For a week after the last men came down with what he called twenty-four-hour flu, he’d made only routine notes in his log. Then there was a terse entry about a suicide—a man had hanged himself. Another man walked in front of a truck. More entries: fistfights, a nonfatal stabbing, broken bones due to drunkenness. Two men disappeared one night; three the next. One was found clinging to the top of a tall tree and brought down. The next day he was found dead, his wrists slashed open. A man hanged himself; four others disappeared. The last note, in Georgi Zhzhyonov’s neat, slanting script, read I suffer from the most vivid and peculiar dreams.
Katya found the forms certifying the deaths of the suicides, with notes on bloodwork. Georgi Zhzhyonov had run samples through his gas spectrometer, looking for heavy metals and toxins, finding only trace levels of tin and titanium, well within expected limits. He had also examined the blood of two pigs. Katya felt a chill at the base of her spine. The men had become ill; the pigs had become ill; Georgi Zhzhyonov had been trying to find a link. And because he was a metallurgist, he had used the tools of his trade.
There was a geological map on one wall of his little lab. Katya studied it carefully. The broad curve of the shoreline with sandbars running parallel to it. A black rectangle marking the site of the station. A series of steeply contoured ridges rising behind, with red stipplings indicating known deposits of ore. The site of the open-cast mine was marked on the first ridge by a crosshatched rectangle. She ran her finger along the top of the ridge, noting the high spots.
Arkadi Sarantsev, searching the disordered office of the mining station’s commandant, had made his own discovery.
“Fish,” he told Katya.
“Fish?”
“A lot of fish.” Arkadi waggled a video disc. “Luckily for us, the commandant liked to make home movies.”
It was short, choppily edited. Panning shots across windrows of black fish on a sandbar that faded into fog, black fish rising and falling on shallow waves. A zoom shot closing on fish shimmying and leaping out of the water, landing on fish already dead or dying. Skinny, armor-plated fish with pale gill ruffs and bulbous eyes. A close-up that included the cameraman’s boots, showing several fish writhing in circles, snapping at their own tails. Men scooping fish into buckets, tipping the buckets into oil drums in the well of a skiff. Men shoveling fish into the water, men throwing fish at each other. A small bulldozer rolling back and forth in the fog, turning up combers of sand and fish and pushing them into the water. Waves rolling in, black with blood, agitated by the splashing of scavengers come to feed.
Katya insisted on replaying the scenes of the men at work. Ten men, twenty, twenty-five. And the cameraman, the commandant, made twenty-six. Everyone in the mining station had joined in the macabre beach party, and none of them had worn protective clothing. Most were dressed in bathing trunks and flip-flops; several were buck naked.
“When was this?” she said.
“Four weeks ago,” Arkadi said.
“And a week later, the men started to become sick,” she said, and gave a quick account of Georgi Zhzhyonov’s notes. The suicides, the disappearances, the cryptic note about dreams.
Arkadi showed her the commandant’s diary. Notes on patrols sent to search the forest behind the station, of sightings of men or man-shaped animals, of strange noises. Toward the end, the commandant’s handwriting degenerated to a jagged scrawl. The last entry consisted of a few indecipherable words and drawings of skulls, fanged devil faces, daggers dripping blood.
“So you think it was the fish,” Arkadi said. “The fish infected them, or they ate the fish and it made them sick. Sick in the body and in the head.”
“It may be slightly more complicated than that,” Katya said. “I think they fed the pigs with some of the fish. I need to examine them.”
She found boxes of vinyl gloves in the little lab and face masks she soaked in bleach. It wasn’t much protection, but it was the best she could manage. She didn’t want to get close to the pigs, not without wearing a full contamination suit, so she and Arkadi rigged a sampler from a scaffold pole and a cup taped to the end, and, after some maneuvering, managed to collect a draft of froth from one of them. She treated it like plutonium, carefully tipping it into a plastic bottle and double-bagging the bottle.
She had noticed no less than six microscopes stacked in unopened boxes in the lab. No doubt the result of the same kind of supply error in central stores that had packed the ekranoplan’s stores with tins of no other kind of soup but pumpkin. She set one up on the knife-scarred butcher’s table in the kitchen of the mess, then used a rolling pin to knock out a window.
“Six microscopes,” she told Arkadi, “but not one microscope slide.”
She plucked a small splinter of window glass, put on a fresh set of vinyl gloves, adjusted her mask, smeared a drop of pig sputum on the splinter and set it on the platform of the microscope, and bent over it and adjusted the focus knob until the smear swam into focus.
Nothing.
She swept the platform on which the splinter was clamped back and forth, fingertips sweating on the vernier knobs, on the fine-focus knob, feeling a touch of the funk she remembered from undergraduate practical classes when she’d failed to see the thing she was meant to see.
“What do you see?” Arkadi said.
“Nothing. But it doesn’t mean anything.”
She had explained her idea on the way to sample the stricken pig’s sputum, explained that Georgi Zhzhyonov had been on the right track but he had been looking in the wrong place. On Earth, she told Arkadi, there were diseases passed from animals to humans. Zoonoses. It was possible that the brain-burning flu was one such. The miners had fed their pigs with raw fish—all that free protein, willingly throwing itself ashore—and an infection carried by the fish had flourished in the animals. They had become reaction vessels, growing ill, coughing up infected sputum. Perhaps the man who fed the pigs had become ill first, then had infected everyone else. Or perhaps the men had become infected after eating undercooked pork. Katya had been hoping that it was some kind of parasite. Something she could see under the microscope. Worms. Fungal cells. Spores. Cysts.
“Something you could show the captain,” Arkadi said.
He was a quick study.
“It could be a bacterium,” Katya said. “Or a virus. Viruses are generally not much bigger than the wavelength of visible light, so hard to see with a conventional microscope like this. I’ll find out exactly what it is when I get the samples to a fully equipped lab, but it has to be something native. Something that affects the behavior of its host. It made the fish beach themselves. It made the miners hallucinate. Made them believe that they were being attacked. Made some of them kill themselves. Made some of them kill their friends. I think the rest ran off into the countryside.”
“But you can’t prove it.”
“Not here. Not yet. Unless Captain Chernov has found the missing men.”
He hadn’t. His search party had scoured the strip mine from one end to the other and returned to the station with two bodies they had found at the base of a vertical rock face, but there was no sign of the rest—six by Katya’s count. Captain Chernov was convinced that they had been captured or killed by raiders, but listened to Katya’s précis of Georgi Zhzhyonov’s notes and watched the video.
At the end, he said, “The pigs became sick, the men became sick. And you want to link them with this—what did you call it?”
“A zoonosis,” Katya said.
“But you have no proof.”
“There is the timing. The men started to become sick a week after the fish washed up. If they fed some of the fish to the pigs, it’s long enough for an infection to develop.”
“The man on the crane, was he coughing? No: he was crazy. And the dead men we found—they died from their own hand, or from bullets. Not some parasite.”