Killer Dust

by Sarah Andrews

  Faye said, “When our Founding Fathers said ‘all men were created equal’ they meant white males. They kept slaves and didn’t even consider sharing the vote with women.”

  “Yeah, and we’ve evolved as a culture, haven’t we? Because we educate people. Those Founding Fathers were smart and educated, and they left the door wide open for positive change. Which comes with education. Education is the thing, Faye. We have to educate everyone. I hope our child is a girl, and if she is, I’m going to do everything in my power to raise her as well educated, free, and independent as you are, because fully empowered women raise sane sons. And if we have a boy, I’m going to make sure he knows what a lucky son of a bitch he is to have a mother like you.”

  Faye yanked her hand free and swatted Tom across the chops, but she was smiling now through her tears. She muttered, “Watch who you call a bitch.”

  The conversation drifted to other topics, such as the theft of native orchids from south Florida, and coral reefs in general. What the world was coming to. The Gaia theory. Climate change. The Mediterranean as a vast, dry basin before the seas broke through Gibraltar and flooded it, long before human time. Noah’s flood. The price of eggs in China.

  When we took our leave after ice cream and cognac, it was agreed that I would present myself at the USGS the following morning to map out a strategy for a proposed research project. But the evening’s topics had pushed me far from worrying about the long-range luxuries of Masters theses. I thanked Miles kindly for the dinner, but thought, I’ll make sure Jack’s safe first, and then worry about your goddamned research, asshole.

  Back at Nancy Wallace’s house, Faye showed me to the room where I was to sleep. I was billeted on the second floor of the main house in a wing that angled off beyond the far side of the living room, the house thus marking two sides of the two-story pool enclosure. My room was large and comfortable and featured plush, rose-pink carpeting and twin beds with ornate wicker headboards. The bedspreads were puffy quilts decorated with tropical birds and flowers, a turquoise blue rendition of the luau shirt I expected Tom would never wear. I wondered at the policy of moving to a hot climate and then refrigerating the house to the point where bed quilts were needed, but my mother and grandmother had ground it into me that polite guests smiled and said thank you a lot, so I kept my silence on that topic. Instead, I switched off the room’s localized temperature control, opened the window to the warm, humid night air, and folded back the quilt on the bed closest to it. Underneath I found a cotton thermal blanket in pink to match the carpeting. I sat on it and stared out into the screened pool deck, wondering if I might just be more comfortable sleeping out there.

  A moment later, Faye quietly let herself into the room. She lowered herself into a turquoise-blue overstuffed chair with a ruffled skirt and stretched her legs up onto the foot of the bed. “I’m tired,” she said.

  “You did just fly us here from Utah seven months pregnant.”

  “Sure, maybe this pregnancy thing is beginning to get to me more than I like to admit. But you’re something worse than tired.”

  “What?”

  “Scared. Mixed with ambivalent. You want to be out finding out what’s going on with Jack, not setting up some intellectual jigsaw puzzle.”

  At the sound of Jack’s name, the wave of longing swept over me, this time followed by that odd tug at my heart I had first felt as he had driven away that afternoon. I shrugged my shoulders. They felt like lead. “I’m a geologist. I might as well do geology. Doing work is known to be useful when a person hopes to make a living.”

  “Come on, let it out. You’re thinking that maybe Jack is some kind of hopeless flake, and here you’ve gone and slept with him. Makes you wonder about your IQ.”

  “Makes me wonder about my sanity.”

  “Give it two days, like Tom said.”

  I rubbed my face with the heels of my hands. “Faye, I don’t know what to think. Jack and I have had a fine time with each other, truly. Things got really nice, so yeah, we became lovers.”

  “That sounds a little clinical.”

  I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. “I am merely respecting the facts. We spent one night together. Next morning, he’s gone. He phoned once. Next time I see him, he’s a total wreck and won’t say a word about what’s going on. What am I supposed to think? Or feel? I’m numb, damn it. No; worse, I am pissed.”

