Yersinia pestis was the name Monique Jenrette best knew it by. Textbooks described it as a poorly staining gram-negative rod-shaped bacillus fatally pathogenic to certain rodents, certain other mammals, and man. Unlike the viruses, Yersinia was not an obligate parasite — it did not require living cells in which to propagate. It would grow and multiply quite vigorously in cellfree dilutions of blood plasma, on certain nutrient agar plates, or in various pH-controlled sugar or peptide solutions. Stained with Wilson’s stain, a special preparation from which the organism took up staining pigment more readily than from others, it looked like a pale, slightly bent rod with bits of genetic material staining more heavily in each end, thus appearing under the microscope lens rather like a tiny closed safety pin.
All this, of course, you could learn from any textbook. Monique Jenrette was concerned about things you could not find in any textbook.
In the special Hot Lab she was charged with setting up and supervising at the CDC installation in Fort Collins in northern Colorado — a rigidly structured, high-security lab designed for the safe propagation and study of violently dangerous bacterial organisms. She was joined by a team of microbiologists flown in from Stanford and the University of Washington, people thoroughly skilled in bacteriologic techniques. Three of them were particularly experienced in recombinant DNA studies with gram-negative bacilli, one of them a prominent Nobel Prize contender for his work pioneering techniques to recombine the genetic material in certain harmless coliform bacilli to make them produce gamma-interferons, growth hormone, Hepatitis B vaccine antigen and multiple sclerosis neutralizing factor. None except Monique had any particular personal experience working with Yersinia pestis and none had more than a nodding acquaintance with high-security Hot Lab procedures.
The materials they had to work with, at first, were none of the best: cultures taken from early victims, mostly in Washington State and a few later ones from Colorado, that had been old when originally flown to the lab in Atlanta for confirmation and now had been plated and replated waiting for somebody to come and do something with them. Many bacterial strains, having been grown and regrown through repeated reculturings, would typically begin losing certain of their characteristics, changing themselves, altering their behavior, especially “frail” bacteria such as Yersinia strains. Under Monique’s guidance the team at Fort Collins did what they could do in studying bacteria from these cultures, plating them against antibiotics, performing various fermentation tests and agglutination tests to identify genetic characteristics, undertaking animal inoculations to document infection patterns and virulence, but for all their care, the results were unpredictable, varying from specimen to specimen from the same culture, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, sometimes indeterminate. They worked in a specially sealed, specially ventilated wing of a lab building, scrubbed, gowned, masked and gloved under the full aseptic precautions of any surgeon in an operating room about to perform open-heart surgery; inside the lab they did their work in a long, sealed, transparent tunnel, using built-in shoulder-length rubber gloves to manipulate specimens, nutrient tubes, culture plates, incubator trays, equipment for enzyme and protein assays and so forth. Death was afoot inside that sealed transparent tunnel, invisible and treacherous and silent and very final; there must be no possible way for any trace of it to escape while they studied the unnatural quality of it.
Those first studies were suggestive, perhaps, but maddeningly inconclusive. Monique knew full well that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people were going to have their lives altered by what might be discovered in that sealed transparent tunnel; at the very least they had to find out what it was those people were dealing with; at the most, her work here might reveal to her colleagues what they might best do. But she couldn’t commit them to widespread action on the basis of inconclusive data. From time to time, like maybe about once every hour during those first few sixteen-hour days, she wished that she were working in the absolutely fail-safe, microbiologically flawless Maximum Security Lab in Atlanta, a sterile room within a sterile room within a sterile room, confining Death from any possible escape within a nest of laboratories built like a nest of boxes — but perhaps, she consoled herself, that would be overkill when dealing with a mere antibiotic-vulnerable bacterium. Maxi had been built for studying and manipulating the truly terrifying and world-threatening viral killers: the Lassa fever virus, the Marburg virus, the hideous Argentine bovine encephalitis virus that turned ninety-eight percent of its human victims into turnips in forty-eight hours — all virulently infective new viral agents with largely unknown spread characteristics, staggeringly high mortality rates, no vaccine whatever and no known treatment. But if Yersinia pestis was really so much less frightening, so much more benign than those wild viral bastards, then why was she suddenly breaking out in sweats and having waking nightmare fantasies every time she walked into this lab?
