PART II. THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

Chapter 5. Pandemic

(Africa)

Geoffrey Answorth squinted through groggy jet lag and peered towards the dark green tree line on the far shore of the sluggish, muddy current of the Zambero River. He scratched at his chin, and a sudden, sharp pain pinched at his throat as his whiskers caught in the weave of his collar, his two-week-old beard itchy and sweaty in the tropics.

Atlanta had blistering summers, but they also had very efficient air conditioners. Answorth shivered in the African sun at the recollection of the way his shirt felt on his back after coming into the lab in Atlanta on a hot, humid August afternoon. He couldn’t remember having a chilly, damp back since he’d stepped off the plane in Ktanu Town—right onto the tarmac—no jetways in Ktanu Town. No autocabs at the terminal, either. You still had to find a human cab driver here. No air conditioner in the cabs, either.

Here, the nearest air conditioner was two hundred miles down the Zambero River, and that was unfortunate, because all these bodies stacked up on the dock at the Kiterro Mission Station were going to need some serious cooling in the next few hours.

Answorth turned from the slow, muddy, swirling river to the corrugated metal shed, gray paint peeling from the hot, rusting walls, corroded iron tobacco and skin-lightening cream advertisements flaking slowly away to rest on the moldy, sagging boards of the landing. The wonder of it all was that the bodies lying on the dock didn’t fall through the rotten boards back into the river that they had just been fished out of.

Mputa leaned over one of the corpses. “As near as we can tell, they’re Atashi tribe. These bodies have been in the water for no more than two days.”

“These are the most recent? How many before these?”

“Just two floated down three days ago. Kosi found them—he runs this fishing pier and what little railroad business there still is at this station. He assumed they were just drowning victims. Fishers. They see that from time to time, especially during the rainy season. They keep the bodies here because the Atashi will come down to claim them. But nobody came, and then three more floated down day before yesterday. Then this group, last night. Half a dozen. There are more piling up on that sand bar up there.” Mputa shielded his eyes with his hand and pointed to a brown strip of shoaling mud roofed by the black hulk of a creeper-wrapped topa tree that had collapsed where the bank gave way at a bend in the river. “That’s when they called me. And I called you. Or, called your computer, I should say, and left the message.”

“Yeah. Sorry about the delay. I was out of town.”

“I wasn’t complaining. Your machine found you fast. I was surprised.”

The shoal was striped with the brown bodies of another half dozen dead and three crocodiles.

Answorth pulled back the plastic sheet from the nearest body. “Done an autopsy yet?”

“They didn’t drown.”

“What killed them?”

Mputa shrugged.

“You’re doing the tissue pathology and the cultures?”

“They were sent to the lab at Kunta this morning, as soon as I arrived. We can hope for the results in two weeks on the cultures.”

“You think this is a pathogen, then?”

“There’s very little to go on. The numbers and the lack of trauma suggest a pathogen. That’s all.”

“Probably ought to isolate these bodies. Why did they end up in the river?”

Mputa shrugged. “My guess is fever.”

“Died while trying to cool down?”

Mputa nodded.

“But—let me guess—no pneumonia, right?”

“Right.”

“I thought so. Not enough time for it. Whatever this is, it’s fast.” Answorth straightened and winced as his back protested. He tucked the front of his shirt back in at his disordered waistline. “Guess we need to get upriver and see what’s going on up there. How soon before WHO gets here? And that Red Cross team?”

“Another hour or two. Maybe. The roads are not too well maintained between here and Kunta.”

And no autocabs in Kunta, Answorth thought, but he didn’t complain. He wasn’t anxious to see WHO or the Red Cross either. He rather liked the thought of Robert Fixton having to haggle over a cab fare and then trying to give directions to a human driver with no GPS. An autocab would get him here in a few hours. But a human driver . . . with any luck he could be on the river before they arrived.

*

In fact it was four hours before the WHO team made it to the riverside at the Kiterro Mission Station, and the sun, low in the west, was washing the far side of the river with a film of hazy tropical golden twilight before Answorth crouched on the bow of the sluggish riverboat nudging wearily upriver. The trees along the riverside trailed branches and creepers in the water, swaying along with the gentle, muddy current. The boat had passed half a dozen more bodies since they left dockside an hour ago, all of them Atashi, as far as you could tell from something face down in the stream.

The river was wide and loaded with floating debris, tree branches, clumps of weed where the soft, sandy banks continually slumped in, ripples from submerged bars and rocks, and long before sunset Answorth began to fancy that every dark knot in the water was another Atashi, drifting down toward the distant coast. The river smelled green, with that eye-watering pungency that makes tropical streams so chic with the gnat set.

The barge wasn’t making better than seven knots against the current, and Answorth couldn’t hope to make the village before noon tomorrow. He wondered what the population of the village was. Mputa hadn’t said. Probably didn’t know. The villagers didn’t come down to the station as a rule, especially since the Mission had been destroyed during the war. The nuns and the priests and their medicines were gone now. Nothing else at Kiterro interested the Atashi. They only came down to collect their dead, and this time they hadn’t come.

*

The riverboat shuddered in the heavy, stagnant morning as it nudged into the shifting currents at the confluence of the muddy Zambero with the little, green-tinted Cinti River, and Answorth leaned on the rusting rail, rinsing his mouth, still foul with hangover. Seven more bodies had passed the boat since first light.

Ahead, a village swung into view around a bend in the Zambero, and underneath him, Answorth felt the low throb of the engine slow. The riverboat drifted to a crawl, just enough to maintain steerage, but made no more progress against the current. Yet the village was still a hundred yards upriver, a ramshackle wooden pier barely visible where it sloped weakly out into the water. Answorth pitched his cigarette over the side. “What’s going on, Mputa?”

The doctor shook his head and started for the wheelhouse. Answorth could hear the talk, but it was all in the local patois, so he waited patiently, lighting another cigarette and scanning the riverbank until Mputa reappeared. The river had fallen in the night and the channel was narrow. From where he stood, Answorth could easily see another five bodies stranded on the muddy banks on both sides of the river.

“The captain will not go any further, Dr. Answorth. He says the crew will not pass this village.”

“We still have twenty miles or more to go to the nearest Atashi village.”

“They will not pass this village.”

“Does he say why not?”

“There are no fires in this village. They see the bodies. The crew is mostly Cinti. They have no juju against this place.”

“Tell them you have juju against this place. Let’s get on up there. Why are there no fires here. . . ?” Answorth’s voice died away as he realized what they were saying. He nodded his head upriver. “This is an Atashi village?”

“No.”

