Virus: The Day of Resurrection

by Sakyo Komatsu

  The door opened and the assistant director entered the room. With cold eyes, he watched closely as Meyer sat in his chair and continued to speak.

  “Is something the matter?” he asked.

  “My nephew seems to be tired,” Lieutenant Colonel F replied. “Do you think you might be able to give him a little leave? I’m asking this as a favor, myself.”

  “Sure thing,” said the assistant director. “This work will wear on your nerves as well as your body. There are some dangerous critters here. I get down in the dumps all the time from trying to maintain secrecy.”

  “Go back to your room, Ed,” said Lieutenant Colonel F. “Then fill out a request for leave.”

  “I …” Meyer stood up and looked like he was about to start shouting.

  “That’s enough already! Leave this to me!” Lieutenant Colonel F spoke in a strong voice and put a hand on his nephew’s shoulder. The assistant director opened the door for him to go.

  “Get plenty of rest,” the assistant director said kindly. “Go fishing in Miami or something.”

  Meyer left the room with his head hung and a dazed expression on his face. As soon as he was gone, the lieutenant colonel cocked his eye at the assistant director. “Have the security folks keep an eye on Ed, all right?”

  “What for?”

  “Don’t worry about ‘what for,’ just do it right away.”

  The assistant director quickly gave the orders via interphone. Lieutenant Colonel F stood by the window, looking into the brightness outside. Somewhere a little bird was singing.

  “What happened?” the assistant director said, his expression sullen. “He wouldn’t be convinced?”

  “Didn’t I just tell you? I thought this was supposed to be a private talk just now.” The lieutenant colonel seemed to be hesitating as he stared out the window. “What about you? What do you think about that germ, that RU-whatchamacallit?”

  “That’s the one that was stolen. The ‘space germ’ that was brought here from Brooks. Ed was studying it.” The assistant director crossed his arms. “There isn’t much to talk about. If that new strain that we tried to steal from the Brits is, as Ed says, something produced from that line, our work on it is still way behind England’s, and Meyer deserves a good spanking. Really, Meyer’s been getting rather neurotic lately, so I can’t help wondering if he has an exaggerated idea of that line’s strength. In particular because he feels responsible, what with it having been stolen by an assistant he was using.”

  “Is he ultimately the one who has to answer for what happens in that section?”

  “He is. It’s experimental research, though, so there are hardly enough people in it to call it a section. Why do you ask?”

  This gave the lieutenant colonel pause. He wondered—had Meyer deliberately held back on reporting the practical effectiveness of that line? Or had he in his neurosis in fact become delusional? He wasn’t sure.

  “Well,” said the lieutenant colonel, turning decisively toward the other man. “To put it bluntly, his psychological condition is degenerating.”

  “You understand, I’m sure, that secrets themselves are dangerous, Lieutenant Colonel. Nothing unusual about that. You know those psych tests you DoD folks give each year to everyone in the three branches who works around nuclear weapons? Ten percent or more get tagged as ‘people to watch’ each year, don’t they? And that’s out of people who took a stringent test before they were assigned and passed it. After just one year, look how many unsuitables have turned up. It’s the same thing here. If we were to do a rigid test of everyone’s emotional stability, half the people here would probably be viewed as dangerous.”

  “Well then, that just means that testing needs to become a legal requirement for people working with gas and germ weapons too,” Lieutenant Colonel F said coldly. “At any rate, the problem at the moment is Ed. We can’t just leave him be. He might try to do something foolish.”

  “We’ll watch him for a while.”

  “No,” the lieutenant colonel said. He was a bit red in the face—possibly from fever—and was sweating a little. And back to chewing on his mustache. “I’ll submit his request for leave. And on your orders, I want him to take his leave here.” With a hand that trembled slightly, he wrote something down quickly on a memo pad that was on the desk. The assistant director furrowed his brows when he caught a glimpse of it.

  “Your own nephew?” he asked.

  “It’s exactly because he’s my own nephew that I want to nip this in the bud,” the lieutenant colonel said. “Regan, in consideration of our long years of friendship, listen to what I have to say. Under normal circumstances, I’d want to hand this order down to a direct subordinate in the interest of preserving national defense secrets, but this time I don’t want any of this coming to light. I want the leave order to come to him from you.”

  “That’s fine with me,” said the assistant director. “And I have authority to have the security guys here watch him.”

  “Tell his wife for me,” the lieutenant colonel said, turning away slightly, “that he’s gone off to Zanzibar or somewhere again and is under orders to keep it secret.”

  The assistant director pressed a switch and said, “Get me Security Chief Quinlan.”

  While he waited, the lieutenant colonel picked up the telephone. “Yes, put me through to the army hospital,” he said, and then coughed painfully. “That’s right. Call up Dr. Balouse in Neurology.”

  Meyer’s private room adjoined the laboratories in the section he ran, and when he returned to it he collapsed into his chair and held his head in his hands. The fit of agitation that had erupted moments ago had subsided somewhat, but the blood in his head was still racing. He had lived with this mental stress for a full year now and was well aware that he was near the limits of his endurance. He lifted his face and stared intently at his hands. They were trembling faintly, moving as though they were not his own.

