THE MAYAN GLYPH Read online

  "Did you look at his tongue?"

  "Yes, it's swollen and dark. He is he going to die, isn't he?"

  "Where is he now?"

  "In the back seat, right there."

  "Anybody else with you?"

  "No, just us."

  Spender got masks from his bag and tied one on Juanita and Carla and one on himself. He slipped on a pair of rubber gloves, a white cap, and a plastic shield, and he dug out a flashlight.

  "Wait here a minute," he said, moving to the car. Manolo's familiar wide cheerful face was in agony, his tongue dark and protruding, eyes frightened and body spasming with the effort to breathe. Spender yelled to Juanita to come to the car.

  He dug out an ampoule of morphine and jabbed the syringe into Manolo's arm. He managed to ram a breathing tube into Manolo's throat, behind the swollen tongue, and saw Manolo relax as his breathing eased. Spender found another mask and tied it to Manolo and a minute later saw him close his eyes as the morphine started to work.

  "We'll take care of you, old buddy, don't worry," he said.

  "Is it the disease?" asked Juanita.

  "Yes. I'm very sorry."

  "What can we do?"

  "We have to get you to quarantine. He'll be with the other confirmed victims. Juanita, the chances are slim. All we can hope for is that one of the hundreds of researchers can find a quick cure. I know that's lousy, but it's all we've got."

  Juanita put her face in her hands and sobbed quietly as Carla held her shoulders.

  "Juanita, I'm sorry, I have no right to do this now, but maybe we can save some lives if we find out how this happened. Can you help me by answering some questions?"

  Carla spoke. "Shouldn't you get to the hospital?"

  "It doesn't really matter much now. But if we can trace the virus' path to Manolo, that could help us to control it."

  Juanita nodded finally, and opened her eyes. "I'm all right."

  "Good. Has he been anywhere near Conover Mercy, especially about six days ago?"

  "No."

  "He works locally now, right?"

  "Yes, the Texaco on Corliss, only two blocks from our home."

  "Has he been anywhere else, five to seven days ago?"

  "I don't think so. He's been working the day shift as a mechanic and another half shift in the evening pumping gas. We haven't been downtown for a few weeks."

  "Thanks, Juanita. If you could, maybe tomorrow you could write down all the names of people that Manolo has come in contact with. I'll drive you to the hospital. Carla, I'll be back in an hour, I promise. I'll take a cab."

  She nodded at him, kissed him through the respirator, and went in to the house to pack.

  * * *

  Spender checked Manolo into the isolation ward and took Juanita to the small chapel. He found two new cases in the ward, which had been admitted in the last hour. He checked the home addresses; they were also from west of the hospital.

  There was a large map of the city posted near the lobby, Spender pulled a handful of thumbtacks from a bulletin board and marked the location of the breakout cases.

  "Spender! Hey!" Hapwell Theslie shouted from the lobby. "There you are! They said you went home."

  "I did. I even got fifteen seconds of sleep. Anything new?"

  "Not yet. What are the tacks?"

  "Three new cases. The timing looks like infection took place six days ago. I think that was the night the fog came in, sometime mid-evening. Why don't you check on the occupations of these two, see if you can find out where they were six days ago. I'll find out the timing of the fog."

  Theslie nodded. "Good thinking, Spender. I see where you're going with this," and then hurried off, keying his cell phone.

  Spender called the local television station and got through quickly to the weather forecaster.

  "Dr. Spender, I'd be happy to help in any way I can," said the weatherman.

  "Exactly six days ago, what was the weather in the city?"

  "Hang on a second." Spender heard rustling papers. "Here it is, sixty-eight degrees high, forty-five low. Scattered clouds A.M., thickening P.M. Winds ten to fifteen from the east-southeast. Low pressure area in the Gulf off New Orleans, we picked up some humid air from the Gulf, causing heavy fog between eight and ten P.M. Anything else?"

  "What was the relative humidity?"

