Mount Dragon

PART ONE

Guy Carson, stuck at yet another traffic light, glanced at the clock on his dashboard. He was already late for work, second time this week. Ahead, U.S. Route 1 ran like a bad dream through Edison, New Jersey. The light turned green, but by the time he had edged up it was red again.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, slamming the dashboard with the fat part of his palm. He watched as the rain splattered across the windshield, listened to the slap and whine of the wipers. The serried ranks of brake lights rippled back toward him as the traffic slowed yet again. He knew he’d never get used to this congestion any more than he’d get used to all the damn rain.

Creeping painfully over a rise, Carson could see, a mere half mile down the highway, the crisp white facade of the GeneDyne Edison complex, a postmodern masterpiece rising above green lawns and artificial ponds. Somewhere inside, Fred Peck lay in wait.

Carson turned on the radio, and the throbbing sound of the Gangsta Muthas filled the air. As he fiddled with the dial, Michael Jackson’s shrill voice separated itself from the static. Carson punched it off in disgust. Some things were even worse than the thought of Peck. Why couldn’t they have a decent country station in this hole?

The lab was bustling when he arrived, Peck nowhere in sight. Carson drew the lab coat over his lanky frame and sat down at his terminal, knowing his log-on time would automatically go into his personnel file. If by some miracle Peck was out sick, he’d be sure to notice when he came in. Unless he had died, of course. Now, that was something to think about. The man did look like a walking heart attack.

“Ah, Mr. Carson,” came the mocking voice behind him. “How kind of you to grace us with your presence this morning.” Carson closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then turned around.

The soft form of his supervisor was haloed by the fluorescent light. Peck’s brown tie still bore testament to that morning’s scrambled eggs, and his generous jowls were mottled with razor burn. Carson exhaled through his nose, fighting a losing battle with the heavy aroma of Old Spice.

It had been a shock on Carson’s first day at GeneDyne, one of the world’s premier biotechnology companies, to find a man like Fred Peck there waiting for him. In the eighteen months since, Peck had gone out of his way to keep Carson busy with menial lab work. Carson guessed it had something to do with Peck’s lowly M.S. from Syracuse University and his own Ph.D. from MIT. Or maybe Peck just didn’t like Southwestern hicks.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said with what he hoped would pass for sincerity. “Got caught in traffic.”

“Traffic,” said Peck, as if the word was new to him.

“Yes,” said Carson, “they’ve been rerouting—”

“Reroutin’,” Peck repeated, imitating Carson’s Western twang.

“—detouring, I mean, the traffic from the Jersey Turnpike—”

“Ah, the Turnpike,” Peck said.

Carson fell silent.

Peck cleared his throat. “Traffic in New Jersey at rush hour. What an unexpected shock it must have been for you, Carson.” He crossed his arms. “You almost missed your meeting.”

“Meeting?” Carson said. “What meeting? I didn’t know—”

“Of course you didn’t know. I just heard about it myself. That’s one of the many reasons you have to be here on time, Carson.”

“Yes, Mr. Peck,” Carson said, getting up and following Peck past a maze of identical cubicles. Mr. Fred Peckerwood. Sir Frederick Peckerfat. He was itching to deck the oily bastard. But that wasn’t the way they did business around here. If Peck had been a ranch boss, the man would’ve been on his ass in the dirt long ago.

Peck opened a door marked VIDEOCONFERENCING ROOM II and waved Carson inside. It was only as Carson looked around the large, empty table within that he realized he was still wearing his filthy lab coat.

“Take a seat,” Peck said.

“Where is everybody?” Carson asked.

“It’s just you,” Peck replied. He started to back out the door.

“You’re not staying?” Carson felt a rising uncertainty, wondering if he’d missed an important piece of e-mail, if he should have prepared something. “What’s this about, anyway?”

“I have no idea,” Peck replied. “Carson, when you’re finished here, come straight down to my office. We need to talk about your attitude.”

The door shut with the solid click of oak engaging steel. Carson gingerly took a seat at the cherrywood table and looked around. It was a beautiful room, finished in hand-rubbed blond wood. A wall of windows looked out over the meadows and ponds of the GeneDyne complex. Beyond lay endless urban waste. Carson tried to compose himself for whatever ordeal was coming. Probably Peck had sent in enough negative ratings on him to merit a stern lecture from personnel, or worse.

In a way, he supposed, Peck was right: his attitude could certainly be improved. He had to rid himself of the stubborn bad-ass outlook that did in his father. Carson would never forget that day on the ranch when his father sucker-punched a banker. That incident had been the start of the foreclosure proceedings. His father had been his own worst enemy, and Carson was determined not to repeat his mistakes. There were a lot of Pecks in the world.

But it was a goddamn shame, the way the last year and a half of his life had been flushed virtually down the toilet. When he was first offered the job at GeneDyne, it had seemed the pivotal moment of his life, the one thing he’d left home and worked so hard for. And still, more than anything, GeneDyne stood out as one place where he could really make a difference, maybe do something important. But each day that he woke up in hateful Jersey—to the cramped, unfamiliar apartment, the gray industrial sky, and Peck—it seemed less and less likely.

The lights of the conference room dimmed and went out. Window shades were automatically drawn, and a large panel slid back from the wall, revealing a bank of keyboards and a large video-projection screen.

The screen flickered on, and a face swam into focus. Carson froze. There they were: the jug ears, the sandy hair, the unrepentant cowlick, the thick glasses, the trademark black T-shirt, the sleepy, cynical expression. All the features that together made up the face of Brentwood Scopes, founder of GeneDyne. The Time issue with the cover article on Scopes still lay next to Carson’s living-room couch. The CEO who ruled his company from cyberspace. Lionized on Wall Street, worshipped by his employees, feared by his rivals. What was this, some kind of motivational film for hard cases?

“Hi,” said the image of Scopes. “How’re you doing, Guy?”

For a moment Carson was speechless. Jesus, he thought, this isn’t a film at all. “Uh, hello, Mr. Scopes. Sir. Fine. Sorry, I’m not really dressed—”

“Please call me Brent. And face the screen when you talk. I can see you better that way.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not sir. Brent.”

“Right. Thanks, Brent.” Just calling the supreme leader of GeneDyne by his first name was painfully difficult.

“I like to think of my employees as colleagues,” Scopes said. “After all, when you joined the company, you became a principal in the business, like everyone else. You own stock in this company, which means we all rise and fall together.”

“Yes, Brent.” In the background, behind the image of Scopes, Carson could make out the dim outlines of what looked like a massive, many-sided vault.

Scopes smiled, as if unashamedly pleased at the sound of his name, and as he smiled it seemed to Carson that he looked almost like a teenager, despite being thirty-nine. He watched Scopes’s image with a growing sense of unreality. Why would Scopes, the boy genius, the man who built a four-billion-dollar company out of a few kernels of ancient corn, want to talk to him? Shit, I must have screwed up worse than I thought.

Scopes glanced down for a moment, and Carson could hear the tapping of keys. “I’ve been looking into your background, Guy,” he said. “Very impressive. I can see why we hired you.” More tapping. “Although I can’t quite understand why you’re working as, let’s see, a Lab Technician Three.”

Scopes looked up again. “Guy, you’ll forgive me if I get right to the point. There’s an important post in this company that’s currently vacant. I think you’re the person for it.”

“What is it?” Carson blurted, instantly regretting his own excitement.

Scopes smiled again. “I wish I could give you specifics, but it’s a highly confidential project. I’m sure you’ll understand if I only describe the assignment in general terms.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do I look like a ‘sir’ to you, Guy? It wasn’t so long ago that I was just the nerdy kid being picked on in the schoolyard. What I can tell you is that this assignment involves the most important product GeneDyne has ever produced. One that will be of incalculable value to the human race.”

Scopes saw the look on Carson’s face and grinned. “It’s great,” he said, “when you can help people and get rich at the same time.” He brought his face closer to the camera. “What we’re offering you is a six-month reassignment to the GeneDyne Remote Desert Testing Facility. The Mount Dragon laboratory. You’ll be working with a small, dedicated team, the best microbiologists in the company.”

Carson felt a surge of excitement. Just the words Mount Dragon were like a magic talisman throughout all of GeneDyne: a scientific Shangri-la.

A pizza box was laid at Scopes’s elbow by someone offscreen. He glanced at it, opened it up, shut the lid. “Ah! Anchovies. You know what Churchill said about anchovies: ‘A delicacy favored by English lords and Italian whores.’ ”

There was a short silence. “So I’d be going to New Mexico?” Carson asked.

“That’s correct. Your part of the country, right?”

“I grew up in the Bootheel. At a place called Cottonwood Tanks.”

“I knew it had a picturesque name. You probably won’t find Mount Dragon as harsh as some of our other people have. The isolation and the desert setting can make it a difficult place to work. But you might actually enjoy it. There are horse stables there. I suppose you must be a fairly good rider, having grown up on a ranch.”

“I know a bit about horses,” Carson said. Scopes had sure as hell done his research.

“Not that you’ll have much time for riding, of course. They’ll run you ragged, no point in saying otherwise. But you’ll be well compensated for it. A year’s salary for the six-month tour, plus a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus upon successful completion. And, of course, you’ll have my personal gratitude.”

Carson struggled with what he was hearing. The bonus alone equaled his current salary.

“You probably know my management methods are a little unorthodox,” Scopes continued. “I’ll be straight with you, Guy. There’s a downside to this. If you fail to complete your part of the project in the necessary time frame, you’ll be excessed.” He grinned, displaying oversized front teeth. “But I have every confidence in you. I wouldn’t put you in this position if I didn’t think you could do it.”

Carson had to ask. “I can’t help wondering why you chose me out of such a vast pool of talent.”

“Even that I can’t tell you. When you get briefed at Mount Dragon, everything will become clear, I promise.”

“When would I begin?”

“Today. The company needs this product, Guy, and there’s simply no time left. You can be on our plane before lunch. I’ll have someone take care of your apartment, car, all the annoying details. Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No,” said Carson.

“That makes things easier.” Scopes smoothed down his cowlick, without success.

“What about my supervisor, Fred Peck? I was supposed to—”

“There’s no time. Just grab your PowerBook and go. The driver will take you home to pack a few things and call whoever. I’ll send what’s-his-name—Peck?—a note explaining things.”

“Brent, I want you to know—”

Scopes held up a hand. “Please. Expressions of gratitude make me uncomfortable. ‘Hope has a good memory, gratitude a bad one.’ Give my offer ten minutes’ serious thought, Guy, and don’t go anywhere.”

The screen winked out on Scopes opening the pizza box again.

As the lights came on, Carson’s feeling of unreality was replaced by a surge of elation. He had no idea why Scopes had reached down among the five thousand GeneDyne Ph.D.s and picked him, busy with his repetitive titrations and quality-control checks. But for the moment he didn’t care. He thought of Peck hearing thirdhand that Scopes had personally assigned him to Mount Dragon. He thought of the look on the fat face, the wattles quivering in consternation.

There was a low rumbling noise as the curtains drew back from the windows, exposing the dreary vista beyond, cloaked in curtains of rain. In the gray distance, Carson could make out the power lines and smokestacks and chemical effluvia that were central New Jersey. Somewhere farther west lay a desert, with eternal sky and distant blue mountains and the pungent smell of greasewood, where you could ride all day and night and never see another human being. Somewhere in that desert stood Mount Dragon, and within it, his own secret chance to do something important.

Ten minutes later, when the curtains closed and the video screen came once again to life, Carson had his answer ready.

Carson stepped onto the slanting porch, dropped his bags by the door, and sat down in a weather-beaten rocker. The chair creaked as the old wood absorbed his weight unwillingly. He leaned back, stretching out the kinks, and looked out over the vast Jornada del Muerto desert.

The sun was rising in front of him, a boiling furnace of hydrogen erupting over the faint blue outline of the San Andres Mountains. He could feel the pressure of solar radiation on his cheek as the morning light invaded the porch. It was still cool—sixty, sixty-five—but in less than an hour, Carson knew, the temperature would be over one hundred degrees. The deep ultraviolet sky was gradually turning blue; soon it would be white with heat.

