My mind was racing about, trying to find reasons for his amazing assertion. Maybe he wasn't really serious, I thought, only to dismiss the idea immediately. Another look at that stern and sober face and I knew he meant it. And only a few moments ago he had been laughing and joking with Pat. I remembered a story I'd heard about him in World War II, how he had been in a Field Hospital with his New Zealand countrymen at Cassino and, during a heavy bombardment, had sat quietly joking with patients who could not be moved to safety. So, it could be true. If he could make jokes in the face of death, he could laugh during a disaster. The buzz of conversation ceased as the Chief went on. "As of this morning there were fifty thousand cases in Vancouver city alone, with no tallies in, as yet, from Burnaby and New Westminster. More are being reported every minute. The hospitals are filling up even though they take only those with complications; and there seems to be no end of it so far. It's like the 1918 pandemic all over again but with some very peculiar differences." Again he stopped and turned to Dr. Armstrong. "Joe, do you see any differences clinically?" Armstrong got to his feet. "Yes, I do, George," he said, in his slow careful way. "For one thing, it is the most explosive epidemic I have ever seen. Usually they start with a few cases and, after an incubation period of two or three days, a fresh batch of victims appears, growing in number each time. Here we have hundreds, all at once, then none for about five days or so, then thousands. It does look almost as if something or somebody had infected them all at the same time." "My God," I thought, "not you too, Joe! Not old steady-boy down-to-earth Armstrong! Shades of the flying saucers!" He continued. "The time lapse between the first outbreak and this new surge of cases is approximately five days, which is just a little longer than usual for influenza. Also, as Dr. Hallam has already mentioned, there are some peculiarities in the clinical picture. For instance, we are seeing patients with enlargement of the salivary glands ... not many of course ... and a few with orchitis. We even have the occasional female with what could be inflammation of the ovaries. That makes me think of mumps except that the time between the first and second waves is much too short, and anyway most of these people tell me they had mumps as a child." One of the public health men down the table broke in. "I remember back in 1956 there was some sort of epidemic pleurisy, or Q-fever, in California, in which there were cases with involvement of the salivary and sex glands. It was quite an unusual thing but I don't remember the outcome. And there were miscarriages in the '57 flu epidemic, so the ovaries were probably involved in some cases. Nobody can say those weren't natural epidemics."