Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science (32 page)

College Lake turned out to be a mile-wide expanse of clay covered with sand. The lake bed had a dark, wet-looking center and was surrounded by thickets of willows. I edged the Expedition out onto the sand, while Murphy and Elrod began to egg me on from the backseat. “Go faster,” Murphy said. “You’re driving like an old lady.” I gunned the engine, the Expedition leaped forward, and we raced across the sand. When I turned sharply, the men shouted with delight. I started cutting cookies and performed a figure eight, then aimed the vehicle toward the center of the lake and floored the accelerator. With the engine roaring, we passed the sunken carcass of a truck, buried up to its roof in clay. The Expedition began slowing down, even though the engine was running at full power. Then the vehicle began tipping over—which was when I realized that we were driving across quicksand. If we stopped, we would go down. I floored it again and turned back for the shore, but it was too late. We slowed to a halt with the engine making an extreme wailing sound and the wheels spinning. The Expedition settled down until its axles were buried; then the engine suddenly died. There was a moment of complete silence. Then the men erupted with profanities. “Jackass!” Elrod yelled.

The two helpers seemed unperturbed. “This is just the nature of our work,” Chris Reeves said. “Everything that you plan never goes as you planned it.”

I opened the door and tested my weight on the sand. At least the Expedition seemed to be floating on it. I got out my cell phone and started calling local towing services.

Elrod leaned over me. “Tell them you’ve got two Lesch-Nyhan guys in the car, and we’re going to cut your head off.”

After a number of calls, it became clear that the local towing companies wouldn’t touch College Lake. “I’ll just have to get somebody to tow
me
out,” one man said.

“We could call my lawyer,” Elrod suggested.

“Forget it!” Jim Murphy said. “Your lawyer won’t do us any good. Call the fire department. Help! Fire! Fire!”

I tried an outfit called Speed of Light Towing. A young guy answered the phone and said he couldn’t do it.

I told him it was a desperate situation. “I’ve got two disabled guys with me. They’re in wheelchairs and can’t walk. We’re in the middle of the lake,” I said.

“What?” he said. He needed to hear that again. “All right. I’ll try,” he finally said. I would have to pay him when he arrived, no results guaranteed.

“I’m nervous,” Murphy said. Blood dribbled out of his mouth—he was biting himself. Tracye Overby lifted him out of the car, carried him across the sand to the shade of some willows, and sat down, holding him in her lap. She wiped the blood from his mouth with a napkin, cradled his head in her arms, and began singing a song to him:

Oh Mama, oh Papa, I’m feeling so down,

I can’t believe there’s no milk in this town…

I’ll do anything for a glass of white milk.

I live in a town, a town without milk.

“I’m sorry, Tracye,” Murphy said.

“What are
you
apologizing for?” She patted his stomach.

Murphy looked at me. “It’s your fault, Richard. No more off-roading with you.” He began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Overby said to him.

“I’ve had enough, Tracye. I’m leaving. I’m getting out of here right now. Good-bye.” He thrashed around on his back, kicking and laughing. He couldn’t even sit up.

Elrod, sitting in the front seat of the Expedition, began laughing, too. Their laughter drifted through the silence of College Lake. The men were connoisseurs of what I had done: I had ignored the advice of a police officer and driven two disabled men at high speed into the mud. They saw something familiar in my behavior.

Stranded in College Lake.
Tracye Overby (left) and Christopher Reeves (right) with Jim Murphy lying between them. He seems quite entertained. (Note his sock-wrapped hand resting on Reeves’s left arm.)
Richard Preston

I popped a beer and handed it to Elrod. “Are you okay?”

“Just fine.”

I opened a beer for myself. “There’s chicken in the cooler. Do you want some?”

He ate pieces of chicken with his gloves on, and asked me not to hand him any pieces that had sharp bones.

It was a cloudless day in spring, without a breath of wind. The Santa Cruz Mountains stretched into the distance, blanketed with many colors of green. Canyons wandered down through the mountains, jammed with the dark spires of redwoods. A flock of coots burst from the willows and flew straight across the lake bed, heading west toward the sea. Overhead, violet-green swallows dodged and looped. The birds were behavioral phenotypes, their movements controlled by their genes. A streak of dust appeared in the east, at the edge of the lake, and extended toward us: something moving fast. Speed of Light Towing was coming for us. A battered pickup truck with fat tires stopped a good distance away. A young man got out. He walked over to us, dragging a chain and stomping his feet on the sand as he went along, testing the sand. His name, it turned out, was Robert, and he was the same person I’d spoken with. He glanced at the Lesch-Nyhan men. “Hey, how are you?” he said in friendly way.

“Fine,” Murphy answered in a slushy voice.

Robert said to me quietly, “What’s with them?”

“It would take a while to explain,” I said.

“We’ll need to dig,” Robert added.

