The Observers, page 10
part #2 of CV Series
“What?”
“I said, what about having a look farther down?”
Hartman stepped over the rope with its no admittance sign, and after a moment McNulty followed him. The light from the mall dimmed behind them; in the gathering gloom they could see the walls covered with dust and cobwebs. Debris had been swept into corners; most of the light fixtures and holoscreens were broken. “You forget how much effort it takes to keep up a place like this,” said Hartman sadly. They turned around and went back.
That autumn there were freak windstorms in Louisiana, Kentucky, and Oklahoma, flooding in the Illinois Dust Bowl, drought in the Pacific Northwest; a new volcano appeared in Mexico near Guaymas; there were earthquakes in Indonesia, Japan, and Alaska. Signs of the times, people said.
Owen moved to San Francisco, where the Navy found her an apartment in a residential hotel and temporary office space in the Naval Research Center on Treasure Island; she began to oversee the remodeling of Sea Venture as soon as the lease agreement was signed. She made frequent trips to Washington, New Haven, Cambridge, Chicago and Baltimore for recruiting purposes. By November she had signed up all eight of her section heads.
For research on human subjects she had Donald R. Strang, a Harvard physiological psychologist highly respected in his field; for animal research, Jerry Plotkin, a former student of Strang’s, recommended by him; for brain studies, Carl Meyer, a neurophysiologist who had done some interesting things in EEG and brain scan interpretation; for R&D, Glen D. Cunningham, a physicist and electrical engineer; for developmental psychology, Melanie Kurtz, the author of several well-regarded studies of young children; for psychological testing, Julian F. Eberhard, an adjunct professor at Cornell; to oversee the medical staff, Conrad H. Geary, a former chief of medicine at Bethesda. The eighth was her “crazy woman,” Dorothy Italiano, a Jungian hypnotherapist who had written intriguing papers about various slightly disreputable things—twin studies, telepathy, acupuncture, even the ouija board and the I Ching.
Hank Harmon, Owen’s liaison at Justice, smoothed the way at every step. Through him and his opposite number at Health, she was able to get delivery of a Mitsubishi 101. Owen had never used such a powerful computer before, and at first she found it a little alarming.
In appearance it was deceptively commonplace, just a holotube and flatscreen with an auxiliary keyboard which she almost never used. It had a low baritone voice, so much better in quality and intonation than the computer voices she was used to, that although it displayed no facial image, she found herself listening to it as though it were a human being—a person infinitely patient, wise, knowledgeable, dispassionate—the perfect friend.
In spite of its masculine voice, she called it Mitzi. She fed it all the medical records she had been able to collect from NIH, CDC, WHO and elsewhere. Then, facing the computer across her desk one afternoon, she said, “Show me a world map of McNulty’s cases to date, Mercator projection, red for male, blue for female.”
The map appeared on the flatscreen. She leaned forward. Something she had suspected before was coming clearer.
“Now a map of the United States, same instructions.”
There it was, unmistakably. “Give me city maps of Baltimore, Galveston, and Atlanta, same instructions.”
The maps came up side by side on the flatscreen. “Superimpose cases to date in the current outbreak of typhus and plague. Use square for typhus, triangle for plague.”
Now there was no doubt: the two sets of case locations, McNulty’s and typhus-plague, overlapped hardly at all; they were almost like photographic negatives of each other. The heaviest concentrations of the two rat-vectored diseases, of course, were in the slum areas of all three cities; only a few McNulty’s cases appeared there.
“Significance?”
“First hypothesis. The parasite avoids areas known to be infected with typhus and plague in order to avoid infection. Second hypothesis: Typhus and plague give cross-immunity for McNulty’s by a mechanism unknown.”
“Show me a bar chart of McNulty’s victims by age and sex.”
The chart appeared on the flatscreen. Every cohort was represented, from infants to the elderly. At Owen’s command, Mitzi overlaid it with a chart of the general U.S. population. The match was fairly good except for children of both sexes below the age of six, who were underrepresented, and women aged 20-25; there was a distinct bulge there. Owen leaned forward and touched the bulge. “Statistically significant?” she asked.
“Yes, at the five percent confidence level.”
“Possible hypotheses?”
“One. Selective exposure. A, women of those age-groups spend more time in public places than the general population. B, the parasite selects women in reproductive age-groups in order to reproduce itself. C, the parasite is attracted to women of those age-groups for reasons unknown. Two. Women in those age-groups are less resistant to the parasite than the general population, for reasons unknown. Three. A difference in report rates based on sex and age. Four. Symptomatic differences in women of those age-groups and the general population.”
“Let me see data organized by occupations.”
The population chart vanished and was replaced by an alphabetical list followed by numbers.
“Give me a bar chart in descending order of magnitude.”
The chart appeared. At the top was “General service personnel,” followed by “Airline personnel” and “Taxi drivers.” That was peculiar.
“Let’s have an overlay of the general U.S. population.”
The bars split into stripes of blue and orange. In the comer of the screen a legend appeared: “Figures from 2001.”
