Taji's Syndrome (15 page)

“Okay,” said Reed. He let his thoughts wander briefly, and then he said, “Do you mind if I look over those printouts? I don’t know if I can help any, but sometimes two heads are better than one.”

Picknor shrugged and handed a stack to Reed. “Help yourself. If you see anything you can make heads or tails of, tell me about it, won’t you.”

Reed was almost halfway through the printouts when his office called back saying that Mrs. Wentworth would meet him at his office or the hospital, whichever he preferred, at six-thirty. “Tell her to make it the hospital, then, the out-patient entrance—that’ll save time. Thanks, Marge.”

“Sure thing, Doctor Reed,” she said.

Reed went back to the printouts with a growing sense of defeat.

—Corwen Blair and Wilson Landholm—

“There are more than twenty kids in the school out with that stuff, and that’s in addition to the dead ones,” Wil Landholm shouted into the telephone. “I want someone from your department to move ass down here right now and start checking this out before we have a full-scale epidemic on our hands.”

“Doctor Landhold, I’m sure that—”

“Land
holm,”
he corrected. “Doctor Wilson Justice Landholm. Your office must have my credentials on file somewhere.” His temper was not helping him, he knew, but he was not willing to play the endless games that the bureaucrats demanded. “Don’t give me any shit, Blair. I know about you and the trouble you got into during the Tunis Flu. We could have saved two thousand more people if you hadn’t held us up with paperwork forever. Your office was so busy making sure you were protected that you left everyone else out in the cold.” Before he could compound his offense, Landholm took a deep breath and deliberately let it out on a slow count of eight.

“Doctor Landholm,” said Blair in a condescending tone, “I don’t want to upset you any more than you obviously are already, but you have to understand that one of the purposes of our office is to assuage the general public’s fears so that we will not have any panic. If there is some sort of communicable disease with a high fatality rate, than it behooves us to do everything possible to calm the citizens. If they are permitted to panic, they might leave the area, and then we would have trouble, because the disease could not be contained.”

“Did you actually say ‘behooves’?” Landholm wondered aloud.

“It is the correct word, Doctor Landholm,” said Blair. “Not that it would matter to you. You specialize in athletic medicine, don’t you? Sports injuries, tennis elbow, football knee, that sort of thing?”

Landholm bit back two equally contemptuous retorts, then said evenly, “I want to understand why it is that you are permitting this to go uninvestigated. I want it on record that I believe you are exceeding your authority in this matter, that you are abusing the public trust, that you are not acting in the best interests of the people of this state. And furthermore, I am going to contact the Environmental Authority in Washington to find out what might be causing this outbreak.” He wanted the satisfaction of slamming down the receiver, but was stopped by the cold, imposing tones of Corwen Blair.

“You’re free to do that, of course. But if it turns out that you have made a mountain of a molehill, Doctor Landholm, I want you to know that I will do everything in my power to see that you lose your license and I will sue you for slander and defamation of character. Win or lose, I will tie up your life in litigation for the next decade.”

“See you in court, Doctor Blair,” Landholm muttered as he hung up.

Blair glowered at his telephone, furious that he was deprived of the satisfaction of hanging up first. When at last he put the phone down, he had brought his breathing almost back to normal and the flush had receded from his fair skin. He stared at the notepad on his desk and tried to decipher what he had said to himself.

“Doctor Blair?” said one of his underlings from the door, a fresh-faced young woman recently out of internship. She was an exotic in this office, a talented internist of Mexican-Vietnamese parentage who had placed fifth in her class but had not yet found a specialty that attracted her.

“Miss Paniagua,” he said, forgetting her proper title as usual.

“You sent for me? It’s eleven o’clock.” She looked at her watch as if there might be some doubt.

“Oh, I hadn’t realized it was so late. That last call took longer than I had anticipated.” He moved away from the desk, then said as if he had a passing thought, “Have we had any change in the incidence of mononucleosis recently? Any increase or more severe cases?”

