Chapter One
Tuesday, January 22, 2154
I was at school the day the world fell apart, in Dr. Weiss’s advanced genetics class, as a matter of fact.
Back in those days I’d never heard of the Orion Strain, the Moon was nothing but a light in the sky, and the worst problem I ever had to deal with was forgetting to turn in my chemistry homework. Mrs. McClendon used to be a real beast about late assignments.
I know the world can never go back to the way it was before, but sometimes I can’t help wishing, you know.
I remember I was supposed to be comparing two different strains of mouse DNA that afternoon; deadly dull stuff, to be honest. So maybe it was just boredom that led me to set aside my genetics project and hack my way into the mainframe of the World Health Organization instead. Molecular genetics happens to be my special field of study, and that’s one of the best places to visit if you like such things.
It was nothing but a whim; I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. But we have a saying in science, about how the most interesting discoveries are almost always the accidental ones. It’s called serendipity, and it ended up saving my life that day.
At any given time, the World Health Organization kept tabs on a dozen or more disease outbreaks in local areas around the world to make sure they didn’t become an epidemic. Nothing unusual about that, and the one I chose to read about that afternoon was called the Orion Strain. I picked that one mostly because the file was classified, and it amused me to break through the security system and find out what they were being so secretive about. I certainly didn’t think it would end up radically changing my life. But that’s what I mean about serendipity; a little bit of whimsical curiosity can change everything.
The Orion Strain turned out to be a low level bacterium which had popped up for the first time in Calcutta, India, about a week earlier, and the only mildly interesting thing about it was the high death rate. So far at least, it seemed to have killed pretty much a hundred percent of the people who caught it, within no more than thirty-six hours after exposure. It was a viciously deadly bug, to be sure, but then of course there are a lot of viciously deadly bugs in the world and most of them never amount to anything much. It made me wonder why the file had been classified at all.
Then I saw what the reason was, and I gasped out loud without thinking, nearly dropping my pencil on the floor.
Dr. Weiss crumpled his Tampa Tribune for a second to frown at me, and I quickly made it look like I was totally absorbed in mouse DNA. But as soon as he went back to reading his article, I completely forgot about my genetics assignment.
Because it wasn’t the deadliness of the Orion Strain that caused the blood to drain from my face and made me feel like a lump of ice had suddenly come to rest right in the pit of my stomach. It was the interspecies infection rate.
That may sound technical, but all it means is whether some other animal can catch a disease or not. Like pigs can sometimes catch human flu, for example. The scary thing about the Orion Strain was that it was highly contagious to any warm-blooded animal. Any bird or mammal, basically. There was no way you could ever contain something like that; a rat or a bird or some such thing would always slip through any barrier you tried to set up and they’d carry the infection elsewhere. There’d be no stopping it.
I quickly set up a simulation on my computer to analyze how fast the bacteria might spread, using the most conservative estimates. And that’s when I really got scared.
“Drew, come look at this,” I finally managed to croak. Drew Breyer was my lab partner and one of my few actual friends. He was fiddling with the electrophoresis unit at the moment, pretending to accomplish something useful. He was actually supposed to be helping me with the mouse analysis, but I didn’t much care. Finishing the work myself was easier anyway.
Nevertheless, he was still technically my lab partner, so he yawned and then ambled over to my workstation to have a look.
“What is it?” he asked in a low voice, staring at the numbers on the screen.
“It’s a statistical analysis of the progress of a bacterium called the Orion Strain on the Indian subcontinent over the past week. Infection rate compared to kill rate, speed of transmission, that kind of thing,” I managed to say. That was good; focusing on data was an easy way to divert my mind from the terrible implications.
“And?” Drew asked, raising one eyebrow.
“Don’t you see it?” I asked, astonished at his thick-headedness.
“See what, Tyke?” Drew asked, with a touch of irritation.
Oh, my name is Tycho, by the way, after Tycho Brahe the famous astronomer. Tyke, for short. Which I guess might have been cute when I was three years old, but it was definitely a liability at the John Brooke Academy for Math and Science. I hated the nickname, but I was so used to it that I barely noticed anymore.
