to do with this new UIR, but was rather a test of a new American President, and that sort of thing happened all the time anyway. Besides, Taiwan was still an annoyance. It was so curious. Iran, motivated by religion of all things. India, motivated by greed and anger. China, on the other hand, thought for the long term, dispassionately, seeking what really mattered, but with circumspection, as always. Iran's goal was self-evident, and if Daryaei was willing to risk war for it, then, why not watch in safety, and hope for his success? But he wouldn't commit his country now. Why appear too eager? India was eager, enough so to overlook the obvious: If Daryaei was successful, then Pakistan would make its peace with the new UIR, perhaps even join it, and then India would be isolated and vulnerable. Well, it was dangerous to be a vassal, and all the more so if you had aspirations to graduate to the next level—but without the wherewithal to make it happen. One had to be careful choosing allies. Gratitude among nations was a hothouse flower, easily wilted by exposure to the real world.
The Prime Minister nodded in acknowledgment of her victory over Pakistan, and said no more.
'In that case, my friends, I thank you for graciously agreeing to meet with me, and with your permission, I will take my leave.' The three stood. Handshakes were exchanged, and they headed to the door. Minutes after that, Daryaei's aircraft rotated off the bumpy fighter strip. The mullah looked at the coffeepot and decided against it. He wanted a few hours of sleep before morning prayers. But first—
'Your predictions were entirely correct.'
'The Russians called these things 'objective conditions. They are and remain unbelievers, but their formulas for analysis of problems have a certain precision to them,' Badrayn explained. 'That is why I have learned to assemble information so carefully.'
'So I have seen. Your next task will be to sketch in some operations.' With that, Daryaei pushed back his seat and closed his eyes, wondering if he would dream again of dead lions.
MUCH AS HE wished for a return to clinical medicine, Pierre Alexandre didn't especially like it, at least this matter of treating people who would not survive. The former Army officer in him figured that defending Bataan had been like this. Doing all you could, firing off your best rounds, but knowing that relief would never come. At the moment, it was three AIDS patients, all homosexual men, all in their thirties, and all with less than a year to live. Alexandre was a fairly religious man, and he didn't approve of the gay lifestyle, but nobody deserved to die like this. And even if they did, he was a physician, not God sitting in judgment. Damn, he thought, walking off the elevator and speaking his patient notes into a mini-tape recorder.
It's part of a doctor's job to compartmentalize his life. The three patients on his unit would still be there tomorrow, and none of them would require emergency attention that night. Putting their problems aside was not cruel. It was just business, and their lives, were they to have any hope at all, would depend on his ability to turn away from their stricken bodies and back to researching the microsized organisms that were attacking them. He handed the tape cassette to his secretary, who'd type up the notes.
'Dr. Lorenz down in Atlanta returned your call returning his call returning your original call,' she told him as he passed. As soon as he sat down, he dialed the direct line from memory.
'Yes?'
'Gus? Alex here at Hopkins. Tag,' he chuckled, 'you're it.' He heard a good laugh at the other end of the line. Phone tag could be the biggest pain in the ass.
'How's the fishing, Colonel?'
'Would you believe I haven't had a chance yet? Ralph's working me pretty hard.'
'What did you want from me—you did call first, didn't you?' Lorenz wasn't sure anymore, another sign of a man working too hard.
'Yeah, I did, Gus. Ralph tells me you're starting a new look at the Ebola structure—from that mini-break in Zaire, right?'
'Well, I would be, except somebody stole my monkeys,' the director of CDC reported sourly. 'The replacement shipment is due in here in a day or two, so they tell me.'
'You have a break-in?' Alexandre asked. One of the troublesome developments for labs that had experimental animals was that animal-rights fanatics occasionally tried to bust in and «liberate» the animals. Someday, if everyone wasn't careful, some screwball would walk out with a monkey under his arm and discover it had Lassa fever—or worse. How the hell were physicians supposed to study the goddamned bug without animals—and who'd ever said that a monkey was more important than a human being? The answer to that was simple: in America there were people who believed in damned near anything, and there was a constitutional right to be an ass. Because of that, CDC,
Hopkins, and other research labs had armed guards, protecting monkey cages. And even rat cages, which really made Alex roll his eyes to the ceiling. 'No, they were highjacked in Africa. Somebody else is playing with them now. Anyway, so it kicks me back a week. What the hell. I've been looking at this little bastard for fifteen years.'
'How fresh is the sample?'
'It's off the Index Patient. Positive identification, Ebola Zaire, the Mayinga strain. We have another sample from the only other patient. That one disappeared—'
'What?' Alexandre asked in immediate alarm.
'Lost at sea in a plane crash. They were evidently flying her to Paris to see Rousseau. No further cases, Alex. We dodged the bullet this time for a change,' Lorenz assured his younger colleague.
Better, Alexandre thought, to crunch in a plane crash than bleed out from that little fucker. He still thought like a soldier, profanity and all. 'Okay.'
'So, why did you call?'
'Polynomials,' Lorenz heard.
'What do you mean?' the doctor asked in Atlanta.
'When you map this one out, let's think about doing a mathematical analysis of the structure.'
'I've been playing with that idea for a while. Right now, though, I want to examine the reproduction cycle and—'
'Exactly, Gus, the mathematical nature of the interaction. I was talking to a colleague up here—eye cutter, you believe? She said something interesting. If the amino acids have a quantifiable mathematical value, and they should, then how they interact with other codon strings may tell us something.' Alexandre paused and heard a match striking. Gus was smoking his pipe in the office again.
'Keep going.'
'Still reaching for this one, Gus. What if it's like you've been thinking, it's all an equation? The trick is cracking it, right? How do we do that? Okay, Ralph told me about your time-cycle study. I think you're onto something. If we have the virus RNA mapped, and we have the host DNA mapped, then—'
'Gotcha! The interactions will tell us something about the values of the elements in the polynomial—'
'And that will tell us a lot about how the little fuck replicates, and just maybe—'
'How to attack it.' A pause, and a loud puff came over the phone line. 'Alex, that's pretty good.'
'You're the best guy for the job, Gus, and you're setting up the experiment anyway.'
'Something's missing, though.'
'Always is.'
'Let me think about that one for a day or so and get back to you. Good one, Alex.'
'Thank you, sir.' Professor Alexandre replaced the phone and figured he'd done his duty of the day for medical science. It wasn't much, and there was an element missing from the suggestion.
23 EXPERIMENTS
IT TOOK SEVERAL DAYS TO get everything in place. President Ryan had to meet with yet another class of new senators—some of the states were a little slow in getting things done, mainly because some of the governors established something akin to search committees to evaluate a list of candidates. That was a surprise to a lot of Washington insiders who'd expected the state executives to do things as they'd always been done to appoint replacements to the upper house just as soon as the bodies were cold—but it turned out that Ryan's speech had mattered a little bit. Eight governors had realized that this situation was unique, and had therefore acted in a