He squinted upriver. No fires. Deserted. But the thatch on the roofs looked good, from here. He’d be able to see them, if there were people up there. . . .

“Apparently the problem has come downstream,” Mputa said.

“Yeah. It would be like the villagers to fish a body from upstream out of the river, right?”

“Yes.”

“Will he put us ashore here and wait for us to return?”

“Yes, Dr. Answorth. It is your charter. He will wait until an hour before dusk.”

*

The riverboat looked a lot smaller from the sandy bank of the river. The bush was fairly thick, and lugging the medical kit was clumsy, creepers and vines constantly snagging on the equipment. The noon sun bore down painfully on Answorth’s thinning hair before they finally stepped out into the clearing that formed the center of the village. The Red Cross team, all Cinti tribe, stayed well behind Answorth and Mputa.

The village was absolutely quiet. Not even the usual sound of dogs or chickens. No movement, no smoke, nothing. Just the clearing and the neat little arc of well maintained huts and a well in the center. At the far edge of the village, the jungle started up again twenty yards away.

Answorth started into the clearing, Mputa beside him, hailing the village. There was no answer. “We’ll start with a sample of the well water, Mputa. Then we’ll search the houses. Don’t forget your gloves. You know what to do.”

Mputa took a bottle from the kit and leaned over the well, trying to tie a line to the neck of the bottle. He stopped beside the low, mud brick ring surrounding the well, peering down into the darkness.

Mputa said nothing, but moaned, a low, quavering hum of astonishment.

Answorth stepped to the well and peered down beside him. The well was full of bodies.

Answorth felt the chill right through the African noon.

The neat little huts were empty.

The fishing dock was covered with bodies, some in the boats, some half in, half out of the water, others draped along the short pier of roughly hewn and weather softened planks. Men, women, children, the young and the old. They were all here, all in the water, wherever they could find it.

Answorth took a respirator out of the kit for himself and handed Mputa one. Then he dug out the satellite phone.

Chapter 6. Bedside Manner

(Atlanta, One Year Later)

“Do you feel warm?” The voice was flat and neutral, just getting the job done.

“No,” Answorth replied, trying to sound just as flat and uninterested in this whole ridiculous process. He crossed his legs, didn’t like the feel of his own naked legs against each other, and lay them out straight again.

The mechanical arm swung quickly over his naked abdomen, paused briefly over his groin, irritating him.

“Yeah, there’s a scar there. It’s an old one. Never mind that. You saw it last week. And the week before that.”

“Please lie still and do not speak except in response to questions.”

Answorth’s face flushed with anger. “Yeah? You want to know if I’m hot now?” he asked, sneering at the metallic arm as it crept back and forth over his lower abdomen.

“Do you feel feverish? Are you changing your response to question fifty-six? Are you experiencing a sudden increase in warmth?”

Answorth swore hotly and reached up to push the robotic arm out of the way, but it sensed the approach of his hand and withdrew with surprising speed before he could touch it. “You must lie down for the examination to proceed.” The voice was flat, neutral, unengaged, disinterested.

“Dr. Answorth?” The voice from the intercom on the wall was human, at least. “Dr. Answorth, is there some difficulty?”

He finished pulling his shirt on in angry silence before he punched the button beside the door. The gray panel slid back and he stormed out into the hall.

“God damn that thing,” he muttered as he rounded the corner and breezed past the nurses’ station.

“Dr. Answorth,” the attendant stood at her station and shouted after him, her voice the one from the intercom. “Dr. Answorth, you must finish the examination! You can’t leave without finishing! You’ll be arrested!”

He ignored her and started straight for the button to hail an elevator. But one of three security guards, all big fellows, all armed, stepped deftly in front of him. “May I see your release, sir?”

Answorth stared at the guard for a minute as he drew a deep breath. He half turned back toward the nurses’ station. The other two security guards had stood and were taking up stations on either side of their colleague. They needn’t have bothered; Answorth was already breathing heavily from the exertion of his escape from the examination room.

At least the guard sounded like he meant to be vaguely threatening. Nothing too personal about it, but there was some hint of emotion, even if it was only officially emotional. Being confronted by a human was almost a mercy. The guard’s face was broad, flat, his nose at least three fingers wide, scarcely rising beyond the level of his flat cheeks. Answorth figured maybe Central American native Indian, maybe a touch of African in there somewhere.

The native Central Americans had been hit hard by the Zambero pandemic. A scant twelve months after the Zambero bacteria first appeared in Africa, southern Mexico was pretty well depopulated, according to the last news out of there, though that news was old. No epidemiological reports had been issued from Mexico for weeks. All the Central American countries were depopulating rapidly, Zambero having found a ready, familiar home there, and a population whose genotype, like everyone else’s genotype, was completely unprepared for the new bacterium.

That fact made this man a particularly good choice for a security guard up here on the Diagnostics Level of St. Jude’s in Atlanta. He knew what the Zambero bacterium would do to a population once it got loose. But for that matter, everyone knew what the Zambero bacterium could do by now, a scant twelve months after it first got loose.

The colder climates had not fared much better than the tropics. Europe lost fifty million in the last eight months and was completely blockaded from the rest of the world. No traffic was allowed in or out, especially coming and going from Asia.

Not that anyone in Asia was trying to get out. If there was anyone left alive in western China, they hadn’t made themselves heard for the last three months. The southeast Chinese coast was now lined with artillery batteries and surface to surface missiles, threatening to shoot anything that attempted to land by sea. They had been devastated when refugees from Japan and Taiwan fled the islands, seeking shelter on the mainland. And of course the Taiwan Straits were patrolled by American and Russian missile frigates, threatening to shoot anything attempting to leave China by air or sea. Nothing came in, nothing got out.

The Americans and the Russians had maintained a blockade around Africa as well, up until a couple of months ago. There didn’t seem to be any point to the exercise anymore. Nobody had heard from sub-Saharan Africa for weeks.

And so on and so on, all the way across the planet. Answorth felt a flush of warmth again, but it was not the first blush of the terrible fever that always heralded the onset of Zambero.

He started back to the nurses’ station.

“Look, miss. Can’t you do this? It’s pretty routine.”

She smiled, sympathetically. “No, Dr. Answorth. We have to process over a hundred patients every hour, and I’m the only one left on duty. I have to stay here and monitor the aides. They—”

“Aides!” Answorth exploded.

“You know we don’t have enough physicians left for all the examinations we have to do every day, Dr. Answorth. You know we have to use the autodocs. There aren’t enough physicians left alive now to do the weekly checks. We can’t risk any more of them. We’ve lost too many already. . . .”