  It’s not my fault! he screamed wordlessly. But that shout was nothing but empty hysterics.

  He stared at the door that bounded off the laboratories. Beyond that perfectly normal, pale green steel door was his research lab, cluttered with flasks, microscopes, an electron microscope, and a microcomputer. A slightly scatterbrained older woman and a young assistant were working there. The area beyond, separated by another sturdy door, was divided into a room for tissue cultures, a room for virus cultures illuminated by a blackroom lamp, and an artificially illuminated room for bacteria cultures. Within the culture bases stored inside those straight rows of glass tanks, within the artificially grown cells created for growing virus cultures, all manner of death was being produced. Each strain was isolated, subcultured, mutated by irradiation or drugs, and hybridized—it was a sea of detestable things, in which only the worst were harvested along the way. Although on the surface it bore great resemblance to the kind of medical or biological lab created to fight against death, in this laboratory, concealed within a dark and grim veil of secrecy, death itself was being created—ever swifter, fiercer, and more difficult to fight than before.

  It isn’t my fault! Meyer screamed again. He wanted to shout it out at the top of his lungs.

  At last, his anxiety began to abate. His mental stress had been caused not so much by the fact that the viruses had been stolen on his watch as lab chief as by the fact that while working as a military researcher, he had been deliberately neglecting the faithful reporting of the results of his work. When a virus in the RU-300 line had been stolen by his ace assistant—who had perhaps grasped before Meyer the unusual properties of that virus—he as well as the other scientists hadn’t yet understood even a fraction of the menace that could be drawn from that line. Only he had continued to trudge along, studying it merely as a part of his work. In that way, a chilling realization had slowly set in of the horror that could be grown from it. It wasn’t like he had been consciously neglecting his reporting from the beginning though. As he was by nature a cautious sort of man, he had always submitt
ed his reports with a certain reserve when it came to the results of his experiments. Somewhere along the way, however, it had suddenly hit him that he was walking along the edge of a cliff. Suppose that this line should blossom into the kind of horror that he could foresee. The military would take an interest in it. What would happen, then, if it were adopted as standard biological weaponry? No—even before then, could it even get through field-testing without any leaks?

  There were still so many things that were not yet understood about the germ. For that reason, until such time as the answers became a bit clearer, he had taken great care to omit from his reports the kinds of data that could stimulate the imaginations of the top brass, that could move their index fingers toward their telephones. In any case, there had been no great expectations laid on him for this work. The number of bacteria, rickettsias, and viruses was vast, and in his job of developing new strains—of selecting useful-looking ones and improving them—he was only in charge of one small part of the overall effort. It was easygoing work, wherein one success out of a hundred trials was considered a good ratio. In this way, he had gradually ended up padding his reports with more and more falsehoods, rather like a treasurer who pockets a little bit here and a little bit there, and at last digs himself a hole he can’t get out of.

  At the same time, this had had the unexpected effect of reawakening his lonely conscience. If he were to give an accurate report of his research, the military men would surely jump on it. They would be delighted to have a weapon that was more fearsome than either the hydrogen or neutron bomb, and moreover, completely secret. But through the contact he had had with various military men during the past four-plus years he’d worked at this laboratory, Meyer had come to have doubts about the military’s powers of imagination when it came to end results. They were courageous, to be sure. Still, they were slaves of the moment and of whatever seemed “necessary” at that moment. They would dance with glee if they got their hands on the first germ weapon that, when spread from an aircraft, could have an effect equal to or greater than that of a nuclear weapon—especially with it being several thousand times cheaper to boot. Most of the germs and viruses that had thus far been available for use in warfare were known both to the enemy and the general public, and despite all the publicity and propaganda surrounding them, they just didn’t have that powerful an effect when it came to actual deployments. Plague? Cholera? Anthrax and parrot fever? These things were known already. They were things that the medical community both now and in the past knew about.

  But this was different. This was a child of Satan, brought back from the outer darkness beyond the atmosphere.

  At some point, Meyer had bitten down on his fist hard enough to draw blood. Accompanied by an icy dread, he felt wave after wave of mental anguish come crashing down inside him from the knowledge that just now, no longer able to bear the pressure of the secrets in his heart, he had told his uncle. It was information he had not even revealed to his boss, and he had given it to his uncle of all people: a hidebound, conservative soldier who worked for the Department of Defense Intelligence Agency.

  What would happen to him now? Would his uncle tell the assistant director? How would the assistant director take it? The assistant director had steady nerves and a cool head, and was not so much the scholarly type as a sort of eagle-eyed public servant who missed nothing. He was more practical, relying not so much on imagination with regard to end results as on an intuition for military efficacy. As the laboratory’s manager, he never missed a chance to score points with the brass.

  That being the case, had he in his agitation really done something he could never take back? As long as he had been the only one who knew about the germ’s effectiveness, he could have destroyed all the samples with his own hands. But now that he had talked about it, there was no chance that that sharp-nosed assistant director would quietly sit on the sidelines.