But I digress.
Drew’s question frustrated me, mostly because it meant I wasn’t explaining myself very well. I must have been more rattled than I thought I was. I made an effort to calm down and be reasonably logical.
“Look here. I got these records from the World Health Organization in Geneva. This germ is spreading fast, and so far there’s been a kill rate of a hundred percent. Everybody that catches it dies,” I explained.
“Yeah, I know how to read stats, Tyke,” Drew said dryly.
“You’re not the least bit worried about that?” I asked.
“About what? A nasty little disease in Calcutta? Why should I be worried about that? There are nasty new diseases all the time and they never amount to anything. They kill some people and then they disappear, which is exactly what this one will do. The very fact that it’s so deadly only means it’ll flame out sooner, because it’ll kill all the available hosts. It says right here that they’ve already sealed off the city to keep it from spreading. Even if they don’t find a cure, it’ll be over in a week. Worse comes to worst, it’ll wipe out Calcutta, maybe even a few other cities if they’re sloppy about their quarantine. Bad, yes, but it’s not like it’s the whole world or anything,” he said.
“No, Drew. Look here,” I said, pointing at the section that dealt with interspecies crossovers. This time he didn’t need to ask me what the numbers meant. He drew in his breath sharply, just like I had.
“Are you sure those numbers are right?” he asked, actually looking worried for the first time.
“Yeah, I’m sure. The interspecies crossover rate is also close to a hundred percent among birds and mammals. They can’t close borders against birds and mice, now can they? And besides that, look here; it says the bacterium can also form spores which are estimated to survive in the environment for at least twenty years,” I said.
Drew looked ill, and I could hardly blame him. If that data was correct, then we were staring at the end of the world.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked.
“I told you, I got it from the World Health Organization. I hacked their computer,” I said, allowing myself a touch of pride in spite of everything. The administration of the Academy would have had a hissy fit if they’d known I was using school computers for hacking into government databases, but in the meantime what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.
“But surely they’ll find a vaccine, or some kind of treatment,” he objected.
“Drew, you’re not thinking. It’ll be a week till the first wave of infections gets here. Maybe even less than that if a bird flies in from one of the affected areas. In ten days, at most, everybody in Tampa will be dead. I give it two weeks for the whole world, and that’s being generous. That’s not enough time to find a cure for anything. You should know that,” I reminded him. Drew was a medical science student; he of all people ought to know how long it took to find treatments for disease.
“But there’s always a chance,” he insisted.
“Yeah, I guess there’s always a chance, but I wouldn’t bet on it,”
I said.
Drew was silent, thinking. He might be a slacker when it came to assignments, but he was still one of the most brilliant kids in the state of Florida; he could analyze the situation as well as anybody, and I watched as despair slowly clouded his eyes. Even if we told the administrators and even if they believed us, there was absolutely nothing to be done about it.
“You don’t think there’s anywhere we could go to ride it out?” he asked hopefully. I considered it, and then shook my head.
“No. There’re nowhere in the world that birds don’t go, not even the most remote islands you can think of. We’d have to find somewhere sealed up tight if we wanted to hide out, with enough food and supplies to last us twenty years or more. There’s no place on Earth like that, unless it was already built and ready by now,” I said dejectedly.
“So you’re saying unless somebody miraculously finds a cure sometime in the next week or so, then we’re toast. Is that it?” he asked.
“Yeah, that’s pretty much it,” I admitted.
“I can’t believe there’s nothing we can do,” he insisted.
“I’m open to suggestions,” I said.
There was silence for a long time, and then I could have sworn I saw the glint of a smile on Drew’s face.
“There’s no place on Earth we’d be safe, huh?” he asked, and then I was sure of it. Drew was actually excited.
“Nope, none at all. Maybe somewhere out in the middle of the ice cap in Antarctica where no animals ever go. But we don’t have time or money to build a fortress out there and stock it with supplies,” I agreed.
