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This book recounts the five-day history of a major American scientific crisis.
As in most crises, the events surrounding the Andromeda Strain were a compound of foresight and foolishness, innocence and ignorance. Nearly everyone involved had moments of great brilliance, and moments of unaccountable stupidity. It is therefore impossible to write about the events without offending some of the participants.
However, I think it is important that the story be told. This country supports the largest scientific establishment in the history of mankind. New discoveries are constantly being made, and many of these discoveries have important political or social overtones. In the near future, we can expect more crises on the pattern of Andromeda. Thus I believe it is useful for the public to be made aware of the way in which scientific crises arise, and are dealt with.
In researching and recounting the history of the Andromeda Strain, I received the generous help of many people who felt as I did, and who encouraged me to tell the story accurately and in detail.
My particular thanks must go to Major General Willis A. Haverford, United States Army; Lieutenant Everett J. Sloane, United States Navy (Ret.); Captain L. S. Waterhouse, United States Air Force (Vandenberg Special Projects Division); Colonel Henley Jackson and Colonel Stanley Friedrich, both of Wright Patterson; and Murray Charles of the Pentagon Press Division.
For their help in elucidating the background of the Wildfire Project, I must thank Roger White, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Houston MSQ; John Roble, NASA Kennedy Complex 13; Peter J. Mason, NASA Intelligence (Arlington Hall); Dr. Francis Martin, University of California (Berkeley) and the President's Science Advisory Council; Dr. Max Byrd, USIA; Kenneth Vorhees, White House Press Corps; and Professor Jonathan Percy of the University of Chicago (Genetics Department).
For their review of relevant chapters of the manuscript, and for their technical corrections and suggestions, I wish to thank Christian P. Lewis, Goddard Space Flight Center; Herbert Stanch, Avco, Inc.; James P. Baker, Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Carlos N. Sandos, California Institute of Technology; Dr. Brian Stack, University of Michigan; Edgar Blalock, Hudson Institute; Professor Linus Kjelling, the RAND Corporation; Dr. Eldredge Benson, National Institutes of Health.
Lastly, I wish to thank the participants in the Wildfire Project and the investigation of the so-called Andromeda Strain. All agreed to see me and, with many, my interviews lasted over a period of days. Furthermore, I was able to draw upon the transcripts of their debriefing, which are stored in Arlington Hall (Substation Seven) and which amounted to more than fifteen thousand pages of typewritten manuscript. This material, stored in twenty volumes, represents the full story of the events at Flatrock, Nevada, as told by each of the participants, and I was thus able to utilize their separate viewpoints in preparing a composite account.
This is a rather technical narrative, centering on complex issues of science. Wherever possible, I have explained the scientific questions, problems, and techniques. I have avoided the temptation to simplify both the issues and the answers, and if the reader must occasionally struggle through an and passage of technical detail, I apologize.
I have also tried to retain the tension and excitement of events in these five days, for there is an inherent drama in the story of Andromeda, and if it is a chronicle of stupid, deadly blunders, it is also a chronicle of heroism and intelligence.
M.C.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 1969
A man with binoculars. That is how it began: with a man standing by the side of the road, on a crest overlooking a small Arizona town, on a winter night.
Lieutenant Roger Shawn must have found the binoculars difficult. The metal would be cold, and he would be clumsy in his fir parka and heavy gloves. His breath, hissing out into the moonlit air, would have fogged the lenses. He would be forced to pause to wipe them frequently, using a stubby gloved finger.
He could not have known the futility of this action. Binoculars were worthless to see into that town and uncover its secrets. He would have been astonished to learn that the men who finally succeeded used instruments a million times more powerful than binoculars.
There is something sad, foolish, and human in the image of Shawn leading against a boulder, propping his arms on it, and holding the binoculars to his eyes. Though cumbersome, the binoculars would at least feel comfortable and familiar in his hands. It would be one of the last familiar sensations before his death.
We can imagine, and try to reconstruct, what happened from that point on.
Lieutenant Shawn swept over the town slowly and methodically. He could see it was not large, just a half-dozen wooden buildings, set out along a single main street. It was very quiet: no lights, no activity, no sound carried by the gentle wind.
He shifted his attention from the town to the surrounding hills. They were low, dusty, and blunted, with scrubby vegetation and an occasional withered yucca tree crusted in snow. Beyond the hills were more hills, and then the flat expanse of the Mojave Desert, trackless and vast. The Indians called it the Country of Lost Borders.
Lieutenant Shawn found himself shivering in the wind. It was February, the coldest month, and it was after ten. He walked back up the road toward the Ford Econovan, with the large rotating antenna on top. The motor was idling softly; it was the only sound he could hear. He opened the rear doors and climbed into the back, shutting the doors behind him.
He was enveloped in deep-red light: a night light, so that he would not be blinded when he stepped outside. In the red light the banks of instruments and electronic equipment glowed greenly.
Private Lewis Crane, the electronics technician, was there, also wearing a parka. He was hunched over a map, making calculations with occasional reference to the instruments before him.
Shawn asked Crane if he were certain they had arrived at the place, and Crane confirmed that they had. Both men were tired: they had driven all day from Vandenberg in search of the latest Scoop satellite. Neither knew much about the Scoops, except that they were a series of secret capsules intended to analyze the upper atmosphere and then return. Shawn and Crane had the job of finding the capsules once they had landed.
In order to facilitate recovery, the satellites were fitted with electronic beepers that began to transmit signals when they came down to an altitude of five miles.
That was why the van had so much radio-directional equipment. In essence, it was performing its own triangulation. In Army parlance it was known as single-unit triangulation, and it was highly effective, though slow. The procedure was simple enough: the van stopped and fixed its position, recording the strength and direction of the radio beam from the satellite. Once this was done, it would be driven in the most likely direction of the satellite for a distance of twenty miles. Then it would stop and take new coordinates. In this way, a series of triangulation points could be mapped, and the van could proceed to the satellite by a zigzag path, stopping every twenty miles to correct any error. The method was slower than using two vans, but it was safer – the Army felt that two vans in an area might arouse suspicion.
For six hours, the van had been closing on the Scoop satellite. Now they were almost there.
Crane tapped the map with a pencil in a nervous way and announced the name of the town at the foot of the hill: Piedmont, Arizona. Population forty-eight; both men laughed over that, though they were both inwardly concerned. The Vandenberg ESA, or Estimated Site of Arrival, had been twelve miles north of Piedmont. Vandenberg computed this site on the basis of radar observations and 1410 computer trajectory projections. The estimates were not usually wrong by more than a few hundred yards.
Yet there was no denying the radio-directional equipment, which located the satellite beeper directly in the center of town. Shawn suggested that someone from the town might have seen it coming down – it would be glowing with the heat – and might have retrieved it, bringing it into Piedmont.
This was reasonable, except that a native of Piedmont who happened upon an American satellite fresh from space would have told someone – reporters, police, NASA, the Army, someone.
But they had heard nothing.
Shawn climbed back down from the van, with Crane scrambling after him, shivering as the cold air struck him. Together, the two men looked out over the town.
It was peaceful, but completely dark. Shawn noticed that the gas station and the motel both had their lights doused. Yet they represented the only gas station and motel for miles.
And then Shawn noticed the birds.
In the light of the full moon he could see them, big birds, gliding in slow circles over the buildings, passing like black shadows across the face of the moon. He wondered why he hadn't noticed them before, and asked Crane what he made of them.
Crane said he didn't make anything of them. As a joke, he added, “Maybe they're buzzards.”
“That's what they look like, all right,” Shawn said.
Crane laughed nervously, his breath hissing out into the night. “But why should there be buzzards here? They only come when something is dead.”
Shawn lit a cigarette, cupping his hands around the lighter, protecting the flame from the wind. He said nothing, but looked down at the buildings, the outline of the little town. Then he scanned the town once more with binoculars, but saw no signs of life or movement.
At length, he lowered the binoculars and dropped his cigarette onto the crisp snow, where it sputtered and died.
He turned to Crane and said, “We'd better go down and have a look.”
THREE HUNDRED MILES AWAY, IN THE LARGE, square, windowless room that served as Mission Control for Project Scoop, Lieutenant Edgar Comroe sat with his feet on his desk and a stack of scientific-journal articles before him. Comroe was serving as control officer for the night; it was a duty he filled once a month, directing the evening operations of the skeleton crew of twelve. Tonight, the crew was monitoring the progress and reports of the van coded Caper One, now making its way across the Arizona desert.
Comroe disliked this job. The room was gray and lighted with fluorescent lights; the tone was sparsely utilitarian and Comroe found it unpleasant. He never came to Mission Control except during a launch, when the atmosphere was different. Then the room was filled with busy technicians, each at work on a single complex task, each tense with the peculiar cold anticipation that precedes any spacecraft launch.
But nights were dull. Nothing ever happened at night. Comroe took advantage of the time and used it to catch up on reading. By profession he was a cardiovascular physiologist, with special interest in stresses induced at high-G accelerations.
Tonight, Comroe was reviewing a journal article titled “Stoichiometrics of Oxygen-Carrying Capacity and Diffusion Gradients with Increased Arterial Gas Tensions.” He found it slow reading, and only moderately interesting. Thus he was willing to be interrupted when the overhead loudspeaker, which carried the voice transmission from the van of Shawn and Crane, clicked on.
Shawn said, “This is Caper One to Vandal Deca. Caper One to Vandal Deca. Are you reading. Over.”
Comroe, feeling amused, replied that he was indeed reading.
“We are about to enter the town of Piedmont and recover the satellite.”
“Very good, Caper One. Leave your radio open.
“Roger.”
This was a regulation of the recovery technique, as outlined in the Systems Rules Manual of Project Scoop. The SRM was a thick gray paperback that sat at one corner of Comroe's desk, where he could refer to it easily. Comroe knew that conversation between van and base was taped, and later became part of the permanent project file, but he had never understood any good reason for this. In fact, it had always seemed to him a straightforward proposition: the van went out, got the capsule, and came back.
He shrugged and returned to his paper on gas tensions, only half listening to Shawn's voice as it said, “We are now inside the town. We have just passed a gas station and a motel. All quiet here. There is no sign of life. The signals from the satellite are stronger. There is a church half a block ahead. There are no lights or activity of any kind.”
Comroe put his journal down. The strained quality of Shawn's voice was unmistakable. Normally Comroe would have been amused at the thought of two grown men made jittery by entering a small, sleepy desert town. But he knew Shawn personally, and he knew that Shawn, whatever other virtues he might have, utterly lacked an imagination. Shawn could fall asleep in a horror movie. He was that kind of man.
Comroe began to listen.
Over the crackling static, he heard the rumbling of the van engine. And he heard the two men in the van talking quietly.
Shawn: “Pretty quiet around here.”
Crane: “Yes sir.”
There was a pause.
Crane: “Sir?”
Shawn: “Yes?”
Crane: “Did you see that?”
Shawn: “See what?”
Crane: “Back there, on the sidewalk. It looked like a body.”
Shawn: “You're imagining things.”
Another pause, and then Comroe heard the van come to a halt, brakes squealing.
Shawn: “Judas.”
Crane: “It's another one, sir.”
Shawn: “Looks dead.”
Crane: “Shall I –”
Shawn: “No. Stay in the van.”
His voice became louder, more formal, as he ran through the call. “This is Caper One to Vandal Deca. Over.”
Comroe picked up the microphone. “Reading you. What's happened?”
Shawn, his voice tight, said, “Sir, we see bodies. Lots of them. They appear to be dead.”
“Are you certain, Caper One?”
“For pete's sake,” Shawn said. “Of course we're certain.”
Comroe said mildly, “Proceed to the capsule, Caper One.”
As he did so, he looked around the room. The twelve other men in the skeleton crew were staring at him, their eyes blank, unseeing. They were listening to the transmission.
The van rumbled to life again.
Comroe swung his feet off the desk and punched the red “Security” button on his console. That button automatically isolated the Mission Control room. No one would be allowed in or out without Comroe's permission.
Then he picked up the telephone and said, “Get me Major Manchek. M-A-N-C-H-E-K. This is a stat call. I'll hold.”
Manchek was the chief duty officer for the month, the man directly responsible for all Scoop activities during February.
While he waited, he cradled the phone in his shoulder and lit a cigarette. Over the loudspeaker, Shawn could be heard to say, “Do they look dead to you, Crane?”
Crane: “Yes Sir. Kind of peaceful, but dead.”
Shawn: “Somehow they don't really look dead. There's something missing. Something funny ... But they're all over. Must be dozens of them.”
Crane: “Like they dropped in their trucks. Stumbled and fallen down dead.”
Shawn: “All over the streets, on the sidewalks ...”
Another silence, then Crane: “Sir!”
Shawn: “Judas.”
Crane: “You see him? The man in the white robe, walking across the street –”
Shawn: “I see him.”
Crane: “He's just stepping over them like –”
Shawn: “He's coming toward us.”
Crane: “Sir, look, I think we should get out of here, if you don't mind my –”
The next sound was a high-pitched scream, and a crunching noise. Transmission ended at this point, and Vandenberg Scoop Mission Control was not able to raise the two men again.
GLADSTONE, UPON HEARING OF THE DEATH OF “Chinese” Gordon in Egypt, was reported to have muttered irritably that his general might have chosen a more propitious time to die: Gordon's death threw the Gladstone government into turmoil and crisis. An aide suggested that the circumstances were unique and unpredictable, to which Gladstone crossly answered: “All crises are the same.”
He meant political crises, of course. There were no scientific crises in 1885, and indeed none for nearly forty years afterward. Since then there have been eight of major importance; two have received wide publicity. It is interesting that both the publicized crises – atomic energy and space capability – have concerned chemistry and physics, not biology.
This is to be expected. Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical. Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own.
It was not until the late 1940's that this situation changed. The postwar period ushered in a new era of biologic research, spurred by the discovery of antibiotics. Suddenly there was both enthusiasm and money for biology, and a torrent of discoveries poured forth: tranquilizers, steroid hormones, immunochemistry, the genetic code. By 1953 the first kidney was transplanted and by 1958 the first birthcontrol pills were tested. It was not long before biology was the fastest-growing field in all science; it was doubling its knowledge every ten years. Farsighted researchers talked seriously of changing genes, controlling evolution, regulating the mind – ideas that had been wild speculation ten years before.
And yet there had never been a biologic crisis. The Andromeda Strain provided the first.
According to Lewis Bornheim, a crisis is a situation in which a previously tolerable set of circumstances is suddenly, by the addition of another factor, rendered wholly intolerable. Whether the additional factor is political, economic, or scientific hardly matters: the death of a national hero, the instability of prices, or a technological discovery can all set events in motion. In this sense, Gladstone was right: all crises are the same.
The noted scholar Alfred Pockrun, in his study of crises (Culture, Crisis and Change), has made several interesting points. First, he observes that every crisis has its beginnings long before the actual onset. Thus Einstein published his theories of relativity in 1905-15, forty years before his work culminated in the end of a war, the start of an age, and the beginnings of a crisis.
Similarly, in the early twentieth century, American, German, and Russian scientists were all interested in space travel, but only the Germans recognized the military potential of rockets. And after the war, when the German rocket installation at Peenemunde was cannibalized by the Soviets and Americans, it was only the Russians who made immediate, vigorous moves toward developing space capabilities. The Americans were content to tinker playfully with rockets and ten years later, this resulted in an American scientific crisis involving Sputnik, American education, the ICBM, and the missile gap.
Pockran also observes that a crisis is compounded of individuals and personalities, which are unique:
* * *
It is as difficult to imagine Alexander at the Rubicon, and Eisenhower at Waterloo, as it is difficult to imagine Darwin writing to Roosevelt about the potential for an atomic bomb. A crisis is made by men, who enter into the crisis with their own prejudices, propensities, and predispositions. A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored.
Yet underlying the uniqueness of each crisis is a disturbing sameness. A characteristic of all crises is their predictability, in retrospect. They seem to have a certain inevitability, they seem predestined. This is not true of all crises, but it is true of sufficiently many to make the most hardened historian cynical and misanthropic.
* * *
In the light of Pockran's arguments, it is interesting to consider the background and personalities involved in the Andromeda Strain. At the time of Andromeda, there had never been a crisis of biological science, and the first Americans faced with the facts were not disposed to think in terms of one. Shawn and Crane were capable but not thoughtful men, and Edgar Comroe, the night officer at Vandenberg, though a scientist, was not prepared to consider anything beyond the immediate irritation of a quiet evening ruined by an inexplicable problem.
According to protocol, Comroe called his superior officer, Major Arthur Manchek, and here the story takes a different turn. For Manchek was both prepared and disposed to consider a crisis of the most major proportions.
But he was not prepared to acknowledge it.
* * *
Major Manchek, his face still creased with sleep, sat on the edge of Comroe's desk and listened to the replay of the tape from the van.
When it was finished, he said, “Strangest damned thing I ever heard,” and played it over again. While he did so, he carefully filled his pipe with tobacco, lit it, and tamped it down.
Arthur Manchek was an engineer, a quiet heavyset man plagued by labile hypertension, which threatened to end further promotions as an Army officer. He had been advised on many occasions to lose weight, but had been unable to do so. He was therefore considering abandoning the Army for a career as a scientist in private industry, where people did not care what your weight or blood pressure was.
Manchek had come to Vandenberg from Wright Patterson in Ohio, where he had been in charge of experiments – in spacecraft landing methods. His job had been to develop a capsule shape that could touch down with equal safety on either land or sea. Manchek had succeeded in developing three new shapes that were promising; his success led to a promotion and transfer to Vandenberg.
Here he did administrative work, and hated it. People bored Manchek; the mechanics of manipulation and the vagaries of subordinate personality held no fascination for him. He often wished he were back at the wind tunnels of Wright Patterson.
Particularly on nights when he was called out of bed by some damn fool problem.
Tonight he felt irritable, and under stress. His reaction to this was characteristic: he became slow. He moved slowly, he thought slowly, he proceeded with a dull and plodding deliberation. It was the secret of his success. Whenever people around him became excited, Manchek seemed to grow more disinterested, until he appeared about to fall asleep. It was a trick he had for remaining totally objective and clearheaded.
Now he sighed and puffed on his pipe as the tape spun out for the second time.
“No communications breakdown, I take it?”
Comroe shook his head. “We checked all systems at this end. We are still monitoring the frequency.” He turned on the radio, and hissing static filled the room. “You know about the audio screen?”
“Vaguely,” Manchek said, suppressing a yawn. In fact, the audio screen was a system he had developed three years before. In simplest terms, it was a computerized way to find a needle in a haystack – a machine program that listened to apparently garbled, random sound and picked out certain irregularities. For example, the hubbub of conversation at an embassy cocktail party could be recorded and fed through the computer, which would pick out a single voice and separate it from the rest.
It had several intelligence applications.
“Well,” Comroe said, “after the transmission ended, we got nothing but the static you hear now. We put it through the audio screen, to see if the computer could pick up a pattern. And we ran it through the oscilloscope in the corner.”
Across the room, the green face of the scope displayed a jagged dancing white line – the summated sound of static.
“Then,” Comroe said, “we cut in the computer. Like so.”
He punched a button on his desk console. The oscilloscope line changed character abruptly. It suddenly became quieter, more regular, with a pattern of beating, thumping impulses.
“I see,” Manchek said. He had, in fact, already identified the pattern and assessed its meaning. His mind was drifting elsewhere, considering other possibilities, wider ramifications.
“Here's the audio,” Comroe said. He pressed another button and the audio version of the signal filled the room. It was a steady mechanical grinding with a repetitive metallic click.
Manchek nodded. “An engine. With a knock.”
“Yes sir. We believe the van radio is still broadcasting, and that the engine is still running. That's what we're hearing now, with the static screened away.”
“All right,” Manchek said.
His pipe went out. He sucked on it for a moment, then lit it again, removed it from his mouth, and plucked a bit of tobacco from his tongue.
“We need evidence,” he said, almost to himself. He was considering categories of evidence, and possible findings, contingencies...
“Evidence of what?” Comroe said.
Manchek ignored the question. “Have we got a Scavenger on the base?
“I'm not sure, sir. If we don't, we can get one from Edwards.”
“Then do it.” Manchek stood up. He had made his decision, and now he felt tired again. An evening of telephone calls faced him, an evening of irritable operators and bad connections and puzzled voices at the other end.
“We'll want a flyby over that town,” he said. “A complete scan. All canisters to come directly. Alert the labs.”
He also ordered Comroe to bring in the technicians, especially Jaggers. Manchek disliked Jaggers, who was effete and precious. But Manchek also knew that Jaggers was good, and tonight he needed a good man.
* * *
At 11:07 p.m., Samuel “Gunner” Wilson was moving at 645 miles per hour over the Mojave Desert. Up ahead in the moonlight, he saw the twin lead jets, their afterburners glowing angrily in the night sky. The planes had a heavy, pregnant look: phosphorus bombs were slung beneath the wings and belly.
Wilson's plane was different, sleek and long and black. It was a Scavenger, one of seven in the world.
The Scavenger was the operational version of the X-18. It was an intermediate-range reconnaissance jet aircraft fully equipped for day or night intelligence flights. It was fitted with two side-slung 16mm cameras, one for the visible spectrum, and one for low-frequency radiation. In addition it had a center-mount Homans infrared multispex camera as well as the usual electronic and radio-detection gear. All films and plates were, of course, processed automatically in the air, and were ready for viewing as soon as the aircraft returned to base.
All this technology made the Scavenger almost impossibly sensitive. It could map the outlines of a city in blackout, and could follow the movements of individual trucks and cars at eight thousand feet. It could detect a submarine to a depth of two hundred feet. It could locate harbor mines by wave-motion deformities and it could obtain a precise photograph of a factory from the residual heat of the building four hours after it had shut down.
So the Scavenger was the ideal instrument to fly over Piedmont, Arizona, in the dead of night.
Wilson carefully checked his equipment, his hands fluttering over the controls, touching each button and lever, watching the blinking green lights that indicated that all systems were in order.
