Blood Music

CHAPTER NINE

It had been two years since Edward Milligan had last seen Vergil. Edward’s memory hardly matched the tan, smiling and well-dressed gentleman standing before him. They had made a lunch appointment over the phone the day before, and now faced each other in the wide double doors of the employee’s cafeteria of Irvine’s new Mount Freedom Medical Center.

“Vergil?” Edward shook his hand and walked around him, a look of exaggerated wonder on his face. “Is it really you?”

“Good to see you again, Edward.” He returned the handshake firmly. He had lost twenty to twenty-five pounds and what remained seemed better-proportioned. At medical school, Vergil had been the pudgy, shock-haired, snaggle-toothed kid who wired doorknobs, gave his dorm floor mates punch that turned their piss blue, and never had a date except with Eileen Termagant, who had shared some of his physical characteristics.

“You look fantastic,” Edward said. “Spend a summer in Cabo San Lucas?”

They stood in line at the counter and chose their food. “The tan,” Vergil said, picking out a carton of chocolate milk, “is from spending three months under a sun lamp. My teeth were straightened just after I last saw you.”

Edward looked closely, lifting Vergil’s lip with one finger. “So they were. Still discolored, though.”

“Yes,” Vergil said, rubbing his lip and taking a deep breath. “Well. I’ll explain the rest, but we need a place to talk in private, or at least with nobody paying attention.”

Edward steered him to the smoker’s corner, where three die-hard puffers were scattered among six tables. “Listen, I mean it,” he said as they unloaded then trays. “You’ve changed. You’re looking good.”

“I’ve changed more than you know.” Vergil’s tone was motion-picture-ominous, and he delivered the line with a theatrical lift of his brows. “How’s Gail?”

“Doing well. We’ve been married a year.”

“Hey, congratulations.” Vergil’s gaze shifted down to his food—pineapple slice and cottage cheese, piece of banana cream pie. “Notice something else?” he asked, his voice cracking slightly.

Edward squinted in concentration. “Uh.”

“Look closer.”

“I’m not sure. Well, yes. You’re not wearing glasses. Contacts?”

“No. I don’t need them anymore.”

“And you’re a snappy dresser. Who’s dressing you now? I hope she’s as sexy as she is tasteful.”

“Candice,” he said, grinning the old and familiar self-deprecating grin, but ending it with an uncharacteristic leer. “I’ve been fired from my job. Four months now. I’m living on savings.”

“Hold it,” Edward said. “That’s a bit crowded. Why not do a linear breakdown? You got a job. Where?”

“I ended up at Genetron in Enzyme Valley.”

“North Torrey Pines Road?”

“That’s the place. Infamous. And you’ll be hearing more very soon. They’re putting out common stock any second now. It’ll shoot off the board. They’ve broken through with MABs.”

“Biochips?”

He nodded. “They have some that work.”

“What?” Edward’s brows lifted sharply.

“Microscopic logic circuits. You inject them into the human body, they set up shop where they’re told and troubleshoot. With Dr. Michael Bernard’s approval.”

The angle of Edward’s brows steepened. “Jesus, Vergil. Bernard’s almost a saint. He’s had his picture on the cover of Mega and Rolling Stone just the last month or two. Why are you telling me all this?”

“It’s supposed to be secret-stock, breakthrough, everything. I have my contacts inside the place, though. Ever heard of Hazel Overton?”

Edward shook his head. “Should I?”

“Probably not. I thought she hated my guts. Turns out she had grudging respect for me. She gave me a call two months back and asked if I wanted to front a paper for her on F-factors in E. coli genomes.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “But you do whatever the hell you want. I’m through with the bastards.”

Edward whistled. “Make me rich, huh?”

“If that’s what you want. Or you can spend some time listening to me before rushing off to your broker.”

“Of course. So tell me more.”

Vergil hadn’t touched the cottage cheese or pie. He had, however, eaten the pineapple slice and drunk the chocolate milk. “I got in on the ground floor about five years ago. With my medical school background and computer experience, I was a shoo-in for Enzyme Valley. I went up and down North Torrey Pines Road with my resumes, and I was Weed by Genetron.”

“That simple?”

“No.” Vergil picked at the cottage cheese with a fork, then laid the fork down. “I did some rearranging of the records. Credit records, school records, that sort of thing. Nobody’s caught on yet. I came in as hot stuff and I made my mark early with protein assemblies and the preliminary biochip research. Genetron has big money backers, and we were given as much as we needed. Four months and I was doing my own work, sharing a lab but allowed to do independent research. I made some breakthroughs.” He tossed his hand nonchalantly. “Then I went off on tangents. I kept on doing my regular work, but after hours…The management found out, and fired me. I managed to…save part of my experiments. But I haven’t exactly been cautious, or judicious. So now the experiment’s going on outside the lab.”

Edward had always regarded Vergil as ambitious and more than a trifle cracked. In their school years, Vergil’s relations with authority figures had never been smooth. Edward had long ago concluded that science, for Vergil, was like an unattainable woman, who suddenly opens her arms to him before he’s ready for mature love—leaving him afraid he’ll forever blow the chance, lose the prize, screw up royally. Apparently, he had. “Outside the lab? I don’t get you.”

“I want you to examine me. Give me a thorough physical. Maybe a cancer diagnostic. Then I’ll explain more.”

“You want a ten thousand dollar exam?”

“Whatever you can do. Ultrasound, NMR, PET, thermogram, everything.”

“I don’t know if I can get access to all that equipment, Vergil. Natural-source PET full-scan has only been here a month or two. Hell, you couldn’t pick a more expensive—”

Then ultrasound and NMR. That’s all you need.”

“I’m an obstetrician, Vergil, not a glamour-boy lab tech, OB-GYN, butt of all jokes. If you’re turning into a woman, maybe I can help you.”

Vergil leaned forward, almost putting his elbow into the pie, but swinging wide at the last instant by scant millimeters. The old Vergil would have hit it square. “Examine me closely, and you’ll…” He narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Just examine me.”

“So I make an appointment for ultrasound and NMR. Who’s going to pay?”

“I have medical. I messed with the personnel files at Genetron before I left. Anything up to a hundred thousand dollars and they’ll never check, never suspect And it has to be absolutely confidential.”

Edward shook his head. “You’re asking for a lot, Vergil.”

“Do you want to make medical history, or not?”

“Is this a joke?”

Vergil shook his head. “Not on you, roomie.”

Edward made the arrangements that afternoon, filling in the forms himself. From what he understood of hospital paperwork, so long as everything was billed properly, most of the examination could take place without official notice. He didn’t charge for his services. After all, Vergil had turned his piss blue. They were friends.

Edward stayed past his usual hours. He gave Gail a bare outline of what he was doing; she sighed the sigh of a doctor’s wife and told him she’d leave a late snack on the table for when he came home.

Vergil returned at ten P.M. and met Edward at the appointed place, on the third floor of what the nurses called the Frankenstein Wing. Edward sat on an orange plastic chair, reading a desk copy of My Things magazine. Vergil entered the small lobby, looking lost and worried. His skin was olive-colored under the fluorescent lighting.

Edward signaled the night supervisor that this was his patient and conducted Vergil to the examination area, hand on his elbow. Neither spoke much. Vergil stripped and Edward arranged him on the paper-covered padded table. “Your ankles are swollen,” he said, feeling them. They were solid, not puffy. Healthy, but odd. “Hm,” Edward said pointedly, glancing at Vergil. Vergil raised his eyebrows and cocked his head; his “you ain’t seen nothing yet” look.

“Okay. I’m going to run several scans on you and combine the results in an imager. Ultrasound first” Edward ran paddles over Vergil’s still form, hitting those areas difficult for the bigger unit to reach. He then swung the table around and inserted it into the enameled orifice of the ultrasound diagnostic unit—the hum-hole, so-called by the nurses. After twelve separate sweeps, head to toe, he removed the table. Vergil was sweating slightly, his eyes closed.

“Still claustrophobic?” Edward asked.

“Not so much.”

“NMR is a little worse.”

“Lead on, Mac Duff.”

The NMR full-scan unit was a huge chrome and sky-blue mastaba-shaped box, occupying one small room with barely enough space to wheel in the table. “I’m not an expert on this one, so it may take a while,” Edward said, helping Vergil into the cavity.

“High cost of medicine,” Vergil muttered, dosing his eyes as Edward swung down the glass hatch. The massive magnet circling the cavity buzzed faintly. Edward instructed the machine to send its data to the central imager in the next room and helped Vergil out.

“Holding up?” Edward asked.

“Courage,” Vergil said, pronouncing it as in French.

In the next room, Edward arranged a large-screen VDT and ordered the integration and display of the data. In the half-darkness, the image took a few seconds to flow into recognizable shapes.

“Your skeleton first,” Edward said. His eyes widened. The image then displayed Vergil’s thoracic organs, musculature, and finally vascular system and skin.

“How long since the accident?” Edward asked, stepping closer to the screen. He couldn’t quite conceal the quiver in his voice.

“I haven’t been in an accident,” Vergil said.

“Jesus, they beat you, to keep secrets?”

“You don’t understand me, Edward. Look at the images again. That’s not trauma.”

“Look, there’s thickening here,” he indicated the ankles, “and your ribs—that crazy zigzag interlocking. Broken somewhere, obviously. And—”

“Look at my spine,” Vergil suggested. Edward slowly rotated the image on the screen.

Buckminster Fuller came to mind immediately. It was fantastic. Vergil’s spine was a cage of triangular bones, coining together in ways Edward could not even follow, much less comprehend. “Mind if I feel?”

Vergil shook his head. Edward reached through the slit in the robe and traced his fingers along the back. Vergil lifted his arms and looked off at the ceiling.

“I can’t find it,” Edward said. “It’s smooth. There’s something flexible; the harder I push, the tougher it becomes.” He walked around in front of Vergil, chin in hand. “You don’t have any nipples,” he said. There were tiny pigment patches, but no nipple formations whatsoever.

“See?” Vergil said. “I’m being rebuilt from the inside out”

“Bullshit” Edward said. Vergil looked surprised.

“You can’t deny your eyes,” he said softly. “I’m not the same fellow I was four months ago.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about” Edward played around with the images, rotating them, going through the various sets of organs, playing the NMR movie back and forth.

“Have you ever seen anything like me? I mean, the new design.”

“No,” Edward said flatly. He walked away from the table and stood by the dosed door, hands in his lab coat pocket “What in hell have you done?”

Vergil told him. The story emerged in widening spirals of fact and event and Edward had to make his way through the circumlocutions as best he could.

“How,” he asked, “do you convert DNA to read-write memory?”

“First you need to find a length of viral DNA that codes for topoisomerases and gyrases. You attach this segment to your target DNA and make it easier to lower the linking number—to negatively supercoil your target molecule. I used ethidium in some earlier experiments, but—”

“Simpler, please, I haven’t had molecular biology in years.”

“What you want is to add and subtract lengths of input DNA easily, and the feedback enzyme arrangement does this. When the feedback arrangement is in place, the molecule will open itself up for transcription much more easily, and more rapidly. Your program will be transcribed onto two strings of RNA. One of the RNA strings will go to a reader-a ribosome-for translation into a protein. Initially, the first RNA will carry a simple start-up code—”

Edward stood by the door and listened for half an hour. When Vergil showed no sign of slowing down, much less stopping, he raised his hand. “And how does all this lead to intelligence?”

Vergil frowned. “I’m still not certain. I just began finding replication of logic circuits easier and easier. Whole stretches of the genomes seemed to open themselves up to the process. There were even parts that I’ll swear were already coded for specific logic assignments—but at the time, I thought they were just more introns, sequences not coding for proteins. You know, holdovers from old faulty transcriptions, not yet eliminated by evolution. I’m talking about the eukaryotes now. Prokaryotes don’t have introns. But I’ve been thinking the last few months. Plenty of time to think, without work. Brooding.”

