Cormack brought the girl early the following morning, as had been promised the previous evening.
“She’s bought and paid for, all day,” the butler said. “She’s all yours.”
Mathieu gritted his teeth. Cormack knew perfectly well what the girl would be required to do, and had had been instructed to explain it to her in sufficient detail to obtain her consent, but the butler was privately convinced that Mathieu used the prostitutes in more orthodox ways as well. Mathieu wished that the fat man was entirely wrong about that, but his own flesh was, alas, as weak as the next man’s, and scientific rectitude had not always counterbalanced temptation. He had only succumbed once in the three years since he had arrived in London, but once was surely too many, especially as he had been fully aware by then of the consequences of the extraction and his inability to ameliorate those consequences. When he had nightmares, the lost face that haunted him was the face of the girl he had used, and defiled, in more ways than one.
On this occasion, however, he was determined to be rigorous, all the more so as the girl was little more than a child. She might only have been thirteen, in Mathieu’s judgment, although she claimed, when asked, to be sixteen. Either way, she seemed unlikely to reach twenty, whatever was done or not done to her in the meantime.
She told Mathieu that her name was Judy Lee, which he had no reason to doubt. Prostitutes who used invented names, as many did, tended to use more fanciful ones, and usually did not bother with surnames at all.
“Do you know why you’re here, Judy?” Mathieu asked, when Cormack had gone, leaving him alone with the girl in the laboratory, which she was inspecting with more wonderment than anxiety.
“Going to bleed me,” the girl said. Her accent was barbaric. “Been cupped afore—didn’t do me no good, though they said it would.”
Her gaze was flitting hither and yon, surprised but not unduly intimidated by the profusion of glassware and apparatus. She had surely never been to a public lecture at the Royal Institution, so the only place she might have seen such an assembly of equipment before was on the stage of some cheap theatre. Quasi-alchemical laboratory equipment had been a clichéd décor of exaggerated melodrama ever since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been adapted for the Porte-Saint-Martin in Paris more than sixty years before and had quickly migrated back to England in imitative pieces. If she had seen such apparatus on the stage, however, it had not given her cause to be frightened. Cormack had evidently impressed upon her that Mathieu was a doctor, a healer, a man who could be trusted.
“I’m not going to cup you, Judy,” Mathieu said, as soothingly as he could. “I’m going to insert two hollow needles into veins in your forearms. They’ve been sterilized in an autoclave—that’s a high-temperature boiler—and I’ll swab the flesh with alcohol first to sterilize that too. The cooling effect of the alcohol’s evaporation will help numb the pain. I’m going to leave the needles in place for some time, so that I can put the blood I draw from one vein through a special filter, and then return it to the other. It might seem rather horrid, but it’s quite safe. You can watch if you like, or look away, if you’d rather. One day, in the not-too-distant future, such procedures will be standard practice in hospitals all over the world, and everyone will be familiar with them.”
“I had worse done to me,” Judy Lee reported, making an effort to remain laconic. Mathieu had no reason to doubt that, either. He thought it best to keep talking, not so much by way of paying lip-service to the principle of informed consent as to reassure her that this was something that he had done before, many times, and that it really would become a normal aspect of medical practice one day—scientific medical practice, not quackery or the obsolete traditions that the majority of practicing physicians still insisted on following.
“You’re contributing to an important study, Judy,” he assured her. “You and I are adventurers on the path of progress.”
The girl attempted to smile, but she had not been a whore long enough to have mastered that kind of insincerity. She was still beautiful, as much because of the pallor of the consumption that had already begun to eat her away as in spite of it. The disease gave a certain semi-transparent gloss to the skin and sculpted her lean features, exaggerating the eyes in a strangely soulful fashion.
Mathieu told himself that she would not have been beautiful for much longer, whether he intervened in the process of her deterioration or not, but he was not sufficiently hypocritical to wonder where it might be good for her to become less attractive, perhaps even to be saved from a successful career in prostitution. He knew that the only thing worse than being a whore who had an overabundance of clients was being a whore who could not find enough.
Soon, he thought instead, he would be able to pay back what he took from his “volunteers,” with abundant interest. If he were only given time and adequate financial support, he would surely find a way to isolate the agent and feed it in vitro, so that it would be able reproduce itself independently of its host. Then the transactions in which he dealt would no longer be a matter of robbing Petronella to pay Paul, but a matter of assisting in the evolution of humankind, of building a hitherto-unimaginable Utopia on the rickety foundations of London’s slums.
