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Rabies

Novel published in Serbian as "Besnilo", Sveuilina Naklada Liber, 1983, Zagreb, Borislav Peki
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 innocent-
sounding 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-el-
Mutesellim; 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 south-
western 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 take-
off and landing runways, was both impressive and frightening. Its dirty gray surface, criss-
crossed 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 wide-
brimmed 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 fair-
haired 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 common-
place? - 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, seor.'
'We know that. That's why you can't travel.'
'But then he won't be born in Villafranca del Cid, seor.'
'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, seor,' 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, seor?'
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 39C. 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 39C.
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 all-
destructive 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 blood-
soaked 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, long-
drawn 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 business-
like 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. A-
typical 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,
Schrdinger, 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 prayer-
book'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 attach, 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 Anglo-
Russian 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 cant 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 nave 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. Gbels 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, werent 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 pre-
perforation 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 long-
term 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 Rolls-
Royce.

'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 twenty-
four 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 communiqus, 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 moon-
green 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 built-
in 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 berspannt.' 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 migrs, 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 migr 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-year-
old, 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 Air-
Line 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 re-
aligning 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-a-
bitch 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 mono-
tone 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 twenty-
four. 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 miracle-
working 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 old-
fashioned 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 self-
castigation.

"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 all-
inclusive 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 dtente 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 nave!" 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 so-
called 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 Transit-
infected-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 nave. 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 car-
park 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 Saint-
Pears, 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 Al-
Khiyam.

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 tea-
parties.

'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 Rmy 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. Rmy 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 Rmy 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 Eugne Laquires to Colonel Rasimov. 'There's someone
shooting over there. What's your answer?'

Monsieur Eugne 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 nave 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-of-
a-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 Liebermans 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 hadnt 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 Liebermans 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 wasnt able to restrain himself.

We had a good method at Wolfenden House, he said passionately, but we got a serum which
didnt 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. Dont
try to make one unfortunate incident into vivisection.

Wasnt that what it was?
Yes, answered Lieberman, in the sense in which that is what every unsuccessful operation is.
Luke got up. I dont want to be involved with unsuccessful operations.
Does that mean that youre not going to work in the laboratory, asked Coro Deveroux.

Perhaps Professor Liebermans way is the only one, probably it is, but Im not capable of
following it. I shall go back to the Medical Centre.
To tranquilize people? asked Lieberman.
Its not much. But at least its 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 Lukes behavior. Im sorry, Professor. Luke has
lost his son at the Airport.
In any case, answered Lieberman indifferently, there are four of us left and thats 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 thats 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 aircrafts 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 Queens 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
sovereigns 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 Elgars 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 aircrafts 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 Queens 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 Bergs face.
Ill inform the people from the Central Heating. That was the euphemism for the Airport
morticians. But we shall have to wait for Dr. Laveicks signature before we let them take him.

Why? asked Dr. Wang Han Hu.
Hes 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.
Ill 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 Lierbermans 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 Liebermans
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, Liebermans 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, Liebermans 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 didnt 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, its as if Lieberman didnt 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 hes
been and what hes been doing until now?
No.
Thats 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.
Thats sounds logical, said John, but it doesnt explain why he changed his name.

No, it doesnt.
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 didnt he come with you?
In that part of Africa yellow fever is endemic, but in the last few months weve 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 Queens Building! Dr. Matthew Laverick is requested to contact Sister Tahaman
immediately, repeat, immediately, in the Exhibition Hall of the Queens Building!

The voice from the loudspeakers echoed through Terminal 2 and the Queens Building, locating
Sir Matthew on the stairs leading down into the Medical Centre.

