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Fretting doesn’t work properly unless one can visualize disasters in all their particulars, including the weather and the time of day.
“Explain! Perhaps you’d like to explain it to me, too. I’m not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can’t go.” And over thirty million Americans died during the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking, he thought.
“What are they all doing here?” Dunworthy said. “Don’t they realize we’re in the midst of an epidemic?” “It’s always this way,” the vicar said. “I remember the beginning of the Pandemic. Largest collections ever taken. Later on you won’t be able to get them out of their houses, but just now they want to huddle together for comfort.”
In boldface type it said “FIGHT INFLUENZA, VOTE TO SECEDE FROM THE EC.” Underneath was a paragraph: “Why will you be separated from your loved ones this Christmas? Why are you forced to stay in Oxford? Why are you in danger of getting ill and dying? Because the EC allows infected foreigners to enter England, and England doesn’t have a thing to say about it. An Indian immigrant carrying a deadly virus—” Dunworthy didn’t read the rest. He turned it over. It read, “A Vote for Secession is a Vote for Health. Committee for an Independent Great Britain.”
Heating systems and the EC and time travel. During the Pandemic it had been the American germ warfare program and air conditioning. Back in the Middle Ages they had blamed Satan and the appearance of comets for their epidemics. Doubtless when the fact that the virus had originated in South Carolina was revealed, the Confederacy, or southern fried chicken, would be blamed.
wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.
It’s strange. When I couldn’t find the drop and the plague came, you seemed so far away I would not ever be able to find you again. But I know now that you were here all along, and that nothing, not the Black Death nor seven hundred years, nor death nor things to come nor any other creature could ever separate me from your caring and concern. It was with me every minute.
“Most of it was terrible,” she said softly, “but there were some wonderful things.”
I, seeing so many evils, have put into writing all the things that I have witnessed. Lest things which should be remembered perish with time.
