Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  "Hector Brickhart, hmmm." Wolton frowned. "He was, I believe, with naval intelligence. But the reason you haven't seen him here lately is that—I assume I'm at liberty to divulge it—the commander has retired recently and has accepted a position as chairman of the board at ALAS-ORE Oil. Whose conservation policies may or may not be what you and I would desire," he added with a moral chuckle. "But of your, and I suppose we might as well call them 'accusations,' the only cause for alarm is the implied complicity of our, I guess we should say, nation in the commander's alleged, shall we call them 'inducements.' What would you say to this, Bucky? What did your people think about the commander's alleged visits up here?"

  "Dan," said Bob ("Bucky") Eagerly, "if this guy Brickhart tried to illegally bribe a government employee, the White House never heard of him. When Dan here caught a look at your correspondence vis-a-vis Pentagon interference, it was the first we'd even heard that this thing is operational." Eagerly, by means of a tiny transistorized American flag in his lapel, took down everything they said for the record on a tape recorder. He took down for the record what everybody said, even his wife. It was a habit.

  "Why, that's bullshit! We've been here since nineteen sixty-nine," sniffed Svatopluk impatiently. "Working our buttsos off.

  You know that!"

  "I don't," said Eagerly loudly.

  "Dr. Swátterplök, let us get to the heart of the matter," urged the handsome Wolton, sitting down in a canvas-backed chair, crossing his legs, and revealing a trim ankle in a black silk sock without a sag in it. There are not many men who can, seated, be superior to other men standing right next to them. Wolton knew he was one of them.

  "Let us be open. Would you tell us exactly who authorized your assignment? Would you tell us what your assignment might be?

  Would you tell us what you think we should conclude about its merits? Would you tell us," he changed legs and revealed the other trim ankle, "frankly, why are you, I might as well say, hiding here in a forest, like fugitives from the horrors of slavery?"

  "I would have preferred MIT, myself," replied Svatopluk. "I don't know who authorized us. I think you did. DDT of CIA of OSS. But that's by the by now. And what we're working on is just what you told us to work on. Defense viralization research. Biological warfare."

  Asked to debrief them briefly, and in his own words, as to the meaning of defense viralization research, Dr. Svatopluk gave his guests a lecture on microbiology, terrifying Mr. Eagerly by grabbing up, and indeed twirling on his fingers as he spoke, test tubes of presumed lethal matter. The head of Operation Archangel explained that there were certain deadly germs that occurred so rarely that a widespread outbreak of one, the plague, for example, would be highly suspect. There were other pathogens that might be common and might spread rapidly, like measles epidemics, but (a) they couldn't exist outside a living cell, and (b) people built up immunity to them.

  "No getting around it," he confessed. The original mandate of the operation had been to study pathogens (he mentioned in passing some short-term tests they had done with brucella and salmonella) and to study commensals, that is, viruses and bacteria that exist harmlessly in our systems all the time, but then all of a sudden change and, in the doctor's phrase, "turn vicious."

  "One of our little projects was to learn how to trigger that shift, to learn why, for example, an inactive pneumococcus abruptly wants to become an active pneumonia, and to learn how to make it happen."

  "I get your point there," interrupted Eagerly. "Obviously, science has got to prepare for the future by looking for answers to the big questions, whatever the cost. I keep thinking of those poor bastards that burned up in Apollo Five, somehow they stick in my mind."

  There was a brief silence, and then Svatopluk resumed his explanation. "This is so, so kindergarten you wouldn't believe it," he promised. His team had finally come up with a germ that was very rare, hard to diagnose, easy to transmit, and generally satisfactory.

  They called it "New Q." Q Fever. A rickettsia that could be passed through dogs, for example, though the hit ratio in that case would be inevitably slapdash. But it could also be transmitted in, say, straw you'd use to pack something in. Or in dust. Or in, say, the public mails. The best part of it was that humans rarely ever got Q Fever and if they did, it was usually no more than a bad fever, shakes, and nausea. However, Q Fever could do some interesting damage to the coronary valves. Assume, Dr. Svatopluk invited his guests, assume that interesting factor could be isolated and intensified, could be made resistant to the normal antibiotics like tetracycline. Assume that through experiments with DNA fragments that the intensified factor, transferred through a bacteriophage from the host to a recipient cell, could result in a new kind of Q Fever, deadly, transportable, undiagnosable. A killer to which no one had built up any immunity.

