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 deeply 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 been 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