Dooms Day Book

She beckoned him into the office. “Are you there?” she said into the telephone. “Hullo?” She slammed the receiver down. “The phones don’t work, half my staff is down with the virus, and the analogues aren’t here because some idiot wouldn’t let them into the quarantine area!” she said angrily.

She sank down in front of the console and rubbed her fingers against her cheekbones. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s been rather a bad day. I’ve had three DOA’s this afternoon. One of them was six months old.”

She was still wearing the sprig of holly on her lab coat. Both it and the lab coat were much the worse for wear, and Mary looked impossibly tired, the lines around her mouth and eyes cutting deep into her face. He wondered how long it had been since she had slept and whether, if he were to ask her, she would even know.

She rubbed two fingers along the lines above her eyes. “One never gets used to the idea that there is nothing one can do,” she said.

“No.”

She looked up at him, almost as if she hadn’t realized he was there. “Was there something you needed, James?”

She had had no sleep, and no help, and three DOA’s, one of them a baby. She had enough on her mind without worrying over Kivrin.

“No,” he said, standing up. He handed her the form. “Nothing but your signature.”

She signed it without looking at it. “I went to see Gilchrist this morning,” she said, handing it back to him.

He looked at her, too surprised and touched to speak.

“I went to see if I could convince him to open the net earlier. I explained that there’s no need to wait until there’s been full immunization. Immunization of a critical percentage of the virus pool effectively eliminates the contagion vectors.”

“And none of your arguments had the slightest effect on him.”

“No. He’s utterly convinced the virus came through from the past.” Mary sighed. “He’s drawn up charts of the cyclical mutation patterns of Type A myxoviruses. According to them, one of the Type A myxoviruses extant in 1318-19 was an H9N2.” She rubbed at her forehead again. “He won’t open the laboratory until full immunization’s completed and the quarantine’s lifted.”

“And when will that be?” he asked, though he had a good idea.

“The quarantine has to remain in effect until seven days after full immunization or fourteen days after final incidence,” she said as if she were giving him bad news.

Final incidence. Two weeks with no new cases. “How long will nationwide immunization take?”

“Once we get sufficient supplies of the vaccine, not long. The Pandemic only took eighteen days.”

Eighteen days. After sufficient supplies of the vaccine were manufactured. The end of January. “That’s not soon enough,” he said.

“I know. We must positively identify the source, that’s all.” She turned to look at the console. “The answer’s in here, you know. We’re simply looking in the wrong place.” She punched in a new chart. “I’ve been running correlations, looking for veterinary students, primaries who live near zoos, rural addresses. This one’s of secondaries listed in DeBrett’s, grouse-hunting and all that. But the closest any of them’s come to a waterfowl is eating goose for Christmas.”

She punched up the contacts chart. Badri’s name was still at the top of it. She sat and looked at it a long moment, as remote as Montoya staring at her bones.

“The first thing a doctor has to learn is not to be too hard on himself when he loses a patient,” she said, and he wondered if she meant Kivrin or Badri.

“I’m going to get the net open,” he said.

“I hope so,” she said.

The answer did not lie in the contacts charts or the commonalities. It lay in Badri, whose name was still, in spite of all the questions they had asked the secondaries, in spite of all the false leads, the primary source. Badri was the index case, and sometime in the four to six days before the drop he had been in contact with a reservoir.

He went up to see him. There was a different nurse at the desk outside Badri’s room, a tall, nervous youth who looked no more than seventeen.

“Where’s…” Dunworthy began and realized he didn’t know the blonde nurse’s name.

“She’s down with it,” the boy said. “Yesterday. She’s the twentieth of the nursing staff to catch it, and they’re out of subs. They asked for third-year students to help. I’m actually only first-year, but I’ve had first-aid training.”

Yesterday. A whole day had passed, then, with no one recording what Badri said. “Do you remember anything Badri might have said while you were in with him?” he said without hope. A first-year student. “Any words or phrases you could understand?”

“You’re Mr. Dunworthy, aren’t you?” the boy said. He handed him a set of SPG’s. “Eloise said you wanted to know everything the patient said.”

Dunworthy put on the newly-arrived SPG’s. They were white and marked with tiny black crosses along the back opening of the gown. He wondered where they’d resorted to borrowing them from.

“She was awfully ill and she kept saying over and over how important it was.”