“Brent, I want you to know—”
Scopes held up a hand. “Please. Expressions of gratitude make me uncomfortable. ‘Hope has a good memory, gratitude a bad one.’ Give my offer ten minutes’ serious thought, Guy, and don’t go anywhere.”
The screen winked out on Scopes opening the pizza box again.
As the lights came on, Carson’s feeling of unreality was replaced by a surge of elation. He had no idea why Scopes had reached down among the five thousand GeneDyne Ph.D.s and picked him, busy with his repetitive titrations and quality-control checks. But for the moment he didn’t care. He thought of Peck hearing thirdhand that Scopes had personally assigned him to Mount Dragon. He thought of the look on the fat face, the wattles quivering in consternation.
There was a low rumbling noise as the curtains drew back from the windows, exposing the dreary vista beyond, cloaked in curtains of rain. In the gray distance, Carson could make out the power lines and smokestacks and chemical effluvia that were central New Jersey. Somewhere farther west lay a desert, with eternal sky and distant blue mountains and the pungent smell of greasewood, where you could ride all day and night and never see another human being. Somewhere in that desert stood Mount Dragon, and within it, his own secret chance to do something important.
Ten minutes later, when the curtains closed and the video screen came once again to life, Carson had his answer ready.
Carson stepped onto the slanting porch, dropped his bags by the door, and sat down in a weather-beaten rocker. The chair creaked as the old wood absorbed his weight unwillingly. He leaned back, stretching out the kinks, and looked out over the vast Jornada del Muerto desert.
The sun was rising in front of him, a boiling furnace of hydrogen erupting over the faint blue outline of the San Andres Mountains. He could feel the pressure of solar radiation on his cheek as the morning light invaded the porch. It was still cool—sixty, sixty-five—but in less than an hour, Carson knew, the temperature would be over one hundred degrees. The deep ultraviolet sky was gradually turning blue; soon it would be white with heat.
He gazed down the dirt road that ran in front of the house. Engle was a typical New Mexico desert town, no longer dying but already dead. There were a scattering of adobe buildings with pitched tin roofs; an abandoned school and post office; a row of dead poplars long stripped of leaves by the wind. The only traffic past the house was dust devils. In one sense, Engle was atypical: the entire town had been bought by GeneDyne, and it was now used solely as the jumping-off place for Mount Dragon.
Carson turned his head toward the horizon. Far to the northeast, across ninety miles of dusty sun-baked sand and rock only a native could call a road, lay the complex officially labeled the GeneDyne Remote Desert Testing Facility, but known to all by the name of the ancient volcanic hill that rose above it: Mount Dragon. It was GeneDyne’s state-of-the-art laboratory for genetic engineering and the manipulation of dangerous microbial life.
He breathed deeply. It was the smell he’d missed most, the fragrance of dust and witch mesquite, the sharp clean odor of aridity. Already, New Jersey seemed unreal, something from the distant past. He felt as if he’d been released from prison, a green, crowded, sodden prison. Though the banks had taken the last of his father’s land, this still felt like his country. Yet it was a strange homecoming: returning not to work cattle, but to work on an unspecified project at the outer reaches of science.
A spot appeared at the hazy limits where the horizon met the sky. Within sixty seconds, the spot had resolved itself into a distant plume of dust. Carson watched the spot for several minutes before standing up. Then he went back into the ramshackle house, dumped out the remains of his cold coffee, and rinsed the cup.
As he looked around for any unpacked items, he heard the sound of a vehicle pulling up outside. Stepping onto the porch, he saw the squat white outlines of a Hummer, the civilian version of the Humvee. A wash of dust passed over him as the vehicle ground to a halt. The smoked windows remained closed as the powerful diesel idled.
A figure stepped out: plump, black-haired and balding, dressed in a polo shirt and white shorts. His mild, open face was deeply tanned by the sun, but the stubby legs looked white against the incongruously heavy boots. The man bustled over, busy and cheerful, and held out a plump hand.
“You’re my driver?” Carson asked, surprised by the softness of the handshake. He shouldered his duffel bag.
