The Mystery of Wandering Caveman - M. V. Carey [8]
“Oh, rot!” exclaimed Brandon. “Man is not inherently violent. You’ve misinterpreted the evidence.”
“Have I?” Terreano looked around him “Consider, if you will, Abraham Spicer,”
he said “Spicer believed in helping humanity. He set up this foundation, and wasn’t that noble! But Spicer was also a killer. He was a big-game hunter.”
Terreano gestured towards the mantelpiece, The head of some delicate horned creature was there, its dead eyes staring towards the windows. On the wall above some bookcases there were other animal heads — a tiger, a puma and a massive water buffalo. The pelts of bears and lions and leopards were strewn over the floor.
“If you kill a wild animal instead of another man,” said Terreano, “you are allowed to bring the carcass home and stuff it. There was a time when it was equally acceptable to crush the bones of an enemy and eat the marrow.”
“You are absolutely wrong!” shouted Brandon.
“You get so angry whenever we have this discussion,” said Terreano. “It almost proves my point.”
A short, balding man came bustling in just then. “Are you discussing bone marrow again?” he said. “I hate to hear about bone marrow before I’ve had my lunch.”
Eleanor introduced Dr. Elwood Hoffer. “Dr. Hoffer is an immunologist,” she told the boys. “He has a lot of white rats that are really kind of sweet. Could I show the rats to Jupiter and his friends?”
“You can, provided they don’t touch anything in the lab,” said Hoffer.
“Of course they won’t,” said Eleanor.
The boys followed her out to a long hall that ran at a right angle to the front of the house.
“The workrooms and laboratories open off this hall,” Eleanor explained. “Dr.
Hoffer’s lab is here.”
She ushered them to the next door, and they found themselves in a small washroom. Eleanor produced four surgical masks. “Here,” she said. “Put these on.”
She fixed hers in place, then drew on a pair of heavy rubber gloves.
She opened another door into a huge room bright with sunlight. Against the walls were dozens of cages enclosed in glass, and small creatures darted and scuttled in each cage.
“Don’t go too close and don’t touch anything,” warned Eleanor. She began to feed the rats, moving quietly from cage to cage.
“These rats are very special,” she said. “Dr. Hoffer took away some of their immunities, so you have to watch that they don’t catch cold or anything. That’s the reason for our masks. Some of them have no way to fight off infections.”
“That doesn’t seem very helpful,” said Bob. “If they can’t fight off infections, won’t they die?”
“I suppose some of them will eventually,” said Eleanor. “But Dr. Hoffer believes that we get some diseases just because we’re immune! Our bodies manufacture special cells that eat up viruses and bacteria, but sometimes those same cells can hurt us.
Maybe we get arthritis from our immune reactions, or stomach ulcers, or even some kinds of insanity.”
“Wow!” said Pete. He sounded frightened.
“But without immunities we’d get smallpox,” said Bob, “and … and measles, and
…”
“I know,” said Eleanor. “What Dr. Hoffer is trying to do is find ways to control immunities so that we’re protected, but we aren’t hurt.”
“Wonderful!” said Jupiter. “And Dr. Terrreano is writing a new book.”
“Dr. Brandon is writing a book too,” said Eleanor. “His is about the person in the locked cabinet in his room.”
“A person?” said Bob. “Locked in a cabinet?”
“It’s a fossil person,” said Eleanor. “He found the bones in Africa and put them together like a jigsaw puzzle to make a whole skeleton. He measures the bones and takes pictures of them and looks things up in his books.”
“He wants to work with the remains in the cave the same way, doesn’t he?” said Jupiter.
“Yes.” Eleanor looked unhappy. “My uncle won’t let him.”
Eleanor had finished feeding the rats. She and the boys returned to the washroom, where she took off her mask and gloves and dropped them into a covered container near the sink. The boys dropped their masks in,