Jack Chalker - A War of Shadows

Her eyebrows shot up. “Set of organisms?”

He nodded. “Yep. Two of them. That’s what threw me. One does the dirty work and the other murders the bum.”

She was excited. “You know how it vanishes!”

He nodded again. “Yeah, a neat trick, too. Anybody can design a bug. The basis of this little bastard, at least its long ago ancestry, was almost certainly Escherichia coli, the bacteria used in the earliest recombinant DNA experiments—including Cambridge and Limitov.” He turned, punched up a picture on the CRT. “There it is—or was.”

She stared at the thing, a pretty common-looking organism considering its effect. “Doesn’t really look like E coli, though,” she said.

“Oh, it isn’t—not any more,” he told her. “It’s something new, unique. Damned well designed and built. Lots of little tricks. Denise Murray will probably be able to tell you what it does in the system—my guess is it’s a borer. Gets inhaled into the lungs, bores into the capillaries there and thence into the blood stream. You probably could get it a million ways. Inside of twelve hours there’s enough of them in there to make a colony visible without a microscope. What it does in its swim through the brain I couldn’t guess, but somehow it must recognize a particular place and secrete some nasty little enzymes that produce that catalyst I was talking about a couple days ago.”

She frowned. “But if it’s a standard-sized bacteria, why didn’t we find antibodies in the victims?”

“Oh, it does a neat trick, it does,” he said. “You know as well as anybody that an antibody is a reaction to a foreign agent, not really a disease-killer. That little baby on the screen has a number of antigens and they do, in fact, stimulate the production of a globulin protein in the human system. There are nine antigens in the bacteria, and nine different antibodies. They should react with each other to do nasty things to each other. Only they don’t.

When the antibody approaches the Wilderness Organism, it’s absorbed into the bacterium—which then does a neat trick not in the biology catalogs. It slightly changes the composition of its own complementary antigen—and pretty damned quickly, too, as if it sampled the threat, then decided on a counter-move. It’s not all that tough, though. There are three basic changes it can make, so it’s usually one step ahead of the body’s ability to manufacture the proper antibodies. It’s just getting into full steam on antibody one when WO, here, adds a dash of this or that from a small amino acid reserve and changes the antigen composition. You remember your basic biology.”

She nodded. “An antibody is the exact complement of an antigen. It can’t react to any other. It’s helpless.”

“Exactly!” he said. “So our little WO-soldier here can escape the enemy by changing its uniform. But, additionally, it does something even nastier—it eats antibodies.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “All of them? Digested?”

“More or less,” he said. “It has the ability to break down the antibody into its component amino acids and store them. What’s an antibody but a protein globule anyway? And the engineer behind this had the advantage of knowing exactly what three antibodies he’d be facing. So the antibodies invade, the WO-soldier changes its spots, then attacks and breaks down the antibodies. Anything it can’t use it expels as waste.”

She considered this. “But such a parasitic organism with those defenses would be impossible to stop. It’d finally grow into colonies so large it would cause strokes, block flows all over, kill the host—and very quickly if it reproduces as fast as you say.”

“True, but look at this.” He punched up a different picture.

“It’s a virus of some kind,” she said, waiting for more information.

“Not just a virus, a second engineered organism,” he responded. “It, my dear, is inside every lousy little WO-soldier. Our parasite’s got a parasite—a bacteriophage. Jillions of them in the world of the microbe, but not like this one. It just rides along, fat, dumb, and happy, eating some excess from the bacteria but nothing harmful, and growing at precisely the same rate as the bacterium—for the first twenty-six hours. Then it goes wild, starts growing like mad, eating our poor kamakaze WO-soldier from the in-side out. Its appetite is enormous and insatiable. Its little clock is perfectly timed; no matter if the WO-soldier is an original or a latest generation a few minutes old, twenty-six hours after the first penetration of the host they start getting eaten alive. It’s fast—damned fast. By the thirty-sixth hour there isn’t a trace of the invading army. All broken down into a mess, and passed out in the usual manner. Without anything left to eat—and bacteriophages are absolutely matched to one type of bacteria and no others whatsoever—the colonies break apart, crumbling like so many old cookies, and are themselves treated as waste by the body. By our seventy-two-hour trigger mark, there wouldn’t be a trace of either organism in the body we could discover. Some leftovers, maybe, but never could they be found or shown to be unusual unless we were looking specifically for them.”

She was silent. Finally she asked, “Mark? Is it within our current technology to build something like this?”

He shrugged. “I guess so. The bacteriophage would be the toughest. Give me Fort Dietrick, about twenty or thirty million dollars, and a staff of a dozen really good medical technicians, and I think I could do it in half a year or so.”

Sandra shivered slightly, even in the controlled atmosphere of the labs. “Now I see why they had all those conventions against this sort of thing. Edelman—that funny little ugly FBI man—said upstairs that it was an erector set for scientists.”

“At least that,” Mark said grimly. “And somebody’s really made a nasty toy here. Or toys. There’s one other thing.”

She looked up at him. “What?”

“The empty cylinders contained, of course, some of the Boland strain. Apparently it’s kept in a nice mixture of freon and other gases which make it totally dormant until exposed to air. Some of the stuff would be left, naturally.”

“Naturally,” she agreed. “So?”

“It’s different, Sandy. It had the same ancestors, but that’s all. It’s not the same bug at all.”

She stared at him. “So much for the universal vaccine, then,” she said flatly.

He smiled. “What can be engineered can be destroyed,” he assured her. “At least we got the start. Now, as for me, I think a good eight hours and I’ll lick it. You get some sleep, too. You’re as dead as I am.”

She smiled weakly. “Okay, we’ll both go. You going home?”

“No, I’ll go beddy-bye upstairs in the clinic. You?”

She sighed. “I’m going to try and make it. I need clothes, a shower, and sleep. They know where to find me if they need me. I’m only the paper-pusher here.”

“No you’re not,” he said kindly. “You’re the glue.”

Her sleep was deep and dreamless, the best sleep, the kind her body and mind craved. In her own apartment, in her own bed, a comforting sleep that, deep down, she knew might be her only chance for many days.

As it always did, the telephone’s constant ringing brought her out of it. She sought to ignore it, even as it drew her consciousness to the surface.

She awoke as if drugged, and reached for the phone. As she did her eyes fell on the little electric clock next to it.

It said 4:12 P.M.

My god! she thought. I’ve slept almost thirteen hours!

She picked up the insistent phone. “O’Connell,” she managed, her mouth full of mush.