Darwin's Radio

36 Eastern Washington State

Wide and slow, the Columbia River glided like a plain of polished jade between black basalt walls.

Mitch pulled off state route 14, drove for half a mile on a dirt and gravel road through scrub trees and bushes, then turned at a bent and rusted sheet-metal sign that read IRON CAVE.

Two old Airstream trailers gleamed in the sun a few yards from the edge of the gorge. Wooden benches and tables heaped with burlap sacks and digging tools surrounded the trailers. He parked the car off the road.

A chill breeze picked at his felt Stetson. He gripped the hat with one hand as he walked from the car to the edge and stared down upon Eileen Ripper’s encampment, fifty feet below.

A short young blond woman in frayed and faded jeans and a brown leather jacket stepped down from the door of the nearest trailer. In the moist air off the river, he instantly picked up the young woman’s scent: Opium or Trouble or some such perfume. She looked remarkably like Tilde.

The woman paused under the outstretched awning, then stepped out and shaded her eyes against the sun. “Mitch Rafelson?” she asked.

“None other,” he said. “Is Eileen down there?”

“Yeah. It’s falling apart, you know.”

“Since when?”

“Since three days ago. Eileen worked real hard to make her case. Didn’t make much difference in the long run.”

Mitch grinned sympathetically. “Been there,” he said.

“The woman from Five Tribes packed up two days ago. That’s why Eileen thought it would be okay for you to come out here. Nobody gets mad now if you show up.”

“Nice to be popular,” Mitch said, and tipped his hat.

The woman smiled. “Eileen is feeling low. Give her some encouragement. I think you’re a hero, myself. Except maybe for those mummies.”

“Where is she?”

“Just below the cave.”

Oliver Merton sat on a folding chair in the shadow of the largest canvas canopy. About thirty, with flaming red hair, a pale broad face and short pushed-up nose, he wore a look of utter and almost fierce concentration, his lips drawn back as he punched the keyboard of a laptop computer with his index fingers.

Hunt-and-peck, Mitch thought. A self-taught typist . He checked out the man’s clothes, distinctly out of place at a dig: tweed slacks, red suspenders, a white linen dress shirt with a banded collar.

Merton did not look up until Mitch was within touching distance of the canopy.

“Mitchell Rafelson! What a pleasure!” Merton shifted the computer to the table, jumped to his feet, and held out his hand. “It’s damned gloomy here. Eileen is up the slope by the dig. I’m sure she’s eager to see you. Shall we?”

The six other workers on the site, all young interns or graduate students, looked up in curiosity as the two men passed. Merton walked ahead of Mitch and climbed over natural shelves cut by centuries of river erosion. They paused twenty feet below the bluff where an old, rust-streaked cave dug into an outcrop of basalt. Above and east of the outcrop, part of an overlying ledge of weathered stone had collapsed, scattering large blocks down the gentle slope to the shore.

Eileen Ripper stood at the outside of a posted series of carefully excavated square pits marked with topometric grids — wire and string — on the western side of the slope. In her late forties, small and dark, with deep-set black eyes and a thin nose, Ripper’s most conspicuous beauty lay in her generous lips, which contrasted appealingly with a short, unruly cap of peppered black hair.

She turned at Merton’s hail. She did not smile or call out. Instead, she put on a determined face, walked gingerly down the talus, and held out her hand to Mitch. They shook firmly.

“We got radiocarbon figures back yesterday morning,” she said. “They’re thirteen thousand years old, plus or minus five hundred…and if they ate a lot of salmon, they’re twelve thousand five hundred years old. But the Five Tribes folks say that Western science is trying to strip them of the last of their dignity. I thought I could reason with them.”

“At least you made the effort,” Mitch said.

“I apologize for judging you so harshly, Mitch. I kept my cool for so long, despite little signs of trouble, and then this woman, Sue Champion…I thought we were friends. She advises the tribes. She comes back here yesterday with two men. The men were…so smug, Mitch. Like little boys who can piss higher up the barn door. They tell me I am fabricating evidence to support my lies. They say they have the government and the law on their side. Our old nemesis, NAGPRA.”

That stood for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Mitch was very familiar with the details of this legislation.

Merton stood on the loose slope, trying to keep from slipping, and made little darting glances between them.

“What evidence did you fabricate?” Mitch asked lightly.

“Don’t joke.” But Ripper’s expression loosened and she held Mitch’s hand between hers. “We took collagen from the bones and sent it to Portland. They did a DNA analysis. Our bones are from a different population, not at all related to modern Indians, only loosely related to the Spirit Cave mummy. Caucasoid, if we can use that loose term. But hardly Nordic. More Ainu, I believe.”

“That’s historic, Eileen,” Mitch said. “That’s excellent. Congratulations.”

Once started, Ripper couldn’t seem to stop. They walked down the trail to the tents. “We can’t even begin to make modern racial comparisons. That is what is so infuriating! We let our screwball notions of race and identity cloud the truth. Populations were so different back then. But modern Indians did not come from the people our skeletons belonged to. They may have competed with the ancestors of modern Indians. And they lost.”

“The Indians won?” Merton said. “They should be glad to hear it.”

“They think I’m trying to divide their political unity. They don’t care about what really happened. They want their own little dream world and the hell with truth!”

“You’re telling me?” Mitch asked.

Ripper smiled through tears of discouragement and exhaustion. “The Five Tribes have got counsel petitioning in federal court in Seattle to take the skeletons.”

“Where are the bones now?”

“In Portland. We packed them up in situ and shipped them out yesterday.”

“Across state lines?” Mitch asked. “That’s kidnapping.”

“It’s better than waiting around for a bunch of lawyers.” She shook her head and Mitch put an arm around her shoulders. “I tried to do it right, Mitch.” She wiped at her cheeks with a dusty hand, leaving muddy streaks, and forced a laugh. “Now I’ve even got the Vikings mad at us!”

The Vikings — a small group of mostly middle-aged men calling themselves the Nordic Worshippers of Odin in the New World — had come to Mitch as well, years before, to conduct their ceremonies. They had hoped that Mitch could prove their claims that Nordic explorers had populated much of North America thousands of years ago. Mitch, ever the philosopher, had let them conduct a ritual over the bones of Pasco man, still in the ground, but ultimately he had had to disappoint them. Pasco man was in fact quite thoroughly Indian, closely related to the Southern Na-dene.

After Ripper’s tests on her skeletons, the Worshippers of Odin had once again left in disappointment. In a world of fragile self-justification, the truth made no one happy.

Merton brought out a bottle of champagne and vacuum packs of smoked salmon and fresh bread and cheese as the daylight waned. Several of Ripper’s students built a large fire that snapped and crackled on the shore as Mitch and Eileen toasted their mutual insanity.

“Where’d you get this feed?” Ripper asked Merton as he spread the camp’s battered Melmac plates on the bare pine table beneath the largest canopy.

“At the airport,” Merton said. “Only place I had time to stop. Bread, cheese, fish, wine — what more does one need? Though I could use a good pint of bitter.”

“I’ve got Coors in the trailer,” a burly, balding male intern said.

“Breakfast of diggers,” Mitch said approvingly.

“Spare me,” Merton said. “And pardon me if I tell everyone to dig in. Everyone has a story to tell.” He took a plastic cup of champagne from Ripper. “Of race and time and migration and what it means to be a human being. Who wants to be first?”

Mitch knew he had only to keep silent for a couple of seconds and Ripper would start in. Merton took notes as she talked about the three skeletons and local politics. An hour and a half later, it was getting bitterly cold and they moved closer to the fire.

“The Altai tribes resent having ethnic Russians dig up their dead,” Merton said. “It’s an indigenous revolt everywhere. A slap on the wrist to the colonial oppressors. Do you think the Neandertals have their spokespersons in Innsbruck picketing right now?”

“Nobody wants to be a Neandertal,” Mitch said dryly.

“Except me.” He turned to Eileen. “I’ve been dreaming about them. My little nuclear family.”

“Really?” Eileen leaned forward, intrigued.

“I dreamed their people lived on a big raft in a lake.”

“Fifteen thousand years ago?” Merton asked, raising an eyebrow.

Mitch caught something in the reporter’s tone and looked at him suspiciously. “Is that your guess?” he asked. “Or have they got a date?”

“None they’re releasing to the public,” Merton said with a sniff. “I have a contact at the university, however…and he tells me they’ve definitely settled on fifteen thousand years. If, that is,” and he smiled at Ripper, “they didn’t eat a lot of fish.”

“What else?”

Merton punched the air dramatically. “Pugilism,” he said. “Raging arguments in the back rooms. Your mummies violate everything known in anthropology and archaeology. They’re not strictly Neandertal, so claim a few in the main research team; they’re a new subspecies, Homo sapiens alpinensis, according to one scientist. Another is betting they’re late stage gracile Neandertals who lived in a large community, got less stocky and robust, looked more like you and me. They hope to explain away the infant.”

Mitch lowered his head. They don ‘tfeel this the way I do. They don’t know the way I know. Then he drew back and blanketed these emotions. He had to keep some level of objectivity.

Merton turned toward Mitch. “Did you see the baby?”

This made Mitch jerk upright in his folding chair. Merton’s eyes narrowed. “Not clearly,” Mitch said. “I just assumed, when they said it was a modern infant…”

“Could Neandertal traits be masked by infant features?” Merton asked.

“No,” Mitch said. Then, with a squint, “I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think so, either,” Ripper agreed. The students had gathered close around this discussion. The fire snapped and hissed and flung up tall yellow arms that grabbed at the cold, still sky. The river lapped the gravelly shore with a sound like a clockwork dog licking a hand. Mitch felt the champagne mellowing him after a long, tiring day of driving.

“Well, implausible as it might be, it’s easier than arguing against a genetic association,” Merton said. “The people in Innsbruck pretty much have to agree that the female and the infant are related. But there are anomalies, pretty serious ones, that no one can explain. I was hoping Mitchell might be able to enlighten me.”

Mitch was saved from having to feign ignorance when a woman’s strong voice called from the top of the bluff.

“Eileen? You there? It’s Sue Champion.”

“Hell,” Ripper said. “I thought she was back in Kumash by now.” She cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled upward, “We’re down here, Sue. We’re getting drunk. Want to join us?”

One of the male students ran up the trail to the top of the bluff with a flashlight. Sue Champion followed him back down to the tent.

“Nice fire,” she observed. Over six feet tall, slender to the point of thin, with long black hair arranged in a braid draped down the front shoulder of her brown corduroy jacket, Champion looked smart, classy, and a little stiff. She might have had a ready smile, but her face was lined with fatigue. Mitch glanced at Ripper, saw the fix in her expression.

“I’m here to say I’m sorry,” Champion said.

“We’re all sorry,” Ripper said.

“Have you been out here all night? It’s cold.”

“We’re dedicated.”

Champion walked around the canopy to be near the fire. “My office got your call about the tests. The chair of the board of trustees doesn’t believe it.”

“I can’t help that,” Ripper said. “Why did you just pull out all of a sudden and sic your attorney on me? I thought we had an agreement, and if they turned out to be Indian, we’d do basic science, with minimum invasion, then turn them over to the Five Tribes.”

“We let our guard down. We were tired after the mess over Pasco man. It was wrong.” She looked again at Mitch. “I know you.”

“Mitch Rafelson,” he said, and held out his hand.

Champion did not accept it. “You ran us a merry chase, Mitch Rafelson.”

“I feel the same way,” Mitch said.

Champion shrugged. “Our people gave in against their deeper feelings. We felt sandbagged. We need the folks in Olympia and last time we upset them. The trustees sent me here because I’m trained in anthropology. I didn’t do such a good job. Now everybody’s angry.”

“Is there anything more that we can do, out of court?” Ripper asked.

“The chairman told me that knowledge isn’t worth disturbing the dead. You should have seen the pain in the board meeting when I described the tests.”

“I thought we explained the whole procedure,” Ripper said.

“You disturb the dead everywhere. We ask only that you leave our dead alone.”

The women stared at each other sadly.

“They aren’t your dead, Sue,” Ripper said, her eyes drooping. “They aren’t your people.”

“The council thinks NAGPRA still applies.”

Ripper lifted her hand; no use going over old battles. “Then there’s nothing we can do but spend more money on lawyers.”

“No. This time you are going to win,” Champion said. “We have other troubles now. Many of our young mothers are ill with Herod’s.” Champion brushed the edge of the canvas cover with one hand. “Some of us thought it was confined to the big cities, maybe to the whites, but we were wrong.”

Merton’s eyes gleamed like eager little lenses in the flickering firelight.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Sue,” Ripper said. “My sister has Herod’s, too.” She stood and put her hand on Champion’s shoulder. “Stay for a while. We have hot coffee and cocoa.”

“Thank you, no. It’s a long drive back. We will not bother with the dead for a while. We need to take care of the living.” A slight change came over Champion’s features. “Some who are ready to listen, like my father and my grandmother, say that what you have learned is interesting.”

“Bless them, Sue,” Ripper said.

Champion looked down at Mitch. “People come and go, all of us come and go. Anthropologists know that.”

“We do,” Mitch said.

“It will be hard to explain to others,” Champion said. “I will let you know what our people decide to do about the illness, if we know any medicine. Maybe we can help your sister.” . “Thank you,” Ripper said.

Champion looked around the group under the canvas canopy, nodded deeply, then gave several additional shallow nods, showing she had had her say and was prepared to leave. She climbed the trail to the lip of the bluff with the burly intern lighting the way.

“Extraordinary,” Merton said, eyes still gleaming. “Privileged insight. Maybe even native wisdom.”

“Don’t let it get to you,” Ripper said. “Sue’s good people, but she doesn’t know what’s happening any more than my sister does.” Ripper turned to Mitch. “God, you look ill,” she said.

Mitch did feel a little queasy.

“I’ve seen that look on cabinet ministers,” Merton observed quietly. “When they were stuffed full of too many secrets.”

37 Baltimore

Kaye swung her small bag out of the backseat of the cab and slipped her credit card through the driver’s-side reader. She craned her head to look at Baltimore’s newest tower condo development, Uptown Helix, thirty floors poised on two broad quadrangles of shops and theaters, all in the shadow of the Bromo-Seltzer Tower.

The remains of a dusting of snow from earlier in the morning lingered in slushy patches along the sidewalk. To Kaye, it seemed this winter was lasting forever.

Cross had told her that the condo on the twentieth floor would be fully furnished, that her belongings would be moved in and arranged, there would be food in the refrigerator and pantry, a running tab at several restaurants downstairs: everything she desired and needed, a home just three blocks from AmericoFs corporate headquarters.

Kaye presented herself to the doorman in the resident’s lobby. He smiled the way servants smile at rich people and gave her an envelope containing her key. “I don’t own this, you know,” she said.

“Doesn’t matter a bit to me, ma’am,” he replied with the same cheerful deference.

She rode the sleek steel and glass elevator through the atrium of the shopping arcade to the residential floors, tapping her fingers on the handrail. She was alone in the elevator . I am protected, provided for, kept busy going from meeting to meeting, no time to think. I wonder who I am anymore.

She doubted that any scientist had ever felt so rushed as she felt now. Her conversation with Christopher Dicken at the NIH had pushed her onto a sidetrack having little to do with the development of SHEVA therapies. A hundred different elements of her research since postgraduate days had suddenly floated to the surface of her mind, shuffled around like swimmers in a water ballet, arranged themselves in enchanting patterns. Those patterns had nothing to do with disease and death, everything to do with the cycles of human life — or every kind of life, for that matter.

She had less than two weeks before Cross’s scientists would present their first candidate vaccine, out of twelve — at last count — being developed around the country, at Americol and elsewhere. Kaye had underestimated the speed with which Americol could work — and had overestimated the extent to which they would keep her informed. I’m still just a figurehead , she thought.

In that time, she had to make up her mind about what was actually happening — what SHEVA actually represented. What would finally happen to Mrs. Hamilton and the other women at the NIH clinic.

She emerged on the twentieth floor, found her number, 2011, fitted the electronic key into the lock, and opened the heavy door. A rush of clean, cool air, smelling of new carpet and furniture, of something else rosy and sweet, wafted out to greet her. Soft music played: Debussy, she could not remember the name of the piece, but she liked it a lot.

A bouquet of several dozen yellow roses spilled over from a crystal vase on the top of the low etagere in the hall.

The condominium was bright and cheerful, with elegant wood accents, beautifully furnished with two couches and a chair in suede and sunset gold fabric. And Debussy. She dropped the bag onto a couch and walked into the kitchen. Stainless-steel refrigerator, stove, dishwasher, gray granite countertops edged with rose-colored marble, expensive jewel-like track lighting throwing little diamond glows around the room…

“Damn it, Marge,” Kaye said under her breath. She carried the bag into the bedroom, unzipped it on the bed, pulled out her skirts and blouses and one dress to be hung in the closet, opened the closet, and stared at the wardrobe. Had she not already met two of Cross’s handsome young male companions, she would have been sure, at this point, that Marge Cross had designs on her other than corporate. She quickly flicked through the dresses, suits, silk and linen blouses, looked down at shoe racks supporting at least eight pairs for all occasions — even hiking boots — and that was enough.

Kaye sat on the edge of the bed and let out a deep, quavering sigh. She was in way over her head socially as well as scientifically. She turned to look at the reproduction Whistler prints over the maple dresser, at the oriental scroll beautifully framed in ebony with brass finials that hung on the wall over the bed.

“Little hothouse posy in the big city.” She felt her face screwing up in anger.

The phone in her purse rang. She jumped, walked into the living room, opened the purse, answered.

“Kaye, this is Judith.”

“You were right,” Kaye said abruptly.

“Beg pardon?”

“You were right.”

“I’m always right, dear. You know that.” Judith paused for effect, and Kaye knew she had something important to say. “You asked about transposon activity in my SHEVA-infected hepatocytes.”

Kaye felt her spine stiffen. This was the stab in the not-so-dark she had made two days after speaking with Dicken. She had pored over the texts and refreshed herself with a dozen articles in six different journals. She had gone through her notebooks, where she had scribbled down mad little moments of extreme speculation.

She and Saul had counted themselves among the biologists who suspected that transposons — mobile lengths of DNA within the genome — were far more than just selfish genes.

Kaye had written a solid twelve pages in the notebook on the possibility that these were very important phenotype regulators, not selfish but selfless; they could, under certain circumstances, guide the way proteins became living tissue. Change the way proteins created a living plant or animal. Retrotrans-posons were very similar to retroviruses — and thus the genetic link with SHEVA.

All together, they could be the handmaids of evolution.

“Kaye?”

“Just a moment,” Kaye said. “Let me catch my breath.”

“Well you should, dear, dear former student Kaye Lang. Transposon activity in our SHEVA-infected hepatocytes is mildly enhanced. They shuffle around with no apparent effect. That’s interesting. But we’ve gone beyond the hepatocytes. We’ve been doing tests on embryonic stem cells for the Taskforce.”

Embryonic stem cells could become any sort of tissue, very much like early growth cells in fetuses.

“We’ve sort of encouraged them to behave like fertilized human ova,” Kushner said. “They can’t grow up to be fetuses, but please don’t tell the PDA. In these stem cells, the transposon activity is extraordinary. After SHEVA, the transposons jump around like bugs on a hot griddle. They’re active on at least twenty chromosomes. If this were random churning, the cell should die. The cell survives. It’s as healthy as ever.”

“It’s regulated activity?”

“It’s triggered by something in SHEVA. My guess is, something in the LPC — the large protein complex. The cell reacts as if it’s being subjected to extraordinary stress.”

“What do you think that means, Judith?”

“SHEVA has designs on us. It wants to change our genome, maybe radically.”

“Why?” Kaye grinned expectantly. She was sure Judith would see the inevitable connection.

“This kind of activity can’t be benign, Kaye.”

Kaye’s smile collapsed. “But the cell survives.”

“Yes,” Kushner said. “But as far as we know, the babies don’t. It’s too much change all at once. For years I’ve been waiting for nature to react to our environmental bullshit, tell us to stop overpopulating and depleting resources, to shut up and stop messing around and just die. Species-level apop-tosis. I think this could be the final warning — a real species killer.”

“You’re passing this on to Augustine?”

“Not directly, but he’ll see it.”

Kaye looked at the phone for a moment, stunned, then thanked Judith and told her she would call her later. Kaye’s hands tingled.

Not evolution, then. Perhaps Mother Nature had judged humans to be a malignant growth, a cancer.

For a horrible moment, that made more sense than what she and Dicken had talked about. Yet what about the new children, the ones born of the ova released by the intermediate daughters? Were they going to be genetically damaged, born apparently normal, but dying soon after? Or would they simply be rejected during the first trimester, like the interim daughters?

Kaye looked through the wide glass doors over the city of Baltimore, the late morning sun glittering on wet rooftops, asphalt streets. She imagined every pregnancy leading to another equally futile pregnancy, to wombs clogged with endless, horribly distorted first-trimester fetuses.

Shutting down human reproduction.

If Judith Kushner was correct, the bell had just tolled for the whole human race.

38 Americol Headquarters, Baltimore

Marge Cross stood at stage left of the auditorium as Kaye formed a line with six scientists, prepared to field questions on the announcement.

Four hundred and fifty reporters filled the auditorium to capacity. Americol’s public relations director for the eastern U.S., Laura Nilson, young, black, and very intent, tugged at the hem of the jacket of her trim olive wool suit, then took over the questions.

The health and science reporter for CNN was first in the queue. “I’d like to direct my question to Dr. Jackson.”

Robert Jackson, head of the Americol SHEVA vaccine project, lifted his hand.

“Dr. Jackson, if this virus has had so many millions of years to evolve, how is it possible that Americol can announce a trial vaccine after less than three months of research? Are you smarter than Mother Nature?”

The room buzzed for a moment with mixed laughter and whispered comment. The excitement was palpable. Most of the young women in the room wore gauze masks, though that precaution had been proven ineffective. Others sucked on special mint and garlic lozenges claimed to prevent SHEVA from gaining a hold. Kaye could smell this peculiar odor even on the stage.

Jackson came to the microphone. At fifty, he looked like a well-preserved rock musician, loosely handsome, with suits only barely pressed and unruly brown hair graying at the temples.

“We began our work years before Herod’s flu,” Jackson said. “We’ve always been interested in HERV sequences, because, as you imply, there’s a lot of cleverness hidden there.” He paused for effect, favoring the audience with a small smile, showing his strength by expressing admiration for the enemy. “But in truth, in the last twenty years, we’ve learned how most diseases do their dirty work, how the agents are constructed, how they are vulnerable. By creating empty SHEVA particles, increasing the retrovirus failure rate to one hundred percent, we make a harmless antigen. But the particles are not strictly empty. We load them with a ri-bozyme, a ribonucleic acid with enzymatic activity. The ribozyme locks on to, and cleaves, several fragments of SHEVA RNA not yet assembled in an infected cell. SHEVA becomes the delivery system for a molecule that blocks its own disease-causing activity.”

“Sir—” the CNN reporter tried to break in.

“I’m not done answering your question,” Jackson said. “It is such a good one!” The audience chuckled. “Our problem until now has been that humans do not react in any strong fashion to SHEVA antigen. So our breakthrough came when we learned how to emphasize the immune response by attaching glycoproteins associated with other pathogens for which the body automatically mounts a strong defense.”

The CNN reporter tried to ask another question, but Nilson had already moved on down the long list. Next up was Sci-Trax’s young on-line correspondent. “Again for Dr. Jackson. Do you know why we are so vulnerable to SHEVA?”

“Not all of us are vulnerable. Men demonstrate a strong immune response to SHEVA they do not themselves produce. This explains the course of Herod’s flu in men — a quick, forty-eight-hour sort of thing, when it happens at all. Women, however, are almost universally open to the infection.”

“Yes, but why are women so vulnerable?”

“We believe that SHEVA’s strategy is incredibly long-term, on the order of thousands of years. It may be the first virus we’ve seen that relies on the growth of populations rather than individuals for its own propagation. To provoke a strong immune response would be counterproductive, so SHEVA emerges only when it seems that populations are either under stress, or because of some other triggering event we don’t yet understand.”

The science correspondent for the New York Times was next. “Drs. Pong and Subramanian, you’ve specialized in understanding Herod’s flu in Southeast Asia, which is reporting over a hundred thousand cases so far. There has even been rioting in Indonesia. There were rumors last week that this was a different provirus—”

“Completely wrong,” Subramanian said, smiling politely. “SHEVA is remarkably uniform. May I make a slight correction? ‘Provirus’ refers to the viral DNA inserted into the human genetic material. Once expressed, it is simply a virus or a retrovirus, although in this case, a very interesting one.”

Kaye wondered how Subramanian could focus solely on the science, when her ears caught the singular and frightening word “riots.”

“Yes, but my next question is, why do human males mount a strong immune response to the viruses of other males, but not to their own, if the glycoproteins in the envelope, the antigens, according to your press announcement, are so simple and invariant?”

“A very good question,” Dr. Pong said. “Do we have time for a daylong seminar?”

Mild laughter. Pong continued, “We believe that male response begins after cell invasion, and that at least one gene within SHEVA contains subtle variations or mutations, which cause production of antigens on the surfaces of certain cells prior to a full-bore immune response, thereby acclimating the body to—”

Kaye listened with half her mind. She kept thinking of Mrs. Hamilton and the other women in the NIH clinic.

Human reproduction shutting down. There had to be extreme reactions to any failure; the burden on the scientists was going to be enormous.

“Oliver Merton, from the Economist. Question for Dr. Lang.” Kaye looked up and saw a young red-haired man in a tweed coat holding the remote microphone. “Now that the genes coding for SHEVA, on their different chromosomes, have all been patented by Mr. Richard Bragg…” Merton glanced at his notes. “Of Berkeley, California…Patent number 8,564,094, issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on February 27, just yesterday, how will any company hoping to create a vaccine proceed without licensing and paying royalties?”

Nilson leaned toward her podium microphone. “There is no such patent, Mr. Merton.”

“There is indeed,” Merton said with an irritated wrinkle of his nose, “and I was hoping Dr. Lang could explain her deceased husband’s involvement with Richard Bragg, and how that figures in her current association with Americol and the CDC?”

Kaye stood in dumfounded silence.

Merton grinned proudly at the confusion.

Kaye entered the green room after Jackson, followed by Pong, Subramanian, and the rest of the scientists. Cross sat in the middle of a large blue couch, her expression grave. Four of her top attorneys stood in a half circle around the couch.

“What in the hell was that all about?” Jackson demanded, swinging his arm out to poke in the general direction of the stage.

“The little rooster out there is right,” Cross said. “Richard Bragg convinced somebody at the PTO that he isolated and sequenced the SHEVA genes before anyone else. He started the patent process last year.”

Kaye took a faxed copy of the patent from Cross. Listed among the inventors was Saul Madsen; EcoBacter was on the list of assignees, along with AKS Industries — the company that had purchased and then liquidated EcoBacter.

“Kaye, tell me now, tell me straight,” Cross said, “did you know anything about this?”

“Nothing,” Kaye said. “I’m at a loss, Marge. I specified locations, but I did not sequence the genes. Saul never mentioned Richard Bragg.”

“What does it mean for our work?” Jackson stormed. “Lang, how could you not know?”

“We’re not done with this,” Cross said. “Harold?” She glanced at the nearest gray-haired man in his immaculate pinstripe suit.

“We’ll challenge with Genetmn v.Amgen, ‘Random patenting of retrogenes in mouse genome,’ “ the attorney said. “Give us a day and we’ll have a dozen more reasons to overturn.” He pointed to Kaye and asked her, “Does AKS or any subsidiary use federal funds?”

“EcoBacter applied for a small federal grant,” Kaye said. “It was approved, but never funded.”

“We could get NIH to invoke Bayh-Dole,” the attorney mused happily.

“What if it’s solid?” Cross interrupted, her voice low and dangerous.

“It’s possible we can get Ms. Lang an interest in the patent. Unlawful exclusion of primary inventor.”

Cross thumped the couch cushions with a fist. “Then we’ll think positive,” she said. “Kaye, honey, you look like a stunned ox.”

Kaye held up her hands in defense. “I swear, Marge, I didn’t—”

“Why my own people didn’t weed this out, I’d like to know. I want to talk with Shawbeck and Augustine right away.” She turned to the attorneys. “See where else Bragg has poked his finger. Where there’s scum, there’s bound to be a slipup.”

39 Bethesda

“It was a very short trip,” Dicken said as he dropped a paper report and a diskette on Augustine’s desk. “The WHO folks in Africa told me they were handling things their way, thank you. They said cooperation on past investigations could not be assumed here. They only have one hundred and fifty confirmed cases in all of Africa, so they say, and they don’t see any reason for panic. At least they were kind enough to give me some tissue samples. I shipped them out of Cape Town.”

“We got them,” Augustine said. “Odd. If we believe their figures, Africa’s being hit much more lightly than Asia or Europe or North America.” He looked troubled — not angry, but sad. Dicken had never seen Augustine look so down before. “Where are we going with this, Christopher?”

“The vaccine, right?” Christopher asked.

“I mean you, me, the Taskforce. We’re going to have over a million infected women by the end of May in North America alone. The national security advisor has called in sociologists to tell them how the public’s going to react. The pressure is increasing every week. I’ve just come from a meeting with the surgeon general and the vice president. Just the veep, Christopher. The president considers the Taskforce a liability. Kaye Lang’s little scandal was completely unexpected. The only joy I got out of that was watching Marge Cross chug around this room like a derailed freight train. We’re getting pasted in the press — ’Incompetent Bungling in an Age of Miracles.’That’s the general tone.”

“Not surprising,” Dicken said, and sat in the chair across from the desk.

“You know Lang better than I do, Christopher. How could she have let this happen?”

“I was under the impression that NIH was getting the patent reversed. Some technicality, inability to exploit a natural resource.”

“Yes — but in the meanwhile, this son of a bitch Bragg is making us look like donkeys. Was Lang so stupid as to sign every paper her husband thrust in front of her?”

“She signed?”

“She signed,” Augustine said. “Plain as day. Handing over control of any discovery based on primordial human endogenous retrovirus to Saul Madsen and any partners.”

“Partners not specified?”

“Not specified.”

“Then she’s not really culpable, is she?” Dicken said.

“I don’t enjoy working with fools. She crossed me quite literally with Americol, and now she’s brought ridicule down on the Taskforce. Any wonder the president won’t meet with me?”

“It’s temporary.” Dicken bit at a fingernail but stopped when Augustine looked up.

“Cross says we go ahead with the trials and let Bragg sue us. I agree. But for the time being, I’m burying our relationship with Lang.”

“She could still be useful.”

“Then let her be anonymously useful.”

“Are you saying I should stay away from her?”

“No,” Augustine said. “Keep everything hunky-dory between you. Make her feel wanted and in the loop. I don’t want her going to the press — unless it’s to complain about Cross’s treatment. Now…for the next bit of unpleasantness.”

Augustine reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a glossy black-and-white photo. “I hate this, Christopher, but I see why it’s being done.”

“What?” Dicken felt like a little boy about to be scolded.

“Shawbeck asked the FBI to keep tabs on our key people.”

Dicken leaned forward. He had long since developed a civil servant’s instinct for keeping his reactions in check. “Why, Mark?”

“Because there’s talk about declaring a national emergency and invoking martial law. No decision has been made yet…it may be months away…But under the circumstances, we all need to be pure as the driven snow. We’re angels of healing, Christopher. The public is relying on us. No flaws allowed.”

Augustine handed him the photo. It showed him standing in front of Jessie’s Cougar in Washington, D.C. “It would have been very embarrassing if you had been recognized.”

Dicken’s face flushed with both guilt and anger. “I went there once, months ago,” he said. “I stayed fifteen minutes and left.”

“You went into a back room with a girl,” Augustine said.

“She wore a surgical mask and treated me like a leper!” Dicken said, showing more heat than he had intended. The instinct was wearing very thin. “I didn’t even want to touch her!”

“I hate this shit as much as anybody, Christopher,” Augustine said stonily, “but it’s just the beginning. We’re all of us facing pretty intense public scrutiny.”

“So I’m under probation and review, Mark? The FBI is going to ask for my little black book?”

Augustine did not feel the need to answer this.

Dicken stood and threw the photograph down on the desk. “What next? Shall I tell you the name of everyone I’m dating, and what we do together?”

“Yes,” Augustine said softly.

Dicken stopped in midtirade and felt his anger fly out of him like a loose burp. The implications were so broad and frightening that he suddenly felt nothing more than cold anxiety.

“The vaccine won’t be through clinical trials for at least four months, even on emergency fast track. Shawbeck and the VP are taking a new policy to the White House this evening. We’re recommending quarantine. It’s a good bet we’re going to need to invoke some sort of martial law to enforce it.”

Dicken sat down again. “Unbelievable,” he said.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about this,” Augustine said. His face was gray with strain.

“I don’t have that kind of imagination,” Dicken said bitterly.

Augustine swiveled to look out the window. “Springtime soon. Young men’s fancy and all that. A really good time to announce segregation of the sexes. All women of child-bearing age, all men. OMB will have a ball figuring out how much this will slow down the GNP.”

They sat in silence for a long moment.

“Why did you lead with Kaye Lang?” Dicken asked.

“Because I know what to do with her,” Augustine said. “This other stuff…Don’t quote me, Christopher. I see the necessity, but I don’t know how in hell we can survive it, politically.” He pulled another print from the folder and held it up for Dicken to see. It showed a man and a woman on a porch in front of an old brownstone, illuminated by a single overhead light. They were kissing. Dicken could not see the man’s face, but he dressed like Augustine and had the same physique.

“Just so you don’t feel bad. She’s married to a freshman congressman,” Augustine said. “We’re finished. Time for all of us to grow up.”

Dicken stood outside the Taskforce center in Building 51, feeling a little ill. Martial law. Segregation of the sexes. He hunched his shoulders and walked to the parking lot, avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk.

In his car, he found a message on the cell phone. He dialed in and retrieved it. An unfamiliar voice tried to overcome a real antipathy toward leaving messages, and after a few false starts, suggested they had mutual acquaintances — two or three removed — and possibly some mutual interests.

“My name is Mitch Rafelson. I’m in Seattle now but I hope to fly East soon and meet with some people. If you’re interested…in historical incidents of SHEVA, ancient examples, please get in touch with me.”

Dicken closed his eyes and shook his head. Unbelievable. It seemed everyone knew about his crazy hypothesis. He took down the phone number on a small notepad, then stared at it quizzically. The man’s name sounded familiar. He marked it through once with his pen.

He rolled down the window and took a deep breath of air. The day was warming and the clouds over Bethesda were clearing. Winter would be over soon.

Against his better judgment, against any judgment worthy of the name, he punched in Kaye Lang’s number. She was not at home.

“I hope you’re good at dancing with the big girls,” Dicken murmured to himself, and started the car. “Cross is a very big girl indeed.”

40 Baltimore

The attorney’s name was Charles Wothering. He sounded pure Boston, dressed with rumpled flair, wore a rough-knit wool cap and a long purple muffler. Kaye offered him coffee and he accepted.

“Very nice,” he commented, looking around the apartment. “You have taste.”

“Marge set it up for me,” Kaye said.

Wothering smiled. “Marge has no taste in decoration at all. But money does wonderful things, doesn’t it?”

Kaye smiled. “No complaints,” she said. “Why did she send you here? To…amend our agreements?”

“Not at all,” Wothering said. “Your father and mother are dead, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Kaye said.

“I’m a middling lawyer, Ms. Lang — may I call you Kaye?”

Kaye nodded.

“Middling at law, but Marge values me as a judge of character. Believe it or not, Marge is not a very good judge of character. Lots of bravado, but a string of bad marriages, which I helped untangle and pack away into the distant past, never to be heard from again. She thinks you need my help.”

“How?” Kaye asked.

Wothering sat on the couch and took three spoons of sugar from the bowl on the serving tray. He stirred them deliberately into his cup. “Did you love Saul Madsen?”

“Yes,” Kaye said.

“And how do you feel now?”

Kaye thought this over, but did not look down from Wothering’s steady gaze. “I realize how much Saul was hiding things from me, just to keep our dream afloat.”

“How much did Saul contribute to your work, intellectually?”

“That depends which work.”

“Your endogenous virus work.”

“Only a little. Not his specialty.”

“What was his specialty?”

“He likened himself to yeast.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“He contributed to the ferment. I brought in the sugar.”

Wothering laughed. “Did he stimulate you, intellectually, I mean?”

“He challenged me.”

“Like a teacher, or a parent, or…a partner?”

“Partner,” Kaye said. “I don’t see where we’re going, Mr. Wothering.”

“You attached yourself to Marge because you did not feel yourself adequate to deal with Augustine and his people alone. Am I right?”

Kaye stared at him.

Wothering lifted a bushy eyebrow.

“Not exactly,” Kaye said. Her eyes stung from not blinking. Wothering blinked luxuriously and set down his cup.

“To be brief, Marge sent me here to separate you from Saul Madsen every way I can. I need your permission to conduct a thorough investigation of EcoBacter, AKS, and your contracts with the Taskforce.”

“Is that necessary? I’m sure there aren’t any more skeletons in my closet, Mr. Wothering.”

“We can never be too cautious, Kaye. You understand that things are getting very serious. Embarrassments of any sort can have a real impact on public policy.”

“I know,” Kaye said. “I’ve said I’m sorry.”

Wothering held out his hand and made a soothing face as he patted the air with his fingers. In a different age, he might have patted her knee in a fatherly fashion. “We’ll clean up the mess.” Wothering’s eyes took on a flinty look. “I don’t want to replace your own growing sense of individual responsibility with the automatic personal housekeeping of a good lawyer,” he said. “You’re a grown woman now, Kaye. But what I will do is untangle the strings, and then…I’ll cut them. You will owe nothing to anybody.”

Kaye bit her lip. “I’d like to make one thing clear, Mr. Wothering. My husband was sick. He was mentally ill. What Saul did or did not do is no reflection on me — nor on him. He was trying to keep his balance and get on with his life and work.”

