Rick sat down heavily. He’d prayed for better news, some sort of amazing fix. He didn’t like Said—his defeatist attitude, his seeming arrogance. But he couldn’t expect a miracle.
And what the man said was true. They both knew too much to turn away. “Do you know why you were chosen?” he asked.
“Chosen?” Said looked up, his expression blank.
“You were picked for this project for the same reason that I was. You have no family.”
“I have my parents—”
“No wife, no kids. We can’t trust people to look at this rationally, if . . .”
“Look,” the doctor replied, his pale brown eyes flashing amber, “I don’t think anyone in his right mind could look at this with complete detachment. But I’ll try to be as rational as I can.”
4
JAMES GRITTED HIS teeth. It was difficult to believe that only a few weeks had passed since his first meeting with Colonel Richard Blevins. Bundled in a Biosafety Level 4 positive-pressure suit, he felt trapped, claustrophobic. Bright overhead lights glinted off the surface of the transparent plastic surrounding his head, blinding him. The short walk down the narrow hallway toward the Fort Detrick maximum containment lab was exhausting, the sweat tracing down the side of his face in an exasperating trickle.
“These suits used to be worse,” Rudy Garza said. The smaller man’s voice, muffled in James’s earpiece, was almost inaudible over the hiss of air through the coiled tubing tethering them to the low ceiling. “At least now we have decent peripheral vision.”
James had never dealt with containment at this level—it wasn’t required for the type of work he did at Emory. But Rudy’s current work involved a contaminated archaebacterium sample harvested from Afghanistan. And if James was going to help challenge this beast, he wanted to meet it face-to-face.
Passing through a second airlock, they approached a biosafety hood across a small interior room. The tiny organisms at the heart of the problem had been classified as members of the phylum Thaumarchaeota, of the domain Archaea—a classification that included some of the most ancient organisms on earth. As James had soon learned, the archaebacteria were not bacteria at all. They were in a kingdom unto themselves—not susceptible to common antibiotics. Naturally drought tolerant, spore-like in their resilience, archaea like these were present in all environments, harsh or otherwise.
So far, human victims confirmed as infected with IC-NAN had been limited to two mountain villages within ten miles of the deployment site. The archaebacterial isolate under study here had been recovered from the uniform of a doomed army reconnaissance specialist. James winced, remembering the classified videos he’d been shown: women and children lying on the ground in poorly equipped medical tents, coughing blood into the sand; the young American soldier, prostrate in a makeshift ventilator—unable to come home, even to die. The problem was that no one was yet sure how far IC-NAN would spread.
Along one side of the hood, tubes of cloudy agar sat in neat rows of racks.
“These are our hosts,” Rudy said. The remnants of Rudy’s Mexican accent, coupled with his quick, sure movements as he manipulated a robotic arm to retrieve a smaller rack from the back of the sealed hood, reminded James of the capable technicians who operated the hemp harvesters alongside his father in Bakersfield. The robot picked a thin slide from the smaller rack. “These archaea are known to be capable of transferring genetic traits among one another in the wild. I’ve been trying to determine whether or not this infected thaumarchaeon species can transmit its new NAN synthesis capabilities to other species of archaea.”
“Am I supposed to be able to see something on that slide?”
“Have a seat,” Rudy said. The arm placed the slide onto a micrometer stage, which then moved dutifully toward the eyepiece of a deep UV fluorescence microscope set into the glass sash of the hood. “Please, fit your mask here.”
James brought his face toward the eyepiece, doing his best to peer through the transparent plastic of his suit. To his surprise, the soft rubber grommet surrounding the eyepiece conformed easily to his mask. “We can actually look for NANs? Aren’t they too small?”
“Each NAN is only about thirteen nanometers in diameter. But when they are labeled with my fluorescent probe, we get something large enough to be retained on the filter in this slide, and bright enough to see.”
James squinted. The image looked like an old crossword puzzle, with some square segments completely dark, others glowing bright yellow. “What am I looking for?”
“Each segment of the grid represents approximately one hundred organisms, each a different archaebacterial species. These organisms were each grown up in a culture medium that was previously used to grow the infected thaumarchaeon species. The question was whether there would be some sort of genetic transfer from the infected species to the new species. As a check, we’ve also included some regular bacteria—gut E. coli, soil Pseudomonas species, and the like. On each slide, we can see the results for fifty different organisms.”
“Which ones were affected?”
“The segments that are illuminated by the fluorescent probe represent organisms in which the NAN has reassembled well enough to capture and visualize at this magnification. Fortunately, none of the common bacterial isolates we tested seem to have picked up the ability to make NANs. But quite a few of the archaebacterial isolates did—most notably including some from the mainland U.S. That one on the lower right is from the Argonne collection. It was harvested just outside Chicago.”
“Which means . . .”
“We have identified a mechanism by which this trait could make its way around the globe. It might be only a matter of time before we have species here in the U.S. that can make IC-NAN.”
James felt his heart racing. He wanted—needed—to have faith in this man, the only person he’d met since joining the project who seemed both willing and able to face the enormity of the task before them. But he also needed better news. Lamely, he pursued the same line of questioning that Blevins had subjected him to on their first meeting. “But . . . can we kill the current hosts before they have a chance to infect other species?” he asked.
“We must keep trying,” Rudy replied evenly. “But we have few options for cheaply available decontamination agents that are not also toxic to humans. These organisms laugh in the face of agents like bleach. And we cannot simply set fire to regions that are heavily populated . . .”
James nodded. He’d already seen it on the nightly news vids—footage of military bots applying flaming torches to an apparently lifeless expanse of desert. The press was all over it, and speculation was rampant as to what might be going on. But the lid was on—no answers were forthcoming.
“To make matters worse, the Argonne Lab data indicate that these archaea can spread through air currents, the jet stream, and so on. And by now, they could already have been carried outside the region on military vehicles and equipment. All we can do is continue to try and contain the spread, continue to build on the existing models, to predict where they might pop up next.” Rudy again manipulated the controller and the robot retracted the eyepiece, then placed the slide carefully back into its rack. His shoulders slumped, he headed back toward the entryway. He raised his gloved hand to activate the airlock, then turned to face James. “What did you tell Colonel Blevins?”