Phantoms

vehicle—a test tube centrifuge, an electron microscope, and so forth—in addition to several pieces of equipment that were not duplicated in the other vehicle. It contained no autopsy table, however, and only one videotape system. There were three computer terminals instead of two.
    Dr. Enrico Valdez was sitting at one of the programming boards, in a deep-seated chair designed to accommodate a man in a decontamination suit complete with air tank. He was working with Houk and Niven on chemical analysis of samples of various substances collected from several business places and dwellings along Skyline Road and Vail Lane—such as the flour and dough taken from the table in Liebermann’s Bakery. They were seeking traces of nerve gas condensate or other chemical substances. Thus far, they had found nothing out of the ordinary.
    Dr. Valdez didn’t believe that nerve gas or disease would turn out to be the culprit.
    He was beginning to wonder if this whole thing might actually be in Isley’s and Arkham’s territory. Isley and Arkham, the two men without names on their decontamination suits, were not even members of the Civilian Defense Unit, they were from a different project altogether. Just this morning, before dawn, when Dr. Valdez had been introduced to them at the team rendezvous point in Sacramento, when he had heard what kind of research they were doing, he had almost laughed. He had thought their project was a waste of taxpayers’ money. Now he wasn’t so sure. Now he wondered…
    He wondered… and he worried.
     
    Dr. Sara Yamaguchi was also in the second motor home.
    She was preparing bacteria cultures. Using a sample of blood taken from the body of Gary Wechlas, she was methodically contaminating a series of growth media, jellied compounds filled with nutrients on which bacteria generally thrived: horse blood agar, sheep blood agar, simplex, chocolate agar, and many others.
    Sara Yamaguchi was a geneticist who had spent eleven years in recombinant DNA research. If it developed that Snowfield had been stricken by a man-made microorganism, Sara’s work would become central to the investigation. She would direct the study of the microbe’s morphology, and when that was completed, she would have a major role in attempting to determine the function of the bug.
    Like Dr. Valdez, Sara Yamaguchi had begun to wonder if Isley and Arkham might become more essential to the investigation than she had thought. This morning, their area of expertise had seemed as exotic as voodoo. But now, in light of what had taken place since the team’s arrival in Snowfield, she was forced to admit that Isley’s and Arkham’s specially seemed increasingly pertinent.
    And like Dr. Valdez, she was worried.
     
    Dr. Wilson Bettenby, chief of the civilian scientific arm of the CBW Civilian Defense Unit’s West Coast team, sat at a computer terminal, two seats away from Dr. Valdez.
    Bettenby was running an automated analysis program on several water samples. The samples were inserted into a processor that distilled the water, stored the distillate, and subjected the filtered-out substances to spectrographic analysis and other tests. Bettenby was not searching for microorganisms; that would require different procedures than these. This machine only identified and quantified all mineral and chemical elements present in the water; the data was displayed on the cathode ray tube.
    All but one of the water samples had been taken from taps in the kitchens and bathrooms of houses and businesses along Vail Lane. They proved to be free of dangerous chemical impurities.
    The other water sample was the one that Deputy Autry had collected from the kitchen floor of the apartment on Vail Lane, sometime last night. According to Sheriff Hammond, puddles of water and saturated carpets had been discovered in several buildings. By this morning, however, the water had pretty much evaporated, except for a couple of damp carpets from which Bettenby wouldn’t have been able to obtain a clean sample. He put the deputy’s sample into the processor.
    In a few minutes, the computer flashed up the complete chemical-mineral analysis of the water and of the residue that remained after all of the liquid in the sample had been distilled:
    PERCENT OF SOLUTION
 
PERCENT OF RESIDUE
 
PERCENT OF SOLUTION
 
PERCENT OF