Now there was a real anomaly: the proportion of airline personnel and cabdrivers among McNulty’s victims was thirty-five percent greater than that in the general population. Owen touched the screen again. “What do you make of it?”
“Hypothesis. The parasite selects hosts in order to travel from one place to another. Taxi drivers are used to travel to airports. Airline personnel are used as intermediate hosts until the parasite is able to select a host going to a preferred destination.”
“Save charts and data.”
“Done.”
She remembered something Marvin Minsky used to say. “Intelligence is a word we use when we don’t understand what a human being is doing.” That was too easy, perhaps, but it had stuck in her mind. What was intelligence, really? The ability to pass the Turing test? If so, Mitzi was intelligent, and yet it was nothing but a program built into a superfast computer.
She called up the chart of occupations again and looked at it more closely, this time with special attention to the bottom of the list. One thing that stood out immediately was the category U/NPA, “unemployed, no permanent address.” In the general population it was nine percent, among McNulty’s victims .03.
U/NPA was a catchall category; it included the structurally unemployed, some criminals, and the permanent underclass of street people and vagrants.
One possible explanation was that the parasite was avoiding people who were poor and homeless, without medical attention, and perhaps as well those who were subject to drug-withdrawal symptoms and frequent arrest, because their life experiences were unpleasant. She felt a tickle of excitement.
“Give me a breakdown in bar chart form of McNulty’s cases who were diagnosed for other medical problems in the hospital.”
“Sorry, I don’t have enough data.”
That was the problem; there was always something she needed to know that had never been reported. It was criminal that there was still no comprehensive medical database anywhere in the world. “Write a new form requesting that information,” she said.
The form poured smoothly out of the printer; Owen looked it over. “All right. Copies to all reporting institutions. Mark it ‘Urgent.’”
She sat back, brooding. “Give me the occupations chart again.”
Now she saw other anomalies that she had dismissed before as insignificant. “Executives,”
“Sales representatives,” “Retired persons,” and “Investors” were all overrepresented. That was easily explained—those were people who traveled a good deal—but there were other differences that now seemed to form another pattern. “Give me a contagion tree. Better put it in the tube.” The three-dimensional pattern formed. Owen looked at it with pleasure: it was beautifully ordered, the sort of thing that would have taken weeks to do in the old days. “Now give me bar charts of duration of infestation for each occupation, with comparison to the general population.”
The charts appeared on the flatscreen.
“All right, now give me another split bar chart, showing frequency and duration for each occupation.” Now that was interesting. She leaned forward. Most of the categories with the highest percentages in frequency—the cabdrivers, airline personnel—were very low in duration. The parasite had used them to get somewhere but had not stayed in them long. Other categories were low in frequency but high in duration: entertainers, scientists, and a wide scattering of other occupations, including “housewives.” Were these people whose inner lives were richer and therefore more interesting? Was the parasite driven by the same force that drove her?
Later that month, during a holo conversation with Hank Harmon in Washington, she remarked, “One of the problems we have is obtaining currently infected subjects.
We thought of introducing visitors into the Detention Center, but we realized that the chance of obtaining a currently infected subject in any given day would be less than one hundredth of a percent. We’ve got to do better than that. We have to go into the general population and find at least five or six infected subjects, isolate them and bring them here without letting them infect anybody else.”
“Let me put you in touch with the CIA research labs. I think they can solve that one.”
In June she went to Langley and talked to the director of the CIA laboratories, a pleasant gray-haired man named Garrity. “I understand you have something for me,” she said.
“Yes, and we’re ready to show it off. Come down this way.”
They entered a basement room where, in a moment, two men appeared. They were wheeling between them an upright aluminum framework with a plastic sheet in the middle marked off in feet and inches. “Dr. Owen, this is Bob Hendrix, one of our wizards, and this is his assistant, Steve Newberry.”
“Glad to know you, Doctor,” said Hendrix. “Well, this is what we’ve come up with. This framework is eleven feet six inches wide in the upright configuration. The subject is asked to stand against it here, in order to measure his height. Steve, will you do the honors?”
Newberry stepped up against the framework. Hendrix pressed a control. Four curved metal pieces sprang out, pivoted and locked around Newberry’s waist and chest.
“At this point,” Hendrix said, “the shock causes the subject to breathe in sharply, and a jet of anesthetic vapor comes out of this cylinder into his face, but we won’t demonstrate that.” He glanced at Newberry, who grinned.
“From here,” Hendrix went on, “you have several options. The subject can be wheeled out in the upright configuration, in which case the whole thing can be covered with opaque plastic to resemble a garment rack. Or the framework can be tilted into the horizontal configuration, and then it looks like a standard medical litter.” He stepped behind the framework and lowered it onto another set of castored legs. Newberry, now supine, stared at the ceiling.
“In this configuration, we have these collapsible rails.” U-shaped metal bars slid out of the framework at the head and foot. “That gives you a minimum of five feet of distance all around. In either configuration, you can get the subject out with a minimum of fuss, and that dose of gas should keep him unconscious for twenty minutes to an hour. At the destination, you give him another shot of gas and wheel him into detention the same way.” He pressed another control; the restraints opened and Newberry got up.
