The Andromeda Strain Part 5

"I mind, I mind," Leavitt said. "Change: there's a car waiting outside and we're already late. Perhaps too late."

He had a gruffly melodramatic way of speaking that had always annoyed Hall.

There was a loud slurp as Leavitt sipped the coffee. "Just as I suspected, " he said. "How can you tolerate it? Hurry, please."

Hall unlocked his locker and kicked it open. He leaned against the door and stripped away the black plastic shoe covers that were worn in the operating room to prevent buildup of static charges. "Next, I suppose you're going to tell me this has to do with that d.a.m.ned project."

"Exactly," Leavitt said. "Now try to hurry. The car is waiting to take us to the airport, and the morning traffic is bad."

Hall changed quickly, not thinking, his mind momentarily stunned. Somehow he had never thought it possible. He dressed and walked out with Leavitt toward the hospital entrance. Outside, in the sunshine, he could see the olive U.S. Army sedan pulled up to the curb, its light flashing. And he had a sudden, horrible realization that Leavitt was not kidding, that n.o.body was kidding, and that some kind of awful nightmare was coming true.

For his own part, Peter Leavitt was irritated with Hall. In general, Leavitt had little patience with practicing physicians. Though he had an M.D. degree, Leavitt had never practiced, preferring to devote his time research. His field was clinical microbiology and epidemiology, and his specialty was parasitology. He had done parasitic research all over the world; his work had led to the discovery of the Brazilian tapeworm, Taenia renzi, which he had characterized in a paper in 1953.

As he grew older, however, Leavitt had stopped traveling. Public health, he was fond of saying, was a young man's game; when you got your fifth case of intestinal amebiasis, it was time to quit. Leavitt got his fifth case in Rhodesia in 1955. He was dreadfully sick for three months and lost forty pounds. Afterward, he resigned his job in the public health service. He was offered the post of chief of microbiology at the hospital, and he had taken it, with the understanding that he would be able to devote a good portion of his time to research.

Within the hospital he was known as a superb clinical bacteriologist, but his real interest remained parasites. In the period from 1955 to 1964 he published a series of elegant metabolic studies on Ascaris and Necator that were highly regarded by other workers in the field.

Leavitt's reputation had made him a natural choice for Wildfire, and it was through Leavitt that Hall had been asked to join. Leavitt knew the reasons behind Hall's selection, though Hall did not.

When Leavitt had asked him to join, Hall had demanded to know why. "I'm just a surgeon," he had said.

"Yes," Leavitt said. "But you know electrolytes."

"So?"

"That may be important. Blood chemistries, pH, acidity and alkalinity, the whole thing. That may be vital, when the time comes."

"But there are a lot of electrolyte people," Hall had pointed out. "Many of them better than me."

"Yes," Leavitt had said. "But they're all married."

"So what?"

"We need a single man."

"Why?"

"It's necessary that one member of the team be unmarried."

"That's crazy," Hall had said.

"Maybe," Leavitt had said. "Maybe not."

They left the hospital and walked up to the Army sedan. A young officer was waiting stiffly, and saluted as they came up.

"Dr. Hall?"

"Yes."

"May I see your card, please?"

Hall gave him the little plastic card with his picture on it. He had been carrying the card in his wallet for more than a year; it was a rather strange card-- with just a name, a picture, and a thumbprint, nothing more. Nothing to indicate that it was an official card.

The officer glanced at it, then at Hall, and back to the card. He handed it back.

"Very good, sir."

He opened the rear door of the sedan. Hall got in and Leavitt followed, shielding his eyes from the flashing red light on the car top. Hall noticed it.

"Something wrong?"

"No. Just never liked flashing lights. Reminds me of my days as an ambulance driver, during the war." Leavitt settled back and the car started off. "Now then," he said. "When we reach the airfield, you will be given a file to read during the trip."

"What trip?"

"You'll be taking an F-104," Leavitt said.

