To Paradise

“Yeah, but how do we know this isn’t just another false positive?” asked a third.

“The genomic sequencing is different here,” said a fourth, and then the conversation became too technical for me to follow, though I stayed and listened anyway. I couldn’t comprehend much, but what I did understand was that there had been another new disease diagnosed, and that it was very bad, potentially disastrous.

New diseases were often being discovered at RU, and not just at RU but in other laboratories around the world as well. Every Monday, Beijing would send the principal investigators at every accredited research organization a status report listing the previous week’s tally of fatalities and new diagnoses of the three to five most severe ongoing pandemics, as well as new developments they were tracking. The tallies were broken down by continent, and then by country, and then, if need be, by prefecture and municipality. Then, every Friday, Beijing would compile and send out the latest research findings—whether clinical or epidemiological—reported by the member nations. The goal, Dr. Wesley once said, was not to eradicate the diseases, because that would be impossible—it was to contain them, preferably within the regions where they were discovered. “Epidemics, not pandemics,” Dr. Wesley said. “Our goal is to discover them before they disseminate.”

I have worked at RU, and in Dr. Wesley’s lab, for seven years, and at least once a year there was at least one scare, when there was an emergency radio announcement, as there had been the week before, and everyone in the institute grew frightened and excited, because it seemed that we were at risk of experiencing the next great pandemic, one as bad as the illnesses of ’56 and ’70, both of which Dr. Wesley said had “remapped the world.” But in the end, every one of those threats had been contained. In fact, none of them had even affected the island; there had been no quarantine or isolation mobilization, no special bulletins, no coordination with the National Pharmacology Unit. Still, the pattern was to remain alert in the first thirty days after the discovery of a new disease, because that was the typical incubation period of most of these illnesses—even though, as everyone would admit in private, just because that had been the pattern of these diseases, it didn’t mean that the successive diseases would behave the same way. That was why what the scientists in our lab did was so important—they tried to predict the next mutation, the next illness that would endanger us all.

I know this will be a surprising thing to hear, but many scientists can be very superstitious. I say this because, over the last few years, the alarm about these reports has grown; I think everyone believes that the upcoming plague—whatever it will be—is overdue. There had been fourteen years between the illness of ’56 and the illness of ’70; now it was ’94, and nothing catastrophic had happened. Of course, as Dr. Morgan likes to say, we are in a much better position now than they were in ’70, and this is true. Our labs are more sophisticated; there’s more scientific cooperation. It’s much more difficult to spread misinformation and therefore breed panic; you can’t just get on a plane and unknowingly infect people in other countries; you can’t just share your theories of whatever’s happening on the internet with whomever you want, whenever you want; there are systems in place to segregate and humanely treat the affected. So things are better.

I was not superstitious. I may not have been a scientist, but I knew that things don’t happen according to patterns, even if it may look like it. This is why I was confident that this was just another minor incident, just as the others had been, one that would excite for a few weeks longer and then vanish, another disease not even worthy of a name.