Virus: The Day of Resurrection (4 page)

A blood-red sun crawled along just above a thick fog flowing along the northwest horizon. The air was piercingly cold. Bathed in pink sunlight, flat, tabular icebergs and countless smaller chunks of drifting ice bobbed in the water. At sixty-two degrees south—a hop, skip, and a jump from the Antarctic Circle, one of the continent’s huge white capes could be seen under roiling gray clouds, indistinct, like some ghost or monster. It was nearly April, and Antarctica was just beginning to dress herself in winter.

One after another, the crew came out of the ship for the long-denied sight of the clear, blue sky toward the zenith, and for a breath of the stingingly cold, salty air. Their teeth chattered as they stretched their arms and legs. The temperature was low enough that ice began to form on the hull and the diving planes right away. Sixty-two degrees south: that was the borderline between life underwater and life in the air. In the history of the human race, it also demarcated the 1960s from the 1970s. From this point forward, everyone would be gazing ahead in silence, looking not for some Antarctic station they were trying to get back to, but for the world of the 1960s that they had left behind so long ago. The world that lay north of that decade’s borders, that huge world that had grown to more than three billion people, which had recorded five thousand years of history, which had achieved a century of blindingly fast development, had come to a sudden end as the 1960s drew to a close, and humanity’s 1970s would come only in the bitter cold and raging blizzards of the south, that harsh world sealed away in eternal ice.

Scarcely ten thousand people … imprisoned on this white continent …

With the aid of the unmanned beacon at Cape Adele, course corrections were completed, and a siren indicating that the ship would be submerging again soon rang out once more.

After taking a moment to gaze up at the auroras in the high skies—they blossomed like white flames from off toward Magnetic South—the crew silently disappeared back into the hatch. Plunged back down into the depths of the sea, they now had to rely on supersonic navigation aids to return to Scott Station. That was where the sole dock for the nuclear submarine had been thrown together. Once they were relieved, the crewmen would embark on another long, hard trek through the snow, each of them toward their own transient homelands scattered across this continent of ice.

Nereid
blew its high-pitched, mournful siren into the blustery Antarctic sky. After that, the thin layer of ice that had formed on her nose cracked and crunched as the smooth shape of the submarine slipped back into the icy water. As the bridge sank into the water, the siren wailed loudly one last time. That sad note continued to echo off of newly forming icebergs and carried long and far over the pack ice. It sounded as if that barren wilderness of ice itself was shouting out in a metallic voice the question of that world that had gone to destruction.

How did this happen, and why … ?

PART ONE:
THE YEAR OF THE CALAMITY

WINTER

 1.
Fifty-two Degrees, Six Minutes North

It was at the beginning of February in 196X …

A great cold wave from Europe was yet again bearing down on the British Isles. Over the past three or four years this seemed to have become a regular event, and even these southern coasts were buried in more than twenty centimeters of snow. It was a cold that robbed people of the strength to think about anything except the cold.

“Terrible weather, eh, Professor Karlsky?” said a guardsman wearing Royal Military Police insignia.

A man had just emerged from near the entrance of a closely guarded, army-affiliated building. The poor village known as P— lay in a small, hilly region not so far from the navy harbor at Portsmouth.

“I feel sorry for the dogs,” replied the tall, middle-aged man called Professor Karlsky. Looking around at the snow-covered stockade, he added in a somewhat nervous tone, “Their fur is completely frozen, isn’t it?”

“That’s the truth. The poor devils have a hard way to go. This cold is awful; we need to go to using Eskimo dogs or something in the winter.”

In the commandant’s stove-heated office, Karlsky had handed the black attaché case under his arm over to the commandant. While the commandant examined its contents, a second RMP had searched the professor’s body from head to toe. At first glance, it had seemed a very rote and casual sort of pat-down, though in reality, the RMP’s dexterous fingers missed nothing.

The commandant had opened the professor’s case and given a cursory inspection to what was inside. He shuffled through the documents, checked a wrapped sandwich that the professor had purchased in the cafeteria, and looked inside the can of tobacco the professor carried for his pipe. He had even opened the lid of his small Thermos to peek at its steaming contents.

“Don’t look too long,” Professor Karlsky said, a nervous twitch of a smile evident in his pale face and magnificent forehead. “It’ll get cold. You think I can drive sixty kilometers in this cold without hot coffee?”

