Pekic, Rabies

Rabies Novel published in Serbian as "Besnilo", Sveučilišna Naklada Liber, 1983, Zagreb, © Borislav Pekić English translation © by Bernard Johnson.

Peste si grande viendra a la grande gousse Proche secours, est bien loinge les remedes, Nostradamus

Mrs. Andrea Milliner of Stroud, Gloucestershire, died two months after being bitten by a dog while on holiday in India… Fifteen people have died from rabies in Britain since 1945. Mrs. Milliner's death was the firs for three years. The Guardian, 9th October, 1981.

PROLOGUE – RHABDOVIRUS Penetrating into the live cell of a foreign body, the virus substitutes its own for the cell's substance and transforms it into a factory for the production of new viruses. The changes which it brings about in this way in the life medium of the cell are incomparably deeper and more dramatic than man can ever hope to bring about in his own milieu. The virus is the most perfect being in the cosmos. Its biological organization is nothing less than a machine for producing life in its purest sense. The virus is the summit of natural creative evolution. The summit of artificial creative evolution is – an intelligent virus. A creation with the form of a man and the nature of a virus, the vitality of a virus and the intelligence of a man. A symbiosis of a virus, divested of its lack of purpose and of man, freed of his limitation would rule over nature, which both otherwise serve only as refuse. Professor Frederick Liebermann When in the 8th Book of the Iliad, through the mouth of Aias Teucros Homer describes Trojan Hector as 'Kion lisitir' – mad dog, man did not yet know of It. Seen for the first time under the electron microscope in 1962, it was bullet-shaped, bulging outwards at the top on an elongated base. It measured approximately 180 milicrons in length and 75 across. It was three hundred times smaller than the animal in which it was born, and sixty million times smaller than the man it would kill. It lived in a cosmos called a Neuron which was five thousand times its size. It was smaller than any other living thing, but this injustice was of no importance, for, paradoxically, it was more powerful than anything else alive. It was a wonder of nature, its origins shrouded in mystery, as are the origins of all mysteries. But its purpose was beyond doubt, and beyond hope. It devastated all its native surroundings with the same treacherous, diseased, savage heedlessness with which man abuses and ravages his own environment. It was the murderous black sun of its cosmos, destined to become the sun of all others. In his persecution of Its ancestors, man had disguised It under the imprecise and innocentsounding designation of a helical ribonicleoprotein acid in a lipoprotein membrane with a glikoprotein casing. But in that ancient war there was nothing for It to fear, for it came into the world with yet a third casing which so far had no name. When that name was given, it would mean that It was impenetrable and indestructible. For It was a mutant, the first of its breed. It was alone, but It had no sense of loneliness. It had an inborn affinity for large numbers. In twenty-four hours there had been six thousand of its ancestors; in ninety-six human hours – two hundred thousand; in two weeks – twenty million. But in Its likeness in twenty-four human hours there would be forty million others. Its multiplication was ruled by a progression which lost itself in incalculable infinity.

And by then no one could know where It would be. It would journey through its microcosm as man journey through the macrocosm. Its wanderings would take It through places with names which are mysterious for modern man as are the Hindukush Mountains, the desert of Karakum, the primeval forests of Amazon; as mysterious for mankind of the future, if there were a guarantee of his continuing existence, as the mists of Andromeda, the constellation of Aldebaran, the star Proxima Centauri… Its cosmic entry ports would be the Nervus Sciaticus, the Ammon's Horn, the Cerebellum, the Hyppocampus, the Salivarna Glandula; its transgalactic route would be by way of the spinal cord, its final detination – the Brain. Wherever It passed, worlds would be transformed by cataclysms more terrible than any earthquake that had ever struck the Planet since its very beginnings. Wherever It passed It would transmit fear, hatred and frenzy to those with the misfortune not to go mad at once from its touch; to those lucky enough to go mad it would transmit some other consciousness whose very nature no one would ever be able to penetrate. It would once again become what It was created to be, what arrogant man had for some short time disputed: the smallest, yet the most powerful, the most dangerous, the most pitiless living creation in the Universe, incomprehensible to the unity of worlds to which its Neuron belonged. Born to die only when It alone would be left, and when there would be no more death for It to live on. This time man would not be able to stand against It. Only Aristaeus, the son of Apollo, could have done so, but there was no belief left in the old gods any more. And so It set off calmly to fulfill its destiny; to annihilate and to die.

PHASE I – INCUBATION

'The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and has still to appear'. Revelation of St. John the Divine, 17,8.

It was the first Sabbath of a hot, dry July in a certain year after the Creation of the World according to the Hebrew Calendar; a different year by the Hedzhiri, or Mohammedan calculation, and yet another year for the Christians. For those with no belief in God it was some unknown year after Satan's Fall, and it was no year at all for those fortunate ones for whom time no longer existed. The place was the Plain of Ezdraelon in biblical Samaria and preset-day Izrael. It stood in the shade of the Har-Carmel mountain and the river of Quishron wound past it. It was called Tell-elMutesellim; but in the tongue of local people it was Harmagedon, though everyone knew it by its ancient name of Maggido. A full moon shone over the ruins of the once famous town; from it there no longer came the hubbub of the market place, the lazy march of the warriors of Izrael, nor even the neighing of Solomon's four hundred stallions. The only sound came from the clear night sky, from the jets of the El-Al flight from Lod Airport, Tel-Aviv, to Rome, whose red navigation lights mingled with the yellow spider's web of the Mediterranean stars. Nothing moved; it was as if everything had been caught up in some magic spell. Nothing except one shadowy form. It was gray and amorphous. It had no likeness to any known thing. The diffused, pre-dawn light could make no firm shape of it. It came up out of the ground and soundlessly, like some dark, primitively colored picture of night floating above mater, merged into the ruins of the southwestern rampart of Solomon's fortress. In the west, Lucifer, the morning star, glowed brightly, the falling star. It would disappear in the west, above the place which had its shape, the radial shape of a star. The shadow slipped easily over the rocky ground which fell in steep, rough, stony sweeps towards the plain. Behind it the earth took on the virgin hue of hoar frost. The leaves on the olive tree, sycamores and palms hung down stiffly in thin crystal membranes. The rock became smooth and slippery as if raised up from the seabed. The landscape lost its brownish yellow warmth and was turned into the frozen waste of some unreal north. In the height of summer Maggido was gripped by an Artic blast. At the feet of the mountain firm where once the marshes of Ezdraelon had given off their poisonous vapors, but where now stood rows of ploughed furrows, as yet untouched by the cold, the shadow stopped.

If it had a body, it must have raised its head, since with that sudden movement its indistinct, phantom shape was turned into something which resembled a powerful animal. It stayed for a moment on the spot from where, beneath the fading moon, could be made out the high wall of the 'Rose of Sharon' kibbutz, built after the last war with Syria. From the kibbutz, like some painful memory, reached out the sharp, aggressive smell of people. And taking on the shape of a wolf, or of a dog with foam dripping from its jaws, the shadow set off towards it.

PHASE II – PRODROME

'Rabies is a killer! One selfish act of animal smuggling could bring rabies permanently into this country. There is no cure for rabies. The symptoms are very painful and distressing. The disease affects both animals and people. Rabies is now widespread in Europe and is getting closer to our shores. Please help to keep rabies out of Britain!' (Poster, Central Office of Information, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, London, 1976)

1. The six electronic clocks of Heathrow Central Underground Station, on the Piccadilly line at London Airport, simultaneously indicated 07.15 hours as the train from Hatton Cross emerged with a hollow rumble from the eastern tunnel and stopped opposite the entrance to the western one where a dead-end section of the track, wrapped in darkness, led towards the end of the line. The automatic doors of the neon-lit carriages opened with a hiss and from them, as out of the glistening cocoon of some magical, mechanical birth-form, poured the passengers with the exuberance of prisoners unexpectedly set free. Random patterns of nomadic humanity of different sexes, races, shapes and sizes, but all united by travel fever; bent beneath the weight of their luggage, they jostled each other frantically along the platform, colliding with others whose less agitated behavior showed that the temptations of summer or the excitement of departure had passed them by. Unhurriedly they stepped into the empty train waiting to take them back to London, whilst the newcomers pushed forwards impatiently towards the escalator and rapidly disappeared from the view of the angular clergyman, the only person to have remained seated on the torn seat of one of the smokers' compartments. The train opposite on the left hand platform closed its doors and disappeared into the tunnel in the direction of Hatton Cross. A few tardy passengers began to get into the train on the right. Only then did the clergyman stand up and step out onto the platform. He stumbled and almost fell. His Pan-Am travel bag had got caught up round his legs. He swore loudly before managing to straighten up, regain control of himself and glance around him. He'd have to watch that damn tongue of his, he thought. Although for the rest the Church had kept in close ecumenical step with time, as far as language was concerned, She was still hesitant about accepting obscenities as the most efficacious medium of understanding between people. He was a man of about forty with quick, mobile features whose sharpness was tempered by his bronzed skin, light-brown hair and tall, thin body in the depths of his too-large suit. Over his shoulder hung the blue Pan-Am travel bag and in his hand he held a black, leather breviary with a gold cross engraved on the cover.

His train too closed its doors and disappeared towards Hatton Cross. He looked round about him. The station was empty. He walked past the escalator in order to examine the platform from the other side. There was no one standing along the left-hand track either. He wasn't surprised – he had counted on this very kind of favorable circumstance. Unless, of course, there was some hidden trap. An observation post which kept watch on the station unseen. He didn't think they'd got round to that. One day televised surveillance would be installed here too. Magic spying like in the big stores and banks. But only after something serious had happened. Not before. Never in time. In Britain no one ever hurries. In Britain, in principle, as Heinrich Heine said, everything happens a hundred years late. A German, of course, that explained the impatience of the remark. This time the lethargy of the Authorities, in the majority of cases intolerable, was working in his favor. He was satisfied. He was quite definitely alone. He knew that he wouldn't be alone for long, but he wanted to check once again for exactly how long that would be. After 59 seconds the first group of passengers, Africans in tribal dress, came noisily down the escalator. They were quickly followed by others. And immediately afterwards a train from Hatton Cross drew in. The catacombs of the Underground were once more filled with the noises of that jungle which optimists have called civilization. The clergyman with the Pan-Am bag made a mental note, in such a public place he couldn't risk writing it down in his breviary, right beneath the already recorded information that on weekdays the first train for London left from Heathrow Central at 05.07, and the first arrival was at 05.45, that the last departure was at 23.50 and the last arrival at 01.21, but that the frequency of trains between those times varied with the time of day: during the morning and evening rush hours, trains ran every four minutes, but during the day the interval could be between three and a half and six and a half, and in the evening, after the rush hour, it was even seven and a half minutes. Paying no attention to the bustle around him, he walked slowly round several concentric circles along the platform stretching out between the two parallel tracks. He checked the position of the escalator, built into their twin massive supporting pillars. Two more, cutting deep into east and west walls of the station, hid, behind thickly iodized glass, stores and offices whose function, as now, he had not been able to detect on earlier visits. On both sides of the oblong platform, the four-pronged furrows of the rails disappeared in the impenetrable darkness of the tunnel. But the station itself was uncomfortably well lit. Too well for what he had in mind. He wondered if it was equally extravagantly illuminated between 01.21 and 05.07 when the Underground was not working. And whether perhaps part of his task should not have been carried out the night before. Once again the platform emptied. The clergyman with the Pan-Am bag verified once again that in the morning Heathrow Central was empty for a variable number of seconds every four minutes. This time it was no more than forty. After a fortieth second he saw the graceful calves of an Air France hostess coming down the escalator. The first time, Heathrow Central had been empty for fifty-nine seconds. Then for forty. The third time most probably it would be still tighter. The time was shrinking like shagreen leather. And it seemed not likely that for fourth time he checked, nothing at all would be left of it. More particularly, that there would be no time at all when it was needed. Castor, of course, was experienced; he'd get round it somehow. After everything that he, Pollux, had made of him,

resourcefulness in unexpected situation was something that could be logically taken for granted. But in this business the skill lay not in being able to cope with unexpected eventualities, but to eliminating them by logical forward planning. He should never have made his tours of the Airport by daylight only. He ought to have come at night as well. In any case, it was quieter here at night. Flights were cut to a minimum by the Noise Abatement Act, the legal consequence of the ban on overlying the Royal Castle at Windsor. There were very few passengers and security measures were lax. And for anyone with that aim in mind it was easier to take note of things, one's thoughts were clearer, more logical. As if on a dark, photographic plate, details lost in the daytime chaos became more visible. He would have realized the unreliability of his calculations. On the other hand, they had to make up the essential part of the conditions in which 'Operation Dioscuri' was to be carried out. Otherwise they would be of no use at all. It had been an inspired place of foresight to dress Castor and his companions in the everyday suit of a protestant minister. Consisting officially of a dark suit with a white clerical collar, but in practice reduced to the 'dog-collar' below which one could wear a sack if one felt like it, it threatened no unpleasant surprises. He admitted, of course, that the whole masquerade somewhat resembled a comic opera, but there was a certain consoling irony in disguising men of War and Chaos as men of Peace and Order. Along the wall above the empty track was a placard several meters high. On the black background, like the universe strewn with gilt, wasp-like stars shimmered a haze, also golden, filled with the elaborate coat of arms of Harrods. Beneath this commercial cosmic vista was written in huge letters: WHERE THE FUTURE BEGINS! Quite an ambitious advertisement, he thought. As if its inventor had the magic power to blow away the unknown, which, like a cloud of condensed possibilities kept hidden from people what lay in store for them tomorrow. The imaginative artist had erred only with the last word. Had he been truly clairvoyant the advertisement would have read: WHERE THE FUTURE ENDS! And there, on the other wall where it said: WELCOME! YOU'RE IN LINE FOR YOUR HOTEL! should be: WELCOME! YOU'RE IN LINE FOR YOUR GRAVE! The escalator hummed dully beneath his in its monotonous movement, like the mechanism of a time bomb. Constructive machinery still had a destructive sound to it. Castor would probably have said - like everything else made by a human hand. He liked to gild his bombs with the philosophy with which he formulated them. The circle was complete. In that Janus-like duality of human products there was a certain perversely perceptive mockery. Beneath the metal staircase which seemed unending, like evil, suffering, injustice, there was, of course, nothing. Not yet. But there was would be. Beneath the whole Airport. A damning memorial to man's treachery. A matricide which right from the Golden Age of the Greek gods had forgiven no one. Mother nature, said Castor, created us for us to perfect her. Instead of that we are killing her. We shall have to pay for it. All right, he thought, but 'abused and offended' nature would have to wait a while. The Airport would suffer today, but only incidentally. They weren't challenging the shortcomings of civilization, only the shortcomings of the politics which made that civilization possible. There's no point in fighting a hole dug in the wrong place, you have to fight the idiots

who dug it. The hole gets filled in any case. He himself, in fact, was not so mad about nature. Privately he considered that a little less nature, especially in the shape of the vulgar, aggressive instincts of lower carnivores and higher bank employees, would in no way detract from mankind's well being. But he needed Castor. Castor could perform tasks of which the castrated brain of any ordinary citizen would not have been capable. With a short, soft jolt the escalator deposited him on the station's upper level. He found himself in a marble foyer from which pedestrian subways led to various Terminal Buildings. He had read somewhere that the Central Terminal Area covered 158 acres, and the whole Heathrow Airport with its auxiliary buildings, hangars, workshops, depots and runways, 2819 acres, ringed by a perimeter road 9.3 miles long. The mammoth proportions of this aeronautical domain suited his plans to the highest degree. At one time he had thought of choosing a transatlantic liner for his operation. But however big, a ship would not have allowed the freedom of action which Castor would have at the Airport complex. True, on some tourist cruise ships there were areas more easily accessible than the Airport, which was certainly more strictly guarded but on the other hand, the surveillance of a relatively small boat was comparatively easier. The fact that at Heathrow Airport during the summer season and at the period of the densest air traffic, there sometimes came together at one time more than 200 000 passengers and people accompanying them daily, together with more than 60 000 airport staff, made any kind of surveillance at best unsatisfactory. Finally, an official state delegation was flying out today. Everywhere, everyone was in a hurry. Even trains, which in their day had replaced the earlier diplomatic mules, had become too slow for the general rush towards a rapid lack of mutual understanding. So, that morning at Heathrow Airport a top-level Soviet State Delegation would be accompanied on their departure from London by important representatives of H. M. Government. There would have been no logical or revolutionary purpose in laying in wait for the Russians with bombs beneath the deck of some ocean liner bound for Murmansk. He gave up his ticket at the ramp and with a light step set off to walk across the foyer. He was humiliatingly aware that he was imitating Castor's professional calm, but he consoled himself with the thought that he was only taking back what he himself had once given. Castor was his product. He had both conceived and created him just as he was. But he sensed a certain creative reciprocity linking them together, that of an author and his hero. Instead, Castor had now begun to shape him, Pollux. Creator and the created had come together in an unusual mixture in which it was barely clear which was which. With a camera's precision his apparently uninterested eyes took in for the 9th time the architectural details of the station hall, the features of its internal layout, communications and he distances between them, each and every slightest, most insignificant detail of the confused life going on around him. If he had been followed, he would have been seen to stop a little longer in front of the escalator leading to the underground bus station, but it would have been impossible to guess why. He would have been lost to view amongst the bustling crowd of passengers and appeared again opposite the battery of wall telephones under their glass domes, for all the world like oversized space helmets.

Waiting for the hands of his wrist watch to come together at Zero hour, the time fixed for the beginning of 'Operation Dioscuri', he sat down in a low armchair and began to read extracts from his diary in the notebook inside the cover of the breviary: '…Castor was against the code name 'Dioscuri' for the operation at Heathrow, just as he had been against his underground name of Castor. It reminded him of castor oil which he had been made to drink as a child. (It must have been a bourgeois childhood since the poor were effectively protected against similar digestive problems by hunger). Pollux, the name I took for myself, seemed to him like a firm producing light bulbs. A bit like Osram. He gave in finally. They were just two dead names which we shall inspire with a new meaning. 'Dioscuri' was something different: it joined Castor and Pollux in an event which already had a definite sense. It was as if he were afraid lest by usurping the names we might not be heir to the fate of their original bearers in some mystical way, even though he didn't know anything about them, (nor about a lot of other things, incidentally). He wanted to know: 'who exactly were they, those two guys?' He had no comment to make when he heard that Castor and Pollux were the sons of Zeus. I hadn't expected any. Revolutionaries are convinced that they have a direct relationship with the highest necessities which govern history. That they themselves are, as a natural incarnation of the cosmic laws of progress, in some way gods. Self-deification is a necessary pre-condition for the secret functioning of any revolutionary machinery. Without it, it would be quite impossible to undertake those exalted missions which in the language of ordinary mortals are called 'outrages'. I told him, too, that the Dioscuri are considered as the protectors of travelers, which, bearing in mind what we are preparing for the Russians at Heathrow, seemed to him to be 'a bloody good joke'. He was particularly happy to know that in reward for their virtues the brothers were given immortality and the privilege of shining in the heavens as stars. I don't know if his optimism would have survived the discovery that Castor, before his astronomical transfer, was obliged to die a somewhat uncomfortable death. In the meantime, the other members of the group were also given names. I chose them because of their mythological associations with the Dioscuri. The two men became Paris and Menelaus, and the three girls Helen, Leda and Clytaemnestra, shortened to Mnestra…' '… The Anglo-Russian talks have been going on for three weeks and if most of the London papers weren't in the middle of one of their endemic strikes, Fleet Street would have designated them quite unambiguously as 'exceptionally fruitful' – 'certainly the most successful since Munich' would have added the few eccentrics, isolated in the swamp of trite pacifism into which British public opinion has sunk. For this special occasion, the BBC has abandoned its natural diplomatic double-talk, and, gallantly espousing Soviet pancosmic rhetoric, has called the talks 'historic'. For Castor they are 'the shameful coupling of exploitory capitalism and exploitory pseudo-socialism, just one more imperialistic grand plot calculating on deceiving the broad masses of the people'. The imperialists, however, are mistaken. It's they who will be deceived. An attack on the Soviet delegation will destroy the agreement even before a single paragraph can be violated in some other, more elegant fashion. Icy blasts will once again blow through international relations. Chaos will follow. And out of Chaos are born the stars…'

Beneath the extract he could see the plans he had sketched out on an earlier visit to the Airport. The first was a rough layout of the Central Terminal Area; the second represented the lower level of the Underground at Heathrow Central. There was no need to sketch the upper level. At the Information Desk he had picked up a brochure entitled 'Heathrow Airport Station and Pedestrian Subways with a pull-out plan of the Underground', published by the BAA, with the black silhouette of doves in flight across the yellow air of its paper cover. From this simple plan it was clear that the Station was built beneath the aerodrome's approach road network between Terminal 2, the Queen's Building and the Control Tower, and that mechanical walkways connected the tree separate corridors to the tree Passenger Terminals. He read: '… It is now 6.00 hours. In fifteen minutes I shall set off. I can feel nothing. Certainly none of the emotions usually attributed to terrorists. No excitement. No fear. But no joy either. Perhaps only relief. I feel like a writer on the last chapter of a book where the subject has at last worked out. If I've made a mistake somewhere, I can no longer put it right. Castor and the other Dioscuri are already on their way to Heathrow and there's no turning back. My clergyman's dress, for example, that was a mistake. At first sight, only a technical one, but actually a careless slip of

imagination. I should have known that for somebody not used to it, it would make you incongruous in your own eyes. And self-ridicule is destructive. It undermines your determination. That in turn leads to a falling off of concentration and thence to failure. Since I am not taking part in the immediate action, the mistake is not fatal. I take note of it only to avoid repetition in the future. At 07.15 I shall be in the Entrance Hall of Heathrow Central Station, at 07.45 in Terminal 2 where Helen will be waiting for me in the nun's habit with tickets for SAS Flight SK 514 to Oslo. The Russians are expected at about 09.00. The VIP Lounge is being redecorated so that the official leave-taking will take place in the Terminal Lounge of Terminal 2. Castor and his companions will already be in position. The operation will begin at 09.50. It will last 10 minutes. At 10.00 it will all be over. At 10.00 also, Helen and I will be airborne en route for Scandinavia. This phase of 'Dioscuri' has no code name. No one knows about it. Not even Helen. She thinks that it's our escape route and that Castor and his followers have theirs. There is no way out for them, Helen. Surely the myth is clear enough? In order to become immortal, Castor must die in battle. To become a star in heaven, one must first bite deeply into the earth. Am I at all sorry about Castor? Subjectively – a little. (But since for us 'subjectively' has no sort of meaning, only 'objectively' means anything at all, I have no pity for him, none). There'll always be plenty of Castors to be found. Castors are expendable. It's Pollux's we're short of. Have you noticed, I'm already speaking of him in the past tense? So we'll let that go, he'll put it right when he dies, it'll be his epitaph. For he is going to die, Helen. He owes it to himself and to his code name. He won't risk losing his place in the heavens through a cowardly betrayal. As for me, I shan't go to heaven. I'll stay here on earth as long as I can. In a year or two I'll send some other Castor up the stairs. That one too will shine down on us with his eternal light. I shan't be jealous. I shan't be jealous of anybody. Somebody has to stay down here and clear up the mess…'

He closed his breviary. It might attract the attention of a member of the Airport Security, or of a passenger with a hysterical imagination. But despite the danger, he had not given up his diary. It helped him to understand his aims better. He looked at his watch – it was 07.35 – and lit a cigarette. At one time he had smoked expensive, aromatic St. Moritz. But since he had been with this present Castor, for he wasn't the first, nor would he be the last, he had been smoking 'Caporal' out of solidarity. He hadn't gone as far as rolling his own. There were, after all, limits to solidarity, However much a man loves his dog, he doesn't chew the same bone out of solidarity with him. His nicotine-stained fingers were trembling as if charged with miniature electric shocks. His nerves had always played him up. They were evidently not strong enough for the imagination they had to sustain. Fortunately, they only bothered him when he was collecting information, putting together his plan. When he had defined the 'plot' and chosen the means of carrying it out, his anxiety disappeared. The morbid hesitation gave way to cold, clean-headed determination. Apparently it was like that with any talent, any skill. In the initial phase of 'Operation Dioscuri', the interconnecting links between the Terminals would be an undoubted help to Castor. Afterwards, all the passages would be blocked. For ease of control the police would probably cordon off the Central Terminal Area into separate sections. To get through from one to another a special pass would be needed. But in the good old British way, preventive measures would only be taken after it was all over. While it was all happening panic would make any sensible organization impossible. Radio controlled explosives in the Entrance Hall of Terminal 2 would drive passengers out onto the plateau above ground or down into the Underground, where other bombs would await them. In the ensuing chaos in which no one would be able to establish any order, Castor would get through to the Russians. The rest would be part of a myth. The yellow BAA brochure with its flight of doves on the cover had helpfully informed him that the walking distances along the three corridors were all different. A passenger leaving from

Terminal 1 had to walk 205 yards along the subway from the upper level of the Underground; on arrival, however, he had only 188 yards to cover. For Terminal 2 on arrival and departure there were 167 yards; to the Departure Lounge of terminal 3 the passenger had to walk 252 yards, but back from the Arrival Hall the route was 410 yards long. Fortunately the figures could not be verified. If there was some room for criticism of the veracity of the Authorities in more serious matters, their statistical accuracy concerning such trivialities was beyond reproach. But he had been obliged to work out the time to walk the distances for himself. In any case, the time in the brochure was the time of flights, of business trips, of tourist excursions and of honeymoons, the time of life. His and Castor's time was the time of dying. So he had needed to calculate how long it would take someone running. By then a frantic run would be the normal pace of movement at Heathrow Airport. The quiet walk, at the worst, civilized, carefully circumspect haste which had been normal up to just a little earlier, with the first second of 'Dioscuri' would become an unnatural risk which few would be prepared to have. Indeed, if everything went off as he had planned, quite a lot of things would not be exactly as they were shown in the picture which the Information Bulletin of the Public Relations Office of the BAA painted of everyday life at the 'world's greatest aerial crossroads'. It's good, he thought, that the redecoration of the VIP Lounge has made it necessary for the Authorities to transfer the official leave-taking ceremony for the Russians to the Transit Lounge of Terminal 2. The time needed to get from the Terminal 2 Lobby to the Underground or to the plateau in front of the Terminal building was the shortest possible. There was the least likelihood of the police realizing what was going on before Castor had finished with the Russians. Most of all, Terminal 2 was international. A majority of foreigners always counted in learning English, if they needed to at all, once in London. The language problems would make it still more difficult to re-impose any kind of order, which would not have been the case if the Russians had been leaving from the Terminal for domestic flights. He walked across the marble entrance of the Station from where, like some aerodynamic intestine, the passage to Terminal 2 led off. Before stepping onto the moving walkway, his eyes fell on the milky white glass with the illuminated advertisement for BA: WE'LL TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOU! It's quite true, he thought. Only it would be he who would take that care, at least for today, instead of BA. He stood on the walkway while the constantly changing silhouettes of a ceramic dove in flight slid noiselessly past his face. When he had stepped onto the walkway the dove had been 'taking off': it had 'flown' with wings spread wide while he moved along, to 'land' when he got off at the other end. Whenever he came to Terminal 2 he always looked at the bird's flight with indignation: whatever it meant in its free state, here, imprisoned in stone, it represented only dead and vanquished nature. But this time it didn't happen. He saw the dove 'take off' but then the bird suddenly disappeared in an evil phantasm which filled the tunnel with the images of a ghostly cataclysm. First he heard a hollow echo of the Airport's welcome, re-arranged in the ominous order of his own world game: WELCOME! WELCOME WHERE THE FUTURE ENDS! YOU'RE IN LINE FOR YOUE GRAVE! I'LL TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOU! Then the same echo was lost in an eruption of phantom silhouettes which in a massive rush peopled the corridor with a mute stampede.

In the distance where the sharp line of the subway was broken by the bend leading to the escalator, there was a dull rumbling and the flickering red glow of fire. Everything was wreathed in a sulphorous mist, in same dreamlike water in which movements were slow and soundless. In a sleep-walker's nightmare from which there was no escape, the shadows rushed towards him, yet remained rooted to the spot, struggling against the moving pathway which carried them implacably back towards the Terminal and death. He couldn't make out their faces; they still looked human but with something animal in the immeasurable, primordial fear in their expressions. His vision had made him draw back, almost knocking over the passenger behind him. He swore loudly, as he moved aside, dropping his breviary as he caught the handrail. The moving band crawled monotonously on towards the exit. "Um Gottes Willen, was tuhen Sie – for God's sake, what are you doing?" The man with whom he had collided was in his early thirties. He had the smothered-down blond hair of a model, his clean-shaven, rather horse-like face was lightly tanned and his eyes were a watery blue beneath glasses in fine gilt frame. He had a square, black, overnight case in his hand. He was just about to continue his outburst but a glance at the clerical collar stopped him short. In a heavy German accent he asked: "Are you all right?" "Yes, of course" he mumbled impatiently, bending down to pick up the breviary which was lying accusingly beside his feet. The fair-haired stranger was quicker. He picked up the breviary and without closing it handed it to him. He had ugly finger nails bitten down. "Thank you" said Pollux without further comment and stuffed the book into the outside pocket of the Pan-Am bag. He wondered if the bastard had seen its contents, and if so, what he would conclude from them. He looked like a commercial traveler whose livelihood depended upon his appearance. He probably even cleaned the underside of his shoes, but he wouldn't get far unless he stopped disfiguring his nails like that. He looked with revulsion towards the exit which was slowly coming closer. Ordinary-looking passengers were gliding towards him now. Between the moving bands several Indians in turbans were pushing trolleys loaded with luggage. Everything was back in place – routinely and recognizable. It was 07.15 hours when the automatic double glass doors of Terminal 2 opened wide in front of him. At exactly the same moment, Enrico Marcone, the captain of Alitalia Boeing 747 AZ 320 on the route Rome – London – New York requested permission to make a high-priority landing 15 minutes before his scheduled arrival time because one of his passengers had suddenly taken ill. But of course Pollux had no inkling of this. The information belonged to the secret life of large international airports of which only a little becomes known occasionally from the newspapers while the dead are being counted and the cause of yet another airplane crash is being sought from the black box with its preserved voices of the dead crew. And even if he had known of it, it would not have concerned him. He, Pollux, alias Daniel Leverquin, alias Patrick Cornell, had more important things on his mind today. He had to keep an appointment with a myth. He stopped as if he had little faith in the automatic doors; then disappeared in the bustle and

throng before the BA's counter on the ground floor of Terminal 2. Where, according to the Airport advertisements, for everyone the future was just beginning, but where, according to his scenario, for many it would in fact end.

2. He too knew nothing of the before-schedule arrival of the plane on the Rome – London – New York flight. The man disguised as a clergyman with the false breviary at least knew why he was at the Airport, whatever judgments might be made about his reasons for being there. But the down-at-heel figure of indeterminate years with thinning gray hair, an unshaven, grayish face and a similarly gray, jumble-sale, tweed suit, who was leaning on the rail of the Roof Gardens above the Queen's Building, from where, for the price of 35 p. the aircraft taking off and landing could be observed, didn't even know that. Although he himself found it strange, he simply had no idea why he was there or what it was he was looking for at Heathrow. From a bird's eye view, the Central Terminal Area, bounded by its multiple bands of radial takeoff and landing runways, was both impressive and frightening. Its dirty gray surface, crisscrossed by the arrow-like reinforced concrete tracks formed, at its outward perimeter where it merged with the metal caterpillars of hangars, warehouses and workshops, a hexagonal crystal, diamond-shaped, like a star of David with its sixth, northernmost point broken off. Along the edges and axes of the aerodrome, as along the boulevards of some enchanted mega polis, there were shining steel insects that stood or crawled forwards, groaning, and then either fell silent or rose howling into the sky towards the sun and towards other hymenoptera which were buzzing down towards the ground from all sides. From on high it looked like a giant mechanical wasp's nest whose organization, like that of a beehive, the uninitiated observer had no means of understanding, even though he knew it must exist. In response to its unseen commands and in predetermined patterns there moved through that noisy chaos the tiny ants of the service vehicles, and yet others, still smaller, inside the armor of those working overalls it was possible to discern men only by using binoculars. The man with gray hair didn't have them. But he had no need of them to make out the objects which had attracted his attention. Of all the aircraft taking off and landing, he had eyes only for the giant outline of the Concorde. Scheduled to take off for Washington at 08.15, it was in the process of being loaded with luggage, brought along from Terminal 3 and lifted into the cargo hold by a mobile crane. To some people it looked like a great bird with a predatory beak. To some it looked like a silver shark. Its silhouette didn't remind him particularly of a fish, or a bird, but it did leave him with the unpleasant sensation of having seen it somewhere, or in some way, before, where or how he didn't know. Something in those nightmares of his, a dream image without a definite shape, whose amorphous and changing shadow gave promise of a future body only in a few vague

features – it was that mysterious, menacing, dangerous something which reminded him of the Concorde. But what could it be, what for Christ's sake was it? Last night as usual, he had gone to bed without the slightest idea of how he was going to spend the day. His life had no need for any plans. The everyday, routine things were waiting for him in the morning. He simply had to observe them. For most of the time he didn't find it difficult, even though he could frequently see no sense in them, as in much of the behavior of the people around him. But whenever he had his own ideas about how to spend time, they conflicted with the fixed order by which one lived in the Home. When he carried them out it got him into difficulties. And that brought him back to the agonizing question of whether there was really something wrong with him, as they told him from time to time. Fortunately, he couldn't remember the last time that had happen, or even whether it had really happened at all. There was something not right with his memory. He could remember things, which people said he couldn't possibly have experienced, and he completely forgot others which again they told him had really happened to him. His memory was really lousy. He had to admit that much. All the rest was hidden in darkness about which, evidently others knew more than he did. Lying in bed the night before while all around him the light bulbs were going out like distant stars growing cold, he didn't know what he was going to do today. Least of all that he would be watching the Concorde take off at the Airport. The disturbing need to go somewhere, to do something, it wasn't clear where or what, had come to him months ago, but in the last few days he had suffered from severe headaches and the need had become an unconquerable longing which drove him to satisfy this wandering instinct as soon as possible. From that first very vague vision, when one stormy April night he had woken covered in cold sweat with a hesitant memory of his dream, he had had the knowledge that he was summoned on a journey whose meaning he would find out only later. Last night had been just like that night in April. The south-westerly gale had lifted off roofs along the Thames valley, overturned cars on the motorway to Cornwall and uprooted trees in London parks. He had been wakened by the thunder. The extinguished sky in the frames of Victorian windows, like repeated copies of the Ascension, was flooded with a bright, purple glow. The reflections of the ghostly lightning flashes crushed against the empty walls of his room. The air was full of electricity, the skin prickled, the hair crackled. He sat up in bed with his knees beneath his chin and his palms on his cheeks which were dripping with clammy moisture. Suddenly he knew where he had to go. Not yet why, but he was certain he would find out as soon as he got to the right place. Otherwise, the knowledge of where he had to go would make no sense. Single details scattered through all his earlier dreams came back to him. Once again he was passing through a dark tunnel whose walls, rising in an arch, had the sharpness and cold of artic crystals. He was wading through a swamp, shallow at first, but later deeper, of a yellowish, oily color in which floated human faeces covered with a film of white hoar frost. It was getting colder. The source of the cold seemed to be at the bottom of the

labyrinth, where a dark mass had formed, like a shadow which had lost all shape, but which was recovering it again with every step he took. The shadow was waiting in an icy whirlwind to be given back its body. In every one of his dreams he was standing in the same spot, at the bottom of a mysterious lagoon, but never managing to guess at the shape or the name. Even in the dream which had been shattered by last night's storm, it had been waiting for him. But now he knew where he could find it. The crossed outline of illuminated pathways in the form of a six-sided, pointed precious stone with the sixth point broken – the X-ray photograph of his nighttime wanderings which in the daytime gave him no peace – did not represent, as he had thought, some seascape or a picture of the star of David, but the ground plan of Heathrow, which, like a heraldic coat of arms, was to be found on the cover of the book 'Air Traffic Control, a man-machine system'. It was a text book which was used in the technological studies of the Open University's Second Level course, and it had attracted his attention quite by chance. It had been lying open in front of young Charlie Rees, who was mad about aero planes. There was no possibility, of course, that Charlie would ever be a pilot, or even travel in one, not to mention to rule over the network of flights above some aerodrome from the Control Tower, but that fact, clear to everyone except him, in no way weakened his desire to find out everything he could about aeronautics from books. Nor did it stop him, quite impervious to his surroundings where everyone else was equally passionately absorbed with his own world, from imagining himself seated at the controls of a Jumbo-Jet on a fatal collision-course, or before a crowded Air Traffic Control radar screen, setting in order, in the impersonal voice of an experienced controller, the aerial chaos above the Airport. Charlie's preoccupation with some such aeronautical crisis had given him the chance to look at the book rather more closely. While the conscientious Charlie, sweating profusely, had been peering into his invisible screen, filled with the bright dots of aircraft positions, and sending out laconic instructions on their behalf, he had examined the picture on the cover of the book. There was no doubt about it. In the ground plan of Heathrow, a hexagonal diamond, pointed, in a shape of a broken Star of David, was the mysterious route he had taken so many times in his dreams, to end up in each one in a windswept tunnel where, frozen in ice, a shapeless, faceless, nameless shadow awaited him. He lived in South Ealing. Heathrow belonged to the Borough of Hillingdon. He knew more or less where it must be from the aero planes which flew over his head during the day. And so, a little before the mist-soaked dawn, with the storm rolling away towards the north-east, he found himself, wet and cold, at the entrance to the brightly-lit approach tunnel above which in clumsy neon letters was written: WELCOME TO HEATHROW AIRPORT! Immediately, he heard the sound of the first aircraft gathering speed on the unseen runway. He had reached his target, the enigmatic territory of his dream. Somewhere in the Terminals, only just rousing from the lethargy of the night, or in the open space between them, was the answer for which he had come. Before climbing up to the Roof Garden, he wandered between the Airport buildings which were like beehives whose gleaming, glazed honeycombs were darkened by the swift shadows of the passengers.

Found no answer. He still didn't know why he had been brought there. He felt hungry. He hadn't eaten much the night before. His nerves had sensed the arrival of the storm. He had some small change in his pocket and could buy something to eat. Perhaps he had even a few pounds. He didn't usually worry about money. He never knew how much he had. Or even if he had any at all. Many of the cares which were important for the majority hardly bothered him. There were many things he simply didn't understand. You couldn't, for example, do the most natural thing in the world, to say you were hungry. Actually, you could say it, but no one would feed you. No one considered themselves responsible for you being hungry. You had to buy your food or go hungry. Of course, he didn't pay for his food. He was given it. But always at a certain time. He wasn't allowed to be hungry at any other time. Or rather, he could be, but he wasn't given any food. On the reinforced concrete runway the Concorde was still insatiably swallowing its load. There was hardly anyone on the Roof Garden. People were only just arriving. Most of them had probably come to see the Concorde take off. He would watch it too. He had nothing else to do, apart from waiting for something to show him why he had come to the Airport, why he had obeyed a dream with no apparent meaning. For what meaning would there be to an icy tunnel with frozen human excrement and a shadow in its depth, a shadow which, like primeval cosmic chaos, searched in torment for its true form? Something in all that didn't fit somehow. Something was wrong. Either it was wrong or he was in no condition to discover the link between the shadow and the Airport, if it really existed, if the broken Star of David, along the axis along which he moved in his dreams was really a bird's eye view of Heathrow and not something quite different. The gray-haired man in the grey suit looked so exhausted that it seemed that he might collapse at any moment. Sue Jenkins looked at him out of the cornet of her eye, her hands clenched tight on the railing and her heels pushing against the concrete as if she were exercising on the bars in her school gym. He looked like one of those lonely people in the park. They were never taking children or dogs for a walk. They never talked. Not even to each other or to others walking there. They behaved as if they had all the time in the world but didn't know what to do with it. They sat without moving on distant benches, quite alone, without company, without newspapers, without any sense of the time of day. The park-keepers had to shepherd them out before they closed the park gates. And when they went, meekly and quietly, each one wrapped up in himself, like a procession of ghosts, it didn't look as if they had any idea of where they were going. Her mother had told her not to go near them. But her mother wasn't here now. She'd gone off to find out how much longer they had to wait for their delayed flight for Nice. Sue Jenkins was left on the Roof Gardens of the Queen's Building, to observe the Concord's take off and 'all the rest which was happening on an international airport.' Of course Mrs. Jenkins wouldn't know for certain that her daughter would be asked to write about aerial transport in Britain at school, but she did know for certain that in this sordid world one had to be prepared for all kinds of stupidities. Even for her husband to have abandoned her after ten years of model, if not exciting marriage, leaving nothing behind save his Asiatic features on their wedding photograph, a few pairs of dirty underpants, two or three 'not very nice' intimate souvenirs, and not a penny to their joint account. And that after everything she had done for that yellow swine from Singapoor to be given British citizenship and a chance to become a

real man. She didn't want something like that to happen to her daughter. Sue would have her own, separate bank account, which would be guaranteed by a good education and by the capacity to know all important things about the Concorde at any time. In her quest for a husband, Sue wouldn't have to change some ape's passport for him. Unfortunately, at ten years old, Sue already had that independence of spirit which is supposed to lie at the roots of any successful civilization before it ceases to be successful and disappears. If she had been told to watch people, she would probably have watched aero planes. But since it was aero planes, she naturally turned her attention to the people around her. And of those, particularly to the elderly man with gray hair and eyes filled with emptiness. He felt that he has being watched. At first he thought that his untidy appearance had attracted some policeman's suspicious gaze. He didn't think he was known here. Back in Ealing, in the House, they'd probably only just noticed his absence. He glanced round. No one was taking any special notice of him. Everyone's eyes were fixed on the Concorde which was now moving slowly towards take off. Then his eyes looked down and he saw the little girl's smiling face. She was standing beside him and watching him with curious blue eyes. She had high, oriental cheekbones and her skirt was the color of light amber. He felt an urge to stroke her black hair, caught up behind in a poly tale. But he stopped himself in time. Perhaps that would frighten her. He certainly didn't want to scare her away. He felt quite alone at the Airport, where apart from him, everyone was with someone, or knew someone. He almost regretted having given way to his instinct. He ought to have been more patient. He should have waited for his dream to have become clearer. Then he wouldn't have been so helpless. He would have known exactly why he was here, if he would be here at all. If in its clearer form his dream hadn't led him off somewhere else. 'Hallo!' said the little girl. 'I'm Sue.' 'Good morrow, Sue!' he answered with the old-fashioned greeting, smiling. He liked children and knew how to get on with them. Only he rarely had the opportunity. People were funny. It was as if they didn't want anyone but themselves to like their children. It was something he couldn't understand. Like a great many other things besides. 'Sue, that's from Susan, isn't it?' 'Yes.' 'Susan's a holy name, from the Bible.' 'I hate it,' said the little girl, and frowned. 'Really, why is that?' 'There's at last four Susan in my class.' 'But thou'rt the only they call Sue?' he said, using the old-fashioned biblical 'thou'. 'That'd be all right. But there are two more. We never know which is which.' 'Yes, that's very awkward.' He admitted. 'It's beastly horrible.' He smiled. On her lips the words didn't sound ugly. Just a precise description of a fact for which there was no remedy.

'I'm Susan Lee really. But so is Susan Lee Alvin. Her name comes before mine in the register, so I had to be Sue, and she's Sue Lee. 'Well, dost know Sue' he said reflectively, 'that's not so hard to put right.' She looked at him doubtingly. 'How can you put something like that right?' 'Simply change the name.' 'Names can't be changed,' she answered crossly. After all the grey-haired man wasn't any different from all the others. He just looked different. And it was funny, he talked so strangely. 'And why not?' 'What do you mean, why not?' 'Why shouldn't they be changed?' 'I don't know why,' she said. 'I only know they can't.' 'But if they could'st, what would'st thou be called?' – Once again the biblical thou. 'Ariadne, I think.' 'Ariadne? Why Ariadne?' 'It's from a story. It's about a man who had to go into a labyrinth and kill a bull which ate people. But the labyrinth was so long and mixed up that no one had ever found their way out of it before. So Ariadne gave him a ball of thread and he unwound it while he went to look for the bull. When he had found it and killed it and saved the town, he found his way back to the entrance by winding up the thread and following it.' 'All right then,' he said, seriously. 'I'll call thee Ariadne.' 'But I'm Susan, Susan Lee!' laughed the little girl. He leaned over, took her hand and said confidently: 'For those who don't know thy real name. But I know it and for me thou shall be Ariadne. If thou would'st like, of course.' 'Yes, I do' she answered. She was beginning to like the game, it was like a fairy-tale. The man with the grey hair really was different from the others. 'But what shall I call you?' 'Wait now, let's see,' he said perplexedly. 'What name dost thou like?' 'Theseus. He was the one who killed the bull and found his way out of the labyrinth with Ariadne' thread.' 'That's' – he hesitated an instant, 'that's really very strange.' 'What's strange?' 'That's my real name.' 'But Theseus is a Greek name. You don't look like a Greek.' 'What do Greeks look like?' 'I don't know.' She was puzzled. 'But different.' 'That's right,' said the man with the gray hair almost apologetically, 'it happened. But it's a long story.' 'Tell it to me!' He looked at her doubtfully. 'Please. I could be called to board the plane at any minute.' The man with the gray hair seemed worried: "I thought thou wast here to watch the flying machines?' 'What made you think that? I'm not mad about planes. I'm going on one, that's all.' She was jumping up and down on one leg, looking at him seriously. The wind lifted her kilt round her

smooth, thin thighs. She thought it was funny the careful way he watched her every movement. 'Where art thou journeying?' He almost had to shout. From the runway came an ever deepening roar. 'To the seaside.' She shouted. 'But the flight to Nice has been delayed.' 'Thou art not going on thine own?' She shook her head: 'With Mummy.' 'Where is she?' 'She went to find out how much longer we've got to wait.' The roaring turned into a howl. A Swissair Boeing 707 taking off, shattered the air through which the sun was just beginning to break. 'It looks like a great white whale, like Moby Dick,' said Sue. From the opposite side, the Concorde was dignifiedly taxing along the perimeter track towards the runway. 'And that one looks like an arctic wolf.' The thundering roar gradually decreased. The Swissair Boeing became rapidly smaller and smaller in the shining air which blurred its outline. Peace returned to the Roof Garden, disturbed only by the rumble of the Concorde as it moved towards take off. The man with the gray hair looked towards the entrance to the Roof Garden from where Sue's mother would come. It was always like that. Whenever he got close to a child, someone always turned up to separate them. They would take Sue away from him too. He would be left with his worries and his headache, which was becoming unbearable. He would never see Sue again. And soon he wouldn't even remember her. Sue-Ariadne would be lost in the forest of memories like so many other details of his life and who knows when she would emerge again as a person he was sure he had seen somewhere before, although he could never quite place where. 'Listen,' he said quickly, 'I am hungry, and thou? 'Not particularly!' said the little girl, and then: 'But I can always eat some chocolate.' She didn't know why she said that. Probably because she had been told it was something one never said. Especially to someone you didn't know. 'Shall we buy some?' She hesitated. 'But what if Mammy comes back?' He stretched out his hand. 'We'll be back by then.' He led the child onto the flat surface from where a stairway went down to the road in front of Terminal 2. He supposed her mother would go up to the roof by the internal staircase and that in this way they would miss each other. Meetings always led to misunderstandings. People were morbidly distrustful. It was as if they were continuously at a state of war with each other, as if no one expected any good from anyone else. People were really very strange. As if they were from different worlds. Even those who showed kindness to him, even they didn't approve of his way of thinking. It's just not done, they said. But when he asked why, why it wasn't done, they were quite unable to give him an answer. Why were they like that? The headache which had tormented him ever since his dreams had begun, was once again clouding his eyes and driving thin, sharp wedges into the back of his head.

'You're squeezing my hand,' said Sue. He released the pressure on his clenched fingers, although he had not been aware of squeezing tightly. Nor was he aware that someone was running after him. Not that the women in the widebrimmed summer hat was shrieking hysterically. The howl of the Concorde deafened all the other sounds of the Airport. The aircraft was sucking all that was left of the world into its engines and suffocating it there. It was even suffocating the crunching of the wedges in his brain. Something tugged at his shoulder. He only caught sight of the woman when he turned round. Her mouth was opening and closing but only the howl of the engines was coming out. Suddenly she raised her handbag. The silver chain flashed in the sunlight. He felt a piercing pain at his forehead, stumbled and let go of the girl's hand. The noise was too loud to permit any explanation. He backed away awkwardly and then a column of schoolgirls carrying a placard with 'EF LANGUAGE SCHOOL – HASTINGS' came between him and the woman. He ran down the stairway whose massive pillars linked the roof of the Queen's Building with the Airport's roadways by an aerial bridge, then stopped in the shadow of a pier. He must go, he thought. They would soon be coming down to look for him. Obviously he was being blamed for something. He didn't know what but he was sure both that it would only bring him harm if they found him, and that it had all happened to him before, only he didn't know where or when. He stopped indecisively in front of the doors of the Medical Centre on the ground floor of the Queen's Building. He could make out neither the roof area from which he had escaped, not the policeman talking to Sue and her mother and the witnesses of what had happened. Evidently they couldn't agree about the direction that the man with the gray hair had taken. They were pointing in conflicting ways. The policeman, notebook in hand, bewilderedly tried to follow the argument. The sky shook. He lifted his hand. The Concorde was rising skywards above Heathrow. Sue had been right. The aircraft was an artic wolf with a stream of foam trailing from its pointed snout.

3. For people who value Order, even if they are not policemen, the world is a logical creation, according to some plan, as a result of which the same causes always give rise to the same effects. Crime leads to Investigation, which in turn leads to Punishment. That this happens most often, but by no means always, in certain well-defined patterns, and only sometimes, but not often, in others, in no way destroys the logical beauty of the plan. The plan is O. K. It's just that certain events don't keep to it. Most of what happens, in fact, does not at all resemble something well thought out, or simply doesn't follow the accepted rules of logic. Many things could quite easily

be considered to be the results of some magic lottery, governed by some Mad Hatter-like Chance. The passengers and crew of Alitalia's Boeing 747 Flight AZ320 Rome – London – New York had no need at all of any 'high priority' landing. It was quite enough for them to be flying in their hermetically sealed, coffin-like box at 30,000 feet above mother earth, which God had created to be crawled upon rather than flown over. It certainly wasn't needed either by the Heathrow's personnel, right after the gale-force winds which had turned the Airport into air traffic chaos. And least of all was it needed by P. R. Larcombe, the diplomatic correspondent of the Washington Post who had come to Heathrow officially to cover the Russians' departure, but also for an article on Pan Am, which was to show that air travel was less dangerous than walking along the street. But they all heard about the flight from Rome's difficulties and some of them were soon going to experience them. The only one whose future depended upon his knowledge of the facts concerning this particular flight – for the others it boded only stomach ulcers - was the fairhaired passenger in the white raincoat, and just he knew nothing at all of them; so much for that logic which guides events. The aircraft was scheduled to land at 08.45 hours. But the man in the white raincoat, Hans Magnus Landau, Chief Accountant of the Deutsche Bank of Cologne, had no intention, for once, of relying on his instinct to obey orders and trust in the announcements of those whose job it was to give those orders or to make information available to the public. Because of the previous night's bad weather, the flight timetable was completely disorganized. He wanted to be one hundred-per-cent certain. For the third time he walked to the left of the Arrivals' Gate, watching the laconic details flickering on the TV screen's glass face and the flights due to arrive at Terminal 2. In between the information about the flights from Madrid and Moscow shone the phosphorescent band which stated that Alitalia Flight AZ320 from Rome was still expected at the scheduled time. He waited a few minutes longer during which time the details of the flight from Rome disappeared, and again appeared on the screen unchanged. On the supposition that there was little probability that any delay would arise during the flight's final stages, and calculating that, with the overloading of the peak flight season, passport control would take longer than usual, thirty minutes at least, the passenger he had come to meet, the Director of the Cologne Branch of the Deutsche Bank, could not be expected to arrive in the Main Concourse Area before 09.15 at the earliest, even though he would have no luggage to hold him up. He looked at his watch it was 08.15. So he had a good hour at his disposal to prepare for the meeting with Dr. Julius Upenkamph on which his self-respect depended, and to make the telephone call as a matter of conscience. Hans Magnus Landau could not know, of course, that at the moment when the Information Services' TV screen showed the flight from Rome still thirty minutes out from London, it was in fact already making its first circuit over Heathrow while waiting for the Control Tower to free a landing lane reserved for other aircrafts. No great fuss is ever made over exceptional circumstances. For their own peace of mind and the Air Lines' profit, it would not be desirable for passengers, enquiring about their flights, to find them in the following predicaments:

OSLO/PARIS - diverted to Island due to bad weather; PARIS/LONDON – delayed due to engine trouble; BELGRADE/LONDON – lost in fog; ATHENS/LONDON – burned down in mid-air collision with the aircraft SOPHIA/PARIS; CARACHI/LONDON – crashed near Dover; MOSCOW/LONDON – highjacked; ISTANBUL/LONDON – blown up by a time bomb. The telephone number he dialed belonged to the Airport Office of the Metropolitan Police. As soon as it rang, the receiver was lifted and a throaty voice with a strong Caribbean accent answered: 'Metropolitan Police Office, Sergeant Elmer.' Hans Magnus was silent. He still wasn't certain he was acting wisely. 'Metropolitan Police Office, Sergeant Elmer. Can I help you?' His civic reflexes came into play. Hans Magnus answered quietly, slowly, searching for the English words from his international banker's vocabulary. 'You can be of help to yourself if you don't interrupt me. Keep quiet and listen. Otherwise I'll put down the receiver.' 'Speak slowly, Sir…' The heavy voice had a matter-of-fact, reassuring tone. 'A priest has just entered Terminal 2. He's tall, thin, with a dark complexion. He is carrying a blue Pan-Am shoulder bag …' Perhaps he should put down the receiver. Why should all this be his concern? It was true that he always tried to be a good citizen in every way. German, that is, not English. 'What's this all about, Sir?' The voice was making an effort not to seem too interested. Matter-of-fact again, thought Hans Magnus. But wasn't what he was doing just as commonplace? - The ordinary reaction of a good citizen who knew his place and his duties. A good citizen of one country is a good citizen of every country. 'That man is certainly no priest.' 'May I ask what makes you think that?' Hans Magnus was in every respect an average example of his kind, a passenger who it would have been hard to distinguish at Heathrow from the majority of the rest. Like everyone else, he thought more of himself than reality allowed, and less of all the rest of the world than they really deserved. But that morning there was a special reason which made him different from the rest of traveling humanity. Passengers usually go into the Airport Toilets to wash, shave, freshen-up, and more often than not, to comply with their most urgent needs. He was going into the toilets to completely change his appearance. He would go into one of the men's toilet cubicles on the first floor gallery of Terminal 2 a man in his early thirties, blond, smooth-skinned, with a light Aryan complexion, blue eyes and meticulously clean-shaven face; he would come out ten years older with black, unruly hair, a swarthy complexion, almond-colored eyes and a short, graying beard. He would go in, in a white gabardine and come out in a black one. He would go in with the step of a man who never missed his morning exercises, and would come out with one leg slightly dragged. But not for a single moment during this process of transformation would he be bothered by the fact that in all probability he was doing exactly the same as the man he had denounced to the police ten minutes earlier. For Hans Magnus was a prime example of the kind of person who in that respect differed little from the majority of other passengers at London's Heathrow Airport on that July morning.

Sergeant Elias Elmer of the Metropolitan Police Office, Heathrow Airport, was still holding the telephone receiver from which, like jumbled Morse code, came the crackling of a broken line. He put it down gingerly, as if it were made of glass. The Morse code stopped. From outside came the muffled noise of aircrafts. His eyes rested on the last lines of an official report which the hefty Ludwell had made out for the Superintendent, an account of the abortive attempt by some unidentified person to kidnap the ten-years-old daughter of a certain Mrs. Jenkins: '… Witness Mr. Lennox, of 20 St. Andrew's Avenue, Wembley, described the man as particularly dark-haired, thick-set, middle-aged and with a limp. Mr. Rowlandson of 7, Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, N. 10 asserted that he was short, of slight build with fair hair and wearing a dark-brown suit. Mrs. Jenkins of 12, Palmerston Road, East Sheen, agreed with this description, except that she thinks the suit was black. When asked what she could remember, her daughter, Susan Lee Jenkins said she was unable to remember anything…' Sergeant Elmer wondered if he would have had any better luck if he had been on the roof Garden instead of Ludwell. But he hadn't been. It was always like that when something important happened at the Airport, he always had to be somewhere else. It didn't matter where; it was never where anything was going on. Between the 'somewhere else' where in his absence something was happening, and 'here' where in his presence nothing ever happened, ran the monotonous story of his police life. It reminded him of the doubtful authenticity of the anonymous telephone message. It simply couldn't be serious. It would have been if someone else had taken it. He would have been, of course, hanging on somewhere where the telephone wouldn't have rung, except if it had been a wrong number. He was alone in the Office, apart from the duty man in the radio-control room. It was situated on the ground floor of the Queen's Building, a few yards from the place where the kidnapper had tried to make off with Sue Lee Jenkins, and because he had been in the right place at the right time it was Ludwell who was now searching for the man. The greater part of the police available was committed to the security of the Russian delegation. That was where the Superintendent was. He must locate him and pass on the information received, which he himself didn't believe. It was only sure it had come from a German. That much he had learned from his contacts with the passengers: to distinguish their impossible accents and to calm down their impossible agitations. The story could be, but wasn't necessarily accurate, particularly since it had been told to him. (If it had been told to someone else, it would probably have been true.) It could be just a stupid hoax. It wouldn't be the first time. Two months after he'd been posted to Heathrow, just such a voice had informed him that there was a dead body in the toilets of Terminal 3. He had wanted to be the first on the scene of the crime. And he had been. Only the corpse had been that of a dead bird. Since then he'd been known as 'Canary' Elmer. He'd suspected it had been someone from the Unit. He wasn't bitter about it any more, but he was still wary of spectacular pieces of information given over the telephone by people who refused to identify themselves. But Regulations were explicit. Any information which was not entirely beyond the bounds of reason (doesn't concern, for example, stealing the moon) had to be treated seriously and the corresponding measures had to be taken; these too were carefully set out in Regulations. Regulations had a section for everything, they catered for all eventualities. Everything, that is, except how to go on working

with pride, dignity and enthusiasm when a man trained to protect people finds himself confronted with the corps of a dead canary. He had to admit that the presence of the Russians ensured a certain measure of probability. It was true that no one had gone in for killing Russians in the same way as they has Americans and Europeans, but why shouldn't they start somewhere? There were people who could find good reasons for it. If the information was genuine, perhaps this could be that really big thing he'd been longing for all the time he'd been guarding passengers from having their pockets picket and directing them to the nearest buffet. That is, of course, unless someone else took over. There had always been a 'lack of understanding between colleagues', a merging of areas of competence, a criss-crossing of professional paths and trespassing on each others' provinces between the Metropolitan Police and the Airport Security Services, the two pillars of order at Heathrow, even big ones. Only not for him, Elias Elmer. Always for someone else. Someone who was in the right place at the right time. In 1974, the Irish Guards had taken over Heathrow in anticipation of an IRA terrorist attack with SAM missiles. Then, four years later, the army had once again occupied the aerodrome during the negotiations between Egypt and Israel. Today the security has been strengthened by Special Branch, but mainly in a routine way. Elmer wondered whether that made the telephone message any more probable. There had been some robberies too. In 1977 two men had broken into the strong-room at the BA depot and got away with ₤ 2,000,000 worth of diamonds. On another occasion, it had been a member of Airport Security who had committed the robbery. Raymond, or some such name. He'd taken ₤ 2,000,000 in banknotes. They'd given him ten years for it. But he, Elmer, hadn't been involved. Nor had he been in any way responsible for the first pair not being caught. While they had been despoiling the coffers at the BA depot, he had been taking passengers round the Airport. When Raymond had made off with his ₤ 2,000,000, he had been returning lost children to their mothers. Once upon a time, Hounslow Heath, a wilderness between the Bath and Staines Road, had been a hunting ground with no closed season. The hunters had been highwaymen, and the excellent game – rich merchants whose business, or misfortune, whichever way you looked at it, called to the City by way of the stagecoaches which were obliged too pass over the Heath. Sometimes the roles were reversed. The incompetent hunters hung on trees alongside the road which barely hold its own against inroads of the thick forest. Two centuries later, this same road, together with the village of Heathrow, was buried beneath the reinforced concrete runways of London Airport. It seemed that the tradition of old, marry England was still alive when in 1977 they found the body of a man with a Canadian passport and three bullets in his chest at the foot of an air-duct. But the investigation had been entrusted to the Middlesex Police. It would have made no difference if it had been the men in blue at the Airport. He wouldn't have been allowed to conduct it. He might just have been allowed to keep guard beside the air-duct to stop curious onlookers from hindering his colleagues during the investigation. Sergeant Elias Elmer got up ponderously from his chair. His arthritis had troubled him ever since he had emigrated from his native Jamaica to Britain. Apart from the constant scorn reserved for

the London Caribbean Unit, chronic arthritis and cronic bronchitis were about all his new homeland had given him up to now. But he was a resilient, stubborn man. He put his black, conical helmet on his head, slackened off the strap beneath his bottom lip, grimaced at the shooting pain in his bones and went out to look for the Superintendent. The toilet cubicles on the first floor gallery of Terminal 2 were painted light blue and a modest furnished cube. A porcelain toilet bowl, a white brass toilet paper holder, a knob for flushing water and a narrow neon strip-light, fixed to the wooden partition above the door, which was eight inches above the ground. There was nothing else in the cubicle. Hans Magnus Landau placed his square executive briefcase on the lid of the toilet and opened it with the easy movement of long practice. He took from it a vanity mirror and a length of sellotape with which he fixed the mirror to the wall at eye level. He took out a black wig and shook it slightly to make it look more natural; then he placed it over his own hair. The unkempt wig irritated him, but he knew from past experience that the modern fashion of sculptured wigs was much better for covering up the tell-tale joins with the skin. He took off his glasses and put them in the case; beneath his eyelids he placed thin, brown contact lenses, adjusting them expertly with his thumb and forefinger – they lent a pleasantly warm glow to his watery, expressionless gaze. From a make-up box he took out a tube of Egyptian brown henna paste, spread several blobs of it with a cotton pad on his face as a base, carefully tapping and spreading it out over his skin so that his pale northern color became dark, sun-burnt and southern looking. When he had practiced this make-up beforehand, it had usually taken him 10 to 15minutes. By the end of his practice sessions the time had regularly been less than 12 minutes. He wondered if he could do it in that time now. Time played an important role in his plan. Time was the key factor which guaranteed its success in every phase, or if he didn't keep to it, its failure. He was certain it would succeed. Time was going to work for him since he had always worked for time and on time. He was a man of accuracy and precision. He functioned like a machine which had been so well wound by nature that apart from occasional cleaning and inspection, no further attention was necessary. This time he had made up his face in eleven and a half minutes. It made no difference at all to his plan but it was pleasing to his vanity. He could still work better and faster. It had always been like that with his accounts, and now it was so with his disguise. Capability lies in Willpower, his father used to say when Willpower, together with Steel and Blood, was still in fashion, and until, in front of the allied investigating judges, it had been replaced by Force, or at worst, by Need. The black, graying beard too he stuck on quicker than in practice. He turned the white raincoat he had been wearing inside-out round. Now he was in a black raincoat. He took a folding walking-stick from his case and pushed the top into the hole in the bottom of a board with the name in large letters: MR. DR. JULIUS UPENKAMPF He put back the make-up box in its place. Then he examined himself carefully for several minutes in the mirror before putting that away in the case too. He said, in English from which by dint of stubborn practice he had managed to banish at least for that sentence all trace of the harsh German accent:

'The Deutsche Bank of Cologne has reserved a suite for you at the King George Hotel, Sir. Where is your luggage?' He knew, of course, that the Managing Director would have no luggage, but someone sent to meet him from the King George Hotel couldn't know that. Perhaps the refinement wasn't really necessary, but he kept it nevertheless. It was such attention to detail which made his plan perfect. Perfect, like the complicated calculations in which all mathematical processes, just because of their infallibility, down to the smallest operation, merge into the uniquely possible result. He returned the mirror to the briefcase and shut the lid. He ran some water to lend authenticity to his lengthy stay in the cubicle. He went out with his left leg limping. He rinsed the traces of the henna from his fingers at one of the wash basins. He was surrounded by the hallowed silence in which humans carry out their dirtiest necessities, a silence only disturbed by the gurgling of water and the distant noise of the Airport. To the southeast the Boeing 747 from Rome was circling above Epsom, one of four aerial holding points for aircrafts which Heathrow could not accept at once. The nun who had been taken ill had been carried into the air hostesses' cabin and the passengers, who had been disturbed by her discomfort, could once again devote their attention to a cartoon film in which Pluto was unsuccessfully trying to get away from an angry swarm of wasps. Ten-year old Adrian Goldman was enjoying the film, trying to keep his thoughts away from the canvas rucksack between his feet and what was in it, and the trouble which the elderly nun would have landed him in because of it had she not been taken ill. In the next seat, by the window in which England looked like a green emerald bathed in the sun, the boy's father was dozing: an imposing bearded sage, Professor of Archeology at Columbia University, Dr. Aron Goldman. He too was enjoying himself. He was thinking of the autumn, his return to Meggido and the beginning of his excavations at that place where, Christian tradition through the mouth of St. John the Evangelist had it, was the site of the last battleground between God and Satan, Good and Evil, Paradise and Hell, and where he had expectations of discovering a Hebrew Troy. It had all happened quite by chance. A colleague of his from the University was going off to spend a month at the Samarian kibbutz 'Rose of Sharon' and has asked him to accompany him. He had long since intended to renew the scientific world's interest in Meggido. He considered that not nearly enough had been got out of it in the past. Apart from the walls, a good part of the ground plan, a few potsherds and objects, a bronze statue's pedestal with the inscription of Ramses IV, for example, Meggido in the archeological sense, had not given anything particular, bearing in mind that it had been Solomon's favorite fortress. And in general, apart from the golden vessels from the ruined temple at Jerusalem and the Samarian armchairs made of ivory, there was barely any support for the prophets in their accusations that the Hebrews, by their pagan orgies, were themselves to blame for the ruin which came upon them. 'When are we going?' he had asked? 'As soon as you're packed' his friend had replied. 'I'm ready,' he said. 'Just give me time to put my hat on.' He was glad now that as well as his hat, he had taken his grandson along. The kibbutz had done the boy good. At that same place

from where 2000 years before his ancestors had left, he had been able to learn something which in America is easily forgotten – that perhaps there exist other people in the world as well.

4. About the pre-scheduled arrival of the flight from Rome Dr. Lukas 'Luke' Komarowsky, the head of the team of doctors at the Medical Centre, Heathrow, had neither been informed. He would get to know about the incident only after he had finished with his everyday routine problems of imagined ills amongst the travelers, and sometimes even imagined travelers amongst his patients. That somebody has been taken ill on the flight from Rome he already knew. On two occasions he had been informed by the Control Tower of her condition, but no mention had been made of the change in the aircraft's arrival time. The first information received by the Medical Centre was that a female passenger in the Economy class had been taken ill. The symptoms were not clearly defined, they could belong to a host of different ailments: irrational behavior, agitation almost to the level of aggression, persistent thirst together with the absolute refusal to accept anything to drink, acute attacks of headache with temporary losses of consciousness. Sedatives administered from the first aid resources on board had had a favorable reaction. The situation was under control. Despite the indefinite nature of the symptoms, of which some, the irrational behavior, the aggression, the capriciousness, could be attributed to quite healthy people, from time to time even to everybody, Luke supposed that it was a question of hysteria, brought on by fear of flying. Such paradoxical behavior was characteristic of similar states. The headache and the fainting fits were a natural consequence of nervous tension. The patient recovered with his first contact with firm ground. Most often while the aircraft was still taxing. The touch of Mother Earth, received through the plane's wheels, was quite sufficient. The second radio message had been sent while the Alitalia 747 was flying over France. The condition of the patient had suddenly deteriorated. A sudden scream had been followed by a short period of rigidity, then a fit of trembling, and violent convulsions which affected all her muscles, and finally, collapse into coma, accompanied by a cold perspiration on the skin and foam around the lips. Luke managed to give the captain some advice over the radio. The patient must not be given sedatives. Great care must be taken not to allow her to injure herself during one of the fits. Something soft, like a leather belt or glove should be placed between her teeth so that she could not bite her tongue. Obviously the preliminary diagnosis had not been correct. The uncertain symptoms of hysteria had in the meantime become evident symptoms of epilepsy. But this too happened occasionally. The excitement of the flight could bring on an epileptic fit in chronic sufferers of the disease. Nothing could be done before the aircraft landed, and once it

was on the ground, probably nothing more would be needed. The fit would pass at once. He would write a reassuring letter to her G. P. if she was from the British Isles, and so far as he was concerned, that would be the end of the matter. Dr. Komarowsky was not informed, however, that there had been a third exchange between the Control Tower and Alitalia Flight AZ320. Captain E. Marconi had had nothing new to say about the passenger taken ill. It was the other passengers who were causing problems. Some idiot had spread the news that 'a dangerous tropical disease' had been 'let loose'. The rumor had been given credence by the fact that the nun was a missionary on her way back from Africa. This of course is far from the truth. It is in fact an epileptic fit. But in such circumstances no one is interested in the truth. Everybody thinks exclusively of their own skin. An attempt to calm things down by moving the passengers from the 1st Class into the Executive and Economy Class and isolating the nun had not worked. The 1st Class passengers to a man refused to mix with the passengers from the Economy Class who had come into contact with the patient. The nun had finally been carried into the air hostesses' cabin and they had begun to show cartoon films. The situation was once again temporarily under control. The captain did not know how long that would last. He proposed to increase flight speed to maximum safety level. His pre scheduled landing had become imminent and Heathrow Control Tower in conjunction with the London Air Traffic Control Centre at West Dayton had set in motion the complicated measures needed to assure him a free aerial corridor. Believing that there was still ample time before the normal landing time of the flight from Rome, Dr. Komarowsky had not ordered preparation to be made to receive the patient at the end of the runway. The normal work of the Medical Centre continued as usual. The General Treatment Area was a square, pastel-green colored room with fittings whose aseptic shine was designed to inspire due respect. And although it was long since daylight – a fact that doesn't mean much in England – and the fog, erased by a non ambitious sun acting like a sponge, and taken from the windows, looking towards Terminal 1 and the main roadway network of the Airport, the treatment Room was still lit by bright, moveable spotlights set in a rail running along the ceiling. Beneath one such light, in a curtained-off cubicle Dr. Philip Pheapson, with his assistant, Nurse Moana Tahaman, was talking with a foreign-looking woman in an advanced state of pregnancy. Her husband was attempting to help in her understanding of medical problems. In a second cubicle Dr. Komarowsky, also behind a curtain, was trying to square his irritation with the code of medical practice with required doctors to show extreme comprehensiveness towards human frailties. He was determinedly seeking the source of the bodily ills of Mrs. Makropoulos, a passenger for Athens whose delayed flight, together with all the other delayed flights, allowed all the hypochondriacs gathered at London Airport to lighten their waiting time by discussing their various complaints in Luke's waiting room and thence, by their narration, in his surgery. All in vain. There was no way of discovering what it was that was really wrong with Mrs. Makropoulos. Mr. Constantine Makropoulos, a lean, sixty year old Mediterranean figure with a sad, wrinkled face, was standing nearby. He was quite uninvolved as if he had washed his hands of his spouse.

Near him stood their luggage. Luke looked at him with sympathy. Mr. Makropoulos himself, evidently, was no more than a piece of family luggage in that marriage. A battered leather case in which mostly unnecessary things were kept. 'When does your flight leave?' he asked hopefully. 'Don't worry,' she said. 'We've got at least two hours yet. Just you try and find out what's the matter with me.' Luke would have liked to be able to tell her that she had just a week to live. But he didn't dare. Hypochondriacs are ungrateful people. They keep on bothering you to find something wrong with them, and when, by chance, that happens, they behave as if you'd done them an injustice. 'It's you who ought to be telling me that.' He said. 'Of course not. You should tell me. You're the doctor, aren't you?' 'I suppose so.' He agreed resignedly His answer was not entirely metaphorical. Since taking over from the night shift he'd had four cases. He'd taken a thorn out of a Turkish child's behind – God alone knew how he'd got it amidst all the glass and plastic - he'd stopped a nosebleed – at least the lad had been fighting – he set the right ankle of a passenger from Montreal, who had seen more steps than there actually were when coming out of the upstairs bare. The fourth was Mrs. Makropoulos who was quite determined to finish him off. At least his earlier patients had needed some treatment. But this woman needed nothing. Nothing except attention. She was just killing time here. And him too. And his faith in medicine and the sense of the sacrifice he had made when he had given up research and dedicated himself to practice. There was no pointing making any special effort on behalf of Mrs. Makropoulos. It would have been better to have become a vet and treat horses. Animals at least know nothing of hypochondria. They're ill or they aren't. That would have been more honorable than continually presenting people with an account for a sacrifice which never existed. At any rate, not because of them. People were his alibi. He had run away from research to be with people, not because he preferred them to research, but because he had become frightened of it. If he had really liked people and not just their illnesses, he would have become a village doctor, gone off somewhere into the provinces, where in some abandoned districts there were still those who it was worth treating. Or he would have put down roots in some industrial suburb, where misfortune still had a real meaning, where illness was not just an instant in life - but life itself. After he had fled from research to medicine, he had seized the first chance to run away from medicine too. He had taken the post of General Practitioner at the Airport where both people and illnesses were in transit and his work consisted of correspondence with real doctors and treatment of false patients. 'There's a certain procedure, Madam,' he said wearily, 'established as long ago as Ancient Egypt. First of all the patient says what's the matter with him, and only then can the doctor explain what it is he has,' If at all he can, he thought. Most often he just can't. 'This is England, isn't it? It's not filthy Egypt!' In 'filthy Egypt' he thought, men paid their doctor while they were not ill. As soon as they fell ill,

they stopped paying him. Egyptian doctors had to cure their patients or die of hunger. Nowadays as punishment they have to fill in a certain number of forms. The Pharaoh's personal medical team died with the Pharaoh. The Heathrow medical team, at least as far as the normal customs of the land were concerned, could without any problems at all survive a massacre of all the tens of thousands of passengers who passed through the Airport every day. The only unpleasantness involved would be in the paper work, the administrative side of the catastrophe. Was it really so unusual then, that the Egyptian doctor was an enthusiast whereas they were just run-of-the mill hacks. 'All right. Let's begin with what it is you're complaining of?' 'In the first place, about the treatment.' In a blinding flash of discovery Luke understood why the Greek civilization had perished. There was no one left to govern. No self-respecting Greek wanted to rule and hence deprive himself of the pleasure of vilifying the Authorities. 'We were told that as soon as we stepped onto British soil we would have the same full right to medical care as the citizens of this country.' I wouldn't recommend that to anyone, he thought. He explained that that rule was for the benefit of someone who was taken acutely ill. 'In transit, for example, you can't treat leprosy. You can only get it.' Mrs. Makropoulos promised herself mentally that at the first chance she had, she would find out something about leprosy and see if perhaps she hadn't already got it. 'How do I know whether what I've got is acute or chronic, if I don't know what I have got?' 'That's just what we're trying to find out.' 'This I just can't see.' 'Luke, can you come for a moment?' The ginger head of Dr. Pheapson peered round the gap in the curtains which separated his territory from Luke's surgery. He looked confused. He was always confused. The world for him was always a great novelty. He pretended not to hear the Makropoulos' protestations and went into Dr. Pheapson's cubicle. In the centre stood a Nesbit-Evans ambulance steel bed with wheels, an adjustable backrest covered with a white sheet, on which a pregnant woman was lying. Nurse Tahaman was measuring her blood pressure; the woman was crying soundlessly. In the corner, between the instrument cupboard and the oxygen flask stood a man with the bent shoulders of a porter. Luke at once recognized them as immigrants. Even apart from their shabby clothes and halting speech, there was something about them which from the very first sight separated them off from other people. Always so damned worried, uncertain, frightened, agitated. In short, out of place. And that was the strangest of all; they never tried to hide that feeling, even if they hid the fact. It was as if they wanted it to be seen that they were out of place. He didn't think that it was because they expected someone to do something about it. They simply wanted to keep their self-esteem; the majority had lost everything else. And it was not because they were really out of place, simply the feeling that they where. It was not so much a question of any difference but rather a will to maintain it more then any ill will on the part of the administration or xenophobia from their surroundings which left them permanently without a place. There was enough material for such a judgment at the Airport. He

could find examples from the Immigration Service and also from the Health Service. When someone wasn't successful, they found obscure sanitary reasons for getting rid of them. An understanding of the situation helped, of course, but there was another reason. He, Luke was a Pole, only a naturalized Englishman. He too was out of place here. 'What's the problem?' Dr. Pheapson took him by the arm and pulled him to one side. He, in fact, regarded medicine as a kind of conspiracy in which the uninitiated patients had no place. Medicine was carried out on them like some ritual ceremony, which lost its healing power if anyone apart from doctors understood it. 'Their name is Suarez. They work in some restaurant in Soho. I think they're Spaniards.' 'They look like people to me,' he said. 'This is a serious matter, Luke.' A scorpion had a better sense of humor then Dr. Pheapson. 'The woman is in her ninth month. It could start at any moment, but they want to go on with their journey.' 'How did they get here?' 'They were sent here from the aircraft boarding ramp by Health control.' 'Have they got a recommendation from their own GP?' 'They have.' 'Then what the hell have they sent them to us for?' Dr. Pheapson lowered his voice: 'Their doctor is a Spaniard too.' 'For Christ's sake, Philip!' 'In any case, we're not obliged to respect anyone's opinion. We have full discretion. The Air Companies are very strict about accepting pregnant women on board the aircraft. Last week a flight from Buenos Aires had to land at Tenerife. The extra costs incurred were …' 'I didn't know you had shares in Aerolineas Argentinas.' 'Come on, Luke. You know very well I'm right,' said Dr. Pheapson in a conciliatory tone. He knew it and it made him angry. 'She doesn't look to me as though she's going to give birth at any time.' 'Not any minutes, but very shortly.' 'What's her blood pressure?' Nurse Tahaman took the reading on the Sphygmomanometer. 'With that kind of blood pressure she should really be lying down,' said Dr. Pheapson. 'Any sign of water breaking?' 'Her urine is still clear, but that doesn't mean anything.' 'And how about contractions?' 'Weak and irregular, but that's just the beginning. The rest will happen on board the plane to Madrid/' And so yet another of his endless revolts against the rules of the game was over, thought Luke, it ended as usual with him laying down his arms. It wasn't that he was too weak for the combat, but that the rules always had a grain of common sense in them, enough to force him to capitulate. 'And what do you want me to do? To talk to them?' 'There's no way to talk to them. She doesn't know any English and he's as stubborn as a mule.' 'And so?' he asked impatiently.

'I don't know.' Dr. Pheapson shrugged his shoulders. 'You're the boss.' That's right I am, he thought, the head of a medical team for sobering up drunks, digging thorns out of children's behinds, keeping hypochondriacs company, and now for pulling chestnuts out of bureaucratic fires. 'What is the real reason for their journey at this moment?' 'That's just what I don't understand,' answered Dr. Pheapson resignedly. Luke turned to the couple. In their eyes he could see the agonizing uncertainty which he had seen in a dying man who is being told that everything is all right with him. 'Mr. Suarez,' he said calmly, 'Dr. Pheapson has explained the situation to you.' 'What he told us was stupid,' rejoined the Spaniard angrily. I don't doubt it, thought Luke. But he didn't expect that what he was going to tell them would be any less stupid, only more convincing. 'He explained to you the risk which your wife is subjecting herself to?' The Spaniard nodded his head. 'And the child?' 'The risk is ours.' 'But the responsibility is ours.' 'Now just listen, Mr. Suarez,' interrupted Dr. Pheapson. He considered himself the vanguard of the medical front, deep in the rear of human ignorance. 'Do you know that we can stop you boarding the aircraft?' 'You can't do that to us, hombre!' 'We really should do,' admitted Luke. 'Then we will go by boat, but we will go somehow.' He said something in Spanish to his wife. She sat up on the bed. Nurse Tahaman helped her to get down onto the ground. 'Look Mr. Suarez,' said Luke. 'Why is it so important for you to leave today?' 'The child can be born at any moment, señor.' 'We know that. That's why you can't travel.' 'But then he won't be born in Villafranca del Cid, señor.' 'That's in Spain,' explained Dr. Pheapson, spreading his hand wide. Spain for him was abroad and that was quite outside his powers of comprehension. 'I don't understand.' 'Is it really so important for you that he should be born in ….' He felt embarrassed that he had forgotten the name of the place. 'Villafranca del Cid,' nurse Tahaman helped him out. 'My child is a Suarez, señor,' said the Spaniard. 'The Suarez' have always been born in Villafranca del Cid. Comprende? Do you understand?' Despite the pompous name and the reference to the famous El Cid, most probably Villafranca, thought Luke, is a small dusty village in which people live just a little above the level of dogs. The Suarez family was evidently even worst off. Here, they'd got on their feet. Perhaps they were already thinking of opening a little Spanish restaurant in Soho. Or if they weren't, they were certainly secretly dreaming of doing so. Dreaming and saving up their money. Living for the moment on dreams. But they went back to Villafranca del Cid to be born. And probably to die too. They would pass the whole of their lives in hard work and poor conditions but they'd be

born and die in Villafranca del Cid. 'I understand,' he said. 'I don't understand,' admitted Dr. Pheapson. Luke took him on one side. 'I'm afraid, Pheapson, that there's nothing we can do here. Can't stop them from going and can't explain to you why they have to go.' Nor was it any justification, he thought bitterly, that when his own son Ian had been born he hadn't taken Katharine to Poland, to Krakow, to his Villafranca del Cid. 'Moana, get their papers ready. Dr. Pheapson and I have agreed that the Suarez' can travel.' 'That's not true,' protested Dr. Pheapson. 'I haven't agreed to it!' 'But they can't leave, doctor,' said Nurse Tahaman. 'The flight for Madrid has already gone.' 'When does the next one leave?' 'This afternoon, I'm not sure.' 'Well find out and try to get those people on it.' He was already on his way out of the cubicle when the Spaniard stopped him. 'Can I know your name, señor?' He was embarrassed. 'Lukas. Luke Komarowsky.' 'Lukas will be my son's name.' 'And what if he's a girl?' 'Won't be. It'll be a son.' The man spoke with conviction. In Villafranca del Cid, evidently, only sons were born. Sons who would go back there to die. Villafranca del Cid was a small village in the Spanish mountains. But it must have a very big cemetery. Once again he found himself confronted by the awesome Mrs. Makropoulos. 'All right. Let's get on with it. The Waiting Room's full. What is it that hurts you?' 'Everything,' she said proudly. In the meantime Mr. Makropoulos had opened his mouth to say something. It was something that at all costs Luke didn't want to miss. He expected that it would be some interpolation which would for ever take the couple out of his medical life. What happened to Mr. Makropoulos afterwards was no concern of his. 'You wanted to say something?' Even Mrs. Markopoulos was astonished. She looked at her husband as if he were an alligator just getting ready to sing. Mr. Makropoulos looked at Luke in confusion. Luke was certain that what he was about to say would be a particular sacrifice on his part for which he would have to pay for some long time to come; he hesitated nervously, then, having made up his mind, seemed to take the plunge into the unknown. He took off his left shoe and sock and jumped about on his right leg, said plaintively: 'I wonder if you could just have a look at my big toe? It's extremely painful.' Constantine Makropoulos didn't owe his life to Luke's humanity. He owed it to the telephone which began to ring just in time. Luke picket up the receiver. The message was short. The nun who had been taken ill on Alitalia Flight AZ320 Rome-London-New York who he believed to be now in a post-epileptic sleep, had got suddenly worse. The aircraft was waiting

permission to land. Because the arrival ramp was not available, it would stop on taxi-track 10 D. Dr. Komarowsky was required to be there with an ambulance in fifteen minutes' time. He put down the receiver and called Nurse Tahaman. She came out of the cubicle together with Dr. Pheapson. 'Moana,' he said, 'get hold of an ambulance and find Logan. Be sure there's an oxygen cylinder and resuscitation equipment available.' He wasn't particularly worried. Epilepsy was no real reason for anxiety. Not for him, at least. The patient ought to be worried about it. And her local doctor. In the meantime, he thought bitterly, he would fill out a number of stupid forms and try to take care of – people. 'They're making a lot of fuss about nothing,' he explained to Dr. Pheapson when he asked what was going on. Mrs. Makropoulos felt offended. 'And what's going to happen to me?' she asked. 'My colleague Dr. Pheapson will examine you. He's a specialist in your type of case.' 'What is her case?' asked Dr. Pheapson zealously. 'God alone knows. If you find out, you will too,' said Luke and went out. The Medical Centre Waiting Room into which he stepped was half-empty. A few arrogantly healthy looking passengers were glancing through travel magazines. In fact the only one who looked at all ill was the elderly, gray-haired man with a fresh scratch on his forehead. Luke called Nurse Tahaman. 'When you've finished with the ambulance, bandage him up, will you.' Before going out to the runway, he had time to wrap up his present for Ian. He went into the doctor's room, opened his locker in the communal metal cupboard and took from it a light hunting rifle, a re-modeled 70 Winchester 270 with a barrel of .22 caliber, a Redfield 4X telescope, an auxiliary telescopic sight of 6X by 8X, and several boxes of 7mm ammunition. It was a real masterpiece of a hunting rifle. The aerodynamic stock was of dark brown wood, ornamented with discreet floral tracery, which tapered into the bluish steel firing mechanism and then into the shiny black barrel to which the body of the telescope seemed to clasp itself in a loving embrace. The gun was wrapped in a cover of green oilcloth. But Luke wanted to surprise his son. He tried to make its shape unrecognizable in its wrapping of brown paper. All in all, it wasn't a bad day. He'd known worse. When the Vanguard had crushed on runway 28D, killing everyone on board, for example. In 1968 a Boeing 707 had caught fire during an emergency landing, killing five people. In 1972, a Trident had come down on the outskirts of neighboring Stains with the loss of one hundred and eighteen lives. From a professional point of view, that is, it wasn't a bad day, and with the epileptic woman from the flight from Rome, it could turn into something even better. In a personal sense though, it was one of the most unpleasant since last autumn and his divorce from Katharine, after fifteen years of marriage which had fallen apart less from any internal explosion of incompatible temperament that simply putrefied in everyday routine. Despite the complete feeling of emptiness with which it had left them, they still had every chance of remaining friendly. And not only because of Ian. Because of themselves and the respect for the better part of their mutual memories. With Ian it was something different. It was not clear. The boy was fourteen, and at Katharine's

wish went to an expensive private school. He appeared not to care one way or another about their divorce. This was fine as far as the absence of complications on his part was concerned, for in fact, there were complications from anywhere, but he was just a little hurt. Unless, of course, the boy was simply pretending that it didn't matter to him. In that respect Luke was not at all clear about it himself. Did he really want some reaction on the part of his son, whatever the cost, or was he in fact purely for the sake of convenience resigned to his demonstrative indifference. How things really were one could never know. You only found out when your son sent you off to the Old People's Home, considering that he no longer owed anything to someone who had done so much to destroy him personally. The boy and Katharine were flying out to Zurich on a Swissair flight at 13.00. For the first time he would not be going on holiday with his son. For the first time Ian would go hunting by himself. He was only going to see him off. And the fact that he would really be left alone afterwards on the 'Passengers only' ramp was probably the particular weight which had made an otherwise bearable day completely unbearable. At first he had thought to avoid the meeting, make some excuse. But what would that have given him? The day would still have been unbearable. Perhaps even more unbearable because he would not have seen his son. He had telephoned Katharine to say that he had managed to get out of his commitment and that he would be able to see them at the Airport. Then he had bought the rifle and taken out the export license for it in Ian's name. He was hoping now that despite the woman taken ill on the flight from Rome, he would be able to keep his promise. For there were many which he had not kept. A coincidence of circumstances, his fault, the result of a misunderstanding, God alone knew what all the reasons had been. There must be some positive reason for all his failures. And not only in his marriage. In his relations too with Moana Tahaman. In his research. Even in practical medicine. In general. Somebody had said that it was impatience that had driven the first people out of Paradise. Personally, it didn't allow him to stay anywhere. The long package no longer betrayed its content. Just as Ian hid his true feelings. If they were anything like what was in the package, a deadly weapon and the bullets for it, he would always have the chance to be aware of it in his heart. From the moment he had come into the Waiting Room at the Medical Centre, the man with gray hair had been listening tensely to the overall noise of the Airport, trying to make out from the chaos of sounds those human ones which might concern him. From the Treatment Room came a thick-set, fair haired man in white coat; he went back into the room and came out again to disappear somewhere, but none of this concerned him, he was a doctor going about his business. Whereas he was expecting the police. Either they had lost track of him or Sue had explained to them how they had got to know each other. She, after all, had come up to him. If here at the Airport, as it seemed, everything had a definite sense, everything was linked with his dreams, everything was working for them, and then Sue too had to mean something. But what? It could be, of course, that the little girl knew nothing about it, that she was just a medium which the dream was making use of to bring closer the reason for his presence at Heathrow. Probably she didn't know. But in his conversation with her he could have sensed it. The dream expected

him to talk with the little girl. That was evident. Otherwise her flight would not have been delayed. He was certain that it was still delayed. He was certain that it was still delayed. It was waiting for him to talk to Sue Jenkins again. He got up. A nurse was standing in front of him. She had the graceful figure of an Egyptian female statuette and the short-cropped black hair of the royal bride Nefertiti. Her face, the color of forest honey, reminded him of the soft, slant-eyed features of little Sue's face. 'I'm Nurse Tahaman. Would you like to come with me?' There's nothing wrong with me,' he said quickly. Moana Tahaman smiled. Men ruled the world and demanded that they should be respected as a natural right, but they still expected that you should treat them as children. All right, she thought that was what she was trained for. 'Don't be afraid. It'll all be over in a couple of seconds.' She took him by the hand and led him towards the Treatment Room. She felt that he was shacking. 'Does it hurt you?' 'What?' 'The graze on your forehead?' He touched his temple and felt the scratch as if he'd only just become aware of it. 'That. Oh no.' She sat him down on a chair. 'Where are you going to?' Where were all those people flying to? Little Sue was going to Nice. 'To Nice.' he said undecidedly. He didn't look as though he was flying to Nice. He didn't look like someone who was flying anywhere at all. 'How did you hurt yourself?' 'I don't know.' 'I only want to help you!' The irritation in her voice surprised even her. The gray-haired man couldn't be the reason for it. Whatever they did, patients never made her impatient. It must be Luke. Apart from a few professional, almost unkind comments, he had not said a word to her since yesterday. Between them, it was true; there was an accepted understanding that their intimate relations should be kept completely separated from their official ones. But there was a free and easy familiarity in the Medical Centre, marred only by the pompous Dr. Pheapson, through which their real relationship could pass unnoticed. 'Whatever it was you scratched yourself on could be rusty. In that case it would be wise to give you an anti-tetanus injection. If it wasn't, a local antiseptic will be enough.' 'There was no corrosion upon it.' Jesus, what sort of language did this man use, she thought as she applied antiseptic to the wound. Then she covered it with a piece of sticking plaster. 'I am thankful to you,' said the man with gray hair as he got up. 'Wait a minute while I take down your name.' 'Why do you need my name?' he asked apprehensively. 'I have to enter it in the medical records.' Everywhere they asked for names. People liked being situated. He had never bothered about it.

He gave the first one which came into his mind. In any case, names didn't mean anything. Sue had become Ariadne without any difficulty at all. He had been called Theseus until just a little while before. Who could know what both of them would be called tomorrow. Or what they had once been called. 'Where do you live?' He couldn't tell her where he lived, and invented an address too. A strange address,' she said. 'Where is it?' He had no idea. Just like the name. It came from nowhere. 'In North London.' The nurse was writing down the address when it happened. He was no longer in the Treatment Room. Where – he didn't know. Darkness was all around. He was cold. The icy coldness was moving all about him like an invisible block of ice. At first he heard nothing. Then he felt rather than heard a monotonous humming. From the darkness, like a shadow which separated itself from it, appeared a puppy. He couldn't make out his breed. The dog is asleep. One hand strokes its head. The hand is black. The dog twitches in its sleep. It touches the hand with its paw. The hand draws back hastily. Black blood drips from it. Once again he was back in the Treatment Room. The nurse was wiping his forehead with wet gauze. It was the first time he'd had a vision during the daytime. It was different from those which had brought him to Heathrow, but not entirely different. In it too there had been darkness and cold he had seen the shadow. Only this one had not bee fearsomely shapeless. It had taken on the form of a nice little dog. 'What happened to me?' 'You fainted. How do you feel now?' Quite well,' he said. 'I have to go.' 'But I have to write a word or two to your doctor,' she lied. 'That's the rule also.' She didn't feel guilty. He too was lying. First, about traveling to Nice. And who knew what else. Nurse Moana Tahaman went out of the Treatment Room hurriedly. Luke was on the runway waiting for the arrival of the flight from Rome. She hoped to find Dr. Pheapson. There was definitely something not right with the man with gray hair. But when she at last found the doctor and came back into the Treatment Room with him, the old man had disappeared. 'He was incredible,' she said to Dr. Pheapson. 'As if he was living in a dream. And he had such a strange name.' 'What was it?' 'Gabriel.'

Pollux, Daniel Leverquin, or Patrick Cornell, depending on which of his many-sided activities he was known by, was standing by the Astrofighter in the Hall of Terminal 2, to the left of the Arrival Gates. On the wall close by, the TV screen which announced flight arrivals, informed him that the SAS flight from Oslo on which he would fly to Norway at the moment when 'Operation Dioscuri' was beginning, had landed at Heathrow and that the passengers' luggage was already in the Baggage Hall.

The Japanese boy at the Astrofighter had the set face of a hero of one of the science-fiction cartoons at the moment of cosmic crisis. His mission, as always, seemed impossible. A squadron of seven interplanetary spaceships in massed attacking formation, behind the controls of which sat monsters from a distant galaxy, was flying towards this lone defender of human civilization. He wondered how the Japanese boy imagined them. When he was a child, Flash Gordon had been the fashion. He had always imagined his stellar adversary from the planet Mongo far more terrifying than he had been depicted in the cartoon. Perhaps it was there, he thought, that was to be found the seed of his passion for words, his desire to become a writer. In the meantime, the Japanese boy was dispassionately firing rocket projectiles, whose number, to give the battle a sporting chance, was limited by the time it took the enemy fleet to reach the bottom edge of the screen, the supposed position of the last earthly stronghold. Here was yet another lie which left the children disarmed before life and its unsporting truths. In life, in fact, there was nothing sporting, no question of fair play. It was no holds barred, the battle was unequal and dirty and the so-called rules of the game served only to conceal its innate irregularities. The phosphorescent lines of the rocket projectiles raced towards the attacking fleet emitting an electronic whistle like the sound of Castor's silenced revolver. They struck the spaceship with a green flash, and the vessel which was hit disappeared into black nothingness, or, flashed past and simply disappeared. The boy was shooting well. Half way to his stronghold in the centre of the screen there were only three surviving enemy spaceships. Pollux watched the battle with a certain morbid excitement. There was an essential injustice in it which reminded him of Castor's position at Heathrow. A handful of dedicated heroes were pitting themselves against the rulers of a monstrous civilization and the prejudices of its robot slaves. He wanted the Japanese boy to win, to destroy the intruders before they touched the bottom limit of the screen and the game ended in defeat. It seemed to him that the boy's victory in some magic way would ensure Castor's victory too. There were still two spaceships left in the attack. The first of them exploded half an interspatial foot from the Earth. He was sweating The boy fired his last missile, followed by the flash of the disintegration of the final attacker. The battle was over. Humanity was once again victorious. He breathed a sigh of relief. He found a 10 p. coin in his pocket and offered it to the boy. He wanted him to act out another star war. The boy looked surprised but took the money. But he didn't put it into the Astrofighter. Instead, he dropped it into his pocket and run away. Probably to buy chocolate. Nobody ever asked themselves, thought Daniel Leverquin, the reasons for the good things that happened to them. They are only interested in the reasons for the bad things. That was why the boy hadn't asked why he'd been given the money. Only he was interested in why his own human expectations had been betrayed. And this he already knew. Such were the rules of the game in the world in which he lived.

5. For Dr. Luke Komarowsky the first encounter with a patient was like a sentry's dramatic confrontation with an enemy whose strength he had no means of knowing. The illness, that anonymous adversary, had to be diagnosed, for in the biological war against its own marvel, man, nature had a whole lot of tricks up her sleeve; it had to be properly recognized and only then attacked. If he failed, his parting from the patient, which in euphemistic vocabulary of the profession was known as 'the administrative conclusion of a terminal case' was the only moment in the whole process which was more terrible than the first encounter. He arrived with the ambulance at the taxi-track off runway 10D with a fairly clear picture of what would be awaiting him there. If the radio message were accurate, he would receive a patient in deep, post-epileptic sleep, complicated by a weakening of the heartbeat. Now he was worried. The Catholic nun, an elderly Negress, was lying uneasily beneath a blanket on the stretcher placed on the runway, ready, as soon as he gave the word, to be put into the ambulance, packed alongside the now silent Boeing 747. The bottom half of her hand lost under a Harris mask, which was linked by a plastic tube to a mobile cylinder with its black iron body and white cap. Through the tube four liters of life-saving 40% oxygen flowed every minute. Her forehead was uncovered, and on it the sunlight showed tiny droplets of sweat. There's no question, he thought of any recuperative sleep. He hadn't taken her temperature. Judging by the galloping pulse rate, it must be higher than 39ºC. Epilepsy did not give such high temperature, or the arrhythmic breathing, irregular in volume, characteristic of Cheyne-Strockes syndrome, which appeared when inter-cranial pressure was present. The skin was not just cyanic but already purple. Her movements, if she made them, were more uncontrolled than spasmodic. The blanket around her was soiled with mucous vomit, and an unpleasant odor indicated diarrhea. The only optimistic feature was her heart. In the general disintegration of her organism, it was holding up well. Some of the symptoms could occasionally be found in atypical cases of epilepsy. But never all together and at one time. Epilepsy could quite definitely be excluded. All that was fine but the problem was that he had not the slightest idea what to diagnose instead of it. There were at least a dozen acute illnesses, more particularly tropical infections, whose symptoms could be found amongst those shown by the woman. Certain poisons too, strychnine, for example, also came into consideration. Not to mention drugs. The difficulties were caused by those symptoms which conflicted with a diagnosis based on a series of those which supported it. Symptoms which normally were mutual exclusive, here went hand in hand together. In malaria vivax, a high temperature with excessive sweating hampered paroxysms. If it was that which was developing, the sweating manifested itself only when the illness passed from its 'hot' into its 'cold' phase. The patient, however, in her paroxitic state, was sweating with a temperature of 39ºC.

Did that mean that malaria had to be dismissed? He wasn't certain. Nothing was certain any more. He felt stupidly helpless. He knew that the attendant, accustomed to urgency in such situations, were wondering why he was hesitating. He knew too that he couldn't come to any sensible conclusion here on the spot. He would have to be left alone with the patient. Get to know the illness. But for the moment it was best to withdraw. Without too great a loss of dignity, if that were possible. For the moment the enemy was too strong. Because it was unknown. When he gets to know it, whatever it was, he would lose the feeling of helplessness and with it also of fear. 'What are you waiting for, for Christ's sake?' he shouted, ashamed of his own coarseness. 'Take her away!' He turned round to his Chief Nurse. Logan was standing at the bottom of the steps, beneath the aircraft door, surrounded by the crew in their Alitalia uniforms and deep in conversation, notebook in hand, with a nun of the same order to which the patient belonged. A real professional, thought Luke. Committed, skilful, brave, self-assured. A gift from heaven in any crisis. Before they reached the Medical Centre, she would know everything about the patient which was necessary for her future treatment. The passengers, against all regulations, were grouped together under the tail of the aircraft, waiting for the bus which would take them to the Transit Lounge. One would have thought they were hiding from the sun. Luke knew that in fact, they were instinctively breaking the Rules, which because of the incident on board the plane no longer controlled their actions. There was something ominous in the sullen refusal to abide by the Regulations on the part of the citizens who under normal circumstances would be perfectly amenable to discipline. They were split up into isolated groups. The passengers from the First Class made up the smaller group and those from the Economy Class the larger one. But they were not simply separated by their ticket categories. They were kept apart by fear. In the smaller group stood the passengers who had not come into contact with the nun who had been taken ill; in the larger one those who had had the misfortune to be sitting near her and who were now coping with their own hallucinations as best they could. The war that had started between them while they were still in the air was being continued in the shade of the aircraft. What he did next had nothing to do with these reflections. He had no prejudices against the upper classes, to which, in any case, his polish family had once belonged, nor any sentiments towards the lower ones, unless they were ill; even then he felt for their illnesses and not for them personally. In so far as their illnesses were not in accordance with their quality. When events proved him right he could not explain his premonition, for he had no means of foreseeing them. If he had, perhaps he would have put his things together and vanished from the Airport. Just as he had escaped from his marriage, run away from research, just as he would soon part from Moana Tahaman. His action was uncontrolled, spontaneous, and if one keeps in mind the absence of any diagnosis, irrational. But nevertheless, he managed to find on his walkie-talkie several of the most responsible people of the Airport and request the introduction of temporary sanitary measures of a severity, which to the majority made it seem a matter of life and death. After a certain amount of hesitation and disagreement, and acrobatic throwing of responsibility back and forward between them, a

compromise was reached: until a detailed examination of the patient had been carried out, her fellow passengers would not be allowed into the General Transit Lounge, and the crew of the flight from Rome would not be permitted to enter the Flight Personnel Area, but they would be isolated in the First Class Transit Lounge in Terminal 2. These measures would be explained as a disturbance in the general running of the Airport due to the leave-taking ceremony for the official Soviet delegation, (most people would believe this, the Russians were always causing some kind of disturbance); the aircraft from Rome would not be cleaned, refueled, nor have its regular inspection carried out until he had done his job; for his part he would do everything as quickly as possible. When he got back to the medical Centre, Luke was determined to keep to his promise. He was still aware of the shortness of the time he had borrowed by force from the Airport bureaucracy and their economic calculations. In half an hour the whole of Heathrow would be on his telephone. And on his back, of course. And then there was the personal feeling of defeat carried with him from the runway. Hysteria, which as soon as it was identified, turned into epilepsy and epilepsy as soon as it was diagnosed, into something unknown. Well, almost unknown. He was fairly certain that what he had to deal with was some kind of tropical malaria. Fairly certain, but by no means a hundred-per-cent. That small percentage which separated him from a definite conclusion, which made every diagnostic a nightmare, drove him to verify his findings with the suspiciousness of a miser counting his savings. There were no other patients in the Isolation Unit of the Medical Centre apart from the nun, who with slightly altered symptoms was lying, relatively peaceful, on one of the Nesbit-Evans beds. Of the medical staff, Nurses Tahaman and Lumley were standing by the bedside. Dr. Pheapson and Dr. Patel were working somewhere in the Terminals. Logan was in the office, collating the information about the patient which she had managed to accumulate in her conversation with the crew of the aircraft from Rome. With a surgical mask over his face and gloves on his hands, Luke went up to the bed. Acute malaria, he thought, no doubt about it. After the 'hot' she's now in the 'cold' stage. The fall in temperature was somewhat too rapid, but possible. The woman was shaking as if she'd been immersed in ice. Her pulse was slow, but not brachicardiac. She was not in shock, but delirious. From time to time she kept on repeating always the same indecipherable words. The sphygonomanometer disclosed both a low systolic and diastolic blood pressure. When she was taken off the oxygen cylinder, her breathing became shallow, hoarse, and intermittent through the mouth gaping wide like a slimy red hole. Her eyes were wide-open and staring, but of course, she couldn't see with them anything. Luke bent over her. The light from his hand torch caused an uncontrolled contraction of the pupils. The patient cried out piercingly, and if Nurse Lumley had not held her down, would have fallen from the edge of the bed. Unless there was some cerebral complications, he thought, photophobia isn't usual with malaria. But even illnesses develop. Like people. Together with them. With them, against them. Now the woman was quiet. He touched her neck gently. It was completely stiff. The smell of diarrhea and vomit became intolerable. He turned round to Lumley. 'Nurse, clean her up and disinfect her. Then cover her with blankets. You can give her a drink of warm water from time to time.'

Nurse Lumley went off. 'So?' asked Moana Tahaman in a neutral tone. 'Pernicious malaria, most probably with cerebral complications, giving an appearance of epilepsy.' He was grateful to her for not making use of the absence of Lumley for some intimacy which by this bedside would have been entirely out of place. But Moana had always been tactful, something which apparently one was born with in Tahiti and lost only with a lengthy education in the West. She still looked like a Gauguin painting hung in the midst of an unsuitable industrial interior. The nun once again pronounced three incomprehensible words. Moana bent over her. The words were rather breathed than properly heard. 'What is she trying to say?' 'I don't know. I don't understand the language.' Chief Nurse Logan brought in the nun's passport, her medical card and several other documents. From them, Luke discovered that the patient was the mother Superior of a Catholic convent, 'The Heart of Jesus', near Lagos in Nigeria, that she has been born fifty-eight years earlier in Atlanta, Georgia, and that before she had become a nun as Sister Teresa, her name had been Amalia Josephina Lincoln; she had been received by the Holy Father at the Vatican and was going off on a campaign to collect help for her Mission in the company of Sister Emilia. 'What is there in her medical card?' 'Inoculations against cholera, yellow fever, typhus.' 'What about malaria?' 'No entry.' 'That doesn't mean that she wasn't vaccinated,' observed Moana Tahaman. 'People are always late in entering information on their medical card.' 'I don't believe that,' said Logan. 'Mother Teresa is a conscientious person.' 'What do you mean by that, Logan?' asked Luke impatiently. 'That there's no malaria in Nigeria?' 'Of course there is, doctor, but it's not considered anything particular. The World Health Organization made registration of illnesses against which Mother Teresa was vaccinated. In Africa, at least in black Africa, no one registers malaria.' 'Except when they die of it,' Luke said through clenched teeth. 'Then they register death, not malaria.' 'Logan,' he turned to his Chief Nurse. 'First of all, give her 650mg. of quinine in 15ml. sterile water or salt solution whichever you have, intravenously. Give her a second dose after eight hours. The third and last one after sixteen hours. Then we'll continue with quinine orally.' 'Yes, Dr. Komarowsky.' 'Half hourly infusions of half a liter of plasma will be enough to make up for her dehydration. After that, we'll continue with glucose.' 'What is it?' asked Moana Tahaman. She was bent over towards the face of the patient. 'What?' asked Luke doubtfully. He was afraid of the appearance of some new symptom which could turn malaria into something else. 'That, on her lips.'

