“Seems fine,” Jim said. “Kind of quiet.” He ran a large hand through his stubble hair. “We don’t see much of you and Annie lately.”
“Lousy hours. Yours and mine. I hope you can make it on Friday.”
“Friday?”
“Friday night. A little get-together. I called about it last week.”
“Yeah, of course. I’m sorry, Matt. Yeah, we’ll try to be here.” Matt said, “You look punch-drunk.” No argument. “Is it that serious?” A nod.
“Then you better tell me about it. And drink your damn coffee before it gets cold.”
“Something’s fucked up at the hospital,” Jim said, “and nobody wants to listen to me.”
It had all happened, he said, very quickly.
It started earlier in the week. He took a couple of complaints from the staff doctors that hematology results were coming back funny. Standard tests: Smack 24s, red counts, white counts. Patients with borderline anemia were showing radically low hemoglobin totals, for instance.
New blood was drawn, new tests ordered, and he promised to oversee the results personally.
“Everything was kosher. I made sure of it. But the results… were worse. 7’
Matt said, “Significantly worse?”
“I couldn’t go to staff with these numbers. What was I supposed to say? I’m sorry, Doctor, but according to the lab your patient is dead. When the patient is actually sitting in the dayroom watching Days of Our Lives. And the bad thing is, it’s not just a few samples now—now everything is coming up fucked. Hematology, hemostasis, immune response, blood typing. Suddenly we can’t run any kind of blood assay without getting completely Martian numbers out of it.”
“A lab problem,” Matt said.
“Can you think of any kind of problem that would screw up all these results? Neither could I. But I thought about it. I talked to the chief resident, and he agreed we should farm out the most urgent tests to other labs until we track down the problem. Okay, we do that. This was a couple of days ago. We start looking at everything. Some weird contamination coming through the air ducts. Bad sterilization. Voltage spikes on the A.C. lines. We clean it all up. We try some basic tests on a sample of whole blood from the freezer. And everything comes out within reasonable limits.”
“So far so good.”
“Exactly. But I’m not entirely convinced. So we draw some fresh blood from a healthy donor, and we put it through the cell counts, hemoglobin counts, reticulocyte counts—plasma fibrinogen, platelet counts, one-stage assays—”
“And it comes up fucked,” Matt guessed.
“It not only comes up fucked,” Jim said, “it comes up so completely fucked that we might as well have been running tests on a glass of tepid well water.”
Matt felt a touch of fear, as tentative as a cold hand stroking the back of his neck.
If there was some new pathology out there, and if it was common enough to be manifesting in all of Jim’s blood samples… but why hadn’t anyone else seen it? “What about the tests you farmed out?”
“They’re not back. We phone the private labs. They’re sorry, but the results don’t seem quite… plausible. They want to know if the samples were damaged in some way, maybe contaminated in transit. Meanwhile, the chief resident gets a call from the hospital in Astoria. Are we having blood-count problems? Because they are. And so is Portland.”
“Jesus,” Matt said.
“That’s the situation this morning. Everybody’s going crazy, of course. Phone lines to the CDC are jammed. This afternoon, I take some fresh blood and I put it under a microscope. Has anything changed? Well, yeah. Suddenly there’s foreign bodies there. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
Matt put aside his coffee cup, which had grown cold in his hands. “Foreign bodies? What—viral bodies? Bacteria?”
“On a slide they look kind of like platelets. Roughly that dimension.”
“You’re sure you’re not looking at platelets? Maybe deformed in some way?”
“I’m not that stupid. They don’t aggregate. They stain differently—”
“I’m not questioning your competence.”
“Fuck, go ahead. I would, in your place. The weird thing is that these organisms weren’t there the day before. I mean, do they reproduce that fast? Or what, were they hiding?”
“It’s just so bizarre. If you were looking at blood from patients with a common pathology, okay, but—the patients are healthy?”
“Far as I can tell, the condition is not making anyone particularly sick.”
“How could it not? White counts are low?”
“White counts are missing.”
“This is ludicrous.”
“Obviously! I know that! I’ve been reminded of it at great length. If you want me to make sense of it for you, I can’t.”
“But it’s harmless?”
“I’m not saying that. I’m not saying that at all. It’s an ongoing situation. It scares the shit out of me, actually. You know what I notice? Everybody I run into seems to have a case of the sniffles. You see that in your work, Matt? Nothing serious. But everybody, every individual. Walk into a crowded room and count the Kleenex. Check out a drugstore. Big run on OTC decongestants. My pharmacist says he can’t keep aspirin in stock. Is this a coincidence?”
Matt said, “Well, Christ—I’ve got a bottle of Dristan half-empty in the bathroom cupboard.”
“Uh-huh,” Jim said. “Me too.”
Annie had been sniffling at work. And Lillian, come to that. Beth Porter.
And Rachel. My God, he thought. Rachel.
The two men looked at each other in the sudden silence of shared fears. Matt said, “What do you want?”
“I just want to talk. Everybody I talk to at the hospital, everybody on staff—either they want a quick fix or they just don’t want to know, period. And I want us to drink. Not this fucking coffee, either.”
“I’ll break out a bottle,” Matt said.
“Thank you.” Jim seemed to relax minutely. “You know why I really came here?”
“Why?”
“Because there are very few sane people on this planet. And you happen to be one of them.”
“You got a head start drinking?”
“I mean it. I always thought that about you. Matt Wheeler, one sane individual. Never said it. Why wait?”
Why wait? This was more of an admission than he might have intended. Matt did not pause on his way to the liquor cabinet, but he asked, as casually as he could manage, “You think we’re all dying?”
“It’s a possibility,” Jim Bix said.
They talked it through several rounds of drinks, covering the same territory, deciding nothing, speculating, probing, perhaps, the limits of each other’s credulity. It was Jim, drunk and tired, who first used the word “machines.”
Matt thought he’d misunderstood. “Machines?”
“You’ve heard of nanotechnology? They move around atoms, make little gears and levers and things? They can do that now.”
“You have some reason to think that’s what you’re looking at?”
“Who knows? It doesn’t look like a machine, but it doesn’t look like a cell, either. Looks kind of like a spiky black ball bearing. There’s no nucleus, no mitochondria, no internal structure I can look at with the equipment at the hospital. I wonder what a good research lab would find if they took one apart.” He showed a thin smile. “Gears and levers. Betcha. Or little computers. Little subatomic integrated circuits. Running algorithms on nucleotides. Or something we can’t even see. Circuits smaller than the orbit of an electron. Machines made out of neutrinos. Held together with gluons.”