He gazed down the dirt road that ran in front of the house. Engle was a typical New Mexico desert town, no longer dying but already dead. There were a scattering of adobe buildings with pitched tin roofs; an abandoned school and post office; a row of dead poplars long stripped of leaves by the wind. The only traffic past the house was dust devils. In one sense, Engle was atypical: the entire town had been bought by GeneDyne, and it was now used solely as the jumping-off place for Mount Dragon.

Carson turned his head toward the horizon. Far to the northeast, across ninety miles of dusty sun-baked sand and rock only a native could call a road, lay the complex officially labeled the GeneDyne Remote Desert Testing Facility, but known to all by the name of the ancient volcanic hill that rose above it: Mount Dragon. It was GeneDyne’s state-of-the-art laboratory for genetic engineering and the manipulation of dangerous microbial life.

He breathed deeply. It was the smell he’d missed most, the fragrance of dust and witch mesquite, the sharp clean odor of aridity. Already, New Jersey seemed unreal, something from the distant past. He felt as if he’d been released from prison, a green, crowded, sodden prison. Though the banks had taken the last of his father’s land, this still felt like his country. Yet it was a strange homecoming: returning not to work cattle, but to work on an unspecified project at the outer reaches of science.

A spot appeared at the hazy limits where the horizon met the sky. Within sixty seconds, the spot had resolved itself into a distant plume of dust. Carson watched the spot for several minutes before standing up. Then he went back into the ramshackle house, dumped out the remains of his cold coffee, and rinsed the cup.

As he looked around for any unpacked items, he heard the sound of a vehicle pulling up outside. Stepping onto the porch, he saw the squat white outlines of a Hummer, the civilian version of the Humvee. A wash of dust passed over him as the vehicle ground to a halt. The smoked windows remained closed as the powerful diesel idled.

A figure stepped out: plump, black-haired and balding, dressed in a polo shirt and white shorts. His mild, open face was deeply tanned by the sun, but the stubby legs looked white against the incongruously heavy boots. The man bustled over, busy and cheerful, and held out a plump hand.

“You’re my driver?” Carson asked, surprised by the softness of the handshake. He shouldered his duffel bag.

“In a manner of speaking, Guy,” the man replied. “The name’s Singer.”

“Dr. Singer!” Carson said. “I didn’t expect to get a ride from the director himself.”

“Call me John, please,” Singer said brightly, taking the duffel from Carson and opening the Hummer’s storage bay. “Everybody’s on a first-name basis here at Mount Dragon. Except for Nye, of course. Sleep all right?”

“Best night’s rest in eighteen months,” Carson grinned.

“Sorry we couldn’t have come out to get you sooner,” Singer replied, slinging the duffel, “but it’s against the rules to travel outside the compound after dark. And no aircraft inside the Range, except for emergencies.” He eyed a case lying at Carson’s feet. “Is that a five-string?”

“It is.” Carson hefted it, came down the steps.

“What’s your style: three-finger? Clawhammer? Melodic?”

Carson stopped in the act of stowing the banjo and looked at Singer, who laughed delightedly in response. “This is going to be more fun than I thought,” he said. “Hop in.”

A wave of frigid air greeted Carson as he settled himself in the Hummer, surprised at the depth of the seats. Singer was almost an arm’s length away. “I feel like I’m riding in a tank,” Carson said.

“Best thing we’ve found for desert terrain. Takes a vertical cliff face to stop it. You see this indicator? It’s a tire gauge. The vehicle has a central tire-inflation system, powered by a compressor. Pressing a button inflates or deflates the tires, depending on terrain. And all the Mount Dragon Hummers are equipped with ‘run flat’ tires. They can travel for thirty miles even after being punctured.”

They pulled away from the cluster of houses and bumped across a cattleguard. Carson could see barbed wire stretching endlessly in both directions from the cattleguard, signs placed at hundred-foot intervals, reading: WARNING: THERE IS A U.S. GOVERNMENT MILITARY INSTALLATION TO THE EAST. ENTRY STRICTLY PROHIBITED. WSMR-WEA.

“We’re entering the White Sands Missile Range,” Singer said. “We lease the land Mount Dragon’s on from the Department of Defense, you know. A holdover from our military contract days.”

Singer aimed the vehicle for the horizon and accelerated over the rocky trail, a great rocket plume of dust corkscrewing behind the rear tires.

“I’m honored you came to get me personally,” Carson said.

“Don’t be. I like to get out of the place when I can. I’m just the director, remember. Everybody else is doing the important work.” He looked over at Carson. “Besides, I’m glad of this chance to talk with you. I’m probably one of five people in the world who read and understood your dissertation. ‘Designer Coats: Tertiary and Quaternary Protein Structure Transformations of a Viral Shell.’ Brilliant.”

“Thank you,” Carson said. This was no small praise coming from the former Morton Professor of Biology at CalTech.

“Of course I only read it yesterday,” Singer said with a wink. “Scopes sent it, along with the rest of your file.” He leaned back, right hand draped over the wheel. The ride grew increasingly jarring as the Hummer accelerated to sixty, slewing through a stretch of sand. Carson felt his own right foot pressing an imaginary brake pedal to the floorboards. The man drove like Carson’s father.

“What can you tell me about the project?” Carson said.

“What exactly do you want to know?” Singer said, turning toward Carson, eyes straying from the road.

“Well, I dropped everything and came out here on an hour’s notice,” Carson said. “I guess you could say I’m curious.”

Singer smiled. “There’ll be plenty of time when we reach Mount Dragon.” His eyes drifted back to the road just as they whipped past a yucca, close enough to whack the driver’s mirror. Singer jerked the Hummer back on course.

“This must be like a homecoming for you,” he said.

Carson nodded, taking the hint. “My family’s been here a long time.”

“Longer than most, I understand.”

“That’s right. Kit Carson was my ancestor. He’d been a drover along the Spanish Trail as a teenager. My great-grandfather acquired an old land grant in Hidalgo County.”

“And you grew tired of the ranching life?” Singer asked.

Carson shook his head. “My father was a terrible businessman. If he’d just stuck to straight ranching he would have been all right, but he was full of grand schemes. One of them involved crossbreeding cattle. That’s how I got interested in genetics. It failed, like all the rest, and the bank took the ranch.”

He fell silent, watching the endless desert unfold around him. The sun climbed higher in the sky, the light turning from yellow to white. In the distance, a pair of pronghorn antelope were running just below the horizon. They were barely visible, a streak of gray against gray. Singer, oblivious, hummed “Soldier’s Joy” cheerfully to himself.

In time, the dark summit of a hill began to creep over the horizon in front of them, a volcanic cinder cone topped by a smooth crater. Along the rim of the crater stood a cluster of radio towers and microwave horns. As they approached, Carson could see a complex of angular buildings spread out below the hill, white and spare, gleaming in the morning sun like a cluster of salt crystals.

“There it is,” Singer said proudly, slowing. “Mount Dragon. Your home for the next six months.”

Soon a distant chain-link fence came into view, topped by thick rolls of concertina wire. A guard tower rose above the complex, motionless against the sky, wavering slightly in the heat.

“There’s nobody in it at the moment,” Singer said with a chuckle. “Oh, there’s a security staff, all right. You’ll meet them soon enough. And they’re very efficient when they want to be. But our real security’s the desert.”

As they approached, the buildings slowly took form. Carson had expected an ugly set of cement buildings and Quonset huts; instead, the complex seemed almost beautiful, white and cool and clean against the sky.

Singer slowed further, drove around a concrete crash barrier and stopped at an enclosed guardhouse. A man—civilian clothes, no uniform of any kind—opened the door and came strolling over. Carson noticed that he walked with a stiff leg.

Singer lowered the window, and the man placed two muscled forearms on the doorframe and poked his crew-cut head inside. He grinned, his jaw muscles working on a piece of gum. Two brilliant green eyes were set deeply into a tanned, almost leathery face.

“Howdy, John,” he said, his eyes slowly moving around the interior and finally coming to rest on Carson. “Who’ve we got here?”

“It’s our new scientist. Guy Carson. Guy, this is Mike Marr, security.”

The man nodded, eyes sliding around the car again. He handed Singer back his ID.

“Documents?” he spoke in Carson’s direction, almost dreamily. Carson passed over the documents he had been told to bring: his passport, birth certificate, and GeneDyne ID.

Marr flicked through them nonchalantly. “Wallet, please?”

“You want my driver’s license?” Carson frowned.

“The whole wallet, if you don’t mind.” Marr grinned very briefly, and Carson saw that the man wasn’t chewing gum after all, but a large red rubber band. He handed over his wallet with irritation.

“They’ll be taking your bags, as well,” Singer said. “Don’t worry, you’ll get everything back before dinner. Except your passport, of course. That will be returned at the end of your six-month tour.”

Marr heaved himself off the window and walked back into his air-conditioned blockhouse with Carson’s belongings. He had a strange walk, hitching his right leg along as if it were in danger of becoming dislocated. A few moments later, he raised the bar and waved them through. Carson could see him through the thick blue-tinted glass, fanning out the contents of his wallet.

“There are no secrets here, I’m afraid, except the ones you keep inside your head,” Singer said with a smile, easing the Hummer forward. “And watch out for those, as well.”

“Why is all this necessary?” asked Carson.

Singer shrugged. “The price of working in a high-security environment. Industrial espionage, scurrilous publicity, and so forth. It’s what you’ve been used to at GeneDyne Edison, really, just magnified tenfold.”

Singer pulled into the motor pool and killed the engine. As Carson stepped out, a blast of desert air rolled over him and he inhaled deeply. It felt wonderful. Looking up, he could see the bulk of Mount Dragon rising a quarter mile beyond the compound. A newly graded gravel road switchbacked up its side, ending at the microwave towers.

“First,” said Singer, “the grand tour. Then we’ll head back to my office for a cold drink and a chat.” He moved forward.

“This project ...?” Carson began.

Singer stopped, turned.

“Scopes wasn’t exaggerating?” Carson asked. “It’s really that important?”

Singer squinted, looked off into the empty desert. “Beyond your wildest dreams,” he said.

Percival Lecture Hall at Harvard University was filled to capacity. Two hundred students sat in the descending rows of chairs, some bent over notebooks, others looking attentively forward. Dr. Charles Levine paced before the class, a small wiry figure with a fringe of hair surrounding his prematurely balding dome. There were chalk marks on his sleeves and his brogues still had salt stains from the previous winter. Nothing in his appearance, however, reduced the intensity that radiated from his quick movements and expression. As he lectured, he gestured with a stub of chalk at complex biochemical formulae and nucleotide sequences scattered across the huge sliding chalkboards, indecipherable as cuneiform.

In the rear of the hall sat a small group of people armed with microcassette recorders and handheld video cameras. They were not dressed like students, and press cards were prominently displayed on lapels and belts. But media presence was routine; lectures by Levine, professor of genetics and head of the Foundation for Genetic Policy, often became controversial without notice. And Genetic Policy, the foundation’s journal, had made sure this lecture was given plenty of advance notice.

Levine stopped his pacing and moved to the podium. “That wraps up our discussion on Tuitt’s constant, as it applies to disease mortality in western Europe,” he said. “But I have more to discuss with you today.” He cleared this throat.

“May I have the screen, please?” The lights dimmed and a white rectangle descended from the ceiling, obscuring the chalkboards.

“In sixty seconds, I am going to display a photograph on this screen,” Levine said. “I am not authorized to show you this photograph. In fact, by doing so, I’ll be technically guilty of breaking several laws under the Official Secrets Act. By staying, you’ll be doing the same. I’m used to this kind of thing. If you’ve ever read Genetic Policy, you’ll know what I mean. This is information that must be made public, no matter what the cost. But it goes beyond the scope of today’s lecture, and I can’t ask you to stay. Anyone who wishes to go may do so now.”

In the dimly lit room, there were whispers, the turning of notebook pages. But nobody stood up.

Levine looked around, pleased. Then he nodded to the projectionist. A black-and-white image filled the screen.

Levine looked up at the image, the top of his head shining in the light of the projector like a monk’s tonsure. Then he turned to face his audience.

“This is a picture taken on July 1, 1985, by the image-gathering satellite TB-17 from a sun-synchronous orbit of about one hundred and seventy miles,” he began. “Technically, it has not yet been declassified. But it deserves to be.” He smiled. Nervous laughter briefly filled the hall.

