Clinton lay in the second row over from the hull. His row contained a mix of patients: a twenty-two-year-old female yeoman from the Montana, a twenty-nine-year-old male electronics technician from the Wilmington, a nineteen-year-old machinist from the Montana, a forty-two-year-old chief from the Wilmington.
“Coincidence?” said Eddie, frowning, leaning close.
I didn’t answer in words, just a disbelieving look.
“Then why?”
Something clear and sweet moved into my throat and caught there. It was the taste of hope, replacing the sour flavor of despair. Oh, I knew the old saying: When hope is hungry, everything feeds it. So I tried to think dispassionately, to lock away pure hope, to be the scientist fathoming intellectually what this medical officer was telling me, because it made no sense yet, none at all. Row two was getting better but everyone else remained as sick as before.
“Go ahead, check it out,” challenged Cullen.
I took a walk between rows two and three, trying to contain the excitement. On my right, in row three, patient after patient continued showing the debilitating effects of disease. But on the left, only feet away, all down row two, violent heartbeats had slowed, fevers were less, eyes seemed more focused, and patients more animated, as if collectively they sensed the change not only in themselves, but in others, too.
Eddie said, “What the hell?”
Okay, what is happening? What’s the reason?
My eyes ran over the walls, vents, carts of medicines, rolling steel door. Overconfidence is a killer, and there was no proof that what we saw meant anything more than a temporary and coincidental upswing.
“Eddie, what is different about people in this row? They got the same medicine. They got the same food. They’re adjacent to two other rows, so it’s not environmental. They’re cared for by the same people.”
“The venting system?”
We looked up. A huge vent lay directly overhead, but air spewing from it would spread over the entire hangar.
“No.”
“The time when they got here!”
“Eddie, most of these people arrived at approximately the same time.”
I double-checked with Janice Cullen to make sure that Clinton’s row had received the same medicines as other patients, and she affirmed that was the case. Same dosages of zanamivir and xapaxin. Two snorts into each nostril, every few hours.
“Well, something’s not the same.”
I tried to clear my mind of preconceptions, although, when it comes to preconceptions, you never know that you have one until it’s too late. I walked to the front of the row and started back again slowly, glancing back and forth at the deathly gray faces on one side, the slightly more alert ones on the other. I let my eyes rove over blankets, parkas, makeshift night tables. Eddie walked beside me, doing the same thing, hoping some difference would jump out.
“Huh!” Eddie exclaimed.
We turned back, guards on patrol, started up the row in the opposite direction. My guts were grinding. A spike drove into my right eye. My fists clenched, as if I felt the presence of an unknown vulnerability in our enemy. My ankle, where I’d been hurt, was swollen, bandaged, on fire. I could feel the steady hum of the powerful engines of the icebreaker, driving us south, and wished we would leave international waters and reach the border of the United States.
I halted midway down the line, concentrating on the array of items on top of the crate night tables: pill vials and plastic aerosol containers, trinkets, books.
“You’re sure they got the same medicines, Lieutenant Cullen?”
“I administered them myself.”
“You’re sure nobody came along and did something special, different to people in row two?”
“Not to my knowledge. And I’ve pretty much been here the whole time, except for bathroom breaks.”
I bent down at a crate, stenciled U.S. COAST GUARD PROPERTY, let my gloved fingers hover above a Timex watch, a plastic mug of water, a dog-eared copy of The Sun Also Rises, the white plastic aerosol container that…
I froze.
Eddie asked me, “What?”
I called over to Janice, the vague suspicion coming as my heartbeat sped up, “Who got the medicines that we brought in? And who got the Chinese stuff?”
“But it’s the same!” she protested.
“Is it?”
I started down the row again. The first patient in line was Alice Richler, age nineteen, her chart read, a food service specialist on the Wilmington. Temperature at 103 two hours ago, at 101 now. Black curly hair tied back. She was breathing easier. The baby blue eyes showed a flicker of hope. She sensed, as the more alert patients did, that something good might be happening. She’d been at death’s door last time I’d checked.
On Alice’s crate lay a pair of pink plastic reading glasses, a ring of keys, a pen flashlight, a lucky bracelet with tiny charms, and a small white aerosol container.
Picking it up with my gloved hand, I read the label out loud. “Xapaxin.” And, “Manufactured in Shanghai.”
I reached across the aisle, to the adjacent night table, and picked up the aerosol container that sat there. It was shaped slightly differently, more bullet shaped, less bulgy at the center. I read the label.
“Xapaxin. Manufactured by Pacific-North Pharma.”
I moved on to the next pair of cots, and stopped. I read the next label on the right side. “Shanghai.” But the shape of the container told me that beforehand.
“And on the left side, Pacific-North Pharma.”
“But what…” said Cullen, and shut up.
Now we split up and the three of us went from cot to cot, reading labels.
Cullen moving down row two, saying, “China… China… China…”
Eddie in row one: “P-N Pharma… Pharma. But, One, I don’t get it. It’s manufactured in two places but it’s both xapaxin, the same stuff.”
And I said, holding two containers up, a bullet-shaped one from Pacific-North, a more rounded version from Zhou’s donated supply, “All we really know, Eddie, is that the labels say it’s the same.”
“It’s not the same,” I said thirty minutes later.
“Not even close,” breathed Eddie.
We were in the lab upstairs at the electron microscope again, comparing medicines, magnified 20,000 times on screens. Night and day. Yin and yang. Xapaxin, or at least the version manufactured in the United States, was an aquamarine crystalline bouquet, a shimmering jewel collection of bright surfaces, molecular clusters absorbing and sending forth the microscope’s internal bright probing light.
Xapaxin molecules, the sort that Zhou had donated, showed up as rust-colored clusters of grape-shaped ovals, thicker in the middle, small and bulging on top.
Eddie and I sat back. My pulse beat in my throat — strong and steady, a mix of hope, excitement, and bafflement.
“Is it possible?”
“Do you think?”
“But if it is an antidote,” I told Eddie, “how did they get it? How did they goddamn even have an antidote for the 1918 flu? You want to tell me that?”
“And also,” Eddie added, thinking out loud, “how did they know to bring it here? How did they know before we did, that we’re even dealing with the 1918 flu?”
“Unless they’re the ones using the bioweapon,” I said, “and this is it. They somehow introduced it into the sub.”