On the bottom edge of Mother Teresa's open lips, like a torn ghostly veil, hung thick, white foam. 'It's nothing,' said Chief Nurse Logan and wiped it away with a piece of gauze. 'It's only saliva.' The 'class war', begun in the air, was still being carried on with undiminished enthusiasm on the ground, in one of the separate Transit Area of Terminal 2. The crew of the aircraft from Rome had lost their 'divine' authority centered on the captain when the plane had landed and no longer attempted to calm things down. In that small, unreal world they represented a position which in the large one outside was usually called - armed neutrality. From it they watched indifferently as the privileges of the First-Class passengers, bought by more expensive tickets, disintegrated before the attack of the more powerful and more numerous 'economy' masses. Once allowed outside their appointed place, in accordance with history, the masses immediately occupied all the seats. The passengers, to whom the comfortable armchairs belonged, had to make a choice. Either to preserve their dignity and their health by standing in the most distant corner, or to mix in with the usurpers in the hope that in the general melee they would manage to get an empty place, but with the probability that they would have to stand there too. It was in their interests to fight, otherwise who know how long they would have to stand. Also, it was in their interests to resist temptation until something more was known about the illness afflicting the African nun. It was a cold war. It was carried on by looks and words. 'I paid twice as much for my ticket as you did, Sir,' raged a banker from New York. He didn't finish his business in Rome. Instead of that, he had almost been killed when he asked a judge in the street to direct him to a hotel. Here, they were grabbing the chair from him. The world was, evidently already in the hands of the mob. 'I have my rights!' 'There aren't any fucking rights any more!' proclaimed a long haired, long-nosed spokesman for the cheaper section of humanity in faded blue jeans. He felt good. He sensed a revolution. 'This is an exceptional state of affairs!' 'What exceptional state. We're here because of those Russians!' 'Shit!' said somebody resignedly. 'I knew that one day those terrible Russians would be the death of us,' said a lady in Yves St. Laurent creation. Against the thick glass which separated their lounge from the glassed off Airside Gallery, she looked like a cubist stained glass. 'No one asked that cow to wander about in the jungle, did they?' 'If people like you hadn't been the ruin of Africa, there wouldn't have been any need for her to wander around there!' The New York banker had been wondering for some time what the youth in blue jeans reminded him of. Now he knew. He was a facsimile of the man who had killed the Roman judge before his very eyes, and so impeded him from finding out where his hotel was. 'What are you talking about?'' 'About exploitation, man.' 'Shit!' the voice was quite righteous. It divided the excrement quite impassionedly, left and right. 'Maybe you've never heard of exploitation?' insisted the young man in blue jeans. He was

thoroughly enjoying himself. 'In fact we're experiencing it here,' answered a member of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. 'You, young man, are excessively exploiting our patience.' The young man in blue jeans stood up, then sat down again. He didn't want to risk loosing his certain seat for the make of a doubtful revolution. 'What exactly do you intend to do about it, Then?' In fact the revolution could be carried on perfectly well sitting down. 'Perhaps you want to drop an atomic bomb on me?' The man from the Amsterdam Stock Exchange evidently didn't intend to go that far. The war remained a cold one. 'I heard,' said the stained glass window lady in the Yves St. Laurent creation, 'that they don't even vaccinate those Africans. They just squirt them with some water.' 'That's not possible, Madam,' protested a thick-set, grey-haired man from the Economy Class, going up to her. 'That would kill people.' The Yves St. Laurent suit moved away sharply. 'You don't have to come near me. You can speak to me from a distance. I'm in fact not deaf.' The gray-haired man stopped, offended. 'I'm a professor, Madam.' 'So what? Don't germs affect intellectuals?' The gray-haired man withdrew. It was Aron Goldman, the Professor of Archeology from Columbia University. Next to him sat his grandson Adrian. Between his legs the boy was holding his rather large rucksack. From time to time he placed the palm of his right hand on its green curves. If anybody had been watching him, perhaps they would have noticed how the canvas of the rucksack moved occasionally as if it were stirred inside by a slight breeze. But no one was watching him. Everyone was busy with their own little 'world war.' Everyone except the Director General of the Cologne Branch of the Deutsche Bank, Dr. Julius Upenkampf. He had been occupied with a war with a member of the Airport Security staff, who was guarding the exit from the First Class Transit Lounge and who, in his brown suit and light brown shirt with its orange tie, looked like a circus usher. The Security man stubbornly refused to let him leave the Transit Lounge. Dr. Julius Upenkampf was beside himself. The conference for which he had journeyed from Rome, from that idiotic Foundation Anniversary in Rome, at which he had done nothing but waste time and poison his liver, began at eleven o'clock. If he didn't get away from here at once, he would not arrive in time for the opening ceremony. The business in the City which awaited him was far too important to his bank to permit of any such gaffe in protocol. What they were doing to him at Heathrow would have been unthinkable in Germany. Sheer English Schlamperei. It wasn't the least bit surprising that they should be chocked by debts and strikes. They deserve it. In fact these Bolshevik guests didn't at all concern him. Personally he wasn't in favor of the Chancellor's Ostpolitik. And the Russians didn't even concern him technically. Technically, he was not a passenger for New York. For him London was the final destination, not a point of transit. He had explained all this to the circus clown at the door and to the anaesthetized employee of BA who had kept him company in wasting time. It hadn't helped.

The only bright spot in the Anglo-Saxon gloom was the reassuring message - via the BA girl that at the Arrival Gate a man with a placard with the name 'Dr. Julius Upenkampf' was waiting for him. He had not been told that anyone would be waiting for him in London, but he was pleased. At least he wouldn't have to fight to get a taxi. The other passenger from Rome who was taking no part in the 'Transit War' was Sister Emilia. She should have stayed beside her Mother Superior and taken care of her, but she couldn't remember insisting on it. Ever since disembarking from the aircraft she had found herself in a kind of mental confusion. She ought to have now been defending Mother Teresa and their order against these unjust accusations, and perhaps still more unjust, defense, but she simply didn't have the strength. Hunched up on a chair in a corner of the Lounge with both hands covering her face, she was trying by prayer and healing touch of her palms the shattering pain in her head.

'Go on then,' grumbled Dr. Luke Komarowsky, letting his large body slip into the chair behind his desk. He wasn't particularly looking for a quarrel, there was already one waiting for him today with Katharine, but it was better that way than thinking that Mother Teresa's malaria was really cerebral, or choleric, or perhaps even algid, or that the damned thing finally was perhaps not even malaria at all. It was the so-called 'Pick of the Air Day', the highest concentration of traffic. The roar from the runways had become an uninterrupted crescendo of noise which seemed to tighten a noose round the Treatment Room, and bear down on him and Moana Tahaman with the thunder of an alldestructive earthquake. Moana looked at him. She had soft gray eyes which held the light like smooth agate pebbles when the sea has washed ever them. 'Why don't you let it go, Luke?' It wasn't a question that he had expected. Any other would have been easier. Even the one which would have driven him finally to admit that as far as he was concerned it was time for them to split up. It had nothing to do with his feeling towards Moana. It was more a question of his own confused feelings toward himself and his own life. Heathrow was stifling him. He was out of place here. Just as he had been in his marriage, while working on research, in this country, finally. Perhaps even in life itself. He had had his letter of resignation addressed to the British Airport Authority in his desk for a month now. In the next few days he was going to send it. He would pack everything up and go back to Poland, to Krakow. To his own Villafranca del Cid. He would find himself anew, after years of being lost in painful compromises between worlds which didn't understand each other. Whenever he thought about it, he felt himself strong again and energetic. Like Anteios who knew, even before touching the ground, what it will bring him. The parting with Moana and Ian had put things off, particularly with Ian. But that had to come anyway sooner or later. And then, the sooner the better. Perhaps even today. Yes, he thought, why not today? Today he will tell them all, Katharine, and Ian, and Moana. He'd send off the letter to the BAA too. 'Why don't you let the aircraft go?'

'I'm waiting for at least some reaction to the quinine therapy to show itself.' 'But there'll be no reaction before this evening and perhaps nothing before morning.' She was sorry for him, but the only way to encourage his resistance to the Administration which at any moment would demand the release of the aircraft, was to step on his professional self-confidence if he wasn't sure in his diagnosis. 'If it shows itself at all.' It was enough for her to take off her uniform, thought Luke, and at once she became the primal woman. The primal woman and the primal mother at the same time. In bed her brown body, powerful, soft, as if created from earth, knew of no perversion which would seem unnatural. As soon as she put on her uniform, she was militarily precise, uncomfortable frank, even strict, in short, a perfect product of the English school of nurses, which had originated beneath the bloodsoaked Crimean skirts of Florence Nightingale. 'What do you mean to say by that?' 'What Mother Teresa has is perhaps not malaria, and that's why you're not letting the aircraft go.' 'Of course it's malaria.' 'Are you quite sure?' 'Relatively sure.' 'For the love of God, Luke, what does 'relatively sure' mean? Are you sure or aren't you?' What is 'certainty', he thought? The triumph of one probability over another. Nothing more. Often temporary, a Pyrrhic victory. 'As much as anyone who is not a specialist in infectious diseases without laboratory analysis can be.' 'But Logan has only just taken a blood sample. You won't get anything back from the laboratory until noon.' 'I shan't wait for that.' 'Then what the devil are you waiting for?' He was waiting for the telephone to ring, he was waiting for the Management of Heathrow Airport or the office of the Director of Medical and Security Services of the BAA to call him and order the release of the aircraft from Rome; he was waiting to be subjected to the usual pressure by means of which he could defend the uncertainly of his diagnosis and finally give in under protest to which he would refer if things took a turn for the worst and Mother Teresa's sickness declared itself as infectious. If he telephoned first, he would lose his alibi. And he needed the alibi. He couldn't hold the aircraft without strong proof that the disease was infectious. Without the absolute certainty that it wasn't he couldn't release it. But he had neither the proof of one nor the certainty of the other at his disposal. That was why he was waiting. 'I thought you were going to ask me about Katharine and the boy.' 'Why should I have asked you?' 'Because it's a kind of tradition.' 'Not mine.' She laughed. 'I'm from an island where polygamy has not yet died out. I think it's natural for you to say goodbye to your son who's flying off. And it seems reasonable that you should see his mother too. But I don't think it's either natural or reasonable that because of that you should get yourself into a mood for which I have to suffer.' 'I am sorry,' he said conciliatory. 'And it's not because of Katharine. With Katharine everything's

all right. It's because of Ian.' She went up to the table and lent on its edge, running her finger over the celluloid card with the name on the lapel of his doctor's white coat. 'It's because of you regarding Ian. Let's not be so damned unselfish. That doesn't suit anyone.' She's right, he thought. It was all to do with him. 'I feel towards the boy like towards an unknown fellow passenger in a train; I don't know when he makes a move towards his pocket whether he's going to take out his cigarettes or a revolver. And because I always suspect it'll be a revolver, and I know I've done more than enough to be blamed and to justify a bullet, I'm continually afraid and I accept cigarettes as if they were in fact bullets, if you see what I mean.' She threw a quick glance towards the door, bent over and kissed him. 'I know, only when will he know?' 'Only when I accept his bullet as a cigarette, I suppose. Not before.' Now's the time, he thought. I'll get up, I'll walk to the window, I'll turn to her and say – I'm going back to Poland. He got up, walked towards the window, lit a cigarette, turned round – and the telephone rang. He lifted the receiver. It was Dr. George Preston, the head of the Medical and Security Services of BAA. 'Luke, do you have any idea at all how much each minute of delay at an international airport costs an airline?' 'No, George, I don't have any idea how much every minute of delay at an international airport costs a damned air line, and it bloody well doesn't concern me.' 'I damn well see that!' 'Save your pedagogy lecture; you can inform Alitalia that it can remove its expensive ass from Heathrow as soon as it likes! And since we're on about it, you can get off my telephone. Tomorrow you'll get a letter from me which will explain everything.' 'What letter?' My resignation, he wanted to say, but he was stopped by an agonized scream. A piercing, longdrawn out wail like a dog howling in the night. A second later, even before Luke and Moana realized that it was a human cry; it was drowned in the breaking and crashing of glass from the door of the Isolation Unit. 'What's happening?' 'I don't know,' answered Luke. 'Stay on the phone.' Moana Tahaman rushed towards the Isolation Unit. Luke ran after her. It was difficult to take in the sight which awaited them there. Mother Teresa was lying across the Nesbit-Evans bed. A powerful convulsion had lifted her cyanotic stomach in a taut arch a foot above the mattress, which was soaked in yellow, greasy excrement, and only the united strength of the two nurses was holding her trembling, slimy body in a horizontal position. From out of the thick foam round her mouth could be heard voices from another world, like those of a medium in a trance, which didn't formulate words and perhaps never would.

The instruments for intensive care were scattered round the room, the blanket was crumpled on the floor and the broken blood transfusion apparatus was dripping with nutritious plasma. Nurse Lumley was leaning against the window with her hair ragged and with her white coat torn and all the blood had drained from her face. Holding her left forearm in her right hand, she kept on repeating as though she could not believe what she saw: 'She bit me, the bitch bit me!' 'Moana, 120 mg of sodium phenolbarbitone intravenously, quickly!' he shouted, going up to the bed. The muscles relaxed before his eyes. The patient's stomach was slowly dropping towards the mattress. 'Don't force her! She'll lie down by herself!' Luke went across to Nurse Lumley, took her right elbow and turned her arm towards the light from the window. Clear teeth-marks, which had not pierced the skin, ringed the place where they had cut through with shallow, blue indentations. The wound was about five centimeters long and was for the most part superficial. 'What happened?' 'You told me to give her some warm water. When I tried to, she … oh my God!' She burst into tears. 'She bit me!' 'Disinfect your arm and stop behaving like a fool, Lumley,' he said harshly. 'It's no more than a scratch.' He turned back to Mother Teresa. The convulsion had clearly calmed down. The body on the bed was resting in a cold, inhuman peace. The muscles were still twitching here and there, like the last thunder of an exhausted storm. He injected the patient with the sedative which Moana had prepared for him, ordered the Unit to be cleared up and Logan to be found, and then went back into the Treatment Room. From the telephone receiver, as from some grave, came the hysterical voice of Dr. George Preston. Luke picked up the receiver. 'Luke here.' 'For Christ's sake, what's going on?' 'I don't know yet, but I'll know within the hour.' 'Does that mean that the aircraft has to wait another hour for you?' 'I must have a diagnosis, George.' 'I understood you already had one!' 'I did. Pernicious malaria with cerebral, eventually choleric complications.' The only malaria, he thought, which didn't, unlike all the others, result from the parasite Anopheles moskitosa, but from an epileptic attack, which also didn't develop from unknown causes, like so many others, but from a false hysteria. 'So what about your damned malaria now?' 'Additional symptoms have appeared which cast some doubt on the diagnosis.' 'Was that the scream I just heard?' 'Among others, yes. But how much it means I'll be able to tell you in an hour's time.' 'Listen, Luke,' Dr. Preston sounded calmer. 'I don't have any reasonable explanation for delaying the aircraft.'

'Who's asking you for a reasonable explanation? Nobody listens to reasonable explanation. They only believe idiotic ones. Up to know at least the Russians, as an exceptionally stupid one, have been more than adequate. For people in the West, it seems perfectly natural that all misfortunes come from the East. Give the Alitalia passengers free whisky to drink as well as the Russians to curse and the majority of them will take up residence at the Airport if need be!' 'It's not the damned passengers I'm worried about,' shouted Dr. Preston. 'For them I personally don't need any excuse. The passengers are the worry of Heathrow and Alitalia. I have to have an acceptable reason for Heathrow and Alitalia.' 'What are you talking about, George? At this very moment they have dozens of delayed flights!' 'None of them because the Chief Airport Doctor is unsure of his diagnosis.' 'George, do I have my hour or don't I?' 'No, you don't!' 'In that case you'll have to confirm that in writing.' At the other end Dr. George Preston was breathing heavily. 'Luke.' 'Yes, George.' 'Do you know where I'm speaking from?' 'From your office in Buckingham Gate, I imagine.' 'To get a courier from here to Heathrow will take more then an hour.' 'And I need only an hour.' After a short silence Dr. George Preston answered wearily. 'All right Luke. You can have your hour. One hour, not a second more. Even if you find the woman's got Bubonic Plague!' 'Thank you George,' said Luke. 'Your understanding is touching.' 'One has to have patience with madmen, I suppose.' He rang off. Luke was left alone with his hard-won hour. He had no idea what he was going to do with it. Even what he could possibly do at all. His lack of practical experience in the field of tropical medicine limited his thinking. 'Moana, get mi the number of the Institute for Tropical Medicine and try to find Dr. Jonathan Hamilton. Tell him that Luke is asking for him.' 'Just Luke?' He hesitated. The past at Wolfenden House was dead. He no longer had those magic key words which would bring it alive. 'Luke the Evangelist.' Nurse Logan came in. 'Where the hell have you been?' Nurse Logan looked at Moana Tahaman. Dr. Komarowsky didn't look at all himself. They must have been quarrelling again, she thought. 'In her delirium Mother Teresa said several incomprehensible words. I thought it might help if we knew what they meant.' 'And you probably found out they mean nothing at all.' 'Not quite. Sister Emilia says that in the language of the natives they mean: IT WAS A DOG, or BEWARE OF THE DOG.'

'Does their convent keep dogs?' 'It's a long way from Lagos. Dogs are their only defense. On the walls around the convent there are boards with the inscription: BEWARE OF THE DOGS.' 'That explains it,' said Luke. Was that all?' 'I'm afraid not, Doctor,' answered the Head Nurse. 'The other nun is ill too now. Seriously ill.'

6. Major Hilary Lawford, Ironheel, Head of Airport Security, was in a foul temper, although his massive, orange face with its short, thick-set neck in the stocky, muscular body gave out only an air of professional concentration. There was no point in revealing his Achilles' heel to those who wanted to shoot at it. Particularly since neither Colonel Donovan of MI 5 nor the KGB man, Colonel Rasimov, in control of security for the last time, gave any sigh of having noticed it. It was quite obvious. Passing along the endless glass tunnel which crossed over into the numbered bays on the airside and the passenger areas of Terminal 2, they had gone right past the automatic doors of the First Class Transit Lounge. One of his men was standing there on guard in his hideously orange tie. Just as he wad ordered. But he hadn't ordered transit passengers to be allowed into that section. He could see quite clearly that all the seats in the space were occupied. In between the armchairs, along the walls, in the corners, people were even standing. He was lagging behind the two colonels. His assistant, Stillman, loyally stayed back with him. 'Stillman, who are these people?' 'Alitalia passengers from Rome to New York I think, but I'm not sure.' 'You're not sure? What the devil does that mean?' A security man could not be unsure about anything. Neither in theory nor in practice. Such was the doctrine Major Lawford preached. In matters of security, the margin of error must equal nil. If it didn't - the security equals to nil. 'Their flight has been delayed, Sir, but it's impossible to find out why. I only know that it has no connection with security.' Stillman explained his first lapse with a second one. For it was also Lawford's preaching that everything was connected with security. 'Everything is connected with security,' he brought out his favorite phrase. 'Everything except you, Stillman.' 'What shall I do about it?' asked Stillman dejectedly. 'Get those people the hell out of there before the Russians arrive, or you'll be taking the plane to Moscow too!' The Deputy Head of Security at Heathrow marched off meekly towards the First Class Lounge. The story about Mother Teresa's misfortune, of which he had heard something, went with him. In the meantime, Major Lawford allowed himself more time than was polite to catch up with the

two colonels. He wasn't at all pleased to be obliged on his home territory to play the third man. For the moment it was a fairly complicated affair. His AS men, the Metropolitan Police, the Special Branch people and Donovan and Rasimov's plain clothed secret service agents were treading on each other's corns. And for 'his' so-called area, the situation was lousy. It was traditional that at the Airport they never knew the boundaries of their own authority or the limits of their responsibility. Heathrow was split up into independent fiefs, like medieval baronies; the international Air Lines, headed by the dukedom of domestic BA; the principality of Flight and Technical Services; the privileged guilds of the Administration, Legal and Health Services; the economic and financial Free Fortresses with charters of independence equal to those of the City. And all of them were engaged in a bitter mutual conflict for the primacy, and all of them together fought still more bitterly against the central authority of the king, embodied in the Management Committee of the BAA and the person of its Director, Mr. William Townsend, the General Manager of Heathrow Airport. The confusion might have been considerably less if those Olympic heights had been occupied by someone else than Townsend, a man without personal authority, without organizational sense and particularly without managing ideas, without any ideas apart from that of arriving at his pension with the least possible personal upset and of dedicating himself thereafter to the flying of kites from the top of Hampstead Heath. And it would completely disappear if the position belonged to him, Lawford. Unfortunately, there was little likelihood of that. Only great crisis, he thought, most of all wars, offered the right people their chances. Peace was quite definitely fashioned for mediocrities. The situation at the Airport was just like that of a decadent empire on the eve of its collapse, and because of it he didn't feel the master even of his own official domain. He just couldn't give an order and expect it to be carried out without it being checked half a dozen times first. People had to be kept constantly on a tight rein. At the Airport, where all sorts of dirty battles of executive cloak and dagger work were being carried on all the time, everyone wanted power but refused to take any responsibility, and everyone' s main idea was just to look after their own skin. The principle of permanent distrust was the rule. Lawford kept to it strictly. A man of big ideas, he even perfected it. Complete overall control, at least in his head, for down there at his feet, back on the ground, it was somewhat defective, led to clarity of definitions which possessed its own independent artistic beauty. The plan for the Russians' security at Heathrow was his. Donovan and Rasimov had made a few, quite stupid alterations, whose clumsiness hit you in the eye, that is if they had any to see such things with. They were supposed to be international aces, but in fact they were amateurs. The originators of ambitious intelligence and counter-intelligence projects which in practice ended in the regular ceremonial exchange on the East-German border of small-time agents in the field who had got themselves caught. Above all, the Russians were morbidly suspicious. Although, he thought, you could hardly say

that of Colonel Rasimov. You couldn't at all accuse him of hereditary Asiatic mistrust towards the West. He had expected the usual dissatisfaction and criticism, but had come up against offensive indifference. Rasimov had behaved as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him. He had personally never met a KGB man who cared so little about his own safety. Unless, he thought, he was a so-called 'terminal case' which in the world of Medicine and Spies awaited much the same fate, well before the end foretold by the lines of their face. Colonel Donovan, on the other hand, had been unbearably pleasant. Lawford supposed that he felt as superior as if he had been on a visit to some intelligence area, hardly more advanced than Patagonia. He had, of course, got his own men here. Golden-haired computers from MI 5. Quite clearly he considered the official Airport Security as no more then pompous, useless decoration. Now he was walking alongside the two colonels. 'Well?' he asked cautiously. 'Well, Lawford, I think we've covered every possibility fairly well, don't you?' said Colonel Donovan with his affected Oxford drawl. Fairly well, my arse, thought Lawford. Everything's been covered absolutely brilliantly. But this idiot, who dropped down on his special parachute from Oxford strait into an armchair in MI 5 has no eyes to see it. 'Donovan,' he answered dryly, omitting his rank, for he too, finally, was a Major, not just Lawford like some butler. 'If you have some comments to make, spit it out. Otherwise I don't quite understand your reservations.' 'Nothing personal in it, Lawford. It's just in case of some unforeseen possibility.' 'There's no such possibility.' Not as far as I'm concerned, thought Lawford. Colonel Donovan smiled caustically, - the pompous idiot! He looked at Rasimov, who returned his glance. He seemed not to have heard the conversation. So much the better. Lawford's arrogance could arouse the KGB man from frightening inertia in which he had been immersed since the first day of his stay in London. But there was still plenty of time for the famous Russian sarcasm to bring him out in a cold sweat more than once before the special aircraft for Moscow took off. Lawford, with the disgust of a fanatic for order, watched the regiments of passengers which were pouring out of the silent bays like raging torrents, merging along the length of the glass airside gallery into a powerful pedestrian river, and then plunging into the depths of the terminal through the numerous automatic doors. In the past ten years, he thought, Gatwick and Heathrow have, on a yearly average increased the number of their flights by 22,000 and their passengers by 1,500,000. Since last July, there have been 320,000 flights at Heathrow this year, and 35,000,000 passengers. By the end of the nineties, flights are expected to reach 400,000, and passengers 40,000,000. Heathrow by then will be, even if they build another terminal and add another runway, to all intent and purpose, a corpse for air travel. It will become the massive grave of British aeronautical hopes. It didn't seem that apart from him anybody else was worried about it. As long ago as 1952, the Ministry of Civil Aviation in a White Paper had drawn attention to the necessity for the earliest possible construction of a third London airport, and only ten years later, by 1963,

from forty-three different locations it had chosen Stanstead as the most suitable. And then, in the sentimental, nature loving, new Victorian mood, which had taken over England, where any damn-fool owl-fancier was capable of stopping a project of national interest, the blood had been sucked out of it in turn by: The Council for the Preservation of Rural England, the 'Wellington-booted' villagers of North-West Essex and the Society for the Preservation of East Herts, the Stanstead Preservationists, the National Union of Farmers, The Noise Abutment Society, the royal Institute of British Architects, birdwatchers, game protectors, fox hunters, the Grass Growing Recording Society and the lovers of after-death silence. They had forces an official enquiry on the basis of limitations on construction which made it impossible for aerodromes to be built for at least a hundred miles from any individual lover of nature. Foulness on the Channel coast had been proposed. That had been really farcical, recalled Lawford. Two successive Governments, Labour and Tory, with their mighty political apparatus, by means of lobbying by skilled practitioners of the art, and most of all for good reasons, were convinced by an archaic band of champions of Mother Nature, who wanted at all costs to bury the future London Airport amongst the fishes, that it should be choked to death in the sands of Foulness. No Company would agree to operate at such a distance from the city. The international air lines would make good their escape to Paris or Amsterdam. It was known as early as 1953 that the third London airport would have to be ready at the latest by 1974, and become operational by 1976. But ten years after this final date had elapsed, it hadn't even been begun. No firm location had yet been found for it. Stanstead was briefly resuscitated from the grave until various demonstrations of democratic public opinion sent it back there. Instead of a new airport, thought Lawford, we got a new restaurant in the old one, and the Underground, which made the flood of passengers even more unbearable. In the meantime, the French hadn't been sitting twiddling their thumbs. They'd built an airport fifteen miles from the Arc de Triomphe, as had been done also in Tokyo, New York and Amsterdam. They didn't banish it to the Pyrenees so that it couldn't be heard. Someone, he couldn't remember who, had wisely said that if we want an efficient and dynamic civilization, we must be prepared to put up with the fact that it's sometime noisy. If not, then we have to ride bicycles. So while England, for three whole decades, had been looking for a place under the sun for the airport of the future, France had already been flying though that future for thirteen years. The new Airport at Roissy could accept any aircraft at any time, twenty-four hours a day. All this gnawed away at Hilary Lawford. Together with its Empire, England had lost her vitality. Great races and nations can't remain bogged down in their own history. They either progress and live, or stagnate and die. England was stagnating and dying. It would become the old junk shop of Europe. And when the Americans had bought from it everything of any value, it would be just the dustbin outside the back door of Paris and New York.

On the way back, they again passed in front of the First Class Transit lounge, which was now empty. England was sick, thought Major Hilary Lawford. An Alsatian with its muzzle covered in foam looked down on him from a green placard which warned passengers of the danger of rabies. That's it, he thought morosely, that was his England, a lion whose weakness had turned it into a tame dog and been paralyzed by the rabies if individualism. In front of the Arrival Gate in the Lobby of Terminal 2, a small group of people were pushing their way through the crowd. They held in their hands, in front of their chests or high in the air, aggressive cardboard placards with the names of the hotels, organizations and institutions on whose behalf they were waiting or written in large letters were names of the passengers they were waiting for. In the midst of them stood a dark-skinned, bearded man in a black raincoat. He was carrying a board with the name: Dr. Julius Upenkampf written on it. Hans Magnus Landau had thought the whole thing out extremely pedantically. As he had everything in his life. That was probably why he had acquired his reputation as the most capable employee of the lower echelons of the Deutsche Bank in Cologne. An accountant who could be depended upon to understand and work out correctly even the most complicated balance sheet. In his fifteen years with the bank he had never once been found out in an accounting error, never admonished. But neither had he ever been promoted. He had remained always in the same place as if he had taken root there, at the level of a higher accountant in the Section for Trusts, the lowest cellar of the working life in the bank. He belonged, evidently, to that nameless layer of employees whose services are taken for granted, like the comfortable shape of a chair, without further reflection, or like the opening and shutting of a well-oiled door of the colour of which no one is at all aware. His abilities were at the bank's disposal, like some kind of inherited human intelligence akin to the coat-hangers, the writing desks and the electric adding machines which were automatically carried over from one business year to the next. But he didn't mind this. He loved his work. Finding his way through the labyrinth of the financial policy of the German Federal Republic's largest bank afforded him a satisfaction which his life with his widowed mother had curtailed. His accounts made up for it all. The obedient columns of figures, which merged or separated out beneath his pen and disappeared in similar columns which traced another of the magic routes by which, like golden blood, financial capital circulated through the world economy. There was just one thing which he had been unable to swallow. It was that that had brought him to London, to Heathrow, to the light blue toilet cubicle on the first floor gallery of Terminal 2, and finally, to be here, waiting in disguise at the Arrival Gate. Three years earlier, approximately at this same time, he had been working on the relatively large account of an Italian religious Trust with interests in the Federal Republic. It had been quite routinely. There had been an entirely insignificant error, and above all, it had not been his. But he had been called in by the Director General, Dr. Julius Upenkampf. For the first time he had

gone up in the lift which rose out of the financial underground up to his heaven. Up to then he had only ever seen the director in passing. He always arrived by car to within a meter of the private entrance, and on those occasions when at that sacred moments he was on the street, all that he could distinguish of him was his expensive wardrobe. Now he could see also his face. It was quite ordinary, a face no one would have given a second glance to. His voice too was ordinary. But what that unremarkable face had said to him in its expressionless voice had been like an earthquake in which for a few hellish seconds the refuge of his professional inviolability and personal self-confidence which had been built up over fifteen years had been destroyed. When he had recovered from the shock, he opened his mouth to justify himself but he was dismissed before he could even begin. Anyone his place would have been enraged. Perhaps in a moment of haste, they might have submitted their resignation. Or someone with less restraint would have suffered, tormented themselves, got drunk and recounted his misfortune to similar unfortunates at the dirty counter of dubious bars. But not him. He had neither the temperament for fury, nor the money to get drunk, nor the time for confessions. He had the intelligence of a cash-register which marks up only the figures which correspond to the keys pressed. It was his professional capabilities which were in question, and if he had anything that was something he was certain of. Certainly he was more capable than that Upenkampf, of whom it was said that he couldn't add two numbers together without the help of his calculator. He had quickly worked out a plan of embezzlement. With a sense of irony generated by his thirst for revenge, it was based on a manipulation of the Italian Trust which has caused his downfall. Since all business between the Deutsche Bank and the Trust passed exclusively through his hands, it simply could not be found out. In any case, that was, before he himself decided how and when it should be brought to light. Hans Magnus Landau was no thief. He had no intention of using the stolen money for himself. He hadn't spent a single one of the million marls that for three years he had been transferring from the Italian Trust account to an anonymous one in Switzerland. He had to teach Upenkampf to get to know his own people better, and to show more appreciation for those amongst them who used their work and knowledge to increase his wealth. For something like that, he was even ready to go to prison. Because he had not spent the money, he pored that it would not be for a long, nor unendurable stay. In the meantime, the world would get to know about Hans Magnus Landau. The benefit from it would perhaps come later. But that was not what was important. Even if, after the scandal, no bank would offer to make use of his services, he would be on his own then. In spirit, of course, but that was all that really mattered. Unfortunately, it had occurred to the governing committee of the Trust to celebrate the anniversary of its foundation. To this occasion were invited its foreign partners. Amongst these was Dr. Julius Upenkampf from the Deutsche Bank of Cologne. Hans Magnus had hoped that because of a conference in London, Upenkampf would refuse the invitation. But instead, he had

mixed business with pleasure and flown off to Rome with the intention of returning to Cologne via London, and unmasking him, Hans Magnus. The Director had taken certain documents with him to Rome in order to sort out a number of unresolved questions with the Trust - their unresolved nature in the main was the fault of Hans Magnus – and it was inevitable that in the process of their clarification, he would discover the embezzlement by which the Trust had been defrauded of more than a million DM. At first sight this was just what Hans Magnus had at one time intended to do himself. But only at first sight. If he had voluntarily confessed to the undiscovered fraud, his reputation would have remained undamaged; he would have recovered his self-esteem. But if it were discovered by the very person who had already humiliated him, he was quite definitely lost. Faced with a catastrophe, Hans Magnus didn't give way to panic. Mathematics had taught him the rule, that a problem of accounting which couldn't be worked out by one method, could always be solved by another. It was only necessary to be persistent. One had to go on calculating. One had to work on it. And he worked on it. He could without fail rely on three factors. Whatever he thought about the theft personally, Dr. Julius Upenkampf would not inform the Italian partners of it, nor would he delay his flight to London where he was expected at an important business conference, and, before his return to Cologne, he would not tell anyone of his discovery. In this age of universal phone-tapping, that just wouldn't be done. Dr. Upenkampf could afford to be patient. He knew that he couldn't get away from him. What the Herr Director didn't know was that he had no intention of trying to. He had no thought of flight. He had a better plan. His plan, in fact, was perfect. And up to just a little while before, it had functioned irreproachable. Then things had begun to get complicated. First the flight from Rome had arrived before its scheduled time, on a day when all other flights were delayed. Then Julius Upenkampf had not appeared at the Arrival Gate long after it had landed. Hans Magnus Landau had not become anxious about the delay until it began to appear possible that the man he was waiting for at the gate would not arrive at least half an hour before the last call for the Lufthansa passengers for the Flight LH 056 to Cologne. Half an hour was the absolute minimum. Despite all his innate precision and training, he was well aware that in the art of killing he was still an amateur. This time they'd really caught him with his pants down! Those two bastard colonels had gone off to get a drink, without thinking to invite him to go along. In the VIP Lounges there was enough drink for a respectable orgy. Nothing had been spared in their sucking up to those Bolsheviks. But the security inspection had been a triumph. He had withdrawn into his office to savour it on his own. And five minutes later he had been caught with his pants down, the confounded news had been passed to him, his self-satisfaction had disappeared and Major Hilary Lawford was now trying to

assimilate it as something which was actually happening and not just the product of an upset stomach. Sergeant Elmer's tale of a suspicious clergyman who was wandering around the Airport was idiotic. But nevertheless, fashion in criminals always kept on coming round again. He had read in a newspaper how the Argentine Minister of Internal Affairs had been stabbed by a bandit, disguised as a courtesan. The masquerade had given the tragedy an air of circus. But the Argentine was still left lying on his mistress's bed with his throat cut. It wouldn't have surprised him if it happened after they managed to fuck. Nobody had any consideration for dignity any more. Neither terrorists nor ministers. The world is definitely going to the dogs! Around him stood his deputy, Stillman, the black Sergeant Elmer, and the Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police at Heathrow, Warden. 'How did it sound to you on the phone, Elmer?' The heavily-built policeman was sweating. He took off his helmet and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. Chasing around after the Superintendent had quite worn him out. 'I don't know, Sir. It's hard to tell. It could be something, but probably it isn't.' 'What do you think, Warden?' The Superintendent didn't think anything. It was true that it was his man who had first heard of this load of shit which was giving them so many problems, but it wasn't the duty of the Metropolitan Police to find it, only to dump it in front of Lawford's door. He never agreed with the routine scheme of things which in a crisis placed the police under the orders of the Airport Security Services. It was a humiliating situation. He could get his revenge now. 'I don't know. You're the boss,' he said maliciously. 'Stillman?' 'It's impossible to know, Sir. The best thing is to play it by the book.' Keep to the book – what else! And when you've created all sort of havoc, nothing comes of it; suppose, for example, he really is a clergyman, what a highly amusing story to tell around the Airport offices, and on international air line flights at thirty thousand feet above the ground! On the other hand, the book offered a certain guarantee. It covered your arse. One had to take care of one's self-esteem in some other way. All right, he'd keep to the book, whatever happened. As for the others, Warden, who was standing there as if the alarm had nothing to do with him, as if he were just making up the number to four, Stillman, who never had a single useful idea except that of never arriving at a situation when he was needed, he'd take care of him later. He had time. For the moment he had to treat them with kid gloves. He knew when to lick someone's arse and when to keep his mouth shut. His hesitation disappeared. Routine took over. 'Where are the Russians?' he asked in a businesslike manner. Over the radio Stillman checked the latest information about the progress of the Russo-British diplomatic cavalcade. 'They're on the M 4 Motorway, Parkway turn off.' How much time before they get here?' 'Ten minutes at the most.' 'Is there any possibility of holding them back?'

'I can't see how,' said Superintendent Warden, 'apart from sending that clergyman to meet them.' Another joker, thought Lawford. 'It's a question of half an hour. There must be some way of doing it. Otherwise our roads wouldn't look as impassable as the Amazon forest as soon as the Police begin to interfere with traffic.' 'Perhaps we could hold them back in front of the Central Terminal Area?' Superintendent Warden relented. 'But not for long.' 'Half an hour?' 'All right. But not a minute longer.' The Superintendent went out of the room hurriedly. Behind him trotted the ponderous Elmer. 'Get together all the men who are not committed to the Russians' security. Tell them to be extremely cautious. Tell them to shoot only if they have to, and for God's sake not to kill. Especially passengers who are taking cigarette cases out of their pockets. I want this lad alive.' 'Especially if he's innocent,' 'Most of all if he's guilty. He certainly isn't alone. And as a rule, it's remarkably difficult to get anything out of dead men. They're only useful as statistics. They're certainly of no use to us.' 'O. K. Chief,' mumbled Stillman. He didn't know which he hated more> Lawford or his generalizations. 'And one thing more, Stillman. Don't play at Cavalry round the Terminals. Be discreet. And get some sniffer dogs for explosives. Empty one of the Staff rooms. I'm going to find Colonel Donovan.' 'Are you going to tell him about the new development?' 'What new development?' 'About the clergyman, Sir?' Major Hilary Lawford looked at his deputy as if he were wiping a dirty mark of the floor with his eyes. 'There's no new development, Stillman,' he whispered threateningly, 'absolutely none. Everything's under complete control.' *** At that very moment, the subject of the 'new development', of which Lawford did not intend to allow anyone outside the circle of Airport Security to hear, was peacefully making his way through the masse of people who were wearing for passengers from Europe at the Arrival Gate in the Main Hall. Flapping above their massed heads like banners were the placards with the name of Travel Companies, London Hotels and clients amongst the passengers. Daniel Leverquin had his back turned to them. For that reason he didn't see the carton on which was written 'DR. JULIUS UPENKAMPF', nor did he recognize in the dark-skinned, bearded man in the black raincoat, the fair-haired foreigner who he had bumped into on the walkway to Terminal 2. Nor did he notice the older, gray-haired man with a plaster across his left temple who was hurrying towards the gate which led to the Transit Lounge like a lunatic, quite unaware of what was going on around him. The yellow clock above the Hall showed 09.00 hours, fifty minutes to the point of no return. 'Operation Dioscuri' was accurately described in his diary:

'09.00/0 minus 50 min. The loudspeaker puts out the first call for passengers to Oslo to go to Passport and Customs control; 09.01/0 minus 49 min. The Soviet delegation accompanied by their British hosts enters the Central Terminal Area at Heathrow; 09.02/0 minus 48 min. Castor's companions take out their weapons hidden in the decorative palms; 09.05/0 minus 45 min. Second call for passengers to Oslo to go to Passport and Customs control; 09.06/0 minus 44 min. Pollux passes through Passport and Customs control into the Transit Lounge and meets Helen at the appointed place; 09.07/0 minus 43 min. The Russians and the British enter the VIP area of Terminal 2, where the leave-taking ceremony begins; 09.30/0 minus 20 min. Passengers for Flight SK 514 to Oslo are called to leave through Gate no 12 to board the aircraft; 09.32/0 minus 18 min. Castor and the Dioscuri take up their positions for the attack; 09.45/0 minus 5 min. The ceremonial part of the leave-taking of the Soviet delegation in the VIP Lounge is almost over; 09.46/0 minus 4 min. Final call for passengers for Oslo on Flight SK 514 to board the aircraft. Pollux and Helen move off to comply; 09.46/0 minus 3 min. Airport Security men empty the airside gallery for the passengers of the Russian delegation to Gate 38; 09.48/0 minus 2 min. Pollux and Helen board the aircraft for Oslo; 09.49/0 minus 1 min. The first time bombe explode in the Main Hall of Terminal 2; at intervals of two seconds only five explodes; 09.50/0 minus 0 min. Castor attacks, 'Operation Dioscuri' begins; 09.51/0 plus 1 min. Bombs explode in the lower level of the Underground station at Heathrow Central; 10.00/0 plus 10 min. 'Operation Dioscuri' has been successfully concludes, Castor and the others die bravely; 10.01/0 plus 11 min. SAS Flight SK 514 for Oslo taxies towards the take-off runway to get away as quickly as possible from the location of the attack (logical supposition, time is approximate); 10.05/0 plus 15 min. The aircraft for Oslo with Pollux and Helen on board takes off (logical supposition, time is approximate)…'

It's all hellishly precise, he thought. A masterpiece of compilation of accurate information, a sense of the coordination of movements in time and space, and powerful imagination. Finally – a powerful imagination. Such a plan couldn't fail. While he was waiting for the call for passengers to Oslo, he wandered through the Hall with no other purpose than that of killing time and calming his nerves. It was his nerves, in fact, which sensed the question which he suddenly refused to ask himself. What would happen if the Russians were late entering the airside gallery, and in the meantime, the flight for Oslo left? Nothing. Nothing would happen. They would read of the outcome of 'Operation Dioscuri' in tomorrow's newspapers. The real problem would arise only if the Russians arrived at the airside gallery before he and Helen were called to board their flight. Or if their flight for Oslo was for any reason delayed. A few minutes delay would be enough for them to find themselves shut off in the Transit Lounge. But even that would probably not have any irrevocable consequences. But since he had calculated everything so carefully, it was quite intolerable to be left at the mercy or otherwise of so many 'probably', 'perhaps', 'ifs', 'as far as'. There has been a strange transformation of his experience of the Airport. Normally when traveling by air, he gave himself over quite passively to the process of transportation without any desire to get to know it better, his only wish: to get back onto the ground as quickly as possible. His preparations for 'Operation Dioscuri' had changed all that. The transport process had become a vital part of his plan. in order for this plan to be convincing, he had had to get to know all the finer details of the process which he was going to use. He had to know everything about the life of the Airport. The reality had disappointed him. He had expected to find the Airport as he knew it from books and films. Those airports were filled with halls like bishops' palaces, and their writers lived on exotic islands; their aircraft were continually crashing, the runways were continually blocked by snowdrifts, machines and nerves cracked up inexplicably, diamonds were plundered from the Air

Lines impenetrable strongrooms; whenever the plot got bogged down in the routine melodramatic partings and meetings, out of nowhere there suddenly appeared bloodthirsty terrorists, fearless fighters for a world without bloodshed, who in the meantime mowed down children with their machine-guns, for terrorists, where-ever they came from, were always left wing and writers right wing. In short, everything that happened was exactly what the civilized observer could expect from the civilized world. In the best of such books, like Hailey's 'Airport', for example, the airport resembled a madhouse. The passengers were like manic depressive fugitives from an asylum, at the very least, lunatics wandered over the roofs, and the airport employees were like people who, without any good reasons, considered them to be sane and logical. In fact, however, an airport was a factory for processing people, a gigantic meat-canning machine in which a terrifying quantity of living human raw material was thrown into all the openings by the Underground tunnels, elevators, buses and cars, to come out the very same minutes at other openings changed in appearance, sex, race and what have you. No matter what name or pretext it functioned under, everything here served the same end / the prefabrication of humanity. The only thing that remained uncertain was to what purpose that end served. He couldn't in fact see any advantage in the products which the airport machine threw out over those which entered it. On the other hand, he discovered that apart from him, everyone could get along very well in the general confusion. The majority of passengers, when asked, seemed to know where they were going, although not always why. The Airport personnel carried out their butcher's duties with the indifference of hired killers, who hid from the doomed passengers the dark secret of the physical and spiritual transformation which awaited them behind the signs with the innocent description 'EXIT'. It was one of these signs towards which he went. The passengers for Oslo had not yet been called for the first time, but Daniel Leverquin, or Pollux, walked blindly and intently towards the Departure Gate as if it were his own commentary on the process which was driving him towards them, as if once through the alluring mouth, the Airport machines would indeed chew him up and spit him out to Oslo a completely new being. ***** Dr. Julius Upenkampf, Director General of the Deutsche Bank, Cologne, was in a caustic mood. Only after several of the Airport Security staff had transferred passengers from the flight from Rome from the First class Transit Lounge into the General Waiting Hall, with an equally specious justification to that with which they had bundled them into the former, did he at last manage to achieve the right which he had bought with his ticket and leave the Transit Area. His indignation was not calmed by the affability with which a good-looking female airport employee accompanied him to the Arrival Gate instead of allowing him to take the regular route which went all the way round by the Departure Gate. These English, he thought had a real gift for making things difficult for you by their kindness. For if he had gone round the usual way he would at once have had the look of a man who had been sent.

But by emerging where no one with any sense would expect him, they would have to look for him. With all these complications, it was a sheer piece of good luck that he had managed to find out that someone was waiting for him. If he hadn't, he would have missed the poor man completely. The whole episode of his London trip was a black spot. First of all, he had had difficulty in coordinating the route Cologne-Rome-London-Cologne. He couldn't take the regular Rome-London flight if he were to arrive in time for the London conference. He had to be satisfied with an unclaimed place on the waiting list for passengers on the transatlantic flight for New York. Fortunately, he had had access to what is euphemistically called 'a network of pressure points', and by simultaneously applying pressure to several of them, he had obtained a seat. And then he had not even got round to clearing up the problem areas in the Trust's documents. He hadn't even taken that out of his case. Those Italians took their fiestas extremely seriously. They hadn't even wanted to hear of any business talk. Then, to cap it all, at the previous night's banquet, the wine had been acid. He'd been troubled by heartburn all night. The torment at Heathrow had quite finished him off. The only bright spot was the unknown man who was waiting for him. If he was waiting, if on seeing that he was nowhere to be found, he hadn't already gone. That wouldn't have surprised him at all. Outside Germany things had long ago ceased to astonish him. He had no need to worry. The man was still waiting for him. The impatient Dr. Julius Upenkampf had to repeat his name at least three times before Hans Magnus Landau understood who was standing in front of him. And without asking himself how he had managed to miss him in the Hall, he uttered his prepared speech, bearing in mind the circumstances, relatively convincingly. 'The Deutsche Bank of Cologne has reserved a suite for you at the King George Hotel, Sir. Where is your luggage?' Dr. Upenkampf was not at all impressed. And he was late. Surely the idiot could see he hadn't got any luggage? 'I have no luggage,' he said. 'And I'm in a hurry. Where's your car?' 'In the car park, Sir.' 'Well go and fetch it, for God's sake. What are you waiting for?' Hans Magnus was nonplused. He had forgotten that General Directors do not go and fetch cars. Cars are brought to them. And he didn't have a car which he could bring. Nor a car to which he could take Herr Director, if it came to that. He didn't need a car for the murder, just the car park and Herr Director. Crisis and Wars lead to new achievements, said Clausewitz and his father, before they had learned in the camp of the advantages of peace. They had been right. Hans Magnus said: 'If Herr Director is in a hurry, then it would be better for him to come to the car park with me. Otherwise we shall lose a lot of time.' Time for Dr. Julius Upenkampf was precious. He could still just arrive in time, if he didn't stop off at the hotel and if the chauffeur took him strait to the conference. He asked himself where he

had seen the chauffeur's hand with its chewed hails before. 'All right,' he said. 'Let's go.' Hans Magnus breathed again. Events, which had threatened to get out of hand, had reverted to normal. In the meantime, there was a commotion to the right of the Midland Bank counter in front of which they were standing. The crowd moved apart and revealed Gate A of the unclaimed baggage counter. Through it three powerful Airport Security men frog-marched a clergyman. He was a short-sighted, asthenic young man with an oriental looking face; from his unarticulated protests, it could be concluded that he belonged to a small Christian community from the Japanese island of Hokkaido. What this had to do with him being hustled out of the Baggage Hall, Dr. Julius Upenkampf could not even imagine, and to himself he ascribed the whole thing to his tortured nerves. Hans Magnus didn't even see the scene, but he couldn't help noticing the unusually large number of Metropolitan policemen and AS men amongst the passengers. He put this down to the presence of the Soviet delegation and he decided that it was high time for them to leave. In the car park, which they reached through a well-lit tunnel like a hollow caterpillar, the plan was hampered by a new crisis. He wasn't immediately able to decide upon the most suitable spot. The one which he had picked out beforehand, in the depths of a level full of cars, was now completely free of vehicles and had been turned into an open space, quite unfit for his purpose. In a panic, he turned around. Dr. Julius Upenkampf got more impatient. At last he caught sight of a massive pillar and a silver Bentley which was half-hidden in the darkness behind it. Making his way round the other cars, he went towards it. Dr. Upenkampf followed him with his black dressing case in his left hand and his umbrella, with its old-fashioned inlaid handle, in the right. On both sides of the Bentley were parked old wrecks. On the left a 1968 Austin Morris, on the right a battered Ford Cortina. But the Bentley itself looked impressive, like Christ between the two robbers. When they got near it, he looked through the window and saw on the front seat several medical journals and an envelope with the address: Sir Matthew Laverick, Esq., M. D., Harley Street. He was lucky that there hadn't been three old cars behind the pillar. Otherwise he would have to explain to the touchy Dr. Upenkampf why an old dustbin had been sent for him rather than a limousine. But he wasn't as lucky with the basic condition of complete isolation which he needed for his plan. He invited the Director to get into the car. He held the handle of the rear door in his left hand and kept his right hand on the butt of the revolver with the silencer in his pocket. Upenkampf bent forward as does someone who is about to get into a car, Hans Magnus stepped to one side as if to grab the door handle, and stood behind him. Then, through the window of the Ford Cortina he saw two ruffled heads appear like Punch and Judy from the depth of the car. The young man's face was marked with red lipstick like an Indian; the girl's was pale, almost comatose. Just in time he kept his right hand where it was. His left hand remained on the door handle in an unconscious effort to open the door, although he knew that he couldn't, and that it was exceptionally dangerous to allow the director to realize that

he couldn't. Dr. Julius Upenkampf was appalled. His indignation at the behaviour of contemporary youth had prevented him from seeing something which was much more important to life, his in this case, than the falling off morals in the world. He had missed seeing that the chauffeur could not open the door of a car which purported to be his. The young man in the Ford Cortina started the engine, leered at them, made an obscene sign and roared out of the parking bay. 'Un-glaub-lich, incredible!' said Dr. Julius Upenkampf, Director General of the Deutsche Bank, Cologne and fell face forwards towards the ground. Blood mingled with fragments of brain tissue was pouring from a hole in the back of his head. Hans Magnus Landau closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the body at his feet had stopped twitching. He wiped the Bentley's door handle clean with his handkerchief. He wiped the butt of the revolver also and put it back in his raincoat pocket. On his way out of the car park he would find a car with an open window and throw it inside. He knelt beside the body and relieved it of the documents which could identify him. In the Terminal he would tear them up and throw them down the toilet. The Herr Director himself and his umbrella he pushed beneath the body of the Bentley. He opened the dressing case, took out the Trust papers, transferred them to his own case, closed both, wiped his fingerprints from the Director's, and then kicked it too under the Bentley. He unscrewed the stick with the name Dr. Julius Upenkampf, wiped it clean, on his way out, and threw it under another car. Ten minutes before the first call for Lufthansa Flight LH 056 for Cologne, in the same toilet on the first floor gallery of Terminal 2 where the fair-haired, clean-shaven commercial traveler from West Germany had become the dark-haired, bearded chauffeur from King George hotel in London, he would again become a fair-haired, clean shaven commercial traveler. No one would find out that both hid the red-haired chief accountant of the Deutsche Bank, Cologne. For at 11.00 he would be in the air on his way home. At 13.00 he would be at the Cologne/Bonn Airport. At 15.00 he would be back at his desk in the bank. He had committed the perfect crime. He had put together a criminal equation which nobody could solve. Only he could solve it. But that would lead to his fraud being discovered. His plan had been that he himself, under no obligation, should confess. Now this was no longer possible. A confession of his embezzlement would prove his superiority, that was true, but it would also unmask his role in the death of Dr/ Julius Upenkampf. To enjoy his superiority while serving a life sentence, that would be stupid, contradictory. For a superior person does not get sent to prison. He certainly would know how to avoid it. So he would have to forgo the confession that he had embezzled a million DM. And with it he would have to forego the proclamation of his intellectual superiority. That was sad. But he still had a million Marks. And with that sort of money even an idiot would not feel himself inferior.

He looked at his watch. It was 09.30. It had taken less than ten minutes. He wondered how long it would take him a second time. For, this time it had been easy. Ridiculously easy. It wasn't at all clear to him why the writers of detective stories made so much fuss about it. ***** At that very moment at Terminal 2 a barely decipherable female voice was announcing: 'SAS announce the departure of Flight SK 514 for Oslo. Passengers are requested to make their way to Passport and Customs Control.' Daniel Leverquin/Pollux looked at his watch. 09.30 hours. 'Operation Dioscuri' had irreversibly moved past the point of no return. Nothing now could stop it.

7. Dr. Jonathan Francis Hamilton, micro-biologist, Head of the Virological Department of the Institute for Tropical Medicine in London, had been born in the U.S.A., the son of an American father and an English mother; he had received his schooling from a German in England, (Oxford); he was a distant descendant of those Irish rebels who a combination of the potato famine and Unionist bayonets had driven across the ocean. But at this moment he was nervously fretting at the wheel of his silver Porsche which had been stopped by the police on the slip road leading, a hundred yards in front of him, into the vehicle tunnel above which stood the neon welcome sign: WELCOME TO HEATHROW AIRPORT. The police belonged to the Metropolitan force and not to the Traffic Control. He wandered if there has been a serious accident, or whether he had again been stopped by the Russians, who had slowed down the traffic ever since he had got onto the M4 Motorway. He had left his day's programme at the Institute in ruins and in the process offended a number of people whom he valued highly; he had activated the emergency siren, cut corners, committed at least a dozen traffic infringements, in short, done everything he could to get there as quickly as possible, and now his way was blocked right at the very Airport itself. A line of cars were frantically blowing there horns behind him. In front of him, separated by a temporary ramp, in an area kept clear by the police who seemed to be moving around as if sleep-walking, was the solemn Russo-British diplomatic suite in large, black limousines; in them, behind amour-plated, darkened windows, shielded by their

bodyguards, sat massive, weary figures in their black suits after the conclusion of their weighty and successful talks. The talks had been successful, fine, he thought; successful as always, after which the world situation also, as always, became still worse. Negotiations were always better and better, the situation always got worse. Perhaps there was no need for negotiations. Then no single country would be able to assert that the other had gone back on an agreement and make use of that proposition for new deteriorations. There would simply not be any agreement to go back on. It would be much better. In any case, it couldn't be any worse. Or, alternatively they should finally put an end to all that humanitarian crap, in which no one with any sense believed any longer, and reach for the cudgels. It would at least be true to the instinct which had stayed to hang on the trees of the primordial forest while man's empty skin had climbed up the skyscraper of the so-called civilization. Monday was the worst day in the Institute. The working timetable was traditionally conceited, people were traditionally impotent. For work, that is, not for wars amongst themselves. It was as if they passed their weekends in some kind of secret private madhouses - perhaps that's what families were – charging themselves up with extravagant ideas and original emotions to spit them out at each other on Monday at the institute which was also a madhouse, but a public and general one. Despite all this, he couldn't refuse Luke Komarowsky. And it hadn't been simply the excitement in his voice which had drawn him to the Airport. Nor the fact, which had come across with evident shame, that Luke couldn't cope with atypical malaria in a few passengers from Rome. It was natural for a doctor, who had fled from research into General Practice to have lost touch with illnesses other than the common cold. Malaria had long since ceased to figure on the list of dangerous infections, and nowadays was more an agricultural than a medical problem. And a-typical malaria simply did not exist. Atypical infections were nonsense by incompetent practice. A-typical symptoms of a known disease on principle belonged to some other, known or unknown. Luke, really, was mistaken in his diagnosis. That much he had understood over the phone. He was certain that it was a question of some disease which was so rare in the U.K. that it obliged the doctors to get out their old dust-covered textbooks; probably something innocent; perhaps some rare tropical allergy. Otherwise Luke must have had recognized the symptoms. He simply had to. Luke had once been the very best of them all, Luke, and then him, John. And it was what Luke had 'once' been to him, what that 'once' meant to all of them but most of all to him, that was the real reason that had made him agree to come to Heathrow. Between that 'once', in which he still lived, and his new meeting with Luke Komarowsky, lay exactly fifteen years, during which time he had neither seen nor heard of him. From time to time, it's true, the name of Komarowsky had changed its page in the Year book of the BMA, moving around on the map of the British Isles from A to Z, but there had been no contribution from him in any of the medical journals. As far as research was concerned, Luke was dead; just as he had been also dead for it.

It was something which could have been foreseen. Luke was too strong a personality to arrive at mediocre decisions from definite conclusions. In Luke's place, he personally would have dug out an alibi from somewhere. That's what he has done, after all; because what has happened to Luke fifteen years ago had happened to them all equally, but didn't affect them all equally. It has been a collective incident of the sort which always accompanies scientific experiments, for which the responsibility is born by an anonymous thirst for knowledge, not by one or another individual scientist, but Luke had simply seized part of the responsibility on himself. After the 'incident', Luke has angrily parted company with Professor Lieberman, who quite logically had defended his programme of genetic virus metamorphosis, (PGMV), science in principle, all of them individually, and especially Luke. The problem was that Luke didn't want to be defended. It was as if his own asserted blame was something precious which Lieberman wanted to take away from him. He had behaved towards his own personal 'wound' like some primitive healer who refuses all drugs so that he may be healed by nature. Lieberman and his, John's, defense of their scientific research, was for Luke no more then a bandage, a bandage which covered the wound but didn't heal it. Beneath the bandage the wound went on festering. It could only be healed by its own organism, the flesh in which it had opened up. A year after Luke had left Lieberman's team, Matthew Laverick had gone too. He had been scared, most probably, least one of 'Lieberman's ennobled and perfected mutant viruses' should wander into one of his own precious personal organs, which were highly necessary for his successful penetration into high society. He had received some kind of inheritance and left Lieberman to open his consultancy in Harley Street. He still used to see him at banquets at which, on behalf of the ITM he was obliged to sit and suffer. He was now Sir Matthew Laverick, Chief consultant at a number of clinics and a specialist in the hopeless field of allergies; in short, a charlatan within the bounds of law. His consulting rooms were a kind of mixture of an occult temple and an interplanetary spaceship. Better than anyone else, he thought, he had understood the magic of spells, our obsession with rituals. But then Matthew had never really been one of them. But Coro Mark Deveroux had. She had left suddenly. One day she had just disappeared. He had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. It was something that happened to him whenever he thought of Coro. A feeling like a yearning for one's native places which one will never see again. And that was after so many years of happy married life with Moira, their two children and the real love he felt for them. While he had been working with Coro he had not been conscious of feeling anything more towards her than loyalty and admiration. He had known better only after she had gone and he had felt the pain of a man who is robbed while kneeling in church. Afterwards, he had found out that as a member of the Pasteur Institute, she was in Africa with some French epidemiological team. He alone had remained with Lieberman's programme of genetic engineering. The recombination of the DNA of one particular variant of Rhabdovirus was close to a decisive break through into

the unknown. According to Lieberman, the field opened up by the microbiologists Delbruck, Schrödinger, Crick, Watson and others, was like the first pioneers' clearing in the Indian West as compared with a present-day mechanized farm. Only then had the premature feeling of fear which could be felt in the letter from Delbruck, Francis Crick and James Watson become real: 'If your structure of the DNA molecule is accurate, we have the feeling that Hell will open up before us and that theoretical Biology will enter upon its most tumultuous phase.' It had not come to that. One day Professor Frederick Lieberman disappeared, and with him the cultures of the recombined virus and the notes concerning the project. Enquiries led nowhere. Rumour had it that he had been killed because of the discovery which it was thought would radically change the structure, position and mission of mankind. Such rumours of the forthcoming biological revolution were, course, exaggerated. He knew that more than anyone. He had been one of the front-line revolutionaries in the field of molecular biology. A part of that 'nucleus' as Lieberman liked to call him, Luke, Matthew and Core (Mark), one of the 'evangelists' of the Messiah, Lieberman as his detractors said. There was no question of any biological metamorphosis of the human race. The road towards it had only just become clear. They'd hardly begun to move along it. It was unknown as yet where it would lead to. It could be predicted – yes, discerned – perhaps, but known – certainly not. Lieberman's body had never been found. Nor had any signs appeared in the scientific world that anybody was in possession of his discovery. He himself had personally gone through all sorts of temptations in respect of the fate of Lieberman's experimental programme. There had been, he remembered, a strong sense of internal urgency, aided by external pressure from Government agencies, to continue the professor's researches. He had been Lieberman's collaborator, the co-author of the majority of theoretical works which had given the principle basis of the programme. And he had participated closely in the laboratory processes. There was no question of rights of succession. The only question had been whether he was capable of handling such explosive wealth. In the general picture of the recombination of DNA were a lot of dark, unpleasant and totally absent areas, about which only Lieberman perhaps, had any concept. Unfortunately, he hadn't shared it with him. Mistrust, aloofness, mysteriousness were derivatives of Lieberman's alchemic, para-scientific nature. He was more like Merlin, Caliostro, Helvetius than Pasteur, Erlich or Koch. So he would have been capable in practical terms of coping with Lieberman's programme despite the inevitable drawbacks caused by the loss of his papers and the absence of his ideas, but he would not have been able to bring it to a conclusion the sense of which he could have bee certain of beforehand. So he refused.

Since then, in addition to his experiments with his own genetic projects, he had arrived at a certain philosophy, a particular concept of nature, and of man's role in it, without which, he was convinced even successful genetic engineering was nothing more than stumbling around in a minefield. This concept, set out in his books 'The Revolt of Nature'. 'Nature and intelligence', and 'Prometheus – Universality or Functionality', was in part a development of the Lieberman doctrines but with the opposite generalizations, and partly a completely original point of view. Lieberman, as far as he had disclosed, and as far as he, John, had understood him, had followed in the aristocratic steps of Julian Huxley, J. Rostand, Vendel, and a highly rationalized Nietzsche. Like John Rostand, he dreamed of a being who would understand what man cannot, capable of something of which man is not capable, which would be as similar in its relationship to homo sapiens of the 20th century as the latter to Neanderthal man; of a super-being; of God, in fact. For him Nature was a concept which was the antithesis of Intelligence, something which intelligence had to conquer, subordinate, change radically. Accommodate to its needs, modify itself also as intelligence. (…) And it was here that he found the natural application of genetic engineering. The defense of nature was a universal, rather than a specialist task. In the system of things, this was a contradiction. The position of human kind of being was contradictory, and for that reason, unsatisfactory, until such time as it itself should be subjected to specialization. By means of the recombination of DNA, the general, contradictory and wasteful function of man would be transformed into a series of derived specialized and useful once. People would no longer be divided into races, classes, and perhaps not even into sexes, but - functions. In the specialized structures of the Cosmos, man would find his true and functional place. For Professor Lieberman the world was a beehive in which naturally or artificially swarmed ever more advanced, powerful and more perfect bees. For him the world was a beehive in which swarmed ever more definite, more limited, and therefore more perfect functions. Of course, he thought, there must be reasonable limitations. There would have to be a maximum of specialization which could not be exceeded. Otherwise, one would simply arrive at a man who could wash dishes perfectly but would be biologically incapable of drying them. In any case, he thought nature needed neither Men nor Non-Men. It doesn't matter whether they only knew how to treat trees perfectly or to destroy them perfectly. Nature needed neither today's Universal-Man, nor Lieberman's Super-Man of tomorrow, together with the necessary legion of Sub-Men. Nature simply needed a cohabiter. He looked at his watch. 09.50. Christ, he thought. A police Rower slid soundlessly along the line of motionless vehicles. A policeman sat behind the wheel but alongside him was a gray-haired man in civilian clothes. John wound down the window of his car.

'What's going on?' 'Everything's under control, Sir!' shouted the man in civilian clothes. 'I wouldn't say quite everything. I should have been at the Airport half an hour ago and I'm still hanging around here!' 'I'm sorry about it.' 'That won't get me to the Airport.' 'Superintendent Warden. Metropolitan Police, Heathrow.' The gray-haired man introduced himself. 'Listen Superintendent, I don't want to make a fuss, but there are two people ill at Terminal 2. There's a possibility that they may be infectious. I've been called in to examine them. My name is Hamilton, Dr. John Hamilton of the Institute of Tropical Medicine.' 'What exactly is happening at the Airport?' asked the Superintendent. 'If you let me through, perhaps I'll be able to tell you,' John said bitterly. 'Who called you in?' 'Dr. Komarowsky of your Medical Centre,' 'All right, Dr. Hamilton. Just hold on a moment. We'll get in touch with the Centre by radio.' The Rower slid on another ten yards and then stopped. 'What did you do, did you bribe him?' The voice was deep and nasal, beside his car stood Louise Sorenson. As always, he thought, strikingly beautiful, strikingly pneumatic, strikingly well turned out. From her emanated a kind of Nordic freshness. 'How do you do it, John? I'm hellishly late!' 'Of course you are if you're walking.' 'I left the taxi back there. I thought I'd be able to get through but they're not letting anyone even move.' 'If they let me through, they'll let my assistant through with me, Dr. Sorensen.' 'Can you really smuggle me in?' 'Get in,' said John Hamilton. 'I'll try, but on one condition.' 'Anything you like.' 'That when you leave Daniel the first person you telephone is me.' 'Be careful.' she laughed. 'It could be sooner than you think.' 'But never soon enough.' Louise Sorensen got into the car. 'He's quite mad. Do you know the latest thing he's thought up?' Dr. John Hamilton didn't have time to hear what it was that their mutual friend Daniel Leverquin had thought up. The Rower reversed back to the Porsche. Superintendent Warden informed him that he could go through to the Airport. He passed off Louise Sorensen as his assistant who had been in a taxi behind him. It was an idiotic explanation, but the Superintendent's thoughts were exclusively occupied with the Russians, he was not interested in other kind of stupidity. Minutes later, Dr. John Hamilton was handing over the keys of his Porsche to a policeman for

him to park it in front of the Queen's Building when the road was cleared. Five minutes later, to the accompaniment of the police Rover's wailing siren, he and Louise Sorensen were driven up to the door of the Medical Centre in Conway Passage, where Dr. Luke Komarowsky and Chief Nurse Logan were waiting for him. Within ten more, he was in the Isolation Unit with the patients from the flight from Rome. Two were the nuns from Lagos in Nigeria. The third was an Alitalia air hostess from Flight AZ 320 from Rome. Louise Sorensen hurried to check in at the BA desk on the ground floor of Terminal 2 and received her boarding card. There she was told that the flight for Oslo was delayed indefinitely. The girl at the desk couldn't say how long she would have to wait. She wandered round the most likely restaurants, buffets and bars in the Terminal, and all the places where she ought to have found Daniel, wherever one left him. He was nowhere to be found. She didn't think he would have already gone through to the Transit Lounge. That would have been contrary to 'the rules of the game' which he himself had ordained. He had said that he would not go through Passport Control until after the final call for passengers to Oslo. At least that was what had been stated in the plan for 'Operation Dioscuri', around which his new novel was built. Personally, Louise Sorensen would have liked Daniel to rely rather more on his imagination, as other writers did. They usually had very little personal experience of the things they were writing about, apart from the occasional interview, or telephone conversation with people who had experienced such things at first hand. At first, of course, she had rather liked the idea of 'true-life experience', a recreation of the psychological frame of mind of the protagonists of the story, in the physical space in which it was supposed to have happened. She herself had agreed to follow Daniel's instructions and take part in this 'game'. Sometimes, she had even felt as if she was one of his heroines. But later, unfortunately, Daniel's demands had become more and more ambitious and consequently more and more bizarre. She had particularly objected to his insistence that she should dress in accordance with what was taking place in the current novel. Today, for example, she had been supposed to travel to Oslo dressed as a nun. It had never occurred to her for a moment to comply. She had put on a beige suit. He would have to be content with the gold cross she had round her neck; and imagine all the rest. It shouldn't be too difficult for him. After all, he was a writer. She hesitated for a moment in front of the Planter's Bar on the upper gallery of Terminal 2. Opposite her she saw a black edged notice on a board: IN THE INTEREST OF HEALTH AND HYGIENE, ONLY GUIDE-DOGS AND DOGS TRAVELLING WITH THEIR OWNERS ARE ALLOWED INTO THE TERMINAL. One of the things which most irritated her personally, together with the gloomy, church-like

pubs, airless and lacking the open terrace view out onto the Paris boulevards, was the ban on taking animals in and out of the country. She couldn't take her dog anywhere outside England. Or rather she could, but on her return, she was obliged to leave him in the R.S.P.C.A. quarantine for animals for six months. Where in heaven's name, she thought, was Daniel? Could he already have gone through into the Transit Lounge? There was not a single empty seat in any of bars or restaurants in the Terminal. Perhaps that had obliged him to alter the timing which he had planned for 'Operation Dioscuri'. In fact, while she was still looking for him, he was sitting in the foyer of the Transit Lounge in front of a double whiskey and writing down in his note book inside the camouflage of the prayerbook's cover what was going through Pollux's mind as with one ear he waited for the first explosion of Castor's bombs, and with the other, the last call for passengers to Oslo. Luke had remained behind in the Treatment Room. He didn't feel hurt that John had not called him into the Isolation Room. He had briefly outlined to him the course of the illness and the patients' general data as far as they had been able to get hold of the information in the short time available. It was quite natural from a professional point of view that John should want to form his own opinion without any external suggestions. If anybody could find out what the disease was, it would be John, he thought. The first to be taken ill had been Mother Teresa; then Sister Emilia. It was as if a pathological pattern had already been established. In the given circumstances, and bearing in mind the more dangerous alternatives, the most favourable one. Both nuns came from the same monastery. The infection, therefore, would eventually be traced back to the same Nigerian source. But then the hostess from the Alitalia flight from Rome had joined them. The apparently established pathological pattern no longer held water. In the last few weeks, the Alitalia air hostess, Anna Maria Rossellini, had flown exclusively on the Stockholm route. She hadn't been anywhere near Nigeria. Nigeria had come to her. For it was she who had taken care of Mother Teresa on board the aircraft. She could only have caught the illness from her and the new pathological pattern which was now taking shape was anything but 'the most favourable in the given circumstances'. It was in fact the worst possible. A highly contagious disease of an uncertain nature and unknown infectious properties could cause havoc of the first order at an anthill-like international airport at the height of the tourist season, especially one that had not jet recovered from the delays caused by several hours of bad weather; it could even mean the coup-de-grace for the whole airport system, whose organization resources were already stretched to breaking point. There was no doubt about it. Whatever IT was, it had been transmitted. Otherwise, the condition of the hostess Rossellini could have no logical explanation. Hell, what am I saying? IT hadn't been just transmitted, IT was virulently contagious. If Rossellini had spent at most two and a half hours with Mother Teresa, the time of their flight from Rome to London, and if she had been infected when she helped the nun on board the aircraft then barely two and a half hours had been sufficient for the first symptoms to appear! But it was more probable that the infection had been transmitted when Rossellini had been trying to alleviate Mother Teresa's first seizure. In that

case, the approximate incubation time would be no more than an hour and a half. But that was impossible! There was no disease which was that infectious! It would probably be, he thought, a wild coincidence. Something that only happened once in a hundred years, that people at the opposite ends of the earth should be carrying the germs of one and the same disease to a single place, and that that disease should not be influenza. That is how he should have been thinking from the very beginning. He should have believed in the infectious nature of the disease until the contrary had been proved. Abide by the first rule of medical practice. Self-assured hunches always came back to you. More under the impact of an apparently inexplicable phenomenon than for any logical reasons, he had isolated Mother Teresa's fellow travelers in the First Class Transit Lounge, but that was more or less all what he had done in terms of epidemiological precautions. He had carried out his examination wearing a mask and gloves, which was true, but he had not put on protective clothing. John had not been party to such laxity. He had gone into the Isolation Unit wearing a full protective suit, with a sterile mask over his mouth and nostrils and with rubber gloves on his hands. Moana Tahaman had brought the suit from the medical store. It had been unused, and a special procedure for putting it on had been unnecessary. But as soon as John had begun to put it on, Luke had no longer been in the Treatment Room of the Medical Centre at Heathrow. He was fifteen years younger in Wolfenden House. They had to follow a strictly ordered procedure when getting into the protective clothing in the Experimental Microbiology Laboratory's Isolation Unit. The experimental subjects taking part in Lieberman's programme were anonymous, numbered, designated by figures, each one behind his screen. The protective suits hung on hooks behind the door. John and he each took his own numbered suit in his gloved right hand, they had already put on their masks, and holding it with the opening at the back towards them, put their left arms into the left sleeve, transferred the hanger from it and with its help push their way into the right sleeve. The hangers were then returned to the hooks and they each fastened the other's suit from behind with its thin straps. They covered their hair with surgical caps and pushed their feet into rubber overshoes. Then they wondered towards the screens; John to number 10, he himself to number 9, and disappeared behind them. They have probably both seen the same sight at the same moment, but it was he, Luke, who had been the first to cry out. He could hear that cry in his ears, even now, after fifteen years. He could see himself standing over the rubberized hospital bed and with growing horror looking at SOMETHING which only the previous night had been a human being. The horror of it had catapulted him back to the Treatment Room where John had just finished getting into the protective suit. Moana was fastening it up at the back. His voice sounded strange, stifled by the padding of the sterile gauge on the inside of the mask. 'Are you all right?' John asked, pulling on the gloves. 'As much as I can be,' he said. Here and now.' 'But you weren't here and now a moment ago!'

There was no point in denying it. 'No, I wasn't.' 'You were back in Wolfenden House.' 'Yes.' 'But that was fifteen years ago, Luke. For Christ's sake, fifteen years ago!' 'For me it's just as if it were now, John. All over again, and now.' 'That's just the trouble!' John's voice had difficulty in making itself heard. 'Something that's still here and now, for you is something that for all of us was over fifteen years ago!' Luke looked at Moana. The nurse was setting out the sterile instruments which were needed for Dr. Hamilton's examination on a metal tray. She was accustomed to being just part of the surrounding in the presence of doctors. 'As you wish,' said John and disappeared behind the doors which led into the Isolation Unit. He tried to transform the waiting into work. He sent Moana off to see how many protective suits were available. If the women were infectious, the Unit would soon be full of passengers from the flight from Rome and everybody in the Medical Centre would have to wear a protective suit. Moana's count revealed that there were barely enough suits for half the personnel. They would have to get more from town. He talked with Chief Nurse Logan about sanitary measures. They agreed not to close the main surgery but to get rid of people from the waiting room who were not in urgent need of treatment. If the disease, despite its infectious nature, remained within bounds, the clinic would continue with its normal routine with Drs. Pheapson and Patel in charge; all the other personnel would be occupied with the infection. If the disease spread to a larger number of passengers, the surgery would stop taking in patients and Pheapson and Patel would make the rounds of the terminals. Just like country doctors, he thought. There were still other problems to be sorted out. What was to done with the passengers from Rome of whom it was not known whether they were infected or not? How was the situation to be kept secret from the rest of the Airport, how could they stop it from making the already disorganized life of Heathrow sill worse? From whom did he have to get permission to introduce special quarantine measures? How could such quarantine be organized if and when it became necessary? The infuriated representative of Alitalia, who was disturbed at the expense caused by the continued delay to Flight AZ 320, came through on the telephone; he was followed by the infuriated Head of Information Services who was disturbed about the impatient passengers, and the Director of Operations, who was also infuriated because the aircraft from Rome was in the wrong place. Finally, the General Manager telephoned; he was not infuriated about the delay, but he was disturbed by the Alitalia representative, the Head of Information Services and the Director of Information. Mr. William Townsend was not infuriated. He was depressed. Then Dr. Preston from the BAA Centre at 2 Buckingham Gate telephoned Luke. After half a minute he banged down the receiver. That is how long he needed to be enraged. John had still not emerged.

They had greeted each other as if they had parted yesterday. On the phone he had shown surprise, it could almost be said that he had seemed pleased. When they had shaken hands, there had been nothing left either of the surprise or of the pleasure at seeing each other again. He had certainly not been conventional; restrained rather, cautious, neutral. And even when they had shaken hands, it had turned out awkwardly. When he thought about it, they hadn't really shaken hands. He remembered that he had stretched out his hand but John had not taken it. Strictly speaking, he hadn't rejected it either. He had made a gesture which had seemed to be quite spontaneous; he had grasped him by the shoulder so naturally that he hadn't even noticed that his hand had remained in the air – empty. Of course, it could have been an automatic movement of sincerity, deeper than a handshake. Or the professional habit of a man who was dealing with deadly viruses. Even a conscious principle of not touching anything with naked hands, which might have come into contact with such a virus. And he, Luke, had such an opportunity if Mother Teresa's illness was infectious. And finally, perhaps John had not forgiven him for leaving Lieberman's programme. Or if he had forgiven him, perhaps he didn't want to put their relationship back on the same footing as it had been before the incident had occurred. If his findings were negative, he thought, if the disease was not contagious, John would take off the protective suit and wash his hands in the Treatment Room. If it was a question of an infectious disease, he would free himself of the suit while he was still in the Isolation Unit. He remembered the procedure from the Wolfenden House. The straps were undone without taking off the coat. One washed one's hands and disinfected them, and then dried them on a towel which was immediately dropped into a hermetically sealed linen bin. Nails had to be cleaned with a sharp brush. Then one took the hanger in one's right hand, pushed it through the neck into the left sleeve and withdrew one's arm without touching the contaminated exterior. The hanger was then transferred to the left hand and the right arm was pulled out in the same way. The coat was hung up on a hook by the door. Finally, as a last precaution, one once again disinfected one's hands. When he had had to go through this procedure for the last time, he had rushed hysterically out of the Isolation Unit at the Wolfenden House and contaminated the laboratory. The laboratory had later been decontaminated. He - never had. He got up, opened the door into the corridor which looked onto the Isolation Unit. He would get to know the verdict earlier. If he heard the noise of the running water with which John was washing his hands, on the other side of the door. The noise which he could hear now. 'Christ almighty!' whispered Moana Tahaman as she too understood. Dr. Hamilton was standing at the door of the Isolation Unit in his protective suit. He was holding the door knob with a

handkerchief. He closed the door and asked dryly. 'Do you have a really hermetically sealed linen bin?'

8. Colonel Alexis Donovan of MI 5 and Colonel Anatoly Sergeyevich Rasimov of the KGB were waiting patiently for the Soviet-British cavalcade, which they had been told had been held up for technical reasons outside the Airport. For Donovan restrain was a way of life. He was a man of whom it was said in the circles of espionage's underground that he would have been surprised by a second bullet even when the first had already killed him. He would have see it as a waste of ammunition. Rasimov was something quite different. He came from the Urals where the all-conquering Mongols had mixed with the blood of his ancestors, as could still be seen from his prominent cheekbones, slanting eye slits and shiny yellow skin; in temperament he was a mixture of mountain bear and steppe fox. No amount of training had been able to stabilize this explosive conglomerate. And it was most unusual for him, thought Donovan, that he should not be worrying about the column's delayed arrival. He had been waiting for some time for Rasimov to explode but nothing had happened. Not even when they had passed by the fully occupied first class Transit Lounge, which according to all the rules of security, should have been as empty as a beggar's cup. He had not wanted to say anything to Lawford in front of the Russian, even though he deserved to be put in his place. He had thought he would make good these lapses after returning from the inspection. But by then the area had already been cleared. He didn't know whether the passengers had gone out to their flight or whether Lawford had realized his mistake. In any case, Rasimov had asked no questions. He had not, in fact, asked questions about any of the oversights, about which both professionally and temperamentally he should have raised hell, ever since he had arrived in London as the Soviet delegation's security chief. That was very strange, thought Donovan. They knew each other well. For years they had been carrying on a private sporting competition, hidden behind the pitiless espionage war between the two Great Powers. Britain, of course, was no longer particularly great, but she still had an espionage service capable of determining how great the really Great were. Sometimes he would score a point, other times Rasimov. His greatest success had been to cut off the information channel by which Rasimov, as the head of the English section of the KGB, had been pumping Britain's secrets out of her – if nowadays there were still any secrets left – and immediately afterwards he had discovered that in the meantime Rasimov had managed to break through his defense and set up another one. In the

course of time there had developed between them the kind of extravagance friendship possible only between long standing professional enemies. If Rasimov found it necessary to take him into his confidence, he would do it in his own time. He wouldn't try to hurry him. His silence was a friendly invitation which he could accept or decline with the same absence of obligation. They were sitting in one of the provisional VIP lounge in the Transit Hall of Terminal 2. Against the rules of the service, the Russian way, out of large glasses over a morsel, they were drinking vodka clouded with lemon juice. But with Rasimov everything was always outside the rules. Around them, people with nothing to do in waiters' white jackets were hovering enticingly, amongst them there were perhaps even some real waiters. The light had a deadly neon colour, for a protective corridor separated the Airside Gallery from the Lounge. The Airport noise was more muffled here. VIP's were not troubled by the rest of the world. Donovan wondered if VIP's didn't act also as if the rest of the world didn't exist. As if the real live world in fact was not there, that it was a question of some disorganized, chaotic vision which only their negotiations and treaties maintained in so solid a state. "When are we going to see each other again, Anatoly?' he asked in English which the Russian spoke with only a slight accent.'Privately, I mean. Not just through your men after I've caught them.' With no sign of bitterness, Rasimov grinned. 'That's rather rare, I'd say.' 'It's not my fault they turn up less often after that disastrous Zholkov business.' Alexei Lavrenievich Zholkov had been a Soviet 'commercial businessman' in London who by day negotiated to buy the latest models of machine tools and by night tried to buy prototype antiaircraft guns. 'Go easy on the lamentations, Alexis,' said the Russian. 'You'll need them when you find out how many men I've replaced Zholkov with.' 'I've a bullet for them.' I'd keep it for yourself, if I were you. You should treat my people as if they were out of porcelain. Take care of them, treat them well, keep them for their trial, so that when they've been given life you can hand them over to us in exchange for those incompetent amateurs of yours, who we take the same good care of.' 'So you can kill them?' 'There's no other way of getting rid of a spy nowadays. In the good old days of Mata Harry you could at least depend on the enemy to do it for you. Now you have to do it yourself. Otherwise the useless bastards keep being brought back to be exchanged at the frontier every year.' 'To get another useless bastard back in exchange?' 'Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You never know. That's the catch. Since you refuse to do the

work you're paid for, we have to liquidate them ourselves. We can't go on living in the fear that we exchanged them for someone who is sill of some use.' 'It's not likely,' smiled Colonel Donovan. He shared Rasimov's opinion of the abysmal standards of their profession. 'No. I suppose it isn't. But I'm not so sure. You could only be certain as long as spying remained a war of people. And not a trade of information-gathering robots, when without any commercial interest at all, before one's very eyes anything that a captured spy knew could be shaken out of him, and then the flesh and bones flushed down the toilet.' There was a cold, final bitterness in Rasimov's tone which Donovan could somehow not at all fathom. He wondered what was bothering him. 'Don't despair,' he said. 'You'll always have enough of your own men left for the toilet.' 'Of course. In any case, most of them work for you too.' 'Except those who we believe are working for us, but are still working for you.' 'And those we've put in without you knowing, but who we don't know you've found out about and have been feeding us shit back for months.' Donovan raised his glass and said. 'Here's for the noble trade we play!' Donovan's glass clashed heavily against his. 'In any case, the only one which allows us to behave honorably like swine!' His ill-defined mood, thought Donovan, is slowly taking some kind of shape. The Russian was going through a crisis, so much was clear. The question was, was there a way of exploiting it. By Rasimov's own definition that meant 'being like a swine in an honorable way!' Only it was understood that it was all part of their job. Rasimov must suppose that he wouldn't let slip the opportunity. And again that meant that he was partially presenting it to him. 'Listen, Anatoly, don't be so superior,' he said laughingly. 'Ever since Dostoyevsky it's been common knowledge that the Slavs have a soul. At least some of them. Dostoyevsky for certain.' 'All Slavs have a soul. Especially the Russians. But most of them don't make any use of it.' 'And what about us in the West?' 'You don't actually have one. But you don't need a soul. You have first-class technology. If you ever need one, you'll invent something.' 'An artificial soul. Like an artificial kidney.' 'Is it important what kind it is, as long as it works?' Donovan laughed. 'Here, as soon as someone has a revolver in his hand, he thinks he has to fire it. Useful conversations in such situation are fairly rare. I shall miss you.' 'I don't think so,' rejoined the Russian, jokingly. 'On the contrary. I think that one of theses days you'll have more than enough of me.' Could Rasimov have transferred to London as an attaché, he thought. It happened sometimes. Rarely, it was true. Most of the diplomatic personnel of the Eastern Block countries were

recruited from the so-called hard core of internal affairs, secret service and police departments. In the main, they got people from the middle echelons of espionage services. Exceptionally, somebody from 'upstairs' would turn up. A Vishinsly, for example. In the underground war, Colonel Anatoly Sergeyevich Rasimov was for the Russians what a two penny blue Mauritius was for stamp collectors, and anyway, the British Government would never dream of giving their agreement to the Head of the English Section of the KGB, even if Moscow wanted to put him in as a cleaner at the Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. Automatically he adopted an attitude of increased wariness. He was trained not to show surprise. The ability to let nothing surprise you was a basic tenet. For an agent in the field, for all those 'downstairs', a moment of surprise most often coincided with the moment of death. For him, one of those 'upstairs', it meant an irreversible break in your career. In the Secret Service there was no way of going back. You couldn't even mark time on the spot. You either moved forwards or defected. And all such defections, like all processes of dying, as a rule began with a surprise. 'All right, Alexis,' Rasimov leant over the edge of the table at which they were sitting towards him. 'What would you say if I told you I was going to stay in Britain?' Donovan carefully put down the glass onto the shiny surface of the saloon table. He didn't want Rasimov to see that his fingers had begun to tremble. The trained, conditioned reflex which protected him from surprise sprang into action irreproachably. He was not in the slightest surprised. He was stunned with bewilderment. 'Would you believe me?' 'No.' 'Why? I wouldn't be the first defector.' 'The majority of defectors are preceded by definite signs or particular circumstances, sometimes even by negotiations. Most of them can be foreseen.' 'This one surprises you and that's why you can't believe it.' 'You know what surprise means in our job, Anatoly?' 'I'm still alive, aren't I?' Rasimov unexpectedly lent across the table and shook him with his massive palms. The crystal glasses jumped like glass toys. 'And I intend to ask you for asylum! What are you going to do about it?' I'll be damned if I do anything for the time being, thought Donovan. 'All right. Take it easy, Anatoly,' he said in a conciliatory tone. 'When?' 'How do you mean, when?' 'When do you intend coming over?' Before then, he would have time to think about it carefully and come to some considered conclusion. 'I really am asking for asylum.' 'Officially, I suppose?' 'God dam it, Alexis,' snorted the Russian. His volatile temperament was at last making itself felt. 'What exactly are you in this country? A bus conductor or a Colonel in the counter-espionage

service?' In principle, Rasimov was right. Colonel Rasimov represented the jackpot in the life of any counter-espionage agent. The extra-caution hesitation was necessary only in case something went wrong. It allowed him to gain time, to compare the profit and losses of the operation, the involvement with the defector of someone from 'upstairs'. To provide himself with some defense if ten years later it should turn out that the defection was just another 'dirty trick' on the part of the opposite side. In this case, Donovan had no doubts about the Russian's sincerity. He was weighing things up. On his mental scale he was comparing two sides, on the left the significance of the AngloRussian Agreement which such as incident would most probably sabotage; on the right, the value of the Soviet spy network in Europe which would be unmasked as a result of it. The decision in any case was in the hands of the Centre, but it was more than only academic for him personally too. 'There's a procedure to be followed, Anatoly!' 'Screw your goddamn procedure, man!' said Rasimov vehemently. 'It'll cost you your neck. In the end that'll be left of your fine democracy will be procedure, which, of course, it will be for others to make use of. But if you think it will be in Parliament, you're mistaken. It'll be in the toilet. If it's any comfort to you this too could be in Parliament.' 'I meant to say that I've no authority to make any promises in such matters.' 'Then find someone who has. Or is there nobody like that in a democracy?' Just a few hours after the first debriefing session, thought Donovan, all the Soviet spy centers in Great Britain and most of them in Western Europe would be eliminated. And the KGB itself would be obliged to dismantle the rest. It would be out of the question to restore a network of the same capacity for a good ten years. Rasimov looked at him with interest. 'It's really quite incredible! I'm making you a present of a general's rank on a plate, and you're sitting here as if all your ships had been sunk in a storm. For God's sake, I think I deserve thanks from you. I could have gone to someone else.' 'I really wonder why you didn't.' Rasimov laughed. 'I am the head of the English Section of the KGB. I consider that in the first place, I owed you something.' 'Quite a lot,' agreed Donovan dryly. 'The others didn't come into consideration, and I can't stand the Americans. I like their household appliances, but they remind me too much of what we Russians have wanted to be since the time of Peter the Great, and because of which we forever lost what we could have been. You're in decline. My sympathy and the future belong to you.' 'Thanks,' said Donovan. 'That's very kind of you. But I had something else in mind. Why are you doing this only now, at Heathrow? Why didn't you do something about it while you were still in

London?' Rasimov got up from his chair abruptly. 'Hold on, are you beginning the interrogation now?' 'Of course not, I was only…' 'I shall say nothing until my request for asylum has been approved. Everyone knows the rules of the game, Alexis.' 'It was just a private curiosity,' Rasimov sat down. 'They'd have stirred up all hell if I had. This way they'll find out I'm missing when they're in the air. No one bothers to count me. I'm here to count them. When they establish that I'm not there. It'll be too late.' 'For what?' 'I don't know. For everything, I suppose. In any case, from then on, you'll be calling the tune. It won't concern me any more.' Despite his training, Donovan didn't hesitate. In theory it debarred him from reminding a prospective defector of any circumstances which might serve to undermine his wish to defect. It was his primary duty to understate the significance of such factors in the eyes of the defector, or, if that was not possible, to convince him that from their side, they would do everything to see that they were without direct consequences. But Donovan knew Darya Rasimov personally. 'Doesn't it matter to you what will happen to Darya?' 'Darya knows already.' 'I'm not asking what has happened to her; what will happen to her?' 'She will die,' said Rasimov unemotionally. 'You lousy son of a bitch!' said Donovan through clenched teeth. 'Not the way you think, and not the way they would hope. She'll die of cancer. Within a month. Certainly before the autumn.' Rasimov's face had gone pale yellow like a tightly-clenched fist. 'I'm sorry,' said Donovan sincerely. 'The bastards have finished her off, at last. They've been killing her for years and at last they've done it,' Rasimov couldn't look at him, he seemed to be looking past him into his own past, a gloomy phantasmagoric process in which his life had lost itself. 'They have been killing us slowly right from the start, ever since 1917, but we didn't know it. When we realized, we were already in our graves. Dead an buried.' He tried to ease the tension. 'Despite all that, you seem to be fairly alive.' 'I shan't go on living for long unless you move your arse and do something quickly.' Donovan got up. So that was it, he thought, disillusionment in the so-called 'basic truths'. The feeling that you'd been cheated in your very own ideals. And, of course, a typically Slovene

attribution of particular personal guilt from the general, sordid state of the world. (…) 'I'm damned if I can understand,' he said, 'why you Slavs dig around in the clouds for the reasons for every action. Never under your own backside. There always has to be something huge and universal. Never small and personal.' Rasimov smiled. 'You know, Alexis, I happen to consider my own life as a fairly personal thing.' In the centre of the lounge there was suddenly an agitated commotion. The false waiters began to move around anxiously in different directions. The real ones stayed at their places, yawning. The former KGB Colonel Anatoly Sergeyevich Rasimov turned towards the doors. Someone shouted: 'They're coming!' Exactly in time, thought Alexis Donovan who was still a colonel in MI 5. The madness could begin. ***** 'Are you sure?' 'Completely.' Luke was insisting on a confirmation of the diagnosis as if the word they were uttering did not belong to the disease but to John's free will, and that if only they wanted to, it could be eliminated by saying it over and over again, by subjecting it to some kind of harmless restriction. Behind the locked doors of the Medical Centre Treatment Room like so many conspirators, Dr. Luke Komarowsky, its Head and Dr. Jonathan (John) Hamilton went through all the symptoms and one by one eliminated all the other infections whose indications blurred the clinical picture of the true one. The outcome was always the same. The name of the disease was still Hydrophobia. Both of them avoided using the popular name under which the disease for millennium of years, from the first dawning of humanity had afflicted the minds and bodies of the infected and the imagination of the healthy. 'The parasthesis in the area around the wound on Mother Teresa's hand is fully developed,' John summed up the situation. 'With Sister Emilia, it's only just beginning and there's none at all so far on the air hostess Rossellini's hand. Mucus in the throat, nose and mouth passages is apparent in all three, but it secretes in the form of foam only in Mother Teresa. The secretions from the salivary glands are least apparent, of course, in Rossellini.' 'John,' Luke still had some slight hope left. 'Isn't it possible that it might be just a pseudo-form? In Nigeria, the disease is endemic. Everyone knows the symptoms. If one of the monastery dogs had scratched her, her fright might have been enough to have developed the majority of the symptoms of the disease, as if she really had it.' 'Mother Teresa's laryngo-pharyngal spasms are real enough, Luke. The woman really cannot swallow water, her fear is not unfounded. If she even tasted water, she would go into the same convulsions which she suffered at just the sight of the liquid. For the rest, the hydrophobia is only present in the nuns. Rossellini can drink without difficulty.'

'Then perhaps she has something different.' The incident could then be kept within reasonable bounds, thought Luke. The unnatural short incubation period would then no longer have to be taken into consideration. 'Rossellini is still between the prodromal and the acute neurological phase. There's still some time before she reaches revulsion for liquid. And apart from that, in a certain number of cases, there is no manifestation of hydrophobia at all. It's a quite unpredictable disease, Luke, within the framework of a very wide area of symptoms, there can be innumerable variations.' 'But only one outcome?' 'If the virus has broken through to the central nervous system, death is inevitable.' 'You can’t see any possibility at all that you might be wrong?' 'There's just one, but it's no comfort to me at all,' answered John. 'We have to telephone to Dr. Tigori, head of the Infectious Clinic in Lagos to find out how things stand with the dogs at the monastery.' 'I don't see how that would help us to cure these women.' 'For God's sake, Luke, who's talking about curing them?' 'I had the naïve hope that that was the aim of medicine.' 'Who's talking about medicine?' They were once again in the ruins where their last conversation and something of their friendship had been left. The words were the same, but not the time. In the meantime, fifteen years had been wasted. He had come to Heathrow with the vague hope of continuing the conversation where they had broken off and bringing Luke back to research. But he could see now that its very mention sent Luke into convulsions, that he reacted to research as painfully as Mother Teresa to water. 'We're looking for a vector. It's an epidemiological problem, Luke. If we don't know the source of the infection, we risk taking the wrong measures against it. If the dogs at the monastery are alright, then we have to take into consideration the possibility of a Lagos bat.' Luke had no defense left. The facts advanced automatically, indicating the Lagos bat virus. Serologically, it was in the second sub-division of Rhabdovirus according to Murphy's classifications. It has been isolated in 1956 by Boulger &Portefield in the brain of Eidilon Helvum from the Nigerian island of Lagos. It was morphologicomorphogenetically similar to the Macola virus (Ib An 27377), isolated from the extracted womb of a shrew in Ibadan in Nigeria in 1968. 'All right,' he said, 'but that bat lives on fruit. Its pathogenic, it's true, for certain laboratory animals, but it's not been proved that it can cause infections in humans.' 'Because we're not in Germany in 1940, otherwise it would be easy to prove it. Now we had to wait for a nun to finish a fruit which a Lagos bat had bitten into.' John's gravedigger's cynicism bothered Luke, but he understood it. It was the instinctive defense of humanity against the madness of certain professions. 'Do you think that's what happened?' 'Hell, I don't know. I ask myself. In any case, it's possible.' 'Of course we can only know after the laboratory findings.'

'Are you joking? There's no ultra-structural difference at all between those three viruses. Morphologically, all three are bullet-shaped. It's an exceptionally complicated specialist job to differentiate between them. And how do you think we're going to get people to do it when the last free, non-laboratory virus in England was seen when a certain Andrea Milliner, who had been bitten by a dog in India, died in 1981? And are you aware that vaccination with the Lagos virus doesn't immunize against classical Rhabdovirus, and conversely not even the strongest classical anti-serum has saved a single experimental animal, infected with the Lagos bat virus?' 'Yes, I am.' 'Do you also know about the fiasco they had with vaccination in Africa in 1965?' Luke nodded his head. It has been one of those epidemiological errors which leave behind them massive studies, and massive graves. The best vaccine on the market had been administrated. The antigen action was missing. The non-immunized population found itself undefended in the middle of a hellish epidemic. Later it was held that it had been a similar but separate virus, which saved nobody. Naturally, John would have said, research was not supposed to save people but to find out. If it ever got round to saving people, that would be a secondary advantage, an incidental product of knowledge. 'If we make the same mistake with the vaccine, we could start off an epidemiological hell here such as this country has not seen since the Black Death in 1347. I hope you've got the picture.' Yes, he'd got the picture all right, thought Luke. He'd got the picture of the situation, but also about John? In principle, of course, he was quite right, it was better not to treat at all than to treat incorrectly. But he'd be damned if he'd let his Medical Centre be turned into a centre for Rhabdovirus research. You could only look for a treatment by actually treating a patient. In practice, unfortunately, that was the true state of things. The majority of medicines were prescribed to the patients in the hope that they would work for them. If they did, the patients got better. If they didn't – they died. In the meantime the medicine isn't withdrawn. It went on been given, for there were patients who got better. With the same treatment some lived and some died. And Medicine, like it or not, was still primitive searching, a fumbling around in darkness, which was only different from scientific research in that instead of guinea-pigs, it was carried out on humans. 'What are we going to do?' John Hamilton hesitated. He wasn't used to this kind of situation. Research didn't know or recognize the responsibility of practice. It was the job of research to discover all aspects of the use of atomic energy. It was for people to choose amongst them which they are going to use. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been aberrations of use, not at all of discovery. But here it was not some discovery which was expected of him, but its application. And together with that went, of course, the responsibility for its incorrect use - Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

'I don't know. If it were in Iran, or in the Balkans, I would know. Those are episodically specific areas. A doctor there doesn't have to reflect. He immunizes with what he has to hand. If he knows that an animal is the source of the infection, he kills it. It doesn't matter whether it turns out to be diseased or not. He carries out an autopsy on its brain by the FRA method and within five hours whether he is right or wrong. If he's wrong – it's OK. If he's right – it's also OK. But this is England; non-specific, good, old England; non-specific good old in everything, but not in the epidemiological sense. Animals here have civil rights. They can't be killed until they've massacred half a village. And even then, they have to be taken ill and the presence of the virus has to be proved irrefutable.' 'We don't have time for anything like that, John.' 'That's why we're going to behave as if we were in Iran; as if we had to deal with a proven, classical Rhabdovirus.' 'And pray to God that that's what it is?' 'If he exists, he's got to be a hell of a big bastard,' answered John Hamilton morosely. There was really something morbid in their position, thought Luke. They had to pray to God to bring them to face with a form of the most terrible, most lethal, most unusual of human diseases, against which they had only the most flimsy defenses, in order that they might not find out that they were at war with something quite different against which they had no defense at all. 'Do you know the local procedure for such eventualities? Both the positive and negative? Who has to be informed, and who doesn't, who to ask for help and who to avoid?' 'This is an Airport, John, an international wasp's nest of opposite interests and overlapping competence. Don't rely on things moving smoothly.' 'That's all right by me, as long as they move.' If they move, thought Luke, if they get moving at all. There had been no medical crises of such proportions since he had been at Heathrow. He couldn't tell how the ponderous organism of the Airport would react. He could only work from analogy and make a guess. The first, more serious safety measures, caused by the incursion of international terrorism, had met with relatively small-scale hostility. It had been a question, after all, of human lives, and the insurances – under the sun. The Airport had adapted itself to awkward restrictions. But the transportation functions of Heathrow had also gradually, imperceptibly, been subjected to restrictions. A happy working arrangement between Interests and Fear had been arrived at. For something like that there is no hope now. There could be no 'happy working arrangement' arrived at with a disease. Not with one like this. Now too it could be said, of course, that human lives were in danger, but this in no way helped the gloomy prospects for the decimated flight schedule, the heaps of unsold tickets, and the

mountain of freight piling up in the cargo depot, nor did it diminish the enormous costs of maintaining fleets of aircrafts, which in the meantime were bringing in the profits. No, he really could not know how the Airport would react. All this time John had been pedantically enumerating the prophylactic measures, which had to be put into force immediately. He was spontaneously taking charge of the situation and of him, Luke, also. It didn't matter. He had always been a first-class organizer. During their studies even. And there in Wolfenden House, where Professor Frederick Lieberman had been the Messiah of a new biogenetic faith. John with all of them was the first evangelists of its church. They had even become known as Lieberman's evangelists. Luke (Komarowsky), John (Hamilton), Matthew (Laverick) and Mark (Deveroux). Mark had in fact been Coro, the only woman amongst them, but for the sake of the anecdote, they'd given her the name of the last evangelist. John, of course, would only set out the general scheme of the epidemiological protection, decided the medical treatment and try to isolate the virus. Then he would leave, like those medical-professor consultants who once a week breezed through the Clinical Section with the speed of lightening, accompanied by a cloud of white hospital coats and then disappeared. When they had met in front of the Queen's Building, John had told him that he had to go back to town for a conference on which the future of the Institute for Tropical Medicine depended. He would be left on his own to carry out the practical details of John's epidemiological scheme, with the disease, with death. In any case, that was what he had wanted, wasn't it? Pure medicine, practice, getting to actual grips with the disease. Not just with its biochemical formula in a laboratory; with it - personally. With its stench of dead bodies, its painful voice, its deformed appearance, its unpredictable behaviour. With the dark mystery of nature at work, restoring its equilibrium which man had disturbed. Good. He got what he wanted. At last he had something which was not just the thorn in the little Turkish boy's arse, or the chronic hypochondria of the Greek woman with her shabby suitcase of a husband. At last he had a real disease. And he was damned if he knew what to do with it. ***** 'Who is Castor?' For the hundredth time the same question broke through the intolerable clamor of human voices which in the last quarter of an hour had turned the main HQ of Airport Security at Heathrow from a home for retired policemen, espionage veterans, honorably discharged bomb-disposal experts and all those who in the crisis from which the United Kingdom had been suffering from the time of the funeral of Queen Victoria, could not find a job, into a third-class bordello.

The shouting was directed at Pollux, Daniel Leverquin, and Patrick Cornell, who was sitting on a stool in his underwear while his clothing was being searched, and trying to understand what was happening to him. On the other end of it was Major Hilary Lawford, the head of Airport Security at Heathrow. Flushed, his legs spread wide, he was bending over the prisoner, brandishing the open breviary, in which, instead of prayers, was outlined the criminal plans of the international terrorist organization 'Dioscuri' in front of his name. There was no time for the correct procedure. They had not been able to keep the Russians waiting indefinitely at the entrance to the Airport. Warden had sent him a message that he had had to let them through. They were already in the VIP Lounge. The Russians were in the VIP Lounge, but Castor was somewhere in Terminal 2. Only where, for Christ's sake, where, thought Lawford. 'Where is Castor?' Where was Castor, what did he look like, where were Castor's men, what did they look like, where were the bombs placed, how could they be recognized, he had already given answers to all questions, thought Daniel Leverquin, so what else did this man want? Was he mad? His story could be verified. He only had to send over to the bookstall in the Terminal and look at the first shelf where the ten most popular paper-backs in Great Britain were on sale. 'I've told you my story,' he said irritably. Major Hilary Lawford wanted the truth. He didn't want a story. Every villain had his story. It was part of his plan for if things went wrong. If it did there was no story. Only the crime was left. The story was the last way out of a situation when the first had been blocked by the police. This time it was too incredible. Göbels was understood literally. It was true that lies were easier to believe than the truth and the more so the bigger were the lies, but only if they contain at least a grain of average logic. Without logic, even the bare truth was not credible. This blockhead had gone too far. Such slips were not rare. Young people treated their parents as if they were idiots. As if the Authorities were likely to be taken in by such absurd stories. Like this one about a writer at the Airport who was collecting material for a book about international terrorism. 'Who is Castor?' He looked like a clockwork toy whose mechanism was slowly winding down and whose movements were becoming slower and less convincing all the time. 'Where is Castor, you bastard? Where are Castor's men?' Daniel looked at him with sincere interest. He must put a policeman like this in one of his next books; perhaps even in just such a nonsensical situation, always supposing of course, that his 'field research' survived. 'I've told you a hundred times, are you deaf?' 'Say it again!'

'So, you're not deaf!' he said, getting up. 'You're simply mad.' Hilary Lawford despised violence, deeply, sincerely, professionally. He considered it a proof of the incapacity to get at the truth by the superior qualities of Will and Spirit. But these same qualities required time which he no longer had. He looked at his watch. It was 10.10 hours. The take off for the Russians were moved to 10.40. Everything what could happen would happen in the next thirty minutes. The blow hit Daniel Leverquin on the right temple. As he fell, his eyebrow was covered with a spider's web of blood. His left shoulder struck the floor. He fell as if he had no shoulder-blade. He rolled over on his back and raised himself on his elbow, dragging himself backwards to lean against the wall. With his right eye he could make out the blood-clouded outline of a man, like an insect, unable to tear himself off a blood-soaked cobweb. His unharmed left eye sent a clear picture to his brain of a man in uniform who was lifting his foot to kick him in the face. Instinct was quicker than the question of whether what he was seeing was possible. He slid to the left. The shoe cut into the wall. He saw it being lifted again and aimed at his injured shoulder. He lost consciousness. Lawford stopped kicking him in disgust. It was as if his foot didn't belong to him. It didn't. It belonged to the Service. And the Service belonged to time which didn't believe in stories. 'The passengers and the crew of the aircraft from Rome have been quarantined and vaccinated,' enumerated Dr. John Hamilton. 'The technicians who came into contact with the interior of the aircraft also. The patients are to be transferred to the Infectious Clinic at St. Pancreas. There's no hope for the first two. The central nervous system has been completely destroyed. But it's worth having a try with Rossellini. Where did you send the specimens?' 'To the Research Centre at Northwick Park Hospital.' 'I think they use fluorescent antibody technique with the isolation method on mice as a control. Perhaps the electron microscope as well, I don't know. But if we wait for them, the mice will outlast us. With the rapid fluorescent focus inhibition technique at my Institute, we'll get the results within twenty-four hours.' 'If that's soon enough,' said Luke Komarowsky. 'I'll take the samples there myself.' 'You mean the nose, throat and mouth specimens?' 'The urine and saliva too.' 'What do you think about brain biopsy?' 'It's complicated. The cerebral spinal liquid is easier for us. Our enemy now is time. Not the symptoms.' Time holds the key, he thought. Outside the extremes with a lower limit of two weeks and the upper of two years, the incubation period of hydrophobia was between five and eight weeks. Here it has been reduced to just hours. 'Have you looked at their wounds?'

Luke nodded his head. He knew what John had in mind. 'That Sister Emilia's and the air hostess Rossellini's are fresh is not surprising. They were scratched in the aircraft. But although I'm not a forensic pathologist, I'm willing to bet that the wound on Mother Teresa's hand is not more than a day old. When did they leave Nigeria?' Luke looked at the notes he had from Logan. 'Yesterday morning, they took off from Murtal Muhammed Airport in Lagos from Rome.' That means that no more then twenty-four hours have passed from the latest moment that Mother Teresa could have been infected, to the appearance of the first symptoms. And it can't have been more that three hours in the case of Rossellini, given that she must have picket up the virus in the plane. But we both know that there's no contagious infection, not even the most virulent influenza, whose incubation period is shorter than the flight of a Boeing between the two most distant points on the earth's globe. Something like this is impossible even in the most ideal laboratory conditions.' Why not, Luke wondered? In a special laboratory with an unrestricted experimental population, with unlimited possibilities for biological combinations? The Earth itself, for example? Human ideas about the Earth, even after the acceptance of the solar theory, were incorrigibly pompous. Human ideas about the cosmos were incurably anthropocentric. But how true were they? Was it really true that only man, with his immortal soul, had been given the right to experiment with other living beings? Was it in fact true that only he could, was allowed to, and knew how to become aware of his truths by means of the suffering, the misfortune and death of others? Was it only he in so-called laboratories who kept the cruel victims of his thirst for knowledge? Could it be that even man's birth was only someone else's laboratory, people – only someone else's experimental animals on which some advanced civilization with a human indifference to life, was testing its intergalactic insecticide and that their higher mammal population down here was experiencing it as more and more terrible illnesses. Of course that's what the Earth could be. That's what mankind could be. For what in the Solar system is man, in another system could be an insect. And a persecuted insect here could be a master race somewhere else. Ecology did not acknowledge universal supremacy, and biology didn't recognize anyone's right to be the dominant life-form for ever. That would be a reasonable way of explaining devastating epidemics, to date interpreted as spontaneous manifestations of an unknown mechanism. Moses' Biblical pestilence, the black Death of 1347, which by 1350, only three years of experimentation with the bacillus Pasteurella Pestis, carried off a third of all Europeans, forty million human monkeys had been laid low by extraterrestrial inoculation with Spanish influenza in the early years of the twenties of our century, and then the laboratory-like regularity of Chinese epidemics, the volcanic eruptions of mortal infections amongst the vertebrates, and why not the three patients at Heathrow Airport.

The disappearances of Atlantis, of the ancient Mediterranean civilizations, of the Aztec Empire, would all be explained and the termination of contemporary cultures could be predicted with scientific accuracy as can be foretold to a minute the fate of laboratory animals who have outlived their experimental purpose. Luke smiled wryly. He could hear the answer coming to him from someone on the other side of the Milky Way as if he wore some sentimental idiot who was against all vivisection. 'For God's sake, what's all the fuss about; they're only people, after all!' It was at that moment that the bolt on the door of the Treatment Room began to be rattled noisily from outside. Luke opened the door. Moana Tahaman and Dr. Pheapson were standing beside Chief Nurse Logan. She was pale and confused-looking and her white coat had a tear in the right sleeve. Luke had a sudden feeling of horror. He looked at Moana Tahaman but her coat showed no signs of a struggle. He introduced Dr. Hamilton to them. Logan was silent, allowing Dr. Pheapson to speak. Indignantly, he informed them that there had been an incident in the Transit Lounge of Terminal 2. He couldn't say exactly what had happened. Dr. Komarowsky, if he so wished, could find out more about it from the AS men who had gone in and who had summoned him, Dr. Pheapson, to take care of the injured. Luke relaxed. At last some good news. The first since the aircraft from Rome had landed. It was almost pleasant to hear that people had begun to lose their heads for good old healthy reasons, because of some administrative error, because of the endless delay in flight departures, and not because of sickness. That they should become maddened because they were reasonable and not because some foul virus had taken control of the command point in their brains. 'When they have to wait for a long while, people get drunk and there are always unfortunate incidents,' he said, with lively understanding. Dr. Pheapson held up his hand. 'I wouldn't say they're drunk. Drugged, perhaps, but I don't think so. At all events, there injuries are trivial and it's not that I wanted to consult you about, Dr. Komarowsky.' He kept stubbornly to a Victorian politeness, even though Luke annoyed him with his choice vulgarities. 'That is if you have the time, of course.' 'I haven't just now, Pheapsy,' the deformation of names was one of them. 'Come back later.' 'I said that the wounds of those injured are trivial, but not their general condition. I found two of them in apparent epileptic fits.' Luke gave a frightened look in the direction of John Hamilton. 'I suppose that in the General Transit Lounge there are only departure passengers?' he asked calmly. 'Not those who have just arrived?' 'No, apart from two passengers who are changing flights on an international route,' answered Luke.

