Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Just thought I’d mention it, dear ones. This is a week when my poor old brain wanders through the delights of Thistown, admiring our beautiful old Main Street, our grand old churches of all denominations, our precious shoreline, and our colonial past which is preserved in so many of our homes. Why, a week like this makes your tough old scribe feel positively Bi-Centennial!

  And as that dashing young dragon-slaying lawyer ULICK BYRNE said to Sarah the other day, Ain’t it grand to live somewhere where absolutely nothing happens at least twice a week?

  But you want to know what’s going on, you say?

  Sarah saw: That RICHARD ALLBEE, that darling boy from Daddy’s Here (catch a rerun on the late-nite tube and see what a cutie he was), is moving in with his bride, Laura—which is one of my alltime favorite names! Will we be seeing you around the Playhouse, Richard? (But rumor has it he acts no more, alas. . . .)

  Sarah saw: a yummy long letter from former residents BUNNY and THAXTER BAINBRIDGE in Los Claros, California, where they met Thistown’s JIX and PETE PETERS, out there visiting grandkids. . . .

  A slow week for Sarah.

  3

  For Leo Friedgood, there would never be any slow weeks ever again, though of this he was happily ignorant when he took the telephone call at the Yacht Club that Saturday morning. He was puttering with his boat, as he did most warm Saturdays. His eighteen-foot Lightning sloop, the Juicy Lucy, had been in the water only a week, and he wanted to repaint some of the interior trim. Bill Terry, whose Grand Banks boat was docked at the next slip, answered the phone when it rang on the dock and called out, “For you, Leo.” Leo said, “Shit,” put down his paintbrush, and paddled down the gently swaying slip. He was sweaty and his right arm was sore. Despite his bushy bristling appearance, Leo was not at heart a physical man. His ancient KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ sweatshirt bulged over his belly, his jeans bore a constellation of white specks. He wanted another bottle from the six-pack of Coors on the sloop’s deck. “Yeah,” he said into the phone. The mouthpiece stank of cigarettes.

  “Mr. Friedgood?” came the anonymous female voice.

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Mrs. Winthrop, General Haugejas’ secretary,” the woman said, and Leo felt something icy stir in his gut. General Henry Haugejas—Leo had seen him only once, at a Telpro general meeting, a gray-flannel slab of a man whose face was the color of cooling iron. The face was slablike too. He had been a hero in the Korean War and looked as though he took no more pleasure in that than in anything else; a willful tide of strength and propriety, of sternness and distaste emanated from the stiff red face and armor of gray flannel.

  “Oh, yes,” Leo said, regretting that he was not already out on the still-frigid water.

  “General Haugejas has requested that you go to our Woodville plant immediately.”

  “We don’t have a plant in Woodville,” Leo said.

  Mrs. Winthrop silkily answered, “We do if the General says so. I understand that it will be new to you. Here’s how you get there.” She gave him an exit number on I-95, and then a complicated set of directions that seemed designed as much to confuse as to elucidate. “The General wants you there in thirty minutes,” she concluded.

  “Hey, hold on,” Leo wailed. “I can’t make that. I’m on my boat. I’ll have to change my clothes. I don’t even have I.D. I can’t get into some—”

  “They’ll have your name at the gate,” she said, and Leo could have sworn he heard that she was smiling. “As soon as you check into things, the General wants you to call him at this number.” She rattled off a 212 telephone number he did not recognize. He repeated it, and the secretary hung up.

  * * *

  In Woodville Leo got lost. Following the directions the secretary had given him, he had found himself in the city’s extensive slums, driving past rotting houses, abandoned gas stations, and tiny bars where groups of black men congregated on the sidewalks. It seemed to Leo that all of them stared at him, a white man conspicuous in a shiny car. He drove in circles, the secretary’s complex set of rights and lefts now a hopeless muddle in his mind. He began to sweat again, knowing that the thirty minutes the General had given him had passed. For a time, no matter where he turned, he seemed to swing back and forth between two poles, the thruway and the Red Devil Lounge with its crowd of lounging, already drunken men.