“Pardon our rudeness …” the commandant said, closing the Thermos’s lid. “Going out on business?”

“A fortnight’s vacation starting tomorrow,” the professor said. “You got my request too, didn’t you? Think I’ll pass the time reading mysteries at my sister’s place in Brighton.”

“How enviable,” the commandant muttered. “In this cold, we’ll all start wanting to run off to the Bahamas or Fiji.”

Back outside, Karlsky bid farewell to the guardsman and his dogs. His tall, hunchbacked form disappeared into the garage, from which soon could be heard the sounds of a fierce struggle to get a frozen engine started. At last, an early-model Willys jeep emerged, jangling with the clamor of snow chains wrapped around the tires. The commandant threw a switch in his office, and the hinges of the base’s imposingly sturdy iron gate squealed open. The round-backed Willys proceeded very slowly into a wilderness covered in slightly dirty snow. As the commandant watched it go, he picked up the telephone. As if suddenly remembering their job, the ferocious German shepherds tied to the gate of the base suddenly began barking fiercely …

When the professor’s car pulled out onto the road and turned east, it fell in line right behind a civilian-tagged escort painted in unassuming colors. Keeping about fifty meters’ space between them, both cars headed straight east along a road where a light dusting of snow was again starting to blow around.

In Southampton, the professor stopped in at a pub in the city, threw down two glasses of grog, and then immediately headed straight out east again. Then, ten minutes after the two cars had departed, the
real professor
emerged from the back door of the pub and climbed into a silver Bentley that was there waiting for him with its engine running. The mustached driver of the Bentley turned its nose in the direction
opposite
of Brighton and headed west. All scientists involved in secret military research were under surveillance by the intelligence community, but by the time one of them had called in from Brighton to inform headquarters of Professor Gregor Karlsky’s safe arrival at his sister’s house, the westbound Bentley had already turned north at Exeter, the capital of Devon County, and was bound for the farms and ranches of Cornwall. Night had fallen completely.

It was after ten when the Bentley stopped at a solitary house on a lonely farm nestled among the low hills of Cornwall. A man with swarthy skin and sharply upturned eyes led three men out to meet the professor.

“Well, then … did it come off well?” the swarthy man asked as he extended a hand to the professor. “It must have been hard, traveling in this snow. Please sit down. Have something hot first.”

“No thank you,” the professor said in a hoarse monotone. “I’ve got
something hot
with me right here.”

At the sight of the small Thermos he pulled from his attaché case, the other man’s eyes narrowed even more, gleaming like needles in the light. The professor kneaded his numbed fingers two or three times, and then with slightly trembling fingertips, unscrewed the cap. With each turn of that screw, the tension in the room rose slightly, as if it were being lifted on a jack. The screw cap clicked against the table as he set it down, and one of the men drew in his breath loudly enough to be heard. The professor placed his fingers on the inner lid’s cork and pulled. The lid came off with a pop, and a faint cloud of steam rose up from inside. The professor tilted the bottle and poured the black liquid inside into a mug, which he then picked up and gulped from in front of them. A faint smile twitched on one cheek. The narrow-eyed man raised his line of sight to look at the professor with approbation. Karlsky returned that stare with one of cold contempt and then, suddenly, perfunctorily emptied the liquid inside onto the floor. Then he placed his hand on the bottom of the Thermos and twisted it with all of his might. The bottom rotated away from the metal band, came off, and beneath the vacuum bottle of the upper part was another, very small, flat vacuum bottle, its interior silver-plated. Karlsky removed its fluoro-resin plug, revealing an interior tightly packed with dry ice. The professor removed this bottle’s lid and thrust it out toward the other man. Within, a tiny ampule was inexpertly enclosed, packed in the dry ice. The ampule’s contents were frozen solid and rattled when shaken.

“Carry it as-is,” the professor said stiffly. “Take care that the dry ice doesn’t sublimate. If you drop it, it’s all over. Do not even touch it until you hand it over to the specialists on your end.”

“And the papers?” the man asked, not touching that little glass bottle.

“You think I can just walk out with something like that?” Professor Karlsky spat out. “Besides, there’s practically nothing written down about this one yet. The data are in my head. Memorize them and go.”

The man turned away with a jerk of his chin. A small man with a mouselike face stepped forward.

