The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

  —Thomas Hardy

  All things are possible until they are proved impossible—and even the impossible may only be so, as for now.

  —Pearl S. Buck

  Part 1

  Yanni: The Quest

  July 13, 1948

  Soviet Research Vessel Kursk

  Destination Unknown

  Dmitri had learned during the war that it was often depressingly necessary to leave the dead behind. After Stalingrad, he had seen how leaving loved ones behind in the ice was the least of the horrors. So he accepted that there would probably never be a chance of recovering his brother’s body from damnable Santorini and bringing him home.

  What he could not accept was tending to Yanni Thorne’s wounds. Dmitri gently reset the splints, noting that swelling was diminishing and the joints in her hands seemed to be healing well despite the damage.

  Breaking her fingers and wrists had been unnecessary, but Trofim Lysenko was very thorough with his interrogations. He was good at what he did. And he liked doing it.

  The monster had intended to inflict even more painful abuse, but Dmitri had summoned every last microgram of charm, along with a willingness to—as the Americans phrased it, “eat crow”—until Lysenko brought the assault to an early stop. Additional helpings of crow permitted him to nurse Yanni back to health and render her, as promised to Lysenko, “more willingly cooperative.”

  “Your fingers and wrists will be perfect again,” Dmitri assured her. “And I think, like your friend Nesbitt, I can guess why.”

  “So why are you helping me?” Yanni said. “You Mutt-and-Jeffing me? You, good cop? Lysenko, bad cop?”

  “No, I don’t care about your red stuff,” Dmitri said slowly, softly. “Least of all does it matter if what’s left of the stuff happens to heal you and Cousteau and a few Greek fishermen.” Then, at a whisper, he added, “All I really care about is that the bishop got his way and blew it all to kingdom come.”

  “And Lysenko’s Kraken, Ahab?”

  “While it’s alive, I can help to keep you alive.”

  Yanni glared back at him, looking skeptical, and perplexed. “You talk as if you’re gonna die too.”

  “We’re literally in the same boat, you and I. Do you really believe he will let either of us out of here alive? I’m as dead as you are. That is why I helped you.”

  Dmitri looked down at Yanni’s splinted and bandaged fingers. He wanted to apologize again, but he could not get the words out. How, he asked himself, did I ever come to this?

  Dmitri had followed a long, strange path from the year when one of his professors required the students to remove pineal glands from the brains of lab rats and record the effects over several weeks. After the first week, all the rats in all the students’ cages were clearly suffering from the effects of the surgery—for there had been no way to remove the gland without damaging surrounding brain tissue. Dmitri could not bear witnessing (and to some degree feeling) the increasingly feeble attempts of his animals to walk, or even to feed themselves. One night he entered the lab alone and euthanized his specimens.

  When Professor Cahn summoned Dmitri to her office and asked him why he had done this, he told her that he simply could not watch them suffering, could no longer listen to their uncomprehending squeals of pain. “I made the decision,” he said, “and I’ve accepted that I will take a failing grade on my lab work.”

  “No, you are not failing, Dmitri. Quite the opposite, but do not tell the other students about your grade.”

  “How is this?”

  “Because in science, humanity matters. Do not forget that.”

  How far I have fallen, Dmitri thought. He tried to believe he was very near to his personal worst, and could soon start again upward, but a part of him knew that he had no concept of how low the worst could really be.

  He had come from sympathy for rats to wanting an intelligent beast and its entire species dead. He hoped Bishop Marinatos and the volcano had accomplished just that, but he doubted their extinction. And Lysenko, for reasons largely unknown, seemed hell-bent on keeping one of them alive, and using Yanni to learn from it.

  Dmitri, like others who had come to know Lysenko, began to hate the monster, and loathe himself.

  Yet, obediently, and at exactly the appointed minute, he brought Yanni to him, and to the Kraken’s holding tank.

