Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Darla laughed and shook his hand, struck by how handsome Singh was when he smiled. His warm dark eyes just lit up, under all that wavy dark hair. She shook her head and smiled, too, as they got out of the car.

  “If acronyms are toxic to microbes,” she said, “then there isn’t a bug in the world that will ever get out of our lab alive!”

  Singh laughed politely.

  “Fortunately we do not have to rely on toxic alphabet-soup bureaucracy for our real defense. We take almost as many measures to prevent the bad guys from getting in as we do to keep the bad bugs from getting out. Follow me, please.”

  As they approached the door, Singh tapped in a code. Someone buzzed them inside. In the IRF main lobby, they approached the man in control of the buzzer: an armed guard seated behind a counter with several closed-circuit TV monitors before him.

  “Access control,” Singh said, then introduced Darla to the guard. The guard handed them another logbook computer to sign and date. The guard then handed Darla a previously prepared photo-ID badge.

  “That’s all?” she asked, as they approached an elevator.

  “Not quite.”

  She soon saw what he meant by that “not quite.” They got into the elevator with no problem but, once inside, the elevator would not move. The elevator requested that each of them insert their ID into the card reader and then speak aloud their destination floor. At last, the elevator deigned to move. Darla gave Reg a look, but he waggled a finger at her.

  The elevator opened into the corridor on the BSL-4 floor. A moment later they were confronted by yet another door. This one demanded a card to read, a retina scan, and yet another log-in before it would let them enter.

  “Welcome to IRF BSL-4,” Singh said as they walked into the anteroom of the lab suite. “We have both cabinet-lab and suit-lab facilities here. Class-three biosafety cabinets—glove boxes—and one-piece positive pressure suits ventilated by a high-efficiency particulate air filtration life-support system.”

  “So, HEPA-filtered air. That’s it for acronyms and security, finally?”

  “Not quite. The outer and inner changing rooms are separated by decontamination shower rooms. Once you’ve removed your street clothes in the outer change room, you’ll be carded, DNA-printed, fingerprinted, and bodyscanned before the system will let you pass into the shower rooms from this side.

  All outer and inner doors make an airlock, and the doors themselves are interlocking in order to prevent door sets from being opened simultaneously. We’ll be meeting in the suit lab to unpack your specimens.

  See you there.”

  Darla walked into the Women’s Outer Change Room and carded open a locker. She began stripping off her street clothes, hanging and folding them in the locker. Naked, she stepped up to the security console beside the door and slid her ID card into the reader, which took the card and kept it.

  The system instructed her to place her thumbs on a pad that did both fingerprinting and DNA printing.

  When that was done, the system instructed her to step onto the footprint marks on the floor and stand very still, which she did. The system counted down from five to zero, then she heard the sort of mechanical sounds she usually associated with medical machinery—X-ray, MRI, and the like.

  As she waited for some sign that she had passed muster, she thought about the relationships between security and freedom—and between biology and privacy. She’d heard of the biomanaged security state, but she’d never seen it as fully embodied as here, standing naked for machine inspection in a BSL-4 lab, in an otherwise nondescript building of a nondescript government-agency complex, in the middle of an old-fashioned neighborhood in a small Montana town.

  Without fanfare the shower door gave a loud click. She stepped into the decontamination shower room and was blasted by very warm water. She wondered what chemicals and disinfectants it might contain.

  Singh could probably tell her, if she wanted to go into that much detail. She wasn’t sure she did.

  The shower shut down and she opened the door to the inner change room. There she found complete laboratory clothes—undergarments, jumpsuits, shoes, and gloves. Because she was going into the suit lab, she donned the one-piece pressure suit and hooked herself into life support as well.

  She saw the pressure-suited Singh waiting for her in the corridor leading to the suit lab.

  “That took awhile,” she said to him, over the suit’s comm link. “Is there any way in and out that’s faster?”

  “Under normal conditions, no. The BSL-4 lab can only be entered or left through the clothing change and shower rooms. The inner change rooms, suit lab, and cabinet lab are constructed as sealed compartments within an internal containment capsule. There is also an expedited airlock entry/exit system, but that’s for use only in extreme emergency.”

  Darla nodded.

  “The sealed internal shell facilitates fumigation and prohibits animal and insect entry. The floors are integrally sealed, and the sewer vents and service lines all have backflow preventers and HEPA filtering.

  The floor drains contain traps of chemical disinfectants appropriate to the particular microorganisms under study at the time. All access doors are self-closing and lockable, while the windows are all break-resistant and sealed. There’s a dedicated nonrecirculating ventilation system providing directional airflow throughout the lab from areas of least to greatest potential hazard. Redundant supply fans, redundant exhaust fans. Exhaust air is multiply filtered in series, followed by incineration.”

  They entered the suit lab proper, where Darla saw her three pressure-suited assistants, including a broadly grinning Barry Levitch. They stood in a world built for ease of decontamination: plastic furniture, sealed and seamless benchtop workspaces.