He stopped and shook his head, folding and unfolding his hands, twisting his fingers together.

“And?”

“It’s very strange, Edward. Since early med school we’ve been hearing about ‘selfish genes,’ and that individuals and populations have no function but to create more genes. Eggs make chickens to make more eggs. And people seemed to think that introns were just genes that have no purpose but to reproduce themselves within the cellular environment. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon, saying they were junk, useless. I didn’t feel any qualms at all with my eukaryotes, working with introns. Hell, they were spare parts, genetic deserts. I could build whatever I wanted.” Again he stopped, but Edward did not prompt Vergil looked up at him, eyes moist “I wasn’t responsible. I was seduced.”

“I’m not getting you, Vergjl.” Edward’s voice sounded brittle, on the edge of anger. He was tired and old memories of Vergil’s carelessness towards others were returning; he was exhausted, and Vergil was still droning on, saying nothing that really made sense.

Vergil slammed his fist on the edge of the table. “They made me do it! The goddamn genes!”

“Why, Vergil?”

“So they won’t have to rely on us anymore. The ultimate selfish gene. All this time, I think the DNA was just leading up to what I’ve done, you know. Emergence. Coming out party. Tempting somebody, anybody, into giving it what it wanted.”

“That’s nuts, Vergil.”

“You didn’t work on it you didn’t feel what I felt. It should have taken a whole research team, maybe even a Manhattan Project, to do what I did. I’m bright but I’m not that bright. Things just fell into place. It was too easy.”

Edward rubbed his eyes. “I’m going to take some blood and I’d like stool and urine.”

“Why?”

“So I can find out what’s happening to you.”

“I’ve just told you.”

“It’s crazy.”

“Edward, you can see the screen. I don’t wear glasses, my back doesn’t hurt, I haven’t had an allergy attack in four months, and I haven’t been sick. I used to get infections all the time in my sinuses because of the allergies. No colds, no Infections, nothing. I’ve never felt better.”

“So altered smart lymphocytes are inside you, finding things, changing them.”

He nodded. “And by now, each duster of cells is as smart as you or I.”

“You didn’t mention clusters.”

“They used to cram together in the medium. Maybe a hundred or two hundred cells. I never could figure out why. Now it seems obvious. They cooperate.”

Edward stared at him. “I’ve very tired.”

“The way I see it I lost weight because they unproved my metabolism. My bones are stronger, my spine has been rebuilt—”

“Your heart looks different.”

“I didn’t know about the heart.” He examined the frame image from several inches. “Jesus. I mean, I haven’t been able to keep track of anything since I left Genetron; I’ve been guessing and worrying. You don’t know what a relief it is to tell someone who can understand.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Edward, the evidence is overwhelming. I was thinking about the fat. They could increase my brown cells, fix up my metabolism. My eating habits have changed. But they haven’t got around to my brain yet.” He tapped his head. “They understand all the glandular stuff. Old-home week. But they don’t have the big picture, if you see what I mean.”

Edward felt Vergil’s pulse and checked his reflexes. “I think we’d better get those samples and call it quits for the evening.”

“And I didn’t want them getting into my skin. That really scared me. Couple of nights, my skin started to crawl, and I decided to take some action. I bought a quartz lamp. I wanted to keep them under control, just in case, you know? What if they crossed the blood-brain barrier and found out about me—the brain’s real function. I figured the reason they wanted to get into my skin was the simplicity of running circuits across the surface. Much easier than trying to maintain lines of communication through muscles and organs and the vascular system; much more direct I alternate sunlamp with quartz lamp treatments now. Keeps them out of my skin, as far as I can tell. And now you know why I have a nice tan.”

“Give you skin cancer, too,” Edward said, falling into Vergil’s terse manner of speech.

“I’ve not worried. They’ll take care of it. Like police.”

“Okay,” Edward said, holding up both hands in a gesture of resignation. “I’ve examined you. You’ve told me a story I cannot accept. What do you want me to do?”

“I’m not as nonchalant as I seem. I’m worried, Edward. I’d like to find a better way to control them before they find out about my brain. I mean, think of it. They’re in the billions by now, more if they’re converting other kinds of cells. Maybe trillions. Each cluster smart. I’m probably the smartest thing on the planet, and they haven’t begun to get their act together. I don’t want them to take over.” He laughed unpleasantly. “Steal my soul, you know? So think of some treatment to block them. Maybe we can starve the little buggers. Just think on it. And give me a call.”

He reached into his pants pocket and handed Edward a slip of paper with his address and phone number. Then he went to the keyboard and erased the image in the frame dumping the memory of the examination. “Just you. Nobody else for now. And please…hurry.”

It was one o’clock in the morning when Vergil walked out of the examination room. The samples had been taken. In the main lobby, Vergil shook hands with Edward. Vergil’s palm was damp, nervous. “Be careful with the specimens,” he said. “Don’t ingest anything.”

Edward watched Vergil cross the parking lot and get into his Volvo. Then he turned slowly and went back to the Frankenstein Wing. He poured a cc of Vergil’s blood into an ampoule, and several cc’s of urine into another, inserting both into the hospital’s tissue, specimen and serum analyzer. He would have the results in the morning, available on his office VDT. The stool sample would require manual work, but that could wait; right now he felt like one of the undead. It was two o’clock.

He pulled out a cot, shut off the lights and lay down without undressing. He hated sleeping in the hospital. When Gail woke up in the morning, she would find a message on the answerphone—a message, but no explanation. He wondered what he would tell her.

“I’ll just say it was good ol’ Vergil,” he murmured.

CHAPTER TEN

Edward shaved with an old straight razor kept in his desk drawer for just such emergencies, examined himself in the mirror of the doctor’s dressing room and rubbed his cheek critically. He had used the straight razor regularly in his student years, an affectation; since then the occasions had been seldom and his face showed it: three nicks patched with tissue paper and styptic pencil. He glanced at his watch. The batteries were running low and the display was dim. He shook it angrily and the display became crystal-clear: 6:30 A.M. Gail would be up and about, preparing for school.

He slipped two quarters into the pay phone in the doctor’s lounge and fumbled with the pencils and pens in his coat pocket.

“Hello?”

“Gail, Edward I love you and I’m sorry.”

“A disembodied voice on the phone awaited me. It might have been my husband.” She had a fine phone voice, one he had always admired. He had first asked her out, sight unseen, after hearing her on a phone at the house of a mutual friend.

“Yes, well—”

“Also, Vergil Ulam called a few minutes ago. He sounded anxious. I haven’t talked to him in years.”

“Did you tell him—”

“You were still at the hospital. Of course. Your shift is at eight today?”

“Same as yesterday. Two hours with premeds in the lab and six on call.”

“Mrs. Burdett called, also. She swears little Tony or Antoinette is whistling. She can hear him/her.”

“And your diagnosis?” Edward asked, grinning.

“Gas.”

“High-pressure, I’d say,” Edward added.

“Steam, must be,” Gail said. They laughed and Edward felt the morning assume reality. Last night’s mist of fantasy lifted and he was on the phone with his wife, making jokes about musical fetuses. That was normal. That was living.

“I’m going to take you out tonight,” he said. “Another Heisenberg dinner.”

“What’s that?”

“Uncertainty,” Edward said crisply. “We know where we are going, but not what we are going to eat. Or vice versa.”

“Sounds wonderful. Which car?”

“The Quantum, of course.”

“Oh, Lord. We just had the speedometer fixed.”

“And the steering went out?”

“Shh! It’s still working. We’re cheating.”

“Are you mad at me?”

Gail hmphed. “Vergil better see you during office hours today. Why is he seeing you, anyway? Sex-change?” The thought made her giggle and start to cough. He could picture her turning the phone away and waving at the air as if to clear it. “’Scuse. Really, Edward. Why?”

“Confidential, my love. I’m not sure I know, anyway. Maybe later.”

“Got to go. Six?”

“Maybe five-thirty.”

“I’ll still be critiquing videos.”

“I’ll sweep you away.”

“Delicious Edward.”

He cupped the receiver and smooched indelicately before hanging up. Then, rubbing his cheek to ball up and remove the tissue paper, he walked to the elevator and rode up to the Frankenstein Wing.

The analyzer was still clinking merrily, running hundreds of samples bottle by bottle through the tests. Edward sat down to its terminal and called up Vergil’s results. Columns and numbers appeared on the screen. The suggested diagnosis was unusually vague. Anomalies appeared in highlighted red type.

24/c ser c/count 10,000 lymphoc./mm³

25/c ser c/count 14,500 lymphoc./mm³

26/d check re/count 15,000 lymphoc./mm³

DIAG (???) What are accompanying physical signs?

If the spleen and lymph nodes show enlargement, then:

ReDIAG: Patient (name? file? ) in late stages of severe infection.

Support: Histamine count, blood protein level (call), phagocyte count (call)

DIAG (???) (Blood sample inconclusive): if anemia, pain in joints, hemorrhage fever:,

ReDIAG: Incipient lymphocytic leukemia

Support: Not a good fit, no support but lymphocyte count.

Edward asked for a hard copy of the analysis and the printer quietly produced a tight-packed page of figures. He looked it over, frowning deeply, folded it and stuck it in his coat pocket. The urine test seemed normal enough; the blood was unlike any he had ever seen before. He didn’t need to test the stool to make up his mind on a course of action: put the man in the hospital, under observation. Edward dialed Vergil’s number on the phone in his office.

On the second ring, a noncommittal female voice answered, “Ulam’s house, Candice here.”

“Could I speak to Vergil, please?”

“Whom may I say is calling?” Her tone was almost comically formal.

“Edward. He knows me.”

“Of course. You’re the doctor. Fix him up. Fix up everybody.” A hand muffled the mouthpiece and she called out, somewhat raucously, “Vergil!”

Vergil answered with a breathless “Edward! What’s up?”

“Hello, Vergil. I have some results, not very conclusive. But I want to talk with you, here, in the hospital.”

“What do the results say?”

“That you are a very ill person.”

“Nonsense.”

“I’m just telling you what the machine says. High lymphocyte count—”

“Of course, that fits perfectly—”

“And a very weird variety of proteins and other debris floating around in your blood. Histamines. You look like a fellow dying of severe infection.”

There was silence on Vergil’s end, then, “I’m not dying.”

“I think you should come in, let others check you over. And who was that on the phone—Candice? She—”

“No. Edward, I went to you for help. Nobody else, you know how I feel about hospitals.”

Edward laughed grimly. “Vergil, I’m not competent to figure this out.”

“I told you what it was. Now you have to help me control it.”

“That’s crazy, that’s bullshit, Vergil!” Edward damped his hand on his knee and pinched hard. “Sorry. I’m not taking this well. I hope you understand why.”

“I hope you understand how I’m feeling, right now. I’m sort of high, Edward. And more than a little afraid. And proud. Does that make sense?”

“Vergil, I—”

“Come to the apartment. Let’s talk and figure out what to do next.”

“I’m on duty, Vergil.”

“When can you come out?”

“I’m on for the next five days. This evening, maybe. After dinner.”

“Just you, nobody else,” Vergil said.

“Okay.” He took down directions. It would take him about seventy minutes to get to La Jolla; he told Vergil he would be there by nine.

Gail was home before Edward, who offered to fix a quickie dinner for them. “Rain check the night out?”

She took the news of his trip glumly and didn’t say much as she helped chop vegetables for a salad. “I’d like to have you look at some of the videos,” she said as they ate, giving him a sidewise glance. Her nursery class had been involved in video art projects for a week; she was proud of the results.

“Is there time?” he asked diplomatically. They had weathered some rocky times before getting married, almost splitting up. When new difficulties arose, they tended to be overly delicate now, tiptoeing around the main issues.

“Probably not,” Gail admitted. She stabbed at a piece of raw zucchini. “What’s wrong with Vergil this time?”

