"Headache," he murmured. "This morning. Must have drunk too much at the dance."

"What dance?"

"Tired," he murmured.

"What dance did you go to?" Dunworthy persisted, feeling like an Inquisition torturer. "When was it? Monday?"

"Tuesday," Badri said. "Drank too much." He turned his head away on the pillow.

"You rest now," Dunworthy said. He gently disengaged his hand from Badri's. "Try to get some sleep."

"Glad you came," Badri said, and reached for it again.

Dunworthy held it, watching Badri and the displays by turns as he slept. It was raining. He could hear the patter of drops behind the closed curtains.

He had not realized how ill Badri really was. He had been too worried about Kivrin to even think about him. Perhaps he shouldn't be so angry with Montoya and the rest of them. They had their preoccupations, too, and none of them had stopped to think what Badri's illness meant except in terms of the difficulties and inconvenience it caused. Even Mary, talking about needing Bulkeley-Johnson for an infirmary and the possibilities of an epidemic, hadn't brought home the reality of Badri's illness and what it meant. He had had his antivirals, and yet he lay here with a fever of 39.7.

The evening passed. Dunworthy listened to the rain and the chiming of the quarter hours at St. Hilda's and, more distantly, Christ Church. The ward sister informed Dunworthy grimly that she was going off-duty, and a much smaller and more cheerful blonde nurse, wearing the insignia of a student, came in to check the drips and look at the displays.

Badri struggled in and out of consciousness with an effort Dunworthy would hardly have described as "drifting." He seemed more and more exhausted each time he fought his way back to consciousness, and less and less able to answer Dunworthy's questions.

Dunworthy kept at it mercilessly. The Christmas dance had been in Headington. Badri had gone to a pub afterward. He couldn't remember the name of it. Monday night he had worked alone in the laboratory, checking Puhalski's coordinates. He had come up at noon from London. On the tube. It was impossible. Tube passengers and partygoers, and everyone he'd had contact with in London. They would never be able to trace and test all of them, even if Badri knew who they were.

"How did you get to Brasenose this morning?" Dunworthy asked the next time Badri "drifted" awake again.

"Morning?" Badri said, looking at the curtained window as if he thought it was morning already. "How long have I been asleep?"

Dunworthy didn't know how to answer that. He'd been asleep off and on all evening. "It's ten," he said, looking at his digital. "We brought you in to hospital at half past one. You ran the net this morning. You sent Kivrin through. Do you remember when you began feeling ill?"

"What's the date?" Badri said suddenly.

"December the twenty-second. You've only been here part of one day."

"The year," Badri said, attempting to sit up. "What's the year?"

Dunworthy glanced anxiously at the displays. His temp was nearly 39.8. "The year is 2054," he said, bending over him to calm him. "It's December the twenty-second."

"Back up," Badri said.

Dunworthy straightened and stepped back from the bed.

"Back up," he said again. He pushed himself up farther and looked around the room. "Where's Mr. Dunworthy? I need to speak to him."

"I'm right here, Badri." Dunworthy took a step toward the bed and then stopped, afraid of upsetting him. "What did you want to tell me?"

"Do you know where he might be then?" Badri said. "Would you give him this note?"

He handed him an imaginary sheet of paper, and Dunworthy realized he must be reliving Tuesday afternoon when he had come to Balliol.

"I have to get back to the net." He looked at an imaginary digital. "Is the laboratory open?"

"What did you want to talk to Mr. Dunworthy about?" Dunworthy asked. "Was it the slippage?"

"No. Back up! You're going to drop it. The lid!" He looked straight at Dunworthy, his eyes bright with fever. "What are you waiting for? Go and fetch him."

The student nurse came in.

"He's delirious," Dunworthy said.

She gave Badri a cursory glance and then looked up at the displays. They seemed ominous to Dunworthy, feeding numbers frantically across the screens and zigzagging in three dimensions, but the student nurse didn't seem particularly concerned. She looked at each of the displays in turn and calmly began adjusting the flow on the drips.

"Let's lie down, all right?" she said, still without looking at Badri, and, amazingly, he did.

"I thought you'd gone," he said to her, lying back against the pillow. "Thank goodness you're here," he said, and seemed to collapse all over again, though this time there was nowhere to fall.

The student nurse hadn't noticed. She was still adjusting the drips.

"He's fainted," Dunworthy said.

She nodded and began calling reads onto the display. She didn't so much as glance at Badri, who looked deathly pale under his dark skin.

"Don't you think you should call a doctor?" Dunworthy said, and the door opened and a tall woman in SPG's came in.

She didn't look at Badri either. She read the monitors one by one, and then asked, "Indications of pleural involvement?"

"Cyanosis and chills," the nurse said.

"What's he getting?"

"Myxabravine," she said.

The doctor took a stethoscope down from the wall, untangling the chestpiece from the connecting cord. "Any hemoptysis?"

She shook her head.

"Cold," Badri said from the bed. Neither of them paid the slightest attention. Badri began to shiver. "Don't drop it. It was china, wasn't it?"

"I want fifty cc's of acqueous penicillin and an ASA pack," the doctor said. She sat Badri, shivering harder than ever, up in bed and peeled the velcro strips of his paper nightgown open. She pressed the stethoscope's chestpiece against Badri's back in what seemed to Dunworthy to be a cruel and unusual punishment.

"Take a deep breath," the doctor said, her eyes on the display. Badri did, his teeth chattering.

"Minor pleural consolidation lower left," the doctor said cryptically and moved the chestpiece over a centimeter. "Another." She moved the chestpiece several more times and then said, "Do we have an ident yet?"

"Myxovirus," the nurse said, filling a syringe. "Type A."

"Sequencing?"

"Not yet." She fit the syringe into the shunt and pushed the plunger down. Somewhere outside a telephone rang.

The doctor velcroed the top of Badri's nightgown together, lowered him back to the bed again, and flipped the sheet carelessly over his legs.

"Give me a gram stain," she said, and left. The phone was still ringing.

Dunworthy longed to pull the blanket up over Badri properly, but the student nurse was hooking another drip onto the stanchion. He waited till she had finished with the drip and gone out, and then straightened the sheet and pulled the blanket carefully up over Badri's shoulders and tucked it in at the side of the bed.

"Is that better?" he said, but Badri had already stopped shivering and gone to sleep. Dunworthy looked at the displays. His temp was already down to 39.2, and the previously frantic lines on the other screens were steady and strong.

"Mr. Dunworthy," the student nurse's voice came from somewhere on the wall, "there's a telephone call for you. It's a Mr. Finch."

Dunworthy opened the door. The student nurse, out of her SPG's, motioned to him to take off his gown. He did, dumping the garments in the large cloth hamper she indicated. "Your spectacles, please," she said. He handed them to her and she began spritzing disinfectant on them. He picked up the phone, squinting at the screen.

"Mr. Dunworthy, I've been looking for you everywhere," Finch said. "The most dreadful thing's happened."