“French, ain’t yer?” the girl said, as the second needle went in, causing her to grimace with pain. The original syringe, having injected the anti-clotting serum, had been hooked up to the pump and the filtration apparatus. Mathieu hooked up the second modified syringe, completing the circuit, with the utmost care.
He had good grounds, nowadays, to be sure that he could feed at least six liters of the girl’s blood through the machine without undue risk, and return it to her body, although he would have to give her instructions to limit subsequent blood-loss, given that the anti-clotting agent would remain in her bloodstream for anything up to three days. It had been an induced hemophilia that had caused the two fatal casualties in Paris, not the extraction process itself, but a Parisian tribunal would have been unlikely to appreciate the nice distinction, and an English court would doubtless take an equally harsh view. There had only been the one fatality since he had decamped to London—but that might well prove to be one too many, if the spy who had been watching Sir Julian’s house the night before really had been a policeman investigating his activities.
“Yes, I’m French,” Mathieu admitted, without looking up from his work. “I worked with Louis Pasteur in Paris before I came to London.”
“Heard o’him,” Judy Lee boasted. “Germs’n’that.”
“That’s right,” Mathieu said, approvingly. “He’s developed a method of sterilizing milk, and a treatment for rabies. A great man—a very great man, although François Raspail actually deserves the credit, not merely for developing the germ theory of disease, but also for pioneering the hygienic precautions that have done so much to prevent infection.”
“Don’t know him,” the girl observed, without any undue shame or disappointment. She was watching her blood flow along the tubes without any evident horror or faintness, and a certain avid fascination.
“Pasteur’s greatest gift has been the founding of the Institute that is continuing and extrapolating his work and Raspail’s. That’s where experiments in blood transfusion are being carried out, now that the legal prohibition has been lifted. We lost two hundred years of potential progress in that regard, because the scientific method came into conflict with the law. The first human blood transfusions are said to have carried out within walking distance of this very spot, by Sir Christopher Wren—the man who designed Saint Paul’s Cathedral—in 1657.”
The date seemed meaningless to Judy Lee, who provably did not have an adequate knowledge of arithmetic to carry out a subtraction of that magnitude.
Mathieu plugged on, thinking that if he talked with blithe confidence, the incomprehensibility of much of what he said would only add to his apparent authority, and help to maintain his patient’s confidence. “Wren was hoping to find a method of rejuvenation, but it soon turned out that one man’s blood is sometimes another man’s poison. My countryman, Jean-Baptiste Denis, was sued by the widow of a man who died in the course of one of his transfusion experiments, and the practice was outlawed. The prohibition was relaxed temporarily early in the present century, when a surgeon named Jamee Blundell used a syringe to carry out infusions in order to counter heavy blood loss after women gave birth. Many of his attempts were successful, but some ran into catastrophic problems because of unexpected incompatibilities between the transfused blood and the recipient’s. My former colleagues at the Institut have been working hard to understand those incompatibilities and to draw up classification of blood types that will enable transfusions to be made safely.
“That could have been done long ago—even the primitive microscopes of the eighteenth century would have been adequate to the necessary investigations—but the work wasn’t done because no one dared take the risk of prosecution. If the early experiments had persisted, all kinds of surgery would have become safer and more effective more than a hundred years ago—the metalworkers and glassworkers of the day would have been easily able to produce hollow needles and Pravaz syringes, if only there had been a manifest need for them. As things turned out, though, it has taken a long time to put together the kind of apparatus that can replace blood lost in surgery, just as I’m now replacing yours, and its use in hospitals is still rare.
“The removal of blood from the body, the prevention of its clotting and its reintroduction may seem bizarre to you, but they’ll very soon be routine procedures in medical practice. In the twentieth century, there will probably be nothing in the least unusual in people selling their blood for the use of others, probably for less than the guinea you were paid.
“Scientific medicine might have made vast strides in the eighteenth century, if only medical scientists had been permitted to experiment rationally. Instead, there was a Golden Age of quackery, when all kinds of bizarre patent medicines flourished, while orthodox physicians fought tooth and nail to defend their own superstitions. The possible deaths of a few dozen or a few hundred volunteers in controlled experiments were prevented by the ban, while hundreds of thousands of people who had no choice at all died by virtue of licensed but misguided treatments, and millions more by virtue of ignorant inaction. Things are different now—very different—but the necessary research requires time, and money, which is direly hard to come by. If the governments of Europe would only take their responsibilities seriously, instead of spending all their time and revenues plotting and preparing for war, there’d be no need for self-serving buccaneers like Sir Julian Temp.…”
He stopped abruptly, realizing that his tongue had run away with him, and that it was perhaps as well that the girl could not be expected to understand what he was saying. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What I mean is that you’re helping in a great cause, and have every reason to be proud of yourself.”
