Two guards helped Brandon-Smith to her feet and began leading her down the hall, while another took charge of the guard with the torn suit. The remaining guards, including Marr, positioned themselves along the corridor, watching the crowd of scientists and technicians carefully.
Soon the two detainees and their party had disappeared down the tube leading to the lower levels. Carson knew their destination: a cramped series of rooms two decks below the animal-quarantine unit. There they would spend the next ninety-six hours, having their blood constantly tested for X-FLU antibodies. If they were clear, they would be released to the infirmary for a week of observation; if not—if antibodies showed up, indicating infection—they would be required to spend the rest of their short lives in the quarantine area as the first human casualties of the rogue flu.
Nye’s brisk voice broke through again. “Mendel, get down to quarantine with a new helmet and reseal the suits. Dr. Grady will administer first aid and draw the blood samples. We will not evacuate Level-5 until everyone—I repeat, everyone—has had his suit pressure-checked for breach.”
“Fascist asshole,” said de Vaca on global.
“Anyone disobeying the orders of the security officers will be imprisoned in quarantine for the duration of the emergency,” came the cool answer. “Hertz, find the renegade animal and kill it.”
“Yes, sir.”
The site physician, Dr. Grady, appeared at the far end of the hall, wearing a red emergency suit and carrying a large metal suitcase. He disappeared down the access tube toward quarantine.
“We will now check everyone in alphabetical order,” came Nye’s voice. “As soon as you are cleared to leave the facility, please go directly to the main conference room for debriefing. Barkley, step into the exit air lock.”
The scientist named Barkley glanced around at the assembled people, then stepped quickly through the hatch.
“Carson next,” said Nye sixty seconds later.
“No,” said Carson. “This isn’t right. Our suits will run out of air in a few minutes. The women should go first.”
“Carson is next,” the voice repeated, calm but with a threatening undertone.
“Don’t be a sexist idiot,” said de Vaca, who was sitting up and cradling her stomach. “Get your ass in there.”
Carson hesitated a moment, then stepped into the air lock. A suited figure waiting in the access chamber visually inspected his suit, then attached a small hose to his air valve.
“I’m going to test your suit for leaks,” the man said. There was a hiss of stale air and Carson felt the air pressure within the suit rise, causing his ears to pop.
“Clean,” said the man, and Carson moved to the chemical shower beyond. As he emerged into the ready room, he noted that Barkley had soiled his suit, and he turned his back while grappling with his own.
As he was stowing his gear, de Vaca emerged from the Fever Tank. She pulled off her helmet.
“Wait, Guy,” she said. “I just want to say—”
Carson shut the door on her sentence and headed for the conference room.
Within an hour, everyone had assembled. Nye stood near a large videoconferencing screen, Singer at his side. Mike Marr slouched against one wall, booted legs crossed, chewing the ever-present rubber band as he lazily surveyed the group. Fear and resentment hung like a pall of smoke. Without a word, the room darkened, and the face of Scopes appeared on the screen.
“I don’t need a debriefing,” he said. “Everything was captured on videotape. Everything.”
There was a silence while Scopes’s eyes moved back and forth behind his thick glasses as if looking around the room.
“I am very disappointed in some of you,” he said at last. “You know the procedures. You’ve rehearsed them dozens of times.”
He turned to Singer. “John, you know the rules better than anyone. Mr. Nye was on top of the situation and you were not. He was perfectly correct to assume responsibility during the emergency. In a situation like this, there’s no room for confusion in the chain of command.”
“I understand,” Singer said, his face expressionless.
“I know you do. Susana Cabeza de Vaca?”
“What,” said de Vaca defiantly.
“Why did you ignore protocol and try to release Brandon-Smith from Level-5 ?”
“So she could receive medical attention in a hospital,” de Vaca said, “instead of being locked in a cage.”
There was a long silence while Scopes gazed at her. “And if she by chance had been infected with X-FLU?” he asked at last. “What then? Would medical attention save her life?”
There was a long silence. Scopes sighed heavily. “Susana, you’re a microbiologist. I don’t need to give you a lesson in epidemiology. If you had succeeded in springing Rosalind from Level-5, and if she were infected, you might have started an epidemic unprecedented in the history of mankind.”
She remained stubbornly silent.
“Andrew?” Scopes said, turning his eyes on Vanderwagon. “In such an epidemic, little children, teenagers, mothers, working men and women, rich and poor, doctors and nurses, farmers and priests, all would have died. Thousands of people, maybe millions, and maybe”—He paused—“even billions.” Scopes’s voice had grown very soft. He allowed another long silence to pass.
“Somebody tell me if I’m wrong.”
There was another excruciating silence.
“Damn it!” he barked. “There are reasons why we have safety rules in Level-5. You all are working with the most dangerous pathogen in existence. The whole world depends on you not fucking up. And you almost fucked up.”
“I’m sorry,” Vanderwagon blurted out. “I acted without thinking. All I could think of was that it could be me—”
“Fillson!” Scopes said abruptly.
The animal handler approached the screen, his hands twitching nervously, his pendulous lower lip moist.
