The Ganymede Project

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  She pulled some graphs from a folder.

  “The circadian cycle appears relatively normal. That’s on this chart. We also looked for maze learning effects. We had to wait on that investigation until the pup was a little older. Ricky—that’s what I call him—is a quick study. His learning is between one and two standard deviations above the norm for this type of rat. Other than his brilliance, the only truly unusual thing I’ve noticed are episodes of total inactivity. They typically occur when there is something novel within his surroundings. He stands upright and freezes. It’s like a catatonic state.”

  “Does that ever occur in field behavior?” Li asked.

  “Sometimes, but not like this. The catatonia lasts for about five minutes at a time—usually when I am talking to someone else. We wired his cage to a motion detector as part of the experiment to evaluate circadian cycles. That’s when we noticed it—periods of absolutely no activity. Zip. As part of the experiment, we had video camera coverage. I was curious about the episodes of inactivity, so I began searching the video record to see what was happening. The camera showed not only what Ricky was doing, but also what was going on in the lab.”

  “And?”

  “The episodes did not appear to be triggered by a mere human presence. There was a lot of video tape showing me in the room, working or humming or writing. Ricky’s behavior seemed normal at those times. Normal behavior was not interrupted by the presence of others—the janitor or other workers. The first catatonic episode occurred after Doctor Anderson entered the room and began asking me about experimental results. The camera shows Ricky turning toward us, standing upright and freezing. A similar behavior occurred the next day, when I began discussing the experiment plan and protocols with Ruth, one of my associates. Five other episodes occurred under similar circumstances.”

  “This is all pretty subjective,” Li said.

  “I knew you’d say that,” Margaret grinned. “After reviewing video tapes of all of the episodes, I decided to informally test my hypothesis. I went up to the cage and talked to Ricky about what we had found so far, and about the next series of tests.”

  “What happened?”

  “He stood up and froze.”

  Li objected. “But a rat can’t...”

  “I know,” Margaret said. “It doesn’t seem possible. It’s like he’s listening. It’s like he understands.”

  “Show me.”

  * * *

  Doctor Tjan led Rita Li to a corner of the Psychobiology Lab. “Here’s Ricky’s cage. See for yourself.”

  Doctor Li opened the cage and looked at a rat nibbling on a food pellet. “There you are,” she said.

  Ricky moved to a far corner of the cage. He cocked his head, pointing one eye at Doctor Li. It was a coal-black eye.

  “You are one heck of a scientific treasure,” Li said, looking at the rat. “You think you can keep your secret, but we’re finding you out. Where do these nano-machines come from? Hmmm? Who made them? And why? Who or what am I talking to?”

  Ricky stood on his hind legs and froze. He stared directly at Doctor Li.

  She saw darkness behind the Norwegian rat’s eyes—a darkness that seemed linked to mystery, death and a purgatory of lost souls.

  The rat blinked.

  She closed the cage.

  “What kind of devil are you?” she whispered.

  49. DEATH TRAPS

  14-15 July 1994

  Yuri stood in a hallway looking at the sign. It read:Occupational Safety and Health Administration/Special Projects . This was one of the last items to check out on his long list of phone numbers and addresses. It didn’t look very promising. Jack, my man,” he said to himself, quietly, “what the hell were you doing at OSHA?”

  He opened the door to see a secretary—or was it a Nordic goddess?—sitting at a desk. She pecked ever-so-slowly at the keyboard of an ancient IBM Selectric.

  “I’d like to see Mister Chisholm,” he said, glancing at a scrap of paper in his hand.

  She stopped tapping, eyed him, then slowly crossed her long legs. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, but it’s important.”

  “We all have important things to do,” she said, brushing back long blond hair. “What’s this about?”

  “It’s private. A government matter.”

  She flashed a Hollywood smile. “I’ll see if he’s available, Mister...”

  “Sverdlov.”

  She winked at him, then waltzed into the inner office. Yuri followed her to the door. He peeked in.

