Mary came in, and Colin grabbed his muffler out of his pocket and wrapped it hastily around his neck. "Happy Christmas," he said. "Thank you for the muffler. Shall I open your cracker for you?"
"Yes, please," Mary said. She looked tired. She was wearing the same lab coat she had been two days ago. Someone had pinned a cluster of holly to the lapel.
Colin snapped the cracker.
"Put your hat on," he said, unfolding a blue paper crown.
"Have you managed to get any rest at all?" Dunworthy asked.
"A bit," she said, putting the crown on over her untidy gray hair. "We've had thirty new cases since noon, and I've spent most of the day trying to get the sequencing from the WIC, but the lines are jammed."
"I know," Dunworthy said. "Can I see Badri?"
"Only for a minute or two." She frowned. "He's not responding at all to the synthamycin, and neither are the two students from the dance in Headington. Ms. Breen is a bit improved." She frowned. "It worries me. Have you had your inoculation?"
"Not yet. Colin's had his."
"And it hurt like blood," Colin said, unfolding the slip of paper inside the cracker. "Shall I read your motto for you?"
She nodded.
"I need to bring a tech into the quarantine area tomorrow to read Kivrin's fix," Dunworthy said. "What must I do to arrange it?"
"Nothing, so far as I know. They're trying to keep people in, not out."
The registrar took Mary aside, and spoke softly and urgently to her.
"I must go," she said. "I don't want you to leave till you've had your enhancement. Come back down here when you've seen Badri. Colin, you wait here for Mr. Dunworthy."
Dunworthy went up to Isolation. There was no one at the desk, so he wrestled his way into a set of SPG's, remembering to put the gloves on last, and went inside.
The pretty nurse who had been so interested in William was taking Badri's pulse, her eyes on the screens. Dunworthy stopped at the foot of the bed.
Mary had said Badri wasn't responding, but Dunworthy was still shocked by the sight of him. His face was dark with fever again, and his eyes looked bruised, as if someone had hit him. His right arm was hooked to an elaborate shunt. It was bruised a purple-blue on the inside of the elbow. The other arm was worse, black all along the forearm.
"Badri?" he said, and the nurse shook her head.
"You can only stay a moment," she said.
Dunworthy nodded.
She laid Badri's unresisting hand down at his side, typed something on the console, and went out.
Dunworthy sat down beside the bed and looked up at the screens. They looked the same, still indecipherable, the graphs and jags and generating numbers telling him nothing. He looked at Badri, who lay there looking battered, beaten. He patted his hand gently and stood up to go.
"It was the rats," Badri murmured.
"Badri?" Dunworthy said gently. "It's Mr. Dunworthy."
"Mr. Dunworthy…" Badri said, but he didn't open his eyes. "I'm dying, aren't I?"
He felt a twinge of fear. "No, of course not," he said heartily. "Where did you get that idea?"
"It's always fatal," Badri said.
"What is?"
Badri didn't answer. Dunworthy sat with him until the nurse came in, but he didn't say anything else.
"Mr. Dunworthy?" she said. "He needs to rest."
"I know." He walked to the door and then looked back at Badri, lying in the bed. He opened the door.
"It killed them all," Badri said. "Half of Europe."
Colin was standing at the registrar's desk when he came back down, telling her about his Christmas gifts. "My mother's gifts didn't arrive because of the quarantine. The postman wouldn't let them through."
Dunworthy told the registrar about the T-cell enhancement and she nodded and said, "It will just be a moment."
They sat down to wait. It killed them all, Dunworthy thought. Half of Europe.
"I didn't get to read her her motto," Colin said. "Would you like to hear it?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Where was Father Christmas when the lights went out?" He waited expectantly.
Dunworthy shook his head.
"In the dark."
He took his gobstopper out of his pocket, unwrapped it, and stuck it in his mouth. "You're worried about your girl, aren't you?"
"Yes."
He folded up the gobstopper wrapper into a tiny packet. "What I don't understand is, why can't you go get her?"
"She isn't there. We must wait for the rendezvous."
"No, I mean why can't you go back to the same time you sent her through and get her while she was still there? Before anything happened? I mean you can go to any time you want, can't you?"
"No," he said. "You can send an historian to any time, but once she's there, the net can only operate in real time. Did you study the paradoxes at school?"
"Yes," Colin said, but he sounded uncertain. "They're like time-travel rules?"
"The space-time continuum doesn't allow paradoxes," Dunworthy said. "It would be a paradox if Kivrin made something happen that hadn't happened, or if she caused an anachronism."
Colin was still looking uncertain.
"One of the paradoxes is that no one can be in two places at the same time. She's already been in the past for four days. There's nothing we can do to change that. It's already happened."
"Then how does she get back?"
"When she went through, the tech took what's called a fix. It tells the tech exactly where she is, and it acts as a…um…" he groped for an understandable word. "A tether. It ties the two times together so the net can be reopened at a certain time, and she can be picked up."
"Like, 'I'll meet you at the church at half-past six?'"
"Exactly. It's called a rendezvous. Kivrin's is in two weeks. The twenty-eighth of December. On that day the tech will open the net, and Kivrin will come back through."
"I thought you said it was the same time there. How can the twenty-eighth be two weeks from now?"
"They used a different calendar in the Middle Ages. It's December the seventeenth there. Our rendezvous date is the sixth of January." If she's there. If I can find a tech to open the net.
Colin pulled out his gobstopper and looked at it thoughtfully. It was a mottled bluish-white and looked rather like a map of the moon. He stuck it back in his mouth.
"So, if I went to 1320 on the twenty-sixth of December, I could have Christmas twice."
"Yes, I suppose so."
"Apocalyptic," he said. He unfolded the gobstopper wrapper and folded it into an even tinier packet. "I think they've forgotten about you, don't you?"
"It's beginning to look that way," Dunworthy said. The next time a house officer came through, Dunworthy stopped him and told him he was waiting for T-cell enhancement.
"Oh?" he said, looking surprised. "I'll try to find out about it." He disappeared into Casualties.
They waited some more. "It was the rats," Badri had said. And that first night he had asked Dunworthy, "What year is it?" But he had said there was minimal slippage. He had said the apprentice's calculations were correct.
Colin took his gobstopper out and examined it several times for change in color. "If something terrible happened, couldn't you break the rules?" he said, squinting at it. "If she got her arm cut off or she died or a bomb blew her up or something?"
"They're not rules, Colin. They're scientific laws. We couldn't break them if we tried. If we attempted to reverse events that had already happened, the net wouldn't open."
Colin spit his gobstopper into the wrapper and folded the wrinkled paper carefully around it. "I'm sure your girl's all right," he said.
He jammed the wrapped gobstopper in his jacket pocket and pulled out a lumpy parcel. "I forgot to give Great-Aunt Mary her Christmas present," he said.