His earphones crackled. The lead plane said lazily, “Coming up on the town, Gunner. You see it?”
He leaned forward in the cramped cockpit. He was low, only five hundred feet above the ground, and for a moment he could see nothing but a blur of sand, snow, and yucca trees. Then, up ahead, buildings in the moonlight.
“Roger. I see it.”
“Okay, Gunner. Give us room.”
He dropped back, putting half a mile between himself and the other two planes. They were going into the P-square formation, for direct visualization of target by phosphorus flare. Direct visualization was not really necessary; Scavenger could function without it. But Vandenberg seemed insistent that they gather all possible information about the town.
The lead planes spread, moving wide until they were parallel to the main street of the town.
“Gunner? Ready to roll?”
Wilson placed his fingers delicately over the camera buttons. Four fingers: as if playing the piano.
“Ready.”
“We're going in now.”
The two planes swooped low, dipping gracefully toward the town. They were now very wide and seemingly inches above the ground as they began to release the bombs. As each struck the ground, a blazing white-hot sphere went up, bathing the town in an unearthly, glaring light and reflecting off the metal underbellies of the planes.
The jets climbed, their run finished, but Gunner did not see them. His entire attention, his mind and his body, was focused on the town.
“All yours, Gunner.”
Wilson did not answer. He dropped his nose, cracked down his flaps, and felt a shudder as the plane sank sickeningly, like a stone, toward the ground. Below him, the area around the town was lighted for hundreds of yards in every direction. He pressed the camera buttons and felt, rather than heard, the vibrating whir of the cameras.
For a long moment he continued to fall, and then he shoved the stick forward, and the plane seemed to catch in the air, to grab, and lift and climb. He had a fleeting glimpse of the main street. He saw bodies, bodies everywhere, spread-eagled, lying in the streets, across cars...
“Judas,” he said.
And then he was up, still climbing, bringing the plane around in a slow arc, preparing for the descent into his second run and trying not to think of what he had seen. One of the first rules of air reconnaissance was “Ignore the scenery “; analysis and evaluation were not the job of the pilot. That was left to the experts, and pilots who forgot this, who became too interested in what they were photographing, got into trouble. Usually they crashed.
As the plane came down into a flat second run, he tried not to look at the ground. But he did, and again saw the bodies. The phosphorus flares were burning low, the lighting was darker, more sinister and subdued. But the bodies were still there: he had not been imagining it.
“Judas Priest,” he said again. “Sweet Judas.”
* * *
The sign on the door said DATA PROSSEX EPSILON, and underneath, in red lettering, ADMISSION BY CLEARANCE CARD ONLY. Inside was a comfortable sort of briefing room: screen on one wall, a dozen steel-tubing and leather chairs facing it, and a projector in the back.
When Manchek and Comroe entered the room, Jaggers, was already waiting for them, standing at the front of the room by the screen. Jaggers was a short man with a springy step and an eager, rather hopeful face. Though not well liked on the base, he was nonetheless the acknowledged master of reconnaissance interpretation. He had the sort of mind that delighted in small and puzzling details, and was well suited to his job.
Jaggers rubbed his hands as Manchek and Comroe sat down. “Well then,” he said. “Might as well get right to it. I think we have something to interest you tonight. “ He nodded to the projectionist in the back. “First picture.”
The room lights darkened. There was a mechanical click, and the screen lighted to show an aerial view of a small desert town.
“This is an unusual shot,” Jaggers said. “From our files. Taken two months ago from Janos 12, our recon satellite. Orbiting at an altitude of one hundred and eighty-seven miles, as you know. The technical quality here is quite good. Can't read the license plates on the cars yet, but we're working on it. Perhaps by next year.”
Manchek shifted in his chair, but said nothing.
“You can see the town here,” Jaggers said. “Piedmont, Arizona. Population forty-eight, and not much to look at, even from one hundred and eighty-seven miles. Here's the general store; the gas station – notice how clearly you can read GULF – and the post office; the motel. Everything else you see is private residences. Church over here. Well: next picture.”
Another click. This was dark, with a reddish tint, and was clearly an overview of the town in white and dark red. The outlines of the buildings were very dark.
“We begin here with the Scavenger IR plates. These are infrared films, as you know, which produce a picture on the basis of heat instead of light. Anything warm appears white on the picture; anything cold is black. Now then. You can see here that the buildings are dark – they are colder than the ground. As night comes on, the buildings give up their heat more rapidly.”
“What are those white spots?” Comroe said. There were forty or fifty white areas on the film.
“Those,” Jaggers said, “are bodies. Some inside houses, some in the street. By count, they number fifty. In the case of some of them, such as this one here, you can make out the four limbs and head clearly. This body is lying flat. In the street.”
He lit a cigarette and pointed to a white rectangle. “As nearly as we can tell, this is an automobile. Notice it's got a bright white spot at one end. This means the motor is still running, still generating heat.”
“The van,” Comroe said. Manchek nodded.
“The question now arises,” Jaggers said, “are all these people dead? We cannot be certain about that. The bodies appear to be of different temperatures. Forty-seven are rather cold, indicating death some time ago. Three are warmer. Two of those are in this car, here.”
“Our men,” Comroe said. “And the third?”
“The third is rather puzzling. You see him here, apparently standing or lying curled in the street. Observe that he is quite white, and therefore quite warm. Our temperature scans indicate that he is about ninety-five degrees, which is a little on the cool side, but probably attributable to peripheral vasoconstriction in the night desert air. Drops his skin temperature. Next slide.”
The third film flicked onto the screen.
Manchek frowned at the spot. “It's moved.”
“Exactly. This film was made on the second passage. The spot has moved approximately twenty yards. Next picture.”
A third film.
“Moved again!”
“Yes. An additional five or ten yards.”
“So one person down there is alive?”
“That,” Jaggers said, “is the presumptive conclusion.”
Manchek cleared his throat. “Does that mean it's what you think?”
“Yes sir. It is what we think.”
“There's a man down there, walking among the corpses?”
Jaggers shrugged and tapped the screen. “It is difficult to account for the data in any other manner, and –”
At that moment, a private entered the room with three circular metal canisters under his arm.
“Sir, we have films of the direct visualization by P-square.”
“Run them,” Manchek said.
The film was threaded into a projector. A moment later, Lieutenant Wilson was ushered into the room. Jaggers said, “I haven't reviewed these films yet. Perhaps the pilot should narrate.”
Manchek nodded and looked at Wilson, who got up and walked to the front of the room, wiping his hands nervously on his pants. He stood alongside the screen and faced his audience, beginning in a flat monotone: “Sir, my flybys were made between 11:08 and 11:13 p.m. this evening. There were two, a start from the east and a return from the west, done at an average speed of two hundred and fourteen miles per hour, at a median altitude by corrected altimeter of eight hundred feet and an –”
“Just a minute, son,” Manchek said, raising his hand. “This isn't a grilling. Just tell it naturally.”
Wilson nodded and swallowed. The room lights went down and the projector whirred to life. The screen showed the town bathed in glaring white light as the plane came down over it.
“This is my first pass,” Wilson said. “East to west, at 11:08. We're looking from the left-wing camera which is running at ninety-six frames per second. As you can see, my altitude is falling rapidly. Straight ahead is the main street of the target...”
He stopped. The bodies were clearly visible. And the van, stopped in the street, its rooftop antenna still turning slow revolutions. As the plane continued its run, approaching the van, they could see the driver collapsed over the steering wheel.
“Excellent definition,” Jaggers said. “That fine-grain film really gives resolution when you need –”
“Wilson,” Manchek said, “was telling us about his run.”
“Yes sir,” Wilson said, clearing his throat. He stared at the screen. “At this time I am right over target, where I observed the casualties you see here. My estimate at that time was seventy-five, sir.”
His voice was quiet and tense. There was a break in the film, some numbers, and the image came on again.
“Now I am coming back for my second run,” Wilson said. “The flares are already burning low but you can see –”
“Stop the film,” Manchek said.
The projectionist froze the film at a single frame. It showed the long, straight main street of the town, and the bodies.
“Go back.”
The film was run backward, the jet seeming to pull away from the street.
“There! Stop it now.”
The frame was frozen. Manchek got up and walked close to the screen, peering off to one side.
“Look at this,” he said, pointing to a figure. It was a man in knee-length white robes, standing and looking up at the plane. He was an old man, with a withered face. His eyes were wide.
“What do you make of this?” Manchek said to Jaggers.
Jaggers moved close. He frowned. “Run it forward a bit.”
The film advanced. They could clearly see the man turn his head, roll his eyes, following the plane as it passed over him.
“Now backward,” Jaggers said.
The film was run back. Jaggers smiled bleakly. “The man looks alive to me, sir.”
“Yes,” Manchek said crisply. “He certainly does.”
And with that, he walked out of the room. As he left, he paused and announced that he was declaring a state of emergency; that everyone on the base was confined to quarters until further notice; that there would be no outside calls, or communication; and that what they had seen in this room was confidential.
Outside in the hallway, he headed for Mission Control. Comroe followed him.
“I want you to call General Wheeler,” Manchek said. “Tell him I have declared an SOE without proper authorization, and ask him to come down immediately.” Technically no one but the commander had the right to declare a state of emergency.
Comroe said, “Wouldn't you rather tell him yourself?”
“I've got other things to do,” Manchek said.
WHEN ARTHUR MANCHEK STEPPED INTO THE small soundproofed booth and sat down before the telephone. He knew exactly what he was going to do – but he was not very sure why he was doing it.
As one of the senior Scoop officers, he had received a briefing nearly a year before on Project Wildfire. It had been given, Manchek remembered, by a short little man with a dry, precise way of speaking. He was a university professor and he had outlined the project. Manchek had forgotten the details, except that there was a laboratory somewhere, and a team of five scientists who could be alerted to man the laboratory. The function of the team was investigation of possible extraterrestrial life forms introduced on American spacecraft returning to earth.
Manchek had not been told who the five men were; he knew only that a special Defense Department trunk line existed for calling them out. In order to hook into the line, one had only to dial the binary of some number. He reached into his pocket and withdrew his wallet, then fumbled for a moment until he found the card he had been given by the professor:
IN CASE OF FIRE – Notify Division 87 – Emergencies Only
He stared at the card and wondered what exactly would happen if he dialed the binary of 87. He tried to imagine the sequence of events: Who would he talk to? Would someone call him back? Would there be an inquiry, a referral to higher authority?
He rubbed his eyes and stared at the card, and finally he shrugged. One way or the other, he would find out.
He tore a sheet of paper from the pad in front of him, next to the telephone, and wrote:
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
This was the basis of the binary system: base two raised to some power. Two to the zero power was one; two to the first was two, two squared was four; and so on. Manchek quickly wrote another line beneath:
20 ® 1
21 ® 2
22 ® 4
23 ® 8
24 ® 16
25 ® 32
26 ® 64
27 ® 128
Then he began to add up the numbers to get a total of 87. He circled these numbers:
20 ® (1)
21 ® (2)
22 ® (4)
23 ® 8
24 ® (16)
25 ® 32
26 ® (64)
27 ® (128)
= (87)
And then he drew in the binary code. Binary numbers were designed for computers which utilize an on-off, yes-no kind of language. A mathematician once joked that binary numbers were the way people who have only two fingers count. In essence, binary numbers translated normal numbers which require ten digits, and decimal places – to a system that depended on only two digits, one and zero.
20 ® (1) ® 1
21 ® (2) ® 1
22 ® (4) ® 1
23 ® 8 ® 0
24 ® (16) ® 1
25 ® 32 ® 0
26 ® (64) ® 1
27 ® 128 ® 0
Manchek looked at the number he had just written, and inserted the dashes: 1-110-1010. A perfectly reasonable telephone number. Manchek picked up the telephone and dialed. The time was exactly twelve midnight.
THE MACHINERY WAS THERE. THE CABLES, THE codes, the teleprinters had all been waiting dormant for two years. It only required Manchek's call to set the machinery in motion.
When he finished dialing, he heard a series of mechanical clicks, and then a low hum, which meant, he knew, that the call was being fed into one of the scrambled trunk lines. After a moment, the humming stopped and a voice said, “This is a recording. State your name and your message and hang up.”
“Major Arthur Manchek, Vandenberg Air Force Base, Scoop Mission Control. I believe it is necessary to call up a Wildfire Alert. I have confirmatory visual data at this post, which has just been closed for security reasons.”
As he spoke it occurred to him that it was all rather improbable. Even the tape recorder would disbelieve him. He continued to hold the telephone in his hand, somehow expecting an answer.
But there was none, only a click as the connection was automatically broken. The line was dead; he hung up and sighed. It was all very unsatisfying.
Manchek expected to be called back within a few minutes by Washington; he expected to receive many calls in the next few hours, and so remained at the phone. Yet he received no calls, for he did not know that the process he had initiated was automatic. Once mobilized, the Wildfire Alert would proceed ahead, and not be recalled for at least twelve hours.
Within ten minutes of Manchek's call, the following message clattered across the scrambled maximum-security cable.
* * *
=UNIT=
TOP SECRET
CODE FOLLOWS
AS
CBW 9/9/234/435/6778/900
PULG COORDINATES DELTA 8997
MESSAGE FOLLOWS
AS
WILDFIRE ALERT HAS BEEN CALLED. REPEAT WILDFIRE ALERT HAS BEEN CALLED. COORDINATES TO READ NASA/AMC/NSC COMB DEC. TIME OF COMMAND TO READ LL-59-07 ON DATE.
FURTHER NOTATIONS
AS
PRESS BLACKFACE POTENTIAL DIRECTIVE 7-12 ALERT STATUS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
END MESSAGE
===
DISENGAGE
* * *
This was an automatic cable. Everything about it, including the announcement of a press blackout and a possible directive 7-12, was automatic, and followed from Manchek's call.
Five minutes later, there was a second cable which named units of the nation: the men on the Wildfire team:
* * *
=UNIT=
TOP SECRET
CODE FOLLOWS
AS CBW 9/9/234/435/6778/900
MESSAGE FOLLOWS
AS
THE FOLLOWING MALE AMERICAN CITIZENS ARE BEING PLACED ON ZED KAPPA STATUS. PREVIOUS TOP SECRET CLEARANCE HAS BEEN CONFIRMED. THE NAMES ARE+
STONE, JEREMY ..81
LEAVITT, PETER ..04
BURTON, CHARLES .L51
CHRISTIANSENKRIKECANCEL THIS LINE CANCEL
TO READ AS
KIRKE, CHRISTIAN .142
HALL, MARK .L77
ACCORD THESE MEN ZED KAPPA STATUS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
END MESSAGE END MESSAGE
In theory, this cable was also quite routine; its purpose was to name the five members who were being given Zed Kappa status, the code for “OK” status. Unfortunately, however, the machine misprinted one of the names, and failed to reread the entire message. (Normally, when one of the printout units of a secret trunk line miswrote part of a message, the entire message was rewritten, or else it was reread by the computer to certify its corrected form.)
The message was thus open to doubt. In Washington and elsewhere, a computer expert was called in to confirm the accuracy of the message, by what is called “reverse tracing.” The Washington expert expressed grave concern about the validity of the message since the machine was printing out other minor mistakes, such as “L” when it meant “1.”
The upshot of all this was that the first two names on the list were accorded status, while the rest were not, pending confirmation.
* * *
Allison Stone was tired. At her home in the hills overlooking the Stanford campus, she and her husband, the chairman of the Stanford bacteriology department, had held a party for fifteen couples, and everyone had stayed late. Mrs. Stone was annoyed: she had been raised in official Washington, where one's second cup of coffee, offered pointedly without cognac, was accepted as a signal to go home. Unfortunately, she thought, academics did not follow the rules. She had served the second cup of coffee hours ago, and everybody was still there.
Shortly before one a.m., the doorbell rang. Answering it, she was surprised to see two military men standing side by side in the night. They seemed awkward and nervous to her, and she assumed they were lost; people often got lost driving through these residential areas at night.
“May I help you?”
“I'm sorry to disturb you, ma'am,” one said politely. “But is this the residence of Dr. Jeremy Stone?”
“Yes,” she said, frowning slightly. “It is.”
She looked beyond the two men, to the driveway. A blue military sedan was parked there. Another man was standing by the car; he seemed to be holding something in his hand.
“Does that man have a gun?” she said.
“Ma'am,” the man said, “we must see Dr. Stone at once.”
It all seemed strange to her, and she found herself frightened. She looked across the lawn and saw a fourth man, moving up to the house and looking into the window. In the pale light streaming out onto the lawn, she could distinctly see the rifle in his hands.
“What's going on?”
“Ma'am, we don't want to disturb your party. Please call Dr. Stone to the door.”
“I don't know if –”
“Otherwise, we will have to go get him,” the man said.
She hesitated a moment, then said, “Wait here.”
She stepped back and started to close the door, but one man had already slipped into the hall. He stood near the door, erect and very polite, with his hat in his hand. “I'll just wait here, ma'am,” he said, and smiled at her.
She walked back to the party, trying to show nothing to the guests. Everyone was still talking and laughing; the room was noisy and dense with smoke. She found Jeremy in a corner, in the midst of some argument about riots. She touched his shoulder, and he disengaged himself from the group.
“I know this sounds funny,” she said, “but there is some kind of Army man in the hall, and another outside, and two others with guns out on the lawn. They say they want to see you.”
For a moment, Stone looked surprised, and then he nodded. “I'll take care of it,” he said. His attitude annoyed her; he seemed almost to be expecting it.
“Well, if you knew about this, you might have told –”
“I didn't,” he said. “I'll explain later.”
He walked out to the hallway, where the officer was still waiting. She followed her husband.
Stone said, “I am Dr. Stone.”
“Captain Morton,” the man said. He did not offer to shake hands. “There's a fire, sir.”
“All right,” Stone said. He looked down at his dinner jacket. “Do I have time to change?”
“I'm afraid not, sir.”
To her astonishment, Allison saw her husband nod quietly. “All right.”
He turned to her and said, “I've got to leave.” His face was blank and expressionless, and it seemed to her like a nightmare, his face like that, while he spoke. She was confused, and afraid.
“When will you be back?”
“I'm not sure. A week or two. Maybe longer.”
She tried to keep her voice low, but she couldn't help it, she was upset. “What is it?” she said. “Are you under arrest?”
“No,” he said, with a slight smile. “It's nothing like that. Make my apologies to everyone, will you?”
“But the guns –”
“Mrs. Stone,” the military man said, “it's our job to protect your husband. From now on, nothing must be allowed to happen to him.”
“That's right,” Stone said. “You see, I'm suddenly an important person.” He smiled again, an odd, crooked smile, and gave her a kiss.
And then, almost before she knew what was happening, he was walking out the door, with Captain Morton on one side of him and the other man on the other. The man with the rifle wordlessly fell into place behind them; the man by the car saluted and opened the door.
Then the car lights came on, and the doors slammed shut, and the car backed down the drive and drove off into the night. She was still standing by the door when one of her guests came up behind her and said, “Allison, are you all right?”
And she turned, and found she was able to smile and say, “Yes, it's nothing. Jeremy had to leave. The lab called him: another one of his late-night experiments going wrong.”
The guest nodded and said, “Shame. It's a delightful party.”
In the car, Stone sat back and stared at the men. He recalled that their faces were blank and expressionless. He said, “What have you got for me?”
“Got, sir?”
“Yes, dammit. What did they give you for me? They must have given you something.”
“Oh. Yes sir.”
He was handed a slim file. Stenciled on the brown cardboard cover was PROJECT SUMMARY: SCOOP.
“Nothing else?” Stone said.
“No sir.”
Stone sighed. He had never heard of Project Scoop before; the file would have to be read carefully. But it was too dark in the car to read; there would be time for that later, on the airplane. He found himself thinking back over the last five years, back to the rather odd symposium on Long Island, and the rather odd little speaker from England who had, in his own way, begun it all.
* * *
In the summer of 1962, J. J. Merrick, the English biophysicist, presented a paper to the Tenth Biological Symposium at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. The paper was entitled “Frequencies of Biologic Contact According to Speciation Probabilities.” Merrick was a rebellious, unorthodox scientist whose reputation for clear thinking was not enhanced by his recent divorce or the presence of the handsome blond secretary he had brought with him to the symposium. Following the presentation of his paper, there was little serious discussion of Merrick's ideas, which were summarized at the end of the paper.
* * *
I must conclude that the first contact with extraterrestrial life will be determined by the known probabilities of speciation. It is an undeniable fact that complex organisms are rare on earth, while simple organisms flourish in abundance. There are millions of species of bacteria, and thousands of species of insects. There are only a few species of primates, and only four of great apes. There is but one species of man.
With this frequency of speciation goes a corresponding frequency in numbers. Simple creatures are much more common than complex organisms. There are three billion men on the earth, and that seems a great many until we consider that ten or even one hundred times that number of bacteria can be contained within a large flask.
All available evidence on the origin of life points to an evolutionary progression from simple to complex life forms. This is true on earth. It is probably true throughout the universe. Shapley, Merrow, and others have calculated the number of viable planetary systems in the near universe. My own calculations, indicated earlier in the paper, consider the relative abundance of different organisms throughout the universe.
My aim has been to determine the probability of contact between man and another life form. That probability is as follows:
FORM |
PROBABILITY |
Unicellular organisms or less (naked genetic in formation): |
.7840 |
Multicellular organisms, simple: |
.1940 |
Multicellular organisms, complex but lacking |
.0140 |
Multicellular organisms with integrated organ systems |
.0078 |
Multicellular organisms with complex nervous system |
.0002 |
TOTAL: |
1.0000 |
* * *
These considerations lead me to believe that the first human interaction with extraterrestrial life will consist of contact with organisms similar to, if not identical to, earth bacteria or viruses. The consequences of such contact are disturbing when one recalls that 3 per cent of all earth bacteria are capable of exerting some deleterious effect upon man.