All of us (except Elrod and Murphy) got down on our knees and began scooping sand from under the vehicle with our hands, Robert working along with us. Ten minutes later, we’d dug a tunnel under the vehicle. Robert crawled into it and got the chain hooked into the chassis. He crawled out. “Start your vehicle,” he said to me. “Give it gas when the chain goes tight. If the chain breaks, watch out. It could come back through the windshield and cut your head off.”

He started his truck, gunned the engine. The truck shot forward in a running start, and chain snapped tight.

There was a sound like a gunshot; the chain had broken. It whiplashed back and hit the Speed of Light truck with a booming sound that echoed over the lake, leaving a dent in the tailgate.

Robert got out and studied the damage to his truck. He seemed philosophical about it. “I should’ve used the big one.” Then he reached into the bed of his truck and unfurled a massive chain—the big one. He dragged it slowly over to us, and got it attached. “This’ll definitely pull
something
out of here. I just hope it’s not your axle.” He floored his truck, the chain went tight, and the Expedition was yanked out, bouncing and fishtailing over the lake bed. Perhaps having Lesch-Nyhan syndrome is like being stuck in mud all your life while waiting for help that never arrives.

Jim Murphy soon after being rescued from quicksand by Speed of Light Towing, Watsonville,
California. He is sticking his tongue out at the photographer. “No more off-roading with you.”
Richard Preston

A
COUPLE OF YEARS LATER
, Jim Murphy came down with pneumonia, and he went downhill fast. When it was clear that he was dying, I called him to say good-bye. As he got on the line, I could hear a hubbub of voices in the background. A lot of people had come to see him, and they were milling around in his hospital room and in the hallway. He seemed to be handling his situation calmly. “I’ll be all right,” he said to me, and added, “Take care with your driving.”

Another day, before Jim Murphy died, I visited James Elrod. Tracye Overby, who was working as Elrod’s assistant that day, needed to change the silk liners he wore inside his motorcycle gloves.

Elrod did not like to see his bare hands. He asked me to hold his wrists while Overby removed his gloves. It occurred to me that I had never seen his hands. The hands that emerged were pale, with spindly fingers that had been gnawed close to the bone in places, and a finger was missing. “Danger,” he said. His eyes took on a strange, bright, blank look. He was staring at the right hand. His arm was tense and trembling. As if a magnet were pulling it, the hand moved toward his mouth. His mouth opened, wider and wider, baring his teeth…. “Help!” he called in a muffled voice.

We threw ourselves on Elrod. It took all our strength to restrain his hand. As soon as we got control of it, he relaxed. Overby got the gloves back on him.

“Nobody knows about this disease. Every day I’m hoping for a cure,” Elrod said. “I wanted you to see that.”

Glossary

arthropod
A segmented invertebrate with a hard exoskeleton made of chitin. Examples: spiders, mites, insects, crustaceans.

basal ganglia
An area in the lower part of the brain, the size of a lemon, that influences many aspects of behavior.

behavioral phenotype
A pattern of actions and behavior traceable to the influence of a
gene
or genes in the DNA.

biohazard space suit
A pressurized whole-body protective suit made of soft, flexible plastic, with a soft helmet, worn by researchers working in
Biosafety Level 4 (BL-4)
laboratories.

Biosafety Level 4 (BL-4)
The highest level of biocontainment security.

Celera Genomics
A division of the Applera Corporation devoted to genomic and proteomic discovery to advance the practice of medicine.

CDC
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a federal organization, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for the detection and prevention of human disease, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

chromosome
A small elongated body in the nucleus of a cell in which a portion of the organism’s DNA is tightly coiled, for storage. Human cells have two sets of twenty-three chromosomes (for a total of forty-six chromosomes).

Chudnovsky Mathematician, the
The brothers David and Gregory Chudnovsky assert that functionally they are a single mathematician who happens to occupy two human bodies.

decon shower
A chemical decontamination shower used in the air lock entry/exit module of a Biosafety Level 4 lab.

DNA sequencing
Determination of the sequence of
nucleotides,
or letters, in a strand of DNA.

ecotone
A boundary-like habitat in nature where different kinds of ecosystems come into contact and mix.

Eddington number, the
The number of protons and electrons in the observable universe. The Eddington number is roughtly 10
⁷⁹
, or a 1 followed by seventy-nine zeros; it was first proposed by the British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington in 1938.

epistaxis
Nosebleed.

EST
Expressed sequence tag. An easily identifiable sequence of letters in DNA, typically located near the end of a
gene.

gene
A stretch of the DNA, typically a thousand to fifteen hundred letters long, that holds the recipe for making a protein or a group of proteins in an organism.

genetic disease
An inherited illness or impairment that is passed from parents to their offspring in a gene or genes in the DNA. A genetic disease is not contagious.

genome, human
The total amount of DNA that is spooled into a set of chromosomes in the nucleus of every typical human cell.