A 1981 BOOK THAT PREDICTED THE CORONA VIRUS
“Strictly biological weapons?”
“Biological and chemical. Recombinant DNA experiments. At any one time,
we have thirty to forty projects underway.”
“I thought the U.S. got out of the chemical and biological weapons race a long
time ago.”
“For the public record, we did,” Dombey said. “It made the politicians look
good. But in reality the work goes on. It has to. This is the only facility of its
kind we have. The Chinese have three like it. The Russians . . . they’re now
supposed to be our new friends, but they keep developing bacteriological
weapons, new and more virulent strains of viruses, because they’re broke, and
this is a lot cheaper than other weapons systems. Iraq has a big biochem warfare
project, and Libya, and God knows who else. Lots of people out there in the rest
of the world—they believe in chemical and biological warfare. They don’t see
anything immoral about it. If they felt they had some terrific new bug that we
didn’t know about, something against which we couldn’t retaliate in kind, they’d
use it on us.”
Elliot said, “But if racing to keep up with the Chinese—or the Russians or the
Iraqis—can create situations like the one we’ve got here, where an innocent
child gets ground up in the machine, then aren’t we just becoming monsters too?
Aren’t we letting our fears of the enemy turn us into them? And isn’t that just
another way of losing the war?”
Dombey nodded. As he spoke, he smoothed the spikes of his mustache.
“That’s the same question I’ve been wrestling with ever since Danny got caught
in the gears. The problem is that some flaky people are attracted to this kind of
work because of the secrecy and because you really do get a sense of power
from designing weapons that can kill millions of people. So megalomaniacs like
Tamaguchi get involved. Men like Aaron Zachariah here. They abuse their
power, pervert their duties. There’s no way to screen them out ahead of time.
But if we closed up shop, if we stopped doing this sort of research just because
we were afraid of men like Tamaguchi winding up in charge of it, we’d be
conceding so much ground to our enemies that we wouldn’t survive for long. I
suppose we have to learn to live with the lesser of the evils.”
Tina removed an electrode from Danny’s neck, carefully peeling the tape off
his skin.
The child still clung to her, but his deeply sunken eyes were riveted on
Dombey.
“I’m not interested in the philosophy or morality of biological warfare,” Tinasaid. “Right now I just want to know how the hell Danny wound up in this
place.”
“To understand that,” Dombey said, “you have to go back twenty months. It
was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United
States, carrying a diskette record of China’s most important and dangerous new
biological weapon in a decade. They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was
developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-
hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research
center.
“Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon. It afflicts only human beings. No other
living creature can carry it. And like syphilis, Wuhan-400 can’t survive outside a
living human body for longer than a minute, which means it can’t permanently
contaminate objects or entire places the way anthrax and other virulent
microorganisms can. And when the host expires, the Wuhan-400 within him
perishes a short while later, as soon as the temperature of the corpse drops below
eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. Do you see the advantage of all this?”
Tina was too busy with Danny to think about what Carl Dombey had said, but
Elliot knew what the scientist meant. “If I understand you, the Chinese could use
Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn’t be any need
for them to conduct a tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved
in and took over the conquered territory.”
“Exactly,” Dombey said. “And Wuhan-400 has other, equally important
advantages over most biological agents.
For one thing, you can become an infectious carrier only four hours after coming
into contact with the virus. That’s an incredibly short incubation period. Once
infected, no one lives more than twenty-four hours. Most die in twelve. It’s
worse than the Ebola virus in Africa—infinitely worse. Wuhan-400’s kill-rate is
one hundred percent. No one is supposed to survive. The Chinese tested it on
God knows how many political prisoners. They were never able to find an
antibody or an antibiotic that was effective against it. The virus migrates to the
brain stem, and there it begins secreting a toxin that literally eats away brain
tissue like battery acid dissolving cheesecloth. It destroys the part of the brain
that controls all of the body’s automatic functions. The victim simply ceases to
have a pulse, functioning organs, or any urge to breathe.”
“And that’s the disease Danny survived,” Elliot said.
“Yes,” Dombey said. “As far as we know, he’s the only one who ever has.”
