Amazonia (14 page)

"Any estimate of the onset of the oral cancer?" the pathologist asked.

"It's hard to say with certainty, but I'd estimate it started between six to eight weeks ago."

A whistle of appreciation sounded over the line. "That's damn fast!"

"I know. And so far, most of the other slides I've reviewed show a similar high degree of malignancy. I can't find a single cancer that looks older than three months." She fingered the stack before her. "But then again, I've still got quite a few slides to review."

"What about the teratomas?"

"They're the same. All between one to three months. But--"

Dr. Hibbert interrupted. "My God, it makes no sense. I've never seen so many cancers in one body. Especially teratomas."

Lauren understood his consternation. Teratomas were cystic tumors of the body's embryonic stem cells, those rare germ cells that could mature into any bodily tissue: muscle, hair, bone. Tumors of these cells were usually only found in a few organs, such as the thymus or testes. But in Gerald Clark's body, they were everywhere--and that wasn't the oddest detail.

"Stanley, they aren't just terat
omas
. They're terato
carcinomas
."

"What? All of them?"

She nodded, then realized she was on the phone. "Every single one of them." Teratocarcinomas were the malignant form of the teratoma, a riotous cancer that sprouted a mix of muscle, hair, teeth, bone, and nerves. "I've never seen such samples. I've found sections with partly formed livers, testicular tissue, even ganglia spindles."

"Then that might explain what we found down here," Stanley said.

"What do you mean?"

"Like I said when I first called, you really should come and see this for yourself."

"Fine," she said with an exasperated sigh. "I'll be right down."

Lauren ended the connection and pushed away from the microscope table. She stretched the kink out of her back from the two hours spent stooped over the slides. She considered calling her husband, but he was surely just as busy over at CIA headquarters. Besides, she'd catch up with him in another hour when they conferenced with Frank and Kelly in the field.

Grabbing her lab smock, Lauren headed out the door and descended the stairs to the institute's morgue. A bit of trepidation coursed through her. Though she was a doctor and had worked as an ER clinician for ten years, she still grew queasy during gross necropsies. She preferred the clean histology suite to the morgue's bone saws, stainless steel tables, and hanging scales. But she had no choice today.

As she crossed down the long hall toward the double doors, she distracted herself with the mystery of the case. Gerald Clark had been missing for four years, then walked out of the jungle with a new arm, undoubtedly a miraculous cure. But contrarily, his body had been ravaged by tumors, a cancerous onslaught that had started no more than three months prior. So why the sudden burst of
cancer? Why the preponderance of the monstrous teratocarcinomas? And ultimately, where the hell had Gerald Clark been these past four years?

She shook her head. It was too soon for answers. But she had faith in modern science. Between her own research and the fieldwork being done by her children, the mystery would be solved.

Lauren pushed into the locker room, slipped blue paper booties over her shoes, then smeared a dab of Vicks VapoRub under her nose to offset the smells and donned a surgical mask. Once ready, she entered the lab.

It looked like a bad horror movie. Gerald Clark's body lay splayed open like a frog in biology class. Half the contents of his body cavities lay either wrapped in redand-orange hazardous-waste bags or were resting atop steel scales. Across the room, samples were being prepped in both formaldehyde and liquid nitrogen. Eventually Lauren would see the end result as a pile of neatly inscribed microscope slides, stained and ready for her review, just the way she preferred it.

As Lauren entered the room, some of the stronger smells cut through the mentholated jelly: bleach, blood, bowel, and necrotic gases. She tried to concentrate on breathing through her mouth.

Around her, men and women in bloody aprons worked throughout the lab, oblivious to the horror. It was an efficient operation, a macabre dance of medical professionals.

A tall man, skeletally thin, lifted an arm in greeting and waved her over. Lauren nodded and slipped past a woman tilting a hanging tray and sliding Gerald Clark's liver into a waste bag.

"What did you find, Stanley?" Lauren asked as she approached the worktable.

Dr. Hibbert pointed down, his voice muffled by his surgical mask. "I wanted you to see this before we cut it out."

They stood at the head of the slanted table holding Gerald Clark's body. Bile, blood, and other bodily fluids flowed in trickles to the catch bucket at the other end. Closer at hand, the top of Gerald Clark's skull had been sawed open, exposing the brain beneath.

"Look here," Stanley said, leaning closer to the purplish brain.

With a thumb forceps, the pathologist carefully pulled back the outer meningeal membranes, as if drawing back a curtain. Beneath the membranes, the gyri and folds of the cerebral cortex were plainly visible, traced with darker arteries and veins.

"While dissecting the brain from the cranium, we found this."

Dr. Hibbert separated the right and left hemispheres of the cerebrum. In the groove between the two sections of the brain lay a walnut-size mass. It seemed to be nestled atop the corpus callosum, a whitish channel of nerves and vessels that connected the two hemispheres.

Stanley glanced at her. "It's another teratoma...or maybe a teratocarcinoma, if it's like all the others. But watch this. I've never seen anything like this." Using his thumb forceps, he touched the mass.

"Dear God!" Lauren jumped as the tumor flinched away from the tip of his forceps. "It...it's moving!"

"Amazing, isn't it? That's why I wanted you to see it. I've read about this property of some teratomic masses. An ability to respond to external stimuli. There was one case even of a well-differentiated teratoma that had enough cardiac muscle to beat like a heart."

Lauren finally found her voice. "But Gerald Clark's been dead for two weeks."

Stanley shrugged. "I imagine, considering where it's located, that it's rich with nerve cells. And a good portion of them must still be viable enough to respond weakly to stimulation. But I expect this ability will quickly fade as
the nerves lose juice and the tiny muscles exhaust their reserve calcium."

