“I’ll have them out in fifteen minutes,” she said, enjoying their tiny moment of closeness.
Phil spent the next fifteen minutes looking more closely at all the remaining slides, but found nothing of interest. Melissa brought twenty newly stained slides and discreetly took a chair while Phil reviewed them. He was allowing her unprecedented access, and even though it was long after five, she had no interest in relinquishing it.
An hour passed, and finally he pushed back away from the microscope. “With the exception of a small segment of bone marrow, everything else is normal,” he said to Melissa without looking at her.
“The marrow is supposed to have some stem cells?” she asked.
“Not like these, and not clustered so tightly. The virus seems to involve the bone marrow as well as the brain.”
It was a curious puzzle, and Phil didn’t see any obvious connection. It was true that both the bone marrow, which was responsible for the production of the red and white blood cells, and the germinal matrix, both derived from the same embryonic layer; but beyond that, the brain and bone marrow had little in common. Plus, there were other tissues that also arose from the same embryonic layer, and all of them were normal.
“Is it neoplastic, maybe some kind of lymphoma of stem cells?” Melissa offered.
“No, it’s not a tumor. The organization is too complex.” Phil rubbed his eyes. “This is something that I’ve never seen before.”
“We have slides from two other cases that came in today, both presumed suicides. Dr. Faraday was going to review them in the morning, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you looked at them tonight.”
“It’s after seven,” Phil said.
Melissa glanced up at the clock, and it was long after seven. “This is important,” she said. “Besides, I’ve got no one waiting on me at home, except for a very lazy border collie.” She left to get the other slides.
Phil wondered why she had no one at home. Maybe she was married and her husband was out of town, or working late. Maybe she was a widow. Maybe she had never married at all. Melissa had worked for the coroner’s office for eleven years, longer than he had been there, and he was surprised by how little he knew about her. He should have picked up more about her personal life just through overheard casual conversations. So why didn’t he know even the most basic information about her? He waited for an answer, but none of his Monsters, not even the smart, small voice, responded. He knew the answer, of course, but he shrank from it. Melissa wasn’t important to him; she wasn’t a part of the small and carefully maintained Phillip Rucker universe. She was a functionary, no more critical to him than this microscope. At an abstract level, he knew that she was more important than a microscope, but he didn’t — he couldn’t — live in an abstract world. His behavior and thoughts were ruled by the concrete codes of Personal Responsibility and The Routine.
Phil stood and stretched his sore, stiff back; at least that hadn’t changed. It dawned on him that this was the second time that day that he had found himself exploring beyond the borders of the Phillip Rucker universe, and he was surprised by how far he could venture beyond the usual narrow range of safe-thought without reprisal.
Melissa returned. “Here is the first set,” she said and placed a rack of slides next to his microscope. Phil noticed a small stripe of lighter skin on her left fourth finger.
Two possibilities, he thought. She’s married and has taken off her wedding ring, probably for safe keeping while she works, or she once wore a ring, but doesn’t now.
“The second rack needs to be restained. I didn’t like the way it came out,” she said, obviously covering for the shoddy work of one of her junior technicians.
“Thank you,” Phil said stiffly, trying to reestablish their normal boundaries. He reached for the first slide in the rack as Melissa left to restain the second set of slides. Phil quickly scanned the twenty-eight slides from the two patients, and again found exactly what he had found in Peter Bilsky’s brain: large cells lining both victims’ ventricles. Stem cells, he thought. Somehow, the virus had reactivated the long-dormant process of cellular differentiation. The implications were incredible. If the lethal aspects of the virus could be eliminated, this virus would be a medical miracle. Strokes, brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, leukemia, almost every degenerative process could be reversed. Phil’s powerful mind began to reel with possibilities.
Melissa had returned with the second rack, and as she was retrieving the original set of slides, her hand accidentally brushed his.
Phil’s next conscious thought was: Where am I? He was on his back with several faces staring down at him. The ground seemed to be moving, and so was the ceiling. A stretcher, he thought. His arms were tied down, and an oxygen mask covered his face. People were talking to him, but a pain in his head prevented him from hearing them. “My head,” he said through the mask, and his head lolled to the right. He spotted Melissa among the various legs and torsos. She had her own facemask, and some stranger was pushing down on her chest. “What happened?” he asked her, his words slurred. His vision began to blur as well, and then she was gone, along with everything else.
Chapter 25
“Someone will always need to rule, “Pushkin finished.
“Then it will be the most capable, the most powerful mind.” Reisch answered.
“And if that turns out to be Amanda, or someone like her, how will you respond?” The car stayed very quiet for a very long time. “Are you leaving or are you going to stay around for the fireworks?” Pushkin wisely changed subjects.
“I’m leaving,” Reisch finally responded. “The signal is not due for another fifty-five hours, and it can be sent from anywhere.”
“Wake me when we get there,” Pushkin said as he dissolved into passenger seat.
Reisch checked the satchel again; it was back where he had put it before the Russian had returned. He was glad for the silence and solitude. Pushkin had always been able to twist Klaus’s ideas back on to themselves; it had started out as a lesson in logic, but over the decades it had turned into a game, a game Reisch rarely won.
As he negotiated the turn south Reisch questioned whether Pushkin was worth the trouble. Probably not he concluded, but he did owe the Russian his life.
Thirty years earlier, a newly graduated Klaus went to Amsterdam for a weeklong vacation, and then decided to stay permanently. The permissive society was ideal for his sociopathic abilities, and he frequently exercised them. He was content for the first time in his life until he had some bad luck that dramatically altered the course of his young life. Finding himself low on funds, he attempted a simple transaction with an elderly woman and her purse. As it turned out she was quite fond of her purse, and when Klaus tried to run with it, he found that she was still attached. He dragged the screaming woman a full block before being tackled by an American tourist, who beat him into unconsciousness. The entire affair was caught on tape by the American’s wife, and a sanitized version aired repeatedly on CNN for the next week. When Klaus faced the magistrate, he was arguably the most hated man in all the Netherlands. His bandaged face and broken ribs did nothing to lessen the sentence of three years.
A month later Reisch was back before the same magistrate after killing another inmate. The man, twice the size of Klaus, had been terrorizing the young German since his arrival, seemingly with the tacit approval of the guards. His assailant had every physical advantage, but Reisch had patience and endured, waiting for his opportunity. It came one afternoon when his tormentor lunged for Klaus’s lunch tray; he stepped away from his attacker, swept his legs from beneath him, and then crushed the man’s throat with his boot. He stood over the dying man as he suffocated. In fairness, the guards also watched the man die before intervening and subduing Reisch. His sentence was changed to thirty years in a maximum-security prison. After attempting to kill the magistrate in the courtroom, he once again was subdued and latter hospitalized.