“By failing to latch the cage properly, you caused incalculable harm. And you also failed to keep the quarantined animals’ nails trimmed, as per explicit instructions. You are, of course, fired. Furthermore, I have instructed our lawyers to initiate a civil lawsuit against you. If Brandon-Smith should die, her blood will be on your hands. In short, your unforgivable carelessness will haunt you legally, financially, and morally for the rest of your life. Mr. Marr, please see that Fillson is immediately escorted out of the premises and dropped off at Engle, to make his own way home.”
Mike Marr pushed himself away from the wall, a smile playing about his lips, and sauntered over.
“Mr. Scopes—Brent—please,” Fillson began as Marr grasped him roughly by the arm and pulled him through the door.
“Susana?” Scopes said.
De Vaca remained silent.
Scopes shook his head. “I don’t want to fire you, but if you can’t see the mistake you made, I’ll have to. It’s too dangerous. More than one life was at stake back there. Do you understand?”
De Vaca dropped her head. “Yes. I understand,” she said finally.
Scopes turned to Vanderwagon. “I know that you and Susana both were motivated by decent human emotions. But you must have more discipline when dealing with a danger as great as this virus. Remember the phrase: ‘If thy right eye offends thee, pluck it out.’ You can’t let such emotions, no matter how well intended, get the better of your reason. You are scientists. We will examine the consequences, if any, of this incident on your bonus package at a later time.”
“Yes, sir,” said Vanderwagon.
“And you too, Susana. You’re both on probation for the next six weeks.”
She nodded.
“Guy Carson?”
“Yes,” Carson said.
“I’m more sorry than I can say that your experiment failed.”
Carson said nothing.
“But I am proud of the way you acted this morning. You could have joined the rush to free Brandon-Smith, but you didn’t. You stayed cool and used your head.”
Carson remained silent. He had done what he thought was right. But de Vaca’s withering insult, her branding him a murderer, had struck home. Somehow, hearing himself praised by Scopes like this, in front of everyone, made him uncomfortable.
Scopes sighed. Then he addressed the entire group. “Rosalind Brandon-Smith and Roger Czerny are receiving the best medical treatment possible, their suits have been resealed, and they are resting comfortably. They must remain in the quarantine unit for ninety-six hours. You all know the procedure and the reasons behind it. Level-5 will remain closed except to security and medical personnel until the crisis period is over. Any questions?”
There was a silence. “If they test X-FLU-positive—?” someone began.
A look of pain crossed Scopes’s face. “I don’t want to consider that possibility,” he said, and the screen went black with a pop of static.
“Get some sleep, Guy. There’s nothing more you can do here.”
Singer, looking drawn and haggard, sat at one of the rolling chairs in the Monitoring Station, his eyes glancing over a bank of black-and-white video screens. Over the last thirty-six hours Carson had returned time and again to the station, gazing at the images on the video screens, as if the sheer force of his will could bring the two scientists out of quarantine. Now he picked up his laptop, said a reluctant good-bye to Singer, and left the subdued blue glow of the station for the empty halls of the operations building. Sleep was impossible, and he allowed his feet to take him to one of the aboveground labs beyond the inner perimeter.
Sitting at a long table in the deserted lab, he went over the failed experiment again and again in his head. He’d recently been told that the escaped chimp had tested positive for X-FLU. He could hot forget, even for a moment, that if he had been successful this would not have been the case. To make things worse, the paternal, encouraging messages from Scopes had ceased. He had let everyone down.
And yet the inoculation should have worked. There was no flaw that he could find. All the preliminary tests had shown the virus altered in precisely the way he intended.
He powered up his computer and began listing the possible scenarios:
Possibility 1: An unknown mistake was made.
Answer: Repeat experiment.
Possibility 2: Dr. Burt got the gene locus wrong.
Answer: Find new locus, repeat experiment.
Possibility 3: Chimps already had dormant X-FLU when inoculated.
Answer: Monitor successive inoculatees for results.
Possibility 4: Viral product exposed to heat or some other mutagen.
Answer: Repeat experiment, taking paramount care with viral culture between gene splicing and in vivo trial.
It all boiled down to the same thing: repeat the damned experiment. But he knew he’d get the same results, because there was nothing that could be done any differently. Wearily, he called up Burt’s notes and began going through the sections that dealt with the mapping of the viral gene. It was superb work, and Carson could hardly see where Burt had gone wrong, but it was worth going over again anyway. Maybe he should remap the entire viral plasmid from scratch himself, a process that he knew would take at least two months. He thought of spending two more months locked up in the Fever Tank. He thought of Brandon-Smith, somewhere in quarantine at this very moment, deep in the Tank. He remembered the blood welling from her raked side, the expression of fear and disbelief on her face. He remembered standing there, watching, while the guards dragged her away.
He worked in front of a large picture window that looked out over the desert. It was his only consolation. From time to time he stared out, watching the afternoon sun grow golden on the yellow sands.
“Guy?” he heard a voice say behind him. It was de Vaca. He turned and found her standing in the door, in jeans and T-shirt, her lab coat slung over her arm.
“Need any help?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“Look,” she said, “I’m sorry about my comment in the Fever Tank.”
He turned away silently. Talking with this woman only ended in grief.
