The Andromeda Strain Part 27

"All right, " Hall said. "Arrange it."

"Yes sir. Who is the person?"

"Dr. Smithson," Hall said.

The girl nodded and the screen went blank. Hall felt sorry for Smithson, but not very sorry; the man would have a few hours of sweating, but nothing more serious than that. And it was essential to halt rumors about Piedmont.

He sat back in his chair and thought about what he had learned. He was excited, and felt on the verge of an important discovery.

Three people: A diabetic in acidosis, from failure to take insulin.

An old man who drank Sterno and took aspirin, also in acidosis.

A young infant.

One had survived for hours, the other two had survived longer, apparently permanently. One had gone mad, the other two had not. Somehow they were all interrelated.

In a very simple way.

Acidosis. Rapid breathing. Carbon-dioxide content. Oxygen saturation. Dizziness. Fatigue. Somehow they were all logically coordinated. And they held the key to beating Andromeda.

At that moment, the emergency bell sounded, ringing in a high pitched, urgent way as the bright-yellow light began to flash.

He jumped up and left the room.

26. The Seal

IN THE CORRIDOR, HE SAW THE FLAs.h.i.+NG SIGN that indicated the source of the trouble: AUTOPSY. Hall could guess the problem-- somehow the seals had been broken, and contamination had occurred. That would sound the alarm.

As he ran down the corridor, a quiet, soothing voice on the loudspeakers said, "Seal has been broken in Autopsy. Seal has been broken in Autopsy. This is an emergency."

His lab technician came out of the lab and saw him. "What is it9"

"Burton, I think. Infection spread."

"Is he all right?"

"Doubt it," Hall said, running. She ran with him.

Leavitt came out of the MORPHOLOGY room and joined them, sprinting down the corridor, around the gentle curves. Hall thought to himself that Leavitt was moving quite well, for an older man, when suddenly Leavitt stopped.

He stood riveted to the ground. And stared straight forward at the flas.h.i.+ng sign, and the light above it, blinking on and off.

Hall looked back. "Come on," he said.

Then the technician: "Dr. Hall, he's in trouble."

Leavitt was not moving. He stood, eyes open, but otherwise he might have been asleep. His arms hung loosely at his sides.

"Dr. Hall."

Hall stopped, and went back.

"Peter, boy, come on, we need your--"

He said nothing more, for Leavitt was not listening. He was staring straight forward at the blinking light. When Hall pa.s.sed his hand in front of his face, he did not react. And then Hall remembered the other blinking lights, the lights Leavitt had turned away from, had joked off with stories.

"The son of a b.i.t.c.h," Hall said. "Now, of all times."

"What is it?" the technician said.

A small dribble of spittle was coming from the corner of Leavitt's mouth. Hall quickly stepped behind him and said to the technician, "Get in front of him and cover his eyes. Don't let him look at the blinking light."

"Why?"

"Because it's blinking three times a second," Hall said.

"You mean--"

"He'll go any minute now."

Leavitt went.

With frightening speed, his knees gave way and he collapsed to the floor. He lay on his back and his whole body began to vibrate. It began with his hands and feet, then involved his entire arms and legs, and finally his whole body. He clenched his teeth and gave a gasping, loud cry. His head hammered against the floor; Hall slipped his foot beneath the back of Leavitt's head and let him bang against his toes. It was better than having him hit the hard floor.

"Don't try to open his mouth," Hall said. "You can't do it. He's clenched tight."

As they watched, a yellow stain began to spread at Leavitt's waist.

"He may go into status," Hall said. "Go to the pharmacy and get me a hundred milligrams of phen.o.barb. Now. In a syringe. We'll get him onto Dilantin later, if we have to."

Leavitt was crying, through his clenched teeth, like an animal. His body tapped like a tense rod against the floor.

A few moments later, the technician came back with the syringe. Hall waited until Leavitt relaxed, until his body stopped its seizures, and then he injected the barbiturate.

"Stay with him," he said to the girl. "If he has another seizure, just do what I did-- put your foot under his head. I think he'll be all right. Don't try to move him."

And Hall ran down to the autopsy lab.

For several seconds, he tried to open the door to the lab, and then he realized it had been sealed off. The lab was contaminated. He went on to main control, and found Stone looking at Burton through the closed-circuit TV monitors.

Burton was terrified. His face was white and he was breathing in rapid, shallow gasps, and he could not speak. He looked exactly like what he was: a man waiting for death to strike him.

Stone was trying to rea.s.sure him. "Just take it easy, boy. Take it easy. You'll be okay. Just take it easy."

"I'm scared," Burton said. "d.a.m.n, I'm scared."