“I don’t know,” said Dien Paniagua. “Would you like me to look up the records?”

“If you would. There’s no rush, of course, but I gather that there might be a slight increase and it would be sensible to keep an eye on the stats, in case we need to issue schoolwide recommendations and physicians’ advisories.” He squared up the stack of envelopes at the corner of his desk. “Also, if there are any indications that we ought to be on the alert for some kind of toxic reaction in the general public, something that has to do with an old dump or maybe delayed fallout reaction from the old testing grounds, keep me informed, will you?”

“Of course,” said Dien Paniagua, curious to know who had brought this on. In the sixteen months she had worked for Blair her respect for him had eroded steadily, so that now she thought of him only as an incompetent physician interested in protecting his place in the power structure, and willing to do whatever seemed expedient to maintain it. As she followed him down the hall, she decided that she would take the time to review the various reports that came into their office to try to find out what was behind this atypical interest.

The conference room was larger than necessary, and the chair at the head of the long table was taller than the others, and had two massive padded arms to enhance its throne-like image. Though there were only going to be four people at the meeting, Blair predictably took the head chair and indicated that Doctor Paniagua should sit four places down from him. Neither of the other two persons attending the meeting was permitted any nearer their boss.

“I have called this meeting in order to inform you that we will be up for federal review again in six months, and the matching funds from the federal government will be reassessed. If we are to keep up our current duties, we will need to convince both the federal and state authorities that we are in need of more money and more help. You will all agree that the work load is too great for the number of men and women we have on the job here. Therefore, I want each of you to take the time to outline the upcoming projects you plan to pursue and to specify the amount of money and personnel you will need in order to complete those projects with the greatest dispatch. I do not want you to cut corners, nor to be sparing of budget. Remember, we always have ways to spend the money we have, but we do not always have ways to get more.” He spread his hands face down on the table. “So far each of your departments has shown a tendency not to meet deadlines, and for that reason, I think it best that you consider your projects both at current manpower and with increased employment.”

“But it isn’t a manpower problem, it’s a time problem,” said Tracy Bell unwisely. “We simply don’t have time enough to gather all the data we need. If we could extend our deadlines we could manage with our current work force very easily.”

Blair’s face darkened. “I don’t believe what I am hearing, Doctor Bell. You do not appreciate our position within the State Department of Health, and if you do not, it is time you did.”

All three of his underlings concealed sighs with varying degrees of success.

“Doctor Blair,” said Daniel Vitale, “we all share that same problem, and there’s no use saying that it isn’t important, or that more manpower is the answer: it isn’t, that’s all there is. You may want to think so, and that’s up to you, but I have to warn you that the reports we are sending out of my section are inadequate and misleading because we do not have enough time to compile our material and get useful comparative curves. We handle disability in my division, and that is a tricky area. In limiting us to six-month units, we have little opportunity to show either recovery rates, or seasonal fluctuations in the various accidents and injuries we have to process.” He stood up, one hand on his hip. “Recently there’s been a slight increase in short-term claims, but unless we’re given longer units of time, we can’t know if this is part of a normal cycle, or something else.”

“I’ll consider what you say. It might be worthwhile to consider establishing a long-term statistical analysis branch to overview all the departments. That way we’ll be able to interrelate all our data.” Blair’s close-set eyes shone at the very thought. “We’ll need to think about that.”

Vitale shook his head with frustration. “If you’ll forgive my saying so, Doctor Blair, we do not need another layer of paperwork and muddle to weight us down, we need, if anything, a simplification of our current system, not the addition of another cumbersome department.” He looked at Tracy Bell and Dien Paniagua. “What do you say? Can we get together and come up with a plan for simplification? Would you be willing to spend a couple extra evenings a week for the next month or so working out a way to streamline our departments?”

“Fine with me,” said Bell.

“I can make arrangements,” said Paniagua, who had a three-year-old son at home.

