The First Eagle

Louisa nodded. Leaphorn said he'd settle for water.

Woody talked while he fixed their drinks.

'Bacteria, like about everything alive, split themselves into genera. Call it families. Here we're dealing with the Enterobacteriaceae family. One branch of that is Pasteurellaceae, and a branch of that is Yersinia pestis—the organism that causes bubonic plague. Another branch is Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes the famous venereal disease. These days, gonorrhea is hard to treat because—Woody paused, sipping his scotch.

'Wait,' he said. 'Let me skip back a little. Some of these bacteria, gonorrhea for example, contain a little plasmid with a gene in it that codes for the formation of an enzyme that destroys penicillin. That means you can'ttreat the disease with any of those penicillin drugs. You see?'

'Sure,' Louisa said. 'Remember, I'm a friend of Professor Perez. I get a lot of this sort of information.'

'We now understand that DNA can be transferred between bacteria—especially between bacteria in the same family.'

'Kissing cousins,' Louisa said. 'Like incest.'

'Well, I guess,' Woody said. 'I hadn't thought of it like that.'

Leaphorn had been sampling his ice water, which had the ice cube flavor plus staleness, plus an odd taste that matched the aroma of the van's air supply. He put down the glass.

Leaphorn had been doing some reading. He said: 'I guess we're talking about a mixture of plague and gonorrhea—which would make the plague microbe resistant to tetracycline and chloramphenicol. Is that about right?'

'About right,' Woody said. 'And possibly several other antibiotic formulations. But that's not the point. That's not what's important.'

'It sounds important to me,' Louisa said. 'Well, yes. It makes it terribly lethal if one is infected. But what we have here is still a blood-to-blood transmission. It requires a vector—such as a flea—to spread it from one mammal to another. If this evolution converted it directly into an aerobic form—a pneumonic Plague spread by coughing or just breathing the same air we'd have cause for panic.'

'No panic then?' Woody laughed. 'Actually, the epidemic trackers might even be happier with this form. If a disease kills its victims fast enough, they don't have time to spread it.'

Louisa's expression suggested she took no cheer from this. 'What is important then?'

Woody opened the door of a bottom cabinet, extracted a wire cage, and displayed it. A tag with the name CHARLEY printed on it was tied to the wire. Inside was a plump brown prairie dog, apparently dead.

'Charley, this fellow here, and his kith and kin in the prairie dog town where I trapped him, are full of plague bacteria—both the old form and the new. Yet he's alive and well, and so are his relatives.'

'He looks dead,' Louisa said.

'He's asleep,' Woody said. 'I took some blood and tissue samples. He's still recovering from the chloroform.'

'There's more to it than this,' Leaphorn said. 'You've known for years that when the plague sweeps through it leaves behind a few towns where the bacteria doesn't kill the animals. Host colonies. Or plague reservoirs. Isn't that what they're called?'

'Exactly,' Woody said. 'And we've studied them for years without finding out what happens in the one prairie dog's immune system to keep it alive while a million others are dying.' He stopped, sipped scotch, watched them over the rim of his glass, eyes intense.

'Now we have the key.' He tapped the cage with his finger. 'We inject this fellow's blood into a mammal that has resisted the standard infection and study the immune reaction. We inject it into a normal mammal and make the same study. See what's happening to white blood cell production, cell walls, so forth. All sorts of new possibilities are open.'

'And what you learn from the rodent immune system applies to the human system.'

'That's been the basis of medical research for generations,' Woody said. He put down his glass. 'If it doesn't work this time, we can quit worrying about global warming, asteroids on collision courses, nuclear war, all those minor threats. The tiny little beasties have neutralized our defenses. They'll get us first.'

'That sounds extreme,' Louisa said. 'After all, the world has had these sweeping epidemics before. Humanity survived.'

'Before fast mass transportation,' Woody said. 'In the old days a disease killed everybody in an area, then died out because there was nobody left to pass it around. Now airlines can have it spread planetwide before the Centers for Disease Control knows it's happening.'

That produced a moment of thoughtful silence, which Woody ended after mixing another drink.

'Let me show you what had me so excited when you drove up,' he said after Louisa declined a refill. He pointed to the larger of his two microscopes. Louisa looked first.

'Notice the clusters of ovoid cells, very regular shapes. Those are the Yersinia. See the rounder ones? They're darker because they take the dye differently. They look a lot like what you find in a gonorrhea victim. But not quite. They also have some of the Yersinia characteristics.'

'You couldn't prove it by me,' Louisa said. 'When I look into one of these things, I always think I'm seeing eyelashes.' Leaphorn took his turn. He saw the bacteria and what he guessed were blood cells. Like Louisa, they told him nothing except that he was wasting time. He had come up here to find out what had happened to Catherine Pollard.

'Very interesting,' Leaphorn said. 'But we're taking too much of your time. About two or three more questions and we'll go. I guess Lieutenant Chee told you that Miss Pollard was trying to find the source of Mr. Nez's infection.