  Going for the third time up a dingy street, he noticed the narrow track between two houses which he had previously taken for a driveway—this time he looked in and saw an iron gate before a slice of high gray wall. As he cruised past the little track, he glimpsed a guardhouse just inside the gate. Leo reversed his car and turned in between the houses, feeling like a trespasser.

  For a second he thought he was wrong again, and frustrated rage burned in him. A sign on the gate read WOODVILLE SOLVENT. A uniformed man jumped out of the guardhouse and pulled open the gate. When he approached the car, Leo lowered his window and said, “Hey, do you know where the Telpro plant—”

  “Mr. Friedgood?” the guard asked, looking suspiciously at Leo’s grubby clothes.

  “Yeah,” Leo said.

  “They want you in Research. You’re late.”

  “Where’s Research?” Leo stifled the impulse to tell the man to go to hell.

  The guard, moon-faced and moon-shaped, pointed across a vast, nearly empty parking lot. His belly wobbled as his arm rose. The only cars in the lot were near a windowless metal door in the high blank facade. “You go in there.”

  Leo sped across the lot and parked his Corvette diagonally across two spaces.

  4

  A white-coated man with sandy hair and rabbit teeth darted toward him as he reached the top of the iron stairs. “You’re the Telpro man? Mr. Friedgood?”

  Leo nodded. He glanced toward the little group of men and women the man addressing him had just left. They too wore white jackets, like doctors. His eyes snagged on a bank of television monitors. “Who are you?” he asked, not looking at the man.

  “Ted Wise, the director of research here. Did anybody fill you in?”

  Leo was self-conscious in his sweatshirt and paint-spotted jeans. One of the monitors before him showed his mop of hair, the back of his sweatshirt hoisted up above a roll of skin. His self-consciousness fed his anger at finding himself thrown into a plant Telpro had not trusted him to know about until there was a disaster. He yanked the shirt down over his belt. It had come to him that General Haugejas had sent him to the plant the same way he would send a first lieutenant over a hill—because he was expendable.

  “Look, the General wants me to report back to him,” Leo said. “Suppose you just stop worrying about what I do or do not know and fill me in fast.” He was still taking in the room; white walls, black-and-white-checkerboard tiles on the floor. The television monitors were set above a desk on which sat a time sheet, a telephone, and a pen. A nervous-looking girl sat at the desk. She swallowed when he glared at her.

  In fact the entire group assembled here at this second-floor foyer was as nervous as cats—more than nervous, Leo was realizing. Even as Ted Wise groped for words, the other three men and two women before him exuded a gloom of panic and fear. They were rigid as poles, restraining themselves because he had appeared. Not sensitive, Leo was an intelligent man, and he could see them holding in their twitches—if they let go, they’d roll across the floor like marbles.

  At the moment that Wise nerved himself to ask Leo for some identification, Leo finally began to assess what sort of abyss might be before him.

  “You want what?” he asked Wise aggressively.

  “Just as a precaution, sir.”

  He was covering himself; as the General was covering himself by sending Leo Friedgood into this . . . mental hospital. For that was what the interior of the plant resembled. In disgust Leo took his wallet from his back pocket and showed Wise his driver’s license. “The General got me off my boat,” he said grandly. “He wanted me to take care of this thing as quickly as possible. Just show me the problem
and then all you basket cases can take a Valium or whatever the hell it is you need.”

  “This way, Mr. Friedgood,” Wise said, and the tense little group of five parted to let them pass through a door.

  * * *

  “We have been in this plant since 1978,” Wise said. “After Woodville Solvent went under a couple of years before, the referee in the bankruptcy sold the buildings and the name to Telpro.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Leo said, as if he knew all about it.

  “It took almost six months to make the necessary alterations. When we moved in, we sort of picked up where we left off in Wyoming. All of us—the bunch you see here—had been working out there in another Telpro facility. Until we had to shut down.”

  “Something go wrong there too?” Leo asked.

  Wise was opening another door, and blinked at the question. “We had been sited in a chemical factory, and the pipes in the drainage system were corroded. Some of the waste penetrated the aquifer to a very minor extent, two parts per million. It was not a serious problem. There was very little feedback.”

