In the Time of Man

Chapters Two and Three

What follows below are the the second and third chapters of a novel I have been working on for many, many years. This has been rewritten more times than Donald Trump’s divorce decrees. But I think it’s time to give it a go and put it out into the wider world. The story falls into the category of science fiction but I like to believe there’s a bit more transpiring in this narrative. I’ve already written my marketing copy for the book, which is also below, and I got a front cover design from an independent graphic artist, also included here. I’d appreciate any and all feedback.

Meanwhile, I am preparing a long piece for Sunday on the Titan and its trip to the Titanic, and the history of such endeavors off the coast of Newfoundland, which is home to my mother’s side of the family. It is a place of great historical triumph and personal tragedy. The sea takes what it wants, and in my family, that has been much.

As always, I beseech you to share and subscribe. Paid subscriptions help keep me rolling, if you think the content and the thinking are of value, please help spread the word. But I appreciate everyone’s interest, paid or free. Just let your friends know. - JM

(Please find Chapter One here).

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."

Chapter Two

Becky

Through the waves of heat shimmering off the tarmac, Becky Acuna had difficulty seeing details with her cheap binoculars. But enough of the scene was visible to leave her mystified. A gray jet aircraft had landed at Luke Air Force Base and had been met by an unmarked panel van. Although a presidential commission several years earlier had shut down the base, it had been in the process of being transferred to civilian control and Becky assumed any air traffic was associated with new commercial endeavors. What she had been witnessing for a few months, however, did not make sense. She squinted through the lenses and slightly racked the focus as a figure appeared on the threshold of the jet’s stairway.

 A man teetering on obviously unsteady legs looked down and appeared to contemplate the dozen steps between him and the runway’s surface. Behind him, someone was holding up a bag of intravenous fluids. Becky wondered why a person so feeble was being asked to walk down the stairway until two attendants came out from behind the van and rushed up to cradle the patient’s arms and guide him down to the surface. The man they were assisting wore loose green scrubs and had long brown hair tangled in clumps, as if he had been sleeping and sweating for many hours. Becky thought he was frail and emaciated but at this distance and through the haze she was uncertain.

Becky Acuna scanned the length of the plane with her binoculars to look for any distinguishing markings. There was no insignia of any type on the fuselage and even more oddly the tail was absent standard identifying numbers. She had seen the planes from the deck of her family’s new home but had not given the landings any thought until a barbecue with neighbors when someone had mentioned noticing the strange passengers. Theories had been voiced at the cookout that the base was being turned into a critical care military hospital without the consent of the people of Phoenix. In a beery conversation, the man living two doors down from Becky had claimed to have seen numerous aircraft unloading sickly passengers but that he had never noticed anyone leave on an airplane. Maybe, Becky guessed, they were getting well and then departing in personal vehicles. Since she was a journalist, though, Becky decided to see if she might get some simple answers through observation, or information that might inform her later questions to authorities.

She had moved with her husband Gene and their children into one of the stylish new developments sprawling in the desert around Phoenix. Land adjacent to Luke Air Force Base, which had once been owned by the government, had been sold and was being turned into a community with leaning palms, upper middle class homes, a golf course and tennis courts, and one of those activity centers with a pool and a clubhouse where family gatherings were conducted on children’s birthdays and summer holidays. 

Becky, of course, immediately assumed that nothing secretive was being done on the base or the government would have not allowed the pricey tract homes to be built that close to its boundaries. The assumption was not necessarily a good one, though, because when she talked to a few of the initial homebuyers, who had been living in the neighborhood since it had been opened, Becky discovered there had never been a cessation of air traffic on the base; it had only been reduced. The small training jets were no longer doing touch-and-goes and the big C-class cargo planes had permanently disappeared but there was still significant activity on a military reservation that was supposedly shut down more than five years ago. Becky wondered if it had been put back into service because there was no other available facility and the military had felt no need to inform the public.

It became a bit of a distracting habit for her to keep checking the far runways through her kitchen windows when she was home. On weekends, she took her coffee on the deck and began to keep the binoculars on a windowsill to be quickly snatched if she ever saw anything worth examining. Over the course of several months, Becky realized there was no schedule or discernible pattern for the arrival of the aircraft and their mysterious human cargo. The afflicted passengers were easily recognizable, painfully distinct from the medical technicians who were lifting them down off stretchers or assisting them as they practically staggered to the ambulances. Most of these patients shuffled slowly across the tarmac to a waiting van, unmarked car, or emergency medical vehicle, which then drove quickly away in the direction of distant hangars. Often, Becky saw people immobile, lying on their backs and being transported by gurneys. There was never even the slightest movement, and their bodies were so thin it looked like there was little more than a blanket being carted across the runway. 

