I broke my silence. “What’s your evidence? You got an observer in West Africa who’s seen someone kicking a drum of anthrax into a dust storm? And how’s that going to affect us this many miles downwind? It wouldn’t all get this far, and there’d be dispersion, and …”
Guffey leaned back in his chair and stared up through the overhead screen into the sky, which was full of puffy clouds turning rose-pink with the sunset. Chameleons ran across the screening, hanging upside down by their tiny toes. Guffey’s eyes panned with one of them, an observer doing what he did incessantly, and did best. When he spoke, all trace of humor had left him. “Right. That’s what any intelligent person would ask first. And I got to admit, the idea only tumbled out of my mind as a subparagraph of the working hypotheses, a sort of ‘if-then.’ An abstraction. An intellectual pursuit, just letting the mind follow where it might go. And the first time I waved that flag in front of anyone else, I was trying to get funding from the military. Trying to get someone worked up enough to notice the project.”
He took a swig of his drink and continued. “I like reefs. Been diving all my life. Want to do something for them. But as I got into it with these guys, looking for funding—with the CDC, the Department of Agriculture, the military—I started getting asked to speak at different kinds of conferences, outside my specialty, outside geology even. I began working with the biologists, the medical people, the chemists, the meteorologists. The picture began to change.” He trailed off, continuing to watch the progress of the lizard across the screen. “All this on a shoestring. Couldn’t have done it without the power of the Internet.”
Tom waited. I waited.
“September 11 happened,” Guffey said. “Terrorism on our own turf. Then what came next, remember? Anthrax. The first death was right here in Florida. Then more in New Jersey, and the scare at the Senate Office Building.”
I said, “But that was done through the mail. Those spores were in letters. It’s a lethal bacillus, and it doesn’t take much to cause illness, but it takes more than one spore. You throw it into the wind over North Africa, it’s going to be so diffused by the time it gets here, no one’s going to even notice, let alone get sick.”
Guffey said, “That’s what everyone thinks. But everyone has been wrong more than once in this man’s universe. Hey, all those people went to work in the World Trade Center towers that morning, and I’ll betcha not too many of them thought they’d be lying under tons of rubble by noon.”
I said, “In
The Secret Life of Dust
, the author quotes scientists as saying that the UV light kills the microbes when they fly up into the air.”
Miles said, “That was the prevailing wisdom, but it wasn’t exactly true. The author of that book had to go to press before we got our early data. We have plenty of germs arriving hale and hearty. I have to suppose that the dust is so thick that whatever’s toward the center of the cloud is sheltered from the UV. But that’s just another scientific wild-assed guess. We get so hung up on guesses that we come to think they’re facts, and they aren’t facts until we put ’em to the test.”
Tom’s face had gone hard with concentration. He said, “But like Em said, show me the evidence that single spores can do what a jet aircraft hitting the Trade Center can do.”
Guffey sat up, frustration making his movements abrupt. “Who says they can’t? Did you know the last person to die of anthrax in that series was a frail old lady in Connecticut? In her nineties. No one could figure that one out. She hadn’t gotten any mail, hadn’t left home in days, but
bam
, there she was in the morgue with lungs as black and festering as
anything you’d see in your worst nightmare. Even I thought: Oh, it’s just a fluke. They missed something in their analysis.
“Well, then I got an e-mail from a feller in England who’s a meteorologist. Like I say, I been traveling in some different circles, and I’ve become part of a grass-roots network of people ’at’s interested in all this medical stuff. So this guy says he analyzed the winds and air conditions recorded for metropolitan New York the evening when that old lady’s exposure would have occurred. What did he find? Moist, cold air flowing straight from the postal building where the letters were handled right over toward the town in Connecticut where this old lady lived. The air would have stayed low to the ground, and there was almost no turbulence. No diffusion. That lady was old and frail, her immune system pretty well shot. Maybe she went out to call the cat, took a deep breath of the night air so she could holler, ‘Here puss-puss.’ You tell me how she got that dose. Thing is, in her case it didn’t take much.
“But here’s the thing: The point of bioterrorism is not to kill everyone. All you got to do to be effective is make enough people sick that the nation’s resources get sucked up into nursing a bunch of invalids. And we are a graying society. We got all these boomers and their elderly mothers living in tight clusters we call cities. Hell, down here in Florida we got all your snowbirds. Medical wizardry has kept them alive long past their three score and ten, and if they don’t get their meds, they’d drop like flies. We’re a hothouse society, used to our little supports. Imagine what a disease like anthrax could do if you moved beyond a half teaspoon in a letter to a whole drum of it dumped purposefully into the wind.”
