Virus: The Day of Resurrection

by Sakyo Komatsu

  “And that’s our problem,” Admiral Conway said. “Antarctica is said to be ‘the germless continent,’ and at the American bases in particular, we’ve always taken health and sanitation extremely seriously. However, summer is only six months away. If those germs were to be carried here from the northern hemisphere …”

  “At this rate, do you really think any supply ships will be coming here next year?” asked Captain Barnes.

  “That’s a problem as well,” Admiral Conway said tightly. “Suppose that we here at the pole find ourselves completely isolated from the rest of the world and have to survive on our own for some period of time—possibly even for years?”

  Silence. Outside the double wall of Showa Station’s wireless room, the whipping, wild winds of the blizzard roared. “In the absolute worst-case scenario,” New Zealand’s Major Blaine added bluntly, “Antarctica may be the only place that survives.”

  “God save us,” said Captain King from Australia. “Living amid all this ice.”

  “Actually, I’ve been thinking about exactly that,” said Admiral Conway. “At the very beginning of this, we received news to some degree of what was going on all over the world, but then, as the situation has deteriorated, it’s become almost impossible to get accurate information about what’s happening out there at present. However, my impression from listening in on the transmissions of others is that things are only going from bad to worse.

  “Currently, we’re in the middle of winter. Any way you look at it, we’re sealed away in ice for the next half of the year. We have no way of communicating with the outside world. However, considering the problems of sanitation and resupply, I don’t think it’s too early to think about creating a formal body to allow each nation’s wintering teams to confer and cooperate with one another.”

  “Resupply is the most pressing concern,” said Lieutenant Lopez from Argentina.

  “Yes, it is. We haven’t a clue what things are like out there, but starting now we have to think about these things. How many years will we need to live here? How will we continue to survive? Seals and penguins can replenish our food supply somewhat, and another fortunate thing is that America, the Soviet Union, France, England, and Japan are all producing electricity with nuclear power generators they’ve brought down here. With those, we should be all right for three, four years. What’ll we do for powering our vehicles, though? And eventually, we’ll have to think about using Antarctica’s coal deposits to supply ourselves with electricity. And how to most effectively use the resources that each country has on hand.”

  “We may all end up living together, eh?” said Professor Borodinov.

  “Yes—yes, that’s true. Everyone, the one thing that we all have in common is that we live in Antarctica. Like it or not, we are already on our way to becoming a single collective bound to a common fate. There are barely ten thousand people hunkered down in the ice of this continent, and they may end up being the last survivors of humanity. The bare handful of resources and facilities we have here may end up being the last remnant of civilization. When that happens, we’ll have to pull together with what little strength we have and live by helping each other.”

  “Once the weather settles down around all of the stations,” began Captain Nakanishi, his heavy jowls moving for the first time, “we’ll need all of the leaders to assemble in one place somewhere to hold a real meeting. If possible, to form a unified organization.”

  “Seconded,” said Captain Barnes.

  “And each team should bring a list—as detailed as possible—of whatever resources, personnel, and facilities they have. We’ll need to talk about those things.”

  “I think we’ll have some data soon from the unmanned weather observation devices,” Admiral Conway said. “I’ll send around a general weather map, and I’d like each station to make corrections. As for the first assembly …”

  Dr. Torigai, the number two man on the station’s medical team, sat before the wireless in Tatsuno’s room, his face blanching as he transcribed the long, hard-to-catch message being transmitted by WA5PS. Tatsuno listened in intent silence as he was running the tape recorder.

  “This is really quite something …” murmured Dr. Torigai. “I need to meet with the medical team to discuss this.”

  “Actually, what we need,” Medical Department Chief Iguchi added in a low tone, peeking at Torigai’s note pad, “is a microbiologist. You say it’s an infectious disease caused by a new type of virus that hides inside Pfeiffer bacilli or golden staph? We need to ask all the other stations to get everyone who’s an authority on microbes together to discuss this, if possible.”

  “Dr. Borodinov, the captain of the Soviet team, is a geophysicist, but he’s also an authority on biochemistry and microbiology,” offered Yoshizumi. “He was once a student of Oparin.”

  “It’s finished,” murmured Tatsuno, picking up the microphone. “Hello, WA5PS?”

  There was no answer, but after a few minutes, WA5PS suddenly started speaking again, repeating exactly the same words that he had said before, starting from the beginning.

  “A recording!” Tatsuno said. “WA5PS is most likely already dead.”

  “Though at the very end he’s given us some very important information,” said Dr. Torigai, looking up with a sad expression on his face. “We may not know who he was or where he came from, but one thing is certain … he was truly a great scientist.”

  In the dark depths of the North Sea, America’s Polaris III–armed nuclear submarine Nereid sat motionless and silent on the seafloor, listening carefully to the world above the waves.

  “This is weird,” Communications Officer Curtis said quietly. “Base no longer responds at all.”

  “As long as there’s no change in orders, it doesn’t matter,” Colonel McCloud, the ship’s captain, replied in a monotone.

  “But, sir,” Curtis said, turning his head around.