  “So come gallivanting with me. We came down here to have a good time. Tell that Miles guy to take a hike. He sounded pretty full of shit, anyway.”

  “Well, he is a bit flamboyant, but his reputation is good. There’s the old rub between broad-brush thinkers like him and those that get off on things as narrow as a gnat’s eyelash. The narrow guys want to debunk the big thinkers, say their science is weak, and the broad-brush guys think the narrow guys are a cartoon. I—”

  Tom had suddenly filled the doorway.

  “Come in,” I said.

  He moved slowly into the room, sloping along with his hands in his pockets until he was within reaching distance of where I was sitting, then put a hand on my shoulder. “Hi, friend. How’s it going?”

  I leaned my head against his hip and closed my eyes. All I could think of to say was, “Lousy.”

  He patted my hair. “I imagine.”

  Tom’s sudden affection was confusing, especially considering that Faye and I were both in our thirties, and he was in his fifties, and he was married to her, and he had until then treated me like a cross between a slave and an errant niece. And this new side of Tom, this sympathetic hugs-and-squeezes Tom, flew right in under my emotional radar. It hit me right in the heart. Tears welled in my eyes, and I began to sniffle.

  “That’s my girl,” he whispered. “That’s it.”

  I fought the tears. “Can you tell me one thing?” I asked.

  “I hope so.”

  “Why did Jack call his project ‘Killer Dust’? I mean, is it in any way connected to what Miles Guffey’s working on?”

  Tom sighed and sat down with his arm around me. “I think so, Em.”

  “So, I mean, is it a wild coincidence that I’m being asked to work on it, too?”

  “No.”

  “You going to tell me what that connection is?”

  Tom heaved a sigh. “I can tell you this: It involves NASA. That’s where Guffey’s getting what funding he has, right?”

  “Yeah. He told me at lunch that NASA likes to ‘push the product on the populace.’ Hell, Tom, I’m beginning to get the idea that it’s all a game of self-justification these days in the sciences. You’ve got to continually let the public know what you’ve done for them lately, which is reasonable, but if you’re doing it just to get a slice of the funding pie, it puts a weird spin on things. Guffey went to NASA for money because they understand publicity. They’ve got all those satellites up there, not to mention observation planes, and oh, yes, this thing called a space shuttle that goes up to a big tin can called a space station, and they’ve got to keep the taxpayer giddy about the whole works.”

  Tom said, “I guess we’ve gotten over being impressed that that space program brought us Tang and Velcro.”

  “Right. They have their gadgets up there looking down on the Earth from hundreds of miles up, but now they have to prove they’re doing something important with them. They find they can observe dust clouds blowing off the desert regions. So that’s all well and good, but you’ve got to prove that it’s important to observe dust clouds. Guffey thinks that there are pathogens in those dust clouds, so he makes his project look like a NASA showpiece. So they tossed some chump change at Guffey so he could hire a microbiologist or two and set up a lab, move from idea to theory to fact. Oo-ee, big news story. That’s what I found on the web at first glance. But what’s that got to do with Jack? How’s he connected to Miles Guffey’s project?”

  Tom gave me another little squeeze and then took his arm away, apparently done displaying affection for the day. “He’s not connected, not dir
ectly, but think about it: Miles’s project, NASA, your work as a geologist, and the FBI’s work of detection all have one important thing in common: observation. You’ve got to think about who else is making those observations, or watching, and why, and ask yourself what gets seen.”

  My mind began to spin through the immense scope of what Tom had just suggested. Guffey’s project, and NASA’s work, and geology in general all embraced a vast span of observations, running the gamut from the tiniest specs of matter viewed through powerful microscopes, and the tight reckoning of laboratory tests, to the broad ruminative realm of field work, clear up to the widest view of the Earth we geologists had yet encompassed: the view from space. My mind conjured the satellite image of a dust cloud that Guffey had shown at the press conference. As I dove into that picture, watching the flowering of those connections and steps downward from the overwhelmingly immense swirling cloud down to the unimaginably tiny motes of dust, I felt that wave of sensuosity sweep through me again, felt my body reach for Jack’s, felt that weird thump at my heart, all in rapid succession.

