Mitch pushed up in bed, in a sweat and shouting. The words leaped out in a guttural tumble even as he realized he was awake. He sat on one side of the bed, leg still tangled in the covers, and shivered. “Nuts,” he said. “I am nuts. Nuts to this”

He had dreamed of the Neandertals again. This time, he had flowed in and out of the male’s point of view, a fluid sort of freedom that had at once immersed him in a very clear and unpleasant set of emotions, and then lofted him away to observe a jumbled flow of events. Crowds had formed at the edge of the village — not on a lake this time, but in a clearing surrounded by deep and ancient woods. They had shaken sharpened, fire-hardened sticks at the female, whose name he could almost remember…Na-lee-ah or Ma-lee.

“Jean Auel, here I come,” he murmured as he extricated his foot from the covers. “Mowgli of the Stone Tribe saves his woman. Jesus.”

He walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water. He was fighting off some virus — a cold, he was sure, and not SHEVA, considering the state of his relationships with women. His mouth tasted dry and foul and his nose was dripping. He had caught the cold somewhere on his trip to Iron Cave the week before. Maybe Merton had given it to him. He had driven the British journalist to the airport for a flight to Maryland.

The water tasted terrible, but it cleaned out his mouth. He looked out over Broadway and the post office, nearly deserted now. A March snowstorm was throwing small crystal flakes down on the streets. The orange sodium vapor streetlights turned the accumulated snow into scattered piles of gold.

“They were kicking us off the lake, out of the village,” he murmured. “We were going to have to fend for ourselves. Some hotheads were getting ready to follow us, maybe try to kill us. We…”

He shuddered. The emotions had been so raw and so real he could not easily shake them. Fear, rage, something else…a helpless kind of love. He felt his face. They had been shedding some sort of skin from their faces, little masks. The mark of their crime.

“Dear Shirley MacLaine,” he said, pressing his forehead against the cold glass of the window. “I’m channeling cavemen who don’t live in caves. Any advice?”

He looked at the clock on the VCR perched precariously on top of the small TV. It was five in the morning. It would be eight o’clock in Atlanta. He would try that number again, and then try to log on with his repaired laptop and send an e-mail message.

In the bathroom, he stared at himself in the mirror. Hair awry, face sweaty and oily, two days’ growth of beard, wearing a ripped T-shirt and BVDs. “A regular Jeremiah,” he said.

Then he started another general cleanup by blowing his nose and brushing his teeth.

Christopher Dicken had returned to his small house on the outskirts of Atlanta at three in the morning. He had worked at his CDC office until two, preparing papers for Augustine on the spread of SHEVA in Africa. He had lain awake for an hour, wondering what the world was going to be like in the next six months. When he finally drifted off into sleep, he was awakened it seemed moments later by the buzzing of his cell phone. He sat up in the queen-size bed that had once belonged to his parents, wondered for a moment where he was, decided quickly he was not in the Cape Town Hilton, and switched on the light. Morning was already glowing through the window shutters. He managed to pull the phone out of his coat pocket in the closet by the fourth ring and answered it.

“Is this Dr. Chris Dicken?”

“Christopher. Yeah.” He looked at his watch. It was eight fifteen. He had managed to sleep a mere two hours, and he was sure he felt worse than if he had had no sleep at all.

“My name is Mitch Rafelson.”

This time, Dicken remembered the name and its association. “Really?” he said. “Where are you, Mr. Rafelson?”

“Seattle.”

“Then it’s even earlier where you are. I need to get back to sleep.”

“Wait, please,” Mitch said. “I’m sorry if I woke you up. Did you get my message?”

“I got a message,” Dicken said.

“We need to talk.”

“Listen, if you are Mitch Rafelson, the Mitch Rafelson, I need to talk to you…about as much as…” He tried to come up with a witty comparison, but his mind wouldn’t work. “I don’t need to talk with you.”

“Point made…but please listen anyway. You’ve been tracking SHEVA all over the world, right?”

“Yeah,” Dicken said. He yawned. “I get very little sleep thinking about it.”

“Me, too,” Mitch said. “Your bodies in the Caucasus tested positive for SHEVA. My mummies…in the Alps…the mummies at Innsbruck test positive for SHEVA.”

Dicken pressed the phone closer to his ear. “How do you know that?”

“I have the lab reports from the University of Washington. I need to show what I know to you and to whoever else is open-minded about this.”

“Nobody is open-minded about this,” Dicken said. “Who gave you my number?”

“Dr. Wendell Packer.”

“Do I know Packer?”

“You work with a friend of his. Renee Sondak.”

Dicken scratched at a front tooth with a fingernail. Thought very seriously about hanging up. His cell phone was digitally scrambled, but somebody could decode the conversation if they had a mind to. This made him flash hot with anger. Things were out of control. Everyone had lost perspective and it was not going to get better if he just played along.

“I’m pretty lonely,” Mitch said into the silence. “I need someone to tell me I’m not completely nuts.”

“Yeah,” Dicken said. “I know what that’s like.” Then, screwing up his face and stamping his foot on the floor, knowing this was going to give him far more trouble than any windmill he had ever tilted at before, he said, “Tell me more, Mitch.”

The title of the international conference, arranged in black plastic letters on the convention center billboard, gave Dicken a brief thrill — brief and very necessary. Nothing much had thrilled him in the good old way of work satisfaction in the past couple of months, but the name of the conference was easily sufficient.

The sign was not overly optimistic or off base. In a few more years, the world might not need Christopher Dicken to chase down viruses.

The problem they all faced was that in disease time, a few years could be very long indeed.

Dicken walked just outside the shadow of the center’s concrete overhang, near the main entrance, reveling in the bright sun on the sidewalk. He had not experienced this kind of heat since Cape Town, and it gave him a furnace boost of energy. Atlanta was finally warming, but the cold gripping the East had kept snow on the streets in Baltimore and Bethesda.

Mark Augustine was in town already, staying at the U.S. Grant, away from the majority of the five thousand predicted attendees, most of whom were filling the hotels along the waterfront. Dicken had picked up his convention package — a thick spiral-bound program book with a companion DVD-ROM disk — just this morning to get an early glimpse at the schedule.

Marge Cross would deliver a keynote address tomorrow morning. Dicken would sit on five panels, two of them dealing with SHEVA. Kaye Lang would be on one panel with Dicken, and on seven others beside, and she would deliver a talk before the plenary session of the World Retrovirus Eradication Research Group, held in conjunction with this conference.

The press was already hailing AmericoPs ribozyme vaccine as a major breakthrough. It looked good in a petri dish — very good indeed — but the human trials had not yet begun. Augustine was under considerable pressure from Shawbeck, and Shawbeck was under considerable pressure from the administration, and they were all using a very long spoon to sup with Cross.