“You’re looking at the town of Novo-Druzhina, in western Siberia. As you can see by the length of the shadows, this was taken in the early morning, the preferred time for image analysis. Note the position of the two parked cars, here, and the ripening fields of wheat.”

A new slide appeared.

“Thanks to the surveillance technique of comparative coverage, this slide shows the exact same location three months later. Notice anything strange?”

There was a silence.

“The cars are parked in exactly the same spot. And the field of grain is apparently very ripe, ready to be harvested.”

Another slide appeared.

“Here’s the same place in April of the following year. Note the two cars are still there. The field has obviously gone fallow, the grain unharvested. It was images like these that suddenly made this area very interesting to certain photo-grammetrists in the CIA.”

He paused, looking out over the classroom.

“The United States military learned that all of Restricted Area Fourteen—a half-dozen towns, in an eighty-square-mile area surrounding Novo-Druzhina—were affected in a similar way. All human activity had ceased. So they took a closer look.”

Another slide appeared.

“This is a magnification of the first slide, digitally enhanced, glint-suppressed, and compensated for spectral drift. If you look closely along the dirt street in front of the church, you will see a blurry image resembling a log. That is a human corpse, as any Pentagon photo-jock could tell you. Now here is the same scene, six months later.”

Everything appeared to be the same, except that the log now looked white.

“The corpse is now skeletonized. When the military examined large numbers of these enhanced images, they found countless such skeletons lying unburied in the streets and the fields. At first, they were mystified. Theories of mass insanity, another Jonestown, were advanced. Because—”

A new slide appeared.

“—as you can see, everything else is still alive. Horses are still grazing in the fields. And there in the upper left-hand corner is a pack of dogs, apparently feral. This next slide shows cattle. The only dead things are human beings. Yet whatever it was that killed them was so dangerous, so instantaneous, or so widespread, that they remain where they fell, unburied.”

He paused.

“The question is, what was it?”

The hall was silent.

“Lowell Cafeteria cooking?” someone ventured.

Levine joined in the general laughter. Then he nodded, and another aerial slide appeared, showing an extensive complex, gutted and ruined.

“Would that it were, my friend. In time, the CIA learned that the cause was a pathogen of some sort, created in the laboratory pictured here. You can see from the craters that the site has been bombed.

“Exact details were not known outside Russia until earlier this week, when a disenchanted Russian colonel defected to Switzerland, bringing with him a fat parcel of Soviet Army files. The same contact who provided me with these images alerted me to this colonel’s presence in Switzerland. I was the first to examine his files. The events I am about to relate to you have never before been made public.

“What you must understand first is that this was a primitive experiment. There was little thought to political, economic, even military use. Remember, ten years ago the Russians were lagging behind in genetic research and struggling to catch up. In the secret facility outside Novo-Druzhina, they were experimenting with viral engineering. They were using a common virus, herpes simplex Ia+, the virus that produces cold sores. It’s a relatively simple virus, well understood, easy to work with. They began meddling with its genetic makeup, inserting human genes into its viral DNA.

“We still don’t know quite how they did it. But suddenly they had a horrific new pathogen on their hands, a scourge they were ill equipped to deal with. All they knew at the time was that it seemed unusually long-lived, and that it infected through aerosol contact.

“On May 23, 1985, there was a small safety breach at the Soviet laboratory. Apparently, a worker inside the transfection lab fell, damaging his biocontainment suit. As you know from Chernobyl, Soviet safety standards can be execrable. The worker told nobody about the incident, and later went home to his family in the worker’s complex.

“For three weeks the virus incubated in his peritoneum, duplicating and spreading. On June 14, this worker felt ill and went to bed with a high fever. Within a few hours, he was complaining of a strange pressure in his gut. He passed a large amount of foul-smelling gas. Growing nervous, his wife sent for the doctor.

“Before the doctor could arrive, however, the man had—you will excuse the graphic description—voided most of his intestines out through his anus. They had suppurated inside his body, becoming pastelike. He had literally defecated his insides out. Needless to say, by the time the doctor arrived, the man was dead.”

Levine paused again, looking around the room as if for raised hands. There were none.

“Since this incident has remained a secret from the scientific community, the virus has no official name, it is known only as Strain 232. We now know that a person exposed to it becomes contagious four days after exposure, although it takes several weeks for symptoms to appear. The mortality rate of Strain 232 is close to a hundred percent. By the time the worker had died, he had exposed dozens, if not hundreds, of people. We could call him vector zero. Within seventy-two hours of his death, dozens of people were complaining of the same gastrointestinal pressure, and soon suffered the same gruesome fate.

“The only thing that prevented a worldwide pandemic was the location of the outbreak. In 1985, movement in and out of Restricted Area Fourteen was highly controlled. Nevertheless, as word spread, a general panic ensued. People in the area began loading their belongings into cars, trucks, even horsecarts. Many tried fleeing on bicycle, or even on foot, abandoning everything in their desperation to get away.

“From the papers the colonel brought with him out of Russia, we can piece together the response of the Soviet Army. A special team in biohazard suits set up a series of roadblocks, preventing anyone from leaving the affected area. This was relatively easy, since Area Fourteen was already fenced and checkpointed. As the epidemic roared through the neighboring villages, whole families died in the streets, in the fields, in the market squares. By the time a person felt the first alarming symptoms, a painful death was only three hours away. The panic was so great that at the checkpoints, the soldiers were ordered to shoot and kill anyone—anyone—as soon as they came within range. Old men, children, pregnant women were gunned down. Air-dropped antipersonnel mines were scattered in wide swaths across woods and fields. What these measures didn’t catch, the razor wire and tank traps did.

“Then the laboratory was carpet-bombed. Not, of course, to destroy the virus—bombs would have no effect on it. But rather to obliterate the traces, to hide what really happened from the West.

“Within eight weeks, every human being within the quarantined area was dead. The villages were deserted, the pigs and dogs gorging on corpses, the cows wandering unmilked, a horrible stench hanging over the deserted buildings.”

Levine took a sip of water, then resumed.

“This is a shocking story, the biological equivalent of a nuclear holocaust. But I’m afraid the last chapter has yet to be written. Towns that have been irradiated with atomic bombs can be shunned. But the legacy of Novo-Druzhina is harder to avoid. Viruses are opportunistic, and they don’t like to stay put. Although all the human hosts are dead, there is a possibility that Strain 232 lives on somewhere in this devastated area. Viruses sometimes find secondary reservoirs where they wait, patiently, for the next opportunity to infect. Strain 232 might be extinct. Or a viable pocket of it may still be there. Tomorrow, some hapless rabbit with muddy paws might wriggle through a hole in the perimeter fence. A farmer might shoot that rabbit and take it to market. And then the world as we know it could very well end.”

He paused.

“And that,” he shouted suddenly, “is the promise of genetic engineering!”

He stopped, letting the silence grow in the hall. Finally he dabbed his brow and spoke again, more quietly. “We won’t be needing the projector anymore.”

The projector image disappeared, leaving the hall in darkness.

“My friends,” Levine continued, “we have reached a critical turning point in our stewardship of this planet, and we’re so blind we can’t even see it. We’ve walked the earth for five thousand centuries. But in the last fifty years, we’ve learned enough to really hurt ourselves. First with nuclear weapons, and now—infinitely more dangerously—with the reengineering of nature.”

He shook his head. “There is an old proverb: ‘Nature is a hanging judge.’ The Novo-Druzhina incident nearly hanged the human race. And yet, as I speak, other companies across the globe are tinkering with viruses, exchanging genetic material between viruses, bacteria, plants, and animals indiscriminately, without any thought to the ultimate consequences.

“Of course, today’s cutting-edge labs in Europe and America are a far cry from 1985 Siberia. Should that reassure us? Quite the opposite.

“The scientists in Novo-Druzhina were doing simple manipulations of a simple virus. They accidentally created a catastrophe. Today—barely a stone’s throw from this hall— much more complicated experiments are being done with infinitely more exotic, infinitely more dangerous viruses.

“Edwin Kilbourne, the virologist, once postulated a pathogen he called the Maximally Malignant Virus. The MMV would have, he theorized, the environmental stability of polio, the antigenic mutability of influenza, the unrestricted host range of rabies, the latency of herpes.

“Such an idea, almost laughable then, is deadly serious now. Such a pathogen could be, and maybe is being, created in a laboratory somewhere on this planet. It would be far more devastating than a nuclear war. Why? A nuclear war is self-limiting. But with the spread of an MMV, every infected person becomes a brand new walking bomb. And today’s transmission routes are so widespread, so quickly achieved by international travelers, it only takes a few carriers for a virus to go global.”

Levine stepped around the podium to face the audience. “Regimes come and go. Political boundaries change. Empires grow and fall. But these agents of destruction, once unleashed, last forever. I ask you: should we allow unregulated and uncontrolled experiments in genetic engineering to continue in laboratories around the world? That is the real question raised by Strain 232.”

He nodded, and the lights came back up. “There will be a full report of the Novo-Druzhina incident in the next issue of Genetic Policy,” he said, turning to gather his papers.

The spell broken, the students stood up and began collecting their things, moving in a rustling tide toward the exits. The reporters at the back of the hall had already left to file their stories.

A young man appeared at the top of the hall, pushing his way through the milling crowd. Slowly, he made his way down the central steps toward the podium.

Levine glanced up, then looked carefully left and right. “I thought you were told never to approach me in public,” he said.

The youth came forward, held Levine’s elbow, and whispered urgently in his ear. Levine stopped loading papers into his briefcase.

“Carson?” he asked. “You mean that bright cowboy fellow who was always interrupting my lectures to argue?”

The man nodded his head.

Levine fell silent, his hand on the briefcase. Then he snapped it shut.

“My God,” he said simply.

Carson looked out across the motor pool toward a sweeping cluster of white buildings which rose abruptly from the desert sands: curves, planes and domes thrusting from the ground. The stark placement of the buildings in the desert terrain, along with a total absence of landscaping, gave the laboratory a Zen-like feeling of purity and emptiness. Glassed-in walkways connected many of the buildings, forming crisscrossing patterns.

Singer led Carson along one of the covered walkways. “Brent is a great believer in architecture as a means of inspiring the human spirit,” he said. “I’ll never forget when that architect, what’s-his-name—Guareschi—came from New York to ‘experience’ the site.”

Singer chuckled softly.

“He arrived in tasseled loafers and a suit, with this silly straw hat. But the guy was game, I’ll give him that. He actually camped out for four days before he got heatstroke and hightailed it back to Manhattan.”

“It’s beautiful,” Carson said.

“It is. Despite his bad experience, the man did manage to capture the spareness of the desert. He insisted there be no landscaping. For one thing, we didn’t have the water. But he also wanted the complex to look as if it was part of the desert, and not imposed on it. Obviously, he never forgot the heat. I think that’s why everything’s white: the machine shop, the storage barracks—even the power plant.” He nodded toward a long building with gracefully curving rooflines.

“That’s the power plant?” Carson asked in disbelief. “It looks more like an art museum. This place must have cost a fortune.”

“Several fortunes,” Singer said. “But back in ’85, when construction began, money wasn’t much of an issue.” He ushered Carson toward the residency compound, a series of low curvilinear structures gathered together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. “We’d obtained a nine-hundred-million-dollar contract through DATRADA.”

“Who?”

“Defense Advanced Technology, Research and Development Administration.”

“Never heard of it,” said Carson.

“It was a secret Defense Department agency. Disbanded after the Reagan years. We all had to sign a lot of formal loyalty documents and the like. Secret clearance, top-secret clearance, you name it. Then they investigated us—boy, did they investigate. I got calls from ex-girlfriends twenty years removed: ‘A bunch of suits were just here asking a lot of questions about you. What the hell did you do now, Singer?’ ” He laughed.

“So you’ve been here from the beginning,” Carson said.

“That’s right. Only the scientists have six-month tours. I guess they figure I don’t do enough real work to get burnt out.” He laughed. “I’m the old-timer here, me and Nye. And a few others, old Pavel and the fellow you just met, Mike Marr. Anyway, it’s been much nicer since we went civilian. The military boys were a pain in the posterior.”

“How did the changeover happen?” Carson asked.

Singer steered him through the smoked-glass door of a structure on the far side of the residency compound. A river of air-conditioning washed over them as the door hissed shut. Carson found himself in a vestibule, with slate floors, white walls, and taupe furniture. Singer led him toward another door.

