The ID badge listed her name and Department of Neuropharmacology assignment next to a photo that looked like a copy of the one she'd submitted with her application. Quinn immediately clipped it to the belt on her slacks. But the card...
"What is this?"
"Your security key," Charlene Turner said. "You can't get to the fifth floor without it."
"Key?"
The card said "Science Center" on the dark blue side, with an arrow pointing away from the "S;" the other side was white with a brown strip running across on the flip side of the arrow.
"Yeah. It's got a magnetic code in that little strip at the end. That's the business end. Just stick it face up into the slot in the elevator and you'll be on your way."
"Okay. Thanks."
They do go a little overboard on their security here, Quinn thought as she headed for the elevators.
One of the pair was standing open when she got there. The car was deep—deep enough for a hospital bed. Inside on the control panel were six buttons for floors 1 through 5 plus the basement. Next to the 5 and the B were pairs of little indicator lights. The red one was glowing next to each. On a hunch, Quinn inserted her card—her key—into the slot above the row of buttons and pressed 5. To the accompaniment of a soft click, the red light next to 5 went off and its companion lit up green. The elevator doors closed and the car started up.
"All right," Quinn said, smiling as she removed the key and slipped it into her pocket. She had a key that let her go where only a select few were allowed. It was exciting. She felt as if she'd arrived, as if she belonged.
Stepping out on the fifth floor, she was lost for a moment. No one was in the hall and she didn't know where to turn. She tried to remember the layout from the tour last Christmas and got the feeling she should head to her right.
And then she saw the glass plate in the wall—the window onto the place called Ward C.
She stopped in the center of the hall. She'd forgotten completely about Ward C. Now it was all back, especially the eyes. She remembered peering through that window and meeting that pair of dull blue eyes staring up at her from within their gauze frame, remembered the questing look in them, remembered the tears as she'd moved away.
How had she forgotten? Why had she forgotten? Too painful a memory? Too disturbing?
As if in the grip of some invisible hand that had reached through the glass from the burn ward and taken hold of her, Quinn gravitated to the window. She couldn't resist. She stopped before it and gazed within.
It was the same...the gauze-swathed bodies on their air mattresses, still, white shapes under their sheets, the IVs, the feeding tubes, the catheters, the blue, green, red, yellow patches on their limbs and trunks, the nurses gliding among them like benevolent phantoms, turning them, examining them, ministering to their unspoken needs. Not a whisper of sound penetrated the glass...like watching a silent movie.
Quinn hesitated, then forced herself to look down at the bed directly before the window, fearing yet yearning for the sight of that same pair of blue eyes, wondering if that person were still here, still in pain, still alive.
The form on the bed by the window was sleeping. Yet even though the eyes were closed, Quinn knew it wasn't the same patient. This one seemed female. Smaller, narrower in the shoulders, a hint of breasts mounded under the gauze—
"Miss Cleary?"
Quinn spun, jolted by the voice. Dr. Emerson was standing behind her.
"I didn't mean to startle you, but they called from downstairs to let me know you were on your way up. When you didn't show..."
"I wasn't sure where to go."
He smiled. "My fault. I should have realized that and had someone watching for you." He glanced at the burn ward window. "This is where we first crossed paths, I believe."
Quinn remembered...the blue-eyed patient, his obvious pain, Dr. Emerson directing the nurse to medicate him.
"Yes. The orientation tour."
"And now you're back in the same spot."
"It's these patients. They're..."
Quinn didn't know how to express her feelings without sounding theatrical, but something about these unknown, faceless, helpless people was drawing her to them. She sensed a need in that ward, and an urge within herself to fulfill it.
"The other patients in the medical center next door come and go," Dr. Emerson said. "But these are our orphans, the homeless, the ones nobody wants. They need more care than a nursing home can provide, yet no hospital can afford to keep them. So they wind up here, at the Science Center, where they allow us to try experimental cures for their damaged skin."
Quinn swallowed. "Experimental?"
