An Air That Kills

by Christine Poulson

  All the same, heads were turning. Her arrival had altered the chemistry in the room. It wasn’t just her looks, Katie realized. She had an energy that seemed to pull people towards her. It was as if she exerted a magnetic attraction, and it was affecting Katie too.

  Claudia was smiling at her as if she was thrilled to see her. “Caitlin, yes? Boy, am I glad to see you. If you hadn’t shown up, I was in danger of having to culture my own samples. Let me get us some coffees. What’ll you have? A latte?”

  “Thanks. That’d be great.”

  As a technician Katie was, strictly speaking, lower down the pecking order. So Claudia was telling Katie that she wasn’t intending to pull rank, that she was going to treat her as an equal.

  “How about you, Maddie?” Claudia asked.

  “Oh no, I must scoot. But thanks.”

  Claudia went to get the coffee, and Maddie got up to go. Katie thanked her for showing her round.

  “My pleasure,” Maddie said. “And you’re welcome – any time – to come down and visit me in the insectary and see what we do there.”

  * * *

  Over coffee Claudia did ask Katie about her previous job, but in a perfunctory way. She was just being polite. She clearly wasn’t really interested in what Katie had done in the past. It was what she was going to do here and now that mattered. And fair enough, that was what Katie was there for – to support Claudia’s research.

  So that was what they talked about.

  “Exciting results,” Katie said.

  “Yeah, it’s great. I’m writing them up for a paper to be co-authored with Gemma.”

  That would certainly be a feather in Claudia’s cap.

  “I don’t suppose we’ll see much of Professor Braithwaite in the lab?” Katie asked.

  “Nah. Hardly ever. Can’t remember the last time she came down here. She just lets me get on with it. I see her once a week and she looks through my lab book. That’s about it.”

  “She’s OK, is she? I mean...” Katie let her voice trail off.

  Claudia thought about that. “She’s a strong woman who’s made her way against the odds. We need more like her. But I guess she’s not everyone’s cup of tea. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but as long as you measure up and you’re prepared to work hard, she’s great and she’ll back you to the hilt. I really like her.”

  They got into the details of what Katie would be doing over the next few weeks. She would be generating the genetic mutations that Claudia required for her own experiments further down the line, so their work would be quite separate. This was going to make it that much harder to check up on Claudia.

  But, in another way, Katie felt she’d made progress. What Claudia had said about Gemma confirmed her suspicions. Gemma was a hard taskmaster who would expect results and wouldn’t be interested in excuses. At the same time, she probably took a broad-brush approach to supervising, and didn’t do much more than glance through Claudia’s lab book. Which would make it much easier for Claudia to doctor her results – if indeed that was what was going on. This could be such a temptation for a young researcher. Sure, she would get into trouble if she was caught out in wrong-doing, but if she didn’t get good results, publishable results, her career was dead in the water anyway. Katie had felt it herself, had found herself on the brink of massaging some results that were nearly, but not quite, what was required. She’d pulled back at the last moment. But what if Claudia hadn’t?

  In spite of Claudia’s friendliness, Katie found herself not liking her very much. Was she envious of Claudia, she wondered, so young, so bright and so much the going-places person, while she, older than Claudia, was in the doldrums, her scientific career stalled. Well, yes, of course she was envious, and it was better to be honest with herself. She would just have to put those feelings to one side and get on with the job.

  * * *

  Claudia went off to do some paperwork and it was time for Katie to take possession of her new domain and start work.

  The lift took her down to the double basement where her Cat 3 lab was located. As the technician in charge, she would be in and out of it all the time. For safety reasons the Cat 3 labs had a CCTV camera fixed in the corridor outside. A glance told her that the lab was empty, which was what she expected. As she looked at the screen it flickered. She frowned. She hoped it wasn’t going on the blink.

  She signed the log the old-fashioned way – a sheet of paper with columns for name, time, reason for entry.

