Connie Willis - Dooms Day Book

“Barricades?” Dunworthy said.

“Yes, sir. On the A4158. Should I put the Americans up in Salvin, sir? William Gaddson and Tom Gailey are on the north staircase but Basevi’s being painted.”

“I don’t understand,” Dunworthy said. “Why were you stopped?”

“The quarantine,” Finch said, looking surprised. “I could put them in Fisher’s. The heat’s been turned off for vac, but they could use the fireplaces.”

I’m back at the drop site. It’s some distance from the road. I’m going to drag the wagon out onto the road so that my chances of being seen are better, but if no one happens along in the next half hour, I intend to walk to Skendgate, which I have located thanks to the bells of evening vespers.

I am experiencing considerable time lag. My head aches pretty badly, and I keep having chills. The symptoms are worse than I understood them to be from Badri and Dr. Ahrens. The headache particularly. I’m glad the village isn’t far.

Quarantine. Of course, Dunworthy thought. The medic sent to fetch Montoya, and Mary’s questions about Pakistan, and all of them put here in this isolated, self-contained room with a ward sister guarding the door. Of course.

“Will Salvin do then? For the Americans?” Finch was asking.

“Did the police say why a guar—” He stopped. Gilchrist was watching him, but Dunworthy didn’t think he could see the screen from where he was. Latimer was fussing over the tea trolley, trying to open a sugar packet. The female medic was asleep. “Did the police say why these precautions had been taken?”

“No, sir. Only that it was Oxford and immediate environs, and to contact the National Health for instructions.”

“Did you contact them?”

“No, sir. I’ve been trying. I can’t get through. All the trunk lines have been engaged, too. The Americans have been trying to reach Ely to cancel their concert, but the lines are jammed.”

Oxford and environs. That meant they had stopped the tube, too, and the bullet train to London, as well as blocking all the roads. No wonder the lines were jammed. “How long ago was this? When you went out to Iffley?”

“It was a bit after three, sir. I’ve been phoning round since then, trying to find you, and then I thought, perhaps he knows about it already. I rang up Infirmary and then started calling round to all the hospitals.”

I didn’t know about it already, Dunworthy thought. He tried to recall the conditions required for calling a quarantine. The original regulations had required it in every case of “unidentified disease or suspicion of contagion,” but those had been passed in the first hysteria after the Pandemic, and they had been amended and watered down every few years since then till Dunworthy had no idea what they were now.

He did know that a few years ago they’d been “absolute identification of dangerous infectious disease” because there’d been a fuss in the papers when Lassa fever had raged unchecked for three weeks in a town in Spain. The local doctors hadn’t done viral typing, and the whole mess had resulted in a push to put teeth in the regulations, but he had no idea if it had gone through.

“Should I assign them rooms in Salvin then, sir?” Finch asked again.

“Yes. No. Put them in the junior common room for now. They can practice their changes or whatever it is they do. Get Badri’s file and phone it in. If the lines are all engaged, you’d best phone it in to this number. I’ll be here even if Dr. Ahrens isn’t. And then find out about Basingame. It’s more important than ever that we locate him. You can assign the Americans rooms later.”

“They’re very upset, sir.”

So am I, Dunworthy thought. “Tell the Americans I’ll find out what I can about the situation and ring you back.” He watched the screen go gray.

“You can’t wait to inform Basingame of what you perceive to be Mediaeval’s failure, can you?” Gilchrist said. “In spite of the fact that it was your tech who has jeopardized this drop by using drugs, a fact of which you may be sure I will inform Mr. Basingame on his return.”

Dunworthy looked at his digital. It was half past four. Finch had said they’d been stopped at a bit before three. An hour and a half. Oxford had only had two temp quarantines in recent years. One had turned out to be an allergic reaction to an injection, and the other one had turned out to be nothing at all, a schoolgirl prank. Both had been called off as soon as they had the results of the blood tests, and those hadn’t taken even ten minutes. Mary had taken blood in the ambulance. Dunworthy had seen the medic hand the vials to the house officer when they came into Casualties. There had been ample time for them to obtain the results. Three quarters of an hour.

“I’m certain Mr. Basingame will also be interested in hearing that it was your failure to have your tech screened that’s resulted in this practicum being jeopardized,” Gilchrist said.

Dunworthy should have recognized the symptoms as those of an infection: Badri’s low blood pressure, his labored breathing, his elevated temp. Mary had even said in the ambulance that it had to be an infection of some kind with his temp that high, but he had assumed she meant a localized infection, staph or an inflamed appendix. And what disease could it be? Smallpox and typhoid had been eradicated back in the twentieth century and polio in this one. Bacterials didn’t have a chance against antibody specification, and the antivirals worked so well nobody even had colds anymore.

“It seems distinctly odd that after being so concerned about the precautions Mediaeval was taking that you wouldn’t take the obvious precaution of screening your tech for drugs,” Gilchrist said.

It must be a thirdworld disease. Mary had asked all those questions about whether Badri had been out of the Community, about his Pakistani relatives. But Pakistan wasn’t thirdworld, and Badri couldn’t have gone out of the Community without a whole series of inoculations. And he hadn’t gone outside the EEC. Except for the Hungarian on-site, he’d been in Oxford all term.

“I would like to use the telephone,” Gilchrist was saying. “I quite agree that we need Basingame here to take matters in hand.”

Dunworthy was still holding the phone. He blinked at it, surprised.

“Do you mean to prevent me from phoning Basingame?” Gilchrist said.

Latimer stood up. “What is it?” he said, his arms held out as if he thought Dunworthy might pitch forward into them. “What’s wrong?”

“Badri isn’t using,” Dunworthy said to Gilchrist. “He’s ill.”

“I fail to see how you can claim to know that without having run a screen,” Gilchrist said, looking pointedly at the phone.

“We’re under quarantine,” Dunworthy said. “It’s some sort of infectious disease.”

“It’s a virus,” Mary said from the door. “We don’t have it sequenced yet, but the preliminary results ID it as a viral infection.”

She had unbuttoned her coat, and it flapped behind her like Kivrin’s cloak as she hurried into the room. She was carrying a lab tray by the handle. It was piled high with equipment and paper packets.

“The tests indicate that it’s probably a myxovirus,” she said, setting the tray down on one of the end tables. “Badri’s symptoms are compatible with that: high fever, disorientation, headache. It’s definitely not a retrovirus or a picornavirus, which is good news, but it will be some time yet before we have a complete ID.”

She pulled two chairs up next to the table and sat down on one. “We’ve notified the World Influenza Centre in London and sent them samples for ident and sequencing. Until we have a positive ID, a temp quarantine has been called as required by NHS regulations in cases of possible epidemic conditions.” She pulled on a pair of imperm gloves.