She nodded to herself. “Have you sent the Action Team in?”
“Of course. That’s the first thing I did. Blood and tissue samples should be coming within the next two, three hours. Want to be down here when they come in?”
She was tired; bone-weary, her father used to call it. It had been a long day and a long week and she needed sleep so bad she could taste it.
“I’ll be down in an hour,” she said resignedly and hung up the phone. She stood there for half a minute, trying to collect herself, then picked the phone up again. Carefully, she punched out a full twenty-two digits on the pushbuttons, including the * and # twice. There was an almost unbelievably long series of clicks and relays, then an electronic buzz which was immediately answered.
“This is Dr. O’Connell, NDCC,” she said into the phone. “We have another Red Town. An Action Team is en route. Please notify the President.”
TWO
Mary Eastwicke had thought that being press officer for the National Disease Control Center would be a fairly nice, easy job. Nobody was very interested in NDCC, most of the time, except for an occasional science reporter doing a Sunday feature, and the pay was top bracket for civil service. But now, as the trim, tiny businesslike woman walked into the small briefing room bulging with reporters, IN lights and cameras, and into the heat generated by it all, she wondered why she hadn’t quit long ago. With the air of someone about to enter a bullring for the first time, she stepped up to the cluster of micro-phones.
“First, I’ll read a complete statement for you,” she said in a. smooth, accentless soprano. “After, I will take your questions.” She paused a moment, apparently arranging her papers but actually giving them time to get ready for the official stuff that would grace the news within the hour.
“At approximately 3:10 this afternoon, Eastern Daylight Time, the town of Cornwall, Nebraska, first began showing symptoms of an as-yet unknown agent, said agent causing most of. the town to come down with varying degrees of paralysis.