NH3

by Stanley Salmons

  “I’ve met some of you, and I think most of you have had some contact with my administrative staff along the corridor. My responsibility as Director is to ensure that things run smoothly. I won’t always be around; I am still Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is now divided between this campus and Washington. Day-to-day coordination will be in the hands of Dr. McKinley and Dr. Ferris, and I think I can do no better than to hand you over to them now.”

  He moved away and indicated to Terry and Maggie that they had the floor. Terry went first.

  “Thank you, Dr. Kramer. First Maggie and I want to apologize to you all. We couldn’t give you the full story before and now I hope you can understand why. Well, that’s behind us now and I can assure you that no one is happier about it than we are.

  “You’ve been told the planet is under threat. I don’t expect you to take that on trust – you’ll want to see hard evidence. Let me show you some of the data. Feel free to ask questions at any time.”

  He dimmed the lights and projected on the screen above him a series of slides showing the NASA satellite maps and the atmospheric sampling data. Then he introduced the team of climatologists, oceanographers, and atmospheric chemists who would be monitoring ammonia levels around the globe and using computer models to predict how quickly and by how much they were going to change.

  A hand was raised.

  “There’s a question. Gareth?”

  “How are you going to do the monitoring?”

  “A combination of methods. There are ongoing atmospheric research programs, and we’ll have direct access to their results. NASA Earth Survey Satellites will do it spectroscopically. We’ll also collect and analyse samples with balloons, and we’ve been allotted four research aircraft and some US Air Force personnel to carry out low stratospheric sampling.”

  Somebody gave a long, low whistle. Terry continued:

  “Okay, like I said, we need to do this so we can make more accurate predictions. But I have to tell you what the situation is as of right now.” He paused, and took a deep breath. “If current trends continue, conditions on this planet will become incompatible with life within six months.”

  A horrified gasp went round the auditorium. Terry understood the reaction. The President had said “months” but these people were used to hearing politicians make exaggerated claims. It was a very different matter to hear a scientist base that conclusion on hard data.

  “That’s a measure of how widely distributed these organisms are, and how little time we have to find a way of combating them. Now in a moment I’m going to hand over to Dr. Maggie Ferris, who will present a plan for doing just that. Before I do there’s one more thing. We’ll meet here, in this lecture theatre, every Friday at eleven a.m. sharp starting a week today. Be here. Don’t schedule anything that can’t be interrupted. We’re working against the clock and our success depends on each person knowing what the others are doing. We’ll be asking each team leader to present their progress during the week. If there hasn’t been any, don’t speak. If there has, keep it crisp. It isn’t just progress we want to hear about: if you’ve hit a problem, bring it to the meeting. You know as well as anyone that research is full of blind alleys. If that’s happening we’ve got to pick it up early – we can’t afford to lose time going off in unproductive directions. I know all this will be coming fresh to some of you. If you have any doubts about where you fit in or what to do next, ask a member of the core team or Maggie or me. Remember, every single person in this room has a reason for being here. All right? Maggie, over to you.”

  Maggie went to the microphone.

  “Thank you, Terry. Today I just want to outline the broad strategy. It’s not set in tablets of stone. In particular if anyone spots a short cut we need to know about it. We’re a multidisciplinary group here so I’ll try to keep it simple.

  She said nothing about the way they had discovered the problem, dealing only with the mutation that caused organisms like phytoplankton to generate ammonia, and how it was spreading. Then she outlined their strategy for defeating it with a plasmid of their own, combined with a bacteriophage that would give their carrier organism a selective advantage. As Kolesnikov had now arrived she introduced him at this point.

  “Dr. Sergei Kolesnikov is a world authority on phages. He and his group are here to help us select a phage that will infect the ammonia organisms, multiply inside them, and kill them. Rajiv Gupta will modify our own organism so that it’s resistant to the phage. That’s what will give it the selective advantage. Sergei?”

