The Andromeda Strain

Chapter 20

 

  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 FLASHING 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 flashing 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 passed 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 bitch," 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 phenobarb. 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 reassure him. "Just take it easy, boy. Take it easy. You'll be okay. Just take it easy. "

  "I'm scared," Burton said. "Damn, 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?"

  "Petit mal. It went on to a grand-mal attack; tonic clonic seizure, urinary incontinence, the whole bit. I got him onto phenobarb 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 flashing 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 button 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 God. " 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 o
f 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 shift 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 massive 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.

  But the arguments for suppression seemed theoretical, and Jensen, sensing billions of dollars at hand, fought hard for a clinical test. Eventually the government, the HEW, the FDA, and others agreed with Jensen and sanctioned further clinical testing over the protests of Stone and others.

  In February 1966, a pilot clinical trial was undertaken. It involved twenty patients with incurable cancer, and twenty normal volunteers from the Alabama state penitentiary. All forty subjects took the drug daily for one month. Results were as expected: normal subjects experienced unpleasant side effects, but nothing serious. Cancer patients showed striking remission of symptoms consistent with cure.

  On March 1, 1966, the forty men were taken off the drug. Within six hours, they were all dead.

  It was what Stone had predicted from the start. He had pointed out that mankind had, over centuries of exposure, developed a carefully regulated immunity to most organisms. On his skin, in the air, in his lungs, gut, and even bloodstream were hundreds of different viruses and bacteria. They were potentially deadly, but man had adapted to them over the years, and only a few could still cause disease.

  All this represented a carefully balanced state of affairs. If you introduced a new drug that killed all bacteria, you upset the balance and undid the evolutionary work of centuries. And you opened the way to superinfection, the problem of new organisms, bearing new diseases.

  Stone was right: the forty volunteers each had died of obscure and horrible diseases no one had ever seen before. One man experienced swelling of his body, from head to foot, a hot, bloated swelling until he suffocated from pulmonary edema. Another man fell prey to an organism that ate away his stomach in a matter of hours. A third was hit by a virus that dissolved his brain to a jelly.

  And so it went.

  Jensen reluctantly took the drug out of further study. The government, sensing that Stone had somehow understood what was happening, agreed to his earlier proposals, and viciously suppressed all knowledge and experimentation with the drug Kalocin.

  And that was where the matter had rested for two years.

  Now Burton wanted to be given the drug.

  "No," Stone said. "Not a chance. It might cure you for a while, but you'd never survive later, when you were taken off. "

  "That's easy for you to say, from where you are. "

  "It's not easy for me to say. Believe me, it's not. He put his hand over the microphone again. To Hall: "We know that oxygen inhibits growth of the Andromeda Strain. That's what we'll give Burton. It will be good for him-- make him a little giddy, a little relaxed, and slow his breathing down. Poor fellow is scared to death. "

  Hall nodded. Somehow, Stone's phrase stuck in his mind: scared to death. He thought about it, and then began to see that Stone had hit upon something important. That phrase was a clue. It was the answer.

  He started to walk away.

  "Where are you going?"

  "I've got some thinking to do. "

  "About what?"

  "About being scared to death. "

  27. Scared to Death

  HALL WALKED BACK TO HIS LAB AND STARED through the glass at the old man and the infant. He looked at the two of them and tried to think, but his brain was running in frantic circles. He found it difficult to think logically, and his earlier sensation of being on the verge of a discovery was lost.

  For several minutes, he stared at the old man while brief images passed before him: Burton dying, his hand clutched to his chest. Los Angeles in panic, bodies everywhere, cars going haywire, out of control. . .

  It was then that he realized that he, too, was Scared. Scared to death. The words came back to him.

  Scared to death.

  Somehow, that was the answer.

  Slowly, forcing his brain to be methodical, he went over it again.

  A cop with diabetes. A cop who didn't take his insulin and had a habit of going into ketoacidosis.

  An old man who drank Sterno, which gave him methanolism, and acidosis.

  A baby, who did . . . what? What gave him acidosis?

  Hall shook his head. Always, he came back to the baby, who was normal, not acidotic. He sighed.

  Take it from the beginning, he told himself. Be logical. If a man has metabolic acidosis-- any kind of acidosis-- what does he do?

  He has too much acid in his body. He can die from too much acid, just as if he had injected hydrochloric acid into his veins.

  Too much acid meant death.

  But the body could compensate. By breathing rapidly. Because in that manner, the lungs blew off carbon dioxide, and the body's supply of carbonic acid, which was what carbon dioxide formed in the blood, decreased.

  A way to get rid of acid.

  Rapid breathing.

  And Andromeda? What happened to the organism, when you were acidotic and breathing fast?

  Perhaps fast breathing kept the organism from getting into your lungs long enough to penetrate to blood vessels. Maybe that was the answer. But as soon as he thought of it, he shook his head. No: something else. Some simple, direct fact. Something they had always known, but somehow never recognized.

  The organism attacked through the lungs.

  It entered the bloodstream.

  It localized in the walls of arteries and veins, particularly of the brain.

  It produced damage.

  This led to coagulation. Which was dispersed throughout the body, or else led to bleeding, insanity, and death.

  But in order to produce such
rapid, severe damage, it would take many organisms. Millions upon millions, collecting in the arteries and veins. Probably you did not breathe in so many.

  So they must multiply in the bloodstream.

  At a great rate. A fantastic rate.

  And if you were acidotic? Did that halt multiplication?

  Perhaps.

  Again, he shook his head. Because a person with acidosis like Willis or Jackson was one thing. But what about the baby?

  The baby was normal. If it breathed rapidly, it would become alkalotic-basic, too little acid-- not acidotic. The baby would go to the opposite extreme.

  Hall looked through the glass, and as he did, the baby awoke. Almost immediately it began to scream, its face turning purple, the little eyes wrinkling, the mouth, toothless and smooth-gummed, shrieking.

  Scared to death.

  And then the birds, with the fast metabolic rate, the fast heart rates, the fast breathing rates. The birds, who did everything fast. They, too, survived.

  Breathing fast?

  Was it as simple as that?

  He shook his head. It couldn't be.

  He sat down and rubbed his eyes. He had a headache, and he felt tired. He kept thinking of Burton, who might die at any minute. Burton, sitting there in the sealed room.

  Hall felt the tension was unbearable. He suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to escape it, to get away from everything.

  The TV screen clicked on. His technician appeared and said, "Dr. Hall, we have Dr. Leavitt in the infirmary. "

  And Hall found himself saying, "I'll be right there. "