Vitals

by Greg Bear

  We climbed to sixteen, the topmost floor in Anthrax Central. There, Delbarco applied her shoulder to what looked like a medium-security bank-vault door, heaved it wide, and motioned us through. The door made a hydraulic sigh as it tried to close. She jammed a screwdriver in the locking wheel before it could throw its bolts home.

  Beyond the vault door, a hundred or more horizontal steel cylinders, about the size of antique iron lungs, stretched in five long rows to the opposite wall, separated only by square support columns and, at the center of the room, two small, glass-walled laboratories or monitoring stations.

  The cylinders had been mounted on cement platforms. Two thin copper pipes, no wider than a pinky, and a stiff white electrical cable emerged from the end of each cylinder.

  “We’re going to need some help understanding this.” Delbarco blinked rapidly behind her plastic hood. “Not that I’m keen to know,” she added.

  I gripped a steel handrail, climbed a set of concrete steps, and looked over the top of the first tank on my right. A long, narrow glass window provided a clear view of the contents. Inside, bathed in a few inches of reddish fluid more like thin jam or ketchup than blood, lay the naked body of a man. Slight, balding, in late middle age, he seemed to be trapped in light but troubled sleep. His facial muscles and fingers twitched, and his eyes jerked beneath their lids. Thick ripples spread across the red fluid.

  Above the man’s head, something clicked, and a silvery blue light came on inside the tank. Full spectrum, I thought, and looked up with spots swimming in front of my eyes.

  A faint electrical hum filled the chamber. Lights had switched on in all the tanks, throwing ranks of fuzzy blue bars on the ceiling.

  Once my eyes adjusted to the new brightness, I could see the man more clearly. Filaments rose from the red liquid and crawled over his fingers, his naked arms, his face, leaving oily trails on the pale, beardless skin.

  With a sense of fascinated dread, I examined the back of his hand. Between the tendons, the skin had formed puckered slits.

  Throat dry, legs wobbly, I climbed down, braced myself, and moved on to four other tanks. Four more men, all naked, two elderly, two middle-aged or perhaps younger, their faces sallow in the silvery glow, all lay in the same red bath, locked in uneasy sleep.

  Ben tapped the end of the fifth tank and pointed to a stamped tin ID plate, the size of a file card, slipped into a holder. Following a twelve-digit string of numbers was a hyphen or dash and what might have been a date: 9/3/61.

  “Maybe they sealed him up in 1961,” Ben suggested. “Like canned tuna.”

  “Self-contained,” I said, and immediately doubted that was possible. With such tiny pipes, there couldn’t have been much in the way of fluids going in and waste going out; maybe only a little fresh water. No pumps, no oxygen. Just the lights. Nothing so simple, whatever the ecological balance, could keep these people alive . . . yet they were alive. Twitching. Troubled. “Failed experiments?” I guessed.

  “Maybe they went crazy from Golokhov’s treatment,” Ben said. “Too crazy to take a chance and let them go out into the world.”

  “Should we breach a tank?” Breaker asked.

  “I wouldn’t dare,” I said. “I wouldn’t know what to look for.” We were in unknown territory.

  “Let’s move on,” Delbarco insisted. Her voice echoed over the rows of tanks. “There may not be much time.”

  We ignored her. Ben and I simultaneously turned to look down the long rows of buzzing steel tanks. The horror had gripped us, and we needed to shake loose, to find answers.

  With a staccato series of clicks, up and down the rows, the tank lights went out in sequence.

  We were like kids in a carnival, determined to see the next freak. Delbarco sensed our giddiness. “Shape up, gentlemen,” she warned. Then, with a pale, tightly controlled expression, she added, “The last thing I want is to know what’s actually going on here. I like to sleep nights.”

  “Too late,” Breaker said.

  Ben raised his hand and snapped his fingers. Within his plastic glove, the sound was not much louder than the plop of a raindrop. “I’ve just had a horrible idea,” he said. “The gallery in her office. There were about a hundred people in the pictures. Count the tanks.”

  “About a hundred,” I said. “If they’re all occupied.”

  Ben stooped and laid his albums on the floor. I stacked mine beside them.

