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He wiped his face. "I've had nightmares about pneumonic plague since the Ring of Fire," he said, almost whispering. "It's airborne, so it can spread like wildfire. Except for some of the exotic Ebola strains of hemorrhagic fever-which, thank God, we don't have to worry about-there is no disease I know of which has a worse fatality rate. No mass disease, anyway. Regular bubonic plague is bad enough. That'll kill half of the people who contract it. But pneumonic plague… With that form of the disease, the fatality rate is at least ninety percent."

He glared down at Underwood, his dark eyes like agates. "The Black Death of the fourteenth century was bubonic plague, by the way-and it started in China. But, hey," he sneered, "who cares about China, right? If we aren't going to worry about some Dutchmen, why lose any sleep over a bunch of coolies? Right? Well, here's how it really works, Mr. Borders-and-Frontiers. After killing an estimated twenty-five million Chinese, the epidemic reached Europe, probably through India and the Middle East. Maybe Istanbul. Who knows? The bacterium's invisible to the human eye, Underwood-you do know

that much, I hope? Ain't no border guard checking papers gonna spot it, trust me."

He moved away from Underwood and started walking back toward his side of the conference table, talking as he went. "It started in the Italian port cities. By the summer of the year 1348 it had reached Paris; by the end of the year, London. By 1350-two years, that's all-it had spread throughout Europe. Everywhere, from Scandinavia to Spain to Russia. By the time it ran its course, the Black Death killed a third of the continent's population, all told. The estimate of historians is another twenty-five million people. Add that to the death toll in China, and you're looking at the same numbers as World War II and the Holocaust-in a world which had a far smaller population than the twentieth century."

He reached down, picked up the chair he'd knocked over, and resumed his seat. Then, clasping his hands in front of him, he swept the room with a long and stony gaze.

"I have been telling all of you for over two years now that we're living on borrowed time. There is no way-I don't care how you try, barbed wire around the borders, it doesn't matter-that you can insulate our little United States here from the rest of the world. For Christ's sake, people, even with the resources the old U.S.A. had, millions of so-called 'illegal aliens' came across our borders every year. From everywhere-China to South America-where there were poor people looking for something better, or fleeing from persecution and oppression. And in case you haven't noticed yet, 17 th -century Europe in the middle of the Thirty Years War has more poverty and persecution and oppression and desperation than we did back up-time-and, God knows, we had plenty of it."

He paused, letting that sink in. "What we are faced with here is basically the same choice we've been faced with since Day One. This is the same argument Mike had with Simpson at that first public meeting. The same argument he had again with him during the campaign. The analogy Mike likes to use is whether a man who stumbles should try to take the fall-on broken glass-or run faster. I think of it like a man in the surf who sees a tidal wave coming. He's got a choice between trying to get to dry land-with not enough time to do it-or swimming out to meet the wave and trying to ride it in. Either way, the odds are crappy. But what looks like the safest course in the short run is sure to be the most dangerous one in the end."

Quentin was frowning. Clearly enough, the parallel James was drawing between the current issue and the old battle between Mike and Simpson had gone right over his head. James sighed.

"I'll put it a different way. The only

way we've really got to protect ourselves from epidemics-sure as hell in the long run-is to spread our knowledge and our sanitary and medical techniques, throughout Europe. The whole world, eventually. I've always known that. The problem, however-compared to which deciding what to do with the piddly supply of antibiotics we've got on hand is meaningless-fucking meaningless, people-is that most of Europe doesn't believe us. Half the time, even our friends and allies don't really believe us. For every Balthazar Abrabanel who does, there's at least ten people who think our notions are either witless babble or heretical theology or-or-God knows what they think. Not the least of the reasons I supported Mike during the wrangle over chemical warfare was because I knew that if we set that monster loose we'd never get anyone to trust us when it came to medicine. Nobody in their right mind goes to a poisoner for remedies."