Tomorrow Sucks Part 11

"Well, in three weeks-when I'm in a Manhattan emergency room and up to my ears in blood-I'll cherish these nice quiet memories. Why don't we take a day off and drive down to the city-"

"Idiot!"

Outside in the garden, Professor Auger was shouting. We heard Weems shouting back. Marlowe and I ran out.

"It's revoked," Weems was yelling. The little man had ducked behind his car for protection. Auger looked mad enough to throttle him. His face was livid, and he was breathing as if he'd just run the four-minute mile. I didn't even want to imagine what his blood pressure was up to.

"Calm down, you'll give yourself a stroke," I said.

Weems turned to us triumphantly. "The Foundation's revoked the grant. We'll want a total accounting."

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" Auger bellowed, and lunged across the car at Weems. He halted in mid-stride, a confused expression on his face, grabbed his stomach, and collapsed.

I leapt over and began examining him. He was pale and breathing rapidly, with a weak, racing pulse. Shock.

"Is it a heart attack?" Weems asked. The little rodent sounded happy.

Marlowe knelt on the other side. "What can I do?" he asked. I ripped open Auger's shirt and felt his abdomen. It was hot, pink and firm. Internal hemorrhage.

"Oh, Christ." I reached inside his pants and felt for the femoral pulse. There was none. "Well, that's it. d.a.m.n." I realized I was crying.

Auger stopped breathing, and Marlowe began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I reached to the neck and felt for the carotid pulse. It fluttered weakly and then faded.

"It's no use, Kevin. He's dead."Weems chortled gleefully, jumped in his car, and sped up the driveway in reverse.

Marlowe began external heart ma.s.sage, anxiously doing it 'way too fast.

I pulled him off and shook his shoulders. "Stop it, Kevin. It won't help.

Remember those stomach pains he had? It was an aneurysm, a weakness in the wall of his abdominal aorta. It burst, Kevin; he's bled to death internally. CPR won't help, dammit, nothing can."

"Ambulance, call a-"

"Listen. Even if they could get here within a half-hour, it wouldn't do any good.

Look, Kevin, five minutes ago, if I'd had him on the table in a fully equipped operating room, with a good team, we could have tried a DeBakey graft. But the chances of saving him would have been maybe five percent."

Marlowe stood and stared down at the body. Then he turned and ran inside the house, leaving me with the corpse. Dead, Auger was devoid of charisma. His features were bloodless white; he looked like a horror waxwork. I closed his mouth and rearranged the clothes to give him more dignity.

Marlowe returned with a huge cardiac syringe and a bottle of milky liquid.

"You're crazy."

"It would work, Mae. We can bring him back. I centrifuged them down to a concentrate. There are enough pseudobacteria here to repair the damage and reanimate him almost immediately."

The implications were terrifying. Vampire rabbits were bizarre enough, but he was preparing to do it to a human being.

"You can save his life! Come on, do it."

Typical Marlowe, always leaving the decisions to someone else. I filled the syringe and plunged the six-inch needle deep into the blood-distended abdomen.

Marlowe looked ill, and turned away. It was hard work pushing in the fluid. I pulled the needle out, and a small amount of blood welled up through the puncture. Two more syringes full and the bottle was empty.

We carried the body into the lab and packed it in ice to lower the body temperature quicker. Marlowe went away to vomit. I brewed some coffee and added a stiff jolt of medicinal Scotch.

"Here's to a fellow future inmate of Sing Sing," I toasted Marlowe.

Half an hour later we were feeling no pain.

"We'll have to buy him a black cape," I was saying. "Lessons in Transylvanian diction, too."

"I vant to suck your blood," Marlowe said, and leapt on me. We collapsed on the floor together, laughing.

The doorbell rang. Weems had returned with a sheriffs deputy.

"Hey, Fred!""Uh, hi, Mae. Long time no see." The deputy looked embarra.s.sed.

"We went to high school together," I announced to no one in particular.

"Sorry to have to disturb you, but this guy says you've got a stiff here."

Marlowe giggled from the floor. "A body? I don't see anybody." He adopted a stern voice. "The only thing dead around here is the night life in town."

Weems piped up with, "They're drunk."

"Brilliant, Weems, an astonishing deduction," I cried.

"They've hidden the body! Alastair Auger was dead. She even said so." He pointed at me accusatorily.

"Remove your finger."

The deputy stepped between us. "Uh, I'm sorry, Mae, uh, Doc, out I have to make a report."

"Professor Auger's not feeling well, Fred; he shouldn't be disturbed. Hey, you can believe me when I say he's alive. I'm a doctor. We're trained to know these things."

"They're faking. I won't leave until I see Auger's body."

"Yes, it is awe-inspiring. But I'm afraid you're just not my type, Weems."

Weems's face blanched at the sight of Auger, leaning in the doorway to the lab, and smiling malevolently at us all. He was glistening from the ice, and was wearing a towel.

"She's done something to him," Weems stuttered. "He was dead."

The deputy took Weems's elbow and propelled the little man out the door.

"Sorry, Mae, Professors-" He headed for the patrol car, saying, "Okay, mister, there's a little matter of making false reports."

Marlowe laughed hysterically.

"If you hadn't woken up right then," I said, "you'd have woken up in the county morgue."

Auger said, "If you'll excuse me, this light is most unpleasant and I'm starving."

I offered to fetch him a pint of blood.

"Yes, please, please, Doctor. I'm finding myself uncomfortably attracted to your neck."

