World without Cats (23 page)

“Do you have the concentrated virus there now?” Noah asked.

“Yes. It’s sitting here on ice.” With a micropipette, the technician began transferring reagents from small, conical plastic centrifuge tubes into other tubes. Noah couldn’t tell what they were, but he could see that Nicky was adept with the devices. After a few minutes, Brown took his arms from the gloves and said, “Well, that’s it for now. We have to wait for the digestion.”

“More ‘hurry up and wait,’” muttered Noah.

The isolation of FHF-C RNA took over a week and resulted in an ample yield of the purified viral genome. The two scientists were now ready to begin the synthesis of the complementary viral DNA. Noah wanted to continue working through the weekend, but Nicky Brown balked.

“Hey, mon,” he declared, “this is a civil-service job. We get weekends off.”

“How about half a day tomorrow at least?” Noah asked. “We’ve got a good start. I’d like to press on.”

“I was plannin’ to drive over to Gainesville with me woman to visit her brother.”

“You’re driving all the way to Florida tomorrow?” Noah asked with astonishment.

“No, no. We got a Gainesville right here in Georgia, Noah. It’s about forty or fifty miles up the Chattahoochee.”

“Oh. Well, damn! I wish I could work in the lab. I feel useless.”

Nicky nodded sympathetically. “How about Sunday afternoon? I could come in for a few a hours.”

“Okay. Good,” Noah responded, “How about one thirty? Is that all right?”

“That’s fine. We can put in three hours.”

Noah looked him in the eye. “Thank you, Nicky. I really appreciate it.”

Saturday, Angelo and Dorothy took Noah to Stone Mountain, where they hiked for an hour and ate a picnic lunch. In the evening, the three of them watched a televised documentary on cats and their history. Noah became caught up in the program, in spite of himself. The domestic cat apparently originated about ten thousand years ago in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia when farmers encouraged wildcats to take up residence around their stores of grain. It was the cats’ ability to keep the rodent population under control that endeared the felines to their human hosts.

As the narrator continued, mention of the Egyptians and their feline goddess Bastet reminded Noah of his dead cat, and he suppressed a pang of sorrow. It was the Egyptians, he learned, who had endowed the felines with nine lives. They revered the domestic cat for thousands of years. For a time, Bastet was the supreme goddess, higher in the Egyptian pantheon than Osiris, Isis, or any of the others. Ailing cats were taken care of in the manner of sick children. When a cat died of natural causes, the animal was mourned in the same way a deceased human would be, complete with wailing and mummification.

“Why,” the narrator asked, “is the cat not mentioned in the Bible, though other domestic animals are? The Jews, while they were held as slaves in Egypt during the time of Moses, certainly must have been exposed to domesticated cats. Perhaps the Hebrews, after fleeing Egypt, and aware that the Egyptians had deified the animals, shunned them in fear of violating their first two commandments.

“The Romans brought domestic cats into the British Isles during the invasion of England by Julius Caesar. Cats eventually spread throughout the world, primarily by sailing ships, which almost always harbored cats in their holds as rodent-catchers.”

Noah turned to Angelo. “This is pretty good. I wasn’t aware of a lot of the history.”

“I still don’t like cats,” Angelo remarked.

The commentator added that the Japanese, from at least the tenth century, also revered cats, probably because of their prowess as mouse-catchers. Mice, relishing tasty cocoons, were the bane of silkworm growers.

The program went on to discuss the biology of cats. Noah, who had begun to doze, perked up when the narrator mentioned that in only three years a fertile female might produce as many as four hundred descendants. He looked over at Angelo, who also had turned to study Noah. It was apparent to both men that, owing to the enormous fecundity of the domestic cat, if just a few fertile individuals of both sexes were to survive, there was a decent chance that the species
Felis catus
could be saved from extinction.

On Sunday Nicky began the process of making DNA from FHF RNA, with Noah offering suggestions from the observation room.

“Damn!” shouted Nicky. “The reverse transcriptase is inactive. I’ll have to get a fresh lot. Sorry, Noah, we won’t be able to continue till tomorrow.”

Noah threw up his hands.
Just like working in my own lab.
The next day, they made progress. By Thursday they had prepared a usable preparation of viral complementary DNA and were preparing to insert it into the lambda GT114 vector.

They would mix the FHF DNA with lambda DNA so that the two molecules would be able to genetically combine. “With any luck,” said Noah through the intercom, “some of the lambda DNA will pick up envelope genes from the FHF virus.” He articulated this, not so much to edify Nicky, but to cement the concept in his own mind. Nicky nodded. “Then,” Noah continued, “when we infect
E. coli
cells
with the altered lambda DNA, we can only pray that some of the bacterial cells will pick up the FHF envelope genes.”

“Are you a prayin’ man?” asked Nicky.

“It’s a figure of speech. I didn’t mean it literally.” Nicky looked up at Noah through the port but said nothing. “Anyway,” Noah went on, “we’ll then have to find those few bacterial cells containing the desired genes—definitely a needle-in-a-haystack problem.”

Noah now had even less to contribute than before; he was in unfamiliar territory. He could only watch as Nicky deftly manipulated pipettes and vials inside the glove box. Noah no longer felt the need to watch Nicky work every second and spent part of the time reading research articles on his iPad. Fortunately, as Noah had surmised, there was some anti-FHF antibody left over from earlier attempts to immunize cats. Nicky was to tag this antibody with a fluorescent dye. After the lambda virus had lysed the bacterial cells, any envelope proteins contained in the bacteria would then be released and could be detected by specific FHF antibody.