He laughed. "You say that as if we're mad scientists, Miss Cleary. All the patients here on Fifth are experimental subjects. They or their families have applied to come here. There's even a waiting list."
"For experimental treatment?"
"Every new drug and every therapeutic advance such as Dr. Alston's semi-synthetic skin grafts goes through exhaustive testing on mice and dogs and monkeys before it's even considered for use in a human being. And once all that testing has been reviewed by the FDA and found suitably safe, then it's tested in human volunteers. Very carefully tested."
Quinn glanced through the window. "But these—"
"Are all volunteers. Or have been given over to our care by their families. You hear about new AIDS drugs being tested. Who do you think they're tested on? AIDS victims. And cholesterol-lowering agents. Who are they tested on? People with high cholesterol. And on whom else can you test new skin grafts but burn victims? Here Dr. Alston and his staff have taken on the toughest burn cases, the ones who've been failed by conventional therapy." He moved up to the window and stared into the ward. His voice softened. "And for the residents of Ward C, The Ingraham is their last, best hope."
"Why the colored patches?" Quinn asked.
"Color coding for different strains of Dr. Alston's grafts. You see, he takes samples of a patient's healthy skin—and on some of these poor devils that's not easy to find—and grows sheets of new cells in cultures. Then he coats the micromesh he's synthesized with the patient's own DNA. The body's immune system does not react against it's own DNA, therefore there's no rejection of the mesh. The skin cells in the mesh begin to multiply, and soon you've got a patch of healthy skin. It's worked wonders in the animal studies. He's maybe two years away from approval by the FDA."
Quinn almost wished she were working for Dr. Alston. Dr. Emerson seemed to be reading her mind.
"I never told you, but your duties in my department will have an impact on the burn patients."
Quinn pointed through the window. "You mean—?"
He gestured down the hall. "Let me show you my lab and things will be clearer."
The prospect of dealing with real live patients pumped up Quinn's already soaring excitement as she accompanied Dr. Emerson down the hall. She followed him past the nurses station and through a narrow doorway.
"Not very glamorous, I'm afraid," he said. "But here's the front section of my little domain."
A small room, its walls lined with desks and computer terminals. A middle-aged woman was hunched over a keyboard, typing madly.
"Alice," Dr. Emerson said, touching her on the shoulder. "This is Quinn Cleary, the student assistant I told you about."
Alice turned and extended her hand to Quinn. She looked about fifty; she wore no make-up, had gray-streaked hair, and unusually dry skin. But her smile was warm and welcoming.
"Am I glad to see you! Are you starting today?"
Quinn glanced at Dr. Emerson. "I'm not sure."
"You're on the payroll as of today," he said, "so you might as well."
"Great!" Alice said. "We're so backed up on data entry, you wouldn't believe! Take a seat and I'll—"
"I think I'll give her the tour first, Alice," Dr. Emerson said with a tolerant smile.
"Oh, right. Sure. Of course. Go ahead. I'll be here when you're through."
D
r. Emerson then led Quinn through a door at the rear of the office. Immediately she noticed a pungent odor. She sniffed.
"Still noticeable?" Dr. Emerson said.
"Something is."
"This used to be the vivarium. Lined with rat cages. But we moved the little fellows back down to the fourth floor. Not many left. We're long since past that stage." He gestured to the work stations where two technicians were measuring minute amounts of amber fluid into pipettes and inserting them into a wide assortment of autoanalytical machines. "This is where we used to sacrifice them. Now we've converted this area to analysis of the sera we draw from the patients."
"The Ward C patients?"
"Yes."
Quinn's face must have reflected her confusion because Dr. Emerson nodded and motioned her back the way they had come.
"Follow me."
They passed Alice again, who turned and looked up at them expectantly.
"Not quite yet, Alice."
Quinn followed him out into the hall to the nurses station.
"Marguerite," he said to the slim, middle-aged, mocha-skinned nurse at the counter. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight bun; her light eye shadow emphasized her dark, penetrating eyes. "One of the 9574 vials, please."
