The Thanatos Syndrome

they’re acting like normal married couples. Two, they’re pathological, but the pathogen is not heavy sodium.”
    â€œThree?”
    â€œFather Smith would say the pathogen is demonic.”
    â€œDemonic. I see. What do you say?”
    â€œI say let’s run some more.”
    We run a dozen more. We’ve got three negatives, the rest positive.
    Lucy turns off all machines. Lights stop blinking. There are no sounds but the hum of lights. A screech owl’s whimpers. It is three o’clock.
    â€œI’m going to bed,” I say. “Let’s sleep on it.”
    â€œWait wait wait.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œI’ve got an idea.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œDo you know where these people live?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œOkay. I’m going to give you a graphic, a map. Let’s see how many we can locate. Maybe we can get a pattern.”
    â€œLet’s do it tomorrow.”
    â€œIt’ll only take a second. Watch this.”
    She pops in a cassette and there’s old Louisiana herself, a satellite view, color-coded, with blue lakes and bayous, silver towns and cities, rust-red for plowed fields, greens for trees—and the great coiling snake of the Mississippi.
    â€œNow watch this.”
    The satellite zooms down. Here’s Feliciana, from the Mississippi to the Pearl, from the thirty-first parallel to the Crayola blue of Lake Pontchartrain. I can even see the Bogue Falaya and Bayou Pontchatolawa, where I fished yesterday—was it yesterday?—with John Van Dorn.
    â€œHere’s your wand. Locate as many patients as you can.”
    Like Tinker Bell, I can touch the screen and make a star. I make a constellation. We gaze at it. It has no shape. It is a skimpy, ill-formed star cluster.
    â€œHow many questions will this thing answer?” I ask finally, hoping to stump it so I can go to bed.
    â€œAlmost any. It is a matter of framing the question.”
    â€œI can frame the question.”
    â€œWell?”
    â€œIt is a preposterous question.”
    â€œAsk it.”
    â€œThere is no way it can be answered.”
    â€œAsk Hal. He’s good.”
    â€œI want the computer to locate on this graphic every person in Feliciana Parish and adjoining parishes who has an elevated plasma level of heavy sodium—which is to say, any level of heavy sodium.”
    â€œGood Lord,” says Lucy. She gazes at me. I seem to hear her own circuits firing away like Hal thinking things over. She taps her teeth with a pencil. She tugs absently at my Bean collar, brushes me off. She slaps the desk. “Well, why the hell not? It’s a challenge. There are data banks which have the information. It’s just a matter of latching on to it, right?”
    â€œRight,” I say wearily. Why did I ask?
    â€œAs a matter of fact,” she muses, plucking a grain of tobacco from her tongue and taking my arm again, “there just might be a chance.”
    â€œThere might be?”
    â€œSure. We got a five-thousand-baud system here.”
    â€œThat ought to do it. What is a baud?”
    â€œNever mind. There just might be a chance.”
    â€œGood.”
    â€œYou know why?” She pulls close.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause. I seem to recall that when the Grand Mer unit was finished, it was after T.M.I. Then after Chernobyl NIH called for an EIS to placate the anti-nukes.”
    â€œWhat’s an EIS?”
    â€œEnvironmental Impact Study.”
    â€œMeaning?”
    â€œMeaning a parish-wide sampling was done for radioactivity.”
    â€œYou mean people were tested?”
    â€œSure. Urinalyses almost certainly. And it’s just possible that they could have—” She jerks me. “Sodium would show up in the urine, wouldn’t it?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œIt is just possible—” She searches my right eye, then my left. “Tell you what?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œLet’s hit the mainframe in Baton Rouge and ask it to do the work. By God, there is just a chance.”
    â€œLet’s do that.”
    She gazes, taps her teeth, plucks at her tongue. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll do some networking. We’ll use State Public Health and if necessary the Census Bureau and if necessary NIH in D.C. And we’ll ask the mainframe in Baton Rouge to do the asking. I’ve got the authority.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œNow understand this. It