* * *
Later, Merrick himself considered the possibility that the first contact would consist of a plague brought back from the moon by the first men to go there. This idea was received with amusement by the assembled scientists.
One of the few who took it seriously was Jeremy Stone. At the age of thirty-six, Stone was perhaps the most famous person attending the symposium that year. He was professor of bacteriology at Berkeley, a post he had held since he was thirty, and he had just won the Nobel Prize.
The list of Stone's achievements – disregarding the particular series of experiments that led to the Nobel Prize – is astonishing. In 1955, he was the first to use the technique of multiplicative counts for bacterial colonies. In 1957, he developed a method for liquid-pure suspension. In 1960, Stone presented a radical new theory of operon activity in E. coli and S. tabuli, and developed evidence for the physical nature of the inducer and repressor substances. His 1958 paper on linear viral transformations opened broad new lines of scientific inquiry, particularly among the Pasteur Institute group in Paris, which subsequently won the Nobel Prize in 1966.
In 1961, Stone himself won the Nobel Prize. The award was given for work on bacterial mutant reversion that he had done in his spare time as a law student at Michigan, when he was twenty-six.
Perhaps the most significant thing about Stone was that he had done Nobel-caliber work as a law student, for it demonstrated the depth and range of his interests. A friend once said of him: “Jeremy knows everything, and is fascinated by the rest.” Already he was being compared to Einstein and to Bohr as a scientist with a conscience, an overview, an appreciation of the significance of events.
Physically, Stone was a thin, balding man with a prodigious memory that catalogued scientific facts and blue jokes with equal facility. But his most outstanding characteristic was a sense of impatience, the feeling he conveyed to every one around him that they were wasting his time. He had a bad habit of interrupting speakers and finishing conversations, a habit he tried to control with only limited success. His imperious manner, when added to the fact that he had won the Nobel Prize at an early age, as well as the scandals of his private life – he was four times married, twice to the wives of colleagues – did nothing to increase his popularity.
Yet it was Stone who, in the early 1960's, moved forward in government circles as one of the spokesmen for the new scientific establishment. He himself regarded this role with tolerant amusement – “a vacuum eager to be filled with hot gas,” he once said – but in fact his influence was considerable.
By the early 1960's America had reluctantly come to realize that it possessed, as a nation, the most potent scientific complex in the history of the world. Eighty per cent of all scientific discoveries in the preceding three decades had been made by Americans. The United States had 75 per cent of the world's computers, and 90 per cent of the world's lasers. The United States had three and a half times as many scientists as the Soviet Union and spent three and a half times as much money on research; the U.S. had four times as many scientists as the European Economic Community and spent seven times as much on research. Most of this money came, directly or indirectly, from Congress, and Congress felt a great need for men to advise them on how to spend it.
During the 1950's, all the great advisers had been physicists: Teller and Oppenheimer and Bruckman and Weidner. But ten years later, with more money for biology and more concern for it, a new group emerged, led by DeBakey in Houston, Farmer in Boston, Heggerman in New York, and Stone in California.
Stone's prominence was attributable to many factors: the prestige of the Nobel Prize; his political contacts; his most recent wife, the daughter of Senator Thomas Wayne of Indiana; his legal training. All this combined to assure Stone's repeated appearance before confused Senate subcommittees – and gave him the power of any trusted adviser.
It was this same power that he used so successfully to implement the research and construction leading to Wildfire.
* * *
Stone was intrigued by Merrick's ideas, which paralleled certain concepts of his own. He explained these in a short paper entitled “Sterilization of Spacecraft,” printed in Science and later reprinted in the British journal Nature. The argument stated that bacterial contamination was a two-edged sword, and that man must protect against both edges.
Previous to Stone's paper, most discussion of contamination dealt with the hazards to other planets or satellites and probes inadvertently carrying earth organisms. This problem was considered early in the American space effort; by 1959, NASA had set strict regulations for sterilization of earth origin probes.
The object of these regulations was to prevent contamination of other worlds. Clearly, if a probe were being sent to Mars or Venus to search for new life forms, it would defeat the purpose of the experiment for the probe to carry earth bacteria with it.
Stone considered the reverse situation. He stated that it was equally possible for extraterrestrial organisms to contaminate the earth via space probes. He noted that spacecraft that burned up in reentry presented no problem, but “live” returns – manned flights, and probes such as the Scoop satellites – were another matter entirely. Here, he said, the question of contamination was very great.
His paper created a brief flurry of interest but, as he later said, “nothing very spectacular.” Therefore, in 1963 he began an informal seminar group that met twice monthly in Room 410, on the top floor of the University of California Medical School biochemistry wing, for lunch and discussion of the contamination problem. It was this group of five men: Stone and John Black of Berkeley, Samuel Holden and Terence Lisset of Stanford Med, and Andrew Weiss of Stanford biophysics – that eventually formed the early nucleus of the Wildfire Project. They presented a petition to the President in 1964, in a letter consciously patterned after the Einstein letter to Roosevelt, in 1940, concerning the atomic bomb.
* * *
University of California
Berkeley, Calif.
June 10, 1964
The President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. President:
Recent theoretical considerations suggest that sterilization procedures of returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee sterile reentry to this planet's atmosphere. The consequence of this is the potential introduction of virulent organisms into the present terrestrial ecologic framework.
It is our belief that sterilization for reentry probes and manned capsules can never be wholly satisfactory. Our calculations suggest that even if capsules received sterilizing procedures in space, the probability of contamination would still remain one in ten thousand, and perhaps much more. These estimates are based upon organized life as we know it; other forms of life may be entirely resistant to our sterilizing methods.
We therefore urge the establishment of a facility designed to deal with an extraterrestrial life form, should one inadvertently be introduced to the earth. The purpose of this facility would be twofold: to limit dissemination of the life form, and to provide laboratories for its investigation and analysis, with a view to protecting earth life forms from its influence.
We recommend that such a facility be located in an uninhabited region of the United States; that it be constructed underground; that it incorporate all known isolation techniques; and that it be equipped with a nuclear device for self-destruction in the eventuality of an emergency. So far as we know, no form of life can survive the two million degrees of heat which accompany an atomic nuclear detonation.
Yours very truly,
Jeremy Stone
John Black
Samuel Holden
Terence Lisset
Andrew Weiss
* * *
Response to the letter was gratifyingly prompt. Twenty-four hours later, Stone received a call from one of the President's advisers, and the following day he flew to Washington to confer with the President and members of the National Security Council. Two weeks after that, he flew to Houston to discuss further plans with NASA officials.
Although Stone recalls one or two cracks about “the goddam penitentiary for bugs,” most scientists he talked with regarded the project favorably. Within a month, Stone's informal team was hardened into an official committee to study problems of contamination and draw up recommendations.
This committee was put on the Defense Department's Advance Research Projects List and funded through the Defense Department. At that time, the ARPL was heavily invested in chemistry and physics – ion sprays, reversal duplication, pi-meson substrates – but there was growing interest in biologic problems. Thus one ARPL group was concerned with electronic pacing of brain function (an euphemism for mind control); a second had prepared a study of biosynergics, the future possible combinations of man and machines implanted inside the body; still another was evaluating Project Ozma, the search for extraterrestrial life conducted in 1961-4. A fourth group was engaged in preliminary design of a machine that would carry out all human functions and would be self-duplicating.
All these projects were highly theoretical, and all were staffed by prestigious scientists. Admission to the ARPL was a mark of considerable status, and it ensured future funds for implementation and development.
Therefore, when Stone's committee submitted an early draft of the Life Analysis Protocol, which detailed the way any living thing could be studied, the Defense Department responded with an outright appropriation of $22,000,000 for the construction of a special isolated laboratory. (This rather large sum was felt to be justified since the project had application to other studies already under way. In 1965, the whole field of sterility and contamination was one of major importance. For example, NASA was building a Lunar Receiving Laboratory, a high-security facility for Apollo astronauts returning from the moon and possibly carrying bacteria or viruses harmful to man. Every astronaut returning from the moon would be quarantined in the LRL for three weeks, until decontamination was complete. Further, the problems of “clean rooms” of industry, where dust and bacteria were kept at a minimum, and the “sterile chambers” under study at Bethesda, were also major. Aseptic environments, “life islands,” and sterile support systems seemed to have great future significance, and Stone's appropriation was considered a good investment in all these fields.)
Once money was funded, construction proceeded rapidly. The eventual result, the Wildfire Laboratory, was built in 1966 in Flatrock, Nevada. Design was awarded to the naval architects of the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics, since GD had considerable experience designing living quarters on atomic submarines, where men had to live and work for prolonged periods.
The plan consisted of a conical underground structure with five floors. Each floor was circular, with a central service core of wiring, plumbing, and elevators. Each floor was more sterile than the one above; the first floor was non-sterile, the second moderately sterile, the third stringently sterile, and so on. Passage from one floor to another was not free; personnel had to undergo decontamination and quarantine procedures in passing either up or down.
Once the laboratory was finished, it only remained to select the Wildfire Alert team, the group of scientists who would study any new organism. After a number of studies of team composition, five men were selected, including Jeremy Stone himself. These five were prepared to mobilize immediately in the event of a biologic emergency.
Barely two years after his letter to the President, Stone was satisfied that “this country has the capability to deal with an unknown biologic agent.” He professed himself pleased with the response of Washington and the speed with which his ideas had been implemented. But privately, he admitted to friends that it had been almost too easy, that Washington had agreed to his plans almost too readily.
Stone could not have known the reasons behind Washington's eagerness, or the very real concern many government officials had for the problem. For Stone knew nothing, until the night he left the party and drove off in the blue military sedan, of Project Scoop.
* * *
“It was the fastest thing we could arrange, sir,” the Army man said.
Stone stepped onto the airplane with a sense of absurdity. It was a Boeing 727, completely empty, the seats stretching back in long unbroken rows.
“Sit, first class, if you like,” the Army man said, with a slight smile. “It doesn't matter.” A moment later he was gone. He was not replaced by a stewardess but by a stern MP with a pistol on his hip who stood by the door as the engines started, whining softly in the night.
Stone sat back with the Scoop file in front of him and began to read. It made fascinating reading; he went through it quickly, so quickly that the MP thought his passenger must be merely glancing at the file. But Stone was reading every word.
Scoop was the brainchild of Major General Thomas Sparks, head of the Army Medical Corps, Chemical and Biological Warfare Division. Sparks was responsible for the research of the CBW installations at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Harley, Indiana, and Dugway, Utah. Stone had met him once or twice, and remembered him as being mild-mannered and bespectacled. Not the sort of man to be expected in the job he held.
Reading on, Stone learned that Project Scoop was contracted to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 1963. Its avowed aim was the collection of any organisms that might exist in “near space,” the upper atmosphere of the earth. Technically speaking, it was an Army project, but it was funded through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a supposedly civilian organization. In fact, NASA was a government agency with a heavy military commitment; 43 per cent of its contractual work was classified in 1963.
In theory, JPL was designing a satellite to enter the fringes of space and collect organisms and dust for study. This was considered a project of pure science – almost curiosity – and was thus accepted by all the scientists working on the study.
In fact, the true aims were quite different.
The true aims of Scoop were to find new life forms that might benefit the Fort Detrick program. In essence, it was a study to discover new biological weapons of war.
Detrick was a rambling structure in Maryland dedicated to the discovery of chemical-and-biological-warfare weapons. Covering 1,300 acres, with a physical plant valued at $100,000,000, it ranked as one of the largest research facilities of any kind in the United States. Only 15 per cent of its findings were published in open scientific journals; the rest were classified, as were the reports from Harley and Dugway. Harley was a maximum-security installation that dealt largely with viruses. In the previous ten years, a number of new viruses had been developed there, ranging from the variety coded Carrie Nation (which produces diarrhea) to the variety coded Arnold (which causes clonic seizures and death). The Dugway Proving Ground in Utah was larger than the state of Rhode Island and was used principally to test poison gases such as Tabun, Sklar, and Kuff-11.
Few Americans, Stone knew, were aware of the magnitude of U.S. research into chemical and biological warfare. The total government expenditure in CBW exceeded half a billion dollars a year. Much of this was distributed to academic centers such as Johns Hopkins, Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, where studies of weapons systems were contracted under vague terms. Sometimes, of course, the terms were not so vague. The Johns Hopkins program was devised to evaluate “studies of actual or potential injuries and illnesses, studies on diseases of potential biological-warfare significance, and evaluation of certain chemical and immunological responses to certain toxoids and vaccines.”
In the past eight years, none of the results from Johns Hopkins had been published openly. Those from other universities, such as Chicago and UCLA, had occasionally been published, but these were considered within the military establishment to be “trial balloons” – examples of ongoing research intended to intimidate foreign observers. A classic was the paper by Tendron and five others entitled “Researches into a Toxin Which Rapidly Uncouples Oxidative Phosphorylation Through Cutaneous Absorption.”
The paper described, but did not identify, a poison that would kill a person in less than a minute and was absorbed through the skin. It was recognized that this was a relatively minor achievement compared to other toxins that had been devised in recent years.
With so much money and effort going into CBW, one might think that new and more virulent weapons would be continuously perfected. However, this was not the case from 1961 to 1965; the conclusion of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee in 1961 was that “conventional research has been less than satisfactory” and that “new avenues and approaches of inquiry” should be opened within the field.
That was precisely what Major General Thomas Sparks intended to do, with Project Scoop.
In final form, Scoop was a program to orbit seventeen satellites around the earth, collecting organisms and bringing them back to the surface. Stone read the summaries of each previous flight.
Scoop I was a gold-plated satellite, cone-shaped, weighing thirty-seven pounds fully equipped. It was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Purisima, California, on March 12, 1966. Vandenberg is used for polar (north to south) orbits, as opposed to Cape Kennedy, which launches west to east; Vandenberg had the additional advantage of maintaining better secrecy than Kennedy.
Scoop I orbited for six days before being brought down. It landed successfully in a swamp near Athens, Georgia. Unfortunately, it was found to contain only standard earth organisms.
Scoop II burned up in reentry, as a result of instrumentation failure. Scoop III also burned up, though it had a new type of plastic-and-tungsten-laminate heat shield.
Scoops IV and V were recovered intact from the Indian Ocean and the Appalachian foothills, but neither contained radically new organisms; those collected were harmless variants of S. albus, a common contaminant of normal human skin. These failures led to a further increase in sterilization procedures prior to launch.
Scoop VI was launched on New Year's Day, 1967. It incorporated all the latest refinements from earlier attempts. High hopes rode with the revised satellite, which returned eleven days later, landing near Bombay, India. Unknown to anyone, the 34th Airborne, then stationed in Evreux, France, just outside Paris, was dispatched to recover the capsule. The 34th was on alert whenever a spaceflight went up, according to the procedures of Operation Scrub, a plan first devised to protect Mercury and Gemini capsules should one be forced to land in Soviet Russia or Eastern Bloc countries. Scrub was the primary reason for keeping a single paratroop division in Western Europe in the first half of the 1960's.
Scoop VI was recovered uneventfully. It was found to contain a previously unknown form of unicellular organism, coccobacillary in shape, gram-negative, coagulase, and triokinase-positive. However, it proved generally benevolent to all living things with the exception of domestic female chickens, which it made moderately ill for a four-day period.
Among the Detrick staff, hope dimmed for the successful recovery of a pathogen from the Scoop program. Nonetheless, Scoop VII was launched soon after Scoop VI. The exact date is classified but it is believed to be February 5, 1967. Scoop VII immediately went into stable orbit with an apogee of 317 miles and a perigee of 224 miles. It remained in orbit for two and a half days. At that time, the satellite abruptly left stable orbit for unknown reasons, and it was decided to bring it down by radio command.
The anticipated landing site was a desolate area in northeastern Arizona.
* * *
Midway through the flight, his reading was interrupted by an officer who brought him a telephone and then stepped a respectful distance away while Stone talked.
“Yes?” Stone said, feeling odd. He was not accustomed to talking on the telephone in the middle of an airplane trip.
“General Marcus here,” a tired voice said. Stone did not know General Marcus. “I just wanted to inform you that all members of the team have been called in, with the exception of Professor Kirke.”
“What happened?”
“Professor Kirke is in the hospital,” General Marcus said. “You'll get further details when you touch down.”
The conversation ended; Stone gave the telephone back to the officer. He thought for a minute about the other men on the team, and wondered at their reactions as they were called out of bed.
There was Leavitt, of course. He would respond quickly. Leavitt was a clinical microbiologist, a man experienced in the treatment of infectious disease. Leavitt had seen enough plagues and epidemics in his day to know the importance of quick action. Besides, there was his ingrained pessimism, which never deserted him. (Leavitt had once said, “At my wedding, all I could think of was how much alimony she'd cost me.”) He was an irritable, grumbling, heavyset man with a morose face and sad eyes, which seemed to peer ahead into a bleak and miserable future; but he was also thoughtful, imaginative, and not afraid to think daringly.
Then there was the pathologist, Burton, in Houston. Stone had never liked Burton very well, though he acknowledged his scientific talent. Burton and Stone were different: where Stone was organized, Burton was sloppy; where Stone was controlled, Burton was impulsive; where Stone was confident, Burton was nervous, jumpy, petulant. Colleagues referred to Burton as “the Stumbler,” partly because of his tendency to trip over his untied shoelaces and baggy trouser cuffs and partly because of his talent for tumbling by error into one important discovery after another.
And then Kirke, the anthropologist from Yale, who apparently was not going to be able to come. If the report was true, Stone knew he was going to miss him. Kirke was an ill-informed and rather foppish man who possessed, as if by accident, a superbly logical brain. He was capable of grasping the essentials of a problem and manipulating them to get the necessary result; though he could not balance his own checkbook, mathematicians often came to him for help in resolving highly abstract problems.
Stone was going to miss that kind of brain. Certainly the fifth man would be no help. Stone frowned as he thought about Mark Hall. Hall had been a compromise candidate for the team; Stone would have preferred a physician with experience in metabolic disease, and the choice of a surgeon instead had been made with the greatest reluctance. There had been great pressure from Defense and the AEC to accept Hall, since those groups believed in the Odd Man Hypothesis; in the end, Stone and the others had given in.
Stone did not know Hall well; he wondered what he would say when he was informed of the alert. Stone could not have known of the great delay in notifying members of the team. He did not know, for instance, that Burton, the pathologist, was not called until five a.m., or that Peter Leavitt, the microbiologist, was not called until six thirty, the time he arrived at the hospital.
And Hall was not called until five minutes past seven.
* * *
It was, Mark Hall said later, “a horrifying experience. In an instant, I was taken from the most familiar of worlds and plunged into the most unfamiliar. “ At six forty-five, Hall was in the washroom adjacent to OR 7, scrubbing for his first case of the day. He was in the midst of a routine he had carried out daily for several years; he was relaxed and joking with the resident, scrubbing with him.
When he finished, he went into the operating room, holding his arms before him, and the instrument nurse handed him a towel, to wipe his hands dry. Also in the room was another resident, who was prepping the body for surgery – applying iodine and alcohol solutions – and a circulating nurse. They all exchanged greetings.
At the hospital, Hall was known as a swift, quick-tempered, and unpredictable surgeon. He operated with speed, working nearly twice as fast as other surgeons. When things went smoothly, he laughed and joked as he worked, kidding his assistants, the nurses, the anesthetist. But if things did not go well, if they became slow and difficult, Hall could turn blackly irritable.
Like most surgeons, he was insistent upon routine. Everything had to be done in a certain order, in a certain way. If not, he became upset.
Because the others in the operating room knew this, they looked up toward the overhead viewing gallery with apprehension when Leavitt appeared. Leavitt clicked on the intercom that connected the upstairs room to the operating room below and said, “Hello, Mark.”
Hall had been draping the patient, placing green sterile cloths over every part of the body except for the abdomen. He looked up with surprise. “Hello, Peter,” he said.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Leavitt said. “But this is an emergency.”
“Have to wait,” Hall said. “I'm starting a procedure.”
He finished draping and called for the skin knife. He palpated the abdomen, feeling for the landmarks to begin his incision.
“It can't wait,” Leavitt said.
Hall paused. He set down the scalpel and looked up. There was a long silence.
“What the hell do you mean, it can't wait?”
Leavitt remained calm. “You'll have to break scrub. This is an emergency.”
“Look, Peter, I've got a patient here. Anesthetized. Ready to go. I can't just walk –”
“Kelly will take over for you.”
Kelly was one of the staff surgeons.
“Kelly?”
“He's scrubbing now,” Leavitt said. “It's all arranged. I'll expect to meet you in the surgeon's change room. In about thirty seconds.”
And then he was gone.
Hall glared at everyone in the room. No one moved, or spoke. After a moment, he stripped off his gloves and stomped out of the room, swearing once, very loudly.
* * *
Hall viewed his own association with Wildfire as tenuous at best. In 1966 he had been approached by Leavitt, the chief of bacteriology of the hospital, who had explained in a sketchy way the purpose of the project. Hall found it all rather amusing and had agreed to join the team, if his services ever became necessary; privately, he was confident that nothing would ever come of Wildfire.
Leavitt had offered to give Hall the files on Wildfire and to keep him up to date on the project. At first, Hall politely took the files, but it soon became clear that he was not bothering to read them, and so Leavitt stopped giving them to him. If anything, this pleased Hall, who preferred not to have his desk cluttered.
A year before, Leavitt had asked him whether he wasn't curious about something that he had agreed to join and that might at some future time prove dangerous.
Hall had said, “No.”
Now, in the doctors' room, Hall regretted those words. The doctors' room was a small place, lined on all four walls with lockers; there were no windows. A large coffeemaker sat in the center of the room, with a stack of paper cups alongside. Leavitt was pouring himself a cup, his solemn, basset-hound face looking mournful.
“This is going to be awful coffee,” he said. “You can't get a decent cup anywhere in a hospital. Hurry and change.”
Hall said, “Do you mind telling me first why –”
“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 damned 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 nobody 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.
“Nobody has,” Leavitt said, “until now.”