“This time?”

“Yeah. He’s done this before. When he was working for Westinghouse and he got into that copyright mess.”

“Freelancing for them.”

“Yeah. What can you do for him now?”

“I’m not even sure what the problem is,” Edward said, being more evasive than he wanted.

“Secret?”

“No. Maybe. But weird.”

“Is he ill?”

Edward cocked his head and lifted a hand: Who knows?

“You’re not going to tell me?”

“Not right now.” Edward’s smile, an attempt to placate, obviously only irritated her more. “He asked me not to.”

“Could he get you in trouble?”

Edward hadn’t thought about that. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“Coming back what time tonight?”

“As soon as I can,” he said. He stroked her face with the tips of his fingers. “Don’t be mad,” he suggested softly.

“Oh, no,” she said emphatically. “Never that.”

Edward began the drive to La Jolla in an ambiguous mood; whenever he thought about Vergil’s condition, it was as if he entered a different universe. The rules changed, and Edward was not sure he had even the inkling of an outcome.

He took the La Jolla Village Drive exit and wandered down Torrey Pines Road into the city. Modest and very expensive homes vied for space with three and four-story apartment buildings and condominiums along curving, sloping streets. Bicyclists and the perennial joggers wore brightly colored jumpsuits to ward off the cool night air; even at this hour of the night, La Jolla was active with strollers and exercisers.

He found a parking space with little difficulty and deftly pulled the Volkswagen in. Locking the door, he sniffed the sea air and wondered if he and Gail could afford to move. The rent would be very steep, the commute would be long. He decided he wasn’t that concerned with status. Still, the neighborhood was nice—410 Pearl Street, not the best the town had to offer, but more than he could afford, now at least. It was simply Vergil’s way to fall into opportunities like the condominium. On the other hand, Edward decided as he buzzed at the ground level door, he wouldn’t want Vergil’s luck if it accompanied the rest of the package.

The elevator played bland music and displayed little hologram clips advertising condos for sale, various products and social activities for the upcoming week. On the third floor, Edward walked past imitation Louis 15th furniture and gold-marbled mirrors.

Vergil opened the door on the first ring and motioned him inside. He wore a checked robe with long sleeves and carpet slippers. His fingers twisted an unlit pipe in one hand as he walked into the living room and sat down, saying nothing.

“You have an infection,” Edward reiterated, showing him the printout.

“Oh?” Vergil looked the paper over quickly, then set it down on the glass coffee table.

“That’s what the machine says.”

“Yes, well, apparently it isn’t prepared for such odd cases.”

“Perhaps not, but I’d advise—”

“I know. Sorry to be rude, Edward, but what’s a hospital going to do for me? I’d sooner take a computer into a shop full of cavemen and ask them to fix it. These figures…they undoubtedly show something, but we aren’t able to decide what.”

Edward removed his coat. “Listen. You have me worried now.” Vergil’s expression changed slowly to a kind of frantic beatitude. He squinted at the ceiling and pursed his lips.

“Where’s Candice?”

“Out for the evening. We’re not getting along too well right now.”

“She knows?”

Vergil smirked. “How could she not know? She sees me naked every night” He turned away from Edward as he said that. He was lying.

“Are you stoned?”

He shook his head, then nodded once, very slow. “Listening,” he said.

“To what?”

“I don’t know. Sounds. Not sounds. Like music. The heart, all the blood vessels, the friction of the blood along the arteries, veins. Activity. Music in the blood.” He regarded Edward plaintively. “What excuse did you give Gail?”

“None, really. Just that you were in trouble and I had to come see you.”

“Can you stay?”

“No.” He glanced around the apartment suspiciously, looking for ashtrays, packs of papers.

“I’m not stoned, Edward,” Vergil said. “I may be wrong, but I think something big is happening. I think they’re finding out who I am.”

Edward sat down across from Vergil, staring at him intently. Vergil didn’t seem to notice. Some inner process was absorbing him.

“Is there any coffee?” Edward asked. Vergil motioned to the kitchen. Edward filled a pot of water to boil and took a jar of instant from the fourth cabinet he looked into. Cup in hand, he returned to the seat. Vergil twisted his head back and forth, eyes wide open.

“You always knew what you wanted to be, didn’t you?” he asked Edward.

“More or less.”

“Smart moves. A gynecologist. Never false moves. I was different I had goals, but no direction. Like a map without roads, just places to be. I didn’t give a shit for anything or anybody but myself. Even science. Just a means. I’m surprised I got so far.” He gripped his chair arms. “As for Mother…” The tension in his hand was clear. “Witch. Witch and spook for parents. Changeling child. Where small things make big changes.”

“Something wrong?”

They’re talking to me, Edward.” He shut his eyes.

“Jesus.” There was nothing else he could think of to say. He thought wildly of hoaxes and being made a fool of and Vergil’s unreliability in the past, but he could not get away from the hard facts the diagnostic equipment had shown him.

For a quarter-hour Vergil seemed to be asleep. Edward checked his pulse, which was strong and steady; felt his forehead—slightly cool—and made himself more coffee. He was about to pick up the phone, undecided whether to call a hospital or Gail, when Vergil’s eyelids flickered open and he shifted his gaze to meet Edward’s.

“Hard to understand exactly what time is like for them,” he said. “It’s taken them maybe three, four days to figure out language, key human concepts. Can you imagine, Edward? They didn’t even know. They thought I was the universe. But now they’re on to it On to me. Right now.” He stood and walked across the beige carpet to the curtained plate glass window, clumsily reaching behind the drapes to find the cord and pull it A few apartment and house lights descended to the abyss of the night ocean. “They must have thousands of researchers hooked up to my neurons. They’re damned efficient you know, not to have screwed me up. So delicate in there. Making changes.”

“The hospital,” Edward said hoarsely. He cleared his throat “Please, Vergil. Now.”

“What in hell can a hospital do? Did you figure out any way to control the cells? I mean, they’re my own. Hurt them, hurt me.”

“I’ve been thinking.” Actually, the idea had just popped into his head—a sure sign that he was starting to believe Vergil. “Actinomycin can bind to DNA and stop transcription. We could slow them down that way—surely that would screw up this biologic you’ve described.”

I’m allergic to actinomycin. It would kill me.”

Edward looked down at his hands. That had been his best shot, he was sure of it. “We could do some experiments, see how they metabolize, differ from other cells. If we could isolate a nutrient they require more of, we could starve them. Maybe even radiation treatments—”

“Hurt them,” Vergil said, turning toward Edward, “hurt me.” He stood in the middle of the Irving room and held out his arms. The robe fell open and revealed Vergil’s legs and torso. Shadow obscured any visible detail. “I’m not sure I want to be rid of them. They’re not doing any harm.”

Edward swallowed back his frustration and tried to control a flush of anger, only making it worse. “How do you know?”

Vergil shook his head and held up one finger. They’re trying to understand what space is. That’s tough for them. They break distances down into concentrations of chemicals. For them, space is a range of taste intensities.”

“Vergil—”

“Listen, think, Edward!” His tone was excited but even. “Something is happening inside me. They talk to each other with proteins and nucleic acids, through the fluids, through membranes. They tailor something—viruses, maybe—to carry long messages or personality traits or biologic. Plasmid-like structures. That makes sense. Those are some of the ways I programmed them. Maybe that’s what your machine calls infection—all the new information in my blood. Chatter. Tastes of other individuals. Peers. Superiors. Subordinates.”

“Vergil, I’m listening, but I—”

“This is my show, Edward. I’m their universe. They’re amazed by the new scale.” He sat down and was quiet again for a time. Edward squatted by his chair and pulled up the sleeve of Vergil’s robe. His arm was criss-crossed with white lines.

“I’m calling an ambulance,” Edward said, reaching for the table phone.

“No!” Vergil cried, sitting up. “I told you, I’m not sick, this is my show. What can they do for me? It would be a farce.”

Then what in hell am I doing here?” Edward asked, becoming angry. “I can’t do anything. I’m one of the cavemen and you came to me—”

“You’re a friend,” Vergil said, fixing his eyes on him. Edward had the unnerving suspicion he was being watched by more than just Vergil. “I wanted you here to keep me company.” He laughed. “But I’m not exactly alone, am I?”

“I have to call Gail,” Edward said, dialing the number.

“Gail, yeah. But don’t tell her anything.”

“Oh, no. Absolutely.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

By dawn, Vergil was walking around the apartment, fingering things, looking out windows, slowly and methodically making himself lunch. “You know, I can actually feel their thoughts,” he said. Edward watched, exhausted and sick with tension, from an armchair in the Irving room. “I mean, their cytoplasm seems to have a will of its own. A kind of subconscious life, counter to the rationality they’ve acquired so recently. They hear the chemical ‘noise’ of molecules fitting and unfitting inside.”

He stood in the middle of the living room, robe fallen open, eyes dosed. He seemed to be taking brief naps. It was possible, Edward thought, that he was undergoing petit mal seizures. Who could predict what havoc the lymphocytes were wreaking in his brain?

Edward called Gail again from the kitchen phone. She was preparing for work. He asked her to phone the hospital and tell them he was too ill to come to work. “Cover up for you? This must be serious. What’s wrong with Vergil? Can’t he change his own diapers?”

Edward didn’t say anything.

“Everything okay?” she asked, after a long pause.

Was it? Decidedly not. “Fine,” he said.

“Culture!” Vergil said loudly, peering around the kitchen divider. Edward said good-by and quickly hung up. “They’re always swimming in a bath of information. Contributing to it. It’s a kind of gestalt thing, whatever. The hierarchy is absolute. They send tailored phages after cells that don’t interact properly. Viruses specified to individuals or groups. No escape. One gets pierced by a virus, the cell blebs outward, it explodes and dissolves. But it’s not just a dictatorship. I think they effectively have more freedom than we do. They vary so differently—I mean, from individual to individual, if there are individuals, they vary in different ways than we do. Does that make sense?”

“No,” Edward said softly, rubbing his temples. “Vergil, you are pushing me dose to the edge. I can’t take this much longer. I don’t understand, I’m not sure I believe—”

“Not even now?”

“Okay, let’s say you’re giving me the right interpretation. Giving it to me straight and the whole thing’s true. Have you bothered to figure out the consequences?”

Vergil regarded him warily. “My mother,” he said.

“What about her?”

“Anyone who cleans a toilet.”

“Please make sense.” Desperation made Edward’s voice almost whiny.

“I’ve never been very good at that” Vergil murmured. “Figuring out where things might lead.”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“Terrified,” Vergil said. His grin became maniacal “Exhilarated.” He kneeled beside Edward’s chair. “At first I wanted to control them. But they are more capable than I am. Who am I, a blundering fool, to try to frustrate them? They’re up to something very important”

“What if they kill you?”

Vergil lay on the floor and spread out his arms and legs. “Dead dog,” he said. Edward felt like kicking him. “Look, I don’t want you to think I’m going around you, but yesterday I went to see Michael Bernard. He put me through his private clinic, took a whole range of specimens. Biopsies. You can’t see where he took muscle tissue samples, skin samples, anything. It’s all healed. He said it checks out. And he asked me not to tell anybody.” His expression became dreamy again. “Cities of cells,” he said. “Edward, they push pili-like tubes through the tissues, spread themselves, their information, convert other kinds of cells…”

“Stop it!” Edward shouted. His voice cracked. “What checks out?”

“As Bernard puts it I have ‘severely enlarged’ lymphocytes. The other data isn’t ready yet. I mean, it was only yesterday. So this isn’t our common delusion.”

“What does he plan to do?”

“He’s going to convince Genetron to take me back. Reopen my lab.”

“Is that what you want?”

“It’s not just having the lab open again. Let me show you. Since I stopped the lamp treatments, my skin’s been changing again.” He pulled back the robe where he lay on the floor.