Becky also realized these planes never stayed on the ground very long. One jet turbine was always kept turning as if the pilots were anxious to get back airborne and seek safety in the great desert sky, distancing themselves from the lesser beings they had left behind, faltering on the ground. Frequently, just as the last gurney had been wheeled clear of the engine cowling, the jets started their slow pressurized whine. It was rare if their landing gear remained on the ground for more than fifteen minutes.

After a few weeks, Becky had begun to write down descriptions of all this in her reporter’s notebooks. She also started logging the appearance of various vehicles, apparently entering the base from the front gate and then traveling back to the rows of hangars on the remote edge of the old base. A few times she was able to make out white-frocked orderlies, who had been hovering just behind the double doors of the tall, corrugated steel buildings, as they hurriedly attended the arrival of the EMT buses. Whatever business was being conducted; punctuality was essential to its performance, but she was unable to see if there were more of the patients being delivered because of the way the EMT vehicles were backed up to the hangar doors. 

Only a few houses were situated near the southwest corner of the base's perimeter, and they were barely close enough to the hangars to make their glimmering steel walls visible. Developers of Becky’s neighborhood had not yet cut roads through the desert that would take the construction of homes nearer to Luke’s fence line and a nature trail was plotted to maintain a permanent separation between the houses and the base. Already, though, there was a broad open space of acreage between the clusters of homes and the base’s perimeter and through the stands of Saguaro and Organ Pipe it was hard to see much of anything beyond the desert sun. 

In fact, hardly anyone in Phoenix paid attention to Luke Air Force Base after it had shut down. Operations at Luke were deemed not to be an integral part of national defense planning for the twenty first century and the base and its civilian employees and a multi-million dollar payroll were lost to the Phoenix economy. Efforts to save the operation by the Arizona congressional delegation resulted in a public relations fiasco for the state and had created sufficient controversy that commercial development of the vast military reserve and its buildings had been almost non-existent. Investors seemed to want nothing to do with Luke’s destiny, whatever it was to become. 

Becky Acuna, though, was becoming increasingly curious about the movement of people on Luke Air Force Base. Over several weeks, her notes showed a slowly increasing number of flights carrying the sick. Once, she had gone so far as to make calls to Air Force and Congressional sources. They yielded no information and left her with the common suspicion the government was lying. Becky was not the kind of journalist who immediately distrusted everything the government said but she was certain the people she was talking to were either giving her the runaround or they were oblivious to precisely what was happening in the Arizona desert. She had become convinced after months of patient scrutiny that there was an organized medical operation of some kind at Luke and there was a concerted effort to keep it secret.  

As the latest twin-engine jet turned around and rolled out toward the pastel horizon, Becky put down the binoculars and sipped her coffee. She remembered just then that her husband Gene still owned the old telescope he had purchased for the star parties he used to attend when they lived in West Texas. The lens was likely not very powerful and maybe she could use it to get a better view of the planes and people on the base. She thought the telescope was still unpacked and on a shelf in the garage. So, while her husband and children slept through the bright early morning in the Great Sonoran Desert, Becky Acuna got up and went to the garage to dig around in musty boxes, almost convinced she was onto a story that might change her life and career.

Chapter Three  

The High Plains 

                                           

Out on the high plains of Eastern Colorado, Barton Crawford had found the perfect location to set up shop. Burlington was near the Kansas line and on I-70, which made the community of 4500 not much more than two hours from the new Denver airport. Geographically, the town was also in the middle of the region where uncounted numbers of cattle mutilations were being reported. Crawford was gathering data from dozens of incidents and many of them were within comfortable driving distance of his temporary lab in Burlington. Fortunately for his research, local ranchers had been frequently victimized by the inexplicable killing and cutting of their cattle and they were willing to accommodate a scientist who might be able to solve the mystery. When Barton found a vacant steel warehouse no longer used by beet growers, he was offered a nice rental rate and discretely moved in with his equipment and three student interns. Burlington residents did not bother Barton Crawford and left him and his charges to their investigations.

