Michael Palmer - The fifth vial

"Good enough," Natalie said with little enthusiasm.

Millwood seemed for a moment as if he were going to say something else. Then he merely shook his head in frustration and sadness, and left. Once in the hallway, he turned to the right, away from the elevators, and went to the nurses' station. Rachel French, working on some notes, was waiting for him.

"Well?" she asked.

Millwood sighed.

"She's as close to beaten as I've ever known her to be. Just a few days ago she was high as a cloud over the news that she had been reinstated at school. Now this."

"I'm afraid I haven't handled things too well. I should have waited until after she was discharged before even bringing up the word 'transplant.' The whole business has her believing that her lung is done for even though I keep telling her that we have no way of knowing at this point."

"She's very smart and very intuitive."

"Good thing she doesn't have all the facts yet."

"What facts?"

"I have some friends in the tissue-typing lab, so I decided to call in a favor or two and have them do a rush job on her."

"And?"

"She's O-positive, which as you know already puts her in a reduced recipient pool. But there's more. I just got the preliminary analysis of her twelve histocompatibility antigens. Many of them are rare — some very rare. The odds on finding a donor are long, and even if we are willing to cut some pretty big corners in terms of donor-recipient matching, she would require a lifetime of fairly high doses of anti-rejection drugs. We haven't addressed the fact yet that in her mind, she's blown the toxicity of the medications out of proportion, but her fears aren't groundless either."

Millwood grimaced.

"So where does that leave her?"

"It leaves her," French said, "squarely between a rock and an extremely hard place."

It would do something of a disservice to the jungle surrounding the Whitestone Center for African Health to say that it was ever quiet, but over the years, Joe Anson had noticed a strange, predictable lull in the white noise between three and three thirty in the morning. Over that specific span — not much more than thirty minutes, and not much less — the peepers, Popillia and stag beetles, chimpanzees and other monkeys, bees and cicadas all seemed to quiet in unison. None of the Cameroon natives was willing to substantiate his observation, but Anson knew what he knew.

On this particular early morning, he leaned against the bamboo railing outside his main lab, and listened as the cacophony from the blackness all about him began to fade. The air was rich with the scents of hundreds of different species of flowering plants, as well as curry, licorice, mint, and a myriad of other spices. Anson inhaled deeply, treasuring the act.

Life following his transplant was as Elizabeth had optimistically predicted it would be. The surgery itself was hell, but he was heavily medicated for the two or three days afterward, so even those memories were vague. The only real problem his doctors encountered occurred in the immediate postoperative period. An epidemic of in hospital infection with an often deadly bacterium caused them to transfer him precipitously out of Amritsar, and in fact, out of India altogether. He was flown, anesthetized and on a respirator, to a renowned hospital in his native Capetown, where the rest of his recovery was uneventful. Thanks to a virtually perfect tissue match with the donor of his lung, the amount of anti-rejection medication he was given initially and was still taking could be kept to an absolute minimum, thus greatly reducing the chance of infection from opportunistic organisms.

If he knew how effective the procedure was going to be in restoring his breathing to normal, Anson admitted to anyone who would listen, he would have sought the transplant several years ago.

"This is your favorite time here, isn't it."

Elizabeth had materialized beside him, and now stood with her hands on the railing and her arm just barely touching his. Following the surgery, their relationship had more or less settled back to what it always had been — a deep friendship built on mutual respect, and constantly on the verge of burgeoning into a romance. It was a comfortable, secure place to be, and with Anson's critical research so close to clinical acceptance, neither of them seemed anxious to cross the line.

Anson reminded her about his belief surrounding the white noise of the jungle, and then pointed to his watch. For a time, the two of them stood there without speaking.

"Listen, now," he said finally. "Listen to how the sound begins to build. There, there, did you hear that? DeBrazza's monkeys. They haven't made a peep for half an hour, now here they go again. It's like they are renewed from a brief siesta."

"I believe you, Joseph. You should document your observations and we will submit them to a zoological journal. Of course, there is the small matter of the research you must complete before you can do that."

He laughed.

"I understand."

"The British and French drug agencies are poised to approve extensive clinical trials of Sarah-nine."

"Yes, that's wonderful."

"The FDA in America is not far behind. You are on the verge of changing the world, Joseph."

"I don't often allow myself the luxury of thinking of our work that way," he said, "but I am pleased with what is happening here and at the Whitestone facility in Europe. Of that you can be certain."

"Have you been sleeping at all?"

"No need. My energy is boundless. You and your surgeons, and of course, my magnificent donor, have given me a new life. Every breath had become such an effort. Now it is as if I am running without weights on my ankles."

"Well, please be careful, Joseph. Just because you have a new lung doesn't mean you are immune to the ill-effects of exhaustion."

"Just think of it, though. We have documented cures from forms of cancer that were thought to be incurable."

"I think of it all the time," St. Pierre said.

"And heart disease."

His ebullience was childlike.

"As I said, my dear friend, your work is about to change the world. Pardon me for asking, but how much investigation do you think you have left to do before you turn your notes over to Whitestone?"

Anson stared off into the darkness, a smile in his eyes, though not yet on his lips. Over the last two or three weeks he had been battling his eccentricities — possessiveness, perfectionism, and mistrust. It was time, he kept thinking — time to thank Whitestone and Elizabeth for setting him up with everything he needed to complete his work? time to thank them for the hospital and the many whose lives had been saved there? time to sit down with their scientists and turn over all the remaining secrets of Sarah-9, time to decide upon a new direction for his life.

"You and your organization have been very patient with me," he said, somewhat wistfully.

"Then we can arrange a meeting with our scientists?"

Anson did not answer right away. Instead, he looked up past the panoply at the sky, which had, in just a few minutes, gone from black to a rosy gray. Dawn was so beautiful in the jungle. It was time to cooperate with Whitestone, he acknowledged to himself. But he had another agenda that he wanted attended to first — an agenda that had everything to do with his being able to appreciate sunrise in the jungle.

"Actually," he said, "there is something I need from you first."

"Something we haven't already provided for you?"

"I know that may be hard to believe, but yes, there is one thing. I want to meet the family of the man who gave me back my life, and to help them financially in any way that I can."