The Deep Zone: A Novel (25 page)

He was now standing in one of the deadliest spots on earth. A pinhole-sized breach in his suit would seem, to any circulating pathogens, like an open barn door. If anything happened to interrupt his suit’s positive pressure after such a breach, they would flood in by the millions and he would die one of the most horrible deaths imaginable in less than a week.

BSL-4 labs tended not to be large because they were prohibitively expensive to build and maintain. It was not just the labs themselves but all the safety and containment systems they required, air and fluid collection and disposal, fail-safe redundancies, and ultrasophisticated instruments like scanning electron microscopes. Each square foot of lab space cost $2,000 and required fifteen additional square feet of support facility at the same cost. Thus a one-thousand-square-foot lab needed fifteen thousand square feet of support works, the whole thing costing $32 million altogether. More expensive, foot for foot, than the space shuttle.

Stainless steel counters ran at waist height down both sides of the room. On top of them sat exotic instruments, glass boxes, trays of cultures. Over the counters hung aluminum hoods with ventilator fans that continually drew air out of the lab, maintaining its negative pressure. Evvie Flemmer was working at one counter.

“Took you a while.” Casey was smiling, his voice muffled by the plastic hood. “Turn around and I’ll hook you up.”

“I’m rusty donning the Chemturion,” Barnard said, a bit sheepishly. “Don’t get down here as often as I would like. Skills deteriorate.” He waited while Casey connected the coiled, ceiling-mounted yellow hose that would give him breathing air from the lab’s integral supply. With twisting and contortions, one person could do it, but having a partner made it much easier. A self-locking nozzle mated with a circular valve seat on the back of the right shoulder of Barnard’s suit. Once it was in place, Casey pushed a butterfly-valve handle that opened the nozzle, delivering air. Finally, Casey rotated the switch on Barnard’s Chem-Air PLSS unit, depowering it.

“You said you had something promising.”

“Yes. Come over here,” Casey said, moving to the electron microscope.

The instrument looked like a white stovepipe eight feet tall and bristling with extensions, controls, and components. At its base were a twelve-by-twelve viewing screen and binocular eyepieces like those found on light microscopes. Barnard bent over the screen. Casey used an oversized mouse and dials as big as cookies to calibrate the settings. They both remained standing. There were no chairs or stools in a BSL-4 lab. Sitting in Chemturions was like trying to sit while wrapped in a stack of inner tubes.

“Okay. Here’s our new ACE.”

As Casey worked the controls, Barnard saw an image clarifying on the viewing screen. He had looked at thousands of microbes over his career, and their beauty still amazed him. As a child he had had a kaleidoscope, a telescope-like tube that, when rotated, rearranged colored pieces of glass into striking patterns. When he tried to describe the microscopic world to other people, that was the best analogy he could come up with. But the reality was infinitely more astonishing: unearthly beauty, every color of the spectrum, and every shape imaginable. God’s artwork—or, really, the
Devil’s.
Streptococci
, burning like red suns against a butter-yellow sky.
Neisseria gonorrhoeae
, golden globes with ruby filaments streaming behind like the long red hair of a drowned woman.
Corynebacterium diphtheriae
, graceful green wands with maroon heads, groups of them looking like beds of tulips.

The microbes came into sharp focus and Barnard saw half a dozen oblong-shaped objects. Their smooth perimeters were white, their bodies the rich red of Burgundy wine. The depth of hue increased toward the center, where it finally became black. Magnified a million times, framed, and hung on a wall, the image could have been a painting by de Kooning or, in his wilder moments, van Gogh.

“Now, here’s what I wanted to show you.”

The image changed to reveal more purple oblongs with white perimeters. The color deepened toward the middle of the organism, but its center had a reddish tint, rather than the solid black Barnard had seen in the previous image. And the white perimeters were jagged and cracked, rather than smooth and intact.

“You got into its genetics.” In the suit, Barnard sounded like he was speaking in a closet, but the excitement in his voice was sharp.