Arent you going to go? asked Lady Laverick.
As soon as Ive 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 Gods sake, whats the matter?
Everythings all right, he tried to reassure her, pulling her down the stairs after him,
everythings perfectly all right. Just keep on walking.
Ill come if you tell me where, said Lady Laverick decidedly and stopped.
Ill 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.
Whats the matter with the vaccine they gave me? Is it no good?
Oh, its quite all right, but its 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 doesnt.
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 Queens Building, from where, shrouded in black plastic bags, they were transferred in self-
propelled 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 Queens 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 couldnt 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 didnt
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 didnt 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 worlds 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 mans 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 worlds 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 SH-
RRR-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 hadnt 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 mans
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 mans 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: thats impossible, that is not permitted to happen! Say: it shouldnt 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 Liebermans 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 citys 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 doctors pass, had barely allowed him and Lady Laverick to
cross the frontier of the Strict Isolation Zone, which ran along Conway Road between the
Queens 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 dogs snarling. He let go his wifes 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 couldnt make out what the bloody silly doctor was about. Couldnt 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 wasnt 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 dogs pitiful whining. He knelt down and felt the mans 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 Queens 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 Queens 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-a-
bitch 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 didnt 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 hadnt heard him or the swine just didnt 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 two-
tiered loader were no use for hiding in, but they could climb into a petrol bowsers 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 ones 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 wouldnt use the automatc-rifle. Not in any
circumstances. The episode with the guard in front of the Queens 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 Queens 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 wifes 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 wasnt
noticable.

He laid the automatic-rifle aside on the next seat, took his wifes hand and stroke it, began to
explain to her why he had had to do all that he had done. He didnt tell her, of course, that the
guard was dead. Only unconscious. At first she didnt understand. She didnt 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. Everythings all right.
Are we in the air?
She still wasnt feeling herself yet, he thought. No.
She looked round. Why are we alone? Where are the other passengers?
Theyll 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 VIPs 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 aircrafts 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
Queens 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 fellow-
passengers 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 didnt look back as he ran in the direction of the Terminal.

He didnt 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 aircrafts 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 Christs 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 couldnt 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 dont 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 didnt understand
anything at all. Hans Magnus was intelligent. And his plan had been brilliant. If it hadnt 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 dont bother me!
Ive already caught this one, Sir. You dont have to worry. Hes 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 couldnt stand Frenchmen either, if it was a question of foreigners, even though they hadnt
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 Gods 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 mans 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 espionages
underhand activities in Europe, he didnt feel all that great himself. He had answered Donovan
with something of that kind.

Im not surprised, he said. Weve 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 hadnt 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 theres nothing strange in that. I
am.
Me too. Im running away from one rabid world and the first thing waiting for me in the so-
called healthy one is that same rabies.
Im ill, Anatoly.
He looked at him wearily.
Im not in the mood for Gothic humor, Alexis.
I mean for real, Ive caught the bloody thing.

he hadnt 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.
Dont talk to me about fear, he said.

You dont understand, Donovan had said. No one understands. And he couldnt 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. Im 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 didnt feel it for anything. Fear was
the one thing of which a Donovan, or a Rasimov, could not know the origin. Of what?

I dont know. And that was the most terrible thing of all, thought Donovan, fighting to hold on
to his reason.
All that doesnt have to mean anything. He offered the vodka to Donovan across the table. Its
just bloody nerves.

The cloudy, bluish liquid rippled behind the glass. The Scot shut his eyes and clenched his teeth.
For Gods 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 wasnt 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. Its just your god dam nerves, cant 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 doesnt mean anything. You always did.
Not like this. Never like this.
How?
I dont know. Like an animal. Inhumanly. Without reason.

Animals dont kill without reason. Thats 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, theyll take you off to the hospital. I dont know whether youve
got the filthy virus or not, but youll 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.

Im 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 didnt 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.

Thats quite O. K. by me, Elmer, said Inspector Hobson, yawning. Only youll 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 didnt
know about him?

Carrying out his duty, he thought bitterly. Where everybody else had forgotten about it.
Everyones gone mad with rabies here. Nobodys bothering about anything any more.

Inspector Hobson had his own opinion as to who was really mad and who wasnt. But he was
careful not to share it with the bewildered-looking sergeant. Elmer certainly looked ill.

That didnt 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 wouldnt 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, lets 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.

Whats the matter with him? Inspector Hobson asked one of the workmen. The voice which
came from beneath the hood had a strong cockney accent. Hes kicked the bloody bucket. What
dyer expect?

What about it Elmer? said the Inspector Hobson maliciously. He doesnt look very Germanic.
Thats not him, mumbled Sergeant Elmer dully. Wheres the other one? The other prisoner
from this cell?

Weve 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 didnt 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.

Youll have to look for them in the bloody boiler, said the workman. Hed 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 wouldnt do that to me? You cant 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 Donovans testament. It was true that everything had not quite
turned out as his friend had envisaged, rabies had spoilt most of that, but it hadnt 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, didnt 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-trades conditioning.

