Virus: The Day of Resurrection

by Sakyo Komatsu

  “But, Professor …” the man began coldly. The small Thermos had at some point made its way into the hands of a large, powerfully built man who was standing behind the speaker. “To be honest with you, we’re really nothing more than brokers. There’s not just one, but two more go-betweens between us and the party for whom we are truly working. He’s hidden way back in the fog. Who are we really working for? Some Nazi holdout in South America? A neo-fascist in West Germany or Italy? The Soviet Union? The Chinese? Perhaps it’s France, possessed by visions of glory. France’s hydrogen bombs are ten years behind those of the Americans and Soviets, after all. OAS? The Mafia? … Perhaps the CIA is thinking again of carrying out some experiment in Southeast Asia or somewhere. Whoever it is, there’s no way for us to know. It’s a very simple business: we receive a request, send back an estimate, draw up a plan, and make the deal.”

  The muscles in the professor’s face were drawn up tightly, like those of a man recently killed. In an instant, Karlsky overturned the table and made a leap for the Thermos, though the big man holding it looked like a ruined boxer. The man with the mustache moved instantly, however, and snapped Karlsky into a full nelson. With well-practiced movements, he nimbly slid his right hand to the professor’s neck. There was a faint whishing sound, and the professor’s face abruptly relaxed. The strength gradually drained out of his struggling limbs, his eyes spasmed, and his entire body grew as sluggish as if it had been turned into clay. At last, he collapsed. The man with the mustache lowered him to the floor and tossed a small, egg-shaped ampule into the fireplace. It was an anpin—a smaller version of the automatic syringes that America had long ago tried making their soldiers carry to deliver atropine shots as a defense against fast-acting G-gas. The needle was in front of the glass ampule, and the inside was filled with inert gas under high pressure. Just by pressing the needle down against the skin, the liquid medicine would be injected.

  “Settle down, Professor,” said the man with the upward-curving eyes. “We’re going to take you to your home in Brighton. Tomorrow morning, it may be a little hard to get up, but once you drink some thick, black coffee, you’ll be fine. As for our deal, we’ll carry it out as I have explained.”

  “W-wait …” The professor was stretched out on the floor, a thread of drool hanging from his mouth, trying to say something though his mouth was not working properly. “Nobody … understands … dangerous … nobody … can stop it … nobody … realizes …”

  “We’re grateful for the admonition,” the sharp-eyed man said with exaggerated politeness. He bent down beside the professor. “We’ll inform those who come after us that they should be very careful with it. Now then, if you’ll excuse us …”

  The man with the mustache stepped forward with a bottle of gin, opened the cap, and splashed some of it across the professor’s face and chest. The mustached man pulled him up onto his shoulders and carried him outside toward the Bentley.

  “Well, then,” muttered the man who was apparently the leader, looking at his wristwatch, “it’s time for us to get out of here too. Starting now, we have ten hours before MI6 starts to move, and that’s assuming the professor feels like confessing.”

  “That chap who was keeping an eye on him didn’t notice anything, did he?” asked the big man a little nervously. He was placing the small Thermos bottle inside a metal trunk filled with packing foam. “Ever since that ‘Spies for Peace’ incident and the Profumo Affair, MI6’s bosses have really been on edge, you know? What with the government having their secret plans for running things after the nukes fall outed in public … and the war secretary’s call girl caught passing intel to Soviet spies, it’s not hard to see why …”

  “They’ve got one more reason to be edgy,” the leader said, chuckling as he pulled on his overcoat. “Several years back, one of the men working in that germ warfare lab died, and that spilled the beans on what they were up to in there to the outside.”

  “What did he die of?”

  “Pneumonic plague,” the man replied casually, relighting his partially smoked cigar. “Now if you ask me, that sort of germ’s a lot easier to deal with than, say, botulinus bacillus or melioidosis. But those European chaps got quite a shock when they heard the word ‘plague.’ After all, it’s vicious enough to have halved the population on the Continent once. Here they’d thought it was extinct for the past two centuries, and it turns up being grown in a secret laboratory. Oop!”

  He put up a hand, stopping the large man who was trying to get the lid of the trunk to close. “There must be some of that coffee left. Warm up whatever’s still inside.”

