I compared the two images, one on each screen.
I heard Eddie’s sharp intake of breath behind me as a 3-D image hummed, complete with grooves and spikes and striations, good as a microbe identity card.
Eddie said, unsurprised but still horrified, “They’re the same.”
Air in the hangar downstairs would be saturated with the exact same particles, with more being sprayed out each time anyone coughed. My thumb drive had told me that the Spanish flu manifested itself in patients after an incubation period of between one and three days. We’d been in contact with the Montana for over twenty-four hours.
“Prime infection time, Uno,” Eddie said.
“Do we have enough antiviral spray for everyone, even the healthy ones?”
“Thanks to our good buddy, Zhou, yeah.”
“Then everyone’s to start taking it, as a preventative. If there’s enough left after that, we supply the rest of the ship.”
“That stuff slows regular flus from replicating. But every flu is different.”
“I’d really like to talk to the CDC.”
“Hey, we’re in better shape than in 1918, One.”
He was Mr. Positive. I thought, Yeah, better. Instead of eighty million dead, only ten million this time.
I said, “Let’s see what else we can come up with.”
The only medicine that definitely worked so far was coffee. We’d plugged in a huge Coast Guard percolator — it made gallons of dark, strong brew — and the smell of Maxwell House permeated the wet lab. Thick sandwiches — slabs of pot roast on rye — lay on the desk and table counters, sent over by the mess, and left by cooks in a passageway outside. No contact was allowed between crew outside the hangar, and inside.
One thing the ship was overstocked with was food.
“Can I help?” asked the voice of Karen Vleska.
Advancing into the lab, she seemed more vulnerable, more tentative. The small, agile persona that had marked her originally was gone. I saw a blue vein fluttering in the side of her neck, a tiny freckle on the jaw as she pulled up a chair beside me. She wore corduroy trousers and a thick wool ski sweater with a moose logo on it, in brown. She wore black Merrell boots and she smelled, like we all did, of unlaundered clothes and shipboard chemical showers. In epidemic country, we wore masks all the time.
“Down there all I’m doing is running cool towels over foreheads, along with Del Grazo and Marietta.”
“Believe me, the people you’re doing it for do not consider it a small thing,” I said.
Eddie was on his laptop, both of our computers having been brought down by the crew. We’d been poring over articles, reports, and speculations on the disease, exploring the reams of information on my thumb drive sticks, replicated onto his.
She said, “Tell me what we’re looking for.”
“Treatments. Old diaries. Any ideas to help,” I said, my eyes burning from staring at the screen.
She rolled her chair beside mine. Knee to knee. “Four eyes beat two,” she said.
More than ten million pages have been written about the Spanish flu since 1918: symptoms, history, speculations, treatments. There were hundreds of photos in here of turn-of-the-century schoolchildren with surgical masks on, terrified kids, patients occupying rows of beds in quarantined Army wards in France, frightened doctors refusing to enter wards, public health notices in newspapers, mayors in radio studios, urging people to stay home. And most recently, results on the reconstituted virus in Atlanta, by the CDC.
The problem wasn’t that we had too little information. The problem was that we had too much.
“Everything but a cure,” Eddie said.
I found a diary written by a doctor working on a South Dakota Sioux Indian reservation in 1918. Patients sitting up in bed survived at a higher rate.
Eddie read aloud from a memo written in Philadelphia General Hospital, mid-outbreak. “‘We’ve had some success inoculating healthy people with blood from survivors. Rate of infection went down.’”
Karen breathed audibly. “You mean, just shoot blood from one person into another?”
“Yeah,” said Eddie. “That’s what they did a hundred years ago.”
“And that worked?” she said, shocked.
I rubbed my eyes, exhausted, groped for coffee. I stirred in three packs of sugar. Anything to get my attention span up. “Survivors have antibodies in their blood.”
“But what about all those warnings about sharing fluids? Like in AIDS?”
I nodded. “The first blood transfusions happened in the 1700s in France, Karen. Doctors joined hoses to patients, ran a foot pump, circulated blood, one person to another. Crude as it gets, and no disinfectants, and it killed some people, but it also worked sometimes. But we didn’t know about different blood types then.”
Karen made a noise deep in her throat. “You’re suggesting that we collect blood from survivors, and inject it into the sick? It sounds so… desperate.”
“It is desperate. And not just the sick. The antibodies would act as a preventative in the healthy, in theory. And we’d also be transferring in lymphocytes, active virus-killing cells. I wonder, Eddie, can we collect blood from survivors, enough to vaccinate a lot of people, if they’re the same blood type? Enough — if the medicines don’t work?”
“Can we pool blood from different donors?”
“Too dangerous. More chance of rejection. One to one. And blood type to blood type.”
It wasn’t exactly the ideal treatment. But we called down to Lieutenant Cullen via ship phone and asked how many hypodermics were on board, just in case. She told us there was a shortage. If we wanted to inoculate, we’d need to reuse hypodermics.
“Great,” I said. “On top of everything else, dirty needles.”
“We could disinfect after each shot,” suggested Eddie. “If it comes to that. Lab sterilizers.”
“We get Chief Apparecio up here, and other survivors. Draw blood. It will have antibodies. We heparinize syringes. Put a couple milliliters of heparin in there so the blood doesn’t clot. Then we’ll give fifty cc’s per patient, make the stuff last. Worst comes to worst…”
Eddie finished it. “Worst comes to worst, we try Dr. One’s patented homemade miracle vaccine. Stops hair loss. Stops gout. Builds muscles. Kills flus.”
Morose, I said, “It would help if we had Elisa kits.”
Karen asked, “What’s an Elisa kit?”
“A way to test for the presence of disease-related proteins,” Eddie explained.
“Speak English.”
“You take a microtiter plate and—”
“A what? A what? I said speak English!”
I sighed. “It’s a plastic plate with little wells in it. You put blood samples in each well. You add a reagent. It enables you to isolate proteins. We want to ID viral proteins, or enzymes to try to disable. If we can ID them, if we had computer-aided designing…” I cursed. A wave of futility swept over me. “Goddamnit! The goddamn CDC can do this. They have equipment. We’re just three people bumbling around on a ship. Why did they fucking cut us off?”
Karen gripped my forearm, clearly to get my mind on business again, “What do these microplates look like, Joe?”
Joe. We rummaged the wet lab. We found no Elisa kits aboard. Nothing in the dry lab either. That would have been too easy.
Back at the screens I drank more coffee, but even the caffeine was failing to stimulate me now. I said, sighing, “Let’s give the medicines a chance to work before we start injecting people.”
“How long before we know that?”
“Could be fast. A day. Two.”
Karen Vleska got up, stretched, picked at the foods on the table that the cooks had sent over: Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies; red shiny Washington State apples; PowerBars; packs of Nestlé’s cocoa.