  “What’s going on with that awful flu up there? It was getting pretty bad about a month ago. Mountains of bodies, they were saying. There was a huge stir about it.”

  “Well, the crewmen in Greenland got laid up with it and couldn’t come,” said communications chief Slim. “I don’t even want to think what it would be like to catch it in a narrow little tub like this.”

  “Ah, crap!” Curtis mumbled softly once he saw that Colonel McCloud had turned his back. “There must be huge crowds out on the streets of Miami right about now, but we’ve had to stay submerged these past three months.”

  “Forget Miami,” said Slim, his eyes gazing into faraway dreams. “It doesn’t hold a candle to skin-diving in Bermuda. There’s a world of difference between diving in this tub and diving into the sea yourself. I’m friendly with one of the island girls too. One time we went diving on a moonlit night without wearing a thing. Buck naked.”

  Curtis swallowed audibly. “You shouldn’t talk about that! What if the security officer finds out?” But then Curtis poked Slim in the side slightly. “Tell me everything. Were you both buck naked?”

  On the seafloor fifty miles off the coast of Bermuda, the Soviet nuclear submarine T-232 lay hidden in an ocean trench.

  “This is very strange,” said the first officer, Major Zoshchenko. “Something isn’t right. Inform the captain when he wakes up.”

  “Shall I send up an antenna buoy once night has fallen?”

  “Do so,” said Major Zoshchenko. “I’ll have a talk with the captain.”

  SUMMER

  1.Early Summer

  If you could choose just one thing as an emblem to represent humanity and the world, what would it be? The World Exposition? Various scenes from recorded films? A luxury cruiser sailing the seven seas? A map of the world? Or would you choose that tall, glass fortress with the level roof standing by the banks of New York’s East River, which served as the headquarters of the United Nations? In front of this building fluttered the particolored flags of over a hundred nations, and in the main assembly room, white-, yellow-, and brown-sk
inned envoys sat in concentric semicircles of seats. They wore earphones carrying to them in every language simultaneous interpretations of the serious speeches being given there. Or would you choose—

  But no.

  That would express a far too anthropocentric point of view. Humans always tend to place exaggerated import on things that relate to themselves. Humans are wonderful—yes, wonderful—because the only creatures capable of thinking themselves so are humans themselves. Love, ideals, creativity, beauty, a soul that can suffer, battle, God and the Devil, pleasure, civilization … It was as though the universe had always existed just for humans—the setting sun, the snow on the mountaintops, the green of young leaves on the trees, flowers, spring, the wind, the stars and moon, the wonder of the heavens. The anguish? It is certainly possible for anguish to be transcendental. But can there be any kind of transcendence that does not itself come from humanity? To achieve a more precise symbol for the world and humanity, you’d have to …

  I’d like to suggest the image of a small sphere floating unsupported in the darkness of space. A tiny, tiny sphere only 13,400 kilometers across, spinning around and around, tilted 23.5 degrees on its axis of rotation, slowly orbiting a giant, blazing star—or more properly, an insignificant star a mere 1,400,000 kilometers in diameter. Only 13,400 kilometers across! Its smallness must be quite surprising. But go take a look at the odometer on any nearby, oft-used automobile. Within the space of a single year, that number will increase by forty or fifty thousand kilometers. Without your even realizing it, that car has already run the length of the earth’s diameter more than three times over. Only a few short years is all it will take for your tiny economy car to go all the way around the planet. An ordinary passenger plane can go the distance of the earth’s diameter in twenty hours, and a Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird can do it in about four. An artificial satellite needs only three hours and forty minutes, and in the case of light, one twenty-third of a second is sufficient.

  It takes about eight minutes and twenty seconds for the light emitted by the sun to reach the earth. To put it differently, light, which travels three hundred thousand meters in one second, takes about sixteen minutes and forty seconds to cross the diameter of Earth’s orbit, from the vernal equinox to the autumnal equinox. However, within the five-billion-light-year radius of this universe, there exist giants such as Epsilon Aurigae, where nearly two hours are required just for light to cross the diameter of the star itself. Compared to that, the tininess of our little chip off the boulder is startling.

  Until the twentieth century, the largest telescope that mankind had ever produced was the two-hundred-inch telescope at Mount Palomar Observatory, and the most distant stars it could capture in long-exposure photographs were two billion light years away. The universe is said to be a sphere that goes on far beyond that, out to a radius of five billion light years. This universe came into being about ten billion years ago. The galaxy that contains our solar system came into existence five or six billion years ago. It was about five billion years ago that the sun first shone. Around the same time, the earth also came into being. Scattered throughout an expanse of ten billion light years of empty vacuum was a bare handful of galactic clusters—about a hundred sextillion of them—among which about a hundred billion stars were contained in the space occupied by a single galaxy. Among the comparatively smaller of those hundred billion stars was a relatively young orange star, around which a rounded speck of a planet—its diameter just over a scant ten thousand kilometers—orbited. The gravity at its surface was just barely strong enough to cause water to collect in depressions on its surface and to hold on to a gaseous shell a few dozen kilometers thick. It was a smooth, light pebble of a world where the height and the depth of its surface irregularities were only plus or minus eight hundredths of a percent of its total diameter.

