"Incredible." I thought of the fax machine in the Gordons' office.
"Yes. Well, let's go see if we can figure out what happened and how it happened." He stood. "If anyone does not want to go into biocontainment, you may sit in the lobby or in the cafeteria." He looked around, but no one said anything. He smiled, more Burl Ives than Colonel Sanders, I think. He said, "Well, everyone is brave then. Please, follow me."
We all stood and I said, "Stay together."
Dr. Zollner smiled at me and said, "When you are in biocontainment, my friend, you will naturally want to stay as close to me as possible."
It struck me that I should have gone to the Caribbean to convalesce.
CHAPTER 12
We returned to the lobby and stood before the two yellow doors. Dr. Zollner said to Beth, "Donna awaits you in the locker room. Please follow her instructions, and we will meet you at the rear door of the ladies' locker room." Zollner watched her go through the yellow door, then said to us, "Gentlemen, please follow me."
We followed the good doctor into the men's locker room, which turned out to be a hideous orange place, but otherwise typical of any locker room. An attendant handed us open locks without keys and freshly laundered lab whites. In a plastic bag were paper underwear, socks, and cotton slippers.
Zollner showed us to a row of empty lockers and said, "Please remove everything, including underwear and jewelry."
So, we all stripped down to our birthday suits, and I couldn't wait to tell Beth that Ted Nash carried a.38 with a three-inch barrel and that the barrel was longer than his dick.
George Foster said, apropos of my chest wound, "Close to the heart."
"I have no heart."
Zollner pulled on his oversized whites and now he looked more like Colonel Sanders.
I snapped my padlock on the locker hasp and adjusted my paper underwear.
Dr. Zollner looked us over and said, "So-we are all ready? Then please follow me."
"Hold on," Max said. "Don't we get face masks or respirators or something?"
"Not for Zone Two, Mr. Maxwell. Maybe for Zone Four, if you want to go that far. Come. Follow me."
We went to the rear of the locker room, and Zollner opened a red door marked with the weird-looking biohazard symbol and beneath the symbol the words "Zone Two." I could hear rushing air and Dr. Zollner explaining, "That's the negative air pressure you hear. It's up to a pound per square inch less in here than outside, so no pathogens can escape accidentally."
"I hate when that happens."
"Also, the particulate air niters on the roof clean all exhaust air from in here."
Max looked stubbornly skeptical, like a man who doesn't want any good news to interfere with his long-held belief that Plum Island was the biohazard equivalent of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl combined.
We went into a cement block corridor, and Zollner looked around and asked, "Where is Ms. Penrose?"
I replied, "Doc, are you married?"
"Yes. Oh… of course, she may take longer to get changed."
"No 'mays' about it, feller."
Finally, from the door marked "Women," Lady Penrose appeared, dressed in loose-fitting whites and cotton slippers. She still looked sexy, more cupid-like in white, I thought.
She heard the rushing air sound, and Zollner explained the negative air pressure, gave us some instructions about being careful not to bump into carts or racks of vials, or bottles filled with lethal bugs or chemicals, and so forth.
Zollner said, "All right, please follow me, and I will show you what goes on here so you can tell your friends and colleagues that we are not making anthrax bombs." He laughed, then said in a serious tone, "Zone Five is off-limits because you need special vaccinations, and also training to put on the biohazard suits and respirators and all of that. Also, the basement is off-limits."
"Why," I asked, "is the basement off-limits?"
"Because that's where we hide the dead aliens and the Nazi scientists." He laughed again. I love being the straight man for a fat Ph.D. with a Dr. Strange-love accent. Really. More to the point, I knew that Stevens had indeed spoken to Zollner. I would have liked to have been a tsetse fly on that wall.
Mr. Foster attempted humor and said, "I thought the aliens and the Nazis were in the underground bunkers."
"No, the dead aliens are in the lighthouse," Zollner said. "We moved the Nazis out of the bunkers when they complained about the vampires."
Everyone laughed-ha, ha, ha. Humor in biocontainment. I should write to Reader's Digest.
As we walked, Dr. Zany said, "It's safe in this zone-mostly we have genetic engineering labs, some offices, electron microscopes-low-risk, low-contagion work here."
We walked through cement block corridors and every once in a while, Dr. Zollner would open a yellow steel door and say hello to someone inside an office or laboratory and inquire as to their work.
There were all sorts of weird windowless rooms, including a place that looked like a wine cellar except the bottles in the racks were filled with cultures of living cells, according to Zollner.
Zollner gave us a commentary as we walked through the battleship-gray corridors. "There are newly emerging viruses that affect animals or humans or both. We humans and the higher animal species have no immunological responses to many of these deadly diseases. Present antiviral drugs are not very effective, and so the key to avoiding a future worldwide catastrophe is antiviral vaccines, and the key to the new vaccines is genetic engineering."
Max asked, " What catastrophe?"
Dr. Zollner continued walking and talking very breezily, I thought, considering the subject. He said, "Well, regarding animal diseases, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, for instance, could wipe out much of this nation's livestock and ruin the livelihoods of millions of people. The cost of other foods would probably quadruple. The foot-and-mouth virus is perhaps the most contagious and virulent in nature, which is why the biological warfare people have always been fascinated by it. A good day for the bio-warfare gentlemen is a day when their scientists can genetically engineer the FMD virus to infect humans. But worse, I think, some of these viruses mutate on their own and become dangerous to people."
No one had a comment or question on that. We peeked in on more labs, and Zollner would always say a few encouraging words to the pale eggheads in white who labored in surroundings that made me nervous just looking at them. He'd say things like, "What have we learned today? Have we discovered anything new?" And so on. It appeared that he was well liked, or at least tolerated by his scientists.
As we turned down yet another in a series of seemingly endless corridors, Zollner continued his lecture. "In 1983, for instance, a highly contagious and deadly influenza broke out in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There were seventeen million dead. Chickens, I mean. Poultry. But you see what I'm getting at. The last big deadly human influenza epidemic in the world was in 1918. There were about twenty million dead worldwide, including five hundred thousand in the United States. Based on our present population, the equivalent number of dead now would be approximately one and a half million people. Could you imagine such a thing today? And the 1918 virus wasn't particularly virulent, and of course, travel was much slower then and less frequent. Today, the highways and skyways can spread an infectious virus around the world in days. The good news about the deadliest viruses, such as Ebola, is that they kill so fast, they barely have time to leave an African village before everyone in it is dead."
I asked, "Is there a one o'clock ferry?"
Dr. Zollner laughed. "You are feeling somewhat nervous, yes? Nothing to fear here. We are very cautious. Very respectful of the little bugs in this building."