Willis, Connie - Doomsday Book (v2.1)

by Doomsday Book (lit)

  Dunworthy walked to the infirmary to fetch the supplies. The street in front of Casualties was jammed, a jumble of ambulance vans and taxis and protesters carrying a large sign that proclaimed, "The Prime Minister Has Left Us Here To Die." As he squeezed past them and in the door, Colin came running out. He was wet, as usual, and red-faced and red-nosed from the cold. His jacket was unstripped.

  The telephones are out," he said. "There was an overload. I'm running messages." He pulled an untidy clutch of folded papers from his jacket pocket. "Is there anyone you'd like me to take a message to?"

  Yes, he thought. To Andrews. To Basingame. To Kivrin. "No," he said.

  Colin stuffed the already wet messages back in his pocket. "I'm off then. If you're looking for Great-Aunt Mary, she's in Casualties. Five more cases just came in. A family. The baby was dead." He darted off through the traffic jam.

  Dunworthy pushed his way into Casualties and showed his list to the house officer, who directed him to Supplies. The corridors were still full of stretcher trolleys, though now they were lined lengthwise on both sides so there was a narrow passage between. Bending over one of the stretcher trolleys was a nurse in a pink mask and gown reading something to one of the patients.

  "'The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee,'" she said, and he realized too late that it was Mrs. Gaddson, but she was so intent on her reading she did not look up. "'Until he have consumed thee from the land.'"

  The pestilence shall cleave unto thee, he said silently, and thought of Badri. "It was the rats," Badri had said. "It killed them all. Half of Europe."

  She can't be in the Black Death, he thought, turning down the corridor to Supplies. Andrews had said the maximal slippage was five years. The plague hadn't even begun in China. Andrews had said the only two things that would not have automatically aborted the drop were the slippage and the coordinates, and Badri, when he could answer Dunworthy's questions, insisted he had checked Puhalski's coordinates.

  He went into Supplies. There was no one at the desk. He rang the bell.

  Each time Dunworthy had asked him, Badri had said the apprentice's coordinates were correct, but his fingers moved nervously over the sheet, typing, typing in the fix. That can't be right. There's something wrong.

  He rang the bell again, and a nurse emerged from among the shelves. She had obviously come out of retirement expressly for the epidemic. She was ninety at the least, and her starched white uniform was yellowed with age, but still stiff. It crackled when she took his list.

  "Have you a supply authorization?"

  "No," he said.

  She handed him back his list and a three-page form. "All orders must be authorized by the ward matron."

  "We haven't any ward matron," he said, his temper flaring. "We haven't any ward. We have fifty detainees in two dormitories and no supplies."

  "In that case, authorization must be obtained from the doctor in charge."

  "The doctor in charge has an infirmary full of patients to take care of. She doesn't have time to sign authorizations. There's an epidemic on!"

  "I am well aware of that," the nurse said frigidly. "All orders must be signed by the doctor in charge," and walked creakily back among the shelves.

  He went back to Casualties. Mary was no longer there. The house officer sent him up to Isolation, but she wasn't there either. He toyed with the idea of forging Mary's signature, but he wanted to see her, wanted to tell her about his failure to reach the techs, his failure to find a way to bypass Gilchrist and open the net. He could not even get a simple aspirin, and it was already the third of January.

  He finally ran Mary to ground in the laboratory. She was speaking into the telephone, which was apparently working again, though the visual was nothing but snow. She wasn't watching it. She was watching the console, which had the branching contacts chart on it. "What exactly is the difficulty?" she was saying. "You said it would be here two days ago."

  There was a pause while the person lost in the snow apparently made some sort of excuse.

  "What do you mean it was turned back?" she said incredulously. "I've got a thousand people with influenza here."

  There was another pause. Mary typed something into the console, and a different chart appeared.

  "Well, send it again," she shouted. "I need it now! I've got people dying here! I want it here by -- hullo? Are you there?" The screen went dead. She turned to click the receiver and caught sight of Dunworthy.