"Just take it easy," Stone said in a soft voice. "We know that Andromeda doesn't do well in oxygen. We're pumping pure oxygen through your lab now. For the moment, that should hold you."

Stone turned to Hall. "You took your time getting here. Where's Leavitt?"

"He fitted," Hall said.

"What?"

"Your lights flash at three per second, and he had a seizure."

"What?"

"Pet.i.t mal. It went on to a grand-mal attack; tonic clonic seizure, urinary incontinence, the whole bit. I got him onto phen.o.barb and came as soon as I could."

"Leavitt has epilepsy?"

"That's right."

Stone said, "He must not have known. He must not have realized."

And then Stone remembered the request for a repeat electroencephalogram.

"Oh," Hall said, "he knew, all right. He was avoiding flas.h.i.+ng lights, which will bring on an attack. I'm sure he knew. I'm sure he has attacks where he suddenly doesn't know what happened to him, where he just loses a few minutes from his life and can't remember what went on."

"Is he all right?"

"We'll keep him sedated."

Stone said, "We've got pure oxygen running into Burton. That should help him, until we know something more. " Stone flicked off the microphone b.u.t.ton connecting voice transmission to Burton. "Actually, it will take several minutes to hook in, but I've told him we've already started. He's sealed off in there, so the infection is stopped at that point. The rest of the base is okay, at least."

Hall said, "How did it happen? The contamination."

"Seal must have broken," Stone said. In a lower voice, he added, "We knew it would, sooner or later. All isolation units break down after a certain time."

Hall said, "You think it was just a random event?"

"Yes," Stone said. "Just an accident. So many seals, so much rubber, of such-and-such a thickness. They'd all break, given time. Burton happened to be there when one went."

Hall didn't see it so simply. He looked in at Burton, who was breathing rapidly, his chest heaving in terror.

Hall said, "How long has it been?"

Stone looked up at the stop-clocks. The stop-clocks were special timing clocks that automatically cut in during emergencies. The stop-clocks were now timing the period since the seal broke.

"Four minutes."

Hall said, "Burton's still alive."

"Yes, thank G.o.d." And then Stone frowned. He realized the point.

"Why, " Hall said, "is he still alive?"

"The oxygen..."

"You said yourself the oxygen isn't running yet. What's protecting Burton?"

At that moment, Burton said over the intercom, "Listen. I want you to try something for me."

Stone flicked on the microphone. "What?"

"Kalocin," Burton said.

"No." Stone's reaction was immediate.

"Dammit, it's my life."

"No," Stone said.

Hall said, "Maybe we should try--"

"Absolutely not. We don't dare. Not even once."

Kalocin was perhaps the best-kept American secret of the last decade. Kalocin was a drug developed by Jensen Pharmaceuticals in the spring of 1965, an experimental chemical designated UJ44759W, or K-9 in the short abbreviation. It had been found as a result of routine screening tests employed by Jensen for all new compounds.

Like most pharmaceutical companies, Jensen tested all new drugs with a scatter approach, running the compounds through a standard battery of tests designed to pick up any significant biologic activity. These tests were run on laboratory animals-- rats, dogs, and monkeys. There were twenty-four tests in all.

Jensen found something rather peculiar about K-9. It inhibited growth. An infant animal given the drug never attained full adult size.

This discovery prompted further tests, which produced even more intriguing results. The drug, Jensen learned, inhibited metaplasia, the s.h.i.+ft of normal body cells to a new and bizarre form, a precursor to cancer. Jensen became excited, and put the drug through intensive programs of study.

By September 1965, there could be no doubt: Kalocin stopped cancer. Through an unknown mechanism, it inhibited the reproduction of the virus responsible for myelogenous leukemia. Animals taking the drug did not develop the disease, and animals already demonstrating the disease showed a marked regression as a result of the drug.

The excitement at Jensen could not be contained. It was soon recognized that the drug was a broad-spectrum antiviral agent. It killed the virus of polio, rabies, leukemia, and the common wart. And, oddly enough, Kalocin also killed bacteria.

And fungi.

And parasites.

Somehow, the drug acted to destroy all organisms, built on a unicellular structure, or less. It had no effect on organ systems-- groups of cells organized into larger units. The drug was perfectly selective in this respect.

In fact, Kalocin was the universal antibiotic. It killed everything, even the minor germs that caused the common cold. Naturally, there were side effects-- the normal bacteria in the intestines were destroyed, so that all users of the drug experienced ma.s.sive diarrhea-- but that seemed a small price to pay for a cancer cure.

In December 1965, knowledge of the drug was privately circulated among government agencies and important health officials. And then for the first time, opposition to the drug arose. Many men, including Jeremy Stone, argued that the drug should be suppressed.