"Professor Kirke is in the hospital," General Marcus said. "You'll get further details when you touch down."

  The conversation ended; Stone gave the telephone back to the officer. He thought for a minute about the other men on the team, and wondered at their reactions as they were called out of bed.

  There was Leavitt, of course. He would respond quickly. Leavitt was a clinical microbiologist, a man experienced in the treatment of infectious disease. Leavitt had seen enough plagues and epidemics in his day to know the importance of quick action. Besides, there was his ingrained pessimism, which never deserted him. (Leavitt had once said, "At my wedding, all I could think of was how much alimony she'd cost me.") He was an irritable, grumbling, heavyset man with a morose face and sad eyes, which seemed to peer ahead into a bleak and miserable future; but he was also thoughtful, imaginative, and not afraid to think daringly.

  Then there was the pathologist, Burton, in Houston. Stone had never liked Burton very well, though he acknowledged his scientific talent. Burton and Stone were different: where Stone was organized, Burton was sloppy; where Stone was controlled, Burton was impulsive; where Stone was confident, Burton was nervous, jumpy, petulant. Colleagues referred to Burton as "the Stumbler," partly because of his tendency to trip over his untied shoelaces and baggy trouser cuffs and partly because of his talent for tumbling by error into one important discovery after another.

  And then Kirke, the anthropologist from Yale, who apparently was not going to be able to come. If the report was true, Stone knew he was going to miss him. Kirke was an ill-informed and rather foppish man who possessed, as if by accident, a superbly logical brain. He was capable of grasping the essentials of a problem and manipulating them to get the necessary result; though he could not balance his own checkbook, mathematicians often came to him for help in resolving highly abstract problems.

  Stone was going to miss that kind of brain. Certainly the fifth man would be no help. Stone frowned as he thought about Mark Hall. Hall had been a compromise candidate for the team; Stone would have preferred a physician with experience in metabolic disease, and the choice of a surgeon instead had been made with the greatest reluctance. There had been great pressure from Defense and the AEC to accept Hall, since those groups believed in the Odd Man Hypothesis; in the end, Stone and the others had given in.

  Stone did not know Hall well; he wondered what he would say when he was informed of the alert. Stone could not have known of the great delay in notifying members of the team. He did not know, for instance, that Burton, the pathologist, was not called until five a.m., or that Peter Leavitt, the microbiologist, was not called until six thirty, the time he arrived at the hospital.

  And Hall was not called until five minutes past seven.

  ***

   It was, Mark Hall said later, "a horrifying experience. In an instant, I was taken from the most familiar of worlds and plunged into the most unfamiliar. " At six forty-five, Hall was in the washroom adjacent to OR 7, scrubbing for his first case of the day. He was in the midst of a routine he had carried out daily for several years; he was relaxed and joking with the resident, scrubbing with him.

  When he finished, he went into the operating room, holding his arms before him, and the instrument nurse handed him a towel, to wipe his hands dry. Also in the room was another resident, who was prepping the body for surgery-- applying iodine and alcohol solutions-- and a circulating nurse. They all exchanged greetings.

  At the hospital, Hall was known as a swift, quick-tempered, and unpredictable surgeon. He operated with speed, working nearly twice as fast as other surgeons. When things went smoothly, he laughed and joked as he worked, kidding his assistants, the nurses, the anesthetist. But if things did not go well, if they became slow and difficult, Hall could turn blackly irritable.

  Like most surgeons, he was insistent upon routine. Everything had to be done in a certain order, in a certain way. If not, he became upset.

  Because the others in the operating room knew this, they looked up toward the overhead viewing gallery with apprehension when Leavitt appeared. Leavitt clicked on the intercom that connected the upstairs room to the operating room below and said, "Hello, Mark."

  Hall had been draping the patient, placing green sterile cloths over every part of the body except for the abdomen. He looked up with surprise. "Hello, Peter," he said.

  "Sorry to disturb you," Leavitt said. "But this is an emergency."

