Virus: The Day of Resurrection (24 page)

“Both of them have been around, but Leisener proposed a new hypothesis based on the former that he called the Evolving Virus Hypothesis. Put simply, it suggests that as viruses continue to have very close relationships with living things, the most evolved of them might become able to replicate themselves without needing the form of a mature virus, using only the genetic material of their nucleic acids. According to Leisener’s Evolving Virus Hypothesis, the viruses spring from cells in a secondary manner. So, isn’t it possible that as the next step, viruses would take on a tertiary form that reproduces by processes using nucleic acids alone, and no longer go through the process of maturing as an individual? He published this hypothesis in
Science
five years ago in an article titled ‘Reproducing Chemical Substances.’ Academia felt it was a little too bold though, so it was ignored.”

Outside the room, the sun dimmed. It was the brightest time of year—early summer in England—but just that day the winds were blowing and there were many clouds. It looked like the weather might turn bad. Already, the sunlight was slanting in from fairly low in the sky. As soon as it went behind the clouds, that worn-out, rugged room at the Department of the Army was suffused with a twilight gloom, and a feeling of sticky, humid air softly exhaled from the corners of the room and from the shadows of furniture—shadows that had been concealed until that moment. The tedious scientific monologue that Dr. Landon was delivering only made the oppressive atmosphere that much heavier.

As if to ward off the humidity, the minister picked up a gold foil cigarette and lit it. The purple smoke of Turkish leaves lent the room a slightly dry, warm aroma.

“Before Karlsky came here, he had been doing joint research with Leisener, so as soon as he saw the strange phenomenon of the MM series’ infection, he remembered Leisener’s theory. He hypothesized that the MM series germs were not just simple bacteria, but also contained the nucleic acids of some kind of prophagic virus hiding in their chromosomes. Or that maybe the MM series had a sort of cellular cancer. A cell that has become cancerous has a much greater rate of replication than a regular, healthy cell does. So could the carcinogen that causes this cellular cancer exist even in the germ-free fluid filtered from the culture base of the MM bacteria and be causing ‘cancer’ in the regular staphylococci that so resemble the MM strains? This replication itself can be malignant or benign, but in this case, it’s probably benign—it makes the cells divide like crazy; it doesn’t make them self-destruct.

“Karlsky and I started poking and prodding at the MM series, trying various things—hitting them with radiation, using chemicals on them—to try to expose the viruses. But in the end, we found nothing. If these bacteria were collected in space several hundred kilometers above the earth’s surface, they would have been floating in a veritable firestorm of radiation up there; the radiation they get on the earth’s surface wouldn’t even be enough to make them twitch, but well, anyway, no viruses came out of the MM series.”

Major Grey had been listening patiently. As his only clinical experience came from working for a while in a field hospital in Normandy, this monologue was difficult to follow, but still it was not entirely incapable of holding his interest. The hidden seed of a sinister virus, quietly hiding in the chromosomes of a bacterium, replicating along with the host by cellular division, waiting for its chance. Stimulate it, and suddenly that seed would germinate into new viruses that would destroy the host bacterium, bursting out of it from within.

I see now. Very interesting. And if what he’s describing could be used as a weapon …

“By the way, one more odd property of these things ended up providing new evidence in favor of Leisener’s theory. If you injected a bird or mammal with either the MM cocci or with staphylococci that had been infected by secretions from the MM series, the germs would first begin to reproduce wildly, just like when animals come down with asuppurative disease, but then they would quickly disappear without a trace. Isn’t that weird? Put them in a human body, and the MM bacteria would self-destruct and then dissolve.”

“Are you saying that humans would develop antibodies right away?”