  "A winner." The scientist grinned as he swept them out of his lab. "I don't mind saying that's when my gray matter began to gyrate. The rest was just, don't you know, old hat for us. Right through here. My office. Can you believe this dump? I wish you could have seen the suite they gave me at Cal Tech back in sixty-three. More coffee? I could give you some Sarah Lee apple strudel."

  Daniel Wolton graciously declined. "Let us be clear, shall we? I confess I remain a bit in the dark—"

  "I'm completely in the dark, I think I said so before," said Eagerly again to the flag in his lapel.

  "Are we," Wolton stroked the dimple in his chiseled chin, "talking about theoretical research into germ warfare? Is that correct? Are we talking about analysis of those future conditions—assault by some power that abrogated the laws of common military decency, some new Fascist megalomaniac—in which we might find ourselves in a state of germ warfare?"

  "Ah-CHOO!" replied the chief of staff. "Mr. Wolton, we are in a state of germ warfare right now, always have been. This puny planet is a hostile, nasty place and every eensy-weensy inch of it is crammed with submicroscopic killers. Now, that was a point I never could get across to Commander Brickbrain. I am talking about so, so small.

  Take a guess at the size of a poliomyelitis virus. It's twenty-five millimicron, that's all. That's point zero zero one times point zero zero one times twenty-five equals one-millionth of an inch. Okay?"

  "That is small," Eagerly nodded.

  "How can you fight a killer that size? They keep coming, coming, coming at us. They sneak in everywhere. Through our food, drink, air, water, through our eyes. Our skins are crawling with billions of these killers. Ditto our dicks and twats."

  Dr. Svatopluk reminded his visitors that it had always been the American way to make allies of enemies. In the same way disease could fight for us abroad the way it already does at home by killing off the unsavory poor and helping us maintain ZPG. With the proper immunodeficiency condition, one carrier of infection could serve as well as an army. He gave them an example from the Faroe Islands, where a man from Copenhagen with the measles singlehandedly killed six thousand natives out of a total population of eight thousand.

  The survivors were over sixty-five and had endured exposure to a previous European that many years earlier. "Why," said the scientist, "gentlemen, we could have sneezed on Hiroshima! We could spit in Red Square and give Russia the plague."

  "But would it be right?" Eagerly asked his lapel.

  "I think not," replied Wolton with a lofty frown. "I really rather think not. All nations who abide by international codes have long agreed that disease is not a civilized way to kill your enemies. I am in accord."

  "Myself, I'd be hard put to choose," remarked Svatopluk over his strudel. "Get me straight, I don't advocate mass distribution of viralization. Implementing it as a military strategy would be your business. I just make it."

  "Why not simply let loose the plague?" Wolton asked with an arm flourish.

  "It wouldn't be right," interjected Eagerly. "Of course, we wouldn't use it. But with a deterrent like that, you know, we could put a stop to the arms race. I bet we could bring peace to the world.

&
nbsp; Right, Dr. Sweaterpluck?"

  "Exactly so," said the scientist, smiling. "Whatever."

  "But just out of curiosity," Eagerly said, "what about this Q Fever stuff? How does that thing work?"

  "It gives people heart attacks, if I follow the doctor's remarks correctly," replied the OSS executive (and secret INR liaison officer).

  "Exactly so, very good." Svatopluk picked up a test tube on his desk. "To kill everyone in New York City, for example, would not require as much as could fit in this tube."

  At the moment, confessed Svatopluk, New Q had not quite been perfected. Trial runs had been buried near the base, as they may have noticed flying in by the defoliation. But now he and his team were "onto something lethal as hell." Unfortunately it was decomposing after a half-hour out of a living cell situation. "Just let me get back in there, and we'll get it! Don't worry about a thing.

  This one's the whole megillah."

  "I'm afraid I do worry," interjected Daniel Wolton. "I'm afraid I must worry. Are you performing experiments on living animals?"

  "In a manner of speaking. We're working with humans actually."

  "God Almighty," Eagerly gasped. "That's incredible. Where'd you get them?"

  "Well, we don't exactly get them. We just work on them where they are."

  Daniel Wolton stood, stiffening in symbolic protest. "Are you prepared to tell me you are performing experiments here in the United States of America? Here in one of its most distinguished regions? Are you testifying that you are murdering American citizens in the Litchfield Hills?" The government fact-finder had forgotten that he was not appearing on one of the many televised investigatory committees upon which he was so popular.

