work, but we’re still trying to pin the tail on that donkey. We don’t have anything to offer right now.”
Henry explained his experiment on the submarine, using the variolation procedure. Marco looked at him with unbridled astonishment. “You figured this out on a submarine?” he asked.
“Well, I had to do something.”
“You must make your variolation technique public right away,” Marco said.
Henry nodded in a distracted manner.
“Henry! You did it! You’ve effectively created a vaccine! Don’t you realize what you’ve done?”
* * *
—
BUT HE HADN’T FOUND his children. Over the next week he spent mornings and evenings searching the city and afternoons in the lab. The city was odd, broken, diminished. Others were wandering through the hospitals and cemeteries, like him searching for records or familiar faces. In Centennial Park there were hundreds of Missing posters pasted on a wall. They told a story of shattered families and lost loves. Some had photographs taped onto them. So many happy faces.
The absence of any formal order was the city’s most noticeable quality. No cops, no soldiers, just people. This is what anarchy looks like, Henry thought. There wasn’t as much chaos as he had expected, although gangs and beggars filled the streets and public places. They seemed more insolent than threatening. Henry realized that everyone was in shock.
There was a woman in Centennial Park who approached him as he was putting up his poster. “Your children?” she said.
“Yes.”
She smiled and said how sweet they looked. Then she said, “My children are dead.”
Henry looked at her. She was in her thirties, he supposed, although like with many survivors her face was ravaged by the disease. Her hands were red and raw. He said how sorry he was for her loss.
“I hope you find yours,” she said.
“Thank you. I will.”
“I hope you do.” Then she leaned toward him and whispered, “Do you want to kiss me?”
Henry quickly drew away, then realized his unconscious reaction had been a dart in her heart. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m in mourning. It’s just not the right time.”
The woman was crying now. “I just wanted someone to talk to me,” she blurted out.
“I can talk to you,” Henry said. “What do you want me to say?”
“Tell me I’m beautiful.”
Henry looked at her blotched and pitted face. “You’re beautiful to me,” he said.
* * *
—
HENRY WAS BOTHERED by the fact that the first human case of Kongoli had not been firmly fixed. It could explain whether the virus had passed from an animal host or was genetically engineered. While he was journeying home, the lab had tracked the previous infections in China, which were confined and likely passed from birds to individuals. The path of infection suggested that Kongoli originated in Manchuria or Siberia. He asked Marco to track any animal die-offs in that region preceding the Chinese infections. That might offer a clue to the origin of the virus.
“Anything new on the phylogeny?” he asked.
“We can’t find a direct evolutionary path,” said Nandi, a lab technician who had worked on Ebola with Henry. She had a dendrogram of Kongoli on her computer screen. It resembled a family tree, tracking backward to show how the influenza viruses had evolved. On it, the outbreak in Indonesia seemed to have come out of nowhere.
“Either it’s from outer space or it’s an engineered virus,” Marco said.
“Right,” said Henry. “Or…”
Everyone stopped what they were doing. Henry was famous for his off-the-wall ideas. “Suppose it’s not new. Suppose it’s old—really old.”
“Some kind of protovirus?” Marco asked.
“It would still be on the graph,” Nandi insisted. “It covers more than a hundred years of influenza mutations, all the way back to the 1918 pandemic.”
“Can you extend the temporal markers by checking against archaic viruses?”
“I’d have to get into a different database,” said Nandi. “There was a phylogenetic tree I saw somewhere on PubMed that postulated the early origins of influenza.” Five minutes later she asked, “How far back?”
“Try a thousand years.”
Nandi entered the parameters. Here she found the common branch of the A and B viruses, but nothing that resembled Kongoli.
“Five thousand,” said Henry.
Here influenza C appeared and was connected to the stem of A and B viruses.
“We’re close,” said Henry. “Let’s try ten thousand years.”
Nandi suddenly drew back from her screen. “Oh, wow. I got something.”
Everyone in the lab gathered around her computer, blocking Henry’s view. “What is it?” he demanded. The team parted enough for Henry to see. There was a sequence that looked very similar to Kongoli. “What’s the history of this agent?”