  Leo peered into the room beyond the door. Sullen-looking monkeys peered back from cages. Zoo odors drifted through the open door. “Primate section,” Wise said. “We have to go through it to get to the testing area.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me about your work,” Leo said wearily.

  Of course he had known that Telpro had certain Defense Department contracts. One of the divisions he oversaw, a plant in Trenton, manufactured the latching mechanism used in half-tracks; another factory in New Jersey put together circuitry panels that later formed a small part of the Minuteman missile. “But we’re Special Weapons,” Wise said as the seven of them stood in the room full of caged monkeys. Special Weapons was a separate endeavor which reported only to General Haugejas and his staff. They were two microbiologists, a physicist, a chemist, and a research assistant. Other research assistants and laboratory technicians were hired from the local pool. For eighteen months they had been working on a single project. “It’s more complex physically and chemically than this, but for our purposes let’s call it a gas,” Wise said. “It’s odorless and invisible, like carbon monoxide, and highly dispersible in water. It doesn’t have a name yet, but the code is DRG. It’s a . . . you’d have to call it a real wild card. We’ve been working to refine it down so we could increase the predictability factor.”

  Predictability was the problem, Leo learned. The Pentagon and Defense Department had been excited about DRG since it had been first synthesized in the early fifties by a German biochemist at MIT named Otto Bruckner. Bruckner had not known what to do with his invention, and the government had happily taken it away from him. “For a long time the project was in limbo,” Wise said. “The government had a lot of simpler concepts it tried to develop, mostly unsuccessfully. In the late seventies, interest in DRG revived again. From the point it came to us, Special Weapons—all of us here—had the job of localizing the effect of Bruckner’s brainchild. We put it through a dozen changes—from ADG 1 and 2 all the way up to what we’ve got now. But it’s still very random in effect. Some people are not affected at all, though only a very few. In some cases inhalation is immediately fatal. Lack of effect and termination are within acceptable parameters, from five to eight percent each. And as a sideline here, let me assure you that the agents in it which cause fatality are relatively short-lived. An exposed population is at immediate risk for no more than twenty-five minutes. It’s with the mid-range that we’re most concerned. You’ve heard of the Army’s experiments with LSD?”

  Leo nodded.

  “Of course that was regrettable in the extreme. We have been at pains to avoid any taint of that sort of thing, and our brief does not extend that far in any case. DRG, originally ADG, is far more various in effect than LSD, and all we’ve been working on is the isolation of a strain which would consistently reproduce a single effect.” Wise now seemed very nervous. “We had quite a range of choice. Some of the wilder effects take months to appear. Skin lesions, hallucinations, outright madness, flu, changes in pigmentation, even narcotization—some percentage of a treated population will simply be mildly tranquilized. There may even have been evidence of fugue state and telepathic ability . . . to tell you the truth, the stuff is so various that after a year and a half we’re just beginning to get a handle on it.”

  “Okay,” Leo said. “Let’s get to the good part. What happened?”

  “Barbara,” Wise said, and a tall dark-haired young woman with puffy eyes came past the wall of cages to open another door.

  Leo saw a room within a room, the top half of the inner room lined with glass. Stepping in behind Barbara, he vaguely took in a clutter of laboratory tables, tissue slides, projectors, gas burners. His attention was focused on the three bodies in the glass enclosure. The two farthest from him lay sprawled a few feet apart on a black floor. Their eyes were open, their mouths yawned. They had clean innocent dead faces.

  Wise coughed into his fist; his face was pink. “The people in there were preparing the chamber for an infusion of DRG-16.” He wiped his face, and his hands were shaking. “The man nearest the wall is Frank Thorogood, and the man next to him is Harvey Washington. They were research technicians—Thorogood was a graduate student at Patchin University and Washington had no academic qualifications. He performed low-level tasks for all of us. One of them was supposed to connect a line from the storage facility to the vaporizer, which in turn is connected to the mask you see on the floor. Instead he plugged it accidentally into the vent line immediately below the vaporizer, and undiluted DRG flooded into the chamber. Washington and Thorogood died immediately.”