The skin all over Vergil’s body was crisscrossed with white lines. He turned over. Along his back, the lines were starting to form ridges.

“My God,” Edward said.

“I’m not going to be much good anywhere else but the lab,” Vergil said. “I won’t be able to go out in public.”

“You…you can talk to them, tell them to slow down.” He was immediately aware how ridiculous that sounded.

“Yes, indeed I can, but that doesn’t mean they listen.”

“I thought you’re their god.”

“The ones hooked up to my neurons aren’t the big wheels. They’re researchers, or at least serve the same function. They know I’m here, what I am, but that doesn’t mean they’ve convinced the upper levels of the hierarchy.”

“They’re disputing?”

“Something like that” He pulled the robe back on and went to the window, peering through the curtains as if looking for someone. “I don’t have anything left but them. They aren’t afraid. Edward, I’ve never felt so close to anyone or anything before.” Again, the beatific smile. “I’m responsible for them. Mother to them all. You know, until the last few days, I didn’t even have a name for them. A mother should name her offspring, shouldn’t she?”

Edward didn’t answer.

“I looked all around—dictionaries, textbooks, everywhere. Then it just popped into my head. ‘Noocytes.’ From the Greek word for mind, ‘noos.’ Noocytes. Sounds kind of ominous, doesn’t it? I told Bernard. He seemed to think it was a good name—”

Edward raised his arms in exasperation. “You don’t know what they’re going to do! You say they’re like a civilization—”

“A thousand civilizations.”

“Yes, and civilizations have been known to screw up before. Warfare, the environment—” He was grasping at straws, trying to restrain the panic that had been growing since he arrived. He wasn’t competent to handle the enormity of what was happening. And neither was Vergil. Vergil was the last person Edward would have called insightful and wise with regard to large issues.

“But I’m the only one at risk,” Vergil said.

“You don’t know that Jesus, Vergil, look what they’re doing to you!”

“I accept it,” he said stoically.

Edward shook his head, as much as admitting defeat. “Okay. Bernard gets Genetron to reopen the lab, you move in, become a guinea pig. What then?”

“They treat me right. I’m more than just good ol’ Vergil I. Ulam right now. I’m a goddamned galaxy, a super-mother.”

“Super-host, you mean.”

Vergil conceded the point with a shrug.

Edward felt his throat constricting. “I can’t help you,” he said. “I can’t talk to you, convince you, can’t help you. You’re as stubborn as ever.” That sounded almost benign; how could “stubborn” describe an attitude like Vergil’s? He tried to clarify what he meant but could only stammer. “I have to go,” he finally managed to say. “I can’t do you any good here.”

Vergil nodded. “I suppose not. This can’t be easy.”

“No,” Edward said, swallowing. Vergil stepped forward and seemed about to put his hands on Edward’s shoulders. Edward backed away instinctively.

“I’d like at least your understanding,” Vergil said, dropping his arms. “This is the greatest thing I’ve ever done.” His face twisted into a grimace. “I’m not sure how much longer I can face it, face up to it I mean. I don’t know whether they’ll kill me or not. I think not. The strain, Edward.”

Edward backed away toward the door and put his hand on the knob. Vergil’s face, temporarily creased with an agony of worry, returned to beatitude. “Hey,” he said. “Listen. They—”

Edward opened the door and stepped outside, closing it firmly behind him. He quickly walked to the elevator and punched the button for the ground floor.

He stood in the empty lobby for a few minutes, trying to control his erratic breathing. He glanced at his watch: nine in the morning.

Who would Vergil listen to?

Vergil had gone to Bernard; perhaps Bernard was now the pivot on which the whole situation turned. Vergil made it seem as if Bernard were not only convinced, but very interested. People of Bernard’s stature didn’t coax the Vergil Ulams of the world along unless they felt it was to their advantage. As Edward pushed through the double glass doors, he decided to play a hunch.

Vergil lay in the middle of the living room, arms and legs cruciform, and laughed. Then he sobered and asked himself what impression he had made on Edward, or on Bernard for that matter. Not important, he decided. Nothing was important but what was going on inside, the interior universe.

“I’ve always been a big fellow,” Vergil murmured.

Everything

—Yes, I am everything now.

Explain

—What? I mean, explain what?

Simplicities

—Yes, I Imagine if s tough waking up. Well, you deserve the difficulties. Damn very old DNA finally waking up.

SPOKEN with other

—What?

WORDS communicate with ^*share^* body structure ^*external^* is this like ^*wholeness WITHIN^{* *}totality^* is EXTERNAL alike

—I’m not understanding, you’re not clear.

Silence inside for how long? Difficult to tell the passage of time, hours and days in minutes and seconds. The noocytes had screwed up his brain clock. And what else?

YOU ^*interface^{* *}stand BETWEEN^* EXTERNAL and INTERNAL. Are they alike.

—Inside and outside? Oh, no.

Are OUTSIDE ^*share body structure^* alike

—You mean Edward, don’t you? Yes indeed…share body structure alike.

EDWARD and other structure INTERNAL similar/same

—Oh yes, he’s quite the same except for you. Only—yes, and is she better now? She wasn’t well last night.

No answer to that question.

Query

—He doesn’t have you. Nobody does. Is she all right? We’re the only ones. I made you. Nobody else but us has you.

A deep and profound silence.

Edward drove to the La Jolla Museum of Modem Art and walked across the concrete to a pay phone near a bronze drinking fountain. Fog drifted in from the ocean, obscuring the cream-plastered Spanish lines of the Church of St. James by the Sea and beading on the leaves of the trees. He inserted his credit card into the phone and asked information for the number of Genetron, Inc. The mechanical voice replied swiftly and he dialed through.

“Please page Dr. Michael Bernard,” he told the receptionist.

“Who’s calling, please?”

“This is his answering service. We have an emergency call and his beeper doesn’t seem to be working.”

A few anxious minutes later, Bernard came on the line. “Who the hell is this?” he asked quietly. “I don’t have an answering service.”

“My name is Edward Milligan. I’m a friend of Vergil Ulam’s. I think we have some problems to discuss.”

There was a long silence on the other end. “You’re at Mount Freedom, aren’t you, Dr. Milligan?”

“Yes.”

“Staying down here?”

“Not really.”

“I can’t see you today. Would tomorrow morning be acceptable?”

Edward thought of driving up and back, of time lost and of Gail, worrying. It all seemed trivial. “Yes,” he said.

“Nine o’clock, at Genetron. 60895 North Torrey Pines Road.”

“Fine.”

Edward walked back to his car in the morning grayness. As he opened the door and slid into the seat, he had a sudden thought. Candice hadn’t come home last night.

She had been in the apartment that morning.

Vergil had been lying about her, he was sure of that much. So what role was she playing?

And where was she?

CHAPTER TWELVE

Gail found Edward lying on the couch, sleeping fitfully as a chill freak winter breeze whistled outside. She sat down beside him and stroked his arm until his eyes opened.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi to you.” He blinked and looked around. “What time is it?”

“I just got home.”

“Four-thirty. Christ. Have I been asleep?”

“I wasn’t here,” Gail said. “Have you?”

“I’m still tired.”

“So what did Vergil do this time?”

Edward’s face assumed a patent mask of equanimity. He caressed her chin with one finger—“Chin chucking,” she called it, finding it faintly objectionable, as if she were a cat.

“Something’s wrong,” she said. “Are you going to tell me, or just keep acting like everything’s normal?”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Edward said.

“Oh, Lord,” Gail sighed, standing. “You’re going to divorce me for that Baker woman.” Mrs. Baker weighed three hundred pounds and hadn’t known she was pregnant until her fifth month.

“No,” Edward said listlessly.

“Rapturous relief.” Gail touched his forehead lightly. “You know this kind of introspection drives me crazy.”

“Well, it’s nothing I can talk about, so…” He took her hand in his and patted it.

“That’s disgustingly patronizing,” she said. “I’m going to make some tea. Want some?” He nodded and she went into the kitchen.

Why not just reveal all? he asked himself. An old friend was turning himself into a galaxy.

He cleared away the dining table instead.

That night, unable to sleep, Edward looked down on Gail from his sitting position, pillow against the wall, and tried to determine what he knew was real, and what wasn’t.

I’m a doctor, he told himself. A technical, scientific profession. Supposed to be immune to things like future shock.

Vergil Ulam was turning into a galaxy.

How would it feel to be topped off with a trillion Chinese? He grinned in the dark, and almost cried at the same time. What Vergil had inside him was unimaginably stranger than Chinese. Stranger than anything Edward—or Vergil—could easily understand. Perhaps ever understand.

What kind of psychology or personality would a cell develop—or a cluster of cells, for that matter? He tried to recall all his schooling on cell environments in the human body. Blood, lymph, tissue, interstitial fluid, cerebrospinal fluid…He could not imagine an organism of human complexity in such surroundings not going crazy from boredom. The environment was simple, the demands relatively simple, and fee levels of behavior were suited to cells, not people. On the other hand, stress might be the major factor—the environment was benign to familiar cells, hell on unfamiliar cells.

But he knew what was important, if not necessarily what was real: the bedroom, streetlights and tree shadows on the window curtains, Gail sleeping.

Very important. Gail, in bed, sleeping.

He thought of Vergil sterilizing the dishes of altered E. coli. The bottle of enhanced lymphocytes. Perversely, Krypton came to mind—Superman’s home world, billions of geniuses destroyed in an all-encompassing calamity. Murder? Genocide?

There was no barrier between sleeping and waking. He was watching the window, and city lights glared through as the curtains opened. They could have been living in New York (Irvine nights were never that brightly illuminated) or Chicago; he had lived in Chicago for two years

and the window shattered, soundless, the glass peeling back and falling away. The city crawled in through the window, a great, spiky lighted-up prowler growling in a language he couldn’t understand, made up of auto horns, crowd noises, construction bedlam. He tried to fight it off, but it got to Gail and turned into a shower of stars, sprinkling all over the bed, all over everything in the room.

He jerked awake to the sound of a gust of wind and the windows rattling. Best not to sleep, he decided, and stayed awake until it was time to dress with Gail. As she left for the school, he kissed her deeply, savoring the reality of her human, unviolated lips.

Then he made the long drive to North Torrey Pines Road past the Salk Institute with its spare concrete architecture past the dozens of new and resurrected research centers which made up Enzyme Valley, surrounded by eucalypti and the new hybrid fast-growing conifers whose ancestors had given the road its name.

The black sign with red Times Roman letters sat atop its mound of Korean grass. The buildings beyond followed the fashion of simple planar concrete surfaces, except for the ominous black cube of the defense contracts labs.

At the guardhouse, a thin, wiry man in dark blue stepped out of his cubicle and leaned down to the Volkswagen’s window level. He stared at Edward with an air of aloofness. “Business, sir?”

“I’m here to see Dr. Bernard.”

The guard asked for ID. Edward produced his wallet. The guard took it to his phone in the cubicle and spent some time discussing its contents. He returned it, still aloof, and said, “There ain’t any visitor’s parking. Take space 31 in the employee lot that’s around this curve and on the other side of the front office, west wing. Don’t go anywhere but the front office.”

“Of course not,” Edward said testily. “Around this curve.” He pointed. The guard nodded curtly and returned to the cubicle.

Edward walked down the flagstone path to the front office. Papyrus reeds grew next to concrete ponds filled with gold and silver carp. The glass doors opened at his approach, and he entered. The circular lobby held a single couch and table of technical journals and newspapers.

“May I help you?” the receptionist asked. She was slender, attractive, hair carefully arranged in the current artificial bun that Gail so fervently eschewed.

“Dr. Bernard, please.”

“Dr. Bernard?” She looked puzzled. “We don’t have—”

“Dr. Milligan?”

