MACHINE FUNCTION ON ALL CIRCUITS WITHIN RATIONAL INDICES

  He looked and nodded, satisfied. He could not have known, as he stood before the teleprinter, that there was indeed a fault, but that it was purely mechanical, not electronic, and hence could not be tested on the check programs.  The fault lay within the teleprinter box itself.  There, a sliver of paper from the edge of the roll had peeled away and, curling upward, had lodged between the bell and striker, preventing the bell from ringing. It was for this reason that no MCN transmissions had been recorded.

  Neither machine nor man was able to catch the error.

  18. The Noon Conference

  ACCORDING TO PROTOCOL, THE TEAM MET EVERY twelve hours for a brief conference, at which results were summarized and new directions planned. In order to save time the conferences were held in a small room off the cafeteria; they could eat and talk at the same time.

  Hall was the last to arrive. He slipped into a chair behind his lunch-- two glasses of liquid and three pills of different colors-- just as Stone said, "We'll hear from Burton first."

  Burton shuffled to his feet and in a slow, hesitant voice outlined his experiments and his results. He noted first that he had determined the size of the lethal agent to be one micron.

  Stone and Leavitt looked at each other. The green flecks they had seen were much larger than that; clearly, infection could be spread by a mere fraction of the green fleck.

  Burton next explained his experiments concerning airborne transmission, and coagulation beginning at the lungs. He finished with his attempts at anticoagulation therapy.

  "What about the autopsies?" Stone said. "What did they show?"

  "Nothing we don't already know. The blood is clotted throughout. No other demonstrable abnormalities at the light microscope level."

  "And clotting is initiated at the lungs?"

  "Yes. Presumably the organisms cross over to the bloodstream there-- or they may release a toxic substance, which crosses over. We may have an answer when the stained sections are finished. In particular, we will be looking for damage to blood vessels, since this releases tissue thromboplastin, and stimulates clotting at the site of the damage."

  Stone nodded and turned to Hall, who told of the tests carried out on his two patients. He explained that the infant was normal to all tests and that Jackson had a bleeding ulcer, for which he was receiving transfusions.

  "He's revived," Hall said. "I talked with him briefly."

  Everyone sat up.

  "Mr. Jackson is a cranky old goat of sixty-nine who has a two-year history of ulcer. He's bled out twice before: two years ago, and again last year. Each time he was warned to change his habits; each time he went back to his old ways, and began bleeding again. At the time of the Piedmont contact, e was treating his problems with his own regimen: a bottle of aspirin a day and some Sterno on top of it. He says this left him a little short of breath."

  "And made him acidotic as hell," Burton said.

  "Exactly."

  Methanol, when broken down by the body, was converted to formaldehyde and formic acid. In combination with aspirin, it meant Jackson was consuming great quantities of acid. The body had to maintain its acid-base balance within fairly narrow limits or death would occur. One way to keep the balance was to breathe rapidly, and blow off carbon dioxide, decreasing carbonic acid in the body.

  Stone said, "Could this acid have protected him from the organism?"

  Hall shrugged. "Impossible to say."

  Leavitt said, "What about the infant? Was it anemic?"

  "No," Hall said. "But on the other hand, we don't know for sure that it was protected by the same mechanism. It might have something entirely different."

  "How about the acid-base balance of the child?"

  "Normal," Hall said. "Perfectly normal. At least it is now."

  There was a moment of silence. Finally Stone said, "Well, you have some good leads here. The problem remains to discover what, if anything, that child and that old man have in common. Perhaps, as you suggest, there is nothing in common. But for a start, we have to assume that they were protected in the same way, by the same mechanism."

  Hall nodded.

  Burton said to Stone, "And what have you found in the capsule?"

  "We'd better show you," Stone said.

  "Show us what?"

  "Something we believe may represent the organism," Stone said.

  ***

  The door said MORPHOLOGY. Inside, the room was partitioned into a place for the experimenters to stand, and a glass-walled isolation chamber further in. Gloves were provided so the men could reach into the chamber and move instruments about.

  Stone pointed to the glass dish, and the small fleck of black inside it.

  "We think this is our 'meteor,' " he said. "We have found something apparently alive on its surface. There were also other areas within the capsule that may represent life. We've brought the meteor in here to have a look at it under the light microscope."

