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plugged into her laptop computer, and she could review the images on the screen.
    She placed a leather folder containing her autopsy knife and sharpening tools on top of the things in her travel bag. The knife is a pathologist’s main piece of professional equipment. She also threw in a Boy Scout knife, fork, and spoon set, for eating meals in a rented room. She would not be staying in a hotel. The C.D.C. travel allowance was ninety dollars a day for accommodations in New York City. You can’t get much in the way of a hotel room in New York for ninety dollars, so she would be staying in a bed-and-breakfast.
                      
    HER FLIGHT TOOK OFF in clear weather. The moon was down, and the stars were bright in the dark sky. Austen watched North America move slowly below the aircraft, a cobweb of lights imposed on blackness. Cities approached and fell behind—Charlotte, Richmond, then Washington, D.C. The Mall was visible from thirty thousand feet, a luminous rectangle against the Potomac River. The federal government looked small and helpless from up here, like something you could step on with your foot.
    They went into a holding pattern around Newark Airport, and when they turned and prepared to land, coming in from the north, they passed close to Manhattan. Looking out her window, Austen unexpectedly saw the organism called New York City. The beauty of it almost took her breath away. The core of the city seemed to emerge from the black waters that surrounded it in a lacework of light and structure, like a coral reef that glowed. She saw the buildings of midtown Manhattan shimmering in the Hudson River, so remote and strange as to seem almost imaginary. The Empire State Building was a spike washed with floodlights. Beyond Manhattan lay expanses of Brooklyn and Queens. To the south she recognized the luminous bulge of Staten Island, and the lights of the Verrazano Bridge hanging in a chain. Closer to the airplane, the waters of Upper New York Bay spread out like an inky rug, devoid of light, except for the sparkling hulls of ships at anchor, their bows pointed to sea with an incoming tide.
    Austen thought of a city as a colony of cells. The cells were people. Individually the cells lived for a while and were programmed to die, but they replaced themselves with their progeny, and the organism continued its existence. The organism grew, changed, and reacted, adapting to the biological conditions of life on the planet. Austen’s patient, for the moment, was the city of New York. A couple of cells inside the patient had winked out in a mysterious way. This might be a sign of illness in the patient, or it might be nothing.
                      
    THE BED-AND-BREAKFAST apartment where the C.D.C. had rented a room for Alice Austen was in Kips Bay, on East Thirty-third Street, between Second and First avenues. Kips Bay is a sixties-era development of blocklike concrete buildings surrounded by gardens, nestled up against a huge complex of hospitals. Her hostess was a German widow named Gerda Heilig, who rented out a room looking toward the New York University Medical Center and the East River. It was a pleasant room with a desk and an antique carved German bed that squeaked when Austen sat on it. The room was full of books in German. There was no telephone.
    Austen placed her knife pack on the desk and opened it. Inside the leather folder were two short knives and a long knife. They were her autopsy blades. The short knives were like fish-fillet knives. The long one was a prosector’s knife. It had a straight, heavy, carbon-steel blade. The knife was two and a half feet long. It was almost like a short sword. It had a comfortable handle made of ash wood, the same wood used in axe handles. She kept a diamond sharpening stone in her prosection pack and a round edging steel. In case they asked her to participate in the autopsy, she wanted to be ready with her own knife. She wet the stone with water