Gravity. Part 24

"The evacuation is off. Exit the CRV. We are experiencing difficulties with both TOPO and GNC computers. Flight has decided it's best to hold off the evac."

"How long?"

"Indefinitely." Jack shot to his feet, ready to wrestle away Capcom's headset.

Jared Profitt suddenly stepped in front of him, barring his way.

"You don't understand the situation, sir."

"My wife is on that station. We're bringing her home."

"They can't come home. They may all be infected."

"With what?" Profitt didn't answer.

In fury, Jack lunged toward him, but was hauled back by two Air Force officers.

"Infected with what?" Jack yelled.

"A new organism," said Profitt. "A chimera."

Jack looked at Blankenship's stricken face. He looked at the Air Force officers who now stood poised to a.s.sume control of the consoles. Then he noticed another familiar face, that of Leroy Cornell, who'd just come into the room.

Cornell looked pale and shaken.

That's when Jack understood that this decision had been made at the very top. That nothing he, or Blankenship, or Woody Ellis would make a difference.

NASA was no longer in control.

The Chimera

August 13

They gathered at Jack's house, where all the shades were drawn.

They didn't dare meet at JSC, where they would most certainly be noticed. They were all so stunned by the sudden takeover of NASA operations they had no idea how to proceed. This was one crisis which they had no operations manual, no contingency plans. Jack had invited only a handful of people, all of them from inside NASA operations, Todd Cutler, Gordon Obie, Flight Directors Woody Ellis and Randy Carpenter, and Liz Gianni from the Payload Directorate.

The doorbell rang, and everyone tensed.

"He's here," said Jack, and he opened the door.

Dr. Eli Petrovitch from NASA's Life Sciences Directorate stepped in, clutching a laptop carrying case. He was a thin and fragile man who, for the past two years, had been battling Lymphoma. Clearly he was losing the war. Most of his hair had fallen out, and only a few brittle white strands remained. His skin like yellowed parchment, stretched over the jutting bones of his face. But there was the glow of excitement in his eyes, lit by a scientist's unflagging curiosity.

"Did we get it?" asked Jack.

Petrovitch nodded and patted his briefoase. On that skeletal face, his smile looked ghoulish. "USAMRIID has agreed to share some of its data."

"Some?"

"Not all. Much of the genome remains cla.s.sified. We were given only parts of the sequence, with large gaps. They're given us just enough to prove that the situation is grave." He carried a laptop to the dining room table and flipped it open. As everyone crowded around to watch, Petrovitch booted up the computer, then slipped in a floppy disk.

Data began to scroll down, line after line of seemingly random letters marching at a dizzying pace down the screen. It was not text, these letters did not spell out words at all, but a code. The four letters reappeared again and again, in a changing sequence, A, T, G, and C. They represented the nucleotides adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. The building blocks that made up DNA. string of letters was a genome, the chemical blueprint for a organism.

"This," said Petrovitch, "is their chimera. The organism that killed Kenichi Hirai."

"What is this ky-mir-ra' thing I keep hearing about?" asked Randy Carpenter. "For the sake of us ignorant engineers, maybe you could explain it?"

"Certainly," said Petrovitch. "And there's no reason to feel ignorant. It's not a term used much outside of molecular biology. The word comes from the ancient Greeks. Chimera was a mythological beast, said to be unconquerable. A fire-breathing creature with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. She was eventually slain by a hero named Bellerophon. It wasn't exactly a fight, because he cheated. He hitched a ride on Pegasus, the horse, and shot arrows down at Chimera from above."

"This mythology is interesting," cut in Carpenter impatiently, "but what's the relevance?"

"The Greek Chimera was a bizarre creature made up of three different animals. Lion, goat, and serpent, all combined into one. And that's exactly what we're seeing here, in this chromosome. A creature as bizarre as the beast killed by Bellerophon. This is a biological chimera whose DNA comes from at least three unrelated species."

"Can you identify those species?" asked Carpenter.

