The First Eagle

'Possibly,' Chee said. 'About when was it?'

'Morning. Fairly early.'

Woody reclosed the bag, shook it vigorously, reopened it, and poured its contents onto a white plastic sheet on the table.

'Fleas,' he said. He selected stainless-steel tweezers from a tray on a lab table, picked up a flea and showed it to Chee. 'Now, if I'm lucky, the blood in these fleas is laced with Yersinia pestis and'— Woody poked the prairie dog with the tweezers—'so is the blood of our friend here. And if I'm very lucky, it will be Yersinia X, the new, modified, recently evolved fast-acting stuff that kills mammals much quicker than the old stuff.' He redeposited the flea among its brethren on the plastic, grinned at Chee. 'Then, if fortune continues to smile on me, the autopsy I'm about to do on this dog here will confirm what not finding any swollen glands suggests. That this fellow here didn't die of bubonic plague. He died of something old- fashioned.'

Chee frowned, not quite understanding Woody's excitement. 'So he died of what?'

'That's not the question. Could be old age, any of those ills that beset elderly mammals. Doesn't matter. The question is, why didn't the plague kill him?'

'But that's nothing new, is it? Haven't you guys known for years that when the plague comes through, it always leaves behind a colony here and there that's immune or something? And then the stuff spreads again, from them? I thought—'

Woody had no patience for this. 'Sure, sure, sure,' he said. 'Reservoir colonies. Host colonies. They've been studied for years. How come their immune system blocks the bacteria? If it kills the bacteria, how come the toxin released doesn't kill the dog? If our friend here just has the original version of Pasteurella pestis, as we used to call it, then he just gives us another chance to poke around in the blind alley. But if he has—'

It had been a hard and disappointing day for Chee, and this interruption rankled him. He interrupted Woody: 'If he has developed immunity to this new fast-acting germ, you can compare—'

'Germ!' Woody said, laughing. 'I don't hear that good old word much these days. But yes. It gives us something to check against. Here's what we know about the blood chemistry of the dogs who survived the old plague.' He suggested a big box with his hands. 'Now we know this modified bacteria is also killing most of those survivors. We want to know the difference in the chemistry of those who survived the new stuff.' Chee nodded. 'You understand that?'

Chee grunted. He'd taken six hours of biology at the University of New Mexico to help meet the science requirement for his degree in anthropology. The teacher had been a full professor, an international authority on spiders who had made no effort to hide his boredom with basic undergraduate courses nor his disdain for the ignorance of his students. He'd sounded a lot like Woody. 'That's easy enough to understand,' Chee said. 'So when you solve the puzzle, you develop a vaccine and save untold billions of prairie dogs from the plague.'

Woody had done something to the flea that produced a brownish fluid and put a bit of it into a petri dish and a drop on a glass slide. He looked up. His face, already unnaturally flushed, was now even redder.

'You think it's funny?' he said. 'Well, you're not the only one who does. A lot of the experts at the NIH do, too. And at Squibb. And the New England Journal of Medicine. And the American Pharmaceutical Association. The same damn fools who thought we won the microbe war with penicillin and the streptomycin drugs.'

Woody slammed his fist on the countertop, his voice rising. 'So they misused them, and misused them, and kept on misusing them until they'd evolved whole new variations of drug-resistant bacteria. And now, by God, we're burying the dead! By the tens of thousands. Count Africa and Asia and its millions. And these damn fools sit on their hands and watch it get worse.'

Chee was no stranger to anger barely under control. He'd seen it while breaking up bar fights, in domestic disputes, in various other ugly forms. But Woody's rage had a sort of fierce, focused intensity that was new to him.

'I didn't mean to sound flippant,' Chee said. 'I'm just not familiar with the implications of this sort of research.'

Woody took a sip of his Dewar's, his face flushed. He shook his head, studied Chee, recognized repentance.

'Sorry I'm so damned touchy about this,' he said, and laughed. 'I think it's because I'm scared. All the little beasties we had beaten ten years ago are back and meaner than ever. TB is an epidemic again. So is malaria. So is cholera. We had the staph bacteria whipped with nine different antibiotics. Now none of 'em work on some of it. And then there's the same story with viruses. Viruses. They're what makes this most important. You know that Influenza A, that Swine Flu that came out of nowhere in 1918 and killed maybe forty million people in just a few months. That's more than were killed in four years of war. Viruses scare me even more than bacteria.'

Chee raised his eyebrows.

'Because nothing stops them except your immune system. You don't cure a viral sickness. You try to prevent it with a vaccine. That's to prepare your immune system to deal with it if it shows up.'

'Yeah,' Chee said. 'Like polio.'

'Like polio. Like some forms of influenza. Like a lot of things,' Woody said. He refilled his whiskey glass. 'Are you familiar with the Bible?'

'I've read it,' Chee said.

'Remember what the prophet says in the Book of Chronicles? 'We are powerless against this terrible multitude that will come against us.''

Chee wasn't sure how to take this. 'Do you read that as an Old Testament prophet warning us against viruses?'

'As it stands now, they are a terrible multitude and we are damn near powerless against them,' Woody said.

Not as well prepared as some of these rodents are anyway. Some of these prairie dogs here somehow have