Another pause, and then Comroe heard the van come to a halt, brakes squealing.

Shawn: "Jesus."

Crane: "It's another one, sir.

Shawn: "Looks dead."

Crane: "Shall I—"

Shawn: "No. Stay in the van."

His voice became louder, more formal, as he ran through the call. "This is Caper One to Vandal Deca. Over."

Comroe picked up the microphone. "Reading you. What's happened?"

Shawn, his voice tight, said, "Sir, we see bodies. Lots of them. They appear to be dead."

"Are you certain, Caper One?"

"For Christ's sake," Shawn said. "Of course we're certain."

Comroe said mildly, "Proceed to the capsule, Caper One."

As he did so, he looked around the room. The twelve other men in the skeleton crew were staring at him, their eyes blank, unseeing. They were listening to the transmission.

The van rumbled to life again.

Comroe swung his feet off the desk and punched the red "Security" button on his console. That button automatically isolated the Mission Control room. No one would be allowed in or out without Comroe's permission.

Then he picked up the telephone and said, "Get me Major Manchek. M-A-N-C-H-E-K. This is a stat call. I'll hold."

Manchek was the chief duty officer for the month, the man directly responsible for all Scoop activities during February.

While he waited, he cradled the phone in his shoulder and lit a cigarette. Over the loudspeaker, Shawn could be heard to say, "Do they look dead to you, Crane?"

Crane: "Yes sir. Kind of peaceful, but dead.'

Shawn: "Somehow they don't really look dead. There's something missing. Something funny . . . But they're all over. Must be dozens of them."

Crane: "Like they dropped in their trucks. Stumbled and fallen down dead."

Shawn: "All over the streets, on the sidewalks . . ."

Another silence, then Crane: "Sir!"

Shawn: "Jesus."

Crane: "You see him? The man in the white robe, walking across the street—"

Shawn: "I see him."

Crane: "He's just stepping over them like—"

Shawn: "He's coming toward us."

Crane: "Sir, look, I think we should get out of here, if you don't mind my—"

The next sound was a high-pitched scream, and a crunching noise. Transmission ended at this point, and Vandenberg Scoop Mission Control was not able to raise the two men again.

3. Crisis

GLADSTONE, UPON HEARING of the death of "Chinese" Gordon in Egypt, was reported to have muttered irritably that his general might have chosen a more propitious time to die: Gordon's death threw the Gladstone government into turmoil and crisis. An aide suggested that the circumstances were unique and unpredictable, to which Gladstone crossly answered: "All crises are the same."

He meant political crises, of course. There were no scientific crises in 1885, and indeed none for nearly forty years afterward. Since then there have been eight of major importance; two have received wide publicity. It is interesting that both the publicized crises—atomic energy and space capability—have concerned chemistry and physics, not biology.

This is to be expected. Physics was the first of the natural sciences to become fully modern and highly mathematical. Chemistry followed in the wake of physics, but biology, the retarded child, lagged far behind. Even in the time of Newton and Galileo, men knew more about the moon and other heavenly bodies than they did about their own.