Virus: The Day of Resurrection

by Sakyo Komatsu

  In an out-of-the-way spot amid the Antarctic Circle, the two submarines called out to one another again with their sirens, and there their courses parted. Nereid could head north along the Atlantic coast of South America, cross the equator, and reach North America, but the Moscow-bound T-232 would have a much longer journey, since in order to reach Moscow, it had to travel farther north, enter the North Sea by way of the English Channel, circle around the peninsula of Denmark, enter the Baltic Sea, then the Gulf of Finland, then by way of the canal from Leningrad enter Lake Ladoga, Lake Onega, and Rybinsk Reservoir before heading south, taking the canal from Kalinin on the headwaters of the Volga, and crossing through a part of the Valdai Hills before finally arriving in Moscow. For that reason, T-232 was traveling fast—at a speed of twenty-seven knots.

  “If T-232 keeps up that kind of speed, I have to wonder if they’ll have enough fuel for the return voyage,” Slim wondered aloud as he watched the receding point of light on the underwater radar board.

  “They’re carrying all the fuel they can,” said Mihailovich, who—off duty—was standing behind Slim. “I know all about that kind of sub. The nuclear reactor is the same kind as Nereid’s—a pressurized light water reactor. Still, if you keep driving it at full power, waste products start building up a lot faster.”

  “And if that happens, T-232 might not be able to make it back?”

  “Captain Zoshchenko understands,” Mihailovich murmured, holding his head in his hands. “Most likely, everyone on board knows. They just won’t talk about it.”

  Thus their long, dull, isolated voyage began. In no time, the temperature of the air inside the submarine began to warm up, and the air conditioner was switched over from “warm” to “cool.” After rounding Cape Blanco, their heading changed from north by northeast to north by northwest, then the vessel crossed the equator and headed into the northern hemisphere. The two sacrificial lambs—Yoshizumi and Major Carter—were treated as guests on the ship. Both of them were given private cabins, and both of them kept themselves locked away inside them, almost never seeing one another or other crewmembers face-to-face. No one knew what Major Carter was doing in his room, but Yoshizumi had brought a portable computer into his room and continued his calculations day after day. The longer he continued, the more impatient he became.

  They passed east of the Lesser Antilles, and soon after—about the time they were crossing the Tropic of Cancer—Yoshizumi received a visit from Dr. de la Tour. Dr. de la Tour was both a medical doctor and an expert on microbiology. He sat down in a chair in Yoshizumi’s cramped cabin, and for a long moment, looked downward, rubbing his fingers.

  “What is it, Doctor?” Yoshizumi asked when he could wait no longer. “Do you have some mysterious secret you want to talk about?” He laughed at his own little joke.

  “Actually, I do,” the doctor said, looking up from his hands. “The experimental phase has been terribly short, but since you’re on a kamikaze mission, this is hard to just come out and say, but …”

  “What is it?”

  “It isn’t right, calling it the ‘Linskey virus.’ ‘Linskey nucleic acids’ would be all right, but …” The doctor was stumbling all over his words. “I’ve only been at it for the one month since this voyage began, so I don’t have much confidence, but I’ve made a kind of variant form of the host bacteria. WA5PS.”

  “The host bacteria for the Linskey nucleic acids?”

  The doctor nodded. “If it’s variants you’re looking for, there have been dozens of them made before now. Nothing that looked like it might be good for anything, though. If it was a virus, we could kill it with pharmaceuticals or weaken its toxicity and make it into a vaccine. But when it comes to these reproducing nucleic acids, there’s just no way to synthesize individual proteins, is there?”

  “And so?”

  “I thought about making a variant with chemicals and tried a number of different things, but no matter what I tried, it never went very well. At any rate, we’re rather short on microbiological research facilities in Antarctica. It was like fumbling around blindly. Even this last time, it was nothing more than a shot in the dark—”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “To make nucleic acid mutants, I tried using beams of neutrons.” Dr. de la Tour’s eyes suddenly shone. “Even before now, bacterial and viral mutants have been made using radiation, but those experiments used primarily gamma rays and X-rays—just stuff on the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s because electromagnetic waves are easy to make. When it comes to particle beams, electron rays—beta rays—are the beginning and end of it. There have hardly ever been any experiments using beams of heavier particles, like protons and neutrons.”