It didnt 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, Donovans 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 Rasimovs 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 youre
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 wouldnt 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, theyd 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 hadnt 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 Donovans 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? Wasnt it true?
Hadnt everybody?

*****

Sergeant Elias Elmer was standing bareheaded, without a mask, in front of a mirror in the
Gentlemens 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.

Its not all over yet, he thought. Youre not going to get away from me, Hans Magnus. I love
you, Hans Magnus. Im 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 didnt 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! Im in despair, frightened and angry. I didnt know how to
define my feelings, or decide whether Im desperate for her, or for myself. With Louise safe, I
was free. I dont 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 cant 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 wasnt 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, ones 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. Hes 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 shant give in, I shall resist, and I shall do something. What I dont yet know but certainly
something. I feel it almost as a mission. If I dont write a book about rabies, my diary at least
will be left. From it, theyll 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 Donnes 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.
Mans 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 havent 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?
Theres no disease which cant be overcome if man really resists it.

There was a note of discord in her behavior, something which didnt belong to her sober nature,
or her Lutheran upbringing. Something of an Asiatic fanaticism.
Thats right, there isnt, I said sourly. A man can even kiss a poisonous snake if hes quick
enough, but I dont think you are.

And you?
I got caught in the snakes lair. I didnt sneak in to see what the snakes get up to.
I dont 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 didnt want to. You
chose to stay.

Im 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 theres something in that, I admitted impatiently. But the epidemic didnt have a
name then. And no one had died. It was more fiction than faction still. If Id known then what I
know now about rabies, Id 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?
Isnt it a good one?

Of course not. Theres no comparison at all. Its 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 dont kill people here because theyre rabid, only because
they can infect those who are still healthy. And when, in addition to that, theyre armed, theres
no other way of neutralizing them.

The man on the pavement this morning wasnt 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 didnt 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. Didnt 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 didnt 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?

Dont 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 dont know what you mean. Im damned if I understand anything.

We were alone in what had once been the hairdressers 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 didnt 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. Im not interested in stories. I can make them up for myself!
A true one, I mean.
Thanks very much. It wasnt 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 isnt a story, I thought. Its 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 Reichsfhrer, 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 mans 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.

Thats 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 Sturmfhrer, and the post of Head of the Genetic Research Section at the
Military Institute of Microbiology, unlimited financial means and the moral support of
Reichsfhrer 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
scientists 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 Claubergs 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 didnt 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 -50C, 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 didnt 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 Reichsfhrer, 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 Mengeles and Claubergs project. At the
Nrnberg 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 didnt have any maimed or
crazy people. Those were only Mengeles. 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 Louises strange behavior disturbed me, her icy rhetoric, which was not usual for her, and
also the feeling that the story doesnt 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. Hes here now, at the Airport.
What?
Hes here at Heathrow, Daniel.

I wasnt surprised. I had known it all along. Without that ending, the story would have had no
point to it. Though even then, I still couldnt see what it was. Or what it had to do with Louise.

Hes 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 hed 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 didnt know
who he was, behind what name he was hiding, could look for him in Komarowsky, Hamilton,
Laverick and Lieberman. But as it is, theres no dilemma, not even a story.

For Christs 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, thats
no good, no good at all.

Its your reaction thats no good.
Im sorry. I took it back. All right. The storys incredible, but hes here. Why, nevertheless,
are you here, and what do you have to do with it?

Im part of the story.
How?
Im 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 Liebermans laboratory?
He was called Siegfried Stadler then, and now hes called Frederick Lohman.

In itself Louises 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 migr 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. Hes 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, Stadlers victims belonged to Mengele.

Wiesenthal was looking for Mengele. Mengeles 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?
Thats another story. After endless false trails, we established that our man was living in
England. We didnt 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.

Thats when you got to know Hamilton.
Yes. Thats why I came to study in London.
But you couldnt be certain that Lieberman was Stadler by process of elimination alone?

No, we found indirect proof as well. First of all, he wasnt 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 doesnt surprise me, I said. Id have washed mine too.
Lieberman too washed them abnormally often and thoroughly.
You didnt 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 didnt 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 Ill 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
ones 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 couldnt count on Jews this time.

Perhaps he hadnt yet got round to people.
What do you mean to say by that?
Perhaps hell 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 dont 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 dont positively know for certain?
Not positively.
God Almighty! I shouted in amazement.
This is how we see it. If hes not Stadler, his presence at Heathrow makes some sense. If he is, it
doesnt. In that case, its suicide for him. But hes still doing it. Why?

