In the Time of Man

Chapter Six

(Hoping to get the novel moving along a bit faster now. I’ll try to get the finalized chapters out midweek as often as possible. Appreciate any and all feedback on the story, ideas to make it better, weaknesses, good stuff. Also, asking y’all to please help me avoid the paywall business by getting me more subscribers, especially the paid variety. My goal has always been to get people who can afford a pay subscription to be significant enough in number I can leave all the material free for those who can’t but still want to read. Anyway, I write fast and have lots of ideas but this is still work and a fella likes to make a little lunch money off his sweat. Thanks in advance. - JM

From the Dogon Tribal villages along the Great Bend of the Niger River, to the glassy towers and glamorous lives of the American Southwest, "In the Time of Man" is a story of people confronting both the history and the fate of humanity. A reporter and two scientists are determined to prove that another intelligence has been operating on planet Earth since the beginning of mankind's evolution. Humans have received external help to make it through the new millennium and there are clues there is more intervention underway as a result of a failure to manage the world's resources. Cattle are being mysteriously mutilated, people are growing inexplicably ill, and researchers trying to understand these phenomena are being threatened by a government that might just be facilitating a culling of the planet's population. Telling the truth is dangerous and love and sex can be fatal. But who is responsible for the present plagues of our world and how can they be stopped? "In the Time of Man" explores the facts behind the theory that ancient aliens have guided humanity to its current station and that they are still engaged in determining our destiny. The essential question asked by this story is what will we know before we meet our fate? A Nobel Laureate, a decorated female TV news correspondent, and a renegade researcher all race to discover the truth and share it with the world before they are silenced, or no one will ever know what happened "In the Time of Man."

Chapters 1-4 here Chapter 5 here

Chapter Six

Barton Crawford did not believe what he was seeing. He pulled his head away from the eyepieces of the microscope and stared into the empty space in front of him.  “Not possible,” was all he thought. The scientist rubbed his eyes and then peered back into the tiny lenses to verify the cellular imagery.

Barton was studying a tissue sample taken from a mutilated bull on a ranch in Colorado and the microscope was focused along the edge of where an incision had been made by some kind of an inexplicably exact instrument. Initially, Barton thought a laser had made the cuts but if that were the case it was unlike any he was aware might be commercially available. The edge of the severed animal’s flesh, viewed under the electronic magnifier, revealed that the tool used on the animal was so precise that it had cut in two the individual cells of the tissue, which had resulted in the uncharacteristically smooth incision. Who would have a laser or any other technology that was so finely calibrated that it could split cells like a cleaver chopping a cantaloupe into halves? Barton Crawford had no idea.

The exsanguination of the animals studied by Barton and his student assistants had also become more difficult to believe after the tissue examinations. In every case his team had scrutinized, there had been no blood at the site where the carcasses were discovered. None was on the ground; not a drop. The liver and heart of numerous mutilated cattle were turned to a kind of puree with the consistency of peanut butter and Barton suspected that process happened before the blood was drained. That might make the exsanguination a less messy undertaking but it did not account for what he was seeing under the microscope. In both the cells that had been cut and those that remained whole there was no residue to indicate any presence of blood.  What type of advanced technology, Barton asked himself, is capable of drawing the blood out of every individual cell in a living being? He was tired of all the questions but continued to suspect a causal connection between the cattle mutilations and the people who were wasting away to death in the Bleak House down in Arizona. There had to be some kind of linkage, and he had to find it. He just did not have enough data to even begin to hypothesize.

A door opened behind Barton and he turned around to see that one of the orderlies had entered the lab. He recognized Vicente Cantu, who had been employed by the government at Bleak House prior to Barton’s engagement and was considered one of its most dependable workers. The young man chose the third shift to make extra money, which all staff and professionals delicately refrained from referring to as “graveyard.” 

“Hello, Vicente.”  Barton got up from the workbench. “You doing all right?”

“Yes, sir. How are you Dr. Barton?”

 “I’m fine, fine. Tired of all the work.” 

 “Yes, sir.”

Vicente began to clean specimen tables with an alcohol wash and Barton picked up his notes and started to key them into his laptop. In a few minutes, a green call light came on along the wall.

“Vicente, will you check on who that is?” Barton asked. “It’s probably just one of the patients wanting water.”

“I’m sure. I’ll go see.”