Answorth nodded understandingly, his bearded face turned to the tile floor. He fished about his side for cigarettes, but his hand merely slapped at flat, thin fabric. He had emptied the contents of his pockets when he arrived at St. Jude’s so everything could be sterilized.

The nurse, like any good nurse, saw the gesture. “You know, Dr. Answorth, you can complete your examination in just another seven and a half minutes. Then you get your health certificate for this week, and you can go have that smoke.”

A door down the hall opened, and out hobbled a tiny old woman, surprisingly brisk for somebody who had to be eighty years old. “I never been so damned insulted in all my life. . . .” she muttered irritably.  “I should have broke the nasty thing!” She marched up to the nurse’s station and held out a wrinkled paw. She got her chit clearing her for the week and specifying the time she had to return next week, and, just as she turned to the door, addressed the nurse over her shoulder. “If you want to know if I been having hallucinations, you just give me a phone call. I will not be back next week, young lady. I will not permit that vile thing to caress me in that fashion.”

But she would be back next week, Answorth knew. She would be, or the police, seeing that she had no health certificate and had missed her checkup, would put her in quarantine.

Same thing for him. Same thing for everybody. Eighty-three million Americans were dead because of Zambero. Ninety percent of the physicians in the country were dead. There wasn’t a doctor left in America whose sole duty wasn’t simply trying to identify and isolate Zambero patients from the rest of the population.

Except for Answorth and his crew at the CDC. They had the decidedly unenviable duty of trying to find a vaccine or a cure.

These people knew that. Answorth felt a little ashamed, knowing they knew that. They were just trying to make sure he stayed alive, after all. It was for his own good. It was for everyone’s good.

He shook his head sadly and started down the hall to the examination room again.

Chapter 7. Autocab

Answorth sat back in the autocab and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. The autocab smelled strongly of ozone and disinfectant from the air purification system. The machine waited a few seconds while it pondered his best route back to the CDC, then pulled easily out into the thin traffic.

The empty sidewalks scrolled past, the blurry concrete punctuated with the occasional brave straggler. Most folks preferred to stay inside where the air was filtered and disinfected these days. Crowds were not popular. In its way, that had proven a blessing. Downtown had seen a little rioting and looting when the epidemic first broke out and people stopped going to work, but then, when everybody realized the best way to catch the disease was in a crowd, the riots and looting stopped cold.

Answorth wondered idly how much longer that nurse would have to sit at her dreary job. That would have to be lonely work, sitting up there all day watching the Origyn Systems autodocs screen people for Zambero. Nobody’s going to stop and talk and pass the time of day. Everybody hates the machine. They just want to get in, get it done, and go home, if they’re lucky enough to still be healthy. That weekly visit to the autodoc at the screening clinic was just a little too much like going for a job interview as the corpse at a funeral home. No doubt that nurse would complain very little when they finally replaced her with an auto-something-or-other from Origyn Systems.

Answorth flinched as the cigarette smoke got into his eyes. If the CDC or somebody else didn’t come up with a cure or a vaccine pretty quickly, they were all going to end up getting that job at the funeral parlor. The funeral parlor run by robots.

He laughed to himself. Origyn Systems, Inc. First they gave us the autocab, nearly four years ago. Everybody loved those. His own mother retired off Origyn stock when those came out. Private cars were getting rare just two years later when the tsunami hit—why bother, when you can call an autocab on your cell phone, have it there in less than five minutes? It’s clean, it’s cheaper than driving yourself, you don’t have to park it, you don’t buy insurance, there’s no human to sit next to, smell, talk to, unless you bring him or her along yourself. They call their own repair service when they break down. They have the best anti-collision systems in the world. They are so cheap to build and operate that within a year’s time they were everywhere. The autocabs got a lot of credit for getting people to safety when the big wave hit, two years ago.

But after the waves hit, Origyn equipment was banned from government service, and nobody really knows why. Their stock drops, though they still promise great things to come, and the public seems to want to reward them by using every autocab that comes off the market.

Then Zambero breaks out, doctors and nurses are killed off by the thousands, leaving only a tenth of the medical-industrial complex in America still on it feet. Zambero kills off seventy percent of the world’s population in one year, and the bacterium is still going strong. You can’t hide from it. Masks are useless—the pathogen is too small to be trapped in common filters. You just have to stay away from anyone who might have it, and you spend as little time outside as possible. So Origyn Systems, Inc., introduces the autodoc to the public, and thus solves the issue of national health care in a single stroke. People hate them, but they use them. Now everybody sees an autodoc once a week or they get thrown into the quarantine facilities, and that’s not a nice place to be.

Origyn Systems, Inc., should run for president, Answorth decided, enjoying his morbid little fantasy. The platform would be a little sticky, though. . . . ‘Rumor has it that Origyn Systems, Inc., is working on the autofuneraldirector.’ Origyn stock goes through the roof.

Of course, nobody would be left to buy stock except the autodocs, the autocabs, and the autofuneraldirectors who, suffering under the sudden downturn of business since all the humans were dead, begin to lobby the autocongress hard for some customers.

Answorth laughed grimly.

*

The streets were quiet, deserted. You could still see a National Guardsman on most street corners, armed and ready to go, although you couldn’t pay people to loot, not anymore. If a store didn’t have the filters and the ionizers going, you didn’t want to hang around in them long enough to smash a window and grab anything.  And you never knew who you passed in the crowd. If the autodocs don’t catch you in the early stages, the first sign that you have the fever is you drop right where you are, and then you and everybody within twenty feet of you goes into quarantine. Try to run, and you get shot by one of those Guardsmen.

Every day looked like a Sunday morning in downtown Atlanta anymore. The city still had a population of nearly a million, but everybody just felt safer inside, with the HEPA filters and the UV chambers and the disinfectant atomizers and the ionizers running full blast, just in case a cloud of something nasty happened to be drifting over the town.

“Autocab, cancel that trip order. Take me down 14th, headed east. The next exit.”

The autocab glided smoothly off to the right, exiting the downtown connector and halting for a few seconds at the peculiar formality of a traffic light on a nearly deserted, fully automated street. Then it turned left and descended into the canyon between high-rises soaring into the gray sky on either side, bracketed by the occasional coffee shop crouching between hundred story buildings.

“Autocab, pull into that café.”

“Very good, sir,” the robotic voice intoned flatly. “However, that café was frequented yesterday by a gentleman who tested positive this morning during his weekly checkup. This autocab does not recommend entering that facility, sir.”

“Just this morning? How do you know that?” Answorth felt his guts tighten. “You’re not supposed to know that, autocab. The list of names of suspected infectees is supposed to be private. Anyway, the café is open. So it’s been sterilized and cleared, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. It was scheduled for sterilization at noon today, and the operation was performed normally.”

