Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

  “I did, sir, but she said in that case she would room with William. I don’t like to do that to him, sir.”

  “No,” Dunworthy said. “There are some things one shouldn’t have to endure, even in an epidemic. Have you told William his mother’s coming?”

  “No, sir. I tried, but he’s not in college. Tom Gailey told me Mr. Gaddson was visiting a young lady at Shrewsbury, so I rang her up, but there was no answer.”

  “No doubt they’re out reading Petrarch somewhere,” Dunworthy said, wondering what would happen if Mrs. Gaddson should come upon the unwary couple on her way to Balliol.

  “I don’t see why he should be doing that, sir,” Finch said, sounding troubled. “Or why his tutor should have assigned Petrarch at all. He’s reading for mods.”

  “Yes, well, when Mrs. Gaddson arrives, put her in Warren.” The nurse looked up sharply from polishing his spectacles. “It’s across the quad at any rate. Give her a room that doesn’t look out on anything. And check our supply of rash ointment.”

  “Yes, sir,” Finch said. “I spoke with the bursar at New College. She said Mr. Basingame told her before he left that he wanted to be ‘free of distractions,’ but she said she assumed he’d told someone where he was going and that she’d try to phone his wife as soon as the lines settled down.”

  “Did you ask about their techs?”

  “Yes, sir,” Finch said. “All of them have gone home for the holidays.”

  “Which of our techs lives the closest to Oxford?”

  Finch thought for a moment. “That would be Andrews. In Reading. Would you like his number?”

  “Yes, and make me up a list of the others’ numbers and addresses.”

  Finch recited Andrews’s number. “I’ve taken steps to remedy the lavatory paper situation. I’ve put up notices with the motto: Waste Leads to Want.”

  “Wonderful,” Dunworthy said. He rang off and tried Andrews’s number. It was engaged.

  The student nurse handed him back his spectacles and a new bundle of SPG’s, and he put them on, taking care this time to put the mask on before the cap and to leave the gloves till last. It still took an unconscionable amount of time to array himself. He hoped the nurse would be significantly faster if Badri rang the bell for help.

  He went back in. Badri was still restlessly asleep. He glanced at the display. His temp read 39.4.

  His head ached. He took off his spectacles and rubbed at the space between his eyes. Then he sat down on the campstool and looked at the chart of contacts he had pieced together thus far. It could scarcely be called a chart, there were so many gaps in it. The name of the pub Badri had gone to after the dance. Where Badri had been Monday evening. And Monday afternoon. He had come up from London on the tube at noon, and Dunworthy had phoned him to ask him to run the net at half past two. Where had he been those two and a half hours?

  And where had he gone Tuesday afternoon after he came to Balliol and left the note saying he’d run a systems check on the net? Back to the laboratory? Or to another pub? He wondered if perhaps someone at Balliol had spoken to Badri while he was there. When Finch called back to inform him of the latest developments in American bell ringers and lavatory paper, he would tell him to ask everyone who’d been in college if they’d seen Badri.

  The door opened, and the student nurse, swathed in SPG’s, came in. Dunworthy looked automatically at the displays, but he couldn’t see any dramatic changes. Badri was still asleep. The nurse entered some figures on the display, checked the drip, and tugged at a corner of the bedclothes. She opened the curtain and then stood there, twisting the cord in her hands.

  “I couldn’t help overhearing you on the telephone,” she said. “You mentioned a Mrs. Gaddson. I know it’s terribly rude of me to ask, but might that have been William Gaddson’s mother you were speaking of?”

  “Yes,” he said, surprised. “William’s an undergraduate at Balliol. Do you know him?”

  “He’s a friend of mine,” she said, flushing such a bright pink he could see it through her imperm mask.

  “Ah,” he said, wondering when William had time to read Petrarch. “William’s mother is here in hospital,” he said, feeling he should warn her but unclear as to whom to warn her about. “It seems she’s come to visit him for Christmas.”

  “She’s here?” the nurse said, flushing an even brighter pink. “I thought we were under quarantine.”