Barton went back to transcribing his notes and letting his mind wander across all the information he had acquired about the cattle mutilations and the emaciated people dying in the Bleak House. After his hasty return to Phoenix and constant worrying about media exposure, the reporter who had been calling appeared to have lost interest and he was relieved he could return to his research without distraction. But Barton still did not know what he was looking for. There were no prions in the Bleak House patients or, if they were present in blood or tissue, they were dormant and could not be isolated. When he had studied the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and the virus that caused it, he was mystified how the viral infection was able to remain dormant in humans for decades and then suddenly become viable and move into the nervous system, destroying the brain in weeks and always 100 percent fatal. The larger question with this new disease was whether it had moved from cattle to humans. Possibly, whoever was harvesting the animals in ranch country was looking for a cure or a vaccine for what was killing humans. Worse yet, Barton thought, the Bleak House sickness was a product of those clandestine experiments being conducted on cattle; it was created for the purpose of killing humans. Probably nonsense, he figured, but he just could not rule out any possibilities yet.

“Dr. Crawford.  I think you should come.” Vicente had returned to the lab wearing slip covers on his shoes, and a full clean room uniform with pants, jacket, and hair-covering. A surgical mask was pulled down to his chin and his hands were in latex gloves.

“What is it Vicente?”

“It’s that Todd in one of the patient clean rooms. He wanted ice water and when I went back, I think he wasn’t breathing no more.”

“God, not another one.” 

Barton Crawford was already moving down the hall toward the patient’s bedside before he had even responded to Vicente. Stopping by his locker, he quickly dressed for the restricted access area where the sickest were sustained. The protections were more for the patients than their caregivers. In their chronically weakened states, if one of the sick were infected with a common cold from outside, they died very quickly. No patient was ever known, however, to have infected a Bleak House worker. What they had contracted had not yet been communicated to another healthy person.

Barton released the air lock and entered the room. Four of the most gravely ill were afforded the privacy of high-walled cubicles. Each had intravenous lines into their hands and they were also connected to heart monitors  Before he even got to Todd’s bed, Barton heard the high-pitched signal of a flat line. He pressed his fingers to the man’s carotid.

“Gone,” he whispered. “And already turning cold from this damned room temperature.”

“I’m sorry,” Vicente said. “I didn’t know what……”

“Please, Vicente. Not your fault. He was already dead. Only the precise moment was left to be decided.”

“I can’t get used to it,” Vicente told Barton. “I’ve been here since the beginning and I still can’t get used to all this death.”

The physician looked down at Vicente’s tired eyes and knew the orderly was assessing him as a Nobel Prize winner who ought to have some answers but did not.  Barton Crawford accepted the blame. 

“I wish I could tell you something comforting, Vicente. But I can’t. I am afraid the people coming in the doors here know as much about what’s happening to them as I do. I’d like to think I am getting closer to understanding, but I’m not so sure.”

Barton bent over to close Todd’s stilled eyes. This was one more face that would populate his sleep. The skin of both the living and the dead patients in the Bleak House looked the same and was drawn tight across the jawbones. Eyes were always lying dry and near motionless in boney hollows. Barton had been treating Todd for three weeks and had not learned his last name. Avoiding familiarity or any kind of intimacy was important for Barton’s psychological health; it was also easy. Usually, the Bleak House ill were too weak for conversation. These people were all simply, and finally doomed and Barton thought his failures in the pathology lab gave him some of the responsibility for their deaths.  

“Evans,” Vicente said.

“What?”

“His last name was Evans. He told me. He wanted me to know him. He had three children. The oldest was a boy who had just started playing baseball. Now all they know is that their dad got sick and went away and never came back. That just doesn’t make sense, does it Dr. Crawford?”

Barton’s hands were resting on the edge of the mattress and his long dark frame was curved in a weary arc over the dead man. His white lab coat billowed out around him. He barely raised his head as he spoke to Vicente.

"No, of course, it doesn’t make sense, Vicente. And I don't know how much more of this I have in me, either. A doctor is not supposed to be totally helpless. We have not yet saved one life in this project. Not one solitary life."

“And they are all fighting so hard to stay alive and that makes it even sadder to watch every day,” Vicente said.

“Yes, I suppose.  But they all get to the same point that Todd here did. Just closed his eyes and gave up. No energy left for the fight. And why not surrender? He knew he couldn't win. What's the point?"

“But that one man we had, Dr. Barton. He went outside and walked. I saw him. Maybe even a mile.”

“I remember. A remarkable obstinacy that fella had. With his blood counts he should not have been able to walk across a room.”

“But we’re safe, right, Dr. Barton? I mean, if it was contagious I sure would have caught it by now, don’t you think?”

“Probably. We’re not very close to even determining how this thing is contracted, Vicente. Andre Giroux, our French researcher, is convinced it has something to do with sexual contact. But he hasn’t been able to prove that just yet. I’m looking at that theory, as well.”

“But it’s not like catching a cold?”

