"New Philadelphia?" said Philip doubtfully. "No, we can't go there. Forget it."

     He, Andrew, Lungelo and Valentina were sitting around a table in the habitat's recreation room. All the others were in their rovers, in bed. Feeling miserable and wondering if they would be dead before the end of the week. David's condition was the worst, not surprising as he was the youngest, and Jasmine had barely left his side despite her own sickly condition. She gave every sign of thinking that the disease was her fault despite being told over and again that the dead cow hadn't been the source of the bacterium. She spent a lot of time talking to Joe over a private channel and Andrew hoped that the young man had some success in getting her to see sense.

     The second most serious case was Izindaba on account of the wound to her leg. Andrew could sympathise as his injured hand was also red and inflamed. The body's response to injury seemed to favour the disease, gave it an environment in which he could flourish and Andrew was only still functional because of the large dose of painkillers he was taking. He could only imagine what Lungelo's daughter was going through right now, but the fear and desperation on the father's face told him that it wasn't good.

     "I don't see that we have any choice," Andrew said. "We need antibiotics and they're the only place within a week's driving that may have some."

     "We're carrying a highly infectious, deadly disease," Philip pointed out. "If they catch it from us hundreds might die. Thousands. We cannot be responsible for that."

     "We'll warn them, of course," said Andrew. "We'll radio ahead, tell them our condition. Tell them to take precautions. We'll wait to be invited in."

     "What if there's no reply to our messages?" asked Valentina. "Suppose we wait outside for hours while our condition worsens. We decide the city must be empty after all, we go in looking for antibiotics and it turns out there are people in there after all."

     "If we have to go in uninvited we'll go in surface suits," Andrew told her. "The cold will kill any bacteria on the surface of the suits and we'll keep them on all the time we're in there." He looked around at the others and they nodded one by one.

     "We should leave warning messages in our rovers as well," said Valentina. "In case someone comes visiting while we're away. They've only got to breathe the air and they're infected. We need to warn them not to."

     "If we leave antiseptic grenades set to go off after we're all out of the rover, everything inside will be sterilised," said Andrew. "There'll be no chance of them being infected."

     "There's always a chance," said Valentina, however. "There only has to be one little nook or cranny the gas can't get to. We leave warning messages. We have to." Andrew nodded his agreement.

     "Any way to tell if this really is 14-b?" asked Philip. "Not some less deadly bug?"

     "Without a DNA sequencer? No," Andrew replied. "We just have to assume the worst, unless you want to to take the biggest gamble of your life. And not just your life on the line but Joe's too. In all the years we've known each other, you've never struck me as a gambling man."

     "I'm not, but New Philly is a gamble too. To us as well as to them." He rubbed his temple as if his head was hurting, which it probably was. He dismissed the discomfort with a visible effort. "We have no idea who's living there now or how they'll react to outsiders. The fact that they've made no attempt to contact us does not bode well, though. I think there's a very great danger that they'll take us prisoner and interrogate us for information about New London. How long will you hold out when you see your children being threatened with torture?"

     "The children won't be going in," Andrew replied. "I'll go in alone, beg them for their help. If they do take me prisoner then the rest of you will have to decide upon another course of action."

     "I assume you don't mean go in and rescue you," said Lungelo. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief held in a trembling hand.

     "That's correct. There will be no rescue attempt. No sense in throwing your lives after mine. I recommend going as far east as you can in an attempt to reach the area of satellite coverage before your health degrades too far. Maybe they can send you some antibiotics by rocket."

     "Maybe that's what we should do anyway," suggested Valentina.

     Andrew shook his head, then wished he hadn't as it worsened his headache. He waited a moment to let the throbbing pain subside before speaking. "The area of satellite coverage is four days away, assuming you aren't delayed by some problem. If this is 14-b we'll all be dead by then. If this is 14-b then New Philly is our only hope. We have no choice but to try it."

     "So you'll be going alone in your rover?" said Lungelo.

     "No," said Andrew. "We'll all go, but everyone else will wait outside the city while I go in alone. If they do have antibiotics and are willing to share them, you'll need to get them as soon as possible. The time it would take to bring them back here might make the difference between life and death."

     "It would mean getting through their defence perimeter," said Philip.

     "Their defence perimeter was destroyed by the mobs that overran the city," pointed out Valentina.

     "The mobs approached from the east," Philip reminded her. "They only destroyed the sentry weapon on that side of the city. The city's new masters may have re-positioned the surviving weapons to restore three hundred and sixty degree coverage."

     "To do that, they'd need the control codes for the weapons," Valentina pointed out. There were red rings around her bloodshot eyes.