  Leo was staring in horror at the third body in the glass chamber. It had bloated—at first Leo thought the body had burst. Lathery white scum coated the hands. The man’s head, a white sponge, had seemed to leak toward a drain in the center of the chamber’s floor. It took Leo a moment to realize that the lather that had once been skin was moving. As he watched—his eyes incapable of shifting away—the froth of the head crawled into the drain. “The third man was Tom Gay, who was one of our best researchers, though he had been working with us only six months or so.”

  The woman named Barbara began to cry. One of the men put his arm around her.

  “You can see the effect of the lesions. He died only a few minutes before you arrived. We had to watch him go. He knew he couldn’t open the chamber.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Leo said, shocked out of his pose. “Look what happened to him.”

  Wise said nothing.

  “Is it safe to go in there now? Can you get rid of that stuff? I mean, I don’t care what the hell mess you people get yourselves into, but I’m not going in there.” Leo jammed his hands into his pockets. He saw wads of brown hair floating on the lather, and turned away from the glass, his stomach lurching.

  “It will be safe in about fifteen minutes. As safe as we can make it, anyhow.”

  “Then you go in.”

  Wise abruptly turned an alarming scarlet. “I’m afraid that isn’t all. The circulators will more or less vacuum out the traces of DRG-16.”

  “It’s still your job, baby.”

  “I was going to say, Harvey Washington would have replaced the filters on the exterior vents immediately after the chamber was empty. But Bill Pierce here switched on the circulators before we realized that the filters were still in their boxes.”

  “Why the hell don’t you leave the filters in all the time?”

  Bill Pierce spoke up. He was taller than Leo, built like a football player, and the sole scientist to wear a beard. “We don’t do that because they have a strong odor, which very quickly leaks back into the chamber. The smell prejudices the experiments. Our procedure was to seal the chamber, make our observations, and to have Harvey Washington install the filters while we dissected the subject. Then we switched on the circulators.” He glared at Leo, full of guilt and challenge. “But when I saw Tom Gay going crazy in there, I
just thought of getting the DRG out of the air. I was thinking that if I could change the air fast enough, I could save Tom anyhow—the other two just dropped where they were standing. And I guess I had our old procedure in the back of my mind.”

  “So where did that stuff go?” Leo asked. “Wait. Let me guess. The circulators circulated it right outside. That’s the good part, isn’t it? You dummies pumped a batch of this stuff straight into the air right after it zapped three guys in the monkey chamber here. So in about a second and a half we got a million dead shwartzes in Woodville. Right? Right?” Leo inhaled deeply. “And! Not only that, but we got a million lawsuits—and I’m supposed to get you jerks off the hook.” Leo clapped his hands over his eyes.

  “Mr. Friedgood,” Wise said, “we’ve just lost three of our colleagues. Bill was acting in accordance with former procedure—for months we did keep the filters in place.”

  “You think that’s a defense?” Leo bellowed. “You want me to feel sorry for you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Wise said around his rabbit teeth. “We are not quite in control of ourselves. Things may not be as bad as you imagine. Let me explain.” The words were confident, but Ted Wise was still the most scared-looking man Leo had ever seen.

  5

  “I’ll do better than write a statement,” Leo was telling the General thirty minutes later. “I’ll get us out of this whole mess. Telpro will never come into it. First of all, these geniuses that you have up here say that because this DRG was vented from the roof of the factory, it’ll carry for miles before it settles. We’ve got a pretty good breeze going right now”—Leo was remembering the sloops, Marlins, and Lightnings, whipping along out on the Sound while he worked on his boat that morning—”and the stuff is going to travel. It could get to Rhode Island before it settles. Maybe it’ll get all the way to Canada. No one in the world is ever going to connect it to Telpro—and if we’re lucky, it’ll blow out over the Sound and kill a few fish. And if we have a good rain anytime in the next week, the worst will never happen at all. Water dilutes the effect fantastically. Bottom line? Somewhere north of here could have a few deaths almost immediately. In a month or two, some citizens of Pawtucket or Stowe might start to go funny in the head—Wise says that the mental effects can take that long to show up. We’ve got no exposure, that’s the bottom line.”