“Nothing so simple as that. Naturally, an animal that we infect can develop quite a few antibodies in its lymph, but the strange thing is that when the MM bacteria disappear, the antibodies disappear too. Incidentally, you probably think that if the MM bacteria dissolves inside a living body, it must be utterly harmless to the animal. It turns out, though, that when we injected MM bacteria into an animal—even though the bacteria will completely disappear in about two hours—sixty percent of our test marmots were dead within twenty-four hours. Acute myocardial infarctions. The same happened to dogs within forty-eight to sixty hours. Monkeys, seventy hours. Our other test animals showed acute symptoms of general paralysis not long after injection and then presently died of metabolic damage. That is to say, extensive, acute damage occurs to the autonomic and sympathetic nerves. In rare cases, G-gas causes the symptoms of muscarine poisoning—as when someone comes into contact with an organophosphorus compound—but in most cases just the opposite occurs, and the impulse-conducting nerves are damaged instead.

“When we looked into the matter we learned that the generation of the impulse conductor oxyacetylcholine was being completely blocked, and in short, the nervous system’s conduction mechanism had gone haywire. Furthermore, we used a technique called the ferritin antibody method, and when we looked closely at the results, we learned that it was the nerve cells themselves committing these murderous acts. Karlsky put it marvelously. ‘Cellular suicide,’ he called it …”

At the sound of the word “suicide,” Major Grey’s eyes, which had shown him to be deep in thought, suddenly twitched. However, the major still said nothing as he listened intently to Dr. Landon’s loquacious speech.

“However, there is another case in which the cells of a living body commit a kind of suicide by way of their own reproductive mechanism. That would be cancer. In the case of virally induced cancer, as is caused by Shope papilloma virus, Rous sarcoma virus, Bittner virus, and others, the nucleic acids of the virus work themselves into the chromosomes of infected cells and make a royal mess of their genetic information, transforming healthy cells into suicidally malformed variants—virulently aggressive cancer cells. Viral cancer is caused by the nucleic acids of those viruses only. Do you understand basically what it is that I want to say? As soon as the ‘Martian Murderer’—the MM bacteria—gets into a body, nucleic acids that drive nerve cells fatally mad and turn them into suicide cells are created within the organism’s own cells.”

Dr. Landon was looking a little pale now and had broken out in a sweat on his forehead, as though overwhelmed by the dreadfulness of what he had just said.

“With this infectious disease caused by the MM bacteria, Karlsky had simultaneously ended up corroborating Leisener’s theory of nucleic acid replication. He took spinal fluid from hamsters that died of MM disease, filtered it, and after a great effort to make completely sure that it contained no virus of any sort, injected it into hamsters that had been raised in a sterile environment. After he did so, the hamsters showed signs of infection, and aside from the time period between infection and the dissolution of the bacteria, the disease progressed exactly as before. After this, he put this fluid into a regular staphylococcus culture base, and exactly the same unusual replication phenomenon took place as takes place in an MM infection. When he infected healthy hamsters with these cocci again, just like the MM bacteria, dissolution and acute symptoms of infection took place. Throughout all of this, no virus was ever detected. Only one thing can explain this: that there is a process of infection by nucleic acids alone, followed by replication, and then illness …”

Landon finally took a breath and wiped the sweat from his damp forehead.

“I think you see what this means—how terrifying the MM line could be as a germ weapon, and how at the same time publically announcing it would practically guarantee a Nobel Prize—its rate of replication is extremely high, and it has a terribly hardy nature that allows it to survive at temperatures as low as sixty degrees below zero. In shape it resembles a staphylococcus, and as is the case with golden staph, antibiotics hardly work on it at all. Another of its outstanding points is that if it got into the human body, it would dissolve and disappear—we don’t know why it dissolves once it infects an organism. It may be the same sort of mechanism at work as when a prophage receives a stimulus, produces bacteriophages, and disintegrates. The antibodies that are produced in the lymph of infected animals may serve as that stimulus.

“Anyway, the point is that even when acute disease occurs, neither bacteria nor viruses will be found in the infected areas. When this utterly new contagious disease first appears, it will take a terribly long time to determine what is causing it. The germ itself is completely unknown, and at first blush looks no different from the exceedingly common staphylococcus. Furthermore, the nucleic acids—which are the real contagion—are hidden inside the bacteria. In bacteria they produce unusual replication; in organisms, they produce acute damage to the nervous system. And nobody else is aware of these things.