Lauren took a few deep breaths to collect her thoughts. "Even so, the mass must be highly organized to develop a flinch reflex."

"Undoubtedly...quite organized. I'll have it sectioned and slides assembled ASAP." Stanley straightened. "But I thought you'd appreciate personally seeing it in action first."

Lauren nodded. Her eyes shifted from the tumor in the brain to the corpse's arm. A sudden thought rose in her mind. "I wonder," she mumbled.

"What?"

Lauren pictured how the mass had twitched. "The number of the teratomas and the mature development of this particular tumor could be clues to the mechanism by which Clark's arm grew back."

The pathologist's eyes narrowed. "I'm not following you."

Lauren faced him, glad to find something else to stare at than the ravaged body. "What I'm saying is--and this is just a conjecture, of course--what if the man's arm is just a teratoma that grew into a fully functioning limb?"

Stanley's brows rose high. "Like some form of controlled cancer growth? Like a living, functioning tumor?"

"Why not? That's pretty much how we all developed. From one fertilized cell, our bodies formed through rapid cellular proliferation, similar to cancer. Only this profusion of cells differentiated into all the proper tissues. I mean, isn't that the goal of most stem cell research? To discover the mechanism for this controlled growth? What causes one cell to become a bone cell and its neighbor a muscle cell and the one after that a nerve cell?" Lauren stared at the splayed corpse of Gerald Clark, not in horror any longer but in wonder. "We may be on our way to answering that very mystery."

"And if we could succeed in discovering the mechanism..."

"It would mean the end of cancer and would revolutionize the entire medical field."

Stanley shook his head and swung away, returning to his bloody work. "Then let's pray your son and daughter succeed in their search."

Lauren nodded and retreated back across the morgue. She checked her watch. Speaking of Frank and Kelly, it was getting close to the designated conference call. Time to compare notes. Lauren glanced back one last time to the ruin that was left of Gerald Wallace Clark. "Something's out in that jungle," she mumbled to herself. "But what?"

Closer at hand, a group of Rangers knelt, setting up the camp's perimeter motion-sensor system. The laser grid, rigged a few feet off the ground and established between the jungle and the camp, was meant to keep any large predator from wandering too near without being detected.

Kelly stared beyond their labors to the dark forest.

A voice spoke near her shoulder, startling her. "Grue-some news indeed."

Kelly glanced over and found Professor Kouwe standing quietly at her side. How long had he been there?
Clearly the shaman had not lost his innate abilities to move noiselessly across the forest floor. "Y...Yes," she stammered. "Very disturbing."

Kouwe slipped out his pipe and began stoking it with tobacco, then lit it with a fiery flourish. The pungent odor of smoky tobacco welled around them. "And what of your mother's belief that the cancers and the regenerated arm might be connected?"

"It's intriguing...and perhaps not without merit."

"How so?"

Kelly rubbed the bridge of her nose and gathered her thoughts. "Before I left the States to come here, I did a literature search on the subject of regeneration. I figured it might better prepare me for anything we find."

"Hmm...very wise. When it comes to the jungle, preparation and knowledge can mean the difference between life and death."

Kelly nodded and continued with her thoughts, glad to express them aloud and bounce them off someone else. "While conducting this research, I came across an interesting article in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
. Back in 1999, a research team in Philadelphia raised a group of mice with damaged immune systems. The mice were to be used as a model to study multiple sclerosis and AIDS. But as they began working with the immune-compromised creatures, an odd and unexpected phenomenon developed."

Kouwe turned to her, one eyebrow raised. "And what was that?"

"The researchers had punched holes in the mice's ears, a common way of marking test animals, and discovered that the holes healed amazingly fast, leaving no trace of a wound. They had not just scarred over, but had regenerated cartilage, skin, blood vessels, even nerves." Kelly let this news sink in, then continued. "After this discovery, the lead researcher, Dr. Ellen Heber-Katz, tried a few experiments.
She amputated a few mice's tails, and they grew back. She severed optic nerves, and they healed. Even the excision of a section of spinal cord grew back in less than a month. Such phenomenal regeneration had never been seen in mammals."

Kouwe removed his pipe, his eyes wide. "So what was causing it?"

Kelly shook her head. "The only difference between these healing mice and ordinary mice was their defective immune systems."

"And the significance?"

Kelly suppressed a grin, warming to the subject, especially with such an astute audience. "From the study of animals with the proven ability to regenerate limbs--starfish, amphibians, and reptiles--we do know their immune systems are rudimentary at best. Therefore, Dr. Heber-Katz hypothesized that eons ago, mammals made an evolutionary trade-off. To defend against cancers, we relinquished the ability to regenerate bodily limbs. You see, our complex immune systems are designed specifically to eliminate inappropriate cell proliferation, like cancers. Which is beneficial, of course, but at the same time, such immune systems would also block a body's attempt to regenerate a limb. It would treat the proliferation of poorly differentiated cells necessary to grow a new arm as cancerous and eliminate it."

"So the complexity of our immune systems both protects and damns us."

Kelly narrowed her eyes as she concentrated. "Unless something can safely turn off the immune system. Like in those mice."

"Or like in Gerald Clark?" Kouwe eyed her. "You're suggesting something turned off his immune system so he was able to regenerate his arm, but this phenomenon also allowed multiple cancers to sprout throughout his body."

"Perhaps. But it has to be more complicated than that. What's the mechanism? Why did all the cancers arise so suddenly?" She shook her head. "And more important, what could trigger such a change?"

Kouwe nodded toward the dark jungle. "If such a trigger exists, it might be found out there. Currently three-quarters of all anticancer drugs in use today are derived from rain forest plants. So why not one plant that does the opposite--one that
causes
cancer?"

"A carcinogen?"

"Yes, but one with beneficial side effects...like regeneration."