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interrupting him for this."
"I don't think that would be a good idea," Tirrell shook his head, mind
racing. The last thing he could afford was someone tipping off Jarvis that
they knew he'd been running a secret project. At best, it would give him time
to hide or destroy anything he didn't want seen; at worst, it could spook him
into dropping into a hole so deep they might never find him. But it was clear
he couldn't voice such thoughts here. "Radiophone conversations are by their
nature more vulnerable to eavesdropping than regular phone calls," he said,
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choosing his words carefully. "If the wrong person heard what you said there
could be real trouble."
Vague intimations had worked once before, but this time Somerset wasn't giving
in quite so easily.
"What sort of trouble?" he asked stubbornly. "You said yesterday you were
trying to find this Oriana woman, but today you seem a lot more interested in
Matt and his work. If we're going to help you, I
think we're entitled to know what's going on."
Tirrell took a deep breath. Somerset unfortunately had a point. "All right.
There's a possibility that
Miribel Oriana is blackmailing Dr. Jarvis. Knowing what he's been working on
may help us identify who's involved." Which was, the detective decided, as
misleading a set of true statements as he'd ever heard.
And it had the desired effect. Somerset's expression ran the complete gamut
from surprise to anger to determination; Cam's got stuck somewhere in the
vicinity of outraged shock. "You'll understand now," Tirrell continued, "why I
can't risk broadcasting any hint of my progress over the airwaves. In this
game, the less your opponent knows of what you're doing, the better your
chances of nailing him."
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A Coming of Age
"Of course," Somerset nodded firmly. "All right. Basically, it looks like Matt
was doing something involving the maturation process. Some of these drugs" he
indicated his list "are known to slow down various aspects of puberty in
earthstock lab animals. Others are synthetic androgens male sex hormones and
some rather hard to isolate pituitary hormones, all of which seem to play a
part in growth and puberty. Um... there are a couple of carriers here,
too those are relatively inert chemicals that can bond loosely to two or more
complex molecules at a time. They're used when you want to get a drug to a
specific but inaccessible area the islets of the pancreas, for example without
flooding the whole system. If you choose the carrier's grabber properly, you
can get the whole thing to link up with, say, the glucagon molecules in the
islets' alpha cells. The drug then drops off and begins its work, while the
carrier-grabber combination either disintegrates or also drops off, leaving
the glucagon molecule undamaged."
Tirrell had caught about one word in five of all that, but the essence made it
through the jargon.
"Would this method also be useful if you wanted to get a drug within range of
something spread through the whole body?" he asked carefully. "Those growth
hormones, say?"
"Yes," Cam spoke up. "Dr. Jarvis has been doing that in some of his
induced-hibernation work using carriers to seek out thyroxin in the blood."
"I didn't know that," Somerset frowned.
She shrugged. "He said it was just an experiment, but it seemed to work pretty
well."
Growth and puberty studies, several months for work without interruption...
and Colin Brimmer, a boy whose teekay was just starting its rise. Something in
the pit of Tirrell's stomach began a slow tumble. "Tell me," he said without
thinking, "is it still accepted theory that the physical changes at puberty
are what bring on Transition?"
The other two suddenly looked thoughtful, and Tirrell cursed his carelessness.
He should have saved the question for later, when they wouldn't have been so
quick to follow his line of thought. "Well,"
Somerset said slowly, "it's not really that simple. Transition does occur
sometime during puberty, but it's not a direct result of the sex hormone
activity otherwise childhood castration should eliminate it. There's a theory
that even with the testes removed the adrenal cortex puts out enough
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testosterone to trigger Transition, but that's never been proved." He
shrugged. "But why would Matt be so secretive about working on something like
that? Every endocrinologist on Tigris has taken a shot at figuring out what
starts Transition. Matter of fact, he and I did some work on that four years
ago."
"What did you learn?"
"Nothing really useful. We were able to extend the B and M curves that's brain
size and metabolism rate all the way up to Transition, but that's about all.
Matt got interested in artificial hibernation after that and we put it aside."
"I see." Tirrell turned to Cam. "Would you go and see if you can find Dr.
Jarvis's lab book for that
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A Coming of Age period, please?"
"If you'd like." She looked at Somerset, eyebrows raised.
"It'll be December and Lucember of three-oh-three and January of
three-oh-four," the other told her.
Cam nodded and left. "There's really not much in that notebook worth looking
at," Somerset told
Tirrell.
"I'm mainly interested in whether the book is here or not," the detective told
him. "It seems rather odd that Dr. Jarvis would suddenly give up on something
as potentially valuable as teekay research in favor of artificial
hibernation."
Somerset smiled. "You underestimate hibernation's value, Detective. For
certain operations being able to slow down the patient's metabolism
drastically could make the difference between life and death. And if we ever
recover the space technology we had before the Lost Generation and want to go
looking for other survivors of the Expansion, some form of hibernation will be
vital." He waved a hand. "Besides, as I said, Transition research is a pretty
crowded field these days. Even more so than teekay work generally. You have to
understand that by the time teekay first appeared on Tigris the viral DNA that
triggered it had had four generations to ensconce itself in our genetic
structure
and
that all the original physiological baseline records were destroyed in the
Lost Generation. What that means is that we're working essentially blind: we
know what human biochemistry is like now, but we don't know where in the
system the critical changes occurred. That makes for a pretty big target for
medical science generally, but for endocrinologists the only really practical
starting point is
Transition."
"And Dr. Jarvis doesn't like following the pack?"
"Not when the pack is nosing uselessly around a locked door, no. But if anyone
ever comes up with the key to that door, odds are it'll be Matthew Jarvis."
"Um," Tirrell grunted, and for a few minutes there was silence. Somerset
glanced once at his watch, and Tirrell realized with a start that it was
approaching five o'clock. He'd have to end this session soon and let the
others get home. He was beginning to wonder if Cam had unilaterally made that
decision when she finally returned.
"There's nothing for that period in any of the file drawers," she told
Somerset. "I looked through the books for at least a year on either side of
the months you gave me, and there's nothing at all on
Transition B and M."
"Uh-huh."
Somerset looked at Tirrell. "Well, you called it, Detective, but it doesn't
make any sense.
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