“Just doin’ it for the money,” she observed, dully. “You can buy a girl in Bethnal Green for a shilling—a guinea’s good scratch. Done worse for far less.”
Mathieu gritted his teeth again. “One day,” he said, in a low voice, “my work will do wonders for girls like you. You’ll be its true beneficiaries, at the end of the day. The twentieth century will be a new Age of Miracles, not just for the rich but for everyone.”
She was hardly listening. Her eyes were glued to the apparatus—not to the flowing red blood now, but to the extract oozing from the gel compartment into the collection tube, which was beginning to form golden droplets.
“What’s that yellow stuff?” she asked.
“The red color of blood is due to a pigment carried in corpuscles,” he told her. “It’s only red when it’s oxygenated—if you look at the veins on the back of your hand you’ll see that they’re blue, because that’s the color the corpuscles have when they’re not oxygenated. You never see blue blood outside the veins, though, because the moment the corpuscles are exposed to the atmosphere by a cut, they turn red. If you take the corpuscles out of the blood, the fluid in which they float, the plasma, is the color of straw. But plasma is still a complex mixture of dissolved substances and living cells. The particular substance that my special filter is removing and diverting is golden yellow.”
“Not real gold, then?” said Judy Lee, in jest.
“More precious than that,” he murmured. “Alchemical gold.”
“Really?”
Mathieu collected himself, not wanting to mislead the girl by the use of metaphors that she might take too literally. “No, not really,” he said, apologetically—that’s just a manner of speaking. Our techniques of chemical analysis aren’t yet capable of determining a precise formula for the golden fluid, but it’s not simply an inert solution. It doesn’t consist of corpuscles visible through a microscope, but I suspect that there are many kinds of living cells, and perhaps living entities that don’t consist of cells, that are too small for microscopes to distinguish.
“The filter is the key to the whole process. That was the one stroke of luck I had that no other researcher has found, and it might have remained undiscovered for decades if I hadn’t stumbled upon it. It doesn’t work like a sieve—in fact, as you can see, it lets the red corpuscles and other cellular components through—but it soaks up the vital ingredient in which I’m interested. At first, I had hoped to make use of the orthodox filters used in chemical analysis, but I soon realized that not only do they trap far too many components, but that the particular biological agents I was trying to isolate are extraordinarily delicate, and very easily destroyed. Some of them, it seems, can only survive in contact with living tissue. I began experimenting with filters comprised of networks of fungal hyphae, and then with gels made from fungal protoplasm. I was fortunate enough to find a gel that not only absorbed but preserved the golden fluid that became the focal point of my future research, at least temporarily. And there it is.”
“But not real gold?” she said “I don’t have real gold in my blood—just fool’s gold.”
That was not an analogy with which Mathieu was comfortable.
“It’s not metallic gold,” he said, “but it really is exceedingly precious.”
“Worth more than a guinea, then?” Without waiting for a reply, though, the girl added: “Obviously, or you wouldn’t bother. Not worth anything to me, though, without a buyer. Like other things I could name, if I weren’t in decent company.”
Mathieu did not want to discuss the other objects of her traffic, even though he was far from sure that he qualified any longer as “decent company.” He continued talking about remoter matters.
“The whole raison d’être of the Institut Pasteur is to substitute a new scientific medicine for the alchemical medicine of old, and to replace the occult version of the human microcosm with an image based on the findings of microscopy and organic chemistry. We knew at the outset, of course, that the microcosm in question would not be simple, but we had no conception of the awesome extent of the complexity that we would discover—although discover may be too strong a word, given that we have barely begun the process of exploration.
“John Donne once proclaimed that no man is an island, and he was right—every man is, in fact, not merely an island but a universe, entire and unique, which plays host to all manner of microbiological life-forms, and other agents whose nature seems to be ambiguously suspended between life and inertia. You might have heard talk of bacilli and protozoans, but we’ll require a terminology far more elaborate than that to get to grips with the complexity of the multitudinous entities that dwell within a human body, the vast majority of which remain invisible to the most powerful microscopes.”
