Myron snugged the carts carrying the machines in a row.
“So what’s that going to do?” asked James.
“I dunno, but we have to start somewhere. We know you have these dreams, or whatever it is you call them, and we know you make more ATP than probably anyone else alive. There’s this substance called luciferin, the stuff that makes fireflies light up. Apply it to ATP, hey presto, it lights up. The more ATP present, the brighter it gets. So we’ll see how that’s affected by your little nap. Sound all right?”
“That does sound kind of cool. Can I see it?”
“Of course you can! We’ll save a bit for ya. Now, we’ll look at a few other odds and ends, but the big thing today is the polysomnography. Ron’s going to keep an eye on you, and at the same time record all environmental factors in the room. These sensors stick on your head. They measure your brainwaves. You’ll have some more electrodes here.” Pat indicated on his own face a point just outside and above the right eye, and below and outside the left eye. “Those will tell us when you are in REM sleep.”
“REM sleep?”
“Jaysus! Watch the Discovery Channel or somethin’, will ya? Rapid Eye Movement. It takes place when you’re dreaming. The machine will record the duration of your dreams.”
“Ah, okay, sorry. Biology was never my thing,” James said sheepishly.
Pat smiled and patted James on the back. “And we have various other contraptions looking at your heart rate, breathing, etc. You’re going to look like an electronic hedgehog when we get done with you. All you have to do is try and sleep with all that rubbish on you.”
“But what if we get nothing?”
“Then we get nothing. There’s no such thing as a negative result, Jimmy. We learn from everything. Tell me, you haven’t been reading up on biology or disease or anything like that, have you?”
“No, none at all, aside from what I have been hearing around here.”
“Okay, well, that’s not so bad. My worry would be this: if you knew too much, you could invent things. Not consciously, you understand. Not calling you a liar or anything.”
“Sure, I understand. Nope, don’t know much more today than I ever have.” James grinned.
“Good. Now, after you after you get to sleep, I will be placing another patient close
by.” He gave James a wink, and glancing at Myron, placed a finger to his lips.
“Comfy?”
James nodded.
Pat combed the wires to tidy them, and squeezed James’ shoulder. “Sweet dreams, Mister S.”
Forty-five minutes later, James was fast asleep. Pat quietly wheeled a glass cage with a wire mesh top into the room, and placed it less than half a yard from James’ bed. Inside the cage, a white rat went about his business.
Nineteen
Seven hours later, as James stirred, Myron wheeled the cage away. James stretched, feeling fresh as the proverbial daisy.
While James washed and dressed in a bath down the hall, Myron cleared away the equipment. Pat breezed in bearing coffee, Danish, and an ancient reel-to-reel recorder. He settled James into an easy chair in the corner and set the lights to dim. “Nice and comfy?” James nodded. The button on the recorder went click. “Okay, let’s have it while it’s fresh, young fella.”
“It was like before, initially, you know—this deep sleep, where I just kind of float. It’s hard to describe.”
“But you are, or were, conscious of a definable space, is that correct?”
“Well, yes, I guess so, but there’s nothing there, which is kind of nice. This is the way it was before, when I went inside myself. It’s like a big, quiet, empty hall. I don’t seem to think of anything there; I just relax.”
“Okay, fair enough. Go on.”
“Then it’s like I’m rising up, you know? Floating up through stratified levels, and as I pass each one, I see more and more, until I end up in the place where all these things are.”
Pat sat, hands folded, his nose nestled on his knuckles and his cagey eyes fixed on James. “Things?” he said.
“You know, bacteria and those things. But this time was different, from the others, I mean. The landscape, or whatever, was like a beach. An oily beach. Or maybe more like a desert, because there was no shoreline. Anyhow, I saw these things.”
Pat stuffed out his lower lip and curled it. “Okay, saw something—what?”
“Some sort of creatures.”
Pat’s heart skipped a beat.
