The White Plague by Frank Herbert Read Free Book Online

the night in an outlying motel, collected his money from the safety deposit box in the morning, and John Leo Patrick McCarthy headed west.
    The transition had gone much more simply than he had anticipated. There remained one more essential detail to complete it. Over the next three days, he removed the hair from his head. There had been a choice – shave or do something more permanent. He chose the latter course, not an insurmountable task for a biochemist, although it proved painful and left a fine network of pink scars, tiny veins that he knew would fade in time.
    The mole on his left cheek vanished under an application of liquid nitrogen, leaving a scabbed sore that would in time become a puckered dimple.
    The change fascinated him. He examined it carefully in the bathroom mirror of a Spokane motel. The flashing neon of an adjoining hamburger stand cast a baleful stroboscopic glare across the side of his face as the light flashed on the bathroom’s drawn shade. He smiled. John Roe O’Neill, rather plump and with a rich matt of brown hair, a distinctive mole on his cheek, had become this bald, slender man with eyes of a burning intensity.
    “Hello, John Leo Patrick McCarthy,” he whispered.
    Four days later, the first Friday in October, he moved into a furnished rental house in the Ballard suburb of Seattle, Washington. He had a one-year lease and only a bank with which to deal. The owners lived in Florida.
    The Ballard house suited his purpose perfectly. The ease with which he had found it struck him as an omen. The owners had painted it a muddy brown with white trim. It sat anonymously in a mishmash row of other houses equally anonymous. The houses had been built on a long, low embankment, some sporting rockeries, some steep lawns. Most of them possessed daylight basements and garages under the main floor. John’s garage opened into the basement with ample room to unload the power wagon.
    The furniture was garage-sale jumble and the bed sagged. Old cooking smells permeated the house and persisted in the draperies. There was an odor of stale tobacco in the bathroom. He flushed the toilet and caught his reflection in the mirror over the sink.
    None of his old mildness had survived. This Other was driven from within. He leaned close to the mirror and looked at the puckering scar where he had removed the mole. In that pitted void he sensed a final break with his past, the past of Mary who had called the mole his “beauty spot.” He tried to remember the sensation of her kiss on that place; this memory, too, had gone. The shifting of his memories, the unchecked displacements, sent a shudder through him. He turned away from the mirror quickly. There were things to do.
    In the next few days he made essential changes in the house – translucent film over basement and garage windows to shield him from prying eyes, burglar alarms, a substantial stock of food. The fireproof box went into a bricked-over secret cache he built behind the furnace. Only then did he feel free to start setting up the purchase routine for the special equipment his project required.
    The thing that surprised him the most over the following weeks was the ease with which he acquired esoteric necessities. Telephone calls and money orders from anyone putting a “Doctor” in front of his name appeared to be the only requirement. He had everything sent to warehouse and accommodation drops, using different names, always paying cash.
    While he was busy, memories remained tame and manageable. At night in bed, though, the shifting kaleidoscope in his mind often kept him awake.
    It was an odd thing , he thought, and not easily explained . John O’Neill had found it impossible to remember the fatal bomb’s explosion. John McCarthy remembered it in detail. He remembered the newspaper clippings, O’Neill’s screaming features in the photograph. But that person of the photo was gone. John McCarthy could remember him, though. He could recall the talks with