Acceptable Risk (19 page)

“Let’s use capillary electrophoresis,” Edward said. “If necessary we can go to micellular electrokinetic capillary chromatography.”

“Should I run a crude sample like I did with the mass spec?” Eleanor asked.

“No,” Edward said. “Let’s extract the alkaloids with distilled water and precipitate them with a weak acid. That’s what I did over at the biological labs and it worked fine. We’ll get purer samples, which will make structural work easier.”

Eleanor started toward her bench space, but Edward grabbed her arm. “Before you start on the extraction I want you to do something else,” he said. With no preamble he opened the plumbing supply box and lifted out the mummified head. Eleanor recoiled at the ghoulish sight.

“You could have warned me,” she said.

“I suppose I could have,” Edward said with a laugh. For the first time he looked at the head with a critical eye. It was rather lurid. The skin was dark brown, almost mahogany in color. It had dried to a leathery texture and retracted over the bony prominences, exposing the teeth in a gruesome smile. The hair was dried and matted like steel wool.

“What is it?” Eleanor asked. “An Egyptian mummy?”

Edward told Eleanor the story. He also explained that the reason he’d brought the head to the lab was to see if there was anything in the cranial vault to sample.

“Let me guess,” Eleanor said. “You want to run it through the mass spec.”

“Exactly,” Edward said. “It would be scientifically elegant if we could show peaks corresponding to the new alkaloids. It would be definitive proof that this woman ingested the new mold.”

While Eleanor ran over to the Department of Cell Biology to borrow anatomical dissection instruments, Edward faced the graduate students and assistants who had come in for the day and were nervously biding their time waiting for his attention. He answered all their questions in turn and sent them back to their experiments. By the time he was through, Eleanor was back.

“An anatomy instructor told me we should take the whole calvarium off,” Eleanor said. She held up an electric vibratory saw.

Edward set to work. He reflected the scalp and exposed the skull. Then he took the saw and cut off a skullcap. He and Eleanor looked inside. There wasn’t much. The brain had contracted to a congealed mass in the back of the skull.

“What do you think?” Edward asked. He poked the mass with the tip of a scalpel. It was hard.

“Cut out a piece and I’ll get it to dissolve in something,” Eleanor said.

Edward did as she suggested.

Once they had the sample, they began to try various solvents. Unsure of what they had, they began to introduce them into the mass spectrometer. By the second sample they had a match. Several of the peaks corresponded exactly with those of the new alkaloids in the crude extract that Eleanor had run the night before.

“Isn’t science great?” Edward commented gleefully.

“It’s a turn-on,” Eleanor agreed.

Edward went over to his desk and called Kim’s apartment. As he anticipated, he got the answering machine. After the beep sounded he left a message that for Elizabeth Stewart the devil in Salem had been explained scientifically.

Hanging up the phone, Edward glided back to Eleanor. He was in a rare mood.

“All right, enough of this fooling around,” he said. “Let’s get down to some real science. Let’s see if we can separate these new alkaloids so we can figure out what we have.”

“This is impossible,” Kim said. She pushed the drawer of a file cabinet closed with her hip. She was hot, dusty, and frustrated. After taking Edward to the train station, she’d returned to the attic in the castle and had made a four-hour general inspection from the servants’ wing all the way around to the guest wing. Not only hadn’t she found anything significant, she hadn’t even found any seventeenth-century material at all.

“This is not going to be an easy task,” Kim said. Her eyes scanned the profusion of file cabinets, trunks, boxes, and bureaus that stretched as far as she could see until the attic made a right-hand turn. She was daunted by the sheer volume of material. There was even more in the attic than there was in the wine cellar. And like the wine cellar there was no order in terms of subject matter or chronology. Sequential pages varied as much as a century, and the subject matter bounced back and forth among mercantile data, business records, domestic receipts, official governmental documents, and personal correspondence. The only way to go through it all was page by page.

Confronted by such reality, Kim began to appreciate the good luck she’d had in finding James Flanagan’s 1679 letter to Ronald Stewart that Monday. It had given her the false impression that researching Elizabeth in the castle would be an enjoyable if not easy undertaking.