Driving in from the rental house near Bonnie Reservoir, Barton felt his iPhone buzz and looked down to see a text message from Tina, the Iowa State University junior who seemed to always be in front of her computer. “Got a good one,” the first line read. “Actually, got two. Same ranch.”

Barton touched her avatar with his thumb while driving with his other hand and watched her phone number appear on screen.   

“They’re in Rocky Ford,” she said, dispensing with the formality of a simple hello because she had seen his name on the display of her phone.

“What are the circumstances,” Barton asked.

“The ranch owner found them early,” Tina explained. “Just before sunrise, about a mile from the house. The first was a bull. All the usual cuts and markings.”

“Okay.”

 “This one’s a little weird, though, Dr. Crawford.”

 “Oh?”

 “On the other side of the ranch there was a heifer down and she had been cut up the same way. It’s like they were going after one of each sex, for some reason. The sex organs were gone from both animals.”

“Okay, Tina. I’m going to run down there, quickly. I’ve got most of the gear in my truck. I’ll need to stop by and pick up a few things. Are the guys in yet?”

“No.”

“Whose turn is it to do field work?”

“Mine,” she said cheerily.

“Well, I’ll see you in about 15 minutes.”

“Great. Okay.”

Barton Crawford, PhD, had begun to think he was trying to do too much. The innocuously named High Plains Research Project, while not yet scientifically demanding, was beginning to consume a great deal of his time. He had funded it with money from an inherited share of his father’s fortune, but the endeavor was not very expensive and was to be conducted only during a few months of the summer. The greater challenge for the scientist was being away from the Bleak House in Phoenix. In the mornings and at the end of the day, he was taking conference calls and Zooms with the top physicians managing the treatment and pathology research on Luke Air Force Base, but Barton was beginning to feel after just a few weeks that he was missing the subtleties of developments in the Bleak House. Nonetheless, he was unable to put aside his suspicion that there might be a connection between mutilated cattle and the patients arriving at Luke and he was compelled to spend a bit of the summer examining the possibility.

The theory was not an idea Barton Crawford was willing to share; not yet. He had not even known of the cattle mutilation phenomenon until he had seen an interview with a frustrated rancher, which had been published in the Rocky Mountain News. During a plane change in Denver, Barton had read with fascination about what had been done to the body of an 800 pound Black Angus. The ranch was near Julesberg and the owner claimed to have lost at least a couple of dozen animals to the mysterious mutilations over the course of a decade. Even though what had been done to the cow was horrendous, the newspaper had published color photos of the fallen animal and the incisions, which the reporter wrote appeared to have been made with surgical precision. The pictures and the narrative description by the rancher made Barton think an operating table had secretly been put up on the rangeland and the cow subjected to strange procedures, which, of course, was a ridiculous idea and virtually impossible. 

Because of his distinctive appearance and the recognition that he had received for his Nobel Laureate research on the transmission of the Ebola virus, Barton Crawford was putting much at risk by chasing after dead cattle. The only information he had given the staff in Phoenix was that he had made a commitment to assist in a project with a handful of very talented young students who were doing innovative work on Mad Cow Disease. Barton made it known that he was always readily available on his cell, if there were an issue that only he might resolve. 

His whereabouts did not remain unknown for more than a few weeks, though. A Burlington high school biology teacher recognized Crawford and mentioned it to a former student who was doing freelance writing for a Denver paper. Almost six and a half feet tall with the glacially white hair of his English father and his Ethiopian mother’s coffee-colored skin, Barton Crawford was rarely incognito. An inveterate bachelor fanatically devoted to his work, he still managed to attend a few high profile social functions and was invariably photographed, often with socialite widows who were, predictably, much younger. When the gossip columnist in Denver wrote that Barton had been spotted out among the beet fields and ranch lands of Eastern Colorado, the scientist suddenly found himself being more cautious. Maybe his Mad Cow cover story was not working but it was based on a germ of truth. 

A few days after the newspaper clipping, he began to get a sense he was being watched. Barton knew the feeling was baseless and the product of too much self-consciousness, but it nagged at him and never relented, even when he was driving the dirt road out to the house at Bonnie Reservoir, and he developed an uncontrollable habit of always looking in his rear view mirror.