  The beast Lysenko smirked indulgently and reminded Dmitri that he already knew Yanni, in accordance with a theremin transcript, as “She who talks with the animals.”

  Lysenko motioned Yanni toward the edge of the tank. “Now,” he said. “Show me.”

  August 15, 1948

  Admiral Rickover’s Command

  Support Ship Intrepid

  Officially, the NR-3 still did not exist.

  Officially, immediately after the Intrepid made port, MacCready, Alan, Walter, and Cousteau disappeared into thin air.

  Unofficially, the NR-3 was scrubbed down and a crew was readied for a new shakedown cruise.

  Courtesy of Cousteau’s engineering, most of the outer hull was now covered in a “wet suit” of rubberized material, tailored in only three weeks to absorb and misdirect any Russian sonar aimed in its direction.

  In theory, this would give the vessel a new sonar cross section, this time no larger than a barracuda.

  And in practice?

  NR-3 was still a “hot” boat. Despite every effort at decontamination, certain isotopes had formed permanent chemical bonds with the inner hull, and a crew could expect to receive about twice the normal human lifetime radiation dose from the sub itself if they stayed aboard for just a year.

  Mac knew that it could never come down to that kind of dose for him. The admiral would not likely let his precious machine be devoted so thoroughly to a single rescue operation for a full year—or even beyond three months. And no matter what, the sub itself was not to be risked if the shore team got into trouble.

  But which shore? Mac wondered. Walter and his British counterpart had ferreted out only vague clues. They knew that the Kursk had captured at least one of the Kraken, and it was a sure bet that Yanni was being put to work on the creature. This meant that, if taken ashore, she was somewhere with access to lots of sea water—probably similar to places where the American navy had been trying to break the code of dolphin communication.

  There was no margin of error allowing for a landing near the wrong ship or the wrong sea-lab-as-public-entertainment-aquarium on the first try.

  Where to land first seemed the only choice Mac had. The past three weeks were filled with worry, heartbreak, and aftereffects. During the moments in which a great chunk of island real estate collapsed under his feet in Kraken-infested waters, there had fortunately been no time to worry. Only afterward, when there was time to think about possible and actual losses, did anything next of kin to panic begin to assert itself—and the only cure for you then, Mac knew, was the next mission.

  Most deep-submergence types shared the same borderline insanity level of mission focus. Even one of the reactor crew had insisted on returning from the Intrepid’s hospital so he could finish field-testing his replacement team. Except for a slight cold that seemed too stubborn to go completely away, Thomas insisted that he was essential for the next cruise despite his radiation dose, and his plea to join them was granted.

  The weeks of training in the flight engineer’s seat had kept Mac dwelling more and more on the Yanni rescue than on all that had gone (or still could go) wrong.

  Captain John diverted Mac’s attention back toward mission planning—“Think nothing but mission success,” he had warned, “or get off my boat.” Despite his declaration to Walter that if he survived Santorini, he was quitting deep submergence, the captain was once again in the pilot’s seat. Alan was invited to take the navigator’s post, directly across from Mac.

  “I’m sorry, Alan,” Mac said.
“It looks like I’ve given you my disease. You could have continued digging up old apes with Boulle. Why not a quiet life at the museum? Why sign up again for one of the most dangerous commutes on earth?”

  “Too late for me now. Interestingly, going where I could be imploded underwater or shot when I come up for air, or get eaten by strange animals, is what makes it more attractive to me.”

  “Besides, if we don’t die in one of those ways, we might die of boredom,” said Captain John.

  Alan nodded, and laughed. “The greater the challenge and the trouble, the greater the urge. Also, so much greater the satisfaction, when you complete this thing that has so much risk and challenge.”

  Mac looked ahead. Divers were unlatching NR-3’s ropes. The view was mostly obscured by swarms of shrimp. “Yanni’s out there somewhere,” he said in a near whisper.

  “Okay, friend. Let’s go find her.”

