“That segment can be pretty vocal.” Carson had sometimes passed groups of demonstrators outside the GeneDyne gates on his way to and from work.
“Yes. You have people out there like Charles Levine. You know his Foundation for Genetic Policy? Very radical organization, out to destroy genetic engineering in general and Brent Scopes in particular.”
Carson nodded.
“They were friends in college, Levine and Scopes. God, that’s quite a story. Remind me to tell you what I know of it someday. Anyway, Levine is a bit unbalanced, a real Don Quixote. Rolling back scientific progress has become his goal in life. It’s gotten worse since the death of his wife, I’m told. And he’s carried out a twenty-year vendetta against Brent Scopes. Unfortunately, there are many in the media who actually listen to him and print his garbage.” He stepped away from the window. “It’s much easier to tear something down than build it up, Guy. Mount Dragon is the safest genetic-engineering lab in the world. No one, and I mean no one, is more interested in the safety of his employees and his products than Brent Scopes.”
Carson almost mentioned that Charles Levine had been one of his undergraduate professors, but thought better of it. Maybe Singer already knew. “So you want to present the X-FLU therapy as a fait accompli. And that’s the reason for the rush?”
“That’s partly the reason.” Singer hesitated, then continued. “Actually, the truth is that X-FLU is very important to GeneDyne. In fact, it’s critical. Scopes’s corn royalty patent—GeneDyne’s financial bedrock—expires in a matter of weeks.”
“But Scopes only turns forty this year,” Carson said. “The patent can’t be that old. Why doesn’t he just renew it?”
Singer shrugged. “I don’t know all the details. I just know it’s expiring, and it can’t be renewed. When that happens, all those royalties will cease. PurBlood won’t see distribution for a couple of months, and it will take years to amortize the cost of R and D anyway. Our other new products are still stuck undergoing the approval process. If X-FLU doesn’t come through soon, GeneDyne will have to cut its generous dividend. That would have a catastrophic effect on the stock price. Your nest egg and mine.”
He turned, beckoned. “Come over here, Guy,” he said.
Carson walked to where Singer was standing. The window offered a sweeping view of the Jornada del Muerto desert, which stretched toward the horizon, dissolving in a firestorm of light where the sky met the earth. To the south Carson could barely make out the rubble of what looked like an ancient Indian ruin, several ragged walls poking above the drifted sand.
Singer placed a hand on Carson’s shoulder. “These matters shouldn’t be of any concern to you right now. Think about the potential that lies just beneath our fingertips. The average doctor, if he’s lucky, may save hundreds of lives. A medical researcher may save thousands. But you, me, GeneDyne— we’re going to save millions. Billions.”
He pointed toward a low range of mountains to the northeast, rising above the bright desert like a series of dark teeth. “Fifty years ago, mankind exploded the first atomic device at the foot of those mountains. The Trinity Site is a mere thirty miles from here. That was the dark side of science. Now, half a century later, in this same desert, we have the chance to redeem science. It’s really as simple and as profound as that.”
His grip tightened. “Guy, this is going to be the greatest adventure of your lifetime. I think I can guarantee that.”
They stood looking out over the desert, and as he stared, Carson could feel its vast intensity, a feeling almost religious in its force. And he knew Singer was right.
Carson rose at five-thirty. He swung his feet over the side of the bed and looked out the open window toward the San Andres Mountains. The cool night air flowed in, bringing with it the intense stillness of the predawn morning. He breathed deeply. In New Jersey, it was all he could do to drag himself out of bed at eight o’clock. Now, on his second morning in the desert, he was already back on his old schedule.
He watched as the stars disappeared, leaving only Venus in the cloudless eastern sky. The peculiar green color of the desert sunrise crept into the sky, then faded to yellow. Slowly, the outlines of plants emerged from the indistinct blueness of the desert floor. The wiry tangles of witch mesquite and the tall clumps of tobosa grass were widely scattered; life in the desert, Carson thought, was a solitary, uncrowded affair.
His room was sparsely but comfortably furnished: bed, matching sofa and chair, oversized desk, bookshelves. He showered, shaved, and dressed in white scrubs, feeling alternately excited and apprehensive about the day ahead.
