A moment later she stared at the dark jungle, recalling the face of the boy she’d seen through a lab window. She was sure it wasn’t her imagination. How could anyone survive here without a space suit? she wondered, if the illness were as dangerous as Mason made it sound.
Funny, she thought, that she was thinking of him as Mason now instead of Dr. Williams.
She glanced over at him as he rapidly gave orders for the isolation and medical treatment of Matos. Yep, he was quite an impressive man.
Chapter 12
Mason felt like a mother hen trying to keep all her chicks in line. Working with a team of brilliant, egocentric scientists is like trying to herd cats, he thought. Just when you get them all going in one direction, something happens and they scatter.
Mason, Jakes, and Shirley Cole were in their Racals in the Cytotec lab, all trying to process blood serum samples, stain tissue sections with exotic dyes to make different forms of bacteria illuminate under microscopes, and generally getting in each other’s way.
To make matters worse, Shirley and Jakes had been sniping at one another all evening. Mason wished the two wouldn’t be so competitive, but then he reasoned, if they weren’t, they probably wouldn’t be as effective as they were at ferreting out secrets of the microscopic world.
Shirley said, “Why don’t you quit fooling with that electron microscope, Sam? I’m telling you, this smells like a bacterial illness to me and I don’t think we need to waste our time looking for viruses.”
Jakes grimaced while fiddling with dials and buttons on a large electron microscope built into a corner of the lab. “You think everything on earth is bacterial, Shirley, including men. You remind me of a carpenter whose only tool is a hammer, so he thinks every problem is a nail.”
“And what is that supposed to imply, Mister Wizard?”
“Just that most cases of hemorrhagic fever, especially ones caused by organisms that are airborne and transmissible from person to person and having a one hundred percent mortality rate, are caused by viruses. I can’t think of a single bacterium that has an onset of action as fast as this bug seems to have.”
“Tell you what, Sam. I’ll make you a bet this agent is a bacteria and not a virus.”
“Precisely what are you willing to wager, Dr. Cole?” Jakes asked, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively.
“If it turns out to be a virus, I’ll personally treat you and every friend you’ve got to a round of drinks at that male chauvinist pig hangout you frequent, the Recovery Room. I won’t have much at stake since you have virtually no friends since you’ve driven them off with those damn cigars.”
Jakes glared at her. Everyone knew the bar she mentioned near the Emory University Medical School campus, a favorite of his. He spent most nights there schmoozing with medical school professors and drinking while smoking his vile cigars.
“Okay, Shirley, and I’ll bet it’s a virus. If I’m wrong, you can bring all your friends to the bar, which will also probably only amount to one or two old maid fem-libbers, and I’ll buy all three of you as many drinks as you think you can metabolize without falling down.”
Mason shook his head, attempting to concentrate on his work through all this banter. The Cytotec lab chamber, stuffed from floor to ceiling with every piece of scientific apparatus imaginable, was small to begin with. When three people, encased in bulky, cumbersome Racals, were all trying to work at once, each feeling his particular task was the most important, there was predictable conflict.
After a brief pause in the conversation, Jakes straightened in front of the large vacuum tube of an electron microscope where he’d been laboring for the past twenty minutes.
“Goddammit, Mason, this piece of crap is still not adjusted properly. I told you the aiming electron focusing beams were knocked out of alignment when those fools dropped it in Australia, and you told me it had been fixed!” He turned to glare at Mason, his hands on his hips and his expression sour.
Mason sighed deeply. He was in the middle of Gram staining tissue slides and didn’t have time to argue at the moment. The delicate process, wherein slides were dipped in methylene blue dye, followed by iodine, scarlet red, and finally washed in acetone, was fairly simple, but if the correct sequence was not followed the tissue sections would be ruined.
Of course, Jakes never bothered to consider anyone else’s duties could possibly be as important as his. Mason answered without raising his head. “The lab tech at CDC assured me it was repaired, Sam. What’s wrong with it?’
“Hell, nothing’s wrong with it except it won’t focus the goddamn beam. Other than that, it’s just fine. You understand my electron micrographs look like they were taken through frosted glass.”
“That’s probably because you’ve adjusted the focus and depth of field knobs incorrectly,” Shirley mumbled snidely, just loud enough for Sam to hear.
Jakes glanced at her and just shook his head, as if such a possibility didn’t bear consideration. “If we’re dealing with a virus here it’d better be a big bastard, because I can’t get my resolution below one hundred microns,” he said. “That means if this bug is a filovirus like I suspect, we’re gonna be shit outta luck finding it.”
Mason was forming a reply when he was halted by an exclamation from Shirley. “Wait a minute, guys! I think I may have something here! Mason, come take a look at the slide of this lung section.”
Mason took a few seconds to wash his slides with acetone, his hands shaking slightly from fatigue. They’d been working continuously without a break since arriving at the site.
He put the slides in a rack to dry, and then he moved over to the counter where Shirley was working. She made a slight adjustment to the focusing knobs on the Zeiss binocular microscope, bringing an image into sharper view on the computer VDT hooked to the Zeiss.
It was impossible to get close enough to the scope’s double eyepieces while wearing a Racal hood, so the equipment was set up to send images to a thirteen-inch computer screen built into the wall of the lab.
On the screen, tiny air sacs of lung tissue appeared in the background like a large pink honeycomb. The air sacs themselves were filled with pink-stained proteinaceous debris, ruptured red blood cells, and clumped leukocytes, surrounded by literally thousands of tiny dark blue, almost violet cigar-shaped bacteria. The honeycomb shapes of the air sacs showed massive disruption with large areas where the lung tissue itself had been completely absorbed and destroyed by the bacteria.
“Jesus,” Mason whispered, awed by the amount of tissue destruction and the large number of bacteria present in the specimen. “This is the most fulminant case of pneumonia I’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah,” Shirley replied. “This kid was one sick puppy all right. And unless I miss my guess, those bad boys there are our hot-bug.”
“Sam, come over here,” Mason said. “I don’t think we need to worry about the electron microscope now. It looks like we’re dealing with a bacterial etiology for the deaths, a Gram-positive rod of some sort.” He stepped aside so Jakes could see the monitor.
“It does appear to be a bacillus,” Jakes agreed, causing Shirley to roll her eyes, as if she couldn’t believe he’d ever doubted her. “And look up there, in the upper left corner of the field — it looks like spores of some sort I don’t recognize,” Jakes muttered, pointing to a section of the screen containing what looked like tiny balls, some of which had ruptured, spilling out hordes of violet bacteria.
“Seems as if I was right, Sam,” Shirley said, with poorly concealed enjoyment. “The only Gram-positive rod I know of that forms spores and can cause pneumonia this aggressive, along with hemorrhagic fever, is Bacillus anthracis.”