Plague

One

He was still half-asleep when the doorbell rang. The sound penetrated his head like someone dropping coins down a well. It rang again, long and urgent, and he opened his eyes and discovered it was morning.

'Just a minute!' he croaked, with a sleep-dry mouth. The doorbell wouldn't wait, though, and kept on calling him. He swung his legs out of bed, groped on the floor for his discarded bathrobe, and pushed his feet uncomfortably into his slippers.

He shuffled out into the hallway. Through the frosted glass front door he could see a short stocky figure in blue, leaning on the bellpush.

'Just a minute!' he called again. 'I'm coming!'

He unlocked the door and peered out. The brilliant Florida sunshine made him blink. The warm morning breeze was blowing the palms beside his driveway, and already the sky was rich and blue.

'You Dr. Petrie?' said the man abruptly. He was heavy-set, dressed in crumpled blue coveralls. He was holding his cap in his hand, and his face had the expression of an anxious pug-dog.

'That's right. What time is it?'

'I don't know,' said the man hoarsely. 'Maybe eight-thirty, nine. It's my kid. He's sick. I mean, real sick, and I think he's gonna die or something. You have to come.'

'Couldn't you call the hospital?'

'I did. They asked me what was wrong, and when I told them, they said to see a doctor. They said it didn't sound too serious. But it keeps on getting worse and worse, and I'm real worried.'

The man was twitchy and sweating and the dark rings under his eyes showed just how little sleep he'd had. Dr. Petrie scratched his stubbly chin, and then nodded. Last night's party had left him feeling as if someone had hit him in the face with a rubber hammer, but he recognized real anxiety when he saw it.

'Come in and sit down. I'll be two minutes.'

The man in the blue coveralls took a couple of steps into the hallway, but was too nervous to sit. Dr. Petrie went into the bedroom, threw off his bathrobe, and dressed hastily. He slipped his feet into sandals, ran a comb through his tousled brown hair, and then reached for his medical bag and car keys.

Outside in the hallway, the man had at last sat down, perched on the edge of a wooden trunk that Dr. Petrie used for storing old medical journals. The man was staring at the pattern on the tiled floor, with that strange dull look that Dr. Petrie had seen so many times before. Why has this happened to me? Of all people, why has it happened to me?

'Mr. — '

'Kelly. Dave Kelly. My son's name is David, too. Are we ready to leave?'

'All set. Do you want to come in my car?'

'Sure,' said Dave Kelly woodenly. 'I don't think I wanna drive any more today.'

Dr. Petrie slammed the glass front door behind them and they stepped out into the heat and the sun. His dark blue Lincoln Continental was parked in the driveway. At the kerb stood a battered red pickup which obviously belonged to Mr. Kelly. On the side it said Speedy Motors Inc.

They climbed into the car and Dr. Petrie turned on the air-conditioning. It was March, and by this time of morning the temperature was already building up to 75 degrees. All along the quiet palm-lined streets of the fashionable Miami suburb, where Dr. Petrie lived and practised, the neat and elegant houses had blinds drawn and shades down.

'Now,' said Dr. Petrie, twisting his lanky body in the seat to reverse the Lincoln out of the drive. 'While we're driving, I want you to tell me everything that's happened to your son. Symptoms, color, everything. Oh, and direct me, too.'

'I live downtown,' said Kelly, rubbing sweat from his eyes. 'Just off North West 20th Street.'

Dr. Petrie swung the car around, and they bounced over the sidewalk and into the street. He gunned the engine, and they flickered through the light and shade of Burlington Drive, heading south. The air-conditioning chilled the sweat on Mr. Kelly's face, and he began to tremble.

'What made you choose me?' asked Dr. Petrie. 'There have to be a hundred doctors living nearer.'

Mr. Kelly coughed. 'You was recommended. My brother-in-law, he's an attorney, he used to be a patient of yours. I called him and asked him for the best. I tell you, doc — I gotta have the best for that kid. If he's as bad as he looks, I gotta have the best.'

'How bad does he look?' Dr. Petrie swerved around a parked truck.

'Right now, when I left him, he didn't even open his eyes. He's white, like paper. He started to shake and shiver around ten or eleven last night. He came into the bedroom and asked for a glass of water. He looked yellow and sick right then, and I gave him water, and aspirin. Was that okay?'

Dr. Petrie nodded. 'They won't do any harm. How old is he?'

'David's just nine years old. Last Thanksgiving.'

Dr. Petrie turned on to 441 and drove swiftly and steadily south. He glanced at his gold wristwatch. It was a little after nine. Oh well, a good abrupt start to Monday morning. He looked at himself in the driving mirror and saw a clean-cut all-American doctor with hangover written all over his face.

Some of his more critical medical colleagues had sarcastically nicknamed Dr. Petrie 'Saint Leonard of the Geriatrics'. That was because his clientele was mainly elderly and exclusively rich — old widows with immense fortunes and skins tanned as brown as leather handbags.

And it was also because of his uncomfortably saintly appearance — a look that gave you the feeling that he drew half of his healing talent from medical training, and the other half directly from God. It was to do with his tall, lean body; his clear and almost inspired blue eyes; his open, benign face — and it all contributed to his success.

The way Dr. Petrie saw it, rich old ladies needed medication just as much as anyone else, and if he could build up his income with a melting smile and a glossy clinic full of Muzak and tropical fish, then there wasn't anything medically or morally wrong. Besides, he thought, at least I'm concerned enough to climb out of bed on a hot Monday morning to visit a sick kid whose father really needs me.

He just wished that he had been saintly enough not to drink eight vodkatinis last night at the golf club get-together.

'Who's with the boy now?' Dr. Petrie asked Mr. Kelly.

'His mother. She was supposed to work the late shift, but she stayed home.'

'Have you given him anything to eat or drink?'

'Just water. He was burning up one minute, and cold the next. His lips was dry, and his tongue was all furred up — I reckoned that water was probably the best.'

Dr. Petrie stopped for a red light and sat there drumming his fingers on the rim of the steering-wheel, thinking.

Mr. Kelly looked across at him, nervous and worried, and tried not to fidget. 'Does it sound like any kind of sickness you know?' he asked. Dr. Petrie smiled. 'I can't tell you until I see the boy for myself. It could be any number of things. What about his motions?'

'His what?'

'His bowels. Are they loose, or what?'

Mr. Kelly nodded. 'That's it. Runny, like soup.' They moved away from the lights, and Mr. Kelly gave directions.

After a couple of turns, they arrived at a busy intersection with a garage on the corner. The garage had three pumps and a greasy-looking concrete forecourt, and in the back were a broken-down truck and a heap of old fenders, jacks, wrenches, and rusted auto parts.

Mr. Kelly climbed out of the car. 'Follow me. We live up over the garage.'

Dr. Petrie took his medical bag and locked his Lincoln. He followed Mr. Kelly around the side of the garage, and they clanged together up a shaky fire-escape, to a cluttered balcony, and then into the Kelly's apartment. They stepped into the kitchen first. It was gloomy and smelled of sour milk.

'Gloria, I brought the doctor!' called Mr. Kelly. There was no answer. Mr. Kelly guided Dr. Petrie through into the dingy hallway. There was a broken-down umbrella stand, and plaques of vintage cars moulded out of plastic. A grubby red pennant on the wall said 'Miami Beach'.

'This way,' said Kelly. He gently opened a door at the end of the hall and ushered Dr. Petrie inside.

The boy was lying on crumpled, sweat-stained sheets. There was a suffocating smell of diahorrea and urine, even though the window was open. The child was thin, and looked tall for his age. He had a short haircut that, with his terrible pallor, made him look like a concentration camp victim. His eyes were closed, but swollen and blue, like plums. His bony ribcage fluttered up and down, and every now and then his hands twitched. His mother had wrapped pieces of torn sheet around his middle, to act as a diaper.

'I'm Dr. Petrie,' Leonard said, resting his hand momentarily on the mother's shoulder. She was a small, curly-haired woman in her mid-forties. She was dressed in a tired pink wrap, and her make-up was still half-on and half-off, just as it was when her son's sickness had interrupted her the night before.

'I'm glad you could come,' she said tiredly. 'He's no better and no worse.'

Dr. Petrie opened his medical bag. 'I just want to make a few tests. Blood pressure, respiration — that kind of thing. Would you like to wait outside while I do that?'

The mother stared at him with weary eyes. 'I been here all night. I don't see any call t'leave now.'

Dr. Petrie shrugged. 'Whatever you like. But you look as though you could do with a cup of coffee. Mr. Kelly — would you be kind enough to make us all a cup of coffee?'

'Surely,' said the father, who had been hovering nervously in the doorway.

Dr. Petrie sat by the bed on a rickety wooden chair and took the boy's pulse. It was weak and thready — worse than he would have expected.

The mother bit her lip and said, 'Is he going to be all right? He is going to be all right, ain't he? Today's the day he was supposed to go to the Monkey Jungle.'

Dr. Petrie tried to smile. He lifted the boy's arm again, and checked his blood pressure. Far too high for comfort. The last time he had seen vital signs as poor as this, the patient had been dead of barbiturate poisoning within three hours. He lifted David's puffed-up eyelids, and shone his torch into the glassy eyes. Weak response. He pressed his stethoscope against the little chest and listened to the heartbeat. He could hear fluid on the lungs, too.

'David,' he said gently, close to the boy's ear. 'David, can you hear me?'

The boy's mouth twitched, and he seemed to stir, but that was all.

'He's so sick,' said Mrs. Kelly wretchedly. 'He's so sick.'

Dr. Petrie rested his hand on David's skinny arm. 'Mrs. Kelly,' he said. 'I'm going to have to have this boy rushed straight to hospital. Can I use your phone?'

Mrs. Kelly looked pale. 'Hospital? But we called the hospital, and they said just a doctor would be okay. Can't you do something for him?'

Dr. Petrie stood up. 'What did you tell the hospital? Did you say how bad he was?'

'Well, I said he was sick, and he had a fever, and he'd messed the bed up a couple of times.'

'And what did they say to that?'

'They said it sounded like he'd eaten something bad, and that I oughtta keep him warm, give him plenty to drink and nothing to eat, and call a doctor. But after that, he started getting worse. That's when Dave went out for you.'

'This boy has to be in hospital,' insisted Dr. Petrie. 'I mean now. Where's your phone?'

'In the lounge. Straight through there.'

On the way out Dr. Petrie almost collided with Mr. Kelly, bringing a tin tray with three mugs of coffee on it. He smiled briefly, and took one of the mugs. While he dialled the hospital, he sipped the scalding black liquid and tried not to burn his mouth.

'Emergency unit? Hallo. Listen, this is Dr. Leonard Petrie here. I have a young boy, nine years old, seriously sick. I want to bring him in right away. I can't tell you now, but have a blood test ready. Sputum, too. Some kind of virus, I guess. I'm not sure. It could be something like cholera. Right. Oh, sure, I'll tell the parents. Give me five, ten minutes — I'll be right there.'

Mr. and Mrs. Kelly were waiting at the door. 'Cholera?' Mr. Kelly said.

Dr. Petrie swallowed as much coffee as he could. 'It's like cholera,' he said, as reassuringly as possible, 'but it's not exactly that. I can't tell without a blood sample. Dr. Selmer will do that for me at the hospital. He's a good friend of mine. We play golf together at Normandy Shores.'

Mrs. Kelly couldn't take in what he was saying. 'Golf?' she asked vaguely.

Dr. Petrie went through into David's bedroom, and helped Mr. Kelly to dress the boy in a pair of clean pajamas. David shuddered and whispered to himself while they buttoned the jacket up, but that was the only sign of life. Dr. Petrie lifted David up in his arms, and carried him out down the fire escape. Mr. Kelly followed with the medical bag.

'I sure hope he's going to be okay,' said Kelly. 'He was supposed to go on a school outing today. He'll be sorry he missed it. He didn't talk about nothing else, for weeks. "When I go to the Monkey Jungle… " every sentence.'

'Don't worry, Mr. Kelly. Once we get David to hospital, he's going to get the best treatment going.'

They were nearly at the bottom of the fire-escape when Dr. Petrie felt something go through David's body — a sigh, a vibration, a cough. He was a skilled doctor and he recognized it. The boy was dying. He needed to get him into a respirator as fast as he could, within the next two or three minutes, or that could be the end.

'Mr. Kelly,' he said tightly, 'we have to get the hell out of here!'

Mr. Kelly frowned. He said, 'What?' But when he saw Dr. Petrie clattering rapidly down the rest of the fire-escape and across to his car, he came running behind without a word.

'My car keys!' Dr. Petrie said quickly. 'Get them out of my pocket. No, the other side. That's right.'

Mr. Kelly, in his panic, dropped the keys on to the sidewalk, and they skated under the car. He knelt down laboriously and scrabbled beneath the Lincoln while his son weakened in Dr. Petrie's arms. 'Hurry — for Christ's sake!'

At last Mr. Kelly hooked the keys towards the gutter, picked them up and opened the car. Dr. Petrie laid David carefully on the back seat, and told Mr. Kelly to sit beside the boy and hold him, in case he rolled off. The hospital was five minutes away if you drove slow and sedate, but David didn't have that long.

The Lincoln's engine roared. They backed up a few feet, then swerved out into the street. Dr. Petrie crossed straight through a red light, sounding his horn and switching on his headlamps. He prayed that downtown Miami wouldn't be jammed up with early-morning traffic. Swinging the Lincoln across a protesting stream of cars, he drove south on South West 27th Avenue at nearly fifty miles an hour. He swerved from one lane to the other, desperately trying to work his way through the traffic, leaning on his horn and flashing his lights.

'How's David?' he shouted.

'I don't know — bad,' said the father. 'He looks kinda blue.'

Dr. Petrie could feel the sweat sliding down his armpits. He clenched his teeth as he drove, and thought of nothing at all but reaching the hospital on time.

He swung the Lincoln in a sharp, tire-howling turn, and in the distance he could see the white hospital building. They might make it yet.

But just at that moment, without warning, a huge green refrigerated truck rolled across in front of them, and stopped, blocking the entire street. Dr. Petrie shouted, 'Shit!' and jammed on the Lincoln's brakes.

He opened the car window and leaned out. The driver of the truck, a heavy-looking redneck in a greasy trucker's cap, was lighting himself a cigar prior to maneuvering his vehicle into a side entrance.

'Out of the goddamn way!' yelled Dr. Petrie. 'Get that truck out of the goddamn way!'

The truck driver tossed away a spent match and searched for another.

'What's the hurry, mac?' he called back. 'Don't get so worked up — you'll give yourself an ulcer.'

'I'm a doctor! I have a sick kid in this car! I have to get him to hospital!'

The driver shrugged. 'When they open the gates, I'll move out of your way. But I ain't shifting till I'm good and ready.'

'For God's sake!' shouted Dr. Petrie. 'I mean it. This kid is seriously ill!'

The truck driver blew smoke. 'I don't see no kid,' he remarked. He looked around to see if the gates were open yet, so that he could back the truck up.

Dr. Petrie had to close his eyes to control his fury. Then he spun the Lincoln on to the sidewalk, bouncing over the kerb, and drove around the truck's front fender. A hydrant scraped a long dent all the way down the Lincoln's wing, and Dr. Petrie felt the underside of the car jar against the concrete as he drove back on to the street on the other side of the truck.

Three more precious minutes passed before he pulled the car to a halt in front of the hospital's emergency unit. The orderlies were waiting for him with a trolley. He lifted David out of the back of the car like a loose-jointed marionette, and laid him gently down. The orderlies wheeled him off straight away.

Mr. Kelly leaned against the car. His face was drawn and sweaty. 'Jesus,' he whispered. 'I thought we'd never make it. Is he going to be all right?'

Dr.Petrie rested a hand on Mr. Kelly's shoulder. 'Don't you doubt it, Mr. Kelly. He's a very sick boy, but they know what they're doing in this place. They'll look after him.'

Mr. Kelly nodded. He was too exhausted to argue. 'If you want to wait in the waiting-room, Mr. Kelly — just go into the main entrance there and ask the receptionist. She'll tell you where it is. When I've talked to David's doctors, I'll come and let you know what's happening.'

Mr. Kelly nodded again. 'Thanks, doctor,' he said. 'You'll — make sure they look after Davey, won't you?'

'Of course.'

Dr. Petrie left Mr. Kelly to find his way to the waiting-room. He pushed through the swing doors outside the emergency unit, and walked down the long, cream-colored corridor until he reached the room he was looking for.

Through the windows, he could see his old friend Dr. Selmer talking to a group of doctors and nurses, and holding up various blood samples. Dr. Petrie rapped on the door.

'How's it going?' he asked, when Dr. Selmer came out. Anton Selmer was a short, gingery-haired man with a broad nose and plentiful freckles. He always put Dr. Petrie in mind of Mickey Rooney. He had a slight astigmatism, and wore heavy horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

Dr. Selmer, in his green surgical robes, pulled a face. 'Well, I don't know about this one, Leonard. I really can't say. We're making some blood and urine and sputum analyses right now. But I'm sure glad you brought him in.'

'Have you any clues at all?'

Dr. Selmer shrugged. 'What can I say? You were right when you said it looked a little like cholera, but it obviously isn't just cholera. The throat and the lungs are seriously infected, and there's swelling around the limbs and the joints. It may be some really rare kind of allergy, but it looks more like a contagious disease. A very virulent disease, too.'

Dr. Petrie rubbed his bristly chin.

'Say,' grinned Dr. Selmer. 'You look as though you've been celebrating something.'

Dr. Petrie gave him half a smile. 'Every divorced man is entitled to celebrate his good fortune once in a while,' he replied. 'Actually, it was the golf club party.'

'By the look of you, I'm not sorry I missed it. You look like death.'

A pretty dark-haired nurse came out of the emergency unit doors and both men watched her walk down the corridor with abstracted interest.

Dr. Petrie said, 'If it's contagious, we'd better see about inoculating the parents. And we'd better find out where he picked it up. Apart from that, I wouldn't mind a shot myself.'

'When we know what it is,' said Selmer, 'we'll inoculate everybody in sight. Jesus, we've just gotten rid of the winter flu epidemic. The last thing I want is an outbreak of cholera.'

'What a great way to start the week,' said Dr. Petrie. 'They don't even live in my district. The guy runs a garage on North West 20th.'

Dr. Selmer took of his green surgical cap. 'I always knew you were the guardian angel for the whole of Miami, Leonard. I can just see you up there on Judgement Day, sitting at God's right hand. Or maybe second from the right.'

Dr. Petrie grinned. 'One of these days, Anton, a bolt of lightning will strike you down for your unbelieving. You know, I bent my goddamn car on the way here. Some son of a bitch in a truck was blocking the street, and I had to drive over the sidewalk. Would you believe he just sat there and lit a cigar?'

Dr. Selmer raised his gingery eyebrows. 'It's the selfish society, Leonard. I'm all right, and screw you Charlie.'

They started to walk together down the corridor. 'I guess that must have been when it happened,' Dr. Selmer said.

'When what happened?'

'When the boy died.'

Dr. Petrie stopped, and stared at him hard. 'You mean he's dead?'

Dr. Selmer took his arm. 'Leonard — I'm sorry. I thought you realized. He was dead on arrival. You better have your car cleaned out if he was sitting in the back. You wouldn't want to catch this thing yourself.'

Dr. Petrie nodded. He felt stunned. He saw a lot of death, but the death that visited his own clientele was the shadowy death of old age, of failing hearts and hardened arteries.

The people who died under Dr. Petrie's care were reconciled to their mortality. But young David Kelly was just nine years old, and today he was supposed to have gone to the Monkey Jungle.

'Anton,' said Dr. Petrie, 'I'll catch you later. I have to tell the father.'

'Okay,' said Dr. Selmer. 'But don't forget to tell both parents to come in for a check-up. I don't want this kind of disease spreading.'

Dr. Petrie walked quickly down the fluorescent-lit corridors to the waiting-room. Before he pushed open the door, he looked through the small circular window, and saw Mr. Kelly sitting hunched on a red plastic chair, smoking and trying to read yesterday's Miami Herald.

He didn't know what the hell he was going to say. How do you tell a man that his only son, his nine-year-old son, has just died?

Finally, he pushed open the door. Mr. Kelly looked up quickly, and there was questioning hope in his face.

'Did you see him?' Mr. Kelly asked, 'Is he okay?'

Dr. Petrie laid his hand on the man's shoulder and pressed him gently back into his seat. He sat down himself, and looked into Mr. Kelly's tired but optimistic eyes with all the sympathy and care he could muster. When he spoke, his voice was soft and quiet, expressing feeling that went far deeper than bedside manner.

'Mr. Kelly,' he said. 'I'm sorry to tell you that David is dead.'

Mr. Kelly's mouth formed a question, but the question was never spoken. He simply stared at Dr. Petrie as if he didn't know where he was, or what had happened. He was still sitting, still staring, as the tears began to fill his eyes and run down his cheeks.

Dr. Petrie stood up. 'Come on,' he said quietly. 'I'll drive you home.'

By the time he got back to his clinic, his assistant Esther had already arrived, opened his mail, and poured his fresh-squeezed orange juice into its tall frosted glass. She was sitting at her desk, her long legs self-consciously crossed and her skirt hiked high, typing with the hesitant delicacy of an effete woodpecker. After all, she didn't want to break her long scarlet nails. She was twenty-one — a tall bouffant blonde with glossy red lips and a gaspy little voice. She wore a crisp white jacket that was stretched out in front of her by heavy, enormous breasts, and she teetered around the clinic on silver stilettos.

For all her ritz, though, Esther was trained, cool and practical. Dr. Petrie had seen her comfort an old woman in pain, and he knew that words didn't come any warmer. Apart from that, he enjoyed Esther's hero-worship, and the suppressed rage of his medical colleagues whenever he attended a doctor's convention with her in tow.

'Good morning, doctor', said Esther pertly, when he walked in. 'I looked for you in your bedroom, but you weren't around.'

'Disappointed?' he said, perching himself on the edge of her desk.

Esther pouted her shiny red lips. 'A little. You never know when Nurse Cinderella might get lucky and catch Dr. Charming's eye.'

Dr. Petrie grinned. 'Any calls?'

'Just two. Mrs. Vicincki wants to drop by at eleven. She says her ankle's giving her purgatory. And your wife.'

Dr. Petrie stood up and took off his jacket. 'My ex-wife,' he corrected.

'Sorry. Your ex-wife. She said you'd have to pick your daughter up tonight instead of tomorrow, because she's going to visit her mother in Fort Lauderdale.'

Dr. Petrie rubbed his eyes. 'I see. I don't suppose she said what time tonight.'

'Seven. Priscilla will be waiting for you.'

'Okay. What time's my first appointment?'

'In ten minutes. Mrs. Fairfax. All her records are on your table. There isn't much mail, so you should get through it all by then.'

Dr. Petrie looked mock-severe. 'You really have me organized, don't you?'

Esther made big blue eyes at him. 'Isn't that what clinical assistants are for?'

He patted her shoulder. 'I sometimes wonder', he said. 'If you feel like making me some very strong black coffee, you may even find out.'

'Sure thing'. said Esther, and stood up. 'Just remember, though, that a girl can't wait forever. Not even for Prince Valiant, M.D.'

Dr. Petrie went through to his clinic. It was built on the east side of the house — a large split-level room with one wide glass wall that overlooked a stone-flagged patio and Dr. Petrie's glittering blue swimming pool. The room was richly carpeted in cool deep green, and there were calm, mathematical modern paintings on every wall.

By the fine gauzy drapes of the window stood a pale marble statue of a running horse.

Dr. Petrie sat in his big revolving armchair and picked at the mail on his desk. Usually, he went through it fast and systematically, but today his mind was thrown off. He sipped his orange juice and tried not to think about David Kelly's flour-white face, and the anguished shivers of his grieving father.

There wasn't much mail, anyway. A couple of drug samples, a medical journal, and a letter from his attorney telling him that Margaret, his ex-wife, was declining to return his favorite landscape painting from the one-time marital home. He hadn't expected to get it back, anyway. Margaret considered that the home, and all of its contents, were fair pickings.

Esther came teetering in with his coffee. The way her breasts bounced and swayed under her white jacket, she couldn't be wearing a bra. Dr. Petrie wondered what she'd look like nude; but then decided that the real thing would probably spoil his fantasy.

She set the coffee down on his desk, and stared at him carefully. 'You don't seem yourself this morning.'

'Who do I seem like? Richard Chamberlain?'

'No, I don't mean that. I mean you don't look well.'

Dr. Petrie stirred Sweet 'n' Low into his coffee, and tapped the spoon carefully on the side of the cup.

'I'm worried.' he said. 'That's all.'

Esther looked at him seriously. 'Is there anything I can do?'

He raised his eyes. He gave a half smile, and then shook his head. 'I don't think so. It was what happened this morning. I was called out to help a young kid downtown. His father came all the way up here because I was recommended. He wanted the best, he said. But it was too late. The kid died on the way to hospital. He was only nine.'

'That's awful.'

Dr. Petrie rubbed the back of his neck tiredly. 'I know. It's awful. And that's all that I can say about it or do about it. I don't often feel inadequate, Esther, but I do right now.'

She gently laid her hand on him. 'If it helps any,' she said, 'you ought to think about the people you've saved.' Just then, the phone bleeped. Esther picked it up, and said, 'Dr. Petrie's clinic — can I help you?' She listened, and nodded, and then handed the phone over. 'It's for you,' she said. 'It's Miss Murry.'

Dr. Petrie took the receiver. 'You don't have to look so disapproving,' he told Esther. 'You and me, we're like the dynamic duo — Batman and Robin. Inseparable.'

Esther collected his empty orange-juice glass and tidied up his mail. 'How can we be inseparable, if we've never been together?' she asked provocatively teasing him, and teetered back to her desk.

Adelaide Murry sounded out of breath. Dr. Petrie said, 'Hi. You sound breathless.'

'I am.' said the sweet little voice on the other end of the phone. 'I've just played three sets with the new pro.'

'Is he good?'

'He's not exactly Bjorn Borg, but he's better than his late unlamented predecessor. A bit heavy with the forearm smashes. Proving his virility, I shouldn't wonder.'

Dr. Petrie laughed. 'I used to like his late unlamented predecessor. He was the only tennis club pro I could ever beat.'

'Darling,' said Adelaide, 'the club dog could beat his late unlamented predecessor.'

'Well,' retorted Dr. Petrie, 'what's wrong with that? Listen — do you want me to pick you up at the club tonight?'

'Are you coming this way?'

'I have to pick up Priscilla.'

'Tonight? I thought it was tomorrow! Oh, darling — what about our elegant intelligent dinner-for-two on the Starlight Roof?'

Dr. Petrie took a deep breath. He knew that Adelaide wasn't crazy about Priscilla — maybe because Adelaide, at nineteen, was still just a little girl herself.

'We can eat at home,' said Dr. Petrie. 'That Polynesian place delivers. And champagne, too. How about that?'

Adelaide was sulking. 'It's hardly romantic. I feel like doing something romantic. Eating at home is so ghoulish. You have to wash your own dishes.'

Dr. Petrie ran his hands through his hair. 'Listen,' he said. 'I'll buy two candles, a single red rose, and a new Leonard Bernstein record. Is that romantic enough for you?'

Adelaide gave a deep mock sigh. 'I should have dated my Uncle Charlie. At least he knows how to twist. All right, darling. I surrender, as usual. What time will you get here?'

'Six-thirty. And listen — I love you.'

'I love you too. I just hope this phone isn't tapped. They'd report you to the medical council for suggestive conduct.'

Dr. Petrie shook his head in exasperation, and laid the phone down.

Esther was helping Mrs. Fairfax into the clinic. Mrs. Fairfax was the sole survivor of the Fairfax food family, who had made their millions out of early freeze-drying techniques. She was a slender old lady with a sharp, penetrating face and a violet rinse. She walked on two sticks, but she held herself upright, and Dr. Petrie knew from uncomfortable experience that she had a sharp tongue.

'Good morning, Mrs. Fairfax,' he said smoothly. 'Are you feeling well?'

Mrs. Fairfax sat herself laboriously down in one of Dr. Petrie's two white Italian armchairs. She propped her sticks against the glass-topped coffee table, and spread her elegant blue-flowered dress around her.

'If I were well, Dr. Petrie,' she said icily, 'I should not be here.'

Dr. Petrie left his desk and went to sit beside her in another armchair. He always preferred the informal touch. It made patients feel easier; it even made them feel healthier.

'Is your hip bothering you again?' he asked sympathetically.

Mrs. Fairfax gave a histrionic sigh. 'My dear doctor, there is absolutely nothing wrong with my hip. But there is a great deal wrong with my beach.'

Dr. Petrie frowned. He could see himself frowning in the large smokey mirror opposite his chair. He wondered if, despite his looks, he was beginning to get old.

'Your beach?' he enquired politely. He was used to the eccentricities of wealthy old widows.

'It's absolutely disgusting,' she said coldly. She brushed back her violet hair with a tanned, elegant claw. Today, her fingers were encrusted with sapphires, but Dr. Petrie knew that she had as many rings for every colour of dress she ever wore.

'What's wrong with it?'

'What's wrong with it? I don't know how you can ask! Haven't you read the newspapers?'

Dr. Petrie shook his head. 'I haven't had much time recently for the Miami Herald.'

'Well you should make time,' said Mrs. Fairfax imperiously. 'It's been happening all along the South Beach. And now it's turned up on mine.'

Dr. Petrie tried to smile. 'I hate to appear ignorant,' he said. 'But what has turned up on yours?'

Mrs. Fairfax lifted her sharp, haughty profile in obvious distaste. In a quiet, cold voice, she said, 'Faeces.' Dr. Petrie leaned forward, 'I beg your pardon?' Mrs. Fairfax turned his way with a look of frozen disdain. 'You're a doctor. You know what that means. I went down to my beach yesterday morning for a swim and I found it was soiled with faeces.'

Dr. Petrie rubbed his chin. 'Was it — much?'

'The whole shoreline,' said Mrs. Fairfax. 'And the beaches next to mine, on both sides. I can't tell you — the smell is abominable.'

'Have you complained to the health people?'

'Of course I have. I spent most of yesterday on the telephone. I got through to some very junior official who told me that they were doing everything they could, and that they were going to try and clear the beaches with detergent. But it's really not good enough. It's there now, it smells revolting, and I want you to do something about it.'

Dr. Petrie stood up and went to the window. He felt sticky and tired, and the glittering pool outside looked very inviting.

'Mrs. Fairfax,' he said, 'I don't think there's very much I can do, apart from call City Hall, like you did. It's probably treated sewage brought in by the sea. I know it doesn't look or smell too good, but it's pretty harmless.'