  The big Russian pulled himself slowly to his feet. “Is complex, but is possible. Alternative is to find phage that target only organisms which carry ammonia plasmid. Would take very long time. May be impossible, even.”

  “Thank you, Sergei. Sergei’s had some problems getting here but we’re delighted he can join us at last.” Maggie paused as she saw Matt Oakley rising for his turn. “Matt?”

  “Maggie, you know damn well we put together a timeline for this project. It could take a year. From what you guys just said we’ll all be dead by then.”

  The audience murmured.

  Maggie took a deep breath. “I’m glad you brought that up, Matt.” She looked around the audience. “Some of you weren’t around when we went through this exercise. What Matt said is perfectly true: the project could take as long as a year in normal circumstances. But these aren’t normal circumstances. We have six months to emerge with a solution. We can do it, but only if every one of us devotes every waking minute of every day to the problem facing us. We have to work together. We have to stay absolutely focused. Interesting side avenues must be ignored. Difficulties must be overcome. We need to work fast, cutting corners wherever the opportunity arises. I don’t want you even to think about failure; failure is not an option. Any other questions? Back to you, Terry.”

  “Okay. That’s it for now. There are already samples of the ammonia organism in the fridges for anyone who wants them. And I’d like to meet with the sampling teams now. Let’s get to work.”

  CHAPTER 32

  That afternoon Maggie appeared in the doorway of Terry’s office.

  “I’m just off to the airport, Terry. I asked Jake to send over some more of our samples. I have to pick them up at the freight terminal.”

  “Right. How’s it going?”

  She grinned, then came in. “We’ve got such a fantastic team up there. Alain Laroche can be a bit prickly but he has an outstanding intellect. You should see him and Matt striking sparks off each other! Sometimes it takes Silvia or me to get them back on track.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Not really. Underneath all the rivalry they have a high regard for each other. And they’ve already come up with some great ideas for cutting the development time.”

  Terry dropped his voice. “What do you think, then, Maggie? Last week you told them you can do it inside six months. Can you? Without my fallback option?”

  Maggie’s smile faded. “I don’t want your fallback option, Terry. As things are going we can succeed without it. We lost a few days with the transfer from NIH, but the way these guys are working – now that they know what they’re really up against – it’s like none of that ever happened. Matt’s already got the sequencer up-and-running. That’s why I need the samples. He can’t wait to get started and Pieter and Ulrich are having problems growing up enough with their culture system.” She glanced at her watch. “Taxi will be waiting for me outside the cordon. I’d better get going.”

  “Okay, safe journey. See you later.”

  Matt came over when he saw Maggie entering the lab with the parcel. He frowned.

  “What’s the problem, Maggie?”

  “I don’t know. It looks like it’s been interfered with. Jake makes a neater job than this, and look at these strips of tape ‘Sealed by US Customs’. I asked the guy at the freight counter. He just shrugged and said sometimes the wrapping gets torn.”

  “We’d bett
er see what’s inside.” He took out a pocket knife.

  Between them they removed the brown paper and tape and opened the box. The cardboard was lined, as before, with expanded polystyrene, but the lining was eroded away in several places.

  “What’s been going on here…?” Maggie said, as she put her hands inside. She withdrew them hurriedly. They were covered with a clear slime. “What the…?”

  “Better rinse that off right away, Maggie; we don’t know what the hell it is. And use gloves.”

  She crossed to a sink, washed and dried her hands, and donned a pair of latex gloves. Then she spread some paper towels on the bench, sat the box on them, and tried again. The source of the slimy material was soon clear. Jake had packed the samples in cold gel packs, as before. But this time every one of those packs had been slit open. The gel had spilled inside, attacking the polystyrene. The mess was dreadful.

  Matt shook his head. “Customs. They must have decided you were smuggling drugs in those bags.”