He heard a rustle as she moved closer.
“I came to apologize,” she said.
He sighed. “Apology accepted.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “You still sound mad.”
Guy turned toward her. “It’s not just the comment in the Fever Tank. You bitch about everything I say.”
“You say a lot of stupid things,” de Vaca said, flaring up.
“That’s just what I mean. You didn’t come to apologize. You came to argue.”
There was a silence in the empty lab.
De Vaca stood up. “We can at least maintain a professional relationship. We’ve got to. I need that bonus for my clinic. So the experiment failed. We’ll try again.”
Carson looked at her, standing illuminated in the picture window, her violet eyes darting at him, her long black hair flowing wild down her back and shoulders. He found himself holding his breath, she was so beautiful. It took all the steam out of his anger.
“What’s going on with you and Mike Marr?” he asked.
She looked at him quickly. “That son of a bitch? He’d been coming on to me since day one. I guess he thought no woman could resist big black boots and a ten-gallon hat.”
“You seemed to be resisting pretty well at the Bomb Picnic.”
A rueful expression crossed de Vaca’s face. “Yes, and he’s not a man who likes to be crossed. He comes across all smiles and aw-shucks, but that’s not how he really is, at all. You saw how he planted the butt of his shotgun in my gut, back there in the Fever Tank. There’s something about him that scares the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth.” She pulled her hair back brusquely with one finger. “Come on, let’s get to it.”
Carson exhaled deeply. “Okay. Take a look at my ideas, see if you can think of any other reasons for the failure.” He pushed the PowerBook over, and she took the next stool at the lab table, reading the information on the screen.
“I have another idea,” she said after a moment.
“What’s that?”
She typed:
Possibility 5: Viral product contaminated with other strains of X-FLU or plasmid fragments.
Answer: Repurify and test results.
“What makes you think it was contaminated?” Carson asked.
“It’s a possibility.”
“But those samples were run with GEF. They’re all cleaner than a Vatican joke.”
“I just said it’s a possibility,” de Vaca repeated. “You can’t always believe a machine. These X-FLU strains are very similar.”
“OK, OK,” Carson sighed. “But first, I want to double-check Burt’s notes on the mapping of the X-FLU plasmid. I know it all by heart, but I want to go through it once more, just to be certain.”
“Let me help you,” said de Vaca. “Maybe between us, we can find something.”
They began to read in silence.
Roger Czerny lay on his bed in the quarantine room, looking at Brandon-Smith sitting, against the far wall. Pouting, as usual. He loathed the sight of her more deeply, more thoroughly, than he ever had any other person in his life. He loathed the fat dough-boy biohazard suit she wore, loathed the whining sarcastic voice, loathed the very sound of her breathing and whimpering through the intercom. Because of her, he might die. He was furious that he had to share the quarantine room with her. With all the money GeneDyne had, why hadn’t they built two quarantine rooms? Why stick him in with this fat, ugly woman who bitched and moaned all day long? He was forced to watch her every bodily function, her eating, her sleeping, her emptying her shit bag, everything. It was intolerable. And everything was so complicated, just taking a piss or trying to eat dinner while maintaining the sterile environment. When he got out of here, he thought, unless they did something really nice for him—a hundred-grand bonus at least—he was going to sue their asses. They should have given him a rip-proof suit. It should have been part of
the procedure. It didn’t matter that they’d given them both fresh bluesuits. They had locked him in with his own would-be murderer. They were liable as hell, and they were going to pay.
On top of everything else, they wouldn’t tell him the results of the frequent blood tests. The only way he’d know anything was when the ninety-six hour waiting period was up. If they let him out, he was clean. If not ...
Shit, he thought, it was going to take two hundred to make up for this. Two-fifty. He’d get himself a good lawyer.
It was ten o’clock. The lighting was dim, so he knew it had to be evening, not morning. That was the only way he could tell in this prison. He thought, once again, of his one visit to a hospital, ten years earlier. Emergency appendectomy. This was like a hospital, only worse. Much worse. Here he was, a hundred feet below the ground, sealed in a small room, no way out, with a roommate that—He opened and closed his mouth several times, hyperventilating, trying to ease the panic that came bubbling toward the surface.
Slowly, his breathing returned to normal. He shifted on his bed and pointed a remote at the television that hung from the ceiling. “Three Stooges” reruns. Anything to get his mind out of there.
A soft beep sounded and a blue light began blinking high on the wall. There was a hiss of compressed air escaping; then the doctor, Grady, squeezed through the hatchway, the bulky red emergency suit hindering his movements. “That time again,” he said cheerfully into the intercom. He took Brandon-Smith’s blood first, inserting the needle through a special rubber-sealed grommet in the upper arm of her suit.
“I don’t feel good,” Brandon-Smith whined. It was what she said every time the doctor came. “I think I’m feeling a little dizzy.”
The doctor checked her temperature, using the thermometer inserted in her suit.
“Ninety-eight point six!” he piped. “It’s the stress of the situation. Try to relax.”
“But I have a headache,” she said again, for the twentieth time.
“It’s not time yet for another shot of Tylenol,” the doctor said. “Another two hours.”
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