     "They may have forced the city's ruling council to hand over the codes," Philip replied.

     "Even if they did, the weapons are still two hundred years old. Their plutonium cores will be degraded. They may not have the power to function."

     "If the city's new masters were able to take over the city's entire industrial base, they would have the ability to create new power cores," Philip told her.

     "We're talking about soldiers trained in the use of weapons and not much else," Valentina told him. "Soldiers who lacked the discipline to obey the lawful orders of their superiors to defend the city and who decided to take it instead. Do they sound like the kind of people who'd be able to operate a nuclear construction facility?"

     "They might have taken the city's original workforce prisoner and forced them to work for them," said Philip.

     "They might have taken some of them prisoner," said Lungelo, entering the argument, "but don't forget that the soldiers would have wanted the city as a home for their families and the city can only support so many people. To hold their families, the soldiers would have had to evict or kill most of the city's original population, and most of the first generation was chosen for their technical knowledge. To make room for their families, the invaders would have had to get rid of most of the people they needed to keep the city going. That's why we assumed the city was dead in the first place."

     "You're right," said Andrew. "I think the best we can hope for is that the city's life support machinery has somehow managed to struggle along with virtually no maintenance for two hundred years. A small population that has no knowledge of how to carry out servicing and repairs. They may even all be dead already. The rover tracks we came across may be decades old, made by the last survivors fleeing a dead city and searching for a new place to live. I don't think we need to worry about a functional defence perimeter. We will, of course, be transmitting the weapons' shut down codes as we go, just in case."

      "They may have changed the codes," said Philip. "We might run smack into fully operational, fully powered sentry weapons that we're unable to shut down. The first we'll know about it is when a fifty kilowatt laser beam burns through the cockpit window."

     "I think Val's right," said Andrew, though. "I really can't see the weapons being any danger to us. We don't have a choice anyway. We either take the risk, or we pin all our hopes on this bug we've all got not being 14-b." He looked around at the others, all of whom were staring feverishly back at him. "The remainers believe that they're saving the human race from extinction by preventing The Return. I believe that some of them at least would be willing to kill the eleven of us in the belief that they're saving a hundred thousand other people. I believe they would use 14-b if they had access to it, and with the resources they've shown themselves to have so far I don't think they'd have had much trouble getting a sample of the bug from the hospital. I believe that we have 14-b and that if we don't go to New Philadelphia we will all die."

     Lungelo and Valentina nodded their agreement. Andrew looked at Philip and Philip looked back at him, but after a couple of moments the larger man nodded as well. "Okay," he said. "Might as well make it unanimous. We're going to New Philadelphia.

☆☆☆

     One by one, the hab-rovers disconnected themselves from the habitat and formed a line pointing west, with the Birch rover in the lead. "Everyone ready to go?" he asked the faces on the monitor screen.

     "The sooner we go," Lungelo replied, his face flushed, his eyes red, "the sooner we get the medicine we need and the sooner we're returned to glorious health. Let's go."

     Philip nodded as well. "Okay," said Andrew. "Everyone got their tracking systems turned on? In our present state it would be easy to make a silly mistake."

     "Check," Philip replied. Lungelo gave the same confirmation.

     "Okay," said Andrew. "Setting off the antiseptic grenades."

     He touched a button on a remote detonator and in the habitat module three small white globes, each marked with a skull and crossbones to warn that they contained deadly poison, began to emit a yellow gas. Every living thing the gas touched died, whether it was animal, plant or bacterial. The habitat module would be completely sterilised,  making it safe in case anyone else from either of the underground cities came there. They wouldn't have to worry that a deadly epidemic might break out somewhere, maybe years later, as a result of their carelessness.

     Andrew watched the gas spreading on one of his monitor screens. "Good," he said. "That's done. Off we go then."

     He gave the rover the command to start moving and they set off along a pre-programmed route that would take them to New Philadelphia by way of the Illinois glacier. They would leave the glacier when they grew close to St Louis and strike east across what had been sparsely populated farmland before The Freeze. They expected to come across rover tracks sooner or later. When they did, the rovers would follow them automatically all the way to the northernmost of the former USA's two underground cities, coming to a halt when they were two kilometres from it. There they would wait, dark and silent, hopefully unnoticed, while Andrew took his rover in alone.