“No. Clearly not. But we haven’t identified the agent that carries it, either. Don’t know if it’s a bacteria or virus or protein or what. Could be science doesn’t win this one.  Maybe we are even looking at the decline of our species.”

“What?”

Barton immediately regretted being so grim and hyperbolic with Vicente but he thought that what he had just said was more than simply a maudlin expression of hopelessness. He sat down in the one plastic and aluminum chair that had been situated in the room beside the bed. Any more furnishings were unnecessary. Visitors were never allowed and no one ever sat with the patients for any length of time.  Vicente' remained standing near the door. Barton looked across the room, searching the orderly's face.

"God, I wonder what you must think, Vicente. All of you. You come here every day and watch this happening and no one tells you or your co-workers a thing. And yet we ask you to say nothing to anyone. Not even your families. We don’t even give you the fundamental human right to ask questions.”

“It’s okay, Dr. Crawford. Like I said, I’m not really afraid.”

Barton stood back up and returned to the dead man’s bedside. He stared down at the blank expression in the ashen complexion and then he reached over and pulled the sheet down from Todd’s neck all the way to his waist. 

"Don't lose your fear, Vicente,” he said. “We need to be afraid of this. Anything that can do this to a man is much more powerful than we are."

Vicente grimaced, which was the reaction Barton had expected. Todd’s body was so frail and narrow as to appear only marginally human. The skin pressed tight and tissue thin against the rib cage and turned the man's middle section into a double skeletal washboard. The neck was a narrow spindle with purplish marks where the veins had bulged outward with the hopeless effort of trying to sustain his circulation. 

Barton looked, too. He made it a point to study the remains of every Bleak House casualty and keep them in his mind as humans, people who had unique dreams and families and abiding memories. That was their lives, though, and he did not know anything about them when they came into his care. The story of their deaths, however, was easy to see and was inscribed upon their faces. Todd’s humanity had been removed by the disease just like everyone else who had died under that roof.  Their flesh and their vitality and their very physical presences were consumed by this relentless illness. What made it even more horrible was that the victims got to watch death’s slow, inevitable approach. In Todd, Barton thought he saw a man who had been dead for a long time before his heart had given up its feeble tremors.

The victims were dehumanized even more after death. Because the Bleak House was a modified airplane hangar, there was no morgue. A refrigerated room had been constructed and after death each of the bodies was zipped into a black bag and placed on a rack inside the cool room. Numerous post mortem tissue and fluid samples were taken before the corpse was released for cremation. What Barton Crawford did not know was where these sick people came from and why no notifications of death were ever sent. Had they consented to be treated at the Bleak House or had they been simply snatched from their lives by the government when it learned of their illnesses?

“I’ll see that Todd here is attended to right away, Vicente.” 

Barton pulled the sheet back up to cover the dead man’s head and then Vicente and he stepped through the air locked door and heard the automated hiss as the vacuum resealed the clean room. Vicente was silently following the physician back in the direction of the laboratory where they both had been working. Abruptly, Barton stopped and motioned for the orderly to follow him into the office area where the researchers and doctors had their computers and file cabinets.

“Let me show you something, Vicente,” Barton said. “You asked me a couple of weeks ago what this disease was called. Everyone keeps asking that. But we’ve just never given it a biological or scientific name. They are probably better at that at the CDC than we are, but for various reasons they have limited insight into what is going on here. Anyway, we have thought we were dealing with a variant form of an illness that already existed. But it’s just as possible we all were worried that if we gave it a name that we were finally acknowledging this as real and a permanent problem. Here we are, what, three years later and the government and all of us in Bleak House are pretending we can keep this from the public.”

“Are we the only ones, Dr. Crawford?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Is our country the only one dealing with this? Is it in other places in the world?”

“Well, to be honest, Vicente, I’m not sure.” Barton stopped next to a desk and turned to look at the orderly. The physician was almost a foot taller than Vicente and when he looked down to address him it was almost as if an adult were scolding a child. “The government has done a very good job of keeping those of us on the research end of this uninformed of anything happening in the wider world. There are discussions about this on the Dark Web on the Internet, but there’s no indication anyone really has data. My guess is that it’s out there in the wider world but other governments are dealing with it in the same fashion as we are to avoid widespread fear or panic; except in Africa.”

“Africa?”

“Yes. We are getting anecdotal information from relief workers, various missionaries, and Doctors without Borders that this disease might be getting out of control in parts of Central and Sub-Saharan Africa. Governments there are ignoring it by insisting it is starvation in places like Sudan and with all of the fighting in religious and ethnic conflicts, it is not likely to get attention as a health matter. I don’t know how long they can ignore it, though. And the few journalists covering those regions are concentrating on politics and war and don’t have the expertise to write about something science and government refuses to even acknowledge.”