Edward turned to see Bernard entering the automatic doors. Thank you, Janet,” he said to the receptionist. She returned to her switchboard to route calls. “Please come with me, Dr. Milligan. We’ll have a conference room all to our selves.” He led Edward through the rear door and down the concrete path flanking the west wing’s ground floor.

Bernard wore a dapper gray suit that matched his graying hair; his profile was sharp and handsome. He closely resembled Leonard Bernstein; it was easy to see why the press had accorded nun so much coverage. He was a pioneer—and photogenic, besides. “We keep very tight security here. It’s the court decisions of the last ten years, you know. They’ve been absolutely insane. Losing patent rights because of simply mentioning work being done at a scientific conference. That sort of thing. What else can we expect when the judges are so ignorant of what’s really happening?” The question seemed rhetorical. Edward nodded politely and obeyed Bernard’s hand gesture to climb a flight of steel stairs to the second floor.

“You’ve seen Vergil recently?” Bernard asked as he unlocked room 245.

“Yesterday.”

Bernard entered ahead of him and turned on the lights. The room was barely ten feet square, furnished with a round table and four chairs and a blackboard on one wall Bernard dosed the door. “Sit, please.” Edward pulled out a chair and Bernard sat opposite him, putting his elbows on the table. “Ulam is brilliant. And I won’t hesitate to say, courageous.”

“He’s my friend. I’m very worried about him.”

Bernard held up one finger. “Courageous—and a bloody damned fool. What’s happening to him should never have been allowed. He may have done it under duress, but that’s no excuse. Still, what’s done is done, you know everything, I take it.”

“I know the basics,” Edward said. “I’m still not clear on how he did it.”

“Nor are we, Dr. Milligan. That’s one of the reasons we’re offering him a lab again. And a home, while we sort this out.”

“He shouldn’t be in public,” Edward said.

“No, indeed. We’re constructing an isolation lab right now. But we’re a private company and our resources are limited.”

“This should be reported to the NIH and the FDA.”

Bernard sighed. “Yes. Well, we’d stand to lose everything if word leaked out right now. I’m not talking about business decisions—we’d stand to lose the whole biochips industry. The public outcry could be horrendous.”

“Vergil is very sick. Physically mentally. He may die.”

“Somehow, I don’t think he’ll die,” Bernard said. “But we’re getting away from the focus.”

“What is the focus?” Edward asked angrily. “I assume you’re working hand-in-glove with Genetron now—you certainly talk like you are. What does Genetron stand to gain?”

Bernard leaned back in his chair. “I can think of a large number of uses for small, super-dense computer elements with a biological base. Can’t you? Genetron has already made breakthroughs, but Vergil’s work is something else again.”

“What do you envision?”

Bernard’s smile was sunny and certifiably false. “I’m not really at liberty to say. It’ll be revolutionary. We’ll have to study him in lab conditions. Animal experiments have to be conducted. We’ll have to start from scratch, of course. Vergil’s…um…colonies can’t be transferred. They’re based on his own cells. We have to develop organisms that won’t trigger immune responses in other animals.”

“Like an infection?” Edward asked.

“I suppose there are similarities.” But Vergil is not infected or ill in the normal uses of the words.”

“My tests indicate he is,” Edward said.

“I don’t think the usual diagnostics are appropriate, do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Listen,” Bernard said, leaning forward. “I’d like you to come and work with us once Vergil’s settled in. Your expertise might be useful to us.”

Edward almost flinched at the openness of the offer. “How will you benefit from all this?” he asked. “I mean you, personally.”

“Edward, I have always been at the forefront of my profession. I see no reason why I shouldn’t be helping here. With my knowledge of brain and nerve functions, and the research I’ve been conducting in artificial intelligence and neurophysiology—”

“You could help Genetron hold off a government investigation,” Edward said.

“That’s being very blunt Too blunt, and unfair.” For a moment, Edward sensed uncertainty and even a touch of anxiety in Bernard.

“Maybe I am,” Edward said. “And maybe that’s not the worst thing that can happen.”

“I don’t get you,” Bernard said.

“Bad dreams, Mr. Bernard.”

Bernard’s eyes narrowed and his brows lowered. Here was an uncharacteristic expression, not suitable for covers on Time, Mega or Rolling Stone: a puzzled and angry scowl. “Our time is too valuable to be wasted. I’ve made the offer in good faith.”

“Of course,” Edward said. “And of course, I’d like to visit the lab when Vergil’s settled in. If I’m still welcome, bluntness and all.”

“Of course,” Bernard echoed, but his thoughts were almost nakedly apparent: Edward would never be playing on his team. They rose together and Bernard held out his hand. His palm was damp; he was as nervous as Edward.

“I assume you want this all in strict confidence,” Edward said.

“I’m not sure we can require it of you. You’re not under contract.”

“No,” Edward said.

Bernard regarded him for a long moment, then nodded. I’ll escort you out.”

“There’s one more thing,” Edward said. “Do you know anything about a woman named Candice?”

“Vergil mentioned he had a girlfriend by that name.”

“Had, or has?”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” Bernard said. “She could be a security problem.”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” Edward said emphatically. “Not at all what I mean.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Brenard went through the stapled papers carefully, hand on forehead, lifting the legal-sized pages and folding them back, his frown deepening.

What was going on in the black cube was enough to make his hair stand on end. The information was by no means complete, but his friends in Washington had done a remarkable job. The packet had arrived by special courier just half an hour after Edward Milligan left.

Their conversation had filled him with a biting, defensive shame. He saw a distant version of himself in the young doctor, and the comparison hurt. Had good old famous Michael Bernard been walking around in a fog of capitalistic seduction the last few months?

At first, Genetron’s offer had seemed clean and sweet-minimal participation in the first few months, then status as a father-figure and pioneer, his image to be used to promote the company.

It had taken him entirely too long to realize how close he was to the trigger of the trap.

He looked up at the window and stood to raise the blinds. With a rustling snap, he had a clear view of the mound, the black cube, the wind-swept clouds beyond.

He could smell disaster. The black cube, ironically, would not be involved; but if Vergil Ulam had not triggered things, then the other side of Genetron would have done so eventually.

Ulam had been fired so precipitously, and blackballed so thoroughly, not because he had done sloppy research—but because he had followed so closely on the heels of the defense research division. He had succeeded where they had met frequent setbacks and failure. And even though they had studied his files for months (multiple copies had been made) they could not duplicate his results.

Harrison yesterday had murmured that Ulam’s discoveries must have been largely accidental. It was obvious why he would say that now.

Ulam had come very close to taking his success and leaving Genetron, and the government, in the lurch. The Big Boys could not put up with that, and could not trust Ulam.

He was your basic crackpot. He could never have gotten a security clearance.

So they had tossed him out, and frozen him out.

And then he had come back to haunt. They could not refuse him now.

Bernard read the papers through once more and asked himself how he could back away from the mess with the minimum of damage.

Should he? If they were such fools, wouldn’t his expertise be useful—or at least his clear thinking? He had no doubt he could think more dearly than Harrison and Yng.

But Genetron’s interest in him was largely as a figurehead. How much influence could he have, even now?

He dropped the blinds and twisted the rod to close them. Then he picked up his phone and dialed Harrison’s number. “Yes?”

“Bernard.”

“Certainly, Michael.”

“I’m going to call Ulam now. We’re going to bring him in now. Today. Get your whole team ready, and the defense research people, too.”

“Michael, that’s—”

“We can’t just leave him out there.”

Harrison paused. “Yes. I agree.”

“Then get on it.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Edward ate lunch at a Jack-in-the-Box and sat in the glass-enclosed eating area after he was finished, arm on a window ledge, staring out at the passing traffic. Something wasn’t right at Genetron. He could always rely on his strongest hunches; some part of his brain reserved for close observation and cataloging of minute details would sometimes put 2 and 2 together and get a disturbing 5, and lo and behold, one of the 2s would really be a 3; he just hadn’t noticed it before.

Bernard and Harrison were hiding a very salient fact. Genetron was doing more than just helping an ex-employee with a work-related problem, more even than just preparing to take advantage of a breakthrough. But they couldn’t act too quickly; that would arouse suspicion. And perhaps they weren’t sure they had the wherewithal.

He scowled, trying to pry loose the chain of reasoning from the clay matrix where it had been pressed and examine it link by link. Security. Bernard had mentioned security in connection with Candice. They might just be concerned with company security, sharing the fear of industrial espionage that had turned every private research company along North Torrey Pines Road into a steel-shell turtle, closed to public scrutiny. But that couldn’t be all.

They couldn’t be as stupid and unseeing as Vergil; they had to know that what was happening to Vergil was far too important to be held dose to the breast of a single business concern.

Therefore, they had contacted the government. Was that a justified assumption? (Perhaps it was something he should do, whether Genetron had or not) And the government was acting as quickly as possible—that is, on a timescale of days or weeks to make its decisions, prepare its plans, take action. In the meanwhile, Vergil was unattended. Genetron didn’t dare do anything against his will; genetic research companies were already regarded with enough suspicion by the public, and a scandal could do much more than disrupt their stock plans.

Vergil was on his own. And Edward knew his old friend well enough to realize that meant no one was watching the store. Vergil was not a responsible person. But he was under self-imposed isolation, staying in the apartment (wasn’t he?), suffering his mental transformation, locked in his psychosis-inducing ecstasy, filled with the results of his brilliance.

With a start, Edward realized he was the only person who could do something.

He was the last responsible individual.

It was time to return to Vergil’s apartment and at least keep track of things until the Big Boys came on the scene.

As he drove, Edward thought about change. There was only so much change a single individual could stand. Innovation, even radical creation, was essential, but the results had to be applied cautiously, with careful forethought. Nothing forced, nothing imposed. That was the ideal. Everyone had the right to stay the same until they decided otherwise.

That was damned naive.

What Vergil had done was the greatest thing in science since—

Since what? There were no comparisons. Vergil Ulam had become a god. Within his flesh he carried hundreds of billions of intelligent beings.

Edward couldn’t handle the thought “Neo-Luddite,” he murmured to himself, a filthy accusation.

When he pressed the buzzer on the condo security panel, Vergil answered almost immediately. “Yeah,” he said, sounding exhilarated, very up.

“Edward.”

“Hey, Edward! Come on in. I’m taking a bath. Door’s unlocked.”

Edward entered Vergil’s living room and walked down the hallway to the bathroom. Vergil was in the tub, up to his neck in pinkish water. He smiled vaguely at Edward and splashed his hands. “Looks like I slit my wrists, doesn’t it?” he said, his voice a happy whisper. “Don’t worry. Everything’s fine now. Genetron’s coming over to take me back. Bernard and Harrison and the lab guys, all in a van.” His face was crisscrossed with pale ridges and his hands were covered with white bumps.

“I talked to Bernard this morning,” Edward said, perplexed.

“Hey, they just called,” Vergil said, pointing to his bathroom intercom and phone. “I’ve been in here for an hour and a half. Soaking and thinking.”

Edward sat on the toilet. The quartz lamp stood unplugged next to the linen cabinet.

“You’re sure that’s what you want,” he said, his shoulders slumping.

“Yeah. I’m sure,” Vergil said. “Reunion. Take back the prodigal son, not so prodigal? You know, I never understood what that prodigal bit meant. Does it mean ‘prodigy’? I’m certainly that I’m going back in style. Everything’s style from here on.”

The pinkish color in the water didn’t look like soap. “Is that bubble bath?” Edward asked. Another thought came to him suddenly and left him weak.

“No,” Vergil said. “It’s coming from my skin. They’re not telling me everything, but I think they’re sending out scouts. Hey! Astronauts! Yeah.” He looked at Edward with an expression that didn’t quite cross over into concern, more like curiosity as to how he’d take it.

Edward’s stomach muscles tightened as if waiting for a second punch. He had never seriously considered the possibility until now—not consciously—perhaps because he had been concentrating on simply believing, focusing on more immediate problems. “Is this the first time?”