  Chisholm’s back was to the door. He was on the phone, gazing out the window.

  The secretary stood next to his desk.

  He swiveled around. Yuri saw his face. It was the man he chased at the embassy; the man who tried to kill Katrina.Chisholm !

  The secretary handed Chisholm a note and pointed to the door. When Chisholm looked, the doorway was empty. Sverdlov had disappeared.

  Yuri quietly closed the door to the OSHA office. He walked swiftly down the corridor and out of the building.

  * * *

  Yuri rubbed his eyes. He was elbow-to-elbow with half a dozen other people at a Denny’s lunch counter, but he seemed alone, isolated and filled with questions that had no answers. Why would Jack go to an OSHA project office? Why would an OSHA representative be chasing someone from the Russian Embassy? Why would he try to kill Katrina? Did he kill Jack? Was this government-sanctioned murder?

  He stirred his coffee.

  Pursuing the Chisholm connection might be dangerous. He would have to proceed cautiously. He needed to know what the game was and who was playing.

  Fall back and re-group, he thought.

  * * *

  The Metro train pulled to a stop. Vladimir stepped out of the car with other disembarking passengers. He carried an orange envelope containing enhanced satellite pictures, given to him by the courier, who continued on the train.

  Vladimir rode the long escalator to the top. The night air was moist and thick. There were very few people around and little traffic on the street. He pulled a raincoat tight around his chest, planted his foot on the concrete sidewalk, and watched a lone rat scurry in front of him.

  He moved to a deserted area below a street light, eager to examine the contents of the package. When he opened it, he whistled in disbelief.

  After a moment, he put the photos back in the package, walked to a phone booth, put in a quarter and dialed. It rang three times. Katrina picked up.

  “Zdrahst’voitye?”

  “It’s Vladimir. I have the material Lysenko sent me. The pictures show something astonishing.”

  “Not on the phone,” she said. “Come to the apartment.”

  * * *

  The route to Katrina’s took him along the edge of a park. He traversed a darkened sidewalk with a high curb.

  Headlights from an oncoming car temporarily illuminated the area—devoid of people, with a few small animals scampering from a storm drain.

  He continued to walk.

  Another car approached.

  The few rats had now become many. They were a living stream that ran in the street, parallel to his path.What could they be doing ? he thought.

  The car passed. Vladimir’s view was swallowed by darkness. The scampering sounds on the street seemed to counterpoint his own footsteps.

  Eventually, headlights strobed again. The stream of rats had become a flood covering half the street.

  Again, darkness.

  Vladimir stopped, listened intently, heard a rustling. He walked faster, then broke into a run.

  In the darkness, he stumbled on something alive.

  He fell to the ground and screamed.

  * * *

  “Does Pooky like hotdogs?” The casually dressed woman held a hotdog in front of the cat’s face. The cat, sitting in the passenger seat next to her, did not respond. It was a Siamese cat with a jeweled collar. Light jazz played on the radio. The woman looked at the cat and smiled. Then she turned
her attention back to the road.

  “Hmm?” she asked. “I’ll bet Pooky wants to eat.”

  She tried to divide her gaze between the cat and the road. “What does Pooky want to eat?”

  When her eyes returned to the road, it was too late to react.

  Vladimir popped into view a few feet in front of her headlights. Rats covered his body like a living blanket.

  The car hit with a dullwhump !

  The windshield darkened with blood and rat bodies.

  The woman screamed and hit the brakes.

  * * *

  As the threesome exited, the door to the morgue rocked back and forth under the pull of heavy springs. Katrina Fontanova felt her legs wobble, then collapse. The hallway spun with slow, uneven motion. She grabbed at Gallagan and Briggam for support, then gagged, burping a blotch of yellow-white fluid on Gallagan’s dark blue suit.

  Gallagan held her with one arm and tried to remove the blotch with the other, whipping out tissue from a pocket. He finally put Katrina down on a desk that crammed the hallway.

