Darwin's Radio Page 30

  Mitch cried out, thrashing through the covers. He threw his legs off the bed, hands clutching the sheets, confused by the curtains and the furniture. For a moment he did not know who or where he was.

  Kaye sat beside him and held him.

  “A dream?” she asked, rubbing his shoulders.

  “Yeah,” he said. “My God. Not psychic. No time travel. He didn’t carry any firewood. But there was a fire in the cave. The masks didn’t seem right, either. But it felt real.”

  Kaye laid him back on the bed and smoothed his damp hair, touched his bristled cheek. Mitch apologized for waking her.

  “I was already awake,” she said.

  “Hell of a way to impress you,” Mitch murmured.

  “You don’t need to impress me,” Kaye said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No,” he said. “It was only a dream.”

  51

  Richmond, Virginia

  Dicken pushed open the car door and stepped out of the Dodge. Dr. Denise Lipton handed him a badge. He shaded his eyes against the bright sun and looked up at the small sign over the clinic’s bare concrete wall: VIRGINIA CHATHAM WOMEN’S HEALTH AND FAMILY CENTER. A face briefly peered at them through a tiny wire-mesh glass window in the heavy blue-painted metal door. The intercom switched on, and Lipton gave her name and her contact at the clinic. The door opened.

  Dr. Henrietta Paskow stood with thick legs planted wide apart, her calf-length gray skirt and white blouse emphasizing a strong stout plainness that made her seem older than she actually was. “Thanks for coming, Denise. We’ve been very busy.”

  They followed her through the yellow and white hallway, past the doors of eight waiting rooms, to a small office in the rear. Brass-framed portraits of a large family of young children hung on the wall behind the plain wooden desk.

  Lipton sat in a metal folding chair. Dicken remained standing. Paskow pushed two boxes of folders at them.

  “We’ve done thirty since Infant C,” she said. “Thirteen D and Cs, seventeen morning-afters. The pills work for five weeks after the rejection of the first-stage fetus.”

  Dicken looked through the case reports. They were straightforward, concise, with attending physician and nurse practitioner notes.

  “There were no severe complications,” Paskow said. “The laminal tissue protects against saltwater lavage. But by the end of the fifth week, the laminal tissue has dissolved, and the pregnancy appears to be vulnerable.”

  “How many requests so far?” Lipton asked.

  “We’ve had six hundred appointments. Nearly all of them are in their twenties and thirties and living with a man, married or otherwise. We’ve referred half of them to other clinics. It’s a significant increase.”

  Dicken laid the folders facedown on the desk.

  Paskow scrutinized him. “You don’t approve, Mr. Dicken?”

  “I’m not here to approve or disapprove,” he said. “Dr. Lipton and I are doing field interviews to see how our figures match the real world.”

  “Herod’s is going to decimate an entire generation,” Paskow said. “A third of the women coming to us don’t even test positive for SHEVA. They haven’t had a miscarriage. They just want the baby out, then wait a few years and see what happens. We’re doing a land-office business in birth control. Our clinic classes are full. We’ve put on a third and fourth classroom upstairs. More men are coming with their wives and their girlfriends. Maybe that’s the only good thing about all this. Men are feeling guilty.”

  “There’s no reason to terminate every pregnancy,” Lipton said. “The SHEVA tests are highly accurate.”

  “We tell them that. They don’t care,” Paskow said. “They’re scared and they don’t trust us to know what might happen. Meanwhile, every Tuesday and Thursday, we have ten or fifteen Operation Rescue pickets outside yelling that Herod’s is a secular humanist myth, that there is no disease. Only pretty babies being needlessly killed. They claim it’s a worldwide conspiracy. They’re getting shrill and they’re very scared. The millennium is young.”

  Paskow had copied key statistical records. She handed Lipton these papers.

  “Thank you for your time,” Dicken said.

  “Mr. Dicken,” Paskow called after them. “A vaccine would save everyone a lot of grief.”