Mrs. Fairfax snorted. 'You're absolutely right it doesn't look too good. I have a beach party planned for tomorrow evening. What am I going to say to my guests — my doctor says it's harmless? I pay very high taxes to live on the ocean, Dr. Petrie, and I don't expect to have to swim in excrement.'

Dr. Petrie turned around and smiled. 'All right, Mrs. Fairfax. I promise that I'll call the health department this morning for you. I'm sure that it's one of those rare accidents, and if they say they're going to clear the beach with detergent, they probably will. They're pretty hot on things like that in Miami.'

Mrs. Fairfax shook her head. 'First it was oil and now it's sewage,' she said tetchily. 'I don't know whether I'm renting a beach or a city dump.'

Dr. Petrie helped her out of her armchair and gave her back her sticks. 'I promise I'll call this morning,' he repeated. 'If you hold on one moment, I'll get Esther to help you out.'

After Mrs. Fairfaix, he saw three more patients. Mrs. Vicincki, with her sprained ankle; old Mr. Dunlop, with his kidney complaint; and the younger of the two elderly Miss Grays, who was suffering from sunburn. As usual, he tried to be calm, comforting, and reassuringly efficient.

Just before one o'clock, he pressed the intercom for Esther. 'Yes, doctor?'

'Esther,' he said. 'What are you doing for lunch?'

'Nothing special. I was thinking of a diet cola and a cream cheese on rye.'

Dr. Petrie coughed. 'That sounds revolting. How about coming down to Mason's Bar with me and sinking a steak-and-lobster grill?'

'But doctor, my figure — '

'Your figure, Esther, is one of the natural wonders of the world. Now, do you want to come, or don't you?'

There was a bleep. Esther said, 'Hold on a moment, doctor. It's the outside phone.'

He waited for a few moments. Then Esther came back to him and said, 'It's Dr. Selmer, from the hospital.'

'Okay. First tell me whether you're coming to lunch, then put him on.'

'Dr. Selmer says it's urgent.'

'Lunch is urgent. Are you coming?' Esther sighed. 'All right. If you insist on twisting my arm like that.'

Dr. Petrie picked up the outside phone and leaned back in his chair, propping his feet on the edge of his desk. He picked at a stray thread on his cotton slacks. 'Anton?'

'Oh, hi, Leonard,' said Dr. Selmer. 'I was just calling you about that kid you brought in this morning.'

'Did you find out what it was?'

'Well, we're not too sure yet. The blood and sputum tests haven't been completed, although there's obviously some kind of bacillus infection there. I had his parents in for a check-up this morning, and they seem okay, but I've asked their permission for a post-mortem.'

Dr. Petrie snapped the thread from his slacks. 'Have you any ideas what you're looking for?' he asked.

Dr. Selmer sounded uncertain. 'It could be tularemia. Did you notice any pet rabbits around the kid's place?'

'I don't think so. You really think it's that?'

'Dr. Bushart thinks so. He had a couple of cases out in California.'

'Sure, but that's California,' Dr. Petrie said. 'California has every weird bug and bacillus going. This is healthy, swamp-infested Florida.'

'We're checking up anyway.' said Dr. Selmer. 'Meanwhile, I shouldn't worry too much. If it was tularemia, the chances that you've picked it up are pretty remote. Just to be safe, though, I should give yourself a couple of shots of streptomycin.'

'Are you playing golf this weekend?' asked Dr. Petrie. 'I'm still short of a partner.'

'Why don't you teach that assistant of yours — what's her name — Esther. I'd sure like to see her swing!'

'Anton,' said Dr. Petrie, 'you have a very impure mind.'

There was a laugh from the other end of the phone. 'It's only because I never get to do anything impure with my body.'

Esther came into the room, signaling elaborately that she was ready for lunch.

Dr. Petrie said, 'Okay, Anton — I have to leave now. But let me know what you find out about the kid, will you? As soon as you know.'

'Sure thing,' said Dr. Selmer. 'And don't forget the shots. All I want right now is a golf partner down with rabbit disease.'

Dr. Petrie laughed. 'Who do you think I am? Bugs Bunny?'

It was a cool, cloudless evening. A fresh wind was blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean, and ruffling the dark blue surface of Biscayne Bay. As they drove across the North Bay Causeway over Treasure Island, a large red motor-launch furrowed the water, and seagulls twisted and spun in its wake.

Dr. Petrie was wearing a sky-blue sports shirt and white slacks belted with rope. He was feeling relaxed and calm, and he drove the Lincoln with one hand resting lightly on the wheel.

Beside him, Adelaide Murry was trying to put on lipstick in the sun-vizor mirror. She was a tall, elegant girl, dressed in a low broderie-anglaise dress the color of buttermilk, which showed off her deep-tanned shoulders and her soft cleavage. Her brunette hair, streaked with subtle tints, was brushed back from her face in fashionable curls. She had unnusual, asymmetrical features — a slight squint in her hazel eyes and pouting lips that made you think she was cross. At the moment, she was cross.

'Do you have to drive over every pothole and bump?' she said, as her lipstick jolted up over her lip.

Dr. Petrie grinned. 'It's a hobby of mine,' he said cheerfully. 'It's called "Getting Your Girlfriend to Push Her Lipstick Up Her Nose".'

Adelaide patted her mouth with a pink tissue. 'You're such a laugh, aren't you. What time are we supposed to pickup Priscilla?'

Dr. Petrie checked his watch. 'Ten minutes. But I like to go a little early. Margaret has a habit of making her wait outside the house.'

'I don't know why you stand for it,' said Adelaide tartly, crossing her long brown legs. Dr. Petrie shrugged.

'If I was you,' said Adelaide, 'I'd march right in there and beat the living shit out of Margaret. And that flea-bitten dog of hers.'

Dr. Petrie glanced across at Adelaide and smiled a resigned smile. 'If you'd paid out as much money as I have — just to get free from a wife you didn't want any more — then you'd be quite satisfied with paying your alimony, seeing your kid, and keeping your mouth shut,' he said gently.

Adelaide looked sulky. 'I still think you ought to break the door down and smash her into a pulp,' she said, with emphatic, youthful venom.

Dr. Petrie swung the Lincoln left into Collins Avenue. 'That's what I like about you,' he said. 'You're so shy and ladylike.'

He switched on the car radio. There was a burst of music, and then someone started talking about this year's unusual tides and weather conditions, and the strange flotsam and jetsam that was being washed up on the shores of the East Coast. A coastguard and a medical officer were discussing the appearance of unsavory bits and pieces around Barnes Sound and Old Rhodes Key.

'I'm not prepared right now to identify this washed-up material,' said the medical officer, 'but we have had complaints that it contains raw sewage, in the shape of sanitary napkins, faecal matter and diapers. We have no idea where the material is coming from, but we believe it to be a completely isolated incident.'

Adelaide promptly switched the car radio off. 'We're just about to have dinner,' she protested. 'The last thing I want to hear about is sewage.'

Dr. Petrie glanced in his mirror and pulled out to overtake a slow-moving truck. 'One of my patients complained this morning… She said she went down for a swim, and found her whole beach smothered in shit.'

'Oh, Jesus,' said Adelaide, wrinkling up her nose.

Dr. Petrie grinned. 'It's pretty revolting, isn't it? Maybe we're learning that what the Bible said was right. Throw your sewage on to the waters, and it shall come back to you.'

'I don't think that's funny,' said Adelaide. 'This is supposed to be the great American resort. I make my living out of people coming down here and playing tennis and swimming and having a good time. Who's going to come down here to paddle in diapers and sanitary napkins?'

Dr. Petrie shrugged. 'Well, it hasn't killed anyone yet.'

'How do you know? They might have swum out there and sunk without trace.'

'Listen,' said Dr. Petrie, 'more people die from bad food in restaurants than ever die of pollution in the sea. You get uneducated kitchen staff who don't wash their hands, and before you know where you are, you've got yourself a king-size dose of hepatitis.'

'Leonard, darling,' said Adelaide, acidly, 'I wish you wouldn't play doctors all the time. For once, I wish I was cooking my own supper.'

Margaret Petrie lived in what their divorce attorneys called the marital residence out on North Miami Beach. Dr. Petrie said nothing at all as he piloted the Lincoln down the familiar streets, and up to the white ranch-style house with its stunted palms and its small, neatly-trimmed lawn. It was here, in this quiet suburb, that he had first set up in medical practise eight years ago. It was here that he had worked and struggled to woo the wealthier and more socially elevated sick.

It was here, too, that Margaret and he had gradually discovered that they no longer had anything in common but a marriage license. Uneasy affection had degenerated into impatience, bickering and intolerance. It had been a messy, well-publicized, and very expensive divorce.

As Dr. Petrie pulled the Lincoln into the kerb, he remembered what Margaret had shrieked at him, at the top of her voice, as he drove away for the last time. 'If you want to spend the rest of your life sticking your fingers up rich old ladies, then go away and don't come back!'

That remark, he thought to himself, summed up everything that was wrong with their marriage. Margaret, from a well-heeled family of local Republicans, had never wanted for money or material possessions. His own deep and restless anxiety for wealth was something she couldn't understand at all. To her, the way that he pandered to rich old widows was a prostitution of his medical talents, and she had endlessly nagged him to give up Miami Beach and go north. 'Be famous,' she used to say, 'be respected.'

It only occurred to him much later that she really did hunger for fame. She had fantasies of being interviewed by McCall's and Redbook — the wonderful wife of the well-known doctor. What she really wanted him to do was discover penicillin or transplant hearts, and on the day that he had realized that, he had known for sure that their marriage could never work.

Priscilla, as usual, was waiting at the end of the drive, sitting on her suitcase. She was a small, serious girl of six. She had long, honey-coloured hair, and an oval, unpretty face.

Dr. Petrie got out of the car, glancing towards the house. He was sure that he saw a curtain twitch.

'Hallo, Prickles,' he said quietly.

She stood up, grave-faced, and he leaned over and kissed her. She smelled of her mother's perfume.

'I made a monster in school,' she said, blinking.

He picked up her case and stowed it away in the Lincoln's trunk. 'A monster? What kind of a monster?'

Priscilla bit her lip. 'A cookie monster. Like in Sesame Street. It was blue and it had two ping-pong balls for its eyes and a furry face.'

'Did you bring it with you?'

Priscilla shook her head. 'Mommy didn't like it. Mommy doesn't like Sesame Street.'

Dr. Petrie opened the car door and pushed his seat forward so that Priscilla could climb into the back. Adelaide said, 'Hi, Prickles. How are you, darling?' and Priscilla replied, 'Okay, thanks.'

Dr. Petrie shut his door, started up the engine, and turned the Lincoln around.

'Did you have to wait out there long?' he asked Priscilla.

'Not long,' the child answered promptly. He knew that she never liked to let her mother down.

'What happened to the cookie monster?' he asked. 'Did Mommy throw it away?'

'It was a mistake,' said Prickles, with a serious expression. 'Cookie fell into the garbage pail by mistake, and must've gotten thrown away.'

'A mistake, huh?' said Dr. Petrie, and blew his horn impatiently at an old man on a bicycle who was wavering around in front of him.

They had chicken and pineapple from the Polynesian restaurant, and then they sat around and watched television. It was late now, and the sky outside was dusky blue. Prickles had changed into her long pink nightdress, and she sat on the floor in front of the TV, brushing her doll's hair and tying it up with elastic bands.

Right in the middle of the last episode of the serial, the telephone bleeped. Dr. Petrie had his arm around Adelaide and his left leg hooked comfortably over the side of the settee, and he cursed under his breath.

'I should've been an ordinary public official,' he said, getting up. He set down his glass of chilled daiquiris, and padded in his socks across to the telephone table. 'At least ordinary public officials don't get old ladies calling them up in the middle of the evening, complaining about their surgical corsets. Hallo?'

It wasn't an old lady complaining about her surgical corset — it was Anton Selmer. He sounded oddly anxious and strained, as if he wasn't feeling well. As a rule, he liked to swap a few jokes when he called up, but tonight he was grave and quiet, and his voice was throaty with worry.

'Anton?' said Dr. Petrie. 'What's the matter? You sound upset.'

'I am upset. I just came back from the bacteriological lab.'

'So?'

'It's serious,' said Dr. Selmer. 'What that kid died of — it's really, genuinely serious.'

Dr. Petrie frowned. 'Did you finish the post-mortem?'

'We're still waiting for the last tests. But we've discovered enough to kick us straight in the teeth.'

'You mean it's not tularemia?'

'I wish it was. We found minor swellings in the joints and the groin area, and at first I thought they could have been symptoms of lymphogranuloma venereum, or some other kind of pyogenic infection. The kid had a lung condition, and we were working on the assumption that the swellings might have been associated with a general rundown of health brought on by influenza.' Adelaide looked questioningly across the room.

Prickles, busy with her doll's coiffure, didn't even notice. On the TV screen, the hero was mouthing something in garish colour, a million light-years away from disease and infection and nine-year-old boys who died overnight.

'Well,' said Dr. Petrie, 'what do you think it is?'

Dr. Selmer said evasively, 'We carried out a pretty thorough examination. We took slides from the spleen, the liver, the lymph nodes and bone marrow. We also took sputum samples and blood samples, and we did bacteriological tests on all of them.'

'What did you find?' asked Petrie quietly.

'A bacillus,' answered Dr. Selmer. 'A bacillus that was present in tremendous numbers, and of terrific virulence. A real red-hot terror.'

'Have you identified it?'

'We have some tentative theories.'

'What kind of tentative theories?'

Dr. Selmer's voice was hardly audible. 'Leonard,' he said, 'this bacillus appears to be a form of Pasteurella pestis.'

'What? What did you say?'

He could hardly believe what Anton Selmer had told him. He felt a strange crawling sensation all over his skin, and for the first time in his medical career he felt literally unclean. He had dealt with terminal cancer patients, tuberculosis patients, Spanish influenza and even typhoid. But this —

Adelaide, seeing his drawn face, said, 'Leonard — what is it?'

He hardly heard her. She came over and he held her hand.

In a dry voice, he said to Anton Selmer, 'Plague? Are you suggesting that it's plague?'

'I'm sorry, Leonard, but that's what it looks like. Only it's worse than plague. The bacterial samples we have here are not identical with any known profile of Pasteurella pestis. They certainly don't correspond with the 1920 records — which is the last time we had an outbreak of plague in Florida. The bacilli seem to have mutated or developed into something more virulent and faster-growing.'

Dr. Petrie looked at Prickles, squatting innocently in front of the television in her pink nightdress. Supposing he had picked it up himself, when he was carrying David Kelly? Supposing —

'Anton,' he said abruptly. 'Do you think I could have caught it?'

Dr. Selmer coughed. 'Right now,' he said, 'it's difficult for me to say. I'm still waiting for the sputum reports, and that will tell us whether the boy's throat and lungs were infected. You took the streptomycin shots, though, didn't you?'

'Sure. Right after you called me this morning.'

'Well, those should help. All antibiotics are useful in plague treatment. If you've come into contact with anyone for any length of time, I should make sure that they get shots too. I can get some serum flown in from the West Coast tonight, and we can all get ourselves vaccinated just in case.'

Dr. Petrie looked at Adelaide, and squeezed her hand reassuringly.

'Anton,' he said, 'what should I look for? What symptoms?'

'Leonard — I can't say. You'll just have to keep yourself under strict observation. If you have any swelling, or dizziness, or headache get in touch with me straight away. And cancel your clinic for three days. That's how long plague usually takes to develop.'

Dr. Petrie felt chilled. 'Anton,' he insisted, 'I have Adelaide and Priscilla with me. I had Esther around me all day. I went to a restaurant for lunch. And what about my patients?'

'I don't know, Leonard,' said Dr. Selmer tiredly. 'It depends on what kind of bacillus mutation we have here. Basically, plague comes in three recognized forms. There's bubonic plague, which is when you have buboes or swellings in the groin and axilla. Then there's pneumonic plague, when the bacilli are localized in the lungs — and septicemic plague, when the blood is infected.'

'And you don't know which one it is?'

'I'm not sure that it's any one of them. The way it looks right now, it could be a new strain of bacillus altogether. Some kind of super-plague.'

Dr. Petrie bit his lip. 'Do we know where the boy picked it up? Isn't it carried by fleas?'

Dr. Selmer sounded weary. 'I talked to the parents, but they say he went out all day Sunday, and he could have been any place at all. He visited some friends, and then went swimming, and then he came home.'

'How about the friends?'

'Oh, we're having them checked. The police are out now, tracking down the last of them. We're taking this very seriously, Leonard. I believe we have to.'

'Do you think he might have come into contact with an infected rat, or a squirrel?'

'It's possible,' agreed Dr. Selmer. 'They've had three or four outbreaks in California and Colorado recently, and it seems like a few people got bitten by fleas from infected ground squirrels. That might have happened here, but we can't tell. The way it's transmitted depends on what type of plague it is.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, bubonic plague is mostly carried by fleas which have bitten plague-ridden rodents, and then accidentally bite people. It isn't a human disease at all, and humans only get caught up in the cycle by mistake. But that doesn't make it any less fatal, and the trouble is that a flea which has been infected in October can still pass on plague the following March. What's more, plague can spread to domestic rats and mice.'

Dr. Petrie frowned. 'But can't one person pass it straight on to another?'

'With bubonic plague, that's difficult,' said Dr. Selmer. 'It doesn't spread easily from man to man.'

'How about the other plagues? Surely pneumonic plague is catching?'

Dr. Selmer said, 'Yes, it is. If you're suffering from pneumonic plague, you only have to cough in someone's face, and they'll almost certainly catch it. It's the sputum. Plague bacilli can stay alive in dried sputum for up to three months.'

'Oh, God,' said Dr. Petrie. 'Listen — when will you get your final results?'

'Two or three hours, the lab people say. As soon as I know for sure, I'll warn City Hall and all the health people.'

Dr. Petrie nodded. 'Okay, Anton. Keep me in touch, won't you? And don't forget to take some streptomycin yourself.'

'Are you kidding? We're walking around here in masks and gloves and flea-proof clothing. It's going to have to be a pretty damned smart bacillus to get through to us.'

Dr. Petrie laid the phone down. Adelaide was looking at him anxiously. On the floor, Prickles was tucking her doll in for the night underneath the armchair, and singing her a lullaby in a small, high voice.

'Did I hear you say plague?' asked Adelaide.

'That's right. That boy I picked up this morning, the one who died. He was infected with some kind of mutated plague bacillus. They're trying to pinpoint it now.'

'Is it dangerous?'

Dr. Petrie went across and picked up his drink. He took a long, icy swallow of chilled white rum, and briefly closed his eyes.

'All diseases are dangerous, if they're not treated promptly and properly. I've taken a couple of shots of antibiotics myself, but I think you and Prickles ought to have the same. Plague will kill you if it's left untreated, but these days it's pretty much under control.'

'Are you sure? I mean — '

Dr. Petrie shrugged. 'I can't be sure until the experts are sure. But I wasn't close to that boy for very long, and the chances are that I probably haven't caught it.'

Adelaide sat down. She watched Prickles playing for a while, and then said, 'I just find it so hard to believe. I thought plague was one of those things they had in Europe, in the Middle Ages. It just seems so weird.'

Dr. Petrie sat on the arm of the settee opposite. Unconsciously, he felt he ought to keep his distance. There was something about the word Plague that made him think of infection and putrescence and teeming bacteria, and until he knew for certain he was clean and clear, he didn't feel like breathing too closely in Adelaide's direction.

He sipped his drink. 'I was reading about it the other day, in a medical journal. We've had plague in America since the turn of the century. We've still got it — particularly in the west. They had to lift the ban on DDT not long ago, so that they could disinfect rats' nests and ground squirrels' burrows. Don't look so worried. It's just one of these things that sounds more frightening than it really is.'

Adelaide looked up, and gave him a twitchy smile. 'Plague. The Black Death. Who's frightened?' she said softly.

Prickles was shaking her doll. 'Dolly,' she said crossly, 'are you feeling giddy again?'

Dr. Petrie smiled. 'Is dolly feeling sick, too?' he asked. 'Maybe she needs a good night's sleep, like you.'

Prickles shook her head seriously. 'Oh, no. Dolly's not tired. Dolly doesn't feel like going to bed yet. Dolly's just feeling giddy.'

Dr. Petrie looked at his little daughter closely! Her hair was drawn back in a pony-tail, and her profile was just like his. When she grew up, and lost some of that six-year-old chubbiness, she would probably be pretty. Margaret, when he had first married her, had been one of the prettiest girls on the north beach.

'Well,' he said, 'if dolly's feeling giddy, perhaps dolly would like some nice streptomycin.'

Prickles frowned. 'No, dolly doesn't want any of that. Dolly doesn't like it. She's just feeling giddy, like Mommy.'

Dr. Petrie stared at Prickles intently. 'What did you say?' he asked her. He said it so sharply that she looked up at him with her mouth open, as if she'd done something wrong.

He knelt on the floor beside her. 'I'm not angry, darling,' he said. 'But did you say that Mommy was giddy?'

Prickles nodded. 'Mommy went swimming, and when she came back she said she felt sick, and the next day she was giddy.'

Dr. Petrie leaned back against the settee. The creeping sensation of anxiety was spreading all over him.

Adelaide, her face pale, said, 'Leonard… you don't think that Margaret…?'

Dr. Petrie stood up. 'I don't know,' he said hoarsely. 'What worries me is how many other people have caught it. I think I'd better get down to the hospital and find out what's going on.'

'Is Mommy all right?' said Prickles, frowning. Dr. Petrie forced a smile, and laid a gentle hand on his daughter's pony-tail.

'Yes, honey. Mommy's all right. Now — don't you think it's time that dolly went to bed?'

Prickles sighed. 'I suppose so. She has been very giddy today. Do all dollies get giddy? All the dollies in Miami?'

Dr. Petrie picked Prickles up in his arms, and held her close against him. The doll was made of lurid pink plastic, with a shock of brassy blonde nylon hair. He examined it closely, and then pronounced his diagnosis.

'I think that dolly's going to get better. And I don't think that all the dollies in Miami will get giddy. At least — '

He couldn't help noticing Adelaide's anxious, attractive face.

'At least I hope not,' he finished quietly, and laid his daughter down.

It was nearly midnight when the black and white police patrol car turned the corner from Washington Avenue into Dade Boulevard, cruising up the warm, deserted streets at a watchful speed. At the wheel, in his neat-pressed shirtsleeves, sat 24-year-old Officer Herb Stone — a thin-faced cop with a dark six o'clock shadow and a pointed nose. Beside him, eating a hot dog out of a pressed cardboard tray, sat his buddy, 26-year-old Officer Francis Poletto, a chunky, tough-looking young police athlete with a face like a pug.

'I almost broke my ass laughing,' Poletto was saying, with his mouth full. 'The guy gets on the water-skis, the boat starts up, and the next thing I know, they're pulling him right across the bay underwater. He climbs out, coughing and spluttering, and he says, "Well, that's great for a start — now teach me how to do it on the surface!" Laugh? I broke my ass.'

Herb Stone grinned politely, and left it at that. He liked Poletto, and there were a couple of times when he'd been glad of Poletto's rough-house style arrest. But Stone was quiet and academic, and hoped to make it through to detective school, and promotion.

Poletto, on the other hand, liked to keep in touch with the streets, and the tough cookies who hung around the beaches. He was hard and dedicated and had once shot a hippie in the left arm.

They stopped at a red light, and waited at the empty junction. Crickets chirruped in the grass, and palms rustled drily in the soft night air. Herb Stone whistled tunelessly under his breath. Poletto munched. The radio said something indistinct about a traffic violation on Tamiami Trail.

Just as they were about to move off, a second-hand silver Pontiac came swerving across the junction in front of them, bouncing unsteadily on its springs, and roared off down Alton Road. Stone looked at Poletto and Poletto looked at Stone.

'Let's go,' said Poletto, screwing up his cardboard hot-dog tray. 'This might be the only action we get all night.' Herb Stone switched on the siren, and the police car squealed and skittered around the corner and bellowed off after the speeding Pontiac. They saw its crimson tail-lights vanishing down Alton Road in the direction of MacArthur Causeway, swaying erratically from one side of the road to the other.

'Drunk,' snarled Poletto. 'Drunk as a fucking skunk.'

Herb Stone, tense and sweating, closed the gap between the speeding Pontiac and the warbling, flashing police car. In a few seconds, they were close enough to see the dark shape of the driver, hunched over his wheel. Herb tried to nudge the police car up alongside the Pontiac and force him over, but the Pontiac slewed from kerb to kerb, tires squealing and suspension banging at every turn.

Suddenly, the Pontiac driver slammed on his brakes. Herb, dazzled by the red glare of the fugitive's tail-lights, went for his brake-pedal and missed it. The black and white police car smashed noisily into the back of the silver Pontiac, knocking it sideways into the kerb. Herb stamped on the brakes and stopped savagely.

'You're, supposed to chase him,' said Poletto bluntly. 'Not smash the ass off him.'

The two officers climbed out of their car and walked across to the Pontiac. Poletto unbuttoned his top pocket and took out his notebook.

'Okay, Charlie,' he snapped. 'What's all this, Death Races?' The driver didn't answer. He was middle-aged, with rimless glasses, and he was sitting upright in his seat like a wax dummy. His face was a ghastly and noticeable white.

Herb stepped up closer and saw that his eyes were closed. He had gray, close-cropped hair and a check working man's shirt. He looked respectable, even staid. He was shivering.

'Do you think he's okay?' asked Herb uncertainly. 'He doesn't look too well to me.'

Poletto shrugged. 'Herb — if you'd drunk as much as this guy, you wouldn't look too well, neither. Okay, Charlie, out of the car.'

The man didn't open his eyes, or stir, or say anything.

He just sat there shaking, pale and beaded with perspiration.

'Come on, wise guy,' ordered Poletto, and wrenched open the dented car door. He was about to reach in, but he stopped himself. He pulled a contorted face and said, 'Jesus H. Christ.'

'What's wrong?' said Herb. Then, before Poletto could answer, he smelled it for himself. It was so rank that he almost felt sick.

'I think he's ill, Frank,' said Herb. 'Get an ambulance, will you, and the wreck squad, and I'll pull him out of there.'

Poletto screwed up his nose. 'Rather you than me, buddy boy. That guy smells like a goddamned drain.'

Poletto went across to the police car, reached inside and picked up the mike. Herb heard him calling for an ambulance. Taking a deep breath he pushed open the Pontiac's door as wide as he could, and tried to get his hands under the driver's armpits. The man murmured and mumbled, and feebly pushed Herb away. But then he sagged and collapsed, and Herb dragged his heavy body out of the diahorrea-filled driving seat, and laid him on the road.

The man whispered something. Poletto, coming back from the police car, said, 'What's he chirping about? Is he sick, or what?'

'I don't know,' said Herb. He knelt on the road beside the feverish driver, and put his face as close as he could to the sick man's mouth. He never did understand what the man was trying to say, but he remembered the spittle that touched his cheek as the man's lips whispered those last, incomprehensible words.

In the distance, they heard the ambulance siren. Herb lifted the man's head from the concrete road and said gently, 'Don't worry, mac. You're going to be all right. They'll take you away, and you're going to be fine.'

Dr. Petrie reached the hospital a little after twelve. He was surprised to see that the casualty reception area was crowded with ambulances and police cars, and even a couple of Press cars. All the lights were on inside the building, and people were running backwards and forwards with medical trolleys and blankets.

He parked the Lincoln on the road and walked across to the hospital doors. A shirt-sleeved policeman said, 'Sorry, friend. This is off limits.'

Dr. Petrie reached into his white linen jacket and produced his identity card. 'I'm a doctor. I came down here to see Anton Selmer. He's in charge of emergency. Say — what goes on here?'

The policeman examined the identity card suspiciously. 'Are you sure you're a doctor? You don't look like a doctor.'

Dr. Petrie raised his eyebrows. 'What's a doctor supposed to look like? Marcus Welby, MD?'

The policeman shrugged, a little embarrassed, and handed the card back. 'I guess it's okay,' he said, ungraciously. 'Seems like they've got some kind of epidemic around here. They just told me to keep people out. Through there.'

'I know the way,' Petrie said, and pushed through the swing doors into the brightly-lit hospital corridors.

There was obviously some kind of panic in progress. The corridors were lined with trolleys, all waiting to collect patients from the ambulance bay; and there were nurses and doctors everywhere, bustling around with medical report sheets, diagnostic kits and bundles of sheets and robes and plastic gloves.

He reached Dr. Selmer's office and rapped on the door. A nurse answered it, wearing a cap and mask, her forehead glistening with perspiration.

'Yes? What is it?'

'I'm Dr. Leonard Petrie. I came to see Dr. Selmer. I thought I could help.'

'Just hold on there. Don't come inside. He won't be a moment.'

Dr. Petrie was about to say something else, but the door was shut firmly in his face. He shrugged, and leaned up against the corridor wall to wait for Dr. Selmer. As he stood there, a medical trolley was rushed past, with a young woman lying on it. Her face was deathly white, and she was shivering and trembling. A young doctor came hurrying in the other direction, calling out for a nurse to bring him some blankets and antibiotics.

It was ten minutes before Anton Selmer appeared. He came out into the corridor, freckled and ginger and worn out. He managed a weak smile as he pulled off his cap and mask, and let out a long, exhausted sigh.

'Hi, Leonard. Glad you could make it.'

Dr. Petrie inclined his head towards the door of the emergency ward. 'How long have you been in there?'

'All day.' said Anton Selmer, rubbing his eyes. 'It looks like it'll be all night, too.'

'Is it the plague?'

Dr. Selmer scratched his head tiredly. 'We've had twenty-eight more cases since eight o'clock. They're picking them up all over the place. We've had a bar-tender, a supermarket manager, two cops and four ambulance crew. We've even had a hooker. They come from all over town. Most from the south — Coral, Gables and South Miami. But two or three from Hialeah, and some from the Beach.'

Dr. Petrie stepped back to let a trolley rattle past. 'What about treatment? Are they responding?'

Dr. Selmer didn't look up. 'Five of them are dead already. Two were dead on arrival. We've tried streptomycin, tetracyclines and chloramphenicol. We even tried aureomycin, in case the bacilli were resistant to streptomycin. I've brought in plague antigens from Tampa, and I'm having serums made up from a virulent strains flown in right now from Los Angeles.'

'And?'

Dr. Selmer's voice was unsteady with emotion. 'It's not going to work, Leonard, It's not going to work at all.'

Dr. Petrie frowned. 'What do you mean — not going to work?'

'Just that, Leonard. The plague is not responding to the normal methods of treatment. Not sulfonamide, not anything. I guess it's because it's some kind of mutation. It's totally resistant to antibiotics, and it's even resistant to heat.'

'What about the antigens?'

Dr. Selmer took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. Then he blew his nose loudly. 'They slow it up, that's all. Usually, they cut the mortality rate. You can save two out of three. But with this plague, they hardly help at all. Whatever we do, Leonard, they're dying just the same.'

