Hooke ended her prayer with something in Spanish. That was a nice touch, Rhonda thought. She hadn’t even known Elsa spoke Spanish. Then the reverend resumed her seat in the first row with her fellow council members, Mr. Sparks and Deke.
Rhonda reminded everyone that this was a council meeting and not a press conference; the media people would have to ask their questions later. Then she began to introduce their guests, starting with the lowliest of them, the county commissioner.
Nothing meaningful was said for the next hour. The officials took turns offering their support for the people of Switchcreek, without ever specifying why the people of Switchcreek needed any.
Rhonda noticed Deke leaning back to hear something Dr. Fraelich was whispering to him. The two of them had been talking earnestly before the meeting-and she had an idea what about. The doctor had nearly jumped out of her skin when Rhonda glided up and said hello. Rhonda had asked her if she could stay a little while after the meeting, and of course she’d agreed-as she’d better, after all the work Rhonda had done to keep her clinic funded.
The audience was bored, and even the newspeople were growing restless. It wasn’t until the Man from COPTER said that a CDC field team would be going door-to-door with a survey that the crowd seemed to wake up. Someone from the crowd asked what kind of survey, and Markle then introduced the field team leader, a man named Eric Preisswerk who looked much too young to have both an MD and a PhD in molecular epidemiology. Nice shoes, though. They looked Italian.
“It will take only a few minutes to answer the questions,” Preisswerk said. “But we hope it will help us determine if there’s any relationship between what’s happening in Babahoyo and what happened in Switchcreek.” Copies of the survey were being passed through the room. Rhonda had already seen it. One of the first questions was, “Have you traveled to South America in the last ten years?”
A voice in the back of the room called out, “Are you saying TDS is contagious?”
Preisswerk held up his hands. “There’s been no evidence of that. All we’re trying to figure out-”
“What about quantum teleportation?”
This came from one of the Whitehall girls sitting next to Paxton. “Are you looking into how TDS could be transmitted that way?”
Preisswerk laughed in surprise. To an outsider the beta girl must have looked about nine years old. “Okay, that’s… Wow. What is your name?”
The girl stood up, slipped off her large backpack, and handed it to Paxton. Paxton had an odd look on his face-surprised but somehow proud. “Lorraine Whitehall,” the girl said.
Preisswerk said, “Well, Lorraine, you sound like a very intelligent girl. I know you may have heard people talking about quantum this or that on TV, but that’s just a guess-we really don’t have the evidence to say that. We’re not sure if teleportation of quantum states is even possible on a molecular scale, but much less responsible for TDS.”
Lorraine said, “The Oxford group did room-temperature teleportation with a complex molecule last year.”
“Yes, but-are you reading physics journals, too?”
“The articles are on the Internet,” she said.
Preisswerk laughed again. “Okay, that experiment was in laboratory conditions,” he said. “Those fifty atoms were carefully isolated. That’s a long way from showing that teleportation can occur inside an organic system.”
Mr. Sparks said, “This is getting completely out of hand. We haven’t even approved the minutes from the last meeting.”
A low voice from the back said, “What are you talking about-Star Trek? Somebody teleported the disease to us?”
Lorraine stepped up onto her chair and turned to find the person who’d spoken, a young argo man. “Quantum teleportation doesn’t teleport bodies or things, just information,” she said. “But lots of stuff in our bodies happens at the subatomic level-breathing, thinking, making DNA. TDS could be like a computer virus that tells our bodies to replicate DNA differently.” Somebody said something Rhonda didn’t catch, and Lorraine said, “I’m not making it up-lots of scientists think so.”
“So TDS can be contagious?” the argo asked.
“Of course it is,” someone said in a loud voice. “We caught it, didn’t we?”
Paxton held up a hand to Lorraine, but the girl jumped down on her own.
Rhonda caught the eye of Chelsea Wilson, a charlie woman in her forties who was sitting in the third row. Chelsea lifted her hand and said, “Is there going to be a quarantine?”
Preisswerk looked at his boss. The Man from COPTER stood, started to speak.
“Louder!” someone shouted.
“I said, there are no current plans for quarantine.”
The room erupted in shouts and questions. Rhonda glanced at Deke. He was staring at the floor, frowning. She’d told him what the government people would say.
Rhonda stood and called for quiet. When she had the room back under control she said, “Dr. Markle, almost everybody in this room lived through the quarantine, and in the end there turned out to be no reason for it. I think the question they’re asking, what we’re all asking, is not whether you have plans for a quarantine, but whether you will guarantee that there won’t be one.”
He seemed to flinch at the word “guarantee.” “Mayor, I already said that there are no plans whatsoever for, for any kind of detention.”
Rhonda touched his arm. “Just say, ‘I promise, there will be no quarantine. Period.’”
He blinked at her.
“That’s all you’ve got to say.”
Markle addressed the crowd. “Let me assure you,” he said. And then louder, “I promise, there are no plans that I know of for any-”
He never finished the sentence. The charlies in the audience had jumped to their feet, followed by a few betas, everyone shouting and talking. Markle didn’t understand who he was talking to. These people had been quarantined before, and after the quarantine they saw their neighbors riot just because they wanted to go to the damn supermarket. They’d seen dead boys by the side of the road, and one of their girls raped, and the feds and the police hadn’t done a damn thing for them. They could smell weasel words at a hundred yards. Now they were sure the government was coming for them.
Deke and the Reverend Hooke rose to stand next to Rhonda. The reverend leaned close to her and said, “I hope you’re happy.”
Damn straight, she was happy. Her people were waking up.
It was nearly midnight before Rhonda shook the hand of the last visiting official, soothed the last constituent, begged off from the last reporter, and finally made her way down the hall to the teachers’ lounge. Deke sat on the floor with his arms around his knees. The Reverend Hooke and Dr. Fraelich sat at the largest table, holding Styrofoam coffee cups. The reverend, despite her masklike face, exuded impatience. Dr. Fraelich, looking more flushed than usual, had picked apart the rim of her cup and made a tiny snowdrift beside it.
“I thought they’d never leave,” Rhonda said by way of apology. She assessed the structural integrity of one of the thin plastic chairs, chose a marginally newer one next to it, and gingerly sat. “I suppose the doctor told y’all that I’d invited her to sit in on our conversation.”
“Is Mr. Sparks not coming?” Dr. Fraelich asked.
“Oh, this isn’t a town council meeting, hon,” Rhonda said.
The doctor smiled tightly. “The inner circle, then? The Star Chamber?”
“Call it the executive board,” the Reverend said.
The doctor glanced at Deke. “I didn’t know the town had one,” she said.
Rhonda chuckled. “Neither does Mr. Sparks. Don’t tell him, it’ll hurt his feelings.” She folded her hands on the table. “So. You speak their language, Doctor, and you’ve already had a run-in with the field team. What do you think they’re planning?”
“Run-in?” Deke asked.
“This morning, Eric Preisswerk and his team came to my office and started going through my records,” Dr. Fraelich said. “Everything they could get their hands on, paper or electronic.”