  “Are you serious?” the big man asked back.

  The man smirked sarcastically. “Perfectly serious … at a time like this. Well, we seem to be ready. Garlo, make sure we’ve left no clues.”

  The men went outside. Out in the freezing night, the wind had come up again, opening gaps here and there in the thick cloud cover through which the stars gleamed coldly and brightly. They went around to a barn in the back, where a small, frightfully old model twin-engine plane crouched in the light of covered lamps. It was painted pitch black. Long canvas sacks had been placed on both of its engines. In front of the sacks, old-fashioned Herman Nelson engine heaters with gasoline burners roared, warming the engines.

  The pilot looked around at the faces of the three men and said nothing as he cut off the fan and pulled the canvases off the engines. What was revealed was a small wooden plane that somehow resembled the De Havilland DH-98 Mosquitoes that had been used as nighttime fighters during the previous world war. Although wooden planes had been old-fashioned even then, they had been used for nighttime air raids because they didn’t get picked up on radar.

  “How’s the weather?” the sharp-eyed man asked as he climbed into his seat and fastened the belt.

  “We’ve got wind and clouds. You never know what the weather agency is going to leave out, eh? Perhaps the wind will change direction.”

  “Fine.” The man nodded. “Let’s depart right away. Everything is finished here.”

  “What do you want to do about our course?” the pilot asked as he started up the engine. “Do we have to make it to Ankara in one hop no matter what?”

  “Absolutely, we do,” the man said in a forceful tone of voice.

  “If we follow along the civilian air routes, we’ll head out to sea from Marseilles, and then from the edge of Sardinia make for Athens. However, this baby’s just barely got enough gasoline. With this bad weather, it might not be enough. We might even be forced to make an emergency landing in the Adriatic.”

  “Don’t let that happen!” the man said in a voice loud enough to be heard over the engine roar. “If the gasoline won’t last, then fly the shortest possible distance.”

  “There’s one other route that goes straight to Athens and another by way of Rome.” As he blew the right and left engines, the pilot nervously checked the hydraulic system. “But if we took either of those carrying a boatload of gasoline and two drop tanks, I wouldn’t feel terribly optimistic about getting over the Alps. On top of that, there’ll be three of you riding. Any way you look at it, these engines are period pieces; they don’t have the horsepower. It’s not going to be easy pulling her up to fifteen thousand feet.”

  “If the load is too heavy …” the man said in a half-joking tone, eyes shining coldly like those of a snake at the big man holding the trunk, “… then someone will have to get off. I trust you can manage if we lighten our load by two hundred pounds?”

  The large man was uncharacteristically pale. He rubbed his parachute belt often.

  “There’s heavy snow over Southampton,” the pilot murmured as he listened intently to his radio receiver. “Three thousand feet … here we go! Excellent. Let’s give her all she’s got before it hits us.”

  The plane began rolling forward with surprisingly little noise. It bounded over the uneven ground until it came out onto the level part where a white line was clearly visible even in the dark
. Although it resembled a painted line, it was actually an accumulation of snow that had apparently been carried down from the hills behind them. Little enough that if the sun were to shine on it, it would melt, and if it were to snow, it would be lost. As though testing its wings, the flaps were lowered two or three times, and then the wooden twin engine plane arrived at the starting line and opened up the engine all the way. It merely waddled along at first due to the drop tanks attached to its underbelly. At last, it got off the ground, and after clearing the hills ahead of it, disappeared into the blackness of the night sky. The frozen stars that had been visible here and there just a little while ago were now concealed by thick layers of cloud, all save one. The black twin-engine plane made for that star, headed from fifty-one degrees north toward forty degrees north, and from west four degrees, over the Greenwich Meridian, to thirty-two degrees thirty minutes east. It was a journey of about one thousand six hundred kilometers flying in a diagonal line across a rectangular slice of the earth’s spherical shape … a long, difficult, and secretive journey.

