“Your Honor,” the Solicitor General said, walking to the podium with the TV microphone, “as the complainant tells us, this is a most important case, but not one of great legal complexity at its foundation.
“The government cites Mr. Justice Holmes in the celebrated free speech case where he told us that the suspension of freedoms is permissible when the danger to the country as a whole is both real and present. The Constitution, Your Honor, is not a suicide pact. The crisis which the country faces today is deadly, as press reports have told us, and it is of a nature that the drafters could not have anticipated. In the late eighteenth century, I remind learned counsel, the nature of infectious disease was not yet known. But quarantining of ships at the time was both common and accepted. We have Jefferson’s embargo of foreign trade as a precedent, but most of all, Your Honor, we have common sense. We cannot sacrifice our citizens on the altar of legal theory …”
Martin listened, rubbing his nose under the mask. It smelled as though a barrel of Lysol had been spilled in the room.
IT MIGHT HAVE been comical, but was not, when each of the fifteen reporters reacted the same way to the blood test. A blink. A sigh of relief. Each one stood and walked to the far side of the room, taking the opportunity to remove
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his or her mask. When the tests were complete, they were led into another briefing room.
“Okay, we have a bus outside to take you to Andrews. You will receive further information after you take off,” the PAO colonel told them.
“Wait a minute!” Tom Donner objected.
“Sir, that was on your consent form, remember?”
“YOU WERE RIGHT, John,” Alexandre said. Epidemiology was the medical profession’s version of accounting, and as that dull profession was vital to running a business, so the study of diseases and how they spread was actually the mother of modern medicine, when in the 1830s a French physician had determined that people who became ill died or recovered at the same rate whether they were treated or not. That awkward discovery had forced the medical community to study itself, to look for things that worked and things that did not, and along the way changed medicine from a trade into a scientific art.
The devil was always in the details. In this case, it might not be a devil at all, Alex realized.
There were now 3,451 Ebola cases in the country. That included those who had started dying, those who showed frank symptoms, and those who showed antibodies. The number by itself wasn’t large. Lower than AIDS deaths, lower by more than two orders of magnitude than cancer and heart disease. The statistical study, aided by FBI interviews and feedback from local physicians all over the country, had established 223 primary cases, all of them infected at trade shows, and all of whom had infected others who had in turn infected more. Though the incoming cases were still on the upslope, the rate was lower than that predicted by preexisting computer models… and at Hop-kins they’d had the first case of someone who showed antibodies, but no symptoms. . . .
“There should have been more primary cases, Alex,” Pickett said. “We started seeing that last night. The first one who died, he flew from Phoenix to Dallas. The FBI got the flight records, and University of Texas tested
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everybody aboard, finished this morning. Only one shows antibodies, and he isn’t really symptomatic.”
“Risk factors?”
“Gingivitis. Bleeding gums,” General Pickett reported.
“It’s trying to be an aerosol. . . but…”
“That’s what I think, Alex. The secondary cases appear to be mostly intimate contact. Hugs, kisses, taking personal care of a loved one. If we’re right, this will peak in three days, and then it’ll stop. Along the way we’ll start seeing survivors.”
“We have one of those at Hopkins. She’s got the antibodies, but it didn’t get beyond the initial presentation.”
“We need to get Gus working on environmental degradation. He should be already.”
“Agreed. You call him. I’m doing some follow-ups down here.”
THE JUDGE WAS an old friend of Kealty. Martin wasn’t exactly sure how he’d fiddled with the docket in this particular district, but that didn’t matter now. The two presentations had taken about thirty minutes each. It was, as Kealty had said and the Solicitor General had agreed, a fundamentally simple point of law, though the practical applications of it led into all manner of complexity. It was also a matter of great urgency, as a result of which the judge reappeared from chambers after a mere hour’s contemplation. He would read his decision from his notes, and type up a full opinion later in the day.
“The Court,” he began, “is cognizant of the grave danger facing the country, and must sympathize with President Ryan’s sincerely felt duty to safeguard the lives of Americans in addition to their freedoms.
“However, the Court must acknowledge the fact that the Constitution is, and remains, the supreme law of the land. To violate that legal bulwark is a step that potentially sets a precedent with consequences so grave as to reach beyond the current crisis, and though the President is certainly acting under the best motives, this Court must vacate the executive order, trusting our citizens to act in-
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telligently and prudently in the pursuit of their own safety. So ordered.”
“Your Honor.” The Solicitor General stood. “The government will and must appeal your ruling immediately to the Fourth Circuit in Richmond. We request a stay until the paperwork can be processed, later today.”
“Request is denied. Court is adjourned.” The judge stood and left the bench without a further word. The room, of course, erupted.
“What does this mean?” the Court 7T correspondent– himself a lawyer, who knew what it probably meant– said to Ed Realty, his microphone extended, as reporters tended to do at the moment.
“It means that so-called President Ryan cannot break the law. I think I have shown here that the rule of law still exists in our country,” the politician replied. He was not being overtly smug.
“What does the government say?” the reporter asked the Solicitor General.
“Not very much. We will have papers filed with the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before Judge Ven-able has his opinion drafted. The order of the court is not officially binding until it is written up, signed, and properly filed. We’ll have our appeal drafted first. The Fourth Circuit will stay the order–”
“And if it doesn’t?”
Martin took that on. “In that case, sir, the executive order will remain in place in the interest of public safety until the case can be argued in a more structured setting. But there is every reason to believe that the Fourth Circuit will stay the order. Judges are people of reality in addition to being people of the written word. There is one other thing, however.”
“Yes?” the reporter asked. Kealty was watching from ten feet away.
“The court has settled another important constitutional issue here. In referring to President Ryan by both his name and the title of his office, the court has settled the succession question raised by former Vice President Kealty. Further, the court said that that order was vacated. Had Mr. Ryan not been the President, the order would have’been
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invalid and never legally binding, and the court could have stated that as well. Instead, the Court acted improperly on point, I believe, but properly in a procedural sense. Thank you. The Solicitor General and I have to get some paperwork done.”
It wasn’t often you shut reporters up. Shutting political figures up was harder still.
“Now, wait a minute!” Kealty shouted.
“You never were a very good lawyer, Ed,” Martin said on his way past.
“I THINK HE’S right,” Lorenz said. “Jesus, I sure hope he is.”
CDC laboratories had been frantically at work since the beginning, studying how the virus survived in the open. Environmental chambers were set up with differing values of temperature and humidity, and different light-intensity levels, and the data, incomprehensibly, kept telling them the same thing. The disease that had to be spreading by aerosol–wasn’t, or at most it was barely doing so. Its survival in the open, even under benign conditions, was measured in minutes.
“I wish I understood the warfare side of this a little better,” Lorenz went on after a moment’s thought.
“Two-two-three primary cases. That’s all. If there were more, we’d know by now. Eighteen confirmed sites, four additional trade shows that generated no hits. Why eighteen and not the other four?” Alex wondered. “What if they did hit all twenty-two, but four didn’t work?”
“On the basis of our experimental data, that’s a real possibility, Alex.” Lorenz was pulling on his pipe. “Our models now predict a total of eight thousand cases. We’re going to get survivors, and the numbers on that will alter the model somewhat. This quarantine stuff has scared the shit out of people. You know, I don’t think the travel ban really matters directly, but it scared people enough that they’re not interacting enough to—“