Finally hunger, exhaustion, and discouragement temporarily overwhelmed Kim’s commitment to discover the nature of the conclusive evidence used against Elizabeth. Badly in need of a shower, Kim descended from the attic and emerged into the late afternoon summer heat. Climbing into the car, she began the trek back to Boston.

Edward’s eyes blinked open after only four hours’ sleep. It was just five a.m. Whenever he got excited about a project, his need for sleep diminished. Just now, he was more excited than he could ever remember being. His scientific intuition was telling him that he’d stumbled onto something really big, and his scientific intuition had never failed him.

Leaping out of bed, Edward set Buffer into a paroxysm of barking. The poor dog thought there was a life-threatening emergency. Edward had to give him a light swat to bring him to his senses.

After speeding through his morning ritual, which included taking Buffer for a short walk, Edward drove to his lab. It was before seven when he entered, and Eleanor was already there.

“I’m having trouble sleeping,” she admitted. Her usually carefully combed long blond hair was in mild disarray.

“Me too,” Edward said.

They had worked Saturday night until one a.m. and all day Sunday. With success in sight, Edward had even begged off plans to see Kim Sunday evening. When he’d explained to her how close he and Eleanor were to their goal, Kim had been understanding.

Finally, just after midnight Sunday, Edward and Eleanor had perfected a separation technique. The difficulties had been mostly due to the fact that two of the alkaloids shared many physical properties. Now all they needed was more material, and as if an answer to a prayer, Kevin Scranton had called saying that he’d be sending over another batch of sclerotia that morning.

“I want everything to be ready when the material arrives,” Edward said.

“Aye, aye,” Eleanor said as she clicked her heels and made a playful salute. Edward tried to swat her on the top of her head but she was much more agile than he.

After they had been feverishly working for more than an hour, Eleanor tapped Edward on the arm.

“Are you intentionally ignoring your flock?” she asked quietly while motioning over her shoulder.

Edward straightened up and glanced around at the students who were milling aimlessly about, waiting for him to acknowledge them. He hadn’t been aware of their presence. The group had been gradually enlarging as more and more people arrived at the lab. They all had their usual questions and were in need of his advice.

“Listen!” Edward called out. “You’re on your own today. I’m tied up. I’m busy with a project that can’t wait.”

With some grumblings the crowd reluctantly dispersed. Edward did not notice their reaction. He went right back to work, and when he worked, his powers of concentration were legendary.

A few minutes later Eleanor again tapped his arm. “I hate to be a bother,” she said, “but what about your nine o’clock lecture?”

“Damn!” Edward said. “I’d conveniently forgotten that. Find Ralph Carter and send him over.” Ralph Carter was one of the senior assistants.

Within a short time Ralph appeared. He was a thin, bearded fellow with a surprisingly broad red-cheeked face.

“I want you to take over teaching the basic biochem summer course,” Edward said.

“For how long?” Ralph asked. He was obviously not enthused.

“I’ll let you know,” Edward said.

After Ralph had left, Edward turned to Eleanor. “I hate that kind of passive-aggressive nonsense. It’s the first time I’ve ever asked anyone to stand in for me for basic chemistry.”

“That’s because no one else has your commitment to teaching undergraduates,” Eleanor explained.

As promised, the sclerotia arrived just after nine. They came in a small glass jar. Edward unscrewed the lid and carefully spread the dark, ricelike grains onto a piece of filter paper as if they were gold nuggets.

“Kinda ugly little things,” Eleanor said. “They could almost be mouse droppings.”

“I like to think they look more like seeds in rye bread,” Edward said. “It’s a more historically significant metaphor.”

“Are you ready to get to work?” Eleanor asked.

“Let’s do it,” Edward said.

Before noon Edward and Eleanor had succeeded in producing a tiny amount of each alkaloid. The samples were in the bases of small, conical-shaped test tubes labeled A, B, and C. Outwardly the alkaloids appeared identical. They were all a white powder.

“What’s the next step?” Eleanor asked as she held up one of the test tubes to the light.

“We have to find out which are psychoactive,” Edward said. “Once we find out which ones are, we’ll concentrate on them.”

