Mae was suggesting that the same thing had happened to the swarms. They had evolved to a milder form, which could be transmitted from one person to another. “It’s creepy,” I said.
She nodded. “But what can we do about it?”
And then she began to cry silently, tears running down her cheeks. Mae was always so strong. Seeing her upset unnerved me now. She was shaking her head. “Jack, there’s nothing we can do. There’s four of them. They’re stronger than we are. They’re going to kill us the way they killed Charley.”
She pressed her head against my shoulder. I put my arm around her. But I couldn’t comfort her. Because I knew she was right.
There was no way out.
Winston Churchill once said that being shot at focused the mind wonderfully. My mind was going very fast now. I was thinking that I had made a mistake and I had to fix it. Even though it was a typically human mistake.
Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything-evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing-it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We looked at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing. Of course we knew it was changing but we behaved as if it wasn’t. We denied the reality of change. So change always surprised us. Parents were even surprised by the maturing of their own children. They treated them as younger than they really were. And I had been surprised by the change in the evolution of the swarms. There was no reason why the swarms shouldn’t evolve in two directions at the same time. Or three, or four, or ten directions, for that matter. I should have anticipated that. I should have looked for it, expected it. If I had, I might be better prepared to deal with the situation now. But instead I had treated the swarm as one problem-a problem out there, in the desert-and I had ignored other possibilities.
It’s called denial, Jack.
I started to wonder what else I was denying now. What else I had failed to see. Where did I go wrong? What was the first clue I had missed? Probably the fact that my initial contact with a swarm had produced an allergic reaction-a reaction that almost killed me. Mae had called it a coliform reaction. Caused by a toxin from the bacteria in the swarm. That toxin was obviously the result of an evolutionary change in the E. coli that made up the swarm. Well, for that matter, the very presence of phage in the tank was an evolutionary change, a viral response to the bacteria that-
“Mae,” I said. “Wait a minute.”
“What?”
I said, “There might be something we can do to stop them.”
She was skeptical; I could see it in her face. But she wiped her eyes and listened.
I said, “The swarm consists of particles and bacteria, is that right?”
“Yes…”
“The bacteria provide the raw ingredients for the particles to reproduce themselves. Right? Okay. So if the bacteria die, the swarm dies too?”
“Probably.” She frowned. “Are you thinking of an antibiotic? Giving everyone an antibiotic? Because you need a lot of antibiotics to clear an E. coli infection, they’d have to take drugs for several days, and I don’t-”
“No. I’m not thinking of antibiotics.” I tapped the tank in front of me. “I’m thinking of this.”
“Phage?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know if it will work,” she said. She frowned. “It might. Except… how’re you going to get the phage into them? They won’t just drink it down, you know.”
“Then we’ll fill the atmosphere with it,” I said. “They’ll breathe it in and they’ll never know.”
“Uh-huh. How do we fill the atmosphere?”
“Easy. Don’t shut down this tank. Feed the bacteria into the system. I want the assembly line to start making virus-a lot of virus. Then we release into the air.” Mae sighed. “It won’t work, Jack,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because the assembly line won’t make a lot of virus.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the way the virus reproduces. You know-the virus floats around, attaches to a cell wall, and injects itself into the cell. Then it takes over the cell’s own RNA, and converts it to making more viruses. The cell ceases all its normal metabolic functions, and just cranks out viruses. Pretty soon the cell is packed with viruses, and it bursts like a balloon. All the viruses are released, they float to other cells, and the process starts all over.”
“Yes… so?”
“If I introduce phage into the assembly lines, the virus will reproduce rapidly-for a while. But it will rupture a lot of cell membranes, leaving behind all those membranes as a lipid crud. The crud will clog the intermediate filters. After about an hour or two, the assembly lines will start to overheat, the safety systems will kick in, and shut everything down. The whole production line will just stop. No virus.”
“Can the safety systems be turned off?”
“Yes. But I don’t know how.”
“Who does?”
“Only Ricky.”
I shook my head. “That won’t do us any good. Are you sure you can’t figure out-”
“There’s a code,” she said. “Ricky’s the only one who knows it.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, Jack, it’d be too dangerous to turn off the safeties. Parts of that system operate at high temperature, and high voltages. And there’s a lot of ketones and methane produced in the arms. It’s continuously monitored and drawn off to keep the levels below a certain concentration. But if it isn’t drawn off, and you start high voltage sparking…” She paused, shrugged.
