Mutant 59

by Kit Pedler

  Like all men wedded to an original idea which means too much to them personally, he began slowly to imagine results. There was no question of fakery, just the nudging of a figure here and the realignment of an experiment there, so that they would better suit his original notion.

  As the months wore on he gave less and less attention to his hospital work and lived only for his small laboratory bench in his house and although he was not consciously aware of it, his body and mind came under increasing strain. He had no means of knowing, for example, that his left middle cerebral artery was constricted by a large patch of cholesterol, or atherosclerosis, as his colleagues would have called it. Also he simply hadn’t the time to recognize that his increasingly frequent frontal headaches were due to a steadily rising blood pressure.

  One evening, at about eleven o’clock, he had almost finished examining the fifty-ninth variation of prodigiosus under the microscope. There were, in all, six sample tubes and as he finished looking at the contents, he carefully lowered it into a large beaker of very strong disinfectant.

  He did this, because he was a careful and highly trained worker and did not want to risk the possibility of accidental release of the mutant bacteria. The results of his investigations were encouraging, at least to his biased eyes. There seemed to be definite evidence of plastic consumption by the carefully tailored organisms.

  As he came to the last tube, he suddenly gave a great cry of triumph.

  There was no doubt!

  The bacteria had consumed a visible amount of the plastic-like material.

  His excitement mounted, but as he rose, his already overstressed middle cerebral artery burst, releasing a fountain of blood into his overstressed brain tissue.

  For an instant, he stood there as his brain function began to stop. As his vision faded and his life ebbed, he was dimly and terminally aware of a terrible pain and a roaring sound in his head.

  His body remained poised for an instant more, then crashed heavily backwards against the laboratory bench. The tube of bacteria flew out of his lifeless hand and smashed down on the edge of the sink, a thin trickle of yellowish opaque fluid running down the side of the porcelain and reaching the waste pipe.

  Ainslie’s body rolled limply off the bench and crashed heavily to the floor bringing his wife running from the living-room.

  As she reached the room the fifty-ninth variant of bacillus prodigiosus had flowed down the waste pipe, past the drain where the blockage had been and reached the main street sewer. In the rushing water, the hundreds of millions of bacteria which had been present in the tube were diluted and diluted again as the sewage water rushed away to the pumping station.

  Ainslie’s death was marked in the hospital magazine and in the British Medical Journal by short factual obituaries accompanied by an over-young photograph. He was soon same, except it’s been sterilized in the autoclave.’

  ‘Sterilized, why?’

  ‘You’ll see in a minute. Number three is a standard broth culture medium and I put some of number one – the unsterilized material – into it. Number four is the same broth culture medium and I put some of number two into it. Now look!’

  He held up the rack against the light. The first two flasks contained a slightly yellow fluid, the third was an opaque brown colour and was topped by a thin layer of foam. The fourth was clear and light brown.

  ‘Remember, number three got the unsterilized stuff and number four the sterilized, OK?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t you see, man, number three got the raw stuff – it’s grown!’

  ‘That’s just not a complete experiment,’ Scanlon complained. ‘When he took the original specimens he must have collected hundreds of different bacteria. There could be any one of a hundred different species in number three there.’

  ‘Very well, I agree.’ He went back to the incubator and took out a stack of circular flat Petri dishes, each one like a glass ashtray with a close fitting lid containing a thin layer of coloured jelly. He laid them out in a row. The lid of each dish was marked in red wax pencil.

  ‘So far you’re right of course, so I did these. My technique’s a bit rusty, it’s a long time since Edinburgh.’ He opened the lid of the first dish. Scanlon peered forward. On it he could see dozens of small round colonies of bacteria. There were many different shapes, sizes and colours. Buchan went on: ‘This is a sub-culture of the original specimen. You can see about four different species of colony.’ He was pointing with a small platinum wire loop, fused on the end of a glass rod. ‘These are coliforms, these are probably staphs, those are probably diptheroids and these’ – he paused for a moment – ‘are interesting.’

