he managed.
He couldn’t seem to draw air into his lungs properly, and gasped. Sweet cool air flooded in; he gasped again, but this time it was harder to suck in a breath. He swayed on the chair.
“Get him on the floor, guys,” he heard Dr. Al say, then felt himself laid supine, a loosely rolled coat behind his head. Markoff was ripping open the buttons on his shirt and barking at someone: “Call an ambulance—resuscitation emergency. Max, tell Muse to give you my bag.”
Nauseated, he retched, tried to vomit, but nothing came up, and now he just felt sick, didn’t have the strength to retch. His teeth chattered, he was appalled to find his whole body invaded by a fine tremor. Then came an almighty, convulsive jerk, as if it were happening to someone else—why was he so aware of everything that was going on? Not in a disembodied way—that he could have borne, to hover looking down on himself. But still to be inside himself going through it was awful!
All that became as nothing compared to his struggle to breathe, an ever-increasing impossibility that flung him into a terror he had no way to show beyond the look in his eyes. I am dying, but I can’t tell them! They don’t know, they’ll let me die! I need air, I need air! Air! Air!
“Heartbeat’s weak rather than suspiciously irregular, it isn’t a primary cardiac catastrophe,” Dr. Al was saying, “but his airway is still patent. Shouldn’t have this gear with me, except that I borrowed it for a refresher course in emergency medicine … Gotta keep up with the times … I’ll intubate and bag breathe.”
And while he talked he worked, one of those odd people who like to do both simultaneously. With the first puff of oxygen into his lungs, John knew through his mania that he could not have had a better man treating him if it had gone down in the ER itself. For perhaps six or seven blissful breaths he thought he’d beaten whatever it was, but then the gas bag and the strong pressure on it couldn’t force his air passages to inflate, even passively.
Inside his head he was screaming, screaming, screaming a blind, utter panic. No thoughts of the life he had lived or any life to come intruded for as long as the width of a photon; no heaven, no hell, just the horrifying presence of imminent death, and he so alive, awake, forced to endure to the last, bitterest … In his eyes an electrified terror, in his mind a scream.
John Hall died eleven minutes after he started feeling hot. Dr. Al Markoff knelt to one side of him fighting to keep him alive, Dr. Jim Hunter knelt to his other side holding his hand for comfort. But life was gone, and of comfort there was none.
PART ONE
From
THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 1969
until
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8, 1969
THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 1969
“Daddy, what’s the procedure when I’m missing a toxin?”
Patrick O’Donnell’s startled blue eyes flew to his daughter’s face, expecting to see it laughing at having successfully pulled Daddy’s leg. But it was frowning, troubled. He gave her a mug of coffee. “It depends, honey,” he said calmly. “What toxin?”
“A really nasty one—tetrodotoxin.”
Holloman County’s Medical Examiner looked blank. “You’ll have to be more specific, Millie. I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s a neurotoxin that blocks nerve transmission by acting on the pores of the voltage-gated, fast sodium channels of the cell membrane—or, in simpler words, it shuts the nervous system down. Very nasty! That’s what makes it so interesting experimentally, though I’m not interested in it per se. I use it as a tool.” Her blue eyes, so like his, gazed at him imploringly.
“Where did you get it from, Millie?”
“I isolated it myself from its source—the blowfish. Such a cute little critter! Looks like a puppy you’d just love to hug to death. But don’t eat it, especially its liver.” She was perking up, sipping the coffee with enjoyment now. “How do you manage to make a good brew in this godawful building? Carmine’s coffee sucks.”
“I pay for it myself and severely limit those invited to drink it. Okay, you’ve jogged my memory cells. I have heard of tetrodotoxin, but only in papers, and in passing. So you actually isolated it yourself?”
“Yes.” She stopped again.
“I’ll do a Carmine: expatiate.”
“Well, I had a tank of blowfish, and it seemed a shame to waste all those livers and other rich bits, so I kept on going and wound up with about a gram of it. If taken by mouth, enough to kill ten heavyweight boxers. When I finished my experimental run I sealed the six hundred milligrams I had left over in glass ampoules, one hundred milligrams to each, slapped a poison sticker on the beaker holding the six ampoules, and put it in the back of my refrigerator with the three-molar KC1 and stuff,” said Millie.
“Don’t you lock the refrigerator?”
“Why? It’s mine, and my little lab. My grant doesn’t run to a technician—I’m not Jim, surrounded by acolytes.” She held out her mug for more coffee. “I lock my lab door when I’m not in it. I’m as paranoid as any other researcher, I don’t advertise my work. And I’m post-doctoral, so there’s no thesis adviser looking over my shoulder. I would have thought that no one even knew I had any tetrodotoxin.” Her face cleared, grew soft. “Except for Jim, that is. I mentioned it in passing to him, but he’s not into neurotoxins. His idea of soup is E. coli.”
“Any idea when it disappeared, sweetheart?”
“During the last week. I did a stocktake of my refrigerator on Christmas Eve, and the beaker was there. When I did another stocktake this morning, no beaker anywhere—and believe me, Dad, I looked high and low. The thing is, I don’t know what to do about losing it. It didn’t seem like something Dean Werther is equipped to deal with. I thought of you.”
“Reporting to me is fine, Millie. I’ll notify Carmine, but only as a courtesy. It can’t be equated with someone’s stealing a jar of potassium cyanide—that would galvanize everybody.” Patrick gave a rueful grin. “However, my girl, it’s time to shut the stable door. Put a lock on your refrigerator and make sure you have the only key.”
He leaned to take her hand, long and graceful, but marred by bitten nails and general lack of care. “Honey, where you did go wrong was in keeping what you didn’t use up. You should have disposed of it as a toxic substance.”
She flushed. “No, I don’t agree,” she said, looking mulish. “The extraction process is difficult, painstaking and extremely slow—a lesser biochemist would have botched it. I’m no Jim, but in my lab techniques I’m way above your run-of-the-mill researcher. At some time in the future I might need the leftover tetrodotoxin, and if I don’t, I can legitimately sell it to get my investment in the blowfish back. My grant committee would love that. I’ve stored it under vacuum in sealed glass ampoules, then