“First of all, the nucleic acid replication theory is not formally accepted in academia. It’s even said by some that the reason Dr. Leisener disappeared was because the objections to his theory were so excessively scornful. As a weapon it is lethal, and moreover, its actual contagion is completely unknown to civilian medicine, or the public. Likewise, its mechanism of infection is unknown. Antibiotics don’t work on it, and lymph won’t work on a nucleic acid infection. What all of this means is that there is no way to treat it. What do you think would happen if such a fearsome contagion were spread around as a biological weapon?”

“What would happen?” asked the minister.

“Well, the first thing would be the annihilation of whatever country it was deployed in,” said Dr. Landon, as though this were a trifling matter. “There would be no way to stop it from spreading. What showed us most clearly that the MM bacteria had such dreadful qualities was the eightieth generational culture done at our laboratory; namely, the series beginning with MM-80. We should be most grateful that we don’t have such fearful germs as those floating around about a hundred kilometers over our heads all the time. Because of those germs, and on Sir Lindner’s instructions, we began trying to find a way to weaken their toxicity. That was from MM-85 onward.”

“Weaken it?” murmured Major Grey.

“Precisely. Major Gren—pardon me—Major Grey—think about a nuclear weapon. The Soviet Union and the United States once made hydrogen bombs in the begaton class, equivalent to a billion tons of TNT. The first nuclear weapon in history to be used in war at Hiroshima had an explosive power of twenty kilotons, or twenty thousand tons of TNT. A begaton hydrogen bomb has fifty thousand times that much power. The estimated total amount of gunpowder used in the Second World War comes to five megatons, or five million tons. That means that if one begaton-class bomb were to be dropped, it would have far greater explosive power than all the gunpowder used in the Second World War going off at once. The hydrogen bomb has now developed to the point that, counterintuitively, it’s quite useless. Theoretically, you could go on making hydrogen bombs as big as you like, but they’ve stopped making anything bigger than these. The reason is simple. It’s because after exchanging a volley of them, there won’t be anything left of either country. The thing about weapons is that if they become too destructive, they become unusable.

“G-gas is also amazingly powerful, which was precisely why the Germans couldn’t use it when the Allies landed at Normandy. If the direction of the wind were to change just slightly they would kill all their own men. For the same reason, if MM-79 were used carelessly, it could mean the extinction of all human life on Earth. And not just humanity alone; it could be the end of every vertebrate as well. That’s why starting with the 80 series, we set about doing research for ‘usability.’ ”

“Well, did you succeed?” Major Grey had not let on to Dr. Landon that he had been waiting for his turn to take the lead in this conversation. Dr. Landon’s long-winded speech was finally nearing its finale.

“It didn’t go very smoothly at all,” Dr. Landon said, blinking his eyes. “MM-84 was a good deal weaker. But then eighty-six went the other way and became stronger. When we got up to making eighty-seven, Karlsky’s nerves got the better of him. We’ve killed a man I really hated to lose. He knew that accursed MM series like he knew the back of his own hand. He was the only one who really knew how to handle such dangerous material. This is just me thinking out loud, but I can’t help wondering if knowing it too well was what did his nerves in.”

“I see.” Major Grey was at last positioned for a counterstrike. “So—”

“Ah, and then a bizarre property manifested in MM-87,” added Dr. Landon, suddenly agitated. “A synergistic effect with other viruses. In 1963 at Japan’s Osaka University, the husband and wife team of Mr. and Mrs. Hanabusa, along with Rubin, discovered that for the Rous sarcoma virus to grow, a secondary ‘bridesmaid virus’ is also necessary. But when the MM-87 nucleic acids entered a living creature that was already infected with a certain kind of virus, they
hijacked
the virus and apparently continued infecting the host. Moreover, the effect was stronger than a single infection. That virus type was the extremely common myxovirus group—”

“I think this is enough technical talk,” snapped Major Grey, this time cutting the doctor off. “Please answer two or three questions from me now.”