Dr. Petrie leaned back against the wall. He tried not to think of Prickles and Adelaide. The corridor was bright and clinical and smelled of disinfectant. Outside, through the constantly swinging doors, he could see the red flash of ambulance lights, and the clatter and shuffle of trolleys. He heard someone shouting and moaning, and someone else trying to argue in a high, persistent voice.

'Have you told the health people?' he asked quietly.

Dr. Selmer nodded. 'I told them around half-past nine. They didn't really believe me at first. Wanted proof. So I brought Jackson and Firenza down here, and let them see for themselves.'

'What are they going to do?'

'Wait and see. Firenza said he thought it was probably an isolated outbreak.'

'Wait and see? Are you kidding? What makes him think it isn't going to spread around the whole damn city?'

Dr. Selmer shrugged. 'Precedent. The worst outbreak in American history was New Orleans, in 1920, when eleven people died. Firenza doesn't believe that we're going to lose more than twelve.'

'Didn't you tell him you'd lost five already? Jesus, Anton, this thing is far worse than bubonic plague. Doesn't he understand that?'

Dr. Selmer pulled his surgical cap on again. He looked at Leonard Petrie with his pale, worn-out eyes, and when he spoke his voice seemed hollow with tiredness.

'I think he understands that, yes. But he's like everyone else. They watch Dr. Kildare and Ben Casey, and they don't believe that American medicine can ever be licked. They don't understand that we can make mistakes. Officially, we're not allowed to. Officially we're not even permitted to be baffled.'

Dr. Petrie looked serious. 'Anton,' he said, 'how bad is it really?'

Before Dr. Selmer could answer, his nurse came out of the emergency ward door and said, 'Doctor, he's almost gone. I think you'd better come.'

'There's a mask and a gown spare, Leonard,' Dr. Selmer said. 'Come inside and you can see for yourself how bad it really is.'

They pushed their way into the emergency ward. Dr. Petrie tugged on a tight surgical cap and laced a mask over his nose and mouth. The nurse helped him put on green rubbers and a long gown. She gave him transparent latex gloves, and he pulled them on to his hands as he followed Selmer into the glare of the surgical lamps.

It was the middle-aged man that Herb Stone and Francis Poletto had picked up in Alton Road. His face was drawn and lividly pale, and his eyes were rolled back into his head so that only the whites were showing. Beside the couch, on the luminous dials of the diagnostic equipment, his respiration, heartbeat and blood pressure were slowly subsiding.

The nurse said, 'His breathing is failing, Dr. Selmer. We can't keep him much longer.'

Dr. Selmer, helpless, stood at the end of the couch and watched the man gradually die.

'This is how bad it really is,' he said to Dr. Petrie, in a hushed voice. 'This man's wife told us that he felt sick just after lunch. By the evening, it had gotten so bad that he decided to go and look up his doctor. He was on his way there when he was picked up by the cops for drunk driving. He wasn't drunk, of course. He was dying of plague. Twelve hours from first symptoms to death.'

Dr. Petrie saw the pulse-rate drop and drop and drop.

The luminous ribbon of the cardiac counter was barely nudged by the man's weakening heart. 'Is his wife here?' Dr. Petrie asked.

Selmer nodded. 'We're keeping every relative and friend in the waiting-room, under observation. The way this plague seems to develop, you show your first symptoms three or four hours after you've been exposed to it. We had a young girl brought in about three-and-a-half hours ago, and her father's showing the first signs. Dizziness, sickness, diahorrea, shivering. It's the fastest infectious disease I've ever seen.'

Dr. Petrie said nothing as the man on the couch died. Whoever he was, whatever he did, his forty-five years of life and memory and experience dwindled to nothing at all, and vanished on that hard, uncompromising bed.

Dr. Selmer motioned to the nurse and they drew a sheet over his face and disconnected the diagnostic equipment. One of the doctors called for a porter from the mortuary.

'Poor guy,' said Dr. Petrie, 'He never even knew what it was.'

Dr. Selmer turned away. Though an emergency ward doctor he was torn apart by losing his patients. He was skilful and talented and he never lost his enthusiasm for other people's survival. What was happening here today was, for him, relentless and unstoppable agony.

'There's one consolation,' said Dr. Selmer hoarsely. 'It looks as though we're not going to get it ourselves.'

'We're not? I always thought doctors and nurses were first-line casualties with plague.'

'Maybe they are. But it was nine o'clock this morning when you came into contact with David Kelly, wasn't it? And are you sick yet? I came into closer contact than you, and I'm okay. Perhaps we're going to get lucky, and stay alive.'

'I still think you ought to call Firenza. Tell him again how bad this is.'

Dr. Selmer shrugged. 'It's not that he doesn't believe me. It's his reputation. I don't think he wants to be known as the health official with the highest mortality rate in the history of Florida.'

'That's absurd,' said Dr. Petrie.

'You think so? Go and talk to him yourself. Meanwhile, you can do me a favor.'

'What's that?'

'Tell this guy's wife that he's gone. Her name's Haskins. She's waiting by the water fountain, just down the corridor.'

Dr. Petrie lowered his head. Then he said, 'Okay,' and went back to the wash-up room to take off his mask and robe. He glanced at himself in the mirror as he straightened his jacket, and thought that he looked tall, tired, handsome and helpless. Maybe Margaret had been right all along. Maybe it was futile, caring for rich and hypochondriac old ladies. Maybe his real work was here, in the thick of the blood and the pain, the failing hearts and the teeming bacteria.

He opened the door and peered down the crowded corridor. Mrs. Haskins was standing on her own — a gray-haired woman in a cheap brown print dress, holding a plastic carrier bag with her husband's clothes and shoes in it. She seemed oblivious to the bustle of medics and porters, as more and more sick people were wheeled swiftly into the hospital. Outside, as the doors swung open, the ambulance sirens echoed through the warm night streets of Miami. Mrs. Haskins, alone by the water fountain, waited patiently.

Dr. Petrie walked across, and took her arm. She looked up at him, her eyes pink with tiredness and suppressed tears.

'Mrs. Haskins?'

'Yes, sir. Is George all right?'

Dr. Petrie bit his lip. In a few short words, he was going to destroy this woman's whole world. He almost felt like saying nothing at all, prolonging her suspense. At least she would believe her husband was still alive. At least she would have some hope.

'George was very sick,' said Dr. Petrie softly.

She nodded. 'I know. He was taken bad right after his lunch. He took his swim in the morning, and then he came back and was taken real bad.'

'He took a swim? Where?'

'Where he always does. Off the beach.'

Dr. Petrie looked at the woman's weary, work-lined face. First it was David Kelly, and he'd taken a swim. Then it was Margaret, and she'd taken a swim. Now it was George Haskins. And all along the beaches, raw sewage was floating in from the Atlantic Ocean. Poisonous, virulent, and seething with diseased bacteria.

'Mrs. Haskins,' he said simply, 'I'm sorry to tell you that George is dead.'

Mrs. Haskins stared at him. 'I beg your pardon?' she said.

'George died, about five minutes ago.'

She frowned, and then looked down at her carrier bag. 'But he can't have. I've got all his clothes in here.'

'I'm sorry, Mrs. Haskins. It's true.'

She shook her head. 'No, that's all right,' she said, with an attempt at brightness. 'I'll just wait here.'

'Mrs. Haskins — '

He was interrupted by the public address system. 'Dr. Petrie, telephone please. Dr. Leonard Petrie, telephone.'

He held Mrs. Haskins' hand. 'I'll be right back,' he told her. 'You just wait there, and I'll be right back.'

Mrs. Haskins smiled blandly, and agreed to wait.

Dr. Petrie pushed his way past trolleys and anaesthetic cylinders, nurses and porters, and made his way to the phone outside the emergency ward. He picked it up and said, 'This is Dr. Petrie. You have a call for me?'

'Hold on, doctor,' said the telephonist. 'Okay, ma'am, you're through now.'

Dr. Petrie said, 'Adelaide?'

Adelaide sounded jumpy and frantic. 'Leonard? Oh God, Leonard, something awful has happened! I've been trying to call you for the past twenty minutes, but the hospital lines were all tied up.'

'What is it? Is it Prickles? Is she sick?'

'No, it's not that. It was Margaret. She knocked at the door, and I opened it up, thinking it was you. She came straight in, like she was drunk or something, and she pulled Prickles out of bed and carried her off.'

'She what?'

'She carried her off, Leonard,' said Adelaide miserably, bursting into tears. 'I tried to stop her, but I couldn't. Oh God, Leonard, I'm so sorry. I tried to stop her.'

'You say she was drunk?'

'She seemed like it. She was swaying around and cursing. It was awful.'

Dr. Petrie rested his head against the wall. 'Okay, Adelaide, don't worry, I'll get right back there. I shouldn't think she's taken Prickles far. Just stay there, and I'll get back in ten minutes.'

He laid down the phone. Dr. Selmer was standing right behind him.

'You're not going home?' asked Dr. Selmer. 'I'm sorry, but I came to look for you, and I couldn't help overhearing.'

'Anton, I have to. My wife has taken my little girl.'

'Leonard, I need you here. You have to talk to Firenza. Please. I can't get away myself.'

Dr. Petrie shook his head. 'Anton — I can't. I think that Margaret has the plague. I have to go get Prickles back, Anton. I can't just leave her. Look — ' he checked his watch ' — just give me two hours, and I'll come right back here. I promise.'

Dr. Selmer looked desperate. 'Leonard, it's Firenza. You have to convince him. If we don't put this whole city into quarantine — well, God knows what's going to happen. I spoke to him just now. He still refuses. He says that until we find out what's causing this epidemic, there's no medical justification for sealing the city off.'

'We do know what's causing it,' said Dr. Petrie.

'We do?'

'I think so. It's the sewage that's been washed up on the beaches. Every one of the people I've come across with plague went swimming — either yesterday, or today.'

Dr. Selmer dropped his hands in resignation. 'Then we have to close the beaches,' he said. 'Go see Firenza, tell him what you think, and insist that he closes the beaches.' Dr. Petrie looked at his watch again. He had just seen a man die from the plague; he knew how short a time it took. If Margaret was already in the dizzy, drunken stage, she may only have a couple of hours left — three or four at the most. Supposing she died when Prickles was with her? Supposing she was driving her car?

'Anton,' he said desperately. 'Just two hours. Please. No one goes swimming at night, anyway.'

Dr. Selmer wiped his brow with the back of his hand. 'Go on, then,' he said softly. 'I can't stop you.'

'Anton, it's my daughter.'

Dr. Selmer nodded, and looked at Mrs. Haskins, waiting, shocked and patient, by the water fountain, and the white shivering people who were being wheeled in through the hospital's double doors.

'Sure. It's your daughter, and her husband, and his son, and my uncle. Everybody belongs to somebody, Leonard. I'm just disappointed, that's all. No matter how people criticized you, I didn't think you were that kind of a doctor.'

Leonard Petrie rubbed the back of his neck. The muscles were knotted and tense, and he could feel the beginnings of a pounding headache.

Dr. Selmer watched him, saying nothing, waiting for him to make up his mind.

Finally, Dr. Petrie sighed. 'All right, Anton. You win. Where does Firenza live?'

'Out by the university on South West 48th Street. The number's here.'

Dr. Petrie took the creased card and tucked it in his pocket. 'I'll be right back when I've seen him. Then I must go and look for Prickles. You understand that?'

Dr. Selmer nodded and laid a hand on his shoulder. 'I won't forget this, Leonard. Just talk sense into those bastards, that's all. I'll catch you later.'

Dr. Petrie was about to leave when he noticed Mrs. Haskins.

'Anton,' he said quietly. 'She still doesn't believe it. Tell her, for Christ's sake, or she's going to stand by that fountain all night.'

Dr. Selmer nodded. Then Dr. Petrie turned, and walked quickly down the hospital corridor, out through the double doors, and into the humid tropical night. By the clock over the hospital's main entrance, it was just past one-thirty. He slung his jacket in the back of his car, started the engine, and squealed off south.

He made a conscious effort to wipe any thoughts of Prickles out of his mind as he drove. There were too many giddy dollies in this city to think about just one of them, no matter how dearly he loved her, no matter how much it hurt to leave her to whatever fate she faced.

Two

Ivor Glantz stalked fiercely across his New York apartment, plucked the stopper out of the whiskey decanter, and splashed himself a more-than-generous glassful. He swallowed it like medicine, grimacing at every gulp, and then, with heavily suppressed fury, he set the glass quietly and evenly back on the table.

His attorney, Manny Friedman, stood watching this performance with respectful distaste.

'Ivor,' he said, in his persistent, nasal voice. 'Ivor, you'll kill yourself.'

Ivor Glantz looked at him and said nothing. He walked across to the floor-to-ceiling window, and parted the expensive translucent drapes. Sixteen floors below, on this gray and rainy Tuesday, the four o'clock traffic was beginning to congest the junction of First Avenue, measled with yellow taxis and teeming with people. Glantz let the drape fall back, and turned to face his attorney with exasperation and badly-concealed ill grace.

'You smart-ass,' he growled. 'You unctious, greasy, half-circumcized smart-ass.'

Manny Friedman frowned nervously. He was clutching his briefcase in front of him like a protective shield.

'Ivor,' he said uncertainly, 'it's a question of legal technique.'

'Technique?' snapped Glantz. 'You tell the jury what a short-tempered tyrannical bastard I am, and that's supposed to be technique?'

Manny Friedman licked his lips. 'Ivor, I explained it. I explained that we had to admit your past mistakes before the defense could get their teeth into them and make a meal out of the whole thing. What we're trying to say is that you're human, and you've made mistakes, but that now, in spite of everything, you've been misjudged, and taken advantage of.'

Ivor Glantz sat down heavily in one of the huge off-white armchairs. 'Oh, sure,' he said sarcastically. 'Well, you certainly made a good job of that. Now they think I'm a cross between Caligula and Adolf Hitler. I've been misjudged? And taken advantage of? What the hell kind of a performance is that?'

'Ivor, listen to me — '

'I won't listen!' snapped Glantz. 'I think I've listened to your half-assed advice long enough! This is my court case, and we'll run it the way I want it! Just because that Finnish bastard has lived a life of one hundred percent purity, that's supposed to give him the right to steal my research? It's not my fault the guy's a virgin, is it? That's my fucking patent, and he's infringed it. That's all there is to it!'

Manny Friedman swallowed hard. He sat down, still clutching his briefcase.

'Ivor,' he said. 'For one moment, just for one second, please listen.'

Ivor Glantz sniffed. 'What do you want me to do now? Confess that I'm a homosexual, so the jury won't think I'm having an incestuous relationship with my daughter?' He paused, looking the discomfited Manny up and down. 'Come on, stop looking so goddamned nervous!'

'It's all a question of credibility,' said Friedman earnestly. 'You're a scientist, and a good scientist, but you also have a checkered kind of a past.'

'Because I argued with those stuffed shirts at Princeton, and told DuPonts to go fuck themselves? That's a checkered past?'

Friedman winced. 'To a jury, Ivor, yes. What we've been trying to do today is to show that you're an honest American Joe, with a particular talent for bacteriological research, and that in spite of your mistakes you've been trying to make good. All of a sudden, you find out how to mutate bacilli with radioactive rays — the greatest discovery of your whole life, the discovery that's going to make it big — and what happens? Some foreign schmuck steps in and claims that it's his idea, and that you're some kind of a quack.'

Ivor rubbed his eyes tiredly. 'Manny,' he said, with immense and laborious patience, 'I am not just an honest American Joe. I am the best-paid, best-known, most successful research bacteriologist in the entire American continent. Manny, just look around you. Is this the kind of place your honest American Joe lives in? Concorde Tower? Stop playing Perry Masonstein and treat this whole thing with reality!'

Manny shrugged. 'You're looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope, Ivor. We don't want the jury to think you're some kind of fat plutocrat, parking your backside on medical patents for your own financial benefit.'

'I discovered it!' protested Glantz. 'Why the hell shouldn't I get the financial benefit?'

Manny flapped his hands like two neurotic doves. 'There's no reason at all, Ivor. No reason at all. Except that any wealthy executive with any kind of capitalistic sympathies never serves on a jury. The people you get on juries are threadbare working-class mugs whose employers won't say their services are indispensable. Juries don't like people with bulging wallets.

Ivor Glantz shook his head impatiently. 'That's bullshit, Manny.'

'That's where you're wrong,' said Manny. 'The way things are going, the jury is more likely to feel sympathetic towards Forward than they are towards you. Forward is a proud, dedicated man who's worked his way up from a working-class background. He's scored one or two minor successes in pharmacology and bacterial study. Not as spectacular as you, Ivor, but steady, reliable stuff. If you want to win against a man like that, you've got to come down off that stack of dollars and make out you're Thomas Edison, slaving away in a shed. You've got to make the jury believe that Forward stole this idea from a plain and hard-working American worthy. Ivor, in cases of patent infringement, you have to look deserving, as well as right.'

Glantz slumped down in his chair. 'I'm beginning to wish that patents were never invented.'

Manny opened his briefcase and began to shuffle green and yellow papers. 'Well, maybe you do,' he said, in his plangent Bronx voice. 'But if you keep hold of this one, it will make you rich. I mean, really rich. Not just rich rich.'

Ivor Glantz watched his attorney rustling through sheaves of flimsy legal paper with mounting distaste. He had never liked litigation, but right now he had about as much say in the matter as a man who leaps off the Empire State Building has in whether he hits the ground or not. He took a cigar out of the breast pocket of his tight gray suit, and clipped the end with a gold cutter. He lit up, and began to puff out cloud after cloud of pungent blue smoke.

Glantz was not a handsome or friendly-looking man. He was almost bald except for a frieze of neatly-oiled curls around the back of his neck. His face was apishly coarse while his bright, near-together eyes were as sharp as his tongue.

He smoked some more, and drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. He hadn't even had time to get used to his new apartment — one of thirty luxurious new condos in Concorde Tower. He had wanted to spend this month settling in, rearranging the paintings and the furniture, and sorting out his stacks of books. His stepdaughter Esmeralda, who shared the condo with him, had already shuffled the bedrooms and the sitting-room into some kind of shape, but Glantz felt the need to move things around himself.

It was all Sergei Forward's fault. When Ivor Glantz had returned six weeks ago from an extended lecture tour of South and Central America, explaining his new bacteriological techniques to major universities, he had been tired and irritable and aching for rest. But then he had picked up Scientific American to find a lengthy and colorful article by Sergei Forward on how he, the great Finnish research bacteriologist, had discovered how to mutate various bacilli with Uranium.

Glantz had had no choice at all but to sue, and right now, the case of the mutated bacilli was a minor cause celebre in the Federal District courts.

Manny Friedman sniffed, and then took out a crisp white handkerchief and blew his nose like the second bassoon in the Boston Pops.

'Tomorrow,' he said, 'we start proving what a two-hundred-percent clean cut, hard-working American fellow you are. We also emphasize the privations of your background — how hard it was to get to the top.'

Ivor Glantz stared. 'Privations?' he said. 'What do you mean — privations?'

'Your parents had to work for a living, didn't they? That's a privation.'

'My father, as you well know, was president of the Glantz and Howell Banking Trust. That's not exactly your roach-ridden corner store.'

Manny looked philosophic. 'Well, maybe it's not. But we'll try and play that down. Let's just say that you worked your way to the top through your own efforts, and despite some hard luck and bad knocks, you made it.' Ivor stood up, and walked across to the far wall. He carefully straightened a large abstract canvas, and stepped back to make sure it was hanging true.

'Manny, you're wasting your time. Just go in there tomorrow and show the jury the absolute, indisputable truth. Sergei Forward is a cheap no-hoper who thought he could filch his way to medical fame by cadging my discovery. Tell the jury something they'll understand. Tell them he's just as much a thief as the guy who steals apples from the A. & P.'

Manny rubbed his nose. 'I don't know whether that's the right approach, Ivor. Most of the people you get in juries these days are so poor that stealing apples from the A. & P. is nothing. They do it themselves, all the time.'

The door chime rang. Ivor went across and opened it, and in came Esmeralda, piled high with marketing bags and with a long French loaf tucked under her arm. She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

'Hi, pa. Hi, Manny. Tonight, we eat French. Clams gratines, baby lamb with fresh beans, and hot garlic bread.'

Manny, rising up from his chair, dropped a pile of papers on to the carpet. 'I'm afraid I can't eat garlic,' he blushed. 'It gives me heartburn.'

Ivor came over and patted him on the back. 'That's okay, Manny. You're not invited to dinner anyway.'

Esmeralda walked through the sitting-room and into the kitchen. She dumped her parcels and her loaf of bread, and came back in. 'He can stay if he wants to. I bought enough for three.'

Ivor sucked his cigar and shook his head. 'I've had enough of attorneys for one day. I would just like to spend an evening in the quiet and charming company of my daughter.'

'It's quite okay,' Manny said. 'My sister is coming around tonight, and she cooks a beautiful fish pie.'

'That's wonderful for you. Es — do you want a drink? I'll just show Manny out.'

'Brandy-soda,' called Esmeralda, disappearing into one of the bedrooms, 'I'm just going to change into something more comfortable. See you soon, Manny. Come for dinner next time.'

Ivor showed Manny to the door.

'There's just one thing,' said Manny, laying his hand on Ivor's sleeve. 'When we go in there tomorrow, I want you to understand that you mustn't show any signs of bitterness, or revenge. I want you to act magnanimous. Like, Forward's made a mistake, but you're willing to forgive and forget — provided he drops his claim to the process. If you're all sour grapes and spit, the jury won't like you. Will you do that for me?'

Ivor stared at him, poker-faced.

'Please?' said Manny.

Ivor nodded. 'Okay. Tomorrow, it's all sweetness and light. Do you want me to wear the wings, and the halo?'

Manny shook his head. 'A smile should be quite enough.'

'Okay.'

Without another word, Manny turned on his heel and made off towards the elevator. Ivor thoughtfully shut the door, and walked back into the sitting-room to fix himself another Scotch, and a brandy-soda for Esmeralda. He sat down with a heavy sigh, and wondered if all men of fifty-two felt as old and used-up as he did. Esmeralda came back in, dressed in a long turquoise silk negligee. It had a wide, floppy collar, pleated sleeves, and yards and yards of floating train. She was a tall, pale girl, with an exquisitely beautiful face; the kind of haunting eyes that fin-de-siecle artists gave to their decadent dryads. Her hair was long and curly and very black, and she wore a thin turquoise headband. As she walked past the windows that made up two walls of the high, rectangular room, the pearly afternoon light shone through the silk of her negligee and gave her stepfather a shadowy outline of high pointed breasts and flat stomach.

'Bad day at Black Rock?' she asked, picking up her drink, and sipping it.

He shrugged. 'Courts were made for lawyers, not people. This is the fifth day, and so far we haven't got any place at all.'

She sat down, in a cloud of turquoise, in the opposite chair.

'Never mind. It will soon be over. You'll see.' He swallowed Scotch. 'That's why I love you. You're such an optimist.'

There was a short silence. Esmeralda looked at him over the rim of her glass.

'My optimism?' she said. 'Or my body?'

Ivor grunted in amusement. 'I guess it's both. Seems like, these days, I've had more of the former than the latter.'

'Are you saying that man cannot live by optimism alone?'

'I don't want to force you. I don't want to make you feel obliged.'

She gave him a calm, almost supercilious smile. 'No man ever could. You know that.'

'I hope so,' he said, crossing his legs. 'I mean, the gallery, and this place — you mustn't feel you have to pay me back.'

She didn't look up. She was twisting a gold and cornelian ring around her finger. 'I feel grateful,' she said. 'You can never stop me feeling that. You know, I looked around the gallery today, and it's so perfect, and it's all because of you. You're a very beautiful man, pa. I mean that.'

He pulled a face. 'Your mother didn't think so.'

'My mother didn't know shit from sauerkraut.'

He laughed, despite himself. 'Don't say that. That's my former wife you're talking about.'

Esmeralda stood up, and walked around the apartment with her bluey-green train floating around her. She wore gold rings on her toes, which Ivor always thought was incredibly erotic.

'Do you think this place is too sombre?' she asked.

He looked around. The sitting-room was decorated in creams and grape colors, with muted abstract paintings on the two inner walls. The furniture was all mirrors and maple.

'It has to be sombre,' he said. 'When you pay $185,000 for seven rooms, and $ 1,100 a month carrying charges — that's sombre.'

She came over and looked at him. Then she knelt down beside his chair, holding her brandy in one hand, and stroked the back of his wrist with one finger. He looked back at her, expressionless, seeking some kind of emotional flicker. She smiled.

'I'd like to say thank you,' she said softly.

'You don't have to.'

'But I would.'

She took his hand, and stood up. 'Come on,' she said, tugging him.

He thought for a moment. Then, without a word, he laid down his drink, and followed her. They walked across the soft, silent carpet to the main bedroom.

On the wide, tapestry-covered bed, she sat him down and undressed him. First his shoes, then his short black silk socks. He started to loosen his own necktie, but she wouldn't let him, and picked at the knot herself with her long dark-red fingernails.

Soon he was naked. His body was white and plump. There was gray wiry hair around his nipples, and his legs were thin and stick-like. He lay there, bald and old and unprepossessing, with his eyes closed. He knew what he looked like, but he also knew that when his eyes were shut, and the reality of age and unfitness were blocked out, there was a warm world of fantasy waiting that was more than nourished by Esmeralda's arousing treats.

Like a great blue-green moth, she mounted him. Her hand sought his hardened penis, and guided it up between her wide-parted thighs. She eased herself back on him, and she sighed a distant, muted sigh, as strange as the cry of some satisfied bird. Ivor kept his eyes tight shut, and said nothing.

Time passed. The apartment was quiet, except for the smooth rustle of Esmeralda's negligee, and their tense and excited breathing. Then Esmeralda started to tremble and shake. She sat in her stepfather's lap with her hands clenched tight against her breasts, feeling the deep, dark ripples of her own orgasm.

They lay side by side in silence for nearly half-an-hour. Ivor felt himself drifting into a curious sleep, and awoke after five minutes with a headache, and a metallic taste in his mouth. He sat up, and reached for his black silk bathrobe.

Esmeralda, her negligee spread romantically around her, opened her dark eyes and grinned.

'We're a strange pair, you and I,' she said, as Ivor walked across to the mirror.

He raised his head and examined her for a few moments in the glass. Somehow, she seemed less beautiful when her face was transposed by a mirror. But that didn't make him love her any the less. He loved her more than any possession he had ever had. Almost as much as his work, and far more than her mother. To fuck a daughter after fucking her mother is like buying your first new car, after you've had second-hand models all your life.

He brushed his few curls flat, splashed on some aftershave, and turned back to his stepdaughter with a serious face.

'I guess we are. Strange, I mean. Sometimes I can't believe it's really happening.'

'Isn't that the way with everything wonderful?'

Ivor nodded. 'It is. But it's the same with terrible things, too. When something truly terrible happens, you can never believe it's for real. You keep smacking yourself and hoping that you'll wake up.'

Esmeralda stretched luxuriously. 'Pa,' she said. 'What in the whole world could possibly happen to us that's terrible?'

On the floor above, in apartment 110, a tall man of sixty years old sat in a large Victorian spoonback chair, in almost total darkness. The heavy drapes were drawn over the windows, and the condominium was rank with cigarette smoke. The man had a handsome but heavily-wrinkled face, a white mane of leonine hair, and he was dressed in a light blue nylon jersey jumpsuit that was absurdly young for his age. He held his cigarette in a long ivory holder, and the ribbon of blue smoke rose rapidly up to the ceiling.

He had been watching home movies. An expensive projector on the small inlaid table beside him had just run through, and the stray end of the film was still flicking against the spool. On the far wall of the sitting-room was a blank movie screen — an incongruously modern intrusion in an apartment that was crowded with antiques.

The man seemed to be paralyzed, or frozen. His eyes were focused into some remote distance, and he let his cigarette burn away without lifting it once to his lips. His name was Herbert Gaines, and he had once been Hollywood's hottest new property.

If you ever saw The Romantics or Incident at Vicksburg, you'd remember the face. Or at least a smoother and younger version of it — a version that remained confident, and open, and bright. Herbert Gaines had just been watching that face, and those movies, for the thousandth time. It no longer hurt, but on the other hand it no longer anaesthetized the present, either.

The door from the bedroom opened, and a diagonal slice of light lit up the ageing actor, in his antique chair, like a movie spot. A young man of twenty-two, with denim shorts and bare feet, his chest decorated with tattoos of eagles, came padding into the sitting-room. He was drying his short-cropped hair with a yellow towel.

The young man looked at the blank screen. 'Have you finished sulking yet?' he asked. 'Or are you going to watch the other one as well?'

Herbert Gaines didn't answer, but there was a subtle change in his expression. His attention was no longer fixed on the faded memories of 1936, but on the present, and on the careless intrusion of his lover, Nicholas.

The young man came and stood between Gaines and the blank screen. A rectangle of white light illuminated his tight denim shorts, with their suggestive bulge, and the fine plume of hair that curled over the top of them. Herbert Gaines dosed his eyes.

'I don't know why you're sulking,' said Nicholas. 'I never said anything unpleasant.'

Gaines opened his eyes again. He reached over and switched off the projector, and as he did so, a long column of ash fell on the pale blue jumpsuit.

'You're so sensitive,' Nicholas went on. 'This is supposed to be an open, man-to-man relationship. Least, that's what you called it when it first began. But all we do these days is argue, and fight, and then you go off in a sulk and play those terrible old movies of yours.'

Gaines' mouth turned down at the corners in bitterness. But he still refrained from answering.

'I sometimes think you want to fight,' said Nicholas. 'I sometimes think you take umbrage on purpose, just to get me upset. Well, it won't work, Herbert. It won't. I'm not the vicious kind. But damn it all, I'm the kind that gets tired of fights.'

Herbert Gaines listened to this, and then took the burned-out cigarette from his ivory holder and replaced it with a fresh one. He lit up, watching Nicholas with one limpid eye.

'When you're tired of fighting me, Nick,' he said, in a rich, hoarse, cancerous voice, 'then you're tired of loving me.'

Nicholas finished rubbing his hair and threw his towel on the floor. Herbert Gaines smoked listlessly, with his holder clenched between his teeth.

Nicholas paced from one end of the room to the other. Then he stopped beside Gaines' chair — tense and exasperated.

'You won't understand, will you? You're too busy wallowing in forty-year-old memories and uneasy nostalgia. Why don't you try looking outside yourself for a change? Open up the drapes, and realize what year it is? Christ, Herbert, I wasn't even born when you made those movies!'

Herbert Gaines looked up. 'You were there though,' he said, in his throaty voice.

