F. Wilson - The Select
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- Название:The Select
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"The Ward C patients?"
"Yes."
Quinn's face must have reflected her confusion because Dr. Emerson nodded and motioned her back the way they had come.
"Follow me."
They passed Alice again, who turned and looked up at them expectantly.
"Not quite yet, Alice."
Quinn followed him out into the hall to the nurses station.
"Marguerite," he said to the slim, middle-aged, mocha-skinned nurse at the counter. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight bun; her light eye shadow emphasized her dark, penetrating eyes. "One of the 9574 vials, please."
The nurse reached behind her and plucked a two-ounce bottle from a pocket in the top of the medication cart. She handed it to Dr. Emerson, who in turn handed it to Quinn.
"This," he said, "is the reason Dr. Alston and I have our labs on the same floor. It's the new anesthetic I'm developing. We have no name for it yet, so we refer to it by its entry number in the log when we isolated it. This is the nine thousand five hundred and seventy-fourth compound we've registered at The Ingraham."
Quinn stared at the bottle of clear fluid in her hand. It looked like water.
"So many."
"We've sythesized tens of thousands, but we only register the ones we feel have might have human therapeutic potential."
"It's good?"
"Good?" His entire forehead lifted with his eyebrows. "It's wonderful . Works like a charm. And you know the best part?"
Quinn placed the bottle on the counter. "What?"
"It's non-toxic. That's because it's not a foreign chemical compound but a naturally-occurring neuroamine, secreted in minute amounts in the brainstem during REM sleep."
Quinn couldn't help but smile at him. His enthusiasm was catching. He was like a little boy talking about a rocket voyage to Mars. She didn't want to slow him down, so she prodded him on.
"Really?"
"Yes. You're paralyzed during dream sleep, you know. Oh, yes. Almost completely paralyzed. Otherwise you'd be talking, laughing, and generally thrashing all about in your dreams. Yet your eyes move. You've heard of rapid eye movements—REM sleep—of course. And your chest wall moves, allowing your lungs to breath. So what you've got is a selective paralysis, affecting all the skeletal muscles except the eyes, the intercostals, and the diaphragm. And of course, you're unconscious."
"It paralyzes," Quinn said. "I thought you said it was an anesthetic."
"It is. At higher doses it produces total anesthesia. I'm working on the mechanism for that now, but I do know it's active in the higher centers as well as the brainstem." The years seemed to drop away from him as his enthusiasm grew. "But do you understand what we've got here, Miss Cleary? A potent general anesthetic that causes complete paralysis but allows the patient to continue breathing on his own. The anesthesiologist won't have to intubate and ventilate the patient. It can be used in every kind of surgery except chest procedures; there's zero chance of allergic reaction because 9574 is a human neurohormone—everybody's got their own. And perhaps best of all, there's no post-anesthesia side effects. You come to in the recovery room like someone awakening from a nap." He put his hands on his hips and stared at the bottle like a proud parent. "So. Those are the properties of the neurohormone you'll be working with here. What do you think?"
"It sounds almost too good to be true."
"It does, doesn't it." He began gesturing excitedly with his hands. "But that's not the whole of it. It would be almost perfect with just those features, but it's also completely non-toxic. Its LD 50—"
"Elldee...?"
"LD 50," Dr. Emerson said. "You'll learn all about that as we go. Stands for the lethal dose of a given compound for fifty percent of the experimental animals. Every drug meant for human use must register one. For instance, I take the Kleederman Pharmaceuticals product fenostatin for my cholesterol, a dose of twenty milli grams per day—total. I happen to know that the LD 50of fenostatin is twenty grams per kilogram. In other words, if I gave a hundred lab mice a dose of twenty grams of fenostatin per kilogram of their body weight, fifty of them would die. That's a good LD 50. It means that if I became suicidal and stuffed 70,000 twenty-milligram fenostatin tablets down my throat, I'd still have only a fifty percent chance of dying from fenostatin toxicity. Probably rupture my intestines first. But the wonderful thing about 9574 is that it's even less toxic. We haven't found a lethal dose yet."
Triumphant, he threw out his arms and struck the bottle of 9574, sending it skittering toward the end of the counter. Marguerite the nurse leaped out of her seat, knocking it over as she lunged for the bottle. She caught it just as it went off the end and dropped toward the floor. Then she slumped there, shaking her head, panting as if she had run a race.
"Thank God you caught that, Marguerite," Dr. Emerson said. He seemed quite upset.
Marguerite straightened and carefully replaced the vial in its slot on the meds cart.
"Dr. Emerson," she said as she righted her chair. "That was too close."
"Amen," he said, then turned to Quinn. "We have precious little of 9574 available. Synthesizing it in quantities would be a simple matter for a commercial lab, but our tiny operation down on the third floor is taxed to its limits to produce what we need here for research purposes. Consequently, we treat it like gold."
"But who are you using it on?"
"Why, the Ward C patients, of course. It's perfect for them."
Quinn was confused. "But why would you want to paralyze them?"
"It's not so much the paralysis we want for them," he said. "It's the anesthesia. Most of the Ward C patients have horrific scarring, thick wads of stiff tissue that resists movement because it's got minimal elasticity. We use 9574 on them during their physical therapy sessions. It allows the therapists to stretch their limbs and exercise their joints to prevent flexion contractures. If left alone, most of them would end up curled into the fetal position. Without 9574 the pain of physical therapy would be unendurable."
"But didn't you say the lower dose paralyzes, and the higher dose anesthetizes? Wouldn't that mean they're completely paralyzed during therapy?" Quinn was starting to feel uncomfortable.
Dr. Emerson turned and looked at her closely. A wry smile worked across his lips.
"You're a quick study, aren't you."
Quinn was suddenly flustered. Had she angered him?
"Well, I don't know...I just—"
"I like that. I like that a lot. Shows you've been listening. But as it works out, the paralysis with 9574 is a harmless side effect for some of the Ward C patients, and an absolute necessity for others." He gestured down the hall. "Let me show you."
They moved the dozen feet or so to the window and stood looking into Ward C. Quinn counted the gauze-wrapped shapes. Seven. All lying still and silent, looking...
"Are they paralyzed now?"
"No," Dr. Emerson said. "Just resting. They sleep a lot. There's not much else they can do. Their scarring is so extensive that they can't move on their own. But for four of them the therapists need the skeletal muscle paralysis that 9574 offers. Those four are brain damaged from their burns."
Quinn tore her eyes away from the ward and looked at him.
"How...?"
"Anoxia. Either the smoke and heat of the fire itself stole their air, or the shock that goes along with such extensive third-degree burns robbed their brains of sufficient blood flow for too long—either way, lack of oxygen damaged their brains, permanently. All four are disoriented and confused; two are frankly psychotic. The physical therapists would have to fight them all the way without 9574. But with 9574 they can work those limbs and keep the muscles from complete atrophy."
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