  Lipton saw Dicken to his car. A black woman in her thirties walked past them and stood at the blue door. She had wrapped herself in a long wool coat, though the day was warm. She was more than six months pregnant.

  “I’ve had enough for one day,” Lipton said, her face pale. “I’m going back to the campus.”

  “I have to pick up some samples,” Dicken said.

  Lipton put her hand on the door and said, “The women at our clinic have to be told. None of them have STDs, but they’ve all had chicken pox and one has had hepatitis B.”

  “We don’t know that chicken pox causes problems,” Dicken said.

  “It’s a herpes virus. Your lab results are scary, Christopher.”

  “They’re incomplete. Hell, almost everyone has had chicken pox, or mono, or cold sores. So far, we’re only positive about genital herpes and hepatitis and possibly AIDS.”

  “I still have to tell them,” she said, and closed the door for him with a definite slam. “It’s about ethics, Christopher.”

  “Yeah,” Dicken said. He kicked at the emergency brake release and started the engine. Lipton walked toward her own car. After a few seconds, he made a disgusted face, shut the engine off again, and sat with his arm out the window, trying to decide how he could best spend his time in the next few weeks.

  Things were not going at all well in the labs. Fetal tissue and placenta analysis on samples sent from France and Japan showed reduced immune response to all manner of herpes infections. Not a single second-stage pregnancy had survived birth, of the 110 studied thus far.

  It was time to make up his mind. Public health policy was in a critical state. Decisions and recommendations would have to be made, and politicians would have to react to those recommendations in ways that could be explained to clearly divided constituencies.

  He might not be able to salvage the truth. And the truth seemed remarkably remote at this point. How could something as important as a major evolutionary event be sidetracked so effectively?

  On the seat beside him he had dumped a pile of mail from his office in Atlanta. There had been no time to read it on the plane. He pulled out an envelope and swore under his breath. How had he not seen it right away? The postmark and handwriting were clear enough: Dr. Leonid Sugashvili, writing from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia.

  He tore open the envelope. A snapshot-size black-and-white photograph on slick paper fell into his lap. He picked it up and examined the image: figures standing before a ramshackle old wood-frame house, two women in dresses, a man in overalls. They looked slender, perhaps even slight, but there was no way to be sure. The faces were indistinct.

  Dicken pulled open the folded letter accompanying the photo.

  Dear Dr. Christopher Dicken,

  I have been sent this photograph from Atzharis AR, you call perhaps Adjaria. It was taken near Batumi ten years ago. These are putative survivors from the purges you have shown such interest in. There is little to be seen here. Some say they are still alive. Some say they are really from UFO but these people I do not believe.

  I will look for them and inform you when the time comes. Finance is in very short supply. I would appreciate financial assistance from your organization, the NCID. Thank you for your interest. I feel they may not be “Abominable Snow People” at all, but real! I have not informed the CDC in Tbilisi. You are the one I have been told to entrust.

  Sincerely,

  Leonid Sugashvili

  Dicken examined the photograph again. Less than no evidence. Will-o’-the-wisps.

  Death rides in on a pale horse, slicing babies right and left, he thought. And I’m teamed up with crackpots and money-grubbing eccentrics.

  52<
br />
  Baltimore

  Mitch called his apartment in Seattle while Kaye was taking a shower. He punched in his code and retrieved his messages. There were two calls from his father, a call from a man who did not identify himself, and then a call from Oliver Merton in London. Mitch wrote the number down as Kaye came out of the bathroom, loosely wrapped in a towel.

  “You delight in provoking me,” he said. She dried her short hair with another towel, gazing at him with an appraising steadiness that was unnerving.

  “Who was that?”

  “Picking up my messages.”

  “Old girlfriends?”

  “My father, somebody I don’t know—a man—and Oliver Merton.”

  Kaye lifted her eyebrow. “An old girlfriend might make me happier.”

  “Mmm hmm. He wonders if I would a make a trip to Beresford, New York. He wants me to meet somebody interesting.”

