The two scientists, Hallie and Cahner, and the doctor, Haight, were at least somewhat familiar with van der Waals forces, which they had learned about way back in graduate and medical school. Arguello, who was not, looked at the two gloves on his hands like they were snakes.
This is going to be interesting, Hallie thought. Getting them to trust these things going down a five-hundred-foot wall. Good test of a leader.
Haight spoke with unusual sharpness, all trace of backwoods Tennessee gone from his voice. “Wil, I’ve been caving and climbing most of my life. I’m still alive because I am very careful about my equipment. That means not using something I don’t understand, especially experimental Buck Rogers stuff.”
“Absolutely right.” Bowman nodded. “Bear with me for a minute. We’re all familiar with how lasers work, I’d guess?”
“They organize random light energy into a coherent, focused beam,” Arguello said, sounding distracted. He was trying to remove his gloves, without success.
“These tools work the same way,” said Bowman. “They organize random molecular bonding energy—those van der Waal forces—into coherent beams. When they meet other random molecular energy, say from a pane of glass, they pull that energy into coherent attraction.”
“Like two magnets?” Hallie was trying to take a glove off, too. It was like trying to peel away her own flesh.
“Yes. But many times more powerful.”
“But are they going to work on rock that is slick and wet?” Haight still sounded skeptical.
“Even better. Moisture enhances the van der Waal forces’ flow. And a slightly rough surface like rock is better than a smooth one because it presents more total bonding area.”
“But how are they able to change themselves to mimic the forms of our hands?” Arguello asked. “And why can’t I get them off?”
“Once again, thank DARPA.” Hallie could hear impatience creeping into Bowman’s voice. But he continued: “It’s called ‘jamming skin enabled locomotion.’ DARPA’s molecular engineers made certain substances, including flexible plastics, capable of changing shape to create motion. It could be helpful moving around on other planets with surfaces that might be impassable by conventional vehicles.” He moved his light toward Cahner, then Arguello. “They don’t come off that way. They meld with, rather than mold to, surfaces.”
“So they’ve literally merged with our bodies?” Haight sounded incredulous.
“More or less. Now watch.” Bowman walked to the nearest vertical section of rock, about twenty feet to their right. He slipped the “overshoes” onto his caving boots, where they molded to the shape of the boots as the gloves had to their hands. It was an incredible thing to watch, the inert black material suddenly appearing to come alive, moving and changing, flowing around the caving boots. He pressed the palm of his right hand onto the wall just above his head, then the left. He placed one foot against the wall, then the other. There was a barely audible sound, something between a hiss and a gulp, and suddenly Bowman was attached to the wall.
He started climbing. It was like watching someone crawl along a floor, except Bowman was doing it straight up.
“Dracula,” Haight whispered.
Hallie didn’t like that comparison. “Spider-Man,” she said. Whatever you called it, Bowman’s demonstration up there was amazing. It wasn’t only the Gecko Gear. A climber herself, she knew how much strength it took to go straight up a wall like that, sticky hands and feet or no.
Bowman ascended thirty feet above the cave floor. There he rested briefly in the big spot cast by the light beams of the other four, staring up at him from below. He moved his hands and feet so that they described half of a large circle. He stopped, hanging upside down above them like a giant red lizard in his brightly colored caving suit. He rotated the remaining half of the circle so that he was upright again.
“Now, here’s a really cool thing.” He peeled his left hand and both feet off the wall and hung by only his right hand. “These things work.”
He reattached his other hand and both feet, down-climbed, rejoined them.
“Things you should know: You don’t need to press hard. And you don’t need to have the whole boot sole in contact. A few square inches are enough. It’s like front-pointing on ice with crampons. You detach by peeling up and away from the bottom. Which is also how you walk on level ground, if you have to, though it’s awkward at best, as you might have noticed.”
“So now what, Wil?” Arguello was looking toward the giant pit.
“Now you practice. Let’s take …” He glanced at his watch. “Ten minutes. Go find a wall.”
At the bottom of a vertical section, Hallie put on the overshoes. Then, taking a deep breath, she moved her right hand slowly toward a spot on the wall about a foot higher than her head. When her hand was several inches from the wall, she began to feel a pull, like that of a magnet attracted to steel. Amazing. The closer she moved her hand, the stronger that pull became. When the “glove” touched rock, she felt it moving again, changing, joining itself, at the molecular level, with the wall. She tested it carefully, first pulling down on it and then, when it would not move, hanging more and more of her body weight from the hand placement. It was an unbelievably solid connection—as though her hand had become part of the rock. Ascending very carefully, she discovered that the climbing was less physically demanding than she’d expected, once she lost the tension of fear and reverted to good form, using the big muscles in her legs rather than trying to power up with her arms. Before long, she and Haight were moving smoothly around like a pair of giant spiders. Cahner took a bit longer, but eventually he, too, was crawling confidently up and down the wall.
Arguello, however, couldn’t seem to get it. Despite working himself into a red-faced sweat, he wasn’t able to rise more than a couple of feet. One hand or boot would peel off and he’d lose control of the others, dropping clumsily to the floor. Bowman watched, arms folded. After a while he walked over.