“What about somewhere else besides Earth, then?” Drew suggested. My first impulse was to call him an idiot, but then I reconsidered.
“You mean the space stations?” I asked.
“No, there’s no way they’ll last twenty years without fresh supplies from Earth. They’ll run out of food, and spare parts, and things like that. Not a good option,” he said.
“What are you talking about, then?” I asked.
“The Moon, buddy, the Moon!” he cried excitedly. In fact he let his voice rise just a little too high, and Dr. Weiss frowned at us again from behind his newspaper. Both of us were quick to take a sudden fascination with the numbers on my computer, and after a few seconds Dr. Weiss went back to ignoring us.
I chewed on my lip, thinking. I didn’t know all that much about the Moon, but I remembered it had always been one of Drew’s pet hobbies. His grandfather had been a member of the original survey team for the Lunar Terraform Project, fifty years ago or more, but he’d been killed in a storm that destroyed the research compound where he was working. Barnaby Station, if I remembered right. If I’d heard that story once, I’d heard it a million times.
Anyway, the idea hadn’t worked out quite the way they’d planned, for some reason. All I could remember was that they’d wasted huge sums of money and then ended up never finishing the Project anyway. The only interesting thing about the whole boondoggle was a couple of footnotes in our genetics textbooks about Macrocystis tranquilitatis, a type of kelp, and Makaira caeruleus, a variety of blue marlin, both of which had been developed for the lunar environment right there at the Academy. I remembered vaguely that there was no salt in the seas of the Moon, so saltwater organisms had had to be modified to live in fresh water. I couldn’t remember much else.
“I didn’t think people could survive up there,” I said skeptically, and Drew wrinkled his nose.
“Well. . . yes and no,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“It means there’s breathable air, and drinkable water, and a somewhat functioning ecosystem. It’s survivable,” he said.
“I hear a ‘but’ in there somewhere,” I said.
“But. . . it gets up to about 140 degrees during the day, minus 20 at night, there are incredible storms all the time, the radiation level is fairly high, and there’s not much to eat,” he said.
“I see. So instead of the Orion Strain, it’s better to die from starvation, or heat stroke, or freezing to death, or maybe cancer? Not to mention the fact that we don’t have a way to get there in the first place,” I scoffed.
“There’s still the old research compound at Lakeside Station. It’s probably run down and ragged out after all this time sitting there empty, but we could knock it back into shape, I’m sure. It’ll have heat and air conditioning, probably a hydroponics lab to grow food, maybe some radiation shielding. It’s a chance, anyway. Better than sitting here twiddling our thumbs and then dying from the Orion Strain next week, don’t you think?” Drew said.
I couldn’t very well argue with that assessment, so I shifted my defense. Truthfully, I was desperate for Drew to convince me. When you’re staring death in the face, you’ll give just about anything for a plan that offers even the barest scrap of hope. Even an utterly stupid one like running off to the Moon.
“Doesn’t matter anyway, since there’s no way for us to get there,” I reminded him.
“I’ll have to think about that one,” Drew finally admitted.
“Yeah, well. . . we got precious little time to think about it, buddy boy,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. I’ll talk to some people, see what we can come up with,” he said.
“I’d be careful who I said anything to,” I warned.
“Oh, come on, Tyke; give me a little credit. I know who’s trustworthy and who’s not,” he said, shaking his head.
I shrugged and started to say something else, but just then the bell rang and I had to sign out of my workstation before the next class came in. There was no way I wanted anybody to see what I’d been working on.
I was preoccupied for the rest of the day and paid no attention to my classes. There didn’t seem to be any point, when you thought about it. Biochemistry was interesting, sure, but two weeks from now what difference would it make to anybody?
After school was over at three, I didn’t have the heart to get involved with any of the extracurricular things which the school offered, or even to go to the library like I usually did. I just trudged slowly back to the dorm room to lie down on my bed and stare blankly at the ceiling. The Academy was a residential school, and except during holidays all students lived on campus unless our families were close enough to drive us every day.
