"True," Killgore conceded. Then he smiled. "We're even improving the breed, aren't we?"
Dr. Archer saw the humor of that. "Yes, John, we are. So, Vaccine-B is readyT-"
He nodded. "Yes, I had my injection a few hours ago. Ready for yours?"
"And -A?"
"In the freezer, ready for mass production as soon as people need it. We'll be able to turn it out in thousand-liter lots per week when we have to. Enough to cover the planet," he told her. "Steve Berg and I worked that out yesterday."
"Can anybody else-"
"No way. Not even Merck can move that fast - and even if they did, they'd have to use our formula, wouldn't they?"
That was the ultimate hook. If the plan to spread Shiva around the globe didn't work as well as hoped, then the entire world would be given Vaccine-A, which Antigen Laboratories, a division of The Horizon Corp., just happened to be working on as part of its corporate effort to help the Third World, where all the hemorrhagic fevers lived. A fortunate accident, albeit one already known in the medical literature. Both John Killgore and Steve Berg had published papers on these diseases, which had been made quite high-profile by the big scare America and the world had gone through not so long before. So, the medical world knew that Horizon/Antigen was working in this area, and wouldn't be surprised to learn that there was a vaccine in the works. They'd even test the vaccines in laboratories and find that, sure enough, the liquid had all manner of antibodies. But they'd be the wrong antibodies, and the live-virus vaccine would be a death sentence to anyone who had it enter his system. The time from injection to onset of frank symptoms was programmed at four to six weeks, and, again, the only survivors would be those lucky souls from the deepest end of the gene pool. One hundred such people out of a million would survive. Maybe less. Ebola-Shiva was one nasty little bastard of a bug, three years in the making, and how odd Killgore thought, that it had been that easy to construct. Well, that was science for you. Gene manipulation was a new field, and those things were unpredictable. The sad part, maybe, was that the same people in the same lab were charging along a new and unexpected path - human longevity and reportedly making real progress. Well, so much the better. An extended life to appreciate the new world that Shiva would bring about.
And the breakthroughs wouldn't stop. Many on the select list to receive Vaccine-B were scientists. Some of them wouldn't like the news, when they were told, but they'd have little choice, and being scientists, they'd soon get back to their work.
Not everyone in the Project approved. Some of the radical ones actually said that bringing physicians along was contrary to the nature of the mission-because medicine didn't allow nature to take her course. Sure, Killgore snorted to himself. Fine, they'd let those idiots have their babies in farm fields after a morning's plowing or hunter gathering, and soon enough those ideologues would breed themselves out. He planned to study and enjoy nature, but he'd do so wearing shoes and a jacket to keep the chill out. He planned to remain an educated man, not revert to the naked ape. His mind wandered… There'd be a division of labor, of course. Farmers to grow the food and tend the cattle they'd eat - or hunters to shoot the buffalo, whose meat was healthier, lower in cholesterol. The buffalo should come back pretty fast, he thought. Wheat would continue to grow wild in the Great Plains, and they'd grow fat and healthy, especially since their predators had been so ruthlessly hunted down that they'd be slower to catch up. Domestic cattle would thrive also, but they'd ultimately be edged out by the buffalo, a much hardier breed better suited to free life. Killgore wanted to see that, see the vast herds that had once covered the West. He wanted to see Africa, too.
That meant that the Project needed airplanes and pilots. Horizon already had its own collection of G-V business jets, capable of spanning most of the world, and so they'd also need small teams of people to manage and maintain a few airports-Zambia, for instance. He wanted to see Africa wild and free. That would take perhaps ten years to come about, Killgore estimated, and it wasn't all that big a deal. AIDS was killing off that continent at a nasty pace, and Shiva would only make it go faster, and so the Dark Continent would again be free of man, and he'd be able to go there and observe nature in all her glory… and maybe shoot a lion to make a rug for his home in Kansas? Some of the people in the Project would raise pure fucking hell over that, but what was one lion more or less? The Project would be saving hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps millions, free to roam and hunt in their prides. What a beautiful New World it would be, once you eliminated the parasitic species that was working so hard to destroy it.