“I understand, Ms. Lang.”

“Saul was very helpful to me, in his own way, but I resent any implication that I am not my own woman.”

“No such implication intended.”

“Good,” Kaye said, feeling her way through a subtle minefield of irritation, threatening to flare into anger. “What I need to know now is, does Marge Cross still find me useful?”

Wothering smiled and gave a tilt of his head in a way that expertly expressed acknowledgment of her irritation and the need to continue his task. “Marge never gives more than she takes, as I’m sure you will learn soon. Can you explain this vaccine to me, Kaye?”

“It’s a combination antigen coat carrying a tailored ri-bozyme. Ribonucleic acid with enzymelike properties. It attaches to part of the SHEVA code and splits it. Breaks its back. The virus can’t replicate.”

Wothering shook his head in amazement. “Technically wonderful,” he said. “For most of us, incomprehensible. Tell me, how do you think Marge will get women all over the world to consider using it?”

“Advertising and promotion, I suppose. She said she’d practically give it away.”

“Who will the patients trust , Kaye? You are a brilliant woman whose husband deceived her, kept her in the dark. Women can feel this unfairness in their very wombs. Believe me, Marge will go to great lengths to keep you on her team. Your story just gets better and better.”

41 Seattle

Mitch pushed up in bed, in a sweat and shouting. The words leaped out in a guttural tumble even as he realized he was awake. He sat on one side of the bed, leg still tangled in the covers, and shivered. “Nuts,” he said. “I am nuts. Nuts to this”

He had dreamed of the Neandertals again. This time, he had flowed in and out of the male’s point of view, a fluid sort of freedom that had at once immersed him in a very clear and unpleasant set of emotions, and then lofted him away to observe a jumbled flow of events. Crowds had formed at the edge of the village — not on a lake this time, but in a clearing surrounded by deep and ancient woods. They had shaken sharpened, fire-hardened sticks at the female, whose name he could almost remember…Na-lee-ah or Ma-lee.

“Jean Auel, here I come,” he murmured as he extricated his foot from the covers. “Mowgli of the Stone Tribe saves his woman. Jesus.”

He walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water. He was fighting off some virus — a cold, he was sure, and not SHEVA, considering the state of his relationships with women. His mouth tasted dry and foul and his nose was dripping. He had caught the cold somewhere on his trip to Iron Cave the week before. Maybe Merton had given it to him. He had driven the British journalist to the airport for a flight to Maryland.

The water tasted terrible, but it cleaned out his mouth. He looked out over Broadway and the post office, nearly deserted now. A March snowstorm was throwing small crystal flakes down on the streets. The orange sodium vapor streetlights turned the accumulated snow into scattered piles of gold.

“They were kicking us off the lake, out of the village,” he murmured. “We were going to have to fend for ourselves. Some hotheads were getting ready to follow us, maybe try to kill us. We…”

He shuddered. The emotions had been so raw and so real he could not easily shake them. Fear, rage, something else…a helpless kind of love. He felt his face. They had been shedding some sort of skin from their faces, little masks. The mark of their crime.

“Dear Shirley MacLaine,” he said, pressing his forehead against the cold glass of the window. “I’m channeling cavemen who don’t live in caves. Any advice?”

He looked at the clock on the VCR perched precariously on top of the small TV. It was five in the morning. It would be eight o’clock in Atlanta. He would try that number again, and then try to log on with his repaired laptop and send an e-mail message.

In the bathroom, he stared at himself in the mirror. Hair awry, face sweaty and oily, two days’ growth of beard, wearing a ripped T-shirt and BVDs. “A regular Jeremiah,” he said.

Then he started another general cleanup by blowing his nose and brushing his teeth.

42 Atlanta

Christopher Dicken had returned to his small house on the outskirts of Atlanta at three in the morning. He had worked at his CDC office until two, preparing papers for Augustine on the spread of SHEVA in Africa. He had lain awake for an hour, wondering what the world was going to be like in the next six months. When he finally drifted off into sleep, he was awakened it seemed moments later by the buzzing of his cell phone. He sat up in the queen-size bed that had once belonged to his parents, wondered for a moment where he was, decided quickly he was not in the Cape Town Hilton, and switched on the light. Morning was already glowing through the window shutters. He managed to pull the phone out of his coat pocket in the closet by the fourth ring and answered it.

“Is this Dr. Chris Dicken?”

“Christopher. Yeah.” He looked at his watch. It was eight fifteen. He had managed to sleep a mere two hours, and he was sure he felt worse than if he had had no sleep at all.

“My name is Mitch Rafelson.”

This time, Dicken remembered the name and its association. “Really?” he said. “Where are you, Mr. Rafelson?”

“Seattle.”

“Then it’s even earlier where you are. I need to get back to sleep.”

“Wait, please,” Mitch said. “I’m sorry if I woke you up. Did you get my message?”

“I got a message,” Dicken said.

“We need to talk.”

“Listen, if you are Mitch Rafelson, the Mitch Rafelson, I need to talk to you…about as much as…” He tried to come up with a witty comparison, but his mind wouldn’t work. “I don’t need to talk with you.”

“Point made…but please listen anyway. You’ve been tracking SHEVA all over the world, right?”

“Yeah,” Dicken said. He yawned. “I get very little sleep thinking about it.”

“Me, too,” Mitch said. “Your bodies in the Caucasus tested positive for SHEVA. My mummies…in the Alps…the mummies at Innsbruck test positive for SHEVA.”

Dicken pressed the phone closer to his ear. “How do you know that?”

“I have the lab reports from the University of Washington. I need to show what I know to you and to whoever else is open-minded about this.”

“Nobody is open-minded about this,” Dicken said. “Who gave you my number?”

“Dr. Wendell Packer.”

“Do I know Packer?”

“You work with a friend of his. Renee Sondak.”

Dicken scratched at a front tooth with a fingernail. Thought very seriously about hanging up. His cell phone was digitally scrambled, but somebody could decode the conversation if they had a mind to. This made him flash hot with anger. Things were out of control. Everyone had lost perspective and it was not going to get better if he just played along.

“I’m pretty lonely,” Mitch said into the silence. “I need someone to tell me I’m not completely nuts.”

“Yeah,” Dicken said. “I know what that’s like.” Then, screwing up his face and stamping his foot on the floor, knowing this was going to give him far more trouble than any windmill he had ever tilted at before, he said, “Tell me more, Mitch.”

43 San Diego, California

The title of the international conference, arranged in black plastic letters on the convention center billboard, gave Dicken a brief thrill — brief and very necessary. Nothing much had thrilled him in the good old way of work satisfaction in the past couple of months, but the name of the conference was easily sufficient.

The sign was not overly optimistic or off base. In a few more years, the world might not need Christopher Dicken to chase down viruses.

The problem they all faced was that in disease time, a few years could be very long indeed.

Dicken walked just outside the shadow of the center’s concrete overhang, near the main entrance, reveling in the bright sun on the sidewalk. He had not experienced this kind of heat since Cape Town, and it gave him a furnace boost of energy. Atlanta was finally warming, but the cold gripping the East had kept snow on the streets in Baltimore and Bethesda.

Mark Augustine was in town already, staying at the U.S. Grant, away from the majority of the five thousand predicted attendees, most of whom were filling the hotels along the waterfront. Dicken had picked up his convention package — a thick spiral-bound program book with a companion DVD-ROM disk — just this morning to get an early glimpse at the schedule.

Marge Cross would deliver a keynote address tomorrow morning. Dicken would sit on five panels, two of them dealing with SHEVA. Kaye Lang would be on one panel with Dicken, and on seven others beside, and she would deliver a talk before the plenary session of the World Retrovirus Eradication Research Group, held in conjunction with this conference.

The press was already hailing AmericoPs ribozyme vaccine as a major breakthrough. It looked good in a petri dish — very good indeed — but the human trials had not yet begun. Augustine was under considerable pressure from Shawbeck, and Shawbeck was under considerable pressure from the administration, and they were all using a very long spoon to sup with Cross.

Dicken could smell eight different kinds of disaster in the winds.

He had not heard from Mitch Rafelson for several days, but suspected the anthropologist was already in town. They had not yet met, but the conspiracy was on. Kaye had agreed to join them for a talk this evening or tomorrow, depending on when Cross’s people would let her loose from a round of public relations interviews.

They would have to find a place away from prying eyes. Dicken suspected the best place would be right in the middle of everything, and to that end, he carried a second bag with a blank convention badge — “Guest of CDC” — and program book.

Kaye walked through the crowded suite, eyes darting nervously from face to face. She felt like a spy in a bad movie, trying to hide her true emotions, certainly her opinions — though she, herself, hardly knew what to think now. She had spent much of the afternoon in Marge Cross’s suite — rather, her entire floor — upstairs, meeting with men and women representing wholly owned subsidiaries, professors from UCSD, the mayor of San Diego.

Marge had taken her aside and promised even more impressive VIPs near the end of the conference. “Keep bright and shiny,” Cross had told her. “Don’t let the conference wear you down.”

Kaye felt like a doll on display. She did not like the sensation.

She took the elevator to the ground floor at five-thirty and boarded a charter bus to the opener. The event was being held at the San Diego Zoo, hosted by Americol.

As she stepped down from the bus in front of the zoo, she breathed in a scent of jasmine and the soil-rich wetness of evening sprinklers. The line at the entrance booth was busy; she queued up at a side gate and showed the guard her invitation.

Four women dressed in black carried signs and marched solemnly in front of the zoo entrance. Kaye saw them just before she was allowed in; one of their signs read OUR BODIES, OUR DESTINY: SAVE OUR CHILDREN.

Inside, the warm twilight felt magical. She had not had anything like a vacation in over a year, the last time with Saul. Everything since had been work and grief, sometimes both together.

A zoo guide took charge of a group of AmericoFs guests and gave them a brief tour. Kaye spent a few seconds watching the pink flamingos in their wading pool. She admired four centenarian sulfur-crested cockatoos, including the zoo’s current mascot, Ramesses, who regarded the departing crowds of day visitors with sleepy indifference. The guide then showed them to a side pavilion and court surrounded by palm trees.

A mediocre band played forties’ favorites under the pavilion as men and women carried food on paper plates and found tables.

Kaye stopped by a buffet table laden with fruit and vegetables, picked up a generous helping of cheese, cherry tomatoes, cauliflower, and pickled mushrooms, then ordered a glass of white wine from the no-host bar.

As she was taking money from her purse to pay for the wine, she spotted Christopher Dicken out of the corner of her eye. He had in tow a tall, rugged-looking man dressed in a denim jacket and faded gray jeans and carrying a scuffed leather satchel under his arm. Kaye took a deep breath, fumbled her change back into her purse, and turned in time to meet Dicken’s stealthy glance, hi return, she gave him a surreptitious tilt of her head.

Kaye could not help giggling as Dicken pulled aside a canvas and they strolled casually away from the closed court. The zoo was nearly empty. “I feel so sneaky,” she said. She still carried her glass of wine, but had managed to ditch the plate of vegetables. “What in the world do we think we’re doing?”

There was little conviction in Mitch’s smile. She found his eyes disconcerting — at once boyish and sad. Dicken, shorter and plumper, seemed more immediate and accessible, so Kaye focused on him. He carried a gift-shop bag and with a flourish pulled from it a folding map of the world’s largest zoo.

“We may be here to save the human race,” Dicken said. “Subterfuge is justified.”

“Damn,” Kaye said. “I’d hoped it was something more sensible. I wonder if anyone’s listening?”

Dicken swept his hand toward the low arches of the Spanish-style reptile house as if waving a magic wand. Only a few straggling tourists remained on the zoo grounds. “All clear,” he said.

“I’m serious, Christopher,” Kaye said.

“If the FBI is bugging Komodo dragons or men in Hawaiian shirts, then we’re goners. This is the best I can do.”

Loud shrieks from howler monkeys greeted the last of the daylight. Mitch led them down a concrete path through a tropical rain forest. Footlights illuminated the pathway and misters sprayed the air over their heads. The charm of the setting held them all for the moment, and no one was willing to break the spell.

To Kaye, Mitch seemed all legs and arms, the kind of man who did not fit indoors. His silence bothered her. He turned, regarded her with his steady green eyes. Kaye noticed his shoes: hiking boots, the thick-treaded soles well-worn.

She smiled awkwardly and Mitch returned her smile.

“I’m out of my league,” he said. “If anybody’s going to start our conversation, it should be you, Ms. Lang.”

“But you’re the man with the revelation,” Dicken said.

“How much time do we have?” Mitch asked.

“I’m free for the rest of the evening,” Kaye said. “Marge wants us in tow by eight tomorrow morning. There’s going to be an Americol breakfast.”

They descended an escalator into a canyon and paused by a cage occupied by two Scottish wildcats. The domestic-looking brindled felines paced back and forth, grumbling softly in the dusk.

“I’m the odd man out here,” Mitch said. “I know very little microbiology, barely enough to get along. I stumbled onto something wonderful, and it almost ruined my life. I’m disreputable, known to be eccentric, a two-time loser in the science game. If you were smart, you wouldn’t even be seen with me.”

“Remarkably candid,” Dicken said. He raised his hand. “Next. I’ve chased diseases over half the Earth. I have a feel for how they spread, what they do, how they work. From almost the very beginning, I suspected I was tracking something new. Up until just recently, I’ve tried to lead a double life, tried to believe two contradictory things at once, and I can’t do it anymore.”

Kaye finished her glass of wine with one gulp. “We sound like we’re working through a twelve-step program,” she said. “All right. My turn. I’m an insecure female research scientist who wants to be kept out of all the dirty little details, so I cling to anybody who’ll give me a place to work and protect me…and now it’s time to be independent and make my own decisions. Time to grow up.”

“Hallelujah,” Mitch said.

“Go, sister,” Dicken said.

She looked up, ready to be angry, but they were both smiling in just the right way, and for the first time in many months — since the last good time with Saul — she felt she was among friends.

Dicken reached into the shopping bag and produced a bottle of merlot. “Zoo security could bust us,” he said, “but this is the least of our sins. Some of what needs to be said may only be said if we’re properly drunk.”

“I gather you two have shared ideas already,” Mitch said to Kaye as Dicken poured the wine. “I’ve tried to read everything I could just to get ready for this, but I’m still way behind.”

“I don’t know where to begin,” Kaye said. Now that they were more relaxed, the way Mitch Rafelson looked at her — direct, honest, assessing her without being obvious about it — stirred something she had thought almost dead.

“Begin with where you two met,” Mitch said.

“Georgia,” Kaye said.

“The birthplace of wine,” Dicken added.

“We visited a mass grave,” Kaye said. “Though not together. Pregnant women and their husbands.”

“Killing the children,” Mitch said, his eyes suddenly losing their focus. “Why?”

They sat at a plastic table near a closed refreshment stand, deep in the shadows of a canyon. Brown and red roosters pecked through the bushes beside the asphalt road and beige concrete walkways. A big cat coughed and snarled in its cage and the sound echoed eerily.

Mitch pulled a file folder from his small leather satchel and laid the papers neatly on the plastic table. “This is where it all comes together.” He laid his hand on two papers on the right. “These are analyses made at the University of Washington.

Wendell Packer gave me permission to show them to you. If somebody blabs, however, we could all be in deep zoo-doo.”

“Analyses of what?” Kaye asked.

“The genetics of the Innsbruck mummies. Two sets of tissue results from two different labs at the University of Washington. I gave tissue samples of the two adults to Wen-dell Packer. Innsbruck, as it turned out, sent a set of samples of all three mummies to Maria Konig in the same department. Wendell was able to make comparisons.”

“What did they find?” Kaye asked.

“That the three bodies were really a family. Mother, father, daughter. I knew that already — I saw them all together in the cave in the Alps.”

Kaye frowned in puzzlement. “I remember the story. You went to the cave at the request of two friends…Disturbed the site…And the woman with you took the infant in her backpack?”

Mitch looked away, jaw muscles tight. “I can tell you what actually happened,” he said.

“That’s all right,” Kaye said, suddenly wary.

“Just to straighten things out,” Mitch insisted. “We need to trust each other if we’re going to continue.”

“Then tell me more,” Kaye said.

Mitch went through the whole story in brief. “It was a mess,” he concluded.

Dicken watched them both intently, arms folded.

Kaye used the pause to look through the analyses spread on the plastic table top, making sure the papers did not get stained by leftover catsup. She studied the results of carbon 14 dating, the comparisons of genetic markers, and finally, Packer’s successful search for SHEVA.

“Packer says SHEVA hasn’t changed much in fifteen thousand years,” Mitch said. “He finds that astonishing, if they’re junk DNA.”

“They’re hardly junk,” Kaye said. “The genes have been conserved for as much as thirty million years. They’re constantly refreshed, tested, conserved…Locked up in tight-packed chromatin, protected by insulators…They have to be.”

“If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to tell you both what I think,” Mitch said, with a touch of boldness and shyness Kaye found both puzzling and appealing.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“This was an example of subspeciation,” he said. “Not extreme. A nudge to a new variety. A modern-type infant born to late-stage Neandertals.”

“More like us,” Kaye said.

“Right. There was a reporter named Oliver Merton in Washington state a few weeks ago. He’s investigating the mummies. He told me about fights breaking out at the University of Innsbruck—” Mitch looked up and saw Kaye’s surprise.

“Oliver Merton?” she asked, frowning. “Working for Nature?”

“For The Economist, at the time,” Mitch said.

Kaye turned to Dicken. “The same one?”

“Yeah,” Dicken said. “He does science journalism, some political reporting. Has one or two books published.” He explained to Mitch. “Merton started a big ruckus at a press conference in Baltimore. He’s dug pretty deeply into Americol’s relationship with the CDC and the SHEVA matter.”

“Maybe it’s two different stories,” Mitch said.

“It would have to be, wouldn’t it?” Kaye asked, looking between the two men. “We’re the only ones who have made a connection, aren’t we?”

“I wouldn’t be at all sure,” Dicken said. “Go on, Mitch. Let’s agree that there is a connection before we get fired up about interlopers. What were they arguing about in Innsbruck?”

“Merton says they’ve connected the infant to the adult mummies — which Packer confirms.”

“It’s ironic,” Dicken said. “The UN sent some of the samples from Gordi to Konig’s lab.”

“The anthropologists at Innsbruck are pretty conservative,” Mitch said. “To actually come across the first direct evidence of human speciation…” He shook his head in sympathy. “I’d be scared if I were them. The paradigm doesn’t just shift — it snaps in two. No gradualism, no modern Darwinian synthesis.”

“We don’t need to be so radical,” Dicken said. “First of all, there’s been a lot of talk about punctuations in the fossil record — millions of years of steady state, then sudden change.”

“Change over a million or a hundred thousand years, in some cases maybe as little as ten thousand years,” Mitch said. “Not overnight. The implications are damned scary to any scientist. But the markers don’t lie. And the baby’s parents had SHE VA in their tissues.”

“Urn,” Kaye said. Again, the howler monkeys let loose with continuous musical whoops, filling the night air.

“The female was injured by something sharp, perhaps a spear point,” Dicken said.

“Right,” Mitch said. “Causing the late-term infant to be born either dead or very near death. The mother died shortly after, and the father…” His voice hitched. “Sorry. I don’t find it easy to talk about.”

“You sympathize with them,” Kaye said.

Mitch nodded. “I’ve been having weird dreams about them.”

“ESP?” Kaye asked.

“I doubt it,” Mitch said. “It’s just the way tny mind works, putting things together.”

“You think they were pushed out of their tribe?” Dicken asked. “Persecuted?”

“Someone wanted to kill the woman,” Mitch said. “The man stayed with her, tried to save her. They were different. They had something wrong with their faces. Little flaps of skin around their eyes and nose, like masks.”

“They were shedding skin? I mean, when they were alive?” Kaye asked, and her shoulders shuddered.

“Around the eyes, the face.”

“The bodies near Gordi,” Kaye said.

“What about them?” Dicken asked.

“Some of them had little leathery masks. I thought it might have been…some bizarre product of decay. But I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Dicken said. “Let’s focus on Mitch’s evidence.”

“That’s all I have,” Mitch said. “Physiological changes substantial enough to place the infant in a different subspecies, all at once. In one generation.”

“This sort of thing had to have been going on for over a hundred thousand years before your mummies,” Dicken said. “So populations of Neandertals were living with or around populations of modern humans.”

“I think so,” Mitch said.

“Do you think the birth was an aberration?” Kaye asked.

Mitch regarded her for several seconds before saying “No.”

“It’s reasonable to conclude that you found something representative, not singular?”

“Possibly.”

Kaye lifted her hands in exasperation.

“Look,” Mitch said. “My instincts are conservative. I feel for the guys in Innsbruck, I really do! This is weird, totally unexpected.”

“Do we have a smooth, gradual fossil record leading from Neandertals to Cro-Magnons?” Dicken asked.

“No, but we do have different stages. The fossil record is usually far from smooth.”

“And…that’s blamed on the fact that we can’t find all the necessary specimens, right?”

“Right,” Mitch said. “But some paleontologists have been at loggerheads with the gradualists for a long time now.”

“Because they keep rinding leaps, not gradual progression,” Kaye said. “Even when the fossil record is better than it is for humans or other large animals.”

They sipped from their glasses reflectively.

“What are we going to do?” Mitch asked. “The mummies had SHEVA. We have SHEVA.”

“This is very complicated,” Kaye said. “Who’s going to go first?”

“Let’s all write down what we believe is actually happening.” Mitch reached into his satchel and brought out three legal pads and three ballpoint pens. He spread them out on the table.

“Like schoolkids?” Dicken asked.

“Mitch is right. Let’s do it,” Kaye said.

Dicken pulled a second bottle of wine from the gift shop bag and uncorked it.

Kaye held the cap of her pen between her lips. They had been writing for ten or fifteen minutes, switching pads and asking questions. The air was getting chilly.

“The party will be over soon,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” Mitch said. “We’ll protect you.”

She smiled ruefully. “Two half-drunk men dizzy with theories?”

“Exactly,” Mitch said.

Kaye had been trying to avoid looking at him. What she was feeling was hardly scientific or professional. Writing down her thoughts was not easy. She had never worked this way before, not even with Saul; they had shared notebooks, but had never looked at each other’s notes in progress, as they were being written.

The wine relaxed her, took away some of the tension, but did not clarify her thinking. She was hitting a block. She had written:

Populations as giant networks of units that both compete and cooperate, sometimes at the same time. Every evidence of communication between individuals in populations. Trees communicate with chemicals. Humans use pheromones. Bacteria exchange plasmids and lysogenic phages.

Kaye looked at Dicken, writing steadily, crossing out entire paragraphs. Plump, yes, but obviously strong and motivated, accomplished; attractive features.

She now wrote:

Ecosystems are networks of species cooperating and competing. Pheromones and other chemicals can cross species. Networks can have the same qualities as brains; human brains are networks of neurons. Creative thinking is possible in any sufficiently complicated functional neural network.

“Let’s take a look at what we’ve got,” Mitch suggested. They exchanged notebooks. Kaye read Mitch’s page:

Signaling molecules and viruses carry information between people. The information is gathered by the individual human in life experience; but is this Lamarckian evolution?

“I think this networking stuff confuses the issue,” Mitch said.

Kaye was reading Dicken’s paper. “It’s how all things in nature work,” she said. Dicken had scratched out most of his page. What remained was:

Chase disease all my life; SHEVA causes complex biological changes, unlike any disease ever seen. Why? What does it gain? What is it trying to do? What is the end result? If it pops up once every ten thousand or hundred thousand years, how can we defend that it is, in any sense, a separate organic concern, a purely pathogenic particle?

“Who’s going to buy that all things in nature function like neurons in a brain?” Mitch asked.

“It answers your question,” Kaye said. “Is this Lamarckian evolution, inheritance of traits acquired by an individual? No.

It’s the result of complex interactions of a network, with emergent thoughtlike properties.”

Mitch shook his head. “Emergent properties confuse me.”

Kaye glared at him for a moment, both challenged and exasperated. “We don’t have to posit self-awareness, conscious thought, to have an organized network that responds to its environment and issues judgments about what its individual nodes should look like,” Kaye said.

“Still sounds like the ghost in the machine to me,” Mitch said, making a sour face.

“Look, trees send out chemical signals when they’re attacked. The signals attract insects that prey on the bugs that attack them. Call the Orkin man. The concept works at all levels, in the ecosystem, in a species, even in a society. All individual creatures are networks of cells. All species are networks of individuals. All ecosystems are networks of species. All interact and communicate with one another to one degree or another, through competition, predation, cooperation. All these interactions are similar to neurotransmitters crossing synapses in the brain, or ants communicating in a colony. The colony changes its overall behavior based on ant interactions. So do we, based on how our neurons talk to each other. And so does all of nature, from top to bottom. It’s all connected.”

But she could see Mitch still wasn’t buying it.

“We have to describe a method,” Dicken said. He looked at Kaye with a small, knowing smile. “Make it simple. You’re the thinker on this one.”

“What packs the punch in punctuated equilibrium?” she asked, still irritated at Mitch’s density.

“All right. If there’s a mind of some sort, where’s the memory?” Mitch asked. “Something that stores up the information on the next model of human being, before it’s turned loose on the reproductive system.”

“Based on what stimulus?” Dicken asked. “Why acquire information at all? What starts it? What mechanism triggers it?”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Kaye said, sighing. “First, I don’t like the word mechanism.”

“All right, then…organ, organon, magic architect,” Mitch said. “We know what we’re talking about here. Some sort of memory storage in the genome. All the messages have to be kept there until they’re activated.”

“Would it be in the germ-line cells? The sex cells, sperm and egg?” Dicken asked.

“You tell me,” Mitch said.

“I don’t think so,” Kaye said. “Something modifies a single egg in each mother, so it produces an interim daughter, but it’s what’s in the daughter’s ovary that may produce a new phenotype. The other eggs in the mother are out of the loop. Protected, not modified.”

“In case the new design, the new phenotype is a bust,” Dicken said, nodding agreement. “Okay. A set-aside memory, updated over thousands of years by…hypothetical modifications, somehow tailored by…” He shook his head. “Now I’m confused.”

“Every individual organism is aware of its environment and reacts to it,” Kaye said. “The chemicals and other signals exchanged by individuals cause fluctuations in internal chemistry that affect the genome, specifically, movable elements in a genetic memory that stores and updates sets of hypothetical changes.” Her hands waved back and forth, as if they could clarify or persuade. “This is so clear to me, guys. Why can’t you see it? Here’s the complete feedback loop: the environment changes, causing stress on organisms — in this case, on humans. The types of stress alter balances of stress-related chemicals in our bodies. The set-aside memory reacts and movable elements shift based on an evolutionary algorithm established over millions, even billions of years. A genetic computer decides what might be the best phenotype for the new conditions that cause the stress. We see small changes in individuals as a result, prototypes, and if the stress levels are reduced, if the offspring are healthy and many, the changes are kept. But every now and then, when a problem in the environment is intractable…long-term social stress in humans, for example…there’s a major shift. Endogenous retroviruses express, carry a signal, coordinate the activation of specific elements in the genetic memory storage. Voila. Punctuation.”

Mitch pinched the bridge of his nose. “Lord,” he said.

Dicken frowned deeply. “That’s too radical for me to swallow all at once.”

“We have evidence for every step along the way,” Kaye said hoarsely. She took another long swallow of merlot.

“But how does it get passed along? It has to be in the sex cells. Something has to be passed along from parent to child for hundreds, thousands of generations before it gets activated.”

“Maybe it’s zipped, compacted, in shorthand code,” Mitch said.

Kaye was startled by this. She looked at Mitch with a little chill of wonder. “That’s so crazy it’s brilliant. Like overlapping genes, only more devious. Buried in the repeats.”

“It doesn’t have to carry the whole instruction set for the new phenotype…” Dicken said.

“Just the parts that are going to be changed,” Kaye said. “Look, we know that between a chimp and humans, there’s maybe a two percent difference in the genome.”

“And different numbers of chromosomes,” Mitch said. “That makes a big difference ultimately.”

Dicken frowned and held his head. “God, this is getting deep.”

“It’s ten o’clock,” Mitch said. He pointed to a security guard walking down the middle of the road through the canyon, clearly heading in their direction.

Dicken threw the empty bottles into a trash can and returned to the table. “We can’t afford to stop now. Who knows when we’ll be able to get together again?”

Mitch studied Kaye’s notes. “I see your point about change in the environment causing stress on individual humans.

Let’s get back to Christopher’s question. What triggers the signal, the change? Disease? Predators?”

“In our case, crowding,” Kaye said.

“Complex social conditions. Competition for jobs,” Dicken added.

“Folks,” the guard called out as he drew close. His voice echoed in the canyon. “Are you with the Americol party?”

“How’d you guess?” Dicken asked.

“You’re not supposed to be out here.”

As they walked back, Mitch shook his head dubiously. He wasn’t going to give either of them any breaks: a real hard case. “Change usually occurs at the edge of a population, where resources are scarce and competition is tough. Not in the center, where everything’s cushy.”

“There are no ‘edges,’ no boundaries for humans anymore,” Kaye said. “We cover the planet. But we’re under stress all the time just to keep up with the Joneses.”

“There’s always war,” Dicken said, suddenly thoughtful. “The early Herod’s outbreaks might have occurred just after World War II. Stress of a social cataclysm, society going horribly wrong. Humans must change or else.”

“Says who? Says what?” Mitch asked, slapping his hip with his hand.

“Our species-level biological computer,” Kaye said.

“There we go again — a computer network,” Mitch said dubiously.

“THE MIGHTY WIZARD IN OUR GENES,” Kaye intoned in a deep, fruity announcer’s voice. Then, marking the air with her finger, “The Master of the Genome.”

Mitch grinned and jabbed his finger back at her. “That’s what they’re going to say, and then they’ll laugh us out of town.”

“Out of the whole damned zoo,” Dicken said.

“That’ll cause stress,” Kaye said primly.

“Focus, focus,” Dicken insisted.

“Screw that,” Kaye said. “Let’s go back to the hotel and open the next bottle.” She swung her arms out and pirouetted. Damn, she thought. I’m showing off. Hey, guys, I’m available, look at me.

“Only as a reward,” Dicken said. “We’ll have to take a cab if the bus is gone. Kaye…what’s wrong with the center? What’s wrong with being in the middle of the human population?”

She dropped her arms. “Every year more and more people…” She stopped herself and her expression hardened. “The competition is so intense.” Saul’s face. Bad Saul, losing and not accepting it, and good Saul, enthusiastic as a child, but still painted with that indelible marker that said, You ‘re going to lose. There are tougher, smarter wolves than you.

The two men waited for her to finish.

They walked toward the gate. Kaye wiped her eyes quickly and said, in as steady a voice as she could manage, “Used to be one or two or three people would come up with a brilliant, world-shaking idea or invention.” Her voice grew stronger; now she felt resentment and even anger, on behalf of Saul. “Darwin and Wallace. Einstein. Now, there’s a hundred geniuses for every challenge, a thousand people competing to topple the castle walls. If it’s that bad in the sciences, up in the stratosphere, what’s it like down in the trenches? Endless nasty competition. Too much to learn. Too much bandwidth crowding the channels of communication. We can’t listen fast enough. We’re left standing on our tiptoes all the time.”

“How is that any different from fighting a cave bear or a mammoth?” Mitch asked. “Or from watching your kids die ofplague?”

“They result in different sorts of stress, affecting different chemicals, maybe. We’ve long since given up on growing new claws or fangs. We’re social. All our major changes are pointed in the direction of communication and social adaptation.”

“Too much change,” Mitch said thoughtfully. “Everyone hates it, but we have to compete or we end up out on the streets.”

They stood in front of the gate and listened to the crickets.

Back in the zoo, a macaw squawked. The sound carried all over Balboa Park.

“Diversity,” Kaye murmured. “Too much stress could be a sign of impending catastrophe. The twentieth century has been one long, frenetic, extended catastrophe. Let loose with a major change, something stored up in the genome, before the human race fails.”

“Not a disease, but an upgrade,” Mitch said.

Kaye looked at him again with the same brief chill. “Precisely,” she said. “Everyone travels everywhere in just hours or days. What gets triggered in a neighborhood is suddenly spread all over the world. The Wizard is overwhelmed with signals.” She stretched out her arms again, more restrained, but hardly sober. She knew Mitch was looking at her, and Dicken was watching them both.

Dicken peered up the drive beside the broad zoo parking lot, trying to find a cab. He saw one making a U-turn several hundred feet away and thrust out his hand. The cab pulled up at the loading zone.

They climbed in. Dicken took the front seat. As they drove, he turned to say, “All right, so some stretch of DNA in our genome is patiently building up a model of the next type of human. Where is it getting its ideas, its suggestions? Who’s whispering, ‘Longer legs, bigger brain case, brown eyes are best this year?’ Who’s telling us what’s handsome and what’s ugly?”

Kaye spoke rapidly. “The chromosomes use a biological grammar, built into the DNA, a kind of high-level species blueprint. The Wizard knows what it can say that will make sense for an organism’s phenotype. The Wizard includes a genetic editor, a grammar checker. It stops most nonsense mutations before they ever get included.”

“We’re off into the wild blue yonder here,” Mitch said, “and they’ll shoot us down in the first minute of any dogfight.” He whipped his hands through the air like two airplanes, making the cabby nervous, then dramatically plunged his left hand into his knee, crumpling his fingers. “Scrunch,” he said.

The cabby regarded them curiously. “You folks biologists?” he asked.

“Grad students in the university of life,” Dicken said.

“Got ya,” the cabby said solemnly.

“Now we’ve earned this.” Dicken took the third bottle of wine from the bag and pulled out his Swiss Army knife.

“Hey, not in the cab,” the cabby said sternly. “Not unless I go off duty and you share.”

They laughed. “In the hotel, then,” Dicken said.

“I’ll be drunk,” Kaye said, and shook her hair down around her eyes.

“We’ll have an orgy,” Dicken said, and then flushed bright pink. “An intellectual orgy,” he added sheepishly.

“I’m worn out,” Mitch said. “Kaye’s got laryngitis.”

She gave a small squeak and grinned.

The cab pulled up in front of the Serrano Hotel, just southwest of the convention center, and let them out.

“My treat,” Dicken said. He paid the fare. “Like the wine.”

“All right,” Mitch said. “Thanks.”

“We need some sort of conclusion,” Kaye said. “A prediction.”

Mitch yawned and stretched. “Sorry. Can’t think another thought.”

Kaye watched him through her bangs: the slim hips, the jeans tight around his thighs, the square rugged face with its single line of eyebrow. Not beautifully handsome, but she heard her own chemistry, a low breathy singing in her loins, and it cared little about that. The first sign of the end of winter.

“I’m serious,” she said. “Christopher?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Dicken said. “We’re saying the interim daughters are not diseased, they’re a stage of development we’ve never seen before.”

“And what does that mean?” Kaye asked.

“It means the second-stage babies will be healthy, viable. And different, maybe just a little,” Dicken said.

“That would be amazing,” Kaye said. “What else?”

“Enough, please. We can’t possibly finish it tonight,” Mitch said.

“Pity,” Kaye said.

Mitch smiled down on her. Kaye offered him her hand and they shook. Mitch’s palm was dry as leather and rough with calluses from long years of digging. His nostrils dilated as he was near her, and she could have sworn she saw his irises grow large, as well.

Dicken’s face was still pink. He slurred his words slightly. “We don’t have a game plan,” he said. “If there’s going to be a report, we have to get all our evidence together — and I mean all of it.”

“Count on it,” Mitch said. “You have my number.”

“I don’t,” Kaye said.

“Christopher will give it to you,” Mitch said. “I’ll be around for a few more days. Let me know when you’re available.”

“We will,” Dicken said.

“We’ll call,” Kaye said as she and Dicken walked toward the glass doors.

“Interesting fellow,” Dicken said on the elevator.

Kaye agreed with a small nod. Dicken was watching her with some concern.

“Seems bright,” he continued. “How in the world did he get in so much trouble?”

In her room, Kaye took a hot shower and crawled into bed, exhausted and more than a little drunk. Her body was happy. She twisted the sheets and blanket around her head and rolled on her side, and almost immediately, she was asleep.

44 San Diego, California

Kaye had just finished washing her face, whistling through the dripping water, when her room phone rang. She dabbed her face dry and answered it.

“Kaye? This is Mitch.”

“I remember you,” she said lightly, she hoped not too lightly.

“I’m flying north tomorrow. Hoped you might have some time this morning to get together.”

She had been so busy giving talks and serving on panels at the conference that there had been little time to even think about the evening at the zoo. Each night, she had fallen into bed, completely exhausted. Judith Kushner had been right; Marge Cross was absorbing every second of her life.

“That would be good,” she said cautiously. He was not mentioning Christopher. “Where?”

“I’m at the Holiday Inn. There’s a nice little coffee shop in the Serrano. I could walk over and meet you there.”

“I’ve got an hour before I have to be somewhere,” Kaye said. “Downstairs in ten minutes?”

“I’ll jog,” Mitch said. “See you in the lobby.”

She laid out her clothes for the day — a trim blue linen suit from the ever-tasteful Marge Cross collection — and was considering whether to block a small sinus headache with a couple of Tylenol when she heard muted yelling through the double-pane window. She ignored it for a moment and reached to the bed to flip a page on the convention program. As she carried the program to the table and fumbled for the badge in her purse, she grew tired of her tuneless whistling. She walked around the bed again to pick up the TV remote and pushed the power button.

The small hotel TV made the necessary background noise. Commercials for tampons, hair restorer. Her mind was full of other things; the closing ceremonies, her appearance on the podium with Marge Cross and Mark Augustine.

Mitch.

