He had time on his hands again and spent some of it thinking about the next pandemic. “I walked away from that one saying, ‘Next time this isn’t going to be easy,’ ” he said. “The whole thing assumed you would know how bad the pandemic was. And that was a really bad assumption. This fog, this not knowing, is such a big part of it. You almost need

The big theme of her book would be the power of storytelling. It had taken Lisa, Richard, and Carter some time to see that they were in a war of competing narratives, and that whoever had the best narrative would win.

Her new husband complained to the church elders that his wife was spending all her time working. “He told me I was being disobedient by working so hard,” recalled Charity. “And they agreed with him. They told me I should be at the fiftieth percentile of my class. No better.” After the next semester, when her grades remained high, the church elders

“We used to tell ourselves, ‘You’re going to make a mistake,’ ” said Carter. “The sin is making the same mistake twice. The best is to learn from other people’s mistakes.”

“They said, ‘You need to do these things one at a time and gather evidence.’ They wanted to learn from this meningitis outbreak, and I wanted to stop it. My goal was to stop it, and that was not their goal. They wanted to observe it as if it were a science experiment on how meningitis moves through a college campus. And I was like, ‘Are you kidding

“I never told them what I would do,” said Carter. “I was allowing them to open the curtain and take a look. You see so much. If people would just spend their time and observe. You don’t need any advanced degrees.”

Carter now sensed when she might have changed her mind about him. Early on, they’d been discussing the pandemic plan, and he had shared with her his thoughts about maps. They were also his thoughts about plans, as a plan is a kind of map: a map of what you plan to do. He told her a story about some troops who’d gotten lost in the Alps. “They’re in

There was, Carter thought, a downside to experience. “Experience is making the same mistake over and over again, only with greater confidence,” he said. The line wasn’t his, but he liked it.

Richard believed that if the country was suddenly overwhelmed by some strain of flu for which there was no vaccine, there nonetheless existed strategies to prevent illness and death. He also wanted to believe that the benefits of these strategies could exceed their costs. He even thought it might be possible to eradicate a new virus without a