NH3

by Stanley Salmons

  The President smiled as he caught sight of her and Terry.

  “You must be Dr. Ferris and Dr. McKinley. Thank you for coming. Would you like to sit over there?”

  When everyone was settled in their places the President took a chair at the desk end of the room so that he could speak to people on the sofas on either side and still view the screen beyond.

  Maggie stole a look in his direction. He was older than any recent President. The forehead was high, the grey hair a mere stubble above his ears, and age had slackened the flesh over a once craggy jaw, but there was still a contained energy about him that seemed to permeate even a room of this size. She felt a little overawed. She glanced at Terry, who was seated on her left. He caught her eye and gave her a reassuring wink.

  “Right,” the President said. “You know why we’re here. Shall we get on with it? Dr. McKinley, do you want to lead off?”

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. President, I think everyone should see the data Dr. Walmesley has to show us first.”

  Walmesley walked over to the screen and brought it to life with a remote control. He faced the room.

  “In May an unseasonally early hurricane, Hurricane Ailsa, came in from the Gulf of Mexico. There’s no need for me to remind you of the extensive damage it caused. A couple of weeks later a choking white smog rolled over London, England, resulting in a ton of casualties and major disruption. Drs. McKinley and Ferris came over from England last week. They had some evidence that an increase in atmospheric ammonia might be responsible for both these events. Dr. McKinley persuaded me to examine data from our environmental sampling program, data on the levels of ammonia in our atmosphere. I did so. What came out of the analysis shocked the hell out of me. In fact at first I thought there’d been some mistake. Since then Dr. McKinley has checked the data from my own NSF-funded surveys against a data set collected independently by NOAA. I can tell you now that there ain’t no mistake. I’ll show you a typical record.”

  A graph flashed onto the screen.

  “Notice the date on the axis; we can go back five years. There’s always some ammonia around but it’s normally just a trace, in fact it barely registers on this scale. But look what’s been happening over the last three years or so. The level of ammonia has been rising like a rat up a drainpipe. And you can see that the curve is getting steeper and steeper.”

  Terry heard a low murmur and noticed the others exchanging glances. Pevensey was pointing. “What in God’s name made it go up like that?”

  “We’ll get to that,” answered Walmesley.

  “Is it increasing exponentially?” Cabot asked.

  “Yup, you probably could fit that curve with a rising exponential. Some of the ammonia is removed by rain and some falls out as ammonium salts but those losses aren’t sufficient to make the curve flatten out to any noticeable extent. Okay, now let me show you just a sample of the data we’ve recorded from other locations.”

  The screen changed to white, and a series of smaller graphs started to go up. Each one was labelled with coordinates and an approximate location: Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Bermuda… Every single graph showed the same upward trend.

  Walmesley faced his audience.

  “What we’re seeing here is an alarming increase in atmospheric ammonia. Ammonia is a light gas. As it rises it adds energy to weather systems and this could sure as heck explain the unseasonal hurricanes.” He pointed to the screen. “These samples were taken in the stratosphere, but there’s little doubt that it’s around in the troposphere too – that’s the weather-forming lower level of the atmosphere. When local concentrations are blown into the air over a city, the ammonia combines with acidic gases from vehicle exhausts and factories and creates the white smog – like what’s just kicked our asses in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.”

  The President raised a finger. “But the levels are increasing. So you’re saying these white smogs are going to get more frequent?”

  “Yes, sir. More frequent and longer lasting.”

  “This is a disaster. I mean, quite apart from the horrific loss of life, the economic consequences would be incalculable. And Baltimore’s no distance at all. If it had happened here, to the nation’s capital, we’d have been paralysed. The country would have been vulnerable to every tinpot nation that wished us harm.”

  “I’m afraid it’s even worse than that, sir. If the ammonia continues to rise at its present rate it won’t be long before the air becomes too poisonous to breathe. When that point is reached neither we nor any other form of animal life will survive.”

  “Good God! Well what sort of timescale are we talking about here? Decades?” He paused. “Years?”

  Terry held his breath as Walmesley answered, “It’s hard to be precise because a lot depends on mixing in the lower reaches of the atmosphere. But all the current indications are that in many places levels incompatible with life will be reached within six months.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Someone whistled and there was a burst of conversation. The President looked grim.

  “That doesn’t exactly give us a whole lot of time, does it? How has this happened?”

  “I’ll hand you back to Dr. McKinley, sir. He’s best placed to answer that question.”

  Terry got to his feet and Walmesley passed him the remote as he returned to the sofa. He took another deep breath and began.

  “Dr. Walmesley showed you evidence of a widespread increase in ammonia,” he said. “I’ll show you first where it’s coming from.”

  He put up a conventional satellite view. “You’ll probably recognize this; it’s the Eastern seaboard of the United States as viewed from space. Now here is the same view, processed to show ammonia. We’ll step forward, one month at a time.”

  At first the screen was blank, then coloured rings developed and expanded, starting with purple and adding blue, green and yellow. As the levels increased the rings became distorted and highly elongated.