  Part 2

  The Darwin Strain: Anatomy of a Legend

  August 15, 1948

  Noon, Washington, D.C.

  President Truman accepted the morning memo with grim resignation. The White House was in very real danger of collapse and would have to be either left to historians or else gutted and rebuilt all the way down to the basement and out to the sandstone walls.

  Won’t be the first gutting, he thought acidly. The most recent remodeling was courtesy of the Canadians burning down the house during that little border spat in 1814. But what most worried the president about the move was losing the wide safety perimeter around the White House. He’d already survived more botched assassination attempts than any modern president. Relocating to a two-story home along one of the city’s narrow streets would aid in the efficiency of any future attempts.

  During his tenure under Franklin Roosevelt and even during his first year in office, President Truman had been able to take long strolls among crowds along Pennsylvania Avenue, without any concern for his safety. And now, with the whole world entering a new and probably long-term convulsion of uncertainty, Truman expected that he was the last president to have walked freely among the people. Beginning with him, presidents might eventually become so withdrawn from their fellow Americans as to be seen and heard only on the emerging medium of television—or, as Einstein and his futurists had it, in “three-dimensional projections.” Gone were the days when Calvin Coolidge took early-morning swims in the Potomac.

  The president was sitting down for a late breakfast of fried eggs and coffee when Bobby entered with some doughnuts and said, “I presume you’ve heard about the latest rant from Senator McCarthy.”

  “You mean last night, or in the last hour?”

  “Last twenty minutes.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He’s caught wind of the coin-boy incident and how far along the Russians are with their bomb.”

  Were Truman a smoker, he’d have needed to open a new pack at this point, but he poured himself a fresh cup of coffee instead. “The kid was our best cover story—the most perfect firewall we had against anyone knowing all about the MacArthur-Intrepid-MacCready bullshit that’s been hitting the fan.”

  “So far, it’s working. It doesn’t seem he’s got a clue beyond the generic Russia problem—except for one tiny snippet that’s come out through the coin-boy scuttlebutt.”

  “He’s got a whiff of MacCready?”

  “No. It’s Nesbitt. Just the name. Nothing else. He wants to learn more through a subpoena.”

  “I’d like to see him try, Bobby.”

  “It probably won’t come to that. Your old friend MacArthur is standing in his way.”

  “So, for a change my interests favor his interests.” The president was about to dunk a doughnut into his coffee, but the sight of either a very small rat or a slightly overgrown mouse scuttling past the office door killed his sweet tooth.

  “That poor deluded child,” Truman said.

  “Pardon?”

  “The general never forgave me for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As he sees it, he had spent nearly two years planning the invasion of Japan from the sea—and then in just a few days, his Operation Olympic gets ruined by a weapon I never told him existed. No amount of talking convinces the stubborn bastard that even I didn’t know about it until just a few weeks earlier.”

  “You mean, the whole time you were vice president?”

  “FDR kept the Manhattan Project secret even from me, all the way to the grave.”

  “And now the question is: What does the general know about Nesbitt and Santorini?”

  “Something more than I know, probably.” The president shook his head. “It may not matter much. The island’s crops were wiped out by more than three weeks of volcano belches and ash-falls—and so were most of the fish. People are abandoning the place by the boatload. Whatever Nesbitt and the Russians and everyone else wanted from Santorini is gone.”

  “And Nesbitt—MacArthur sent a war criminal in with her?”

  “Yeah. A bioweapons guy: Hata. Dead now. Thank God.”

  “But Nesbitt,” Bobby said. “I’ve asked around for anything I can get on her. MacArthur might have attached Hata to her team, but she wasn’t in it for weapons. She was looking for something else.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Truman. To judge by what little he and Captain Christian knew about Nesbitt—which was probably no more than what Patrick Hendry and Nesbitt herself believed anyone needed to know—the White House was living mostly in the ignorance of “plausible deniability.”