Judy Lee was looking at him carefully, with a certain wonderment. He knew that she could only understand a tiny fraction of what he was saying, but would be all the more impressed by it in consequence, all the more inclined to believe that he knew what he was doing, that he could be trusted. In any case, he needed to keep talking, for his own benefit rather than hers. He felt a need to summarize, to clarify, to remind himself what not only of he was doing, but why—to remind himself that the poor child wasn’t simply “raw material” to be used, discarded and forgotten but a collaborator in a great and magnificent enterprise, of which she should and ought to be proud.
She was prepared to listen to him meekly and patiently, not merely because she was a captive of the apparatus, for the time being, but because she doubtless had to be prepared to listen meekly and patiently to other clients who liked to talk while they used her flesh for their own purpose, putting on a show of understanding, of being interested, of giving value for the money they were paying her. For a guinea, she was prepared to manifest a lot of docility.
“Thanks to François Raspail and Louis Pasteur,” Mathieu continued, “we now have good grounds for believing that many, if not all, infectious diseases are caused by micro-organisms of one sort or another. Thanks to Edward Jenner, we’ve begun to find ways of countering the pathological activity of those invaders, sometimes by means of other micro-organisms. The vast majority of the entities that live within us are, however, benign. It is quite possible that we couldn’t exist without them—that the life we think of as our own is actually a collaborative enterprise, and that the processes of progressive evolution that the Chevalier de Lamarck and Charles Darwin have identified and explained are collaborative too. At any rate, our internal populations are as subject to the principle of natural selection as we are, and far more intensely, by virtue of the brief life-spans of the individuals comprising them.
“When I was at the Institut I agreed with my colleagues in thinking of aging and death in terms of disease. Like them, I entertained the hope that we might one day find ways to combat the disease of aging, perhaps to find a medical elixir of life. That was why I went to the Institut in the first place. Once there, though, I began to think in somewhat different terms, wondering whether it was really accurate to imagine youth and health in terms of the mere absence of, or resistance to, agents of decay. I began to wonder whether good health and the common attributes of youthfulness might more accurately be considered as positive results of the tireless endeavor of active agents, while old age and death are merely the consequences of the eventual fatigue and failure of those collaborative commensals.
“There was nothing unreasonable about that kind of eventual failure, I realized, in terms of the logic of Darwin’s theory. Like all living organisms, the primary imperative of our indwelling multitudes is to reproduce themselves, not merely within the context of a particular human microcosm but in terms of the further reproduction of the microcosm entire. Natural selection exerts strong pressure on our indwelling micro-organisms—especially those which, unlike disease-causing bacilli, can’t easily transmit themselves from one microcosm to another by infection or contagion—to do whatever they can to further the cause of human reproduction. Once the reproductive phase of human life is over, however, such micro-organisms would no longer be subject to pressure maintaining that aspect of their activity, and their own mortality would tend, in consequence, to be fragile and limited.…”
He broke off, not because the argument was complete, but because the extraction process had nearly run its course. The collection tube was almost full of golden liquid. He inspected it closely, trying to measure the exact color, the presumed purity. He was convinced that the fragility and mortality of the substance was at least partly due to impurities that earlier versions of his filter had retained. The sample extracted from Judy Lee, however, seemed perfectly clear to the naked eye, and the color was beautiful.
“You don’t get much for your guinea,” Judy Lee observed, measuring the size of the collection tube with her bleak blue eyes.
Not nearly enough, he could not help thinking. But for you, unless you’re very lucky, far too much.
The effects on the donors of the removal of the golden fluid had been very variable, apparently in accordance with some mysterious law or pattern that he could not yet predict. Some girls were less disfigured by the diminution of their beauty than others. Younger ones tended to fare better, and also to have more capacity to regenerate fluid to compensate for the removal; it was the riper, more mature forms of beauty whose loss was more striking, more despairing. He hoped, with all sincerity, that Judy Lee would not come out of the process too badly.
Initially, he had assumed that the golden fluid would be regenerated fully, in exactly the same that blood removed from patients by means of leeches, lancets or syringes was renewed by the body’s own mechanisms. Even when he had realized that the recovery was always partial, he had hoped that the deficit might be reparable by means of conventional tonics and cordials, that if the general health of the patient could be improved, the golden fluid might recover the level and effect that it had had prior to the extraction.