As she looked for a good pair of nylons, she heard the woman say, “…first full-term infant. To bring all our listeners up to date, this morning, an unidentified woman in Mexico City gave birth to the first scientifically recognized second-stage Herod’s baby. Reporting live from—”

Kaye flinched at the sound of metal crunching, glass breaking. She pulled back the window’s gauze curtain and looked north. West Harbor Drive outside the Serrano and the convention center was covered by a thick shag of people, a packed and streaming mass flowing over curbs and lawns and plazas, absorbing cars, hotel vans, shuttle buses. The sound they made was extraordinary, even through the double panes of glass: a low, grinding roar, like an earthquake. White squares flopped about over the mass, green ribbons flexed and rippled: placards and banners. From this angle, ten floors up, she could not read the messages.

“ — Apparently born dead,” the TV announcer continued. “We’re trying to get an update from—”

Her phone rang again. She pulled the receiver from its cradle and stretched the cord to reach the window. She could not stop watching the living river below her window. She saw cars being rocked, flipped on their backs as the crowd surged, heard more sounds of glass breaking.

“Ms. Lang, this is StanThorne, Marge Cross’s chief of security. We want you up here on the twentieth, in the penthouse.”

The writhing mass below cheered with one animal voice.

“Take the express elevator,” Thorne said. “If that’s blocked, take the stairs. Just get up here now.”

“I’ll be right there,” she said.

She put on her shoes.

“This morning, in Mexico City—”

Even before she boarded the elevator, the bottom seemed to fall out of Kaye’s stomach.

Mitch stood across the street from the convention center, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, trying to look as unin-volved and anonymous as possible.

The crowd sought out scientists, official representatives, anyone involved in the convention, flowing toward them, waving signs, shouting at them.

He had removed the badge Dicken had provided him, and with his faded denims, suntanned face, and windblown, sandy hair, did not at all resemble the hapless pasty-skinned scientists and pharmaceutical representatives.

The demonstrators were mostly women, all colors, all sizes, but nearly all young, between the ages of eighteen and forty. They seemed to have lost all sense of discipline. Anger was quickly taking over.

Mitch was terrified, but for the moment, the crowd was moving south, and he was free. He walked with quick, stiff steps away from Harbor Drive and ran down a parking ramp, jumped a wall, and found himself in a planter strip between high-rise hotels.

Out of breath, more from alarm than exertion — he had always hated crowds — he trudged through the ice plant, climbed another wall, and lowered himself onto the concrete floor of a parking garage. A few women with stunned expressions ran awkwardly to their cars. One of them carried a drooping and battered placard. Mitch read the words as they swept by: OUR DESTINY OUR BODIES.

The aching sound of sirens echoed through the garage. Mitch pushed through a door to the elevator cubicle just as three uniformed security guards came thumping down the stairs. They rounded the corner, guns drawn, and glared at him.

Mitch held up his hands and hoped he looked innocent. They swore and locked the double glass doors. “Get up there!” one shouted at him.

He climbed the stairs with the guards close behind.

From the lobby, looking out upon West Harbor Drive, he saw small riot trucks skirt the crowd, pushing slowly and steadily into the women. The women cried out in chorus, compressed and angry voices like a crashing wave. Water cannons twisted on top of a truck like antennae on a bug’s head.

The lobby’s glass doors opened and closed as guests waggled keys at staff and were allowed in. Mitch walked to the middle of the lobby, standing in an atrium, feeling the air from outside brush past. A sharp tang caught his attention: odors of fear and rage and something else, acrid, like dog piss on a hot sidewalk.

It made his hair stand on end.

The smell of the mob.

Dicken met Kaye on the penthouse floor. A man in a dark blue suit held open the door to the penthouse level and checked their badges. Tiny voices chattered in his earplug.

“They’re already in the lobby downstairs,” Dicken told her. “They’re going nuts out there.”

“Why? “ Kaye asked, baffled.

“Mexico City,” Dicken said.

“But why riot?”

“Where’s Kaye Lang?” a man shouted.

“Here!” Kaye held up her hand.

They pushed through a line of confused and chattering men and women. Kaye saw a woman in a swimsuit laughing, shaking her head, clutching a large white terry cloth towel. A man in a hotel bathrobe sat in a chair with his legs drawn up, eyes wild. Behind them, the guard yelled, “Is she the last one?”

“Check,” another answered. Kaye had never known there were so many of Marge’s security people in the hotel — she guessed twenty. Some wore sidearms.

Then she heard Cross’s high-pitched bellow.

“For Christ’s sake, it’s just a bunch of women! Just a bunch of frightened women!”

Dicken took Kaye’s arm. Cross’s personal secretary, Bob Cavanaugh, a slender man of thirty-five or forty with thinning blond hair, grabbed both of them and ushered them through the last cordon into Cross’s bedroom. She was sprawled across a king-size bed, still in her silk pajamas, watching closed circuit television. Cavanaugh draped a fringed cotton wrap over her shoulders. The view on the screen swayed back and forth. Kaye guessed the camera was on the third or fourth floor.

Riot control vehicles sprayed selective shots from water cannons and forced the mass of women farther down the street, away from the convention center entrance. “They’re mowing ‘em down!” Cross shouted angrily.

“They trashed the convention floor,” the secretary said.

“We never expected this kind of reaction,” Stan Thorne said, thick arms folded across a substantial belly.

“No,” Cross said, her voice like a low flute. “And why in hell not? I always said it was a gut issue. Well, here’s the gut response! It’s a goddamned disaster!”

“They didn’t even present their demands,” said a slender woman in a green suit.

“What in hell do they hope to accomplish?” someone else said, not visible to Kaye.

“Dropping a big fat message on our doorstep,” Cross grumbled. “Something’s kicked the body politic in the groin. They want fast, fast relief, and screw the process.”

“This could be just what we needed,” said a small, thin man whom Kaye recognized: Lewis Jansen, the marketing director for Americol’s pharmaceutical division.

“The hell you say.” Cross cried out, “Kaye Lang, I want you!”

“Here,” Kaye said, stepping forward.

“Good! Frank, Sandra, get Kaye on the tube as soon as they clear the streets. Who’s the talent here?”

An older woman in a bathrobe, carrying an aluminum briefcase, named from memory the local television commentators and affiliates.

“Lewis, have your folks work up some talking points.”

“My folks are at another hotel.”

“Then call them! Tell the people we’re working as fast as we can, don’t want to move too fast on a vaccine or we’ll harm folks — shit, tell them all the stuff we were saying down on the convention floor. When in hell will people ever learn to sit back and listen? Are the phones out of order?”

Kaye wondered whether Mitch had been caught in the riot, if he was okay.

Mark Augustine entered the bedroom. It was getting crowded. The air was thick and hot. Augustine nodded to Dicken, smiled genially at Kaye. He seemed cool and collected, but there was something about his eyes that betrayed this camouflage.

“Good!” Cross roared. “The gang’s all here. Mark, what’s up?”

“Richard Bragg was shot to death in Berkeley two hours ago,” Augustine said. “He was out walking his dog.” Augustine tilted his head to one side and drew his lips together into a wry expression for Kaye’s benefit.

“Bragg?” someone asked.

“The patent asshole,” another answered.

Cross stood up from the bed. “Related to the news about the baby?” she asked Augustine.

“You might think so,” Augustine said. “Somebody at the hospital in Mexico City leaked the news. La Prensa reported the baby was severely malformed. It was on every channel by six A.M.”

Kaye turned to Dicken. “Born dead,” he said.

Augustine pointed to the window. “That might explain the mob. This was supposed to be a peaceful demonstration.”

“Let’s get to it, then,” Cross said, subdued. “We have work to do.”

Dicken looked downcast as they walked to the elevator. He spoke in an undertone to Kaye. “Let’s forget the zoo,” he said.

“The discussion?”

“It was premature,” he said. “Now is no time to stick our necks out.”

Mitch walked along the littered street, boots crunching through shards of glass. Police barricades marked by yellow ribbon closed off the convention center and the front entrances of three hotels. Overturned cars were wrapped in yellow ribbon like presents. Signs and banners littered the asphalt and sidewalks. The air still smelled of tear gas and smoke. Police in skintight dark green pants and khaki shirts and National Guard troops in camouflage stood with folded arms along the street while city officials disembarked from vans and were led off to tour the damage. The police watched the few unofficial bystanders through dark glasses, silently challenging.

Mitch had tried to get back to his hotel room at the Holiday Inn and had been turned away by unhappy clerks working with the police. His luggage — one bag — was still in his room, but he had the satchel with him, and that was all he really cared about. He had left messages for Kaye and Dicken, but there was no fixed place for them to return his calls.

The convention appeared to be finished. Cars were being released from hotel garages by the dozens, and long lines of taxis waited a few blocks south for passengers dragging wheeled suitcases.

Mitch could not pin down how he felt about all this. Anger, jerks of adrenaline, a bitter surge of animal exultation at the damage — typical residues of being so near mob violence. Shame, the single thin coating of social veneer; after hearing about the dead baby, guilt at perhaps being so wrong. In the middle of these flashing emotions, Mitch felt most acutely a wretched sense of displacement. Loneliness.

After this morning and afternoon, what he regretted most was missing his breakfast with Kaye Lang.

She had smelled so good to him in the night air. No perfume, hair freshly washed, richness of skin, breath smelling of wine, but flowery and hardly offensive. Her eyes a little drowsy, her parting warm and tired.

He could picture himself lying next to her on the bed in her hotel room with a clarity more like memory than imagination. Forward memory .

He reached into his jacket pocket for his airline tickets, which he always carried with him.

Dicken and Kaye made up a lifeline, an extended purpose in his life. Somehow, he doubted Dicken would encourage that continued connection. Not that he disliked Dicken; the virus hunter seemed straightforward and very sharp. Mitch would like to work with him and get to know him better. However, Mitch could not picture that at all. Call it instinct, more forward memory.

Rivalry.

He sat on a low concrete wall across from the Serrano, gripping his satchel in two broad hands. He tried to summon the patience he had used to stay sane on long and laborious digs with contentious postdocs.

With a start, he saw a woman in a blue suit coming out of the Serrano lobby. The woman stood for a moment in the shade, speaking with two doormen and a police officer. It was Kaye. Mitch walked slowly across the street, around a Toyota with all its windows smashed. Kaye saw him and waved.

They met on the plaza in front of the hotel. Kaye had circles under her eyes.

“It’s been awful,” she said.

“I was out here, I saw it,” Mitch said.

“We’re going into high gear. I’m doing some TV interviews, then we’re flying back East, to Washington. There has to be an investigation.”

“This was all about the first baby?”

Kaye nodded. “We got some details an hour ago. NIH was tracking a woman who got Herod’s flu last year. She aborted an interim daughter, got pregnant a month later. She gave birth a month premature and the baby is dead. Severe defects. Cyclopia, apparently.”

“God,” Mitch said.

“Augustine and Cross…well, I can’t talk about that. But it looks as if we’re going to have to rework all the plans, maybe even conduct human tests on an accelerated schedule. Congress is screaming bloody murder, pointing fingers everywhere. It’s a mess, Mitch.”

“I see. What can we do?”

“We?” Kaye shook her head. “What we talked about at the zoo just doesn’t make sense now.”

“Why not?” Mitch asked, swallowing.

“Dicken has done a turnabout,” Kaye said.

“What kind of turnabout?”

“He feels miserable. He thinks we’ve been completely wrong.”

Mitch cocked his head to one side, frowning. “I don’t see that.”

“It’s more politics than science, maybe,” Kaye said.

“Then what about the science? Are we going to let one premature birth, one defective baby—”

“Steamroll us?” Kaye finished for him. “Probably. I don’t know.” She looked up and down the drive.

“Are any other full-term babies due?” Mitch asked.

“Not for several months,” Kaye said. “Most of the parents have been choosing abortion.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s not been talked about much. The agencies involved aren’t releasing names. There’d be a lot of opposition, you can imagine.”

“How do you feel about it?”

Kaye touched her heart, then her stomach. “Like a punch in the gut. I need time to think things over, do some more work. I asked him, but Dicken never gave me your phone number.”

Mitch smiled knowingly.

“What?” Kaye asked, a little irritated.

“Nothing.”

“Here’s my home number in Baltimore,” she said, handing him a card. “Call me in a couple of days.”

She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently, then turned and walked back into the hotel. Over her shoulder, she shouted, “I mean it! Call.”

45 The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

Kaye was hustled out of the Baltimore airport in a nondescript brown Pontiac lacking government license plates. She had just spent three hours in TV studios and six hours on the plane and her skin felt as if it had been varnished.

Two Secret Service agents sat in polite silence, one in front and one in back. Kaye sat in the back. Between Kaye and the agent sat Farrah Tighe, her newly assigned aide. Tighe was a few years younger than Kaye, with pulled-back blond hair, a pleasant broad face, brilliant blue eyes, and broad hips that challenged her companions in these tight quarters.

“We have four hours before you meet with Mark Augustine,” Tighe said.

Kaye nodded. Her mind was not in the car.

“You requested a meeting with two of the NIH mothers-in-residence. I’m not sure we can fit that in today.”

“Fit it in,” Kaye said forcefully, and then added, “Please.”

Tighe looked at her solemnly.

“Take me to the clinic before we do anything else.”

“We have two TV interviews—”

“Skip them,” Kaye said. “I want to talk with Mrs. Hamilton.”

Kaye walked through the long corridors from the parking lot to the elevators of Building 10.

On the drive from the airport to the NIH campus, Tighe had briefed her on the events of the past day. Richard Bragg had been shot seven times in the torso and head while leaving his house in Berkeley and had been declared dead at the scene. Two suspects had been arrested, both male, both husbands of women carrying first-stage Herod’s babies. The men had been captured a few blocks away, drunk, their car packed with empty cans of beer.

The Secret Service, on orders from the president, had been assigned to protect key members of the Taskforce.

The mother of the first full-term, second-stage infant born in North America, known as Mrs. C., was still in a hospital in Mexico City. She had emigrated to Mexico from Lithuania in 1996; she had worked for a relief agency in Azerbaijan between 1990 and 1993. She was currently being treated for shock and what the first medical reports described as an acute case of seborrhea on her face.

The dead infant was being shipped from Mexico City to Atlanta and would arrive tomorrow morning.

Luella Hamilton had just finished a light lunch and was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out over a small garden and the windowless corner of another building. She shared a room with another mother who was down the hall in an examination room. There were now eight mothers in the Task-force study.

“I lost my baby,” Mrs. Hamilton told Kaye as she walked in. Kaye stepped around the bed and hugged her. She returned Kaye’s embrace with strong hands and arms and a little moan.

Tighe stood with arms folded near the door. “She just slipped out one night.” Mrs. Hamilton held her eyes steady on Kaye’s. “I hardly felt her. My legs were wet. Just a little blood. They had a monitor on my stomach and the little alarm started to beep. I woke up and the nurses were there and they put up a tent. They didn’t show her to me. A minister came in, Reverend Ackerley, from my church, she was right there for me, wasn’t that nice?” “I’m so sorry,” Kaye said.

“The reverend told me about that other woman, in Mexico, with her second baby…”

Kaye shook her head in sympathy. “I am so scared, Kaye.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I was in San Diego and I didn’t know you had rejected.”

“Well, it’s not like you’re my doctor, is it?” “I’ve been thinking about you a lot. And the others.” Kaye smiled. “But mostly you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a strong black woman, and we make an impression.” Mrs. Hamilton did not smile as she said this. Her expression was drawn, her skin verging on olive. “I talked to my husband on the telephone. He’s coming by today and we’ll see each other, but we’ll be separated by glass. They told me they’d let me go after the baby was born. But now they say they want to keep me here. They tell me I’m going to be pregnant again. They know it’s coming. My own little baby Jesus. How can the world get along with millions of little baby Jesuses?” She started to cry. “I haven’t been with my husband or anyone else! I swear!”

Kaye held her hand tightly. “This is so difficult,” she said. “I want to help, but my family, they’re having a hard time.

My husband is half crazy, Kaye. They could run this damned railroad so much better.” She stared out the window, held on to Kaye’s hand tightly, then waved it gently back and forth, as if listening to some inner music. “You’ve had some time to think. Tell me what’s happening?”

Kaye fixed her eyes on Mrs. Hamilton and tried to think of something to say. “We’re still trying to figure that out,” she finally managed. “It’s a challenge.”

“From God?” Mrs. Hamilton asked.

“From inside,” Kaye said.

“If it’s from God, all the little Jesuses are going to die except one, then,” Mrs. Hamilton said. “That’s not good odds for me.”

“I hate myself,” Kaye said as Tighe escorted her to Dr. Lipton’s office.

“Why?” Tighe said.

“I wasn’t here.”

“You can’t be everywhere.”

Lipton was in a meeting, but interrupted it long enough to talk with Kaye. They went to a side office filled with filing cabinets and a computer.

“We did scans last night and checked out her hormone levels. She was almost hysterical. The miscarriage didn’t hurt much if at all. I think she wanted it to hurt more. She had a classic Herod’s fetus.”

Lipton held up a series of photographs. “If this is a disease, it’s a damned organized disease,” she said. “The pseudo-placenta is not very different from a normal placenta, except that it’s much reduced. The amnion is something else, however.” Lipton pointed to a process curled on one side of the shrunken shriveled amnion, which had been expelled with the placenta. “I don’t know what you’d call it, unless it’s a little fallopian tube.”

“And the other women in the study?”

“Two should reject within a few days, the rest over the next two weeks. I’ve brought in ministers, a rabbi, psychiatrists, even their friends — as long as they’re female. The mothers are deeply unhappy. No surprises there. But they’ve agreed to stay with the program.”

“No male contact?”

“Not from any male past puberty,” Lipton said. “By order of Mark Augustine, co-signed by Frank Shawbeck. Some of the families are sick of this treatment. I don’t blame them.”

“Any rich women staying here?” Kaye asked, deadpan.

“No,” Lipton said. She chuckled humorlessly. “Need you even ask?”

“Are you married, Dr. Lipton?” Kaye said.

“Divorced six months ago. And you?”

“A widow,” Kaye said.

“We’re the lucky ones, then,” Lipton said.

Tighe tapped her watch. Lipton glanced between them. “Sorry to be keeping you,” the doctor said sharply. “My people are waiting, too.”

Kaye held up the photographs of the pseudo-placenta and amniotic sac. “What do you mean when you say this is a terribly organized disease?”

Lipton leaned on the top of a filing cabinet. “I’ve dealt with rumors and lesions and buboes and warts and all the other little horrors diseases can build in our bodies. There’s organization, to be sure. Rearranging the blood flow, subverting cells. Sucking greed. But this amniotic sac is a highly specialized organ, different from any I’ve ever studied.”

“It’s not a product of disease, in your opinion?”

“I didn’t say that. The results are distortion, pain, suffering, and miscarriage. The infant in Mexico…” Lipton shook her head. “I won’t waste my time by characterizing this as anything else. It’s a new disease, a hideously inventive one, that’s all.”

46 Atlanta

Dicken climbed the gentle slope from the parking garage on Clifton Way, glancing up with a squint at clear skies with low fat-bellied puffs of cloud. He hoped the fresh cool air would clear his head.

Dicken had returned to Atlanta the night before and bought a bottle of Jack Daniels and holed up in his house, drinking until four in the morning. Walking from the living room to the bathroom, he had stumbled over a pile of textbooks, slammed his shoulder against a wall, and fallen to the floor. His shoulder and leg were bruised and sore, and his back felt as if he had been kicked, but he could walk and he was pretty sure he did not have to go to the hospital.

Still, his arm hung half-bent, and his face was ashen. His head hurt from the whiskey. His stomach hurt from not eating breakfast. And in his soul he felt like shit, confused and angry at just about everything, but mainly angry at himself.

The memory of the intellectual jam session at the San Diego Zoo felt like a burning brand. The presence of Mitch Rafelson, a loose cannon, saying little substantive but still seeming to guide the conversation, at once challenging their sophomoric theories and spurring them on; Kaye Lang, lovelier than he had ever seen her before, almost radiant, with her patented look of puzzled concentration and no goddamned interest in Dicken beyond the professional.

Rafelson clearly outclassed him. Once again, after having spent his entire adult life braving the worst that Earth could throw at a human male, he was coming up short in the eyes of a woman he thought he might care for.

And what the hell did it matter? What did his masculine ego, his sex life, matter in the face of Herod’s?

Dicken came around the corner onto Clifton Road and stopped, confused for a moment. The attendant at the garage booth had mentioned something about picketing, but had given no hint of the scale.

Demonstrators filled the street from the small plaza and tree planter fronting the redbrick entrance of Building 1 to the American Cancer Society headquarters and the Emory Hotel across Clifton Road. Some were standing in the beds of purple azaleas; they had left a path open to the main entrance but blocked the visitor center and the cafeteria. Dozens sat around the pillar that held the bust of Hygeia, their eyes closed, swaying gently from side to side as if in silent prayer.

Dicken estimated there were two thousand men, women, and children, in vigil, waiting for something; salvation or word at least that the world was not about to end. Many of the women and more than a few of the men still wore masks, colored orange or purple, guaranteed by half a dozen fly-by-night manufacturers to kill all viruses, including SHEVA.

The organizers of the vigil — it was not called a protest — walked among their people with water coolers and paper cups, leaflets, advice, and instructions, but those holding the vigil never spoke.

Dicken walked to the entrance of Building 1, through the crowd, attracted to them despite his sense of the danger in the situation. He wanted to see what the troops were thinking and feeling — the people on the front line.

Cameramen moved around and through the crowds slowly, or more deliberately along the pathways, cameras held at waist level to capture the immediacy, then being lifted to shoulders for the panorama, the scale.

“Jesus, what happened?” Jane Salter asked as Dicken passed her in the long hall to his office. She carried a briefcase and an armload of files in green folders.

“Just an accident,” Dicken said. “I fell. Did you see what’s going on outside?”

“I saw,” Salter said. “Creeps me out.” She followed him and stood in the open door. Dicken glanced over his shoulder at her, then pulled out the old rolling chair and sat down, his face like a disappointed little boy’s.

“Down about Mrs. C.?” Salter asked. She pushed back a wisp of brown hair with the corner of a folder. The wisp fell back and she ignored it.

“I suppose,” Dicken said.

Salter bent to set down the briefcase, then stepped forward and laid the files on his desk. “Tom Scarry has the baby,” she said. “It was autopsied in Mexico City. I guess they did a thorough job. He’ll do it all over again, just to be sure.”

“Have you seen it?” Dicken asked.

“Just a video feed when they took it from the ice chest in Building 15.”

“Monster?”

“Major,” Salter said. “A real mess.”

“For whom the bell tolls,” Dicken said.

“I’ve never figured out your position on this, Christopher,” Salter said, leaning against the door jamb. “You seem surprised that this is a really nasty disease. We knew that going in, didn’t we?”

Dicken shook his head. “I’ve chased diseases so long…this one seemed different.”

“What, more sympathetic?”

“Jane, I got drunk last night. I fell in my house and cracked my shoulder. I feel like hell.”

“A bender? That sounds more appropriate to a bad love life, not a misdiagnosis.”

Dicken made a sour face. “Where are you going with all that?” he asked, and shoved his left forefinger at the files.

“I’m moving some stuff over to the new receiving lab. They’ve got four more tables. We’re putting together personnel and procedures for a round-the-clock autopsy mission, L3 conditions. Dr. Sharp is in charge. I’m helping the group doing neural and epithelial analysis. I’ll keep their records straight.”

“Keep me in the loop? If you find something?”

“I don’t even know why you’re here, Christopher. You flew way above us when you went with Augustine.”

“I miss the front lines. News always gets here first.” He sighed. “I’m still a virus hunter, Jane. I came back to look over some old papers. See if I forgot something crucial.”

Jane smiled. “Well, I did hear this morning that Mrs. C had genital herpes. Somehow it got to little Baby C early in its development. It was covered with lesions.”

Dicken looked up in surprise. “Herpes? They didn’t tell us that before.”

“I told you it was a mess,” Jane said.

Herpes could change the whole interpretation of what happened. How did the infant contract the genital herpes while still protected in the womb? Herpes was usually passed from mother to infant in the birth canal.

Dicken was severely distracted.

Dr. Denby passed by the office, smiled briefly, then doubled back and peered through the open door. Denby was a bacterial growth specialist, small and very bald, with a cherub’s face and a natty plum shirt and red tie. “Jane? Did you know they’ve blocked the cafeteria from outside? Hello, Christopher.”

“I heard. It’s impressive,” Jane said.

“Now they’re up to something else. Want to go look?”

“Not if it’s violent,” Salter said with a shudder.

“That’s what’s spooky. It’s peaceful and absolutely silent! Like a drill team without the band.”

Dicken walked with them and took the elevator and stairs to the front of the building. They followed other employees and doctors to the lobby beside the public display of CDC history. Outside, the crowd was milling in an orderly fashion. Leaders were using megaphones to shout orders.

A security guard stood with his hands on his hips, glaring at the crowd through the glass. “Will you look at that,” he said.

“What?” Jane asked.

“They’re breaking up, boy-girl. Segregating,” he said with a mystified look.

Banners stretched in plain view of the lobby and the dozens of cameras arrayed outside. A breeze rippled one banner. Dicken caught what it said in two sinuous flaps: VOLUNTEER. SEPARATE. SAVE A CHILD.

Within a few minutes, the crowd had parted before their leaders like the Red Sea before Moses, women and children on one side, men on the other. The women looked grimly determined. The men looked somber and shamefaced.

“Christ,” the guard muttered. “They’re telling me to leave my wife?”

Dicken felt as if he were being whipsawed. He returned to his office and called Bethesda. Augustine had not arrived yet. Kaye Lang was visiting the Magnuson Clinical Center.

Augustine’s secretary added that protesters were also on the NIH campus, several thousand of them. “Look on the TV,” she said. “They’re marching all over the country.”

47 The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

Augustine drove around the campus on the Old Georgetown Road to Lincoln Street and made his way to a temporary employee parking lot near the Taskforce Center. The Taskforce had been assigned a new building at the surgeon general’s request just two weeks before. The protesters apparently did not know of this change, and were marching on the old headquarters, and on Building 10.

Augustine walked quickly in the warming sun to the ground floor entrance. NIH campus police and newly-hired private security guards stood outside the building, talking in low voices. They were eyeing knots of protesters a few hundred yards away.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Augustine,” the building’s chief of security told him as he carded himself in through the main entrance. “We’ve got the National Guard coming in this afternoon.”

“Oh, goodie.” Augustine drew in his chin and punched the elevator button. In the new office, three assistants and his personal secretary, Mrs. Florence Leighton, matronly and very efficient, were trying to reestablish a network link with the rest of the campus.

“What’s wrong, sabotage?” Augustine asked, a little savagely.

“No,” Mrs. Leighton said, handing him a sheaf of printouts. “Stupidity. The server decided not to recognize us.”

Augustine slammed the door to his office, pulled out his rolling chair, slapped the brief on the desktop. The phone cheeped. He reached over to punch the button.

“Five minutes uninterrupted, please, Florence, to put my thoughts in order?” he pleaded.

“It’s Kennealy for the vice president, Mark,” Mrs. Leigh-ton said.

“Double goodie. Put him on.”

Tom Kennealy, the vice president’s chief of technical communications — another new position, established the week before — was first on the line, and asked Augustine if he had been told about the scale of the protests.

“I’m seeing it through my window now,” he replied.

“They’re at four hundred and seventy hospitals at last count,” Kennealy said.

“God bless the Internet,” Augustine said.

“Four demonstrations have gotten out of hand — not including the riot in San Diego. The vice president is very concerned, Mark.”

“Tell him I’m more than concerned. It’s the worst news I could imagine — a dead full-term Herod’s baby.”

“What about the herpes angle?”

“Screw that. Herpes doesn’t infect an infant until it’s born. They must not have taken any precautions in Mexico City.”

“That’s not what we’re hearing. Maybe we can offer some reassurance on this? If it is a diseased infant?”

“Quite clearly it is diseased, Tom. It’s Herod’s we should be focusing on here.”

“All right. I’ve briefed the vice president. He’s here now, Mark.”

The vice president came on the line. Augustine composed his voice and greeted him calmly. The vice president told him that the NIH was being afforded military security, high-security protected status, as were the CDC and five Taskforce research centers around the country. Augustine could visualize the result now — razor wire, police dogs, concussion grenades, and tear gas. A fine atmosphere in which to conduct delicate research.

“Mr. Vice President, don’t push them off campus,” Augustine said. “Please. Let them stay and let them protest.”

“The president gave the order an hour ago. Why change it?”

“Because it looks like they’re venting steam. It’s not like San Diego. I want to meet with the leaders here on campus.”

“Mark, you aren’t a trained negotiator,” the VP argued.

“No, but I’d be a hell of a lot better than a phalanx of troops in camouflage.”

“That’s the jurisdiction of the director of NIH.”

“Who is negotiating, sir?”

“The director and chief of staff are meeting with the protest leaders. We shouldn’t divide our effort or our voice, Mark, so don’t even consider going out there to talk.”

“What if we have another dead baby, sir? This one came at us out of nowhere — we only knew it was on its way six days ago. We tried to send a team down to help, but the hospital refused.”

“They’ve sent you the body. That seems to show a spirit of cooperation. From what Tom tells me, nobody could have saved it.”

“No, but we could have known ahead of time and coordinated our media release.”

“No division on this, Mark.”

“Sir, with all due respect, the international bureaucracy is killing us. That’s why these protests are so dangerous. We’ll be blamed whether we’re culpable or not — and frankly, I feel pretty sick to my stomach right now. I can’t be responsible where I don’t have input!”

“We’re soliciting your input now, Mark.” The VP’s voice was measured.

“Sorry. I know that, sir. Our involvement with Americol is causing all sorts of problems. Announcing the vaccine…prematurely, in my opinion—”

“Tom shares that opinion, and so do I.”

What about the president? he thought. “I appreciate that, but the cat is out of the bag. My people tell me there’s a fifty-fifty chance the preclinical trials will fail. The ribozyme is depressingly versatile. It seems to have an affinity for thirteen or fourteen different messenger RNAs. So we stop SHEVA, but we end up with myelin degradation…multiple sclerosis, for God’s sake!”

“Ms. Cross reports that they’ve refined it and it’s more specific now. She personally assured me there was never any chance of MS. That was just a rumor.”

“Which version is PDA going to let them test, sir? The paperwork has to be refiled—”

“PDA is bending on this one.”

“I’d like to set up a separate evaluation team. NIH has the people, we have the facilities.”

“There’s no time, Mark.”

Augustine closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He could feel his face turning beet red. “I hope we draw a good hand,” he said quietly. His heart was hammering.

“The president is announcing speedier trials tonight,” the vice president said. “If the preclinical trials are successful, we’ll go to human trials within a month.”

“I wouldn’t approve that.”

“Robert Jackson says they can do it. The decision’s been made. It’s done.”

“Has the president talked to Frank about this? Or the surgeon general?”

“They’re in constant touch.”

“Please have the president call me, too, sir.” Augustine hated to be put in the position of having to ask, but a smarter president would not have needed the reminder.

“I will, Mark. As for your response…follow what the NIH brass says, no division, no separation, understood?”

“I’m not a rogue, Mr. Vice President,” Augustine said.

“Talk with you soon, Mark,” the VP said.

Kennealy came back on the line. He sounded miffed. “Troops are being trucked in now, Mark. Hold on a second.” His hand cupped over the receiver. “The VP is out of the room. Jesus, Mark, what did you do, chew him out?”

“I asked him to have the president call me,” Augustine said.

“That’s a hell of a note,” Kennealy said coldly.

“Will someone please tell me if we learn about another baby, out of the country?” Augustine said. “Or in? Could the State Department please coordinate with my office on a daily basis? I hope I am not treading water here, Tom!”

“Please don’t ever talk to the VP like that again, Mark,” Kennealy said, and hung up.

Augustine pressed the call button. “Florence, I need to write a cover letter and a memo. Is Dicken in town? Where’s Lang?”

“Dr. Dicken is in Atlanta and Kaye Lang is on campus. At the clinic, I believe. You’re supposed to meet with her in ten minutes.”

Augustine opened his desk drawer and took out a legal pad. On it he had sketched the thirty-one levels of command above him, thirty between him and the president — a bit of an obsession with him. He sharply slashed off five, then six, then worked his way up to ten names and offices, tearing the paper. If worst came to worst, he thought that with a little careful planning he could possibly eliminate ten of those levels, maybe twenty.

But first he had to stick out his neck and send them his report and a coverage memo, and make sure it was on everybody’s desk before the shit was airborne.

Not that he would be sticking his neck out very far. Before some White House lackey — maybe Kennealy, greasing for a promotion — whispered in the president’s ear that Augustine was not a team player, he strongly suspected there would be another incident.

A very bad incident.

48 The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

Burying herself in work was the only thing Kaye could think of to do right now. Confusion blocked any other option. As she left the clinic, walking briskly past the outdoor tables full of Vietnamese and Korean vendors selling toiletries and knickknacks, she looked at the task list in her daybook and ticked off the meetings and calls — Augustine first, then ten minutes in Building 15 with Robert Jackson to ask about the ribozyme binding sites, a cross-check with two NIH researchers in Buildings 5 and 6 helping her in her search for additional SHEVA-like HERV; then to half a dozen other researchers in her backup list to solicit their opinions -

She was halfway between the clinic and the Taskforce center when her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her purse.

“Kaye, this is Christopher.”

“I don’t have any time and I feel like shit, Christopher,” she snapped. “Tell me something that will make me feel good.”

“If it’s any consolation, I feel like shit, too. I got drunk last night and there are demonstrators out front.”

“They’re here, too.”

“But listen to this, Kaye. We have Infant C in pathology now. It was born at least a month premature.”

“It? Ithad a sex, didn’t it?”

“He. He’s riddled inside and out with herpes lesions. He had no protection against herpes in the womb — SHEVA induces some sort of opportunistic opening through the pla-cental barrier for herpes virus.”

“So they’re in league — all out to cause death and destruction. That’s cheerful.”

“No,” Dicken said. “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. I’m coming up to NIH tomorrow.”

“Give me something to go on, Christopher. I don’t want another night like the last two.”

“Infant C might not have died if his mother hadn’t contracted herpes. They may be separate issues, Kaye.”

Kaye closed her eyes, stood still on the sidewalk. She looked around for Farrah Tighe; in her distraction, she had apparently walked out without her, against instructions. No doubt Tighe was frantically searching for her right now. “Even if they are, who will listen to us now?”

“None of the eight women at the clinic have any herpes or HIV I called Lipton and checked. They’re excellent test cases.”

“They aren’t due for ten months,” Kaye said. “If they follow the one-month rule.”

“I know. But I’m sure we’ll find others. We need to talk again — seriously.”

“I’ll be in meetings all day, then at the Americol labs in Baltimore tomorrow.”

“This evening, then. Or doesn’t the truth mean much now?”

“Don’t lecture me about truth, damn it,” Kaye said. She could see National Guard trucks moving in along Center Drive. So far, the protesters had kept to the northern end; she could see their signs and banners from where she stood beside a low grassy hill. She missed Dicken’s next few words. She was fascinated by the distant crowds on the move.

“ — I want to give your idea a fair chance,” Dicken said. “The LPC carries no possible benefit for a simple virus — why use it?”

“Because SHEVA’s a messenger,” Kaye said, her voice soft, between dreamy and distracted. “It’s Darwin’s radio.”

“What?”

“You’ve seen the afterbirth from the Herod’s first-stage fetuses, Christopher. Specialized amniotic sacs…Very sophisticated. Not diseased.”

“Like I said, I want to work on this more. Convince me, Kaye. God, if this Infant C is just a fluke!”

Three blunt little popping sounds came from the north end of the campus, small, toylike. She heard the crowd let out a startled moan, then a distant, high scream.

“I can’t talk, Christopher.” She shut the phone with a plastic clack and ran. The crowd was about a quarter of a mile away, breaking up, people pushing back and scattering along the roads, the parking lots, the brick buildings. No more pops. She slowed to a walk for several steps, considering the danger, then ran again. She had to know. Too much uncertainty in her life. Too much hanging back and inaction, with Saul, with everything and everybody.

Fifty feet from her she saw a stocky man in a brown suit dash out of a building’s rear service door, arms and legs going like windmills. His coat flapped up over a bulging white shirt and he looked ridiculous, but he was quick as a bat out of hell and heading right for her.

For a moment she was alarmed and veered to avoid him.

“Damn it, Dr. Lang,” he shouted. “Hold on there! Stop!”

She slowed to a grudging walk, out of breath. The man in the brown suit caught up with her and flashed a badge. He was from the Secret Service and his name was Benson and that was all she managed to catch before he closed the case and pocketed it again. “What in hell are you doing? Where’s Tighe?” he asked her, his face beefy red, sweat pouring down his pockmarked cheeks.

“They need help,” she said. “She’s back at the—”

“That’s gunfire. You will stay right here if I have to hold you down personally. Goddamn it, Tighe was not supposed to let you out alone!”

At that moment, Tighe came running to catch up with them. She was red-faced with anger. She and Benson exchanged quick, harsh whispers, then Tighe positioned herself beside Kaye. Benson broke into a speedy trot toward the broken clumps of protesters. Kaye continued walking, but slower.

“Stop right here, Ms. Lang,” Tighe said.

“Somebody’s been shot!”

“Benson will take care of it!” Tighe insisted, standing between her and the crowd.

Kaye peered over Tighe’s shoulders. Men and women clutched their hands to their faces, crying. She saw dropped banners, drooping signs. The crowd swirled in complete confusion.

National Guard soldiers in camouflage, automatic rifles held at ready, took positions between brick buildings along the closest road.

A campus police car drove over the lawn and between two tall oak trees. She saw other men in suits, some talking on cell phones, walkie-talkies.

Then she noticed the lone man in the middle, arms held straight out as if he wanted to fly. Beside him, a motionless woman sprawled on the grass. Benson and a campus security officer reached them simultaneously. Benson kicked a dark object across the grass: a pistol. The security officer pulled out his own pistol and aggressively pushed back the flying man.

Benson knelt beside the woman, checked the pulse at her neck, looked up, around, his face saying it all. Then he glared at Kaye, mouthed emphatically, Get back .

