Dooms Day Book

“Yes. No. Put them in the junior common room for now. They can practice their changes or whatever it is they do. Get Badri’s file and phone it in. If the lines are all engaged, you’d best phone it in to this number. I’ll be here even if Dr. Ahrens isn’t. And then find out about Basingame. It’s more important than ever that we locate him. You can assign the Americans rooms later.”

“They’re very upset, sir.”

So am I, Dunworthy thought. “Tell the Americans I’ll find out what I can about the situation and ring you back.” He watched the screen go gray.

“You can’t wait to inform Basingame of what you perceive to be Mediaeval’s failure, can you?” Gilchrist said. “In spite of the fact that it was your tech who has jeopardized this drop by using drugs, a fact of which you may be sure I will inform Mr. Basingame on his return.”

Dunworthy looked at his digital. It was half past four. Finch had said they’d been stopped at a bit before three. An hour and a half. Oxford had only had two temp quarantines in recent years. One had turned out to be an allergic reaction to an injection, and the other one had turned out to be nothing at all, a schoolgirl prank. Both had been called off as soon as they had the results of the blood tests, and those hadn’t taken even ten minutes. Mary had taken blood in the ambulance. Dunworthy had seen the medic hand the vials to the house officer when they came into Casualties. There had been ample time for them to obtain the results. Three quarters of an hour.

“I’m certain Mr. Basingame will also be interested in hearing that it was your failure to have your tech screened that’s resulted in this practicum being jeopardized,” Gilchrist said.

Dunworthy should have recognized the symptoms as those of an infection: Badri’s low blood pressure, his labored breathing, his elevated temp. Mary had even said in the ambulance that it had to be an infection of some kind with his temp that high, but he had assumed she meant a localized infection, staph or an inflamed appendix. And what disease could it be? Smallpox and typhoid had been eradicated back in the twentieth century and polio in this one. Bacterials didn’t have a chance against antibody specification, and the antivirals worked so well nobody even had colds anymore.

“It seems distinctly odd that after being so concerned about the precautions Mediaeval was taking that you wouldn’t take the obvious precaution of screening your tech for drugs,” Gilchrist said.

It must be a thirdworld disease. Mary had asked all those questions about whether Badri had been out of the Community, about his Pakistani relatives. But Pakistan wasn’t thirdworld, and Badri couldn’t have gone out of the Community without a whole series of inoculations. And he hadn’t gone outside the EEC. Except for the Hungarian on-site, he’d been in Oxford all term.

“I would like to use the telephone,” Gilchrist was saying. “I quite agree that we need Basingame here to take matters in hand.”

Dunworthy was still holding the phone. He blinked at it, surprised.

“Do you mean to prevent me from phoning Basingame?” Gilchrist said.

Latimer stood up. “What is it?” he said, his arms held out as if he thought Dunworthy might pitch forward into them. “What’s wrong?”

“Badri isn’t using,” Dunworthy said to Gilchrist. “He’s ill.”

“I fail to see how you can claim to know that without having run a screen,” Gilchrist said, looking pointedly at the phone.

“We’re under quarantine,” Dunworthy said. “It’s some sort of infectious disease.”

“It’s a virus,” Mary said from the door. “We don’t have it sequenced yet, but the preliminary results ID it as a viral infection.”

She had unbuttoned her coat, and it flapped behind her like Kivrin’s cloak as she hurried into the room. She was carrying a lab tray by the handle. It was piled high with equipment and paper packets.

“The tests indicate that it’s probably a myxovirus,” she said, setting the tray down on one of the end tables. “Badri’s symptoms are compatible with that: high fever, disorientation, headache. It’s definitely not a retrovirus or a picornavirus, which is good news, but it will be some time yet before we have a complete ID.”

She pulled two chairs up next to the table and sat down on one. “We’ve notified the World Influenza Centre in London and sent them samples for ident and sequencing. Until we have a positive ID, a temp quarantine has been called as required by NHS regulations in cases of possible epidemic conditions.” She pulled on a pair of imperm gloves.

“Epidemic!” Gilchrist said, shooting a furious glance at Dunworthy as if accusing him of engineering the quarantine to discredit Mediaeval.

“Possible epidemic conditions,” Mary corrected, tearing open paper packets. “There is no epidemic as yet. Badri’s is the only case so far. We’ve run a Community computer check, and there have been no other cases with Badri’s profile, which is also good news.”