The White Death

Nine thousand years ago they saved us. Now they have changed theirminds.Freda has represented the Alliance on Earth for a hundred and thirtyyears. She likes the humans. She has spent a career explaining them to aCouncil that has never once visited them.Then a virus escapes from a laboratory beneath the Korean DMZ - a virusthe Council built, lost, and did not report - and within days the infectedare walking out of the mountains in hospital gowns. A newsroom nobody canidentify gives the thing a name, and the name sticks: the whitedeath.In Washington, a president is asked to destroy one of his own cities. InBeijing, a scientist works alone in a sealed room with the only livingcarrier. And on a station at the edge of charted space, Freda findssomething that should not be possible in a civilisation of eleven thousandworlds: every scholar who ever studied humanity is dead, and the reportsthat condemned the species have been rewritten fourteen times.Somebody discovered something about human beings in 1971. Somebody hasspent sixty years making sure nobody else finds out what it was.SECOND EDITION - revised and expanded. This edition restores fourchapters cut from the original, dramatising an investigation that the firstedition reported only in summary, and rebuilds the closing confrontation.Readers of the first edition will find the story, the characters and theending unchanged.