Let Them Eat Tea

by Coleman Maskell

  Chapter 16 - Back at the Lab

  Back at home in his lab in Soufriere, Baldwin sits looking intently into a microscope. He's spent most of the night experimenting with the plant compounds he obtained from the smaller island. The sun is starting to come up, but he hasn't noticed it yet. Almost a week after their island expedition, he still spends nearly every waking moment in this lab, sorting through information, running experiments, looking for answers, trying to put together both a vaccination and a cure that can be distributed in a stable, standardized, reliable form. His mind is filled with it during the day, and at night it fills his dreams, until his entire being seems to merge with the problem he's trying to solve.

  Zeph comes into Buddy's lab without knocking, carrying a small case of sample containers. Glancing around the big room, he notices some small plants Baldwin has already started growing from the seeds they brought back. The little plants sit perched in their little pots on the windowsill facing the morning sun, baby shoots nudging upwards from under little blankets of dark earth. The larger samples are now neatly potted and stand in the windowsills beside the babies. They've already tripled in size, in just a few days. He marvels at how different they look here in the lab, like ordinary houseplants.

  After a while Baldwin looks up from his microscope and sees his friend in the room, holding something. "What's that?" he asks, curious.

  "Oh, these. Yeah. Remember my niece Katrina? The one who phoned me when we were on the island? She sent me these. Well, Doug brought them out to me on his yacht. Nice guy Doug. Anyway, these are samples I'd like you to run."

  "Samples from what?" Baldwin asks. Taking the sample case, he opens it and looks inside.

  "She, uh, she's read about the little epidemic you're interested in. The sudden onset insanity. Thing is, she's convinced her boyfriend is afflicted."

  Baldwin smiles and shakes his head slightly, almost laughing.

  "Difficult to quantify what constitutes irrational behavior in a mate," Baldwin observes aloud. "It tends to be a bit on the subjective side."

  "Yeah," Zeph mutters, nodding but not laughing. "The thing is, his behavior has changed radically in the last few months. She's my niece, but she's more like a little sister really. We've been close since we were kids. She looks up to me. I'm Uncle Zeph who can fix anything."

  Baldwin exhales abruptly in a cynical chuckle.

  "They're college kids," Zeph continues. "In the sciences. Grad students. They're not given to irrational behavior. Neither one of them. I met the boyfriend once, Charlie his name is, about a year ago. He seemed normal enough when I met him. Well, for a scientist. Sharp guy too. He'd landed a Research Assistant gig at the University, and he was just starting work on an interesting project. Had everything going for him, and everything he needed to keep going. Dedicated to science. Wouldn't have known politics from astrology. Dedicated to Kat too; A storybook couple. But now she says he's all whacked out on some political nonsense. Wants to drop out of graduate school and campaign fulltime for some crazy issue or something."

  They both laugh.

  "Well, there's no shortage of crazy political causes going," Baldwin allows, taking out one of the sample jars and examining the neatly printed label. He sets it down and takes out another, looking at the label in the same way. "Neat handwriting," he observes.

  "Yeah, she's a peach. Good at origami too. She can even cook. I hate to see her having trouble like this. She really sounded pretty upset. And Kat's not usually emotional. I've never seen her like this before." He stops talking for a minute to gather his thoughts about the girl.

  "She's not all that much younger than me, you know? Almost like a little sister," he continues, not realizing he's repeating himself. "I've known her forever. She's not just making this stuff up, Al. There's a problem of some kind."

  After another reflective pause he adds, "Could be he's just gone psychotic, of course. It happens."

  Buddy chuckles again at the last remark and nods, agreeing to run the samples. "Reminds me a bit of that case from Florida, I have to admit."

  "I do have to point out one thing though," he adds hesitantly, staring at the label on the sample jar in his hand, not wanting to disappoint his friend. He looks up at Zeph and waits for Zeph to look over at him, then holds his gaze steady while continuing. "Listen, Zeph, we don't really have a deliverable cure yet. I don't know how much we can do for the girl even if we find evidence of the disease in the samples." He waits for that to sink in before continuing. "What do we say to her if the samples test positive?"

  After a few seconds he answers his own question. "Yes, your boyfriend's nuts and he's probably going to die," he jokes in the way scientists joke. "Have a nice day, apart from that. Try to stay out of the way if his head explodes."

  The two men laugh together, then turn serious again.

  "I can go back to the island and try to beg some more plants from the old man, if that's what I need to do," Zeph suggests. "Get him to grind up some more instant tea."

  "Might do," Baldwin agrees and shrugs. "but you don't really need to," he adds.

  "If we have something ready to test," Baldwin allows, thinking it out as he talks, "and if she's volunteering her boyfriend for the first clinical trial . . . and if there's evidence of infection in the samples she sent, then sure, I'm game for sending her the doses she'll need. It's an informal clinical trial for me and it might help her."

  "Or if you just want to take a chance on unstandardized doses of instant tea powder," he continues after thinking about the possibilities again, "we still have a bunch of that powder Azacca ground up for us. We can just send her some of that. When is Doug planning to go back?"

  Without waiting for an answer from Zeph, he continues again, still thinking it out as he goes. "I can put measured doses into gelatin capsules. If Doug's in a hurry I could just empty out a tea jar and fill it with the stuff. She probably wouldn't need a lot of it." He stops and evaluates the situation, then adds the downside. "We don't really know what the shelf life is once it's ground up and mixed," he points out the problem. "The active ingredients might be stable, or they might be volatile. That's the main problem with the instant tea approach. The ingredients might need to be freshly prepared within a few days of consumption. We just don't know enough yet. I need to run more tests."

