“Try it again, Colonel,” the President ordered, not unpleasantly, “and this time in layman’s terms.”
“Yes, sir. DIC is sometimes called consumptive coagulopathy, since excessive intravascular coagulation leads to consumption of platelets and nonenzymatic coagulation factors—”
The President interrupted Hamilton by holding up his hand and shaking his head.
“You might as well be speaking Greek, Colonel. Try it again, please, keeping in mind that you’re dealing with a simple country boy from Alabama.”
“Yes, sir,” Hamilton said, paused in thought, and then announced, almost happily: “Sir, DIC causes coagulation to run amok.”
“Coagulation, as in blood?”
Hamilton nodded.
“Go down that road, Colonel, and see where it takes us,” the President said.
“Coagulation is the process, in this connection, which causes liquid human blood to turn into a soft, semisolid mass.”
He looked at the President to see if the President was still with him.
The President responded by smiling encouragingly, and making a gesture with both hands for him to continue.
“If you think of the vascular system of the body, Mr. President, as a series of interconnected garden hoses, and of the heart as a pump that pushes blood through that system.”
He paused to see if his student was still with him, and when the President nodded, went on: “Imagine, if you will, sir, that the blood is transformed into a very thick mud. The pump cannot push the mass through the vascular system. It is overwhelmed; it stops.”
“And death occurs? By what a layman might call a heart attack?”
“That, too, Mr. President,” Hamilton said.
“‘That, too’?” the President parroted.
“The mud, the now-coagulated blood, then begins to attack the garden hose. As sort of a parasite. It feeds on it, so to speak.”
“Eats it, you mean?”
Hamilton nodded. “And when it’s finished, so to speak, with the vascular system, it begins to feed on the other tissues of the body. In some sort of unusual enzymatic manner, which I have so far been unable to pin down.”
“You’d better run that past me again, Colonel,” the President said. “‘Enzymatic manner’?”
Hamilton considered for a moment the level of knowledge the President might have.
“Think of meat tenderizer, Mr. President. Do you know how that works?”
“I can’t say that I do,” Clendennen confessed.
“Meat—and that would of course include human flesh—is held together by a complex protein called collagen. This makes it quite tough to chew in the raw state.”
“I’ve noticed,” the President drawled dryly.
“Cooking destroys these proteins, making the meat chewable. But so does contact with certain enzymes, most commonly ones extracted from the papaya. These proteolytic enzymes break the peptide bonds between the amino acids found in complex proteins. Such as flesh.”
“What you’re saying is that Congo-X is some sort of meat tenderizer?” the President asked. “Why is that so dangerous?”
“Unlike the enzymatic tenderizers one finds in the supermarket, which lose their strength after attacking the peptide bonding between the amino acids of meat, the Congo-X enzymes—if they are indeed enzymes, and I am not yet prepared to make that call—seem to gather strength from the collagens they attack. In a manner of speaking, they are nurtured by it.”
“What happens when they run out of meat?” the President asked, and then corrected himself: “Out of something to eat?”
Hamilton didn’t answer directly.