Mount Dragon (36 page)

Because the Fever Tank was decontaminated each week-night and again over the weekend, Carson had rarely been inside this late. Although the red nocturnal illumination was creepy and a little disorienting, he preferred it to what had come just before. The full-scale stage-one alert drills—which had begun to supplant the less severe stage-two and stage-three drills since Brandon-Smith's death—were grim affairs. Nye was now personally supervising the drills, directing events from the security substation on the bottom level of the Fever Tank, and his brusque tones had rung irritatingly through Carson's headset.

The one advantage of the frequent drills was that Carson had become more adept at moving around the Fever Tank in his bluesuit. He found that he could maneuver quickly through the corridors and around the labs, avoiding protrusions deftly, hooking and unhooking his air hoses to his suit instinctively, like breathing.

He looked away from the clock toward de Vaca, who was staring skeptically back at him.

“Just how do you plan to test this theory of yours?” came her voice over the private channel.

Instead of taking the time to answer, Carson turned to the small lab freezer, dialed its combination, and removed two small test tubes containing X-FLU samples. The tops of the test tubes were covered with thick rubber seals. The virus existed as a small white crystalline film at the bottom of each tube.
If I handle this stuff a million times
, he thought,
I'll never get used to the fact that it's potentially more lethal to the human race than the largest hydrogen bomb
. He placed both tubes inside the bioprophylaxis table and sealed it carefully, waiting for the samples to reach room temperature.

“First,” he said, “we're going to split open the virus and get rid of the genetic material.”

Moving to a silver cabinet on the far wall of the lab, he removed some reagents and two sealed bottles labeled D
EOXYRIBASE
.

“Give me a number-four Soloway, please,” he said to de Vaca.

Since hypodermics were considered too dangerous for anything other than animal inoculation in the Fever Tank, other devices for transferring materials had to be used. The Soloway Displacer, named after its inventor, used blunt-ended plastic vacuum-needles to siphon liquid from one container to another.

Carson waited for de Vaca to place the instrument inside the bioprophylaxis table. Then, moving his gloves through the rubber openings in the front end of the table, he inserted one nozzle of the Soloway device into a reagent and the other through the rubber seal in one of the two test tubes. A cloudy liquid squirted into the tube. Gingerly, Carson swirled the tube in one gloved hand. The liquid became clear.

“We just killed a trillion viruses,” Carson said. “Now to undress them. Take off their protein coats.”

Using the device, Carson added a few drops of a blue liquid through the rubber seal, then removed .5 cc's of the resulting solution, injecting it into the deoxyribase container. He waited while the enzyme broke up the vital RNA, first into its base pairs, then into nucleic acids.

“Now, to get rid of the nucleic acids.” He tested the precise acidity of the solution, then performed a remote-assist titration with a high-pH chemical. Then he drained off the solution, centrifuged out the precipitate, and transferred the pure, unfiltered X-FLU molecules that remained to a small flask.

“Let's see what this little old molecule looks like,” he said.

“X-ray diffraction?”

“You got it.”

Carson carefully placed the X-FLU flask into a yellow biobox and sealed it. Then, holding the box carefully in front of him, he removed his air hose and followed de Vaca down the corridor toward the central hub of the Fever Tank, ducking at last through a hatchway into a deserted lab. A single red light glowed from the ceiling. Already small, the compartment was cramped by the eight-foot stainless-steel column that dominated the center of the room. Next to the column was an instrument housing that contained a computer workstation. There were no knobs, switches or dials on the column; the diffraction machine was controlled entirely by computer.

“Warm it up,” Carson said. “I'll prepare the specimen.”

De Vaca sat down at the workstation and began typing. There was a click and a soft, low hum that gradually increased in pitch until it disappeared into inaudibility, followed by the hiss of air being evacuated from the interior of the column. De Vaca typed in additional commands, tuning the diffraction beam to the correct wavelength. In a few moments, the terminal beeped its readiness.

“Open the mount, please,” Carson said.