“Then it’s clean. Take me to the coffee shop, please. Right now.”

The autocab turned at the next block, though its response was a second or two in coming. “Sir, this autocab would not recommend that action.”

The autocab’s voice, flat, neutral, the twin of the autodoc, was beginning to grate on Answorth’s nerves.

When he responded to the machine, he tried to keep his own voice cool and level, and only tinged with the faintest hint of menace as he sat forward to stare at the control panel. “And why would you not recommend that action, autocab?”

“Because, sir, in correlating the movements of recent infectees as reported by other autocabs with the published reports of quarantined and recently disinfected sites, this autocab has determined that there is a seventy-five percent probability that the sterilization procedures are not adequate. The number of new infectees who patronized recently sterilized locations just prior to infection and who had no other identifiable contact with known infectious vectors is statistically significant. Decontaminated sites appear as a site of initial infection at a rate higher than a randomly chosen control group of other sites.”

Answorth did not sit back, but neither did he repeat his command to the autocab. The cab had access to the news—that could just come in over the car radio. So they would know which shops were closed for decontamination, because that was news. The identities of the recent infectees were supposed to be secret, but that just meant the autocabs were passing this data around among themselves. After all, they probably carried the recent victims to the hospital for their weekly checkup, and infectees don’t come out the same door they went in. The autocabs would know this. They also had no doubt carried the victims to their coffee shops. . . . And they knew who they carried from place to place. All fares were logged.

They had figured out what it meant.

So the autocabs, talking among themselves, took all the information they had gathered among themselves, combined it with publicly broadcast information, and they analyzed it, including a statistical workup, and used that to draw the conclusion that Answorth needed to stay away from the coffee shop. Very interesting.

“Autocab, who owns you?”

“This autocab is leased by the DeKalb Yellow Autocab Company, sir. This autocab received its CPU, interface, and sensory subsystems from Origyn Systems, Incorporated, one year ago, and is still the property of Origyn Systems, Incorporated. This autocab was not operational prior to that time. If you wish any further information, please refer to Origyn Systems, Incorporated, of Baltimore, Maryland.”

“I see.” Answorth mulled over this as the cab turned right onto Peachtree. “Autocab, take me to work. The CDC.”

Answorth resisted the urge to ask the autocab to step on it.

Chapter 8. The CDC

Answorth stopped at the front desk at the CDC’s Zambero Pathogen Special Containment Facility which, despite the name, didn’t actually act as the repository for any particular collection of specimens of the Zambero bacterium—there was plenty of that available everywhere for anyone who really wanted it. This unit was so named as it was tasked with the job of designing a way to restrain the spread of the plague.

The approach so far had been exclusively along the lines of isolating outbreaks so as to confine the geographical spread of the disease, which was why the entire population of the country had to endure the indignity of the weekly checkups with the autodocs.

The effort had been fairly successful. Most new cases were caught before they were more than a few days old, during which the bacterium was a little less communicable, and since people tended to stay indoors, infectees’ contact with others would be minimal. Patients detected carrying the bacteria were transported under isolation to huge camps outside cities. The camp nearest Atlanta was south of the town near Macon, on the site of Warner Robbins Air Force Base. There the victims were observed for another week. The symptoms were very specific: high fever, hallucinations, and a meningitis-like inflammation in the brain that invariably led to cerebral hemorrhage and death. No involvement of any other organs. If the autodoc initial diagnosis was confirmed at the quarantine camp, the internees were introduced into the population of the camp where they were treated, mostly just to keep them comfortable from the raging fever that characterized the infection, and where they acted as research subjects as the search for a vaccine or other treatment continued round the clock.

The central organizing facility for this search for a vaccine and for other treatments was at Answorth’s CDC facility in Atlanta.

He had a good crew, though they were few enough now and slowly growing fewer. They had figured out what the bug looked like, they knew how it moved around, they now knew how it killed, and they knew what you looked like when you caught it. They would know its genetics in another week or two, if he didn’t lose anymore of his crew. They also knew that Zambero was resistant to every antibiotic they threw at it.

*

“Good evening, Dr. Answorth. You have seventeen messages.”

Answorth ignored the autoreceptionist computer and hurried past his office door and into the Cultures Room. Nobody was in there except Todd and Janni, the two graduate students who managed the work of growing cultures of the Zambero in various media.

“Where’s Andrew? Boris?”

“They’re gone,” Janni said.

“Went up to Duluth to pick up a package.”

“Why wasn’t it delivered?”

“Fed Ex is running a little short on drivers. They couldn’t have it here before tomorrow. They should be back anytime.”

“Should have put it in an autocab,” Answorth said and went back to his desk and sat at his computer. He could wait a few minutes to put the autocab’s discovery in front of the two epidemiologists. It would be better to put a few facts together first, anyway.

He pulled up a map of the Atlanta metro area. “Computer, plot all the locations in Atlanta where we have run decontamination procedures during the last month.” The screen instantly changed as small blue disks began to dot the map.

“Now plot locations at which new infections have been detected.”

Clumps of tens of thousands of red dots began to pile on top of hospitals.

“No, no, I mean infections found, not at a hospital, uh, I mean the places where the individuals bearing the new infections likely picked up the infection in the first place.”

“We do not have that level of resolution in the data.”

“Oh, then just plot their movement history prior to diagnosis. Yeah, that’s what I want.”

This took a few minutes, as the computer retrieved masses of data from the infectee history database and then plotted the information on the map in the form of yellow lines crawling over the map. Many of them intersected the blue decon locations.

“Now, color code red all those decon locations where the victim routes you have just plotted intersect the decon site within twenty four hours after the date of decontamination.”

Most of the disks changed from blue to red.

“Remove any paths that might have served to re-contaminate a decon site prior to a subsequent infection.”

“I have no basis for making that judgment. Can you give me criteria?”

The computer waited patiently while Answorth considered. “I want to know where new infections get picked up. Can you help me with that? Maybe. . . .”

Answorth leaned into the screen as the map redrew and took his chin in his hand, wondering if he was doing this right. Answorth swore and sat back, mulling the issue. He stared at the screen for several minutes. If he had more than two epidemiologists on his staff, this problem would just be an overnighter. But doing it this way was hopeless. He knew what he wanted, but he didn’t know how to ask for it.

Answorth was still trying to figure out how to put this question to the computer when Andrew stuck his head in the door.

“Thank God you’re here,” Answorth said. “Come in, come in. I think we have found some crack new epidemiologists to put on our crew. . . .”