Nicholas was about to say something else, but he stopped and looked quizzical. 'What do you mean?'

'Precisely what I say. You were there. Haven't you seen yourself?'

'Seen myself? I don't — '

Herbert Gaines put down the cigarette holder and laboriously got out of his chair. Nicholas watched him uneasily as he walked across to the bookshelves, and took down a large Film Pictorial Annual for 1938. The old man put the book on his desk, and opened it out. Then he beckoned Nicholas over.

'Look,' he said, pointing with his pale, elegant finger to a large black-and-white photograph. 'Who does that remind you off?'

Nicholas took a cursory glance. 'It's you. It says so, underneath. 'Herbert Gaines plays young Captain Dash-foot in Incident at Vicksburg'.'

'Cretin,' said Herbert Gaines. He gripped Nicholas by the back of the neck, and forced him over to the large gilt Victorian pub mirror that hung on the wall beside the desk. Then he lifted the open book and held it up beside Nicholas' face.

'Well,' said Nicholas. 'I guess there's a kind of passing resemblance. But we're not exactly the Wrigley Double-mint twins, are we?'

Herbert Gaines let him go, and tossed the annual back on the desk.

'You don't think so? You don't even know. The first time I saw you, down in the Village, I felt a sensation like I'd never felt before. At first, I couldn't understand it. I stared and stared at you, and still I couldn't grasp what it was that made me stare. Then I saw myself in a bookstore window. I saw myself. And I realized what it was about you that attracted me so much. You, Nicholas, are the spitting image of me, when I was in movies.'

Nicholas looked uncertain. 'That's not why you like me, though, is it? I mean — that's not the only reason?' Herbert Gaines walked carefully back to his chair, and sat down. It looked as if his jumpsuit was filled with nothing more substantial than bent coat-hangers and odd bones. When he was comfortable, he fixed his gaze on Nicholas again — those deep, disturbing eyes — and he spoke in grave, sonorous tones. 'Nicholas,' he said, 'I love you.'

Nicholas scratched the back of his neck in embarrassment. 'I know that, Herbert, but — '

'But nothing,' said Herbert. 'I love you. Does it matter why?'

Nicholas lowered his eyes. 'I guess not. It was just that I wondered if you loved me because I was me, or because, well… '

'Because what?'

'Well, because I was you. I mean — is it me you love, or your old self?'

There was an uncomfortable silence. Then, unexpectedly, Herbert Gaines nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'It is me that I love. You are the personification of what I once was, and what I could be once more, if they would give me a chance. That, and that alone, is why I love you.'

Nicholas stood there, biting his lip. He watched Herbert Gaines for a while, but Herbert didn't look back. The old actor sat in his Victorian chair, smoking steadily and staring at the floor.

'Well, fuck you,' said Nicholas.

Herbert Gaines said nothing.

'Do you think I can take that?' said Nicholas, his eyes filling with tears. 'Do you think I can just stand here and take that? What do you think I am? Just one of your goddamned celluloid images? Just one of your old movies? Well, fuck you, Herbert Gaines!'

Gaines shrugged. 'Please yourself, dear boy.'

Nicholas wiped his eyes with his arm. 'Oh, that's great, that is. That's just too fucking neat for words. You spend your whole time sulking and moping like an over-age Shirley Temple, and when I tell you the truth about it, you come out with a charmer like that. Well, I can tell you here and now — I'm packing.'

'Packing?' said Gaines. 'What for?'

Nicholas bent forward and hissed the words at him. 'To leave you, my withered darling, that's what for.'

Herbert caught his wrist. His mouth twitched for a moment as he searched for the words. 'You leave me, you young bastard, and I'll break your neck.'

Nicholas pulled himself away. 'You might have been a muscle boy in 1936, but there's not much chunk left on the old bones now, is there, Herbert?'

He turned and walked towards the bedroom. Herbert Gaines, with a curiously intense expression on his face, heaved himself out of his chair and went after him. Hobbling as quickly as he could, he caught up with Nicholas in the doorway, and snatched at his arm.

Nicholas shook himself free. 'Herbert, it's no fucking use!'

Herbert clutched his young lover again. 'You're not leaving, Nicky. Not really.'

Nicholas turned away. 'What do you want me to do? Stay here and listen to your ramblings about the good old days for the rest of my life, and how fucking wonderful I am because I look just like you used to look, in one of those two dreary old pictures of yours? Jesus, Herbert, I don't know which is more boring — you or your second-rate movies.'

Herbert slapped him, quite hard, across the face. Nicholas stared at him, more in surprise than in pain. A red bruise spread across his left cheek. He lifted his hand and dabbed it.

Without a word, Nicholas punched Herbert in the stomach. Herbert gasped, and collided with the door-jamb. Nicholas hit him again, with his open hand, and he fell to the floor with his nose bleeding.

Herbert didn't cry out, didn't even raise a hand to protect himself. Viciously and systematically, Nicholas punched him in the face and chest, lifting him up each time he dropped to the floor by tugging his pale blue jumpsuit. There were speckles and splashes of blood down the front, and Herbert's face was a mass of bruises.

Finally, with his rage exhausted, Nicholas let him fall on to the pink Wilton carpet, and stumbled unsteadily into the bedroom. He collapsed on to the bed, and lay there panting and sobbing, his legs curled up in a foetal crouch.

After a few minutes, he became aware that Herbert was standing at his bedside, his white hair awry, his Jumpsuit dark with blood. Herbert reached out with a wrinkled and trembling hand and touched his bare shoulder. Nicholas recoiled.

'Nick,' whispered Herbert Gaines. 'Nicky.' Nicholas turned his face away. 'Nicky, listen,' said Herbert thickly. Nicholas shook his head. 'Nicky, you still haven't punished me enough.' Nicholas turned, and lifted his head. The handsome, wrinkled face was swollen and red. The bony shoulders were bowed.

'Not enough?' said Nicholas, unbelievingly.

Herbert Gaines, the one-time movie hero, dropped to his knees. 'I have sinned against myself,' he said hoarsely. 'I have grown old, and unappealing. You must punish me.'

Nicholas sat up. He took Herbert's hand in his, and gripped it tight. 'Herbert, you mustn't say things like that. Nobody can help themselves from growing old. And anyway, what's sixty? It's when you get to ninety-five that you've got to start worrying!'

Herbert wiped blood from his chin. 'Sixty is older than twenty. Nick. It's all my fault. I threw my youth away. Two movies, too much money too fast. They offered me $25,000 for my third picture. I was high on my own conceit. I said $100,000 or nothing.'

'And?'

'You know what happened. I got nothing. I was young and headstrong, and I wouldn't give in. Don't you think that's worthy of punishment?'

Nicholas rested his head in his hands. He felt tired and depressed, and he didn't know what possible words of comfort he could give. He was a one-time art student, a one-time merchant seaman, and articulating his sympathies didn't come easy.

'Nicky,' said Herbert Gaines, 'you must hit me.'

Nicholas shook his head. 'No, Herbert, I can't.'

'But you must! It's the only way! The past must punish the future!'

Nicholas stood up, and walked over to a painting of a Chinese mandarin on the other side of the room. He looked ancient, and inscrutable, and deeply wise. The youth gazed at his calmness, and wondered how it was possible to live the kind of life where you could smile as calmly and benignly as that, even once. 'Nicky,' whispered Herbert Gaines again. 'What is it, Herbert?'

'I want you to kill me.'

Nicholas almost smiled — 'No, Herbert, I can't.'

'The police needn't know. You could drown me in the bath. An unfortunate accident. Only — I couldn't do it myself. I'm a Catholic. It isn't easy to want to die, and to be afraid of it.'

Nicholas turned around. He stared at this pathetic, blood-smattered figure, and he shook his head once again. 'I can't kill you, Herbert. You're indestructible. You're in movies, aren't you? Two magnificent movies. It doesn't matter if your body is dead, does it? Every time those movies play, you'll come back to life again.'

'Nicky,' said Herbert wretchedly, 'I need to be punished.'

'You are being punished,' said Nicholas, quietly. 'Every day of your miserable life, you're being punished. You don't need me to do it. Only one thing will ever let you off the hook, Herbert, and that's the end of civilization. When there are no more people to go to the movies, and the last picture-house closes down, that's when you get your freedom.'

Herbert lowered his head. In a scarcely audible voice he said, 'If that's true, Nicky, then I pray God that civilization comes to an end before I do.'

Nicholas walked back and rested his hand on Herbert's shoulder.

'The way things are going these days, God might even grant your wish. Now, let's go and get you cleaned up, hey?'

Across the hallway, in apartment 109, Kenneth Garunisch was the only person in Concorde Tower who was concerned about the plague. He was sitting at his cluttered desk, trying to fix his necktie, watch television, and talk to his union attorneys on the telephone, all at the same time. He spoke with the steady relentlessness that had earned him the nickname of 'Bulldozer', and he was angry.

'This thing broke out last night, Matty. How come they only told me this morning? Because I have a right to know, that's why! What do you mean, emergency? I don't care what they call it.'

Through the open hatch in the sitting-room wall, he could see his wife, Gay, in the kitchen, fixing cocktail snacks with their black maid, Beth. She was warbling Strangers in the Night as she popped little curled-up anchovy fillets on to crackers and cream cheese. Beth, silent and fat, was peeling prawns.

'You'd better believe it, Garunisch said, in his hectoring voice. 'I got a call from two of my guys at the hospital. Plague, that's what they got. The Black Death.'

He put his hand over the receiver and sighed. He was a short, stocky, bullet-headed man with an iron-gray crew-cut. His eyes were pale and uncompromising, and there was a prickly roll of fat at the back of his neck. He spoke with a monotonous harshness, like the retreating sea dragging pebbles down the beach. He was Germanic and hard-bitten, and he was president of the Medical Workers' Union — a union he had started himself in 1934, with four other hospital porters from Bellevue — and which was now a powerful, nut-cracking international with a billion-dollar fund and a two and a half million membership.

'You hear that? Plague. They don't know what kind, and they've got people dying like flies. So how come I only found out this morning?'

Gay stuck her heavily-lacquered blue-rinsed curls through the serving hatch.

'What did you say, Ken? Did you say something?'

Kenneth waved her away. 'I was talking to Matty. They got some kind of plague in Miami. Can you believe that?'

Gay, with her head still stuck through the hatch, blinked her eyes as if she was trying to work out whether she could believe it or not. Finally, she said, 'What's plague?'

Kenneth ignored her. His attorney was asking him what he intended doing about Miami.

'What do you think I'm going to do? I want to protect my members. If my members have to handle people with plague, they're gonna catch it themselves, right?'

His attorney guessed that was right.

'In which case,' went on Garunisch, 'I suggest you call the health department down at Miami and tell them it's double time or nothing, and all hospital workers got the right to refuse to handle plague cases, without penalization, recrimination, or loss of benefits.'

His attorney was silent for a while. Then the lawyer suggested that under the circumstances, union action might be construed as taking immoral and unfair advantage of a medical emergency.

'Listen,' grated Garunisch, 'you just get on to that telephone to Florida, and you tell those health folk that if they want my members to risk their lives, they're gonna have to pay for it. I don't want no arguments, and I don't want no fuss. Now do it.'

He clamped the receiver back on the phone, and shook his head. 'Immoral and unfair advantage,' he repeated, sarcastically. 'You get some underpaid Cuban hospital porter to risk his life, and you don't expect to pay him no more? Immoral and unfair advantage, my ass.'

Gay popped her head through the hatch again. 'Did you say something, Ken?'

Garunisch stood up and walked over to the kitchen, tying up his necktie as he went. It was a very lurid necktie, with purple flowers and greenish spots. It had been an expensive gift from Gay.

'Was that something serious, dear?' said Gay, rinsing her hands. 'You look awful sore.'

Garunisch reached over to pilfer a smoked-salmon canape. 'It's just the usual,' he said, with his mouth full. 'They got some kind of epidemic down in Florida, just like the Spanish influenza, and they're expecting the porters and the drivers to handle the patients without any compensation for extra health risk.'

'That's awful,' said Gay. She was a small, busty woman with wide-apart eyes. 'Supposing they caught it? Supposing their children caught it?'

Garunisch looked around the expensive, glossy, Colonial kitchen, with its antique-style tables and chairs. It still gave him a sense of justice and satisfaction, this condominium. For the first time in his life, he owned a luxurious home, decorated just the way that he and Gay had wanted, and he could turn around to all those capitalist palookas who had tried to crush him, and grind him and his union out of existence, and he could raise two rigid fingers.

'That's right,' he said absent-mindedly. 'Supposing their children caught it.'

Gay said, 'Beth, haven't you finished those prawns yet? We still have the fondant frosting to make.'

Beth peeled as quickly as her fat fingers would allow. 'I don't have too many more now, Mrs. Garunisch. Just as soon as I'm through, I'll make that frosting.'

'Well!' said Gay Garunisch, turning back to her husband. There was a pleased little smile on her face. 'Our first social event at Concorde Tower! Isn't it exciting?'

Kenneth looked up. He was miles away. 'It's terrific, Gay. I just wish we didn't have this plague business hanging over our heads. It really kind of worries me.'

'It's not hanging over my, head,' said Gay. 'I don't even know what it is.'

Garunisch took another canape and pushed it into his mouth whole. 'Plague is a deadly epidemic disease,' he mumbled, spitting out crumbs. 'They used to have it back in the Middle Ages. These days, it's pretty much under control. But, you know, people can die when they get it, and that's serious. The news said that thirty or forty people were already dead.'

Gay Garunisch was taking off her apron. 'Thirty or forty's not many,' she said, looking for the pepper. 'Why, more people die in a single plane crash.'

Garunisch looked at her patiently for a moment. He loved her, but he sometimes wondered how she could be so totally impervious to everything that went on around her. She lived in her own self-contained world of cocktail parties and celebrity luncheons, and the real events of America escaped her attention.

'Plane crashes,' he said, very gently, so that he didn't sound sarcastic, 'are not catching.'

The doorbell rang. The chimes were a copy of the bells of Amory Baptist Church, which used to ring outside Mrs. Garunisch's home when she was a little girl. Beth looked up from her prawn-peeling, but Kenneth moved to get it.

He opened the door with a fixed grin on his face, and welcomed his first visitors. It was Mr. and Mrs. Victor Blaufoot, from the apartment above theirs. They had met in the elevator just the other day, and Kenneth, in an expansive mood after successful overtime talks, had invited the Blaufoots along to their condo-warming.

'Mr. Bloofer, isn't it?' said Garunisch, showing them in. 'Would you like something to drink?'

'Blaufoot,' corrected the guest. He was neat and small, in a shiny blue mohair suit, with gold-rim spectacles, and a large nose. Mrs. Blaufoot was even smaller, in a dark green dress and a fur stole.

Kenneth Garunisch laughed. 'I'm sorry. I'm usually terrific with names. This is my wife, Gay.'

There was a lot of hand-shaking and uncomfortable laughter. Then they all stood there and looked at each other.

'I hope we're not early,' said Mrs. Blaufoot. 'The truth is, we don't have very far to come.'

They all laughed some more.

'You've certainly made your place look different,' said Mr. Blaufoot, looking around. 'I don't think that any of the other apartments have been done like this. It's — it's — well, it's very different.'

'It's a genuine replica,' smiled Gay Garunisch, pleased. 'It's just like the old colonial farmhouse at Trenter's Bend, Massachusetts. Right down to the patterns on the drapes.'

Mrs. Blaufoot laughed nervously. 'You must be the only people on First Avenue with an authentic early-American farmhouse.'

Kenneth Garunisch, grinning, put his arm around his wife. 'We were thinking of having ourselves a farm, too, but they don't allow cows in the lobby.'

They all laughed.

Kenneth fixed some drinks, and they perched themselves around the sitting-room on the early-American rockers and upright reproduction Windsors.

'You're in unions, aren't you, Mr. Garunisch?' asked Victor Blaufoot politely. 'The Medical Workers, if I recall.'

'That's right,' nodded Garunisch. 'It's not the biggest union around, but I guess you could say that after the Teamsters, it has one of the hardest clouts. When we get up to defend our members' interests, Mr. Bloofer, there ain't many people who don't tremble in their shoes.'

Victor Blaufoot smiled uncomfortably. 'No, I'm sure. I've heard a lot about you. Myself, I'm in diamonds.'

Gay Garunisch looked interested. 'Diamonds, huh? The girl's best friend? Can you get me a diamond tiara, at wholesale?'

Mr. Blaufoot stared for a moment, then looked embarrassed. 'I regret not, Mrs. Garunisch. It's not exactly a jeweller’s. It's more of a brokerage.'

Gay's smile stayed on her face, but she was obviously confused. 'Brokerage?' she asked.

'That's correct. I buy uncut stones from South Africa, and sell them in New York.'

'Oh,' said Gay Garunisch. 'So you don't have tiaras?'

Mr. Blaufoot shook his head.

There was another long silence, and they all sipped their drinks and smiled at each other. Then, to Kenneth Garunisch's relief, the telephone rang. He reached over and picked it up. Everyone else watched him because there was nothing else to do.

'Garunisch. Oh, hi, Matty. What news? Did you get through?'

There was obviously a long explanation on the other end of the phone.

'You what?' said Garunisch. 'You couldn't reach him? That's ridiculous! Didn't you tell the switchboard who you were? You did? And they still didn't? Get back on there and try him again! Yes, now! And call me back when you've spoken!'

He slammed the phone down angrily. 'Would you believe that?' he grated. 'That was my chief attorney. He's been trying to call up the health people down at Miami for twenty minutes, and they can't find the guy in charge. They can't find him — can you believe that?'

'I heard about Miami on the news,' said Mrs. Blaufoot. She looked like an old, unsteady pigeon. 'I understand they have an epidemic down there.'

'They sure do,' said Garunisch. 'They have an epidemic, and it's already knocked off thirty or forty people, and my members are having to deal with it. That's what I'm trying to sort out now.'

'Excuse me,' said Mr. Blaufoot, 'but what exactly are you trying to sort out?'

Garunisch opened his wooden colonial cigarette box and took put a cigarette. He didn't offer them around. He lit up, and tossed the spent match into an ashtray. 'Pay, mainly,' he said. 'My members are having to drive and carry people infected with this disease, and I want to make sure they're properly compensated. I also want to make sure they have a choice of whether they want to do the job or not, without penalties.'

'Surely it's an emergency,' said Mr. Blaufoot, looking concerned. 'Does pay matter so much, when there are people's lives at risk?'

'My members' lives are at risk,' replied Garunisch. 'I believe that, every man who willingly risks his life at work should be paid for taking that risk, and that he should also have the choice of whether he wants to take the risk or not.'

Mrs. Blaufoot held her husband's hand. 'Supposing none of your members wants to take the risk? What happens then?'

Garunisch shrugged. 'That's one of those bridges we'll have to cross when we come to it.'

Victor Blaufoot spread his hands, appalled. 'But what if it were your own sick child, and a hospital worker refused to carry him into hospital, because he was not getting paid enough, or because he didn't choose to? What then?'

Kenneth Garunisch blew out smoke. He had heard all these soft-headed emotional arguments a million times before, and they cut no ice with him.

'Listen, Mr. Bloofer — everyone is somebody's child, and my members have parents and families as well. They're entitled to danger money, and that's as far as it goes. Before you start shedding tears for the patients, think of the kids whose fathers and mothers have to treat those patients. Everyone has their rights in this kind of situation, and those rights have to be respected.'

Victor Blaufoot frowned. 'I see. Everyone has rights, except the sick and the needy.'

'I didn't say that,' snapped Garunisch. 'I said everyone has rights, and I mean everyone.'

'But what if it was your own child? Answer me that.'

Garunisch was about to say something, then bit his tongue and stopped himself. He said quietly, 'I don't have any children.'

Victor Blaufoot nodded. 'I thought not. You talk and behave like a man with no children. Men with no children have nothing to lose, Mr. Garunisch, and with respect, that makes their bravery very hollow. I know you think that I'm an emotional old fool. I can see it on your face. But I have a daughter in Florida, and I'm worried about her.'

Kenneth Garnish crushed out his cigarette and stood up. 'Okay, Mr. Bloofer, Mrs. Bloofer, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you. I didn't realize you were personally involved.'

Mrs. Blaufoot looked up at him. A frail old lady staring pointedly at the heavyweight union boss. 'Would it have mattered if you had realized?' she asked. 'Would it have changed, one iota, what you have asked your people to do?'

Garunisch shook his head. 'No, Mrs. Bloofer, it wouldn't.'

Gay Garunisch, sensing unpleasantness, said brightly, 'Would anyone like something to eat? We have some hot spiced sausage, and some Southern fried chicken.'

Nobody answered. 'Hold the food,' Garunisch said. Wait till some more people arrive. I don't think Mr. and Mrs. Bloofer are very hungry.'

'I could use another drink,' said Mr. Blaufoot, holding up his empty glass. 'Please.'

The doorbell chimed. Kenneth Garunisch collected Mr. Blaufoot's glass, and then went over to answer it. It was Dick Bortolotti, one of his union officials — a young blue-chinned Italian with suits that always reminded Kenneth of the Mafia.

'Dick?' he said. 'What's wrong?'

Bortolotti stepped in, and closed the door.

'I know you're having your party, Ken, and I don't want to spoil your fun. But there's big trouble down in Miami, and we can't get through.'

'What do you mean?'

'It's this epidemic. It says on TV that it's getting worse — spreading. They won't even say how many people are dead, because they can't keep count.'

A muscle in Garunisch's cheek began to twitch. 'Go on,' he said in a whisper. 'What else?'

'The hospital phones are jammed solid. I can't get through to any of our organizers for love nor money.'

The telephone began to ring, and Garunisch knew it would be Matty, with the same story.

He held himself in close control. 'Who do we have at Fort Lauderdale? Maybe they could drive down and take a look-see.'

'I had a call from Copes, out at Tampa. He said the Miami health people were being really cagey and uptight. They keep insisting it's nothing too serious, and that they've gotten it under control, but the evidence sure doesn't point that way. I think it's a bad one, Ken. I mean, it sounds like a real bad one.'

Garunisch bowed his head. He was thinking, fast and hard. If there was an epidemic in Florida, his members were going to be right in the front line, and he was responsible for them.

Eventually, he looked up. 'Okay, Dick. You'd better come in. Grab yourself a drink and something to eat, while I try to talk to those health department dummies down at Miami. Maybe I can get some sense out of this situation.'

Garunisch turned back to his guests. 'Sorry about the interruption, folks, but it seems like some urgent union business has just come between me and my fun again. Just enjoy yourselves, and I'll join you in a moment.'

Victor Blaufoot looked round. 'Is it the plague? Have you heard any news?'

Kenneth Garunisch smiled. 'Don't concern yourself about that plague, Mr. Bloofer. Everything about the plague is well under control.'

Edgar Paston first heard about the plague on the radio of his seven-year-old Mercury station wagon. He was driving back to Elizabeth, New Jersey, after picking up fifteen boxes of canned peaches from his wholesaler. It was growing dark, and he had just switched on his headlights.

The radio newscaster was saying, 'Unconfirmed reports from Miami say that nearly forty people have fallen victim to an inexplicable epidemic disease. Health authorities say that the epidemic is well under control, and have warned Miami residents not to panic or react prematurely to what health chief Donald Firenza called "an unfortunate but containable outbreak."

'Hospitals and police are working overtime to cope with suspected sufferers, and Miami Police Department, have reported that nine of the epidemic victims are police officers who were called out to assist with casualties. Specialists have been unable so far to identify the disease, but Mr. Firenza has likened it to Spanish influenza.

'The mayor of Miami, John Becker, has sent personal messages of condolence to the families of the dead, and has called for a speedy containment of what he described as "this tragic mishap".

'We'll have more reports about the epidemic later, but meanwhile here's the weather report for New York and Jersey City… '

Paston switched the radio off. He reached across to the glove box, and found a peanut bar. Tearing the wrapper off with his teeth, he began to chew. He hadn't eaten since early this morning, when he had stopped for a cheese Woppa just outside Elizabeth.

Edgar Paston was the owner and manager of Elizabeth's Save-U Super-mart. He had bought the premises ten years ago, at an auction, when they were nothing more than a dilapidated tire-fitting works on the outskirts of town. He had taken a risk, because in those days, zoning laws still prevented any residential development in that part of Elizabeth. Business, at first, had been hard, and the family ate cheap vegetable soup and corn biscuits at night, even though they served hams and chickens by day.

A new housing policy changed all that, and overnight the area was designated suitable for a new suburb. The Save-U Super-mart attracted more and more customers as houses and streets went up all around it. What had once been a wilderness of truck stops and rough fields became a thriving cluster of chalet-style suburban houses, with neat gardens and kids on scooters. Now Edgar Paston had a healthy yearly profit, a four-bed-roomed chalet, and two cars.

To look at, he was a supermarket manager and nothing else. Thirty-nine years old, with thinning hair, thick-lensed spectacles, a five o'clock shadow and a taste for plaid short-sleeved shirts.

He finished the peanut bar and tucked the wrapper in his shirt pocket. He never littered. It was eight-fifteen. He would be back at the store in twenty minutes. That would just give him time to unload the peaches, lock everything up, and go home for his dinner. Today was his wife, Tammy's, half-day at the telephone company, and that meant a good hot supper with fresh-baked bread. Soon the wide lighted window of Save-U Super-mart appeared at the end of the block, and Edgar swung the station wagon off the road, over the car park, and pulled up outside. He-switched off the engine, and wearily climbed out.

He opened the Mercury's tailgate, dragged out one-of the boxes of peaches, and walked quickly across to the supermarket entrance, and inside. The lights were bright in there, and he blinked. His assistant, Gerry, was standing by the cash-desk chewing a pencil.

Edgar put down the box. 'What's the matter?' he said, half-stern and half-joking. 'Your mother not feeding you enough?'

Gerry, a thin and serious boy of sixteen with a beaky nose and short blond hair, looked worried.

'Hi, Mr. Paston. It's those kids again. They came in about ten minutes ago, and they're up to something, but I don't know what. I daren't leave the cash desk, and they've been down by the freezers for quite a while.'

Paston peered down the length of the store, past the shelves filled with cereals and cookies and baby-foods. There were only a few late shoppers left now, trundling their carts around and picking up TV dinners and canned drinks. The freezers, where he kept the meat and the beer, were down at the far end.

'Hold on, Gerry. I'll go and take a look.'

When he reached the end of the supermarket, he saw exactly what was going on. Four or five teenage boys in denims and black leather jackets were sitting around on the floor, drinking beer from a six-pack they had taken from the fridge.

'Okay,' said Edgar sharply. 'What the hell's happening here?'

The kids looked at him, and then looked at each other. A couple of them giggled.

'Come on, get your butts out of her, or I'll call the cops.'

None of the kids moved. One of them took a mouthful of beer and sprayed it in the air, and the rest of them laughed.

'All right,' said Edgar. 'I've warned you before. If that's the way you want it.'

He turned away, and walked towards the telephone on the wall. He was just about to pick it up, when one of the boys called out, 'Paston!'

He looked round. He had seen this kid before. He was tall for his age, with a tight black jacket decorated with zippers. He had a thin, foxy face, and greased-back hair.

'Are you talking to me?' said Edgar, putting the phone back on the hook.

'That's right, Paston,' said the kid. He came up closer and stood only a couple of feet away, his thumbs in his belt, chewing a large wad of gum with quick, noisy chews.

'It's Mr. Paston to you,' said Edgar calmly. The kid nodded.

'That's okay, Mr. Paston. And it's Mr. McManus to you.'

Edgar adjusted his glasses. 'Are you going to leave the store now, or do I have to call the cops and get you thrown out?'

McManus chewed, and looked Edgar up and down. 'Is that the way you talk to all your customers, Mr. Paston? It seems to me that me and my friends, we're just ordinary, law-abiding customers, and there ain't nothing you can do to get us out of here.' Edgar swallowed. The rest of the gang had now picked themselves up off the floor, and were lounging behind McManus in what they obviously considered were cool and threatening poses. One of them started cleaning his fingernails with a long-bladed knife.

'You took beer.' said Edgar quietly. 'You took beer and you drank it.'

McManus raised his eyebrows. 'Is there any law says you can't consume food and drink on the premises, provided you pay for it when you leave?'

'Yes, there is. Until you've paid for it, the stuff belongs to me, and if you drink it, that's theft. Now, you've got ten seconds to get the hell out.'

McManus didn't move. 'If you're saying I'm a thief, Mr. Paston, you'd better call yourself a cop and prove it.'

Edgar looked around the loutish faces of McManus and his gang, and then nodded.

'Okay,' he said tightly, and picked up the phone. The gang watched him with remote curiosity.

He spoke to the police, and then laid the phone down again.

'They said a couple of minutes,' he announced.

McManus shrugged. 'Seems to me they take longer every time,' he said, and his cronies all giggled.

It wasn't long before they heard the sound of a siren outside, and the crunch of car doors being slammed. Edgar looked towards the front of the store, and saw two police hats bobbing towards him behind one of the rows of shelves. Round the corner by the dog-food came Officer Marowitz, and his partner Officer Trent. They were big, weatherbeaten local patrolmen, and Edgar knew them well.

'Hi, Mr. Paston,' said Marowitz. He had a broad, swarthy face and a drooping mustache. 'Looks like you got Shark trouble.'

'Witty,' sneered one of the kids.

Marowitz ignored him. 'McManus,' he snapped. 'Have you been bothering my friend Mr. Paston?'

McManus grinned a foxy grin. 'Mr. Paston here says I'm a thief. I drank some beer in the store, and he says I stole it. Look, I got my money all ready to pay, and he says I stole it.'

Marowitz sniffed. 'Do you want to bring a charge, Mr. Paston?'

McManus said, 'I didn't steal it, man. The money's here. I was thirsty, and I opened a couple of cans, that's all.'

'You shut your mouth, McManus. Do you want to bring a charge, Mr. Paston?' Marowitz repeated.

Edgar Paston bit his lip, and then sighed. 'I guess not. Just get them out of here.'

Marowitz shrugged. 'It's up to you, Mr. Paston. If you want to bring a charge, you can do so.'

Edgar shook his head. 'For a few mouthfuls of beer, it isn't worth it. But if there's any more trouble, McManus, I know your face and I'm going to have the law on your tail so fast you won't know what's hit you.'

McManus grinned, and saluted. 'Jawohl, mein Fuhrer,' he mocked.

Marowitz closed his notebook. 'All right, you guys — scram. Next time you won't be so lucky.'

Giggling and larking about, McManus and his gang shuffled out of the store, and then amused themselves for a few minutes by pressing their faces against the glass of the window, pulling grotesque faces.

'They're only kids,' said Marowitz. 'Weren't you the same when you were a kid, Mr. Paston?'

Edgar looked up at him. 'No,' he said quietly. 'I wasn't.'