Was there some reason to worry? There was certainly something unsettling about this cattle mutilation business. Barton was astonished to learn from various ranching associations and rural sheriffs’ departments that cases of mutilation of cows and horses had been consistently recorded for more than forty years. Snippy the horse was the first victim to be reported to law enforcement. In September of 1967, the horse disappeared from its owner’s ranch outside Alamosa, Colorado. Snippy had always returned each evening for water after grazing but had not shown up for two days. When Harry King, whose parents owned the ranch, discovered Snippy, he saw that the horse’s head and neck had been completely stripped of flesh. Visible bones were bleached white, as if they had been desiccated by years in the sun, and there was not even the faintest evidence of blood where the animal lay, making it appear Snippy had been meticulously exsanguinated. King described the cuts on his dead horse as having been “very precise.” Sexual organs had been removed and the anus was cored out.

The explanations for cattle mutilations were numerous and outlandish and they were what prompted Barton Crawford’s scientific restraint. The most widely-accepted belief was that urban cultists were going out into the country and taking blood and sex organs for pagan rituals. No evidence had ever been left behind, however, and not a single arrest had been made after tens of thousands of mutilations across the country during a span of four decades. Most farmers and ranchers, uncomfortable with any explanation other than nature, blamed the deaths on sickness and predators tearing at soft flesh and the work of blowflies on rotting corpses. They made no effort to understand what caused the total loss of blood or why coyotes, wolves, foxes, dogs, skunks, badgers, and bobcats, or any other type of scavenging wildlife, did not come near the carcasses. 

As he did with every one of his projects, Barton Crawford approached this mystery with no preconceived ideas. He was always determined to let data and scientific evidence speak for itself. The idea of cultists struck him as nonsense, though. The loss of cattle had been massive and widespread and had spanned the continent from the Mississippi Valley to west of the California Sierras. Barton did not know what it was, but he knew what it was not and cultists were not responsible for what appeared to him as almost an epidemic. 

He just had to be careful, though. The Arizona project at the old Air Force base was under the financial and management purview of the National Security Agency, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security. The Bleak House was not top secret but all staffers, scientists, and physicians, including Nobel Laureate Barton Crawford had been required to sign governmental non-disclosure agreements. His presence in Phoenix was not, however, closely guarded information and the Arizona Republic had published a feature on Barton and the research on retroviruses he was conducting in conjunction with Arizona State. The ASU project was a public relations smoke screen designed to allow Barton Crawford an excuse for being in Arizona while he devoted his disciplined mind to the mystery inside the walls of Bleak House. And the reason he was living in a two exit-town off of Interstate 70 and working out of a rusting steel building was because he thought the Bleak House mystery disease and the cattle mutilations might somehow be related. 

Barton stopped his car in front of the old warehouse, got out and went inside to tell Tina he was ready to leave for Rocky Ford, and then he grabbed a Geiger counter.  

            *                                              *                                              *

The owner of the J-Bar 4 north of Rocky Ford, Clint Peeler, led Barton and Tina to the site of the fallen bull. The animal was on its side near the edge of a grassless mound not far from a fence line. Peeler put out his arms to stop them about fifty feet from the carcass.

“You see those footprints leading out to him?” Peeler pointed. “Those are mine. I was on my horse, like I told ya, and I left him here. He was nickering and acting all spooked, so I got off and walked over yonder. You can see how clear my prints are. We had a light rain just before dark yesterday and there ain’t no damned way anybody could’ve done this without leaving prints or tire tracks or something. And you can see there ain’t anything like that.”

Tina was writing notes on her clipboard and sketching on her iPad. Barton looked down on her scribbling. This was only the second time he had worked with her and he wanted to be comfortable she was capturing the information but he assumed she would get out her phone and make various videos and record conversations with Peeler. Tina was diminutive and Barton’s great size made her seem even smaller. Her voice was assertive, though, and her odd silver eyes conveyed confidence but Barton frequently had to remind himself of her presence. Every now and then she made him think of Egg, the tiny girl from a John Updike novel he had read.

“Let’s walk the perimeter here a bit before we approach him,” Barton said.

Peeler nodded and Tina followed as Barton led them through the tall pasture grass around the edge of the bare spot. Even from that distance, Barton clearly saw the large cuts on the bull. The legs were spread apart and stiffened already in rigor mortis. A hole of some kind was visible where the penis and testicles had been located. As they moved around to the other side of the animal, Barton saw that a circular section of the bull had been removed all the way from the sexual organs through to the back. The thick spinal bones had been neatly excised along with the genitalia.