  The lab consisted of three rooms, and to enter the first room there were two layers of security. Katie went through the procedure she had been taught that morning. She inserted her key card and then she punched in her code. She stepped into the first room, taking with her the insulated bag in which was the flask containing the cells she would be infecting with the flu virus. The room functioned like an airlock. The door she’d entered by had to be closed before she could open the door into the next room.

  That second room was the robing room. She put on a blue disposable lab gown over her clothes. Wobbling first on one leg and then the other, she pulled blue overshoes on top of her trainers. High-end trainers, of course. She wondered how she could have afforded them on a technician’s salary. She didn’t have a private income or a rich boyfriend. It was part of her cover story that she was unattached. If she didn’t have to remember details of a fictitious boyfriend, there was less danger of getting caught out. No, Caitlin would have saved up for those trainers. A large part of her disposable income went on clothes.

  To get into the last room where the work actually went on, she used another key and another code. She went in with the insulated bag and the door closed behind her. Off to one side was the incubator containing the strains of flu virus.

  She felt a frisson of unease at being alone there for the first time. It was part of her job to be always considering ways in which things could go wrong, to be alert to errors of procedure. And in a week or two, she knew, she would think nothing of it. It would be just another day at the office. But today she couldn’t help being very conscious of the potential danger of what she was doing. She reminded herself that the safety measures were stringent. The flask was made of a tough plastic, pretty much unbreakable. She would be working in a glove box, where she would be handling the material with gloves attached to a biosafety cabinet filled with filtered air. She had been shown how to do that this morning. The virus could not escape, but even if it did, there was negative airflow – air was drawn into the lab, but was then filtered before it came out. And the lab itself was sealed. Of course all this was dependent on a reliable supply of electricity, but there was an emergency generator that would kick in if there was a power cut.

  No, it was perfectly safe.

  She came to herself and glanced at the clock on the wall. Somehow she had lost ten minutes. How had that happened? She looked down at her gloved hand, holding the flask. She must have opened the insulated bag and taken it out without really registering what she was doing. It was only avian tissue, uninfected at this stage, but still... with this kind of work you couldn’t afford to let your attention slip.

  After that she became absorbed in her work and made good progress. But by four o’clock she needed a break. She decided to take Maddie up on her invitation.

  CHAPTER 13

  Katie knocked on the door of the insectary. The door opened and Maddie’s head popped out. “Hey, Caitlin! Come on in!” “Am I interrupting anything?”

  “No, no, glad of a break. I’m pupae-picking, my least favourite job. So fiddly and it takes forever. Come in!”

  It was a smallish room, windowless and airless, with white painted walls.

  “Phew, it’s hot in here,” Katie said.

  “We have to mimic the mozzies’ natural environment, so it’s kept at twenty-eight degrees with seventy to eighty per cent humidity. It’s great on a bitter winter’s day.”

  Katie looked around. Three walls were lined with shelves, and two stacks jutted out into the room.
On the fourth wall was a sink and a work surface. On some shelves, white plastic trays a few inches deep were stacked at angles to allow air to penetrate the muslin that was stretched over them. On other shelves were piled boxes covered at the front with muslin tied in a knot.

  “So here they are,” Katie said. “All your babies...”

  “Yes, indeed.” Maddie waved an airy hand. “From cradle to grave, from egg to full-grown mosquito, they live out their little lives here.”

  “Why don’t you talk me through it?”

  “You’re really interested?”

  “Absolutely!”

  Maddie’s face brightened, and Katie guessed that like most people who love their work, she always enjoyed sharing what she knew. “OK, well, once the females have laid their eggs on this special paper, we put it into one of these trays.”

  She showed Katie a shallow white plastic tray with a centimetre of water in the bottom in which tiny black specks were squirming.

