Virus: The Day of Resurrection (33 page)

“JA6YF!” Tatsuno all but shrieked into the microphone. “Hello, JA6YF! Are you all right? Hello—”

In a small, simply painted cottage on a slope not far from Yaku Harbor on Yakushima Island, a young man who had just breathed his last lay crumpled on the ground beside a handmade chair that had fallen over. A red light still blinked on top of the black box in front of him, and from the old-fashioned speakers placed on top of it, Tatsuno’s cries could be heard amid the hiss of static.

“Hello! JA … F! Hello, please respond, J6YF …”

Yet now there was no longer anyone left there to hear him. In the stifling heat of early summer on that southern island, a warm breeze wended its way through the thick cedar groves and into the cottage, where a young scorpion that had just shed its skin was crawling along the top of a desk. A single snake slithered slowly across the floor. The scorpion crawled over the hand of the fallen man, his fingers already so cool that the creature made no move at all to sting.

“Shhh!” More than ten thousand kilometers to the south, amid the Antarctic midwinter, Tatsuno strained his ears as he listened for any response. “Come on, give me something …” he said.

There was nothing but silence though and white noise.

“I hear a bird singing,” Yoshizumi said.

“Impossible!”

“Try calling WA5PS,” Yoshizumi said. “Like JA6YF was saying. He said to get all the hams out there to try to get hold of him. Maybe WA5PS has something he wants to tell us.”

“All right,” Tatsuno said with a nod once he had finally gotten hold of himself again. “Go get Torigai, would you? He can speak English.”

Tatsuno began calling up his other ham buddies all across Antarctica.

Professor Nakanishi, captain of the observation team, together with the core members of his research group, crammed into the designated radio station of the Japanese wintering team at Dome III of Showa Station, which housed the twenty-kilowatt wireless transmitter. Upon request from the leadership of the American, British, Soviet, and French wintering teams, an emergency meeting was being held over the wireless. Three years prior, installation of automatic relay stations at the Antarctic stations of every nation that had an exploration team present had begun, so that they would be able to communicate in real time. It was only during the summer of that year that this continental wireless phone network had at last been completed.

The special relay center for the western hemisphere was run by the US Army Corp of Engineers communication division at McMurdo Station, while the eastern hemisphere’s relay was run alternately by the Soviet Union’s observation team at Mirny Station and Australia’s communications team at Davis Station.

The soldierly—if slightly haughty—voice of the US commander-in-chief flowed from the speakers. “Everyone, may I have your attention?” he said. “This is James Conway, commander of the American stations. Are the leaders of each nation’s stations present?”

Captain Nakanishi looked for a moment like he was about to say something into the microphone, but Shintani—who was in charge of the wireless station—motioned for him to keep silent. Broken occasionally by intrusions of static or of people calling out to one another in the background, a faint voice came through calling out a call-up code. “5000KC—Is this all right? It is? Hello, Queen Maud Land, Norway team, come in please. Adjusting …”

“Admiral, please,” somebody whispered, and then Vice-Admiral Conway cleared his throat and began to speak. “To all of you who are in charge of your various nations’ Antarctic stations, I’ve called this emergency radio conference on my authority as representative of the nation in charge of the Multinational Antarctic Observation Teams’ Mutual Communication Council. The topics of this meeting are, of course, our homelands, and the disaster being caused by this epidemic disease that is sweeping across five continents.”

“Adjustments for the eastern hemisphere complete,” an accented voice said, breaking in again. Mirny Station, apparently.

“Forgive me, but would you mind if we did a roll call?” Admiral Conway said politely. “At this time, it seems that relays have been established between all of the various stations across Antarctica. Is Captain Barnes of Britain’s Shackleton Station present?”

“Present,” Barnes replied in a curt, sportsman’s voice.

“Is the overall head of the Soviet Union’s stations, Dr. Borodinov, present?”

“In front of the microphone,” replied a voice with a terribly thick Slavic accent.

One after another, he called them: Professor Blanchot of the Belgian team at Blade Station, Captain King of Davis Station for Australia, Major Blaine of New Zealand’s Scott Station, Professor Bjornsen of Norway’s Queen Maud Land Station, Dr. la Rochelle of France’s Dumont d’Urville Station, Lieutenant Lopez, representing Argentina on the Palmer Peninsula.

“Everyone, the main purpose of calling this emergency conference is that at last night’s multinational station communications meeting, every team excepting Norway’s judged that official communications with their homelands have ceased. The teams from New Zealand and Japan are receiving intermittent, broken transmissions, but the cessation of even these is most likely only a matter of time. About four percent of broadcasting stations and communication facilities worldwide are still transmitting, but they don’t seem to have the wherewithal to answer calls from the South Pole. Even the amateur wireless operators are slowly disappearing. We can soon expect full radio silence.”

“We’ve been abandoned at the South Pole,” said the British representative with a hint of irony in his voice.