Fate is a truly ironic thing. By a coincidence as narrow as a single hair, events can swing either right or left. Who can say whether this moment perhaps corresponded to such a situation, but anyway, when Major Grey, who had been more than patient in listening to Dr. Landon, cut him off at this very instant, it was a gravely unfortunate coincidence. Had Dr. Landon not been interrupted, the war minister, whose interest had been piqued, would have asked,
The myxovirus group? What is that?

He had been just about to ask it. Myxoviruses are viruses that breed in mucopolysaccharides—influenza viruses, Newcastle disease viruses, and so on. Had Dr. Landon explained this to Major Grey and the minister, they would have doubtless felt their hearts skip a beat. They might have realized the obvious connection between the stolen germs and the two viral epidemics that were at that time already raging across the globe.

Instead, however, Dr. Landon was simply asked two or three questions regarding the state of the lab and Professor Karlsky’s research just prior to and immediately after that man’s death, and was then dismissed. Major Grey, after observing how unexpectedly loquacious the doctor had been, felt just a bit apprehensive about taking him into his confidence. He didn’t feel like telling that childish, baby-faced man that Karlsky might have committed an act of treason against his country. He would certainly become upset, and that would be bad.

Major Grey just wanted to know about the care and handling of that frightful MM series.

“Yes, of course. There are two senses in which we’re handling it with extreme care. The first is making sure that none of these vicious germs get out. The other is making sure that no trade secrets get out.”

From the standpoint of safekeeping and security, there had been no problem whatsoever with the eighty-six types of germs prior to MM-87. The laboratory was the room that had the most through traffic, but Karlsky committed suicide right after finishing the prep for isolating the mutant MM-88 strain. Which means that although there were notes on test preparation, “… the mutant MM-88 strain didn’t yet exist,” testified Dr. Landon. “Work on adapting it for use is stalled for now.”

Once he had gotten this far, the doctor was sent home. He left without knowing that Grey was considering the possibility that Karlsky might have stolen the MM bacteria. At the same time, he had also missed his chance to contemplate the horrific state of affairs that would come to pass when the major epidemics of Tibetan flu, Newcastle disease, and MM bacteria overlapped.

Incompetent as a researcher, the lab director Sir Lindner’s experience amounted to having treated
gerubezorute
—German soldiers who had suffered exposure to chlorine gas—during his days as an army doctor during the First World War, and in having identified the anthrax germs that had been buried in the garden of the German legate in Budapest in 1916. As such, he was unable to keep up with the latest theories in microbiology; it was rather as a germ warfare strategist, and as director of the military research center, that he was competent. He was already an old man, steeped in the conservative narrow-mindedness of the nineteenth century British upper class, completely lacking in any understanding of the new world. He was feeling terribly angry because of his subordinate’s shameless act of betrayal—of which he had already been informed—and by the undignified, rapid-fire manner of speaking of that man’s colleague.

“It sounds like a most dreadful item, Arthur,” said the minister once Dr. Landon—who had looked rather happy at being allowed to leave early—had left the room. He addressed Sir Lindner by his Christian name, which he had used since they were boys. “And that man, too, is quite a dreadful piece of work himself. Just babbles on and on, doesn’t he, like some cheeky schoolboy who wants to parade his knowledge after reading a science article.”

“The young lot we have now are all like that,” Sir Lindner said, practically spitting out the words. “I thought Karlsky was a little more mature, but look what’s become of him.” He then turned back toward Major Grey and snapped, “Well? Did you turn up any conclusive proof that he was a spy?”

“Not yet,” said Major Grey. “I have, however, come to an admittedly vague understanding of something one might say is almost as good. Three days before he died, Karlsky took leave and went straight from Porton Down to his sister-in-law’s home in Brighton. Thanks to a report we received at that time from his observers, however, we’ve learned that somewhere along the line he was evidently swapped out with a double, right under the noses of his keepers.”