“Now, for controlling the subject in the institution,” Hendrix said, “we came up with a simpler solution.” At his nod, Newberry went out and came back with an aluminum pole, six feet long, with a framework at one end that looked a little like a music stand. He handed the pole to Hendrix, who showed Owen the framework. “When you push this against anything, these pieces in the middle are forced backward, turning around the pivots on the side. That brings the ends together in the front, and they lock until the operator releases them.” He turned the pole around and showed her the red line painted around the shaft. “This tells the operator where he has to hold it. From this line to the business end when the mechanism is closed, it’s exactly five feet.”
“That’s very impressive,” Owen said. “How long will it take to manufacture them?”
“About how many?”
“Say fifty of the other ones and ten of these.”
“We can have them for you in five weeks, tested and ready to go.”
They were ready in six; then there were complicated arrangements involving Peace, Justice, and Health. It was finally decided that Marine MPs would make the actual arrests, supported by special agents of the FBI. Local authorities would be informed just before the program went into effect. The date had been set: Wednesday, September 8, two days after the Labor Day weekend.
21
In August, after all her section heads had moved to San Francisco, Owen held an orientation meeting in a conference room at the Naval Research Center.
“What seems to be happening,” she told them, “is that the parasite reproduces in a human female at the moment of conception. Since this isn’t an organism in the usual sense of the word, there’s no point in asking how, but the result is that there are two parasites instead of one. The original parasite leaves the host; then there is a latency period, which apparently is not the same as the human gestation period—it averages about thirty-six weeks instead of forty. That’s puzzling, but it may correspond to the point at which the human cortex becomes functional.”
“Thirty-six weeks?” Kurtz asked. “That’s a debated point, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is, but I think most of the discussion is rather metaphysical. Anyhow, I’m just suggesting this as a possibility, but if it’s right, then we could assume that the daughter parasite becomes functional at the same time and begins to pass between hosts. In any event, the growth curve is consistent with that assumption.”
“The doubling rate is about four months?” asked Donald Strang.
“Apparently that’s right, and that means that the present population of McNulty’s victims may be already on the order of seven hundred thousand. It also means that unless we find some way of containing the epidemic, we can expect saturation of the human population sometime around three and a half years from now.”
“What about natural immunity?” Carl Meyer asked. “A good point. We don’t know if there is any, but we need to find out. There’s a lot we don’t know. For instance, there are some unexplained differences between what happened on Sea Venture and what’s happened since. The most striking is the period of stupor, eight to ten days on CV and only eight or nine hours afterward. One possibility is that the parasite has become adapted to human hosts by reproducing in them. There are also a few cases where we can’t construct a contagion tree without including a host who has had the disease before, a person who did not collapse at all. We can’t draw any firm conclusion until we have more data, but the suggestion here is a progressive adaptation: a parasite bom in a human host causes a shorter period of stupor in a naive host, and none at all in a previously infected one. This line of thought also leads to some rather alarming conclusions about the primary hosts, the children infected at conception. If we are dealing with an adaptive process here, they may be more profoundly affected than other hosts, in ways that we may not be able to detect for years.”
“What are you doing about that?” Strang asked.
“Nothing. When we get our test group together, Ms. Kurtz will be studying the children known or suspected to be primary hosts. That’s a very important part of our research program, and it would be almost impossible to do under any other conditions.”
Owen paused and looked around the circle. “Now I want you all to understand very clearly what our goals are. We are going to study recovered McNulty’s patients, primary hosts, and the parasite itself, with three ends in view. First, we want to determine the long-term effects of the disease; second, we are going to study means of identifying active hosts, and third, we are going to try to find ways of inactivating or destroying the parasite itself. That’s our mission as laid down by the President when he established the Emergency Civil Control Authority. Beyond that, however, and this is very exciting to me, we have a unique opportunity to do basic research on human subjects.”
“What are the limitations of this research?” Strang asked.
“Do you mean ethical limitations? I think they will be just what they would be, or should be, in animal research.”
“That’s what I wanted to know,” said Strang.
In September McNulty spent part of his vacation with Geller and Barlow in Michigan, as he usually did. Janice had planned to come, but at the last minute she had had a call from her sister in Seattle, who was experiencing some kind of marital problem, and had gone up there instead.
“Why doesn’t she just divorce him?” Geller wanted to know.
“Not so easy. They have two kids.”
“Well, which is better, divorce, or raising two kids in a family where the parents hate each other?”
McNulty did not reply. It was late evening, and they were sitting on the screened patio in back of the house. The air was already cooling off, and the lake breeze had driven away the blackflies.
“Tell me something else,” Geller said after a moment. “In all the time you were on Sea Venture, did you ever wonder why you were wearing clothes? No insects there; the whole place was enclosed and air-conditioned; they could have kept it at twenty-two degrees and walked around bare-assed, but what did they do? They kept it three degrees cooler, so the women could wear fur coats. How do you explain that?”