  “We’re looking at the western and southern boundaries of the Sargasso Sea. We have a distribution of ammonia that travels north along the Eastern seaboard and another branch that’s reaching eastwards towards Bermuda. It’s my guess that your white smogs derived from the northerly branch.”

  “Where’s it coming from?” Cabot asked. “Industrial pollution?”

  “No. Believe it or not we’re dealing with tiny organisms called cyanobacteria – you may know them as blue-green algae. They’re a normal part of our environment and we’re used to them undergoing seasonal expansions, such as algal blooms and mats. But this is different. One of these organisms has mutated. It’s processing nitrogen from our atmosphere and releasing it as ammonia. Because it’s enriching its own environment it grows without limit. It’s even worse than that. Dr. Ferris has evidence that it also passes the modification to other species, by a process called plasmid transfer. When it does so it makes them produce ammonia, too. As I said, the organisms are tiny but there are trillions of them, so they’re producing large volumes of ammonia.”

  James Brierley pointed at the screen. “If the problem’s confined to those sites how do you explain the smogs in Pittsburgh and Cleveland?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not confined to these sites. For technical reasons I’ve had to show you the situation about two-and-a-half years ago Since then it’s had ample time to spread much further. We believe London’s white smog was the result of the organisms being carried from the Eastern seaboard to Bermuda and from there to the UK. The cyanobacteria tend to build up in rivers, lakes, and oceans – that’s probably why the white smogs here have affected cities located near to large bodies of water: Chesapeake Bay in the case of Baltimore, a junction of major rivers in Pittsburgh, Lake Erie in Cleveland. But by now there’s so much ammonia up there it could be stirred into our weather systems almost anywhere. So that’s our problem. For millions of years, organisms of this type have pumped oxygen into our atmosphere. Now, they’re progressively poisoning it with ammonia.”
>
  “There’s got to be a fairly simple solution,” said Cabot. “Some sort of algicide, maybe? The kind of thing we put in garden ponds and aquaria.”

  “Come on, Bob,” the President replied. “You know how much you need for a tiny job like that. Look at the quantities you’d need to tip into the ocean!”

  “An oil spill, then?” Richard Pevensey said. “Smother the stuff. Sink a tanker where it started, pretend it was an accident.”

  “I hope you’re not serious, Dick,” the President said heavily. “I have enough environmental problems down in the Gulf without adding pollution of every beach up and down the East Coast. In any case, the way I understand it, these organisms have spread all over the Atlantic. You wouldn’t be going near the problem.” He glanced at Terry, who nodded his agreement.

  Pevensey looked at the others, shrugged, and said, “Well, I don’t know. What else is there?”

  The President’s gaze went round the table and settled on Maggie. “Dr. Ferris, Chris tells me you had a suggestion.”

  Terry tensed. Maggie had come up with her idea only that morning and she’d come running into his room to share her excitement. This was her chance to set it out for the others but she’d had very little time to prepare…

  He needn’t have worried; she sounded relaxed and confident.

  “Terry mentioned plasmid transfer – it’s the process responsible for some of the antibiotic resistance you see in hospitals. That’s why this ammonia mutation has spread so rapidly: it’s been passing from organism to organism in a chain reaction. But…” she held up a finger, “that also suggests a way of fighting it. The affected organisms would be receptive to another plasmid, one that we could introduce, one designed to turn off ammonia production. If we could do that it would spread in the same way as the rogue organisms and go wherever they’ve gone. In my view, that’s the way to defeat it – assemble a team of experts to design, produce and distribute our plasmid across the globe.”

  There was a murmur of interest around the table.

  “Elaine?” The President turned to Dr. Elaine Zanuck, Director of the National Institutes of Health. “What do you think of that idea?”

  She nodded. “Sounds feasible. The sequencing could be done fairly quickly; there are platforms around that can sequence an entire genome in a matter of days. They’re mostly set up for human genomes so they’d have to be adapted for this type of organism. But in a way that’s the easy part. Then you have to find out what the plasmid is coding for and how to switch it off. And then you need to construct another plasmid that would do the job, put it into another organism and distribute it. Like Dr. Ferris said, it would solve the delivery problem because it would spread in the same way. I think it’s a great idea, but it won’t be easy.”

  “But you think it can be done?”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Elaine, could you accommodate an expert group like that at the NIH?”

  Zanuck thought for a moment. “I believe we can. Right now one of the older buildings is being refurbished to house the new Center for Integrative and Systems Biology. There’ll be lab accommodation on all four floors.”

  “We can’t wait, Elaine.”

  “No, you won’t have to. When I last looked the top two floors were finished. There are three or four good-sized labs in there. They were working on the rest.”

  “All right. Throw the workmen out and we’ll base the operation there.”

  “Why do we have to set up a separate expert group?” Robert Cabot’s voice was a growl. “We have all the expertise we need at NBACC.”

  “Sorry,” Terry said. “En Back?”

  “NBACC, the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center out at Fort Detrick.”

