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can’t ask you to stay. Anyone who wishes to go may do so now.”
    In the dimly lit room, there were whispers, the turning of notebook pages. But nobody stood up.
    Levine looked around, pleased. Then he nodded to the projectionist. A black-and-white image filled the screen.
    Levine looked up at the image, the top of his head shining in the light of the projector like a monk’s tonsure. Then he turned to face his audience.
    â€œThis is a picture taken on July 1, 1985, by the image-gathering satellite TB-17 from a sun-synchronous orbit of about one hundred and seventy miles,” he began. “Technically, it has not yet been declassified. But it deserves to be.” He smiled. Nervous laughter briefly filled the hall.
    â€œYou’re looking at the town of Novo-Druzhina, in western Siberia. As you can see by the length of the shadows, this was taken in the early morning, the preferred time for image analysis. Note the position of the two parked cars, here, and the ripening fields of wheat.”
    A new slide appeared.
    â€œThanks to the surveillance technique of comparative coverage, this slide shows the exact same location three months later. Notice anything strange?”
    There was a silence.
    â€œThe cars are parked in exactly the same spot. And the field of grain is apparently very ripe, ready to be harvested.”
    Another slide appeared.
    â€œHere’s the same place in April of the following year. Note the two cars are still there. The field has obviously gone fallow, the grain unharvested. It was images like these that suddenly made this area very interesting to certain photogrammetrists in the CIA.”
    He paused, looking out over the classroom.
    â€œThe United States military learned that all of Restricted Area Fourteen—a half-dozen towns, in an eighty-square-mile area surrounding Novo-Druzhina—were affected in a similar way. All human activity had ceased. So they took a closer look.”
    Another slide appeared.
    â€œThis is a magnification of the first slide, digitally enhanced, glint-suppressed, and compensated for spectral drift. If you look closely along the dirt street in front of the church, you will see a blurry image resembling a log. That is a human corpse, as any Pentagon photo-jock could tell you. Now here is the same scene, six months later.”
    Everything appeared to be the same, except that the log now looked white.
    â€œThe corpse is now skeletonized. When the military examined large numbers of these enhanced images, they found countless such skeletons lying unburied in the streets and the fields. At first, they were mystified. Theories of mass insanity, another Jonestown, were advanced. Because—”
    A new slide appeared.
    â€œâ€”as you can see, everything else is still alive. Horses are still grazing in the fields. And there in the upper left-hand corner is a pack of dogs, apparently feral. This next slide shows cattle. The only dead things are human beings. Yet whatever it was that killed them was so dangerous, so instantaneous, or so widespread, that they remain where they fell, unburied.”
    He paused.
    â€œThe question is, what was it ?”
    The hall was silent.
    â€œLowell Cafeteria cooking?” someone ventured.
    Levine joined in the general laughter. Then he nodded, and another aerial slide appeared, showing an extensive complex, gutted and ruined.
    â€œWould that it were, my friend. In time, the CIA learned that the cause was a pathogen of some sort, created in the laboratory pictured here. You can see from the craters that the site has been bombed.
    â€œExact details were not known outside Russia until earlier this week, when a disenchanted Russian colonel defected to Switzerland, bringing with him a fat parcel of Soviet Army files. The same contact who provided me with these images alerted me to this colonel’s presence in Switzerland. I was the first to examine his files. The events I am about to relate to