The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson

  “Could’ve. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Yeah,” Jack Carlson said, “and I’m just brewing beer for a hobby.”

  Lots of mail came the next day, including a few letters from Desiree. They’d done a mass-casualty drill that weekend, so she hadn’t been able to come home and Clyde hadn’t been able to visit her. She was dealing with the guilt by writing every day and calling at bedtime to coo into Maggie’s ear over the phone.

  Still sticking needles into butts like mad. Lots of nice diseases over there in the Gulf. Many of the reservists not up to snuff physically—can’t believe some of them got into the service in the first place. Had a young man in here with a scar up his chest like a zipper—he’d had open-heart surgery as a boy and somehow got into the Army anyway.

  Getting geared up for the mass-casualty drill this weekend. Lots of triage tags floating around—one is enclosed.

  She had enclosed a cardboard tag on a loop of string, apparently made to go around a patient’s neck. The tag was about three by six inches and bore lines for the patient’s name and notes on his condition. At the bottom were three colored strips attached by perforations, so that they could easily be torn off. The strip on the bottom was green and bore a cartoon of a tortoise.

  If we leave the bottom (green) strip attached, it means the patient is basically okay, there’s no big rush. If we tear it off, what’s left is the yellow strip with the picture of the hare on it—that means better hurry and get this one some attention. If we tear that off, what’s left is the red strip with the picture of the speeding ambulance on it.

  Tactfully, she didn’t explain what Clyde could see with his own eyes: if the red strip was torn off, what remained was a black strip with a little icon that might have been a cross; but when he looked closer, he saw it was probably supposed to be a dagger.

  We know all about nasty old anthrax now and so they are training us in something more exotic: botulin toxin. They think Saddam may have some of that in his stockpile, too. I hope they’re wrong, because though we have tons and tons of anthrax vaccine, the botulin serum is in very short supply. I suppose they are trying to make more, but it’s a slow process. Apparently you can’t just crank the stuff out like sausage. They gave us some handouts to read—mostly copies of research papers. Gave my little Iowan heart a thrill to see that a lot of this research comes from our very own hometown. Remember Dr. Folkes, the old man who rides his bicycle to work? Turns out what he’s been doing all this time is studying botulin. So his name and the name of our fair city are all over this research.

  Give the little one a big hug and kiss for me. I’ve been thinking that when I get out of this in one piece, we should give her a new little brother or sister as a present for Christmas ninety-one. We’ve been holding off, I know, but now I want to do everything right away.

  thirty-five

  “DR. FOLKES? Clyde Banks. Sorry to disturb you in the evening like this, but as you may have heard, I’m running for Forks County sheriff, and I’ve made a personal commitment to knock on every door in the county before the election, and, well, your turn just came up.”

  Dr. Arthur Folkes had emerged onto the porch and now peered at his visitor through large glasses with lenses even thicker than Clyde’s. Between the two of them they must be separated by a good inch of expensively ground glass. Rumor had it that he was in his mid-eighties. He certainly looked that way from the shoulders up; his blotched scalp was completely bald, and loose flesh sagged from his neck and jowls. But he moved like a sixty-year-old fencing master. For decades he had been making a spectacle of himself by riding his Raleigh to the university every day, snow or shine. Every few years, just to break the monotony, he got run off the road by a thoughtless student or careening school bus and racked up a few weeks in a body cast.

  “That’s okay. Haven’t had any peace anyway,” he said. “Door’s open.”

  Clyde opened the screen door, wiped his feet carefully on the mat, and stepped in. Dr. Folkes had already retreated inside the house, so Clyde crossed the porch, made another show of wiping his feet on a second mat, and entered. It had the wet human smell that he had learned to associate with houses where people had grown old. There was another smell, too, a hospital smell, though Clyde didn’t consciously recognize it for a while.

  He had lost Dr. Folkes’s trail and stood uncertainly in the foyer until he heard the old professor’s voice from the kitchen. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to trap you here for hours. You get a lot of old people doing that to you?”

  “Some folks are quite pleased to receive a visitor,” Clyde allowed.

  “Got something going on the stove and want to keep an eye on it,” Folkes said.