  She was breathing fast, her face hot with anger. “The idiots! It couldn’t have been clearer. Look at the manifest.” She spread the sheet out on the bench and read from it. “‘Valuable samples for scientific research. Refrigerate where possible. Please conduct any inspection in the presence of the recipient as they must not be allowed to thaw.’ So which part of that did they not understand?”

  “These people are a law to themselves, Maggie. They’ll say they were just doing their job.”

  “Every living being on Earth is under threat and they’re ‘just doing their job’! I can’t believe this.” She drew out the flasks with the samples and wiped them off. “These aren’t even remotely cold. They’ve been sitting in a warehouse somewhere, in God knows what kind of temperatures, without any cool bags. Put them in the fridge right away, Matt. I’ll test them for viability in a moment.”

  “Dead, Terry! The whole lot of them! I’d like to go down to the airport to find whoever did this and wring their bloody necks!” She sat down hard.

  He got up from behind his desk, pushed the door to his office to, and returned to her.

  “You say they slit open the gel bags?”

  “Yes, every one of them!”

  “There’s quite a drugs scene in Florida. Maybe Customs are tighter here. Jake didn’t send all the samples, did he?”

  “I’m not that stupid!” she snapped.

  “Maggie…”

  She buried her face in her hands. “I’m sorry. I’m upset, that’s all.”

  “Which samples have gone?”

  Her voice was muffled. “All the river samples.”

  “Damn.”

  She looked up at him, reading the expression on his face. Her voice softened. “You could say they’ve served their purpose, Terry. I mean, without them we would never have got as far as this. But I want Jake to send the rest of the Bermuda samples. What are we going to do if this happens again?”

  His jaw tightened. “It won’t happen again. Give me Jake’s contact details. I’ll go over to the Department of Defense building. I don’t know if Dick Pevensey is on campus at the moment but they’ll know how to contact him. I’ll arrange a military escort for the next batch of samples.”

  She reached up and gripped his hand. “Terry, that’s a great idea. Why didn’t I think of it?”

  “You have other things on your mind. Don’t worry, I’ll look after it. I’ll come by your office when I’m done.”

  Forty minutes later he walked into her office. “I was in luck, Dick was there. Couldn’t have been more helpful. Your samples will be picked up by the USAF and brought back on a special flight. They’ll deliver them here.”

  It was a warm June day and the sky was hazy but cloudless, so the thick white smog that came in off Lake Ontario was totally unexpected. Multiple collisions blocked all but one lane of the Queen Elizabeth highway. The city of Toronto ground to a halt, the streets dim and curiously quiet, shadowy figures emerging from the whiteness and disappearing again as they scurried along sidewalks with scarves, sleeves, tissues – anything – across nose and mouth. The silence was disrupted only by the ambulances wailing through the intersections as they took the casualties to hospital. At the Toronto General the wards overflowed, frantic staff hurried down corridors lined with patients waiting on gurneys, and everywhere the air was filled with the sounds of coughing and wheezing. The stocks of oxygen cylinders ran out. They were on the point of shutting the doors to any more emergency admissions when the fire service came to the rescue; wearing respirators, their drivers began to ferry patients to outlying hospitals. And still the casualties kept arriving.

  Three hours later a brisk wind arose from the south-west and the smog thinned and dispersed. By that time it had taken the lives of nearly two thousand people.