De Vaca typed a command, and a titanium-alloy stage mount slid out of the base of the column. It contained a small removable well.

Using a micropipette, Carson removed a single drop of the protein solution and placed it in the well. The stage mount slid shut with a hiss.

“Chill.”

There was a loud drumming noise as the machine froze the drop of solution, lowering its temperature toward absolute zero.

“Vacuum.”

Carson waited impatiently as the air was removed from the specimen chamber. The resulting vacuum would force all water molecules from the solution. As it did so, a faint electro-magnetic field would allow the protein molecules to settle into a lowest-energy configuration. What remained would be a microscopic film of pure protein molecules, spaced with mathematical regularity on the titanium plate, held steady at two degrees above absolute zero.

“We're green,” de Vaca said.

“Then let's go.”

What happened next always seemed like magic to Carson. The huge machine began to generate X-rays, shooting them at the speed of light down the vacuum inside the column. When the high-energy X-rays struck the protein molecules, they would be diffracted by the crystal lattice structures. The scattered beams would be digitally recorded with an array of CCD chips and sent, as an image, to the computer screen.

Carson watched as a blurred image appeared on the screen, bands of dark and light. “Focus, please,” he said.

Using an optical mouse, de Vaca manipulated a series of diffraction gratings inside the column, which tuned and focused the X-rays onto the specimen at the bottom. Slowly, the blurred image came into focus: a complicated series of dark and light circles, reminding Carson of the surface of a pond stippled with rain.

“Great,” he said softly. “Easy does it.”

The X-ray diffraction machine took just the right touch, Carson knew, and de Vaca had that touch.

“That's as sharp as it gets,” she said. “Ready for film and data feed.”

“I want sixteen angles, please,” Carson said.

De Vaca typed in the commands, and the CCD chips captured the diffraction pattern from sixteen separate angles.

“Series complete,” she said.

“Let's feed this into the central computer.”

The machine's computer began loading the diffraction data into the GeneDyne net, where it was sent across a dedicated land line at 110,000 bits per second to the GeneDyne supercomputer in Boston. All Mount Dragon jobs had high priority, and the supercomputer immediately began translating the X-ray diffraction pattern into a three-dimensional model of the X-FLU molecule. For over a minute, those working late in the GeneDyne home office noticed a perceptible slowdown while several trillion floating-point operations were performed and fed back to Mount Dragon, where the image was reassembled on the diffraction machine's workstation.

An image appeared on the workstation screen: a breathtakingly complex cluster of vibrantly colored spheres, glowing in rainbows of rich purples, reds, oranges, and yellows: the protein molecule that made up the viral coat of X-FLU.

“There it is,” Carson said, peering at the image over de Vaca's shoulder.

“The cause of such terrible suffering and death,” came de Vaca's voice in his headset. “And look how beautiful it is.”

Carson continued gazing at the image for a moment, mesmerized. Then he straightened up. “Let's purify the second test tube with the GEF filtration process. It's almost decontam time, we have to vacate the Tank for an hour or two anyway. Then we'll come back, take another look at it, and see if the molecule has changed.”

“Lots of luck,” de Vaca grumbled. “But I'm too tired to object. Let's go.”

 

By the time the second, filtered X-FLU molecule crystallized on the computer screen, dawn was breaking over the desert floor fifty feet above their heads. Once again Carson marveled at the beauty of the molecule: how surreal it was, and how deadly.

“Let's compare the two molecules side by side,” he said.

De Vaca split the screen into two windows and called up the image of the unfiltered X-FLU molecule from the computer's memory, displaying it side by side with the filtered molecule.

“They look the same to me,” she said.

“Rotate them both ninety degrees along the X axis.”

“No difference,” de Vaca said.

“Ninety degrees along the Y axis.”

They watched as the images rotated on the computer screen. Suddenly, the silence turned electric.

“
Madre de Dios
,” breathed de Vaca.