  “To prevent contamination of this inside world by the outside world,” Singh continued, “or the outside world by this inside world, all supplies and equipment not brought in through the change rooms must pass through double-door autoclaves, dunk tanks, or fumigation chambers. All biosafety cabinets are heaviest duty, totally enclosed and ventilated, with arm-length gloves or half-suits attached to O-ring ports. We have redundant air compressors, alarms, and backup air tanks for all pressure suits. For the IRF as a whole we have autostart emergency power sources—backup generators—for the exhaust system, life support, alarms, lighting, entry and exit controls. You’ll also find voice, computer, and fax communication hardlines from the lab to the outside world.”

  “Very good,” Darla said, unable to think of anything else to say in response to the barrage of security info Singh had been hitting her with. She switched onto the common channel, which included the three assistants as well as Singh in the conversation. Everyone introduced themselves all around.

  The assistants moved aside so she could see the transfer packages they had been awaiting. She recognized the packaging: durable cartons, labeled with biohazard symbols and infectious substances warnings. The packages came with attached sheaves of documentation—paperwork chronicling facilities, personnel, and “justification of need” for every stage of their journey.

  At a nod from her, the assistants began opening the boxes, which were triple packed: heavy cartons on the outside, followed by absorbent and watertight secondary packaging, ending at last in the primary receptacles. In the case of the smaller box, the primaries were glass vials and bottles, while a containment bag of heavy plastic was the final line of defense in the larger box.

  Such overkill, she thought, as the bag with what was left of their chunk of meteorite was lifted out of the larger container. The tepui skystone was less than one third the size it had been when Retticker had initially given it to her. True, a sizable portion of that reduction had been the result of the tests she had run or that colleagues had performed at her behest, but she was sure those tests accounted for no more than a quarter of the stone’s lost mass.

  Once Retticker had learned of her findings, he had divvied the stone far beyond her own distributing of it.r />
  He informed her that he was sending portions of it to his connections at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland—yet another BSL-4 containment facility. Darla suspected that the general was now double-tracking the investigation, at the very least.

  She wondered at all this belated caution. Who knew how many people had been exposed to the skystone on its way to her, its secret origins notwithstanding? She and Barry had long been exposed to the stone themselves, working with it for weeks without all these high-flown safety measures. She had been more afraid that she and Barry might contaminate the meteorite, than that the meteorite might contaminate them.

  She was certain they had suffered no ill effects. No exotic face-melting infections, nothing even so much as a head cold—as she grumpily told the techs in Boulder while they were doing her baseline interview.

  They cheerfully informed her that the IRF’s biomedical surveillance system monitored all employees for any lab-associated illness and that RML had facilities for quarantine, isolation, and medical care, in the unlikely event of exposure to a deadly pathogen.

  No one in her university lab, it was true, had actually tried to culture anything found on the meteorite.

  Doing so might change everything, although she doubted it. Odds were all too overwhelming that what she and her collaborators had found in both the chemistry and the imagery was most likely fossil or artifact. Even if those nanoshapes were something potentially viable, how likely was she to stumble, at random, on the proper medium for growing such critters out?

  “Hey, Doctor P,” Barry said over the comm line, “there’s a sealed envelope in here addressed to you.”

  Startled, Darla took the envelope from Barry. Opening it, she found a printed message from General Retticker.

  Dear Darla:

  I trust you are reading this inside a high-level containment lab—interesting twist on information security, eh?

  There are some more facts you might like to know about your tepui meteorite. It was found in association with a tribe of meteorite cultists, who were infected with a fungal parasite. Their legends claimed the source of that mushroom infection was purposely crashed on our planet by their sky gods.

  Make what you will of that. Your discovery of potential fossils or biologicals, however, leads me to think that it is perhaps possible that the meteorite may in fact be the original source of the tribe’s endemic infection. For that reason I have also provided spore print material from their supposedly sky-derived sacred fungus. We gather from autopsies that the infection is limited to neural tissue and somehow involved in tryptamine chemistry. That might suggest to you some appropriate culture media and growing conditions.

  I urge you in your research to verify the replicability or viability of any biologicals you might uncover. Whatever the truth of the tribe’s legends, I feel that, should you succeed in growing out what you found in the meteorite, the risk of pathogenicity is strong enough that your work must be conducted in a top-level biocontainment facility. You’re in Hamilton, Montana, primarily because that is the closest such facility to Boulder, Colorado.

  I look forward to receiving further reports from you on your good work—and very soon.

  Sincerely,

  Joseph Retticker

  Not exactly a love letter, but helpful and encouraging nonetheless. Darla glanced up from the note to find her colleagues in the suit lab looking at her expectantly.

  “From General Retticker,” she said, waving the note. “Wishing us luck and urging us to get on with it.”

  “What would you like us to get on with, exactly?” Barry asked.

  “Take the samples we have here and locate all objects whose shapes suggest anything bacterial or nanobacteroidal. I’ll come up with a list of polymerase chain reactants to determine replicability, and culture media appropriate for determining viability and growth rates.”

  Darla turned away from the group and situated herself before a flatscreen computer mounted flush with the top of the lab table. Bringing up a list of growth media on the display, she tried to puzzle her way through which media might be best. She stared at the note from Retticker again. What relevance could mushroom-infected meteorite cultists possibly have to her work? If the general wanted something in that line, he should have hired an ethnobotanist.