“It wasn’t my baby,” the flying man shouted. Skinny, white, short fuzzy blond hair, in his late twenties, he wore a black T-shirt and black jeans slung low on his hips. He tossed his head back and forth as if surrounded by flies. “She made me come here. She goddamn made me. It wasn’t my baby!”

The flying man danced back from the guard, jerking like a marionette. “I can’t take this shit anymore. NO MORE SHIT!”

Kaye stared at the injured woman. Even from twenty yards she could see the blood staining her blouse around her stomach, sightless eyes staring up with a blank kind of hope at the sky.

Kaye ignored Tighe, Benson, the flying man, the troops, the security guards, the crowd.

All she could see was the woman.

49 Baltimore

Cross entered the Americol executive dining room on a pair of crutches. Her young male nurse pulled out a chair, and Cross sat with a relieved puff of breath.

The room was empty but for Cross, Kaye, Laura Nilson, and Robert Jackson.

“How’d it happen, Marge?” Jackson asked.

“Nobody shot me,” she piped cheerfully. “I fell in the bathtub. I have always been my own worst enemy. I am a clumsy ox. What do we have, Laura?”

Nilson, whom Kaye had not seen since the disastrous vaccine press conference, wore a stylish but severe blue three-piece suit. “The surprise of the week is RU-486,” she said. “Women are using it — a lot of it. The French have come forward with a solution. We’ve spoken to them, but they say they are tendering their offer directly to the WHO and to the Taskforce, that their effort is humanitarian, and they aren’t interested in any business liaisons.”

Marge ordered wine from the steward and wiped her forehead with the napkin before spreading it on her lap. “How generous of them,” she mused. “They’ll supply all the world needs, and no new R D costs. Does it work, Robert?”

Jackson took up a Palmbook and poked his way through his notes with a stylus. “Taskforce has unconfirmed reports that RU-486 aborts the second-stage implanted ovum. No word yet on first-stage. It’s all anecdotal. Street research.”

Cross said, “Abortion drugs have never been to my taste.” To the steward, she said, “I’ll have the Cobb salad, side of vinaigrette, and a pot of coffee.”

Kaye ordered a club sandwich, though she was not hungry in the least. She could feel thunderheads building — an unpleasant personal awareness that she was in a very dangerous mood. She was still numb from witnessing the shooting at NIH, two days before.

“Laura, you look unhappy,” Cross said, with a glance at Kaye. She was going to save Kaye’s complaints for last.

“One earthquake after another,” Nilson said. “At least I didn’t have to experience what Kaye did.”

“Horrible,” Cross agreed. “It’s a whole barrel of worms. So, what kind of worms are they?”

“We’ve ordered our own polls. Psych profiles, cultural profiles, across the board. I’m spending every penny you gave me, Marge.”

“Insurance,” Cross said.

“Scary,” Jackson said simultaneously.

“Yes, well it might buy you another Perkin-Elmer machine, that’s all,” Nilson said defensively. “Sixty percent of married or involved males surveyed do not believe the news reports. They believe it is necessary for the women to have sex to be pregnant a second time. We’re coming up against a wall of resistance here, denial, even among the women. Forty percent of married or otherwise involved women say they would abort any Herod’s fetus.”

“That’s what they tell a pollster,” Cross murmured.

“They’d certainly go for an easy out in large numbers. RU-486 is tried and proven. It could become a household remedy for the desperate.”

“It isn’t prevention,” Jackson said, uneasy.

“Of those who wouldn’t use an abortion pill, fully half believe the government is trying to force wholesale abortion on the nation, maybe the world,” Nilson said. “Whoever chose the name ‘Herod’s’ has really skewed the issue.”

“Augustine chose it,” Cross said.

“Marge, we’re heading for a major social disaster: ignorance mixed with sex and dead babies. If large numbers of women with SHEVA abstain from sex with their partners — and get pregnant anyway — then our social science people say we’re going to see more domestic violence, as well as a huge rise in abortions, even of normal pregnancies.”

“There are other possibilities,” Kaye said. “I’ve seen the results.”

“Go ahead,” Cross encouraged.

“The 1990s cases in the Caucasus. Massacres.”

“I’ve studied those, as well,” Nilson said efficiently, flipping through her legal pad. “We don’t actually know much even now. There was SHEVA in the local populations—”

Kaye interrupted. “It’s far more complicated than any of us here can deal with,” she said, her voice cracking. “We are not looking at a disease profile. We’re looking at lateral transmission of genomic instructions leading to a transition phase.”

“Come again? I don’t understand,” Nilson said.

“SHEVA is not an agent of disease.”

“Bullshit,” Jackson said in astonishment. Marge waved her hand at him in warning.

“We keep building walls around this subject. I can’t hold back anymore, Marge. The Taskforce has denied this possibility from the very beginning.”

“I don’t know what’s being denied,” Cross said. “In brief, Kaye.”

“We see a virus, even one that comes from within our own genome, and we assume it’s a disease. We see everything in terms of disease.”

“I’ve never known a virus that didn’t cause problems, Kaye,” Jackson said, his eyes heavy-lidded. If he was trying to warn her she was treading on thin ice, this time it wasn’t going to work.

“We keep seeing the truth but it doesn’t fit into our primitive views on how nature works.”

“Primitive?” Jackson said. “Tell that to smallpox.”

“If this had hit us thirty years from now,” Kaye persisted, “maybe we’d be prepared — but we’re still acting like ignorant children. Children who have never been told the facts of life.”

“What are we missing?” Cross asked patiently.

Jackson drummed his fingers on the table. “It’s been discussed.”

“What?” Cross asked.

“Not in any serious forum,” Kaye countered.

“What, please?”

“Kaye is about to tell us that SHEVA is part of a biological reshuffling. Transposons jumping around and affecting phe-notype. It’s the buzz among the interns who’ve been reading Kaye’s papers.”

“Which means?”

Jackson grimaced. “Let me anticipate. If we let the new babies be born, they’re all going to be big-headed super-humans. Prodigies with blond hair and staring eyes and telepathic abilities. They’ll kill us all and take over the Earth.”

Stunned, near tears, Kaye stared at Jackson. He smiled half-apologetically, half in glee at having warded off any possible debate. “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “And we don’t have any time to waste.”

Nilson watched Kaye with cautious sympathy. Marge lifted her head and glared at the ceiling. “Will someone please tell me what I’ve just stepped into?”

“Pure bullshit,” Jackson said under his breath, adjusting his napkin.

The steward brought them their food.

Nilson put her hand on Kaye’s. “Forgive us, Kaye. Robert can be very forceful.”

“It’s my own confusion I’m dealing with, not Robert’s defensive rudeness,” Kaye said. “Marge, I have been trained in the precepts of modern biology. I’ve dealt with rigid interpretations of data, but I’ve grown up in the middle of the most incredible ferment imaginable. Here’s the solid foundation wall of modern biology, built brick by careful brick…” She drew the wall with her outstretched hand. “And here’s a tidal wave called genetics. We’re mapping the factory floor of the living cell. We’re discovering that nature is not just surprising, but shockingly unorthodox. Nature doesn’t give a damn what we think or what our paradigms are.”

“That’s all very well,” Jackson said, “but science is how we organize our work and avoid wasting time.”

“Robert, this is a discussion,” Cross said.

“I can’t apologize for what I feel in my gut is true,” Kaye persisted. “I will lose everything rather than lie.”

“Admirable,” Jackson said. “ ‘Nevertheless, it moves,’ is that it, dear Kaye?”

“Robert, don’t be an asshole,” Nilson said.

“I am outnumbered, ladies,” Jackson said, pushing back his chair in disgust. He draped his napkin over his plate but did not leave. Instead, he folded his arms and cocked his head, as if encouraging — or daring — Kaye to continue.

“We’re behaving like children who don’t even know how babies are made,” Kaye said. “We’re witnessing a different kind of pregnancy. It isn’t new — it’s happened many times before. It’s evolution, but it’s directed, short-term, immediate, not gradual, and I have no idea what kind of children will be produced,” Kaye said. “But they will not be monsters and they won’t eat their parents.”

Jackson lifted his arm high like a boy in a classroom. “If we’re in the hands of some fast-acting master craftsman, if God is directing our evolution now, I’d say it’s time to hire some cosmic lawyers. It’s malpractice of the lowest order. Infant C was a complete botch.”

“That was herpes,” Kaye said.

“Herpes doesn’t work that way,” Jackson said. “You know that as well as I.”

“SHEVA makes fetuses particularly susceptible to viral invasion. It’s an error, a natural error.”

“We have no evidence of that. Evidence, Ms. Lang!”

“The CDC—” Kaye began.

“Infant C was a Herod’s second-stage monstrosity with herpes added on, as a side dish,” Jackson said. “Really, ladies, I’ve had it. We’re all tired. I for one am exhausted.” He stood, bowed quickly, and stalked out of the dining room.

Marge picked through her salad with a fork. “This sounds like a conceptual problem. I’ll call a meeting. We’ll listen to your evidence, in detail,” she said. “And I’ll ask Robert to bring in his own experts.”

“I don’t think there are many experts who would openly support me,” Kaye said. “Certainly not now. The atmosphere is charged.”

“This is all-important with regard to public perception,” Nilson said thoughtfully.

“How?” Cross asked.

“If some group or creed or corporation decides that Kaye is right, we’ll have to deal with that.”

Kaye suddenly felt very exposed, very vulnerable.

Cross picked up a strip of cheese with her fork and examined it. “If Herod’s isn’t a disease, I don’t know how we’d deal with it. We’d be caught between a natural event and an ignorant and terrified public. That makes for horrible politics and nightmarish business.”

Kaye’s mouth went dry. She had no answer to that. It was true.

“If there are no experts who support you,” Cross said thoughtfully, pushing the cheese into her mouth, “how do you make a case?”

“I’ll present the evidence, the theory,” Kaye said.

“By yourself?” Cross asked.

“I could probably find a few others.”

“How many?”

“Four or five.”

Cross ate for a few moments. “Jackson’s an asshole, but he’s brilliant, he’s a recognized expert, and there are hundreds who would agree with his point of view.”

“Thousands,” Kaye said, straining to keep her voice steady. “Against just me and a few crackpots.”

Cross waggled a finger at Kaye. “You’re no crackpot, dear. Laura, one of our companies developed a morning-after pill some years ago.”

“That was in the nineties.”

“Why did we abandon it?”

“Politics and liability issues.”

“We had a name for it…what were we calling it?”

“Some wag code-named it RU-Pentium,” Nilson said.

“I recall that it tested well,” Marge said. “We still have the formulae and samples, I assume.”

“I made an inquiry this afternoon,” Nilson said. “We could bring it back and get production up to speed in a couple of months.”

Kaye clutched the tablecloth where it crossed her lap. She had once campaigned passionately for a woman’s right to choose. Now, she could not work her way through the conflicting emotions.

“No reflection on Robert’s work,” Cross said, “but there’s a better than fifty-fifty chance the trials on the vaccine are going to fail. And that statement does not leave this room, ladies.”

“We’re still getting computer models predicting MS as a side effect for the ribozyme component,” Kaye said. “Will Americol recommend abortion as an alternative?”

“Not all on our lonesome,” Cross said. “The essence of evolution is survival. Right now, we’re standing in the middle of a minefield, and anything that clears a path, I’m certainly not going to ignore.”

Dicken took the call in the equipment room next to the main receiving and autopsy lab. He slipped off his latex gloves while a young male computer technician held the phone. The technician was there to adjust a balky old workstation used to record autopsy results and track the specimens through the rest of the labs. He stared at Dicken, in his green robe and surgical mask, with some concern.

“Nothing catching, for you,” Dicken told him as he took the phone receiver. “Dicken here. I’m elbow deep.”

“Christopher, it’s Kaye.”

“Hello-o-o, Kaye.” He did not want to put her off; she sounded gloomy but however she sounded, to Dicken, hearing her voice was a disturbing pleasure.

“I’ve screwed things up big time,” Kaye said.

“How’s that?” Dicken waved his hand at Scarry, still in the pathology lab. Scarry wagged his arms impatiently.

“I had a tiff with Robert Jackson…a conversation with Marge and Jackson. I couldn’t hold back. I told them what I thought.”

“Oh,” Dicken said, making a face. “How’d they react?”

“Jackson pooh-poohed it. Treated me with contempt, actually.”

“Arrogant bastard,” Dicken said. “I always thought so.”

“He said we need evidence about the herpes.”

“That’s what Scarry and I are looking for now. We have an accident victim in our pathology lab. Prostitute from Washington, D.C., pregnant. Tests positive for Herpes labialis and for hepatitis A and HIV as well as SHEVA. Rough life.”

The young technician grimly folded his tool kit and left the room.

“Marge is going to match the French on their morning-after pill.”

“Shit,” Dicken said.

“We have to move fast.”

“I don’t know how fast we can go. Dead young women with the right mix of problems just don’t come rolling in off the street every day.”

“I don’t think any amount of evidence is going to convince Jackson. I’m close to my wit’s end, Christopher.”

“I hope Jackson doesn’t go to Augustine. We aren’t ready yet, and thanks to me, Mark is already touchy,” Dicken said. “Kaye, Scarry is dancing around in the lab. I’ve got to go. Keep your chin up. Call me.”

“Has Mitch spoken to you?”

“No,” Dicken said, a deceptive truth. “Call rne later at my office. Kaye — I’m here for you. I’ll support you every way I can. I mean that.”

“Thank you, Christopher.”

Dicken put the receiver in its cradle and stood for a moment, feeling stupid. He had never been comfortable with these emotions. Work became all because everything else important was too painful.

“Not very good at this, are we?” he asked himself in a low voice.

Scarry tapped angrily on the glass between the office and the lab.

Dicken lifted his surgical mask and put on a new pair of gloves.

50 Baltimore

Mitch stood in the apartment building lobby, hands in his pockets. He had shaved very carefully this morning, staring into the long mirror in the communal bathroom at the YMCA, and just last week he had gone to a barber and had his hair styled — managed was more like it.

His jeans were new. He had dug through his suitcase and pulled out a black blazer. He had not dressed to impress in over a year, but here he was, thinking of little else but Kaye Lang.

The doorman was not impressed. He leaned on his pedestal and watched Mitch closely out of the corner of his eye. The phone rang at the pedestal and he answered it.

“Go on up,” he said, waving his hand at the elevator. “Twentieth floor. 2011. Check in with the guard up there. Serious beef.”

Mitch thanked him and stood in the elevator. As the door closed, he wondered for a panicky moment what the hell he thought he was doing. The last thing he needed in this mess was emotional involvement. Where women were concerned, however, Mitch was guided by secret masters reticent to divulge either their goals or their immediate plans. These secret masters had caused him a lot of grief.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and resigned himself to the next few hours, come what may.

On the twentieth floor, he stepped out of the elevator and saw Kaye speaking to a man in a gray suit. He had short black hair, a strong thick face, a hooked nose. The man had spotted Mitch before Mitch saw them.

Kaye smiled at Mitch. “Come on in. The coast is clear. This is Karl Benson.”

“Glad to meet you,” Mitch said.

The man nodded, folded his arms, and stepped back, allowing Mitch to pass, but not without a sniff, like a dog trying for a scent.

“Marge Cross gets about thirty death threats every week,” Kaye said as she led Mitch into the apartment. “I’ve had three since the incident at NIH.”

“The game is getting tough,” Mitch said.

“I’ve been so busy since the RU-486 mess,” Kaye said.

Mitch lifted his thick brows. “The abortion pill?”

“Didn’t Christopher tell you?”

“Chris hasn’t returned any of my calls,” Mitch said.

“Oh?” Dicken had not told her the precise truth. Kaye found that interesting. “Maybe it’s because you call him Chris.”

“Not to his face,” Mitch said, grinned, and sobered. “As I said, I’m ignorant.”

“RU-486 removes the secondary SHEVA pregnancy if it’s used at an early stage.” She looked for his reaction. “You don’t approve?”

“Under the circumstances, it seems wrong.” Mitch peered at the simple, elegant furniture, the art prints.

Kaye closed the door. “Abortion in general…or this?”

“This.” Mitch sensed her tension and felt for a moment as if she were putting him through a quick exam.

“Americol is going to make its own abortion pill available. If it’s a disease, we’re close to stopping it,” Kaye said.

Mitch strolled to the large plate glass window, pushed his hands into his pockets, looked over his shoulder at Kaye. “You’re helping them do this?”

“No,” Kaye said. “I’m hoping to convince some key people, rearrange our priorities. I don’t think I’m going to succeed, but it has to be done. I’m glad you came here, though. Maybe it’s a sign my luck is improving. What brings you to Baltimore?”

Mitch pulled his hands out of his pockets. “I’m not a very promising sign. I can barely afford to travel. I got some money from my father. I’m on the parental dole big time.”

“Are you going on to somewhere else?” Kaye asked.

“Just to Baltimore,” Mitch said.

“Oh.” Kaye stood a long step behind him. He could see her reflection in the glass, her bright beige suit, but not her face.

“Well, that’s not strictly true. I’m going to New York, SUN Y. A friend in Oregon arranged for an interview. I’d like to teach, do field research in the summer. Maybe start over again on a different coast.”

“I went to SUNY. I’m afraid I don’t know anybody there now. Nobody influential. Please sit.” Kaye motioned toward the couch, the armchair. “Water? Juice?”

“Water, please.”

As she went to the kitchen, Mitch sniffed the flowers on the etagere, roses and lilies and baby’s breath, then circled around the couch and sat at one end. His long legs seemed to have no place to go. He folded his hands over his knees.

“I can’t just scream and shout and resign,” Kaye said. “I owe it to the people I work with.”

“I see. How’s the vaccine coming?”

“We’re well into preclinical trials. Some fast-track clinical trials in Britain and Japan, but I’m not happy about them. Jackson — he’s in charge of the vaccine project — wants me moved out of his division.”

“Why?”

“Because I spoke out in the dining room three days ago. Marge Cross couldn’t use our theory. Doesn’t fit the paradigm. Not defensible.”

“Quorum sensing,” Mitch said.

Kaye brought him a glass of water. “How’s that?”

“A chance discovery in my reading. When there’s enough bacteria, they change their behavior, get coordinated. Maybe we do the same thing. We just don’t have enough scientists to make a quorum.”

“Maybe,” Kaye said. She stood, once more, about a step away from him. “I’ve been working in the HERV and genome labs at Americol most of the time. Finding out where other endogenous virus like SHEVA might express, and under what conditions. I’m a little surprised that Christopher—”

Mitch looked up at her and interrupted. “I came to Baltimore to see you,” he said.

“Oh,” Kaye said softly.

“I can’t stop thinking about our evening at the zoo.”

“It doesn’t seem real now,” Kaye said.

“It does to me,” Mitch said.

“I think Marge is moving me off the press conference schedule,” Kaye said, perversely trying to shift the conversation, or to see if he would allow it to be shifted. “Wean me away from being a spokeswoman. It’ll take me some time to earn her trust again. Frankly, I’m glad to be away from the public eye. There’s going to be a—”

“In San Diego,” he interrupted, “I reacted pretty strongly to your presence.”

“That’s sweet,” Kaye said, and half turned, as if to run away. She did not run, but she walked around the table and stopped on his other side, again, just a step away.

“Pheromones,” Mitch said, and stood tall beside her. “The way people smell is important to me. You aren’t wearing perfume.”

“I never do,” Kaye said.

“You don’t need it.”

“Hold it,” Kaye said, and backed off one more step. She raised her hands and stared at him intently, lips pressed together. “I can be easily confused now. I need to keep my focus.”

“You need to relax,” Mitch said.

“Being around you is not relaxing.”

“You’re not sure about things.”

“I’m certainly not sure about you.”

He held out his hand. “Want to smell my hand first?”

Kaye laughed.

Mitch sniffed his palm. “Dial soap. Taxi cab doors. I haven’t dug a hole in years. My calluses are smoothing over. I’m out of work, in debt, and I have a reputation as a crazy and unethical son of a bitch.”

“Stop being so hard on yourself. I read your papers, and old news stories. You don’t cover up and you don’t lie. You’re interested in the truth.”

“I’m flattered,” Mitch said.

“And you confuse me. I don’t know what to think about you. You’re not much like my husband.”

“Is that good?” Mitch asked.

Kaye looked him over critically. “So far.”

“The customary thing would be to try things out slowly. I’d ask you out to dinner.”

“Dutch treat?”

“My expense account,” Mitch said wryly.

“Karl would have to come with us. He’d have to approve the restaurant. I usually eat up here, or at Americol’s cafeteria.”

“Does Karl eavesdrop?”

“No,” Kaye said.

“The doorman said he was serious beef,” Mitch said.

“I am still a kept woman,” Kaye said. “I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is. Let’s stay here and eat. We can walk in the roof garden later, if it’s stopped raining. I stock some really good frozen entrees. I get them from a market in the mall down below. And salad in a bag. I’m a good cook when there’s time, but there hasn’t been any time.” She walked back to the kitchen.

Mitch followed, looking at the other pictures on her walls, the little ones in cheap frames that were probably her own contribution to the decor. Small prints of Maxfield Parrish, Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham; photos of family groups.

He did not see any pictures of her dead husband. Perhaps she kept them in the bedroom.

“I’d like to cook for you some time,” Mitch said. “I’m pretty handy with a camp stove.”

“Wine? With dinner?”

“I need some now,” Mitch said. “I’m very nervous.”

“So am I,” Kaye said, and held up her hands to show him. They were trembling. “Do you have this effect on all women?”

“Never,” Mitch said.

“Nonsense. You smell good,” Kaye said.

They were less than a step apart. Mitch closed the gap, touched her chin, lifted it. Kissed her gently. She pushed back a few inches, then grasped his own chin between thumb and forefinger, tugged it down, kissed him more forcefully.

“I think it’s okay to be playful with you,” she said. With Saul, she could never be sure how he would react. She had learned to limit her range of behaviors.

“Please,” he said.

“You’re solid,” she said. She touched the sun wrinkles in his face, premature crow’s feet. Mitch had a young face and bright eyes but wise and experienced skin.

“I’m a madman, but a solid one.”

“The world goes on, our instincts don’t change,” Kaye said, eyes losing their focus. “We’re not in charge.” A part of her she had not heard from in a long time liked his face very much.

Mitch tapped his forehead. “Do you hear it? From the deep inside?”

“I think so,” Kaye said. She decided to fish. “What do I smell like?”

Mitch leaned into her hair. Kaye gave a little gasp as his nose touched her ear. “Clean and alive, like a beach in the rain,” he said.

“You smell like a lion,” Kaye said. He nuzzled her lips, laid his ear against her temple, as if listening. “What do you hear?” she asked.

“You’re hungry,” Mitch said, and smiled, a full-bore, thousand-watt, little-boy smile.

This was so obviously unrehearsed that Kaye touched his lips with her ringers, in wonder, before his face returned to that protective, endearing, but ultimately disguising, casual grin. She stepped back. “Right. Food. Wine first, please,” she said, and opened the refrigerator. She handed him a bottle of semillon blanc.

Mitch pulled a Swiss Army knife out of his pants pocket, extended the corkscrew, extracted the cork deftly. “We drink beer on a dig, wine when we finish,” he said, pouring her a glass.

“What kind of beer?”

“Coors. Budweiser. Anything not too heavy.”

“All the men I’ve known preferred ales or microbrews.”

“Not in the sun,” Mitch said.

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

“The YMCA,” he said.

“I’ve never met a man who stayed at the YMCA.”

“It isn’t so bad.”

She sipped her wine, wet her lips, moved up closer, lifted on her toes, and kissed him. He tasted the wine on her tongue, still slightly chilled.

“Stay here,” she said.

“What will serious beef think?”

She shook her head, kissed him again, and he wrapped his arms around her, still holding his glass and the bottle. A little wine spilled on her dress. He turned her and put the glass on the counter, then the bottle.

“I don’t know where to stop,” she said.

“I don’t either,” Mitch said. “I know how to be careful, though.”

“It’s that kind of age, isn’t it?” Kaye said regretfully, and tugged his shirt from his pants.

In Mitch’s experience, Kaye was neither the most beautiful woman he had seen naked, nor the most dynamic in bed. That would have to have been Tilde, who, despite her distance, had been very exciting. What struck him most about Kaye was his complete acceptance of every feature, from her small and slightly pendulous breasts, her narrow rib cage, wide hips, thickly flossed pubis, long legs — better than Tilde’s, he thought — to her steady and examining gaze as he made love to her. Her scent filled his nose, filled his brain, until he felt as if he were drifting on a warm and supportive ocean of necessary pleasure. Through the condom, he could feel very little, but all his other senses compensated, and it was the touch of her breasts, her cherry-pit-hard nipples, on his own chest that propelled him up and over the wave. He was still moving in her, instinctively still supplying the last of his flow, when she looked very startled, thrashed underneath, squeezed her eyes shut, and cried, “Oh, God, fuck, fuck!”

She had been mostly silent until that moment, and he looked down on her in surprise. She turned her face away and hugged him tight against her, pulling him down, wrapped her legs around him, rubbed against him vigorously. He wanted to pull out before the condom spilled, but she kept moving, and he found himself firming again, and he obliged until she gave a small shriek, this time with eyes open, her face contorted as if in great need or pain. Then her expression went slack, her body relaxed, and she closed her eyes. Mitch withdrew and checked: the condom was still secure. He removed it and deftly tied it, dropped it over the side of the bed for disposal later.

“1 can’t talk,” Kaye whispered.

Mitch lay beside her, savoring their mingled scents. He did not want anything more. For the first time in years, he was happy.

“What was it like to be one of the Neandertals?” Kaye asked. The twilight deepened outside. The apartment was quiet but for the far and muffled sound of traffic on the streets below.

Mitch lifted up on his elbow. “We talked about that already.”

Kaye lay on her back, naked from the waist up, a sheet pulled to her navel, listening for something much farther away than the traffic.

“In San Diego,” she said. “I remember. We talked about them having masks. About the man staying with her. You thought he must have loved her very much.”

“That’s right “Mitch said.

“He must have been rare. Special. The woman on the NIH campus. Her boyfriend didn’t believe it was his baby.” The words started to pour out of her. “Laura Nilson — PR manager for Americol — told us that most men won’t believe it’s their baby. Most women will probably abort rather than take the risk. That’s why they’re going to recommend the morning-after pill. If the vaccine has problems, they can still stop this.”

Mitch looked uncomfortable. “Can’t we forget for a little while?”

“No,” Kaye said. “I can’t stand it anymore. We’re going to slaughter all the firstborn, just like Pharaoh in Egypt. If we keep this up, we’ll never know what the next generation looks like. They’ll all be dead. Do you want that to happen?”

“No,” Mitch said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not as frightened as the next guy.” He shook his head. “I wonder what I would have done if I were that man, back then, fifteen thousand years ago. They must have been thrown out of their tribe. Or maybe they ran away. Maybe they were just walking and they came upon a raiding party and she got hurt.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No,” Mitch said. “I really don’t know. I’m not psychic.”

“I’m spoiling the mood, aren’t I?”

“Mmm hmm,” he said.

“Our lives are not our own,” Kaye said. She ran her finger around his nipples, stroked the stiff hairs on his chest. “But we can build a wall for a little while. You’re going to stay here tonight?”

Mitch kissed her forehead, then her nose, her cheeks. “The accommodations are much nicer than the YMCA.” “Come here,” Kaye said. “I can’t get much closer.” “Try.”

Kaye Lang lay trembling in the dark. She was certain Mitch was asleep, but to make sure, she poked his back lightly. He squirmed but did not respond. He was comfortable. Comfortable with her.

She had never taken such a risk; from the time of her first dates she had always looked for safety and, she hoped, security, planning her safe haven where she could do her work, think her thoughts with minimal interference from the outside world.

Marrying Saul had been the ultimate achievement. Age, experience, money, business acumen — so she had thought. Now, to swing so far in the opposite direction, was all too obviously an overreaction. She wondered what she would do about it.

When he woke up in the morning, to simply tell Mitch it was all a mistake…

Terrified her. Not that she thought he would hurt her, he was the gentlest of men and showed few if any signs of the internal strife that had so troubled Saul.

Mitch was not as handsome as Saul.

On the other hand, Mitch was completely open and honest.

Mitch had sought her out, but she was fairly sure she had seduced him. Kaye certainly did not feel anything had been forced upon her.

“What in the hell are you doing?” she muttered in the dark. She was talking to another self, the stubborn Kaye that so seldom told her what was really going on. She got out of bed, put on her robe, went to the desk in the living room and opened the middle drawer, where she kept her record books.

She had six hundred thousand dollars, adding together income from the sale of her home and her personal retirement account. If she resigned from Americo\ and xYie Taskforce, she could live in moderately comfortable circumstances for years.

She spent a few minutes working out expenses, emergency budgets, food allowances, monthly bills, on a small piece of note paper, then stiffened in her chair. “This is stupid,” she said. “What am I planning?” Then, to that stubborn and secretive self, she added, “What in hell are you up to?”

She would not tell Mitch to go away in the morning. He made her feel good. Around him, her mind became quieter, her fears and worries less pressing. He looked as if he knew what he was doing, and maybe he did know. Maybe it was the world that was screwy, that set traps and snares and forced people to make bad choices.

She tapped the pen on the paper, pulled another sheet from the pad. Her fingers pushed the pen over the paper almost without conscious thought, sketching a series of open reading frames on chromosomes 18 and 20 that might bear a relation to the SHEVA genes, previously identified as possible HERVs but turning out not to have the defining characteristics of retrovirus fragments. She needed to look into these loci, these scattered fragments, to see if they might possibly fit together and be expressed; she had been putting this off for some time. Tomorrow would be the proper moment.

Before she followed through with anything, she needed ammunition. She needed armor.

She returned to the bedroom. Mitch seemed to be dreaming. Fascinated, she lay down quietly beside him.

At the top of a snow-covered rise, the man saw the shamans and their helpers following him and his woman. They could not avoid leaving tracks in the snow, but even on the lower grasslands, through the forest, they had been tracked by experts.

The man had brought his woman, heavy and slow with her child, to such heights in hope of crossing over into another valley where he had once gone as a child.

He glanced back at the figures a few hundred steps behind. Then the man \ooked at the crags and peaks ahead, like so many tumbled flints. He was lost. He had forgotten the way into the valley.

The woman said little now. The face he had once looked upon with so much devotion was hidden by her mask.

The man was filled with such bitterness. This high, the wet snow soaked through his thin shoes with their grass pads. The chill worked up his calves to his knees and made them ache. The wind cut through his skins, even with the fur turned inside, and sapped his strength, shortened his breath.

The woman plodded on. He knew he might escape if he abandoned her. The prospect made his anger darken. He hated the snow, the shamans, the mountains; he hated himself. He could not bring himself to hate the woman. She had suffered the blood on her thighs, the loss, and hidden it from him so as not to bring shame; she had daubed her face with mud to hide the marks, and then, when she could not hide, she had tried to save him by offering herself to the Great Mother, carved into the grass hillside of the valley. But the Great Mother had refused her, and she had come back to him, moaning and mewing. She could not kill herself.

His own face showed the marks. That puzzled and angered him.

The shamans and sisters of the Great Mother, of the Goat Mother, of the Grass Mother, the Snow Woman, Leopard the Loud Killer, Chancre the Soft Killer, Rain the Weeping Father, had all gathered and made their decision during the cooling times, taking painful weeks while the others — the others who had the marks — stayed in their huts.

The man had decided to run. He could not convince himself to trust the shamans and the sisters.

As they fled, they had heard the cries. The shamans and sisters had begun to kill the mothers and the fathers with the marks.

Everyone knew how the flatfaces were brought forth by the people. The women might hide, their men might hide, but all knew. Those who would bear flatface children could only make things worse.

Only the sisters of the gods and goddesses bred true, never bred flatfaces, because they trained the young men of the tribe. They had many men.

He should have let the shamans take his wife as a sister, let her train the boys, too, but she had wanted only him.

The man hated the mountains, the snow, the running. He plodded on, roughly grabbed the woman’s arm, pushed her around a rock so they could find a place to hide. He was not watching closely. He was too full of this new truth, that the mothers and fathers of the sky and the ghost world around them were all blind or just lies.

He was alone, his woman was alone, no tribe, no people, no helpers. Not even Long Hairs and Wet Eyes, the most frightening of the dead visitors, the most harmful, cared about them. He was beginning to think none of the dead visitors were real.

The three men surprised him. He did not see them until they came from a cleft in the mountain and thrust their sticks at his woman. He knew them but no longer belonged to them. One had been a brother, another a Wolf Father. They were none of these things now and he wondered how he even recognized them.

Before they could run, one thrust a burned and sharpened stick and pushed it into the woman’s full stomach. She spun around, reaching under the skins with scrabbling hands, cried out, and he had rocks in his hand and was throwing them, grabbed a stick from one man and thrust blindly with it, poked one in the eye, drove them off whining and yelping like pups.

He yelled at the sky, held his woman while she kept trying to catch her breath, then carried her and dragged her higher. The woman told him with her hands and her eyes that behind the blood, behind the pain, it was her time. The new one wanted to come.

He looked higher for a place to hide and watch the new one come. There was so much blood, more than he had ever seen except from an animal. As he walked and carried the woman, he looked over his shoulder. The shamans and the others were not following now.

Mitch cried out, thrashing through the covers. He threw his legs off the bed, hands clutching the sheets, confused by the curtains and the furniture. For a moment he did not know who or where he was.

Kaye sat beside him and held him.

“A dream?” she asked, rubbing his shoulders.

“Yeah,” he said. “My God. Not psychic. No time travel. He didn’t carry any firewood. But there was a fire in the cave. The masks didn’t seem right, either. But it felt real.”

Kaye laid him back on the bed and smoothed his damp hair, touched his bristled cheek. Mitch apologized for waking her.

“I was already awake,” she said.

“Hell of a way to impress you,” Mitch murmured.

“You don’t need to impress me,” Kaye said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” he said. “It was only a dream.”

51 Richmond, Virginia

Dicken pushed open the car door and stepped out of the Dodge. Dr. Denise Lipton handed him a badge. He shaded his eyes against the bright sun and looked up at the small sign over the clinic’s bare concrete wall: VIRGINIA CHATHAM WOMENS HEALTH AND FAMILY CENTER. A face briefly peered at them through a tiny wire-mesh glass window in the heavy blue-painted metal door. The intercom switched on, and Lipton gave her name and her contact at the clinic. The door opened.

Dr. Henrietta Paskow stood with thick legs planted wide apart, her calf-length gray skirt and white blouse emphasizing a strong stout plainness that made her seem older than she actually was. “Thanks for coming, Denise. We’ve been very busy.”

They followed her through the yellow and white hallway, past the doors of eight waiting rooms, to a small office in the rear. Brass-framed portraits of a large family of young children hung on the wall behind the plain wooden desk.

Lipton sat in a metal folding chair. Dicken remained standing. Paskow pushed two boxes of folders at them.

“We’ve done thirty since Infant C,” she said. “Thirteen D and Cs, seventeen morning-afters. The pills work for five weeks after the rejection of the first-stage fetus.”

Dicken looked through the case reports. They were straightforward, concise, with attending physician and nurse practitioner notes.

“There were no severe complications,” Paskow said. “The laminal tissue protects against saltwater lavage. But by the end of the fifth week, the laminal tissue has dissolved, and the pregnancy appears to be vulnerable.”

“How many requests so far?” Lipton asked.

“We’ve had six hundred appointments. Nearly all of them are in their twenties and thirties and living with a man, married or otherwise. We’ve referred half of them to other clinics. It’s a significant increase.”

Dicken laid the folders facedown on the desk.

Paskow scrutinized him. “You don’t approve, Mr. Dicken?”

“I’m not here to approve or disapprove,” he said. “Dr. Lipton and I are doing field interviews to see how our figures match the real world.”

“Herod’s is going to decimate an entire generation,” Paskow said. “A third of the women coming to us don’t even test positive for SHEVA. They haven’t had a miscarriage. They just want the baby out, then wait a few years and see what happens. We’re doing a land-office business in birth control. Our clinic classes are full. We’ve put on a third and fourth classroom upstairs. More men are coming with their wives and their girlfriends. Maybe that’s the only good thing about all this. Men are feeling guilty.”

“There’s no reason to terminate every pregnancy,” Lipton said. “The SHEVA tests are highly accurate.”

“We tell them that. They don’t care,” Paskow said. “They’re scared and they don’t trust us to know what might happen. Meanwhile, every Tuesday and Thursday, we have ten or fifteen Operation Rescue pickets outside yelling that Herod’s is a secular humanist myth, that there is no disease. Only pretty babies being needlessly killed. They claim it’s a worldwide conspiracy. They’re getting shrill and they’re very scared. The millennium is young.”

Paskow had copied key statistical records. She handed Lipton these papers.

“Thank you for your time,” Dicken said.

“Mr. Dicken,” Paskow called after them. “A vaccine would save everyone a lot of grief.”

Lipton saw Dicken to his car. A black woman in her thirties walked past them and stood at the blue door. She had wrapped herself in a long wool coat, though the day was warm. She was more than six months pregnant.

“I’ve had enough for one day,” Lipton said, her face pale. “I’m going back to the campus.”

“I have to pick up some samples,” Dicken said.

Lipton put her hand on the door and said, “The women at our clinic have to be told. None of them have STDs, but they’ve all had chicken pox and one has had hepatitis B.”

“We don’t know that chicken pox causes problems,” Dicken said.

“It’s a herpes virus. Your lab results are scary, Christopher.”

“They’re incomplete. Hell, almost everyone has had chicken pox, or mono, or cold sores. So far, we’re only positive about genital herpes and hepatitis and possibly AIDS.”

“I still have to tell them,” she said, and closed the door for him with a definite slam. “It’s about ethics, Christopher.”

“Yeah,” Dicken said. He kicked at the emergency brake release and started the engine. Lipton walked toward her own car. After a few seconds, he made a disgusted face, shut the engine off again, and sat with his arm out the window, trying to decide how he could best spend his time in the next few weeks.