  "About eighty percent midday, increasing to nearly one hundred percent in the fog."

  "How often do we get close to a hundred percent relative humidity here?"

  "In the rain, often. With no rain, not more than once or twice a year."

  "Thanks," said Spender, "That helps a lot."

  A few minutes later Hapwell Theslie hurried up with a clipboard. "This Cooper woman was working the cash register at a miniature golf place." He gave the address and Spender moved his thumbtack a bit. "The Verrazo guy was giving a barbecue party in his back yard."

  "In the fog?"

  "That's what he said," said Theslie. "Probably alcoholic beverages involved."

  "He could talk?"

  "No, but he could write pretty good," said Theslie, showing Spender the awkward scrawl. "What's your take on this, Spender?"

  "One possibility is that the virus is airborne on a microdroplet, and needs high humidity to survive. An infinitesimal bit of air venting from our isolation ward could have been carried by the prevailing east-southeast winds. You can see the new cases are on a straight line west-northwest of us."

  "That's the way I figure it, too. I'll spread the word. You can go home, Spender."

  "You spread the word. I'll try to find the leak," said Spender, shoulders sagging wearily. He walked off to the isolation wing.

  Chapter 7

  * * *

  Boston, October 21, present day

  Robert Asher shared the Biolevel 3 lab with a few other staff members and some students working on their theses, and the large room was often busy well into the night. It was supplied with the usual equipment: optical microscopes, centrifuges, microtomes, a wall of reagents and culture samples, refrigerators, and a high-power electron microscope.

  The charge microscope was set up on a lab bench. Its most prominent feature was a black glass plate, almost two feet square, with a movable aluminum plate hinged to make contact with the top of the glass plate. The aluminum plate was wired to an aluminum ball six inches in diameter, supported on a clear plastic column, and provided with a silk cloth to generate electrostatic voltage. That Thursday morning, Robert was demonstrating the microscope to Dr. Teppin and several other staff members.

  "Robert," said Teppin, "You beat the deadline."

  "It came together pretty quickly. I found a way to get the sample plate and the aluminum plate to come together perfectly without needing to make them exactly flat. Lots of pressure, thin soft aluminum. And the virus sample came in from Austin."

  "You have been handling it with great care, of course?"

  "I did the virus work in the BL-3 facility, in the Racal suit. I got some good results last night."

  "Maybe you can give us some background."

  "The theory is based on the moiré effect," said Robert. "You can see it when you look through two window screens from a ways off. The tiny pattern of the screen is magnified by a huge factor and you see giant dark squares which move when you move your head. One of the window screens, at a much smaller dimension, is the sample. The sample is crystallized on this smooth black plate, like frost on your window, by evaporating a liquid solution. Then a charge pattern is formed by contact with a charged crystalline conductor. The conductor is the second window screen, and it needs to have a regular crystal structure with almost the same molecular dimension as the sample's."

  "How do you arrange that?"

  "Deposit the crystal on the plates at a slightly different temperature. Then equalize the temperature; the different thermal expansion of aluminum and glass causes a slight size change. A tenth of a percent change in size gives you a magnification of a thousand times."

&nb
sp; "But isn't it difficult to get a monocrystalline deposit?"

  "Yes, impossible, so I simply use the glass plate crystal as a template to seed the growth of a similar crystal on the aluminum. I used aluminum, almost any other metal would work as well. Then you put a high voltage on the conductor to charge the sample plate. I'm using this poor man's Van de Graaf generator to get the high-voltage supply, but I've ordered a fifty-kilovolt lab supply. Field emission pulls charge out where the molecules are closest." He rubbed the silk cloth on the aluminum sphere and moved the large aluminum plate down into contact with the black plate.

  "I've set the magnification to ten thousand times here. If the humidity is not over about twenty percent we can make the magnified charge pattern visible with a white powder. I use talcum powder."

