by Trevor Hoyle
Rolsom wore a triumphant grin, like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
“Animal carriers,” Colonel Madden mused. “Deployment and containment in one neat simple package.”
“Somebody here gave it the name of the ‘Kissing Plague,’ ” said Rolsom, still grinning. “We’ve hopes for humans too.”
“You’ve tried it on humans?” Madden asked.
“Not yet. But the physiology of chimps and humans is very similar.” Rolsom winked at them through the fishbowl. “And humans also kiss a lot.”
After lunch they were shown the special area known as Zone 4 on the far side of the lagoon. The laboratories and medical wards were outwardly unimpressive: an untidy jumble of single- and two-story white stucco buildings surrounded by a double perimeter electrified fence. The only odd thing about it, for a research establishment, was that the windows were very small and barred, like those of a prison.
On the short ride across the lagoon Rolsom jokingly remarked that the electrified fence wasn’t to keep intruders out; it was to keep the patients in. If any of them escaped and managed to interbreed, Starbuck might become—in his phrase—“an island of freaks.”
Even with his experience in genetic engineering Skrote had never seen anything like it. The director hadn’t been joking after all—it really was like a fairground freak show.
First they were shown the anoxia and pollution victims, gray shriveled wrecks in oxygen tents living on borrowed time. In answer to Skrote’s inquiry, Rolsom said, “We use these to study the effects on body tissue resulting from drastic oxygen depletion. Very little medical research has been done on the subject till recently. We also need them as guinea pigs to find out if TCDD can be transferred as effectively in humans as in chimps. We’ll be starting on that in about a month from now.”
“What do you intend to do?” asked Major Jones sardonically. “Force them to kiss one another?”
Rolsom smiled and shook his head. “You’d be surprised—or maybe you wouldn’t—at the strength and persistence of the human sexual impulse. Even in cases such as these.” He nodded down the ward at the rows of oxygen tents. “Perhaps you’ve noticed that the wards are mixed. At night we turn out the lights and let them get on with it.” He led the way down the central aisle, the muted hiss and rumble of oxygen being piped into the tents the only sound. It was like a mortuary, keeping alive the undead. A technician in a white smock was injecting an old man. The party stopped to observe.
“New arrival,” Rolsom said, after glancing at the chart. “We’re pepping him up a bit. No good to us dead. It’s a hormone extraction that dramatically improves their condition. After a couple of months they have a relapse.”
“What happens then?” Skrote asked.
Rolsom looked at him, puzzled, as if it were a trick question. “They die,” he said. He leaned over the rail at the foot of the bed, raising his voice. “How are you feeling today, Mr. Walsh? Not a thing to worry about. You’re in good hands.”
The old man gazed up at them dully with brown watery eyes. His face was the same color as the pillow, except that his lips were purple.
As they were moving away Skrote said, “Where do these people come from?”
“You mean how do we get hold of them?” Rolsom said over his shoulder. “Our main source of supply is the Pryce-Darc Clinic in Maryland. As you probably know it’s funded and administered by ASP through an intermediary organization. In effect the clinic is a staging post. They send us anoxia and pollution cases referred to them by hospitals.”
“They come here willingly?”
“Sure.” Rolsom held the door into the corridor open and caught Madden’s eye as if the two of them shared a private joke. “The patients are told they’ve been selected for special treatment, very expensive treatment, which is free of charge. Naturally they’re only too happy to participate. They think Starbuck is a highly advanced medical research unit with miracle cures galore.” He chuckled gruffly. “Once we get them here it’s too late to change their minds.”
Major Jones said, “How many of them will you inject with TCDD?” They were approaching a large iron sliding door with a red M in a white circle on it.
“We intend to isolate six to begin with, three males, three females. We’ll inject just one of them and see how quickly it spreads. What we’re really hoping for is a chain reaction: A male infects a female and carries on infecting other females, while the females infect the other males. We also want to find out whether males or females make the best carriers.” They were climbing concrete steps now, whitewashed walls on all sides. “You know,” Rolsom added, as if anxious that the full implication of this shouldn’t escape them, “in quite a short space of time it ought to be possible to infect a city of twenty million people, starting off with a handful of carriers.”