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 passengers 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 Spaceflight Center in Houston. Earlier he had done research at the National Institutes 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 assumed 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 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 analyses 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 Autonomics Corporation)]
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 arsenic 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 clustered 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.
Over the intercom, the pilot said, “Your orders, sir?”
“Go to the center of the main street,” Stone said, “and drop the rope ladder. You are to remain twenty feet above ground. Do not put down. Is that clear?”
“Yes sir.”
“When we have climbed down, you are to lift off to an altitude of five hundred feet.”
“Yes sir.”
“Return when we signal you.”
“Yes sir.”
“And should anything happen to us –”
“I proceed directly to Wildfire,” the pilot said, his voice dry.
“Correct.”
The pilot knew what that meant. He was being paid according to the highest Air Force pay scales: he was drawing regular pay plus hazardous-duty pay, plus non-wartime special-services pay, plus mission-over-hostile-territory pay, plus bonus air-time pay. He would receive more than a thousand dollars for this day's work, and his family would receive an additional ten thousand dollars from the short-term life insurance should he not return.
There was a reason for the money: if anything happened to Burton and Stone on the ground, the pilot was ordered to fly directly to the Wildfire installation and hover thirty feet above ground until such time as the Wildfire group had determined the correct way to incinerate him, and his airplane, in midair.
He was being paid to take a risk. He had volunteered for the job. And he knew that high above, circling at twenty thousand feet, was an Air Force jet with air-to-air missiles. It was the job of the jet to shoot down the helicopter should the pilot suffer a last-minute loss of nerve and fail to go directly to Wildfire.
“Don't slip up,” the pilot said. “Sir.”
The helicopter maneuvered over the main street of the town and hung in midair. There was a rattling sound: the rope ladder being released. Stone stood and pulled on his helmet. He snapped shut the sealer and inflated his clear suit, puffing it up around him. A small bottle of oxygen on his back would provide enough air for two hours of exploration.
He waited until Burton had sealed his suit, and then Stone opened the hatch and stared down at the ground. The helicopter was raising a heavy cloud of dust.
Stone clicked on his radio. “All set?”
“All set.”
Stone began to climb down the ladder. Burton waited a moment, then followed. He could see nothing in the swirling dust, but finally felt his shoes touch the ground. He released the ladder and looked over. He could barely make out Stone's suit, a dim outline in a gloomy, dusky world.
The ladder pulled away as the helicopter lifted into the sky. The dust cleared. They could see.
“Let's go,” Stone said.
Moving clumsily in their suits, they walked down the main street of Piedmont.
SCARCELY TWELVE HOURS AFTER THE FIRST KNOWN human contact with the Andromeda Strain was made at Piedmont, Burton and Stone arrived in the town. Weeks later, in their debriefing sessions, both men recalled the scene vividly, and described it in detail.
The morning sun was still low in the sky; it was cold and cheerless, casting long shadows over the thinly snow-crusted ground. From where they stood, they could look up and down the street at the gray, weathered wooden buildings; but what they noticed first was the silence. Except for a gentle wind that whined softly through the empty houses, it was deathly silent. Bodies lay everywhere, heaped and flung across the ground in attitudes of frozen surprise.
But there was no sound – no reassuring rumble of an automobile engine, no barking dog, no shouting children.
Silence.
The two men looked at each other. They were painfully aware of how much there was to learn, to do. Some catastrophe had struck this town, and they must discover all they could about it. But they had practically no clues, no points of departure.
They knew, in fact, only two things. First, that the trouble apparently began with the landing of Scoop VII. And second, that death had overtaken the people of the town with astonishing rapidity. If it was a disease from the satellite, then it was like no other in the history of medicine.
For a long time the men said nothing, but stood in the street, looking about them, feeling the wind tug at their oversized suits. Finally, Stone said, “Why are they all outside, in the street? If this was a disease that arrived at night, most of the people would be indoors.”
“Not only that,” Burton said, “they're mostly wearing pajamas. It was a cold night last night. You'd think they would have stopped to put on a jacket, or a raincoat. Something to keep warm.”
“Maybe they were in a hurry.”
“To do what?” Burton said.
“To see something,” Stone said, with a helpless shrug.
Burton bent over the first body they came to. “Odd,” he said. “Look at the way this fellow is clutching his chest. Quite a few of them are doing that.”
Looking at the bodies, Stone saw that the hands of many were pressed to their chests, some flat, some clawing.
“They didn't seem to be in pain,” Stone said. “'Their faces are quite peaceful.”
“Almost astonished, in fact,” Burton nodded. “These people look cut down, caught in midstride. But clutching their chests.”
“Coronary?” Stone said.
“Doubt it. They should grimace – it's painful. The same with a pulmonary embolus.”
“If it was fast enough, they wouldn't have time.”
“Perhaps. But somehow I think these people died a painless death. Which means they are clutching their chests because –”
“They couldn't breathe,” Stone said.
Burton nodded. “It's possible we're seeing asphyxiation. Rapid, painless, almost instantaneous asphyxiation. But I doubt it. If a person can't breathe, the first thing he does is loosen his clothing, particularly around the neck and chest. Look at that man there – he's wearing a tie, and he hasn't touched it. And that woman with the tightly buttoned collar.”
Burton was beginning to regain his composure now, after the initial shock of the town. He was beginning to think clearly. They walked up to the van, standing in the middle of the street, its lights still shining weakly. Stone reached in to turn off the lights. He pushed the stiff body of the driver back from the wheel and read the name on the breast pocket of the parka.
“Shawn.”
The man sitting rigidly in the back of the van was a private named Crane. Both men were locked in rigor mortis. Stone nodded to the equipment in the back.
“Will that still work?”
“I think so,” Burton said.
“Then let's find the satellite. That's our first job. We can worry later about –”
He stopped. He was looking at the face of Shawn, who had obviously pitched forward hard onto the steering wheel at the moment of death. There was a large, arc-shaped cut across his face, shattering the bridge of his nose and tearing the skin.
“I don't get it,” Stone said.
“Get what?” Burton said.
“This injury. Look at it.”
“Very clean,” Burton said. “Remarkably clean, in fact. Practically no bleeding...”
Then Burton realized. He started to scratch his head in astonishment, but his hand was stopped by the plastic helmet.
“A cut like that,” he said, “on the face. Broken capillaries, shattered bone, torn scalp veins – it should bleed like hell.”
“Yes,” Stone said. “It should. And look at the other bodies. Even where the vultures have chewed at the flesh: no bleeding.”
Burton stared with increasing astonishment. None of the bodies had lost even a drop of blood. He wondered why they had not noticed it before.
“Maybe the mechanism of action of this disease –”
“Yes,” Stone said. “I think you may be right.” He grunted and dragged Shawn out of the van, working to pull the stiff body from behind the wheel. “Let's get that damned satellite,” he said. “This is really beginning to worry me.”
Burton went to the back and pulled Crane out through the rear doors, then climbed in as Stone turned the ignition. The starter turned over sluggishly, and the engine did not catch.
Stone tried to start the van for several seconds, then said, “I don't understand. The battery is low, but it should still be enough –”
“How's your gas?” Burton said.
There was a pause, and Stone swore loudly. Burton smiled, and crawled out of the back. Together they walked up the street to the gas station, found a bucket, and filled it with gas from the pump after spending several moments trying to decide how it worked. When they had the gas, they returned to the van, filled the tank, and Stone tried again.
The engine caught and held. Stone grinned. “Let's go.”
Burton scrambled into the back, turned on the electronic equipment, and started the antenna rotating. He heard the faint beeping of the satellite.
“The signal's weak, but still there. Sounds over to the left somewhere.”
Stone put the van in gear. They rumbled off, swerving around the bodies in the street. The beeping grew louder. They continued down the main street, past the gas station and the general store. The beeping suddenly grew faint.
“We've gone too far. Turn around.”
It took a while for Stone to find reverse on the gearshift, and then they doubled back, tracing the intensity of the sound. It was another fifteen minutes before they were able to locate the origin of the beeps to the north, on the outskirts of the town.
Finally, they pulled up before a plain single-story woodframe house. A sign creaked in the wind: Dr. Alan Benedict.
“Might have known,” Stone said. “They'd take it to the doctor.”
The two men climbed out of the van and went up to the house. The front door was open, banging in the breeze. They entered the living room and found it empty. Riming right, they came to the doctor's office.
Benedict was there, a pudgy, white-haired man. He was seated before his desk, with several textbooks laid open. Along one wall were bottles, syringes, pictures of his family and several others showing men in combat uniforms. One showed a group of grinning soldiers; the scrawled words: “For Benny, from the boys of 87, Anzio.”
Benedict himself was staring blankly toward a corner of the room, his eyes wide, his face peaceful.
“Well,” Burton said, “Benedict certainly didn't make it outside –”
And then they saw the satellite.
It was upright, a sleek polished cone three feet high, and its edges had been cracked and seared from the heat of reentry. It had been opened crudely, apparently with the help of a pair of pliers and chisel that lay on the floor next to the capsule.
“The bastard opened it,” Stone said. “Stupid son of a bitch.”
“How was he to know?”
“He might have asked somebody,” Stone said. He sighed. “Anyway, he knows now. And so do forty-nine other people.” He bent over the satellite and closed the gaping, triangular hatch. “You have the container?”
Burton produced the folded plastic bag and opened it out. Together they slipped it over the satellite, then sealed it shut.
“I hope to hell there's something left,” Burton said.
“In a way,” Stone said softly, “I hope there isn't.”
They turned their attention to Benedict. Stone went over to him and shook him. The man fell rigidly from his chair onto the floor.
Burton noticed the elbows, and suddenly became excited. He leaned over the body. “Come on,” he said to Stone. “Help me.”
“Do what?”
“Strip him down.”
“Why?”
“I want to check the lividity.”
“But why?”
“Just wait,” Burton said. He began unbuttoning Benedict's shirt and loosening his trousers. The two men worked silently for some moments, until the doctor's body was naked on the floor.
“There,” Burton said, standing back.
“I'll be damned,” Stone said.
There was no dependent lividity. Normally, after a person died, blood seeped to the lowest points, drawn down by gravity. A person who died in bed had a purple back from accumulated blood. But Benedict, who had died sitting up, had no blood in the tissue of his buttocks or thighs.
Or in his elbows, which had rested on the arms of the chair.
“Quite a peculiar finding,” Burton said. He glanced around the room and found a small autoclave for sterilizing instruments. Opening it, he removed a scalpel. He fitted it with a blade – carefully, so as not to puncture his airtight suit – and then turned back to the body.
“We'll take the most superficial major artery and vein,” he said.
“Which is?”
“The radial. At the wrist.”
Holding the scalpel carefully, Burton drew the blade along the skin of the inner wrist, just behind the thumb. The skin pulled back from the wound, which was completely bloodless. He exposed fat and subcutaneous tissue. There was no bleeding.
“Amazing.”
He cut deeper. There was still no bleeding from the incision. Suddenly, abruptly, he struck a vessel. Crumbling red-black material fell out onto the floor.
“I'll be damned,” Stone said again.
“Clotted solid,” Burton said.
“No wonder the people didn't bleed.”
Burton said, “Help me turn him over.” Together, they got the corpse onto its back, and Burton made a deep incision into the medial thigh, cutting down to the femoral artery and vein. Again there was no bleeding, and when they reached the artery, as thick as a man's finger, it was clotted into a firm, reddish mass.
“Incredible.”
He began another incision, this time into the chest. He exposed the ribs, then searched Dr. Benedict's office for a very sharp knife. He wanted an osteotome, but could find none. He settled for the chisel that had been used to open the capsule. Using this he broke away several ribs to expose the lungs and the heart. Again there was no bleeding.
Burton took a deep breath, then cut open the heart, slicing into the left ventricle.
The interior was filled with red, spongy material. There was no liquid blood at all.
“Clotted solid,” he said. “No question.”
“Any idea what can clot people this way?”
“The whole vascular system? Five quarts of blood? No.” Burton sat heavily in the doctor's chair and stared at the body he had just cut open. “I've never heard of anything like it. There's a thing called disseminated intravascular coagulation, but it's rare and requires all sorts of special circumstances to initiate it.”
“Could a single toxin initiate it?”
“In theory, I suppose. But in fact, there isn't a toxin in the world –”
He stopped.
“Yes,” Stone said. “I suppose that's right.”
He picked up the satellite designated Scoop VII and carried it outside to the van. When he came back, he said, “We'd better search the houses.”
“Beginning here?”
“Might as well,” Stone said.
* * *
It was Burton who found Mrs. Benedict. She was a pleasant-looking middle-aged lady sitting in a chair with a book on her lap; she seemed about to turn the page. Burton examined her briefly, then heard Stone call to him.
He walked to the other end of the house. Stone was in a small bedroom, bent over the body of a young teenage boy on the bed. It was obviously his room: psychedelic posters on the walls, model airplanes on a shelf to one side.
The boy lay on his back in bed, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. His mouth was open. In one hand, an empty tube of model-airplane cement was tightly clenched; all over the bed were empty bottles of airplane dope, paint thinner, turps.
Stone stepped back. “Have a look.”
Burton looked in the mouth, reached a finger in, touched the now-hardened mass. “Good God,” he said.
Stone was frowning. “This took time,” he said. “Regardless of what made him do it, it took time. We've obviously been oversimplifying events here. Everyone did not die instantaneously. Some people died in their homes; some got out into the street. And this kid here...”
He shook his head. “Let's check the other houses.”
On the way out, Burton returned to the doctor's office, stepping around the body of the physician. It gave him a strange feeling to see the wrist and leg sliced open, the chest exposed – but no bleeding. There was something wild and inhuman about that. As if bleeding were a sign of humanity. Well, he thought, perhaps it is. Perhaps the fact that we bleed to death makes us human.
* * *
For Stone, Piedmont was a puzzle challenging him to crack its secret. He was convinced that the town could tell him everything about the nature of the disease, its course and effects. It was only a matter of putting together the data in the proper way.
But he had to admit, as they continued their search, that the data were confusing:
* * *
A house that contained a man, his wife, and their young daughter, all sitting around the dinner table. They had apparently been relaxed and happy, and none of them had had time to push back their chairs from the table. They remained frozen in attitudes of congeniality, smiling at each other across the plates of now-rotting food, and flies. Stone noticed the flies, which buzzed softly in the room. He would, he thought, have to remember the flies.
* * *
An old woman, her hair white, her face creased. She was smiling gently as she swung from a noose tied to a ceiling rafter. The rope creaked as it rubbed against the wood of the rafter.
At her feet was an envelope. In a careful, neat, unhurried hand: “To whom it may concern.”
Stone opened the letter and read it. “The day of judgment is at hand. The earth and the waters shall open up and mankind shall be consumed. May God have mercy on my soul and upon those who have shown mercy to me. To hell with the others. Amen.”
Burton listened as the letter was read. “Crazy old lady,” he said. “Senile dementia. She saw everyone around her dying, and she went nuts.”
“And killed herself?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Pretty bizarre way to kill herself, don't you think?”
“That kid also chose a bizarre way,” Burton said.
Stone nodded.
* * *
Roy O. Thompson, who lived alone. From his greasy coveralls they assumed he ran the town gas station. Roy had apparently filled his bathtub with water, then knelt down, stuck his head in, and held it there until he died. When they found him his body was rigid, holding himself under the surface of the water; there was no one else around, and no sign of struggle.
“Impossible,” Stone said. “No one can commit suicide that way.”
* * *
Lydia Everett, a seamstress in the town, who had quietly gone out to the back yard, sat in a chair, poured gasoline over herself, and struck a match. Next to the remains of her body they found the scorched gasoline can.
* * *
William Arnold, a man of sixty sitting stiffly in a chair in the living room, wearing his World War I uniform. He had been a captain in that war, and he had become a captain again, briefly, before he shot himself through the right temple with a Colt .45. There was no blood in the room when they found him; he appeared almost ludicrous, sitting there with a clean, dry hole in his head.
A tape recorder stood alongside him, his left hand resting on the case. Burton looked at Stone questioningly, then turned it on.
A quavering, irritable voice spoke to them.
“You took your sweet time coming, didn't you? Still I am glad you have arrived at last. We are in need of reinforcements. I tell you, it's been one hell of a battle against the Hun. Lost 40 per cent last night, going over the top, and two of our officers are out with the rot. Not going well, not at all. If only Gary Cooper was here. We need men like that, the men who made America strong. I can't tell you how much it means to me, with those giants out there in the flying saucers. Now they're burning us down, and the gas is coming. You can see them die and we don't have gas masks. None at all. But I won't wait for it. I am going to do the proper thing now. I regret that I have but one life to kill for my country.”
The tape ran on, but it was silent.
Burton turned if off. “Crazy,” he said. “Stark raving mad.”
Stone nodded.
“Some of them died instantly, and the others...went quietly nuts.”
“But we seem to come back to the same basic question. Why? What was the difference?”
“Perhaps there's a graded immunity to this bug,” Burton said. “Some people are more susceptible than others. Some people are protected, at least for a time.”
“You know,” Stone said, “there was that report from the flybys, and those films of a man alive down here. One man in white robes.”
“You think he's still alive?”
“Well, I wonder,” Stone said. “Because if some people survived longer than others – long enough to dictate a taped speech, or to arrange a hanging – then you have to ask yourself if someone maybe didn't survive for a very long time. You have to ask yourself if there isn't someone in this town who is still alive.”
It was then that they heard the sound of crying.
* * *
At first it seemed like the sound of the wind, it was so high and thin and reedy, but they listened, feeling puzzled at first, and then astonished. The crying persisted, interrupted by little hacking coughs.
They ran outside.
It was faint, and difficult to localize. They ran up the street, and it seemed to grow louder; this spurred them on.
And then, abruptly, the sound stopped.
The two men came to a halt, gasping for breath, chests heaving. They stood in the middle of the hot, deserted street and looked at each other.
“Have we lost our minds?” Burton said.
“No,” Stone said. “We heard it, all right.”
They waited. It was absolutely quiet for several minutes. Burton looked down the street, at the houses, and the jeep van parked at the other end, in front of Dr. Benedict's house.
The crying began again, very loud now, a frustrated howl.
The two men ran.
It was not far, two houses up on the right side. A man and a woman lay outside, on the sidewalk, fallen and clutching their chests. They ran past them and into the house. The crying was still louder; it filled the empty rooms.
They hurried upstairs, clambering up, and came to the bedroom. A large double bed, unmade. A dresser, a mirror, a closet.
And a small crib.
They leaned over, pulling back the blankets from a small, very red-faced, very unhappy infant. The baby immediately stopped crying long enough to survey their faces, enclosed in the plastic suits.
Then it began to howl again.
“Scared hell out of it,” Burton said. “Poor thing.”
He picked it up gingerly and rocked it. The baby continued to scream. Its toothless mouth was wide open, its cheeks purple, and the veins stood out on its forehead.
“Probably hungry,” Burton said.
Stone was frowning. “It's not very old. Can't be more than a couple of months. Is it a he or a she?”
Burton unwrapped the blankets and checked the diapers. “He. And he needs to be changed. And fed.” He looked around the room. “There's probably a formula in the kitchen...”
“No,” Stone said. “We don't feed it.”
“Why not?”
“We don't do anything to that child until we get it out of this town. Maybe feeding is part of the disease process; maybe the people who weren't hit so hard or so fast were the ones who hadn't eaten recently. Maybe there's something protective about this baby's diet. Maybe...” He stopped. “But whatever it is, we can't take a chance. We've got to wait and get him into a controlled situation.”
Burton sighed. He knew that Stone was right, but he also knew that the baby hadn't been fed for at least twelve hours. No wonder the kid was crying.
Stone said, “This is a very important development. It's a major break for us, and we've got to protect it. I think we should go back immediately.”
“We haven't finished our head count.”
Stone shook his head. “Doesn't matter. We have something much more valuable than anything we could hope to find. We have a survivor.”
The baby stopped crying for a moment, stuck its finger in its mouth, and looked questioningly up at Burton. Then, when he was certain no food was forthcoming, he began to howl again.
“Too bad,” Burton said, “he can't tell us what happened.”
“I'm hoping he can,” Stone said.
* * *
They parked the van in the center of the main street, beneath the hovering helicopter, and signaled for it to descend with the ladder. Burton held the infant, and Stone held the Scoop satellite – strange trophies, Stone thought, from a very strange town. The baby was quiet now; he had finally tired of crying and was sleeping fitfully, awakening at intervals to whimper, then sleep again.
The helicopter descended, spinning up swirls of dust. Burton wrapped the blankets about the baby's face to protect him. The ladder came down and he climbed up, with difficulty.
Stone waited on the ground, standing with the capsule in the wind and dust and thumpy noise from the helicopter.
And, suddenly, he realized that he was not alone on the street. He turned, and saw a man behind him.
He was an old man, with thin gray hair and a wrinkled, worn face. He wore a long nightgown that was smudged with dirt and yellowed with dust, and his feet were bare. He stumbled and tottered toward Stone. His chest was heaving with exertion beneath the nightgown.
“Who are you?” Stone said. But he knew: the man in the pictures. The one who had been photographed by the airplane.
“You...” the man said.
“Who are you?”
“You... did it...”
“What is your name?”
“Don't hurt me... I'm not like the others...”
He was shaking with fear as he stared at Stone in his plastic suit. Stone thought, ‘We must look strange to him. Like men from Mars, men from another world.’
“Don't hurt me...”
“We won't hurt you,” Stone said. “What is your name?”
“Jackson. Peter Jackson, Sir. Please don't hurt me.”
He waved to the bodies in the street. “I'm not like the others...”
“We won't hurt you,” Stone said again.
“You hurt the others.”
“No. We didn't.”
“They're dead.”
“We had nothing –”
“You're lying,” he shouted, his eyes wide. “You're lying to me. You're not human. You're only pretending. You know I'm a sick man. You know you can pretend with me. I'm a sick man. I'm bleeding, I know. I've had this ... this ... this...”
