"Fraidy cat," said Chiun. "Had you bathed, you would have nothing to fear."
"What makes you say that?" asked Remo as they floated into a stand of evergreens.
"It is obvious that your unappetizing odor is attracting them."
"Oh," said Remo, suddenly realizing the Master of Sinanju was probably right.
When they got into the trees, Remo watched for lurking ants. There were none. Looking back, he saw the dozens of them leaping from weed to weed, and even the lethargic thunderbugs were compelled to get out of their way. The slow ones-which was most of them-were pounced upon.
Remo didn't wait to see what happened next. He was sick of bugs by now.
Chapter 16
Dale Parsons was puzzled.
They had brought the body of the Ukiah coroner Lee Esterquest to him because they feared he had died of HELP.
As a federal pathologist, Parsons was not licensed to autopsy people in Mendocino County. Drawing blood was another matter. He had done that, taken tissue samples, and was looking at them under the electron microscope powered by a portable gasoline generator. The generator whine was enough to permanently injure his hearing, but Parsons was so deep in his work he was barely aware of the racket.
He almost didn't hear the impatient slapping on his tent flap either.
"Go away," he snapped. "I'm working."
The flap was swept aside and a familiar face poked in.
"Remember me?"
"Salk. FDA, right?"
"You got it."
Parsons grunted. "Whoever named this virus got it exactly right too."
Remo Salk stepped in, followed by the Korean Japanese beetle expert. The old man simply stood there, stony and wordless, his long-nailed fingers clapped over his tiny ears.
"Paradox?" asked Remo.
"Here, take a look."
Noticing the draped form, Remo asked, "Dead Snapper?"
"No. That's the local coroner, Esterquest."
Remo's face grew sad. "I met him. He was a nice guy. Took a lot of pride in his work."
Parsons nodded. "I'm kicking myself for not talking to him before this. He tell you anything about the autopsies?"
"Just that he couldn't make heads or tails of it. But he found something strange in the bloodstream."
"He did? Now that's very interesting. Take a look through this microscope."
Remo put his eye to the eyepiece. Parsons said, "What you're looking at is a blood sample magnified ten thousand times. See those spindle-shaped things inside the blobs?"
"Yeah?"
"Protein particles, embedded in the cytoplasm of white blood cells. Dead matter that has lodged into the bloodstream after doing its work."
Remo looked away from the lens. "That what's been killing people?"
"Probably. But those aren't virus particles."
"What are they?"
"I don't know, but here comes the paradox. They match nothing I find in the thunderbugs I've autopsied."
"You autopsied bugs? With what-safety pins?"
"Very funny. What I found in the bug is interesting. An enzyme harmless to people. It's not poison, it's digestible and excretable. But it does have an interesting property."
"What?"
"Remember that the thunderbug is high in protein, nutrients, and carbohydrates, is easily digested, and even causes people to lose weight the more they keep eating them."
"Yeah?"
"Well, apparently this enzyme chemically bonds with receptors in the small colon, blocking them from absorbing the nutrients and proteins and carbohydrates."
"You can tell that from cutting open a little bug?"
"Actually, I couldn't make heads or tails of the enzyme itself. But I was walking around this place and happened upon the latrine. I noticed the awful smell."
"It's hard not to," Remo said dryly.
"When I looked in, I noticed almost all the stools were yellow and greasy-looking. A sure sign of steatorrhea-undigested fat in the stools. I took a few stool samples back and ran some tests."
"You're a braver man than me if you climbed into that mess."
Parsons nodded unhappily. "It's a gross job, but someone had to do it. My tests showed that not only was fat passing through the PAPA people's intestines unabsorbed, but so were carbohydrates and proteins. The way it works was the chemical receptors would latch on to these enzymes, thinking they were real food, and they'd get clogged up like the wrong key stuck in a lock. The poor proteins and carbohydrates would go marching past untouched. The human body extracts the value of food through the intestines, not the stomach."
"In other words, they were getting nothing out of eating?"
Parsons nodded. "You can eat thunderbugs all day long, and none of the nutrients are going to get into your system. You might as well be eating cardboard. Hell, cardboard would be a step up from thunderbugs."
The old Korean approached, his hands coming off his ears. "What is this you are saying?"
"Those people out there gorging themselves? They think they're eating well, but they're not. They're actually starving themselves. That's why they keep eating and why they keep wasting away. They're fooling their stomachs into thinking they're eating but their bodies keep demanding more and more nourishment. Not getting it from their diet, the body draws it from stored fat and muscle tissue. If they go on long enough, they end up looking like Somalis."