“I like the sound of it.” Madden patted the director’s arm. “I think you’re on the right track.”
Rolsom shrugged it off, though he was obviously pleased by this rare praise. He pushed a large black hand through thinning wiry hair and led on with renewed enthusiasm. Skrote followed behind Colonel Madden and Major Jones, worrying about how, when they’d infected the patients in the ward with TCDD, they intended disposing of the corpses. Burial would be too dangerous. Incineration seemed the best way, and certainly the safest. If the infection were ever to get loose on the island ...
This section of Zone 4—behind the iron door with the red M— reminded him of a modern and sophisticated version of the old Victorian lunatic asylum. Padded cells, barred windows, heavy metal doors. Everything monitored and controlled by an all-seeing electronic surveillance system. Now they were entering Cy Skrote’s territory, that of genetic manipulation. But whereas Skrote was a theorist, this was where the theories found practical expression.
They passed through a complicated series of checkpoints and entered a darkened control gallery in which twenty or so people sat wearing headsets, presiding from a semicircular instrumentation console over a huge bank of TV screens.
Skrote stood between Madden and Jones, all three silent, because all three weren’t sure what they were looking at until Rolsom explained that what the screens showed were “natural” mutants: creatures misshapen in their mothers’ wombs by the genetic damage of the deteriorating environment. Many of them were so grotesquely deformed as to be incapable of movement. Others were maniacally strong and dangerously homicidal. Hence the need for the high-level security and the constant electronic vigilance.
It seemed to Skrote as if each screen showed a separate section of the human anatomy—as if all the screens together would make up one complete human being. It finally dawned on him what in fact he was looking at. On each screen there was a human being, though not necessarily a complete one. He stared, sickened and fascinated.
A body without a rib cage, lungs exposed. A smooth head with blank depressions for eyes. A trunk with four legs, two where the arms should have been. A head and torso narrowing down to a bifurcated stump. A child with liver, pancreas, kidneys, and bowels growing externally. Another child (he couldn’t be sure) with two tiny hands sprouting from its neck. A hairless woman with a vaginalike slit up to her navel. A skeletal figure with transparent flesh, the organs visible inside (like a medical student’s anatomy model). A gargantuan head, all the features squashed into the lower left side. Hands with no thumbs and seven, eight, nine fingers. Arms and legs jointed the wrong way. Feet attached heel to heel and joined in a single limb. Bodies with both sets of sexual organs. A man (he assumed it was male) with membranes of pink translucent flesh attaching elbows to chest. A fishlike creature with bulbous eyes and what appeared to be gills on its neck. A baby without a face, with apertures in its chest and stomach for breathing and eating.
Rolsom braced his hands on the backs of two chairs, leaning forward. “What we’re seeing is natural selection at work. The human species adapting genetically to changes in the environment. Their parents have been exposed to conditions that hav
e affected the chromosomal structure of their offspring—such things as solar and cosmic radiation, pollutants in the air and water, nuclear fallout, herbicidal and pesticidal contamination, carcinogenic agents in food, tobacco, vehicle exhaust, industrial waste, so on and so on.
“In recent years the declining 02 levels have contributed significantly to the numbers and varying types of genetic mutation. What you see here represents the tip of the iceberg. Nature has many ways of dealing with aberrations from the norm, of course. Infertility, abortions, stillbirths.” Rolsom gestured at the screens. “In fact these—the ones who survive—probably account for less that fifteen percent of the total.”
“It must be one hell of an operation just keeping them alive,” Major Jones marveled. He seemed awestruck.
“This control room is manned round the clock,” Rolsom said. “We keep an audio-visual check on them and they’re wired up to alert us of any primary malfunction. We do lose some,” he admitted, “but not many.”
“What do you think?”