He faltered, and then doubled over, clutching his stomach and wincing in pain.
“Are you all right?”
The man fell to the ground. He was breathing heavily, his skin pale. There was sweat on his face.
“My stomach,” he gasped. “It's my stomach.”
And then he vomited. It came up heavy, deep-red, rich with blood.
“Mr. Jackson –”
But the man was not awake. His eyes were closed and he was lying on his back. For a moment, Stone thought he was dead, but then he saw the chest moving, slowly, very slowly, but moving.
Burton came back down.
“Who is he?”
“Our wandering man. Help me get him up.”
“Is he alive?”
“So far.”
“I'll be damned,” Burton said.
* * *
They used the power winch to hoist up the unconscious body of Peter Jackson, and then lowered it again to raise the capsule. Then, slowly, Burton and Stone climbed the r into the belly of the helicopter.
They did not remove their suits, but instead clipped on a second bottle of oxygen to give them another two hours of breathing time. That would be sufficient to carry them to the Wildfire installation.
The pilot established a radio connection to Vandenberg so that Stone could talk with Major Manchek.
“What have you found?” Manchek said.
“The town is dead. We have good evidence for an unusual process at work.”
“Be careful,” Manchek said. “This is an open circuit.”
“I am aware of that. Will you order up a 7-12?”
“I'll try. You want it now?”
“Yes, now.”
“Piedmont?”
“Yes.”
“You have the satellite?”
“Yes, we have it.”
“All right,” Manchek said. “I'll put through the order.”
DIRECTIVE 7-12 WAS A PART OF THE FINAL Wildfire Protocol for action in the event of a biologic emergency. It called for the placement of a limited thermonuclear weapon at the site of exposure of terrestrial life to exogenous organisms. The code for the directive was Cautery, since the function of the bomb was to cauterize the infection – to burn it out, and thus prevent its spread.
As a single step in the Wildfire Protocol, Cautery had been agreed upon by the authorities involved – Executive, State, Defense, and AEC – after much debate. The AEC, already unhappy about the assignment of a nuclear device to the Wildfire laboratory, did not wish Cautery to be accepted as a program; State and Defense argued that any aboveground thermonuclear detonation, for whatever purpose, would have serious repercussions internationally.
The President finally agreed to Directive 7-12, but insisted that he retain control over the decision to use a bomb for Cautery. Stone was displeased with this arrangement, but he was forced to accept it; the President had been under considerable pressure to reject the whole idea and had compromised only after much argument. Then, too, there was the Hudson Institute study.
The Hudson Institute had been contracted to study possible consequences of Cautery. Their report indicated that the President would face four circumstances (scenarios) in which he might have to issue the Cautery order. According to degree of seriousness, the scenarios were:
1. A satellite or manned capsule lands in an unpopulated area of the United States. The President may cauterize the area with little domestic uproar and small loss of life. The Russians may be privately informed of the reasons for breaking the Moscow Treaty of 1963 forbidding aboveground nuclear testing.
2. A satellite or manned capsule lands in a major American city. (The example was Chicago.) The Cautery will require destruction of a large land area and a large population, with great domestic consequences and secondary international consequences.
3. A satellite or manned capsule lands in a major neutralist urban center. (New Delhi was the example.) The Cautery will entail American intervention with nuclear weapons to prevent further spread of disease. According to the scenarios, there were seventeen possible consequences of American-Soviet interaction following the destruction of New Delhi. Twelve led directly to thermonuclear war.
4. A satellite or manned capsule lands in a major Soviet urban center. (The example was Stalingrad.) Cautery will require the United States to inform the Soviet Union of what has happened and to advise that the Russians themselves destroy the city. According to the Hudson Institute scenario, there were six possible consequences of American-Russian interaction following this event, and all six led directly to war. It was therefore advised that if a satellite fell within Soviet or Eastern Bloc territory the United States not inform the Russians of what had happened. The basis of this decision was the prediction that a Russian plague would kill between two and five million people, while combined Soviet-American losses from a thermonuclear exchange involving both first and second-strike capabilities would come to more than two hundred and fifty million persons.
As a result of the Hudson Institute report, the President and his advisers felt that control of Cautery, and responsibility for it, should remain within political, not scientific, hands. The ultimate consequences of the President's decision could not, of course, have been predicted at the time it was made.
Washington came to a decision within an hour of Manchek's report. The reasoning behind the President's decision has never been clear, but the final result was plain enough:
The President elected to postpone calling Directive 7-12 for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Instead, he called out the National Guard and cordoned off the area around Piedmont for a radius of one hundred miles. And he waited.
MARK WILLIAM HALL, M.D., SAT IN THE TIGHT rear seat of the F-104 fighter and stared over the top of the rubber oxygen mask at the file on his knees. Leavitt had given it to him just before takeoff – a heavy, thick wad of paper bound in gray cardboard. Hall was supposed to read it during the flight, but the F-104 was not made for reading; there was barely enough room in front of him to hold his hands clenched together, let alone open a file and read.
Yet Hall was reading it.
On the cover of the file was stenciled WILDFIRE, and underneath, an ominous note:
THIS FILE IS CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET.
Examination by unauthorized persons is a criminal offense punishable by fines and imprisonment up to 20 years and $20,000.
When Leavitt gave him the file, Hall had read the note and whistled.
“Don't you believe it,” Leavitt said.
“Just a scare?”
“Scare, hell,” Leavitt said. “If the wrong man reads this file, he just disappears.”
“Nice.”
“Read it,” Leavitt said, “and you'll see why.”
The plane flight had taken an hour and forty minutes, cruising in eerie, perfect silence at 1.8 times the speed of sound. Hall had skimmed through most of the file; reading it, he had found, was impossible. Much of its bulk of 274 pages consisted of cross-references and interservice notations, none of which he could understand. The first page was as bad as any of them:
THIS IS PAGE 1 OF 274 PAGES
PROJECT: WILDFIRE
AUTHORITY: NASA/AMC
CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET (NTK BASIS)
PRIORITY: NATIONAL (DX)
SUBJECT: Initiation of high-security facility to prevent dispersion of toxic extraterrestrial agents.
CROSSFILE: Project CLEAN, Project ZERO CONTAMINANTS, Project CAUTERY
SUMMARY OF FILE CONTENTS:
By executive order, construction of a facility initiated January 1965. Planning stage March 1965. Consultants Fort Detrick and General Dynamics (EBD) July 1965. Recommendation for multistory facility in isolated location for investigation of possible or probable contaminatory agents. Specifications reviewed August 1965. Approval with revision same date. Final drafts drawn and filed AMC under WILDFIRE (copies Detrick, Hawkins). Choice of site northeast Montana, reviewed August 1965. Choice of site southwest Arizona, reviewed August 1965. Choice of site northwest Nevada, reviewed September 1965. Nevada site approved October 1965.
Construction completed July 1966. Funding NASA, AMC, DEFENSE (unaccountable reserves). Congressional appropriation for maintenance and personnel under same.
Major alterations: Millipore filters, see page 74. Self-destruct capacity (nuclear), page 88. Ultraviolet irradiators removed, see page 81. Single Man Hypothesis (Odd Man Hypothesis), page 255.
PERSONNEL SUMMARIES HAVE BEEN ELIMINATED FROM THIS FILE. PERSONNEL MAY BE FOUND IN AMC (WILDFIRE) FILES ONLY.
The second page listed the basic parameters of the system, as laid down by the original Wildfire planning group. This specified the most important concept of the installation, namely that it would consist of roughly similar, descending levels, all underground. Each would be more sterile than the one above.
THIS IS PAGE 2 OF 274 PAGES
PROJECT: WILDFIRE
PRIMARY PARAMETERS
1. THERE ARE TO BE FIVE STAGES:
Stage I: Non-decontaminated, but clean. Approximates sterility of hospital operating room or NASA clean room. No time delay of entrance.
Stage II: Minimal sterilization procedures: hexachlorophene and methitol bath, not requiring total immersion. One-hour delay with clothing change.
Stage III: Moderate sterilization procedures: total-immersion bath, UV irradiation, followed by two-hour delay for preliminary testing. Afebrile infections of UR and GU tracts permitted to pass. Viral symptomatology permitted to pass.
Stage IV: Maximal sterilization procedures: total immersion in four baths of biocaine, monochlorophin, xantholysin, and prophyne with intermediate thirty-minute UV and IR irradiation. All infection hafted at this stage on basis of symptomatology or clinical signs. Routine screening of all personnel. Six-hour delay.
Stage V: Redundant sterilization procedures: no further immersions or testing, but destruct clothing x2 per day. Prophylactic antibiotics for forty-eight hours. Daily screen for superinfection, first eight days.
2. EACH STAGE INCLUDES:
1. Resting quarters, individual
2. Recreation quarters, including movie and game room
3. Cafeteria, automatic
4. Library, with main journals transmitted by Xerox or TV from main library Level 1.
5. Shelter, a high-security antimicrobial complex with safety in event of level contamination.
6. Laboratories:
a) biochemistry, with all necessary equipment for automatic amino-acid analysis, sequence determination, O/R potentials, lipid and carbohydrate determinations on human, animal, other subjects.
b) pathology, with EM, phase and LM, microtomes and curing rooms. Five full-time technicians each level. One autopsy room. One room for experimental animals.
c) microbiology, with all facilities for growth, nutrient, analytic, immunologic studies. Subsections bacterial, viral, parasitic, other.
d) pharmacology, with material for dose-relation and receptor site specificity studies of known compounds. Pharmacy to include drugs as noted in appendix.
e) main room, experimental animals. 75 genetically pure strains of mice; 27 of rat; 17 of cat; 12 of dog; 8 of primate.
f) nonspecific room for previously unplanned experiments.
7. Surgery: for care and treatment of staff, including operating room facilities for acute emergencies.
8. Communications: for contact with other levels by audiovisual and other means.
COUNT YOUR PAGES
REPORT ANY MISSING PAGES AT ONCE
COUNT YOUR PAGES
As Hall continued to read, he found that only on Level 1, the topmost floor, would there be a large computer complex for data analysis, but that this computer would serve all other levels on a time-sharing basis. This was considered feasible since, for biologic problems, real time was unimportant in relation to computer time, and multiple problems could be fed and handled at once.
He was leafing through the rest of the file, looking for the part that interested him – the Odd Man Hypothesis – when he came upon a page that was rather unusual.
THIS IS PAGE 255 OF 274 PAGES
BY THE AUTHORITY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE THIS PAGE FROM A HIGH-SECURITY FILE HAS BEEN DELETED
THE PAGE IS NUMBER: two hundred fifty-five/255
THE FILE IS CODED: Wildfire
THE SUBJECT MATTER DELETED IS: Odd Man Hypothesis
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS CONSTITUTES A LEGAL DELETION FROM THE FILE WHICH NEED NOT BE REPORTED BY THE READER.
MACHINE SCORE REVIEW BELOW
Hall was frowning at the page, wondering what it meant, when the pilot said, “Dr. Hall?”
“Yes.”
“We have just passed the last checkpoint, Sir. We will touch down in four minutes.”
“All right.” Hall paused. “Do you know where, exactly, we are landing?”
“I believe,” said the pilot, “that it is Flatrock, Nevada.”
“I see,” Hall said.
A few minutes later, the flaps went down, and he heard a whine as the airplane slowed.
* * *
Nevada was the ideal site for Wildfire. The Silver State ranks seventh in size, but forty-ninth in population; it is the least-dense state in the Union after Alaska. Particularly when one considers that 85 per cent of the state's 440,000 people live in Las Vegas, Reno, or Carson City, the population density of 1.2 persons per square mile seems well suited for projects such as Wildfire, and indeed many have been located there.
Along with the famous atomic site at Vinton Flats, there is the Ultra-Energy Test Station at Martindale, and the Air Force Medivator Unit near Los Gados. Most of these facilities are in the southern triangle of the state, having been located there in the days before Las Vegas swelled to receive twenty million visitors a year. More recently, government test stations have been located in the northwest corner of Nevada, which is still relatively isolated. Pentagon classified lists include five new installations in that area; the nature of each is unknown.
HALL LANDED SHORTLY AFTER NOON, THE hottest part of the day. The sun beat down from a pale, cloudless sky and the airfield asphalt was soft under his feet as he walked from the airplane to the small quonset hut at the edge of the runway. Feeling his feet sink into the surface, Hall thought that the airfield must have been designed primarily for night use; at night it would be cold, the asphalt solid.
The quonset hut was cooled by two massive, grumbling air conditioners. It was furnished sparsely: a card table in one corner, at which two pilots sat, playing poker and drinking coffee. A guard in the corner was making a telephone call; he had a machine gun slung over his shoulder. He did not look up as Hall entered.
There was a coffee machine near the telephone. Hall went over with his pilot and they each poured a cup. Hall took a sip and said, “Where's the town, anyway? I didn't see it as we were coming in.”
“Don't know, Sir.”
“Have you been here before?”
“No Sir. It's not on the standard runs.”
“Well, what exactly does this airfield serve?”
At that moment, Leavitt strode in and beckoned to Hall. The bacteriologist led him through the back of the quonset and then out into the heat again, to a light-blue Falcon sedan parked in the rear. There were no identifying marks of any kind on the car; there was no driver. Leavitt slipped behind the wheel and motioned for Hall to get in.
As Leavitt put the car in gear, Hall said, “I guess we don't rate any more.”
“Oh yes. We rate. But drivers aren't used out here. In fact, we don't use any more personnel than we have to. The number of wagging tongues is kept to a minimum.”
They set off across desolate, hilly countryside. In the distance were blue mountains, shimmering in the liquid heat of the desert. The road was pock-marked and dusty; it looked as if it hadn't been used for years.
Hall mentioned this.
“Deceptive,” Leavitt said. “We took great pains about it. We spent nearly five thousand dollars on this road.”
“Why?”
Leavitt shrugged. “Had to get rid of the tractor treadmarks. A hell of a lot of heavy equipment has moved over these roads, at one time or another. Wouldn't want anyone to wonder why.”
“Speaking of caution,” Hall said after a pause, “I was reading in the file. Something about an atomic self-destruct device.”
“What about it?”
“It exists?”
“It exists.”
Installation of the device had been a major stumbling block in the early plans for Wildfire. Stone and the others had insisted that they retain control over the detonate/no detonate decision; the AEC and the Executive branch had been reluctant. No atomic device had been put in private hands before. Stone argued that in the event of a leak in the Wildfire lab, there might not be time to consult with Washington and get a Presidential detonate order. It was a long time before the President agreed that this might be true.
“I was reading,” Hall said, “that this device is somehow connected with the Odd Man Hypothesis.”
“It is.”
“How? The page on Odd Man was taken from my file.”
“I know,” Leavitt said. “We'll talk about it later.”
* * *
The Falcon turned off the potted road onto a dirt track. The sedan raised a heavy cloud of dust, and despite the heat, they were forced to roll up the windows. Hall lit a cigarette.
“That'll be your last,” Leavitt said.
“I know. Let me enjoy it.”
On their fight, they passed a sign that said GOVERNMENT PROPERTY KEEP OFF, but there was no fence, no guard, no dogs – just a battered, weather-beaten sign.
“Great security measures,” Hall said.
“We try not to arouse suspicion. The security is better than it looks.”
They proceeded another mile, bouncing along the dirt rut, and then came over a hill. Suddenly Hall saw a large, fenced circle perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. The fence, he noticed, was ten feet high and sturdy; at intervals it was laced with barbed wire. Inside was a utilitarian wooden building, and a field of corn.
“Corn?” Hall said.
“Rather clever, I think.”
They came to the entrance gate. A man in dungarees and a T-shirt came out and opened it for them; he held a sandwich in one hand and was chewing vigorously as he unlocked the gate. He winked and smiled and waved them through, still chewing. The sign by the gate said:
GOVERNMENT PROPERTY
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
DESERT RECLAMATION TEST STATION
Leavitt drove through the gates and parked by the wooden building. He left the keys on the dashboard and got out. Hall followed him.
“Now what?”
“Inside,” Leavitt said. They entered the building, coming directly into a small room. A man in a Stetson hat, checked sport shirt, and string tie sat at a rickety desk. He was reading a newspaper and, like the man at the gate, eating his lunch. He looked up and smiled pleasantly.
“Howdy,” he said.
“Hello,” Leavitt said.
“Help you folks?”
“Just passing through,” Leavitt said. “On the way to Rome.”
The man nodded. “Have you got the time?”
“My watch stopped yesterday,” Leavitt said.
“Durn shame,” the man said.
“It's because of the heat.”
The ritual completed, the man nodded again. And they walked past him, out of the anteroom and down a corridor. The doors had hand-printed labels: “Seedling Incubation”; “Moisture Control”; “Soil Analysis.” A half-dozen people were at work in the building, all of them dressed casually, but all of them apparently busy.
“This is a real agricultural station,” Leavitt said. “If necessary, that man at the desk could give you a guided tour, explaining the purpose of the station and the experiments that are going on. Mostly they are attempting to develop a strain of corn that can grow in low-moisture, high-alkalinity soil.”
“And the Wildfire installation?”
“Here,” Leavitt said. He opened a door marked “Storage” and they found themselves staring at a narrow cubicle lined with rakes and hoes and watering hoses.
“Step in,” Leavitt said.
Hall did. Leavitt followed and closed the door behind him. Hall felt the floor sink and they began to descend, rakes and hoses and all.
In a moment, he found himself in a modern, bare room, lighted by banks of cold overhead fluorescent lights. The walls were painted red. The only object in the room was a rectangular, waist-high box that reminded Hall of a podium. It had a glowing green glass top.
“Step up to the analyzer,” Leavitt said. “Place your hands flat on the glass, palms down.”
Hall did. He felt a faint tingling in his fingers, and then the machine gave a buzz.
“All right. Step back.” Leavitt placed his hands on the box, waited for the buzz, and then said, “Now we go over here. You mentioned the security arrangements; I'll show them to you before we enter Wildfire.”
He nodded to a door across the room.
“What was that thing?”
“Finger and palm-print analyzer,” Leavitt said. “It is fully automatic. Reads a composite of ten thousand dermatographic lines so it can't make a mistake; in its storage banks it has a record of the prints of everyone cleared to enter Wildfire.”
Leavitt pushed through the door.
They were faced with another door, marked SECURITY, which slid back noiselessly. They entered a darkened room in which a single man sat before banks of green dials.
“Hello, John,” Leavitt said to the man. “How are you?”
“Good, Dr. Leavitt. Saw you come in.”
Leavitt introduced Hall to the security man, who then demonstrated the equipment to Hall. There were, the man explained, two radar scanners located in the hills overlooking the installation; they were well concealed but quite effective. Then closer in, impedance sensors were buried in the ground; they signaled the approach of any animal life weighing more than one hundred pounds. The sensors ringed the base.
“We've never missed anything yet,” the man said. “And if we do...” He shrugged. To Leavitt: “Going to show him the dogs?”
“Yes,” Leavitt said.
They walked through into an adjoining room. There were nine large cages there, and the room smelled strongly of animals. Hall found himself looking at nine of the largest German shepherds he had ever seen.
They barked at him as he entered, but there was no sound in the room. He watched in astonishment as they opened their mouths and threw their heads forward in a barking motion.
No sound.
“These are Army-trained sentry dogs,” the security man said. “Bred for viciousness. You wear leather clothes and heavy gloves when you walk them. They've undergone laryngectomies, which is why you can't hear them. Silent and vicious.”
Hall said, “Have you ever, uh, used them?”
“No,” the security man said. “Fortunately not.”
* * *
They were in a small room with lockers. Hall found one with his name on it.
“We change in here,” Leavitt said. He nodded to a stack of pink uniforms in one corner. “Put those on, after you have removed everything you are wearing.”
Hall changed quickly. The uniforms were loose-fitting one-piece suits that zipped up the side. When they had changed they proceeded down a passageway.
Suddenly an alarm sounded and a gate in front of them slid closed abruptly. Overhead, a white light began to flash. Hall was confused, and it was only much later that he remembered Leavitt looked away from the flashing light.
“Something's wrong,” Leavitt said. “Did you remove everything?”
“Yes,” Hall said.
“Rings, watch, everything?”
Hall looked at his hands. He still had his watch on.
“Go back,” Leavitt said. “Put it in your locker.”
Hall did. When he came back, they started down the corridor a second time. The gate remained open, and there was no alarm.
“Automatic as well?” Hall said.
“Yes,” Leavitt said. “It picks up any foreign object. When we installed it, we were worried because we knew it would pick up glass eyes, cardiac pacemakers, false teeth – anything at all. But fortunately nobody on the project has these things.”
“Fillings?”
“It is programmed to ignore fillings.”
“How does it work?”
“Some kind of capacitance phenomenon. I don't really understand it,” Leavitt said.
They passed a sign that said:
YOU ARE NOW ENTERING LEVEL I – PROCEED DIRECTLY TO IMMUNIZATION CONTROL
Hall noticed that all the walls were red. He mentioned this to Leavitt.
“Yes,” Leavitt said. “All levels are painted a different color. Level I is red; II, yellow; III, white; IV, green; and V, blue.”
“Any particular reason for the choice?”
“It seems,” Leavitt said, “that the Navy sponsored some studies a few years back on the psychological effects of colored environments. Those studies have been applied here.”
They came to Immunization. A door slid back revealing three glass booths. Leavitt said, “Just sit down in one of them.”
“I suppose this is automatic, too?”
“Of course.”
Hall entered a booth and closed the door behind him. There was a couch, and a mass of complex equipment. In front of the couch was a television screen, which showed several lighted points.
“Sit down,” said a flat mechanical voice. “Sit down. Sit down.”
He sat on the couch.
“Observe the screen before you. Place your body on the couch so that all points are obliterated.”
He looked at the screen. He now saw that the points were arranged in the shape of a man.
He shifted his body, and one by one the spots disappeared. “Very good,” said the voice. “We may now proceed. State your name for the record. Last name first, first name last.”
“Mark Hall,” he said.