PART II. THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

Chapter 5. Pandemic

(Africa)

Geoffrey Answorth squinted through groggy jet lag and peered towards the dark green tree line on the far shore of the sluggish, muddy current of the Zambero River. He scratched at his chin, and a sudden, sharp pain pinched at his throat as his whiskers caught in the weave of his collar, his two-week-old beard itchy and sweaty in the tropics.

Atlanta had blistering summers, but they also had very efficient air conditioners. Answorth shivered in the African sun at the recollection of the way his shirt felt on his back after coming into the lab in Atlanta on a hot, humid August afternoon. He couldn’t remember having a chilly, damp back since he’d stepped off the plane in Ktanu Town—right onto the tarmac—no jetways in Ktanu Town. No autocabs at the terminal, either. You still had to find a human cab driver here. No air conditioner in the cabs, either.

Here, the nearest air conditioner was two hundred miles down the Zambero River, and that was unfortunate, because all these bodies stacked up on the dock at the Kiterro Mission Station were going to need some serious cooling in the next few hours.

Answorth turned from the slow, muddy, swirling river to the corrugated metal shed, gray paint peeling from the hot, rusting walls, corroded iron tobacco and skin-lightening cream advertisements flaking slowly away to rest on the moldy, sagging boards of the landing. The wonder of it all was that the bodies lying on the dock didn’t fall through the rotten boards back into the river that they had just been fished out of.

Mputa leaned over one of the corpses. “As near as we can tell, they’re Atashi tribe. These bodies have been in the water for no more than two days.”

“These are the most recent? How many before these?”

“Just two floated down three days ago. Kosi found them—he runs this fishing pier and what little railroad business there still is at this station. He assumed they were just drowning victims. Fishers. They see that from time to time, especially during the rainy season. They keep the bodies here because the Atashi will come down to claim them. But nobody came, and then three more floated down day before yesterday. Then this group, last night. Half a dozen. There are more piling up on that sand bar up there.” Mputa shielded his eyes with his hand and pointed to a brown strip of shoaling mud roofed by the black hulk of a creeper-wrapped topa tree that had collapsed where the bank gave way at a bend in the river. “That’s when they called me. And I called you. Or, called your computer, I should say, and left the message.”

“Yeah. Sorry about the delay. I was out of town.”

“I wasn’t complaining. Your machine found you fast. I was surprised.”

The shoal was striped with the brown bodies of another half dozen dead and three crocodiles.

Answorth pulled back the plastic sheet from the nearest body. “Done an autopsy yet?”

“They didn’t drown.”

“What killed them?”

Mputa shrugged.

“You’re doing the tissue pathology and the cultures?”

“They were sent to the lab at Kunta this morning, as soon as I arrived. We can hope for the results in two weeks on the cultures.”

“You think this is a pathogen, then?”

“There’s very little to go on. The numbers and the lack of trauma suggest a pathogen. That’s all.”

“Probably ought to isolate these bodies. Why did they end up in the river?”

Mputa shrugged. “My guess is fever.”

“Died while trying to cool down?”

Mputa nodded.

“But—let me guess—no pneumonia, right?”

“Right.”

“I thought so. Not enough time for it. Whatever this is, it’s fast.” Answorth straightened and winced as his back protested. He tucked the front of his shirt back in at his disordered waistline. “Guess we need to get upriver and see what’s going on up there. How soon before WHO gets here? And that Red Cross team?”

“Another hour or two. Maybe. The roads are not too well maintained between here and Kunta.”

And no autocabs in Kunta, Answorth thought, but he didn’t complain. He wasn’t anxious to see WHO or the Red Cross either. He rather liked the thought of Robert Fixton having to haggle over a cab fare and then trying to give directions to a human driver with no GPS. An autocab would get him here in a few hours. But a human driver . . . with any luck he could be on the river before they arrived.

*

In fact it was four hours before the WHO team made it to the riverside at the Kiterro Mission Station, and the sun, low in the west, was washing the far side of the river with a film of hazy tropical golden twilight before Answorth crouched on the bow of the sluggish riverboat nudging wearily upriver. The trees along the riverside trailed branches and creepers in the water, swaying along with the gentle, muddy current. The boat had passed half a dozen more bodies since they left dockside an hour ago, all of them Atashi, as far as you could tell from something face down in the stream.

The river was wide and loaded with floating debris, tree branches, clumps of weed where the soft, sandy banks continually slumped in, ripples from submerged bars and rocks, and long before sunset Answorth began to fancy that every dark knot in the water was another Atashi, drifting down toward the distant coast. The river smelled green, with that eye-watering pungency that makes tropical streams so chic with the gnat set.

The barge wasn’t making better than seven knots against the current, and Answorth couldn’t hope to make the village before noon tomorrow. He wondered what the population of the village was. Mputa hadn’t said. Probably didn’t know. The villagers didn’t come down to the station as a rule, especially since the Mission had been destroyed during the war. The nuns and the priests and their medicines were gone now. Nothing else at Kiterro interested the Atashi. They only came down to collect their dead, and this time they hadn’t come.

*

The riverboat shuddered in the heavy, stagnant morning as it nudged into the shifting currents at the confluence of the muddy Zambero with the little, green-tinted Cinti River, and Answorth leaned on the rusting rail, rinsing his mouth, still foul with hangover. Seven more bodies had passed the boat since first light.

Ahead, a village swung into view around a bend in the Zambero, and underneath him, Answorth felt the low throb of the engine slow. The riverboat drifted to a crawl, just enough to maintain steerage, but made no more progress against the current. Yet the village was still a hundred yards upriver, a ramshackle wooden pier barely visible where it sloped weakly out into the water. Answorth pitched his cigarette over the side. “What’s going on, Mputa?”

The doctor shook his head and started for the wheelhouse. Answorth could hear the talk, but it was all in the local patois, so he waited patiently, lighting another cigarette and scanning the riverbank until Mputa reappeared. The river had fallen in the night and the channel was narrow. From where he stood, Answorth could easily see another five bodies stranded on the muddy banks on both sides of the river.

“The captain will not go any further, Dr. Answorth. He says the crew will not pass this village.”

“We still have twenty miles or more to go to the nearest Atashi village.”

“They will not pass this village.”

“Does he say why not?”

“There are no fires in this village. They see the bodies. The crew is mostly Cinti. They have no juju against this place.”

“Tell them you have juju against this place. Let’s get on up there. Why are there no fires here. . . ?” Answorth’s voice died away as he realized what they were saying. He nodded his head upriver. “This is an Atashi village?”

“No.”