On her third day there the first chipmunk arrived by special courier, reaching her not terribly long after having been bagged by Carlos and Frank in the wild. Fresh meat, indeed. Well, Monique was ready for it. The bag went into a separate, sealed tank in the sealed, transparent tunnel, relieved of the outer transportation bag, which itself was sent down the belt to the autoclave and thence to the incinerator. The polybag inside was filled with fleas no longer interested in the dead, cold rodent hulk they had once inhabited; they were hopping about on its nose and eyes, on its belly, and swarming around on the inside of the bag. Telephone conversations ensued with some rather specialized people in Atlanta to figure the best agent to use under Hot Lab circumstances in order to kill eggs as well as fleas, to get them all, but as dead as possible. A nonflammable gas was chosen and applied to the polybag in a pressure-cooker affair, capable of permeating the capture bag without opening it. Two hours should be plenty of time, but let’s give it three just the same. Endless minutes spent waiting out the time; Monique broke scrub and paced the adjoining corridor for a while, nervous as a cat, smoking one of her rare cigarettes — God forbid this job should drive me back to that foolishness again. Finally, after a full three hours the cooker was opened, the bag opened in the long transparent tunnel, and a million dead fleas collected, six million eggs, totaling about a half-tablespoon of specimen. The dead fleas and eggs crushed in a special nonporous quartz-crystal device. Half of the material was placed in a special holding broth for later use, the rest divided in hundreds of aliquots for initial plating and culturing that had been so carefully planned.
Then, finally, there was the chipmunk itself. Body fluids cultured — blood, urine, lymph, spinal fluid, using microcollection techniques devised by one of the UW men. Cultures from organs and tissues — lymph glands, liver, kidney, fascia, muscle, lung — yes, by all means, lung — even eye vitreous. Into the incubator. Labeling, numbering, computer-keying, working furiously, then waiting. Hurrying again, then waiting. Out for a bite of dinner that nobody felt like eating. Then waiting again.
Within six hours they knew that the fleas were teeming with very live Yersinia. That meant the chipmunk was too. But what kind of Yersinia? What nature of deadly beast? Monique huddled with the others for a final hour, reviewing once again the protocol, the order and urgency of studies they could start tomorrow when growth would be far enough advanced to start working, really working, determining once again who would be responsible for what so that not a waking hour would be wasted.
Teeming with Yersinia. Monique went back to her motel room, sweat-soaked, drenched from the skin out, underwear, outer clothes, hair, forehead. Teeming. She took a fast shower and fell into bed and dreamed of an imaginary Pamela Tate she had never met. Her last conscious thought before sleeping was: Soon we will know.
Each day brought new rodent specimens to process. On the third day, while the first answers they sought were still cooking — Monique profoundly hoped — in nutrient flasks, with the computer programmed and ready to handle an expanding volume of microbiological genetic data when finally it was ready, Frank Barrington appeared to hand deliver yet another specimen, a golden-sided ground squirrel in one of Carlos’s bags, catching Monique just as she was leaving the lab for the evening. “I’ve been walking ridges and gullies for five days now,” he said, “up in the mountains, watching the ground, and I decided a break would be a smart idea.”
“Oh, good,” Monique said. She took the bag, peered at it. “Where is this one from? It’s important we have samples from a wide area.”
“Each one has been from a different region. We got this one about noon today from the Red Feather Lakes area just a few miles north of here, near the Wyoming border.”
“Ah, so. And I thought you’d come all the way up from Canon City just to see me.” She smiled at him. “You’re staying over tonight?”
“Right. Then tomorrow we’ll hit the lower reaches of Estes Park.”