“At first, we did strictly defense research. That’s how we got these land parcels in the Missile Range. Our job was to look for vaccines, countermeasures and antitoxins to presumed Soviet biological weapons. When the Soviet Union fell apart, so did our brief. We lost the contract in 1990. We almost lost the lab, too, but Scopes did some quick lobbying behind closed doors. God knows how he did it, but we were able to get a thirty-year lease under the Defense Industry Conversion Act.”

Singer opened a door into a long laboratory. A series of black tables gleamed under fluorescent lights. Bunsen burners, Erlenmeyer flasks, glass tubing, Stereozoom microscopes and various other low-tech equipment sat in neat, spotless rows.

Carson had never seen a lab look so clean. “Is this the low-level facility?” he asked incredulously.

“Nope,” Singer said. “Most of the real work is done on the inside, our next stop. This is just eye candy for congressmen and military brass. They expect to see an upscale version of their old university chem lab, and we give it to them.”

They passed into another, much smaller room. A large, gleaming instrument sat in its center. Carson recognized it instantly.

“The world’s best microtome: the Scientific Precision ‘Ultra-Shave,’ ” Singer said. “That’s what we call it, anyway. It’s all computer controlled. A diamond blade that cuts a human hair into twenty-five hundred sections. Widthwise. This one’s just for show, of course. We’ve got two identical units operating on the inside.”

They walked back into the baking heat. Singer licked a finger and held it up. “Wind’s from the southeast,” he said. “As always. That’s why they picked this place—always blowing from the southeast. The first town downwind of us is Claunch, New Mexico, population twenty-two. One hundred forty miles away. The Trinity Site, where they blew up the first A-bomb, is only thirty miles northwest of here. Good place to hide an atomic explosion. You couldn’t find a more isolated place in the lower forty-eight.”

“We called that wind the Mexican Zephyr,” Carson said. “When I was a kid, I hated to go out in that wind more than anything. My dad used to say it caused more trouble than a rat-tailed horse tied short in fly time.”

Singer turned. “Guy, I have no idea what you just said.”

“A rat-tailed horse is a horse with a short tail. If you tie him short and the flies start tormenting him, he’ll go crazy, tear down your fence and take off.”

“I see,” Singer said without conviction. He pointed over Carson’s shoulder. “Over there are the recreational facilities—gymnasium, tennis courts, horse corral. I have a strong aversion to physical activity, so I’ll let you explore those on your own.” He patted his paunch affectionately and laughed. “And that awful-looking building is the air incinerator for the Fever Tank.”

“Fever Tank?”

“Sorry,” Singer said. “I mean the Biosafety Level-5 laboratory, where the really high-risk organisms are worked on. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Biosafety classification system. Level-1 is the safety standard for working with the least infectious, least dangerous microbes. Level-4 is for the most dangerous. There are two Level-4 laboratories in the country: the CDC has one in Atlanta, and the Army’s got one at Fort Detrick. These Level-4 laboratories are designed to handle the most dangerous viruses and bacteria that exist in nature.”

“But what’s this Level-5? I’ve never heard of it.”

Singer grinned. “Brent’s pride and joy. Mount Dragon has the only Level-5 laboratory in the world. It was designed for handling viruses and bacteria more dangerous than anything naturally existing in nature. In other words, microbes that have been genetically engineered. Somebody christened it the Fever Tank years ago, and the name stuck. Anyway, all the air from the Level-5 facility is circulated through the incinerator and heated to one thousand degrees Celsius before being cooled and returned. Sterilized completely.”

The alien-looking air incinerator was the only structure Carson had seen at Mount Dragon that was not pure white. “So you’re working with an airborne pathogen?”

“Clever. Yes we are, and a very nasty one at that. I enjoyed it much more when we were working on PurBlood. That’s our artificial blood product.”

Carson glanced over in the direction of the corrals. He could see a barn, stalls, several turnouts, and a large fenced pasture beyond the perimeter fence.

“Can you ride outside the facility?” he asked.

“Of course. You just have to log out and log in.” Singer glanced around and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Christ, it’s hot. I just never get used to it. Let’s go inside.”

“Inside” meant the inner perimeter, a large chain-linked area at the heart of Mount Dragon. Carson could see only one break in the inner fence, a small gatehouse directly in front of them. Singer led the way through the gate and into a large building on the far side. The doors opened to a cool foyer. Through an open door, Carson could see a row of computer terminals on long white tables. Two workers, ID cards hung around their necks, wearing jeans under white lab coats, were busily typing at terminals. Carson realized with surprise that, except for guards, these were the first workers he’d seen on the site.

“This is the operations building,” Singer said, gesturing into the mostly empty room. “Administration, data processing, you name it. Our staff isn’t large. There were never more than thirty scientists here at one time, even in our military days. Now the number is half that, all focused on the project.”

“That’s pretty small,” Carson said.

Singer shrugged. “The human-wave approach just doesn’t work in genetic engineering.”

He gestured Carson out of the foyer into a large atrium paved in black granite and roofed with heavily tinted glass. The strong desert sun, attenuated to a pale light, fell on a small grouping of palm trees in the center. Three corridors branched out from the atrium. “Those lead to the transfection labs and the DNA-sequencing facility,” he said. “You won’t be spending much time there, but you can get somebody to take you through at your leisure, if you like. Our next stop’s out there.” He pointed at a window. Through it, Carson could make out a low, rhombus-like structure poking up from the desert.

“Level-5,” Singer said unenthusiastically. “The Fever Tank.”

“Looks pretty small,” Carson said.

“Believe me, it feels small. But what you see is just the housing for the HEPA filters. The real lab’s beneath that, underground. Added protection in case of an earthquake, fire, explosion.” He hesitated. “Guess we might as well go in.”

A slow descent in a cramped elevator deposited them in a long, white-tiled corridor lit by orange lights. Video cameras hung from the ceiling, tracking their progress. At the end of the corridor, Singer stopped at a gray metal door, its edges curved to fit the doorframe and sealed with thick black rubber.

To the right was a small mechanical box. Bending over, Singer spoke his name into the device. A green light came on above the door, and a tone sounded.

“Voice recognition,” said Singer, opening the door. “It’s not as good as hand-geometry readers or retinal scanners, but those don’t work through biosuits. And this one, at least, can’t be fooled by a tape recorder. You’ll be coded this afternoon, as part of your entrance interview.”

They moved into a large room, sparsely decorated with modern furniture. Along one wall was a series of metal lockers. On the far side stood another steel door, polished to a high gloss, marked with a bright yellow-and-red symbol. EXTREME BIOHAZARD, read a legend above the frame.

“This is the ready room,” Singer said. “The bluesuits are in those lockers.”

He moved toward one of the lockers, then paused. Suddenly he turned toward Carson. “Tell you what. Why don’t I get someone who really knows the place to show you around?”

He pressed a button on the locker. There was a hiss as the metal door slid up, revealing a bulky blue rubber suit, carefully packed into a molded container that resembled a small coffin.

“You’ve never entered a BSL-4 facility, right?” Singer asked. “Then listen closely. Level-5 is a lot like Level-4, only more so. Most people wear scrub under the full-body suits for comfort, but it’s not a requirement. If you wear your street clothes, all pens, pencils, watches, knives must come out of the pockets. Anything that could puncture the suit.” Carson quickly turned his pockets inside out.

“No long fingernails?” Singer asked.

Carson looked at his hands. “Nope.”

“That’s good. I’m always worrying mine down to the quick, so I don’t have a problem.” He laughed. “You’ll find a pair of rubber gloves in that lower left compartment. No rings, right? Good. You’ll have to take off your boots and put on those slippers. And no long toenails. You’ll find toenail clippers in one of the locker compartments, if you need them.”

Carson removed his boots.

“Now step into the suit, right leg first, then left leg, and draw it up. But not all the way. Leave the visor open for now so we can talk more easily.”

Carson fumbled with the bulky suit, drawing it over his clothes with difficulty.

“This thing weighs a ton,” he said.

“It’s fully pressurized. See that metal valve at your waist? You’ll be on oxygen the entire time you’re inside. You’ll be shown how to move from station to station. But the suit itself contains ten minutes’ worth of air, in case of emergencies.” He walked toward an intercom unit, pressed a series of buttons. “Rosalind?” he asked.

There was a short pause. “What?” came the buzzing response.

“Could I trouble you to give our new scientist, Guy Carson, a tour of BSL-5?”

There was a longer silence.

“I’m in the middle of something,” the voice came back.

“It’ll just take a few minutes.”

“Aw, for Chrissakes.” The voice cut off immediately.

Singer turned to Carson. “That’s Rosalind Brandon-Smith. She’s a little eccentric, I guess you could say.” He leaned toward Carson’s open visor conspiratorially. “Actually, she’s extremely rude, but don’t pay any attention. She was instrumental in developing our artificial blood. Now she’s wrapping up her part of the new project. She did a lot of work with Frank Burt, and they were pretty close, so she may not be too friendly to his replacement. You’ll be meeting her inside, no reason for her to go through decontam twice.”

“Who’s Frank Burt?” Carson asked.

“He was a true scientist. And a fine human being. But he found conditions here a little too stressful. Had something of a breakdown recently. It’s not uncommon, you know. About a quarter of the people who come to Mount Dragon can’t finish their tour.”

“I didn’t know I was replacing anyone,” Carson frowned.

“You are. I’ll tell you about it later. You’ll be filling some large shoes.” He stepped back. “OK, finish up the zippers. Make sure you close and secure all three. We’ve got a buddy system here. After you suit up, someone else has to check over everything.”

He did a careful inspection of the bluesuit, then showed Carson how to use the visor intercom. “Unless you’re standing next to somebody, it’s very hard to hear anything. Press this button on your forearm to speak over the intercom.”

He waved toward the door marked EXTREME BIOHAZARD. “On the far side of the air lock is a chemical shower. Once you’re inside, it starts automatically. Get used to it, there’ll be a much longer one coming out. When the inner door opens, go on through. Be especially careful until you’re used to the suit. Rosalind will be waiting for you on the far side. I hope.”

“Thanks,” said Carson, raising his voice to make sure it carried through the thick rubber of the suit.

“No problem,” came the muffled response. “Sorry I won’t be going in with you. It’s just ...” He hesitated. “Nobody goes into the Fever Tank unless they have to. You’ll see why.”

As the door hissed shut behind him, Carson walked forward onto a metal grating. There was a sudden rumble, and a yellow chemical solution spurted from shower heads in the ceiling, walls, and floor. Carson could feel the solution drumming loudly on his suit. In a minute it was over; the next door opened, and he stepped into a small antechamber. A motor began to rumble, and he could feel the pressure of a powerful air machine blowing at him from all directions. Inside his suit, the drying mechanism felt like a strange, distant wind: He was unable to tell whether the air was hot or cold. Then the inner door hissed open, and Carson found himself facing a short woman who was staring at him impatiently through the clear faceplate of her visor. Even compensating for the bulkiness of the suit, Carson estimated her weight at 250 pounds.

“Follow me,” a voice inside his helmet said brusquely, and the woman turned away, moving down a tiled corridor so narrow that her shoulders brushed against both walls. The walls were smooth and slick, with no corners or projecting apparatus that might tear a protective suit. Everything—floors, wall tiles, ceiling—was painted a brilliant white.

Carson pressed the left button on his forearm, activating the intercom. “I’m Guy Carson,” he said.

“Glad to hear it,” came the reply. “Now, pay attention. See those air hoses overhead?”

Carson looked up. A number of blue hoses dangled from the ceiling, metal valves affixed to their ends.

“Grab one and plug it into your suit valve. Careful. Turn it to the left to lock it in. When you move from one station to the next, you’ll have to detach it and plug into another hose. Your suit has a limited supply of air, so don’t dawdle between hookups.”

Carson followed her instructions, felt the snap as the valve seated itself, and heard the reassuring hiss of airflow. Inside the suit, he felt a strange sense of detachment from the world. His movements seemed slow, clumsy. Because of the multiple pairs of gloves, he could barely feel the air hose as he guided it into the attachment.

“Keep in mind that this place is like a submarine,” came the voice of Brandon-Smith. “Small, cramped, and dangerous. Everything and everyone has its place.”