Marowitz grinned. 'Well, don't you worry. Different strokes for different folks. You have to remember these kids have got nothing to do in the evening around here. There's no dance halls, no movies, and most of them are banned from the hamburger joints. It's natural they're going to raise a little hell.'

Edgar picked up the beer-cans that were strewn on the floor, and went to fetch a damp doth to wipe up the mess. 'You wouldn't happen to have one of those cans of beer going spare, would you?' Marowitz asked.

Edgar stared at him. Marowitz said, grinning, 'It gets kind of dry, patrolling around all evening.'

Edgar reached into the refrigerator and took out a six-pack of Old Milwaukee. He handed it over, and said flatly, 'That's one dollar and eighty-five cents. You can pay at the desk.'

Marowitz took the pack without a word. He muttered to Trent, 'Come on, we got more friendly places to visit,' and walked out. Just by the cash desk, he banged his money down in front of Gerry, and called out loudly, 'Support your local police department!'

Edgar watched them drive away, and then went out into the car park to fetch the rest of his canned peaches. The night was growing cooler now, and there was a soft wind from the east. A couple of trucks bellowed past on their way to Jersey City, and one or two cars, but mostly the roads were empty and silent.

He didn't realize what had happened at first. But when he reached into the back of the car, he noticed how low down it seemed to be. He frowned, and looked around the side. All four tires had been slashed into black ribbons, and the Mercury was resting on its wheel hubs.

Edgar stood there for a while, feeling utter frustration and despair. Then he slammed the tailgate angrily shut, locked it, and walked back to the supermarket.

Gerry was just counting up the day's takings. 'What's wrong, Mr. Paston?' he asked.

'Someone slashed my tires. I'll have to take the pick-up. Let's get this place closed down for the night, and leave it at that.'

'Do you think it was Shark McManus?'

'Is that what they call him? Shark?'

'I guess it was after Jaws. He's a kind of a wild kid.'

Edgar almost laughed. 'Wild? He's a goddamned maniac. I mean, what kind of a person goes around stealing beer and slashing tires? What the hell's it all for?'

Gerry shrugged. 'I don't know, Mr. Paston. I guess they get kind of frustrated.'

'Oh yeah? Well, I wish they wouldn't take their half-baked frustrations out on me.'

He went to check the cold shelves and the meat, to make sure that everything was kept at the right temperature for overnight storage. Then he swept up the rubbish, while Gerry restocked some of the canned goods. He did everything quickly and superficially, because he wanted to get home. He could always get up early and dean the place more thoroughly tomorrow.

He was almost finished when he thought he heard a tap on the store window. He looked up, frowning. There was another tap, louder. Then, right in front of his eyes, the huge plate-glass window smashed, and half-a-hundred-weight of glass dropped to the sidewalk with a shattering, pealing sound.

Edgar ran to the front of the store and stared out into the night. It was silent, and dark. The wind blew fitfully into the store, making price tags flap on the shelves. He crunched across the sea of broken glass, still staring, still searching.

In the distance, he thought he heard someone laugh. It could have been a dog barking, or a car starting up. But the sound of it was enough to make him shiver.

Three

Miami was always quiet in the small hours of the morning, but tonight that silence seemed to be sultry and threatening. As Dr. Leonard Petrie drove through echoing and deserted streets, he sensed in the air the beginning of something new and frightening and strange. Two or three cars and an ambulance passed him as he drove downtown. Out on the expressway, lines of traffic still shuttled backwards and forwards from the airport, and trucks and cars still traveled up and down US, heading north for Fort Lauderdale or south for the Keys. It could have been any night of any year in Miami. The radio was playing country music from Nashville, and the hotels along the Beach glittered with light.

Dr. Petrie swung the Lincoln left on West Flagler and 17th. For the first time, he saw the spreading effects of the plague. There were four or five bodies lying on the sidewalk, sprawled-out and motionless in the light of a store window. They looked as if they were fast asleep. He drew the Lincoln into the kerb, and got out to take a look. It was a family. A father — middle-aged, with a small moustache; a middle-aged mother; and two small boys, aged about eight and ten. It was so unbelievably odd to see them here, on this warm and normal night, lying dead and pale on the sidewalk, that Dr. Petrie was moved to prod the father's body with his toe, to see if he were sleeping.

The father's hand slipped across his silent chest, and rested on the concrete.

A police-car came cruising up 17th in the opposite direction, and Dr. Petrie quickly stepped across the sidewalk to flag it down.

The cop was wearing orange sunglasses, even though it was night-time, and a handkerchief over his mouth, bandit-style.

'I'm a doctor,' Petrie said. 'I came around the block and saw those people. They're all dead, I'm afraid. I guess it's the plague.'

The patrolman nodded. 'We're getting cases all over. Six or seven cops down with it already. Okay, doctor, I'll call headquarters and notify them about the dead people. Between you and me, though, I don't think they got enough ambulances to cope. It won't be long before it's garbage trucks.'

'Garbage trucks?' said Dr. Petrie. He was appalled. He looked back across the street, and the family was lying there, pale and still. The children must have died first, and the mother and father died while trying to nurse them. 'You mean — '

The cop said, 'They don't have enough ambulances, doctor. It's either that, or we leave them to rot in the streets.'

Dr. Petrie rubbed his face tiredly. 'Have you seen many like this?' he asked the cop.

'A couple of dozen maybe.'

'And what are you supposed to do about them?' The cop shrugged. His radio was blurting something about a traffic accident on the West Expressway. 'We have to report them, that's all. Those are the orders. Report them, but don't touch them.'

'And that's all? No orders to stop people using the beaches, or leaving the city?' The cop shook his head. Dr. Petrie stood beside the police car for a moment, thinking. Then he said, 'Thanks,' and walked back to his Lincoln. He climbed in, gunned the engine, and drove off in the direction of Donald Firenza's house.

The more he heard about the health chief's inactivity, the more worried and angry he grew. If one cop had seen two dozen cases, there must be at least a hundred sick people in the whole city, and that meant a plague epidemic of unprecedented scale. He drove fast and badly, but the streets were deserted, and it only took him five minutes to get out to Coral Gables.

He had no trouble in picking out Donald Firenza's house. There were cars parked all the way up the street, including a television truck and a blue and white police car, and every window was alight. He pulled his Lincoln on to the sidewalk and switched off the engine. Over the soft rustling of palm trees and the chirrup of insects, he could hear voices raised in argument.

He was greeted at the door by a fat uniformed cop with a red sweaty face.

'I'm a doctor,' Petrie said. 'I just came up from the hospital. Is Mr. Firenza home?'

The cop scrutinized Dr. Petrie's ID card. He was monotonously chewing gum. 'Guess Mr. Firenza's pretty tied up right now, but you can ask. Go ahead inside.'

Dr. Petrie stepped through the door. The house was crowded with newspaper reporters and television cameramen, all lounging around with cardboard cups of coffee and cans of beer. It was one of those houses that in normal circumstances was guaranteed to make Dr. Petrie wince. There were coach lamps and sculptured carpets, wrought-iron banistairs and paintings of horses leaping through the foamy sea. On one wall was a print of a small girl with enormous eyes, out of which two fat sparkling tears were dropping.

In the pink-decorated sitting-room, Petrie found Donald Firenza, sitting back in a large plastic-covered easy chair, talking to a young reporter from the Miami Herald and a bald man in a bright sport shirt from UPI. Dr. Petrie recognized a couple of friends from the city health department at the back of the room, and he nodded to them briefly. Tonight was not a night for smiles.

'Mr. Firenza?' he said crisply. 'I'm Dr. Leonard Petrie. I just came from Dr. Selmer, down at the hospital.'

Mr. Firenza looked up. He was right in the middle of saying, ' — all the epidemic deaths we've suffered so far have been tragic, but unfortunately they've been unavoidable — ' He didn't look at all pleased at being interrupted.

'Can it wait?' he said. He was a small, pale-faced, curly-headed man wearing a green turtle-neck sweater.

'I don't think so,' said Dr. Petrie.

The UPI man turned around in his chair. 'Is it something to do with the epidemic? Is it getting worse?'

Dr. Petrie didn't look at him. 'I came to talk to Mr. Firenza, not to the press.'

'What's the latest death-toll?' persisted the man from UPI. 'Has it gone above twelve yet?'

Dr. Petrie ignored him. 'Mr. Firenza,' he said. 'I'd appreciate a private word.'

Mr. Firenza sighed, and stood up. 'Excuse me, you guys,' he said to the two reporters. 'I'll be right back.'

He led Dr. Petrie through the throng of police, health department officials and newsmen to a small study at the back of the house. He closed the door behind them and shut out the babble of conversation and argument.

'Sit down,' said Mr. Firenza. 'We've met before, haven't we?'

Dr. Petrie sat down, and nodded. 'Two or three times, at health department meetings. Maybe at dinners once or twice. Perhaps we should've gotten better acquainted.'

Firenza reached for a large briar pipe and proceeded to stack it with rough-cut tobacco. 'I want to tell you here and now that I'm very proud of the way that Miami's doctors are rallying to help.' he said.

'Thank you.'

'However — I don't really think that you picked the subtlest way of breaking into a press conference,' Firenza went on. 'I've just been trying to convince our friends from the papers that this epidemic is containable and isolated.'

'Do they believe you?'

Firenza looked at Dr. Petrie curiously. 'Of course they believe me. Why shouldn't they?'

Dr. Petrie coughed. 'Because it's not true.'

Firenza pushed some more tobacco into his pipe, and then laughed. 'You've been talking to Dr. Selmer, haven't you? I know he thinks this is the end of the world, and that we're all going to get stricken down. I had to remind him that this is Miami, which has more qualified doctors per square inch than almost any other city in the continental United States, and that we have both the finance and the resources to cope with any kind of epidemic.'

'Is that your considered opinion, or is that the story you're telling the press?' Dr. Petrie asked.

'It's both.'

'Have you been down to the hospital within the last hour?'

'No, of course not. I've been up here. This is where we're doing all the planning and the organization. I get constant reports from all over, and the police and the hospitals are keeping me up to date with every new case.'

'So you know how many people have died?'

Firenza looked at him narrowly. 'Yes, I do,' he said, in a slow voice. 'What are you getting at?'

'I'm not getting at anything. If you know how many people have died, how come this city isn't already in quarantine? When I drove here, I saw people lying dead on the sidewalks.'

Firenza struck a match and began to light his pipe. 'There are more people lying dead on the sidewalks in New York City, my friend, and they don't even have an epidemic there.'

Dr. Petrie frowned. 'Mr. Firenza,' he said, 'that is completely irrelevant. We have a serious epidemic disease on our hands right here in Miami, and it's up to us to do something about it.'

Firenza crossed his little legs. 'We are doing something about it, doctor. We have all the medical people on call that we need. But you don't think that a medical officer can only concern himself with medicine, do you? It's just as important for me to protect Miami's interests as a city as it is for me to protect the health of its citizens.'

Dr. Petrie stared at him. 'You mean — what you're telling the press — it's all to protect the city's business?'

'Partly. It has to be. You think I want panic in the streets? What we have here is a very tragic, very unfortunate incident. But it's no more than an incident. The last thing we want is for people to get hysterical.'

Dr. Petrie looked up. 'In other words, you don't want them to cancel their holidays?'

Firenza caught the tone of his voice. 'Look here, Dr. Petrie, I don't quite know why you're here, but I have a serious job to do and I don't appreciate sarcasm.'

'Dr. Selmer has a serious job to do, too. He has to stand there and watch people die.'

'He's getting all the back-up he needs. What more does he want?'

'He wants to be sure that this epidemic doesn't spread. We have a general idea of how it started. All that raw sewage that's been piling up on the beaches in the past couple of days has polluted the water and the sand. Somehow, the plague bacillus has been developing inside the sewage, and anyone who's gone down on the beach or swum in the ocean has caught it.'

Firenza puffed his pipe. 'You've got proof?' he said shortly.

'I don't think it needs proof. Every plague victim we've come across went swimming over the weekend or early yesterday morning.'

'That doesn't mean anything. Sixty percent of the population goes swimming over the weekend.'

'Yes — but mostly in private pools. All the victims went for a swim in the ocean.'

'I still find that hard to believe, Dr. Petrie. We've had raw sewage wash up on the beaches a couple of times before, and each time it's proved neutral.'

'Have you tested this sewage?'

'The health department didn't consider it necessary,' Firenza replied firmly.

Dr. Petrie stared at him. 'Mr. Firenza,' he said, 'am I hearing things? We have a dozen people dead of plague down at the hospital, and thirty or forty, maybe more people sick. We have beaches ankle-deep in sewage. Don't you think that, between the two, there's just the shadow of a probable link?'

Firenza shrugged. 'You're a doctor. You ought to know the danger of jumping to conclusions.'

Dr. Petrie sucked in his breath in exasperation. 'Mr. Firenza, I came here to ask you to close down the beaches. Not ask — insist. We have some kind of disease on our hands that's spreading faster than any disease we've ever come across before. People are dying within three to four hours of first catching it. Unless you want the whole population of Miami dead or dying within a couple of days, I suggest you act pretty fast.'

'Oh, you do, do you?' sneered Firenza. 'And just how do you suggest that I shut down twenty miles of beach without setting off the biggest hysterical exodus in American history?'

Dr. Petrie stood up. He was very tired, and he was angry. 'I think it's far better to set off an hysterical exodus of living people, than it is to shovel them up unhysterically when they're dead.'

Firenza almost grinned. 'Dr. Petrie,' he said. 'You have a fine turn of phrase. Unfortunately, you're reacting like all of your breed when you're faced with genuine diseases instead of old people's hypochondriac complaints. Real diseases frighten the pants off you. For once, you've got to do some real medical work, instead of prescribing sugar pills and syrup for rich and bad-tempered old ladies. Come on — admit it — you're scared.'

Dr. Petrie's face was strained with suppressed fury.

'Yes,' he said, in a shaking voice. 'I'm scared. I'm scared of a disease that kills people off like bugs down a drain, and I'm scared of you.'

Firenza stood up, too. He was nearly a foot shorter than Dr. Petrie.

'I suggest you go get yourself some rest,' said Firenza. 'In the light of day, the whole thing is going to look a lot less scary. I'm not saying that the situation isn't serious. It is, and I'm treating it as a medical emergency. But that's no reason to disturb the whole city, to cause unnecessary distress and anxiety, and to kill off the proceeds from a vacation season that's only just started. If we quarantine this city, Dr. Petrie, we'll destroy our business-folk, and our ordinary men and women, just as surely as if they'd gotten sick.'

Petrie looked at him for a long while, then slowly shook his head.

Mr. Firenza said, 'I promise you, and I promise Dr. Selmer, that if this epidemic gets any worse by tomorrow noon, I'll bring in the Dade County Health Department, and seek some federal help if we need it. Now — is that to your satisfaction?'

There was a long, awkward silence. Dr. Petrie opened the door of the study. 'I don't know what to say to you, Mr. Firenza. If you won't listen, you won't listen. Maybe I should go straight to the mayor.'

'The mayor's in Washington, for two days.'

'But he knows about the epidemic, surely?'

'He's heard about it, on the news. He called me, and I told him it was all under control, and to stay put. All I can say, Dr. Petrie is that it's up to the men of healing like you and Dr. Selmer to prove me right.'

Dr. Petrie turned away. 'If it didn't mean a terrible loss of life,' he said bitterly, 'I'd do anything to prove you wrong.'

He called Dr. Selmer from the phone-booth on the corner of the street, and told him what had happened. Selmer sounded frayed and worried, and on the point of collapse.

'Doesn't he have any idea how bad it is?' asked Anton Selmer. 'I've had fifteen more deaths since you left. I've had three nurses and two doctors down with it, and it won't be long before I get it myself.'

'Of course you won't. Just like you said, you and I are probably immune. Maybe it was contact with David that did it, or maybe we're just lucky.'

'I need to be lucky, if Firenza won't close the beaches.'

'I'm sorry, Anton. I did try. He's still telling the press that it's containable and localized, and that we're all going to wake up in the morning and discover it was nothing more than a nasty dream.'

'Jesus Christ.'

'I'm going after Prickles now,' Dr. Petrie said. 'I don't know where Margaret's taken her, but maybe if she's sick she's gone home. It shouldn't take long.'

'Will you come back here, just as soon as you can? I need every bit of help I can get. Joe Mamiya is making some tests on the bacillus, but it's going to take him a long time to come up with anything positive.'

'Anton — I'll be as quick as I can.'

Dr. Petrie put the phone back in its cradle, and went back to his car. On the far sidewalk, he saw a man shuffling and staggering along, leaning against parked cars for support. The man suddenly stopped, and his head jerked back. Then he dropped to his knees, and fell face first on to the concrete. He lay there muttering and twitching, his cheeks bruised and pale, his right leg nervously shuddering.

Dr. Petrie walked across the road and knelt down beside him.

'I'm a doctor.' he said. 'Do you feel bad?'

The man turned his bloodshot eyes upwards to look at him. 'I'm dying,' he muttered hoarsely. 'I got that disease, and I'm dying.'

'Do you want anything? A drink maybe?'

The man closed his eyes.

Dr. Petrie stayed beside him for a few minutes, then the man opened his eyes again.

'It hurts so bad,' he whispered. 'It hurts me in my guts. In my balls. It's like someone's eating me up alive.'

'Don't worry. The pain will soon be over.'

'I'm dying, doc.'

'Leonard, my name's Leonard.'

The man, his face pressed against the rough sidewalk, tried to smile. There was a cold wreath of sweat around his forehead, and his face was now a ghastly white.

'Leonard… ' he whispered.

Dr. Petrie took out his handkerchief and wiped the man's forehead. He turned him over, and tried to make him as comfortable as he could. He checked the pulse, and the rate of respiration, and it was quite obvious there was nothing he could do. The man would be dead in a matter of minutes.

The man opened his eyes one last time. He looked up at the night sky as if it was something he had never seen before, and then he turned his gaze back to Dr. Petrie. He stared at him for a long time, and then, in a small, quiet voice, he said, 'Leonard?'

Dr. Petrie said gently, 'Don't try to talk. Just lie still.'

'Thank you, Leonard.'

'You've got nothing to thank me for. Now, stay still. It won't hurt so bad if you're still.'

The man reached out with cold sweaty fingers and took Dr. Petrie's hand in his. He attempted a squeeze of friendship.

'Thanks for — thanks for — '

Dr. Petrie was going to answer, but it was too late. The man was dead. He released his hand, and stood up. He thought about going back to Firenza's house, and telling the police that the body was lying here, but then he considered that the police had enough bodies to pick up, and that they'd spot this one soon enough. Maybe it was better for his freshly-dead acquaintance to spend a last night in the open, under the night sky, then be shoveled straight away into the back of a garbage truck.

He went back to the Lincoln, climbed in and slammed the door. He felt physically and morally drained. For a moment, he held up his hands in front of him, and imagined they were teeming with infected bacilli. The enemy was invisible and endlessly malevolent, and so far there was no way of fighting back.

Dr. Petrie released the brake, and turned the car east. There was no future in thinking things like that. Right now, it was Prickles he wanted. A safe, healthy, and happy Prickles.

He joined the North-South Expressway and drove up towards North Miami Beach at nearly seventy miles an hour. The ocean was turning pale misty blue on his right, and the sky was growing lighter. The clock in the car reminded him that it was nearly dawn, and that he hadn't slept all night. There was hardly any other traffic at all, and several times he had to pull out to overtake abandoned cars.

It was almost light by the time he pulled up outside the white ranch-style house with the stunted palms. He shut the car door with a bang and strode across the lawn. There were no lights in the house, but Margaret's cream-colored Cutlass was parked in the car port. He went up to the frosted-glass front door and rang the bell.

There was no answer. He rang again and again, and shouted, 'Margaret! Margaret — are you in there? Margaret, it's Len!'

He tried to peer in through the sitting-room window, but it was too dark to make anything out. He went around the side of the house and tried the side door, but it was locked and bolted. He banged on it a couple of times and shouted his wife's name, but again there was no reply.

Dr. Petrie was just walking back across the lawn towards his car when he turned and saw a bedroom curtain move upstairs. The window opened and Prickles leaned out.

'Daddy,' she called, with a serious frown.

'Prickles! Listen, give me a couple of minutes and I'll get you out of there.'

'I didn't want to go but Mommy said I had to. Daddy, I'm frightened. Mommy says she's sick. Daddy, I'm real frightened.'

Dr. Petrie was still standing there when the front door opened. It was Margaret. She was very pale, and she was wearing a red flowery wrap. It gave him an odd sensation to see her there, because she was at once so familiar and so hostile. There was the same bird's-wing sweep of dark hair; the same wide-apart eyes; the same tight mouth; the same long angular nose. But there was something else as well — a blank stare of bitter resentment and dislike.

'Margaret?' said Dr. Petrie, walking back across the lawn towards her. 'Are you all right? Prickles said you were sick.'

Margaret attempted a smile.

'I have been unwell, Leonard. If that interests you.' Dr. Petrie pointed up to the bedroom window. 'Why did you take her back? I thought you were going to Fort Lauderdale to see your mother.'

Margaret was holding the door so tight that her knuckles were white.

'So you care about her when it suits you,' she said slurrily.

'Look Margaret — are you sick, or what? What's the matter with you?'

'I'm fine, now. I was a little under the weather, but I'm fine.'

'You don't look fine. You look terrible.' Margaret laughed, humorlessly. 'You don't look so good yourself. Now, why don't you just get out of here and leave us alone.'

Dr. Petrie went right up to the door. But before he could push his way in, Margaret closed it, and latched the security chain. She peered at him through the four-inch gap that was left, like a suspicious animal in its darkened den.

He tried to force the door, but it wouldn't budge. 'Margaret,' he warned. 'Open this door.'

'You're not coming in, Leonard. I won't let you. Just go away and leave us alone.'

'Margaret, you're sick. You don't know what you're saying. You could have the plague. There are people dying in the streets. I've seen them.'

'Go away, Leonard! We can manage without you!' Dr. Petrie slammed his shoulder against the door. The security chain was wrenched in its screws, but it stayed firm.

'Margaret — you're sick! For Christ's sake, think of Prickles! If you're sick, then she's going to get sick, and that could mean that both of you die!' Margaret tried to dose the door completely, but Dr. Petrie kept his foot jammed in it, and wouldn't let her.

He was so busy trying to wrench the door open that he didn't hear the car stop in the road, or see the two men walking slowly across the lawn towards him. It was only when Margaret looked up, and the cop said, 'Okay, Superman, what's going on here?' that he realized what was happening.

The policemen looked tired and hard-faced. One of them was standing a little way back, with his hand on the butt of his gun. The other was right up behind him, with his arms akimbo. They both wore sunglasses, and they both had knotted handkerchiefs around their necks, ready to pull over their nose and mouth in case of plague duty.

Dr. Petrie pushed back his hair from his forehead. He knew how disreputable he must look after a whole night without sleep. He said weakly, 'This is my house. I mean, this was my house.'

'This was your house?' said the cop. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'This was my house and this lady was my wife. We were having a slight argument. That's all.'

The cop strained his eyes to see Margaret standing in the shadows of the hall.

'Is this true, ma'am?'

Margaret sounded so different that Dr. Petrie could hardly believe it was the same person. Instead of speaking harshly and bitterly, she was like a pathetic little girl, all weak and heartbroken and begging for sympathy.

'I was only trying to reason with him, officer. He went crazy. Look, he broke the door. He went absolutely crazy. He said he was going to beat me up, and take my little girl away.'

Dr. Petrie stared in amazement. 'But — this is preposterous — I was — '

The cop reached down, and calmly attached a handcuff to Dr. Petrie's wrist. 'I have to advise you of your rights,' he said. 'You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to — '

'I didn't do anything!' snapped Dr. Petrie. 'My wife came around to my place and took my little girl without my permission. Now she's sick with the plague and she won't let me take my daughter back. For God's sake, look at her! She's sick with the plague! If you take me away, my daughter's going to catch it and die! Don't you understand that?'

The second cop was opening the police car doors.

The first cop said, 'Listen, sir, we've all had a very trying time recently with this epidemic. You know what I mean? I picked up a guy for breaking in a TV store just half-an-hour ago. He said his old granny was dying of sickness, and he wanted to make her last hours happy by letting her watch TV. It's an emergency situation. Lots of people are trying to take advantage of it. Now, let's go, huh?'

Dr. Petrie said, 'I don't suppose it would make any difference if I told you I was a doctor?'

The cop pushed him into the car and sat down beside him. The second cop settled himself down behind the steering wheel, and pulled away from the kerb, siren whooping and lights ablaze.

'You're a doctor, huh?' answered the cop, after a while. 'Well, maybe you ought to be out there healing some of these sick people, instead of bothering your ex-wife.'

Dr. Petrie said nothing. The police car squealed on to the North-South Expressway, and sped downtown.

They took his money, his keys and his necktie, and locked him in an open-barred cell with two black looters and a drunk. He was exhausted, and he lay on the rough gray blanket of his bed, and slept without dreams for four hours.

It was eleven o'clock when he woke up, feeling cramped and sore but slightly more human. The drunk had gone, and the two negroes were left by themselves, murmuring quietly to each other.

He sat up, and rubbed his face. There was a small basin in the corner of the cell, and he splashed cold water over himself, and wiped himself dry with his handkerchief.

He went to the bars and looked out, but there was no sign of anyone. Nothing but a gray-painted corridor, and a smell of body odor and carbolic soap. He turned around to the blacks.

'What do you have to do to get some service around here?'

The blacks stared at him briefly, and then went back to their conversation.

'I'm a doctor,' Petrie insisted, 'and I want to get out of here.'

The blacks started at him again. One of them grinned, and shook his head.

'They don't let nobody out today, man. It's emergency regulations. Anyway, if things don't get much better out there on the streets, maybe you safer where you at.'

Dr. Petrie nodded. 'You're probably right. But what do I have to do to get some attention?'

The other black said, 'This ain't the Coral-on-the-Ocean, man. This is the Slammer-in-the-city.'

They both laughed, then resumed their talk.

Dr. Petrie went to the bars and shouted, 'Guard!'

The blacks stopped talking again and watched him.

He waited for a while, and then shouted, 'Guard! Guard! Let me out of here!'

A few more minutes passed, and then a young policeman with rimless spectacles came down the corridor jangling a bunch of keys.

'You Dr. Petrie?' he asked.

'That's right. I want to see my lawyer.'

'You don't have to. You're free to leave.'

The guard unlocked the cell, and Dr. Petrie stepped out. One of the blacks said, 'So long, honky, have a nice day,' and the other laughed.

Dr. Petrie was ushered back to the police station desk, where the two arresting officers had brought him that morning. Adelaide was there, with dark rings under her eyes. She was still wearing the buttermilk-colored dress in which he had picked her up last night.

'Leonard — are you all right? Oh God, I was so worried.'

She came up and held him close, and he was so relieved to feel her and see her that he felt tears prickling in his eyes.

The desk sergeant said, 'When you've quite finished the love tableau, would you mind signing for these personal possessions?'

Dr. Petrie signed. 'Listen,' he told Adelaide, as he tied his necktie, 'I have to get back to the hospital. I promised Dr. Selmer.'

'It was Dr. Selmer who told me you were missing,' Adelaide said. He called at the house to see if you were there. When I said you weren't, he called the police, and they found out that you were here. I came straight over.'

'Have they closed the beaches yet?' he asked her, as they walked out of the tinted glass doors of the police station into the brilliant mid-morning sunlight.

'Not yet. The news says that it's serious, this plague, but that people mustn't get too worried. But it doesn't make sense. What the newspapers are saying, and the TV, it doesn't seem to tie up at all. I've seen people sick in the streets, and yet they keep saying there's nothing wrong.'

Dr. Petrie looked around. The sky was its usual imperturbable blue, flecked with shadowy White clouds. But the city was quiet. There were only a few cars, and they seemed to be rolling around the city streets in a strange dream. Some of them were piled high with possessions — chairs, tables and mattresses — and it was obvious that the few people who had realized what was going on were getting out as quick as they could.

The sidewalks — usually crowded with shoppers and tourists — were almost empty. People who needed to go for food or drink were, hurrying back to their cars and avoiding strangers like — Like the plague, thought Dr. Petrie bitterly.

'Have you seen any bodies?' he asked Adelaide.

She shook her head. 'I've heard though,' she said quietly. 'I caught a taxi, and the taxi-driver said he'd seen people lying on the ground, dead.'

'I saw a whole family last night,' Dr. Petrie said. 'It was awful. They were just lying on the sidewalk. I can't understand how Donald Firenza has kept this under wraps for so long.'

'Are you going back to the hospital?' Adelaide asked.

'I have to.'

'Do you want me to come with you?'

He shook his head. 'It's too risky. The hospital is full of infection. I don't know why on earth I haven't caught the plague yet but Dr. Selmer reckons that a few people could be immune. Maybe I'm one of them.'

Adelaide held his arm. 'Maybe? Leonard — what if you go to the hospital and — well, what if I never see you again?' She looked away.

'Adelaide, I'm a doctor. This city is dying around us. Look at it. Have you ever seen downtown Miami as quiet as this on a Tuesday lunchtime? I have to find out what's going on, and I have to help.'

'Leonard, I'm not leaving you. Not again. I've just spent the most frightening night of my life, waiting for you to come back, and I'm not going to let it happen again.'

A cab was parked at the corner. The driver, a squat middle-aged man in a straw hat, was calmly smoking a cigar and sunning himself as he leaned against the trunk.

Dr. Petrie walked over, holding Adelaide's hand, and said, 'Will you take me to the hospital?'

The taxi driver looked him up and down. 'You sick?' he asked.

'No, I'm a doctor.'

The man reached behind him and opened the door. 'That'll be forty bucks,' he said, without taking the cigar out of his mouth.

'Forty bucks? What are you talking about? That's a two-dollar ride at the most.'

The taxi driver slammed the door shut again. 'That's the price. Forty bucks or no trip.'

Dr. Petrie said firmly, 'Come on, Adelaide. We'll find ourselves a cab driver with some goddamned morality.'

The taxi driver was unfazed. 'Mister,' he said, 'you can search all day. All the moral cab drivers have taken their taxis and headed north. So has anyone else who's realized what the hell's going on in this town.'

Dr. Petrie reached for his wallet and peeled off three ten-dollar bills. 'Here's thirty. Take me down to the hospital, and you'll get the other ten. But don't think for one moment that I enjoy paying money to a flake like you.'

The taxi driver tucked the cash in his shirt pocket, and opened the car door. They climbed in, and the driver performed a wide U-turn, and drove them downtown to the hospital.

'I've seen fifty, sixty people dead in the streets,' said the driver conversationally, puffing on his cigar. 'I came out for my roster this morning, and I couldn't believe it. You know what they said on the radio? It's a kind of an influenza, and that it's all going to be over by the end of the week. Nothing to get excited about. You think fifty or sixty stiffs is nothing to get excited about?'

