There was one thing to be said: nobody quit. The crest of an epidemic was just that, the high point, the point of control or containment. The campaign continued full force, as if the brush fire were in full flame, despite the now-encouraging word carried on national radio and television. A week after the crest Monique and a couple of her people came down from Fort Collins and joined Carlos and Frank and Roger Salmon and a few of the public-health people and they all went out for an evening’s bash, but it was a restrained sort of bash, and that was about all the celebration there was. New cases were dropping very swiftly to the zero line; projections said it would be another month before the whole thing was past and gone. Monique had asked Atlanta, and received the go-ahead, to stay at Fort Collins long enough to pursue her study of the mutant organism with the setup she had, and long enough for Atlanta to prepare the Maximum Security Lab down there for her to use when she came back, especially for new antibiotic testing in vivo in rodents and small primates. Frank, his usefulness fast drawing to an end, had negotiated a transfer to a Rocky Mountain regional Forest Service unit to monitor dead rodents and to train and dispatch personnel to other forested areas to try to determine the spread of the mutant Yersinia in the wild. And Carlos was replaced by a junior CDC man from Atlanta so he could go back for several weeks’ debriefing and preparation of a detailed report of this first major skirmish with plague in the United States since 1904.
Mopping up. It was great to have hit it and killed it right here. Mopping up was an anticlimax.
The next day, Carlos’s last one in Colorado before he caught the evening plane from Denver to Atlanta, he ran into Frank in one of the field stations, clearing out some of his personal gear. “You going today too?” Carlos said.
“Right. I’ll be stationed at Golden, just out of Denver.”
“Well, I wish you luck,” Carlos said. “You’ve been one hell of a help, and it’s been a bitter fight.”
“Not my kind of a fight, if I had a choice,” Frank said.
“Nor anybody else’s kind of a fight. All dirty. But when you have to, you fight that kind of fight.” Carlos looked up at the big man. “So now you’re going to Golden, and I’m leaving tonight. And I hope and trust that you will be taking very special care of Monique.”
Frank turned sharply. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Look, Carlos, believe me, I’m sorry about — what happened up there.”
Carlos blinked at him. “You’re sorry? Whatever for?”
“For moving in on you, there. Believe me, I wasn’t trying to crowd you out, personally. There didn’t seem to be anything I could do, it just happened.”
“Ah.” Carlos looked at him quizzically. “It was just — what would you call it? … Fate, maybe? In the stars, so to speak?”
“Well, maybe. In a way. Only I don’t think you believe that.”
Carlos smiled. “I merely believe you don’t know too much about women, my friend. Not that Monique is not a very exceptional woman in every imaginable way, because I truly believe she is. But at the root of it all, she is a woman.”
Frank frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that Monique is a very crafty and skillful engineer of her own best interest. And let me tell you something, my friend, before you begin to get angry with me. I have known Monique for a long time, and I truly believe that she is one of those rare people who can often foresee certain broad aspects of the future. If I believed in ESP, which I do not, I would say that she was very definitely prescient. I think she has in the past foreseen times and events in the future that I could not foresee. And being a woman, she instinctively moves in the directions she foresees as best for her. And I think she has known for some time that something is happening, and she is going to need a man to help and protect her, a man to cleave to, and she knows that I am not that man, because she knows that I have, shall we say, obligations. So much for Fate — and for your apology for what you have done. I hold no grudge. Just keep her well and closely as long as she will be kept, that’s all I ask …”
Later, as the plane rose high above Denver, heading east, Carlos thought again of his oddly stiff conversation with Frank before they had clasped hands and taken leave. She knows that I am not that man, because she knows that I have, shall we say, obligations. Yes, of course — but she knew all that before. Long before. So what else might she have foreseen? He turned aside from the thought, listened to the motors roar, bone weary, too weary to think. He had a double bourbon, savored it in the first real moment of relaxation he had had in over six weeks, ate one bite of the dry sandwich offered for a midnight snack, dozed for a couple of hours. Awakening, he was disoriented — where could the plane be? Over what city, what village? Somewhere over Missouri, the cabin attendant told him when he finally attracted her attention, St. Louis far to the northeast. He ordered another double bourbon, then sipped it as he took out pencil and paper and began outlining the lengthy report he would inevitably be called upon to write. A vicious outbreak of plague, sudden and unexpected, now broken. The work his people had done to accomplish that. He scribbled on. Summer nights were short, flying east. It was clear dawn as the plane began its descent into Atlanta. There would be no wife to meet him there, he disapproved of wives meeting airplanes. Good Spanish wives stayed home, they did not meet their husbands in public airports. A swift pass by the baggage port, a taxi, and soon enough he would be home to greet his wife, to have a meal, to rest and rest and rest before reporting for duty …
Up the ramp and through the crowds, heading for the baggage claim, when someone took his arm and he found Ted Bettendorf beside him, tall and gaunt and gray, his face haggard. “Carlos, thank God. I was afraid you might have dawdled somewhere.”
“Dawdled?”
“Never mind. We’ve got to get you down to Delta Gate 24 in ten minutes and it’s twenty minutes’ walk in this antediluvian airport.” Bettendorf flagged another CDC man. “Call down and hold that plane, and then be sure his baggage gets aboard — ”
Carlos stopped dead. “Hold it. What’s this Delta Gate 24 business? Where are you packing me off to? I am dead on my feet, man, I haven’t seen my wife, my family …”
“Easy,” Ted broke in. “It’S necessary. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing else we can do.”
“About what?”
“There’s plague in Savannah. Lots of it, and all over. Five days ago there was one identified case, one single case. Today we have over thirty confirmed and about two thousand suspected. We’re shipping you to Savannah with all the support we can scramble. That’s about what.”
Carlos walked along with him, benumbed, unable to grapple the man’s words, down ramps, down escalators, up stairs, down corridors toward the Delta Airlines gates, and for the first time in his life Carlos Quintana was fully, consciously and crushingly aware of the full ugly weight of the imminent presence of Death.