Dunworthy walked to the infirmary to fetch the supplies. The street in front of Casualties was jammed, a jumble of ambulance vans and taxis and protesters carrying a large sign that proclaimed, "The Prime Minister Has Left Us Here To Die." As he squeezed past them and in the door, Colin came running out. He was wet, as usual, and red-faced and red-nosed from the cold. His jacket was unstripped.

The telephones are out," he said. "There was an overload. I'm running messages." He pulled an untidy clutch of folded papers from his jacket pocket. "Is there anyone you'd like me to take a message to?"

Yes, he thought. To Andrews. To Basingame. To Kivrin. "No," he said.

Colin stuffed the already wet messages back in his pocket. "I'm off then. If you're looking for Great-Aunt Mary, she's in Casualties. Five more cases just came in. A family. The baby was dead." He darted off through the traffic jam.

Dunworthy pushed his way into Casualties and showed his list to the house officer, who directed him to Supplies. The corridors were still full of stretcher trolleys, though now they were lined lengthwise on both sides so there was a narrow passage between. Bending over one of the stretcher trolleys was a nurse in a pink mask and gown reading something to one of the patients.

"'The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee,'" she said, and he realized too late that it was Mrs. Gaddson, but she was so intent on her reading she did not look up. "'Until he have consumed thee from the land.'"

The pestilence shall cleave unto thee, he said silently, and thought of Badri. "It was the rats," Badri had said. "It killed them all. Half of Europe."

She can't be in the Black Death, he thought, turning down the corridor to Supplies. Andrews had said the maximal slippage was five years. The plague hadn't even begun in China. Andrews had said the only two things that would not have automatically aborted the drop were the slippage and the coordinates, and Badri, when he could answer Dunworthy's questions, insisted he had checked Puhalski's coordinates.

He went into Supplies. There was no one at the desk. He rang the bell.

Each time Dunworthy had asked him, Badri had said the apprentice's coordinates were correct, but his fingers moved nervously over the sheet, typing, typing in the fix. That can't be right. There's something wrong.

He rang the bell again, and a nurse emerged from among the shelves. She had obviously come out of retirement expressly for the epidemic. She was ninety at the least, and her starched white uniform was yellowed with age, but still stiff. It crackled when she took his list.

"Have you a supply authorization?"

"No," he said.

She handed him back his list and a three-page form. "All orders must be authorized by the ward matron."

"We haven't any ward matron," he said, his temper flaring. "We haven't any ward. We have fifty detainees in two dormitories and no supplies."

"In that case, authorization must be obtained from the doctor in charge."

"The doctor in charge has an infirmary full of patients to take care of. She doesn't have time to sign authorizations. There's an epidemic on!"

"I am well aware of that," the nurse said frigidly. "All orders must be signed by the doctor in charge," and walked creakily back among the shelves.

He went back to Casualties. Mary was no longer there. The house officer sent him up to Isolation, but she wasn't there either. He toyed with the idea of forging Mary's signature, but he wanted to see her, wanted to tell her about his failure to reach the techs, his failure to find a way to bypass Gilchrist and open the net. He could not even get a simple aspirin, and it was already the third of January.

He finally ran Mary to ground in the laboratory. She was speaking into the telephone, which was apparently working again, though the visual was nothing but snow. She wasn't watching it. She was watching the console, which had the branching contacts chart on it. "What exactly is the difficulty?" she was saying. "You said it would be here two days ago."

There was a pause while the person lost in the snow apparently made some sort of excuse.

"What do you mean it was turned back?" she said incredulously. "I've got a thousand people with influenza here."

There was another pause. Mary typed something into the console, and a different chart appeared.

"Well, send it again," she shouted. "I need it now! I've got people dying here! I want it here by — hullo? Are you there?" The screen went dead. She turned to click the receiver and caught sight of Dunworthy.

She beckoned him into the office. "Are you there?" she said into the telephone. "Hullo?" She slammed the receiver down. "The phones don't work, half my staff is down with the virus, and the analogues aren't here because some idiot wouldn't let them into the quarantine area!" she said angrily.

She sank down in front of the console and rubbed her fingers against her cheekbones. "Sorry," she said. "It's been rather a bad day. I've had three DOA's this afternoon. One of them was six months old."

She was still wearing the sprig of holly on her lab coat. Both it and the lab coat were much the worse for wear, and Mary looked impossibly tired, the lines around her mouth and eyes cutting deep into her face. He wondered how long it had been since she had slept and whether, if he were to ask her, she would even know.

She rubbed two fingers along the lines above her eyes. "One never gets used to the idea that there is nothing one can do," she said.

"No."

She looked up at him, almost as if she hadn't realized he was there. "Was there something you needed, James?"

She had had no sleep, and no help, and three DOA's, one of them a baby. She had enough on her mind without worrying over Kivrin.

"No," he said, standing up. He handed her the form. "Nothing but your signature."

She signed it without looking at it. "I went to see Gilchrist this morning," she said, handing it back to him.

He looked at her, too surprised and touched to speak.

"I went to see if I could convince him to open the net earlier. I explained that there's no need to wait until there's been full immunization. Immunization of a critical percentage of the virus pool effectively eliminates the contagion vectors."

"And none of your arguments had the slightest effect on him."

"No. He's utterly convinced the virus came through from the past." Mary sighed. "He's drawn up charts of the cyclical mutation patterns of Type A myxoviruses. According to them, one of the Type A myxoviruses extant in 1318-19 was an H9N2." She rubbed at her forehead again. "He won't open the laboratory until full immunization's completed and the quarantine's lifted."

"And when will that be?" he asked, though he had a good idea.

"The quarantine has to remain in effect until seven days after full immunization or fourteen days after final incidence," she said as if she were giving him bad news.

Final incidence. Two weeks with no new cases. "How long will nationwide immunization take?"

"Once we get sufficient supplies of the vaccine, not long. The Pandemic only took eighteen days."

Eighteen days. After sufficient supplies of the vaccine were manufactured. The end of January. "That's not soon enough," he said.

"I know. We must positively identify the source, that's all." She turned to look at the console. "The answer's in here, you know. We're simply looking in the wrong place." She punched in a new chart. "I've been running correlations, looking for veterinary students, primaries who live near zoos, rural addresses. This one's of secondaries listed in DeBrett's, grouse-hunting and all that. But the closest any of them's come to a waterfowl is eating goose for Christmas."

She punched up the contacts chart. Badri's name was still at the top of it. She sat and looked at it a long moment, as remote as Montoya staring at her bones.