“I see,” said Carson.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Good, because sloppiness is death down here in the Fever Tank. And not just for you. Got that?”

“Yes,” Carson repeated. Bitch.

They continued down the narrow hall. As he followed Brandon-Smith, trying to acclimate himself to the pressure suit, Carson thought he could hear a strange noise in the background: a faint drumming, almost more sensation than sound. He decided it must be the Fever Tank’s generator.

Brandon-Smith’s great bulk eased sideways through a narrow hatch. In the lab beyond, suited figures were working in front of large Plexiglas-enclosed tables, their hands stretched through rubber holes bored into the cases. They were swabbing petri dishes. The light was painfully bright, throwing every object in the lab into sharp relief. Small waste receptacles with biohazard labels and flash-incineration attachments stood beside each worktable. More ceiling-mounted video cameras-swiveled, monitoring the scientists.

“Everybody,” Brandon-Smith’s voice sounded in the intercom. “This is Guy Carson. Burt’s replacement.”

Visors angled upward as people turned to get a look at him, and a chorus of greetings crackled in Carson’s helmet.

“This is production,” she said flatly. It wasn’t a statement that invited questions, and Carson didn’t ask any.

Brandon-Smith led Carson through a warren of other labs, narrow corridors, and air locks, all starkly bathed in the same brilliant light. She’s right, Carson thought, looking around. The place is like a submarine. All available floor space was packed with fabulously expensive equipment: transmission and scanning electron microscopes, autoclaves, incubators, mass spectrometers, even a small cyclotron, all reengineered to allow the scientists to operate them through the bulky bluesuits. The ceilings were low, heavily veined with piping, and painted white like everything else in the Fever Tank. Every ten yards Brandon-Smith halted to hook up to a new air hose, then waited for Carson to do the same. The going was excruciatingly slow.

“My God,” Carson said. “These safety measures are unbelievable. What have you got in here, anyway?”

“You name it,” came the response. “Bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, Marburg virus, Hantavirus, Dengue, Ebola, anthrax. Not to mention a few Soviet biological agents. All currently on ice, of course.”

The cramped spaces, the bulky suit, the stuffy air, all had a disorienting effect on Carson. He found himself gulping in oxygen, fighting down an urge to unzip the suit, give himself breathing room.

At last they stopped in a small circular hub from which several narrow corridors branched out like the spokes of a wheel. “What’s that?” Carson pointed to a huge manifold over their heads.

“The air uptake,” Brandon-Smith said, attaching another new hose to her suit. “This is the center of the Fever Tank. The entire facility has negative airflow controls. The air pressure decreases the further in you go. Everything flows to this point, then it’s taken up to the incinerator and recirculated.” She gestured at one of the corridors. “Your lab’s down there. You’ll see it soon enough. I don’t have time to show you everything.”

“And down there?” Carson pointed to a narrow tube at their feet containing a shiny metal ladder.

“There are three levels beneath us. Backup labs, security substation, CRYLOX freezers, generators, the control center.”

She stepped a few feet down one of the hallways, stopping in front of another door.

“Carson?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Last stop. The Zoo. Keep the hell away from the cages. Don’t let them grab you. If they rip a piece off your suit, you’ll never see the light of day. You’ll be locked up in here and left to die.”

“The Zoo—?” Carson began, but Brandon-Smith was already opening the door. Suddenly the drumming was louder, and Carson realized it was not a generator, after all. Muffled screams and hoots filtered through his pressure suit. Turning a corner, Carson saw that one wall of the room’s interior was lined floor to ceiling with cages. Black beady eyes peered out from between wire mesh. The new arrivals in the room caused the noise level to increase dramatically. Many of the prisoners were now pounding on the floors of the cages with their feet and hands,

“Chimpanzees?” asked Carson.

“Good for you.”

A small bluesuited figure at the far end of the row of cages turned toward them.

“Carson, this is Bob Fillson. He takes care of the animals.”

Fillson nodded curtly. Carson could see a heavy brow, bulbous nose, and- wet pendulous lip behind the faceplate. The rest was in shadow. The man turned and went back to work.

“Why so many?” Carson asked.

She stopped and looked at him. “They’re the only animal with the same immunological system as a human being. You should know that, Carson.”

“Of course, but why exactly—”

But Brandon-Smith was peering intently into one of the cages.

“Aw, for Chrissakes,” she said.

Carson came over, keeping a respectful distance from the countless fingers poking through the mesh. A chimpanzee was lying on its side, trembling, oblivious of the commotion surrounding it. There seemed to be something wrong with its facial features. Then Carson realized that the creature’s eyeballs seemed abnormally enlarged. Looking closer, he could see that they were actually bulging from its head, the blood vessels rupturing and hemorrhaging in the sclera. The animal suddenly jerked, opened its hairy jaws, and screamed.

“Bob,” Carson could hear Brandon-Smith saying through the intercom, “the last of Burt’s chimps is about to go.”

With a notable lack of haste, Fillson came shuffling over. He was a very small man, barely five feet, and he moved with a slow deliberation that reminded Carson of a diver under water.

He turned to Carson, and spoke with a hoarse voice. “You’ll have to go. You too, Rosalind. Can’t open a cage when others are in the room.”

Carson watched in horror as one of the eyeballs suddenly erupted from its socket, followed by a gush of bloody fluid. The chimp thrashed about silently, teeth snapping, arms flailing.

“What the hell?” Carson began, frozen in horror.

“Good-bye,” Fillson said firmly, as he reached into a cabinet behind him.

“Bye, Bob,” said Brandon-Smith. Carson noticed a distinct change of tone in her voice when she spoke to the animal handler.

The last thing Carson saw as they sealed the door was the chimp, rigid with pain, pawing desperately at its ruined face, as Fillson sprayed something from an aerosol can into the cage.

Brandon-Smith made her ponderous way down another corridor, not speaking.

“Are you going to tell me what was wrong with that chimpanzee?” Carson said at last.

“I thought it was obvious,” she snapped. “Cerebral edema.”

“Caused by what?”

The woman turned to look at him. She seemed surprised. “You really don’t know, Carson?”

“No, I don’t. And from now on, the name is Guy. Or Dr. Carson, if you prefer. I don’t appreciate being called by my last name.”

There was a silence. “Fine, Guy,” she replied. “Those chimps are all X-FLU positive. The one you saw is in the tertiary stage of the disease. The virus stimulates massive overproduction of cerebrospinal fluid. In time, the pressure herniates the brain down through the foramen magnum. That’s when the lucky ones die. A few hang on until the eyeballs are forced from their sockets.”

“X-FLU?” Carson asked. He could feel the sweat trickling down his forehead and under his arms, dampening the inside of his suit.

This time Brandon-Smith stopped dead. There was a buzz of static and he heard her voice: “Singer, can you enlighten me as to why this joker doesn’t know about X-FLU?”

Singer’s voice came back. “I haven’t briefed him yet on the project. That comes next.”

“Mr. Ass-backwards, as usual,” she said, then turned to Carson. “Let’s go, Guy, the tour’s over.”

She left Carson at the exit air lock. He stepped through the access chamber into another chemical shower, waiting the required seven minutes as the high-pressure solution doused his suit. A few minutes later he was back in the ready room. He was vaguely annoyed to see Singer, cool and relaxed, doing the crossword of the local newspaper.

“Enjoy your tour?” Singer asked, looking up from the paper.

“No,” said Carson, breathing deeply, trying to shake the oppressive feeling of the Fever Tank. “That Brandon-Smith is meaner than a sidewinder in a hot skillet.”

Singer burst out laughing and shook his bald head. “A colorful way of putting it. She’s the most brilliant scientist we’ve got at present. If we pull this project off, you know, we’re all going to become rich. Yourself included. That’s worth putting up with a Rosalind Brandon-Smith, don’t you think? She’s really just a frightened, insecure little girl underneath that mountain of adipose tissue.”

He helped Carson out of his suit and showed him how to pack it back inside the locker.

“I think the time has come for me to hear about this mysterious project,” Carson said, closing the locker.

“Absolutely. Shall we head back to my office for a cold drink?”

Carson nodded. “You know, there was a chimpanzee back there with its—”

Singer held up a hand. “I know what you saw.”

“So what the hell was it?”

Singer paused. “Influenza.”

“What?” Carson said. “The flu?”

Singer nodded.

“I don’t know of any flu that pops your eyeballs out of your skull.”

“Well,” Singer said, “this is a very special kind of flu.” Gripping Carson’s elbow, he led him through the outer corridors of the maximum-security lab and back up into the welcoming desert sunlight.

At precisely two minutes to three in the afternoon, Charles Levine opened his door and ushered a young woman, clad in jeans and sweatshirt, back into his outer office.

“Thank you, Ms. Fields,” he said, smiling. “We’ll let you know if anything opens up for next term.”

As the student turned to leave, Levine checked his watch. “That’s it, right, Ray?” he said, turning to his secretary.

With an effort, Ray shifted his eyes from Ms. Fields’s departing ass to the open appointment book on his desk. He smoothed his hand over his immaculate Buddy Holly haircut, his fingers dropping to scratch the heavily muscled chest beneath the sleeveless red T-shirt. “That’s it, Dr. Levine,” he said.

“Any messages? Sheriff’s deputies bearing summonses? Offers of marriage?”

Ray grinned and waited until the outer door closed before answering. “Borucki called twice. Apparently that pharmaceutical company in Little Rock was unimpressed with last month’s article. They’re suing for libel.”

“How much?”

Ray shrugged. “A million.”

“Tell our legal friends to take the usual steps.” Levine turned away. “No interruptions, Ray.”

“Right.”

Levine closed the door.

With his notoriety as Foundation for Genetic Policy spokesman growing, Levine found it increasingly difficult to maintain a routine existence as professor of theoretical genetics. The nature of the foundation made it a lightning rod for a certain kind of student: lonely, idealistic, in need of a burning cause. It also made him and his office the target of a great deal of anger from business concerns.

When his former secretary quit after receiving a number of threatening phone calls, Levine took two precautionary steps. He had a new lock installed on his office door, and he hired Ray. Ray’s office skills left a lot to be desired. But as an ex-Navy SEAL discharged because of a heart murmur, he was very good at keeping things peaceful. Ray seemed to spend most of his non working hours chasing women, but at the office he was serenely indifferent to all forms of intimidation, and for that alone Levine found him indispensable.

The heavy bolt of the lock slid home with reassuring finality. Levine tugged at the doorknob, then, satisfied, moved quickly between piles of term papers, scientific journals, and back issues of Genetic Policy to his desk. The affable, easygoing air he had maintained during his consultation hours quickly dissipated. Clearing the center of the desk with a sweep of his hand, he tugged his computer keyboard into typing range. Then he dug into a pocket of his briefcase and pulled out a black object the size of a cigarette box. A slender length of gray cable dangled from one end. Leaning forward in his chair, Levine disconnected his telephone, plugged the phone line into one end of the Black box, and inserted the slender gray cable into the back panel of his laptop computer.

Even before his single-minded crusade to regulate genetic engineering made his name a foul word in a dozen top labs around the world, Levine had learned hard lessons about security. The black box was a dedicated cryptographic device for scrambling computer transmissions over telephone lines. Using proprietary public-key algorithms far more sophisticated than the DES standard, it was supposedly uncrackable even by government supercomputers. Mere possession of such devices was of questionable legality. But Levine had been an active member of the student antiwar underground before graduating from U.C. Irvine in 1971. He was no stranger to using unorthodox or even illegal methods to achieve his ends.

Levine switched on his PC, drumming his fingers on the desktop while the machine booted itself into consciousness. Typing rapidly, he brought up the communications program that would dial out over the phone lines to another computer, and another user. A very special user.

He waited while the call was rerouted, then rerouted again across the telephone long lines, threading a complex, untraceable path. At last, the call was answered by the hiss of another modem. There was a shrill squealing noise as the two computers negotiated; then Levine’s screen dissolved into a now-familiar image: a figure, dressed in mime’s costume, balancing the earth on one fingertip. Almost immediately the log-in device disappeared, and words appeared on Levine’s screen: disembodied, as if typed by a ghost.

Professor! What up?

I need a line into GeneDyne’s net, Levine typed.

The response was immediate. Simple enough. What are we looking for today? Employee phone numbers? P&L sheets? The latest scores of the mailroom deathmatchers?