  "Have to wait," Hall said. "I'm starting a procedure."

  He finished draping and called for the skin knife. He palpated the abdomen, feeling for the landmarks to begin his incision.

  "It can't wait," Leavitt said.

  Hall paused. He set down the scalpel and looked up. There was a long silence.

  "What the hell do you mean, it can't wait?"

  Leavitt remained calm. "You'll have to break scrub. This is an emergency."

  "Look, Peter, I've got a patient here. Anesthetized. Ready to go. I can't just walk--"

  "Kelly will take over for you."

  Kelly was one of the staff surgeons.

  "Kelly?"

  "He's scrubbing now," Leavitt said. "It's all arranged. I'll expect to meet you in the surgeon's change room. In about thirty seconds."

  And then he was gone.

  Hall glared at everyone in the room. No one moved, or spoke. After a moment, he stripped off his gloves and stomped out of the room, swearing once, very loudly.

  ***

  Hall viewed his own association with Wildfire as tenuous at best. In 1966 he had been approached by Leavitt, the chief of bacteriology of the hospital, who had explained in a sketchy way the purpose of the project. Hall found it all rather amusing and had agreed to join the team, if his services ever became necessary; privately, he was confident that nothing would ever come of Wildfire.

  Leavitt had offered to give Hall the files on Wildfire and to keep him up to date on the project. At first, Hall politely took the files, but it soon became clear that he was not bothering to read them, and so Leavitt stopped giving them to him. If anything, this pleased Hall, who preferred not to have his desk cluttered.

  A year before, Leavitt had asked him whether he wasn't curious about something that he had agreed to join and that might at some future time prove dangerous.

  Hall had said, "No."

  Now, in the doctors' room, Hall regretted those words. The doctors' room was a small place, lined on all four walls with lockers; there were no windows. A large coffeemaker sat in the center of the room, with a stack of paper cups alongside. Leavitt was pouring himself a cup, his solemn, basset-hound face looking mournful.

  "This is going to be awful coffee," he said. "You can't get a decent cup anywhere in a hospital. Hurry and change.

  Hall said, "Do you mind telling me first why--"

  "I mind, I mind," Leavitt said. "Change: there's a car waiting outside and we're already late. Perhaps too late."

  He had a gruffly melodramatic way of speaking that had always annoyed Hall.

  There was a loud slurp as Leavitt sipped the coffee. "Just as I suspected, " he said. "How can you tolerate it? Hurry, please."

  Hall unlocked his locker and kicked it open. He leaned against the door and stripped away the black plastic shoe covers that were worn in the operating room to prevent buildup of static charges. "Next, I suppose you're going to tell me this has to do with that damned project."

  "Exactly," Leavitt said. "Now try to hurry. The car is waiting to take us to the airport, and the morning traffic is bad."

  Hall changed quickly, not thinking, his mind momentarily stunned. Somehow he had never thought it possible. He dressed and walked out with Leavitt toward the hospital entrance. Outside, in the sunshine, he could see the olive U.S. Army sedan pulled up to the curb, its light flashing. And he had a sudden, horrible realization that Leavitt was not kidding, that nobody was kidding, and that some kind of awful nightmare was coming true.

  ***

  For his own part, Peter Leavitt was irritated with Hall. In general, Leavitt had little patience with practicing physicians. Though he had an M.D. degree, Leavitt had never practiced, preferring to devote his time research. His field was clinical microbiology and epidemiology, and his specialty was parasitology. He had done parasitic research all over the world; his work had led to the discovery of the Brazilian tapeworm, Taenia renzi, which he had characterized in a paper in 1953.

  As he grew older, however, Leavitt had stopped traveling. Public health, he was fond of saying, was a young man's game; when you got your fifth case of intestinal amebiasis, it was time to quit. Leavitt got his fifth case in Rhodesia in 1955. He was dreadfully sick for three months and lost forty pounds. Afterward, he resigned his job in the public health service. He was offered the post of chief of microbiology at the hospital, and he had taken it, with the understanding that he would be able to devote a good portion of his time to research.