“Yeah,” Vergil said. He laughed. “I have half a mind to let the little buggers down the drain. Let them find out what the world’s really about.”

“They’d go everywhere,” Edward said.

“Sure enough.”

Edward nodded. Sure enough. “You never introduced me to Candice,” he said. Vergil shook his head.

“Hey, that’s right” Nothing more.

“How…how are you feeling?”

“I’m reeling pretty good right now. Must be billions of them.” More splashing with his hands. “What do you think? Should I let the little buggers out?”

“I need something to drink,” Edward said.

“Candice has some whiskey in the kitchen cabinet.”

Edward knelt beside the tub. Vergil regarded him curiously. “What are we going to do?” Edward asked.

Vergil’s expression changed with shocking abruptness from alert interest to a virtual mask of sorrow. “Jesus, Edward, my mother—you know, they’re coming to take me back, but she said…I should call her. Talk to her.” Tears fell across the ridges which pulled his cheeks out of shape. “She told me to come back to her. When…when it was time. Is it time, Edward?”

“Yes,” Edward said, feeling suspended somewhere in a spark-filled cloud. “I think it must be.” His fingers dosed about the quartz lamp cord and he moved along its length to the plug.

Vergil had hot-wired door-knobs, turned his piss blue, played a thousand dumb practical jokes, and never grown up, never grown mature enough to understand how brilliant he was and how much he could affect the world.

Vergil reached for the bathtub drain lever. “You know, Edward, I—”

He never finished. Edward had inserted the plug into the wall socket. Now he picked up the lamp and upended it into the tub. He jumped away from the flash, the steam and the sparks. The bathroom light went out. Vergil screamed and thrashed and jerked and then everything was still, except for the low, steady sizzle and the smoke wafting from his hair. Light from the small ventilation window cut a shaft through the foul-smelling haze.

Edward lifted the toilet lid and vomited. Then he clenched his nose and stumbled into the living room. His legs went out from under him and he collapsed on the couch.

But there was no time. He stood up, swaying and nauseated again, and entered the kitchen. He found Candice’s bottle of Jack Daniel’s and returned to the bathroom. He unscrewed the cap and poured the contents of the bottle into the tub water, trying not to look at Vergil directly. But that wasn’t enough. He would need bleach and ammonia and then he would have to leave.

He was about to call out and ask Vergil where the bleach and ammonia were, but he caught himself. Vergil was dead. Edward’s stomach began to surge again and he leaned against the wall in the hallway, cheek pressed against the paint and plaster. When had things become less real?

When Vergil had entered the Mount Freedom Medical Center. This was another of Vergil’s jokes. Ha. Turn your whole life deep midnight blue, Edward; never forget a friend.

He looked into the linen closet but saw only towels and sheets. In the bedroom, he opened Vergil’s wardrobe and found only clothes. The bedroom had a master bathroom attached—he could see into it from where he stood by the corner of the unmade bed. Edward entered the master bath. At one end was a shower stall. A trickle of water came out from under the door. He tried the light switch but this whole section of the apartment was powerless; the only light came from the bedroom window. In the closet he found both bleach and a big half-gallon jug of ammonia.

He carried them down the hall and poured them one by one into the tub, avoiding Vergil’s sightless pale eyes. Fumes hissed up and he dosed the door behind him coughing.

Someone softly called Vergil’s name. Edward carried the empty bottles into the master bathroom, where the voice was louder. He stood in the doorway, one plastic jug brushing the frame, and cocked an ear, frowning.

“Hey, Vergil, that you?” the voice asked dryly. It came from the shower stall. Edward took a step forward, then paused. Enough, he thought. Reality had been twisted enough and he didn’t really want to go any farther. He took another step, then another, and reached for the door of the shower stall.

The voice sounded like a woman, husky, strange, though not in distress.

He grasped the handle and tugged. With a hollow click, the door swung open. Eyes adjusting to the darkness, he peered into the shower.

“Jesus, Vergil, you’ve been neglecting me. We’ve got to get out of this hotel. It’s dark and small and I don’t like it”

He recognized the voice from the phone, though he could not possibly have recognized her by appearance, even had he seen a photograph.

“Candice?” he asked.

“Vergil? Let’s go.”

He fled.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The phone was ringing as Edward came home. He didn’t answer. It could have been the hospital. It could have been Bernard—or the police. He envisioned having to explain everything to the police. Genetron would stonewall; Bernard would be unavailable.

Edward was exhausted, all his muscles knotted with tension and whatever name one could give to the feelings one has after-

Committing genocide?

That certainly didn’t seem real. He could not believe he had just murdered a trillion intelligent beings. “Noocytes.” Snuffed a galaxy. That was laughable. But he didn’t laugh.

He could still see Candice, in the shower.

Work had proceeded on her much more rapidly. Her legs were gone; her torso had been reduced to an impressionistic spareness. She had lifted her face to him, covered with ridges as if made from a stack of cards.

He had left the building in time to see a white van speed around the curve and park In front, with Bernard’s limousine not far behind. He had sat in his car and watched men in white isolation suits climb out of the van, which, he noted, was unmarked.

Then he had started his car, put it in gear, and driven away. Simple as that. Return to Irvine. Ignore the whole mess as long as he could, or he would very soon be as crazy as Candice.

Candice, who was being transformed over an open shower drain. Let the little buggers out, Vergil had said. Show them what the world’s about.

It was not at all hard to believe that he had just killed one human being, a friend. The smoke, the melted lamp cover the drooping electrical outlet and smoking cord.

Vergil.

He had dunked the lamp into the tub with Vergil.

Had he been thorough enough to kill all of them in the tub? Perhaps Bernard and his group would finish what he had started.

He didn’t think so. Who could encompass it understand it all? Certainly he couldn’t; there had been horrors, fearsome things for the mind to acknowledge, to see, and he did not believe he could predict what was go-big to happen next, for he hardly knew what was happening now.

The dreams. Cities raping Gail. Galaxies sprinkling over them all. What anguish…and then again, what potential beauty—a new kind of life, symbiosis and transformations.

No. That was not a good thought Change—too much change—and

so where did his objections begin, his objections to a new order, a new trans

formation because he well knew that humans weren’t enough that there had to be more Vergil had made more; in his clumsy unseeing way he had initiated the next stage.

No. Life goes on no period no end no change, no shocking things like Candice in the shower or Vergil dead in the tub. Life is the right held by an individual to normality and normal progress normal aging who would take away that right who in their right minds would accept and what was it he was thinking was going to happen that he would have to accept?

He lay down on the couch and shielded his eyes with his forearm. He had never been so exhausted in his life—drained physically, emotionally, beyond rational thought. He was reluctant to sleep because he could feel the nightmares building up like thunderheads, waiting to shower refractions and echoes of what he had seen.

Edward pulled away his forearm and stared up at the ceiling. It was just barely possible that what had been started could be stopped. Perhaps he was the one who could trigger the chain of actions which could stop it. He could call the Centers for Disease Control (yes, but were they the ones he wanted to talk to?). Or perhaps the defense department? County health first, work through channels? Maybe even the VA hospital or Scripps Clinic in La Jolla.

He put his arm back over his eyes. There was no clear course of action.

Events had simply exceeded his capacity. He imagined that had happened often in human history; tidal waves of events overwhelming crucial individuals, sweeping them along. Making them wish there was a quiet place, perhaps a little Mexican village where nothing ever happened and where they could go and sleep just sleep.

“Edward?” Gail leaned over him, touching his forehead with cool fingers. “Every time I come home, here you are—sacked out. You don’t look good. Feeling okay?”

“Yes.” He sat on the edge of the couch. His body was hot and wooziness threatened his balance. “What have you planned for dinner?” His mouth wasn’t working properly; the words sounded mushy. “I thought we’d go out.”

“You have a fever,” Gail said. “A very high fever. I’m getting the thermometer. Just stay there.”

“No,” he called after her weakly. He stood and stumbled into the bathroom to look in the mirror. She met him there and stuck the thermometer under his tongue. As always, he thought of biting it like Harpo Marx, eating it like a piece of candy. She peered over his shoulder into the mirror.

“What is it?” she asked.

There were lines under his collar, around his neck. White lines, like freeways.

“Damp palms,” he said. “Vergil had damp palms.” They had already been inside him for days. “So obvious.”

“Edward, please, what is it?”

“I have to make a call,” he said. Gail followed him into the bedroom and stood as he sat on the bed and punched the Genetron number. “Dr. Michael Bernard, please,” he said. The receptionist told him, much too quickly, there was no such person at Genetron. “This is too important to fuck around with,” he said coldly. “Tell Dr. Bernard this is Edward Milligan and it’s urgent.”

The receptionist put him on hold. Perhaps Bernard was still at Vergil’s apartment, trying to sort out the pieces of the puzzle; perhaps they would simply send someone out to arrest him. It really didn’t matter either way.

“Bernard here.” The doctor’s voice was flat and serpentine—much, Edward imagined, like he himself sounded.

“It’s too late, Doctor. We shook Vergil’s hand. Sweaty palms. Remember? And ask yourself whom we’ve touched since. We’re the vectors now.”

“I was at the apartment today, Milligan,” Bernard said “Did you kill Ulam?”

“Yes. He was going to release his…microbes. Noocytes. Whatever they are, now.”

“Did you find his girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do with her?”

“Do with her? Nothing. She was in the shower. But listen—”

“She was gone when we arrived, nothing but her clothes. Did you kill her, too?”

“Listen to me, Doctor. I have Vergil’s microbes inside me. So do you.”

There was silence on the other end, then a deep sigh. “Yes?”

“Have you worked out any way to control them, I mean, inside our bodies?”

“Yes.” Then, more softly, “No. Not yet Antimetabolites, controlled radiation therapy, actinomycin. We haven’t tried everything, but…no.”

“Then that’s it, Dr. Bernard.”

Another longer pause. “Hm.”

“I’m going back to my wife now, to spend what little time we have.”

“Yes,” Bernard said. “Thank you for calling.”

“I’m going to hang up now.”

“Of course. Good-bye.”

Edward hung up and put his arms around Gail.

“It’s a disease, isn’t it?” she said.

Edward nodded. “That’s what Vergil made. A disease that thinks. I’m not sure there’s any way to fight an intelligent plague.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Harrison leafed through the procedure manual, making notes methodically. Yng sat in a stressless leather chair in the corner, fingers of both hands forming a pyramid before his face, his long, lank black hair falling over his eyes and glasses. Bernard stood before the black formica-topped desk, impressed by the quality of the silence. Harrison leaned back from the desk and held up his notepad.

“First, we’re not responsible. That’s how I read it. Ulam did his research without our authorization—”

“But we didn’t fire him when we learned of it,” Yng countered. “That’s going to be a bad point in court.”

“We’ll worry about all that later,” Harrison said sharply. “What we are responsible for is reporting to the CDC. This isn’t a vat spill or breach of lab containment, but—”

“None of us, not one of us, thought Ulam’s cells could be viable outside the body,” Yng said, twisting his hand into a jumble of fingers.

“It’s very possible they weren’t, at first,” Bernard said drawn into the discussion despite himself. “It’s obvious there’s been a lot of development since the original lymphocytes. Self-directed development.”

“I still refuse to believe Ulam created intelligent cells,” Harrison said. “Our own research in the cube has shown how difficult that would be. How did he determine their intelligence? How did he train them? No—something—”

Yng laughed. “Ulam’s body was being transformed, redesigned…how can we doubt there was an intelligence behind the transformation?”

“Gentlemen,” Bernard said softly. “That’s all academic. Are we, or are we not going to alert Atlanta and Bethesda?”

“What in hell do we tell them?”

“That we are all in the early stages of a very dangerous infection,” Bernard said, “generated in our laboratories by a researcher, now dead—”

“Murdered,” Yng said, shaking his head in disbelief.

