Warp Speed (24 page)

"That's why I just can't rule out the terrorist theory. Johnny was too well financed for it to be anything less than a large cell structure or a government. He had superfast fixed wing helicopters, surface to air anti-aircraft missiles, and he did mention that the Chinese were going to steal the probe on orbit. Didn't Mission Control tell us that the Chinese had a rocket on the pad but it wasn't ready for launch yet? We need some more intel on that."

"That's right. And he must have had a top-notch crew to get into the Vehicle Assembly Building to plant the bomb on the Shuttle. I think you're right. It must have been a government or at least an organization as big."

"We need to tell somebody this. These people or government could change the balance of power in the world!"

I was terrified. Much like I had been as a kid in the seventies and eighties during the Cold War. Now I was far more terrified by a warp missile than any intercontinental ballistic missile. The worst part is that I had invented the terror. Now I know how Einstein and Oppenheimer must have felt after the Rosenbergs. Or was Einstein already dead by then? For that matter, was Oppie?

"Relax Anson. After the press conference with the Vice President in New Mexico, we're flying back with him to D.C. to debrief the Joint Chiefs and the President."

"Vice President?" I asked Tabitha. She told me to read the cup in my hand, the one that I had been sipping water from for more than thirty minutes. I did. The logo on the side explained that the cup was from the Office of the Vice President of the United States of America.

"Air Force Two?" I asked while studying the cup.

"Bright boy." Tabitha smiled at me and patted my arm with her good hand. "Buy 'em books and send 'em to college . . ." she hinted at the old joke. She kissed my cheek.

"Give me a break," I said. "I've been mostly dead all day!"

I only waved and smiled and said that I was fine as they rolled my stretcher by the press corps at Edwards. Then I shook the Vice President's hand as he thanked me for what I'd done for the country. I never got to discuss the state of world affairs with him. He must be a busy man. Tabitha and I did get about thirty minutes with the Joint Chiefs and with some guys from agencies that didn't exist. They basically told us that they had "top men" working on it. I was beginning to understand how Indiana Jones must've felt.

The general premise was that "black bag" guys and Special Ops could retrieve whatever was lost and discredit anything left behind. Tabitha and I weren't as confident in that assessment. I tried to make myself clear on that point, but arguing while lying in a gurney isn't a real power position.

So, we went home and Tabitha checked me into Huntsville Hospital for a few days of observation. The second morning--let's see that would be four days after the space-warp--Tabitha and I were eating breakfast in my room when Jim finally got around to seeing me.

"Jim! What took you so long?" I asked.

"Hi there slacker. How you doing? Tabitha is he really just goldbrickin'?" Jim replied.

"Oh absolutely, Jim. He is the laziest S.O.B. I ever met." Tabitha laughed and clutched her ribs.

"Forget him, how are you feeling?" Jim asked Tabitha.

"Side hurts when I laugh or sneeze, but I'll make it."

"Jim," I started, "it worked! Can you believe it? It worked." Tabitha gave me a dirty look, meaning that we weren't supposed to discuss the space warp outside of a secure area.

"Cool." Jim smiled and winked.

I noticed Jim was looking rather tired and that his clothes looked slept in, peaked around the gills as my dad might have said. So I asked, "Jim, you been out partying or something? You look kind of rough."

Jim looked at me with tears in his eyes, "No, Doc. I've been here all night. 'Becca's not doing so well."

"What do you mean?" I asked. Tabitha held my hand and I could tell that she was holding back tears as well.

"Anson, she's in the intensive care unit. About five days ago she took a turn for the worse with all of her asthma and allergy symptoms as well as some sort of flulike thing. She's been incoherent for the past two days and running very high fevers. Nobody knows what to do here and the doctors don't have much hope." Jim's head sunk and he cried.

"What!?" I rose from my bed and threw the covers off of me. "She is here?"

"Anson sit down!" Tabitha started.

"Tabitha, can it. No way I ain't going to see her." I stood up and dressed. About that time a nurse came to collect my tray and give me my dose of daily antibiotics and pain meds. She asked where I was going and I told her that I needed a drink and that the stuff they served in this bar was watered down. She "harrumphed" and exited. I pulled on my pants and a T-shirt that was in my overnight bag. Tabitha had even brought my toothbrush.