  Within the hospital he was known as a superb clinical bacteriologist, but his real interest remained parasites. In the period from 1955 to 1964 he published a series of elegant metabolic studies on Ascaris and Necator that were highly regarded by other workers in the field.

  Leavitt's reputation had made him a natural choice for Wildfire, and it was through Leavitt that Hall had been asked to join. Leavitt knew the reasons behind Hall's selection, though Hall did not.

  When Leavitt had asked him to join, Hall had demanded to know why. "I'm just a surgeon," he had said.

  "Yes," Leavitt said. "But you know electrolytes."

  "So?"

  "That may be important. Blood chemistries, pH, acidity and alkalinity, the whole thing. That may be vital, when the time comes."

  "But there are a lot of electrolyte people," Hall had pointed out. "Many of them better than me."

  "Yes," Leavitt had said. "But they're all married."

  "So what?"

  "We need a single man."

  "Why?"

  "It's necessary that one member of the team be unmarried."

  "That's crazy," Hall had said.

  "Maybe," Leavitt had said. "Maybe not."

  They left the hospital and walked up to the Army sedan. A young officer was waiting stiffly, and saluted as they came up.

  "Dr. Hall?"

  "Yes."

  "May I see your card, please?"

  Hall gave him the little plastic card with his picture on it. He had been carrying the card in his wallet for more than a year; it was a rather strange card-- with just a name, a picture, and a thumbprint, nothing more. Nothing to indicate that it was an official card.

  The officer glanced at it, then at Hall, and back to the card. He handed it back.

  "Very good, sir."

  He opened the rear door of the sedan. Hall got in and Leavitt followed, shielding his eyes from the flashing red light on the car top. Hall noticed it.

  "Something wrong?"

  "No. Just never liked flashing lights. Reminds me of my days as an ambulance driver, during the war." Leavitt settled back and the car started off. "Now then," he said. "When we reach the airfield, you will be given a file to read during the trip."

  "What trip?"

  "You'll be taking an F-104," Leavitt said.

  "Where?"

  "Nevada. Try to read the file on the way. Once we arrive, things will be very busy."

  "And the others in the team?"

  Leavitt glanced at his watch." Kirke has appendicitis and is in the hospital. The others have already begun work. Right now, they are in a helicopter, over Piedmont, Arizona.

  "Never heard of it," Hall said.

  "Nobody has," Leavitt said, "until now."

  6. Piedmont

  AT 9:59 A.M. ON THE SAME MORNING, A K-4 JET helicopter lifted off the concrete of Vandenberg's maximum-security hangar MSH-9 and headed east, toward Arizona.

  The decision to lift off from an MSH was made by Major Manchek, who was concerned about the attention the suits might draw. Because inside the helicopter were three men, a pilot and two scientists, and all three wore clear plastic inflatable suits, making them look like obese men from Mars, or, as one of the hangar maintenance men put it, "like balloons from the Macy's parade."

  As the helicopter climbed into the clear morning sky, the two passengers in the belly looked at each other. One was Jeremy Stone, the other Charles Burton. Both men had arrived at Vandenberg just a few hours before-- Stone from Stanford and Burton from Baylor University in Houston.

  Burton was fifty-four, a pathologist. He held a professorship at Baylor Medical School and served as a consultant to the NASA Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston. Earlier he had done research at the National Institutes in Bethesda. His field had been the effects of bacteria on human tissues.

  It is one of the peculiarities of scientific development that such a vital field was virtually untouched when Burton came to it. Though men had known germs caused disease since Henle's hypothesis of 1840, by the middle of the twentieth century there was still nothing known about why or how bacteria did their damage. The specific mechanisms were unknown.

