Jack Chalker - A War of Shadows

“If it gets the chance,” Edelman said ominously. “Once you got this thing in effect, you can rig Congress and the courts at the point of a gun.”

She started to protest. “But the government isn’t going to—”

“You been around this town and you can say that?” he shot back. “I been here since before you were born. This is a company town, and the product is power. The workers are the bureaucrats who keep everything going by following orders. They like power, too. Hell, they’re having a ball with all this power. They don’t think of people as people. When you got to talk in trillions on a budget, what’s a dollar? When you got to figure a 900-page law that affects all the people, who thinks about the people it pushes around until election time?”

“You’re a fine one to talk,” she pointed out. “You’re one of them.”

He frowned. “No, never. Never one of them. I just understand them, that’s all.”

“With your attitudes I’m surprised you’re still around,” she said. “I’d think you were very unpopular about now.”

Jake Edelman shrugged. “So I’m one man still doing his job. They don’t even think about me, as long as the paperwork’s right and I don’t somehow make this speech over TV or even the Bureau intercom. But I worry all the same.”

She didn’t like the tenor of the conversation. He seemed to sense this, and changed the subject again.

“So what was Dr. Speigelman working on?” he asked.

“The Wilderness Organism, of course,” she told him. “He’d worked out a good deal about it and its behavior which tallied with the findings of the other lab personnel. In a sense, he’d finished his job.”

Edelman’s bushy gray eyebrows rose. “So? And yet he still worked? On what?”

“I told you he was a genius,” she reminded him. “Once he determined the basic nature of the Wilderness Organism—or organisms, really—he set out, it seems, to try and duplicate them, to find out how they were constructed.”

Edelman was interested. “You mean he was doing this recombinant stuff? I thought that was a no-no.”

She nodded. “Oh, yes, in real life. What he was doing was running computer models, where you take the basic chemicals and start trying all sorts of combinations and see if you can make something that matches your live sample.”

“And did he?” Edelman was more than interested now.

“Oh, in a way,” she said. “He had a start anyway. A really amazing start considering the number of random possibilities to build that organism, but, as I said, he was a genius.”

“Give it one more try, will you?” he urged. “The clue—the motive—has got to be there. It’s what I need. I need it desperately and I need it yesterday. You don’t know how bad I need it.”

She didn’t understand, and she was tired, but she said, “All right, I’ll try. Another work day. That’s about it, though. I’ve called in Joe Bede—a really fine biologist, and the first on the scene in that Maryland tragedy—to see if I’m missing something elementary. But if this doesn’t work, that’s it. I can’t do it forever.”

“That’s all right,” he said softly. “Do it that once.

Here are others working on it, of course. I just figured that, while you might not be the best microbiologist in the world, you knew how Mark Spiegelman thought better than anybody else. I want to know what would panic him and not a dozen other scientists. Go to it, Doc. Give me what I need.”

Again she said, “I’ll try.”

Dr. Joseph Edward Bede shook his head for the hundredth time. “1 just can’t see it, Sandy,” he told her. “A really good run of model work, yes, but nothing that would cause me to run screaming.” He looked up at her, and she was staring off into space. “What’s the matter? Too many tabular columns and bar graphs?”

Her expression didn’t change.

“No, it’s not that. Something the FBI man Edelman, said. About me knowing how Mark thought.”

Joe Bede chuckled, but his voice was gentle, consoling. “You were always in love with him, Sandy. We all knew it. I think he knew it. He was always Jupiter up on Olympus to you. The perfect man.”

Suddenly she was agitated, but not by Bede’s revelation that what she had always believed was her innermost secret was out.

“Maybe that’s it,” she murmured, more to herself than to Bede.

The other doctor was interested. “What? Got something?”

“What you just said, about me always thinking of Mark as Jupiter. Perfect. A genius who could do no wrong.” Suddenly she whirled around and looked straight at him, slightly excited.

“Joe, maybe I’ve put Mark on too high a pedestal.”

Now he was puzzled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Listen!” she continued, growing more intense. “Joe, how many chemicals go into making up a DNA molecule?”

He thought a second. “Four. Adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine,” he told her. “Why? You know that. You been looking at the four of them for days now.”

“Okay. Now if you’re going to build the Wilderness Organism, you first construct your DNA molecules so they transmit the right instructions, okay?”

He nodded. “Sure. You get one of twenty protein molecules made by RNA. The amount and combination of these determine the cellular makeup.”

“Joe,” she asked slowly, “what are the odds of getting several hundred correct genetic orders in a period of three hours’ research?”

He thought for a moment. “Pretty slim,” he admitted, “although not outside the realm of chance with a good mind and a good computer.”

She shook her head. “No, no. I mean getting the code right to build the specific organism under study. Think of the variables! It’s days, weeks of work at least! But Mark got almost the entire bacterium built in model in a little under three hours!”

He considered this. “But we all knew he was a genius.”

“Joe! That’s what’s caused my block!” She was almost yelling. “I was so damned in worship of him I admired how easily he did it. Joe! I don’t think he did do it!”

“Sure he did,” Bede said, still puzzled. “There it is.”

“Joe!” she persisted. “Suppose he just got the first few steps right inside the overall problem? Suppose, Joe, that the computer took his admittedly genius-level start and completed the rest of the model for him?”

Bede was incredulous. “No way, Sandy. That’s impossible.”

She sighed, seemed to collapse, and started feeling a little scared. She felt, in fact, just what Mark Spiegelman had radiated over the phone in that last, fatal coversation.

“Not if the Wilderness Organism was already in the computer, Joe,” she breathed.

Joe Bede laughed nervously. “Oh, come off it, Sandy. In order for that to be so, either somebody else would already have had to have broken the WO code makeup…”

“…Or designed it on our own damned computer,” she finished.

He shook his head in disbelief. “That’s not possible, and you know it,” he objected. “Why, that’d mean that somebody inside our own staff was behind all this.”

She was shaking now, very scared indeed. “Yeah, Joe. And Mark was killed inside the Dietrick secured labs. Imagine! A lot of trial and error, then a few combinations hit, then several—and suddenly the machine completes the model for him! My God!”

Joe Bede was looking a little nervous himself now. “Hell, Sandy, if what you say is true we’d better damned well get the hell out of here and over to your FBI friend. If they killed Mark…”

He didn’t have to spell it out.

She grabbed the phone and dialed Jake Edelman’s number. There was a click and a whirr and then a mechanical voice that said, “The-number-that-you-have-dialed-is-not-in-service-to-this-telephone. Please-hang-up.”