  At the same time that this strange wooden plane, loaded with three strange men and their strange cargo, was taking off from Cornwall with a snowstorm bearing down from the north, five hundred kilometers west of the Turkish capital of Ankara—far south of the airplane’s Near Eastern destination—the longitudinal line at thirty-nine degrees thirty-five minutes east ran southward. It crossed over the blazing An-Nafūd Desert and the Red Sea; it grazed Ethiopia’s capital of Addis Ababa; and it crossed the equator over Kenya. At Mozambique, it bid the continent farewell and crossed over vast expanses of sea, before running aground at last on the continent of Antarctica.

  There, one other journey was about to begin.

  2. Sixty-nine Degrees, Twenty-five Seconds South

  “That about does it …” said Norio Yoshizumi, giving the final checklist a tap. He signed the copy and handed it to the officer who was standing by. The officer bowed slightly, put the copy in his breast pocket, and glanced at his watch.

  “Departure’s at 2300, so there’s still a little time left.” The middle-aged officer, Taguchi, smiled, drawing lines in his tanned cheeks, and pulled out that Meerschaum pipe he was always smoking from the pocket of his overcoat, offering it to Yoshizumi. “How about it? Have a pinch to remember us by?”

  “Thanks,” said Yoshizumi, returning the other man’s smile and pulling off a glove. Yoshizumi had often smoked that pipe—it was Major Taguchi’s pride and joy—during the voyage. That pipe had belonged to Major Taguchi’s father before him. Though it was reasonably worn, there was not a single crack in it, and Yoshizumi especially liked the taste of its mouthpiece.

  Major Taguchi handed a bag of Capstan Navy Cut to Yoshizumi, its mouth tied with a string, and for himself took out 3B’s Blackwood and put it between his teeth. The wide rear deck was lit with glittering lights, and on it a large, specially fitted Bristol helicopter, having finished taking on baggage, was noisily starting up its rotors. The uproar had mostly died down at the scene that stretched from the rear deck almost to the lift that went down to the ship’s hold. And all that could be seen now were the figures of sailors running around picking up the canvases and ropes that had been thrown aside. The arm of the derrick that had been in operation all day was now also firmly bound against the rough weather. Yoshizumi looked down from the deck and, bathed in light from the lamps on the snow, saw the side of Shiretoko on a field completely covered in ice, above which its reddish draft, usually submerged, was peeking out.

  That’s because it’s unloaded two thousand tons in four days’ time … Yoshizumi thought, breathing out a deep sigh of relief. Thank goodness the weather held … though that’s already over now.

  After days and nights of hard work unloading the ship, the strong pipe smoke caught in Yoshizumi’s sleep-deprived throat a little. Thanks to the frozen, dry air of the Antarctic, his smoking didn’t go well at all. Even so, Yoshizumi and Major Taguchi, reluctant to say farewell, smoked in the clear air, exhaling pale blue vapors. The whistle’s sound grew shrill. The refitted Bristol—so it was called, although being as its blueprint had been purchased and greatly improved upon in Japan, it was more properly called a Shin-Mikasa L-Type—was finished loading, with the door half closed.

  “The Samson helicopter will make one more round trip, so I’ll go back on it,” Yoshizumi said in reply to an inquiring look from Major Taguchi. “There’s one more reserve turbine to go.”

  “So we part at last, eh … ?” Major Taguchi leaned against the rail, staring out beyond the bluish ice fields that spread out beneath the white nights of the Antarctic, looking off toward Ongul Island, where coal-black boulders could faintly be descried.

  Standing on this island was a streamlined, portable tower several meters tall, on top of which sat a giant, ovoid tube that lay horizontally, its black mouth wide open. A turbocharged wind turbine. It had been installed the previous year, and now, outside of its role as a backup source of electricity, it served mainly as a case for various kinds of observational instruments.

  Below the generator tower, domes resembling Inuit igloos, only flatter and larger, gleamed whitish in the lights. They looked just like the innumerable air bubbles that rose up through the ice field. Beyond them the “white continent” lay enclosed in ancient snow and ice, encircled by precipitous glaciers and icebergs. Including the ice fields, its area rivaled that of South America. The white mountains of this giant, cruel continent went on and on like a dream against the gray horizon.

