“Sorry,” Dicken said.

Bao nodded. “Seven hundred thousand reported second-stage Herod’s pregnancies. Well, here the statistics fall apart — we do not know what is happening,” Bao said, and stared at Dicken. “Where have all the others gone? They are not reporting. Does Mark know?”

“I know,” Dicken said. “Mark knows. It’s sensitive information. We don’t want to acknowledge how much we know until the president makes his policy decision on the Taskforce proposal.”

“I think I can guess,” House said sardonically. “Educated women with means are buying black-market RU-486, or otherwise obtaining abortions at different stages of their pregnancy. There’s a wholesale revolt in the medical community, in women’s clinics. They’ve stopped reporting to the Taskforce, because of the new laws regulating abortion procedures. My guess is, Mark wants to make official what’s already happening around the country.”

Dicken paused for a moment to gather his thoughts, shore up his sagging false front. “Mark has no control over the House of Representatives or the Senate. He speaks, they ignore him. We all know the rates of domestic violence are way up. Women are being forced out of their homes. Divorce. Murder.” Dicken let that sink in, as it had sunk in to his own thoughts and self in the last few months. “Violence against pregnant women is at an all-time high. Some are even resorting to quinacrine, when they can get it, to self-sterilize.”

Bao shook her head sadly.

Dicken continued. “Many women know the simplest way out is to stop their second-stage pregnancies before they go anywhere near full term and other side effects appear.”

“Mark Augustine and the Taskforce are reluctant to describe these side effects,” Bao said. “We assume you refer to facial cauls and melanisms in both the parents.”

“I also refer to whistling palate and vomeronasal deformation,” Dicken said.

“Why the fathers, too?” Bao asked.

“I have no idea,” Dicken said. “If NIH hadn’t lost its clinical study subjects, due to an excess of personal concern, we might all know a lot more, under at least mildly controlled conditions.”

Bao reminded Dicken that no one in the room had had anything to do with the closure of the Taskforce clinical studies in this very building.

“I understand,” Dicken said, and hated himself with a ferocity he could barely hide. “I don’t disagree. Second-stage pregnancies are being ended by all but the poor, those who can’t get to clinics or buy the pills…or…”

“Or what?” Meeker asked.

“The dedicated.”

“Dedicated to what?”

“To nature. To the proposition that these children should be given a chance, whatever the odds of their being born dead or deformed.”

“Augustine does not seem to believe any of the children should be given a chance,” Bao said. “Why?”

“Herod’s is a disease. This is how you fight a disease.” This can’t go on much longer. You ‘II either resign or you ‘II kill yourself trying to explain things you don’t understand or believe.

“I say again, we are not isolated, Christopher,” Bao said, shaking her head. “We go to the maternity wards and the surgeries in this clinic, and visit other clinics and hospitals. We see the women and the men in pain. We need some rational approach that takes into account all these views, all these pressures.”

Dicken frowned in concentration. “Mark is just looking at medical reality. And there’s no political consensus,” he added quietly. “It’s a dangerous time.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Meeker said. “Christopher, I think the White House is paralyzed. Damned if you do, and certainly damned if you don’t and things go on the way they are.”

“Maryland’s own governor is involved in this so-called States’ Health revolt,” House said. “I’ve never seen such fervor in the religious right here.”

“It’s pretty much grass roots, not just Christian,” Bao said. “The Chinese community has pulled in its horns and with good reason. Bigotry is on the rise. We are falling apart into scared and unhappy tribes, Christopher.”

Dicken stared down at the table, then up at the figures on the whiteboard, one eyelid twitching with fatigue. “It hurts all of us,” he said. “It hurts Mark, and it hurts me.”

“I doubt it hurts Mark as much as it hurts the mothers,” Bao said quietly.

71

Oregon

”I’m an ignorant man, and I don’t understand a lot of things,” Sam said. He leaned on the split-rail fence that surrounded the four acres, the two-story frame farmhouse, an old and sagging barn, the brick workshed. Mitch pushed his free hand into his pocket and rested a can of Michelob on the lichen-grayed fence post. A square-rump, black-and-white cow cropping a patch of the neighbor’s twelve acres regarded them with an almost complete absence of curiosity. “You’ve only known this woman for what, two weeks?”

“Just over a month.”

“Some whirlwind!”

Mitch agreed with a sheepish look.

“Why be in such a hurry? Why in hell would anyone want to get pregnant, now of all times? Your mother’s been over her hot flashes for ten years, but after Herod’s, she’s still skittish about letting me touch her.”

“Kaye’s different,” Mitch said, as if admitting something. They had come to this topic on the backs of a lot of other difficult topics that afternoon. The toughest of all had been Mitch’s admission that he had temporarily given up looking for a job, that they would largely be living on Kaye’s money. Sam found this incomprehensible.

“Where’s the self-respect in that?” he had said, and shortly after they had dropped that subject and returned to what had happened in Austria.

Mitch had told him about meeting Brock at the Daney mansion, and that had amused Sam quite a bit. “It baffles science,” he had commented dryly. When they had gotten around to discussing Kaye, still talking with Mitch’s mother, Abby, in the large farmhouse kitchen, Sam’s puzzlement had blossomed into irritation, then downright anger.

“I admit I may be stuck in abysmal stupidity,” Sam said, “but isn’t it just damned dangerous to do this sort of thing now, deliberately?”

“It could be,” Mitch admitted.

“Then why in hell did you agree?”

“I can’t answer that easily,” Mitch said. “First, I think she could be right. I mean, I think she is right. This time around, we’ll have a healthy baby.”

“But you tested positive, she tested positive,” Sam said, glaring at him, hands gripping the rail tightly.

“We did.”

“And correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s never been a healthy baby born of a woman who tested positive.”

“Not yet,” Mitch said.

“That’s lousy odds.”

“She’s the one who found this virus,” Mitch said. “She knows more about it than anyone else on Earth, and she’s convinced—”

“That everyone else is wrong?” Sam asked.

“That we’re going to change our thinking in the next few years.”

“Is she crazy, then, or just a fanatic?”

Mitch frowned. “Careful, Dad,” he said.

Sam flung his hands up in the air. “Mitch, for Christ’s sake, I fly to Austria, the first time I’ve ever been to Europe, and it’s without your mother, damn it, to pick up my son at a hospital after he’s…Well, we’ve been through all that. But why face this kind of grief, take this kind of chance, I ask, in God’s name?”

“Since her first husband died, she’s been a little frantic about looking ahead, seeing things in a positive light,” Mitch said. “I can’t say I understand her, Dad, but I love her. I trust her. Something in me says she’s right, or I wouldn’t have gone along.”

“You mean, cooperated.” Sam looked at the cow and brushed his hands free of lichen dust on his pants legs. “What if you’re both wrong?” he asked.

“We know the consequences. We’ll live with them,” Mitch said. “But we’re not wrong. Not this time, Dad.”