  “Would the source of a neutron beam be a nuclear reactor?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly right. Even in our research, we’ve occasionally done gamma ray irradiations using cobalt-60 as the source of the beam, but we didn’t get much for our efforts. Still, these bacteria and nucleic acids are utterly bizarre little fellows, so when I hit them with fairly dense, fairly high-speed neutrons, a very strange mutation took place. Naturally, most of them died under bombardment. However, there was an interesting little fellow among the diehard holdouts that survived.” Dr. de la Tour suddenly lowered his voice. “Hot neutrons—that is to say, neutrons at low or middling speed—are no good. I tried it using the breeder reactor at Shackleton Station.”

  “Weird little fellows, you say?” said Yoshizumi, just to show he was listening.

  “Incredibly weird little fellows! High speed neutrons, of all things—I don’t know about outer space, but this is something that absolutely does not exist on Earth.”

  “Electromagnetic radiation doesn’t work, but hit it with a beam of heavy particles and it mutates—why on earth is that?”

  “I haven’t the slightest,” said the doctor. “Living things only mutate via chemical changes, so I’d thought that any kind of radiation that was strong enough to spark chemical reactions on the genetic level would work as well as any other. I guess we’ll have to proceed from molecular biology to nuclear biology now. For example … suppose it happened because there’s some element in the nucleic acid that absorbed neutrons and became an unstable radioactive isotope, then decayed rapidly into something else.”

  “And? What kind of mutant did you make?”

  “Well, up until now, it was a reproducing nucleic acid, but very suddenly, it started acting more like a virus,” said the doctor, leaning forward. “All around the nucleic acid, small particles of a protein called capsomere began to attach themselves. It became something midway between a living virus and the bare nucleic acid. And then it—it stopped invading human cells, and became a mere bacteriophage.”

  “You say it doesn’t invade human cells?”

  “Exactly … when WA5PS bacteria are replicating in an inorganic system, the Linskey nucleic acid is in the form of a prophage, as it were, hiding in the bacteria’s chromosomes. Then, when the bacteria begin to incorporate foreign proteins and replicate, that serves as a stimulus. The nucleic acid consumes the bacteria and comes bursting out. Then it invades human nerve cells. The mutual antibody-antigen relation between germs and the human body provide the nucleic acids with their one and only stimulus for spreading. However, the mutant Linskey nucleic acid, like a normal phage, destroys only the WA5PS bacteria and hardly grows at all inside human cells grown in tissue cultures.”

  Yoshizumi realized that somewhere along the way he had clenched his fists tightly. “That’s an incredible discovery, Doctor,” he said in a thick voice. “But does that mutant virus kill normal bacteria?”

  “Even in a simple inorganic reproduction cycle, it’s very easy to stimulate prophages and make bacteriophages pop out from them. Just hit them with a little ultraviolet light, and they’ll start eating up the cells one after another,” Dr. de la Tour said nodding. “It’s just—if these things could suppress the growth of Linskey nucleic acid in the human body—or the divisio
n of their host cells in the human body—even a little, it would be so wonderful. What’s becoming clear is that if this mutated virus infects normal WA5PS cells that have the Linskey nucleic acid compound factors incorporated into their chromosomes, the cells will make only the mutated virus when the time comes to self-destruct. They won’t make Linskey nucleic acids.”

  “If that’s true,” said Yoshizumi, “does that mean that this mutant virus—if it can exist at sufficient density within the human body—could suppress the Linskey nucleic acids to some extent?”