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. The vampire is traditionally considered a body occupied by a demon. We may now modify that picture to encompa.s.s a mammal, dead in that its heart does not beat and its body temperature is abnormally, indeed fatally, low, but still functioning as an organism due to the presence of a colony of symbiotes. The pseudobacteria function as metabolizers and astransporters of oxygen, nutrients, and wastes, functions a.s.sumed in uninfected organisms by the circulatory and digestive systems. P. augeria is a weak infective agent, requiring the special environment found after death, and susceptible to most common antibacterial drugs. Folklore doc.u.ments the vampire's aversion to game, a mild antibiotic.

The host physiology undergoes changes which seem to eliminate unnecessary systems and increase efficiency for vampiric adaptations. These changes appear to be progressive, but must await long-term studies.

The first major change is the atrophy of the digestive tract. Nutrients pa.s.s directly from the stomach to the blood-stream, with the concurrent necessity that only isotonic solutions be ingested, to avoid the osmotic destruction of the blood cells. As the only isotonic solution available in nature is blood, the vampire's fluid intake has traditionally been in this form. An external blood source is also necessary for other reasons. Because blood transport is pseudobacterial rather than hydrostatic, and hence much slower, the body requires more red cells than can be produced by the host's bone marrow.

"All the great men are dead-myself, for instance."

"Breathe in," I replied.

Marlowe walked in, saw us, and blushed. The longer I knew Kevin, the more I realized how a.n.a.l retentive he could be.

"Am I interrupting?"

"Yes," Auger said! When he spoke, I could see his sharp canine teeth.

"No. Pa.s.s me that, yeah, the sphygmomanometer. You don't realize what a pleasure it is to have a patient who doesn't complain about the stethoscope being cold."

I joked as I put on the blood pressure cuff, trying to hide the creepy feeling Auger gave me. Intellectually, I knew he was the same man I a met a week before, but emotionally I had problems relating to a patient with a current body temperature of 30C-midway between what it should be, and the temperature of the room. And because of the vagaries of his circulation, even in the warmest room Auger's hands felt like he'd been out in a snowstorm without his mittens.

"Must we do this again?" Auger winced as I pumped up the cuff. I nodded, and listened with the stethoscope. I just couldn't get used to the fact that his heart didn't beat, and that he had no blood pressure.

"No diastolic, no systolic," I said. "Sir, your b.p.'s holding steady at zero over zero."

"Ah, normal," Auger said, reaching for his shirt. "Enough time wasted. Shall we return to the lab?"

He hated medical exams (and, I was convinced, doctors as well). I argued in vainfor the opportunity to take him to a hospital and run some real tests on him: X-rays, metabolic studies, EEGs...

"It's three in the morning," Marlowe complained. "I need some coffee."

"Can't get used to working graveyard shift?"

He acknowledged my joke with a weak smile. This nocturnal living was tough to get used to. Auger had acquired the vampiric dislike of daylight. Another thing that needed more study: was it because of the temperature, or the infrared radiation? In any case, my parents seemed to think my new hours were the result of an affair with Kevin Marlowe, and this made things fairly uncomfortable on the home front.

Auger accepted a cup of coffee, and stirred in a spoonful of salt, to make it osmotically similar to blood.

"There aren't enough metabolites and nutrients in the blood you drink to sustain you, Professor. Where the h.e.l.l do you get your energy?"

"It's a negentropic process, similar to the one which allows my Pseudobacteria augeria to be dormant over 35, while ordinary enzymatic processes become accelerated," he told me. "How much calculus have you had, Dr. Sanger?"

"Two semesters."

"You'd need at least four to understand. Hadn't we better return to work?"

As human populations grew, they tended to eliminate competing species, creating a niche for a predator. It may be possible to remutate Pseudobacteria augeria to its hypothetical ancestor, P. lycanthropica, which could survive at normal body temperature and changed its hosts into carnivorous animals. The body type was probably mediated by a supervene complex similar in principle to those found in b.u.t.terfly mimicry, resulting in discrete morphs with a lack of intermediate types. Examination of the literature suggests the morph adopted was that of the major natural predator of the geographical area, leading to werewolves in Northern Europe, were-bears in Scandinavia, and were-tigers in India. Some cases have been reported of werewolves becoming vampires after death, suggesting either concurrent infection, or evolution in progress.

I was driving back from town when I saw police cars lined up along the road. I slowed up and yelled out the window.

"Need a doctor?"

My deputy friend Fred flagged me in behind a patrol car. "Remember the wimp who accused the big guy of being dead?"

He led me through a swarm of cops, down the gully to the creek.

Weems lay with his arm dangling in the creek. His wrist had been slashed, and he had bled to death."Not much blood," I finally commented. "It usually gets all over when someone exsanguinates."

"Washed away downstream," the sheriff said. "They always have to come on my territory to kill themselves. How long would you say he's been dead?"

The body was cold. Rigor mortis was complete but not yet pa.s.sing off. I estimated twenty hours, maybe less allowing for the cold.

"d.a.m.ned suicides," the sheriff muttered.

"Big G.o.dd.a.m.n nuisance." I agreed, and we all stood around for a few minutes swapping gross-out stories.

Then I sped home, parked the car, and walked over to the lab. It was dusk when I arrived.

Marlowe was in an elated mood. "We've started on the last draft of the article.

We'll submit simultaneously to Science and Nature. Well, Mae, start working up an appet.i.te because I hear they have great food at the n.o.bel awards."

I stomped past him to Auger's bedroom. Auger was lying on his bed, absolutely straight, like a corpse already laid out. As I stood there, clenching my fists, he awoke and sat up.

"Well, Dr. Sanger. To what do I owe the honor of-"

"You killed him."

"Whom?"

Oh he could be suave.

"You were clever making it look like suicide. The cops have swallowed it."

He gave me his most charming smile, not realizing how his long teeth spoiled the effect. "I had no alternative. The man was our enemy. He convinced the Foundation to revoke our funding."