  “Hers was the last train up from London,” Dunworthy said wistfully.

  “Does William know?”

  “My secretary is attempting to notify him,” he said, omitting the bit about the young lady at Shrewsbury.

  “He’s at the Bodleian,” she said, “reading Petrarch.” She unwrapped the curtain cord from her hand and went out, no doubt to telephone the Bodleian.

  Badri stirred and murmured something Dunworthy could not make out. He looked flushed, and his breathing seemed more labored.

  “Badri?” he said.

  Badri opened his eyes. “Where am I?” he said.

  Dunworthy glanced at the monitors. His fever was down a half a point and he seemed more alert than before.

  “In Infirmary,” he said. “You collapsed in the lab at Brasenose while you were working the net. Do you remember?”

  “I remember feeling odd,” he said. “Cold. I came to the pub to tell you I’d got the fix …”A strange, frightened look came over his face.

  “You told me there was something wrong,” Dunworthy said. “What was it? Was it the slippage?”

  “Something wrong,” Badri repeated. He tried to raise himself on his elbow. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “You’re ill,” Dunworthy said. “You have the flu.”

  “Ill? I’ve never been ill.” He struggled to sit up. “They died, didn’t they?”

  “Who died?”

  “It killed them all.”

  “Did you see someone, Badri? This is important. Did someone else have the virus?”

  “Virus?” he said, and there was obvious relief in his voice. “Do I have a virus?”

  “Yes. A type of flu. It’s not fatal. They’ve been giving you antimicrobials, and an analogue’s on the way. You’ll be recovered in no time. Do you know who you caught it from? Did someone else have the virus?”

  “No.” He eased himself back down onto the pillow. “I thought—Oh!” He looked up in alarm at Dunworthy. “There’s something wrong,” he said desperately.

  “What is it?” He reached for the bell. “What’s wrong?”

  His eyes were wide with fright. “It hurts!”

  Dunworthy pushed the bell. The nurse and a house officer came in immediately and went through their routine again, prodding him with the icy stethoscope.

  “He complained of being cold,” Dunworthy said. “And of something hurting.”

  “Where does it hurt?” the house officer said, looking at a display.

  “Here,” Badri said. He pressed his hand to the right side of his chest. He began to shiver again.

  “Lower right pleurisy,” the house officer said.

  “Hurts when I breathe,” Badri said through chattering teeth. “There’s something wrong.”

  Something wrong. He had not meant the fix. He had meant that something was wrong with him. He was how old? Kivrin’s age? They had begun giving routine rhinovirus antivirals nearly twenty years ago. It was entirely possible that when he’d said he’d never been ill, he meant he’d never had so much as a cold.

  “Oxygen?” the nurse said.

  “Not yet,” the house officer said on his way out. “Start him on two hundred units of chloramphenicol.”

  The nurse laid Badri back down, attached a piggyback to the drip, watched Badri’s temp drop for a minute, and went out.

  Dunworthy looked out the window at the rainy night. “I remember feeling odd,” he had said. Not ill. Odd. Someone who’d never had a cold wouldn’t know what to make of a fever or chills. He would only have known something was wrong and would have left th
e net and hurried to the pub to tell someone. Have to tell Dunworthy. Something wrong.

  Dunworthy took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. The disinfectant made them smart. He felt exhausted. He had said he couldn’t relax until he knew Kivrin was all right. Badri was asleep, the harshness of his breathing taken away by the impersonal magic of the doctors. And Kivrin was asleep, too, in a flea-ridden bed seven hundred years away. Or wide awake, impressing the contemps with her table manners and her dirty fingernails, or kneeling on a filthy stone floor, telling her adventures into her hands.

  He must have dozed off. He dreamed he heard a telephone ringing. It was Finch. He told him the Americans were threatening to sue for insufficient supplies of lavatory paper and that the vicar had called with the Scripture. “It’s Matthew 2:11,” Finch said. “Waste leads to want,” and at that point the nurse opened the door and told him Mary needed him to meet her in Casualties.