Petrovitch nodded. "Over the years, scientists around the world have ama.s.sed a library of gene sequences from a variety of species, from viruses to elephants. But collecting this data is slow and tedious. It's taken decades just to a.n.a.lyze the human genome. So you can imagine, there are a number of species that haven't been sequenced. Large areas of this chimera's genome can't be identified, they're nowhere in the library. But here's what we have been able to identify so far." He clicked on the icon for "species matches." On the screen appeared, Mus musculis common mouse), Rana pipiens (northern leopard frog), h.o.m.o sapiens.

"This organism is part mouse, part amphibian. And part human." He paused. "In a sense," he said, "the enemy is us." The room fell silent.

"Which of our genes is on that chromosome?" Jack asked softly. "What part of Chimera is human?"

"An interesting question," said Petrovitch, nodding in approval.

"It deserves an interesting answer. You and Dr. Cutler will appreciate the significance of this list." He typed on the keyboard.

On the screen appeared, Phospholipase A.

"My G.o.d," murmured Todd Cutler. "These are all digestive enzymes." The organism is primed to devour its host, thought Jack. It uses these enzymes to digest us from the inside, reducing our muscles and organs and connective tissue to little more than a foul soup.

"Jill Hewitta"she told us Hirai's body had disintegrated," said Randy Carpenter. "I thought she was hallucinating."

Jack said suddenly, "This has got to be a bioengineered organism! Someone cooked this thing up in a lab. Took a bacteria or virus and grafted on genes from other species, to make it a more effective killing machine."

"But which bacteria? Which virus?" said Petrovitch. "That's the mystery here. Without more of the genome to examine, we can't identify which species they started off with. USAMRIID refuses to show us the most important part of this organism's chromosome. The part that identifies this killer." He looked at Jack.

"You're the only one here who's actually seen the pathology at autopsy."

"It was only a glimpse. They pushed me out of the room so fast I barely got a look. What I saw appeared to be some sort of cysts. The size of pearls, embedded in a blue-green matrix. They were in Mercer's thorax and abdomen. In Hewitt's cranium. I've never seen anything like it before."

"Could they have been hydatid cysts?" asked Petrovitch.

"What's that?" asked Woody.

"It's an infection by the larval stage of a parasitic tapeworm called echinococcus. It causes cysts in the liver and lungs. For matter, in any organ."

"You think this could be a parasite?"

Jack shook his head. "Hydatid cysts take a long time to grow. Years, not days. I don't think this was a parasite."

"Maybe they weren't cysts at all," said Todd. "Maybe they were spores. Fungus b.a.l.l.s. Aspergillus or cryptococcus."

Liz Gianni from Payloads cut in, "The crew reported a problem with fungal contamination. One of the experiments had to be destroyed because of overgrowth."

"Which experiment?" asked Todd.

"I'd have to look it up. I remember it was one of the cell cultures."

"But simple fungal contamination wouldn't account for these deaths," said Petrovitch. "Remember, there were fungi floating around Mir all the time, and no one died of it." He looked at the computer screen. "This genome tells us we're dealing with a new life-form. I agree with Jack. It must have been engineered."

"So it's bioterrorism," said Woody Ellis. "Someone's sabotaged our station. They must have sent it up in one of the payloads." Liz Gianni vigorously shook her head. Aggressive and intense, she was a forceful presence at any meeting, and she spoke up now with absolute a.s.surance.

"Every payload goes through safety review. There are hazard reports, three-phase a.n.a.lyses of all containment devices. Believe me, we would have nixed anything dangerous."

"a.s.suming you knew it was dangerous," said Ellis.

"Of course we'd know!"

"What if there was a breach in security?" said Jack. "Many of the experimental payloads arrive directly from the princ.i.p.al investigatorsa"the scientists themselves. We don't know what their security is like. We don't know if they have a terrorist working lab. If they switched a bacterial culture at the last minute, we necessarily wouldn't know?"

For the first time Liz looked uncertain. "It a it's unlikely."

"But it could happen." Though she wouldn't admit the possibility, dismay registered in her eyes. "We'll grill every princ.i.p.al investigator," she said.

"Every scientist who sent up an experiment. If they had a lapse in security, I'm f.u.c.king well gonna find out about it."