  Breaker took a call on a small walkie-talkie as Ben stalked purposefully between two rows, peering in the murky light at the stamped tin labels. “Maybe we can find a catalog,” he said. “Some ID for these bastards.”

  I followed Ben, wondering what he was up to. “What’s your idea?” I asked.

  “It’s too weird,” he murmured.

  The doors to the monitoring stations in the center of the room were open, but the glassed-in rooms were completely bare. Dust lay in a thin gray film on the floor. Ben left tracks.

  The lights switched on again. The tanks buzzed like electric hives. Instant sunlight every few minutes, regular as clockwork.

  “Think Russian,” Ben called over his shoulder. “Golokhov was playing every side, pitting them against each other, supposedly doing services for everybody, with secret shenanigans as insurance. Who was taking advantage of whom? I can’t believe these are failed experiments. It doesn’t make sense they would keep them lying around, sucking up resources. They would just dispose of them. And I don’t think they were friends. Who would treat their friends this way? Wouldn’t you put them out of their misery?”

  He looped back and marched up another aisle, pausing to read the tags one by one. “I think we’re in a Gulag. A steel Gulag.”

  He stopped and held his finger on a tag, jiggling it experimentally. He had found what he was looking for. “This could be it. Dear, sweet Jesus.” He adjusted the plastic leggings on his suit with muttered curses and clomped up the concrete steps.

  The date on the tag, following the long serial number, was 3/7/53. That would have been a year before the Jenner Building had been handed over to Silk.

  Ben waved for me to climb up beside him. Together, we leaned over the rectangular window in the cylinder.

  The man stretched out in the bath of red fluid had bushy eyebrows, a distinctive thick nose, and a long, back-slung shock of what had probably once been white hair, slicked now and stained pink. Spatters and purposeful ribbons of red gelatin clung to his lined cheeks and his ragged mustache, worked along parted lips.

  I wondered if the red fluid dissolved the lengthening hair, took care of the waste products, kept the confined individuals fed and alive. Self-contained. I still wasn’t convinced, but the dust between the rows of tanks, marred only by our footprints, showed that few if any people had been there for years, perhaps decades.

  “Doesn’t look happy, does he?” Ben asked. “Maybe he’s having bad dreams.”

  “So?”

  “Granted, he isn’t in the best shape. After all, he’s over a hundred and, what, twenty-five, twenty-six years old?” Ben seemed in awe. “Christ. Who had a stroke in the Kuntsevo dacha? Who was leeched but denied access to doctors? Who pointed up at the print on the wall of a boy and a girl bottle-feeding a lamb? Who died on the bed while Svetlana was watching? It was all a sham. Did Beria know?” Ben looked at me almost cross-eyed with a weird excitement.

  “Know what?”

  “Don’t you recognize him? Didn’t they teach you history in school?” Ben paused, then asked plaintively, “Or am I just going crazy?”

  “Could be,” I said.

  Ben shook his head as if to scare away flies, but he could not stop staring at the old man in the cylinder.

  “Hell, I’m sure of it! He’s a wreck, but I’ve studied pictures of him since I was a kid. This is him. Banning was right. Golokhov treated him, kept him going way past a normal lifetime. But not the way he would have wanted.” Ben let out a barking laugh that echoed from the far walls of the chamber. “Golokhov was in exile, but
he must have helped the Politburo bring him down. Fake an illness. Incapacitate him. Maybe they slipped in a double. Or maybe Svetlana and the others were tagged or brainwashed.” Ben was working up enthusiasm for this unlikely tale. “It has to be! They shipped him out of Russia when Silk set up shop in New York. Installed him here in the new building, along with his fellow monsters, architects of the old regime. Then they hung their pictures on the wall downstairs.” Ben squinted at the rows of cylinders. “Jesus, do you think Beria is in here, too? Packed away for old times’ sake?”

  “I’m still lost, Ben.”

  “It’s Koba, Hal!” Ben cried out, exasperated. “Iosip Dzugashvhili. Say ‘Hello’ to Papa Joe Stalin.”

  I looked down on the shrunken, pocked, red-beribboned face and could not see a resemblance, but then, I hadn’t pored over as many old photos as Ben.

