Free More Stories from the Twilight Zone by Carol Serling Page B

if sensing an abyss before it.
    â€œYou know, I used to collect those when I was a kid,” Wry saysfondly. “Matchbox cars, they’re called. Can’t remember now what I did with all of them.”
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    Special Agent Nobis and Pierre Saint-Philèmon were on hand for Wry Wrixton’s autopsy, as they had been for all of the autopsies, some postburial, of the nine victims. The findings of the pathologist remained consistent and as puzzling as ever.
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    â€œIn each case,” Nobis explained to a packed house in the largest conference room available at FBI headquarters the afternoon following Wrixton’s funeral, “certain proteins concentrated in the heart valves of the victims were ingested by agents widespread in nature, found in—among other taxonomic species—the Venus flytrap and the venom of the Japanese hornet. In each case the delivery system was contained in one of these hobby cars.”
    He picked up one of the eight identical black racers from a table beside him. The components of the ninth car (some so small a strong magnifying glass was required to see them) were arranged in orderly fashion a little distance away. While Nobis spoke, another of the components, somewhat like a near-microscopic Swiss Army knife with dozens of tools, was robotically rebuilding the ninth car.
    â€œThe metal is a nickel-titanium alloy called nitinol,” Nobis continued. “Motive power is contained in nickel hydride batteries, each the size of a grain of sand.” He gave the wheels of the car he was holding a spin and put it upside down on a leg of the table. The car descended and, with a version of eight-wheel drive, smoothly made the transition from table leg to floor. It then made a right turn and stopped half an inch from the FBI agent’s right foot. Nobis returned the little car to the table.
    â€œThe wheels are coated with a substance similar to the adhesive found on the hairs that sprout at the ends of a gecko’s toes. Itprovides sticking power that nevertheless doesn’t impede smooth forward or reverse motion.”
    There was dead silence in the room until the director of Carnegie-Mellon University’s Autonomous Mobile Robotics Lab spoke up.
    â€œWhere in God’s name did the technology come from?
We
can’t do this!”
    The Pentagon’s rep, bristling with gold stars, said darkly, “And who’s funding it? Not us.”
    Other representatives of world governments or R and D divisions of biobusinesses who were present via satellite looked puzzled; or they shook their heads emphatically.
    â€œ
Tant pis
,” Pierre Saint-Philèmon said softly. “It gets worse. Or better, perhaps, depending on one’s scientific viewpoint.”
    From Prague a Nobel laureate in integrative biology asked, “Do you have an explanation of how the bacteria confine their destruction to the heart valves? Can the bacteria distinguish one protein from another? As we all know, there are millions of different proteins in the human body, thus far uncatalogued.”
    The chief pathologist for the FBI took over.
    â€œNo, we can’t answer that. But examination of each victim’s tissues by electron microscope reveals an infinitesimally small borehole through the sternum and into the heart wall.” A computer graphic on another large LCD screen illustrated his remarks. “The secondary delivery vehicle, which we believe is off-loaded from one of the toy cars—a nanobiomimetic ‘creature,’ for want of a better word—completes the drilling process into the heart wall, then disperses bacteria that immediately set to work, um, replicating themselves.”
    â€œHave you isolated the bacteria?” asked the director of Singapore’s Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology.
    â€œNo. The chief characteristic of the bacteria is that it seems tobe amazingly fast-acting, and somehow genetically engineered to, um, cease to