“I think I can help, Rafael. Don’t reach so high. You can’t use your most powerful leg muscles, and you don’t have the right angle to peel off correctly.”
Arguello looked skeptical, but he did as Bowman suggested, setting his hands closer to the top of his helmet, then finding his foot placements. He moved tentatively, as though expecting to fall off again, but before long, he was twenty feet above Bowman. He glanced back over his shoulder, grinning.
“It works!” He traversed side to side, went up and down a few more times, then stepped down beside Bowman. “Once you get it, these things are fun.”
“Good job, Rafael. You looked strong up there.”
Arguello shook his head. “Good job by you. If not for you, I would still be flopping around.”
“What I’m here for.”
“Hey, this place have a name?” It was Haight, calling down from far above.
Hallie answered. “You know cavers give names to everything, Ron. This is Don’t Fall Wall.”
DON BARNARD SAT BEHIND HIS DESK AND TRIED TO REMEMBER when he had slept last. He couldn’t recall, but he did know the current day, date, and time—because in a bit less than two minutes he would have a videoconference with the president of the United States and some of his key advisers.
He had put on a fresh white shirt and a new tie, blue with small silver stars. He fiddled a good deal with the knot, getting the dimple just right, and playing with the dimple made him remember the day his father had taught him to tie a tie, more than a half century ago.
“The dimple is everything, Donald,” his father had said. “And nothing. Nothing but a tiny detail, but of such details fortunes and tragedies are made.” He had been ten at the time, and, though he had dutifully said, “Yes, sir,” he’d had little idea what his father was talking about. Now he did.
He ran a comb through his white hair one more time, straightened his suitcoat. His attire was in good order. Not the face, though. The face looked like that of a man who had aged five years in two week
s. Nothing he could do about that. Maybe he would look better when this was all over. Then again, maybe not. Fatigue and fear were cruel sculptors.
He took a sip of water from the glass on the desktop, which was clean except for a fresh legal pad and a pen. He looked at his watch. Twenty-eight seconds.
He watched the red hand climb up toward 12, and just as it passed over that number, a soft chime sounded. The big flat-screen monitor on the wall changed from blue to a bright image of President O’Neil in the White House Situation Room. A tall black man with close-cut hair beginning to show flecks of gray, he was sitting at the head of the room’s thirty-foot-long mahogany conference table, wearing a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, collar loosened, dark red tie pulled down. He did not look here as he always did in public—calm, collected, quick to flash a dazzling smile. Now he looked tired. The president was flanked by Vice President Eileen Washinsky, Health and Human Services Secretary Nathan Rathor, and Secretary of Homeland Security Hunter Mason.
Barnard cleared his throat. “Good evening, Mr. President, Madam Vice President, Secretary Rathor, Secretary Mason,” he said respectfully.
“Hello, Dr. Barnard.” A quick flash of the famous presidential smile that, in the early years of his tenure, had lit up an entire country. “I’m sorry that our earlier conference had to be cut short. And for taking too long to reconnect. I need to learn more, and a lot of people say you are the best person to help me do that.”
He felt himself blush. “Thank you, sir.”
“In our previous discussion, you said that this germ might have the potential to destroy our armed forces from the inside out. Has that proved to be an accurate assessment, Doctor?”
“More accurate than when we last spoke, sir. Its contagion factor appears similar to that of smallpox. Its mortality rate is worse—something like ninety percent thus far.”
“Ninety percent?” Eileen Washinsky’s eyebrows shot up. “Is that really possible?”
“I’m afraid so, Madame Vice President. No other known pathogen, possibly excepting Ebola, is so deadly. It’s too early, and our sample size is too small, to make final determinations, of course.”
The president spoke. “Doctor Barnard, we have every CDC lab not otherwise engaged in critical national security at work. We also have the military’s biowarfare people involved. We have not brought in any private-sector entities because of security concerns.”
“Thank you, sir. I concur that letting the bad news out before we have any good to counter it with could trigger a panic.”
“We agree on that, Doctor,” rasped Hunter Mason. He was a massive man, not tall but plated with muscle from years of weight lifting, his personal passion. He had a shaved head shaped like an artillery shell, and even in a tailored business suit he looked like he could bench-press a refrigerator. His voice sounded like gravel sliding out of a dump truck. “But when do we start to talk about this?”
Barnard took a deep breath. “Sir, we have received cultures of the pathogen from Afghanistan. Our own laboratories are just beginning their work. Until we’ve had some time with the thing, I would respectfully suggest that it would be best to maintain silence.”
The president nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Barnard. We value your opinion highly because, as I understand it, your laboratories were very close to formulating promising new antibiotics. That puts you closer than anyone else to producing something that might be effective against this germ.”
“Thank you, sir.” Barnard thought, Rock and hard place. If he keeps it quiet and there’s a pandemic, they’ll say he should have told the world. If he goes public and there’s a panic, they’ll say he caused it. Glad I’m not in his seat.
The president spoke again, bringing that part of their discussion to a close. “Now. Can you brief us quickly on what’s being done over there at BARDA?”