'Dr. Pheapson, do you perhaps know where those two are going to?' 'To New York, Dr. Hamilton,' said Logan. 'Wait a minute,' interrupted Luke nervously. 'Transatlantic flights start from Terminal 3.' 'These two are passengers from Rome, doctor.' 'What are you talking about, Logan? How can they be passengers from Rome? The arrivals from Rome are isolated in the First-Class Transit Lounge!' 'Not any more.' Logan dropped her eyes. 'Major Lawford had them transferred to the General Transit Lounge.' 'But why, in the name of Christ, why?' 'Because of the Russians.' 'The bloody idiot!' Luke swore. 'The bloody Russians!' 'Dr. Pheapson,' John asked. Even he was beginning to show a certain impatience. 'Where are your patients now?' For a brief instant Dr. Philip Pheapson felt and rejected the attractive possibility of not answering the question. Although his patients were no concern of this intruder Hamilton, the news of a tropical infection at the Airport made it somehow necessary for him to know. 'Here, in the Medical Centre Surgery.' 'Transfer them at once into the Isolation Unit. Use procedures for a maximum infectious condition; coats, masks, gloves, everything that goes with it.' Dr. Pheapson opened his mouth to protest, to ask in the first place for an explanation, what right had this unknown man to give orders here, and that in a tone which could hardly be distinguished from the military, but Luke stopped him short. 'Do it, Pheapson. Don't ask anything. Just do it.' 'Sister Logan,' John Hamilton turned to the Chief Nurse. 'See to it that the Surgery is disinfected with the strongest substance available.' 'Yes, Dr. Hamilton.' 'For God's sake, Komarowsky, what's happening?' shouted at last even Dr. Pheapson. 'Rabies, Dr. Pheapson. Rabies is happening,' said Dr. Luke Komarowsky. 'We have got canine rabies at Heathrow.'

9. 'Rabies? It's not possible. You can't be serious!' At the end of the ad hoc conference of doctors in the Medical Centre, and despite Dr. Hamilton's dramatic report abundantly supported by Luke's interruptions, Dr. Pheapson was still not convinced. It seemed to him that such medieval abomination just didn't happen in a civilized country. 'And why not, Pheapson?' Luke pushed him towards the door. He avoided touching him with his hand. He pushed a ruler into his chest. Dr. Pheapson angrily pushed the ruler aside. 'Because this isn't Poland, Komarowsky! Because in Britain rabies has been wiped out!' 'Statistics wiped out, Pheapson. But Rhabdoviruses, evidently, don't read the annual bulletins of your Ministry of Health. The poor little bastard viruses don't know that the United Kingdom is rabies free and that you can't become rabid like the rest of the poor bloody world… And now go and do your job! Move your arse! And don't go trumpeting it around! People will get to know in good time what they need to know!' 'And what is it that they have to know at all?' asked Dr. Cunningham. 'For the moment, even we don't know that,' said Hamilton gloomily. 'But I'm certain we soon shall.' Dr. Patel, Dr. Cunningham, Dr. Johnson, Chief Nurse Logan and Moana Tahaman followed the rebellious Dr. Pheapson out of the room. Luke was tempted to keep Moana back and then send her to some neutral task. If he could think up a convincing enough reason perhaps he could send her to London with Hamilton. But in front of the all-seeing Logan, it would have been too transparent. He would have to wait for a more favourable opportunity, he thought. John lit a cigarette and offered one to Luke. He noticed that Luke's hand was shaking. Just like half an hour after the incident in Wolfenden House, then too he had tried to calm him down with a cigarette. 'Do you still smoke Papastratos?' asked Luke. It had been Core Leveroux who had introduced Lieberman's team to the Greek cigarettes, and they all had been addicted to it. 'When I can get them.' 'Coro always managed to find them.' John didn't answer. 'Do you know what's happened to her?' 'I think she's in Africa.' 'And Matthew?' 'He got the O.B.E. He has consulting rooms in Harley Street and is coining money by persuading the native that he can cure their allergies.' 'Do you see him at all?' 'When I have to.' Both of them knew that the conversation was no more than a subterfuge. They were talking in

order to collect their wits and acclimatize themselves to the situation. It was hellishly difficult to do, and to some extent futile. As soon as they could get used to one situation, it would change. One patient had turned into three. Three had become five. What until a short time before had been only an unpleasant incident involving canine rabies, was slowly taking on the shape of an epidemic. 'It's much more serious than I had imagined, Luke. It's up to you to see that the Airport Management knows what it's up against; that there's no chance at all now of avoiding interruptions in air traffic. And there's no point in transferring the patients to London. First of all we have to see if it's a question of a limited infection or an epidemic.' 'There is no sense to it, John,' Luke wanted to remain logical. He couldn't accept the apparently bewildering illogicality of what confronted them. 'In the strictly epidemiological aspect, there's no such thing as an epidemic of rabies. There are scattered outbreaks of infection, which are called - infectious incidents. In episodically specific areas, Russia, Iran, the Balkans, an infected carnivore, a wolf or a fox, bites a domestic dog which then attacks ten or so people. The dog is killed. Rhabdovirus is found in its brain. A definitive diagnosis is made. The people who have been bitten are treated or die. Others, who simply came into contact with the dog, are vaccinated. And that's the end of it. There are, of course, isolated cases of transmission of rabies from one human to another…' 'More then are usually supposed.' 'All right. I still never heard of a case where the only way the virus is transmitted is between humans. For God's sake, rabies isn't cholera!' 'I imagine you're not quite up to date, but all the signs indicate that we're at the beginning of a mutation crisis of nature. The viruses and bacilli of defeated diseases, of which the majority degenerate into the endemia of scarlatina, typhus, malaria, cholera, even the plaque, for some long time have been evincing symptoms of regeneration in new biochemical properties, new morphologic physiological structures, resistant to the old serums. From influenza, the diluted descendant of Spanish flu which after the First World War decimated Europe, nowadays, one hardly sneeze, but that doesn't mean that next year we shan't be dying from it. There are many branches of the rabies virus of which we know nothing. We only heard of the bat virus in 1956, of the Macola Ibandan one in 1968. Man is progressing, that's true, but nature is also progressing. the plague, typhus, weren’t always in existence. Diphtheria didn't come down from the trees with us. Mankind and viruses are a part of the same evolutionary process…' 'But they follow certain rules of the game, John.' 'The rules are of our making. Nature keeps to them only until they change. We don't know the mechanisms of change, nor shall we ever know them. For those mechanisms, as we understand them, as logical rules, to which everything is subject, just don't exist in nature. Nature knows only – incidents. We are condemned to fumbling around it in the dark.' We were fumbling around in the dark in Wolfenden House too, thought Luke. And then out of that darkness, in which virus and man coupled, there came out into the light SOMETHING which had almost made him lose his mind.

'I suppose that the whole of the Transit Area of Terminal 2 has to be quarantined off and vaccinated?' 'That also means the postponement of all flights from that Terminal and the transference of incoming aircraft to the other Terminals. Can you get that done?' Luke shrugged his shoulders. 'I don't know. I'll believe it when I see some of the people here moving their fat behinds. I'd have much more clout, of course, if I could quote your authority. But I haven't the right to detain you.' John Hamilton smiled. 'Do you know why I'm in such a hurry to get to that Conference?' 'No.' 'To ask for money, from those same fat behinds, for my Institute, to free these islands of pathogenic viruses. And now, could there be any better proof that I need that money then by putting the most dangerous of them on the table in front of them.' 'I suppose you realize what consequences you might be letting yourself in for?' 'One of the best would be that on the basis of demonstrable success here I could get them to agree to give me the money.' 'And the worst?' 'That I get the money too, only for the opposite reasons.' He was prepared for battle. It was his war. The war which he was trained for. During the last months, he had considered going to Asia or Africa, where Coro Deveroux had gone, where the war had bee going on for centuries. But the war had been quicker and had come to him. And the disease had come to Luke Komarowsky. Rabies, of course, was not exactly what he had in mind when he had complained of the medical monotony of Heathrow. Pneumonia, with moderate complications and a few left-over focal points of general practice would have been enough to make him again into a doctor. Rabies was a somewhat exaggerated answer to his wish. For months he had been spiritually lost, wandering around in a morass, in which first Ian, then Moana had lit his path like deceptive will-o-the-wisps, as too had been his nostalgia for Poland, or for real medicine. Rabies had taken the decision for him. His written resignation to the British Airport Authority was rejected even before it had got to anybody's desk at Buckingham Gate. They were silent. The noise of the Airport, which was moving into the mature part of the day, was growing. Nobody had ever heard the noise made by a virus and its penetration through a human body, nor could it be supposed that it made any. But id it had existed and had been audible to the human ear, it must have been something like the roar of an earthquake in which the world was destroyed. ***** The noise could also be heard in the Headquarters of Heathrow Security, but Daniel Leverquin was not able to decide where it came from, whether it originated from aircrafts or from the blood which disturbed by Lawford's deadened blows was roaring through his ears. He was loosing control of his nerves. Left for a moment in peace - Lawford was having a smoke and waiting for the result of the search of the decorative palm tree, in which, according to the information in the false breviary, the weapons had been concealed – he could feel that something was very wrong with his second plan. It simply wasn't working. Just like the first one.

The first has been, at least at the beginning, to make use of the principle of barter to obtain some benefit from the damage. When they had seized hold of him without giving him any time to explain, he had known at once that it had been the fair-haired tourist with whom he had collided on the movable walkway between the tube and Terminal 2 who had denounced him. The misunderstanding about the sketches in the breviary had been truly farcical. The Airport Security men had not shared that opinion. That had made it still funnier. On the spur of the moment he had decided to explain the situation. If he was careful and didn't commit any real offence, here was a chance for him to find out about police techniques in much greater depth than from any books. At first, everything had gone as planned. He had answered the questions ambiguously, giving the machinery time to warm up and demonstrate all its secrets. He had withstood the first blow in the face. After the second, which had split his ear, he had been more hesitant. The procedure was becoming monotonous. The only changes to be noted were in the kind of blows. But he wasn't interested in boxing as an art. He simply wanted to find out about police behaviour. He didn't want to experience it. What the hell was the point of confessing if it wasn't to save one's own neck? He admitted the truth, and immediately he found himself in a situation where he was obliged to ask himself what was the point of the truth if no one believed it? The bastards just laughed in his face. It never even occurred to anyone that he was telling the truth. Part of the blame for this he accepted, but the lion's share of it had to be put down to that German idiot who completely erroneously had seized upon the contents of his breviary. For these maniacs here, truth and lies had exactly the same value. He had to find out about everything he wrote of at first hand. When he had decided to write a novel about terrorists who mounted an attack on an international airport – the Russians had somehow forced themselves into the action later – in order to create havoc in international relations and ferment revolution, Heathrow had been a natural choice. He had sketched it, made notes, worked out everything that he could get to at the Airport, verifying, incidentally, that most of the strictly guarded secrets came into this category. He had given Lawford the names of two BAA employees who had helped him with his enquiries although he had felt this to be a betrayal of loyalty, but written it off as one of those necessary betrayals which save lives, The employees, unfortunately, did not corroborate his statement. The swine had told Lawford by telephone that they had never even heard of Daniel Leverquin. He had tried to explain to Major Lawford that his method was nothing new, that it was used by many novel writers. But Major Hilary Lawford had steadfastly refused to be drawn into the muddy waters of a writer's technique. He couldn't find anything particular of interest to him in it. If he wasn't a terrorist, the man's method could only be qualified as insanity. And he didn't believe in madmen. People only escaped into madness when they came before a judge. While they were killing people they regularly fired their guns with perfect sanity. Apart from that, the books which at the express wish of the prisoner, had been brought from the shelves of the Airport W.H.Smith, didn't prove anything. They didn't have his picture on the cover, nor was the writer's name his. Even with Louise, there had been a hitch. They should have met in the Transit Lounge of

Terminal 2 just as Helen and Pollux were supposed to meet in the novel before the flight for Oslo. She had her passport in the name of Louise Sorensen, which could be believed. (For his, in the name of Daniel Leverquin had immediately been judged to be forged.) She was the daughter of the Norwegian Ambassador who every year presented London with the Christmas tree for Trafalgar Square. He was sure that Louise, and that damn Christmas tree would be enough to identify him. Even that had not held up. Lawford's men, for some unknown reason, had not allowed him into the Transit Lounge, and those already in the Transit Lounge had reported that there were no nuns to be seen. There had been two, but they had arrived from Rome and had immediately been taken off to the Airport Hospital. Louise had evidently come to the airport in her usual clothes, not as they had agreed, and now nobody could recognize her, while Lawford stubbornly refused to make use of the loudspeaker system and put out a call for her. He was afraid in case the woman might starts shooting. There was nothing he could do against such logic which was based on the belief that Louise was armed, and that the detectors at the Passport Control never worked properly. Lawford stretched and threw the end of his cigarette onto the floor, crushing it heavily with his heel. Daniel wondered why it was that policemen never used ashtrays. He had no time to take this interesting thought any further. He had to watch out for Lawford's hands and think up an answer to the question: 'Where is Castor?' The man with gray hair and the lined face of a chronic invalid whose left temple was covered with sticking plaster was passing through the crowded hall of Terminal 2. He had gone round the desk of all the Airlines on the ground floor, waited in front of the Ladies' toilets, passed through both the restaurants. Everywhere was full, all the chairs were occupied, the sofas packed with bodies, the passengers jammed with luggage. He hadn't seen little Sue anywhere. He was afraid she might be already in the Transit Lounge and out of reach. He had to see her. He quite simply knew that that little girl, Sue Jenkins, and the nice little dog from his vision in the Medical Centre were in some way linked, or that they soon would be, that both of them, Sue and the dog, were in some way also related to his nightmares in which, at the bottom of an icy labyrinth full of human excrement covered with frost, a shadow was waiting. He sensed that Sue would lead him to the dog, and the dog to the shadow, and that then he would find out why it was he was at Heathrow. In the hall he was jostled by the impatient crowds of people. Further delays in the flight departures had made them still more impatient and aggressive. The increased presence of the Metropolitan Police and the Airport Security men had built up tension. He heard that they had taken over the Terminal because of some Russians or other who were about to fly out from the Airport. He didn't believe it. He suspected that they were still

looking for him. He soon realized that the police's attention was directed towards clergymen. He saw them quite unceremoniously bundling off a large group somewhere or other. He wondered whether the world had not once again begun one of its religious wars. It wouldn't have surprised him. In this world, nothing surprised him. At the Information Desk he was told that Air France passengers were already in transit, but that the flight had again been postponed indefinitely. Somehow he had known that that would be the case and that Sue Jenkins would not fly off before seeing him again. He didn't know how that would come about. They only let people with tickets into the Transit Lounge. Any tickets for Europe could get him in there, but he didn't have one, nor the money to buy it. And then, quite by chance, he noticed something which as far as tickets were concerned at least, was some consolation for him. They weren't even allowing into the Transit Area people who had tickets any more. From the Transit Lounge came a sharp stream of cold air which, it seemed, no one but he could feel. It was the same cold which the little dog had been giving off in his dream in the Medical Centre. Did that mean that with Sue in the Transit Lounge there was also the dog? ***** Both Daniel Leverquin and Major Hilary Lawford had placed their greatest hopes in the search of the decorative palm tree. When the idiots saw there were no weapons hidden there, that the weapons were only a literary fiction, they would at last have to believe him. Only then, thought Daniel, could there be some talk of the beating which they euphemistically called 'special' and he personally 'swinish' technique. If there were no weapons there, thought Major Lawford, perhaps the man was telling the truth. When the Russians had gone and his nerves calmed down, his real identity could be checked in the regular way. The beating up would certainly be one of the themes of their ensuing talk. He would clearly have to offer an apology. All right, he thought. He'd kiss his arse if he had to. Civil servants were accustomed to that. He was more worried about the clergymen closeted in the next room. Especially a bishop. He couldn't be more than thirty. Everything was completely topsy-turvy, they'd soon be making children bishops. It was a quite enough that this beardless wonder was a bishop. The fact that he was also a bloody Frenchman made the things even worse. At last Stillman appeared in the doorway with the news that the palms were clean. 'So what now?' said Daniel gleefully. 'But,' Stillman added, 'the soil in each pot is greasy with something,' 'A solution of plant food, probably,' suggested Daniel. 'I doubt,' said Stillman, 'that machine oil is particularly good for growing palm trees.' Major Hilary Lawford cast a carnivorous glance at Daniel. The blow to the jaw was again

unexpected. The author staggered, collided with the wall and fell to the ground like a sack. 'For God's sake, it's all fiction,' he moaned. 'Don't worry about,' said Lawford. 'So is this.' ***** The body in the car park of Terminal 2 was no fiction. It was lying in the same position as it has been left, crouched on its left side with its hands along its hips. But the silver Bentley no longer protected it from view and around its edges was marked in white chalk an elliptical line which followed its crumpled shape. The technician from the forensic unit was wandering around with whitish finger-print powder. Two more were hurriedly taking photographs by camera flashlight. The fourth, with more artistic ambition, was sketching the position of the body against its surroundings. Detectives were measuring everything that could be measured and looking at everything which could be looked at. Dr. Luke Komarowsky had bee dragged here under protest from the medical Centre and was touching everything that could be touched on the murder victim. And Chief Inspector Hawkins of Scotland Yard was asking the kind of questions that are normally asked in such circumstances, whose sense only he was aware of. The Assistant Superintendent of Metropolitan Police at Heathrow, representing Warden, who could not be there because of the Russians, was giving all the answers that could be given. A little further off, behind the police Rover and the laboratory van, as always, stood a curious crowd, and as usual, Sergeant Elias Elmer was keeping them back. 'All right, everybody,' he kept on repeating monotonously, 'move back, please, move back!' The Assistant Chief of Metropolitan Police at Heathrow had brought the Scotland Yard Inspector a number of statements which in the absence of names of the victim and his murderer, could be considered as facts. The body had been found by the chauffeur of the Bentley, which belonged to Sir Matthew Laverick, M.D., who had driven his employer and his wife to the Airport. When he had tried to start the car with the intention of going back to town, the rear wheel had got caught up in the body. The victim's suit and suitcase had no documents which could identified him, but the maker's name on his coat and his shaving lotion indicated that in all probability he was German. 'It's not much to go on, is it?' he ended with, offering his apologies. 'No,' answered Inspector Hawkins bad-temperedly, 'but we dislike easy cases, don't we? We're much happier with bodies we know nothing about.' He turned to the stocky, awkward doctor who was kneeling beside the corpse. 'What have you got that will make me happy?' 'The man was killed,' said Luke Komarowsky distractedly. In spirit he was still back in the Medical Centre at the bedside of Mother Teresa whose heart was weakening. 'Is that so? And here was I thinking that the hole at the back of his head was just to let some air in!'

Luke looked him over, asthenia, he thought. Below normal weight. A smooth, Chinese-looking skin. Tired eyes. A frozen expression caused by indigestion-pains around the corners of his mouth. Suppressed belching. An ulcer, probably of the duodenum. A duodenal ulcer in the preperforation stage. 'I'm not a forensic pathologist, Inspector.' 'A psychiatrist knows everything, but does nothing,' announces Inspector Hawkins to anybody who was listening, 'a surgeon knows nothing, but does everything; a dermatologist also knows nothing and does nothing; only a pathologist knows and does everything, but a day too late. All right. Which of those are you?' 'A mere general practitioner who corresponds with real doctors.' 'Can you at least tell me when this has happened, without saying – during the last few days?' 'Not before 09.00, and not after 10.00.' 'Are there any signs that he tried to defend himself?' 'No,' said Luke with some bitterness. People were killing each other just a hundred yards away from rabies. Of course, they didn't know about it, but he was somehow certain that they would go on killing each other even when they found out. Man was basically a creature of conscience. He didn't like others to do his work for him. Not even a virus. The Inspector put his hand to his mouth. The belch started in the pit of his stomach, rose through his esophagus, gathered itself together in the hollow of his mouth and was normally expelled gently or disguised in the words he was speaking. This time it tumbled out together with what he was saying. 'Thank you, Doctor, you have been a great help.' Luke moved away amidst the parked cars and disappeared from the scene of the crime towards the place where there was no need of murder for people to die. After him went the laboratory technicians and the police photographers; then the detectives. And then Superintendent Warden's deputy left to make his apologies to the Russians. Finally, an ambulance arrived to take away the corpse. The crowd dispersed. Over the chalk-drawn silhouette on the ground which until only a short time before had directed one of the largest Bank in the world, were left just Inspector Hawkins and Sergeant Elias Elmer, who had stayed behind to act as the Inspector's guide, should he want to carry out further investigations. Inspector Hawkins was not especially taken with the idea. He didn't belong to the 'bloodhound' school of policemen. He was a logical man who carried out the investigation in his mind, not at the so-called scene of the crime. That would only lead him to the victim's name, not the murderer. Only logic could help him there. The murdered man had either been about to leave, or had just arrived. If he had arrived, then he had been killed by someone who was waiting for him. If he had been leaving, then he had been killed by someone who was accompanying him. The last possibility was untenable. London was certainly a better place for a murder than the extremely busy Airport Car Park. The murderer had been waiting for his victim, had taken him to the car park, killed him, removed his identification, and then left. Because the murdered man was a German, he would have to

check all the German names at Heathrow Airport. And that didn't mean running round from one Air Line desk to another. It could all be done by telephone. And then, there was the question of the tropical fever which according to the Metropolitan Police Superintendent's deputy, had descended on the Airport. They expected that a quarantine zone would be set up. It would be stupid to be confined at Heathrow and to allow the murderer a chance to get away. 'Sergeant.' 'Yes, Sir?' Have you heard of some kind of emergency at the Airport?' 'What kind of emergency, Sir?' 'A medical one.' 'I've heard something.' 'And what exactly is it?' 'Nothing particular, Sir. A few cases of Bubonic Plague.' When the Inspector's Rover had gone on its way through the narrow lanes of the car park, only Sergeant Elias Elmer was left to guard the outline of Dr. Julius Upenkampf's body. He had a smile on his face and an idea in his mind. And in the right-hand pocket of his uniform was a tiny piece of paper. ***** It was quite by chance that Louise Sorensen found out what had happened to Daniel Leverquin and she immediately found herself up to her neck in her attempt to establish his civil identity. When she had not found him, she had put out an appeal through the loudspeaker system for him to be called to the Information Desk. Instead of Daniel, two Airport Security men arrived at the desk and quite enigmatically, with no explanation at all, asked her to accompany them. When in the office of yet a third, who introduced himself as Major Hilary Lawford, she discovered what it was all about, she burst into laughter; Daniel had finally got more than he had asked for. She went on laughing until she saw him. He had a number of bruises and lacerations all over his body. His left temple was swollen and an Airport Security man was trying to stop the blood in the way they did with boxers in the ring. Standing there like that, battered, in his underpants, he looked a pitiful sight. Holding back her anger now, Louis Sorensen confirmed his story and hers was confirmed by the Norwegian Ambassador on the telephone. She also cited the name of Dr. Jonathan Hamilton of the Institute of Tropical Medicine, who was at the Airport because of some kind of contagious infection. Dr. Hamilton had helped Leverquin with specialist advice about a book which took place in a clinic for nervous diseases.

Lawford's uneasiness increased with every step towards the incontestable identification of the mysterious Pollux as the popular writer Daniel Leverquin alias Patrick Cornell. He telephoned the Medical Centre and from Dr. Hamilton received confirmation of their statements. He already knew he had made a mistake. The call was just a routine, which drew him relentlessly towards the catastrophic conclusion. In the ominous silence, in which only roar of aircraft engines from outside could be heard, the Airport Security man finished taking care of Daniel's injuries and then went out at the Major's orders to put a stop to the intensive search for Castor which in the next room they had been carrying on amongst the naked clergymen. The Author had his clothes and his breviary returned to him; its cover was ruined, as Lawford muttered sufferingly 'for investigatory reasons'. When the process of returning Daniel to a human condition was over, Louise, completely ignoring Lawford's existence, said that she would wait in the corridor. She realized that the two of them had something more to say to each other. Lawford expressed the initiative for an explanation to come from Leverquin, and he was already prepared to accept anything that came out of it. He had a well developed sense of the rules of that particular game. Success was praised, failure was punished. It was a universal formula of justice which he understood. Whoever it was applied to. But Leverquin said nothing. The bastard was waiting, he thought bitterly for himself, to rub his own nose in it. In a calm, neutral voice, he explained the nature of the misunderstanding, without attempting to diminish his own contribution to it, but giving significant emphasis to 'Leverquin's stupid behaviour'. The idea of coming to Heathrow on the same day as the Russian delegation, disguised as a clergyman and with a breviary filled with sketches of the aerodrome and a complete plan for a terrorist attack, followed by the inexplicable delay in revealing his identity, had been both incomprehensible, he added, hoping that Leverquin would seize upon this as an offer that in exchange for not pressing charges for the beating he had received, the police would not proceed with an accusation of assuming a false identity, all of which was undoubtedly part of Leverquin's role in the misunderstanding. It did not, of course, in the slightest excuse his, Lawford's share of the blame, for which he was prepared to offer the most sincere official apology. 'What an excellent speech, Lawford,' said Daniel in an equally neutral voice. 'I only wonder why you didn't say something like that from the beginning instead of behaving like a hoodlum.' 'For God's sake, Leverquin,' exploded Lawford, 'put yourself in my position. What would you have done with those Russians on your back? Or better still, what would one of the heroes of your book have done?' 'If he'd been like you, Lawford, I wouldn't have written about him. And that's just what I want to say to you. You're a damned lousy policeman. If by any chance I had in fact been Pollux, with your methods of interrogation, you'd only found out where Castor was by the explosion. The rest

of the time you would have spent collecting the little bits that were left of those Russians from various parts of the Airport!' 'All right,' growled Lawford, barely controlling himself. 'If we're handling out compliments, Leverquin, you're one of the lousiest writers on the market; the way you describe your diversion in your breviary wouldn't have worked in a Home for the Blind.' 'What was it you got so worked up about, then?' 'It was because we couldn't believe that anyone could be so incompetent as to invent such an idiotic plan; that's why we suspected it was just a front which was hiding something cleverer,' Daniel Leverquin thought for a moment. 'Perhaps you're right. I'll have to go over the whole of it again.' 'That's my most sincere advice.' 'But what about all these cuts and bruises?' he laughed. 'What am I going to say if someone asks me how I got them?' 'You'll think something up. You're a writer.' 'But you're a policeman, Lawford, you know all the best excuses.' Major Lawford thought for a moment. 'You can say you fell down a flight of stairs.' Now both of them laughed cordially. Daniel put out his right hand. Lawford accepted it with some hesitation. It had passed off rather better than he had hoped. That was clear from the pressure of Leverquin's hand, sincere and firm, perhaps rather exaggeratedly forceful. But before feeling any pain, the hand pulled him towards Leverquin's knee, which came up with all his force into his crutch. Lawford yelped, and spun round, and spun round to meet Leverquin's left which bundled him back against the wall. As he rebounded off the wall, he again come into contact with Daniel's fist and while Lawford held both hands over his stomach, there came a lethal blow with both hands to the back of his head which sent him sprawling to the ground. Daniel Leverquin gave him the coup-de-grace with a vicious kick with his shoe into the ribs, and simultaneously it passed through his mind that he could add a similar reckoning between Castor and Pollux when he was writing the last chapter of his novel 'Operation Dioscuri'. Major Lawford groaned sickeningly. Daniel bent over him and whispered sympathetically: 'Don't worry, Lawford, none of it will show. This too is just ordinary fiction.' Louise Sorensen looked in through the door. 'What's going on here?' 'Nothing at all,' said Daniel Leverquin as he went out. 'Major Lawford has just fallen downstairs.' ***** Moana Tahaman was standing in front of the door of the medical store which was colloquially known as the 'drugstore'. Medicines, instruments, bandages and other hospital requisites were issued by Master of Pharmacy McGoldrick, who was momentarily on leave. Logan was his replacement. She was occupied in disinfecting the surgery and it was the first time since the keys had been entrusted to her that she had let them out of her sight.

She's afraid too, thought Moana, and it was only with the help of their routine duties that the majority of the Medical Centre Staff, who had been informed of the outbreak of rabies, could manage to hide their fear behind their expressionless faces. And the apprehension could be felt in the order which had directed Moana to find Alice Lumley, the nurse who had been hurt beside Mother Teresa's bed and apply a local treatment to her wound. The instructions received from Dr. Hamilton, the only person in the Centre showing no signs of nervousness, had been quite precise. Lumley had to be taken into the Isolation Unit. It was taken for granted that only personnel protected from infection could be allowed to come into contact with her. Then Lumley was to be given a local anesthetic so that the pain which would certainly follow, together with probable contortion of the muscle fabric, should not drive her to physical resistance. The wound on her hand had to be strongly soaked in a mixture of tepid water from the tap, twenty per cent soap solution with one per cent of Benzalkonium Chloride. The wound was not to be stitched or bound up. Instead, it would get a second soaking with anti-rabies serum. The Medical Centre did not have IGHO serum available, immunoglobulin of human origin, but the soaking and the hard scrubbing with a brush would be carried out with 82.6 international units/milligrams/IGEO, immunoglobin of equine origin. Finally, Lumley would be vaccinated. But first of all the girl had to be found. Moana went round the Centre several times, looking also into the toilets. But Alice was nowhere to be seen. Passing by the 'drugstore' she thought she heard a noise like a paw scraping along the floor. she went up to the door and listened. She was just about to move away between the wooden frame and the door, near the lock, she noticed some slight scratch marks. As if somebody had tried to break in. She put the key into the lock, it turned in a void. The door swung open without resistance. Inside was the darkness of a room without windows. The darkness was velvety. Black, protective darkness. The warm depths of a night without stars. Complete and perfect like a mother's embrace. It had a tranquilizing effect after the brightness of daylight, in which ones eyes burned as if on fire. Nurse Alice Lumley with her legs hunched beneath her was crouching under McGoldrick's desk. Her headache has lessened as soon as she had got out of the light, but not her fear. A strange kind of fear. Without cause of origin, faceless. A destructive terrifying fear of something which she couldn't recognize or give a name to, but the source of which she knew with agonizing certainty was hidden in the depth of her own body. Several times she had heard people looking for her. She had recognized the voice of Moana Tahaman. But she hadn't answered. Outside, beyond the bounds of the darkness, people were submerged in bright, noisy light, like into a poison gas. People were - noise. Noise was - light. Light was – death. Light which like a pale spider, was crawling from the open doorway towards her refuge beneath the desk. Through the open door Moana Tahaman could make out the long narrow shelves, filled with boxes of drugs, different coloured vessels of medical solutions, metal instrument containers, and small packages of gauze and bandages. Green protective coats were hanging on the right on brass rods like a string of hanged men, on the left she could see the outline of the desk at which, in normal circumstances, sat the permanently gloomy, and, on account of the medicines he

dispensed, highly reserved McGoldrick. She put out her hand towards the electric switch to the right of the door. She was stopped short by a muffled, hostile snarling. She turned round. The corridor behind her was empty. She wasn't expecting to see anything. The medical Centre was no place for dogs. They were very rarely seen at the Airport. The only dogs at Heathrow lived in the Airport quarantine kennels which were run by the RSPCA. She must have been mistaken. The talk of canine rabies would have driven even the sanest person to hallucinations. Again she moved her hand towards the switch. The snarling came again. More vicious and persistent. She was not hallucinating. In the depth of the darkness, where the light from the corridor didn't reach, something was crouching. Something live and dangerous. It was breathing like a frightened animal. ***** Then, it had been another darkness and there had been another creature in it. It belonged to the noble race of the short-haired German shepherd, and it responded, when it felt like it, to the sound made by the large, hairless beings, in their own eyes people, when they spoke the name Sharon. That day they had been calling him in vain. Sharon was sleeping. Everywhere, close around him was a scent-laden darkness, warm, like his mother's protective fur. The sack in which he lay curled up had two tiny air-holes through which short bursts of light were coming. They didn't disturb him. The darkness was inside him too. Sharon was sleeping. Sharon had always slept a great deal and dreamed sweetly. Most often he dreamed of hunting with his family. Accompanied by the Great Being, the pack was chasing comical forest creatures with pointed ears, which bounced away as they ran out of isolated clumps of bushes and disappeared into thickets. In his dream, he was never small and weak, his transformation into a grown dog was the best part of hunting, and he was racing along at the head of the pack of his brothers and sisters. Nothing he chased escaped him. And when he awoke and found nothing of his catch between his paws, he would be saddened. But somehow he knew that that was how it had to be, that it wasn't a real hunt. In time, he had forced himself to believe that, according to the customs of her kind, what he caught had to be given up to the Great Being, to whom it rightfully belonged even though he hadn't caught it. Very soon it was that which he began to dream of. Of hunting and proudly dropping his quarry between the Great Being's paws.

But all that had been before Something, huge and terrible, had got into their kennel and had left behind It his family lying on the black ground and giving off a smell which made him whine mournfully; he had tried in vain with his anxious licking to arouse their torn, spread-eagled limbs. Since then, he had been afraid to go to sleep. For he always found himself in the same dream. He would crawl between his mother's paws and curl up against her warm fur. But he felt only a mortal chill and the penetrating scent of something which, in some distant and hostile way, was related to him. All around a vicious snarling could be heard. The kennel was shaking. His mother was carrying him off in her teeth into the darkest corner and covering him with earth as if she were burying a bone. The kennel gate burst open and at it there appeared Something, a kind of shadow, whose maddened fury he couldn't understand. Two shining eyes like burning coals, pierced into the half light of dawn. The gaping jaws were bathed in foam. He was waking up. Now too he tried to open his eyes. Nothing happened. However much he tried to wake up, Sharon remained crouching in the darkness, alone with those two red eyes which froze into him. It went on until everything was covered with foam, like white, frozen hoar frost.

STAGE III – ACUTE PHASE

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. William Shakespeare, 'Macbeth', Act V.

10. To the south of Heathrow Airport's Central Terminal Area, with its diamond-like surface covering a radial area of 158 acres, bordered by the reinforced concrete runway like long, white seams, opposite Terminal 2 and the Queen's Building and at a distance of 127 feet from them, rises up a T-shaped, steel framed building, 9 stories of brick, stone and glass, surmounted by a trapezoid, glazed, transparent dome. But the tower buildings T-shape is only schematic. In fact, its walls, with their iodized, light reflecting windows, are set at a carefully calculated angle to minimize the interference from its large smooth surfaces on the radio aircraft guidance and control equipment, housed in the tower's upper levels and the dome at its summit. This was the Control Tower. Each minute of the Airport's working 'twenty-four hours', apart from those few hours after midnight, when it is obliged by the Noise Abatement Act to sleep, there flows from its Traffic Control of both aerial and ground movement, the command impulses which control the life of the world's busiest international aerial crossroads with the same precision and purposefulness with which a healthy brain controls the life and actions of reasoning human beings. But today, for the first time in the history of Heathrow, since, from an RAF Transport Command station in 1943, it had become in 1955 what it now was, the course of its life was not being ordered in the isolated glass honeycomb of Flight Control, but in another part of the Tower, several floors lower, in the executive offices of the BAA. More precisely, in the Conference Room next to the General Manager's Office in which the Airport Management Committee met to discuss current problems or where an occasional ad hoc committee came together to sort out items left over from the Management Committee's meeting of the previous day. The view from the smoked glass window slid over the outline of the aerodrome, white, dirty and sharply etched in the sunlight, reached as far as the harsh edge of the urbanized horizon, and if the onlooker stood up, even as far as the huge aircraft landing and taking off. There was nothing in the room besides the long conference table with its jumble of ashtrays, boxes of cigarettes, lighters, cut glass goblets, half-empty cups, open notepads with the elaborate doodling of immeasurable irritations and fountain pens of all shapes and sizes, together with a number of chairs, whose aggressive lack of comfort was intended to keep meetings to as short as

possible a length, a telephone console and a coloured plan of the whole aerodrome which took up all of the northern wall. From the opposite side looked down a row of men, their eyes filled with posthumous doubt, the oil-painted and photographic legends of civil aviation, headed by the pioneer Wright Brothers. The composition of the group in the room was, as far as the height of the season permitted, representative. A number of elements were missing, away on high priority duties or journeys, but they were represented by those next to them in status. Chairing the meeting was William Townsend, General Manager of Heathrow Airport, thickset and gray haired. A brisk Cornishman with an inborn talent for buffering problems and an inexhaustible reserve of compromises, he was perhaps the only man capable of coping with a managerial position which knowledgeable people compared with the duties of the animal keeper at Chesterton, where tigers are allowed to wander about in freedom. Then cam his deputy Colin Hayman. The Operations' Director of the Airport, Thomas Stonehouse, an engineer by profession. The director of Legal Services, Henry Masterson. Paul Becker, Chef of the Public Relations Office, the department which was responsible for Heathrow's good public image. Superintendent Vernon Warden, the Head of the Metropolitan Police at the Airport. The Head of Airport Security (AS), Major Hilary Lawford, with dark blue bruises around his face. The Executive Chief of BA, Stephen Crowly, who was also there on behalf of the other seventy Air Lines at Heathrow. James Cockgrove, of the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation. And finally, Sir William St. Pears, OBE, Vice-President of Rolls Royce and a member of the Management Committee of BA. The last two were in a certain sense interlopers: James Cockgrove happened to be at the Airport on a specific job, and Sir William St. Pears was a passenger on a delayed flight to Sidney who happened to have been drinking tea in Townsend's office. The central figure of the meeting, on account of the crisis, which it had been summoned to deal with, were Dr. Luke Komarowsky, Head of the Heathrow Medical Centre, and Dr. Jonathan Hamilton, Director of the Virological Section of the institute of Tropical Medicine in London. 'Gentlemen,' said William Townsend, General Manager of Heathrow, cutting through the pleasant undercurrent of conversation which had sprung up around the conference table. 'We have not met together here to chatter amiably amongst ourselves but because of a medical crisis, which the most competent of us in that field, Dr. Hamilton from the Institute of Tropical Medicine, has characterized as potentially the most dangerous in the history of the Airport. We haven't had time to call in everyone who ought to be here, and even some who aren't where they should be, but if it proves necessary, we shall constitute a standing committee…' 'On whose authority?' The remark came from where it might have been expected to come from. The Air Lines were jealous guardians of their own independence of action within the framework of the general

Airport restrictions, and the representative of BA was expressing the feeling of all of them in interrupting the General Manager. 'The authorities of rabies,' Luke threw out sharply. 'I wanted to know on exactly what legal footing we are, Komarowsky. It's a question of millions.' 'People, not money.' 'Don't try to frighten me with visions of Judgment Day! At least not till you have shown what this so-called 'medical crisis' is all about!' 'All right,' mediated Townsend. 'The Air Lines who pay for the use of the Airport, have the right to question to what extent and on whose authority, if it comes to that, that use is to be restricted, but the Medical Services too, who give us protection from all those infections we read about in the newspapers have the right to give the answer which has just been heard from Dr. Komarowsky. You're within your own rights, but a fairly long way from common sense. For Christ's sake, let's hear what it's all about first, before we start cutting each others' throats!' Dr. John Hamilton looked round the gathering dispassionately. They were like laboratory animals that had been in the experiment cage for years without showing any results. He had personal experience of bureaucratic machinery. They took nothing seriously until it had become too serious for anything to be done about it. And then they did nothing because it was too late. 'Does anyone at this table have any idea of what rabies implies?' he asked. 'One of the ways for a man to turn into a dog, I suppose,' said the Public Relations Director, arousing general laughter around the table. He had seen too many false alarms. Nobody ever suffered from them except the Public Relations Office who, when the panic was over, had to cope with the stupid question from the Press and the still stupider answers from the Heathrow Management. 'Is that about it?' 'Quite right,' growled Luke. 'Only for some people, it isn't necessary.' 'Come on, let's get all this rabies business over,' protested Major Lawford, who was present in body but whose mind was still with the Russians. 'Some of us have real problems waiting to be dealt with outside. What's this all about, Dr. Hamilton?' 'If the Chairman will allow, before I explain what it's all about, I should like to see what the rest of us around this table think about the following. At 08.45 Mother Teresa, a nun from Nigeria, who had been taken ill on board the aircraft, was taken off the Alitalia Rome-London-New York flight. It was diagnosed, and subsequently clinically confirmed to be an advanced case of canine rabies. By 10.00, two more passengers with the same symptoms from the flight from Rome were lying in the Isolation Unit of the Medical Centre. It is now 11.00 hrs. We have ten patients in quarantine. One of them is one of our own nurses. Four of those ten are not from the flight from Rome but from the General Transit Lounge of Terminal 2. Some idiot allowed the passengers from Rome, who Dr. Komarowsky had isolated, into the Transit Lounge.' Major Lawford was visibly silent. The joviality around the table had disappeared. The atmosphere for his explanation was not at all favourable.

'Does anyone present know anything about the incubation period for rabies? How long is it between infection and the appearance of the first symptoms?' What John was doing, thought Luke, was typical of the approach of an experienced epidemiologist to the task of destroying the conscious disbelief submerged deep down in the false security of modern civilization. The 'anaesthetized' consciousness only acknowledges dangers which are not right beneath its own nose. Only crisis in Ethiopia, Iran, the Congo, Malaysia. As soon as it is confronted with something nearer home, it insists, by some contrary instinct of preservation, not on surmounting them, but on pretending them to be harmless. It was for that reason that John was not using the heavy artillery of the truth about canine rabies on those present. His neutral questions simply served to detonate the bombs which in the sub-conscious of the majority of them, were already planted. It was the method of the detective story. The danger became apparent only gradually, through scattered, apparently independent happenings, which the mind inevitably linked into a whole. The horror was slowly built up. The gradually acquired realization became a lasting Impression. And that impression was the strongest basis of resistance. The general unease at last produced a hesitant answer from the Operational Director, Stonehouse. 'A month, I think. Sometimes several months. I'm not sure. But since the regulation quarantine period for dogs coming into Great Britain is six months, I imagine that after that time the danger has disappeared.' 'Between the first theoretical possibility that after that unfortunate mixing of passengers, a bearer of the infection from the First Class Transit Lounge could have passed on the infection to someone in the General Transit Area, and the appearance of rabies in the engineer Juan Silva, who was waiting in the General Transit Lounge for a flight to Lisbon, no more then an hour and a half passed. Your answer, Sir, therefore is wrong.' Dr. Hamilton paused to allow the time for the first real truth about rabies to sink into all their brains and for them to come to an understanding of the actual crisis with which the Airport was faced. 'Can anyone tell me how rabies is transmitted?' This time there were proportionately more answers. The general opinion put forward was that it was normally passed on though the bite of a rabid dog, or in rare cases, by contact through the unprotected skin with the saliva of an infected animal. 'Wrong again,' said John coldly. 'In the late fifties, at an interval of three years, two men, a scientist and a mining engineer, passed a night in the Frio cave, near Uvalde in South-West Texas, which is inhabited by a mass of vampire-bats, after the carnivores, the largest carriers of rabies. Both men died without having been touched by the bats. In 1962 in the Constantine cave, an experiment was carried out. Twelve coyotes and a fox were left for twenty-four days in cages, with nets which prevented any contact with the environment, apart from the air. All animals died, often after only twelve hours of illness. In 1968, the 'air-born rabies virus' was isolated in the atmosphere of the Frio cave.

And in 1969, Hronovsky and Bender showed that there was a replication in the nasal secretion of guinea pigs exposed to the virus in the laboratory six days after infection and a day before the virus appeared in their lungs. The virus had got into the guinea pigs' organs through the nose. It had been breathed in. I make no assertion that we are dealing with that kind of virus here. Of the seven cases which are not from the flight from Rome, all had been in physical contact with the earlier patients. On four off them we found fresh scratches. I am simply telling you this in order to show how wrong our ideas about rabies are. Now we should see how things stand in regard to the mortality rate and then we can begin to talk seriously. Can canine rabies be cured?' Now there was only one solitary answer. It came from the Director of Public Relations and its aggressivity did not correspond to the general gloomy mood which had set in around the table. Their aroused consciousness is protesting, thought Luke, they're sorry to loose the pleasant state of anesthesia, they'd be glad to return to it. 'I read somewhere that nine people survived rabies.' 'During what period of time?' 'I don't know. In recent times, I suppose.' 'In the last hundred years, Sir, from 1875 to the present day nine cases of reconvalescence have been reported, but not one of them has been medically proven. Half of them were reported by non-specialist sources, and it isn't known whether it was a question of rabies at all. Doctors have never had any documentation of the others.' 'Do you mean to say by that,' interrupted Townsend anxiously, 'that rabies is in fact incurable?' 'Gentlemen, with its 100% mortality rate, rabies is the most terrible human disease since man came down out of the trees, and probably even before that. For in all probability rabies is the only disease which is older than man.' Dr. John Hamilton cast a quick glance round the table. 'Are there any other questions?' There were none. In the general, terrible realization of what Heathrow was faced with, there was no further purpose in asking any more questions, in making any protest, in showing any doubt. Lighters clicked nervously, matchsticks were broken in half, chairs scraped on the floor and water was poured into already full glasses. John Hamilton was able to go on without fear of not being understood. But Like didn't hear him. His eyes were fixed on the wall clock. It was 11.15. He had arranged to meet Katharine at midday at the Departure Gate of Terminal 2. He had completely forgotten about it. Rabies had driven it clean out of his head. Very soon quarantine would be proclaimed here. Nobody would be allowed to leave Terminal 2. Katharine and Ian would be caught up in it. He tried to calculate the time they needed to get from the house to the Airport. He got it wrong. He tried again. He concluded that he still had time to stop them. Perhaps he could still reach them at home. He got up sharply, in a whisper asked John Hamilton to excuse his sudden departure, he would explain it all to him later, and ran out of the room. 'What's going on?' asked Townsend frightened 'Dr. Komarowsky has had to go to his patients. His presence is needed more there than here,' said

John Hamilton, taking in the whole silent group in a glance. Good, he thought, now we can start to do something. There was only one thing in the behaviour, the eyes of all those people. It was the touching hope that after his brutal introduction, he would finally be able to say something comforting to them. But he had nothing. Absolutely nothing. Rabies didn't know hope. ***** 'Nonsense!' with a laugh said Sir Geoffrey Drummond, Minister for Foreign affairs in Her Majesty's Government, and drunk down the last of twelve toasts with which, like posting stations for half-dead horses, was punctuated the endless course of the Soviet Foreign Minister's speech. Comrade Pavel Igorovich Artomonov was loading what little of the speech was left between toasts with firm steps seven miles long towards the next glass, before the previous one had even had a chance to burn the diplomatic lining of his stomach. 'You can't be serious, Donovan. Such things just don't happen.' I'm afraid that one of them really has,' whispered Colonel Alexis Donovan. He was standing beside the Head of the British Foreign Office and energetically applauding the thousand years of peace for which the Russo-British Agreement had laid the foundations. He recalled similar longterm prospects after Munich, which had eventually been crowned by the bloodiest slaughter in human history. 'Have you told this fool what this would mean at the present moment?' 'I warned him of the difficulties, and particularly because of the Agreement, but I couldn't tell him that he wouldn't be given asylum. It's my job to encourage defections, not to discourage them, Sir Geoffrey.' 'It seems to be your job, Donovan, to ruin any plan of this or any other government with your dirty spy games,' hissed the Minister, returning the smile which accompanied his Russian colleague's toast. 'But this time, don't count on it.' 'The Centre thinks otherwise.' 'You've already reported this to your damn Centre? And before telling me?' 'It's internal procedure. If there had been time, the Centre would have informed you of the situation. That's why I received the order to contact you direct although it's normally quite irregular.' 'Don't bring me that rubbish about regularity, Colonel!' The Russo-British Agreement was the child of his diplomatic conception. He didn't allow anyone to resolve their own moral problems by relieving themselves all over his affairs and him personally. 'You people in the Centre are 'regular' like hell!' Colonel Donovan had anticipated the Government's displeasure and the difficulties which would be caused for it by the Center's plan for Rasimov. But his difficulties were of a completely different nature. He just didn't know what technical course to take. Would Sir Geoffrey

telephone to the Prime Minister, and then talk with Anatoly, or would he talk with the Russians first and then inform the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister would undoubtedly order them under any pretext, in what way was irrelevant, short of suffocating him in the toilet, to get rid of the defector, who would smash the Agreement into little pieces. But in the meantime, the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service had also ordered, foreseeing some 'foul-up on the part of the politicians', that at all costs, and by any means possible, they should make sure of a man who would smash the Russian spy network in Europe to smithereens. He could already envisage the scene of the underground battle for Rasimov's soul. It stretched out right over him. 'You realize, Colonel,' whispered Her Majesty's Minister for Foreign Affairs, with a smile on his face as he imperceptibly inched his slim, aristocratic figure out of the massed ranks of diplomatic and newspaper men, 'that we get on perfectly well with these Russian Communists. Our greatest problems are caused by those, who, towards the end of their lives, suddenly feel that they don't want to be communists any longer. Where is this son-of-a-bitch?' ***** Dr. Luke Komarowsky listened to the telephone ringing at the other end of the line. Katharine wasn't at home. She was on her way to Heathrow or already at the Airport. He went down in the lift and out of the Control Tower. On the way to the taxi rank in front of Terminal 2, he thought of what he was going to say to her. There was no point in trying to tell her the flight to Zurich was simply delayed. She would want to know until when. And he couldn't tell her that. Nobody could tell her. Tomorrow's flight for Zurich with the passengers who bought tickets for it, would leave from Terminal 1. If it left at all. Whether there would be any amongst them from today's passengers, depended on the virus. He couldn't make up his mind to tell her about the epidemic. Katharine was impulsive. She wouldn't be able to keep it to herself. The Press would find out about the disease before they were ready to counter the ensuing panic. He would think of something. A baggage-handlers' strike, say. Anybody would believe that. Finally, he would tell her that he had asked about the new departures times for the Zurich flight and that it was put back till tomorrow. And by tomorrow, things at the Airport would have become clearer. The road in front of the European Terminal, the so-called Inner Ring East, was crowded with cars and passengers carrying their suitcases or pushing them on trolleys towards the automatic doors on the ground floor. In his imagination, Luke saw the greedy glass mouths with their steel jaws engulfing people, who disappeared into the belly of the Terminal, which would soon be meriting the 'termination' element of its name, like the bewitched people in H. G. Wells' SF story. There they were returned from the maddened machine, the worshipper of the absolute harmony of the circle, in the shape of tiny metal spheres in which adults could only be distinguished from children by their size. It could happen that these people here would not even be returned like that; that they would disappear in the smoke of some provisional crematorium, leaving behind them only safe, but

lifeless cinders. He felt like climbing onto the roof of the first car and shouting to them all to make good their escape from the Airport as fast as they could. But of course he didn't dare. As usual, he didn't dare speak the truth. As usual he had his alibi. The news would be carried into the Terminal. Everyone would try to get away. Amongst them would be some already infected. Rabies would break out into London. Or perhaps nothing at all would happen. They would think him mad, or some crank of a preservationist who wanted to return the world to the healthy atmosphere of the prehistoric cave. Katharine had always been afraid of being late. Sometimes they had quarreled, because of her fear that she would not arrive on time and his aristocratic indifference to arriving at all. Unless she had changed a great deal, she would already be at the Airport. But where? He went towards the place where they were supposed to meet, the Departure Gate in the Terminal Hall. He tried not to run. In any case, it would have been difficult. He could barely force his way between passengers and their luggage. The irritability of frustration had made people less and less considerate towards each other. As he looked at them bumping into each other, pushing and jostling in the passageways, he felt the violent pressure constricting his breathing. Although no one was being allowed into the Transit Area, and although it had been announced several times that no flights were leaving, the crowd in front of the Departure Gate had not dispersed. He noted that most of them were poorly dressed and shabby-looking and understood. The poorer a man is, the greater his mistrust of broadcast information. Since he already feels deceived in principle by life, he expects to be deceived also by such individual details as flights which he has already paid for. There were no better dressed people to be seen. They had gone off to drink in the various Terminal restaurants. They knew that they would be informed of everything in good time. Life was kind to them. They believed in the machinery of live. Life, together with its airports and aircrafts, belonged to them. They had nothing to worry about. But for once for a change, thought Luke, even the better dressed people had been deceived. They had not been told that would be no flights at all. If they had, they would have gone away and come back tomorrow. But that couldn't be allowed. The virus might already be in any one of them. Flights were postponed for half an hour, for an hour. Then again for a further half hour, another hour. And they would go on being delayed until the Terminal was sealed off. As he went down to the ground floor, he passed a man with grey hair and a tired look who seemed familiar to him, but he couldn't remember where and under what circumstances he had seen him before. The man with the sticking plaster across his left temple was going round in circles distractedly, caught up between two streams of passengers who were passing each other on the stairs. All the BA desks and those belonging to the other Air Lines were closed. There were notice boards over them informing passengers that luggage would be accepted for the various flights as soon as their departure time became known.

Katharine and Ian were not to be found there. He ran out onto the roadway. The inner Ring East was blocked with traffic. Cars could neither move forwards nor backwards. Several policemen were trying in vain to sort out the jam. He began to panic. Fear was beginning to paralyze him. Stop it, for God's sake he kept on saying to himself. Don't behave like a madman. Everything will be all right if you just keep your head. Choose a place and wait there. It doesn't matter where as long as it's somewhere. He looked at his watch. The meeting was probably firmly in John's hands by now. He would be describing the disease dryly, coldly. Then they would ask him questions of clarification. Only then would they move on to the organization of protective measures. There was still time before the actual introduction of quarantine. Not much, but still some. Jesus Christ, he thought, and until this morning he had believed that he had all the time in the world at his disposal, only for him to throw it all out the window at Heathrow. ***** When he had finished talking of the whole unpleasant business with Her Majesty's Prime minister, Sir Geoffrey Drummond accompanied Colonel Donovan to one of the abandoned Transit Lounges. The 'unpleasantness' for Her Majesty's Government was sitting with two Secret Service guardians guarding the door, his tie unfastened, his shirt open at the neck and his soul unburdened, at the Lounge table with a row of empty glasses at the centre. Sir Geoffrey looked at him in disgust and with the authority from the Prime Minister to get rid of him. Donovan looked at Sir Geoffrey with interest and with authority from the Centre to stop this last happening. The former KGB Colonel, Anatoly Sergeyevich Rasimov, looked at his glass, at the vodka in it and at the crystal gazer's tortured image of Darya Anatolovna which seemed to be appearing on the surface of the liquid. 'What's the matter with him?' 'I imagine he's unhappy,' explained Donovan. 'In any case, I hope we're not going to begin listening to his confessions. I just haven't the time for them,' said Sir Geoffrey morosely. Rasimov lifted his head. He recognized the British Foreign Secretary. He didn't care much for him but he wasn't allowed the choice. He had made his choice half an hour earlier. From then on he would be in the hands of others. He asked himself whether, as far as that went, anything had really changed. 'Sir Geoffrey? Can I offer you a drink?' 'Thank you, no. I've already had quite enough for today.' 'You've signed the Agreement with the great Soviet Union about lousy great matters concerning the great lousy world.'

'We're satisfied,' said Sir Geoffrey with restraint. 'But now there's this business of yours.' 'What business of mine?' snapped the Russian, 'I no longer have any business of my own. I've finished my business, and now it's yours.' Sir Geoffrey smiled politely. 'That's why we're here, Colonel. The Prime Minister has authorized me on behalf of Her Majesty's Government and of herself personally to welcome you to Great Britain.' What the hell is this? began to wonder Colonel Donovan. 'We are fully aware of the sacrifice you made when you decided on the step which will separate you from your own country, family and friends, continued Sir Geoffrey, measuring his words carefully, 'but we are also aware of the advantages which we shall derive from your presence here, and of which Colonel Donovan, I am sure, will inform you better than I can. Your defection undoubtedly presupposes a wish to help the West in continuing to preserve its fundamental values against those from which you have fled, that is right, isn't it?' 'It could be put that way,' answered Rasimov indifferently. The definition, of course, was not accurate. What he was doing, he was doing because of the East, not because of the West. He was indifferent towards the West. For the main part, he didn't understand it. He even despised it a little. The East was what was choking him to the last vein in his body. 'May I take it, that in case of need, you would be capable of an even greater sacrifice?' Through the fog of Sir Geoffrey's Byzantine rhetoric, Donovan saw the sandbar towards which they were sailing a second before they ran violently aground it, and quite a while before Rasimov caught of what was being said to him. 'What, for example?' 'That you should return to Moscow.' 'Sir Geoffrey!' exclaimed Donovan, but without much conviction. 'Be quite, Colonel!' You've had your minutes. Allow reason to have its say now.' Colonel Rasimov got up. He was at once completely sober. 'Must I understand that in your English way you're telling me to go on board the flight to Moscow?' 'That would be the general idea,' agreed Sir Geoffrey dryly. 'For the present, of course. Later you will be able to come to an arrangement with the corresponding services.' 'But my general idea, Sir, is that you together with it can go to hell!' Sir Geoffrey remained unimpressed. 'You haven't understood me Colonel. We are not refusing to give you asylum. We are simply postponing it.' 'With the noble intention of granting it to my corpse?' 'Listen, Rasimov, if you can't do something as simple as this for us, it of course contradicts your own action. Instead of helping us, it causes us trouble. It will bury the Anglo-Russian Agreement for the next hundred years. And we need that Agreement, Rasimov. The world needs it.' Colonel Rasimov sat down again. It seemed to Donovan that he was not even angry at the state of things. It was as if it rather amused him. He poured himself another vodka. 'Are you conversant with Russian logic, Sir Geoffrey?' 'The hell I am!' The Minister was at last showing his true colours. Every Head of the British

Foreign Office had had one particular nation which had eaten away his liver. At one time or other it was the Spaniards, the French, the Germans. But for him it was the Russians. 'Logic is really the thing about you, which I least of all understand.' 'I wouldn't have said so. The rubbish you've just come out with is typical of it. Subjectively, Rasimov is our friend, but because his defection is temporarily an embarrassment to us, he is both objectively and subjectively our enemy. With this kind of logic during the last fifty years we've managed to liquidate at least a fifth of the whole of Russia, and the other four fifths have been spiritually and morally crippled permanently. So, my friend, don't try that kind of bastard logic on me. I'm immune to it. It's because of it that I'm here.' 'And I am here to inform you with regret that because of the special circumstances, of which we have just been speaking, we cannot accept you.' Colonel Rasimov settled back in his chair. 'Fine, and what exactly do you intend to do about it now?' 'I must ask you to button your shirt and fasten your tie for a start.' 'And then tighten it a little more and strangle myself with it?' And then you must rejoin your delegation and fly off to Moscow with them.' 'For them to strangle me there?' 'Don't be foolish, Rasimov. Nobody knows of all this.' 'If we stay here alone for just a few more minutes, everyone will know about it.' 'How?' Even the thought that the Russians could have some intimation of the content of their conversation, filled Sir Geoffrey with horror. 'It's easy, Sir Geoffrey, by means of Russian logic. Russian logic isn't roulette. It always comes up with the same number. In our case, for example, it could in no way conclude that we are making some agreement to the detriment of Great Britain, to offer exile to you, say, fly you off to Moscow disguised as an air hostess. Any discussion between us must always lead to some harm for the Soviet Union. In our case, for me to stay here, to decide what clothes I shall change into. The logic is based on the premise that a normal person cannot be a friend of the Soviet Union, and when two such persons meet secretly, negotiations between them cannot be in the Soviet interest.' 'You know, Rasimov, that we can deport you?' 'Of course,' laughed the Russian. 'The picture of you carrying me off struggling into the aircraft would have an excellent effect on propaganda about Western freedoms.' 'Beside that,' interrupted Donovan, 'deportation requires a certain procedure, and such a procedure, I'm afraid, needs time and publicity. We don't have the first, and we certainly don't need the second.' 'All right, Donovan,' snapped Sir Geoffrey. 'That's very considerate of you. I shan't forget it… And as for Colonel Rasimov, we'll see about that.'

And he strode angrily out of the Lounge. 'What do you think?' asked Rasimov. 'I think we should get the hell out of here as quickly as possible,' said Donovan. 'That's quite clear, but how?' Colonel Alexis Donovan of MI 5 thought for a second. 'In exactly the way you said. We'll put you into a waiter's jacket, you'll carry a tray and some glasses, wait for some imbecile to start up with an announcement over the loudspeakers, and we'll simply walk out through the Lounge.' Now it was Colonel Anatoly Sergeyevich Rasimov of the KGB's turn to think for a moment. 'But what if one of my people asks to be brought a drink?' 'The glasses will be empty,' said the Englishman. 'And nobody pays any attention to a waiter carrying empty glasses,' agreed the Russian. They both laughed Not all logic turned out to be twisted. ***** Luke caught sight of Katharine across the roofs of the motionless cars. She was walking along the pavement of the Inner Ring East between Terminal 2 and the Control Tower, pushing a luggage trolley in front of her. He couldn't see Ian. He'd probably stayed behind to pay off the taxi. He calmed down. But as soon as they came face to face, his decision to go on remaining calm, in no way to show that this was no ordinary day at Heathrow, and he was no ordinary Airport doctor, overloaded with work, went by the board, and he shouted nervously. 'Where on earth have you been?' 'Why?' she asked in surprise. 'We arranged to meet at twelve.' He managed to regain control of himself. He mustn't behave like an idiot. Otherwise she would realize that something was wrong. 'Have you just arrived?' 'Of course not; we've been here almost an hour.' Christ, he thought. 'Ian wanted to go up onto the Roof Garden to take photographs of aircrafts for his collection.' He relaxed again. On the roof of the Queen's building, Ian could not be threatened by any danger. 'You know that the Zurich flight has been delayed?' 'Until 14.00 they say. But all the other flights are delayed too. The reception desks are all closed. What's going on, Luke?' 'The same as usual, a strike.' 'But flights are leaving from the other Terminals?' 'The strike is selective. Selective and random. The important thing is for the passengers not to know what's not working. For them to feel like a gambler who's having a bad day. Where were you waiting? In the Terminal?' He awaited her answer tensely. He looked at her. She was unimpressively beautiful, of that rare kind of woman whose beauty is comprehended only with the time which is devoted to it, the time

he never had. She had a gymnast's silhouette, soft, brown hair, opal eyes and a fresh, English skin. She was smiling. Her smile was passive, comforting. 'Not likely! It's like a gas chamber in there.' He was struck by the comparison. It was perhaps somewhat premature, but on the right track. 'I just wandered around. I was in St. George's Chapel. I walked round the Control Tower several times. In other words, I passed the time on my own. Just like I used to when we were still together. I hope they'll take my luggage now.' 'I doubt it. The flight has been postponed again.' 'Christ, until when?' 'Until tomorrow at the same time.' He waited for Katharine to draw her own conclusions from the situation. He didn't want it to seem as if it came from him. 'It'll be quite impossible to find a taxi now,' she said turning round. 'I'll take cake of the taxi, you go and fetch Ian down from the Roof garden.' He put out his hand to take the luggage trolley. 'But he's not at the Roof Garden.' 'So where the hell is he?' 'He went to the Medical Centre to tell you that the flight has been postponed.' The whole bloody conversation, he thought, was like a 'hot and cold' treatment. After the fear came calm, then again fear. He hoped they hadn't let the boy go inside. The orders were categorical. Nobody was to be allowed into the Medical Centre apart from authorized personnel, and no one inside was to be allowed to leave. 'You try and find a taxi then,' he said, 'I'll go and fetch him.' 'What's the matter, Luke?' 'Why should there be anything the matter?' 'You're behaving as if the surgery was on fire.' Perhaps it is on fire, he thought. 'I'm sorry. There are twice as many passengers at Heathrow today as usual, tree times as many patients the devil alone knows how many hypochondriacs, It's just that I'm tired.' 'All right Luke. Don't worry,' she said and took over the luggage trolley. 'I've heard it all before.' And he too heard it, he thought, as he hurried towards the Queen's Building. On the polished stone tablet fixed to the wall opposite the Control Tower was an inscription. He knew what was written there by heart. 'THE STONE WAS LAID BY HER MAJESTY ELIZABETH II TO COMMEMORATE THE FORMAL INAUGURATION OF THE CENTRAL TERMINAL AREA, 16TH DECEMBER, 1955.' He wondered what stone would commemorate its end.

11. 'The most famous hunter of Greek mythology,' said Dr. John Hamilton to the assembled meeting in the Control Tower, 'was torn to pieces by maddened dogs for committing the sacrilege of surprising the goddess Diana while bathing. In Homer's Iliad, the expression 'mad dog' is used to describe Hector's behaviour in one of the Trojan battles. But the first mention of rabies gone back to the so-called Eshnunhn Codex which in the twenty-third century BC preceded the Hammurabi laws. 'If a mad dog bites a man,' – is written there – 'its owner to pay forty shekels of silver; if a dog kills a slave, the owner is to pay fifteen shekels of silver.' Five hundred years before Christ, Democritus described the symptoms of rabies. It is probable, also, that it was this disease that Hippocrates had in mind when he described the behaviour of epileptics who were terrified by any kind of noise, and who, although they were thirsty, refused water. The Roman Cardanus noted the infectious nature of a mad dog's saliva, and believing it to be a question of poison, gave its cause the name 'virus' – the Latin word for poison. I do not want to go into the treatment of the disease once used in order to make fun of it, but to show that in the distant future our own treatment of it will seem equally ridiculous. Celsus, for example, prescribed as the only treatment for rabies, the immersion of the patient several times in water or in hot oil. The patient at one and the same time satisfied both his chronic thirst and his acute fear of water. Celsus doesn't say what was satisfied by the hot oil. The mad dog was sometimes sprinkled with salt and given to the victim in a raw state. According to Fleming, this remedy with its undoubted echo of homeopathic philosophy, was used right up to the 19th century. The Arabia Avicenna was the first to notice that a rabid man barked and snarled like a dog. I mentioned this because science considers such incidents to be exceptional,' – he stressed his last words with the image of Nurse Lumley, who, while they were dragging her out of her refuge in the darkness of the Medical Centre, had ground her foam covered jaws and snarled like a dog, before his eyes – 'and linked, in frenzied cases, with hallucinating substances. As far as I recall, the last cast of dog-like behaviour to date was noted by Habel in 1940 in Washington DC.' 'Dr. Hamilton,' the General Manager Townsend interrupted him gently, 'do you consider it really necessary to go into this dreadful thing in such detail?' 'I do, Sir,' answered John, 'unless you can imagine it for yourselves.' 'All right, go on,' the Chief of Heathrow gave way. 'The first outbreak of rabies happened in Franconia in 1217. Rabid wolves attacked a town. In 1500 there was an epidemic in Spain. In 1604 in Paris. At the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries, rabies covered the whole of Europe, with the greatest number of rabid animals and people around 1803 in the Alps. A committee of experts from the World Health Organization pronounced bat rabies to be the chief cause of the high mortality rate in the cattle in South America.

Asia, Africa and Australia all have their history of rabies which there is no point in going into now. Apart from Nigeria, which for the rabies at Heathrow, is important as the probable source area. WHO statistics show dogs to be the only cause of infection in Nigeria. That allows us to consider our first diseased patient, Mother Teresa, to be a victim of canine rabies.' 'But there are no dogs at Heathrow,' observed the Rolls Royce Vice President. He was fond of horses and dogs and these last, at least today, had no friends round the table. 'There are dogs everywhere but they're simply not seen,' said Major Hilary Lawford. It was his official duty to know such things. 'As far as Great Britain is concerned, rabies is mentioned for the first time in 1026 in the Laws of Howel the Good of Wales. By 1752 it was so widespread that by order of the town authorities in London, dogs were to be shot on sight. After the Metropolitan Streets Act of 1867, which empowered the Police to catch ownerless dogs, the most important measure for the elimination of rabies in the British Isles, was the Infectious Diseases in Animals Act of 1886 and the Rabies Order of 1887, and especially the introduction of controls on imported dogs in the in the framework of the so-called Canine Order of 1897. Great Britain also was the first country to introduce six months obligatory quarantine for imported animals. Thanks to this, the country was free of rabies between 1902 and 1918, when it appeared in Plymouth in a dog which had been smuggled in from the Continent and soon spread through Devon and the whole of the British Isles. Since the end of the last war, fifteen have died of rabies in Great Britain. The last of these, Mrs. Andrea Milliner, succumbed in October, 1981, two months after being bitten by a rabid dog in India. But these relatively low figures should not lure you into a false sense of security. Without the quarantine regulations, we in England would have had thirty epidemics since the Great War. In that period, the virus has been found in thirty quarantined animals, twenty eight dogs, one cat and one leopard cub.' 'Christ almighty!' blasphemed the PR Director with likeable sincerity. For the first time healthy laughter was heard round the table. The tension dropped. It was about time, thought Hamilton. His account had petrified them but before he could mobilize them for action, he had to thaw them out. Otherwise, hypnotized by fear, they would function like puppets. Dolls without initiative or imagination. The laughter didn't destroy their consciousness of the danger. It only showed that with this, together with compassion, healthiest of human feelings, they were still on top of it. 'There exist two epidemiological types of rabies, natural infection in wild animals and the aberrant kind in domestic ones. The disease is confined in nature by definite geographical barriers, like extensive expanses of water and mountain ranges, and sometimes by the scarcity of animals capable of carrying the infection. But the greatest barrier to the spread of rabies is man.' 'I hadn't noticed' said the Assistant General Manager, Colin Hayman. It was his responsibility to negotiate with the Trade Unions on behalf of the Management.

'More exactly, man's capacity to find out the truth about nature and to adapt it to himself.' It was, of course, he thought, a quite contrary notion of the role of intelligence in the natural order of things. An adaptation to nature rather than an adaptation of nature, a formula which guaranteed permanency to the species. For the heightening of the self-awareness round the table, a false idea of human omnipotence was worth more than the true one, which reduced that power to cooperation with nature. 'From Homer we got the name of the disease. From Cardanus, the hypothesis that it was transmitted by virus from the saliva of a rabid dog. From Democritus and Hippocrates, the first description of the symptoms. From Zinke, in 1804, the demonstration of the infectious nature of the saliva of a diseased dog. From Kugelstein, in 1826, the definition of rabies as an illness affecting the nervous system. But it was only from Louis Pasteur that we correctly understood the mechanism of that infection and managed, for the first time to overcome it. There is no need for me to describe the complicated means by which Pasteur produced his vaccine, although it is important for the attestation of the so-called 'free' virus, the one found in nature, and its modification to 'denatured' virus, in the laboratory, without which the production of vaccine is impossible. It's sufficient to note that after successful experiments on dogs, in 1885, Pasteur with the aid of his vaccine, saved the life of the nine-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been bitten fourteen times by a rabid dog.' 'Excuse me, doctor,' interrupted the Executive Head of BA, 'but didn't you say that rabies was a one hundred per cent fatal disease?' 'With one reservation, Sir, the disease is fatal if it has infiltrated the Central Nervous system. The young Meister had only just been bitten and Pasteur's serum, speaking figuratively, cut off the virus' route to the brain.' 'So what about the patients in the Isolation Unit?' asked Townsend. 'In all of them the virus has already reached the Central Nervous system.' 'Does that mean that these people, how shall I put it, in fact … what the hell, that they are already dead?' 'I'm afraid so,' answered John. 'Wait a minute, doctor,' interrupted the Director of Legal Services, 'are they not even being treated?' John wondered whether the questioner was worried about the legal process which might arise out of it, or whether he could imagine for himself what it would be like to die in agony without even the comfort of knowing that somebody was trying to save your life. 'They are tranquilized with sedatives, and in the comatose state, into which so far only Mother Teresa has passed, their vital functions are artificially maintained.' 'If I have understood properly,' this was Major Lawford who had a policeman's brain, and liked to make use of it, 'these people are beyond help since they have all already developed the symptoms of rabies?' 'To a greater or lesser degree, but all of them sufficiently for treatment to be impossible.'

'And in any case, it can only begin after infection?' 'Always supposing that it can be detected in time.' John understood what the Head of Airport Security was getting at. He couldn't stop him. Nor did he want to. 'Which means it has to be something visible? It's a question of dog bites or scratches?' 'Of any animal, if there are grounds to suspect it is rabid.' 'How is it established?' 'By laboratory isolation of the virus in the brain, glands, or other nervecentres of the euthanized animal.' 'And what happens in the meantime to the person who is suspected of having been infected with rabies?' 'Exactly the same as with someone for whom it is positively established that they have got rabies. They're given the serum, vaccinated with the most reliable vaccine available, and the wound, if there is one, is given local treatment.' 'If there is one? But what if there isn't ?' Lawford's voice had an intense, almost plaintive tone. 'If the infection has been transmitted in some other way?' 'Are you thinking of one of those, Major, which you made possible when you mixed the passengers from the flight from Rome with those already in the General Transit Lounge?' Hilary Lawford went pale. It was not in his nature to deny responsibility for actions, whatever they might be, which resulted from the use of his official authority. He would state his reasons – his Russians and his necessary security measures - and he would emphasize the fact that the medical Centre had not informed him about the epidemic before this meeting; if all that was not enough, he would take the consequences. If you acted correctly, you were rewarded. If you made a mistake, you had to pay for it. 'Dr. Hamilton,' he said calmly, 'I am always ready to offer an explanation for my actions. Do you want to hear it?' 'I think it's a little late for that now, isn't it Lawford?' the General Manager put forward awkwardly. Lawford's glance burnt a hole in him, but he didn't react. 'Far too late,' interjected Henry Masterson, the Director of Legal Services. 'But it isn't for Dr. Hamilton's explanation. From what we heard from him, if rabies is transmitted by one of the ways which leave no trace, trough the air, it can't be known if a person is infected before being taken ill?' 'Strictly speaking, no,' admitted Dr. John Hamilton. 'And when they're taken ill, then they can no longer be treated?' 'Strictly speaking, that is so.' 'For God's sake, Hamilton,' exclaimed Townsend, wiping the sweat from his forehead, 'what is it you're expecting from us then? What can be expected from anyone? What are we here for at all?' Rabies, thought Dr. John Hamilton. Disease. Or the world in a mirror.

***** In the entrance Hall of the Medical Centre, Dr. Luke Komarowsky met Moana Tahaman. She was carrying a tray with medical instruments on it. 'I'm sorry, Luke,' she said worriedly. 'I tried to telephone but they told me you'd already left.' 'Moana,' he said, looking through her as if through glass. 'Find Logan. Get her to telephone Warden. Tell him from me personally that if he doesn't at once change that bastard of a Metropolitan Policeman in front of our door for someone who'll do his job properly, then he'll find him in little pieces with the rest of the garbage. Where's the boy?' 'In the Treatment Room. I saw him too late or I wouldn't have let him go in. He's only just gone in. He can't have been here for more than a few minutes.' 'That's already too much.' 'The Treatment Room's all right, Luke. And listen, no one knows anything about it apart from me and the boy. You can take him out with no worries.' 'I can take him out, but not with no worries.' She looked at him angrily. 'Don't be crazy, for god's sake. Don't try to be a hero. Not with the boy at risk. Take Ian by the hand and get him outside. Do what nay normal father would do.' How could he know, what a normal father would do? He'd never been a father for Ian. And certainly not a normal one. He found the boy in the Treatment room, beside the desk, with the Winchester in his hands. He had his mother's soft hair and opal eyes, but the heavy, loose-knit bones were his. The shy impulsiveness too. He felt awkward at having opened the present before it had been given to him, but the temptation had obviously been too great. And his name was on the wrapper. He mumbled a few words of apology, mixed with clumsy thanks. It seemed to Luke that the wall between them had become still thicker, still more opaque. 'It doesn't matter. I was going to give it to you anyway before you left.' 'In an hour,' said the boy, running his fingers along the butt. 'Tomorrow, unfortunately. The Zurich flight is postponed until tomorrow.' 'We'd better tell Mum.' 'I've told her already. He kept control of himself, his words were slow and unhurried. 'She's waiting in front of the Terminal.' The boy was silent, his attention taken up with the rifle. He was trying to find a way of getting rid of him. But whatever excuse he found, Ian wouldn't understand it. He'd feel hurt. The wall between them would become even thicker. If he wanted to get him out of the Centre, he had to do it at once. At any moment someone might come in and he would have to introduce Ian to them. If he wanted to get him out at all. He wasn't certain of that. First of all, he had to find out where the boy had got to. He owed that at least to his own conscience. Before taking any risk. Before exposing others to risk. 'Who brought you in here?'

'Moana.' 'Where did she find you?' 'In the Waiting Room.' That was a relatively neutral place. His hopes began to grow. 'Was there anyone else in the Waiting Room?' 'No.' He wondered if the boy sensed something in this questioning. He didn't think so. He still only had eyes for the rifle. He would have to issue him with a pass, something he had wished to avoid. The dishonest action would be given a written form. If it got as far as that. If he could get Ian out at all. It still wasn't certain. He neither had enough strength of will for something like that, nor the strength not to. He would fill out the pass just in case. Passes had been issued before the meeting as an internal measure in the Medical Centre, with the suspension of the regular acceptance of patients, and a request of the Metropolitan Police to place a guard on the doors of the Centre. The cards in a transparent case with a red border allowed the bearer to leave the Medical Centre. Those with a blue border confirmed that the holder worked in the Centre but didn't give the right of communication with the rest of the Airport. Blue edged cards were given to the nurses and doctors who had worked in the Isolation Unit, apart from the Chief Nurse Logan, Luke Komarowsky and John Hamilton who had red cards because of the need to maintain contact with the Heathrow Management. While the boy was trying to fix the telescopic sight to the rifle, he sat down at the desk, unlocked the drawer, took out a card with a red border and began to fill in false details and a false name. 'What is rabies, Dad?' The question came quite unexpectedly. His fingers were shaking. The hot and cold treatment to which he had been subjected since leaving the meeting, and even earlier, from the first news of the passenger who had been taken ill on the flight from Rome, once again took over. 'A disease.' 'Is it dangerous?' 'Fairly, why do you ask?' 'Have the people in the Isolation Unit got rabies?' There was no point in denying. 'Who told you that?' 'No one. I heard the doctors talking together. They said that quarantine regulations would soon be introduced in Terminal 2, perhaps in the whole of the Airport.' 'There's no need for the whole Airport to be put in quarantine, Ian. Only the Transit Lounge of Terminal 2, and eventually the whole Terminal.' 'But the Medical Centre is already in quarantine, isn't it?' 'Yes, it is.' 'That means that nobody is allowed to leave?' 'Who says so? I went out and came back in again.' Thanks to that idiot policeman on the door, thought Luke, and you'll leave too, thanks to this idiot of a GP behind this desk.

'I got in just like that. I lied that you had sent me. And you've got a pass. Can I see it?' Luke took it out of his coat pocket. 'Not that one,' said the boy. 'The one on the table.' Luke showed him the card. The boy read what was written on it, then put it back on the desk. 'I heard,' he said, 'that you have a special room for people who happened to come in here and who you can't allow to leave. They're not really ill, but they're in quarantine until it's clear that they're not contagious.' 'What has that got to do with you,' asked Luke, beginning to lose his patience. 'When I saw you writing the pass out, I was sure it was for me. I'm glad it isn't. Who's name is it?' 'A laboratory technician who is going into town with samples of infected tissue,' lied Luke. 'And what would have happened if it had been yours?' 'Nothing.' answered the boy coolly, 'only that would mean that you are not…' 'I understand.' 'That you're not such a good doctor as I thought.' 'Do you mean to say that you would have been disappointed in me?' 'I think that it was stupid of me to come in here, but I understand very well that you can't let me out.' 'No, I can't,' said Luke dully and put the pass back into the drawer. He sensed that something important had changed between them. The wall had become thinner. A sudden closeness had come about. A kind of miraculous ripening of their relationship which for years had been held back by his lack of resourcefulness and Ian's defensiveness. He had always foreseen that for such a new relationship, if it ever came, he would have to pay a high price. But not as high as this. This was a price he had never thought to pay, one he would never have paid of his own accors. Ian had driven him to it. And the worst thing was that now he felt despicable. Both as a father and as a doctor. The truth was that he was not going to let his son leave the quarantine, but that he wanted to, that much was certain. He had just needed some time to get used to the idea. To find an alibi as a doctor, since as a father he already had one. It was Ian himself who stopped him. If he had let him out of the quarantine he would at least have gained something as a father. Now as a father he felt despicable. Both as a doctor and as a father. ***** 'Viruses,' said Dr. John Hamilton, as if he were giving a lecture to students visiting his Institute, 'are the parasitic initiators of infectious illnesses, capable of reproducing themselves only in the cells of another organism. Their genetic material takes the form of a nucleoprotein combination of nucleoacids and proteins. In the smaller ones, those of poliomyelitis, for example, the nucleoacid is of the RNA type which contains ribose with its sugar components.

In the larger ones like rabies, the nucleoprotein is of the DNA type which contains part xyrobose as a sugar component. The nucleoacid is, in fact, a chemical core with a hard protein shell which is called a capsid. The most significant feature of a virus is its capacity for reproduction, selective survival and the setting up of infection. Their evolutional origin has not been established. I personally consider that they came into being through a spontaneous re-combination of genetic material in the nucleus of a healthy cell and continue living and reproducing as independent live entities outside the control of the source organism. I shall give you an example. When a bacteriophage virus comes into contact with certain chemical combination on the surface of bacteria, it brings about a series of reactions by which the DNA of the virus penetrates into the bacteria cells, takes over control of their metabolism and transforms them into synthetic material for the production of new viruses. These appear in the course of the following 12 minutes. After 25 minutes, the bacteria explodes, setting free about 200 new particles of the virus. In animals, however, this liberation is progressive rather than explosive.' Dr. John Hamilton felt the conference table, all those pale, concentrated people, as a single unity. They were no longer individuals in different skins, but they had become, through the morbid irony of what had happened, a somber synthetic which was based on the birth of the virus. Fear, the only evident product of their mutual metabolism, had joined them together in a single organism, whose life was accepted as the only passive movement. He could imagine the picture they had in front of them. A monstrous bacteria, which, however much it was destructive nevertheless represented life. Under the influence of a single, infinitesimally small virus, it exploded like a time bomb, transforming itself into two hundred new time bombs, which in a biological progression would continue the cataclysm. At intervals of half an hour, 200 x 200 x 200, and so on who knows to where. Probably until it itself had replaced everything which could be replaced. 200, 40 000, 1 600 000 000, on the open, undefended road to an incredible number. And of course, he thought, they don't imagine bacteria. They see a man. They see themselves. Their near and dear ones. The world of their memory and hope. The world in which they live. the fact that in fauna the process of morbid genesis went on in a secret, delicate progression and not through successive explosions, did not comfort them. The idea of an indefatigable inaudible, crawling, clambering, creeping horde of viruses moving through the human body probably seemed to them still more terrible. He had to disrupt that paralyzing fear as soon as possible, disperse the image which it aroused, like a virus, reproduced itself in new and still stronger fear. 'The natural history of our virus is defined by the condition that it is born and multiplies only in the cell of a living organism.' He had called it 'theirs' on purpose. By his description and a detailed exposition of the pathogenesis, he wanted to bring it so close to the meeting that it lost the destructive force of 'unknown proportions'. The basis of such a remedy was homeopathic. One wedge is knocked out by another, fear by fear.

The method was, of course, both dangerous and delicate. But it was the only one. 'The virus of rabies belongs to the family of Rhabdovirus. Cylindrical in form, it is like a bullet with an enlarged base, and bulging out at the top. It consists of an inner helical ribonucleoprotein capsid, an external shell of membrane with surface projections 10 nm long and a kind of tail in the form of a loop. It looks something like this, more or less.' He held up a piece of paper on which during the meeting he had sketched the schematically simplified and somehow 'disarming' shape of the enemy. It looked like a dimly shaded thumb with the nail representing the bulging top of the virus, and under careful examination, like a short-haired caterpillar cut in half. Its lifeless outline on the paper didn't look anything special. The external dimensions of a typical rabies virus are 75 by 180 mq, where 1 mq equals a millionth part of a millimeter.' Naturally, he thought. It's the microcosm which takes the decisions. The macrocosm is only an extreme projection of what is going on in the microcosm. 'The development of the particles of the virus in the cell is linked with the formation of organic bodies – of the matrices or the Negri bodies, which are, in fact, the only changes in the host cell specific to rabies. In other words, the finding of Negri bodies proves the presence of the virus, but their absence doesn't prove that it is not present. In laboratory conditions, the penetration of the virus into the cell and the fusion of its cell with the plasmatic and vacuolar cell membrane is exceptionally rapid. A few seconds of contact are necessary for the virus to establish itself in the cell to such an extent that it cannot then be got rid of by complex rinsing, nor can it be overcome by the host's antibody system.. Replication continues by 'budding'. The virus moves towards the Central Nervous System and the brain by way of the nerves and centripetally, in the 'denatured' virus at the rate of 3 mm an hour, but in the 'wild' kind, as is ours, considerably more slowly. Replication takes place in the muscle, neighbouring tissues or nerve at the site of the initial infection, but it can remain inert for months before it begins to move towards the brain, and this causes abnormal differences in the incubation period. In the Central Nervous System, the multiplication begins in the cells of the spinal or dorsal ganglia, joined to the affected peripheral nerve. The blood circulation used to be excluded as a possible viral route. Now we have proofs of its –passive transportation by means of the blood or the cerebrospinal fluid as far as the brain and then to the saliva glands from where it is carried by physical means to another host. The passage of the virus through the viral nerve centers makes the patient irritable, aggressive, in short, rabid. And it is the enormous number of nerve tracks through which the virus moves which makes it impossible to stop the infection once it has taken over the spinal marrow and the brain. I am going into such detail so that you can clearly understand the medical measures which must be undertaken, and indeed those which will not be undertaken, even though the uninformed will consider them to be necessary.' It was, in fact, a request to approve in advance sentences of death which would be pronounced and which were already being pronounced on the patients whose central nervous system and brain was overrun by the virus. For inhumanity to be justified by human reasons.

His practical experience of large scale epidemics which he had fought against until he had withdrawn into the laboratory, to try to transform their viruses into the co-creator of a new mankind, had proved that people defended themselves best from disease the more they knew about them, however dangerous they were. That the doctors held out best of all served to back up this experience. 'From the brain the virus through the centrifugal nerves infiltrates the other organs. There is hardly a single one in which in the final stages of the disease it can't be found. But I shall concentrate only on those organs which serve as an entry into the organism or an exit from it. These are: the digestive tract with the salivary glands, the respiratory system and the urinary tract. The virus is found in the salivary glands of an infected person several days before the symptoms of the disease. In the case of 'our' rabies, we can replace days by hours, and we must bear both facts in mind when it comes to determining the kind of isolation for people who show no signs of the infection, but who have been in contact with infected persons without protective clothing. An air transmitted virus does not only bring about infection of the lungs and the trachea, but also appears in the secretions of nasal mucus. For the time being, we have no proof that 'our' rabies is air transmitted, but at the first doubt, the quarantine measures must be fundamentally changed and adapted to an air-borne transmission of the virus. And finally, the virus is found in the urine of infected animals, which makes the Airport toilets into a greenhouse of infection,' 'For God's sake, Hamilton,' protested the PR Director. 'We have to relieve ourselves somewhere!' 'You'll use a chamber-pot, or something that looks like one, then you'll empty it into a communal sanitary container.' 'And who said that Victorian times would never return?' sighted Sir William St. Pears of RollsRoyce. 'The development of the disease,' continued John Hamilton, 'progresses along the line: MAN EXPOSED TO INFECTION – INFECTED MAN – SICK MAN…' 'DEAD MAN,' somebody completed for him. 'Exactly. DEAD MAN. From the appearance of the clinical symptoms, death follows within a period of four to fourteen days. This period, of course, relates to the classical form of the disease. In the case of 'our' rabies, the period could be very much reduced. I personally doubt that the firs patient, Mother Teresa will live through the night.' The tension again began to build up from the pieces of the temporarily reassembled illusions, as soon as the account moved away from impersonal scientific data and through vivid symptoms began to refer to man. Despite everything, a virus was an abstraction which could only be seen after special preparation with an electronic microscope. A symptom was something which everybody could see in another person or imagine in himself. 'Clinically, rabies has four phases: Incubation, Prodrome, and the Acute Neurological Stage, which is divided into the Frenzied and Paralytic types, and Coma. The incubation period for classical rabies can be from nine days to nineteen years, but shorter than fifteen days and longer than six months is very rare.

The average incubation lasts between twenty and sixty days. We must adapt this time to the extremely shortened model of our cases, which presents a barely resolvable task for prophylaxis. During the incubation period, the individual feels quite well except for pain around the wound if he has been bitten. In the prodromal phase the first symptoms make their appearance, but they are still non-specific and often interpreted as signs of other illnesses. They are general weakness; lose of appetite, fatigue, headache, fever. The Prodrome can also be non-specific with anxiety, irritability, neurosis, insomnia, depression. Less common symptoms are coughing, a dry throat, palsy, stomach pain, diarrhea or vomiting. Ten days later, in the acute neurological stage, when, therefore, the virus has already got into the central nervous system, the patient begins to manifest hyperactivity, often irrational behaviour, disorientation, in time and space, severe hallucinations, powerful convulsions and generally unusual actions of the frenzied type, or bodily rigidity, and paralysis, in the so-called paralytic type. Hyperactivity in the first case often turns into frenzy and aggressivity, desperate thrashing about, running away, biting, howling and snarling like a dog, and cases have been recorded where the patient in every respect is turned into a rabid dog. The violent fits come on either spontaneously or as a reaction to tactile, auditive, visual or olfactory stimulation. Most often they are caused by bright light or loud noise. Between the attacks the patient can be lucid, although he always remains with a feeling of panic, the origin of which he cannot explain. In our cases, the relatively calm periods are significantly shorter and sometimes disappear completely.' 'And what about the legendary fear of water?' asked Townsend. 'Any attempt in that phase to drink produces spasms of the muscles of the larynx and pharynx which lead to shock, convulsions of the other parts of the body and fear of all liquids. A hydrophobia syndrome develops a psychic reaction at the sight of water or when it is mentioned to the patient. An exaggerated production of secretions by the salivary glands, so-called foaming at the mouth, is especially characteristic of rabies. If the patient does not succumb to the violent convulsions, paralysis becomes predominant in the clinical picture as he gradually goes into a coma from which he never recovers. During the neuroactive phase, the mental state of the patient becomes slowly worse, from confusion and disorientation through deranged hallucinatory episodes to stupor and the loss of consciousness. The heart fails, the patient dies.' John made a dramatic pause and then said: 'Here I end my description of the enemy, and now, gentlemen, let us see how we shall defend ourselves.' Fear brought about a kind of miracle. The Airport administrators, accustomed to opposing each other down to the last, most trivial details, in the interests of their service, or their ideas of that service, now set their minds extremely rationally to defining a defense strategy. An authorization for the introduction of a state of emergency at Heathrow had already been accorded. The meeting reconstituted itself into a so-called 'Anti-Rabies Committee' with the proviso that it

could be added to or changed according to need. The General Manager of Heathrow, William Townsend, became its chairman, Dr. John Hamilton, despite his insistence that this role belonged to Dr. Komarowsky, was made responsible for the medical side of the battle, and Major Hilary Lawford was empowered to put into force the measures for the quarantine, security and the maintenance of order within the isolated zones. The others divided the duties arising from the crisis between them. Dr. John Hamilton at first wanted to stop all aerial traffic throughout the whole Airport and empty all buildings and areas within its perimeter, at all costs, the Central Terminal Area, and to place Terminal 2 and the Queen's building with the Medical Centre under strict quarantine. This met with the united opposition if the concerted forces of the Airport Management and Air Lines. It was explained to him that traffic at an international airport cannot be stopped with the magic wand of a sudden decision. He was given precise information about the number of aircraft which were en route for London, and outside the limits of any possibility of returning to their take-off points or of being diverted to another airport. The process was exceptionally complicated, demanding not only the intervention of a series of foreign control centers, but also numerous authorizations. As usual, it was the General Manager, Townsend, who arrived at an acceptable compromise. All aircraft arriving at Terminal 2 (European), would be diverted to the reserve London airports of Herne, Manchester, Prestwick, Stanstead and Gatwick, or, if that was not possible, would be received at Terminal 1 (Domestic) and Terminal 3 (Intercontinental). Flights leaving from Terminal 2 would be stopped. Departures from Terminal 1 and 3 would be allowed, but their number in the following twentyfour hours would be gradually decreased, in conjunction with corresponding announcements in the newspapers and on the radio. In this way, traffic ay Heathrow would come to a standstill of its own accord, the arrival of large numbers of passengers would cease and the Airport would empty. Terminal 2 would be placed in quarantine together with its car park, the Queen's Building and the Control Tower. People who were caught there would have to remain. ((The Russian delegation was made an exception to this rule, providing they flew out at once.) The quarantine was envisaged as a system of two strict isolation, (the Medical Centre in the Queen's Building and the General Transit Lounge in Terminal 2), and four preventive quarantine zones, (the remaining parts of Terminal 2 and the Queen's building, the Control Tower and the Terminal 2 Car Park). Movement between the actual epidemic and preventive zones would be allowed only for authorized members of the organizational, medical and security services. Major Lawford, because of this, asked permission for the AS and the Metropolitan Police to be armed. If this request were to be denied, he could not guarantee observance of the quarantine regulations. With some hesitation, the meeting approved this request. Dr. John Hamilton gave an outline of the medical measures undertaken or projected. The essential feature was to be the vaccination of everybody in the quarantine zone. Between the best single-dose vaccine, only just on trial on the market, which they would have to wait to be

prepared in the USA, and the classical three-dose kind, of which there was ample in London, he decided for the second, maintaining that at least at the beginning, even a weaker vaccine was better than none at all. Vaccination would be accompanied by rigorous sterilization, disinfection, and other epidemiological measures, a ban on assembly and physical contact between the people in quarantine as far in their circumstances that this was possible. Protective measures in the form of suits and masks would be used only in the Medical Centre, since there introduction into the Terminal would cause panic with consequences worse than rabies. Dr. Hamilton informed the meeting that in case of need, a team from the Institute for Tropical Medicine would come to the help of the Airport, and those volunteers with medical experience from amongst the passengers would be mobilized. One of the most sensitive problems was the decision as to the amount of information to be made public. The Authorities and epidemiological circles would, of course be acquainted with the true state of affairs, but the wider public must be protected from the shock. The truth would have aroused panic, particularly amongst friends and relatives of the passengers in quarantine. a panic which would have brought pressure for the Airport Management and hence chaos in the organization of defensive measures. Since many passengers had transistors, which at least for the time being could not be confiscated, it was dangerous to put out different communiqués, one for the quarantine zone and another for London, England and the world. The public telephones in the quarantined area of the Airport would, of course, be disconnected, apart from those at the disposal of the Anti Rabies Committee in the Control Tower and of Flight Control. At that moment the General Manager of Heathrow was summoned to the telephone which up to then his secretary had been successfully answering. It was something requiring his authority. The process of bringing back the aircraft that had taken off from the European Terminal after the mixing of passengers from the flight from Rome with passengers in the General Transit Lounge, had been carried out successfully, apart from a Boeing 727 of Royal Air Maroc on flight AT 917 to Casablanca. At first, everything had gone off as planned. The aircraft had sufficient fuel and after making a 180° turn it was on its way back to Heathrow at full speed. But complications had begun when it was over Spain. The Captain, Christian Jakobskon, announced that he had a disturbed passenger who had been taken seriously ill on board. The symptoms described were those of the acute neurological phase of rabies. Jakobskon wanted to land at Gibraltar, but he was refused permission. In spite of London's intervention, he was also not allowed to land at Lisbon with the aircraft in which there were already several people taken ill. Captain Jakobson didn't know what it was he had to deal with and Flight Control was forbidden to inform him. The last conversation with him brought the number of those taken ill to seven, and the flight crew were in serious danger. Someone had to tell the captain how to behave towards his passengers in that situation. The choice fell upon Dr. John Hamilton. Accompanied by the General Manager and the Director

of Operations, he went up in the lift to Flight Control. The lift was well insulated against the noises of the Airport. Too well. In it, he thought, you felt as if you were in a metal coffin which God's hand was raising up to heaven. Raising up to heaven or lowering down to hell. Because even the sense of the direction of movement was impaired inside it. It could have been either the one or the other.

12. The world's aerial space is divided, by an international convention, into FIR (Flight Information Regions), in which the movement of aircrafts, providing they maintain general flight rules, is unrestricted, and CAS (Controlled Air Space), which is in fact a network of flight paths, like motorways, ten miles wide and twenty thousands feet high, in which traffic is strictly regulated by regional Air Traffic Control Centres, established in geographical sequence. For southern England, the London Air Traffic Control Centre is at West Drayton, near Heathrow. They are a large number of flight paths which cross Great Britain, and of these the international routes are coloured with poetic names like AMBER 1, BLUE 1, AMBER 25, RED 1, BLUE 29, etc, and the domestic ones, more prosaically – white. The aerial tunnel, for transatlantic flights, for example, is called GREEN 1 and it invisibly, if audibly, takes up the aerial space above Britain in a line crossing Dover – London – Dover. Aircrafts fly along this line at a terrifying close frequency, keeping a distance of three miles from each other in the same horizontal plane and a vertical interval of one thousand feet. Naturally enough, in the island's narrow skies, these flight paths cross, forming at these points specially controlled regions, so-called Control Areas, such as the TMA, the London Terminal area, eighty miles square. In these too are situated the control zones which regulate the landing and taking off of aircrafts and the traffic in the immediate vicinity of aerodromes. At Heathrow Airport, the nerve centre of this zone is situated in the Control Tower. This is Flight Control. GMC, Ground Movement Control, is responsible for the movement of aircrafts, cars, freight-hoists, fire-fighting, ambulance and technical vehicles on the ground, and it works from a glass dome at the top of the Tower, colloquially known as the 'fish bowl'. In this area, alongside the GMC personnel, are also to be found the controllers who direct aircraft landing and take-off, the Air Control staff. Two floors lower, on the seventh level, is the Approach Control which looks after the safe transfer of aircrafts from the regional centre at West Drayton into the hands of Air Control for them to be brought in to land. It was to this part of the Tower that Dr. John Hamilton was taken.

Radio communication with the Moroccan aircraft had been momentarily lost. The radio operator did not seem worried. He kept on repeating at short intervals in the unimpassioned voice of a puppet: AT 917! At 917! This is Heathrow Flight Control. Are you receiving me? Over!' Instead of an answer, there was an intolerable whistling as if the radio could not locate its station. The call-sign was repeated again nad again but always with the same answer. John had time to look round the darkened room with its smoked-glass windows whose moongreen light illuminated the four radar receivers. Phosphorescent emerald fingers moved flickeringly in centripetal and centrifugal sweeps across the fine grid of emerald concentric circles and diagonals, designating air corridors. For an instant he had the unpleasant impression that he was standing over four microscopes and looking through all four at coloured living tissue through which the geometrical silhouettes of the rabies' virus was moving. The controllers sat beside their panels, two to each external screen, and one to each internal one. In addition to the metallic hum in the atmosphere, the concentrated tension could be felt almost physically. The pressure of air traffic was getting close to the limits of nervous tolerance. This could not be noticed in the tone or the rhythm of the voices giving out instructions and information. It was apparent only from their shirts which were streaked with sweat stains like grey blood. The situation was critical, explained Timothy Farenden, the Head Controller, quietly. Critical, because it was at the limits of what could be coped with, at any moment there could be a minimal worsening, as the result of an incident or an oversight, vis mayor or human error, which would immediately disrupt the Airport's whole safety system. Something like aerial rabies, which several floors lower, was already disrupting the system on the ground. At one time there had been just one two-hour flight to Paris, explained the Head Controller, now there were thirty fifty-minute flights every day. Fifteen for New York, eight for Montreal and Toronto, twelve for India and Pakistan, five for Tokyo, and the numbers were increasing for every major town on the planet. When Heathrow was opened to civilians' traffic in 1946, in the course of that year, 63,000 passengers passed through it in both directions. At the height of the summer season in July, that number was less than the total for one day now. Last night's bad weather with a large number of flights postponed, today's quarantine, with the number of flights from Terminal 2 to Terminal 1 and 3, or their re-routing to other airports, had turned the sky above Heathrow into air traffic chaos with more than a hundred aircrafts movements an hour, and the ground area into a melting pot full of seething metal, mixed with human flesh. The London ATCC had filled to overflowing all the four aerial stacking points, Bovington, Ongar, Biggin Hill and Ocham with aircrafts which Heathrow could not accept because of the overloaded approach paths. From 13,000 feet upwards in all four movable parking lots for unwanted aircrafts, incoming flights were circling in a clockwise direction at 1,000 feet intervals and waiting for Heathrow Control Tower to authorize them to land.

The first to be allowed to approach the Airport was the aircraft at the bottom of the stack, the next one above it immediately dropped down to the height it had been occupying and the whole pile moved down a place so that the top of the stack could now be taken up by an aircraft from one of the blue, red, amber, green or white flight paths above Great Britain. At the moment when Dr. Hamilton came on the scene, there had already been three 'loss of separation', a situation in which aircrafts had been beneath the permitted distance apart, and one 'air miss', where there had almost been an aerial collision. Although he didn't fully understand the technical side of this alarming background, nor the complicated procedure for resolving it, John could feel the darkened space around him filled with a kind of 'specialist mysticism' like the nave of a church. The luminous green-gold radar screen resembled altars of some mysterious gods of the air, with which only the high priests of the cult of light, the air controllers, could communicate. Only the understood their enigmatic instructions and interpreted their strange will. There was in those men the essence of something which ideal molecular biology was only just beginning to be able to create. Specialist-formed men of the future would have in their brain the genetically builtin capacities to control aircrafts, and there would be no possibility of any kind of human error. Even as it was, those here were behaving as if they already possessed such a capability. It was in such arrogant behaviour patterns, he thought, that the lack of understanding with nature began, a lack of accord which end in heaps of burnt-out metal all over the planet. 'AT 917! At 917! AT 917! Ate you receiving me? Over!' The radio operator kept on repeating. The voice which answered was distorted by heavy interference, but nevertheless understandable. 'Heathrow Flight Control! This is AT 917! I hear you loud and clear! Go ahead! Over!' 'Do you still need a doctor?' 'Affirmative! Over!' In the meantime, John had been informed that the Royal Air Maroc Boeing 727, flight AT 917, with a CS (Cruising Speed) of 550 knots and an ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) at 14.20 hours, was flying back towards England. 'The flight captain is a Swede.' explained the Head Controller. 'What sort of a man is he?' asked John. 'He wouldn't make a fuss unless the situation was really desperate.' 'What legal powers have I?' 'The captain has the last word,' said the General Manager, 'but I don't think he'll worry about that at the moment, unless, of course, you ask him something impossible.' That's just what I'm going to ask him, thought John, the impossible. But in this situation, it's the only thing possible. 'Speak quite normally, Doctor,' the radio operator instructed him. 'Just as if you were speaking on the telephone. The captain's name is Christian Jakobson.' And he again called up the aircraft. 'AT 917! AT 917! This is Heathrow Flight Control! I'm passing you Dr. Hamilton.'

'Am I speaking to Captain Jakobson?' 'Jakobson here. Who are you?' The voice was clear and audible. 'D. Hamilton from the Institute for Tropical Medicine.' 'O.K. Doctor. What do you have for me?' 'Have you been informed of the situation at Heathrow?' 'If it's anything like what I have here, I've a damned good idea.' 'What is your situation? Try to be exact.' 'I have eight passengers ill. Amongst them is my steward. All of them are rabid mad. I cannot be any more exact.' 'Who's taking care of them?' 'Two air hostesses and my number two.' 'And who is with you on the flight deck?' 'My radio operator and the flight engineer.' The critical moment had arrived. John wondered how to begin. He could feel that despite their preoccupation with the radar, the whole room was listening to him. 'Captain Jakobson!' 'I'm listening, Doctor.' 'I'm going to ask you to do something that will not be easy for you, but I assure you it is the only way to bring your aircraft back to Heathrow. Can you hear me?' 'I'd listen to the devil himself if he could give me some good advice.' 'Are the doors between you and the passengers section reinforced?' 'They have a protective shutter.' 'If they are shut from the flight deck, they can't be opened from the passenger cabin?' 'That's what they're there for.' 'All right, Jakobson. You must shut them, lock them and under no circumstances, I repeat, under no circumstances, must you open them until you have landed and we can take over the passengers from you. Do you understand?' After a short pause, Captain Jakobson answered. 'You must be joking?' 'The hell I am!' 'But what will happen to the people taken ill?' 'We'll take care of them as soon as you're on the ground.' 'Then you'd better get the coffins ready, they won't need anything else.' 'Jakobson.' John realized that he was shouting. 'Listen to me, man! You can't help them. No one can help them. You have to bring them back here where perhaps something can still be done for them. But you won't get them back unless you do as I have told you at once!' 'I'm sorry, Doctor. I can't do that.' 'Shut those doors at once, Jakobson!' Shouted John. 'Can you hear me? This very minute!' 'I'm sorry,' repeated Captain Jakobson. The General Manager of Heathrow took over the radio. 'Captain Jakobson. This is Townsend. Carry out the orders as they have been given to you. Don't ask questions. Just do it!'

'It's easy to say, Townsend, but I have to close the door.' John one again took over the initiative. He thought he had heard some slight hesitation in the captain's voice. 'Imagine that there are hijackers, Jakobson. Hijackers who you have shut off in the passenger cabin. You're being hijacked, Jakobson, do you understand?' 'Who the hell by?' 'By rabies, canine rabies! Lock the doors and forget what's on the other side of them!' 'But part of my crew's there!' 'Forget them too. Can you hear what's going on in the passenger cabin?' 'If I switch on the intercom.' 'Then don't switch it on. Don't open the doors whatever happens, no matter who wants you to. Do you understand? ... Jakobson! ... Do you understand me?' 'O.K, Doctor,' came back the stifled answer. 'I hope you know what you're doing. Because if you don't know, then God help us both. Over and out!' Contact was broken off. The line was taken over by the electronic music of space. John turned towards the Head Controller. 'Where exactly is the aircraft at this moment?' Timothy Farenden consulted the Head Approach Control, who was responsible for so-called Procedural Control (South and North) and then West Drayton. John was shown the track of the Moroccan aircraft on an aerial map of Western Europe. It was still on the Iberian side of the Pyrenees, over the Ebro somewhere between Soria and Zaragoza. He asked where it would go from there. A line was drawn on the map linking the French towns of Lourdes, Cognac, Le Mans and Rouen. The aircraft would then fly over the Channel and enter the territory of the London ATCC and West Drayton. 'If for any reason,' asked John, 'the aircraft had to change course, to fly, say, only over water like this,' his finger moved slowly over the bay of Biscay and along the Atlantic seaboard of France, went round the Brittany coastline, the island of Guernsey and the Contantin peninsula, crossed over the Channel and entered the Straits of Dover, 'how could that be managed?' 'Through the IATCC at West Drayton, and the regional flight centres in Europe which are at present controlling the aircraft,' said the Head Controller. 'But for something like that there would have to be a very good reason, and the aircraft, of course, would have to have sufficient fuel on board.' 'Does it have sufficient fuel on board?' 'It probably has.' 'Then there is a very good reason,' said John. 'Can you set in motion the necessary procedure?' The Head Controller, Timothy Farenden, looked at the General Manager and the Director of Operations. All three of them understood Dr. Hamilton's reasoning. Although it was entirely contrary to the principles of their service and the very nature of their organization, the prime responsibility of which was to assure the safe passage of air traffic, there was no open resistance on their part. Dr. Hamilton conversation with the Captain Jakobson had left a deep impression on all of them.

