Kevin Anderson - Ill Wind

It was a gas-guzzler, too.

As the engine whirred and rattled, bringing the car up to a maximum speed of 53 mph, Connor watched the gas gauge drop. Other cars passed by him like spawning fish swimming upstream, but he struggled along. When he reached the crossroads town of Santa Nella, he pulled off at one of the gas stations.

Santa Nella had a clot of fast-food restaurants, a giant motorized windmill advertising pea soup, and a few motels—though why anyone would want to stay in the middle of the empty Central Valley, Connor could not fathom. Cars pulled in and out in a confused tangle of too many drivers who had been behind the wheel for too long in one sitting.

A vehicle sat beside every pump at the gas station, as the owners jammed gas nozzles into their tanks. Connor waited in line behind a bronze Chevy pickup. He thumped his fingers on the dashboard. Ahead of him, an old man wearing a dark blue cap sporting a fertilizer logo moved with the speed of growing grass. “Just squeeze the handle and the gas’ll squirt out, grandpa!” he muttered to himself. “That’s the way it works.”

When it was finally his turn, Connor pulled up and got out, leaving the creaking door to hang half open. He opened the Gremlin’s gas tank and grabbed the fuel pump nozzle. A sour, rotten-egg smell drifted up to him from his car. He wrinkled his nose. “Smells like someone farted in there!”

He inserted the gas nozzle and began pumping, keeping his face down so as not to attract attention. The black rubber vapor sheath wrapped around the nozzle like a condom. Gasoline rushed into the Gremlin’s tank, and sharp gas fumes swirled all around.

He went to the outside cashier window, paid the attendant in cash, then drove off again.

Another car pulled up as he left. The driver took the pump nozzle, and slid it into his own gas tank, sniffing at the residual sulfur odor.

Connor intended to drive all night to reach Los Angeles, then hook east toward Las Vegas, and from there head to Arizona. He’d never driven the distance before, though he guessed it could be done in a straight day or two on the road.

But fat with the cash the Stanford clown had given him, Connor decided to spend the night in a nice motel, get a good shower, shave, make himself look presentable.

The Gremlin started acting up an hour or so before he expected to reach LA. He had just passed the crest of the Grapevine, the line of mountains blocking the Central Valley from the outer fringes of the southern California metropolis. Around him, rugged shoulders of mountains rose high above, spattered with bright freckles of orange, purple, and white wildflowers, now turning into dark shadows against the deepening indigo of the sky.

The engine stuttered as he climbed the pass, winding along as even loaded semi trucks crawled past him uphill. The car chugged as if in great pain, then caught again. At the crest, when the grade shifted downhill, Connor eased off on the accelerator.

The gauge showed his tank to be at least half full. He tapped on the dash board, but the needle hovered in the middle. Dammit! That crummy service station in Santa Nella must have watered their gas. The Gremlin sounded as if it had indigestion.

He kept wrestling with the steering wheel, fluttering his foot on the gas pedal. Angrily, he snapped the emergency flashers on and crawled along. Full night had fallen. If the car died now, he would be stranded in more ways than one, because he sure as hell couldn’t call Triple A, and he couldn’t wait for a CHP officer to pull up and help. The moment they found out Connor’s name, they’d snap on the cuffs.

He had just passed the exits for a middle-of-nowhere clot of gas stations and fast-food restaurants when the car died for good. It wheezed and gave a death rattle, allowing Connor just enough freedom to wrestle it to the side of the road.

In disgust, he climbed out of the car and slammed the door. Traffic soared past him on the freeway. A truck blatted past, rumbling downhill. He saw the stream of headlights and wondered why, of all those cars, he had to get one that didn’t last more than a few hours.

He lifted the hood, and the rotten-egg smell rose in a cloud all around him. He wished he had some effective way of venting his anger, like maybe throttling Dave Hensch. How had Hensch expected him to get all the way to Georgia in a junk heap like this? No wonder the preppie hadn’t wanted to drive it! Connor began to wonder if the kid and his snotty Stanford buddies were laughing it up, wondering where their patsy would be stranded. He walked around the Gremlin and kicked the tire as hard as he could.

Grumbling, Connor abandoned the dead car and hiked along the side of the road. One car honked at him, and he flipped a finger in response. He headed back toward the last exit, trying to figure out how to find some other form of transportation.

Iris Shikozu’s lab at Stanford was like any other research lab, set up to fit the eccentricities of the lead scientist, without regard to how bewildering it might be to anyone else. Iris felt right at home; she knew where everything was, and didn’t care whether anyone else could find it.

Like a rat making its way through a high-tech maze, she moved past PCR systems, sequencers, film readers, an electrophoresis setup, log books, and image analyzers. The air seemed flat as she breathed it, the dulling metallic and plastic smells of new equipment mixed with old.

The lab’s stereo system played a live comeback album from the rock group Kansas. Her colleagues couldn’t figure out how she could concentrate with the stereo blaring, but the cheering audience and the music charged her with energy. She loved concerts. Competing with the music, a diffusion pump chugged as it kept the microbe containment vessels at low pressure; cryogenic pumps at the far end of the room added to the background noise.

Holding a styrofoam cup of potent black coffee, Iris stood in front of a whiteboard that ran the length of one wall. Chemical reaction equations were scribbled in blue, green, and black dry-erase marker. Some of the reactions were circled in red; some had exclamation points. A Polaroid camera sat on top of a filing cabinet; several instant photos balanced on the marker tray, recording important equations that had once been scribbled on the board. Iris rarely took the time to copy her work into a lab notebook; the Polaroids were faster.

Pacing, she studied the symbols, tapping her fingers against the desktop with the music. She needed to understand why her predictions based on the control sample of Kramer’s Prometheus organism were so different from actual measurements out on the spill. The rate-of-reaction equations circled in red were orders of magnitude too small. The tiny organisms were supercharged somehow, like the coffee that kick-started her brain. But Iris couldn’t find the catalyst driving the little buggers. It worried her when she didn’t understand something.

The Prometheus problem had sunk its claws into her, grabbing her focus so that she noticed little else. She took another sip of coffee, not caring that it was lukewarm. Iris had long since lost count of how many cups she had downed that morning.

She leaned back against a black laboratory table and tried to make sense of what she knew. She thought she understood how Prometheus worked. Prometheus had an appetite for octane—eight carbons and ten hydrogens in a straight chain—metabolizing it into water and carbon dioxide. But no organism would eat only one food, and with the myriad components of crude oil, the microbes should be munching shorter-chain hydrocarbons and some of the aromatic ring molecules.

Since the spraying, multi-spectral imagery from high-flying NASA planes showed a marked decrease in oil density around the spill. Prometheus was metabolizing the spilled crude more than a hundred times faster than expected. TV and print journalists had begun running feature stories about Kramer’s “miracle.”