  “A Neandertal?”

  “He says he can arrange for my expenses and accommodations.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” Kaye said.

  “I haven’t said I’ll go. I haven’t the slightest idea what he’s up to.”

  “He knows quite a bit about my business,” Kaye said.

  “You could come with me,” Mitch said with a squint that showed he knew this was too hopeful.

  “I’m not done here, not by a long shot,” she said. “I’ll miss you if you go.”

  “Why don’t I call him and ask what he’s got in his bag of tricks?”

  “All right,” Kaye said. “Do that, and I’ll fix us two bowls of cereal.”

  The call took a few seconds to go through. The low trill of an English phone was quickly interrupted by a breathless, “Fuck it’s late and I’m busy. Who’s this?”

  “Mitch Rafelson.”

  “Indeed. Pardon me while I wrap myself. I hate talking half-naked.”

  “Half!” exclaimed a perturbed woman in the same room. “Tell them I’m soon to be your wife, and you are completely naked.”

  “Shush.” Louder, phone half-muffled, Merton called to the woman, “She’s getting her essentials and going into the next room.” Merton removed his hand and brought his mouth closer to the phone. “We need to talk in private, Mitchell.”

  “I’m calling from Baltimore.”

  “How far from Bethesda is that?”

  “A ways.”

  “NIH have you in the loop yet?”

  “No,” Mitch said.

  “Marge Cross? Ah . . . Kaye Lang?”

  Mitch winced. Merton’s instincts were uncanny. “I’m a simple anthropologist, Oliver.”

  “All right. The room’s empty. I can tell you. The situation in Innsbruck has hotted up considerably. It’s gone beyond fistfights. Now they don’t even like each other. There’s been a falling-out, and one of the principals wants to talk to you.”

  “Who?”

  “Actually, he says he’s been a sympathizer since the beginning. Says he called you to tell you they’d found the cave.”

  Mitch remembered the call. “He didn’t leave a name.”

  “Nor will he now. But he’s on the level, he’s important, and he wants to talk. I’d like to be there.”

  “Sounds like a political move,” Mitch said.

  “I’m sure he’d like to spread some rumors and see what the repercussions are. He wants to meet in New York, not Innsbruck or Vienna. At the home of an acquaintance in Beresford. Do you know anybody there?”

  “Can’t say that I do,” Mitch replied.

  “He hasn’t told me what he’s thinking yet, but . . . I can put a few links together and it all makes a very nice chain.”

  “I’ll think about it and call you back in a few minutes.”

  Merton did not sound happy about waiting even that length of time.

  “Just a few minutes,” Mitch assured him. He hung up. Kaye emerged from the kitchen with two bowls of cereal and a pitcher of milk on a tray. She had put on a calf-length black robe tied with a red cord. The robe showed off her legs, and, when she bent over, neatly revealed a breast. “Rice Chex or Raisin Bran?”

  “Chex, please.”

  “Well?”

  Mitch smiled. “May I share breakfast with you for a thousand years.”

  Kaye looked both confused and pleased. She placed the tray on the coffee table and smoothed her robe over her hips, primping with a kind of awkward self-consciousness that Mitch found very endearing. “You know what I like to hear,” she said.

  Mitch gently pulled her down to the couch beside him. “Merton says there’s a breakdown in Innsbruck, a schism. An important member of the team wants to talk to me. Merton’s going to write a story about the mummies.”

  “He’s interested in the same things we are,” Kaye said speculatively. “He thinks something important is happening. And he’s following every angle, from me to Innsbruck.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Mitch said.

  “Is he intelligent?”

  “Reasonably. Maybe very intelligent. I don’t know; I’ve only spent a few hours with him.”

  “Then you should go. You should find out what he knows. Besides, it’s closer to Albany.”

  “That’s true. Ordinarily, I’d pack my small bag and hop the next train.”

  Kaye poured her milk. “But?”