  CHAPTER 33

  The President had remained in Washington but he still wanted to be kept posted on the progress of the research. Kramer was too out of touch to do this; over the past few weeks he had rarely been seen at the Institute, and never at the Friday meetings. The responsibility therefore passed to Terry, and he had to fly to the capital every week or so. It was a distraction he could well have done without, especially at the moment, when it seemed that everything was taking ten times longer than it should. The USAF had finally made available four aircraft for the research flights but even with the help of their engineers, equipping them was a lengthy operation. Terry wanted to short-cut the whole process by appropriating four of the aircraft that NOAA and the NSF teams had been using for atmospheric sampling. That proved to be an administrative nightmare so he returned to the tedious business of modifying the aircraft they had. After that the airborne equipment had to be tested exhaustively, calibrated, and cross-checked against samples collected by balloon. It was standard scientific practice but in the present circumstances it was even more vital to have measurements that were utterly reliable. As decided at the meeting in the Oval Office, Noel Harrison and Chris Walmsley had used all the available evidence to set an upper level of ammonia, a threshold beyond which direct action could no longer be avoided. They had also identified a number of key locations representative of atmospheric ammonia around the globe. The sites would be monitored at different altitudes and at frequent intervals, and the measurements combined for comparison with the threshold level. That level was high – alarmingly high – but if it was exceeded they’d be forced to approach the President about invoking the Yellowstone option.

  While the aircraft were being prepared, the climatologists, ocean and atmospheric scientists set up a data-gathering web, and information started to flow in along the threads. They put it together, then called Terry over to discuss the results. There was a tension in the room which he felt the moment he opened the door. He sat down and said lightly:

  “Okay, what have you got?”

  John Gilchrist acted as the group’s spokesman. “Terry,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re going to make of this. The data we have gives us an ammonia level that’s already forty-nine per cent of the threshold level.”

  Terry blinked. “Forty-nine per cent of threshold? That’s impossible, it can’t be as high as that. How representative is your data?”

  “Hard to say. I mean, there isn’t a whole lot of it. It would only take one rogue reading to bump up the average.”

  “That must be what’s happened.” He got up. “Okay, guys – look, it was worth a try, but let’s wait for the full measurement programme to get under way, shall we? Obviously we need something more solid than this to go on.”

  He gave them a reassuring smile as he left, and received glum nods in return.

  He accompanied the sampling team on their first flight, partly to make sure that all the equipment was working, but mainly to get an idea of what was involved. With stops for refuelling and overnight stays it lasted several days. When they got back he analyzed the raw data in his office and then calculated a global average from all the specified locations and altitudes. He stared at the res
ult in disbelief. Then he repeated all the calculations, but the answer was the same. If anything John Gilchrist’s figure had been conservative; ammonia was already at fifty-three per cent of the threshold level.

  He looked up, gazing into the distance.

  No wonder there’ve been white smogs! I thought ammonia had just been pooling in pockets, but with an average level this high it could happen at any time. What else is going on out there?

  A formation of migrating geese flew high over the Himalayas, making an asymmetrical V in the sky. The V became more ragged, the rhythmic beat of the wings interrupted, uncoordinated. Geese began to tumble, landing in a line of powdery explosions on the snow-laden mountain tops. Their bodies, no longer warmed by the heat generated by flight muscles, cooled rapidly in the sub-zero temperatures. The carcasses froze quickly. Stray feathers stirred gently in the icy breeze.

  Maggie had a lot of time for Matt Oakley. He’d been frank with her about his frustrations when they first arrived in Florida but they’d both put that behind them. She found him easier to talk to than Laroche. In fact in many ways he was the ideal scientific colleague: as up front about failures as successes, ready to listen to another viewpoint – and totally uninhibited in expressing his own.

  “Hi, Maggie.”

  “Hi, Matt. How’s the sequencing going?”

  He flicked a lock of dark hair off his forehead. “It isn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We can’t do the sequencing ’cos we can’t get enough of the fucking stuff to sequence.”

  Maggie raised her eyebrows, but not at the expletive. “Come on, Matt. You guys can get DNA from the root of a single human hair.”

  “Oh yeah, if you want total DNA. But we don’t want total DNA; we just want the plasmid DNA. That’s the problem: separating it out. I work with mammalian cells and bacteria like E. coli. This stuff is different. Like you said, there’s a whole bunch of different organisms in these samples and a lot of them have cell walls that are thick or protected by some sort of jelly. Straight alkaline lysis isn’t enough. I had to use more aggressive techniques to break it down.”