  He looked at his digital. It was twenty past four. Badri was still asleep, looking almost peaceful. The nurse met him outside with the disinfectant bottle and told him to take the elevator.

  The smell of disinfectant from his spectacles helped wake him up. By the time he reached the ground floor he was almost awake. Mary was there waiting for him in a mask and the rest of it. “We’ve got another case,” she said, handing him a bundle of SPG’s. “It’s one of the detainees. It might be someone from that crowd of shoppers. I want you to try to identify her.”

  He got into the garments as clumsily as the first time, nearly tearing the gown in his efforts to get the velcro strips apart. “There were dozens of shoppers on the High,” he said, pulling the gloves on. “And I was watching Badri. I doubt that I could identify anyone on that street.”

  “I know,” Mary said. She led the way down the corridor and through the door to Casualties. It seemed like years since he’d been there.

  Ahead, a cluster of people, all anonymous in paper, were wheeling a stretcher trolley in. The house officer, also papered, was taking information from a thin, frightened-looking woman in a wet mackintosh and matching rain hat.

  “Her name is Beverly Breen,” the woman told him in a faint voice, “226 Plover Way, Surbiton. I knew something was wrong. She kept saying we needed to take the tube to Northampton.”

  She was carrying an umbrella and a large handbag, and when the house officer asked for the patient’s NHS number, she leaned the umbrella against the admissions desk, opened the handbag, and looked through it.

  “She was just brought in from the tube station complaining of headache and chills,” Mary said. “She was in line to be assigned lodging.”

  She signaled the medics to stop the stretcher trolley and pulled the blanket back from the woman’s neck and chest so he could get a better look at her, but he didn’t need it.

  The woman in the wet mac had found the card. She handed it to the officer, picked up the umbrella, the handbag, and a sheaf of varicolored papers, and came over to the stretcher trolley carrying them. The umbrella was a large one. It was covered with lavender violets.

  “Badri collided with her on the way back to the net,” Dunworthy said.

  “Are you absolutely certain?” Mary said.

  He pointed at the woman’s friend, who had sat down now and was filling out forms. “I recognize the umbrella.”

  “What time was that?” she said.

  “I’m not positive. Half past one?”

  “What type of contact was it? Did he touch her?”

  “He ran straight into her,” he said, trying to recall the scene. “He collided with the umbrella, and then he told her he was sorry, and she yelled at him for a bit. He picked up the umbrella and handed it to her.”

  “Did he cough or sneeze?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  The woman was being wheeled into Casualties. Mary stood up. “I want her put in Isolation,” she said, and started after them.

  The woman’s friend stood up, dropping one of the forms and clutching the others awkwardly to her chest. “Isolation?” she said frightenedly. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Come with me, please,” Mary said to her and led her off somewhere to have her blood taken and her friend’s umbrella spritzed with disinfectant before Dunworthy could ask her whether she wanted him to wait for her. He started to ask the registrar and then sat down tiredly in one of the chairs against the wall. There was an inspirational brochure on the chair next to him. Its title was “The Importance of a Good Night’s Sleep.”

  His neck hurt from his uncomfortable sleep on the campstool, and his eyes were smarting again. He supposed he should go back up to Badri’s room, but he wasn’t certain he had the energy to put on another set of SPG’s. And he didn’t think he could bear to wake Badri and ask him who else would be shortly wheeled into Casualties with a temp of 39.5.

  At any rate Kivrin wouldn’t be one of them. It was half past four. Badri had collided with the woman with the lavender umbrella at half past one. That meant an incubation of fifteen hours, and fifteen hours ago Kivrin had been fully protected.

  Mary came back, her cap off and her mask dangling from her neck. Her hair was in disarray, and she looked as bone-weary as Dunworthy felt.

  “I’m discharging Mrs. Gaddson,” she told the registrar. “She’s to be back here at seven for a blood test.” She came over to where Dunworthy was sitting. “I’d forgotten all about her,” she said, smiling. “She was rather upset. She threatened to sue me for unlawful detainment.”

  “She should get along well with my bell ringers. They’re threatening to go to court over involuntary breach of contract.”

