“Yeah, Plerry, we’ll talk about that later. For now I’ve got some information for the other teams. The Centers for Disease Control, the NIH, the Department of Defense, and the petroleum industry all better throw their research muscle into this.”
Plerry hesitated on the other end of the line, and she could picture his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “I assure you, Miss Shikozu—”
“That’s Dr. Shikozu, and I’m damned tired of you ‘assuring’ me!” she said. “Listen to me. Most of the equipment in my lab is already shot, so I can’t run any analyses, but I have been able to piece together some of my own results. I know why Prometheus is going after plastics.
“The microorganism primarily dissociates the octane molecule, which is made up of eight carbons in a chain, surrounded by hydrogen atoms. Most petroleum plastics are just longer polymers made up of shorter hydrocarbons, interlinked. Kramer engineered the new strain of Prometheus to break out eight-carbon chains from longer polymers, as well as some ring hydrocarbons. It can reach into heavy petroleum molecules and snip out bite-sized molecules. That’s how it breaks down plastics! Any plastic that doesn’t have eight-carbon segments should still be safe—”
Plerry cut her off. “Thank you, Dr. Shikozu. The working teams have already come up with that independently. But it’s not always true. We have not been able to come up with a simple explanation for why Prometheus attacks certain plastics and leaves others alone. Nylon seems to resist the plague, and so does polyvinyl chloride, PVC—which should be one of the most easily affected plastics. But even that may change, as the microorganism adapts to new food sources. We just don’t know, but we are working round the clock to look for answers.”
“Have you gotten in touch with Kramer’s assistant Mitch Stone?” Iris persisted. No one had ever given her such a cold brush-off before. She’d earned a little more respect and consideration. “He might know something.”
“The research teams have already commandeered Dr. Stone and his expertise. He is working with Oilstar to interpret Dr. Kramer’s notes right now.”
Iris felt exasperated. She was never good at sitting still, and she couldn’t just wait for somebody else to work on the problem. She wanted to be involved. She wanted to be somewhere she could put her hands on the problem. She stood up again and brushed her hand across the bedspread to smooth the wrinkles. “Maybe I could assist them.”
Plerry’s voice was as smooth as hemorrhoid ointment. “Thank you for your interest, Dr. Shikozu. I’ll take that under advisement and pass it along to the appropriate people. We’ll get back to you if anything turns up.” He hung up on her.
Iris stared at the phone. “Good thing the petroplague doesn’t eat pure slime, Plerry.” She slammed the receiver back in the cradle. She paced her apartment, desperate for something to do. This was worse than being forced to go on vacation.
Iris padded over to the stereo. She didn’t know how much longer she’d have electricity, so she might as well do something constructive. The power had flickered out earlier in the day, as she sat at the kitchen table, trying to go over chemical equations without the aid of her computer. She figured all the wiring in her apartment; the electrical substations must be insulated with plastic, though natural rubber seemed to resist the plague, but the generating stations would fail before long.
She flicked on the amplifier, cranked the volume knob, and went to select a CD. Tom Petty? Talking Heads? Yeah, “Burning Down the House” sounded particularly appropriate.
She plucked out the jewel box, but it had a cloudy, frosted appearance. When she lifted the compact disk, it sagged in her hand, the plastic substrate gone limp like a floppy computer diskette.
“Oh, dammit!” Iris said, tossing the CD and jewel box across the room. The same Talking Heads album that featured the song “Making Flippy Floppy.” Appropriate.
“This is really getting annoying. The fall of civilization is bad enough, but do I have to do it without my music?”
Chapter 32
The moment Heather Dixon dragged herself into the offices of Surety Insurance, her supervisor shouted at her. “Where the hell have you been, Heather? Damn it all, this place is going crazy! Boston’s been calling since six o’clock this morning.”
She blinked at Albert “You Can Call Me Al!” Sysco, already exhausted from her ordeal of just getting to work. After her car wouldn’t start, she had to walk nearly two miles in her high heels, red plaid business skirt, and itchy panty hose.
Al Sysco, the water-cooler Napoleon, lorded over the women in the office as if it were his due, breathing down their necks until they couldn’t do their jobs—and then he reprimanded them when productivity dropped. Heather decided it was because he had a tiny penis, but she had no intention of finding out for sure.
She wanted to tell him that Headquarters knew full well there was a two-hour time difference between Boston and Arizona. She wanted to tell him that her calves were sore from walking in clothes that were meant to be admired, not exercised in. She wanted to know what in the world Sysco had been doing in the office at 6 A.M. anyway.
Most of all, she wanted to go to the coffee maker, yank out the filter basket, and stuff a steaming wad of coffee grounds down the front of Al Sysco’s pants.
Instead, she went to her desk. “My car wouldn’t start, and the streets are a zoo.” The city seemed much worse than the local radio news described it, though for two days the broadcasts had been growing more panicked as reporters tracked the progress of the “petroplague.”
“You’ve got a hundred forms to process already. I’ve made some follow-up phone calls, but you’ll have to do the rest of them. I’m going nuts! The phone connections break off half the time anyway. Keep trying until you get through.”
Sysco wiped his palm across the sweat in his porcupine hair. In the background, a few telephones continued to ring. The air smelled stuffy, with an aftertaste of turpentine.
Two women bustled down the hall, arguing about something, then split down two separate paths among the cubicles, still shouting over the metal-rimmed cloth barriers. Heather noticed that half of the office cubicles were empty. Pale green ferns poked over the top of the nearest barrier. Her own wood-grain desk was strewn with pencils, cute post-it notes, two coffee cups, and clippings from the comic strip Cathy.
Before Heather could get to her desk and slip her canvas purse into the bottom file drawer, Sysco came with a six-inch stack of paperwork. Heather ignored him as she turned to switch on her terminal.
“Don’t bother,” said Sysco. “They’re falling apart from that gasoline plague. What a mess. I can’t get Surety to give me a decision on how we’re going to cover all this. Use the telephone, but for God’s sake don’t tell anybody the computers are down! We’re, uh, ‘unable to access that information at this time’ or some such nonsense.”
Heather blinked. If Surety’s networked computers were down, they were in big trouble. If plastic components were falling apart across the country, then why the hell had she come to work at all? People resisted changing their momentum, moving from their daily routine. Tabloids had screamed about the end of the world for so long that everyone seemed numb to the possibility. But maybe…
“Stacie has an old Selectric typewriter under her desk,” said Sysco. “You’ll have to type things by hand.”
Heather glared at him as he turned back to his own work area. His shoulders hunched with spring-wound tension. Sysco was such a little man, harried and suffering. At the moment, she didn’t particularly envy him the promotion.