAH

THE EYES OF HEISENBERG

GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE

THE GODMAKERS

THE JESUS INCIDENT (with Bill Ransom)

THE SANTAROGA BARRIER

SOUL CATCHER

WHIPPING STAR

THE WHITE PLAGUE

THE WORLDS OF FRANK HERBERT

The author gratefully acknowledges permission from the following sources to reprint material in their control: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., for lines from "Sailing to Byzantium," by William Butler Yeats, from Collected Poems, copyright 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1956 by Georgle Yeats; and lines from "Remorse for Intemperate Speech," by William Butler Yeats, from Collected Poems, copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.

New Directions and David Higham Associates Limited for lines from Poems of Dylan Thomas by Dylan Thomas, copyright 1939 by New Directions Publishing Corporation.

This Berkley book contains the complete

text of the original hardcover edition. It has been completely reset in a typeface designed for easy reading, and was printed from new film.

THE WHITE PLAGUE

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with

the author

PRINTING HISTORY

G. P. Putnam's Sons edition / September 1982 Berkley edition / December 1983

All rights reserved. Copyright 1982 by Frank Herbert. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

ISBN: 0-425-06555-3

A BERKLEY BOOK TM 757,375 Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016. The name "BERKLEY" and the stylized "B" with design are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To Ned Brown

for his years of friendship

PRECEDE

Theres a lust for power in the Irish as there is in every people, a lusting after the Ascendancy where you can tell others how to behave. It has a peculiar shape with the Irish, though. It comes of having lost our ancient ways the simpler laws, the rath and the family at the core of society. Romanized governments dismay us. They always resolve themselves into widely separated Ascendants and Subjects, the latter being more numerous than the former, of course. Sometimes its done with great subtlety as it was in America, the slow accumulations of power, law upon law and all of it manipulated by an elite whose monopoly it is to understand the private language of injustice. Do not blame the Ascendants. Such separation requires docile Subjects as well. This may be the lot of any government, Marxist Russians included. Theres a peculiar human susceptibility you see when you look at the Soviets, them building an almost exact copy of the czarist regimes: the same paranoia, the same secret police, the same untouchable military, and the murder squads, the Siberian death camps, the lid of terror on creative imagination, deportation for the ones who cannot be killed off or bought off. Its like some terrible plastic memory sitting there in the dark of our minds, ready on the instant to reshape itself into primitive patterns the moment the heat touches it. I fear for the shape of things which may come from the heat of ONeills plague. Truly, I fear, for the heat is great.

Fintan Craig Doheny

May the hearthstone of hell be his bed rest forever!

I T WAS an ordinary gray British Ford, the spartan economy model with right-hand drive customary in Ireland. John Roe ONeill would remember the drivers brown-sweatered right arm resting on the cars windowsill in the cloud-filtered light of that Dublin afternoon. A nightmare capsule of memory, it excluded everything else in the scene; just the car and that arm.

Several other surviving witnesses commented on a crumpled break in the Fords left front wing. The break had begun to rust.

Speaking from her hospital bed, one witness said: The break was a jagged thing and I was afraid someone would be cut if they brushed against it.

Two of those who recalled seeing the car come out of Lower Leeson Street knew the driver casually, but only from his days in postal uniform. He was Francis Bley, a retired postman working part-time as a watchman at a building site in Dun Laoghaire. Bley left for work early every Wednesday, giving himself time to run a few errands and then pick up his wife, Tessie. On that one day each week, Tessie spent the morning doing light secretarial for a betting shop in King Street. It was Tessies habit to spend the rest of the day with her widowed sister who lived in a remodeled gatehouse off the Dun Laoghaire bypass just a few minutes out of his way.

This was a Wednesday. May 20. Bley was on his way to pick up Tessie.

The Fords left front door, although appearing undamaged by the accident that had crumpled the wing, still required a twist of wire around the doorpost to keep it closed. The door rattled every time the car hit a bump.

I heard it rattling when it turned onto St. Stephens Green South, one witness said. Its Gods own mercy I wasnt at the Grafton corner when it happened.

Bley turned right off St. Stephens Green South, which put him on St. Stephens Green West, hugging the left lane as he headed for Grafton Street. There were better routes for him to make his connection with Tessie, but this was his way.

He liked to see all the people, Tessie said. God rest him, thats what he said he missed most when he quit the postal all the people.

Bley, slight and wrinkled, had that skin-stretched cadaverous look that is common among certain aged Celts from the south of Ireland. He wore a soiled brown hat almost the exact shade of his patched sweater, and he drove with the patient detachment of someone who came this way often. And if the truth were known, he rather liked being slowed by the heavy traffic.

It had been cold and wet through most of spring and, while it was still cloudy, the cloud cover had thinned and there was a feeling that there might be a break in the weather. Only a few of the pedestrians carried umbrellas. The trees of St. Stephens Green on Bleys right were in full leaf.

As the Ford inched along in the congested traffic, the man watching for it from a fourth-floor window of the Irish Film Society Building nodded once in satisfaction.

Right on time.

Bleys Ford had been selected because of this Wednesday punctuality. There was also the fact that Bley did not garage his car where he and Tessie lived in Davitt Road. The Ford was parked outside beside a thick yew hedge, which could be approached from the street along a path shielded by a parked van. There had been a van parked in this covering position the previous night. Neighbors had seen it but no one had thought to comment at the time.

There were often vehicles parked in that place, one said. How were we to know?