“What should we use for a test?” Eleanor asked. “I suppose we could use Aplasia fasciata ganglia preparations. They would certainly tell us which ones are neuroactive.”

Edward shook his head. “It’s not good enough,” he said. “I want to know which ones cause hallucinogenic reactions, and I want quick answers. For that we need a human cerebrum.”

“We can’t use paid volunteers!” Eleanor said with consternation. “That would be flagrantly unethical.”

“You are right,” Edward said. “But I have no intention of using paid volunteers. I think you and I will do fine.”

“I’m not sure I want to be involved in this,” Eleanor said dubiously. She was beginning to get the drift of Edward’s intentions.

“Excuse me!” called another voice. Edward and Eleanor turned to see Cindy, one of the departmental secretaries. “I hate to interrupt, Dr. Armstrong, but a Dr. Stanton Lewis is in the office, and he’d like a word with you.”

“Tell him I’m busy,” Edward said. But as soon as Cindy started back toward the office, Edward called her back. “On second thought,” he said, “send him in.”

“I don’t like that twinkle in your eye,” Eleanor said as they waited for Stanton to appear.

“It’s perfectly innocent,” Edward said with a smile. “Of course if Mr. Lewis would like to become a principal investigator in this study I won’t stand in his way. Seriously, though, I do want to talk to him about what we are doing here.”

Stanton breezed into the lab with his usual glib hellos. He was particularly pleased to get Edward and Eleanor together.

“My two favorite people,” he said, “but for different parts of my brain.” He laughed at what he thought was an off-color joke. Eleanor proved to be faster than he when she said she’d not known he’d changed his sexual orientation.

“What are you talking about?” Stanton asked. He was genuinely perplexed.

“Simply that I’m confident you are attracted to me because of my intellect,” Eleanor said. “That leaves your instinctual brain for Edward.”

Edward chortled. Repartee was Stanton’s forte, and Edward had never seen him bested. Stanton laughed as well and assured Eleanor that her wit had always blinded him to any of her other charms.

Stanton then turned to Edward. “All right,” he said. “Fun and games are over. What’s the story on the Genetrix prospectus?”

“I haven’t had a chance to look at it,” Edward admitted.

“You promised,” Stanton warned. “Am I going to have to tell my cousin she’s not to see you anymore because you’re not to be trusted?”

“Who’s this cousin?” Eleanor asked, giving Edward "a gentle poke in the ribs.

Edward’s face blushed with color. Rarely did his mild stutter affect his speech in the lab, but it did at that moment. He did not want to discuss Kim. “I haven’t had time for any reading,” he told Stanton with some difficulty. “Something has come up that might particularly interest you.”

“This better be good,” Stanton teased. He slapped Edward on the back and told him he was only kidding about Kim. “I would never interfere with you two love doves. I heard from my aunt that old man Stewart surprised you two up in Salem. I hope it wasn’t flagrante delicto, you old rogue.”

Edward coughed nervously while he motioned for Stan-ton to pull up a chair. He then quickly changed the subject by launching into the story about the new fungus and the new alkaloids. He told Stanton that at least one of them was psychotropic, and he told him exactly how he knew. He even handed Stanton the three test tubes, saying they’d just finished isolating the new compounds.

“Quite a story,” Stanton said. He put the test tubes down on the counter. “But why did you think it might interest me in particular? I’m a practical guy. I’m not titillated by esoteric exotica which you academics thrive on.”

“I think these alkaloids could have a practical payoff,” Edward said. “We could be on the brink of finding a whole new group of psychotropic drugs which at the very least will have research applications.”

Stanton visibly straightened up in his seat. The casual air that he affected vanished. “New drugs?” he questioned. “This does sound interesting. What do you think the possibilities are they might be clinically useful?”

“I think the chances are excellent,” Edward said. “Especially considering the molecular modification techniques which are now available in modern synthetic chemistry. Also, after the psychedelic episode with the crude extract, I felt strangely energized and my mind seemed especially clear. I believe these drugs might be more than merely hallucinogenic.”

“Oh, my goodness!” Stanton exclaimed. His entrepreneurial proclivity had quickened his pulse. “This could be something huge.”

“That’s what we have been thinking,” Edward said.