He’d spent the previous afternoon being processed into the Mount Dragon workforce: filling out forms, getting voice-printed and photographed, and undergoing the most extensive physical he’d ever experienced. The site doctor, Lyle Grady, was a thin, small man with a reedy voice. He’d barely smiled as he typed notes into his terminal. After a brief dinner with Singer, Carson had turned in early. He wanted to be well rested.
The workday at GeneDyne began at eight o’clock. Carson did not eat breakfast—a holdover from the days when his father roused him early and made him saddle his horse in the dark—but he found his way to the cafeteria, where he grabbed a quick cup of coffee before heading toward his new lab. The cafeteria was deserted, and Carson remembered a remark Singer had made at dinner the night before. “We eat big dinners around here,” he’d said. “Breakfast and lunch aren’t too popular. Something about working in the Fever Tank that really curbs your appetite.”
People were suiting up quickly and silently when Carson arrived at the Fever Tank. Everyone turned to look at the new arrival, some friendly, some frankly curious, some noncommittal. Then Singer appeared in the ready room, his round face smiling broadly.
“How’d you sleep?” he asked, giving Carson a friendly pat on the back.
“Not bad,” Carson said. “I’m anxious to get started.”
“Good. I want to introduce you to your assistant.” He looked around. “Where’s Susana?”
“She’s already inside,” said one of the technicians. “She had to go in early to check some cultures.”
“You’re in Lab C,” Singer said. “Rosalind showed you the way, right?”
“More or less,” Carson said, pulling the bluesuit out of his locker.
“Good. You’ll probably want to start by going over Frank Burt’s lab notes. Susana will see that you have everything you need.”
Completing the dressing procedure with Singer’s help, Carson followed the others into the chemical showers, then again entered the warren of narrow corridors and hatches of the Biosafety Level-5 lab. Once again, he found it difficult to get used to the constricting suit, the reliance on air tubes. After a few wrong turns he found himself in front of a metal door marked LABORATORY C.
Inside, a bulky, suited figure was bent over a bioprophylaxis table, sorting through a stack of petri dishes. Carson pressed one of the intercom buttons on his suit.
“Hi. Are you Susana?”
The figure straightened up.
“I’m Guy Carson,” he continued.
A small sharp voice crackled over the intercom. “Susana Cabeza de Vaca.”
They clumsily shook hands.
“These suits are a pain in the butt,” de Vaca said irritably. “So you’re Burt’s replacement.”
“That’s right,” said Carson.
She peered into his visor. “Hispano?” she asked.
“No, I’m an Anglo,” Carson replied, a little more hastily than he’d intended.
There was a pause. “Hmm,” de Vaca said, looking at him intently. “Well, you sure sound like you could be from around here, anyway.”
“I grew up in the Bootheel.”
“I knew it! Well, Guy, you and I are the only natives here.”
“You’re a New Mexican? When did you come?” Carson asked.
“I got here about two weeks ago, transferred from the Albuquerque plant. I was originally assigned t
o Medical, but now I’ll be replacing Dr. Burt’s assistant. She left a few days after he did.”
“Where’re you from?” Carson asked.
“A little mountain town called Truchas. About thirty miles north of Santa Fe.”
“Originally, I mean.”
There was another pause. “I was born in Truchas,” she said.
“Okay,” Carson said, surprised by her sharp tone.
“You meant, when did we swim the Rio Grande?”
“Well, no, of course not. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Mexicans—”
“Mexicans?”
“Yes. Some of the best hands on our ranch were Mexican, and growing up I had a lot of Mexican friends—”
“My family,” de Vaca interrupted frostily, “came to America with Don Juan de Oñate. In fact, Don Alonso Cabeza de Vaca and his wife almost died of thirst crossing this very desert. That was in 1598, which I’m sure was a lot earlier than when your redneck dustbowl family settled in the Bootheel. But I’m deeply touched you had Mexican friends growing up.”
She turned away and began sorting through petri dishes again, typing the numbers into a PowerBook computer.