  "Do you have something ready to test on people?" Zeph asks hopefully, ignoring all the stream of consciousness caveats and what ifs.

  "Depending what you mean by ready," Baldwin answers. "It definitely kills the parasite in a tissue sample in a Petrie dish."

  He shrugs again, looks off to the left at nothing and back again, looks down, then looks at the nothing on his right, sighs and turns his head back to look his friend in the eyes.

  "Somebody has to be the first test subject," he finally announces, looking at Zeph evenly. "It may as well be Charlie, assuming he actually is infected. If so, then he'll eventually die if left untreated, so we can't really hurt him any by trying it."

  "But you're not really ready by generally accepted standards," Zeph restates the position.

  "Not by rigorous standards, not even close," Baldwin agrees. "I was hoping to file a request for a hospital trial in a few days, optimistically."

  "Okay, so let's do it now," Zeph agrees to the nonrigorous terms on offer. "If you have something reasonably standardized and stable that you're willing to send, let's send her that. Otherwise the tea powder and crossed fingers."

  "Okay, give me a day to run the samples and another day after that to put something together for her. If Doug is willing to hang around St. Lucy for a couple of days, you can arrange for him to pick up your niece's souvenir of St. Lucy the morning after next, if the samples test positive. It's a nice place, St. Lucy. Especially this time of year. Show Doug the sights or something. Introduce him to some women. Take him to that club, you know the one? He won't miss the time. Show him loads of
beer and pretty women."

  "One other thing," Zeph adds. "She tells me Charlie has recently become philosophically opposed to vaccinations and inoculations of all kinds whatsoever."

  "All kinds?" Baldwin asks. "No tetanus shots? No penicillin?"

  "All kinds," Zeph says nodding. "It isn't the only insane idea the guy's taken up. If he'd been sane and rational we wouldn't be getting asked to provide a treatment."

  Buddy sighs. "I'll fix up an oral form," he says. "Azacca dispenses it orally, so it should work. We just have to get it standardized and stabilized. They used to give polio vaccine as sugar cubes. Quinine water for malaria. Drugs are administered orally all the time. We'll work it out."

  "Thanks, Al," Zeph responds in a serious tone.

  "Sure. Sorry I can't do more," Baldwin answers with equal seriousness. "Right now I have to finish this thing I'm in the middle of analyzing. Have to set up the next stage of a test. Then I'll get on to analyzing the samples you brought. You'll have an answer by tonight." Then he turns back to the hypnotic pull of his microscope as if the whole conversation with Zeph had never happened.

  As he heads for the door, Zeph's attention is drawn to an experiment he hadn't noticed on the way in. A small fluffy white kitten is mewing very quietly, shivering slightly like a Chihuahua. It's eyes are moist and frightened. It looks about three weeks old. The delicate kitten sits in a cage with a white rat. The rat is much larger than the kitten, but the cellmates seem to exist in detente. The whole thing strikes Zeph as odd. Baldwin doesn't normally do animal experiments if they can be avoided.

  "I think your pet kitten's hungry," Zeph comments on the mewing.

  Baldwin rouses himself from the microscope and joins his friend. He looks down at the occupants of the cage.

  "Watch this," he says, taking a small piece of soft cheese from a nearby cabinet. He places the cheese in the cage near the rat. As both men watch, the rat backs off slightly from the cheese, enough to let the tiny kitten approach it without fear. The kitten begins to lap at the cheese, licking it up while the rat sits quietly.

  "So this rat doesn't like cheese?" Zeph asks. "Or it isn't hungry?"

  "On the contrary," Baldwin answers, putting on thin plastic gloves. He reaches a gloved left hand into the cage and removes the kitten. Stroking it gently, he sets it into a nearby empty cage. He turns back and gets another piece of cheese from the cabinet, then drops it into the cage with the rat. The rat pounces on it hungrily.

  "So – what's going on?" Zeph wonders.

  "The rat is infected with the parasite we've isolated from the samples we brought back from the island. Apparently the infection makes the rat like cats," Baldwin informs him. "Interesting, isn't it?"

  "Yeah. Is the kitten infected?"

  "Not at all. It's been inoculated with my test vaccine. Last night. I'll be returning it to its mother today, if she'll take it back. She may reject it. Then I guess it'll have to grow up here with me. But I think she'll take it back. There's a shopkeeper nearby who keeps a few cats around to help with pest control. I borrowed the kitten from him last night. He gave me a really cute one, too."

  So saying, he slides a separation panel into place in the rat cage, dividing it into two areas. "I kept the kitten separated in the adjacent cage for a while before putting them together. There wasn't any problem with the rat. It seems quite fond of the little fluff ball. Love at first sight in fact."

  He stares at the rat and the kitten blankly, thinking. "You might ask Katrina if her boyfriend has developed a fondness for cats recently," he ends with a suggestion.

  Baldwin then feeds the kitten one more morsel of cheese and returns again to his seat at the microscope, tuning out the rest of the world.

  Zeph hangs around for a few minutes looking out the windows at the scenery, then leaves quietly. Baldwin is too engrossed in his work to notice or care.