  "Are you bananas?" asked Dr. Svatopluk. "I'm not prepared to testify to anything. We're testing New Q here in our control site, this little town, and a little bit in Manhattan. Here and there. The way it's usually done. That's all I'm saying. We're doing what you told me to do."

  "I, sir?" Wolton's silver-haired voice rumbled with righteous indignation, and with his palms he brushed down the passion in his handsome breast. "I told you nothing."

  "Same here," mumbled Eagerly.

  "Well, somebody did," snapped Svatopluk. "And I want you to tell them that if they don't like the work I'm doing, they can get in touch with me and say so. Because I haven't heard a word of thanks out of you tinker toys for years. Money, yes. Equipment, yes. But hello, good-bye, keep it up? Forget it. Bureaucracies! Geniuses of inefficiency. Ninety percent! It has to be on purpose, or I would slit my throat over the human race." The scientist had either lost his temper or was, as Mr. Eagerly assumed, jogging in place in his office. "I have to get back to work now!" he said. "I can't waste any more time. It must be midnight. I'm sorry, but we're right on the edge! You know how you get that feeling? What your people call the Big Enchilada."

  "Yes, well," said Eagerly, "the important thing is, Sweaterpluck, will it work, and is it right?"

  The three men stood in the dirt clearing of the compound while the pilot prepared the army helicopter for lift-off. "A nice machine," sniffed Svatopluk. "Remember those S-Sixty-four Skycranes, military transport helicopters? Huge, excuse me, ah-CHOO! The Vietnamese have probably turned them all into restaurants by now.

  Yes, I admit, machines are impressive. But don't you forget, all the weaponry a Skycrane could carry would be nothing more than a bee's belch compared to Pasteurella pestis carried in the front stomach of a flea."

  The head of the base was worried. What would happen to his boys, not to mention his base, if Washington (lashed by Wolton) suddenly flung itself into one of its periodic flagellating spates of moral self-contempt?

  Eagerly was equally uneasy. Word was that Wolton was looking for a seat somewhere on the Hill, or in the cabinet. If he got on his high horse with this bit of news about germ warfare, so called, between his teeth, he could gallop it God knows where. With that kind of copy he'd be all over the front page, he could stir up all the old nests—the pacifists, the environmentalists, the human righters, the right-to-lifers, the no-no-nukers, the SPCA, leftover Yippies, and the whole Mrs. Ralph Bunche bunch that patronized moral outrage.

  Wolton was thinking the same thing. It was important, however, not to act too precipitously. He must be certain that when he kicked open the door, he would catch in flagrante something big. Though not, at least not prematurely, something too big. Wolton took Svatopluk by the arm and attempted to lead him away from Eagerly, who could not be shaken off but pressed his lapel even closer. "I will be presenting the information you've given me," intoned the OSS official, "presenting it, without delay and without distortion, to the proper authorities in Washington, at the very instant of my return."

  "So will I," Eagerly said.

  "What do you think you might say if I asked for your assurance that no further experiments will be carried out until the legality of your authority to test them on American citizens has been verified to my satisfaction?"

  "Satisfactory verification," Eagerly said.

  "Of course." Wolton's voice glided smoothly past the interruption. "Of course, you will want to continue your research. Keep everything going in the lab as before, until I return."

  "What are you talking about? What's he talking about?"

  Svatopluk spun away from Wolton's grasp and wheeled on Eagerly.

  "Well, it's just that Dan here thinks we ought to be sure we've got our wires straight before pushing ahead. Just take a little time out, check on our signals," the executive aide muttered while rapping his fingers on the flag in his lapel. He couldn't decide where his best position lay. Should he take Svatopluk aside, and warn him to blow up the base and destroy every trace of Operation Archangel, or should he take Svatopluk aside and ask him to blow up Daniel Wolton? Or should he throw in with Wolton and go the saviorstoolie route? Wolton, he noticed, was still orating, though it was hard to hear him over the helicopter: something about "perfectly willing to stand alone. Until I learn that some responsible branch of this government has sanctioned such an operation as you appear to be conducting against the inviolate rights of private individuals, I cannot believe it, I will not believe it, and, in such a democracy, thank God, I am honor-bound not to believe it. When the policies of Adolf Hitler—"

  "Dan, hold off a second, we've got to board. We can talk about this later."