Because hes not Stadler, damn it, thats why.
But if he is?
Then hes a madman.
But Siegfried Stadler is not a madman, Daniel. And thats what worries me. Theres something
wrong here.

Whats wrong is that you havent 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 havent the proof for that.
But what, for Gods sake, do you intend to do?

To present him with what we know about Stadler.
In the hope that hell burst into tears and confess everything?
Oh, no, of course he wont. But at least Ill know.
How? How will you know?
I dont know how, Daniel, but Ill 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 wasnt. Shed only just arrived at
Terminal 2. She hadnt had time to become infected, she couldnt be rabid. And jet again she
was. Rabid in the normal, healthy, human way which had made of our earths history an endless
funeral.

Youre quite mad, do you know? I said bitterly, youre absolutely out of your mind! Do you
know that all our lives depend on Lieberman now?
No ones life can depend on that kind of man, Daniel. Only their death.
And anyway, Liebermans in the laboratory, in the Control Tower. You can only get in there
with a special pass which you dont have.

Youve got one.
O looked at her dumbfounded. So what?
Youll get me in to the Tower.
Ill be damned if I will.
Daniel, she said imploringly, Siegfried Stadler killed more than seven hundred people!

Theres a killer here which has killed off thousands, Louise, and which threatens to kill millions
more, I said decidedly. I didnt 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 thats the first one to be dealt with. We know that its killing us. About Stadler, were not
even certain. But even if we were, if he really is Stadler and we kill him now, we shall have
deserved rabies. It cant do any more to us. Were rabid already, theres 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. Its no kind of dilemma. Lieberman cant 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. Youll find out from
them what kind of a man is this Lieberman on whom your life depends.
And she went out of the hairdressers.

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 Queens Building and Terminal 1. Lawfords
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. Shed conned him.

When Abner suggested that the Irish woman had perhaps been taken ill, he hadnt regarded that
as sufficient reason. Not in business, where everything was based on confidence. He too, he said
didnt 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 didnt spare it. His family would understand.
He too wanted them all to be together, and felt as he did. Otherwise they wouldnt have been a
family.
They went though the underground passage with their eyes blindfolded. The Lebanese didnt
want to see Abner organizing his own smuggling trade along his route. The Irish womans
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 hadnt 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 didnt 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 couldnt 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.

Hes no thankfulness at all, thought Mrs. Markopoulos of her so-called husband. He hadnt 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 years 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 wifes contractions would stop now, he thought anxiously. It was true they werent
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, dont let it happen, prayed Suarez, dont 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 old-
fashioned 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 cars door handle. For a moment the thought
went through his mind to lower the window noiselessly and smash the wrench down on the
intruders fingers. In Gods 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 couldnt control herself. She was raving. He couldnt 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 didnt 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 couldnt have been
rabid. Or at least he hadnt 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 hed never even seen, of
whom he had not even known that he wished to do him harm. If it hadnt 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. Its all
right now, he whispered gently, stroking her hair, take it easy, its 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.
Whos Osman?

My brother. My elder brother.
He understood. Did you tell them about me?
We have to hide, Reuben. Theyll kill me.
They cant if they dont 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. Theyre rabid!
No, Miriam, he said dully. Its 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 girls 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 Hamiltons
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 spiders 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 boxers
gloves that he didnt 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 couldnt 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 didnt 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 Airports 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 Townsends 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
didnt try to stop him. He didnt 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 wasnt.

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 minutes 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 Liebermans
scientific team, but not Dr. Komarowskys 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 Leverquins 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 Leverquins 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 Liebermans 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. Georges Chapel.

While waiting to be made up for his broadcast the service was already in progress. Major Hilary
Lawford in Townsends 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 couldnt 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 dogs 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 didnt 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 wouldnt
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 youre wanted on the telephone, he was afraid, wouldnt 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 gods 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 mans 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 couldnt 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 hadnt 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 wasnt that he was afraid of responsibility, hed 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 didnt 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 nations 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. Georges 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 were 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 hed been able to live without it up to then.

The camera began to hum dully.

St. Georges 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 wouldnt have called himself Iron Heel. He would have said,
Lawford, the Iron Paw.

The Siberian borzoi hissed, Lets 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 Lawfords 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 dogs
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 didnt have to become a dog.

