A Call to Darkness - Michael Jan Friedman [18]
Not that he’d ever make any advances toward her. Not even now, when her ice blue eyes were just inches from his. He was too much of a professional for that. And maybe too much of a coward as well.
“When I heard you scream,” said Burtin, “I thought there was something wrong.”
Pulaski chuckled. “Wrong? Quite the contrary. Everything is remarkably right.” She got to her feet, then came around her desk and plunked down into her chair. “Have a seat.”
Burtin rose too, then, and took the chair on the other side of the desk. He didn’t have to ask for an explanation-she’d already embarked on one before he could say a thing.
“We have been looking,” she told him, “for the wrong kind of bacterium. We’ve been assuming that the thing that’s afflicted Fredi-that’s releasing the toxins into his system-is something foreign. Something alien.”
Burtin shrugged. “What else can it be?”
Pulaski leaned forward across her desk, brushing against one of the luck-charm fragments. Her expression had intensified; the skin between her brows was pinched together.
“Picture this,” she said. “Fredi encounters an unfamiliar bacterium on Baldwin-McKean’s Planeta bacterium that produces the toxin we’ve been purging him of. It gets inside his tissues and lives for some finite period of time. But it’s only present in trace quantities-and it doesn’t replicate very quickly, so it can’t produce much of the poison. Therefore, there are no obvious effects. Eventually, the bacterium finds something about its new environment intolerable. Maybe it’s already dead by the time Fredi beams up; maybe not. In any case, it has expired long before he displays any symptoms.
“But before it keels over, it has an effect on one of the body’s normal bacterial residents. It translocates some of its genetic makeup-don’t ask me how-to that resident. One gene, say, for production of a toxin that happens to cause paralysis in humans. Another for a stimulant that tickles the adrenal gland-causing the energy spurt that Fredi described to me. You know, that period of unusual efficiency before his muscles began to lock up on him?”
Burtin nodded.
“In effect,” she went on, “a hybrid is created. A bacterium that looks and acts like one that we know-except that it has an alarming propensity to produce an alien toxin.”
He grunted. It was theoretically possible. Viruses communicated genetic material to other viruses. Why not bacteria to other bacteria?
And of course, she was Kate Pulaski. It was difficult not to take her seriously.
“You seem a little skeptical,” she observed.
He smiled. “A little.”
“Well,” she said, “there’s only one way to prove me wrong. Let’s see if we can’t isolate the affected resident.” She leaned back from her desk now. “But I have to warn you-I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”
Burtin looked at her-purely as a colleague now, doctor to doctor. “Tell me one thing,” he said. “How the hell did you come up with this?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I was sitting here, racking my brain for a new angle-and it just hit me. Out of the blue, as it were.” She blushed a little-but just a little. “That’s when I let out with that victory cry. And knocked over my good-luck charm.”
Ruefully, Pulaski considered the shattered souvenir. “A small price to pay,” she concluded, “in the scheme of things.”
Burtin was about to agree when her monitor beeped. She swiveled it around to face her and answered, suddenly all business.
“Pulaski here.”
“I’m convening the command staff in the lounge.” It was the captain’s voice, though Burtin couldn’t see his face. “Five minutes, Doctor.”
“I have a rather serious case here in sickbay,” said Pulaski. “Crewman Fredi, as I…”
“Nonetheless,” said the captain, his voice charged with impatience, “I expect to see you in the lounge. That is all.”
And the communication ended.
The chief medical officer appeared a little startled. It wasn’t an expression that became her.
“Well,” she said, looking up at Burtin, “I can hardly