straight in her safety harness beside Paul on the front seat. She said, "Mark, sometimes 
I think you're five years old instead of nine."
  "Oh, yeah? Well, sometimes I think you're sixty instead of eleven!"
  "Touche," Paul said.
  Mark grinned. Usually, he was no match for his sister. This sort of quick response was 
not his style.
  Paul glanced sideways at Rya and saw that she was blushing. He winked to let her know 
that he wasn't laughing at her.
  Smiling, sure of herself again, she settled back in her seat. She could have topped 
Mark's line with a better one and left him mumbling. But she was capable of generosity, 
not a particularly common quality in children her age.
  The instant the station wagon stopped at the curb, Mark was out on the pavement He 
bounded up the three concrete steps, raced across the wide roofed veranda, and 
disappeared into the store. The screen door slammed shut behind him just as Paul switched 
off the, engine.
  Rya was determined not to make a spectacle of herself, as Mark had done. She took her 
time getting out of the car, stretched and yawned, smoothed the knees of her jeans, 
straightened the collar of her dark blue blouse, patted her long brown hair, closed the 
car door, and went up the steps. By the time she reached the porch, however, she too had 
begun to run.
  Edison's General Store was an entire shopping center in three thousand square feet. 
There was one room, a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide, with an ancient pegged pine 
floor. The east end of the store was a grocery. The west end held dry goods and sundries 
as well as a gleaming, modem drug counter.
  As his father had been before him, Sam Edison was the town's only licensed pharmacist.
  In the center of the room, three tables and twelve oak chairs were grouped in front of 
a wood-burning country stove. Ordinarily, you could find elderly men playing cards at one 
of
  those tables, but at the moment the chairs were empty. Edison's store was not just a 
grocery and pharmacy; it was also Black River's community center.
  Paul opened the heavy lid on the soda cooler and plucked a bottle of Pepsi from the icy 
water. He sat down at one of the tables.
  Rya and Mark were standing at an old-fashioned glass-fronted candy counter, giggling at 
one of Sam's jokes. He gave them sweets and sent them to the paperback and comic book 
racks to choose presents for themselves; then he came over and sat with his back to the 
cold stove.
  They shook hands across the table.
  At a glance, Paul thought, Sam looked hard and mean. He was very solidly built, five 
eight, one hundred sixty pounds, broad in the chest and shoulders. His short-sleeved 
shirt revealed powerful forearms and biceps. His face was tanned and creased, and his 
eyes were like chips of gray slate. Even with his thick white hair and beard, he looked 
more dangerous than grandfatherly, and he could have passed as a decade younger than his 
fifty-five years.
  But that forbidding exterior was misleading. He was a warm and gentle man, a push-over 
for children. Most likely, he gave away more candy than he sold. Paul had never seen him 
angry, had never heard him raise his voice.
  "When did you get in town?"
  "This is our first stop."
  "You didn't say in your letter how long you'd be staying this year. Four weeks?"
  "Six, I think."
  "Wonderful!" His gray eyes glittered merrily; but in that very craggy face, the 
expression might have appeared to be malice to anyone who didn't know him well. "You're 
staying the night with us, as planned? You aren't going up into the mountains today?"
  Paul shook his head: no. "Tomorrow will be soon enough. We've been on the road since 
nine this morning. I don't have strength to pitch camp this afternoon."
  "You're looking good, though."
  "I'm feeling good now that I'm in Black River."
  "Needed this vacation, did you?"
  "God, yes." Paul drank some of the Pepsi. "I'm sick to death of hypertense poodles and 
Siamese cats with ringworms."
  Sam smiled. "I've told you a hundred times. Haven't I? You can't expect to be an honest 
veterinarian when you set up shop in the suburbs of Boston. Down there you're a nursemaid 
for neurotic house pets-and their neurotic owners. Get out into the country, Paul."
  "You mean I ought to involve myself with cows calving and mares foaling?"
  "Exactly."
  Paul sighed. "Maybe I will one day."
  "You should get those kids out of the suburbs, out where the air is clean and the water 
drinkable."
  "Maybe I will." He looked toward the rear of the store, toward a curtained doorway. "Is 
Jenny here?"
  "I spent all morning filling prescriptions, and now she's out delivering them. I think 
I've sold more drugs in the past four days than I usually sell in four weeks."
  "Epidemic?"
  "Yeah. Flu, grippe, whatever you want to call it."
  "What does Doe Troutman call it?"
  Sam shrugged. "He's not really sure. Some new breed of flu, he thinks."
  "W/hat's he prescribing?"
  "A general purpose antibiotic. Tetracycline."
  "That's not particularly strong."
  "Yes, but this flu isn't all that devastating."
  "Is the tetracycline helping?"
  "It's too soon to tell."
  Paul glanced at Rya and Mark.
  "They're safer here than anywhere else in town," Sam said. "Jenny and I are about the 
only people in Black River who haven't come down with it."
  "If I get up there in the mountains and find I've got two sick kids on my hands, what 
should I expect? Nausea? Fever?"
  "None of that. Just night chills."
  Paul tilted his head quizzically.
  "Damned scary, as I understand it." Sam's eyebrows drew together in one bushy white 
bar. "You wake up in the middle of the night, as if you've just had a terrible dream. You 
shake so hard you can't hold on to anything. You can barely walk. Your heart is racing. 
You're pouring sweat-and I mean sweating pints-like you've got awfully high blood 
pressure. It lasts as much as an hour, then it goes away as if it never was. Leaves you 
weak most of the next day."
  Frowning, Paul said, "Doesn't sound like flu."
  "Doesn't sound like much of anything. But it scares hell out of people. Some of them 
got sick Tuesday night, and most of the others joined in on Wednesday. Every night they 
wake up shaking, and every day they're weak, a bit tired. Damned few people around here 
have had a good night's sleep this week."