Dating : Fossil Fuel

Doctor Datson is getting older, but that doesn’t keep him from still getting into mischief. When one of his lab experiments re-animates some old fossils, it is up to Detective Truman and the rest of the gang to track down the dangerous creatures and find out who’s responsible.

Copyright 2010
Illustrations designed by Jay Horne

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Datson’s Big Idea

Datson had been a credit to the world of genetic engineering. That was before he picked up his amateur interest in paleontology after retirement. That was also before the Alzheimer’s started taking hold.

Now, he was pushing seventy, and the talent he was most proud of was being able to twitch the curls of his mustache independently. That didn’t mean he wasn’t still making great discoveries. He just wasn’t advertising. After you have most of your work published in Science Magazine before you’ve even written the proposal, you start keeping the best stuff to yourself.

He was thinking this again, as he sat on one of the wooden stools in his personal laboratory, staring ahead at the stainless steel doors of the specimen freezer, watching his indistinct reflection. Though he had been going a little heavy on the Memantine lately, he posed a good argument that it helped him think outside the box.

When the colors in the steel started getting more fuzzy he knew it was about time to start.

Besides a centrifuge, which was permanently attached, and some petri dishes, there were four paper-wrapped bundles atop the steel table before him. Those were the reason for his excitement and solitude over the past two days. Well, those and SENG-2, the concoction he had been keeping near absolute zero.

He was relying heavily on the observer effect that the younger physicists had been touting.

“You wouldn’t believe the amazing things inanimate objects do when you’re the only one in the room,” Neil had said.

Neil was one of the only guys who checked up on Datson anymore. It was kinda nice to have someone care, but it also could become hair-pulling when the guy gets a little too concerned. Neil was the main reason Datson didn’t keep a phone in the lab; if you get my drift.

A foot-and-a-half thick redwood door separated his lab from his condo and all of the distractions it contained. Which weren’t many, he was still moving stuff over from his old place down on west-end.

Anyhow, the Doctor felt more at home in the lab, among the white lights, microscopes, lasers, test-tubes racks, and stainless steel appliances. He’d hung a potted plant in the corner, and there was a jalousie one-way bay window, otherwise all the living things were basically jarred up or undergoing some sort of osmosis.

Nearly everything in the lab was in a state of suspended animation, he thought, even me.

The more he thought of it, the more he was sure it would work.

He reached out and started unfolding the fossil from the tan paper wrapping. He had to stand on the rungs of his stool in order to reach far enough to roll the thing end-over-end a few times to expose it.

“Majestic,” Datson said aloud when it was revealed.

The angular stone was the secular proof that giant centipedes did indeed exist! Embossed in the rock was a Trilobite of massive proportion.

“Majestic, but creepy.”

No cameras rolling, just one lone observer, nothing could interfere. He wondered how many magic mushrooms physicists took before doing their double-slit and light-as-a-wave experiments alone…

It was going to get colder in here. Good thing he had on his long brown pea coat with the huge buckles on the front.

Datson balanced the fossil in the center of the table the best he could, as it was a misshapen stone, and placed a petri dish right at the apex; The point at which the underbelly of the creature called attention, with all of those drawn up little pincers and crab legs pointing inward.

When he pressed a button, fog rolled from under the table top where the dry ice now met the air. Out from under the vacuum of laser cooling, the atoms of SENG-2 would soon be dancing like its Friday night at the disco.

He had, what equated to a gallon jug of it, though it had been flash frozen and sliced into discs. It was the only way he was going to be able to drape the fossils with the solution before they went to work.

From the mist, Datson stood up and placed a robotic capsule onto the table. He juggled it with with a reflective pair of oven mitts until it came to rest beside the fossil.

“Now,” he said to himself, “it’s time to sing —

He picked up the forceps, which were really the tongs from his fireplace, and reached out with his left forefinger and pressed the button for Sample Number One.

It reminded him of selecting an album from an old multi-disk CD-player.

“ — just don’t call me Datson!” he said, as the tray slid out of the capsule squealing and steaming like a teapot.

“Who needs friends, when you can —

Now he held the disc of overactive matter above the petri dish, which waited atop the fossil, it spewing and whistling in all sorts of trans-formative indifference all the while, “ — make your own.”

His mustache twitched when he let the large fuming coin drop into the dish.

There was definitely something happening.

The doctor had played with enough dry ice to know that the matter being sloughed off would be heavier than air. He stepped back from the dancing multicolored disc of ice as it sublimated and produced a huge heavy cloak of fog over the fossil.

Those electrons are really moving now, he thought. He just hoped that the excitement would transpose onto the dormant creature’s own mitochondria. Like a tuning fork, each dormant cell should recognize one another.

…and then, for a moment, he thought it had happened!

Maybe he had taken a little too much Memantine…

The thick fog was starting to creep him out, as he couldn’t see what the result of the experiment yet was. Just as he was feeling like a vampire might rise up out of the mist, like from an old horror movie, the table gave up under the cold and warped with a BANG!

“Jesus,” he’d exclaimed, while reaching to turn on the fan.

Though, it was mostly harmless C02, he blindly made his way to the window and opened it in preparation for the worst.

When the table had warped, the robotic capsule had tipped over and the other four discs had slid out onto the table. Now, they were barking and whistling, and the fog was growing exponentially.

It looked to him like a fireworks show, yet made of harmless gasses and ice hockey pucks dancing around one another until one pinged off its neighbor and went careening to the floor, but only after leaving a dent in the steel freezer.

Okay, that was scary.

It was time to vacate.

Datson reached up and pulled the chain for the active vent hood and headed for the door to his condo.

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He could hardly hear the commotion from this side of the redwood door. Datson was leaning against it, considering the time it would take for the reaction to degenerate.

At least there shouldn’t be any mess to clean up, all the elements were well below their triple points.

He rested his curly grey head of hair back against the door and looked up at the ceiling.

The only real concern would be someone mistaking all the fog for smoke and calling the fire department.

I bet I don’t have more than twenty minutes before someone shows up here asking questions, he thought.

And he was right. This was going to be one of the three times 911 would be called over his little experiment.

The phone was ringing, but it wasn’t emergency services.

That would be Neil Inglow, Physicist from Medlab USA, adopted son and wet nurse. Datson rocked his head back and forth indifferently, “Yeah Neil, I’m fine, Neil,” said Datson to the ringing phone.

“Alzheimer’s ain’t got me yet. I still remember you call every five minutes, and I still remember you always call me Datson!”

The doctor pushed off irritably from the door and marched across the small studio to the kitchenette. The phone was still ringing.

He grabbed a half-gallon of milk from the fridge and sat down at the bar. The apartment was still relatively empty. For once in his life he would just like to be called, Doctor. It wasn’t that hard. It’s literally just as many syllables, but that was what had stuck. A PhD in Molecular Genetics, a Master of Science, and as an old man, they still called him Datson!

He took a swig. Licked the milk out of his mustache. Tilted his head to the side. Did he hear sirens already?

No. That wasn’t sirens. That was something from the other side of the door. It wasn’t any sound of solids turning directly into gases either. He knew what those sounded like.

He walked slowly over to the redwood and pressed his ear against it.

There it was again!

When there came a thump at the door, he dropped the carton of milk and it ran out on the floor.