  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."

  The boy led Dunworthy into Badri's room, looked at the screens above the bed, and then down at Badri. At least he looks at the patient, Dunworthy thought.

  Badri lay with his hands outside the sheet, plucking at it with hands that looked like those in Colin's illustration of the knight's tomb. His sunken eyes were open, but he did not look at the nurse or at Dunworthy, or at the sheet, which his ceaseless hands could not seem to grasp.

  "I read about this in meds," the boy said, "but I've never actually seen it. It's a common terminal symptom in respiratory cases." He went to the console, punched something up, and pointed at the top left screen. "I've written it all down."

  He had, even the gibberish. He had written that phonetically, with ellipses to represent pauses, and (sic) after questionable words. "Rats," he had written, and "backer (sic)" and "Why doesn't he come?"

  "This is mostly from yesterday," he said. He moved a cursor to the lower third of the screen. "He talked a big this morning. Now, of course, he doesn't say anything."

  Dunworthy sat down beside Badri and took his hand. It was ice-cold even through the imperm glove. He glanced at the temp screen. Badri no longer had a fever or the dark flush that had gone with it. He seemed to have lost all color. His skin was the color of wet ashes.

  "Badri," he said. "It's Mr. Dunworthy. I need to ask you some questions."

  There was no response. His cold hand lay limply in Dunworthy's gloved one, and the other continued picking steadily, uselessly at the sheet.

  "Dr. Ahrens thinks you might have caught your illness from an animal, a wild duck or a goose."

  The nurse looked interestedly at Dunworthy and then back at Badri, as if he were hoping he would exhibit another yet- unobserved medical phenomenon.

  "Badri, can you remember? Did you have any contact with ducks or geese the week before the drop?"

  Badri's hand moved. Dunworthy frowned at it, wondering if he were trying to communicate, but when he loosened his grip a little, the thin, thin fingers were only trying to pluck at his palm, at his fingers, at his wrist.

  He was suddenly ashamed that he was sitting here torturing Badri with questions, though he was past hearing, past even knowing Dunworthy was here, or caring.

  He laid Badri's hand back on the sheet. "Rest," he said, patting it gently, "Try to rest."

  "I doubt if he can hear you," the nurse said. "When they're this far gone they're not really conscious."

  "No. I know," Dunworthy said, but he went on sitting there.

  The nurse adjusted a drip, peered nervously at it and adjusted it again. He looked anxiously at Badri, adjusted the drip a third time and finally went out. Dunworthy sat on, watching Badri's fingers plucking blindly at the sheet, trying to grasp it but unable to. Trying to hold on. Now and then he murmured something, too soft to hear. Dunworthy rubbed his arm gently, up and down. After awhile, the plucking grew slower, though Dunworthy didn't know if that was a good sign or not.

  "Graveyard," Badri said.

  "No," Dunworthy said. "No."

  He sat on a bit longer, rubbing Badri's arm, but after a little it seemed to make his agitation worse. He stood up. "Try to rest," he said and went out.

  The nurse was sitting at the desk, reading a copy of Patient Care.

  "Please notify me when ... " Dunworthy said, and realized he would not be able to finish the sentence. "Please notify me."

  "Yes, sir," the boy said. "Where are you?"

  He fumbled in his pocket for a scrap of paper to write on and came up with the list of supplies. He had nearly forgotten it. "I'm at Balliol," he said, "send a messenger," and went back down to Supplies.

  "You haven't filled this out properly," the crone said starchily when Dunworthy gave her the form.

  "I've had it signed," he said, handing her his list. "You fill it out."

  She looked disapprovingly at the list. "We haven't any masks or temps." She reached down a small bottle of aspirin. "We're out of synthamycin and AZL."

  The bottle of aspirin contained perhaps twenty tablets. He put them in his pocket and walked down to the High to the chemist's. A small crowd of protesters stood outside in the rain, holding pickets that said, "UNFAIR!" and "Price gouging!" He went inside. They were out of masks, and the temps and the aspirin were outrageously priced. He bought all they had.

