Virus: The Day of Resurrection

by Sakyo Komatsu

  “What about Australia?”

  “About ten years ago, at the time of the Asian flu, the defensive measures they took down there worked perfectly, but this time that doesn’t appear to have been the case. At almost the same time as in New Zealand, it’s breaking out in both the cities and the backwaters. I hear one tribe of Maori people has been completely wiped out.”

  On the president’s desk, a videophone’s call buzzer went off.

  “It’s from the Senate vice chairman,” said the secretary, Ms. Maple. The president pressed the switch. No sooner had gray-aired Vice Chairman MacLean appeared via cathode ray tube than he coughed violently.

  “George,” the president said, “don’t give me your flu through the phone! That would’ve been dangerous if I hadn’t been vaccinated already.”

  “Oh, I had my shot too,” the vice chairman said as he blew his nose into a handkerchief. “Ah, crap! The vaccine didn’t help at all. Wonder if the nurse was watering it down?”

  “Unfortunately, this vaccine doesn’t work without a triple dose split over three injections,” the president said with a slight chuckle. “Did you go three times?”

  “The doctor said something about that, but one shot is one too many as far as I’m concerned. I’m fighting it with a secret family remedy handed down from my grandmother.”

  “Chicken soup?”

  The vice chairman’s eyes widened in surprise. “How did you know?”

  “Anyway, what can I do for you?” asked the president. “The order for mass production of vaccine has already been given. The secretary of defense is here trying to skim the cream off the top, but I intend to make him wait for a bit. Is the conversion of public buildings into temporary hospital wings going smoothly?”

  “There still aren’t hospitals enough for all the patients who need admitting,” growled Vice Chairman MacLean. “On top of that, we’re starting to run short of doctors. After all, doctors and nurses catch the flu too.” MacLean was serving as chairman for the Senate Special Committee on Influenza, which had been created the previous week. By having immediately drafted administrative measures for dealing with Tibetan flu, they had been the first country to act on the warnings of the WHO. Even so, it had fallen into such a state as this.

  “More importantly, Richardson,” said the vice chairman, “according to an internal announcement from Rockefeller Labs, the scientists over there are saying that what’s going around might not only be influenza.”

  “Polio?”

  “Apparently not. They say that statistically speaking, the death rate with this thing is way too high. The rate of patient mortality is already greater than twenty percent. At the same time, however, even people who haven’t caught it yet—and people who have caught it but still should be nowhere near death’s door—are dying. They’re saying the death rate for the uninfected and the just-infected is outrageously high too.”

  The president’s brow furrowed. “So what does that mean? I’ve heard that this flu can easily cause croup-type pneumonia, but—”

  “It seems that the scientists and doctors are saying that there’s more to it than that. Considering how symptomatic heart attacks are starting to spread like wildfire, there must be another completely new contagion that’s somehow been camouflaged by Tibetan flu.”

  Just then, the emergency phone next to the videophone rang.

  “George, I’m sorry, but can you tell me about this later? That’s the emergency line.”

  He switched off the videophone and put the other phone’s receiver to his ear. The moment he did so, the president’s face grew stern.

  “He’s what?!” the president bellowed. “And he thinks he can get away with that kind of stupid—? Get me the governor right now! If he’s not there now, have him call me the minute he comes in! And tell his secretary that there’s absolutely no way he’s going to get away with this; I’ll mobilize the army if it comes to that!”

  The phone clacked as he slammed it down. The president’s face was sour as he spoke: “Black neighborhoods in Alabama are on the verge of rioting,” he said.

  “Why?” asked the secretary of the treasury.

  “They say the state government is discriminating in vaccinating its citizens. The National Guard has been mobilized and is driving the rioters away from clinics. With live ammunition.”

  “There’s no way there’ll be enough vaccine,” said the secretary of defense.

  “That doesn’t mean we can stand by while Alabama discriminates against African-Americans.”

  “Mr. President,” said the secretary of the treasury in a cool tone of voice. “It appears that the time has come to take our measures to the next stage.”

