Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

“So SHEVA is a specialist,” Dicken said, shaking his head. “How the hell do we know that?”

“Look at the footnote, Christopher, and the wording. ‘Women in domestic partnering situations, or those who have had extensive sexual experience.’ “

“How many cases so far — five thousand?”

“Six thousand two hundred women, and only about sixty or seventy men, all partners of infected women. Only constant reexposure transmits the retrovirus.”

“That’s not so crazy,” Dicken said. “It’s not unlike HIV, then.”

“Right,” Salter said, mouth twitching. “God has it in for females. Infection begins with the mucosa of nasal passages and bronchia, proceeds to the mild inflammation of alveoli, enters the bloodstream — mild inflammation of ovaries…and then it’s gone. Aching and some coughing, a sore tummy. And if the woman gets pregnant, there’s a very good chance she’ll miscarry.”

“Mark should be able to sell that,” Dicken said. “But let’s make his case stronger. He needs to scare a more reliable group of voters than young women. What about the geriatric set?” He looked at her hopefully.

“Older women don’t get it,” she said. “Nobody younger than fourteen or older than sixty. Look at the spread.” She leaned over and pointed to a pie chart. “Mean age of thirty-one.”

“It’s too crazy. Mark wants me to make sense of this and strengthen the surgeon general’s case by four o’clock this afternoon.”

“Another briefing?” Salter asked.

“Before the chief of staff and the science advisor. This is good, this is scary, but I know Mark. Look through the files again — maybe we can come up with a few thousand geriatric deaths in Zaire.”

“Are you asking me to cook the books?”

Dicken grinned wickedly.

“Then screw you, sir,” Salter said mildly, head cocked. “We haven’t got any more statistics out of Georgia. Maybe you could call up Tbilisi,” she suggested. “Or Istanbul.”

“They’re tight as clams,” Dicken said. “I was never able to shake much out of them, and they refuse to admit they have any cases now.” He glanced up at Salter.

Her nose wrinkled.

“Please, just one elderly passenger out of Tbilisi melting on an airplane,” Dicken suggested.

Salter let loose an explosion of laughter. She took off her glasses and wiped them, then replaced them. “It’s not funny. The charts are looking serious.”

“Mark wants to let the drama build. He’s playing this one like a marlin on a line.”

“I’m not very savvy about politics.”

“I pretend not to be,” Dicken said. “But the longer I hang around here, the more savvy I get.”

Salter glanced around the small room as if it might close in on her. “Are we done, Christopher?”

Dicken grinned. “Claustrophobia acting up?”

“It’s this room,” Salter said. “Don’t you hear them?” She leaned over the desk with a spooky expression. Dicken could not always tell whether Jane Salter was joking or serious. “The screaming of the monkeys?”

“Yeah,” Dicken said with a straight face. “I try to stay in the field as long as possible.”

In the director’s office in Building 4, Augustine looked at the statistics quickly, flipped through the twenty pages of numbers and computer-generated charts, and flung them down on the desk. “All very reassuring,” he said. “At this rate we’ll be out of business by the end of the year. We don’t even know if SHEVA causes miscarriages in every pregnant woman, or whether it’s just a mild teratogen. Christ. I thought this was the one, Christopher.”

“It’s good. It’s scary, and it’s public.”

“You underestimate how much the Republicans hate the CDC,” Augustine said. “The National Rifle Association hates us. Big tobacco hates us because we’re right in their backyard. Did you see that damned billboard just down the highway? By the airport? ‘Finally, a Butt Worth Kissing.’ What was it — Camels? Marlboros?”

Dicken laughed and shook his head.

“The surgeon general is going right into the bear’s den. She’s not very happy with me, Christopher.”

“There’s always the results I brought back from Turkey,” Dicken said.

Augustine held up his hands and rocked back in his chair, fingers gripping the edge of the desk. “One hospital. Five miscarriages.”

“Five out of five pregnancies, sir.”

Augustine leaned forward. “You went to Turkey because your contact said they had a virus that might abort babies. But why Georgia?”

“There was an outbreak of miscarriages in Tbilisi five years ago. I couldn’t get any information in Tbilisi, nothing official. A mortician and I did a little drinking together — unofficially. He told me there had been an outbreak of miscarriages in Gordi about the same time.”

Augustine had not heard this part before. Dicken had not put it in his report. “Go on,” he said, only half-interested.

“There was some sort of trouble, he wouldn’t come right out and say what. So — I drove to Gordi, and there was a police cordon around the town. I did some asking around in a few local road stops and heard about a UN investigation, Russian involvement. I called the UN. They told me that they were asking an American woman to help them.”

“That was—”

“Kaye Lang.”

“Goodness,” Augustine said, and pressed his lips into a thin smile. “Woman of the hour. You knew about her work on HERV?”

“Ofcourse.”

“So . . . you thought somebody in the UN was on to something and needed her advice.”

“The thought crossed my mind, sir. But they called on her because she knew forensic pathology.”

“So, what were^oH thinking about?”

“Mutations. Induced birth defects. Teratogenic viruses, maybe. And I was wondering why governments wanted parents dead.”

“So there we are again,” Augustine said. “Back to wild-eyed speculation.”

Dicken made a face. “You know me better than that, Mark.”

“Sometimes I haven’t the slightest idea how you get such good results.”

“I hadn’t finished my work. You called me back and said we had something solid.”

“God knows I’ve been wrong before,” Augustine said.

“I don’t think you’re wrong. This is probably just the beginning. We’ll have more to go on soon.”

“Is that what your instincts tell you?”

Dicken nodded.

Mark drew his brows together and folded his hands tightly on the top of the desk. “Do you remember what happened in 1963?”

“I was just a baby then, sir. But I’ve heard. Malaria.”

“I was seven years old myself. Congress pulled the plug on all funding for the elimination of insect-borne illnesses, including malaria. The stupidest move in the history of epidemiology. Millions of deaths worldwide, new strains of resistant disease…a disaster.”

“DDT wouldn’t have worked much longer anyway, sir.”

“Who can say?” Augustine peaked two fingers. “Humans think like children, leaping from passion to passion. Suddenly world health just isn’t hot. Maybe we overstated our case. We’re backing down from the death of the rain forests, and global warming is still just a simmer, not a boil. There haven’t been any devastating worldwide plagues, and Joe Sixpack never signed on to the whole Third World guilt trip. People are getting bored with apocalypse. If we don’t have a politically defensible crisis soon, on our home turf, we are going to get creamed in Congress, Christopher, and it could be 1963 all over again.”

“I understand, sir.”

Augustine sighed through his nose and lifted his eyes to the ranks of fluorescent lights in the ceiling. “The SG thinks our apple is still too green to put on the president’s desk, so she’s having a convenient megrim. She’s postponed this afternoon’s meeting until next week.”