He squinted upriver. No fires. Deserted. But the thatch on the roofs looked good, from here. He’d be able to see them, if there were people up there. . . .

“Apparently the problem has come downstream,” Mputa said.

“Yeah. It would be like the villagers to fish a body from upstream out of the river, right?”

“Yes.”

“Will he put us ashore here and wait for us to return?”

“Yes, Dr. Answorth. It is your charter. He will wait until an hour before dusk.”

*

The riverboat looked a lot smaller from the sandy bank of the river. The bush was fairly thick, and lugging the medical kit was clumsy, creepers and vines constantly snagging on the equipment. The noon sun bore down painfully on Answorth’s thinning hair before they finally stepped out into the clearing that formed the center of the village. The Red Cross team, all Cinti tribe, stayed well behind Answorth and Mputa.

The village was absolutely quiet. Not even the usual sound of dogs or chickens. No movement, no smoke, nothing. Just the clearing and the neat little arc of well maintained huts and a well in the center. At the far edge of the village, the jungle started up again twenty yards away.

Answorth started into the clearing, Mputa beside him, hailing the village. There was no answer. “We’ll start with a sample of the well water, Mputa. Then we’ll search the houses. Don’t forget your gloves. You know what to do.”

Mputa took a bottle from the kit and leaned over the well, trying to tie a line to the neck of the bottle. He stopped beside the low, mud brick ring surrounding the well, peering down into the darkness.

Mputa said nothing, but moaned, a low, quavering hum of astonishment.

Answorth stepped to the well and peered down beside him. The well was full of bodies.

Answorth felt the chill right through the African noon.

The neat little huts were empty.

The fishing dock was covered with bodies, some in the boats, some half in, half out of the water, others draped along the short pier of roughly hewn and weather softened planks. Men, women, children, the young and the old. They were all here, all in the water, wherever they could find it.

Answorth took a respirator out of the kit for himself and handed Mputa one. Then he dug out the satellite phone.

Chapter 6. Bedside Manner

(Atlanta, One Year Later)

“Do you feel warm?” The voice was flat and neutral, just getting the job done.

“No,” Answorth replied, trying to sound just as flat and uninterested in this whole ridiculous process. He crossed his legs, didn’t like the feel of his own naked legs against each other, and lay them out straight again.

The mechanical arm swung quickly over his naked abdomen, paused briefly over his groin, irritating him.

“Yeah, there’s a scar there. It’s an old one. Never mind that. You saw it last week. And the week before that.”

“Please lie still and do not speak except in response to questions.”

Answorth’s face flushed with anger. “Yeah? You want to know if I’m hot now?” he asked, sneering at the metallic arm as it crept back and forth over his lower abdomen.

“Do you feel feverish? Are you changing your response to question fifty-six? Are you experiencing a sudden increase in warmth?”

Answorth swore hotly and reached up to push the robotic arm out of the way, but it sensed the approach of his hand and withdrew with surprising speed before he could touch it. “You must lie down for the examination to proceed.” The voice was flat, neutral, unengaged, disinterested.

“Dr. Answorth?” The voice from the intercom on the wall was human, at least. “Dr. Answorth, is there some difficulty?”

He finished pulling his shirt on in angry silence before he punched the button beside the door. The gray panel slid back and he stormed out into the hall.

“God damn that thing,” he muttered as he rounded the corner and breezed past the nurses’ station.

“Dr. Answorth,” the attendant stood at her station and shouted after him, her voice the one from the intercom. “Dr. Answorth, you must finish the examination! You can’t leave without finishing! You’ll be arrested!”

He ignored her and started straight for the button to hail an elevator. But one of three security guards, all big fellows, all armed, stepped deftly in front of him. “May I see your release, sir?”

Answorth stared at the guard for a minute as he drew a deep breath. He half turned back toward the nurses’ station. The other two security guards had stood and were taking up stations on either side of their colleague. They needn’t have bothered; Answorth was already breathing heavily from the exertion of his escape from the examination room.

At least the guard sounded like he meant to be vaguely threatening. Nothing too personal about it, but there was some hint of emotion, even if it was only officially emotional. Being confronted by a human was almost a mercy. The guard’s face was broad, flat, his nose at least three fingers wide, scarcely rising beyond the level of his flat cheeks. Answorth figured maybe Central American native Indian, maybe a touch of African in there somewhere.

The native Central Americans had been hit hard by the Zambero pandemic. A scant twelve months after the Zambero bacteria first appeared in Africa, southern Mexico was pretty well depopulated, according to the last news out of there, though that news was old. No epidemiological reports had been issued from Mexico for weeks. All the Central American countries were depopulating rapidly, Zambero having found a ready, familiar home there, and a population whose genotype, like everyone else’s genotype, was completely unprepared for the new bacterium.

That fact made this man a particularly good choice for a security guard up here on the Diagnostics Level of St. Jude’s in Atlanta. He knew what the Zambero bacterium would do to a population once it got loose. But for that matter, everyone knew what the Zambero bacterium could do by now, a scant twelve months after it first got loose.

The colder climates had not fared much better than the tropics. Europe lost fifty million in the last eight months and was completely blockaded from the rest of the world. No traffic was allowed in or out, especially coming and going from Asia.

Not that anyone in Asia was trying to get out. If there was anyone left alive in western China, they hadn’t made themselves heard for the last three months. The southeast Chinese coast was now lined with artillery batteries and surface to surface missiles, threatening to shoot anything that attempted to land by sea. They had been devastated when refugees from Japan and Taiwan fled the islands, seeking shelter on the mainland. And of course the Taiwan Straits were patrolled by American and Russian missile frigates, threatening to shoot anything attempting to leave China by air or sea. Nothing came in, nothing got out.

The Americans and the Russians had maintained a blockade around Africa as well, up until a couple of months ago. There didn’t seem to be any point to the exercise anymore. Nobody had heard from sub-Saharan Africa for weeks.

And so on and so on, all the way across the planet. Answorth felt a flush of warmth again, but it was not the first blush of the terrible fever that always heralded the onset of Zambero.

He started back to the nurses’ station.

“Look, miss. Can’t you do this? It’s pretty routine.”

She smiled, sympathetically. “No, Dr. Answorth. We have to process over a hundred patients every hour, and I’m the only one left on duty. I have to stay here and monitor the aides. They—”

“Aides!” Answorth exploded.

“You know we don’t have enough physicians left for all the examinations we have to do every day, Dr. Answorth. You know we have to use the autodocs. There aren’t enough physicians left alive now to do the weekly checks. We can’t risk any more of them. We’ve lost too many already. . . .”

