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"And the Renaissance came about," Greg said thoughtfully. "Would it have happened without the plague? No one really knows, do they?"

"That's the romantic version," I said, not quite snapping at him. "The silver-lining theory. Out of every evil thing comes something good. You believe that?"

Warren had been brooding, gazing at the fire in the fireplace, snapping and cracking, a many-hued fire burning off salts and minerals of dried wood scavenged from the beach. He sounded very tired when he spoke now. "The Renaissance came about because people had used up all the resources they had available to them; they were desperate for better ways to farm, to make clothing, to warm themselves. Better ways to survive. They had to invent the Renaissance. It had nothing to do with plague."

I realized that they had had this conversation before; neither was saying anything the other had not already heard. I stood up.

"Are you going to tell me what you're doing in your lab?"

Greg looked blank, and Warren shook his head. "Same old stuff," he said after a long pause. "Just the same old stuff."

If it was just the same old stuff -artificial blood, whole blood transfusions, work they had been publishing for years - why had they both become so old? Why were they both terrified? Why had Warren stopped talking about his work altogether, and refused to talk about it when I brought it up?

Greg got up abruptly and went to bed, and Warren shook his head when I asked him again what they were doing. "Go on to bed," he said. "I'll just be a few minutes."

What do you do if your husband holds the agent to destroy half the human race? You try not to know it; you don't demand answers; you go to bed.

A gale has arrived finally. Now the trees are thrashing, and the broom is whipping about furiously, making its own eerie shrieking sound, and the rain is so hard it's as if the sea has come up here and is raging against the car, pushing, pushing. I am getting very cold and think how strange that I was so reluctant to turn on the motor, use the heater. I can hardly even hear the engine when it starts and, as soon as I lift my foot from the accelerator, I can't hear it at all.

Greg's wife took her two children and ran when she learned. I wonder if that is why Warren refused to tell me anything for so long.

In the past two years Warren became a stranger to us, his family. We saw him rarely, and only when he was so fatigued he could hardly stay awake long enough to eat, to bathe. I didn't see Greg at all after that day at the coast, not until two weeks ago.

Warren came home late. I was already undressed for bed, in my robe. He was so pale he looked very ill. "I blew the whistle," he said, standing just inside the door, water running off his jacket, down his hands, down his face. I went to him and pulled the jacket off his shoulders. "It's going to be out of our hands by tomorrow," he said, and walked stiffly into the living room to sit on the sofa.

I hurried to the bathroom and came back with a towel, sat beside him, and began to dry his hair, his face.

"Will you tell me about it now?"

He told me. They had found a viroid that had an affinity for some blood groups, he said. Not even a whole virus, not a killed virus, a piece of a virus. They had combined it with the O group first and nothing happened, but when they then combined the O blood with A blood, the viroid changed, it became whole, replicative, and the A blood was destroyed, consumed. He said it in a monotone, almost absently, as if it were of no real consequence, after all. And then he buried his face in his hands and cried.

Forty-five per cent of Caucasians have A-group blood; five percent have AJB. Thirty per cent of Blacks have A or AJB. Thirty per cent of Amerinds have A or AB... And the virus they created could destroy all of them.

I held him as he wept and the words tumbled incoherently. They would both go to Atlanta, he said that night, he and Greg, and someone would come to oversee the packing