  Reaching through with the gloves, Stone set the glass dish into an opening in a large chrome box, then withdrew his hands.

  "The box," he said, "is simply a light microscope fitted with the usual image intensifiers and resolution scanners. We can go up to a thousand diameters with it, projected on the screen here."

  Leavitt adjusted dials while Hall and the others stared at the viewer screen.

  "Ten power," Leavitt said.

  On the screen, Hall saw that the rock was jagged, blackish, dull. Stone pointed out green flecks.

  "One hundred power."

  The green flecks were larger now, very clear.

  "We think that's our organism. We have observed it growing; it turns purple, apparently at the point of mitotic division."

  "Spectrum shift?"

  "Of some kind."

  "One thousand power," Leavitt said.

  The screen was filled with a single green spot, nestled down in the jagged hollows of the rock. Hall noticed the surface of the green, which was smooth and glistening, almost oily.

  "You think that's a single bacterial colony?"

  "We can't be sure it's a colony in the conventional sense," Stone said. "Until we heard Burton's experiments, we didn't think it was a colony at all. We thought it might be a single organism. But obviously the single units have to be a micron or less in size; this is much too big. Therefore it is probably a larger structure-- perhaps a colony, perhaps something else."

  As they watched, the spot turned purple, and green again. "It's dividing now," Stone said. "Excellent."

  Leavitt switched on the cameras.

  "Now watch closely."

  The spot turned purple and held the color. It seemed to expand slightly, and for a moment, the surface broke into fragments, hexagonal in shape, like a tile floor.

  "Did you see that?"

  "It seemed to break up."

  "Into six-sided figures."

  "I wonder," Stone said, "whether those figures represent single units."

  "Or whether they are regular geometric shapes all the time, or just during division?"

  "We'll know more," Stone said, "after the EM." He turned to Burton. "Have you finished your autopsies?"

  "Yes."

  "Can you work the spectrometer?"

  "I think so."

  "Then do that. It's computerized, anyway. We'll want an analysis of samples of both the rock and the green organism."

  "You'll get me a piece?"

  "Yes." Stone said to Leavitt: "Can you handle the AA analyzer? "

  "Yes."

  "Same tests on that."

  "And a fractionation?"

  "I think so," Stone said. "But you'll have to do that by hand."

  Leavitt nodded; Stone turned back to the isolation chamber and removed a glass dish from the light microscope. He set it to one side, beneath a small device that looked like a miniature scaffolding. This was the microsurgical unit.

  Microsurgery was a relatively new skill in biology-- the ability to perform delicate operations on a single cell. Using microsurgical techniques, it was possible to remove the nucleus from a cell, or part of the cytoplasm, as neatly and cleanly as a surgeon performed an amputation.

  The device was constructed to scale down human hand movements into fine, precise miniature motions. A series of gears and servomechanisms carried out the reduction; the movement of a thumb was translated into a shift of a knife blade millionths of an inch.

  Using a high magnification viewer, Stone began to chip away delicately at the black rock, until he had two tiny fragments. He set them aside in separate glass dishes and proceeded to scrape away two small fragments from the green area.

  Immediately, the green turned purple, and expanded.

  "It doesn't like you," Leavitt said, and laughed.

  Stone frowned. "Interesting. Do you suppose that's a nonspecific growth response, or a trophic response to injury and irradiation? "

  "I think," Leavitt said, "that it doesn't like to be poked at."

  "We must investigate further," Stone said.

  19. Crash

  FOR ARTHUR MANCHEK, THERE WAS A CERTAIN kind of horror in the telephone conversation. He received it at home, having just finished dinner and sat down in the living room to read the newspapers. He hadn't seen a newspaper in the last two days, he had been so busy with the Piedmont business.

  When the phone rang, he assumed that it must be for his wife, but a moment later she came in and said, "It's for you. The base."

  He had an uneasy feeling as he picked up the receiver. "Major Manchek speaking."

  "Major, this is Colonel Burns at Unit Eight." Unit Eight was the processing and clearing unit of the base. Personnel checked in and out through Unit Eight, and calls were transmitted through it.

  "Yes, Colonel?"

  "Sir, we have you down for notification of certain contingencies. " His voice was guarded; he was choosing his words carefully on the open line. "I'm informing you now of an RTM crash forty-two minutes ago in Big Head, Utah."