Things were not going at all well in the labs. Fetal tissue and placenta analysis on samples sent from France and Japan showed vulnerability to all manner of herpes infections. Not a single second-stage pregnancy had survived birth, of the 110 studied thus far.

It was time to make up his mind. Public health policy was in a critical state. Decisions and recommendations would have to be made, and politicians would have to react to those recommendations in ways that could be explained to clearly divided constituencies.

He might not be able to salvage the truth. And the truth seemed remarkably remote at this point. How could something as important as a major evolutionary event be sidetracked so effectively?

On the seat beside him he had dumped a pile of mail from his office in Atlanta. There had been no time to read it on the plane. He pulled out an envelope and swore under his breath. How had he not seen it right away? The postmark and handwriting were clear enough: Dr. Leonid Sugashvili, writing from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia.

He tore open the envelope. A snapshot-size black-and-white photograph on slick paper fell into his lap. He picked it up and examined the image: figures standing before a ramshackle old wood-frame house, two women in dresses, a man in overalls. They looked slender, perhaps even slight, but there was no way to be sure. The faces were indistinct.

Dicken pulled open the folded letter accompanying the photo.

Dicken examined the photograph again. Less than no evidence. Will-o’-the-wisps.

Death rides in on a pale horse, slicing babies right and left, he thought. And I’m teamed up with crackpots and money-grubbing eccentrics.

52 Baltimore

Mitch called his apartment in Seattle while Kaye was taking a shower. He punched in his code and retrieved his messages. There were two calls from his father, a call from a man who did not identify himself, and then a call from Oliver Merton in London. Mitch wrote the number down as Kaye came out of the bathroom, loosely wrapped in a towel.

“You delight in provoking me,” he said. She dried her short hair with another towel, gazing at him with an appraising steadiness that was unnerving.

“Who was that?”

“Picking up my messages.”

“Old girlfriends?”

“My father, somebody I don’t know — a man — and Oliver Merton.”

Kaye lifted her eyebrow. “An old girlfriend might make me happier.”

“Mmm hmm. He wonders if I would a make a trip to Beres-ford, New York. He wants me to meet somebody interesting.”

“A Neandertal?”

“He says he can arrange for my expenses and accommodations.”

“Sounds wonderful,” Kaye said.

“I haven’t said I’ll go. I haven’t the slightest idea what he’s up to.”

“He knows quite a bit about my business,” Kaye said.

“You could come with me,” Mitch said with a squint that showed he knew this was too hopeful.

“I’m not done here, not by a long shot,” she said. “I’ll miss you if you go.”

“Why don’t I call him and ask what he’s got in his bag of tricks?”

“All right,” Kaye said. “Do that, and I’ll fix us two bowls of cereal.”

The call took a few seconds to go through. The low trill of an English phone was quickly interrupted by a breathless, “Fuck it’s late and I’m busy. Who’s this?”

“Mitch Rafelson.”

“Indeed. Pardon me while I wrap myself. I hate talking half-naked.”

“Half!” exclaimed a perturbed woman in the same room. “Tell them I’m soon to be your wife, and you are completely naked.”

“Shush.” Louder, phone half-muffled, Merton called to the woman, “She s getting her essentials and going into the next room.” Merton removed his hand and brought his mouth closer to the phone. “We need to talk in private, Mitchell.”

“I’m calling from Baltimore.”

“How far from Bethesda is that?”

“A ways.”

“NIH have you in the loop yet?”

“No,” Mitch said.

“Marge Cross? Ah…Kaye Lang?”

Mitch winced. Merton’s instincts were uncanny. “I’m a simple anthropologist, Oliver.”

“All right. The room’s empty. I can tell you. The situation in Innsbruck has hotted up considerably. It’s gone beyond fistfights. Now they don’t even like each other. There’s been a falling-out, and one of the principals wants to talk to you.”

“Who?”

“Actually, he says he’s been a sympathizer since the beginning. Says he called you to tell you they’d found the cave.”

Mitch remembered the call. “He didn’t leave a name.”

“Nor will he now. But he’s on the level, he’s important, and he wants to talk. I’d like to be there.”

“Sounds like a political move,” Mitch said.

“I’m sure he’d like to spread some rumors and see what the repercussions are. He wants to meet in New York, not Innsbruck or Vienna. At the home of an acquaintance in Beres-ford. Do you know anybody there?”

“Can’t say that I do,” Mitch replied.

“He hasn’t told me what he’s thinking yet, but…I can put a few links together and it all makes a very nice chain.”

“I’ll think about it and call you back in a few minutes.”

Merton did not sound happy about waiting even that length of time.

“Just a few minutes,” Mitch assured him. He hung up. Kaye emerged from the kitchen with two bowls of cereal and a pitcher of milk on a tray. She had put on a calf-length black robe tied with a red cord. The robe showed off her legs, and, when she bent over, neatly revealed a breast. “Rice Chex or Raisin Bran?”

“Chex, please.”

“Well?”

Mitch smiled. “May I share breakfast with you for a thousand years.”

Kaye looked both confused and pleased. She placed the tray on the coffee table and smoothed her robe over her hips, primping with a kind of awkward self-consciousness that Mitch found very endearing. “You know what I like to hear,” she said.

Mitch gently pulled her down to the couch beside him. “Merton says there’s a breakdown in Innsbruck, a schism. An important member of the team wants to talk to me. Merlon’s going to write a story about the mummies.”

“He’s interested in the same things we are,” Kaye said speculatively. “He thinks something important is happening. And he’s following every angle, from me to Innsbruck.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Mitch said.

“Is he intelligent?”

“Reasonably. Maybe very intelligent. I don’t know; I’ve only spent a few hours with him.”

“Then you should go. You should find out what he knows. Besides, it’s closer to Albany.”

“That’s true. Ordinarily, I’d pack my small bag and hop the next train.”

Kaye poured her milk. “But?”

“I don’t just love and run. I want to spend the next few weeks with you, uninterrupted. Never leave your side.” Mitch stretched his neck, rubbed it. Kaye reached out to help him rub. “That sounds clinging,” he said.

“I want you to cling,” she said. “I feel very possessive and very protective.”

“I can call Merton and tell him no.”

“But you won’t.” She kissed him thoroughly and bit at his lip. “I’m sure you’ll have some amazing tales to tell. I did a lot of thinking last night, and now I have a lot of very focused work to do. When it’s all done, I may have some amazing tales to tell you , Mitch.”

53 Washington, D.C.

Augustine jogged briskly along the Capitol mall, following the dirt jogging path beneath the cherry trees, now dropping the last of their blossoms. An agent in a dark blue suit followed at a steady lope, turning to run backward for a moment and scan the trail behind.

Dicken stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, waiting for Augustine to approach. He had driven in from Bethesda an hour earlier, braving rush-hour traffic, hating this clandestine nonsense with something approaching fury. Augustine stopped beside him and jogged in place, stretching his arms.

“Good morning, Christopher,” he said. “You should jog more often.”

“I like being fat,” Dicken said, his face coloring.

“Nobody likes being fat.”

“Well, in that case, I’m not fat,” Dicken said. “What are we today, Mark, secret agents? Informers?” He wondered why they had not yet assigned an agent to him. He concluded it was because he was not as yet a public figure.

“Goddamn damage control experts,” Augustine said. “A man named Mitchell Rafelson spent the night with dear Ms. Kaye Lang at her lovely condominium in Baltimore.”

Dicken’s heart sank.

“You walked around the San Diego Zoo with the two of them. Got him a badge into a closed Americol party. All very convivial. Did you introduce them, Christopher?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Dicken said, surprised at how miserable he felt.

“That wasn’t wise. Do you know his record?” Augustine asked pointedly. “The body snatcher from the Alps? He’s a nut case, Christopher.”

“I thought he might have something to contribute.”

“To support whose view in this mess?”

“A defensible view,” Dicken said vaguely, looking away. The morning was cool, pleasant, and there were quite a few* joggers on the mall, getting in a little outdoors activity before sealing themselves into their government offices.

“The whole thing smells. It looks like some kind of an end run to refocus the whole project, and that concerns me.”

“We had a point of view, Mark. A defensible point of view.”

“Marge Cross tells me there’s talk about evolution” Augustine said.

“Kaye has been putting together an explanation that involves evolution,” Dicken said. “It’s all predicted in her papers, Mark — and Mitch Rafelson has been doing some research along those lines, as well.”

“Marge thinks there will be severe fallout if this theory gets publicized,” Augustine said. He stopped windmilling his arms and performed neck-stretch exercises, grabbing each upper arm with the opposite hand, applying tension, sighting along the extended arm as he bent it back as far as it would go. “No reason for it to get that far. I’ll stop it right here and now. We got a preprint from the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut in Germany this morning that they’ve found mutated forms of SHEVA. Several of them. Diseases mutate, Christopher. We’ll have to withdraw the vaccine trials and start all over again. That pushes all our hopes onto a really bad option. My job might not survive that kind of upheaval.”

Dicken watched Augustine prance in place, pounding the ground with his feet. Augustine stopped and caught his breath. “There could be twenty or thirty thousand people demonstrating on the mall tomorrow. Somebody’s leaked a report from theTaskforce on the RU-486 results.”

Dicken felt something twist inside him, a small little pop, combined disappointment with Kaye and with all the work he had done. All the time he had wasted. He could not see a way around the problem of a messenger that mutated, changing its message. No biological system would ever give a messenger that kind of control.

He had been wrong. Kaye Lang had been wrong.

The agent tapped his watch, but Augustine screwed up his face and shook his head in annoyance.

“Tell me all about it, Christopher,” Augustine said, “and then I’ll decide whether I’m going to let you keep your goddamned job.”

54 Baltimore

Kaye walked with steady confidence from her building to Americol, looking up at the Bromo-Seltzer Tower — so named because it had once carried a huge blue antacid bottle on its peak. Now it carried just the name; the bottle had been removed decades ago.

Kaye could not shake Mitch from her thoughts, but oddly, he was not a distraction. Her thoughts were focused; she had a much clearer idea of what to look for. The play of sun and shadow pleased her as she walked past the alleys between the buildings. The day was so pretty she could almost ignore the presence of Benson. As always, he accompanied her to the lab floor, then stood by the elevators and the stairs, where everyone would have to pass his inspection.

She entered her lab and hung her purse and coat on a glassware drying rack. Five of her six assistants were in the next room, checking the results of last night’s electrophoresis analysis. She was glad to have some privacy.

She sat at her small desk and pulled up the Americol intranet on the computer. It was just a few seconds from the first screen to AmericoFs proprietary Human Genome Project site. The database was beautifully designed and easy to poke through, with key genes identified and functions highlighted and explained in detail.

Kaye plugged in her password. In her original work, she had tracked down seven potential candidates for the expression and reassembly of complete and infectious HERV particles. The candidate genes she had thought most likely to be viable had turned out — luckily, she would have thought — to be associated with SHEVA. In her months at Americol, she had begun to study the six other candidates in detail, and had planned to move on to a list of thousands of possibly related genes.

Kaye was considered an expert, but what she was an expert in, compared to the huge world of human DNA, was a series of broken-down and seemingly abandoned shacks in a number of small and almost forgotten towns. The HERV genes were supposed to be fossils, fragments scattered through stretches of DNA less than a million base pairs long. Within such small distances, however, genes could recombine — jump from position to position — with some ease. The DNA was constantly in ferment — genes switching locations, forming little knots or fistulas of DNA, and replicating, a series of churning and twisting chains constantly being rearranged, for reasons no one could yet completely fathom. And yet SHEVA had remained remarkably stable over millions of years. The changes she was looking for would be both slight and very significant.

If she was right, she was about to overturn a major scientific paradigm, injure a lot of reputations, cause the scientific fight of the twenty-first century, a war actually, and she did not want to be an early casualty because she had come to the battlefield in half a suit of armor. Speculation about the cause was not sufficient. Extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence.

Patiently, hoping it would be at least an hour before anyone else entered the lab, she once again compared the sequences found in SHEVA with the six other candidates. This time she looked closely at the transcription factors that triggered expression of the large protein complex. She rechecked the sequences several times before she spotted what she had known since yesterday must be there. Four of the candidates carried several such factors, all subtly different.

She sucked in her breath. For a moment she felt as if she stood on the brink of a tall cliff. The transcription factors would have to be specific for different varieties of LPC. That meant there would be more than one gene coding for the large protein complex.

More than one station on Darwin’s radio.

Last week Kaye had asked for the most accurate available sequences of over a hundred genes on several chromosomes. The manager of the genome group had told her they would be available this morning. And he had done his work well. Even scanning by eye, she was seeing interesting similarities. With so much data, however, the eye was not good enough. Using an in-house software package called METABLAST, she searched for sequences roughly homologous with the known LPC gene on chromosome 21. She requested and was authorized to use most of the computing power of the building’s mainframe for over three minutes.

When the search was completed, Kaye had the matches she had hoped for — and hundreds more besides, all buried in so-called junk DNA, each subtly different, offering a different set of instructions, a different set of strategies.

LPC genes were common throughout the twenty-two human autosomes, the chromosomes that did not code for sex.

“Backups,” Kaye whispered, as if she might be overheard, “alternates,” and then she felt a chill. She pushed back from the desk and paced around the lab. “Oh, my God. What in hell am I thinking here?”

SHEVA in its present form was not working properly. The new babies were dying. The experiment — the creation of a new subspecies — was being thwarted by outside enemies, other viruses, not tame, not co-opted ages ago and made part of the human tool kit.

She had found another link in the chain of evidence. If you wanted a message delivered, you would send many messengers. And the messengers could carry different messages. Surely a complex mechanism that governed the shape of a species would not rely on one little messenger and one fixed message. It would automatically alternate subtle designs, hoping to dodge whatever bullets might be out there, problems it could not directly sense or anticipate.

What she was looking at could explain the vast quantities of HERV and other mobile elements — all designed to guarantee an efficient and successful transition to a new pheno-type, a new variety of human. We just don’t know how it works. It’s so complicated…it could take a lifetime to understand!

What chilled her was that in the present atmosphere, these results would be completely misinterpreted.

She pushed her chair back from the computer. All of the energy she had had in the morning, all the optimism, the glow from her night with Mitch, seemed hollow.

She could hear voices down the hall. The hour had passed quickly. She stood and folded the printout of the candidate sites. She would have to take these to Jackson; that was her first duty. Then she had to talk with Dicken. They had to plan a response.

She pulled her coat from the drying rack and slipped it on. She was about to leave when Jackson stepped in from the hall. Kaye looked at him with some shock; he had never come down to her lab before. He looked tired and deeply concerned. He, too, held a slip of paper.

“I thought I should be the first to let you know,” he said, waving the paper under her nose.

“Let me know what?” Kaye asked.

“How wrong you can possibly be. SHEVA is mutating.”

Kaye finished the day in a three-hour round of meetings with senior staff and assistants, a litany of schedules, deadlines, the day-to-day minutiae of research in a small part of a very large corporation, mind-numbing at the best of times, but now almost intolerable. Jackson’s smug condescension at the delivery of the news from Germany had almost goaded her into a sharp rejoinder, but she had simply smiled, said she was already working on the problem, and left…To stand for five minutes in the women’s rest room, staring at herself in a mirror.

She walked from Americol to the condominium tower, accompanied by the ever-watchful Benson, and wondered if last night had just been a dream. The doorman opened the big glass door, smiled politely at them both, and then gave the agent a brotherly nod. Benson joined her in the elevator car. Kaye had never been at ease with the agent, but had managed in the past to keep up polite conversation. Now she could only grunt to his inquiry about how her day had gone.

When she opened the door at 2011, for a moment she thought Mitch was not there, and let out her breath with a small whistle. He had gotten what he wanted and now she was alone again to face her failures, her most brilliant and devastating failures.

But Mitch came out of the small side office with a most pleasing haste and stood in front of her for a moment, searching her face, estimating the situation, before he held her, a little too gently.

“Squeeze me until I squeak,” she said. “I’m having a really bad day.”

That did not stop her from wanting him. Again the love was both intense and wet and full of a marvelous grace she had never felt before. She held on to these moments and when they could go on no more, when Mitch lay beside her covered with beads of sweat and the sheets beneath her were uncomfortably damp, she felt like crying.

“It’s getting really tough,” she said, her chin quivering.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I think I’m wrong, we’re wrong. I know I’m not but everything is telling me I’m wrong.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Mitch said.

“No!” she cried. “I predicted this, I saw it happening, but not soon enough, and they aced me. Jackson aced me. I haven’t talked with Marge Cross, but…”

It took Mitch several minutes to work the details out of her, and even then, he could only half follow what she was saying.

The short form was that she felt new expressions of SHEVA were stimulating new varieties of LPCs, large protein complexes, in case the first signal on Darwin’s radio had not been effective or had met with problems. Jackson and nearly everyone else believed they were encountering a mutated form of SHEVA, perhaps even more virulent.

“Darwin’s radio,” Mitch repeated, mulling over the term.

“The signaling mechanism. SHEVA.”

“Mmm hmm,” he said. “I think your explanation makes more sense.”

“Why does it make more sense? Please tell me I’m not just being pigheaded and wrong.”

“Put the facts together,” Mitch said. “Run it through the science mill again. We know speciation sometimes occurs in small leaps. Because of the mummies in the Alps, we know SHEVA was active in humans who were producing new kinds of babies. Speciation is rare even on a historical time scale — and SHEVA was unknown in medical science until just recently. There are far too many coincidences if SHEVA and evolution in small leaps aren’t connected.”

She rolled to face him, and ran her fingers along his cheeks, around his eyes, in a way that made him flinch.

“Sorry,” she said. “It is so marvelous that you’re here. You restore me. This afternoon — I have never felt so lost…not since Saul was gone.”

“I don’t think Saul ever knew what he had, with you,” Mitch said.

Kaye let this lie between them for a moment, to see if she quite understood what it meant. “No,” she said finally. “He wasn’t capable of knowing.”

“I know who and what you are,” Mitch said.

“Do you?”

“Not yet,” he confessed, and smiled. “But I’d like to try.”

“Listen to us,” Kaye said. “Tell me what you did today.”

“I went to the YMCA and cleared out my locker. I took a cab back here and lounged around like a gigolo.”

“I mean it,” Kaye said, gripping his hand tighter.

“I made some phone calls. I’m going to take a train to New York tomorrow to meet with Merton and our mysterious stranger from Austria. We’re getting together at a place that Merton describes as a ‘wonderful, thoroughly corrupting old mansion upstate.’Then I’ll take the train to Albany for my interview at SUNY.”

“Why a mansion?”

“I have no idea,” Mitch said.

“You’re coming back?”

“If you want me to.”

“Oh, I want you to. You don’t need to worry about that,” Kaye said. “We’re not going to have much time to think, much less worry.”

“Wartime romance is the sweetest,” Mitch said.

“Tomorrow is going to be much worse,” Kaye said. “Jackson is going to make a stink.”

“Let him,” Mitch said. “In the long run, I don’t think anybody is going to be able to stop this. Slow it down, maybe, but not stop it.”

55 Washington, D.C.

Dicken stood on the Capitol steps. It was a warm evening, but he could not help but feel a little cold, listening to a sound like the sea, broken by waves of echoing voices. He had never felt so isolated, so distant, as he did now, staring out over what must have been fifty thousand human beings, stretching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument and beyond. The fluid mass pushed against the barricades along the bottom of the steps, streamed around the tent pavilions and speakers’ stands, listened intently to a dozen different speeches being delivered, milling slowly like stirred soup in a huge tureen. He caught bits and pieces of breeze-tattered speeches, incomplete but suggestive: bits of raw language charging the mass.

Dicken had spent his life hunting down and trying to understand the diseases that affected these people, acting as if in some way he were invulnerable. Because of skill and a little luck he had never caught anything but a bout of dengue fever, bad enough but not fatal. He had always thought of himself as separate, a little superior perhaps but infinitely sympathetic. The self-delusion of an educated and intellectually isolated fool.

He understood better now. The mass called the shots. If the mass could not understand, then nothing he did, or Augustine did, or the Taskforce, would much matter. And the mass quite clearly understood nothing. The voices drifting his direction spoke of outrage at a government that would slaughter children, voices angrily denouncing “morning-after genocide.”

He had thought about calling Kaye Lang earlier, to regain his composure, his sense of balance, but he hadn’t. That was done with, finished in a very real way.

Dicken descended the steps, passing news crews, cameras, clumps of office workers, men in blue and brown suits and dark glasses and wearing microphones in their ears. The police and National Guard troops were determined to keep people away from the Capitol, but did not prevent individuals from joining the crowd.

He had already seen a few senators descend in a tight-packed group and join the mass. They must have sensed they could not be separate, superior, not now. They belonged with their people. He had thought them both opportunistic and courageous.

Dicken climbed over the barricades and pushed into the crowd. It was time to catch this fever and understand the symptoms. He had looked deep inside himself and did not like what he saw. Better to be one of the troops on the front line, part of the mass, ingest its words and smells, and come back infected so that he could in turn be analyzed, understood, made useful again.

That would be a kind of conversion. An end to the pain of separation. And if the mass should kill him, maybe that was what he deserved for his previous aloofness and his failures.

Younger women in the crowd wore colored masks. All the men wore white or black masks. Many wore gloves. More than just a few men wore tight-fitting black jumpers with industrial fume masks, so-called “filter” suits, guaranteed by various enterprising merchants to prevent the shedding of “devil virus.”

People in the crowd at this end of the mall were laughing, half listening to a speaker under the nearest pavilion — a civil rights leader from Philadelphia sounding out in deep, rich tones, like caramel. The speaker talked of leadership and responsibility, what the government should do to control this plague, and possibly, just possibly, where the plague had arisen, inside the secret bowels of the government itself.

“Some cry out it has its birth in Africa, but we are sick, not Africa. Others cry out it is the devil’s disease that strikes us, that it is foretold, to punish—”

Dicken moved on until he came under the more frantic voice of a television evangelist. The evangelist was brightly illuminated, a large and sweating man with a square head wearing a straining black business suit. He pointed and danced around his stage, exhorting the crowd to pray for guidance, to look deep inside.

Dicken thought of his grandmother, who had liked this sort of thing. He moved on again.

It was getting dark, and he could sense a growing tension in the crowd. Somewhere, out of earshot, something had happened, something had been said. The dark triggered a change of mood. Lights turned on around the mall, casting the crowd in etched and lurid orange. He looked up and saw helicopters at a respectful altitude, buzzing like insects. For a moment, he wondered if they were all going to be tear-gassed, shot, but the disruption was not from the soldiers, the police, the helicopters.

The impulse came in a wave.

He experienced an expectant hunger, felt its advancing tide, hoped whatever was disturbing the crowd would reveal something to him. But it was not really news at all. It was simply a propulsion, first this way, then that, and he walked with the tight-packed crowd ten feet north, ten feet south, as if caught in a bizarre dance step.

Dicken’s survival instincts now told him it was time to cut the personal angst, cut the psychological crap and get out of the flow. From a speaker nearby, he heard a voice of caution. From the man next to him, dressed in a filter suit, he heard, muffled through the filters, “It’s not just one disease now. It’s on the news. There’s a new plague.”

A middle-aged woman in a flower print dress carried a small Walkman TV She held it out for those around her, showing a tiny framed head speaking in tinny tones. Dicken could not hear these words.

He worked toward the edge, slowly and politely, as if wading through nitroglycerin. His shirt and light jacket were soaked with sweat. A few scattered others, born observers, like him, sensed the change, and their eyes flashed. The crowd smothered in its own confusion. The night was deep and humid, and stars could not be seen, and the orange lights along the mall and around the tents and platforms made everything look bitter.

Dicken stood near the Capitol steps again, within twenty or thirty people of the barricades, where he had stood an hour before. Mounted police, men and women on beautiful brown horses now rich amber in the unreal light, moved back and forth along the perimeter, dozens of them, more than he had ever seen before. The National Guard troops had pulled back, forming a line, but not a dense line. They were not ready. They did not expect trouble; they had no helmets or shields.

Voices immediately around him, whispering, subdued -

“Can’t”

“Children have the”

“My grandchildren will”

“The last generation”

“Book”

“Stop”

Then, an eerie quiet. Dicken was five people from the edge. They would not let him move any farther. Faces dull and resentful, like sheep, eyes blank, hands shoving. Ignorant. Frightened.

He hated them, wanted to smash their noses. He was a fool; he did not want to be among the sheep. “Excuse me.” No response. The mob’s mind had been made up; he could feel it deliberately pulsing. The mob waited, intent, vacant.

Light flared in the east and Dicken saw the Washington Monument turn white, brighter than the floodlights. From the dark muggy sky came a loose rumble. Drops of rain touched the crowd. Faces looked up.

He could smell the mob’s eagerness. Something had to change. They were being pressed by a single concern: something had to change.

The rain came pouring. People raised their hands over their heads. Smiles broke out. Faces accepted the rain and people spun as best they could. Others shoved the spinners and they stopped, dismayed.

The crowd spasmed and suddenly expelled him and he made it to the barricades and confronted a policeman. “Jesus,” the policeman said, dancing back three steps, and the mob shoved over the barricades. The horsemen tried to push them back, weaving through. A woman screamed. The mob surged and swallowed the policemen mounted and on foot, before they could raise their batons or unholster their guns. A horse was pushed up onto the steps and stumbled, falling over into the mob, its rider rolling off, a boot flung high.

Dicken shouted “Staff!” and ran up the Capitol steps, between the guardsmen, who ignored him. He was shaking his head and laughing, glad to be free, waiting for the melee to really begin. But the mob was right behind him, and there was barely time to start running again, ahead of the people, the scattered gunshots, the wet and spreading and stinking mass.

56 New York

Mitch saw the morning headlines on a rack of Daily News at Perm Station:

He and Kaye had spent the night eating by candlelight and making love. Very romantic, very out of touch. They had parted just an hour ago; Kaye was getting dressed, choosing her colors carefully, expecting a difficult day.

He picked up a paper and boarded the train. As he took his seat and spread the paper open, the train began to pull out, picking up speed, and he wondered if Kaye was safe, whether the riot had been spontaneous or organized, whether it really mattered.

The people had spoken, or rather, snarled. They had had enough of failure and inaction in Washington. The president was meeting with security advisors, the joint chiefs of staff, the heads of select committees, the chief justice. To Mitch, that sounded like a soft approach preliminary to declaring martial law.

He did not want to be on the train. He could not see what Merton could do for him, or for Kaye; and he could not picture himself lecturing on bonehead bone-ology to college students and never setting foot on a dig again.

Mitch slipped the folded paper onto his seat and made his way down the aisle to the public phone box at the end of the car. He called Kaye’s number, but she had already left, and he did not think it would be politic to call her at Americol.

He took a deep breath, tried to calm himself, and returned to his seat.

57 Baltimore

Dicken met Kaye in the Americol cafeteria at ten. The conference was scheduled for six o’clock, and a number of visitors had been added: the vice president and the president’s science advisor among them.

Dicken looked terrible. He had not slept all night. “My turn to be a basket case,” he said. “I think the debate is over. We’re down, we’re out. We can do some more shouting, but I don’t know anyone who will listen.”

“What about the science?” Kaye asked plaintively. “You tried hard to bring us back in line after the herpes disaster.”

“SHEVA mutates,” Dickens said. He beat his hand rhythmically on the table.

“I’ve explained that to you.”

“You’ve only shown that SHEVA mutated a long time ago. It’s just a human retrovirus, an old one, with a slow but very clever way of reproducing.”

“Christopher…”

“You’re going to get your hearing,” Dicken said. He finished his cup of coffee and stood up from the table. “Don’t explain it to me. Explain it to them ”

Kaye looked up at him, angry and puzzled. “Why change your mind after so long?”

“I started out looking for a virus. Your papers, your work, suggested it might be something else. We can all be misled. Our job is to look for evidence, and when it’s compelling, we have to give up our most cherished little notions.”

Kaye stood beside him and poked her finger. “Tell me this is entirely about science.”

“Of course not. I was on the Capitol steps, Kaye. I could have been one of those poor bastards who got shot or beaten to death.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. Tell me you returned Mitch’s call, after our meeting in San Diego.”

“I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

Dicken glared back at her. “After last night, anything personal is trivial, Kaye.”

“Is it?”

Dicken folded his arms. “I could never present someone like Mitch to someone like Augustine and hope to build our case. Mitch had some interesting information, but it only proves that SHEVA has been with us for a long time.”

“He believed in both of us.”

“He believes in you more, I think,” Dicken said, his eyes darting away.

“Has that affected your judgment?”

Dicken flared. “Has it affected yours ? I can’t take a pee without someone telling someone else how long I spent in the John. But you, you bring Mitch up to your apartment ”

Kaye crowded in on Dicken. “Augustine told you I slept with Mitch?”

Dicken would not be crowded. He pushed Kaye gently back and sidestepped. “I hate this as much as anyone, but it’s the way we have to be!”

“According to whom? Augustine?”

“Augustine’s been burned, too. We’re in a crisis. Goddamn it, Kaye, that should be obvious to everyone by now.”

“I never said I was a saint, Christopher! I trusted you not to abandon me when you brought me into this.”

Dicken lowered his head and looked to one side, then the other, his misery and anger tearing him. “I thought you might be a partner.”

“What sort of partner, Christopher?”

“A…supporter. An intellectual equal.”

“A girlfriend?”

For a moment, Dicken’s face put on the expression of a small boy handed a crushing bit of news. He looked at Kaye with both longing and sadness. He could hardly stand up straight he was so tired.

Kaye pulled back and reconsidered. She had done nothing to lead him on; she had never regarded herself as a raving beauty whose attractions were irresistible to men. She could not fathom the depth of this man’s feeling.

“You never told me you felt anything more than curiosity,” Kaye said.

“I never move fast enough, and I never say what I mean,” Dicken said. “I don’t blame you for not suspecting.”

“But it hurt you that I chose Mitch.”

“I can’t deny it hurts. But it doesn’t affect my scientific judgment.”

Kaye walked around the table, shaking her head. “What can we salvage from this?”

“You can present your evidence. I just don’t believe it’s going to be compelling.” He swung around and walked out of the cafeteria.

Kaye bused her tray and dishes to the kitchen conveyer belt. She glanced at her watch. She needed a strong dose of the personal, the face-to-face; she wanted to speak with Luella Hamilton. She could make it out to NIH and be back before the meeting.

At the floor security desk, she called for a company car.

58 Beresford, New York

Mitch stepped out under the soaring white tent pavilion that covered the antique train station of the small town of Beresford. He shaded his eyes against the morning sun and glanced at a planter loud with yellow daffodils, near a bright red garbage can. He was the only one getting off the train.

The air smelled of hot grease and pavement and fresh-cut grass. He looked for someone to meet him, expecting Merton. The town, visible across the tracks, accessible by a pedestrian bridge, was little more than a row of shops and the Amtrak parking lot.

A black Lexus pulled into the parking lot, and Mitch saw a redheaded man step out, look through the chicken-wire fencing at the station, and wave.

“His name is William Daney. He owns most of Beresford — his family does, that is. They have an estate about ten minutes from here that rivals Buckingham Palace. I was nai’ve enough to forget what kind of royalty America cherishes — old money spent in strange ways.”

Mitch listened to Merton as the journalist drove him down a winding two-lane road between splendid hardwood trees, maple and oak, new leaves so intensely green he felt as if he were in a movie. The sun threw dazzles of gold across the road. They hadn’t seen another car in five minutes.

“Daney used to be a yachtsman. Spent millions perfecting a graceful big boat, lost a few races. That was more than twenty years ago. Then he discovered anthropology. Problem is, he hates dirt. Loves water, hates dirt, hates to dig. I love driving in America. But this is almost like driving in England. I could even” — Merton swerved briefly over the center line into the left lane—”Follow my instincts.” He quickly corrected, smiled at Mitch. “Pity about the riots. England’s still relatively calm, but I’m expecting a change of government any minute. Dear old PM doesn’t get it yet. Still thinks switching to the Euro is his biggest worry. Hates the gynecological aspect of this whole mess. How’s Mr. Dicken? Ms. Lang?”

“They’re fine,” Mitch said, unwilling to talk much until he saw what he was being dragged into. He liked Merton well enough, found him interesting, but did not trust him one bit. He resented that the man seemed to know so much about his private life.

Daney’s mansion made a three-story, gray stone curve at the end of a redbrick drive flanked by beautifully manicured lawns, perfect as a putting green. A few gardeners were out trimming hedges, and an elderly woman in jodhpurs and a broad and ragged straw hat waved at them as Merton drove past. “Mrs. Daney, our host’s mum,” Merton said, waving out the window. “Lives in the housekeeper’s cottage. Nice old woman. Doesn’t go into her son’s rooms very often.”

Merton parked in front of the brownstone steps leading to the huge, double-door entrance.

“Everybody’s here,” he said. “You, me, Daney, and Herr Professor Friedrich Brock, formerly of the University of Innsbruck.”

“Brock?”

“Yes.” Merton smiled. “He says he met you once.”

“He did,” Mitch said. “Once.”

The entry way of the Daney mansion was shadowy, a huge hall paneled with dark wood. Three parallel beams of sun dropped through a skylight onto the age-darkened limestone floor, cutting over a huge Chinese silk rug, in the middle of which rose a round table covered with a hemisphere of flowers. Just to one side of the table, in shadow, stood a man.

“William, this is Mitch Rafelson,” Merton said, taking Mitch’s elbow and leading him forward.

The man in shadow stuck out his hand into one of the shafts of sun, and three gold rings gleamed on thick, strong fingers. Mitch shook the hand firmly. Daney was in his early fifties, tanned, with yellow-white hair receding from a Wag-nerian forehead. He had small, perfect lips quick to smile, dark brown eyes, baby-smooth cheeks. His shoulders were broadened by a padded gray blazer, but his arms looked well-muscled.

“It’s an honor to meet you, sir,” Daney said. “I’d have bought them from your friends if they had been offered, you know. And then I would have turned them over to Innsbruck. I’ve told this to Herr Professor Brock, and he has given me absolution.”

Mitch smiled to be polite. He was here to meet Brock.

“Actually, William doesn’t own any human remains,” Merton said.

“I’m happy with duplicates, casts, sculptures,” Daney said. “I’m not a scientist, merely a hobbyist, but I hope I honor the past by trying to understand it.”

“Into the Hall of Humanity,” Merton said with a flourish of his hand. Daney tossed his head proudly and led the way.

The hall filled a former ballroom in the eastern curve of the mansion. Mitch had seen nothing like it outside of a museum: dozens of glass cases arranged in rows, with carpeted aisles in between, each case containing casts and replicas of every major specimen of anthropology. Australopithecus afarensis and robustus; Homo habilis and erectus. Mitch counted sixteen different Neandertal skeletons, all professionally mounted, and six of them had waxwork reconstructions of how the individuals might have looked in life. There was no attempt to avoid offending modesty: All the models were nude and hairless, avoiding any speculation on clothing or hair patterns.

Row upon row of hairless apes, illuminated by elegant and respectfully softened spotlights, stared blankly at Mitch as he walked past.

“Incredible,” Mitch said, despite himself. “Why have I never heard of you before, Mr. Daney?”

“I only talk to a few people. The Leakey family, Bjorn Kurten, a few others. My close friends. I’m eccentric, I know, but I don’t like to flaunt it.”

“You’re among the elect now,” Merton said to Mitch.

“Professor Brock is in the library.” Daney pointed the way. Mitch would have enjoyed spending more time in the hall. The wax sculptures were superb and the reproductions of the specimens first rate, almost indistinguishable from the specimens themselves.

“No, actually, I am here. I couldn’t wait.” Brock stepped around a case and advanced. “I feel as if I know you, Dr. Rafelson. And we do have mutual acquaintances, do we not?”

Mitch shook hands with Brock, under Daney’s beaming and approving inspection. They walked several dozen yards to an adjacent library, furnished in the epitome of Edwardian elegance, three levels with railed walkways connected by two wrought-iron bridges. Huge paintings of Yosemite and the Alps in dramatic moods flanked the single high north-facing window.

They took seats around a large, low round table in the middle of the room. “My first question,” Brock said, “is, do you dream of them, Dr. Rafelson? Because I do, and frequently.”

Daney served the coffee himself, after it was rolled into the library by a stout, somber young woman in a black suit. He poured each of them a cup in Flora Danica china, botanical patterns in this series displaying the microscopic plants native to Denmark, based on nineteenth-century scientific art. Mitch examined his saucer, adorned with three beautifully rendered dinoflagellates, and wondered what he would do if he had all the money he could ever hope to spend.

“I myself do not believe these dreams,” Brock picked up the conversation. “But these individuals do haunt me.”

Mitch looked around the group, completely unsure what was expected of him. It seemed distinctly possible that associating with Daney, Brock, and even Merton, could somehow be turned to his disadvantage. Perhaps he had been battered once too often in this arena.

Merton sensed his unease. “This meeting is completely private, and will be kept secret,” he said. “I don’t plan to report anything said here.”

“At my request,” Daney said, lifting his brows emphatically.

“I wanted to tell you that you must be correct in your judgments, the judgments you have shown by seeking out certain people, and learning certain things about our own researches,” Brock said. “But I have just been released from my responsibilities with regard to the Alpine mummies. The arguments have become personal, and more than a little dangerous to all our careers.”

“Dr. Brock believes the mummies represent the first clear evidence of a human speciation event,” Merton said, hoping to move things along.

“Subspeciation, actually,” Brock said. “But the idea of a species has become so fluid in past decades, has it not? The presence of SHEVA in their tissues is most evocative, don’t you think?”

Daney leaned forward in his chair, cheeks and forehead pink with the intensity of his interest.

Mitch decided he could not be reticent among such fellow travelers. “We’ve found other instances,” he said.

“Yes, so I hear, from Oliver and from Maria Konig at the University of Washington.”

“Not me, actually, but people I’ve talked to. I’ve been ineffectual, to say the least. Compromised by my own actions.”

Brock dismissed this. “When I called your apartment in Innsbruck, I had forgiven you your lapse. I could sympathize, and your story rang true.”