“That’s right.”

“How?”

“We fractured its skull. Withdrew mitochondrial material and breached its defenses to reach the genes.”

“Where’s the but? There has to be one, or we’d both be dancing around in my office now.”

“The but is that we’re not exactly sure why it happened. You know what it’s like, playing with the genes of these things.”

“Like trying to do brain surgery with a jackhammer.”

“Yep. The trick is not destroying the whole thing, and it’s quite a trick.”

“So, what are we looking at for time?”

“Before we do it again? Realistically, two days. Maybe three.”

Barnard gaped. He had been the recipient of so much bad news
recently that he’d been primed to hear Casey talk about weeks or even months. “By
God
, Lew. That’s incredible. Can I take this to the president?”

“Well, I hate to overpromise and underdeliver. But yeah, I think you can go with it. That good enough for you?”

“More than good enough.”

“We’re not all the way there, Don. Not by a long shot.”

“No, but based on what you just reported, we have taken a huge step closer.”

“Yeah, I think we can say that.” Casey suppressed a grin, but the smile in his eyes was a mile wide. They stood there gazing at each other through the plastic hoods. Barnard felt an affection for Casey not unlike what he had felt for his men in Vietnam. He could happily stay down here for the rest of this shift and the next one, as well. But he had news to deliver, and he was aware that at best he was a director-level distraction. Still, he did not want to leave. When he was up in his office with his three-piece suit and secretary and windows showing daylight, it felt wrong. Down here, it felt right. Deadly, but right.

He smiled and patted Casey on the shoulder, his heavy rubber-gloved hand thumping on Casey’s biosuit. Clumsy, but Casey got the idea.

“I gotta go make some calls, Lew. Find me when something more happens.”

“Damn right. Now go on, give the powers that be some good news. Turn around and I’ll disconnect you.”

Barnard started to leave, then stopped. “One more thing. Who did it?”

Casey looked embarrassed.

“I thought so. Nice going, Dr. Casey. Keep it up and you may make a scientist yet.”

THEY TRAVELED FOR TWELVE HOURS AFTER HALLIE AND
Bowman secured Haight’s body. No two steps were alike. There were crashing waterfalls, glistening slopes slick as tilted ice, vertical faces, rubble fields, wormhole crawls. At the shorter drops, they rappelled on their only rope, a ninety-meter PMI Classic that Bowman was carrying. Where the vertical distance was too great, they donned their Gecko Gear and down-climbed. In other places the cave floor dipped below the surface of lakes so vast their lights could find no shores, and these had to be waded or swum, Bowman going first, rigging a line where he could, and the others hauling themselves along the line to join him. There were long passages where the space between the cave’s floor and its ceiling was so small that they could move forward only by taking off their packs and shoving them in front or pulling them behind. They had to pass through acres of boulder gardens, sections where, over the course
of eons, huge fragments of ceiling had broken off and fallen. The trick here, as it had been earlier in the entrance chamber, was to avoid dropping between the rocks. But walking along their wet tops, which were never flat but always jagged or rounded, took immense concentration and was physically exhausting.

By three
P.M
. the next day, even Bowman was beginning to falter. He halted them at the only potential site for a camp, and it was a poor one. The floor sloped downward and there was no one place big enough for all of them to deploy their sleeping bags together. There was one spot where the four of them could stand. It was about eight feet square, walled by giant breakdown rubble. A narrow slot between two of these boulders gave exit, and from there each found a place on the boulder-littered floor with room for a sleeping bag. Now Hallie and the others were standing in the little clearing, spooning MRE chicken and dumplings out of foil pouches.

“This is very bad.” Arguello listlessly stirred his glop.
“Muy malo.”

At first, Hallie thought he was talking about the food, but those last two words signaled something else. Not very bad. Very
evil
. Food was not evil.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the thing that happened to Dr. Haight. To Ron.”

