'The key lies in the Lost City. Whatever caused the mutation in the first place came from the Lost City. There's got to be a way to use something from down there to fight this thing.'
'Let's think about this,' Trout said. MacLean knew that his life-extension formula was flawed, that it would reverse aging, but as Racine Fauchard learned the hard way, the formula was unpredictable. It also accelerated growth.'
'That's what I was getting at. Nature is always out of balance.'
'That's right. It's like a rubber band that snaps back after being stretched too far.'
'I don't know if Racine Fauchard would like being compared to a rubber band, but it makes my point about nature seeking equilibrium. Mutations happen every day, even in humans. Nature has built a corrective device into the system or we'd have people running around with two or three heads, which might not be all that bad. When it comes to aging, every species has a death gene that kills off the old to make room for the new generation. Go/gonweed was stable until the Fauchards introduced the enzyme into the equation, tipping things out of balance. It's got to snap back eventually.'
'What about the mutant soldiers who lived so long?'
'That was an artificial situation. Had they been on their own, they probably would have devoured each other. Equilibrium again.'
'The constant here is the enzyme,' Trout concluded. 'It's the precipitating factor. It can retard aging or it can accelerate it.'
'Have Gamay look at the enzyme again.'
'I'll see how she's coming along,' Trout said.
'I'm going back to the meeting to see if I can discourage General Kyle from a nuclear carpet bombing of the Atlantic Ocean, although I'm not optimistic.'
Trout's head was spinning. The Fauchards were dead, but they were still managing to inflict harm on the world from their graves.
He left the bridge and went down to a 'wet' lab where Gamay was working with a four-person team of marine biologists and those from allied marine sciences.
'I was talking to Kurt,' Paul said. 'The news isn't good.' He outlined his conversation with Austin. 'Have you turned up anything new?'
'I explored the interaction between the enzyme and the plant, but I didn't get anywhere, so I've been looking into DNA instead. It never hurts to revisit previous research.'
She led the way to a table where a series of about twenty steel containers were lined up in a row.
'Each one of these containers contains a sample of Gorgon weed. I've exposed the samples to the enzymes that the ROV collected from the columns to see what would happen. I wanted to see if there would be any reaction if I overloaded the weed with various forms of enzyme. I've been busy following other avenues and haven't looked at the samples recently.'
'Let me see if I understand what happened,' Trout said. 'The Fauchards distorted the molecular makeup of the enzyme during the refinement process, when they separated it from the microorganisms that created the substance. The irregularity was absorbed into the genetic makeup of the weed, triggering its mutation.'
'That's a pretty good summation.'
'Stay with me. Up until that time, the weed coexisted with the enzyme in its natural state.'
'That's right,' Gamay said. 'Only when the enzyme was modified did it interact with the nearest life-form, which happened to be obnoxious but perfectly normal seaweed, transforming it into a monster. I hoped that an overdose of the stuff would speed up the aging even more, just the way it did with Racine Fauchard. It didn't work.'
'The premise sounds logical there's something missing here.'
He thought about it for a moment. 'What if it isn't the enzyme but the bacteria that are the controlling influence?'
'I never thought about that. I've been fooling around with the chemical, thinking that was the stabilizing factor here, rather than the bugs that produce it. In extracting the enzyme from the water, the Fauchards killed off the bacteria, which may have been the governing factor that kept things on an even keel.'
She went over to a refrigerator and extracted a glass phial. The liquid contents had a slight brown discoloration.
'This is a culture of bacteria we collected from under the Lost City columns.'
She measured off some liquid, poured it into a Gorgonweed container and made a note.
'Now what?'
'We'll have to give the bacteria time to do their work. It won't take long. I haven't eaten. What say you get me some food?'
'What say you get out of here and we have, a real meal in the mess hall?'
Gamay brushed the hair back from her forehead. 'That's the best invitation I've had all day.'
Cheeseburgers had never tasted so good. Refreshed and full, the Trouts went back to the lab after an hour. Trout glanced at the container with the bacteria. The complex tangle of tendrils looked unchanged.
'Can I take a closer look at this stuff? It's hard to see in this light.'
Gamay pointed to a long pair of tongs. 'Use those. You can examine the specimen in that sink basin.'
Trout extracted the glob of weed from its container, carried it to the sink and dropped it into a plastic tub. By itself, the clump of Gorgonweed looked so innocent. It was not a pretty plant, but it did have an admirable functionality, with spidery tendrils hooked onto other
pieces of weed to form the impenetrable mat that sucked nutrients from the ocean. Trout poked it with the tongs, then lifted it up by a tendril. The tendril broke off at the stem and the weed plopped wetly back into the tub.
'Sorry,' he said. 'I broke your weed sample.'
Gamay gave him a peculiar look and took the tongs from his hand. She plucked at another tendril and it, too, came off. She repeated the experiment. Each time, the thin appendages broke off easily. She removed a tendril and took it over to a bench, where she sliced it up, put the thin sections on slides and popped them under a microscope.
A moment later, she looked up from the eye piece. 'The weed is dying,' she declared.
'What?' Trout peered into the sink. 'Looks healthy to me.'
She smiled and plucked off more tendrils. 'See. I'd never be able to do this with a healthy weed. The tendrils are like extremely strong rubber. These are brittle.'
She called over her assistants and asked them to prepare microscope slides from different parts of the sample. When she looked up from her microscope again, her eyes were red-rimmed, but her face was wreathed in a wide grin.
'The weed sample is in the first stage of necrosis. In other words, the stuff is dying. We'll try it with some of the other samples to make sure.'
Again she mixed the bacteria in with the weed, and again they waited an hour. Microscopic examination confirmed their original findings. Every sample subjected to the bacteria was dying.
'The bacteria are essentially eating something in the Gorgon weed that it needs to survive,' she said. 'We'll have to do more research.'
Trout picked up the phial with the original bacteria culture. 'What's the most effective way to use these hungry little bugs?'
'We'll have to grow large quantities, then spread the bacteria far and wide and let them do the work.'
Trout smiled. 'Do you think the British government would let us use the Fauchard submersible to spread this stuff around? It's got the capacity and speed that we need.'
'I think they'll bend over backward to keep the British Isles from being cut off from the rest of the world.'
MacLean saved our hash again,' Trout said, with a shake of his head. 'He gave us the hope that we could beat this thing.'
'Kurt deserves some credit.'
'His instincts were on the nose when he said to go back to the Lost City and to think in terms of equilibrium.'