“Thank you,” Mitch said, and found himself genuinely affected.

“I apologize for not revealing myself at the time, but you understand, I hope.”

“I do,” Mitch said.

“Tell me what’s going to happen,” Daney said. “Are they going to release their findings about the mummies?”

“They are,” Brock said. “They are going to claim contamination, that the mummies are in fact not related. The Nean-dertals are going to be labeled Homo sapiens alpinensis, and the infant is going to be sent to Italy for study by other specialists.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Mitch said.

“Yes, and they will not get away with this pretense forever, but for the next few years, the conservatives, the hardliners, will rule. They will mete out information at will, to those they trust not to rock the boat, to agree with them, like zealous scholars defending the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are hoping to see their careers through without having to deal with a revolution that would topple both them and their views.”

“Incredible,” Daney said.

“No, human , and we all study the human, no? Was not our female injured by someone who didn’t want her baby to be born?”

“We don’t know that,” Mitch said.

“I know that,” Brock said. “I reserve my own irrational domains of belief, if only to defend myself against the zealots. Is this not the sequence that you dream, in some form or another, as if we have these events buried in our very blood?”

Mitch nodded.

“Perhaps this was the original sin of our kind, that our Neandertal ancestors wished to stop progress, hold on to their unique position…By killing the new children.

Those who would become us. Now we do the same thing, perhaps?”

Daney shook his head, quietly growling. Mitch observed this with some interest, then turned to Brock. “You must have examined the DNA results,” he said. “It must be available for criticism by others.”

Brock reached down by his seat and brought up a briefcase. He tapped it meaningfully. “I have all the material here, on DVD-ROM, massive graphics files, tabulations, the results from different labs around the world. Oliver and I are going to make it available on the Web, announce the coverup, and let the chips fall where they may.”

“What we’d really like to do is make this relevant in the broadest way imaginable,” Merton added. “We’d like to present conclusive evidence that evolution is knocking on our door again.”

Mitch bit his lip, thinking this over. “Have you talked with Christopher Dicken?”

“He told me he can’t help me,” Merton said.

This shook Mitch. “Last time I spoke with him, he seemed enthusiastic, even gung ho,” Mitch said.

“He’s had a change of heart,” Merton said. “We need to bring Dr. Lang onboard. I think I can convince some of the University of Washington people, certainly Dr. Konig and Dr. Packer, perhaps even an evolutionary biologist or two.”

Daney nodded enthusiastically.

Merton turned to Mitch. His lips straightened, and he cleared his throat. “Your look says you don’t approve?”

“We can’t exactly go at this like we were college freshmen in a debating society.”

“I thought you were a rough-and-tumble fellow,” Merton said archly.

“Wrong,” Mitch said. “I love it smooth and by the book. It’s life that’s rough-and-tumble.”

Daney grinned. “Well put. Myself, I love to be on the ground floor.”

“How’s that?” Merton asked.

“This is a marvelous opportunity,” Daney said. “I’d like to find a willing woman and bring one of these new people into my family.”

For a long moment, neither Merton, Brock, nor Mitch could find the right words to reply.

“Interesting idea,” Merton said quietly, and glanced quickly at Mitch, eyebrow raised.

“If we try to kick up a storm outside the castle, we might close more doors than we open,” Brock admitted.

“Mitch,” Merton said, subdued, “tell us, then, how should we go about this…more by the book?”

“We put together a group of true experts,” Mitch said, and thought intently for a moment. “Packer and Maria Konig make a fine start. We recruit from their colleagues and contacts — the geneticists and molecular biologists at the University of Washington, NIH, and half a dozen other universities, research centers. Oliver, you probably know whom I’m referring to…maybe better than I do.”

“The more progressive evolutionary biologists,” Merton said, and then frowned, as if that might be an oxymoron. “Right now, that’s pretty well limited to molecular biologists and a select few paleontologists, like Jay Niles.”

“I know only conservatives,” Brock said. “I have been drinking coffee with the wrong crowd in Innsbruck.”

“We need a scientific foundation,” Mitch said. “An overwhelming quorum of respected scientists.”

“That’ll take weeks, even months,” Merton said. “Everyone has careers to protect.”

“What if we fund more research in the private sector?” Daney said.

“That’s where Mr. Daney could be helpful,” Merton said, looking from beneath shaggy red eyebrows at their host. “You have the resources to put together a first-class conference, and that’s just what we need now. Counter the public pronouncements from the Taskforce.”

Daney’s expression dimmed. “How much would that cost? Hundreds of thousands, or millions?”

“The former rather than the latter, I suspect,” Merton said with a chuckle.

Daney gave them a troubled glance. “That much money, and I’ll have to ask Mother,” he said.

59 The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

”I let her go,” Dr. Lipton said, sitting down behind her desk. “I let them all go. The head of clinic research said we had enough information to make our patient recommendations and bring the experiments to a halt.”

Kaye stared at her, dumfounded. “You just…let them out of the clinic, to go home?”

Lipton nodded, jaw lightly dimpled. “It wasn’t my call, Kaye. But I have to agree. We were beyond our ethical limits.”

“What if they need help at home?”

Lipton looked down at the desk. “We advised them that their infants were likely to be born with severe defects, and that they would not survive. We referred them to outpatient treatment at their nearest hospitals. We’re picking up all their expenses, even if there are complications. Especially if there are complications. They’re all within the period of efficacy.”

“They’re taking RU-486?”

“It’s their choice.”

“It isn’t policy, Denise.”

“I know that. Six of the women asked for the opportunity. They wanted to abort. At that point, we can’t continue.”

“Did you tell them — ?”

“Kaye, our guidelines are crystal clear. If there’s a judgment that the infants could endanger the mother’s health, we give them the means to terminate. I support their freedom to choose.”

“Of course, Denise, but…” Kaye turned around, examining the familiar office, the charts, the pictures of fetuses at different stages of development. “I can’t believe this.”

“Augustine asked us to hold off giving them the RU-486 until a clear policy could be established. But the head of clinical research calls the shots.”

“All right,” Kaye said. “Who didn’t ask for the drug?”

“Luella Hamilton,” Lipton said. “She took it with her, promised to check in with her pediatrician regularly, but she did not take it under our supervision.”

“It’s over, then?”

“We’ve pulled our finger out of the pie,” Lipton said softly. “We don’t have a choice. Ethically, politically, we’re going to get hit whatever we do. We chose ethics and support for our patients. If it were today, however…We have new orders from the secretary of Health and Human Services. No recommendations to abort and no dispensing of RU-486. We got out of the baby business just under the wire.”

“I don’t have Mrs. Hamilton’s home address or phone number,” Kaye said.

“You won’t get it from me, either. She has a right to privacy.” Lipton stared at her. “Don’t go outside the system, Kaye.”

“I think the system is going to eject me any minute now,” Kaye said. “Thanks, Denise.”

60 New York

On the train to Albany, surrounded by the musty smells of passengers, sun-warmed fabric, disinfectant, plastic, Mitch sank into his seat. He felt as if he had just escaped from Wonderland. Daney’s enthusiasm for bringing a “new person” into the family both fascinated and frightened him. The human race had grown so cerebral, and had assumed so much control of its biology, that this unexpected and ancient form of reproduction, of creating variety in the species, could be stopped in its tracks, or engaged in as if it were some kind of game.

He stared out the window at small towns, forests of young trees, bigger towns with gray expanses of warehouses, factories dull and dirty and productive.

61 Americol Headquarters, Baltimore

Kaye picked up the papers she had ordered from Medline through the library, twenty copies each of eight different papers, all neatly collated. She shook her head and skimmed one of the folios as she boarded the elevator.

She took an additional five minutes going through the security checkpoints on the tenth floor. Agents waved wands, scanned her photo ID, and then passed sniffers over her hands and purse. Finally, the head of the vice president’s Secret Service detail asked for someone inside the executive dining room to vouch for her. Dicken emerged, said that he knew her, and she entered the dining room fifteen minutes into the meeting.

“You’re late,” Dicken whispered.

“Caught in traffic. Did you know they’ve ended the special study?”

Dicken nodded. “They’re dancing around each other now, trying to avoid making any commitments. Nobody wants to take the blame for anything.”

Kaye saw the vice president sitting near the front, the science advisor beside him. The room held at least four Secret Service agents, which made her glad Benson had stayed outside.

Soft drinks, fruit, crackers, cheese, and vegetables had been set out on a table at the back, but no one was eating. The vice president clutched a can of Pepsi.

As Dicken led Kaye to a folding chair on the left side of the room, Frank Shawbeck finished a briefing on the findings of the NIH studies.

“That took just five minutes,” Dicken whispered to Kaye.

Shawbeck tapped his papers on the lectern, stepped aside, and Mark Augustine walked forward. He leaned on the lectern.

“Dr. Lang is here,” he announced neutrally. “Let’s move on to social issues. We have suffered twelve major riots across the U.S. Most seem to have been triggered by announcements that we are going to pass out free RU-486. No such plans were ever completed, but they were of course under discussion.”

“None of these drugs are illegal,” Cross said irritably. She sat to the right of the VP. “Mr. Vice President, I invited the senate majority leader to attend this meeting, and he declined. I will not be held responsible for—”

“Please, Marge,” Augustine said. “We’ll air our grievances in a few minutes.”

“Sorry,” Cross said, and folded her arms. The vice president glanced over his shoulder, surveyed the audience. His eye fell on Kaye and he seemed troubled for a moment, then turned again to face front.

“The U.S. is not alone in having to deal with civil unrest,” Augustine continued. “We’re heading toward a social disaster of major proportions. Plainly speaking, the general public does not understand what is going on. They react according to gut instincts, or according to the dictates of demagogues. Pat Robertson, bless him, has already recommended that God blast Washington, D.C., with Hell’s hottest fires if the Taskforce is allowed to go ahead with RU-486 testing. He’s not alone. There’s a real likelihood that the public will knock around until they find something, anything, more palatable than the truth, and then they’ll flock behind that banner, and it’s likely to have a religious aspect, and science will go right out the window.”

“Amen,” Cross said. Nervous laughter rippled through the small audience. The VP did not smile.

“This meeting was scheduled three days ago,” Augustine continued. “The events of yesterday and today make it even more urgent that we keep our ducks in a row.”

Kaye thought she could see where this was going. She looked for Robert Jackson and located him seated behind Cross. He angled his head, and his eyes swung left for the briefest moment, looking right at her. Kaye felt her face grow hot.

“This is about me,” she whispered to Dicken.

“Don’t be arrogant,” Dicken warned. “We’re all here to eat a little crow today.”

“We’re already tabling the research on RU-486 and what has very loosely, and in very bad taste, been labeled RU-Pen-tium,” Augustine said. “Dr. Jackson.”

Jackson stood. “Preclinical trials show no efficacy by any of our vaccines or ribozyme inhibitors against newly located strains of SHEVA, loosely referred to as SHEVA-X. We have reason to believe that all new incidents of Herod’s in the last three months can be attributed to lateral infection by SHEVA-X, which may come in at least nine different varieties, all with different coat glycoproteins. We can’t target the LPC messenger RNA in the cytoplasm because our current ri-bozymes do not recognize the mutated form. In short, we’re dead in the water on a vaccine. We probably won’t come up with alternatives for six more months.”

He sat down again.

Augustine pressed his fingers together symmetrically, making a flexible polygon. The room was silent for a long interval, absorbing the news and its implications. “Dr. Phillips.”

Gary Phillips, science advisor to the president, stood and approached the lectern. “The president wishes me to convey his appreciation. We had hoped for so much more, but no research effort in any other nation has done better than the NIH and the CDC Taskforce. We have to realize we face an extremely clever and versatile opponent, and we have to speak with one voice, with resolve, to avoid pushing our nation into anarchy. That is why I have listened to Dr. Robert Jackson and to Mark Augustine. Our situation now is very sensitive, publicly sensitive, and they tell me there is a potentially divisive disagreement between some members of the Taskforce, especially within the Americol contingent.”

“Not a split,” Jackson said acidly. “A schism”

“Dr. Lang, I have been informed you do not share some of the opinions expressed by Dr. Jackson and Mark Augustine. Could you please express and clarify your point of view now, so that we may judge them?”

Kaye sat in shock for a few seconds, then stood up and managed to say, “I don’t believe a fair hearing can be given now, sir. I am apparently the only person in this room whose opinion differs from the official statement you’re obviously preparing.”

“We need solidarity, but we need to be fair,” the science advisor said. “I’ve read your papers on HERV, Ms. Lang. Your work was seminal and brilliant. You could very well be nominated for a Nobel prize. Your disagreements have to be listened to, and we’re prepared to listen. I regret nobody has the luxury of sufficient time. I wish we did.”

He motioned for her to come forward. Kaye walked to the lectern. Phillips stepped aside.

“I’ve expressed my opinions in numerous conversations with Dr. Dicken, and in one conversation with Ms. Cross and Dr. Jackson,” Kaye said. “This morning, I put together a folder of supporting articles, some of them my own, and evidence gleaned from studies in the Human Genome Project, evolutionary biology, even paleontology.” She opened her briefcase and handed the stack of folders to Nilson, who passed them to her left.

“I do not yet have the conclusive linchpin that holds my theories together,” Kaye continued, then sipped from a cup of water handed to her by Augustine. “Scientific evidence from the Innsbruck mummies has not yet been released to the public.”

Jackson rolled his eyes.

“I do have preliminary reports on evidence gathered by Dr. Dicken in Turkey and the Republic of Georgia—”

She spoke for twenty minutes, focusing on specifics and on her work with transposable elements and HERV-DL3. She came to an uncertain close by describing her successful search for different versions of the LPC on the same day she heard from Jackson that mutations in SHEVA had been located. “I believe SHEVA-X is a backup or alternate response to the failure of initial lateral transmissions to produce viable children. Second-stage pregnancies induced by SHEVA-X will not be open to herpes viral interference. They will produce healthy and viable infants. I have no direct evidence for this; no such infants have been born that I’m aware of. But I doubt we’ll have to wait long. We should be prepared.”

Kaye was surprised that she had spoken as coherently as she had, yet she was miserably aware she could not possibly succeed in turning the tide. Augustine watched her closely, with some admiration, she thought, and he gave her a quick smile.

“Thank you, Dr. Lang,” Phillips said. “Questions?”

Frank Shawbeck raised his hand. “Does Dr. Dicken support your conclusions?”

Dicken stepped forward. “I did for a time. Recent evidence convinced me I was wrong.”

“What evidence?” Jackson called out. Augustine waggled his finger in warning, but allowed the question.

“I believe SHEVA is mutating as a disease organism mutates,” Dicken said. “Nothing convinces me it is not acting as a human pathogen.”

“Isn’t it true, Dr. Lang, that previous supposedly noninfec-tious forms of HERV have been associated with some kinds of tumors?” Shawbeck asked.

“Yes, sir. But they’re also expressed in noninfectious form in many other tissues, including placenta. We only now have the opportunity to understand the many roles these endogenous retroviruses may play.”

“We don’t understand why they are in our genome, in our tissues, do we, Dr. Lang?” Augustine asked.

“Until now, we knew of no theory that could explain their presence.”

“Other than their actions as disease-causing organisms?”

“Many substances in our bodies are both positive and necessary and yet, on occasion, are implicated in disease,” Kaye responded. “Oncogenes are necessary genes that can also be provoked to cause cancer.”

Jackson raised his hand. “I’d like to scotch this argument with an approach from an evolutionary perspective,” he said. “While I’m not an evolutionary biologist, and I’ve never even played one on TV…”

Chuckles from all in the crowd but Shawbeck and the VP, still stony faced.

“…I believe I had enough of the paradigm drummed into me in school and university. The paradigm is that evolution proceeds by random mutations within the genome. These mutations alter the nature of the proteins or the other components expressed by our DNA, and are usually detrimental, causing the organism to sicken or die. Yet over deep time, and under changing conditions, mutations may also create novel forms that confer positive advantages. Am I correct so far, Dr. Lang?”

“That is the paradigm,” Kaye acknowledged.

“What you seem to be implying, however, is a hitherto undiscovered mechanism whereby the genome takes control of its own evolution, somehow sensing the right time to bring about change. Correct?”

“As far as it goes,” Kaye said. “I believe our genome is much more clever than we are. It’s taken us tens of thousands of years to get to the point where we have a hope of understanding how life works. The Earth’s species have been evolving, both competing and cooperating, for billions of years. They’ve learned how to survive under conditions we can barely imagine. Even the most conservative biologist knows different kinds of bacteria can cooperate and learn from each other — but many now understand that different species of metazoans, plants and animals like us, do much the same thing when they play their roles in any ecosystem. The Earth’s species have learned how to anticipate climate change and respond to it in advance, get a head start, and I believe, in our case, our genome is now responding to social change and the stress it causes.”

Jackson pretended to work these ideas through in his head before asking, “If you were a graduate advisor and one of your students were to propose doing a thesis on this possibility, would you encourage them?”

“No,” Kaye said bluntly.

“Why not?” Jackson pursued.

“It is not a widely defended point of view. Evolution has been a very closed-minded field in biology, and only the brave few challenge the paradigm of the Darwinian Modern Synthesis. No grad student should try it alone.”

“Charles Darwin was wrong, and you’re right?”

Kaye turned to Augustine. “Is Dr. Jackson conducting this inquisition all by himself?”

Augustine stepped forward. “This is an opportunity to answer your opponents, Dr. Lang.”

Kaye swung back and faced Jackson and the audience, eyes narrowed. “I do not challenge Charles Darwin, I have immense respect for him. Darwin would have recommended we not set our ideas in stone before we understood all the principles. I do not even reject many of the principles of the modern synthesis; quite clearly, whatever the genome devises has to pass the test of survival. Mutation is a source of unexpected and sometimes useful novelty. But there has to be more to explain what we see in nature. The modern synthesis was devised during a period when we were just beginning to learn the nature of DNA and establish the roots of modern genetics. Darwin would have been fascinated to know what we know today, about plasmids and exchange of free DNA, about error correction within the genome, about editing and transposition and hidden viruses, about markers and gene structure, about all manner of genetic phenomena, many of which do not fit at all neatly into the most rigid interpretations of the modern synthesis.”

“Does any reputable scientist support the proposition that the genome is a self-aware ‘mind,’ able to judge the environment and determine the course of its own evolution?”

Kaye took a deep breath. “It would take me several hours to correct and expand upon that proposition as you state it, but, loosely, the answer is yes. None of them are here, unfortunately.”

“Are their views noncontroversial?”

“Of course not,” Kaye said. “Nothing in this field is non-controversial. And I try to avoid the word ‘mind,’ because it has personal and religious connotations that are not productive. I use the term network; a perceptive and adaptive network of cooperating and competing individuals.”

“Do you believe this mind, or network, could in some way be the equivalent of God?” Jackson stated this without smugness or contempt, to her surprise.

“No,” Kaye said. “Our own brains function as perceptive and adaptive networks, but I don’t believe we are gods.”

“But our own brains produce minds, do they not?”

“I believe the word applies, yes.”

Jackson held up his hands in puzzled query. “So we come full circle. Some sort of Mind — perhaps with a capital M — determines evolution?”

“Again, emphasis and semantics are important here,” Kaye said slowly, and then realized she should have simply dismissed the question with silence.

“Have you ever had the larger scope of your theories peer-reviewed and published in a major journal?”

“No,” Kaye said. “I have expressed some aspects in my published articles on HERV-DL3, which were peer-reviewed.”

“Many of your articles were rejected by other journals, were they not?”

“Yes,” Kaye said.

“By Cell, for example.”

“Yes.”

“Is Virology the most respected journal in the field?”

“It’s an important journal,” Kaye said. “It has published very important papers.”

Jackson let this go. “I haven’t had time to read all of the material in your handout. I apologize,” he continued, getting to his feet. “To the best of your knowledge, would any of the authors whose papers you have included in your handout agree with you completely on the subject of how evolution occurs?”

“Of course not,” Kaye said. “It’s a developing field.”

“It’s not just developing, it’s infantile, isn’t that right, Dr. Lang?”

“In its infancy, yes,” Kaye shot back. “Infantile would apply to those who deny compelling evidence.” She could not help looking at Dicken. He returned her look with unhappy resolve.

Augustine stepped forward again and held out his hand. “We could go on like this for days. I’m sure it would be an interesting conference. What we must do, however, is judge whether views such as those held by Dr. Lang could prove detrimental to the goals of the Taskforce. Our mission is to protect public health, not debate rarefied issues in science.”

“That isn’t exactly fair, Mark,” Marge Cross said, rising. “Kaye, does this seem like a kangaroo court to you?”

Kaye let out a small explosion of breath, half chuckle, half sigh, looked down, and nodded.

“I wish there was time,” Marge said. “I surely do. These views are fascinating, and I share many of them, dear, but we are hopelessly mired in business and politics, and we must go with what we can all support, and with what the public will understand. I do not see the support in this room, and I know we do not have time or the will to engage in a highly public debate. Unfortunately, we are stuck with science by committee, Dr. Augustine.”

Augustine was obviously not pleased by this characterization.

Kaye looked at the vice president. The vice president stared at the folio on his lap, which he had not opened, clearly embarrassed by being stuck in a race in which he had no horse he could hope to ride. He was waiting for the debate to end.

“I understand, Marge,” Kaye said. She could not keep her voice from quavering. “Thank you for making things so clear. I see no alternative but to resign from the Taskforce. My value to Americol is probably reduced by doing that, so I offer my resignation to you, as well.”

Augustine took Dicken aside in the hallway after the meeting. Dicken had tried to catch up with Kaye, but she was far down the hall toward the elevator.

“This didn’t turn out the way I would have liked,” Augustine told him. “I don’t want her out of the Taskforce. I just don’t want her going public with these ideas. Christ, Jackson may have done us a greater disservice—”

“I know Kaye Lang well enough,” Dicken said. “She’s gone for good, and yes, she’s pissed off, and I’m as responsible as Jackson.”

“Then what in hell can you do to put things right?” Augustine asked.

Dicken shrugged loose from his grip. “Nada, Mark. Zip. And don’t ask me to try.”

Shawbeck approached them, his face grim. “There’s another march on Washington planned for tonight. Women’s groups, Christians, blacks, Hispanics. They’re evacuating the Capitol and the White House.”

“Jesus H.,” Augustine said. “What are they trying to do, shut the country down?”

“The president’s agreed to a full defense. Regular Army as well as National Guard. I think the mayor is going to declare a state of emergency in the city. The VP is being flown to Los Angeles this evening. Gentlemen, we should get out of here, too.”

Dicken heard Kaye arguing with her bodyguard. He walked briskly down the hall to see what was happening, but they were in the elevator and the door had closed by the time he arrived.

Kaye stood in the ground floor lobby, hands on her hips, shouting at the top of her lungs. “I don’t want your protection! I don’t want any of this! I told you—”

“I don’t have any choice, ma’am,” Benson said, standing his ground like a small bull. “We are on full alert. You can’t go back to your apartment until we get more agents here, and that’s going to take at least an hour.”

The building security guards were locking the front doors and moving barricades into position. Kaye twirled, saw the barricades, the curious people beyond the glass doors. Steel barriers dropped slowly over the outside entrance.

“Can I make a phone call?”

“Not now, Ms. Lang,” Benson said. “I’d apologize all over if this were my fault, you know that.”

“Yes, like when you told Augustine who was in my apartment!”

“They asked the doorman, Ms. Lang, not me.”

“So what is it now, us versus them’? I want to be outside with real people, not in here—”

“Not if they recognize you, you don’t,” Benson said.

“Karl, for God’s sake, I’ve resigned]”

The agent held up his hands and shook his head firmly: no matter.

“Then where am I going to stay?”

“We’re putting you with the other researchers in the executive lounge.”

“With Jackson?” Kaye bit her lip and stared at the ceiling, shaking with helpless laughter.

62 The State University of New York, Albany

Mitch stared out of the taxi window at the students marching along the tree-lined avenue. People poured out of homes and office buildings along the path of the march. This time, they carried no signs, no banners, but all held their left hands high, fingers stretched out, palms forward.

The driver, a Somali immigrant, lowered his head and peered through the window to his right. “What does that mean, raised hand?”

“I don’t know,” Mitch said.

The march had cut them off at an intersection. The university campus lay just a few blocks away, but Mitch doubted they would get that far today.

“It is scary,” the driver said, glancing over his shoulder at Mitch. “They want something to be done, yes?”

Mitch nodded. “I suppose.”

The driver shook his head. “I won’t cross that line. It’s a long line. Mister, I take you back to the station, where you’ll be safe.”

“No,” Mitch said. “Let me out here.”

He paid the driver and walked to the curb. The taxi swung around and drove away just before other cars could block it in.

Mitch’s jaw clenched. He could feel and smell the tension, the social electricity, in the long line of men and women, mostly young at first, but now more and more older, emerging from the buildings, all marching with left hands held high.

Not fists; hands. Mitch found that significant.

A police car parked just a few yards from him. Two patrol officers stood by their open doors, just watching.

Kaye had joked about wearing a mask, the day they had first made love. They had made love so few times. Mitch’s throat constricted. He wondered how many of the women in the march were pregnant, how many had had their tests for exposure to SHEVA return positive, and how that had affected their relationships.

“You know what’s going on?” an officer called to Mitch.

“No,” Mitch said.

“Think it’s going to get ugly?”

“I hope not,” Mitch said.

“We weren’t told a damned thing,” the officer grumbled, then climbed back into the patrol car. The car backed up but was hemmed in by other cars and could go no farther. Mitch thought it was wise they did not turn on their sirens.

This march was different from the march in San Diego. The people here were tired, traumatized, almost past hope. Mitch wished he could tell them all that their fear was unnecessary, that this was not a disaster, not a plague, but he was no longer sure what to believe. All belief and opinion faded in the presence of this massive tide of emotion, of fear.

He did not want the job at SUNY. He wanted to be with Kaye and protect her; he wanted to help her get through this, professionally and personally, and he wanted her to help him, as well.

It was no time to be alone. The whole world was in pain.

63 Baltimore

Kaye opened the door to the condominium and walked in slowly. She kicked the heavy door shut with two bangs of her foot, then leaned into it with her hand to get it latched. She dropped her purse and valise on the chair and stood for a moment as if to get her bearings. She had not slept in twenty-eight hours.

It was late morning outside.

The phone message light blinked at her. She retrieved three messages. The first was from Judith Kushner, asking her to call back. The second was from Mitch, leaving an Albany phone number. The third was from Mitch also. “I’ve managed to get back to Baltimore, but it wasn’t easy. They won’t let me in the building to use the key you gave me. I tried Americol but the switchboard says they’re not transferring outside calls, or you’re not available, or something. I’m worried sick. It’s hell out here, Kaye. I’ll call in a few hours and see if you’re home.”

Kaye wiped her eyes and swore under her breath. She could hardly see straight. She felt as if she were stuck in molasses and no one would let her clean her shoes.

Americol had been surrounded by four thousand protesters for nine hours, shutting off traffic all around the building. Police had moved in and succeeded in roiling the crowds, breaking them into smaller and less controlled groups, and riots had broken out. Fires had been started, cars overturned.

“Where do I call, Mitch?” she murmured, taking the phone out of its recharging cradle. She was paging through the phone book, looking for the number of the YMCA, when the phone rang in her hand.

She fumbled it to her ear. “Hello?”

“Dark Intruder again. How are you?”

“Mitch, oh God, I’m okay, but I’m so tired.”

“I’ve been walking all over downtown. They burned part of the convention center.”

“I know. Where are you?”

“A block away. I can see your building and the Pepto-Bismol Tower.”

Kaye laughed. “Bromo-Seltzer. Blue, not pink.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t want you here anymore. I mean, I don’t want to be with you here anymore. Mitch, I’m not making sense. I need you so badly. Please come. I want to pack and get out. The bodyguard is still here, but he’s down in the lobby. I’ll tell him to let you in.”

“I didn’t even try to get the job at SUNY,” Mitch said.

“I quit Americol and theTaskforce. We’re equal now.”

“We’re both bums?”

“Shiftless and rootless and with no visible means of support. Other than a large bank account.”

“Where will we go?” Mitch asked.

Kaye reached into her purse and pulled out the two small boxes containing SHEVA test kits. She had taken them from the common stores area on the seventh floor at Americol. “How about Seattle? You have an apartment in Seattle, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Exquisite. I want you, Mitch. Let’s go live forever and ever in your bachelor apartment in Seattle.”

“You’re nuts. I’m coming right over.”

He hung up and she laughed in relief, then broke into sobs. She smoothed the phone against her cheek, realized how crazy that was, put it down. “I am really strung out,” she told herself, walking to the kitchen. She kicked off her shoes, pulled a Parrish print that had belonged to her mother from the wall, laid it on the dining room table, then all the other prints that belonged to her, her family, her past.

In the kitchen, she drew a glass of cold water from the refrigerator tap. “Screw luxury, screw security. Screw propriety.” She worked through a list often other items to screw, and at the end of the list came “goddamned stupid me.”

Then she remembered she had better let Benson know Mitch was coming.

64 Atlanta

Dicken walked toward his old office in the subbasement of Building 1 at 1600 Clifton Road. As he walked, he fingered his way through a vinyl packet of new material — special federal-grade security pass, fresh-printed instructions on new security procedures, talking points for arranged interviews later in the week.

He could not believe it had come to this. National Guard troops patrolled the perimeter and the grounds, and while there had not yet been any violent incidents at the CDC, phone threats arrived at the main switchboard as often as ten times a day.

He opened his office door and stood for a moment in the small room, savoring the cool and quiet. He wished he could be in Lagos or Tegucigalpa. He was much more at home working under rugged conditions in remote places; even the Republic of Georgia had been a bit too civilized, and therefore a bit too dangerous, for his tastes.

He much preferred viruses to out-of-control humans.

Dicken dropped the packet on his desk. For a moment, he could not remember why he was here. He had come to pick up something for Augustine. Then he recalled: the Northside Hospital autopsy reports on first-stage pregnancies. Augustine was working on a plan so top-secret Dicken knew nothing about it, but all the files pertaining to HERV and SHEVA in the building were being copied for his benefit.

He found the reports, then stood pensively, remembering the conversation with Jane Salter months ago, about the screaming of the monkeys in these old subbasement rooms.

He tapped his toe on the floor to the rhythm of an old and morbid child’s song and murmured, “The bugs go in and the bugs go out, the monkeys will scream and the apes will shout…”

No doubt about it anymore. Christopher Dicken was a team player, hoping just to survive with his wits and his emotions in a few well-ordered pieces.

He picked up the vinyl packet and the folders and left the office.

65 Baltimore

Kaye swung the garment bag to her shoulder. Mitch grabbed two suitcases and stood in the door, held open by a rubber chock. They had already loaded three boxes into the car in the condo garage.

“They tell me to keep in touch,” Kaye said, and held up a black cell phone for Mitch’s inspection. “Marge pays for this. And Augustine tells me not to give any interviews. That I can live with. What about you?”

“My lips are sealed.”

“With kisses?” Kaye bumped him with her hip.

Benson followed them down to the garage. He watched them load Mitch’s car with a plain expression of disapproval.

“You don’t like my idea of freedom?” Kaye asked the agent with a piquant expression as she slammed the trunk. The car’s rear springs groaned.

“You’re taking everything with you, ma’am,” Benson responded stonily.

“He doesn’t approve of the company you keep,” Mitch said.

“Well,” Kaye said, standing beside Benson, brushing back her hair. “That’s because he’s a man of taste.”

Benson smiled. “You’re a fool to leave without protection.”

“Maybe,” Kaye said. “Thanks for your vigilance. Pass along my gratitude.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Benson said. “Good luck.”

Kaye hugged him. Benson blushed.

“Let’s go,” Kaye said.

Kaye fingered the door frame of the Buick, its dusty blue finish powdery and matte with wear. She asked Mitch how old the car was.

“I don’t know,” Mitch said. “Ten, fifteen years.”

“Find a dealership,” Kaye said. “I’m going to buy you a brand-new Land Rover.”

“That’s roughing it, all right,” Mitch said, lifting an eyebrow. “I’d prefer we be less obvious.”

“I love the way you do that,” Kaye said, lifting her much less impressive eyebrow dramatically. Mitch laughed.

“Screw it, then,” she said. “Drive the Buick. We’ll camp out under the stars.”

66 Approaching Washington, D.C.

The Air Force Falcon passenger jet rolled gently to the east. Augustine sipped a Coke and glanced frequently through the window, clearly nervous about flying. Dicken had not known this about Augustine until now; they had never flown together before.

“We can make a strong case that even should second-stage SHEVA fetuses survive birth, they’ll be carriers of a wide variety of infectious HERVs,” Augustine said.

“Whose evidence?” Jane Salter asked. Her face was a little flushed from the heat in the airplane before takeoff; she was at best mildly unimpressed by these military trappings.

“I’ve hadTaskforce researchers putting together biopsy results for the last two weeks, just on a hunch. We know HERVs express under all sorts of conditions, but the particles have never been infectious until now.”

“We still don’t know what the hell purpose the noninfec-tious particles serve, if any,” Salter said. The other staffers, younger and less experienced, sat quietly in their seats, content to listen.

“No good purpose,” Augustine said, tapping the seat arm. He swallowed hard and looked out the window again. “The HERV continue to produce viral particles that aren’t infectious…Until SHEVA codes for a complete tool kit, everything necessary for a virus to assemble and escape a cell. I have six expert opinions, including Jackson’s, that SHEVA may ‘teach’ other HERV how to be infectious again. They’ll be most active in individuals with rapidly dividing cells, and that means SHEVA fetuses. We could have to deal with diseases we haven’t seen in millions of years.”

“Diseases that may no longer be pathogenic in humans,” Dicken said.

“Can we take that chance?” Augustine asked. Dicken shrugged.

“So what are you going to recommend?” Salter asked.

“Washington is already under curfew, and they’ll have it under martial law the instant someone decides to break a plate glass window or roll a car. No demonstrations, no inflammatory comments…Politicians hate to be lynched. It won’t be long. The common folk are like cows in a herd, and there’s been more than enough lightning to make even the cowboys nervous.”

“Infelicitous comparison, Dr. Augustine,” Salter said dryly.

“Well, I’ll refine it,” Augustine said. “I’m not at my best when I’m at twenty thousand feet.”

“You think we’re going to be under martial law,” Dicken said, “and we can sequester all pregnant women and take their babies away from them…for testing?”

“It’s horrible,” Augustine admitted. “Most if not all of the fetuses will probably die. But if they do survive, I think we can make a case that we’ll have to sequester them.”

“Talk about throwing gas on a fire,” Dicken said.

Augustine thoughtfully agreed. “I’ve been racking my brains trying to find a different solution. I will entertain alternatives.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t muddy the waters right now,” Salter said.

“I have no intention of saying or doing anything now. The work goes on.”

“We’d better be on firm ground,” Dicken said.

“Damned right,” Augustine said with a grimace. “Terra firma, and the sooner the better.”

66 Leaving Baltimore

Everyone has a bitch,” Mitch observed as he steered them along state route 26 out of the city, staying away from the main highways. Too many demonstrations — by truckers, motorists, even bicyclists, all claiming a shot at civil disobedience — had shut down the main routes. As it was, they had to wait twenty minutes in the middle of downtown as police cleared tons of garbage dumped by protesting sanitation workers.

“We failed them,” Kaye said.

“You didn’t fail them,” Mitch said as he tried to find an alley to turn into.

“I screwed up and didn’t make my case.” Kaye hummed nervously to herself.

“Something wrong?” Mitch asked.

“Nothing,” she said briskly. “Just the whole damned planet.”

In West Virginia, they pulled into a KOA campground and paid thirty dollars for a tent site. Mitch set up the lightweight dome tent he had bought in Austria before he met Tilde, and a small camp stove, under a young oak tree looking out over a low valley where two tractors sat idle in a carefully furrowed field.

The sun had gone down twenty minutes before and the sky was mottled with light clouds. The air was just beginning to cool. Kaye’s hair was sticky, the elastic of her panties chafed.

One other family had set up two tents about a hundred yards away, otherwise the campground was empty.

Kaye climbed through the rainflap into the tent. “Come in here,” she told Mitch. She pulled off her dress and lay back on the sleeping bag Mitch had unrolled. Mitch set the campstove down and poked his head into the tent.

“My God, woman,” he said admiringly.

“Do you smell me?” she asked.

“I surely do, ma’am,” he said in agent Benson’s fine North Carolina accent. He slipped in beside her. “It’s still a little warm.”

“I smell you,” Kaye said. She had a needful and serious look on her face. She helped him out of his shirt, and he kicked aside his pants before reaching for the shaving kit where he was keeping the condoms. As he started to rip open the foil package, she bent over and kissed his erect penis. “Not this time,” she said. She licked him swiftly, looked up. “I want you now, nothing in between.”

Mitch took hold of her head and lifted her mouth away from him. “No,” he said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“You’re fertile,” he said.

“How the hell do you know?” Kaye asked.

“I can see it in your skin. I can smell it.”

“I bet you can,” she said admiringly. “Can you smell anything else?” She pushed closer to him, lifted over his head, swung her knee to the other side.

“Spring,” Mitch said, returning the favor.

She arched her back, half-twisted, and deftly fondled him, as he nuzzled between her legs.

“Ballet dancer,” Mitch said, his voice muffled.

“You’re fertile, too,” she said. “You didn’t say otherwise.”

“Mm.”

She lifted her torso again, rolled off him, and swung around to face him. “You’re shedding,” she said.

Mitch screwed up his face in puzzlement. “What?”

“You’re shedding SHEVA. I test positive.”

“Good Christ, Kaye. You sure know how to trash a mood.” Mitch pushed back and sat with his legs pulled up in the corner of the tent. “I didn’t think it could happen so fast.”

“Something thinks I’m your woman,” Kaye said. “Nature says we’re going to be together a long time. I want that to be true.”

Mitch was at a complete loss. “I do, too, but we don’t need to act like idiots.”

