Darwin’s Radio. Greg Bear
let loose an explosion of laughter. She took off her glasses and wiped them, then replaced them. ‘It’s not funny. The charts are looking serious.’
‘Mark wants to let the drama build. He’s playing this one like a marlin on a line.’
‘I’m not very savvy about politics.’
‘I pretend not to be,’ Dicken said. ‘But the longer I hang around here, the more savvy I get.’
Salter glanced around the small room as if it might close in on her. ‘Are we done, Mark?’
Dicken grinned. ‘Claustrophobia acting up?’
‘It’s this room,’ Salter said. ‘Don’t you hear them?’ She leaned over the desk with a spooky expression. Dicken could not always tell whether Jane Salter was joking or serious. ‘The screaming of the monkeys?’
‘Yeah,’ Dicken said with a straight face. ‘I try to stay in the field as long as possible.’
In the director’s office in Building 4, Augustine looked at the statistics quickly, flipped through the twenty pages of numbers and computer-generated charts, and flung them down on the cafeteria table. ‘All very reassuring,’ he said. ‘At this rate we’ll be out of business by the end of the year. We don’t even know if SHEVA causes miscarriages in every pregnant woman, or whether it’s just a mild teratogen. Christ. I thought this was the one, Christopher.’
‘It’s good. It’s scary, and it’s public.’
‘You underestimate how much the Republicans hate the CDC,’ Augustine said. ‘The National Rifle Association hates us. Big tobacco hates us because we’re right in their back yard. Did you see that damned billboard just down the highway? By the airport? “Finally, a Butt Worth Kissing.” What was it – Camels? Marlboros?’
Dicken laughed and shook his head.
‘The Surgeon General is going right into the bear’s den. She’s not very happy with me, Christopher.’
‘There’s always the results I brought back from Turkey,’ Dicken said.
Augustine held up his hands and rocked back in his chair, fingers gripping the edge of the desk. ‘One hospital. Five miscarriages.’
‘Five out of five pregnancies, sir.’
Augustine leaned forward. ‘You went to Turkey because your contact said they had a virus that might abort babies. But why Georgia?’
‘There was an outbreak of miscarriages in Tbilisi five years ago. I couldn’t get any information in Tbilisi, nothing official. A mortician and I did a little drinking together – unofficially. He told me there had been an outbreak of miscarriages in Gordi about the same time.
Augustine had not heard this part before. Dicken had not put it in his report. ‘Go on,’ he said, only half-interested.
‘There was some sort of trouble, he wouldn’t come right out and say what. So – I drove to Gordi, and there was a police cordon around the town. I did some asking around in a few local road stops and heard about a UN investigation, Russian involvement. I called the UN. They told me that they were asking an American woman to help them.’
‘That was –’
‘Kaye Lang.’
‘Goodness,’ Augustine said, and pressed his lips into a thin smile. ‘Woman of the hour. You knew about her work on HERV?’
‘Of course.’
‘So … you thought somebody in the UN was on to something and needed her advice.’
‘The thought crossed my mind, sir. But they called on her because she knew forensic pathology.’
‘So, what were you thinking about?’
‘Mutations. Induced birth defects. Teratogenic viruses, maybe. And I was wondering why governments wanted parents dead.’
‘So there we are again,’ Augustine said. ‘Back to wild-eyed speculation.’
Dicken made a face. ‘You know me better than that, Mark.’
‘Sometimes I haven’t the slightest idea how you get such good results.’
‘I hadn’t finished my work. You called me back and said we had something solid.’
‘God knows I’ve been wrong before,’ Augustine said.
‘I don’t think you’re wrong. This is probably just the beginning. We’ll have more to go on soon.’
‘Is that what your instincts tell you?’
Dicken nodded.
Mark drew his brows together and folded his hands tightly on the top of the desk. ‘Do you remember what happened in 1963?’
‘I was just a baby then, sir. But I’ve heard. Malaria.’
‘I was seven years old myself. Congress pulled the plug on all funding for the elimination of insect-borne illnesses, including malaria. The stupidest move in the history of epidemiology. Millions of deaths world-wide, new strains of resistant disease … a disaster.’
‘DDT wouldn’t have worked much longer anyway, sir.’
‘Who can say?’ Augustine peaked two fingers. ‘Humans think like children, leaping from passion to passion. Suddenly world health just isn’t hot. Maybe we overstated our case. We’re backing down from the death of the rain forests and global warming is still just a simmer, not a boil. There haven’t been any devastating world-wide plagues, and Joe Sixpack never signed on to the whole Third World guilt trip. People are getting bored with apocalypse. If we don’t have a politically defensible crisis soon, on our home turf, we are going to get creamed in Congress, Christopher, and it could be 1963 all over again.’
‘I understand, sir.’
Augustine sighed through his nose and lifted his eyes to the ranks of fluorescent lights in the ceiling. ‘The SG thinks our apple is still too green to put on the President’s desk, so she’s having a convenient megrim. She’s postponed this afternoon’s meeting until next week.’
Dicken suppressed a smile. The thought of the Surgeon General faking a headache was precious.
Augustine fixed his gaze on Dicken. ‘All right, you smell something, go get it. Check miscarriage records in US hospitals for the last year. Threaten Turkey and Georgia with exposure to the World Health Organization. Say we’ll accuse them of breaking all our cooperation treaties. I’ll back you. Find out who’s been to the Near East and Europe and come down with SHEVA and maybe miscarried a baby or two. We have a week, and if it’s not you and a more deadly SHEVA, then I’m going to have to go with an unknown spirochete caught by some shepherds in Afghanistan … consorting with sheep.’ Augustine mocked a hangdog expression. ‘Save me, Christopher.’
Kaye was exhausted, felt like a queen, had been treated for the past week with the respect and friendly adoration of colleagues saluting one who has after some adversity been recognized as having seen farther into the truth. She had not suffered the kind of criticism and injustice others in biology had experienced in the last one hundred and fifty years – certainly nothing like what her hero, Charles Darwin, had had to face. Not even what Lynn Margulis had encountered with the theory of symbiotic evolution of eucaryotic cells. But there had been enough –
Skeptical and angry letters in the journals from old-guard geneticists convinced she was chasing after a wild hare; comments at conferences from faintly superior, smiling men and women convinced they were closer to a big discovery … Farther up the ladder of success, closer to the brass ring of Knowledge and Acknowledgment.
That