“In a manner of speaking, Guy,” the man replied. “The name’s Singer.”
“Dr. Singer!” Carson said. “I didn’t expect to get a ride from the director himself.”
“Call me John, please,” Singer said brightly, taking the duffel from Carson and opening the Hummer’s storage bay. “Everybody’s on a first-name basis here at Mount Dragon. Except for Nye, of course. Sleep all right?”
“Best night’s rest in eighteen months,” Carson grinned.
“Sorry we couldn’t have come out to get you sooner,” Singer replied, slinging the duffel, “but it’s against the rules to travel outside the compound after dark. And no aircraft inside the Range, except for emergencies.” He eyed a case lying at Carson’s feet. “Is that a five-string?”
“It is.” Carson hefted it, came down the steps.
“What’s your style: three-finger? Clawhammer? Melodic?”
Carson stopped in the act of stowing the banjo and looked at Singer, who laughed delightedly in response. “This is going to be more fun than I thought,” he said. “Hop in.”
A wave of frigid air greeted Carson as he settled himself in the Hummer, surprised at the depth of the seats. Singer was almost an arm’s length away. “I feel like I’m riding in a tank,” Carson said.
“Best thing we’ve found for desert terrain. Takes a vertical cliff face to stop it. You see this indicator? It’s a tire gauge. The vehicle has a central tire-inflation system, powered by a compressor. Pressing a button inflates or deflates the tires, depending on terrain. And all the Mount Dragon Hummers are equipped with ‘run flat’ tires. They can travel for thirty miles even after being punctured.”
They pulled away from the cluster of houses and bumped across a cattleguard. Carson could see barbed wire stretching endlessly in both directions from the cattleguard, signs placed at hundred-foot intervals, reading: WARNING: THERE IS A U.S. GOVERNMENT MILITARY INSTALLATION TO THE EAST. ENTRY STRICTLY PROHIBITED. WSMR-WEA.
“We’re entering the White Sands Missile Range,” Singer said. “We lease the land Mount Dragon’s on from the Department of Defense, you know. A holdover from our military contract days.”
Singer aimed the vehicle for the horizon and accelerated over the rocky trail, a great rocket plume of dust corkscrewing behind the rear tires.
“I’m honored you came to get me personally,” Carson said.
“Don’t be. I like to get out of the place when I can. I’m just the director, remember. Everybody else is doing the important work.” He looked over at Carson. “Besides, I’m glad of this chance to talk with you. I’m probably one of five people in the world who read and understood your dissertation. ‘Designer Coats: Tertiary and Quaternary Protein Structure Transformations of a Viral Shell.’ Brilliant.”
“Thank you,” Carson said. This was no small praise coming from the former Morton Professor of Biology at CalTech.
“Of course I only read it yesterday,” Singer said with a wink. “Scopes sent it, along with the rest of your file.” He leaned back, right hand draped over the wheel. The ride grew increasingly jarring as the Hummer accelerated to sixty, slewing through a stretch of sand. Carson felt his own right foot pressing an imaginary brake pedal to the floorboards. The man drove like Carson’s father.
“What can you tell me about the project?” Carson said.
“What exactly do you want to know?” Singer said, turning toward Carson, eyes straying from the road.
“Well, I dropped everything and came out here on an hour’s notice,” Carson said. “I guess you could say I’m curiou
s.”
Singer smiled. “There’ll be plenty of time when we reach Mount Dragon.” His eyes drifted back to the road just as they whipped past a yucca, close enough to whack the driver’s mirror. Singer jerked the Hummer back on course.
“This must be like a homecoming for you,” he said.
Carson nodded, taking the hint. “My family’s been here a long time.”
“Longer than most, I understand.”
“That’s right. Kit Carson was my ancestor. He’d been a drover along the Spanish Trail as a teenager. My great-grandfather acquired an old land grant in Hidalgo County.”
“And you grew tired of the ranching life?” Singer asked.