“Every man wants to make love to a fertile woman. It’s in their genes.”

“That is complete bullshit,” Mitch said, and pushed back from her. “What in hell are you doing?”

Kaye hunkered across from him and rested on her knees. She made his head throb. The entire tent smelled of both of them and he could not think straight. “We can prove them wrong, Mitch.”

“About what?”

“I once worried that work and family wouldn’t fit together. Now, there’s no conflict. I am my own laboratory.”

Mitch shook his head vehemently. “No.”

Kaye lay down beside him, pillowing her head on her arms. “Pretty forward and up front, no?” she asked softly.

“We haven’t the slightest idea what’s going to happen,” Mitch said. His eyes were brimming, warm, half from fear, half from another emotion he could not define — something close to pure physical joy. His body wanted her so intensely, wanted her now. If he gave in, he knew it would be the supreme sexual act of his entire life. And if he gave in now, he worried he would never forgive himself.

“I know you believe we’re right, and I know you’d be a good father,” Kaye said, eyes narrowed to slits. She slowly lifted one leg. “If we don’t do something now, maybe it will never happen, and we’ll never know. Be my man. Please.”

The tears came in a rush and Mitch hid his face. She rose beside him and held him and apologized, feeling his shaking. He mumbled a confused and jerking series of words about how women simply did not understand, never could understand.

Kaye soothed him and lay down beside him and for a while the breeze blew the rain flap gently over their silence.

“It’s nothing wrong,” she said. She wiped his face and looked down on him, frightened at what she had provoked. “It’s the only right thing there is, maybe.”

“I’m sorry,” Kaye said stiffly as they loaded the car. A cool current of morning air slopped up from the flat farmland below the campsite. The leaves on the oak trees whispered. The tractors stood motionless on their perfect and empty furrows.

“No reason to be sorry,”Mitch said, shaking out the tent. He folded it and rolled it into its long fabric sheath, then, with Kaye’s help, unsocketed the tent poles and clapped them together into a fasces connected top to bottom by their stretching cords.

They had not made love during the night, and Mitch had slept very little.

“Any dreams?” Kaye asked as they sipped hot coffee from the pot on the camp stove. Mitch shook his head. “You?”

“I didn’t sleep more than a couple of hours,” Kaye said. “I dreamed of working at EcoBacter. All these people were coming in and out. You were there.” Kaye did not want to tell Mitch that in the dream she did not recognize him.

“Not very exciting,” Mitch said.

As they traveled, they saw little out of the ordinary, out of place. They drove west on the two-lane road through small towns, coal towns, old towns, tired towns, towns repainted and repaired, gussied up, with their grand old homes in the rich old neighborhoods made into bed-and-breakfasts for well-to-do young people from Philadelphia and Washington and even New York.

Mitch switched on the radio and they heard about candlelight vigils in the Capitol, ceremonies honoring the dead senators, funerals for others killed in the riot. There were stories on the vaccine effort, how scientists now believed the torch had been passed to James Mondavi or perhaps a team at Princeton. Jackson seemed on the descent, and despite all that had happened, Kaye felt sorry for him.

They ate at the High Street Grill in Morgantown, a new restaurant designed to look old and established, with Colonial decor and thick wood tables coated with clear plastic resin. The sign out front declared the restaurant to be “Just a bit older than the Millennium, and a hell of a lot less significant.”

Kaye watched Mitch closely as she picked at her club sandwich.

Mitch avoided her gaze and looked around at the customers, all stolidly involved in fueling their bodies. Older couples sat in silence; a lone man dropped his wool cap on the table next to a foam cup of coffee; three teenage girls in a booth picked at sundaes with long steel spoons. The staff was young and friendly and none of the women wore masks.

“Makes me believe I’m just an ordinary guy,” Mitch said quietly, looking down at the bowl of chili before him. “I never thought I’d make a good father.”

“Why?” Kaye asked, equally quiet, as if they were sharing a secret.

“I’ve always focused on my work, on wandering around and going places where there was interesting stuff. I’m pretty self-centered. I never thought any intelligent woman would want me to be a father, or a husband, for that matter. Some made it perfectly clear that wasn’t why they were with me.”

“Yeah,” Kaye said, completely tuned in on him, as if every word might contain an answer essential to solving something that puzzled her.

The waitress asked if they needed more tea or dessert. They declined.

“This is so ordinary,” Mitch said, lifting his spoon and swinging it through a small arc to measure the restaurant. “I feel like a big bug in the middle of a Norman Rockwell living room.”

Kaye laughed. “There,” she said.

“What do you mean, ‘there’?”

“That was you, saying that. And I just felt my insides quiver.”

“It’s the food,” Mitch said.

“It’s you.”

“I need to be a husband before I can be a father.”

“It certainly isn’t the food. I’m shaking, Mitch.” She held out her hand and he let go of the spoon to grasp it. Her fingers were cold and her teeth were chattering though the interior was warm.

“I think we should get married,” Mitch said.

“That’s a lovely idea,” Kaye said.

Mitch held out his hand. “Will you marry me?”

Kaye held her breath for a moment. “Oh, God, yes,” she said with a short puff of resolve.

“We’re crazy and we don’t know what we’re in for.”

“We don’t,” Kaye agreed.

“We’re on the edge of trying to make someone new, different from us,” Mitch said. “Don’t you find that terrifying?”

“Utterly,” Kaye said.

“And if we’re wrong, it’s just going to be disaster after disaster. Pain. Grief.”

“We are not wrong,” Kaye said. “Be my man.”

“I am your man.”

“Do you love me?”

“I love you in ways I’ve never felt before.”

“So fast. That’s incredible.”

Mitch nodded emphatically. “But I love you too much not to be a little critical.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m troubled by you calling yourself a laboratory. That sounds cold and maybe a little out of it, Kaye.”

“I hope you see through the words. See what I hope to say and do.”

“I might,” Mitch said. “Just barely. The air feels very thin where we are, right now.”

“Like being on a mountain,” Kaye said.

“I don’t like mountains much,” Mitch said.

“Oh, I do,” Kaye said, thinking of the slopes and white peaks of Mount Kazbeg. “They give you freedom.”

“Yeah,” Mitch said. “You jump off, and you get ten thousand feet of pure freedom.”

As Mitch was paying their bill, Kaye walked toward the rest rooms. On impulse, she pulled her phone card and a piece of paper from her wallet and lifted the receiver on a pay phone.

She was calling Mrs. Luella Hamilton at her home in Richmond, Virginia. She had persuaded the number out of the hospital switchboard at the clinic.

A deep, smooth male voice answered.

“Excuse me, is Mrs. Hamilton in?”

“We’re having an early supper,” the man said. “Who wants her?”

“Kaye Lang. Dr. Lang.”

The man mumbled something, then called out “Luella!” and a few seconds passed. More voices. Luella Hamilton picked up the phone, her breath briefly pounding on the mouthpiece, then familiar and calm. “Albert says this is Kaye Lang, that right?”

“It’s me, Mrs. Hamilton.”

“Well, I’m at home now, Kaye, and don’t need no checking up on.”

“I wanted to let you know I’m no longer with the Task-force, Mrs. Hamilton.”

“Please call me Lu. Whyever not, Kaye?”

“A parting of the ways. I’m heading west and I was worried about you.”

“There’s nothing to be worried about. Albert and the kids are all right and I’m just fine.”

“I was just concerned. I’ve been thinking about you a lot.”

“Well, Dr. Lipton gave me these pills that kill babies before they’re very big, inside. You know about the pills.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t tell anybody, and we thought about it, but Albert and me, we’re going ahead. He says he believes some of what the scientists say, but not all, and besides, he says I’m too ugly to be messing around behind his back.” She let out a rich, disbelieving laugh. “He don’t know us women and our opportunities, does he, Kaye?” Then, in an undertone, to someone beside her, “Stop that. I’m talking here.”

“No,” Kaye said.

“We’re going to have this baby,” Mrs. Hamilton said, coming down heavy on have. “Tell Dr. Lipton and the folks at the clinic. Whatever he or she is, he or she is ours, and we’re going to give him or her a fighting chance.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Lu.”

“You are, huh? You curious, too, Kaye?”

Kaye laughed and felt her laughter catch, threaten to reverse to tears. “I am.”

“You want to see this baby when he comes, don’t you?”

“I would like to buy you both a present,” Kaye said.

“That’s nice. Then why not go find yourself a man and get this flu, and we’ll visit together and compare, you and me, our two fine youngsters, all right? And I’ll buy you a present.” The suggestion carried not a hint of anger, absurdity, or resentment.

“I might do that, Lu.”

“We get along, Kaye. Thanks for caring about me and you know, looking at me like I was people and not a lab rat.”

“May I call you again?”

“We’re moving soon, but we’ll find each other, Kaye. We will. You take care.”

Kaye walked down the long corridor from the rest rooms. She touched her forehead. She was hot. Her stomach was unsettled, as well. Get this flu and we ‘II visit and compare.

Mitch stood outside the restaurant with his hands in his pockets, squinting at the passing cars. He turned and smiled at her as he heard the heavy wood door open.

“I called Mrs. Hamilton,” she said. “She’s going to have her baby.”

“Very brave of her.”

“People have been having babies for millions of years,” Kaye said.

“Yeah. Piece of cake. Where do you want to get married?” Mitch asked.

“How about Columbus?”

“How about Morgantown?”

“Sure,” Kaye said.

“If I think about this much longer, I’m going to be completely useless.”

“I doubt it,” Kaye said. The fresh air made her feel better.

They drove to Spruce Street, and there, at the Mononga-hela Florist Company, Mitch bought Kaye a dozen roses. Walking around the County Magistrates Building and a senior center, they crossed High Street, heading toward the tall clock tower and flagpole of the county courthouse. They stopped beside a spreading canopy of maples to examine the inlaid and inscribed bricks arranged across the courthouse square.

“ ‘In loving memory, James Crutchfield, age 11,’ “ Kaye read. The wind rustled through the maple branches, making the green leaves flutter with a sound like soft voices or old memories. “ ‘My love for fifty years, May Ellen Baker,’ “ Mitch read.

“Do you think we’ll be together that long?” Kaye asked.

Mitch smiled and clasped her shoulder. “I’ve never been married,” he said. “I’m nai’ve. I’d say, yes, we will.”They walked beneath the stone arch to the right of the tower and through the double doors.

Inside, in the Office of the County Clerk, a long room filled with bookshelves and tables supporting huge, scuffed black and green volumes of land transactions, they received paperwork and were told where to get their blood tests.

“It’s a state law,” the elderly clerk told them from behind her broad wooden desk. She smiled wisely. “They test for syphilis, gonorrhea, HIV, herpes, and this new one, SHEVA. A few years ago, they tried to get the blood test removed as a requirement, but that’s all changed now. You wait three days, then you can get married at a church or by a circuit court judge, any county in the state. Those are beautiful roses, honey.” She lifted her glasses where they hung on a gold chain around her neck and scanned them shrewdly. “Proof of age will not be required. What took you so long?”

She handed them their application and test papers.

“We won’t get our license here,” Kaye said to Mitch as they left the building. “We’ll fail the test.” They rested on a wooden bench beneath the maples. It was four in the afternoon and the sky was clouding over swiftly. She laid her head on his shoulder.

Mitch stroked her forehead. “You’re hot. Something wrong?”

“Just proof of our passion.”

Kaye smelled her flowers, then, as the first drops of rain fell, held up her hand and said, “I, Kaye Lang, take you, Mitchell Rafelson, to be my wedded husband, in this age of confusion and upheaval.”

Mitch stared at her.

“Raise your hand,” Kaye said, “if you want me.”

Mitch swiftly realized what was required, clasped her hand, braced himself to rise to the occasion. “I want you to be my wife, come hell or high water, to have and to hold, to cherish and to honor, whether they have any room at the inn or not, amen.”

“I love you, Mitch.”

“I love you, Kaye.”

“All right,” she said. “Now I’m your wife.”

As they left Morgantown, heading southwest, Mitch said, “You know, I believe it. I believe that we’re married.”

“That’s what counts,” Kaye said. She moved closer to him across the broad bench seat.

That evening, on the outskirts of Clarksburg, they made love on a small bed in a dark motel room with cinder block walls. Spring rain fell on the flat roof and dripped from the eaves with a steady, soothing rhythm. They never pulled back the bedcover, lying instead naked together, limbs for blankets, lost in each other, needing nothing more.

The universe became small and bright and very warm.

68 West Virginia and Ohio

Rain and mist followed them from Clarksburg. The old blue Buick’s tires made a steady hum on wet roads pushing and curling through limestone cuts and low round green hills. The wipers swung short black tails, taking Kaye back to Lado’s whining little Fiat on the Georgian Military Road.

“Do you still dream about them?” Kaye asked as Mitch drove.

“Too tired to dream,” Mitch said. He smiled at her, then focused on the road.

“I’m curious to know what happened to them,” Kaye said lightly.

Mitch made a face. “They lost their baby and they died.”

Kaye saw she had touched a nerve and drew back. “Sorry.”

“I told you, I’m a little wacko,” Mitch said. “I think with my nose and I care what happened to three mummies fifteen thousand years ago.”

“You are far from being wacko,” Kaye said. She shook her hair, then let out a yell.

“Whoa!” Mitch cringed.

“We’re going to travel across America!” Kaye cried. “Across the heartland, and we’re going to make love every time we stop somewhere, and we’re going to learn what makes this great nation tick.”

Mitch pounded the wheel and laughed.

“But we aren’t doing this right,” she said, suddenly prim. “We don’t have a big poodle dog.”

“What?”

“Travels with Charley,” Kaye said. “John Steinbeck had a truck he called Rocinante, with a camper on the back. He wrote about traveling with a big poodle. It’s a great book.”

“Did Charley have attitude?”

“Damn right,” Kaye said.

“Then I’ll be the poodle.”

Kaye buzzed his hair with mock clippers.

“Steinbeck took more than a week, I bet,” Mitch said.

“We don’t have to hurry,” Kaye said. “I don’t want this to ever end. You’ve given me back my life, Mitch.”

West of Athens, Ohio, they stopped for lunch at a small diner in a bright red caboose. The caboose sat on a concrete pad and two rails off a frontage road beside the state highway, in a region of low hills covered with maples and dogwood. The food served in the dim interior, illuminated by tiny bulbs in railway lanterns, was adequate and nothing more: a chocolate malt and cheeseburger for Mitch and patty melt and bitter instant iced tea for Kaye. A radio in the kitchen in the back of the caboose played Garth Brooks and Selay Sammi. All they could see of the short-order cook was a white chef’s hat bobbing to the music.

As they left the diner, Kaye noticed three shabbily dressed adolescents wandering beside the frontage road: two girls wearing black skirts and torn gray leggings and a boy in jeans and a travel-stained windbreaker. Like a lagging and downcast puppy, the boy walked several steps behind the girls. Kaye seated herself in the Buick. “What are they doing out here?”

“Maybe they live here,” Mitch said.

“There’s just the house up the hill behind the diner,” Kaye said with a sigh.

“You’re getting a motherly look,” Mitch warned.

Mitch backed the car out of the gravel lot and was about to swing out onto the frontage road when the boy waved vigorously. Mitch stopped and rolled down the window. A light drizzle filled the air with silvery mist scented by trees and the Buick’s exhaust.

“Excuse me, sir. You going west?” the boy asked. His ghostly blue eyes swam in a narrow, pale face. He looked worried and exhausted and beneath his clothes he seemed to be made of a bundle of sticks, and not a very large bundle.

The two girls hung back. The shorter and darker girl covered her face with her hands, peeping between her fingers like a shy child.

The boy’s hands were dirty, his nails black. He saw Mitch’s attention and rubbed them self-consciously on his pants.

“Yeah,” Mitch said.

“I’m really really sorry to bother you. We wouldn’t ask, sir, but it’s tough finding rides and it’s getting wet. If you’re going west, we could use a lift for a while, hey?”

The boy’s desperation and a goofy gallantry beyond his years touched Mitch. He examined the boy closely, his answer snagged somewhere between sympathy and suspicion.

“Tell them to get in,” Kaye said.

The boy stared at them in surprise. “You mean, now?”

“We’re going west.” Mitch pointed at the highway beyond the long chain-link fence.

The boy opened the rear door and the girls jogged forward. Kaye turned and rested her arm on the back of the seat as they jumped in and slid across. “Where are you heading?” she asked.

“Cincinnati,” the boy said. “Or as far past as we can go,” he added hopefully. “Thanks a million.”

“Put on your seat belts,” Mitch said. “There’s three back there.”

The girl who hid her face appeared to be no more than seventeen, hair black and thick, skin coffee-colored, fingers long and knobby with short and chipped nails painted violet. Her companion, a white blond, seemed older, with a broad, easygoing face worn down to vacancy. The boy was no more than nineteen. Mitch wrinkled his nose involuntarily; they hadn’t bathed in days.

“Where are you from?” Kaye asked.

“Richmond,” the boy said. “We’ve been hitchhiking, sleeping out in the woods or the grass. It’s been hard on Delia and Jayce. This is Delia.” He pointed to the girl covering her face.

“I’m Jayce,” said the blond absently.

“My name is Morgan,” the boy added.

“You don’t look old enough to be out on your own,” Mitch said. He brought the car up to speed on the highway.

“Delia couldn’t stand it where she was,” Morgan said. “She wanted to go to L.A. or Seattle. We decided to go with her.”

Jayce nodded.

“That’s not much of a plan,” Mitch said.

“Any relatives out west?” Kaye asked.

“I have an uncle in Cincinnati,” Jayce said. “He might put us up for a while.”

Delia leaned back in the seat, face still hidden. Morgan licked his lips and craned his neck to look up at the car’s headliner, as if to read a message there. “Delia was pregnant but her baby was born dead,” he said. “She got some skin problems because of it.”

“I’m sorry,” Kaye said. She held out her hand. “My name is Kaye. You don’t have to hide, Delia.”

Delia shook her head, hands following. “It’s ugly,” she said.

“I don’t mind it,” Morgan said. He sat as far to the left-hand side of the car as he could, leaving a foot of space between himself and Jayce. “Girls are more sensitive. Her boyfriend told her to get out. Real stupid. What a waste, hey.”

“It’s too ugly,” Delia said softly.

“Come on, sweetie,” Kaye said. “Is it something a doctor could help with?”

“I got it before the baby came,” Delia said.

“It’s okay,” Kaye said soothingly, and reached back to stroke the girl’s arm. Mitch caught glimpses in the rearview mirror, fascinated by this aspect of Kaye. Gradually, Delia lowered her hands, her fingers relaxing. The girl’s face was blotched and mottled, as if splattered with reddish-brown paint.

“Did your boyfriend do that to you?” Kaye asked.

“No,” Delia said. “It just came, and everybody hated it.”

“She got a mask,” Jayce said. “It covered her face for a few weeks, and then it fell off and left those marks.”

Mitch felt a chill. Kaye faced forward and lowered her head for a moment, composing herself.

“Delia and Jayce don’t want me touching them,” Morgan said, “even though we’re friends, because of the plague. You know. Herod’s.”

“I don’t want to get pregnant,” Jayce said. “We’re really hungry.”

“We’ll stop and get some food,” Kaye said. “Would you like to take a shower, get cleaned up?”

“Oh, wow,” Delia said. “That would be so great.”

“You two look decent, hey, real nice,” Morgan said, staring up at the headliner again, this time for courage. “But I have to tell you, these girls are my friends. I don’t want you doing this just so he can see them without their clothes on. I won’t put up with that.”

“Don’t worry,” Kaye said. “If I were your mom, I’d be proud of you, Morgan.”

“Thanks,” Morgan said, and dropped his gaze to the window. The muscles on his narrow jaw clenched. “Hey, it’s just the way I feel. They’ve gone through enough shit. Her boyfriend got a mask, too, and he was really mad. Jayce says he blamed Delia.”

“He did,” Jayce said.

“He was a white boy,” Morgan continued, “and Delia is partly black.”

“I am black,” Delia said.

“They were living in a farmhouse for a while until he made her leave,” Jayce said. “He was hitting her, after the miscarriage. Then she was pregnant again. He said she was making him sick because he had a mask and it wasn’t even his baby.” This came out in a mumbled rush.

“My second baby was born dead,” Delia said, her voice distant. “He only had half his face. Jayce and Morgan never showed him to me.”

“We buried it,” Morgan said.

“My God,” Kaye said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It was hard,” Morgan said. “But hey, we’re still here.” He clamped his teeth together and his jaw again tensed rhythmically.

“Jayce shouldn’t have told me what he looked like,” Delia said.

“If it was God’s baby,” Jayce said flatly, “He should have taken better care of it.”

Mitch wiped his eyes with a finger and blinked to keep the road clear.

“Have you seen a doctor?” Kaye asked.

“I’m okay,” Delia said. “I just want these marks to go away.”

“Let me see them up close, sweetie,” Kaye said.

“Are you a doctor?” Delia asked.

“I’m a biologist, but not a medical doctor,” Kaye said.

“A scientist?” Morgan asked, interest piqued.

“Yeah,” Kaye said.

Delia thought this through for a few seconds, then leaned forward, eyes averted. Kaye touched her chin to steady her. The sun had come out but a big panel truck growled by on the left and the wide tires showered the windshield. The watery light cast a wavering gray pall over the girl’s features.

Her face bore a pattern of demelanized, teardrop-shaped dapples, mostly on her cheeks, with several symmetrical patches at the corners of her eyes and lips. As she turned away from Kaye, the marks shifted and darkened.

“They’re like freckles,” Delia said hopefully. “I get freckles sometimes. It’s my white blood, I guess.”

69 Athens, Ohio

Mitch and Morgan stood on the wide white-painted porch outside the office of James Jacobs, MD.

Morgan was agitated. He lit up the last of his pack of cigarettes and puffed with slit-eyed intent, then walked over to a rough-barked old maple and leaned against it.

Kaye had insisted after a lunch stop that they look up a family practice doctor in the white pages and take Delia in for a checkup. Delia had reluctantly agreed.

“We didn’t do anything criminal,” Morgan said. “We didn’t have no money, hey, and she had her baby and there we were.” He waved his hand up the road.

“Where was that?” Mitch asked.

“West Virginia. In the woods near a farm. It was pretty. A nice place to be buried. You know, I am so tired. I am so sick of them treating me like a flea-bitten dog.”

“The girls do that?”

“You know the attitude,” Morgan said. “Men are contagious. They rely on me, I’m always here for them, then they tell me I have real boy cooties, and that’s it, hey. No thanks, ever.”

“It’s the times,” Mitch said.

“It’s lame. Why are we living now and not some other time, not so lame?”

In the main examining room, Delia perched on the edge of the table, legs dangling. She wore a white flower-print open-backed robe. Jayce sat in a chair across from her, reading a pamphlet on smoking-related illnesses. Dr. Jacobs was in his sixties, thin, with a close-cut and tightly curled patch of graying hair around a tall and noble dome. His eyes were large, and both wise and sad. He told the girls he would be right back, then let his assistant, a middle-aged woman with a bun of fine auburn hair, enter the room with a clipboard and pencil. He closed the door and turned to Kaye.

“No relation?” he asked.

“We picked them up east of here. I thought she should see a doctor.”

“She says she’s nineteen. She doesn’t have any ID, but I don’t think she’s nineteen, do you?”

“I don’t know much about her,” Kaye said. “I’m trying to help them, not get them in trouble.”

Jacobs cocked his head in sympathy. “She gave birth less than a week or ten days ago. No major trauma, but she tore some tissue, and there’s still blood on her leggings. I don’t like to see kids living like animals, Ms. Lang.”

“Neither do I.”

“Delia says it was a Herod’s baby and that it was born dead. Second-stage, by the description. I see no reason not to believe her, but these things should be reported. The baby should have undergone a postmortem. Laws are being put in place right now, at the federal level, and Ohio is going along…She said she was in West Virginia when she delivered. I understand West Virginia is showing some resistance.”

“Only in some ways,” Kaye said, and told him about the blood test requirements.

Jacobs listened, then pulled a pen from his pocket and nervously clicked it with one hand. “Ms. Lang, I wasn’t sure who you were when you came in this afternoon. I had Georgina get on the Web and find some news pictures. I don’t know what you’re doing in Athens, but I’d say you know more about this sort of thing than I do.”

“I might not agree,” Kaye said. “The marks on her face…”

“Some women acquire dark markings during pregnancy. It passes.”

“Not like these,” Kaye said. “They tell us she had other skin problems.”

“I know.” Jacobs sighed and sat on the corner of his desk. “I have three patients who are pregnant, probably with Herod’s second-stage. They won’t let me do amnio or any kind of scans. They’re all churchgoing women and I don’t think they want to know the truth. They’re scared and they’re under pressure. Their friends shun them. They aren’t welcome in church. The husbands won’t come in with them to my office.” He pointed to his face. “They all have skin stiffening and coming loose around the eyes, the nose, the cheeks, the corners of the mouth. It won’t just peel away…not yet. They’re shedding several layers of facial corium and epidermis.” He made a face and pinched his fingers together, tugging at an imaginary flap of skin. “It’s a little leathery.

Ugly as sin, very scary. That’s why they’re nervous and that’s why they’re shunned. This separates them from their community, Ms. Lang. It hurts them. I make my reports to the state and to the feds, and I get no response back. It’s like sending messages into a big dark cave.”

“Do you think the masks are common?”

“I follow the basic tenets of science, Ms. Lang. If I’m seeing it more than once, and now this girl comes along and I see it again, from out of state…I doubt it’s unusual.” He looked at her critically. “Do you know anything more?”

She found herself biting her lip like a little girl. “Yes and no,” she said. “I resigned from my position on the Herod’s Taskforce.”

“Why?”

“It’s too complicated.”

“It’s because they’ve got it all wrong, isn’t it?”

Kaye looked aside and smiled. “I won’t say that.”

“You’ve seen this before? In other women?”

“I think we’re going to see more of it.”

“And the babies will all be monsters and die?”

Kaye shook her head. “I think that’s going to change.”

Jacobs replaced his pen in his pocket, put his hand on the desktop blotter, lifted its leather corner, dropped it slowly. “I won’t file a report on Delia. I’m not sure what I’d say, or who I’d say it to. I think she’d vanish before any authorities could come along to help her. I doubt we’d ever find the infant, where they buried it. She’s tired and she needs steady nourishment. She needs a place to stay and rest. I’ll give her a vitamin shot and prescribe antibiotics and iron supplements.”

“And the marks?”

“Do you know what chromatophores are?”

“Cells that change color. In cuttlefish.”

“These marks can change color,” Jacobs said. “They’re not just a hormonally induced melanosis.”

“Melanophores,” Kaye said.

Jacobs nodded. “That’s the word. Ever seen melanophores on a human?”

“No,” Kaye said.

“Neither have I. Where are you going, Ms. Lang?”

“All the way west,” she said. She lifted her wallet. “I’d like to pay you now.”

Jacobs gave her his saddest look. “I’m not running a goddamned HMO, Ms. Lang. No charge. I’ll prescribe the pills and you pick them up at a good pharmacy. You buy her food and find her a clean place to get a good night’s sleep.”

The door opened and Delia and Jayce emerged. Delia was fully dressed.

“She needs clean clothes and a good soak in a hot tub,” Georgina said firmly.

For the first time since they had met, Delia smiled. “I looked in the mirror,” she said. “Jayce says the marks are pretty. The doctor says I’m not sick, and I can have children again if I want.”

Kaye shook Jacobs’s hand. “Thank you very much,” she said.

As the three of them left through the front office, joining Mitch and Morgan on the front porch, Jacobs called out, “We live and we learn, Ms. Lang! And the faster we learn, the better.”

The little motel sported a huge red sign with TINY SUITES and $50 crowded onto it, clearly visible from the freeway. It had seven rooms, three of them vacant. Kaye rented all three and gave Morgan his own key. Morgan lifted the key, frowned, then pocketed it.

“I don’t like being alone,” he said.

“I couldn’t think of another arrangement,” Kaye said.

Mitch put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “I’ll stay with you,” he said, and gave Kaye a level look. “Let’s get cleaned up and watch TV”

“We’d like you to stay in our room,” Jayce told Kaye. “We’d feel a lot safer.”

The rooms were just on the edge of being dirty. Draped on beds with distinct hollows, thin and worn quilted coverlets showed unraveled nylon threads and cigarette burns. Coffee tables bore multiple ring marks and more cigarette burns. Jayce and Delia explored and settled in as if the accommodations were royal. Delia took the single orange chair beside a table-lamp combo hung with black metal cone-shaped cans. Jayce lounged on the bed and switched on the TV. “They have HBO,” she said in a soft and wondering voice. “We can watch a movie!”

Mitch listened to Morgan in the shower in their room, then opened the front door. Kaye stood outside with her hand up, about to knock.

“We’re wasting a room,” she said. “We’ve taken on some responsibilities, haven’t we?”

Mitch hugged her. “Your instincts,” he said.

“What do your instincts tell you?” she asked, nuzzling his shoulder.

“They’re kids. They’ve been out on the road for weeks, months. Someone should call their parents.”

“Maybe they never had real parents. They’re desperate, Mitch.” Kaye pushed back to look up at him.

“They’re also independent enough to bury a dead baby and stay on the road. The doctor should have called the police, Kaye.”

“I know,” Kaye said. “I also know why he didn’t. The rules have changed. He thinks most of the babies are going to be born dead. Are we the only ones with any hope?”

The shower stopped and the stall door clicked open. The small bathroom was filled with steam.

“The girls,” Kaye said, and walked over to the next door. She gave Mitch a hand-open sign that he instantly recognized from the marching crowds in Albany, and he understood for the first time what the crowds had been trying to show: strong belief in and a cautious submission to the way of Life, belief in the ultimate wisdom of the human genome. No presumption of doom, no ignorant attempts to use new human powers to block the rivers of DNA flowing through the generations.

Faith in Life.

Morgan dressed quickly. “Jayce and Delia don’t need me,” he said as he stood in the small room. The holes in the sleeves of his black pullover were even more obvious now that his skin was clean. He let the dirty windbreaker dangle from one arm. “I don’t want to be a burden. I’ll go now. Give my thanks, hey, but—”

“Please be quiet and sit down,” Mitch said. “What the lady wants, goes. She wants you to stick around.”

Morgan blinked in surprise, then sat on the end of the bed. The springs squeaked and the frame groaned. “I think it’s the end of the world,” he said. “We’ve really made God angry.”

“Don’t jump to any conclusions,” Mitch said. “Believe it or not, all this has happened before.”

Jayce turned on the TV and watched from the bed while Delia took a long bath in the chipped and narrow tub. The girl hummed to herself, tunes from cartoon shows — Scooby Doo, Anima-niacs, Inspector Gadget. Kaye sat in the single chair. Jayce had found something old and affirming on the TV: Pollyanna, with Hayley Mills. Karl Maiden was kneeling in a dry grassy field, berating himself for his stubborn blindness. It was an impassioned performance. Kaye did not remember the movie being so compelling. She watched it with Jayce until she noticed that the girl was sound asleep. Then, turning down the volume, Kaye switched over to Fox News.

There was a smattering of show business stories, a brief political report on congressional elections, then an interview with Bill Cosby on his commercials for the CDC and the Taskforce. Kaye turned up the volume.

“I was a buddy of David Satcher, the former surgeon general, and they must have a kind of ol’ boy network,” Cosby told the interviewer, a blond woman with a large smile and intense blue eyes, “ ‘cause years ago they got me, this ol’ guy, in to talk about what was important, what they were doing. They thought I might be able to help again.”

“You’ve joined quite a select team,” said the interviewer.

“Dustin Hoffman and Michael Crichton. Let’s take a look at your spot.”

Kaye leaned forward. Cosby returned against a black background, face seamed with parental concern. “My friends at the Centers for Disease Control, and many other researchers around the world, are hard at work every day to solve this problem we’re all facing. Herod’s flu. SHEVA. Every day. Nobody’s gonna rest until it’s understood and we can cure it. You can take it from me, these people care, and when you hurt, they hurt, too. Nobody’s asking you to be patient. But to survive this, we all have to be smart”

The interviewer looked away from the big screen television on the set. “Let’s play an excerpt from Dustin Hoffman’s message…”

Hoffman stood on a bare motion picture sound stage with his hands thrust into the pockets of tailored beige pants. He smiled a friendly but solemn greeting. “My name is Dustin Hoffrnan. You might remember I played a scientist righting a deadly disease in a movie called Outbreak. I’ve been talking to the scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they’re working as hard as they can, every day, to fight SHEVA and stop our children from dying.”

The interviewer interrupted the clip. “What are the scientists doing that they weren’t doing last year? What’s new in the effort?”

Cosby made a sour face. “I’m just a man who wants to help us get through this mess. Doctors and scientists are the only hope we’ve got, and we can’t just take to the streets and burn things down and make it all go away. We’re talking about thinking things through, working together, not engaging in riots and panic.”

Delia stood in the bathroom doorway, plump legs bare beneath the small motel towel, head wrapped in another towel. She stared fixedly at the television. “It’s not going to make any difference,” she said. “My babies are dead.”

Mitch returned from the Coke machine at the end of the line of rooms to find Morgan pacing in a U around the bed. The boy’s hands were knots of frustration. “I can’t stop thinking,” Morgan said. Mitch held out a Coke and Morgan stared at it, took it from his hand, popped the top, and chugged it back fiercely. “You know what they did, what Jayce did? When we needed money?”

“I don’t need to know, Morgan,” Mitch said.

“It’s how they treat me. Jayce went out and got a man to pay for it, and, you know, she and Delia blew him, and took some money. Jesus, I ate some of that dinner, too. And the next night. Then we were hitching and Delia started having her baby. They won’t let me touch them, even hug them, they won’t put their arms around me, but for money, they blow these guys, and they don’t care whether I see them or not!” He pounded his temple with the ball of his thumb. “They are so stupid, like farm animals.”

“It must have been tough out there,” Mitch said. “You were all hungry.”

“I went with them because my father’s nothing great, you know, but he doesn’t beat me. He works all day. They needed me more than he does. But I want to go back. I can’t do anything more for them.”

“I understand,” Mitch said. “But don’t be hasty. We’ll work this through.”

“I am so sick of this shit!” Morgan howled.

They heard the howl in the next room. Jayce sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. “There he goes again,” she murmured.

Delia dried off her hair. “He really isn’t stable sometimes,” she said.

“Can you drop us off in Cincinnati?” Jayce asked. “I have an uncle there. Maybe you can send Morgan back home now.”

“Sometimes Morgan’s such a child,” Delia said.

Kaye watched them from her chair, her face pinking with an emotion she could not quite understand: solidarity compounded with visceral disgust.

Minutes later, she met Mitch outside, under the long motel walkway. They held hands.

Mitch pointed his thumb over his shoulder, through the room’s open door. The shower was running again. “His second. He says he feels dirty all the time. The girls have played a little loose with poor Morgan.”

“What was he expecting?”

“No idea.”

“To go to bed with them?”

“I don’t know,” Mitch said quietly. “Maybe he just wants to be treated with respect.”

“I don’t think they know how,” Kaye said. She pressed her hand on his chest, rubbed him there, her eyes focused on something distant and invisible. “The girls want to be dropped off in Cincinnati.”

“Morgan wants to go to the bus station,” Mitch said. “He’s had enough.”

“Mother Nature isn’t being very kind or gentle, is she?”

“Mother Nature has always been something of a bitch,” he said.

“So much for Rocinante and touring America,” Kaye said sadly.

“You want to make some phone calls, get involved again, don’t you?”

Kaye lifted her hands. “I don’t know\” she moaned. “Just taking off and living our lives seems wildly irresponsible. I want to learn more. But how much will anybody tell us — Christopher, anybody on the Taskforce? I’m an outsider now.”

“There’s a way we can stay in the game, with different rules,” Mitch said.

“The rich guy in New York?”

“Daney. And Oliver Merton.”

“We’re not going to Seattle?”

“We are,” Mitch said. “But I’m going to call Merton and say I’m interested.”

“I still want to have our baby,” Kaye said, eyes wide, voice fragile as a dried flower.

The shower stopped. They heard Morgan toweling off, alternately humming to himself and swearing.

“It’s funny,” Mitch said, almost too softly to hear. “I’ve been very uncomfortable about the whole idea. But now…it seems plain as anything, the dreams, meeting you. I want our baby, too. We just can’t be innocent.” He took a deep breath, raised his eyes to meet Kaye’s, added, “Let’s go into that forest with some better maps.”

Morgan stepped out onto the walkway and stared at them owlishly. “I’m ready. I want to go home.”

Kaye looked at Morgan and almost flinched at his intensity. The boy’s eyes seemed a thousand years old.

“I’ll drive you to the bus station,” Mitch said.

70 The National Institutes of Health, Bethesda

Dicken met the director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Dr. Tania Bao, outside the Natcher Building, and walked with her from there. Small, precisely dressed, with a composed and ageless face, its features arranged on a slightly undulating plain, nose tiny, lips on the edge of a smile, and slightly stooped shoulders, Bao might have been in her late thirties but was in fact sixty-three. She wore a pale blue pantsuit and tasseled loafers. She walked with small quick steps, intent on the rough ground. The never-ending construction on the NIH campus had been brought to a halt for security purposes, but had already torn up most of the walkways between the Natcher Building and the Magnuson Clinical Center.

“NIH used to be an open campus,” Bao said. “Now we live with the National Guard watching our every move. I can’t even buy my granddaughter toys from the vendors. I used to love to see them on the sidewalks or in the hallways. Now they’ve been cleared out, along with the construction workers.”

Dicken raised his shoulders, showing that these things were outside his control. His area of influence did not even include himself anymore. “I’ve come to listen,” he said. “I can take your opinions to Dr. Augustine, but I can’t guarantee he’ll agree.”

“What happened, Christopher?” Bao asked plaintively. “Why do they not respond to what is so obvious? Why is Augustine so stubborn?”