“Jesus. How in the hell did they do that?” Barton knelt and stared through the circular opening that passed all the way through the bull’s carcass. 

“I don’t know,” Peeler answered. “But I can tell you this much, it damn sure weren’t no critters.”

“That much we can be sure of,” Barton said. 

“And I’ll tell ya somethin’ else,” Peeler added. “This ranch has a hell of a lot more than its share of coyote and fox and other critters and every other time I’ve had an animal go down they have been pullin’ at its soft parts in a coupla hours. You can see there ain’t no critter tracks around him, either. Not a damned one. And where in the hell is the blood?  I never saw any, anywhere.”

Barton looked more carefully at the soft, grayish dirt where the bull lay and there was no trace of animal sign or any darkened spots that might be drops of blood. He did, however, see an oval indentation in the dirt mound and it had a slight ridge running around its perimeter. Tina and the rancher followed him as he stood and moved toward the concave impression on the soil.

“Any idea what this is, Mr. Peeler,” Barton asked.

“No sir, I can’t tell you what it is. But I can tell you what it looks like; except what it looks like is impossible.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Well, it looks to me like that damned bull was dropped right there and he bounced and landed in that spot where he is right now.”

Barton looked more closely at the position of the bull and the shallow crater. He had no guess how high in the air the bull would have been dropped from to have bounced to its present resting place. In some of the literature on mutilations, he had read of a never explained incident where a Charolais heifer had been discovered twenty feet up in a tree. When he turned around Barton saw that Tina had put down her clipboard and without being told and was now using her phone camera to record their conversations and the evidence.

“Did you hear anything last night, Mr. Peeler?” Barton’s expression revealed that he yet had no clue what had transpired in the dark on the J-Bar 4. “I mean, if this animal was dropped, as you suspect, it would have required a helicopter, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose it would have. But we didn’t hear a thing and the wife and I sleep with the windows open this time of year. There’s no way any kinda chopper could’ve come this close to the house without waking one or both of us up. All we saw was a little flickering of light, which we figured was heat lightning.”

“Light, huh? Hear that a lot with these.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, nothing. Sorry. Just thinking out loud.”

Barton looked around the grass, which was about a foot tall, searching for any signs of prop wash. A helicopter’s down draft would have left some of the grasses flattened or bent. He saw nothing.

“Tina, get me a number 10 blade and some sealed plastic specimen bags and let’s harvest some tissue to take back with us.”

“Okay, Dr. Crawford. Did you want me to record all of that, too?”

“Yes, please, except when I ask for your assistance.”

“Of course.”

Approaching from the front of the bull, Barton immediately saw that something had also been done to the animal’s head and mouth, which was what he had anticipated from previous examinations on other ranches. He knelt to examine the eye socket and jaw line. The left eye was completely missing, though the bone of the socket appeared undamaged. A circle of flesh and hide surrounding the orbital socket had also been taken by what looked to the naked human eye to be clean, surgical incisions. On the left side of the jaw, an oval-shaped section of tissue had been lifted to expose the bull’s teeth. While they remained set in the bone, there was no soft tissue and the jaw was bare and clean as if it had been stripped by decades of elements.

“Who the hell can do something like that, anyway?” Clint Peeler said over the shoulder of Barton Crawford.

“I don’t know, Mr. Peeler. I am as baffled as anyone else by this stuff.”

“My neighbor’s lost about twenty head in the past five years. I wish to hell I could get my hands on who’s doing this.” Peeler took off his straw hat and ran his hand through his coarse, dark hair. Barton thought the man was hiding his fear with a bit of bravura. Peeler was teenager thin with a droopy, untrimmed mustache and over-sized eyelashes that suggested a softness he probably struggled to conceal. Barton figured Peeler was a man who was better at loving things than he was at carrying around anger.

“Here you go, Dr. Crawford.” 

Tina handed Barton the surgical blade and the plastic sandwich bags used for specimen collection. The scientist reached down and lifted a flap of skin remaining around the orbit of the eye and sliced off a large piece. He turned and held the tissue sample up to the bright sunlight.

“Look at that,” he said. “That look’s like an incision made by a laser or some kind of a machine I’ve never heard of. I’ve never seen a cut that neat. It’s just like the others we’ve seen this month. I’ll be interested in seeing this one and the rest of them under a big microscope.”

“Well, I hope you can figure this out, professor,” Peeler said. “And help us put a damned end to it.”