'I'm surprised you didn't leave town along with the rest of your buddies,' said Adelaide tartly.

'Why should I?' said the cab driver, turning the car towards the hospital. 'I can make a few bucks here in the city. I've lived here all my life. Look — there's another stiff on the sidewalk — right there.'

They looked, and saw the body of a woman in a blue-and-green dress lying on the concrete sidewalk outside a delicatessen. Her basket of groceries had spilled all over the pavement, and her arms were drawn up underneath her like a sick child.

The delicatessen proprietor was standing in his doorway staring at her, but what struck Dr. Petrie more than, anything else was the attitude of the few passers-by. They stepped over the sprawling woman as if she and her shopping were quite invisible.

Dr. Petrie said, 'Don't slow down. I have to get to the hospital as soon as I can.'

Adelaide was pale. 'Leonard,' she said. 'That woman.'

Dr. Petrie looked away. 'There's nothing we can do. She's probably dead already.'

The taxi driver puffed his cigar. 'You bet she's dead. I hear tell they got so many stiffs in the streets, they're going to start collecting them with garbage trucks.'

Adelaide looked shocked. 'Yes,' Dr. Petrie said, 'I heard that too.'

Dr. Selmer was waiting for him in his private office. The corridors outside were jammed with medical trolleys, and the weeping and wailing relatives of the dead were adding to the confusion of amateur ambulance drivers and local doctors who had been brought in to console the sick. All that was left to give was consolation. In spite of every kind of antibiotic treatment, people who caught the plague were dying with the inevitability of mayflies. 'Firenza was on the phone about an hour ago,' said Anton Selmer, leaning back wearily in his large leather chair, and resting his feet on his cluttered desk. 'He's agreed to close the beaches.'

'What's the death toll?' asked Dr. Petrie, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.

'About a hundred and twenty so far. That's with this hospital and all the others. Add to that another thirty who may be lying dead in their apartments or in the streets, and you've probably got yourself a reasonably accurate figure.'

'The city's real quiet. I thought it would have been more.'

Dr. Selmer shook his sandy head. 'Don't worry, Leonard. It will be more before the day's over. Every one of those dead people came into contact with seven or eight or maybe even more live people, and every one of those live people, right now, is incubating the plague bacillus.'

'What about quarantine? Did Firenza mention that?'

'He said that he's talking to Decker, when the mayor flies back from Washington this afternoon. Between them, they're going to decide what emergency action they ought to take.'

Dr. Petrie heaved a sigh. 'For the first time in five years, I feel like smoking a cigarette.'

Anton Selmer pushed a wooden box across the desk. 'Have one,' he said. 'It might even be your last.'

Adelaide knocked on the door and came in. She had been down in the ladies' room, washing her face and repairing her make-up. She looked pale and tense, and her hands were trembling.

'Hallo, Adelaide,' Anton Selmer said. 'Take a seat. Can I fix you a drink? I have some fine medicinal whiskey.'

'Please.'

'Leonard?'

'I'll take a beer. The way this city's going, I'm not sure how long it's going to be before we taste cold beer again.'

Selmer fixed the drinks. 'I wish I knew how this city was going, Leonard. It seems to be impossible to get any straight information. Either the newspapers are blind and deaf, or else they're following a deliberate policy of keeping this thing quiet. It's the same with the TV channels. They all keep saying that the epidemic is isolated, and that it's containable, and that it won't spread. But, Jesus Christ, you only have to come here to the hospital, or walk out into the streets, and you can see that something's wrong. We have a major epidemic on our hands, Leonard, and yet everybody in charge of anything seems to be smiling and waving and making out it's nothing worse than a slight headcold.'

Adelaide said, 'Doesn't the government know? What about the federal health people? Surely they've been informed? Even if they haven't, they must be worried.'

Dr. Petrie pulled the ring of his flip-top can, and took a freezing mouthful of beer. He stood up and walked across to the window. Through the Venetian blinds, he could see the sparse streets of downtown Miami, and the afternoon sun on the white buildings opposite. High in the sky, a long horse's-tail of cirrus cloud was curled by the wind.

'Maybe they do know,' he said. 'Maybe they're helping to keep the whole thing quiet. I haven't heard any airplanes coming out from the airport this morning, Anton.'

'Oh, that,' said Dr. Selmer. 'As a precautionary measure, the baggage handlers at Miami International Airport have suddenly decided to go on strike, which means all Miami flights are being diverted to Palm Beach or Tampa.'

'That's convenient. Maybe Firenza does take this plague more seriously than we think. What about boats?'

Dr. Selmer shrugged. 'I don't know, but I guess they're working the same kind of stunt there.'

'But why no official quarantine?' frowned Dr. Petrie. 'I know this thing has spread in just a few hours, but surely there's somebody around with enough sense to seal the city off for a while, even if Firenza won't do it.'

'Don't ask me,' said Dr. Selmer. 'The official line is perfectly straightforward. We have a minor epidemic of something akin to Spanish influenza which we expect to have run its course by the end of the week. I've seen it on the television, and I've read it in the paper. Here.'

He leafed through a stack of letters and manila files, and produced the morning's paper. The main headline read: Twenty Die In Influenza Outbreak.

'That's incredible,' Adelaide said. 'There are people lying around in the streets dead. Why don't they print the truth?'

Dr. Petrie shuffled through the newspaper until he found the telephone number of its city desk. Without a word, he picked up Dr. Selmer's phone, and dialed. He waited while it rang, and Adelaide and Anton watched him in tense anticipation.

The girl on the newspaper's switchboard answered, and Dr. Petrie asked for the city desk.

There was a long pause, and then finally he was switched through. A nasal, surly sub-editor answered. 'Can I help you?'

'Maybe you can. My name is Dr. Leonard Petrie and I'm down at the hospital here with Dr. Anton Selmer. Look, I've just seen your morning edition and it doesn't seem to bear any relation to what we know to be the real facts.'

'I see.'

'What we have here is a form of Pasteurella pestis, which is the medical name for plague. It's very virulent, and very dangerous, and so far as we know to date, almost a hundred and fifty people have died. By the end of the day, it could be five or six times that figure.'

There was a silence. The sub-editor coughed, and then said, 'Well, Dr. Petrie. Your theory is very interesting.'

'What are you talking about? These are facts! I've seen dead people on the streets myself.'

'Oh, sure.'

'Aren't you interested? Isn't this newsworthy? Or have you gotten so goddamned deadened to violence that when a hundred and fifty Miami residents die of the plague, it only rates two lines on the inside page?'

'I am not deadened to violence, Dr. Petrie. I am simply doing my job.'

Dr. Petrie frowned. 'I wish I knew what your job was. So far, it seems to amount to out-and-out misrepresentation.'

'I resent that, Dr. Petrie.'

'Oh you do, huh? Well, I resent a newspaper that deliberately obscures the truth.'

The sub-editor sighed. 'Dr. Petrie, we're not dummies. We know what's going on, and so does City Hall and the County Health Department and the US Disease Control people in Washington.'

'Well, there isn't much evidence of it.'

'Of course not. We've already been briefed along with all of the other media that we have to play this thing right down. No screams, no shouts.'

'No facts?' said Dr. Petrie, incredulous.

The sub-editor sighed again. 'Dr. Petrie, do you have any idea what would happen if the majority of people in Miami became aware that plague was loose in the city? Panic, looting, robbery, violence — the city would die overnight. Apart from that, people carrying plague would spread over the surrounding countryside faster than you could say epidemic. It's not the way we usually do things, this play-down policy, but in this particular case we felt obliged to agree.'

Dr. Petrie was silent.

'The city health people have known about the plague since Friday of last week,' the sub-editor continued. 'A young baby in Hialeah went down with it, and died. The doctors did a routine test, and passed the information to Mr. Firenza. He went straight to the federal health authorities, they sought higher sanction, and the government decided that fewer people would be exposed to risk if they kept it quiet.'

Dr. Petrie said, 'You can't keep it quiet! The rumours are going around already. Have you seen US 1 and the North-South Expressway? People are beginning to drive out of Miami like rats out of a sinking ship.'

The sub-editor coughed. 'They won't get far.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, you're not supposed to know this, doctor, but you're bound to find out sooner or later. Every route out of Miami is sealed off. The whole city has been in the bag since about midnight last night. The National Guard have orders to stop and detain anyone trying to leave or enter the city limits.'

'And what about people who insist?'

'They're detained along with the rest of them.'

Dr. Petrie rubbed the back of his neck. 'I don't know what to say,' he said wearily. 'I guess you've told me all there is to know.'

'I just hope you see what we're doing in the right light,' said the sub-editor, with unexpected sincerity. 'I mean, we love this city, and we're real worried about this plague, but if we let the pig out of the sack, this whole place is going to be ripped apart in five minutes flat.

Especially when people realize that they can't escape.' Dr. Petrie nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'I should think you're right.' Then he laid the phone back down, and sat there for twp or three minutes with his head in his hands.

'Well?' said Adelaide. 'What was all that about? Don't keep us in suspense.'

He took her hand, and squeezed it. 'It appears that we have been taken for mugs. Donald Firenza and his health department have known about the plague since Friday. As soon as they identified it, they sought advice from the federal government, which is probably the real reason that Becker is in Washington. The federal government has covertly sealed off Miami during the night, and is arresting and detaining anyone who tries to get in or out.'

Dr. Selmer said, open-mouthed, 'They knew? They knew about the plague all along and they didn't warn us?

'I guess they realized that warnings were futile. This plague kills people so fast, the whole population might have contracted it by now. All they want to do is stop it spreading.'

'But what are they doing about it? Are they trying to find an antidote? What are they doing about us? They can't just seal off a whole city and let it die.'

Dr. Petrie drummed his fingers on the edge of Dr. Selmer's desk.

'No,' he said softly. 'I don't suppose they can.'

Throughout the afternoon, and into the evening, it became clear that the plague was spreading through Miami and the suburbs like a brushfire on a dry day. Dr. Petrie and Dr. Selmer tried several times to get through to Washington, and to Donald Firenza, but the telephone switchboards were constantly busy. They were aware that four of their plague victims had been telephone operators, so it was likely that the exchange was seriously undermanned.

They worked hour after hour in the cold fluorescent light of the emergency ward, sweating in their flea-proof clothing, comforting the dying and easing the pain of the sick. Dr. Petrie saw an old woman of ninety-six die in feverish agony; a young boy of five shuddering and breathing his last painful breaths; a twenty-five-year-old wife die with her unborn baby still inside her.

Ambulances and private cars still jammed the hospital forecourt, bringing more and more people to the wards, even though the regular ambulance drivers had almost all sickened and died. Nurses made makeshift beds from folded blankets, and laid the whispering, white, dying people down in the corridors.

During a break in his work, Dr. Petrie stood in one of those corridors and looked around him. It was like a scene from a strange war, or some whispering asylum. He rubbed the sweat from his eyes and went back to his latest patient.

Dr. Selmer looked up from giving a streptomycin shot to a young teenage girl with red hair. 'What's it like out there?' he said hoarsely. 'Are they still coming in?'

Leonard Petrie nodded. 'They're still coming in, all right. How many do you reckon now?'

Dr. Selmer shrugged. 'If all the hospitals are coping with the same amount of patients — well, six or seven hundred. Maybe more than a thousand. Maybe even more than that.'

Dr. Petrie shook his head. 'It's like hell,' he said. 'It's like being in hell.'

'Sure. Would you take a look at Dr. Parkes? He doesn't seem too well.'

Dr. Parkes was an elderly physician who used to have a practise out at Opa Locka. Dr. Petrie had met him a few times on the golf course, and liked him. Now, across the crowded emergency ward, he could see Dr. Parkes wiping his forehead unsteadily, and taking off his spectacles.

'Dr. Parkes?' he said, pushing his way past two part-time trolley porters.

Dr. Parkes reached out and leaned against him. 'I'm all right,' he said quietly. 'I just need a moment's rest.'

'Dr. Parkes, do you want a shot?'

'No, no,' said the gray-haired old man. 'Don't you worry about me. I'll be all right. I'm just tired.'

Dr. Petrie shrugged. 'Well, if you say so. You're the doctor.'

Dr. Parkes smiled. Then he turned away from Dr. Petrie, and immediately collapsed, falling face-first into a tray of surgical instruments, and scattering them all over the floor.

'Nurse I' Dr. Petrie shouted. 'Give me a hand with Dr. Parkes!'

They lifted the old man on to a bed, and Dr. Petrie loosened the pale blue necktie from his wrinkled throat. The elderly doctor was breathing heavily and irregularly, and it was obvious that he was close to death. 'Dr. Parkes,' said Dr. Petrie, taking his hand. Dr. Parkes opened his pale eyes, and gave a soft and rueful look. 'I thought I was too old to get sick.' he said quietly.

'You'll make it,' said Dr. Petrie. 'Maybe you're just tired, like you said.'

Dr. Parkes shook his head. 'You can't kid me, Petrie. Here — lift up my left hand for me, would you?'

Dr. Petrie lifted the old man's liver-spotted hand. There was a heavy gold ring on it, embossed with the symbol of a snake and a staff, the classical sign of medical healing.

'My mother gave me that ring,' whispered Dr. Parkes. 'She was sure I was going to be famous. She's been dead a long time now, bless her heart. But I want you — I want you to take the ring — and see if it brings you more luck than me.'

'I can't do that.'

'Yes you can,' breathed Dr. Parkes. 'You can do it to please an old man.'

Dr. Petrie tugged the ring from Dr. Parke's finger, and pushed it uncertainly on to his own hand. Dr. Parkes smiled. 'It suits you, son. It suits you.'

He was still smiling when he died. Dr. Petrie covered his face with a paper towel. They had long since run out of sheets.

Anton Selmer came across, patting the sweat from his face. 'Is he dead?' he asked, unnecessarily. Dr. Petrie nodded.

'I think I'm becoming immune,' said Dr. Selmer. 'Even if I'm not immune to the plague, I'm immune to watching my friends die. I don't even want to think how many good doctors and nurses we've lost here today.'

Dr. Petrie fingered the ring. 'It makes you wonder whether it's worth it. Whether we should just leave all this, and get the hell out.'

Dr. Selmer tied a fresh mask around his face. 'If there was any place to get the hell out to,' he said, 'I'd go. I think we have to face the fact that we're caught like rats in a barrel.'

The ward doors swung open again, and they turned to see what fresh victims were being wheeled in. This time, it looked like something different. A young dark-haired boy of nineteen was lying on the medical trolley, with his right side soaked in blood. He was moaning and whimpering, and when the amateur ambulance attendants tried to ease him on to a bed, he screamed out loud.

Dr. Selmer and Dr. Petrie helped to make him comfortable. Dr. Selmer gave him a quick shot of painkiller, while Dr. Petrie cut away the boy's stained plaid shirt with scissors.

'Look at this,' said Dr. Petrie. He pointed to the fat, ugly wound in the boy's side. 'This is a gunshot wound.'

Dr. Selmer leaned over the boy, and wiped the dirt and sweat from his face with a tissue. There was asphalt embedded in the youth's cheeks, as if he had fallen on a sidewalk or roadway.

'What happened, kid?' said Dr. Selmer. 'Did someone shoot you?'

The boy gritted his teeth, and nodded. With his face a little cleaner, he looked like the sort of average kid you see working behind the counter at a hamburger joint, or delivering lunchtime sandwiches for a delicatessen.

'Who shot you, kid?' asked Dr. Selmer, coaxingly, 'Come on — it might help us to make you better. If we know what kind of gun it was, we can find the slug faster.' The boy took a deep whimpering breath, tried to talk, and then burst into tears. Dr. Selmer stroked his forehead, and spoke soothingly and softly to him, like a mother talking to a child.

'Come on, kid, you're going to be all right. Tell me who shot you, kid. Tell me who shot you.'

The boy turned his head, his eyes squeezed tight shut. 'We was — we was going to get out — ' he panted. 'Me and my friend — we heard there was plague — and we was going to get out — '

'What happened?'

'We — we took his dad's old — Buick. We drove up as far as — the turnpike — and they — they sent us back.'

'Who sent you back, kid?' asked Dr. Selmer. 'National — Guardsmen — sent us — back — said we couldn't — leave — '

'So what did you do?'

The boy was biting his tongue so hard that blood was running down his chin. He shook his head desperately, as if he was trying to erase the memory of something that he never wanted to think about again.

'What did you do?' Dr. Selmer repeated. 'Did they shoot you?'

'My friend — said — we ought to make a — break — said — they wouldn't really shoot us. So we — put the gas — down and — tried to get — through. They — they blew off — his whole — they blew off his — they blew off his head — '

Dr. Petrie laid his arm on Dr. Selmer's shoulder. 'Leave the kid alone, Anton. We might have guessed they were going to keep us in the hard way. It's either die here or else die on the city limits.' Dr. Selmer nodded bitterly. He called one of his assistants to see to the boy's bullet-wound, and then he went through to the scrub-up room to wash. Dr. Petrie came with him.

'I've been on the emergency wards for a long time,' said Dr. Selmer, drying his hands. 'And if there's one thing that constantly amazes me, it's how totally callous we Americans can be to each other. Over the past ten years, I've had people brought in here who were found bleeding in the street, while dozens of passers-by walked around them. I've had women who were raped or beaten-up, while crowds just stood around and watched. And now this. We may be two hundred years old, Leonard, but if you ask me we're still a nation of strangers.'

Dr. Petrie was combing his hair. 'Would you do any different, if you had the federal government's problem? Wouldn't you seal off the city?'

'Maybe not. But at least I would let us unlucky rats, caught in our barrel, know what the hell was going on. So far as we know, and so far as the rest of the country knows, this is just a mild outbreak of Spanish influenza.'

Dr. Petrie said, 'Has it occurred to you that this might be germ warfare? That the Russians might have started this disease?'

Dr. Selmer laughed wryly. 'The Russians didn't need to, did they? We've done a good enough job of it on our own. I don't know where all this sewage came from, but I'm ninety-nine-per-cent convinced that you're right. The shit of sophisticated society has come to visit upon us the wrath of an offended and polluted ocean. What a way to go. Poisoned by our own crap!'

Dr. Petrie said, 'You're tired, Anton. Go take a rest.'

Dr. Selmer shook his head. 'The rate this plague is spreading, the whole city is going to be dead by Thursday. If I went to sleep I'd miss half of it.'

'Anton, you're exhausted. For your own sake, rest.'

'Maybe later. Right now, I could do with some coffee.'

They left the emergency ward and went out into the corridor, stepping over sick and dying people wrapped up in red regulation blankets. A couple of thin and desperate voices called out to the doctors but there was nothing they could do except say, 'It won't be long now, friend. Please be patient,' and leave it at that. No treatment could arrest the course of the plague, and most of these people would have done better to stay at home, and die in their own beds. Dr. Petrie found there were tears in his eyes.

A cop came slowly down the corridor towards them, wearing a bandit neckerchief around his nose and mouth. 'Excuse me, doctors.' he called. 'Excuse me!'

'What's wrong, officer?'

The cop stepped carefully over an old man who was wheezing and coughing as the plague bacillus clogged his lungs.

'It's the Chief of Police, sir. He's been taken real bad.'

Dr. Selmer looked at him, without moving. 'So?'

The cop seemed confused. 'Well, sir, he's sick. I thought that maybe someone could come out and take a look at him.'

'What's wrong with him?' Dr. Selmer 'asked. 'Is it the same as these people here?'

The cop nodded. He was only a young kid, thought Dr. Petrie. Twenty, twenty-one. His eyes were callow and uncertain as they looked out from between his bandit mask and his police cap.

'Well, then,' said Dr. Selmer, 'don't you think that if I could cure these people here, I'd have done it?'

'I guess so, doctor, but — '

'But nothing, officer, I'm afraid. I can't save your Chief of Police any more than I can save these folk. Keep him comfortable, and dispose of the body as quickly as you can when he dies.'

The cop seemed stunned. He looked around him for a moment at the huddled shapes of the dead and dying, and Dr. Petrie was surprised to find himself feeling sorry for a policeman. He touched the cop's arm and said, 'I should get out of here now, son. This place is thick with the plague, and if you hang around too long, there's a danger you'll catch it yourself.'

The cop paused for a while, then nodded again and stepped his way back along the corridor.

'Plague is a great leveller,' said Dr. Selmer hoarsely. 'Chief of Police or not, that's the end of him.'

'You're in a philosophical mood today, Anton.'

Dr. Selmer pushed the elevator button and waited while the numbers blinked downward to the ground floor. 'I think I'm entitled to be,' he replied bluntly.

Adelaide was still waiting in Dr. Selmer's office. She had been trying to call Washington on the phone all afternoon, but it was unrelentingly busy. She made them a couple of cups of instant coffee, and they took off their shoes and relaxed.

'Is it still bad?' she asked. She sat beside Leonard, stroking his forehead, and he loved the touch and the fragrance of her. It almost made the carnage of the wards seem like a half-forgotten nightmare, and nothing more. 'Worse,' put in Dr. Selmer. 'But I guess it can't go on for ever. Sooner or later, the people who keep on bringing people to the hospital will get sick themselves, and that will be the end of that.'

Dr. Petrie rubbed his eyes. 'This whole damned city is dying and we can't do a thing about it.' Adelaide said, 'I had a priest in here a little while ago.'

'What was he doing?' asked Dr. Petrie. 'Hiding from the vengeance of the Lord?'

'No,' said Adelaide, brushing her brunette curls away from her forehead. 'He seemed to think that America was getting no more than it deserved. He really felt that we were getting our just desserts for everything. For mistreating the Indians, for inventing the motor car, for suppressing the blacks, for destroying the environment.' Dr. Petrie sipped his coffee. 'I don't suppose he was willing to intercede with God, and get this whole thing stopped?'

Adelaide shook her head. 'If you ask me, the Church will be delighted. If this doesn't turn a few more millions into true believers, I don't know what will.' The office phone rang. Dr. Selmer answered it, then passed it over. 'It's for you, Leonard, Sister Maloney from the emergency ward.'

Sister Maloney spoke to Dr. Petrie in her careful Irish accent, 'We have a patient down here who is asking for you by name, doctor.'

'By name? Do you know who she is?'

'I'm afraid not, sir. She's very sick. I think you'd better come down quickly if you want to see her alive.'

'I'll be right there.' He put down the phone, swallowed the rest of his coffee, and collected his green mask and gown.

'Leonard,' said Adelaide. 'Is anything wrong?'

'Sister Maloney says a woman is calling for me. She's probably one of my regular patients. Why don't you stay here and force Anton to drink another cup of coffee?

'At least it'll keep him out of the ward for five more minutes.'

Dr. Selmer chuckled. 'Alone at last, Adelaide! Now we can pursue that affair I keep meaning to have with you.'

Dr. Petrie closed the office door behind him and walked quickly down to the elevators. There was a strange bustling whisper throughout the hospital, a sound he had never heard before — like a thousand people murmuring their prayers under their breath. He was alone in the elevator, and he leaned tiredly against the wall as it sank downwards to the ground floor.

The elevator doors slid open, and he was back in hell. The corridors were crowded with moaning, crying people. There were people lying white-faced and shuddering against the walls; people coughing and weeping; people hunched silently on the floor.

The plague had taken both the rich and the poor. There were elderly widows, tanned by years of Florida sun, dying in their diamonds and their pearls, There were waitresses and mechanics, shop assistants and chauffeurs, hotel managers and wealthy executives. Anyone who had swum in the polluted ocean was dying; and anyone who had talked to them or touched them was dying, too.

Dr. Petrie, grim-faced, stepped carefully through the plague victims, and pushed open the door of the emergency ward. Sister Maloney, wearing a big white surgical gown and a surgical mask, was waiting for him. 'Where is she? Is she still alive?'

'Only just, doctor, I'm afraid. It won't be many minutes now.'

Dr. Petrie put on his gown and mask, and followed Sister Maloney into the crowded ward. He had to squeeze his way past the bedside of a 24-year-old policeman called Herb Stone, who was now in the final stages of sickness. His face was gray, and he was muttering incoherently.

Sister Maloney, forging through the patients like a great white ship, brought Dr. Petrie at last to a bed in the corner. A woman was lying on it with dark circles under her eyes, clutching a soiled blanket and shaking with uncontrollable spasms.

Dr. Petrie leaned forward and looked at her closely. He felt a long, slow, dropping feeling in his stomach. The woman opened her eyes and blinked at him through the glare of the ward's fluorescent light. 'Leonard,' she whispered. 'I knew you'd come.'

'Hallo, Margaret,' he said quietly. 'Are you feeling bad?'

She nodded, and tried to swallow. 'I'd sure like a drink of water.'

'Sister? Could you get me one please?' Dr. Petrie asked.

Sister Maloney steamed off for him, and Dr. Petrie turned back to his former wife.

'Where's Prickles?' he asked. 'Is she safe?'

Margaret nodded again. 'I left her with Mrs. Henschel, next door. She's all right, Leonard. She didn't catch anything.'

'You can't be sure.'

Margaret looked at him for a while. 'No,' she whispered. 'I can't be sure.'

'Is there anything you want me to do? Are you comfortable?'

'It hurts a little. Not much.'

He reached out and took her hand. He could hardly believe that, less than two years ago, he had lain side by side in bed with this same woman, that he had kissed her and argued with her, and that he had actually given her a child. He remembered her in court, in her severe black suit. He remembered her on the day that he had walked out, red-eyed and crying by the front door. He remembered how she had looked on the day they were married.

'Leonard.' she said, stroking the back of his hand.

'Yes, Margaret?'

'Did you ever love me?'

Dr. Petrie turned away and stared for a long time at the wall.

'You can't ask me that, Margaret. Not now.'

'Why?'

'Because I would probably lie. Or worse than that, I might even tell you the truth.'

'That you did love me, or that you didn't?'

He felt her pulse. She was fading fast. She was being taken away from him like a Polaroid photo in reverse, each detail gradually melting back to blank, unexposed, featureless film.

'How do you feel now?' he asked her.

You're changing the subject.'

'No, I'm not. I'm trying to treat a patient.'

'Leonard, didn't you ever love me? I mean — really, really love me?'

He didn't answer. He looked at her dying, and held her hand, but he didn't answer. He didn't know at that moment what the true answer was.

'Leonard,' she said, 'kiss me.'

'What?'

'Kiss me, Leonard.'

He saw that she was almost dead. Her eyes were glazing, and she could barely summon the breath to speak. Her head was slowly sinking towards the rough blanket trying to treat you like a doctor on which she lay, and even the shudders of plague had subsided in her muscles.

There was no time to decide whether to kiss her. Instead, he pulled the blanket over her face.

Sister Maloney, busy with a sick boy, said, 'Has she gone, Dr. Petrie?'

Dr. Petrie nodded. 'Yes, sister. She's gone.'

As he passed by, Sister Maloney laid a hand on his sleeve. Her sympathetic green eyes showed above her surgical mask.

'Was she someone you knew rather well, Dr. Petrie?'

Dr. Petrie took a deep breath, and looked around him. 'No, sister, she wasn't. I didn't know her well at all.' It was not a callous denial, it was the truth. There were parts of Margaret he had understood thoroughly, and hated — but there was so much, he realized now, that he had not known at all.

Afterwards, as he walked back down the crowded corridor towards the elevators, he felt oddly calm and numb. He didn't feel happy; he had never, in his bitterest moments, wished Margaret dead. But now the problem had been taken out of his hands by chance, and by Pasteurella pestis. He was free at last.

A nurse came up to him and touched his arm. She was a small, pretty colored girl. He had seen her around the emergency wards before, and even toyed with the idea of asking her out for a drink.

'Doctor Petrie?' she said.

He looked at her. 'Yes, nurse?'

She lowered her eyes. 'I don't know how to say this. It sounds ridiculous.'

He looked at her steadily. Like every nurse in the hospital, she had been working for hours without a break, and all around her, she had seen doctors and interns and sisters dying on their feet. She was tired, and her black face was glossy with perspiration.

'Why not try me?' he asked huskily.

'Well,' she said, 'I heard a rumor.'

'What kind of a rumor?'

'My brother's friend works for the Miami Fire Department. It seems like he told my brother they've been given special orders. The firemen, I mean. They've been told to get ready for some big blazes.'

Dr. Petrie felt a cold sensation sliding down his spine.

'Some big blazes?' he said. 'What did he mean by that?'

'I don't know, doctor,' said the nurse. She still didn't look up, and her voice was barely audible. 'I guess they mean to burn the city.'

Dr. Petrie let the words sink in. I guess they mean to burn the city. It was a medieval way of dealing with an epidemic, but then, all things considered, they were faced with a medieval situation. For the first time in a hundred years, they had a raging disease on their hands that modern medical treatments could neither suppress nor deflect.

He reached out and gently lifted the nurse's chin. 'I'm not going to pretend I don't believe you,' said, 'because I've seen enough of this administration's tactics to believe it could be true. You might as well know that Miami has been thrown to the wolves. The city is surrounded by National Guardsmen, and there's no way out.'

She held his hand for a moment, and then nodded. 'I guessed they would do that,' she said simply.

They stepped back for a moment while a medical trolley was pushed between them, carrying a shivering middle-aged woman in a soiled white summer coat.

'Well,' said the colored nurse. 'I suppose I'd better get back to work.'

Dr. Petrie said, as she turned, 'You could try to escape, you know. You could run away.'

She looked back. 'Run away? You mean, right out of Miami?'

'That's right. Right out of Miami.'

'But there are people here who need me. How could I leave my patients?'

'Nurse,' said Dr. Petrie, 'you know and I know that they're all going to die anyway. You don't think that anything you can do will prevent that?'

'No, I don't,' she said, without hesitating. 'But it's my duty to stay with them, and do whatever I can. It's only human.'

Dr. Petrie said, 'You know that you'll die yourself, don't you?'

She nodded.

He didn't say anything else — just looked at her, and thought what a waste it was. She was young and she was black and she was pretty, and she had everything in the world to stay alive for. Now, because of some crass and destructive official bungling, she was going to die.

'Doctor,' she said quietly, 'I know what you're thinking.'

He looked away, but she stepped up to him again and laid her hand on his arm.

'Doctor, we're all human here. We're nothing special — just ordinary people. I want to stay because that's my choice, but maybe you want to go. Doctor, you don't have to seek my approval to do that. You only have to walk right out of here, and take your chance.'

'I have a daughter,' he said, in a trembling voice.

The nurse smiled, and shook her head. 'There's no reason to make excuses. Not to me, nor anyone. Just go, Doctor Petrie.'

He bit his lip, then turned away to the elevators. The last he saw of the colored nurse was her forgiving, resigned and understanding face, as the elevator doors closed between them. There are some people, he thought, whose devotion makes everything else around them seem tawdry and irrelevant.

