Michael could see that the light had gone on in Murphy’s head. He just had to press ahead convincingly with his case.
“Eleanor and Sinclair may not be able to leave the Point as passengers on that plane, but they can leave as cargo. Just use some of that bureaucratic pull you’ve got to book me—and them—back to Santiago, and from there on to Florida.”
There was a silence in the room, punctuated only by the ticking of the clock. Finally, Murphy broke it by saying, “But it’s a nine-hour flight just from Santiago to Miami. They’ll die in transit.”
“Why would they?” Michael said. “They’ve suffered far worse. Try a century of suspended animation. If they could live through that, this would be a piece of cake.”
“It’s different now,” Murphy countered. “They’re alive and kicking, and they’ve got a big problem that you seem to be conveniently forgetting.”
“That’s what I was trying to address,” Darryl said, “before I was so rudely interrupted.”
Michael slumped in his chair, more than happy to have someone else carry the ball a few yards downfield. But he quickly realized that Darryl wasn’t looking for a first down; he was heading straight for the end zone. After proudly describing some of his laboratory breakthroughs with the Cryothenia hirschii, he strongly hinted that he might have found a cure—“or at least as close as we’re going to come to one”—for the disease afflicting both Eleanor and Sinclair. If Michael understood him correctly, he was suggesting that he could extract the antifreeze glycoproteins from his fish specimens and transfuse them into the humans’ bloodstream. Doing so apparently allowed the blood to carry oxygen and nutrients without constantly needing to be replenished by foreign supplies of hemoglobin. It seemed irrational, it seemed insane, it even seemed impossible—but it was also the first, and only, slender thread on which Michael could hang any hope. Michael would take it.
“It all sounds pretty cockamamie to me,” Murphy said, “but I’m not the scientist here. How do you know it would work?”
“I don’t,” Darryl replied. “So far, the recombinant blood has been tolerated by the fish. But as for Eleanor and Sinclair, that’s another question.”
And there wasn’t time, Michael reflected, to do any trial runs.
“But you’ve got to remember,” Darryl reiterated, in portentous tones, “they’re going to wind up in the same predicament my fish are. If their tissue touches ice, they’re goners.”
For the next half hour, the three of them debated and discussed how all the elements of the scheme might work. Murphy, by his own admission, had not been dutifully recording all the events of the day in the NSF logbooks—“I just couldn’t find the right way to explain how corpses were coming back to life”—and he was particularly worried about what Michael had already told his editor. Michael assured him that he had already unwound that knot—“though it means I may never be trusted with another decent assignment for the rest of my days”—and they called a halt only when a conference call about the oncoming storm came in from McMurdo Station. Murphy waved them out of his office as he recited the barometric pressure readings recorded at Point Adélie in the past twenty-four hours.
In the hall outside, Michael and Darryl stopped to take a breath and contemplate everything that had just been said. Michael was so on edge he felt like he had electric current running through his veins.
“So, this transfusion,” he said. “How soon can you try it?”
“I just need another hour or two in the lab. Then I’ll have the serum ready.”
“But we’re surrounded by ice,” Michael said, still fearful.
“Which they’re never going to touch. They’re going straight from the infirmary and the meat locker into the body bags. What’s the alternative? You plan to oversee the procedure on your own, in Miami?”
That, Michael knew, would never work.
“If they’re going to have a bad reaction,” Darryl went on, “we’d better know it now, before they’re zipped into the bags and shipped out.”
“Eleanor first?”
“Sure,” Darryl said. “From what I know of Sinclair, he may need more in the way of persuading.”
Darryl was already turning away, when Michael took his elbow to stop him. “You think it will work?” he said. “You think Eleanor will be cured?”
Darryl hesitated, as if weighing his words carefully, then said, “If all goes well, I think that Eleanor—and Sinclair—will be able to live reasonably normal lives.” He held Michael’s gaze, as Murphy had earlier held his, and added, “But that’s only if you consider living like a snake, who has to warm itself by lying in the sun, to be normal. With the help of an occasional booster shot, Eleanor will no longer feel the need she does now. But she will carry this contagion to the end of her days.”
The words weighed like stones on Michael’s heart.