“I’ll just go up and check on Badri,” he said, “and then I’ll be in the waiting room.”
Badri was asleep, the nurse said. “I wouldn’t wake him.”
“No, of course not,” Dunworthy said and went back down to the waiting room.
Colin was sitting crosslegged in the middle of the floor, digging in his duffel. “Where’s Great-Aunt Mary?” he asked. “She’s a bit flakked at my showing up, isn’t she?”
“She thought you were safely back in London,” Dunworthy said. “Your mother told her your train had been stopped at Barton.”
“It was. They made everyone get off and get on another train going back to London.”
“And you got lost in the changeover?”
“
“Eric?”
“My mother’s livein.” He pulled out a large red gobstopper, picked off a few bits of lint, and popped it in his mouth. It made a mumplike lump in his cheek. “He is absolutely the most necrotic person in the world,” he said around the gobstopper. “He has this flat down in Kent and there is absolutely
“So you got off the train at Barton. What did you do then? Walk back to Oxford?”
He took the gobstopper out of his mouth. It was no longer red. It was a mottled bluish-green color. Colin looked critically at all sides of it and put it back in his mouth. “Of course not. Barton’s a long way from Oxford. I took a taxi.”
“Of course,” Dunworthy said.
“I told him I was reporting the quarantine for my school paper and I wanted to get vids of the blockade. I had my vidder with me, you see, so it seemed the logical thing.” He held up the pocket vidder to illustrate, and then stuffed it back in the duffel and began digging again.
“Did he believe you?”
“I think so. He did ask me which school I went to, but I just said, very offended, ‘You should be able to tell,’ and he said St. Edward’s, and I said, ‘Of course.’ He must have believed me. He took me to the perimeter, didn’t he?”
And I was worried about what Kivrin would do if no friendly traveller came along, Dunworthy thought. “What did you do then, give the police the same story?”
Colin pulled out a green wool jumper, folded it into a bundle, and laid it on top of the open duffel. “No. When I thought about it, it was rather a lame story. I mean, what is there to take pictures of, after all? It’s not like a fire, is it? So I just walked up to the guard as if I were going to ask him something about the quarantine, and then just at the last I dodged sideways and ducked under the barrier.”
“Didn’t they chase you?”
“Of course. But not for more than a few streets. They’re trying to keep people from getting out, not in. And then I walked about awhile till I saw a street sign I recognized.”
Presumably it had been pouring rain this entire time but Colin hadn’t mentioned it, and a collapsible umbrella wasn’t among the items he’d rooted out of his bag.
“The hard part was finding Great-Aunt Mary,” he said. He lay down with his head on the duffel. “I went to her flat, but she wasn’t there. I thought maybe she was still at the tube station waiting for me, but it was shut down.” He sat up, rearranged the wool jumper, and lay back down. “And then I thought, she’s a doctor. She’ll be at the infirmary.”
He sat up again, punched the duffel into a different shape, lay down and closed his eyes. Dunworthy leaned back in the uncomfortable chair, envying the young. Colin was probably nearly asleep already, not at all frightened or disturbed by his adventures. He had walked all over Oxford in the middle of the night, or perhaps he had taken further taxis or pulled a collapsible bicycle out of his duffel, all by himself in a freezing winter rain, and he wasn’t even fazed by the adventure.
Kivrin was all right. If the village wasn’t where it was supposed to be she would walk until she found it, or take a taxi, or lie down somewhere with her head on her folded-up cloak, and sleep the undauntable sleep of youth.
Mary came in. “Both of them went to a dance in Headington last night,” she said, dropping her voice when she saw Colin.
“Badri was there, too,” Dunworthy whispered back.
“I know. One of them danced with him. They were there from nine to two, which puts it at from twenty-five to thirty hours and well within a forty-eight hour incubation period, if Badri’s the one who infected them.”
“You don’t think he did?”
“I think it’s more likely all three of them were infected by the same person, probably someone Badri saw early in the evening, and the others later.”
“A carrier?”
She shook her head. “People don’t usually carry myxoviruses without contracting the disease themselves, but he or she could have had only a mild manifestation or have been ignoring the symptoms.”