“They weren’t like the bacteria, or viruses, or anything like that. They were more like slugs.”
The heart skipped two beats. My little beauties!
“They kind of floated along the tops of the dunes. The thing about the dunes, though, is that they were all around, above and below me.”
“Right, right, right. Beaches and slugs, anything else?”
“Well, they seemed bigger than the things I had seen before.”
“What things?”
“You know, those things in the painting, the bacteria. Lots bigger.”
“Ah, right, sorry.”
James hesitated, then said, “Drawing this stuff is a whole lot easier.”
“You want to draw them for me? Do you need to do it now before it goes away?”
“No, I’d rather keep going. I’ll sketch this all out for you in a few minutes. Anyhow, these things were a lot more sophisticated than anything I’ve seen before. The other things were kind of like little beeping satellites or globs, like the bacteria. These were more like little submarines.”
Submarines! Pat walked his rear end to the edge of the seat.
When he was a boy, about twelve years of age or so, Pat experienced something that set his life’s direction. One rainy Saturday afternoon, forearms tented and head cradled in hands as he sprawled on the carpet, he watched a film in which a crew of scientists and surgeons were stuck in a submarine. Via a bit of Hollywood magic, the people, their tools, submarine, and all were shrunk to the size of a pinprick and injected into a human body. The film was called Fantastic Voyage, and it starred a young Raquel Welch. Pat didn’t move from his spot during the entire film.
“They moved quickly when they wanted to. They swam kind of like a fish, or maybe a snake. No, that’s wrong, they didn’t wiggle much or anything. They just kind of moved and swayed.”
“Like crawling?”
“Um, more like swimming. They were sort of majestic, I’d have to say.”
Majestic: the word was like a perfumed breeze. Pat sighed.
“Like a whale swimming. I could see through them, too. They had parts inside, looked kind of like a cross section of a rocket ship. You know, like fuel tanks and a rocket engine.”
“A rocket engine, eh? Hah! Imagine that. And idea what it was for?”
“No, I don’t think so. It was more like it was just there, belonged there, part of her. I don’t know what it did.”
“Okay, let me stop you there. Did you just say her?”
“Oh, yeah, I guess so. I think they were all ‘hers’. All females, I mean. I wondered at the time where all the men were.” James chuckled nervously.
Pat bit his lip.
“Then one of them slid along the beach and disappeared through the surface. I followed her, and I could see her inside.”
“So you can swim, too? In this place?”
“I guess. I don’t seem to have any body or anything, and until today, I didn’t think they could see me.”
“Really? Do tell.”
James leaned forward, and with his elbows on his knees, said, “Well, the smell, sound, whatever you want to call it, was there, but at this point it was different from the nervous bacteria and virus sort of sensations I get. It was more serene, almost relaxing.”
Whale music, Pat thought, and laughed silently to himself.
“Now and then, though, there would be something that I could probably best describe as—barking.”
“Barking,” Pat repeated. “Okay, barking. Why the hell n
ot? Go on.”
“Why? Does that just sound stupid, or is that something you’d expect?”
“It’s your story, Jimmy. You tell it. We’ll talk after.”
“Well, I could hear this barking all over the place. I’d see two of them facing each other, kind of fighting. They’d bark at each other for a while and then one of them would leave, like it had been chased away, and the other one would go through the surface. I followed one of them through the surface, and the surface just flowed around me, then closed up again.”
“But I thought you had no body?”
“Yeah, I’m coming to that. So, I followed this one through, then I moved up alongside of her and watched her for a while. This bubble of air appeared all around her body, just a little bigger than she was, kind of loose-fitting, but not touching. A stream of little globs came out through the pointy end and unraveled into strings, and the strings attached themselves to the bubble and to her, like a million little struts.”
A jinked eyebrow cracked Pat’s cool facade. Any lingering doubt flickering in his mind was extinguished.
“And this all took place in this deep sea you followed her into?”