“You see, Doctor Blair? We’re willing. It won’t cut into your time and there’s no reason for you to—”

“This is ridiculous!” thundered Blair. “Good God, man, do you realize what you’re suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting we find a way to deliver health information to the people of this state,” said Vitale with asperity. “We aren’t doing a very good job of that now, and if we muck it up with more bureaucracy, we’ll deliver even less.”

“Your behavior is inexcusable,” said Blair with a frown that had frightened lesser men than Dan Vitale.

“I’m trying to do the work I was hired to do, sir. No disrespect intended, Doctor Blair, but this department has not been very successful in that department. After the way we screwed up on the Tunis Flu, I think we ought to try to clean up our act.”

That was twice in one day that the Tunis Flu had come up and by now Corwen Blair wanted to hear no more of it. He rose to his feet and leaned forward on the table so that he loomed over the others. “I have heard quite enough out of you, young man. When you have dried off behind the ears, you might be prepared to offer your criticism on the performance of this department, and the rest of the state bureaucracy, for that matter. But until you have a track record that consists of more than your medical degree, I suggest—I very strongly suggest—that you comply with my order. Is that clear?”

“You bet,” said Vitale angrily. “Yes sir, sir.”

“I am going to dismiss you all and I will expect to hear from you tomorrow with the plans I have already outlined to you. If you have some reason to question the advisability of these plans, we may discuss them in private then. Otherwise I will regard these last remarks as an unfortunate lapse, the result of zeal. If they are renewed in any way, I will have to change my mind. And that might have repercussions, Doctor Vitale. Is that clear?”

“It’s clear,” said Vitale. “I got you.” He turned on his heel and left the room.

In the abrupt silence that followed Vitale’s departure, Tracy Bell and Dien Paniagua exchanged covert and uneasy glances, though neither gave any sign of noticing the gravity of the insult Vitale had given Blair.

“I will expect both of you to be in my office before noon tomorrow,” Blair announced, his voice loud and forceful.

“All right,” said Tracy Bell, rising and gathering up her attaché case. “Tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning,” echoed Dien Paniagua, wishing she had the courage to do what Dan had done. If only she did not have a child to support, if only she did not fear being unable to work. If worse came to worse, there were clinics where she might practice, but the pay was often poor and the locations unsafe. The reason she had taken this job was that the money was good and the hours predictable, so that she would not have to leave her child with sitters all the time. These considerations and apprehensions ran in endless repetition as she went back to her office.

At last, in desperation, she went to the main computer room and asked to see the reported incidents of mononucleosis for the last four months. She needed something to take her mind off the conflicts that seethed in her. Long ago she had learned the anodyne use of study and now she sought it as eagerly as an addict.

Two hours later, looking at the improvised graph she had prepared, she knew she had not escaped from anything, that the unpleasantness in the office was nothing more than a minor irritation. What she had found in her reading and figuring was more than an outbreak of mononucleosis, it was a potential epidemic of an unknown and deadly disease that appeared to have the greatest incidence in teenagers. She leaned back in her chair, pondering the best way to convince Corwen Blair that his greatest success might lie in bringing this to the attention of the medical professionals in the state as soon as possible, a prospect that chilled her almost as much as the thought of the possible outcome if he did not. for she knew without doubt that unwatched and unchecked the disease would increase and spread quickly, geometrically. She put the graph in her leather file envelope, determined to study the figures further in order to strengthen her argument. She was not looking forward to trying to convince Corwen Blair that they had a potential epidemic on their hands.

—Sam Jarvis and Maximillian Klausen—

“We’ve got an inquiry I thought you might be interested in,” Sam told Harper Ross on the phone.

“Oh?” Harper sounded more fatigued than the week before, but his determination had not slackened. “What about?”

“About the syndrome,” said Sam, knowing that those words would get Harper’s full attention.

“What does it say?” Harper asked sharply.

“It’s from Portland, from the new complex there, the one that specializes in environmental conditions. It seems that there’s a small town in Oregon that’s been hit with the same thing we’re seeing in Seattle, or something very like it.”