UNTIL HE’D GOTTEN SIDETRACKED by that blood sample Charlotte gave him, Darryl thought, things had been going great.
He’d been hard at work on the blood and tissue samples from the Cryothenia hirschii—the discovery on which he was going to make his scientific reputation—and the preliminary results were remarkable: The blood from the fish was not only entirely hemoglobin-free, but also mysteriously low in the antifreeze glycoproteins he had been studying. In other words, this species could thrive in the frigid waters of the Antarctic Sea, but only so long as it remained extremely careful. It had even less protection against the ice than all the other species he had studied—a mere touch of actual ice could propagate across its body like lightning and flash-freeze it on the spot. Perhaps that was why he had discovered the first one—and the two others now swimming in the aquarium tank—relatively close to shore, and hovering near the warm current from one of the camp’s outflow pipes. Or maybe they had just liked the shafts of sunlight, dim as they were, that had been admitted to the depths by the dive hut holes. Whatever the reason, he was grateful to have them.
He was reveling in all the new data, which made his find increasingly distinctive and newsworthy, when he remembered the favor he had promised Charlotte. He fished the sample out of the fridge and noticed then that the label had only initials on it—E.A.—and no name. He quickly ran through the beakers in his mind, but none of them had those initials. So it had to be from one of the grunts; he wasn’t familiar with a few of them, and a couple just went by nicknames like Moose or T-bone. The other thing Charlotte hadn’t given him was any specific instructions on what he should be testing for, and that was more than a little irritating. Didn’t she know he had his own work to do?
Fortunately, the marine biology lab was provided with everything a hematologist could ask for, from state-of-the-art autocrits to a high-volume analyzer that could incorporate monoclonal assays, fluorescent staining, and advanced optical platelet readings in pretty much one fell swoop. He ran the whole battery of tests, from ala-nine aminotransferase to triglycerides and everything in between, and while he’d expected to simply shoot the results back to Charlotte, he had to stop when he read through the printouts. Nothing in them was making any sense, and in some respects he could just as well have been looking at the results from one of his marine samples. While a normal cubic millimeter of human blood contained an average of 5 million red blood cells and seven thousand white, this sample was nearly reversed. If the results were right, Charlotte’s patient made his newly discovered fish look positively red-blooded and vital.
That convinced him that the results couldn’t be right, or that he had somehow inadvertently mixed up the samples. Jeez, he thought, maybe you’re getting the Big Eye and don’t even know it. He’d have to ask Michael for a reality check. But just to see if the equipment was functioning properly, he ran a sample of his own blood, and it came back fine. (His cholesterol, he was happy to see, was even lower than usual.) With what was left of the E.A. sample, he ran the tests again…and got back the same results as before.
If this was human blood, the toxicity levels alone should have killed the patient off in a heartbeat.
Maybe, he considered, he had to get out of the laboratory for a while and clear his head. Ever since his last visit to the dive hut—where Danzig had nearly drowned him—he’d been holed up in his room or the lab. His scalp and ears still itched from frost nip, and as a precaution he’d been taking blood thinner and a course of antibiotics. At the South Pole, inattention to the slightest thing—a blue spot on your toes, a burning sensation at the tips of your fingers—could wind up costing you a limb…or even your life. Nor had the relentlessly bad weather made outdoor activities any easier; he wondered, as he stuffed the lab printouts into the pockets of his parka, how the Point Adélie personnel who “winter-overed,” as it was called, managed to survive. Six months of foul weather was bad enough, but six months of foul weather with no sun was hardly conceivable.