“He had an accident.”

Arguello looked up, careful to avoid shining his light in her eyes. “You think so?”

“Don’t you?”

“There is evil in this cave, and I can feel it.”

Cahner spoke first.

“What does it feel like, Rafael?” He was looking at Arguello intently. The light was on Arguello’s chest, but Hallie could see the seriousness of his expression.

“Excuse me?”

“You said that you could feel evil in the cave. I was asking what that felt like.”

“Oh, yes. I see now. It feels like nausea, but not only in the stomach. Everywhere. A sick and weak feeling. Like maybe the flu. But worse.”

“You believe the
cave
is evil.” There was no hint of mockery or sarcasm in Cahner’s question.

“
No
. Not the cave. But there is evil in the cave. There is a difference.”

“There is
danger
in the cave,” said Cahner. “Danger’s not good or evil. It’s just danger. In the mountains we talk about objective dangers, things like weather and avalanches over which we have no control. Same in a cave. Isn’t that right, Hallie?”

Arguello spoke before Hallie could. “I am thinking about the two men who were lost in here, during your other expedition. What happened to them? Why did they not return?”

“As I said, we never found out.”

“That is a great pity.” She waited for Arguello to go on, but he said nothing more.

“We all need some rest.” Bowman, more gently than Hallie would have expected, was telling them it was bedtime. “We haven’t gone as far as I’d planned, but given the circumstances, I think it would be dangerous to keep moving. Let’s plan to sleep for four hours, and then head out again.”

“You will have no argument from me,” said Arguello. “I can surely use the rest.”

“Sleeping in caves is such fun,” Cahner sighed.

Bowman waved an arm. “Welcome to the Cueva de Luz Hilton, my friends. I hope you find the accommodations to your liking.”

Hallie’s spot was a hundred feet from where they had eaten. Back there, she took from her pack an airtight red capsule about the size of a flashlight. She unscrewed the container’s top and removed its contents, a super-compressed, waterproof sleeping bag with an integral bottom pad. On contact with air it began to expand like a dry sponge absorbing water. Unlike a sponge, it kept on growing as
though it were being inflated, which, in fact, was exactly what was happening as the nanopolymer filling’s affinity for nitrogen molecules drew them in. In less than two minutes, the thing had grown to resemble a conventional, puffy mummy bag.

She took off her boots and set them just to the left of her bag. She stripped off her filthy caving suit, folded it, and put it on top of the boots. Wearing her damp but clean red polypro long underwear, she slipped into her bag. But for a long time she lay awake, staring at false light images. It never failed. The times when she needed to sleep most were inevitably the times when she could not sleep at all. She lay there, watching the fireworks that the dark tricked her eyes into producing, feeling more impatient as the seconds passed—which, of course, made it even harder to fall asleep. Before long, she heard snoring from the direction of Cahner’s sleeping spot. Then Arguello, whose snoring was slower and more deeply pitched than Cahner’s. She waited, expecting to hear Bowman next, but did not.

One reason she could not sleep was that her mind kept returning to Haight’s death, seeing the young man’s body, which lay, unburied, under the green plastic groundsheet. By now, she knew, it would be stiffened by rigor mortis. Tomorrow decomposition would set in, if it had not already. Another thing holding sleep at bay was her own body’s soreness. She knew from experience that no matter how good her conditioning was when she came into a cave like this, it would still take several days to get acclimated.

But there was a third reason why she could not sleep. She waited half an hour, listening to Cahner and Arguello snoring, waiting for them to work their way down into REMs. Finally, she slipped out of her bag and, navigating from her mental snapshot, started moving.

Hallie moved through the dark softly, smoothly, going by sense of touch and memory, looking not so much like a blind person groping through unfamiliar rooms as a dancer in slow motion. After two minutes she caught a trace of scent, a minute later picked up the
sound of soft breathing. She kept moving forward, working her way between boulders, until, without warning, a hand clamped her ankle.