“Sounds good. And what’s going on down south? I’ve barely heard from Carlos since I got here.”
Frank spread his hands. “They’re going crazy down there. New cases in seven different communities so far, including Colorado Springs, but mostly in Canon City. Twenty new ones just yesterday, the last I heard. It’s getting way ahead of them just trying to track down new contacts, and Carlos is looking kind of gray. Parke-Davis doesn’t seem to believe the amount of chloramphenicol he wants, they keep shipping half-orders, and he’s using streptomycin on suspect cases now, right from the first.” The forester shrugged his big shoulders. “They’re short on data, that’s the real problem. They’re floundering around blind, don’t really know what they’re dealing with.” He looked at her. “You’d better realize they’re waiting for you to pull a rabbit out of the hat up here.”
“I know.” She sighed. “But I can’t create answers overnight. And right now, if I don’t get out of this place for a few hours and forget about this whole hideous thing, I’m going to start smashing windows and climbing walls. Look, this little fellow in the bag here has to be taken care of right away, that’s four hours’ work at least, but maybe I can sweet-talk the guys from Stanford into doing it for me. Let me drop it in their laps and go back to change, and then you take me out to dinner — would that be nice?”
Frank hadn’t planned it that way, uncertain as he was of her lab hours or the demands on her time, but he had certainly thought often enough of this tall, oddly beautiful girl with the violet eyes and red-blond hair, as he had walked the ridges and searched the ground for his quarry. Certainly Monique was as totally different from Pam as night from day, and the wound of Pam’s loss was far too raw and immediate for him to turn his mind seriously to anything but the pain and emptiness. Yet there were odd moments when Monique’s expressions and gestures and way of speaking evoked Pam as sharply and bitterly as Pam herself had; justification or not, he somehow felt that Pam would approve this slender, hard-driving woman — at least approve what she was doing and the intensity she was bringing to the job. So Frank was both pleased and relieved at Monique’s proposal, pleased at the prospect of her evening company, half relieved that she had made the first move — as Pam would have done. He agreed to pick her up at her motel room in an hour, and then departed for his own simple lodgings out at the edge of town to shower and shave and dress. When he arrived to pick her up she was still in a slip, doing interesting things to her hair, but she waved him toward an ice bucket and some good bourbon and he settled down to an hour’s contemplative wait. “You won’t mind in the end, I betcha,” she shouted through the bathroom door. “I haven’t worn anything but jeans and a T-shirt for a solid week, and I’m damned if I’m going out looking raggy, so just drink up and be patient …”
She did not, in the end, look raggy; she looked almost painfully lovely. They took Frank’s Forest Service Jeep, found a modest but respectable steak house in town, and ordered another drink before tackling the menu. Frank lifted his glass and touched hers. “Eat, drink and be merry,” he said.
She winced. “Any more of that, and I get up and leave,” she said. “Graveyard humor I can’t take right now. Nor lab talk. Nor plague talk.”
“Sorry. Really. I just wasn’t thinking.”