“No,” said the halting voice of the Soviet representative Borodinov, “Most likely, they have too much on their own hands to even think of us now. An awesome and terrible thing has happened to our country. Our premier and vice premier are both dead. Hard as it is to believe, the last transmission we received said that one hundred million have died. It’s insane. It’s impossible. Science, civilization, and the socialist system are as good as gone. Everything has been turned upside down and ruined. I do not know how many people of the fatherland still live. And even if some still live, who can say whether the nation can endure?”

“It is as the Soviet representative has said,” Admiral Conway said, his tone solemn. “It’s beyond our ability to take in, but those are the terrible circumstances we face.”

“The question of whether our countries can still continue to exist is a very serious issue,” said the icy voice of Dr. Blanchot, the Belgian representative. “Europe may continue to exist, but …”

“Admiral Conway,” Dr. la Rochelle said. His voice was shaking with an anger that had no outlet. “France’s stations were the first to lose official communications with their homeland. That’s why we find all of this so exceptionally hard to believe. Do you have any hard, clear-cut information at your bases?
What in the world has happened out there?
”

There was a brief silence.

Static.

“What happened … is what all of the wintering teams already know has happened,” Admiral Conway said. “In March of this year, influenza broke out in central Asia, and—”

“But, Admiral Conway! Everyone! Can you really believe that something as simple as influenza can kill off all three and a half billion human beings on this planet? And in the space of three months!”

“About ten days ago,” said the Norwegian representative Professor Bjornsen, “we received a transmission stating that Oslo University’s Infectious Disease Research Center had announced the real culprit. It’s not just that new form of influenza; another completely unknown terminal disease has been spreading in parallel with it. That’s the real killer. At any rate, it’s quite an incredible disease. It destroyed the world’s disease prevention system before anyone could find it.”

“What kind of disease? Is it plague?” a new voice cut in to ask.

“Nothing so simple as that. It seems this has been brought on by an entirely new kind of contagion that has never appeared on Earth before.”

“But even if that’s so, what contagion could possibly wipe out the entire human race in just three to six months?” la Rochelle asked.

“You can say that because you don’t understand the power of microbes. When the conditions are right, microbes replicate with frightful intensity and do … frightful things.” said Dr. Borodinov. “A single drop of lactic acid bacteria, under the right conditions, will produce
tons
of lactic acid over the course of only one night. Just a teaspoon of the botulin toxin weaponized and deployed via missile could kill every human on Earth. And during a serious outbreak of a contagious disease, it won’t just be the disease that kills. Many things that are worse than the disease will happen in society.”

“But what about us, here?” Dr. la Rochelle said.

“We’re sealed in by ice. In other words, we’re quarantined from the rest of the world. We’re far away, and right now we’re in the middle of a polar winter. Nobody comes here, so nobody brings the germs. And most likely—or hopefully at least—this germ cannot thrive in such low temperatures.”

“And that’s our problem,” Admiral Conway said. “Antarctica is said to be ‘the germless continent,’ and at the American bases in particular, we’ve always taken health and sanitation extremely seriously. However, summer is only six months away. If those germs were to be carried here from the northern hemisphere …”

“At this rate, do you really think any supply ships will be coming here next year?” asked Captain Barnes.

“That’s a problem as well,” Admiral Conway said tightly. “Suppose that we here at the pole find ourselves completely isolated from the rest of the world and have to survive on our own for some period of time—possibly even for years?”

Silence. Outside the double wall of Showa Station’s wireless room, the whipping, wild winds of the blizzard roared. “In the absolute worst-case scenario,” New Zealand’s Major Blaine added bluntly, “Antarctica may be the only place that survives.”

“God save us,” said Captain King from Australia. “Living amid all this ice.”

“Actually, I’ve been thinking about exactly that,” said Admiral Conway. “At the very beginning of this, we received news to some degree of what was going on all over the world, but then, as the situation has deteriorated, it’s become almost impossible to get accurate information about what’s happening out there at present. However, my impression from listening in on the transmissions of others is that things are only going from bad to worse.

“Currently, we’re in the middle of winter. Any way you look at it, we’re sealed away in ice for the next half of the year. We have no way of communicating with the outside world. However, considering the problems of sanitation and resupply, I don’t think it’s too early to think about creating a formal body to allow each nation’s wintering teams to confer and cooperate with one another.”

“Resupply is the most pressing concern,” said Lieutenant Lopez from Argentina.

“Yes, it is. We haven’t a clue what things are like out there, but starting now we have to think about these things. How many years will we need to live here? How will we continue to survive? Seals and penguins can replenish our food supply somewhat, and another fortunate thing is that America, the Soviet Union, France, England, and Japan are all producing electricity with nuclear power generators they’ve brought down here. With those, we should be all right for three, four years. What’ll we do for powering our vehicles, though? And eventually, we’ll have to think about using Antarctica’s coal deposits to supply ourselves with electricity. And how to most effectively use the resources that each country has on hand.”