"Where?"

"Nevada. Try to read the file on the way. Once we arrive, things will be very busy."

"And the others in the team?"

Leavitt glanced at his watch." Kirke has appendicitis and is in the hospital. The others have already begun work. Right now, they are in a helicopter, over Piedmont, Arizona.

"Never heard of it," Hall said.

"n.o.body has," Leavitt said, "until now."

6. Piedmont

AT 9:59 A.M. ON THE SAME MORNING, A K-4 JET helicopter lifted off the concrete of Vandenberg's maximum-security hangar MSH-9 and headed east, toward Arizona.

The decision to lift off from an MSH was made by Major Manchek, who was concerned about the attention the suits might draw. Because inside the helicopter were three men, a pilot and two scientists, and all three wore clear plastic inflatable suits, making them look like obese men from Mars, or, as one of the hangar maintenance men put it, "like balloons from the Macy's parade."

As the helicopter climbed into the clear morning sky, the two pa.s.sengers in the belly looked at each other. One was Jeremy Stone, the other Charles Burton. Both men had arrived at Vandenberg just a few hours before-- Stone from Stanford and Burton from Baylor University in Houston.

Burton was fifty-four, a pathologist. He held a professorship at Baylor Medical School and served as a consultant to the NASA Manned s.p.a.ceflight Center in Houston. Earlier he had done research at the National Inst.i.tutes in Bethesda. His field had been the effects of bacteria on human tissues.

It is one of the peculiarities of scientific development that such a vital field was virtually untouched when Burton came to it. Though men had known germs caused disease since Henle's hypothesis of 1840, by the middle of the twentieth century there was still nothing known about why or how bacteria did their damage. The specific mechanisms were unknown.

Burton began, like so many others in his day, with Diplococcus pneumoniae, the agent causing pneumonia. There was great interest in pneumococcus before the advent of penicillin in the forties; after that, both interest and research money evaporated. Burton shifted to Staphylococcus aureus, a common skin pathogen responsible for "pimples" and "boils." At the time he began his work, his fellow researchers laughed at him; staphylococcus, like pneumococcus, was highly sensitive to penicillin. They doubted Burton would ever get enough money to carry on his work.

For five years, they were right. The money was scarce, and Burton often had to go begging to foundations and philanthropists. Yet he persisted, patiently elucidating the coats of the cell wall that caused a reaction in host tissue and helping to discover the half-dozen toxins secreted by the bacteria to break down tissue, spread infection, and destroy red cells.

Suddenly, in the 1950's, the first penicillin-resistant strains of staph appeared. The new strains were virulent, and produced bizarre deaths, often by brain abscess. Almost overnight Burton found his work had a.s.sumed major importance; dozens of labs around the country were changing over to study staph; it was a "hot field." In a single year, Burton watched his grant appropriations jump from $6,000 a year to $300,000. Soon afterward, he was made a professor of pathology.

Looking back, Burton felt no great pride in his accomplishment; it was, he knew, a matter of luck, of being in the right place and doing the right work when the time came.

He wondered what would come of being here, in this helicopter, now.

Sitting across from him, Jeremy Stone tried to conceal his distaste for Burton's appearance. Beneath the plastic suit Burton wore a dirty plaid sport shirt with a stain on the left breast pocket; his trousers were creased and frayed and even his hair, Stone felt, was unruly and untidy.

He stared out the window, forcing himself to think of other matters. "Fifty people," he said, shaking his head. "Dead within eight hours of the landing of Scoop VII. The question is one of spread."

"Presumably airborne," Burton said.

"Yes. Presumably."

"Everyone seems to have died in the immediate vicinity of the town," Burton said. "Are there reports of deaths farther out?

Stone shook his head. "I'm having the Army people look into it. They're working with the highway patrol. So far, no deaths have turned up outside."

"Wind?"

