Blood and Ice

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

December 24, 8:15 p.m.

EVEN THOUGH SHE HAD TAKEN great care to hide the dreadful evidence, Eleanor soon knew that her secret had been discovered. No one had said anything to her, but all the other bags of blood had been removed from the infirmary. And there had been a wary look in Dr. Barnes's eye.

Eleanor was ashamed-mortified, truth be told, by her dreadful need-but she was also scared. What was she to do when the urge, the terrible thirst, came upon her again? And it would-she knew that it would. Sometimes she could go days, even perhaps a week, without it… but the longer she waited, the more urgent it became, and the more she was driven, even against her own will, to slake it.

How could she ever confess to such a desire? In whom could she confide?

She stared out the window of her tiny room, at the frozen square with the flagpole at its center. A tall man in a bulky coat and hood was standing there, looking up at the pewter sky, with something in his gloved hand, something that looked like several strips of bacon.

And although it was hard to recognize anyone, under all the coats and hats and boots, she knew instinctively that this was Michael.

Under the whining of the constant wind, she heard him whistle, loudly, still looking up, and after several seconds, a bird appeared. Perhaps it had been roosting atop the infirmary. It was a dirty gray, with a hooked beak, and it shot almost directly at his head. Michael ducked, and the bird skimmed the top of his hood. She heard him laugh, and it was only then that she realized how long it had been since she had heard anyone laugh like that. It was at once the most foreign, and agreeable, sound she had heard in ages. And she longed to run outside, into the snow and ice, and join it. To laugh, too, at the marauding bird, and to put her face up to the sun-what sun there was-and feel its rays beating on her eyelids.

As she looked on, Michael straightened up again and waved the bacon in the air. Then, as the bird doubled back, he threw the bacon high into the air-the strands separating-and the bird swooped down, catching one in its beak and flying off. The other strips landed on the hard-packed snow, and Michael simply waited-wisely, it seemed-for the bird to come back. It plunked itself down, rather inelegantly, and waddled from one to the next, gobbling them up. Another bird, bigger and brown, dropped down to investigate, but the first one ran at it, squawking, and Michael even tossed a chunk of snow to chase it off. Ah, Eleanor thought, the dusky bird is his favorite. His pet.

He crouched, extending one gloved hand, and the bird came toward him. It pecked at his glove-and although she couldn't see it, she guessed he had some bits of bacon left-and the two of them remained there, like a couple of old friends catching up. The wind ruffled the feathers of the bird and made the sleeves of Michael's coat ripple like tiny waves, but still they sat, and Eleanor felt so suddenly overwhelmed that she couldn't watch any longer.

Her whole life felt like a prison, and she slumped back on the edge of her bed as if she were condemned.

When the knock came on her door, her heart filled with dread. Was it Dr. Barnes, come to confront her about her crime? She didn't answer, but when the knock came again, she said, “You may come in.”

The door opened only halfway, and Michael, his hood thrown back, put his head in. “Permission to visit?” he said, and Eleanor replied, “Permission granted, sir.” She felt like she'd been given a reprieve. “But I'm afraid there's little I can offer you,” she said, “besides a chair.”

“I'll take it,” Michael said, turning the chair around and straddling it. His cumbersome down coat hung down on either side, and given the size of the room, he was only a few feet away from her- so close, in fact, that she could feel the bracingly cold air radiating from his coat and boots. Oh, how she longed to be free.

Michael took a few seconds to unzip his coat and collect his own thoughts. It was always awkward enough, talking to someone under such bizarre circumstances as these, but it was even stranger in light of that harrowingly erotic dream he'd had about her. Even now, it was a little difficult to look her in the eye; the nightmare had seemed all too real.

He was also afraid that their close proximity-the sick bay was so small-was making her self-conscious.

Above the stiff collar of her blue dress, he could see the vein pulsing in her neck. She was looking down at her hands, crossed in her lap; he discreetly glanced at her fingers, but there was no wedding band.