Jesus, thought Carson, Singer wasn’t kidding when he said everyone here was stressed. “Ms. de Vaca,” he said, “I hope you understand I was just trying to be friendly.”
Carson waited. De Vaca continued to sort and type.
“Not that it matters, but I don’t come from some dustbowl family. My ancestor was Kit Carson, and my great-grandfather homesteaded the ranch I grew up on. The Carsons have been in New Mexico for almost two hundred years.”
“Colonel Christopher Carson? Well, whaddya know,” she said, not looking up. “I once wrote a college paper on Carson. Tell me, are you descended from his Spanish wife or his Indian wife?”
There was a silence.
“It’s got to be one or the other,” she continued, “because you sure don’t look like a white man to me.” She stacked the petri dishes and squared them away, sliding them into a stainless-steel slot in the wall.
“I don’t define myself by my racial makeup, Ms. de Vaca,” Carson said, trying to keep an even tone.
“It’s Cabeza de Vaca, not ‘de Vaca,’ ” she responded, beginning to sort another stack.
Carson jabbed angrily at his intercom switch. “I don’t care if it’s Cabeza or Kowalski. I’m not going to take this kind of rude shit from you or that walking chuck wagon Rosalind or anyone else.”
There was a momentary silence. Then de Vaca began to laugh. “Carson? Look at the two buttons on your intercom panel. One is for private conversation over a local channel, and one is for global broadcast. Don’t get them mixed up again, or everyone in the Fever Tank will hear what you’re saying.”
There came a hiss on the intercom. “Carson?” Brandon-Smith’s voice sounded. “I just want you to know I heard that, you bowlegged asswipe.”
De Vaca smirked.
“Ms. Cabeza de Vaca,” said Carson, fumbling with the intercom buttons. “I just want to get my job done. Got that? I’m not interested in petty squabbling or in sorting out your identity problem. So start acting like an assistant and show me how I can access Dr. Burt’s lab notes.”
There was an icy pause.
“Right,” de Vaca said at last, pointing to a gray laptop stored in a cubbyhole near the entry hatch. “That PowerBook was Burt’s. Now it’s yours. If you want to see his entries, the network jacks are in that receptacle by your left elbow. You know the rules about notes, don’t you?”
“You mean the pencil-and-paper directive?” Back in New Jersey, GeneDyne had a policy of discouraging the recording of any information except into company computers.
“They take it a step further here,” de Vaca said. “No hard copy of any kind. No pens, pencils, paper. All test results, all lab work, everything you do and think, has to be recorded in your PowerBook and uploaded to the mainframe at least once a day. Just leaving a note on someone’s desk is enough to get you fired.”
“What’s the big deal?”
De Vaca shrugged inside the confines of her suit. “Scopes likes to browse through our notes, see what we’re up to, offer suggestions. He roams company cyberspace all night long from Boston, poking and prying into everyone’s business; The guy never sleeps.”
Carson sensed a note of disrespect in her voice. Turning on the laptop and plugging the network cable into the wall jack, he logged on, then let de Vaca show him where Burt’s files were kept. He typed a few brief commands—annoyed at the pudgy clumsiness of his gloved fingers—and waited while the files were copied to the laptop’s hard disk. Then he loaded Burt’s notes into the laptop’s word processor.
February 18. First day at lab. Briefed by Singer on PurBlood with other new arrival, P. Brandon-Smith. Spent afternoon in library, studying precedents for encapsulating naked hemoglobin. The problem, as I see it, is essentially one of ...
“You don’t want that stuff,” de Vaca said. “That’s the last project, before I came. Page ahead until you get to X-FLU.”
Carson scrolled through three months’ worth of notes, at last locating where Burt had completed work on GeneDyne’s artificial blood and begun laying the groundwork for X-FLU. The story unfolded in terse, businesslike entries: a brilliant scientist, fresh from the triumph of one project, launching immediately into the next. Burt had used his own filtration process—a process that had made him a famous name within GeneDyne—to synthesize PurBlood, and his optimism and enthusiasm shone through clearly. After all, it had seemed a fairly simple task to neutralize the X-FLU virus and get on with human testing.
