William's blonde student nurse met him at the door of Isolation. She was wearing a white cloth gown and mask. "I'm afraid you can't go in," she said, holding up a gloved hand.
Badri's dead, he thought. "Is Mr. Chaudhuri worse?" he asked.
"No. He seems actually to be resting a bit more quietly. But we've run out of SPG's. London's promised to send us a shipment tomorrow, and the staff's making do with cloth, but we haven't enough for visitors." She fished in her pocket for a scrap of paper. "I wrote down his words," she said, handing it to him. "I'm afraid most of it's unintelligible. He says your name and — Kivrin's?-is that right?"
He nodded, looking at the paper.
"And sometimes isolated words, but most of it's nonsense."
She had tried to write it down phonetically, and when she understood a word, she underscored it. "Can't," he had said, and "black," and "so worried."
Over half the detainees were down by Sunday morning, and everyone not ill was nursing them. Dunworthy and Finch had given up all notion of putting them in wards, and at any rate they had run out of cots. They left them in their own beds, or moved them, bed and all, into rooms in Salvin to keep their makeshift nurses from running themselves ragged.
The bellringers fell one by one, and Dunworthy helped put them to bed in the old library. Ms. Taylor, who could still walk, insisted on going to visit them.
"It's the least I can do," she said, panting after the exertion of walking across the corridor, "after I let them down like that."
Dunworthy helped her onto the air mattress William had carried over and covered her with a sheet. "'The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,'" he said.
He felt weak himself, bone-tired from the lack of sleep and the constant defeats. He had finally managed, between boiling water for tea and washing bedpans, to get through to one of Magdalen's techs.
"She's in hospital," her mother had said. She'd looked harried and tired.
"When did she fall ill?" Dunworthy'd asked her.
"Christmas Day."
Hope had surged in him. Perhaps Magdalen's tech was the source. "What symptoms does she have?" he'd asked eagerly. "Headache? Fever? Disorientation?"
"Ruptured appendix," she'd said.
By Monday morning three-quarters of the detainees were ill. They ran out, as Finch had predicted, of clean linens and NHS masks, and more urgently, of temps, antimicrobials, and aspirin. "I tried to ring Infirmary to ask for more," Finch said handing Dunworthy a list, "but the phones have all gone dead."
Dunworthy walked to the infirmary to fetch the supplies. The street in front of Casualties was jammed, a jumble of ambulance vans and taxis and protesters carrying a large sign that proclaimed, "The Prime Minister Has Left Us Here To Die." As he squeezed past them and in the door, Colin came running out. He was wet, as usual, and red-faced and red-nosed from the cold. His jacket was unstripped.
The telephones are out," he said. "There was an overload. I'm running messages." He pulled an untidy clutch of folded papers from his jacket pocket. "Is there anyone you'd like me to take a message to?"
Yes, he thought. To Andrews. To Basingame. To Kivrin. "No," he said.
Colin stuffed the already wet messages back in his pocket. "I'm off then. If you're looking for Great-Aunt Mary, she's in Casualties. Five more cases just came in. A family. The baby was dead." He darted off through the traffic jam.
Dunworthy pushed his way into Casualties and showed his list to the house officer, who directed him to Supplies. The corridors were still full of stretcher trolleys, though now they were lined lengthwise on both sides so there was a narrow passage between. Bending over one of the stretcher trolleys was a nurse in a pink mask and gown reading something to one of the patients.
"'The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee,'" she said, and he realized too late that it was Mrs. Gaddson, but she was so intent on her reading she did not look up. "'Until he have consumed thee from the land.'"
The pestilence shall cleave unto thee, he said silently, and thought of Badri. "It was the rats," Badri had said. "It killed them all. Half of Europe."
She can't be in the Black Death, he thought, turning down the corridor to Supplies. Andrews had said the maximal slippage was five years. The plague hadn't even begun in China. Andrews had said the only two things that would not have automatically aborted the drop were the slippage and the coordinates, and Badri, when he could answer Dunworthy's questions, insisted he had checked Puhalski's coordinates.
He went into Supplies. There was no one at the desk. He rang the bell.
Each time Dunworthy had asked him, Badri had said the apprentice's coordinates were correct, but his fingers moved nervously over the sheet, typing, typing in the fix. That can't be right. There's something wrong.
He rang the bell again, and a nurse emerged from among the shelves. She had obviously come out of retirement expressly for the epidemic. She was ninety at the least, and her starched white uniform was yellowed with age, but still stiff. It crackled when she took his list.
"Have you a supply authorization?"
"No," he said.
She handed him back his list and a three-page form. "All orders must be authorized by the ward matron."
"We haven't any ward matron," he said, his temper flaring. "We haven't any ward. We have fifty detainees in two dormitories and no supplies."
"In that case, authorization must be obtained from the doctor in charge."
"The doctor in charge has an infirmary full of patients to take care of. She doesn't have time to sign authorizations. There's an epidemic on!"
"I am well aware of that," the nurse said frigidly. "All orders must be signed by the doctor in charge," and walked creakily back among the shelves.
He went back to Casualties. Mary was no longer there. The house officer sent him up to Isolation, but she wasn't there either. He toyed with the idea of forging Mary's signature, but he wanted to see her, wanted to tell her about his failure to reach the techs, his failure to find a way to bypass Gilchrist and open the net. He could not even get a simple aspirin, and it was already the third of January.
He finally ran Mary to ground in the laboratory. She was speaking into the telephone, which was apparently working again, though the visual was nothing but snow. She wasn't watching it. She was watching the console, which had the branching contacts chart on it. "What exactly is the difficulty?" she was saying. "You said it would be here two days ago."
There was a pause while the person lost in the snow apparently made some sort of excuse.
"What do you mean it was turned back?" she said incredulously. "I've got a thousand people with influenza here."
There was another pause. Mary typed something into the console, and a different chart appeared.
"Well, send it again," she shouted. "I need it now! I've got people dying here! I want it here by — hullo? Are you there?" The screen went dead. She turned to click the receiver and caught sight of Dunworthy.
She beckoned him into the office. "Are you there?" she said into the telephone. "Hullo?" She slammed the receiver down. "The phones don't work, half my staff is down with the virus, and the analogues aren't here because some idiot wouldn't let them into the quarantine area!" she said angrily.
She sank down in front of the console and rubbed her fingers against her cheekbones. "Sorry," she said. "It's been rather a bad day. I've had three DOA's this afternoon. One of them was six months old."
She was still wearing the sprig of holly on her lab coat. Both it and the lab coat were much the worse for wear, and Mary looked impossibly tired, the lines around her mouth and eyes cutting deep into her face. He wondered how long it had been since she had slept and whether, if he were to ask her, she would even know.