The General Manager limited himself to observing that in his opinion such precaution was exaggerated. 'Rabies is an exaggerated disease, Sir,' answered Dr. John Hamilton, moving towards the door. He distinctly heard one of the Approach Control men call him a 'bloody son-of-a-bitch'. He was not offended. That was exactly how he felt. ***** Dr. Luke Komarowsky too felt like a 'Bloody son-of-a-bitch'. He had been able to do nothing for those people. Not even for the young Austrian girl who had been the last to be brought into the Isolation Unit. If she had some wound or scratch which could have been considered to be the site of infection, he would have proceeded to an intensive cleaning of the area, its severe scrubbing and scouring before the local administration of serum; by at least taking care of the patient, he would have had the illusion that he was doing something for her, even though it might have had no prospect of success. But all he could do was to go from bed to bed, wrapped up in a phantom-like protective suit like some ghost of helplessness, with a mask hiding his face and the truth that his passage served no useful medical purpose; the nurses were standing alongside the beds in green suits, increasing the doses of sedative and seeing to it that the unfortunate wretches were correctly attached to their artificial machine life supporting systems, most probably for ever, but in any case for the rest of their tormented lives. Several of them were already in the advanced paralytic phase, two already in a coma. Mother Teresa's breathing had become difficult, her hearth was weakening. The other patients, the majority of whom were in the acute neurological stage, were relatively calm, thanks to the continuing treatment with large doses of sedative. The Austrian girl who had just been brought in was in fact entering that phase. The Isolation Unit of the Heathrow Airport Medical Centre was a long, narrow room which seemed smaller because of the iron beds on wheels set out along the walls in two opposite rows. From the ceiling hung steel rails along which curtains could be drawn if necessary, to separate off each bed. The curtains were closed now, and if you walked along the provisional corridor between them, it seemed as if you were passing between walls hung with draperies behind which there was nothing. In each separate cubicle stood a night commode, a chair, and a lamp fixed to the wall, together with the cables and tubes of the artificial life-support system apparatus. On the left of the door, a special curtain shut off a wash basin and instruments for disinfection, and, to the right, another hid hangers with the protective suits which had to be taken off before leaving the area. At the other end of the Unit, by the short wall, a battery of instruments had been set out on a mobile trolley. The room did not, in fact, appear any different from any other unit of an English hospital, run by

the social service. The only difference was in the noises to be heard. In a normal hospital, the noises, whatever actions or sufferings they expressed, were human. Here could be heard only the ominous whimpering of an animals' lair. Sudden snarls, almost dog-like yelps, accompanied by a commotion behind the curtain. Even the noise from Terminals 1 and 3 seemed not to sound like aircrafts, but rather the growling of ferocious animals in their sleep. Luke went towards the cubicle in which the Austrian girl had been placed. At least he didn't have to think about Katharine any more. She had taken the news about Ian without making any comment, it had seemed to him even with a certain satisfaction for which he was thankful to her. Of course she knew nothing of the real reasons for keeping Ian in the Medical Centre. He had told her that the boy would sleep with him in a hotel near to the Airport where he had been living for the last year. He had taken Katharine to the Tube, saying that he would see her tomorrow. A tomorrow which would not exist. Tomorrow she too would know everything. And, of course, she wouldn't be able to understand his action. She would have to suppose that he had known about the quarantine before they had met in front of Terminal 2. In the light of that, his action in keeping Ian would seem insane. Criminally insane. And he would not be able to explain it to her. The knowledge that Ian was in the Observation Room, that he would remain there until it was seen if he was infected, would have killed her. Here too he was quite helpless. The Austrian patient, Wagner, a high school teacher from Vienna, was lying between her unseen neighbors, a sedated nurse and an unconscious Rumanian diplomat. For once even diplomatic immunity had been of no value. It was a natural immunity that was needed rather than a miserable piece of paper. Rabies had not taken any account of a privileged passport, only of a mass of antibodies, which, evidently, not a single organism in that room had developed. They were of all nations and races. White, Asiatic, Black, women, men, children. An old women of seventy and a boy of seven. A mining engineer from Alaska and a Japanese industrialist en route from Rome to New York. A young man and his bride from Portsmouth on their honeymoon and a Russian dissident for whom this was the first window into 'the free world'. A student from West Berlin, a merchant from Ankara, a tourist from Belgrade. Soon, he thought, he would have to be setting out the patients on camp beds on the floor of the Medical Centre. Always supposing there was enough floor space. Thanks to John's appeal, a variety of medical supplies was already on its way from the London clinical centres. It had begun to be a race between nature and human technology. Luke hoped that it wouldn't reach the speed with which civilization eliminated its dead bodies. In epidemics up to the present, it had not been a question of medicine competing with disease, but of grave diggers with death. This room, like a beehive in which the cells were for dying rather than for giving birth, did not give promise of anything better this time either. It looked as though Fraulein Wagner was conscious and relatively calm. It was a typical example of a lucid interval. It was the first one he had witnessed. He had to make use of it to find out something more about

the means of infection. He drew the curtain behind him and sent the nurse out. He remained alone in the cubicle with the ash-blond young woman with fear in her dark blue eyes. 'Do you speak English?' He had to be careful. She was clearly terrified. He understood that she was trying to discover the reasons for her terror, and her inability to do so made her even more frightened. Fear gave birth to fear. And then frenzy. 'Who are you?' She sat up and pulled her knees up under her chin. 'I'm a doctor, Fraulein Wagner. My name is Luke Komarowsky. I see you speak English?' 'I teach it in Vienna,' she answered. 'We can speak German if you would like to?' The woman examined him suspiciously. 'Why are you dressed like that? Why is everybody dressed like that? Am I infectious?' 'Of course not.' He sat down on the chair. 'But there are certain Airport regulations. An illness must be considered to be infectious until the contrary has been proved. It's just a normal precaution which you shouldn't let worry you.' 'But I an ill, aren't I?' 'We don't even know that yet. How do you feel?' 'I don't know.' She was evidently trying to concentrate on her own body, on what the sensations in it were. And she could only just manage it. The inability to concentrate, he thought, was one of the most frequent symptoms of the prodromal phase of rabies. 'A little vague and weak. What happened to me, Doctor Komarowsky?' 'Can't you remember?' 'No' Limited amnesia after an attack was also common. 'What is the last thing you can remember?' Her speech was breathless, interrupted, fragmented. 'I was sitting in the Transit Lounge … I was getting anxious … My flight had already been delayed twice … I was talking about it with a man sitting next to me … He too was angry … There was something wrong with his flight as well.' 'Do you remember what flight it was?' 'For New York. From Rome, I think … The man was a banker or something like that. He was saying that he'd almost been killed in Rome when terrorists had shot at some judge.' 'Did you notice anything about him?' 'He had a heavy cold. Do you think I could have caught something from him?' 'It's possible.' Some kind of influenza, perhaps?' He was glad of the influenza. It was something familiar, not dangerous. A large number of Englishmen have it permanently. Influenza or an allergy with its symptoms. 'Very possibly. This man, the banker, did he cough a lot?' 'I didn't notice. But he had a cold … His nose was streaming … It was rather unpleasant.'

A banker from New York, on his way home to Rome, with a running nose. He would have wiped his nose with his handkerchief. Secretion from the nasal mucus containing the virus – perhaps transmitted through the air – had come into contact with his right hand. From his hand it would have been carried to Fraulein Wagner's hand. Perhaps with that same hand a few minutes later she had touched up her makeup. 'While you were sitting next to him, did you touch up your lips with a lipstick?' 'What kind of question is that?' The Austrian girl asked anxiously. 'It would help if you could remember.' 'Yes, I did, in fact. I was bored. I had nothing to do … It was very hot … I wanted to freshen up.' 'How long were you sitting next to that man?' 'A long time. All the time … Until he became worried and run off somewhere. I don't know what happened to him. Perhaps he went to ask about his flight?' 'Probably.' Or to bite someone, he thought. 'What happened after that?' The woman shuddered suddenly on the bed. 'I went on sitting there … Someone sat down beside me … Then I felt a headache coming on … Probably from the stuffy air.' 'And afterwards?' 'I don't know.' 'You don't remember becoming unconscious?' 'No. What's happening to me, Doctor?' she said with fear in her voice. Her eyes suddenly widened. 'Why do I feel like this?' 'How do you feel?' 'I don't know. And that's what worries me … I feel strange … As if something terrible was about to happen … Something which I can't stop, although it concerns me.' 'You mustn't worry, Fraulein Wagner.' It was that irrational, primeval panic, characteristic only of rabies. 'It's a normal reaction to you having been taken ill a long way from home, while on a journey …' 'My journey!' she shouted. 'I'll miss my flight.' 'No you won't.' He had an almost overwhelming temptation to take her hand and try to calm her, but he overcame it. 'It's been delayed for another five hours,' he said. And by then, in all probability, she would already be on another, longer journey. 'Thank God.' She smiled. She had a pretty unforced smile. 'It's the first time that I've ever been glad about that kind of news.' He got up. 'What is your diagnosis?' she asked anxiously. 'Quite strait forward. As a result of all these problems with your flight for Vienna, you were quite simply überspannt.' He deliberately used the German word to make her feel at ease. 'You were over tense, and because of that you had a nervous attack.' 'Aren't you going to examine me?' He felt embarrassed. 'We've already examined you.' 'While I was unconscious?'

'Yes.' She calmed down again. 'And what will happen to me now?' he had no answer to that question either. Apart from a lie, of course. Medicine, he thought, is made up of ninety-nine per cent lies and one pre cent good luck. 'You'll rest here until your flight is ready and then you'll leave. What else could happen? The nurse will give you an injection …' 'Why if I'm quite all right?' she asked doubtfully. 'It's just a normal sedative. There's no cause for you to worry. You'll sleep for a while and then everything will be fine. By tomorrow you won't even remember any of all this.' It was becoming grotesque, he thought. He couldn't even utter the most banal sentence any more without them taking on a sardonic meaning. Because, of course, tomorrow she really wouldn't remember anything. Fraulein Wagner now looked almost normal. A little livelier than circumstances warranted, perhaps she was at the beginning of the disease's hyper-active stage, which the sedative would retard, but still relatively well. 'There's just one thing I don't understand, Dr. Komarowsky,' she said. 'This is all a provisional medical area here, isn't it?' 'To some extent, yes. For accidents and urgent cases.' 'For people?' 'I don't understand?' 'There are only people who are ill here?' 'I still don't understand you.' 'You mustn't hold it against me Doctor I know that the English love animals, perhaps even more than people, than foreigners certainly. But don't you find it a little exaggerated that they should treat them together with people?' Luke wondered if this was what rabies was. An interrupted sense of reality. Clinically no. Clinically, rabies was not madness in the sense of real insanity. It wasn't like manic depression, for example. Rabies only led to bizarre, pseudo-insane behaviour. That was all. Because, Doctor, I heard a dog.' He understood. His spine crawled. 'Where?' 'Here, right beside me.' She pointed to the curtain which separated her cubicle from the next one to the right. 'That's impossible.' he said decidedly. 'There are no dogs at Heathrow.' 'But I heard it. Quite definitely.' 'You probably dreamt it.' 'There is a dog in the next cubicle, Doctor,' said the woman stubbornly. Luke went up to the right hand curtain and opened it. In the bed, immobile, like a broken mechanical plastic doll, Nurse Lumley was lying. Her face was drained, white, motionless.

Around her lips, down the visible opening of her nostrils, was a barely apparent film of foam. 'You see,' he said dully. 'There's no dog here.' 'I'm sorry, Doctor,' she apologized. She was clearly embarrassed. 'You're right. I probably dreamt it.' He shut the curtain around Lumley as if on a stage belonging to some other world and went out. He had the vague feeling that he too was only dreaming. Fraulein Verena Wagner, the English teacher from Vienna, was also wondering if she too, perhaps was dreaming, just as she had dreamed of a dog in the next cubicle. Between the curtains it was half-dark, with daylight barely seen on the other side. At the edge of this side of the darkness and that side of the light, as if it was being traced across the curtain with dark-blue thread, something was taking shape. A form, a cold mist, which was becoming denser but at the same time without losing any of its semi-transparent volume. On the contrary, it grew like an indistinct, ghostly mass, taking on the contours of an animal's muzzle., straining towards her. She couldn't move a muscle. Nothing came out of her mouth which was struggling to take in air. When the dog's head was right over her bed, with the pupil-less whites of the eyes, like icy globes, the jaws opened slowly and dripping slimy foam. She felt it freezing on her face, but she could do nothing about it. ***** In the first-floor gallery of the next building, in the garden restaurant on the second floor of terminal 2, the former Pollux, who had now proved himself to be Daniel Leverquin, known to a wider public as the writer Patrick Cornell, was bitterly trying not to hear the lively waltz which was being played, albeit somewhat loudly, by the Heathrow Chamber Orchestra. It was Strauss ' 'Blood of Vienna' and the orchestra was an experiment on the part of the Public Relations Office and its resourceful Director, Paul Becker, in the universal battle for consumers' souls. Leverquin was trying desperately to think of his future novel about the Airport and not to heed the biting comments being made by Louise Sorensen sitting opposite him. 'The whole thing was an unfortunate mistake,' he said. 'You don't have to say that. Your face says it for you. I just hope that from now on you'll find out so-called reality in the same way as normal writers do, by telephone.' Daniel Leverquin in fact did not feel nearly as bad as the bruises about his face and body indicated. Downing his second whiskey as they waited for the meal they had ordered, he leafed through his tattered breviary with a hunter's pride, and felt content. Despite everything, he was in profit. Without the misunderstanding with the police, he would have written just an ordinary book. Neither better nor worse than what had done before, and therefore, bad. Life itself had

overturned the old subject and given him a real one in exchange. 'It's really very interesting how ideas develop, Louise,' he said. 'Some of the best of them are found in the toilet. Dostoyevsky became a writer standing next in line to the execution post. O. Henry in prison. Women made D. H. Lawrence a writer.' 'And Major Lawford made you one?' 'In a certain way, yes,' he acknowledged without bitterness. His new perspective made him magnanimous. 'He certainly showed me a mistake in the plot. From the point of view of conspiratorial technique, dressing up as a clergyman was stupid. The best way to loose oneself is not to be different from anyone else. It isn't for nothing that nature discovered mimicry. For the weak, of course. The strong are quite at liberty to look like rhinoceroses. But above all, Lawford found a gap in my knowledge of facts. The explosive of my 'Dioscuri' should have been remotely controlled and not timed devices. And you couldn't hide a teaspoon in those damned palms, never mind a machine-gun. The idea of an attack on the Russians wasn't bad, but the whole technique of the diversion was a failure. The Airport isn't a suitable place for attacks of that sort.' 'Where did you intend the attack to take place?' 'I didn't intend to attack them at all.' 'I understand. You were going to attack the Americans. They're used to it.' 'I wasn't going to attack anyone.' He leaned across the table and took her hand. Louise knew she had no reason to be proud of herself. It was not her hand he was holding. He was holding on to his own idea. She was just the link in the chain of transmission. A link in the closed circuit of his thoughts. 'For Christ's sake, Louise! The world isn't just made up of policemen and criminals, spies and counterspies, terrorists 'troikas' and bomb disposal experts. There are quite normal people who kill each other.' 'There are even those who don't kill each other and somehow manage to go on living,' she said acidly. 'Those are the ones I'm talking about. Ordinary people in ordinary circumstances, in ordinary places. We're all, in fact, potential murderers.' 'At this moment that's very true.' 'But in fact everything ends up in mutual abuse. Life is really a soft, pleasant-smelling mush, and that's how it should be described.' 'Then you've got to give up the whole idea of the Airport.' 'What the hell for?' 'Because life here is not just mush, and not the least pleasant. At least, not at the present moment. I've just been talking to John Hamilton …' 'I've certainly no intention of giving up the idea of the Airport. What's the matter with you? What would I do with all this material? For any other place now I'd need at least a year's research.'

'The Airport it is, then,' she concluded impatiently, 'but you're not going to write about some fictitious terrorists or other, but about the soft and pleasant mush of everyday life.' 'Everything that really happens here.' 'How do you know from here in the bar what is really going on?' 'If I don't know, I'll find out.' 'If you're thinking about today, don't count on me. John Hamilton told me …' 'Everywhere, wherever you turn, are people and their stories. It's not my story about them. It's their story. The Airport is really a picture of the world in miniature.' He took up his breviary to note down what he had said. 'I'm going now, Daniel,' said Louise Sorensen. 'Just look!' He pointed at the glass doors of the restaurant against which passengers with nowhere to sit were pushing. 'How many people at this moment are there at Heathrow?' 'I'm not in the slightest worried. I just don't want to be among them any more.' He calculated. 'Given normal transport conditions, at this time of year and day, together with the Airport staff, there's probably more than 200,000. But traffic isn't normal, flights from Terminal 2 are delayed …' 'Jesus Christ, Daniel, that's what I'm trying to tell you. Do you know why the flights are delayed?' 'I've no idea.' 'Because some illness has broken out in the Transit Lounge of Terminal 2.' He looked at her sharply. For the first time, she thought, he noticed her presence rather than just took it for granted. 'Who told you that?' 'John told me. That's why they called him in here.' 'Did he say what kind of disease it was?' 'When we talked, he still didn't know. He only knew it was infectious.' 'And dangerous?' 'Perhaps.' 'Even deadly?' 'Everything's possible. They're already talking about quarantine.' He looked worried. He was glad she had managed to drag him out of his fantasy and bring him back to earth. From there it would be easier to get him back to London. 'Who was talking about quarantine?' 'John and the doctor who was waiting for him in front of the Queen's Building.' 'Excellent!' She looked at him in disbelief. Was he mad? 'What the hell is excellent about it?' 'Can't you see?' He was genuinely excited. 'That's my story. QUARANTINE is the general story against the background of which the others develop, the enquiry concerning the murder in the car park, the search for a maniac who attacks little girls, and of course, the maniac's search for little girls, the story of the Russians and the English in the V.I.P. Lounge, my and your story …'

Louise Sorensen got up. 'No. Not mine.' She walked decidedly between the tables towards the restaurant's exit, and then passed the oval buffet in the gallery from where the stairway led down into the Main Hall of the Terminal. Daniel Leverquin moved slowly after her. The quarantine, he thought, was an ideal setting for a drama. Like a boat in a storm, a maximum security prison on fire, a passenger aircraft forced down in the middle of the wilderness of Andes. In a wider sense the quarantine illustrated the position of the species. The position of a man in the world was quarantined. And the disease, if it was dangerous, was the yeast which would draw out of people that real substance they were made of, beneath the artificial exterior of education, appearance, interest and cunning. It would be unprofessional of him to let something of this sort slip away. He would accompany Louise to a taxi and then come back and look for Hamilton in order to find out something more about the disease. With some difficulty Louise Sorenson managed to push her way past the closed reception desks on the ground floor. The automatic glass doors kept on opening and shutting rapidly, letting passengers through in both directions. At the same moment they both caught sight of the Metropolitan Police and Airport Security men who were grouped together on the apron of the Inner Ring East. A line of loaded luggage trolleys cut across their passage from the left. Louise managed to get round them. He stopped. For a moment they were separated by a pile of suitcases which was no longer moving. Louise turned round. 'Daniel!' she shouted in sudden panic. 'I'm coming!' On the other side of the glass wall, the future quarantine cordon was beginning to form up in an impenetrable rank of uniforms. The automatic doors were still opening to let people through. Louise again turned round. 'For God's sake, go on out!' He shouted. She hesitated. She took a step to one side as if to come back, then a group of coloured people with heavy suitcases pushed her out on to the platform. The doors shut with a subdued hiss. Louise turned back towards the Terminal, but one of the AS men came up to her and took her by the arm. Daniel saw her try unsuccessfully to get free. Then a wave of passengers came across from the right, shutting out both the policeman and Louise and the glass doors opened once more in front of Daniel Leverquin. He drew back to one side. While the group of people came in, he stood pressed together with those who intended to go out. The passengers coming in thinned out and once again he was pushed towards the exit. He saw the automatic doors close slowly, a young man in jeans held them apart at the last moment with his arms, and squeezed through, then a swarthy face with black curly hair and

deep-set, feverish eyes was pushed against him, he felt himself jerked to one side to the accompaniment of an oath in Spanish, and then again pushed forward from behind, so that his forehead banged against the thick glass, on the other side of which, in the distance, isolated from him by the police cordon, stood Louise Sorensen. The glass doors no longer opened even when the crowd pressing against them all but broke them down. The automatic mechanism had been switched off. The quarantine had begun. Welcome, he thought, recalling the Airport advertisement. Welcome to where the future begins!

13. The unkempt young man who had bumped into Daniel Leverquin just before the automatic doors had locked shut and cut off movement between the European Terminal and the rest of the Airport, and who, most probably, was the last person to get into the quarantine zone, was called Joaquin Diaz Marangos. He had been born a native Indian in Rio de Janeiro, now a student, and according to his false passport, his name was Joan Fernandos, also an Indian, but a farmer from Diamantin on the high plateau of the Matto Grosso. J. D. Marangos knew nothing of the writer Daniel Leverquin's conclusion that the Airport should be quite definitely excluded from the list of places suitable for terrorist action. Even if he had known of it, there was little chance that it would have influenced him in any way. He was an idealist, who, five South American, tree European and two Asian countries had on their wanted list. J. D. Marangos was also, as is the rule with any kind of idealist, a fanatic. For him revolution was the categorical imperative of history, for which every time, every place, every means, were good. On principle, the process was not worth ones while only if one missed the target. On principle, for example it was superfluous to shoot at some servant of imperialism who had previously been killed by a heart attack. All others were fair game. Heathrow Airport was just as good as any other place for that purpose. Midday was no less suitable than midnight. The Russian delegation was just as worthy of a bullet as any other. His comrades in arms, all members of the IRLF, the International Revolutionary Liberation Front, three young men and a girl, were already waiting for him in previously agreed position in the Main Hall. Their machine pistols and bombs, wrapped in plastic bags so as not to attract the attention of the sniffer dogs, and buried in the soil of the decorative palm trees, had already been

transferred to quite ordinary looking air-travel hold-alls. For the logical Daniel Leverquin, the problem which had been insoluble, of concealing a large weapon in a relatively small tub in which the decorative palms stood, had been here resolved by smaller size of the guns and by dismantling them before their concealment, then re-assembling them in the Terminal's toilets. Everything was in order. On time and at the right place. Everything, except J. D. Marangos who was late. They had come to the Airport by Tube, so as not to attract attention, each individually. His train had stopped between Hammersmith and Acton Town. He had had to take a taxi to make up for the lost time. The increased police activity in front of Terminal 2 didn't worry him. He knew it was because of the Russians. If the police were there, so were the Russians. And that meant that despite everything, he was not too late. As soon as he got into the building, he disappeared in the mass of passengers. He would find his companions within a few minutes. And in those that followed he would give the sign for the revolutionary action to begin. He was relying on it, after so many unsuccessful attempts, to throw the world into chaos. Creative chaos. Chaos from which the stars would be born. At that very moment, an unimpassioned woman's voice made an important announcement over the loudspeakers in the Main Hall. ***** The renewed postponement of the flight for Cologne was causing Hans Magnus Landau a considerable amount of anxiety, the Chief Accountant of the Deutsche Bank first heard of the introduction of the quarantine in the foyer of the General Transit Lounge of Terminal 2. The lounge, with its duty-free shops, its restaurant, its bar and other facilities, was relatively large, although smaller than that in the other Terminals but the disturbance in traffic movement at Heathrow had made it unbearably cramped for all those who were waiting for their uncertain flights. He was standing at the bar and drinking tasteless lemonade which had been served by an unfriendly waiter in a white jacket, when the Airport Management's announcement came through. He had expected to hear the usual excuse for the air traffic chaos, and certainly nothing like what was now being put out. "British Airways and the Heathrow Airport Management wish to make the following announcement on the basis of an authorization by the Health Authorities: because of several cases of infectious disease, quarantine is being put into force in the buildings of Terminal 2 and its car park, the Queen's Building and the Control Tower. Movement between the quarantine zone and the non-isolated parts of the Airport is no longer allowed. Movement between quarantine buildings and between Terminal 2 and the General Transit Lounge is permitted exclusively to authorized medical and security personnel. All flights from terminal 2 are postponed until further notice.

Flights scheduled to disembark at Terminal 2 will be transferred to Terminals 1 and 3, or to Gatwick and Stanstead Airports. These measures are temporary and have been introduced in the interests of the passengers and Airport staff who at this moment are inside the quarantine zone. It is hoped that restrictions on movement will be ended in the shortest possible time, and normal air traffic resumed. The Management of Heathrow Airport regrets the inconvenience which will be caused as the result of these measures. Passengers are requested to observe the instructions given to them, to remain calm and to avoid unnecessary movement and congregation together in large groups; wherever possible, they should try to give assistance to the Airport staff, the medical teams and the security organs in carrying out their official duties. There will be regular bulletins broadcast concerning the development of the situation. Thank you for your attention.' The announcement was then repeated in a number of European languages. And then a frightening, anguished silence fell on the Terminal Lounge. Hans Magnus Landau listened to the announcement as if it were a death sentence pronounced on an accused man who had been certain he would be set free. If his flight did not take off immediately, or, in the worst possible case, if he didn't get away from Heathrow quickly and by whatever means he was not at once en route for Cologne, his 'perfect alibi' fell to pieces. He was certain that the corpse of the Herr Director Upenkampf had already been found, and that the police had identified it. One of their theories must be that the murderer was sill at the Airport. This damned quarantine could give them time to work on it. They would check the passenger lists. That would not get them very far, of course. The face on his passport looked nothing like the one he had used when he had executed Julius Upenkampf, that face was at that very moment melting away in the Airport sewers. And if anyone had noticed him with his beard in front of the Arrival Gate, and made the connection with the body in the car park, that was all right too, the enquiries would be directed towards finding a black-haired, bearded, dark-skinned man, whereas he was fair, clean-shaven and pale. They would never catch him. If he had been the old Hans Magnus, the clerk from the basement of the German f9innancial metropolis, an obedient, loyal, blind mole, the police would have had a chance. But things had changed since the car park. His attitude towards the world and its sacred values had fallen apart at that moment when he had seen one of its most important and most secret ones writhing helplessly at his feet. A number of other more general values had disappeared alongside them in the dust of the car park, although, while he had been pushing the Herr Director beneath the Bentley, he had not actually felt that he was pushing them too into darkness, oblivion, the void. He had only felt the change strongly now that he was again threatened. The fear which had taken hold of him when the quarantine had been announced, that was of

course the old, Hans Magnus-like anxiety of a lower being, caught showing insufficient respect for his betters, committing the sin of offending greatness, which had not left him, together with a certain amount of inherited agitation, a lack of resourcefulness, and an awkwardness, but in the meantime, something important had been lost – his petty bourgeois submission to fate, and a life which was ordered by others had remained beside the corpse under the Bentley. Hans Magnus finished his lemonade; for the first time he felt the taste of it on his lips. For the first time also, he felt a certain unleashed, exhilarating strength. He moved across the Transit Lounge to enquire about the possibility of getting out. When the quarantine had been stabilized and its mechanics had been worked out, it would be all the more difficult, perhaps even impossible. He would think about how he was going to get out of the Terminal later. He passed through the glass barrier between the foyer and the Airside Gallery. Under normal conditions, passengers hurried in both directions through a well-lit tunnel which had numbered bays on each side of it. Now it was empty. Every ten minutes, outlined in the sunlight from behind them, like badly cut out cardboard figures, stood uniformed Airport Security men, members of the Special Branch and policemen in civilian clothes. There was no way through there. He had to try at the passenger entrance. People moved out of his way. For the first time, his existence was noticed rather than no one paying any attention to him. (Before the car park, no one would have noticed, even if he had walked through the Airport naked, perhaps only if he had been shooting as he went.) It was an exceptionally pleasant feeling. He didn't know where the change had come from, but he sensed that it had some connection with the internal authority which he had acquired there in the car park. Everything had passed off easily. Everything in this world, he thought, was much easier then it seemed. You just had to take the plunge. Drunk with this new-found self-confidence, of which he had no previous experience, Hans Magnus Landau did not notice that the passengers were not only giving way in front of him. As far as was possible in the overcrowded space, they moved away from each other. A secret and gloomy fermentation was going on all around. People were splitting up into races, races into nations, nations into families, families into individuals. Less than half an hour after the introduction of the quarantine, the Transit Lounge had been transformed into a complicated system of isolated blood-relation enclaves, in which it was evident to the naked eye that even those who apparently went together, those with the same names, maintained the greatest possible distance between each other. If he had not been so full of his own sense of superiority, Hans Magnus Landau would also have noticed that he had bitten his nails down to the quick and perhaps too, the sight of the occasional passenger, who, shivering and shacking his head as if trying to clear it, with frightened look in his half-closed eyes, and with swollen, slobbering lips, was trying to drag himself away into the darkest corners of the Transit Lounge. ***** Sergeant Elias Elmer found out about the quarantine a short time before the official announcement.

At the meeting of the combined security services (the Metropolitan Police, the Airport Security and the Customs Officials) in the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, Major Hilary Lawford had issued them with firearms and had given certain instructions, which quite unambiguously showed, that at least as far as the maintenance of order was concerned, a cold northerly wind was blowing through the Airport. The quarantine, of course, for every member of the police force at Heathrow, represented a series of unpleasantness disturbances in everyday routine, extra duties, unavoidable incidents with worried, irritated and fractious members of the public, and to some extend, the danger of infection themselves. All that was true. But for him, for him alone, the quarantine was something different. It gave him his first professional chance. Sergeant Elmer would certainly not have bet any money on the hasty conclusion arrived at by the Scotland Yard Inspector, Hawkins, that the murderer was already a long way from Heathrow. (Inspector Hawkins was already a long way away that was true.) But the murderer was still at the Airport. He had been led to that assessment by a slow process of enquiry and logical deduction. Hampered by his regular duties, which had been further complicated by the exceptional state of affairs, the process was not as efficient as it would have been if the case had been officially entrusted to him. If he had not been obliged to take it on without authorization, off his own hat, 'under cover' so to speak. His only authorized connection with the crime was of a quite perfunctory nature. He had to keep the curious member of the public as far away as possible from the corpse and the quite indifferent Inspector Hawkins, who begrudged the time and effort spent on it. When first of all the corpse had been removed, and shortly afterwards Inspector Hawkins had followed it, and then finally the public had dispersed as well, he should have officially forgotten the whole affair and rededicated himself to the trivialities of the duties for which he was paid. He, on the other hand, did not consider that he was paid just to tell people to 'move back there', 'don't come any nearer', and to wave his arms about. He was hired to defend people from crime. From the very beginning there had been a number of questions that needed answering. Who was the murdered man? Why has he been killed at the Airport? Why had the murderer done everything he could to delay the identification of the body? In normal circumstances, such questions would be only the beginning of the case. Sergeant Elmer sensed that the right answers would be enough to close this one. They would lead directly to the murderer. Before the appearance of Scotland Yard, in the person of Inspector Hawkins, in the car park of Terminal 2, Elmer had taken the opportunity of examining the corpse, and the scene of the crime. The victim, first of all, was quite evidently some 'big fish'. That was evident from his expensive

suit and several even more expensive pieces of small personal jewellery, and his general appearance which the Sergeant had become accustomed to in his dealings with VIP passengers. His small overnight case was evidence of a short stay in London. Hence the murdered man was not a Londoner about to leave on some journey, nor an Englishman, but a foreigner, most probably a German. So much was clear from the German origin of his toilet requisites and the label of a Cologne footwear manufacturer in the lining of his shoes. A fragment of a boarding card had been found by the body. It did not, unfortunately, belong to Lufthansa but to Alitalia. Given that the Germans were a much traveled people - it was enough to remember where they had got to in the last war - this did not invalidate the theory that the victim was a German; nor the deduction that his stay in London was intended for strictly business purposes. The absence of papers which would have confirmed it means that the murderer had got rid of them; in order to make the identification of the body more difficult, or because the papers were the reason for which the murder had been committed. After the withdrawal of Inspector Hawkins in the face of the danger of possible infection, Sergeant Elmer had begun to telephone around. He enquired at the reception desks of the netter London hotels about any guests who had not signed in at the expected time. The majority, Africans, Asians and South Americans, could be eliminated. Eliminating the Europeans one by one, he arrived at the King George Hotel, Dr. Julius Upenkampf and a description which corresponded to the body in the car park. The receptionist recognized the General Manager of the Deutsche Bank of Cologne, who had stayed at the King George whenever, once yearly, he was present at the International Monetary Conference. The name under which this gathering of financial sharks met was not difficult to confirm, nor where the conference was to be held. From the secretariat, he got the information that Herr Upenkampf had not yet arrived. The rest he managed to find out in the Alitalia office. Dr. Julius Upenkampf had been on the list of passengers on the morning Rome-London-New York flight, the same one which had brought rabies to Heathrow. So the question as to who the murdered man was, was answered. The remaining two questions could now be answered by logical deduction. Of all the places where the murder could have been committed, God alone knew that if someone wanted to commit a murder, almost anywhere was good enough, the Airport was the most inappropriate. Since he had been there, there had been only one other. At night, when there were no flights and only a small number of passengers. This murder had been carried out at the busiest tourist season in the history of British public holidays and at the height of its busiest period. That means that the murderer had been in a hurry, and that Upenkampf had been pushed under the Bentley so that he should not get to the conference. The true culprit, therefore, would have to be looked for in the real world, at the conference table, and the actual murderer in the underworld of hired criminals. If the contract has been taken out in the London underworld, then the murderer would have found some way of finishing the job in

town. He must therefore be a foreigner, who did not know London, or planned to leave it immediately his task was done. Otherwise, the whole business of concealing the victim's identity – a dangerous waste of time in the busy car park, made no senses at all and was quite unprofessional. From this it followed, that thanks to the disturbance in air traffic, the murderer must still be at the Airport. And finally, if he was, that at that very moment he was in the Transit Lounge. If this were not so, the complicated timing would not have been worthwhile. And, what was worse, his, Elmer's logic would be false. He didn't dare to dream that even more rapidly, almost miraculously so, he would get the answer to his main question – who was the murderer? In fact, not exactly who he was, what his name was, but at least what he looked like. But he arrived at that quite by chance. Clearly it was 'his day' on which he had everything going for him. Even the outbreak of rabies, the cause of quarantine, had played into his hands. When he had enquired at the Alitalia office about the passenger list, there had been a girl, a representative of the Air Company who had recalled Julius Upenkampf because of the fuss he had made when he had been detained in the First Class Transit lounge. She remembered too, that Martia Tracey, a BA employee, had informed him that somebody was waiting for him in the Main Hall of the Terminal. From Martia Tracey, Elmer got a very satisfactory description of the man who had been waiting for Herr Director with a board with Dr. Julius Upenkampf written on it. That man had to be found in the Transit Lounge. A dark-skinned, black-haired, bearded murderer who had something wrong with one leg and who, despite the heat, was wearing a dark raincoat. There remained the technical problem of how to get into the isolated Transit Lounge. That too was easy, confirming that today the stars were in his favour. The passengers in the Transit Lounge had to be listed for vaccination. In addition, their hand luggage had to be discreetly examined, for word had come from the Medical Centre that there might be a smuggled dog somewhere in the Transit Lounge, a dog which was the cause of the infection. Superintendent Warden asked for volunteers. Only Sergeant Elmer came forward. The remaining volunteers were chosen by Major Lawford. Somewhat later, protected by special clothing, the small group of them moved off, sweating, in the direction of the Transit Lounge. They had the appearance of masked carnival figures. ***** It was not only Sergeant Elmer who was glad at the news of the introduction of the quarantine at the European Terminal. Two young people, despite the worry of being separated from their respective families by the announcement, the one at the Intercontinental, the other at the Domestic Terminal, were happy that before the departure of the flights which would separate them for ever, they would still have some time left to spend together.

The young man was Reuben Abner, the girl was called Miriam. The twenty-five year old Reuben was an electrical-engineering student from Warsaw who had managed to get to London with his and several more Jewish families after a running battle of several years with the Polish authorities to be issued with exit visas. From London he was to fly on El-Al to Israel. Amongst the group of émigrés, he was the only one who spoke English. Because of that, he had been chosen to wait at the European Terminal for the arrival of a LOT flight from Warsaw on which a further group of his countrymen was to fly in. The Polish aircraft was late and Reuben Abner had already come across from Terminal 3, from where the flight for Israel left, these times to find out how long the delay would be from the Information Desk of the European Terminal. In the meantime, the flight for Lodd was also about to leave. But there was still a possibility that the last group of Poles would arrive in time for the El Al flight. He had noticed the girl some time before. She was quite beautiful and undoubtedly Jewish; she had coal-black hair, an olive skin and a look in her dark, velvet eyes which seemed bottomless. He was very sensitive to the Semitic type of beauty, perhaps because with his hair the colour of ripe wheat, his high cheek-boned, steppe-nomad face and heavy figure, he had nothing Jewish about him at all. Complete confusion reigned at the Information Desk, which was besieged by passengers in varying degrees of ill-humor. But he managed to extract the information that no information about the LOT flight was available. In the meantime, he lost sight of the girl. They came across each other in the same place an hour later. She was standing helplessly on the other side of the desk without even trying to get to the front of the crowd of people. Instinctively he seized his chance. He pushed his way towards her and asked in English what it was she was trying to find out. She wished to know when the TAROMA flight from Bucharest was expected. After half an hour he re-emerged from the mass at the desk with the battered look of a soldier from a defeated army, and with no news. It was still not known when either the Polish or the Rumanian flights would arrive. But they had achieved something. They had got to know each other. They spent the next half hour, before going back to their respective Terminals, together. When they finally separated after agreeing to meet up again at the same counter, Reuben Abner realized that they knew almost as little about each other as before they had met, but that it didn't matter any more. He knew that her name was Miriam and that she was waiting for her brother to arrive from Bucharest before leaving together from Terminal 1 for Cyprus. He had told her that he was called Reo – the nickname he had acquired at the University - and that he was a Pole who was expecting the arrival of some friends from Warsaw. But he had said nothing of his onward journey to Israel. Perhaps this was the result of excessive prudence, ingrained by the hardship of life in Poland, or perhaps simply the collective tribal experience of the two thousand years of the Diaspora. Now, seeing each other for the third time, they listened to the Airport Management's announcement with mixed and ambiguous feelings. Reuben felt some inevitable pangs of

conscience about the family from which he was now cut off. The girl too felt something similar. But nevertheless, both of them felt a secret satisfaction at being together for longer then they had thought possible, a pleasure which each tried to hide awkwardly behind the pretext that it was good to know at least someone in the Terminal in such a situation. They didn't dare admit, even to themselves, that the best thing of all was that they had met each other. He suggested that they should try and contact their families by telephone, but they soon established that the public telephones in the Terminal had been disconnected. 'What shall we do?' asked the girl. The cutting off of the phone services, the only guarantee that they were still part of the world, and not just a diseased swelling on its surface, circumscribed by the quarantine and anaesthetized by promises, brought her back to reality more completely then the announcement of the disease, 'The most sensible thing,' said Reuben Abner, 'would be to find somewhere where we could be left alone in peace. If possible, before other people think of it.' 'I hope the quarantine won't last long.' 'I don't think so. In any case it can't go on for ever.' Ruben Abner, an émigré from Warsaw, had no inkling of how close to the truth he was. ***** Sir Matthew Laverick, M.D, the dermatological star of Harley Street, a grey-haired, fifty-yearold, ascetically sinewy figure of a man, with something permanent, at the very least, highly durable in his bearing and behaviour - the allergies which he treated were also of a lengthy duration, as therefore were his patients - did not for a moment consider that the quarantine applied to him and Lady Laverick, his wife, who was some twenty years younger than he was. They had already been waiting patiently for two hours for their flight to Istanbul. He had been the fourth member of the team from Liebermann's 'Messianic' times, together with the Head of the medical Centre at Heathrow, Luke Komarowsky, Hamilton and Deveroux; the genetic engineering of people, which they had worked on together had promised a biological paradise, until one night it had been discovered that every paradise has its corresponding inferno, and that the two are sometimes difficult to distinguish. Luke and he had got out into practice, into a normal world which they had no wish to perfect, only to treat. John Hamilton and Coro Deveroux had gone back to classical virology, there were enough established viruses in the world without endeavour8ing to produce new ones – and Liebermann himself had disappeared in mysterious circumstances. It was true that relations between him and Luke had never been very close, or even in the circle of the 'evangelists' in general. All four had been people of the 'chemically pure' kind, not at all suitable to mix emotionally. And what was more, Luke was a Slav, a Catholic from the furthest frontier of the Faith, facing the protestants in the West and the Orthodox in the East. A Slav Irishman in fact. A devilishly complicated, unpredictable, explosive personality. Nevertheless, he believed he would understand him. It wasn't for himself, after all. It was on account of Andrea. She wasn't the sort of person to cope with this kind of situation.

He knew from experience that epidemiological measures in the densely populated zones of Europe – Afro Asia, of course, was something quite different – were always in excess of the real epidemiological danger. Sometimes they were no more than an artificially inspired fear with the aim of urging people to defend themselves by giving up some commodity, a fear that it was risky to take advantage of. For the time being, the Terminal was showing no signs of a collective psychosis. Whether it was from a conditioned belief in the unassailability of human civilization, which had to some extent drugged natural instincts so that they had remained undisturbed, or whether people were still 'chewing over' the news of the quarantine, he could not know. Only the church-like whispering and the sudden cessation of unnecessary movement indicated that something unusual was going on. He, of course, knew that the calm was only on the surface. Andrea, for example, was already very worried. His presence, his reassurances were preventing her anxiety from building up into a nervous crisis. Amongst the thousands of passengers imprisoned in the glass and steel cage of Terminal 2, there were at least several hundred who felt the same obligations towards those weaker and more nervous than themselves. In the multitude of nerve centres of an organism, unified by the uncertainty of the quarantine, many unknown tensions were being created, and when they were stretched to breaking point, they would explode in a terrible thermo-psychological explosion. Like the quite innocent noise which throws a rabies' sufferer into agonizing convulsions. He had to get Andrea out of the quarantine zone before something like that happened. Even though he believed the whole fuss was exaggerated. perhaps not entirely illusory, but certainly over played in the true epidemiological tradition; it was probably some rare tropical infection, like legionnaires' disease, which from time to time satisfied the need that human nature had to be frightened, and within several hours everything would be back to normal and they would be on their flight to Istanbul. But he didn't want to allow himself to be lulled into a false sense of security. He had persuaded Andrea somehow to stay by herself and had set off in search of Luke Komarowsky. It was not easy. The Airport employees ware offensively pleasant, insolently stubborn like the air hostess who went on assuring the passengers that everything about their flight was perfectly normal while the aircraft was falling out of the sky, but they did nothing to put him in touch with Komarowsky, until he informed one of them who he was. He could make allowances for their hesitations. Most of those who from now on represented the Authorities here, even those with only the flimsiest connection with the all-powerful voice behind the microphone, would be mercilessly besieged with demands for special treatment. It was really going to be extremely difficult to explain to people before whom all doors usually opened, why those belonging to the quarantine were to remain closed. The particular employee, judging by the identity card in his lapel, was called Hendrix. He looked at him with respect. Sir Matthew wondered whether he had perhaps heard of him, or whether it was simply a reflection of the esteem in which Hendrix held the whole of the medical profession.

He followed him up to the gallery on the first floor, and then along the corridor where the AirLine offices were situated, until they reached a door at the end. Hendrix unlocked it and led him into a small room. There was a telephone on the empty table in front of the radiator. He asked him to sit down and dialed a number. The Medical Centre was engaged. 'They don't know whether they're on their head or their heels,' Hendrix said in a confidential tone. Evidently exceptional situation permitted exceptional relationships. 'But anyway, it's really a bloody fine thing you're doing Doctor. The Airport needs every doctor it can get at the moment.' He would have gone on developing the theme of nobility of human nature, he had taken a liking to this tall gentleman who without pomposity, unasked and unknown, was ready to expose himself to a disease about which rumors of phantasmagoric horror were already spreading, but the Medical Centre answered and he was in a hurry to present Sir Matthew as his personal contribution to the fight against rabies. 'This is Hendrix, Terminal 2. I want to speak to Dr. Komarowsky … No, there's been no new seizure. On the contrary. Something agreeable for a change. We've got a volunteer here. He's with me now, Doctor …' He had forgotten the name. 'What was your name again, Doctor?' He asked over his shoulder, going red with embarrassment because of his lapse. He got no answer. He turned round. The room was empty. Hendrix's admiration for the sons of Hippocrates was somewhat compromised. Sir Matthews Laverick walked down from the first floor gallery quite calmly. He wasn't feeling especially proud of himself, but he had had no alternative. Not until he had got Andrea out of the quarantine, or had managed to protect her in some way could he even think of volunteering to help in the epidemiological team. Nor did he feel any particular moral urge to do so, any unconquerable impulse deriving from a feeling of solidarity; it was more of a passive acceptance of his professional code. He was a doctor, after all. There were certain advantages to be enjoyed from this status, but also there were certain less pleasant drawbacks. The question was one of those. And the fact that he had been caught up in it another. From the staircase, the Main Hall Concourse looked like a brightly illuminated dance floor, the dancers had been petrified and fixed to the spot by a magnetic force which has been passed through the centre of the floor. There was very little movement in the mass of people, who were separated out into small islands, like an archipelago thrown up by some catastrophe of nature; everybody was listening intensely to the Airport Management's second announcement. It concerned the organization of life inside the quarantine zone and the registration of those confined there for purposes of vaccination. There would be other such announcements, he thought. And they were unavoidable, of course. But the majority of them would be anesthetic only. Verbal hypnosis with the aim of controlling fear. The announcement concerned vaccination was a success. The second part, however, was clumsily phased and conceived. Nobody in fact would organize life for something which was

only going to last a few hours. He wondered how long it would take for people to draw their conclusions from that, and how long before their nerves began to give way because of it. Before returning to his wife, he went down to the ground floor to look at the exits; he had already verified that those leading to the Tube and the car park had been sealed off. In a state of spontaneous separation, the crowd was listening to the announcement being repeated. Between the chains of the closed-off glass doors and the passengers, of whom many were sitting on their suitcases or luggage trolleys, a no-man's land had been created, a kind of barren security zone, patrolled by unarmed policemen. On the other side of the glass barrier, along the Inner Ring East, the cordon was denser and the police were armed. Along the roads between the Terminals, around the Control Tower, the heart and brain of the Airport. In the area now free from cars and taxis, police Rovers with loud hailers moved at a crawl. Behind them, in the direction of the Main Tunnel through which the Central Terminal Area was reached, along the apron and the pedestrian bridges, people were moving about calmly and freely. Occasionally the air was shattered by the noise of an aircraft which would have taken them to safety. A few moments later, the Lavericks - both with wet handkerchiefs over their faces - were standing at the bottom of the dimly lit corridor on the gallery, in front of a room of which it was written JAT. The door was locked. There was no one else in the corridor. He moved back as far as the width of the corridor would allow and with all his force threw himself at the door. A few dirty fouls, learned in the college rugby team, helped him to break it down without injuring himself. He led his wife into the room and shut the door behind them. He barricaded the door with a writing table, a filing cabinet and two chairs. He helped Lady Laverick to settle herself down as comfortably as possible on the floor. Then he picked up the telephone receiver and began to deal a number. Only after some time did it become clear to him that the line was dead. And that he would have to think up something else if he wanted to get his wife out of the quarantine. ***** It is part of human nature not to believe in even the most evident truths if they cannot be made to accord with a pre-conceived and advantageous pattern. Stalin paid no attention to the most alarming reports concerning German intentions towards the Soviet Union because they did not correspond to his own desire for the war to be waged in the imperialist West, and for that West, like an overripe fruit, shaken down by the war, to drop of its own accord into the Russian basket, waiting expectantly beneath the European tree; he didn't believe the reports until one June dawn Hitler's Stukas roused him out of his self-imposed hypnosis. Before the plague of the firstborn, nothing could convince the Pharaoh Ramses to set Moses' Israelites free from the exile which so admirably suited the prosperity of Egyptian industry.

And consequently, the Russians in the VIP Transit Lounge of the European Terminal could not believe in the official reasons given for the quarantine, because of which the speeches of protocol had to be broken off abruptly, the vodka had to be left un-drunk and they themselves were obliged to leave for Moscow at once. The head of the Soviet delegation, Pavel Igorovich Artamonov, a member of the Politburo and Soviet Foreign Affairs Minister regarded the ridiculous tale of rabies as just one more proof of the 'capitalist hypocritical madness', which did not hesitate with its right hand to sign with a sixth of the world's globe – and that from the perspective of 'a pair of pocket handkerchief sized islands' – a treaty between their two countries, and with the left at one and the same moment to lure away from the KGB 'one of its most unscrupulous brains'. It was crystal clear to Colonel Donovan of MI 5 how Artamonov had found out about Rasimov's defection. When the Russian had declined his offer to help the West, since he admired it so greatly, from inside Russia, that son-of-a-bitch Drummond had quite simply gone to Artamonov and told him everything. Donovan acknowledged that from the point of view of official British policy, this particularly underhand action made sense as an attempt to save the agreement with the Russians. It was not, however, binding on the Secret Services of MI 5 and MI 6. Their business was with British unofficial dirty work. Drummond had not denied his indiscretion. 'If you play dirty games, Donovan, you have to get your own hands dirty. You can't walk through sewage and come out smelling like a rose garden. And finally, the ball is now in the Russians' court and that's what's most important.' Donovan was afraid that that particular ball would get more than just kicked around. Rasimov was standing there, in a white, waiter's jacket, his legs wide apart, surrounded by several of his angry countrymen, at the far end of the room in which he had first confided his intentions to Donovan. The battle for his soul was in full swing. But there was little chance of Rasimov realigning his affections for his own country again. A scalded cat flees from water. 'At least you might have told me about your conversation with Artamonov earlier,' he said dryly. 'For God's sake, Sir Geoffrey, we're both working for England.' The memory of the moment when the Russians had burst into the lounge just as Rasimov was putting on the waiter's coat was humiliating. 'My England seems not to be on the same side as yours,' answered Her Majesty's Minister, 'ot5herwise you would have informed me of Rasimov's intentions in good time.' 'I came as soon as I found out about them.' 'Not before you'd cooked up the whole nasty business with your Centre, and filled Rasimov's head with all sorts of promises, which the government, and I particularly, have to pay for now.' 'Does that mean that you still want to send him back to Moscow?' 'He will certainly get onto the aircraft. Where he goes afterwards is none of our business.' 'That's damned heartless kind of thing to say, Sir Geoffrey.' 'Nuclear devastation is also a fairly heartless thing, don't you think?' 'And what about Helsinki?'

'As far as I know, Helsinki is the capital of Finland,' said Sir Geoffrey coldly. 'All right,' growled Colonel Donovan. 'You do what you think you have to.' 'And you? What are you going to do now?' 'I shall also do what I think to be necessary.' 'It would be quite remarkable if just for once in politics those two things coincided,' concluded the Minister philosophically. In the 'Russian' corner in the meanwhile, things were becoming decidedly agitated. It looked as though Rasimov wanted to put an end to the talking, but he was not being allowed to. Donovan did not intervene. He had to leave the Russians some hope until it was too late. 'And something else,' he added, not looking at Sir Geoffrey. He had the impression that they were talking in a darkened theatre in which only the stage and its vociferous actors at the far end was brightly lit. 'Perhaps in passing you might let the Russians know that they can talk with Rasimov for as long as they want, or rather, as long as Rasimov is in agreement, but that any attempt to 'take him off voluntarily to board the aircraft' will be met with force.' Sir Geoffrey gave him a sharp look. It was not a bad idea. 'You, it seems would like to start the next war here and now?' 'The next war has been going on for some time already, but the majority of people haven't noticed it yet.' 'Me, for example?' 'Oh, you've noticed it all right, you simply refuse to acknowledge its victims.' 'You can add our guests to their number. Artamanov has informed me that Moscow don't allow them to return without Rasimov.' 'And what do they have to say about the rabies' outbreak?' 'That our Secret Service has invented it. And you know what, Donovan, I'm inclined to believe them.' Colonel Donovan did not answer. 'Do you know anything, incidentally, about this damned rabies?' asked Sir Geoffrey. 'Is it ordinary canine rabies? What exactly is it, in fact?' The MI 5 Colonel pointed to the scene in the corner of the VIP Lounge. 'That's what it is,' he said pointedly. Rabies is what it was. Rabies is everything what was happening to Rasimov. Everything that had gone on between him and Donovan. Everything of the exchange between Drummond and Artamonov. At that moment in London and Moscow. It was that same madness which had ruled all of his, Donovan's life. The lives of Colonel Rasimov and of the Foreign Minister, Sir Geoffrey Drummond. And most probably those of everyone else. The whole of the damned human race. What, in the meantime, was officially designated as rabies, the reason for which the quarantine had been introduced, must be something d i f f e r e n t, something n e w and u n k n o w n. *****

The news that they were subject to the quarantine reached Approach Control by word of mouth, through the sudden Procedure Controller (South)'s change of shift, and then it was confirmed by the Airport Management. For the time being, nobody paid any attenti9on to it. The personnel here were always in quarantine, the isolation which enveloped all their senses, all their powers and all their faculties. Their entire mental energies were tied up in the traffic control crisis, which in no way diminished with the departure of Dr. Hamilton. It seemed, that despite the dispersal of flights to other aerodromes, London Air Traffic Control in West Drayton's holding points, inexhaustible, like Bovington, Ongar, Biggin Hill and Ocham, with their mysterious, alchemic names, until then innocent depositories for flights which could not immediately be accepted, had suddenly become a magician's aerial bottomless sack. Nor did the radio operator Archie Roberts have time for the news of the quarantine. He was still waiting for word from Christian Jakobsen at the control of the Royal Air Maroc Boeing 727 which was on its way back from the aborted flight to Casablanca. For the moment, Jakobsen must be somewhere over the waves of the Bay of Biscay, because at the request of that son-of-abitch Hamilton, he had been diverted from his normal flight path and directed back to Heathrow over the sea. It had been agreed that Jakobsen should make contact every ten minutes. The time has passed. Jakobsen had not come in. For fifteen minutes Archer Roberts, stubbornly, apparently imperturbably, had been sending out the Moroccan aircraft's call sign. He could feel the Head Controller's eyes on his back. He knew what Farenden was thinking. In his place he would have been thinking the same. At any moment he expected a touch on his shoulder, a sign that he was being replaced by someone with no personal involvement in the Moroccan aircraft. For Archie Roberts had asked for a day off the next day. He was to be the best man at the wedding of Captain Christian Jakobsen and the air hostess, Aisha Karafi from Rabat. The girl who was now shut in with rabies in the passenger cabin of the RAM Boeing 727. Archie Roberts tried not to think about that, to isolate himself from the meaning of the procedure by which he was governed, and to become, as his training advised, a lifeless machine for transmitting the human voice through space. He was helped by the language he made use of, the abortive aeronautical language from which all normal expression had been filtered by pragmatic condensation, so that there remained only the coded essence with a few dead recollections of human speech. The abstract space with which he had to make contact, came alive once more. Static interference gave way to a new volume, known to radio operators as the 'expansion of the auditive field', into something where the voice of Captain Jakobsen should have resounded as if it were emerging from a hollow metal can. But it was not there. Archie Roberts couldn't understand it. The sounds were familiar, but somehow distorted and changed. There was one in particular which seemed to stifle all others. The sound of a rhythmical thumping. As if someone were banging on a tin drum.

'AT 917! AT 917! This is flight Control, Heathrow! Are receiving me? … Over! … AT 917! AT 917! Come in! Over!' Finally he understood that what he could hear was the pilot's cabin of the Moroccan aircraft. 'Flight Control Heathrow. This is AT 917!' 'For God's sake, Christian, why haven't you made contact? What's happening?' The radio operator Harry Waterman looked at the Chief Controller, Roberts was clearly losing his cool, instead of the accepted formula he was letting his feelings intervene, he waited for the sign to take over his position, but Farenden made no move. 'We have something for Dr. Hamilton!' said the Hoarse voice of Captain Jakobson. The receiver in Approach Control exploded in a pandemonium of sounds. Jakobsen had deliberately switched on the intercom between the pilot's and the passengers' cabin. Through the chaotic noises of space there resounded a hammering on the reinforced doors and the hysterical voice of a woman who Roberts recognized as Aisha. 'Christian, let me in! Christian, let me in!' In the pilot's cabin someone was repeating deliriously: 'For God's sake, switch it off … switch it off!' 'We can't keep them back any longer!' screamed the air hostess. 'Don't touch the door!' yelled a man's voice in the cabin. 'For God's sake, Christian!' 'Don't open the faking doors! Don't open the faking doors!' It wasn't until they had dragged Archie Roberts away from his chair by force that he realized that the voice was his. 'AT 917! AT 917! This is Flight Control Heathrow!' Harry Waterman sent out the call-sign like some magic slogan by means of which it was expected that the incredible message from the other side of Ireland would be brought back to earth, to technical reality which could be coped with. 'Captain Jakobson, are you receiving me? Over.' The pilot's cabin over the bay of Biscay exploded once more. The roar of the aircraft's engines suddenly became stronger, drowning the shouting and filled the air waves. And then the transmission went dead. The Chief Controller, Timothy Farenden, went over to look at the radar screens, that world of certainty in which aircrafts some times crashed, but rabid people never flied in them. Captain Jakobsen had not been able to hold out. He had opened the doors. He, Farenden, would not open his. The aircraft entrusted to him would take off and land normally. In Approach Control there was silence for a moment only while the unimpassioned voice of Harry Waterman stubbornly called up RAM AT 917 to come in.

And for that lightning-like instant, it was no longer Flight Control for any one of them there. For all of them, it was the pilot's cabin from which Christian Jakobsen, if he was sill alive, was watching the sea coming up to meet him. Blue, endless, comforting.

14. The quarantine at Heathrow Airport began to take on the characteristics of the very disease against which it had been introduced. The incubation period for the news of its real meaning was slow, gradual, unnoticed. The uncertainties, the inconveniences, the limitations, the deprivation, all settled in slowly, and at first, immediately after the first announcements, nothing unusual was felt. At the beginning, the quarantine resembled an ordinary period of waiting at the Terminal, but for other reasons. In any event, flights had to be waited for. With the quarantine or without it. The transition from meaningless air traffic chaos, which none of the passengers understood, to something which had a logical, explicable, even though somewhat unpleasant reasons, was not difficult. People considered that the disease was the cause of the disturbance in the flight schedules from early in the morning, which had been kept from the public until now. The majority of the passengers received the admission by the Airport Management with some relief. At last they knew where they stood. And that somewhere, some kind of organized battle was being carried on against the elemental force, so that they were no longer, as they had been up to then, at the mercy of chance in terms of flight movement and human confusion. Dr. John Hamilton had some experience of quarantine. He knew that the incubation phase, in which the infected person behaved rationally, however long it continued, suddenly came to an end and the first symptom became apparent. The calm inside the quarantine would come to an end too. The symptoms of awareness of the real state of things would appear at the state which in rabies corresponded to the prodrome. The general characteristic was a state of anxiety, worry, fearful uncertainty and discomfort, an unpleasant feeling for which no natural cause could be neither found, nor any real reason, above all the devastating metastasis of fear. From then on every announcement by the quarantine authorities would be received with the same revulsion with which the hydrophobic sufferer refused water. The disease would become more terrible the more it was talked about. And nothing else would be talked about in the quarantine zone. Most often what was heard were weird, mythological fabrications originating in a monstrous combination of ignorance and fear.

The acute neurological phase of consciousness of the quarantine came about when individual awareness's of it, all those at first intimate, hidden, separate fears began to interact, to mix, and to amalgamate until they combined into one single universal act. First of all a paroxysm of panic, then hyperactivity with no object, and finally, frenzied, senseless aggression. Then the body of the quarantine was convulsed with collective madness, just as the body of the rabies victim was violently devastated by violent convulsions. At that point in every quarantine, violence could be expected, depravity, unpredictability and unnatural reactions. During the cholera epidemic in India in 1891, whole villages committed suicide collectively. When the same infection moved to the Balkans, there were suicides, but there was a noticeable rise in murders. Before it was dispersed by death, the quarantine of typhus sufferers in Katanga in the Congo degenerated into a sexual orgy to which the hallucinations of the participants in a typhus-inspired trance, gave a picture of a hell for fornicators punished by forced coupling in the most improbable ways. Religious manias were by no means rare, as early as 'the brethren of the Holy Cross', who, flagellating themselves to death, wandered over the plague-stricken Europe of the fourteenth century. Epidemics in civilized countries, where ownership was a way of life, gave rise to a record increase in armed looting, break-ins and thefts. Like rabies, quarantine passed from the frenzied stage into paralytic, in which isolated people accepted their fate, even when it was the most gruesome. The quarantine gradually lapsed into a coma, a terrible silence and immobility, characteristic of hospital wards for comatose patients, in which in fact only the machines for the maintenance of organism on the fringes of death remained alive. Dr. Hamilton also knew that if the quarantine developed at the same time as the disease, the incubation period for the awareness of what it really meant would not be long for Heathrow's improvised defense organization to prepare itself for the disturbances which would arise when that awareness began to take on its more vicious symptoms. The time had to be made good use of while everyday routine still governed the life of the Terminal through inertia. While the passengers and the Airport employees still felt themselves to be the same people as yesterday, with yesterday's cares. For when the worries and hopes for tomorrow took over, they too would become different, tomorrow's people, for whom today's reasons the measures of today's world, would no longer be valid. In fact, Dr. John Hamilton was explaining all this to Daniel Leverquin, the new number of the Anti-rabies Committee, on his own initiative occupying the role of authorized chronicler of the epidemic, but in the opinion of others, there only in the capacity of Dr. Hamilton's personal friend, when the news came that the first consignment of instruments from the Institute for Tropical Medicine had arrived on the 5th floor of the Control Tower, an area which had been vacated to allow the setting up of a Virological laboratory, and that amongst them was a monotone electronic microscope. Ten times heavier than a man's weight, man was obliged to make use of it to see beings which lived happily in his world quite weightlessly.

***** Ian Komarowsky paid hardly any attention at all to the Airport Management's announcement. When the quarantine had been introduced, he had already been isolated in the Observation room in the Medical Centre in which his father had placed those individuals who, outside the strict isolation area, had either come into contact with the patients suffering from rabies, or with areas where the Rhabdovirus might be. All of them had had samples taken of their urine, saliva, blood and nasal mucus. If within a certain time corresponding to the abortive time of the incubation period of the 'new' rabies, they showed no symptoms of infection, they would be sent back to the general quarantine area. If the symptoms appeared, they would be taken into the hospital just across the corridor. And then they would soundlessly disappear to make way for new patients. Ian Komarowsky was not at all worried about that. Luke Komarowsky had allowed his son to take His Winchester, without the bullets into the Observation room with him. From that moment onwards, only the rifle had existed for him. And the seductive vision of the mountains of the French Jura above the Lac de Neuchatel, where the hunting of high-altitude game was still permitted. He was standing in front of the opaque glass window. The sun was in his eyes and hampered his aim. In front of the rifle sight, in the round lens of the telescope, the Airport shimmered in a luminous haze, just like that given off by the lake at the time of early-morning hunting, tomorrow or the day after. Behind the curtain of light along the Conway Road, the silhouettes of passengers moved inaudibly, as if they were game, moving through the silence of the mountain. He pressed the trigger. The imaginary bullet exploded in the imaginary brain of the imaginary animal. ***** The Makropoulos' heard of the quarantine at approximately the same time as they received the news that their flight for Athens had already left, while they were going from office to office looking for someone official to whom they might complain of the unheard of attitude of the Medical Centre towards the bodily misfortunes of Madam Makropoulos. The flight for Athens was one of the last to leave the European Terminal. Nor did they manage to get back into the Medical Centre Waiting Room. Normal illnesses were no longer sufficient to be received there. The only potential entry pass was canine rabies. Madam Makropoulos, breathing heavily, sat down on her suitcase in the middle of the Main Terminal Hall and hated England.

Mr. Makropoulos stood alongside her, wiping the sweat from his forehead and hating Madam Makropoulos. ***** The Suarez's from Villafranca del Cid stayed close to the Iberia desk. The father-to-be was standing with his legs astride a large bundle tied up with strings. His wife was sitting on the floor with her head leaning against the wall of the desk. She was quite motionless. She was afraid that an awkward movement might bring on the birth contractions which would make it impossible, for the first time in the family, for a Suarez to be born in Villafranca del Cid. She was just finishing her tenth 'Ave Maria', praying for it not to happen, when the quarantine announcement was made. The Suarez's consulted each other. The disease played no part in their discussion. Only the forthcoming birth was of any importance. While things had gone on more or less normally, the Virgin Mary had been enough to prevent it taking place in England. In the new crisis, both of them considered it wise to turn their appeal in another direction. Juanita Suarez, as did all women of the province of Castellon, that in the Sierra de Gudar a woman's womb could be temporarily closed. Beseeching the Virgin Mary for understanding, between each prayer directed up to Heaven, she put in a forbidden appeal to the powers of the underworld, which would have curdled the blood of even the most indulgent of priests. But if the child were to be born in Villafranca del Cid, it would all be worthwhile. ***** Ten-year-old Adrian, the grandson of the Professor of Archaeology at Columbia University, Dr. Aron Goldman, was wondering anxiously how long the puppy, Sharon, in the rucksack between his feet would keep quiet. The pill with which he had drugged him before leaving the 'Rose of Sharon' kibbutz, should last for another ten hours. It kept his grandfather, when he had become over-exhausted at the excavation, quiet for twentyfour. That would have been quite enough for the journey from Tel Aviv to Rome, and then for the flight from Rome to New York. But he hadn't counted on the London quarantine. If it went on for much longer, Sharon would wake up over the Atlantic. Perhaps even in the Transit Lounge. He would be frightened, disturbed and would start to bark. They would take him away from him. When he had asked if he could take Sharon back home with him, his grandfather had been against it because of the quarantine regulations, but he couldn't say how long they lasted in the States. His grandfather used to spend the better part of the day groveling around in the quarry, which was called Meggido, or Harmageddon. He, in the meantime, had been freer than he'd ever been before, even though as a child of divorced parents who lived first with one and then with the other, he was used to more freedom than most of the children who both parents together bothered all the time. It had been really great in the kibbutz. There he had found Sharon, a puppy from a pack of

German Shepard dogs which the kibbutz used for protection at night. The dogs lived in kennels by the outside wall of the settlement. He used to go and say hello to Sharon every morning. The dog had got to know him and had begun to welcome him as soon as he came near. Until that morning. When, in the half light of dawn, he had gone to say goodbye, no bark had awaited him. The kennels were in ruins and the dogs had been torn to pieces as if a giant scythe had passed through the pack. By some good fortune, Sharon had survived the massacre. Without even thinking about it, he had taken the puppy and put it in his rucksack. In the kibbutz it was thought that a lynx had come down from Mount Carmel, but there were doubts as to whether there was any animal from the from the plain of Ezdraelon which would have been powerful enough to make such short shift of a pack of German shepherds. Some felt it must have been the work of Arab terrorists, whose attack, thanks to the dogs, had come to nothing. No one however had been able to suggest an explanation for the unheard of cold of the previous night. Adrian was not worried about all that. He took advantage of the commotion to steel the sleeping pills from his grandfather's toilet bag, and Sharon soon lost consciousness. Nothing had gone wrong until they had taken off from Rome. His grandfather, in the seat by the window, at once fell asleep. On the seat on the other side of him set the nun who was called Mother Teresa. Sharon had begun to squirm about in his sleep and mother Teresa had noticed it. He had not been able to explain to her satisfactorily what it was he had in the rucksack. The nun had pushed her hand down into it and at once jerked it back in pain. Sharon had left a long scratch on her hand. She had been kind about it, but firm. He had had to promise that he would declare the dog's presence as soon as they landed in London. Later, she had been taken ill. They had taken her off into the hostesses' cabin. At Heathrow an ambulance had been waiting for her and he hadn't seen her again. Nor her companion, Sister Emilia. Everything had seemed to be all right again, until the quarantine. Now he had to look round the Transit Lounge to find a better hiding place for Sharon if the poppy woke up prematurely. But his grandfather wouldn't let him leave his side. The people moving around them were mainly Airport staff. The passengers were sitting or standing some distance from each other. Some of them had handkerchiefs round their mouths and noses. They looked like outlaws from some old cowboy film. He wondered how far he could trust Sue Jenkins. Her mother, who was talking to his grandfather, was fearsomely neurotic, but Sue was O.K. Mrs. Jenkins was complaining of fatigue, exhaustion and a headache. His grandfather was saying that these were the effects of nervous tension and trying to calm her down. Nobody was paying any attention to him and Sue. Perhaps she would agree to help him. She looked pretty capable. And he supposed he owed her a certain amount of trust in return. She had told him about something which was her very own secret. The story of the eccentric old man she had got to know at

Heathrow that morning. His name was Theseus; he had strange eyes and said strange things in a way which no one else talked. ***** The grey-haired old man who Sue had told Adrian Goldman was called Theseus, the man with strange eyes and a way of speaking which nobody used any more, was not more than fifty yards from them. At that short distance away, pre-fabricated barriers erected in the form of a labyrinth of narrow corridors with wider openings at the cross-over point, led passengers from international flights out of the main Terminal Hall to the so-called Departure Lounge, through a succession of passport and security controls, like factory production lines carrying finished products through the various stages of human inspection. By the Departure Gates in the Main Hall where the whole process began, the man with grey hair was sitting on the ground, his body shaking as if galvanized by an electric current. His glassy eyes were staring into the empty circle of space which the other passengers, thinking he had been taken ill, had left around him. But he was seeing neither the passengers nor the Terminal where he now found himself. Nor was his name Theseus. He was Gabriel, a monk walking along in a procession of hooded brethren, in his left hand he carried a coarsely fashioned wooden cross and in his right, a heavy whip made of leather thongs tipped with iron. He was singing: 'Who'er to same his souls is fain, must pay and render back again. Mercy ye ne're to others show, None shall ye find, but endless woe. Come here for penance good and well, Thus we escape from burning hell!' The procession stopped in the middle of a town square, in front of a stone fountain. From out of its serpent's mouth, a yellow, stinking stream was trickling, like diseased, slimy mucus instead of water. At a sign from their leader, the shaggy Father Benedict, together with his companions he let slip from the his shoulder the rags of what had once been a monk's habit, and with all his force brought down the whip on his naked back from which blood mixed with shreds of torn skin began to pour. He did not stop singing. He felt no pain. He was completely drugged with the ecstasy of atonement. For he had sinned in deed. He had sinned in speech. He had sinned in his heart. He had sinned as the whole town had sinned. The whole world.

And the retribution had come upon them one night when vice was resting from its transgressions, and virtue had long since rotted away in people's memory. All round, as far as his eye could reach into the slits of the narrow streets, fires were burning. The air was heavy with the bitter smell of burning juniper, elder and rosemary. Those few people who could be seen on the streets, wore grotesque wax masks over their faces to frighten away the demons of the Plague, and in their hands they held incense burners, which gave off the vapors of eastern herbs, aloes, amber and musk. Despite this, the town stank as if it was decomposing. Open carts, loaded high with naked bodies, oozing blood and suppuration, creaked past in the silence, which was only otherwise disturbed by the whistle of the pitiless whip. People in black hoods walked slowly along the carts, like slaves in a treadmill, shaking wooden rattles and calling to those still alive in the barricaded houses with the blind eyes of wax-sealed windows, to throw out their dead. There was no defense against this Plague which killed with its breath. The masks and incense burners had no effect. Flight into solitude gave no salvation. Prayers remained without response. Good works, which people once again began to remember, could not help them. The miracleworking icon of the Virgin Mary, carried from the neighbouring monastery, had refused to go into the afflicted town. The horse on which it was being borne in sacred procession had suddenly found itself in front of a bottomless chasm from which intolerable heath rose up, encircling the town with a fiery shield. Nothing could induce it to cross this hellish pit and carry the Virgin into the town. When the horse turned back, the chasm disappeared. But the Plague had remained. He, brother Gabriel, one of those who saw the last hope for the doomed world in self-castigation, was standing in the square and thrashing himself because of his sins, and all the time chanting: 'Come here for penance good and well, Thus we escape from burning hell!' Suddenly, a shrill scream was heard from the head of the procession. A terrified wail rose from the throats of the line of monks as they scattered and fled, throwing down their whips as they ran. he did not run. He did not even move. What kept him at that place did not belong to him, it was given to him. It was given to him for that very moment. It was the moment which he had been waiting and preparing for in all his dreams. The dreams were always the same. He was in the square of some town, in one hand holding a cross and in the other a whip, and waiting for a huge black dog to come towards him. It was happening now. In the open space in the middle of the square around which were lying the mangled bodies of pilgrims, a huge black dog was crouching with its eyes now burning like torches, now freezing in

their dead, white orbs. Foam was now dripping from its gaping jaws and hardening on the ground into a crystal-white frost. ***** In the neighbouring Queen's Building, under the neon lights of the Isolation Unit of the Medical Centre, Mother Teresa was dying. First the last glow of the western sun faded in the glass dome of the Control Tower, and then, on the monitor set by her bedside, the electrical projection of the systolic and diastolic movement of the nun's heart ceased to show the pyramid shaped peaks an continued along the deadly darkness of the screen in an uninterrupted, squealing line, which sounded like a shrill whining. Darkness had come upon Heathrow at the same time as upon Mother Teresa. Dr. Luke Komarowsky, Nurse Moana Tahaman and Chief Sister Logan, who had spent the last half hour at the patient's bedside, a half hour that could be ill-spared from the new cases of rabies coming in, had expected no other outcome. The laboratory tests had revealed a massive invasion of Rhabdovirus in all specimens. Luke nodded towards the Minister of St. George's Chapel, The Rev. Gregory Cameron, who was praying by the bedside, wrapped up like a mummy in his protective suit. The clergyman went out of the room. Chief Nurse Logan switched off the equipment which had maintained the earthy life of this first victim of rabies at Heathrow. Luke closed his eyes for a moment. Moana Tahaman was sobbing quietly. For a moment, there was complete silence. Nothing at all was heard. Neither people's voice nor the roar of aircrafts. Then it was shattered. An animal-like howl seeming to come from all sides filled the room, and then, spreading like an echo over Heathrow, dwindled away in a deep, threatening snarl. ***** On the roof of the Queen's Building, in the Roof Garden between the trees of the artificial paradise, caught in the lunar network of the Airport searchlights, a human form was turning in a circle. Its huge, dissipated shadow, like nighttime mist, fell across the dead concrete runways. It was the triumphant conqueror of the cosmos on his last majestic flight.

PHASE FOUR – FURIOSA And they make music, and some of them run away from the light while others enjoy it. Others howl like dogs and bite whomever approaches them, who in turn get afflicted also. Some people mentioned that they saw one or two men bitten and loose, and that Odimus and Hemson were affected by the disease and that one of them succumbed to the disease after being bitten and then expired; the other, however, was staying with a friend and manifested fear of water and ran.

(From an Arab painting of 1224)

15. FROM THE HEATHROW DIARY OF DANIEL LEVERQUIN '… The rabid Algerian in the frenzied stage of the disease was suffering from a deranged centre of gravity. caught in the crisscrossed beam of the searchlight which Lawford had installed on the roof around the quarantine zone, his head held crookedly on one side and his facial muscles contorted, his sightless eyes bulging and his lips covered with foam, he went on circling stubbornly, like a moth blinded by a flame, around the ornamental lanterns on the Roof Garden. The most terrible thing of all was his dog-like howling whenever the medical attendant tried to get near him. The panic aroused by the appearance of an infected person in the general quarantine zone, which it had been thought was free from infection, has already passed, and the people from the Medical Centre, mummified in their green protective suits, with masks over their faces, are going about their work in a routine way. But only half an hour ago, the situation seemed desperate. An infected person outside the hospital and the Transit Lounge, the most strictly controlled areas, meant that rabies had penetrated the inner quarantine ring and was threatening the whole Terminal. It was quickly established, however, that the alarm was premature. It was simply a matter of an Air Algeria passenger who was being taken to the hospital. (Last night passengers were requested to report any symptoms of the illness in their vicinity. The civilized public was both ready and willing to comply. Even the most innocent sneeze on the part of one's neighbors was at one reported. It was all the more surprising that the Algerian had remained unnoticed for so long. The only explanation I can see is that he was traveling with a group of his countrymen, uneducated, primitive people, who tried to protect him. Amongst the Americans and the Europeans, such anti-social behaviour would not be possible. Because of an excess of social conscience, someone could well find themselves in hospital and not actually have rabies, without such scrupulousness between healthy people, civilization could not get by.) In fact the Algerian had been seized by a sudden attack of frenzy while being taken to hospital. He got away from the nurses and disappeared in the labyrinth of the Queen's Building. The attendants set off in pursuit. He was found on the roof, in the garden, immediately after the Airport had resounded to his barking like some wild call of nature. It was neither human nor animal. A still incomplete mixture of a shout and a howl. The voice of a creature in which man, though still existing, was rapidly disappearing. No one could get hear him. The danger of being bitten was stronger than the courage and the ingenuity of the nurses.

Lawford, who after my inclusion in the Anti-Rabies Committee, has been almost offensively pleasant towards me, took over the initiative. I have to admit the son-of-a-bitch is not without ideas and that he makes good use of them. He ordered a crate sent from Los Angeles for the GLC to be sent for from the BA Cargo Depot. This equipment, which the Californian police use in dealing with drug addicts, was brought up onto the roof, shiny metal rods about five feet long. On the end of each rod is a steel noose which can be manipulated by means of a handle at the other end. The whole thing looks like a perfect dog catcher's pole. The manipulation of this apparatus evidently necessitates a certain skill. The drug addict, if he is violent, is surrounded by policemen armed with these nooses. They circle round him until he looses his sense of orientation, like a child playing blind man's buff. At a favourable moment, the noose is thrown over his head and drawn tight. Sometimes it is necessary to restrict him still further with a second noose. The metal rod prevents him from getting anywhere near his tormentors. He is forced to the ground and kept there until tranquilized by injections. The art lies, it seems, in not strangling the drug addict in the course of this process. On the roof, lit up by searchlights like the stage in a horror play, Lawford distributed the nooses and his instructions and then his men took up their positions around the Algerian. I thought of trying to intervene, of drawing the Major's attention to the lack of experience of the medical attendant in this kind of operation, and the danger to which the infected man was being subjected. But I kept silent. I am here only to watch, listen and record. I AM NOT HERE TO PARTICIPATE. It's other peoples' job to take care of reality. My duty is to make a permanent record of it, to turn it into a fiction which is accessible to those who didn't actually live through it. As if anticipating objections, Lawford ordered the medical attendants to distract the Algerian. He personally got the noose over his head. He took to the noose as if he'd been born to it. It was an unpleasant business, filled with shouts pf warning and the sick man's rabid snarling, but it only went on for a short time. The man was quickly pinned to the ground, like a butterfly stuck down with a drawing pin. He was given a sedative. His muscles relaxed, like waves of water no longer moved by the wind. I thought that after this performance, the searchlights would be switched off. But they're still on …' ***** '… The Medical Centre has been shaken by the news that an infected person has now been found in the Main Terminal Hall. The hypothesis that the infection is an air borne one has become highly likely. Fortunately, this alarm too has proved false. I went to the Terminal with Dr. Komarowsky and two nurses. Protective clothing, obligatory for a trip to the Transit Lounge, the infection zone, is not worn here. The man was simply to be taken off to the Medical Centre and examined there. He was found near the Departure Gate. He did not give the impression of someone suffering from the disease. It seemed that it was just his natural appearance. Witnesses informed us that he had not been in full possession of his wits before our arrival, that he had been speaking in

incomprehensible words and behaving bizarrely. When he was asked to come with us, he did not resist. Only when we got him to the Centre did I have a chance to look at him better. He had gray hair and was certainly old, although it was difficult to define exactly how old. There was nothing special about him, except perhaps his lost look, which is often found in worried or distracted people. Dr. Komarowsky's examination gave no positive results. The man had no headache, temperature or fever. His sensitivity to acoustic and auditive sensations was normal. He was not suffering from excessive thirst, nor a morbid fear of water. The wound on his forehead had come from a blow. It was from this that the old man was identified. Nurse Tahaman recognized him. She remembered that he had fainted when she was bandaging his wound. He had avoided giving his name and address, and when he did, they were fictitious. She had checked. All of this was no concern of the medical Centre. He could be allowed back into the Terminal. He asked to stay. It appeared he had some experience of taking care of sick people. He requested to be included in the team which was working in the infected Transit Area, and remained quite unimpressed when he was warned that that was the riskiest job in the whole quarantine zone. Dr. Komarowsky was in dire need of helpers and was already considering putting out an appeal through the Terminal for volunteers with any medical expertise. Gabriel was taken on and Nurse Tahaman was given the job of telling him what he had to do and taking care of his protective suit. It's been left to me to describe what exactly Gabriel's 'eccentricity' consists of. This will be both easy and difficult. It is easy, for example, to illustrate his old-fashioned way of speaking which sounds as if it had come strait out of the medieval chronicle of William of Dene, a monk from Rochester, or from some ancient folk-tale. But it is difficult to prove that behind this oldfashioned speech is hidden a quite different way of thinking. I went with him to the storeroom where the Medical Centre keeps its medicines and medical garments. Tahaman brought him a protective suit and then went out, leaving him to put it on. I told him who I was, what I was doing there and asked him if I could call him by his Christian name. "Be it as it pleases thee," he answered calmly, "for as long as I am called Gabriel. For names change with us. Names are needed by people. To the Lord they mean nothing." "What makes you say that?" I was afraid that the old man's 'eccentricity' concealed his membership of some esoteric cult. 'I don't know. It is as it comes to me." 'Dr. Komarowsky is sure you are not infected, but I am not sure you are entirely well." "Who under the heavens is?" "You've lost consciousness on two occasions already?" He looked at me innocently. "You don't have to answer me if you don't want to. I've no right to ask you any questions." "But thou hast," he said. "Since thou dost ask them." "But you don't have to answer."

"I must. If thou dost ask." He answered as if it were the most natural thing possible, in a world where everyone tried not to give answers to just those questions they should answer. "Certain questions and answers are ordained for each other, just as certain people are ordained for each other." "All right," I said, "what was it that made you loose consciousness?" "I did not faint away," he said quietly, "I was simply not in this place." "Where were you?" "In a town." "What town? London?" "It was not London." "An old town?" "Then, it was not old." He gave a picturesque description of narrow streets, houses from cut stone, white waxed sheets at the windows of a medieval country town, where only the most prosperous could afford glass. "In this vision of yours …" He stopped me gently. "It was not a vision. I was, I tell thee truly, on that town." "You don't seriously believe that?" 'Fires were burning there." "The town had been set on fire?" "Oh, it had not. The streets were empty. By the entrance gates dead men were sitting." "What did they look like?" "Black as charcoal. But we paid no heed to them." "Who was that with you?" "Brethren of the Holy Cross." Gabriel's vision was slowly taking on a specific identity. The ' Brethren of the Holy Cross' or the 'Brotherhood of Flagellants' was an order of penitents who wandered over Europe in the middle of the 15th century, at the time of the Black Death, striving to mollify God by means of selfcastigation. "And what did you do?" "We walked in a holy procession, scourged ourselves and sang songs." "What kind of songs?" He recited some lines of verses in the monotonous tone of Gregorian chant. I had not heard the song before, but it undoubtedly corresponded with the year 1347, the time of the Black Death. The old man must have come across some chronicle of the Plague which had left so strong an impression on him as to become an obsession. "And what happened after that?" "Afterwards, a large black dog came." Gabriel's face darkened. "I had best don this garment." As far as I was concerned, the conversation was at an end. As for me, my astonishment, to tell the truth, had only just begun. When he took off his shirt, I looked at his back, it was like a tracery of red marks, etched with welts and bruises as if from a whip. The wounds were ostensibly fresh.

"God Almighty," I shouted. "What's happened to your back?" "What?" he asked as if he felt no pain, as if he had no knowledge of the injuries. I touched the skin on his back. It was hot. There was no blood on my fingers. "This?" He smiled. "Didst I not tell thou of our whips?" …' ***** "...The silence at the Airport is intolerable. It is not the peace of a grave, the immobility of the dead. It is the catalepsy of a vampire's lair, beneath its apparent lifelessness runs an unquenchable lust for blood and there throbs wakefulness, ready to lunge into movement at the first shadow of darkness. The earliest patients are anaesthetized by a coma and the more recent ones, showing only the first prodromal symptoms, by hope, those in between in the stage of acute neurological frenzy, are kept under control by straps which hold them down and sedatives. The Anti-Rabies Committee, the quarantine personnel, the Medical and Security Services are under an hypnosis of anxiety, and the meaningless routine goes on quietly, soundlessly, as if every clumsy movement, loud noise or human voice could set off rabies, which is only held in check by that same hellish routine. The passengers are mesmerized by fear, which is only forgotten in sleep. I can hardly wait for it to get light, for the noise of aircraft engines to provide at least the illusion of victory over this unreal death …" ***** "…Someone else from whom I could put together a character for my novel about rabies is Sergeant Elias Elmer. I came across him quite by chance. I knew that there had been a murder discovered yesterday in the car park of Terminal 2. It seems an ironical contrast to the allinclusive death which threatens us. Compared with the disease, it looks almost a natural occurrence. Almost welcome. The Metropolitan Police directed me to Sergeant Elmer. He is a thick-set, indolent Jamaican, with the sleep-laden face of a man bitten by a tsetse fly. He says that the matter is now in the hands of Scotland Yard and that he has nothing to do with it. But it seems that the murder is of some interest to him. My own involvement interested him even more. I explained my role to him. He took it to be the keeping of a 'book of the dead'. The pleasantry broke the ice. He let me into the case in which it seems the only certain fact is that the body is that of a General Manager of a German Bank. I am not sure, but I feel the Sergeant knows more then he is prepared to tell me. Quite by chance I asked him if he had taken part in the search for 'a terrorist dressed as clergyman'. He says that I was denounced by some German. The passenger I bumped into on the walkway was also a German. "Was he blond, with gold-rimmed spectacles, with a white raincoat with a black lining?" Sergeant Elmer didn't know. The report had come in by phone, anonymously. He was called away. I was left dissatisfied. A murder which no one is investigating is no good to anyone. But in any case, there's no one here to carry out such an investigation. Neither the time nor the inclination for it. Everybody is busy with the rabies' outbreak. But I am not obliged to stick to reality. Especially if it's monotonous, uninspiring and uninteresting. If I put Elmer into my novel, I shall have to make him something special, involve him in some particular action. What could Elias Elmer do? Could he be part of the battle against

rabies. Everybody is doing that. Everybody is fighting the rabies outbreak. There's no originality at all in that. It would only be original if he were not involved in it. If he were not thinking about rabies. If in the presence of a mass killer, to which he himself could fall victim, he was searching for the murderer of a single individual. The fact that that murderer is probably not at the Airport would only trouble a real policeman. For a fictitious one, it would be no problem. In the meantime, I have an ambitious idea. I wonder if it's possible to bring the 'real Elmer' closer to my idea of him? Would it be possible to further arouse his interest in the investigation? …' ***** '… My third theme is presented to me by Major Lawford. He is now trying to butter me up. For him I am now publicity, judgment, history. It's become important for him to make an impact. If the infection goes on developing at the present rate, I'm afraid it will only be for posterity. I bear no grudge for his brutal actions against me. Despite my liberal beliefs about citizens' rights, in his place, given the immediacy of the situation, should probably have behaved even worse. In any case, I have settled accounts with him. We're all square now. But apart from anything else, Lawford is the most informed person at Heathrow. Despite a certain coarseness, and even arrogance, Lawford was born for just such a situation as this. His thoughts are like a bullet – direct, effective, and unstoppable. His reflexes are automatic. He always has in his head an overall view of all the components of a question. If it is necessary to move passengers out of some area quickly, he sees to it that it is done, without any messing about with details like suitcases. They are no more than a superfluous extra. Occasionally, a passenger too is no more than that kind of detail. But the area is cleared. Irrefutably empty …' ***** ' … It is time for me to formulate the background to my narration, to give a general picture of Heathrow Airport at the beginning of the epidemic. I shall make use of a summary from a meeting of the Anti-Rabies Committee, held immediately after we received news from London that the virus was present in every one of the samples forwarded there. The cause of infection in the first victims, Mother Teresa and Sister Emilia, has not been established. Enquiries in Lagos have given no positive results. Not a single case of hydrophobia has been recorded in the last six months in that Nigerian province. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the nuns were infected in the aircraft by some carrier of the virus, who is himself immune. Or by some more resistant individual in whom the incubation has lasted longer. A third, least probable theory is being put forward. On the basis of something that mother Teresa said in her delirium, it is being suggested that there is a possibility that she came into contact in the aircraft with a smuggled rabid dog. It has been decided to send a team into the Transit Lounge to look for it, under cover of registering passengers for vaccination. Up to now, there has only been one death from rabies but Dr. Komarowsky has announced that

there is no hope for seventeen others, that a hundred and thirty passengers and Airport employees are in a coma, and that the total number of those taken ill is over three hundred. The whole of the Queen's Building with its offices, exhibition hall, public rooms and even the cinema has been turned into a hospital reception area. The only exceptions are the Treatment Room, the Stuff Room; the Pharmacy and a small number of offices. In Sketch no. 3 of the Central Terminal Area, the quarantine zone, as can be seen, comprises the Control Tower, the Queen's Building, Terminal 2 with its car park and both of its loading bays, and the open area in between these buildings. During the daytime, the zone is surrounded by Lawford's men, at night the cordon is reinforced by powerful searchlights on the roof. Beneath their bright lights, the quarantine area looks like a brightly illuminated slide under the magnifying lens of an electron microscope on which vividly stained microbes scurry in haphazard fashion. The remaining areas of Heathrow are functioning more or less normally. Flights from Terminal 1 and 3, and the routes transferred from Terminal 2, are still taking off and landing. Vehicles are free to come into the Central Terminal Area through the Main Tunnel, and the Piccadilly Line of the Tube to Heathrow Central is still working. Only the corridor leading to Terminal 2 is blocked off. This situation gave rise to a sharp difference of opinion at the meeting of the Anti-Rabies Committee. Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Komarowsky and Major Lawford demanded the immediate interruption of all traffic at Heathrow, warning of the danger that, because of possible gaps in the quarantine corridor, or certain features of the virus as yet unknown, the infection might be spread outside the zone. Airport and Air Line representatives based their opposition to this on the fact the infection had not spread even as far as outside the Transit Lounge, and that the transference of air traffic to the other Airports presented an enormous logistic problem and a serious financial loss. The General Manager hesitated to take the decision. At the very first meeting he had promised Dr. Hamilton that traffic would be gradually reduced until it stopped altogether. The pressure from the Air Lines had prevented him from keeping to this promise. A compromise was arrived at in postponing the decision for another twenty-four hours. John Hamilton was not satisfied but he was out-voted. Dr. Komarowsky left the meeting, saying that he felt happier amongst the rabies' sufferers. They, at least, were only rabid, they were not mad. Major Lawford made a number of caustic comments at the expense of democracy, which was in the process of making stupidity statistically identifiable with reason, and giving idiots, if only there were enough of them, the right to rule the world …' ' … It's still difficult to say anything about the organization of life within the quarantine area. Despite the efforts of the Airport Management to establish a certain pattern, and with it, a feeling of security, things develop more or less fortuitously, spontaneously, hectically. Life has been abruptly reduced to the simplest forms of food and care.

Anyone who has the appetite, and it's amazing how many of them there are, can get free meals in the restaurant, everything over and above that has to be paid for in the Airport shops. Hairdressers, perfume shops, cigarette kiosks, bookstores, banks are all open. The hotel reservation desks and the counters offering railway tickets and hire cars are shut. It somehow seems that nobody is going to travel anywhere from here. And the Post Office is shut for the same reasons for which telephones have been cut off. The Anti-Rabies Committee also considered the prohibition of alcohol, but it took the view that in addition to all the other bans, that were for now superfluous. There has not been a disturbing degree of drunkenness. To a certain degree, this relative abstinence is influenced by the fear that 'peculiar' behaviour under the influence of alcohol could lead to people being taken off to hospital as rabid. For inside the quarantine it very quickly became known that it was most probably a question of canine rabies. Nobody knows how this information leaked out. From that moment onwards the Airport Management no longer tried to deny the true nature of the disease. It has simply gone on truing to compensate for the deteriorating general mood inside the quarantine by issuing regular announcements. In the "prophylactic zone", there are received relatively well since they correspond to what people want to hear and nothing has yet happened to disprove them. In the "infected zone" they got down less well. Eye-witnesses of the rapid spread of the disease, which, after the imperceptible prodrome, suddenly erupts with all the violent symptoms of acute rabies, are not prepared to accept blindly the Management's assurances that it is "under control". Where they are it's clearly rabies which is in full control. In the rest of the Terminal, nothing was known of all that. Passengers instinctively began to take protective measures of their own. People with moistened handkerchiefs over their nose and mouth soon became a kind of fashion. As far as possible, people kept their distance from each other. I've noticed that in that respect there has been a certain rearrangement. The original groups consisted of people who happened to find themselves in the same place, in the main, those who had flown on the same aircraft or had been waiting at the same Air Line desk. But those groups soon disintegrated. If you go through the main hall now, you hear Frenchmen talking to Frenchmen, Germans to Germans, English to English; you see groups of Asians standing apart from people with black skins, who are all standing together. Together or apart. Even in the face of death people still stick to their favourite prejudices. I've noticed too, that the family, at least up to now, has remained the basic unit of quarantine life …' '… The Medical Centre in making intensive preparations for prophylactic vaccination, as soon as the vaccine arrives. Up to now, only hermetic metal coffins have got here from London. The safe disposal of corpses has become the chief problem for those who thought that their main task was to save people from death. In fact, death is becoming hellishly busy. Sister Emilia, Nurse Lumley and seven other patients died soon after Mother Teresa. Individual death rites, as were said over the nuns, are no longer practical. They will be replaced by collective ceremonies, one for every ten bodies, and they will be performed in St. George's Chapel, which has now been included in the quarantine zone, by clergymen of the official faiths,

headed by the Rev. Gregory Cameron. But the pessimistic Administration has foreseen the time when the death rate will reduce formalities and ceremonies to simple counting of numbers. (It doesn't matter for how long this situation takes to come about in the real Heathrow, in mine it has to arrive quickly. In reality, a cataclysm can go on for a long period of time without losing any of its excitement. In a novel, the drama can only last for a short time or be lost. Humanity dying gradually would be like a dying man who welcomes you a year later with a breakfast cognac. Even if you were moved to tears the first time, the second time you simply join in the revels.) Everything that is now going on in the medical Centre is in fact concerned with the administrative measures surrounding death. The serious work is in the hands of Dr. John Hamilton. He is afraid that, given the abnormal virulence of the Heathrow Rhabdovirus, existing vaccines may turn out to be ineffective. He places his greatest hopes in concentrated inactivated vaccine, obtained from human diploid cell strain WI-38 and its modified sub-species inactivated by propilactone. (In 1971 T. J. Wiktor and J. R, Mitchell succeeded in protecting an experimental rhesus-monkey from the exceptionally virulent "free Virus" with which it had been inoculated several hours before vaccination with a single dose of this vaccine.) John spends the greatest part of his time in the laboratory which has been improvised on the fourth floor of the Control Tower. When the transfer of the full list of equipment from the Institute for Tropical Medicine has been completed, the technical conditions there will be as good as the most up to date anywhere in the world. He knew that the most important Virological and microbiological laboratories in England and abroad would work on a serum to counter the Heathrow Rhabdovirus – so it has been named – but that he would have priority over them all in the unlimited quantity of specimens at his disposal. I have no wish to confuse the real John Hamilton with his double in my novel, but I have to note one of John's features with differentiates him sharply from Dr. Luke Komarowsky. I am not saying that he is not the slightest interested in the diseased patients, but I have the impression that he feels and perceives them only through the medium of the virus. It is the disease which really interests him. Rabies inspires him. The patient is something by means of which he arrives at the knowledge of the virus, and then at the virus "in vivo". The virus "in vivo" is transformed into the virus "in vitro", a culture in Petri jars. It is given the right temperature to multiply, magnified on the slide of a powerful electronic microscope, subjected to biochemical tests. In the course of the process, it loses its individuality, and is freed of the indications which link it to one or another patient. And in the end, it is known to have been found in the neurons of the General Nervous System, Cerebellum, Salivary Glands or Cerebra-spinal Fluid, but the original knowledge of whose cerebellum, whose salivary glands, whose fluid has been in the meantime forgotten. The virus ceases to be the cause of the suffering of one or another human being and becomes an anonymous representative of its own kind, a being in its own right, equal in status to man. On the other hand, Dr. Luke Komarowsky is not interested in rabies beyond what the disease does to people and with people. For him the Heathrow Rhabdovirus is a sours of suffering, madness, agony, death and it is not simply a natural phenomenon which in the evolutionary

history of the Cosmos is linked to the cooling of distant stars and the birth of intelligence on a single one of them. He is a soldier in the trenches whereas Hamilton is a strategist at Staff HQ. Komarowsky is fighting rabies at the front which passes through the nervous system of one or another human being, a patient with a name and an identity, and not at the front of an uninvolved laboratory desk, where all individuals features are abstracted into faceless figures, and where the preserved brains of those who have died from rabies can only be distinguished from each other by their labeled numbers. In short, Komarowsky is a healer, Hamilton is a scientist. Komarowsky would forget all about rabies the moment when people ceased to become ill and die from it. Hamilton would carry on working on the virus even if only a distant memory of it remained on earth. Despite the differences, a special rapport between them, in connection with which Wolfenden House and Professor Frederick Liebermann are sometimes mentioned, still exists. I must try to find out what is at the root of it, where a certain dark shadow on their personal relationship originates …' ' … I am trying to establish what the rest of the world thinks about the rabies' epidemic at Heathrow Airport. For this purpose I am making use of the radio and the TV screen in the Control Tower. I listen to the BBC, Paris, Oslo, Rome, Cologne, Madrid, news from the USA and the SSSR. I note down the commentaries in the order they come so as to obtain a picture from their spontaneous comparison. Taken over all, the civilized world is no longer behaving as if it were a question of anonymous children in Ethiopia. After the first uncertain surmises, the European radio stations have been flooded with more and more exhaustive reports. Madrid gave the background history of great viral epidemic. Over everything falls the fateful shadow of the pandemic plague of 542 and 1347, the London bacillus Pasteurella Pestis, 1666, which was burnt out with the whole of the town by the fire of the following year, and the Yen-Nan epidemic in China which began in 1850 and died out after some forty years. Cologne meditated about our powerlessness to overcome influenza and the authorities' fear of the inexhaustible powers of mutation displayed by microorganisms. Oslo quoted Dr. Hamilton: "It is in the micro and not the macro world that lies hidden the key to the survival of the species, for until we crack the secret of the virus, our fight towards the stars will be a journey of doomed corpses." Rome believes that in the most common natural catastrophes, earthquake and floods, human death on the whole has remained heroic, only disease humiliates those it kills. I have to confess that all these radio-philosophies leave me cold. I am interested in more practical pieces of news. The Americans are sending canine embryo vaccine to Heathrow in military aircraft, the Japanese – vaccine inactivated by ultra-violet radiation. Epidemiological teams ready to come to our aid are being set up everywhere. Samples of diseased nerve tissues, packed in dry ice in sealed unbreakable jars and protected by hermetically armoured drums are already under examination in microbiological centres from Tokyo to Moscow and Los Angeles. Some countries have already introduced restrictions on flights to Heathrow.

It is John's fervent hope that in this way air traffic to the other two Terminals which the profit motive, contrary to all common sense, is keeping in operation will be spontaneously shut down. Amongst the practical pieces of news can be counted an interview with a Nobel Prize winner in medicine. In answer to the question: "What in your opinion at the moment is the ideal prophylactic treatment for someone infected with rabies?" – He replied subdued: "To tell you the truth, there is none." Governments too are showing a lively interest. It appears that no one has reckoned with a great and influential nation becoming rabid. (Only reciprocal rabies could possibly be envisaged.) The heads of government of the European Community, instead of sharing out the fish in the Atlantic, have dedicated their next meeting to rabies. The Holy Father in the Vatican has announced a day of prayer for those suffering from rabies. The Soviet gerontology, which has several of its members blockaded at Heathrow, has confounded Sovietologists with a statement that rabies does not differentiates between systems and that everybody is liable to become infected by it. Idi Amin has even announced that he "admires the British enormously, even when they're rabid!" The latest television news bulletin broadcasts a picture of the Situation Room in the White House from which the president of the United States and the Committee on National Security is following the crisis. In the background, like a statue, stood a man with a black briefcase, whose orders are to stay at all times at a distance of no more than six feet from the President with the code for the initiation of a nuclear attack. "Don't you think all this attention is touching?" I said to Lawford who was watching the programme with me. "The world's once again united." "United my arse," he answered. "Your ideas of international politics, Leverquin, are no more sensible than your ideas of international terrorists who keep their weapons underneath the Airport potted palm-trees." "Do you mean to say that it's probably for some other reason?" "In politics and the police it's always most probably a question of some other quite different reason. Otherwise they wouldn't have any need for us. The Foreign Minister, Sir Geoffrey Drummond told me in confidence that the Americans believe that the epidemic at Heathrow is a full-scaled trial of Soviet bacteriological warfare." "Is Ser Geoffrey rabid too?" I asked. I could see no other possible reason for that opinion. "Not yet. Not from rabies, at least. He's simply enraged over some Russian defector." 'For Christ's sake, Lawford, but they've their own people here too!" "That's just it. But the Americans have evidently not been taken in. That's why they've given Moscow a warning by sending them a picture of the President with his fingers poised over the nuclear button." "And what do the Russians have to say about it?" "They accuse the Chinese of using rabies to try to hamper détente between East and West. On the other hand, the Chinese are calling the Russians 'revisionist' rabid dogs!" "Who is it who's rabid, us or them?" I asked bitterly.

"You never can tell. In any case, Leverquin, that's the true state of things. And everything else is just coloured pictures on the television.' I made another effort to save my reason. "All right, Major," I said, "the world's like that, perhaps there is something in what you say, but you can't dispute that the world scientific community is genuinely united. Even the American government laboratories have asked us for samples." "For God's sake, man, don't be so blindly naïve!" shouted Major Hillary Lawford. What bloody kind of a writer are you anyway? Where's your criminal intelligence? Do you really think that the people in the chemical-bacteriological centre at Fort Detrick are interested in whether we catch rabies or not?" "What is it, then, that interests them?" "Whose virus is it, natural or Russian. If it's natural – O.K. In six months, if they take the time off from making new viruses, they can perhaps come up with a vaccine. If it's Russian, they're already too busy choosing the response they'll propose to the president." "What response?" "Personally, I'd bet on bubonic plague, but it could be smallpox." "But what does our own government think about it?" I asked gloomily. "That was the one thing Drummond couldn't tell me," said Major Hillary Lawford as he went out. "It seems that first they have to see what they can get out of Colonel Rasimov." Lawford was quite right about the BBC. Apart from a brief announcement that "the situation is completely under control" the BBC put out one other short news item about Heathrow, namely that the world Health Organization in New York has convoked a committee of experts on rabies. The rest of the news was devoted to the current wave of strikes, the latest failure of the giant panda to breed outside China and the discovery of the existence of an eleventh Russian agent in the higher ranks of the British SIS …' 'This of course is only raw material for "Rabies". The facts will have to be fashioned into a story. Confused reality will have to be given a backbone of logic. A logical sequence it does not naturally posses. And then inspire it with an idea. There is no kind of higher idea to be found in what is actually going on here. Reality has no need of it. Reality is meaningless. A story about it cannot be that. In reality rabies could come about quite by chance, with no purpose. Such freedoms are unfortunate in successful fiction. Critics immediately accuse you of not knowing what it is you really want. Of not being in control of your material. I must be very cautious. Reality is a gigantic "vacuum cleaner". It sucks you in an instant. And you find yourself in the rubbish bin, before you know what's happening to you. I am here to listen, to watch and to record. IN NO WAY TO TAKE PART. If I let reality take me over, I would participate in it just as Dr. Komarowsky is doing, my capacity for sound reasoning would be decreased proportionate to the decree of my involvement. In accordance with Archimedes' principle, a man submerged in reality loses the same amount of critical faculty as reality displaced. I repeat this, because as I look through my notes, here and there, I find the dangerous need to interfere in things. When they caught the rabid Algerian on the roof in their steel noose, it wouldn't have needed much for me to try to go to his defense. For

a writer, such spontaneous reactions are fatal. One can be either a writer or a human being. To be both is absolutely impossible. I shall, of course, interfere in my story of rabies at Heathrow. I would like not to have to. Reality, unfortunately, is never literarily perfect. It is never completely refined. There is always dross in it. Natural rabies, for example, would not be very likely to kill off all the people at the Airport. In reality, there's always some idiot to be found to discover a life-saving serum in time. With disgusting regularity the world is always extricated from the mire. The whole damned fuss will be no more today than a matter of several hundred lives. In socalled civilization, nature is not even allowed that much. In the old days a writer used to find more cover in reality. Boccaccio wrote the Decameron under the breath of the Plague, which, according to the most conservative estimates, killed off every third European. That really was something! Even a novice could make a story out of that. Definite facts in a raw state are unusable. For that very reason they have to be recombined. Just as in molecular biology, the recombination of the DNA molecule arrives at a new species. Take Gabriel, for example, he's clearly a mentally unbalanced character. But so what? Who today isn't? We are moving towards a time when mental stability will be given treatment. In which people will be saved from common sense. As for Sergeant Elmer, the position is rather better. As a policeman he has everything apart from a resemblance to a bloodhound. But I know nothing of the murderer. I have to invent him. Put together some kind of a literary photo-fit from Elmer's details. It's a pity that I feel that there is a conflict of ideas in the relationship between Hamilton and Komarowsky, but I must introduce a woman. The percentage of people who would be interested in what it is that the two doctors don't agree about professionally is far less than those who would like to know what kind of woman had come between them. The rules of the game are harsh. Whoever can't keep to them should abandon his typewriter and go and drive a tractor. My situation, the situation of the writer in "Rabies", is clear. I'm worried about Louise. Here it's this damned reality too that has tripped me up. Louise has simply vanished from the Airport. She's a sober Nordic girl whose brain was brought up to go on working in a sauna. Of course, she'll be worrying about me, but she knows that you get a better view of horse-racing on the television than at the racetrack. By leaving the Airport Louise has also left my story. Good luck to her! I'll get over this somehow. It's the idea that's the problem. The reader couldn't care less about her. He wants his story. But good ideas are only to be found in telephone books. I shall have to wait for facts to produce one for me. Those damned facts again. There is really something diseased in western European education. We never have enough facts. Facts for us are the actual truth. We think that we've got to know all there is to know about something if we get together a mountain of facts about it. Yet it's common knowledge that this is just not the case. The majority of them simply don't accord with each other. In fact facts are the least stable element in our perception of the world. Its one truly unknown dimension. If it were not for reality, how profoundly and precisely one could write about it! …

16. By midnight of the first day of the epidemic, several passengers in varying, in the main, initial stages of rabies had been carried or dragged off to the Medical Centre. But it was only at dawn on the second day that, as the result of a decision taken by the Anti-Rabies Committee, the first properly equipped epidemiological team made its appearance at the entrance to the Transitinfected-Zone of the Terminal. In an operation theatre, they might have looked like assisting doctors in their white and green protective suits. But here, armed with metal rods and wire nooses whose true purpose had only hitherto been understood by dogs, to most of the passengers they seemed like invaders from the other end of the galaxy, who had come to the Airport to hunt specimens. Even before they had come to be called 'dogcatchers', Sergeant Elias Elmer felt that the atmosphere in the Transit Terminal Foyer was changing. He had a flair for such things. Once he had been on duty during a National Front demonstration in the East End. While they were gathering up the injured and taking away those who had been arrested, no one could say how they had known that the violence would soon begin, but everyone had known it nevertheless. Nothing could be done beforehand. Afterwards it had been too late. An elderly American in the first row of seats facing the airside gallery, where there was a view of the runways lit in a criss-cross pattern by the searchlights, from whom he was taking details for the vaccination, was hunched up in his chair as if with stomach pain. Next to him stood a boy with a rucksack and a girl, clearly of mixed parentage. The children looked at him worriedly. They were still holding up amazingly well, he thought; half an hour before, masked medical attendants had taken Sue Jenkins' mother away. And how long had passed since the attempted kidnapping on the roof of the Queen's Building? Once again he compared the passport details with those in his notebook: Dr. Aaron Goldman. Professor of Classical Archeology at Columbia University. En route from Tel-Aviv via Rome and London to New York. He would have to look in his grandson's rucksack even though he knew there was nothing in it. The rumour about a dog had been dreamed up because of the rabies. It was as if he'd been sent round the Airport to hunt for rats in the middle of the plague. You didn't need to keep chickens to get chickenpox. It's all crazy, he thought, and most of all, this search for a dog which didn't exist, instead of for a murderer who quite definitely did. People were laughing at him behind his back. ***** Hans Magnus Landau was standing some ten yards behind the sergeant's back, but he wasn't laughing. He wasn't that naïve. Perhaps he had been, before the events of the car park. After his 'decisive action', his brain had begun to work and that on a wavelength which was not a normal civilian one. Of course the portly policeman was looking for him. Vaccination was just a pretext. There was no real need for that kind of medical bookkeeping. If they had the vaccine, people

should be vaccinated. No one would be fool enough to refuse. Most of all, the policeman was looking at passengers' passports. How could there be anything in your passport which decided whether you should be vaccinated or not? Did they think he was an idiot? In broad daylight he'd killed a man who held one of the most important position in the world, and then strolled calmly out of the car park as if he killing were his everyday profession? He had committed the perfect crime. Well, not quite perfect. But it hadn't been his fault. Nobody could possibly have foreseen canine rabies in their calculations. Despite the mishap of the quarantine, the feeling that in the car park he had freed himself of the inferiority complex which, like a millstone, had hung round his neck had not left him. What he had gone through had somehow perfected him and redefined him in his own eyes as a new, supperiour being. Since he had seen the all-powerful General Manager Upenkampf in a helpless position, from above, and not as up to then, always from below, always from the mouse hole of his bank clerk's insignificance, the perspective from which he viewed the rest of the world had changed radically. It no longer seemed either dangerous or unattainable to him and people no longer appeared worthy of respect. Humility at least. He had experienced their slave-like fear, until yesterday his own, their helplessness, indecisiveness, lack of will power, also his own until yesterday, and most of all, he was aware of the futility of everything that in the frantic mutual rat race, right up to their entombment in this hermetic glass coffin, they had amassed. In his intimate contacts with the owners of bank accounts he had lost the last trace of that superstitious veneration which he had felt for them when they had appeared to him in the basement of the Deutsche Bank in the form of impersonal multifigured cheques. A man of real will-power could do what he wanted with them. Get rid of them one by one so that no one even noticed. Of course, he wouldn't do that. He was not a murderer. He had a conscience. And an account which he had had to settle. The killing of Upenkampf had been an execution. No question of murder. Something like a divine necessity. But it was an unutterably pleasant and immensely liberating feeling that he could do all this and a great deal more if the wish took him. It wasn't necessary actually to do it. Simply to know that he could. ***** Professor Aaron Goldman was deep beneath the ground. While he had been digging near the southern ramparts of Solomon's fortress in Meggido, a dark abyss had opened up beneath his feet and he had been sucked down into it, floating as if he was being lowered on a soft, thick, supporting cushion of air. He was submerged in a dry, dusty darkness which was choking him, but through which he could see the pitted sides of a huge black cave, covered with icy froth; on it he could make out in a circle, without apparent and, ran the prints of enormous paws as if a maddened animal of a shape and size unknown to man had been shut up in the pit.

