Killer Dust Read online

  Faye managed to look affronted. “No. You guys were just talking—you know, having your beer before Jack took off—and I was lying down in the bedroom there minding my own business, thank you very much!” Quickly she added, “I suppose you didn’t know I was in the house.”

  “We damned well did not!”

  I hollered, “Is there some good reason I can’t know where Jack is?”

  Tom’s posture stiffened, which told me that until then, he hadn’t been as worked up as he’d been trying to appear. He had jumped on Faye to try to shut her up, and had continued his attack as a crude subterfuge to evade my questions. Faye seemed to have read that in him, too. She smiled brightly, a kind of girl-scout-cookie-salesperson grin meant to sell him on something he didn’t want. On Faye’s aristocratic face it looked downright goony. “That’s all I heard you say. Honest.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him.

  He wiggled his graying eyebrows back.

  Afraid now that I might at any moment lose them into the bedroom, I roared, “Come on, Faye! If that’s all you heard Tom say, then what did Jack say?”

  Faye looked from her husband to me doubtfully, then shrugged her shoulders. “Well, he said he was going to Florida.”

  Tom groaned.

  I said, “And?”

  “And something about ‘code-name dust,’ and ‘don’t tell Em, she’ll get the wrong idea.’”

  I glanced at Tom. His lips twisted wildly for a moment, then he turned and stormed out of the room. I heard the back door open and slam shut. Heard a car engine start up. Heard the sound of tires squealing on blacktop as the vehicle left the curb abruptly.

  I looked at Faye. We both knew that this was no act.

  She stared at her belly and began to cry.

  I thought of going to her and trying to comfort her, but found that I could not move. I now knew where Jack was, geographically—two thousand miles east and south—but without more information, that was just a compass direction along which to direct my longing. And, jammed right up against that longing, I now suffered a new, infinitely worse emotion: the first shards of fear.

  – 2 –

  A woman stood alone on the beach, clinging to her aloneness. The wind played games with the soft tendrils of hair that grew in random curls around her face. She took off her sandals, threaded the straps through one belt loop of her rolled-up jeans, and buckled them together so that she could run with her hands free. She stepped forward and looked down, examining her footprints.

  Her name was Lucy, and she had almost majored in anthropology in sympathy for the prehuman namesake who had long ago left tiny footprints in Africa, but she had abandoned such romances of the past. Hers was a life of the future, and she would walk where few could follow her. She stood now with her own bare feet on the sands of Cape Canaveral, deep in the vastness of the Kennedy Space Center. And when the space shuttle next rose into the skies, she would rise with it, and take her first steps in space.

  But that moment had not yet come, and she had first to deal with the agony of waiting through each hour and each day that hung between her and her goal. Lately that agony had darkened. She felt eyes on her back; the eyes of the world, yes, but also other eyes, and escaping that gaze had become as important as rising into space.

  She marked this rare moment of relative privacy by closing her eyes, so she could concentrate on the sensation of sand rubbing against her skin. It was almost like a message. But as she opened herself to this pleasure, she could for an instant also perceive emotional pain, and a bolt of it shot through her heart and mind.

  Unable to stop herself now from searching for a source for her anxiety, she glanced nervously over her shoulder, even though she knew he could not be there. He might track me home to Florida, but he can’t follow me this deep into the cape. I am safe here. Even safer in space. He can’t follow me there … .

  Anxious that any of her colleagues should witness her anxiety, she forced her gaze forward again and squared her shoulders. She must look normal, casual, in charge of her destiny, just out for a jog on the beach. Physical training. Dedication. Her lips stiffened as she thought, I am in charge, damn it!

  She closed her eyes and drew the thought inward, inhaled the salt air, opened them again. She examined the world, once again the observer, and not the observed.

  The beach stretched long and smooth down the cape, fading into the mists. She regarded the wave-sculpted quartz sand, just one section of the apron of sand that edged the pancake-flat complex of ancient sea deposits that geographers called Florida. Waves washed the beach, grinding the cast-off shells of a hundred zillion sea creatures, working and rolling them along an endless conveyor belt that transported them slowly along the shore, perhaps one day to be the cement in a new generation of stone.

