It went on for quite a while, with even the crazies having their turn. Any flying saucers reported near these places? No. Is the Army back into biological warfare experimentation? No, not the military. Somebody who’d just seen The Andromeda Strain on the Late Show asked about meteors, space probes, and the like, but again the answer was no, none that had been found.

They left with lots of scare headlines and nasty suppositions, but nothing more. Page one again, to scare the hell out of the population, but the truth was that nobody really knew what was going on.

Mary Eastwicke made her way wearily back to her office feeling as if she’d worked ten hours in the last seventy minutes. Several staffers were looking over papers, telexes, and the like. She sank into her chair.

“I need a drink,” she said. “Anything new?”

A young assistant shook his head. “Nothing more. The toll’s 864 now, with eighty-six deaths. In a couple hundred cases they’d be better off dead, though. A hundred percent paralyzed. Stiff, too. You can bend ’em in any position and they’ll stay that way. Most of the rest are nasty partials. That town was wiped out as surely as if you dropped a bomb on it.”

Mary sighed, and decided she was going to get that drink no matter what. It was going to be a long night; no going home for them or anyone else this time.

She prayed that the folks upstairs would come up with something solid on this one. She thought of that comment from that reporter to the effect that it was as if somebody was wiping out the small towns of America.

She wondered how the tests were going.

Dr. Mark Spiegelman was about fifty, and usually looked forty, but by 5:00 A.M. looked seventy instead. He sank wearily down in Sandra O’Connell’s office and gulped his thirty-sixth cup of strong black coffee as she read the reports and looked at the photos.

“Did you ever dream of a nice little VA hospital job someplace?” he asked her. “You know, the kind where they give you some patients with known ailments and ask you to do your best to help them? I do. Lord! I’d settle for a nice bubonic plague someplace. But this!”