  Manchek frowned. Why was he being informed of a routine training-mission crash? It was hardly his province.

  "What was it?"

  "Phantom, Sir. En route San Francisco to Topeka."

  "I see," Manchek said, though he did not see at all.

  "Sir, Goddard wanted you to be informed in this instance so that you could join the post team."

  "Goddard? Why Goddard?" For a moment, as he sat there in the living room, staring at the newspaper headline absently-- NEW BERLIN CRISIS FFARED-- he thought that the colonel meant Lewis Goddard, chief of the codes section of Vandenberg. Then he realized he meant Goddard Spaceflight Center, outside Washington. Among other things, Goddard acted as collating center for certain special projects that fell between the province of Houston and the governmental agencies in Washington.

  "Sir," Colonel Burns said, "the Phantom drifted off its flight plan forty minutes out of San Francisco and passed through Area WF."

  Manchek felt himself slowing down. A kind of sleepiness came over him. "Area WF?"

  "That is correct, Sir.

  "When?"

  "Twenty minutes before the crash."

  "At what altitude?"

  "Twenty-three thousand feet, Sir."

  "When does the post team leave?"

  "Half an hour, Sir, from the base."

  "All right," Manchek said. "I'll be there."

  He hung up and stared at the phone lazily. He felt tired; he wished he could go to bed. Area WF was the designation for the cordoned-off radius around Piedmont, Arizona.

  They should have dropped the bomb, he thought. They should have dropped it two days ago.

  At the time of the decision to delay Directive 7-12, Manchek had been uneasy. But officially he could not express an opinion, and he had waited in vain for the Wildfire team, now located in the underground laboratory, to complain to Washington. He knew Wildfire had been notified; he had seen the cable that went to all security units; it was quite explicit.

  Yet for some reason Wildfire had not complained. Indeed, they had paid no attention to it whatever.

  Very odd.

  And now there was a crash. He lit his pipe and sucked on it, considering the possibilities. Overwhelming was the likelihood that some green trainee had daydreamed, gone off his flight plan, panicked, and lost control of the plane. It had happened before, hundreds of times. The post team, a group of specialists who went out to the site of the wreckage to investigate all crashes, usually returned a verdict of "Agnogenic Systems Failure." It was military doubletalk for crash of unknown cause; it did not distinguish between mechanical failure and pilot failure, but it was known that most systems failures were pilot failures. A man could not afford to daydream when he was running a complex machine at two thousand miles an hour. The proof lay in the statistics: though only 9 per cent of flights occurred after the pilot had taken a leave or weekend pass, these flights accounted for 27 per cent of casualties.

  Manchek's pipe went out. He stood, dropping the newspaper, and went into the kitchen to tell his wife he was leaving.

  ***

  "This is movie country," somebody said, looking at the sandstone cliffs, the brilliant reddish hues, against the deepening blue of the sky. And it was true, many movies had been filmed in this area of Utah. But Manchek could not think of movies now. As he sat in the back of the limousine moving away from the Utah airport, he considered what he had been told.

  During the flight from Vandenberg to southern Utah, the post team had heard transcripts of the flight transmission between the Phantom and Topeka Central. For the most part it was dull, except for the final moments before the pilot crashed.

  The pilot had said: "Something is wrong."

  And then, a moment later, "My rubber air hose is dissolving. It must be the vibration. It's just disintegrating to dust."

  Perhaps ten seconds after that, a weak, fading voice said, "Everything made of rubber in the cockpit is dissolving."

  There were no further transmissions.

  Manchek kept hearing that brief communication, in his mind, over and over.  Each time, it sounded more bizarre and terrifying.

  He looked out the window at the cliffs. The sun was setting now, and only the tops of the cliffs were lighted by fading reddish sunlight; the valleys lay in darkness. He looked ahead at the other limousine, raising a small dust cloud as it carried the rest of the team to the crash site.

  "I used to love westerns," somebody said. "They were all shot out here. Beautiful country."

  Manchek frowned. It was astonishing to him how people could spend so much time on irrelevancies. Or perhaps it was just denial, the unwillingness to face reality.

  The reality was cold enough: the Phantom had strayed into Area WF, going quite deep for a matter of six minutes before the pilot realized the error and pulled north again. However, once in WF, the plane had begun to lose stability. And it had finally crashed.

  He said, "Has Wildfire been informed?"