Carson shook his head. “My father was a terrible businessman. If he’d just stuck to straight ranching he would have been all right, but he was full of grand schemes. One of them involved crossbreeding cattle. That’s how I got interested in genetics. It failed, like all the rest, and the bank took the ranch.”
He fell silent, watching the endless desert unfold around him. The sun climbed higher in the sky, the light turning from yellow to white. In the distance, a pair of pronghorn antelope were running just below the horizon. They were barely visible, a streak of gray against gray. Singer, oblivious, hummed “Soldier’s Joy” cheerfully to himself.
In time, the dark summit of a hill began to creep over the horizon in front of them, a volcanic cinder cone topped by a smooth crater. Along the rim of the crater stood a cluster of radio towers and microwave horns. As they approached, Carson could see a complex of angular buildings spread out below the hill, white and spare, gleaming in the morning sun like a cluster of salt crystals.
“There it is,” Singer said proudly, slowing. “Mount Dragon. Your home for the next six months.”
Soon a distant chain-link fence came into view, topped by thick rolls of concertina wire. A guard tower rose above the complex, motionless against the sky, wavering slightly in the heat.
“There’s nobody in it at the moment,” Singer said with a chuckle. “Oh, there’s a security staff, all right. You’ll meet them soon enough. And they’re very efficient when they want to be. But our real security’s the desert.”
As they approached, the buildings slowly took form. Carson had expected an ugly set of cement buildings and Quonset huts; instead, the complex seemed almost beautiful, white and cool and clean against the sky.
Singer slowed further, drove around a concrete crash barrier and stopped at an enclosed guardhouse. A man—civilian clothes, no uniform of any kind—opened the door and came strolling over. Carson noticed that he walked with a stiff leg.
Singer lowered the window, and the man placed two muscled forearms on the doorframe and poked his crew-cut head inside. He grinned, his jaw muscles working on a piece of gum. Two brilliant green eyes were set deeply into a tanned, almost leathery face.
“Howdy, John,” he said, his eyes slowly moving around the interior and finally coming to rest on Carson. “Who’ve we got here?”
“It’s our new scientist. Guy Carson. Guy, this is Mike Marr, security.”
The man nodded, eyes sliding around the car again. He handed Singer back his ID.
“Documents?” he spoke in Carson’s direction, almost dreamily. Carson passed over the documents he had been told to bring: his passport, birth certificate, and GeneDyne ID.
Marr flicked through them nonchalantly. “Wallet, please?”
“You want my driver’s license?” Carson frowned.
“The whole wallet, if you don’t mind.” Marr grinned very briefly, and Carson saw that the man wasn’t chewing gum after all, but a large red rubber band. He handed over his wallet with irritation.
“They’ll be taking your bags, as well,” Singer said. “Don’t worry, you’ll get everything back before dinner. Except your passport, of course. That will be returned at the end of your six-month tour.”
Marr heaved himself off the window and walked back into his air-conditioned blockhouse with Carson’s belongings. He had a strange walk, hitching his right leg along as if it were in danger of becoming dislocated. A few moments later, he raised the bar and waved them through. Carson could see him through the thick blue-tinted glass, fanning out the contents of his wallet.
“There are no secrets here, I’m afraid, except the ones you keep inside your head,” Singer said with a smile, easing the Hummer forward. “And watch out for those, as well.”
“Why is all this necessary?” asked Carson.
Singer shrugged. “The price of working in a high-security environment. Industrial espionage, scurrilous publicity, and so forth. It’s what you’ve been used to at GeneDyne Edison, really, just magnified tenfold.”
Singer pulled into the motor pool and killed the engine. As Carson stepped out, a blast of desert air rolled over him and he inhaled deeply. It felt wonderful. Looking up, he could see the bulk of Mount Dragon rising a quarter mile beyond the compound. A newly graded gravel road switchbacked up its side, ending at the microwave towers.
“First,” said Singer, “the grand tour. Then we’ll head back to my office for a cold drink and a chat.” He moved forward.
“This project ...?” Carson began.
Singer stopped, turned.
“Scopes wasn’t exaggerating?” Carson asked. “It’s really that important?”
