A new slide appeared.
“—as you can see, everything else is still alive. Horses are still grazing in the fields. And there in the upper left-hand corner is a pack of dogs, apparently feral. This next slide shows cattle. The only dead things are human beings. Yet whatever it was that killed them was so dangerous, so instantaneous, or so widespread, that they remain where they fell, unburied.”
He paused.
“The question is, what was it?”
The hall was silent.
“Lowell Cafeteria cooking?” someone ventured.
Levine joined in the general laughter. Then he nodded, and another aerial slide appeared, showing an extensive complex, gutted and ruined.
“Would that it were, my friend. In time, the CIA learned that the cause was a pathogen of some sort, created in the laboratory pictured here. You can see from the craters that the site has been bombed.
“Exact details were not known outside Russia until earlier this week, when a disenchanted Russian colonel defected to Switzerland, bringing with him a fat parcel of Soviet Army files. The same contact who provided me with these images alerted me to this colonel’s presence in Switzerland. I was the first to examine his files. The events I am about to relate to you have never before been made public.
“What you must understand first is that this was a primitive experiment. There was little thought to political, economic, even military use. Remember, ten years ago the Russians were lagging behind in genetic research and struggling to catch up. In the secret facility outside Novo-Druzhina, they were experimenting with viral engineering. They were using a common virus, herpes simplex Ia+, the virus that produces cold sores. It’s a relatively simple virus, well understood, easy to work with. They began meddling with its genetic makeup, inserting human genes into its viral DNA.
“We still don’t know quite how they did it. But suddenly they had a horrific new pathogen on their hands, a scourge they were ill equipped to deal with. All they knew at the time was that it seemed unusually long-lived, and that it infected through aerosol contact.
“On May 23, 1985, there was a small safety breach at the Soviet laboratory. Apparently, a worker inside the transfection lab fell, damaging his biocontainment suit. As you know from Chernobyl, Soviet safety standards can be execrable. The worker told nobody about the incident, and later went home to his family in the worker’s complex.
“For three weeks the virus incubated in his peritoneum, duplicating and spreading. On June 14, this worker felt ill and went to bed with a high fever. Within a few hours, he was complaining of a strange pressure in his gut. He passed a large amount of foul-smelling gas. Growing nervous, his wife sent for the doctor.
“Before the doctor could arrive, however, the man had—you will excuse the graphic description—voided most of his intestines out through his anus. They had suppurated inside his body, becoming pastelike. He had literally defecated his insides out. Needless to say, by the time the doctor arrived, the man was dead.”
Levine paused again, looking around the room as if for raised hands. There were none.
“Since this incident has remained a secret from the scientific community, the virus has no official name, it is known only as Strain 232. We now know that a person exposed to it becomes contagious four days after exposure, although it takes several weeks for symptoms to appear. The mortality rate of Strain 232 is close to a hundred percent. By the time the worker had died, he had exposed dozens, if not hundreds, of people. We could call him vector zero. Within seventy-two hours of his death, dozens of people were complaining of the same gastrointestinal pressure, and soon suffered the same gruesome fate.
“The only thing that prevented a worldwide pandemic was the location of the outbreak. In 1985, movement in and out of Restricted Area Fourteen was highly controlled. Nevertheless, as word spread, a general panic ensued. People in the area began loading their belongings into cars, trucks, even horsecarts. Many tried fleeing on bicycle, or even on foot, abandoning everything in their desperation to get away.
“From the papers the colonel brought with him out of Russia, we can piece together the response of the Soviet Army. A special team in biohazard suits set up a series of roadblocks, preventing anyone from leaving the affected area. This was relatively easy, since Area Fourteen was already fenced and checkpointed. As the epidemic roared through the neighboring villages, whole families died in the streets, in the fields, in the market squares. By the time a person felt the first alarming symptoms, a painful death was only three hours away. The panic was so great that at the checkpoints, the soldiers were ordered to shoot and kill anyone—anyone—as soon as they came within range. Old men, children, pregnant women were gunned down. Air-dropped antipersonnel mines were scattered in wide swaths across woods and fields. What these measures didn’t catch, the razor wire and tank traps did.