Day after day Burt worked on various angles of the problem: computer-modeling the protein coat; employing various enzymes, heat treatments, and chemicals; moving from one angle of attack to another with rapidity. Scattered liberally throughout the notes were comments from Scopes, who seemed to peruse Burt’s work several times a week. The computer had also captured many on-line typed “conversations” between Scopes and Burt. As he read these exchanges, Carson found himself admiring Scopes’s understanding of the technical aspects of his business, and envying Burt’s easy familiarity with the GeneDyne CEO.
Despite Burt’s ceaseless energy and brilliant attack, however, nothing seemed to work. Altering the protein capsule around the flu virus itself was an almost trivial matter. Each time, the coat remained stable in vitro, and Burt would then move toward an in vivo test—injecting the altered virus into chimpanzees. Each time, the animals lived for a while without obvious symptoms, then suddenly died hideous deaths.
Carson scrolled through page after page in which an increasingly exasperated Burt recorded continual, inexplicable failures. Over time, the entries seemed to lose their clipped, dispassionate tone, and become more rambling and personal. Barbed comments about the scientists Burt worked with— especially Rosalind Brandon-Smith, whom he detested—began to appear.
About three weeks before Burt left Mount Dragon, the poems began. Usually ten lines or less, they focused on the hidden, obscure beauty of science: the quaternary structure of a globulin protein, the blue glow of Cerenkov radiation. They were lyrical and evocative, yet Carson found them chilling, appearing suddenly between columns of test results, unbidden, like alien guests.
Carbon, one of the poems began,
Most beautiful of elements.
Such infinite variety,
Chains, rings, branches, buckyballs, side groups, aromatics.
Your index of refraction kills shahs and speculators.
Carbon.
You who were with us in the streets of Saigon,
You were everywhere, floating in the air
Invisible in the fear and sweat,
The napalm.
Without you we are nothing.
Carbon we were and carbon we shall become.
The entries quickly grew more sporadic and disjointed as the end drew near. Carson had increasing difficulty following Burt’s logic from one thought to
another. Throughout, Scopes had been a constant background presence; now his comments and suggestions became more critical and sarcastic. Their exchanges developed a distinct confrontational edge: Scopes aggressive, Burt evasive, almost penitent.
Burt, where were you yesterday?
I took the day off and walked outside the perimeter.
For every day this problem isn’t solved, it’s costing GeneDyne one million dollars. So Dr. Burt decides to take the day off for a one-million-dollar hike. Charming. Everybody’s waiting on you, Frank, remember? The entire project’s waiting on you.
Brent, I just can’t go on day after day. I’ve got to have some time to think and be alone.
So what did you think about?
I thought about my first wife.
Jesus Christ, he thought about his first wife. One million bucks, Frank, to think about your fucking first wife. I could kill you, I really could.
I just couldn’t work yesterday. I’ve tried everything, including recombinant viral vectors. The problem isn’t solvable.
Frank, I really hate you for even thinking that. No problem is insoluble. That’s what you said about the blood, remember? And then you solved it. You did it, Frank, think about it! And I love you for it, Frank, I do. And I know you can do it again. There’s a Nobel Prize in this for you, I swear.
Tempting me with glory won’t help, Brent. Money won’t, either. Nothing is going to make an impossible problem possible.
Don’t say that, Frank. Please. It hurts me to hear you say that word, because it’s always a lie. “Impossible” is a lie. The universe is strange and vast, and anything is possible. You remind me of Alice in Wonderland. You remember that exchange between Alice and the Queen about this very subject?
No, I don’t. And I don’t think Alice in Wonderland is going to help me believe in the impossible.
You son of a bitch, if I hear that word again I’ll come out there and kill you with my bare hands. Look, I’ve given you everything you need. Please, Frank, just get back in there and do it. I have faith that you can do it. Look, why don’t you just start over. Start with some other host, something really improbable, like a new virus, a macrophage. Or a reovirus. Something that will let you approach things from an entirely new direction. Okay?
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