Noah and Nicky labored for two weeks, at the end of which they had succeeded in isolating not one, but three strains of
E. coli
capable of manufacturing FHF-C envelope proteins. On their last day of work, when Nicky Brown emerged from the airlock, Noah held out his hand. Brown paused a moment, and then he shook Noah’s hand vigorously, following with a high five. Noah returned the gesture.

Lunching for the last time with Angelo and Nicky, Noah thanked the technician and declared, “Well, it’s up to you guys at the CDC now. With your giant vats, you can grow two-hundred-liter cultures of
E. coli
and make all of the FHF envelope antigen you need—for all immunizations the whole world needs, for that matter.”

Angelo nodded. “We have a task force gearing up for a crash program to locate and immunize cats all over the world.”

At that moment, Bronkowski dashed in, breathless, carrying a sheaf of papers. “Oh, am I glad I caught you before you left,” he said to Noah. “We have a problem. OMB has stopped funding all work on FHF.”

The three men, incredulous, stared at him. “That’s impossible!” Noah cried.

“It is quite possible, even certain,” Bronkowski declared, handing the papers to Noah. “Remember, when you arrived here, I mentioned that I’d had to persuade the OMB to fund the work you’ve just completed? For some time, the bean-counters have been sending me memos to the effect that we should not be squandering—that’s what they call it—our resources on a disease that does not affect human beings. Now they’ve turned off the tap. No more FHF work. They will not fund the preparation of the FHF vaccine, let alone the immunization program. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you of the correspondence earlier, but I didn’t want to discourage you while the work was ongoing.”

Nicky shook his head. “Dat’s crazy, mon.”

Bronkowski shrugged. “Noah, you will have to seek private funding. Perhaps you can get a grant from Nestlé or some such company.”

“I’m a scientist, not a goddamn fundraiser. Shit!”

“Noah, I think the best scientists are also good fundraisers,” said Angelo. “This has been building for a long time,” he noted. “The OMB has been interfering with CDC projects for over a decade. It’s not just FHF. They even rejected proposals to investigate human birth defects, STDs, effects of toxic wastes, all kinds of important projects. It’s this damned recession. The federal deficit is supposed to increase by over twenty-two trillion this year.”

“Yes,” said Bronkowski, “with 15-percent unemployment, bankruptcies at an all-time high, the stock market tanking … I don’t know why they don’t come right out and call it a depression.”

“Maybe we could enlist public support,” Nicky commented. “Public outcry. Letters to senators and congressmen, dat sort of thing.”

“I don’t think so,” Angelo said. “It would take weeks or months. We need to get started now. Right now.”

Noah closed his eyes, lowered his head to his chest, and ran his fingers through his hair. “Couldn’t you grow the bacteria on the sly, so to speak? Does OMB have to know about it?”

Bronkowski shook his head. “It would never pass audit, Noah. We have to account for every pound of nutrient medium … every watt of power. There is no way we could hide a project of such magnitude. Besides, how would we explain where the vaccine came from?” The director extracted a handkerchief and wiped his brow. “It’s over, Noah,” he said softly. “Take your envelope-producing bacteria and go home. It’s up to you now.”

On the plane, Noah was too demoralized to look out the window at the scenery below. He perused the news on his laptop. It seemed to him that most of the articles were devoted to cats, or rather the consequences of the absence of cats. Apparently, rodent infestations were increasing throughout the world.

Noah questioned the wisdom of the OMB withdrawing funding for the FHF vaccine. The worldwide impact on human health resulting from the loss of cats should be sufficient reason, deficit or not. He figured that the president, whose campaign had been fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget, was probably behind the OMB’s action. Noah closed the laptop and shut his eyes. A knot had formed in his stomach; it wasn’t airsickness.

No one knew how many cats had perished, but biological statisticians estimated that 52 percent of North American cats had died. For Europe, the estimate was 19 percent. In South America and Asia, an undetermined number of cats had died. Russian newspapers reported that over a fourth of the cats in the Russian Federation were gone.

In the US, cat owners were resorting to desperate measures. Veterinarians and holistic practitioners who espoused “alternative” therapies were thriving. Rosemary Hughes of Marin County, California, treated FHF-infected cats with flower essences—alcohol extracts of various flowers which she placed under the tongues of the cats at a hundred dollars a treatment. There was no evidence that treated cats survived FHF infection. Hughes made out well … for a while.

Homeotherapy, deep massage and aromatherapy were also put to the test. Herbs such as garlic, goldenseal, cats claw, essiac tea, and a pharmacopeia of exotic botanical products were tried. None of these treatments had the slightest effect. The cats died as if they had received no treatment at all.

The Taft mouse infestation was partially controlled after the city’s department of public health offered ten cents for each rodent, dead or alive, delivered to the authorities. Adults and children alike caught and killed hundreds of thousands. The program was to be funded by a special bond issue provided voters approved it, as they were expected to do.

In Cleveland, ninety-year-old Rebecca Neidleman, a resident at the Van Buren Home for the Aged, was mauled by mice while lying in her bed. Both her ears were shredded, as was part of her nose. She was expected to live. Governor Terrence Houghton called for an investigation.

In San Francisco, large numbers of rats were migrating into the city from Pacific-facing beaches. Several residential neighborhoods were badly infested. Hardware stores could not keep rattraps in stock. Rats had been a problem on the west side in the past, but now, owing to the absence of their natural enemy, the common house cat, the rodents were moving into the city without hindrance. Public-health authorities were reluctant to use poisons, because of the many dogs and young children in the area.

New York City was also battling a huge population explosion of rats. Ever a problem in lower-income areas, the rodents were now so numerous that residents were fleeing their homes. Central Park was overrun with squatters who staked out areas for themselves and their families. To date, four people had been killed—two by gunshots, two by knifings—when they encroached on territory claimed by others.