Tom wrapped his arm around Sally and carried her toward the tear in the fuselage, the only way out. He grasped the netting and struggled up, hooked an arm over the sill and hauled her up to the hole. She grasped the ragged edge and Tom helped her outside, on top of the fuselage where it was an eight-foot drop to the ground. He could see the fire was spreading rapidly along the tail, crawling along fuel and electrical lines, engulfing the chopper.
'Can you jump?'
Sally nodded. He eased her down the side, and she dropped.
'Run!'
'What the hell are you doing staying there?' she screamed from below. 'Get off!'
'Ford's in there!'
'It's going to blow-!'
But Tom had turned his attention back into the chopper, where Ford, injured, was trying to climb up the netting to the opening. One of his arms dangled uselessly.
Tom lay on his stomach, reached through the hole, grasped the man's good arm, and hauled him up. Black smoke billowed out in a great wave just as he pulled Ford free and up on top of the fuselage, then slid him to the ground.
'Tom! Get off there!' Sally screamed from below, helping Ford away from the wreck.
'There's still Hitt!'
Smoke was now pouring through the opening. Tom dropped down into it and crouched, finding a layer of fresh air underneath. He crawled toward where he
had last seen Hitt, keeping low. The unconscious soldier lay on his side in the cockpit amid a shower of debris. Waves of heat from the fire scorched his skin. He slid his arms around Hitt's torso and pulled, but the soldier was huge and he couldn't manage it.
There was a muffled thump as something burst into flame inside the fuselage. A wave of heat and smoke rolled over Tom.
'Hitt!' He slapped the man across the face. The man's eyes rolled. He slapped him again, very hard, and the eyes came into focus.
'Get moving! Get out!'
Tom wrapped his arm around the man's neck and heaved him up. Hitt struggled to his knees, shaking his head, droplets of blood dripping from his hair. 'Damn . . .'
'Out! We're on fire!'
'Jesus. ..'
Hitt finally seemed to be coming back to reality, ready to move under his own power. The smoke was now so thick that Tom could barely see. He felt along the floor, Hitt crawling behind him. An eternity later they reached where the fuselage of the chopper curved upward. He turned, grabbed Hitt's arm, placed his meaty fist on the netting. 'Climb!'
There was no air and the acrid smoke felt like broken glass in his lungs.
'Climb, damn you!'
The man started climbing, almost like a zombie, the blood running down his arms. Tom followed alongside, screaming at him, dizziness filling his head. He was going to pass out, it was too late. It was over. He felt his grip weakening . . .
And then arms reached down, pulling him up and throwing him off the side of the chopper. He fell heavily in the sand, and a moment later Hitt landed heavily next to him, with a groan. Sally jumped down beside them-she had climbed back up on the chopper to haul them out.
They stumbled and crawled, trying to get as far away from the burning chopper as possible. Tom finally collapsed, gasping and coughing, able to go no more. Half crawling, half lying in the sand, he heard a dull thud and felt the sudden heat as the last of the chopper's tanks blew, engulfing the wreck in flame.
Suddenly a bizarre sight appeared: a man emerged from the fire, sheeted in flame, his arm raised with a gun in his burning fist. With strange deliberation he stopped, aimed, fired a single wild shot-and then the figure slowly toppled like a statue back into the burning inferno and was gone.
Tom passed out.
4
NIGHT HAD FALLEN on the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the old sycamores in MuseumPark, and the stone gargoyles that haunted the rooftops squatted silently against the darkening sky. Deep in the museum's basement a light burned in the Mineralogy laboratory, where Melodic Crookshank sat hunched over the stereozoom microscope, watching a lump of cells divide.
It had been going on for three and a half hours. The Venus particles had triggered an amazing spurt of growth-triggering an orgy of cell division. At first Melodic thought the particles might have somehow set off a cancerous growth, an undifferentiated bunch of malignant cells. But it wasn't long before she realized that these cells were not dividing like cancerous cells, or even normal cells in a culture.
No-these cells were differentiating.
The group of cells had begun to take on the characteristics of a blastocyst, the ball of cells that form from a fertilized embryo. As the cells had continued to divide, Melodic had seen a dark streak develop down the middle of the blastocyst. It had begun to look exactly like the so-called primitive streak that developed in all chordate embryos-which would eventually form the spinal cord and backbone of the developing creature.
Creature.
Melodic, at the limit of exhaustion, raised her head. It hadn't occurred to her exactly what this thing that was growing might be, whether a lizard or something else, and it was too early in the ontological process to know.
She shivered. What the hell was she doing? It would be insane to wait around and find out. What she was doing now was not only foolish, it was extremely
dangerous. These particles needed to be studied under biosafety level four conditions, not in an open lab like hers.
She glanced toward the clock, hardly able to focus on the dial. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, rolled them to the left and the right. She was so tired she was almost hallucinating.
Melodic had no idea what these particles were, what they did, how they worked. They were an alien life-form that had hitched a ride to Earth on the Chicxulub asteroid. This was over her head-way over her head.
Melodic shoved back the chair and stood up, a little unsteady on her feet, gripping the side of the table for support, her hands trembling. She began to consider what she had to do. She cast around and her eyes lit on a bottle of 80 percent hydrochloric acid in the chemical stores. She unlocked the cabinet, took down the bottle, brought it to under the fume hood, broke the seal, and poured a few ounces of it into a shallow glass tray. With infinite care she removed the slide from the microscope stage, carried it to the fume hood, and slipped it into the hydrochloric acid. There was a faint foaming and hissing noise as the acid instantly destroyed and dissolved the hideous growing blob of cells until nothing was left.
She breathed a deep sigh of relief. That was the first step, to destroy the organism growing on the slide. Now to destroy the loose Venus particles themselves.
She added a strong base to the acid, neutralizing it and causing the precipitation of a layer of salt at the bottom of the dish. Setting up a Bunsen burner under the hood, she put the glass dish on the burner and began boiling away the solution. In a few minutes all the liquid had evaporated, leaving behind a crust of salt. She now turned up the burner as high as it would go. Five minutes passed, then ten minutes, and the salt began to crust up, glowing red-hot as the temperature approached the melting point of glass. No form of carbon, not even a buckyball, could survive that kind of heat. For five minutes she kept the Pyrex dish over the burner while it glowed cherry-red and then she turned off the gas and let it cool down.
She still had one more thing to do: the most important thing of all. And that was to finish the article, adding what she had just discovered. She spent ten minutes writing up two final paragraphs, describing in the driest scientific language she could muster what she had just observed. She saved it, read it over one final time, and was satisfied.
Melodic silently criticized her own lack of caution. Whatever the particles
were, she now believed they might be very dangerous. They was no telling what they might do to a live organism, to a human being. She felt a chill, wondering if she was infected. But that was impossible-the particles