Answorth nodded understandingly, his bearded face turned to the tile floor. He fished about his side for cigarettes, but his hand merely slapped at flat, thin fabric. He had emptied the contents of his pockets when he arrived at St. Jude’s so everything could be sterilized.

The nurse, like any good nurse, saw the gesture. “You know, Dr. Answorth, you can complete your examination in just another seven and a half minutes. Then you get your health certificate for this week, and you can go have that smoke.”

A door down the hall opened, and out hobbled a tiny old woman, surprisingly brisk for somebody who had to be eighty years old. “I never been so damned insulted in all my life. . . .” she muttered irritably.  “I should have broke the nasty thing!” She marched up to the nurse’s station and held out a wrinkled paw. She got her chit clearing her for the week and specifying the time she had to return next week, and, just as she turned to the door, addressed the nurse over her shoulder. “If you want to know if I been having hallucinations, you just give me a phone call. I will not be back next week, young lady. I will not permit that vile thing to caress me in that fashion.”

But she would be back next week, Answorth knew. She would be, or the police, seeing that she had no health certificate and had missed her checkup, would put her in quarantine.

Same thing for him. Same thing for everybody. Eighty-three million Americans were dead because of Zambero. Ninety percent of the physicians in the country were dead. There wasn’t a doctor left in America whose sole duty wasn’t simply trying to identify and isolate Zambero patients from the rest of the population.

Except for Answorth and his crew at the CDC. They had the decidedly unenviable duty of trying to find a vaccine or a cure.

These people knew that. Answorth felt a little ashamed, knowing they knew that. They were just trying to make sure he stayed alive, after all. It was for his own good. It was for everyone’s good.

He shook his head sadly and started down the hall to the examination room again.

Chapter 7. Autocab

Answorth sat back in the autocab and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. The autocab smelled strongly of ozone and disinfectant from the air purification system. The machine waited a few seconds while it pondered his best route back to the CDC, then pulled easily out into the thin traffic.

The empty sidewalks scrolled past, the blurry concrete punctuated with the occasional brave straggler. Most folks preferred to stay inside where the air was filtered and disinfected these days. Crowds were not popular. In its way, that had proven a blessing. Downtown had seen a little rioting and looting when the epidemic first broke out and people stopped going to work, but then, when everybody realized the best way to catch the disease was in a crowd, the riots and looting stopped cold.

Answorth wondered idly how much longer that nurse would have to sit at her dreary job. That would have to be lonely work, sitting up there all day watching the Origyn Systems autodocs screen people for Zambero. Nobody’s going to stop and talk and pass the time of day. Everybody hates the machine. They just want to get in, get it done, and go home, if they’re lucky enough to still be healthy. That weekly visit to the autodoc at the screening clinic was just a little too much like going for a job interview as the corpse at a funeral home. No doubt that nurse would complain very little when they finally replaced her with an auto-something-or-other from Origyn Systems.

Answorth flinched as the cigarette smoke got into his eyes. If the CDC or somebody else didn’t come up with a cure or a vaccine pretty quickly, they were all going to end up getting that job at the funeral parlor. The funeral parlor run by robots.

He laughed to himself. Origyn Systems, Inc. First they gave us the autocab, nearly four years ago. Everybody loved those. His own mother retired off Origyn stock when those came out. Private cars were getting rare just two years later when the tsunami hit—why bother, when you can call an autocab on your cell phone, have it there in less than five minutes? It’s clean, it’s cheaper than driving yourself, you don’t have to park it, you don’t buy insurance, there’s no human to sit next to, smell, talk to, unless you bring him or her along yourself. They call their own repair service when they break down. They have the best anti-collision systems in the world. They are so cheap to build and operate that within a year’s time they were everywhere. The autocabs got a lot of credit for getting people to safety when the big wave hit, two years ago.

But after the waves hit, Origyn equipment was banned from government service, and nobody really knows why. Their stock drops, though they still promise great things to come, and the public seems to want to reward them by using every autocab that comes off the market.

Then Zambero breaks out, doctors and nurses are killed off by the thousands, leaving only a tenth of the medical-industrial complex in America still on it feet. Zambero kills off seventy percent of the world’s population in one year, and the bacterium is still going strong. You can’t hide from it. Masks are useless—the pathogen is too small to be trapped in common filters. You just have to stay away from anyone who might have it, and you spend as little time outside as possible. So Origyn Systems, Inc., introduces the autodoc to the public, and thus solves the issue of national health care in a single stroke. People hate them, but they use them. Now everybody sees an autodoc once a week or they get thrown into the quarantine facilities, and that’s not a nice place to be.

Origyn Systems, Inc., should run for president, Answorth decided, enjoying his morbid little fantasy. The platform would be a little sticky, though. . . . ‘Rumor has it that Origyn Systems, Inc., is working on the autofuneraldirector.’ Origyn stock goes through the roof.

Of course, nobody would be left to buy stock except the autodocs, the autocabs, and the autofuneraldirectors who, suffering under the sudden downturn of business since all the humans were dead, begin to lobby the autocongress hard for some customers.

Answorth laughed grimly.

*

The streets were quiet, deserted. You could still see a National Guardsman on most street corners, armed and ready to go, although you couldn’t pay people to loot, not anymore. If a store didn’t have the filters and the ionizers going, you didn’t want to hang around in them long enough to smash a window and grab anything.  And you never knew who you passed in the crowd. If the autodocs don’t catch you in the early stages, the first sign that you have the fever is you drop right where you are, and then you and everybody within twenty feet of you goes into quarantine. Try to run, and you get shot by one of those Guardsmen.

Every day looked like a Sunday morning in downtown Atlanta anymore. The city still had a population of nearly a million, but everybody just felt safer inside, with the HEPA filters and the UV chambers and the disinfectant atomizers and the ionizers running full blast, just in case a cloud of something nasty happened to be drifting over the town.

“Autocab, cancel that trip order. Take me down 14th, headed east. The next exit.”

The autocab glided smoothly off to the right, exiting the downtown connector and halting for a few seconds at the peculiar formality of a traffic light on a nearly deserted, fully automated street. Then it turned left and descended into the canyon between high-rises soaring into the gray sky on either side, bracketed by the occasional coffee shop crouching between hundred story buildings.

“Autocab, pull into that café.”

“Very good, sir,” the robotic voice intoned flatly. “However, that café was frequented yesterday by a gentleman who tested positive this morning during his weekly checkup. This autocab does not recommend entering that facility, sir.”

“Just this morning? How do you know that?” Answorth felt his guts tighten. “You’re not supposed to know that, autocab. The list of names of suspected infectees is supposed to be private. Anyway, the café is open. So it’s been sterilized and cleared, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. It was scheduled for sterilization at noon today, and the operation was performed normally.”

