Mount Dragon (5 page)

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 photogrammetrists 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.