  Lucy turned her face fully into the wind. The waves were big, and thirsty. They marched in from the broad Atlantic and heaved themselves up steeper and steeper as they approached the shore. She thought for a moment that they looked like prides of lions pacing across the veldt from Mother Africa and opening their mouths to roar as they drew near.

  Lions! That’s absurd, she told herself firmly. The stuff of childhood. She scanned her body for tension. Arms. Fingers still clutching, as if on the ready to grasp a weapon. Anxiety must still be lurking within her brain. She reminded herself that she had made it to her destination. That she was in charge.

  So why can’t I let go of this foolish anxiety?

  Focusing her mind on abstraction as she had so doggedly trained herself to do, Lucy studied one single wave as it approached, forced herself to think rationally of the series of circles each molecule of water described as it came, her mind’s eye now replicating the diagram on wave motion that had been in her freshman geology text. The long fetch of the Atlantic wind was a comforting surety. Just physics. Sanity. All in control. There is no mystery to the wind, she assured herself.

  But the wind had drawn its hand across the water’s surface, dragging it first into cat’s paws and then into swells, forming long, sensuous troughs of water that marched across the open water, and the lions again emerged.

  Better African lions than a Florida panther. Lucy forced both images out of her mind. It’s just water. H-two-O. With salt. In motion. It’s all just physics.

  But as she watched, the waves again became stalking lions. Lionesses, she insisted, still fighting for some shred of control of her thoughts. Bewilderment turning to anger, she thought, The females do the work while the males sleep, then the sons of bitches climb on board and have themselves a good fuck!

  She drew in a ragged breath, let it out, the sound of it lost in the wind. Focus harder. The wave she had been watching began to rise, the lioness heaving her body into a self-sacrificing pounce. Lucy gritted her teeth, forced her mind to imagine the oscillatory circle of its individual molecules stretching into ellipses as they intersected the slope of the beach and tripped bottom. Now the axis of that ellipse flattens with the drag of the undertow, now the wave oversteepens and collapses … . The chaos of tumbling water churned up the beach. More powerful than most, this wave kept coming, swept clear up to where she stood, snatched at her feet, wiping out her footprints with one jealous swipe of its paw. Lucy felt its sucking caress pull at her ankles and shuddered, her mind suddenly free of words. Tears burst from her eyes as she finally released herself into the tide of her emotions.

  Springing into a run, Lucy dashed along the swash line, pounding a string of footprints into the sands. She ran hard, filling her lungs with salt air, raising her face to the north, drinking in the privileged privacy of this farthest reach of the space center. She felt her well-trained muscles respond with grace, raising her above the bonds of earth with every stride, carrying her northward with the long-shore wind. The mists clung to the waves and sand and beach ridge, almost obscuring the magnificent machinery that towered ahead of her. Yes! This was her destiny, to rise above the Florida peninsula once and for all! As her breathing deepened rhythmically int
o her belly, she regarded the rocket that would carry her skyward: four and a half million pounds of rockets and fuel, and mounted on its side, space shuttle Endeavor, 122 feet of technologically marvelous craft. It hugged its boosters like an emerging butterfly clinging to its cocoon, as if hanging there in wait for its stubby wings to pump themselves to a fuller potential. Lucy shook her head ruefully, again defying such imaginings. A butterfly’s gossamer wings would snap under the stresses of launch, she told herself. Or fry to a crisp in the heat of reentry. Better these laughable little tile-encrusted planes that protrude from Endeavor’s chubby tail!

  Once again assured of her rationality, Lucy fairly flew up the beach, her hands describing the same circles as the waves, her feet making a dance with the sands, here sinking in a little deeper, there barely digging in a toe. Her mind opened outward, observing variations in the packing of the grains of sand—Is it the waves that determine the softness and hardness, or is it also grain size, roundness, and sorting? —no matter, years of fierce training had brought her to this moment, to this opportunity.