  Clyde found his way into the kitchen and discovered Folkes frying up some Italian sausages. “I’d offer you some, but I know you probably want to exchange some pleasantries and move on.”

  Clyde said nothing to this remark, still trying to work out whether his host was trying to be polite or rude.

  “Not much of a politician, are you?” Folkes said, eyeing him through a column of fennel-scented steam.

  The telephone began ringing. Dr. Folkes ignored it. Clyde wondered whether he was hard of hearing; but he’d heard the doorbell.

  “No, sir, I don’t imagine that I am.”

  “I’m kind of a knee-jerk Democrat. Like most academics, I guess.”

  “That’s a decision I respect, sir. But you may find that the traditional policy differences that separate the two parties don’t have much relevance in the position of county sheriff.”

  “Ah. Well-oiled riposte.”

  The phone stopped ringing after nine or ten times, then immediately started ringing again. “Hate it when people call during dinnertime,” Dr. Folkes said.

  “I have a handout here with some drunk-driving statistics—comparing Iowa’s ninety-nine counties.” Clyde laid a sheet of paper on the spotless avocado Formica of Dr. Folkes’s kitchen counter.

  “Hell,” said Dr. Folkes, squinting at it from across the room. “You handwrote it. Don’t you have a computer or a typewriter or something?”

  “Thought the numbers spoke for themselves.”

  “What do they say?”

  “We have the lowest rate of drunk-driving arrests and the highest rate of drunk-driving fatalities in the state.”

  “Ah. And you’re thinking that as a bicyclist, this one is near and dear to me.”

  Clyde said nothing.

  “Well, I’ll review your statistics and probably vote for you. Satisfied?”

  “No, sir.”

  Dr. Folkes was in the midst of transferring the sausages onto a marred plastic dinner plate decorated with large daisies. He stopped and peered at Clyde. “How’s that? I said I’d vote for you. What do you want me to do? Go out and distribute campaign literature for you? I’ve already spent enough time pulling your bumper stickers out of my chainwheel.”

  “When I knocked on your door, you told me that you never got any peace in the evening. That makes me wonder whether you are having any problems that might be of interest to the sheriff’s department. So even if I have your vote, I can’t honestly say I’m satisfied until I’ve—”

  “Oh, shit, no, it’s nothing like that,” Dr. Folkes said. Laughing, he turned his back on Clyde and carried his plate into the dining room. Clyde followed him there. “It’s the goddamn phone calls, Mr. Banks.”

  “Prank calls?”

  “I wish they were. No, it’s work related. And it’s nothing that you can help with. But thank you for making the offer.”

  “What’s your line of work there at the university?” Clyde said, trying to sound conversational.

  “I’m a microbiologist,” Dr. Folkes said through a mouthful of sausage. “I study things that are yucky.”

  “Yucky?”

  “Most of the time when people ask what I do, they don’t really want to know. They are just being polite. If I really tell them, they get uncomfortable. Sinc
e I suspect that all you really want is to extricate yourself from this conversation and move on to the next house, I’m giving you an easy out.” He looked at Clyde expectantly.

  “Cop work is like that,” Clyde said after a thoughtful pause. “Lots of high-speed road accidents. Farmers caught in grain augers and such.”

  Dr. Folkes nodded enthusiastically, seeming to find this analogy insightful.

  “So I wouldn’t say that I am easily grossed out,” Clyde continued.

  “Well, then, what I do is study a particular genus of bacterium called Clostridium, of which the best known is C. botulinum—the manufacturer of botulin toxin.”

  “People ever bring you tainted soup?”

  “All the time. Most of it isn’t tainted at all—just old. And the tainted stuff isn’t always tainted with C. botulinum. But I have acquired some interesting strains that way, yes.”

  “What do you do with them?”

  “Mostly freeze ’em. But I grow some of it.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I grow it,” Dr. Folkes said, mildly irritated. “Come here.” He wadded up his napkin and threw it onto the table, then jumped to his feet, wheeled, and strode back through the kitchen to a door. The door opened onto a narrow, steep stairway descending into a dark basement. Dr. Folkes stomped down into darkness, his hand flailing above his head until it caught a length of twine strung through a line of screw eyes. Bluish light flickered from down below and then exploded as several long fluorescent fixtures came to life. Clyde followed him down the nearly vertical steps, hunching to avoid banging his head on the ceiling. The hospital smell became much stronger.

