by JC Ryan
“If it will provide an answer that will let me get back to work before the season is over, I’ll agree to it,” he said. Wordlessly, JR and Rebecca exchanged a look that spoke of their opinion of Summers’ single-mindedness in the face of global disaster. Then JR nodded.
“Go for it,” he said.
Rebecca left to inform Robert and Nyree that their mission was a go, while JR, unable to contain himself, confronted Summers.
“What’s wrong with you, man? Tens of thousands are dead, and all you can think about is your precious excavation?”
“Did it ever occur to you that there might be records of this disease in the hospital ruins?” Charles answered. “Maybe even records of a cure?”
“They didn’t find it in the library,” JR countered.
“No, but that’s no reason to assume it wouldn’t be in the hospital. Come on, JR, it’s been weeks and none of us are sick. Let me take a few of the support personnel in there and continue to excavate.”
“You’re willing to take the risk?”
“Yes.”
“All right. But we have to inform anyone who proposes to go in that we can’t guarantee they won’t get sick. And we can’t force them to go if they don’t want to.”
“Fair enough,” said Charles. It was late enough in the day that, although the sun was still high, he preferred to wait for the next day to start. With little thought to how he would get his workers in if Robert and Nyree hadn’t returned with the rail cars, he went to recruit some, with JR following to make sure the situation was explained to them in terms they could all understand.
Robert and Nyree wasted no time in heading into the valley. By now, Robert was familiar with every face of the canyon wall that surrounded the valley. He thought it might be necessary to rappel down from the top to find any artificial source of the light, but that would require considerably more effort in climbing the outside slope of the ash cone in the Antarctic environment. If they could check some easily-accessible ledges inside first and find something there, it would be preferable. Nyree and el-Amin had already covered some of the lower reaches, but not being expert climbers, they hadn’t ventured further than easily climbed tumbles of rock had allowed; the highest being some one hundred feet or so above the valley floor.
From the top of the roughly circular canyon to the edges of the valley floor averaged some eight hundred feet. Since Nyree was small and wiry, Robert felt he could safely guide her to climb some areas to approximately halfway up. If she found nothing, he would either have to teach her more advanced climbing techniques, which would take more time than they had, or recruit JR to spot him as he rappelled from the top.
Robert and Nyree made their way in silence around the canyon wall until they came to the first waterfall, which emanated from a fissure in the canyon wall about two-thirds of the way to the top. It had carved a path that consisted of several steps where water collected and then flowed over the lip to the next protrusion. The canyon wall was broken nearby, with both vertical and horizontal cracks and ledges that Robert thought would be a good introduction to free-climbing.
Nyree would harness up and carry a length of rope with her. Any chance she had, she would loop it around a sturdy protrusion or crack so that if she needed him to, Robert could lower her quickly. When she couldn’t go any further or became concerned about her safety, he would lower her and then try to retrieve the rope. It wasn’t the most efficient way to accomplish their goal, but was all they could do with the resources at hand.
“What am I looking for, Robert? Your best guess,” Nyree clarified. She and el-Amin had been looking for plants or insects that fluoresced in colonies to reflect off the constant mist at the top of the canyon. The heavy mist, a product of the intersection between the intense cold of the outside and the rising warmth from the volcanic understory of the valley, prevented the sun from shining into the valley even at summer equinox. It also prevented anyone inside the valley from seeing the sky. The light seemed to come from the mist, but common sense told them that it was a reflection. The only trouble was, no one had yet found what could be casting light up to the mist to be reflected.
“Honestly?” Robert answered, “I don’t have a clue. If it were lava flow, the quality of the light would be different, and I’d think it would spill over and we’d see it on the walls. It’s probably more in your bailiwick than mine.”
Nyree nodded and turned to the wall. “Here goes,” she said, placing her hands as high as she could reach, one foot on a crack about three feet from the ground. She heaved herself upward, climbing easily from crack to ledge to protrusion.
“Pace yourself,” Robert warned. Nyree responded by slowing her upward progress, resting a bit as she placed the rope in its first secure place. Pitons really would have been better, Robert reflected, but then he would have had to instruct her in their use. Free-climbing was all right, as long as she was careful in where she placed her weight. He watched anxiously as she made her way upward.
When she had climbed as far as she could, Nyree was still a few feet short of her goal, what appeared to be a broad overhang that suggested a ledge above it. She called down to Robert for suggestions on how to proceed up and over the overhang, but he was unwilling to risk her safety on a technical move like that.
He asked her to see if she could move horizontally, either from where she was or anywhere she could comfortably see below her perch. In answer, she began to spider sideways, away from the waterfall, until she found a narrow crack that followed the trajectory of a ledge that was mere inches wide. Placing her hands into the crack, she steadied herself as she inched along the ledge, which traveled upward and still further away from the falls.