  But Endeavor was leaving the launch pad. Some little quirk in the vast, ultrasophisticated assemblage of machinery had nudged the schedule past its safe launch window. Her crew had stood like stone, each looking at the other as they heard, “Sorry. With this weather coming in we’ll have to start off-loading fuel, and …” NASA was rolling back the shuttle—she watched it go, sliding dumbly along on its crawler, a butterfly not yet ready to emerge from its cocoon, creeping meekly back toward the safety of the assembly building. She had been all suited up—so close!—and the countdown had stopped and … but with luck, it would be a short delay. Get the flaw in the machinery fixed, get these storms past, roll the shuttle back out … .

  Surely she could endure that much more to gain the fulfillment of her lifelong dream. She, Lucy of all Lucys, would snap loose her tether to this earth, ride that rocket to the sky, the thundering pressure of five gravities pressing at her slender back like the fist of God.

  In ecstasy, she arched her neck and threw her face open to the heavens. Yes, yes, yes, her feet chanted to the sands, her angry dash transformed into a swell of victory. Yes, I have made it. Yes, I have prevailed. Yes, I can do this, I can make it at last, I can rise above this ground—

  A seagull glided into her field of vision. It was mottled with dark feathers. It swooped closer, eyed her coldly. An untamed corner of Lucy’s mind found something all too familiar its primitive gaze, and issued a fearful thought. He sent this bird—no, worse yet, he has climbed inside the creatures of the sky! Her adrenal glands jolted their chemical stimulant into her unwitting bloodstream, ramming her heart against her ribs like a trapped animal trying to escape its cage.

  She wanted to scream, “No! Not here! Not now! Someone might be watching, someone might see, and even now shake his head, say Lucy is weak, and scratch me from the duty roster. Oh, God …”

  The worst part of waiting is going back to Houston to wait, where he can find me … .

  Her gait fumbled. She slowed for a moment to correct it, bring it back under control. Forcing herself not to look over her shoulder, turning her vision instead to the far horizon, away from the evilness of gulls and those who would inspire rage, Lucy transformed the shot of adrenaline into an even faster gallop. Yes, that’s good; anyone watching will think I’m simply forwarding my training, and never know what’s truly chasing me up the beach. In fact, yes, I can now already slow my pace, move it back into an easy lope. Easy now, remember where I am, remember that I am the predator here, not the prey. No matter that the space program puts its scientist astronauts at the bottom of the food chain, and treats those women among them even worse; money is the bottom line here, and they have invested plenty in my training. I am part of a team. An essential part of a team, a team that has prepared rigorously to do a job.

  Lucy pounded on up the beach, building her future one footprint at a time. NASA would not fail to use her now, she assured herself, and when she rode that thrumming monster into the sky, no adolescent gull, or any of the searing memories it unearthed, could possibly reach high enough to find her.

  – 3 –

  Calvin Wheat bent over his apparatus, cussing at the cone-shaped filter that was once again acting up. How in hell was he supposed to get a valid dust sample if the filter kept slipping? He had committed himself to all these days on board in order to get it, and now this. Damned budgetary constraints, how was he supposed to do science with no data? This experiment had just better work, because in order to collect these data, he had begged and fussed his way onto this Caribbean cruise, selling his soul to the tune of giving three dumbed-down lectures to the paying passengers so he could inhabit the so-called free scientist’s berth on this ship—This over-decorated party tub on steroids, he mentally grumbled to himself, this techno-idiot’s equivalent of snake oil; this gold-plated floating spa; this sheltered workshop where Joe and Betty eco-tourist loll about in their carpeted staterooms, gorge on fish that ought to be on the endangered species list, cultivate their tans, never quite make it to the squash courts, swill their rum punches with the little parasols, and feel noble about paying twenty-five dollars for three-dollar “I ‘heart’ sea turtles” T-shirts. I wish they’d all just go on home to New Jersey and get it over with, tell their neighbors what a deep and meaningful time they had learning about the natural splendors of the Caribbean, and leave me to my frigging work!

  Calvin bared his teeth at his sampling equipment. All this I suffer in the faint hope of catching a midocean dust sample, and now I can’t get the damned filter paper straight. What crap!