“State your name for the record. Last name first, first name last.”
Simultaneously, on the screen appeared the words:
SUBJECT HAS GIVEN UNCODABLE RESPONSE
“Hall, Mark.”
“Thank you for your cooperation,” said the voice. “Please recite, ‘Mary had a little lamb.’ ”
“You're kidding,” Hall said.
There was a pause, and the faint sound of relays and circuits clicking. The screen again showed:
SUBJECT HAS GIVEN UNCODABLE RESPONSE
“Please recite.”
Feeling rather foolish, Hall said, “Mary had a little lamb, her fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.”
Another pause. Then the voice: “Thank you for your cooperation.” And the screen said:
ANALYZER CONFIRMS IDENTITY
HALL, MARK
“Please listen closely,” said the mechanical voice. “You will answer the following questions with a yes or no reply. Make no other response. Have you received a smallpox vaccination within the last twelve months?”
“Yes.”
“Diphtheria?”
“Yes.”
“Typhoid and paratyphoid A and B?”
“Yes.”
“Tetanus toxoid?”
“Yes.”
“Yellow fever?”
“Yes, yes, yes. I had them all.”
“Just answer the question please. Uncooperative subjects waste valuable computer time.”
“Yes,” Hall said, subdued. When he had joined the Wildfire team, he had undergone immunizations for everything imaginable, even plague and cholera, which had to be renewed every six months, and gamma-globulin shots for viral infection.
“Have you ever contracted tuberculosis or other mycobacterial disease, or had a positive skin test for tuberculosis?”
“No.”
“Have you ever contracted syphilis or other spirochetal disease, or had a positive serological test for syphilis?”
“No.”
“Have you contracted within the past year any gram-positive bacterial infection, such as streptococcus, staphylococcus, or pneumococcus?”
“No.”
“Any gram-negative infection, such as gonococcus, meningeococcus, proteus, pseudomonas, salmonella, or shigella?”
“No.”
“Have you contracted any recent or past fungal infection, including blastomycosis, histoplasmosis, or coccidiomycosis, or had a positive skin test for any fungal disease?”
“No.”
“Have you had any recent viral infection, including poliomyelitis, hepatitis, mononucleosis, mumps, measles, varicella, or herpes?”
“No.”
“Any warts?”
“No.”
“Have you any known allergies?”
“Yes, to ragweed pollen.”
On the screen appeared the words:
ROGEEN PALEN
And then after a moment:
UNCODABLE RESPONSE
“Please repeat your response slowly for our memory cells.” Very distinctly, he said, “Ragweed pollen.” On the screen:
RAGWEED POLLEN
CODED
“Are you allergic to albumen?” continued the voice.
“No.”
“This ends the formal questions. Please undress and return to the couch, obliterating the points as before.”
He did so. A moment later, an ultraviolet lamp swung out on a long arm and moved close to his body. Next to the lamp was some kind of scanning eye. Watching the screen he could see the computer print of the scan, beginning with his feet.
....................................................................
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.................................................IIIIIIIII..........
.................................................IIIIIIIII..........
.......................................IIIIIIII..IIIIIIIII..........
..............................IIIIIII..IIIIIIII..IIIIIIIII..........
..............................IIIIIII..IIIIIIII..IIIIIIIII..........
.....................IIIII....IIIIIII..IIIIIIII..IIIIIIIII..........
....................IIIIIII...IIIIIII..IIIIIIII..IIIIIIIII..........
.....................IIIIIII..IIIIIII..IIIIIIII..IIIIIIIII..........
...............IIII...IIIIII..IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII..........
..............IIIIII...IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII..........
...............IIIIIII.IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII..........
................IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII.........
.................IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII........
..................IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII........
...................IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII........
....................IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII........
....................IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII........
....................IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII.........
....................IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII.........
“This is a scan for fungus,” the voice announced. After several minutes, Hall was ordered to lie on his stomach, and the process was repeated. He was then told to lie on his back once more and align himself with the dots.
“Physical parameters will now be measured,” the voice said. “You are requested to lie quietly while the examination is conducted.”
A variety of leads snaked out at him and were attached by mechanical hands to his body. Some he could understand: the half-dozen leads over his chest for an electrocardiogram, and twenty-one on his head for an electroencephalogram. But others were fixed on his stomach, his arms, and his legs.
“Please raise your left hand,” said the voice.
Hall did. From above, a mechanical hand came down, with an electric eye fixed on either side of it. The mechanical hand examined Hall's.
“Place your hand on the board to the left. Do not move. You will feel a slight prick as the intravenous needle is inserted.”
Hall looked over at the screen. It flashed a color image of his hand, with the veins showing in a pattern of green against a blue background. Obviously the machine worked by sensing heat. He was about to protest when he felt a brief sting.
He looked back. The needle was in.
“Now then, just lie quietly. Relax.”
For fifteen seconds, the machinery whirred and clattered. Then the leads were withdrawn. The mechanical hands placed a neat Band-Aid over the intravenous puncture.
“This completes your physical parameters,” the voice said.
“Can I get dressed now?”
“Please sit up with your right shoulder facing the television screen. You will receive pneumatic injections.”
A gun with a thick cable came out of one wall, pressed up against the skin of his shoulder, and fired. There was a hissing sound and a brief pain.
“Now you may dress,” said the voice. “Be advised that you may feel dizzy for a few hours. You have received booster immunizations and gamma G. If you feel dizzy, sit down. If you suffer systemic effects such as nausea, vomiting, or fever, report at once to Level Control. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“The exit is to your right. Thank you for your cooperation. This recording is now ended.”
* * *
Hall walked with Leavitt down a long red corridor. His arm ached from the injection.
“That machine,” Hall said. “You'd better not let the AMA find out about it.”
“We haven't,” Leavitt said.
In fact, the electronic body analyzer had been developed by Sandeman Industries in 1965, under a general government contract to produce body monitors for astronauts in space. It was understood by the government at that time that such a device, though expensive at a cost of $87,000 each, would eventually replace the human physician as a diagnostic instrument. The difficulties, for both doctor and patient, of adjusting to this new machine were recognized by everyone. The government did not plan to release the EBA until 1971 and then only to certain large hospital facilities.
Walking along the corridor, Hall noticed that the walls were slightly curved.
“Where exactly are we?”
“On the perimeter of Level 1. To our left are all the laboratories. To the right is nothing but solid rock.”
Several people were walking in the corridor. Everyone wore pink jumpsuits. They all seemed serious and busy.
“Where are the others on the team?” Hall said.
“Right here,” Leavitt said. He opened a door marked CONFERENCE 7, and they entered a room with a large hardwood table. Stone was there, standing stiffly erect and alert, as if he had just taken a cold shower. Alongside him, Burton, the pathologist, somehow appeared sloppy and confused, and there was a kind of tired fright in his eyes.
They all exchanged greetings and sat down. Stone reached into his pocket and removed two keys. One was silver, the other red. The red one had a chain attached to it. He gave it to Hall.
“Put it around your neck,” he said.
Hall looked at it. “What's this?”
Leavitt said, “I'm afraid Mark is still unclear about the Odd Man.”
“I thought that he would read it on the plane.”
“His file was edited.”
“I see.” Stone turned to Hall. “You know nothing about the Odd Man?”
“Nothing,” Hall said, frowning at the key.
“Nobody told you that a major factor in your selection to the team was your single status?”
“What does that have to do –”
“The fact of the matter is,” Stone said, “that you are the Odd Man. You are the key to all this. Quite literally.”
He took his own key and walked to a corner of the room. He pushed a hidden button and the wood paneling slid away to reveal a burnished metal console. He inserted his key into a lock and twisted it. A green light on the console flashed on; he stepped back. The paneling slid into place.
“At the lowest level of this laboratory is an automatic atomic self-destruct device,” Stone said. “It is controlled from within the laboratory. I have just inserted my key and armed the mechanism. The device is ready for detonation. The key on this level cannot be removed; it is now locked in place. Your key, on the other hand, can be inserted and removed again. There is a three-minute delay between the time detonation locks in and the time the bomb goes off. That period is to provide you time to think, and perhaps call it all off.”
Hall was still frowning. “But why me?”
“Because you are single. We have to have one unmarried man.”
Stone opened a briefcase and withdrew a file. He gave it to Hall. “Read that.”
It was a Wildfire file.
“Page 255,” Stone said.
Hall turned to it.
* * *
Project: Wildfire
ALTERATIONS
1. Millipore(R) Filters, insertion into ventilatory system. Initial spec filters unilayer styrilene, with maximal efficiency of 97.4% trapping. Replaced in 1966 when Upjohn developed filters capable of trapping organisms of size up to one micron. Trapping at 90% efficiency per leaf, causing triple-layered membrance to give results of 99.9%. Infective ratio of .1% remainder too low to be harmful. Cost factor of four or five-layered membrance removing all but .001% considered prohibitive for added gain. Tolerance parameter of 1/1,000 considered sufficient. Installation completed 8/12/66.
2. Atomic Self-Destruct Device, change in detonator close-gap timers. See AEC/Def file 77-12-0918.
3. Atomic Self-Destruct Device, revision of core maintenance schedules for K technicians, see AEC/Warburg file 77-14-0004.
4. Atomic Self-Destruct Device, final command decision change. See AEC/Def file 77-14-0023. SUMMARY APPENDED.
SUMMARY OF ODD MAN HYPOTHESIS: First tested as null hypothesis by Wildfire advisory committee. Grew out of tests conducted by USAF (NORAD) to determine reliability of commanders in making life/death decisions. Tests involved decisions in ten scenario contexts, with prestructured alternatives drawn up by Walter Reed Psychiatric Division, after n-order test analysis by biostatistics unit, NIH, Bethesda.
Test given to SAC pilots and groundcrews, NORAD workers, and others involved in decision-making or positive-action capacity. Ten scenarios drawn up by Hudson Institute; subjects required – to make YES/NO decision in each case. Decisions always involved thermonuclear or chem-biol destruction of enemy targets.
Data on 7420 subjects tested by H1H2 program for multifactorial analysis of variance; later test by ANOVAR program; final discrimination by CLASSIF program. NIH biostat summarizes this program as follows:
It is the object of this program to determine the effectiveness of assigning individuals to distinct groups on the basis of scores which can be quantified. The program produces group contours and probability of classification for individuals as a control of data.
Program prints: mean scores for groups, contour confidence limits, and scores of individual test subjects.
K.G. Borgrand, Ph.D. NIH
RESULTS OF ODD MAN STUDY: The study concluded that married individuals performed differently from single individuals on several parameters of the test. Hudson Institute provided mean answers, i.e. theoretical “right” decisions, made by computer on basis of data given in scenario. Conformance of study groups to these right answers produced an index of effectiveness, a measure of the extent to which correct decisions were made.
Group: |
Index of Effectiveness |
Married males: |
.343 |
Married females: |
.399 |
Single females: |
.402 |
Single males: |
.824 |
The data indicate that married men choose the correct decision only once in three times, while single men choose correctly four out of five times. The group of single males was then broken down further, in search of highly accurate subgroups within that classification. Results of special testing confirm the Odd Man Hypothesis, that an unmarried male should carry out command decisions involving thermonuclear or chem-biol destruct contexts.
Subgroup: | Index of Effectiveness |
|
Single males, total: | .824 |
|
Military: | ||
commissioned officer: | .655 |
|
noncommissioned officer: | .624 |
|
Technical: | ||
engineers: | .877 |
|
ground crews: | .901 |
|
Service: | ||
maintenance and utility: | .758 |
|
Professional: | ||
Scientists: | .946 |
These results concerning the relative skill of decision-making individuals should not be interpreted hastily. Although it would appear that janitors are better decision makers than generals, the situation is in reality more complex. PRINTED SCORES ARE SUMMATIONS OF TEST AND INDIVIDUAL VARIATIONS. DATA MUST BE INTERPRETED WITH THIS IN MIND. Failure to do so may lead to totally erroneous and dangerous assumptions.
Application of study to Wildfire command personnel conducted at request of AEC at time of implantation of self-destruct nuclear capacity. Test given to all Wildfire personnel; results filed under CLASSIF WILDFIRE: GENERAL PERSONNEL (see ref. 77-14-0023). Special testing for command group.
Name: | Index of Effectiveness |
|
Burton: | .543 |
|
Leavitt: | .601 |
|
Kirke: | .614 |
|
Stone: | .687 |
|
Hall: | .899 |
Results of special testing confirm the Odd Man Hypothesis, that an unmarried male should carry out command decisions involving thermonuclear or chem-biol destruct contexts.
* * *
When Hall had finished reading, he said, “It's crazy.”
“Nonetheless,” Stone said, “it was the only way we could get the government to put control of the weapon in our hands.”
“You really expect me to put in my key, and fire that thing?”
“I'm afraid you don't understand,” Stone said. “The detonation mechanism is automatic. Should breakthrough of the organism occur, with contamination of all Level V, detonation will take place within three minutes unless you lock in your key, and call it off.”
“Oh,” Hall said, in a quiet voice.
A BELL RANG SOMEWHERE ON THE LEVEL; STONE glanced up at the wall clock. It was late. He began the formal briefing, talking rapidly, pacing up and down the room, hands moving constantly.
“As you know,” he said, “we are on the top level of a five-story underground structure. According to protocol it will take us nearly twenty-four hours to descend through the sterilization and decontamination procedures to the lowest level. Therefore we must begin immediately. The capsule is already on its way.”
He pressed a button on a console at the head of the table, and a television screen glowed to life, showing the coneshaped satellite in a plastic bag, making its descent. It was being cradled by mechanical hands.
“The central core of this circular building,” Stone said, “contains elevators and service units – plumbing, wiring, that sort of thing. That is where you see the capsule now. It will be deposited shortly in a maximum-sterilization assembly on the lowest level.”
He went on to explain that he had brought back two other surprises from Piedmont. The screen shifted to show Peter Jackson, lying on a litter, with intravenous lines running into both arms.
“This man apparently survived the night. He was the one walking around when the planes flew over, and he was still alive this morning.”
“What's his status now?”
“Uncertain,” Stone said. “He is unconscious, and he was vomiting blood earlier today. We've started intravenous dextrose to keep him fed and hydrated until we can get down to the bottom.”
Stone flicked a button and the screen showed the baby. It was howling, strapped down to a tiny bed. An intravenous bottle was running into a vein in the scalp.
“This little fellow also survived last night,” Stone said. “So we brought him along. We couldn't really leave him, since a Directive 7-12 was being called. The town is now destroyed by a nuclear blast. Besides, he and Jackson are living clues which may help us unravel this mess.”
Then, for the benefit of Hall and Leavitt, the two men disclosed what they had seen and learned at Piedmont. They reviewed the findings of rapid death, the bizarre suicides, the clotted arteries and the lack of bleeding.
Hall listened in astonishment. Leavitt sat shaking his head.
When they were through, Stone said, “Questions?”
“None that won't keep,” Leavitt said.
“Then let's get started,” Stone said.
* * *
They began at a door, which said in plain white letters: TO LEVEL II. It was an innocuous, straightforward, almost mundane sign. Hall had expected something more – perhaps a stern guard with a machine gun, or a sentry to check passes. But there was nothing, and he noticed that no one had badges, or clearance cards of any kind.
He mentioned this to Stone. “Yes,” Stone said. “We decided against badges early on. They are easily contaminated and difficult to sterilize; usually they are plastic and high-heat sterilization melts them.”
The four men passed through the door, which clanged shut heavily and sealed with a hissing sound. It was airtight. Hall faced a tiled room, empty except for a hamper marked ‘clothing’. He unzipped his jumpsuit and dropped it into the hamper; there was a brief flash of light as it was incinerated.
Then, looking back, he saw that on the door through which he had come was a sign: “Return to Level I is NOT Possible Through this Access.”
He shrugged. The other men were already moving through the second door, marked simply EXIT. He followed them and stepped into clouds of steam. The odor was peculiar, a faint woodsy smell that he guessed was scented disinfectant. He sat down on a bench and relaxed, allowing the steam to envelop him. It was easy enough to understand the purpose of the steam room: the heat opened the pores, and the steam would be inhaled into the lungs.
The four men waited, saying little, until their bodies were coated with a sheen of moisture, and then walked into the next room.
Leavitt said to Hall, “What do you think of this?”
“It's like a goddam Roman bath,” Hall said.
The next room contained a shallow tub (“Immerse Feet ONLY”) and a shower. (“Do not swallow shower solution. Avoid undue exposure to eyes and mucous membranes.”) It was all very intimidating. He tried to guess what the solutions were by smell, but failed; the shower was slippery, though, which meant it was alkaline. He asked Leavitt about this, and Leavitt said the solution was alpha chlorophin at pH 7.7. Leavitt said that whenever possible, acidic and alkaline solutions were alternated.
“When you think about it,” Leavitt said, “we've faced up to quite a planning problem here. How to disinfect the human body – one of the dirtiest things in the known universe – without killing the person at the same time. Interesting.”
He wandered off. Dripping wet from the shower, Hall looked around for a towel but found none. He entered the next room and blowers turned on from the ceiling in a rush of hot air. From the sides of the room, UV lights clicked on, bathing the room in an intense purple light. He stood there until a buzzer sounded, and the dryers turned off. His skin tingled slightly as he entered the last room, which contained clothing. They were not jumpsuits, but rather like surgical uniforms – light-yellow, a loose-fitting top with a V-neck and short sleeves; elastic banded pants; low rubber-soled shoes, quite comfortable, like ballet slippers.
The cloth was soft, some kind of synthetic. He dressed and stepped with the others through a door marked EXIT TO LEVEL II. He entered the elevator and waited as it descended.
Hall emerged to find himself in a corridor. The walls here were painted yellow, not red as they had been on Level I. The people wore yellow uniforms. A nurse by the elevator said, “The time is 2:47 p.m., gentlemen. You may continue your descent in one hour.”
They went to a small room marked INTERIM CONFINEMENT. It contained a half-dozen couches with plastic disposable covers over them.
Stone said, “Better relax. Sleep if you can. We'll need all the rest we can get before Level V.” He walked over to Hall. “How did you find the decontamination procedure?”
“Interesting,” Hall said. “You could sell it to the Swedes and make a fortune. But somehow I expected something more rigorous.”
“Just wait,” Stone said. “It gets tougher as you go. Physicals on Levels III and IV. Afterward there will be a brief conference.”
Then Stone lay down on one of the couches and fell instantly asleep. It was a trick he had learned years before, when he had been conducting experiments around the clock. He learned to squeeze in an hour here, two hours there. He found it useful.
* * *
The second decontamination procedure was similar to the first. Hall's yellow clothing, though he had worn it just an hour, was incinerated.
“Isn't that rather wasteful?” he asked Burton.
Burton shrugged. “It's paper.”
“Paper? That cloth?”
Burton shook his head. “Not cloth. Paper. New process.”
They stepped into the first total-immersion pool. Instructions on the wall told Hall to keep his eyes open under water. Total immersion, he soon discovered, was guaranteed by the simple device of making the connection between the first room and the second an underwater passage. Swimming through, he felt a slight burning of his eyes, but nothing bad.
The second room contained a row of six boxes, glass-walled, looking rather like telephone booths. Hall approached one and saw a sign that said, “Enter and close both eyes. Hold arms slightly away from body and stand with feet one foot apart. Do not open eyes until buzzer sounds. BLINDNESS MAY RESULT FROM EXPOSURE TO LONG-WAVE RADIATION.”
He followed the directions and felt a kind of cold heat on his body. It lasted perhaps five minutes, and then he heard the buzzer and opened his eyes. His body was dry. He followed the others to a corridor, consisting of four showers. Walking down the corridor, he passed beneath each shower in turn. At the end, he found blowers, which dried him, and then clothing. This time the clothing was white.
They dressed, and took the elevator down to Level III.
* * *
There were four nurses waiting for them; one took Hall to an examining room. It turned out to be a two-hour physical examination, given not by a machine but by a blank-faced, thorough young man. Hall was annoyed, and thought to himself that he preferred the machine.
The doctor did everything, including a complete history birth, education, travel, family history, past hospitalizations and illnesses. And an equally complete physical. Hall became angry; it was all so damned unnecessary. But the doctor shrugged and kept saying, “It's routine.”
After two hours, he rejoined the others, and proceeded to Level IV.
* * *
Four total-immersion baths, three sequences of ultraviolet and infrared light, two of ultrasonic vibrations, and then something quite astonishing at the end. A steel-walled cubicle, with a helmet on a peg. The sign said, “This is an ultraflash apparatus. To protect head and facial hair, place metal helmet securely on head, then press button below.”
Hall had never heard of ultraflash, and he followed directions, not knowing what to expect. He placed the helmet over his head, then pressed the button.
There was a single, brief, dazzling burst of white light, followed by a wave of heat that filled the cubicle. He felt a moment of pain, so swift he hardly recognized it until it was over. Cautiously, he removed the helmet and looked at his body. His skin was covered with a fine, white ash – and then he realized that the ash was his skin, or had been: the machine had burned away the outer epithelial layers. He proceeded to a shower and washed the ash off. When he finally reached the dressing room, he found green uniforms.
* * *
Another physical. This time they wanted samples of everything: sputum, oral epithelium, blood, urine, stool. He submitted passively to the tests, examinations, questions. He was tired, and was beginning to feel disoriented. The repetitions, the new experiences, the colors on the walls, the same bland artificial light...
Finally, he was brought back to Stone and the others. Stone said, “We have six hours on this level – that's protocol, waiting while they do the lab tests on us – so we might as well sleep. Down the corridor are rooms, marked with your names. Further down is the cafeteria. We'll meet there in five hours for a conference. Right?”
Hall found his room, marked with a plastic door tag. He entered, surprised to find it quite large. He had been expecting something the size of a Pullman cubicle, but this was bigger and better-furnished. There was a bed, a chair, a small desk, and a computer console with built-in TV set. He was curious about the computer, but also very tired. He lay down on the bed and fell asleep quickly.