  Meyer stood up and began pacing the room like a restless animal in a cage. After a moment, he ran to his desk and, with the mental action peculiar to those who are truly cornered, opened the drawer, pulled out a notepad covered with scattered marks and numbers, and tried to start doing some calculations. However, after writing only two or three numbers down, he broke his pencil with a crack. No matter how many times he did the math, the sum was still the same. No matter how many times. As he combined the numbers, tore them apart, and knitted them back together, they became a skeleton that grew into the image of a monster. Meyer had attacked the problem from every possible angle and exhausted the possibilities long ago. He had factored in the worldwide capacity for preventative measures, speeds of disease transmission, everything that might not happen, and all of the unreleased data related to epidemic disease prevention in society. He had studied the history of the spread of contagious diseases and had spoken with those who had been on the front lines—both specialists in the strategic use of germ warfare and authorities on public health. Without allowing himself to appear too interested, Meyer had subtly extracted information from these people about a variety of factors and had been able to make a clear prediction of what the end result would likely be.

  Due to numerous factors beyond the toxicity of the contagion itself, it would first become a societal problem. First was the issue that the contagion wasn’t known to civilian science. Then there was the difficulty of early identification that followed from this, the difficulty in understanding the course of its spread, the fact that the extant pharmacopeia would be useless, the fact that it had no power to reproduce, the fact that the organs in which disease would occur were the most critical ones—the RU-300 line was dangerous for all of these reasons.

  Am I too much of a pessimist? Meyer had asked himself this hundreds of times. Is the pressure of being the only person who knows how scary this stuff is making me too jumpy? But the possibility is just too great that a combination of factors could align to create the worst possible outcome. No, even if all of the factors didn’t cause the worst possible result, if even one of them should stick its foot out, the other factors would fall into line like dominoes …

  His uncle had said that there was a possibility that England could be researching the deadly possibilities of the germ. The Soviet Union as well.

  Think about it that way, and the danger could have increased threefold by now. And if this was going on in all of these countries, hidden under veils of military secrecy …

  What have I created here? Oh, Lord, forgive me …

  Meyer came from a long line of Quakers, but he had never believed in God from the bottom of his heart until that moment. Now, though, he clung to God for the first time in his life, seeking solace or judgment. With his elbows on the desk, he folded his hands and leaned his forehead against them, but instead of even a faint glimpse of God, a deep, dark pit whose bottom he could not see floated before his eyes. He clenched his teeth and began to weep.

  When Fermi and Einstein fled from Europe, he thought as he wept, would those scientists have suggested the Manhattan Project to the government if they could have clearly seen what it would lead to fifteen years later? Had they been capable of imagining in complete and accurate detail the damage they would cause when the first bomb fell on Hiroshima and the second on Nagasaki? Were the politicians and the people who used them the only ones deserving of blame? To be sure, with Heisenberg in Germany and the heavy water factory in Rjukan under German control, there had been a danger that Germany would develop the atom bomb first. But was it truly possible for the scientists who had advised the government and built those bombs to escape criticism? Science is always a double-edged sword. But did the scientists who willingly put such weapons into the very hands of Mars truly feel no anguish over having cooperated? True, it’s a basic tenet of warfare that you can’t hold back in battle, but wasn’t that all the more reason why scientists should have delayed handing over their discoveries to the politicians—at least until such time as there was little chance of them being used in the field?

  What on ea
rth was Meyer hoping for? What was he waiting for? The many torments and hesitations that had been swirling chaotically in his heart until now became clear, and at last he understood. Deep in his heart, he had hung his private but fervent hopes on the completion—either this summer or this fall—of an across-the-board arms reduction agreement sponsored by the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain in the General Assembly of the United Nations. Although the issue of comprehensive arms reduction, the course of which had veered right and left over a long period of time, still faced entrenched resistance in the United States as well as in every nation—particularly in France and China—the limits proposed by the Soviet Union during the Kennedy-Khrushchev era of the 1960s had gradually begun to look as though they might take hold. So in the corner of Meyer’s mind, he remembered the three-stage arms reduction plan that Khrushchev proposed in September of 1960 at the fifteenth General Assembly of the United Nations, whose first step—the elimination of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems—was followed by a second step that called for the complete elimination of both chemical and biological weapons. When he thought about it, if the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty could be finalized, this fearsome thing could be declared a weapon and locked away, and Meyer himself would be free of the veil of state secrecy that prevented him from leaking the slightest sliver of information. He would be able to present his findings to the academic community, and he would be able to speak not only of the threat of the RU-300 line, but also of its endlessly fascinating mechanism for symbiosis with and reproduction by way of viruses—a bizarre mechanism never before seen in terrestrial bacteria. It was a mechanism that should also give a strong hint as to how viruses—life-forms that had no way of reproducing outside of living cells—had ever come to exist in the first place. Meyer’s name would be cleared at last, and in academia it would even be held in high esteem.