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me, I mean?"
    "I don't know for sure. The only tests we could run, obviously, were on animals. When did you and Ann first pick up the children?"
    "About six hours ago. Give it to me straight, doctor. Please . I have to know."
    She saw what he was doing: looking desperately for a way out. All his training, like hers, had taught him that the way out of anything was information, knowledge, reasoning. But not this time.
    I can't do this.
    She said, “I have to sit down, I'm sorry ... knee injury.” She eased herself onto the ground, partly cutting off the illumination from the floodlamps, so that they sat in shadowed darkness. That should have made it easier, but didn't.
    "A virus in their breath gets into the bloodstream from the victim's lungs and makes a targeted, cytopathic toxin. When the virus has replicated enough for the toxin to reach a critical level, it stops the heart. And the virus is highly contagious, passed from person to person."
    "So everyone here—"
    "Yes,” Katherine said quietly.
    "I don't understand!” All at once he sounded like a child, like Li. Simultaneously Katherine shuddered and put a hand on his arm. Baker shook it off. “I just don't understand. If that's all true, the virus would spread through the whole country, killing everybody—"
    "The—"
    "—and then the whole world! The enemy would have killed themselves, too!"
    "No,” Katherine said. Her knee began to throb painfully. “There are racial differences among genomes. Small differences, and not very many, but enough. Think of genetic diseases: Tay-Sachs among Jews, sickle-cell anemia among Blacks. We've found more, and much more subtle. This virus exploits a tiny difference in genetic structure, and so in cellular functioning, in anyone with certain Caucasian-heritage genes. Tully—"
    "The Indians here..."
    She peered at his face, shrouded in night, and loved him. She had just told him he was going to die, and he had a soul generous enough to think of others. She started to say, “Depends on whether any of their ancestors intermarried with—” when his rage overcame his generosity.
    "You're a fucking geneticist! You and the entire United States government couldn't come up with an antidote or vaccine or something!"
    "No. Do you think we didn't try?"
    "Why didn't you kill them all as soon as you found them?"
    Katherine didn't answer. Either he hadn't meant the question, or he had. If it had been just more terrified rage, she certainly didn't blame him. If he meant it, nothing she could say would make it clear to him.
    He said bitterly, “There were political considerations, right? Ten years ago it was fucking President DuBois, working so hard to undo the wrongs of the previous screw-ups, ending the war with compassion, re-establishing our fucking position as the so-called moral leader of the world, and so now Ann is dead and I have to....” Abruptly his anger ran out.
    She waited a long moment and then uttered what she knew to be, the moment she said it, the stupidest, most futile statement of her entire life. “I'm sorry."
    He didn't hear it. She sat dreading his reply, and it was a full minute, more, before she realized there wouldn't ever be one. Baker Tully still sat with his head thrown back in fury and anguish against the mobile's rear wheel, but when she felt for his wrist, there was no pulse.
    Six hours, then, from the time of initial exposure.
    He was too heavy for her to move, but nobody would find him there before morning. She returned to the tent where the villagers had laid Ann Lionti's body and told everyone that Baker was mourning alone, in the trailer. Katherine checked on the patients in the medical tent, issued instructions, and drank coffee to stay awake for the few hours until everyone else slept. Then she removed the distributor caps from the three working vehicles in the small camp and carried them with her inside the DDR mobile, where the children waited.
* * * *
    "Why doesn't she come? Why doesn't she come?