  The basement was perhaps half the size of the house. One wall was bulging inward as the foundation wall gave way to the pressure of the soil and was being held at bay by a few massive timbers propped against it and anchored to the floor. An antique toilet was fixed to another wall, a rust-streaked porcelain tank above it with a cobwebbed pull chain dangling. In one corner, next to an ancient, stained laundry tub, was a heavy workbench made from a particleboard door set up on four-by-four legs. The workbench held a plethora of laboratory glassware, some of which was upside down on a rack of dowels, drying out, the rest containing fluids that were either transparent or muddy brown. Larger jugs sat on the floor underneath, containing what Clyde took to be bulk raw materials.

  The most prominent object was a five-gallon glass carboy in the middle of the workbench, filled to the shoulder with brown fluid veiled with yellow foam. Dr. Folkes was already there, eyeing it carefully. He waited until Clyde was standing right in front of it and allowed him to have a gander.

  “See, now, right there,” he said, “is enough botulin toxin to kill everyone in the state of Iowa.”

  Clyde stepped back a pace. “Are you joking?”

  “When I’m joking, Mr. Banks, I try to say things that are actually funny.”

  “Well, isn’t it dangerous to have it here?”

  “Let me put it this way,” Dr. Folkes said in a tired tone of voice, as if he were running through this explanation for the thousandth time. He went over to a Peg-Board where numerous tools were hanging, neatly arranged, and selected a clawhammer. “This hammer right here could kill everyone in the state of Iowa—if you went around and bashed their heads in with it. True?”

  “Theoretically.”

  “But no one thinks it’s unsafe for me to have a hammer in the basement. Now, do you want me to carry through with the analogy, or are we clear?”

  “I follow,” Clyde said. “But why are you doing it here? Don’t you have a lab at the university?”

  “Yes. But this isn’t university work that I’m doing here. This is private. You know how Professor Larsen has all those spin-off companies out at the technology park?”

  “I’ve heard he has several companies going there.”

  “Well, this is my spin-off, and it’s got a better profit margin than anything that son of a gun will ever do. No overhead—except for this door and these four-by-fours from Hardware Hank.”

  “You make money from this?”

  “Yep. Not a fortune by any means, but enough to buy me some nice vacations.”

  “How?”

  “You mean, where exactly is the market for botulin toxin?”

  “Right.”

  “It’s used in medical treatments. The toxin works by paralyzing muscles. So, for example, if you have a wandering eye because some of the eye muscles are out of whack, the doctor injects a tiny amount of this toxin into the muscles that are too strong, paralyzing them.”

  Clyde mulled this one over. “If this is enough to kill three million people, then isn’t that overkill for a few people with wandering eyes?”

  “Very good,” Dr. Folkes said. “It’s massive overkill. Most of this stuff goes to the military.”

  “For weapons?”

  Dr. Folkes looked disappointed in Clyde. “Nah! This wouldn’t be enough for weapons production. They’d build a gold-plated assembly line somewhere for that. My stuff is used in preparing the antidote.”

  “How’s that work?”

  “They inject botulin toxin into horses. Small amounts at first. As the horse builds up an immunity, they inject progressively higher doses, until the amount of toxin running through that horse’s bloodstream is a thousand times what would kill a human. They draw blood from the horse and isolate the immune protein, then shoot it into soldiers.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Who knows? No one’s ever used botulin toxin on an actual battlefield. Saddam’s working on it, though.”

  The phone upstairs was ringing again.

  “And that,” Folkes said, “is why I never get any peace these days. Military.” He shook his head and rolled his eyes as he uttered the word, as if words could never express the depth and complexity of his relationship with the military. “They must have my phone number posted above every urinal in the Pentagon. So it’s nice of you to ask, Mr. Banks. But I’m afraid you can’t help me with the kind of hassles I’ve been getting.”