A few minutes later, again above the ground, back in the Transit Foyer, Professor Aaron Goldman lifted himself from his seat groaning. Adrian put out his hand to help him but the old man waved it away fearfully. That's quite natural, thought Elmer, in the presence of infection. It seemed to him that the professor was about to say something. He was swallowing hard with his hand at his throat. What was it Dr. Komarowsky had said to them? Was a sore throat a symptom? A headache certainly was, but he couldn't remember about a sore throat. Perhaps he should have a look in the boy's rucksack to give the old man time to collect himself. If the man who had been waiting for General Manager Upenkampf had been carrying a rucksack and not a black overnight case, everything would have been simpler. There were tens of black overnight cases here. But unfortunately, their owners did not fit the description. Those with beards and dark skins did not have black raincoats. Those with black raincoats were not bearded and dark skinned. And if they were, they didn't have a limp. He had in fact found a man who was bearded, dark-skinned, wearing a black raincoat and holding a black overnight case in his hand, but he wasn't a German. He was some rabbi or other, traveling to Jerusalem. In any case, the clue was not to be found in the black overnight case and raincoat. Anybody could get rid of those. A German accent, at least for a short time, also. The clue was in the description of the murderer, or, not even in that, exactly. A face too could be changed. The false beard could be unstuck, the wig taken off, and the colour washed off the face. If he was not a cripple, the man would quite simply stop limping. The dark-skinned, dark-haired, lame passenger in the black raincoat would immediately become a clean shaven, light-skinned, fair-haired, passenger who walked normally without a raincoat or even without the overnight case. Perhaps even the fair German with gold-rimmed glasses in a white raincoat of whom Leverquin had spoken. A German who could be wearing a reversible raincoat with the black on the inside. Professor Goldman at least managed to speak. 'Can I have a word with you, Sergeant?' he asked indistinctly. It was causing him terrible pain to speak at all. He had to try and take care of Adrian and the little Jenkins girl before the terrifying weakness which was sapping at his spine overtook him again and sent him back into the darkness with the animal's footprints in the frost. 'Yes?' 'Can I speak to you alone?' 'Yes, of course, Sir,' Sergeant Elmer answered pleasantly. 'Only not just at the moment. A bit later.' Now he had to find Daniel Leverquin and ask him just one question. And then he would come back to hear what it was that Professor Goldman wanted of him. Adrian Goldman let go of Sue Jenkins' hand with a feeling of relief. That really had been a near thing. The black policeman had been looking at the rucksack as if the canvas was transparent and he could see the god beneath it. He had seemed just about to open it, and then had changed his

mind and walked away. He had, it's true, said that he would come back, but before that he would find a new hiding place for Sharon. In fact, he'd already found it. In the men's toilet there was a line of low cupboards against the wall where cleaning materials were kept. But he had to get there. To persuade his grandfather to let them go. He had not let them out of his sight since they had taken Mrs. Jenkins away. He had made some strange demands. He had asked them not to touch anything, and not to move away from him. And in general, grown-ups were quite impossible, thought Adrian. One moment silent, the next all hot up. It was difficult to distinguish the sick from the healthy. He wondered how the nurses managed it. They all looked ill to him. Sue, fortunately, was bearing up superbly. She had not lost her cool when they had arrived to take her mother. Perhaps the attendants had looked funny. Sue was really something! She hadn't even been surprised when he had confessed all about Sharon to her. She had agreed to help at once. She had only wanted to stoke the dog. He had had to let her put her hand into the rucksack. He watched his grandfather carefully. The old man was sitting hunched up in the chair with the head in his hands. He wouldn't even notice they had gone. He took Sue by the hand and picked up the rucksack with the other. When he threw it across his shoulder, he thought he could feel the canvas move. ***** Hans Magnus tapped the barman on the shoulder. The man in the white jacket spun round nervously. 'Can I have a glass of water?' The barman gave him an unfriendly look. 'Yes, you can. But it isn't necessary to touch me. You only have to ask.' 'I know how you feel,' said Hans Magnus sharply, in a way that he would never have dared in his pre-car park self. 'But you don't have to be rude about it.' 'You're German, aren't you?' 'I am.' 'Then you should have thought of that in 1939!' hissed the barman in the white jacket gruffly, and pushed the glass of water across the counter. He was twenty-nine. 1939 did not particularly concern him. Nor any other year apart from the next one. But he was plagued by a headache and a gnawing pain as if his bones were dissolving, all around him, hung the rows of glass bottles, stood on their heads, and filled with multi-coloured liquids; their hypnotic shine had begun to clutch at his throat for the last half hour. The bastard's wearing fine white gloves, thought Hans Magnus as he moved away from the bar. It's certainly not for appearances' sake. The majority of passengers at the counter had handkerchiefs over their mouths. They looked like a gang of outlaws in a Wild West saloon. The provisional masks had nothing to do with the instructions from the quarantine authorities.

The unimpassioned voices from the loudspeakers, which were the only means of knowing that anyone had any concern for them, announcing that the crisis was under the control of the authorities, had not mentioned either masks or gloves. Someone's personal invention had turned into a fashion which everyone had, parrot-like, adopted. Rabies was beginning to have its effect, he thought. Like a delayed-action drug. The Christian skin over the wild flesh born in the dark of the primeval forest was very thin, the paper-thin skin of a bank account with a certain number of refined manners which were preventing the passengers from killing each other on the spot. That kind of world really didn't deserve to go on living for long. The trouble was that he, Hans Magnus was part of it. And in addition to the new mood confidence he had just begun to acquire yesterday in the car park, he also had an account of untouched millions in Zurich. He found the American in the position in which he had left him. His head was thrown back on the headrest of the seat and his closed eyelids were covered with sweat, his throat was constricted by the effort to swallow something imaginary in his mouth. Taking care not to touch the old man's purple lips with his fingers, he brought the glass towards him. They were clenched unnaturally, stitched together with a thin thread of greasy foam. He parted them with the edge of the glass and then tipped it forwards. The old man choked, spat out the liquid, knocked the glass away with his hand, smashing against it a nearby pillar, and screamed painfully, jumped out of his chair. His shoulder shook under the unbearable strain, and his arms wind-milled in powerful disorientated sweeps. Hans Magnus Landau stepped back awkwardly. 'He's ill!' he shouted. He had counted on the effect produced by fear. For he had known the old man was ill, known it all at once. That was why he had given him the water. The water was the first part of his carefully thought-out plan, which would be followed by general panic which he could make use of to get out of the isolation zone. It was the product of his new, liberated imagination. But he hadn't planned on being really frightened himself. He had wanted to frighten others. 'This man is rabid!' he screamed, without any pretence, unnerved, shaken, starting backwards and nervously wiping his hands on his white raincoat. An open circle of passengers formed around Aaron Goldman; at its centre, the old man, without understanding what was going on nor why a brilliant light like a glass globe was tearing at his eyeballs and a strident noise hammering at his skull, moved from one foot to another, as if from inside, nagging at his innards, a pneumatic hammer was smashing him to pieces. 'We've got to call them to take him away!' shouted a calmer voice. The last thing that Hans Magnus wanted was for the situation to be calmed down. The danger of the crisis going off the boil sharpened his wits. 'For God's sake,' he shouted, 'they ought to be getting us out of here! If they leave us here we'll all catch it! We'll go mad one after the other!'

The crowd began to get agitated. Several other passengers joined in the harangue. Hans Magnus shouted that it was they who were being sacrificed, that they were already dead. It was an evil thought which everyone there had been trying to hide both from others and from themselves, and it now emerged on the surface, like a dead body left by some crime committed long ago which floats to the top when a swamp is disturbed. The idea was a unifying, destructively kinetic force, which controlled by mutual fear, turned towards the exit of the Transit Lounge just at the moment when the medical attendants, in their demoniac shapes, appeared there. Hans Magnus Landau smiled to himself. ***** Sergeant Elias Elmer was smiling too. His conversation had brought progress. He had found Leverquin with two other volunteers: Dr. Aristophanes Basilides from Thessalonica, and Dr. Vang Han Hue from Canton. Leverquin had been able to give an answer to his questions without hesitation. 'Are you quite sure?' asked Elmer. 'Of course,' said Daniel Leverquin. 'When the bastard bent down to pick up the breviary, he saw the plan of Heathrow and immediately ran off to telephone.' 'I know that part of the story. I was on the other end of the telephone.' 'Then it was you who warned Lawford?' Sergeant Elmer shrugged his shoulders. 'I'm sorry. Regulations. You know how it is with the police.' 'So I've learned,' said Daniel Leverquin sourly. 'It looks as though the Major gave you a bad time?' 'If you look at his face, you'll see it was mutual.' 'I heard he fell down some stairs.' 'That's right. The same one I fell down.' 'O.K. Leverquin,' Lawford didn't concern him. 'But what made you conclude that the man you bumped into was German?' 'You heard him on the phone, dammit! And it's only the German who still believes in absolving their civic conscience by informing to the police.' The Terminal was clanking like a badly oiled motor. He found that strange. His duties at Heathrow, always a hive of voices and sounds, had made him insensitive to noise. But now he could clearly hear how it was growing. 'When we spoke about it first time, you told me that the man had a light skin, fail hair and glasses in a gold frame. Was about forty, and of medium height. Five feet nine, approximately?" 'I didn't measure him.' 'But did he have a black overnight case in his hand and was he wearing a white raincoat with a black lining?' 'Maybe. One of those which is reversible.'

'Can you remember anything else? Anything at all?' 'Look here, Sergeant, don't you think your asking rather a lot from me?' 'No, you look here, Leverquin, a man has been killed here!' 'Only one?' Daniel Leverquin laughed caustically. Something's happening in the Terminal, thought Elmer, something about the noise level had changed so that you could hear it. 'Rabies isn't my concern. Rabies is the doctor's province. My job is to find the murderer.' Was it possible, Daniel Leverquin wondered, that reality could follow his imagination, his scenario so closely? That this man, in the midst of the rabies' epidemic, could be concerned with a single individual, should be worried only about him and taking no notice of all the rest, the real thing going on all around him? Was that what people were dying of at the Airport really rabies? Or was what Sergeant Elmer was suffering from the real madness and the rest just a disease? 'When he gave the breviary back to you, did you see his hands?' 'Go to hell, Sergeant!' The policeman grabbed him by the shoulders. Daniel Leverquin recoiled instinctively. He wasn't sure whether Elmer's eccentric behaviour was motivated by his mission or by the virus. He closed his eyes, and in the darkness formulated an image of the walkway at the exit of Heathrow Central Station. First of all, of course, he had a hallucination. (Remarkably clairvoyant, in fact.) Faceless people had been rushing towards him, driven by an immeasurable, uncontrollable fear. Then he had collided with the fair-haired man in the white raincoat. He had dropped his breviary. The man had bent down and picked it up for him. He had small, soft hands with short, jagged nails. 'I think he bites his nails.' Sergeant Elmer smiled. Now he could go back into the Transit Lounge and 'pin down' the carpark killer, who had imagined that his airport was the best place to commit his hired crime. And finish his conversation with the old Professor Goldman, if he still had anything to say to him. ***** When he got back to the Sabena cubicle where he had left Miriam and found it empty, Reuben Abner began to feel worried. They had agreed that she should wait for him there. He couldn't understand where the girl had gone to. It was very imprudent of her. It was difficult to find a relatively safe place in the Terminal, after the first numbing shock had passed and people had at last realized the true state of things, that the quarantine had to be accepted as a way of life to which they had to adapt if they wished to survive, it had all begun again, their unfortunate history from the very beginning, a struggle for the most favoured place in the sun. Once lost, it was hard to win a place back. And all the others were already full, all the cubicles, offices, storerooms and smaller official and

public corners. All the holes in the Terminal which had four walls to separate them off from other similar holes had been taken possession of during the first few hours of the quarantine. For now, by those who had found them first. By tomorrow, perhaps it would be only by those who were strong enough to hold on to them. Their cubicle belonged to the Belgian Air Line, Sabena. It was squeezed in between the desks and cubicles of Finn air and Swissair in the Main Hall of Terminal 2, between the stairs to the Gallery, and to the left, the Arrival Gates for passengers who had just flown in. It had three, high, prefabricated walls and a low counter facing towards the Hall, which had to be clambered over to get into the narrow space in which you could barely turn round, but in which it was possible to imagine, to a certain degree, protected from contact with other people. They had been together the whole time since the quarantine had come into force without noticing it. And how little they knew about each other. For the moment, at least that was how it had seemed to him. It was completely unimportant, it would come about of its own accord, quite naturally, later, he thought, when time was again measure in hours and minutes, and not as now, by public appeals from the Airport Anti-Rabies Committee. They had talked as if they had always known each other, as if they had grown up together and not as if their flights had brought them together by chance in the Transit Lounge of the Airport and the unexpected quarantine had prolonged their meeting for several hours. In fact, it had been he who had done most of the talking. Now, suddenly, he was shamefacedly aware that he should have chosen a more interesting subject of conversation then hydroelectric power stations and thermo-electrics. The girl had simply made good her escape having decided that he was an eccentric for whom the world did not consist of people and the lives they lived, but of electrical circuits and their transmutation. But she hadn't seemed to be bored. He knew how to make his subject sound exciting, like artists talking about their work. Electrical current was his art. Chatting up girls, he thought, judging by the empty cubicle and his own sense of emptiness evidently wasn't. And just before daylight, they felt hungry. They had eaten nothing since the beginning of the quarantine. He had offered to go to the restaurant and bring back something to eat. She had wanted to go with him. He had not let her. Somebody had had to stay behind to guard the cubicle. The majority of passengers in the Terminal were not lucky enough to have 'separate quarters'. They were only waiting for a chance to take over theirs. But the true reason had been that he had not wanted her to move. The announcements put out by the quarantine authorities, ambiguous in all other respects, were ominously clear about the danger of physical contact with other people. When he had come back with the food, she had no longer been there. His jacket was lying where he had left it. His passport was still there in his left inside pocket. And his wallet in the right one, but the girl had gone. He sat down on the floor and waited. He didn't touch the food. He wasn't hungry any more. He heard a commotion from the Departure Area, from the other side of the staircase which led up

to the Terminal Gallery. He got up. He decided to go and look for her. Perhaps he would find her again somewhere in the Terminal. He no longer looked upon the cubicle as a safe hiding place. As it has been when Miriam was there with him. Picking up his coat, he caught sight of a dark stain on the floor which looked like coagulated blood. It consisted of a single word. AL-KHIYAM. A single word, whose sense he did not at once grasp. AL-KHIYAM. Then he remembered. Not long ago the Polish Press had been full of that word. Al-Khiyam had been a small settlement in South Lebanon. It had been inhabited by Palestine refugees and a secret PLO commando base had been set up there, from where attacks had been mounted against Israeli territory and kibbutzes along the South Lebanon-Israeli border. AL-KHIYAM. One night the Israeli commandos had come across the border, attacked the settlement and destroyed the Palestinian base. Seventy people have been killed. Of those, sixty-eight were Arabs. And of those, forty had been armed PLO guerillas. Of the others, fifteen had been ordinary men and women. AL-KHIYAM. Ruben Abner understood. ***** Sergeant Elias Elmer looked around him in incomprehension. He was standing with his back to the wall and his right hand on the top of his revolver holster. No, this could not be the Main Hall which he had passed through when he had decided to abandon the senseless search for the phantom dog and look for Daniel Leverquin. Then, the Terminal's Main Hall Concourse Area had looked like the nave of a church, like the Tower of Babel filled to overflowing with terrified worshippers of strictly separated and exclusive creeds who have been surprised by a new, unknown and dark divinity. Little groups of passengers, come together on who knows what basis, blood, chance, need, alongside their cases, the only remains of their earthly possession, were waiting as if petrified, each group on the cleared space of its own territory, which represented its own illusion of safety, to hear from the loudspeakers, as from the all-powerful heavens, something which would at last give them back their faith in Reason and order, which in those last hours of the quarantine had been subjected to enormous trials. Now it seemed to him that he had been set down in the middle of a lunatic asylum in which fire had broken out.

From the direction of the Departure Gates where the wide staircase led down to the ground floor with its Air Line desks for checking in passengers and luggage came a howling mob, which trampling everything before it, sucked in the panic-stricken passengers from the Hall like some giant amoeba which devours all in its path as it slides along the ocean bed. Chairs were broken, suitcases were torn open and thrown in all directions, the glass in the counters was shattered, and the Air Line cubicles were thrown like cardboard models crushed beneath a giant heel. Before he had time to draw hid revolver, the human whirlwind, howling incoherently, was all around him and dragging him into its seething depths. Something pushed him away fiercely, he was carried along, once again he felt himself struck and then he was falling and that lasted for some time, so that he had long enough to hunch himself up as he fell and defended his face before, slowed down by the other bodies, he crashed to the ground. He had the impression that as he fell he caught sight of a corner of a white raincoat, flashing before his eyes, with a black, shiny lining on the inside, but he could not be certain because everything else around him was going black with a chaotic speed which cut out both breath and thoughts. ***** As soon as he found out that the passengers from the 'strictly infected' zone, from the Transit Area, had broken into the 'prophylactic isolation' of the Terminal's Main Hall, had made a violent rush which had overwhelmed his man and smashed down the provisional barricades, the Chief of Airport Security Services, Major Lawford, set in motion 'SECURITY PHASE II', which for the ignorant civilians of the Anti-Rabies Committee was the unknown product of his professional and personal experience with people. For he had foreseen something exactly like this. He had not known precisely when such a disturbance would arise, nor what it was that would provoke it. In fact he had expected it rather earlier. As soon as the initial shock of the discovery that rabies was infectious, fatal, and until it had been mastered, there was no way out of the quarantine for anyone caught there. He would have liked to know how the riot started. Knowledge of the circumstances was exceptionally useful for future crowd control and for future disturbances which would certainly arise. He had proposed to the Committee in the Tower that his men should be armed with automatic rifles of Steyr AUG type, which the special anti-terrorist squads of the SAS used with such success. This had not been accepted and they had been allowed only revolvers and rubber riot sticks. Automatic rifles of course, could be fired. The fact that they were made to be fired did not bother anyone. Nor even Sir William SaintPears, who derived his livelihood from shares in the company which made them. The Chief Manager of Heathrow, Townsend, was the first to be against them. He was always against anything which Lawford wanted.

(Except in the case of the Russians. The Airport Security had not been able to protect the Russians from people, and people from rabies. He had demanded that the Russians be allowed to fly out of Heathrow immediately. Amazingly, Townsend had agreed. But then the Russians had been against it.) He had also put forward a proposal that the Transit Foyer should be blocked off with metal shutters in order to make its control more efficient. This too had been rejected. It would, of course, have frightened the isolated passengers. As if they were not all scared out of their wits already. The chief Manager was predictably against that too. Evidently the stubborn mule had decided to be against in principle everything which aimed at establishing any kind of order at this crossroads of international insanity. And he didn't let the matter rest there. The Transit Foyer could not be blocked off without it being noticed, nor could the automatic rifles be issued to the AS men, who were on guard at the Terminal exit without the knowledge of the administration, but with a kind of chameleon-like conspiratorial skill he had been able to invent the 'HEATHROW SECURITY PLAN' and as part of it, 'PHASE II' which once proclaimed, automatically, at that very instant, placed in the hands of every member of the Airport Security, an automatic Steyr AUG, and of every fifth one a gas-grenade rifle. Hilary Lawford looked at his watch. The critical minute had passed. He got up and buttoned his uniform. Terminal 2, of course, was lost. It no longer belonged to people but to rabies. But the European Terminal was not the only one at the Airport. Heathrow was a town, the aerial metropolis of the world. He'd be damned before he'd let bloody viruses wander around a town for whose security he was responsible. ***** 'Are you all right?' An indistinct, incomplete face slowly emerged from the silky darkness of the huge raincoat in which the Main Hall of Terminal 2 was wrapped. Sergeant Elias Elmer shook his head with a groan. The silky blackness gradually dispersed, the black raincoat was transformed into a white one being worn by a young, fair-haired man with gold-rimmed spectacles and soft hands whose nails were chewed to the quick. And then he too disappeared and an attendant from the Medical Centre was bending over him. Beside him stood Metropolitan Police Sergeant Ludwell. 'He bites his nails,' said Elmer distinctly. 'Who?' asked Ludwell. 'The man from the car park.' Ludwell looked at him suspiciously. 'How are you feeling?' 'Shaky.' 'You ought to go over to the Medical Centre.' 'I'll go later,' answered Sergeant Elmer sitting up. 'I have to go into the Transit Area now.'

The medical attendant shrugged his shoulders and moved away. 'What the hell do you want to do there?' He didn't have to tell Ludwell anything. It was his case. Ludwell had one of his own He was interested just how far he'd got, had he any ideas at all about the man who had tried to rape little Sue Jenkins on the roof of the Queen's Building. He didn't think so. He wasn't even concerned about it. Rabies was clouding everyone's memory and dulling their conscience. 'I have to register people for vaccination.' 'Register? Transit Area? There's no more Transit Area, man! Can't you see?' Only then did he manage to look around. Lit by its purplish neon lights and shut off by large layers of glass behind which sheaves of searchlights cut into the darkness, the Main Hall of the Terminal looked like a miniature lunar landscape after an earthquake. A few passengers huddling into frightened groups were still standing amongst the ruins of the Air Line desks. Nurses in their green and white suits and with masks over their faces were carrying away the injured. At the door leading to the Terminal car park, the roof garden, and in front of the tunnel going off to the Underground, AS guards, armed with automatic rifles were in position behind temporary barricade. But there was no one in front of the Departure Gates. 'What happened?' 'Some idiot started a riot. The crowd broke through the corridor into the Terminal Hall.' That's it, he thought, a professional hand. But something was not quite right about it. Professional murderers had steady nerves. Professional murderers didn't bite their nails. 'And where are all those people now?' 'Can't you hear?' From somewhere below came the sounds of voices and movement. 'On the ground floor?' 'They're trying to break out of the Terminal,' explained Sergeant Ludwell. 'Christ!' he exclaimed. 'If they break out the infection will be spread all over the Airport!' 'If it stops even there!?' 'The whole of Heathrow will have to be put in quarantine.' 'Naturally. Can you imagine rabies in London?' He could imagine it. Who then would be able to find a single man amongst nine million. It would be difficult enough if rabies was limited to the perimeter of the Central Terminal Area. 'I must go down there!' he shouted. 'They mustn't be allowed to break out!' Ludwell took hold of his arm. 'They won't, don't worry. Lawford is down there. And the Superintendent has ordered us to clean up this mess.' In the chaos there would be more than enough lost children to return to their mothers, thought Sergeant Elmer bitterly, suitcases to be returned to their owners, self-confidence to be given back to people. Everything except the man with the chewed nails.

A few yards beneath Sergeant Elmer, who was still wondering what the man with the chewed nails was doing at that very moment, he was in fact biting his nails. Things have not gone quite as planned, thought Hans Magnus Landau. Everything had seemed to be going well up to the time when the barricades at the entry to the transit Foyer had been broken down and panic had spread to the Terminal Hall. His only care had been to stay on his feet, not to fall, not to be crushed by the maddened crowd. The human flood had dragged him violently along with it, down the wide staircase towards the Air France and KLM desks on the ground floor, and then, split in two by them, as if by a breakwater, further to the left, into a low, narrow hall along which, between people hemmed in by the BA counters for baggage reception and the rows of glass exits from the Terminal, surrounded by piles of suitcases scattered in all directions. All around him there was shouting, cursing, swearing, plaintive cries in different languages, people were fighting for space by all means possible, as if the virus from which they were fleeing was not infinitely small, invisible, perhaps already part of them, at least of some of them, but a gigantic monster from which with a bit of luck a lot of lack of concern for others they could escape. Behind them was the monstrous rabies virus and in front of them the thick glass of the closed exit door, beyond which everything was in impenetrable darkness. And beyond the darkness was Heathrow, London, the world. Beyond the darkness was safety, life, freedom, thought Hans Magnus as he chewed away at his nails. The years which he had lost were waiting to be caught up with, and the million marks with which to do it. He didn't move. There was no need to. In the Transit Lounge he had done everything he could. He had put his irons in the fire. They were white hot. They couldn't go on being heated for ever. They would crack. Something would happen. Someone would start something. The doors would be opened. Or smashed down. He would get away into the darkness. To Heathrow, to London, to the world. From the loudspeakers, as if from the heavens, came a melodious feminine voice which in hypnotic tones informed passengers that the expected vaccine had arrived and that vaccination would start immediately, if the passengers would be good enough to precede with the calm order and self-discipline which they had so-far shown, to the designated points. Directions how to get there followed, together with a reminder to passengers to bring their passports with them. There was the possibility, therefore, that the quarantine authorities were not up to date with the crisis in the Terminal, that it was probably a misunderstanding, but filled with his new sense of awareness, Hans Magnus could in no way exclude the possibility that it was all a dirty psychological trick by which, instead of an uncertain confrontation with the revolt, the authorities were trying to reassert their control over the passengers. There was something treacherously demoralizing in the neutral voice of reason. He understood something which he had never realized before: why the Jews had let themselves be led away to

the gas chambers without resistance, leaving their clothes in tidy bundles before the doors at which they would never again emerge, but why now there was the real threat of the danger that the crowd would go off the boil, disperse and line up with their passports at some counter at which doctors would inject them with useless phials of liquid. He was not alone in this way of thinking. Somebody from the mass shouted hysterically: 'God-dam you and your bastard vaccine! I want to get out!' The door next to Hans Magnus shattered under the iron weight of a luggage trolley, surprising him with the ease with which he had broken it down. The new Hans Magnus was not only braver, more resourceful, cleverer. He was also stronger. The crowd made a frantic rush at the glass barrier. Along the whole length of the ground floor, the glass shattered under the blows of heavy suitcases and luggage trolleys. Hans Magnus crouched down to crawl through the opening. All round him people with no care for cuts and abrasions were forcing their way through the holes in the glass. The darkness exploded. The apron in front of the Terminal was suddenly lit up as if by daylight. The shining eyes of the searchlights positioned along the edge of the darkness which had moved back, followed his every movement. He recoiled backwards like an animal faced with fire. Round the apron of the Inner Ring East stood the uniformed men of Airport Security, their feet wide apart and their automatic rifles at the ready. A little to one side, a powerful thick-set man in a brown uniform, standing on the roof of an official car, was speaking through a megaphone: 'This is Major Lawford, Head of Airport Security speaking! There is no cause for panic! The disease is completely under control! Go back into the Terminal! Vaccination will begin at once!' No one had any intention of obeying. The passengers on the apron already saw themselves outside the quarantine zone, out of reach of rabies. Those still inside the chaos of the Terminal could not know that outside they were faced by armed guards. 'Go back or we shall open fire!' The crowd continued to pour out frantically through the broken windows. Major Lawford raised his arm. A volley fired into the air rang out. The crowd turned back, trampling all before them. 'I repeat! There is no case for alarm! The infection is under control!' The voice, distorted by the megaphone, was hoarse and barely understandable. The apron was again empty. One man only was left in the middle, hesitating, hunched up and bent almost double as if the silky, luminous threads of the searchlights had stitched him to the

tarmac. He was wearing a white, waiter's jacket and white gloves. Hans Magnus recognized the unpleasant barman from the Transit Lounge. 'Hey, you! Go back inside!' Stumbling slightly, the man in the white jacket moved towards the cordon. 'Do you hear me! Go back inside!' shouted Lawford through the megaphone. The man in the white jacket raised his head like an animal, startled by an unexpected noise. His face was distorted, a cracked open, half melted death mask. His hand in the white glove was shading his eyes from the light, but he went on staggering towards the cordon. 'Stop or we'll shoot!' shouted Lawford. The youngster in AS uniform towards whom the man was moving, suddenly took an involuntary step backwards. 'He's rabid! The man's rabid!' he shouted. 'Shoot him!' ordered Major Lawford. 'Stop!' Dr. Luke Komarowsky was running out from the direction of the Medical Centre. 'He's not rabid, he's simply terrified!' 'This is no time for guessing, Doctor!' shouted Major Lawford. 'Shoot him!' The AS men hesitatingly raised their automatic rifles, aimed them at the man - but no one fired. The man in the white jacket rushed towards the AS man who had refused to carry out Lawford's order; the youngster dropped his rifle and jumped to one side. The cordon fell apart. The man in the white jacket propelled himself towards the blessed darkness of the Inner Ring West from which he was now only divided by the murderous sun of the searchlights. Major Hilary Lawford raised his revolver. The sharp crack of a shot rang out. The man in the white jacket stumbled and fell, raised himself on his knees and went on crawling on all fours towards the darkness, his face half-turned towards the passengers still in the Terminal with an expression which had once again taken on a human sensitivity. A second shot rang out. The man in the white jacket rolled over on the concrete and lay still. For a moment, the solemn silence of early dawn reigned over Heathrow, its first faint rays mixing with the paling glare of the searchlights Then Hans Magnus Landau heard the muffled roar of the first aircraft, preparing to take off from the International Terminal.

17. Dr. John Hamilton has followed the whole incident from the window of the micro-biology laboratory which now took up the whole of the right-hand wing of the Control Tower. The equipment had been transported from the Institute for Tropical Medicine and the series of inter-connecting rooms had begun to remind him of mysterious temples in which the dedicated high priests of science, with the arrogant self-assurance of the ruling caste, were fumbling about amongst the sensitive mysteries of nature, and, or so it was believed, getting ever nearer to life's profoundest truths, whereas he was still working on fresh samples of infected nerve tissue. Some of their donors were still in the Medical Centre, in a coma or at the different stages of frenzy, but the majority of the poisoned cultures belonged to those already dead. Mother Teresa was in a hermetically sealed coffin in St. George's Chapel. But there, her body whose life force was no longer capable of producing young cells, was reduced to the decomposition of old ones. In the laboratory, in the resinous culture of a Petri dish bearing the number '1' was a part of her organs which still held within itself the spark of life. It contained her virus, the unlooked-for product of her own organism, or at the very least, its symbiosis with the virus which was still multiplying, still living, and virulently lethal. Daniel Leverquin was standing next to him. He was beside himself with anger. 'Lawford killed him! Did you see it? The bastard killed him!' Dr. Hamilton pulled down the blind sharply. The blood-stained body on the tarmac of the Inner Ring East belonged to a reality with which he could not concern himself. He could not allow himself the luxury of compassion which was available to other people and some consolation for those who could not fight against the Rhabdovirus in a more intelligent manner. When tomorrow, or the day after, it would be a question of thousands of dead, not only from, but also because of rabies, a mood of depression, or indeed any emotion, would destroy his capacity to think dispassionately about the virus, without hatred or prejudice, as an individual part of nature to which he himself belonged. And on the degree of this obligatory dehumanization depended the survival of humanity at this Airport, and perhaps even beyond it. For whatever might be thought of it in its torments, rabies was a part of nature, equal with all others, if he had been a Christian, he would have said that it was a work of the same God who had created man, and evidently quite vainly given him the intelligence to perfect himself and the world around him. The Rhabdovirus had a sacred, inalienable right to life. That life, it was true, depended on something else's death. But didn't the life of all other creatures, not excluding man, also depend on that unfortunate causality which was known as the struggle for survival. The virus had no less right to kill in order to live than man, who killed in order to rule. 'He was rabid, Daniel,' he said calmly.

'Mother Teresa was rabid too, John, and Sister Lumley. And there are a lot of others who are rabid in the Medical Centre, but we don't shoot them like mad dogs!' Not yet, thought Dr. Hamilton. They still believe that the epidemic can be kept within limited parameters. But what if that turns out to be impossible? 'He had broken through the cordon. He would have infected the whole Airport before they could have found him in the darkness. We would have lost the only advantage that we have, the certain knowledge that the disease is localized inside the quarantine zone. A percentage certainly, of course, because of which most probably the whole of Heathrow will soon have to be placed inside the zone. I imagine it's a damned hard thing for any man to have to do. But Lawford got up enough courage to do it. The young lad with the automatic rifle didn't. You or I wouldn't have either. But then somebody has to. Somebody always has to clean up out refuse.' For the moment he himself felt rather like a refuse collector who had been given the virus to deal with whilst everyone else was proudly busying themselves with people. 'And if he hadn't been rabid?' 'He was.' But if he hadn't been?' 'Even that happens sometimes.' He turned back to the laboratory bench. The salivary ganglia whose microscopic particles were waiting electronic magnification, had once belonged to mother Teresa, the nun from Lagos, but now were the property of the Rhabdovirus of unknown origin and uncertain characteristics. Up to then, he had only seen its results. For the first time he was about to see the actual virus. 'Hamilton?' 'Yes?' he answered distractedly. He was no longer there in the room. His thoughts had plunged him deep into that micro world which was ruled by his deadly enemy. An enemy who in a perverse way he loved. 'Sometimes you're a real bastard.' 'Salvation is in routine, Leverquin.' He didn't try to defend himself. He simply stated the only fact that was of any value to him. 'In merciless routine. We have to live and work as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. If we allow ourselves to be tempted to believe in the exceptional nature of the situation, we shall all soon believe in its invincibility. We shall all be done for. It won't be only that man down there who will die. We shall all die. We have to grit our teeth and tell ourselves that everything is all right and that nothing unusual is happening. In fact, nothing is. In some part of the world, things like this are the normal state of affairs. Only, of course, they don't exist except as little red tins asking for help, in which from time to time we drop a coin or two.' 'But this isn't some other part of the world. This is England.' 'Then let's be like those Englishmen who on a desert island dressed for dinner in order to eat a tough old hen, and afterwards become somebody else's supper.'

The internal phone began to ring. Dr. Hamilton pressed the button. 'Laboratory, Dr. Hamilton.' 'You have London, Doctor,' announced a cool, feminine voice. Then came another, quite different voice, slightly hoarse and nasal with a strong French accent. 'Coro Deveroux.' Coro Deveroux. Mark. She always used to sound as if she had a cold, as if she had just got up from a warm bed. He felt as if it were the opposite of an illness which you get over on your feet, without knowing you've had it, only really knowing you're been ill when the pains start up again. 'This is a surprise. How did you find me? How did you manage to get through to Heathrow?' 'Does that really matter for the moment?' 'No, of course, not.' He was confused and excited. 'But we're in telecommunications quarantine. Do you know what's happening here?' 'I talked to someone at the Ministry of Health.' 'I mean what's really happening? Not the shit about "the situation being completely under control"?' 'That's why I'm in London, John.' 'We sent tissue samples with our virus to the Pasteur Institute, too,' once again he referred to the virus as 'theirs', such an intimacy with the micro monster made it somehow less dangerous, 'but I didn't know that you were there. I thought you were in Africa. Angola or somewhere.' 'Uganda. John, is it really as serious as that?' 'Even more than that, I'm afraid.' 'Do you have any idea of the virological nature of the cause?' 'Not yet. I was just getting ready to look at it.' 'In the meantime, do you have any concrete idea of anything at all?' 'Only of the kind that says we ought to crawl into some hermetically sealed hole as soon as possible. Unfortunately, they won't let me. In fact, they have disgustingly high hopes in me.' 'We have some here too.' 'I'd like to hear them.' The artificial light-heartedness had disappeared from his voice. 'You'll hear them when I see you.' He was bewildered. 'What do you mean to say by that?' 'That I'm one of an international epidemiological teal which is here to help you. We'll be at Heathrow in a few hours.' 'Oh, no. No you won't!' he said decidedly. 'In any case you won't!' 'But why not?' 'Because I won't allow it.' 'I have the authority from the Ministry of Health and the British Airport Authority, John.' 'I'm the only authority here.' 'I don't see how you can stop me!' 'I'll say I can't work with you!'

'Don't be silly. Everyone knows we've already worked together.' 'Just because of that.' He didn't want to be offensive, but that was how it sounded. Everything always turned out the wrong way between the two of them. 'Listen, John Hamilton, once and for all forget that masculine, big-headed patronizing tone!' Her voice sounded sharp. 'I don't need it. I'm a doctor and a scientist. Disease is my work, and my place is where people are ill.' 'For god's sake, Coro, people are not ill here. They're dying!' 'Do you think that's some kind of novelty? They're dying here too. When I was working in Ethiopia, in one day more people were dying there than die in Great Britain in a whole year. As you see, people are dying everywhere, John.' 'But not like this. You don't understand. You haven't seen it.' He had to try and persuade her not to come, to stop her. 'This is no laboratory, Coro. It's not even an epidemic as we know it. It's a bloody micro-biological madhouse! Just a few minutes ago, right beneath my window, they killed a man simply because he looked rabid!' We've got time enough afterwards to see if he really was rabid, thought Daniel Leverquin; we've got the most advanced techniques at our disposal, even though they're slower than a revolver shot, to establish whether we were mistaken or not. Or, since in the first issue we can't be mistaken, whether they killed him prematurely. Coro Deveroux's voice once again came into the laboratory. 'There's no point, John. I'm coming. But I've not rung you because of that. There's something else. I want you to know so that you won't be surprised.' 'After all this, I don't think I can be.' 'Are you alone?' He looked at Leverquin. It was too late now. 'Yes.' 'The Messiah is coming to Heathrow with me.' He wasn't surprised. He was astounded. 'Who?' 'Professor Frederick Lieberman. He's the head of our team. Only now he's called Lohman, Frederick Lohman. He asked you to accept him as that. And not to ask any questions until he can explain everything to you personally.' There was a soft metallic click and then the crackling sound of an empty line. 'Deveroux!' shouted Dr. Hamilton. 'Mark!' 'I'm sorry, Doctor,' answered the measured feminine voice. 'London has rung off.' Daniel Leverquin wanted to ask his friend what had happened to his saving routine and the Englishman's behaviour on the desert island, but he restrained himself. 'I thought Lieberman was dead?' 'So did I.' 'Do you want me to try to get Lawford to do something about Deveroux?' asked Leverquin, taking off his laboratory protective suit. 'The bastard owes me a couple of favours.' 'There's no real way for me to stop her, Daniel. If Coro's decided to come, she'll come.'

'On a broomstick, most probably, if she's anything like what I imagine her to be.' For a moment he hesitated as to whether to ask Hamilton about the so-called evangelists and the mystery surrounding Wolfenden House. But he decided against it. He didn't look ready to take him into his confidence. He'd wait for a better opportunity. But one way or another, he would have to find out what it was that had happened fifteen years before. That was one of the themes for his 'Rabies'. The dead man in the white jacket down there on the tarmac was another theme, although during his altercation with Hamilton he had tried to involve himself in it as reality, as a crucial fact of his human position at the Airport. After the initial and understandable feeling of compassion, it had ceased, fortunately, to be reality with which one had to live and become material with which one wrote about life. He would go over to the Medical Centre. He had to see once again how people were dying from rabies. There was nothing more unpleasant than false descriptions of the process of dying. If there was no one dying for the moment, he would wait. His time certainly wouldn't be wasted. There was always something happening in the Medical Centre which he could make use of for his book. Some phrase which doctors used when they were alone, some incident which was quite tangential to the main action of 'Rabies'. He would have to be careful that his 'Rabies' did not become simply a chronicle of the epidemic at Heathrow, a record. That on the basis of so-called authenticity, reality didn't sneak in at the back door and inhibit his imagination. For imagination was everything. Reality, if it existed at all, nothing. At the very best, the product of a successful imagination. He realized suddenly that Hamilton could not be reproached because of the clinical indifference with which he had accepted the death beneath his window. Hamilton was there to take care of the virus, not of people. He, Daniel Leverquin, was the Eyes and the Ears. He was there to write about rabies, to tell the world what happened at Heathrow, perhaps even what could happen, and not to participate in rabies. There was no real difference between his artistic and Hamilton's scientific neutrality. He wanted to tell him so. But Dr. Hamilton was already in front of the electronic microscope, alone with his virus. Daniel Leverquin went out of the laboratory, carefully shutting the door behind him. ***** Consumed with hatred, Miriam Mahmud didn't hear the commotion that was getting nearer and nearer. She hated him, God, how she hated him! She was kneeling down in the Main Hall of the Terminal, beneath the vast darkened window, the

blind glass eye which had lost its light, between the Information Desk and the mobile buffet, hidden from all contact and filled with hatred for Reubin Abner, the Jew. The boy with whom, before he had been Jew, before she had found that out from his passport, she had had so much in common that it had seemed to her that they had known each other for much longer, as long as if they had spent their childhood together, or as the happy future which awaited them. The boy, who, amongst all other people, was the only one who had come to her help when she had been cut off from her family, terrified, alone and wretched. But it was Reuben Abner who had killed her father, Rahmet, a PLO feddayin. It was Reuben Abner who had crippled her youngest brother, still not old enough to be a PLO feddayin. It was Reuben Abner who had driven her out of Palestine where she had been born, where her forefathers and her forefathers' forefathers had been born, right back to the times of the Prophet. It was Reuben Abner who had destroyed her last home with his bombe, a hovel of dried mud in the refuge settlement close to Al-Khiyam in Southern Lebanon, where hope and despair, people lived and died with the name of Reuben Abner on their lips. One dark night, Reuben Abner with other Reuben Abners had come to Al-Khiyam to finish the butchery begun in Dayr-Dibwan near Jerusalem. To kill her father, cripple her youngest brother, driven out her older brothers and force her and her mother into exile in an alien land. She who bore the name of Miriam, a name common to both Arabs and Jews. Reuben Abner had destroyed her youth. Everything that she had known and loved. Perhaps not him personally. His accursed people. But then again, that was him. In 1967 she had been five. There had been a war. There was always a war. Everything she could remember was part of war. And everything was linked to war. Massacres, fires, flight. Over everything, fear, and only hopelessness was more terrible than fear. Reuben Abner and his people were to blame for it all. It was no excuse that in 1967 Reuben Abner too was only a few years old, that he had been living in Poland and, as he had told her, he himself had been persecuted. If he had lived in Israel, he would have fought in the war. He would have killed them. Killed her father. Crippled her brother. Driven her to take refuge in Al-Khiyam. She remembered the expression on the face of her youngest brother, when after the operation, he realized that his leg had been amputated and that he would never be a feddayin. He hadn't needed to come to Al-Khiyam one night to be responsible for something like that. Nor to shoot at her brother. It was enough to be a Jew. A Jew anywhere. Reuben Abner in Poland. For Reuben Abner in Poland, Reuben Abner in America, anywhere at all, was the same as Reuben Abner from Israel. Her mother suffered in silence and contracted cancer. There was no hope for her, wherever she was to live now. And that too was the work of Reuben Abner, wherever he had lived up till then.

Miriam Mahmud was crying. The noise got louder and louder. The disturbance was arousing the passengers in the Hall out of their lethargy. She could her nothing because of her crying, she felt it as if it were a betrayal. She could not hate Reuben Abner enough, as much as he justly deserved and as much as they had taught her at Al-Khiyam. When the mob broke through from the Transit Lounge, it was already too late to hide. Reason told her not to move, to stay where she was, in the safe space between two cubicles, but her overpowering experience told her that those who stay put in wartime – die. The moment she stepped out, the hysterical mass closed round her and sucked her with it towards the ground floor of the Terminal. Almost fainting, she saw Reuben Abner trying to cut through the mass of people and get to her. She lost him from sight, for a moment of panic thought he had fallen to the ground and would be trampled underfoot, and was ashamed of that fear which shamelessly, treacherously took place of the satisfaction which she should have, had to feel, and then his head, covered with blood, once again appeared a few steps away from her. She felt his arm around her. 'Don't touch me! Leave me alone!' she shouted, but her voice couldn't make itself heard above the din. Nor could she understand what Reuben was saying to her. She came to in the ruins of a smashed cubicle. Reuben Abner lay senseless next to her, with blood on his face, just like her father's after one such Reuben Abner had withdrawn from AlKhiyam. She crawled out of the ruins on her knees. The Main Hall of the Terminal was quite empty. Passengers' bodies where lying everywhere on the ground, with broken pieces of furniture around. Amongst them, masked medical attendants moved like ghosts. The noise had now receded into the distance, somewhere beneath her feet. A policeman, also wearing a mask, came up to her. 'Are you all right, Miss?' She didn't answer. She walked past him with chilling calm. Once again she found herself in the ruins of the cubicle. Only then did she realize that it had been the one belonging to Sabena. Rubin Abner was lying as she had left him. She took off the scarf from around her neck and wiped the blood from his face gently. From outside, like lightning close by a salvo of shots rang out. She took no notice. She was used to war. ***** Sir Mathew Laverick, M. D. was not used to war. In 1940, when the Battle of Britain had been at its height over London, he, with other children

from the capital had enjoyed unforgettably carefree days on a farm in Yorkshire. The firing worried him. It was the staccato rattle of automatic rifles. Then came two short, less loud shots, separated by a short interval. Apart from the inexplicable noise of breaking from the direction of the Hall, which had come to them shortly before, it was the first noise from the outside which had reached him since he had barricaded himself and Andrea in the Yugoslav Air Transport office in the fist floor gallery. He had left that refuge only once, to fetch food from the quarantine canteen, set up in the nearby restaurant. At that short distance, and protected by a mask and gloves, the danger of infection had been minimal. It wasn't himself he had been thinking about, of course. He had to protect Andrea. She was pregnant. In such circumstances, even a cold could be dangerous. If it had not been for Andrea, he would long since have responded to the appeal for doctors who happened to find themselves cut off in Terminal 2 to help the Heathrow medical team in the fight against the epidemic. But this way, he was quite helpless. He had a fairly clear idea of what was happening in the Terminal and why there was shooting. The African epidemics which he had studied in the field with Lieberman's team still haunted him even to the present day. But he wasn't certain. The hole in which he had hidden Andrea had its disadvantages. It was true that they were well concealed, but they remained uninformed of everything that was going on outside, and because of that, to some extent happy state of ignorance, unprepared for unexpected dangers. He went up to the window. There was nothing to be seen from it. In the gray, half-light, the massive buildings of the Airport were still in darkness, pervaded by steely neon light. 'What is it? What's happening?' Lady Laverick was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall. He could barely make out her face in the darkness. 'I don't know. I can't see anything.' 'Don't you think we ought to go out and see why they're shooting?' 'I imagine that somebody had started looting. In situations like this, even the most honest people are sometimes tempted.' 'I think there's some kind of war going on outside,' said Lady Laverick. 'It would be a good idea to find out what's really going on.' 'You mustn't worry yourself,' he said nervously. 'I'm not worried at all. It's you who's worrying,' answered Lady Laverick. 'I shall only start worrying when we have to go out of here.' It's true, he thought. He could neither leave her alone nor admit that he was anxious because of her. That would cause her to panic. In her condition, nagging anxiety was no better than frenzied hysteria. More than once already, someone had tried to break into the office. If they were to try seriously, the barricade wouldn't hold out.

They were kneeling in the corner in the darkness. Those outside had soon given up. They were probably afraid of finding a corpse in the room. They'd gone off to try other offices. But surely Andrea could see that such luck couldn't hold forever, that only he stood between her and rabies. 'The quarantine could be lifted and we wouldn't know about it,' insisted Lady Laverick. 'Everybody in the Airport could be dead, and we still wouldn't know. For Christ's sake, Matthew, what are we doing here?' 'We're still alive.' 'All right.' Lady Laverick got up off the floor. 'But to go on living, from time to time it's necessary to proceed with certain functions.' 'What?' 'Shit, for God's sake!' He was always surprised by her capacity to choose the most direct expression in their arguments, where he especially was inclined to fall back on weak euphemisms. She was right. He hadn't thought of that. His own bowels were tied up with worry about her. But he couldn't let her go to the toilet. The toilets were the busiest, most frequented places in the whole Airport. 'You can use the vase off the table,' he said practically. I'll turn my back.' 'You can go to Hell!' She got up and moved towards the door. He stood in front of her. He didn't know what to do to stop her, or how to keep her from taking the barricade away from the door. 'Jesus Christ, Andrea, don't you understand. Until they get the epidemic under control, we daren't go out.' 'How long do you think it's going to last?' 'I don't know. It can't last long. They can't afford to let it last long.' 'If you were in the medical team, you'd know.' That was harsh and unjust. She had no right to say that to him. Not her, not Andrea. 'I'm not in it because of you. You know that very well.' 'I'm not sure about that,' she said sarcastically. 'But I am sure that we can't stay here forever.' 'No. Of course not. Only until we can be vaccinated.' 'I don't think we can stay even until then.' 'What do you mean by that?' He was suddenly wildly anxious again. 'Do you feel all right?' 'Look.' She pointed to the door. The door handle was moving. Somebody was trying to get in. 'Is there anyone in there?' The voice was metallic, imperative. The handle began to shake violently. The door cracked. The barricade began to move. He was obliged to answer. 'What do you want?' 'Open the door!' The pressure from outside was beginning to push back the barricade. He pushed frantically at the

metal cupboard holding the door, and with an effort forced it back. There was a loud banging at the door. 'Go away! Leave us in peace,' he shouted. The cupboard was forced pitilessly backwards. The door began to open again. The opening looked like a pair of thin, bloodthirsty lips which were gaping wide to swallow them up. From the corridor could be heard the stifled voices of the intruders. 'How many of you are there in?' 'We're full up in here. Some of us are ill.' He hoped that would send them away. 'Go away!' 'It's because of those who are ill that we're here.' The voice was soothing. 'We're from the Medical centre. We're carrying out vaccinations.' 'You see,' said Lady Laverick triumphantly. He rushed to the barricade and in one movement pushed back the cupboard, then struggled with the table. Suddenly he was in a hurry. The vaccine would free him from his fear for Andrea. He could join the epidemiological team. The door opened. Framed in it with his feet wide apart, a cigarette hanging from his lips, was a long-haired Indian in tattered blue jeans with a Pan-Am shoulder bag. Several young people looking like primeval savages were pushing forward behind him. Two whites, an Asian and a girl in something which passed for clothing. 'Look folk, who we have here!' said Joaquin Diaz Marangos as he came in. The last into the room, a young man with the beard of a desert hermit, closed the door and lent against it. 'Two selfish bourgeois pigs, as far as I can see,' he said, maliciously. 'Where are the injections,' asked Sir Matthew Laverick stupidly. It seemed quite impossible to him that something like this could happen in an age when even monkeys in the zoo gave teaparties. 'For God's sake, Matthew,' said Lady Laverick angrily. She had been born on the wrong side of the tracks and her sense of reality had still not completely atrophied in the cotton-wool of suburban life. 'Do you hear that, Dr. Marcos? He'd like to be vaccinated. Do you think we can accommodate him?' 'With pleasure, Dr. Marangos,' agreed the young man with the hermit's beard and pulled a hunting knife resembling a curved bayonet out of his bag. 'After this, you won't have to be afraid of rabies any more.' The girl giggled. The other white looked docilely at the floor. The Asian said: 'You're wasting time, Marangos.' Lady Laverick pulled at her husband's arm. 'Come on, Matthew.'

'Don't worry,' said Sir Matthew Laverick. One had to treat these people like wild animals and show them one was not afraid. Force was the only thing they understood. That would put them in their place. He stood up strait. 'What are you talking about? Who are you? What does this mean?' He didn't even see Marangos' foot as it came up to kick him in the groin. He writhed in pain and groaning, fell to his knees. It was still wiser to be afraid, he thought, as he vomited. Andrea helped him to get up and stagger out of the office. The door was shut behind them. They heard furniture being moved as it was put back against the door. The corridor was empty, half in darkness. Through the glass at the end he could see the gallery was lit. At its other end, rabies was waiting for them. 'Now you can go to the bloody toilet,' groaned Sir Matthew Laverick, holding his stomach. At last he too had found the right word. ***** The Transit Foyer was empty. Smashed furniture, scattered hand luggage and broken glass were the only proof that just a little earlier people were present. The man with gray hair, who for the time being had chosen to be called Gabriel, was standing without a mask or protective clothing in the middle of the wrecked lounge, which was separated off from the Airside Gallery by a glass wall. On the other side of it, AS men armed with automatic riffles and Secret Service agents were patrolling. He was thinking how strange and unpredictable people were. The majority of healthy passengers behaved as if they were ill. Whereas a lot of those who were ill looked perfectly healthy. Sue Jenkins, for example. His little Ariadne. She was ill. There was nothing to be seen as yet, but he knew. He had an instinct for that. He had sensed the presence of rabies as soon as he had found the little girl, hunched up beneath the bar in the Foyer. The boy was lying next to her. 'May thou be well, Ariadne,' he said, smiling. 'Hullo, Theseus,' she answered, as if they had only just parted. The boy was dead. He had received a blow on the head with something heavy. Clearly, he had been trampled down in the rush to get out of the Transit Area. 'What's the matter with him?' asked the little girl. 'He is well now. And thou?' 'I'm all right. Only I'm afraid.' He stroked her hair. He could do that now. Nobody could drive him away. 'Be not afraid. Dost thou wish me to take thee away from here?' 'I'm all right here.' 'To where there is no fear?' 'And will you take Sharon too?' 'Who is Sharon?' He pointed to the boy. 'He?' 'No. He is Adrian. Sharon is his dog.'

The dog at the bottom of the dark tunnel of his dreams, he thought, the dog which the Black Hand touched. 'Where is the dog now, Ariadne?' The little girl was silent. He had to hurry. Soon, he would not be able to speak with her any longer. 'Ariadne, where is Sharon?' 'In the cupboard, in the toilet.' He didn't find the dog. He had looked in all the metal cupboards in both toilets and in the one for invalids. He searched carefully through the Foyer and all the rooms leading off it. The dog was not there. But in one of the cupboards in the men's toilets, he found the empty rucksack which smelt of the dog. When he got back, the little girl had lost consciousness. Her body was shaking as if it was galvanized. He picked her up in his arms and covering her face with a handkerchief so that the light should not trouble her, he carried her to the Medical centre. Dr. Komarowsky took the little girl from him. Only his tired, empty eyes could be seen. All the rest was covered by his protective suit. He knew at once that the child was beyond help. All of them here were beyond help. The hospital was in the chaotic state of a Georgian lunatic asylum from a Hogarth engraving. After half an hour, Sue suffered the first attack of frenzy. A heavy dose of sedative returned her agitated body to the calm of apparent death. The man with gray hair watched by her bedside, holding the tiny, sweating hand from which life was ebbing. The formless shadow in the frozen tunnel of his dreams was that of a dog. Now at last he knew why he had been drawn to Heathrow. To find it, the dog Sharon. He didn't yet know what he must do with it when he found it, but iy didn't worry him. That too would be shown to him when the time came. As everything up to now had been shown to him in time. Just as everything that was happening had a certain sense. Every step. From the time of his first dream. From his first dream, Something outside his power of understanding had worked to lead him to Sharon. Something had carried young Charlie away in his imagined aeroplane for him to have time to make out the image on the cover of the booklet 'Air Traffic Control', and from its likeness to the outline of Heathrow and the contours of the labyrinth through which he moved in his dreams, to come to the conclusion that he had to go to Heathrow and search for the sense of his nightmares there. That Something, as against all other places, had led him up to the Roof Garden of the Queen's Building and from all other passengers, had brought him into contact with Sue Jenkins. That Something had also led Sue Jenkins to the boy who had smuggled in the dog and had made him trust her. That something had finally driven him to look for Sue and to hear of the dog from her. After some time he sensed a slight pressure on his hand. He lifted his eyes. She was looking at him calmly. 'Theseus!' 'Yes, Ariadne?'

'Did you find Sharon?' 'No.' 'Find him.' 'I shall find him.' She moved her hand in his. 'This will help you.' 'What is it?' 'A thread,' she said and closed her eyes. He opened her hand. There was nothing in it. Or rather, there was nothing he could see. But there had to be something there. He would see it when it would be given to him, when the time came. As it came to all. To the picture of Heathrow on the cover of the book. To little Sue Jenkins in the Roof Garden. To Sharon. He closed Ariadne's palm carefully around Ariadne's invisible skein and ran off to fetch Dr. Komarowsky. Sue Jenkins was better. Sue Jenkins was getting well. When he came back with the doctor, the little girl was dead. Dr. Komarowsky covered her face with the sheet. 'But she spoke to me,' the man with gray hair kept on saying. 'She couldn't have,' objected Luke gently. 'You must have been mistaken. She's been dead for more than half an hour.' 'But she spoke to me. She awoke and spoke to me.' 'From that sort of coma, no one wakes up, friend.' 'But she awoke. She gave me this.' He opened his empty hand. Only then did Luke notice that the old man was not wearing protective clothing. 'For God's sake, man, you're not protected!' The old man was crying. 'Do you realize that you're infected with rabies?' 'No. No, I'm not,' he said quietly. 'She was my friend.' ***** The man-hunter from the microcosm, the mysterious Heathrow Rhabdovirus, whose shape the powerful electronic beam had fixed on the electroscope's phosphorous-coated screen, was waiting with a light-assisted magnification to the power of ten, for the first man who would see it. The apparatus had been brought from the micro-biological laboratory of the Institute for Tropical Medicine. Dr. Hamilton had not been afraid of oscillating magnetic fields, but there had been some doubt that the vibration of aircraft engines might disrupt the work of the sensitive machinery. But the upper level of the Control Tower housed the even more complicated and sensitive equipment of Flight Control and the danger from vibratory interference had been taken into account in the construction of the building.

In any case, today, in accordance with his agreement with the Anti-Rabies Committee, traffic at Heathrow would be discontinued and a general quarantine would be put into force over the whole Terminal Area of the Airport. The electron microscope in its most up-to-date version was a technological elephant, an armoured white monster made up of half a ton of coffin-shaped base with the incorporated column of the microscope itself and the lens-control panel, and another half a ton of power unit of hundred thousand volts which accelerated the electrons, carrying them with phantom-like speed through the condensing system of the magnetic lenses. The system concentrated the beam on the tissue sample, and the lenses assured the initial magnification. The final image was formed on a phosphorescent screen and was observed through the built-in photon microscope, which enlarged the already achieved magnification by ten times. Since the most powerful electron microscope magnify up to 250,000 times, with the new apparatus, this figure could be increased to 1,000,000 and made possible the clear determination of incredibly tiny particles of 5 Angstrom units. In order for the viruses to show up light on the dark film of the neutral cell content, the specimen had previously been tinted with a lead solution which absorbed the electrons. Fixed and propagated in a special culture, Mother Teresa's viruses had been subjected to negative tinting, mixed with an electron-impenetrable material, and spread out with the specimen on the carbon-coated grids. The specimen had been sliced with a diamond blade of an ultra microtome into components of one twelfth of a micron thick and these had then been prepared as for the photon microscope, except that the so-called 'embedding' had not been carried out in wax but in epoxide resin. Nature is just, naturally just, thought Dr. John Hamilton, slowly accommodating his eye to the infinitesimal world illuminated by the electronic sun and as far removed from him as any star in the sky. In the death-dealing vitality, the murderous precision of the Heathrow Rhabdovirus, that professional assassin from the microcosm, there must be something good, something which turned it against itself. In vivo, the incubation of classical rabies was measured in weeks and months. HRV, the Heathrow rabies virus carried out its allotted task in the lightning tempo of hours and minutes. But on the other hand, in vitro, fixed, it adapted itself with the same implacable speed to a strange, experimentally forced cell culture and reproduced itself temperamentally in a corresponding measure. In nature there was always, intelligent, just balance between 'good' and 'evil', when anthropocentrism was discounted from such concepts. The built-in mechanism of natural justice kept the cosmic scales in their horizontally balanced position. In so far, of course, as men did not interfere with it. Then the scales inclined to one side or the other, most commonly to the unexpected one. Sometimes even to the opposite of what seemed the more desirable. Was something like that happening in this case?

Whose work was rabies? From laboratory, and therefore man's? From the refrigerators of the English Porton Down or the American Fort Detrick, or some other scientific centre for a biological war of the future? Or was it a freak product of some imbalance in nature, in a roundabout way, again the work of man? Or finally, was it natural, a work of evil whose good side, necessary to the maintenance of the general equilibrium, was a product of that evil but not yet apparent? It was too early to think of that yet. First of all the virus had to be seen. It was a majestic, terrifyingly strange vision which appeared before him. An incomprehensible world like the light and dark plates from X-ray screens. Even the accustomed eye needed time to recognize in that ghostly structure where, at first sight, there was nothing at all earthly and natural, the last visible wrapping of life, the biological machine-unit, in whose mechanism it developed to be transformed through a system of infinite physiochemical transmissions into a Flemish miniature masterpiece from the 16th Century, the Theory of Relativity, the pain of lonely dying, a passionate kiss in the twilight of a public park or the dilemma as to whether to begin a new world war. It needed time, for no two cells were the same. The cytoplasmic landscape was always different, always for a moment it seemed to be like something completely new, a revelation of something which had never before been seen by the human eye. In that case he needed courage as well. For the cell which Dr. John Hamilton was looking at was dying. It was not dying in order to merge into another form from which other life would be produced but to give birth to - death. Death for everything with which it came into contact. Everything in it was in a fearful microcosmic chaos. The viral morphogenesis, he thought, evidently corresponds with the endoplasmic reticule of cell membrane. The ugly, fibrillose structure of the cytoplasm derived from the replacement of its natural content by the viral nucleus. That was the Matrix, the monstrous womb of the future rabies virus. The synthesis of the excessive presence of the fibrous viral ribonucleoprotein capsid in the cytoplasm of diseased cell and its organelles. The unity of murderer and victim. Of death and life. A natural state he thought. In principle, quite normal. But this time it was the principle which was killing. He could not yet see the virus itself. Only its isolated, scattered parts, the result of decomposition, the unwinding of the helical core or the lifting of the casing membrane. An archipelago of death and an ocean of life.

In the perpetual turmoil of the living cell, such as one might imagine and compare with the birth of new planets, floated the virus' internal helix, its womb, loosened in a wave-like band like some voracious tapeworm. But what was that in the left hand corner of the hell hole? A double circle like a rifle bullet with a swollen, spreading blotch at its centre. It was still not the virus. But it would be. For it was its fetus, the embryo of a royal branch of rabid killers. And then IT too was there. The Angel of Death. The great Beast of Judgment Day which would feed on human and animal brains. The demoniacal tyrant from the nether cosmos, from the depths, from the pit, from the very weft of life. The White Horseman of the end of the world. He recognized it. There was its symbolic bullet shape. There was internal helical ribonucleoprotein capsid, like a thick, symbolical comb full of poisonous honey. There too was its 'hairy' external membrane with its terminal elongation resembling a noose. He recognized it, but he still didn't know it. Something was not quite right with its appearance, with its morphology. He made a careful adjustment on the control panel. Later, of course, he would photograph the virus with the camera fitted beneath the fluorescent screen, which was raised to expose its photographic plate. The extra photographic enlargement would give the image its final, greatest possible magnification. But even without it, he could see between the outer membrane and the internal helix of the virus, there ran an uninterrupted, intensively bright line, parallel to its cylindrical shape which had not existed in all those he had seen before. God Almighty, thought Dr. John Hamilton, mesmerized by what he saw: IT was nothing like the rabies' virus as it had been known to science since 1962 when the first beam of the early electron microscope had been directed onto it. The rabies' virus had ONE CASING. All the viruses of rabies which had been isolated and laboratory manipulated up to that date had had ONE CASING only. This one had TWO. It was a NEW being in nature. The bastard was a MUTANT.

18. 'Attention! Attention!' The authoritative voice of Anti-Rabies Committee, which up to that time had been restricted to the buildings of the quarantine zone, now echoed through the whole of the Airport. 'This is William Townsend, General Manager of Heathrow Airport speaking!' Everything at Heathrow stopped and held its breath. Only the hearths of those still healthy and the viruses of the sick carried on their noiseless movement. 'Because of the danger of the spread of infection, the quarantine is now to be extended to the whole of the Central Terminal Area and comes into force with this announcement. No one inside this zone will now be allowed to leave it, and no new passengers will be allowed into it. The quarantine zone, which hitherto consisted of Terminal 2 and its Car Park, the Queen's Building and the control Tower will now, with the addition of the Central Heating Building, become part of the Strict Isolation Zone. All the remaining parts of the Central Terminal Area, Terminal 1 with its two Car Parks, the Office and Store Block, the Cold Store, the Airmail Services' Building, d'Albiac House, The Arrival and Departure Blocks of Terminal 3 and its Car Park, the southern Office Block, the Bus Station, all the Terminal Loading Bays and the roadways around them and the Subways leading to Heathrow Central Underground Station will now become part of the Preventative Quarantine Area. Communication between the two quarantine zones, except for members of the Administrative, Security and Medical Services with official passes, is prohibited until further notice. All aerial traffic at Heathrow has now been stopped, and all unauthorized vehicle movements in the Central Terminal Area is banned. The Anti-Rabies Committee will immediately take over all organizational details of life at the Airport. Passengers and Airport employees are asked to keep calm and help the quarantine authorities in their efforts to deal with the crises, in the first instance by strict observance of the extraordinary measures in force. Physical contact, assembly and unnecessary movement throughout the Terminal Area should be avoided. Any instance of strange behaviour should be reported immediately to the Medical Services. All humanly possible efforts are being made to make the crisis bearable and to overcome it very soon. An international epidemiological team, headed by Professor Frederick Lohman, an expert in human forms of rabies, will soon be arriving at Heathrow for this purpose, and general vaccination will begin as soon as possible at points to be announced. This vaccination guarantees absolute protection against the disease. We wish to assure all passengers and Heathrow Airport

employees that the situation is under complete control …' 'Un-der com-plete con-trol,' repeated Marcos, the young man with the face of a desert hermit, drunkenly. 'Only, of rab-ies, you fuck-ing bas-tard, not yours!' In the meantime, a female voice was translating the announcement into French. Marcos took another long pull at the Rémy Martin bottle. In their search for a safer place after the chaos on the ground floor of the Terminal, and before arriving at the Gallery, they had gone past the Planter's Bar which demented passengers were looting – and supplied themselves with alcohol. He personally had chosen only the very best. Rémy Martin and Chivas Regal. He saw no reason to die with the usual rubbish with which he lived in his stomach. And there was something revolutionary, fundamentally just, in robbing those bourgeois pigs of their last luxury in this life. As far as he was concerned, the revolution ended there. At least, in this case, at least for today. When they agreed on the attack on those Anglo-Soviet swine, there'd been nothing about rabies. Apart from the imperialist kind, of course. They had discussed physical barriers, the police, the technical details of their proposed action, the amount and kind of ransom to be demanded, their escape route to Libya and similar routine arrangements. With those he knew how to cope. He always had coped before. Rabies had not been part of the plan, he was not prepared for it. He was not afraid of death. Death was just another piece of shit like everything else. Simply the last, and therefore the easiest. He knew that in one of the police guns, on one of the numberless urban guerilla fronts, a bullet was waiting for him. Marcos' bullet had already left the factory with his name on it. That kind of death was a revolutionary one. At least a human one. But to croak from canine rabies, with a stream of foam on ones lips, barking, snapping at everything around you, there was nothing at all revolutionary in that. Simply humiliating, the kind to which his whole filthy life was accustomed. There was no difference between that kind of rabies and the one against which he was fighting, the rabies of his own life. Of course he wasn't an intellectual like Joaquin Diaz Marangos. He hadn't been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, in the home of a well-to-do Indian lawyer in Rio de Janeiro. He hadn't been to the most expensive schools, if it came to that he hadn't been to even the cheapest ones, nor did he have classy rhetorical phrases to describe the world order. He simply felt like screwing the whole world, but most often, there had been nothing he could do about it. He was hungry, miserable, maddened. And because he saw that nothing was been done about it, that the world didn't give a damn that he, Marcos, was hungry, miserable, maddened, he had set out to put right that injustice personally. For him the best of all possible worlds would be the one with enough to eat, a lot of amusements and a modicum of justice which would show considerable tolerance towards him. A revolution was not a 'dialectical necessity' as it was for J. D. Marangos. For if it had been, if that mangy world of the future was so 'dialectically necessary and inevitable', he, Marcos, would not have to rupture himself to see that it was born. It could probably manage quite well by itself.

'The situation is under complete control' concluded the pleasant voice in French. 'Like fuck it is!' said Marcos and tilted the bottle towards him. There were five of them in the barricaded JAT office on the Gallery of the First floor of Terminal 2 from which they had unceremoniously evicted the two bourgeois pigs. The young man with the gentle, pre-raphaelite face, in which could still be seen some decayed traces of a devastated care, was sitting at the desk peering through the window at a sky which dripped lead. In the opposite corner, Rose, a ginger-haired revolutionary girl with sleepy eyes was dosing. The silent Japanese with a supple body of a samurai, was sitting in the other corner, his legs crossed in the yoga position of Siddha san. Joaquin Diaz Marangos was standing in the middle of the room and making a speech. It was, he knew, a very fine speech. Dialectically he tied together all the scattered threads of human history into a single knot and finally brought them together at Heathrow Airport. He showed that the knot could only be cut with the revolutionary sword of Damocles, and proved to them that that sword was the five of them. He translated the complex law of historical necessity into a political vocabulary, and that into a kind of universal 'do-it-yourself' technique on which their revolutionary action was based. Their attack on the Russians would smash the Anglo-Soviet imperialist agreement, international relations would once again be returned to a state of creative chaos. And out of chaos, it is said, are born the stars. 'Jesus!' groaned Marcos. The bloody Indian was mad. Did the son-of-a-bitch really not know what was going on at the Airport? In the mean time, J. D. Marangos was going on with his adaptation of their plan to the special circumstances of the epidemic, and rejecting in its entirety Marcos' suggestion that rabies substantially changed the situation. Their revolutionary-libratory aims remained the same. With or without rabies, that world was doomed. With or without rabies, the Anglo-Soviet agreement was imperialist, and chaos was the inevitable result of its disruption. The world, of objective necessity, would be a new and better one. What the hell, with rabies or without it! J D. Marangos had an unshakeable belief in that. It seemed to him that the others were convinced too. All of them, except Marcos. He was making difficulties. It was logical that it would be him. Marcos, in the impassable jungle of historical eventualities, was the animal which did not understand them. He didn't know the way through and was therefore trying to defend himself. He was the one who had to be led by the rein into the better future. He had to be driven into it as sheep are driven into a pen. All the others there were intellectuals, they weren't protesting, nothing was threatening them nor were they fighting for something better, for themselves, in any case things for them were all right. They were fighting for Marcos. For all the Marcos of the world. Many of the Marcos, unfortunately, did not understand that. They had to be led by the rein.

In the meantime, at least according to the loudspeaker, the situation was under complete control in German also. 'The Transit Foyer is empty, comrades. In the Airside Gallery there are less Airport Security Men than we predicted, and the ones that are there have more important things to do than to look after the Russians. The Administration's all crapped up with the quarantine, and the passengers with rabies. The situation at Heathrow is better than we could have dreamed of.' 'Really great,' growled Marcos through the Rémy Martin. 'Listen, Marcos,' said J. D. Marangos soothingly. He had to stop him, defeatism was contagious. 'If you want to say something, say it. We're all free people here.' And what's more, you are mad, thought Marcos. Free and mad. What a bloody fine combination. 'You're wasting time, Marangos,' said the Japanese without moving. 'Makes no difference to me,' said the girl Rose hoarsely. 'Are you still capable of knowing what we're here for,' hissed J. D. Marangos, going up to Marcos and grabbing the bottle from his hand. The bottle smashed against the wall. The golden liquid poured down onto the dirty floor like sunlight onto a sandy beach. Marcos wasn't worried. He had two more like it in his bag. 'Well, do you?' 'Listen, man, there's no more fucking reason for what we came to do. There's no more fucking reason for anything. We'll all get rabies.' 'You're already rabid, Marcos,' murmured the young man with the pre-raphaelite face. 'Rabid with fear.' 'And what about you?' asked Marcos. He had had occasion to see rabid dogs in his village, sometimes he and his companions had killed them with stones. 'What are you rabid with?' Perhaps it would be better to move on to the practical side of the action, thought J. D. Marangos. That was where Marcos was at his best. He had the murderous instinct of a hungry animal. Familiar things would give him back his confidence in those which were unfamiliar and which worried him 'O. K., comrades,' he said, 'you will take care of the police, I and Marcos will take out the Russians.' Like hell I will, thought Marcos. The only thing I'll take is get the hell out of here. 'You're wasting time Marangos,' repeated the Japanese dreamily. 'Makes no difference to me,' repeated Rose. She could feel a cold tremor in her back, a stiffness in the neck. The moisture in her throat was thick like resin. Objects around her shone with a painful brightness. 'Any questions?' insisted J. D. Marangos in a business-like way. 'Just one.' It was Marcos again. 'How do you intend us to get out of here?'

'By plans, of course.' 'Do you think they'll give you one just like that?' 'Why not?' 'Have a good flight,' Marcos wished him, taking a bottle of Chivas Regal out of his bag. But in fact the plan was fantastic, thought J. D. Marangos. They couldn't refuse to give them an aircraft. With rabies hanging over them, they'd have neither the time nor the energy to think up anything clever. It was yet another proof that revolutionary consciousness, even in the most unfavorable situation, could turn things to its advantage. Even rabies could be made to work for the people's revolution. Rabies, but not that drunken pig Marcos. Despite everything they were doing for him now with their action. 'Does that mean you're not coming with us?' 'You're wasting time, Marangos.' 'Does that mean you're no longer thinking of the revolution?' 'I'll think of the revolution tomorrow. For today, I've something more important in mind.' 'What the hell can be more important?' 'Thinking up a way to get my arse out of this Airport as soon as possible, Marangos. That's what. To get away, if you know what that means.' 'Yes, I know,' said J. D. Marangos, bitingly. 'Betrayal.' 'Shit.' The Japanese sprang agilely to his feet. 'You're wasting time, Marangos,' he said calmly. 'Marcos is right. We have to get out of here. Do you want to get away, Marcos?' 'For Christ's sake, of course.' 'Then I'll help you.' Marcos had paid no attention to the silent Japanese, but if he had a good idea of a way to escape, so much the better. 'How?' he asked eagerly. 'Like this,' said the Japanese and with surgical precision plunged his knife between Marcos' ribs. Marcos, the young man with the face of a desert hermit, slid to the floor like an empty sack. He let go of the bottle the very last minute before he died. The bottle rolled towards the wall and stopped there. Its golden contents mingled with Marcos' blood and dirt of the floor. The four people left alive in the JAT office shivered; the young man with the pre-raphaelite face from revulsion together with a late realization of what had happened; the Japanese with a samurai-like pleasure in death; J. D. Marangos with the intoxicating feeling that he was serving historical necessity, and Rose from rabies, which creeping through the dark tunnels of her nerves, was seeking out her brain. Through the loudspeaker a voice translated Mr. William Townsend, the Central Manager of Heathrow's announcement into Russian. 'Let' go,' said the leader IROF, J. D. Marangos.

***** The voice in Russian finally informed the passengers in Russian that the situation at the Airport was under complete control. In the VIP area of the European Terminal, there was nobody to understand it. The former KGB colonel, Antoly Sergeyevuch Rasimov, was quite drunk, the English Russian interpreter had rabies, and the Soviet delegation headed by Pavel Igorevich Artomonov, a member of the Politburo and USSR Minister for Foreign Affairs, who suddenly felt far from well, were well on their way through the Airside Gallery towards their aircraft and almost beyond the reach of Townsend's announcement. The decision for them to leave without the traitor Rasimov had come trough from Moscow quite suddenly. It had evidently been believed that the rabies epidemic was real, and not just a trick of the British Byzantine-like politics, but of course the possibility that western vaccines were more efficacious than eastern ones had been rejected out of hand. Patriotism, strengthened by the defection of Colonel Rasimov, had culminated in the final phase of the conflict over his soul with the Russian assertion that in the socialist countries, even rabies was stronger, and in the British retort that there was nothing to be compared with the English variant. The diplomatic freeze gripped at the hearts of the VIP's, still warm from vodka. The fear of infection put an end to the ritual leave-taking. They all new that in any case, they would soon meet again. The Anglo-Soviet 'thousand year' agreement had lasted just a thousand minutes and lay in ruin around a spy's long delayed attack of conscience. A new one would soon have to be negotiated. For reasoning men could not only arm themselves. They had to believe that the arms would not be used. That was what guaranteed them the moral right to continue making weapons. That in turn encouraged new agreements on disarmaments which no serious person believed in, but which gave impetus to new armament, which no serious person wanted. And so everything developed with the speed of an Olympic athlete and without unnecessary ceremonial. And without the Foreign Minister of Her Majesty's Government. Sir Geoffrey Drummond regretted his indisposition, and retired to his personal room to rest from everything. To rest from the Russians, Rasimov, Donovan, from the prime Minister, from the Airport, from the world and from himself. It was the curtailment of the ceremonial part of the leave-taking which saved the Russians. They were already at the turning that lead from the Airside Gallery to one of the right-hand loading bays where the Ilyushin IL-62 was waiting at the end of the ramp with its engines already turning over, when the popular revolution, headed by Joaquin Diaz Marangos fell upon them from the empty Transit Foyer like God's vengeance. Several surprised and unprepared Security men fell immediately before the concentrated fire of the automatic weapons. Those that were left hustled the Russians into the loading bay and returned the fire. Glass shattered in all

directions and flying splinters, sharp as knives, cut into the stagnant air of the corridor. The Japanese with the face of a samurai was cut down by a hail of bullets which convulsed his whole body. He dropped his weapon and crumpled to his knees. The bullets had torn open his stomach. He fell face forwards to the ground. He had always wanted to know what it felt like to commit hara-kiri. Now he knew. Joaquin Diaz Marangos too realized that they were too late, that the VIP shell was already empty and that they could not get at the Russian pearls. That there was no way of staying alive in that open space, nor of getting into the loading bay in front of which stood the Ilyushin. 'Get back!' he shouted, firing. 'Get your god dam arsis back!' The young man with the pre-raphaelite face moved back along the glass wall. He saw the Aeroflot Ilyushin at the end of the ramp and the Russians hurriedly climbing into it. He could have fired. Perhaps he could have hit someone. But there was no point. Marcos had been right. There was no point in it any more. The girl did not hear J. D. Marangos. She lay on the warm floor petrified with fear and shivering for the spasm which was working through the empty cavern of her body. It had seized her first as soon as she had run out into the blinding light of the Airside Gallery. Before she fell, thinking that she'd been hit by a bullet, she thought she saw, through the window on the concrete of the taxi-approach runway – a dog. It was a black dog, small, unsteady on its feet as if it had lost its sense of orientation. A she waited for the convulsion, she thought how nice it would be to go and join him. To run about on all fours and bark at the moon. ***** 'Let's stop there for now,' said Monsieur Eugène Laquires to Colonel Rasimov. 'There's someone shooting over there. What's your answer?' Monsieur Eugène Laquires was the London correspondent of 'Agence France' and in his free time worked for the CIA. He had taken advantage of Donovan's absence to approach the Russian. When the firing begun, he was in fact offering him American political asylum in exchange for an agreement to give the Americans all his secret information. Rasimov was not surprised. He already had another offer in his pocket. Herr Jochanes Kessler, the diplomatic observer of 'Der Spiegel' of the German Federal Republic, who, whenever practical, worked for Paris, had invited him to be the guest of the French Counterespionage Service. Rasimov knew them both from their files. From the field he had received information that both of them worked for a third country. He didn't believe it. Experience had taught him that in such clear cases, it was usually a case of yet a fourth.

'Do you know, Laquires, that there's rabies at Heathrow?' 'There's certainly something unusual going on,' said Monsieur Laquires impatiently. 'But what's that got to do with you?' 'For the moment, nothing,' said Rasimov, smiling. 'But I'm still mortal, I think? Perhaps you're more fortunate in that respect?' What a strange breed these Slavs are, thought Monsieur Laquires. Sometimes you'd think they've no idea of what's going on in the world around them. Or, that they simply pay no attention to it. He must make just one more effort to win him over before Donovan came back. But he couldn't find the right words. This damned shooting disturbed his concentration. ***** The firing came from Joaquin Diaz Marangos' sub-machine gun and it served to eliminate the last obstacle before the VIP Lounge in which were waiting hostages, guarantees for an aircraft, freedom, Libya and the means to continue the revolutionary struggle. As he kicked in the door, he shouted to the young man with the pre-raphaelite face who was covering his back. 'Now I'll cover you. Go in and get him!' 'Who?' 'Anyone!' screamed J. D. Marangos, still firing. 'Just make sure it's not some bloody waiter!' In fact he had already had enough trouble with lousy bourgeois custom of dressing their servants better than themselves. Three years before instead of a Uruguayan general, he had taken prisoner his batman. No question of negotiating with terrorists, had said the general courageously, and got himself a new batman. J. D. Marangos had killed the first one and promised himself to be much more careful in the future. It was more than a little humiliating to have to kill those for whom in principle you were fighting. Fortunately, the face of the elderly gentleman who was lying on a makeshift couch of several armchairs pushed together left no room for doubt. Despite his crumpled, sweat-soaked shirt and his bleary-eyed, bemused look, it was a good catch. J. D. Marangos recognized his hostage from the photographs in the newspapers. It was that confirmed enemy of the working masses, the British Foreign minister, Sir Geoffrey Drummond he had laid his hands on. In fact that was far more than Sir Geoffrey himself for the time being was aware of. He hadn't known exactly either who he was or where he was, or even what he was doing there. Nor was he trying to find out. The necessity for reasons came from a part of his brain which was already host to other guests. 'Now we're safe.' Joaquin Diaz Marangos breathed a sight of relief and kicked the door between him and the rest of the world shut. The Head of Airport Security, Major Hilary Lawford did not share Marangos' opinion. In his

view, the terrorists were pinned down in a trap which should be ridded with bullets so that he could return to the ordinary job of quarantine control. He refused even to listen to the conditions of the IRFF. One didn't negotiate with terrorists, he said, and pulled his revolver from its holster. General Manager Townsend, of course, did not agree. The conflict between the civil and military authorities was unexpectedly and quite arbitrary solved by Sir Geoffrey Drummond himself. Joaquin Diaz Marangos was nervously talking with people whose faces he couldn't see on the other side of the door. The young man with the pre-raphaelite face was waiting tensely in the expectation of being given the aircraft which he had been promised to get away from this cursed Airport, but most of all from that demented Indian. Sir Geoffrey Drummond, like a mechanical doll whose jaw mechanism has jammed, got up suddenly from his improvised bed, approached the young man with the pre-raphaelite face from behind and sank his teeth voraciously into his neck. A minute later, the lounge door burst open with a crash. Walking backwards, without his weapon, his hands in the air, Joaquin Diaz Marangos appeared in the doorway. His face was ashen. He was beginning to vomit. When, a further minute later, Major Lawford entered the lounge, the last people's revolutionary was lying on the floor with his throat torn out. In the furthest corner, in the semi-darkness behind an executive sofa, Sir Geoffrey Drummond was noisily spitting blood. Blood which was burning, choking, killing him. ***** At the same moment, Colonel Donovan went into the room where he had left Rasimov. 'Have they gone, then?' asked the Russian. 'Yes,' answered the Englishman, sinking heavily into a chair. 'And what about the terrorists?' 'Three of them are dead. One has surrendered.' 'Did I hear they'd got Drummond?' 'I wouldn't have said so,' answered Donovan. 'It rather looks to me as though he got them.' 'In any case,' Rasimov got up, 'now we can get to work. For a change a proper one.' He had come to an agreement with Donovan to tell the Anti-Rabies Committee that he would take part in the fight against the epidemic. The Englishman dropped his eyes. 'I'm afraid we can't. Not immediately.' 'Jesus Christ, Alexis, the job we have to do is outside!' 'There's another one to do here.' 'I don't see it.' 'I talked with the centre. They want us to begin the debriefing.'

'At the Airport?' 'Since we can't leave the quarantine …' 'At the Airport, in the bloody quarantine?' 'In this very Lounge of the quarantine. Lawford has already received the order to isolate us.' 'I can't believe it.' 'Neither could I, until they gave me the Dictaphone with which we have to record everything you say.' 'I'll be damned if I've anything to say!' shouted the Russian. 'Except that your people are crazy and that I refuse to have any part of such insanity! Do those bastards know what's happening here?' 'That's just what I asked them. They said that as far as the centre was concerned, nothing was happening here. Nothing that would change anything. Your spy network in Europe won't cease to function because of rabies at Heathrow. I must say they've got something there.' 'The shit they have,' said Colonel Rasimov morosely. 'They also told me that the rabies is being taken care of and that we should mind our own bloody business.' 'And exactly what is that supposed to be?' 'Espionage, I imagine.' Rasimov laughed cynically. 'If the day when the sun would burn up the earth was known what do you think out Centres would do about it?' 'Most probably they'd carry on arguing about whether it would burn us or you up first.' 'They're crazy.' 'Perhaps.' 'And we're crazy too.' 'Probably.' 'Everything's crazy,' concluded the Russian. 'The whole world's nothing but a bloody madhouse.' 'Absolutely,' agreed the Englishman. 'But even a madhouse has to be run by someone.' ***** In fact Colonel Donovan of MI5 was badly informed. Two terrorists were dead but the girl was still alive. True, it wasn't much in terms of real life, or even enough to attract the attention of the Airport Security men, who were busy with Joaquin Diaz Marangos, to her. And so nobody saw her as she crawled along the Airside Gallery towards the broken window looking out onto the runway and with closed eyes against the sun which turned the tarmac beneath her into a crater filled with white, shining lava, climbing onto its ledge. She wasn't worried that she couldn't see the dog. As soon as she jumped down, she would find it by smell. The two of them together would not be a real pack. But at least to be two would be

better than being alone, surrounded by Great Beings who she hated and who filled her with sick terror. ***** Even though the girl Rose couldn't see him, the dog was there. Some ten yards away from the reinforced concrete slab onto which she crashed down, deep in the shade of the vast bulk of a self-propelled hydraulic platform that was used by the Airport servicing staff to clean aircraft exteriors. From there Sharon, for that was the name to which she raised her snout and wagged her tail with pleasure, half-frightened and half-curious, observed the strange chaotic world of the Great Beings around her. She didn't feel at all well. She had slept for a long time in a curled-up position and had had bad dreams. Her head had been gripped in an unseen wire muzzle, her neck was hurting, and her bones seemed to be crumbling away and refused to move her numbed paws. She had been tormented by thirst, and by fear. That sick fear which from time to time gripped her, subjecting everything to frenzied movement and desperate courage, tortured her most of all in her present state. It was ill-defined, unclear, not linked to anything known, by which it could have been distinguished from that other terror when, not so long ago, she had been carried in her mother's mouth to the corner of the kennel and buried in the ground like some precious bone, from where she had sensed the kennel shaking and falling apart under the blows of that mysterious nighttime force. When with her eyes closed and her heart pounding, she had waited for that same terrible force to come for her too, to tear her to pieces like her father, her mother, her brothers and sisters, she had known what it was she feared. Now she did know. It gripped her suddenly and unexpectedly as she ran frantically and unreasoning through the vast wastes of the Airport and dragged her down into the first available hiding place. From there, with feverish mistrust and growing enmity, she had watched the great, ugly, noisy world around her. Then, her panic had left her, as unexpectedly as it has come. Once again she felt afraid of nothing, powerful, capable of anything. She would break into a frantic run; she felt an incessant need to gnaw, to scratch, to bite everything she came upon. Great living beings and great dead things. Ever since she had woken from her exhausting sleep, she had had several inexplicable moods of animal joy and others of unaccountable fatigue. She has woken up in darkness. The darkness had been warm and close. She hadn't been able to remember how he had got there. After the night in the kennel, when she had been the only one of her breed left alive, the Great Being had dug her out of the ground. The smallest of them, her friend had given her something to eat and drink. She had been thirsty, but the milk almost choked her. Then she had been plunged into the

darkness, in which she had dreamed fearful dreams, trying in vain to wake up. When she awoke, she understood that the darkness did not belong to her dream. It was smooth and smelt of the Great Being. Her paws had slipped against it, unable to tear it or to find anything to get hold of. The darkness had made her angry. She had become frantic. She had turned and twisted and yelped in the trap. At last she had found a tiny speck of light and worked at it with her claws to make it wider. She had dragged herself out into painful, scorching light. She hadn't known where she was. She had known that it was a place that belonged to the Great Being even before the first of them had to come in. She could smell a piercing smell. Whenever she had left that smell in the great Being's kennels, they had snapped and barked at her. But here they came in and smeared that same smell down the walls. She didn't understand the Great Beings. Nor, more often than not, did they understand her. They knew what she wanted only when she was hungry or thirsty. And sometimes when she was ill. That was all. That was important, of course, but not the most important. A lot of things which really mattered to her, things that concerned her freedom and her temper they just had no idea about. The Great Being let its smell slide down the wall and went out. She found herself in a kind of a box, in which, judging from its scent, the Great Being kept their things. The door opened and another one of their kind came in. It had a sack over its head and was pushing along in front of it some kind of howling instrument. She recognized the monster. The Great Being used it to take away from the ground everything which for him was interesting and which he liked to play with. The monster devoured everything it came across. The noise became unbearable. She became angry and almost jumped out at the monster. To bite and silence it. Or to run away from its howling. She squeezed through a hole and, teeth snapping, made a dash for the open door. She found herself in a brightly-lit open space where the ground was soft like grass, and Great Beings were running around everywhere and barking. She couldn't remember clearly what had happened after that or how she had reached that barren area. Bewildered, she had collided with Great Beings who at the same time were bumping into each other, scratching and biting, she had sunk her teeth into them, incoherently changing directions, rushing further and further, jumping over barriers, crawling trough cracks, running along endless corridors in which there were less and less of them. At last she had rolled down some steps onto the huge white open space where there were no more of them, where, between the distant silhouettes which resembled the white hills of her birthplace, reigned a comfortable, quiet twilight. But all that had been some time ago and it had been night time. Now there was a bright light all around her, daylight in which any dog would have expected to see Great Beings everywhere, with their noisy and senseless movements. Yet everything was empty. Motionless as death.

If Sharon had had human eyes and their capacity for recognizing objects of use to man, she would have known that the stilled shadows on the runways were empty aircraft and not huge animals hunting, and that the swift moving dots in the sky were birds, who after so long a time could now fly directly over Heathrow in the way nature intended them to. She would have known from the immobile service vehicles all around and the stillness of the fan-like radar antennae that that monument to man's technological genius which was proudly famous as the 'busiest aerial crossroads in the world' was no longer alive. But even without the eye of a human, Sharon knew that the great Being who was lying not far from his place of shelter was not alive. For that she had instinct of her kind. Something else had changed, something in her was new. Before, when she felt that a Great Being he liked was dead, she had curled up into a ball and whined with grief. Now she straightened herself up and snarled with gladness. For now she hated the Great Being.

19. (FROM THE HEATHROW DIARY OF DANIEL LEVERQUIN) '… It was Lawford's idea to place men with rifles on the roofs of Airport buildings to shoot birds and so stop them carrying the infection to London, instead of the previous practice of driving them away with explosive cartridges, high-pitched whistles, or tape-recordings of the cries of their natural enemies, as in fact has been everything containing a "total solution" to a problem, and the idea was a good one. But as with most good ideas, it concealed unpredictable consequences. Several of the best shots from among the Airport Security men, who were detailed to shoot at birds, suddenly became rabid and began to shoot people. This big-game hunt must have given them a great deal of pleasure, for each hit was greeted with howls of triumph. There was no way of getting near them and dealing with them medically. They had to be killed off one by one from a distance by other sharpshooters. A lot has changed at Heathrow since the introduction of the quarantine. Everything is different, it's as if everything belonged to a new, young world, whose customs have not yet been learned. The speed of events has been incredible. It's not unknown in times of crisis for things to take on a pace of acceleration which renders measures adjusted to a normal everyday tempo quite useless. Even the heart beats faster in moments of danger. When there is no time, love is more violent. Nature knows no "sense of time". Everything is adapted to the situation and its circumstances.

The frantic changes to which Heathrow has been exposed are consequent upon the powerful vitality and dynamism of their creator, Rhabdovirus. Rabid people are as unpredictable as rabies. After the breakout of passengers from the Strict Isolation Zone, this latter has been extended to the former Zone of Preventative Quarantine, which itself now comprises the whole of the Central Terminal Area. As a result, according to the Anti-Rabies Committee's estimate, bout 250,000 people have now been placed in quarantine. Statistics further show that of that number, 230,000 are (for the time being) healthy, 15,000 are ill, (including those doubtful cases of "eccentric behaviour" which could also derive from other causes), and 5,000 are dead. It could be said that rabies has at last done away with that inequality between people, with which reason has been struggling in vain for thousands of years. That it has abolished the traditional division between white and coloured, men and women, rich and poor, strong and weak, clever and stupid, and replaced them with the universal difference between sick and healthy. (In fact, there are no divisions. All sick people are potentially dead, all healthy people are potentially sick. We are all, therefore, in reality, dead. The world has at last been united.) It has already been shown that even rabies cannot justify injustice. The BA workers belonging to the TGWU have threatened to strike because only they have been detailed to take care of the dead. After a mass meeting in the Central Heating Building, where cremation is carried out, the workers took the view that disposal is the affair of the whole quarantine group, and that they are not a trade union of gravediggers. There is some truth in this and at this very moment General Manager Townsend is taking care of it as best he can. Major Lawford would not have entered into discussions. He would have thrown every tenth worker into the fire and settled the argument. However, the workers' case has been weakened by the lack of unity within their own ranks. The coloured members of the union rejected industrial action while racial discrimination continued to be practiced against them. They had been given the heaviest jobs right next to the ovens themselves. (I don't know how far these talks have got and it doesn't really concern me. It is an incident which is quite unusable in my novel. If I wrote about it, no one would believe me.) The extension of the quarantine zone by more than four times its original area has landed the ARC with a number of complicated problems. There was no easy answer to any of them. And often, even the problems didn't exist in reality. There was enough food and other necessities. In that respect, the world has been magnanimous. A permanent supply route has been set up between London and Heathrow, via the M4 Motorway and the Bath Road, which are temporarily closed to all other traffic. The problem has been caused by distribution. It was possible to eat in shifts in the Terminal restaurants, but that increased the danger of infection. There were neither enough services nor protective clothes for food to be taken round. A compromise had to be resorted to. People come to fetch their rations and go back to eat them in the relative safety of their residual places.

It's comforting to see some of the most powerful mechanisms of the normal world still functioning in the world of rabies. There have been no incidents to speak of connected with the issue of food, but there are sharp protestations from the various religious creeds, either about its choice, or about its preparation. (I wonder what would happen if there were not enough food to go round or none at all? Dare I imagine the situation of the passenger aircraft which came down in the trackless Andes in my "Rabies"? Logically it would cause people to become cannibals. But that, again logically, is another theme I can only treat cannibalism as a result of reason, as a consequential use of intelligence, whose exclusive purpose and aim is the maintenance of the individual, lies, in this case, outside my scope.) With this in mind, I have spent some time in the Medical Centre. This is the most thankless part of my investigation into rabies. One has to grit one's teeth, be quite unselfish, merciless, in fact, towards one's own feelings and sensitivities and stand there at the very bottom of the "valley of the shadow", amidst hellish suffering, madness, hopelessness, steal oneself not to rush to anyone's help, although that is in effect impossible, and limit oneself to the collection of facts. BUT I HAVE A MISSION. I AM THE EYES AND EARS. I AM A WITNESS. I have to leave an eye-witness account. Like those of life in a concentration camps, the San Francisco earthquake, the Black Death, the sinking of the Titanic. And not only an eye-witness account. Something more human than that. An account of the experience. And something more modern, a story. Something like the Homeric epic of the Fall of troy. The Ionic civilization disappeared with Troy, perhaps Heathrow will mark the collapse of Christianity. I've arrived at my own image of rabies, conscious of the thankless role of a man descending into hell carrying instead of a fire-extinguisher, a thermometer to measure heat. In the initial, prodromal, passive period, the symptoms are non-specific. They belong also to the majority of other, more naïve ailments, and the patients are still capable of giving reasonable accounts of them. (The fact that nobody apart from me is interested in these accounts is quite another thing. The medical personnel try to alleviate their condition, not to understand and explain it.) According to what they say, this phase is extremely unpleasant. Particularly the constant thirst that chokes them when they try to quench it, and the fear of whose origin they know nothing. These reactions accord with those of classical rabies, and nothing would be special about them if the same patients did not in the lucid intervals in the course of the acute, neurological, active phase, which, with its convulsions, aggressive madness, hallucinations and destructive violence, seems to us from outside so terrible, give a completely different picture. They cannot offer details, nor remember anything specific, but the condition while they were experiencing it for the majority was an exceptionally pleasant one. They didn't remember it as pleasant, they felt it as having been so in the past, just as a man feels the phantom presence of a leg which he no longer has.

I must speak with Hamilton and Komarowsky about this astonishing feeling of bliss, which Ancient Greeks called "ekstasis" and for the purpose of the cult, they induced by eating poisonous mushrooms of the amanite muscaria type. Perhaps too with Professor Lieberman when he arrives. Patients with classic rabies know of nothing like this kind of bliss in connection with the disease. If they remembered anything they spoke of a terrible experience to which even the most painful death would be preferable. What can this mean? There exists, of course, a state of religious ecstasy brought about by self-induced pain, usually an eastern art, the hallucigenic action of drugs, but this is a disease, the most fearful disease known to man, a disease which kills. It isn't natural, it isn't just, that it should produce a feeling of happiness. There is something in all this, in the whole rabies, which is damnably wrong. But what, for God's sake? What? ...' The animal had the white fur of a polar bear and an unbearable roar was coming from its pointed snout. It was raised up on its hind legs and stood motionless about twenty yards away from the rock behind which he had taken shelter. at that range, even without the telescopic sight, he couldn't miss. He had missed the first time, but the animal had been further away then, just emerging from its lair and showing him only the upper part of its huge bulk. Slowly, as his father had taught him, giving each moment the time to achieve perfection, each part of his body to take up an ideal position, Ian Komarowsky raised the scale-model Winchester 270 with the .22 caliber, enjoying the blissful anticipation of the shot which would once more confirm his superiority over the other lower beings, which he had demonstrated during the course of the hunt. He had already killed two such creatures, but they had been running along, deep at the bottom of the gorge above which he had taken up his position of ambush. Not one of them had seemed so savagely bloodthirsty, nor at such a dangerous, sporting, close range. All around the harsh mirrors of the steep cliffs reflected the sun. Behind them, in the plain, like prehistoric steppes, the skeletons of dinosaurus lay rotting, chalk-white and cumbersome. It was a mountainous area without roundness or vegetation unlike anything he had ever seen on previous hunting expeditions. Evidently exotic nature had attracted exotic fauna. He had never hunted such animals as these. Particularly the one he was about to kill. The rifle's smooth butt rubbed softly against his right cheek, wet with saliva. The result of the inexpressible pleasure of the hunt, the innocent joy of killing. He had always loved hunting, but he had never felt it so intimately, deeply, uncontrollably as the ultimate experience of life, as the fulfillment of his very being. He had never experienced hunting as life. Nor had he imagined that real life had to consist of hunting. A hunt in which there was nothing animally selfish or self-seeking, no urge to carry off

the game into ones den and devour it there. A hunt in which everything was absolutely human, everything was accomplished in the act of killing. He settled the rifle between his cheek and shoulder, moving his left hand down the barrel to the bowed cross where it joined with the wood. In the oval eye of the telescope, etched with the crossed lines of the sight into four quarters, the unknown white animal loomed large. He wanted a clean hit, a bullet in the heart, instantaneous death. He didn't want any blood. He couldn't stand blood. The very thought of it choked him, clouded his vision with exploding streaks of red. He felt his mouth fill with a dense resinous mass which he couldn't spit out. The animal in the lens of the telescope was no longer completely visible. Nor was it white. The blood which was oozing up from his mind and his throat, splashed over its fur in scarlet streams which spread out before his eyes like the petals of a fibrous lily. The bullet struck the concrete slab of the Terminal's roof a foot away from Dr. Komarowsky, cut into it and ricocheted away harmlessly. Ian Komarowsky staggered, dropped the rifle and fell beside the concrete bunker. His hands clawed at his throat as if he were trying to drag something out of it. Luke, standing in front of the door out onto the roof in his white coat but without a mask, could hear his son's tortured gasping, punctuated by inhuman cries. He let the medical attendants, who had come out onto the roof only after the boy had been seized by convulsions, approach him. They held him firmly. They were saying something, he didn't hear what. On the roof, in the whole world nothing more existed for him, except Ian. The son with whom he had not had time to speak even once since he had left him in the observation Room. He hadn't even had time to think about him seriously. He had been vaccinating passengers. Moana Tahaman had told him what was going on the roof. He hadn't had time to ask how Ian had got up there. Nor how he had managed to find the bullets. Feeling guilty at having forgotten about the boy, she had nevertheless told him everything that she could. Ian had taken advantage of the temporary laxity in the quarantine control after the riot in the Transit Foyer, broken into the drawer of Luke's desk, taken out the bullets and volunteered for the team of riflemen who were protecting the roof of Heathrow from birds. Several of them were already rabid. 'What did they do with them?' he asked as he raced up to the roof. 'They couldn't get near them.' Moana was close beside him. 'What did they do?'

'They killed them.' He knew that they would kill Ian too if he didn't get there in time. He just managed it. Major Lawford, who was in charge on the operation 'clearing the roof of rabies', was already unbuttoning the holster of the revolver. He didn't know, in fact, that the rabid boy was Luke's son. And even if he had known, the son-ofa-bitch wouldn't have held back. He would have killed him, just as, without hesitation, he had shot the man in the white jacket in front of Terminal 2. 'All right, Komarowsky,' he said. 'I know how you feel. Try to do what you can. The boy's got a rifle and is a bloody good shot. He's already killed two of my lads in front of the Bus Station. I just can't afford to loose any more.' He had pushed him to one side and walked out onto the roof. A bullet hummed past him. He had been wrong not to take off his mask, Ian hadn't recognized him. He removed the mask and stood there in his doctor's white coat. He knew the risk he was taking if Ian was infected, if his behaviour was not just hysteria caused by fear. If he was ill, Ian would die. But he wasn't going to let him be shot down like a rabid dog. 'He'll kill you, Komarowsky,' Lawford shouted to him, 'don't be crazy. You've tried. O. K. Now leave it to us.' 'It's my affair Lawford it's my son who's there.' 'Perhaps he's your son, but it's not your concern. You're a doctor, Komarowsky. We haven't got so many of you at Heathrow.' But he had already pushed open the door and stepped onto the roof. He took several steps towards the concrete hut behind which Ian had taken shelter. He saw him come out into the open and raise the rifle. He stretched out his arm to him, called him by name, took another step forward. The rifle in Ian's hands took aim slowly, settling itself comfortably into his shoulder and against his cheek. He had taught him to treat a rifle gently, as if it were a living being. He thought that this was really what he had wanted ever since he had realized that as a doctor he was powerless against rabies. To run away. Just as he had run away from Poland, research, his marriage to Katherine, from Ian. Just as he was getting ready to run away from England, Moana Tahaman and who could know what else. His whole life had been an uninterrupted, paranoid flight from something. This would be the last one. He waited. He didn't close his eyes. He didn't need the cloak of lies any more. Here, the greatest possible justice was being carried out. He would be killed by the very person who he had killed with his running away. He would kill him cleanly, neatly, sportingly as he had taught him. Almost at the same instant he understood that this would be his vilest desertion of all. He would be leaving his son to die alone. Suddenly, he wanted to go on living. He stumbled towards the door to get down off the roof. At the same moment he noticed that something was happening to

Ian. He was beginning to shake. The rifle barrel was no longer steady. The bullet hit the concrete a foot away from him. Ian fell, gripped by a spasm which convulsed his whole body. All that had happened an hour before. His son, like some dumb animal, had been caught in the steel noose, drugged with powerful sedatives and taken off to the hospital. For some long time there had been no free beds in the Queen's Building. The sick lay on the floor, placed in rows like cut sheaves of wheat with narrow lines between them to allow the medical staff to pass. The comatose were separated from the frenzied that were kept under control by sedatives. It was still possible also to keep people in the first stages in a separate section, to prolong the illusion, at least for a few hours, that they were not rabid. Soon they would be no more space, time or perhaps even the will to preserve even this division, the last concession to humanity. Ian was breathing relatively peacefully under a blanket on the floor of the Exhibition Hall in the Queen's Building. Dr. Luke Komarowsky was kneeling beside his son. Moana was at Luke's side. Everything was shrouded in a gray half-darkness. Black plastic bags had been stuck over the windows to keep out the sunlight which aggravated the patients. From all sides came the sounds of hoarse, raucous breathing, stifled groaning, snarling or howling, which quickly, depending on the agility of the attendants, turned into the painful whining of an animal whose movements have been restricted. Luke had the terrifying impression of being in a gigantic mud-bath, in which a whole pack of wolves was dying in agony. There was no point in praying to god. 'We are the gods' Lieberman used to say. He would remind him of that when he arrived. He would bring him here for him to see his gods. To see his son Ian. 'It's my fault,' said Moana Tahaman. 'I didn't keep a close enough watch on him.' 'It's no one's fault.' But it was, it was his. He should have taken Ian away from there at once. He should have subordinated his pride, which he had disguised as so-called conscience, to his son's life. He should have left his job at Heathrow long ago. He shouldn't have worked for Lieberman. He should have gone back to Katharine and the boy. There were a whole lot of other things which he should have or should not have done. 'Did you know that I was really thankful for rabies because it gave me a chance to get nearer to him?' 'Don't torture yourself, Luke. I know that that's not true.' 'It really is true.' 'And even if you'd wanted to, you couldn't have got him out of the Centre.' 'Oh yes I could. In the beginning, I wanted to. I even started to write out a pass for him. But I didn't finish it.' 'Why not?'

'I was afraid that he would despise me. I wanted him to respect me. I sold his life for my own self-esteem.' 'Self-respect, Luke.' 'And where is that now? Where's my bloody self-respect now?' Moana Tahaman didn't answer. She knew that she had lost, just as surely as he was losing his son. And not just because in the desk-drawer from which Ian had taken the bullets for his Winchester, she had found his unsealed letter to the BAA, in which he had set out his resignation from the post of Head of the Medical Centre. She had felt him getting further and further away from her for a long time, and her powerlessness to keep him. But what until yesterday had seemed unbearable, now appeared less important to her. She was silent. The question hadn't been put to her. Luke had to find an answer for it himself. He didn't need her for that. Probably he didn't need her for anything any more. She got up and walked away quietly. Perhaps there was someone somewhere who needed her. A few minutes later, Ian opened his eyes. He recognized his father and smiled. He seemed to be completely lucid. Luke was not deceived. His hand moved unseen towards the box of injections. At any moment Ian could go into convulsions. 'How do you feel?' 'What happened?' Luke had been waiting for the question. It was always the same. Those who were ill with rabies didn't know what had happened to them while they had been in frenzied delirium. 'You were taken ill,' he said, vaguely. The boy was silent. His face was peaceful although its lines were sunken, the skin mottled and purple. He wondered how long it would be before that good-looking face began to contort under the blow of a new attack of frenzy. 'Ojcze,' said the boy in Polish. It was the first time he had called him that. And the first time in Polish. 'Slucham, synku,' he responded, also in Polish. 'Czy to jest wscieklizna?' 'Don't be stupid,' he said in English, more nervously than he intended. 'Rabies isn't like that.' 'That's what I thought,' said the boy. 'I felt so really well.' Perhaps, thought Luke excitedly, it really wasn't rabies? A patient with rabies didn't feel well in any of the phases. Certainly not 'really well'. Almost blissful, if he had understood his son correctly. Perhaps Ian was suffering from a particularly intense hallucinatory psychosis brought on by stress? A kind of temporary clouding of the mind, pseudo-madness? The boy closed his eyes. Let him rest, thought Luke, let him gat his strength back. There were no signs of residual frenzy. His pulse was almost normal. Nor indications of

difficulty in swallowing. The colour was coming back to his skin. Everything was going to be all right, he thought, everything would be fine. As soon as he got a little stronger, he would transfer him to the Treatment Room, to be nearer to him. He wouldn't let anything like this happen again. He gave him an injection. The minutes passed slowly. Exhausted with fear and fatigue, Dr. Luke Komarowsky fell asleep on his knees. He didn't know what awoke him. Perhaps the cry of an attack, perhaps the voices of the medical attendants, perhaps a primordial awareness that something that was a threat to him was happening. Ian was lying motionless, his eyes closed. From his lips flowed a thin stream of foam. Luke touched his forehead. It was as cold as glass. He seized his hand. He couldn't feel the pulse. Ian, Janek, his son, was dead. He realized that once again he had run away. And that there were no tears which could ever redeem that desertion. ***** (FROM THE HEATHROW DIARY OF DANIEL LEVERQUIN) ' … After the unsuccessful talks with Townsend, the members of the TGWU have proclaimed a strike. The cremating of bodies has come to a standstill and strike pickets have been posted in front of the Central Heating Building. Lawford's proposal was to throw every tenth man into the oven, once again to become up-to-date in the more refined use of force on the basis of the exceptional situation, but the Anti-Rabies Committee refused to give him the necessary majority. Lieberman's international epidemiological team has still not shown its august arse at the Airport. I can't blame them. Who in his right mind would hurry to get here? Only saints and madmen would come voluntarily to our madhouse. There are no saints left, and madmen aren't idiots. It's by no means impossible that this "voluntary team" is simply an illusion, one of the dirty tricks foisted upon us by those outside, who want to anaesthetize us so that we shall not realize that we are being abandoned to rabies and start something ourselves on that account. I note that that rabies has even infiltrated itself into my definition of humanity. I already speak, and I'm not alone in this, about "those outside' and "us inside". There is developing something akin to the forced solidarity of lepers, who are aware that they are forever excluded from the world of the healthy, that the future, if there is to one, has to be built on different propositions, perhaps even on quite contrary ones from those which were the rule in their former world.

