And it had worked perfectly. He had done it many times before, at MIT, but this had been different. This was no dissertation experiment; he was involved with a project that could save countless lives and, perhaps, win them a Nobel Prize. And he had access to finer equipment than even the best-equipped laboratory at MIT.
It had been easy. In fact, it had been a breeze.
He murmured a few words to de Vaca, and she placed a single test tube into the bioprophylaxis chamber. At the bottom of the tube, the crystallized X-FLU virus formed a white crust. Despite the elaborate safety measures that constrained his every movement, Carson still had trouble comprehending that this thin film of white substance was terrifyingly lethal. Sliding his hands into the chamber through the rubberized armholes, he took a syringe, filled it with viral transport medium, and gently swirled the tube. The crystallized mass gently broke up and dissolved, forming a cloudy solution of live virus particles.
“Take a look,” he said to de Vaca. “This is going to make us all famous.”
“Yeah, right,” said de Vaca. “If it doesn’t kill us first.”
“That’s ridiculous. This is the safest lab in the world.”
De Vaca shook her head. “I have a bad feeling, working with a virus this deadly. Accidents can happen anywhere.”
“Like what?”
“Like what if Burt had become homicidal instead of just stressed out? He could have stolen a beaker of this shit and— well, we wouldn’t be here today, I can tell you that.”
Carson looked at her for a moment, thought of a reply, then shelved it. He was rapidly learning that arguments with de Vaca were always a waste of time. He uncoupled his air hose. “Let’s get this to the Zoo.”
Carson alerted the medical technician and Fillson, the animal handler, through the global intercom, and they started the slow journey down the narrow corridor.
Fillson met them outside the holding area, glaring at Carson morosely through his visor as if annoyed to be put to work. As the door swung open, the animals began their piteous screaming and drumming, brown hairy fingers curling from the wire mesh of the cages.
Fillson walked down the line of cages with a stick, rapping on the exposed fingers. The screaming increased, but the banging of the stick had the desired effect and all the fingers vanished back into the cages.
“Ouch,” said de Vaca.
Fillson stopped and looked toward her. “Excuse me?” he asked.
“I said ‘ouch.’ You were hitting their fingers pretty hard.”
Uh-oh, thought Carson, here we go.
Fillson gazed at her for a few moments, his wet bottom lip moving slightly behind his visor. Then he turned away. He reached into the cabinet and removed the same pump canister Carson had seen him use before, shuffled over to a cage, and directed its spray inside. He waited a few minutes for the sedative to take effect, then unlocked the cage door and carefully removed the groggy occupant.
Carson came forward for a look. It was a young female. She squeaked and looked up at Carson, her terrified eyes barely open, half-paralyzed by the drug. Fillson strapped her to a small stretcher and wheeled it to an adjoining chamber. Carson nodded to de Vaca, who handed the test tube, encased in a shockproof Mylar housing, to the technician.
“The usual ten cc’s?” the technician asked.
“Yes,” said Carson. This was his first time directing an inoculation, and he felt a strange mixture of anticipation, regret, and guilt. Moving into the next chamber, he watched as the technician shaved a small round area on the animal’s forearm and swabbed it vigorously with betadine. The chimpanzee drowsily watched the process, then turned and blinked at Carson. Carson looked away.
They were joined, silently, by Rosalind Brandon-Smith, who gave Fillson a broad smile before turning, stony-faced, toward Carson. One of her responsibilities was tracking the inoculated chimps and autopsying those who died of edema. So far, Carson knew, the ratio of inoculations to deaths had been 1:1.
The chimp didn’t flinch as the needle slid home.
“You realize you need to inoculate two chimps,” Brandon-Smith’s voice sounded in Carson’s headset. “Male and female.”
Carson nodded without looking at her. The female chimp was wheeled back into the Zoo, and Fillson soon returned with a male. He was even smaller, still juvenile, with an owlish, curious face.
“Jesus,” said de Vaca, “it’s enough to break your heart, isn’t it?”
Fillson glanced at her sharply. “Don’t anthropomorphize. They’re just animals.”
“Just animals,” de Vaca murmured. “So are we, Mr. Fillson.”
“These two are going to live,” said Carson. “I’m sure of it.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Carson,” said Brandon-Smith, with a snort. “Even if your neutralized virus works, they’ll be killed and autopsied anyway.” She crossed her arms and looked at Fillson, receiving a smile in return.
Carson glanced at de Vaca. He could see an angry blush collecting on her face—a look that was becoming all too familiar to him. But she remained silent.
The technician slid the needle into the male chimp’s arm and smoothly injected ten cc’s of the X-FLU virus. He slipped the needle out, pressed a piece of cotton on the spot, then taped the cotton to the arm.
“When will we know?” Carson asked.
“It can take up to two weeks for the chimps to develop symptoms,” said Brandon-Smith, “although it often happens more quickly. We take blood every twelve hours, and antibodies usually show up within one week. The infected chimps go straight into the animal-quarantine area behind the Zoo.”
Carson nodded. “Will you keep me posted?” he asked.
“Certainly,” said Brandon-Smith. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t wait around for the results. I’d assume it was a failure and proceed accordingly. Otherwise, you’re going to waste a lot of time.”