“Then it’s clean. Take me to the coffee shop, please. Right now.”

The autocab turned at the next block, though its response was a second or two in coming. “Sir, this autocab would not recommend that action.”

The autocab’s voice, flat, neutral, the twin of the autodoc, was beginning to grate on Answorth’s nerves.

When he responded to the machine, he tried to keep his own voice cool and level, and only tinged with the faintest hint of menace as he sat forward to stare at the control panel. “And why would you not recommend that action, autocab?”

“Because, sir, in correlating the movements of recent infectees as reported by other autocabs with the published reports of quarantined and recently disinfected sites, this autocab has determined that there is a seventy-five percent probability that the sterilization procedures are not adequate. The number of new infectees who patronized recently sterilized locations just prior to infection and who had no other identifiable contact with known infectious vectors is statistically significant. Decontaminated sites appear as a site of initial infection at a rate higher than a randomly chosen control group of other sites.”

Answorth did not sit back, but neither did he repeat his command to the autocab. The cab had access to the news—that could just come in over the car radio. So they would know which shops were closed for decontamination, because that was news. The identities of the recent infectees were supposed to be secret, but that just meant the autocabs were passing this data around among themselves. After all, they probably carried the recent victims to the hospital for their weekly checkup, and infectees don’t come out the same door they went in. The autocabs would know this. They also had no doubt carried the victims to their coffee shops. . . . And they knew who they carried from place to place. All fares were logged.

They had figured out what it meant.

So the autocabs, talking among themselves, took all the information they had gathered among themselves, combined it with publicly broadcast information, and they analyzed it, including a statistical workup, and used that to draw the conclusion that Answorth needed to stay away from the coffee shop. Very interesting.

“Autocab, who owns you?”

“This autocab is leased by the DeKalb Yellow Autocab Company, sir. This autocab received its CPU, interface, and sensory subsystems from Origyn Systems, Incorporated, one year ago, and is still the property of Origyn Systems, Incorporated. This autocab was not operational prior to that time. If you wish any further information, please refer to Origyn Systems, Incorporated, of Baltimore, Maryland.”

“I see.” Answorth mulled over this as the cab turned right onto Peachtree. “Autocab, take me to work. The CDC.”

Answorth resisted the urge to ask the autocab to step on it.

Chapter 8. The CDC

Answorth stopped at the front desk at the CDC’s Zambero Pathogen Special Containment Facility which, despite the name, didn’t actually act as the repository for any particular collection of specimens of the Zambero bacterium—there was plenty of that available everywhere for anyone who really wanted it. This unit was so named as it was tasked with the job of designing a way to restrain the spread of the plague.

The approach so far had been exclusively along the lines of isolating outbreaks so as to confine the geographical spread of the disease, which was why the entire population of the country had to endure the indignity of the weekly checkups with the autodocs.

The effort had been fairly successful. Most new cases were caught before they were more than a few days old, during which the bacterium was a little less communicable, and since people tended to stay indoors, infectees’ contact with others would be minimal. Patients detected carrying the bacteria were transported under isolation to huge camps outside cities. The camp nearest Atlanta was south of the town near Macon, on the site of Warner Robbins Air Force Base. There the victims were observed for another week. The symptoms were very specific: high fever, hallucinations, and a meningitis-like inflammation in the brain that invariably led to cerebral hemorrhage and death. No involvement of any other organs. If the autodoc initial diagnosis was confirmed at the quarantine camp, the internees were introduced into the population of the camp where they were treated, mostly just to keep them comfortable from the raging fever that characterized the infection, and where they acted as research subjects as the search for a vaccine or other treatment continued round the clock.

The central organizing facility for this search for a vaccine and for other treatments was at Answorth’s CDC facility in Atlanta.

He had a good crew, though they were few enough now and slowly growing fewer. They had figured out what the bug looked like, they knew how it moved around, they now knew how it killed, and they knew what you looked like when you caught it. They would know its genetics in another week or two, if he didn’t lose anymore of his crew. They also knew that Zambero was resistant to every antibiotic they threw at it.

*

“Good evening, Dr. Answorth. You have seventeen messages.”

Answorth ignored the autoreceptionist computer and hurried past his office door and into the Cultures Room. Nobody was in there except Todd and Janni, the two graduate students who managed the work of growing cultures of the Zambero in various media.

“Where’s Andrew? Boris?”

“They’re gone,” Janni said.

“Went up to Duluth to pick up a package.”

“Why wasn’t it delivered?”

“Fed Ex is running a little short on drivers. They couldn’t have it here before tomorrow. They should be back anytime.”

“Should have put it in an autocab,” Answorth said and went back to his desk and sat at his computer. He could wait a few minutes to put the autocab’s discovery in front of the two epidemiologists. It would be better to put a few facts together first, anyway.

He pulled up a map of the Atlanta metro area. “Computer, plot all the locations in Atlanta where we have run decontamination procedures during the last month.” The screen instantly changed as small blue disks began to dot the map.

“Now plot locations at which new infections have been detected.”

Clumps of tens of thousands of red dots began to pile on top of hospitals.

“No, no, I mean infections found, not at a hospital, uh, I mean the places where the individuals bearing the new infections likely picked up the infection in the first place.”

“We do not have that level of resolution in the data.”

“Oh, then just plot their movement history prior to diagnosis. Yeah, that’s what I want.”

This took a few minutes, as the computer retrieved masses of data from the infectee history database and then plotted the information on the map in the form of yellow lines crawling over the map. Many of them intersected the blue decon locations.

“Now, color code red all those decon locations where the victim routes you have just plotted intersect the decon site within twenty four hours after the date of decontamination.”

Most of the disks changed from blue to red.

“Remove any paths that might have served to re-contaminate a decon site prior to a subsequent infection.”

“I have no basis for making that judgment. Can you give me criteria?”

The computer waited patiently while Answorth considered. “I want to know where new infections get picked up. Can you help me with that? Maybe. . . .”

Answorth leaned into the screen as the map redrew and took his chin in his hand, wondering if he was doing this right. Answorth swore and sat back, mulling the issue. He stared at the screen for several minutes. If he had more than two epidemiologists on his staff, this problem would just be an overnighter. But doing it this way was hopeless. He knew what he wanted, but he didn’t know how to ask for it.

Answorth was still trying to figure out how to put this question to the computer when Andrew stuck his head in the door.

“Thank God you’re here,” Answorth said. “Come in, come in. I think we have found some crack new epidemiologists to put on our crew. . . .”