“I’ll do what I can.” Barton gazed intently at the bull’s flesh and turned it around in the light.

“What is it, Dr. Crawford?” Tina moved lowered her phone camera.

“It’s the same thing we’ve seen in others, Tina,” Barton said. “I just have no idea how this is done.”

“What?” Peeler was growing impatient and put his hat back on his head. He had work to do.

“There doesn’t seem to be the slightest indication of blood in this tissue. It’s almost as if it has been exsanguinated down to the cellular level. I don’t know of any technology that can do that. We’ll have to make sure when we get this back to the lab but it’s similar to what we’ve been seeing elsewhere.” 

Barton dropped the pinkish tissue in one of the plastic bags and pressed the seal. In the five other mutilations they had studied already that summer, the complete absence of blood was the most mysterious characteristic. The perfect measurements of the amputations and apparent vivisections were also confounding and the parts of the animals’ bodies that were being removed complicated the puzzle, but nothing was more baffling than the absolute lack of blood in any of the tissue or on the ground around the carcasses. How could that be possible? The volume of blood in a thousand-pound bull could be ten or twelve gallons. You just do not make it all disappear without spilling a drop or two. Barton hoped to learn more when he returned to Phoenix with some of the tissue and put it under powerful lab microscopes.   

Tina kept her camera focused as Barton moved to the rear of the bull’s body. He removed a small tape measure from his pocket and stretched it across the hole where the male sex organs had been located. 

“That’s exactly eighteen inches,” he said for the camera. He walked to the back of the animal and measured where the opening left a similar gaping hole on the other side of the bull. “Also, eighteen inches. Someone or something has cut a perfect circle of flesh and bone out of the middle of this massive animal.”

“How do they do such a thing? Damn it.” Peeler was shaking visibly. “And who in the hell is doing this? It just makes no damned sense.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have answers to any of those questions,” Barton said. “Not a clue.”

The scientist was, however, beginning to formulate a few ideas. He was thinking about them again as he excised snippets of flesh from the edge of the hole in the bull’s back and then reached his arm deep within the cavity to pinch off a few pieces of tissue. In the animals he had examined, people he had interviewed, and the literature he had read, Barton had seen a consistency in the removal of sex organs, the anus, udders, and tissue around the mouth. They were all connected to the creation and the transmission of bodily fluids. Was it possible the federal government was conducting a secret study to determine how Mad Cow, or some other disease moved from animals to humans? And why in the hell would it be kept a secret, though, unless it had something to do with what he was seeing in patients in the Bleak House? If that was the case and the government was trying to figure out Mad Cow, what did the eyes and the tail and the ear have to do with anything? Barton had seen dozens of photos where these had been cut from animals with the same calibrated accuracy as the sex organs. And the tail was missing from the bull he was presently examining.

“What do they want with the tail? That’s what I want to know.” Clint Peeler was growing exasperated. His hat was off again, and he was impatiently tapping it against his leg. “What do they want, period, that’s what I want to know. I just don’t want this on my ranch. I don’t need it. Makes me damned uncomfortable. I’m glad my boy’s in school and he ain’t seein’ any of this. He’s always out ridin’ the herd with me when he’s home. And I sure don’t want you all telling the police or anybody else about this. That’s why I called you, professor, when I saw your flier tacked on the wall at the co-op. It said confidentiality. I don’t need people worrying about any problems with beef coming off of my place.”

“I understand,” Barton said. 

He was finishing measurements and the removal of a specimen from where the anus had been cored out. “But I can’t tell you any more about the tail than I can any of the rest of this, which is, in sum, nothing.”

Tina took the last of the plastic specimen bags from Barton and went to store them in the insulated pouch on the side of the equipment bag. Barton, meanwhile, unzipped the Geiger counter from his vest pocket and turned it on. Immediately, the digital display showed a row of bars ascending to the red zone. The instrument clicked annoyingly.

“What is that?” Peeler asked.

“It’s a Geiger counter.”

“You mean for radioactivity?”

“Yes.”

“So, it’s telling you there’s radiation here?”

“That appears to be the case, yes. And not an insignificant amount. Nothing dangerous but not insignificant, either.”

Tina returned to Barton’s side, raised her phone, and focused its camera on the readout on the display. They were all silent as she taped, and the Geiger counter clicked. She lowered the camera.

“We haven’t measured radiation at any of these before, have we Dr. Crawford?” Tina asked.