  “I don’t know. It does appear that the antigens formed in the human body due to the mutated virus do, to a degree, suppress the replication of the nucleic acids themselves. WA5PS is too dangerous to handle, so we still haven’t done even one animal experiment in Antarctica. Indeed, if WA5PS gets any colder than minus twenty-five degrees, inorganic reproduction also comes to a halt. But even at low temperatures, it still won’t die.”

  “So … what you’re telling me,” said Yoshizumi, “is that you want to perform a live body experiment over there, eh?”

  “I’m sorry. But I just couldn’t come out and say ‘Let me use people as guinea pigs.’ The nature of the mutant virus itself is not well understood, after all.”

  “I’ll do it gladly,” said a sudden voice from the entrance of the cabin. At some point during all this, Carter had come by and had been standing outside. “Edward Jenner and even Hideo Noguchi experimented on their own bodies and on those of flesh and blood relatives. And since I’m gonna die anyway, I’ll do anything you ask.”

  “If that’s the case,” said the doctor, his voice trembling like a leaf, “I’ll inject you with it when it’s time for you to depart. I’ll talk to the captain, and if at all possible, get him to have you carry a shortwave radio strong enough to communicate with Antarctica.”

  “I’ve got one among my gear,” said Yoshizumi. “I’ll keep reporting until I’m dead.”

  Nereid at last passed by the Bermuda Islands and drew near to the state of Virginia. They passed to the north of Cape Hatteras and found themselves in Chesapeake Bay in no time. The previous night there had been another farewell party inside the ship. At that party, Colonel McCloud had gotten drunker than anyone else.

  It was during the still-dark predawn that the officer on watch came to report that he had felt an unusual shudder running through the whole structure of Nereid as it rested still on the seafloor. Apparently, there had been an earthquake in some far-off place. This news resulted in plans for departure being moved up by about an hour.

  Taking care to go slowly because of the bay’s shallow interior, the ship gradually made its way toward the mouth of the Potomac. After several minutes had passed in which it was hard for the crew to tell whether the ship was moving or not, there was a faint shock in the bottom of the vessel, and it came to a stop.

  “All hands,” Colonel McCloud said, turning to face everyone, speaking in a voice that sounded like something was caught in his throat. “We have arrived in Washington.”

  The two men who had received Dr. de la Tour’s injections were already wearing rubber diving suits and were standing with aqualungs strapped to their backs. When they heard the captain’s words, they exchanged silent handshakes with all who were present with them.

  “Farewell,” said the captain, squeezing their hands firmly with his own hard, bony hands. It looked as though he wanted to say something more, but although his wrinkled Adam’s apple moved up and down, he turned his face away in the end.

  “Live for as long as you can,” Dr. de la Tour said. His face was pale and his voice weak. “It may be difficult, but please keep responding till the very end. Your fever, pulse, how you’re feeling …”

  The two of them waved their hands and got into the escape tube. Behind them, the final door between themselves and the world of the survivors clanked shut. There was the hiss of a valve being opened.

  “Here we go,” said Major Carter, not yet wearing his mouthpiece, his eyes smiling ironically behind his diving goggles. “With this, it’s sayonara to Antarctica and the world of the living. How’s it feel?”

  “Like we should get moving,” Yoshizumi said loudly. “That last tremor has me worr—”

  His last words were cut off suddenly by an torrent of water that came pouring in from overhead.

  The two men swam out of the ship through the escape hatch and out into the open water. They opened the lid of a storage container near the bridge of the ship and pulled out a rubber raft that was loaded with items stuffed in waterproof bags. With one pull on a string connected to the lever of the compressed air tank, the raft inflated halfway and began to rise to the surface. When it neared the surface, the pressure-activated switch of a second air tank opened automatically, and the raft shot toward the surface like an arrow.

  When the raft surfaced, the two men tore away the masks occluding their view, threw away their aqualungs, and began rowing as soon as they had shimmied up into the raft.