  Maybe he had already done so. If, however, on the advice of just such a specialist, his people at USAMRIID were thinking they were going to grow something as complex as mushrooms from the nano-sized stuff she’d spotted, then she was sure they were off on a wild truffle hunt. No matter how viable the stuff might turn out to be, there was no way those nanoshapes could contain instructions for something as complex as mushrooms. They were just too small.

  Given that neither she nor Barry had suffered any ill effects from exposure to the tiny things on the meteorite, she also doubted they would be able to infect humans directly. She’d have to test for that possibility, however—just to be on the safe side.

  Then again, if the tiny things were living stuff, they might be able to splice some of their genetic material into more complicated organisms. Lots of viruses and bacteria possessed that capability. The mushrooms of the general’s note might have served only as a vector for getting inside still more complex organisms, including humans.

  And humans might serve as a vector for…what?

  She stopped, realizing she’d only proceeded to that next step because of her time spent with Miskulin in Antarctica.

  “The code for life on Earth did not originate on Earth,” he’d insisted, in one of their argumentative conversations. “It seeded this planet from outer space. The life code came from space, and to space it must return.”

  “What’s your proof?” she asked. “‘Seeded’ is too purposeful. Why not randomly? And why ‘must’ it return to space? What are your sources? Where’s your logic? We’re not talking about salmon swimming back to their birthplaces, you know.”

  “You want proof? All you have to do is look at the deep genetic dynamic that’s driving nearly all organisms on earth. Overpopulation, environmental destruction, aggressive territorial expansion. They’re all part of—”

  “Your usual litany of sins. I don’t see it—not in every species, anyway. How do you know all that isn’t just the result of human stupidity? You’re arguing for some kind of biological essentialism. That’s ideology, not science.”

  “No, this dynamic is truly universal. It’s just that it manifests itself more clearly in some species than in others—in lemmings, for instance. Or in humans. Our fate is to swim the ocean of interstellar space, or die trying.”

  “Human beings as space lemmings? Doesn’t seem like a very glorious end for carriers of your ‘life code.’

  And how is this ‘return’ supposed to be accomplished, anyway?”

  “It doesn’t matter to the code whether it travels in starships, or in the corpses of deceased astronauts.”

  Typical Michael. Always had to have the last word. Still, Darla wondered if his ideas—ideological and illogical as they seemed—might still not be entirely wrong. She knew from the schedule for this year’s exobio conference that he would be presenting a paper there. Might be good to pick his brain about “next steps”—in a circumspect and circuitous fashion, of course.

  Staring at the list of culture media now, and checking off serum, cerebrospinal fluid, and mushroom mycelial media, Darla vowed that neither Michael Miskulin nor anyone else besides herself should have that last word, this time.

  RENDEZVOUS IN THE BAY

  Joe Retticker sat in the lounge of Victor Fremdkunst’s ketch Skyminer, admiring the nautical brass, wood, and hemp-rope decor of the bar. It was much more ostentatious than his own bait-troller, the Fish ‘n’ Reaction, moored alongside. His own boat was a good deal more casual—and probably a helluva lot more fun, too—than Fremdkunst’s.

  He stood when Fremdkunst himself entered, clad in a bathrobe over swim trunks, to
weling water from his hair like a bronzed blond surf god newly emerged from the sea.

  “Hello, Joe. How’s the fishing?”

  A simple question, but there was something about the way Fremdkunst fixed him with his gaze that rendered every question weighty far beyond its apparent content. Maybe it was just the man’s eyes—a luminescent blue Retticker had seen only one other place in his life: in the radioactively glowing coolant water of a cobalt-fueled nuclear reactor.

  “Striped bass were hitting,” Retticker said, as they moved from the bar to sit at a table. “Hit a nice boil of stripers an hour or so before you contacted me. How about you? How was the desert?”

  “Hot enough to fry an egg on your forehead. Sandstorms. Surly laborers. At least the last member of our core team—the Argentinian, Zaragosa—he’s on board. He strongly believes, as I do, that myths, folk stories, and religious tales of people throughout the world record more than a few meteoritic impact events. I think things should move ahead nicely now. Thanks for hooking him up with us.”

  Retticker gave a no-problem shrug. Just a stroke of luck, really. He knew Luis Martin from the old days in Tri-Border, and Martin knew this Zaragosa fellow.

  The nautically-clad woman tending bar came out to take their drink order. Fremdkunst ordered a scotch, neat, while Retticker kept on with the screwdrivers he’d been drinking.

  “Thank you, Vic, for the tipoff on the tepui,” Retticker said. “Our experts are finding all sorts of interesting things.”

  “I’d love to take credit for that, but I can’t. You can thank Doctor Vang and his people for the suggestion. I’m just in it for my share of the stone.”

  Ah yes. Doctor Vang. Personally Joe considered the whole Tetragrammaton organization only a shadow of its former self since the Kwok-Cho thing happened, but Vang still had lots of cash, clout, and connections. It was because Victor had dropped Vang’s name that he’d taken Fremdkunst’s “tip” seriously in the first place.