However perfect a principle, it could not have deserved that.

The TVs 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 didnt 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 Lawfords
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 Airports 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 Gods sake, Komarowsky, dont make my life any more difficult!

The mans voice was stifled beneath the mask. Do you know whats happening at the Airport?

Is that you, Stillman?
Yes, it is, but thats the only thing Im sure of for the moment.
Im not moving from here until you tell me where youre taking me!

The dead AS Chief Lawfords deputy pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and pushed it
towards the doctor. Ive 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 Hamiltons handwriting.

Whose order is it?
Liebermans. 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. Dont 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 Lawfords successor to a
scientist, and even worse, to a foreigner. Lets go!

My place is here in the hospital, said Luke sharply. What the hell do they want with me in the
Control Tower?

Youll 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, theyll die.
Where are they taking us? Whats happening? protested Chief Sister Logan.
Dont ask me! said Luke angrily. Ask that bastard of Lawfords.

Stillman was loosing patience. He was not a dogcatcher. Especially for those gravediggers in
white coats. Hed had more than enough of being insulted by people for whom hed risked being
lynched outside. Were 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, lets 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. Ive 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!
Im 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 Queens 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 didnt hear him.

From outside came the sound of machine-gun fire, which drowned all other noises, even the dog-
like 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 dAlbiac 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 Lawfords, and at
the moment of crisis, had come into force automatically. Automatically also Lawfords
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. Thats 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 ones 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 Noahs 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 Liebermans 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 Lawfords 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
Lawfords 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 Gabriels 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 Lawfords 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 wasnt, he thought, she was dead.
All right, so you dont 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.
Youll die for nothing.

The old man looked at him with warmth which he had never seen in anyones eyes before, not
even in his mothers 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 mans mad, Leverquin, cant 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 wasnt 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 wasnt until he was inside the Control Tower that he realized that his impulsive gesture
appeared no less insane than Gabriels search for the non-existent dog, and just as completely
natural. After his conversation with Louise about Professor Liebermans identity, he had tried
several times to go on with the Diary.

He couldnt 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 hed 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.

Its unheard of, Collins, he said drily. Do you think that Her Majestys 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 peoples 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 doesnt 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 Noahs 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 wouldnt 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 Airports
misfortune.
,
From a broken window in the Queens 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 Gods 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 Noahs 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 engines 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 wasnt
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 Lawfords
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 Townsends 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 couldnt 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 womans 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 didnt want to
share it with anyone. He knew that Hamilton and Deveroux were disappointed that he wasnt
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 elses are crapped up.

He couldnt 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 wasnt
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 anti-
rabies 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 Brunos, forced Galileo shamefully to retract
his, mocked at Darwins. 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-781s 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 ones 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 didnt 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



Its us who are rabid. They are just ill.
(From the Heathrow Diary of Daniel Leverquin.)


27.

At mankinds funeral, perhaps a few of mans 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 mans 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 natures 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 couldnt 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 co-
existence.
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 Airports 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 didnt 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 didnt step on it, or as long as
it couldnt 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 Airports 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 Heathrows 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 Towers 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 Liebermans announcement although she
supposed, of course, that it was in connection with the anti-rabies serum and that it would
probably be favorable.

(She hadnt worked in the main direction of Liebermans research, which he had processed
himself, but under Hamiltons 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 Tokyos Kitasato Institute and Dr.
Iakhani, an Indian from the British Medical Research Councils 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 Lawfords 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. Mans most faithful friend. One of those who,
like the lice, would mourn at mans 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 mans throat?

What guarantee was there that Lawfords 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 didnt please some people, at once have to be mad
or rabid?) and that therefore, Major Lawfords 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
Sorensens 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 Gods 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, Thats bloody good now,
professor and proposed opening a bottle of whisky from the late General Manager Townsends
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.

Ill 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 didnt cake if he didnt 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.
Im sorry, Stillman, but Ill go alone.
Coro Deveroux regarded that as madness bordering on suicide. Its a real hell out there, Luke!

Thats 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 doesnt go alone. By himself he had
no chance.

On the contrary, only if I go alone. If Lawfords gang of dog-catchers appears in the Terminal,
theyll tear us to pieces.
Are you proposing to go out there without protective clothing? asked Stillman.
And without automatic riffles.
Then dont count on me. Im a policeman. Im not a bloody maniac.