“I saw you outside,” she said, “with the bird.”

“That's Ollie,” he said. “Named after another orphan, Oliver Twist.”

“You are familiar with the books of Mr. Dickens?” she asked in amazement.

“To tell you the truth, I've never read it,” Michael confessed. “But I've seen the movie.”

Now she looked blank again. And why not, he thought… the movie?

“My father was quite radical in his ideas,” she continued. “He allowed me to attend school as often as possible, and even frequent the parsonage, where there was a library.”

Her eyes, he thought, were as green and glistening as spruce needles after a rainfall.

“They must have had two hundred books there,” she boasted.

What, he wondered, would she make of a Barnes and Noble?

“I so wanted to join you out there,” she said, with a touch of sadness.

“Where?”

“When you were feeding Ollie.”

He was about to ask her why she hadn't when he remembered that she was being kept a virtual prisoner. Her nervous pallor showed it. He surveyed the room, but there wasn't so much as a book or magazine here.

“Maybe tonight, late, we can sneak you into the rec hall,” he said, “for another piano recital.”

“I would like that,” she said, but with less enthusiasm than he expected.

“What else would you like?” he said. “For one thing, I can definitely round up some decent reading material for you.”

She hesitated, but then, leaning an inch or two forward, she said, “Shall I tell you what I would really like? What I would give anything for?”

He waited… afraid, to his own surprise, that it might have to do with Sinclair. How long could he keep that a secret?

“I should like to walk outside-no matter how cold it is-and hold my face up to the sun. I had only a taste of it on my visit to the whaling station. More than anything, I want to see the sun, and feel it on my face again.”

“Sun we've got,” Michael admitted, “but it isn't exactly warm.”

“I know,” she said. “And isn't that strange? We've come to a place where the sun never sets, but it offers so little in the way of warmth.”

Michael sat very still, considering what she had said, and rolling over in his mind an outlandish idea that had just occurred to him. The consequences, if he got caught, would be bad; Murphy would skin him alive. But the thought of it so thrilled him-what, he wondered, would Eleanor make of it?-that he couldn't resist.

“If I said I could give you what you're asking for,” he said, cautiously, “would you agree to follow my instructions to the letter?”

Eleanor looked puzzled. “You can smuggle me outside?”

“That part's easy.”

“And make the sun shine hot, even in a place like this?”

Michael nodded. “You know what? I can.” He'd been wondering what kind of Christmas present he could give her the next day… now he knew.

“So?” Charlotte said, looking into the aquarium tank, where several dead fish floated in various compartments. “You've got some dead fish.”

“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.

He was holding an ice cube between two gloved fingers, his pinkie delicately extended. Gently touching the ice to the surface of the slide, he said, “Keep your eye on the magic monitor.”

On the screen, even the tiniest corner of the ice cube was like a glacier, instantly blotting out half the field. Darryl promptly removed it, but the damage had been done. Like a wind blowing across a pond, a million tiny fissures rippled across the surface of the slide, touching each skin cell and radiating outward in all directions until, finally, all activity had stopped. What had been moving and circulating only seconds before was completely still. Frozen. Dead.

“As you can see, once you let ice come into direct contact with tissue, all bets are off.”

“I thought the AFGP-5 would prevent that.”

“It can prevent ice crystals from propagating in the bloodstream, but not from binding to the skin cells,” Darryl said. “That's why antifreeze fish stay well below the ice cap.”

“Eleanor should have no problem with that,” Charlotte said.

“But can she make sure-absolutely sure-that she never touches ice in any form? That she never takes a cold drink and lets an ice cube graze her lips? That she never slips on a sidewalk and puts her bare hand down on an icy patch of ground? That she never reaches into a freezer, absentmindedly, to remove a bag of frozen vegetables?”

“And if she did?”

“She'd freeze so hard, she'd shatter like glass.”