Maryk’s breathing began to deepen and his head and arms grew heavy. The amplitude of Stephen’s infection was reflected in the intensity of Maryk’s cascade. Maryk knew that he had to get away in order to remain on his feet and see this thing through.
Maryk directed the nurse to draw off as much of Stephen’s poisoned blood as she could before transfusing four MARYK blood units. She repeated his orders back to him before Maryk underwent a thorough UV exposure and departed B4.
It was dawn and the aboveground halls of Building Seven were empty. He felt better outside the pressure tank of B4. He found an unlocked office and fell into a chair. He dug a sterile syringe out of his black bag. He drew a measure of clear liquid amphetamine out of a small glass ampule and dosed himself with it. He could not afford the energy drain of a cascade just yet.
The jazz started in his head and he stood and rebuckled his bag. The speed would keep him going a few hours more.
Engineering occupied the bottom three floors of Building Four. There was a bright light shining beneath Geist’s office door and Maryk entered and found the BDc’s chief genetic engineer balancing number two pencils eraser-down on his desk. The overhead halogens paled Geist’s already sallow complexion. Each individual bulb was reflected upon his waxy pate. He had lost every strand of his straw blond hair following a substantial radiation exposure some months before. He previously had suffered degenerative kidney and spleen damage and still occasionally set off sensors in the labs.
Geist looked up at Maryk through round wire-rimmed glasses with the ghosts of his blond eyebrows slightly raised. “Dr. Maryk,” he said.
“You know about Pearse.”
Geist was inordinately sedate. “From Bobby Chiles. An absolute shame. You know how much I admired Stephen.”
“Is that the jizz?”
Between the standing pencils and a photograph of an oily black Doberman sporting a blue show ribbon stood a wire rack containing a single glass tube of clear fluid. Dr. Amory Geist was a pioneer in the field of viral therapy. The retroviral antigen was a genetic smart bomb designed to excite Maryk’s killer T cells now roaming Stephen’s veins. The tube was capped and safety-taped.
“I’m going to need a patient consent,” Geist said. He pulled the tube rack closer to his,forest of pencils. “I need a signed consent before I kill somebody. I’d like to know what you’re up to.”
Maryk said, “Straight viral therapy.”
“V.T. isn’t cleared for late-stage catastrophic and you know it. If it’s Plainville, then Stephen Pearse is dead already.”
“He’s laid out on a table over in Seven. His cells are dying off by the millions every hour. How long do you want to chat?”
“I am not one of your errand boys in Special Pathogens.”
Maryk smiled thinly. “I see,” he said.
“And I’m not afraid of you either. I think you know that. My little laboratory mishap relieved me of two things: hope for an average life expectancy; and fear. I don’t believe I fear anything anymore. And still, there are rules that I follow. In our game, the rules are all we have. Stephen stood for that.”
“Get to the point, Geist.”
“I can’t stop you from doing this. Bobby Chiles said to give you the juice, no questions asked. But you called me — that’s the catch. You called me in here in the middle of the night to do your bartending for you.”
“I could have done it myself.”
“Possibly. I don’t doubt it. You’re very capable, even given your disdain for laboratory science. A few days, a week, maybe longer. Here I have it for you in under four hours. Now I want an audience. I want answers.”
“You’re the top geneticist in the country.”
“Flattery,” Geist remarked. “You are desperate, aren’t you?”
“I thought you might like the challenge of helping him.”
Geist sat back. “When you say things like that, I feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck. And I don’t have any hair. Everyone knows how cold-blooded you are, especially Stephen. I would have expected you to be the first to suggest a quality of life action, to relieve his suffering. Instead you want to prolong it. Why?”
“You wouldn’t want to live, Geist? You wouldn’t want me to keep you going, even just a few more hours?”
“I told you before: I have no fear. But even I am a little afraid of Plainville.”
They regarded each other across the desk under the unnaturally bright office. The pause was long but neither one of them grew uncomfortable.
Maryk said, “You’re wondering why I’m still here.”
“I’m thinking you’re enjoying it. Someone finally standing up to you. Because I know I’m not changing your mind. If you’re expecting the ‘You Can’t Play God’ speech, you won’t get it here. I play God every day in that glass bell across the hall. I could twist DNA helixes into origami if the mood struck me. But I don’t. Because I am a benevolent god. May I offer a theory? I think some doctors love humanity while harboring enormous contempt for actual people. And I think you’re one of those — though I may be mistaken about the ‘loving humanity’ part. Why a retrovirus? Why the brain?”
“I took some pictures. I did a lumbar and a cerebrospinal pull; both were clear. The bug hasn’t fully colonized his brain yet.”
“So you’d like a chance at that yourself. Circle the genetic wagons, as it were. You realize this retrovirus will run rampant — invading at high efficiency, shooting its genes into the cells’ chromosomes.”
“Exactly. Only here, you’ve snipped out the virus gene and recoded it with genetic matter from a beneficial source, fighting bad virus with good virus. I can infect one hundred million cells with good, clean cargo in under two hours.”
Geist said, “Transduce.”
“Transduce, infect — whatever.
“Not ‘whatever.’ Viruses infect people; I don’t. It is not an infection because it produces no new viruses. A payload has been transduced.” He sat forward again. “What is this ‘beneficial source’?”
Maryk held Geist’s gaze without answering.
Geist smiled. “This retroviral antigen will soak him with DNA. It will change him. Not physically, but this is another human being’s genetic material. Soup to his brain’s saltine. It’s dangerous, and it won’t hold.”
“It will over a limited period of time.”
“Which is to say, you expect he’ll die before it has the chance. So Stephen Pearse’s survival is not your ultimate goal.”
“He’s too far gone for that.”
Geist looked at Maryk as one might observe the artistry of a spider consuming a fly. “The beneficial genetic source is you.”
“If it were my DNA, you wouldn’t do it.”
Geist smiled broadly. “I’ll do a lot of things, but plucking the hot stuff out of a live virus and exchanging it for your twisted helix is not one of them. Mengele, in his happiest hour, would still have respected nature enough not to infect an unsuspecting brain with Maryk virus.”
“Transduce,” said Maryk.
“Whatever.”
“Are we through lying to each other yet?”
Geist pointed at the shiny tube. “How do you know this isn’t a saline placebo? By the time you figure out it’s not working, Pearse would be out of his misery — and there is nothing you can do to me.”
“Because I have a theory too. My theory is that you’re that other kind of doctor, the bleeding heart kind, and that so long as there is a million-to-one chance Pearse might pull through this thing, you’ll take that chance, because Stephen Pearse is the patron saint of your cause. Because you gods in the laboratory are content to leave the practical decisions of death and life to the foot soldiers such as myself. You work in a greenhouse, Geist. I live in the jungle. Fiat experimentum in corpore vili.”