Greg Bear - Darwin's Radio

Kaye swung the garment bag to her shoulder. Mitch grabbed two suitcases and stood in the door, held open by a rubber chock. They had already loaded three boxes into the car in the condo garage.

“They tell me to keep in touch,” Kaye said, and held up a black cell phone for Mitch’s inspection. “Marge pays for this. And Augustine tells me not to give any interviews. That I can live with. What about you?”

“My lips are sealed.”

“With kisses?” Kaye bumped him with her hip.

Benson followed them down to the garage. He watched them load Mitch’s car with a plain expression of disapproval.

“You don’t like my idea of freedom?” Kaye asked the agent with a piquant expression as she slammed the trunk. The car’s rear springs groaned.

“You’re taking everything with you, ma’am,” Benson responded stonily.

“He doesn’t approve of the company you keep,” Mitch said.

“Well,” Kaye said, standing beside Benson, brushing back her hair. “That’s because he’s a man of taste.”

Benson smiled. “You’re a fool to leave without protection.”

“Maybe,” Kaye said. “Thanks for your vigilance. Pass along my gratitude.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Benson said. “Good luck.”

Kaye hugged him. Benson blushed.

“Let’s go,” Kaye said.

Kaye fingered the door frame of the Buick, its dusty blue finish powdery and matte with wear. She asked Mitch how old the car was.

“I don’t know,” Mitch said. “Ten, fifteen years.”

“Find a dealership,” Kaye said. “I’m going to buy you a brand-new Land Rover.”

“That’s roughing it, all right,” Mitch said, lifting an eyebrow. “I’d prefer we be less obvious.”

“I love the way you do that,” Kaye said, lifting her much less impressive eyebrow dramatically. Mitch laughed.

“Screw it, then,” she said. “Drive the Buick. We’ll camp out under the stars.”

The Air Force Falcon passenger jet rolled gently to the east. Augustine sipped a Coke and glanced frequently through the window, clearly nervous about flying. Dicken had not known this about Augustine until now; they had never flown together before.

“We can make a strong case that even should second-stage SHEVA fetuses survive birth, they’ll be carriers of a wide variety of infectious HERVs,” Augustine said.

“Whose evidence?” Jane Salter asked. Her face was a little flushed from the heat in the airplane before takeoff; she was at best mildly unimpressed by these military trappings.

“I’ve hadTaskforce researchers putting together biopsy results for the last two weeks, just on a hunch. We know HERVs express under all sorts of conditions, but the particles have never been infectious until now.”

“We still don’t know what the hell purpose the noninfec-tious particles serve, if any,” Salter said. The other staffers, younger and less experienced, sat quietly in their seats, content to listen.

“No good purpose,” Augustine said, tapping the seat arm. He swallowed hard and looked out the window again. “The HERV continue to produce viral particles that aren’t infectious…Until SHEVA codes for a complete tool kit, everything necessary for a virus to assemble and escape a cell. I have six expert opinions, including Jackson’s, that SHEVA may ‘teach’ other HERV how to be infectious again. They’ll be most active in individuals with rapidly dividing cells, and that means SHEVA fetuses. We could have to deal with diseases we haven’t seen in millions of years.”

“Diseases that may no longer be pathogenic in humans,” Dicken said.

“Can we take that chance?” Augustine asked. Dicken shrugged.

“So what are you going to recommend?” Salter asked.

“Washington is already under curfew, and they’ll have it under martial law the instant someone decides to break a plate glass window or roll a car. No demonstrations, no inflammatory comments…Politicians hate to be lynched. It won’t be long. The common folk are like cows in a herd, and there’s been more than enough lightning to make even the cowboys nervous.”

“Infelicitous comparison, Dr. Augustine,” Salter said dryly.

“Well, I’ll refine it,” Augustine said. “I’m not at my best when I’m at twenty thousand feet.”

“You think we’re going to be under martial law,” Dicken said, “and we can sequester all pregnant women and take their babies away from them…for testing?”

“It’s horrible,” Augustine admitted. “Most if not all of the fetuses will probably die. But if they do survive, I think we can make a case that we’ll have to sequester them.”

“Talk about throwing gas on a fire,” Dicken said.

Augustine thoughtfully agreed. “I’ve been racking my brains trying to find a different solution. I will entertain alternatives.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t muddy the waters right now,” Salter said.

“I have no intention of saying or doing anything now. The work goes on.”

“We’d better be on firm ground,” Dicken said.

“Damned right,” Augustine said with a grimace. “ Terra firma , and the sooner the better.”

Everyone has a bitch,” Mitch observed as he steered them along state route 26 out of the city, staying away from the main highways. Too many demonstrations — by truckers, motorists, even bicyclists, all claiming a shot at civil disobedience — had shut down the main routes. As it was, they had to wait twenty minutes in the middle of downtown as police cleared tons of garbage dumped by protesting sanitation workers.

“We failed them,” Kaye said.

“You didn’t fail them,” Mitch said as he tried to find an alley to turn into.

“I screwed up and didn’t make my case.” Kaye hummed nervously to herself.

“Something wrong?” Mitch asked.

“Nothing,” she said briskly. “Just the whole damned planet.”

In West Virginia, they pulled into a KOA campground and paid thirty dollars for a tent site. Mitch set up the lightweight dome tent he had bought in Austria before he met Tilde, and a small camp stove, under a young oak tree looking out over a low valley where two tractors sat idle in a carefully furrowed field.

The sun had gone down twenty minutes before and the sky was mottled with light clouds. The air was just beginning to cool. Kaye’s hair was sticky, the elastic of her panties chafed.

One other family had set up two tents about a hundred yards away, otherwise the campground was empty.

Kaye climbed through the rainflap into the tent. “Come in here,” she told Mitch. She pulled off her dress and lay back on the sleeping bag Mitch had unrolled. Mitch set the campstove down and poked his head into the tent.

“My God, woman,” he said admiringly.

“Do you smell me?” she asked.

“I surely do, ma’am,” he said in agent Benson’s fine North Carolina accent. He slipped in beside her. “It’s still a little warm.”

“I smell you,” Kaye said. She had a needful and serious look on her face. She helped him out of his shirt, and he kicked aside his pants before reaching for the shaving kit where he was keeping the condoms. As he started to rip open the foil package, she bent over and kissed his erect penis. “Not this time,” she said. She licked him swiftly, looked up. “I want you now, nothing in between.”

Mitch took hold of her head and lifted her mouth away from him. “No,” he said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“You’re fertile,” he said.

“How the hell do you know?” Kaye asked.