Crocodile Farm

22.

This got the reaction Joel must have been expecting: an excited murmur rippled through the audience, then grew in volume. Around her, Lucy heard her colleagues speculating on the future of the facility, discussing the job opportunities which would arise from successfully producing a cure, or casting judgement on the government's decision to hold the patients for longer than was strictly necessary. She remained quiet. Andre was not a doctor and she did not want to discuss her views with him in any case; he grinned over at her but she studiously avoided eye contact.

Joel called them all back to order, one hand raised like a teacher trying to subduea class. Astonishingly, it worked. "I know this is exciting news for many ofyou," he said. "Especially for those of you who will be actively involved inthis important development. But I want to remind you that all of you, no matteryour professional position, every single one of you has a role to play in thisnew phase of the facility. We are about to enter a new age, a time of trial anddevelopment, a time which I'm sure will test us. It is very exciting to thinkthat there are people in this room who might be the ones to pioneer a cure. Veryexciting indeed. I hope you will all join me in a round of applause now, inanticipation, for the doctors in this room and their support staff. We will start work on this immediately."

   As the crowd dispersed, Andre turned to Lucy.

"Well, your job just got a whole lot more interesting," he said.

"I'll do what I can to help," she mumbled, but her head was swimming: what did all this mean? Was she really going to be part of the team to find a cure for the biggest plague to ever sweep the world? She felt hopelessly underqualified. She had been selected from her class of sixty – from all the med schools across the country – but she was barely graduated, still felt strange about calling herself a doctor. Medical research was an area they had barely skimmed over at university, and when there had been opportunity to go into it in greater depth, she had instead opted for the psych rotation. Yet, as the newest member of the medical team, she would have been selected for the purpose of contributing to this new phase for the facility. Was she really the one they thought could do this? In conjunction with Doctor Singh and the others, did they really think she would have anything to offer?

"Do you know what the Flu actually does?" When she tuned back in, Andre's eyes were bright. This was all wrong, his reaction set her on edge. He was like a parody of a normal, functioning human, but missing the vital parts, as though he were a highly sophisticated robot. The thought came to her with a sudden clarity and made her feel sick, and in that instant she made up her mind: she did not like this boy.

"It kills everyone," she said. "It has an eighty per cent mortality rate." She wanted to take a step back, out of his orbit.

He smiled at her, as though he had won something, but she did not even know it was a competition; as though she now owed him something, but there was no prize. She wished she had opted out of this conversation, somehow, but would that in some small way also be a concession of ground?

"The virus doesn't kill anyone," he said. "They starve to death. The virus infects everyone with a sudden mania. It comes on quickly, so quickly that they can't warn anyone, can't enlist help, even if they know that they have it. And they don't want help, because they feel happy, even though they're behaving in erratic ways. They become so consumed by it that they can't look after their children, they don't feed themselves, they can't drive cars or anything. They just move and move and move and keep moving, they're restless, they never feel safe. They use all their energy and they don't put any fuel into their bodies. And then eventually they starve to death." He looked at her. "If you're going to find a cure, you might need to start by looking at the American mind. You better start with looking at what's wrong with a country, that its whole population was overcome by this kind of crazy thinking."

She hadn't known that; hadn't gone into the details of the Flu before this point, had thought it a nebulous concept, a very aggressive form of standard Influenza. How was it that this guy, with the undefined job and the slightly glazed eyes, could know so much about the Flu? She wasn't even sure that what he was saying was true. It sounded medically unlikely, a contagious form of mania: although mental illness was sometimes hereditary, it was typically developed at an individual level, not a populatory one.

As shedid the ward round of her patients, most of them relatively healthy butsuffering from short-term, non-life-threatening afflictions; fevers, theubiquitous gastro, aggressive sunburn, she could not stop thinking about whathe had said. If that was true, why was it not public knowledge? If thisdisease, which had swept a once-great nation, had already killed two Presidents,had led to a complete disintegration of infrastructure and government in just afew months, was really more in the mind than the body, what did that mean forcivilisation? And could Lucy, a fresh graduate, a twenty-three-year old SomaliAustralian, a woman who still thought of herself as a girl, really contribute,even in some small way, to its eradication?