The Eyes of Darkness

had been made to keep him from chafing.
    While Tina worked on Danny, Elliot questioned Carl Dombey. "What goes on in this place? Military research?"
    "Yes," Dombey said.
    "Strictly biological weapons?"
    "Biological and chemical. Recombinant DNA experiments. At any one time, we have thirty to forty projects underway."
    "I thought the U.S. got out of the chemical and biological weapons race a long time ago."
    "For the public record, we did," Dombey said. "It made the politicians look good. But in reality the work goes on. It has to. This is the only facility of its kind we have. The Chinese have three like it. The Russians . . . they're now supposed to be our new friends, but they keep developing bacteriological weapons, new and more virulent strains of viruses, because they're broke, and this is a lot cheaper than other weapons systems. Iraq has a big bio-chem warfare project, and Libya, and God knows who else. Lots of people out there in the rest of the world—they believe in chemical and biological warfare. They don't see anything immoral about it. If they felt they had some terrific new bug that we didn't know about, something against which we couldn't retaliate in kind, they'd use it on us."
    Elliot said, "But if racing to keep up with the Chinese—or the Russians or the Iraqis—can create situations like the one we've got here, where an innocent child gets ground up in the machine, then aren't we just becoming monsters too? Aren't we letting our fears of the enemy turn us into them? And isn't that just another way of losing the war?"
    Dombey nodded. As he spoke, he smoothed the spikes of his mustache. "That's the same question I've been wrestling with ever since Danny got caught in the gears. The problem is that some flaky people are attracted to this kind of work because of the secrecy and because you really do get a sense of power from designing weapons that can kill millions of people. So megalomaniacs like Tamaguchi get involved. Men like Aaron Zachariah here. They abuse their power, pervert their duties. There's no way to screen them out ahead of time. But if we closed up shop, if we stopped doing this sort of research just because we were afraid of men like Tamaguchi winding up in charge of it, we'd be conceding so much ground to our enemies that we wouldn't survive for long. I suppose we have to learn to live with the lesser of the evils."
    Tina removed an electrode from Danny's neck, carefully peeling the tape off his skin.
    The child still clung to her, but his deeply sunken eyes were riveted on Dombey.
    "I'm not interested in the philosophy or morality of biological warfare," Tina said. "Right now I just want to know how the hell Danny wound up in this place."
    "To understand that," Dombey said, "you have to go back twenty months. It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, carrying a diskette record of China's most important and dangerous: new biological weapon in a decade. They call the stuff 'Wuhan-400' because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center.
    "Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon. It afflicts only human beings. No other living creature can carry it. And like syphilis, Wuhan-400 can't survive outside a living human body for longer than a minute, which means it can't permanently contaminate objects or entire places the way anthrax and other virulent microorganisms can. And when the host expires, the Wuhan-400 within him perishes a short while later, as soon as the temperature of the corpse drops below eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. Do you see the advantage of all this?"
    Tina was too busy with Danny to think about what Carl Dombey had said, but Elliot knew what the scientist meant. "If I understand you, the Chinese could use Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn't be any need for them to conduct a tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved in and took over the conquered territory."
    "Exactly," Dombey said. "And Wuhan-400 has other, equally important advantages over most biological agents. For one thing, you can become an infectious carrier only four hours after coming into contact with the virus. That's an incredibly short incubation period. Once infected, no one lives more than twenty-four hours. Most die in twelve. It's worse than the Ebola virus in Africa—infinitely worse.