But without moving away from one thing, an approach to another is impossible. A fierce lack of patience towards everything outside the quarantine, towards those on the "outside", is being born. We accuse them of not doing as much as is necessary for "us inside", of forgetting us, of having betrayed us, and in any case of wishing rather to see us dead than to have rabies in London. In all probability, that is true, and quite natural, I am obliged to add. Neither is our hatred entirely free from prejudice. In a good part, it is an alibi for the cosmic injustice that the epidemic has chosen us and not "someone else", Heathrow, and not Charles de Gaulle in Paris, Chicago's O'Hare, and Fort Worth in Dallas or Los Angeles in California. There are large airports in Edinburgh, Manchester and Birmingham, if it had to be somewhere in Great Britain. And even London has another airport at Gatwick. Our behaviour towards "the rest of the world" is like that of a hijacked. In fact, we have been hijacked. Rhabdovirus has kidnapped us. It has taken us hostage for all the evil that, according to Hamilton, man has done to nature. Like all kidnap victims, of course, we are aware that we must be isolated, that the Airport has to be sealed off. The kidnapper, Rhabdovirus, must not be allowed to escape. One misfortune is that we too are "sealed in" with it. We wonder why nothing is being done, why the demands of the kidnappers are "satisfied", why there is nobody to save us. There's an unpleasant smell about the attitude of "those outside". We feel ourselves more and more abandoned, betrayed, more and more prepared to make separate agreements with the kidnappers. With rabies, unfortunately there can be no agreements. It has taken us hostage and is killing us off one by one. Each of us wants the next one to be someone else. We are turning into Donne's islands of poets, who cannot hear the bells ringing on other islands. The betrayal, of which we accuse the world "outside", is becoming the one and only content of our own. All humanity is disappearing in the smoke of our own solitary fire which does not allow any other to be seen. In the meantime, it is as if the lines of the "world outside" and our former life in it are being wiped away. Even when they remain, they are irrelevant. "Yesterday" doesn't exist in the quarantine, unless it is the quarantine one. Any other "yesterday" torments us with memories, missed chances, wasted days, and lost opportunities. We forget it is as quickly as possible, the sooner the better. For in the quarantine, only that which is "today" has any value. "Yesterday" is something which cannot be thought about. "Tomorrow" is something which dared not be thought about. There remains only "today". For example, I don't think about Louise at all. I love her, of course. But I don't think about her. From the moment when at the very last instant before the Terminal's exits were closed, she went out through them – "outside", she has been part of the "world outside" and ceased to exist for "me inside". (Apart, of course, for her double in my novel, who is saved from the quarantine of death at the last moment.)'

'For those "outside" rabies is a threat. For us "inside", rabies is a way of life. A new way, that needs to be adjusted to. Many things of "that" world have changed their values in "this" one. Overnight, civilized criteria have become barbaric. It has become uncivilized to shake hands, inhuman to kiss. Asociality has become the basic premise of RHABDOCIVILIZATION. Dangerous gatherings of people are banned, in that we are no different from the old world, but still more, they are voluntarily avoided and in that we are more progressive. Solitude has become an affair of good habits, and not misanthropy, eccentricity or paranoia. A rule from an exception. A respected rule from a despised exception. The concepts of "need" and "luxury" have changed their meanings. The needs of the outside world have become our luxuries. And luxuries are things we simply don't have - none of us. A certain number of ideals have been put into practice, which would be unworkable "outside". Rabies has made us all equal. As before God or the Law. For now, of course, here too only theoretically. Since there are not sufficient protective suits to go round, those from the quarantine administration, have them, others have been wearing their own personal ones, and the majority has only their luck to protect them from the virus. Even here, therefore, some have been more equal than others. A new philosophy is in the process of being formed, the quarantine "view of the world". The one "outside" had God, the Mind, and Reality for its higher principles to be formed around. We have only - rabies. Around it we have revolved as if it was the sun. Rabies is our basic astronomical constant. The source of the energy which moves us. From it all depends in the quarantine. Rabies is the ontological essence of our world, its sense, even its aim. Everything is subordinated to it. Rabies has become our God. Morality too has been re-defined according to it. It is good to be healthy, bad to be ill. It has become good to kill a rabid man. It is still bad to kill a healthy one, but in respect of the killing of someone who appears to be ill and perhaps is not, there is some doubt. There has been noted a natural directness in relations between people, which is lacking in the artificial world "outside". Hypocrisy has disappeared and a puritan-like love of truth is again valued. If someone has found a good place for himself or his family, no one pretends that he doesn't want to take it, nor does its possessor live in any doubt that if he leaves it undefended, it will be taken from him. As regards possession and hereditary rights, many popular doctrines have attained their ideal here. Nothing is from all time or for ever. Everything depends on the dialectic of chance. But nevertheless, there exists another, more original kind of adaptation. It resembles the Englishman's dressing for dinner on the desert island. The enthusiasm with which the "Titanic's" dance band kept on playing. There have always been people who have stubbornly resisted new gods. And there are some of them amongst us. They quite simply do not recognize rabies. They don't allow the virus to dictate their life and behave as if nothing at the Airport has changed. They live, think and work as if it didn't exist.

The Metropolitan Police arrested a Bulgarian immigrant who was busy picking pockets at Terminal 2 during the breakout of passengers from the Transit area into the Main Hall. Several wallets, watches and even some items of jewellery were found on him. The Bulgarian didn't consider that in a situation in which he was probably soon going to die, such thefts were senseless. And in principle, he was right, despite the fact that two hours after his arrest, he became rabid. That was just chance. He might not have caught rabies. At dawn, immediately after the shooting of the man in the white jacket, I came across two passengers near the Irish Air Lingus desk. They were arguing bitterly, taking no notice of the ban on physical contact. A quarantine man would have supposed that their dispute was about the ownership of a place of safety. Not at all. They were financiers from South Africa, arguing over the extent to which rabies would affect the value of their shares on the diamond exchange. A group of Armenians who were smuggling silk hit upon the idea of putting their stocks to immediate use. They began to make protective masks and hoods by hand and selling them to wealthy passengers. Then they got together with a well-known fashion designer from Paris and began to make "unique creations", for those who still wanted to look different from everyone else and could afford it. I heard that they are now making black mourning armbands and are doing a roaring trade. A lady from Argentina enquired of the Anti-Rabies Committee about the possibility of obtaining a divorce at the Airport. She absolutely refused to stay married a single day longer. She found no consolation in the probability that she would soon die. There have also been examples of the opposite. The clergymen of St. George's Chapel have already officiated at a number of weddings. Requests by such people to be allowed to spend their honeymoon in a separate room have not been acceded to. I don't know what has happened to these marriages afterwards. I can't even accept myself. Am I too not still doing exactly what I was doing before? Am I not, despite rabies, still writing? Am I not, instead of trying to be of help to him, limiting myself to noting down how Dr. Luke Komarowsky lost his son …' ***** Dr. Luke Komarowsky was carrying the body of his son Ian, wrapped in a black plastic bag, in his arms. He went out of the Queen's Building at the Medical Centre door, passed beneath the bridge which led up to the Roof Garden, crossed the pavement in front of Terminal 2 and the space which had once been a taxi-rank on the Inner Ring East along which were patrolling the internal Airport Security guards, and moving along the Inner Ring West between the Car Park and the Control Tower, reached the Central Heating Building. At the entrance stood several men in the overalls of transport workers with strike bands on their

arms and pick-axe handles in their hands. 'Hey, friend,' shouted one of them, 'the boilers are not working. We're on strike.' D. Komarowsky paid no attention. He continued walking towards the entrance. The men, brandishing his club, moved to bar his way. The others caught him by the shoulders and held him back. 'Leave him alone, Fred. It's Dr. Komarowsky with his boy.' The striker, Fred, drew back. Dr. Komarowsky went into the building. He passed along a corridor filled with strikers who were talking, playing cards or simply leaning against the wall. As he went by the talking ceased. The men stood up and took off their caps. One of the strikers followed him. Several others joined him. He went down the steps into the cellar. A whole group of silent men accompanied him. In their protective overalls, their heads covered by hoods, they looked like a noiseless procession of mummies through the labyrinths of a pyramid. He pushed open the heavy double doors and found himself in a hall filled with the Airport heating installations. The boilers took up a large part of this space; the rest was heaped high with black plastic bags in which lay the victims of rabies. He hesitated. He didn't know what he had to do. He remembered how nervous he had been when he had carried the month-old Ian up to the baptismal font in which he was to be baptized. He hadn't known what to do then either. He had supposed – nothing. The priest had done everything that was necessary. He had had only to be glad and believe in his son's future. Now there was nobody to take his place. This new, last baptism he had to carry out himself. A large Negro came forward from the group and went up to the boiler. He unbolted the massive door and swung it open. The heat immediately reached his face. The inside was white-hot. Shimmering red sparks stood out against the ghostly hoods of workers. The Negro raised a metal plate shaped like a smooth funnel, fitted it against the open door of the boiler, turned his shrouded head towards Luke. He understood what was expected of him. He laid Ian's body on the funnel. A voice, muffled behind its mask, spoke of the "passage through the valley of the shadow, of that last journey on which there would be no fear". Others joined in. A ghostly chorus was reciting the prayer for the dead. Luke raised the funnel until the body began to slip towards the flame. When he had been born Ian had been bathed in water. Now he was going into the fire, which the water of his christening had not extinguished. Another worker went up to the next boiler, opened its door and fitted a board to the opening. Two more placed a black bundle from one of the heaps on it. A second body moved towards the

flame. By the time Ian Komarowsky's body had disappeared in the first boiler's red womb, all the others were already working. They looked like Molochs, the fiery gods of iron which presided over the cannibal feasting of the Phoenicians' sacred rituals.

20. (FROM THE HEATHROW DIARY OF DANIEL LEVERQUIN) '… The only radio receiver and TV set left at the Airport, the others have all been confiscated of hidden away, are in the Anti-Rabies Committee-office on the fourth floor of the Control Tower. There I can learn that war between Iran and Iraq is continuing to both sides' satisfaction; that other wars in areas of Africa and Asia are also going well, but for the moment that is about all that is going well; that in the course of a slight Sino-Soviet dispute near Iran on the Usuri river on the Manchurian border, both sides have brought up heavy tanks; that the cult of 'the Children of Aquarius' which has infiltrated from Scandinavia down into Pomerania had claimed another hundred victims in Griswald, this time not 'young and mad', as the press called the Stockholm suicides, but the residents of an old peoples' home, who, holding each other by the hand and singing hymns to the Golden Age, collectively set themselves on fire; that there has been a radio-active leak at the nuclear power station at Hiroshima, which was built on the principle of 'fire drives out fire' to wipe out the memory of the atom bomb in 1945; that the town of Mississauga, Ontario, has been evacuated, some half million people in all, after the explosion of a chlorine cloud, produced as the result of a collision between a tanker lorry loaded with gas and a train carrying propane, tuolane and caustic soda. But about us at Heathrow there was nothing. An hour later the radio gave the following news items. "Friday's nuclear alert when the US defense forces were placed in a state of 'red alert' to counter a Russian missile attack was the result of a computer error at the National Air Defense Centre, which, confused by a flight of wild ducks, indicated that Russian missiles were approaching North America. The error came to light within six minutes but not before several F 14 and F 15 fighter squadrons had taken off from Kingley Field, Oregon, Sawyer Air Force Base, Missouri and the Canadian base at Comex. The Pentagon stresses, however, that at no time was there any question of an American counterstrike on Russian nuclear bases." Of us at Heathrow, again nothing.

From the third news bulletin, I heard that the situation at Heathrow Airport was under control. The news sounded comforting. Evidently the same cannot be said of the situation outside. In the meantime, reality has enriched my synopsis for "Rabies" with events which even the most perverse imagination could not have thought of. The story of the Russian defector, Colonel Rasimov, has been given added piquancy by the announcement from Moscow of the tragic accident which befell the Soviet delegation on their flight home. The cause of the crash is as yet unknown. The Russians are really very lucky. And also bloody careful. The aircraft came down on the territory of the Polish Peoples' Republic. In the second case, my imagination has come out on top over Major Lawford's logic. Terrorists did make their appearance at Heathrow. An attack on the Airport is possible. Old Gabriel continues to be an enigma. For Dr. Komarowsky and John Hamilton he is a medical mystery. His contact with the infected Sue Jenkins would have killed anyone else in the space of a few hours. But nothing has happened to him. He has gone on working with rabid patients in conditions of maximum infectiousness without protective clothing and yet he is still in good health. John believed that Gabriel is naturally immune to Rhabdovirus. Unless, contrary to our experience, Heathrow rabies, like its classical form, has a variable, longer or shorter incubation period and in fact the old man is already infected. In which case, it's only a question of time before he falls ill. Both doctors hope that Gabriel's nervous system contains anti-genes which could serve as a base for an anti-rabies' serum. They are waiting impatiently for the arrival of Professor Lieberman to verify their theory. I am more interested in the origin of the hallucination which transported him back to the flagellants of the Black Death of 1347. His Old English comes from the personal account of the plague by Williams of Dene, a monk from Rochester. He could, of course, have learnt to speak Old English and with effort and will-power get used to using it spontaneously, like actors in medieval mystery plays. But the fresh scars on his back were no pretence. John tells me that in the case of certain mental illnesses, each self-inflicted mutilation is not rare and that after an attack the patient doesn't remember that he has caused the wounds himself but links them to the content of his hallucination, in whose reality he firmly believes. But Gabriel's trance came upon him in a public place. Is it possible that he could have inflicted those wounds on his back on himself some time before that? And is Gabriel in fact mad? His behaviour after the death of the little girl was certainly not normal. I was present when he spoke to Komarowsky. I saw the dead girl. She couldn't have spoken to him. She was certainly

dead when he "talked" with her. And of course she couldn't have given him any kind of thread. When he tried to show it to us, there was nothing at all in his hand. The tale of Sharon, a dog smuggled into the Airport, which like some magic animal, could not be found, has some kind of mystical connection with rabies, and is also unlikely. I could find no rucksack or any trace of a dog in the metal cupboard in the toilets. Clearly, Gabriel was a victim of hallucination, caused by the fear of canine rabies which had already killed Mother Teresa as were also a certain number of passengers, who asserted that during the riot in the Transit area, they saw a dog running away. All right, so Gabriel is mad. But what is madness? Deviation from the normal. Yes, but what is – normal? ***** 'May I have a word with you, Sir?' Hans Magnus Landau's arm was hurting him. His vaccination had been carried out clumsily and his upper arm was numb. He didn't feel like talking. He turned round impatiently, and felt even less like it. In front of him, sweating as if in a sauna, stood a masked, black Metropolitan Police sergeant. It was the same man who had been checking passengers' passports in the improvised surgery in the Patio Buffet on the first-floor gallery of the European Terminal, before the doctors had carried out the vaccination. 'What is it you want?' he asked angrily, and at once regretted it. He mustn't allow himself to be ruled by fear. In any case, he was not afraid. At least not because of the car park. He was worried about rabies. But who wasn't? The policeman would understand that. 'I'm sorry,' he added. 'I'm nervous. You know how it is?' Once again, he had made a mistake. Why the hell should he apologize? The policeman could well understand his irritability without his explanation. Otherwise, he might suspect that he had some more personal reason for it. 'That's quite O. K, Sir,' agreed Sergeant Elias Elmer. 'I don't feel so well myself.' He knew exactly how the blond German was feeling. Uncertain, like even the most professional murderer surprised by the Law, even if he was only wearing the uniform of a cinema doorkeeper. His recognition of his man by the vaccination table had come about bit by bit. Like the gradual disclosure of cards at poker. First of all, he had noticed the gold-rimmed glasses, the black overnight bag and the white raincoat; he had lived trough some harsh seconds of doubt in case it had not been one of those with a black lining.

With a sight of relief, he had seen that it was. Then he had been kept in suspense by his uncertainty about the nails. The blond-haired man had held out his West-German passport. His nails were bitten down to the quick. The man from the car park. 'Sergeant Elmer. Metropolitan Police.' He introduced himself. 'I shan't keep you long.' Hans Magnus thought he had already heard that name somewhere. 'I've nothing particular to do, except to catch rabies.' The joke was a black one. It filled him with self-confidence. 'Not now, Sir, not now you've been vaccinated.' It would be quite stupid, thought Elmer, unjust if that should happen. At least not before he'd dragged a confession out of the German. 'The doctors say that the vaccine is a hundred-per-cent safe.' A hundred-per-cent, just like his perfect crime, thought Hans Magnus. A hundred-per-cent, just like his conviction that the riot in the Transit Foyer would serve to get him out of the Airport. 'You're German?' 'I am.' 'From Cologne?' Another mistake. A false passport should have been issued in another town. Any other, except Cologne. He wondered if he should take the bull by the horns. 'Is there something wrong with my passport?' 'Oh, no, your passport is quite in order.' As far as any false passport could be, thought Elmer. 'It's nothing at all to do with you. Yesterday, a compatriot of yours was killed in the Car Park of Terminal 1. We thought perhaps you might be able to help us.' He waited with some curiosity for Hans Ischerchtet, as the German was called according to his passport, to answer. Ischerchstet ought to be worried by the fact that, from all the passengers from Cologne, he had chosen him to ask for help. Hans Magnus, however, chose to accept this doubtful honor calmly. Rabies had made everything possible. If he were capable of thinking, the policeman would understand that too. 'I didn't know that the Airport was a good place for a murder.' 'Any place is good, if the reason is adequate,' philosophized Sergeant Elmer. He felt excellent. Hans Magnus Landau didn't feel so bad either. He felt almost a perverse delight in the unexpected and dangerous trials to which his new nature, born amidst the cars in the car park, was being subjected. If he had been the old Hans Magnus, the book-keeping rat from the social cellar, he would probably have given himself away in some fashion. (Little people always feel guilty for something. In the first place, for being little, and then for everything else.) But he was the new Hans Magnus, the man who dared, a great man. (And great men never felt guilty for anything. In the first place, because they were great, and then also, because of all the rest.) And what was the most important, he realized that all that he had dared to do had not only been feasible, but really rather easy. In fact, ridiculously simple. He wouldn't give himself away.

'All right, Sergeant. What can I do for you?' 'The murdered man was Dr. Julius Upenkampf, the Director General of the Deutsche Bank of Cologne. Did you know him?' Hans Magnus laughed. 'No, but I would have liked to.' 'Who wouldn't?' smiled Sergeant Elmer. He hadn't imagined that an amateur would have the nerves of a professional, but anything could be expected from those Germans with their economic miracle. 'I thought perhaps you might have heard of him.' Hans Magnus thought for a moment. In the right place. If you know someone, you answered automatically. If you'd heard of someone, you had to dredge it up from your memory. 'No, I'm afraid I haven't.' 'Upenkampf was a fairly well known personality in Cologne.' 'Yes, I'm sure. But not to me, if you see what I mean?' 'That you didn't move in the same circles.' 'Unfortunately not.' 'I hoped, in fact, that you might have kept your money in the Deutsche Bank.' 'I do, but that doesn't mean I'm friendly with its Director General.' A little bravado was needed. The policeman mustn't get the impression that he was afraid of him. 'Do you know the Director of your bank, Sergeant?' The son-of-a-bitch, thought Elmer, the dirty son-of-a-bitch. 'Of course not.' 'You at least know his name?' Elmer dejectedly had to admit that he didn't even know that much. 'I'm sorry to have bothered you.' he said politely. 'And thank you for your time, Mr. …' 'Ischerchtet. Hans Ischerchtet.' Hans Magnus automatically put out his hand with its chewed nails. That was the only ungainly feature of his otherwise irreproachable appearance. He had shaved twice since the day before. He wasn't going to allow the disease to beat him even in trivial things. Every defeat began with trivialities. Like the discovery of great crimes through small slips by their perpetrators. Like a passport issued in Cologne instead of Frankfurt. Sergeant Elias Elmer didn't take the offered hand. He was looking at a prominent, corn-like growth on the index and middle fingers of Ischerchtet's right hand. 'Excuse me.' Hans Magnus withdrew his hand sharply. Shaking hands was forbidden. And in any case, even before rabies, people in England didn't care much for it. Sergeant Elmer touched his helmet with his fingers, turned round and walked away in the direction of the vaccination point. Hans Magnus Landau/ Ischerchtet left the Gallery by the wide staircase which led to the Main Hall of the Terminal, up which, moving along slowly three abreast, the column of passengers advanced slowly towards the place where they were to be injected with the life-saving vaccine.

When rabies had been far from Heathrow, apart from the blackest thoughts of the most pessimistic amongst them, those who regarded getting into the aircraft like climbing directly into a coffin, people here, as at all international aerial crossroads, even during the summer season, when normal routine was relaxed because of the heat, were strikingly well turned out, better dressed and more content than the crowds to be seen on the platform of European railway stations. The only exception were those enclaves of agitated, frustrated, noisy people, sometimes in strange clothes, and always wretched-looking and loaded down with clumsy, tattered baggage, who could easily be recognized as emigrants whose desire to leave their own country was regularly in a better state than that of their immigration papers for their resettlement in another one. Now everyone at Heathrow, passengers and employees alike, looked like emigrants, whose papers were not in order. Like those phantom beings from old yellowed newsreels of Jews being transported eastwards. There was a certain justice in the fact that he, Hans Magnus Landau, at least on the inside, had changed for the better, whereas all others who considered themselves better than him were in fact going downhill. Climbing away both inside and outside. The hiding place, which he had found for himself before vaccination, in the children's nursery on the first floor of the Terminal, had, of course, in his absence been occupied by someone else. To try to claim the right of precedence, even though it preceded from the fact that he had been there first, rather than the certainty that he was of greater value than the usurpers, to claim any right was pointless. The only right to apply here was that of the jungle from which the tigers, drawn life-size on the walls of the nursery looked out at him. And the force (besides luck and the vaccine) to defend it. He took a look at his former shelter in the separate room for nursing mothers which was now occupied by a dark-skinned intruder, resembling an orangutan and his pregnant orangutan wife. He could have managed to do something about her, but the man was bigger than he was. If he had still had his revolver and they had been in some empty parking lot, it would, of course, have been a different matter. But now he retired to look for another hiding place. He was angry that in his conversation with the black policeman sergeant he had missed the obvious fact that he could not be the only one to be questioned. Probably every German from Cologne was being asked about Upenkampf. It was routine procedure. His misplaced apprehension that it was he who was under suspicion had caused him to make a second slip, that of showing no fellow feeling for the death of a compatriot. Not even the curiosity which as innocent man would certainly have felt. He wondered if he ought to go and find Sergeant Elmer 'by chance', and also in their 'chance' conversation, make good his mistake. He didn't have to find the sergeant 'by chance'. It was he who sought out Hans Magnus on purpose.

Apologizing for troubling him a second time, he asked for his address in Cologne. The rules of procedure demanded certain details of information. Hans Magnus was used to rules. They controlled his life just as the mechanism of his body controlled the circular movement of its hands. One single murder, however successful, a single murder, a single act of disregard for those rules could not change him completely. He gave the address at which he had lived as Hans Ischerchtet, in order to guarantee the authenticity of that false name. 'Profession?' 'Commercial traveler, temporarily unemployed.' He hadn't dared choose a profession whose credibility could be easily verified. 'Damn it!' laughed Sergeant Elmer. 'How easy it is to be mistaken about someone.' 'I don't understand.' The policeman had begun to irritate him. It appeared somehow that the contact between them was being drawn out of its own accord. 'I could have sworn that you worked in an office.' 'Oh, yes? Why is that?' 'On the index and middle finger of your right hand there are corns, quite clearly from holding a pencil or a fountain pen. Like people who worked with words.' explained Elmer. 'Or with numbers,' he added flatly. He ought to have used a calculator, like all the others in the bank, thought Hans Magnus. He shouldn't have looked upon bookkeeping as an art, like music, which had to be performed only in the old-fashioned way, with the help of classical instruments, and not with a confounded jumble of electric wires and buttons. Only who could have known then that he would need his fingers for killing. That his fingers could give him away. 'The thing is,' he hesitated, his timidity was real, 'that, how can I put it, in my spare time I do a bit of writing. Nothing special and not very successful, I'm afraid.' Another bloody writer, thought Sergeant Elmer. Another Leverquin. Only this one didn't look as though he could wriggle out of it and leave him, Elmer, in front of the Superintendent in the role of the idiot who couldn't distinguish a false alarm from a real one. 'Detective stories, probably?' The comment was not a let-up in the psychological pressure. Simply an acknowledgement of the fact that for most people, it seemed, it was very easy to think up how to kill someone. 'No, not at all,' said Hans Magnus, blushing. 'Love stories in the main.' He felt it was more than unfair that he had to take refuse in an area in which he had experienced his most painful defeats. 'Thank Heaven,' Elmer approved of his choice. 'Most of the time people go about killing each other. They have to love each other as well sometimes, I suppose?' Reproduce themselves, he thought, so that there was someone to kill.

'Can I ask you something, Sergeant?' He didn't really want to go on with the conversation longer than necessary, but he didn't dare break it off of his own accord. 'This Upenkampf was a compatriot of mine. You understand my curiosity.' 'It's quite natural, Mr. Ischerchtet.' A professional would have asked him about Upenkampf long before. Professionals were always natural. They always acted in a way in which the majority of ordinary people could be expected to act. Never differently. To behave otherwise meant to stand out, to attract attention to oneself. 'How's the enquiry coming along?' 'Considering the rabies' epidemic, quite satisfactorily, Sir.' 'I thought that because of rabies you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.' 'Why not? Murder too is a kind of illness.' 'Do you mean to say the murder was committed by someone who was rabid?' 'Certainly by someone who wasn't healthy.' 'But there wasn't any rabies at the Airport then.' 'When?' It was on the tip of Hans Magnus' tongue to say when Director General Upenkampf had left the Transit Lounge, but he stopped himself in time. What was he doing, for God's sake? 'When Upenkampf's plane arrived.' 'I didn't say he'd arrived by plane.' The ground beneath his feet was becoming uncertain. Hans Magnus was beginning to regret that he'd ever stepped onto it. But he couldn't go back. Behind him, his footing was just as unsure. 'But what was he doing at Heathrow then?' 'Perhaps he was flying off somewhere, don't you think? Why, for example, did you come to the Airport?' 'Are you questioning me, Sergeant?' Ha had to ask the question. He would have been suspect if he had let himself be treated in that way without protest. 'God forbid, Mr. Ischerchtet. We're just talking, aren't we? You yourself began the conversation.' That was true, thought Hans Magnus. It was he who had begun this idiotic questioning and he had to go on with it so as not to be even more suspect. 'I just thought it strange when you said the murderer was rabid.' 'I didn't say he was rabid. I said he was sick. Don't you think that, in a certain sense, all murderers are abnormal people?' The oaf wanted to make a maniac out of him, thought Hans Magnus, to take away the plan, the calculation, and the order from his motives for removing Upenkampf, the very thing which had made it worthwhile. 'I don't know,' he said dryly. 'Sometimes they probably are. But not always. Some of the reasons for which people kill seem to me to be quite normal.' Once again he felt a dramatic pleasure in tempting fate. 'Sometimes they're good reasons.'

'I don't know whether in this case the reason was very good,' observed Sergeant Elmer calmly, 'but its execution was extremely poor, that's quite clear.' 'Really?' 'The man certainly wasn't a professional.' 'How do you know that?' The question was dangerous, but suddenly it didn't matter any more to Hans Magnus. The black police swine was just showing off. It simply wasn't possible that his plan had not been a good one. 'We have a fairly clear picture of how it was done. If it had been a professional job we wouldn't know anything. And we know that the murderer arrived at Heathrow at 07,45, that he waited for Upenkampf at the Arrival Gate about 09,20, and that immediately after that he took him to the Car Park as the driver from the King George Hotel.' 'That means that Upenkampf didn't know him?' 'Not necessarily. Perhaps he knew him under some other aspect.' Hans Magnus didn't answer. The sergeant had described the murder accurately. In the final eventuality, he had expected that. But the police couldn't know any more then that. Or could they? He wasn't sure. His feeling of superiority had taken a hard knock. 'In fact,' continued Elmer distractedly, as if trying to answer himself, and not the person he was talking to, 'we know who he is.' 'Really?' said Hans Magnus, like a medium who is no longer controlled by his own will. 'Not his name, of course.' For that certainly wasn't Ischerchtet. 'Simply that he's acquainted with the business of that bank, and probably works in the branch in Cologne.' 'Why should he work there, even if he is a bank employee?' 'Because only the bank could know the plan of Upenkampf's journey.' Hans Magnus Landau could only agree with this reasoning. And with the inevitability that the police would soon arrive at his name. It would be sufficient to enquire by telephone which of the bank staff was not at his desk, eliminate those with an alibi, or for whom it would have been physically impossible to be at Heathrow the day before, and the only one left would be Hans Magnus Landau. Nor would the fact that he now called himself Ischerchtet be of any help. On the contrary. That would simply tighten the noose round his neck. 'Unfortunately,' continued Sergeant Elmer, 'for the moment, everything that we know is of little use to us. The bastard isn't at the Airport any more and hasn't been for some time.' In the wall which was closing around Hans Magnus, a small chink was unexpectedly beginning to appear. He breathed again. 'You think so?' 'I don't think, Mr. Ischerchtet, I know.' The chink was widening into a large fissure. Hans Magnus dug away at it to make it wider still.

'How?' 'If he were still here, he would have given himself up long ago.' The hole disappeared, the wall disintegrated, but he still couldn't climb over it. 'That's rather strange supposition, Sergeant. 'Not so strange, Sir,' answered Sergeant Elias Elmer, 'if you bear in mind that the Metropolitan Police cells are the only hermetically sealed space at Heathrow, the one place where a man could hope to stay alive.' Half an hour later, Sergeant Elias Elmer was standing in the men's toilet on the first floor Gallery of Terminal 2, wondering to himself in which of the blue-tiled cubicles the fair-haired, pale passenger in a white raincoat had turned into a black-haired, dark-skinned chauffeur in a black raincoat. Or had the transformation taken place in another of the Terminal's toilets? He didn't expect to find any trace of the process. The water had long since washed them away. He simply wanted to get the feel of the place in which the murderer had moved. He also wanted to know why Ischerchtet had arrived in London by plane, but was about to fly back to Cologne when such a journey was expensive, and he, by his own admission, was out of work? And why all that for just one day? By the stamp in his passport, Ischerchtet had arrived on Sunday afternoon, yet on Monday morning he was already waiting for the flight back to Cologne. He knew that Mr. Ischerchtet would have a ready answer to that. Most probably, not much cleverer then the one about the love stories from which he had got the lumps on his fingers. But as clever, or otherwise, as the answer might be, it would give cause for a new question. And that question – for an answer. And eventually, one of them wouldn't be quite so good. It would be followed by another question to which the answer would be still worse. Finally, he would ask a question to which Hans Ischerchtet would have absolutely no answer. All this was extremely exciting, thought Sergeant Elmer, in some way, even amusing. And for all of it he had to thank Ischerchtet who had chosen his Airport for his crime and rabies which had kept him there. He even felt more than thankfulness towards the blond-haired German. A certain closeness engendered by the enjoyment of the same secret. Both of them at the Airport were lonely foreigners. Together, their loneliness seemed smaller, more bearable. And then, they were worried about each other, here where nobody cared about anyone else, where rabies had broken down all moral, social, racial and even blood ties between people. He didn't know, of course, what emotion the man in the white raincoat who had represented himself to be Hans Ischerchtet, a commercial traveler from Cologne, would feel towards him when he arrested him, when he got closer to him perhaps he would find out, but what he personally felt towards the German was crystal clear. He felt love towards him. 'May I have a word with you, Sergeant?'

He heard the same question which he had put to Hans Ischerchtet when he had approached him for the first time on the Gallery of the Terminal near the vaccination table. He turned round slowly. In front of him stood the fair-haired German from Cologne in a dark raincoat with a light lining. In his left hand he was holding an oblong, black overnight case, and he was nervously biting the nails of his right. He really did feel love towards the man. And he didn't have to ask him what he felt for him. It could be seen in his white, entreating face. In the rabid hell of Heathrow Airport, on that black day for humanity, in the midst of terror, pain and hatred – it was love. (FROM THE HEATHROW DIARY OF DANIEL LEVERQUIN) ' ... Dr. Luke Komarowsky has returned to the vaccination team. Apart from his look of exhaustion, he showed no signs of what he has been through in the last few hours. But there is, nevertheless, in his mesmerized concentration on work, the silent despair with which he tries to overcome rabies, something maniacal, something in itself rabid. All the more so because the vaccination is useless. It was John Hamilton who informed us of this. The Heathrow Rhabdovirus is a MUTANT. Those isolated to date had only a single outer shell. This one has two. Even the most efficient vaccine on the market is powerless against it. Useless as water. The Anti-Rabies Committee has nevertheless decided to carry on with the mass vaccination. To stop it would throw the Terminal into chaos. As a process, vaccination acts as a sedative on the mood of the quarantine. It brings back hope to people. But for how long will they be able to keep it? How long will it be before they understand that it doesn't protect them from rabies? That the doctors know of the inefficacity of the vaccine? That for this rabies there is no cure? And how long before that knowledge builds up into fear and collective hysteria, and that hysteria flares up into a mutually annihilating war? The only real help to be expected is from Hamilton's laboratory. In addition to the fact that in principle, someone who is himself in danger of getting burnt puts out a fire more quickly, than if someone else is burning, one of the other laboratories in the world which are working on our virus has not Professor Lieberman. The crisis has to be resolved quickly or it will be too late for any solution. To date I've managed

to set down the figures in my diary. They guaranteed our catastrophe a certain grotesque orderliness. Mr. Caramichael, a statistician from the Heathrow Administration, tried conscientiously to do something with them. I can't even do that any more. Half an hour ago, Mr. Caramichael too became a victim of rabies. Afterwards I established that his numbers were perfectly healthy. Only he had become rabid. Very soon, in any case, there will be no further point in counting. There will be too few healthy people left for whom the numbers would have any meaning. And fingers will be quite enough to calculate the most complicated statistics. For us the arrival of Professor Lieberman, or Lohman as he is now called, is a Second Coming. He is our Saviour, or Messiah. In fact, that was what they called him when in the apostolic company of JOHN Hamilton, LUKE Komarowsky, MARK Coro Deveroux and MATTHEW Laverick he preached the gospel of a genetic faith and prophesied its – Superman. The Messiah and his 'evangelists' are once again together. Matthew, Sir Matthew Laverick, who with Lady Laverick was trapped here by rabies on their honeymoon, turned up quite unexpectedly. To be vaccinated and to offer himself for work in the Medical Centre. Komarowsky received him coolly. I don't think the reason was Laverick's delay to respond to the appeal from the Anti-Rabies Committee, the animosity is mutual, personal, and of an earlier date. No one has asked him for an explanation as to why he didn't come forward immediately, nor has he given one. (If Laverick is included in my "Rabies" he won't be so noble. In reality, where everything depends on action, motives don't have to be so important. In reality, someone can quite often be a son-of a-bitch for no good reason, or for no reason at all. In a novel, that is impossible. Judging by the concern he shows for his wife, it's very possible that she was the cause of his unprofessional behaviour.) Professor Lieberman's international epidemiological team is made up of twenty scientists, doctors and laboratory technicians. I am only interested in the Professor and Coro Deveroux. In more favourable surroundings, Coro Deveroux would be a beautiful, even an exceptionally beautiful woman. Her dark, horn-rimmed spectacles, her black hair swept back into a bun, her face without make-up, her sack-like medical clothing, and most of all her crisp, business-like manner prevents one from arriving at that impression automatically. You discover it only gradually. You realize that Coro Deveroux's hair is streaked with gray, flecked with the dull sheen of a bluish-coloured polled, that the Orient has added the nobility of wide cheekbones to the sharp purity of the Grecian line of her face, and the depth of greenish water, gilt by the setting sun to her eyes, that the coarse shell of the medical clothing holds its own precious secrets. I have found out something about her from Hamilton. Of French-Canadian origin, she was born in Marseilles where her father was the representative of a Canadian firm for the export and

exploitation of timber. She studied microbiology at the Sorbonne and Cambridge. She specialized in genetic engineering under Professor Lieberman. With the other "evangelists" she worked in Wolfenden House. Then she moved to the Pasteur Institute in Paris and has spent the last few years in Africa in epidemiological research, financed by the United Nations. I have found still less about Lieberman/Lohman. I know that he is a microbiologist of world repute, but not why, that he is a Swiss Jew, but not from where, that up to fifteen years ago he worked in Wolfenden house, but not what he did there, and that now he is occupied in research, but not where. Who is this "Messiah" Lieberman? What does his "messianism" consist of? And what for us and for rabies at Heathrow does his Second Coming portend? All that remains to be seen. If there is still time …'

21. ‘Time here is the single critical factor,’ said Professor Lieberman, alias Lohman, winding up his analysis of the situation. ‘For the question is not whether we shall find a serum but when we shall find it.’ Although spellbound by Lieberman’s ingenious deductions, Dr. Luke Komarowsky could not but return to the time when for him they were still optimistic theories of the revolutionary role of the microbiology in the formation of a more perfect man. Before the night in Wolfenden House when he had actually seen that revolution in practice, in the merciless destruction of even that small advantage that man spontaneously possesses over the animal. They were sitting in the laboratory on the fifth floor of the control Tower, surrounded by the mute witnesses, the instruments of that revolution. As in the old days, there were five of them, he himself, Luke, Coro, John, Matthew and Lieberman, the Messiah and his Evangelists. But it was not, as then, guinea-pigs, rats, rhesus monkeys that were dying in the cages all round them. In the steel and concrete cages of Heathrow, people were dying. In fact, in the true sense of the word, there was no real difference. The last series of experiments at Wolfenden House had been carried out on people. Lieberman had spoken uninterrupted for two hours. He hadn’t explained his disappearance, or his arrival at the Airport under a false name. He had said that for the moment that was of minor significance, and Luke had to agree with him. After the disaster at Wolfenden House, he had carried on his work on the ‘perfection of human microbiological organization’ in another

laboratory, about which he also said nothing. His aim had still been ‘natural immunity’, which would give mankind a spontaneous defense against all known viruses and microbes, a defense which would be fixed in the genetic code and inherited. The process was called ‘universal vaccination by chromosomes’. He had experimented with the majority of tropical viral infections. With different branches of the influenza virus; Bartonella bacilloformis, indcued Bartonellosisa, atypical virus of the PLT group, which spread the Lymphopathia venereal disease; the Plague bacillus – Pasteurella pestis; the A,B,C type of Arbor virus, which produced viral fevers, amongst others, yellow fever; but especially with the Rhabdovirus group, which he had already been working in Wolfenden House. It was with rabies that he had achieved his first successes. Although his aim had not been to produce a serum, ‘the treatment of something which in the first instance should never have happened at all’, but natural immunity, ‘which made it genetically impossible for it to happen’, as a side product of his research, he had arrived at the theoretical route to a serum. Its production had become simply a question of laboratory technique, and its efficacy a question of time for the elaboration of a trial sample. Lieberman even had a clear idea of the process. He had a clear idea about everything. Luke had to admit it, despite the repugnance he felt for his philosophy. He could see that Deveroux and Hamilton shared his fascination. Only Matthew Laverick seemed absent, unimpressed. In fact Sir Matthew Laverick was unable to concentrate. He had found out for the first time that the Heathrow virus was not of a classical nature during the first third of Lieberman’s expose, that it was a mutant against which traditional vaccination by the best known vaccines was useless. Andrea could have been injected with pure saline solution with the same hope of success. From that moment onwards, nothing existed for him except the terrifying picture of his wife, who was outside without any protection, in the midst of all the viruses which were waiting for her. ‘From what we have heard, Professor’, said Dr. Deveroux, ‘not even the time factor is really crucial. If the proposed method is successful, we can have the serum in the shortest possible time’. Luke knew the lottery-like rules of the laboratory game. Things went wrong, even in the most perfectly projected experiment. In fact they regularly went wrong. As a rule, success was the exception. A drop in the ocean of failures. But nevertheless, he wasn’t able to restrain himself. ‘We had a good method at Wolfenden House’, he said passionately, ‘but we got a serum which didn’t cure the rabid but which infected the healthy’. ‘Those people were not healthy, Luke’, said John Hamilton irritably. It all seemed to him like a senseless repetition of the scene which exhausted all his strength fifteen years earlier and which

now was being dragged up with the half-truths of all but forgotten memories. ‘They had all been in contact with a rabid dog in the animal quarantine in Portsmouth. Two of them had been bitten, three of them scratched, and the others had come into contact with saliva. The dog was killed, the virus isolated. By then they were already in the prodrome’. ‘But not one of them had shown symptoms specific to rabies’. ‘Rhabdovirus was found in the CNS of every one of them. The appearance of symptoms under those conditions was just a matter of time.’. ‘Which we, at the very least, accelerated’. ‘This is a naive objection, Komarowsky’, said Professor Lieberman coldly. ‘Unworthy of a research scientist’. ‘A former research scientist’, Luke corrected him. ‘So I see’, observed Lieberman sarcastically. ‘The patients at Wolfenden House were already beyond the help of any then known serum, and you very well know that. You know that they were treated with their families’ and their own agreement and accepted the possible risk. Don’t try to make one unfortunate incident into vivisection’. ‘Wasn’t that what it was?’ ‘Yes’, answered Lieberman, ‘in the sense in which that is what every unsuccessful operation is’. Luke got up. ‘I don’t want to be involved with unsuccessful operations’. ‘Does that mean that you’re not going to work in the laboratory’, asked Coro Deveroux. ‘Perhaps Professor Lieberman’s way is the only one, probably it is, but I’m not capable of following it. I shall go back to the Medical Centre’. ‘To tranquilize people?’ asked Lieberman. ‘It’s not much. But at least it’s certain’, said Luke moving towards the door. Professor Lieberman got up. ‘Dr. Komarowsky, if certain people, instead of their thirst for knowledge had entertained your hypocritical scruples, today we would still be swinging around in the trees’. Luke turned round. Professor Lieberman, I am not at all sure that we were not better off there’, he said, and went out. John Hamilton found it necessary to explain Luke’s behavior. ‘I’m sorry, Professor. Luke has lost his son at the Airport’. ‘In any case’, answered Lieberman indifferently, ‘there are four of us left and that’s quite sufficient’. ‘Three’, Deveroux corrected him. ‘Matthew has gone too’. Lieberman glanced at the empty chair between the electron microscope and the sample preparation table in which Sir Matthew Laverick had been sitting until a few moments before. His lined face creased into a reluctant smile. ‘All right, three. But that’s as many as there were on Golgotha’.

Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II was standing at the top of a mobile staircase in front of the door of a BA jet and smiling. In the dark opening of the doorway behind her stood the Duke of Edinburgh. He too was smiling. The aircraft’s captain, Wing Commander Paul Berg, was not smiling. Standing at attention at the bottom of the steps at the head of his crew, he was waiting for the ceremonial handshake which as far as he was concerned marked the end of the Queen’s return flight from Sydney. The flight was over, but not the professional pleasure he had taken in it. Ever since he had joined the R. A. F. he had had only one wish. He had wanted to be a member of the crew of an aircraft of the Royal Flight. He had done a good job as second pilot. He had become a flight captain. His first flight in that capacity, to Australia and back, in favorable weather conditions, had been a great success in every respect. Nothing of that could be seen in his face. He stood stiff as a ramrod and waited for his sovereign’s hand, the pressure of which with a few kind words would confirm his feelings of triumph. The red carpet shone in the sun. The band of the Coldstream Guards began to play Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ march. Smiling the Queen descended the steps, Wing Commander Berg felt his right hand grow stiff in anticipation of the long awaited moment when it would be held by the Queen, and it seemed to be taking her an age to come down the steps, far too long for those few steps which separated the aircraft’s cabin from the ground. The handshake never came. For the Queen was coming down steps which cut diagonally across a picture. The picture was hanging on the wall of the Exhibition Hall of the Queen’s Building, between others which showed the life and times of Heathrow Airport, above a row of patients with rabies. Up against the wall directly beneath the picture, Paul Beg was lying. Stiff, motionless as a fallen tree. He was in the comatose phase of paralysis and the hand in the rubber glove of Dr. Wang Han Hu from Canton could feel no signs of life from his pulse. ‘Is he dead?’ asked Moana Tahaman. Dr. Wang Han Hu nodded his head and pulled the blanket over Berg’s face. ‘I’ll inform the people from the Central Heating’. That was the euphemism for the Airport morticians. ‘But we shall have to wait for Dr. Laveick’s signature before we let them take him’. ‘Why?’ asked Dr. Wang Han Hu. ‘He’s the head of this section of the hospital, Doctor’. ‘But we need the space now, Sister. Where id Dr. Laverick?’ ‘At a conference in the Tower’. ‘I met him just a little while ago in the corridor’. ‘I’ll go and look for him’, said Moana Tahaman and went out. Dr. Wang Han Hu looked at the ungainly body under the blanket. He would never understand the western love of numbers, stamps and signatures. Still more the need for people to be differentiated even in death. In the East, statistics were simply ‘from ... to’.

The last Yellow River flood had drowned from half a million to one million people and there had been no need of signatures for them to be buried. Simply a hole that was deep and wide enough. But this will change, he thought, when here in the West so many people are beginning to die that numbers lose all significance. Then he too went out. Paul Berg remained on the floor, under the blanket, waiting for the Queen to shake his hand and express her thanks to him for a good flight. ***** In the Preparation Centre of the laboratory complex in the Tower, Dr. Coro Deveroux and Dr. John Hamilton were alone for the first time since her arrival at the Airport. Two microbiologists from Lierberman’s team, Dr. Nakamura from Tokyo and the Finn, Heinenen from the U. S. A., were working in the control room for parallel processes. Lieberman himself was working behind closed doors in the Main Laboratory, room A. Nakamura and Heinenen had a not unfavorable opinion of this unusual isolation of Lieberman’s which he had explained as a measure of sanitary precaution. Both of them came from microbiological institutes in which biohazards were eliminated by the strictest protection, resulting from the conclusions of the Asilomar Congress on the procedure to be adopted during the use of the Recombined DNA Molecule, which prescribed the use of hermetically closed experimental cubicles and the filtration of all air evacuated from the laboratory. John, knew that in addition to the precautions, Lieberman’s isolation at work was part of the alchemist-like mysteriousness, a habit from Wolfenden House, of concealing his technical procedures until he had achieved an indisputable result. In the circumstances of a deadly epidemic, Lieberman’s behavior was at the very least eccentric. And not only because of his quite inappropriate isolation. Under normal conditions, of course, the discovery of the main vector of the epidemic, what it was that the virus introduced into the population, would have been of first priority. But the epidemiological conditions at the Airport had not been normal for some long time, if such a thing as normality existed. The infection was raging with a violence which made the search for its vector nonsensical. The prospect of finding it before they all died was negligible. But nevertheless, Lieberman, at a time when every second was precious, was wasting time in elucidating several unclear details concerning the history of rabies at Heathrow. He was interested in the tale of the smuggled dog to a quite disturbing degree. He didn’t accept the interpretation that it was probably a collective hallucination associated with the fact that dogs were the most frequent carriers of rabies. Leverquin had taken him to see some old man called Gabriel, who allegedly knew everything about the ‘phantom’ dog. And then again, thought John, bent over the ultra microtome, whose diamond blade was slicing the sample of infected tissue with invincible speed, it’s as if Lieberman didn’t believe that he owed them an explanation for his disappearance from Wolfenden House and reappearance

fifteen years later under the name of Lohman. ‘Coro’, he called. Coro Deveroux raised her head from her culture dish. ‘Has Lieberman said anything about himself?’ ‘What, exactly, did you have in mind?’ ‘Why he disappeared from Wolfenden House, why he took the name of Lohman, where he’s been and what he’s been doing until now?’ ‘No’. ‘That’s very strange. Do you have any idea?’ ‘Perhaps he left because after that disaster, the experiments which he had envisaged could no longer be carried out’. ‘He went off somewhere where there was nothing to hinder them’. ‘I imagine so’. ‘That’s sounds logical’, said John, ‘but it doesn’t explain why he changed his name’. ‘No, it doesn’t’. ‘And you?’ he asked, ‘have you changed yours?’ ‘You mean did I get married?’ ‘Yes’. ‘Yes, I did’. ‘Have you any children?’ ‘No. In the unsettled circumstances in which we live, that was impossible.’ ‘What is he?’ ‘A doctor’. ‘An epidemiologist, I suppose?’ ‘We work in the same teak at the Pasteur Institute’. ‘Why didn’t he come with you?’ ‘In that part of Africa yellow fever is endemic, but in the last few months we’ve had an abnormal increase of it. Almost 25% more than last year. Bernard thought that we were on the threshold of an epidemic’. ‘And was he against you coming to Heathrow?’ ‘Is that of any importance?’ ‘None at all’, said John Hamilton. ‘He thought I was more needed there’. He set the ultra microtome in motion. ‘But you still came. Why?’ Coro Deveroux was silent. It was a question to which she herself had no answer. She had received the summons from Professor Lieberman, who was now called Lohman, and responded to it. But such an answer was only technically true. She herself had to wait to find the real one.

***** ’Dr. Matthew Laverick is requested to contact Sister Tahaman immediately in the Exhibition Hall of the Queen’s Building! Dr. Matthew Laverick is requested to contact Sister Tahaman immediately, repeat, immediately, in the Exhibition Hall of the Queen’s Building!’ The voice from the loudspeakers echoed through Terminal 2 and the Queen’s Building, locating Sir Matthew on the stairs leading down into the Medical Centre. ’Aren’t you going to go?’ asked Lady Laverick. ‘As soon as I’ve taken care of you’, said her husband worriedly. The need to keep silent about the truth was wearing him down. ‘I was quite all right in the Terminal. I have been vaccinated. For God’s sake, what’s the matter?’ ‘Everything’s all right’, he tried to reassure her, pulling her down the stairs after him, ‘everything’s perfectly all right. Just keep on walking’. ‘I’ll come if you tell me where’, said Lady Laverick decidedly and stopped. ‘I’ll explain to you later’. ‘Explain to me now’. They were standing on the stairs. At any moment one of the medical staff might find them. The insistent voice, which was asking for him over the loudspeakers, could be heard here too. He had to tell her at least part of the truth. ‘The vaccine which they gave you ...’ he stopped. ‘What’s the matter with the vaccine they gave me? Is it no good?’ ‘Oh, it’s quite all right, but it’s not a hundred-per-cent certain’. ‘How do you know that?’ ‘Several people who were vaccinated have contracted the disease. It seems that organisms react in different ways. Some it helps, some it doesn’t’. ‘Christ’, whispered Lady Laverick and started down the stairs at once. The Medical Centre was in chaos. The majority of the patients were at the beginning of the prodrome and frenzied stages. The paralytic and comatose were all kept in the Exhibition Hall of the Queen’s Building, from where, shrouded in black plastic bags, they were transferred in selfpropelled trolleys to the crematorium in the Central Heating Building, and the noise of yapping, whining, barking and howling drowned the lonely human voices. Horrified, the Lavericks watched three medical attendants with merciless clumsiness dragged a rabid man who was being throttled with the nooses of three steel rods along the corridor. Sir Matthew pushed his wife into the foyer of the Medical Centre. It was empty. At the opposite end, a door led into the Conway Road, which separated the Queen’s Building from Terminal 1. He went up to the door and looked outside. A few paces from the exit with his back stood towards them a member of the Airport Security Services armed with an automatic-rifle. Further away, in front of him, almost up against the wall of Terminal 1, a white ambulance was parked. He thought he could see something moving beneath it. Something live and dark.

But he couldn’t make out what it was. It was getting rapidly dark outside. The first flashes of lightning were cutting across the unseen sky, illuminating the walls of the Terminal with sudden blue streaks of light. It was the beginning of a summer storm. ***** In the square of the iodized window of the Control Tower, the sky was full of the storm, almost black. It looked like the swollen cyanotic belly of a man dying of dropsy. Or from long-established malnutrition, thought Dr. Frederick Lieberman, alias Lohman, standing by the window behind the closed door of Room A in the laboratory complex of the Tower. Man was no longer prepared for any violent natural phenomena. Technological progress has spoiled or undermined almost all the defense mechanisms which he had carried over from the animal world into his own. He could no longer dominate the nature of the planet. He could only run away from it. The so called triumphant steps onto the Moon were in fact the first step in his flight from Earth, his total defeat, for the idea of flight was an error of the collective imagination which didn’t know where it was going. On other planets, even if he reached them in time and established himself there, there would be other natures of which we knew even less then of this one, the one which from fear and ignorance we have neglected to subjugate. Man, of course, should not run away. The alternative was the remain and hermetically seal himself off from nature. To die as an immigrant in the artificial asylum conditions of some mechanically impenetrable dome, where birth was simply a transition from death to death, from a biological grave into the grave of the automatized womb. The only real, logical, intelligent and above all human solution was to stay here, on the battlefield, and triumph over nature. And to triumph meant to change. And not from outside. To change nature inside itself. To rise high above the level of external conditions. In short – TO CREATE A NEW MAN. To create him on the basis of a plan which would be fundamental and final. Change him spiritually, morally, socially – everything which had been done in the course of thousands of years with ever more pitiful success was pointless. It didn’t work. It simply never got off the ground. Even if they were any good, the changes were not lasting. History was not inherited; it died with each violent generation. And with each new one it was born again as something new with no prospects of outliving its creators. What was inherited was the average. Just as in nature, with the survival of the fittest, the strongest and the weakest disappeared. Those of the ‘just mean’ remained the average. The average increased and became even more average since in the average world, the least average disappeared and there were left only those who represented the most average. Man remained for a reason, the average cast-off of his kind. One could not fight with nature; nature could only be beaten by a superman for all seasons. A being which contained in itself, all the most vital characteristics of flora and fauna. A

biologically universal creation, armed with all the defense mechanisms which were now irrationally scattered through the DNA molecules, the genes of mutually antagonistic species. The Recombination of the DNA molecule from human chromosomes with the DNA molecules of an organism which could live for long periods without food would resolve the problem of chronic hunger on the planet. Most of the insects of the Syphonaptera type, for example, lived for weeks without blood, which in terms of human lifespan would mean years. Theoretically, the combination of flea and man would resolve the world’s agricultural problems faster and more cheaply than ploughing up the ocean bed. The modern procedure of genetic engineering, of course, although in the process of achieving greater perfection every day, was still incapable of such a fundamental project. The so-called ‘shotgun’ technique was really microbiological ‘firing blind’. From millions of genes of a higher organism, one DNS molecule was selected by the primitive method of ‘belief in chance and good luck’, in the hope that the genetic code of the species in question contained, deposited in it, that very characteristic which it was desired to transfer to another species, and that it, also with ‘faith in chance’ and the ‘firing blind-technique, would be shot out amongst the millions of genes of that species, whose specific function was entirely unknown. (And even then, an additional complication had to be taken into account, the fact that certain higher characteristics were dictated by the highly refined co-operation between a large number of genes and not just one of them.) By combining specific inherited characteristics of flea and man, microbiology of the future would be able to free man permanently from hunger, or at least the regular intake of food, but it would also, he was afraid, condition him to jump fifty or a hundred times his own height. If not at once, then in hereditary generations when man’s legs became stronger. The headlong bounds of the flea were necessary for it to survive, for flight and migration from one territory to another. The effects of that on human civilization would be extremely uncertain. In any case, transport would look very different, and probably towns too. He smiled. The scope of his vision was endless. He could imagine a combination of the genetic characteristics of the alligator and the tobacco plant, where it would be unclear if the resultant ‘symbiosis’ was a carnivore or primarily intended for smoking. What would be the way of life of the ‘symbioses of a tapeworm and a rhinoceros? Of a rose and a tarantula spider, a man and a cactus? Man + cactus – he thought. Man + wolf. Man + hawk. Man + scorpion. Man + scorpion + cactus + wolf + hawk + shark. A flying amphibian with a poisonous intelligence and a body covered with spikes? Dr. James Danielli, the Director of the Centre for Theoretical Biology of the University of Buffalo had been right in predicting that soon microbiological manipulation of the genetic

messages would be able to create in a year species for which nature had needed millions. And in answer to that, someone had said that that would mean ‘turning virgins into bastards’? ‘You go into bacteria as a virgin and come out as a bastard’. Who was it that had said that? Probably one of those morons who in 1975 had organized the Asilomar Congress to discuss the socio-moral and genetic aspects of the Recombination of the DNA molecule with the intention of castrating research, of hanging a set of guide lines round its neck which proclaimed even the experiments with E. Coli bacilli DNA and the DNA of non-embryonic primate tissue to be physically, biologically and ecologically dangerous. But apart from that, there had been research scientists present at that Congress who knew that WHAT CAN BE DONE, MUST BE DONE. Sooner or later. He, of course, had not been at the Asilomar Congress. He had been deep underground with the viruses and his hope. He had been on the verge of the final breakthrough, miles ahead of what was being done in the most advanced of the world’s microbiological centers, including the American, British and Russian military ones. He had needed only the final level of recombination of the DNA molecule between two species which he had been genetically manipulating, when the accident had happened. The suspicions which he had had ever since he heard of the epidemic of rabies at Heathrow had been justified, even though until now, right up to his first examination of the so-called Heathrow Rhabdovirus through the electron microscope and his first words with the old man Gabriel, the way in which it had happened had remained unclear. His talk with Gabriel had solved the mystery. At first, he had thought the old man was mad, that his tale of the dog Sharon at Heathrow was a hallucination when Hamilton had told him of it. But as soon as he heard where the ‘phantom dog’ had come from, he had had no further doubts. Everything fitted together logically. The black nun from Nigeria had been infected with rabies by the dog Sharon, which the young Goldman from some Jewish kibbutz near Megiddo – as always, he thought, everything had to revolve around those damned Jews! – had tried to smuggle to New York, via Rome. (Heathrow had been hit quite by chance, it should have been New York.) And Sharon had been infected by specimen AK-407, a black German shepherd, which had escaped from his laboratory, carrying with him the recombined, but unfinalised rabies’ virus SHRRR-FL-77. Between his Syrian laboratory and Megiddo lay the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel, but for a dog infected with his virus, with his super-rabies, that was no significant barrier. As to what had happened to him, that question was fortunately resolved by the absence of any epidemic along the borders of Syria, Israel and Lebanon. Most probably specimen AK-407 had died before having time to spread the virus in that area.

The very thing that Sharon had succeeded in doing. For the Mutant under the electro-microscope, the recombinant DNA with two outer casings, which here was called the Heathrow virus, and his (S0uper (H)uman (R)habdovirus (F)rederick (L)ieberman 77 – were identical. The Heathrow rabies was his. He hadn’t intended it like that. The combination of man and the recombined Rhabdovirus had come about to early. It was too early by one recombination of the DNA molecule in Rhabdovirus. Instead of SH-RRR-FL-78, man had been combined with SH-RRR-FL-77. But nothing was lost. Everything could still be put right. That was why he was here. To make the serum SH-RRR-FL-78 and a NEW MAN. ‘A virus is the most perfect creation in the Cosmos’, he had once written. ‘Its biological organization is nothing less than a machine for producing life in its purest form. A virus is the summit of natural creative evolution. The summit of artificial creative evolution would be an intelligent virus. A creature with the form of a man but the nature of a virus, the vitality of a virus and a man’s intelligence. The symbiosis of a virus deprived of its lack of purpose and of a man freed from his limitations would rule nature in which both of them now serve only as fertilizer’. That was why he was here. To create the most improbable of human dreams. He moved away from the window and the lowering sky behind it and returned to his apparatus. Atomic physics, he thought, going over his quarrel with Luke Komarowsky, had already been doing exactly the same thing for some time. Competing with that same nature behind which biology was condemned to follow blindly. In the Cosmos, for every human second, countless explosions took place, but for their preparation in nature numberless human ages were needed. Science had reduced that time to a minimum and nothing more. The beauty of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was not in the number of its victims and the speed with which it killed, but rather in the relationship of that number and that speed to the time needed for that explosion to be produced, scientifically and technically. Natural evolution changed and recombined species, but milliards of years were necessary for that to come about. We, he thought, are doing no more than shortening that process and adapting it to human needs. And that is the sense both of man’s existence and of the function of his science. That cannot be permitted! – Luke Komarowsky had shouted inside him. In nature, Komarowsky, he thought, already plunged back into his work, the words not permitted do not exist! Those words took away from man all his predominance over animals! Nature, Komarowsky, is permitted everything, apart from the violation of its own principles which in the main consists of the principle that there are none!

All the laws which we discover under the microscope are temporary and last only until we find exceptions to them! And when you come across an enigma in which, at first sight, nature denies itself, never say: that’s impossible, that is not permitted to happen! Say: it shouldn’t have happened! And then go on to prove why it nevertheless has happened! And if nature is permitted everything, what chance does man have, Komarowsky, if we say nothing is permitted? For that reason, Komarowsky, in science too the words ‘not permitted’ are not permitted! WHAT CAN BE DONE, MUST BE DONE! Behind Professor Lieberman’s back, the cyanotic sky poured out its contents onto the Airport. But he was already far into the depths of the microcosm. The water from the sky fell on Sharon at the moment when he crawled out from underneath the ambulance, parked in Conway Road, and snarling, rushed at the two Great Beings. It ruffled the fur on his back, poured down his muzzle and filled his mouth. He staggered forwards, shaken by convulsions, and then disappeared in the darkness.

PHASE 5 PARALYSIS ’... They banded together, and, disassociating themselves from all others ... lived a separate and secluded life, which they regulated with the utmost care ... Tedious were it to recount how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbours was scarce found and that showed fellow-feeling for another, how kinsfolk held aloof and never met; enough that this sore affliction entered so deep into the minds of men and women that in horror thereof, brother was forsaken by brother, husband by wife, fathers and mothers were found to abandon own children, untended, to their fate, as they had been strangers ... In this extremity of our city’s sufferings and tribulation the venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abused and all but totally dissolved, for lack of those who should have administrated and enforces them, most of whom, like the rest of the citizens, were either dead or sick. Whereby every man was free to do what was right in his own eyes ...’ Boccacio: “The Decameron.”

22. Sir Matthew Laverick caught sight of the rabid dog at the same moment as it started to rain. The dog was standing there in front of him, behind the suspicious Airport Security man with his automatic-rifle, who despite his doctor’s pass, had barely allowed him and Lady Laverick to cross the frontier of the Strict Isolation Zone, which ran along Conway Road between the Queen’s Building and Terminal 1. After the staggering realization that the Heathrow virus was a mutant and that vaccination was nothing more than a subterfuge of the quarantine authorities, he had no longer been able to bear the thought that Andrea was exposed to the disease. He had to protect her somehow or other. If they could get out of the Strict Isolation Zone, perhaps there was some chance that he could get her away from the Airport. He, of course, would come back. It was his duty. And it would be easier for him too with Andrea in safety. The rabid dog was snarling in front of them, behind them the Security man was shouting something. The heavy summer rain, mixed with the noise of thunder drowned both his voice and the dog’s snarling. He let go his wife’s hand and turned round. The man was raising the automatic-rifle in his direction and still shouting something at him. Obviously he was shouting for them to come back. Willie Hickman couldn’t make out what the bloody silly doctor was about. Couldn’t he see the rabid dog in front of him? The woman was no problem, but the idiot was standing in front of the dog. And as if that wasn’t enough, he was walking back right along his line of fire.

Willie Hickman shouted to the doctor again to move aside. Sir Matthew walked straight on towards the guard without knowing what he would do when he reached him. Even when he got close up to him, he was still unaware of the intention behind the sudden movement with which he snatched the automatic-rifle out of his hands. And the last thing he wanted was to strike him with the rifle butt when he tried to get it back. Willie Hickman fell to his knees. The second blow caught him on his right temples. He fell and lay motionless in a pool of water mixed with blood. Sir Matthew Laverick looked without understanding at the body beside his feet. Behind him, he could hear the dog’s pitiful whining. He knelt down and felt the man’s neck with professional detachment. He could feel no movement. Jesus Christ, he thought, Jesus Christ! Why had the young madman wanted to shoot at them. His pass had been quite in order and it gave him the right of movement throughout the whole Central Terminal Area. He had a convincing explanation for Andrea and in any case, she was with him. The guard had had no right to shoot. He had had to defend himself. The man had intended to kill them. He had only protected himself. He had been completely within the limits of his civil rights. If anyone had seen the incident, they must have known that he had no other choice. If he had been alone, perhaps he would have hesitated. The guard would have probably changed his mind in the end, but with Andrea next to him, he had not dared to take the risk. He looked round about him. There was little probability of anyone having seen him. From Conway Passage, between the Queen’s Building and Terminal 1, the view was obscured, almost obliterated by the rain, and it was clear only from the direction of the former Bus station. And there was no one at all there. He went back to his wife. She was standing exactly where he had left her. Only her hand had moved to her lips and stayed there as if magnetized. Behind her the dog was writhing in convulsion which lifted his body from the concrete and again and again hurled it back onto it with uncontrolled violence. ***** The rain fell like molten lead all over Heathrow Airport. The rapidly cooled buildings were beginning to give off steam. Streams of water splashed down on the stone, steel and glass of the Terminals. It seemed as if the cell in the Metropolitan Police lock-up in the Queen’s Building was submerged like a diving bell in a rabid ocean.

Crouched in an empty corner of the white painted box with its barren window high in the wall, the leader of the International Revolutionary Freedom Front was hallucinating that he was swimming across that ocean. His comrades were swimming alongside him. The girl Rose, the samurai, Lord and that son-of-abitch Marcos. All of them were swimming through water, except Marcos, who was swimming in blood. His arms were numb and his legs refused to obey him. The water was filling his mouth. He was drowning. He was chocking to death. But he didn’t give in. Revolution was determination + organization + goal. This time the goal was a wreck which was drifting not far away from him. In the diagonally opposite corner of the cell crouched Hans Magnus Landau, the senior accountant of the Deutsche Bank in Cologne. He had been tricked. Just as always. Just like the old Hans Magnus to whom life had always offered its more slippery side. A steep slope down which he always rolled. His daring had not been worthwhile. The killing had been nothing. It had all been just a trick, a lie like the one with which he had been caught. It was that dirty black bastard to whom he had almost begun to take a liking who had tricked him. After he had confessed to him that he had killed Director General Upenkamf and described exactly how he had done it, he had led him away to a cell with the promise that he would be alone in it. But as soon as he had gone away, they had thrown in with him this bemused Indian who at first had behaved like an animal and had now started slobbering at the mouth. He had banged on the door, shouted, howled, called the Sergeant Elmer, asked for the sick Indian to be taken to the hospital, but nobody had heard him. They hadn’t heard him or the swine just didn’t care. The International Revolutionary Freedom Front was not alone in the water. A repugnant bourgeois creature in pince-nez was also swimming around in it, insolently pushing himself towards the piece of wreckage which was rightfully his, J. D. Marangoes’, alone. He would have to get rid of him if he wanted to reach the plank, and by extricating himself from the water which was killing him, return to that blissful state from which it had dragged him. He began to swim strongly towards the intruder. Pressed against the wall of the cell, Hans Magnus Landau in terror watched the Indian moving towards him, dragging himself along on his hands and feet, like a shark on its fins, with his mouth gaping wide and dripping foam. ***** Sir Matthew Laverick could not make out where the shouts were coming from, the rain dispersed and disorientated the sounds, but he knew that when he had located them he would have to move

in the opposite direction and find as soon as possible a hiding place where they could wait for night and a suitable moment to break out of the Airport quarantine. By then Andrea would most probably have got over the shock. He had to drag her, passive and unconscious, after him, at the same time keeping an eye open for the Airport Security whose patrols could come upon them at any moment. Several Airport service vehicles were standing nearby. The self-propelled platform and the twotiered loader were no use for hiding in, but they could climb into a petrol bowser’s cabin or into a fire tender. He hesitated. He was afraid lest someone should notice them through windows od one of the vehicle. A hundred yards away from them, near the right-hand loading bay of Terminal 1, a McDonnel Douglas DC-10, THY, of the Turkish National Airline was parked, obviously abandoned in the confusion. The nose door was open and the mobile steps were still in place. An ideal hiding place, he thought. It was painfully difficult to drag the inert Andrea across the open space, through the driving rain, which blured the outline of things and made iy dificult to keep one’s footing, carry her up the steps to the body of the aircraft, all the time expecting someone to stop him. That would be the end of it. He knew that he wouldn’t use the automatc-rifle. Not in any circumstances. The episode with the guard in front of the Queen’s Building had been an unfortunate misunderstanding which would not be repeated, even if it cost him his life. He swung the vertical door down after him and firmly spun the locking handle. It was dark in the deep, narrow tunnel of the pasenger cabin, which seemed still to be giving off the scent of human bodies. The plastic blinds the colour of raw hide were lowered over the oval windows and let in very little light, showing up clearly only the white headrest covers on the backs of the seats. Only in the tail of the aircraft above the last row on the right was the ghostly light of a forgotten reading lamp. He settled Andrea in the second row of seats on the left from where, when he raised the blind, he had a good view of all the exits from the Queen’s Building through the window. That was where the greatest danger would come from, where the quarantine patrols, if they appeared at all, would emerge. He sat next to his wife, placed the automatic-rifle on his knees and fumbled for his cigarettes, in the pocket of his jacket beneath his medical white coat. If he wanted to calm her down, he would have to calm himself down first. He had to forget the man in the pool of blood in front of the Medical Centre exit. He had to forget everything, push everything to one side, think only of how to get Andrea out of there. Nothing seemed to come into his mind except that smoking in the aircraft on the ground was forbidden. He had never found any good reason for that. Flights were full of such restrictions which went back to the early days of aerial transport. Just as the superstitious fear of accidently

spilt salt went back to the times when salr was a rara luxury. Just as the rules of professional medical etiquette, based on normal circumstances, had in mind the sensible sacrifice of those who had given their Hypocratic oath. The life of otherrs had to be respected while it lasted, while the electroencephalogram showed the slightest activity, and even forty-eight hours after that, efforts had to be made to try and save a patient even if all practical hope had been lost. A doctor should never fall into the trap of false sympathy for those in pain and cut short their suffering, but, and again, but, nowhere was it required of a doctor to sacrifice his life for that of anothr. That which was demanded of him today. And what he would do, finally, as soon as he had got rid of this damned concern for Andrea. He took off his own and his wife’s protective masks and lit a cigarette. For the first time since those young hooligans had thrown them out of their shelter in the Gallery of Terminal 2, he breathed freely. They were not the only ones who had behaved barbarously. Komarowsky had been no better. Luke had not pulled out his knife at him. That was the only difference : he had simply not understood the special position in which his responsibility for Andrea placed him. The oaf was swollen with pride at doing such ’great work’. He too, then, before he had been told of the inefficcacity of the vaccine, had believed in it. But he had never been able to stand Luke, evem at the time of Wolfenden House. Everything had changed so much since then. Luke had finally become a stranger, which, in fact, in spirit he had always been. John had somehow become hardened, Coro Deveroux had lost her good looks, Lieberman had aged. Probably he too, Matthew, had changed, it simply wasn’t noticable. He laid the automatic-rifle aside on the next seat, took his wife’s hand and stroke it, began to explain to her why he had had to do all that he had done. He didn’t tell her, of course, that the guard was dead. Only unconscious. At first she didn’t understand. She didn’t even seem to be listening to him. And then the colour began to come back into her face. ’Where are we?’ she asked fearfully. ’In an aeroplane, Andrea. Everything’s all right.’ ’Are we in the air?’ She still wasn’t feeling herself yet, he thought. ’No.’ She looked round. ’Why are we alone? Where are the other passengers?’ ’They’ll be coming,’ he said impatiently. ’Just keep calm.’ He had the impression that the other passengers would really be arriving any minute. That they were VIP’s who had been allowed on board the aircraft before more ordinary mortals. They should have flown to Istanbul on THY, perhaps even in that very aircraft. He closed his eyes as always when he was in a plane taxying towards the runway from which it was to take off. He expected to hear the voice of the chief air hostess asking them tofasten yheir safety belts, and the others enquiring what they would like to drink after take-off.

Instead, he heard THAT noise behind him. Something between the scratching of nails on cloth and asthmatic breathing. He snatched up the atomatic-rifle and turned round without getting up. The tunnel of the cabin behind him was dark as before. The reading lamp above one of the rear seats on the right hand side was still burning as before. Everything looked just as it had been. Except for the most important thing of all, they were no longer ALONE. He stepped out warily into the passage between the seats. In the depths of the aircraft the darkness began to condense and move. Next to the first emergency, exit on the left, and behind the wings, the darkness was coming alive, taking on the soft contours of a man. From somewhere in the tail came an ominous anarling. The howl of a wolf joined it from the other side. Underneath the solitary, ghostly lamp at the rear, faces took shape, and even before he recognized something that had once been a human beneath the bloodstained, slimy foam which dripped from them, he understood why all the blinds on the aircraft’s windows had been lowered, why the cabin had been in darkness. He was in a ’house of the dead’, amongst rabid people, because of the lack of space in the Queen’s Building, and because they were beyond the control of the most powerful sedatives, were kept under guard in some ofthe jets nearest the Terminals. But there were no more guards and rabid patients with vampire-like stiffness of movement began to rise up from the seats all round him. The passengers who would board the aircraft, the fellowpassengers of whom he had spoken to Andrea. Hefired a burst at random into the line of shadows which were moving towards him. He had to move backwards towards the door. He stumbled over the legs of the AS man, chewed to the bone. His shout remained mute. A shout that stayed in his brain, like an echo which would never be silenced. Andrea Leverick streched out her arms towards him. He didn’t see them. He had eyes only for those others which were also searching for him. The hands of the inhuman darkness. The bloodthirsty hands of rabies. With wide opened eyes from which the spark of reason was vanishing, Andrea Laverick was left in that darkness, and he, he didn’t himself knopw how, opened the door of the passengers cavin and rolled down the metal steps into the wall of rain which awaited him. He didn’t look back as he ran in the direction of the Terminal. He didn’t see those hands reaching out after him, convulsing and melting away at the first contact with the water and returning to their black source in the shiny shell of the aircraft’s body. *****

‘Have you gone mad?’ shouted the Deputy Head of Airport Security Stillman. ‘What bloody murder?’ ‘The murder in the Car Park of Terminal 2, Sir,’ said Sergeant Elias Elmer officiously. ‘Do you mean that German?’ ‘Julius Upenkamf, Director General of the Deutsche Bank in Cologne.’ ‘For Christ’s sake, Elmer, who gives a damn for that now?’ ‘I do, Sir,’ he declared coldly. Stillman glared at the black policeman with undisguised aversion. He had never approved of the policy of accepting colored recruits into the force of order. He couldn’t stand them. Not because of any racial prejudice. He simply disliked all colored people without prejudice. ‘The one who was killed yesterday morning?’ ‘Between 09.00 and 10.00 hours, Sir.’ ‘Do you have any idea of how many people at Heathrow have been killed since yesterday?’ ‘No, Sir,’ admitted Elmer. ‘Quite a lot, I imagine, but I don’t know the exact number.’ ‘Thousands, Sergeant! A whole town! And you come to me with one single lousy German corpse!’ Sergeant Elmer felt hurt. His Hans Magnus was not lousy. It was Stillman who didn’t understand anything at all. Hans Magnus was intelligent. And his plan had been brilliant. If it hadn’t been for him, Elmer, it would have been completely successful. ‘With due respect, Sir, I must say that all those other people died a natural death whereas Director General Upenkamf was murdered.’ ‘Is rabies something natural for you?’ ‘All diseases are natural, Sir.’ ‘And so?’ ‘I consider, that against rabies, so it seems, we can do nothing, but we can probably still catch murderers.’ ‘Jesus Christ!’ groaned Stillman. He had quite enough lunatics to contend with. ‘Well go and catch them then, man, but don’t bother me!’ ‘I’ve already caught this one, Sir. You don’t have to worry. He’s certain Hans Magnus Landau, an accountant from Deutsche Bank in Cologne.’ What was the fat black gorilla talking about? What Magnus? What accountant from Germany? He hated Germans too. Germans had killed his grandfather and his father. His father in the second and his grandfather in the first World War. And most probably his great-grandfather in the Boer War. He couldn’t stand Frenchmen either, if it was a question of foreigners, even though they hadn’t yet killed any of his relations. Perhaps a cousin or two in the Napoleonic Wars. In fact, since yesterday, he hated everyone. And himself most of all for ever having had the idea of coming to work at Heathrow. ‘Fine. And what is it now, in God’s name, you want from me?’ ‘I wanted to know what I should do with him?’ Stillman looked at him in disbelief. ‘Fuck it, Sergeant,’ he said and went away.

***** The two muscular medical attendants from the Medical Centre in their white hoods like members of the Ku-Klux-Klan had to help Colonel Alexis Donovan to get up out of the armchair, so clumsy, inert and uncontrollable had his body become. The former KGB Colonel Anatoly Sergeyevich Rasimov was standing by a glass-topped table on which, in the company of ashtrays brimming over with cigarette ends and empty bottles of vodka, lay the switched off dictaphone. They had only just finished the de-briefing, that euphemistic expression of espionage experts for what in fact was the drying out of a man’s brain with the most improbable questions that could occur to professional suspicions, when the Scot had complained of feeling ill. He had not taken him seriously. After so many hours without a break spent in plumbing the depths of his memory, to drag out of him even the most innocent of Soviet espionage’s underhand activities in Europe, he didn’t feel all that great himself. He had answered Donovan with something of that kind. ‘I’m not surprised,’ he said. ‘We’ve worked as if we were rabid.’ ‘I certainly have.’ Donovan made an effort to smile. The tightening of his jaw had turned his smile into a dog-like baring of teeth. Rasimov hadn’t understood him at once. ‘What,’ he had asked, stretching his large body. He was pleased. It had worked. ‘Worked like someone rabid,’ Donovan had explained. ‘But there’s nothing strange in that. I am.’ ‘Me too. I’m running away from one rabid world and the first thing waiting for me in the socalled healthy one is that same rabies.’ ‘I’m ill, Anatoly.’ He looked at him wearily. ‘I’m not in the mood for Gothic humor, Alexis.’ ‘I mean for real, I’ve caught the bloody thing.’ he hadn’t believed him. He had thought he was imagining it, natural exaggeration in the quarantine conditions and a mistaken interpretation of the nervous tension to which they had both been subjected for hours, or was it days? And it was impossible. Where could Donovan have become infected? There had been no rabies in the VIP saloons before they had shut them in there hermetically. Quite simply sealed them off. They had not gone outside. They had neither the desire nor the time to eat. They had drunk vodka from the bottles. They had not been allowed into the toilets. They had urinated into metal pails. Just like in prison. In fact, they had been just that. Prisoners of rabies. The question was, which one? The one outside or the one within them. ‘What is it you feel?’

‘Exhaustion, headache, thirst, anxiety.’ ‘The symptoms of any illness. Even of a cold.’ ‘And fear, of course.’ ‘Don’t talk to me about fear,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand,’ Donovan had said. ‘No one understands.’ And he couldn’t explain it. There was no way in which he could explain to healthy, uninitiated people, for whom he felt revulsion, who irritate him, the deep and promise-filled uncertainty, and the darkness with an answer only for him. ‘I’m not afraid of rabies, Anatoly. I AM RABIES. The fear is of something else.’ ‘Of what?’ He saw now that there really was something wrong with Donovan. Fear was the purest, most natural, most frequent, healthy human feeling. The whole species derived from fear. Fear had inspired the instinct for preservation without which both he and Donovan would still be vacuole in the primordial swamp – a perspective which for the moment did not have to appear less desirable than a polished table in the offices of MI 5 or the KGB – fear was creative. Fear in a narrow sense, was one of the basic operational factors of espionage service. Fear was something which Donovan should know all about, even if he didn’t feel it for anything. Fear was the one thing of which a Donovan, or a Rasimov, could not know the origin. ‘Of what?’ ‘I don’t know.’ And that was the most terrible thing of all, thought Donovan, fighting to hold on to his reason. ‘All that doesn’t have to mean anything.’ He offered the vodka to Donovan across the table. ‘It’s just bloody nerves.’ The cloudy, bluish liquid rippled behind the glass. The Scot shut his eyes and clenched his teeth. ‘For God’s sake, take it away!’ He chocked back the mucus rising in his throat, his face malarial yellow. His voice had become thin, like fine, cut-glass. Rasimov put the vodka back on the table, but that wasn’t enough for Donovan. ‘No, not on the table, underneath. And all the other bottles. Put them all under the table.’ He did as Donovan asked. ‘It’s just your god dam nerves, can’t you see?’ Donovan opened his eyes. They were clouded with worry and out of focus. “I can only see that when you pushed the bottle towards me, I wanted to kill you. And I still do, Anatoly.’ The Russian had laughed good-humouredly. ‘That doesn’t mean anything. You always did.’ ‘Not like this. Never like this.’ ‘How?’ ‘I don’t know. Like an animal. Inhumanly. Without reason.’ ‘Animals don’t kill without reason. That’s our exclusive prerogative.’ ‘Call the medical attendants.’ ‘How would it be if we waited a while, Alexis?’ ‘Call them, Anatoly.’ ‘Listen, Alexis, if I call them, they’ll take you off to the hospital. I don’t know whether you’ve

got the filthy virus or not, but you’ll certainly get it there.’ ‘Call the medical attendants, for the love of God!’ Donovan was shaking convulsively against the back of his armchair. He was breathing hoarsely, graspingly, in uneven gasps. His mouth had become painfully moist and he was trying to dry it with his thick, purple tongue. Rasimov did not try to stop him any longer. Donovan really was ill. He banged on the door and informed the AS guards. The medical attendants had arrived now, and were lifting his friend out of the chair. For Colonel Donovan was now his friend. In fact, he always had been. His only real friend. The only man in that bitch of a world who had still thought of him even when thousands of miles had separated them. ‘I’m sorry my friend,’ said Colonel Alexis Donovan of MI 5 in Russian, turning round as they reached the door. ‘Goodbye.’ ‘Till we meet, my friend,’ the former KGB Colonel Anatoly Sergeyevich Rasimov corrected him. He didn’t understand why the Scotsman was apologizing. He was the one who should have been expressing his sorrow. ***** ‘Inspector, unless you come with me immediately and take down a written statement from the suspect, Hans Magnus Landau, I shall be obliged to ask to take a report to the Superintendent.’ ‘That’s quite O. K. by me, Elmer,’ said Inspector Hobson, yawning. ‘Only you’ll have to hurry up before they cremate him.’ Sergeant Elias Elmer was taken aback. ‘The Superintendent became rabid an hour ago. Where have you been, man, that you didn’t know about him?’ Carrying out his duty, he thought bitterly. Where everybody else had forgotten about it. ‘Everyone’s gone mad with rabies here. Nobody’s bothering about anything any more.’ Inspector Hobson had his own opinion as to who was really mad and who wasn’t. But he was careful not to share it with the bewildered-looking sergeant. Elmer certainly looked ill. That didn’t mean, of course, that he was actually infected – it had become difficult to distinguish the sick from the healthy, they all looked equally dreadful – but there was a way to find out the truth. It was a somewhat primitive, even dangerous method, but if the disease was progressing, it always worked. The person, who was suspected of having rabies, was offered a glass of water or some other liquid. If he was rabid, as a rule he reacted violently. He wouldn’t go as far as that, of course, with the test on the sergeant. They were alone in the office and the sergeant was as strong as an

ox – and just about as intelligent. It would be enough if he simply mentioned liquid. More often than not the simple mention of water brought on an aggressive reaction. ‘How would it be, Sergeant, if you had a spot of tea and a good sleep?’ he suggested, taking the precaution of moving towards the door. ‘Not before you agree to accept the arrested man.’ Sergeant Elmer was certainly angry, but within the limits of healthy displeasure. Inspector Hobson had no choice. ‘All right, Elmer, let’s go, but God help you if this Hans Magnus is some fairy tale of yours, like the terrorist, dressed as a clergyman.’ As soon as they got into the corridor of the Metropolitan Police lock-up, Sergeant Elmer felt that something was wrong. The door of number one cell stood wide open and through it two workers, so-called ‘gravediggers’ and sometimes even ‘knackers,’ shrouded from head to toe in their white Ku-Klux-Klan overalls, were carrying out the bloodstained body of the black-haired Indian in jeans. He pushed them aside and went into the cell. It was empty. Only fresh bloodstains on the walls bore witness to the fact that a short time before it had been occupied by civilized beings. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ Inspector Hobson asked one of the workmen. The voice which came from beneath the hood had a strong cockney accent. ‘He’s kicked the bloody bucket. What d’yer expect?’ ‘What about it Elmer?’ said the Inspector Hobson maliciously. ‘He doesn’t look very Germanic.’ ‘That’s not him,’ mumbled Sergeant Elmer dully. ‘Where’s the other one? The other prisoner from this cell?’ ‘We’ve already warmed him up,’ answered the workman. Humor was his only means of defense against rabies. ‘Was he dead?’ ‘It looked like it to us,’ the workman answered dispassionately. The possibility that Hans Magnus had fainted with terror at being looked up with the rabid Indian and then been burned alive was terrible enough. He didn’t dare to think about the still worse alternative, that Inspector Hobson would not believe that he had ever existed. He remembered having described Hans Magnus to the Inspector. ‘Was he fair-haired?’ ‘How should I know!’ growled the workman. ‘Well, was ‘e?’ he asked his mate. The second man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Who the fuck cares?’ ‘Did he have gold-rimmed spectacles? A white raincoat?’ ‘How should I know, ‘guv? All the dead ones look the same to me!’ ‘What happened to his passport, his air ticket? Where are his papers?’ Sergeant Elmer insisted desperately. ‘You’ll have to look for them in the bloody boiler,’ said the workman. He’d had more than

enough of it all. Corpses, the Airport, rabies, and most of all, that lousy feeling that he was falling apart inside and that his bones were breaking away from his skeleton. He grabbed the IRFF leader, Joaquin Diaz Marangos by the legs, the other man took his arms and bowed under weight, they moved down the corridor towards the self-propelled luggage trolley, onto which, instead of suitcases, corpses had been thrown haphazardly and covered with a tarpaulin. Ten minutes later, after an unpleasant conversation with Inspector Hobson, Sergeant Elmer was standing in front of the Lufthansa desk. He expected to find at least some trace of Hans Magnus’ presence at Heathrow Airport amongst the records of the German Air Line. The desk had been left in ruins after the breakout from the Transit Lounge. He knelt down and began to dig about the torn, trampled papers. Passengers nearby heard him muttering indistinctly to himself. ‘You wouldn’t do that to me? You can’t get away from me, Hans.’ And thinking him rabid, gave him a wide berth. ***** Donovan had expected that he, Rasimov, would see to it that the de-briefing tape reached the SIS Centre safely. In a way, it was Donovan’s testament. It was true that everything had not quite turned out as his friend had envisaged, rabies had spoilt most of that, but it hadn’t been able to spoil the tape. The tape, from which the Centre expected to find out the names of Soviet espionage agents and the resident director in Europe, lay on the table, in front of the empty chair from which death had taken Donovan. What would happen to the blown agents when he had sent the tape on, didn’t concern him. In fact, it concerned him a great deal, but that was an impermissible overreaction of his emotional interest which after a quarter of a century of irreproachable functioning, simply served to show the damaged, worn-out, shabby state of his spy-trade’s conditioning. It didn’t matter what was going to happen to him. Personally he was already dead. Eventually they could cremate him. Outside it had stopped raining. The thunder, like an overrun front, was moving away towards the north-east. At Heathrow it was getting lighter again. He pressed the re-wind button on the dictaphone, and when the tape had wound back to the beginning, he pressed the play button and waited. As if at some posthumous parade, he wanted to hear once again the names of his comrades who would cease to exist so that his request for asylum could be given unconditional confidence in the eyes of the British Intelligence Service. But nothing happened. The tape wound itself forward silently. He stopped the machine and began the whole procedure over again. Again he heard only the crackling of silence, nothing else. He reversed the tape spool and again pressed the play button. The other side was empty too. The whole damned tape was empty.

Or almost empty. At the beginning of the last of the four tracks, Donovan’s voice could be heard speaking. From what he was saying, he learnt that Colonel Alexis Donovan of MI 5 had been an agent of Soviet Intelligence, GRU, from the time of his studies at Cambridge, one of the Anthony Blunt reserve team of spies, who had replaced Philby, Burgess and MacLean, and that the empty tape on which should have bee recorded Colonel Rasimov’s treacherous information, was his last, so to speak, posthumous service to his ‘chosen homeland of free and happy people, the great and unconquerable Soviet Union’. He understood now why it was that Donovan had apologized when he had left for the hospital. The GRU was the intelligence section of the Red Army, a rival organization to his own KGB. And the incredible Donovan had been working for it all this time. But when, he wondered, had he been able to wipe the tape clean and record his own confession. Suddenly he remembered. After they had been working for about fifteen minutes, Donovan had gone out, allegedly to give the Centre a sample of the de-briefing and to get instructions for the direction in which they should continue. It was then that for the magnetized tape he had substituted a de-magnetized one on which only the first quarter of the fourth track with his own declaration could be recorded on. For the whole of their debriefing, the tape which had been turning was incapable of recording a single word. Yes, that was when the bastard had done it. That was probably when he became infected with rabies too. ‘Anatoly Sergeyevich,’ KGB General Chaidze had said to him when he had given him his final instructions before the flight to London and he had been careless enough to make a number of comments from which it could be concluded that the buying of British confidence with money composed of the heads of his own people gave him no particular pleasure, ‘it is not your job to worry about that. Your sole task is to make your defection seem credible. If you lie, the English will realize you’re a plant. And immediately after that, Artomonov will realize it too. Half an hour after that the Politburo will know on whose door to knock and an hour later we shall all be put up against a wall and shot.’ ‘Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing?’ he had blurted out. ‘What – that we should ALL be shot?’ had asked General Chaidze in some surprise. ‘No, Pyotr Georgiyevich – disarmament.’ ‘No, that would be still worse. A year after the Anglo-Soviet Agreement, we would have a general conference on disarmament, and a year after that we should be left bate-arsed, without a single rocket. One more year and we would have – counterrevolution.’ ‘I imagine,’ he had said, ‘that the Pentagon and the American arms’ industry take a similar view

of the agreement.’ ‘Most probably,’ agreed Genera Pyotr Georgiyevich Chaidze, ‘but the Americans are terrible blunderers. If they tried anything, they’d be sure to make a mess of it ... We have to foul up the whole thing on our own.’ ‘I have to foul it up.’ ‘Yes, Anatoly Sergeyevich, you.’ ‘And become a traitor to my country.’ ‘For her good, even that has to be done sometimes,’ said General Chaidze gloomily, and kissed him three times on the cheeks as they parted. All right, so he had screwed up the agreement. He hadn’t even had to pay the expected price – the Soviet espionage network in Europe. His friend Donovan had seen to that. He had to repay him for that service. He wound the dictaphone tape back to the beginning and pressed the recording button. Then in laconic, but factual terms, at the same time erasing Donovan’s confession, he recorded his own, he described the plot of the Red Army General Staff and the KGB against the Politburo and the Anglo-Soviet Agreement, its main perpetrators and his own role in it. No one would ever know that Colonel Donovan had been a traitor. His friend would receive his posthumous due. And KGB General Pyotr Georgiyevich Chaidze, that ‘smooth operator’ on a waste scale would most probably get a bullet in the back of the head. He finished off the bottle from which Donovan had drunk. He smiled. He laughed out loud. The tape recorded his laughter faithfully. They would probably think he had become rabid. What did it matter? Wasn’t it true? Hadn’t everybody? ***** Sergeant Elias Elmer was standing bareheaded, without a mask, in front of a mirror in the Gentlemen’s Toilet on the first floor gallery of Terminal 2. He was holding his bulky police revolver in his hand. He placed the barrel of the pistol in his mouth. It’s not all over yet, he thought. You’re not going to get away from me, Hans Magnus. I love you, Hans Magnus. I’m coming, coming for you, Hans Magnus. Then he pressed the trigger. *****

High above Sharon, the sky was split by a painfully yellowish glow and the soot-colored horizon was torn by the last lightning flash, the weakest of all. The summer storm had moved away north-eastwards. Clear now of cumuli-nimbus, the cobalt blue west was drying out in the still invisible sun. Sharon opened her eyes. Through the shining base of mist which was gradually clearing, she recognized the shapes of things around her, the gigantic kennels of the Great Being, the evil-smelling world in which they lived. If she had a human sense of perception, she would have known that she was in the Bus Station behind the Control Tower, opposite the Main Tunnel, 2,000 feet long and 86 wide, which led into the Central Terminal Area of the Airport. But even then, she would not have known how she had got there. She was conscious of exhaustion, but her head was less heavy, her jaws more mobile, her breathing deeper and more regular. Her strength was gradually coming back to her, and the urge to wander abroad with it. It was if she didn’t know where she had come from, or where she was going. She would be led by that ancient instinct which was chosen for her before she was born and for the first time saw the yellowed ruins of the town which people called Meggido, or Harmageddon, in the land known as ‘the promised’. Instinct was thinking for Sharon. Mother nature was with her. As in the biggest star in the sky. As within the tiniest virus on earth. And she, Sharon, in it. Together with the stars, together with the virus. She simply had to submit herself to nature.

23. (FROM THE HEATHROW DIARY OF DANIEL LEVERQUIN) ... Louise is here! Here at the Airport! I’m in despair, frightened and angry. I didn’t know how to define my feelings, or decide whether I’m desperate for her, or for myself. With Louise safe, I was free. I don’t have to take part, I could remain outside reality, arrive at an experience of it without having to pay immediately in cash, in feelings, or still worse, in compassion. In the personal worries and practical commitment which they demand. Oh yes, I had feelings all right, felt compassion, suffering which sometimes was so strong that it barely crossed the

threshold of perception, barely allowed me to eliminate it with the professional impartibility of a historian. Rabies has remained terrible in the synopsis of my future novel, as in the synopsis, bloody and insane which the virus had written throughout the Airport. But between that suffering, however absurd, and me, there was always a protective wall. A transparent wall, I can see everything, but I can’t touch anything. Nor can what I am looking at touch me. I am the expert who in the sealed-off gallery above the operating theatre explains to future doctors the process of surgical intervention, which is being carried out by others. But it was not my mother who was lying on the operating table. Or the wife I love. It wasn’t Louise lying there. I have watched families in the quarantine. Their suffering is double, triple, multiple. Everything depends on how many people are around the one who is affected. Many people have gone mad as a result, even before the virus found them out. Finally, one’s perception becomes blunted. The weight of suffering has dulled its quality. Mental catalepsy has left a majority of families paralyzed. Without defense. The virus has taken it away from them in one gulp. Only those people entirely on their own, who in the world of the healthy we regard as unfortunate and try to socialize at all costs, have held out. After the death of his son, Komarowsky himself died also. He’s still functioning, of course, by inertia, (if the administration of useless vaccines can be considered functioning). In appearance, in a moral way too, if his dispute with Professor Lieberman is not the intellectual hysteria of an Oppenheimer, who suffered after having produced the atomic bomb because the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, instead of suffering for refusing to produce it, unless, therefore, it is simply the reflex of a galvanized frog, pinned to an experimental metal plate by unnatural circumstances. Concern for his wife killed Dr. Matthew Laverick before the virus got at them. Before I knew that Louise Sorensen was at Heathrow, I was free, therefore alive. Now I too, unless I do something medical, will join the automatons, which with greater or lesser convictions are simulating life around me. I shan’t give in, I shall resist, and I shall do something. What I don’t yet know but certainly something. I feel it almost as a mission. If I don’t write a book about rabies, my diary at least will be left. From it, they’ll be able to find out what was happening at Heathrow, while they were eating their TV sandwiches and watching the antics of Andy Pandy or enthusing over twenty-two men fighting over a ball with just one resisting temptation and trying to make them come to their senses with a whistle, in a time of prosperity when, at least in the West, everyone could have things of their own. Later, perhaps some of them would remember that frustrated sexual hunger is not the only hunger in the world that needs to be satisfied, that the torments derived from kicking a ball between two posts a couple of yards apart are not the only torments worthy of notice, and understand that they are not an island, that Donne’s bells whenever and wherever they begin to sound, always sound for them.

But for that to be known, it has to be noted down, described somewhere, inscribed on something. Man’s footsteps have to be left somewhere. And for them to be left, he has to stay alive. Alive and free, of course. And that is not enough. He has to be alone. In that sense, Louise is an unexpected hindrance, an unnecessary burden, an excessive care and even a potential danger for my mission. Ancient Mediterranean people called them “jinxes” and their seafarers threw them overboard. Louise has told me what happened after we were separated by the automatic doors of Terminal 2 when the quarantine at Heathrow began. She stayed in the Central Terminal Area waiting for more detailed information. She tried unsuccessfully to get into contact with me. Even the intervention of the Norwegian Embassy, which she mobilized through her father, was of no avail. There was no alarm outside the quarantine, apart from that caused by the delay in flight departures and the transference of flights to other airports. No one knew anything definite. The first official announcement had a soothing effect. It gave the impression that the epidemic had been localized. In the meantime, night fell. The last tube left Heathrow Central for London two hours early, at 21.50 instead of 23.50. There were no taxis. She had spent the night in the Terminal 1 Foyer. When she had woken up, she had been inside the quarantine zone. “All right,” I said. Her explanation sounded convincing. Of course. Stupidity always does. Only intelligent things sound improbable. “Why did you stay at the Airport? Why for the love of Christ did you come here?” ‘They asked me to.” ‘Who?” ‘The Anti-Rabies Committee.” “Why you?” “Not me specifically,” she said nonchalantly. “They asked for people with some medical experience.” “As far as I know, you haven’t any.” “I worked for some time for the Norwegian Red Cross.” “You stood on some corner once a year with a tin box asking for money for the blind? And you think that that kind of experience is enough for canine rabies?” “There’s no disease which can’t be overcome if man really resists it.” There was a note of discord in her behavior, something which didn’t belong to her sober nature, or her Lutheran upbringing. Something of an Asiatic fanaticism. “That’s right, there isn’t,” I said sourly. “A man can even kiss a poisonous snake if he’s quick enough, but I don’t think you are.” ‘And you?” “I got caught in the snake’s lair. I didn’t sneak in to see what the snakes get up to.”

“I don’t believe you.” “You saw the doors closing in front of my nose.” “You could have got through if you had wanted to,” she insisted. “But you didn’t want to. You chose to stay.” “I’m not that kind of a mad hero, Louise.” “No, but you are a mad writer. A mad writer who got the scent of a story in his nostrils.” “Perhaps there’s something in that,” I admitted impatiently. “But the epidemic didn’t have a name then. And no one had died. It was more fiction than faction still. If I’d known then what I know now about rabies, I’d have gone straight through the glass. But you, you came here when even an idiot could see that the only way out is through the Central Heating Building.” “Just as at Auschwitz.” For a second time she surprised me. “What made you say that?” “What?” “Why did you make the comparison with a concentration camp?” “Isn’t it a good one?” “Of course not. There’s no comparison at all. It’s not us who are doing the killing here.” I said US, as if we were already something different from ALL the rest. As if we belonged to an autarchic world, from which not only could there be no return into the old one, but with which and with whose customs there no longer existed any kind of spiritual connection. “I heard that several AS snipers who were placed on the roofs to drive away birds have been killed.” Lawford had killed a barman on the pavement outside the Terminal, his white, blood-stained jacket crawled through my memory like a ghost, but the snipers and perhaps the barman too were infected. “They were rabid.” “That smells of euthanasia, Daniel.” “What are you talking about? They don’t kill people here because they’re rabid, only because they can infect those who are still healthy. And when, in addition to that, they’re armed, there’s no other way of neutralizing them.” “The man on the pavement this morning wasn’t armed. The Jews too were neutralized not because they were Jews, only because they infected healthy Aryans.” “The man looked rabid, Louise, he really did.” “The Jews too didn’t really infect the Germans, it just seemed like it. But they were still killed, just like the man in the white jacket who only looked rabid.” “Wait a minute, how did you know that the man who was killed was wearing a white jacket?” “I was there.” “But that happened early in the morning. Almost when it was still dark. Didn’t you tell me that you spent the night in an armchair in the hall of Terminal 1 and that it was the announcement of the extension of the quarantine to the Central Terminal Area that woke you up?” She didn’t answer.

“And the quarantine extension to the CTA was announced after the incident in front of the Terminal.” She still said nothing. “You knew that the quarantine would be extended and you still stayed here. Why?” “Don’t worry about it,” she answered, guessing the reason for my apprehension. “Not because of you. Not only because of you, if you know what I mean.” I was beside myself. “I don’t know what you mean. I’m damned if I understand anything.” We were alone in what had once been the hairdresser’s on the first floor gallery of Terminal 2. At the beginning of the quarantine it had been virtually impossible to be alone. But now more and more often one could find a place which didn’t have to be shared with anyone. Rabies had done its best for us not to be too crowded in our world in the same way that in the old one outside, the problem had been taken care of by endemic hunger, wars and genocide. “Will you understand if I tell you a story?” “What story?” I protested. “I’m not interested in stories. I can make them up for myself!” “A true one, I mean.” “Thanks very much.” It wasn’t the suggestion that mine were false that upset me. It was a presentiment that the story itself would disturb me. “In 1939 a young man from a well-known German medical family, graduated first in his class from his studies in Medicine at Gottingen and thanks to his membership of the SS, was given a post in Hohenlychen hospital, whose then Director was Professor Dr. Karl Gebhart, the main health consultant for the SS formation and the Gestapo. But the young man was not only a doctor. He was also a biologist who had specialized in genetic research under Jean Rostand at the Sorbonne. A hospital in which patients were only treated and not perfected, where science as a servant of nature was reduced to the conservation of her defects, could not satisfy him. With the support of Dr. Gebhart he moved to the Berlin Biological Institute and under the spiritual guidance of Max Delbrik – physically the Jewish Delbrik had emigrated to the U.S.A., the father of future molecular biology, he studied the effects of radioactivity on the wine fly with Timofeyev-Ressovsky and Zimmer.” This isn’t a story, I thought. It’s the recitation of a lesson learned by heart. That much was clear to me. But nothing more than that. “There,” continued Louise, “he achieved such good results that, again through Dr. Gebhart, they arrived at the desk of the SS Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler, who became personally acquainted with him. The visionary eugenic doctrines of the young scientist, especially the laboratory means by which they could be put into practice, charmed the Nietzschean imagination of his host. They coincided with his own dreams of a thousand-year long empire of SS supermen, the kingdom of Blood and Will. Up to that time, people had been changed by psychological conditioning and intellectual manipulation. Indoctrination or pressure. Never anything else. But

the forms or behavior which could be arrived at in this way were not necessarily lasting and rarely radical. Even the final stage of indoctrination, hypnosis, was restricted by moral barriers. It was impossible to hypnotize someone to perform an act contrary to his moral make-up. The real key lay in man’s fundamental biological structure. If his basic biological foundations could be artificially changed, and then he could be made to inherit those changes, as the color of the skin is transferred from one generation to another, it would be possible to arrive at a new man with one of the genetic recombination, a superman, a future ruler of the world. And his slaves could also be produced, for if in a genetic code the will to rule and the capability to use that will could be conserved, in another code, it would be possible to deposit the will to submit, the capacity to carry out blindly and lovingly fulfill even the blackest commands of the ruler. It would no longer be the case as previously, that certain members of the species wanted to rule, and others, out of fear, indifference or powerlessness, accepted to be ruled. They would HAVE to accept it. Just as they had to breathe. For the members of the sub-species who were condemned as early as ...” “Balls,” I said mockingly. The story sounded like a continuation of the quarrel between Komarowsky and Lieberman. “That’s right, although the correct expression is Chromosomes.” “The story sounds more and more like Dr. Frankenstein.” “Yes. In as far as Dr. Frankenstein to change our history.” “As it looks as though rabies does. Except that in changing it, rabies looks to have every chance of ending it by the same token.” “In any case,” Louise went on, ignoring my cynical interpolation, “the young man was given the rank of Captain, SS Sturmführer, and the post of Head of the Genetic Research Section at the Military Institute of Microbiology, unlimited financial means and the moral support of Reichsführer Himmler himself. 1941. Wartime. He took no part in it. He had a vision of eternal peace. ‘Pax Germanica’, shut up in his laboratory in between those who nature, with his assistance had chosen to rule, and those who it had earth marked to serve. He actually despised war, the barbarian form of the necessary struggle for superiority, in which human potential was wasted irrationally. For the time being, he had to work with wine flies and bacteria. At best, with guinea pigs, rats and dogs. In the rhesus-monkey he got nearest of all to men, but there he reached the limits defined by nature itself of experimental material. The principle was proved for the lower forms of life. Would it also hold for the higher form? Unfortunately, in the Third Reich, there was a law against vivisection. Experiments on animals were carried out in the dark of a laboratory where the acoustic insulation let nothing through. Himmler had both considerations for the young scientist’s problem.

In Germany there existed yet another form of lower being, which, as distinct from rats, no legislation protected. That insectoid form of being had one further advantage over the rat, which circulated freely in sewers through Germany. It was concentrated in concentration camps. There was over-abundance of such material, and there was already a precedent for its use. For the needs of the Luftwaffe in Auschwitz was investigating the frontiers of human endurance in conditions of extreme cold and oxygen deprivation. Dr. Clauberg, also at Auschwitz, was experimenting with sterilization which would reduce the population of the conquered to an economically justifiable level. In both cases, the experimental material was, in the main, Semitic. Could there have been a more favorable working milieu for the young scientist than the one which already had a certain tradition of experimentation with sub-human material and a corresponding intellectual atmosphere? He, of course, despised the primitive practicum of Mengele and Clauberg’s methods, all that bathing of specimens in ice, choking in chambers with regulated air pressure, poking about in vaginas, whose results, if they gave anything at all, were valid only for the given situation and the given specimen. The children of parents, who were trained, if they survived, to function at great heights, could still choke there, yet work excellently on the sea shore, on which their parents would breathe like fish out of water. Their genes had learnt nothing of their parents’ experience of high altitude. As long as such adaptation was not incorporated in the genetic memory, as long as it didn’t enter into the data for the life of the species, it would remain a characteristic of an exceptional individual and disappeared with him.” “If Darwin was right,” I said, “it would be necessary to keep selected and genetically linked individuals in ice for centuries, and each generation longer, and mate them with similarly conditioned individuals, and hope that in the course of natural evolution a being would be produced which would function effectively at -50°C, and that that characteristic would be transmitted to their descendants. And who could have time for something like that? And could any race be plunged for so long in ice without it being known about and not coming up against the resistance and opposition which our mental inertia always shows for new ideas?” “The young scientist didn’t want to have anything to do with such amateurs. Himmler understood that. Moreover, Mengele and Clauberg were working for the Wermacht. Himmler wanted to have his own SS project in Auschwitz. The young scientist organized in absolute secret a genetic laboratory, whose work was only known to the Reichsführer, Dr. Gebhart, his tutor, Mengele and Clauberg, his colleges, who had to cover for him, and of course to the experimental material. The statistical data about it were shown only as Mengele’s and Clauberg’s project. At the Nürnberg Trial half of the victims which were attributed to Mengele in reality belonged to the young scientist. And at that only the half that were dead. Since he didn’t have any maimed or crazy people. Those were only Mengele’s. His were only the corpses. He is of course a scientist.