“No, I just wanted to see if there was any radiation presence. I’d read it in some of the reports.”

“Do you think it means anything?”

“I have no more idea about that than I do any of the rest of it, Tina.”

“But maybe that’s why none of the wild animals ever come around to scavenge or pick at the carcass? You think that’s possible?”

“I do. Yes. I just wish I knew what was causing the radiation.”

“And now my ranch is radioactive,” Peeler sighed. “This ain’t gonna hurt any of my other cattle, is it?”

“No. I doubt that will happen,” Barton said.     

“Okay, then. Not much I can do about any of this, it seems. You all still want to see the heifer?” Peeler was clearly in a hurry to get about his business.

“Yes, please,” Barton answered. “But if you can just show us where it is, we’ll be fine.”

“It’s only a few hundred yards over this way. But you’re gonna see the same thing you’ve seen here; except it’s a female and they took the udder and cut a circle clear through like they did on this bull.”

“Well, we’ll need to take a look, if you don’t mind.”

“Come on, then.”

Peeler stepped briskly ahead of Barton and Tina. The student researcher was almost jogging to keep up with Barton’s loping stride through the tall grass, even though he had picked up the equipment bag and slung it over his shoulders as if it were a delicate women’s purse.

“You think it’s prions, don’t you, Dr. Crawford?” Tina looked up to see the reaction on his face when she broached the subject.

“I don’t know, Tina. I truly have no idea what’s going on here.”

“Yes, but you think it’s possible something or someone is studying the spread of prions through animals, and maybe humans, too.”

“I think that’s possible. Yes. Or the spread of something we haven’t discovered yet. Maybe a new virus.”

The rogue form of proteins known as prions was first discovered by American chemist and neurologist Stanley Prusiner. According to his hypothesis, this unique protein molecule attaches itself to a healthy protein already present in nerve cells and converts the healthy protein into a prion. The process repeats itself until plaques form and destroy brain and other nerve tissue, essentially turning gray matter to a kind of mush with the consistency of a wet sponge. Prusiner’s work, which was also awarded a Nobel, suggests that prions are the infectious agent that made it possible for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE or Mad Cow) to spread from animals to humans after lingering for centuries in sheep as a kind of “wasting disease.”

For Barton Crawford and other scientists, the unbelievable attribute of prions was their complete lack of nucleic acid, either DNA or RNA. Every living thing with the ability to replicate itself contains nucleic acid, except for prions. If DNA or RNA were present in prions, they could be inactivated like most traditional viruses by radiation bombardment, autoclaving at high temperatures, being blasted with strong dosages of ultra-violet light, or even pickling in concentrations of formalin. None of those methods worked, however, to stop prions and that made Barton Crawford suspect they were intelligently designed and not a product of nature. Mad Cow and the illness he was seeing in humans at the Bleak House had both arisen quickly, and unexpectedly, a fact that prompted his scientific curiosity about prions but he had not yet found any during research on patients in Phoenix. Not a single case of Mad Cow had been recorded in the U.S, either, but if the brain-eating disease could lie dormant in sheep for centuries, prions might already be distributed throughout all types of creatures in America, human and otherwise, just waiting to be activated and prompt mass death. Maybe, he thought, someone was culling the human race; the herd had gotten too big.   

Barton’s iPhone buzzed and he took it off his hip. The caller ID showed that it was his administrative assistant Dorothy Lund calling on her personal phone.

“Hello, Dorothy. Is something the matter?”

 “I’m sorry to bother you, Dr. Crawford. But we may have something to be concerned about and I wanted to make you aware of it.”

“Yes? What is it?”

“Well, I’ve been getting phone calls from a reporter wanting to talk to you.”

“On the government line at the Bleak House?”

 “Yes.”

 “But how would anyone outside of the cleared employees have that number?”

 “I don’t know. But since I didn’t acknowledge that you were even at that number, she’s begun calling other doctors here. She seems to have their personal cell phone numbers and emails, too.”

“Has anyone spoken to her or acknowledged their identity; that you know of?”

“No, I don’t. But they’ve all asked me to contact you and make you aware of what’s going on. People are worried.”

 “I understand, Dorothy. Please pass the word that I will be there in the morning. I’ll get the earliest possible flight out of Denver.”

Before she could say “thank you” or “good-bye,” Barton had pressed the red button to end the call and was staring at another mutilated cow. All of this, he thought, might be getting beyond his ability to manage.