“Yes, I saw it on the news last night,” he said into the phone as he shaved.
“I need to see you. I have something to show you, sir,” Popov’s voice said, just after seven in the morning.
The man thought about that. Popov was a clever bastard who’d done his jobs without much in the way of questions . . . and there was little in the way of a paper :rail, certainly nothing his lawyers couldn’t handle if it cane to that, and it wouldn’t. There were ways of dealing with Popov, too, if it came to that.
“Okay, be there at eight-fifteen.”
“Yes, sir,” the Russian said, hanging up.
Pete was in real agony now, Killgore saw. It was tine to move him. This he ordered at once, and two orderlies came in dressed in upgraded protective gear to goal the wino onto a gurney for transport to the clinical side. Killgore followed them and his patient. The clinical side was essentially a duplication of the room in which the street bums had lounged and drunk their booze, waiting unknowingly for the onset of symptoms. He now had hem all, to the point that booze and moderate doses of morphine no longer handled the pain. The orderlies loaded Pete onto a bed, next to which was an electronically operated “Christmas tree” medication dispenser. Kilgore handled the stick, and got the IV plugged into Pete’s major vein. Then he keyed the electronic box, and seconds later, the patient relaxed with a large bolus of medication The eyes went sleepy and the body relaxed while the Shiva continued to eat him alive from the inside out. Another IV would be set up to feed him with nutrients to keep his body going, along with various drugs to see if any of them had an unexpectedly beneficial effect on the Shiva. They had a whole roomful of such drugs, ranging from antibiotics-which were expected to be useless against this viral infection-to Interleukin-2 and a newly developed -3a, which, some thought, might help, plus tailored Shiva antibodies taken from experimental animals. None were expected to work, but all had to be tested to make sure they didn’t, lest there be a surprise out there when the epidemic spread. Vaccine-B was expected to work, and that was being tested now with the new control group of people kidnapped from Manhattan bars, along with the notional Vaccine A, whose purpose was rather different from -B. The nanocapsules developed on the other side of the house would come in very handy indeed. As was being demonstrated even as he had the thought, looking down at Pete’s dying body. Subject F4, Mary Bannister, felt sick to her stomach, just a mild queasiness at this point, but didn’t think much of it. That sort of thing happened, and she didn’t feel all that bad, some antacids would probably help, and those she got from her medicine cabinet, which was pretty well stocked with over the-counter medications. Other than that, she felt pretty mellow, as she smiled at herself in the mirror and liked what she saw, a youngish, attractive woman wearing pink silk jammies. With that thought, she walked out of her room, her hair glossy and a spring in her step. Chip was in the sitting room, reading a magazine slowly on the couch, and she made straight for him and sat down beside him
“Hi, Chip.” She smiled.
“Hi, Mary.” He smiled back, reaching to touch her hand.
“I upped the Valium in her breakfast,” Barbara Archer said in the control room, zooming the camera in. “Along with the other one.” The other one was an inhibition reducer. “You look nice today,” Chip told her, his words imperfectly captured by the hidden shotgun microphone.
“Thank you.” Another smile.
“She looks pretty dreamy.”
“She ought to be,” Barbara observed coldly. “There’s enough in her to make a nun shuck her habit and get it on.”
“What about him?”
“Oh, yeah, didn’t give him any steroids.” Dr. Archer had a little chuckle at that.
In proof of which, Chip leaned over to kiss Mary on the lips. They were alone in the sitting room.
“How’s her blood work look, Barb?”
“Loaded with antibodies, and starting to get some small bricks. She ought to be symptomatic in another few days.”
“Eat, drink, and be merry, people, for next week, you die,” the other physician told the TV screen.
“Too bad,” Dr. Archer agreed. She showed the emotion one might display on seeing a dead dog at the side of the road.
“Nice figure,” the man said, as the pajama tops came off. “I haven’t seen an X-rated movie in a longtime, Barb.” A videotape was running, of course. The experimental protocol was set in stone. Everything had to be recorded so that the staff could monitor the entire test program. Nice tits, he thought, about the same time Chip did, right before he caressed them on the screen.
“She was fairly inhibited when she got here. The tranquilizers really work, depressing them that way.” Another clinical observation. Things progressed rapidly frond that point on. Both doctors sipped their coffee as they watched. Tranquilizers or not, the baser human instincts charged forward, and within five minutes Chip and Mary were humping madly away, with the usual sound elects, though the picture, blessedly, wasn’t all that clear. A few minutes later, they were lying side by side on the thick shag rug, kissing tiredly and contentedly, his hand stroking her breasts, his eyes closed, his breathing deep and regular as he rolled onto his back.
“Well, Barb, if nothing else, we have a pretty good weekend getaway for couples here,” the man observed with a sly grin. “How long do you figure on his blood work?”
“Three or four days until he starts showing antibodies, probably.” Chip hadn’t been exposed in the shower as Mary had.
“What about the vaccine testers?”
“Five with -A. We have three left as uncontaminated controls for -B testing.”
“Oh? Who are we letting live?”
“M2, M3, and F9,” Dr. Archer replied. “They seem to have proper attitudes. One’s a member of the Sierra Club, would you believe? The others like it outdoors, and they should be okay with what we’re doing.”
“Political criteria for scientific tests-what are we coming to?” the man asked with another chuckle.
“Well, if they’re going to live, they might as well be people we can get along with,” Archer observed.
“True.” A nod. “How confident are you with -B?”
“Very. I expect it to be about ninety-seven percent effective, perhaps a little better,” she added conservatively.
“But not a hundred?”
“No, Shiva’s a little too nasty for that,” Archer told him. “The animal testing is a little crude, I admit, but the results follow the computer model almost exactly, well within the testing-error criteria. Steve’s been pretty good on that side.”
“Berg’s pretty smart,” the other doctor agreed. Then he shifted in his chair. “You know, Barb, what we’re doing here isn’t exactly-”
“I know that,” she assured him. “But we all knew that coming in.”
“True.” He nodded submission, annoyed at himself for the second thoughts. Well, his family would survive, and they all shared his love of the world and its many sorts of inhabitants. Still, these two people on the TV, they were humans, just like himself, and he’d just peeped in on them like some sort of pervert. Oh, yeah, they’d only done it because both were loaded with drugs fed to them through their food or in pill form, but they were both sentenced to death and
“Relax, will you?” Archer said, looking at his face and reading his mind. “At least they’re getting a little love, aren’t they? That’s a hell of a lot more than the rest of the world’ll get-”
“I won’t have to watch them. ” Being a voyeur wasn’t his idea of fun, and he’d told himself often enough that he wouldn’t have to watch what he’d be helping to start.
“No, but we’ll know about it. It’ll be on the TV news, won’t it? But then it will be too late, and if they find out, their last conscious act will be to come after us. That’s -he part that has me worried.”
“The Project enclave in Kansas is pretty damned insecure, Barb,” the man assured her. The one in Brazil’s even more so.” Which was where he’d be going eventually. The rain forest had always fascinated him.
“Could be better,” Barbara Archer thought.
“The world isn’t a laboratory, doctor, remember?” Wasn’t that what the whole Shiva project was about, or Christ’s sake? Christ? he wondered. Well, another ice a that had to be set aside. He wasn’t cynical enough to invoke the name of God into what they were doing. Nature, perhaps, which wasn’t quite the same thing, he thought.
“Good morning, Dmitriy,” he said, coming into his office early.
“Good morning, sir,” the intelligence officer said, rising to his feet as his employer entered the anteroom. It was a European custom, harkening back to royalty, and one that had somehow conveyed itself to the Marxist sate that had nurtured and trained the Russian now living in New York.