He is not a butcher. His work is classically clean.” I was shocked. In view of rabies, the story is unbearable. It was more rabid than real rabies. And then Louise’s strange behavior disturbed me, her icy rhetoric, which was not usual for her, and also the feeling that the story doesn’t finish in 1945, as it is with horror history stories, that it will continue to our days. “In 1945, Mengele, Clauberg and the young scientist disappear. Clauberg was caught; he was sentenced to death and hanged. Mengele went into hiding, probably in South America. The young scientist had not need of that. Nobody knew about him. His colleagues were as good as dead; the witnesses against him were really dead. With a false identity he joined the refugees and repatriated from camps that scattered throughout Western Europe. There is also a grotesque finesse. He became a Jew.” “The bastard really had the balls for it,” I said in astonishment. “He still has,” said Louise. “He’s here now, at the Airport.” “What?” “He’s here at Heathrow, Daniel.” I wasn’t surprised. I had known it all along. Without that ending, the story would have had no point to it. Though even then, I still couldn’t see what it was. Or what it had to do with Louise. “He’s been trapped hare?” “No. He came here after the setting up of the quarantine.” And then I knew. I was getting more and more tense. And that for me meant a need to escape into my imagination. In my mind, the fact I had been given could be set out and ordered, without danger of their final alignment hacking me to pieces. “Pity.” I said coarsely, “if he’d been at the Airport from the beginning, or had been asked to come, the story would be a lot better. Someone who knew he was at the Airport but didn’t know who he was, behind what name he was hiding, could look for him in Komarowsky, Hamilton, Laverick and Lieberman. But as it is, there’s no dilemma, not even a story.” “For Christ’s sake, Daniel!” “All the candidates, unfortunately, would have to be Jews. Or at least be pretending to be. And that, with due respect to all their sufferings, is a bit too much even for the best story. No, that’s no good, no good at all.” “It’s your reaction that’s no good.” “I’m sorry.” I took it back. “All right. The story’s incredible, but he’s here. Why, nevertheless, are you here, and what do you have to do with it?’ “I’m part of the story.” “How?” “I’m a Jewess.” It was truly a day of chaos and confusion. Rabies had not just plunged our present into chaos and destroyed our future, it had even attacked our past, to recombine that too and turn it rabid.

“My real parents died in Auschwitz, in that third laboratory which was never discovered.” “Frederick Lieberman’s laboratory?” “He was called Siegfried Stadler then, and now he’s called Frederick Lohman.” In itself Louise’s story was like many other Jewish wartime tragedies. Before their arrest, her parents had been rich professional people. As a new-born baby she had been taken from Germany to Denmark, from where, after the occupation, the Danes had smuggled her to Sweden. There she had been adopted by a Norwegian émigré family called Sorensen. She would probably never have found out about her real origins if a group of people had not tried to find out what had happened to her. They were of no one believed. A ghost who only the selected few had got to know, and whose acquaintance not one of them had survived. The international different professions and lived in different countries, and were linked only by their common heritage which had been lost in ‘that third Auschwitz laboratory which had never been discovered’, and the determination to seek out its creator, the SS Doctor Stadler. Louise Sorensen had joined the exclusive circle of those dedicated to hunting down war criminals whose names had not been on any list, and for whose crimes no country had demanded punishment. It was a ghost hunt in which no one believed. A ghost who only the selected few had got to know, and whose acquaintance not one of them had survived. The international and the German organizations for hunting down was criminals had sufficient trouble in bringing those real ones for whom proof actually existed to justice, to waste time on an imaginary one, against whom there was no valid accusation. It was something like the desperate and fruitless search by a few fanatics for supernatural elements in a haunted house, whose ghost had not been seen for a long time and whose victims had been ascribed to other demoniacal forces. “We were only interested in Siegfried Stadler,” said Louise, “and whenever we came across the tracks of other war criminals, we left them to Simon Wiesenthal.” “Who, I imagine, helped you in the hunt for Stadler?” “Not particularly. He’s quite empirical. In principle, he believed that Nazism was capable of anything, but in practice he was after only those for whom there was proof of guilt. And we had none for Stadler. Officially, Stadler’s victims belonged to Mengele. Wiesenthal was looking for Mengele. Mengele’s capture would have proved the existence of Stadler and his genetic butchery. But, as you know, right up to the present day, all the efforts to find Mengele have been unsuccessful.” “But how did you discover Stadler then?” How the devil did you find out that he was hiding under the name of Frederick Lieberman?” “That’s another story. After endless false trails, we established that our man was living in England. We didn’t know what he was calling himself, or what he looked like, or what he was doing.”

“You could well have supposed that he was working in his specialty.” “But in medicine. Stadler was a doctor too. And do you know how many doctors there are in Great Britain? We had to examine each one under a microscope. Finally, by a process of elimination, we arrived at Lieberman and Wolfenden House.” “That’s when you got to know Hamilton.” ‘Yes. That’s why I came to study in London.” “But you couldn’t be certain that Lieberman was Stadler by process of elimination alone?” “No, we found indirect proof as well. First of all, he wasn’t a Jew, that he had a false identity. That he was a German hiding behind a Swiss nationality. Then, certain particular habits which it was known Stadler had, that helped to confirm it. For example, Stadler used to wash his hands painfully often.” “That doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “I’d have washed mine too.” “Lieberman too washed them abnormally often and thoroughly.” “You didn’t have a photograph of Stadler?” “He was never photographed.” “That means that even then, you could never be sure?” “No. Only he could tell us if we were right.” I didn’t want to ask her how. I could only imagine it. “But the day we should have met him, he disappeared.” “He felt that you were getting close?” “I can see no other reason for him to have rune away. Investigation, like crime, leaves traces. In any case, we needed fifteen years to find him again. And once again it was where one would have least expected.” “Back in Germany?” “No. At the very gates of Israel. In Syria.” “Well I’ll be damned.” I had begun to feel a kind of perverse sympathy for Lieberman. The kind I would have felt for a lone tiger. The fact that that tiger had previously massacred half the village would not decrease one’s sympathy for it. It would only make a more sensitive man feel ashamed. “To settle himself near Meggido, Harmageddon, where the last battle between God and Satan is supposed to take place, means that he knows his place. What in fact was he doing there?” “Officially, working on preparations for a bacteriological was against Israel. Unofficially, anything he wanted to.” “On perfecting of the Auschwitz superman?” “That means that the Syrians knew who he was?” “The Egyptians at one time knew that their German instructors were former Nazi generals.” “But where did he get the human material from? He couldn’t count on Jews this time.”

“Perhaps he hadn’t yet got round to people.” “What do you mean to say by that?” “Perhaps he’ll only get round to people here?” The idea was monstrous. But everything connected with Stadler was monstrous. If it had happened at all. If it was not the fruit of the collective psychosis of a few fanatics. Of course I could participate in the general compassion and sympathy because of the crimes which were committed against the Jews. But I could see no point in a permanent requiem. Nor could I see anything good in building the future of a race exclusively on the worst of its collective memories. “At Heathrow? In the middle of an epidemic of rabies? Perhaps he could find the material for super dogs here, but surely not for supermen.” “I said perhaps. I don’t know. Why else would he risk being discovered?” “If he has risked it. If he id Stadler.” “Yes. If it is him.” “Do you mean to say you don’t positively know for certain?” “Not positively.” “God Almighty!” I shouted in amazement. “This is how we see it. If he’s not Stadler, his presence at Heathrow makes some sense. If he is, it doesn’t. In that case, it’s suicide for him. But he’s still doing it. Why?” “Because he’s not Stadler, damn it, that’s why.” “But if he is?” “Then he’s a madman.” ”But Siegfried Stadler is not a madman, Daniel. And that’s what worries me. There’s something wrong here.” “What’s wrong is that you haven’t left the whole bloody affair to those whose job it is to take care of it.” “Who?” “Wiesenthal. The police, the courts, hell, anyone!” “We haven’t the proof for that.” “But what, for God’s sake, do you intend to do?” “To present him with what we know about Stadler.” “In the hope that he’ll burst into tears and confess everything?” “Oh, no, of course he won’t. But at least I’ll know.” “How? How will you know?” “I don’t know how, Daniel, but I’ll know.” “And then, if it is him, what will you do then?” She seemed to be looking right through me, as if she were searching for an answer in some infinite perspective which could only be refracted through me. “Then I shall kill him.” I believed her. It was Louise all right, but then again it wasn’t. She’d only just arrived at Terminal 2. She hadn’t had time to become infected, she couldn’t be rabid. And jet again she

was. Rabid in the normal, healthy, human way which had made of our earth’s history an endless funeral. “You’re quite mad, do you know?” I said bitterly, “you’re absolutely out of your mind! Do you know that all our lives depend on Lieberman now?” “No one’s life can depend on that kind of man, Daniel. Only their death.” “And anyway, Lieberman’s in the laboratory, in the Control Tower. You can only get in there with a special pass which you don’t have.” “You’ve got one.” O looked at her dumbfounded. “So what?” “You’ll get me in to the Tower.” “I’ll be damned if I will.” “Daniel,” she said imploringly, “Siegfried Stadler killed more than seven hundred people!” “There’s a killer here which has killed off thousands, Louise, and which threatens to kill millions more,” I said decidedly. I didn’t want to sound moral, I wanted to be logical. For now only cold logic could save life. And to be moral one had first of all to go on living. “I think that’s the first one to be dealt with. We know that it’s killing us. About Stadler, we’re not even certain. But even if we were, if he really is Stadler and we kill him now, we shall have deserved rabies. It can’t do any more to us. We’re rabid already, there’s no way we could become more so!” She was silent a moment and then said quietly. “You were short of a dilemma in your story. Now you have it. Should Lieberman be killed or not? Is my story good enough for you now?” “No,” I answered roughly. “It’s no kind of dilemma. Lieberman can’t be killed. If he were, that would kill all Heathrow.” She had a medical bag across her shoulder. From it she took out a sealed envelope. “There are some photos inside. Have a look at them when you have time. You’ll find out from them what kind of a man is this Lieberman on whom your life depends.” And she went out of the hairdresser’s. I was left holding the envelope. I had no thoughts for its contents. I was thinking only of a comparison. It was neither a good nor a bad one for me. It was simply rabid. Like everything else. As I myself was. I was standing there, I, Daniel Leverquin, a storyteller who invented gloomy, exciting, dangerous, often incredible tales. And all the time I had been telling them, the woman I loved had been living them, and I had known nothing about it. How could I have known? I had been dead. A corpse for a long time ...

24. The family unit at the infected Airport, which was more and more like a confused battlefield with its front continually moving, was still the only reliable defense, if not from rabies, from which there could be no defense, at least from those healthy passengers who were behaving more and more aggressively, as if they had become rabid. The frontier between health and sickness had become barely discernable, so uncertain that only an experienced epidemiologist could diagnose it, and even then sometimes a hysterical man was sent off to the hospital while his silent neighbor was left to the viruses that were already teeming within him. Reuben Abner and Miriam Mahmud had been separated from their families since the very beginning of the epidemic. It was natural that they should want to find them again. They knew that it would not be an easy thing to do. Although drastically reduced by infection, the guards at the frontier between the Strict Isolation Zone in which they found themselves and the Preventative Quarantine Zone with their families were strong enough to prevent any unauthorized movement between the two areas. By good fortune, they came across a Lebanese named Haron who had turned his experience of smuggling in the lethal triangle of borders between Syria, the Lebanon and Israel to financial benefit at Heathrow by making the crossing of the still more deadly borders which rabies had drawn at the Airport. He had found an underground passage between the Queen’s Building and Terminal 1. Lawford’s men had been posted there but their number had been quickly reduced to a single guard. Then he too had disappeared, Abner could imagine how, and the way was free for anyone who had the money to pay. The resourceful Lebanese guided people through it to Terminal 1. There had been no customers for the return journey, except for an Irish woman from Belfast who was looking for her children in Terminal 2. He had let her have a concessionary price. Having persuaded her to make the return trip, he had followed the example of the Air Lines whose return fares cost proportionately less than those for one way only. And how had this kindheartedness been repaid, he complained to Abner. The bitch had simply not turned up. She’d conned him. When Abner suggested that the Irish woman had perhaps been taken ill, he hadn’t regarded that as sufficient reason. Not in business, where everything was based on confidence. He too, he said didn’t feel so great, actually he felt lousy, but he had taken the money from Abner and in accordance with his obligations, he would take them out of the Strict Isolation Zone and rest later. The constant tension of life as a smuggler had worn him out. He often got the same kind of headaches in Lebanon when he had to cross the border several nights running. Abner paid the ‘guide through rabies’ with his family money. He didn’t spare it. His family would understand. He too wanted them all to be together, and felt as he did. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been a family.

They went though the underground passage with their eyes blindfolded. The Lebanese didn’t want to see Abner organizing his own smuggling trade along his route. The Irish woman’s betrayal of his trust had undermined his faith in the honesty of his fellow human beings. It was dusk when Haron left Reuben and Miriam in the Terminal 1 Car Park where the route ended, a squat architectural structure which, windowless and with its open, dirty corridors, resembled an unfinished mass burial ground. What was left of day-light trickled through the parapet walls, mingling with their pock-marked surfaces and the dark outline of the cars into a dirty grey sludge, like ashes in a burnt-out fireplace. It seemed as if the car park was a ghost town, which had been destroyed by fire. Only when their eyes accustomed to the chaotic space in which there was no way of telling where the half-light ended and objects began, where air and substance clustered together, did they see that they were not alone. Tiny interior lamps, beneath whose malarial gleam, lighted some of the cars as if under the candles before church icons, hung gothically elongated human faces. Some of the cars were full to bursting, in others there were only two figures, a man and a woman, and some cars had only one passenger, most often behind the wheel, stiff and lifeless as if struck down by lightning. The scene was incredible, unreal, and unnatural. For a moment Reuben Abner thought that the people in the cars were dead, that with the passage of the storm, the car park had been swept by a flash fire leaving behind it only the burnt out structure of the building and dry, withered shells of people. That they were alive, very much alive, he realized as soon as they went up to a darkened Ford and tried to force their way into it. The light in the car was suddenly switched on. An elderly gentleman was sitting at the wheel. He was wearing a dark, city suit with a bowler hat on his head. But instead of completing the pattern of an employee of some London bank with a rolled-up umbrella, in his hand he held an oily monkey wrench and his eyes were filled with a savage readiness to use it, if they continued with their attempt to break in They withdrew in search of an empty car. They understood now why all those people were there. Just as those who had been caught in the quarantine in families, they had gone off on their own, shut themselves away in their car-fortresses, perhaps they were even their own cars, and defended themselves from rabies, indifferent to everything that was going on outside, with their solitude and their monkey wrenches, the only available weapon after the realization that the vaccine would not protect them. Reuben Abner wondered when the remaining human communities, the sentinels of humanity in retreat, would fall apart, and those people at Heathrow with their monkey wrenches would find themselves alone in the great darkness where everything would remain as if spellbound in a charmed stillness, and only the uniting force of rabies, would move from one to the other like poisonous breath. *****

In a black London taxi, Mr. and Mrs. Makropoulos, the couple from Athens, were protecting themselves from rabies by their solitude. London taxis had a significant prophylactic advantage over other passenger vehicles. A movable glass barrier separated off the driver from the passenger seats and so reduced the possibility of infection, already halved by their withdrawal from the world. Mrs. Makropoulos was sitting in the front seat, and behind her, walled off by the glass and surrounded by cases, sat her husband, Constantine. He too had a monkey wrench in his hand, but thanks to his wife, it was no longer dirty. He had been obliged to wipe it clean. She had not wanted in their flight from rabies to pick up some other infection. They had been running away from that accursed rabies from the very beginning of the quarantine, and they had been caught up in it through running away from other ailments, which that idiot of a doctor in the Medical Centre had assured them that they hadn’t got. Her husband, that wooden, immobile object behind her on who she could count about as much as on a coat hanger, had his own stupid conviction. He asserted that they would have caught the plane to Athens, the last one to have taken off from Heathrow, if it had not been for her insane idea of taking the disagreement with Dr. Komarowsky as far as the Airport Authorities. Now he was sitting behind her like a mummy, separated by the glass and by something else, which she didn’t yet know of. A certain feeling of rebellious malice. And she had been the one who had found the Lebanese, Haron, and got them as far as this. If it had been left to Makropoulos, they would already have been rabid. The deal, of course, had made her angry. The Lebanese had refused to accept the obvious fact that he was taking only half a man in her husband, and had demanded a full price for him too. All right, so she had paid it. She couldn’t have managed the cases by herself. But she was sure that she had paid at least a third less than the fare the Lebanese extracted from others. He’s no thankfulness at all, thought Mrs. Markopoulos of her so-called husband. He hadn’t even given her what she had married him for – something special in life. Not even what the most miserable Greek peasant girl from Thessalia got every Sunday night. ***** The third man with a monkey wrench on the same level of the Terminal1 Car Park was Suarez, the Spaniard from Villafranca del Cid. As well as the monkey wrench, he had his wife with their son still in her belly, the same son who had to be born in Villafranca del Cid. That was why he had given the Lebanese a year’s savings, and here in a battered Toyota, he could have some greater hope of his son being born there than had been the case in the rabid Terminal 2. If only his wife’s contractions would stop now, he thought anxiously. It was true they weren’t regular yet, but they seemed to him to be more violent than before, and somehow different. Before they had affected only her belly, but now it was as if when they took hold of her, her whole body was shaken. Even her jaws contracted.

Mother of God, don’t let it happen, prayed Suarez, don’t let it happen here, Bind her up, Maria, full of grace, until she gets to Spain, until she reaches Villafranca del Cid! His wife was lying on the back seat with her head in his lap. In the dry, yellow light, which fell slanting across both sides of the car body, her sweating face looked like the clay mask on an oldfashioned jug covered with varnish. She too was praying, but to another Great Mother. To the ancient Phoenician goddess Asratie, who had been driven out, first of all by the men of Olympus, and then by the Christians, but who, in the legendary form of a Good Fairy, still lurked in the forests of the Sierra de Gudar, and shut up the wombs of Castillian village girls, when they had borne enough of the children of which their men folk could never have sufficient. That was what they agreed. In that way they had a chance of being heard by at least one of the deities. ***** Reuben Abner was alone in the Renault. He and Miriam had split up to find their respective families and then meet there again. He had found his. He was waiting impatiently for Miriam to come back. He was worried that she had not yet arrived. The Terminal for domestic flights and British Airways’ aircraft flying on the European routes was much more spacious and, in an English fashion, more comfortable than Terminal 2 which was used by all the foreign Air Lines; that was certainly true, he thought, and if you were looking for someone, they were difficult to find. But the organization of quarantine life was better there, and the passengers, although with no mutual contacts, were considerably calmer. Quite clearly this was because not a single case of rabies had as yet been notified in Terminal 1. It was said that it had appeared in the intercontinental Terminal 3 and that the Anti-Rabies Committee had placed it inside the Strict Isolation Zone, but the report had not been confirmed. He tried to convince himself that there was no need for alarm, Miriam was amongst her own people, there was no rabies there, everything was all right – but he went on worrying. Then he caught the sound of a suspicious noise, a scratching at the door. He gripped the monkey wrench more firmly and looked out through the tightly shut car window towards where the noise was coming from. On the concrete he could just make out the vague outline of a human body. It lifted itself from the ground, crawled forwards and tried to reach the car’s door handle. For a moment the thought went through his mind to lower the window noiselessly and smash the wrench down on the intruder’s fingers. In God’s name, he shuddered, had he gone rabid too? He switched on the internal light in the car, It was Miriam outside. Miriam, her face swollen and covered in blood. He pulled her into the car. She couldn’t control herself. She was raving. He couldn’t understand

what she was trying to say. While he washed the blood from her face with water from a plastic container, looking for its source under her hair, he didn’t try to question her. When she got her wits back, she would tell him what had happened. In fact he knew very well what had happened. Some bastard had taken advantage of the darkness and attacked her while she was passing through the car park. It was lucky they were not in Terminal 2. The man couldn’t have been rabid. Or at least he hadn’t been ill. For the son-of-a-bitch was certainly crazy. How else could he have done something like that? Rabies had changed all the perspectives with which you accepted the things around you. Just a moment before, he had been ready to break the bones of someone he’d never even seen, of whom he had not even known that he wished to do him harm. If it hadn’t been for rabies, how could he have been glad for a single moment that Miriam had been attacked by a healthy man? Mad, perhaps, but not rabid. A shameful, filthy, perverse animal for whose good health he now thanked God. The girl was crying. That was a good sign, he thought. A sign she was feeling better. “It’s all right now,’ he whispered gently, stroking her hair, ‘take it easy, it’s all right now.’ ‘He wanted to kill me, Reuben,’ she said. She was sorrowful rather than desperate. ‘Who?’ ‘He really wanted to kill me,’ repeated the girl as if in a trance. ‘Who, Miriam, who wanted to kill you?’ ‘Osman.’ ‘Who’s Osman?’ ‘My brother. My elder brother.’ He understood. ‘Did you tell them about me?’ ‘We have to hide, Reuben. They’ll kill me.’ ‘They can’t if they don’t know where you are?’ ‘They know,’ answered the girl sobbing. ‘How?’ ‘I told them.’ ‘Hell!’ he swore and turned out the light in the car, asking himself if it was not already too late. For, where the side ramp of the entrance to the next level crossed over the circular parking ring, the darkness was disturbed by already denser shadows and the sound of animated voices cut through the grave-like silence of the parking lot. The highlights of several cars were switched on at the same instant. In their shining swathes as if on the stage of a theatre in a play of life after death, a group of wild-looking men were shouting and waving their arms.

Reuben Abner too, ashamed of himself, had had something to tell Miriam from the very beginning. There was no need for any further explanation. It was there live in front of them. ‘God almighty!’ shouted the girl. ‘They’re rabid!’ ‘No, Miriam,’ he said dully. ‘It’s my family.’ His brothers! His father! His relations! His friends! His people! His cursed people! And their cursed history! They were moving from car to car as if from bush to bush of the desert manna on which their survival had once depended, as if they had only just come out of the captivity in Egypt, out of the darkness of the European ghettos, out from beneath the gas clouds of the concentration camps and only now, like fermenting mold, had risen from the dregs’ of others’ shattered history so as to, at that very Airport, that very night, find Reuben Abner and Miriam Mahmud and destroy them, and then with tranquil hearts and sols overflowing return back into oblivion. He looked in the opposite direction. Just a little earlier it would have been possible to squeeze between the cars over there and escape from the parking lot before his people reached the Renault. Now it no longer was. There too in the light of the headlights stood history. This time, the girl’s history. The Jews and the Arabs saw each other at the same moment. That was enough for war to break out. They had never needed any more than that in the old, good, healthy world outside. ***** In the black taxi, Mrs. Makropoulos was hypnotized by the Arab-Israeli war, which in the space of a few, incomprehensible minutes had turned the car park into a shouting and screaming hell. For the first time she was no longer worried for her health in individual parts, because of this or that organ, this or that discomfort, now she felt, not without reason, that all her organs together were in danger. That her very life was being threatened. For the moment, Haris to Teo, - thanks be to God, it was still a long way away from her metal shelter, she could see several cars in flames and against the blood-red backdrop of fire, dark human shapes came together and fell apart in grotesque bounds as if they were not killing each other but joining in some primitive ritual dance. She wondered if hondrokephalos Constantine, her useless husband, would do something to get them out of there, or if he would just go on sitting woodenly amidst the cases like the most immovable, useless and ugliest of them all. If she had taken her eyes away from the unreal scene in front of her, Mrs. Makropoulos would have realized, that getting up from her seat, Mr. Makropoulos was actually about to undertake a decisive action. With one hand he carefully pushed aside the glass, which separated him from his wife, with the

other, smiling for the first time since their wedding, he raised the heavy, irreproachably clean monkey wrench above her head. ***** After the outbreak of rabies at Terminal 3 and its automatic inclusion in the strict isolation area, the internal organization of the Anti-Rabies Committee demonstrably no longer corresponded to the critical situation at the Airport. Even before the crisis, Major Hilary Lawford on several occasions had pointed out the ponderousness of inefficacity of a body in which the controlling competences overlapped and tangled together, so recreating the worst possible copy of the impotent feudal order at Heathrow from the time of its apparent good health. In his opinion, only two quarantine services were really essential: Lieberman and Hamilton’s laboratory to work at the anti-rabies serum, and his security forces to make that work possible by maintaining order in the Central Terminal Area. In the circumstances of the dramatic spread of the infection, when the very preservation of life itself was counted in hours, everything else had become superfluous and simply hampered the more important work. The Medical Services were carrying out basically a police function. Its aim was not the treatment of rabies, in any case that was impossible, but the containment of the violence caused by it. The methods used for that purpose, straps, chains, handcuffs, drugs, physical force, were in short traditionally those used by the guardians of order, not the guardians of health. Logically, this task should be under the control of the Head Airport Security, not the Head of the Medical Centre. Of Hilary Lawford, not Dr. Luke Komarowsky. At the Airport, mainly due to the weakness and slovenliness of the Committee, features which for some reason its chairman, Townsend, called democratic and humanitarian, there was too much freedom of action, movement and indeed of opinion, to be countenanced in such a terminal crisis. Lawford knew better than to ask specifically for the introduction of special dictatorial powers. He anticipated that external influences, (the BAA, the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the Home Office and the Ministry of Health, the Government and Parliament) and internal factors inside the Anti-Rabies Committee, would come round of their own accord to realizing in this the most critical hour of its history where the real interests of Heathrow lay, what policy would best protect them and who should be called upon to put it into effect. The external factors, unfortunately, like inarticulate flies themselves caught up in the bureaucratic spider’s web of paralyzing interdependence and contradictory competences, were deeply interested only in preventing the spread of the infection to London, and the internal ones foolishly enjoyed playing at being a local parliament for as long as they could. Until, thought Lawford, all of them, one by one are carted off on luggage trolleys to the Central Heating Building. The disturbance in the car park had come just at the right time for him. It was eloquent proof of the urgent need for medical change at the Airport, (and it relieved him of the difficult decision as

to whether, in the highest interests, to provoke a riot with his own men). The news of the riot had reached the Control Tower during the course of one of the endless meetings of the Committee, dedicated to an ideal system of control at Heathrow. The General Manager, Townsend, who mentally and physically bore a strong resemblance to the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald, and who at each more worrying piece of news reacted with the words: “Oh dear, dear, this is really most unfortunate, what shall we do, what shall we do, what shall we do?” in an effeminate Oxford accent, whilst sitting firmly on his arse and for the most part doing nothing, on this occasion also proposed that the situation should be approached without undue hastiness and handled with kid gloves. Lawford had had more than enough. He replied that the only gloves he believed in were boxer’s gloves that he didn’t give a damn for all the rest, but that if any of the gentlemen of the Committee wanted to go along to the car park in kid gloves, as far as he was concerned, they could. Townsend couldn’t get out of it. With Major Lawford and a specially equipped riot squad of Airport Security men, he went to the car park a few minutes after the Fire Brigade. The situation was by then completely out of control. The Rapid Intervention Vehicles could do nothing. The savage fighting prevented the firemen from getting near the burning cars. They blew up one by one like a chain of linked bombs, and flying splinters of red-hot metal cut through the smoke-filled darkness for yards around. It was at once clear to Lawford that this was no longer Arab-Israeli conflict as had been reported to the Control Tower. It was a ‘world war’. But rabies had distorted things here too, for there were no belligerent powers or immutable frontiers. Everyone was fighting everyone else. And it looked as though there were no classical weapons either. They were killing each other in a good old Neanderthal fashion, with stones and fists. That it was really the 20th Century and a car park at Heathrow and no Cromagnon cave, could be seen only from the monkey wrenches, the lines of cars, the metal splinters and the occasional bread knife. The car park was rabid without a single rabid man. Through a megaphone, General Manager William Townsend tried to spread Christian ideas, which no one heard against the explosions and the shouting. Major Hilary Lawford didn’t interfere; he was letting the ‘kid gloves’ get dirty, and waiting for his moment. He set out his men in a double cordon in assault formation around Car Park 1 along the Airport’s Calshot, Conway and Croydon Roads and the Inner Ring East, posted special elite detachments at the exits and waited. He would wait another two minutes for Townsend’s ‘soft’ methods to be completely compromised, and then he would take matters into his own ‘gloves’. At his command the AS men would open fire without warning and shoot to kill.

Mr. Townsend could make his protest later. If he was still able to, thought Major Hilary Lawford. ***** An hour later, the Suarez’ were back in Terminal 2. Suarez had memorized the route by which he had been brought to the car park. The Lebanese didn’t try to stop him. He didn’t think that there could be anyone foolish enough to want to go back amongst the rabid. The Suarez’ went back. After what had taken place in the car park, they somehow thought they would be safer in the midst of rabies. At least there you knew who was rabid and who wasn’t. Those who were ill were restless, thirsty, sweating, foaming at the mouth, they clutched at their throats, writhed in convulsions, sometimes even barked like dogs. The Airport Security Officer in front of the car where they had been lying on the floor had talked with a grey-haired gentleman in civilian cloths. He had not barked. He had been calm and polite. It had seemed more likely that the grey-haired, elderly gentleman had been rabid, or at the very least, deranged. But even so, when they had separated and the elderly gentleman had turned his back on the AS officer to move away, the AS man had hit him on the back of his head with his revolver. Who then could hope to be saved there?

25. The tragic death of William Townsend, the General Manager of Heathrow, ‘Uncle Bill’ as he was known to everybody, during the disturbance in the Car Park, sliced through the Gordian Knot of the discussion surrounding the ideal organization of power at the Airport. At their first meeting after the event, the Anti-Rabies Committee observed a minute’s silence in respectful memory of the former Chairman, and then, by fifteen votes to two, (Dr. Komarowsky and Dr. Hamilton), and one abstention, (Daniel Leverquin) transferred all authority to Major Lawford. This decision was confirmed fifteen minutes later by radio from 10 Downing Street, the BAA at Buckingham Gate, and the other parties concerned, and sixteen minutes after his election, Lawford gave his first administrative ruling: he dissolved the Anti-Rabies Committee and in its

place declared Martial Anti-Rabies Law, consisting of one single article. In order to be understood by everyone, it was short and straightforward. He announced to the quarantine that from that moment, all authority at the Airport was in the hands of Major Hilary Lawford. At first, this dramatic event, which completely escaped the notice of the majority of people inside the quarantine, hardly seemed as if it would cause any particular change in the life at the Airport. The transformation of the Control Tower into a fortress for the ultimate withdrawal of the healthy, (and necessary), and their final separation from the sick and the healthy, (and unnecessary), in the event of the possible breakdown of organized life at Heathrow, was carried out in strict secrecy, and could not, therefore, cause anyone any disquietude. The list of the healthy (and necessary) was compiled by Lawford personally. It began with Lawford himself and a number of elite personalities from AS detachments, took in Lieberman’s scientific team, but not Dr. Komarowsky’s doctors, since without effective vaccine there was no point in risking the spread of infection through contact with the sick patients, and concluded with the writer Daniel Leverquin. Lawford wasted a certain amount of time before writing down Leverquin’s name. The need for an official chronicler, a court poet, finally overcame his personal antipathy. The fact that Leverquin by his abstention had in fact voted against him, in practice meant nothing. Leverquin was a ‘rotten liberal’, neither flesh nor fowl but simply small intellectual fry, who at the rabid Airport could not even breathe honestly, and certainly in no way engage in subversive action. If he explained the news order to him properly, the bloody idealist could not possibly not see for himself that only he, Lawford, ‘Iron Heel’, could save the Airport from annihilation, stop it becoming a threat to the English world and to Leverquin’s beloved humanity. No one so revered strength as those who in principle were against it. Leverquin would make the best of it. What was more, artists were like cattle. There were very few of them who could not be bought. In the main, the reorganization concerned the isolation of Lieberman’s laboratory and the Control Tower, from which the whole of Flight Control was evicted, (healthy, but unnecessary). The only thing that affected the quarantine directly and which was noticed was the more aggressive and energetic functioning of the security organs and as a direct consequence, the rapid elimination of rabid people from the Central Terminal Area. And that was something, which could only be approved of, even when by mistake there occasionally were taken off with them the ‘possibly rabid’ and sometimes even the quite healthy, which had behaved in some way out of the ordinary. The vast majority of healthy people approved of this stricter policy towards those who were ill, since it gave them a feeling of security. Those who were ill, of course, had their own opinion about it. Quite abnormal, of course, and nobody even bothered to ask them.

Lawford needed the support of public opinion, whatever he might otherwise have thought of it, in order to carry out his sanity measures with as large as possible a population consensus. He would carry them out, if necessary, even without it, a consensus of higher interest was sufficient for any measure, but popularity made his job easier. For that reason he decided to make an inaugural speech to the quarantine to set out his plans for the future. A TV team from the BBC had been stranded at the Airport after the departure of the Russians. Although most of them had become rabid, there were still a number of healthy cameramen. His speech would be transmitted throughout the Terminal over improvised screens, the very same on which the passengers had once been given information regarding the landing and departure times of their flights. He also wanted to prepare his audience mentally for a vision of the New Heathrow. For that purpose, a news local station came into being, immediately christened RSH, Rabies Station Heathrow, and before his appearance the Rev. Gregory Cameron would broadcast a religious service from St. George’s Chapel. While waiting to be made up for his broadcast the service was already in progress. Major Hilary Lawford in Townsend’s old office guarded by AS men put the finishing touches to his speech. On the table by the text of his speech lay an American handbook for the control for rabies, which had served as his inspiration, and to some extent as his model. It was the ‘MODEL RABIES CONTROL ORDINANCE’, published by the AVMA in 1966, the Commission for Public Health and Regulation of Veterinary Medicine. The Handbook related to animals, particularly dogs, but since the Heathrow Rhabdovirus turned people into animals, also in the main, dogs, there was nothing else for it but to treat them as such, taking into account, as far as that was practical, that they had nevertheless once been people. To maintain such a balance had been the most difficult part of his task in composing the MRPR, the MARTIAL RABIES PREVENTION REGULATION, the proclamation of which in his speech would mark the beginning of a New Era at the Airport. He read the text over carefully. He still had time to polish it, strengthen a point or two here, and soften an order there, although he saw no need to weaken any of it. In the long run it was always the best thing to tell dogs, or rather people, the truth. Not to allow them to discover it as something quite different from the lies which had been served up to then. Churchill had not lied to the British people when he had promised them only ‘blood, sweat and tears’. Perhaps he had been an optimist, but he had not lied to them. He thought very highly of ‘old Winnie’. You couldn’t have expected anything more from a man with Parliament always hanging round his neck. But he had no conditions hanging over him, no kind of Parliament. There would be no excuses for him if he failed. The key to success in the fight against rabies was the coordination of controlling activities. That was why the very first paragraph of the MRPR envisaged the strategy

for prevention as being in his hands, and that its execution should be delegated to specialized teams of ‘epidemiologists’, about which he intended to talk in more detail later in his speech. The following paragraph dealt with the obligatory registration of healthy and sick people. Everyone in the quarantine would be issued with two cardboard plaques, somewhat larger than a dog collar, which they would display on their backs and on their chests. The registration would be renewed every morning and would be valid until the next one. Without it, no one would receive the daily food ration, nor other necessities. Unregistered people would be considered ‘stray’, or ‘wild’ people and treated as infected. As far as treatment was concerned, that would be made more explicit in the second part of the speech. The effective number of the Airport Security forces with their attached units of the Metropolitan Police and Customs Service, had continually fallen, partly because of the disease, and partly because of the fierce4 fighting with sick people, or healthy ones in the quarantine who behaved as if they were sick. Therefore, one of the paragraphs of the MRPR ordained that families, or where there was no family, corresponding ethnic groups or trade unions, should take care of their own rabid members, until the Airport authorities could take charge of them. Since the transition from passivity to aggression could not be predicted, sick people were to be kept on a leash, a chain or some other safe means of restricting their movement. Any rabid individual found within the limits of the Central Terminal Area unaccompanied would be terminated on the spot. Any unregistered person would be considered rabid and also terminated on the spot. If there was evidence of a large number of members of individual families, ethnic groups or trade union coming into conflict with the provisions of the Regulation, their leaders would be held responsible and terminated on the spot. From his personal experience, more people fell ill during the day than during the night, since they moved about and lived more actively during the day; men were taken ill more rapidly than the more passive and more prudent women; hence the ban on movement both during the day and during the night. A curfew was introduced for the whole of the 24 hours. Anybody found moving between 00.00 hours and 24.00 hours would be terminated on the spot. It was also stipulated that all inhabitants of the quarantine, both rabid and healthy, including officials, would be obliged to wear dog’s muzzles over their heads at all times, anyone without a muzzle would be terminated on the spot. A large consignment of muzzles had already been ordered from London and he wished to set a personal example in the observation of this regulation by appearing on TV with a muzzle over his face. In the second part of his speech, he dealt with the action to be taken with regard to the infected. The action envisaged was classically straightforward: 1. Patients infected with rabies to be terminated. 2. Anyone suspected of suffering from rabies also to be terminated. 3. Anyone not suspected of suffering from rabies, but behaving as if they were rabid, also to be subjected to termination.

4. Any healthy person who in any way or for any reason hindered the termination of those infected with rabies, also to be terminated. He didn’t want to go into the details of the ‘termination techniques’. For it to be effective, the speech could not afford to get bogged down in specific complexities. He had to win over the hearts of the quarantine by basic truths. Personally, however, he preferred the bullet to any other methods. He had unfortunately to bow to practical difficulties and leave the job to lethal doses, injected intravenously. He had contemplated the use of gas, calcium cyanide or carbon monoxide, in the hermetically sealed BA treasury depots, but they were all located in the warehouses outside the Central Terminal area, and their conversion to gas chambers would have requited an extension of the quarantine outside its present perimeter. The greatest difficulty was the matter of rapid diagnosis of the disease. While still in the hands of medicine, while the rabies had been of the old-fashioned, Pasteur type, specimens from the patient, positive to Negri bodies and CF antigens had been diagnosed as hydrophobia, but the final confirmation of the diagnosis had always been given only through the laboratory isolation of the virus. At Heathrow, because of the abnormal virulence of the disease, this practice had had to be abandoned from the very first day of the epidemic. Those infected died before any result could be received from the laboratory. Death has become the final confirmation and was attained very quickly. Everything else, therefore, has become an external symptom. The problem with these had been that they did not appear at once, and in the meantime the infected person could infect others; and when they did appear, they had rarely been the same. The veterinary handbook of the AVMA had not been of particular help to him in that. Many of the dogs, which from clinical symptoms were suspected of being rabid, were proved not to have been so by autopsy when they had been killed. Many others, which had not been suspect, had in fact turned out to be infected. Without the isolation of the virus, one could know nothing for certain. With time running out he had had to find a more certain indication than the clinical one. He had found it in the concept of BIZARRE BEHAVIOUR. All of the infected with hydrophobia behaved in one way or another, abnormally. From that fact it had been possible to arrive at the following two regulations: 1. Where examples of individuals behaving abnormally were reported or where it might be suspected that individuals without protective clothing had come into contact with such instances of abnormal behaviour, such individuals to be terminated as rabid. 2. It would become obligatory for everyone to report instances of individuals behaving abnormally, failure to do so to be considered abnormal and to be terminated as rabid. (The comment of Dr. Tara, a veterinary surgeon from the Philippines where rabies was endemic, and who he had taken on as a medical consultant, that in fact in such a situation it was quite

normal to behave abnormally, had been interpreted as abnormal behaviour and the doctor had been terminated.) From the statistics in the AVMA handbook he had discovered that of 660 rabid animals investigated between 1948and 1954 in Tokyo, only 85 (12.9%), had exclusively human food in their stomachs, 84 (14.2%), had a mixture of human food and other material, 256 (38.8%), had only other material, lime, stone, wood, glass, and 225 (34%), had their stomachs completely empty. From that he had concluded: 1. That rabid people should not be given food. 2. That anyone licking lime, sucking stones, chewing wood or swallowing glass should be terminated. For Hilary Lawford, however, the greatest problem, which he did not even mention in his speech, was the density of the Airport population and the resultant proportionately greater danger from the spread of infection. The only method which man had at his disposal for controlling rabies amongst wild animals, and he was obliged to consider both the healthy and the sick at the Airport as such, was still the reduction of the ‘vector’, the species in which the virus was domesticated, to a sufficient degree of rarity for the epidemic to die out of its own accord. Adapted to the situation at Heathrow, this meant that the less people there were, the less was the danger of the transmission of the infection. The need to thin them out preventively, therefore, had become obvious. In nature, great barriers such as rivers, seas, marches, mountains, deep snows, limited the movement of infected animals and sometimes brought a stop to epidemics. Here, eventually, he could burn several of the Airport buildings, but there was no guarantee that the fire would trap sufficient people in them and justify the risk. The ‘Trapping Programme’, which could be used in nature, was impractical here. Steel traps, camouflaged with rubbish, were contrary to his feeling for hygiene and the open spaces of the Terminals were flat, there were no declivities where the traps would be sufficiently unnoticed. A ‘Poisoning Programme’, had greater promise. The poisoning of food with strychnine wouldn’t work, since rabid people hardly ate and even those still healthy had little appetite. Poisoning with gas also was tempting. A hermetic area into which the gas could be pumped, a public bathhouse with showers, for example, could be organized relatively easily, but how would people be got into it? All those damn fool stories of concentration camps had made them somehow suspicious of mass hygiene. Even ‘you’re wanted on the telephone’, he was afraid, wouldn’t work since it was known that the public telephones at Heathrow were cut off. He placed his greatest hopes in the so-called ‘epidemiological bounty hunters’, - marksmen with .22 rifles and cartridges filled with cyanide – with the right of discretion and a good eye, paid on production of the body, as health authorities in the southwest United States had used for the control of coyotes. Disguised as ordinary passengers, they would wait at the busiest points of the Airport, such as the toilets, and shoot the surplus population. Although somewhat primitive, such a procedure would at least have an element of the sporting about it.

The BBC men had arrived to make him up for his broadcast. The television team was moving around the office, dragging cables, setting up lights, fussing around the cameras. On the large screen in the corner, the Rev. Cameron was wailing mournfully. From time to time he caught at his throat in a curious manner, modernizing his prayer with the occasional stronger expression. When he called the viruses ‘god’s fucking hired assassins’, and began to spit foam towards the heavens, Lawford realized that something was wrong. By definition that was ‘abnormal behaviour’. He made a sign to his deputy Stillman. Stillman went out of the room. Strange, although not unnatural, in no way ‘bizarre’ in the sense of the conditions for termination, thought Major Hilary Lawford, while the make-up man’s sponge felt pleasantly cool on his feverish brow. He was beginning to look at people as if they were animals, mainly dogs. Domestic dogs, and lovingly, of course. For he loved dogs. They simply had to be kept under strict control, they couldn’t be allowed to get out of hand, to become lazy. Good hunting needed a proper condition. And he had prepared himself for a good hunt. (His language too, although he hadn’t noticed it, had insensibly adapted itself to the circumstances of the dog-like life at the Airport and taken its expressions from it.) It would be rather difficult he thought, to work with the dogs at Heathrow in such a huge, almost uncontrollable pack. It wasn’t that he was afraid of responsibility, he’d manage it all right even with that pack, but it was clear to him that the task demanded all his talent for training and command. As had the higher idea which would give his role a deeper sense than that of a simple epidemiological programme. The practical side of the programme was well organized. He could be satisfied. The apprehension of ‘stray’, ‘wild’ people for termination was already being carried out with the help of the ‘dog-catchers’ service to which had been recruited, in addition to the medical attendants, unemployed aircraft crew members, Customs’ men, immigration officials, and all those passegers who had shown a special zeal in the reporting of people who had become infected. In the AVMA handbook, he had read of dogs, which had finally learnt to keep well away from the control teams. For that reason, he had dressed them as doctors. And on the whole, he thought, from the epidemiological aspect, things were going well in the field. He was worried about the ideological side. Even the most perfect empirical acts would have no sense unless they were inspired by an idea. He, of course, had one. But he was worried by the problem of whether he could make it understandable to the Airport. Would Heathrow understand that the right to freedom didn’t exist, that there existed only the urge to survive. And that survival did not depend on the continuing existence of this or that individual, but on the preservation of the community, on the survival of the pack. If dogs could no longer be preserved, at least the canine idea could be saved. As soon as Lieberman found the vaccine, he would retire.

After a certain transitional period, of course, while things got back to the normal old-fashioned routine of international air traffic. But it would be a pity, after all that had happened, if Heathrow were plunged back into its primeval chaos. If from the crisis, as usual, no lesson could be learned about its administration. If they wanted him to, he would sacrifice himself and stay to carry on his work as General Manager of Heathrow. On the condition that he kept his present authority, of course. His experience at Heathrow could be put to good use in the country. And it could be used to make the nation’s puppies learn how to think. So that a dog like him could have his hundred days! Once a powerful animal, the fearless lion, England today was a frightened, disorientated, paralytic dog, whose rabies could not yet be seen. England was in prodrome. That morning, or had it been yesterday, or the day before, or several days earlier, when had it been, when Mother Teresa, the Mother-Superior of a Nigerian convent had flown in from Rome. With love in her heart for her neighbor. With the virus in her brain, also for them. On the screen, in the pulpit of St. George’s Chapel, the Rev. Cameron was energetically gnawing at a metal cross. Then the screen went blank. When it reappeared, everything in the chapel was back in place. Everything, except, that was, for the Rev. Cameron. The lights came on and reflected their heat onto Major Hilary Lawford. He felt a sharp pain in his eyes and a desert-like dryness in his mouth. He tried to moisten his lips with saliva. Nervousness was a new sensation for him. The producer, with a pointed snout like a borzoi said: “Ready! In one minute we’re on the air.” He placed the wire muzzle over his head and tightened the strap at the back. It was quite comfortable. He was amazed that he’d been able to live without it up to then. The camera began to hum dully. St. George’s Chapel disappeared from the screen in the corner, and was replaced by his working kennel, full of authentic animal atmosphere. But he was not yet in picture. Another snout, like a Pekinese, lost in long hair barked something from the screen. (Some kind of artistic dog, he thought maliciously, some kind of damned Leverquin.) The Pekinese announced him as ‘Lawford Iron Heel’, the ‘Father of Heathrow’, and the ‘Savior of the Airport’. He regretted not having written the introduction himself. He would have added ‘the wisest police dog of all time’. And he certainly wouldn’t have called himself ‘Iron Heel’. He would have said, ‘Lawford, the Iron Paw’.

The Siberian borzoi hissed, “Let’s go!” First there appeared on all the TV screens of Heathrow Airport, a large gilt frame, from which the founder of Heathrow had been taken out and replaced by a picture of Lawford’s favorite dog, a black Alsatian. Then the camera moved gently downwards and took in its entirety, the authoritative figure of Major Hilary Lawford with a gleaming muzzle over his face. “My dear pack!” he said with difficulty and raised his head high as if searching for the moon; then he let out a long, doleful howl.

26. Nobody could really say how the trouble began. When the Leader of Heathrow Airport, Major Hilary Lawford, in the full glory of his dog’s muzzle, flashed onto the quarantine TV screen, when he had called people a pack of dogs, or not until he had begun to howl insanely? A moment later the screens had been shut down and, battered with the butts of his own dog-men somewhere deep in the darkness behind them, Hilary Lawford disappeared forever from the story of rabies at the ‘greatest aerial crossroads in the world’. What could be written on his tombstone? It was true that he had had to be radical, fresh, original. That was the experience which democracy, even without his stubborn will, he taught him. It seemed, however, that it was a principle, which he had somewhat exaggerated. But he didn’t have to become a dog. However perfect a principle, it could not have deserved that. The TV’s were switched off, but Heathrow continued to blaze. Urged on by the unreal demonstration of rabies, of which no one bothered to ask whether it was ideological or medical, but which, foaming and howling on their screens, played out faithfully a prediction of their own future, the surviving population of Heathrow, healthy and infected alike, in a lucid or frenz8ied state of mind, just as long as they could still move, everyone, that is, who was not dead or comatose, exploded out of the passenger Terminals, the official buildings, the annexes, the warehouses, and, swamping the thinned ranks of the AS guards at the frontiers of the quarantine zone, poured into the bowl of the Central Terminal area like unstoppable tidal wave, breaking down everything before it, looking for any kind of way out of that Procrustean bed of suffering and horror.

There was a profound darkness at Heathrow and a still profounder one in the people themselves. The only light, dirty and greasy as oil, shone along the avenues, plateaus and platforms of the gigantic windows in the Terminal. The only light in the people was the maddened wish to be as far as possible away from that hell. The last surviving units of the old, healthy society fell apart. There were no more families, people who loved each other, who cared for each other, enclaves of friends, inseparable couples. National and racial solidarity disappeared, if it had still been preserved even here and there. Everyone was on his own now. Everyone was running away for himself. Everyone was running against everyone else. And it was impossible to say who in that crazed human avalanche which poured along the labyrinths of the Central Terminal Area was rabid, and who had still to become so through contact with those already infected. One thing alone was clear, although still only to a small number, that there was no way out of the quarantine. The broad staircase which led down underground next to the Bus Station into the hall of Heathrow Central Tube Station, had been bricked up with a thick wall which all of those who tried to save themselves along the corridors leading from the Terminals to the Underground came up against. At first it seemed that the crowd who were trying to break through the Cargo Tunnel on the southern side of the Central Terminal Area would be more fortunate. It too was bricked up but on both sides of it, was darkness, the protective darkness of the concrete steppe in which like winged legendary giants, huge metal birds stood guard at the approaches to some enchanted town. Behind it, beyond the darkness, London was lit up. People were going on with their normal lives there as if rabies didn’t exist. The hurled themselves into the darkness. Suddenly there rose up between them and the blackness of their salvation a shining barrier of light in which London and their hopes disappeared. In the barrage of searchlight, as if in a transparent cage of light, stood tanks and armored cars, camouflaged as petrol tankers. A hundred yards nearer, the machine gun nests could be seen, barricaded with sandbags. And in the fifty yards directly in front of them stood soldiers in gas masks and full battle order. The frenzied rush slowed down and then stopped altogether. For on the other side of the barrier of light, nothing looked like human beings, like living beings at all, not even dangerous or known animals.

It was a bloodthirsty, soundless, mechanical army of dogcatchers in gas masks, which in the flickering light of the banks of searchlights looked like steel muzzles over dogs’ snouts. ***** At the same moment when the Airport at its farthest borders, where the perimeter roads marked the end of the runway, discovered that it was blockaded by the army and condemned to rabies, a group of masked and armed AS men made an incursion into Terminal 1 and began to drag away a number of those who, despite the general panic, had remained where Major Hilary Lawford’s howling had found them. A dispassioned observer, if there had been one there at the moment, would not have missed that despite the violence and brutality with which the AS men operated, they were not taking everyone, and that in their selection there was clearly some sense and order. The Suarez’ from Villafranca del Cid could not see it. They could not understand what the dogcatchers wanted with them. Both of them were healthy and the woman was expecting a child. As soon as they had told them their name, they were dragged off, scared to death, to the basement of Terminal 2 and put together with a bewildered group, which was already waiting there under guard. No one knew what was happening, where they were being taken. The worst doubts drove the remaining sane people outside to get as far as possible from the murderous machine, which, taking advantage of the chaos, was stalking the Airport. ***** At the Airport’s southern boundary, forced back from the bricked up Cargo Tunnel to the right of the Jumbo-Jet bays of Terminal 3, and from there onto the runways, the crowd of people in the darkness which seemed to offer them salvation, rushed headlong onto a three-yard high wire fence, which carried a lethal electric current. Ghostly fireworks flared up everywhere along the line of the meeting of metal and human flesh, saturating the night with the bitter smell of life, which, telescoping the gap of thousands of years, turned into coal. “What does this mean? WAS men had just forced their way into the Medical Centre and two of them in masks rushed towards him. Without any explanation, they began to drag him towards the door. He caught a glimpse of them seizing hold of Chief Sister Logan. From the floor of the hospital the groans of paralyzed patients mingled with the raving of the delirious. “For God’s sake, Komarowsky, don’t make my life any more difficult!” The man’s voice was stifled beneath the mask. “Do you know what’s happening at the Airport?” “Is that you, Stillman?”

“Yes, it is, but that’s the only thing I’m sure of for the moment.” “I’m not moving from here until you tell me where you’re taking me!” The dead AS Chief Lawford’s deputy pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and pushed it towards the doctor. “I’ve been ordered to take these people into the Control Tower.” Luke glanced at the paper. There was a list of names typewritten on it. Most of them had been crossed out, his own name had been written in in Hamilton’s handwriting. “Whose order is it?” “Lieberman’s. Professor Lieberman is now the Head of Heathrow.” Such an example of natural selection would have made Darwin happy, thought Luke. “Head of the dog catchers, is that what you mean?” “Lieberman is one of your layabouts, Komarowsky. Don’t try and be clever.” Those son-of-the bitches in white coats stuck their names in the air and all they had to do was to count the bodies.” He was angry that London has passed him over and given the job of Lawford’s successor to a scientist, and even worse, to a foreigner. “Let’s go!” “My place is here in the hospital,” said Luke sharply. “What the hell do they want with me in the Control Tower?” “You’ll find out when you get there.” “And what about my patients? What will happen to them?” “The same as if you stayed with them, Komarowsky, they’ll die.” “Where are they taking us? What’s happening?” protested Chief Sister Logan. “Don’t ask me!” said Luke angrily. “Ask that bastard of Lawford’s.” Stillman was loosing patience. He was not a dogcatcher. Especially for those gravediggers in white coats. He’d had more than enough of being insulted by people for whom he’d risked being lynched outside. “We’re withdrawing into the Central Tower,” he explained to the group he had collected. “The Airport can no longer be held.” An AS man went up to him. “Is that all, Stillman?” Stillman looked at his list. “Two doctors are missing. By the name of Suarez.” “Johns has brought them in.” “All right then, let’s go. Get your goddamn arses out of here. And keep together.” “Wait!” protested Luke. “There are still some healthy people left here.” “I know nothing about healthy people,” answered Stillman coldly. “I’ve been told only about the people on the list.” “And what about the rest of the medical staff?” What was going to happen to Moana, thought Luke. “I know only about the people on the list. Come on!” “I’m not going anywhere,” said Luke furiously. “Come on, Doctor,” Stillman moved to one side and with a sudden movement hit him hard in the belly with the butt of his machine pistol. Luke doubled up groaning.

While they were dragging him towards the exit of the Queen’s Building, he caught sight of Moana Tahaman at the door of the Treatment Room. “Moana!” he shouted, stretching out his hand towards her. “Moana!” The girl didn’t hear him. From outside came the sound of machine-gun fire, which drowned all other noises, even the doglike howling of the rabid. ***** At the northern, broken point of the Heathrow star, where the Inner Ring East and the Inner Ring West joined and converged into the Main Approach Tunnel for pedestrian and vehicular traffic entering the Central Terminal Area, there could also be heard the sound of machine-gun fire. The soldiers of the invisible blockade had opened up out of the darkness on the maddened mob of passengers who, driven back from the other approaches to the Airport, had funneled into the ventral communication plateau around the Bus Station and instinctively moved towards the tunnel. The searchlights were switched on with the first burst of firing and the massacre continued in a light as bright as day. Even then, the soldiers of the blockade could not be seen and it seemed to Henry Masterson, the former Director of Legal Services at Heathrow and a member of the dissolved Anti-Rabies Committee, before he was cut down by the bullets, that some merciless, invisible god out of that heavenly, shining halo was driving them away from life, paradise, salvation, back into death, execution, hell. A yard away from where he lay dying in Chalshot Way, nineteen yards old Joan Barlow, a ticket agent for BCA was lying in her own blood on the concrete, a bust of machine-gun fire had sliced diagonally across her thighs. A middle-aged Pakistani woman, a cleaner from Terminal 2, still in her brown, working overalls, lay at the exit of Cromer Road, near d’Albiac House. She was still alive when she was trampled underfoot in the stampede of a group of quarantine inmates, harried by bullets, and turned into a crumpled, bloodstained mass that had once been human beings. Archie Roberts, the Flight Control radio operator at Heathrow who had continued to maintain radio contact with Captain Jakobsen while the Royal Air Maroc aircraft with rabies on board had plunged towards the Atlantic, crawled groaning towards the round flower-bed next to Chard Road. He had been hit in the stomach. The concrete was burning and the cool, healing earth was so far away. The bullets of the invisible blockade swept the open space in front of the Main Tunnel. The seeds of gunpowder fell on the fertile soil of human flesh and took root in blood. In the blood of Dr. Pheapson, the doctor from the Heathrow Airport Medical Centre.

In the blood of the newspaper correspondent, Jean Carlos Oyhiane, from Buenos Aires who had come to London looking for a story. In the blood of Anvara Favzia, the custodian of the Cairo Museum, in London with the offer of an exhibition. In the blood of a student girl from Dallas, who had been carrying home from London the memories of her boy friend, which had been cremated two hours before in the Central Heating building. In the blood of hundreds of people in the quarantine who had had the misfortune, while trying to escape from rabies, to fall foul of another kind of ambush. For the Lebanese Haron, it was the happiest moment of his life. Walking proudly towards the Main Tunnel, he had been trying to work in his head, at least approximately how much his smuggling activities, most probably his last and quite sufficient to maintain him in comfort for the rest of his life, would bring in when he had been paid by all the people who he had guided across the frontier. The bullets smashed into his brain, already eaten by the virus, before he could reach the tunnel and collect. But at least he died happy. ***** It seemed to Daniel Leverquin that ‘the Father of Heathrow’ was, still ruling his life and that of all the prisoners of the Control Tower. ‘The Saviour of the Airport’, Major Hilary Lawford even from his grave, just as outside, in the healthy world, dead dictators went on ruling their peoples long after their death. The list of those chosen to withdraw into the Control Tower was without doubt Lawford’s, and at the moment of crisis, had come into force automatically. Automatically also Lawford’s ‘necessary and temporary lack of consideration for others’, was prolonged. The ‘Higher Interest’ of the Airport also continued to be the main operational alibi of the post-Lawford quarantine era. No one would be allowed into the Control Tower so that rabies could not be brought in to that last sanctuary of health and reason, so that the work of the microbiological laboratory, on which depended the salvation of the world, could not be threatened. That’s it, he thought, nothing more or less than the world, Lieberman said. If they in the Tower should be preserved, it would be simply incidental, with the world and because of the world. Shit, he thought, bloody hypocritical shit! People who, while not worrying about rabies for their comfort, denounced their neighbors to the dog catchers as rabid, in order to get hold of their shelter, in their eyes always better, always safer than the one they themselves already had, had no need of any pretexts. The will for survival had been sufficient.

But as soon as the crime moved into the intellectual sphere, as soon as it had to be committed by those who were trained to care for people, to rule them, undisguised love for one’s own skin was no longer enough. They immediately began to call on big words, big things, and the highest ideals. Immediately it was the world, which hung in the balance. That bloody world, because of which more people had been wiped out than had perished at that moment when the first man had felt the higher need because of it to kill his brother. The only thing that was unclear to him was how he had got on to the list for ‘Noah’s Ark’. Komarowsky, despite the revulsion he felt towards his own scientific past, was a microbiologist. Useful to the community as ‘Father Lawford’ would have said, that particular community, since for some other which needed an astrophysicist or a cyberneticist, he would not have been. The Finn, Dr. Hainenen, and the Japanese, Dr. Ischio Nakamura, of Lieberman’s team were epidemiologists. For Lieberman himself, Coro Deveroux and Hamilton, the choice could be more easily understood. The three of them were the heart of the ‘Anti-Rabies Project’. Without them, the serum was unthinkable. Even Logan could be of some use if influenza broke out in the Tower. The majority of those chosen had belonged to Lawford’s AS service, but there was even some sense in that. Without them, the mass would have broken into the Tower, threatened the laboratory, London, England, the world. The Suarez from Villafranca del Cid were, of course, a mistake made by the administration. They should have brought the Suarez, man and wife, virologists from Brazil. (The mistake had a kind of justice about it. For if the virologists Suarez had had to be killed, the Suarez from Villafranca del Cid would have been killed in their place.) But why had he been chosen? That was quite beyond his understanding. It has happened while, with his ‘breviary’ and pencil in his hand, he had been waiting for Lawford’s speech. He could, of course, in his ‘Rabies’ have invented it, but Major Lawford, after his assumption of dictatorial powers, had suddenly been on the brink of that abnormal behaviour, after the onset of which it was more profitable even for the most perverse imaginings to copy than to invent them. He had been in Terminal 2, in the middle of a most fruitful conversation with the grey-haired man who called himself Gabriel. The last few hours, by the way, had been full ones. Reality had been finishing both its and his story. He had sketched out a variant of the demise of Sergeant Elias Elmer, who had shot himself in the Terminal 2 toilets, already sensing quite clearly that he was rabid. While leaving his actions unchanged, he had altered their motive. His Elmer had killed himself because he had not found the murderer of Director General Upenkamph. He was satisfied that nothing could be said of the final act of the Russo-English story. It worried him. It even made him rather angry. After a dramatic beginning, and grotesque development it suddenly come to a dead end without a climax. Colonels Donovan and Rasimov had become rabid, but in the circumstances of the epidemic,

where that happened to everyone, the disease was no kind of dramatic climax. If he could not find a better one, he would have to put aside the whole damned theme. And replace it, eventually, with the Lieberman-Stadler-Sorensen one, if anything came of it in reality. And if nothing did, in any case it had turned out paradoxically that in a good book, Lieberman would have to be Stadler, he would have to be a war criminal to be worthy of mention, whereas in ‘good reality’ something like that could only spoil it all for him. As far as Gabriel was concerned, gradually, like a revelation which is not given one all at once, but is illuminated by an internal realization in stages, separated by dead zones of uncertainty, in a world which seemed half in darkness, with only an area of it partially illuminated, he had begun from the real Gabriel, most probably a harmless lunatic who had run away from care, with the symptoms of Dementia praecox, which ate away his memory barely a day old eve, he had begun to make out the stronger Gabriel, his Gabriel, the Archangel Gabriel, designated by Christ to guard mankind, who was here to send back the Great Beast into the primeval abyss. Just as he had done with epidemics of the Plague from the time of Justinian, or in 1347. It was only necessary to give Gabriel’s madness some sense, which had been lost in the prevalent idea that he had been brought to Heathrow because of some non-existent dog. Immediately after Lawford’s televised rabies, which had thrown the Airport into chaos, when the majority of quarantine inmates had rushed out of the Terminal in a wild panic, they had come to fetch him. He had recognized the senior of the trio of dog-catchers, who agreed that they should take Gabriel along. Evidently he wanted to be well written up in history, maintaining the truth that in despotisms only corruption helped men to survive. But Gabriel had refused to take refuge in the Control Tower. In impossible medieval language he explained that he had promised little Sue Jenkins to find the dog Sharon. “But no such dog exists”, he had told him. Gabriel gave a smile of understanding. “Oh, he exists all right, Sir, he “Because a little girl spoke to you of it in her delirium?” “Sue was not delirious.” No, she wasn’t, he thought, she was dead. “All right, so you don’t want to go into the Tower. Where will you go?” “There”. He had pointed in the direction of the Main Tunnel from where could be heard the sound of rapid machine-gun fire. “Why there?” “Sharon is there”. “Gabriel,” he insisted, “ be sensible. People are been killed at the entrance to the Main Tunnel. You’ll die for nothing.” The old man looked at him with warmth which he had never seen in anyone’s eyes before, not even in his mother’s when she was dying. “I cannot die, Sir,” he said. The AS man had become impatient. He was afraid the mob, forced back from the Main Tunnel,

might cut off their retreat to the Control Tower. “The man’s mad, Leverquin, can’t you see?” Of course Gabriel was mad. And his refusal to take refuge in the Control Tower was natural. Insanely natural. But he, Daniel Leverquin, was not mad. What then, in the name of God, had induced him to hand over his Diary to such a madman? Even if Gabriel was immune to rabies, and even that wasn’t certain, he had no apparent prospects of getting out of Heathrow alive. But that was exactly what he had done. He had taken the Diary out of his Pan-Am bag, hurriedly scrawled an address on its first page and handed it over to him without a word. Gabriel had tucked the Diary away in his inside coat-pocket, said, “Be with God,” and walked away. It wasn’t until he was inside the Control Tower that he realized that his impulsive gesture appeared no less insane than Gabriel’s search for the non-existent dog, and just as completely natural. After his conversation with Louise about Professor Lieberman’s identity, he had tried several times to go on with the Diary. He couldn’t get any further. It had somehow lost all sense. To try to urge himself on, he had even written out the introductory paragraph of the first chapter of his future novel, “Rabies’. He remembered the sentence: ‘The six electronic clocks of Heathrow Central Underground Station, on the Piccadilly line at London Airport, simultaneously indicated 07.15 hours as the train from Hatton Cross emerged with a hollow rumble from the eastern tunnel and stopped opposite the en of the entrance to the western one, where a dead-end section of the track, wrapped in darkness, led towards the end of the line …” And then nothing. Not another word. Was it possible that the reason had been his conversation with Louise, the realization that until then he had been dead? Long since dead in that real, only way in which a man could be dead, and where physical death, whatever it came from, represented simply a break with real death, and the beginning of something unknown, perhaps even of true life? Was that what Louise had done to him? Louise! Louise was still there at the Airport! He had forgotten all about her! As he’d forgotten a lot of other things! About everything! ***** Sheltering behind a concrete rampart in front of the Air Mail Building, ten Airport Security men

of those who had not been selected for the Control Tower were the first, in the name of Heathrow, to open fire on with their automatic rifles on the invisible blockade. The resistance had flared up spontaneously, and the hope that it would be able to break through the blockade came only later. Captain Collins, the commander of the southern, (from the Airport – northern) section of the blockade considered that despite the loss of a number of his men, a counterattack with light weapons was sufficient to break such isolated resistance. When he was informed of the incident, the C-in-C of the blockading troops, Major General Samuel Winterton, arrived at the scene. He was indignant about Captain Collins’ methods. ‘It’s unheard of, Collins,” he said drily. “Do you think that Her Majesty’s Government sent us here to make war on its own subjects?” “The majority of people at Heathrow are foreigners, Sir,” Captain Collins ventured to comment. “The ones who were shooting were certainly ours.” “Ours, but rabid, Sir.” “If I had been interested in people’s health, I would have been a doctor, Captain, not a soldier,” said Major General Winterton. “Put an end to this nonsense.” “How, Sir?” “A captain who doesn’t intend one day to be a general, should resign immediately; if he does intend to become a general then he must know how to deal with such things for himself,” said the general, got into his jeep and ordered his driver to take him to the northern (from the Airport – southern) sector of the blockade from where it had been reported that ten yards of wire fence had collapsed under the weight of electrified bodies. Captain Collins in the meantime ordered the space in front of the Air Mail Building to be saturated with mortar fire. Ten minutes later the shooting at Heathrow had stopped. The nonsense had been put to an end to. The unseemly civil war was over. Panic-stricken and bleeding , and further enraged at the betrayal, (or because of the virus), the survivors of the massacre at the Main Tunnel left their dead behind and made their way back from the north to the central plateau around the Bus Station, mingling explosively with the other quarantine inmates who had not been carbonized by the electric fence in the south. Then someone began to spread the rumor that Heathrow had been abandoned to and that the quarantine officials had all taken refuge in the Control Tower, from where military helicopters would ferry them to safety. Fury and fear destroyed the last difference between the healthy and the sick, unifying them all in a single idea, a fierce desire to break into the Control Tower, to grab for themselves a place in a helicopter, that Angel of Salvation of the End of the World.

In the grey island dawn, the Noah’s Ark of stone, glass and metal stood like the Biblical original before the flood, gloomy, shut-off, inaccessible to the human misery, which splashed round it. Anything outside was doomed. Measured on the scale of humanity, found wanting and cast aside. Already dead, although still moving from inertia. Very soon, outside the Ark, outside the Control Tower, no living thing would be left at the Airport. But that wouldn’t happen all at once. The Airport would first of all undergo the violent biological transformation of which microbiology, as preached by Frederick Lieberman, dreamed. The only thing was, that this time, evolution would wind it backwards. For millions of years animals had been climbing up the tree of life to pluck the fruit from its uppermost braches, awareness of themselves and the sense of their own existence. Within a few hours they would fall back to the ground as animals with no understanding of it. Thanks to the endless, excruciating climb up the tree by their ancestors, dogs had been born as people, the people at the Airport would die as dogs. The greatest aerial crossroads in the world would become its greatest kennel. As to whether there has been understanding, or only a presentiment of that future who would know, but everyone acted as if it were immediate. But not all in the same way. Even in that terminal crisis of humanity, there was idealism, which did not care only for itself, which was ready to sacrifice itself for others. Sergei Michalewsky, a stockbroker from Amsterdam deduced from the likeness of the outline of the ground plan of Heathrow to the Star of David, and the fact of the rabies epidemic, that the two were linked by some occult relationship, that the Jewish symbol had attracted the disease by its demoniac shape, and that as a consequence, the Jews were to be blamed for all the Airport’s misfortune. , From a broken window in the Queen’s Building he incited everyone to join in a pogrom, stating that there would be no difficulty in identifying the culprits, he knew those dogs by their very smell. An American in a Stetson on the roof of an abandoned fire engine called on ‘the children of holy rabies’, with him at their head as the prophet of a new faith, to accept the disease as God’s gift, to ride on the back of the Great Rabid Beast and give themselves up to the blessed harmony of madness. There were other speakers who raised their voices too. They spoke with fiery intensity against prosperity and poverty, peace and war, health and sickness, America and Russia, this or that continent, this or that race, this or that faith.

In the meantime, the realist mass mounted an attack on the Tower. But there was no entreaty, threat, force, which could force an opening in Noah’s Ark. The windows of the two lower floors were blocked off with metal shutters, the entrance door was strengthened with steel and barricaded, and AS marksmen were posted at the windows of the third floor and upwards. They killed only those who stubbornly crawled up the wall in their efforts to reach the third, undefended level. Or those, who having dispossessed the prophet from Texas, tried to storm the upper windows by raising the fire engine’s turntable ladder against them. The Head of the Tower defenses, Stillman, was categorically against firing at everything that moved in front of the building, so called preventative killing. That it was preventative, that was quite clear. Everything outside the Tower was hostile and had to be killed preventatively. But for that kind of ‘total solution’ there was not enough ammunition. He had to suppress the instinct, exclusively human, to annihilate everything living that wasn’t useful, and another, also human, that sometimes destroyed even what was useful if one derived some pleasure from it. Stillman ordered the mob to be doused with fire hoses. Dense streams of water hissed down onto the square in front of the Tower. Those already infected writhed in agonizing convulsions. Those still healthy went on with the attack. There was no way into the Tower. ***** Nor was there any way out. Daniel Leverquin tried everything he could to get out, the AS guards would finally have let him go, regarding him as a lunatic whose ‘abnormal behaviour’, according to Lawford’s classification, merited a ‘terminal solution’, in other words, a bullet in the back of the head, but the metal shutters could not be raised and the doors unbarricaded without the risk of letting the mob through them. From Townsend’s former office in which Major Lawford had turned into a dog, through the window which was too high up for him to climb out of, he could see the illuminated outline of Terminal 2, and on the apron on which in more healthy times had stood taxis, under a streetlamp, Louise. It seemed to him that everything that had happened at Heathrow from the time he had got out of the train at Heathrow Central Station was just an evil dream, delirium, from which he had awoken just in time to see Louise Sorensen waiting for a taxi to take her back to town, in time for him, if he hurried, to catch her up and go back with her. Sometimes, he had been able to control his imagination, and, like a microscopic filter, which allowed only adapted material to pass through, hold it up between him and reality. That was what had made him a writer.

It was disgusting, indeed unworthy of the misfortune, which had fallen upon the Airport. It was cowardly to imagine that Louise down there was waiting for a taxi and that she was quite all right, when in fact nothing was all right and the only thing she could wait for where she was standing was death. She couldn’t see him, the window behind which he was standing was iodized, but she was still waiting there, a lonely, vulnerable figure at the taxi stand without taxis, at the Airport without aeroplanes, amongst people without hope, looking upwards in the direction of the Control Tower. He remembered that he had still not opened the envelope, which she had given him after their conversation about Professor Lieberman. He took it out of his pocket and opened it. In it were several yellow, worn photos. The first one showed a beautiful woman of about thirty in the striped clothing of a German concentration camp. Her head had been shaven, and she looked like a rather gentle, effeminate young man. On the back was written: SUBJECT AK 25, BEFORE TREATMENT WITH RRR SERUM, AUSCHWITZ, 1st FEBRUARY 1944. In the second, something had happened to the woman’s face; but it was still deep beneath the dried-up skin, which had changed its expression, although no single feature had moved. The potential transformation was there, its aim uncertain, mysterious in its scope, uncontrollable in its force, but the face still resisted. The physical shape remained proudly undiminished, defined by its personal, particular, idiosyncratic genetic material. On the back was written: SUBJECT AK 25, AFTER SEVEN DAYS OF TREATMENT WITH RRR SERUM, AUSCHWITZ, 7th FEBRUARY 1944. In the third picture, it looked as though it was another person who had been photographed, different from the first, but not in the way that two human beings are different, but like man, however far removed, from an animal of the order of the primates. And only the designation AK 25 on the back of the photo attested to the fact that it was the same beautiful woman as in the first one, AFTER 14DAYS OF TREATMENT WITH RRR SERUM, 14th FEBRUARY, 1944. The mysterious force, like a terrible underground biological explosion, had broken the resistance of heredity and reworked the face in accordance with its own genetic code. But the most terrible thing of all was its frenzied expression, virtually identical with that of patients in the frenzied stage of the disease in the Medical Centre. In the fourth photo, the face had undergone no further change, except that the woman was clearly dead. On the back was the information that: SUBJECT AK 25, TREATED WITH RRR SERUM FOR 21 DAYS, and that with no further reasons given, TERMINATED 21st FEBRUARY, 1944, AUSCHWITZ. And one more truth became clear to Daniel Leverquin. The face in the photo was to all intents the same as the face of Louise Sorensen.

When he lifted his eyes from the photo, she was no longer at the taxi-rank. In her place, a man in the uniform of a Pan-Am pilot was crawling along on his stomach and greedily licking the asphalt. ***** The improvised microbiological laboratory on the fifth level of the Control Tower was not completely isolated, it had once been the office of the Heathrow Administration, and the convulsions of the rabid Airport could be heard there as if the howling and the shooting were in the centre of the building itself. Nevertheless, Professor Frederick Lieberman heard nothing. The sound isolation was within him. The complete isolation of indifference for everything which was not going on in the electronic nerve system of the AMCO-781computer, the most powerful artificial brain in the world, which the Japanese had reduced in size to a 3x2x0.90 meters large encyclopedia, capable not only of providing information on any question in the sphere of molecular biology and genetic biochemistry but also of carrying out independent6 calculations for the logical projections of any theoretically possible experiment. Professor Lieberman was alone. The moment belonged exclusively to him. He didn’t want to share it with anyone. He knew that Hamilton and Deveroux were disappointed that he wasn’t working with them in the general area of the isolation of antigens, even the approach to his part of the fifth level was out of bounds to them and they had been detailed for the process which was officially known as a ‘control’, but in the slang of laboratory technicians, as ‘clean pants when everyone else’s are crapped up’. He couldn’t risk anything. Hamilton was too well acquainted with experimental practice. He would at once have realized that, together with the fact that the Heathrow Rhabdovirus was his, the Lieberman recombinant DNA, he had not told them the whole truth. And Hamilton wasn’t yet ready for it. And not only him. No one at the Airport. No one in the world. He could only expect understanding when the serum SH-RRR, (Super Human Rhabdovirus Regenerative Recombinant) in the form of two strong doses was safely in the refrigerator, and in the process of demonstrating its power on the first pair of patients. The serum, for which he was waiting on the opinion of the AMCO-781 regarding the percentual probability of its biochemical structure corresponding to the declared aim of the experiment. For all his coworkers and everyone in the Control Tower, the serum was simply ARS – the antirabies serum. For him personally, it was temporarily SH-RRR. The code, relatively precisely, if not yet in meaning, certainly in form, described the material and the aim of the recombinatory process which was achieved by the serum. When it was successful, and that was now only a matter of minutes, when he received the

confirmation of the independent superhuman brain, he would do what all the other scientists had done. Stanley Coohen from Stanford had his PSC 101, (Plasmid Stanley Cohen 101), and then there were PTC and PPL, (Plasmids Charlie Thomas and Phil Leder), like the Francis Krick series – FHC/0, FHC/1, and so on. He would call his DNA recombinant: S(upper) H(uman) R(egenerative) R(ecombinant) F(rederick) L(ieberman) 78, where the number stood for the last, successful recombination of the rabies’ virus which he had been working on since the beginning of his scientific career. It would be more correct, of course, to call it SH-RRR-SS, but the world of little people was not yet ready to receive his truth. It had burnt Giordano Bruno’s, forced Galileo shamefully to retract his, mocked at Darwin’s. He would be appalled by his. The world of little people was never ready for great truths. The Pope himself would be frightened to death if the existence of God were proved to him beyond doubt. The computer went on thinking soundlessly. In the depths of its hardware loops, its memory was blossoming. Multicoloured light impulses proclaimed the end of a chain of mathematical combinations and the beginning of another. In a few minutes, like in some fateful lottery, the number of his life would come up on the AMCO-781’s black screen. Just a little before he had been seriously considering what a man, cured of the Heathrow rabies and the limitations of his heredity with the help of SH-RRR-FL-78, would attain in combination with a computer of the AMCO-781 type. What would he get from a perfect intelligence which would be forced on him. Nothing, in fact. His man only without freedom of choice. He would lose his freedom of unlimited action, which would place him beneath other animals on the zoological scale. Rigorous logic would replace the rigorous ethics which he had only just shaken off and which had not allowed him to develop beyond his inherited possibilities. He would not even be able to take advantage of the super-human powers he had been given, not because they were amoral, but because, incapable of being corrupted by personal interest a human AMCO brain would be obliged to proclaim them illogical, and because of that, unusable. After SH-RRR-FL-78 a intellectually perfect model of a man, say an SH-AMCO-RRR-79, even if it were practically feasible, laboratory possible, in real life would be something less in its capacity for real life survival than an Australian aborigine, of use perhaps exclusively for isolated, protected colonies of super scientists without any real power, and not at all as beings which ruled the world. The illuminated ruby eye of the artificial brain announced by its intermittent flashing that the result could be expected on the screen at any moment. It was the unrepeatable sacred, fascinating moment, which in an agony of doubt, fear, uncertainty, despair and numberless disappointed hopes, every scientist waited for for years, sometimes for decades, and which the majority never experienced. It was a moment of the highest, divine perception, a moment of revelation, when the truth, fostored in vitro, in the turmoil of one’s own brain, was turned into a truth in vivo, which would

change the fate of the world and of mankind. It was his serum. His SH-RRR-FL-78, which would cure the people at Heathrow of rabies. The ANCO-781 was explicit in its logical diagnosis. The efficacy of the SH-RRR-FL-78 serum reached a figure of 99.09% of logical probability. He had been successful. With a weary smile on his face such as had not been seen for a long time, he moved away from the computer control panel and went off to wash his hands before announcing to Heathrow the news that it was saved. ***** How long passed before the crows in dull resignation moved away from the wall of the Control Tower and dispersed through the Terminals and the other buildings of the Central Terminal Area no one knew. All powerful - the time to which everything had once been subjected, no longer meant anything. The clock ticked only in the microbiological laboratory on the fifth floor of the Tower. Only there did time have any sense, and only there did something still depend on it. From the entrance of the Main Tunnel to the Bus Station stretched a concrete desert on which lay the bodies of those who had been killed in the massacre of the night before. Over them, here and there, like faithful dogs over their dead masters, knelt the guards of the new race, the race of the rabid. There was no one between the abandoned crematorium in the Central Heating Building and the low, lateral wing of the Control Tower. No one paid any attention to a shadow, which crawled along the wall of the Tower, close by the metal shutter, which blocked off the basement window. The shutters moved slightly, a hand on an invisible arm helped the shadow to squeeze inside the building. Immediately afterwards, the metal plate fall back into place. At the same moment the dawn sun bathed Heathrow Airport with the full force of its light. Reuben and Miriam Mahmud were walking along the Inner Ring West, across the central plateau of the Airport. The sun warmed them. They were holding hands. They were young and beautiful. Like life. Like nature. Like eternity. They moved towards the Main Tunnel leading out of the Airport. They passed by the dead of the great massacre who could not stop them. And by the rabid of the great mistake who didn’t know how to stop them. For they looked like strong young gods who nothing could stop. They came nearer to the tunnel and its mouth which was black and silent. A shot rang out. A single shot. Crisp, short, pure as crystal.

The girl, Miriam fell. The young Reuben Abner bent down. She was dead. He gently kissed her still live lips. He picked her up in his arms and walked on. He walked towards the tunnel whose mouth had become still blacker and more silent. No one tried to stop him. The sun warmed him. He was young and handsome, like a solitary god who nothing could stop. He passed into the black, silent mouth of the tunnel and disappeared from view. Then a second shot rang out. ***** Captain Collins had fired only when the first line of the cordon moved aside in disorder to allow the young man with the dead girl in his arms to pass. Against the clear, arched background of the tunnel entrance, on which as on a dark frame, the labyrinth-like silhouettes of the Airport shone in the sun, their faces could not be seen. They were like two holes into the mysterious world from the dark side of the real one. That made his accursed task easier. He took aim at length before squeezing the trigger of his revolver. He wanted a clean execution. And a clean conscience. The young man crumpled slowly, wavering to the ground. Not as if he was falling but as if he were laying the girl down on a bed to sleep. ***** Captain Collins, the commander of the southern section of the Heathrow blockade clenched his teeth and made a sign to the second combat line of the cordon. The sign had been agreed beforehand for just such an eventuality. The front line had lost its nerve. It had come into physical contact with individuals ‘behaving abnormally’. Therefore the front line was infected with rabies. A dense volley rang out such as is heard only from firing squads or over open graves. ***** A hundred yards from the place where Reuben Abner, the emigrant from Cracow fell, Sharon the puppy from Maggido, stood listening in the noise of firing and understood that her instinct had deceived her. The way through the tunnel was not a good one. She turned her back on it and ran back towards the Terminals. The dead whom she run past could not stop her. The rabid she passed by had no wish to. She was one of them. She was a DOG.

PHASE SIX – COMA

“It’s us who are rabid. They are just ill’. (From the Heathrow Diary of Daniel Leverquin.)

27. At mankind’s funeral, perhaps a few of man’s last faithful friends, dogs, will set up a howling, but the only creatures directly affected will be lice. One of their hairy, squat, bloodsucking breeds, which go under the fine-sounding name of Pediculus Humanis, cannot live without man. Associated with human skin from the time of man’s monkey ancestors, the unfortunate lice have lost the capacity to live independently. But they too would very quickly adapt themselves and transfer to other hosts. ‘Man, such as he is, is nature’s most useless product’, was what Professor Lieberman had said. Speaking of Scotland, Dr. Johnson once said: ‘The best thing you can say for it is that God created it for some purpose, but the same is true of Hell’. Taken together, those two comments most truly summed up the situation at Heathrow Airport on that faithful day which was the third, the fifth or the seventh since the outbreak of the epidemic. As far as the people there were concerned, it could have been the twenty-seventh. Time no longer existed, just as it no longer existed in death. But nevertheless, everything depended on it. If God created the world in six days, he couldn’t need more than that to destroy it. But how long would man take to defend himself, if that was in any way possible? For with rabies, as with God, the time was not human, nor measured according to Greenwich. Sometimes it seemed that Heathrow, infected with rabies, was a condensed projection of the world and its bloody, crazed, chaotic history, but wherever such a parallel could be seen, it was not with regard to time. What ‘outside’, in the healthy world needed a year, in the rabid one was over within a day. What outside took an hour, at the Airport was done with in a minute. When he arrived in the world, man was not aware of what awaited him. It took him millions of years to come to some understanding of it. A good part of his history, both biological and intellectual, was spent in a kind of delirium, mad with terror occasioned by the knowledge that faced with nature and his own fate, he was helpless. At last, also through the ages, he began to become accustomed to it and to adapt himself. Finally, he even began to adapt things around him to himself. But it was still a long way from coexistence.

When the passengers and Airport employees at Heathrow found them in quarantine, they had no idea of what awaited them. Time had to pass for them to understand. Everything else was delirium induced by terror, which they could not understand, because if they had it would have driven them mad, but again, it had to be understood if they wanted to resist it. At last certain people began to become accustomed, even adapted to it. It remained only for someone to try to adapt rabies to him for the history of the species to be repeated. That was how things appeared in the dimension of time. In the dimension of space, the Control Tower was the epicenter of the universe, its sun, on whose energy life depended. Around the Tower was the belt of the world of rabies, and around that, the belt of the world of the healthy. Graphically, it was the shape of a bullet with two concentric circles and a black spot at its centre. In that black spot, the two worlds, that of the healthy and that of the rabid, had their common centre, their osmotic membrane. The Tower maintained radio contact with the world of the healthy, and used helicopters for one way transport, return trips were out of the question, they lowered their wire baskets down to the glass dome of the former Airport Control. They were quite clear as to how things stood. The outside world sincerely wanted an anti- rabies serum to be found, the work of all the microbiological and virological centers in the world was directed to that aim. But in fact it was taking care only not to become infected itself. Between the misfortunes of the serum being discovered only after the virus had broken through to London, and that of it not being discovered at all, and of the virus remaining at the Airport and destroying all life there, there was simply no choice. The proof of that was tightly around them like a noose. The original sanitary police quarantine ring around the Central Terminal Area had been replaced overnight, treacherously, without their knowledge, by a military blockade. Instead of doctors’ white coats and dark blue police uniforms, along the boundaries of the Airport’s star-shaped outline, stood soldiers on a war footing; an uninformed observer looking at their ungainly protective clothing, would have thought they came from outer space. The police whistles, truncheons, dogcatchers’ nooses, handcuffs, fire hoses, teargas and automatic rifles had been replaced by tanks, armored cars, artillery, flame-throwers, heavy machine-guns and mortar bombs. Assurances and explanations had given way to an electrified wire fence which was even of barbed wire, in case of the risk of power failure, it was rumored that the barb were poisoned. An ominous silence had taken the place of the soothing loudspeakers. The silence was broken only by the noise of shooting somewhere within the Airport, when the people at Heathrow were in process of being ‘terminated’. They were not mistaken. They were in a ghetto, which, if the serum were not discovered, would

suffer the same fate as the ghetto in Warsaw. In that respect, there was no difference between a dictatorship and democracy. Tales of ‘the danger to civilization as we know it’, if the virus were to bleak through to London, were of course quite true, but nevertheless, London was taking care of itself in the first instance, and only then of ‘civilization as we know it’. The attitude of the world of the healthy towards the Control Tower was like that of a man with a poisonous snake around his neck. He would go on living as long as he made no false movement, as long as he didn’t try to throw it off. The attitude towards the rabid world was very much like that of people who knew that there was a poisonous snake nearby. They would go on living as long as they didn’t step on it, or as long as it couldn’t find a hole to force its way in amongst them. Little was known of the ‘rabid Airport’. There was no safe way of finding out what was going on in the Terminals. But everyone in the Tower had had some experience of rabies. They could well imagine what was going on there. Even with help of binoculars, very little could be seen. From time to time, between the aerodynamic contours of the building, a human figure rushed out; others, slower and shambling, dragged themselves along after it. Sometimes, on some of the platforms in front of the Terminals, or on the interconnection bridges, people took part in something, which to the naked eye from the Tower looked like a ritual dance, which only in the lens of the binocular became bloody and merciless combat. On the distant runways several jets, which had not had their fuel removed in time burst into flames and their alluminium skins blazed until they were extinguished and cooled down from helicopters of the military blockade. At night, things were livelier. Packs of dog-people gathered together on the roof of the Terminals and howled together at the moon. Other packs roamed helplessly beneath the tightly sealed windows of the Control Tower. Solitary wandering dog-like shapes sprang at the shuttered doors of the Tower, gnawed and tore at them with teeth and nails, leaving traces of bloodstained foam on the metal. During the daytime hours, it was relatively quiet. The occasional shot was heard from an automatic rifle, but no one could know whether the firing come from the Terminals or whether it had been started off by an attempt to escape from the quarantine. Since the great massacre, there had been no collective eruption of frenzy.

Rhabdovirus was making its way into the nerve system of an ever greater number of people, destroying them and driving them out of the painful light into the Airport’s darker corners. The healthy too were forced by their fear of rabies to seek shelter in dark places. Instead of gathering together in brightly illuminated areas where the light would have offered them protection, they fled into the darkness where the teeth and the nails of the rabid hoards waited for them greedily. But of the healthy there were fewer and fewer. The frenzied gradually and inevitably passed into the paralytic phase in which they became immobile, silent, and finally died. Their half-naked corpses steamed in the breath of the sun. They were dead but their viruses lived on happily and multiplied under the shine of the hereditary inevitability deposed in the molecule DNA, and even if they were individually mortal, as a specimen, they could never die. The Airport became quieter and quieter like a huge kennel from which the dogs have long since gone. That day in the Tower they calculated with certainty that by dawn, not counting themselves, not even a handful of people would be left alive on the territory of Heathrow’s Central Terminal Area. The AMCO-781, which had not been distracted by the human hope, was still more pessimistic. According to it, there was one chance in ten thousand that at 05.00 anybody at Heathrow would still be alive, as against the mathematical certainty that at 05.00 everyone would be dead. It was now 21.20 and the darkness had already penetrated into both things and hearts. ***** At 21.40, a group of five people were together in the former office of the late General Manager of Heathrow, Townsend, on the fourth level of the Control Tower, waiting for Professor Lohman/Lieberman who had given them to expect an important announcement in the near future. They were the biologists Dr. Coro Deveroux and Dr. John Hamilton, the Airport GP Dr Luke Komarowsky, the writer Daniel Leverquin and the Head of the Tower’s Security Forces, Captain Stillman They all had some idea of the meaning of the announcement, but only Hamilton knew of its details. But that was not his worry for the moment. It was the unfortunate question of Coro. He loved her, he knew that quite definitively now. The majority of the things he needed came to a man only late in life. Most often when he had no particular use for them. Wisdom, amongst others. True feeling sometimes.

Truth always seemed arrive in time to be taken down into the grave with you. He had worked at Wolfenden House fifteen years before with Coro but then he had loved only viruses. Now at Heathrow he was working with viruses but he loved Coro Deveroux. It was a world in which the only obligation was to die and everything else was a question of luck and chance. A bloody unpredictable lottery. Dr. Coro Deveroux knew nothing of the content of Lieberman’s announcement although she supposed, of course, that it was in connection with the anti-rabies serum and that it would probably be favorable. (She hadn’t worked in the main direction of Lieberman’s research, which he had processed himself, but under Hamilton’s lead on the control, together with the Finn, Dr. Heinenen from the microbiological research section of the Cutter Laboratory of Berkeley University in California, the Japanese Dr. Makamura of the virological laboratory of Tokyo’s Kitasato Institute and Dr. Iakhani, an Indian from the British Medical Research Council’s laboratory for molecular biology at Cambridge.) But in the meantime, she knew very well what the truth was for her. It was the old truth of Wolfenden House, from which fifteen years ago she had fled to Africa, only to find it again unchanged at Heathrow, clearer then ever. She had loved John Hamilton and she loved him now. There was nothing else which could have preserved her from rabies. Daniel Leverquin looked distractedly at the oil painting of Lawford’s favorite dog, hanging in its gilt, floral frame on the wall of the office behind the desk, and gradually, like an illusion, disappearing into the darkness. It was probably changed with every new Airport Director. But it was very well in keeping with anyone who found himself in charge at that moment. But uncertainty and the unexpected were the rule now. The dog in the picture, a black German police Alsatian, was beautiful, tame, healthy, certainly irreproachably trained, in short, entirely civilized. Man’s most faithful friend. One of those who, like the lice, would mourn at man’s funeral. But what guarantee was there that inside he was not rabid and that he would not, the very next second, jump at that same man’s throat? What guarantee was there that Lawford’s speech, whose text he had found in the desk drawer, had not been written by a normal policeman with a highly developed sense of duty, a deep feeling for his job and the ideal of carrying it out to the last possible detail with only perhaps a somewhat eccentric vocabulary. (Why, for example, did ideas, which simply didn’t please some people, at once have to be mad or rabid?) and that therefore, Major Lawford’s action, which had thrown Heathrow into its last rational chaos, was completely healthy, and the AS men had beaten him to death with a primitive lack of understanding of which their rifle butts had served only as a weapon? That quarantine was there that Professor Lieberman was the evil scientific monster who had turned Louise Sorensen’s mother into an animal? Dr. Luke Komarowsky was thinking about Moana Tahman and wondering why nobody had switched on the lights in the office. It was almost if they were rabid, he thought, and the lights bothered them. He got up from the chair in which he had been sitting motionless for a whole

hour and pressed the switch. The neon light flooded out of the transparent blue tubes in the ceiling and banished the darkness outside the windows, but the image of the lonely, fragile Moana Tahaman, wondering aimlessly through the Terminal stayed with him. Even when he closed his eyes, weary from his long vigil, she was still there with him. Only the Airport Security Captain, Stillman, was thinking about rabies. “For God’s sake”, he said from time to time, “where is that bloody professor?” At 21.50 the door of the office was at last opened and Lohman/Lieberman came in. In his hand he held a container with two sealed flasks full of a yellow, oily liquid which glistened like golden Rhenish wine. In a dry, laconic tone he informed those present that the SH-RRR-FL 78 single dose against the Heathrow Rhabdovirus had been successfully produced. Everyone was seized with the first burst of enthusiasm since the epidemic had broken out. Daniel Leverquin wondered whether it was possible that a Siegfried Stadler could have done that, if a Siegfried Stadler would have come to Heathrow in order to save mankind, even though he regarded it as to such a degree biologically imperfect that in Auschwitz he had insisted so strongly on perfecting it? He asked himself also where he had already heard the initials of the formula with which the professor designated his serum. Dr. Luke Komarowsky thought of those who were already dead, of his own son Ian, for whom the serum was too late, but also of those who were still alive, of Moana Tahaman, for whom it had perhaps arrived in time. Coro Deveroux thought that she had gone through a moment of mental blackout when she had been thankful that rabies had made it possible for her to be with Hamilton when in a lightning attack of ‘healthy rabies’ she had wished for the epidemic to go on longer. John Hamilton realized that now there was some sense in telling Coro Deveroux of his feelings for her, which until the discovery of the serum, in the context of the disease, would have been without sense and without hope. Captain Stillman exclaimed, “That’s bloody good now, professor” and proposed opening a bottle of whisky from the late General Manager Townsend’s official reserve to celebrate it. Coro Deveroux wanted the news to be announced immediately. At that moment people needed hope as much and as they needed the serum. But first of all Heinenen, Nakamura and Lakhani, who were still working on the parallel experiments, should be told. Professor Lieberman stopped her. He was a scientist. They had to know better what they were really dealing with. The serum had been found, that was true. The sample was enough for two intensive doses. But what the antigens’ action would be, if it would be successful or not, was a question that only a trial on a patient could answer. At that same instant, everyone except Stillman, who was busy opening the bottle of whiskey, realized that paradoxically grotesque nature of the situation.

They had no patients available. There was no one rabid in the Control Tower. “All right”, Hamilton was the first to size up the situation. “Then we shall have to go where there are patients”. Daniel Leverquin suggested that they should send AS men outside into the Airport. They had the best chance of finding someone and coming back alive. Professor Lieberman cautioned them that only an experienced eye amidst so many cases in the atmosphere of terror, which reigned at the Airport would be able to choose a patient in that phase of rabies, which was suitable for a trial of the serum. One of them would have to go along with the AS men. “I’ll go”, announced Dr. Luke Komarowsky. “Why should it be you?” John Hamilton was suspicious. Something had been happening to Luke ever since the death of his son. As if he didn’t cake if he didn’t come out of it alive. “I know the Airport better than anyone”. “What are we waiting for then?” Captain Stillman thought it natural that he should personally lead the mission. “I’m sorry, Stillman, but I’ll go alone”. Coro Deveroux regarded that as madness bordering on suicide. “It’s a real hell out there, Luke!” “That’s why”. Komarowsky looked at Stillman. “The best way for a man to pass through hell unnoticed is for him to look like a sinner, and not like a devil”. “The object is to bring at least one sick person back here, not to leave another dead man there”. John Hamilton wondered if Leverquin had the same fear. He personally was ashamed of his. Luke might be grief-stricken enough to be thinking about suicide, but he was a doctor. A good doctor. He would bring a patient back and only then look for a way out of his own misfortune. “I think that Luke is the best choice, but on condition that he doesn’t go alone. By himself he had no chance”. “On the contrary, only if I go alone. If Lawford’s gang of dog-catchers appears in the Terminal, they’ll tear us to pieces”. “Are you proposing to go out there without protective clothing?” asked Stillman. “And without automatic riffles”. “Then don’t count on me. I’m a policeman. I’m not a bloody maniac”. “We’re not asking anything more than that from you, Stillman. We don’t need corpses to test the serum”. “That’s enough of this crap, Komarowsky”, said Stillman with calculated malice. “You killed your son yourself. It wasn’t us, neither me nor Lawford”. “For God’s sake”, shouted Coro Deveroux, “what are you saying?” Captain Stillman looked at Komarowsky. With all the blood drained from his face, he was standing in front of the window, through which, in the distance, with the promise of wind for the next day, the setting sun glowed blood red. “It’s none of my business. But in the Medical Centre

it was said that Dr. Komarowsky gave his son a lethal injection to stop him suffering and it was that that killed him, not rabies”. Ian had fallen asleep immediately after he had told him that he felt ‘blissful’, without remembering anything of what had happened to him on the roof of the Terminal. He had wanted desperately to believe in an attack of nerves with phantom symptoms of rabies. He had wanted to believe that people suffering from canine rabies could not feel blissful in any phase, he didn’t want to remember how many of them in the lucid intervals before they died in terrible agonies had spoken to him of that very ‘bliss’ with longing. Her had two capsules in the pocket of his coat. One had been a sedative, and then the other one. One capsule in his left and the other in his right-hand pocket. He had taken out one of them, prepared the syringe and injected its contents into the vein in Ian’s arm. He didn’t want to know which one of the capsules it had been. Not then. Not now. Perhaps he would know tomorrow if he remained alive. But not now. “Is that the truth, Luke?” John Hamilton asked quietly. “I don’t know”, Luke answered. And he didn’t know. Not then. He would know tomorrow. Only not now. Daniel Leverquin in disgust watched the faint smile on Lieberman’s stern face, which put a triumphant end to the uninterrupted dispute with Komarowsky at the conference in the microbiological laboratory, but the professor said nothing. Leverquin turned to Stillman. “You’re a real son-of-a-bitch, Stillman!” “Gentlemen”, said Professor Lohman/Lieberman dryly. “You are forgetting that we are not here as judges but as the judged. And if we hesitate much longer we shall be simply condemned to death”. He looked at his watch. “It is now exactly 22.00. If we suppose that the test patients are given the serum by midnight, we shall know whether we have been successful at about 02.00. Otherwise, by 5.00 no one, apart from us, will still be alive at Heathrow”. ***** At 22.40 they unbarred the reinforced shutters from the basement window of the Control Tower and Dr. Luke Komarowsky disappeared into the darkness of the Airport. He had an improvised mask over his face such as it was imagined the majority of those who still survived at Heathrow must be wearing, and over his shoulder he carried a canvas bag containing his medical instruments, and a radio to maintain contact with the Tower. At Hamilton’s insistence, he also had a revolver in his pocket. At 22.45 Senora Suarez from Villafranca del Cid was convulsed by a powerful contraction. Suarez was looking for Dr. Komarowsky. He had taken a liking to the doctor from the time of their first meeting in the Medical Centre. He wanted him to bring his son into the world, the first Suarez not to be born in Spain. He had been told that Dr. Komarowsky was no longer in the building and that Dr. Hamilton would help with the birth. At 22.50 Daniel Leverquin at last remembered that the formula RRR with which Professor Lieberman had denoted his anti-rabies serum was the same one which he had seen on the back of

the photographs of Louise Sorensen’s mother, taken in Auschwitz concentration camp. At 22.55 Senora Suarez with an oxygen mask over her face was carried in the lift on a stretcher from the lower level of the Security zone into the upper laboratory area. (The functions of the Central Tower had been reduced to work on the anti-rabies serum on the middle level, armed defense of that work on the lower floors and the reporting of progress on it to London from the radio on the top floor. All the other functions of the Airport had come to a standstill.) Her husband walked beside the stretcher and held her hand. Chief Sister Logan held her other hand and measured her pulse. She was taken into the room which with the minimum of adaptation had been turned into a delivery room, where Dr. Hamilton was waiting. Beside him, also in a surgical coat and mask stood Coro Deveroux. He was thankful that she offered to help. He had not assisted at a birth since the days of his clinical practice. He had transferred immediately to the study of molecular biology and had never personally delivered a baby on his own. All his life had been passed in the company of death, in the isolation of the viruses, which had caused it. For the first time he was expected to ‘isolate’ life. He was nervous and apprehensive. They placed Senora Suarez in the office table, made more comfortable with carpets and covered with hospital sheet, beneath a spotlamp, which was brought in from the laboratory. Hamilton vaguely remembered that a mother about to give birth should have her temperature, pulse and blood pressure measured and that the position of the child in the womb had to be checked, but he had no idea of the order in which these things should be done. Logan led him through the routine procedure skillfully and almost unnoticeably, even to him. The child’s position was not too bad although not the most ideal one. The head was not jammed in the pelvis so at least from that the point of view they need not expect complications. Logan concluded non-committedly that the birth would be normal. She should have said ‘relatively normal’ but she didn’t want to worry him unnecessarily. She herself resembled those airhostesses who promise their passengers a comfortable flight while the pilot is desperately trying to retract the undercarriage which has locked itself down. Coro Deveroux began to talk to Senora Suarez in Spanish, to turn her thoughts away, as far as that was possible, from the contractions, which were becoming more and more painful and violent. Suarez’s darkened face was near the window. When she had finished shaving the woman’s vulva, Logan proposed giving her a pain-killer. Hamilton automatically nodded his head. His eyes, above the green surgical mask, were still more expressive, fixed on the woman’s vagina, which in the depths of her wide-spread thighs had begun to come to trembling life. He was mesmerized by what was happening. It didn’t help to try to convince himself that it was all quite normal, that the miracle which was just awakening was the golden gate of life, that through it a new human being would soon come out into the world. For some unknown reason he was not at all sure of that. For when with an encouraging smile Logan invited him to palpitate THAT with his fingers in

their thin rubber gloves, the gaping cervix was flooded with a greasy mixture of blood and water and seemed not to resemble those wonderful gates of life as much as the foam-covered lips of a rabies’ sufferer, opened wide to give out an agonizing scream.

27. The screams were coming from the dark side of the Control Tower. The windows which looked out to the north and the Main Tunnel were darkened. Sheltering from lighted windows on the south face of the building looking out onto Terminal 2, beneath their blind eyes, packs of dogpeople gathered together and solitary, lone individuals crouched or roamed wildly, patiently laying in wait for those people at the Airport who were still alive. For that reason Dr. Luke Komarowsky went out of the Tower on its brightly lit side. On the dark side, they would have attacked him before he could have understood the way of life of the ‘rabid world’ if there was any such system, and come to terms with at least some of its customs, so learning how to defend himself. The first ten minutes were the most critical. After that, he was in a more favorable position. He too crouched down like a dog in a narrow shade of a wall in which an opening about ten paces wide allowed transport vehicles access to the courtyard of the Control Tower. Further in front of him, across the taxi ranks and passengers vehicle set-down platform of the Inner Ring East, the steel-blue neon lit up the jagged holes in the glass of the automatic entry doors to Terminal 2, and beyond them, the shattered BA reception desks with bodies lying around them in grotesque heaps so many unneeded plastic figures in a clothes store. Although the Medical Centre in the Queens Building was in darkness, he could reach it from there, even though he doubted that there could be anyone still alive in the quarantine hospital. Or that Moana Tahaman was there. There was no life on the Terminal platforms. The motionless outlines of the bodies, scattered haphazardly where they had fallen looked like a small child’s clumsy, incongruous charcoal drawing. He glanced at the phosphorescent dial of his watch. It had taken him twenty minutes to get into a position from which he could continue his route in relative safety. If the rest of the time passed as quickly, the chances of a patient being given Lieberman’s serum before midnight were very slim. It was true that midnight was not the last, fatal time limit. That was about one minute after midnight. If the serum were successful, it would need about two hours to show its effects. Lieberman had said that a further two hours would have to be added to produce the first largescale batch.

If the trial dose were injected at 24.00 and its effects became apparent only at 02.00, by 05.00 all who were not already in a coma could be saved. The percentage was reduced with every minute that the test was delayed. If the serum were given after 03.00, it made no further practical sense. By dawn, no one at Heathrow would still be alive. If it had been HIM who was infected at that moment, the chances for the Airport would have been incomparably better. Even if the infection were at its very earliest stage. Taken into the bloodstream through an open wound, the virus reached the central nervous system within the hour. It wouldn’t even be necessary to wait for the clinical symptoms of rabies. It would be enough to carry out a biopsy of the peripheral nerves around the wound, confirm Rhabdovirus, inject the serum and by about 01.00 they would know if it worked. There was no way of predicting how many lives at the Airport that would mean, but it would be worthwhile even if it were only one. It would be worth the life he had taken when he had killed his son. It would be worth the life which might be preserved for Moana. He looked at his watch. 23.10. He had to decide at once. How long would it take him to find a patient who fitted Lieberman’s requirements? If he were in the frenzied stage, how would he tranquilize him, without which it would be impossible to get him back inside the Control Tower? He would have to search from body to body to find one in the paralytic stage. And what if they were all dead here? He would have to go into the Terminal. Anything could happen there. The sick attacked the healthy. Always the healthy, he thought, never those who were ill like themselves. They didn’t attack them to make them become like themselves, to infect them, that was not in keeping with the human system, human self-interest, but to destroy them, to maintain the natural justice of which John Hamilton had spoken. Only the healthy at the Airport attacked others like themselves. They killed them as soon as they tried to come near, killed them just in case. But both groups killed. He took the radio out of his bag and called the Tower. “Tower! Tower! This is the Airport! Like speaking! Can you hear me?” A distorted voice answered. “This is the tower. Leverquin speaking. Go ahead, Luke.” “I’m at the transport gates. There’s no material here. I have to go to Terminal2.” “Lieberman says go to Terminal 1. He thinks everyone’s already dead at Terminal 2” “Tell him I’ll go where I can and the Tower can go to hell!” “What’s like out there?” “Lousy.” “Komarowsky, what is RRR?” “Anti-rabies serum.”

“What does the formula mean?” “I don’t have time, Leverquin.” “For God’s sake, Luke!” “Regenerative Rabies’ Recombination.” The Tower broke off contact. He set of across the empty platform to the Terminal. He stopped at the first body. It was that of a woman who had clearly been well-off, but what she had looked like before her death agony was impossible to see. The strap of her travel bag was still attached to her bare left forearm. Right up to the last instant she had not stopped thinking of her belongings. From the open bag stuck out an American passport with its gold mountain eagle on the darkgreen cover. Without thinking, he picket it up and opened it. The name in it was Anderson, Margaret Anderson, Washington, D. C. He put it back in the bag. It was a common name. The Director of the CIA was called Anderson. Nearby lay a young black boy. He had not died of rabies. His chest had been torn open by a rifle bullet. He had been about Ian’s age. All along the platform the victims of madness and of rabies lay indistinguishable. He went up to a Chinaman in a deep coma. He was lying sprawled across the huge letters TRAF of the white-painted sign COACHES – THROUGH TRAFFIC written across the roadway in front of Terminal 2. His clothing was in tatters. It had been torn to pieces by his frenzied efforts to find the source of the pain, which was destroying him. Now his muscles had become paralyzed. His unseeing eyes were open wide. His skin too could feel nothing. None of his senses was working, for the nerve centre, which supplied their stipulation no longer existed. His brain was dying. Biologically, the Chinaman was alive, but he was like a clock without the hands, which could not show the time. His breathing was like the sound of the wind ruffling the dense surface of water. To force its way out, it had to break through the layer of dirty foam which covered his bloodied mouth. Dr. Luke Komarowsky opened his medical bag, took out a scalpel, turned back the sleeve on his left arm and made a long, narrow cut along the soft muscle of the forearm, the musculus flexor carpi radialis, with surgical precision. The blood dripped down the skin and down onto the concrete. Then, using the same scalpel, he removed some of the poisonous saliva from the Chinaman’s lips and spread it over the wound in his arm. ***** The sharp thread of the icy skein which was unwinding somewhere far ahead of him was leading the grey-haired man who called himself Gabriel through Terminal 2 towards Terminal 1.

The dog Sharon was there. Earlier, it had been the cold alone that had led him on. Like a tunnel through a warm night. But now he could follow its trace, a trail of whitish, glass-like hoar frost, which crumbled beneath his fingers. He would have caught up with the dog if he had not been held up in the Terminal. Most of the people there were dead, but he had come across several who were still alive. He couldn’t pass them by without doing something for them. He gently carried a woman with hair streaked with grey and wearing the uniform of the Salvation Army into the half-darkness of an Air Line counter and she was at once quite. An Indonesian was choking to death. He wiped the foam from his lips and he too became calm immediately. An Airport porter lying pinned beneath the metal base of the Astrofighter was still conscious. Not noticing its weight, he lifted the machinery off the man’s body and freed him. But he couldn’t save him from rabies. The porter crawled away whimpering to the shadow of the ruined W. H. Smith’s bookstall. On the ground floor, he met Nurse Moana Tahaman. She didn’t recognize him. She was delirious. She was picking her way between the corpses and the piles of luggage with a sleepwalker’s surefootedness. She had always shown him kindness. She had bandaged his injured temple. She had taken care of the sick in the Medical Centre with no thought for the danger to herself. And yet they had not taken her into the Tower. No, he thought, he would never understand this world. Instead, they had taken people who had vied with rabies in their killing. He took the nurse by the arm. She offered no resistance. Her body slowly lost its sleepwalker’s stiffness, relaxed at his touch. He picked the girl up in his arms, looked round for the safest place for her. He found nowhere on the ground floor. He began to go up to the next floor. He passed through the labyrinth of the Airport’s different sections, which before the epidemic had served for the ‘processing of arrival and departure passengers and their baggage’, but had now become storerooms for corpses, which of all the remarkable human processes, now needed only one, burial. On many of the doors was written ‘STAFF ONLY’, or that entry was prohibited to unauthorized persons. Such warnings looked pitiful when he was the only human being to whom they referred, the last one who would ever pass through those doors. What kind of sense was there, he thought, in dividing people into those who can and those who can’t and then making a world in which no one could do anything? he found himself in a half-dark baggage-store without windows, through which passed the conveyor belt carrying baggage. The place was empty, quiet as a church. The wide metal band on its metal rollers was silent and motionless almost like a bier.