Singer squinted, looked off into the empty desert. “Beyond your wildest dreams,” he said.
Percival Lecture Hall at Harvard University was filled to capacity. Two hundred students sat in the descending rows of chairs, some bent over notebooks, others looking attentively forward. Dr. Charles Levine paced before the class, a small wiry figure with a fringe of hair surrounding his prematurely balding dome. There were chalk marks on his sleeves and his brogues still had salt stains from the previous winter. Nothing in his appearance, however, reduced the intensity that radiated from his quick movements and expression. As he lectured, he gestured with a stub of chalk at complex biochemical formulae and nucleotide sequences scattered across the huge sliding chalkboards, indecipherable as cuneiform.
In the rear of the hall sat a small group of people armed with microcassette recorders and handheld video cameras. They were not dressed like students, and press cards were prominently displayed on lapels and belts. But media presence was routine; lectures by Levine, professor of genetics and head of the Foundation for Genetic Policy, often became controversial without notice. And Genetic Policy, the foundation’s journal, had made sure this lecture was given plenty of advance notice.
Levine stopped his pacing and moved to the podium. “That wraps up our discussion on Tuitt’s constant, as it applies to disease mortality in western Europe,” he said. “But I have more to discuss with you today.” He cleared this throat.
“May I have the screen, please?” The lights dimmed and a white rectangle descended from the ceiling, obscuring the chalkboards.
“In sixty seconds, I am going to display a photograph on this screen,” Levine said. “I am not authorized to show you this photograph. In fact, by doing so, I’ll be technically guilty of breaking several laws under the Official Secrets Act. By staying, you’ll be doing the same. I’m used to this kind of thing. If you’ve ever read Genetic Policy, you’ll know what I mean. This is information that must be made public, no matter what the cost. But it goes beyond the scope of today’s lecture, and I can’t ask you to stay. Anyone who wishes to go may do so now.”
In the dimly lit room, there were whispers, the turning of notebook pages. But nobody stood up.
Levine looked around, pleased. Then he nodded to the projectionist. A black-and-white image filled the screen.
Levine looked up at the image, the top of his head shining in the light of the projector like a monk’s tonsure. Then he turned to face his audience.
“This is a picture taken on July 1, 1985, by the image-gathering satellite TB-17 from a sun-synchronous orbit of about one hundred and seventy miles,” he began. “Technically, it has not yet bee
n declassified. But it deserves to be.” He smiled. Nervous laughter briefly filled the hall.
“You’re looking at the town of Novo-Druzhina, in western Siberia. As you can see by the length of the shadows, this was taken in the early morning, the preferred time for image analysis. Note the position of the two parked cars, here, and the ripening fields of wheat.”
A new slide appeared.
“Thanks to the surveillance technique of comparative coverage, this slide shows the exact same location three months later. Notice anything strange?”
There was a silence.
“The cars are parked in exactly the same spot. And the field of grain is apparently very ripe, ready to be harvested.”
Another slide appeared.
“Here’s the same place in April of the following year. Note the two cars are still there. The field has obviously gone fallow, the grain unharvested. It was images like these that suddenly made this area very interesting to certain photo-grammetrists in the CIA.”
He paused, looking out over the classroom.
“The United States military learned that all of Restricted Area Fourteen—a half-dozen towns, in an eighty-square-mile area surrounding Novo-Druzhina—were affected in a similar way. All human activity had ceased. So they took a closer look.”
Another slide appeared.
“This is a magnification of the first slide, digitally enhanced, glint-suppressed, and compensated for spectral drift. If you look closely along the dirt street in front of the church, you will see a blurry image resembling a log. That is a human corpse, as any Pentagon photo-jock could tell you. Now here is the same scene, six months later.”
Everything appeared to be the same, except that the log now looked white.
“The corpse is now skeletonized. When the military examined large numbers of these enhanced images, they found countless such skeletons lying unburied in the streets and the fields. At first, they were mystified. Theories of mass insanity, another Jonestown, were advanced. Because—”
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