  “They take around thirty-six to forty-eight hours to hatch out into larvae, and that’s what we’ve got here. Eight to ten days later they become pupae. The adult mosquitoes form inside and then they break through the pupa skin. But before that there’s pupae-picking, and a tedious fiddly job it is too.” Maddie made a face. “We have to sort them into male and female, so that we can decide which can mate with which. And it’s only the females that feed on blood – they need the protein to make babies – so it’s only the females that can carry malaria. You have to examine them under the microscope to see what sex the pupae are. Here, have a look.”

  She led Katie to the microscope she’d been working at and Katie looked through the eyepiece. At first she couldn’t see any difference between the comma-shaped creatures until Maddie pointed out the minuscule sex organs.

  “What happens to the males?” Katie asked as she straightened up.

  “Oh, they’re useful too. The females only feed well after they’ve mated, so we need them for that. More importantly, we need them to breed new generations for research. And then there’s quite a bit of work going on about how you could engineer a population crash by making the males sterile.”

  Katie was fascinated. “You mean, one way of tackling malaria would be to wipe out the mosquitoes – just get rid of a whole species?” What kind of knock-on effect might that have, she wondered. The law of unintended consequences.

  Maddie shrugged. “It wouldn’t be all mosquitoes. There are loads and loads of different species, over three thousand, and only thirty or forty of them carry malaria. Those are the ones to go after. Those mosquitoes cause the death of about half a million people a year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. A child dies of malaria every thirty seconds.”

  Katie nodded. There was no arguing with that. Of course they had to try to do it. She thought of Rachel and her Christian faith. She wondered if Rachel would argue that mosquitoes were part of God’s creation. They were hard to square with a just and compassionate God.

  Her eye was caught by a row of popcorn buckets with light brown material stretched over them and tied off in a knot. Could that be... surely not?

  Maddie saw her looking and laughed. “Yes, they really are popcorn buckets and tights. Let no one say we don’t have the latest cutting-edge equipment here! Actually, they’re perfect for the job. We get two covers out of each leg. These are American Tan. I buy them in bulk.”

  “American Tan? Blimey! Do they still make them? That’s what my granny used to wear. And when you say they’re perfect for the job –”

  “Handy for making small cages to house a hundred or a hundred and fifty mosquitoes. And for even smaller cages we use paper cups with bridal veil material. The great thing is that they’re disposable, so we don’t have to mess about sterilizing them for re-use like we do with the plastic cages.”

  Maddie’s face glowed. She was loving sharing the tricks of the trade with Katie, and that was endearing. But already the heat and the continuous hum of the humidifier were making Katie drowsy. How did Maddie stick it down here for hours on end? No wonder she was so pleased to see visitors. Katie roused herself to show an interest.

  “I suppose you have to feed them on blood,” she said.

  “Sure do. It’s like the crypt in Dracula’s castle down here.” She showed Katie a jar in which mosquitoes were feeding from a blood-stained membrane. “We have to simulate human skin,” she explained, “otherwise they’re not able to feed.”

  Katie gazed at them. “They’re not really animals that you could get fond of, are they?”

  “Not really, no. Even I have to admit that they’re not the most prepossessing of creatures. And to the naked eye one mozzie is much like another. But I do get a bit proprietorial when I’ve managed to colonize a new strain from the field.”

  “Of course, none of these are carrying the parasite. So even if one did manage to get out –”

  “Couldn’t do you any harm. You need to be in the Cat 3 lab to infect them. This is simply where we breed the little blighters – or should I say biters?”

  Katie’s respect for Maddie was growing. Her work was essential to the research that was being carried out here. She had to run a tight ship and her record-keeping had to be immaculate.

  “What are the things that can go wrong?” Katie asked.

  “Oh, all sorts,” Maddie said. “You have to be careful not to crowd them, or you can kill the larvae by overfeeding, and there’s sometimes contamination when you mix the different strains.” Her face clouded over. “The real problem though is when you don’t know what went wrong. I had a batch of larvae die the other day and I have no idea why. Just can’t understand it. I did exactly what I’d done hundreds of times before.”

