Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

“ — I want to give your idea a fair chance,” Dicken said. “The LPC carries no possible benefit for a simple virus — why use it?”

“Because SHEVA’s a messenger,” Kaye said, her voice soft, between dreamy and distracted. “It’s Darwin’s radio.”

“What?”

“You’ve seen the afterbirth from the Herod’s first-stage fetuses, Christopher. Specialized amniotic sacs…Very sophisticated. Not diseased.”

“Like I said, I want to work on this more. Convince me, Kaye. God, if this Infant C is just a fluke!”

Three blunt little popping sounds came from the north end of the campus, small, toylike. She heard the crowd let out a startled moan, then a distant, high scream.

“I can’t talk, Christopher.” She shut the phone with a plastic clack and ran. The crowd was about a quarter of a mile away, breaking up, people pushing back and scattering along the roads, the parking lots, the brick buildings. No more pops. She slowed to a walk for several steps, considering the danger, then ran again. She had to know. Too much uncertainty in her life. Too much hanging back and inaction, with Saul, with everything and everybody.

Fifty feet from her she saw a stocky man in a brown suit dash out of a building’s rear service door, arms and legs going like windmills. His coat flapped up over a bulging white shirt and he looked ridiculous, but he was quick as a bat out of hell and heading right for her.

For a moment she was alarmed and veered to avoid him.

“Damn it, Dr. Lang,” he shouted. “Hold on there! Stop!”

She slowed to a grudging walk, out of breath. The man in the brown suit caught up with her and flashed a badge. He was from the Secret Service and his name was Benson and that was all she managed to catch before he closed the case and pocketed it again. “What in hell are you doing? Where’s Tighe?” he asked her, his face beefy red, sweat pouring down his pockmarked cheeks.

“They need help,” she said. “She’s back at the—”

“That’s gunfire. You will stay right here if I have to hold you down personally. Goddamn it, Tighe was not supposed to let you out alone!”

At that moment, Tighe came running to catch up with them. She was red-faced with anger. She and Benson exchanged quick, harsh whispers, then Tighe positioned herself beside Kaye. Benson broke into a speedy trot toward the broken clumps of protesters. Kaye continued walking, but slower.

“Stop right here, Ms. Lang,” Tighe said.

“Somebody’s been shot!”

“Benson will take care of it!” Tighe insisted, standing between her and the crowd.

Kaye peered over Tighe’s shoulders. Men and women clutched their hands to their faces, crying. She saw dropped banners, drooping signs. The crowd swirled in complete confusion.

National Guard soldiers in camouflage, automatic rifles held at ready, took positions between brick buildings along the closest road.

A campus police car drove over the lawn and between two tall oak trees. She saw other men in suits, some talking on cell phones, walkie-talkies.

Then she noticed the lone man in the middle, arms held straight out as if he wanted to fly. Beside him, a motionless woman sprawled on the grass. Benson and a campus security officer reached them simultaneously. Benson kicked a dark object across the grass: a pistol. The security officer pulled out his own pistol and aggressively pushed back the flying man.

Benson knelt beside the woman, checked the pulse at her neck, looked up, around, his face saying it all. Then he glared at Kaye, mouthed emphatically, Get back .

“It wasn’t my baby,” the flying man shouted. Skinny, white, short fuzzy blond hair, in his late twenties, he wore a black T-shirt and black jeans slung low on his hips. He tossed his head back and forth as if surrounded by flies. “She made me come here. She goddamn made me. It wasn’t my baby!”

The flying man danced back from the guard, jerking like a marionette. “I can’t take this shit anymore. NO MORE SHIT! ”

Kaye stared at the injured woman. Even from twenty yards she could see the blood staining her blouse around her stomach, sightless eyes staring up with a blank kind of hope at the sky.

Kaye ignored Tighe, Benson, the flying man, the troops, the security guards, the crowd.

All she could see was the woman.

Cross entered the Americol executive dining room on a pair of crutches. Her young male nurse pulled out a chair, and Cross sat with a relieved puff of breath.

The room was empty but for Cross, Kaye, Laura Nilson, and Robert Jackson.

“How’d it happen, Marge?” Jackson asked.

“Nobody shot me,” she piped cheerfully. “I fell in the bathtub. I have always been my own worst enemy. I am a clumsy ox. What do we have, Laura?”

Nilson, whom Kaye had not seen since the disastrous vaccine press conference, wore a stylish but severe blue three-piece suit. “The surprise of the week is RU-486,” she said. “Women are using it — a lot of it. The French have come forward with a solution. We’ve spoken to them, but they say they are tendering their offer directly to the WHO and to the Taskforce, that their effort is humanitarian, and they aren’t interested in any business liaisons.”

Marge ordered wine from the steward and wiped her forehead with the napkin before spreading it on her lap. “How generous of them,” she mused. “They’ll supply all the world needs, and no new R D costs. Does it work, Robert?”

Jackson took up a Palmbook and poked his way through his notes with a stylus. “Taskforce has unconfirmed reports that RU-486 aborts the second-stage implanted ovum. No word yet on first-stage. It’s all anecdotal. Street research.”

Cross said, “Abortion drugs have never been to my taste.” To the steward, she said, “I’ll have the Cobb salad, side of vinaigrette, and a pot of coffee.”

Kaye ordered a club sandwich, though she was not hungry in the least. She could feel thunderheads building — an unpleasant personal awareness that she was in a very dangerous mood. She was still numb from witnessing the shooting at NIH, two days before.

“Laura, you look unhappy,” Cross said, with a glance at Kaye. She was going to save Kaye’s complaints for last.

“One earthquake after another,” Nilson said. “At least I didn’t have to experience what Kaye did.”

“Horrible,” Cross agreed. “It’s a whole barrel of worms. So, what kind of worms are they?”

“We’ve ordered our own polls. Psych profiles, cultural profiles, across the board. I’m spending every penny you gave me, Marge.”

“Insurance,” Cross said.

“Scary,” Jackson said simultaneously.

“Yes, well it might buy you another Perkin-Elmer machine, that’s all,” Nilson said defensively. “Sixty percent of married or involved males surveyed do not believe the news reports. They believe it is necessary for the women to have sex to be pregnant a second time. We’re coming up against a wall of resistance here, denial, even among the women. Forty percent of married or otherwise involved women say they would abort any Herod’s fetus.”

“That’s what they tell a pollster,” Cross murmured.

“They’d certainly go for an easy out in large numbers. RU-486 is tried and proven. It could become a household remedy for the desperate.”

“It isn’t prevention,” Jackson said, uneasy.

“Of those who wouldn’t use an abortion pill, fully half believe the government is trying to force wholesale abortion on the nation, maybe the world,” Nilson said. “Whoever chose the name ‘Herod’s’ has really skewed the issue.”

“Augustine chose it,” Cross said.

“Marge, we’re heading for a major social disaster: ignorance mixed with sex and dead babies. If large numbers of women with SHEVA abstain from sex with their partners — and get pregnant anyway — then our social science people say we’re going to see more domestic violence, as well as a huge rise in abortions, even of normal pregnancies.”