Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,181

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 primaries, in spite of all the false leads, the 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 blond 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 arms 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. “Half,” 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 bit 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