By the time the Plague Years began, there was no latitudinal freedom between prosperity and famine, no country on Earth that could safely sustain itself on even half its normal harvest. And in most places it quickly got down to less than half. The insects made a clean sweep of equatorial Asia, chewing most of India and Thailand down to bare earth and clay. The hostilities between India and Pakistan escalated into a horrible nuclear spasm that reached into Turkey and Bosnia before dying. Almost simultaneously, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, and Seoul ceased to be. Australia and New Zealand had halted all imports, and had thus managed to stave off contamination by the Wells strain; but Sydney and Wellington were on the verge of war with Beijing when the Americans announced that they might soon be able to clone whole armies of Wells-resistant birds.

Desperate times had brought Richard Tuna back to the field of paleobiology, whether or not he wanted to be part of it. He and Powell had recently modified “a piece of equipment,” originally designed to take aim on Saddam Hussein and carbonize him from orbit, into a prototype Valkyrie rocket engine. Joined now by Gerard Case and a paleogeneticist named Mary Schweitzer, they turned the engine inside out, and in so doing created a microscope the like of which no one had ever seen before, one which suddenly enabled them to scan at will any portion of an extinct DNA molecule as quickly and easily as one would scan a laser disc and as often as one wished.

With unlimited billions in funding, the mass resurrection of birds began, made possible by museum displays of stuffed specimens, whose DNA was edited to fight the Wells strain. Rookery building became the top priority of every surviving government. But resurrection was a slow process whose first and most complicated step required the mass production of unfertilized and re-engineered reptilian eggs, for there were simply not enough birds. Without the egg, there could be no chicken. As a-result, the resurrection did not occur in time to prevent the fishing of the South China Sea into a biological desert or to save Australia from invasion.

One outcome of the Plague Years was that the technology for cloning lost species, spurred by dire need, came into existence nearly two decades before it should have. As the world’s economy began to recover, New Zealand’s giant moas and eagles, and South America’s overgrown roadrunners, with beaks powerful enough to crush a child’s skull, began to redefine the word ”extinct.” In Washington, D. C., piling live dodo birds on the steps of the Capitol became the political joke craze of the century, amid suggestions that when the first veloci-raptors really did become available, rather than try to create a “Jurassic Park,” the proper use of them would be to follow John Carpenter’s lead in Escape from New York.

“Wall in Washington,” said a prominent late night talk show host, “and keep all the senators and congressmen, judges and lawyers inside. Then set up TV cameras all over the city, charging forty dollars a pop on Pay-Per-View, with commentary provided by Howard Stem and Wildcat Bob as we let the raptors in.”