  “Sorry to put you through this, Ms. Fontanova,” Briggam said, eyes leaking tears. He turned his head and sneezed. “Chebbicals,” he said with a sniffle, wiping first with a hand, then reaching for a handkerchief.

  Gallagan now dabbed aggressively at the blotch on his suit. “We want the body, Mr. Briggam. As soon as possible. We will ship it back to Moscow for autopsy.”

  “Given the circumstances, you’ll need to wait a few more days. Ah—Tzoooo!”

  “Bless you. We have a courier flight on the 24th. I’ll need it then.” He looked at Katrina. “Can you walk, Fontanova?”

  Katrina—face pale, clothes rumpled, body stiffened to the integrity of a wet dishrag—nodded weakly.

  “You’ll get my request tomorrow, through official channels,” Gallagan said firmly, steadying Katrina as she rose to her feet.

  “Understand,” Briggam replied, shaking his hand.

  Gallagan felt a stickiness in his palm, released Briggam’s hand, and tried to wipe away spittle as he guided Katrina down the dull brown corridor.

  * * *

  The room was dark. There was awhirr of a projector fan.

  “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m James Stone. I’ll be leading this effort.”

  He pushed a button. There was a mechanical sound as the projector brought up a jarring view of the accident scene. Vladimir’s twisted body lay on the hood of the car, sandwiched between a light pole and the car’s windshield.

  “These pictures were taken by police during their initial investigation,” he said.

  He punched the button again. The slide showed an open passport containing Vladimir’s photograph and identifying information.

  “This case was turned over to FBI when police discovered Russian diplomatic papers on the body,” he said. “The victim is Vladimir Fontanov, from the Science and Technology Office of the Russian Embassy.”

  He punched the button again. The new slide showed Vladimir’s partially eaten face, viewed from the interior of the car. Rat bodies nestled around the smashed head. A rat’s tail extended from Vladimir’s mouth—now locked in an eternal scream.

  “It appears that at the time he was hit and killed by the car, Fontanov was being devoured by sewer rats. Obviously a fluke accident,” Stone said.

  He punched the button again. Air bags were extended inside the car. The windshield was broken. The driver was not present. There was blood on the driver’s seat. A cat was visible in the passenger’s seat. It was devouring a rat. A partially eaten hotdog was visible on the floor.

  Stone continued his summary of the death scene.

  “The driver, Ms. Annebelle Courtney, is a cashier at a 7-11 and appears to have no obvious link to the victim. She was found conscious, but fought the Emergency Medical Team when they tried to extract her from the car. She was sent to a local hospital for observation. They released her 24 hours later. She’s in reasonably good physical condition. The victim was Dead On Arrival.”

  Stone turned the room lights back on. He was a balding, well-dressed man in his mid-fifties, who carried his body with a proud, military posture.

  “Sverdlov,” he said, “I don’t have to tell you this is a politically sensitive case. You’ve met Fontanov?”

  Yuri nodded, “Yes. And his sister, Ms. Fontanova.”

  “Any ideas on how the embassy will react?”

  “They’ll be suspicious. Paranoid. We’ll need good answers. Can you tell me what medical tests were run on the driver and victim?”

  “I’ll let our medical specialist answer that one. Alan?”

  Alan Babcock’s voice, like his appearance, lacked any flair, emphasis or interest. “The driver received a fairly extensive battery of tests, including blood tests, psychological tests and tests for physical trauma. Coroner’s report on the victim says death resulted from internal and external hemorrhaging due to impact from the automobile. Most of the damage on the face and body is from rat bites inflicted immediately prior to being hit. Here are the files.”

  He shoved them across the table.

  Yuri picked them up and began to read.

  “And what about tests on the rats?” Yuri asked.

  Babcock shrugged. “They’re over at Veterinary Services. I think they’re checking for rabies.”