* * *
Burton could not sleep. He lay in his bed on Level IV and stared at the ceiling, thinking. He could not get the image of that town out of his mind, of those bodies, lying in the street without bleeding...
Burton was not a hematologist, but his work had involved some blood studies. He knew that a variety of bacteria had effects on blood. His own research with staphylococcus, for example, had shown that this organism produced two enzymes that altered blood.
One was the so-called exotoxin, which destroyed skin and dissolved red cells. Another was a coagulase, which coated the bacteria with protein to inhibit destruction by white cells.
So it was possible that bacteria could alter blood. And it could do it many different ways: strep produced an enzyme, streptokinase, that dissolved coagulated plasma. Clostridia and pneumococci produced a variety of hemolysins that destroyed red cells. Malaria and amebae also destroyed red cells, by digesting them as food. Other parasites did the same thing.
So it was possible.
But it didn't help them in finding out how the Scoop organism worked.
Burton tried to recall the sequence for blood clotting. He remembered that it operated like a kind of waterfall: one enzyme was set off, and activated, which acted on a second enzyme, which acted on a third; the third on a fourth; and so on, down through twelve or thirteen steps, until finally blood clotted.
And vaguely he remembered the rest, the details: all the intermediate steps, the necessary enzymes, the metals, ions, local factors. It was horribly complex.
He shook his head and tried to sleep.
* * *
Leavitt, the clinical microbiologist, was thinking through the steps in isolation and identification of the causative organism. He had been over it before; he was one of the original founders of the group, one of the men who developed the Life Analysis Protocol. But now, on the verge of putting that plan into effect, he had doubts.
Two years before, sitting around after lunch, talking speculatively, it had all seemed wonderful. It had been an amusing intellectual game then, a kind of abstract test of wits. But now, faced with a real agent that caused real and bizarre death, he wondered whether all their plans would prove to be so effective and so complete as they once thought.
The first steps were simple enough. They would examine the capsule minutely and culture everything onto growth media. They would be hoping like hell to come up with an organism that they could work with, experiment on, and identify.
And after that, attempt to find out how it attacked. There was already the suggestion that it killed by clotting the blood; if that turned out to be the case, they had a good start, but if not, they might waste valuable time following it up.
The example of cholera came to mind. For centuries, men had known that cholera was a fatal disease, and that it caused severe diarrhea, sometimes producing as much as thirty quarts of fluid a day. Men knew this, but they somehow assumed that the lethal effects of the disease were unrelated to the diarrhea; they searched for something else: an antidote, a drug, a way to kill the organism. It was not until modern times that cholera was recognized as a disease that killed through dehydration primarily; if you could replace a victim's water losses rapidly, he would survive the infection without other drugs or treatment.
Cure the symptoms, cure the disease.
But Leavitt wondered about the Scoop organism. Could they cure the disease by treating the blood clotting? Or was the clotting secondary to some more serious, disorder?
There was also another concern, a nagging fear that had bothered him since the earliest planning stages of Wildfire. In those early meetings, Leavitt had argued that the Wildfire team might be committing extraterrestrial murder.
Leavitt had pointed out that all men, no matter how scientifically objective, had several built-in biases when discussing life. One was the assumption that complex life was larger than simple life. It was certainly true on the earth. As organisms became more intelligent, they grew larger, passing from the single-celled stage to multicellular creatures, and then to larger animals with differentiated cells working in groups called organs. On earth, the trend had been toward larger and more complex animals.
But this might not be true elsewhere in the universe. In other places, life might progress in the opposite direction – toward smaller and smaller forms. Just as modern human technology had learned to make things smaller, perhaps highly advanced evolutionary pressures led to smaller life forms. There were distinct advantages to smaller forms: less consumption of raw materials, cheaper spaceflight, fewer feeding problems...
Perhaps the most intelligent life form on a distant planet was no larger than a flea. Perhaps no larger than a bacterium. In that case, the Wildfire Project might be committed to destroying a highly developed life form, without ever realizing what it was doing.
This concept was not unique to Leavitt. It had been proposed by Merton at Harvard, and by Chalmers at Oxford. Chalmers, a man with a keen sense of humor, had used the example of a man looking down on a microscope slide and see in the bacteria formed into the words “Take us to your leader.” Everyone thought Chalmers's idea highly amusing.
Yet Leavitt could not get it out of his mind. Because it just might turn out to be true.
* * *
Before he fell asleep, Stone thought about the conference coming up. And the business of the meteorite. He wondered what Nagy would say, or Karp, if they knew about the meteorite.
Probably, he thought, it would drive them insane. Probably it will drive us all insane.
And then he slept.
* * *
Delta sector was the designation of three rooms on Level I that contained all communications facilities for the Wildfire installation. All intercom and visual circuits between levels were routed through there, as were cables for telephone and teletype from the outside. The trunk lines to the library and the central storage unit were also regulated by delta sector.
In essence it functioned as a giant switchboard, fully computerized. The three rooms of delta sector were quiet; all that could be heard was the soft hum of spinning tape drums and the muted clicking of relays. Only one person worked here, a single man sitting at a console, surrounded by the blinking lights of the computer.
There was no real reason for the man to be there; he performed no necessary function. The computers were self-regulating, constructed to run check patterns through their circuits every twelve minutes; the computers shut down automatically if there was an abnormal reading.
According to protocol, the man was required to monitor MCN communications, which were signaled by the ringing of a bell on the teleprinter. When the bell rang, he notified the five level command centers that the transmission was received. He was also required to report any computer dysfunction to Level I command, should that unlikely event occur.
“TIME TO WAKE UP, SIR.”
Mark Hall opened his eyes. The room was lit with a steady, pale fluorescent light. He blinked and rolled over on his stomach.
“Time to wake up, Sir.”
It was a beautiful female voice, soft and seductive. He sat up in bed and looked around the room: he was alone.
“Hello?”
“Time to wake up, Sir.”
“Who are you?”
“Time to wake up, Sir.”
He reached over and pushed a button on the nightstand by his bed. A light went off. He waited for the voice again, but it did not speak.
It was, he thought, a hell of an effective way to wake a man up. As he slipped into his clothes, he wondered how it worked. It was not a simple tape, because it worked as a response of some sort. The message was repeated only when Hall spoke.
To test his theory, he pushed the nightstand button again. The voice said softly, “Do you wish something, Sir?”
“I'd like to know your name, please.”
“Will that be all, Sir?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“Will that be all, Sir?”
He waited. The light clicked off. He slipped into his shoes and was about to leave when a male voice said, “This is the answering-service supervisor, Dr. Hall. I wish you would treat the project more seriously.”
Hall laughed. So the voice responded to comments, and taped his replies. It was a clever system.
“Sorry,” he said, “I wasn't sure how the thing worked. The voice is quite luscious.”
“The voice,” said the supervisor heavily, “belongs to Miss Gladys Stevens, who is sixty-three years old. She lives in Omaha and makes her living taping messages for SAC crews and other voice-reminder systems.”
“Oh,” Hall said.
He left the room and walked down the corridor to the cafeteria. As he walked, he began to understand why submarine designers had been called in to plan Wildfire. Without his wristwatch, he had no idea of the time, or even whether it was night or day. He found himself wondering whether the cafeteria would be crowded, wondering whether it was dinner time or breakfast time.
As it turned out, the cafeteria was almost deserted. Leavitt was there; he said the others were in the conference room. He pushed a glass of dark-brown liquid over to Hall and suggested he have breakfast.
“What's this?” Hall said.
“Forty-two-five nutrient. It has everything needed to sustain the average seventy-kilogram man for eighteen hours.”
Hall drank the liquid, which was syrupy and artificially flavored to taste like orange juice. It was a strange sensation, drinking brown orange juice, but not bad after the initial shock. Leavitt explained that it had been developed for the astronauts, and that it contained everything except air-soluble vitamins.
“For that, you need this pill,” he said.
Hall swallowed the pill, then got himself a cup of coffee from a dispenser in the corner. “Any sugar?”
Leavitt shook his head. “No sugar anywhere here. Nothing that might provide a bacterial growth medium. From now on, we're all on high-protein diets. We'll make all the sugar we need from the protein breakdown. But we won't be getting any sugar into the gut. Quite the opposite.”
He reached into his pocket.
“Oh, no.”
“Yes,” Leavitt said. He gave him a small capsule, sealed in aluminum foil.
“No,” Hall said.
“Everyone else has them. Broad-spectrum. Stop by your room and insert it before you go into the final decontamination procedures.”
“I don't mind dunking myself in all those foul baths,” Hall said. “I don't mind being irradiated. But I'll be goddammed –”
“The idea,” Leavitt said, “is that you be as nearly sterile as possible on Level V. We have sterilized your skin and mucous membranes of the respiratory tract as best we can. But we haven't done a thing about the GI tract yet.”
“Yes,” Hall said, “but suppositories?”
“You'll get used to it. We're all taking them for the first four days. Not, of course, that they'll do any good,” he said, with the familiar wry, pessimistic look on his face. He stood. “Let's go to the conference room. Stone wants to talk about Karp.”
“Who?”
“Rudolph Karp.”
* * *
Rudolph Karp was a Hungarian-born biochemist who came to the United States from England in 1951. He obtained a position at the University of Michigan and worked steadily and quietly for five years. Then, at the suggestion of colleagues at the Ann Arbor observatory, Karp began to investigate meteorites with the intent of determining whether they harbored life, or showed evidence of having done so in the past. He took the proposal quite seriously and worked with diligence, writing no papers on the subject until the early 1960's, when Calvin and Vaughn and Nagy and others were writing explosive papers on similar subjects.
The arguments and counter-arguments were complex, but boiled down to a simple substrate: whenever a worker would announce that he had found a fossil, or a proteinaceous hydrocarbon, or other indication of life within a meteorite, the critics would claim sloppy lab technique and contamination with earth-origin matter and organisms.
Karp, with his careful, slow techniques, was determined to end the arguments once and for all. He announced that he had taken great pains to avoid contamination: each meteorite he examined had been washed in twelve solutions, including peroxide, iodine, hypertonic saline and dilute acids. It was then exposed to intense ultraviolet light for a period of two days. Finally, it was submerged in a germicidal solution and placed in a germ-free, sterile isolation chamber; further work was done within the chamber.
Karp, upon breaking open his meteorites, was able to isolate bacteria. He found that they were ring-shaped organisms, rather like a tiny undulating inner tube, and he found they could grow and multiply. He claimed that, while they were essentially similar to earthly bacteria in structure, being based upon proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids, they had no cell nucleus and therefore their manner of propagation was a mystery.
Karp presented his information in his usual quiet, unsensational manner, and hoped for a good reception. He did not receive one; instead, he was laughed down by the Seventh Conference of Astrophysics and Geophysics, meeting in London in 1961. He became discouraged and set his work with meteorites aside; the organisms were later destroyed in an accidental laboratory explosion on the night of June 27, 1963.
Karp's experience was almost identical to that of Nagy and the others. Scientists in the 1960's were not willing to entertain notions of life existing in meteorites; all evidence presented was discounted, dismissed, and ignored.
A handful of people in a dozen countries remained intrigued, however. One of them was Jeremy Stone; another was Peter Leavitt. It was Leavitt who, some years before, had formulated the Rule of 48. The Rule of 48 was intended as a humorous reminder to scientists, and referred to the massive literature collected in the late 1940's and the 1950's concerning the human chromosome number.
For years it was stated that men had forty-eight chromosomes in their cells; there were pictures to prove it, and any number of careful studies. In 1953, a group of American researchers announced to the world that the human chromosome number was forty-six. Once more, there were pictures to prove it, and studies to confirm it. But these researchers also went back to reexamine the old pictures, and the old studies – and found only forty-six chromosomes, not forty-eight.
Leavitt's Rule of 48 said simply, “All Scientists Are Blind.” And Leavitt had invoked his rule when he saw the reception Karp and others received. Leavitt went over the reports and the papers and found no reason to reject the meteorite studies out of hand; many of the experiments were careful, well-reasoned, and compelling.
He remembered this when he and the other Wildfire planners drew up the study known as the Vector Three. Along with the Toxic Five, it formed one of the firm theoretical bases for Wildfire.
The Vector Three was a report that considered a crucial question: If a bacterium invaded the earth, causing a new disease, where would that bacterium come from?
After consultation with astronomers and evolutionary theories, the Wildfire group concluded that bacteria could come from three sources.
The first was the most obvious – an organism, from another planet or galaxy, which had the protection to survive the extremes of temperature and vacuum that existed in space. There was no doubt that organisms could survive – there was, for instance, a class of bacteria known as thermophilic that thrived on extreme heat, multiplying enthusiastically in temperatures as high as 70°C. Further, it was known that bacteria had been recovered from Egyptian tombs, where they had been sealed for thousands of years. These bacteria were still viable.
The secret lay in the bacteria's ability to form spores, molding a hard calcific shell around themselves. This shell enabled the organism to survive freezing or boiling, and, if necessary, thousands of years without food. It combined all the advantages of a space suit with those of suspended animation.
There was no doubt that a spore could travel through space. But was another planet or galaxy the most likely source of contamination for the earth?
Here, the answer was no. The most likely source was the closest source – the earth itself.
The report suggested that bacteria could have left the surface of the earth eons ago, when life was just beginning to emerge from the oceans and the hot, baked continents. Such bacteria would depart before the fishes, before the primitive mammals, long before the first ape-man. The bacteria would head up into the air, and slowly ascend until they were literally in space. Once there, they might evolve into unusual forms, perhaps even learning to derive energy for life directly from the sun, instead of requiring food as an energy source. These organisms might also be capable of direct conversion of energy to matter.
Leavitt himself suggested the analogy of the upper atmosphere and the depths of the sea as equally inhospitable environments, but equally viable. In the deepest, blackest regions of the oceans, where oxygenation was poor, and where light never reached, life forms were known to exist in abundance. Why not also in the far reaches of the atmosphere? True, oxygen was scarce. True, food hardly existed. But if creatures could live miles beneath the surface, why could they not also live five miles above it?
And if there were organisms out there, and if they had departed from the baking crust of the earth long before the first men appeared, then they would be foreign to man. No immunity, no adaptation, no antibodies would have been developed. They would be primitive aliens to modern man, in the same way that the shark, a primitive fish unchanged for a hundred million years, was alien and dangerous to modern man, invading the oceans for the first time.
The third source of contamination, the third of the vectors, was at the same time the most likely and the most troublesome. This was contemporary earth organisms, taken into space by inadequately sterilized spacecraft. Once in space, the organisms would be exposed to harsh radiation, weightlessness, and other environmental forces that might exert a mutagenic effect, altering the organisms.
So that when they came down, they would be different.
Take up a harmless bacteria – such as the organism that causes pimples, or sore throats – and bring it back in a new form, virulent and unexpected. It might do anything. It might show a preference for the aqueous humor of the inner eye, and invade the eyeball. It might thrive on the acid secretions of the stomach. It might multiply on the small currents of electricity afforded by the human brain itself, drive men mad.
This whole idea of mutated bacteria seemed farfetched and unlikely to the Wildfire people. It is ironic that this should be the case, particularly in view of what happened to the Andromeda Strain. But the Wildfire team staunchly ignored both the evidence of their own experience – that bacteria mutate rapidly and radically – and the evidence of the Biosatellite tests, in which a series of earth forms were sent into space and later recovered.
Biosatellite II contained, among other things, several species of bacteria. It was later reported that the bacteria had reproduced at a rate twenty to thirty times normal. The reasons were still unclear, but the results unequivocal: space could affect reproduction and growth.
And yet no one in Wildfire paid attention to this fact, until it was too late.
* * *
Stone reviewed the information quickly, then handed each of them a cardboard file. “These files,” he said, “contain a transcript of autoclock records of the entire flight of Scoop VII. Our purpose in reviewing the transcript is to determine, if possible, what happened to the satellite while it was in orbit.”
Hall said, “Something happened to it?”
Leavitt explained. “The satellite was scheduled for a six-day orbit, since the probability of collecting organisms is proportional to time in orbit. After launch, it was in stable orbit. Then, on the second day, it went out of orbit.
Hall nodded.
“Start,” Stone said, “with the first page.”
Hall opened his file.
AUTOCLOCK TRANSCRIPT
PROJECT: SCOOP VII
LAUNCHDATE:
ABRIDGED VERSION. FULL TRANSCRIPT
STORED VAULTS 179-99,
VDBG COMPLEX EPSILON.
HOURS | MIN | SEC | PROCEDURE |
T MINUS TIME | |||
0002 | 01 | 05 | Vandenberg Launch pad Block 9, Scoop Mission Control, reports systems check on schedule. |
0001 | 39 | 52 | Scoop MC holds for fuel check reported from Ground Control. |
STOP CLOCK STOP CLOCK. REALTIME LOSS 12 MINUTES. | |||
0001 | 39 | 52 | Count resumed. Clock corrected. |
0000 | 41 | 12 | Scoop MC holds 20 seconds for Launch pad Block 9 check. Clock not stopped for built-in hold. |
0000 | 30 | 00 | Gantry removed. |
0000 | 24 | 00 | Final craft systems check. |
0000 | 19 | 00 | Final capsule systems check. |
0000 | 13 | 00 | Final systems checks read as negative. |
0000 | 07 | 12 | Cable decoupling. |
0000 | 01 | 07 | Stat-link decoupling. |
0000 | 00 | 05 | Ignition. |
0000 | 00 | 04 | Launch pad Block 9 clears all systems. |
0000 | 00 | 00 | Core clamps released. Launch. |
T PLUS TIME | |||
0000 | 00 | 06 | Stable. Speed 6 fps. Smooth EV approach. |
0000 | 00 | 09 | Tracking reported. |
0000 | 00 | 11 | Tracking confirmed. |
0000 | 00 | 27 | Capsule monitors at g 1.9. Equipment check clear. |
0000 | 01 | 00 | Launch pad Block 9 clears rocket and capsule systems for orbit. |
“No point in dwelling on this,” Stone said. “It is the record of a perfect launch. There is nothing here, in fact, nothing for the next ninety-six hours of flight, to indicate any difficulty on board the spacecraft. Now turn to page 10.”
They all turned.
TRACK TRANSCRIPT CONT'D
SCOOP VII
LAUNCHDATE:
ABRIDGED VERSION
HOURS | MIN | SEC | PROCEDURE |
0096 | 10 | 12 | Orbital check stable as reported by Grand Bahama Station. |
0096 | 34 | 19 | Orbital check stable as reported by Sydney. |
0096 | 47 | 34 | Orbital check stable as reported by Vdbg. |
0097 | 04 | 12 | Orbital check stable but system malfunction reported by Kennedy Station. |
0097 | 05 | 18 | Malfunction confirmed. |
0097 | 07 | 22 | Malfunction confirmed by Grand Bahama. Computer reports orbital instability. |
0097 | 34 | 54 | Sydney reports orbital instability. |
0097 | 39 | 02 | Vandenberg computations indicate orbital decay. |
0098 | 27 | 14 | Vandenberg Scoop Mission Control orders radio reentry. |
0099 | 12 | 56 | Reentry code transmitted. |
0099 | 13 | 13 | Houston reports initiation of reentry. Stabilized flight path. |
“What about voice communication during the critical period?”
“There were linkups between Sydney, Kennedy, and Grand Bahama, all routed through Houston. Houston had the big computer as well. But in this instance, Houston was just helping out; all decisions came from Scoop Mission Control in Vandenberg. We have the voice communication at the back of the file. It's quite revealing.”
TRANSCRIPT OF VOICE COMMUNICATIONS SCOOP MISSION CONTROL VANDENBERG AFB HOURS 0096:59 TO 0097:39
THIS IS A CLASSIFIED TRANSCRIPT.
IT HAS NOT BEEN ABRIDGED OR EDITED.