  “Oh, I know,” Katie said with heartfelt sympathy. That was something that non-scientists found hard to understand. They saw science as something cut and dried, black and white. They didn’t know about the frustration when an experiment you’d run successfully before unexpectedly failed and you couldn’t work out what had gone wrong.

  “How long have you been here, Maddie?” she asked.

  “Oh, must be three years, I’d say.”

  Katie already knew that the rapid turnover of technicians was confined to Claudia’s lab. It wasn’t a problem throughout the research centre.

  “And what are they like, your lot?”

  Maddie considered this. “Don’t see that much of Bill, he’s the PI, though to be fair he drops into the lab more often than a lot of supervisors. Bill’s alright. A bit nerdy, maybe. He’s a moth man.”

  “He’s what?”

  “You know. Keen on moths. A lepidopterist. That’s in his spare time. His academic specialism is parasite diseases in cattle. He has a postdoc – Tarquin – who’s working on malaria –”

  “Tarquin? No, really? That’s what he’s called?”

  “Yeah, really. That is his actual name – and yes, he is a posh boy, but I don’t hold that against him. He’s a good laugh and he mucks in. The other thing you need to know about Tarquin is that he’s the only hipster on Debussy Point. My theory is that he was heading for Bristol and got blown off course like a migrating bird. Luckily he and Bill get on OK.”

  “That’s not always the case with postdocs and their supervisors.”

  “Exactly. And then we’ve got a couple of PhD students. They’re OK too and do their share of the grunt work. Yeah, can’t complain.”

  Katie had already pegged Maddie as someone who saw the best in people.

  The door opened and Maddie said, “Hey, and there’s the man himself. This is Bill.”

  Bill was in his mid-forties maybe, a big guy – not fat, just big, with broad shoulders. He was one of those men who is almost completely bald but wears it well. He could have been attractive if it wasn’t for the air of vague apology that hung about him. It was the way his eyes slid away from Katie’s. He seemed uncomfortable, as if he had gatecrashed a social occasion rather than entered his own lab, where he had a perfect right to be.
/>
  Maddie said, “This is Caitlin. She’s the new technician in the flu lab.”

  “Oh, hi,” he said. Katie could see him wondering whether to offer his hand or not. In the end he didn’t.

  There was an awkward silence and then Maddie and Katie both spoke at once: “Were you looking for Tarquin?” and “I hear you’re interested in moths?”

  Bill’s face brightened. “Oh, are you interested too?”

  “I think they’re fascinating.” Katie really didn’t care for moths at all – those fat furry bodies, yuk – but she told herself that it wasn’t exactly a lie. From a scientific viewpoint all creatures were fascinating. “But I don’t suppose there are many about at this time of year.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Bill eagerly. “Of course they mostly overwinter as larvae and there are a few that hibernate. But there are some moths that can only be found on the wing in the winter months. There’s one that’s actually called the winter moth, and there’s the December moth. And the spring usher – that one’s on the wing from late January to March, hence its name – so I’m hoping to spot one any day now.”

  Katie was charmed by the poetry of the names and intrigued in spite of herself. “But why doesn’t the cold kill them?”

  “Their bodies contain alcohols that act like antifreeze. If you’re really interested, I might be able to show you a December moth,” Bill said. “I’ve got a moth trap and –” He intercepted the amused glance that Maddie shot at Katie and he flushed. “Sorry. I can be a bit of a bore, I know.”

  “No, no,” Katie said. “I’m interested, really I am. Let’s do it.” And by now she was genuinely interested, but it had also occurred to her that she needed to get people talking, and showing an interest in moth-hunting was a good way to strike up a rapport with Bill.

  “Well, if you are interested,” he said, “I’m going off to set up the trap in about half an hour. Would you like to come?”

  Katie looked at her watch. That would give her time to pop back to the lab and tidy up, and then it would be reasonable to knock off. As long as she got the work done, it was up to her when she did it. She was more or less her own boss.