October 30, 1995
Washington, D.C.
Anxious, plinking guitar melodies, a driving baseline, sighing vocals; his music matched his mood as he turned the page. …and renders the support for a match between the two markers ultimately inconclusive, as the following report demonstrates. Mulder lifted the page and furrowed his brow at a sheet with dots on it. He sighed, set it aside, and cast around for the Bethesda scans. He found them under Scully's book: ghostly images of human brains, peppered with red arrows and handwritten notes. …suggesting a pervasive congenital dementia that went undetected in previous service physicals… He rubbed his eyes. …recommending an immediate medical discharge due to 100% disability…
Scully came in with a box on a cart.
Mulder watched over the edge of his reading glasses as she unpacked a brushed steel barrel that looked like it belonged in Star Trek. He raised his eyebrows as she plugged it into the wall and twisted the dials. He started to ask and she held up a finger. The barrel shuddered and made a noise like a hairdryer. A wave of warm air coursed across the floor and began to thaw his ankles.
"A space heater," Mulder said.
She turned down his music. "We are not going to freeze like last year."
"Is it that cold already?"
"Mulder, you could keep corpses in here. I had to scrape frost off the file cabinets."
"Huh."
She sat down across from him and gathered up one of the files. "What're you working on?" For a number of reasons, October was a dead time of year for the X-Files. You got hauntings in the spring, abductions in late summer and ritual murder in early fall. But nothing for Halloween. No tricks, no treats.
The report she'd picked up was a new VA clinical report on Eli Brinkman. He'd been hospitalized again and they were exploring long-term care. His diagnosis was the same as the others: idiopathic dementia undetected prior to service. It would have raised some questions in a Congressional investigation—if the disabilities were congenital, why were they receiving full combat pensions?—but then again, they were never going to have one.
"Ah." Scully's expression was noncommittal. "This again."
"Same old tune, Scully." He scratched his chin. "It's getting overplayed."
The Waddington plant had been abandoned by the time Mulder made it back. Nothing left but a few rusting cots and some scuffs on the floor. The town of Lawdon had received a fat Superfund compensation check and wasn't inclined to think deep thoughts about it. In the aftermath of Wickham's death, the bio-atomic research projects at NC State had been quietly defunded, the scientists shipped off to Los Alamos, where that trail went, rather predictably, cold. The examinations of Alvarez, Brinkman and Clayton were similar but inconclusive. There was clearly something very wrong with them, and what they had wrong was also what they had in common. But they weren't even in the same branch of service, and had never officially served in the same unit.
Detective Winn had died of what the CDC called a 'novel influenza,' and for a few days they had gotten really upset about it. But with Wickham's body missing, there wasn't much to compare it with. The disease didn't spread and the epidemiological investigation faltered. No doubt there was an unheated basement office somewhere in Atlanta where strange cases went to die, but they weren't about to let Fox Mulder near it. Forty-five days later all that was left of the case were eighteen thick reports, the word inconclusive, and the pervasive stink of industrial glue.
Scully turned a page. "Yeah, I guess we should give up."
Mulder chuckled desperately.
She put the report down. "Have you ever heard of something called CIPA? I've been thinking about it lately."
He shrugged.
"It's an incredibly rare genetic disorder," she said. "It affects the autonomic nervous system. The patients are unable to feel pain." She shook her head. "They can't tell hot from cold. They can't cry or sweat."
He waited.
"It's almost always fatal," she said. "Often in infancy. The babies die of heatstroke, or they choke on food. It's terrible. These reports say your soldiers are like that, here." She touched her temple. "Mulder, if you can't feel fear or regret—or stress or anticipation—then you never know when you've gone too far. You can never guess what's going to happen next, or weigh two different values. You can't decide to decide what to eat for breakfast, much less when to shoot somebody. If that's the future of the U.S. military then we'll never win another war. You know it, I know it, and I bet DARPA knows it too." For the last month, Jiang's twisted leaf had been sitting on Mulder's desk. She picked it up and turned it in the light. "Ultimately it's our fears and neuroses that save us." She bit her lip thoughtfully. "If it was an experiment, then it was a failure."
"Then they'll try again," Mulder said.
"So what if they do?" She clamped the leaf between two fingers, got up and crossed behind him. He had to swivel his chair to keep watching her. "They've been 'trying again' for fifty years." She shrugged. "They've probably been trying since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein." She surveyed his bulletin boards, that bird's nest of his favorite implausibilities. "She was right, you know."
She leaned over his shoulder to pluck a pushpin from the tray. As she reached, she tipped her head to speak in his ear. "The error isn't in the process. It's in the idea."
She pinned the leaf to the wall.
###
Author's Epilogue
Clipped from Wisconsin Ag Connection, 29 September 2013:
"Kenya Debuts Two Stem Rust-Resistant Wheat Varieties"
To counter the resurgence of wheat stem rust originating in neighboring Uganda, Kenyan plant breeders have introduced two new varieties resistant to this yield-robbing disease. The varieties were developed using a nuclear technique for crop improvement known as mutation breeding. By exposing seeds or plant tissues to radiation, scientists accelerate the natural process of mutation and are able to select and develop new varieties more quickly…