HOURS | MIN | SEC | COMMUNICATION |
0096 | 59 | 00 | HELLO KENNEDY THIS IS SCOOP MISSION CONTROL. AT THE END OF 96 HOURS OF FLIGHT TIME WE HAVE STABLE ORBITS FROM ALL STATIONS. DO YOU CONFIRM. |
0097 | 00 | 00 | I think we do, Scoop. Our check is going through now. Hold this line open for a few minutes, fellows. |
0097 | 03 | 31 | Hello, Scoop MC. This is Kennedy. We have a stable orbit confirmation for you on the last passby. Sorry about the delay but there is an instrument snag somewhere here. |
0097 | 03 | 34 | KENNEDY PLEASE CLARIFY. IS YOUR SNAG ON THE GROUND OR ALOFT. |
0097 | 03 | 39 | I am sorry we have no tracer yet. We think it is on the ground. |
0097 | 04 | 12 | Hello, Scoop MC. This is Kennedy. We have a preliminary report of system malfunction aboard your spacecraft. Repeat we have a preliminary report of malfunction in the air. Awaiting confirmation. |
0097 | 04 | 15 | KENNEDY PLEASE CLARIFY SYSTEM INVOLVED. |
0097 | 04 | 18 | I'm sorry they haven't given me that. I assume they are waiting for final confirmation of the malfunction. |
0097 | 04 | 21 | DOES YOUR ORBITAL CHECK AS STABLE STILL-HOLD. |
0097 | 04 | 22 | Vandenberg, we have confirmed your orbital check as stable. Repeat the orbit is stable. |
0097 | 05 | 18 | Ah, Vandenberg, I am afraid we also confirm readings consistent with system malfunction on board your spacecraft. These include the stationary rotor elements and spanner units going to mark twelve. I repeat mark twelve. |
0097 | 05 | 30 | HAVE YOU RUN CONSISTENCY CHECK ON YOUR COMPUTERS. |
0097 | 05 | 35 | Sorry fellows but our computers check out. We read it as a real malfunction. |
0097 | 05 | 45 | HELLO, HOUSTON. OPEN THE LINE TO SYDNEY, WILL YOU. WE WANT CONFIRMATION OF DATA. |
0097 | 05 | 51 | Scoop Mission Control, This is Sydney Station. We confirm our last reading. There was nothing wrong with the spacecraft on its last passby here. |
0097 | 06 | 12 | OUR COMPUTER CHECK INDICATES NO SYSTEMS MALFUNCTION AND GOOD ORBITAL STABILITY ON SUMMATED DATA. WE QUESTION KENNEDY GROUND INSTRUMENT FAILURE. |
0097 | 06 | 18 | This is Kennedy, Scoop MC. We have run repeat checkouts at this end. Our reading of system malfunction remains. Have you got something from Bahama. |
0097 | 06 | 23 | NEGATIVE, KENNEDY. STANDING BY. |
0097 | 06 | 36 | HOUSTON, THIS IS SCOOP MC. CAN YOUR PROJECTION GROUP GIVE US ANYTHING. |
0097 | 06 | 46 | Scoop, at this time we cannot. Our computers have insufficient data. They still read stable orbit with all systems going. |
0097 | 07 | 22 | Scoop MC, this is Grand Bahama Station. We report passby of your craft Scoop Seven according to schedule. Preliminary radar fixes were normal with question of increased transit times. Please hold for systems telemetry. |
0097 | 07 | 25 | HOLDING, GRAND BAHAMA. |
0097 | 07 | 29 | Scoop MC, we are sorry to say we confirm Kennedy observations, Repeat, we confirm Kennedy observations of systems malfunction. Our data are on the trunk to Houston. Can they be routed to you as well. station. |
0097 | 07 | 34 | NO, WE WILL WAIT FOR HOUSTON'S PRINTOUT. THEY HAVE LARGER PREDICTIVE BANKING UNITS. |
0097 | 07 | 36 | Scoop MC, Houston has the Bahama Data. It is going through the Dispar Program. Give us ten seconds. |
0097 | 07 | 47 | Scoop MC, this is Houston. The Dispar Program confirms systems malfunction. Your vehicle is now in unstable orbit with increased transit time of zero point three seconds per unit of arc. We are analyzing orbital parameters at this time. Is there anything further you wish as interpreted data. |
0097 | 07 | 59 | NO, HOUSTON. SOUNDS LIKE YOU'RE DOING BEAUTIFULLY. |
0097 | 08 | 10 | Sorry, Scoop. Bad break. |
0097 | 08 | 18 | GET US THE DECAY RATIOS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. COMMAND WISHES TO MAKE A DECISION ON INSTRUMENTATION TAKEDOWN WITHIN THE NEXT TWO ORBITS. |
0097 | 08 | 32 | Understand, Scoop. Our condolences here. |
0097 | 11 | 35 | Scoop, Houston Projection Group has confirmed orbital instability and decay ratios are now being passed by the data trunk to your station. |
0097 | 11 | 44 | HOW DO THEY LOOK, HOUSTON. |
0097 | 11 | 51 | Bad. |
0097 | 11 | 59 | NOT UNDERSTOOD. PLEASE REPEAT. |
0097 | 12 | 07 | Bad: B as in broken, A as in awful, D as in dropping. |
0097 | 12 | 15 | HOUSTON, DO YOU HAVE A CAUSATION. THAT SATELLITE HAS BEEN IN EXCELLENT ORBIT FOR NEARLY ONE HUNDRED HOURS. WHAT HAPPENED TO IT. |
0097 | 12 | 29 | Beats us. We wonder about collision. There is a good wobble component to the new orbit. |
0097 | 12 | 44 | HOUSTON, OUR COMPUTERS ARE WORKING THROUGH THE TRANSMITTED DATA. WE AGREE A COLLISION. HAVE YOU GUYS GOT SOMETHING IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD. |
0097 | 13 | 01 | Air Force Skywatch confirms our report that we have nothing around your baby, Scoop. |
0097 | 13 | 50 | HOUSTON, OUR COMPUTERS ARE READING THIS AS A RANDOM EVENT. PROBABILITIES GREATER THAN ZERO POINT SEVEN NINE. |
0097 | 15 | 00 | We can add nothing. Looks reasonable. Are you going to bring it down. |
0097 | 15 | 15 | WE ARE HOLDING ON THAT DECISION, HOUSTON. WE WILL NOTIFY AS SOON AS IT IS MADE. |
0097 | 17 | 54 | HOUSTON, OUR COMMAND GROUP HAS RAISED THE QUESTION OF WHETHER*************************. |
0097 | 17 | 59 | [reply from Houston deleted] |
0097 | 18 | 43 | [Scoop query to Houston deleted] |
0097 | 19 | 03 | [reply from Houston deleted] |
0097 | 19 | 11 | AGREE, HOUSTON. WE WILL MAKE OUR DECISION AS SOON AS WE HAVE FINAL CONFIRMATION OF ORBITAL SHUTDOWN FROM SYDNEY. IS THIS ACCEPTABLE. |
0097 | 19 | 50 | Perfectly, Scoop. We are standing by. |
0097 | 24 | 32 | HOUSTON, WE ARE REWORKING OUR DATA AND NO LONGER CONSIDER THAT********IS LIKELY. |
0097 | 24 | 39 | Roger, Scoop. |
0097 | 29 | 13 | HOUSTON, WE ARE STANDING BY FOR SYDNEY. |
0097 | 34 | 54 | Scoop Mission Control, this is Sydney Station. We have just followed the passby of your vehicle. Our initial readings confirm a prolonged transit time. It is quite striking at this time. |
0097 | 35 | 12 | THANK YOU, SYDNEY. |
0097 | 35 | 22 | Bit of nasty luck, Scoop. Sorry. |
0097 | 39 | 02 | THIS IS SCOOP MISSION CONTROL TO ALL STATIONS. OUR COMPUTERS HAVE JUST CALCULATED THE ORBITAL DECAY FOR THE VEHICLE AND WE FIND IT TO BE COMING DOWN AS A PLUS FOUR. STANDBY FOR THE FINAL DECISION AS TO WHEN WE WILL BRING IT DOWN. |
Hall said, “What about the deleted passages?”
“Major Manchek at Vandenberg told me,” Stone said, “that they had to do with the Russian craft in the area. The two stations eventually concluded that the Russians had not, either accidentally or purposely, brought down the Scoop satellite. No one has since suggested differently.”
They nodded.
“It's tempting,” Stone said. “The Air Force maintains a watchdog facility in Kentucky that tracks all satellites in earth orbit. It has a dual function, both to follow old satellites known to be in orbit and to track new ones. There are twelve satellites in orbit at this time that cannot be accounted for; in other words, they are not ours, and are not the result of announced Soviet launches. It is thought that some of these represent navigation satellites for Soviet submarines. Others are presumed to be spy satellites. But the important thing is that Russian or not, there are a hell of a lot of satellites up there. As of last Friday, the Air Force reported five hundred and eighty-seven orbiting bodies around the earth. This includes some old, nonfunctioning satellites from the American Explorer series and the Russian Sputnik series. It also includes boosters and final stages – anything in stable orbit large enough to reflect back a radar beam.”
“That's a lot of satellites.”
“Yes, and there are probably many more. The Air Force thinks there is a lot of junk out there – nuts, bolts, scraps of metal – all in more or less stable orbit. No orbit, as you know, is completely stable. Without frequent corrections, any satellite will eventually decay out and spiral down to earth, burning up in the atmosphere. But that may be years, even decades, after the launch. In any event, the Air Force estimates that the total number of individual orbiting objects could be anything up to seventy-five thousand.”
“So a collision with a piece of junk is possible.”
“Yes. Possible.”
“How about a meteor?”
“That is the other possibility, and the one Vandenberg favors. A random event, most likely a meteor.”
“Any showers these days?”
“None, apparently. But that does not rule out a meteor collision.”
Leavitt cleared his throat. “There is still another possibility.”
Stone frowned. He knew that Leavitt was imaginative, and that this trait was both a strength and a defect. At times, Leavitt could be startling and exciting; at others, merely irritating. “It's rather farfetched,” Stone said, “to postulate debris from some extragalactic source other than –”
“I agree,” Leavitt said. “Hopelessly farfetched. No evidence for it whatever. But I don't think we can afford to ignore the possibility.”
A gong sounded softly. A lush female voice, which Hall now recognized as that of Gladys Stevens of Omaha, said softly, “You may proceed to the next level, gentlemen.”
LEVEL V WAS PAINTED A QUIET SHADE OF BLUE, AND they all wore blue uniforms. Burton showed Hall around.
“This floor,” he said, “is like all the others. It's circular. Arranged in a series of concentric circles, actually. We're on the outer perimeter now; this is where we live and work. Cafeteria, sleeping rooms, everything is out here. Just inside is a ring of laboratories. And inside that, sealed off from us, is the central core. That's where the satellite and the two people are now.”
“But they're sealed off from us?”
“Yes.”
“Then how do we get to them?”
“Have you ever used a glove box?” Burton asked.
Hall shook his head.
Burton explained that glove boxes were large clear plastic boxes used to handle sterile materials. The boxes had holes cut in the sides, and gloves attached with an airtight seal. To handle the contents, you slipped your hands into the gloves and reached into the box. But your fingers never touched the material, only the gloves.
“We've gone one step further,” Burton said. “We have whole rooms that are nothing more than glorified glove boxes. Instead of a glove for your hand, there's a whole plastic suit, for your entire body. You'll see what I mean.”
They walked down the curved corridor to a room marked CENTRAL CONTROL. Leavitt and Stone were there, working quietly. Central Control was a cramped room, stuffed with electronic equipment. One wall was glass, allowing the tails, were considered particularly trying. Many a scientist workers to look into the adjacent room.
Through the glass, Hall saw mechanical hands moving the capsule to a table and setting it down. Hall, who had never seen a capsule before, watched with interest. It was smaller than he had imagined, no more than a yard long; one end was seared and blackened from the heat of reentry.
The mechanical hands, under Stone's direction, opened the little scoop-shaped trough in the side of the capsule to expose the interior.
“There,” Stone said, taking his hands from the controls. The controls looked like a pair of brass knuckles; the operator slipped his own hands into them and moved his hands as he wanted the mechanical hands to move.
“Our next step,” he said, “is to determine whether there is still anything in the capsule which is biologically active. Suggestions?”
“A rat,” Leavitt said. “Use a black Norway.”
The black Norway rat was not black at all; the name simply designated a strain of laboratory animal, perhaps the most famous strain in all science. Once, of course, it had been both black and Norwegian; but years of breeding and countless generations had made it white, small, and docile. The biological explosion had created a demand for genetically uniform animals. In the last thirty years more than a thousand strains of “pure” animals had been evolved artificially. In the case of the black Norwegian, it was now possible for a scientist anywhere in the world to conduct experiments using this animal and be assured that other scientists elsewhere could repeat or enlarge upon his work using virtually identical organisms.
“Follow with a rhesus,” Burton said. “We will want to get onto primates sooner or later.”
The others nodded. Wildfire was prepared to conduct experiments with monkeys and apes, as well as smaller, cheaper animals. A monkey was exceedingly difficult to work with: the little primates were hostile, quick, intelligent. Among scientists, the New World monkeys, with their prehensile tails, were considered particularly trying. Many scientists had engaged three or four lab assistants to hold down a monkey while he administered an injection – only to have the prehensile tail whip up, grasp the syringe, and fling it across the room.
The theory behind primate experimentation was that these animals were closer biologically to man. In the 1950's, several laboratories even attempted experiments on gorillas, going to great trouble and expense to work with these seemingly most human of animals. However, by 1960 it had been demonstrated that of the apes, the chimpanzee was biochemically more like man than the gorilla. (On the basis of similarity to man, the choice of laboratory animals is often surprising. For example, the hamster is preferred for immunological and cancer studies, since his responses are so similar to man's, while for studies of the heart and circulation, the pig is considered most like man.)
Stone put his hands back on the controls, moving them gently. Through the glass, they saw the black metal fingers move to the far wall of the adjoining room, where several caged lab animals were kept, separated from the room by hinged airtight doors. The wall reminded Hall oddly of an automat.
The mechanical hands opened one door and removed a rat in its cage, brought it into the room, and set it down next to the capsule. The rat looked around the room, sniffed the air, and made some stretching movements with its neck. A moment later it flopped over onto its side, kicked once, and was still.
It had happened with astonishing speed. Hall could hardly believe it had happened at all.
“My God,” Stone said. “What a time course.”
“That will make it difficult,” Leavitt said.
Burton said, “We can try tracers...”
“Yes. We'll have to use tracers on it,” Stone said. “How fast are our scans?”
“Milliseconds, if necessary.”
“It will be necessary.”
“Try the rhesus,” Burton said. “You'll want a post on it, anyway.”
Stone directed the mechanical hands back to the wall, opening another door and withdrawing a cage containing a large brown adult rhesus monkey. The monkey screeched as it was lifted and banged against the bars of its cage.
Then it died, after flinging one hand to its chest with a look of startled surprise.
Stone shook his head. “Well, at least we know it's still biologically active. Whatever killed everyone in Piedmont is still there, and still as potent as ever.” He sighed. “If potent is the word.”
Leavitt said, “We'd better start a scan of the capsule.”
“I'll take these dead animals,” Burton said, “and run the initial vector studies. Then I'll autopsy them.”
Stone worked the mechanical hands once more. He picked up the cages that held the rat and monkey and set them on a rubber conveyor belt at the rear of the room. Then he pressed a button on a control console marked AUTOPSY. The conveyor belt began to move.
Burton left the room, walking down the corridor to the autopsy room, knowing that the conveyor belt, made to carry materials from one lab to another, would have automatically delivered the cages.
Stone said to Hall, “You're the practicing physician among us. I'm afraid you've got a rather tough job right now.”
“Pediatrician and geriatrist?”
“Exactly. See what you can do about them. They're both in our miscellaneous room, the room we built precisely for unusual circumstances like this. There's a computer linkup there that should help you. The technician will show you how it works.”
HALL OPENED THE DOOR MARKED MISCELLANEOUS, thinking to himself that his job was indeed miscellaneous – keeping alive an old man and a tiny infant. Both of them vital to the project, and both of them, no doubt, difficult to manage.
He found himself in another small room similar to the control room he had just left. This one also had a glass window, looking inward to a central room. In the room were two beds, and on the beds, Peter Jackson and the infant. But the incredible thing was the suits: standing upright in the room were four clear plastic inflated suits in the shape of men. From each suit, a tunnel ran back to the wall.
Obviously, one would have to crawl down the tunnel and then stand up inside the suit. Then one could work with the patients inside the room.
The girl who was to be his assistant was working in the room, bent over the computer console. She introduced herself as Karen Anson, and explained the working of the computer.
“This is just one substation of the Wildfire computer on the first level,” she said. “There are thirty substations throughout the laboratory, all plugging into the computer. Thirty different people can work at once.”
Hall nodded. Time-sharing was a concept he understood. He knew that as many as two hundred people had been able to use the same computer at once; the principle was that computers operated very swiftly – in fractions of a second while people operated slowly, in seconds or minutes. One person using a computer was inefficient, because it took several minutes to punch in instructions, while the computer sat around idle, waiting. Once instructions were fed in, the computer answered almost instantaneously. This meant that a computer was rarely “working,” and by permitting a number of people to ask questions of the computer simultaneously, you could keep the machine more continuously in operation.
“If the computer is really backed up,” the technician said, “there may be a delay of one or two seconds before you get your answer. But usually it's immediate. What we are using here is the MEDCOM program. Do you know it?”
Hall shook his head.
“It's a medical-data analyzer,” she said. “You feed in information and it will diagnose the patient and tell you what to do next for therapy, or to confirm the diagnosis.”
“Sounds very convenient.”
“It's fast,” she said. “All our lab studies are done by automated machines. So we can have complex diagnoses in a matter of minutes.”
Hall looked through the glass at the two patients. “What's been done on them so far?”
“Nothing. At Level I, they were started on intravenous infusions. Plasma for Peter Jackson, dextrose and water for the baby. They both seem well hydrated now, and in no distress. Jackson is still unconscious. He has no pupillary signs but is unresponsive and looks anemic.”
Hall nodded. “The labs here can do everything?”
“Everything. Even assays for adrenal hormones and things like partial thromboplastin times. Every known medical test is possible.”
“All right. We'd better get started.”
She turned on the computer. “This is how you order laboratory tests,” she said. “Use this light pen here, and check off the tests you want. Just touch the pen to the screen.”
She handed him a small penlight, and pushed the START button.
The screen glowed.
MEDCOM PROGRAM
LAB/ANALYS
CK/JGG/1223098
BLOOD:
COUNTS RBC
RETIC
PLATES
WBC
DIFF
HEMATOCRIT
HEMOGLOBIN
INDICES MCV
MCHC:
PROTIME
PTT
SED RATE
CHEMISTRY:
BRO
CA
CL
MG
PO4
K
NA
CO2
ENZYMES:
AMYLASE
CHOLINESTERASE
LIPASE
PHOSPHATASE,ACID
ALKALINE
LDH
SGOT
SGPT
PROTEIN:
ALB
GLOB
FIBRIN
TOTAL FRACTION
DIAGNOSTICS:
CHOLEST
CREAT
GLUCOSE
PBI
BEI
I
IBC
NPN
BUN
BILIRU, DIFF
CEPH/FLOC
THYMOL/TURB
BSP
PULMONARY:
TVC
TV
IC
IRV
ERV
MBC
STERIOD:
ALDO
L7-OH
17-KS
ACTH
VITS
A
ALL
B
C
E
K
URINE:
SP
GR
PH
PROT
GLUC
KETONE
ALL ELECTROLYTES
ALL STERIODS
ALL INORGANICS
CATECHOLS
PORPHYRINS
UROBIL
5-HIAA
Hall stared at the list. He touched the tests he wanted with the penlight; they disappeared from the screen. He ordered fifteen or twenty, then stepped back.
The screen went blank for a moment, and then the following appeared:
TESTS ORDERED WILL REQUIRE FOR EACH SUBJECT
20 CC WHOLE BLOOD
LO CC OXALATED BLOOD
L2 CC CITRATED BLOOD
15 CC URINE
The technician said, “I'll draw the bloods if you want to do physicals. Have you been in one of these rooms before?”
Hall shook his head.
“It's quite simple, really. We crawl through the tunnels into the suits. The tunnel is then sealed off behind us.”
“Oh? Why?”
“In case something happens to one of us. In case the covering of the suit is broken – the integrity of the surface is ruptured, as the protocol says. In that case, bacteria could spread back through the tunnel to the outside.”
“So we're sealed off.”
“Yes. We get air from a separate system – you can see the thin lines coming in over there. But essentially you're isolated from everything, when you're in that suit. I don't think you need worry, though. The only way you might possibly break your suit is to cut it with a scalpel, and the gloves are triple-thickness to prevent just such an occurrence.”
She showed him how to crawl through, and then, imitating her, he stood up inside the plastic suit. He felt like some kind of giant reptile, moving cumbersomely about, dragging his tunnel like a thick tail behind him.
After a moment, there was a hiss: his suit was being sealed off. Then another hiss, and the air turned cold as the special line began to feed air in to him.
The technician gave him his examining instruments. While she drew blood from the child, taking it from a scalp vein, Hall turned his attention to Peter Jackson.
* * *
An old man, and pale: anemia. Also thin: first thought, cancer. Second thought, tuberculosis, alcoholism, some other chronic process. And unconscious: he ran through the differential in his mind, from epilepsy to hypoglycernic shock to stroke.
Hall later stated that he felt foolish when the computer provided him with a differential, complete with probabilities of diagnosis. He was not at that time aware of the skill of the computer, the quality of its program.
He checked Jackson's blood pressure. It was low, 85/50. Pulse fast at 110. Temperature 97.8. Respiration's 30 and deep.
He went over the body systematically, beginning with the head and working down. When he produced pain – by pressing on the nerve through the supra-orbital notch, just below the eyebrow – the man grimaced and moved his arms to push Hall away.
Perhaps he was not unconscious after all. Perhaps just stuporous. Hall shook him.
“Mr. Jackson. Mr. Jackson.”
The man made no response. And then, slowly, he seemed to revive. Hall shouted his name in his ear and shook him hard.
Peter Jackson opened his eyes, just for a moment, and said, “Go...away...”
Hall continued to shake him, but Jackson relaxed, going limp, his body slipping back to its unresponsive state. Hall gave up, returning to his physical examination. The lungs were clear and the heart seemed normal. There was sm., tenseness of the abdomen, and Jackson retched once, bringing up some bloody drooling material. Quickly, Hall did a basolyte test for blood: it was positive. He did a rectal exam and tested the stool. It was also positive for blood.
He turned to the technician, who had drawn all the bloods and was feeding the tubes into the computer analysis apparatus in one corner.
“We've got a GI bleeder here,” he said. “How soon will the results be back?”
She pointed to a TV screen mounted near the ceiling. “The lab reports are flashed back as soon as they come in. They are displayed there, and on the console in the other room. The easy ones come back first. We should have hematocrit in two minutes.”
Hall waited. The screen glowed, the letters printing out:
JACKSON, PETER LABORATORY ANALYSES
TEST: | NORMAL: | VALUE | ||
HEMATOCRIT: | 38–54: | 21 | ||
TEST |
: |
NORMAL |
: |
VALUE |
HEMATOC |
: |
38–54: |
: |
21 INITIAL |
: |
: |
25 REPEAT |
||
: |
: |
29 REPEAT |
||
: |
: |
33 REPEAT |
||
: |
: |
37 REPEAT |
||
BUN |
: |
10-20 |
: |
50 |
COUNTS RETIC |
: |
1 |
: |
6 |
BLOOD SMEAR SHOWS MANY IMMATURE ERYTHROCYTE FORMS |
||||
TEST |
: |
NORMAL |
: |
VALUE |
PRO TIME |
: |
12 |
: |
12 |
BLOOD PH |
: |
7.40 |
: |
7.31 |
SGOT |
: |
40 |
: |
75 |
SED RATE |
: |
9 |
: |
29 |
AMYLASE |
: |
70-200 |
: |
450 |