The Fog - James Herbert [72]
‘We are not here to apportion blame, Richard. Just tell us the facts,’ the Home Secretary snapped irritably.
‘Very well.’ The big man straightened up as though relieved and proceeded in a brisk business-like manner, throwing off his look of guilty admission completely. ‘If we are to start at the beginning we must go back fifteen years, to our Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down and a brilliant scientist named Broadmeyer. His speciality was bacteriological warfare.’
Holman felt a coldness grip him. He had been right! The stupid bastards had been responsible.
‘Professor Broadmeyer was a brilliant man in many ways,’ Lord Gibbon continued. ‘Perhaps too brilliant. He discovered – or invented – an organism that could affect the brains of man or animal.’
‘May we be more accurate than that.’ A slightly accented voice interrupted. All eyes swung round towards Professor Hermann Ryker, the Chief Scientific Adviser.
‘Yes, Professor Ryker?’ said the Home Secretary.
‘He did not invent, he did not discover,’ Ryker said gravely. ‘He mutated. He took an organism known as mycoplasma and mutated it.’ He was silent again.
‘Perhaps you would like to continue, Professor. You’re more of an authority on this kind of thing than I am,’ said the Defence Minister.
‘Yes,’ Ryker admitted dryly. He looked around at the assembly. ‘Broadmeyer was a brilliant man – I studied under him for many years – but he was, what shall we say, a little irresponsible. He mutated the mycoplasma so that if it entered the bloodstream it would attack the healthy existing cells and travel as a parasite to the brain. I am sure Mrs Halstead knows of the Rhesus factor,’ – she nodded in acknowledgement – ‘where a mother produces a mental defect because of antigenic incompatibility between the mother and foetus. In analogical theory the same process takes place except that the disease is transmitted to the host’s brain rather than a foetus.
‘The micro-organisms cause inflammation of the brain substance and covering membranes, eventually leading to a breakdown of existing healthy brain cells and a build-up of new, parasitical cells. The stronger the parasites become, the more easily the healthy cells are “devoured”. Hence the complete and utter mental breakdown of whoever contracts the disease. Eventually, the victim would become a vegetable, capable of no action at all.’
‘But what about me?’ Holman exclaimed, unable to hold back. ‘Why didn’t I become a vegetable?’
Professor Ryker regarded him with a faint smile. ‘You have been a very fortunate young man,’ he said, then looking at Janet Halstead again. ‘I believe Mrs Halstead we have some idea of what saved you by now, but there is a little more to it.’
The Principal Medical Officer spoke up. ‘Mr Holman was given a blood transfusion because of an injury he sustained during his attack. I assume this helped clear the bloodstream of the foreign cells.’
‘Precisely, Mrs Halstead,’ the Professor nodded. ‘It helped the existing cells destroy the parasites, rather like a regiment that has been sent reinforcements. Luckily for Mr Holman, he received the transfusion before the parasitical cells had a chance to multiply. But he was also lucky in another respect.
‘Like most organisms used in germ warfare, the Broadmeyer Mutation, as it was secretly called, was self-reproducing. All it needed was carbon dioxide, the simple element that is contained in the very air we breathe and it could grow and grow, or I should say, multiply itself. Mr Holman was exposed to it in the early stages of its process for it had just been released in its pure form, therefore it was comparatively weak. The vapour, or fog as you have called it, is a by-product of the process it goes through as it draws the carbon dioxide from the air. This in itself is strange, for normally an organism that lives on carbon dioxide and precious little else must be photosynthetic, and would require sunlight to live and multiply. Now, mycoplasmas lack a cell wall, the mycoplasma being bounded