Mount Dragon (10 page)

“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.

“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,

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.

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.