There was lots of confusion and consternation on the other end.
“Just do it!” he snapped. “And ring me when you have Edelman. Put it on the satellite scrambler!”
He put down the phone, and realized he was shaking violently.
Boland, California, he thought. My god! And Foley, too.
James Foley, alias Rupert, specialist in international terror, the man who’d once blown up six school busses in the Middle East, who’d poisoned a New York state water system, and those were only for starters.
Just the kind of fellow to blind an entire town for the hell of it, he thought. Just exactly the kind… The telephone in the mobile van gave an electronic buzz, and Carillo picked it up.
“Harry?” came a familiar voice from long ago. “What the hell is all this about?”
“You know about Operation Wilderness,” the inspector began. “I’m still on the scene.”
“Yeah, just got the report in on the telex. Nice job it looks like. So?”
“Jake, one of ’em’s James Foley, and there’s a map with Boland, California, circled on it.”
Edelman was suddenly excited. “So that’s it! God! You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this! This is the break, Harry! The link! Did you find out how they did it?”
Carillo sighed. “Well, in the cabin, along with the expected stuff, were six blue gas cylinders, look like scuba tanks with a fire extinguisher cap stuck on. I had them sent to NDCC at Dietrick. And—Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“One of ’em was turned on, Jake. We don’t know if any of it escaped.”
There was silence on the other end for a moment. Then Edelman said, “You’ve taken all the precautions?”
“Done,” said the field man. “We’re all going into quarantine. As soon as the lab stuff, which is also going under seal, is sorted out we’ll burn the cabin to the ground.”
Edelman was silent again, uncertain of just what to say. He knew the other man was scared, and he understood it. He’d be having the screaming fits himself if their situations were reversed. Finally he said, “Well, look. We’ll work on those things here as soon as we get them. In the meantime, we need blood samples, everything. I hope you haven’t got any problems, Harry—and I mean that sincerely but if you have, you’ll be the first people we know of within the three-day limit. If the active agent’s there, we’ve got a good crack at isolating it and getting it. It can mean a cure, Harry—or even a preventative!”
Harry Carillo nodded silently, but he had a numbed, detached feeling inside him. Three days. The terror starting now. Three long days…
“All right, Jake,” he managed. “Remember—we’re depending on your side.”
“Good luck, Harry—and good job,” Edelman said softly, and terminated the conversation.
Harry Carillo sat there for a long time with the dead phone in his hands, feeling the first effects of the disease called terror.
FIVE
“C’m’on, you little bastard, come to papa,” Mark Spiegelman said insistently. “Come on, you can do it, yes you can.”
The object of the conversation was well away from him, inside a special sealed chamber, and within a gel on a small platform within that chamber. The serologist was watching a CRT screen over 130 centimeters across diagonally, with perfect resolution, the computer-generated picture of what was happening in the gel at that time as seen by the hypersensitive electron microscope.
The creature on the screen was not very thrilling to look at; it was three-quarters of a micron in width and just a little over one micron in length, surrounded by cilia. It was close to a small protein globule, and it almost seemed to be stalking it. The globule, in turn, was obviously attracted to the tiny bacterium, and the two seemed to be in some sort of slow-motion ballet.
Suddenly they touched, and the bacterium absorbed the protein globule.
Dr. Mark Spiegelman smiled in satisfaction, mumbled something about the course of true love, and continued to watch.
Tiny enzymes within the bacterium moved with unusual swiftness, surrounding the antigen and doing something to it.
Spiegelman’s mouth dropped.
In the course of the next three minutes, the globule was completely broken down, so much so that it was impossible to tell that it had ever been there.
“Well I’ll be damned,” the serologist said. He turned to check that the videotape recorder was still running, although hesitant to take his eyes off the creature on the screen.
He grabbed a dictation recorder, punched the record button, and said, “Samples from the Operation Wilderness subjects should be examined for any rapidly reproducing strains of what might appear to be Escherichia coli in the bloodstream, stomach, or intestinal tract, characterized by the formation of antigens in pulses, a large number appearing then disappearing, in constant progression.”
He switched off, plugged the dictation module back into the panel, punched transmit, and settled back.
There were two bacteria on the screen now. He looked at his watch, then turned in his swivel chair to a computer console and asked for a time on the reproductive cycle.
Six minutes forty-six seconds to complete division.
Seven minutes, give or take, he thought wonderingly. About four times faster than the fast-breeding bacteria.
Roughly eight doublings in geometric progression per hour.
He pulled out his pocket calculator, put in a “2.” Okay, that was seven minutes. At fourteen minutes there’d be four, at twenty-one minutes sixteen, at twenty-eight minutes 256, at thirty-five minutes 65,536. He swore. This was getting hairy and he wasn’t even close to the end. At forty-two minutes you had—god!—4,294,967,296! At forty-nine minutes his calculator overloaded and refused to compute any further.
And if the thing defended itself as he’d seen, there’d be little loss. Some, of course, but not very much.
Inside of a day your bloodstream should be crawling with the things, too thick to miss.
He returned to the computer terminal, requesting a comparison of the Wilderness Organism with the microbiology reports from the autopsies and blood samples of prior victims.
None.
Were there abnormal numbers of Escherichia coli in the bodies of the victims? he asked the computer, thinking that they might have been passed over as the common variety often, in fact invariably, found there.
No unusual counts of that or any other bacillus.
He frowned. Why? There was the villain, all right, sitting there fat, dumb and happy on the giant CRT screen, in living color just like home television. He didn’t know a lot about it yet, but he knew for certain that that creature had caused at least the blindness at Boland, and maybe the other ailments as well. Why it acted where it did, and how it did its little tricks there, was still a mystery, but nothing a lot more hard lab work wouldn’t solve.
But it mutiplied faster than any known bacteria or anything else. Okay, he accepted that. But that should make it a thousand times more conspicuous.
Why wasn’t the damned thing in the bodies of the previous victims?
He typed in more instructions to the computer. They would step up the magnification to impossible limits and do a molecule-by-molecule analysis of the damned thing.
President of the United States Jefferson Lee Wainwright looked appropriately grim.
It had been said of him that he was the absolutely perfect presidential candidate; had someone the means and methods of production to create the perfect robotic politician, the result would have been Wainwright. The strong, rugged, Olympian look, the perfectly coiffured light brown hair, the warm, sympathetic blue eyes and patented smile, the sonorous voice—all perfect. His rise to power had been meteoric; Governor of Texas at thirty, senator at thirty-five, President at forty. A liberal on domestic issues, a staunch conservative on foreign policy, he had something for everyone except the radical fringes of the political spectrum.