As she’d hoped, the ledge on which she stood intersected another that led up and back toward the falls, eventually becoming the overhang that had stopped her before. In a heart-stopping maneuver, she transferred her handhold from the crack, which was now below her shoulder level, to the intersecting ledge, and prepared to make the transition with her feet as well. Below her, Robert watched in horror as she slipped, catching herself with her hands only, and her feet scrabbling for purchase on the ledge from which she was trying to transition. When she caught it, she was stuck, stretched to her limit, on tiptoes and with her hands still holding much of her weight close to the wall.
There was nothing Robert could do but climb to her rescue, even though that left no one to belay them down. This had been a foolhardy venture that could yet end in tragedy for one or both of them. But, he had no choice. He couldn’t simply leave her there, and she wasn’t likely to be talked down after a close call like that. Nor was the belay rope in position to let her down. It took him mere seconds to analyze the situation and begin climbing, making better progress because of his superior height and climbing experience. When he reached her, he straddled her body, taking a precarious balance on his toes and steadying himself with his left hand jammed securely into the crack. Gently, he removed her hand from the upper ledge, holding her body steady by pressing his into her.
“See if you can put your hand in the crack, lovely,” he said, unconsciously using the term that he always used mentally for any woman.
Reassured by Robert’s calm voice and steady presence, Nyree complied, finding the crack after a couple of passes. “Okay.”
“Now the other,” Robert directed. This time, she found it more quickly. “I’ve got it.”
“Good girl. I’m going to swing back to the left, now. You wait here until I’m out of the way.”
“Okay.”
When he’d performed the tricky move, which required all the strength in the fingers of his left hand to steady himself in a lopsided position, Robert retraced his climb, placing his feet easily on the same places where he’d come up. He wouldn’t ask Nyree to do the same, though. The belaying rope was a few feet below her present position. Before climbing all the way down, he secured it in the crack they’d been using, inserting a camming device first, through which he fed a sl
ing fastened with a carabiner, wrapping it around the rope.
Then he scrambled to the bottom and told Nyree to let go and push away from the ledge. At first, she was paralyzed by fear of the drop, but as Robert talked, explaining what would hold her up, she relaxed. Without uttering the critical words ‘on belay’ to indicate she was going to put all her weight on the rope, Nyree swung free. Robert wasn’t caught off guard, though, knowing her inexperience and probable fright, he took her weight easily and let her down slowly, directing her to push away from the wall with her feet if she got too close. When she was down, she threw her arms around him and burst into tears.
“Here, now, you did fine. No need for this.”
“You saved my life,” she answered.
“Only after putting it in danger in the first place. We’re going to need another person before we do this again. Let’s see if JR can spare a day.”
~~~
After seeing Robert and Nyree off on their mission, Rebecca returned to the infirmary, where the gene sequencer had finally finished its work. Before looking at the results, Ben and Hannah prepared two more slides, this time with samples from a deceased patient and from Rebecca, whom they assumed to be carrying the highest number of virus cells because of her role as doctor to the patients. Once they had the machines working on the next slides, they each took a copy of both the original sequences and began to compare them against each other.
Ben took the methodical method of comparing chromosome by chromosome, while Hannah went straight to the loci of several genes she suspected of implication in the disease. Therefore, she was first to find the first difference, an allele, that is, a variant, of the CCR5 gene that in Ben’s sample was heterozygous and on hers was homozygous. Since the CCR5 gene has an important role in resistance to infection, this was a significant discovery.
The kicker was that the CCR5 gene made some individuals more vulnerable to certain viruses, and at least one common genetic mutation, the CCR5-Delta32, actually protected individuals with homozygous expressions of it from certain other viruses, specifically several strains of the HIV virus. Hannah would have to think about this, whether it could be the key or not. She would also have to analyze Ben’s anomalous CCR5 gene for the genetic deletion and compare it to known mutations like the Delta32. Then she’d have to examine the action of the mutation in attracting or repelling T-cells, the body’s infection fighters.
Before settling on this particular difference to investigate, Hannah compared several other locations for other genes associated with immune response, including CD4, the prototype marker for T helper cells, CD8, the marker for cytotoxic or killer T cells, both important in fighting infection, and IL10, an anti-inflammatory cytokine important to immune response to inflammation. However, she found no other areas of suspicion.
It made perfect sense to Hannah that a defective or ineffective CCR5 gene could mean the difference between contracting the virus and dying from it or contracting it and not even becoming ill. What she didn’t know was whether Ben’s heterozygous expression of the gene was an individual trait, or the ethnic trait they were looking for to explain the difference between desperately ill or dead Middle Easterners and presumably healthy others. The opposite could also be true. Perhaps her homozygous expression of the gene was an individual trait, not necessarily shared by all the members of the expedition and by extension, all non-Middle Eastern peoples. The sample was too small for true discovery. If it turned out to be a promising line of inquiry, they would have to turn it over to the CDC and their multi-national partners to prove it.
