Chapter 34
42.
 Professor Shaun Nolan, Ph.D., mycologist at UCSD Medical Center, was on his way to meet with Louise Trost downtown. She had invited him to join her for a light lunch at the ornate Victorian fountain at Horton Plaza.
He was beginning to notice a large species of what looked like a fine, light green Dictydium sporangia. More likely, he felt it was a new type of mycena. He was at a red light, and got out of the car to harvest a handful of these fungi by hand. The light turned green, and people behind him started honking, but he ignored them as he got back into the car. He sniffed his catch, but did not find the characteristic iodine smell of many mycena. The sporangium was a form of slime mold, and these were too large to be of that species. Cars roared around him. Angry shouts floated in the air. When he looked up, the light was red again.
Dr. Sean Nolan, 48, was a senior scientist at the University of California, San Diego. A jogger and basically a youthful, happy man, Sean felt privileged to work in a series of small wooden structures on a 200-foot-high sandy bluff with a spectacular view overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Sean was a botanist, on the faculty of the Biology Department. His specialty was mycology, the study of fungi.
Sean, who had a solid, dry sense of humor, liked to call himself an ambassador to the Fifth Kingdom. Over the past century, scientists had classified life on earth into kingdoms at the highest level. They'd started with three such kingdoms in the 1890s —Protista, Plants, and Animals—and, as their understanding grew more sophisticated, five and later six kingdoms (subdividing the 'all else' Protista into four subdivisions including Fungi). More recently, many scientists preferred a more simplified scheme of three domains (Bacteria, Archaea, and Eucaryotes or 'those with cells'). Somehow, Sean preferred the simple romance of the Fifth Kingdom. After all, the fungi were a powerful and creative bunch of life forms, with over 60,000 variations of stunning diversity.
Pete's wife Eileen, 42,a vivacious dark-haired woman, shared his enthusiasm for the daily ten mile jogs that they referred to as 'cleansing' or 'flushing the pipes.' She had been a champion bicycle racer a U.C. Santa Barbara, where she earned her M.D. degree, as well as a softball enthusiast. Rosario was in Family Practice with the old Hillcrest-based hospital of the U.C. San Diego Medical Center near downtown San Diego. They lived in a 4,000 square foot town home in a gated community in Del Mar (very upscale) but also owned a 1,200 square foot condo in the Gaslamp district in downtown San Diego, where they could spend the night if they'd had a beer too many at a Petco Park baseball game, or took in a late movie downtown during their sparse hours together. They had no children, and it was starting to look unlikely that they ever would. It had always seemed that their busy lives pushed childbearing yet another year or two out into the future.
Arriving downtown, he entered the parking structure behind the wildly colored and imaginatively shaped Horton Plaza mall. Parking in the shady garage, he bought a pretzel and a hot tea on the 5th floor food court, and got his parking ticket validated. Taking the complicated mid-air tangle of stairs and elevators down to ground level, he found Louise. She sat on a bench under the shade of a queen palm in the small rectangular park. Traffic and pedestrians were thick downtown, for it was the noon hour. The courts had let out, and jurors and court officials were rushing to Horton or the Gaslamp for a bite. The air smelled delightfully of mingled cuisines—Japanese, Mandarin, Italian, Greek, Persian, anything one could desire. Shaun found Louise, meanwhile, calmly munching a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on plain white bread, and sipping a can of cola. He joined her with his pretzel and tea. They nodded by way of greeting, as if they were old friends, though they had only known each other vaguely from years of floating through the court system on various cases.
"What's that sticking from your pocket?" Louise asked.
"Oh this." He'd almost forgotten. "Not sure." He reached down and pulled a handful out of the gravel at their feet. "It's some sort of fungus, probably not a gilled mushroom but something close. It may actually be a more primitive thing called a sporangium, but I won't know until I get it on slides and under a microscope, plus do various tests."
"Is it poisonous?" Louise asked.
"It's sure to be toxic to some extent. The County M.E. autopsied a roofer who died of classic mushroom poisoning symptoms, and he had some of the genetic structure of this in his blood and lungs."
"He died from inhaling it? Why aren't we all panicking?"
Shaun considered this for a moment. "There are over 300 species of poisonous plants in San Diego County. The oleander, for example, has been used in murders. We're not in an alarm over the common philodendron or the deadly nightshade, both of which, while not native, abound here. I do think if a few more people die from this, we'll have a public health uproar."
"And you're going to wait until that happens," Louise goaded in her soft, grandmotherly voice loaded with poisons of her own.
He felt the back of his neck crawl hot pink. "Louise, I'm sitting here having lunch with you. Ease off, you stinkhorn."
She chuckled. "Shaun, I'm just rattling your cage. In my own slow, quiet way, that is what I do. It works very well. You will have a report for me by the end of the day, won't you?"
"Yes. I want you to put in an official request through channels just to back me up."
"I can do that." She flicked out her cell phone and spoke with her executive assistant. She put the phone away two or three minutes later. "She'll have it typed up and waiting for my signature after lunch, and it will be on your desk by 3 p.m."
"Great."
"So what is going on, Shaun? Terrorists?"
"Well, I can't rule it out. There are at least nine types of mycotoxins, or fungus poisons, that have been weaponized by various countries, from aflatoxins to zearalenones. There have been historical precedents of fungal warfare. For example, from the late 1970s through the early 1980s, Soviet client militias in Laos and Cambodia may have used what the peasants called Yellow Rain (trichothecene mycotoxins)."
"Is there an antidote, just in case this turns out to be mushroom warfare?"
"None. However, there are counter-measures. For example, soap and water washes it away. If you feel strongly—in other words, if you think it is warranted from a law enforcement perspective—I would start calling people like the U.S. Army's Chemical Corps, which knows about mycotoxins. And the National Centers for Health."
"A little precaution is always warranted. I'm going to make some calls, if you'll give me phone numbers for the best people. I want to keep it quiet for now so we don't start a big panic."
"I suggest we do more," Shaun said. "Let's go through the media and advise people with compromised respiratory systems to stay indoors for a few days if possible. I'm almost certain that the roofer died from an over-ingestion of live spores."
"I can see that, no matter what we do, we're going to get beat up later for not doing more sooner."
"If only we knew what to do."
"I'll tell you what," Louise said, "I'm going to call Washington, and have them contact the Governor of California to get the state and city apparatus rolling. No harm in being prepared. Meanwhile, you go back to your lab and find out what we are dealing with."
They sat for a few moments in pained silence, finishing their lunches which had lost all flavor. Then, with a quiet handshake, they parted company for the moment.
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Copyright © 2014 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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