DAY 7 5:12 A.M.
She came forward into the room, smiling. “You know, Jack,” she said, “if I didn’t trust you so completely, I’d think there was something going on between the two of you.”
“Really,” I said. I stepped away from Mae a little, while she typed quickly. I felt tremendously uneasy. “Why would you think that?”
“Well, you had your heads together about something,” she said, as she came toward us. “You looked quite fascinated by what you were seeing on the screen. What’re you looking at, anyway?”
“It’s ah, technical.”
“May I see? I’m interested in technical things. Didn’t Ricky tell you I had a new technical interest? I do. I’m fascinated by this technology. It’s a new world, isn’t it? The twenty-first century has arrived. Don’t get up, Mae. I’ll just look over your shoulder.” By now she had walked around the bench, and could see the screen. She frowned at the image, which showed bacterial cultures on a red growth medium. White circles within red circles. “What’s this?”
Mae said, “Bacterial colonies. We’ve got some contamination of the coli stock. I had to take one tank offline. We’re trying to figure out what’s wrong.”
“Probably phage, don’t you think?” Julia said. “Isn’t that what it usually is with bacterial stocks—a virus?” She sighed. “Everything about molecular manufacturing is so delicate. Things go wrong so easily, and so often. You have to keep alert for trouble.” She glanced at me, and at Mae. “But surely this isn’t what you’ve been looking at all this time ...”
“Actually, it is,” I said.
“What? Pictures of mold?”
“Bacteria.”
“Yes, bacteria. You’ve been looking at this the whole time, Mae?”
She shrugged, nodded. “Yes, Julia. It’s my job.”
“And I don’t question your dedication for a moment,” Julia said. “But do you mind?” Her hand darted forward and hit the back key in the corner of the keyboard. The previous screen showed more pictures of bacterial growth.
The next screen showed a virus electron micrograph.
And then a table of growth data over the last twelve hours.
Julia continued to hit the back key half a dozen times more, but all she saw were images of bacteria and viruses, graphs, and data tables. She took her hand away from the keyboard. “You seem to be devoting a lot of time to this. Is it really so important?”
“Well, it’s a contaminant,” Mae said. “If we don’t control it, we’ll have to shut down the entire system.”
“Then by all means keep at it.” She turned to me. “Want to have breakfast? I’d imagine you must be starving.”
“Sounds great,” I said.
“Come with me,” Julia said. “We’ll make it together.”
“Okay,” I said. I glanced at Mae. “I’ll see you later. Let me know if I can do anything to help.”
I left with Julia. We started down the corridor to the residences.
“I don’t know why,” Julia said, “but that woman bothers me.”
“I don’t know why either. She’s very good. Very thoughtful, very conscientious.”
“And very pretty.”
“Julia ...”
“Is that why you won’t kiss me? Because you’re involved with her?”
“Julia, for Christ’s sake.”
She stared at me, waiting.
“Look,” I said. “It’s been a rough couple of weeks for everybody. Frankly, you’ve been difficult to live with.”
“I’m sure I have.”
“And frankly, I’ve been pretty angry with you.”
“With good reason, I know. I’m sorry for what I put you through.” She leaned over, kissed me on the cheek. “But it feels so distant now. I don’t like the tension between us. What do you say we kiss and make up?”
“Maybe later,” I said. “We have a lot to do now.”
She got playful, puckering her lips, kissing air. “Oooh, come on, sweetie, just a little smooch ... come on, it won’t kill you ...”
“Later,” I said.
She sighed, and gave up. We continued down the corridor in silence for a while. Then she said, in a serious voice, “You’re avoiding me, Jack. And I want to know why.” I didn’t answer her, I just gave a long-suffering sigh and kept walking, acting like what she’d said was beneath response. In fact, I was badly worried.
I couldn’t keep refusing to kiss her forever; sooner or later she’d figure out what I knew. Maybe she already had. Because even when Julia was acting girlish, she seemed sharper, more alert than she’d ever been before. I had the feeling she didn’t miss anything. And I had the same feeling about Ricky. It was as if they were tuned up, ultra-aware. And I was worried about what I’d seen on Mae’s monitor. The black cloud that seemed to come from Julia’s mouth. Had it really been there, on the video? Because as far as I knew, swarms killed their prey on contact. They were merciless. Now Julia seemed to be harboring a swarm. How could that be? Did she have some sort of immunity? Or was the swarm tolerating her, not killing her for some reason? And what about Ricky and Vince? Did they have immunity, too?
One thing was clear: Julia and Ricky did not want us to call anybody. They had deliberately isolated us in the desert, knowing that they would have only a few hours until the helicopter arrived. So apparently, that’s all the time they needed. To do what? Kill us? Or just infect us? What?
Walking down the corridor next to my wife, I felt as if I was walking with a stranger. With somebody I didn’t know anymore. Somebody who was immensely dangerous. I glanced at my watch. The helicopter would be here in less than two hours, now.
Julia smiled. “Got an appointment?”
“No. Just thinking it’s time for breakfast.”
“Jack,” she said. “Why won’t you be honest with me?”
“I’m being honest ...”
“No. You were wondering how long until the helicopter comes.”
I shrugged.
“Two hours,” she said. And she added, “I’ll bet you’ll be glad to get out of here, won’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I’m not leaving until everything is done.”
“Why? What’s left to be done?”
