Medusa (NUMA Files 8)

He went into his study and dug through his file cabinets, returning with a brown envelope. He opened the envelope and pulled out a stack of five-by-seven photos. He fanned the photos like a deck of cards, picking out one and handing it to Lee.

“This is the facade of the temple as seen from a canal,” he explained. “There’s a hollow space under the temple’s floor that seems to have been some sort of pool. This picture shows the carvings on the interior.”

Lee stared at the photo for a moment, then passed it over to Austin, who studied the bell shapes in it and then looked up.

“Jellyfish?” he asked.

“It appears to be,” Whittles said. “Not sure why they decorated the wall of a temple with those creatures. But, as I said, there’s a pool dedicated to the sacred eel, so why not one to jellyfish?”

“Why not indeed?” Lee said, her dark eyes sparkling with excitement.

“I’d like to see this place in person,” Austin said. “Can you tell us where it is?”

“I can show you exactly, but I hope you brought your bathing suit. The platform the temple rested on got knocked around in an earthquake years ago and sank into the canal. Not too deep. Maybe twelve feet or so.”

Austin looked at Lee.

“What’s your pleasure, ma’am? Head off to our ship or check out Nan Madol?”

“I think the answer to that question is obvious,” she said.

He wasn’t surprised by her reply, given what he had seen of her determination.

Austin asked to borrow a local telephone book and within minutes had arranged to rent a boat and some scuba equipment. Whittles marked the temple’s location on a tourist map of the ruined city. They thanked him and said their good-byes, then went back out to the waiting Pontiac station wagon. As the taxi headed toward the harbor, the Chevy Silverado pulled away from the curb and followed a few lengths behind.

CHAPTER 35

DR. LYSANDER CODMAN GREETED THE TROUTS IN THE LOBBY of a building that overlooked the grassy square off Longwood Avenue where Harvard Medical School was part of a campus with some of the most prestigious such institutions in the country. The professor was a tall, loose-boned man in his sixties. He had the type of long, big-toothed face that seemed to raise the possibility that some of the old Yankee families had bred with horses.

Codman led the way along a hallway and swept the Trouts into his spacious office. He asked his visitors to make themselves comfortable and poured cups of Earl Grey from an electric kettle. He then plunked himself behind his desk and asked a few questions about their work with NUMA, then held up a bound report so the Trouts could read the title on its dark blue cover:

THE NEW BEDFORD ANOMALY:

A STUDY OF IMMUNE RESPONSE AMONG

CREW FROM THE WHALING SHIP PRINCESS

Codman took a noisy slurp from his cup.

“I’ve had a chance to browse through Dr. Lee’s paper,” he said. “It’s even more curious than I remember.”

Paul asked, “Curious in what way, Professor Codman?”

“You’ll understand when you get into it. The first section of Dr. Lee?

?s treatise is based mostly on newspaper reports. The reporter was interviewing retired whaling men, looking to chronicle their exploits, and realized that he was onto something. He noticed that a group of whalers in their seventies and eighties had been almost completely disease free for a good part of their very long lives.”

“We were in the New Bedford Seamen’s Bethel earlier today,” Gamay said. “The walls are lined with tablets memorializing whaling crews. Paul remarked at how tough the old-timers must have been.”

“It went beyond toughness in this case,” Codman said. “These men had never suffered a single illness, not even the common cold. They died at an advanced age, usually from some geriatric condition such as congestive heart failure.”

“Newspaper writing can be overblown,” Gamay said.

“Especially in the nineteenth century,” Codman said. “But the stories caught the eye of a doctor in immunology named Fuller here at the medical school. He organized a team of physicians to investigate. They talked to the men and the physicians who had treated them. What they found was even stranger than what newspapers had reported. The men enjoying the most robust health had all served on the whaling ship Princess during a single voyage in 1848. They had been infected on that voyage with a tropical illness then making the rounds through the Pacific whaling fleet. While some of those men shipped out again later and died in whaling accidents, fourteen were still living. They were compared to men from other ships, and the statistical differences healthwise were startling. The doctors backed up their findings with tables and graphs and so on.”

“Yet you expressed doubts over Dr. Lee’s findings,” Gamay said.

Professor Codman sat back in his chair, tented his fingers, and stared into space.