  Stone paced back and forth at the front of the room, thumping his nose as though thought flowed from nostrils. He stopped, then gazed at Yuri.

  “Sverdlov,” I know your field is counterintelligence. However, the Russian Ambassador believes you should be handling this. I’m going to humor him. Because of our touchy-feely situation, I’m making you point man with the embassy.”

  * * *

  When she called her father at three o’clock, it was eleven PM, Moscow time. The old man took the news of Vladimir’s death like a stab in the heart. He told her, between bouts of drunken sobbing, that Vladimir’s unshakable belief in the Communist Party marked him for future greatness. And he offered a theory: “The Americans killed him because of what he knew about Archangelsk.”

  She reminded him that it had been many years, and the Cold War was over, but he continued to babble about the Party—a rock he had clung to his entire life, a rock now submerged in a sea of change. She let the old man have his say, then finally hung up with a quiet “Goodbye, Papa, I love you.”

  We disagreed about many things, Katrina thought, gazing at a photograph of her dead brother,but we never disagreed about our need for each other .

  She gazed at a picture of a New Year’s party. Vladimir and a young girlfriend were laughing. Katrina was blowing a party horn in Vladimir’s face.So long ago .

  Katrina carefully placed the photo in a box on her desk, where relics of Vladimir’s life now collected.

  The door opened unexpectedly.

  She wiped a tear from her eye and tried to assume the role of hardened Russian intelligence officer.

  Nikolai Gallagan, John Anderson and Zfar Jafri entered. They could see she was upset.

  “This has been very troubling for all of us,” Gallagan said, attempting to judge Katrina’s emotional stability. He gently touched her shoulder. “Doctor Anderson and Mister Jafri would like to talk to you.”

  She nodded, then motioned for them to have a seat.

  “Nikolai told me about the circumstances surrounding Vladimir’s death,” Anderson said. “I don’t know how to say this gently or delicately. We have evidence that your brother may have been murdered.”

  Katrina collapsed back in her chair.

  “Before reporting this to the authorities,” Anderson said, “I wanted to talk to you first. And Nikolai.”

  Jafri pulled out pictures and put them in front of Katrina. “A friend of mine found a dead animal at the Groom site. We were afraid there might be some sort of germ warfare testing going on. We were wrong.”

  As Katrina flipped through the photos, Anderson picked up the conversation.

  “We did a
n autopsy on the animal and experiments on its tissue. The brain was modified, probably during embryonic development, with implanted devices.”

  “Katrina,” Gallagan said, “they think the Groom test involved control of the animals.”

  “This is just a guess,” Anderson said. “We haven’t been able to find any evidence of electromagnetic transmission from the Devices, or any power source implanted within the dead animal that could support such a data link.”

  “We’re assuming a data link would be necessary for control,” Jafri said. “Otherwise you’d only be able to influence behavior in generic ways.”

  “Frankly, however, we’re dealing with technology we’ve never seen before,” Anderson said.

  Katrina’s face darkened. She walked to an open safe drawer.

  “I want to show them the file on Groom.”

  Gallagan shook his head, “No.”

  She slapped at a pile of books perched on the safe, dropping them to the floor. “The file—dammit!” She grabbed Gallagan’s tie near the throat, wrenching his neck in a tight clutch. “Today I saw my brother half eaten by animals, flesh devoured in a coordinated attack. I talked to my father, in Moscow, trying to explain what happened, his heart breaking with grief. Show them the files, Nikolai. This isn’t some stupid government game. This is very, very personal.” She quivered with rage, releasing the tie.

  Gallagan replied calmly, smoothing wrinkles from his cravat. “I have release authority over all information we collect here at the embassy. I could do it. Maybe I should do it.” He shrugged. “Go ahead. I give you permission.”

  Katrina tossed the file to Anderson. “The data link is invisible to you,” she said. “The devices don’t use an electromagnetic channel. They use a quantum mechanical channel. A faster-than-light channel. We’ve been following this research.”