[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
to build something like this?"
He shrugged. "I guess so. The bacteriophage would be the toughest.
Give me Fort Dietrick, about twenty or thirty million dollars, and a staff
of a dozen really good medical technicians, and I
think I could do it in half a year or so."
Sandra shivered slightly, even in the controlled at-mosphere of the labs. "Now
I see why they had all those conventions against this sort of thing.
Edelman that funny little ugly FBI man said upstairs that it was an erector
set for scientists."
"At least that," Mark said grimly. "And somebody's really made a
nasty toy here. Or toys.
There's one other thing."
She looked up at him. "What?"
"The empty cylinders contained, of course, some of the Boland strain.
Apparently it's kept in a nice mixture of freon and other gases which make it
totally dormant until exposed to air. Some of the stuff would be left,
naturally."
"Naturally," she agreed. "So?"
"It's different, Sandy. It had the same ancestors, but that's all. It's not
the same bug at all."
She stared at him. "So much for the universal vac-cine, then," she said
flatly.
He smiled. "What can be engineered can be de-stroyed," he assured her. "At
least we got the start. Now, as for me, I think a good eight hours and I'll
Page 27
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
lick it. You get some sleep, too. You're as dead as I am."
She smiled weakly. "Okay, we'll both go. You going home?"
"No, I'll go beddy-bye upstairs in the clinic. You?"
She sighed. "I'm going to try and make it. I need clothes, a shower, and
sleep. They know where to find me if they need me. I'm only the paper-pusher
here."
"No you're not," he said kindly. "You're the glue.
"
Her sleep was deep and dreamless, the best sleep, the kind her body and mind
craved. In her own apartment, in her own bed, a comforting sleep that, deep
down, she knew might be her only chance for many days.
As it always did, the telephone's constant ringing brought her out of it. She
sought to ignore it, even as it drew her consciousness to the surface.
She awoke as if drugged, and reached for the phone. As she did her eyes fell
on the little electric clock next to it.
It said 4:12 P.M.
My god!
she thought.
I've slept almost thirteen hours!
She picked up the insistent phone. "O'Connell," she managed, her mouth full of
mush.
"Sandy? This is Mark," came a familiar voice. "I figured you'd still be out.
Good girl. Now get over to the labs here as soon as you can."
She tried to shake the sleep from her. "What's happening?"
"I I can't tell you right now," he said hesitantly. "Something nasty.
Something I stumbled on by ac-cident. Just well, get over here quick as you
can, okay? I'll be in my cubbyhole."
She was puzzled, but said, "All right, Mark," and hung up.
* * *
It's funny how when you oversleep you feel like you've never slept at all, she
thought for the tenth time since starting out. The trip was a quick one,
under an hour if you had the traffic with you, and she pulled into a space
assigned to NIH bigwigs and hurried inside. Mark's tone on the phone worried
her. Something nasty, he'd said. Something I stumbled on by accident.
.
Of course most business couldn't be done by phone anyway security
and all that. But his tone he'd been upset, terribly upset, and fear
tinged in his voice.
What would cause fear in the medical Rock of Gi-braltar?
There were the usual procedures to go through. Nine guards, twenty-six TV
cameras maybe more, they never told you everything four airlocks and the whole
sterilization mess.
Finally in her medical whites she walked again down that familiar
yellow-painted corridor to those double doors and pushed them open.
Nobody was there. The computer was on, the whole lab was activated, there was
even a sample on the electron microscope. A pad lay on the floor as if hastily
dropped, and she picked it up. It
held a lengthy serological series in Mark's handwriting. He had been
trying to find the key, the organisms from which the two Wilderness
Organisms had been bred.
She was curious, but not concerned.
He went out for more coffee, probably, she told herself.
She set-tled down to wait for him, passing the time until his return by going
over his notes. They were in a typi-cal doctor's scrawl, and highly
disorganized, and outside her specialty at that, but she roughly fol-lowed
what he was doing.
Having isolated from the protein "punctuation mark" the first signal in the
DNA message of the
Page 28
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Wilderness Organism, he and the computer were trying to duplicate it using
computer models.
Dr. Denise Ferman, a petite little black woman who was a crack expert at
toxicology, stuck her head in the door.
"Oh, hi, Sandy!" she said. "Where's Mark?" "In the canteen, most
likely," Sandra replied.
Ferman shook her head. "No, I just came from there. He must be up top I'm
pretty sure he's not in A-complex."
That worried Sandra. She reached over, pressed an intercom stud and three
numbers on its face.
"Security," said a voice in her ear.
"This is Dr. O'Connell," she said. "Is Dr. Mark Spiegelman in A-complex or did
he come out?"
"Let me check," said the voice. There were a few seconds of dead air, then the
voice returned.
"Dr. Spiegelman logged into A-complex at 12:15, cleared security and decontam
at 12:45, and has not yet emerged."
"All right, thank you," she said, hanging up. "He's got to be here someplace,"
she said to Denise
Ferman. "Security says he is."
The toxicologist looked puzzled. "Let's go see," she suggested.
There were eight one-person control centers in A-complex, four multi-person
labs, and a small automated canteen. They checked them all.
Nobody had seen or heard Spiegelman in hours. "This is impossible," Ferman
insisted. "You can't disappear out of a place like this. He has to have gone
up, no matter what security says."
She didn't know why, but she was suddenly feel-ing nervous and a little
scared. "I'm going back up," she told the scientist. "You let me know if he
somehow turns up here."
Ferman nodded, and Sandra O'Connell began the long procedure back
out. Something smelled and smelled bad. First that strange phone call, then
this. At each step in the chain she questioned the hu-man attendants. None
had seen Dr. Spiegelman leave, and his initial passes were still there. Once
out, she called down to Denise Ferman once more.
"Still nothing," the toxicologist told her. "He isn't here."
She went to security and made a scene. They, too, assured her that it was
impossible for him not
to be down there, but when they checked with the others they agreed to go down
and take a look.
A huge black sergeant and four very efficient-looking squad members went down,
through the same procedure, checks, and watches that made it impossible for
anyone to just vanish.
The security team was very efficient without being intrusive. They searched
the obvious places, then the less than obvious, then the impossible places as
well.
Over an hour after they went in, the intercom at the security central desk
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]