“We have vaccines,” said Tom. “And antibiotics.”
Guffey laughed humorlessly. “Tests show the vaccines don’t do the whole job.” As Tom’s eyebrows shot up in alarm, Guffey pressed onward. “A combination of vaccination and antibiotics worked the best in clinical trials. Hell, we don’t even know for sure what those tests mean,
because we ran them on monkeys! Do you know any human that would have volunteered for that? Nobody in their right mind would even think of it. Not even prisoners. We’re talking about a lethal disease, not the common cold. Even with both vaccination and drugs, you have to start administering the drugs within twenty-four hours of exposure, and the first symptoms take at least forty-eight to emerge, and even then, it comes on like a case of the flu, and no one even goes to the doctor until they’re five inches from gone.
“What’s more, these bugs used by terrorists have teeth as long as your arm. Hell, that’s no normal anthrax floating out of those envelopes. Our own smart guys worked hard to make them as potent as possible, and as you no doubt know, our strains are the source of most of the terrorist supplies in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein’s boys bought their starter supply from the American Type Culture Collection, a private germ bank in Maryland.”
Tom was starting to squirm in his seat. He’d long since forgotten his Scotch. “All right,” he said. “You’ve got my attention. But take a number on the big list of things to worry about. English Muslims wearing explosive tennis shoes climbing on airliners. Suitcase-sized A-bombs. Pregnant women wearing plastique. The list is endless. We simply have too many things to fear these days.”
I said, “And if you really want to make people sick, rent a crop duster and buzz Miami.”
Guffey took a gulp of his drink. “Sure enough, Emily. Go to the head of the class.”
Tom set down his drink. “Then you’re not talking about Africa.”
Guffey said, “Oh, hell no. I’m talking much closer to home. All’s anyone’s got to do to nail us and hide it under the cover of nature is this: wait for a nice dust storm to work its way across the ocean, then run a drone trawler past us just outside the international limit with a nice smudging device running. Our own military researchers developed the technique. A small canister of the stuff would
be enough to kill every man, woman, and child in this state several times over. Hell, the Russians made whole tank cars of that bacillus that are unaccounted for. Where’d it all go? You tell me, Tom. You tell me.”
Tom sat up straight and leaned toward Guffey. “But you’re not really talking about Russian anthrax left over from the Cold War. You’re talking about new germs being cultured right now.”
Guffey stared off toward the sunset. The golden orb had disappeared below the horizon, and great billowy clouds had darkened to a moldering gray. “You are correct. Now we’re getting back to our missing microbiologist.”
Lucy fumbled with the buttons on the front of her best beseen-in-public dress, wishing that, when the publicist had called and asked her to sub for a colleague, who had developed laryngitis, at this evening’s public appearance she had had the intelligence to say no. She would have been within her rights to do so, citing an interest in staying free of germ exposure before a flight. But as usual, she had said yes, unwilling to risk anyone thinking she was not tough enough to do whatever needed to be done. Deep inside the closely kept privacy of her mind, Lucy grumbled,
Can’t the PR department do its job without making me trot in front of the public?
As her fear and frustration mounted, she thought,
Damn NASA for using its astronaut corps like freaks in a sideshow!
The force of her emotions made her feel like she was losing her balance. She caught herself and leaned on the edge of the sink, eyes closed, remembering to breathe.
This is not me,
she told herself.
I am a team player. I have not forgotten that it’s the public that is paying for this flight. And all my training. And all the years I spent at university. The least I can do is help them celebrate American’s highest achievement.
She opened her eyes and stared at the floor. Her gaze came into focus with her eyes aimed at infinity, focusing on the centers of two tiles in the pattern instead of one.
The wider parallax made the tiles jump and float with an illusion of greater depth, as if she were staring at a stereo pair of air photographs. Her mind slipped into a tight observation of the phenomenon, careening away from the stress of the evening’s coming event. But she was unable to maintain the abstraction, and her mind soon crashed back to her ongoing awareness of the danger she must face by being seen in public. Her ears rushed with a sound like the crowd of people who would fill the hall, earthbound enthusiasts and their semi-interested spouses hoping to be inspired or at least entertained by what she had to say. Like a drowning woman clutching a floating piece of wreckage, she clamped onto the thought of the task itself, and ran the assignment through her head, rehearsing. She was to speak to them about the various projects in which a geologist would be involved in space. She would go for the usual laughs—What’s a rock hound doing going into space, where there are no rocks?—and when they were warmed up, she would speak to them of observation. Of the beauty of patterns and what they told her, seen close up through a microscope, or as the naked-eye observer standing in the landscape, or from a distant platform in space or beyond, a never-ending expansion of fractals.