"A stroke of luck," Stone said. "Last night the wind was fairly brisk, nine miles an hour to the south and steady. But around midnight, it died. Pretty unusual for this time of year, they tell me."

"But fortunate for us."

"Yes." Stone nodded. "We're fortunate in another way as well. There is no important area of habitation for a radius a of nearly one hundred and twelve miles. Outside that, of course, there is Las Vegas to the north, San Bernardino to the west, and Phoenix to the east. Not nice, if the bug gets to any of them."

"But as long as the wind stays down, we have time."

"Presumably," Stone said.

For the next half hour, the two men discussed the vector problem with frequent reference to a sheaf of output maps drawn up during the night by Vandenberg's computer division. The output maps were highly complex a.n.a.lyses of geographic problems; in this case, the maps were visualizations of the southwestern United States, weighted for wind direction and population.

[Graphic:About page 58.First map of mountain west of USA, showing examples of the staging of computerbase output mapping.Each shows coordinates around population centers and other important areas.A second map shows the weighting that accounts for wind and population factors and is consequently distorted in Southern CA, and Southern NV.A third map shows the computer projection of the effects of wind and population in a specific "scenario."None of the maps is from the Wildfire Project.They are similar, but they represent output from a CBW scenario, not the actual Wildfire work.(Courtesy General AutonomicsCorporation)]

Discussion then turned to the time course of death. Both men had heard the tape from the van; they agreed that everyone at Piedmont seemed to have died quite suddenly.

"Even if you slit a man's throat with a razor," Burton said, "you won't get death that rapidly. Cutting both carotids and jugulars still allows ten to forty seconds before unconsciousness, and nearly a minute before death."

"At Piedmont, it seems to have occurred in a second or two."

Burton shrugged. "Trauma," he suggested. "A blow to the head."

"Yes. Or a nerve gas."

"Certainly possible."

"It's that, or something very much like it," Stone said. "If it was an enzymatic block of some kind-- like a.r.s.enic or strychnine-- we'd expect fifteen or thirty seconds, perhaps longer. But a block of nervous transmission, or a block of the neuro-muscular junction, or cortical poisoning-- that could be very swift. It could be instantaneous."

"If it is a fast-acting gas," Burton said, "it must have high diffusibility across the lungs--"

"Or the skin," Stone said. "Mucous membranes, anything. Any porous surface."

Burton touched the plastic of his suit. "If this gas is so highly diffusible..."

Stone gave a slight smile. "We'll find out, soon enough."

Over the intercom, the helicopter pilot said, "Piedmont approaching, gentlemen. Please advise."

Stone said, "Circle once and give us a look at it."

The helicopter banked steeply. The two men looked out and saw the town below them. The buzzards had landed during the night, and were thickly cl.u.s.tered around the bodies.

"I was afraid of that," Stone said.

"They may represent a vector for infectious spread," Burton said. "Eat the meat of infected people, and carry the organisms away with them."

Stone nodded, staring out the window.

"What do we do?"

"Gas them," Stone said. He flicked on the intercom to the pilot. "Have you got the canisters?"

"Yes sir."

"Circle again; and blanket the town."

"Yes sir."

The helicopter tilted, and swung back. Soon the two men could not see the ground for the clouds of pale-blue gas.

"What is it?"

"Chlorazine," Stone said. "Highly effective, in low concentrations, on aviary metabolism. Birds have a high metabolic rate. They are creatures that consist of little more than feathers and muscle; their heartbeats are usually about one-twenty, and many species eat more than their own weight every day."

"The gas is an uncoupler?"

"Yes. It'll hit them hard."

The helicopter banked away, then hovered. The gas slowly cleared in the gentle wind, moving off to the south. Soon they could see the ground again. Hundreds of birds lay there; a few flapped their wings spastically, but most were already dead.

Stone frowned as he watched. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he knew he had forgotten something, or ignored something. Some fact, some vital clue, that the birds provided and he must not overlook.