  “Observing dust,” I said. I turned to Tom, my mind skidding like a stone skipping across a pool of water. “But what’s observation got to do with Jack?”

  Tom looked at me with sympathy. “Poor Em, it’s not mine to tell you, but it’s got everything to do with Jack.”

  – 14 –

  I lay down on the bed exhausted, turned out the light, and did try to sleep without the air-conditioning, honest. A last rainstorm had cooled the air nicely, and I thought I could sleep, but the relentless, variable singing of a mockingbird somewhere out beyond the pool deck quickly poked a hole right through the barrier I tried assiduously to build between me and my anxiety. The horrors of bioterrorism, or any kind of terrorism for that matter, bloomed in my head, and the song of the bird became torture.

  I clicked on the bedside light and reached for something to read. The first thing that came to hand was Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, which I had brought with me from Utah. “Great,” I said aloud. “Just the thing to lull me to sleep.” But I opened it and began to read. I read for hours, and when my eyes, aching and feeling like the lids were made of sandpaper, finally refused to focus, I turned off the light and eventually caught two or three hours of sleep.

  The next morning I went back to the USGS and was about to find my way down the hall to Miles Guffey’s office when the director beckoned to me from her office doorway.

  “I thought I should introduce myself,” she said. “I’m Olivia Rodríguez Garcia, the center chief here. I was wondering if you could join me for lunch.”

  Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I didn’t know the lady knew I existed, and what was this “go to lunch” business? But I said yes. Of course I did. If nothing else, I wanted to know what was up. As in, what’s the chief scientist of an office with maybe a hundred Ph.D.s doing taking the wandering maybe-sorta graduate student to lunch?

  So I arranged to meet her by the front door at noon. Meanwhile, I went upstairs to Miles Guffey’s office and was immediately sucked into what was important to him.

  He took me first on a whirlwind tour of the laboratory the missing Calvin Wheat had put together. It was full of industrious-looking equipment that I was soon informed were things such as incubating boxes and RNA replicators, all spotlessly clean and nestled in among the usual clusters of gas and water jets that jutted out of high black counters.

  As Miles began to show me through the setup, a young woman bustled into the room. She had chocolate-brown skin and was curvy and stunningly attractive, and wore a short, low-cut dress that looked like it had been put on with spray paint. Her eyes were calm and confident. She stuck out her hand to shake mine. “Hi, I’m Waltrine Sweet. You must be Em Hansen.”

  “Delighted,” I said, and shook her hand. I immediately felt foolish, as my response had been more appropriate to a social meeting than a professional one, but in fact it did delight me to meet her. What I did not mention was that I also felt slightly intimidated. One tends to leave that detail out of a greeting.

  Perhaps she read me more clearly than I wished, because she gave me a flicker of a smile, little more than a quick crimp at one corner of her mouth, and an undecipherable signal zapped through her eyes.

  Guffey said, “Waltrine here’s doing her doctoral dissertation on some of our data.”

  “So,” she said, “I hear you’re looking for a thesis project out of this dust we’re collecting.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Well, cool. Why don’t you come with me tomorrow? I’m going to talk to some engineering geeks about doing some sampling for us.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Kennedy. Where the NASA goonies hang out. It’s a big whoop. Rockets and stuff. You might like it.”

  I wasn’t quite sure where to go with her dry humor, if that is what this was. I looked at Miles.

  “Sure,” he said. “That would be just super. You-all could do your girl-bonding exercises, keep the project rolling along.”

  “Okay,” I said, not sure I meant it.

  Waltrine said, “They have the eye in the sky, and we have the little sniffers. You’ll be in charge of connecting some dots, if you can. Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of it.”

