"Where did it come from?" the President asked, then interrupted himself: "No. Tell me what this stuff-Congo-X-is and what it does."
"I don't know what it is. I'm working on that. As to what it does, it causes disseminated intravascular coagulation, acronym DIC."
"And can you tell me what that means? In layman's terms?"
"DIC is a thrombohemorrhagic disorder characterized by primary thrombotic and secondary hemorrhagic diathesis, usually fatal."
"Try it again, Colonel," the President ordered, not unpleasantly, "and this time in layman's terms."
"Yes, sir. DIC is sometimes called consumptive coagulopathy, since excessive intravascular coagulation leads to consumption of platelets and nonenzymatic coagulation factors-"
The President interrupted Hamilton by holding up his hand and shaking his head.
"You might as well be speaking Greek, Colonel. Try it again, please, keeping in mind that you're dealing with a simple country boy from Alabama."
"Yes, sir," Hamilton said, paused in thought, and then announced, almost happily: "Sir, DIC causes coagulation to run amok."
"Coagulation, as in blood?"
Hamilton nodded.
"Go down that road, Colonel, and see where it takes us," the President said.
"Coagulation is the process, in this connection, which causes liquid human blood to turn into a soft, semisolid mass."
He looked at the President to see if the President was still with him.
The President responded by smiling encouragingly, and making a gesture with both hands for him to continue.
"If you think of the vascular system of the body, Mr. President, as a series of interconnected garden hoses, and of the heart as a pump that pushes blood through that system."
He paused to see if his student was still with him, and when the President nodded, went on: "Imagine, if you will, sir, that the blood is transformed into a very thick mud. The pump cannot push the mass through the vascular system. It is overwhelmed; it stops."
"And death occurs? By what a layman might call a heart attack?"
"That, too, Mr. President," Hamilton said.
"'That, too'?" the President parroted.
"The mud, the now-coagulated blood, then begins to attack the garden hose. As sort of a parasite. It feeds on it, so to speak."
"Eats it, you mean?"
Hamilton nodded. "And when it's finished, so to speak, with the vascular system, it begins to feed on the other tissues of the body. In some sort of unusual enzymatic manner, which I have so far been unable to pin down."
"You'd better run that past me again, Colonel," the President said. "'Enzymatic manner'?"
Hamilton considered for a moment the level of knowledge the President might have.
"Think of meat tenderizer, Mr. President. Do you know how that works?"
"I can't say that I do," Clendennen confessed.
"Meat-and that would of course include human flesh-is held together by a complex protein called collagen. This makes it quite tough to chew in the raw state."
"I've noticed," the President drawled dryly.
"Cooking destroys these proteins, making the meat chewable. But so does contact with certain enzymes, most commonly ones extracted from the papaya. These proteolytic enzymes break the peptide bonds between the amino acids found in complex proteins. Such as flesh."
"What you're saying is that Congo-X is some sort of meat tenderizer?" the President asked. "Why is that so dangerous?"
"Unlike the enzymatic tenderizers one finds in the supermarket, which lose their strength after attacking the peptide bonding between the amino acids of meat, the Congo-X enzymes-if they are indeed enzymes, and I am not yet prepared to make that call-seem to gather strength from the collagens they attack. In a manner of speaking, they are nurtured by it."
"What happens when they run out of meat?" the President asked, and then corrected himself: "Out of something to eat?"
Hamilton didn't answer directly.
"Grocery store tenderizer doesn't work on bones," he said. "Congo-X does. Whenever it finishes turning the meat into sort of a mush-perhaps strengthened by taking nutrition from that process-it attacks bones. They are turned into mush. When the entire process is completed, what is left is a semisolid residue, which then enters sort of a coma. Forgive the crudeness, Mr. President, but what remains bears a strong physical resemblance to what one might pass when suffering from diarrhea: a semisolid brown, or brownish black, mass."
"And what happens to that?"
"It apparently receives enough nutrients from the atmosphere to maintain life-I hesitate to use that term but I cannot think of another-for an indefinite period. If it is touched by flesh, the process begins again."
"The only way it is contagious, so to speak, is if there's physical contact with it? Is that what you're saying?"
"When it is in the dormant, coma stage, yes, sir. But when it is feeding, so to speak, on flesh, it gives off microscopic particles which, if inhaled, also start the degenerative process."
"How can it be killed?"
"My initial tests suggest the only way it can be killed is by thorough incineration at temperatures over a thousand degrees Centigrade. The residue, I am coming to believe, may then be encased in a nonporous container. Glass or some type of ceramic would work, I think, but there one would have the risk of the glass or ceramic breaking. Aluminum seems to form a satisfactory barrier. As a matter of fact, I used simple aluminum foil to isolate the material I brought out of the Congo; I had nothing else. And the Congo-X material that was sent to my laboratory today was wrapped in aluminum foil."
"Like a Christmas turkey?" President Clendennen asked.
"More like, I would say, Mr. President, cold cuts from a delicatessen. Very carefully, so there was little or no risk that the foil could be torn. The people who sent me the Congo-X obviously seem to know what they are doing."
"And who, would you guess, Colonel, were the people who sent you the Congo-X? More importantly, why do you think they did?"
"I've given that some thought, Mr. President," Hamilton said.
"And?"
The tone of impatience in the President's voice was clearly evident.
"They wanted us to know that the attack on the Fish Farm was unsuccessful," Hamilton said. "That they have Congo-X. We have to presume they know a great deal more about it than I have been able to learn in the few days I've had to work with it. They are making the point that the threat which existed before we learned of the Fish Farm and attempted to destroy it exists now."
"Why wouldn't they try to keep that secret, so they would have the element of surprise if they decide to use Congo-X on us?"
"That's the question to which I have given the most thought," Hamilton said. "It was self-evident that they wanted us to know we failed, and that they have Congo-X. The question is, why?"
"That's the question I asked, Colonel," the President said.
"I think they want something from us," Hamilton said, very seriously.
"And what, Colonel, do you think that might be?"
"I have no idea," Hamilton said. "Absolutely no idea."
President Clendennen looked around the Oval Office.
The Honorable Natalie Cohen, secretary of State; Ambassador Charles M. Montvale, director of National Intelligence; the Honorable John J. Powell, director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and the Honorable Mason Andrews, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, were sitting on the chairs and couches around a glass-topped coffee table. Not one had said a word during the "bad news" exchange between the President and Colonel Hamilton.
"Odd," Clendennen said to them. "I would have bet two bits to a doughnut that y'all would be falling all over yourselves to offer sage political advice and profound philosophical opinions concerning our little dilemma."
No one responded.
The President grunted, then announced: "One, I believe everything Colonel Hamilton has told us about this terrible substance. Two, we are not about to react to this threat the way my predecessor did. We bombed everything in a twenty-square-mile area of the Congo into small pieces and then incinerated the pieces. Since somebody still has enough of a supply of this stuff to share it with us, I think we have to concede that the only thing that bombing did was bring us within a cat's whisker of a nuclear exchange and give those people who don't like us much anyway good reason to like us even less.