Christy Esmahan - The Laptev Virus

Tally nodded. “I’ve got some vials in cold storage. I’ll retrieve them and begin cultivating them.”

“Excellent,” said Sarah. “I’d also like us to take a look at some mouse models.”

“Do you think the virus will propagate in mice cells?” asked Miquela. Sarah was pleased that she seemed unscathed by Shane’s earlier slight.

“Well, I’m not really sure, but I have a hunch that with so many genes, the Laptev virus might have several different hosts in nature. We don’t know what the world looked like when it was frozen in the ice 30,000 years ago, but we do know that there were mammals around, including rodents. What I’m hoping is that passing it through various generations in mice might attenuate the virus enough to be able to handle it better in the lab. We don’t want it to change completely, but if it were to become a bit tamer, I don’t think that would be a bad thing.”

“Yeah, flu viruses are attenuated when we grow them in chicken eggs, so maybe this virus will get weaker in mice. It’s a good idea. Certainly worth a try,” said Drew.

“It could get worse, though. You never know. Passing it through mice could make it mutate and become 100% fatal,” said Shane.

Everyone was silent as they pondered the implications of Shane’s words. The truth was that no one knew much at all about the Laptev Hemorrhagic Fever Virus. Soon her lab would be one of a handful of groups who would know more about the virus than anyone else in the world. It was a grim thought.

After the meeting, Sarah shuffled down the hall to the room where the student technicians sat around studying and socializing. Some were undergrads, but several, including Kevin, who looked after the mice that they used for experiments, were graduate students.

“Kevin,” she said, addressing the technician who sat at a table in the corner, his books spread out in front of him. There was another young woman sitting at the table with him. Sarah had seen her before—what was her name? Tammy something, she recalled. The girl wore entirely too much makeup, Sarah noted idly, even as she addressed Kevin. “How are our mice doing? How many do we have?”

Kevin looked up from his cell phone, which he had been poking vigorously. He was one of those people who hardly spoke at all, it seemed to her, preferring instead to live his life online, immersed in whatever social media was most prevalent at the moment. He seldom joined in any meetings, and even when he did, he was never really fully present as the lure of his phone was so strong. In any case, he rarely ever spoke although Sarah strongly suspected that he did nothing in his life without commenting on it electronically.

She had heard Shane telling stories about Kevin’s adventures with his smart phone. Apparently it had fallen into the toilet a few months ago. Before that, he had placed it on the hood of his car as he was doing something, then driven off and lost it. Another time he had been texting and walking and he had tripped on the sidewalk. The phone had flown out of his hand and fallen through the grates into the sewer. Sarah figured that he must spend every cent he earned on either buying phones or buying insurance for his phones.

Kevin looked up at her, but did not answer for several seconds. Sarah thought that she would need to repeat her question, but then he said, “Um, I’ll speak with the other vivarium techs, but last check, we had quite a few mice to work with.”

“Quite a few?” repeated Sarah. She was annoyed with Kevin for not seeming to take her request seriously. The line of investigation did not matter much to him. His job, to provide mice for the experiments, was the same no matter what the research topic.

Kevin stared at her blankly for a moment, and then began to scroll through his phone again. She was just about to say something else to him when suddenly he said, “I dunno, but it looks like we have about 200 or thereabouts.”

Sarah nodded. “You’ve got an app for that?”

Kevin looked up at her and grinned his affirmation and suddenly she felt a little fonder of him.

“Good,” she said. “I think that’s plenty to get the investigations going.”

“You look beat, honey,” said John. “You coming to bed?”

Sarah sat hunched over her laptop, scrolling through numbers on a spreadsheet. “Yeah, I’ll be right there. Give me just a few more minutes to wrap up these notes.” Her work was an unapologetically huge part of her life and when a new project got started, it filled her with so much energy that she often found it hard to disengage herself even after she left the lab. Luckily, her husband, also a professor at the university, was equally dedicated. His area of expertise was different, and that meant they often had a lot of things to share with each other.

Sarah finished reading the reports that Riesigoil had sent, jotted down a few quick notes and closed the laptop. Then she stood up and stretched. She was wearing her faded yellow pajamas, the ones with little blue kittens running up the side of the pant legs. Her husband had given her these pajamas when they had first started dating, twelve years ago. They were her favorite ones, not only because they were silky and had lasted so well, but also because of the story that had come with them. John had explained, after they were married, that they had been quite expensive for his grad student’s budget, and he had felt both embarrassed and bold as he strode through the aisles of the small shop whose shelves were filled with everything pink, fluffy or lacy. Sarah could easily imagine him blushing as he looked at the endless rows of undergarments and instinctively turned the other way, toward the less intimate apparel.

“I saw all those hangers standing tall with flowing gowns, and little lacy things so I looked around to find a safer shelf, piled high with folded pajamas,” he said. The kittens had right away reminded him of Sarah and he had reached for them gratefully, anxious to abort the shopping experiment his best friend had suggested.

Sarah walked over to her husband, who was sitting on the bed holding a journal in his hand, the soft cover folded back and around the pages like a small cylinder. John raised his glasses to his forehead and smiled at her. “Tea?”

“Yes, please,” she said, and almost felt like purring when he reached out and began massaging her shoulders.

Then, by adjusting the pressure on her shoulders, he turned her around to face him. Sarah loved the way he looked at her, always apparently pleased by the sight. It made her feel attractive. Luxuriating in his admiring stare, she pulled her hair loose from the ponytail she always wore, and shook her hair out. It was dark and curly, and hung quite far down her back.

John winked at her as he rose from the bed and headed toward the kitchen of their small apartment. Sarah followed him there, though more slowly. Her leg was always more painful at night.

“This Laptev Virus project is going to be a real challenge. We’ve been working on the AIDS project for so long and we’ll have to shake things up a bit to change gears.”

“It does suck, but you always love a new challenge,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “Weren’t you getting bored with that other virus?”

“ Bored? John, we were finally starting to make real progress.”

“Seems to me that that’s the perfect time to begin doing something else.”

Sarah made a hrmph sound and rolled her eyes. She knew that her husband was teasing her. “Well, I just hope Rhonda’s confidence in my team is well-placed and that we can figure something out, you know. Six weeks is such a short window of time. It’s almost laughable. You can barely begin to sink into a simple research problem in six weeks, let alone find answers to what’s killing those people up there in the Arctic and how to stop it. It’s going to be a tough nut to try to crack.”