The nurse reached behind her and plucked a two-ounce bottle from a pocket in the top of the medication cart. She handed it to Dr. Emerson, who in turn handed it to Quinn.
"This," he said, "is the reason Dr. Alston and I have our labs on the same floor. It's the new anesthetic I'm developing. We have no name for it yet, so we refer to it by its entry number in the log when we isolated it. This is the nine thousand five hundred and seventy-fourth compound we've registered at The Ingraham."
Quinn stared at the bottle of clear fluid in her hand. It looked like water.
"So many."
"We've sythesized tens of thousands, but we only register the ones we feel have might have human therapeutic potential."
"It's good?"
"Good?" His entire forehead lifted with his eyebrows. "It's wonderful. Works like a charm. And you know the best part?"
Quinn placed the bottle on the counter. "What?"
"It's non-toxic. That's because it's not a foreign chemical compound but a naturally-occurring neuroamine, secreted in minute amounts in the brainstem during REM sleep."
Quinn couldn't help but smile at him. His enthusiasm was catching. He was like a little boy talking about a rocket voyage to Mars. She didn't want to slow him down, so she prodded him on.
"Really?"
"Yes. You're paralyzed during dream sleep, you know. Oh, yes. Almost completely paralyzed. Otherwise you'd be talking, laughing, and generally thrashing all about in your dreams. Yet your eyes move. You've heard of rapid eye movements—REM sleep—of course. And your chest wall moves, allowing your lungs to breath. So what you've got is a selective paralysis, affecting all the skeletal muscles except the eyes, the intercostals, and the diaphragm. And of course, you're unconscious."
"It paralyzes," Quinn said. "I thought you said it was an anesthetic."
"It is. At higher doses it produces total anesthesia. I'm working on the mechanism for that now, but I do know it's active in the higher centers as well as the brainstem." The years seemed to drop away from him as his enthusiasm grew. "But do you understand what we've got here, Miss Cleary? A potent general anesthetic that causes complete paralysis but allows the patient to continue breathing on his own. The anesthesiologist won't have to intubate and ventilate the patient. It can be used in every kind of surgery except chest procedures; there's zero chance of allergic reaction because 9574 is a human neurohormone—everybody's got their own. And perhaps best of all, there's no post-anesthesia side effects. You come to in the recovery room like someone awakening from a nap." He put his hands on his hips and stared at the bottle like a proud parent. "So. Those are the properties of the neurohormone you'll be working with here. What do you think?"
"It sounds almost too good to be true."
"It does, doesn't it." He began gesturing excitedly with his hands. "But that's not the whole of it. It would be almost perfect with just those features, but it's also completely non-toxic. Its LD50—"
"Elldee...?"
"LD50," Dr. Emerson said. "You'll learn all about that as we go. Stands for the lethal dose of a given compound for fifty percent of the experimental animals. Every drug meant for human use must register one. For instance, I take the Kleederman Pharmaceuticals product fenostatin for my cholesterol, a dose of twenty milligrams per day—total. I happen to know that the LD50 of fenostatin is twenty grams per kilogram. In other words, if I gave a hundred lab mice a dose of twenty grams of fenostatin per kilogram of their body weight, fifty of them would die. That's a good LD50. It means that if I became suicidal and stuffed 70,000 twenty-milligram fenostatin tablets down my throat, I'd still have only a fifty percent chance of dying from fenostatin toxicity. Probably rupture my intestines first. But the wonderful thing about 9574 is that it's even less toxic. We haven't found a lethal dose yet."
Triumphant, he threw out his arms and struck the bottle of 9574, sending it skittering toward the end of the counter. Marguerite the nurse leaped out of her seat, knocking it over as she lunged for the bottle. She caught it just as it went off the end and dropped toward the floor. Then she slumped there, shaking her head, panting as if she had run a race.
"Thank God you caught that, Marguerite," Dr. Emerson said. He seemed quite upset.