“Then the laboratory was carpet-bombed. Not, of course, to destroy the virus—bombs would have no effect on it. But rather to obliterate the traces, to hide what really happened from the West.
“Within eight weeks, every human being within the quarantined area was dead. The villages were deserted, the pigs and dogs gorging on corpses, the cows wandering unmilked, a horrible stench hanging over the deserted buildings.”
Levine took a sip of water, then resumed.
“This is a shocking story, the biological equivalent of a nuclear holocaust. But I’m afraid the last chapter has yet to be written. Towns that have been irradiated with atomic bombs can be shunned. But the legacy of Novo-Druzhina is harder to avoid. Viruses are opportunistic, and they don’t like to stay put. Although all the human hosts are dead, there is a possibility that Strain 232 lives on somewhere in this devastated area. Viruses sometimes find secondary reservoirs where they wait, patiently, for the next opportunity to infect. Strain 232 might be extinct. Or a viable pocket of it may still be there. Tomorrow, some hapless rabbit with muddy paws might wriggle through a hole in the perimeter fence. A farmer might shoot that rabbit and take it to market. And then the world as we know it could very well end.”
He paused.
“And that,” he shouted suddenly, “is the promise of genetic engineering!”
He stopped, letting the silence grow in the hall. Finally he dabbed his brow and spoke again, more quietly. “We won’t be needing the projector anymore.”
The projector image disappeared, leaving the hall in darkness.
“My friends,” Levine continued, “we have reached a critical turning point in our stewardship of this planet, and we’re so blind we can’t even see it. We’ve walked the earth for five thousand centuries. But in the last fifty years, we’ve learned enough to really hurt ourselves. First with nuclear weapons, and now—infinitely more dangerously—with the reengineering of nature.”
He shook his head. “There is an old proverb: ‘Nature is a hanging judge.’ The Novo-Druzhina incident nearly hanged the human race. And yet, as I speak, other companies across the globe are tinkering with viruses, exchanging genetic material between viruses, bacteria, plants, and animals indiscriminately, without any thought to the ultimate consequences.
“Of course, today’s cutting-edge labs in Europe and America are a far cry from 1985 Siberia. Should that reassure us? Quite the opposite.
“The scientists in Novo-Druzhina were doing simple manipulations of a simple virus. They accidentally created a catastrophe. Today—barely a stone’s throw from this hall— much more complicated experiments are being done with infinitely more exotic, infinitely more dangerous viruses.
“Edwin Kilbourne, the virologist, once postulated a pathogen he called the Maximally Malignant Virus. The MMV would have, he theorized, the environmental stability of polio, the antigenic mutability of influenza, the unrestricted host range of rabies, the latency of herpes.
“Such an idea, almost laughable then, is deadly serious now. Such a pathogen could be, and maybe is being, created in a laboratory somewhere on this planet. It would be far more devas
tating than a nuclear war. Why? A nuclear war is self-limiting. But with the spread of an MMV, every infected person becomes a brand new walking bomb. And today’s transmission routes are so widespread, so quickly achieved by international travelers, it only takes a few carriers for a virus to go global.”
Levine stepped around the podium to face the audience. “Regimes come and go. Political boundaries change. Empires grow and fall. But these agents of destruction, once unleashed, last forever. I ask you: should we allow unregulated and uncontrolled experiments in genetic engineering to continue in laboratories around the world? That is the real question raised by Strain 232.”
He nodded, and the lights came back up. “There will be a full report of the Novo-Druzhina incident in the next issue of Genetic Policy,” he said, turning to gather his papers.
The spell broken, the students stood up and began collecting their things, moving in a rustling tide toward the exits. The reporters at the back of the hall had already left to file their stories.