  But no secret is 100 percent leak proof, the president knew. From a Plum Island scientist who one night shared too many pitchers of beer with some biker “Grummie” friends in Bethpage had emerged rumors of a mythical lab where fruit flies lived almost forever. Not even for Truman would anyone confirm whether or not the myth was reality. He thought back to the Einstein–von Braun committee on “The Future of War.” They were forecasting brave new bombs, brave new wars, and simultaneously so many brave new cures that population stress would lead to what one visionary called “the inevitability of breeder lynchings.” And then: famine and famine-induced disease—spreading worldwide and leading to the use of all those brave new bombs.

  Truman pushed his eggs aside, unfinished. “Nesbitt. I think MacArthur’s friends have her hidden somewhere. It’s as if the earth opened up and swallowed her.”

  “I have a brother who once served on a mission with Nesbitt.”

  “Interesting,” the president said. “Most interesting.”

  “What, specifically?”

  “You want to tell me? Your brother came back from the war infected with every sort of tropical disease, and with his spine cracked practically from stem to stern. But he’s doing well—right?”

  “His back still gives him a really hard time now and then, but he seems to be holding up.”

  “Holding up? Even when I was thirty-one—no, twenty-one—I didn’t have his kind of energy.”

  “You’ve lost me somewhere.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, really. Nothing to worry about,” the president lied. “Nothing at all.”

  August 15, 1948

  Plum Island Secondary Lab, Ice Station Georgia Peach

  Project Enoch

  The first news of the morning made this the happiest day of Nora Nesbitt’s career. Though they had each taken an estimated 430 rads, every member of the NR-3 reactor crew was still alive—most of them showing signs of steadily improving health. One even felt well enough for a return to duty.

  With some of the most advanced yet secretive medical research in the world being performed aboard aircraft carriers, the Intrepid had become the perfect extension of Nora’s studies. Her newest experiment had been so secret that not even the Captain Christian or General MacArthur knew the Plum Islander turned the crewmen—half of whom should have been dead or dying by now—into her own private laboratory rats. Indeed, none of the human “lab rats” knew an experiment had been performed. By rights, and in the name of a proper laboratory study, s
he should have administered the derivative of her own blood as a controlled experiment—meaning that half of the men would have received none of the remedy at all. Nesbitt knew enough, from the data of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, exactly what would happen to the men if she left half of them untreated. It might not be a proper scientific experiment to treat them all, but she believed that in at least this case, she must “do no harm.” Besides, she told herself, you owe these men.

  The next news of the morning could not have been more disturbing. Russia had already dispersed enough highly refined uranium-235 to build at least two versions of the Hiroshima bomb into four or five versions of Fort Knox.

  Nora Nesbitt read the classified report and, in accordance with instructions, burned it. She found it impossible to fathom how the best day of her career, and the worst day, had become the same day. Now the nuclear arms race she most dreaded was unavoidable.

  Bioweapons escalation was also bound to pick up speed.

  Today she decided the only escape from civilization’s march toward Armageddon was the hope of building a better future—a future too good for either side (Capitalist or Communist) to risk losing in a war.

  On this day, the only escape from a future too dark to visualize was into the past.

  The mysteries of Fira Quarry, NR-3’s “golden death mask,” and the evolution of her Darwin Strain seemed as good a place as any toward which to flee.

  Nora looked mournfully at Hata’s half-finished machine—which they had called a “proton magnetic resonance mapper.” This futuristic tool was precisely what they needed to map genetic codes, using nothing more exotic (or less brilliant) than the positions of hydrogen atoms in carbon-based molecules. Even if Nora succeeded in completing the machine (and she knew she could), a printout of genes into actual code, though rendered readable, would be no more understandable than Egyptian hieroglyphs prior to finding the code-breaking Rosetta Stone. For a long time to come there would be no such thing as a genetic Rosetta Stone. Alan had seen to this, with the murder of Hata, the scientist most likely to have eventually made the perfect breakthrough.