  He removed the aluminum plate and dusted the surface with an aerosol bottle of powder. A pattern appeared, etched in thin white lines against the black glass.

  The onlookers reacted with applause and astonishment. "Sweet Jesus, the goddamn thing works!"

  "That pattern shows the electrostatic field of an individual molecule. A single molecule would produce a field far too small to be measured, but when we crystallize billions of molecules and expose them through the moiré plate, the field becomes visible. Since the molecule is probably not symmetric, I will need to repeat this experiment twice more to get the charge pattern at three different possible crystal orientations."

  "How do you use the information?" asked Dr. Teppin.

  "The charge image of a molecule, once we learn how to use it, may be more useful for some purposes than the normal electron microscope image. It's a more accurate picture of the forces that bind molecules. I can't predict all the uses. We're going to be working on this for years."

  He pointed at an electron microscope image on the wall. "This is the Austin virus under ten thousand times magnification from three angles with a conventional electron microscope. You can see that the structure in the first image is similar to the moiré microscope. But the charge image of the moiré microscope will show you how the molecule wants to form bonds with other molecules, so it is a much better predictor of behavior. We can design an anti-molecule with a similar but mirror image charge pattern which will bond to and kill the virus molecule, and ideally not be too harmful to humans by itself."

  "Now, this is exciting," another staff member said. "I thought it was just more weird science like Kirlean images."

  "Yeah, we got some bad press. There's some parallels. Kirlean images are supposed to show the soul or the aura of a leaf or a rock, but they're really showing the corona discharge pattern. Trust me, we're not looking at the soul of the virus molecule, we're just looking at its charge image."

  Teppin spoke. "Congratulations, Robert. This is an incredible achievement. You have officially got all the funding you need as of now. But you also have some work to do. You need to see if you can find some practical demonstration that shows that charge images can do things that standard electron microscopes cannot. The Austin virus is the place to start. Of course, you have a certain advantage in that your microscope probably costs about a hundred times less than an electron microscope. Or a few thousand times less than a cryo-electron microscope."

  "Great. I'll get back to work."

  "Yes," said Teppin. "You get those other views of the virus and let me know when you can use some help with the antiviral effort. And we'll stay in touch with Spender down in Texas. They're a long way from keeping this outbreak contained. They're going to need all the help they can get."

  "It could be many months, or years, before we're ready for a practical application."

  "I know, but this virus is a tough one. It may be months or years before anybody figures out a cure. Robert, this may seem unfair, but you should assume that you're the best chance to save a lot of human lives."

  "How can that be?" asked Robert. "The CDC is in Austin in force, right? Handling quarantine and isolation? They shouldn't have any trouble with one virus outbreak."

  Teppin shook his head. "This one isn't that easy. The virus is a throwback in some ways: it's got a simple structure, like Ebola but with an extra kink that gives it even better propagation and a faster reproductive cycle. And it keeps its host alive longer pumping out aerosol virus particles. Vancomycin doesn't touch it, there's no known cure. And the symptoms don't appear until after the host is infectious."

  Robert nodded, face grim.

  * * *

  The next evening, Robert was at home staring at the three-view projections of the virus on his computer screen, trying to finish the study of the microscope images. But his eyes kept losing focus, slipping past the screen to infinity. The problem was, the concept was too simple. A junior high school kid could build this damn microscope on the kitchen table during lunch hour. Robert realized that he was expecting to fail, expecting that the microscope had been invented already and had some hidden flaw.

  OK, then, maybe it was time to find out for sure if anybody had ever built a charge microscope. The concept had unfolded itself slowly in his head more than a year ago—first the longest of long shots—but as he began to refine the idea it had seemed possible, even probable. He had been disappointed when the project had been back-burnered and exhilarated when Spender had needed the microscope's medical capability and moved it back to top priority.

  Until now he hadn't seen any hint of any other researcher working on the principle. But now that the microscope was making pictures he could easily make sure that it was unique.