“It was more like the inside of a giant globe.”
“How big?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I really don’t. How big is big? How big were the creatures? I don’t even know that. They were bigger than most of the things I’ve seen, I’m pretty sure.”
Pat crimped his lip. “Well, how large was the globe in relation to the creature?”
“Oh, it was maybe a hundred times larger. There were a bunch of other things floating around inside of it, like some kind of natural machinery. Now that I think about it, it reminded me a lot of a Miro.”
“A Miro? What’s a Miro?”
“Joan Miro. He was a painter, a surrealist. Yeah, there’s this one in particular—The Tilled Field. It was very much like that.”
“Can’t say I’m familiar with it, but I’ll look it up later,” said Pat, and scribbled the name down.
“It’s one of his first masterpieces. A reduction of realism into geometric shapes. Some aspects of his work are not unlike my own. Anyhow, the creature also had this ball inside. The ball split in two, and then each of those two split, and on and on.”
“Just like that? How long did all of this take?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Could’ve been weeks, could’ve been minutes. It kind of happened in dream-time. You know how you can have a dream that feels like it lasts a year? I don’t know how to describe it in real time.”
“Don’t mind all the questions. They don’t actually mean anything. I’m just trying to keep you moving is all.”
“I should have paid more attention. I could be telling you lots more.”
Pat flipped his hand magnanimously. “Yer grand!”
“Okay, so I went back outside.”
“Through the boundary?”
“Yeah.”
“We call that a membrane.”
“Yeah, okay. I went out through this membrane, and a few globes over, this other globe just burst open right in front of me, and thousands of these creatures poured out, but much smaller—babies. They were everywhere. Millions of them.”
“Those globes, Jimmy, those are cells. The globes are cells.”
“Oh, okay. So anyhow, I could see in the cells, and there were some that were just full of these things. So I went through another surface—”
“Membrane. Use the word, Jimmy. The cell wall is a membrane.”
“Membrane, right. When I passed through the membrane, this big howl went up, and I thought, they know I’m here. Scared the crap out of me.”
“Heh heh, I’ll bet. You don’t want to piss off Toxoplasma Gondii—beastly bastards.”
“Toxowhosamawhat?”
“Well, unless I am very much mistaken, and I very seldom am,” Pat added with a grin, “that’s what you were cavorting with. T. gondii, or Toxo, as it’s known to its friends, is a type of parasite. Just as you describe, they infect a cell, use its juicy innards to feed their brats, and then leave it like yesterday’s dinner scraps.”
“Yeah, maybe, yeah. So that is what I was looking at?”
“Mmm, could be! Damn, Jimmy. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Okay, then lots and lots of cells erupted. Millions and millions of babies came out, and grew very quickly. The place was full of them. Then this kind of battle cry or slogan or something went up. I didn’t really understand what it was all about. It was confusing.”
“That’s fine. It’s—”
James clamped his face up and balled his hands into fists. “I mean, it was like they were trying to say something. They were talking to each other, I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t expect you to translate what stupid little animals are saying to each other, Jimmy. Don’t worry about it.”
“But I did know what they meant.”
“How could you? It’s not like there’s a Toxo-English phrase book. Relax!”
“They were all supposed to go to the brain or something. And they wanted this guy to...go start a fight?”
“What guy?”
“The guy they were in. They wanted him to start a fight. I don’t know. Why would they say that?”
Pat snickered, and the snicker grew into a solid stream of laughter.
“Hey, I’m only telling you what I think. I know it’s stupid, but you wanted—”
Pat, laughing so hard he couldn’t speak, waved off James’ protestations and slapped palm to forehead. Tears rolled down his cheeks. The laughter subsided in stages, and in between its dying ebbs, he said, “I’m sorry, Jimmy. I’m not laughing at you, honestly. There was no ‘guy’. The patient was a rat.”
“A rat?”