Were not asking anything more than that from you, Stillman. We dont need corpses to test the
serum.
Thats enough of this crap, Komarowsky, said Stillman with calculated malice. You killed
your son yourself. It wasnt us, neither me nor Lawford.
For Gods 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. Its 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 didnt
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 Ians arm. He didnt 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 dont know, Luke answered. And he didnt know. Not then. He would know tomorrow. Only
not now.

Daniel Leverquin in disgust watched the faint smile on Liebermans 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. Youre 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 Hamiltons 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 Sorensens 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 childs 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 didnt want to worry him unnecessarily. She herself resembled those air-
hostesses 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. Suarezs darkened face was near the window. When she had finished shaving the
womans 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 womans
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 didnt 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 dog-
people 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 childs 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 Liebermans 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 large-
scale 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 wouldnt 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 Liebermans 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 didnt 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.

Im at the transport gates. Theres no material here. I have to go to Terminal2.
Lieberman says go to Terminal 1. He thinks everyones already dead at Terminal 2
Tell him Ill go where I can and the Tower can go to hell!

Whats like out there?
Lousy.
Komarowsky, what is RRR?
Anti-rabies serum.

What does the formula mean?
I dont have time, Leverquin.
For Gods 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 dark-
green 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 Ians 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 Chinamans 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 couldnt 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 mans body and freed him. But he
couldnt save him from rabies. The porter crawled away whimpering to the shadow of the ruined
W. H. Smiths bookstall.

On the ground floor, he met Nurse Moana Tahaman. She didnt recognize him. She was
delirious. She was picking her way between the corpses and the piles of luggage with a
sleepwalkers 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 sleepwalkers 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 Airports 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 cant 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
didnt 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 couldnt 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 couldnt 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 couldnt 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.
Jeromes 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 Queens 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 didnt 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 wolfs 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 leaders half-
naked 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 Gods 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 mans faith, mans imagination for mans sins. Mans 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
didnt 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
hadnt 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 didnt 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.

Lukes 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.
Whats 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. Im ill. I cant give you my hand.
Thou knowest of thine illness?

He explained what he had done and why. He didnt know why he was explaining it all to a
madman. He didnt know what was happening in the Tower, what was going on in his body and
he didnt 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 mothers 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 Lukes 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 Deverouxs 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! Thats it! Thats 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.

Thats 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 Logans
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 couldnt see the childs 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 didnt 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, blood-
flecked 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 didnt 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 womans 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 Logans 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 someones 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.
Ill 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 youll 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 dogs 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 doctors
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 professors 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 wasnt. 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 spaceships flight deck, the AMCO-781 computer was putting up an illuminated
display on its screen but its meaning was well beyond Leverquins comprehension.

Professor Liebermans 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 wasnt 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?

Dont 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. Its 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 isnt a moral
question, Leverquin. Its a matter of usefulness and practicality. Komarowsky is simply not big
enough for it.

Perhaps, but I can understand him.

There was bitterness in Liebermans voice. Would you understand it if a surgeon, with you on
the operating table, stopped in the middle of a operation simply because he couldnt stand the
sight of blood?

I dont know, Leverquin answered worriedly.
Dont talk nonsense! Of course you wouldnt understand him!
I probably wouldnt.
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. Liebermans arguments
were strong for elementary-school level moralistic comments.

But dont worry, Lieberman continued, getting up from the revolving stool from which he had
been watching the work of the computer. Youre not the only one. The majority of people
would understand him. Of course, they wouldnt understand us. There arent 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 Louises 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. Im 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
havent, 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 dont think he was right to have made the incident public?

You cant 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 dont really know. Perhaps Dr. Deveroux said something along those lines.
Dr. Deveroux couldnt 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, isnt 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 Sorensens mother out of the envelope and spread them out
on the laboratory sample-preparation table in the order in which the womans 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 didnt 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
Sorensens 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, Sorensens and
Liebermans. 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 Gods sake, are numbers really important for you?
Not for me, no. Theyre important for you. And you havent even got them right. Where the
devil do you think youll get to with this lousy civilization of yours when you cant 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 didnt 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 wouldnt 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, Im 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.

Wiesenthals 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. Dont be so stupidly pathetic, Leverquin. Theres
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, youre 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 Sorensens 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. Thats not a Jewish name.