The name of the book is " THE EYES OF DARKNESS " Written by DEAN KOONTZ
Pages 254-257
“Biological and chemical. Recombinant DNA experiments. At any one time,
we have thirty to forty projects underway.”
“I thought the U.S. got out of the chemical and biological weapons race a long
time ago.”
“For the public record, we did,” Dombey said. “It made the politicians look
good. But in reality the work goes on. It has to. This is the only facility of its
kind we have. The Chinese have three like it. The Russians . . . they’re now
supposed to be our new friends, but they keep developing bacteriological
weapons, new and more virulent strains of viruses, because they’re broke, and
this is a lot cheaper than other weapons systems. Iraq has a big biochem warfare
project, and Libya, and God knows who else. Lots of people out there in the rest
of the world—they believe in chemical and biological warfare. They don’t see
anything immoral about it. If they felt they had some terrific new bug that we
didn’t know about, something against which we couldn’t retaliate in kind, they’d
use it on us.”
Elliot said, “But if racing to keep up with the Chinese—or the Russians or the
Iraqis—can create situations like the one we’ve got here, where an innocent
child gets ground up in the machine, then aren’t we just becoming monsters too?
Aren’t we letting our fears of the enemy turn us into them? And isn’t that just
another way of losing the war?”
Dombey nodded. As he spoke, he smoothed the spikes of his mustache.
“That’s the same question I’ve been wrestling with ever since Danny got caught
in the gears. The problem is that some flaky people are attracted to this kind of
work because of the secrecy and because you really do get a sense of power
from designing weapons that can kill millions of people. So megalomaniacs like
Tamaguchi get involved. Men like Aaron Zachariah here. They abuse their
power, pervert their duties. There’s no way to screen them out ahead of time.
But if we closed up shop, if we stopped doing this sort of research just because
we were afraid of men like Tamaguchi winding up in charge of it, we’d be
conceding so much ground to our enemies that we wouldn’t survive for long. I
suppose we have to learn to live with the lesser of the evils.”
Tina removed an electrode from Danny’s neck, carefully peeling the tape off
his skin.
The child still clung to her, but his deeply sunken eyes were riveted on
Dombey.
“I’m not interested in the philosophy or morality of biological warfare,” Tinasaid. “Right now I just want to know how the hell Danny wound up in this
place.”
“To understand that,” Dombey said, “you have to go back twenty months. It
was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United
States, carrying a diskette record of China’s most important and dangerous new
biological weapon in a decade. They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was
developed at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-
hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research
center.
“Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon. It afflicts only human beings. No other
living creature can carry it. And like syphilis, Wuhan-400 can’t survive outside a
living human body for longer than a minute, which means it can’t permanently
contaminate objects or entire places the way anthrax and other virulent
microorganisms can. And when the host expires, the Wuhan-400 within him
perishes a short while later, as soon as the temperature of the corpse drops below
eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. Do you see the advantage of all this?”
Tina was too busy with Danny to think about what Carl Dombey had said, but
Elliot knew what the scientist meant. “If I understand you, the Chinese could use
Wuhan-400 to wipe out a city or a country, and then there wouldn’t be any need
for them to conduct a tricky and expensive decontamination before they moved
in and took over the conquered territory.”
“Exactly,” Dombey said. “And Wuhan-400 has other, equally important
advantages over most biological agents.
For one thing, you can become an infectious carrier only four hours after coming
into contact with the virus. That’s an incredibly short incubation period. Once
infected, no one lives more than twenty-four hours. Most die in twelve. It’s
worse than the Ebola virus in Africa—infinitely worse. Wuhan-400’s kill-rate is
one hundred percent. No one is supposed to survive. The Chinese tested it on
God knows how many political prisoners. They were never able to find an
antibody or an antibiotic that was effective against it. The virus migrates to the
brain stem, and there it begins secreting a toxin that literally eats away brain
tissue like battery acid dissolving cheesecloth. It destroys the part of the brain
that controls all of the body’s automatic functions. The victim simply ceases to
have a pulse, functioning organs, or any urge to breathe.”
“And that’s the disease Danny survived,” Elliot said.
“Yes,” Dombey said. “As far as we know, he’s the only one who ever has.”
The name of the book is " THE EYES OF DARKNESS " Written by DEAN KOONTZ
Pages 254-257
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