Virus: The Day of Resurrection (18 page)

Lieutenant Colonel F frowned. “By which I take it you’re studying them here?”

“Of course. The influenza virus is a mysterious little critter. It can mutate to its heart’s content.”

“You’re not saying this Tibetan flu is—”

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be one of mine. But Soviet experiments might have caused this outbreak. At any rate, a tough new strain like this has excellent strategic value.” So saying, the assistant director tossed a newspaper onto the desk. “Look at this. These past two or three days, the New York Stock Exchange has been on a severe downslope. London’s also down across the board. At the Tokyo Stock Exchange, a lot of the employees are absent from work, and there are signs that it may close. There are one thousand two hundred factories that have had to temporarily shut down because of this flu bug, including seventeen that are main production plants for major corporations. Even the supervisors for the automated areas are out. Seven hundred eighty offices are having temporary closures. Sixty percent of regular flights aren’t running, and the train schedules are all out of whack as well. Just in the past week, there’s been a seventy-two percent spike in traffic accidents. Look at this. All of America is gradually being paralyzed by this
mere
influenza.”

“National defense is—” Lieutenant Colonel F started to growl. “Huh. National defense is our job.”

“We’re already calling up reservists at a steady clip, aren’t we?” the assistant director asked with an ironic look in his eyes. “But what’re they gonna do at NORAD? They can’t just swap people out on the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System crews, can they? They don’t have enough people.”

Lieutenant Colonel F’s face grew pale. What were those clowns at the Department of Defense doing to try to deal with this? To what extent did they grasp what was going on?

“How about you people here?” Lieutenant Colonel F said, going on counteroffensive, feeling a little hot under the collar. “Have you got a plan ready for dealing with a situation like this? Is this not comparable to a scenario in which a hypothetical enemy, so to speak, has launched a germ attack against us? You all are using twenty million dollars a year. We’ve poured over a hundred million into this place, so tell me, what’s Fort Detrick’s plan for dealing with this?”

“With this? Come on. However you look at it, this is
just
a form of flu,” the assistant director said, a bit taken aback. “But just in case, the Indiana production facility should be making vaccine to go around to all of the defense personnel nationwide. Only, this A-Minus vaccine for some reason doesn’t have much of an effect, so they’re having to produce about three times the usual amount.”

“In other words, it hardly works at all, eh.” Lieutenant Colonel F sneezed again.

“Anyway, is there something in particular that brings you here today?” the assistant director asked as he took a capsule of medicine out of his drawer and swallowed it.

“Yes, I want to see Meyer.”

“I heard that he bungled that last job,” the assistant director said in an ironic tone. He rested his finger on top of the interphone switch. “Meyer’s becoming quite the neurotic,” he added.

“He wasn’t responsible for that.”

“Well, in any case, he seems to feel morally responsible.”

“Morally?

“Yeah.” A conflicted look appeared on the assistant director’s face. “After all, a year and a half ago, the contagion he was working on got stolen, right?”

“Yeah …” Lieutenant Colonel F also wore a bitter expression. “His assistant walked right out with his culture medium and vanished with it. The way I hear it, a professional spy ring acted as middleman. We chased them as far as Mexico, but they slipped through our fingers in the end.”

“Meyer was saying the germs they were supposed to bring back from England might be an improved strain of the ones that were taken.”

“What?” Lieutenant Colonel F stared at him. “So the stolen ones … were sold to Great Britain?”

The assistant director finally pressed the interphone button. “Send in Meyer,” he said as he stood. “I’ve got a little errand to run. You can talk to him here. Oh, and one more thing.” He pointed underneath the desk. “If you want to tape him, the switch is right under here.”

Lieutenant Colonel F frowned slightly. He and Meyer were uncle and nephew.
You’re quite the little cynic
, he thought.
Think I’m investigating Meyer, do you?

While he was waiting, the lieutenant colonel glanced around the room. These buildings were fairly old. At any rate, he’d heard that they had been standing for over twenty years, built in April of 1943, while World War II was still raging. Originally budgeted at twelve million dollars, with a research staff of about four thousand, they now had a yearly budget of two hundred million and over fifteen thousand workers. Facilities for field experiments existed in Mississippi and Utah, there was a production plant in Indiana, and just recently a new, secret plant had been built out in the desert.

Meyer stepped into the room. He was a tall, slender, pasty-skinned man still in his thirties. He had a sort of nervous air about him, as though he were thinking terribly hard about something. “Hey there, Ed …” assayed Lieutenant Colonel F in a friendly voice. “How are you doing? Haven’t come down with that awful Dalai Lama flu have you?”

“What do you want, Uncle— ” he broke off in mid-sentence, glanced around the room, and corrected himself. “I mean, Lieutenant Colonel, sir?”

“Don’t worry about that,” his uncle said. “The assistant director showed me where the tape recorder switch is.”

Meyer returned a strained sort of smile. “Ever since that incident last year, we’ve been under constant surveillance. That’s fine for the people who know they’re being watched. But those who don’t know will say bad things about their bosses and nitpick everything the Defense Department does, never knowing that what they say is being turned into ‘reference material.’ ”

“Well, there’s no way around it. I was the one who proposed it after all, in the interest of security.”

Meyer lowered his eyes. “What do you want?”

“It’s about that recent operation. The one that ended in failure.” The muscles in his cheeks grew as tight as piano wire. “I’d like to hear your opinion as to whether or not we should try again.”

“Why are you asking me?” Meyer said, turning away. “Weren’t you the one who said that intelligence had been provided by career spies?”

“Yes, and afterward, when I asked your opinion about whether or not we should buy that contagion, you stepped up willingly and offered to participate in the operation.”

“Because I was thinking, one little mistake and we’d be in big trouble. You needed to have a specialist along for handling it.”