Are you sorry about that?
It makes no difference at all to me. Im 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 Mengeles excuse too?
Lieberman/Stadler suddenly became agitated. The lined death mask gave evidence of some
expression. What in Gods 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/Stadlers 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?
Dont 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 hadnt 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. Natures 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 hasnt 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 couldnt 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 couldnt 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 others 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 Lawfords: 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
Komarowskys 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 Leverquins 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 hadnt 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 Sorensens mother. Perhaps Komarowsky had already tried to contact him.
He had not heard the radio because of the other apparatus in Liebermans 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 couldnt, 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 Gods name have you been?
The lift slowed down.
Daniel Leverquin was surprised that hed already reached the basement.
Whats 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 Stillmans 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,
Lawfords 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 Leverquins 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 Leverquins 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.
Whats going on? Whats 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! Ill send some men!
Whats happened to Leverquin?
I think hes 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. Georges Chapel, Heathrow Airports
underground sanctuary.

He was seeking the God who alone could understand him. For men no longer could. The rabid
didnt know how to, the healthy didnt want to.

The rest were all dead or dying.

The Airport Boulevard of the Inner West, between Car park 2 and St. Georges 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 Airports aeronautical
prayer:

Slow me down, Lord!
And inspire me
To send my roots deep into the soil of lifes 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 six-
foot high cross on which Christs 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 wasnt the body of Christ.
On the cross, hanging from a leather strap, was Father Robert ODonaghus.
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 worlds 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.
Im 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 Komarowskys 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 Queens 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 Liebermans 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 Liebermans 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 hadnt 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.

Dont come near, for Gods sake! he warned the man, seeing he was about to come into the
room.

Theres 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 didnt answer. Hes not rabid, thought Luke. Rabid people dont 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 couldnt risk it. He had to
be alive for the trial of Liebermans serum.

Listen, he said, moving his hand towards the open medical bag which hung from his shoulder,
Im waiting for the Airport Security guards to arrive, and they dont 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. Theyre coming to fetch me, he answered.

And what are you doing here? This is the dead zone.
Im a Heathrow doctor. We wanted to know if there was anyone who had survived.
Youd have known that if youd stayed with us.

There was arrogance in the voice that made it even more familiar. You yourself know what
happened here. The hospital couldnt 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 wouldnt be killed. I know what people feel like here.

Oh, no. You dont know! said the man unexpectedly coarsely.

Luke sensed that the unknown mans mood was changing and to his disadvantage, and that he
would have to shoot in a hurry.

Do you know what its 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 ones own every movement, every feeling of ones own body as if it were alien,
hostile? Because IT is already perhaps inside you. Crawling through you although you cant yet
feel it, but you know its there, that its seeking out its routs to your brain ant that theres nothing
you can do to stop it nothing!

It wasnt going to be murder, of course, thought Luke. It was the inalienable right of the defense
of ones 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 cant go on like that any longer, he groaned. I cant!
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 youd never pull out your damned revolver, he said wildly.
I didnt recognize you. Im sorry.
Its me who should be sorry. Id have killed myself long ago if Id 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 didnt 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 cant 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 Christs sake, Luke!

The patient seemed somehow familiar to him, but he couldnt remember from where. It was a
good thing, though, that he couldnt remember. He didnt like operating on people he knew.
Emotional involvement was detrimental to the efficient work of the surgeons knife.

We can treat such things, nowadays, he said with a smile and pulled on his rubber gloves.
But Im 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 patients 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. Youre 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 Airways 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 wasnt. The rabid came after her, dragging himself on hands and knees. Ive had some
experience, Luke. Rabid people dont attack each other. They only kill the healthy. The healthy
dont 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 thats not the most terrible thing of all, Luke. The
most terrible thing was that they didnt attack me. They didnt 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 didnt see what Dr. Luke Komarowsky was doing. He was moaning, his face hidden in his
hands. In St. Georges 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 friends hand on his head.

Dr. Komarowsky slowly traced in the air the curved line which his surgical scalpel would follow
along the patients 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 Queens Building.

He had thought, in fact that he would be the patient on whom the trial with Liebermans 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 Stillmans 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 couldnt 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 couldnt remember. He wasnt feeling too good either.

Wheres 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 didnt seem to have any other injury.
Wheres 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.

Wheres your patient, you bastard?

Luke Komarowskys 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 didnt know where or why. The sun high above her kept
changing its position like a star in the night sky.