  The eyes of the man within the tank opened suddenly and stared up through the glass, then fixed on me. His sclera were tinted pink and reddish spittle bubbled from his mouth. I was sure he could see me. His gaze chilled me: dim, but still electric. Charged with pure hate.

  “You’re imagining things,” I said, with an awful, hollow feeling that he was not, that I was standing only a couple of feet away from the worst mass murderer in human history.

  “Gentlemen!” Delbarco called.

  “Am I?” Ben shot back, ignoring her. “Look at those peepers. Gorky described him as a flea blown up to human size. Didn’t give a damn about the human race, just wanted to suck out all its blood. Looks like a real vampire now, doesn’t he?”

  “We’ve got to go immediately!” Breaker shouted from the vault door.

  The man’s purple tongue poked out obscenely and his lips were drawn back, uncovering yellow teeth. He seemed to be trying to speak, or to scream. His head canted over, and waves of red fluid slapped against the sides of the tank. Some flowed into his mouth and he swallowed, gagged, weakly pursed his lips as if to spit, but could not. Then he writhed like an eel in a jar, thumping against the walls of the cylinder.

  “It’s not possible,” I said.

  Ben slapped my shoulder and laughed. “Hal, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say. Fuck, man, look around you.”

  “There’s trouble on one!” Delbarco shouted.

  Mercifully, the light in the tank clicked off, but the thumping continued, then a long, thin shriek.

  Ben jerked his head to one side, breaking the spell, and shuddered as he descended the steps. I lingered by the cylinder even as Breaker stalked down the aisle to pull us out of there.

  “It’s nuts!” I said as I joined Ben. We reclaimed our loads and ran awkwardly to the vault door in our plastic suits, the albums heavy as bricks. Ben managed to hold on to his stack and touch his plastic-sheathed cranium with a finger, screwing his hand back and forth. “The whole damned century was nuts, Hal!”

  We descended sixteen floors. Delbarco went first, scouting the platform overlooking the loading dock, then waved us through the door. We walked between the shattered aquariums and looked down over a milling crowd of NYPD officers and firemen. Through the doors, I saw fire engines and police cars in broken echelon, lights blinking.

  Someone—probably on our side—had called out all the city watchdogs.

  “Just play it cool,” Delbarco said, as we stripped off our isolation suits. “Let Agent Breaker do the talking.”

  “Friends, you need to get out of here,” Breaker called out over the crowd. “This building is still contaminated.” Wearing a plastic isolation suit gave him some authority. A few broke for the door. The firemen donned their oxygen masks.

  “Follow me,” Delbarco said. “I don’t think they’ll shoot with the City’s Finest watching.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Ben muttered.

  We walked through the crowd. Halfway out the door, I grabbed a fireman’s arm. “There are kids on the eighth floor,” I told him. “They’re hungry, and they need medical attention. You can go in there—we did. Please go get them.”

  The fireman stared at my suit. “Easy for you to say. It’s contaminated, buddy.”

  “They’re just kids!” I shouted.

  He waved me off.

  Mingling with the men and women in police uniforms and emergency gear, I spotted a few men in casual clothes, no more than six or seven. They watched us closely. Some carried pistols, others, small boxes.

  Ben froze.

  “Come on,” I said, and tugged at him, but he was unshakable. I followed his line of sight and saw a trim man in his middle seventies, wearing Dockers, a black windbreaker, and a stoic expression. He folded his arms and stood in the middle of the crowd as if no one else mattered.

  “Forget him,” Breaker said to Ben in a harsh whisper. “We need to get out of here before they cut through the confusion and bring up reinforcements.”

  The man in the black windbreaker stared Ben down, then spat on the concrete.

  We were hustled with our photographic treasures into the cars waiting in the wide alley. Weaving through the fire trucks and police cruisers, we drove down the alley.

  No one followed.

  “Was that Stuart Garvey?” I asked Ben, as the flashing and blinking lights grew small behind us.

  He nodded, then leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

  Delbarco made a call on a satellite phone. She did not sound happy with what she was told. When the call was finished, she, too, closed her eyes and rested her head on the window.

  We left the city and transferred to a caravan of Suburbans in New Jersey.

