James Tabor - The Deep Zone

Barnard stood and waited for another two minutes, monitoring air flow and pressurization, to make sure that the suit was intact. Then he went through yet another air lock. This one was what they called a submarine door because its design had been copied from submarines’ watertight bulkheads. He pushed a lever from left to right, releasing a locking latch. Then he turned a large steel wheel counterclockwise. He pulled a second latch, opening the bulkhead door, stepped through, and reversed the whole procedure.

He stood in a small room with a grate floor and seamless stainless steel walls from which multiple nozzles protruded. He pushed a doughnut-sized red button—in BSL-4 areas, everything was bigger, to compensate for the reduced manual dexterity—to initiate the chemical-shower decon sequence and stepped onto two white footprints in the middle of the steel-grate floor. High-pressure jets sprayed green Chemex decontamination solution at him from above, both sides, front, and behind. He raised his hands over his head, as though preparing to dive into water, and pirouetted slowly around and around, exposing every square millimeter of surface to the spray, which resembled antifreeze fluid in color and viscosity. He lifted both boots, one at a time, to let the spray hit the soles. Excess liquid drained through the grates into collection reservoirs. After two minutes the jets cut off and powerful fans blew warm air for another three minutes, clearing the suit of decon liquid and drying it.

On the far wall was another big red button, with two lights, one red and one green, beside it. He pressed the button and waited. A stainless steel door slid open, right to left, he stepped through, and the door whisked shut behind him, pneumatic airtight seals inflating once it was closed.

He was now standing in one of the deadliest spots on earth. A pinhole-sized breach in his suit would seem, to any circulating pathogens, like an open barn door. If anything happened to interrupt his suit’s positive pressure after such a breach, they would flood in by the millions and he would die one of the most horrible deaths imaginable in less than a week.

BSL-4 labs tended not to be large because they were prohibitively expensive to build and maintain. It was not just the labs themselves but all the safety and containment systems they required, air and fluid collection and disposal, fail-safe redundancies, and ultrasophisticated instruments like scanning electron microscopes. Each square foot of lab space cost $2,000 and required fifteen additional square feet of support facility at the same cost. Thus a one-thousand-square-foot lab needed fifteen thousand square feet of support works, the whole thing costing $32 million altogether. More expensive, foot for foot, than the space shuttle.

Stainless steel counters ran at waist height down both sides of the room. On top of them sat exotic instruments, glass boxes, trays of cultures. Over the counters hung aluminum hoods with ventilator fans that continually drew air out of the lab, maintaining its negative pressure. Evvie Flemmer was working at one counter.

“Took you a while.” Casey was smiling, his voice muffled by the plastic hood. “Turn around and I’ll hook you up.”

“I’m rusty donning the Chemturion,” Barnard said, a bit sheepishly. “Don’t get down here as often as I would like. Skills deteriorate.” He waited while Casey connected the coiled, ceiling-mounted yellow hose that would give him breathing air from the lab’s integral supply. With twisting and contortions, one person could do it, but having a partner made it much easier. A self-locking nozzle mated with a circular valve seat on the back of the right shoulder of Barnard’s suit. Once it was in place, Casey pushed a butterfly-valve handle that opened the nozzle, delivering air. Finally, Casey rotated the switch on Barnard’s Chem-Air PLSS unit, depowering it.

“You said you had something promising.”

“Yes. Come over here,” Casey said, moving to the electron microscope.

The instrument looked like a white stovepipe eight feet tall and bristling with extensions, controls, and components. At its base were a twelve-by-twelve viewing screen and binocular eyepieces like those found on light microscopes. Barnard bent over the screen. Casey used an oversized mouse and dials as big as cookies to calibrate the settings. They both remained standing. There were no chairs or stools in a BSL-4 lab. Sitting in Chemturions was like trying to sit while wrapped in a stack of inner tubes.

“Okay. Here’s our new ACE.”

As Casey worked the controls, Barnard saw an image clarifying on the viewing screen. He had looked at thousands of microbes over his career, and their beauty still amazed him. As a child he had had a kaleidoscope, a telescope-like tube that, when rotated, rearranged colored pieces of glass into striking patterns. When he tried to describe the microscopic world to other people, that was the best analogy he could come up with. But the reality was infinitely more astonishing: unearthly beauty, every color of the spectrum, and every shape imaginable. God’s artwork—or, really, the Devil’s. Streptococci , burning like red suns against a butter-yellow sky. Neisseria gonorrhoeae , golden globes with ruby filaments streaming behind like the long red hair of a drowned woman. Corynebacterium diphtheriae , graceful green wands with maroon heads, groups of them looking like beds of tulips.

The microbes came into sharp focus and Barnard saw half a dozen oblong-shaped objects. Their smooth perimeters were white, their bodies the rich red of Burgundy wine. The depth of hue increased toward the center, where it finally became black. Magnified a million times, framed, and hung on a wall, the image could have been a painting by de Kooning or, in his wilder moments, van Gogh.

“Now, here’s what I wanted to show you.”

The image changed to reveal more purple oblongs with white perimeters. The color deepened toward the middle of the organism, but its center had a reddish tint, rather than the solid black Barnard had seen in the previous image. And the white perimeters were jagged and cracked, rather than smooth and intact.

“You got into its genetics.” In the suit, Barnard sounded like he was speaking in a closet, but the excitement in his voice was sharp.

“That’s right.”

“How?”

“We fractured its skull. Withdrew mitochondrial material and breached its defenses to reach the genes.”

“Where’s the but? There has to be one, or we’d both be dancing around in my office now.”

“The but is that we’re not exactly sure why it happened. You know what it’s like, playing with the genes of these things.”

“Like trying to do brain surgery with a jackhammer.”

“Yep. The trick is not destroying the whole thing, and it’s quite a trick.”

“So, what are we looking at for time?”

“Before we do it again? Realistically, two days. Maybe three.”

Barnard gaped. He had been the recipient of so much bad news recently that he’d been primed to hear Casey talk about weeks or even months. “By God , Lew. That’s incredible. Can I take this to the president?”

“Well, I hate to overpromise and underdeliver. But yeah, I think you can go with it. That good enough for you?”

“More than good enough.”

“We’re not all the way there, Don. Not by a long shot.”

“No, but based on what you just reported, we have taken a huge step closer.”

“Yeah, I think we can say that.” Casey suppressed a grin, but the smile in his eyes was a mile wide. They stood there gazing at each other through the plastic hoods. Barnard felt an affection for Casey not unlike what he had felt for his men in Vietnam. He could happily stay down here for the rest of this shift and the next one, as well. But he had news to deliver, and he was aware that at best he was a director-level distraction. Still, he did not want to leave. When he was up in his office with his three-piece suit and secretary and windows showing daylight, it felt wrong. Down here, it felt right. Deadly, but right.