  Burton began, like so many others in his day, with Diplococcus pneumoniae, the agent causing pneumonia. There was great interest in pneumococcus before the advent of penicillin in the forties; after that, both interest and research money evaporated. Burton shifted to Staphylococcus aureus, a common skin pathogen responsible for "pimples" and "boils." At the time he began his work, his fellow researchers laughed at him; staphylococcus, like pneumococcus, was highly sensitive to penicillin. They doubted Burton would ever get enough money to carry on his work.

  For five years, they were right. The money was scarce, and Burton often had to go begging to foundations and philanthropists. Yet he persisted, patiently elucidating the coats of the cell wall that caused a reaction in host tissue and helping to discover the half-dozen toxins secreted by the bacteria to break down tissue, spread infection, and destroy red cells.

  Suddenly, in the 1950's, the first penicillin-resistant strains of staph appeared. The new strains were virulent, and produced bizarre deaths, often by brain abscess. Almost overnight Burton found his work had assumed major importance; dozens of labs around the country were changing over to study staph; it was a "hot field." In a single year, Burton watched his grant appropriations jump from $6,000 a year to $300,000. Soon afterward, he was made a professor of pathology.

  Looking back, Burton felt no great pride in his accomplishment; it was, he knew, a matter of luck, of being in the right place and doing the right work when the time came.

  He wondered what would come of being here, in this helicopter, now.

  Sitting across from him, Jeremy Stone tried to conceal his distaste for Burton's appearance. Beneath the plastic suit Burton wore a dirty plaid sport shirt with a stain on the left breast pocket; his trousers were creased and frayed and even his hair, Stone felt, was unruly and untidy.

  He stared out the window, forcing himself to think of other matters. "Fifty people," he said, shaking his head. "Dead

  within eight hours of the landing of Scoop VII. The question is one of spread."

  "Presumably airborne," Burton said.

  "Yes. Presumably."

  "Everyone seems to have died in the immediate vicinity of the town," Burton said. "Are there reports of deaths farther out?

  Stone shook his head. "I'm having the Army people look into it. They're working with the highway patrol. So far, no deaths have turned up outside."

  "Wind?"

  "A stroke of luck," Stone said. "Last night the wind was fairly brisk, nine miles an hour to the south and steady. But around midnight, it died. Pretty unusual for this time of year, they tell me."

  "But fortunate for us."

  "Yes." Stone nodded. "We're fortunate in another way as well. There is no important area of habitation for a radius a of nearly one hundred and twelve miles. Outside that, of course, there is Las Vegas to the north, San Bernardino to the west, and Phoenix to the east. Not nice, if the bug gets to any of them."

  "But as long as the wind stays down, we have time."

  "Presumably," Stone said.

  For the next half hour, the two men discussed the vector problem with frequent reference to a sheaf of output maps drawn up during the night by Vandenberg's computer division. The output maps were highly complex analyses of geographic problems; in this case, the maps were visualizations of the southwestern United States, weighted for wind direction and population.

  [Graphic:  About page 58.  First map of mountain west of USA, showing examples of the staging of computerbase output mapping.  Each shows coordinates around population centers and other important areas.  A second map shows the weighting that accounts for wind and population factors and is consequently distorted in Southern CA, and Southern NV.  A third map shows the computer projection of the effects of wind and population in a specific "scenario."  None of the maps is from the Wildfire Project.  They are similar, but they represent output from a CBW scenario, not the actual Wildfire work.  (Courtesy General Autonomics  Corporation)]

  Discussion then turned to the time course of death. Both men had heard the tape from the van; they agreed that everyone at Piedmont seemed to have died quite suddenly.

  "Even if you slit a man's throat with a razor," Burton said, "you won't get death that rapidly. Cutting both carotids and jugulars still allows ten to forty seconds before unconsciousness, and nearly a minute before death."

  "At Piedmont, it seems to have occurred in a second or two."

  Burton shrugged. "Trauma," he suggested. "A blow to the head."

  "Yes. Or a nerve gas."

  "Certainly possible."