  He launched Netscape 12 on the computer. With its new graphical browser capability, it would let him scan through millions of pages of information on the Internet and look for anything that closely matched his image, the charge pattern of the virus.

  When Netscape came up, he pasted his three-view image into its browser window and clicked on "Submit." In a few seconds, the computer beeped softly, reported "One match found," and displayed a nearly identical image with an added column of unrelated figures.

  Robert was stunned. His incredible new breakthrough was yesterday's news, a rediscovery, a footnote instead of the big story. Nearly a year out of his life, reinventing the wheel. Another dead end, already tested, already failed.

  He spun away from the computer. He emptied his beer can in one swig, crushed it, and threw it at the wall. He saw the implication, if this brilliant idea was second hand, there'd be some reason it wouldn't help with the Austin virus. He slammed both hands down on a table with a muffled scream and paced around the room. After a while, the soothing effect of a third Sam Adams restored a measure of calm and he turned back to the computer to get the details of the bad news.

  Then his eye caught something strange: the image on the screen was labeled "Stela in Uxmal, Mexico, AD 823."

  There must be some mistake. He looked closer; the image on the screen was of a stone carving, not a microscope picture from another researcher. An old stone carving. The accompanying text was, "In the third group, these two columns of three do not resemble any known glyphs. They have not been translated, but from the surrounding glyphs we can guess that they represent some chemical or pharmacological product."

  Robert clicked through the complete document. It was the doctoral thesis of a researcher at Harvard who was studying the language of the ancient Maya Indians. The twelve-century-old stone carving that matched the Austin virus had been photographed in 1923. What in hell was going on?

  He considered the options. The images were too similar to be coincidental, but how could they not be? And could the second column be a charge image of an antiviral? It looked close enough to be a mirror image, with the differences in structure that would be appropriate for an antiviral. But how could the ancient Maya Indians have built a charge microscope? Or synthesized an antiviral?

  He sat for ten minutes, his mind churning over with the possibilities, but nothing made any sense. It was past nine o'clock in the evening, but he would get no sleep unless he got this sorted out, and Dr.
Teppin had given him his home phone number.

  "This is Teppin."

  "Dr. Teppin, this is Robert Asher."

  "Please call me Edward after five o'clock. What is it?"

  Robert described the situation.

  "That is impossible, of course, but you already know that. Can you come over with a printout?"

  "Sure, if it won't be a problem this late?"

  "You know where I live, right? I will expect you in half an hour."

  * * *

  Robert had been at a faculty party at Dr. Teppin's suite last Christmas. Dr. Teppin lived alone, in most of the thirtieth floor. His apartment was furnished in a nautical motif: pieces of wrecked wooden boats, a big old brass binnacle from an eighteenth century schooner, marine charts, and an antique brass-and-wood telescope, retrofitted with modern optics and looking out over Boston Harbor to Deer Island and Boston Light. A three-foot illuminated globe in an old oak frame dominated the room.

  Robert was buzzed in to the apartment and Teppin in his motorized wheelchair led him to a leather sofa in the library. Robert accepted the offer of a cognac and handed Teppin the computer printouts. Teppin considered the documents for a few minutes as Robert watched the lights of the harbor and a few ships coming back to port.

  "Yes. The way it looks to me," said Teppin, finally. "There are three possibilities. One is a coincidence, the second is some complicated kind of hoax, and the third is that the Maya simply got there twelve hundred years before you."

  Robert smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

  "The possibility of a coincidence can be calculated fairly easily. The chance of each of the three glyphs matching to one picture element is about ten to the eighteenth power, a billion billion to one. Of course, you have to consider near misses, mirror images, and so forth. If you factor these effects, the odds probably drop to a thousand billion to one. Still, you would have to consider it a rather long shot.

  "And then there's the hoax. But the possibility of a hoax is infinitesimal, if you indeed created the three views today and nobody else got a look before you did the net search. Is that what happened?"