“No, no, not those,” Darryl said. “Those were the failures. Look at the Cryothenia hirschii and the other antifreeze fish—the ones that are languishing quite comfortably at the bottom of the tank.”
Charlotte craned her neck forward, and she could see the pale, almost translucent, fish, some nearly three feet long, their gills beating slowly in the salt water. “Okay, I see them,” she said, still unimpressed. “So what?”
“Those fish may be Eleanor Ames’s salvation.”
Now Charlotte was interested.
“I’ve mixed their blood with samples of hers, and some of them in the tank are carrying the hybridized blood in their veins right now.” He grinned at Charlotte, his spiky red hair electric with discovery. “And as you can see, they’re doing fine.”
“But Eleanor’s not a fish,” Charlotte said.
“I’m aware of that. But what’s sauce for the goose…” he said, beckoning Charlotte over to the lab table, where the microscope was set up and a slide had already been inserted. The video monitor displayed another highly magnified picture of platelets and blood cells, the kind of thing that transported Charlotte back to her med-school classes.
“You’re looking at a droplet of concentrated, hemoglobin-rich plasma,” he said, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. “My own, in fact.”
Charlotte could see the red blood cells, pale pink in color, with little white spots in the center of each circle.
“Now, watch what happens.”
Darryl bent low over the microscope and opened the slide tray. The video monitor went blank. With a syringe he deposited a tiny drop onto the slide, gently wiped it, and replaced it on the stage. “Normally, I’d fix it properly, but we haven’t got time.” He adjusted the view, and the image on the monitor returned.
And apart from the introduction of more leukocytes—the white cells responsible for defending an organism against disease and infection, along with some companion phagocytes—everything appeared the same. The white cells, larger and more lopsided, actively roamed around, as they were supposed to do, in search of bacteria and foreign agents.
“Okay,” Charlotte said, “now we’ve got a more even mix. What did you just add?”
“A drop of Eleanor’s first blood sample. Watch what happens.”
For a few seconds, nothing did. And then all hell broke loose. The white cells, with no bacteria to destroy, began to surround and attack the red, oxygen-bearing cells instead, gobbling them up until none were left. It was a wholesale slaughter. And no warm-blooded organism, Charlotte knew, could survive very long with the kind of blood supply that was left.
Charlotte looked over at Darryl in shock, who simply said, “I know. But watch this.”
Again, he swiveled the slide tray, and used another syringe to take a sample from one of the many glass vials on the counter—the masking tape on that one, Charlotte noted, was labeled AFGP-5—and then altered the original slide again.
The picture on the video, which had been reduced to a wildly heaving mass of white cells and phagocytes scavenging for further prey, gradually calmed down, like a sea after the storm had passed. Another element had intruded, and those particles moved like ships sailing on the now becalmed waters.
Unattacked.
“Those are the glycoproteins,” Darryl said, without waiting for Charlotte to ask, “from the Cryothenia specimens. Antifreeze glycoproteins—AFGP, for short. They’re the natural proteins that bind to any ice crystals in the bloodstream, immediately arresting their growth. In the fish, they circulate like the oxygen does, within the plasma itself. It’s a very neat evolutionary trick, and one that might save Eleanor’s life.”
“How?”
“If she could tolerate its periodic ingestion—and her blood counts look like she could tolerate anything short of strychnine—she could live a fairly normal life.”
“Where?” Charlotte said. “At the bottom of the ocean?”
“No,” Darryl said, patiently, “right here. Anywhere. She wouldn’t need red cells and hemoglobin any more than the fish do. But there would be a couple of caveats,” he added, with a helpless shrug. “For one, she’d essentially be a cold-blooded creature, only able to warm herself from external sources—the way, say, that a snake does, by lying in the sun.”
Charlotte shuddered at the thought.
“And the second poses a more immediate threat.”
“It’s worse?”
“You be the judge.” Darryl picked up a clean slide, rubbed it vigorously against the dry skin on the back of Charlotte’s hand, then put it under the microscope. The living and dead cells appeared on the video monitor. Then, he added a drop of the AFGP-5. Nothing happened; it was a picture of peaceful coexistence.
“This is a good sign?” Charlotte asked, glancing over at Darryl.