  "Can we, Bucky, can we?" Wolton ran his Ivy League ring through his gray groomed hair. "Don't you frankly find this situation absolutely mind-boggling?"

  "This guy's bananas," Svatopluk told the sky. "Listen, boggle your own mind. Tell me this, okay? If Operation Archangel isn't authorized, then who's sending us the Cokes? Huh? Huh?"

  "He's got you there," Eagerly noted. But, without another word, Wolton pulled him into the helicopter and instructed the pilot to take off. Thomas Svatopluk, M.D., Ph.D., winner of many prizes, prized only son of doting parents, now chief of staff, was unaccustomed to being ignored and discounted. More maddening than the blustering threats of Commander Hector Brickhart was the cool contempt with which Daniel Wolton had just now slammed the (helicopter) door in his face, he (so intimidating to his, staff of Ph.D.s and M.D.s that they stammered when they spoke to him), he, a man of science, a man with the skill to transform the substance of life itself, a man who was the brightest man he had ever met, he, Thomas Svatopluk! "Come back here, you ivory-dick twat-head!" he screamed at Wolton. "Okay, tinker toy! Go ahead and tell on me, see if I care! Do they want to be number one, or don't they? Tell them to make up their minds!"

  In an excess of feeling, Svatopluk threw a rock at the tail rotor blade just at the instant when the helicopter began its ascent. He scrambled for another rock, picked it up, and hurled it into the night. It winged the blade. Then everything happened in a matter of seconds, the way such horrible things usually do. Tipped, the helicopter went out of control. Svatopluk was slammed, like a carpet, into the side of a tree. The tail rotor slammed against the side of his laboratory. A blade snapped off and flun
g itself, spinning, through the window. The machine looped and somersaulted up into night.

  And looking like—or so it had seemed to Ramona Dingley, watching miles away on her widow's walk—a falling star, the helicopter then spiraled down and dove headfirst toward Bredforet Pond.

  The tiny American flag tape recorder on the White House staffer's lapel recorded these words: "Would you say something's wrong?" asked in a gasp by Daniel Wolton. Followed by Bob ("Bucky") Eagerly's exclamation, "Holy shit! God Almighty! Fuck!"

  And terminating with the unhurried, unmistakably American sign-off of the young pilot's, "Come on, baby, come on, baby, hold it.

  Hold it, honey! All right, hang loose, down we go. Hello, Mama!"

  Down fell the global machine like a smug and innocent Humpty Dumpty who never dreamed he could fall or break into a thousand pieces that all the kingdom's men could not put back together in just that way again. Never dreaming that he wasn't more than the sum of his fragile parts.

  part four

  chapter 34

  Like a Busby Berkeley chorine, Dawn sprang up to admire herself in the million mirrors shining on grass and flowers. The day, announced Sarah MacDermott, was a real production number, though she couldn't help supposing it would have been more fitting if it had kept on raining through the little services for poor Alf Marco and poor Sister Mary Joseph. "God's tears, Joe. That's what the Father said when it poured so hard the morning we buried Mama. I remember he came around the side of the grave and I was thinking how his nice shoes were getting all covered with mud and how Mama was down there in that box wearing her best shoes too, and he said, 'Sarah, this rain is God's tears for your mama.'"

  But in the night, wind had hurried the rain along eastward, shirring toward the sea. And now Dingleyans were cultivating their gardens. Some did so only in a Voltairean sense, by renouncing unattainable desires (again). A.A. Hayes, for example, gave up a spasm of hope that on such a day he could "do something" to give his life significance. Sammy Smalter gave up a fantasy of love and Winslow Abernathy gave up a fantasy of marriage and Jonathan Fields gave up Walter Saar. Other Dingleyans, in the Virgilian manner, cultivated in the sun with hoes and hums. Of these, many had application and a few some talent, but only that floricultural archimage Sebastian Marco was a Merlin, and over the best gardens in town he held an inviolate suzerainty, which with unpredictable moodiness he periodically accepted, resigned, and reclaimed. This morning Sebastian was supposed to be at work on the Ransoms' garden. His absence, however, was not temperamental: with his mother, his brother Carl, and Carl's wife and children, the bachelor gardener sat in the Church of Our Lady of Mercy, where Father Patrick Crisp said some prayers for the soul of Alfredo Marco. Without imposing long illness, expensive hospitals, or even an outing in inclement weather on his family, the postal assistant had died as undemandingly as he had lived.