Marguerite straightened and carefully replaced the vial in its slot on the meds cart.
"Dr. Emerson," she said as she righted her chair. "That was too close."
"Amen," he said, then turned to Quinn. "We have precious little of 9574 available. Synthesizing it in quantities would be a simple matter for a commercial lab, but our tiny operation down on the third floor is taxed to its limits to produce what we need here for research purposes. Consequently, we treat it like gold."
"But who are you using it on?"
"Why, the Ward C patients, of course. It's perfect for them."
Quinn was confused. "But why would you want to paralyze them?"
"It's not so much the paralysis we want for them," he said. "It's the anesthesia. Most of the Ward C patients have horrific scarring, thick wads of stiff tissue that resists movement because it's got minimal elasticity. We use 9574 on them during their physical therapy sessions. It allows the therapists to stretch their limbs and exercise their joints to prevent flexion contractures. If left alone, most of them would end up curled into the fetal position. Without 9574 the pain of physical therapy would be unendurable."
"But didn't you say the lower dose paralyzes, and the higher dose anesthetizes? Wouldn't that mean they're completely paralyzed during therapy?" Quinn was starting to feel uncomfortable.
Dr. Emerson turned and looked at her closely. A wry smile worked across his lips.
"You're a quick study, aren't you."
Quinn was suddenly flustered. Had she angered him?
"Well, I don't know...I just—"
"I like that. I like that a lot. Shows you've been listening. But as it works out, the paralysis with 9574 is a harmless side effect for some of the Ward C patients, and an absolute necessity for others." He gestured down the hall. "Let me show you."
They moved the dozen feet or so to the window and stood looking into Ward C. Quinn counted the gauze-wrapped shapes. Seven. All lying still and silent, looking...
"Are they paralyzed now?"
"No," Dr. Emerson said. "Just resting. They sleep a lot. There's not much else they can do. Their scarring is so extensive that they can't move on their own. But for four of them the therapists need the skeletal muscle paralysis that 9574 offers. Those four are brain damaged from their burns."
Quinn tore her eyes away from the ward and looked at him.
"How...?"
"Anoxia. Either the smoke and heat of the fire itself stole their air, or the shock that goes along with such extensive third-degree bu
rns robbed their brains of sufficient blood flow for too long—either way, lack of oxygen damaged their brains, permanently. All four are disoriented and confused; two are frankly psychotic. The physical therapists would have to fight them all the way without 9574. But with 9574 they can work those limbs and keep the muscles from complete atrophy."
Quinn stared back into the ward and her heart went out to them. "Those poor, poor people." And then a thought struck her. "But even if Dr. Alston's grafts repair their skin, they'll never get any benefit from it."
"True. Their bodies may improve but not their brains. However, their lives will not be wasted. Other burn patients will reap the benefits of what we learn from these poor devils' tragedies." He put a hand gently on her elbow. "But enough philosophizing. It's time to drag you down and introduce you to the more mundane aspects of the daily grind that is medical research. The nitty gritty of gathering raw data, sorting and analyzing it, and organizing it seven hundred different ways in order to satisfy the bureaucrats at the FDA."
*
That's the trouble with Women's Country, Louis Verran thought as he waited outside the dorm and watched the windows of the south wing's second floor. Too much of a class mix.
Women's Country. Sounded so uppity. The kind of name his ex-wife would have been into after her conversion. Elizabeth, the born-again feminist. She took to the women's movement like a convert to a new religion. Took him to the cleaners, then took off. Good riddance.
Woman's Country? Broads' Country was more like it.
It had been Alston's bright idea—not a bad one, really—to room each class as a unit, generally one class per floor per wing, allowing them to work out study groups, make friends, and generally build a sense of camaraderie. The third- and fourth-year students were out more than they were in due to their clinical training schedules at the medical center, but first- and second-year wing floors went to class together, attended labs together, and ate together. One quick look at the class schedule told you when a certain wing would be deserted.