The fact that the remaining members of the expedition were still healthy nine weeks after the first sign of illness led her to believe that they would continue to be so. She knew of no virus with an incubation period of nine weeks, except perhaps herpesviroids or the small number of others that could go dormant within an organism’s cells only to attack again if the cells were disturbed. The dichotomy of this virus indicated it was not of that type, or so she could hope for the sake of her new friends and indeed for the sake of the world population.
Hannah’s next step would be to determine whether the fatalities’ CCR5 gene was heterozygous as well, but to do that she had to wait for the sequencers to finish their next set of samples, at a minimum. Meanwhile, while Ben patiently continued to compare the chromosomes, Hannah started looking more closely into the CCR5 allele that represented what she thought of as the anomaly in Ben’s blood sample.
As Hannah’s agile mind lined up her mental to-do list, Daniel walked in looking for any sign of progress that he could report to the President in his next call. With Hannah looking pleased and Ben positively excited, Daniel thought they must have made a breakthrough, and indeed, they had, though the investigation wasn’t yet finished. Hannah started to explain it to Daniel, but was soon stopped by his upraised hand.
“You might as well be speaking Greek, or maybe Swahili,” he said, so thoroughly confused that he had a flashback to his school days.
Hannah drew a breath and calmed herself, realizing that she must simplify it all for Daniel. More slowly, she began again.
It was a matter of high-school biology to understand that an individual’s chromosomes contained copies of genes from each of his parents. When the genes’ DNA matched in sequence, they were said to be homozygous, or alike. When they didn’t, they were said to be heterozygous, or different. When a gene was expressed in different ways, the way hers and Ben’s were different, the individual expressions were known as alleles—variations on a theme, to borrow an expression from music. That was a simplification, of course, but Hannah knew she was going to have to explain this to people who couldn’t be expected to know or remember it. Mentally, she drew a diagram known as a Punnett square diagram that would illustrate what she meant, using the common brown-eye versus blue-eye phenotype as an example. Yes, that would do to illustrate to the expedition leaders what she had discovered in at least the first two samples. It would be better to have a larger pool of subjects, but they would have to make do with what they had.
By now it was time for the evening meal, and Ben was at a stopping place. They walked together to the mess hall, Hannah explaining what she would say to the others. As far as she was concerned, they were on the right track and it would only be a matter of process of elimination to discover the reason for the virus’s behavior.
“Do you think it’s as simple as that?” Ben asked.
“Not very likely. In the first place, we need more samples to determine if it’s completely normal. Even if it isn’t, the fact that you have a heterozygous pair means that one of the alleles is dominant and the other recessive. It isn’t very likely that every Middle Eastern individual has the exact chromosome you have. We still have a long way to go before we can even mention it to the CDC at home.”
“What are you going to tell them here?”
“That we have a lead, but we have a long way to go.”
“Good enough. I’ll follow your lead in what to say and not to say,” Ben affirmed.
When they got to the mess hall, only Robert and Nyree were missing. Ben asked about them, and Rebecca explained that she had sent them into the valley to again try to determine what the light source was, saying that it would save time in eliminating that as a factor. Hannah nodded, pleased at Rebecca’s initiative. Too bad the girl was a practicing doctor. She’d make a great researcher with that kind of methodical mind.
Chapter 23 - Death to the Infidels
Although it was already Monday evening in Antarctica, it was again only about three in the morning on Monday when President Harper’s Chief of Staff woke him with another crisis. In Alabama, a mosque had been bombed, taking out several occupied residences nearby. Eleven people were dead, members of the Muslim community that worshiped in the mosque were outraged and demanding reparations already, though the incident had just been reported within the past hour.
The worst part was that a mob of angry rednecks was facing down the National Gua
rd unit that had been rushed to the scene. They wanted to finish the job of destroying the mosque, citing a rumor that there were plans afoot to mount a local jihad to avenge a handful of Muslims who had recently died from the N10H7 virus. With a crowd of upset Muslims on one side and the redneck mob on the other, the Guard unit was requesting orders regarding how to defend themselves and threatening to allow the combatants to just have it out.
Harper rose with his usual ability to come to full attention from a sound sleep. This was just the first in what he expected to be many skirmishes across the country. He didn’t have enough National Guard to contain it if it spread, and for a moment he considered allowing this unit to do just as they threatened. Knowing it wasn’t a viable answer, he sent for the Secretary of Defense to help him sort out what would be. While he waited for SecDef to appear, he once again cursed the bumbling idiot in the CDC who had delayed their response by failing to report what was happening. If only they’d had just a little more warning, perhaps the pandemic could have been delayed by stronger quarantine orders.
Harper was fully aware of the accusations from the Middle East that his orders were to round up all Muslims and infect them with the disease. Of course he denied it, but his denials had no effect on the raging lunatics who were using the situation to further their own agendas. It also didn’t help that some conservative religious denominations were actively citing passages from Revelation, interpreting them to mean that the pandemic was the fulfillment of prophecy.
One passage he had heard only that morning was from Revelation 6, verses 7 and 8: And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