  He stepped over the bright yellow “CAUTION, KEEP OUT!” tape he had strung from rail to rail across the bow of the ship and began jimmying the apparatus from another direction, his head bent close to the intake valve. The caution tape had become an essential bit of equipment, as it seemed that each female aboard—Each wishful drum of hair spray abuse that’s roaming this ship—seemed to find it necessary, when they thought he wasn’t looking, to rush into the bow and attempt a Kate-Winslet-aboard-the-Titanic pose. More than one of these cows had gotten upwind of the intake valve while the apparatus was collecting—Offering up her own unique mix of talcum powder, psoriasis, deodorant, dandruff, eyelash mites, and who knows what other bodily flora and effluvia—to a sample he had been hoping to keep pristine. It had been necessary to run those samples over again, a loss of precious time and opportunity.

  The ship would be putting in at its easternmost port tomorrow, and thereafter would be steaming back westward toward its proprietary island in the Bahamas and thence back to Port Canaveral, snaking its way downwind of one island or another the whole way. What a sap he’d been to think that grabbing a sample of dust blown off Africa would be a simple matter of setting up the equipment, keying the timer, and then wandering off to dinner while the little gizmo swilled the easterly breeze. He’d even bought the tuxedo required for dining at the captain’s table—I did okay there, found a tail tux auctioned for forty dollars on eBay, he reminded himself—but I’ve yet to make it to a single dinner, it being easiest to keep the stampede of fantasy artists off the bow when they’re all off chowing down their grits.

  The filter cone finally slid securely into place. With satisfaction, Calvin decided that this sampling run would be good, and had every chance of staying good, as everyone else on the ship was at dinner or hanging over the stern toasting the setting sun with a glass of rum. And—this he barely dared acknowledge even to himself—I am a lucky man. The latest storm off Africa is just now arriving, and here’s a nice haze of red smut dusting the whole ship just to prove it. Hell, I could get this sample with a catcher’s mitt! But four years of undergraduate training in biology, two years to get a Master’s in public health, three more for a Ph.D. in microbiology and two more for post-doctorate fellowships had taught him that it was just plain essential to get his sample onto the sterile filter paper that waited deep inside the little mechanical lung h
e now set into action. And with these data, there’s no way in hell Chip Hiller and his band of idiots can claim that my results aren’t valid!

  The machine hissed, its metal lips offering the evening breeze a hungry kiss. Calvin hovered downwind, inhaling the wind as if it were perfume, regardless of the fungi, bacteria, and viruses he knew to be riding it. The ship was now completely upwind of the Windward Islands. The air his canister was sucking had not passed over any land mass—no dalliances over islands, no sojourns over South America—since leaving mother Africa. Life was sweet.

  He allowed himself a smug grin. If this sample doesn’t win funding for the rest of the research, I’ll eat my tuxedo … . No, it looks too good on me. Okay, I’ll kiss the next would-be Winslet who comes near me. Fuck Chip Hiller and his attempts to block this project, because with adequate funding I, Calvin Wheat, will be the man of the hour in microbiological circles, the smart little cracker who will prove beyond the last foolish shreds of malingering doubt that the dust blowing off Africa is carrying live pathogens that threaten every organism on which it lands. Germs. Bacteria and fungi, not to mention the odd virus, all tucked tenderly into the crevices of the mineral dust that spall off that godforsaken continent like rats off a sinking environmental ship!

  Finding live germs in the samples collected in Africa itself had been a slam dunk; those little nasties had barely left the dung heaps they’d blown from. Testing the air over the Caribbean islands and Florida had turned up plenty as well, but the naysayers and critics argued that the “bugs” had originated as the wind swept the islands, and could not have survived three to six days of transit. It was necessary to prove that the little critters could and did survive exposure to ultraviolet light, and survived it for up to 5,000 miles.

  Calvin leaned down over his machinery one more time to retest the offending clips, leaning hard onto the port rail. As he did so, he saw, out of the corner of one eye, the sudden appearance of yet one more idiot rushing at the bow, bearing down on him. Calvin had only enough time to put out one arm to protect his apparatus, and no time at all to choose an epithet before he felt himself being lifted over the side. As shock and fear exploded though his body, he flailed his arms and legs, trying desperately to connect with the outside of the rail. He missed. That hope dashed, he tried instead to propel himself outward, away from the curling bow wake that waited, three stories below, ready to suck him under the length of the ship before spitting him one limb at a time through its immense propellers.