By now we had reached the residential unit. I could smell bacon and eggs cooking. Ricky came around the corner. He smiled heartily when he saw me. “Hey, Jack. How’d you sleep?”
“I slept okay.”
“Really? ’Cause you look a little tired.”
“I had bad dreams,” I said.
“Oh yes? Bad dreams? Bummer.”
“It happens sometimes,” I said.
We all went into the kitchen. Bobby was making breakfast. “Scrambled eggs with chives and cream cheese,” he said cheerfully. “What kind of toast do you guys want?” Julia wanted wheat toast. Ricky wanted English muffin. I said I didn’t want anything. I was looking at Ricky, noticing again how strong he appeared. Beneath his T-shirt, the muscles were well defined, cut. He caught me staring at him. “Something wrong?”
“No. Just admiring your butch look.” I tried to be light, but the truth was that I felt incredibly uncomfortable in the kitchen with all of them around me. I kept thinking of Charley, and how swiftly they had attacked him. I wasn’t hungry; I just wanted to get out of there. But I couldn’t see how to do it without arousing suspicion.
Julia went to the refrigerator, opened the door. The champagne was in there. “You guys ready to celebrate now?”
“Sure,” Bobby said. “Sounds great, a little mimosa in the morning ...”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “Julia, I’m going to insist you take this situation seriously. We’re not out of the woods yet. We have to get the Army in here, and we haven’t been able to call. It’s not time to break out the champagne.”
She pouted. “Oh, you’re such a spoilsport ...”
“Spoilsport hell. You’re being ridiculous.”
“Oooh, baby, don’t get mad, just kiss me, kiss me.” She puckered her lips again, and leaned across the table.
But it seemed like getting angry was the only move I had. “God damn it, Julia,” I said, raising my voice, “the only reason we are in this mess is because you didn’t take it seriously in the first place. You had a runaway swarm out there in the desert for what—two weeks? And instead of eradicating it, you played with it. You fooled around until it got out of control, and as a result three people are dead. This is not a goddamn celebration, Julia. It’s a disaster. And I am not drinking any fucking champagne while I am here and neither is anyone else.” I took the bottle to the sink and smashed it. I turned back to her. “Got it?”
Stony-faced, she said, “That was completely unnecessary.”
I saw Ricky looking at me thoughtfully. As if he was trying to decide something. Bobby turned his back while he cooked, as if he was embarrassed by a marital spat. Had they gotten to Bobby? I thought I saw a thin black line at his neck, but I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t dare stare.
“Unnecessary?” I said, full of outrage. “Those people were my friends. And they were your friends, Ricky. And yours, Bobby. And I don’t want to hear this celebration shit anymore!” I turned and stomped out of the room. As I left, Vince was coming in. “Better take it easy, pal,” Vince said. “You’ll give yourself a stroke.”
“Fuck off,” I said.
Vince raised his eyebrows. I brushed past him.
“You’re not fooling anybody, Jack!” Julia called after me. “I know what you’re really up to!”
My stomach flipped. But I kept walking.
“I can see right through you, Jack. I know you’re going back to her.”
“Damn right!” I said.
Was that what Julia really thought? I didn’t believe it for a moment. She was just trying to mislead me, to keep me off guard until ... what? What were they going to do? There were four of them. And only two of us—at least, there were two if they hadn’t already gotten to Mae.
Mae wasn’t in the biology laboratory. I looked around and saw that a side door was ajar, leading downstairs to the underground level where the fermentation chambers were installed. Up close, they were much larger than I had realized, giant stainless spheres about six feet across. They were surrounded by a maze of pipes and valves and temperature control units. It was warm here, and very noisy.
Mae was standing by the third unit, making notes on a clipboard and shutting a valve. She had a rack of test tubes at her feet. I went down and stood beside her. She looked at me, then shot a glance toward the ceiling, where a security camera was mounted. She walked around to the other side of the tank, and I followed her. Over here, the tank blocked the camera. She said, “They slept with the lights on.”
I nodded. I knew what it meant, now.
“They’re all infected,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And it’s not killing them.”
“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t understand why.”
“It must have evolved,” she said, “to tolerate them.”
“That fast?”
“Evolution can happen fast,” she said. “You know the Ewald studies.” I did. Paul Ewald had studied cholera. What he found was that the cholera organism would quickly change to sustain an epidemic. In places where there were no sanitary water supplies but perhaps a ditch running through a village, the cholera was virulent, prostrating the victim and killing him where he fell from massive overwhelming diarrhea. The diarrhea contained millions of cholera organisms; it would run into the water supply and infect others in the village. In this way the cholera reproduced, and the epidemic continued.
But when there was sanitary water supply, the virulent strain could not reproduce. The victim would die where he fell but his diarrhea would not enter the water supply. Others would not be infected, and the epidemic would fade. Under those circumstances, the epidemic evolved to a milder form, enabling the victim to walk around and spread the milder organisms by contact, dirty linens, and so on.
Mae was suggesting that the same thing had happened to the swarms. They had evolved to a milder form, which could be transmitted from one person to another. “It’s creepy,” I said.
She nodded. “But what can we do about it?”
And then she began to cry silently, tears running down her cheeks. Mae was always so strong. Seeing her upset unnerved me now. She was shaking her head. “Jack, there’s nothing we can do. There’s four of them. They’re stronger than we are. They’re going to kill us the way they killed Charley.”
She pressed her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her. But I co............