Dr. Selmer was fast asleep on the couch when Dr. Petrie returned to the office. Adelaide was sitting beside him reading a medical magazine and yawning.

'That didn't take long,' she said.

He sat down next to her and rubbed his eyes. 'It was Margaret,' he said wearily. 'She just died, about five minutes ago.'

Adelaide slowly put down her magazine. 'Margaret?' she said, shocked.

'She's dead, Adelaide. She had the plague.'

She reached over and grasped his wrist. 'Oh, Leonard. Oh, God — I'm sorry. I know that we wished all kinds of things on her. But not this.'

Dr. Petrie sighed. 'There's nothing we can do. She caught it, and she died. It doesn't matter what we wished or didn't wish.'

'What about Prickles? Has she got it too?'

'I don't know. Margaret said she hadn't. She left her with the woman next door when they took her into hospital.'

Adelaide frowned. She could see what Leonard was thinking. He was exhausted, and the past forty-eight hours seemed to have bent and aged him. He was suddenly faced with a choice — to shoulder the responsibility of saving what he had left; or to close his eyes to his own loves and feelings, and plunge himself into a medical battle that he knew was utterly hopeless.

'Leonard,' she said softly, 'I know that you're a doctor, and whether you can cure people or not, you still have to do your best.'

He didn't answer. He merely said, 'Is there any more coffee?'

She held his wrist harder. 'Leonard, if you want to stay here, I'll understand. But if you want to make a break for it, I'll understand that, too. I want to be with you, that's all.'

Dr. Petrie leaned over and kissed her cheek. She turned her face, and kissed him on the mouth. There was passion in their kiss, but there was also a kind of exploration and communication. Lips touching each other, tongues touching each other, questioning and asking.

At last, he said, 'A nurse downstairs told me they were going to burn the city. She heard it from a fireman.'

Adelaide stared. 'They're going to do what?'

'The plague is obviously out of hand. They're thinking of burning the city.'

'Who is?'

'I don't know. Firenza, the Disease Control Center, the county health chief. What does it matter?'

'But that's insane. They can't set fire to the whole of Miami!'

Dr. Petrie stood up. 'They can, honey, and they probably will. Now, how about that coffee?'

Adelaide stood up, too. 'Leonard — damn the coffee! If this city's going to bum, I'm not going to burn along with it! You think I'm going to stand here passively making cups of coffee while the whole place goes up in flames? You're out of your mind!'

Dr. Petrie held her shoulders and calmed her down. 'Don't panic, Adelaide, for God's sake. It's probably nothing more than a contingency plan, that's all. Whenever there's a plague, you have to burn clothing and blankets and bodies, just to stop further infection. Look — we don't even know what's really happening. We have no idea how many people have died, or whether the plague is spreading or not.'

Adelaide looked straight into his eyes. 'Leonard,' she said, 'I don't care. I just think we ought to get the hell out of here before they put a match to us.'

'Even if I decide to stay?'

'You can't decide to stay!'

Dr. Petrie turned away. 'That girl downstairs — the one who told me they were going to burn Miami — she's staying. She wants to stand by her patients.'

'This is her hospital,' persisted Adelaide. 'It's her job to stay. What about Prickles? Are you just going to leave her out there, and cross your fingers that she won't get sick — or burned — or raped by some maniac?'

'Adelaide!' shouted Dr. Petrie.

'For Christ's sake, Leonard, this is not the time to play at heroes!' retorted Adelaide. 'These people don't need you! They're all going to die, aren't they? What's the use of staying, Leonard?'

Dr. Petrie turned around, clenching and unclenching his fists. He stared at Adelaide, with her fierce brown eyes, and her brunette curls, and that disturbing, angry, beautiful face.

'The use — ' he began, uncertainly. 'The use is — '

'The use is what?' interrupted Adelaide hotly. 'You can't cure them, so what are you going to do for them? Make sure that the last thing they see on earth is your benign and self-sacrificing mug? Leonard, for Christ's sake, you're not Albert Schweitzer!'

Dr. Petrie was about to answer, but changed his mind. He simply said: 'No, honey, I know I'm not Albert Schweitzer.'

'Then let's go,' said Adelaide. 'Let's just get out of here while we can.'

Dr. Petrie nodded. 'I was going to go anyway. I guess I just needed someone to persuade me. I just don't feel very proud of myself.'

Adelaide sighed. 'Leonard, it's not a question of pride. It's purely a matter of survival.'

Dr. Petrie sat down heavily, with his face in his hands.

She knelt down in front of him, and took his hands away. 'You don't have to justify what you do. There doesn't have to be a reason. It's the same with everything. Why did we fall in love? Why do I want to cling on to you so much?'

'I'm not a great sheltering tree, you know,' said Dr. Petrie. 'I don't even know if I'm a great sheltering man. I feel like a goddamned broken reed at the moment.'

Aaton Selmer, asleep on the couch, grunted and whispered something. Dr. Petrie gently laid Adelaide's hands aside, and walked over to look at him. The stocky, red-headed doctor looked pale and sweaty. Petrie lifted his wrist and checked his pulse.

'Is he all right?' asked Adelaide.

He counted the pulse-rate and respiration-rate. Under his probing, long-fingered hands, Dr. Selmer didn't even stir.

'I think he's okay,' Dr. Petrie said at last. 'But he's totally exhausted. He needs all the rest he can get.'

'Are, you going to wake him, and tell him, we're leaving?'

'I'll try.'

Dr. Petrie shook Dr. Selmer's shoulder. The sleeping doctor licked his lips, and stirred. Dr. Petrie shook him again.

'Anton — wake up. It's Leonard.'

Finally, Dr. Selmer opened his eyes. They were bloodshot from lack of sleep, and his mind was completely fuddled. 'Leonard… what's going on? I was dreaming we were playing golf.'

'Was I winning?'

'Like hell you were. You were three strokes down. What's going on?'

Dr. Petrie said awkwardly, 'We've come to a decision. Adelaide and I.'

Adelaide interrupted, 'We're leaving.'

'Leaving?' Dr. Selmer sat up. 'I don't understand.'

Dr. Petrie shrugged. 'We're going to try and make a break. I want to see if I can rescue Prickles, and then maybe we can get through the quarantine cordon and find ourselves a remote place to stay until this whole thing's over.'

'But supposing you spread the disease beyond Miami? Jesus, Leonard, this thing could wipe out the whole damned United States!'

'That's why we want to go some place remote,' said Dr. Petrie. 'We can keep ourselves under observation until we're sure that we're clear.'

'The National Guard will kill you,' said Dr. Selmer. 'You saw what happened to that boy downstairs.'

'They'll kill us either way,' said Dr. Petrie. 'The rumor's going around that they're going to burn the city down.'

Dr. Selmer shook his head. 'I don't know what to say. I'm a doctor, and so are you. How can we leave this place?'

Leonard Petrie couldn't answer that. He didn't know what the answer was. He only knew that all his instinct and personality were telling him now that it was important for him to survive. He completely accepted a doctor's responsibilities to care for his patients, yet he was unable to invest any belief in a hopeless situation. To him, it was like moths flying into the windshields of speeding cars.

He knelt down beside Dr. Selmer's settee, and said, 'Anton, I'm not running out. I just don't believe that it's worth sticking around here any longer. We're not doing anyone any good. Least of all ourselves.'

Dr. Selmer looked thoughtful. "Well,' he said, 'I can't prevent you from going. I won't say I'm not disappointed.'

"Will you come along with us?'

Dr. Selmer shook his head. 'No, Leonard. That's my emergency ward down there, and I have to stay whether I like it or not.' He got up from the settee. 'I do feel disappointed, Leonard, but that doesn't mean I don't wish you luck.'

Dr. Petrie got up from his knees. Dr. Selmer gave him a small, rueful grin. 'I can't hold you back, Leonard. Maybe it's right that you should be the one to go. Someone has to get out of here and tell the people of this country what's happening. Now, if I were you, I'd get my lady out of here as quick as I could, and high-tail it for the city limits before dawn.'

Dr. Petrie checked his watch. It was already 11:47. 'Okay, Anton,' he said gently. 'But do me a favor, will you?'

'If you promise to keep on playing such a lousy game of golf in my dreams, I'll do you any favor you want.'

'Look after yourself. If they start burning the city, do your best to get out. When this is all over, I want you and me to meet up, and have ourselves a couple of drinks at the club, and drown the memory of this goddamned plague forever.'

Dr. Selmer scratched the back of his gingery neck. 'I think you've got yourself a deal there, Leonard.' The two men clasped hands for a long moment, and then Dr. Petrie took Adelaide by the arm, and led her out into the corridor. As he closed the door behind him, Dr. Selmer called out, 'Please, Leonard — take care.'

Dr. Petrie nodded, and closed the office door behind him for the last time.

They pushed their way along the crowded hospital corridors as quickly as they could. Adelaide kept a handkerchief over her nose and mouth, and Dr. Petrie steered her clear of obvious plague cases. There was a background of low muttering and whispering, occasionally interrupted by cries of pain or anguish. People sat and lay everywhere, huddled in comers too sick to move, or gradually dying on their trolleys. The stench of dead bodies was almost too much to bear.

Two patients, nearly dead themselves, watched with glazed eyes as a doctor, gasping and shuddering with his own plague, tried to inject them with painkilling drugs. In the night outside, the streets echoed with the never-ending wail of sirens.

They broke out of the hospital doors and into the warm, neon-lit hospital forecourt. The place was still cluttered with ambulances, but there was noticeably less activity than there had been before. Dr. Petrie's car was still at Margaret's. By now it had probably been stolen, commandeered or towed away. But there was a whole hospital car-park round the side of the building, and they were bound to find a car with its ignition keys left inside.

Adelaide said, 'My God, it's gotten so much worse. Look — there's a couple of bodies over there, by the hospital entrance.'

Dr. Petrie took her arm. 'Don't worry about that. Let's just get the hell out.'

They half-ran, half-walked round to the side of the hospital. The car-park was dark, and shadowed from the street-lights by the fourteen-storey bulk of the hospital tower. Dr. Petrie said: "You take the first row of cars, I'll take the second. Try the driver's door, and see if it opens. If it does, check for keys.'

As swiftly and silently as they could, they went from one car to the other, trying the door-handles. By the time Dr. Petrie had tugged at his twelfth car, he was beginning to wonder if the staff of this particular hospital weren't security-conscious to a fault. Then Adelaide hissed, 'I've got one!'

She was opening the door of a bronze Gran Torino. Dr Petrie skirted around the back of the car that he had been trying to open, and crossed the space in between the rows of parked vehicles. The moment he stepped into the open, a rough voice shouted, 'Hold it right there, buddy!'

He froze, with his hands above his head. A stocky shadow disengaged itself from all the other shadows, and started to walk towards him. In a thin slanting beam of light from one of the hospital windows, Dr. Petrie saw a solid, middle-aged security guard, with a navy-blue uniform, a face as hard as a concrete post, and a revolver. 'I'm a doctor,' Petrie said.

The security guard came up close, and shone a torch in Dr. Petrie's face. 'Then how come you're trying to steal yourself a car?'

'Someone took mine. I have an emergency.'

'You got ID?'

'Sure. It's in my top pocket. Here — I'll get it out for you.'

'Don't you move a muscle.'

The security guard came forward, reached into Dr. Petrie's inside pocket, then tried to open the papers with one hand. As he did so, Dr. Petrie grabbed the man's gun wrist, and tried to twist the revolver out of his grasp. Forcing the guard's arm around in a circle, he jammed his leg behind the man's calf, and pushed him. The man fell backwards on to the tarmac, jarring his knee — but he still kept his grip on the gun.

Dr. Petrie pressed the guard's wrist against the ground, and then trod on it, hard. At last, the fingers opened, and Dr. Petrie snatched the revolver away from him.

The guard cried, 'Don't shoot.' He raised his arms protectively over his face. 'I got a wife with a bad leg.'

Dr. Petrie said, 'I'm not going to hurt you, you dumb ox. Just get up and get the hell out of here.'

The guard got to his feet, and dusted himself off. 'You won't get far, you know," he said, stepping cautiously backwards. 'They got the cops on the lookout for bums like you. All I have to do is call them up, and they've got your number.'

Petrie waved the gun in his direction again. The guard said, 'Hey — I didn't mean it serious. I was joking! You go right ahead.'

Adelaide was watching, tense and fearful, from a few feet away, holding the door of the Gran Torino. Dr. Petrie looked at her, and couldn't see her eyes, only the dark brunette curls of her hair. The guard was shuffling away from them, step by step, holding his hands out in front of him.

As if in a dream, Dr. Petrie fired the revolver twice. The guard yelped like a small dog, and started running away across the car park. Dr. Petrie lifted the revolver in both hands, held it steadily, and fired again. He missed. He fired once again, and the bullet sang mournfully off the fender of a parked car.

Dr. Petrie lowered the gun, and peered into the darkness.

'He got away,' he said, as the smoke drifted away across the car-park.

'You might have killed him," Adelaide gasped. 'You meant to.' She sounded very frightened.

Dr. Petrie put the revolver in his pocket.

'Yes,' he said. 'I meant to. But I didn't.'

They drove out of the car park in silence, and out into the plague-ridden streets of Miami.

They switched on the car radio. It was now just past midnight, into the early hours of Wednesday morning. What they heard on the news and what they saw as they drove through the dark broken streets of the city were so different as to be totally bizarre.

The calm, rich voice of the mayor, John Becker, was reassuring citizens throughout Florida and the United States that the breakdown in communication between Miami and the outside world was 'purely temporary and technical, and in the best interests of all concerned.'

Dr. Petrie glanced across at Adelaide, and shook his head. She smiled him a tight little smile.

Mayor Becker went on, 'This epidemic, which is still awaiting medical analysis, is proving a little more difficult to control than we had originally hoped, and for the protection of residents and folks on vacation, we've had to restrict some of the highway traffic through the city. But we can assure you that there's nothing to worry about, provided you follow a simple safety code and remain at home whenever possible.'

It was while he was saying this that, without warning, the city lights of Miami began to go out. Most of the downtown office buildings and stores were already in darkness, but now the street lights flickered out, and everything electrical dimmed and died. Like stars obscured by the passing of a murky cloud, the bright subtropical city with its glittering strip of hotels and its garish downtown streets was gradually overtaken by a shadowy gloom, as dark and threatening as a primitive jungle.

'I expect it's the power station,' Dr. Petrie said. 'They've got the plague.'

He switched on the car's headlights. The streets seemed wrecked and deserted. Store windows were smashed, and there was garbage and junk strewn all over. Despite the threat of summary shooting, the looters had obviously been out in force. As they turned north on to 95, they saw a small group of blacks running furtively through the shadows with television sets, stereo equipment and records.

Abandoned cars — some with their dead drivers still sitting in them — cluttered the highway. From the height of the expressway, Dr. Petrie and Adelaide could see small fires burning all over Miami in the tropical darkness, and a few buildings uncertainly lit by emergency generators. The whole city echoed with the endless warbling of police and fire sirens, and the crack of spasmodic shooting.

In just over four days, from the first signs of plague in Hialeah, Miami had collapsed into pandemonium. It was like an old painting of hell with lurid flames and demonic shadows; and above everything was the terrible wail of sirens, the smashing of glass and the ceaseless blast of car horns, pressed down by the weight of their dead owners.

Dr. Petrie opened the car window and slowed down for a while, listening and looking in cold disbelief.

'It's like the end of the world,' whispered Adelaide. 'My God, Leonard, it's like the end of the world.'

The stench of burning and the inhuman sounds of a dying city filled the car, and Dr. Petrie wound up the window again. He felt exhausted beyond anything he had ever known before. He had to open his eyes wide to clear them and focus them, and even then he found it difficult to drive through the debris and jetsam that strewed the highway.

They were almost level with Gratigny Drive when he had to pull the Torino up short. The road was entirely blocked by two burning cars. One of them, a Riviera, was already blackened and smoldering, but the other, a Cadillac, still had its tires ablaze, like a fiery chariot from Heaven.

Dr. Petrie opened his car door and got out. The heat was oily and fierce. Shielding his eyes, he went as close to the wrecks as he could, and to his horror, he saw a woman still sitting in the Cadillac — her face was roasted raw, but she was lifting her smoking arm up and down, trying to call out. A lurch of nausea made his empty stomach turn over, and he had to look away.

Adelaide called out, 'What is it? Can we get past?'

Dr. Petrie shouted back, 'Stay there! Just stay there!'

He took the security guard's revolver out of his pocket, held it tight in both hands, and hoped to God that he wouldn't miss. He inched as close to the blazing car as he could, and then fired. The woman jerked sharply back into her ruined seat as if he had kicked her. She disappeared in a torrent of rubbery smoke.

Dr. Petrie climbed back into the Gran Torino.

'Was there someone in there?' Adelaide asked quietly.

He nodded, and laid the gun on the parcel shelf. For some reason, the killing seemed to have purged something within him; to have quelled his broken nerves. Maybe it was because, for the first time since Mr. Kelly had woken him up on Monday morning, he had been able to act, to do something positive.

'Honey — I'm going to have to ram my way through there.' he said. He twisted around in his seat, and backed the car up thirty or forty yards. He stopped. 'All you have to do is hold tight.'

He licked his lips. Then he shifted the car into 2, and stamped on the gas. The back tires screeched and slithered as they fought for traction on the concrete, and then the Torino bellowed forward — straight towards the two smoking wrecks.

There was a heavy smash, and for a moment Petrie thought the car was going to roll over. But he forced his foot harder on the gas, and their car gradually shoved the black carcass of the Riviera, its buckled hubs scraping and shuddering on the road, right to the edge of the expressway. Then Dr. Petrie backed up a foot or two, turned the wheel, and drove the Gran Torino over broken glass and oil and litter until they were clear. The car gave one last snaking skid, and they were driving north again.

'Are you all right?' asked Dr. Petrie.

Adelaide brushed back her hair. 'I bruised my knee when we collided, but that's all. I'm okay.'

Dr. Petrie checked his watch. 'Another two or three minutes, and we'll be there. Then we can try and get out of this godforsaken place.'

They drove without talking for a moment or two, and then Adelaide said, 'Was it a man or a woman?'

Dr. Petrie frowned. 'Was what a man or a woman?"

'In that burning car. I just wondered.'

He rubbed at his left eye. The road was dark and confusing, and he had to swerve to avoid an abandoned police car.

'It was a woman,' he said baldly. "Does it make any difference?'

'I don't know. I got the feeling you needed to kill someone.'

He glanced across at her. 'What made you think that?'

'It was the way you fired at that security man. He wasn't doing anything. He was just doing his job. Somehow, you looked as though you really needed to kill him.'

She was right, but Dr. Petrie could no more analyze his reactions than she could. It was connected with his present sense of helplessness as a doctor, with the need to protest, however ridiculously, against the outrage that was sweeping through his city. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I guess I'm just tired and frustrated.'

They didn't say anything more until they had driven through the dark suburbs of North Miami Beach up to Dr. Petrie's former house. He pulled the Gran Torino up to the kerbside, and climbed out. With Adelaide he walked across the grass to the house next door. It was a pink Spanish-style ranchette, called El Hensch, and owned by the Henschels. There was a bright gas-light burning in the living-room, so Dr. Petrie assumed his erstwhile neighbors were at home. He rang the doorbell, and it played The Yellow Rose of Texas.

The frosted-glass door opened half-an-inch. Dr. Petrie saw one bespectacled eye and the muzzle of a.38 revolver.

'Who's that?' said David Henschel. 'You get along out of here before I put a hole through ya.'

'Mr. Henschel,' said Dr. Petrie. 'It's me. Leonard Petrie. Used to live next door — remember? I've come for Prickles.'

There was a pause, then Dr. Petrie heard Gloria Henschel saying, 'David — open the goddamned door, will ya? It's Dr. Petrie. I seen him through the upstairs window.'

After a lot of rattling of chains and locks, the door was opened. Dr. Petrie took Adelaide by the arm and stepped inside. Mr. Henschel, a fat, fiftyish man with a check shirt and a pot belly, opened the living-room door for them.

On the living-room table was a butane camping lamp. It made the room seem like a dazzling religious grotto. Pickles was lying on the red velvet-style settee, with her thumb in her mouth, and her long honey-colored hair tied back with a pink ribbon. She was holding a worn-out teddy bear with a peculiarly maniac smile on its face, and she was wearing a red dressing gown and one red slipper.

Dr. Petrie knelt down on the floor beside her, very quietly, and watched her sleeping. Her cheeks were flushed, but she didn't look as if she had contracted plague. He ran the tip of his finger down the middle of her forehead, and down the small curve of her nose. Adelaide came up behind him, and put her arm around him.

He looked up. 'She's beautiful, isn't she?' he said, shaking his head — a proud father who couldn't believe that his luck was real.

Mrs. Henschel came into the room in a dazzling yellow bathrobe and pink-rinsed hair in curlers. She looked like a giant canary.

'Dr. Petrie,' she crooned. 'Well, it's been a long time! Have you come to stay awhile? You know you're welcome.'

Dr. Petrie looked at his watch. It was 12:35. 'I'm sorry, Gloria,' he said. 'I've come to collect Prickles, and then we're getting out of here.'

Mr. Henschel frowned, 'Getting out? You mean, leaving town?'

'Sure. Don't you know how bad it is?'

'How bad what is?'

Dr. Petrie felt like a time-traveler who has accidentally stepped into the past.

'The plague. The epidemic. The whole of Miami is sick with plague.'

Mr. Henschel looked suspicious. 'Plague?' he said. 'You mean — like sickness? I heard on the television there was flu, and that forty or fifty people was dead, but that's all. We haven't been out of the house today, this is my week off work.'

'Is that all they've been saying on television?' Adelaide asked. 'Forty or fifty dead?'

'Sure. They said it wasn't nothing to worry about.'

Dr. Petrie sat down on the edge of the settee where Prickles slept. 'I'll tell you how much it is to worry about.' he told them. 'Margaret died of this sickness just an hour or two ago, and she's just one of thousands.'

While the Henschels stood there, barely able to grasp what he was telling them, he explained the raw facts about the plague, and how long it was going to be before fire or bacilli were going to destroy the Miami way of life for ever.

As he spoke, he saw the growing desperation and terror in their faces, and he understood for the first time why nobody from city hall or Washington had considered it prudent to let them know before.

'I'll get my rifle,' said David Henschel, his voice unsteady. 'I'll get my rifle and I'll blast my way out of this town, even if I die trying.'

'Mr. Henschel,' said Dr. Petrie, as the old man went for the door.

'What is it?'

'I'm afraid you probably will.'

'I probably will what?'

'Die trying.'

Mr. Henschel stared at him balefully for a moment, and then without a word, went off to fetch his gun.

Four

Kenneth Garunisch eased himself back into his big Colonial armchair and took a swig from his ice-cold beer. Pulling his necktie loose, he propped his feet up on the Colonial coffee table. It had been a hard, long night, and he felt as if he had been beaten up by three Polish muggers in a Turkish bath.

The lavatory flushed, and Dick Bortolotti came out, wiping his hands on a towel.

'Is there any of that beer going spare?' he asked, coughing.

'There's a six-pack in the icebox,' growled Garunisch. 'I couldn't face any breakfast.'

'What time is it?'

Garunisch peered at his watch. 'Five-forty-five.'

Bortolotti came back with a beer and sat down next to him. There was a large-scale map of Florida and Georgia on the coffee table, and it was marked in several places with red felt-tip pen. During the night, Garunisch, apart from the US Disease Control Center and the federal government, had been one of the best-informed people on the spread of the unstoppable plague. His members in hospitals all the way up the East Coast had been reporting outbreaks as they happened, and although he didn't yet know that Miami had been completely sealed off by National Guardsmen, he did know that the hospital system there had virtually collapsed.

'What are they saying on the television news?' asked Bortolotti.

'They're still making out that it's swine flu or Spanish flu or some other kind of flu. But they're having to fess up that it's getting worse. They can't hold the lid on this thing for ever.'

'Did you try your guy at The Daily News?'

'I just came off the phone. He says there's a hundred percent media cooperation with the federal government. It's not as voluntary as it looks, though. The White House is apparently ready to do some kind of deal over their interpretation of secrets bill. If the press and the TV boys play ball, the government will ease off their legislation.'

Dick Bortolotti swallowed beer, and grinned wryly. 'Sounds just like the politicians I know and love.'

Kenneth Garunisch opened his cigarette box and lit a cigarette. 'Don't worry about it. The most important thing is protecting our members. Apart from that, I think we can squeeze some future guarantees and emergency pay scales out of the health people. This may be a serious situation, but it's an ill illness that brings nobody any good.'

'You kidding?' Bortolotti asked.

Garunisch blew smoke noisily, and nodded. 'I'm kidding that this whole goddamned business doesn't bother me, because it sure as hell does. But there's no future in being squeamish. If we can't force some favorable negotiations out of this little baby, then we don't deserve to be wearing long pants. Take a look at this map.'

Dick Bortolotti leaned forward.

'This thing is spreading like shit on a shoe,' said Garunisch. 'Here's the first reported outbreak — in Hialeah, on Friday. By Tuesday afternoon, they're counting the dead in hundreds. By Tuesday evening, they've stopped counting the dead because there are too many. The last I heard was four A.M., and the whole of Miami has packed up. No power, no police, no nothing.'

'Any of our members still alive?'

Garunisch shrugged. 'It's hard to tell. I had Evans call Grabowsky, but his home phone isn't answering, and we can't get through to the hospital. If you ask me, Dick, this epidemic is a whole lot worse than anyone knows. We've had reports of outbreaks down as far as Bahia Honda, and we've had them here, at Fort Lauderdale, and here, at Fort Pierce, and about fifteen minutes ago I heard that there are suspects at Jacksonville.'

'So? What's your conclusion?'

'My conclusion has got to be very simple,' he said, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. 'I take out my measuring rule and I discover that the distance between Miami and Jacksonville is approximately 300 miles. I divide 300 miles by four days and I learn that this plague is traveling northwards up the East Coast at a rate of 75 miles a day. Maybe faster. This means that if it continues spreading over the next couple of weeks in the same way that it's been spreading up till now, it'll be here.'

'Here?' said Bortolotti, frowning at the map.

'Here, dummy!' snapped Garunisch. 'Here in New York City! They're already dropping dead in the goddamned streets in Miami! Imagine what's going to happen if it starts infecting people here!'

Bortolotti blinked. 'Jesus,' he said. 'That would be murder. Nothing short of murder.'

'You bet your ass it'd be murder,' Garunisch stood up and walked across to the window. A dirty dawn was just making itself felt over the East River, and he lifted the embroidered net curtains and stared out at it. Then he turned around.

'And do you know whose murder?' he said. 'Not the fucking federal government's murder. Not the kiss-my-butt President of the United States. Oh, no. They're okay. They have their private doctors and their quarantined quarters, and if the worst comes to the worst, they can always fly off and leave us to stew in our own germs. Dick — if anyone's going to get murdered in this epidemic it's the members of the Medical Workers' Union. Our members. Our boys. And what do you think the federal government is doing about it, right now, right this minute?'

'Fuck all, I should guess,' said Bortolotti. Garunisch wrinkled up his nose. 'Don't swear, Dick, it doesn't suit you.'

Bortolotti said, 'But I'm annoyed, Ken. I'm just as annoyed as you.'

Garunisch, in a burst of temper, threw his half-full can of beer across the living-room. It splashed against the wall and rolled under, a fat Colonial settee.

'Nobody is as annoyed as I am! Nobody! This half-assed administration is using my members as cattle-fodder, and it's going to stop!'

Dick Bortolotti coughed. "What are you going to do, Ken?'

'I want the legal department round here right now. Get them out of bed if you have to. I want Edgar and Cholnik round here too. This government may have gotten the press to play patsy, but they're not doing it to me. Unless we get assurances on protection and pay, we're coming out. Today.'

Dick Bortolotti put down his can of beer. 'Ken,' he said uncertainly, 'wouldn't that kind of make matters worse? I mean, if this plague's spreading at 75 miles a day, and our members go out for a couple of days, well that's 150 miles, and maybe a whole lot more, just because they weren't there to slow it down.'

Kenneth Garunisch stepped up to his aide and patted him, a little too briskly for comfort, on the cheeks.

'You're quite the little Einstein, aren't you Dick? Yes, that's exactly what would happen. And if this tight-assed government have any sense at all, they won't argue for five minutes. We're just about to see the biggest pay and benefits deal that any union ever negotiated, Dick.'

It was five hours later before Herbert Gaines woke up. To help himself sleep, he had drunk half a bottle of Napoleon brandy, and his mouth was furred and dry. He slept in a long kimono of black silk, decorated with dragons, with a hair-net to keep his white leonine mane from getting mussed up on the pillow. He opened his eyes just a fraction, and reached across the bed to make sure that Nicky was still there.

Nicky, of course, was. He was rude, bitchy and defiant to Herbert, but he never forgot that he was comfortably ensconced in a luxury condominium in Concorde Tower, and it would take more than an argument, no matter how brutal or vicious, to winkle him out. He lay naked and seraphic, his hands raised on either side of his head, his soft and hefty penis resting on his thigh.

Herbert raised himself on one bony elbow, leaned over, and kissed that penis with showy reverence. Then he swung his legs out of bed, and went to fix himself a blender full of mixed vegetable juice.

He was slicing up tomatoes and green peppers when the doorbell chimed. He frowned up at the early-American wall-clock, and muttered, 'Who the hell…?' He was still trying to figure out which of his less couth friends would dare to disturb him before noon when the doorbell chimed again, and someone hammered on the door. Herbert Gaines sighed crossly, and tugged off his hair net. He walked quickly through the dark, heavily-curtained living-room, and up the three steps to the door. 'Who is it?' he called. There was no reply.

He bent down and put his eye to the peep-hole, but whoever was out there must have had his hand across it. Herbert called, 'I can't let you in until I see who you are!'

The hand was removed. Herbert squinted out, and saw a stocky, well-groomed man in a respectable gray mohair suit.

'Well,' said Herbert. 'What do you want?'

The well-groomed man gave a smile. A radiant, politician's smile. 'My name's Jack Gross,' he said. 'I was wondering if you could spare me a few minutes of your time, Mr. Gaines.'

'Do I know you?' asked Herbert irritably. Shouting always made him hoarse, and there was still enough of the actor left in him to worry about protecting his voice.

'You should do. Do you read Time magazine?'

'Sure, for the showbiz section.'

'Well, if you have last week's edition, you'll see something about me in the politics section. Go and look. I can wait.'

Herbert sighed again. 'Look here, Mr — '

'Gross, Jack Gross.'

'This is very early for me, Mr. Gross. At this time of the morning, I am still rescuing myself from the little death. Even if you are who you say you are, I can't help feeling that a few minutes of my time would be a ridiculous waste of yours.'