By the time I was dressed, the nurse had returned with a doctor and a much larger nurse--or maybe he was an orderly.

"Mr. Clemons I suggest that you stay in bed a while longer," the doctor told me.

"Sorry Doc, I'm going up to the ICU to see a friend. You can join me if you like." I told him. The orderly stepped between me and the door to my room.

"Perhaps you should listen to the doctor," the orderly said.

I looked at Jim and Tabitha as I stretched my arms slowly and yawned. I needed to see how strong I felt. I felt fine--just very sore. I rolled my head around to loosen my neck and then stepped toward the door. The orderly placed a hand on my chest.

"Sir, you should reconsider." He smiled.

"Doctor, I am paying for medical attention and this room, not for imprisonment." I said as I wrist-locked the orderly's hand and twisted his hand backward and showed him his own palm. He must not have like the way his palm looked because he collapsed to his knees in either disgust or pain. Probably, pain. I walked past him and let go of his wrist. Jim and Tabitha never said a word. They just followed me.

"Lead the way, Jim." I motioned him around me.

The three of us found the elevators, then up to the ICU. There was some slight resistance until I told a nurse that Tabitha and I were Rebecca's parents. She didn't seem to care if I was lying or not and let us through to see her.

'Becca had an I.V. in her and several other machines appeared to be connected to her. I touched her hand and nearly cried.

"Hang in there, girl," Tabitha said and hugged up behind me.

"Jim, what do the doctors say?" I asked.

"Well, her pathologist thinks she has some sort of weird virus. He asked where all we went on the cruise but nothing seems to add up. I still think she's never been fully well since the bronchitis after the accident."

Jim was right. Although she had been well at times, 'Becca had never been as sick as much as she had the last two years.

"Jim, did the doctors say anything about opportunistic infections?" Tabitha asked.

"That's exactly what we thought it was," a voice from behind me said. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

"Dr. Reese, this is Professor Clemons and Colonel Ames," Jim introduced us to 'Becca's physician.

"The astronauts?" Reese asked. Tabitha and I just nodded.

"It's a pleasure to meet you both." He shook our hands. "As I was saying, we thought it was just multiple opportunistic bacteria coupled with allergic reactions but not any longer." He looked at his pad. "We sent several blood samples to Atlanta. The CDC has isolated some new mutated flulike virus. It is the first time it has ever been reported. CDC is trying to develop a cure but it would help if we knew where she caught it. Its host might have antibodies."

"What exactly does flulike mean?" I asked.

"Well, it's a flu virus with something else attached to it. Here's a print out of the electron microscope image Atlanta emailed me." He held his pad where we could see it and began explaining what we were looking at.

"You see this filament shape here--that's a typical looking influenza filament. But there's something funny about these glycoprotein spikes that extrude from the filament. On this picture here," he flipped the page, "zooming in on the spike you can see that there's a shape instead of a single spike like would be expected. Instead of a spike it's more the shape of a . . . I dunno a . . ."

"A dumbbell," I said. I suddenly felt as if the weight of the world rested on my shoulders, again.

Tabitha, and Jim said in unison, "Holy shit!" Then neither of us said a word for a long moment. Dr. Reese paused to see why we were so amazed.

"I wish I would have never invented those damn things!" I bit my lower lip in anger.

"Anson, if they're really Casimir effect devices can't we just give them a good jolt?" Jim said hopefully.

Tabitha looked grim. "Jim, we can't risk it. What if one of them . . ." She couldn't bring herself to say what Jim was now thinking, what we all three were thinking.

"Exploded!" Jim finished it for her.

"Okay everybody, just calm down." I turned to the confused Dr. Reese, "Doc, can she be moved safely?"

"What? Are you serious? Invented what things?" He thought we were all nuts. "She is in ICU. You can't seriously think she could be moved?"

"Listen to me, Doctor, and listen very carefully. If the things in this picture you just showed me are what we believe they are, then 'Becca is contaminated with Top Secret nanoscopic explosives. Don't ask where they came from. One, and I mean
one
," I emphasized by holding up one finger, "of these tiny devices could blow her arm off." I told him.