A young man appeared at the top of the hall, pushing his way through the milling crowd. Slowly, he made his way down the central steps toward the podium.
Levine glanced up, then looked carefully left and right. “I thought you were told never to approach me in public,” he said.
The youth came forward, held Levine’s elbow, and whispered urgently in his ear. Levine stopped loading papers into his briefcase.
“Carson?” he asked. “You mean that bright cowboy fellow who was always interrupting my lectures to argue?”
The man nodded his head.
Levine fell silent, his hand on the briefcase. Then he snapped it shut.
“My God,” he said simply.
Carson looked out across the motor pool toward a sweeping cluster of white buildings which rose abruptly from the desert sands: curves, planes and domes thrusting from the ground. The stark placement of the buildings in the desert terrain, along with a total absence of landscaping, gave the laboratory a Zen-like feeling of purity and emptiness. Glassed-in walkways connected many of the buildings, forming crisscrossing patterns.
Singer led Carson along one of the covered walkways. “Brent is a great believer in architecture as a means of inspiring the human spirit,” he said. “I’ll never forget when that architect, what’s-his-name—Guareschi—came from New York to ‘experience’ the site.”
Singer chuckled softly.
“He arrived in tasseled loafers and a suit, with this silly straw hat. But the guy was game, I’ll give him that. He actually camped out for four days before he got heatstroke and hightailed it back to Manhattan.”
“It’s beautiful,” Carson said.
“It is. Despite his bad experience, the man did manage to capture the spareness of the desert. He insisted there be no landscaping. For one thing, we didn’t have the water. But he also wanted the complex to look as if it was part of the desert, and not imposed on it. Obviously, he never forgot the heat. I think that’s why everything’s white: the machine shop, the storage barracks—even the power plant.” He nodded toward a long building with gracefully curving rooflines.
“That’s the power plant?” Carson asked in disbelief. “It looks more like an art museum. This place must have cost a fortune.”
“Several fortunes,” Singer said. “But back in ’85, when construction began, money wasn’t much of an issue.” He ushered Carson toward the residency compound, a series of low curvilinear structures gathered together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. “We’d obtained a nine-hundred-million-dollar contract through DATRADA.”
“Who?”
“Defense Advanced Technology, Research and Development Administration.”
“Never heard of it,” said Carson.
“It was a secret Defense Department agency. Disbanded after the Reagan years. We all had to sign a lot of formal loyalty documents and the like. Secret clearance, top-secret clearance, you name it. Then they investigated us—boy, did they investigate. I got calls from ex-girlfriends twenty years removed: ‘A bunch of suits were just here asking a lot of questions about you. What the hell did you do now, Singer?’ ” He laughed.
“So you’ve been here from the beginning,” Carson said.
“That’s right. Only the scientists have six-month tours. I guess they figure I don’t do enough real work to get burnt out.” He laughed. “I’m the old-timer here, me and Nye. And a few others, old Pavel and the fellow you just met, Mike Marr. Anyway, it’s been much nicer since we went civilian. The military boys were a pain in the posterior.”
“How did the changeover happen?” Carson asked.
Singer steered him through the smoked-glass door of a structure on the far side of the residency compound. A river of air-conditioning washed over them as the door hissed shut. Carson found himself in a vestibule, with slate floors, white walls, and taupe furniture. Singer led him toward another door.
“At first, we did strictly defense research. That’s how we got these land parcels in the Missile Range. Our job was to look for vaccines, countermeasures and antitoxins to presumed Soviet biological weapons. When the Soviet Union fell apart, so did our brief. We lost the contract in 1990. We almost lost the lab, too, but Scopes did some quick lobbying behind closed doors. God knows how he did it, but we were able to get a thirty-year lease under the Defense Industry Conversion Act.”
Singer opened a door into a long laboratory. A series of black tables gleamed under fluorescent lights. Bunsen burners, Erlenmeyer flasks, glass tubing, Stereozoom microscopes and various other low-tech equipment sat in neat, spotless rows.