“What’re you saying? It could explode?”
“No, Jack. I’m saying it will explode. In a matter of minutes after the safeties are shut off. Six, maybe eight minutes at most. And you wouldn’t want to be there when that happens. So you can’t use the system to produce a lot of virus. Safeties on or safeties off, it just won’t work.” Silence.
Frustration.
I looked around the room. I looked at the steel tank, curving upward over my head. I looked at the rack of test tubes at Mae’s feet. I looked in the corner, where I saw a mop, a bucket, and a one-gallon plastic bottle of water. And I looked at Mae, frightened, still on the verge of tears, but somehow holding it together.
And I had a plan.
“Okay. Do it anyway. Release the virus into the system.”
“What’s the point of that?”
“Just do it.”
“Jack,” she said. “Why are we doing this? I’m afraid they know that we know. We can’t fool them. They’re too clever. If we try to do this, they’ll be onto us in a minute.”
“Yes,” I said. “They probably will.”
“And it won’t work, anyway. The system won’t make viruses. So why, Jack? What good will it do?”
Mae had been a good friend through all this, and now I had a plan and I wasn’t going to tell her. I hated to do it this way, but I had to make a distraction for the others. I had to fool them. And she had to help me do it-which meant she had to believe in a different plan. I said, “Mae, we have to distract them, to fool them. I want you to release the virus into the assembly line. Let them focus on that. Let them worry about that. Meanwhile, I’ll take some virus up to the maintenance area beneath the roof, and dump it into the sprinkler reservoir.”
“And then set the sprinklers off?”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “And they’ll be soaked in virus. Everybody in this facility. Drenched.”
“Right.”
She said, “It just might work, Jack.”
“I can’t think of anything better,” I said. “Now open one of those valves, and let’s draw off some test tubes of virus. And I want you to put some virus into that gallon jug over there.” She hesitated. “The valve is on the other side of the tank. The security camera will see us.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “It can’t be helped now. You just have to buy me a little time.”
“And how do I do that?”
I told her. She made a face. “You’re kidding! They’ll never do that!”
“Of course not. I just need a little time.”
…
We went around the tank. She filled the test tubes. The liquid that came out was a thick brown slop. It smelled fecal. It looked fecal. Mae said to me, “Are you sure about this?”
“Got to do it,” I said. “There’s no choice.”
“You first.”
I picked up the test tube, took a breath, and swallowed it whole. It was disgusting. My stomach heaved. I thought I would vomit, but I didn’t. I took another breath, swallowed some water from the gallon jug, and looked at Mae.
“Awful, huh?” she said.
“Awful.”
She picked up a test tube, held her nose, and swallowed. I waited through her coughing fit. She managed not to vomit. I gave her the gallon jug, she drank, and poured the rest out onto the floor. Then she filled it with brown slop.
The last thing she did was twist the handle of a big flow valve. “There,” she said. “It’s going into the system now.”
“Okay,” I said. I took two test tubes and stuck them in my shirt pocket. I took the gallon jug. It said ARROWHEAD PURE WATER on the label. “See you later.” And I hurried off. As I went down the hallway, I figured there was one chance in a hundred that I would succeed. Maybe only one chance in a thousand.
But I had a chance.
Later on, I watched the entire scene on the security camera, so I knew what happened to Mae. She walked into the kitchen, carrying her rack of brown test tubes. The others were all there, eating. Julia gave her a frosty look. Vince ignored her. Ricky said, “What’ve you got there, Mae?”
“Phage,” she said.
“What for?”
Now Julia looked over. Mae said, “It’s from the fermentation tank.”
“Ew, no wonder it stinks.”
“Jack just drank one. He made me drink one.”
Ricky snorted. “What’d you do that for? Jeez, I’m surprised you didn’t puke.”
“I almost did. Jack wants all of you to drink one, too.”
Bobby laughed. “Yeah? What for?”
“To make sure none of you is infected.”
Ricky frowned. “Infected? What do you mean, infected?”
“Jack says that Charley was harboring the swarm inside his body, so maybe the rest of us are, too. Or some of us. So you drink this virus, and it’ll kill the bacteria inside you, and kill the swarm.”