Virus: The Day of Resurrection (19 page)

“I … I’m scared. Lieutenant Colonel … is this really for national defense? For the balance of power? Once you start down that road, there’s no end to it. There is truly no end. We’ve already reached the saturation point with nuclear weapons. That’s why the US, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union are negotiating to eliminate them. In times like these, why do we have to keep doing this kind of dangerous work? In terms of power, nuclear weapons may have reached a saturation point, but our field is a swamp with no bottom. We can create the infinitely terrible in infinite numbers—things that the human eye can’t even see. Ever since the days of Pasteur, the whole framework of modern microbiology has been helping to manufacture these disgusting tools of murder. Our systems of learning were created in order to free human beings from death and disease. And it’s because the knowledge for fighting that fight is released to the general public that people like us can use these priceless new advances to our hearts’ content. But what we can’t do, for reasons of national security, is let anyone know just how horrifying what we’ve made here really is.”

Meyer was starting to sob now. With a dark gaze, the lieutenant colonel stood motionless, observing the state of the man.

“We receive a budget from the DoD, and with facilities and equipment vastly more luxurious than what civilian doctors have, we develop offensive weapons to keep us one step ahead of other countries. The F12 influenza virus we’ve made has much more impressive effects than that A-Minus type that’s going around right now. I’m sure you know about that
botulinus bacillus
that kills twenty-four hours after infection. A mutant strain of botulinus-K could kill two hundred twenty million people, and it’s overcome the greatest weakness of the old
botulinus bacilli
—its anaerobic nature. It won’t die in air and can even replicate in it. Do any of the world’s doctors know about this? Even our anthrax and melioidosis have toxicities and reproductive power many times what they did fifteen years ago. Aside from the eighty-six strains that aren’t, as a rule, considered biological weapons, we’ve got over sixty strains of germs and viruses that are so effective, that are so
dangerous
we can’t even use them—although we could grow them in tanks anytime we liked if the need arose …”

The lieutenant colonel quietly pressed the button on top of the desk. Biting his fist, Meyer kept talking, as if in a delirium.

“Achievements in cancer research and in molecular biology have finally given us four kinds of nucleic acid weapons adopted for standard use. The study of viruses for biological weapons use is pulling us into a veritable quagmire. The more the world’s theoretical biology and therapeutic medicine advance, the more the power of biological weapons will increase. I—”

The door opened and the assistant director entered the room. With cold eyes, he watched closely as Meyer sat in his chair and continued to speak.

“Is something the matter?” he asked.

“My nephew seems to be tired,” Lieutenant Colonel F replied. “Do you think you might be able to give him a little leave? I’m asking this as a favor, myself.”

“Sure thing,” said the assistant director. “This work will wear on your nerves as well as your body. There are some dangerous critters here. I get down in the dumps all the time from trying to maintain secrecy.”

“Go back to your room, Ed,” said Lieutenant Colonel F. “Then fill out a request for leave.”

“I …” Meyer stood up and looked like he was about to start shouting.

“That’s enough already! Leave this to me!” Lieutenant Colonel F spoke in a strong voice and put a hand on his nephew’s shoulder. The assistant director opened the door for him to go.

“Get plenty of rest,” the assistant director said kindly. “Go fishing in Miami or something.”

Meyer left the room with his head hung and a dazed expression on his face. As soon as he was gone, the lieutenant colonel cocked his eye at the assistant director. “Have the security folks keep an eye on Ed, all right?”

“What for?”

“Don’t worry about ‘what for,’ just do it right away.”

The assistant director quickly gave the orders via interphone. Lieutenant Colonel F stood by the window, looking into the brightness outside. Somewhere a little bird was singing.

“What happened?” the assistant director said, his expression sullen. “He wouldn’t be convinced?”

“Didn’t I just tell you? I thought this was supposed to be a private talk just now.” The lieutenant colonel seemed to be hesitating as he stared out the window. “What about you? What do you think about that germ, that RU-whatchamacallit?”

“That’s the one that was stolen. The ‘space germ’ that was brought here from Brooks. Ed was studying it.” The assistant director crossed his arms. “There isn’t much to talk about. If that new strain that we tried to steal from the Brits is, as Ed says, something produced from that line, our work on it is still way behind England’s, and Meyer deserves a good spanking. Really, Meyer’s been getting rather neurotic lately, so I can’t help wondering if he has an exaggerated idea of that line’s strength. In particular because he feels responsible, what with it having been stolen by an assistant he was using.”

“Is he ultimately the one who has to answer for what happens in that section?”

“He is. It’s experimental research, though, so there are hardly enough people in it to call it a section. Why do you ask?”

This gave the lieutenant colonel pause. He wondered—had Meyer deliberately held back on reporting the practical effectiveness of that line? Or had he in his neurosis in fact become delusional? He wasn’t sure.

“Well,” said the lieutenant colonel, turning decisively toward the other man. “To put it bluntly, his psychological condition is degenerating.”

“You understand, I’m sure, that secrets themselves are dangerous, Lieutenant Colonel. Nothing unusual about that. You know those psych tests you DoD folks give each year to everyone in the three branches who works around nuclear weapons? Ten percent or more get tagged as ‘people to watch’ each year, don’t they? And that’s out of people who took a stringent test before they were assigned and passed it. After just one year, look how many unsuitables have turned up. It’s the same thing here. If we were to do a rigid test of everyone’s emotional stability, half the people here would probably be viewed as dangerous.”

“Well then, that just means that testing needs to become a legal requirement for people working with gas and germ weapons too,” Lieutenant Colonel F said coldly. “At any rate, the problem at the moment is Ed. We can’t just leave him be. He might try to do something foolish.”