  Major Taguchi turned his head toward the right to gaze at the white cliff face of a cape that stood between him and the Prince Olav Coast to the east, then turned the other way toward the dark mountains of snow that were the Langhovde Hills. From the Shirase Glacier, which emptied into Lützow-Holm Bay, carving a notch into the western edge of Enderby Land, this eastern coastal region was by the 1964 naming called the Souya Coast, and since the seventh International Geophysical Year had been Japan’s base for the International Antarctic Development Olympiad, which had kicked off three years ago.

  And now …

  Showa Station, having begun as four rough huts built in February of 1957 by the eleven-member First Wintering Team under Captain Nishibori, now consisted of seven domes and was on its way to becoming a large, semipermanent base. Japanese polar research, which had halted between 1962 and 1964, had picked up again and was now approaching the level of its earlier peak.

  “They’re building those domes really fast, aren’t they?” murmured Major Taguchi as he squinted in the direction of Showa Station’s new, almost-completed Ninth Section. “There are already two more just since the supplies were dropped off. Even for prefab buildings, that’s an incredible speed. How do they build them?”

  “They glue them together,” Yoshizumi said with a chuckle. “No, really! These days, they’re coming out with all kinds of very simple, very strong bonding agents. I hear the Americans are even using metallic bond to build rockets for going into space. Cyanide acrylate. That stuff’ll stick in two or three seconds, and as long as there are no air bubbles, it won’t budge. The plastic plates they use to assemble the domes come with numbers that tell you what goes where, and the edges fit together male-female style. On one edge, there’s sealant A, and on another there’s sealant B. If you try to put an A and an A together— or a B and a B—the parts won’t stick at all. But when you pull off the protective tape and put the fitting edges together, the A and B substances have a chemical reaction, and ten seconds later, you couldn’t pry them apart with a crowbar.”

  “How about that,” Major Taguchi said, impressed. “So you’re going to be living in a glued-together house when the temperature’s forty below outside and a blizzard is hitting you with fifty-meter-per-second winds?”

  “Next year, definitely come to the base,” Yoshizumi said. He took one more pull on the pipe, though it had already gone out. “You won’t believe how nice it is. There’s a little theater, a bar. The only thing missing i
s some ladies. When I read stuff like the records of Nishibori’s first winter there, I really feel sorry for them. Now they’re finally getting ready to start test runs on a thousand-kilowatt portable reactor.”

  “Speaking of feeling sorry for someone,” Major Taguchi murmured, glancing toward the rear of the sleek nuclear icebreaker Shiretoko, “after riding in this boat, I feel pretty bad for anyone who’s had to ride on Souya. That ship’s been ferrying polar teams down here since the very start. It’s terribly out of date now and was never all that well made to begin with. I hear it can’t break more than a meter and a half of ice.”

  “The record says it’s been rescued time and again by the Soviets’ Ob’ and the Americans’ Hudson Island.”

  “Yeah,” Major Taguchi agreed. “It was like a dream for me when I first rode this boat. Cruising speed of twenty-eight knots, only needs fueling once every four years, and a steam gun to use in tandem with the power crusher. Breaks more than eight meters.”

  On top of that, Yoshizumi thought, this time out, she’s got a brace of big cargo helicopters and three Samsons that can fly dangling a five-ton container underneath.

  He watched a V-shaped Bristol as it landed at the base heliport five kilometers away. Japan has really been interested in Antarctica these past two or three years. I don’t know; maybe it’s because they don’t want to get left behind by the big countries, but when I think of how it used to be, something seems a little funny.

  Major Taguchi put his pipe away in a pocket and smiled at Yoshizumi. “It looks like this Antarctic boom is going to last for a while,” he said. “You all are on the cutting edge of your generation, as it were.”

  “Even so, why are they so excited about it? You’d think a festival was going on from the uproar,” Yoshizumi said. “To us, it can’t help looking a little suspicious. They originally started this because of the IGY. We’re here to carry on the original goal, as it were: scholarly research about Antarctica. But lately the research teams have been getting shoved off to the sidelines, and all the interest seems to be in resource exploration—cold endurance tests related to those reactors—that kind of thing. That said, though, they’re not really going far enough in terms of investment if they’re planning to, say, build a polar city or get serious about developing resources here. I do wish they’d make our objective a little clearer, though, even if it’s nothing flashy like the Americans going all out and building a space station at the South Pole.”