I need a private channel into the Mount Dragon facility, Levine typed.

The next response was a little slower in coming. Whoa! _Whoa!_ Whose pair of balls have you strapped on today, monsieur le professor?

Can’t do it? Levine prodded.

Did I say I couldn’t do it? Remember to whom you’re speaking, varlet! You won’t find the word ‘can’t’ in my spell-checker. I’m not worried about me: I’m worried about _you_, my man. I hear that this guy Scopes is bad juju. He’d love to catch you copping a feel beneath his skirts. Are you sure you’re ready to jack into prime time, professor?

You’re worried about me? Levine typed. That’s hard to believe.

Why, professor. Your callousness wounds me.

Do you want money this time? Is that it?

Money? Now I’m insulted. I demand satisfaction. Meet me at high noon in front of the Cyberspace Saloon.

Mime, this is serious.

I’m always serious. Of course I can handle your little problem. Besides, I’ve heard rumors of some truly girthy program Scopes has been working on. Something very hip, very interesting. But he’s a jealous guy, supposedly, keeps a chastity belt around it. Perhaps while I’m taking care of business, I can pay a little visit to his private server. That’s just the kind of deflowering I enjoy most.

What you do on your off time is your own affair, Levine typed irritably. Just make sure the channel is absolutely secure. Let me know when it’s in place, please.

CID.

Mime, I don’t understand. CID?

Bless me, I keep forgetting what a newbie you are. Out here in the electronic ether, we use acronyms to help keep our epistolary exchanges short and sweet. CID: ‘Consider it done.’ You long-winded academic types could take a page from our virtual book. Here’s another: TTFN. Viz, ‘ta-ta for now.’ So TTFN, Herr Professor.

The screen went blank.

John Singer’s office, which occupied the southwest corner of the administration building, was more living room than director’s suite. A kiva fireplace was built into one corner, surrounded by a sofa and two leather wing chairs. Against one wall was an antique Mexican trastero, on which sat a battered Martin guitar and an untidy stack of sheet music. A Two Gray Hills Navajo rug lay on the floor, and the walls were lined with nineteenth-century prints of the American frontier, including six Bodmer images of Mandan and Hidatsa Indians on the Upper Missouri. There was no desk—only a computer workstation and telephone.

The windows looked over the Jornada desert, where the dirt road wandered off toward infinity. Sun streamed in the tinted window and across the room, filling it with light.

Carson seated himself in one of the leather chairs while Singer moved to a small bar on the far side of the room.

“Anything to drink?” he asked. “Beer, wine, martini, juice?”

Carson glanced at his watch. It was 11:45 A.M. His stomach still felt a little queasy. “I’ll have some juice.”

Singer returned with a glass of Cranapple in one hand and a martini in the other. He settled back on the sofa and propped his feet up on the table. “I know,” he said, “drinking before noon. Very bad. But this is a special occasion.” He raised his glass. “To X-FLU.”

“X-FLU,” Carson muttered. “That’s what Brandon-Smith said killed the chimp.”

“Correct,” Singer took a sip, exhaling contentedly.

“Forgive my bluntness,” said Carson, “but I’d really like to know what this project is all about. I still can’t understand why Mr. Scopes chose me out of—what—five thousand scientists? And why did I have to drop everything, get my ass out here on five minutes’ notice?”

Singer settled back. “Let me start at the beginning. Are you familiar with an animal called a bonobo?”

“No.”

“We used to call them pygmy chimpanzees until we realized they were a completely different species. Bonobos are even closer to human beings than the more common lowland chimps. They are more intelligent, form monogamous relationships, and share ninety-nine-point-two percent of our DNA. Most importantly, they get all our diseases. Except one.”

He paused, sipped his drink.

“They don’t get the flu. All other chimps, as well as gorillas and orangs, get the flu. But not the bonobo. This fact came to Brent’s attention about ten months ago. He sent us several bonobos, and we did some genetic sequencing. Let me show you what we discovered.”

Singer opened a notebook lying on the coffee table, moving aside a malachite egg to make room. Inside, the sheets of paper were covered with strings of letters in complex ladder-like arrangements.

“The bonobo has a gene that makes it immune to influenza. Not just one or two strains, but all sixty known varieties. We’ve named it the X-FLU gene.”

Carson examined the printout. It was a short gene, going only to several hundred base pairs.

“How does the gene work?” Carson asked.

Singer smiled. “We don’t really know. It would take years to figure it out. But Brent hypothesized that if we could insert this gene into human DNA, it would render humans immune to flu, as well. The initial in vitro tests we performed bore this out.”

“Interesting,” Carson replied.

“I’ll say. Take the gene out of the bonobo, and insert it into yourself. Presto, you never get the flu again.” Singer leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Guy, how much do you know about the flu?”

Carson hesitated. He actually knew quite a bit. But Singer didn’t seem the type who’d appreciate a braggart. “Not as much as I should. People are too complacent about it, for one thing.”

Singer nodded. “That’s right. People tend to think of it as a nuisance. But it’s not a nuisance. It’s one of the worst viral diseases in the world. Even today, a million people die annually from the flu. It remains one of the top ten causes of death in the United States. During flu season, one quarter of the population falls ill. And that’s in a good year. People forget that the swine flu epidemic of 1918 killed one person out of fifty worldwide. That was the worst pandemic in recorded history, worse than the Black Death. And it happened in this century. If it happened again today, we’d be almost as helpless now as we were then.”

“Truly virulent flu mutations can kill in hours,” Carson said. “But—”

“Just one moment, Guy. That word, mutation, is key. The serious pandemics occur when the flu virus undergoes significant mutation. It’s already happened three times this century, most recently with the Hong Kong flu in 1968. We’re overdue—we’re ripe—for another pandemic right now.”

“And because the coating of the viral particle keeps mutating,” Carson said, “there’s no permanent vaccine. A flu shot is just a cocktail of three or four strains, a guess on the part of epidemiologists as to what strain might be coming along in the next six months. Correct? They could guess wrong and you’d be just as sick.”

Singer smiled. “Very good, Guy. We’re well aware of the work you did with flu viruses at MIT. That’s part of the reason we chose you.”

He finished his drink with a short hard gulp. “One thing you may not have been aware of was that the world economy loses almost one trillion dollars a year in unrealized productivity to the flu.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Here’s something else you may not know: the flu causes an estimated two hundred thousand birth defects annually. When a pregnant woman gets a fever above a hundred and four degrees, all kinds of developmental hell can break loose in the womb.”

He inhaled slowly. “Guy, we’re working on the last great medical advancement of the twentieth century. And now you’re a part of it. You see, with the X-FLU gene inserted into his body, a human being will be immune to all strains of the flu. Forever. What’s more, his children will inherit the immunity.”

Carson slowly put down his drink and looked at Singer.

“Jesus,” he said. “You mean, a gene therapy aimed at reproductive cells?”

“That’s right. We’re going to alter the germ cell line of the human race permanently. And you, Guy, are central to this effort.”

“But my work with influenza was just preliminary,” Carson said. “My main focus was elsewhere.”

“I know,” Singer replied. “Bear with me a moment longer. Our major obstacle has been getting the X-FLU gene into human DNA. It has to be done, of course, using a virus.”

Carson nodded. He knew that viruses worked by inserting their own DNA into a host’s DNA. That made viruses the ideal vector to exchange genes between distantly related species. As a result, most genetic engineering used viruses in this way.

“Here’s how it will work,” Singer continued. “We insert the X-FLU gene into a flu virus itself. Use the virus as a Trojan horse, if you will. Then we infect a person with that virus. As with any flu vaccine, the person will develop a mild case of influenza. Meanwhile, the virus has inserted the bonobo DNA into the person’s DNA. When he recovers, he’s got the X-FLU gene. And he’ll never get the flu again.”

“Gene therapy,” Carson said.

“Absolutely,” Singer replied. “It’s one of the hottest things around today. Gene therapies are promising to cure all kinds of genetic diseases. Like Tay-Sachs disease, PKU syndrome, hemophilia, you name it. Someday, anyone born with a genetic defect will be able to get the right gene and live a normal life. Only in this case, the ‘defect’ is susceptibility to the flu. And the change is inheritable.”

Singer mopped his brow. “I get pretty excited, talking about this stuff,” he said, grinning. “I never dreamed I could change the world when I was teaching at CalTech. X-FLU made me believe in God again, it really did.” He cleared his throat.

“We’re very close, Guy. But there’s one small problem. When we insert the X-FLU gene into the ordinary flu virus, it turns the ordinary virus virulent. Infinitely more virulent. And brutally contagious. Instead of being an innocuous messenger, the protein coat of the virus seems to mimic a hormone that stimulates the overproduction of cerebrospinal fluid. What you saw in the Fever Tank was the virus’s effect on a chimpanzee. We don’t quite know what it will do to a human being, but we know it won’t be pleasant.” He stood up and moved to a nearby window.

“Your job is to redesign the viral coat of the X-FLU ‘messenger’ virus. To render it harmless. To allow it to infect its human host without killing it, so that it can transport the X-FLU gene into human DNA.”

Carson opened his mouth to speak, then shut it abruptly. He suddenly understood why Scopes had plucked him out of the mass of GeneDyne talent. Until Fred Peck had set him to doing make-work, his specialty had been altering the protein shells that surround a virus. He knew that the protein coat of a virus could be changed or attenuated using heat, various enzymes, radiation, even through the growing of different strains. He’d done it all himself. There were many ways to neutralize a virus.

“It sounds like a straightforward problem,” he said.

“It should be. But it isn’t. For some reason, no matter what you do, the virus always mutates back to its deadly form. When Burt was working on it, he must have inoculated an entire colony of chimps with supposedly safe strains of the X-FLU virus. Each time, the virus reverted, and, well, you’ve seen the grim result. Sudden cerebral edema. Burt was a brilliant scientist. If it wasn’t for him, we’d have never been able to get PurBlood, our artificial blood product, stabilized and out the door. But the X-FLU problem drove him—” Singer paused. “He couldn’t take the pressure.”

“I can see why people avoid the Fever Tank,” Carson said.

“It’s horrible. And I have grave misgivings about using the chimps. But when you consider the benefits to humanity ...” Singer fell silent, looking out over the landscape.

“Why the secrecy?” Carson finally asked.

“Two reasons. We believe that at least one other drug company is working along similar lines of research, and we don’t want to tip our hand prematurely. But more importantly, there are a lot of people out there afraid of technology. I don’t really blame them. With nuclear weapons, radiation, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl—they’re suspicious. And they don’t like the idea of genetic engineering.” He turned toward Carson. “Let’s face it, what we’re talking about is a permanent alteration in the human genome. That could be very controversial. And if people object to genetically altered veggies, what are they going to make of this? We face the same problem with PurBlood. So we want to have X-FLU ready to go when it’s announced to the world. That way, opposition won’t have time to develop. People will see that the benefits far outweigh any irrational outcry of fear from a small segment of the public.”

“That segment can be pretty vocal.” Carson had sometimes passed groups of demonstrators outside the GeneDyne gates on his way to and from work.

“Yes. You have people out there like Charles Levine. You know his Foundation for Genetic Policy? Very radical organization, out to destroy genetic engineering in general and Brent Scopes in particular.”

Carson nodded.

“They were friends in college, Levine and Scopes. God, that’s quite a story. Remind me to tell you what I know of it someday. Anyway, Levine is a bit unbalanced, a real Don Quixote. Rolling back scientific progress has become his goal in life. It’s gotten worse since the death of his wife, I’m told. And he’s carried out a twenty-year vendetta against Brent Scopes. Unfortunately, there are many in the media who actually listen to him and print his garbage.” He stepped away from the window. “It’s much easier to tear something down than build it up, Guy. Mount Dragon is the safest genetic-engineering lab in the world. No one, and I mean no one, is more interested in the safety of his employees and his products than Brent Scopes.”

Carson almost mentioned that Charles Levine had been one of his undergraduate professors, but thought better of it. Maybe Singer already knew. “So you want to present the X-FLU therapy as a fait accompli. And that’s the reason for the rush?”

“That’s partly the reason.” Singer hesitated, then continued. “Actually, the truth is that X-FLU is very important to GeneDyne. In fact, it’s critical. Scopes’s corn royalty patent—GeneDyne’s financial bedrock—expires in a matter of weeks.”