  ‘It’s what I told you,’ Scanlon persisted. ‘We’ve got a complete spectrum of bugs out of the original specimen.’ forgotten. But in the months that followed, the fifty-ninth variant lived a brief existence in the sewers and then began to disappear. Unable to find the specialized food which Ainslie had designed for it, it ceased to be able to divide and died. But, not all the individual bacteria were wiped out. Some formed spores.

  When bacteria are subjected to hostile conditions they revert to a resting phase called a spore. It is really like a seed. So when conditions are favourable once again the spore germinates and forms a new bacterium which then divides into two, into four, into eight and so on forming a new generation. Spores can last for hundreds of years and are almost totally resistant to drying and quite strong heat or cold.

  Deep in a storm relief sewer near King’s Cross Station, about a hundred spores lay in a dried patch just above the water line. Each one, only two thousandths of a millimetre in diameter, each containing a perfect biological blue print for the fifty-ninth variant of bacillus prodigiosus. A silent and microscopic testimony to Ainslie’s one original thought, they lay embedded in a dried patch of sewage waiting with all the mindless patience of suspended life. Waiting for specialized food which would never come. Waiting for the infinitely small possibility that another molecule of similar size and shape to the food they needed would eventually find its way into the dark fetor of the sewer and so give them energy to start into full life once more.

  Two years after Dr Ainslie had passed into obscurity, the Kramer group’s biodegradable bottle had gone into general use by the public. Down into the sewers went the fragmenting containers. Down into the rushing effluents from a million drains floated the specialized molecules of Degron.

  One evening after a heavy rain storm, the water in the storm relief sewer at King’s Cross rose rapidly to an unprecedented height. The molecules of Degron, almost exactly similar to those of Ainslie’s special culture medium, splashed over the dried spores.

  For almost twenty-four hours, the spores remained dormant. Then in a blind but totally efficient way, they began to recognize the properties of the material outside their desiccated shells.

  The spore cases broke and the fifty-ninth variant of bacillus prodigiosus emerged and expanded into life.

  Conditions were to its liking. It burgeoned and spread. Everywhere it flowed, it found food. Degron was everywhere. Each generation became more versatile and more omnivorous. Man had been good to the fifty-ninth variant. He had provided it with food for a millennium.

  The Kramer laboratory was dark except for neon indicator lights glowing on the congested blocks of electronic equipment lining the walls. The only sound came from a single refrigerator pump softly whirring in one corner. Buchan walked over and pulled the main switches. The room flooded with light, helping to dispel the tension they both felt.

  ‘Where are they?’ Scanlon asked.

  Without answering, Buchan opened the door of an incubator and took out a rack of clear glass flasks each one labelled with a felt pen symbol. He was tense and clumsy: ‘May not have been long enough. I had to do it in a hurry.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d tell me what you have done. Anyway, what about Wright?’

  ‘Never mind about that, bear with me,’ Buchan held each flask in turn up t
o the light and made short notes on a desk pad. He appeared not to notice Scanlon’s presence at all.

  ‘Buck!’ Scanlon complained. ‘It’s two in the morning, I said I’d come down, now tell me what the hell you’re doing.’

  ‘Aye, I treat you badly, but I’ve put a lot of money on this. Let me show you what I’ve done.’ He pointed to the flasks in turn.

  ‘This is an aqueous suspension of the goo Gerrard got from the bits out of the robot, number two here is the

  ‘Yes we did, but plating out a mixture like this is a way of separating a lot of different bacteria. Once you can see different colonies, you can take a tiny bit of each one and identify it on a slide in a microscope.’

  ‘Not just by looking, surely.’

  ‘No, by using gram-staining – various logically selective methods and media – it’s like a crossword puzzle really – finally you end up with a clean case of identity!’ He was excited, enjoying the description of the chase.