  “I don’t just love and run. I want to spend the next few weeks with you, uninterrupted. Never leave your side.” Mitch stretched his neck, rubbed it. Kaye reached out to help him rub. “That sounds clinging,” he said.

  “I want you to cling,” she said. “I feel very possessive and very protective.”

  “I can call Merton and tell him no.”

  “But you won’t.” She kissed him thoroughly and bit at his lip. “I’m sure you’ll have some amazing tales to tell. I did a lot of thinking last night, and now I have a lot of very focused work to do. When it’s all done, I may have some amazing tales to tell you, Mitch.”

  53

  Washington, D.C.

  Augustine jogged briskly along the Capitol mall, following the dirt jogging path beneath the cherry trees, now dropping the last of their blossoms. An agent in a dark blue suit followed at a steady lope, turning to run backward for a moment and scan the trail behind.

  Dicken stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, waiting for Augustine to approach. He had driven in from Bethesda an hour earlier, braving rush-hour traffic, hating this clandestine nonsense with something approaching fury. Augustine stopped beside him and jogged in place, stretching his arms.

  “Good morning, Christopher,” he said. “You should jog more often.”

  “I like being fat,” Dicken said, his face coloring.

  “Nobody likes being fat.”

  “Well, in that case, I’m not fat,” Dicken said. “What are we today, Mark, secret agents? Informers?” He wondered why they had not yet assigned an agent to him. He concluded it was because he was not as yet a public figure.

  “Goddamn damage control experts,” Augustine said. “A man named Mitchell Rafelson spent the night with dear Ms. Kaye Lang at her lovely condominium in Baltimore.”

  Dicken’s heart sank.

  “You walked around the San Diego Zoo with the two of them. Got him a badge into a closed Americol party. All very convivial. Did you introduce them, Christopher?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Dicken said, surprised at how miserable he felt.

  “That wasn’t wise. Do you know his record?” Augustine asked pointedly. “The body snatcher from the Alps? He’s a nut case, Christopher.”

  “I thought he might have something to contribute.”

  “To support whose view in this mess?”

  “A defensible view,” Dicken said vaguely, looking away. The morning was cool, pleasant, and there were quite a few joggers on the mall, getting in a little outdoors activity before sealing themselves into their government offices.

  “The whole thing smells. It looks like some kind of an end run to refocus the whole project
, and that concerns me.”

  “We had a point of view, Mark. A defensible point of view.”

  “Marge Cross tells me there’s talk about evolution,” Augustine said.

  “Kaye has been putting together an explanation that involves evolution,” Dicken said. “It’s all predicted in her papers, Mark—and Mitch Rafelson has been doing some research along those lines, as well.”

  “Marge thinks there will be severe fallout if this theory gets publicized,” Augustine said. He stopped windmilling his arms and performed neck-stretch exercises, grabbing each upper arm with the opposite hand, applying tension, sighting along the extended arm as he bent it back as far as it would go. “No reason for it to get that far. I’ll stop it right here and now. We got a preprint from the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut in Germany this morning that they’ve found mutated forms of SHEVA. Several of them. Diseases mutate, Christopher. We’ll have to withdraw the vaccine trials and start all over again. That pushes all our hopes onto a really bad option. My job might not survive that kind of upheaval.”

  Dicken watched Augustine prance in place, pounding the ground with his feet. Augustine stopped and caught his breath. “There could be twenty or thirty thousand people demonstrating on the mall tomorrow. Somebody’s leaked a report from the Taskforce on the RU-486 results.”

  Dicken felt something twist inside him, a small little pop, combined disappointment with Kaye and with all the work he had done. All the time he had wasted. He could not see a way around the problem of a messenger that mutated, changing its message. No biological system would ever give a messenger that kind of control.

  He had been wrong. Kaye Lang had been wrong.

  The agent tapped his watch, but Augustine screwed up his face and shook his head in annoyance.

  “Tell me all about it, Christopher,” Augustine said, “and then I’ll decide whether I’m going to let you keep your goddamned job.”

  54