  A member of the group, a psychiatrist with a crew cut-- all post teams had at least one psychiatrist-- said, "You mean the germ people?"

  "Yes."

  "They've been told," somebody else said. "It went out on the scrambler an hour ago."

  Then, thought Manchek, there would certainly be a reaction from Wildfire. They could not afford to ignore this.

  Unless they weren't reading their cables. It had never occurred to him before, but perhaps it was possible-- they weren't reading the cables. They were so absorbed in their work, they just weren't bothering.

  "There's the wreck," somebody said. "Up ahead."

  ***

  Each time Manchek saw a wreck, he was astonished. Somehow, one never got used to the idea of the sprawl, the mess, the destructive force of a large metal object striking the earth at thousands of miles an hour. He always expected a neat, tight little clump of metal, but it was never that way.

  The wreckage of the Phantom was scattered over two square miles of desert. Standing next to the charred remnants of the left wing, he could barely see the others, on the horizon, near the right wing. Everywhere he looked, there were bits of twisted metal, blackened, paint peeling. He saw one with a small portion of a sign still intact, the stenciled letters clear: DO NOT. The rest was gone.

  It was impossible to make anything of the remnants. The fuselage, the cockpit, the canopy were all shattered into a million fragments, and the fires had disfigured everything.

  As the sun faded, he found himself standing near the remains of the tail section, where the metal still radiated heat from the smoldering fire. Half-buried in the sand he saw a bit of bone; he picked it up and realized with horror that it was human. Long, and broken, and charred at one end, it had obviously come from an arm or a leg. But it was oddly clean-- there was no flesh remaining, only smooth bone.

  Darkness descended, and the post team took out their flashlights, the half-dozen men moving among, smoking metal, flashing their yellow beams of light about.

  It was late in the evening when a biochemist whose name he did not know came up to talk with him.

  "You know," the biochemist said, "it's funny. That transcript about the rubber in the cockpit dissolving."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Well, no rubber was used in this airplane. It was all a synthetic plastic compound. Newly developed by Ancro; they're quite proud of it. It's a polymer that has some of the same characteristics as human tissue. Very flexible, lots of applications. "

  Manchek said, "Do you think vibrations could have caused the disintegration."

  "No," the man said. "There are thousands of Phantoms flying around the world. They all have this plastic. None of them has ever had this trouble."

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning that I don't know what the hell is going on," the biochemist said.

  20. Routine

  SLOWLY, THE WILDFIRE INSTALLATION SETTLED into a routine, a rhythm of work in the underground chambers of a laboratory where there was no night or day, morning or afternoon. The men slept when they were tired, awoke when they were refreshed, and carried on their work in a number of different areas.

  Most of this work was to lead nowhere. They knew that, and accepted it in advance. As Stone was fond of saying, scientific research was much like prospecting: you went out and you hunted, armed with your maps and your instruments, but in the end your preparations did not matter, or even your intuition. You needed your luck, and whatever benefits accrued to the diligent, through sheer, grinding hard work.

  Burton stood in the room that housed the spectrometer along with several other pieces of equipment for radioactivity assays, ratio-density photometry, thermocoupling analysis, and preparation for X-ray crystallography.

  The spectrometer employed in Level V was the standard Whittington model K-5. Essentially it consisted of a vaporizer, a prism, and a recording screen. The material to be tested was set in the vaporizer and burned. The light from its burning then passed through the prism, where it was broken down to a spectrum that was projected onto a recording screen. Since different elements gave off different wavelengths of light as they burned, it was possible to analyze the chemical makeup of a substance by analyzing the spectrum of light produced.

  In theory it was simple, but in practice the reading of spectrometrograms was complex and difficult. No one in this Wildfire laboratory was trained to do it well. Thus results were fed directly into a computer, which performed the analysis. Because of the sensitivity of the computer, rough percentage compositions could also be determined.

  Burton placed the first chip, from the black rock, onto the vaporizer and pressed the button. There was a single bright burst of intensely hot light; he turned away, avoiding the brightness, and then put the second chip onto the lamp. Already, he knew, the computer was analyzing the light from the first chip.

  He repeated the process with the green fleck, and then checked the time. The computer was now scanning the self-developing photographic plates, which were ready for viewing in seconds. But the scan itself would take two hours-- die electric eye was very slow.