"Presumably airborne," Burton said.

"Yes. Presumably."

"Everyone seems to have died in the immediate vicinity of the town," Burton said. "Are there reports of deaths farther out?

Stone shook his head. "I'm having the Army people look into it. They're working with the highway patrol. So far, no deaths have turned up outside."

"Wind?"

"A stroke of luck," Stone said. "Last night the wind was fairly brisk, nine miles an hour to the south and steady. But around midnight, it died. Pretty unusual for this time of year, they tell me."

"But fortunate for us."

"Yes." Stone nodded. "We're fortunate in another way as well. There is no important area of habitation for a radius a of nearly one hundred and twelve miles. Outside that, of course, there is Las Vegas to the north, San Bernardino to the west, and Phoenix to the east. Not nice, if the bug gets to any of them."

"But as long as the wind stays down, we have time."

"Presumably," Stone said.

For the next half hour, the two men discussed the vector problem with frequent reference to a sheaf of output maps drawn up during the night by Vandenberg's computer division. The output maps were highly complex analyses of geographic problems; in this case, the maps were visualizations of the southwestern United States, weighted for wind direction and population.

A NOTE ON THE OUTPUT MAPS: these three maps are intended as examples of the staging of computerbase output mapping. The first map is relatively standard, with the addition of computer coordinates around population centers and other important areas.

The second map has been weighted to account for wind and population factors, and is consequently distorted.

The third map is a computer projection of the effects of wind and population in a specific "scenario."

None of these output maps is from the Wildfire Project. They are similar, but they represent output from a CBW scenario, not the actual Wildfire work.

(courtesy General Autonomics Corporation)

Discussion then turned to the time course of death. Both men had heard the tape from the van; they agreed that everyone at Piedmont seemed to have died quite suddenly.

"Even if you slit a man's throat with a razor," Burton said, "you won't get death that rapidly. Cutting both carotids and jugulars still allows ten to forty seconds before unconsciousness, and nearly a minute before death."

"At Piedmont, it seems to have occurred in a second or two."

Burton shrugged. "Trauma," he suggested. "A blow to the head."

"Yes. Or a nerve gas."

"Certainly possible."

"It's that, or something very much like it," Stone said. "If it was an enzymatic block of some kind—like arsenic or strychnine—we'd expect fifteen or thirty seconds, perhaps longer. But a block of nervous transmission, or a block of the neuro-muscular junction, or cortical poisoning—that could be very swift. It could be instantaneous."