  "It's that, or something very much like it," Stone said. "If it was an enzymatic block of some kind-- like arsenic or strychnine-- we'd expect fifteen or thirty seconds, perhaps longer. But a block of nervous transmission, or a block of the neuro-muscular junction, or cortical poisoning-- that could be very swift. It could be instantaneous."

  "If it is a fast-acting gas," Burton said, "it must have high diffusibility across the lungs--"

  "Or the skin," Stone said. "Mucous membranes, anything. Any porous surface."

  Burton touched the plastic of his suit. "If this gas is so highly diffusible..."

  Stone gave a slight smile. "We'll find out, soon enough."

  ***

  Over the intercom, the helicopter pilot said, "Piedmont approaching, gentlemen. Please advise."

  Stone said, "Circle once and give us a look at it."

  The helicopter banked steeply. The two men looked out and saw the town below them. The buzzards had landed during the night, and were thickly clustered around the bodies.

  "I was afraid of that," Stone said.

  "They may represent a vector for infectious spread," Burton said. "Eat the meat of infected people, and carry the organisms away with them."

  Stone nodded, staring out the window.

  "What do we do?"

  "Gas them," Stone said. He flicked on the intercom to the pilot. "Have you got the canisters?"

  "Yes sir."

  "Circle again; and blanket the town."

  "Yes sir."

  The helicopter tilted, and swung back. Soon the two men could not see the ground for the clouds of pale-blue gas.

  "What is it?"

  "Chlorazine," Stone said. "Highly effective, in low concentrations, on aviary metabolism. Birds have a high metabolic rate. They are creatures that consist of little more than feathers and muscle; their heartbeats are usually about one-twenty, and many species eat more than their own weight every day."

  "The gas is an uncoupler?"

  "Yes. It'll hit them hard."

  The helicopter banked away, then hovered. The gas slowly cleared in the gentle wind, moving off to the south. Soon they could see the ground again. Hundreds of birds lay there; a few flapped their wings spastically, but most were already dead.

  Stone frowned as he watched. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he knew he had forgotten something, or ignored something. Some fact, some vital clue, that the birds provided and he must not overlook.

  Over the intercom, the pilot said, "Your orders, sir?"

  "Go to the center of the main street," Stone said, "and drop the rope ladder. You are to remain twenty feet above ground. Do not put down. Is that clear?"

  "Yes sir."

  "When we have climbed down, you are to lift off to an altitude of five hundred feet."

  "Yes sir."

  "Return when we signal you."

  "Yes sir."

  "And should anything happen to us--"

  "I proceed directly to Wildfire," the pilot said, his voice dry.

  "Correct."

  The pilot knew what that meant. He was being paid according to the highest Air Force pay scales: he was drawing regular pay plus hazardous-duty pay, plus non-wartime special-services pay, plus mission-over-hostile-territory pay, plus bonus air-time pay. He would receive more than a thousand dollars for this day's work, and his family would receive an additional ten thousand dollars from the short-term life insurance should he not return.

  There was a reason for the money: if anything happened to Burton and Stone on the ground, the pilot was ordered to fly directly to the Wildfire installation and hover thirty feet above ground until such time as the Wildfire group had determined the correct way to incinerate him, and his airplane, in midair.

  He was being paid to take a risk. He had volunteered for the job. And he knew that high above, circling at twenty thousand feet, was an Air Force jet with air-to-air missiles. It was the job of the jet to shoot down the helicopter should the pilot suffer a last-minute loss of nerve and fail to go directly to Wildfire.

  "Don't slip up," the pilot said. "Sir."

  The helicopter maneuvered over the main street of the town and hung in midair. There was a rattling sound: the rope ladder being released. Stone stood and pulled on his helmet. He snapped shut the sealer and inflated his clear suit, puffing it up around him. A small bottle of oxygen on his back would provide enough air for two hours of exploration.

  He waited until Burton had sealed his suit, and then Stone opened the hatch and stared down at the ground. The helicopter was raising a heavy cloud of dust.