  “I know, “ said the president, staring intently at the faces of the two cabinet members. At last, he turned to the secretary of defense and said, “Call the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and tell him to come here right away. If the chairman is able, I’d like him to come here as well. If the circumstances require it, we may have to declare martial law.”

  “The army’s special bacteriological warfare unit has had special training for wartime epidemic prevention, hasn’t it?” the secretary of the treasury said to the secretary of defense. “Their whole strategy can’t rest on offense alone; they must have some contingencies concerning what we should do if we were attacked, right?”

  “True, but things are going to get loud and crazy if we mobilize for that,” said the secretary of defense. “We’ll need special orders from the president. And once we start quarantining patients by force …”

  Once again, a telephone began ringing. It was the direct line to the Central Intelligence Agency. The president looked at it as though he were staring at some kind of nightmarish thing and then slowly picked it up.

  “It’s me. This is Richardson. What?!” The president’s face went pale almost instantly. “Are you sure? What’s happening at the Soviet Embassy? They’re refusing visitors? What’s the reaction in Europe?”

  The two VIPs held their breath as they watched the president’s face.

  “I see. Well, keep trying to get confirmation. If this is really true …”

  His sentence still unfinished, the president suddenly pressed a button on his desk.

  “Get me confirmation via direct Telex to the Kremlin. Immediately. The addressee is, uhm, let’s see … Vice Premier Godonov. Give my name as the sender.” Between the instructions he dictated to other persons elsewhere, the president quickly turned to the two men beside him and said, “This is unconfirmed, but Sullivan’s saying the Soviet premier died this morning of influenza at a health resort.”

  “The Soviet premier has—” shouted the defense secretary. He stopped, then began again calmly. “I don’t know. Even Khrushchev was murdered once according to German disinformation.”

  “But this time something really does feel off. And besides—” The president turned back to the phone. “The Kremlin doesn’t answer? They’re not responding to our signal? All right. Keep calling them.” He set the phone back down and leaned back in his chair weakly, as though he had gone limp from exhaustion. “Has the ideal that America has pursued for the past decade—that the world has pursued for a century—just slipped through our fingers when it was finally within arm’s reach?”

  “Don’t go weak on us,” said the treasury secretary. “Even over there, the days of dictatorship are long past, and they’ve built a long history since changing over to collective leadership. The successor Godonov will play ball just fine.”

  “We can’t say anything’s certain yet,” the president said, rubbing his face. “They say Godonov has some suspicious ties, both to the Stalinist faction and the Communist Party of China. Premier or no, he’s something of an unknown quantity.”

  “Besides that,” said the secretary of defense. “This flu may be like the plague in that it could raise tensions in international politics. We don’t know what will happen at the UN General Assembly this fall.”

  “
Ms. Maple …” the president said weakly over the interphone. “Would you call the vice president in Paris? Tell him I want him to get back to DC with all due haste.”

  “It’s true that Godonov might not be what we’re used to or what we’re expecting,” murmured the treasury secretary. “And we’re only four months away. I wonder if maybe the disarmament treaty just went down the drain again.”

  “And all because of a simple flu bug?” The president practically spat out the words.

  2. London, England

  In a room at the Department of the Army sat a gaunt, spindly-legged old man and a plump middle-aged man. The old man had a drooping mustache and wore striped pants with his black overcoat. He sported a black hat, carried an old-fashioned umbrella, and was an almost comical cliché of an English gentleman. The middle-aged man wore a loose necktie around his loose collar and a slightly dirty-looking shirt with his tweed suit. The elderly man was Sir Arthur E. Lindner, director of the British Army Germ Warfare Research Laboratory. The other was Dr. James Landon, chief of a newly formed special research division called P-5.

  The door opened and Sir Cronin, the well-built war minister, came in leading a short, rather plain-looking man.