"Whew!" Reese whistled, "There are most likely millions of them in her body!

"I was afraid of that," Tabitha said. "More than enough to destroy the whole city."

I was beginning to realize the awesome power of the dumbbells and how they might could be used as a weapon of terror. There would be no way to detect a dumbbell or millions of them. And they could be hidden inside the terrorist's own body until,
kablooie
!

"Why haven't they gone chaotic?" Jim mentioned.

"Good question, Jim, but first things first." I tried to think of a plan of action. "Doctor, she has to be moved to a safer location and we may be able to cure her with your help. Tabitha . . ." I turned to see if she could get us some help but she was already on her cell phone ordering a helicopter, security containment, and general support.

"No I don't care what your orders are! They just changed damnit!" she was ordering into her cell phone.

"Tabitha, we need to track who has seen these pictures." I reminded her. She just nodded. Tabitha knows how to do her job so I decided not to micromanage. I switched gears to something I could do to help. "Jim, are you parked here?"

"Yes. Why?" he replied.

"Let's get over to the lab and gather some diagnostic equipment, my laptop, and whatever else we can think of that might help. Doctor, please keep her healthy as long as possible." We left Tabitha to take care of business at the hospital. Jim waved his cell phone at her as we were leaving as if to say, "Call us if you need us. You have the number." Tabitha gave us the thumbs up and waved us out.

Down the elevator and out to the parking garage we went. We had to climb about fifteen steps to the level where Jim's car was. I realized on about the fourth step that one of my lungs was healing from a bullet wound. My chest was on fire, but I pushed on to the car.

"Are you okay, Doc? You look pretty bad."

"Fine," is all I could gasp out. After a few minutes sitting in the passenger side as we made it to the lab I began to feel better.

"Anson, how is it that you have stitches in your chest and back and Tabitha's face is all cut up? That is, I mean, if you two were in your spacesuits, how bad was the crash?" Jim was figuring things out even though he had been told by security not to even speculate.

"Let's not talk about it right now, Jim." I gave him the nod that now wasn't the time or place.

"Okay," Jim said. "Then what is your take on 'Becca's flu."

"The answer is obvious, I think. The only problem with that obvious answer is that it's too damn unbelievable."

"You mean that you think the dumbbells have been in her since the accident and somehow a flu virus mutated with them?"

"That's the only way I can see it. It's just amazing." It
was
amazing. How versatile viruses must be if they can mutate to capture physical objects. Or at that scale, is everything physical or biological the same? In other words, on the nanoscale is there no way to distinguish live from mechanical? If you think about a bacteriophage for example, some of them look just like a nanoscale Lunar Excursion Module (LEM). And what do they do? They land on a cell and inject the occupants of the LEM cabin into it. The occupants go and rewrite the code of that cell to reproduce more bacteriophages and the cycle continues. The cell is just redesigned to manufacture a different product. That's pretty damn amazing. Is it biological or mechanical? It's my view that everything in the universe is due to electromagnetic interactions. Just some interactions appear to have been animated.

"I don't know, Jim. Let's just hope we can figure out a way to get those things out of her and neutralized."

As we came to the guard shack of our laboratory parking lot, one of Tabitha's security requirements, we both noticed that there was no guard anywhere to be seen. "Jim, stop the car!"

"There should be a guard here." Jim did his best to rubberneck over the windowsill of the two-man shack.

"I don't like this." I began to feel edgy and thoughts of Johnny Cache flooded my mind. I opened Jim's glove box. "Jim, the Orbiter didn't just explode due to some accident," I began as I chambered a round in Jim's Glock. I grabbed his other clip and placed it in my pocket.

For you folks that don't live in the South, I guess I should mention that most everybody has at least one pistol in his or her glove compartment. Those who don't, well they are carrying theirs on them somewhere. That's why our crime rate is so much lower than the big "no-gun" cities. There, only the criminals are armed. If you recall history, the "shoot out at the O.K. Corral" was over a no-gun ordinance in the city of Tombstone. In the South we try to keep the playing field as even or better as we can. Therefore, criminals know that if they want to start something in the South that they
will
be shot back at. Deterrence is a very good crime prevention technique. Hell, it kept the Soviets at bay during the Cold War.