He had clung to that hope for a long time but it was gone now. He knew, now, that the extraction process inflicted permanent damage—damage that he had not yet found a means of repairing The beauty he stole from the donors in order to improve Sir Julian Templeforth’s good looks—in the service, as Myrtille de Valcoeur had reminded him, of the aristocrat’s vanity and lust—was for them a permanent diminution.
Some of the earlier patients who had come back to see him—not to accuse him of anything, at least directly, but simply because he was the only doctor they knew, and someone to whom they could turn for help—had gained some benefit from the tonics he had devised, but none had recovered her former attractions in full. Meanwhile, the benefit transferred to Sir Julian was always temporary, and the duration of the effect declined with each new treatment. The arithmetic of the exchange never added up; there was always a deficit in the total.
He did not know how long he could keep telling himself that he was on the very brink of the breakthrough that would enable him to maintain Sir Julian’s condition without increasingly frequent transfusions, and begin to repair some of the damage that he had inflicted upon the victims of his vampirism. He did not know how long he could ward off the confrontation with the possibility that the breakthrough in question might never some, that the moment might arrive when he might have to tell Sir Julian that he was not prepared to continue his treatment, and that he too would have to suffer the fate of his victims, perhaps in an exaggerated fashion.
“Do you mind if I leave you alone for a few minutes, Judy?” he said. “The process is almost finished; I’ll come back to unhook you very soon. I’ll be within earshot, so if you need anything, just shout.”
Judy Lee nodded. Mathieu knew that he really ought to stay, but her taciturnity was putting undue stress on his lecturing skills, and the atmosphere in the subterranean laboratory was becoming foul with the reek of blood. He needed a few breaths of fresh air—and today, fortunately, was one of the rare days on which London’s air really was fresh. Yesterday’s rain had washed the lingering smog-particles out of the atmosphere, and a brisk south-westerly breeze was preventing its reformation. Although the new network of sewers had not yet taken up the entirety of the river’s burden, the days of the Great Stink were long gone.
Mathieu went up the steps to the pavement of the street and leaned against the railings protecting the hollow in which his front door was set. There was a faint unsteady vibration beneath his feet, which was primarily a side-effect of the construction-work on the underground railway, although the excavation of the sewers still had a minor contribution to make. London’s Underworld was a complex hive of activity nowadays, with countless workers toiling round the clock in shifts, largely unnoticed by the denizens of the surface.
Men of science, Mathieu thought, were not unlike those subterranean laborers, their patiently heroic endeavors being largely unheeded by journalists and historians alike. The chroniclers of the modern world, like those of the Middle Ages, paid close attention to the actions of kings, statesmen and generals, but rarely noticed the subtle revolutions in technology that were the true motor of history.
Mathieu realized, however, that he was not unobserved at present. There was a tall, thin man bundled up in a dark blue overcoat leaning casually on the railings of the house opposite, who never looked at him directly but never excluded him from his field of vision either. Mathieu had no idea whether it was the same man who had been watching Sir Julian’s house the previous evening, and he had no way of determining whether or not the watcher might be a police detective, but he was suddenly in no doubt that he and his lodgings were under surveillance.
The laboratory was only visible from the street when the blinds were raised, as they hardly ever were, and only partially then. It was completely invisible from the back yard too—the only other ground floor window was that of the kitchen—but that did not make him feel any more comfortable.
He went back inside immediately, and hurried back to the girl, who was drowsy but seemed as well as could possibly be expected. He fed her a small measure of port wine, holding the glass to her lips so that she did not have to move her arms.
“Nearly over now, Judy,” he said, mustering his best bedside manner. “I just have to take the needles out and tidy everything up.”
“Don’t mind,” she replied, valiantly. “It don’t hurt.” She did not bother to add, once again, that she had done worse for less. For the moment, at least, she thought it was less. Perhaps she still would when the full cost became evident, even if it was worse than he hoped. The likelihood was, in any case, that she would not connect the delayed effect with this particular cause, and would not bear any grudge against him at all. But he felt sure—and his meeting with the Valcoeurs the previous evening had only confirmed his conviction, in spite of their careful circumlocutions—that other people would soon been able to put two and two together and arrive at the correct total. His carefully sterilized hands were far from clean, even if the young women he injured—the children he injured, in some cases—did not realize it.