She probably will, thought Jack. Like the other men in the room, he was a little afraid of Liz Gianni.

"There's one question we haven't asked yet," said Gordon Obie, speaking up for the first time. As always, he'd been the Sphinx, listening without comment, silently processing information. "The question is why? Why would anyone sabotage the station? Is this someone with a grudge against us? A fanatic to technology?"

"The biological equivalent of the Unabomber," said Todd Cutler.

"Then why not just release the organism at JSC and kill off our infrastructure? That would be easier, and far more logical."

"You can't apply logic to a fanatic," Cutler pointed out.

"You can apply logic to everyone, including fanatics," Gordon responded.

"As long as you know the framework in which they operate. And that's why this bothers me. That's why I wonder if we're really dealing with sabotage."

"What else would it be," said Jack, "if not sabotage?"

"There is another possibility. It could be something just as frightening," said Gordon, his troubled gaze lifting to Jack's. "A mistake."

Dr. Isaac Roman ran down the hall, his pager alarm squealing on his belt, dreading what he was about to face. He silenced the beeper and opened the door leading into the Level 4 isolation suite. He did not enter the patient's room, but stood safely outside and stared the horror unfolding beyond the observation window.

There was blood splattered on the walls and pooling on the floor where Dr. Nathan Helsinger lay seizing. Two nurses and a physician in s.p.a.ce suits were trying to stop him from injuring himself, but his spasms were so violent and so powerful they could not restrain him. His leg shot out and a nurse went sprawling, across the blood-slicked concrete floor.

Roman hit the intercom b.u.t.ton. "Your suit! Is there a breach?" As she slowly rose to her feet, he could see her expression of terror. She looked down at her gloves, her sleeves, then at the juncture where the hose fed air into her suit. "No," she said, and it was almost a sob of relief. "No breach."

Blood splattered the window. Roman jerked back as bright droplets trickled down the gla.s.s. Helsinger was banging his head against the floor now, his spine relaxing, then hyperextending.

Opisthotonos. Roman had seen this bizarre posture only once before, in a victim of strychnine poisoning, the body curved backward like a bow strung under tension. Helsinger spasmed again, and his skull slammed backward against the concrete. Blood sprayed the faceplates of the two nurses.

"Back off!" Roman commanded through the intercom.

"He's hurting himself!" said the physician.

"I don't want anyone else exposed."

"If we could get these seizures under controla""

"There's nothing you can do to save him. I want you all to move away now. Before you get hurt." Reluctantly the two nurses backed away. After a pause, so did the physician. They stood in silent helplessness as the scene of horror played out at their feet.

New convulsions sent Helsinger's head whipping backward.

The scalp split open, like cloth ripping along a seam. The pool blood widened into a lake.

"Oh, G.o.d, look at his eyes!" one of the nurses cried.

The eyes were popping out, like two giant marbles straining to burst out of the sockets. Traumatic proptosis, thought Roman.

Helsinger's eyeb.a.l.l.s thrust forward by catastrophic intracranial pressure, the lids shoved apart, wide and staring.

The seizures continued, unrelenting, the head battering the floor.

Splinters of bone flew up and ticked against the window.

It was as though he were trying to crack open his own skull, to free whatever was trapped inside.

Another crack. Another spattering of blood and bone.

He should have been dead. Why was he still seizing?

But even decapitated chickens continue to twitch and thrash, and Helsinger's death throes were not yet over. His head lifted the floor, his spine curling forward like a spring winding up to unbearable tension just before it snaps. His neck lashed backward.

There was a crack, and the skull split open like an egg. Shards of bone flew everywhere. A lump of gray matter splashed the window.

Roman gasped and stumbled backward, nausea rising in his throat. He dropped his head, fighting to stay in control. He struggled against the darkness that threatened to envelop his vision.

Sweating, shaking, he managed to lift his head. To look, once again, through the window.

Nathan Helsinger at last lay still. What was left of his head rested in a lake of blood. There was so much blood that for a moment Roman could not focus on anything else but that spreading pool of scarlet. Then his gaze settled on the dead man's face. On a blue-green ma.s.s that clung, quivering, to his forehead. Cysts.