Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

My love, the sun is growing low in the sky, and I must leave. But I will return tomorrow. I’ll tell Brent I need a day off. It’s not a lie. If you only knew how pouring out my soul to you on these pages has lifted a great weight from my shoulders.

June 13

Dearest Amiko,

I come now to the most difficult part of my story. The part, in fact, that I was not sure until now I could bring myself to tell you. I may yet burn these pages, if my resolve weakens. But it is a secret I can no longer keep within myself.

... So I began the purification process. We fermented the solution to free the hemoglobin from its bacterial prison. We centrifuged it to clear out the refuse. We forced it through ceramic micron filters. We fractionated it. To no avail.

You see, hemoglobin is extremely delicate. You cannot heat it; you cannot use overly strong chemicals; you cannot sterilize or distill it. Each time I attempted to purify the hemoglobin, I ended up destroying it. The molecule lost its delicate structure: it “denatured.” It became useless.

A more delicate purification process was required. And so Brent suggested we try my own GEF filtration process.

I realized immediately that he was right. There was no reason not to. It must have been misplaced modesty on my part that kept it from occurring to me before.

The process I’d been working on in Manchester was a type of modified gel electrophoresis, an electric potential that drew precisely the correct molecular weight molecule through a set of gel filters.

Setting up the process took time, however—time during which Brent grew increasingly impatient. At last, I was able to purify six pints of PurBlood using the gel process.

The GEF process was successful beyond my wildest hopes. Using four of the six pints as samples, I was able to prove the mixture was pure down to sixteen parts per million. Thus, out of one million hemoglobin molecules, there were no more than sixteen foreign particles. And probably less.

This may sound pure. And it is pure enough for most drugs. But, in this case, it was not. The FDA had decided, with typical capriciousness, that 100 parts per billion would be safe. Sixteen parts per million was not. The number 16—it will haunt me forever. In scientific terms, a purity of 1.6 X 10 -7.

Please don’t misunderstand. I believed—and I still believe—that PurBlood is much purer than that. I just couldn’t prove it. The difference is crucial. But to me, the distinction was unfair and artificial.

There was one test for purity—the ultimate test—that I had not performed, because it was discouraged under FDA regulations. I secretly performed that test. Please forgive me, my love—one night, in the low-security lab, I opened a vein in my arm and bled out a pint. Then I replaced it with a transfusion of PurBlood.

It was rash, perhaps. But PurBlood passed with flying colors. Nothing happened to me, and all medical tests proved it was safe. Naturally, I couldn’t report the results of that test, but it satisfied me that PurBlood was pure.

So I did something else. I infinitesimally diluted my last pint of PurBlood with distilled water, two hundred to one, and ran the array of tests that automatically calculated and recorded purity. The result was, of course, a purity of 80 parts per billion. Well within the FDA safety range.

That was all I had to do. I did not make a report, I did not change figures or falsify data. When Scopes downloaded the test results that night, he knew what they meant. The next day he congratulated me. He was beside himself.

The question I now ask myself—the question you may ask me—is why did I do it?

It wasn’t for the money. I have never really cared that much about money. You know that, my darling Amiko. Money is more trouble than it’s worth.

It wasn’t for fame, which is a terrific nuisance.

It wasn’t to save lives, although I have rationalized that this was the reason.

I think perhaps it was pure, naked desire. A desire to solve this last problem, to take that final step to completion. It is the same desire that led Einstein to suggest the terrible power of the atom in a letter to Roosevelt; it is the same desire that led Oppenheimer to build the bomb and test it not thirty miles from here; it is the same desire that led the Anasazi priests to meet in this stone chamber and exhort the Thunderbird to send the rain. It was the desire to conquer nature.

But—and this is what haunts me, what has driven me to commit this all to paper—the success of PurBlood does not alter the fact that I cheated.

I am only too well aware of this. Especially now ... now that PurBlood has gone on to large-scale production, and I am banging my head against another, even more insoluble problem.

Anyway, dearest one, I hope you can find it in your heart to understand. Once I am free of this place, I will make it my life’s resolve never to be apart from you again.

And perhaps that will be sooner than you think. I’m beginning to suspect certain people here of— but more on that some other time. I had best end this for today.

You will never know what being able to speak this secret has done for me.

June 30

It took me a long time to get here today. I had to take a special route, a secret route. The woman who cleans my room has been looking at me strangely, and I don’t want her following me. She’ll talk to Brent about it, just as my lab assistant and the network administrator have done.

It’s because I’ve discovered the key. And now I must be ceaselessly vigilant.

You can tell them by the way they leave things on their desks. Their messiness gives them away. And they are polluted with germs. Billions of bacteria and viruses hiding in every crevice of their bodies. I wish I could speak of it to Brent, but I must continue as if nothing had happened, as if all were normal.

I don’t think I had better come here again.

Carson was silent. The sun settled toward the horizon, its shape ballooning in the layers of air. The old stone walls of the ruin smelled of dust and heat, mingled with the faint scent of corruption. One of the horses whinnied with impatience, and the other answered.

At the sound of the horses, de Vaca started. Then she quickly stuffed the journal in the container, placed it into the sipapu, covered the hole with the flat rock, and smoothed the warm concealing sand over the spot.

She straightened up, brushing off her jeans. “We’d better get back,” she said. “There’ll be questions if we miss the emergency drill.”

They climbed out of the ruined kiva, mounted their horses, and reined slowly in the direction of Mount Dragon.

“Burt, of all people,” de Vaca muttered as they rode. “Faking his data.”

Carson was silent, lost in thought.

“And then using himself as guinea pig,” de Vaca went on.

Carson roused himself, startled by a sudden realization. “I guess that’s what he meant by ‘poor alpha,’ ” he said.

“What?”

“Teece told me that Burt has been raving about ‘poor alpha, poor alpha.’ I guess he meant himself, as the alpha test subject.” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t call him a guinea pig, though. Making himself the alpha was very much in character. A man like Burt wouldn’t deliberately risk thousands of lives on unproven blood. He was under incredible time pressure to prove its safety. So he tested it on himself. It’s not unheard of. It isn’t exactly illegal to do something like that, either.” He looked at de Vaca. “You have to admire the guy for putting his life on the line. And he had the last laugh. He proved the blood was safe.”

Carson fell silent. Something was teasing the back of his mind; something that had surfaced as they read the journal. Now it remained just out of the reach of consciousness, like a forgotten dream.