Virus: The Day of Resurrection (20 page)

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 earth 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.

And then just when he was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, he had gotten sucked into this nerve-wracking spy incident and had now shot off his mouth in front of his uncle from the DIA. He wished he could have held out a little longer. It looked like it was too late for that now. The bigwigs would turn their attention once more to the RU-300 line, and this time they would realize that there were actually gaps in the reports. They might even order field tests right away. And if that happened …

Meyer looked around with a half-crazed gleam in his eyes. Once, when he was young, he had worked for the prevention of epidemic diseases in South America, a soldier in the worldwide battle against contagious disease. Thanks to that experience, he had been able to form a clear enough mental image of how wretched the situation could become even in cases where the diseases were known quantities. Yellow fever, dengue, parrot fever, smallpox, and Q-fever—cures and vaccines and other treatments might exist for them, but once the balance of the society itself began to teeter …

When he had been on assignment, there had been a mass outbreak of a mutant paracholera in the backwaters of Bolivia, and in the mere week that passed between the outbreak’s discovery and the identification of the disease, three Indian villages had been wiped out, and Meyer’s team had had to go so far as to start flying in medical supplies and vaccines from all over the world in order to keep it from spreading to the capital. But this—the RU-300 line …

Meyer glanced back to the drawer he had left open, and there his gaze remained riveted. When he had been rooting around in there for his memo pad, an old piece of paper once buried in the bottom of the drawer had come up to the top. It was a pamphlet for the fifth Pugwash Conference, held in Canada in August of 1959. Nineteen fifty-nine—already more than a decade in the past. Several years ago one of the vigil regulars—a young university student—had turned up in his neighborhood and wordlessly handed him the pamphlet. He had discreetly put it away afterward. His trembling hand now took hold of that crudely made pamphlet.

The Pugwash Conferences had, in answer to the appeals of Russell and Einstein, been organized in the Canadian city of Pugwash in July of 1956 to send out the message that addressing the menace of atomic weapons and other weapons of mass destruction was a responsibility that all scientists shared and a battle that all of them must fight. The first conference had dealt with the harmful effects of radiation in the use of atomic energy, the management of atomic weapons, and the social responsibility of scientists. The second conference had been held the following year in Lac-Beauport—again in Canada. The third had been held in Vienna, and it was there that the famous Vienna Declaration, which spoke of the scientist’s responsibility in relation to the history of humanity, had been made. After the pages outlining the history of the conferences up to that point, there was a section in the pamphlet about the fifth conference, which was to focus largely on chemical and biological weaponry. Topics that had been discussed at the conference included these:

• It is an open secret that chemical and biological (CB) weapons research is now under way throughout the world.

• CB weapons far more powerful than those in the past have been developed, and it is extremely dangerous to make assumptions about them based on preexisting knowledge. There are some frightening biological weapons among those that could be created according to the infection theory of cancer, which is rooted in microbial genetics and biochemistry.

• Germ contagions
with abnormal routes of infection
and resistance to antibiotics can be created quite easily.

• Research by Martin M. Kaplan concludes that the contagions for anthrax, botulism, brucellosis, tuberculosis, rabbit fever, adenovirus, yellow fever,
Japanese encephalitis
,
influenza
, parrot fever, and
typhus
are suitable for use as biological weapons.

• CB weapons are sufficiently easy to synthesize and developing countries could readily create them for offensive purposes.

• CB weapons, therefore, must not be underestimated based on present technical difficulties and their vastly inferior destructive power compared to nuclear weapons. In cases where colonies and developing countries are fighting wars for independence, where external powers are interfering in such wars, and where internal conflicts have erupted in developing countries, we cannot at present conclude that such weapons are not being used even now.

• CB weapons are inexpensive and therefore can be mass-produced. If spread effectively, their effects may be incalculable.

After this came two proposals printed in large, Gothic boldface, to which the participating scientists had signed their names.

I. That an international treaty prohibiting the use of biological and chemical weapons be swiftly adopted.

II. That research in fields such
microbiology
, toxicology, pharmacology, chemistry, and
biology
be
declassified
and managed peacefully.

In Meyer’s own hand, key points in the pamphlet had been underlined, and in the margin he had written the following: “You’re sentimental idealists who don’t understand the realities of politics!”

Meyer stared intently at those letters of faded ink. Ten years ago! Ten years ago, scientists had already foreseen the possibility that unknown biological weapons might come to be. And now, a decade later, with yearly budget increases that were followed by explosive leaps forward in molecular biology, with the wholesale adoption of genetic theory—suddenly, Meyer was struck by the smallness of his section in this huge organization—the secret of the RU-300 line was ultimately nothing more than a single discovery by his own tiny section. Within this giant military research organization, there might be much more terrifying research and terrifying results that he, in his relatively unimportant post, had never been informed of. No, even more troubling were the things that lay beyond the even higher walls of international political secrecy, moving across the world, from one country to another …