And she would speak to them of one objective of her voyage: the whirls of dust that blew off the Earth’s deserts. She would tell them of the diseases carried on that mineral dust, and tell them about the synthetic chemicals riding along as aerosols, and help them to perceive the importance of doing primary research on these phenomena. She would describe the various observation platforms NASA was using to study them, what and how much was riding on the wind, and how and where it originated, and when the problem had reached lethal proportions. She would tell them about the satellite image slices used—TOMs, SeaWiFS—and about observations made from the International Space Station and from the shuttle itself.
And she would try, desperately, to convey to them her passion for the beautiful orb over which she would soon
float, a lover levitated by her force of feeling. But she wouldn’t use such words. Such words were too revealing, too intimate. Instead, she would keep her voice level and forceful and pump out scientific terms that aimed more abstractly at her truths.
She had learned public speaking in graduate school. Years working as a teaching assistant to earn her funding had long since ironed out the wrinkles of terror that used to fall like heavy drapery around her as she walked to the front of the room, turned, and faced the assembled listeners. She had learned to be poised, confident, dynamic … at times even charming. More usually, people perceived her as aloof. The PR coach at NASA had taken pains to tell her this, trying to get her to drop some of her multisyllabic, Latinate terms for simpler words with more emotional punch. And to smile, and make better eye contact. Lucy had fought this badgering every inch of the way and would tonight of all nights perform her task any way she damned well could, interpersonal warmth be damned.
Tonight, she would not be looking into her audience’s eyes except to scan each face to make certain that
he
was not there. After confirming this, she would be staring over their heads, keenly watching the entrances to the room. But what would she do if
he
appeared?
Her mind shot backward to the evening she had met him. How ironic that it was at a speaking event like this. He had come up after her talk to compliment her. She had been tired, lonely, hungry for approval, and … he had been quite attractive, all big and brawny and blond, just the way she liked her men. How she wished she could take back that night, rewind, and live forward again without the fateful accident of that meeting. Her mind went blank with dissociation as the intensity of that upset once again overwhelmed her.
Shaking herself back to the present moment, Lucy straightened up, picked up her hairbrush, and began, mechanically, to pull it through her hair. Three strokes on the left, three on the right, one front-to-back to lift it off her
forehead. She stared at her reflection in the mirror, assessing the weight of the years. She was a month shy of forty and had never married. Marriage and raising children had just never seemed an option, not with everything she aimed to accomplish … or were her former boyfriends right when they said that she had armored her heart to protect her precious mind and ambitions?
To hell with them all
, she thought bitterly.
In just days, or at worst weeks, I will achieve my goal. We’ll climb into the T-38’s and fly to the Cape. The next day, final prep, begin to suit up. The day after that, we climb aboard
Endeavor
for the final countdown. At T minus O, we have ignition, we lift off, and I
… She stared into the mirror at the dark areas under each eye, and thought,
How strange to be looking forward to the risk of space travel to feel safe.
The timer she had set in the kitchen buzzed distantly. She dropped the brush into the sink. Time to go. She moved out of the bathroom, headed down the hall toward the hat stand that filled the space next to the door into the garage. There she had ritually placed her pocketbook, her keys, and the light jacket that protected her from the ubiquitous air-conditioning of house, car, office, and meeting rooms. She surely did not need it for the sultry Houstonian night air.
She paused with her hand on the knob of the door into the garage. This was the moment that scared her most, ever since the morning she had opened this very door and found
him
standing on the other side.
In one terrible moment, she had frozen.
He had lunged, hands flying toward her.
Thawing, she had slammed the door and shot the bolt, saved by decades of physical training and the lightning-fast reflexes it took to make the astronaut corps in the first place.
Had he held a knife, or had she just imagined that?
And—this question tormented her—how had he gotten into the garage? How had he gotten past the security system?
She still did not know.
Her mind plummeted back to that day. How long ago
had it been? Two months? Three? Was it really that long ago? That recent? Time seemed to dilate either way, the effect of stress.
The knob felt cold in her hand. Too cold. Did that mean that he was there now, on the other side of her door again, waiting for her to unlock it?
