Doomsday Book

"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.