“What were you Army Intelligence people doing?” Sir Lindner shouted, not holding back. “A man under special watch, and you let
that
happen!”

“We’re shorthanded,” Major Grey said softly. “And the ones surveilling him at that time were police, not us.”

“So where did Karlsky go after they lost him?” asked the minister. “At the very least, you said he was in Brighton on the following day, didn’t you?”

“We had to do a lot of legwork asking around, but at any rate, it seems he got into another car and went to Cornwall,” Major Grey said. “We also learned that although there was a terrible snowstorm that night, an airplane apparently took off from Cornwall headed east. All of this is circumstantial, mind you. The testimony of those who said they heard an explosion is vague and uncertain, and the story that someone who
appeared
to be Karlsky was seen in a Rolls Royce headed for Devonshire is unreliable. However, there is no record of any such eastbound airplane being picked up on radar that night.”

“You think all this has something to do with his killing himself without so much as leaving a note?”

“I suspect it might. The day before his suicide, there was definitely one other man at the house in Brighton. That man could have murdered Karlsky and made it look like a suicide, but at this point there’s no longer any way to tell for sure. His sister-in-law only said that she was away from the house at the time but knew he was staying there. However, she was a rather senile old lady, so take that for what it’s worth. She died recently of Tibetan flu.”

“And what are you saying all this means?” Sir Lindner said irately. “Was he a spy or wasn’t he?”

“The possibility is looking quite strong,” Major Grey said dispassionately. “On the very night of his trip to and from Cornwall, an airplane of unknown nationality crashed in the Alps, on the Italian side. The following morning, American intelligence agents in Ankara and Istanbul were up before dawn. They appeared to be waiting for something—this we managed to drag out of the lads in the foreign intelligence department. There was a bit of an argument shortly thereafter between the Americans and a ring of professional spies. If you want to connect the dots between these assembled facts, it’s certainly possible to do so. But there is nothing in the way of conclusive proof.”

“That’s all you’re capable of getting in three months’ time?” Lindner said bitterly. “If that’s the case, it’s no wonder you’re always being beaten to the punch by the boys at MI6.”

At that, a slight hint of red tinged the serene face of Major Grey, though otherwise he remained a model of self-discipline. “I wouldn’t say that’s
all
we’re capable of. Even we have to set priorities in our line, you know. Even so, we were the ones who nicked the Americans’ MM germs by hitting that deal between the middlemen and the foreign spies who hired them. For that I think we can spot MI6 a few points. And if those same germs have been stolen by another spy this time—and if it does turn out to be the Americans trying to buy them back, I’d say the Fates have you running in circles.”

“Americans, you say? I see. And here I thought it was the French again,” the minister muttered. “At least it wasn’t a Communist Bloc country.”

“I can’t say for certain that it isn’t. It’s just … one thing bothers me a little. It’s about Leisener, Karlsky’s former teacher from the Max Planck Laboratory. We’ve learned that after he disappeared four years ago, he turned up working on germ weapons under an assumed name at a chemical weapons research facility in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. This may or may not be related to all this, but Leisener also died just one week ago.”

“He’s dead?” Sir Lindner said. “Was it influenza?”

“Yes. Or, well, according to one theory, he was infected by his own germs in the course of his research, but … well, that’s neither here nor there. After that, there was one other thing. The doctor who performed the postmortem on Karlsky spoke of a possibility that Karlsky may have killed himself against his own will, under the influence of post-hypnotic suggestion, perhaps, or a drug-induced delirium.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“Well, what I’m trying to say is that there is reason to believe Professor Karlsky may have been a spy. Or at least, that he may have been manipulated by some foreign power. If the professor has handed over some vital secret related to Britain’s germ weapons, we must try to steal it back. That’s why today I wanted to hear a specialist’s opinion on whether or not Karlsky’s work was of vital interest to national defense.”