They talked about other things, inconsequential things, new-acquaintance things, as the meal came and went. She clearly wanted to talk, and he let her, sensing the sharp undercurrent of tension in her voice. She’s tight as a wire, he thought, tight to the breaking point — from what? From what she’s fearing that I don’t know enough to fear? He guided the talk to herself, who she was, where she had come from. Two more different people might never have been found, except that both were rebels in their own odd ways. Monique Jenrette, only child of a wealthy New Orleans architect representing very old money, sent to a highly selective finishing school for Young Southern Ladies in Baton Rouge. They had nearly finished her then and there, but she had been pretty resilient even then. Bowing to her father, she had spent a year at Smith as an English major, where she lost a little of her thick New Orleans drawl and acquired a thoroughly curious overlay of Back Bay Massachusetts nasal that she never entirely weeded out — together with a bitter hatred of northern winters. Perversely, then, she had transferred to Duke, sweet-talking her father into tolerating it if not liking it, and graduated magna cum laude in biological sciences. Well, medical school was at least respectable, and she had gone on to Emory in Atlanta with medicine in mind, but an uncanny knack for thinking her way through complex and labyrinthine biochemical problems and then finding insanely simple, practical laboratory techniques for solving them, got her sidetracked from the medical mainstream within a year and a half. She had never really wanted to palpate bellies and examine tonsils; what she came to want was to find ways to make microorganisms do what she told them to do and nothing else, and she soon was concentrating her total attention on the arcane and mysterious world of cutting-edge microbiology. For her Ph.D. thesis she had worked two additional years to compare the natural mutational behavior of three exotic families of bacteria, among them the family of Yersinia. With that accomplished, and with a small but growing reputation for somewhat outré thinking about bacterial genetics and mutations, and a positive flair for creative laboratory techniques, she had left the multicolored stone walls of Emory to move six blocks up the street to the Centers for Disease Control, with their microbiological laboratories unequaled anywhere in the world, and their endless succession of microbiological problems to be solved.
Through all this, of course, Monique being Monique, there had been men, two of them almost serious enough for her to have thought of marriage, but not quite serious enough, with neither man quite capable of accepting the notion that this rather frail-looking, willowy girl might have a will of iron and a driving ambition and an acknowledged national name in a field of science they could barely understand at all, so nothing ultimately happened. And then, of course, there was Carlos. Yes, indeed, Carlos.
Frank Barrington contributed bits of his background as Monique’s torrents of words slowed, a simpler and briefer background and a total counterpoint except for the common thread of an abortive entry into medical school years before. Only son of a self-educated farmer, born and raised on a wheat ranch in the Palouse country of southeastern Washington. Taught to read at the age of four at his mother’s knee, with freedom of the rather surprising family library that made up for the lack of any public or school library whatever anywhere within reach. Long hours and days and months and years in the blazing sun, helping tend the farm; attendance at a tiny one-room grade school taught by a teacher with a tiny one-room mind, then on to a slightly-less-tiny high school, created to grant obligatory diplomas, but nothing to trigger a hungry mind beyond the books at home.
The natural science of field and stream, heritage of any farm boy, had appealed to Frank early and led to a solid interest in biology and, later, medicine. He started college in a forestry major, graduated in a zoology major, and moved on to medicine, uncertain that he wanted it but willing to try. Family tragedy broke that up: his mother’s sudden and shocking death from pneumonia, and then, in the same year, the pancreatic cancer that took his father, the loss of the farm, of all funds, and of the ambition for medicine …
A forest fire in Idaho late that terrible year triggered something else. Frank went over as a volunteer to help fight the blaze and spent two weeks digging fire lines, hauling hoses, filling tank trucks from natural springs and breathing smoke and ash. As a result, he was offered a job with the Forest Service the next summer on a first-strike fire crew, and that work blossomed into a full-time appointment. He went back for night courses in forest management, evolving a strong conservationist attitude toward the local logging practices that somebody in the Forest Service in western Washington liked; there was room there for someone willing to fight for real, rational management of the forests and to oppose the pressures to cut them all down as fast as possible and ship the logs to Japan. In the logging industry he wouldn’t have lasted long; in the Forest Service there was a chance to be heard as he entered into what he clearly conceived might be a lifelong battle.
Monique had listened closely as they devoured their steaks, skipped dessert, sipped coffee and finished their wine. He touched only briefly on the direction his work had been taking him in the time he had free from slash fires — for example, his plans for simple but supremely logical small-scale studies to document the permanent environment-changing effects of logging at the forest-desert margin. “Where the forest in the foothills comes down in fingers into semiarid land, there isn’t enough water for any recovery if the trees are taken,” he said. “The ones that are there are scrubby, hardly worth harvesting, but they may be hundreds of years old, marginally surviving because they have enormously deep tap roots and themselves hold water in the soil. Cut them out, and little ones will never grow back, and the desert will creep up the mountainside, acre by acre. I can’t do anything big with it, of course. But with luck and a little work I can maybe get a few reports published in Science, small-scale studies, and maybe catch somebody’s attention.”