“Around ten degrees below zero, on the Celsius scale, it enters a budding state and reproduction begins …” the professor began mechanically. “If it gets above minus three, its rate of growth increases over a hundredfold. If it gets above zero, it starts to grow like crazy.”

As the mouselike man peered up at the professor, his fingers moved rapidly. He was using some kind of mnemonic device.

“When it reaches five degrees Celsius, it … begins to exhibit a ferocious toxicity. Its rate of growth at the toxic stage is …”—here the professor swallowed—“Around
two billion
times what it was at minus ten …”

A silence fell across the room that seemed to freeze everyone in it.

The professor began speaking again, this time in a voice that sounded like something was caught in his throat. “In animal experiments, ninety-eight percent of the house mice we infected were dead within five hours. The earliest deaths were at the two-hour mark.

“In the case of large mammals, the differences between individuals became more pronounced. At any rate, though, at the present stage, human beings absolutely cannot control it. We performed these experiments in a hermetically sealed chamber using manipulators—just as if we were handling radioactive materials.”

“So this MM-87—” the tall man began.

“This is MM-
88
,” the professor said.

“What did you say?” the man said, eyes flashing. “That isn’t what we agreed to.”

“MM-88 was created just ten days ago as a variant strain of MM-87. It was intended to weaken the toxicity of MM-87 so it could be put to use in military applications, but instead the opposite happened, and a strain two thousand times more toxic was created. Only a handful of people even know it exists.”

“Very well,” the man said with a nod. “I’ll believe you. It’s the same for us either way.”

The tiny, frost-covered glass bottle was locked back into the bottom of the Thermos as before.

“Well, this concludes our business. Professor Karlsky, one week from today, fifty thousand pounds will be paid into your account in Brazil.”

“I thought I told you, I don’t want it!” the professor shouted fiercely, his clean-shaven cheeks flushing. “I never asked for money even once! If you’ll just execute your instructions precisely as I’ve given them to you, that’s enough. Hand this sample directly to Dr. Leisener of the BC Weapons Research Center in Pilsen—”

“You’ll pardon me, Professor, but we won’t be able to do so ‘precisely.’ We have no arrangements with the Czech.”

“What?” The professor’s face went pale. “That wasn’t the deal! Listen to me. Dr. Leisener is a molecular biologist and the foremost authority on viral nucleic acid research. Most likely, he is the only person in the world who can develop pharmaceuticals to resist the MM-80 series. This thing threatens all humanity, and we need to pool the knowledge of all peoples to look for a way to fight it. But we can’t do that because it’s a state secret. And that’s exactly why—”

“But, Professor …” the man began coldly. The small Thermos had at some point made its way into the hands of a large, powerfully built man who was standing behind the speaker. “To be honest with you, we’re really nothing more than brokers. There’s not just one, but two more go-betweens between us and the party for whom we are truly working. He’s hidden way back in the fog. Who are we really working for? Some Nazi holdout in South America? A neo-fascist in West Germany or Italy? The Soviet Union? The Chinese? Perhaps it’s France, possessed by visions of glory. France’s hydrogen bombs are ten years behind those of the Americans and Soviets, after all. OAS? The Mafia? … Perhaps the CIA is thinking again of carrying out some experiment in Southeast Asia or somewhere. Whoever it is, there’s no way for us to know. It’s a very simple business: we receive a request, send back an estimate, draw up a plan, and make the deal.”

The muscles in the professor’s face were drawn up tightly, like those of a man recently killed. In an instant, Karlsky overturned the table and made a leap for the Thermos, though the big man holding it looked like a ruined boxer. The man with the mustache moved instantly, however, and snapped Karlsky into a full nelson. With well-practiced movements, he nimbly slid his right hand to the professor’s neck. There was a faint whishing sound, and the professor’s face abruptly relaxed. The strength gradually drained out of his struggling limbs, his eyes spasmed, and his entire body grew as sluggish as if it had been turned into clay. At last, he collapsed. The man with the mustache lowered him to the floor and tossed a small, egg-shaped ampule into the fireplace. It was an anpin—a smaller version of the automatic syringes that America had long ago tried making their soldiers carry to deliver atropine shots as a defense against fast-acting G-gas. The needle was in front of the glass ampule, and the inside was filled with inert gas under high pressure. Just by pressing the needle down against the skin, the liquid medicine would be injected.