16.The Jupiter Legacy by Harry Harrison

Looks like a question mark

I took this book mainly on the strength of its cover design.  I was a big fan of Harry Harrison in my teenage years, but won't go out of my way to read his books now a days.  I just really dug the cover and it is about a plague, which is Post-Apocolyptic adjacent.  The original title was "Plague from Space".  I bet there are some much more illustrative and action-oriented earlier covers with that title and then when we got into the late '60s (this version was published in 1970), they wanted a more conceptual and heady look and title.

The protagonist, Sam Bertolli, is an intern, late in life to become a doctor, working on the emergency shift.  He and his driver get a call to JFK airport where a ship that had gone to Venus, has landed basically frying a bunch of the airport and now just sitting there amongst the ruins.  It's gigantic and when they get there,  the main door opens and a sick man comes out.  He dies before he can say anything, other than "sick in ship".  They quarantine him but soon learn that somehow, when the main door was open a disease beam shot out of the ship in a straight line, infecting anything that it hit, which was birds.

The birds soon become the vector for this strange space disease that kills in hours.  The odd thing about the disease is that (at first) it only jumps from birds to humans, but not humans to humans.  While trying to figure out the disease, they also have to decide on the logistical response, which means killing all the birds and setting up a perimeter.  Though Bertolli is only an intern, he has some connected past which I forgot, so he gets access to everything.  He must figure out the source of the disease and deal with bureaucracy and ignorant colleagues.

The first half of the book was quite grim, lacking the light touch that is Harrison's usual style.  It's a pretty dark look at what would happen if you tried to kill all the birds around the tri-state area and prevent people from leaving.  There are a couple of bad plot points that extend the narrative, the big one being that the doctors decide to seal off the rocket and not let anybody go inside and investigate.  Bertolli, at first agrees with this decision.  The plan is to nuke it! This is so stupid.  Of course, they would go in and investigate, even with the risk of losing other diseases.  Set up a perimeter around the entire rocket, send people in with hazmat suits.  Furthermore, Bertolli suddenly changes his mind about halfway through, I guess out of desperation, though the book does not offer any explanation.  So now he has to escape the bureaucratically repressive doctors  to meet up with his old General and break into the rocket.

Despite the flawed premise, the book really kicks into gear in the second half.  It moves away from dour social collapse to fun individual adventure with a pretty fun sci-fi explanation as to what is going on.  The action moves forward as does the reader's desire to find out.  This is a neat multi-genre story that is a bit flawed in its construction but mostly fun in execution and concept.