Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

De Vaca stopped, looking at Carson. He had positioned himself between her and the lab’s video camera, blocking its view. He was moving his gloved hands downward in a suppressing motion. Through the visor, she could see him shaking his head and silently mouthing the word stop .

De Vaca frowned. “What’s up?” she asked. “Been chewing peyote buttons, cabrón ?”

Carson brusquely motioned her to wait. Then he looked around the lab as if searching for something. Suddenly he reached for a cabinet, pulled out a large vial of disinfectant powder, and sprinkled a light dusting of it on the glass surface of the bioprophylaxis table. Shielding his actions from the camera, he formed letters in the white dust with a gloved finger:

Don’t use intercom .

De Vaca stared at the words for a moment. Then, extending a gloved finger, she formed a large question mark in the powder.

Tell me the rest HERE , Carson wrote.

De Vaca paused, looking narrowly at Carson. Then she wrote out the message: PurBlood contaminated by GEF filtration . Burt used himself as alpha tester . That’s what’s wrong with him.

Carson quickly smoothed out the message and sprinkled a little more disinfectant on the surface. He quickly wrote: THINK. If Burt was alpha tester, who were the beta testers?

He saw a look of fear spread slowly across her face. She was mouthing words but he could not hear them.

He wrote: Library . Half hour . After waiting for her to nod agreement, he erased the tracings with a sweep of his glove.

The Mount Dragon library was an oasis of rusticity in a high-tech desert: its yellow, gingham-checked curtains, rough-hewn roof beams, and coarse floorboards were designed to resemble an oversized Western lodge. The intent of the designers had been to provide relief from the sterile white corridors of the rest of the facility. However, given the moratorium on paper products at Mount Dragon, the library contained mostly electronic resources, and in any case few members of the overworked Mount Dragon staff had time to enjoy its solitude. Carson himself had only been in the library twice before: once when poking around the facility during his initial explorations, and again just a few hours before, immediately after leaving Singer and Nye to themselves.

As he closed the heavy door behind him, he was glad to see that de Vaca was the library’s only occupant. She was sitting in a white Adirondack chair, dozing despite herself, long black hair fallen carelessly across her face. She looked up at his approach.

“Long day,” she said. “And long night.” She looked at him speculatively. “They’re going to wonder why we left the Fever Tank early,” she added in a lower tone.

“ They would have wondered a lot more if I’d let you keep running your mouth,” Carson muttered back.

“Hell, and I thought I was paranoid. You really think somebody listens to all those monitor tapes, cabrón ?”

Carson gave a short shake of the head. “We can’t take that chance.”

De Vaca stiffened slightly. “Don’t pull a Vanderwagon on me, Carson. Now, what’s this about beta testers for PurBlood?”

“I’ll show you.” He motioned her over to a data terminal in a far corner of the library. Pulling up two chairs, he put the terminal’s keyboard on his lap, entering his employee ID at the waiting prompt.

“What research have you done on PurBlood since you got here?” he asked, turning to her.

De Vaca shrugged. “Not much. The later lab reports of Burt’s. Why?”

Carson nodded. “Exactly. The same kind of materials I examined: sample runs, lab notes Burt made while he was transferring his attention to X-FLU. The only reason we were interested in PurBlood at all was because Burt had worked on it prior to getting involved with our own project, X-FLU.”

He punched keys. “I did see Singer this morning. But I didn’t really speak with him. I came here instead. I remembered what you’d said about PurBlood, and I wanted to learn a little more about its development. Look what I found.”

He gestured at the screen:

mol_desc_one

vcf

10,240,342

11/1/95

mol_desc_two

vcf

12,320,302

11/1/95

bipol_symmetr

vcf

41,234,913

12/14/95

hemocyl_grp_r

vcf

7,713,653

01/3/96

diffrac_series_a

vcf

21,442,521

02/5/96

diffrac_series_b

vcf

6,100,824

02/6/96

pr

vid

940,213,727

02/27/96

transfec_locus_h

vcf

18,921,663

03/10/96

“These are all the video files in the PurBlood research archives,” he went on in a low tone. “Most of them are the usual: animations of molecules and the like. But look at the second from the last on the list, the one called pr . Notice its extension: it’s a digital dump from a video camera, not the video compression format used in computer animations. And look at its huge size: almost a gigabyte.”

“What is it?” de Vaca asked.

“It’s a rough-cut video, unreleased, probably created for public-relations purposes.” With a few more keystrokes, he called up a multimedia software object to play back the video file. An image appeared in a window on the terminal screen, grainy but perfectly distinct.

“You’ll have to watch closely,” he said. “There’s no associated audio file.”

A caravan of Hummers is approaching across the desert. The camera zooms out briefly to show the Mount Dragon complex, the white buildings, the blue New Mexico sky.

The camera returns to the caravan, now parked at the Mount Dragon motor pool. The passenger door of the lead vehicle opens, and a man emerges. He stands on the tarmac, waving, grinning, and shaking hands.

“Scopes,” Carson murmured.

The entire Mount Dragon staff are on hand to greet him. There is much backslapping and grinning.

“Looks like a camp meeting,” said de Vaca. “Who’s that big-nosed guy standing next to Singer?”

“Burt,” Carson replied. “It’s Franklin Burt.”

Now Burt is standing next to Scopes on the tarmac, talking to the crowd. Scopes puts his arm around him, and they raise hands in a victory gesture. The camera pans across the crowd.

The scene shifts to the Mount Dragon gymnasium. It has been cleared of all equipment, and in the center are two rows of chairs, carefully arranged. They are occupied by what appears to be the entire Mount Dragon staff. The camera, positioned on the balcony running track, now focuses on a temporary stage built at one end of the gym. Scopes is giving a talk to the enthusiastic crowd.

As Scopes continues, the camera pans the crowd again. Several of the faces seem to have grown somber, even uncertain.

A nurse comes from offstage, dressed in white, wheeling a stretcher with an IV rack. The rack holds a single unit of blood.

Scopes sits on the edge of the stretcher and the nurse rolls up his left sleeve. Franklin Burt now mounts the stage and begins to talk passionately, moving back and forth across the stage.

The camera zooms in as the nurse swabs Scopes’s arm and slides in the IV. Then she hooks up the pint of blood and turns a plastic stopcock, starting the flow. While Scopes receives the blood, Burt talks to him, obviously monitoring his vital signs.

“Jesus Christ,” de Vaca said. “He’s getting PurBlood, isn’t he?”

The camera makes a few cuts and in a few minutes the pint of blood is empty. The nurse removes the IV, places a gauze patch on the arm, and folds the arm up to seal the vein.

Scopes stands with a grin and holds up his other arm in a victory salute.