She left the room. Carson and de Vaca unhooked their air hoses and followed her out the hatch and back to their work area.
“God, what an asshole,” said de Vaca as they entered Lab C.
“Which one?” Carson asked. Watching the inoculations, listening to Brandon-Smith’s sarcasm, had left him feeling short-tempered.
“I’m not sure we have a right to treat animals like that,” de Vaca said. “I wonder if those tiny cages meet federal regulations.”
“It may not be pleasant,” Carson said, “but it’s going to save millions of lives. It’s a necessary evil.”
“I wonder if Scopes is really interested in saving lives. It seems to me he’s more into the dinero. Mucho dinero.” She rubbed her gloved fingers together.
Carson ignored her. If she wanted to talk this way on a monitored intercom channel and get herself fired, that was her business. Maybe his next assistant would be a little more friendly.
He brought up an image of an X-FLU polypeptide and rotated it on his computer screen, trying to think of other ways it might be neutralized. But it was hard to concentrate when he believed that he had already solved the problem.
De Vaca opened an autoclave and started removing glass beakers and test tubes, racking them at the far end of the lab. Carson peered deep into the tertiary structure of the polypeptide, made up of thousands of amino acids. If I could cut those sulfur bonds, there, he thought, we might just uncurl the active side group, make the virus harmless. But then Burt would have thought of that, too. He cleared the screen and brought up the data from his X-ray diffraction tests of the protein coat. There was nothing else left to be done. He allowed himself to think, just briefly, of the accolades; the promotion; the admiration of Scopes.
“Scopes is smart,” de Vaca continued, “giving all of us stock in the company. It stifles dissent. Plays to people’s greed. Everyone wants to get rich. Whenever you get a big multinational corporation like this—”
His daydream rudely punctured, Carson turned on her. “If you’re so set against it,” he snapped into his intercom, “why the hell are you here?”
She emphasized the word barrio, rolling the rs off her tongue in rich Mexican Spanish, which Carson found even more irritating, as if she were showing off her bilingual ability. He could speak reasonable pocho Spanish, but he wasn’t about to try it and give her an opportunity for ridicule.
“What do you know about mental health?” he asked.
“I spent two years in medical school,” said de Vaca. “I was studying to be a psychiatrist.”
“What happened?”
“Had to drop out. Couldn’t swing it financially.”
Carson thought about that for a moment. It was time to call this bitch on something. “Bullshit,” he said.
There was an electric silence.
“Bullshit, cabrón?” She moved closer to him.
“Yes, bullshit. With a name like Cabeza de Vaca, you could’ve gotten a full scholarship. Ever heard of affirmative action?”
There was a long silence.
“I put my husband through medical school,” de Vaca said fiercely. “And when it was my turn he divorced me, the canalla. I lost more than a semester, and when you’re in medical school—” She stopped. “I don’t know why I’m bothering to defend myself to you.”
Carson was silent, already sorry that he’d once again allowed himself to be drawn into an argument.
“Yeah, I could’ve gotten a scholarship, but not because of my name. Because I got fifteens on all three sections of my MCATs. Asshole.”
Carson didn’t believe the perfect score, but fought to keep his mouth shut.
“So you think I’m just some poor dumb chola who needs a Spanish surname to get into medical school?”
Shit, Carson thought, why the hell did I start this? He turned back to his terminal, hoping that by ignoring her she would go away.
Suddenly he felt a hand tighten on his suit, screwing a fistful of the rubber material into a ball.
“Answer me, cabrón.”
Carson raised a protesting arm as the pressure on his blue-suit increased.
The enormous figure of Brandon-Smith bulked in the hatchway, and a harsh laugh barked over the intercom.
“Forgive me for interrupting you two lovebirds, but I just wanted to let you know that chimps A-twenty-two and Z-nine are back in their cages, revived and looking healthy. For now, anyway.” She turned abruptly and waddled out.
De Vaca opened her mouth as if to respond. But then she relaxed her hold on his suit, stepped away, and grinned.
“Carson, you looked a little nervous there for a moment.”
He looked back at her, struggling to keep in mind that the tension and nastiness that overcame people down in the Fever Tank was just a part of the job. He was beginning to see what had driven Burt crazy. If he could just keep his mind on the ultimate goal ... in six months, one way or another, it would be over.
He turned back to the molecule, rotating it another 120 degrees, looking for vulnerabilities. De Vaca went back to racking equipment out of the autoclave. Quiet once again settled on the lab. Carson wondered, briefly, what had happened to de Vaca’s husband.
Carson awoke just before dawn. He glanced blearily at the electronic calendar set into the wall beside his bed: Saturday, the day of the annual Bomb Picnic. As Singer had explained it, the Bomb Picnic tradition dated back to the days when the lab did military research. Once a year, a pilgrimage was organized to the old Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb had been exploded in 1945.
Carson got up and prepared to brew a cup of coffee. He liked the quiet desert mornings, and the last thing he felt like doing was making small talk in the dining hall. He’d stopped drinking the insipid cafeteria coffee after three days.
