Phantoms

be grass, and there’ll be a herd of hungry cows all around me.”
    “Jack, I’m counting on you to make the right decisions, not just the right political decisions. Until we know more about the situation, we don’t want hordes of Guardsmen tramping around up here. They’re great for helping out in a flood, a postal strike, that sort of thing. But they’re not full-time military men. They’re salesmen and attorneys and carpenters and schoolteachers. This calls for a tightly controlled, efficient little police action, and that sort of thing can be conducted only by real cops, full-time cops.”
    “And if your men can’t handle it?”
    “Then I’ll be the first to yell for the Guard.”
    Finally Retlock said, “Okay. No Guardsmen. For now.”
    Bryce sighed. “And I want to keep the State Health Department out of here, too.”
    “Doody, be reasonable. How can I do that? If there’s any chance that a contagious disease has wiped out Snowfield—or some kind of environmental poisoning—”
    “Listen, Jack, Health does a fine job when it comes to tracking down and controlling vectors for outbreaks of plague or mass food poisoning or water contamination. But essentially, they’re bureaucrats; they move slowly. We can’t afford to move slowly on this. I have the gut feeling that we’re living strictly on borrowed time. All hell could break loose at any time; in fact, I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t. Besides, the Health Department doesn’t have the equipment to handle it, and they don’t have a contingency plan to cover the death of an entire town. But there’s someone who does, Jack. The Army Medical Corps’ CBW Division has a relatively new program they call the Civilian Defense Unit.”
    “CBW Division?” Retlock asked. There was a new tension in his voice. “You don’t mean the chemical and biological warfare boys?”
    “Yes.”
    “Christ, you don’t think it has anything to do with nerve gas or germ war—”
    “Probably not,” Bryce said, thinking of the Liebermanns’ severed heads, of the creepy feeling that had overcome him inside the covered passageway, of the incredible suddenness with which Jake Johnson had vanished. “But I don’t know enough about it to rule out CBW or anything else.”
    A hard edge of anger had crystallized in the governor’s voice. “If the damned army has been careless with one of its fucking doomsday viruses, I’m going to have their heads!”
    “Easy, Jack. Maybe it’s not an accident. Maybe it’s the work of terrorists who got their hands on a supply of some CBW agent. Or maybe it’s the Russians running a little test of our CBW analysis and defense system. It was to handle those kinds of situations that the Army Medical Corps instructed its CBW Division to create General Copperfield’s office.”
    “Who’s Copperfield?”
    “General Galen Copperfield. He’s the Commanding officer of the Civilian Defense Unit of the CBW Division. This is precisely the kind of situation they want to be notified about. Within hours, Copperfield can put a team of well-known scientists into Snowfield. First-rate biologists, virologists, bacteriologists, pathologists with training in the very latest forensic medicine, at least one immunologist and biochemist, a neurologist—and even a neuropsychologist. Copperfield’s department has designed elaborate mobile field laboratories. They’ve got them garaged at depots all over the country, so there must be one relatively close to us. Hold off the State Health gang, Jack. They don’t have people of the caliber that Copperfield can provide, and they don’t have state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment as mobile as Copperfield’s. I want to call the general; I am going to call him, in fact, but I’d prefer to have your agreement and your guarantee that state bureaucrats won’t be tramping around here, interfering.”
    After a brief hesitation, Jack Retlock said, “Doody, what kind of world have we let it become when things like Copperfield’s department are even necessary?”
    “You’ll hold off Health?”
    “Yes. What else do you need?”
    Bryce glanced down at the list in front of him. “You could approach the telephone company about pulling the Snowfield circuits off automatic switching. When the world finds out what’s happened up here, every phone in town will be ringing off the hook, and we won’t be able to maintain essential communications. If they could route all calls to and from Snowfield