Carson had never seen a lab look so clean. “Is this the low-level facility?” he asked incredulously.
“Nope,” Singer said. “Most of the real work is done on the inside, our next stop. This is just eye candy for congressmen and military brass. They expect to see an upscale version of their old university chem lab, and we give it to them.”
They passed into another, much smaller room. A large, gleaming instrument sat in its center. Carson recognized it instantly.
“The world’s best microtome: the Scientific Precision ‘Ultra-Shave,’ ” Singer said. “That’s what we call it, anyway. It’s all computer controlled. A diamond blade that cuts a human hair into twenty-five hundred sections. Widthwise. This one’s just for show, of course. We’ve got two identical units operating on the inside.”
They walked back into the baking heat. Singer licked a finger and held it up. “Wind’s from the southeast,” he said. “As always. That’s why they picked this place—always blowing from the southeast. The first town downwind of us is Claunch, New Mexico, population twenty-two. One hundred forty miles away. The Trinity Site, where they blew up the first A-bomb, is only thirty miles northwest of here. Good place to hide an atomic explosion. You couldn’t find a more isolated place in the lower forty-eight.”
“We called that wind the Mexican Zephyr,” Carson said. “When I was a kid, I hated to go out in that wind more than anything. My dad used to say it caused more trouble than a rat-tailed horse tied short in fly time.”
Singer turned. “Guy, I have no idea what you just said.”
“A rat-tailed horse is a horse with a short tail. If you tie him short and the flies start tormenting him, he’ll go crazy, tear down your fence and take off.”
“I see,” Singer said without conviction. He pointed over Carson’s shoulder. “Over there are the recreational facilities—gymnasium, tennis courts, horse corral. I have a strong aversion to physical activity, so I’ll let you explore those on your own.” He patted his paunch affectionately and laughed. “And that awful-looking building is the air incinerator for the Fever Tank.”
“Fever Tank?”
“Sorry,” Singer said. “I mean the Biosafety Level-5 laboratory, where the really high-risk organisms are worked on. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Biosafety classification system. Level-1 is the safety standard for working with the least infectious, least dangerous microbes. Level-4 is for the m
ost dangerous. There are two Level-4 laboratories in the country: the CDC has one in Atlanta, and the Army’s got one at Fort Detrick. These Level-4 laboratories are designed to handle the most dangerous viruses and bacteria that exist in nature.”
“But what’s this Level-5? I’ve never heard of it.”
Singer grinned. “Brent’s pride and joy. Mount Dragon has the only Level-5 laboratory in the world. It was designed for handling viruses and bacteria more dangerous than anything naturally existing in nature. In other words, microbes that have been genetically engineered. Somebody christened it the Fever Tank years ago, and the name stuck. Anyway, all the air from the Level-5 facility is circulated through the incinerator and heated to one thousand degrees Celsius before being cooled and returned. Sterilized completely.”
The alien-looking air incinerator was the only structure Carson had seen at Mount Dragon that was not pure white. “So you’re working with an airborne pathogen?”
“Clever. Yes we are, and a very nasty one at that. I enjoyed it much more when we were working on PurBlood. That’s our artificial blood product.”
Carson glanced over in the direction of the corrals. He could see a barn, stalls, several turnouts, and a large fenced pasture beyond the perimeter fence.
“Can you ride outside the facility?” he asked.
“Of course. You just have to log out and log in.” Singer glanced around and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Christ, it’s hot. I just never get used to it. Let’s go inside.”
“Inside” meant the inner perimeter, a large chain-linked area at the heart of Mount Dragon. Carson could see only one break in the inner fence, a small gatehouse directly in front of them. Singer led the way through the gate and into a large building on the far side. The doors opened to a cool foyer. Through an open door, Carson could see a row of computer terminals on long white tables. Two workers, ID cards hung around their necks, wearing jeans under white lab coats, were busily typing at terminals. Carson realized with surprise that, except for guards, these were the first workers he’d seen on the site.
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