  “This is Major Stanley Grey,” said Minister Cronin, introducing the small man. “Major, these are Sir Lindner and Dr. Landon. Major Grey is attached to the Army Intelligence Corps and says he has some questions for you regarding that incident with Professor Karlsky.”

  The short man called Major Grey was, true to his name, dressed in gray clothing from head to toe. He made a gesture as if to conceal his left hand, as the tip of his middle finger was missing.

  “Yes, about Professor Gregor Karlsky, who committed suicide recently,” Grey said, launching in immediately in an uninflected voice.

  “If this is about him, we’ve already been over the matter many times,” said Director Lindner, his displeasure evident. “He killed himself while on leave at the home of his sister-in-law in Brighton. I approved his leave because I’d had a communiqué from Landon here that he was in a state of extreme mental exhaustion and was apparently on the verge of snapping. That must be why he killed himself. We’ve had exactly two similar incidents before him.”

  “Did those previous cases also leave no note?”

  “One of them died leaving a scrawled letter filled with unintelligible, youthful babblings. The other got drunk and called me at my home in the middle of the night. He said, ‘Lindner, I’m about to bash my bloody head in!’ ” Lindner made a sour face. “People who kill themselves are not in their right mind. That man must have been beside himself with gin. He was spewing venom and filthy language at me as though he were some American sailor. Wouldn’t call me ‘Sir’ either … So I finally said, ‘Very well then, Peter, if that’s what you want to do, then hurry up and get it sorted.’ ”

  War Minister Cronin made an expression that was both bitter and amused and turned aside.

  “Dr. Landon, you were Professor Karlsky’s direct supervisor, weren’t you?” said Grey, switching targets.

  “Yes, although we were really more like colleagues,” said Dr. Landon, blinking his large, childlike eyes. “We worked together to create that, er, new research group.”

  “Terribly important research, was it?”

  “What area of research is not important?” Sir Lindner interjected, annoyed. “You’ve read the report from the laboratory’s security detail, haven’t you?”

  “I read it,” Major Grey said patiently, “and I thought I’d like to hear the story in a bit more detail from Dr. Landon. In particular, the more scientific aspects.”

  “If you’re asking if the work we do at P-5 is important,” Landon began with a constrained glance at Director Lindner’s face, “I’d say yes, it’s important. If you’re asking if it’s dangerous, I’d say yes, it’s dangerous. This is because in our line we’re dealing with unknowns as wide as the sea and as high as a mountain. Out of tens of thousands of contagions, we’re looking for things that are entirely new and effective. Or to put it more accurately, we’re making them.”

  “In other words, you’re hunting for buried treasure?”

  “Nothing so grand as that. The reality is a rather more orderly process. At any rate, the theories of contagion and heredity have leapt into the spotlight in academia recently. And the theory about cancer …”

  “Cancer?” Major Grey looked shocked, as may well have been expected. “Is cancer research useful in germ warfare?”

  “When it comes to new medical theories, nothing is useless.” An innocent smile spread over Dr. Landon’s face. “Once the cause of a given disease is nailed down, you can of course use that information to find a way to treat it, but at the same time you can use it to find ways to cause the disease. This is an obvious example, but in the field of pathology, it’s by artificially cultivating a given disease that its cause is determined. Particularly in our field, we’re keenly interested in new theories. The newness of contagion—in other words, the less likely it is that any wonder drug for it is in clinical trials, the less likely that any system of mass production is in place for any drugs or vaccines that do exist, and the less likely that your average hospital or company doctor is used to diagnosing and treating it—is what attracts our attention. We’re looking for the kind of disease that’s completely new, and the longer it takes them to figure out what’s causing it, the more effective it is as a strategic biological weapon.

  “For example, we have an improved germ strain in regular use already that produces symptoms that—given a typical diagnosis—look like anything other than acute stomach catarrh or a stomach ulcer. This germ, however, is very contagious and has a mortality rate of sixty percent.”

  “Cancer research …” Major Grey said with a sigh. “But cancer is humanity’s last incurable disease; the whole world is desperate for the discovery of a cure.”