“Look how one of the tertiary folds of the filtered molecule has uncoiled!” said Carson excitedly. “The weak sulfur bonds along the entire side have become unstuck.”

“Same molecule, same chemical composition, different shape,” said de Vaca. “You were right.”

“What's that?” Carson asked, looking at her with a grin.

“Okay,
cabrón
. You win this one.”

“And it's the
shape
of a protein molecule that makes all the difference.” Carson stepped away from the diffraction machine. “Now we know why X-FLU keeps mutating back to its deadly form. The last thing we always do before the in vivo test is to purify the solution using the GEF process. And it's the GEF process
itself
that causes the mutation.”

“Burt's original filtration technique was to blame,” de Vaca answered. “He was doomed from the beginning.”

Carson nodded. “Yet nobody, least of all Burt, thought the process itself could be flawed. It's been used before without any problems. And here we've been banging our heads against the wrong door all this time. The gene splicing, everything else, was fine to begin with. It's like sifting through the wreckage of a plane crash to determine the cause of an accident, when in reality the problem was faulty directions from the control tower.”

He leaned wearily against a cabinet. The full significance of the discovery began to sink in, like a flame in his gut. “Hot damn, Susana,” he breathed. “After all this time, we've solved it at last! All we need to do is change the filtration process. It may take some time to correct, but we know the real culprit now. X-FLU is as good as manufactured.” He could almost picture the expression on Scopes's face.

De Vaca was silent.

“You agree, don't you?” Carson prompted.

“Yes,” said de Vaca.

“So what's the problem? Why the long face?”

She looked at him for a long moment. “We know the flaw in the filtration process causes mutations in the X-FLU protein coat. What I want to know is, what the hell does it do to PurBlood?”

Carson stared back at her, not comprehending. “Susana, who cares?”

“What do you mean, who cares?” de Vaca said, flaring up. “PurBlood could be dangerous as hell!”

“It's not the same thing at all,” Carson replied. “We don't know that the filtration flaw would affect anything other than the X-FLU molecule. And besides, the kind of purity necessary for X-FLU doesn't necessarily apply to hemoglobin.”

“Easy for you to say,
cabrón
. You're not putting the stuff into your veins.”

Carson fought to keep his temper. This woman was attempting to spoil the greatest triumph of his life. “Susana, think a moment. Burt tested it on himself, and he survived. It's been in phased FDA testing now for months. If anybody had become sick, we'd have heard of it. Teece would have known. And, believe me, the FDA would have yanked it.”

“Nobody getting sick? So tell me, where's Burt now? In a fucking hospital, that's where he is!”

“His nervous breakdown came
months
after he tested himself with PurBlood.”

“There still might be a connection. Maybe it breaks down in the body, or something.” She looked at him defiantly. “I want to know what the GEF process does to PurBlood.”

Carson sighed deeply. “Look. It's seven-thirty in the morning. We've just made one of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of GeneDyne. And I'm dead on my feet. I'm going to report this to Singer. Then I'm going to take a shower, and get some well-deserved rest.”

“Go ahead and get your gold star,” de Vaca snapped. “I'm going to stay here and finish what we started.”

She switched off the machine, disconnected the air hose from her suit valve with an angry yank, then turned and marched out of the compartment. As he watched her go, Carson heard other voices on the intercom, people announcing their arrival in the lab. The workday was beginning. He wearily pushed himself away from the cabinet. God, he was tired. De Vaca could tinker with PurBlood as much as she liked. He was going to spread the good news.

 

Carson stepped outside, breathing in the cool morning air with relish. He was tired, but elated. While there might be other snags ahead, he knew that this, at long last, was the home stretch.

Ducking back into the administration building, he bounded up the stairs and headed for Singer's corner office. At the far end of the main hall, he could see the director's door standing open, the light reflecting brilliantly off the white surfaces.

As he entered the office, Carson saw Singer sitting near the kiva fireplace. Another man stood before Singer, his back to Carson; a man with a ponytail, wearing a safari hat.