     He had originally intended to sit in the cockpit for the entire journey, which he expected to be no longer than six or seven hours, but the disease wore him down slowly but relentlessly. His head pounded, his limbs ached so much that only by keeping them straight was the pain bearable, and worst of all he was tired. All he wanted to do was lie down, close his eyes and escape the torment for a little while in sleep. The voice of temptation told him that his presence in the cockpit wasn't necessary, that the rover was quite capable of driving and navigating itself. The seat was uncomfortable with a headrest that was designed to protect him from whiplash rather than for comfort. Also, he worried about his children. He knew Susan was watching over them despite her own sickness but Andrew wanted to see them for himself. To see for himself that they...

     That they...

     That they were still alive.

     It was this, the awful, nagging suspicion that they might have died and that Susan might be trying to protect him from this awful discovery, that finally convinced him to leave the cockpit, after taking one last look around to reassure himself that all was well with the rover. He rose from the seat with a groan of agony and staggered back to the ladder reaching up to the upper level. Suddenly, climbing that ladder seemed like climbing a mountain. His children were at the top, though, and he needed to see them. With a sigh of determination, therefore, he reached up with his hands and put his foot on the first rung.

     It took him many long minutes to climb the ladder, with each rung climbed being a triumph of its own before he braced himself to take the next one. The pain in his head reached a level he hadn't thought possible and several times he sensed himself to be on the verge of blacking out. When that happened he paused, hanging onto the ladder, and waited for his body to recover enough for him to continue.

     Finally, after what seemed an eternity, he reached the top and staggered to the door to the childrens' bedroom. Inside, he found Susan sleeping beside Jasmine; the mother on top of the bed, the daughter under the covers. Both wearing three sets of coveralls in an attempt to stop the shivering. Their breathing was rough and laboured, as was that of the two boys. All four were drenched with sweat, and seeing it made Andrew realise that his own coveralls were soaked as well. He didn't care, though. What mattered was that all the people he loved were still alive, for the moment at least.

     He staggered across the room to David's bed. The youngest. The one who would die first if the disease followed its usual progression. When he saw him, Andrew's heart faltered with a cold fear. David, was breathing through a wide open mouth, but even so it sounded as though his breath was struggling to make it through narrowed, inflamed tubes. His skin was puffy and red, and when Andrew touched his forehead it felt hot and sweaty.

     "It's going to be okay, son," he said, taking the boy's hand in his own. "It's going to be okay."

     The boy made no reply. He was probably unconscious by now rather than simply asleep. This is no accident, thought Andrew angrily. Someone did this to him, to all of us. Someone deliberately exposed him to a disease that he knew would kill him. What kind of monster could do a thing like that? And it wasn't some stranger. It was one of the people on the expedition with them. Lungelo, perhaps, or maybe Philip, or possibly Halona. It didn't have to be a man after all. Whoever he though of, he couldn't believe that that person would do such a thing, but there was absolutely no doubt that one of them had. One of the people that he'd thought was a friend was trying to murder his whole family.

     Whoever it was had infected themselves as well. There had probably been no avoiding it. Strep 14-b was one of the most infectious diseases ever discovered and it would be all over every rover by now. Sitting on every surface, drifting in the air itself, just waiting for someone to come along and breathe it in. There would be no way for the remainer to avoid it and he would have known it. He probably thought he was being noble and honourable, being prepared to give his own life to accomplish his objective, but all Andrew felt was a sick fury. For the first time in his life he felt himself capable of killing a man, emotionally if not physically. Physically, he was barely capable of even holding a weapon, let alone wielding one, but if hatred alone could kill a man then the remainer was dead already.

     David moaned in his sleep and turned over onto his side, curling into a fetal position and pulling the blanket up to his neck. It left no part of his body visible except his sandy blonde hair, plastered to his scalp by perspiration. There was a medical thermometer on the bedside table beside him, probably left there by Susan. He put it to the boy's ear canal and looked at the reading. Thirty eight point three degrees. Hot, but not dangerously so. The acetaminophen Susan had been giving them was doing its work, for the time being at least. He thought about giving the boy another dose of the drug, then decided against it. A mild fever was the body's way of fighting an infection. The bacterium could tolerate the heat less well than the human body. The fever was slowing the disease's advance, giving them more time.

     Weariness swept over him, but he couldn't bring himself to leave his family. He lay down on the bed beside his son, therefore, the soaked bedsheets between them. The boy's body glowed with heat as he put his arms around him, holding him close. Perhaps he'll beat the disease even without antibiotics, he thought. Some people had, after all. About one person in fifty. David was strong. If anyone had a chance to survive, he did.

     As he was thinking this, fatigue and sickness finally overcame him and he fell asleep, lulled by the gentle rocking of the rover as it trundled its way across bumps and hollows. Left to make its way without human supervision, as best it could, towards what could be either their salvation or their doom.