“The military is isolating the crash site. They’ve already done so, to the tune of several miles. There is a body there, already, and that body belongs to someone not on our payroll. That body is civilian. That means it’s possible, from what I understand, that the bacteria has spread from the site.”
“You have people on the ground?”
“We are contacting local doctors and hospitals, and the military has people there — they have a base in the area, and I’m trusting we can all coordinate on this, and that we can play a leadership role in the coordination, since it’s NASA’s mess.”
Henderson grunted and then said something about CDC being primarily an information and education agency. But they too had research affiliates among medical people in participating regions.
“Then the last question is,” Anderson or Henderson said, “do you have any reason to believe that you have contained the astronaut’s remains?”
“We have done statistical modeling,” Rob Antoine said. “There are small pieces of the craft in a debris stream, starting south of the border and moving northwest, through the empty part of the state of New Mexico, across the southern part of the Sonoran Desert. We have helicopters working to isolate every piece of the capsule in this debris stream.We believe we may be able to find every piece of significance. Wherever there is aeronautical or biological debris, we will be working on it. And I’ll have more for you later when I hear from our people. I imagine if somebody finds… a piece of the body, of Colonel Richards, who was, I should say, a personal friend of mine, we will probably hear about it as soon as it happens.”
With that, they rang off.
The problem was pieces of the body, true. Rob Antoine’s nightmares, which were mostly drug induced these days, what with the twenty-four-hour days that he’d been working, had to do with the body, with the remainder of Jed Richards that he feared was going to turn up everywhere and advertise the debacle that the Mars mission had become. In the recurrent nightmare, some portion of Richards was always trying to find a way to write, as if the most devastating thing an undead astronaut could do was somehow put pen to paper, to tell Rob that NASA was responsible for what had become of him. NASA had reduced a fine astronaut, and an eloquent spokesman for the Mars mission, a veteran, a patriot, a poet, a family man, to a disembodied head — because that was one outcome that Antoine’s dream life favored — or to a headless, armless body that was still able to type somehow. With its toes.
The military had verified that it had subjected the crash site near Rio Blanco, the site with the larger part of the debris, to incendiary devices designed to eliminate any biological material. A controlled burn. Which meant that any mission data at that location was also entirely lost. Rob had advanced in the Mars mission because he loved the neglected part of interplanetary research, not the life-on-Mars stuff, but, for example, the study of Martian winds. He loved the way the winds worked on Mars, and he had promoted a number of studies of these winds, and none of those studies had ever been completed by the poor, lonely astronauts who had gone there to die. All that ancillary data, the topographical data about an undisturbed planet that had been unchanged for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, that was all obscured by the human story. And it was all going to get a lot more human very soon. If that guy, that miner who had been found dead near the crash site, was infected.
Debra Levin stretched languidly and looked over at him, yawning.
“What did they say?”
“CDC? They are not happy.”
Debra, at some way station between nap and awful truth, gave the news a respectful silence.
“At a certain point,” she said at last, “we have to start working more directly on limiting the agency’s liability in all of this. That should be one of our priorities, along with attempting to maximize the science that is available. We should get out, leave it to other agencies.”
There were questions Rob wanted to ask, beginning with: Did Debra Levin know and approve of the work on biological agents that was taking place on the Mars mission? Was she fully informed by the Department of Defense? And what about her predecessor, Anatoly Thatcher? She could easily be reporting to the highest levels of government without telling Vance Gibraltar or Rob or anyone else. She was capable of making even the idlest conversation seem like it was material to your annual review. Your career hung on the answer to any simple inquiry. And for this reason he left well enough alone.
“I’m going to call the guy at URB. Everybody keeps suggesting him, the Korean guy, does stem cell issues. Subcontracted for the Company at one time.”
“I already contacted him. You talk to him, and if I have to get on the line, I will.”
The plane had banked south, and brought into view the great barrenness of the desert out the window. The closest thing to Mars on Earth. Rob dialed the Korean researcher while he watched the waves of terrain below him, the bottom of that long-ago ocean.
The voice of Woo Lee Koo was sleepy and unconcerned, with an accent thick enough that Rob was grateful for his interminable linguistic pacing. There was some getting-to-know-you conversation between the two, and a reiteration of the material that Debra had used when speaking with Koo the night before. The sad truth was that Rob, who had taken on a lot of the damage control out of a sense of responsibility, was now getting used to coming up with euphemisms.
Koo said, “As I understood the instructions, I was to keep my eyes open and to let your people know if I saw or heard anything unusual in the aftermath of the crash.”
“That’s very helpful, and we appreciate that. But we need to alert you to what we know now. The playing field has changed. Already. It’s possible,” Rob went on, “that there was a murder near the crash, and that this murder is somehow related to the crash itself.”
“Please go on.”
“Since we are unsure about the effect of the relevant bacteria and its infection postmortem, we are unable to say whether this unfortunate mortality has anything to do with the crash. The facts are as follows: there was a mining professional near the crash site, a man who we believe made his way to the debris after it touched down and who was found dead nearby not long after. Our worry is that Colonel Richards, our astronaut, may have been somehow responsible.”
“How could he have been responsible?” Koo asked.
“Strictly speaking, he couldn’t have been. Since he was killed when the mission was aborted. But anecdotal reports of M. thanatobacillus infections on Mars itself suggest that parts of the body may continue to function, may continue to have muscular capabilities, after heart and brain function has stopped, at least as we understand it here on Earth.”
“I have made clear my skepticism about this.”
“We understand your skepticism, and we share it, but we are not in a position to allow even unlikely medical claims to go uninvestigated. We have the military on the case, and we are trying to fend off the local police, because once the local police are involved, we believe that there will be publicity about the crash and the quarantine. As you may have seen online, we are already trying to balance the public’s need to know with our own institutional needs. What we would like is for you to go out to the quarantine site. To look for Colonel Richards.
“If you should find some portion of him, and we are able to provide you with distinguishing markings, for example that he is missing a finger on his left hand, we want you to go ahead and begin looking at some of the tissue under the microscope and see if you can find evidence of any particular pathogen. We believe the bacteria is related to sepsis. It’s our understanding, Dr. Koo, that this kind of research is related to some of the applications of stem cells that you have been looking at in your own work, so perhaps there will be compensation in that way.”