  ‘Look, I’ll show you.’ He picked up another dish. ‘Finally I isolated this one.’ He pointed to a small group of wrinkled, glistening discs on the layer of jelly in one of the dishes. ‘This was the character I was after.’

  ‘Buck, it’s very late, I’m losing the thread.’

  ‘Wait – all will be revealed. If you look carefully, the edges of each colony show little dried-up specks.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, our wee friends here don’t like the medium they’re growing on – it’s blood-agar by the way.’

  ‘They don’t like blood?’

  ‘Different bugs like different food, it’s as simple as that. Anyway I identified all the sample bacteria except this one which wouldn’t grow on conventional media: plain agar, blood agar, McConochie’s and so on.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I made up my own medium.’ He walked over to an incubator and took out a larger beaker. On the bottom of the beaker, there was a small, squat conical flask plugged with cotton wool. The top of the beaker was sealed with transparent film. He placed it gingerly on the bench underneath the light. Scanlon looked down in amazement. Around the edges of the cotton wool, there was a slowly moving rim of foam pouting outwards and sliding stickily down the outer surface of the flask and collecting on the base of the beaker.

  ‘God, what did you use?’

  Buchan paused for several seconds before replying: ‘I chopped up some Degron – made it into a paste together with some salts and one or two amino-acids – mostly tyrosine …’

  ‘This is pretty damning – there must be some other explanation.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well,’ Scanlon was hesitating, frantically trying to find a logical way round the evidence. ‘All right, you’ve grown bacteria, some like blood, others like sugar …’

  ‘Scanlon, there’s one more experiment necessary for a proof situation. If you suspect a bug as the cause of a condition – a clinical condition anyway – you must be able to recover the bug in pure culture from the patient. Now the patient in this case is the plastic – OK you don’t believe it, but it’s true. So I took a culture from the muck in that flask there and put it up on more plastic.’ He opened the last of the Petri dishes. ‘And here it is.’ He showed him the surface of the gel in the dish. It was covered by wet glutinous foam. ‘This time I used larger fragments of Degron and some ordinary polystyrene – look, you can see the bits with the naked eye.’

  ‘How do you know it’s bacteria, couldn’t it be – a chemical – some substance which carries through all these samples?’ Scanlon felt the weakness of the suggestion even as he said it.

  ‘It could just be. So there’s still one more experiment – we can do it now if you’ll help.’

  ‘What experiment?’

  ‘The electron microscope – we can look and see what’s in there – come on.’ He got up and went towards a door labelled with the international radiation clover leaf sign and a notice stating: ‘Danger, high voltage. No unauthorized admission.’

  Inside, in the dim yellow light, the eight-foot high column of the high resolution electron microscope towered over them. From the apex of the column a thick high tension cable led away to a large six-foot cube of complex electronics.

  From another unit came the soft squashing flapping sound of vacuum pumps, keeping the space inside the column of the instrument at a vacuum harder than outer space.

  Buchan began to operate the controls. Lights sprang up on the control panels and the noise of the pumps changed to a more urgent hard-working note. He got up. ‘We’ll leave it pumping down, while we get the specimen ready.’

  In the lab he laid down a glass plate on the bench top and put the Petri dish containing the plastic medium on the glass. Then, he cleaned a glass slide and waved it briefly through a bunsen flame. With a small glass hand dropper, he put one drop of distilled water on the glass plate.

  Then, with a small platinum wire, heated first in the flame and then allowed to cool, he carefully opened the lid of the Petri dish and took a small sample of the contents. This he mixed with the drop of distilled water on the slide until the whole drop turned milky, finally passing the platinum wire through the flame to sterilize it. He was talking as he worked. Scanlon looked on, fascinated by the almost priest-like ritual of the technique.

  ‘What I’m doing now is to make a diluted sample of whatever’s in that culture dish. Then – like this I’m going to mix it with phospho-tungstic acid.

