Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

Teece looked at him with a wry smile. “You should see yourself, Dr. Carson,” he panted. “All drawn up with righteous manly indignation. But don’t get your knickers in a twist. I’ve asked you here for a very good reason.”

“I’m waiting to hear it.” Carson could already feel a sheen of sweat coating his skin. Teece must have this thing cranked to a hundred and sixty , he thought.

“There’s something else I want to discuss with you,” Teece said. “Mind if I add some steam?”

At some point, a Mount Dragon wag had replaced the usual wooden water dipper with a retort full of distilled water. Before Carson could protest, the investigator had picked up the retort and poured a pint of water onto the glowing coals. Clouds of steam rose immediately, filling the room with a scorching vapor.

“Why the hell did we have to come in here?” Carson croaked, head reeling.

“Mr. Carson, I don’t mind sharing most of my discussions,” came the disembodied voice through the steam. “In fact, more often than not it has served my own purposes. As with our talk in your lab this afternoon. But right now, what I want is privacy.”

Comprehension came slowly to Carson’s brain. It was commonly believed around Mount Dragon that any conversation taking place in the bluesuits was monitored. Obviously, Teece didn’t want anybody else overhearing what he was about to say. But why not meet in the cafeteria, or the residency compound? Carson answered his own question: The canteen rumor mill suspected Nye of bugging the entire facility. Teece, apparently, believed the rumors. That left the sauna—with its corrosive heat and steam—as the only place where they could talk.

Or did it? “Why couldn’t we have just taken a walk along the perimeter fence?” Carson gasped.

Teece suddenly materialized through the vapor. He took a seat next to Carson, shaking his head as he did so. “I have a horror of scorpions,” he said. “Now, listen to me a moment. You’re wondering why I asked you here, of all people. There are two reasons. First, I’ve watched your response to the Brandon-Smith emergency several times on tape. You were the one scientist who was intimately involved with the project, and with the tragedy , who behaved rationally. I may need that kind of impartiality in the days ahead. That’s why I spoke with you last.”

“You’ve talked to everyone?” Teece had been on-site only a few days.

“It’s a small place. I’ve learned a great deal. And there is much else that I suspect, but do not yet know for certain.” He wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand. “The second and most important reason involves your predecessor.”

“You mean Franklin Burt? What about him?”

“In your lab, I mentioned that Andrew Vanderwagon was suffering from leaky blood vessels and overdrives of dopamine and serotonin. What I didn’t tell you was that Franklin Burt is suffering from the same symptoms. And, according to the autopsy report, so to a lesser degree was Rosalind Brandon-Smith. Now, why would that be, do you suppose?”

Carson thought for a moment. It made no sense at all. Unless ... Despite the heat of the sauna, a sudden thought chilled him.

“Could they be infected with something? A virus?” My God , he thought, could it be some long-gestating strain of X-FLU ? Dread coursed through him.

Teece wiped his hands on his towel, grinning. “What’s happened to your unswerving faith in safety procedures? Relax. You aren’t the first to jump to that conclusion. But neither Burt nor Vanderwagon show any X-FLU antibodies. They’re clean. Brandon-Smith, on the other hand, was riddled with them. So there’s no commonality.”

“Then I can’t explain it,” Carson said, expelling a pent-up breath. “Very strange.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” Teece murmured.

He added more water to the coals. Carson waited.

“I assume you studied Dr. Burt’s work in detail when you first arrived,” Teece went on.

Carson nodded.

“So you must have read his electronic notebook?”

“I have,” said Carson.

“Many times, I imagine.”

“I can recite it in my sleep.”

“Where do you think the rest of it is?” asked Teece.

There was a short silence.

“What do you mean?” Carson asked.

“As I read the on-line files, something in them struck me as funny, like a melody that was missing some notes. So I did a statistical analysis of the entries, and I found that over the course of the last month the average daily entry dropped from over two thousand words to a few hundred. That led me to the conclusion that Burt, for whatever personal or paranoid reasons of his own, had started to keep a private notebook. Something Scopes and the others couldn’t see.”

“Hard copy is forbidden at Mount Dragon,” Carson said, knowing he was merely stating the obvious.

“I doubt if rules meant much to Dr. Burt at that point. Anyway, as I understand it, Mr. Scopes likes to roam GeneDyne cyberspace all night long, poking and prying into everyone’s business. A hidden journal is a logical response to that. I’m sure Burt wasn’t the only one. There are probably several completely sane people here who keep private logs.”

Carson nodded, his mind working fast. “That means—” he began.

“Yes?” Teece prompted, suddenly eager.

“Well, Burt mentioned a ‘key factor’ several times in his last on-line entries. If this secret journal exists, it might contain that key, whatever it is. I was thinking it might be the missing piece to solving the riddle of rendering X-FLU harmless.”

“Perhaps,” Teece said. Then he paused. “Burt worked on other projects before X-FLU, correct?”

“Yes. He invented the GEF process, GeneDyne’s proprietary filtration technique. And he perfected PurBlood.”

“Ah, yes. PurBlood.” Teece pursed his lips distastefully. “Nasty idea, that.”

“What do you mean?” Carson asked, mystified. “Blood substitutes can save countless lives. They eliminate shortages, the need for blood typing, protect against transfusions of tainted blood—”

“Perhaps,” Teece interrupted. “Just the same, the thought of injecting pints of it into my veins isn’t pleasant. I understand it’s produced by a vat of genetically engineered bacteria that have had the human hemoglobin gene inserted into them. It’s the same bacteria that exists by the trillions in ...” His voice trailed off, and he added the word “dirt” almost soundlessly.

Carson laughed. “It’s called streptococcus. Yes, it’s the bacterium found in soil. The fact is, we at GeneDyne know more about streptococcus than any other form of life. It’s the only organism other than E. coli whose gene we have completely mapped from beginning to end. So it’s a perfect host organism, just because it lives in dirt doesn’t make it disgusting or dangerous.”

“Call me old-fashioned, then,” said Teece. “But I’m straying from our subject here. The doctor who’s treating Burt tells me that he repeats an apparently nonsensical phrase over and over again: ‘Poor alpha.’ Do you have any idea what that might mean? Could it be the beginning of some longer sentence? Or perhaps his nickname for somebody?”

Carson thought a moment, then shook his head. “I doubt if it’s anybody here.”

Teece frowned. “Another mystery. Perhaps the notebook will shed light on this, as well. In any case, I have some ideas on how to go about searching for it. I plan to follow them up when I get back.”

“When you get back?” Carson echoed.

Teece nodded. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow for Radium Springs to file my preliminary report. Communication links to the outside world are practically nonexistent here. Besides, I need to consult with my colleagues. That’s why I’ve spoken to you. You are the person closest to Hurt’s work. I’ll be needing your full cooperation in the days to come. Somehow, I think Burt is the key to all this. We need to make a decision soon.”