“But Scopes only turns forty this year,” Carson said. “The patent can’t be that old. Why doesn’t he just renew it?”

Singer shrugged. “I don’t know all the details. I just know it’s expiring, and it can’t be renewed. When that happens, all those royalties will cease. PurBlood won’t see distribution for a couple of months, and it will take years to amortize the cost of R and D anyway. Our other new products are still stuck undergoing the approval process. If X-FLU doesn’t come through soon, GeneDyne will have to cut its generous dividend. That would have a catastrophic effect on the stock price. Your nest egg and mine.”

He turned, beckoned. “Come over here, Guy,” he said.

Carson walked to where Singer was standing. The window offered a sweeping view of the Jornada del Muerto desert, which stretched toward the horizon, dissolving in a firestorm of light where the sky met the earth. To the south Carson could barely make out the rubble of what looked like an ancient Indian ruin, several ragged walls poking above the drifted sand.

Singer placed a hand on Carson’s shoulder. “These matters shouldn’t be of any concern to you right now. Think about the potential that lies just beneath our fingertips. The average doctor, if he’s lucky, may save hundreds of lives. A medical researcher may save thousands. But you, me, GeneDyne— we’re going to save millions. Billions.”

He pointed toward a low range of mountains to the northeast, rising above the bright desert like a series of dark teeth. “Fifty years ago, mankind exploded the first atomic device at the foot of those mountains. The Trinity Site is a mere thirty miles from here. That was the dark side of science. Now, half a century later, in this same desert, we have the chance to redeem science. It’s really as simple and as profound as that.”

His grip tightened. “Guy, this is going to be the greatest adventure of your lifetime. I think I can guarantee that.”

They stood looking out over the desert, and as he stared, Carson could feel its vast intensity, a feeling almost religious in its force. And he knew Singer was right.

Carson rose at five-thirty. He swung his feet over the side of the bed and looked out the open window toward the San Andres Mountains. The cool night air flowed in, bringing with it the intense stillness of the predawn morning. He breathed deeply. In New Jersey, it was all he could do to drag himself out of bed at eight o’clock. Now, on his second morning in the desert, he was already back on his old schedule.

He watched as the stars disappeared, leaving only Venus in the cloudless eastern sky. The peculiar green color of the desert sunrise crept into the sky, then faded to yellow. Slowly, the outlines of plants emerged from the indistinct blueness of the desert floor. The wiry tangles of witch mesquite and the tall clumps of tobosa grass were widely scattered; life in the desert, Carson thought, was a solitary, uncrowded affair.

His room was sparsely but comfortably furnished: bed, matching sofa and chair, oversized desk, bookshelves. He showered, shaved, and dressed in white scrubs, feeling alternately excited and apprehensive about the day ahead.

He’d spent the previous afternoon being processed into the Mount Dragon workforce: filling out forms, getting voice-printed and photographed, and undergoing the most extensive physical he’d ever experienced. The site doctor, Lyle Grady, was a thin, small man with a reedy voice. He’d barely smiled as he typed notes into his terminal. After a brief dinner with Singer, Carson had turned in early. He wanted to be well rested.

The workday at GeneDyne began at eight o’clock. Carson did not eat breakfast—a holdover from the days when his father roused him early and made him saddle his horse in the dark—but he found his way to the cafeteria, where he grabbed a quick cup of coffee before heading toward his new lab. The cafeteria was deserted, and Carson remembered a remark Singer had made at dinner the night before. “We eat big dinners around here,” he’d said. “Breakfast and lunch aren’t too popular. Something about working in the Fever Tank that really curbs your appetite.”

People were suiting up quickly and silently when Carson arrived at the Fever Tank. Everyone turned to look at the new arrival, some friendly, some frankly curious, some noncommittal. Then Singer appeared in the ready room, his round face smiling broadly.

“How’d you sleep?” he asked, giving Carson a friendly pat on the back.

“Not bad,” Carson said. “I’m anxious to get started.”

“Good. I want to introduce you to your assistant.” He looked around. “Where’s Susana?”

“She’s already inside,” said one of the technicians. “She had to go in early to check some cultures.”

“You’re in Lab C,” Singer said. “Rosalind showed you the way, right?”

“More or less,” Carson said, pulling the bluesuit out of his locker.

“Good. You’ll probably want to start by going over Frank Burt’s lab notes. Susana will see that you have everything you need.”

Completing the dressing procedure with Singer’s help, Carson followed the others into the chemical showers, then again entered the warren of narrow corridors and hatches of the Biosafety Level-5 lab. Once again, he found it difficult to get used to the constricting suit, the reliance on air tubes. After a few wrong turns he found himself in front of a metal door marked LABORATORY C.

Inside, a bulky, suited figure was bent over a bioprophylaxis table, sorting through a stack of petri dishes. Carson pressed one of the intercom buttons on his suit.

“Hi. Are you Susana?”

The figure straightened up.

“I’m Guy Carson,” he continued.

A small sharp voice crackled over the intercom. “Susana Cabeza de Vaca.”

They clumsily shook hands.

“These suits are a pain in the butt,” de Vaca said irritably. “So you’re Burt’s replacement.”

“That’s right,” said Carson.

She peered into his visor. “Hispano?” she asked.

“No, I’m an Anglo,” Carson replied, a little more hastily than he’d intended.

There was a pause. “Hmm,” de Vaca said, looking at him intently. “Well, you sure sound like you could be from around here, anyway.”

“I grew up in the Bootheel.”

“I knew it! Well, Guy, you and I are the only natives here.”

“You’re a New Mexican? When did you come?” Carson asked.

“I got here about two weeks ago, transferred from the Albuquerque plant. I was originally assigned to Medical, but now I’ll be replacing Dr. Burt’s assistant. She left a few days after he did.”

“Where’re you from?” Carson asked.

“A little mountain town called Truchas. About thirty miles north of Santa Fe.”

“Originally, I mean.”

There was another pause. “I was born in Truchas,” she said.

“Okay,” Carson said, surprised by her sharp tone.

“You meant, when did we swim the Rio Grande?”

“Well, no, of course not. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Mexicans—”

“Mexicans?”

“Yes. Some of the best hands on our ranch were Mexican, and growing up I had a lot of Mexican friends—”

“My family,” de Vaca interrupted frostily, “came to America with Don Juan de Oñate. In fact, Don Alonso Cabeza de Vaca and his wife almost died of thirst crossing this very desert. That was in 1598, which I’m sure was a lot earlier than when your redneck dustbowl family settled in the Bootheel. But I’m deeply touched you had Mexican friends growing up.”

She turned away and began sorting through petri dishes again, typing the numbers into a PowerBook computer.

Jesus, thought Carson, Singer wasn’t kidding when he said everyone here was stressed. “Ms. de Vaca,” he said, “I hope you understand I was just trying to be friendly.”

Carson waited. De Vaca continued to sort and type.

“Not that it matters, but I don’t come from some dustbowl family. My ancestor was Kit Carson, and my great-grandfather homesteaded the ranch I grew up on. The Carsons have been in New Mexico for almost two hundred years.”

“Colonel Christopher Carson? Well, whaddya know,” she said, not looking up. “I once wrote a college paper on Carson. Tell me, are you descended from his Spanish wife or his Indian wife?”

There was a silence.

“It’s got to be one or the other,” she continued, “because you sure don’t look like a white man to me.” She stacked the petri dishes and squared them away, sliding them into a stainless-steel slot in the wall.

“I don’t define myself by my racial makeup, Ms. de Vaca,” Carson said, trying to keep an even tone.

“It’s Cabeza de Vaca, not ‘de Vaca,’ ” she responded, beginning to sort another stack.

Carson jabbed angrily at his intercom switch. “I don’t care if it’s Cabeza or Kowalski. I’m not going to take this kind of rude shit from you or that walking chuck wagon Rosalind or anyone else.”

There was a momentary silence. Then de Vaca began to laugh. “Carson? Look at the two buttons on your intercom panel. One is for private conversation over a local channel, and one is for global broadcast. Don’t get them mixed up again, or everyone in the Fever Tank will hear what you’re saying.”

There came a hiss on the intercom. “Carson?” Brandon-Smith’s voice sounded. “I just want you to know I heard that, you bowlegged asswipe.”

De Vaca smirked.

“Ms. Cabeza de Vaca,” said Carson, fumbling with the intercom buttons. “I just want to get my job done. Got that? I’m not interested in petty squabbling or in sorting out your identity problem. So start acting like an assistant and show me how I can access Dr. Burt’s lab notes.”

There was an icy pause.

“Right,” de Vaca said at last, pointing to a gray laptop stored in a cubbyhole near the entry hatch. “That PowerBook was Burt’s. Now it’s yours. If you want to see his entries, the network jacks are in that receptacle by your left elbow. You know the rules about notes, don’t you?”

“You mean the pencil-and-paper directive?” Back in New Jersey, GeneDyne had a policy of discouraging the recording of any information except into company computers.

“They take it a step further here,” de Vaca said. “No hard copy of any kind. No pens, pencils, paper. All test results, all lab work, everything you do and think, has to be recorded in your PowerBook and uploaded to the mainframe at least once a day. Just leaving a note on someone’s desk is enough to get you fired.”

“What’s the big deal?”

De Vaca shrugged inside the confines of her suit. “Scopes likes to browse through our notes, see what we’re up to, offer suggestions. He roams company cyberspace all night long from Boston, poking and prying into everyone’s business; The guy never sleeps.”

Carson sensed a note of disrespect in her voice. Turning on the laptop and plugging the network cable into the wall jack, he logged on, then let de Vaca show him where Burt’s files were kept. He typed a few brief commands—annoyed at the pudgy clumsiness of his gloved fingers—and waited while the files were copied to the laptop’s hard disk. Then he loaded Burt’s notes into the laptop’s word processor.

February 18. First day at lab. Briefed by Singer on PurBlood with other new arrival, P. Brandon-Smith. Spent afternoon in library, studying precedents for encapsulating naked hemoglobin. The problem, as I see it, is essentially one of ...

“You don’t want that stuff,” de Vaca said. “That’s the last project, before I came. Page ahead until you get to X-FLU.”

Carson scrolled through three months’ worth of notes, at last locating where Burt had completed work on GeneDyne’s artificial blood and begun laying the groundwork for X-FLU. The story unfolded in terse, businesslike entries: a brilliant scientist, fresh from the triumph of one project, launching immediately into the next. Burt had used his own filtration process—a process that had made him a famous name within GeneDyne—to synthesize PurBlood, and his optimism and enthusiasm shone through clearly. After all, it had seemed a fairly simple task to neutralize the X-FLU virus and get on with human testing.

Day after day Burt worked on various angles of the problem: computer-modeling the protein coat; employing various enzymes, heat treatments, and chemicals; moving from one angle of attack to another with rapidity. Scattered liberally throughout the notes were comments from Scopes, who seemed to peruse Burt’s work several times a week. The computer had also captured many on-line typed “conversations” between Scopes and Burt. As he read these exchanges, Carson found himself admiring Scopes’s understanding of the technical aspects of his business, and envying Burt’s easy familiarity with the GeneDyne CEO.

Despite Burt’s ceaseless energy and brilliant attack, however, nothing seemed to work. Altering the protein capsule around the flu virus itself was an almost trivial matter. Each time, the coat remained stable in vitro, and Burt would then move toward an in vivo test—injecting the altered virus into chimpanzees. Each time, the animals lived for a while without obvious symptoms, then suddenly died hideous deaths.

Carson scrolled through page after page in which an increasingly exasperated Burt recorded continual, inexplicable failures. Over time, the entries seemed to lose their clipped, dispassionate tone, and become more rambling and personal. Barbed comments about the scientists Burt worked with— especially Rosalind Brandon-Smith, whom he detested—began to appear.

About three weeks before Burt left Mount Dragon, the poems began. Usually ten lines or less, they focused on the hidden, obscure beauty of science: the quaternary structure of a globulin protein, the blue glow of Cerenkov radiation. They were lyrical and evocative, yet Carson found them chilling, appearing suddenly between columns of test results, unbidden, like alien guests.

Carbon, one of the poems began,

Most beautiful of elements.

Such infinite variety,

Chains, rings, branches, buckyballs, side groups, aromatics.