  Ben switched on his seat light an hour or so later and lifted one of Mrs. Golokhova’s albums into his lap. The truck’s big tires hummed on the highway. “We should have taken all of them,” he said. “It would have been worth the risk. Christ, the history she must have pasted in here.” He flipped a few pages, squinting at the snapshots.

  I pictured Mrs. Golokhova in her husband’s special asylum, living out her madness, with plenty of time on her hands, and these albums as her special task.

  A few minutes later, Ben whistled. “Jackpot,” he said.

  He held the page up for my inspection. A crinkle-cut black-and-white photograph—a home snapshot, judging by the trimmed edges and lighting—showed a middle-aged Joe Stalin, easily recognizable, hair graying with dignity. He stood with his arm around the shoulder of a doctor in a white lab coat, wearing pince-nez. Stalin smiled broadly, contemplating a brave future. The date neatly penned below was 4.vi.38.

  He did resemble the man in the tank.

  “He’d already killed millions,” Ben said, voice tinged with that odd wonder that comes over male historians when they contemplate vast atrocities. “He wiped out the Soviet military leadership. He’s going to make a pact with Hitler to gain some time, then Hitler will invade Russia. In the next ten years, almost thirty million people will die, some say fifty million, some say more. Do you think he was undergoing Golokhov’s treatments by then?”

  I had no answer. I just stared at the picture, memorizing the second man’s features. Pleasant, mousy even, with soft eyes and a beaky nose.

  Two middle-aged guys being chummy.

  Most of the trip to Florida is a blur. I don’t know what finally happened to the steel Gulag. I’ll probably never know whether Ben was simply imagining things.

  But the man in the tank, if he had any mind left at all, was suffering. If the stamped tag was any guide, he had been suffering for more than fifty years.

  35

  PORT CANAVERAL, FLORIDA • AUGUST 17

  We could see the Lemuria from the balcony of our hotel suite. It was hard to miss, four gleaming high-rise towers arranged from bow to stern on a white cruise ship almost two thousand feet long. In the deep-water port, the ship had come about over the last ten minutes, using bow and stern thrusters, making ready to put out to sea. Through a small pair of stabilized binoculars I could peer a little ways into the shaded entrance to the marina deployed between the ship
’s massive twin hulls. Yachts drifted in and out of this portal like little butterflies flitting through a house’s open back door.

  In its presumptive way, the Lemuria was about as ugly as anything I had ever seen go to sea. No doubt the views from the seven hundred condos were spectacular. Rich folks, I thought with a twinge. All with enough money and not enough time to spend it. Lots of potential investors.

  Perhaps Golokhov had struck a real gold mine.

  Beyond the long entrance to Port Canaveral, I could make out the towers of a launchpad. I spun my map around on the table. Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 39. Squeezed into a few square miles around the hotel were some of the greatest technological endeavors in human history. Why didn’t I feel a surge of pride?

  We were on the fifth floor of the Westin Tropicale, under the guise of attending a Wade Cook investment seminar. There had been some talk of moving us into the Coast Guard station, but that had been nixed just before we arrived, hence our new cover. We had badges and bags full of pamphlets and everything we needed. As the highlight of our seminar, we were scheduled to take a tour of the Lemuria.

  Breaker returned to the room accompanied by a man and woman unknown to me. Ben followed. I stayed by the window, a prepackaged ham sandwich in one hand, binoculars in the other.

  Breaker formally waved his arms. “Hal Cousins, I’d like to introduce Nate Carson, from the National Institutes of Health.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Carson said. He was in his early thirties, with shoulder-length brown hair and a long, pale, patrician face. He held out his hand, but I shook my head, sorry. He withdrew the hand with a glance at Breaker, then a sheepish grin. “Right,” he said.

  “And this is Dr. Val Candle. She’s from NSA, we dare not speak its name, a specialist in security bioinformatics.”

  Candle appeared to be in her late thirties. She had strong Middle Eastern features—long, thick black hair curled into a loose bun, elegant sad eyebrows, large black eyes faintly underscored by marks of shadow, prominent but classic nose. Depending on my mood, I could have found her homely or strikingly beautiful, but it was clear she didn’t much care what anyone thought. She was professional and clipped in her speech, with a deep voice and a defiant Brooklyn accent. “You don’t look so good, Dr. Cousins,” Candle said.