  Covered in a thin cuticle of silica and oxidized aluminum, this small rocky planet traveled continuously around and around in the gravity-warped space that surrounded its blazing mother-star. In the time it took to circle this star once, it would itself rotate 365 times. In the time since that planet had become locked into an eternal bond with its mother star, it had rotated around that star three billion times or more, and in the thin film of water that covered its rocky sphere, a strange combination of organic compounds had by chance formed at the border between exposed stone and water.

  The light and the heat poured down from above, cosmic rays came down like rain, static electricity built up in the atmosphere as a result of convection currents and friction against the surface—these things created compounds of carbon and nitrogen, which dissolved in the water, and sulfur and water adhered to one another. Then those strange organic compounds—through a process of absorbing carbon from their surroundings and repeating a chain of iterative chemical reactions, produced a substance that was exactly the same as itself. In other words, it had started to reproduce!

  This tiny earth orbited its star billions of times more. During that time, the star continued to burn its own hydrogen and travel along on its endless, recursive journey through the galaxy, dragging a handful of stellar fragments along with it. At the intersections of the air and water and stone that thinly covered the surface of this tiny sphere, through the trillions of repeating chemical reactions of which have already been spoken, through complex and compounded processes, incredibly intricate polymer compounds had formed.

  These squirmed all across the surface of the sphere, their soft bodies unchanged in nature from that of early organic compounds. Hard shells of calcium carbonate drawn from the seawater clung to their slimy bodies. These life-forms were no more than one one-hundred-millionth as thick as that tiny sphere’s diameter, which was about the same ratio as that between the sizes of humans and viruses. They multiplied into the hundreds of millions, and by the hundreds of millions crawled across the crust of that sphere.

  The little sphere orbited the sun another three hundred million times. Some of the life-forms had by this point come loose from the seafloor, and perhaps according to the commands of some sort of will, had begun to undulate their bodies and swim around in the water. Others had chosen a different path and stuck fast to the rocks. Eight hundred million years earlier, when they had been organic compounds of only a few dozen millimicrons’ length with the energy necessary for chemical reactions, one factor, which had been nothing more than the probability of having a chance to absorb light and heat, had over millions of years and through trillions of iterations of reactions and chemical combinations caused something approaching an individual will to begin to take shape. The sizes of the ostracoderms of the Ordovician period are known; their spinal columns were not yet well formed, they had shells on their heads, and were primitive creatures in every respect. Yet even so, they had “eyes” and moved their muscles to swim in search of food.

  And then this small stone sphere, this earth, revolved around the sun a hundred million times more. In the time since that single dot in the vast expanse of the universe had by coincidence come into being next to one star out of a hundred billion similar stars, it had already revolved around it four billion eight hundred million times or more. And since the time that those first little threads of reproducing organic compounds only a few millimicrons in length—the first life-forms—had appeared, it had revolved eight hundred million times more. But the earth knew neither exhaustion nor ennui, and it continued revolving around and around its blazing mother-star, which had shown no great change in its nearly five billion years of burning.

  Now, much larger creatures—far more complex and far more variegated than those earliest life-forms—had at last left the waters and begun walking around on dry land with organs whose functions could only be described as miraculous. The differences from one individual to another also spanned a stunning range of diversity. If one were to have counted out the sum total of all living things, beginning with the germs and viruses that had arisen of old and still retained the lines of their species, the variation and num
bers would have climbed to staggering heights.

  The largest creature of that time, diplodocus, had a body length that was actually one two-hundred-thirty-thousandth the diameter of the sphere on which it walked—thirty meters! The first reproducing organic compounds were probably somewhere between one one-hundred-thirty-trillionth and one one-quadrillion-three-hundred-trillionth of the sphere’s diameter—in other words, between a few dozen and a few hundred millimicrons. When you think about it, that means that life-forms had actually swelled up in size three billionfold in only eight hundred million years! Already, things were appearing that had even left the ground itself to fly through the sky. As individual changes gave rise to diversity, plant life also increased to the same levels of diversity. One creature type had been eating the same sort of inorganic matter for eight hundred billion years. Others evolved to consume cellulose with the assistance of microorganisms in their digestive systems. Larger creatures ate smaller ones in order of size. And among the smallest organisms of all, some of which had stopped eating inorganic matter, some began eating creatures larger than themselves. All creatures. Some of these didn’t even eat in the proper sense but instead lived as parasites within more advanced organisms, and some hijacked the entire reproductive mechanisms of their hosts. From the microscopic to the macroscopic, from the simplest organisms to the most complex, the surface of the earth’s thin crust overflowed with life. However, such creatures had no great importance so far as the tiny sphere was concerned.

  The surface of the small sphere cooled and was heated by various factors, causing it to wrinkle and stretch a little. The continents—those faint, scablike rises in the heavy crust’s surface—cracked, were pulled apart, and drifted under the influence of rotational effects. In the wrinkled places, the scabs broke, and relatively warm, miry material came bursting out, and gases escaped as well. Every time this happened, the creatures nearby died.