  Terry caught his breath. A development like this could leave Maggie on the periphery of the research or, worse still, excluded altogether. It was Zanuck who spoke up.

  “Bob, with respect, I think our way is better. I have a high regard for the work going on up there, but we don’t have the time for conventional solutions. We need top drawer people, guys who can think out of the box, cut corners, work fast.”

  Richard Pevensey raised a hand. “Sir, the DoD has a lot of experience with contract research, and despite our best efforts it often goes over time and over budget. What worries me is, we don’t have that luxury in this case.”

  “Good point,” the President said. “This project will have to be monitored very closely. That’s another good reason for setting it up in the Washington area. I want to keep things tight. We can’t afford to overshoot.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Dr. McKinley?”

  “There’s one possibility we shouldn’t ignore. The NASA data shows the mutation originated here, on the Eastern seaboard. Because of that atmospheric ammonia is elevated in the Western hemisphere. There’s no reason why it should hang around here. I would expect it to mix in the upper atmosphere, and that would spread it around the world and dilute it. I’m not sure why this hasn’t happened yet, but when it does the levels should drop. It may give us more time, possibly as much as another six months.”

  The President sighed. “Well now, that’s the first good news we’ve had today. We need to keep a close eye on that situation.”

  “Sir,” Walmesley said, “I’ve set Dr. McKinley up with an office in my building. He has access to data from NSF, NOAA, and the US Geological Survey. We’d have no difficulty setting up contact with our counterparts elsewhere – the British Atmospheric Data Centre, for example. If he’s happy to continue he’s in pole position to monitor the atmospheric levels.”

  “All right with you, Dr. McKinley? Do you need any help with that?”

  “I can handle most of it at the moment, sir. I’d like some help with climate modelling, though, and I’d like to expand the scope of the sampling effort: more sites, more frequent flights.”

  The President nodded. “Work through Chris and we’ll see if we can’t organize something.” He sat back.

  “So, we need a crack group of scientists on the job and we need them yesterday. Dr. Ferris, exactly who is it we are going to be hauling out of bed and putting on a plane?”

  Maggie smiled. “I was hoping that would be your response, sir. I have a list of the most important names. We can add more as we go along and require additional expertise. First up is Pieter van der Rijt and his colleague Ulrich Lunsdorfer from Enschede, the world’s foremost experts on cyanobacteria and algal blooms. Next is Matt Oakley from New York; leading scientist in the human genome project. Then we have Silvia Mussini, an expert in gene silencing from California. We’ll start with them and their teams and build from there.”

  “Do we have accommodation for them, Elaine?”

  “There are hotels in Bethesda we use for guests.”

  “Good. Take one over. Book every room for six months. We have to minimize outside contact. Elaine, get your team to start working the phones. I want all these people here within 24 hrs. Don’t give them all the info, but don’t take no for an answer!”

  CHAPTER 21

  Pieter van der Rijt was the first to arrive. Maggie met him in the hotel lobby.

  She knew Pieter was in his late thirties but he looked a lot younger. He had a full head of blond hair, a small blond beard, and a high, somewhat orange complexion. It was the kind of face that easily broke into a smile and she warmed to him almost instantly.

  “Good journey, Pieter?” she asked.

  “Yes, fine. I have not flown Business Class before; this was very nice. And thank you for sending the limousine to the airport.”

  She smiled. “All part of the service. Is your room okay?”

  “Yes, it’s very fine for me.”

  “Good. I can show you the labs if you like, but you must be tired.”

  “Well, I am still on European time, of course. But I would like to see the labs. It is best when I go to bed at a normal time. I need to change my body clock.”

  “All right, I’ll
take you over. We can walk – it’s not far.”

  As they set off he asked: “Am I the first to arrive?”

  “Yes, you are. But most of the others should be arriving later today.”

  He eyed her speculatively.

  “Big rush. The President must be very concerned about white smogs?”

  Maggie flushed a little and turned her face to hide it. “Well, yes. It is becoming a big problem.”

  Pieter continued.

  “Well, I thought I could look at the facilities and see if there is more we need. Ulrich had a few things to tidy up in Enschede. He will also be here later today.”

  Maggie nodded. Ulrich Lunsdorfer was his colleague. Ulrich was a more traditional biologist; Pieter was an expert in modelling the growth kinetics of the organisms. Their joint expertise would be invaluable.

  They turned left.

  “It’s not your first time in the States, is it, Pieter?”

  “No, I was a year working at Woods Hole. It was a very good time for me.”

  “Right, here we are. Sorry about the mess.”

  They faced a plain four-storey building. It was evident that work here had stopped abruptly. To the right of the glass-fronted entrance was a large skip, overflowing with rubble, splintered planks of wood, pieces of pipework, and coils of old cable. A line of paving stopped short on a path of compacted sand. The rest of the slabs could be seen stacked in bundles on the back of a nearby truck, a built-in grab poised over them, motionless, jaws open wide, like a predator frozen at the instant of the kill. The whole area was criss-crossed with heavy tyre tracks.