“Of course, sir. Since we first learned of the crisis, we’ve employed a three-pronged approach. One of our lab groups has been trying to synthesize an antibiotic that might prove effective. Another is trying to synthesize moonmilk itself—the extremophile that we had been working with earlier. And a third will now begin looking for a way to disrupt ACE’s genetic codes.”
Barnard waited for questions. Lathrop had told him and the others that his boss, Hunter Mason, and the president both knew about the moonmilk mission to Cueva de Luz. Barnard assumed that Rathor and Washinsky had been briefed as well. But events had been unfolding very quickly, and no one had verified that fact for him. Because of the Cueva de Luz mission’s secrecy and, given its unusual nature, the potential for political backlash, he had decided not to speak of it until the president did.
No one asked him any questions. The president leaned forward, looked down at his notes, then up again. “Doctor, I understand you also have people looking for that extremophile in its natural form.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How would you estimate their chances of success?”
Barnard had been anticipating this question, but he still wasn’t sure how to answer it. The fact that the president and his people were not actually in the room did nothing to lessen Barnard’s awareness of their inestimable power. It was like sitting next to explosives that might detonate at any moment without warning. In his whole life, the only comparable experience had been his reaction to combat in Vietnam, an intoxicating brew of fear, awe, and ecstasy. The adrenaline affected heart rate and respiration and, as he well knew, could bend judgment as well. Always tempting to overpromise. Better to underpromise and overdeliver. He also recalled Haight’s words during their briefing: “a desperate thing.” He thought, Occupy the middle ground.
“I would say their chances are good, sir.”
It was as neutral as he could be without raising false hopes of success or leaving the impression that failure was preordained. O’Neil just nodded. Washinsky and Mason remained expressionless because, Barnard assumed, as nonscientists they placed little stock in what must have sounded something like science fiction to them. Nathan Rathor’s eyebrows went up, wrinkling his forehead, and he frowned. The expression was visible only for a millisecond, but long enough to reveal itself as surprise, and that, in turn, surprised Barnard.
“I thought that those people in the cave were a pretty long shot,” Rathor said.
Why? Barnard wondered. He had had no direct communication with Rathor about this. But not yours to question why, old man. A cabinet officer has sources you can’t even dream of.
“They will face—are facing—many challenges, Mr. Secretary,” Barnard agreed. He hesitated, struggling for some right way to say this, and then found the words. “I can tell you that if any team on earth could accomplish such a mission, it is this one.”
Rathor looked as though he were about to ask another question, but then put his flat, cabinet officer face on again and said only, “I understand. That’s all from me, Mr. President.”
The president, though, was not quite finished. “I have two last questions, and then we will let you go. If your laboratory does come up with a drug that is effective against ACE, won’t it take many months to produce enough vaccine? You have to grow it in eggs, don’t you?”
“Vaccine you do, yes sir. An antibiotic is different. Once we understand its genetic code, we can produce essentially unlimited amounts relatively quickly. Something like a million doses in two weeks if we involve private-sector assets. Then the real problem would be further down the pipeline. In other words, how do we get the drug quickly to the millions who might need it by then?”
The president looked hugely relieved. “Doctor, I have to tell you, that’s the first piece of good news I’ve heard in a week. Distribution is a problem we can handle. Now my second question: how many casualties are we talking about?”
“Worst case, Mr. President?”
“Of course. There’s no other way to plan.”
Barnard got up from behind his desk and walked to a whiteboard on the wall. The system’s motion-sensitive telecom camera
tracked him all the way. David Lathrop moved to stay out of the frame.
“Mr. President, our best information at this point is that ACE’s contagion factor is faster than that of smallpox. Here’s what that looks like.”
With a red marking pen, Barnard drew a numeral:
1
“This scenario assumes that ACE has broken containment. The pathogen appears to reach contagion stage after three to five days. It’s about seven to ten with smallpox, by the way—a significant difference between the two. Once contagious, that first person—the index case—will transmit the infection to about twelve people every day in your typical urban setting.”
Beneath the 1, Barnard wrote
DAY THREE:
12
“Those twelve will become contagious within the same time period, and each of them will infect another twelve.”
DAY SIX:
144
After that he stopped talking and just drew:
DAY NINE:
1,728
DAY TWELVE:
20,736
DAY FIFTEEN:
248,832
DAY EIGHTEEN:
3,257,437
Barnard stepped to one side of the board and waited. Absurdly, he worried for a moment about the dimple in his tie knot. Then that he might have forgotten to raise his zipper after his last trip to the bathroom. Stress, he thought. Stay focused.
No one spoke. No one in the Situation Room would until the president did. O’Neil stared at the whiteboard for a long time.
“You’re telling me,” said the president, “that if this thing breaks out, absent some countermeasure, we will have three million infected people in three weeks? And that nine out of ten of them could die?”
“No, sir.”
“Then what are you telling me?”
“That it’s not if ACE will break out, sir. It’s when.”
The president’s normally rich skin tone had turned to ashen gray. His mouth opened, closed. He put a hand on his forehead, let it drop. “What in God’s name will we do with three million infected corpses?”
The Deep Zone: A Novel Page 12
