When a second case is reported, the entire city is locked down in quarantine status and the team released with orders to return the following day.

There, it's determined that Badri has a virus and the entire team is quarantined for a period of time. Mary, a physician, calls for medical transport and Dunworthy travels to the hospital with Badri.

At the lab, Badri says that he has a fix on Kivrin's location but says again that there's a problem, then faints over the console. While Mary is reassuring him, Badri rushes in, mutters about a problem and rushes back out with Dunworthy and Mary in pursuit. Dunworthy admits to being very worried because drops to such distant times have not been attempted. Gilchrist has overridden the policy to allow Kivrin to go.Īs soon as she is through the net, Dunworthy and Mary go to a nearby pub to wait for Badri, the tech in charge of the drop, to get a definite fix on Kivrin's location so she can be picked up in two weeks. Basingame, is out of town and has left a faculty member named Gilchrist in charge. The policy has been not to send historians to the medieval period because of the danger to the historian, but the head of the department, Mr.

Together, they battle their invisible enemy with only the crudest weapons, and, when those inevitably fail, faith.James Dunworthy, a faculty member of the Oxford History Department, enters a viewing chamber where his friend, Mary Ahrens, is watching the preparations for sending a historian named Kivrin to 1320. Kivrin, who has been inoculated against the plague, helps the local priest, Father Roche, care for the dying in her adoptive town. As the plague scythes through the English countryside that winter of 1348, the bells ring until it seems they might never stop. They ring for holidays, they ring for weddings - and they ring for the dead, so that the sound might guide their souls to heaven. And yet, when I recalled Connie Willis' groundbreaking, Hugo Award-winning science-fiction novel Doomsday Book, the resonances came back to me with the sound of tolling bells.īells ring throughout Doomsday Book - they mark the hours in the small medieval village in which the time-traveling heroine Kivrin Engle has been stranded, awaiting rescue from her contemporaries in Oxford of the 2050s. It is hard for me to conceive of the bravery required to take care of people with this awful, contagious disease. Many sobering statistics have emerged from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, but one number in particular has stuck with me: More than 200 health care workers have died so far. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Doomsday Book Author Connie Willis

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