Madden’s question caught Skrote off-guard. He had to clear his throat before he could find his voice. “I’ve never in my life seen anything like it,” he managed to say, which was the gospel truth.
“I’m damn sure of that,” Madden replied crisply. “This is the only research facility of its kind in the world.” He turned to Rolsom. “How are the breeding experiments coming along?”
“It’s too soon to know, Colonel. We’ve taken sperm and ovum samples and at the moment we’re trying—hoping—to induce conception in the laboratory. You’ll appreciate that the patients here in Section M aren’t capable of normal sexual activity, and in any case the females lack the equipment for childbearing. That’s why we’re trying for mechanical conception. But if that doesn’t work out we’ll go for insemination of mutant sperm using normal healthy women as incubators.”
“That’s where Lieutenant Skrote should be useful,” said Madden. “He was trained in genetics at the Front Royal Military Hospital in Virgina. He’s been seconded to ASP as scientific-medical liaison officer, and I know he’ll be happy to give what assistance he can.” Skrote nodded rapidly in the flickering room. He was obviously expected to be agreeable. “Yes, of course. Though I should point out, Dr. Rolsom, that I was concerned mainly with the theoretical aspects of genetic engineering. This side of the coin, so to speak, is new to me. Completely. Absolutely.”
“That’s what we need,” Rolsom was quick to assure him. “We’re light on theory. I’ll be glad of any contribution you feel you can make, Lieutenant. Don’t hesitate to pitch right in.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll do that.”
He turned his head jerkily to the bank of screens. A myriad of tiny rectangles of Frankensteinian horror reflected in his slightly bulging eyes. Over the headsets he could hear a faint mad gabble of discordant noises, like the tape of a creature in pain played backward.
Waiting for the boat to take them back across the lagoon, Skrote was convinced he must be living in a dream. The swaying palm trees and the white sandy beaches and the little dancing waves gilded with sunlight seemed unreal, like a movie set. The reality, strangely enough, had been left behind in those innocuous white buildings with the rows of tiny barred windows behind the electrified fences.
He didn’t seem to be here; not on Starbuck Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He didn’t seem to be anywhere at all.
“If we can develop new mutant strains ...”
Skrote listened numbly to Colonel Madden’s voice.
“ ... it will be a real achievement....”
Which only compounded the unreality.
“ ... a new breed of human being that can survive in the most hostile environmental conditions. Something with twice the normal lung capacity and inbuilt resistance to chemical pollution.” The voice hardened, became emphatic. “It should be possible. It will be possible.”
“Starbuck man,” said the dreamy voice of Major Jones. “Heirs to the New Earth. Two hundred years from now it could be the only species left.”
Rolsom’s voice was more cautious. “Can we be certain the Russians or the Chinese aren’t working along the same lines? They could have advanced even more than we have—”
“No,” said Colonel Madden, not entertaining the remotest doubt. “The Chinese don’t have the scientific expertise and the Russians are concentrating on the extermination plan.” He addressed Rolsom directly. “That’s why the work you’re doing in Zone Two with TCDD is just as important as the work here in genetic manipulation. The Longfellow extermination plan is a vitally important element in our overall strategy. On that we cooperate fully with the Russians. Even invite them to look over Zone Two if necessary. Demonstrate our total commitment and cooperation.”
“Zone Two.” Major Jones’s voice. “Not Zone Four.”
“Not Zone Four,” Madden’s voice repeated.
“That’s our baby.” Rolsom’s voice.
“Literally.” Jones’s voice.
The Desert Range missile silo complex straddled the state line dividing Utah and Nevada. Although sited geographically in Utah, part of the labyrinthine network of tunnels actually extended across the border.
Chase and Nick Power arrived at Wah Wah Springs after a seventeen-hour journey by aircraft, bus, and finally diesel-engined jeep. As Prothero had said, the nearest towns were considerable distances away: Richfield one hundred miles due east, Cedar City about eighty miles southwest of the complex. There were a few small settlements— Black Rock, Milford, Lund, Beryl—but none of them nearer than forty miles. Chase had to admit that it was the perfect location.
