She rubbed two fingers along the lines above her eyes. "One never gets used to the idea that there is nothing one can do," she said.
"No."
She looked up at him, almost as if she hadn't realized he was there. "Was there something you needed, James?"
She had had no sleep, and no help, and three DOA's, one of them a baby. She had enough on her mind without worrying over Kivrin.
"No," he said, standing up. He handed her the form. "Nothing but your signature."
She signed it without looking at it. "I went to see Gilchrist this morning," she said, handing it back to him.
He looked at her, too surprised and touched to speak.
"I went to see if I could convince him to open the net earlier. I explained that there's no need to wait until there's been full immunization. Immunization of a critical percentage of the virus pool effectively eliminates the contagion vectors."
"And none of your arguments had the slightest effect on him."
"No. He's utterly convinced the virus came through from the past." Mary sighed. "He's drawn up charts of the cyclical mutation patterns of Type A myxoviruses. According to them, one of the Type A myxoviruses extant in 1318-19 was an H9N2." She rubbed at her forehead again. "He won't open the laboratory until full immunization's completed and the quarantine's lifted."
"And when will that be?" he asked, though he had a good idea.
"The quarantine has to remain in effect until seven days after full immunization or fourteen days after final incidence," she said as if she were giving him bad news.
Final incidence. Two weeks with no new cases. "How long will nationwide immunization take?"
"Once we get sufficient supplies of the vaccine, not long. The Pandemic only took eighteen days."
Eighteen days. After sufficient supplies of the vaccine were manufactured. The end of January. "That's not soon enough," he said.
"I know. We must positively identify the source, that's all." She turned to look at the console. "The answer's in here, you know. We're simply looking in the wrong place." She punched in a new chart. "I've been running correlations, looking for veterinary students, primaries who live near zoos, rural addresses. This one's of secondaries listed in DeBrett's, grouse-hunting and all that. But the closest any of them's come to a waterfowl is eating goose for Christmas."
She punched up the contacts chart. Badri's name was still at the top of it. She sat and looked at it a long moment, as remote as Montoya staring at her bones.
"The first thing a doctor has to learn is not to be too hard on himself when he loses a patient," she said, and he wondered if she meant Kivrin or Badri.
"I'm going to get the net open," he said.
"I hope so," she said.
The answer did not lie in the contacts charts or the commonalities. It lay in Badri, whose name was still, in spite of all the questions they had asked the secondaries, in spite of all the false leads, the primary source. Badri was the index case, and sometime in the four to six days before the drop he had been in contact with a reservoir.
He went up to see him. There was a different nurse at the desk outside Badri's room, a tall, nervous youth who looked no more than seventeen.
"Where's…" Dunworthy began and realized he didn't know the blonde nurse's name.
"She's down with it," the boy said. "Yesterday. She's the twentieth of the nursing staff to catch it, and they're out of subs. They asked for third-year students to help. I'm actually only first-year, but I've had first-aid training."
Yesterday. A whole day had passed, then, with no one recording what Badri said. "Do you remember anything Badri might have said while you were in with him?" he said without hope. A first-year student. "Any words or phrases you could understand?"
"You're Mr. Dunworthy, aren't you?" the boy said. He handed him a set of SPG's. "Eloise said you wanted to know everything the patient said."
Dunworthy put on the newly-arrived SPG's. They were white and marked with tiny black crosses along the back opening of the gown. He wondered where they'd resorted to borrowing them from.
"She was awfully ill and she kept saying over and over how important it was."
The boy led Dunworthy into Badri's room, looked at the screens above the bed, and then down at Badri. At least he looks at the patient, Dunworthy thought.
Badri lay with his hands outside the sheet, plucking at it with hands that looked like those in Colin's illustration of the knight's tomb. His sunken eyes were open, but he did not look at the nurse or at Dunworthy, or at the sheet, which his ceaseless hands could not seem to grasp.
"I read about this in meds," the boy said, "but I've never actually seen it. It's a common terminal symptom in respiratory cases." He went to the console, punched something up, and pointed at the top left screen. "I've written it all down."
He had, even the gibberish. He had written that phonetically, with ellipses to represent pauses, and (sic) after questionable words. "Rats," he had written, and "backer (sic)" and "Why doesn't he come?"
"This is mostly from yesterday," he said. He moved a cursor to the lower third of the screen. "He talked a big this morning. Now, of course, he doesn't say anything."
Dunworthy sat down beside Badri and took his hand. It was ice-cold even through the imperm glove. He glanced at the temp screen. Badri no longer had a fever or the dark flush that had gone with it. He seemed to have lost all color. His skin was the color of wet ashes.
"Badri," he said. "It's Mr. Dunworthy. I need to ask you some questions."
There was no response. His cold hand lay limply in Dunworthy's gloved one, and the other continued picking steadily, uselessly at the sheet.
"Dr. Ahrens thinks you might have caught your illness from an animal, a wild duck or a goose."
The nurse looked interestedly at Dunworthy and then back at Badri, as if he were hoping he would exhibit another yet- unobserved medical phenomenon.
"Badri, can you remember? Did you have any contact with ducks or geese the week before the drop?"
Badri's hand moved. Dunworthy frowned at it, wondering if he were trying to communicate, but when he loosened his grip a little, the thin, thin fingers were only trying to pluck at his palm, at his fingers, at his wrist.
He was suddenly ashamed that he was sitting here torturing Badri with questions, though he was past hearing, past even knowing Dunworthy was here, or caring.
He laid Badri's hand back on the sheet. "Rest," he said, patting it gently, "Try to rest."
"I doubt if he can hear you," the nurse said. "When they're this far gone they're not really conscious."
"No. I know," Dunworthy said, but he went on sitting there.
The nurse adjusted a drip, peered nervously at it and adjusted it again. He looked anxiously at Badri, adjusted the drip a third time and finally went out. Dunworthy sat on, watching Badri's fingers plucking blindly at the sheet, trying to grasp it but unable to. Trying to hold on. Now and then he murmured something, too soft to hear. Dunworthy rubbed his arm gently, up and down. After awhile, the plucking grew slower, though Dunworthy didn't know if that was a good sign or not.
"Graveyard," Badri said.
"No," Dunworthy said. "No."
He sat on a bit longer, rubbing Badri's arm, but after a little it seemed to make his agitation worse. He stood up. "Try to rest," he said and went out.
The nurse was sitting at the desk, reading a copy of Patient Care.
"Please notify me when…" Dunworthy said, and realized he would not be able to finish the sentence. "Please notify me."