He placed the girl on the belt. He could do nothing more for her. Then he went off to follow the white trail of ice, which only he could see. ***** Sharon once again sensed that THAT was getting near to her and that SOMETHING was behind her; that the THAT did not want to meet up with the SOMETHING. Earlier too, at certain moments while she had been wandering through the vast kennels of the Great Being, most of which gave off a smell of death but from which occasionally there came an unbearable din, he had had that same feeling. Usually it had gone away quickly. When THAT was mowing away from him. Or when it was no longer following him. Now it was again behind him, getting nearer and nearer. Breathing heavily, with his tongue down, which ran a greasy saliva, hanging out, he ran on and on. But the feeling that there was SOMETHING behind him grew no weaker. It would catch up with him. He knew that. He was an animal, instinct, nature.

28. Gregory Markovich, a member of the Airport Security Forces, was not, unfortunately, a dog and his instincts did nothing for him. He was at the end of his guard duty and his high tension control room from which the electric current was distributed around the Central Terminal Area. He felt that there was something behind him only when, savage and heavy, it was already on top of him and had begun to tear at his neck with its teeth. Then it was too late. With a sudden movement he tried to throw himself backwards and crush his attacker against the fuse boxes on the wall, but it didn’t work. As he was dying he was still unaware of what it was that had killed him. The dog-woman in the uniform of KLM who had torn his throat out had her mouth full of his flesh and couldn’t even bark. She let out the first triumphant howl over his dead body. Frank Harding, the AS man who arrived to relieve Markovich had the feeling that something was going on in yje control room. He opened the door, took a step inside and fell to the floor, his skull smashed by a blow from an iron crowbar.

The crowbar went on to batter the electric fuses which regulated the electric lighting in the various zones of the Central Terminal Area, until it finally reached the third from the right and put out the lights in the Tower itself. In the darkness, the dog-woman felt much better. ***** When the light in the Tower went out, Clive McGee, a Customs Officer pressed into service in the AS, at once thought of the KLM hostess. It was he who, immediately after the withdrawal into the Tower, had secretly let the Dutch girl, whose name he scarcely knew and could certainly not pronounce, into the building and hidden her in a storeroom next to the CTA electricity control room. At first it had seemed a perfect arrangement. He had only to hide her, feed her and screw her. That the Dutch girl had not yet found about the second half of the programme was the fault of his police duties which so far had not once taken him anywhere near her hiding place. In practice he had only managed to feed her. The darkness at last offered him the chance to get something in return for his services. He had to hurry. The darkness would not last long. If it was a matter of a serious fault, the reserve generator for the Tower would be put into operation. In the meantime, the Dutch girl would be getting worried. She would start to scream or leave her hiding. It would be found out that they had a stowaway on board. Stillman would skin him alive. Perhaps even force him to leave the Tower. It was a surprise even to him that the thought of being thrown out of the Tower was in no way frightening. Somehow his feelings towards the rabid were now completely different. He couldn’t remember why it was that the people inside the Tower hated them so much. Nor what it was that they were reproached with. To him their behaviour had begun to seem by no means out of the ordinary. In fact, it looked more natural than the behaviour of people. He would have to think about it more carefully and perhaps leave the Tower voluntarily when he had finished screwing the Dutch girl. In his present state of excitement he couldn’t think of anything else. And then, suddenly, he was right into her. He vagina spread all around him like a moist, dark cave filled with pungent roots, damp seaweed and warm, soft moss. The sensation grew and grew, he was losing his senses, it rose to a crescendo and exploded all around him, spilling over in all directions. ***** The Frenchman Jerome who Lawford had selected for the Tower because he was the best cook at the Airport, made a frenzied attack on two of the AS men as soon as the lights went out, as they made their way using electric torches to guide them along the first-floor corridors.

He killed the first before he even managed to cry out. The second was the inseparable friend of Clive McGee and was himself already a prey to the anxious fear, which marked the boundary between the prodromal and acute phase of the disease. The frenzy in him was just waiting to be provoked to break out by some stronger sensation. Jerome’s sudden attack acted like the detonator of a time bomb on the rabies in his nerves. Howling wildly, he disappeared into the darkness. ***** When the Control Tower with parts of the Queen’s Building and Terminal 2 was suddenly plunged into darkness and thick shadow fell like a coffin lid over the platform in front of the Terminal, the outlines of bodies and objects disappeared and Dr. Komarowsky knew that very soon the dog-people would be there. He began to run towards the basement window where it had been agreed they would await his return. His several days’ lack of sleep caught up with him all at once. He had no breath left in his chest or strength of movement in his legs. From behind the side corner of the Tower, vague shapes began to crawl and slide along the wall. For the moment they were no more than a blacker part of the darkness still far removed from any distant shape. He stumbled over the body of a half-dead woman, staggered, fell, he burnt by the arctic cold of her hands, the grasping embrace which would have dragged him with her into oblivion, he tore himself away pitilessly, straightened up, once again broke into a run. He heard the snarling and snapping, the hoarse barking of the Airport pack, which, dragging themselves forward from the right, was taking up a position to cut off his access to the courtyard of the Tower. The dog-like creatures were once again being guided by the protective instinct of the jungle which, as a superfluous surrogate for intelligence, civilization had driven back into the lowest depths of the human sub-conscience but had never completely succeeded in eliminating from the genetic code of the species, never wiped out of its collective memory. They no longer had to think about where they would find the best hunting, how and when to attack, they were not obliged to work out logistic plans for every hunt, draw up maps, consult computers. All that they now quite simply knew. They were waiting for him exactly where he had to pass. He reached the basement window, threw himself to the ground, banged on the metal shutters with his fist. Nothing moved. The window was expressionless as a blind metal eye. He remembered that the shutter, which had been raised for him to get out had had a curved hock on the outside. His fingers slipped over the rough surface, feeling the dried paint flaking away, but there was no hook. He had come to the wrong window. From the left and right the pack was closing its circle.

He dragged himself to the next window. The dog-people were waiting for him there, now only a few yards away. They knew where he had to be long before he himself had had time to work it out. The hook was there. He was at the right window. He banged frantically at the shutter. It remained unanswered. The noise held back the pack for a moment. Rabies could not stand loud noise. He went on banging on the shutter. It would be senseless, unjust to die there, for everything he had done to in vain. He had to get into the Tower. He had to be given the serum. The serum had to succeed. At least some people had to be saved. Not for their sake, but because of human self-confidence and self-esteem without which nothing could be achieved. He banged on the shutter. While he went on banging they would not attack him. And the people inside the Tower would hear him. He went on until his hands were covered with blood but they didn’t hear him. His blows on the shutter became weaker and weaker. And then he could feel his hands no longer. He sank to the ground. The pack moved forward. He fumbled in his bag for a hand torch, found it, switched it on and shone it to the right, just in time to catch the body of the pack leader in its beam. Its body seemed human only because of the shreds of clothing, which hung to it. Its stance, the tenseness of its hairy muscles, ready to spring through the air at him from its hunting crouch, was purely animal. The face too, which savage fury had turned into a wolf’s snout, was animal. The man had been changed from inside and now that genetic internal transformation had reached his mind, in the battered ruins of his former being he was seeking a new one, like a dog gone wild and reverting to a wolf. The face melted away in the sudden burst of light. With an animal scream the pack leader’s halfnaked body fell writhing onto the asphalt. From behind his back, from out of the darkness broken, bloody nail-claws tore at him. He stumbled, swung round and the lightening swathe of the torchlight out across a dog-like muzzle as it snarled towards him. With closed eyes it withdrew whining into the darkness. He saw it was impossible to hold them back. Against their vast numbers, the six bullets of his revolver were useless. He had to get back into the light, where the dog-people dared not to go. He moved away from the wall and accompanied by frenzied barking, he rushed towards the circle of light, which the streetlight threw onto the platform. Breathing heavily, he leant against its column. It seemed to him as if he were in some kind of arena where the watchers and the watched had changed places. In a Roman circus in which the wild animals were enjoying the torments of the solitary man in the sand of the amphitheatre.

He was that man. In the darkness in the half-ring of the circus between the streetlight and the Tower, shone wild eyes and a threatening snarling came from all sides. He knew that only the Airport Security men could get him out of there. He took the radio out of his bag. “Tower! Tower! This is the Airport! Luke Komarowsky here! Come in!” He waited. There was no answer. “Tower! This is the Airport! Come in!” He heard nothing. The radio was dead. “Leverquin, for God’s sake!” He stopped speaking into the transmitter. He stood in the centre of the island of light beneath the streetlight with his arms raised towards the dark Tower as if before the statue of an implacable, unhearing divinity. “You son-of-a-bitch!” The crash above his head brought him back to reality and darkness. The stone had hit the bulb of the streetlight and smashed it. Wild, shining eyes moved towards him, grew larger. This was not hell, he thought. Hell was human. It had been created by man’s faith, man’s imagination for man’s sins. Man’s reason for the comprehension of irrational things. In hell there were no animals. What then was this? The wild, shining eyes grew all around him. He was no longer afraid. He had triumphed over instinct and fear it had taught him. It was now some spontaneous, insane courage, which soothed him. It was the awareness that up to then had been chocked back by the sacrifice he had made when he had infected himself, which, if he didn’t die at once, would very soon make him one with those wild, shining eyes, that road backwards, that headlong return to nature, He would cease to be a man. To know what he was doing, to be responsible for it. He would take up with his brothers, the wild breed of human madness, like a rabid dog, a position of ambush in some dark corner of the Airport, and tomorrow perhaps of the world, desirous of tearing to pieces everything that moved and did not belong to the pack. The wild, shining eyes plunged together into his. ***** Gabriel, the man with gray hair, heard a clear, human voice for the first time since the healthy had retreated into the Tower. Someone was calling Leverquin, the man whose notebook he was carrying in his pocket. He came out of Terminal 2 where he had taken care of Moana Tahaman onto the platform in

front of it. By the extinguished streetlight of the Inner Ring east, as if nailed to it, stood Dr. Komarowsky. The man who had told him that Sue Jenkins, his Ariadne, was already dead when she had spoken to him. He had behaved strangely. As if it had been possible, as if the dead disappeared for ever and it was impossible to speak with them. Now he too was behaving strangely. There were sick people around him in a close circle but he was doing nothing to help them. He stood there, as if paralyzed. Or frightened. Perhaps he himself was ill. But not from rabies. With fear. Fear was the illness from which all others derived. Indifference, hatred, malice. Greed and vanity. Mistrust of others and doubt. Fear was the plague of the world. Everyone was afraid of everything. And most of all of fear. And of there not being fear. That was why they had separated him from Sue Jenkins. That was why they all dragged themselves away into holes and died on their own. That was why they hadn’t helped each other when rabies had attacked them. That was why so many of them had died uncomforted. He went towards the streetlight. The dog-people stopped snarling and moved apart, opening out the tight circle around the doctor. They didn’t seem afraid of the old man. They seemed to recognize him. “Be not afraid”. It was the old-fashioned expression. “They may not harm thee”. Luke’s senses came back to him slowly. From the animal world he came back to the human hell. In front of him stood the crazy old man who said he could talk with the dead. But even madmen were more bearable than the rabid. Madmen belonged to his world. He touched his left forearm. It had not swollen but it was hot. The process of infection was developing rapidly. “I must get to the Tower”, he said urgently. “Are there still people there?” “I hope so”. From the direction of the Tower came several sharp bursts of automatic-rifle fire. “You see, there are some.” “What’s happening there?” “People are talking to each other,” said the old man reflectively. Yes, thought Luke, the sound of bullets was now the only authentic human voice at Heathrow. “I shall guide thee there. Give me thy hand.” Luke hesitated. “I’m ill. I can’t give you my hand.” “Thou knowest of thine illness?” He explained what he had done and why. He didn’t know why he was explaining it all to a madman. He didn’t know what was happening in the Tower, what was going on in his body and he didn’t want to do anything. He stood as if transfixed and watched the old man touching the wound of his arm. “Is this then, thine arm?”

Luke nodded his head. The old man raised it towards his face and placed his lips against the bloodied wound. “Come,” he said. The wild, shining eyes were no longer all round him. The pack had gone back further into the darkness. ***** With sharp pleasure Dr. John Hamilton felt between his fingers the first spasms of life which with energetic resistance, as if it knew what was waiting for it in the world outside, was separating itself from his mother’s womb, for as yet he could see nothing. The birth was taking place in darkness and from below could be heard animal-like howling and the sound of automatic-rifle fire. Part of his brain realized that the loss of light must be connected in some way with the noise, that probably the rabid mob outside had finally broken into the Tower, that fighting must be going on on the lower floors and that Luke’s way back was probably blocked, but the birth absorbed his attention to such an extent that the consequences of those facts barely occupied his thoughts. Mechanically he took in the more and more hoarse, unnatural, almost animal groans of Senora Suarez and Coro Deveroux’s cursing as she fumbled about and banged into chairs, searching for a pocket torch which Logan had said was to be found in one of the office desk drawers. The Sister in her hospital coat, ghostly against the counter-light of the star-studded sky, which filtered in through the window, was repeating over and over again in a commanding voice: “Push! Push! Harder! That’s it! That’s good! Push! Push!” By the window the lonely fgigure of Suarez was murmuring incomprehensible Spanish words to himself. He felt the child free itself from the pressure of the womb and its whole weight pressed against his hands. He heard the sharp click of the scissors with which Logan cut the umbilical cord and her sight of relief. “That’s it, doctor. Now you can give me the child.” Senora Suarez settled back in darkness. She had stopped groaning and was breathing heavily. He heard Coro opening drawers and rummaging about in them, and he saw the sleeves of Logan’s white coat stretched out towards him. He held it high towards the starry sky, waiting for the first cry. A faint whimpering was heard. He couldn’t see the child’s face, dark in the gloom like a dark stain on a black wall covered with golden shells. He turned it round, he had an impression that the child was choking, that the whimpering was because its lungs were deprived of air. He turned it upside down abruptly and smacked it hard on the bottom. Even then, the child didn’t begin to cry out but the strange sound became purer, clearer, more terrible. It was at that moment that the generator began to work and light returned to the Control Tower.

The face of the newborn child was cyanotic blue, there was foam around the wide-open, bloodflecked lips, the eyes were hard and immobile as stone and the body was writhing in fierce convulsions. Raised high in his arms as if in ugly triumph, Dr. John Hamilton was holding the youngest victim of rabies at Heathrow Airport. Coro Deveroux let out a scream. Suarez looked at the child. It was a son. Logan, wild-eyed, stepped forward holding the surgical scissors in her hand. She didn’t get far. The Spaniard threw himself on her and they fell to the floor together. With the stiffness of a newly awakened corpse, Senora Suarez straightened up, jumped down from the office table, pushed towards Coro Deveroux who, mesmerized by the sight of what was going on, failed to see her in time, and drove her nails into her neck. John Hamilton had no recollection of putting down the child onto the table where it continued to contort in frenzy, he only knew that he found himself on the rabid Spanish woman’s back, struggling with all his strength to tear her away from Coro. She let go of Coro and seized him by the throat. Her nails cut into his flesh. His bent knee caught her in the stomach and then in the face. The woman fell backwards, hitting her head against the table and remained motionless on the floor. He went up to Coro and helped her to her feet. At the same moment Suarez rose from Logan’s body. The surgical scissors were dripping with blood. Hamilton tried to open the door. It was locked. Logan had the key. Suarez came towards him unseeing, the stiffness and solemnity of his movements made his approach still more frightening. The sterilized instruments were lying on a small table near the door. Hamilton grabbed on of the scalpels. But Suarez paid no attention to them. He stopped at the table. He put down the bloodstained scissors and picked up his son in his arms. The child, as if by same miracle, was calmed at once. Suarez did not see Dr. John Hamilton as he edged his way round him, knelt by the dead Logan, felt for the keys in the pocket of her coat, returned to the door, unlocked it and went out into the corridor with Dr. Coro Deveroux. He saw nothing. He had eyes only for his son – a Suarez. ***** When the light in the Control Tower came back on, the grey-haired man and Dr. Luke Komarowsky began once again to knock at the door in an attempt to attract someone’s attention. No one answered. Automatic rifle fire could be heard from inside the building. On the platform, nothing moved. The light and the noise had driven rabies back into the shadows of more distant

buildings. “What shalt thou do now?” asked the man with grey hair. “I’ll try to find a telephone in one of the Terminals which is still working.” answered Luke. “When we retreated into the Tower, communications with the Terminals were still switched on. And you?” “I must find a dog.” “I wish you well in your search,” said Luke, his face twisted. He was beginning to feel shooting pains in his arm. “And I shall find her.” “Are you sure?’ “Whilst there are still people as art thou.” “Why do you say that?” The grey-haired man looked at him in surprise. “What?” “Why do you say that you’ll find the dog if there are still people like me?” “Did I? I do not remember. My memory is not quite well. Go in health.” “Gabriel!” The old man turned round. “Who are you?” “I do not know,” he answered. “But I shall know.” And then he went off along the white, frozen trail, which only he could see. ***** The underground catacombs of the departure building of the intercontinental Terminal 3, an opening had been left in the concrete foundations to allow the evacuation of human waste products into the sewerage system, the network of which beneath the Central Terminal Area carried excrement and urine, the detritus of the life of passengers and employees at Heathrow, into the main London sewers and from there back into nature. The opening was normally covered by an iron manhole-cover but now it had been moved to one side as if someone had tried to escape by that route. But it was so small that threw it only a dog could squeeze. And when that dog’s instinct at last brought her to the hole, Sharon knew that it was waiting for her, that it had been opened just for her. ***** Fifteen minutes later, the man with grey hair calling himself Gabriel stood in front of the opening and knew that it had not been opened for him and that he would have to find another one. There must be ways for men to get into the sewage network at the Airport, at the beginning of the quarantine they had probably been guarded; now they were certainly left unattended. Otherwise his dream would not have led him to Heathrow.

Nor would Sue Jenkins, who was simply a waking part of the same dream, have set him the task of finding the dog. And if the dog had not been part of his dream, would she too have been at Heathrow on that same day? And so he set off to find the opening, which was waiting for him. The opening to the tunnel in which he would discover who he really was.

29. Half an hour before the electrical installations broke down and the lights went out in the Control Tower, and an hour before the man with gray hair stood before the entrance into the sewer, Daniel Leverquin took part in a conversation from which he hoped to find out who Frederick Lieberman really was. The radio link-up with Luke Komarowsky was dead. There was still time before the doctor’s return from the Terminal. He owed what he was doing to Louise. And to himself. He knew that to talk to Lieberman about his past, whatever came out of it, was senseless. Not one of the principles on which so-called healthy civilization was based was valid in the diseased, Rhabdovirus society at the rabid Airport. And least of all amongst them – justice. Even if Lieberman was Stadler, and admitted as much to him, of which there was little possibility, and he was certainly not in possession of the means to make him admit it, he could do absolutely nothing about it. In the professor’s hands, whether they were bloodstained or not, lay the fate the species. He looked upon the fact that he was no longer keeping a diary as a kind of denial, a rejection of the comfortable role of observer and the acceptance of the responsibility of a participant. It was an empty gesture. Once again he had been thrown in amongst the ‘historians’. It seemed, he thought, that certain callings were inevitable. There existed men of action, and those who were not. He wasn’t. And there was nothing which could be done about. The instruments and apparatus in Laboratory A gave off the subdued noise of a busy kitchen. Looking like a spaceship’s flight deck, the AMCO-781 computer was putting up an illuminated display on its screen but its meaning was well beyond Leverquin’s comprehension. Professor Lieberman’s behaviour too. He had to admit that he had not expected such a readiness to talk. The scientist was relaxed, attentive. The fact that he had actually found an anti-rabies serum which the computer gave an almost one-hundred-per-cent chance of success explained his good mood. But it could in no way justify his easy preparedness to answer the questions put to him by an almost completely unknown man as to why he had changed his name from Lieberman

to Lohman, rather than to simply throwing him out of the laboratory. At that moment Daniel Leverquin had been certain that Louise Sorensen had been mistaken. Stadler, of course, had existed, but he was not Lieberman. “Did you ever hear of a microbiological research laboratory in Wolfenden House, Leverquin?” “Dr. Komarowsky spoke to me of it.” Lieberman smile wryly. “With a greater passion for research and a little more courage. Komarowsky could have been a great scientist.” “It seemed to me that what Komarowsky is doing at this moment requires more than a little courage, Professor.” “I wasn’t thinking of civic courage, a readiness to expose oneself to danger. I was thinking of the moral courage to expose others to the danger.” Leverquin shuddered. “Instead of oneself?” “Don’t be childish, Leverquin,” said Lieberman impatiently. “If the fate of medical experiment could be decided by a single trial, the majority of scientists, those with both courage and real passion, would happily submit themselves to it. In any case, the history of science is full of such examples. It’s imperative, unfortunately, that trials be carried out in series, the majority of which are unsuccessful. And what purpose would be served if the man on whom a scientific project depended, were to perish at its very outset? If medicine had experimented on doctors rather than on patients, it would still today be treating the sick by driving out evil spirits from their bodies. It isn’t a moral question, Leverquin. It’s a matter of usefulness and practicality. Komarowsky is simply not big enough for it.” “Perhaps, but I can understand him.” There was bitterness in Lieberman’s voice. “Would you understand it if a surgeon, with you on the operating table, stopped in the middle of a operation simply because he couldn’t stand the sight of blood?” “I don’t know,” Leverquin answered worriedly. “Don’t talk nonsense! Of course you wouldn’t understand him!” “I probably wouldn’t.” “And the fact that he broke off his work at Wolfenden House, do you understand that?” Leverquin said nothing. He was no longer sure that he understood Luke. Lieberman’s arguments were strong for elementary-school level moralistic comments. “But don’t worry,” Lieberman continued, getting up from the revolving stool from which he had been watching the work of the computer. “You’re not the only one. The majority of people

would understand him. Of course, they wouldn’t understand us. There aren’t even all that many who are prepared to forgive a victorious general the losses with which he bought his victory.” In the corner of the room was a square, movable washbasin. Lieberman poured water into it from a glass container and began to wash his hands, carefully, thoroughly, rubbing one finger after another with a scrubbing brush which he took out from a sealed cellophane packet. Leverquin remembered Louise’s information that Stadler suffered from a ‘hygiene complex’. “Why are you washing your hands, Lieberman?” “Because I am working with the most lethal virus known to science, Leverquin. I’m not particularly keen on contracting rabies,” said Lieberman, taking a sterile towel from a metal box and wiping his hands on it. “Do you have any more inane questions on your mind? If you haven’t, I should like to get back to work.” “What happened in Wolfenden House?” “Komarowsky told you.” “What according to you happened?” Lieberman dropped the towel into a hermetically sealed waste bucket. “There was an incident. An unfortunate incident. An accident. A slip-up. Whatever you like to call those failures which sometimes happen in biological laboratories and which are not generally known. Ours too would not have become known if Dr. Komarowsky had not wanted to find a public alibi for his own cowardice.” “You don’t think he was right to have made the incident public?” ”You can’t make things like that public in a way that anyone would understand what it was all about. Of everything that was written in the newspapers about Wolfenden House and our project, the only thing that was understood was that several wretched people there died in the most terrible agonies because my experiment with rabies virus went wrong. The fact that patients with a massive infection of the central nervous system would have died in any case in terrible pain, no one bothered to understand. Still less that my way was the only one that would have achieved universal immunity against microorganisms and the elimination of infectious diseases. Legally, of course, no one could do anything to me, but in answer to the political pressure of so called democratic opinion; the financial support for the laboratory was cut off. In the face of such a frenetic campaign, it was impossible to go on working in London. “And so you left England?” “Of course.” “You didn’t leave because there was some threat hanging over you?” It was the first dangerous step. Leverquin wondered how Lieberman would react, whether he would guess where the conversation was leading. It didn’t seem like it. He looked at him curiously and said calmly: “What do you mean to say by that?”

Leverquin was taken aback. It seemed to early for him to show his cards and begin to mention the Jews. “I imagine that the families of those who died at Wolfenden House were bitter about it?” “I told you that legally the affair was absolutely clean. The threats came from another direction.” Leverquin waited, but Lieberman showed no inclination to explain himself further. “From where?” “They were religious fanatics. The usual noisy opponents of genetic experiments, test-tube babies, transplantation of human organs, vivisection, you know the kind. But they were not the reason for my departure. I left because I no longer had the means to carry on my research. No one wanted to finance a project which in 1975 would be condemned as contrary to the resolution of the Asilomar Conference.” “What was that?” “An international gathering of morons for the establishment of conditions by which genetic experiments with the recombination of the DNA molecule could or could not be carried out.” “And because of the fact that, according to still unformulated criteria, your project was considered a bio-hazard, no one wanted to finance it.” “No one.” “Apart from the Arabs?” Professor Frederick Lieberman got up abruptly from his chair. For his years, his movement was rapid, unexpectedly supple. “Who are you? Where did you get the idea I was working for the Arabs?” Leverquin realized he had made a mistake. Not so much because he had admitted that he knew where Lieberman had been working after leaving England, but because it was impossible for him, without involving Louise Sorensen, to explain where he had got that information. There was no intelligent way of putting the mistake right. He tried to play for time. “I don’t really know. Perhaps Dr. Deveroux said something along those lines.” “Dr. Deveroux couldn’t have said anything of the sort. Dr. Deveroux knew nothing at all about it.” He felt ashamed. He was standing before one of the most repulsive mass murderer that mankind, always in its sumptuous in its baseness, had ever produced in its efforts to be more ideal. Greater than those who, maddening and incensed, had killed only people. He had killed nature. He had killed God in it. And he was talking with him calmly, collectedly, indifferently, as if between them, under the mound of vain words, there did not lie hundred Jews in whom that nature had been treacherously massacred. “Wherever I got it from,” he said sharply, “the information is correct, isn’t it? You were working for the Arabs?” “I was working for science, young man!” answered Professor Lieberman just as sharply. “In an Arab laboratory in the Near East?” “Geographically, in Syria. But what importance does that have?” “For a Jew it must be of some importance.” “Science does not choose its sponsors according to race, but from their readiness to serve it. The

money came from Saudi Arabia and Libya. If Israel had shown itself ready to finance the project, I would have worked fro Israel.” Leverquin believed him. There was evidently in Lieberman a Faust-like readiness to pay definitively for his skill with his soul. The Jews and Slavs had not been sub-humans for him. He had seen the whole species of mankind as sub-human. The crucial moment was getting close now. “If the Project for the Regeneration and Recombination of the Rhabdovirus DNA, Project RRR had been taken up by Israel, you would have worked for the Jews?” “Of course,” Lieberman answered dryly. Leverquin had the humiliating and at the same time aggravation feeling that Lieberman had known the whole time why he was there, and that he was not at all worried about hiding his identity, if he really was Stadler. It was as if he wanted to clear the whole thing up as quickly as possible. “Listen, Leverquin, what is it that you really want from me?” He took the photographs of Louise Sorensen’s mother out of the envelope and spread them out on the laboratory sample-preparation table in the order in which the woman’s body was transformed from a human to a dog-like shape. “Is this your Project?” Professor Lieberman went up to the table and cast a superficial glance over the photographs. His face remained expressionless. Leverquin thought that he would refuse to recognize them. For one split second he even thought that he didn’t recognize them. He took the first photograph and turned it over to look at the back. He knew that something was written there. And most probably, what it was. He took another look at the picture of Louise Sorensen’s mother at the stage when human beauty could still be discerned in her features. Then, passing over the two intermediate photographs, he picked up t6he last one in which the woman looked as though she would begin to bark at any moment. A flicker of displeasure passed over his deeply furrowed face. “I knew so little then about the real nature of the virus,” he said almost sadly, glancing at the other photographs. “But I was on the right track.” Daniel Leverquin felt a kind of irrational anger growing inside him. It put him in a position of disadvantage, but there was no way he could resist it. He had come into the laboratory as a judge, ready to listen dispassionately to the case for the prosecution and the defense, Sorensen’s and Lieberman’s. As a judge who was not there to arrive at a verdict, but to formulate it after the decision of the jury. But now he was fighting the need to leave out all the other stages of human justice and become at once the executioner. Judge, prosecutor, jury and executioner all at the same time. “And on what track was the woman in the photograph, Stadler?” Lieberman showed no reaction to the name. He examined the photographs carefully. “On what track were the other seven hundred human guinea-pigs?” Lieberman/Stadler put the photographs back onto the table. “Three hundred and twenty-eight, Leverquin. To be exact, tree hundred and twenty-eight, including the subject in these photographs.”

“For God’s sake, are numbers really important for you?” “Not for me, no. They’re important for you. And you haven’t even got them right. Where the devil do you think you’ll get to with this lousy civilization of yours when you can’t even keep its figures in order?” “You, Stadler, would still be a monstrous murdering bastard if you had killed even just one of them in that way!” ”They died in the front-line trench the sense of which they didn’t understand. But that happens to all soldiers in any war. Those three hundred and twenty-eight deaths have a certain sense, Leverquin. Without them, we wouldn’t have an anti-rabies serum today. And our famous civilization, with its primitive emotions, incompetence and ignorance kills millions without any purpose or sense. But I have forgotten, of course, that even for a senseless crime a certain form is needed. You are nothing, you are obviously clean.” “No, I’m not,” said Daniel Leverquin and took a step towards the table. “But not because I did something, but because I did nothing.” Lieberman/Stadler looked at him with surgical interest. “And now, I see, you have the serious intention of making up for it. Before you make a complete fool of yourself, tell me, Leverquin, are you an Israeli agent?” “No.” “Wiesenthal’s man?” “No.” “Are you at least a Jew?” “No, I am not.” “Then what the devil are you?” “A human being.” Lieberman/Stadler gave a coarse laugh. “Don’t be so stupidly pathetic, Leverquin. There’s nothing at all praiseworthy in being a human being like you. The last dinosaur must have thought something similar about itself before the vultures tore it to pieces. No superior intelligence, no willpower, no mental or physical strength, no kind of vision, you’re an exemplary genetic failure, a cast-off of natural evolution. At the very best, biological raw material out of which something can be made only with considerable hard work and a complete recombination of its biological organization.” “Was that what you did with Louise Sorensen’s mother?” “I knew it was probably something personal. Specimens of your kind can do nothing out of principles or ideals. Everything is subordinated to insignificant personal interests. Sorensen, then that was the name of the person in the photographs. Strange. That’s not a Jewish name.” “Are you sorry about that?” It makes no difference at all to me. I’m not an anti-Semite. Within the framework of the limitations of their kind, the Jewish race had reached a maximum. But in Auschwitz, thanks to the Aryan hallucinations of Hitler and Himmler, they were the only material which in practice was accessible to me.” “Was that Mengele’s excuse too?”

Lieberman/Stadler suddenly became agitated. The lined death mask gave evidence of some expression. “What in God’s name are you talking about? Joseph Mengele was nothing better than a butcher! How dare you compare Siegfried Stadler with that amateur scum!?!” Daniel Leverquin realized that the man in front of him was not a criminal. That he was ill with something that the ‘healthy world’ outside the Airport neither knew nor acknowledged as an illness, of which it had often made its history and built up its idols. Joseph Mengele certainly did not deserve to be compared with him. Mengele was a criminal in the routine, human sense. Lieberman/Stadler’s scale was a super-human one. “Mengele was to science what that ape Hitler was to history,” shouted Lieberman/Stadler. “A cursed dilettante! They poked around like blind animals on the edge of the greatest truth of the age, that everything was to be found in the genes and that without mastery over the genes, there could be no mastery over the world. Mengele immersed people in ice to increase their resistance to cold, Hitler plunged them into illusions of the superiority of the German race, which, incidentally, together with the other races, was hardly more advanced than an orangutan. In a genetically perfect world, such specimens would quite simply be terminated.” “In the world, which you began to create in Auschwitz?” “Don’t worry about that, Leverquin,” said Lieberman/Stadler excitedly. “What we have here is just an unfinished experiment.” “What we have in the photographs?” “What we have here at the Airport, man!” Leverquin looked at him without understanding. “The unfortunate dog on which I was carrying out my experiments with Rhabdovirus mutant escaped before I had had time to finish them; somewhere near Megiddo it infected another dog which someone smuggled into Heathrow. I hadn’t had time to perfect the recombination of its DNA.” “In what way?” asked Leverquin in a numbed voice. “You will see.” It was at that moment that the dog-woman in the uniform of a KLM airhostess smashed one of the fuse-boxes in the electricity control room, which regulated the supply of electricity to the whole of the Central Terminal Area with a crowbar. The Tower was at once plunged into darkness. Daniel Leverquin had already taken several unconscious steps towards the preparation table and Lieberman/Stadler. Now he stopped. The lowered plastic blinds kept even the moonlight out. The magic electronic eyes of the computer flickered in the background, their multi-colored rays from time to time lit up objects around the laboratory. Lieberman/Stadler went on speaking and it seemed to Leverquin that the sonorous, wasteful voice no longer belonged to the Professor but to the blackness, that it was the voice of primordial darkness, the evil of which had finally attained the capability of speech. “This, then, is your glorious world, Leverquin,” said the darkness in front of him, “a gloomy, hopeless biological pit. Nature’s dead end, where a little man blindly and aimlessly totters after

little things, a genetic dwarf who has reached out to the cosmos but who hasn’t yet even managed to put his own testicles in order!” Daniel Leverquin turned his body towards the dark source of the voice. “The monstrous product of blind nature and a slavish reason!” Daniel Leverquin moved towards the voice. “But I shall snatch you away from nature and save you from humiliating reason! I shall inoculate you with the holy rabies of greatness!” From below them came the sudden sound of automatic-rifle fire. Daniel Leverquin understood that the rabid mob from outside had broken into the Tower that it was all over. Not quite all, he thought. He couldn’t aloe Stadler to be killed by his own rabid people. Than would be unjust. He had to be killed by someone still healthy, while there were still some of them left. He went on towards the voice. “I am offering you life! I am bringing you hope! I am giving you power!” The darkness went on preaching. Daniel Leverquin was still moving towards the voice. It couldn’t be killed, he thought. That would be unjust. It had to be terminated. Terminated by naked human reason. Terminated without any human weapon. With bare human hands. “I will make of you Titans for Titans, a land in which everything will be possible and everything will be attainable!” Terminated, thought Daniel Leverquin. That voice, that darkness, that rabies! When the reserve generator in the Tower began to work, the light, which returned to the laboratory lit up Daniel Leverquin in the centre of the room. His hands were torn and bloodstained. On the floor, by the preparation table laid Professor Lieberman, alias Siegfried Stadler. From his mouth, like miniature bloodstained glaciers, stuck out the jagged fragments of the laboratory retort.

30. No one ever knew by whom or how in the general chaos of the ‘safe levels’ of the Control Tower the rumor was spread that the rabid mob had broken into the building. Nor which one of the healthy first used his automatic-rifle. Probably a few of the police had been infected by contact with Clive McGee, who himself had caught the disease from the KLM hostess when he had taken food to her hiding place, without managing to obtain in exchange anything of what he had planned.

The sudden darkness, the uproar and shooting, but most of all the overpowering faceless terror to which the darkness gave phantasmagoric substance threw everyone into a frenzied commotion which spread through the building like wildfire. The majority of those still healthy set about killing each other. On the lower levels they fired at anything that moved without hesitation. Only pairs and small groups who the breakdown in the electricity supplies had caught together and amongst whom there was no one rabid to create the panic of not knowing who was healthy and who was sick, managed to stay alive. In the darkness, everyone else looked rabid. At first every group believed themselves to be the only ones not infected and fired at all the others. After the initial confusion, reason began to counsel that the rabid did not attack in an organized manner, at a word of command such as was heard in the darkness and that they did not make use of weapons, only of teeth and nails, finally, that they were more likely to be barking than talking indelibly. This led to individual groups beginning to negotiate between the bullets and to verify each other’s state of health. Captain Stillman, withdrawing upwards from floor to floor managed to organize a number of such combined groups into a defense force for the upper levels which housed the laboratory and the telecommunications installations, and to create an impenetrable barrier between the sick and the healthy along the central staircase. Everyone above that barrier was held to be ‘in principle healthy’, and everyone below it, ‘in principle rabid’. In practice, anyone still healthy who by chance in the course of that chaotic realignment had remained amongst the rabid and had tried to join the healthy had been considered ‘in principle infected’ and on principle liable to be killed. When, enraged by the same principle, they had returned the fire with their automatic rifles that had been regarded as ‘abnormal’ behavior, a medical proof that it had been wise to fire on them in good time. Captain Stillman had hated the Major Lawford, but he had known that he had to learn from him, even when his methods had disgusted him. The defense strategy was still basically Lawford’s: at ‘better to kill a thousand healthy than to let slip a single rabid person’. He summed up the situation realistically. It was very serious but not hopeless. He had only a few men, but they were well armed. Because of the laboratory, the upper floors had their own individual electric generator which he at once brought into use. On the other hand, he had not been able to stop the breaking down of the barricades at the entrances to the Tower and the reinforcement of the rabid inside by the pack from outside, whose assault could be expected at any moment. The relatively narrow and well-lit staircase could be defended. Radio contact with London was still working, and the helicopter landing-pad was not under threat. His only real problem was Komarowsky. He could certainly not get through to them alive with the dead weight of a rabies-victim round his neck. But without him, everything was in vain. As soon as the situation calmed down, he would send a squad of men out to find him. That damned rabies had turned everything upside down. Personally, he would have liked to have wrung Komarowsky’s neck, but instead, he had to take good care of him, as of his own life.

For Komarowsky was now his life. Something made him listen harder. He thought he caught the muffled hum of the lift in motion. ***** Daniel Leverquin’s descent into hell had begun even before he had got into the lift and pressed the button which would take it down into the basement. It has begun when he had killed Lieberman, without in fact really wanting to. He had killed the wrong man the one who could save them. And that was the real rabies, what he himself had done. He hadn’t needed the Rhabdovirus. Only the virus of memory. The lethal virus of human history. For the sake of people who meant nothing, apart from intellectually, except as an illustration of the menace of a single moral idea, people who, whichever way you looked at it, were irrevocably and irretrievably dead, he had condemned to death those of the living, Heathrow, London, and perhaps even – hell... He pressed the button marked stop. The lift came to a halt. It was true that by the murder he had achieved nothing. That was exactly what Lieberman had told him, but in the anger of the moment, in that madness he had not understood him. He had admitted that he had carried out experiments with the RRR serum in Auschwitz. He had admitted that the Heathrow Rhabdovirus was the result of the genetic engineering he had been engaged on in a Syrian biochemical warfare laboratory. But that was not what was most important! Then too he had still been their only chance. The most important thing in all that Lieberman had said had been that it was a runaway dig which had started the whole epidemic, his unfinished experiment with the DNA recombination, and that the dog had escaped before the recombination of the DNA in its Rhabdovirus had been completed. “In what way?” he had asked him. “You will see,” said Lieberman had said. That was what he had not understood. He had thought of the Auschwitzes which had already happened. He had not thought of those which were yet to come. He had to inform Hamilton. But that could wait. He had to go down into the basement to fetch Luke. He had forgotten all about him. He had taken no notice either of the shooting, or of the probability that the rabid mob had broken into the Tower, or of his own fate. Only of what had happened to Louise Sorensen’s mother. Perhaps Komarowsky had already tried to contact him. He had not heard the radio because of the other apparatus in Lieberman’s laboratory. He pulled out the aerial and began to transmit at the same moment as he again pressed the button starting the lift. ***** Captain Stillman pressed the button to stop the lift at his floor, at the boundary between the healthy and the rabid zones.

The lifts in the Central Tower were constructed in such a way that it could not be seen whether the lift was going up or down. It could only be heard moving. There was no way of telling if it was coming up from below, or down from above, from the healthy, whether anyone in it had to be terminated or allowed to live. He couldn’t, therefore rely on his intelligence. He had to rely on his own experience to come up with a principle, and to pull his revolver out of his holster. ***** “Airport! Airport! This is the Tower! Leverquin speaking! Come in, Luke!” The lift descended slowly. “This is the Tower! Come in, Luke!” The lift was still descending. The radio came to life. “This is Komarowsky! Where in God’s name have you been?” The lift slowed down. Daniel Leverquin was surprised that he’d already reached the basement. “What’s happening in the Tower?” ***** The lift stopped and the door opened. Captain Stillman was faced with a man in whom he could scarcely recognized the writer Daniel Leverquin, his clothes were torn, his hair was unkempt, his hands were covered in blood and his eyes shone with an unhealthy brilliance. In one hand he held a radio and he was shouting some kind of gibberish about Lieberman. Abnormal behavior was Stillman’s first reaction in the first second. He was detailed to wait for Komarowsky; he was coming up, therefore, from the infected basement. Abnormal circumstances – another second. In the third second there flashed into his mind, like a message from the other side of the grave, Lawford’s precept that for Heathrow it was better to terminate a thousand healthy people than let a single rabid man slip through. Four seconds after the lift doors had opened, he discharged the full magazine of his revolver into Daniel Leverquin. ‘Just like the barman in the white jacked’ was Daniel Leverquin’s last thought as he fell. From the radio which had fallen to the ground with him could be heard the loud appeals of Dr. Luke Komarowsky.

Captain Stillman took some rubber gloves from his pocket, pulled them on to his hands meticulously, stepped into the lift over Leverquin’s body and picked up the radio from the floor. As he stepped back over the threshold, he pressed the button indicating the basement. The lift doors shut, its cables began to move, and the heavy metal coffin moving with ceremonial solemnity, carried the body of the writer down into the hell of which he had wanted to be a witness. “Komarowsky! This is Stillman.” “What’s going on? What’s all the shooting?” “Rabies has broken into the Tower. The lower floors are lost, the barricades have been forced. The situation in the upper levels is under control. Do you have an infected patient for Professor Lieberman?” “I have.” “Where are you?” “In the Metropolitan Police radio room.” “Stay where you are! I’ll send some men!” “What’s happened to Leverquin?” “I think he’s down in the basement. Over and out.” ***** The man was going towards another basement. In his hand he carried an automatic-rifle and he was wearing protective clothing with a hood which covered his head, leaving only two narrow, dark slit for the eyes. He was moving towards the huge wooden cross in St. George’s Chapel, Heathrow Airport’s underground sanctuary. He was seeking the God who alone could understand him. For men no longer could. The rabid didn’t know how to, the healthy didn’t want to. The rest were all dead or dying. The Airport Boulevard of the Inner West, between Car park 2 and St. George’s Chapel was covered with a carpet of corpses. Terminal 2 was only partially illuminated. The upper floors of the Tower were too far away to pierce the darkness. Close to the ground it was mixed with moonlight, which wrapped the black silhouettes of people and objects in a silver-blue cocoon. In the immediate vicinity of the solitary pilgrim, everything was quiet. From the distance came the desperate howling of feuding packs. The uneven courtyard of the chapel with the huge oak cross planted at the centre was bounded by a wall of reddish brick. The man walked across the paved yard and went into the underground porch which led down into the chapel itself, built on the pattern of the Roman catacomb in which the first Christians had started to pray.

In the portico to the right of the entrance, a thick candle sputtered fitfully, lighting up a wooden plaque. Beneath the glass hung a placard. He went up to look at it more closely On the white cardboard in copper-plate handwriting was written Heathrow Airport’s aeronautical prayer: Slow me down, Lord! And inspire me To send my roots deep into the soil of life’s enduring values, That I may grow toward the stars Of my greater destiny! He went on further towards the entrance into the catacombs. He had to move slowly for the electric lighting was not working and the spiral staircase descended into the depths through a completely impenetrable darkness. From time to time he felt the soft resistance of a human body beneath his feet. He paid no attention. The puritanically bare crypt, like a cave, was dimly lit by candles which had almost burnt down. A heavy, bitter incense rose into the air under the low vault. There was a smell of laudanum and decomposition. Along the bench and beneath them, along the walls and the aisles, sat or lay those who, like him, had sought salvation in God. They were all dead. Further in, behind the altar in a vaulted niche which looked like an operating table stood the sixfoot high cross on which Christ’s crucified body could just be made out. The man went down on his knees in the middle of the centre aisle. He had come to pray but realized that he no longer knew how to. He had not prayed to God since he had been a child. He had not needed God. He had got on very well without Him. He dragged himself along on his knees towards the altar, crawling over the corpses that lay in his path. He hoped that as he got nearer to Him, he would remember what to say. He was already close to the podium; he could touch it with his hand, when he recalled the prayer he used to say as a child before going to sleep: “Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name...” He dragged himself up to the podium and laid his hands on it. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done...” He steeled himself to raise his eyes. To look at his God. “On earth as it is in heaven!”

He looked up. The cross rose up above him. From it hung a naked, bloodstained body. But it wasn’t the body of Christ. On the cross, hanging from a leather strap, was Father Robert O’Donaghus. The new God of Heathrow Airport. God was a blackened face and foam at the lips. ***** “Moana Tahaman! Moana Tahaman! Luke Komarowsky here!” The Metropolitan Police radio network was linked in with the Terminals and the Airport public buildings. The message was carried through the ether of Heathrow, like some grotesque replica of the personal messages of the healthy days of the ‘world’s aerial crossroads.” The message resounded through the empty baggage hall for arrival passengers at Terminal 2 and echoed back from the bare walls. Of the three circular luggage conveyors, two were motionless. The third and central one was still turning, but instead of cases, its circular track carried corpses. The clanking, metallic noise from the conveyor-belt mingled with the voice from the loudspeakers. “I’m waiting for you in the Metropolitan Police radio room!” The corpses continued to turn in their endless circle, but now mixed with cases which, abandoned at some previous time on the line, now began to arrive, falling with a crash through the rubble and metal orifice of the main transporter. The revolving track became as tightly packed as on the day of the heaviest traffic. A heavy case slid down to the edge of the conveyer as it turned in its circle and pushing up against a human body, forced it out onto the floor. At the other end of the phantom drum, a body pushed a case over the edge. The struggle for survival went on in the world of the dead. It was quickly over. There were no more cases arriving and now everything left on the conveyer, bodies and cases together, continued calmly and monotonously in its aimless round. The hallowed silence was disturbed only by Luke Komarowsky’s voice. “The serum has been found! I repeat - the serum has been found!” Suddenly, at the fanlight doors of the arrival tube a cardboard box tied up with thick string appeared; on it was written FRAGILE. It was followed by a cello case. Finally came a body in a white, hospital uniform. Moana Tahaman slipped down to the edge of the conveyor, stopped there and continued to turn in the circle.

***** In the Metropolitan Police radio room in the Queen’s Building, Dr. Luke Komarowsky switched the transmission control lever to ‘off’. He had never told Moana Tahaman that he loved her. He had taken it for granted. He had taken a lot for granted. The majority of them no longer existed. Taking them for granted had not been sufficient to preserve them. Evidently something else had been needed, but no one knew what. Wandering through the Terminals and the administrative buildings in search of a radio transmitter that still worked, he had seen the ashes of many things which people had taken for granted. And many of his own personal things. The largest number of people still healthy was apparently in Terminal 1. He had tried to approach them, to tell them of the serum, but they had all fled from him. Those who had been armed had fired at him. Two of them had attacked him with dog-catchers’ nooses. He had had to fire into the air to drive them off. The healthy were no less dangerous than the sick. They were in fact worse. A healthy intelligence sustained its own arrogance by means of tricks of which the infected were not capable. He thought that perhaps for many of them Lieberman’s serum had come too late. The rabies with which they were infected did not come from Rhabdovirus and could not disappear with it. What was it that Leverquin had wanted to tell him before Stillman had taken over the radio? Something about Lieberman’s serum. He had been cut off half through the sentence. He would have to ask Stillman when he saw him. He hoped that he would have no trouble before the AS men arrived. He had only one bullet left in his revolver. He had used the next-to-the-last in Terminal 3, in the main hall. A pack of dog-people had been chasing a healthy Metropolitan policeman. He had hesitated to use his revolver for fear of hitting the hunted man. But when they had caught him, knocked him to the ground and begun to eat him alive, he had fired. Since he could not kill the whole pack with his two remaining bullets, he had killed the policeman with one and kept the last one for himself in case he should feel himself becoming rabid before he could reach the Tower and the serum. That too, for a change, was also an act which in the old, healthy, wise world he would not have taken for granted, it was something he would have had to think about before actually doing it. In the old, healthy, wise world in fact, it would have been taken for granted that you shut your ears, closed your eyes, quickened your step and kept the two bullets for yourself. In the old, healthy, wise world it was taken for granted, also, that you could get used even to the most terrible things. In Terminal 3 he had come upon a woman with disheveled gray hair holding a board with the sign EF LANGUAGE SCHOOL HASTINGS in her hand. All around her lay her dead or

comatose pupils. The woman had evidently been the leader of an excursion and in monotous tones and in carefully chosen English she was giving her lecture on London Airport. She was telling the dead girls from France, Holland, Spain, Scandinavia and Germany of the greatness of Heathrow and its history, of the daily and yearly volume of passengers, international Air Lines and the amount of cargo that was transported through it. She was telling them of the advantages of air transport and the magic of a civilization which took man up into the clouds. The woman was not rabid. She had gone mad. But that hadn’t made it any easier for him to accept the night of an Airport porter who was pushing a line of trolleys loaded with corpses in front of him and shouting ‘Porter! Porter!’ It was another of those things which were taken for granted but which had proved to be mistaken. He heard steps outside the radio room. He thought of Moana. He turned round. At the door stood a man in protective clothing with a hood which left only thin slits for his eyes. He held an automatic-rifle in his hand. It was high time for the man from the Tower to come for him. He was beginning to feel ill. The symptoms suggested that the incubation period was over, that he was entering the prodromal phase of the disease. The virus was beginning its massive invasion of his peripheral nerve system en route to his brain. Very soon anything could be expected of him. “Don’t come near, for God’s sake!” he warned the man, seeing he was about to come into the room. “There’s no God at Heathrow any more,” said the man hoarsely, motioning with his rifle for him to move away from the radio transmitter. As he moved back Luke pushed the transmission control lever to on, counting on the conversation with the unknown man being carried through the whole Airport and being heard by the men who had been sent from the Tower to fetch him. He realized that the man in the hood was not one of them and that he was in danger. “Who are you?” The man didn’t answer. He’s not rabid, thought Luke. Rabid people don’t behave in that way, not even in their lucid intervals. But he could be mad. Like the teacher from the Hastings’ language school. He could fire his automatic-rifle at any moment. He couldn’t risk it. He had to be alive for the trial of Lieberman’s serum. “Listen,” he said, moving his hand towards the open medical bag which hung from his shoulder, “I’m waiting for the Airport Security guards to arrive, and they don’t like armed men wondering around the Airport.” Now they would know that the man was armed and that they had to surprise him, he thought, feeling with his fingers for the handle of the revolver amongst the instruments at the bottom of the bag.

“What does Airport Security want here?” Although the hood muffled the voice, it seemed to Luke that there was something familiar about it. “They’re coming to fetch me,” he answered. “And what are you doing here? This is the dead zone.” “I’m a Heathrow doctor. We wanted to know if there was anyone who had survived.” “You’d have known that if you’d stayed with us.” There was arrogance in the voice that made it even more familiar. “You yourself know what happened here. The hospital couldn’t go on functioning in such conditions.” He felt like a hostage who was trying to make contact with his kidnapper in the hope that they got to know each other better he wouldn’t be killed. “I know what people feel like here.” “Oh, no. You don’t know!” said the man unexpectedly coarsely. Luke sensed that the unknown man’s mood was changing and to his disadvantage, and that he would have to shoot in a hurry. “Do you know what it’s like to be here alone? To be terrified of everything? People, objects, the very air? Yes, even the bloody air! Because IT comes through the air. To be terrified even of oneself, to watch one’s own every movement, every feeling of one’s own body as if it were alien, hostile? Because IT is already perhaps inside you. Crawling through you although you can’t yet feel it, but you know it’s there, that it’s seeking out its routs to your brain ant that there’s nothing you can do to stop it – nothing!” It wasn’t going to be murder, of course, thought Luke. It was the inalienable right of the defense of one’s own natural interests. In this case, of the general interest. But cannibalism too was that. When there was no food, cannibalism was the defense of natural interests. Shit, he thought, pulling out the revolver from the bag. At that very moment the man put down his automatic-rifle and pulled back the hood covering his face. “I can’t go on like that any longer,” he groaned. “I can’t!” “Matthew!” shouted Luke Komarowsky. He4 hardly recognized him. The sunken, bluish face, overgrown with graying, sparse hair, the staring eyes, the encrusted mouth, had turned Sir Matthew Laverick into something that looked like a werewolf. “I thought you’d never pull out your damned revolver,” he said wildly. “I didn’t recognize you. I’m sorry.” “It’s me who should be sorry. I’d have killed myself long ago if I’d had any bullets.” It cost Luke an effort to look at him. The mist which had come before his eyes blurred the shapes of objects around him, but soothed his headache and brought back clarity to his thoughts. The stiffness around his jaw which had made it a great strain to form his words had gone. He felt somehow strange, but much better.

“What are you waiting for,” asked Laverick. Only then did he realize what was expected of him. And that in the middle of his own operating theatre! A temple dedicated to life! Wrapped up in himself, in his own anguish, Sir Matthew Laverick didn’t notice the metamorphosis which for the man he was talking to transformed the Metropolitan Police radio centre into an operating theatre. “I beg you!” “I can’t do it.” What did this man think he was? He was a doctor. He had taken the Hippocratic Oath. He was there to save, not to kill. The unfortunate creature was evidently ill. He had to be helped as quickly as possible. “For Christ’s sake, Luke!” The patient seemed somehow familiar to him, but he couldn’t remember from where. It was a good thing, though, that he couldn’t remember. He didn’t like operating on people he knew. Emotional involvement was detrimental to the efficient work of the surgeon’s knife. “We can treat such things, nowadays,” he said with a smile and pulled on his rubber gloves. “But I’m not ill, man! Nothing can cure me!” Luke looked at him with professional curiosity, without compassion. Compassion clouded the clinical picture of the disease. And without a precise clinical picture an operation was a risky journey through unexplored wilderness without a geographical map. “I killed a man, Luke! An AS guard!” A disturbed sense of reality, a prevalent illusion, disorientation in time and space, concluded Luke. “I killed Andrea, my wife. We hid in an aircraft without knowing it was full of rabid people. I ran away, I left Andrea, I killed her!” Incoherent speech, thought Luke, tying the surgical mask over his face. An AS guard, a man, clearly could not be the patient’s wife. The sick were not treated in aircrafts but in hospitals. A man could not run away from somewhere and then kill somebody in that place, the act was logically inverted. It was all quite clear; the poor man had a tumor on the brain. The tumor was pressing on the cervical centers and marrying men, carting off patients into aircrafts, killing after the murderer had run away from the place of the crime. “I was left alone with rabies. Andrea was no longer there as an excuse. In the meantime, I had to go on living. And I lived. You’re not going to ask me how?” Luke was not even interested. More often than not the patients knew least of all about there own disturbances. And what they did know was mistaken. It only served to disorientate the doctors. Above all, there was no time. This man was not his only patient. The Airport was full of people

who were waiting for salvation by his scalpel. “A few hours, I happened to come across the bathroom for British Airway’s crews. I felt the need to wash myself, to try to get clean, to become a human being again. I undressed and stood under one of the showers. I have never experienced such a relief, Luke. I felt somehow that my fall had been stopped, that I had triumphed over the terror which had turned me into an animal. And then an elderly woman ran into the bathroom screaming. At first I thought she was rabid. But she wasn’t. The rabid came after her, dragging himself on hands and knees. I’ve had some experience, Luke. Rabid people don’t attack each other. They only kill the healthy. The healthy don’t make any difference. They kill both rabid and healthy. The woman dragged herself into the corner of the bathroom, still screaming. The rabid pack snapped at her and crawled towards her. I stood there petrified in my cubicle, knowing that I was done for if they saw me. The old woman was worn out, thin, all skin and bones, and I was still physically in good shape. And do you know what I did? I went on my hands and knees and joined the pack, barking. I was the first one to sink my teeth into her leg. And that’s not the most terrible thing of all, Luke. The most terrible thing was that they didn’t attack me. They didn’t recognize me. Their instinct told them that I was rabid too.” Sir Matthew Laverick had spoken slowly, choosing his words, the last words of his life into which he had to put everything. And they were just that. He didn’t see what Dr. Luke Komarowsky was doing. He was moaning, his face hidden in his hands. In St. George’s chapel the new God hanging on the cross had laughed in his face. He was beyond help, the other side of salvation. But he had an immeasurable feeling of relief when he felt his friend’s hand on his head. Dr. Komarowsky slowly traced in the air the curved line which his surgical scalpel would follow along the patient’s skin when he brought it down centimeter lower, and then his hand moved back to the beginning of the arc and descended that centimeter. As always when he was operating, he was filled with an intoxicating feeling of bliss, a wealth of elated, live-saving purpose, in which, as if in an enchanted dream, this world disappeared and he was left alone with the disease. ***** Captain Stillman found Dr. Luke Komarowsky in the Metropolitan Police radio room alone. He had thought he would find him with the madman whose revelations of cannibalism he had been listening to through the loudspeakers the whole of the time it had taken him to force his way through to the Queen’s Building. He had thought, in fact that he would be the patient on whom the trial with Lieberman’s anti-

rabies serum would be conducted. In disbelief he looked at the doctor who was sitting on the floor in the corner of the room and staring at the bloodstained gloves on his hands. At Stillman’s side stood an armed AS man, the only one who had managed to bring him alive through the pack of dog-people. Although for the moment he was lucid, recognized Captain Stillman and knew he had come to fetch him, there were some things which Luke couldn’t grasp. The bloodstained gloves on his hands, for example. Nor where Matthew Laverick, who he had just been talking to, had disappeared. Matthew had been in some kind of difficulties. It had been something to do with his wife. He couldn’t remember. He wasn’t feeling too good either. “Where’s your patient, Komarowsky,” said Stillman. Luke turned back the sleeve on his left arm. The wound was swollen but not bleeding. The blood on his gloves could not have come from there. And he didn’t seem to have any other injury. “Where’s the patient, you son-of-a-bitch?” Where was the blood from, Luke wondered? His eyes fell on the canvas medical bag next to his foot. A stain was spreading along the bottom. He pulled it towards him. It was heavy. He began to open the patent fastener. Stillman caught him by the neck and pulled him to his feet. He banged his head against the wall. Then with all his force, his fist smashed into his teeth. So violently that his knuckles began to bleed. Luke Komarowsky fell to the ground. “Where’s your patient, you bastard?” Luke Komarowsky’s face cracked into a grin which was streaked with blood and traces of foam. “I was the first one,” he said, coughing blood. “But now we have two.” ***** Moana Taheman opened her eyes. She felt she was moving but she didn’t know where or why. The sun high above her kept changing its position like a star in the night sky. She could hear Luke’s voice filling all the space around her. She didn’t know what he was talking about, nor to whom. It didn’t matter to her. What mattered was that he was beside her. She closed her eyes. The luggage transporter turned faster and faster, carrying her off towards another circle of life.

31. Dr John Hamilton and Dr. Coro Deveroux had barricaded themselves inside the tinted glass dome, the crystallized globe linking the Tower with the sky from where the Airport Flight Control had once directed aircraft landing and taking off. All the other levels of the Tower were controlled by rabies. All of Heathrow was in the grip of Rhabdovirus. The reassuring announcements that everything was under control had at last become true. From the other side of the Control Room door, in front of which Hamilton stood guard with an automatic rifle, the scratching, whining and whimpering of the rabid pack became weaker and weaker. Soon nothing more would be heard. Very soon the poor unfortunates would all be dead. But that would not solve their problem, he thought, for the real enemy was no longer outside, not beyond that glass cage. It was inside it now, inside him and Coro. At the other side of the dome, in complete darkness giving him the impression that they were part of the starry sky, in some spaceship which was journeying on the other side of human imagination, Dr. Coro Deveroux, also armed with an automatic rifle, was speaking on the special telephone with the National Anti-Rabies Committee, sitting in permanent session since the previous night under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister. It was the Prime Minister himself who was now on the telephone from 10 Downing Street. A sense of helplessness could be felt in her voice. Medical rabies, unexpectedness added to the political and economic madness with the Government had already been struggling to cope, had completely exhausted him. And the latest news was still worse. Coro had informed him that Professor Lieberman had been killed by the rabid, that the microbiological laboratory had been wrecked and that the last hope of Dr. Komarowsky’s return with a patient for a trial of the serum, of which she had spoken when she had last talked to the Committee, had now been lost. “For god’s sake, Dr. Deveroux, can’t you make use of one of those unfortunates who are howling outside the door?” “But Prime Minister,” said Coro, “we do have infected patients for a trial of the serum.” “But a moment ago you said that you were alone in the dome with Dr. Hamilton.” Coro hesitated. “Am I to understand from that that the pair of you are now infected?” Coro explained their decision, when it had become clear that Dr. Komarowsky was not going to return, to carry out the trial of Lieberman’s serum on them. “When shall we know the outcome?”

“If neither of us show violent symptoms before 02.00, it will have been successful.” “It’s a difficult and unpleasant question, Dr. Deveroux, but I have to put it to you – how shall we know if the serum does not prove successful?” “The telephone which we are using is a special one?” “It is connected exclusively with you.” “If the serum is not successful, it won’t ring and you will know.” “By 02.00 hours?” “Yes, Sir, by 02.00 hours.” Core Deveroux put down the receiver before the Prime Minister had time, she was certain, to tell her what a brave woman she was, how much he admired her, how the whole world would be grateful to her and the other senseless utterances which are made in such circumstances. For Coro Deveroux was not brave. At that moment she was the most lonely and most frightened person in the world. She was afraid of herself. If she had known what at that moment was actually going on in that world, she would have been even more terrified. ***** For the first time something was happening that the world would never know about, which it would not believe could happen, but which if it ever did find out, would most probably be its last discovery. It was the middle of the night over Heathrow and London, but that was very far removed from the Eastern Time Zone of the United States. Air Force One, the ‘recombined’ passenger Boeing 707-320B, (in the Air Force technical jargon, VC-137C), the President of the United States’ official aircraft, was flying at 30.000 feet in the crystal atmosphere above the earth lit by an opal-tinted western sun, at a cruising speed of 500 miles per hour. On board were the first citizen of the USA and the members of the National Security Council, and it had taken off from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington for some strictly secret destination. Thanks to the special telecommunication equipment which linked Air Force One with all the strategic points of the United States’ military power and with the capitals of friends and enemies alike, everything could be directed from the ‘flying White House’ with the same technical efficiency as from the ground, or more accurately, just as well or just as badly. In the aircraft at that moment, little was known of the real level of the crisis which had caused their presence there. In fact, little was known of anything. The crew still had no idea of where they were heading. The security agents were quite unaware of what it was they had to protect the President from at 30.000 feet above the ground, the elite group of military and scientific advisers had scarcely any notion of the nature of the advice

which they would be required to give. And the auxiliary services were present without the slightest knowledge of the service which was expected of them. (The Chief Warrant Officer to whose wrist was handcuffed the black briefcase with the coded figures needed to blow up the world and who, with that purpose in mind, remained always within earshot of the President, still did not know, thank God, the magic codeword which would unlock his Pandora’s Box.) In fact, the six worried men knew just about as much about the decisions which they would soon have to take, (the US Vice-President, the Head of the State Department, the Secretary-of-State for Defence, the President of the Joint Chief-of-Staff, the Foreign Affairs’ Secretary and the Director of the CIA), as they sat huddled around the President in his work cabin. All of them, of course, sensed that it had something to do with rabies, but not exactly what, or how rabies several thousand miles away could affect them. The only ones who knew anything more, at least why they were in the air and what was expected of them, were the flight-stewards with the presidential badge on their jackets. Everyone in the aircraft was to be given anything they asked for in terms of food and drink. In the meantime, in the President’s office, the news from London was encouraging. An the anti-rabies serum, it appeared, had been found. By 02.00 hours, London time, it would be known for certain how succesful it was. The British, nevertheless, had evacuated the area round Heathrow and sealed off the Airport with a military blockade just in case. An alarming report in the American Press which concerned a ‘rabies-incident’ in the town itself had proven to be mistaken. An autopsy had shown that the two men who had been stoned to death by a mob in the vicinity of the Airport had not been rabid. Their erratic behaviour had been the result of alcohol. The British Prime Minister had informed the President of this not ten minutes earlier. The news from Moscow, unfortunately, was less optimistic. Making full use of the fact that the Anglo-Soviet Agreement, on which serious hopes for a general nuclear disarmament had rested, had been compromised by some idiotic spy affair, the ‘hardliners’ of the Moscow Politbureau had gained the upper hand over the ‘doves’. The Soviet Premier and First Party Secretary, Nikolai Gerasimovich Vorontsov had been replaces by his Minister of Defence, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Sergei Arnoldovich Shurov. For the first time since the days of Stalin, Party, Government and the Army were all under the control of a single man, a single brain. How that brain finctioned was still not known, and the six men in the President’s flying office were busy wracking their own brains over the problem. The President was hoping that the radio conversatio with Marshal Shurov which he was wainting to begin would at least to some extent solve the dilemma. If this damned rabies had been Russian and not ‘natural’, thought the President, discerning at the same time in certain comments of the Chief of the Pentagon, a suspicious indifference towards the breackdown of the Anglo-Soviet Agreement, the whole affair would have been technically much simpler. One could have envisaged a micro-recombination counter to the Russieansfrom Fort Detrick.

But it was not the bomb which had been dropped at Heathrow. With the new, ‘clean’ ones, it wasn’t necessary to think whethear they were infectious or not and how many megatons of madness they carried. Only wheather they worked or not. There was no problem with statistics of ‘clean death’. They could be counted on less only when the consequences which human genes would spit out in their faces who knew how many generations later had to be calculated. There was rabies, he thought, even in that logic. In the way of thinking with which he was obliged to function. One could never simply come out with the most simple solution. It always had to be the most reasonable amongst the other less reasonable ones. More reasonable and less rabid. Cancelation of important visits rather than the breaking off of commercial talks, the breaking off of commercial relations rather than diplomatic ones, the breaking off of diplomatic relations rather than a total cold war, a total cold war rather a local one, limited killing in Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola rather than large-scale, world-wide massacre. And perhaps, what the hell, a dead Britain rather than a rabid planet! At that moment the Kremlin came on the line and the order to put into operation the ‘scramble’ procedure, making it impossible for the ensuing conversation to be overheard, was given. In ‘normal’ critical circumstances, the President’s words passed through the intermediary of an interpreter in the Situations’ Room of the White House, and the Moscow talks were taped for posterity, if there was to be one. The tapes were painfully reminiscent of a ‘Black Box’ with the last words of an aircraft’s pilot before it crashed. He intended that in the ruins of an indistructable Government antinuclear bunker, at least that box of tapes should be preserved so that those who survived, if anyone did, should know how Doomesday had came about and whose rabies had been responsible for it. Personally, though, he doubted whether anyone would give a shit. They would be too busy trying to re-invent the wheel. For of all the heritage of history, at their disposal in abundance they would have only fire. But on this ocasion , thanks to Marshal Shurov’s English, the conversation would be direct. The United States, (as the Soviet Union, according to reports from spy satelites), had for several days been in a state of yellow alert, or as the pacifists said, ‘two steps from the grave’, and there was no more time for the complicated procedure which guaranteed the secrecy of radio transmissions. (And there was no longer any desire to record history on tapes, for both sides sensed that there would be things said for which it would have been better if they had died at birth,) But in the civilised world, the time could always be found for pleasanteries. For that reason, the President of the United States first of all congratulated Marshal Shurov on being chosen as Premier and replied to the Marshal’s interest in his health, which for the last few months had not been all that good. The ‘hot’ talks could then begin. Premier: Mr. President, the Soviet Government is extremly worried by the development of the crisis at Heathrow Airport. President: Mr. Marshal, the Government of the United States shares your anxiety, but I have the personal assurance of the British Prime Minister that the situation is ‘completely under control’.

Premier: I don’t know what the British Prime Minister understands as ‘completely under control’, we have our own interpretation of that, but I don’t believe that either one of them includes the incidents of which we have been informed. President: Which incidents do you have in mind? Premier: In the first instance, the cases of rabies in London itself. President: There are no causes of rabies outside the perimeter of Heathrow Airport, Mr. Marshal. That was an unfortunate misunderstanding which came about, I have to confess, as a result of illinformed reports in the American Press. Premier: The American Press, it would seem, is well-informed only when it’s a question of the internal affairs of the Soviet Union. President: With all due respect, Mr. Marshal, it doesn’t seem to me that the placing of nuclear forces in a state of wartime alert can be defined as the internal affairs of any country. Premier: The Soviet Army has been placed in a state of alert only because we were informed that the United States Army had been placed in that same state of readiness. President: The Army of the United States was put on the first degree of alert only after we heard that the Soviet Army was already on full alert. Premier: Mr. President, it is my constitutional duty to defend my country with all the means at my disposal. President: That is also the constitutional duty of the President of the United States, Sir, Premier: It is for that very reason that I am certain you will understand correctly what I am going to propose. President: I am listening to you Mr. Marshal Premier: Mr. President, are you aware of the morphological nature of the rabies’ virus which is in question? President: As far as a non-specialist can be, Premier: Soviet scientists have isolated the virus and confirm that it is a Mutant. President: I have also been informed of that fact. Premier: But that is not all. Soviet scientists have established that it is a laboratory and not a natural Mutant. Since the epidemic broke out at a British Airport, it is not difficult to guess whose. President: Mr. Marshal, the disease was brought to Heathrow by a Nigerian nun on the flight from Rome. Premier: Do you have proof of that? President: Of course I haven’t. Premier: Then we have to rely on logic. And logic attributes the virus to the British. President: If we are to judge by the logic which is current in the world today, free laboratory virus, in Britain and America must be Russian, and such a virus in Russia – American and British. Premier: Perhaps it ought to be.

President: What do you mean to say by that? Premier: That it is probably a mistake. President: Mr. Marshal... Premier: Mr. President, a Soviet State delegation was at Heathrow at the moment when rabies made its appearance there. President: That was a matter of sheer coincidence; you surely cannot believe that any civilized government would carry on international relations by means of rabies? Premier: Up to now it would seem that the majority of such relations have been conducted in that very way, Mr. President. Anything, therefore, is possible. But what is past is for the moment of no importance. It is what will happen in the future. Soviet scientists claim that, given the extreme virulence of the Mutant, if it breaks out of the quarantine into London, man and all the fauna of this planet will succumb within a year. President: I can assure you that your fears are unwarranted. The British Prime Minister has informed me that a serum has been found. Premier: But not yet tested. President: Have you talked with the Prime Minister also? Premier: Not with him personally. President: In any case, we shall soon know what we are dealing with. Premier: The Soviet Government wishes to know what we shall be dealing with if the serum should prove to be unsuccessful. President: Mr. Marshal! Premier: Mr. President? President: How would it be if we postponed discussion of that until 02.00? Premier: The Government and Politburo of the Soviet Union are in permanent session. I can assure you that not a single one of the members of those bodies believes in the capability of the British to maintain control of events, and while we’re on the subject; neither do they believe in the serum. It is as option which I myself share, Mr. President, the incapacity of the British threatens the Soviet Union. President: No more than America, Sir. Premier: That is why I am certain that you will understand our wish that in this critical moment for mankind we should adopt the same attitude. President: That is also my wish. Premier: And all that at a situation, which in the conditions of military alert, fear, and mistrust could lead to our mutual annihilation, quite independently of rabies, should be eliminated as quickly as possible. President: The USA, Mr. Marshal, is ready to do everything humanly possible to that end. Premier: Mr. President, is the United States prepared for combined action with the Soviet Union to achieve that end? President: In principle, yes. Premier: I am glad to hear it.

President: What especially do you have in mind? Premier: Soviet scientists affirm that at the present moment an effective end to the epidemic can only be arrived at by a drastic reduction of population prone to rabies, as is the case when dealing with the occurrence of the disease in wild animals. President: Would you be good enough to repeat that? I am not sure that I have fully understood you. Premier: I am proposing that, if by 02.00 London times we do not receive from the United Kingdom confirmed prove of the liquidation of rabies at Heathrow Airport, we should carry out a combined Soviet-American nuclear incineration of the epicenter of the disease. President: Mr. Marshal, you can’t be serious? Premier: I have never been more serious in my life, Mr. President! President: But for God’s sake, that would mean the annihilation of London and probably a good part of southern England! Premier: Our worst predictions are of the order of about twenty million people. There are over four milliards in the world, Mr. President. President: And you would carry it out without warning? Premier: If the virus breaks through to London, panic will spread throughout the whole island. It would be in England’s interest for them not to be told beforehand. President: The United States could never agree to such a measure, Marshal Shurov I could not justify it to my own conscience. Premier: Mr. President, you do not have to hurry with your final decision. There is still time. I know how you feel. It was not an easy decision for me either when we were obliged to shoot down the aircraft which was carrying our comrades back from Heathrow. The job that we do is not a pleasant one, Mr. President. But think carefully which is the more important, that your own conscience should condemn you but that posterity should understand, or that your conscience understands you but that there should be no posterity to condemn you. ***** “I think it would be better if we switched on the light,” said Dr. John Hamilton getting up. He turned towards the switch. The glass dome of the Airport Control room flashed with light like a solitary precious stone in a velvet setting of the darkness. The sky drew back, the stars went pale. The illusion of belonging to the universe disappeared. It again became difficult to die. But Coro Deveroux knew that it was necessary. In that way it would be easier to see each other. They would know sooner. In both of them a number of prodromal symptoms were not conclusive. Chronic headache, fatigue, extreme nervous tension, irritability, and other neurological disturbances could also be the result of the abnormal way of life at the Airport since the introduction of the quarantine. Sensitivity to strong sensations, light and loud noise particularly, was also inconclusive, although probably significant. They could also be attributed to nerves. In their position, besieged from outside by rabies, and inside by its virus, the fear which was

characteristic of the prodromal phase of the disease, could also be an entirely natural reaction. It was fear of rabies perhaps, not because of it, Hallucinations, and especially thirst, meant much more. In particular if it was to seem unbearable and accompanied by convulsions when absorbing liquid, and subsequently by an uncontrollable fear of it. For that reason they were sitting at the furthest distant corners of their glass cage with a tumbler of water next to each of them, and from time to time they took a sip from the glass. For the moment everything was still normal. They had no sensation of thirst or of any discomfort when drinking. Their automatic riffles lay across their knees. It was these weapons which were the most agonizing, most incredible and most morbid part of what they had agreed. Even the most successful serum, the most perfect cure, could not work for everyone. There was always a percentage of failure. In principle, the SH-RRR-F1-78 serum could fail to work in one of them, yet still save the other and the majority of those surviving at the Airport. “In that case,” Coro Deveroux had said, when Hamilton had gingerly mentioned the possibility, “surely a violent attack in the one of us where the serum didn’t work would put the other one in danger?” “Who would not know the action of the serum in either of them, “he continued her line of thought. He was feeling his way as if through a mine field. “In fact, he or she wouldn’t be the only one in danger, Coro.” “But the whole undertaking.” Now it was Deveroux’s turn to carry on the morbid train of thoughts, with its obvious consequences for both of them. “It would never be known whether RRR had been successful or not.” “And that would be the end of it for the whole Airport. The serum, which on the basis of Lieberman’s formula, is now being produced in London, could be tested only if rabies breaks through into London itself. And if it does, I’m afraid that any serum would be too late.” Coro Deveroux said nothing. All around them glimmered the dial and glass eye of the instrument whose work was no longer of any use to anyone. On the spherical shield of the radar screen, green flashes of lightning moved in cycles across the empty black image of the air space above Heathrow. Once they had become used to the light, the sky once again began to break through into the dome. Once more it seemed that she was amongst the stars. “Do you know where that leaves us?” “I know,” she said. Despite the stars, she had seen that despairingly empty sky in Africa, when, worn out with work, she used to lie on the back in the savannah twilight and abandon herself to the intoxicating feeling of sinking into it, when it seemed to her that she was falling onto the sky from above rather than that it was pressing down on her. The light and the black void were arranged in a

different order, of course, but the feeling of belonging was the same. Soothing, blending into the greatest truth of all, that life and death are the same, that the universe is their eternal recombination, that to be dead or alive in such a universe are in fact one and the same. “Do you think that if it were necessary you could do THAT?” he asked. He himself was not certain that he could. “No, I couldn’t,” she said. “But I must.” ***** Just a few days ago, thought the Soviet Premier and Defense Minister, First Party Secretary, Marshal of the Soviet Union Sergey Arnoldovich Shurov, the bastards were ready to send me off as Ambassador to Mongolia; if I hadn’t outwitted them, I’d be kicking my heels in Ulan Bator by now, keeping company with the buzzards and the souvenirs of Molotov, whereas a few minutes earlier they were nodding their heads like clockwork dolls at his each and every proposal, even the most senseless ones, ready to blow up the whole world without even trying to get at his real motives behind the formal words. He was sitting alone in the dimly-lit conference room of the Kremlin, where, until just ten minutes before he had been charring the meeting of the Party Politburo. A thick web of tobacco smoke hung heavily in the air. Behind the curtains, could be sensed the chill of approaching dawn. It was 04.15 hours, Moscow time. 01.15 hours in London, at Heathrow, and 20.15 hours in Air Force One, which was carrying the President of the United States. The other members of the Politburo had gone out for half an hour after having nodded their assent to the incineration of London Airport, completely ignoring the Americans’ refusal to take part in the operation. At the nuclear rocket base ‘somewhere in the Urals,’ which, in the event of war, had been designated to sow southern England with an agreed number of megaton mushrooms, preparation were already under way at the launching ramps. The automatic countdown to zero had started. For a missile launch, which of course would never happen. He was not foolish enough to begin his reign with the destruction of a realm which he had dreamed of ruling. No one would dissipate the possessions which they themselves would inherit. It was natural that the President would have refused American participation. He had not expected any other decision from him. It was only a question of how convinced he was that the Russians would carry out the operation on their own. The spy satellites would very quickly give them warning of the preparations at the Soviet nuclear base in the Urals. They had to know he wasn’t joking.

He would have to put pressure on the British Prime Minister to undertake serious measures against the epidemic. To decontaminate his own house. While there was still time. Before the whole world was doomed. On the other hand, the Soviet preparations could be interpreted as a defensive act, dictated by the state of military alert in the US. The Americans could not know the countdown had already started. Yet without their knowing, there was no real bluff. Marshal Sergey Arnoldovich Shurov dialed a number and identified himself by a codeword. “Vasily Andreevich,” he said, “do you have at your disposal someone whose information Washington could have no possible doubts about?” “Yes, Comrade Marshal, I have,” answered the Head of G.R.U., the Soviet Military intelligence Service. “How long would it take to get one such piece of information onto the President’s desk?” “If it’s important, half-an-hour at the most.” Marshal Shurov dictated the report himself and put down the receiver. Now he was certain that the Americans would believe it. Perhaps he could have achieved the same result by making use of one of the KGB channels, but he hadn’t wanted to. It was true that in the matter of the planting of Rasimov, Chaidze the Head of the KGB had shown a technically mature, truly Byzantine multiplicity. But only technically. He had failed to grasp the real essence. The idiot believed that he, Shurov, was in favor of the arms’ race so that Communism would conquer the world and that that was the reason for sabotage of the Anglo-Soviet Agreement. Whereas in fact he wanted to conquer his own country. Permanent military strength gave the Soviet Union Power which no economic prosperity could replace. Economic prosperity was destructive. It gave the people time to think up all kinds of new desires, more and more new demands. And amongst them one day there could well be one that seemed to Shurov quite unwanted. And the world too, thought the Marshal, the world had to be kept intact for there to be any sense in trying to conquer it one way or another. Otherwise, in the end, it would come down to a world in which amongst the handful of survivors, it would only be the early communism of wild savages which reigned. ***** “The change doesn’t have to be physical initially,” said John Hamilton. “In fact, fairly regularly they occur first of all in the infected person’s psyche. That’s why those around them are most often unaware by the attack, which has been heralded by no externally visible signs. It’s very important to know what they are. What I mean to say is that you should know what is happening to me at every moment.”

“I shall know, John,” said Coro Deveroux. “How?” “I don’t know. But I shall know.” “I hope I shall be able to warn you.” He was trying to give it all the appearance of a scientific experiment, to make things unreal, impersonal, emotionally irrelevant. By autosuggestion, like some magic ritual, to remove both of them from the terrifying reality of their glass retort filled with the bubbling liquid of their bodies in which the virus was multiplying, away from the Airport and the intolerable waiting, into an imaginary laboratory where they could look at themselves as something different, impersonally, with scientific detachment. “If it happens, it will happen inside me, to me in fact, but as far as I’m concerned, I imagine, it will seem to me to be going on outside me, happening to things all around me. Probably, first of all to you. I shall have the mistaken impression which you have when you think you’re standing in a train which is moving parallel and in the same direction as another one. The illusion of a madman who believes that madness exists, but that it’s all the people around him who are mad. The onset of frenzy which follows such internal changes never comes completely without warning. The abnormal state takes shape only gradually; the mood of aggression builds up little by little. It is always preceded by a progressive heightening of awareness, which, the infected person, if he concentrates his attention, if he known what he is looking for, can monitor. And to a certain ext5ent, at least at the beginning, can even control. When that self-monitoring ceases, when the ‘observer’s eye’ fuses with the real one and through it continues to look at the world in a changed form, the capacity for control disappears. From then on, the crisis can come at any moment. It’s a good thing then if the infected person wants to talk about it. To describe what he is seeing, hearing, feeling. By following the increasing deterioration of the patient’s awareness of the world around him, a doctor can pinpoint the moment of complete loss of contact with reality and predict the onset of aggression.” Imperceptibly Coro Deveroux, as gradually as the state of self-awareness of rabies’ sufferer changed, edged the muzzle of her automatic riffle round to point at John Hamilton. For there was, in fact, one further pre-frenzy symptom in those infected with rabies – the majority of them became abnormally talkative. A smaller proportion felt as she did, reserved, withdrawn, with no will to take part in any action. ***** Are you sure?” asked the President of the United States. “I am, Mr. President,” answered the Director of the CIA Anderson. “Quite sure?” “Quite sure, Sir. The report is confirmed by a picture which we received by satellite. It originated

from our most reliable man in Moscow. There can be no doubt that the Russians, if the serum fails, will drop the bomb on London.” They were alone in the President’s working cabin. The other members of the National Security Council had gone out for a brief rest. “Robert, is Margaret still in London?” “Yes, she is, Sir.” “Perhaps there’s still time to telephone her.” “That’s no longer necessary.” The President looked at the Director of the CIA in surprise. “I don’t understand you, Robert. You said that Margaret is still in London?” “In London, but at Heathrow, Sir.” The Director of the CIA went out before the President could say anything, and for that he was thankful. He was left on his own. The isolation was complete, desperate, terrifying. There was something irrevocably final about it, irreversible, like the loneliness of the last man left alive on earth. From the flight deck, the captain of the aircraft announced that they were passing out of the Eastern into the Central Time Zone. Fleeing from night, the aircraft was flying westwards. With it he was running away from the decision. It would have been better if he had known nothing at all of Russian intentions. Rabies would just have disappeared. Medical rabies. There would be left, of course, the fury of the British. The fury of the world against the Russians. But he knew. And the other knew that he knew. This time he would have to put serious pressure on the British. There was no sense in becoming involved in a world war just to humor their lordly convenience. He pressed the button of the intercommunications system and asked to be put in contact with three separate destinations. He issued three orders one after the other. On the basis of the first, the American Armed Forces throughout the world were placed in a state of the last, ‘red’ degree of military alert, after which the next state had to be his personal cancellation of war. On the basis of the second, contact was made with 10 Downing Street, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain was requested to remain by the telephone while the President communicated with Moscow. On the basis of the third, Moscow came on the line, and for the second time he found himself talking to Marshal Sergey Arnoldovich Shurov.

President: Mr. Marshal, since our last conversation, there have been new elements in the development of the situation which require an explanation from the Soviet Government. Premier: Mr. President, in fact I was just on the point of getting in touch with you. President: Does that mean that it’s true? Premier: What’s true, Mr. President? President: That the Soviet Government has decided to go ahead with unilateral action if by 02.00 hours, London time, the anti-rabies serum at Heathrow has not proved to be successful? Premier: Since the Government of the United States rejected joint action, the Government of the Soviet Union has been forced to investigate other alternatives. President: That other alternative implies twenty million dead, does it not? Premier: No, Mr. President, no more than a million at most. We have decided on the most limited scale of operation concomitant with the maximum certainty that the epidemic would be eliminated with the minimum of lives sacrificed. President: In that case, Mr. Marshal, I have to warn you, and must ask that you take my words without reservation, that the United States will honor the obligations consequent upon her membership of the Atlantic Treaty Organization and automatically launch a nuclear counterstrike of a similar capacity on the region of Moscow most closely approximating to Heathrow. Premier: That is war, Mr. President. President: No, Mr. Marshal that is justice. As to whether it becomes war that will depend entirely on your further reactions. Premier: It would be a tragedy. President: For which my country will bear no responsibility. Premier: There is an old saying – when you find yourself in the dark, don’t waste time looking for the man who blew out the candle, find another candle. And it is because if we didn’t even look for one, there would have been no great chance of ever finding it, that just a few moments ago I wished to contact you. I have a proposal to make. President: I am listening to you with some hope, Mr. Marshal. ***** John Hamilton had been talking for a painfully long time, but it was Coro who noticed the first change. And not in him. In herself. And not in her sense of awareness, where she had expected it. The change had come about in her body; it was first of all a physical one before it affected her mind. With her attention concentrated on John, conscious that he was watching her carefully, she didn’t notice it at once. She became aware that something was happening to her only when she realized that she could hear him much more clearly, and then understand him much better than before. The dimensions of objects in the room, right down to the smallest instruments, stood out in precise outline before her strengthened eyes, which now missed nothing instead of blurring

everything in the dim mist of her tired sight. The contrast between light and shadow became sharper, more defined. Even stars in the sky above Heathrow regained the clarity they had lost when John had switched on the central light in the dome. She showed no reaction. She gave herself time to find out the true nature of the change. The room, evidently, had remained the same. And John was still the same. It was she who had changed. Her exhaustion had disappeared. She had not slept for more than an hour or two since her arrival at the Airport, how many days ago was that, she thought? But she felt alive and strong as if after a long, refreshing, dreamless sleep. The paper-like dryness of her throat had disappeared too. The water by her side, more and more tasteless - she had not been deceived that it had been because of the heat of the July night – had once again become crystal clear and capable of quenching her thirst. But most of all, she was no longer afraid. “Do you still have a headache?” Hamilton asked suddenly. “No,” she said and she too was surprised. “Not any more.” The heavy numbing headache had gone, and with it the film over her eyes which seemed to have covered things in the dome with a grimy coal dust and troubled her perspective. ”And you?’ “No. Apart from that, how do you feel?” “Fine,” she said, “and you? “Never better.” She hesitated. “Does it mean that ...?” “Yes, Core,” said Dr. John Hamilton, getting up. “We’ve made it. The serum works.” She thought she was going to cry, but only for a moment, she was much too proud for anything like that. ***** The Prime Minister of the Government of Great Britain was in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, surrounded by a host of ministers, officers, advisers, scientists and technical personnel, but he still felt completely alone. As far as the other people were concerned, he could have been on a deserted volcanic island in the middle of the ocean which had seen no ships for centuries. For, in the last and final issue, it was he who had to take the decision. At 02.00 hours he would know the results of Lieberman’s serum and whether God had relieved him from a role of which he had never dreamed when he had kissed hands with Her Majesty and formed the first LiberalSocial-Democrat Alliance Government to take office in Great Britain. There was nothing from Air Force One. He was completely unconscious of the activity all

around him; he had eyes only for the special telephone, that balefully silent piece of equipment for maintaining contact with the President’s aircraft, as if he were looking at his own coffin. He was loath to ask anything of the President. It would look as though he were not strong enough to take an independent decision, or worse still, that he needed the justification of pressure from outside to take it. When the ‘flying White House’ finally came on the line, he was requested to wait because the President was talking to Moscow. It was the petty insolence of an important, rich neighbor, who carried on with his everyday tasks while his poor cousin waited to tell him his troubles. No matter. He could swallow more than that if it means he got what he needed. And he needed to be put in a situation where he had no choice. That before witnesses, before history, he should be constrained ‘by the higher interests of the human species’, which, in reality, underneath all the fine words, were no more than fear for one’s own neck. Up to then in his talks with the Americans, he had fairly successfully played the part of lordly lack of concern, striving to create the impression that London, in its confrontation with the rabies’ virus, was repeating the mistake of Munich in its avoidance of a timely confrontation with the rabies of Hitler. As if London was unaware of the danger. The hell he was unaware. He felt sick to his stomach at the very awareness. But he couldn’t be expected to carry out genocide on his own initiative, even if it was to be billed as ‘sanity’. Such things could only be done with the support of solidarity, with an international sharing of responsibility. For rabies was neither a threat to England alone, nor exclusively English. It belonged to nature, and nature was American, and Russian, and everyone’s. It had been sheer chance that it had settled on Heathrow. If the accursed aircraft had not landed in London but continued on to its eventual destination, New York, the quarantine would have been at John F. Kennedy Airport and it would be the President who would be waiting nervously for his call now. Of course, if in the meantime the serum proved unsuccessful, from the other side of the Ocean he would get only warm understanding and moral encouragement, no real collaboration, just as at the beginning of both wars that England had fought that century for the world and even for America, even though the Yanks had landed when it was all over; he would have to tighten the noose himself and decide the fate of Heathrow on his own. Five minutes later, the Prime Minister of Great Britain was talking to the President of the United States. Acquainted with the Russian accusations, he gave firm assurances that the Heathrow rabies had not originated from Porton Down, that the military laboratories there were not working with Rhabdovirus, (they were working on other viruses), and that in that respect, Great Britain’s conscience was quite clear. He learned that the world was on the brink of thermo-nuclear war, and that the biological

survival of mankind depended on his capacity – and here the president emphasized ‘absolutely, with all means’ – to localize the epidemic. He energycally rejected the discreet suggestion that if RRR failed, the treatment of the infected Airport should be undertaken by R.A.F. He was appalled to hear that at the other end of Europe they were already counting the seconds in the life of Heathrow, and, incidentally, London. He threatened retribution and thanked the US for having taken the same attitude towards the Russian remedy. He was obliged, nevertheless, to agree with the President’s comment that that meant a third World War, and that there was no purpose to be served in fighting against rabies on the one hand and producing it on the other. He admitted to the President that he was going through the most difficult moment of his life and that, in fact, for the moment he simply did not know what to do, except to place his hopes in the success of the serum. In the President he found a certain amount of impatience, a great deal of sympathy and a single proposal. He listened to it attentively and could not reject it. The alternative was the ‘nuclear recombination of the planet’. And why in fact should he reject it? It was exactly what he had been waiting for. It was more or less what he himself had envisaged. The basic plan was Hamilton’s, but only now did it take on a form which could be put into practice. When he put down the receiver and mad4e his report, the Government listened in horrified silence. But even in the silence, there was a certain relief. ***** Major General Samuel Winterton, the Commander of the Heathrow blockade, was shocked by the order from Downing Street, shocked and offended. The idea of the ‘total solution of the Heathrow crisis’ had in fact been Hamilton’s, but technically ‘plan DID’ was his. The material and manpower resources for the operation had been in immediate readiness for the last 24 hours, and were British, Heathrow was a British Airport and everything that was happening was on familiar, one could almost say, home ground. The order from 10 Downing Street disturbed this harmony. Samuel Winterton despised hypocrisy. He was not one of this soldiers who went to war to ‘save lived’ or ‘to end all wars’. He knew very well that he went to war to kill and that however many people were killed, there would always remain sufficient good reasons for future wars and people left alive to fight them and die for those reasons. He had thought seriously of retirement. But he was prevented by the fear that it would be seen as being for the wrong reasons. That it would be thought that he was afraid of shouldering a responsibility such as no British navy general had had throughout history. The cal from Heathrow found him engaged in activities which he openly called ‘whitewashing’. “General Winterton?” “This is Dr. Hamilton. How is the work on the production of Lieberman’s serum coming along?” “I have been informed that the first batch will be ready by about 02.000.” “Try to get it here as soon as possible and make sure the vaccination team is ready.” “Do you mean to say that ...?”

“That’s right, General, I believe that the serum is successful.” “That’s marvelous news, Dr. Hamilton. I’ll let the Prime Minister know at once.” “I shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry, General. We have to wait until 02.00 for definite confirmation. You can tell him that things are looking excellent, but as yet not completely certain.” He liked the man. There was something military about him, mechanically precise, ‘business-like’ even. Winterton wondered how many men would have had the strength to propose what he had just suggested. “Dr. Hamilton,” he said, “you know very well that the programme has not been changed. If by 02.00 Plan RRR should fail, at 03.00 we will automatically put the alternative Plan DDD into operation.” “I know, General.” “Do you want to talk to your family before that?” “General, if it comes to that, I shall only be able to bark.” “Do you wish to talk to them now then? Your wife has bee here with us for the last two days.” “No, I don’t want to.” “I understand you. Does Dr. Deveroux perhaps want to talk to someone?” “No.” “I would be happier if you asked her personally.” “I’ll be damned if I’ll ask her.” “Am I to understand that she doesn’t yet know?” “Yes.” “Can I do anything for you?” “No.” “Do you have anything else you want to say?” “No.” “Good luck then, Dr. Hamilton.” “You too, General.” We’ll need all the luck we can get, thought Major General Samuel Winterton. If rabies breaks through into London, we’ll nee that luck. We’ll need a miracle. ***** At 20.35 hours New York time, 01.35 London time, the Security Council of the United Nations met in emergency session. The combined Anglo-American-Soviet motion was approved unanimously. At 20.45 hours New York time, 0145 London time, the members of the Security Council dispersed to their homes.

No communication was issued. The UN General Secretary announced to the reporters assembled in the corridor that the session had been devoted to the crisis at Heathrow. And that it had been the most successful in the history of the Security Council. ***** It was Coro Deveroux’s idea that they should wait for dawn on the roof of the Queen’s Building, from where, if everything was all right, the helicopter would take them to London. They felt very well. Fresh, vital, ready for anything, “As well as the first people on the very first day”, joked John Hamilton. “Before they saw what was waiting for them” added Coro. The serum, obviously was working. It wasn’t necessary to go on sitting there amongst the corpses in the Control Tower. Shortly before the time for the expiry of the ultimatum at 02.00, they would come back and inform the Anti-Rabies Committee in Downing Street that they were cured, that rabies was conquered and that they were waiting for the helicopter. John Hamilton agreed with her suggestion. Although in theory the danger was not over, the chances of the symptoms returning had really become negligible. The recovery was too stable and long-lasting for it to give way to the customary rapid deterioration, which most often was followed by yet more violent attacks of the disease. Most of all, recovery never went as far as the patient feeling healthier and stronger in his intervals of lucidity than he had ever been before. Nevertheless, they took the automatic rifles with them. They could not know what the situation outside in the Airport was. Probably the majority of people inside the quarantine were dead. But in addition to the paralyzed and comatose, powerless to harm them, there could be some still in a state of frenzy against whom they would have to defend themselves. But as they passed along the corridor of the Control Tower, there was nothing left alive. The bodies lay where the virus had completed its work or where a bullet had caught them, and without a more careful examination it was difficult to establish where the disease had been responsible for death and where man. Stepping over the corpses, they reached the lift. Hamilton pressed the call button. He was thinking about General Winterton. The General had not said – the RRR serum. Not even the RRR Project. He had said – the Plan. The RRR Plan. For him, this was a war. As in all the other wars where he had been in command. Korea, Kenya, Cyprus, Ulster. RRR was the main operational plan to break through the front. DDD was the reserve, alternative one. Ready in case the first failed. In fact, that was how one went about things in science too. There was never just one plan. One never carried out a single experiment. There were always reserve, alternative variants. Perhaps that was the reason why man’s wars had become so successful. And why man’s science had become so dangerous.

He heard the hum of the lift but didn’t know where it was coming from. The metal door was vibrating slightly. The defiance of a machine which carried on working with no further purpose, expecting soon to be completely abandoned, was astonishing. And alarming. It seemed as if man’s force was imperceptibly being transformed to his machines, his hands transformed into automatic tools, his legs into wheels or propellers, his senses into sensory mechanisms and telecommunications’ systems and his hands into computers. And with this force went something of his right to primacy. In the empty palace of man’s aeronautical illusions, where all living hearts had stopped breathing and only the clocks were still working correctly, a piece of machinery made of wire and cables, a transportation cage, a lift, was stubbornly demonstrating that man was in no way necessary for a perfect civilization. The lift arrived to carry out its last task for people. And as for those hypocritical codes, he thought, in which like the bitter taste in honey, were hidden unpleasant truths, all those RRR’s and General Wintertone’s DDD, they had them here too, but they had no one to pass them on to. The passengers had died as they prepared for their flights – they had come to be known colloquially, not without the cynicism which every exaggerated, extreme catastrophe gives rise to – as D.O.D., Dead on Departure, or as D.O.A., Dead on Arrival. The lift stopped. The door opened. The lifeless bodies, their arms firmly entwined around each others throats fell noisily into the corridor. A human head covered in blood fell from an open canvas bag. In the dead men they recognized Dr. Luke Komarowsky and the Airport Security captain, Stillman. The head had belonged to Sir Matthew Laverick, the Harley Street doctor. The lift was ahead of its time. It was the precursor of the automatic age. Although it was only a primitive machine sub-species, what the chimpanzee had been to man, even that lift had understood that man was no longer necessary and begun to eject him from its working processes. Perhaps it was somewhat premature, but it was on the right track. ***** At that moment, the grey-haired man who was still calling himself Gabriel was standing indecisively above a round, iron cover over an entrance into the sewers. From the unbroken rust along the iron edge of the opening, it was apparent that no one had used it for a long time. At the Airport given over to rabies and in the quarantine from which everyone had been trying to find a way out, it would have seemed strange to other people that no one had found this route to freedom.

But not Gabriel. He knew that nobody else could see the opening. It was open for him alone. For everyone else, there was only the expanse of the impenetrable concrete floor. He moved back the iron plate and looked down into the hole. It was cold, slimy, and dark. It smelt like the ground from which a vampire had just arisen. He lifted his gaze. From the wall there looked down at him wearingly a jagged-toothed death’s head from a placard for the fight against rabies. Across the scull’s bony forehead was written in large, green and orange letters: RABIES IS A KILLER!

32. Underground, beneath the Airport, in the labyrinth of the sewers, it was cold, slimy, dark, like the night in Samaria near Maggido in the pink and yellow cradle of her birth when the pack to which she had belonged disappeared for ever. At first it had been so cold that she had not been able to dream even beneath the warm coat of her mother. Then the kennel shook as if it was going to burst apart and all round there had been a roaring such as she had never heard before in her short life. And then at the smashed kennel gates the Great Beast appeared with glowing eyes and gaping, sharp-toothed jaws, its fiery tongue, dripping with white, poisonous saliva. In her mouth Sharon could still taste the blood of her brothers which she had licked at, whining, after the Great Beast had gone away. She was bothered too by bitter foam which she had to spit out continually to stop her from choking. But she had got used to all that. Now there was a new feeling. It had not come to her until she had gone underground. She knew that she was not alone. That there was SOMETHING behind her and that that SOMETHING was getting nearer. The cold told her that whatever it was, she come face to face with it. Gabriel had no feeling of being beneath ground. As if he was in a dream. The mysterious dream which had led him to the Airport. Before, the dream had been in him. Now he was in it. He was passing through a dark tunnel; its walls which joined in an arch above his head gave off the sharpness and icy chill of artic crystals. He was wading through a shallow, and then deeper swamp of a yellowish, greasy color, in which human excrement was floating, covered with a film of white frost. It was getting colder.

The source of the cold was evidently at the bottom of the labyrinth where a thick darkness had gathered, like a shadow which had lost its form, but which was regaining it with every step he took. The Shadow, shrouded in an icy whirlwind, was waiting for him to give it back its substance. The way towards it was dark, but he was led forwards by Ariadne’s white thread of frost which along the centre of the maintenance walkway above the sewers looked like the foam on the lips of a rabies’ victim. ***** Height above the underground labyrinth of the dark, cold antechamber of Lucipher’s domain through which, like lost souls, wandered Sharon and Gabriel, animal and man, up above, on the surface of the newly created earth, in the first night of the sixth day, there stretched out on the top of the Queen’s Building what had once been the Roof Garden and now for Coro Deveroux and John Hamilton was God’s Paradise in the East. What had once been Heathrow Airport had disappeared in the first darkness of the planet beneath a sky which was shot with the starry steps of its departing Creator, God who had placed them there. The gigantic hunched shadow of some being which on the runway far beneath them, alone and desperate was circling round a burnt-out aircraft did not belong to that world, that life, to that paradise. It was no more than the morbidly senseless reflex of a sacred dance round the fire of some other world of which the departing God had finally washed his hands. Neither Coro Deveroux nor John Hamilton had ever been in the Roof Garden, nor did they have any idea of what it could be like, beyond that of urban terraces, where the planting of exotic trees and bushes in a patch of soil adds just one more feature of human artificiality to the dirty pastures of concrete. This was something quite different. The exotic trees and bushes were there, but in a living, richly-green plantation on which, here and there, over the white stone of Greek Arcadian glades trickled gently rustling streams of water. The stars in them became luminous fish; and up above, in the velvety sky, the stars winked motionlessly like fossilized birds of flame. Nature here was still young, untouched, as if created for them just a few moments earlier. And they were alone in it. Adam and Eve on the first night of the human story. And that was just how they felt. Now they had been created just as they were. The whole lifeforce had been breathed into them; it was still in their veins. And they had nothing to expend it on except each other.. It was not love. It was much more than that. It was the pouring out of life from body to body, recombination, the genetic unification of the two halves of being.

For each one of them it was a kind of feast. There was no place on each of their bodies that the other did not experiance, both as master and slave, and then joined to his own. They penetrated one into each other, went on and one in the other, fulfilled each other to oblivion, until, as if in a psychedelic ecstacy, they were no longer conscious of being one but came to experience love as a summit of self delight. Then they would break apart and come together anew. There was no time which could stop them. Time no longer existed. Everything had stopped as if entranced. Only in the sky, like an evil eye, shone the star-Lucipher, announcing the arrival of the day. ***** Beneath the ground too, time no longer existed. Nothing has changed. The province through which he was passing remained the same. As if he was standing in one place. The caves were dark, empty, icy. Lined with deathly moisture. And there was no end to the white trail which was always the same. But everything was not quite the same. In it something had changed. He was no longer following behind the nice little dog Sharon from the Jenkin’s story.Nor the ice-bound Shadow of his dreams. Dog and Shadow had become one. Now he knew they had always been one. For the Great Beast had always existed. Always and for ever. ***** Coro Deveroux and John Ha,milton dressed without speaking. They tried not to look at the bare concrete waste of the Roof Garden from which the grass had disappeared and the one-time springs had turned into rusty cisterns full of dirty water, at Eden’s glades of which here and there were left only a dusty bush or a half-withered, stricken trees. All around them lay the corpses of rabid passengers and Airport employees, grey in the light of dawn. Beneath the balustrade could be seen the Airport, equally dead and gray. “What happened to us, John?” “We took more then we gave, Coro,” he said. “We exhausted the wells. We spent our credits. We fouled the earth. We disturbed the balance. We behaved towards the earth like highwaymen, who were just passing over it, and not as its fellow-owners and fellow-sufferers. As if there would be no-one after us.

We shall pay for it. And there won’t be. We were wrong in something else too. Daniel Leverquin was right. We thought that what Rhabdovirus did at Heathrow was rabies. But it’s just exactly what we’ve been doing from the time we became an intelligent species. What we made of ourselves, of our biological chance, our history, our life and aims. It’s that, Coro, that is the real rabies. And all this is only a disease which we will conquer somehow or other just as we have conquered them all up to now. And it’s not a question of how many of us will be left, but why? Will those who survive be any different. For unless they are, there is no pont in survival.” “John,” she interrupted him, “I’m not asking about that. What was it that happened to us here. Was that rabies?” “Rabies isn’t paradise, Coro. Rabies is hell. And we were in paradise. At least I was.” “So was I.” “It was a nervous crisis which acted like a hallucinatory drug.” “It wasn’t love?” He took her hand. It was cold, alien and reserved. “Of course it was. Why shouldn’t it have been?” “Because I didn’t feel it in that way.” “How did you feel?” She tought for a moment. Trying to remember, to accound the contrary impression to define the nature of her feelings, confused by the function of her body, that just a few short moments earlier, as if independent of her will, had of its own accord joined itself to John. It had been, certainly, a certain kind of love, sublimated into a savage lust, but towards something which by unquestionable right was hers, which belonged to her as if part of her own body, which controlled itself spontaneously, ruled and commanded like her own limbs, where even the temporary subjection was only a selfish game, like onanism. “Like domination, conquest, but at the same time like self-satisfaction, I don’t know, John, in any case, different from what I really feel towards you.” He was silent. “That’s strange,” he said at last. “What’s strange?” “It’s something like that I went through as well.” “All right. And what is it now?” “I know. I love you, and that’s all that I know. And that I know. And that’s all that’s important for the moment. For a long time we were under inhuman pressure. When the pressure relaxed, and that happened unexpectedly, everything inside us which had been pent up for days, reused its head, and so we behaved and felt crazily. It made us blind to all this around us, the whole idea that we should make love amongst these corpses, in this charnel house, do you understand?”

“I understand,” she said, not looking at him. “But everything’s all right.” “You mean to say that we’re healthy?” “Completely, Coro. Lieberman’s serum has worked.” She hesitated. “Does that mean they won’t incinerate Heathrow?” He looked at her in astonishment. “You know?” “Of course.” “Since when?” “From the beginning. You ought to let them know.” He looked at his watch. It was 01.40. “I told General Winterton that I shouldn’t call him up before 02.00.” “It’s 02.05 now, John.” “No, Coro. It’s 01.40.” He put his watch to his ear. It had stopped. It too, he thought, was part of the anti-human conspiracy which had turned the life in the Tower into a coffin. ***** Down beneath the earth, the Great Beast walked silently in front of Gabriel. He was getting nearer and nearer to it all the time. He didn’t know what he would do when he caught up with it. He didn’t have to. It would all be resolved when he got close to it. Just as it was only at the Airport that he had found out why he was there. Just as he had only found out from the dead Sue Jenkins why he had met her and just as he had found out why he had gone down beneath the ground to find what had once been Sharon. Down there underneath the earth the Great Beast walked silently in pursuit of Sharon. Sharon too did not know what she would do when it caught up with her. Nor did she have to know. Instinct would teach her. It had brought her there, and it would get her out. ***** Leaving Coro Deveroux in the Roof Garden to try to attract the attention of the reconnaissance helicopter which would precede Plan DID, (Devastation, Incineration, Decontamination of Heathrow Airport), Dr. John Hamilton stood at 02.10 hours in front of the lift in the basement of the Control Tower and verified that it was not working. At 02.15, by way of the staircase, he reached Airport Control at the top of the Tower where he came upon the bodies of several dog-people and the smashed radio-transmitter. At 02.23 he ran towards the Main Tunnel. He didn’t get far. The machine-gun bullets missed him, and forced him to crawl back. Like a dog. Finally, you too have become a dog, he thought. At 02.35, barely alive, he dragged himself out of the cab of the yellow Airport maintenance vehicle in which he had tried to break through into the Main Tunnel a second before it was set on

fire by a direct hit from a bazooka. At 02.37 he realized that he had left his automatic rifle on the roof. Luckily he found another one in the central Roadway and at the entrance to the Main Tunnel, sheltering beneath a car; he tried to imitate the Morse Code signal for S. O. S. by firing into the air. Tree dots, tree dashes, tree dots, a pause and then the same repeated. Three shots, three bursts, three shots. They didn’t understand him. They didn’t answer. Panicking, signaled S. O. S. firing into the invisible blockade. Now they understood him. They returned his fire.

Borislav Pekić, written by Ljiljana Pekić

Borislav Pekić is considered one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century. He was born on 4th February 1930 to a prominent family in Montenegro and died in London on 2nd July 1992. From 1945 until he moved to London in 1971, he lived in Belgrade. After WW-II, Pekic co-founded and led as VP the secret "Yugoslav Democratic Youth" organization. Due to his opposition to the Communist regime, he was arrested in 1948 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, but released after 5 years. 1958 marked the year of his marriage to Ljiljana Glišić, an architect and the niece of Dr Milan Stojadinović, Prime Minister of Yugoslavia (1935-1939) and the publication of his first of over twenty film scripts, among which "The Fourteenth Day" represented Yugoslavia at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. This success did however not soften the official ban issued by the ruling Communist Regime on the publication of any of Pekic's literary works. His first book, "Time of Miracles", was only published in 1965, many years after the manuscript had been completed. Despite decades of communist boycott, Pekic's literary genius proved indomitable in the end.