“And spreading at an alarming rate.”

“Yes,” Yng said, “but what can the CDC do about it? The contamination has spread, perhaps across the continent by now.”

“No,” Harrison said, “not quite that far. Vergil hasn’t made contact with that many people. It could still be confined to Southern California.”

“He made contact with us,” Yng said ruefully. “It is your opinion we are contaminated?”

“Yes,” Bernard said.

“Is there anything we can do, personally?”

He pretended to consider, then shook his head. “If you’ll excuse me, there’s work to do before we announce.” He left the conference room and walked down the outside corridor to the stairs. Near the front of the west wing was a pay phone. Removing his credit card from his wallet, he inserted it into the slot and punched in the number of his Los Angeles office.

“This is Bernard,” he said. “I’m going to take my I’m to the San Diego airport shortly. Is George available?” The receptionist made several calls and placed George Dilman, his mechanic and sometimes-pilot, on the other end of the line. “George, sorry for such short notice, but it’s something of an emergency. The jet should be ready in an hour and a half, fully fueled.”

“Where this time?” Dilman asked, used to long flights on short notice.

“Europe. I’ll let you know precisely in about half an hour, so you can file a flight plan.”

“Not your usual, Doctor.”

“Hour and a half, George.”

“We’ll be ready.”

“I’m flying alone.”

“Doctor, I’d rather—”

“Alone, George.”

George sighed reluctantly. “All right”

He held down the receiver switch and then punched in a twenty-seven-digit number, beginning with his satellite code and ending with a secret scramble string. A woman answered in German.

“Doktor Heinz Paulsen-Fuchs, bitte.”

She asked no questions. Whoever could get through on this line, the doctor would speak to. Paulsen-Fuchs answered several minutes later. Bernard glanced around uneasily, realizing he was taking some risk being observed in the open.

“Paul, this is Michael Bernard. I have a rather extreme favor to ask of you.”

“Herr Doktor Bernard, always welcome, always welcome! What can I do for you?”

“Do you have a total isolation lab at the Wiesbaden facility you can clear within the day?”

“For what purpose? Excuse me, Michael, is it not a good time to ask?”

“No, not really.”

“If there is a grave emergency, well, yes, I suppose.”

“Good. I’ll need that lab, and I’ll need to use B.K. Pharmek’s private strip. When I leave my plane, I must be placed in an isolation suit and a sealed biologicals transport truck immediately. Then my aircraft will be destroyed on the runway and the entire area sprayed with disinfectant foam. I will be your guest…if you can call it that…indefinitely. The lab should be equipped so that I can live there and do my work. I will require a computer terminal with full services.”

“You are seldom a drunkard, Michael. And you have never been unstable, not in our time together. This sounds quite serious. Are we talking about a fire, Michael? A vat spill, perhaps?”

Bernard wondered how Paulsen-Fuchs had found out he was working with gene engineering. Or did he know? Was he just guessing? “A very extreme emergency, Herr Doktor. Can you oblige me?”

“Will all be explained?”

“Yes. And it will be to your advantage—and your nation’s advantage—to know ahead of time.”

“It does not sound trivial, Michael.”

He felt an irrational stage of anger. “Compared to this everything else is trivial, Paul.”

“Then it will be done. We can expect you—?”

“Within twenty-four hours. Thank you, Paul.”

He hung up and glanced at his watch. He doubted if anyone at Genetron understood the magnitude of what was about to happen. It was difficult for him to imagine. But one thing was clear. Within forty-eight hours of Harrison informing the CDC, the North American continent would be placed under virtual isolation—whether officials believed what was said, or not. The key words would be “plague” and “genetic engineering firm.” The action would be completely justifiable, but he doubted if it would be sufficient. Then more drastic measures would be taken.

He did not want to be on the continent when that happened, but on the other hand, he did not want to be responsible for transmitting the contagion. So he would offer himself up as a specimen, to be kept at the finest pharmaceutical research firm in Europe.

Bernard’s mind worked in such a way that he was never bothered by second guesses or extreme doubts—not in his work, at any rate. When in an emergency or tight situation, he always came up with one solution at a time—usually the correct one. The reserve solutions waited in the background of his thoughts, unconscious and unobtrusive, while he acted. So it had always been in the operating room, and so it was now. He did not regard this faculty without some chagrin. It made him seem like a bloody robot at times, self-confident beyond all reason. But it had been responsible for his success, his stature in neurophysiological research, and the respect he had been accorded by fellow professionals and public alike.

He returned to the conference room and picked up his briefcase. His limo, as always, would be waiting for him in the Genetron parking lot, the driver reading or playing chess on a pocket computer. “I’ll be in my office if you need me,” Bernard said to Harrison. Yng stood facing the blank white marker board, hands clasped behind his back.

“I’ve just called CDC,” Harrison said. They’ll be getting back to us with instructions.”

The word would soon go out to every hospital in the area. How soon before they closed the airports? How efficient were they? “Let me know, then,” Bernard said. He walked out the door and wondered for a moment whether he needed to take anything else with him. He thought not. He had copies of Ulam’s floppy diskettes in his briefcase. He had Ulam’s organisms within his blood.

Surely that would be enough to keep him busy for a while.

People? Anyone he should warn?

Any of his three ex-wives? He didn’t even know where they lived now. His accountant sent them their alimony checks. There was really no practical way—

Anybody he truly cared for, who truly cared for him?

He had last seen Paulette in March. The parting had been amicable. Everything had been amicable. They had orbited around each other like moon and planet, never really touching. Paulette had objected to being the moon, and quite rightly. She had done very well in her own career, chief cytotechnologist at Cetus Corporation in Palo Alto.

Now that he thought of it, she had probably been the one who had initially suggested his name to Harrison at Genetron. After they broke up. No doubt she had thought she was being very fair-minded and objective, helping all concerned.

He couldn’t fault her for that. But there was nothing in him that urged a call to her, a warning.

It just wasn’t practical.

His son he hadn’t heard from in five years. He was in China someplace on a research grant.

He put the notion out of his head.

Perhaps I won’t even need an isolation chamber, he thought. I’m pretty damned isolated already.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

They nearly died. Within minutes, Edward was too weak to move. He watched as she called his parents, different hospitals, her school. She was frantic with fear that she might have infected her students. He imagined a ripple of news going out, being picked up. The panic. But Gail slowed, became dizzy, and lay down on the bed next to him.

She struggled and cursed, like a horse trying to right itself after breaking a leg, but the effort was useless.

With her last strength she came to him and they lay in each other’s arms, drenched in sweat. Gail’s eyes were closed, her face the color of talcum. She looked like a corpse in an embalming parlor. For a time Edward thought she was dead and sick as he was, he raged, hated, felt tremendous guilt for his weakness, his slowness to understand all the possibilities. Then he no longer cared. He was too weak to blink, so he closed his eyes and waited.

There was a rhythm in his arms, in his legs. With each pulse of blood, a kind of sound welled up within him as if an orchestra were performing thousands strong, but not in unison; playing whole seasons of symphonies at once. Music in the blood. The sensation become more coordinated; the wave-trains finally canceled into silence, then separated into harmonic beats.

The beats melted into the sound of his own heart.

Neither of them had any feel for the passage of time. It could have been days before he regained enough strength to go to the faucet in the bathroom. He drank until his stomach could hold no more and returned with a glass of water. Lifting her head with his arm, he brought the edge of the glass to Gail’s mouth. She sipped at it. Her lips were cracked, her eyes bloodshot and ringed with yellowish crumbs, but there was some color in her skin. “When are we going to die?” she asked, her voice a feeble croak. “I want to hold you when we die.”

Minutes later, he was strong enough to help her into the kitchen. He peeled an orange and shared it with her, feeling the pulse of the sugar and juice and acid down his throat. “Where is everybody?” she asked. “I called hospitals, friends. Where are they?”

The harmonic orchestral sensation returned, beats coordinating into recognizable fragments, the fragments coalescing, coming into a focus of meaning, and suddenly—

Is there DISCOMFORT?

—Yes.

He answered automatically and in kind, as if he had expected the exchange and was ready for a long conversation.

PATIENCE. There are difficulties.

—What? I don’t understand—

^*Immune response^{* *}Conflict^*. Difficulties.

—Leave us, then! Go away!

Not possible. Too INTEGRATED.

They weren’t recovering, not to the extent they were free of the infection. Any feeling of returning freedom was illusory. Very briefly, saying what his strength would allow, he tried to explain to Gail what he thought they were experiencing.

She propped herself up out of the chair and went to the window, where she stood on shaking legs, looking out at green commons, other rows of apartments. “What about other people?” she asked. “Have they got it, too? That’s why they’re not here?”

“I don’t know. Probably soon.”

“Are they…the disease. Is it talking to you?”

He nodded.

“Then I’m not crazy.” She walked slowly across the living room. “I’m not going to be able to move much longer,” she said. “How about you? Maybe we should try to escape.”

He held her hand and shook his head. “They’re inside, part of us by now. They are us. Where can we escape?”

“Then I’d like to be in bed with you, when we can’t move any more. And I want your arms around me.”

They lay back on the bed and held each other.

“Eddie…”

That was the last sound he heard. He tried to resist, but waves of peace rolled over him and he could only experience. He floated on a wide blue-violet sea. Above the sea, his body was mapped onto a seemingly limitless plane. The noocyte endeavors were charted there, and he had no problem understanding their progress. It was obvious that his body was more noocyte than Milligan now.

—What’s going to happen to us?

No more MOTION.

—Are we dying?

Changing.

—And if we don’t want to change?

No PAIN.

—And fear? You won’t even allow us to be afraid?

The blue-violet sea and the chart faded into warm darkness.

He had plenty of time to think things through, but not nearly enough information. Was this what Vergil had experienced? No wonder he had seemed to be going crazy. Buried in some inner perspective, neither one place nor another. He felt an increase in warmth, a closeness and compelling presence.

•Edward…

—Gail? I can hear you-no, not hear you—

•Edward, I should be terrified. I want to be angry but I can’t.

Not essential.

—Go away! Edward, I want to fight back

—Leave us, please, leave us!

PATIENCE. Difficulties.

They fell quiet and simply reveled in each other’s company. What Edward sensed nearby was not the physical form of Gail; not even his own picture of her personality, but something more convincing, with all the grit and detail of reality, but not as he had ever experienced her before.

—How much time is passing?

•I don’t know. Ask them.

No answer.

—Did they tell you?

—No. I don’t think they know how to talk to us, really…not yet. Maybe this is all hallucination. Vergil hallucinated, and maybe I’m just imitating his fever dreams…

•Tell me who’s hallucinating whom. Wait. Something’s coming. Can you see it?

—I can’t see anything…but I feel it.

•Describe it to me.

—I can’t.

•Look-it’s doing something.

Reluctantly, •It’s beautiful.

—It’s very…I don’t think it’s frightening. It’s closer now.

No HARM. No PAIN. ^*Learn^* here, ^*adapt^*.

It was not a hallucination, but it could not be put into words. Edward did not struggle as it came upon him.

•What is it?

—It’s where we’ll be for some time, I think.

•Stay with me!

—Of course…

There was suddenly a great deal to do and prepare for.

Edward and Gail grew together on the bed, substance passing through clothes, skin joining where they embraced and lips where they touched.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Bernard was very proud of his Falcon 10. He had purchased it in Paris from a computer company president whose firm had gone bankrupt. He had cherished the sleek executive jet for three years, learning how to fly and getting his pilot’s license within three months from “a sitting start,” as his instructor had put it. He lovingly touched the edge of the black control panel with one finger, then smoothed his thumb across the panel’s wood inlay facing. Peculiar, that out of so much left behind-and so much lost-an inert aircraft could mean something important to him. Freedom, accomplishment, prestige…Clearly, in the next few weeks, if he had that long, there would be many changes beyond the physical. He would have to come to grips with his fragility, his transience.