  Dr. Folkes turned away and began stomping up the stairs. “Kill the lights when you’re done. Just don’t touch anything if you want to make it out of this basement alive.”

  Clyde came up a few minutes after and found Dr. Folkes polishing off the last of his dinner. “Saw you had some brewer’s yeast down there on your workbench,” he said.

  “Bacteria food,” Dr. Folkes said. “C. botulinum needs that and a few other goodies.”

  “Such as?”

  “Why? Going to grow some of your own?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Sugar and chicken soup.”

  Clyde pondered the matter of chicken soup at some length. “Would beef or pork work?”

  Dr. Folkes grimaced. “Don’t take me literally. It’s not really chicken soup. It’s a solution of various proteins. Remember, the stuff grows wild in all kinds of soup that’s been canned wrong. And I won’t tell you anything more, because you already know enough to grow these little bugs in your own basement and compete with me and my little spin-off.”

  “Dr. Folkes, I realize that that was a facetious comment. But is it really that easy to grow this stuff?”

  “You saw my setup down there. That look like million-dollar technology to you?”

  “Well, Dr. Folkes, it sure has been interesting getting to know you a bit and talk about your work.”

  “Well, I hope you go out and catch some drunk drivers.”

  “I’ll be sure and do that, sir, and I appreciate your vote. I’ll see myself out.”

  thirty-six

  IT WAS two o’clock in the morning of Clyde’s night off. But he was in uniform anyway and brandishing an unfamiliar weapon: a metal detector. He had borrowed the implement from the frugal Ebenezer, who occasionally used it to seek lost treasure in the mud-covered floodplains of the local rivers after seasonal floods. When he had explained the nature of the night’s errand, Ebenezer had even offered to sleep over at his house
and keep an eye on Maggie. As Clyde stalked up and down the warehouse floor of Byproducts Unlimited in a bobbing pool of yellow light, he could not help wondering whether Maggie was awake, and what she would think when the gaunt, spectral face of Ebenezer swam into view above her crib.

  Clyde was accompanied by one Chris, an edgy, chain-smoking, thirtyish rent-a-cop who had been deputized to hold Clyde’s big black cop flashlight. In more blessed circumstances Clyde might have been annoyed to find himself wrapped in a moving cloud of acrid tobacco smoke, but there he was glad of anything that might deaden his sense of smell.

  The warehouse adjoined the rendering floor on one side and the loading dock on the other. It was divided into long aisles by stacks of wooden cargo pallets, each pallet occupied by bulging plastic sacks stenciled with the legend “MegaPro: Packed with Pride at Byproducts Unlimited.” For as long as Clyde could remember, Byproducts Unlimited had been a part of the landscape, its fleet of ramshackle box trucks careening down gravel farm roads with the stiff legs of dead livestock poking out the top. The animals’ fat ended up in drums, destined for restaurants, and their protein ended up as MegaPro powder, used to make dog food and other delicacies.

  The rent-a-cop dropped Clyde’s flashlight while trying to light another cigarette, his hands gone clumsy with the October chill. He cursed, picked it up, apologized. Clyde said nothing, just moved on to the next pallet and scanned each sack in turn with the big disk of the metal detector.

  The rent-a-cop had reason to be jumpy. His company had been hired on short notice a few days ago, when Byproducts found evidence of a break-in at one of their back doors. It seemed that these break-ins might actually have been going on for as long as a few weeks. Nothing important had been stolen, though, despite the fact that tools and VCRs and TV sets were lying out in plain sight in the company’s workshops and offices. Tire tracks were noted in the dirt behind the building.

  In a seemingly unrelated development, early-morning fishermen noticed a large, persistent gasoline slick near the end of a public pier up at Lake Pla-Mor. A diver was sent down and came up with the news that a black van rested on the bottom, fifty feet beneath the surface. The van was hauled out and examined, not only by local detectives but by some FBI people who drove out from Chicago. It was suspiciously free of useful evidence. Some prints were lifted from the driver’s-side door, which had been found hanging open; they matched the prints of the oft-arrested, oft-fingerprinted Tab Templeton, who was still missing.