The alarm jarred me out of deep sleep. As I groped beside the bed for the still vibrating clock, I regretfully abandoned my dreams for the austere grey walls of my temporary room, and the dreary window view of a wet Vancouver dawn. The tide was out and the slimy green-spattered mud and rocks of the estuary looked like a surrealistic painting of a hangover. At the water's edge, a school of fishing boats angled in the mud, their tilted trolling masts reminding me of the broken antennae of some strange crayfish, stranded and dead on a fishmarket floor. And dead they were. No smoke came from their humpbacked little cabins; no fisherman climbed the slanted decks. I wondered if the epidemic had silenced their motors, or was it just not the season for fishing. Were the lusty trollers and seiners worrying about their lost virility and gone home to test it out? The newspapers had been asked to play down their sterility stories, which had caused so much consternation yesterday, but even so it was common knowledge that those who had had involvement of the sex glands might be sterile. I turned down the corridor to the kitchen and started the coffee dispenser. Pat was still asleep after a late night coaxing reluctant male and female ferrets into the same cage and to be friends instead of messily murdering each other. Chivalry among ferrets is not highly regarded, even with females in season. We wanted to see if they could produce families, not to see which one was the stronger sex. Tranquillizers are fine for the purpose but it takes a neat balance to eliminate the fight and keep the desire. Hallam was not around. He was an early riser and could probably be found watching the monkeys if I cared to go there. They had shown no symptoms as yet. Probably the incubation period was about the same as in man, and if so there had not been time for the fever to start. I moved on again to the shower, taking it cool to clear my fuzzy head. Now there was little to do but wait; wait for the ferrets to get amorous; wait for the chattering monkeys to fall ill; wait for more biopsies of the human volunteers out there beyond the virus-proof walls of our chosen prison. I thought of the previous day, the second after our brief excursion. After breakfast we had rechecked the animals while Pat had transferred cultures, brought our records up to date and then Hallam and I sat in the living room playing cribbage while we waited for Smith's reports.