The Lure

44 Alien Solutions

A cold, overcast late afternoon. Snowflakes still drifting down, the sky darkening.

Bull looked through the slatted blinds at his old evangelist friend, in a blue windcheater and scarf as white as his hair. Harris was sat on a bench near the pool, reading something. From this distance it looked like a Bible.

Reading outdoors, in the snow!

There was a knock on the door, and Bull turned back from the window. The man opening the door was about fifty, stockily built, with short cropped hair and light blue eyes. He was wearing the uniform of an army Colonel.

‘Colonel Rocco, have we met?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Time’s very short, let’s get down to business. Over here, please.’

They sat down on chairs set at a desk. The Colonel opened a laptop computer, and on its screen was a thing which looked like a dimpled sponge.

There was another knock. Sullivan and Baxendale crowded into the little study. Bull nodded indifferently and sat down next to the soldier. He pointed to the image on the laptop screen. ‘What’s this?’

‘Well, sir, this is on the compact disk Ms Baxendale gave me. Happens it’s one of the leukaemia RNA viruses identified only last year. Not the representation I’m used to, though.’ The Colonel’s brow wrinkled. ‘It’s not a simple C-alpha trace.’

‘Remember you’re talking to a layman.’

‘Yes, Mr President. What I mean is, whoever obtained this construction is using a novel imaging technique.’ The Colonel’s finger traversed the screen. ‘It’s two hundred angstroms end to end, and wonderfully detailed. They must have access to some heavy CPU time.’

‘Okay.’

‘Now sir, here they’ve isolated a protein from an immature white cell. Happens it’s the target of this virus. The virus gets on to that, screws up the immune response, you get an overproduction of cells, which is bad news.’

Another image replaced the sponge, this one made up of hundreds of tiny, multi-coloured balls joined by short sticks, the whole making an irregular, elongated hollow structure. It spun slowly.

‘I’m more familiar with this type of imaging. I recognise it as something called the VP1 protein.’ The Colonel pointed to a long, deep valley. ‘And there’s what we call the canyon. Dozens of research groups have been trying to find a receptor for it.’

Bull was patient. ‘Colonel, if I could have it in simple language?’

‘Sorry, Mr President. But now see what followed on the disk.’

The big protein stayed on screen, but another set of balls-and-sticks appeared, much smaller and simpler. Someone with a sense of drama had made this new image drift into view, approaching the protein like a little space ship returning to the mother station. It orbited the protein, hovered over the deep valley, distorted and stretched as it descended and clicked into place like a piece from a three-dimensional jigsaw, filling the canyon smoothly.

Now the dramatist sent in a flotilla of little ball-and-stick space ships. They swirled and orbited the mother ship and, one at a time, landed in other valleys, again filling them neatly.

The mother ship then tumbled, displaying its filled canyons. Bull glanced behind him. The CIA Director and the Science Adviser were absorbed in the image. Hazel was looking numbed.

‘Colonel?’

The soldier came back to the present. ‘My first instinct was to say that this is some sort of hoax. I mean, here we have fourteen hits, fourteen conformers to prevent receptor attachments, where one is a medical revolution.’

Bull was still being patient. ‘Colonel Rocco, what does all this gobbledygook mean?’

‘It means you can interrupt the lytic cycle — the virion can’t enter a human cell.’

‘Try harder, Soldier.’

‘Mr President, the material on this disk is describing the molecular basis for curing adult leukaemia. These are small molecules, as you see, so we wouldn’t have to worry about stomach enzymes. Meaning no injection, just swallow a pill. It might even be preventative. An anti-cancer pill, taken with your cornflakes every morning along with your vitamins.’

‘Colonel, what I need to know is this. What can you say about the state of advancement of this technology?’

‘Sir, it’s the stuff of fantasy. It puts our chemotherapy in the Stone Age. It must come from some protein targeting procedure a hundred years in the future, maybe more. We have a hundred doctoral scientists at Fort Detrick and we pride ourselves on being state of the art. We’re one of only two places in the States working at biosafety level four on account of we routinely deal with some mighty hazardous pathogens, and we’re pretty clued up on what’s going on elsewhere. But this — it’s way beyond anything we’ve encountered. I haven’t been told the source of this disk, but I surely wonder who has got this far.’

‘Are you saying this is a cure for leukaemia?’

‘Not yet. From genomics to commercial drug takes ten years and a lot of mice. But it’s giving us the molecular basis. GlaxoSmithKline, Wellcome, all the pharmaceutical giants would kill for this.’

‘Thank you, Colonel. This disk and any copies of it are to be erased. And that includes erasing its contents from your mind.’

The soldier looked blankly at the President as if he hadn’t heard correctly.

‘That will be all, Colonel.’

‘Forgive me, Mr President, but the disk contains more than that, a lot more. Some of it we already know, most of it’s new like the gene locations for polygenic diseases, and some of it’s beyond anything we’ve even thought about, like…’

The President stood up and walked to the window. The Colonel was still talking.

In his morning walk, Bull had noted that cloud had already covered the cottages higher up the mountain. He guessed that come the morning he’d have to take a motorcade down to Thurmont to catch the helicopter. He’d give Logie a ride.

The President envied Logie. He envied his certainties. But a distance had grown between them; their life paths had diverged to the point where they were scarcely within hailing distance of each other.

‘… seem to be maps for the flow of energy and biological information through the human body, and—’

‘Colonel Rocco.’

The soldier stopped in mid-flow.

Bull was still looking out of the window. He spoke quietly. ‘Kill it.’

This time the Colonel didn’t flinch. ‘Yes, sir.’

Somewhere out there, aliens reaching out to us.

Somewhere in Europe, fugitives with their message.

And hard decisions to be reached.