  He spent the night dispensing them and studying Badri's chart, looking for some clue to the virus's source. Badri had run an on-site for Nineteenth Century in Hungary on the tenth of December, but the chart did not say where in Hungary , and William, who was flirting with the detainees who were still on their feet, didn't know, and the phones were still out.

  They were still out in the morning when Dunworthy tried to phone to check on Badri's condition. He could not even raise a dialing tone, but as soon as he put down the receiver, the telephone rang.

  It was Andrews. Dunworthy could scarcely hear his voice through the static. "Sorry this took so long," he said, and then something that was lost entirely.

  "I can't hear you," Dunworthy said.

  "I said, I've had difficulty getting through. The phones ... " More static. "I did the parameter checks. I used three different L-and-L's and triangulated the ... " The rest was lost.

  "What was the maximal slippage?" he shouted into the phone.

  The line went momentarily clear. "Six days."

  "Six days?" Dunworthy shouted. "Are you certain?"

  "That was with an L-and-L of ... " More static. "I ran probabilities, and the possible maximal for any L-and-L's within a circumference of fifty kilometers was still five years." The static roared in again, and the line went dead.

  Dunworthy put the receiver down. He should have felt reassured, but he could not seem to summon any feeling. Gilchrist had no intention of opening the net on the sixth, whether Kivrin was there or not. He reached for the phone to phone the Scottish Tourism Bureau, and as he did, it rang again.

  "Dunworthy here," he said, squinting at the screen, but the visuals were still nothing but snow.

  "Who?" a woman's voice that sounded hoarse or groggy said. "Sorry," it murmured, "I meant to ring -- " and something else too blurred to make out, and the visual went blank.

  He waited to see if it would ring again, and then went back across to Salvin. Magdalen's bell was chiming the hour. It sounded like a funeral bell in the unceasing rain. Ms. Piantini had apparently heard the bell, too. She was standing in the quad in her nightgown, solemnly raising her arms in an unheard rhythm. "Middle, wrong, and into the hunt," she said when Dunworthy tried to take her back inside.

  Finch appeared,
looking distraught. "It's the bells, sir," he said, taking hold of her other arm. "They upset her. I don't think they should ring them under the circumstances."

  Ms. Piantini wrenched free of Dunworthy's restraining hand. "Every man must stick to his bell without interruption," she said furiously.

  "I quite agree," Finch said, clutching her arm as firmly as if it were a bell rope, and led her back to her cot.

  Colin came skidding in, drenched as usual and nearly blue With cold. His jacket was open, and Mary's gray muffler dangled uselessly about his neck. He handed Dunworthy a message. "It's from Badri's nurse," he said, opening a packet of soap tablets and popping a light blue one into his mouth.

  The note was drenched, too. It read, "Badri asking for you," though the word 'Badri' was so blurred he couldn't make out more than the B.

  "Did the nurse say whether Badri was worse?"

  "No, just to give you the message. And Aunt Mary says when you come, you're to get your enhancement. She said she doesn't know when the analogue will get here."

  Dunworthy helped Finch wrestle Ms. Piantini into bed and hurried to Infirmary and up to isolation. There was another new nurse, this one a middle-aged woman with swollen feet. She was sitting with them propped up on the screens, watching a pocket vidder, but she stood up immediately when he came in.

  "Are you Mr. Dunworthy?" she asked, blocking his way. "Dr. Ahrens said you're to meet her downstairs immediately."

  She said it quietly, even kindly, and he thought, she's trying to spare me. She doesn't want me to see what's in there. She wants Mary to tell me first.

  "It's Badri, isn't it? He's dead."

  She looked genuinely surprised. "Oh, no, he's much better this morning. Didn't you get my note? He's sitting up."

  "Sitting up?" he said, staring at her, wondering if she were delirious with fever.

  "He's still very weak of course, but his temp's normal and he's alert. You're to meet Dr. Ahrens in casualties. She said it was urgent."