“You’re a far more experienced administrator than I am,” Dicken said. “I know only what I see and what I hear in the news. What I see is unbearable pressure from all sides. The vaccine teams haven’t been able to do anything. Mark will do everything he can, regardless, to protect public health. He wants to focus our resources on fighting what he believes is a virulent disease. Right now, the only available option is abortion.”

“What he believes …” Bao said incredulously. “What do you believe, Dr. Dicken?”

The weather was coming into a warm and humid summer mood that Dicken found familiar, even comforting; it made a deep and sad part of him think he might be in Africa, and he would have much preferred that to the current round of his existence. They crossed a temporary asphalt ramp to the next level of finished sidewalk, stepped over yellow construction tape, and walked into the main entrance of Building 10.

Two months ago, life had begun to come apart for Christopher Dicken. The realization that hidden parts of his personality could affect his scientific judgment — that a combination of frustrated infatuation and job pressure could jolt him into an attitude he knew to be false — had preyed on him like a swarm of little biting flies. Somehow, he had managed an outward appearance of calm, of going with the game, the team, the Taskforce. He knew that could not go on forever.

“I believe in work,” Dicken said, embarrassed that his thoughts had delayed a response for so long.

Simply cutting himself off from Kaye Lang, and failing to support her in the face of Jackson’s ambush, had been an incomprehensible and unforgivable mistake. He regretted it more with each day, but it was too late to retie old and broken threads. He could still build a conceptual wall and work diligently on those projects assigned to him.

They took the elevator to the seventh floor, turned left, and found the small staff meeting room in the middle of a long beige and pink corridor.

Bao seated herself. “Christopher, you know Anita, Preston.”

They greeted Dicken with little cheer.

“No good news, I’m afraid,” Dicken reported, seating himself opposite Preston Meeker. Meeker, like his colleagues within the small, close room, represented the quintessence of a child health specialty — in his case, neonatal growth and development.

“Augustine still at it?” Meeker asked, pugnacious from the start. “Still pushing RU-486?”

“In his defense,” Dicken said, and paused for a moment to collect his thoughts, to present this old false face more convincingly, “he has no alternatives. The retrovirus folks at CDC agree that the expression and completion theory makes sense.”

“Children as carriers of unknown plagues?” Meeker pushed out his lips and made a pishing noise.

“It’s a highly defensible position. Added to the likelihood that most of the new babies will be born deformed—”

“We don’t know that,” House said. House was the acting deputy director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; the former deputy director had resigned two weeks ago. A great many NIH people associated with the SHEVA Taskforce were resigning.

With hardly a pang, Dicken thought that once again Kaye Lang had proved herself a pioneer by being the very first to leave.

“It’s indisputable,” Dicken said, and had no trouble telling her this, because it was true: no normal infants had been born yet to a SHEVA-infected mother. “Out of two hundred, most have been reported severely deformed. All have been born dead.” But not always deformed, he reminded himself.

“If the president agrees to start a national campaign using RU-486,” Bao said, “I doubt the CDC will be allowed to remain open in Atlanta. As for Bethesda, it is an intelligent community, but we are still in the Bible Belt. I have already had my house picketed, Christopher. I live surrounded by guards.”

“I understand,” Dicken said.

“Perhaps, but does Mark understand? He does not return my calls or my e-mail.”

“Unacceptable isolation,” Meeker said.

“How many acts of civil disobedience will it take?” House added, clasping her hands on the table and rubbing them together, her eyes darting around the group.

Bao stood and took up a whiteboard marker. She quickly and almost savagely chopped out the words in bright red, saying, “Two million first-stage Herod’s miscarriages, as of last month. Hospitals are flooded.”

“I go to those hospitals,” Dicken said. “It’s part of my job to be on the front.”

“We also have visited patients here and around the country,” Bao said, mouth tight with irritation. “We have three hundred SHEVA mothers in this very building. I see some of them every day. We are not isolated, Christopher.”

“Sorry,” Dicken said.

Bao nodded. “Seven hundred thousand reported second-stage Herod’s pregnancies. Well, here the statistics fall apart — we do not know what is happening,” Bao said, and stared at Dicken. “Where have all the others gone? They are not reporting. Does Mark know?”

“I know,” Dicken said. “Mark knows. It’s sensitive information. We don’t want to acknowledge how much we know until the president makes his policy decision on the Taskforce proposal.”

“I think I can guess,” House said sardonically. “Educated women with means are buying black-market RU-486, or otherwise obtaining abortions at different stages of their pregnancy. There’s a wholesale revolt in the medical community, in women’s clinics. They’ve stopped reporting to the Taskforce, because of the new laws regulating abortion procedures. My guess is, Mark wants to make official what’s already happening around the country.”

Dicken paused for a moment to gather his thoughts, shore up his sagging false front. “Mark has no control over the House of Representatives or the Senate. He speaks, they ignore him. We all know the rates of domestic violence are way up. Women are being forced out of their homes. Divorce. Murder.” Dicken let that sink in, as it had sunk in to his own thoughts and self in the last few months. “Violence against pregnant women is at an all-time high. Some are even resorting to quinacrine, when they can get it, to self-sterilize.”

Bao shook her head sadly.

Dicken continued. “Many women know the simplest way out is to stop their second-stage pregnancies before they go anywhere near full term and other side effects appear.”

“Mark Augustine and the Taskforce are reluctant to describe these side effects,” Bao said. “We assume you refer to facial cauls and melanisms in both the parents.”

“I also refer to whistling palate and vomeronasal deformation,” Dicken said.

“Why the fathers, too?” Bao asked.

“I have no idea,” Dicken said. “If NIH hadn’t lost its clinical study subjects, due to an excess of personal concern, we might all know a lot more, under at least mildly controlled conditions.”

Bao reminded Dicken that no one in the room had had anything to do with the closure of the Taskforce clinical studies in this very building.

“I understand,” Dicken said, and hated himself with a ferocity he could barely hide. “I don’t disagree. Second-stage pregnancies are being ended by all but the poor, those who can’t get to clinics or buy the pills…or…”

“Or what?” Meeker asked.

“The dedicated.”

“Dedicated to what?”

“To nature. To the proposition that these children should be given a chance, whatever the odds of their being born dead or deformed.”

“Augustine does not seem to believe any of the children should be given a chance,” Bao said. “Why?”

“Herod’s is a disease. This is how you fight a disease.” This can’t go on much longer. You ‘II either resign or you ‘II kill yourself trying to explain things you don’t understand or believe.

“I say again, we are not isolated, Christopher,” Bao said, shaking her head. “We go to the maternity wards and the surgeries in this clinic, and visit other clinics and hospitals. We see the women and the men in pain. We need some rational approach that takes into account all these views, all these pressures.”

Dicken frowned in concentration. “Mark is just looking at medical reality. And there’s no political consensus,” he added quietly. “It’s a dangerous time.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Meeker said. “Christopher, I think the White House is paralyzed. Damned if you do, and certainly damned if you don’t and things go on the way they are.”

“Maryland’s own governor is involved in this so-called States’ Health revolt,” House said. “I’ve never seen such fervor in the religious right here.”

“It’s pretty much grass roots, not just Christian,” Bao said. “The Chinese community has pulled in its horns and with good reason. Bigotry is on the rise. We are falling apart into scared and unhappy tribes, Christopher.”

Dicken stared down at the table, then up at the figures on the whiteboard, one eyelid twitching with fatigue. “It hurts all of us,” he said. “It hurts Mark, and it hurts me.”

“I doubt it hurts Mark as much as it hurts the mothers,” Bao said quietly.

71 Oregon

”I’m an ignorant man, and I don’t understand a lot of things,” Sam said. He leaned on the split-rail fence that surrounded the four acres, the two-story frame farmhouse, an old and sagging barn, the brick workshed. Mitch pushed his free hand into his pocket and rested a can of Michelob on the lichen-grayed fence post. A square-rump, black-and-white cow cropping a patch of the neighbor’s twelve acres regarded them with an almost complete absence of curiosity. “You’ve only known this woman for what, two weeks?”

“Just over a month.”

“Some whirlwind!”

Mitch agreed with a sheepish look.

“Why be in such a hurry? Why in hell would anyone want to get pregnant, now of all times? Your mother’s been over her hot flashes for ten years, but after Herod’s, she’s still skittish about letting me touch her.”

“Kaye’s different,” Mitch said, as if admitting something. They had come to this topic on the backs of a lot of other difficult topics that afternoon. The toughest of all had been Mitch’s admission that he had temporarily given up looking for a job, that they would largely be living on Kaye’s money. Sam found this incomprehensible.

“Where’s the self-respect in that?” he had said, and shortly after they had dropped that subject and returned to what had happened in Austria.

Mitch had told him about meeting Brock at the Daney mansion, and that had amused Sam quite a bit. “It baffles science,” he had commented dryly. When they had gotten around to discussing Kaye, still talking with Mitch’s mother, Abby, in the large farmhouse kitchen, Sam’s puzzlement had blossomed into irritation, then downright anger.

“I admit I may be stuck in abysmal stupidity,” Sam said, “but isn’t it just damned dangerous to do this sort of thing now, deliberately?”

“It could be,” Mitch admitted.

“Then why in hell did you agree?”

“I can’t answer that easily,” Mitch said. “First, I think she could be right. I mean, I think she is right. This time around, we’ll have a healthy baby.”

“But you tested positive, she tested positive,” Sam said, glaring at him, hands gripping the rail tightly.

“We did.”

“And correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s never been a healthy baby born of a woman who tested positive.”

“Not yet,” Mitch said.

“That’s lousy odds.”

“She’s the one who found this virus,” Mitch said. “She knows more about it than anyone else on Earth, and she’s convinced—”

“That everyone else is wrong?” Sam asked.

“That we’re going to change our thinking in the next few years.”

“Is she crazy, then, or just a fanatic?”

Mitch frowned. “Careful, Dad,” he said.

Sam flung his hands up in the air. “Mitch, for Christ’s sake, I fly to Austria, the first time I’ve ever been to Europe, and it’s without your mother, damn it, to pick up my son at a hospital after he’s…Well, we’ve been through all that. But why face this kind of grief, take this kind of chance, I ask, in God’s name?”

“Since her first husband died, she’s been a little frantic about looking ahead, seeing things in a positive light,” Mitch said. “I can’t say I understand her, Dad, but I love her. I trust her. Something in me says she’s right, or I wouldn’t have gone along.”

“You mean, cooperated.” Sam looked at the cow and brushed his hands free of lichen dust on his pants legs. “What if you’re both wrong?” he asked.

“We know the consequences. We’ll live with them,” Mitch said. “But we’re not wrong. Not this time, Dad.”

“I’ve been reading as much as I can,” Abby Rafelson said. “It’s bewildering. All these viruses.” Afternoon sun fell through the kitchen window and lay in yellow trapezoids on the unvarnished oak floor. The kitchen smelled of coffee — too much coffee, Kaye thought, nerves on edge — and tamales, their lunch before the men had gone out walking.

Mitch’s mother had kept her beauty into her sixties, an authoritative kind of good looks that emerged from high cheekbones and deep-sunk blue eyes combined with immaculate grooming.

“These particular viruses have been with us a long time,” Kaye said. She held up a picture of Mitch when he was five years old, riding a tricycle on the Willamette riverfront in Portland. He looked intent, oblivious to the camera; sometimes she saw that same expression when he was driving or reading a newspaper.

“How long?” Abby asked.

“Maybe tens of millions of years.” Kaye picked up another picture from the pile on the coffee table. The picture showed Mitch and Sam loading wood in the back of a truck. By his height and thin limbs, Mitch appeared to be about ten or eleven.

“What were they doing there in the first place? I couldn’t understand that.”

“They might have infected us through our gametes, eggs or sperm. Then they stayed. They mutated, or something deactivated them, or…we put them to work for us. Found a way to make them useful.” Kaye looked up from the picture.

Abby stared at her, unfazed. “Sperm or eggs?”

“Ovaries, testicles,” Kaye said, glancing down again.

“What made them decide to come out again?”

“Something in our everyday lives,” Kaye said. “Stress, maybe.”

Abby thought about this for a few seconds. “I’m a college graduate. Physical education. Did Mitch tell you that?”

Kaye nodded. “He said you took a minor in biochemistry. Some premed courses.”

“Yes, well, not enough to be up to your level. More than enough to be dubious about my religious upbringing, however. I don’t know what my mother would have thought if she had known about these viruses in our sex cells.” Abby smiled at Kaye and shook her head. “Maybe she would have called them our original sin.”

Kaye looked at Abby and tried to think of a reply. “That’s interesting,” she managed. Why this should disturb her she did not know, but that it did upset her even more. She felt threatened by the idea.

“The graves in Russia,” Abby said quietly. “Maybe the mothers had neighbors who thought it was an outbreak of original sin.”

“I don’t believe it is,” Kaye said.

“Oh, I don’t believe it myself,” Abby said. She trained her examining blue eyes on Kaye now, troubled, darting. “I’ve never been very comfortable about anything to do with sex. Sam’s a gentle man, the only man I’ve felt passionate about, though not the only man I’ve invited into my bed. My upbringing…was not the best that way. Not the wisest. I’ve never talked with Mitch about sex. Or about love. It seemed he would do well enough on his own, handsome as he is, smart as he is.” Abby laid her hand on Kaye’s. “Did he tell you his mother was a crazy old prude?” She looked so sadly desperate and at a loss that Kaye gripped her hand tightly and smiled what she hoped was reassurance.

“He told me you were a wonderful mother and caring,” Kaye said, “and that he was your only son, and that you’d grill me like a pork chop.” She squeezed Abby’s hand tighter.

Abby laughed and something of the electricity fell from the air between them. “He told me you were headstrong and smarter than any woman he had ever met, and that you cared so much about things. He said I’d better like you, or he’d have a talk with me.”

Kaye stared at her, aghast. “He did not!”

“He did,” Abby said solemnly. “The men in this family don’t mince words. I told him I’d do my best to get along with you.”

“Good grief!” Kaye said, laughing in disbelief.

“Exactly,” Abby said. “He was being defensive. But he knows me. He knows I don’t mince words, either. With all this original sin popping out all over, I think we’re in for a world of change. A lot of ways men and women do things will change. Don’t you think?”

“I’m sure of it,” Kaye said.

“I want you to work as hard as you can, please, dear, my new daughter, please, to make a place where there will be love and a gentle and caring center for Mitch. He looks tough and sturdy but men are really very fragile. Don’t let all this split you up, or damage him. I want to keep as much of the Mitch I know and love as I can, as long as I can. I still see my boy in him. My boy is strong there still.” There were tears in Abby’s eyes, and Kaye realized, holding the woman’s hand, that she had missed her own mother so much, for so many years, and had tried unsuccessfully to bury those emotions.

“It was hard, when Mitch was born,” Abby said. “I was in labor for four days. My first child, I thought the delivery would be tough, but not that tough. I regret we did not have more…but only in some ways. Now, I’d be scared to death. I am scared to death, even though there’s nothing to worry about between Sam and me.”

“I’ll take care of Mitch,” Kaye said.

“These are horrible times,” Abby said. “Somebody’s going to write a book, a big, thick, book. I hope there’s a bright and happy ending.”

That evening, over dinner, men and women together, the conversation was pleasant, light, of little consequence. The air seemed clear, the issues all rained out. Kaye slept with Mitch in his old bedroom, a sign of acceptance from Abby or assertion from Mitch or both.

This was the first real family she had known in years. Thinking about that, lying cramped up beside Mitch in the too-small bed, she had her own moment of happy tears.

She had bought a pregnancy test kit in Eugene when they had stopped for gas not far from a big drug store. Then, to make herself feel she was really making a normal decision despite a world so remarkably out of kilter, she had gone to a small bookstore in the same strip mall and bought a Dr. Spock paperback. She had shown the paperback to Mitch, and he had grinned, but she had not shown him the test kit.

“This is so normal,” she murmured as Mitch snored lightly. “What we’re doing is so natural and normal, please, God.”

72 Seattle, Washington / Washington, D.C.

Kaye drove through Portland while Mitch slept. They crossed the bridge into Washington state, passed through a small rainstorm and then back into bright sun. Kaye chose a turnoff and they ate lunch at a small Mexican restaurant near no town that had a name that they would know. The roads were quiet; it was Sunday.

They paused to nap for a few minutes in the parking lot and Kaye nestled her head on Mitch’s shoulder. The air was slow and the sun warmed her face and hair. A few birds sang. The clouds moved in orderly ranks from the south and soon covered the sky, but the air stayed warm.

After their nap, Kaye drove on through Tacoma, and then Mitch drove again, and they continued in to Seattle. Once through the downtown, passing under the highway-straddling convention center, Mitch felt anxious about taking her straight to his apartment.

“Maybe you’d like to see some of the sights before we settle in,” he said.

Kaye smiled. “What, your apartment is a mess?”

“It’s clean,” Mitch said. “It just might not be…” He shook his head.

“Don’t worry. I’m in no mood to be critical. But I’d love to look around.”

“There’s a place I used to visit a lot when I wasn’t digging…”

Gasworks Park sprawled below a low grassy promontory overlooking Lake Union. The remains of an old gas plant and other factory buildings had been cleaned out and painted bright colors and turned into a public park. The vertical gasworks tanks and decaying walkways and piping had not been painted, but had been fenced in and left to rust.

Mitch took her by the hand and led her from the parking lot. Kaye thought the park was a little ugly, the grass a little patchy, but for Mitch’s sake, said nothing.

They sat on the lawn beside the chain-link fence and watched passenger seaplanes landing on Lake Union. A few lone men and women, or women with children, walked to the playground beside the factory buildings. Mitch said the attendance was a little low for a sunny Sunday.

“People don’t want to congregate,” Kaye said, but even as she spoke, chartered buses were arriving in the parking lot, pulling into spaces marked off by ropes.

“Something’s up,” Mitch said, craning his neck.

“Nothing you planned for me?” she asked lightly.

“Nope,” Mitch said, smiling. “But maybe I don’t remember, after last night.”

“You say that every night,” Kaye said. She yawned, holding her hand over her mouth, and tracked a sailboat crossing the lake, and then a wind surfer in a wetsuit.

“Eight buses,” Mitch said. “Curious.”

Kaye’s period was three days late, and she had been regular since going off the pill, after Saul’s death. This caused a steely kind of concern. When she thought about what they might have started, her teeth ground together. So quickly. Old-fashioned romance. Rolling downhill, gathering speed.

She had not told Mitch yet, in case it was a false alarm.

Kaye felt separated from her body when she thought too hard. If she pulled back from the steely concern and just explored her sensations, the natural state of tissues and cells and emotions, she felt fine; it was the context, the implications, the knowing that interfered with simply feeling good and in love.

Knowing too much and never knowing enough was the problem.

Normal.

“Ten buses, whoops, eleven,” Mitch said. “Big damn crowd.” He stroked the side of her neck. “I’m not sure I like this.”

“It’s your park. I don’t want to move for a while,” Kaye said. “It’s nice.” The sun threw bright patches over the park. The rusty tanks glowed dull orange.

Dozens of men and women in earth-colored clothes walked in small groups from the buses toward the hill. They seemed in no hurry. Four women carried a wooden ring about a yard wide, and several men helped roll a long pole on a dolly.

Kaye frowned, then chuckled. “They’re doing something with a yoni and a lingam,” she said.

Mitch squinted at the procession. “Maybe it’s a giant hoop game,” he said. “Horseshoes or something.”

“Do you think?” Kaye asked with that familiar and uncritical tone he instantly recognized as no-holds-barred disagreement.

“No,” he said, smacking his temple with his palm. “How could I have not seen it right away? It’s a yoni and a lingam.”

“And you an anthropolologist,” she said, lightly doubling the syllables. Kaye got up on her knees and shaded her eyes. “Let’s go see.”

“What if we’re not invited?”

“I doubt it’s a closed party,” she said.

Dicken went though the security check — pat-down, metal detection wand, chemical sniff — and entered the White House through the so-called diplomatic entrance. A young Marine escort immediately took him downstairs to a large meeting room in the basement. The air conditioning was running full blast and the room felt cold as a refrigerator compared to the eighty-five-degree heat and humidity outside.

Dicken was the first to arrive. Other than the Marine and a steward arranging place settings — bottles of Evian and legal pads and pens — on the long oval conference table, he was alone in the room. He sat hi a chair reserved for junior aides at the back. The steward asked him if he’d like something to drink — a Coke or glass of juice. “We’ll have coffee down here in a few minutes.”

“Coke would be great,” Dicken said.

“Just fly in?”

“Drove from Bethesda,” Dicken said.

“Going to be some miserable weather this afternoon,” the steward said. “Thunderstorms by five, so the weather people say at Andrews. We get the best weather reports here.” He winked and smiled, then left and returned after a few minutes with a Coke and a glass of chopped ice.

More people began arriving ten minutes later. Dicken recognized the governors of New Mexico, Alabama, and Maryland; they were accompanied by a small group of aides. The room would soon hold the core of the so-called Governors’ Revolt that was raising hell with the Taskforce across the country.

Augustine was going to have his finest hour, right here in the basement of the White House. He was going to try to convince ten governors, seven from very conservative states, that allowing women access to a complete range of abortion measures was the only humane course of action.

Dicken doubted the plea would be met with approval, or even polite disagreement.

Augustine entered some minutes later, accompanied by the White House-Taskforce liaison and the chief of staff. Augustine put his valise on the table and walked over to Dicken, his shoes clicking on the tile floor.

“Any ammunition?” he asked.

“A rout,” Dicken said quietly. “None of the health agencies felt we had a chance of taking control again. They feel the president has lost his grip on the issue, too.”

Augustine’s eyes wrinkled at the edges. His crow’s feet had grown noticeably deeper in the last year, and his hair had grayed. “I suppose they’re going it on their own — grass-roots solutions?”

“That’s all they see. The AMA and most of the side branches of the NIH have withdrawn their support, tacitly if not overtly.”

“Well,” Augustine said softly, “we sure as hell don’t have anything to offer to get them back in the fold — yet.” He took a cup of coffee from the steward. “Maybe we should just go home and let everyone get on with it.”

Augustine turned to look as more governors entered. The governors were followed by Shawbeck and the secretary of Health and Human Services. “Here come the lions, followed by the Christians,” he said. “That’s only as it should be.” Before leaving to sit at the opposite end of the table, in one of the three seats where no tiny flags flew, he said, in a very low voice, “The president’s been talking with Alabama and Maryland for the last two hours, Christopher. They’ve been arguing with him to delay his decision. I don’t think he wants to. Fifteen thousand pregnant women were murdered in the last six weeks. Fifteen thousand, Christopher.”

Dicken had seen that figure several times.

“We should all bend over and get our butts kicked,” Augustine growled.

Mitch estimated there were at least six hundred people in the crowd moving toward the top of the hill. A few dozen onlookers followed the resolute group with its wooden ring and pillar.

Kaye took his hand. “Is this a Seattle thing?” she asked, pulling him along. The idea of a fertility ritual intrigued her.

“Not that I’ve heard of,” Mitch said. Since San Diego, the smell of too many people gave him the willies.

At the top of the promontory, Kaye and Mitch stood on the edge of a large flat sundial, about thirty feet across. It was made of bas-relief bronze astrological figures, numerals, outstretched human hands, and calligraphic letters showing the four points of the compass. Ceramics, glass, and colored cement completed the circle.

Mitch showed Kaye how the observer became the gnomon on the dial, standing between parallel lines with the seasons and dates cast into them. It was two o’clock, by her estimation.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Kind of a pagan site, don’t you think?” Mitch nodded, keeping his eye on the advancing crowd.

Several men and boys flying kites moved out of the way, pulling and winding their strings, as the group climbed the hill. Three women carried the ring, sweating beneath the weight. They lowered it gently to the middle of the sundial. Two men carrying the pillar stood to one side, waiting to set it down.

Five older women dressed in light yellow robes walked into the circle with hands clasped, smiling with dignity, and surrounded the ring in the center of the compass. The group said not a word.

Kaye and Mitch descended to the south side of the hill, overlooking Lake Union. Mitch felt a breeze coming from the south and saw a few low banks of cloud moving over downtown Seattle. The air was like wine, clean and sweet, temperature in the low seventies. Cloud shadows swung dramatically over the hill.

“Too many people,” Mitch told Kaye.

“Let’s stay and see what they’re up to,” Kaye said.

The crowd compacted, forming concentric circles, all holding hands. They politely asked Kaye and Mitch and others to move farther down the hill while they completed their ceremony.

“You’re welcome to watch, from down there,” a plump young woman in a green shift told Kaye. She explicitly ignored Mitch. Her eyes seemed to track right past him, through him.

The only sound the gathering people made was the rustling of their robes and the motion of their sandaled feet in the grass and over the bas-relief figures of the sundial.

Mitch shoved his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders.

The governors were seated at the table, leaning right or left to speak in murmurs with their aides or adjacent colleagues. Shawbeck remained standing, hands clasped in front of him. Augustine had walked around one quarter of the table to speak with the governor of California. Dicken tried to puzzle out the seating arrangements and then realized that someone was following a clever protocol. The governors had been arranged not by seniority, or by influence, but by the geographic distribution of their states. California was on the western side of the table, and the governor of Alabama sat close to the back of the room in the southeastern quadrant. Augustine, Shawbeck, and the secretary sat near where the president would sit.

That meant something, Dicken surmised. Maybe they were actually going to bite the bullet and recommend that Augustine’s policies be carried out.

Dicken was not at all sure how he felt about that. He had listened to presentations on the medical cost of taking care of second-stage babies, should any survive for very long; he had also listened to figures showing what it would cost for the United States to lose an entire generation of children.

The liaison for Health stood by the door. “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.”

All rose. The governor of Alabama got to his feet more slowly than the others. Dicken saw that his face was damp, presumably from the heat outside. But Augustine had told him that the governor had been in conference with the president for the past two hours.

A Secret Service agent dressed in a blazer and golf shirt walked past Dicken, glanced at him with that stony precision Dicken had long since become used to. The president entered the room first, tall, with his famous shock of white hair. He seemed fit but a little tired; still, the power of the office swept over Dicken. He was pleased that the president looked in his direction, recognized him, nodded solemnly in passing.

The governor of Alabama pushed back his chair. The wooden legs groaned on the tile floor. “Mr. President,” the governor said, too loudly. The president stopped to speak with him, and the governor took two steps forward.

Two agents glanced at each other and swung about to politely intervene.

“I love the office and I love our great country, sir,” the governor said, and wrapped the president in his arms, as if delivering a protective bear hug.

The governor of Florida, standing next to them, grimaced and shook his head in some embarrassment.

The agents were mere feet away.

Oh, Dicken thought, nothing more; just a blank and prescient awareness of being suspended in time, a train whistle not yet heard, brakes not yet pressed, arm willed to move but as yet limp by his side.

He thought perhaps he should get out of the way.

The blond young man in a black robe wore a green surgical mask and kept his eyes lowered as he advanced up the hill to the compass rose. He was escorted by three women in brown and green, and he carried a small brown cloth bag tied with golden rope. His wispy, almost white hair blew back and forth in the breeze that was quickening on the hill.

The circles of women and men parted to let them through.

Mitch watched with a puzzled expression. Kaye stood with arms folded beside him. “What are they up to?” he asked.

“Some sort of ceremony,” Kaye said.

“Fertility?”

“Why not?”

Mitch mulled this over. “Atonement,” he said. “There are more women than men.”

“About three to one,” Kaye said.

“Most of the men are older.”

“Q-Tips,” Kaye said.

“What?”

“That’s what young women call men who are old enough to be their fathers,” Kaye said. “Like the president.”

“That’s insulting,” Mitch said.

“It’s true,” Kaye said. “Don’t blame me.”

The young man was hidden from their view as the crowd closed again.

A large burning hand picked up Christopher Dicken and carried him to the back of the wall. It shattered his eardrums and collapsed his chest. Then the hand pulled back and he slumped to the floor. His eyes flickered open. He saw flames rush along the crushed ceiling in concentric waves, tiles falling through the flames. He was covered with blood and bits of flesh. White smoke and heat stung his eyes, and he shut them. He could not breathe, could not hear, could not move.

The chanting began low and droning. “Let’s go,” Mitch told Kaye.

She looked back at the crowd. Now something seemed wrong to her, as well. The hair on her neck rose. “All right,” she said.

They circled on a walkway and turned to walk down the north side of the hill. They passed a man and his son, five or six years old, the son carrying a kite in his small hands. The boy smiled at Kaye and Mitch. Kaye looked at the boy’s elegant almond eyes, his long close-shaven head so Egyptian, like a beautiful and ancient ebony statue brought to life, and she thought, What a beautiful and normal child. What a beautiful little boy.

She was reminded of the young girl standing by the side of the street in Gordi, as the UN caravan left the town; so different in appearance, yet provoking such similar thoughts.

She took Mitch’s hand in hers just as the sirens began. They looked north toward the parking lot and saw five police cars skidding to a halt, doors flung open, officers emerging, running through the parked cars and across the grass, up the hill.

“Look,” Mitch said, and pointed at a lone middle-aged man dressed in shorts and a sweatshirt, talking on a cellular phone. The man looked scared.

“What in hell?” Kaye asked.

The droning prayer had strengthened. Three officers rushed past Kaye and Mitch, guns still bolstered, but one had pulled out his baton. They pushed through the outer circles of the crowd on the top of the hill.

Women shrieked abuse at them. They fought with the officers, shoving, kicking, scratching, trying to push them back.

Kaye could not believe what she was seeing or hearing. Two women jumped on one of the men, shouting obscenities.

The officer with the baton began to use it to protect his fellows. Kaye heard the stomach-twisting chunk of weighted plastic on flesh and bone.

Kaye started back up the hill, but Mitch grabbed her arm.

More officers plowed into the crowd, batons swinging. The chanting stopped. The crowd seemed to lose all cohesion. Women in robes broke away, hands clutched to their faces in anger and fear, screaming, crying, their voices high and frantic. Some of the robed women collapsed and pounded the scruffy yellow grass with their fists. Spittle dribbled from their mouths.

A police van pushed over the curb and over the grass, engine roaring. Two female officers joined in the rout.

Mitch backed Kaye off the mound, and they came to the bottom, facing uphill to keep an eye on the crowd still massed around the sundial. Two officers pushed out of this assembly with the young man in black. Red dripping slashes marked his neck and hands. A woman officer called for an ambulance on her walkie-talkie. She passed within yards of Mitch and Kaye, face white and lips red with anger.

“Goddamn it!” she shouted at the onlookers. “Why didn’t you try to stop them?”

Neither Kaye nor Mitch had an answer.

The young man in the black robe stumbled and fell between the two officers supporting him. His face, warped by pain and shock, flashed white as the clouds against the hard-packed dirt and yellow grass.

73 Seattle

Mitch drove them south on the freeway to Capitol Hill, then turned off and headed east on Denny. The Buick chugged up the grade.

“I wish we hadn’t seen that,” Kaye said.

Mitch swore under his breath. “I wish we’d never even stopped.”

“Is everybody crazy? It’s just too much,” Kaye said. “I can’t figure out where we stand in all this.”

“We’re going back to the old ways,” Mitch said.

“Like in Georgia.” Kaye pressed a knuckle against her lips and teeth.

“I hate to have women blame men,” Mitch said. “It makes me want to throw up.”

“I don’t blame anybody,” Kaye said. “But you have to admit, it’s a natural reaction.”

Mitch shot her a scowl that bordered on a dirty look, the first such he had ever given her. She sucked in her breath privately, feeling both guilty and sad, and turned to look out her window, peering down the long straight stretch of Broadway: brick buildings, pedestrians, young men wearing green masks, walking with other men, and women walking with women. “Let’s forget about it,” Mitch said. “Let’s get some rest.”

The second-floor apartment, neat and cool and a little dusty from Mitch’s long absence, overlooked Broadway and gave a view of the brick-front post office, a small bookstore, and a Thai restaurant. As Mitch carried the bags through the door, he apologized for clutter that did not exist, as far as Kaye was concerned.

“Bachelor digs,” he said. “I don’t know why I kept up the lease.”

“It’s nice,” Kaye said, running her fingers along the dark wood trim of the windowsill, the white enamel on the wall. The living room had been warmed by the sun and smelled slightly stuffy, not unpleasant, just closed in. With some difficulty, Kaye opened the window. Mitch stood beside her and closed the window slowly. “Gas fumes from the street,” he said. “There’s a window in the bedroom that looks out over the back of the building. Gets a good draft.”

Kaye had thought that seeing Mitch’s apartment would be romantic, pleasant, that she would learn a lot about him, but it was so neat, so sparely furnished, that she felt let down. She examined the books in a ceiling-high case near the kitchen nook: textbooks on anthropology and archaeology, some tattered biology texts, a box full of science magazines and photocopies. No novels.

“The Thai restaurant is good,” Mitch said, putting his arms around her as she stood before the bookcase.

“I’m not hungry. This is where you did your research?”

“Right here. Stroke of lightning. You were inspirational.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Want to just take a nap? There are beers in the refrigerator—”

“Budweiser?”

Mitch grinned.

“I’ll take one,” Kaye said. He let go of her and rummaged in the refrigerator.

“Damn. There must have been an outage. Everything in the freezer melted…” A cool sour smell wafted from the kitchen. “The beer’s still good, though.” He brought her a bottle and deftly unscrewed the cap. She took it and sipped it. Barely any flavor. No relief.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Kaye said. She felt numb, far from anything that mattered. She carried her purse into the bathroom and removed the pregnancy kit. It was sweet and simple: two drops of urine on a test strip, blue if positive, pink if negative. Results in ten minutes.

Suddenly, Kaye was desperate to know.

The bathroom was immaculately clean. “What can I do for him?” she asked herself. “He lives his own life here.” But she put that aside and dropped the lid on the toilet to sit.

In the living room, Mitch turned on the TV Through the old solid-pine door Kaye heard muffled voices, a few stray words.”…also injured in the blast was the secretary—”

“Kaye!” Mitch called.

She covered the strip with a Kleenex and opened the door.

“The president,” Mitch said, his face contorted. He pounded his fists at nothing. “I wish I’d never turned the damned thing on!”

Kaye stood in the living room before the small television, stared at the announcer’s head and shoulders, her moving lips, the run of mascara from one eye. “The count so far is seven dead, including the governors of Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama, the president, a Secret Service agent, and two not yet identified. Among the survivors are the governors of New Mexico and Arizona, director of the Herod’s Taskforce Mark Augustine, and Frank Shawbeck of the National Institutes of Health. The vice president was not in the White House at this time—”

Mitch stood beside her, shoulders slumped.

“Where was Christopher?” Kaye asked in a small voice.

“No explanation has yet been given for how a bomb could have been smuggled into the White House through such intense security. Frank Sesno is outside the White House now.”

Kaye pushed free of Mitch’s arm. “Excuse me,” she said, patting his shoulder nervously. “Bathroom.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” She shut the door and locked it, took a deep breath, and lifted away the Kleenex. Ten minutes had passed.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Mitch called outside the door.

Kaye held the strip up to the light, looked at the two test patches. The first test showed blue. The second test showed blue. She read the instructions again, the color comparisons, and leaned an elbow against the door, feeling dizzy.

“It’s done,” she said softly. She straightened and thought, This is a horrible time. Let it wait. Let it wait if you can possibly wait.

“Kaye!” Mitch sounded close to panic. He needed her, needed some reassurance. She leaned on the sink, could barely stay upright, she felt such a mix of horror and relief and awe at what they had done, at what the world was doing.

She opened the door and saw tears in Mitch’s eyes.

“I didn’t even vote for him!” he said, his lips trembling.

Kaye hugged him tightly. That the president was dead was significant, important, it mattered, but she could not feel it yet. Her emotions were elsewhere, with Mitch, with his mother and father, with her own absent mother and father; she felt even a mild concern for herself, but curiously enough, no real connection with the life inside her.

Not yet.

This was not the actual baby.

Not yet.

Don’t love it. Don’t love this one. Love what it does, what it carries.

Quite against her will, as she held Mitch and patted his back, Kaye fainted. Mitch carried her into the bedroom, brought a cold cloth.

She floated for a while in closed darkness, then became aware of a dryness in her mouth. She cleared her throat, opened her eyes.

She looked up at her husband, tried to kiss his hand as it passed the cloth over her cheeks and chin.

“Such a fool,” she said.

“Me?”

“Me. I thought I’d be strong.”

“You are strong,” Mitch said.

“I love you,” she said, and that was all she could manage.

Mitch saw that she was sound asleep and pulled the blanket over her on the bed, turned out the light, and returned to the living room. The apartment seemed so different now. Summer twilight glowed beyond the windows, casting a fairy-tale pallor over the opposite wall. He sat in the worn armchair before the TV, its muted sound still clear in the quiet room.

“Governor Harris has declared a state of emergency and called out National Guard troops. A curfew of seven P.M. has been declared for weekdays, five P.M. for Saturday and Sunday, and if martial law is declared at the federal level, we presume by the vice president, as seems very likely, then throughout the state, no groups will be allowed to gather in public places without special permission from the Emergency Action Office in each community. This official state of emergency is open-ended, and is in part, so officials say, a response to the situation in the nation’s capital, and in part an attempt to bring under control the extraordinary and continuing unrest in Washington state itself…”

Mitch tapped the plastic test strip on his chin. He switched channels just to have a feeling of control.

“…is dead. The president and five out often visiting state governors were killed this morning in the situation room of the White House—”

And again, punching the button on the small remote.

“…The governor of Alabama, Abraham C. Darzelle, leader of the so-called States’ Revolt movement, embraced the president of the United States just before the explosion. Both the governors of Alabama and Florida, and the president, were blown apart by the blast—”

Mitch turned the TV off. He returned the plastic strip to the bathroom and went to lie beside Kaye. He did not pull the covers back and did not undress, to avoid disturbing her. Kicking off his shoes, he curled up with one leg laid gently over her blanketed thighs, and pushed his nose against her short brown hair. The smell of her hair and scalp was more soothing than any drug.

For far too short a moment, the universe once again became small and warm and entirely sufficient.