  “Well, if comprehensive disarmament comes to pass, the results our research lab has produced should be of great use in that direction,” Dr. Landon said pleasantly. “However, the circumstances being what they are, that isn’t possible yet. Thanks to you people. Every last scrap of our research is considered a military secret. Actually, we have discovered a highly effective method for treating many cancers, but it was a subsidiary discovery unrelated to our military objectives. Also, because that treatment is connected to some extremely important characteristics of our latest germ weapons, we have been unable to announce it. But what with it being for national defense, it can’t be helped, I guess.”

  “What kind of biowar operations can cancer research be useful for, I wonder?” inserted the war minister, apparently interested now.

  “ ‘Nucleic acid weaponry,’ your Excellency,” said Dr. Landon with just a touch of a scientist’s sense of superiority detectable in his voice. In his tone was a hapless desire to tell someone about the latest fruits of his labor. “The causes of cancer were unclear for a very long time, so the theory of cellular mutation and the contagion theory were battling it out against each other. The former is the theory that the cellular system itself undergoes a sudden, malignant mutation that makes the cell destructive to the body as a whole, causing it to multiply. The latter is the theory that some unknown contagion—a virus perhaps—causes the cell to mutate. We were able to cause cancer in animals by infecting them with things like polyomavirus and Rous sarcoma virus, but in humans, we couldn’t find any virus that caused cancer no matter how hard we tried. True, the virus called SV40 which monkeys get produces cancer in artificially cultured human adrenal gland cells. Once you get cancer, however, it’ll never get better on its own, so human trials were out of the question.” Dr. Landon pointed at his lips slightly.

  “Nucleic acids, on the other hand—the genetic material that forms the core of a virus—are simple chemical substances, and it’s long been known that even in crystalline form, you can inoculate living cells with them to cause both the viral disease and the free production of new live virus
es. Viruses are hard to preserve in a ‘living’ state because you have to keep providing them with a medium of living cells or they die right away. If they die, their nucleic acids break down and lose their potency. For that reason, even the nucleic acids alone are enough to be useful as biological weapons. Chemical toxins normally require a fixed amount to be lethal, and moreover, their effectiveness is not sustained. Take the examples of G-gas—the poison gas that’s been adopted as standard issue in every country starting with the Soviet Union and the USA—and carbamate, which the French use. On the point of the swiftness with which they take effect, a thirty-second exposure to a density of a hundred milligrams per cubic meter of air is one hundred percent fatal. A fierce potency to be sure, but with no communicability or ripple effect. But nucleic acids, on the other hand—if a few ounces of dry, beautiful crystals in a small, sealed bottle were to infect a living creature, the creature’s cells themselves would get sick and die, and even as this was happening, they would be producing new disease-carrying viruses in unlimited numbers. In other words, nucleic acids are self-replicating weapons.”

  The air in the room had somehow become unpleasant and felt almost sticky. The rather shrill, high-pitched voice in which Dr. Landon spoke so enthusiastically was only exaggerating the gloomy atmosphere, but Landon himself seemed entirely unaware of this. It made the atmosphere in the room almost grotesque. Sir Lindner’s mouth was drawn down unhappily at both corners. If Major Grey was bothered, he didn’t show it. His eyes were like dull circles of graphite that only stared expressionlessly at Landon’s mouth.

  Perhaps this man Dr. Landon has some sort of psychological defect, War Minister Cronin thought suddenly as he stared at the doctor, who was still going on and on with his explanations enthusiastically. He had a gloomy, ghastly job whose aim was mass slaughter. Perhaps he had developed this defect during his long years of living like Hecate in Macbeth—gathering the vile, the obscene, and the accursed, and simmering them into deadly brews. War Minister Cronin had had some small involvement with the production of poison gas himself, during the Second World War, and knew of at least one case in which one of the on-site managers at a secret factory had become a cheerful eccentric. Or had it perhaps been an inborn defect that had allowed him to endure in work such as this for so long?