She could hear Lukes voice filling all the space around her. She didnt know what he was
talking about, nor to whom.

It didnt 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. Komarowskys 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 gods sake, Dr. Deveroux, cant 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 Liebermans serum on them.

When shall we know the outcome?
If neither of us show violent symptoms before 02.00, it will have been successful.
Its 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 wont 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 Pandoras 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 Presidents 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 Presidents 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
wasnt 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 Presidents 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 aircrafts 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 Shurovs 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 Marshals 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 dont know what the British Prime Minister understands as completely under
control, we have our own interpretation of that, but I dont 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 ill-
informed reports in the American Press.

Premier: The American Press, it would seem, is well-informed only when its a question of the
internal affairs of the Soviet Union.

President: With all due respect, Mr. Marshal, it doesnt 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 havent.
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 were 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 cant be serious?

Premier: I have never been more serious in my life, Mr. President!
President: But for Gods 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 Englands 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 didnt 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 wouldnt be the
only one in danger, Coro.

But the whole undertaking. Now it was Deverouxs 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
Liebermans formula, is now being produced in London, could be tested only if rabies breaks
through into London itself. And if it does, Im 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 couldnt, 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 hadnt outwitted them, Id 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 wasnt
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 Presidents desk?

If its 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 hadnt 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 doesnt have to be physical initially, said John Hamilton. In fact, fairly regularly
they occur first of all in the infected persons psyche. Thats why those around them are most
often unaware by the attack, which has been heralded by no externally visible signs. Its 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 dont 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 Im 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 youre 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 its 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
observers 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. Its 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 patients 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 Presidents 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 theres still time to telephone her.
Thats no longer necessary.

The President looked at the Director of the CIA in surprise.
I dont 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 its true?
Premier: Whats 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, dont waste time looking
for the man who blew out the candle, find another candle. And it is because if we didnt 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 didnt 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. Weve 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 Liebermans 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 Liberal-
Social-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 Presidents 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 ones 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 couldnt 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 everyones. 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 Britains
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 Presidents 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 Hamiltons, 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 Hamiltons, 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 Liebermans 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 ...?
Thats right, General, I believe that the serum is successful.

Thats marvelous news, Dr. Hamilton. Ill let the Prime Minister know at once.
I shouldnt 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 dont want to.
I understand you. Does Dr. Deveroux perhaps want to talk to someone?
No.
I would be happier if you asked her personally.
Ill be damned if Ill ask her.
Am I to understand that she doesnt 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.
Well need all the luck we can get, thought Major General Samuel Winterton. If rabies breaks
through into London, well nee that luck.
Well 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 Deverouxs idea that they should wait for dawn on the roof of the Queens 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 wasnt 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
mans wars had become so successful. And why mans science had become so dangerous.

He heard the hum of the lift but didnt 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
mans 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 mans
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 RRRs and General Wintertones 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 deaths head from a placard
for the fight against rabies. Across the sculls 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 Ariadnes 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 Luciphers 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 Queens Building what had once been the Roof Garden and now for Coro Deveroux
and John Hamilton was Gods 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 life-
force 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 Jenkins 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 Edens
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 wont be. We were wrong in something else too. Daniel Leverquin
was right. We thought that what Rhabdovirus did at Heathrow was rabies. But its just exactly
what weve 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.

Its 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 its 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, Im not asking about that. What was it that happened to us here.
Was that rabies?

Rabies isnt 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 wasnt love?

He took her hand. It was cold, alien and reserved. Of course it was. Why shouldnt it have
been?

Because I didnt 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 dont know, John, in
any case, different from what I really feel towards you.

He was silent. Thats strange, he said at last.
Whats strange?
Its something like that I went through as well.
All right. And what is it now?

I know. I love you, and thats all that I know. And that I know. And thats all thats 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 everythings all right.
You mean to say that were healthy?
Completely, Coro. Liebermans serum has worked.

She hesitated. Does that mean they wont 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 shouldnt call him up
before 02.00.
Its 02.05 now, John.
No, Coro. Its 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 didnt know what he would do when he caught up with it.
He didnt 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 didnt 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 didnt understand him. They didnt answer. Panicking, signaled S. O. S. firing into the
invisible blockade. Now they understood him. They returned his fire.











































Borislav Peki,
written by Ljiljana Peki


Borislav Peki 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 Glii, an
architect and the niece of Dr Milan Stojadinovi, 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.

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