sandwiches are better value than bagels and lox.'
'Ken,' said Mrs. Garunisch, hurt.
Garunisch put his arm around her. 'Don't take it the wrong way, Gay, but it's true. Dr. Petrie has to go. It's his idea, anyway. Can you imagine me trying to sell it? You know what they think of me in Washington right now. Or Nicholas here, in his sailor suit?'
'There's still a spare seat,' said Dr. Petrie.
Adelaide, sitting next to him, looked up. She frowned, and said, 'But surely — '
'That's true,' said Garunisch, interrupting her. 'We can draw lots for that. Esmeralda — do you have any drinking straws?'
'Of course,' said Esmeralda, and went into the kitchen to fetch them.
Adelaide tugged gently at Dr. Petrie's sleeve. He turned around.
'Leonard,' she whispered. 'I thought that — '
He put his finger to his lips. 'Don't worry. Whatever happens, you'll be okay.'
'But I want to go with you!'
He laid his hand over hers. 'Darling — we're all in this together. We all have to take the same risks. Trying to get out of here is going to be far more dangerous than staying. If you ask me, Herbert Gaines didn't even make it upstairs.'
'That's not the point!'
'Sshh,' he said. Esmeralda had come back with the straws. She handed them to Dr. Petrie along with a pair of kitchen scissors.
'Okay,' said Garunisch. 'Cut them to different lengths, and whoever draws the longest straw gets to go. Agreed?'
Dr. Petrie trimmed the straws. Keeping his back turned, he arranged them in his hand. Then he walked over and offered them to Nicholas.
Nicholas plucked one out quickly, with his eyes shut. 'It's a short one,' he said, 'I know it is.'
He held it up. It was.
Dr. Petrie moved across to Kenneth Garunisch. The old union leader thought for a while, rubbing his chin, and then he carefully picked the straw in the middle. It was longer than Nicholas' straw, but it was still short. He shrugged, and twisted it up.
Mrs. Garunisch was next. She was dithering and anxious. She didn't actually want to pick the longest straw, because she preferred to stay with her husband, but she knew how insistent he was on playing by the rules. If she picked it, he would make her go.
She pulled one out. It was short. She let out a big puff of relief.
Adelaide looked across at Esmeralda. 'Her first,' she said to Dr. Petrie.
Dr. Petrie shook his head. 'I'm going around the room clockwise,' he said.
Adelaide lifted her eyes and stared at Dr. Petrie for a long moment. He stared back, sadly. They say that a woman can always sense when a man no longer wants her, and he wondered how it showed. He wondered, too, when he had stopped wanting her. It hadn't happened all at once, and it was nothing to do with Esmeralda. What had happened last night had been no more than a human attempt to feel something after so much misery.
Maybe the whole experience since the beginning of the plague had changed him, and made him come to terms with what he really was and what he wanted to be. It seemed to him now that Adelaide was part of a life that had become remote and irrelevant. Like tennis, and swimming, and Normandy Shores Golf Club.
'Pick,' he said softly, holding out the two remaining straws.
Adelaide picked.
Dr. Petrie held out the last straw to Esmeralda. She didn't look at him — simply took it, and held it up.
Esmeralda's straw was fractionally longer than Adelaide's.
'There you go, then,' said Kenneth Garunisch loudly. 'That settles that!'
Esmeralda stood up. She kept her eyes downcast, and she said simply, 'I'll get my things together.'
Adelaide shrieked out, 'You won't!'
Dr. Petrie held Adelaide's shoulder. 'Darling, it was a fair draw. I can't do anything about it. We had to decide somehow.'
'I'm left behind while you're going,' said Adelaide. There were angry tears running down her cheeks. 'You didn't have to pick a stupid straw!'
'Come on, now,' put in Kenneth Garunisch, 'I thought we'd decided all that!'
'Well, decide again,' snapped Adelaide, the tension of all she had been through giving her a note of desperation. 'Leonard is my fiance and that's all there is to it. Would you go without your wife?'
'Adelaide, you'll be safer here.'
'I don't care! I want to go with you!' she shrieked.
Dr. Petrie turned around angrily, and was about to rebuke her, but he checked his tongue.
Esmeralda said, in a quiet voice, 'It's all right. Let her go. I'd rather stay here anyway.'
Dr. Petrie said, 'Esmeralda — ' But she shook her head and wouldn't look at him.
'Take her,' she said. 'Go on.'
Adelaide was mopping her eyes with a handkerchief. Dr. Petrie felt irritated at her outburst, but at the same time he was almost relieved. Leaving Adelaide behind would have given him the familiar tangles of guilt that he had felt about Margaret.
The trouble with being a doctor, he thought, is that even your lovers become your patients. How can I cause Adelaide the same kind of anguish for which other women come to me to be treated? I'm supposed to cure diseases, not spread them.
Dr. Petrie sighed. 'All right, then,' he said, almost inaudibly. 'If that's what you want.'
It took them almost two hours to get themselves ready, and by the time they'd finished, they looked like fat and scruffy astronauts, all wrapped up in quilts and blankets, and tied up with strings and cords.
Dr. Petrie had bagged Prickles up completely in a duvet, and he was going to carry her on his back. He and Adelaide were both padded all over, with their thick blanket leggings tucked into three pairs of Ivor Glantz's walking socks, and their hands wrapped in gloves and bandages. They had made themselves hoods out of their quilts, covering their faces up completely except for their eyes, which were protected with pieces of nylon mesh cut from a vegetable strainer and safety-pinned into place.
Dr. Petrie had Kenneth Garunisch's automatic pistol tucked into his belt in case of emergencies, and he carried the precious car keys inside his glove.
'I'm going to lose pounds,' he said, in a muffled voice. 'It's like a goddamned Turkish bath in this outfit.'
Kenneth Garunisch handed him the Glantz statistics, securely buckled up in a canvas map case, and shook him by the hand.
'Don't forget to send back the choppers,' he said with a grin. 'I wouldn't like to think I was going to spend the rest of my life in this dump.'
Dr. Petrie nodded his quilted head. He was already sweating like a mule inside the blankets, and he wanted to get their escape over as quickly as possible.
He said goodbye to Nicholas, and to Mrs. Garunisch, and then he padded over to Esmeralda's room.
She was sitting by the window, looking out over the gray light of later afternoon. Through his mesh facemask, she took on a new softness, and he hardly knew what to say to her.
She turned, and gave a small smile. 'You look as if you're off to the North Pole,' she said. She came over and took his hand.
'As soon as I get to someplace safe, I'll have a helicopter back here straight away,' he said.
Esmeralda put her hands to her face and looked at him gently.
'Don't worry about me,' she said. 'You have other things to think about. You know, I believe you could do something really great, Leonard, if you ever gave yourself half a chance.'
He nodded. 'That's what Margaret used to say.'
'Margaret?'
'My ex-wife. She's dead now. She died in the plague.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Well — I think the only reason she wanted me to realize my potential was so that she could bask in