“We’ll watch him for a while.”

“No,” the lieutenant colonel said. He was a bit red in the face—possibly from fever—and was sweating a little. And back to chewing on his mustache. “I’ll submit his request for leave. And on your orders, I want him to take his leave here.” With a hand that trembled slightly, he wrote something down quickly on a memo pad that was on the desk. The assistant director furrowed his brows when he caught a glimpse of it.

“Your own nephew?” he asked.

“It’s exactly because he’s my own nephew that I want to nip this in the bud,” the lieutenant colonel said. “Regan, in consideration of our long years of friendship, listen to what I have to say. Under normal circumstances, I’d want to hand this order down to a direct subordinate in the interest of preserving national defense secrets, but this time I don’t want any of this coming to light. I want the leave order to come to him from you.”

“That’s fine with me,” said the assistant director. “And I have authority to have the security guys here watch him.”

“Tell his wife for me,” the lieutenant colonel said, turning away slightly, “that he’s gone off to Zanzibar or somewhere again and is under orders to keep it secret.”

The assistant director pressed a switch and said, “Get me Security Chief Quinlan.”

While he waited, the lieutenant colonel picked up the telephone. “Yes, put me through to the army hospital,” he said, and then coughed painfully. “That’s right. Call up Dr. Balouse in Neurology.”

Meyer’s private room adjoined the laboratories in the section he ran, and when he returned to it he collapsed into his chair and held his head in his hands. The fit of agitation that had erupted moments ago had subsided somewhat, but the blood in his head was still racing. He had lived with this mental stress for a full year now and was well aware that he was near the limits of his endurance. He lifted his face and stared intently at his hands. They were trembling faintly, moving as though they were not his own.

It’s not my fault!
he screamed wordlessly. But that shout was nothing but empty hysterics.

He stared at the door that bounded off the laboratories. Beyond that perfectly normal, pale green steel door was his research lab, cluttered with flasks, microscopes, an electron microscope, and a microcomputer. A slightly scatterbrained older woman and a young assistant were working there. The area beyond, separated by another sturdy door, was divided into a room for tissue cultures, a room for virus cultures illuminated by a blackroom lamp, and an artificially illuminated room for bacteria cultures. Within the culture bases stored inside those straight rows of glass tanks, within the artificially grown cells created for growing virus cultures, all manner of death was being produced. Each strain was isolated, subcultured, mutated by irradiation or drugs, and hybridized—it was a sea of detestable things, in which only the worst were harvested along the way. Although on the surface it bore great resemblance to the kind of medical or biological lab created to fight against death, in this laboratory, concealed within a dark and grim veil of secrecy, death itself was being created—ever swifter, fiercer, and more difficult to fight than before.

It isn’t my fault!
Meyer screamed again. He wanted to shout it out at the top of his lungs.

At last, his anxiety began to abate. His mental stress had been caused not so much by the fact that the viruses had been stolen on his watch as lab chief as by the fact that while working as a military researcher, he had been deliberately neglecting the faithful reporting of the results of his work. When a virus in the RU-300 line had been stolen by his ace assistant—who had perhaps grasped before Meyer the unusual properties of that virus—he as well as the other scientists hadn’t yet understood even a fraction of the menace that could be drawn from that line. Only he had continued to trudge along, studying it merely as a part of his work. In that way, a chilling realization had slowly set in of the horror that could be grown from it. It wasn’t like he had been consciously neglecting his reporting from the beginning though. As he was by nature a cautious sort of man, he had always submitted his reports with a certain reserve when it came to the results of his experiments. Somewhere along the way, however, it had suddenly hit him that he was walking along the edge of a cliff. Suppose that this line should blossom into the kind of horror that he could foresee. The military would take an interest in it. What would happen, then, if it were adopted as standard biological weaponry? No—even before then, could it even get through field-testing without any leaks?

There were still so many things that were not yet understood about the germ. For that reason, until such time as the answers became a bit clearer, he had taken great care to omit from his reports the kinds of data that could stimulate the imaginations of the top brass, that could move their index fingers toward their telephones. In any case, there had been no great expectations laid on him for this work. The number of bacteria,
rickettsias
, and viruses was vast, and in his job of developing new strains—of selecting useful-looking ones and improving them—he was only in charge of one small part of the overall effort. It was easygoing work, wherein one success out of a hundred trials was considered a good ratio. In this way, he had gradually ended up padding his reports with more and more falsehoods, rather like a treasurer who pockets a little bit here and a little bit there, and at last digs himself a hole he can’t get out of.

At the same time, this had had the unexpected effect of reawakening his lonely conscience. If he were to give an accurate report of his research, the military men would surely jump on it. They would be delighted to have a weapon that was more fearsome than either the hydrogen or neutron bomb, and moreover, completely secret. But through the contact he had had with various military men during the past four-plus years he’d worked at this laboratory, Meyer had come to have doubts about the military’s powers of imagination when it came to end results. They were courageous, to be sure. Still, they were slaves of the moment and of whatever seemed “necessary” at that moment. They would dance with glee if they got their hands on the first germ weapon that, when spread from an aircraft, could have an effect equal to or greater than that of a nuclear weapon—especially with it being several thousand times cheaper to boot. Most of the germs and viruses that had thus far been available for use in warfare were known both to the enemy and the general public, and despite all the publicity and propaganda surrounding them, they just didn’t have that powerful an effect when it came to actual deployments. Plague? Cholera? Anthrax and parrot fever? These things were known already. They were things that the medical community both now and in the past knew about.