My parents passed away a long time ago, in a boating accident on Tampa Bay when I was four years old. I don’t really remember very much about them, honestly. My dad was an astronomer and my mother was a math professor, and I know they named me Tycho because they hoped I’d grow up to become a famous scientist someday. I’m not sure if biology was exactly what they had in mind, but that’s what I’ve always loved.
Anyway, ever since they died I’ve lived with my aunt and uncle, Joan and Philip Carpenter, and my four cousins out in Clearwater Beach. Their names were Chris, Jesse, Callum, and Veronica, and it so happened that Jesse and I were born just two weeks apart. We’d been best friends ever since preschool, and one of the things I’d always liked about the Academy was that I got to share a room with him.
People were always a little surprised that we both went to school together; the Academy isn’t such an easy place to get into. You have to score really high on your placement exams in eighth grade, and then you have to apply and have an interview and all kinds of things. It’s a very prestigious place, and by the time we graduate high school we’ll already have a Master’s degree in our chosen field. There were a lot of programs to choose from, some of them better than others, of course. The advanced genetics program was one of the very best, along with marine science and aerospace engineering. Those were our top three programs, and sometimes it humbled me to think I was a part of one of them. There have been a lot of famous people who went to this place, and a lot of famous teachers, too. Dr. Weiss had a Nobel prize for his work in genetics, and he was far from the only one.
Jesse and I had shared the same room fo
r two and a half years, ever since we started ninth grade, and all that time together had made us tighter than ever.
That’s why in spite of what I said to Drew about being careful who he talked to, I’d already decided to tell Jesse everything.
He came in about four-thirty, covered in sweat from running. He always ran five miles around the dirt track after school every day, rain or shine, hot or cold. It was unusually warm for January, and he flopped down on his bed with a sigh of contentment wearing nothing but his running shorts.
“A thousand blessings on the head of whoever invented air-conditioning!” he said with a theatrical flourish to no one in particular, and I couldn’t help smiling a little. Jesse is nearly impossible not to like.
“I think that was Charles Carrier,” I told him, sitting up and leaning my back against the cinderblock wall.
“Well, then, a thousand blessings on the head of Saint Charles Carrier!” Jesse said, grinning.
“Whatever, dude,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“You’d say the same thing if you knew how warm it was out there today. Track was so hot I bet you could fry an egg on the dirt,” Jesse said.
“Nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to go out there running today, Jesse,” I pointed out.
“True, but I wouldn’t want to get all weak and pale and flabby like some people I could mention, now would I?” he said, laughing. I shook my head at the good-natured dig; Jesse was always trying to get me to run or swim or get involved in some kind of athletic activity. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself weak and pale and flabby, but sometimes I did envy Jesse a little bit for his chiseled muscles and his careless good looks. He’s big and tall and blond, like my Uncle Philip, and I’m small and dark-haired like my mother and Aunt Joan. No one who saw us together would ever have guessed we were related at all. He also loves athletics, and sports just aren’t my thing, not by a long shot. I’m a pretty good swimmer, but that’s about as far as it goes.
I was about to say so when there came a knock on the door. I got up to answer it and saw that it was Drew.
“Hey, Drew Dog, what’s up?” Jesse called from the bed.
“Um. . . just need to talk to Tyke for a minute, that’s all,” he said.
“I’m guessing that means you want me to trot off and leave y’all alone, huh?” he asked, smiling.
That was another thing about Jesse; he’s always enjoyed playing the redneck country boy role, ever since I can remember. We have a saying in Florida, that the farther north you go, the more South you get. It’s nothing unusual to hear a drawly voice around Tampa, but Jesse definitely plays it up to the fullest. His middle name is James, so I think he was doomed to be a rebel ever since the day he was born.
“Well, yeah, it’s kinda private. Sorry, Jesse,” Drew said.
“Oh, it’s okay. I needed to hit the showers before suppertime, anyway. I’ll see you in a little while, Tyke,” Jesse said. He took a minute to gather up some clothes and a towel, and then headed down the hall toward the bathroom, whistling.