“But you can cure it, pretty soon, right?” Vicente suddenly seemed to Barton as though he were anxious. “I mean, you’ll figure it out and make a pill or a shot to give people and they’ll all be okay. Don’t you think?”

“Well, that’s the hope, Vicente. But I don’t know. As you know, we’ve been at this one for quite a while and I don’t think we’ve made any meaningful advancement.”

Barton watched Vicente turn his head away and grow silent, looking across the room to the one small window where a floodlight mounted on an outside corner of the old hangar illuminated the interior’s rough concrete floor. 

“Oh, here’s what I wanted to show you, Vicente. It’s on this matter of a name. Dr. Giroux came across this quote. He’s a fan of Nostradamus.” Barton pointed to a piece of paper taped to the top of a computer monitor. It was written in French so he translated for Vicente.

"For nine years the reign of the Slim Thing will continue, and then it will fall into so bloody a thirst that a great nation will die because of it; killed by a better natured man."

“The Slim Thing?”

“Yes, and he said that more than 500 years ago. And isn’t it odd that the rare reports we get out of Africa indicate that people there have begun referring to a mysterious illness that physically wastes them away as ‘Slims Disease?’ So, this is the name that has begun to circulate in the Bleak House and I think it has stuck.”

“Slims Disease?” Vicente repeated. “That doesn’t sound very frightening.”

“I guess not. But that’s what we now call it. I need to get back to work, Vicente.”

“Yes, me too.”

Back at his computer, Barton continued to transcribe his notes and random thoughts about both Slims Disease and the cattle mutilations. In every one of the animals he had examined with his students and in the other reliable reports he had studied, all of the incisions on the animals were connected to bodily fluids and their transmissions.  Only the removal of the ear did not make sense and that had prompted Barton to suspect that certain animals were tagged with some kind of an implant, which was always in the left ear. No one had ever recorded the removal of a right ear. If, in fact, both ears were used for implantation a record would have to be kept on each animal to determine which ear to remove on the final visit.

The next logical question, of course, was to ask who was doing the implantations and why. Barton remembered that back in 1984 Dr. James Womack, an animal geneticist at Texas A and M University had said, “We are finding big chunks of cattle chromosomes identical to large regions of human chromosomes. These are perfect matches. The genes fall in the same sequence." A similarity of that nature might make cattle good subjects for biological hosting of experimental drugs or diseases before they are used on humans. Made perfect sense to Barton. In order to create tetanus antitoxin, tetanus antigen, which killed organisms, it is injected into horses. The blood is then harvested and the protein antibodies to tetanus are separated and purified.  They are subsequently injected into humans recently exposed to potential tetanus infection.

Were cattle being secretly used for a similar purpose in connection to the Slims Disease? The idea of the government conducting such experiments did not make sense, though. Washington could buy all the cattle it wanted and perform the experiments wherever it was convenient. That left open the question of who else had the technology as well as a reason to perform the mutilations. 

Barton Crawford wanted to believe that the cattle killings were serving a curative purpose related to Slims Disease but it was a weak assertion since he had no real data to support his idea, either. If, however, there were perfect match chromosomes for humans in cattle, the animals could be used to replicate whatever agent is carrying the disease. Normally, replication has to occur using the genetic material of the disease’s host and as far as had been determined Slims Disease had only appeared in humans. Mad Cow Disease might be connected but it was an altogether different biological problem with unique characteristics.

Barton had begun to speculate that certain cattle were identified and were given an implant for tracking purposes. They would then be inoculated with an antigenic microbiological agent, presumably the one which carries Slims Disease. After a period of time sufficient to cause an antigenic response in the cow, the blood would have to be removed in order to separate the antibodies created by the injected antigens. In this manner, a vaccine might be developed and Barton hoped that was why the animals were being killed. It was just as possible, though, they were a part of a scheme that created the deadly illness.

Barton Crawford turned away from his computer and put his head in his hands and then ran his fingers through the thick strands of his white hair. “What,” he whispered to himself, “am I missing? It has to be right in front of me and so obvious I just can’t see it.” 

He had no immediate answer to his own question, of course, but he did decide that if he ever figured out what caused Slims Disease, he was going to tell the world. Barton was growing increasingly worried that someone was culling the human race, thinning the herd of a planet with resources being depleted to dangerous levels by almost seven billion hungry and thirsty souls. Oil wars were already being waged and the next battles were likely going to be over water. Maybe Slims Disease was a new kind of deadly weapon. Barton Crawford intended to find out.