  “Great,” I answered, thinking, Whatever you say, lady.

  “Right. Well, let me show you around. Okay, this is what the dust samples look like when we get them,” she said, as she pulled a disk of white filter paper about two inches across out of a special cartridge. “We handle the real ones with gloves and all, natch.”

  “Natch.”

  “But this one’s a dud. Someone dropped it. Shit happens. Okay, we culture them out. Then we do our count and then extract DNA from each individual bug and run it through PCR—polymerase chain reaction—to amplify the DNA for identification. It works kind of like a Xerox machine for biological sequences. With me so far?”

  “Big ten-four,” I lied.

  She gave me a very dry look with her very big brown eyes. Proceeding to the next machine and the next, she whizzed me through about six or eight years of college and postgraduate biology, chemistry, and public health, all macerated and cross-riffled through a haze of cutting-edge technology.

  “So,” I said, “I take it you’re a biologist, too, like Calvin Wheat?”

  She let her heavy eyelids down and up, a somnolent display of just how impressed she was by my not very brilliant deduction of her curriculum vitae. “Yeah. You got it, Wheat and Sweet, microbiologists extraordinaire.” As in, You got a problem with any of this, honey?

  “Oh.” I glanced sideways at Miles Guffey.

  Guffey’s face had settled into a mild smirk. He fiddled with a spare bit of filter paper, held it up to the light, generally did his best to look casual while he kept himself from guffawing at the deep hole I’d just found myself in. I could see that he was quite proud of his microbiologist lady.

  I looked back and forth between Miles and Waltrine. Something was niggling at me, a steady signal that there was something I should be figuring out, as if there were a joker somewhere in the deck having a good laugh at Em. Such as, why weren’t they more worried about their missing colleague? “Have you heard anything more about Calvin Wheat?” I asked.

  Waltrine blinked, one quick bat of her enormously thick, curly eyelashes.

  Miles Guffey cleared his throat. “Well, funny you should ask,” he said, his expression turning somber. “We’ve heard from a lady on the cruise ship who says she saw him thrown overboard.”

  “Thrown overboard?” I gasped.

  Miles gave me a probing look. “I told you.”

  “But—”

  “Right, well, we have certain friends in port there in Barbados, and we got a report back that there’s an eyewitness says she was watching him from her stateroom because she thought what he was doing was kinda interesting, and she didn’t want to be at dinner. He was out th
ere in his tuxedo fiddling with the sampling gear, and some big guy came and picked him up and tossed him clean over the rail.”

  “Shit!”

  “As I said.”

  “Well, who would want to do that?”

  Miles gave me a sardonic look. “I been tryin’ to figger that out myself.”

  “What about the cruise line that owns the ship? Don’t they want to know if they have someone on board that’s ejecting their passengers before the boat gets to dock?”

  “Well, essackly. You do ask the right questions.”

  “All flattery aside, Miles, what is the cruise line doing about this? And why did you have to hear this from a contact in Barbados?”

  “All the right questions.”

  Something in Guffey’s tone stopped me short. He was an odd one, simultaneously laser sharp and just a wee bit paranoid. Little red flags were popping up all over the place in my brain, telling me to back off before I got myself sucked into something I did not understand and did not need to be involved in. “Well, great,” I said, backpedaling like mad. “So I’m on the right track. Meanwhile, let’s get back to the tour here.”

  Waltrine nodded and took me through the rest of her setup.

  When she was done, I asked. “How many critters have you ID’d so far?”

  “Over 130,” Waltrine replied. “Fungi, bacteria. The viruses are there but we can’t culture them, because they won’t grow outside specific hosts. But just the bacteria and fungi are enough to make me want to pee in my britches. We’ve got Aspergillus, Cladosporium, Alternaria, sixteen species of Bacillus already, and dozens of other genera are represented. About twenty-five percent are agricultural diseases and ten percent are opportunistic diseases in humans.”