PEARL
Chapter Seven
Bodies Detective wasn't in the mortuary but the door was unlocked. (In fact I had not yet encountered a locked door.) I let myself in and looked around. I had no desire to check out any bodies but I did open the top drawer of a filing cabinet and peer in, then start looking with a purpose. I didn't find a folder on Honeylu until halfway through the third drawer down. I pulled it out and looked around for a chair. As there wasn't one, I sat on a cold examining table and bent over the file. Honeylu had drunk an intoxicating beverage, perhaps similar to mead, as it was sweetened with honey, and had infused that beverage with a generous serving of an enzyme that by itself would not have harmed anyone; it was an enzyme produced by sperm to allow it to fertilize an egg. How toxic could that be, even in high doses? Yet it had killed him.
I now knew where to find Honeylu's laboratory so I navigated my way there next. The lab was in disorder and strewn with paper, in and out of file folders. There were no fewer than six file cabinets and half of them had their drawers gaping. The floor was slippery with paper. I started there, hunching down and gathering everything into a loose bundle and plopping it down on what little surface space I could free by bundling more papers, without regard for whether they were related or even marked. Where should I begin? I picked a paper at random and began to read. As I read, I sorted. As I sorted, I read.
Nyssa found me asleep on the floor between two huge piles of paper, with some scraps under me and some stuck to my hair. Tegan came in hesitantly (until she saw that there was nothing frightening in the room) as I was awakening and said I looked like an Albert Anker painting she had seen in a book as a child. Nyssa said I just looked like a scarecrow. Tegan tried to describe the painting and why I reminded her of it. I sat up and patiently tolerated being discussed as if I were not there as best I could and then I interrupted: "Nyssa, would you mind taking a look at these?" I withdrew several sheets of paper from my breast pocket and held them up. She took them and read them almost as rapidly as I had. A frown formed on her brow and then her eyes widened and she looked down at me in complete understanding. "Explain it to me."
"Hyaluronidase. That's what Honey Gatherer was experimenting with. It's an enzyme. It is found in white blood cells and in a lot of diseases, because it penetrates connective tissue so easily. It is also contained in sperm because that helps it penetrate and fertilize an egg. Honey Gatherer was worried about the low fertility rate in such a small community, the small success rate, really. Also how slow the whole process was. He wanted to make it work faster and better. Hyaluronidase doesn't affect the embryo at all. It makes the embryo possible but that's all. Very safe. Since it is found in so many kinds of cells it's easy to acquire and I guess Honey Gatherer found it easy to synthesize, too. So he was doing that." She referred to another page. "But he changed it. He was trying to make it more aggressive. It looks as if he was trying to make it easier to have twins, too. Anyway, when he made it more aggressive, he also made it less safe. It did its job but also then affected the embryo, and that made a lot of them unstable. They seemed okay, they got implanted, and then the mothers miscarried."
"What about the brain bleeds," asked Tegan, who appeared to be following some of this, at least.
"He stopped using it but the mothers who had miscarried and tried again miscarried again. Apparently, the aggressive enzyme had penetrated not just individual eggs but the mothers' ovaries. Honey Gatherer had done the opposite of what he intended and made extinction more likely instead of less. But he tried one more time. He took the aggressive enzyme and modified it with a substance that he hoped would strengthen a fetus' chance of survival. It worked." She stopped.
I had stood up by now and had my back to Nyssa, my eyes closed to help me listen better. I had understood some of what I'd read, certainly enough to know which papers were important enough to set aside, but for most of the formulae I needed Nyssa. The next part, though, I had understood all too well. When she stopped, I continued for her. "It worked but not well enough. There was another baby girl who hemorrhaged and either Bodies Detective didn't catch it or she covered it up. But Honeylu knew."
"So now what?" asked Tegan. "How can they recover? Will they really become extinct? Is all this now hereditary?"
"I don't know, Tegan. I really don't know. Boys seem not to be affected."
Nyssa asked, "How many settlements are there on Pearl?" I confessed that I hadn't asked. "I am guessing there are a lot. Climfu will need a lot of outside help. The settlements will have to cooperate more."
"Yes," I agreed, "a population exchange seems to be in order."
It took a while to explain it all to Egglu. "Poor Honeylu," he said. "He tried to save us." Then he sighed, "I suppose I shall have to be a kind of emissary, as I will be out of a job here until we get this straightened out." He took Tegan's hands in his. "I shall miss you, Teganlu."
"I'll miss you too, Egglu." They embraced and then Tegan kissed him with a fervor that surprised him even more than it surprised me and Nyssa. He shook my hand and kissed Nyssa's, then came up the stairs with us and watched us exit into the darkness of Pearl. In mere minutes we were back in the TARDIS.
Nyssa and Tegan went off to freshen up but I stayed in the console room and tried to find the signal that had come from Philadelphia. It would do us no good to get there any time other than that of the signal's origination. Nothing was coming through.
Something was nagging at me and I couldn't think what it could be. Then I realized that I still had a paper from Honeylu's room, tucked into my breast pocket. I'd meant to show that to my companions and to Bean Tender, to whom we hadn't even said our goodbyes. I left the console room with a mind to freshen up, myself, and along the way chanced to overhear Tegan asking Nyssa if I had ever hugged her. I forgot all about freshening up, all about sharing the information I had discovered, even all about the distress call. I really don't know why it affected me so strongly. It was a perfectly innocent conversation.
I walked around a bit and then returned to the console room, where that signal was now audible and visible. I amplified it, slowed it down, sped it up, separated tracks, blocked out background noise, blocked out the main signal and amplified background noise, did everything but stand on my head to get a date out of it. For a moment I actually considered standing on my head.
Tegan and Nyssa entered the room together and saw my frantic operations. Tegan stopped me. "Doctor," she said, "allow me." Somewhat amused, I stepped back. Tegan made a fist and gave the console a mighty thwack. The signal shifted briefly into white noise and then came in full strength.
"Let's set the coordinates while the setting is good," I said, but my poor joke was rewarded with blank stares "Let's leave the date to the TARDIS." We dematerialized – we'd still been sitting on Pearl – and materialized within seconds, on a street corner, in front of a small general store with a sign above the window reading "Morley's." The console display read 1959. It all looked harmless enough. We stepped out.