FORT DETRICK
FREDERICK, MARYLAND
SEPTEMBER 29, 1984
“I must say, Doctor LaVelle, I am impressed.”
Benjamin Greve of the DIA had called her lab and told her to meet him in the same back corner of the USAMRMC offices as before. And as before, he sat behind the rickety desk, looking as pale and thin as ever, with the same embalmed expression. But no waiting this time.
“Impressed by what?”
“By the amazing amount of data you’ve compiled in seven weeks.”
“Not so amazing. You’re impressed only because you underestimated me.”
Everybody underestimated her. She was used to it.
That smilelike grimace appeared. “Are you always this blunt?”
“I simply did what was asked of me.”
“Yes, you did, but … let me tell you something. You were one of four researchers at four different facilities given a sample of Substance A to investigate. Not one of them has compiled anywhere near the data you have.”
“Melis proved something of a challenge.”
Probably the understatement of the year, she thought.
“ ‘Melis’ … ah, yes. Your term for Substance A. Where did you come up with that, may I ask? I’m guessing it’s an acronym of a list of its properties.”
Greve watched her with an expectant expression, as if waiting for a nugget of brilliance.
“It’s an anagram for ‘slime.’ ‘Substance A’ is pretty lame.”
She watched his look of expectation fade. Sorry. You guessed wrong. You lose.
“An anagram for slime … how … interesting. Well, be that as it may, if I had shown up on a Saturday at any of those other facilities, I am quite sure I would not have found the designated researcher in his lab.”
Okay, she admitted it … well, to herself, at least: She’d become fixated on melis. Obsessed was probably more like it. Since that first instant when it had weighed in at zero, she hadn’t been able to get it out of her mind. It had taken over her brain.
She’d subjected it to thousands of degrees of heat, but it didn’t boil, desiccate, or harden. She’d cooled it to near absolute zero, but it remained pliant and pourable. She’d electrocuted it and dropped it into caustic acids. She’d put it into a blender and emulsified it in various fluids, but when the mix dried out it returned to its original state.
After exposing mice and rats to melis with no ill effects, she tried feeding it to them, but they weren’t interested. So she emulsified it in normal saline and administered it via intraperitoneal injection, again with no ill effects. She determined it was not toxic. The damn stuff was too inert to be toxic.
“Your most recent fax stated that you had some unexpected results from the rodent studies, but you didn’t mention what they were.”
“I wanted to confirm the preliminary reports. The rodents injected with the melis-saline emulsion appeared unaffected, so I sent them off to be studied for changes in motor function. They were run through standard mazes and performed no better or worse than their unexposed brethren.”
Greve looked bored. “How, pray tell, was that unexpected?”
“It wasn’t. But some of the rats happened to be pregnant at the time of the injection.”
“Oh?” He straightened in his chair. “You have my interest. Mutagenic effects?”
“If you call improved maze performance a mutation, then yes.”
“Improved how?”
“The animal behavior people called me all excited, wanting to know what I’d done to the rats.”
Greve leaned forward. “I trust you didn’t—”
“Of course not.” She remembered the stringent terms of the NDA she’d signed. “I said it was classified.”
“And why were they excited?”
“The melis offspring were absolute star performers in the mazes. But I didn’t want to report that unless I was sure they could replicate the results.”
“And?”
“And that’s where I was when you called—watching maze-naïve baby rats zoom this way and that toward the cheese.”
“Let me get this straight: The melis-treated rats showed no effects one way or the other, but their offspring demonstrated increased intelligence?”
“I didn’t say that. No one’s ready to say any more than the offspring demonstrated improved maze performance. Assessing actual intelligence will take more refined testing.”
He waved her off. “Spoken like a true scientific tight-ass. We’ll arrange for it.”
She groaned. “That’ll mean applying for grants and—”
“Grants? Wherever did you get that idea? Did you know that there are one thousand three hundred thirty-seven words in the Declaration of Independence, and twenty-six thousand nine hundred eleven words in federal laws regulating the sale of cabbages? We do not want bureaucratic oversight.”
Great. She hated applying for grants.
“I’ll need more melis.”
“No problem. We have plenty of it.”
“Can I ask where—?”
“No, you may not.”
Maureen vented a blast of frustration. “After all the work I’ve done? I probably know more about this damn stuff than anyone on Earth, but I’m not cleared to know where it came from?”
“Maybe someday.”
“Because it’s not from Earth, is it?”
Greve’s expression froze. “Why do you say that?”
“Because it behaves like nothing on Earth. Our spectrometers here are capable of analyzing the molecular structure of anything, but they can’t analyze melis because they don’t recognize its existence. We enter a sample for analysis and the machine tells us it’s waiting for a sample. Under an electron microscope it looks like a glob—no resolution. Melis is like nothing on Earth, so it has to be from someplace other than Earth.”
Greve shot to his feet behind the desk. “You will keep your unfounded opinions to yourself, Doctor LaVelle! Your duty here is to provide us with facts, not wild speculation.”
He was right, of course, but damn, she wanted to know where this stuff came from.
He added, “You are, however, correct about one thing.”
“Oh?”
“You are indeed the world authority on what you call melis. And as such you will be involved in every phase of the investigation.”
Yes! If she stayed with this wonderfully mysterious goop, she was confident she’d learn where it came from. Unfounded opinion it might be, but she was positive melis was not of Earthly origin.
“I won’t let you down.”
“To that end, we will begin primate trials immediately and you will oversee them.”
“I’m a molecular biologist. I don’t do animal studies.”
“You just did—the mazes, remember?”
“That was an ad-hoc thing, and only rodents.”
She considered melis hers—her baby. She didn’t want anyone else taking over. But primates? Too much like humans.
“They’re just dumb animals,” Greve said.
“I don’t do primates.”
“You do now.”