Jack Gross, seen through the peep-hole in the door, smiled his radiant smile again. 'I'm sure it won't be, Mr. Gaines. All I want to do is make you an interesting offer.'

Herbert Gaines stood up, away from the peep-hole, and rubbed his eyes: Until noon, and until he'd ingested a pint of cold vegetable juice and a large plain gin, his brain never seemed to function at all. But he supposed it was going to be easier to invite this grinning Mr. Gross inside, than go through the complicated hassle of getting him to go away.

'Mr. Gaines?' persisted Mr. Gross.

'Very well,' said Herbert, and opened the security locks. He turned away from the door, haughtily winding himself in his long black kimono, as Jack Gross stepped inside.

Jack Gross respectfully removed his hat, and peered into the stale, unventilated gloom. 'I've never been in Concorde Tower before. Quite a place you have here.'

'It's adequate,' said Herbert. 'I trust you don't mind if I finish preparing my breakfast.'

'Not at all,' said Jack Gross, affably. 'You just go right ahead.'

Herbert Gaines shuffled back into the kitchen and picked up his slicing knife. Jack Gross followed him, peeping as discreetly as he could into bedrooms and down corridors.

Herbert sliced vegetables while Jack Gross perched himself on a kitchen stool, balanced his hat on his knee, and started to talk. Gross spoke directly and fast, but his eyes flickered around the room as he talked, taking in the authentic antiques, the genuine butcher's table and the expensive built-in ovens and ranges. Even the view through the kitchen window, a misty panorama of Gabriels Park and downtown Manhattan, was worth more money than most people ever accumulated in their whole lives.

'Mr. Gaines,' he said, in his brusque, cheerful voice, 'you're still something of a hero to most people.'

Herbert looked at him balefully. 'Do you think I don't know that? Down in Atlanta, people still stand up in the movies and cheer at Captain Dashfoot. A thirty-year-old picture, and they cheer.'

Jack Gross kept smiling. 'We know that. That's why I've come around to see you this morning.'

'Well, fire away, Mr. Gross. I may look as if I'm fixing breakfast, but I assure you that I'm agog.'

Jack Gross said, 'Thank you.' Then he fixed his smile into a serious, sincere expression and continued, 'It's a question of public sympathy, if you see what I mean.'

'No. Spell it out for me.'

'Well, it's like this. A politician and an actor have got more in common that most people would like to think. Look at Ronald Reagan. Look at Shirley Temple Black. They didn't have to go through the hard graft of building themselves a sympathetic image in the public eye because they had it already, through movies. All they had to do was convince the public that they were serious, identify themselves with a clear-cut political line, and they were made.'

Herbert Gaines dropped peppers, tomatoes, celeriac and sliced apple into his blender. 'Are you trying to suggest something, Mr. Gross?'

Jack Gross smiled warmly. 'My people are, Mr. Gaines.'

'And who, exactly, are your people?'

Jack Gross looked almost embarrassed. 'Well, Mr. Gaines, let's say that my people are political realists. They come mainly from the staunch right wing of the Republican party, and also from industry and finance. They're not, though, what you'd call the old guard. I guess the easiest way of describing us would be to say that we are the young, committed right.'

Herbert Gaines raised an eyebrow. 'How right?' he asked. 'Right of Ford?'

'Certainly.'

'In other words,' Herbert said, 'you're the Green Berets of the Grand Old Party?'

Jack Gross grinned. 'You could say that, Mr. Gaines. That's a nice turn of phrase.'

Herbert Gaines left his blender and moved closer to Jack Gross.

'Mr. Gross,' he said steadily, 'I've been a Republican all my voting life. I used to go around with pals of Duke Wayne, and I've come out now and again and said my piece about pinko thinking and moral standards. I have letters of admiration from the Daughters of the American Revolution, and I contribute to veterans' charities and several other conservative causes.'

Jack Gross didn't flinch. 'We know all that, Mr. Gaines. We have a dossier.'

Herbert Gaines stood straight, and nodded. 'I'm sure you do, Mr. Gross. But there is one thing that your dossier obviously omits to mention.'

'What's that, Mr. Gaines?'

'I am not a politician, Mr. Gross, and I never want to be. I have a patriotic duty to my country, but I also have a private and personal duty to my art.'

'Your art?'

Herbert Gaines lifted his gaunt, withered head.

'Yes, Mr. Gross, my art. I am — I was — one of the finest movie actors that ever crossed the screen. I made two pictures and both pictures are classics. Even today, after three decades, people still applaud out loud when they see them. Mr. Gross, I have an abiding duty to those people. It is my task in life to make sure that those magical images I created in my youth stay fresh. If I come out now, like a skeleton out of a closet, and try to whip up political support on the strength of those images, my whole life's achievement would be destroyed. Who could ever look at Captain Dashfoot again, after seeing me, as I am today, talking about busing and housing and economic tariffs?'

Jack Gross still smiled. 'Mr. Gaines,' he said gently, 'we don't want you to talk about anything like that. We want you to talk about plague.'

Herbert Gaines frowned. 'I beg your pardon?'

'Plague, Mr. Gaines. The ancient scourge of nations. The Black Death.'

'I don't understand.'

'Have you heard the news?'

'I haven't had breakfast yet, for God's sake.'

'Well,' Jack Gross explained, 'there's a serious epidemic down in Florida. The government and the press have been keeping it tightly under wraps, saying it's an isolated outbreak of swine flu, but we know better. It's a highly dangerous, highly virulent strain of plague. The whole of Miami is afflicted, and there's talk of razing the whole city to the ground. It's also broken out in Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Brunswick and Charleston.'

'Is this some sort of joke?'

Jack Gross shook his head. 'It's not a joke, Mr. Gaines. It's the most disastrous result of this administration's mismanagement we've ever experienced. The US Disease Control Center have failed to contain the outbreak, and the government is so terrified that they don't know what to do next. They're too frightened even to tell the nation what's really going on.'

'But — '

Jack Gross raised his hand. 'It's the chance my people have been waiting for, Mr. Gaines. It's the chance to show up these weak-kneed liberals for what they really are. It's the chance to make the GOP a pure and concerted and effective machine again.'

Herbert Gaines ran his hand through his white hair. 'And you want me to help you? Is that it?'

'We want you as our figurehead. Captain Dashfoot to the rescue.'

Herbert Gaines found himself a kitchen stool and sat down. He was thoughtful and grim-faced.

'Mr. Gross,' he asked, after a few moments, 'is this epidemic really serious?'

Jack Gross nodded. 'As far as we can tell, between six and seven thousand people are dead, and many more are dying.'

Herbert Gaines looked up. 'So there must be great fear and panic in those places? In Florida and Georgia?'

'There is. The police and the National Guard have cordoned off the Florida state line, as far as they can. And no one, but no one, is allowed out.'

Herbert Gaines got up from his stool and walked across to the kitchen window. He stared out at Gabriels Park for a while, then he said, 'Mr. Gross, you're asking me to do something that conflicts with my sensitivities.'

'I'm sorry, Mr. Gaines. I don't get you.'

The old movie actor turned around. 'If there's an epidemic in the south, and people are dying, then the last thing I want to do is make political capital out of it. It's against my nature to advance myself through the fear and suffering of others. I have made terrible personal mistakes in my life, Mr. Gross, and I have been fortunate or unfortunate enough not to have been punished for them. I don't intend to add callousness and exploitation to my list of sins.'

Jack Gross smiled. 'Well, I understand your objections. But there's no reason why they should stand in your way. You have to see this thing in its historical context. A chance like this may never happen again.'

'A chance like what? A chance to put the squeeze on the public's uncertainty and fear? A chance to sweep into power on a tide of dead bodies? I'm not interested, Mr. Gross.'

Jack Gross sighed. 'I really think you're being oversensitive, Mr. Gaines.'

Herbert returned to his blender, and mixed his vegetables into a reddish-green froth. He poured the juice into a tall glass of crushed ice, and sipped it. He didn't look at Jack Gross, and was obviously waiting for him to go.

Jack Gross stared at the floor. 'I didn't want to do this, Mr. Games,' he said softly.

Herbert Gaines patted his lips with a Kleenex. 'Do what?' he said impatiently.

'Exert pressure.'

'Don't make me laugh," said Herbert Gaines. 'What possible pressure could you exert on me?'

Jack Gross shrugged, still staring at the floor. 'There's always Nicky,' he said.

'What do you mean by that?'

Jack Gross was silent. He just smiled.

'What do you mean by that?' Herbert snapped.

Jack Gross looked up. 'I mean that our patriotic duty sometimes has to come before our personal opinions and that it always has to come before our personal pleasures.'

'Is that a threat? By God, you'd better not threaten me, Mr. Jack Gross.'

Jack Gross took his hat off his knee and parked it neatly on his head.

'I'll make myself plain, Mr. Gaines. We need you, and we need you now. If you don't oblige us with your assistance, then some friends of ours will have to pay you a visit. Those friends of ours come from Chicago, Mr. Gaines, where the stockyards are, and they've had a lifetime of experience with stud bulls like Nicky. When those stud bulls won't behave, they take their stockman's knives, the sharp ones with the hooked blades, and they castrate them.'

Jack Gross said all this with the same radiant smile on his face with which he had first walked in. At the kitchen door, he turned and said, 'Think about it, Mr. Gaines. I'll be in touch.'

Then he let himself out of the apartment, and closed the door behind him.

Herbert Gaines, pale-faced, went slowly into the bedroom, and stared for a long while at Nicky, sleeping peacefully on the satin sheets. 'Oh, God… ' he murmured, with a shiver and went back into the living-room to find the brandy.

At two-thirty, just before the court hearing Glantz vs Forward went back for its afternoon session, the news finally hit the streets that Florida and parts of Georgia were stricken with plague.

The New York Post brought out a special edition with a front-page photograph of Miami's ruined Civic Center, and a banner headline saying SUPER-PLAGUE SWEEPS SOUTH, THOUSANDS DIE. A kind of nervous ripple went through the city, and the lunchtime bars stayed crowded until well after three as New Yorkers watched the special half-hourly TV reports on the effects of the epidemic.

The President, looking tired but, trying to sound optimistic, explained in a special interview that 'everything humanly possible has been done to contain the outbreak.' He announced that the entire state of Florida was quarantined until further notice, and that ocean bathing was prohibited all the way from Cape Fear to Key West.

'It appears on first examination that a possible source of the plague bacillus is pollution of the ocean by raw sewage, although where this sewage is coming from, and how such an unusual and virulent bacillus could have developed within it, are still mysteries. This year's unusual climatic conditions, in which the currents in the ocean are running counter-clockwise, may be a contributing factor.'

The President wound up by saying that he intended to pray for the sick and the dying, and that the best medical brains in the country were working on antidotes.

Ivor Glantz, sitting with his attorney Manny Friedman in a dark and busy Wall Street bar, watched the President fade from the TV screen next to the bottles of Jack Daniels, and shook his head.

'You know what that means?' he said seriously.

'Sure,' said Manny Friedman, rustling impatiently through a sheaf of pink legal papers. 'It means the end of civilization as we know it. Now, can we please go over these patents?'

'It means,' said Ivor, 'that they haven't yet found a way to cure it. If they could cure it, or contain it, they'd say so. But they can't. You see what the paper says? «Super-plague». Ordinary plague responds to Sulfamides or HafEkine antiserum, but this one evidently doesn't.'

'Ivor,' interrupted Manny impatiently, 'today is the most crucial day of all. Can we just concentrate on your bugs, and leave the President's bugs alone?'

Ivor checked his watch. 'We'd better get back to court anyway. But I'd sure like to know a little more about this plague. Do you realize — this could be an entirely new disease? Some new strain of bacillus, totally unknown?'

They collected their things together and went out into the humid afternoon street. Manny hailed a cab, and they drove through heavy traffic towards the court house. Ivor, sweating in his dark, too-tight suit, mopped his forehead with a clean handkerchief.

The cab-driver, a big-nosed Czech in a cloth cap and horn-rimmed spectacles, was rapping about the plague.

'If you ask me,' he said, swerving imperturbably across three lanes of traffic, 'if you ask me it's the Soviets.'

'How do you make that out?' asked Ivor. 'Are you a buddy of Kosygin?'

The cab-driver laughed. 'You gotta be kidding. If you ask me, the Soviets is responsible for half the troubles this country's got. They bought our wheat, correct? Well, they bought our wheat so that they could trade good American grain for worthless roubles, right? I mean, what good's a rouble to anyone? Grain — that's different. You can offload a loaf of bread any place.'

Ivor grinned. 'You wouldn't be Polish by any chance?' he asked.

'Am I hell,' said the cab-driver.

The courtroom, dusty and badly-lit, looked as if a burglar had just rifled it. Sheaves of paper spilled on to the floor, and volume after volume of legal books and evidence, files and clippings lay scattered all over the attorneys' desks. It was the debris of a four-day hearing.

Ivor Glantz and Manny Friedman pushed open the swing doors and went to their places. Across the court, a thin, blue-suited figure with a gray crewcut, Sergei Forward the Finnish-born bacteriologist, was consulting with his lawyer. He was a calm polite man with a meticulous accent and a way of leaning forward when he spoke, like a near-sighted stork investigating an appetizing grub. He didn't look up when Glantz and Friedman came in.

By three o'clock, the courtroom was filled. There was a high burble of conversation — more intense than this morning. News of the Florida plague had spread, and every science journal and bacteriological expert in the place was discussing it. To them, it was the hottest medical story in years.

Esmeralda, severe and elegant in a pale pink 1930s suit, her curls tucked into a pink turban hat with a diamond brooch and a feather, came into the courtroom just before the judge. She sat down behind her stepfather, in a heady cloud of Chant d'Arfimes, and touched his shoulder.

'Have you heard about the plague?' she whispered. 'Isn't that awful?'

'I heard over lunch,' Ivor whispered back. 'I'm only guessing, but I'd say it's even worse than they're pretending.'

'The Army have sealed off Pensacola and Mobile,' said Esmeralda. I just heard it on the car radio. They say that people are dying at the rate of two thousand a day.'

At that moment, Judge Secombe came into the courtroom, and they all stood. When he had sat down and put on his spectacles, Sergei Forward's attorney raised his hand to make an application.

'My client respectfully wishes to apply for adjournment, your honor. While he appreciates the serious consequences of this action for infringement of patent, he believes he can make a material contribution to the government research work to find an antidote for the plague that we now hear is threatening our southern states. Mr. Forward is sure that Mr. Glantz will not stand in his way in this crucial emergency, and he hopes that Mr. Glantz will perhaps also wish to join in the government research work.'

Manny Friedman swore under his breath. 'What does he mean,' Ivor Glantz asked. 'He can't do this.'

Manny Friedman said, 'He can and he has. Unless you agree to an adjournment, you're going to look like a self-centered schmuck who puts his own money-making before the good of America. He's got you, right by the balls.'

Ivor frowned. 'But why does he want an adjournment? What for?'

Manny shrugged. 'Don't ask me. Whatever he's up to, I don't like it.'

Judge Secombe called for Manny Friedman's attention. 'Mr. Friedman,' he said, 'does your client have any strong feelings about an adjournment?'

Manny Friedman stood up. 'My client appreciates Mr. Forward's devotion to public service, your honor, but does not regard an adjournment necessary. This action can only take one more day at most, and twenty-four hours is hardly likely to make any material difference to Mr. Forward's research. Perhaps I can remind the bench that most of the great breakthroughs in bacteriology only came after years of intensive labor — including the process claimed by my client under this present action.'

Sergei Forward's attorney protested. 'Your honor, we believe that twenty-four hours — even four hours — could be vital. This plague has infected an entire state in a week. People are dying right now, even as we speak.' Manny Friedman glanced down at Ivor Glantz, who shrugged helplessly. Then he looked at the press table, where reporters from The New York Times, The Daily News and Associated Press sat with their pens poised, eager for any story that would tie up with the plague. He could see the headlines now. 'No Mercy Adjournment, Insists Litigating Scientist.'

Manny said quietly, 'Very well. We will agree to an adjournment until the present national crisis has passed.'

Judge Secombe said, 'Adjourned sine die,' and rose. The court rose, too, and people began to shuffle out.

While Manny Friedman busied himself gathering his papers, Ivor Glantz sat still, his head in his hands. Esmeralda came and sat next to him, and stroked his few sparse curls.

'Papa,' she said. 'It's not the end of the world.'

He grunted. Then he smiled warmly, and took her hand. 'Don't mind me,' he said. 'I'm disappointed, that's all.'

'Don't worry,' she reassured him. 'As soon at the plague is over, you can apply for the hearing to continue.'

Ivor rubbed his eyes tiredly. 'The way this plague's spreading, that could be never. If it goes on like this, we'll all be six feet underground by the time this action gets heard.'

'You don't think it's that serious, do you?'

He shrugged. 'I don't know. What disturbs me is that they don't have any way to cure it. We're all so used to living in a society that protects us with drugs and medicines that when we're exposed to something really deadly, we don't take proper precautions.'

'Come on, Ivor,' Manny Friedman said. 'This whole thing will fade away in two weeks, just like swine flu did. One minute it's panic stations, the next minute everybody's saying, "Plague? what plague? — never heard of no plague!"'

Friedman led the way out of the courtroom. 'What will you do now?' he asked over his shoulder. 'Do you want to see if you can bring the action forward to a specific date?'

Ivor shook his head. 'I don't know yet. This thing has cost me a goddamned mint as it is. I have five corporations wetting their pants to buy this process, and until I can clear it through the courts, I'm fucked.'

Outside the courthouse, in the humid afternoon sun, they met Sergei Forward and his attorney. Forward came up to Ivor with his hand extended, and a watery smile on his lean, Nordic features. 'I hope there are no tough feelings,' he said. Ivor ignored the Finn's hand, and pulled a face. 'It is our patriotic duty, you know — as Americans,' Forward added.

Ivor turned and stared at him. 'You've been an American for precisely four months,' he said sarcastically. 'When I need lessons in patriotism from you, I'll pack my case and go live in Russia.'

Manny Friedman took Ivor's arm. 'Come on, Ivor, don't get involved in a fight. He's up to something, and there's no point in losing your cool until you know what it is.'

Ivor shouted angrily, 'No half-baked Finnish quack is going to — '

'Yes, he is,' insisted Friedman, and pulled Ivor away. 'I'm your attorney, and when I say leave off, I say it for your own good.'

Esmeralda, following close behind, said, 'He's right, papa. Let's just have a drink and forget about it.'

Ivor surrendered, and took his stepdaughter's hand. 'Okay, Es. You win. I could do with a quart of Scotch right now.'

They walked around the block to the meter where Esmeralda's Skylark was parked. Manny climbed into the back, and Esmeralda herself was about to get in when someone called, 'Miss Baxter!'

Esmeralda turned. A tall, good-looking young man in a pale suit was waving to her across the street. 'Are you calling me?' she asked.

The young man dodged a passing cab, and came across the street. He was a little out of breath. He had dark, slightly Italian looks, with black curly hair, a straight nose, and a firmly-cleft chin.

'I hope you don't mind, Miss Baxter,' he said, 'but I've been wanting to meet you for some time. You are the Esmeralda Baxter who runs Esmeralda's gallery, aren't you?'

Esmeralda looked puzzled. 'That's right, I am. But should I know you? I don't recall your face.'

The young man grinned. 'Oh — I'm sorry. My name's Charles Thurston. Charles Thurston III, actually, but my father and my grandfather were so undistinguished that nobody gets confused. I write books on art. Maybe you saw my book on Man Ray.'

Esmeralda blushed slightly. 'I'm afraid I didn't. Listen — do you want to make an appointment to see me? I'm pretty tied up right now.'

'Can I call you at the gallery?'

'Well, sure.'

Unexpectedly, Charles Thurston III lifted Esmeralda's hand and kissed it. 'You know something,' he said. 'I'm sure you and I will get along like a house on fire.'

Afterwards, as they drove back to Concorde Tower, Ivor said caustically, 'Did you see the way he kissed your hand? Goddamned almost swallowed it. Maybe kids these days don't get enough to eat.'

'Oh, papa,' Esmeralda protested. 'He's not a kid. In fact I think he's rather gracious.'

In the plush quietness of their condominium, Mr. and Mrs. Victor Blaufoot tried again and again to call their daughter Rebecca in Florida. Each time, the lines were busy. After five hours of dialing, Mrs. Blaufoot went and sat at one end of the shot-silk settee, fiddling restlessly with her large diamond engagement ring, and biting her lips in endless nervousness.

Mr. Blaufoot came up and put his arm gently around her shoulders. 'The lines,' he said, 'they're bound to be busy. It's a crisis. But don't worry. If she's in trouble, she'll find some way to let us know. She always has, hasn't she? Always, when there's a problem.'

Mrs. Blaufoot suddenly started to weep. Her tears dropped on the rug.

'But what if she's dead?' she cried miserably. 'What if she's caught that plague, and she's dead? How could she call us then?'

At five-twenty, Kenneth Garunisch announced on television that the Medical Workers' Union were coming out on strike, after the failure of negotiations with the federal government for emergency pay increases during the plague crisis. There would be no porters, no hospital cleaners, no janitors, no administration assistants, no sanitation engineers, no ambulance maintenance men, no electricians, no pharmacy assistants.

The government insisted that to pay emergency rates would be to surrender to 'heinous moral blackmail' and that it would create 'a disturbing and destructive precedent.'

On the six o'clock news, an outbreak of possible plague was reported at Newport News, and the ban on sea bathing was extended northwards to Delaware Bay. Residents of cities and towns along the eastern seaboard were urged to remain calm, and not to take hasty or ill-considered action. All airlines reported heavy bookings for westbound flights, and the Highway Patrol said that traffic through the Alleghenies was well above seasonal norms.

Quiet fear began to spread throughout the eastern states, but nobody knew quite how bad the plague was, or what to do about it, because the press and television were still keeping a low profile. Nobody knew that four hundred people — men, women and children — had been shot dead by the Army and National Guardsmen while trying to escape from quarantined areas.

Edgar Paston ate a quiet dinner at his home in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His wife Tammy had come home from the telephone company half-an-hour early, and had made a chocolate pudding. Edgar sat at the round table with its red check tablecloth, silently spooning the pudding into his mouth, and thinking.

'You're awful quiet,' said Tammy, bustling into the dining room in her apron. She was a short, big-breasted woman of 33, with wiry blonde hair and plump cheeks.

'I was thinking,' said Edgar.

'You're not still worried about those kids?'

He sighed, chasing the last spoonful of chocolate around his bowl. 'No, I guess I've reconciled myself to that. I was thinking about this epidemic, this plague.'

'What about it? It's miles away! I mean — how far is Georgia from New Jersey?'

'I don't know. Eight hundred miles, I guess.'

'Well, then.'

Edgar Paston laid down his spoon and pushed his plate away. 'It's eight hundred miles away today, Tam — but how long is it going to take to get here? I mean, I'm kind of worried.'

Tammy took his plate away, and flapped some crumbs off the table with her apron. She kissed him loudly on the forehead.

'The television said it wasn't going to spread too far, and that nobody should worry about it, or panic. If the television says that, well… '

Edgar pushed his chair neatly under the table, and followed Tammy into the kitchen to help with the washing up.

'I guess you're right,' he said. 'They don't usually put anything on the television unless it's true. All the same, I think we ought to have some kind of emergency plan, in case the plague does spread.'

Tammy stacked the dishes in the dishwasher while Edgar rinsed them under the tap. Their kitchen was simple and modern, and decorated in candy-apple red. On the wall was a color print of fall tints in the Catskills, and a wrought-iron profile of President Eisenhower.

'Emergency plan?' asked Tammy. 'Eddie — I don't think we have to. You remember the last time we had an emergency plan, during Cuba? You spent the whole weekend digging a hole in the garden for an atom shelter!'

Edgar laughed at the memory of it. 'I guess you're right. Tam. I guess I made a fool of myself over that.'

After they had washed and wiped the dishes, they went into their yellow-decorated living-loom and joined their children, 10-year-old Marvin and 14-year-old Chrissie.

Both children were watching television. Edgar asked, 'Is there any more news about the plague?'

Chrissie said, 'Nothing much, dad. They said they had some people in isolation at Newport News, but they didn't know if they were sick with the plague.'

'Newport News? I though they only had the plague in Georgia.'

'Well,' she shrugged, 'that's what they said. They're going to have another speech by the President later.'

Edgar frowned. 'That doesn't sound too healthy. I just hope the darned thing doesn't spread up this way.'

'Dad — what's plague?' Marvin said.

Edgar Paston blinked. 'Plague? Well, it's a kind of disease. You know, a real serious disease, that you can die of.'

'Sure, Dad. But what's it like?'

Edgar Paston looked at Tammy, but Tammy knew as little about it as he did.

'I don't know. Why don't you look it up in your Children's Encyclopedia? It cost me five dollars a month for three centuries, you might as well use it.'

Edgar watched television until seven o'clock, then roused himself to go and close the store. Gerry was in charge at the moment, but Edgar always liked to check the final day's takings himself, and make sure that everything was locked up. He kissed Tammy at the front door, and went out into the cool darkness to fetch his car.

A cricket was chirruping on the front lawn. He climbed into his Mercury wagon, and switched on the lights. Tammy waved from the front door. He drove down the road, and round the corner to the junction where the Save-U Supermart stood.

He didn't realize that anything was wrong until he pulled up outside. He saw Gerry inside the brightly-lit store, bending over for some reason. Then, as he climbed out of the wagon, he saw what had happened. He ran heavily across the car park and into the supermarket, panting with exertion.

Gerry had a red bruise on his left eye. 'I'm sorry, Mr. Paston, I did try to stop them. But they held me down, and they hit me. I'm just trying to clear up.'

Edgar looked around his store in frantic horror. Every shelf in the entire store had been cleared of groceries, and every can and packet and bag had been tossed on to the floor. Thousands of dollars' worth of flour and candies and nuts and cake-mixes and household goods had been spilled and trampled on.

He walked the length of the supermarket in a stunned dream of despair. A few customers still stood around, embarrassed and silent. As Edgar walked, he trod on fruit and broken glass, corn-meal and crumpled packets. Gerry, dabbing his bruised eye, followed behind.

'What happened here?' Edgar said hoarsely, when he got to the freezer cabinet. Though he could see for himself.

'They — er — they pissed in it,' said Gerry. Tm sorry, Mr. Paston. I did try my level best to stop them.'

Edgar stood still and cast his gaze over the whole wrecked store. The new store-front window, which had been installed first thing that morning, had been cracked. Displays and signs costing hundreds of dollars had been torn down and smashed. Honey and molasses oozed from cracked jars, the contents of cereal boxes were strewn everywhere.

'Who was it?' asked Edgar quietly. 'McManus?'

Gerry looked at the floor. 'They said they'd kill me if I told. I'm sorry, Mr. Paston. I'm so sorry.'

Edgar laid a hand on the boy's shoulder. 'I understand. Well, I guess we'd better call the cops.'

'I would have called them myself, sir, but after yesterday I didn't know whether they'd like it.'

Edgar shook his head. 'It's not a question of whether they like it. It's their job.' He went to the wall phone, and picked it up.

He was in the middle of dialing when he heard someone laughing outside the store. A raucous, mocking laugh. He paused, and then laid the telephone receiver down again. Quickly, making sure that he didn't tread in any debris, he made his way towards the cash-desk, searching in his pants pocket for his keys.

Gerry called, 'Mr. Paston — ' but he ignored the boy, and ducked low behind the counter. He lifted his keys, examined them closely, and picked the right one. Then he unlocked the drawer under the till, and took out a.38 revolver.

Holding the pistol behind his back, he stalked slowly towards the front of the store. He eased open the glass door, and looked out into the breezy night. Across the car-park, close to his station wagon, he saw a huddled group of kids. They were laughing and hooting and horsing around, and he knew damned well who they were. He shouted, 'McManus! Shark McManus!' The kids went quiet, and looked in his direction. He raised the.38 in his right hand, supporting his wrist with his left, and squinted down the barrel. The kids were all close together, and they presented an easy target. Edgar, his voice tight, shouted again, 'McManus! Stand forward, McManus, and get what's coming to you!'

The kids evidently didn't realize that Edgar was holding a gun, because they started laughing again, and jeering. Edgar aimed carefully at the tallest figure in the group, and let out his breath. He fired, and the pistol kicked in his hand. There was a flat, echoing bang. One of the kids fell to the ground, without a sound. The rest of them suddenly scattered.

Edgar, holding his gun raised up, walked slowly across the car park to the fallen youth. The boy was sprawled on his stomach, and there was a wide pool of glistening blood around his head. Edgar hunkered down and examined him. The bullet had hit him in the back of the skull, and must have killed him instantly.

He looked around. The car park was silent.

Gerry, walking on tippy-toes for some reason, came up behind him.

'Mr. Paston — ' he breathed.

'What is it, Gerry?'

'Mr. Paston, you shouldn't have!'

Edgar stood up. 'Shouldn't have? Did you see what these scum did to my store? These are scum, Gerry, and don't you forget it! He tried to destroy my way of life, and the only way I could answer that was to try and destroy his! Don't you forget that, Gerry!'

Edgar was shaking. He still had the gun in his hand, but he didn't know what to do with it.

'Mr. Paston,' said Gerry, miserably. 'This isn't Shark McManus. This isn't his gang.'

Edgar felt cold. He looked down at the boy's body lying on the concrete. The blood kept spreading, and there was no way to mop it up and return it to his veins.

'I don't understand you. He was laughing. They were all laughing.'

'They come around here quite often,' Gerry said. 'They don't mean no harm. I know one or two of them. They come around to the store after meetings, and buy candy.'

'Meetings?' said Edgar numbly. 'What meetings?'

'Boy scout meetings, Mr. Paston. They're boy scouts.'

Edgar stared down at the body. 'Boy scouts,' he whispered, 'Well — what — I mean — boy scouts?

He was still standing by the body when the black and white police car came howling into the car park, lights flashing, and squealed to a stop beside them. The doors opened, and Officers Trent and Marowitz came briskly across the concrete.

They looked down at the body. Marowitz said briskly, 'Is he dead? Has anyone checked?

Edgar said, 'He's dead all right. I got him in the head.'

He lifted his pistol, and handed it silently to Officer Marowitz.

'It appears he's a boy scout.' explained Edgar. 'I thought he was a vandal, and I shot him by mistake.'

Officer Marowitz looked hard at Edgar for a moment, then at the boy's body.

'You shot and killed a boy scout by mistake?'

'That's what I said.'

'In that case,' said Officer Marowitz, with a humorless grin, 'I had better advise you of your rights. You're under arrest, Mr. Paston, for suspected homicide.'

'Yes,' said Edgar. He stepped around the body, and walked towards the police car of his own accord.