“And Pam fit into that plan,” Monique said.
“Oh, yes. She fit into the whole Forest Service kind of life.” Frank was silent for a moment. “Lots of women wouldn’t. There’s no money in it, ever, and you’re off and away three-quarters of the time, and there are — very real hazards.” He grimaced.
“I’m sorry,” Monique said, touching his hand across the table. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“It doesn’t bother me that much. Not now. It already seems like a long, long time ago.”
“The mind’s a remarkable mechanism. It works like lightning to protect itself from too much pain. Sometimes it works almost indecently fast. But then, sometimes remembering and talking can help.”
“Maybe. There’s not that much to talk about, with Pam. She turned up out of nowhere, one day, and then she disappeared, like the girl in the Keats poem. We only had three months together, not even that — what can you say about three months? That for me it was a whole other lifetime? A sort of dream world, come and gone? Maybe so, but that lifetime is over. It’s not ever coming back. End of story.” He looked up at her sharply. “Not for you, of course. You do have your Carlos.”
Monique glanced aside. “Yes, I have my Carlos, and he is a very lovely man, sweet and gentle and smart and capable, a man any woman could love. And Carlos is also very, very married to a proud and exquisitely beautiful woman from a proud upper-class Mexican family, and his background is so deeply entrenched in him that that marriage is never going to change. Carlos behaves himself in the way the men in his culture are permitted to behave, and his wife conducts herself in the way such wives are required to conduct themselves, and that is that. Another dream world.” She gave Frank’s hand a squeeze and pushed her chair back from the table. “Why don’t we go see the sights before it’s totally dark out there?”
He drove the Jeep toward the setting sun along the valley floor, then turned west on a road into the steeply rising mountains. Half an hour later they found a turnout on a high viewpoint ridge. To the west the sun was setting behind the high peaks of the Rockies in Estes Park, splattering the sky and clouds with reds and oranges and pinks and yellows and blues and blacks as an evening thunderstorm came billowing up. To the south and east the lights of Fort Collins were coming on in multicolors, the freeway strip to the east a shimmering golden necklace.
They got out of the car and walked out on a promontory to take in the panorama. There was a chill breeze from the west; Monique shivered in her summery dress and Frank Slipped his down jacket over her shoulders and held it in place with his arm. “You’re still not relaxing,” he said.
“I can’t,” she said after a long silence. “I can’t get away from that lab. The world looks so beautiful from up here, but I have to work with ugliness.”
“You don’t have to. You could go back home and marry a rich New Orleans lawyer and be a society lady.”
She gave him a brief look. “I’m not precisely a lady. And New Orleans society is a screaming bore. So are most rich New Orleans lawyers. Anyway, I can’t run away from what I’m doing — not now. I’m really into it up to my ears, and there you are.”
“You personally?”
“Somebody personally has got to do it. I’m equipped, and I’m on the spot. People are dropping dead while I fool around with culture plates. We need to know which way this evil wind is blowing, and I haven’t got the answers yet.” She shivered in spite of the jacket. “Let’s go back, Frank.”
They drove in silence back to town. Her place was a second-story room with an outside entrance. He opened her door and turned and kissed her, tentatively. She returned a different kiss, long and deep and yielding. When he started to turn away she said, “Frank Barrington, don’t you dare walk away from me tonight.”
He looked down at her pale face, the wide-set, frightened eyes looking up at him like a doe terrified at the approaching fireline, and he couldn’t move.
Suddenly her arms were around him, clinging to him fiercely, and her face was buried in his chest and he realized she was weeping. “Hey, hey,” he said gently, stroking her hair. “Take it easy — ”
“I can’t take it easy, Frank. I’m scared. You just don’t know how scared I am.” She looked up, holding him with her eyes. “Stay and help me not be scared tonight.”