“I heard you knew it was an improved strain of the germs that were stolen from this lab last year,” Lieutenant Colonel F said in a sharp voice. “So why didn’t you say so, Ed?”

“It wasn’t like I knew for certain. But I did wonder if that’s what it might be after we discussed the intel your people stole from the Soviets.” Meyer waved his hands around, looking annoyed. “Even with incomplete data, that germ was the first thing that came to mind. And such a specialized—”

“Should we try again, Ed?” Lieutenant Colonel F asked. He chewed on his mustache for a moment. “Is that germ so terrible that America absolutely must get it for the sake of national security? If you want it that badly, I swear to you we’ll get it. There is a way.”

“Please just stop!” Meyer shouted, slamming his fist down on the table. “If you can get in touch with the people in England, tell them to leave
that stuff alone
! Tell them to incinerate all of it, so not even one microbe ever gets out into the open. On second thought, no—just tell them to stop doing that kind of research altogether!”

“Whoa, Ed, settle down!”

“Listen to me! As my uncle! Those germs are
monsters
! They’re not even from this planet!” Meyer put both hands on the desk and leaned forward. “You remember, don’t you? Back in ’63 and ’64, when the satellites were doing their bug-collecting in space? It’s one of
those
. Brought back from somewhere three, five hundred kilometers above the earth’s surface.”

“I’m aware of that,” Lieutenant Colonel F said, a little taken aback. “I hear they’re still alive in the underground vault at Brooks Aerospace Medical Research Center. Several years back, I heard about the problems they were having with it growing so insanely fast.”

“Even after that, there were six kinds of microbes captured and brought back from outer space, two of which were bacterial endospores,” Meyer said. “These superbugs live in hard vacuum at absolute zero in a storm of cosmic radiation, and the one characteristic they all have in common is an absolutely shocking rate of growth in terrestrial environments.”

Lieutenant Colonel F felt a faint chill, and not just because of the slight fever his flu was causing him. Somehow, he had a feeling that the space just in front of him was crawling with tiny, invisible microbes.

“The stolen original, RU-308, was created through the process of generational refinement from one of these space microbes. But actually, it has an even more terrifying secret.”

“I don’t understand scientific jargon,” Lieutenant Colonel F interrupted. He didn’t want his nephew talking about any “secrets” here in a room where additional recording devices might still be planted. But Meyer went on talking like a man possessed.

“What’s really frightening about this is the fact that there’s not a doctor in the world who knows the truth about the RU-300 series or even understands what they are. Nobody does, outside of the people in this section of this germ warfare laboratory. The microbes that were collected in space are also under a veil of military secrecy, so generally speaking, no one from the outside can come anywhere near them. You’ve had us studying them, sifting out what looks usable, and have only announced the existence of two of the six microbes that have been discovered. Do you understand what that means? The academic world doesn’t know a thing yet about this series
. . .”

Lieutenant Colonel F’s restless eyes looked all around the room. Somehow, he had to stop Meyer from saying any more than this.

“Likewise,” Meyer continued, his bloodshot eyes fixed on his uncle, “the real secret of RU-308 isn’t just that simple improvements in the laboratory increased its breeding power threefold; it’s that we’re trying to use a phenomenon that nobody in the fields of microbiology or genetics has even been told about. At first glance, RU-308 itself looks like nothing more than an everyday kind of coccus—harmless, but impossible to kill with antibiotics. In reality, however, this is just a front for something else. Something truly terrible.”

“Edward!” the lieutenant colonel barked. “That’s enough! Be quiet!”

“If this should ever get out,” Meyer continued, speaking through agitated sobs. “If this should ever be used on the battlefield—a contagion that’s
still completely unknown
to the world’s doctors—they’d have no way of knowing what the
true
contagion really was. Unless you understand the principles of the mechanism this RU-308 uses to disguise itself, I can say with near absolute certainty that you won’t be able to independently discover them. If I could announce the existence of that phenomenon to academia, I’d win the Nobel Prize.”

“But we at least have vaccine for the military, don’t we?” Lieutenant Colonel F said, trying to soothe him.

“Not yet,” Meyer said, covering his face. “We’re doing various kinds of work in tissue cultures, but there’s no telling yet how long it’ll take for that to translate into a mass-produced vaccine. I’m still stuck at the experimental stage, and there are only a handful of people in this place who know how powerful it is. We obviously can’t take it into field-testing yet. I can’t imagine what might happen if the RU-308 line was taken outside or if it leaked out of the laboratory somehow.”

Lieutenant Colonel F suddenly remembered a story about a genie he’d read in
One Thousand and One Nights
as a child. A man opens a tiny little bottle lying on the seashore, and out comes a cloud-swathed genie, powerful and cruel, who plucks up the little man who’d released him from his bottle. This story made the lieutenant colonel a bit uneasy, but at the same time he found Meyer’s pale, nervous visage simply ridiculous.
That takes me back. I remember thinking about that story when the first atom bomb experiment succeeded at Los Alamos, and again when the first hydrogen bomb was detonated at Eniwetok. I thought about it again when we got the ICBM, and again when the antimissile radar network was finished. But in the end, mankind somehow found a way to control all of those things. The balance of power was like a dispensation from heaven in that it made controlling them possible.

“But at the end of the day, the British have gotten hold of it too,” said the lieutenant colonel. “And the Soviet Union—they’ve sent up several satellites capable of harvesting biological materials. More than likely, they’ve got the same kinds of bugs we do. They could be working on germ weapons even more deadly than ours. When you think about that, our most powerful means of attack becomes at the same time a defensive weapon, protecting us from the same kinds of weapons our enemies have. In other words, you’re working for the defense of our nation.”