He opened a cupboard and took out an enameled coffeepot, battered by years of use. Along with his old set of spurs, the tin pot was one of the few things he had brought with him to Cambridge, and one of the only possessions that remained after the bank auctioned the ranch. It was his companion of many morning campfires on the range, and he had become almost superstitiously fond of it. He turned it over in his hands. The outside was dead black, covered with a crust of fire-hardened soot a bowie knife couldn’t remove. The inside was still a cheerful dark blue enamel flecked with white, with the fat dent on the side where his old horse, Weaver, had kicked it off the fire one morning. The handle was mashed, again Weaver’s doing, and Carson remembered the unbearably hot day when the horse had rolled in Hueco Wash with both saddlebags on. He shook his head. Weaver had gone with the ranch, just a goose-rumped Mexican grade horse worth a couple hundred bucks, tops. Probably got his ass sent straight to the knacker’s.
Carson filled the pot with water from his bathroom sink, dumped in two fistfuls of coffee grounds, and placed it on a hot plate built into a nearby console. He watched it carefully. Just before it boiled over he plucked it from the heat, poured in a little cold water to settle the grounds, and put it back on to finish. It was the very best way to make coffee—far better than the ridiculous filters, plungers, and five-hundred-dollar espresso machines everyone had used in Cambridge. And this coffee had a kick. He remembered his dad saying that the coffee wasn’t done until you could float a horseshoe in it.
As he was pouring the coffee he stopped, catching his reflection in the mirror above his desk. He frowned, remembering how dubious de Vaca had looked when he’d insisted he was Anglo. In Cambridge, women had often found something exotic in his black eyes and aquiline nose. Occasionally, he’d told them about his ancestor, Kit Carson. But he never mentioned that his maternal ancestor was a Southern Ute. The fact that he still felt secretive about it, so many years removed from the schoolyard taunts of “half-breed,” annoyed him.
He remembered his great-uncle Charley. Even though he was half white, he looked like a full-blood and even spoke Ute. Charley had died when Carson was nine, and Carson’s memories of him were of a skinny man sitting in a rocking chair by the fire, chuckling to himself, smoking cigars and spitting bits of tobacco off his tongue into the flames. He told a lot of Indian stories, mostly about tracking lost horses and stealing livestock from the reviled Navajos. Carson could only listen to his stories when his parents weren’t around; otherwise they hustled him away and scolded the old man for filling the boy’s head with lies and nonsense. Carson’s father did not like Uncle Charley, and often made comments about his long hair, which the old man refused to cut, saying it would reduce rainfall. Carson also remembered overhearing his father tell his mother that God had given their son “more than his share of Ute blood.”
He sipped his coffee and looked out the open window, rubbing his back absently. His room was on the second floor of the residency quarters, and it commanded a view of the stables, machine shop, and perimeter fence. Beyond the fence the endless desert began.
He grimaced as his fingers hit a sore spot at the base of his back where the spinal tap had been inserted the evening before. Another nuisance of working in a Level-5 facility, he’d discovered, were the mandated weekly physical exams. Just one more reminder of the constant worry over contamination that plagued workers at Mount Dragon.
The Bomb Picnic was his first day off since arriving at the lab. He’d discovered that the inoculation of the chimps with his neutralized virus was just the beginning of his assignment. Although Carson had explained that his new protocol was the only possible solution, Scopes had insisted on two additional sets of inoculations, to minimize any chance of erroneous results. Six chimpanzees were now inoculated with X-FLU. If they survived the inoculations, the next test would be to see if they had been, given immunity to the flu.
Carson watched from his window as two workmen rolled a large galvanized stock tank over to a Ford 350 pickup and began wrestling it onto the bed. The water truck had arrived earl
y and the driver was idling in the motor pool, too lazy to shut off his engine, sending up clouds of diesel smoke. The sky was clear—the late-summer rains wouldn’t begin for another few weeks—and the distant mountains glowed amethyst in the morning light.
Finishing his coffee and going downstairs, he found Singer standing by the pickup, shouting directions at the workmen. He was wearing beach sandals and Bermuda shorts. A flamboyant pastel shirt covered his generous midriff.
“I see you’re ready to go,” Carson said.
Singer glanced at him through an old pair of Ray-Bans. “I look forward to this all year,” he said. “Where’s your bathing suit?”
“Under my jeans.”
“Get in the spirit, Guy! You look like you’re about to round up some cattle, not spend a day at the beach.” He turned back to the workmen: “We leave at eight o’clock sharp, so let’s get moving. Bring up the Hummers and get them loaded.”
Other scientists, technicians, and workers were drifting down to the motor pool, burdened with beach bags, towels, and folding chairs. “How did this thing ever start?” Carson asked, looking at them.
“I can’t remember whose idea it was,” Singer said. “The government opens the Trinity Site once a year to the public. At some point we asked if we could visit the site ourselves, and they said yes. Then someone suggested a picnic, and someone else suggested volleyball and cold beer. Then someone pointed out what a shame it was we couldn’t bring the ocean along. And that’s when the idea of the cattle tank came up. It was a stroke of genius.”
“Aren’t people worried about radiation?” Carson asked.
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