When he had detached the needles and bandaged the residual wounds, he gave Judy Lee a generous cup of hot sweet tea and a slice of toast with marmalade before allowing her to go on her way. He advised her to go home and rest, but he did not suppose that she would take the advice. She was a little unsteady on her feet but she could walk perfectly well. She looked around as he ushered her through the hallway, taking what note she could of the circumstances of his life.
“I can come back later, if you like” she said, as he opened the door. “For company, not blood.” She sounded genuinely hopeful, perhaps because he seemed a substantial cut above her usual clients, one she would be glad to see regularly, or perhaps because she was optimistic enough to think that he might pay her as generously for the use of her meager flesh as for her rich blood.
“No,” he said, brusquely. “That’s not necessary.” He suspected that she would be back eventually, for one reason or another, but he had learned to steel himself against such occasions, and to send the visitors away with whatever meager prescriptions he could provide. He was always discomfited, nevertheless, by the sight of the consequences of his work.
The watcher on the other side of the street did not budge from his station when Mathieu escorted the girl back up to the pavement, and did not follow her when she made her way back toward Goldhawk Road. The tall man watched the girl attentively as she walked away, though, before returning his eyes to Mathieu’s lodgings, abruptly enough to catch Mathieu’s gaze for a moment.
Mathieu judged, as the two of them locked stares, that the other man knew perfectly well that he had been spotted, but did not care. The watcher’s eyes were dark and keen. The uneven coloring of his face suggested that he had recently shaved off a well-grown beard and moustache, in the habitual fashion of a seaman recently returned from a long voyage. He was lean but seemed muscular, and if he really was a mariner, he was probably strong and physically capable.
Mathieu hurried back to his laboratory, to begin work on the filtrate; it was a few minutes after three o’clock, and he was anxious to get the preparatory work done before Sir Julian arrived. He wanted the laboratory to be spick and span, to present an image of efficient, dedicated and productive labor. He wanted Sir Julian to feel confident that his money was being well spent, and would eventually prove, in spite of temporary snags, to be an excellent investment, on his own behalf and the world’s.
Mathieu split the filtrate into two unequal parts: one for Sir Julian and one for the continuation of his in vitro experiments. He would dearly have loved to retain the larger fraction for the latter purpose, but he did not dare. Sir Julian’s need—if need was the right word—was increasing too rapidly. Had the baronet been given the choice, Mathieu would probably have been instructed to reserve all the filtrate for his use, but Mathieu still had power enough within their relationship to insist that the broader purpose be maintained. Sir Julian had had plenty of opportunity to see what happened to the “volunteers” who provided him with the means to maintain his condition, and he knew exactly how valuable Mathieu’s expertise was.
As a last resort, Mathieu knew, the baronet might take the chance of replacing him with some ambitious graduate of Guy’s or St. Thomas’s—but only as a last resort. Parties to the kind of Faustian bargain that Sir Julian Templeforth and Dr. Mathieu Galmier had made could not easily be substituted, on either side. On the other hand, he thought, the Valcoeurs of ancient Aquitaine might well be correct in suggesting that they could play Mephistopheles more convincingly than a minor Anglo-Irish landlord whose fortunes were apparently in decline.
He held the collection tube up to the lamplight, to try once again to assess the quality of the alchemical gold. The sample seemed pure, and beautiful, but he knew that it was not only Judy Lee’s beauty that had been compromised by the extraction; the golden color would begin to tarnish too, in a matter of hours. Once in Sir Julian’s veins, his fraction ought to be stabilized to some degree, but invisibly, it would gradually begin to lose its force, its alchemical power. The fraction that remained in the tube would follow a more visible deterioration, gradual but inexorable—unless he could find a way to nourish it, to maintain its mercurial vitality, and perhaps to multiply it.
He began, patiently and meticulously, to distribute droplets of the golden fluid in Petri dishes, whose lids were carefully marked to indicate the make-up of their substrates. The substrates were mostly transparent, but even in those, the yellow color was hardly visible once the droplet had spread out.
When all the dishes had been prepared he placed them carefully in the incubator, in order to maintain them at body temperature. There were only a dozen. Tomorrow or the next day, when Cormack brought him another patient ready and willing to be bled, he might be able to prepare as many as thirty, or even three dozen.…but with the necessary replications, and the potential number of substrates whose effects had to be explored, that was still a very small number. He was in desperate need of a stroke of luck, a single crucial success on which to build. If he could only obtain that…
In the meantime, there was nothing he could do but keep trying, to keep working as hard as he could.