Your index of refraction kills shahs and speculators.

Carbon.

You who were with us in the streets of Saigon,

You were everywhere, floating in the air

Invisible in the fear and sweat,

The napalm.

Without you we are nothing.

Carbon we were and carbon we shall become.

The entries quickly grew more sporadic and disjointed as the end drew near. Carson had increasing difficulty following Burt’s logic from one thought to another. Throughout, Scopes had been a constant background presence; now his comments and suggestions became more critical and sarcastic. Their exchanges developed a distinct confrontational edge: Scopes aggressive, Burt evasive, almost penitent.

Burt, where were you yesterday?

I took the day off and walked outside the perimeter.

For every day this problem isn’t solved, it’s costing GeneDyne one million dollars. So Dr. Burt decides to take the day off for a one-million-dollar hike. Charming. Everybody’s waiting on you, Frank, remember? The entire project’s waiting on you.

Brent, I just can’t go on day after day. I’ve got to have some time to think and be alone.

So what did you think about?

I thought about my first wife.

Jesus Christ, he thought about his first wife. One million bucks, Frank, to think about your fucking first wife. I could kill you, I really could.

I just couldn’t work yesterday. I’ve tried everything, including recombinant viral vectors. The problem isn’t solvable.

Frank, I really hate you for even thinking that. No problem is insoluble. That’s what you said about the blood, remember? And then you solved it. You did it, Frank, think about it! And I love you for it, Frank, I do. And I know you can do it again. There’s a Nobel Prize in this for you, I swear.

Tempting me with glory won’t help, Brent. Money won’t, either. Nothing is going to make an impossible problem possible.

Don’t say that, Frank. Please. It hurts me to hear you say that word, because it’s always a lie. “Impossible” is a lie. The universe is strange and vast, and anything is possible. You remind me of Alice in Wonderland. You remember that exchange between Alice and the Queen about this very subject?

No, I don’t. And I don’t think Alice in Wonderland is going to help me believe in the impossible.

You son of a bitch, if I hear that word again I’ll come out there and kill you with my bare hands. Look, I’ve given you everything you need. Please, Frank, just get back in there and do it. I have faith that you can do it. Look, why don’t you just start over. Start with some other host, something really improbable, like a new virus, a macrophage. Or a reovirus. Something that will let you approach things from an entirely new direction. Okay?

All right, Brent.

Several days passed with no entries at all. Then, on June 29—just a fortnight past—came a rush of writing, full of apocalyptic imagery and ominous ramblings. Several times Burt mentioned a “key factor,” never explaining what it was. Carson shook his head. His predecessor had obviously gone delusional, imagining solutions his rational mind had been unable to discover.

Carson sat back, feeling the trapped sweat collecting between his shoulder blades and around his elbows. For the first time, he felt a momentary thrust of fear. How could he succeed, when a man like Burt had failed—not only failed, but lost his mind in the process? He glanced up and found de Vaca looking at him.

“Have you read this?” he asked.

She nodded.

“How ... I mean, how do they expect me to take this over?”

“That’s your problem,” she responded evenly. “I’m not the one with the degrees from Harvard and MIT.”

Carson spent the rest of the day rereading the early experiments, staying away from the distracting convolutions of Burt’s lab notes. Toward the end of the day he began to feel more upbeat. There was a new recombinant DNA technique he had worked with at MIT that Burt hadn’t been aware of. Carson diagrammed the problem, breaking it down into its parts, then further breaking down those parts until it had been separated into irreducibles.

As the day drew to a close, Carson began to sketch out an experimental protocol of his own. There was, he realized, still a lot to work with. He stood up, stretched, and watched as de Vaca plugged her notebook into the network jack.

“Don’t forget to upload,” she said. “I’m sure Big Brother will want to check over your work tonight.”

“Thanks,” said Carson, scoffing inwardly at the thought that Scopes would waste time looking over his notes. Scopes and Burt had clearly been friends, but Carson was still just a grade-three technician from the Edison office. He uploaded the day’s data, stored the computer in its cubbyhole for the night, then followed de Vaca as she made the long slow trip out of the Fever Tank.

Back in the ready room, Carson had unbuckled his visor and was unzipping the lower part of his biohazard suit when he glanced over at his assistant. She had already stowed her suit and was shaking out her hair, and Carson was surprised to see not the chunky señorita he had imagined underneath the bluesuit, but a slender, extremely beautiful young woman with long black hair, brown skin, and a regal face with two deep purple eyes.

She turned and caught his look.

“Keep your eyes to yourself, cabrón,” she said, “if you don’t want them to end up like one of those chimps in there.”

She slung her handbag over her shoulder and strode out while the others in the ready room erupted into laughter.

The room was octagonal. Each of its eight walls rose ponderously toward a groined ceiling that hung fifty feet above, softly illuminated by invisible cove lighting. Seven walls were covered with enormous flat-panel computer screens, currently dark. The eighth wall contained a door, flush with the wall, small but extremely thick to accommodate the room’s external soundproofing. Although the room stood sixty stories above the Boston harbor, there were no windows and no views. The floor was laid in rare Tanzanian mbanga slate. The colors were a spectrum of muted grays, ashes, and taupes.

The exterior of the door was made of a thick, banded metal alloy. Instead of a handle, there was an EyeDentify retinal scanner and a FingerMatrix hand geometry reader. Next to the door, beneath a sterilizing ultraviolet light, sat a row of foam slippers, their sizes imprinted in large numbers on the toes. Below an overhead camera that swiveled ceaselessly to and fro, a large sign read, SPEAK SOFTLY AT ALL TIMES PLEASE.

Beyond lay a long, dimly lit corridor leading to a security station and an elevator bank. On either side of the corridor, a series of closed doors led to the security offices, kitchens, infirmary, air-purifying electrostatic precipitators, and servants’ quarters necessary to fill the various requirements of the octagonal room’s occupant.

The door closest to the octagon was open. The room inside was paneled in cherry, with a marble fireplace, a parquet floor covered with a Persian rug, and several large Hudson River School paintings on the wall. A magnificent mahogany desk stood in the center of the room, its only electronic device an old dial telephone. A suited figure sat behind the desk, writing on a piece of paper.

Inside the huge octagonal room itself, a spotlight was recessed into the very point of the vaulted ceiling, and it dropped a pencil beam of pure white light down to the midpoint of the room. Centered in the pool of light was a battered sofa of 1970s styling. Its arms were dark with use and wifts of stuffing protruded from the threadbare nap. Silver duct tape sealed the front edge. As ugly and frayed as it was, the sofa had one essential quality: it was extremely comfortable.

Two cheap faux-antique end tables stood guard at either side of the sofa. A large telephone and several electronic devices in black brushed metal boxes stood on one of the end tables, and a video camera, affixed to one end, was pointed toward the sofa. The other end table was bare, but it bore the legacy of innumerable greasy pizza boxes and sticky Coke cans.

In front of the sofa sat a large worktable. In contrast to the other furniture, it was breathtakingly beautiful. The top was carved from bird’s-eye maple, polished and oiled to bring out its fractal perfection. The maple was surrounded by a border of lignum vitae, black and heavy, in which was inlaid a strip of oyster walnut in a complex geometric pattern. This pattern showed the naadaa, the sacred corn plant, which was at the heart of the religion of the ancient Anasazi Indians. The kernels of this corn had made the room’s occupant a very wealthy man. A single computer keyboard lay on the table, a short remote antenna jutting from its flank.

The rest of the vast room was clinically sterile and empty, the only exception being a large musical instrument that stood perched at the periphery of the circle of light. It was a six-octave, quadruple-string pianoforte, supposedly built for Beethoven in 1820 by the Hamburg firm of Otto Schachter. The shoulders and lyre of the piano’s rosewood sound box were ornately carved in a rococo scene of nymphs and water gods.

A figure in a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and beaded Sioux Indian slippers sat hunched at the piano, head drooping, motionless fingers dead on the ivory keys. For several minutes, all was still. Then the profound silence was shattered with a massive diminished-seventh chord, sforzando, resolving to a melancholy C minor: the opening bars of Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Opus 111. The maestoso introduction echoed upward into the great vaulted space. The introduction evolved into the allegro con brio ed appassionato, the first motive notes filling the room with sound, drowning out the beep of an incoming video call. The movement continued, the slight figure hunched over the keyboard, his untidy hair shaking with the effort. The beep sounded again, unnoticed, and finally one massive wall screen sprang to life, revealing a mud-streaked, rain-spattered face.

The notes suddenly stopped, the sound of the piano dying away quickly. The figure rose with a curse, slamming the keyboard cover shut.

“Brent,” the face called. “Are you there?”

Scopes walked over to the battered couch, flounced down on it cross-legged, and dragged the computer keyboard into his lap. He typed some commands, then looked up at the vast image on the screen.

The mud-spattered face belonged to a man currently seated inside a Range Rover. Beyond the vehicle’s rain-streaked windows lay a green clearing, a fresh gash in the flank of the surrounding Cameroon jungle. The clearing was a sea of mud, churned into lunar shapes by boots and tires. Scarred tree trunks were pulled up along the edges of the clearing. A few feet from the Range Rover, several dozen cages made of pipe and hog wire were stacked into rickety piles. Furry hands and toes poked from the hog wire, and miserable childlike eyes peered out at the world.

“How you doing, Rod?” Scopes said wearily, turning to face the camera on the end table.

“The weather sucks.”

“Raining here too,” Scopes said.

“Yeah, but you haven’t seen rain until you’ve—”

“I’ve been waiting three days to hear from you, Falfa,” Scopes interrupted. “What the hell’s been going on?”

The face broke into an ingratiating smile. “We had problems getting gas for the trucks. I’ve had a whole village out in the jungle, at a dollar a day per person, for the last two weeks. They’re all rich now, and we’ve got fifty-six baby chimps.” He grinned and wiped his nose, which only served to smear more mud across his face. Or maybe it wasn’t mud.

Scopes looked away. “I want them in New Mexico in six weeks. With no more than a fifty-percent mortality rate.”

“Fifty percent! That’ll be tough,” Falfa said. “Usually—”

“Yo, Falfa!”

“Excuse me?”

“You think that’s tough? See what happens to Rodney P. Falfa if more corpses than live bodies arrive in New Mexico. Look at them, sitting out there in the goddamn rain.”

There was a silence. Falfa honked and an African face appeared in the window. Falfa cracked the window a half inch, and Scopes could hear the miserable screams of the animals beyond. “Hunter mans!” Falfa was saying in pidgin. “You cover up dat beef, you hear? For every beef dat ee go die, hunter mans get dashed out one shilling.”

“Na whatee?” came the response from outside the Range Rover. “Masa promise de dash of—”

“Do it.” Falfa snugged the window shut, locking out the man’s complaints, and turned to Scopes with another grin. “How’s that for prompt action?”

Scopes looked at him coldly. “Piss-poor. Don’t you think those chimps need to be fed, too?”

“Right!” Falfa honked the horn again. Scopes pressed a button, cutting off the video communication, and sat back on the sofa. He typed a few more commands, then stopped. Suddenly, with another curse, he winged the keyboard angrily across the room. The keyboard hit the wall with a sharp cracking sound. A single key, jarred loose, rattled across the polished floor. Scopes flopped back onto the sofa, motionless.

A moment later the door hissed open and a tall man of perhaps sixty appeared. He was dressed in a charcoal suit, with a starched white shirt, wing-tip shoes, and a blue silk tie. Between graying temples, two fine gray eyes framed a small, chiseled nose.

“Is everything all right, Mr. Scopes?” the figure asked.

Scopes gestured toward the keyboard. “The keyboard is broken.”

The figure smiled ironically. “I take it Mr. Falfa finally checked in.”

Scopes laughed, rubbing his unruly hair. “Correct. These animal collectors are the lowest form of human being I’ve encountered. It’s a shame the Mount Dragon appetite for chimps seems insatiable.”

Spencer Fairley inclined his head. “I wish you would let somebody else handle these details, sir. You seem to find them so upsetting.”

Scopes shook his head. “This project is too important.”

“If you say so, sir. Can I get you anything else besides a new keyboard?”

Scopes waved his hand absently. As Fairley turned to go, Scopes suddenly spoke again. “Wait. There were two things, after all. Did you see the Channel Seven news last night?”