The plane had been refueled at La Guardia without his leaving the cockpit. He had radioed instructions, taxied up to the executive aircraft service bay, and shut the jets down. The attendants had performed their work quickly and he had filed a continuation flight plan with the tower. Not once did he have to touch human flesh or even breathe the same air as the ground crew.

In Reykjavik he had to leave the plane and attend to the fueling himself, but he wore a tightly wrapped muffler and made sure he touched nothing with his ungloved hands.

On his way to Germany, his mind seemed to clear-to become uncomfortably acute in his own self-analysis. He did not like any of the conclusions. He tried to blank them out, but there was little in the cockpit to completely absorb his attention, and the observations, the accusations, returned every few minutes until he put the plane on autopilot and gave them their due.

He would be dead very soon. It was, to be sure, a noble kind of self-sacrifice to donate himself to Pharmek, to the world that might not yet be contaminated. But it was far from making up for what he had allowed to happen.

How could he have known?

“Milligan knew,” he said between clenched teeth. “Damn all of them.” Damn Vergil I. Ulam; but wasn’t he similar to Vergil? No, he refused to admit that Vergil had been brilliant (he saw the reddened, blistered body in the bathtub, had been had been) but irresponsible, blind to the precautions which should have been taken almost instinctively. Still, if Vergil had taken those precautions, he never would have been able to complete his work.

Nobody would have allowed it.

And Michael Bernard knew all too well the frustrations of being stopped dead in his tracks while following a promising path of research. He could have cured thousands of people of Parkinson’s disease…if he had simply been allowed to collect brain tissue from aborted embryos. Instead, in their moral fervor, the people with and without faces who had contrived to stop him had also contrived to let thousands of people suffer and be degraded. How often had he wished that young Mary Shelley had never written her book, or at least had never chosen a German name for her scientist All the concatenations of the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, coming together in people’s minds.

Yes, yes, and hadn’t he just cursed Ulam for his brilliance, and hadn’t the same comparison crossed his mind?

Frankenstein’s monster. Inescapable. Boringly obvious.

People were so afraid of the new, of change.

And now he was afraid, too, though admitting his fear was difficult Best to be rational, to present himself for study, an unintentional human sacrifice like Dr. Louis Slotin, at Los Alamos in 1946. By accident, Slotin and seven others had been accidentally exposed to a sudden burst of ionizing radiation. Slotin had ordered the seven others not to move. He had then drawn circles around his feet and theirs, to give fellow scientists solid data about distances from the source and intensity of exposure on which to base their studies. Slotin had died nine days later. A second man died twenty years later of complications attributed to the radiation. Two others died of acute leukemia.

Human guinea pigs. Noble, self-possessed Slotin.

Had they wished, in those terrible moments, that no one had ever split the atom?

Pharmek had leased its own strip two kilometers from its countryside research facilities, outside Wiesbaden, to play host to businessmen and scientists, and also to expedite the receiving and processing of plant and soil samples from search teams around the world. Bernard circled over the divided fields and woods at ten thousand feet, the eastern sky touched with dawn.

He switched the secondary radio to the Pharmek automatic ILS system, and keyed the mike twice to activate the lights and glide path. The strip appeared below him in the predawn grayness, wind direction indicated by an arrow of lights to one side.

Bernard followed the lights and glide path and felt the wheels thump and squeal against the strip’s concrete; a perfect landing, the last the sleek executive jet would ever make.

On the port side he could see a large white truck and personnel dressed in biohazard suits waiting for him to finish his taxi. They kept a brilliant spotlight trained on the aircraft. He waved out the window and motioned for them to stay where they were. Over the radio, he said, “I need an isolation suit ready for me about one hundred meters from the plane. And the truck will have to back off a hundred meters beyond that.” A man standing on the truck cab listened to a companion inside and signaled thumbs-up. A limp isolation suit was arranged on the runway and the truck and personnel quickly increased their distance.

Bernard powered down the engines and cut the switches, leaving only the cabin lights and emergency fuel jettison system on. Jeppesen case under his arm, he stepped into the passenger cabin and took out a pressurized aluminum canister of disinfectant from the luggage compartment. With a deep breath, he slipped a rubber filter mask over his head and read the instructions on the side of the canister. The black conical nozzle had a flexible plastic hose with a brass fitting. The fitting slipped snugly into the top valve in the canister and snicked home.

Nozzle in one hand and canister in another, Bernard returned to the cockpit and sprayed the controls, seat, floor and ceiling until they dripped with the milky green, noxious fluid. He then re-entered the passenger cabin, applying the high-pressure stream to everything he had touched, and more besides. He unscrewed the nozzle when the can was empty and released the pressure valve, placing the canister in a leather-cushioned seat. With the twist of a lever, the hatch hissed open, descending to a few inches above the concrete.

He tapped his pants pocket with one hand to make sure the flare pistol was there, felt for the six extra shells, and climbed down the stairway to the concrete, setting the Jeppesen case on the runway about ten meters from the jet’s bright red nose.

Step by step, he sabotaged his aircraft, first loosening and draining the hydraulics systems, then slashing the tires and letting out the air. With an ax he broke the windscreen on the starboard side of the cockpit, then the three passenger windows on the port side, clambering up on the wing to reach them.

He climbed up the stairs and entered the cockpit, reaching around the disinfectant-soaked seat to pull up the cover on the fuel jettison switch. With a hard click, the switch depressed under his finger and the valves opened. Bernard quickly left the plane, snatched the case and ran to where the gray and orange isolation suit lay on the strip.

The technicians and Pharmek personnel had made no attempt to interfere. Bernard removed the pistol and shells from his pocket, took off all his clothing and donned the pressurized suit. Balling up the clothing, he carried it to the pool of jet fuel under the Falcon. He returned and opened the case, removing his passport and dropping it into a plastic bag. Then he picked up the gun.

The shell slid smoothly into the barrel. He took careful aim-hoping the trajectory wouldn’t be too curved-and fired a flare at his pride and joy.

The fuel blossomed in a mushroom of orange and roiling black. Silhouetted against the inferno, Bernard hefted his case and walked toward the truck.

A customs official was not likely to be present, but to be legal and aboveboard, he held the plastic-wrapped passport out and pointed at it. A man in a similar isolation suit took it from him.

“Nothing to declare,” Bernard said. The man raised his hand to the suit’s helmet in acknowledgment and stepped back. “Spray me down, please.”

He pirouetted in the shower of disinfectant, lifting his arms. As he climbed the steps into the truck’s isolation tank, he heard the faint hum of the air recirculator and saw the purple gleam of ultraviolet lights. The hatch swung shut behind nun, paused, then sank into its seals with a distant sigh.

Heading toward Pharmek on a narrow two-lane road through grass pastures, Bernard peered through the thick side view port at the landing strip. The fuselage of the jet had collapsed in a skeletal, blackened heap. Flames still leaped high into the summer dawn. The blaze seemed to be consuming everything.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Heinz Paulsen-Fuchs looked at the records of calls displayed on the screen of his phone. Already it was beginning. There had been inquiries from several agencies, including the Bundesumweltamt—House Environmental Oversight—and the Bundesgesundheitsamt, Federal Health. State officials in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden were also concerned.

All flights to and from the United States had been canceled. He could expect officials on his doorstep within hours. Before they arrived, he had to hear Bernard’s explanation.

Not for the first time in his life did he regret coming to the aid of a friend. It was not the least of his failings. One of the most important industrialists in post-war Germany, and he was still a sentimental soft-touch.

He donned a transparent raincoat over his trim gray wool suit and carefully placed a beret on his curly white hair. Then he waited by the front door for the rain-beaded Citröen.

“Good morning, Uwe,” he greeted his chauffeur as the car door was opened for him. “I promised this for Richard.” He leaned over the seat and handed Uwe three paperback mysteries. Richard was the chauffeur’s twelve-year-old son, like Paulsen-Fuchs an avid mystery buff. “Drive even faster than usual.”

“You will pardon me that I didn’t meet you at the airstrip,” Paulsen-Fuchs said. “I was here, preparing for your arrival—and then I was called away. There are already inquiries from my government. Something very serious is happening. You are aware of it?”

Bernard approached the thick, triple-paned window separating the biological containment laboratory from the adjacent viewing chamber. He held up his hand, criss-crossed by white lines, and said, “I’m infected.”

Paulsen-Fuchs’ eyes narrowed and he held two fingers to his cheek. “You are apparently not alone, Michael. What is happening in America?”

“I haven’t heard anything since I left.”

“Your Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta have issued emergency instructions. All air flights intra-and international are cancelled. Rumors say some cities do not respond to communications—telephone or radio. There appears to be rapidly spreading chaos. Now, you come to us, burn your vehicle on our airstrip, make very certain that you are the only thing from your country to survive in ours-everything else is sterilized. What can we make from all this, Michael?”

“Paul, there are several things all countries must do immediately. You must quarantine recent travelers from the U.S., Mexico-possibly from all of North America. I have no idea how far the contagion will spread, but it seems to be moving quickly.”

“Yes, our government is working to do just this. But you know bureaucracy—”

“Go around the bureaucracy. Cut off all physical contact with North America.”

“I cannot simply make them do that by suggesting—”

“Paul,” Bernard said, holding up his hand again, “I have perhaps a week, less if what you say is accurate. Tell your government this is more than just a vat spill. I have all the important records in my flight case. I need to conference with your senior biologists as soon as I’ve had a couple of hours sleep. Before they talk to me, I want them to view the files I brought with me. I’ll plug the disks into the terminal here. I can’t say much more now; I’ll fall over if I don’t sleep soon.”

“Very well, Michael.” Paulsen-Fuchs regarded him sadly, deep lines of worry showing on his face. “Is it something we imagined could happen?”

Bernard thought for a moment. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

“All the worse, then,” Paulsen-Fuchs said. “I will arrange things now. Transfer your data. Get sleep.” Paulsen-Fuchs left and the light in the viewing chamber was turned off.

Bernard paced the three-by-three meters area of his new home. The lab had been built in the early eighties for genetic experiments which, at the time, were regarded as potentially dangerous. The entire inner chamber was suspended within a high-pressure tank; any ruptures in the chamber would result in atmosphere entering, not escaping. The pressurized tank could be sprayed with several kinds of disinfectant, and was surrounded by yet another tank, this one evacuated. All electrical conduits and mechanical systems which had to pass through the tanks were jacketed in sterilizing solutions. Air and waste materials leaving the lab were subjected to high-heat sterilization and cremation; any samples taken from the lab were processed in an adjacent chamber with the same safeguards. From now until the problem was solved, or he was dead, nothing from Bernard’s body would be touched by another living thing outside the chamber.

The walls were neutral light gray; lighting was provided by fluorescents in vertical strips in the walls, and by three bright ceiling-mounted panels. Lights could be controlled from both inside and outside. The floor was featureless black tile. In the middle of the room-clearly visible from both of the opposed viewing chambers-was a standard business desk and secretary’s chair, and on the desk, a high-resolution monitor. A utilitarian but comfortable-looking cot, without sheets or blanket, awaited him in one corner. A chest of drawers stood by the stainless steel pass-through hatch. On one wall, a large rectangular square marked a hatch for large equipment—waldoes, he suspected. The ensemble was completed by a lounge chair and a curtained commode-shower facility that looked like it had been removed in one piece from an airplane or recreational vehicle.

He picked up the pants and shirt laid out for him on the cot and felt the material between forefinger and thumb. There would be no accommodations for modesty or privacy from here on. He was no longer a private person. He would soon be wired, probed, inspected by doctors and generally treated like a laboratory animal.

Very well, he thought, lying back on the cot. I deserve it. I deserve whatever happens now. Mea culpa.

Bernard fell back on the cot and closed his eyes.

His pulse sang in his ears.