  ‘So now I’ve got sample plus water plus phospho-tungstic. Now here I’ve got a wee copper grid – it’s just three millimetres across. It fits into the microscope. Now I’m putting a small drop of the mixture on the grid.’

  He got up carrying the grid on a filter paper. He opened a glass bell jar attached to pumps; put the filter paper and grid inside, sealed the bell jar on its base and switched on the pumps. He sat carefully watching the vacuum gauge as it indicated the pressure of the atmosphere inside the jar.

  ‘The vacuum inside there will dry off the water in the drop. When the water’s gone, the phospho-tungstic acid will dry down around whatever solid bodies are in the sample. Now, the electron microscope shows all biological objects to be almost transparent, but substances containing heavy metals look black.’

  ‘So everything biological will look like – let me think it out – like a clear area – surrounded by a – yes – a black halo.’

  ‘Aye, you’re a good visualizer. Now it should be about ready.’ He opened a valve letting air back into the bell jar. The hissing sound gradually died away. Lifting the bell jar on its counterweights, he took the filter paper with the grid and moved methodically over to the microscope room. Scanlon followed and closed the light tight door behind them.

  Buchan opened the specimen lock and inserted the grid. Then deftly moving over the complex of controls, ran the machine up to operating condition.

  Finally, the screen inside the radiation proof glass on the base of the column glowed green, underlighting their faces as they peered at the image on the screen. Buchan turned the remote controls on the specimen high up on the column. The lines on the screen wavered and vanished then hardened and fixed. For a long minute, the two of them sat quite silent, without speaking.

  In front of them, on the screen, were hundreds of thousands of clear rectangular spaces; each one surrounded by a dark halo. Each space the unmistakable electronic image – of bacteria.

  ‘We’d better get Wright,’ Scanlon said.

  Buchan reached for the telephone.

  Twelve

  The emergency control room had been built in 1945. Over sixty feet down beneath Horseguards’ Parade it formed part of an underground complex of tunnels, communication centres and living quarters stretching as far north as Trafalgar Square and to the east under Whitehall to the War Office. An underground city from which an entire country could be run without ever going to the surface.

  Its walls were heavily buttressed by reinforced concrete beams painted wh
ite and the floor was government issue green linoleum, At one end, almost the whole wall was covered by a black projection screen and in front of it was a jumble of desks littered with phones of different colours, scrambler controls and closed circuit television links. The rest of the room was occupied by hastily arranged rows of stacking chairs.

  The air was now thick with smoke and filled by a loud excited buzz of conversation from about fifty people, some uniformed and others in the neutral anonymity of civil service grey. There was an atmosphere of suppressed tension and excitement. Most of the faces were on the wrong side of fifty.

  Faces used to power, influence and privilege. Men who would, rightly or wrongly, not flinch from taking grave decisions.

  In the front row, a stocky man in the uniform of a brigadier stood up and turned round, tapping his knuckle on a desk top to gain attention. The conversation died away to silence almost reluctantly. He spoke in the relaxed manner of easy authority, hands deliberately in pockets.

  ‘Gentlemen.’ He looked briefly at his watch. ‘I think we should begin.’ He walked over to a desk in front of the screen and pressed a buzzer.

  ‘Most of you are more or less in the picture I think, but first I want to introduce you to each other, You’ve all been brought here in great haste and for this I must apologize, but we have done our best to provide you with some quarters. Mr Riggs over there’ – he nodded to a civilian standing by one of the exits – ‘will provide you with a room card and instructions as to how to get there. The tunnel system is rather complex and I must ask you please to comply with the directions on the card, our – ah – security services are – enthusiastic.’ He smiled bleakly. ‘Now, you should all have a lapel badge, so if I may I’ll kick off.

  ‘The medical side of the operation is under the control of Sir Frank Dale.’ He pointed to a grey-haired, austere man in the second row, who half got to his feet in an embarrassed attempt to introduce himself. The brigadier indicated each person as he spoke.