For the thousandth time, her mind whispered its question:
What would he have done to me if I had not stopped him?
She knew, and did not want to know. A spurned lover, insane, willing to do anything to get her under his control. He’d have her chained to his bedstead if he could.
Her mind reeled out of control, spinning back through the events that had led to her present moment of terror, of torture. He had at first seemed so charming, almost impish in his capacity to shift from one apparent personality to another, like dating an actor who was always in rehearsal. But there had always been little signals, even from their first meeting, telling her that something was wrong, each clue too small or inconsequential in itself to make her turn and say, “Sorry, but I don’t want to see you again.” One moment he’d seem infinitely suave and pulled together and then, suddenly, she’d note a moment of disarray, the man flickering instantaneously toward the inchoate rage and panic of an abandoned child; then, not a word or a gesture having quite skidded over the line past which she could be sure of what was happening, he would resume the appearance of normalcy, a sly deception giving him the image of an adult male.
She had dated him erratically, when he was in town on business that was never quite described. She had gone to bed with him three, no, four times, and wondered still how he had talked her into it. Why had she let him? Was it his intensity, or his obvious need of her? She had let herself imagine that it could work, his house of mirrors encouraging her to select whichever fantasy suited her own fragile needs. But always something about him seemed off, discolored. Yet each meeting seemed innocuous enough, and
he even handed her the rationalizations.
We’re not kids
, he’d tell her.
Be my lady just this night.
And one more night. And one more. Inching ever closer to the darkness that seethed within him. Just one more. As if, having hugged this tar baby and become slightly soiled, she could tell herself that she might as well hug again and wash later. His sexual demands had been by turns exciting, overwhelming, unnerving, and finally … frightening.
She had decided—for the fifth or sixth time—to see him maybe one more time before breaking off the relationship when a mutual acquaintance phoned. An old classmate, a member of the association that had invited her to that first fateful meeting. He invited her now to join him for a cup of coffee at a public cafeé. His tone was casual, but she knew something was up. Over the smell of beans, he had revealed the awful truth. This man she had been dating—this creature that she had let near her—had held another woman at knifepoint, naked, squirming, begging for her life.
“What do you mean?” Lucy had asked.
“I mean he very nearly killed her,” he had replied.
“But he didn’t.”
The friend had looked at her. Blinked. “No. She said he was interrupted. The bastard heard the mailman coming up the walk. He made her promise she would not tell.” When Lucy said nothing in response, he continued. “She said it was as if he suddenly became a small boy. He let her up and told her to put her clothes on. Said it was their secret. Imagine.”
“Did she go to the police?”
“No. She was too frightened. She left town instead. I only know about this through a mutual friend.”
“Then there’s no record of the event.”
“Correct.”
Lucy had sat there, her coffee untouched and going cold, stray bits of observation finally clicking together.
“Sorry,” the friend had said. “It must be tough; I mean, you’ve given up so much of your social life to get this far,
making the astronaut corps and all. You’re my age, right? Almost forty? Is there anything I can do?”
Leaping past his pity, Lucy had said, “No,” the word flying from her lips, the old pattern of denial closing all access to her heart. She had managed a wry smile to indicate a lack of importance. She had said, “I’ll take care of this. I appreciate your telling me. I was just breaking it off anyway. Only went out a couple of times. He’s not my type.” So casual. Let everyone think it was barely a scratch.
But the scratch had proved a vicious gash as talons sank deep into her flesh, a predator who would not let go.
That night he had called just as she was turning out the light to go to sleep. Even from their first meeting, he had thus moved to throw her off her rhythms, keeping her awake past her schedule. This night she would not let him steal her sleep. This night, she decided, she would not answer. Not answer to the creature who had lied so deeply about himself.
When the phone clicked over to the machine, he had left a message. His words had been innocuous enough, but his tone told her that, by the very fact that she had not picked up the phone, he knew she knew. She lay back on her bed and waited. Fifteen minutes later, she had heard a car drive up and slow down, its driver scanning her house.
Her hand moving faster than conscious thought, she had clicked off the bedside light.
The car had stopped, its engine idling.
Seconds later, the phone rang.
She did not answer. No message was left.
The next day, he had phoned her at work, asking her to lunch. She had declined, citing EVA practice drills in the pool.
You can’t do this,
he had said.
Can’t.
And had repeated the word twice, like a chant, then told her,
You haven’t asked my permission.
The morning after that she first found footprints pressed into the dew in her backyard. Large, like him.
No night after that had borne the rest she needed.