  It was a fine morning in early June. White clouds floated in a spectacularly blue sky, and ripples in the river were lapping gently at the sides of the rubber boat. The hushed, silent city of Washington, DC, was covered in dazzling greens. The row of cherry trees that lined the shore of the Potomac were already grown thick with summer leaves. For a moment, the pair stopped rowing. They looked all around at a world that was almost too brilliant—too colorful—to eyes that had been so long imprisoned in a world of ice. They filled their lungs with great breaths of crisply refreshing warm air—with air that was filled with fearsome death. Here and there, rusted boats and battered, half-sunken barges were floating on the surface. The grass was wild and overgrown in Potomac Park, and in the parking lot beside the train’s iron bridge, cars that had lost their color from being exposed to wind and rain were peeking out from amid the tall grasses. On the left shore, in the Arlington area, they could see the Pentagon. Even the building that had once controlled the most powerful army in the world was now just an empty shell.

  After passing under the Rochambeau Memorial Bridge, they could see the lovely white dome of the George Mason Memorial. Once they had rowed the boat into the tidal basin, that symbol of Washington—the obelisk of the Washington memorial—rose up in front of them, the solitary point of its sharp outline jutting up toward the blue sky, all the more lonely with no one there anymore to look up at it.

  Washington was a city of chalk swathed in green. Amid bright light reminiscent of summer, for just a brief moment, it seemed as if it had merely nodded off to sleep. However, they soon began to feel the terrible silence that seemed to absorb all sound, telling them that the capital of the former United States was now under occupation by the army of the dead.

  Beside the beautiful waterside where the Washington Monument threw its sharp shadow, several bleached skeletons clothed in rags could be seen peeking out from among the overgrown summer grasses. They landed the boat at the water’s edge near North Potomac Park, and when they looked down the road that ran straight north, they saw several cars and buses sitting abandoned on the white pavement of the street. Between them, lying half buried in mud and dust, were heaps of white bones lined up all the way to the intersection of K Street and Connecticut Avenue at the north end of the street. The two men brought the boat ashore at the water’s edge and silently opened the waterproof bags.

  Inside the bags were food supplies, clothing, and shortwave radio communication devices. The radios were for live use, and once both men had attached portable wireless devices to their shoulders, Carter communicated briefly with Nereid, which was submerged in the mouth of the Potomac.

  “This is Carter. We’ve landed safely and will head directly for the White House.”

  In the bottom of the bag there were a couple of other things jostling around. Yoshizumi pulled them out; there were two automatic pistols.

  “Are we supposed to figure out whether these are for self-defense or to commit suicide with?” muttered Carter in a low voice. F
or a moment, he held the thirty-two caliber pistol in his hand as though measuring its weight, but at last he said, “Let’s go.”

  Although they were in a hurry, the area was filled with obstacles that slowed the two men’s pace. Green trees slowed them. The sweating sun and the cool breeze slowed them. It had been four—no, five years since they had last set foot in a temperate zone. The pair were headed straight north along the park’s central street. The beautiful tree-shaded paths that stretched from east to west in that area were now overgrown with both trees and grass. To the distant right, like a huge white skull, they could see the Capitol building.

  In the midst of the intersection at Constitution Avenue, a bus and a tractor-trailer had collided and overturned. They appeared to have burned; the paint was blackened, and rust clung to their twisted hulks. From the broken windshield of the bus lying on its side, the forehead of a badly damaged skull looked like a broken eggshell. Shards of glass that had buried themselves in the punctured bone were peeking out, glinting brightly in the strong sunlight. The sound of the two men’s wet rubber soles as they squished along the dusty street was irritatingly loud. When one of them cleared his throat once, it seemed as if the sound were being absorbed by the streets, soaked up by the entire capital city.

  With each step, the deathly atmosphere gripped the two of them more tightly. At the roadside, in empty, open windows, in sitting positions on the front steps of buildings, everywhere they looked, there were bleached bones—countless skeletons staring at them from empty eye sockets where rainwater had collected, clenching their teeth in anguish, looking as though they were crying out at them in voiceless remonstrance from jawbones that hung open, exposing the rows of their teeth.