"Yes."
The I-want line that Stu had first noticed in New Hampshire hours after meeting her now appeared on Fran's forehead. "Will you get to the point, for heaven's sake?"
"I'm trying, but I have to be careful and I'm going to be careful," George said. "This is your son's life we're discussing, and I'm not going to let you press me. I want you to understand the drift of our thinking. Captain Trips was a shifting-antigen flu, we think now. Now, every kind of flu - the old flu - had a different antigen; that's why it kept coming back every two or three years or so in spite of flu vaccinations. There would be an outbreak of A-type flu, Hong Kong flu that was, and you'd get a vaccination for it, and then two years later a B-type strain would come along and you'd get sick unless you got a different vaccination."
"But you'd get well again," Dan broke in, "because eventually your body would produce its own antibodies. Your body changed to cope with the flu. With Captain Trips, the flu itself changed every time your body came to a defense posture. In that way it was more similar to the AIDS virus than to the common sorts of flu our bodies have become used to. And as with AIDS, it just went on shifting from form to form until the body was worn out. The result, inevitably, was death."
"Then why didn't we get it?" Stu asked.
George said: "We don't know. I don't think we're ever going to know. The only thing we can be sure about is that the immunes didn't get sick and then throw the sickness off; they never got sick at all. Which brings us to Peter again. Dan?"
"Yes. The key to Captain Trips is that people seemed to get almost better, but never completely better. Now this baby, Peter, got sick forty-eight hours after he was born. There was no doubt at all that it was Captain Trips - the symptoms were classic. But those discolorations under the line of the jaw, which both George and I had come to associate with the fourth and terminal stage of superflu - they never came. On the other hand, his periods of remission have been getting longer and longer."
"I don't understand," Fran said, bewildered. "What - "
"Every time the flu shifts, Peter is shifting right back at it," George said. "There's still the technical possibility that he might relapse, but he has never entered the final, critical phase. He seems to be wearing it out."
There was a moment of total silence.
Dan said, "You've passed on half an immunity to your child, Fran. He got it, but we think now he's got the ability to lick it. We theorize that Mrs. Wentworth's twins had the same chance, but with the odds stacked much more radically against them - and I still think that they may not have died of the superflu, but of complications arising from the superflu. That's a very small distinction, I know, but it may be crucial."
"And the other women who got pregnant by men who weren't immune?" Stu asked.
"We think they'll have to watch their babies go through the same painful struggle," George said, "and some of the children may die - it was touch and go with Peter for a while, and may be again from all we know now. But very shortly we're going to reach the point where all the fetuses, in the Free Zone - in the world - are the product of two immune parents. And while it wouldn't be fair to pre-guess, I'd be willing to lay money that when that happens, it's going to be our ballgame. In the meantime, we're going to be watching Peter very closely."
"And we won't be watching him alone, if that's any added consolation," Dan added. "In a very real sense, Peter belongs to the entire Free Zone right now."
Fran whispered, "I only want him to live because he's mine and I love him." She, looked at Stu. "And he's my link with the old world. He looks more like Jess than me, and I'm glad. That seems right. Do you understand, love?"
Stu nodded, and a strange thought occurred to him - how much he would like to sit down with Hap and Norm Bruett and Vic Palfrey and have a beer with them and watch Vic make one of his shitty-smelling home-rolled cigarettes, and tell them how all of this had come out. They had always called him Silent Stu; ole Stu, they said, wouldn't say "shit" if he had a mouthful. But he would talk their ears off their heads. He would talk all night and all day. He grasped Fran's hand blindly, feeling the sting of tears.
"We've got rounds to make," George said, getting up, "but we'll be monitoring Peter closely, Fran. You'll know for sure when we know for sure."
"When could I nurse him? If... If he doesn't... ?"
"A week," Dan said.
"But that's so long!"
"It's going to be long for all of us. We've got sixty-one pregnant women in the Zone, and nine of them conceived before the superflu. It's going to be especially long for them. Stu? It was good meeting you." Dan held out his hand and Stu shook it. He left quickly, a man with a necessary job to do and anxious to do it.