“Yes, one of my test subjects—a rat with an almost total immunodeficiency.” Pat slid his lip out in confession. “And infected with T. gondii.”
“You had me inside a rat?”
“Well, you weren’t inside anything, I don’t believe, but please, please, go on!”
“Well, that’s kind of it. Surely that’s my own embellishment? I must have misinterpreted something.”
“Well, probably not, in actual fact. In a street-smart kind of a way, you seem to know as much about T. gondii as me. And hand on my heart, there is nobody on God’s green earth who knows more about these little buggers than me. Here’s the thing: Toxoplasma gondii has a life cycle centered in cats, but it needs to pass on from them into another mammal to complete its reproductive cycle. It reproduces sexually in cats, but reproduces asexually, as a female, in its second stage in a second host, like a rat, for example. That second stage appears to be what you just witnessed. But here’s the interesting bit: when a mouse or a rat gets infected by Toxo, the animal actually commits suicide by sacrificing itself to a cat. Well, it thinks it’s fighting it, gets brave, like, but it hasn’t got a chance. The cat chews up the corpse, becomes infected, and the little bugger’s life cycle starts all over again.”
“Holy crap!”
“Holy crap, indeed. Even more incredibly, T gondii might just be the most effective treatment yet for certain types of cancer. They’re very skilled at concealing themselves from the immune system, not unlike cancer. Coincidentally, their presence provokes activity in certain T-cells that also attack cancerous cells. My plan is to farm these critters as medicine.”
“Farm them?”
“That’s right, farm ’em like cattle. And you’ve just been down on the ranch.”
Pat, as he’d put it himself, was like a dog with two mickeys. He’d always figured he’d have a better chance of getting his hands on Raquel Welch than a microscopic submarine. As it turned out, he was wrong.
Twenty
“Hello, is this Mrs. Weems?”
“Dr. Weems, yes.” Karen shooed her secretary out of the office.
“This is Thomas Sharpe, from Sharpe, Sharpe, and Schiavo. We’re the law firm seeing to the liquidation of Dr. R
ichardson’s estate.”
“Ah, thank you for calling, Mr. Sharpe. I appreciate it.”
“How may I help you, Mrs.—sorry, Dr. Weems?”
“Well, it’s a little awkward. Unusual, more like. Dr. Richardson and I had a son together over thirty years ago.”
“Oh, I see. I’m afraid this is information we didn’t have. And your son wishes to make a claim on the estate?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Well, Dr. Richardson’s will clearly delineates the beneficiaries. Your son is definitely not mentioned.”
“No, you don’t understand. James is not going to be making a claim.”
“Ah, I see. Well, in any case, the estate is rather small by most standards.”
“Yes, that’s not really of any interest to us. Really, what we want is access to some of Dr. Richardson’s DNA. We’d just like to ascertain my son’s parentage for his own peace of mind.”
“Ah, I see,” Sharpe said dubiously.
Karen bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. The bastard thought she didn’t know who the father was! She swallowed hard and said, “We don’t want to go as far as to disinter the body; we would just like access to a few of his personal items, like old combs and such, in order to gather some DNA. Would there be any problem with that?”
“Well, it is highly unusual, but I will discuss the matter with my associates and get back to you.”
“Look, I just want a few hairs or toenail clippings, or whatever else he has left lying around. This has medical implications for my son. We need to establish a DNA history.”
“I see, and your son needs this soon, does he?”
“Well, that would be nice, yes. And any family history that may be available, also.”
“I am sure that can all be done in the fullness of time. At the moment, however, Dr. Richardson’s residence is being prepared for clearance.”
“Clearance? What do you mean?”
“In a case like this, a contractor is brought in to clear the personal belongings. It’s a standard procedure. There were delays with the return of the body and some other problems with the estate, so it was left until the lease on his apartment ran out. They will be cleared out tomorrow at the latest. The items will be auctioned off afterwards, if that is of any interest to you.”
Ezembe Page 12
