The Four Fingers of Death (78 page)

The good news? There was no problem making the occasional satellite phone call. You wouldn’t have a seat on the NASA jet if you didn’t have the appropriate security clearance for outgoing satellite calls. The pilots of the NASA jet, many of them astronauts who hadn’t yet made the jump into orbit, didn’t fret about the security issues that had dogged civil aviation in the period of the Middle Eastern and Central Asian conflicts.

Which is how Rob Antoine found himself talking to the director of the Centers for Disease Control during flight. While Debra Levin slept across the aisle, a small rivulet of drool tracking down her attractive if forbidding jawline, he found himself in the middle of an unpleasant interagency conversation. What Rob was doing was trying to explain a certain exotic extraterrestrial infection, though in doing so what he really was doing was trying to explain what he in turn had been told by the Department of Defense an hour earlier. He had little confidence in that account. He was giving away half a story, the half he was authorized to possess, to another government agency, without understanding the story entirely and without feeling competent about any of the technical or scientific issues, and all this while he was flying directly into the epicenter of what could become a ghastly epidemic. The director of the CDC, whose name Rob had already forgotten out of anxiety, Anderson or Henderson, was just as rattled as Rob was himself, and Anderson (Henderson) made it more apparent by reaching new heights of condescension when he didn’t feel that he was getting the facts he needed.

“Can you walk me through this one more time?”

Below, the glorious mountains had risen up from the plains in the middle of the nation, as if to impale inbound air traffic. Even the fuzzy windows couldn’t stop the mountains. The mountains were an overpowering presence, and no matter how many times Rob flew in this direction he never failed to be impressed. Especially while being dressed down by a medical expert.

Rob said, “Again, I’m not on the medical staff. But here’s what we think we know. What we think we know is that the astronauts on the Mars mission somehow contracted a bug while on the surface of the planet. Despite the fact that the planet was considered sterile, or all but sterile, our people contracted a bug. The best information we have at this time suggests that the bug is a mutation of something being worked on here on Earth, something that was believed to have military applications, which was then in turn transported to Mars during unmanned missions, perhaps by design, where it picked up some nasty tendencies, such as a high tolerance for gamma rays on the one hand, and for oxygen-deprived environments. Because of some unfortunate personnel problems we had going on during the mission itself—”

“I’ve heard,” said Henderson or Anderson.

“Because of personnel problems, we essentially transmitted the bacterium from person to person up there, giving it a new chance to reacclimate to human tissue, and in the process killing the majority of our astronauts. When we thought we were in the clear with the one astronaut who was coming home, we found that unfortunately he was ill as well. At this point the mission was terminated, while that astronaut, Colonel Richards, was still inbound.”

“Well, one question I have to ask,” Henderson or Anderson said, “is why you didn’t use the antisatellite system to take down the craft when it was farther out. Isn’t that the reason for the shield system? To prevent just this sort of thing?”

“We were hoping to salvage our guy. That’s all. We believed his condition was safe, and he worked hard, he did the work we asked him to do, and we’d lost a lot of good people. We weren’t ready to give up on him yet.”

“So you blew pieces of him all over the Southwest, jeopardizing millions of civilians.”

“Colonel Richards made that decision himself. And I can understand how you might be a little concerned about this, and we are too. But there’s no reason yet to assume that the situation is beyond control. For one thing, we are in an area of very low population density. And furthermore, we aren’t really sure if any of Colonel Richards survived the blast. The redundant systems we had in place to abort should have been effective enough to prevent that. Still, I am calling because we do have one report that is not as reassuring as we’d like. This is in the extreme Southwest, Rio Blanco area, and I’m flying there now, as is the director of the agency.”

Debra Levin shifted positions in her medicated sleep. The drool detached and beaded on the lapel of her stylish suit jacket. Antoine watched, while listening to the CDC’s protests.

Rob blundered into a silence, without much heart for it. “The exact facts of the bioweapon, if that’s what it is, I am unable to get out of the Department of Defense. The exact genetic information on the bug. Maybe you have a contact there. Although I should stress that there’s a public-relations issue here, and we would prefer not to alarm the residents of the area just yet. Until we know exactly what we are dealing with.”

“That’s your problem,” said Anderson, or was it—“Our job is to prevent and contain infectious outbreaks, and we are not concerned with how it looks for the other agencies, and we’re willing to take this up the chain of command.”

Rob let the shrill stuff that followed from Henderson or Anderson drift by. Some of this was all about the specifics of viral contagions versus bacterial contagions, which apparently Rob had been confusing on and off throughout the discussion. The CDC guy went on and on about Ebola and Marburg and the fact that viruses were simply
not as effective
as bacterial infections, when weaponized, but the hemorrhagic feature was much more common in these viral infections than in their bacterial cousins, as the viruses would infect the blood and skin cells, and thus the multiplying of tiny cuts in the Ebola outbreaks, like the one in Denmark in 2012 and the one in the Czech Republic two years later. And what about H1N1? And what about hantavirus? If Anderson or Henderson remembered correctly, and he could have the facts in the next few minutes, hantavirus was quite common in the homeless population of Rio Blanco and surrounding towns, and wasn’t the homeless population there restive and militant? These were the kinds of cofactors they’d be dealing with—there could even be a viral infection piggybacking on the bacterial pathogen.