  Mary ran her hand through her disorderly hair. “We got an ident from the World Influenza Centre on the influenza virus.” She stood up as if she had had a sudden infusion of energy. “I could do with a cup of tea,” she said. “Come along.”

  Dunworthy glanced at the registrar, who was watching them attentively, and hauled himself to his feet.

  “I’ll be in the surgical waiting room,” Mary said to the registrar.

  “Yes, Doctor,” the registrar said. “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation …”she said hesitantly.

  Mary stiffened.

  “You told me you were discharging Mrs. Gaddson, and then I heard you mention the name ‘William,’ and I was just wondering if Mrs. Gaddson is by any chance William Gaddson’s mother.”

  “Yes,” Mary said, looking puzzled.

  “You’re a friend of his?” Dunworthy said, wondering if she would blush like the blond student nurse.

  She did. “I’ve come to know him rather well this vac. He’s stayed up to read Petrarch.”

  “Among other things,” Dunworthy said and, while she was busy blushing, steered Mary past the “NO ENTRANCE: ISOLATION AREA” sign and down the corridor.

  “What in heaven’s name was that all about?” she asked.

  “Sickly William is even more self-sufficient than we had at first assumed,” he said, and opened the door to the waiting room.

  Mary flicked the light on and went over to the tea trolley. She shook the electric kettle and disappeared into the WC with it. He sat down. Someone had taken away the tray of blood-testing equipment and moved the end table back to its proper place, but Mary’s shopping bag was still sitting in the middle of the floor. He leaned forward and moved it over next to the chairs.

  Mary reappeared with the kettle. She bent and plugged it in. “Did you have any luck discovering Badri’s contacts?” she said.

  “If you could call it that. He went to a Christmas dance in Headington last night. He took the tube both ways. How bad is it?”

  Mary opened two tea packets and draped them over the cups. “There’s only powdered milk, I’m afraid. Do you know if he’s had any contact recently with someone from the States?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Do you take sugar?”

  “How bad is it?”

  She poured powdered milk into the cups. “The bad news is that
Badri’s very ill.” She spooned in sugar. “He had his seasonals through the University, which requires broader-spectrum protection than the NHS. He should be completely protected against a five-point shift, and partially resistant to a ten-point shift. But he’s exhibiting full influenza symptoms, which indicates a major mutation.”

  The kettle was screaming. “Which means an epidemic.”

  “Yes.”

  “A pandemic?”

  “Possibly. If the WIC can’t sequence the virus quickly, or the staff bolts. Or the quarantine doesn’t hold.”

  She unplugged the kettle and poured hot water into their cups. “The good news is that the WIC thinks it’s an influenza that originated in South Carolina.” She brought a cup over to Dunworthy. “In which case it’s already been sequenced and an analogue and vaccine manufactured, it responds well to antimicrobials and symptomatic treatment, and it’s not fatal.”

  “How long is its incubation period?”

  “Twelve to forty-eight hours.” She stood against the tea trolley and took a sip of tea. “The WIC is sending blood samples to the CDC in Atlanta for matching, and they’re sending their recommended course of treatment.”

  “When did Kivrin check into Infirmary on Monday for her antivirals?”

  “Three o’clock,” Mary said. “She was here until nine the next morning. I kept her overnight to ensure she got a good night’s sleep.”

  “Badri says he didn’t see her yesterday,” Dunworthy said, “but he could have had contact with her Monday before she went into Infirmary.”

  “She’d need to have been exposed before her antiviral inoculation, and the virus have had a chance to replicate unchecked for her to be in danger, James,” Mary said. “Even if she did see Badri Monday or Tuesday, she’s in less danger of developing symptoms than you are.” She looked seriously at him over her teacup. “You’re still worried over the fix, aren’t you?”

  He half shook his head. “Badri says he checked the apprentice’s coordinates and they were correct, and he’d already told Gilchrist the slippage was minimal,” he said, wishing Badri had answered him when he asked him about the slippage.

  “What else is there that can have gone wrong?” Mary asked.