With Nick at the wheel they drove along a crumbling concrete road with weeds and sagebrush growing in the cracks and gutters. The terrain was bleak. Undulating desert scrub as far as the eye could see, the ground compacted and fissured through lack of rain. There were no signposts—no visible evidence at all, in fact, that this had once been a restricted military zone.
“How much did you say the MX system cost?” asked Nick, lolling back and steering with one hand. The road went straight as an arrow into the far distance.
“Eighty billion dollars, give or take the odd billion.” Chase shaded his eyes. “Altogether they constructed forty-six hundred silos connected by ten thousand miles of roads and two thousand miles of railway track spread across southern Nevada and southwest Utah. They planned to have two hundred missiles with nuclear warheads constantly moving on five-hundred-ton transporters, so each missile had the option of twenty-two available silos. It was a crazy idea and it never worked. They hoped to keep the Russians guessing at which silo any one missile was at any given moment.”
“Christ, a bloody expensive permutation if you ask me,” Nick commented with a weary shake of the head.
“Bloody futile as well,” Chase said. “By the time the system was completed and operational in the mid-nineties, it was already obsolete. You know, it cost three hundred dollars for every man, woman, and child in the United States. And this”—he swept his arm out to indicate the barren landscape—“is what they got for their money.”
“Come on now,” Nick chided him. “You’re forgetting the four thousand six hundred holes in the ground. I bet the gophers were extremely grateful.”
Fifteen minutes later they passed a concrete blockhouse almost completely buried in windblown sand. Chase unfolded the army map supplied by Prothero. The main installations were marked as broken red lines, indicating that they were below ground. The blockhouse was shown as a solid black dot, with the designation GP5.
“Guardpost five,” Chase said, putting the map away. “Not far now. About six miles to the complex itself.”
“How many silos in this one?”
“One hundred and fourteen in an area of two hundred square miles.”
“Hey, Gav”—Nick glanced at him, eyes narrowed, struck by an uncomfortable thought—“I hope to God they’ve removed all the fucking missiles. Have they?” When Chase grinned and nodde
d, Nick blew out his cheeks. “Thank the Lord for that!”
Aboveground there was only a radio communications tower to be seen, with the antennae and microwave dish removed, held by taut steel guy wires that sang in the wind. Because of the dry desert air the tower and wires were untarnished, without a speck of rust.
Finding the entrance wasn’t easy. They wandered around for several minutes trying to locate it, until Chase happened to come upon a sloping gully that was partly filled with sand, rocks and sagebrush. He gave it a glance and almost passed on before noticing that the shallow bank of sand followed a regular stepped pattern. It was a flight of steps leading down to a studded metal door that was silted three quarters of the way up. After scooping the sand away they were then able, with a little forceful persuasion, to slide the door open.
Chase led the way with an iodine halogen lamp into the musty passages of slabbed concrete, strung with skeins of thick multicolored cables secured by aluminum cladding. The cladding was brightly polished, proving that Prothero had been right about the installation: It was still in remarkably good condition.
The bright circle of light probed walls and ceiling and picked out arrows painted in different colors where the passage branched in several directions. Beneath the arrows, in corresponding colors, they saw:
>
COMPLEX 88-B
RED DOCK
GREEN DOCK
BLUE DOCK
LAUNCH CONTROL
MASTER ENGINEER
ELECTRICAL STORES
The beam roved higher and Nick said, “I don’t like the sound of that, Gav.”
Above the arrows somebody had written in chalk: Welcome to the Tomb.
“It doesn’t fill me with unbounded optimism,” Chase said, swinging the lamp away and moving on.
Taking one of the wider passages they came upon three enormous freight elevators with their doors yawning wide, big enough to take a truck apiece. Farther on, a wide concrete stairway with the edges of the steps painted yellow led downward. As they descended Chase took careful note of each turning and the number of levels; he didn’t have a plan of the complex and he didn’t fancy getting lost in several hundred miles of tunnels.