Almost impossible to take all this in. So quickly had it come to this. So quickly had the story gone sour, with the potential for worse up ahead, in the Southwest, a part of the country that was noteworthy for bad economic news, for the inability of state and local governments to deliver basic services. Still, from the air, it was so beautiful. The absence of government and industry in the better part of the Southwest, and the acute drought, had made it possible for a lot of plant and animal species to rebound. After environmental devastation, some of the animals always rebounded—when there were no people around. You always saw this sort of thing on
nature programming
.

“Are you listening to what I’m saying?” Henderson asked.

“You’re going in and out. Must be a satellite problem.”

“I’m saying that I don’t have any idea what this ‘disassembling’ nonsense means, but it is very possible that even a corpse, if infected with a bacterium that has mutated to this degree, is liable to be contagious. Based on what I’m hearing. You want to try to isolate and quarantine anyone exposed, and that includes the bodies. I’ll get you more backup on this from our end, but that’s likely what we’re talking about.”

“The military is isolating the crash site. They’ve already done so, to the tune of several miles. There is a
body
there, already, and that body belongs to someone not on our payroll. That body is civilian. That means it’s possible, from what I understand, that the bacteria has spread from the site.”

“You have people on the ground?”

“We are contacting local doctors and hospitals, and the military has people there—they have a base in the area, and I’m trusting we can all coordinate on this, and that we can play a leadership role in the coordination, since it’s NASA’s mess.”

Henderson grunted and then said something about CDC being primarily an information and education agency. But they too had research affiliates among medical people in participating regions.

“Then the last question is,” Anderson or Henderson said, “do you have any reason to believe that you
have
contained the astronaut’s remains?”

“We have done statistical modeling,” Rob Antoine said. “There are small pieces of the craft in a debris stream, starting south of the border and moving northwest, through the empty part of the state of New Mexico, across the southern part of the Sonoran Desert. We have helicopters working to isolate every piece of the capsule in this debris stream.We believe we may be able to find every piece of significance. Wherever there is aeronautical or biological debris, we will be working on it. And I’ll have more for you later when I hear from our people. I imagine if somebody finds… a piece of the body, of Colonel Richards, who was, I should say, a personal friend of mine, we will probably hear about it as soon as it happens.”

With that, they rang off.

The problem
was
pieces of the body, true. Rob Antoine’s nightmares, which were mostly drug induced these days, what with the twenty-four-hour days that he’d been working, had to do with the body, with the remainder of Jed Richards that he feared was going to turn up everywhere and advertise the debacle that the Mars mission had become. In the recurrent nightmare, some portion of Richards was always trying to find a way to write, as if the most devastating thing an
undead
astronaut could do was somehow put pen to paper, to tell Rob that NASA was responsible for what had become of him. NASA had reduced a fine astronaut, and an eloquent spokesman for the Mars mission, a veteran, a patriot, a poet, a family man, to a disembodied head—because that was one outcome that Antoine’s dream life favored—or to a headless, armless body that was still able to type somehow. With its toes.

The military had verified that it had subjected the crash site near Rio Blanco, the site with the larger part of the debris, to incendiary devices designed to eliminate any biological material. A controlled burn. Which meant that any mission data at that location was also entirely lost. Rob had advanced in the Mars mission because he loved the neglected part of interplanetary research, not the life-on-Mars stuff, but, for example, the study of Martian winds. He loved the way the winds worked on Mars, and he had promoted a number of studies of these winds, and none of those studies had ever been completed by the poor, lonely astronauts who had gone there to die. All that ancillary data, the topographical data about an undisturbed planet that had been unchanged for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, that was all obscured by the human story. And it was all going to get a lot more human very soon. If that guy, that miner who had been found dead near the crash site, was infected.

Debra Levin stretched languidly and looked over at him, yawning.

“What did they say?”

“CDC? They are not happy.”

Debra, at some way station between nap and awful truth, gave the news a respectful silence.

“At a certain point,” she said at last, “we have to start working more directly on limiting the agency’s liability in all of this. That should be one of our priorities, along with attempting to maximize the science that is available. We should get out, leave it to other agencies.”

There were questions Rob wanted to ask, beginning with: Did Debra Levin know and approve of the work on biological agents that was taking place on the Mars mission? Was she fully informed by the Department of Defense? And what about her predecessor, Anatoly Thatcher? She could easily be reporting to the highest levels of government without telling Vance Gibraltar or Rob or anyone else. She was capable of making even the idlest conversation seem like it was material to your annual review. Your career hung on the answer to any simple inquiry. And for this reason he left well enough alone.

“I’m going to call the guy at URB. Everybody keeps suggesting him, the Korean guy, does stem cell issues. Subcontracted for the Company at one time.”