The Alchemy of Murder by Carol McCleary

of Health insignia, is on the floor under the table. He silently sighs to himself as he looks at the superb selection of scientific apparatus. If only the great man would permit him to work beside him …
    “Have a bite of sausage,” Perun says, without looking up from the microscope.
    The “sausage” is spoiled food in a glass container.
    “What is it?”
    “ Clostridium botulinum .”
    “Ahhh.”
    Clostridium botulinum is a bacterium that secretes one of the deadliest poisons known to man: botulism. The name is derived from the Latin word for sausage: botulus . It was applied after people in Wildbad, Germany, died from eating uncooked smoked sausage. Even with the knowledge that ill-prepared foods are the breeding ground for a microbe that emits a deadly toxic, thousands of people still died every year from the poison, usually from home-canned foods that were not cooked thoroughly.
    Perun had bred the lethal little creatures by following the example of the sausage-eating Germans: He allowed food to spoil in a low oxygen atmosphere.
    “What stage are you?” Dubois asks. His tone reveals the envy and admiration he has for Perun’s ability as a scientist.
    “I have a pure culture.”
    That meant he now had laboratory-grown botulus as opposed to what he obtained from the decomposed food. Dubois knows the first specimens taken from the “sausage” would have contained many different species of bacteria. Perun had to first separate out the botulus from the other bacteria. Once he has a culture of pure botulus in a nutritious medium of simple sugars or perhaps a meat broth, either in a liquid or solidified in agar, it would not be difficult to increase the size of the colony by keeping the bacteria well fed.
    As Perun continues to study the bacteria, Dubois steps over to watch a worker inside an “incubator.” While Pasteur’s scientists would have found the microscope and other items on Perun’s lab table familiar, the incubators on the barge were unique. Not just unique , Dubois thinks, but strange and amazing .
    An incubator is an insulated box in which temperature, humidity, and other conditions are controlled so microbes will reproduce. But the three incubators on the barge are rooms the size of walk-in meat coolers.
    One wall of each incubator room is clear glass and faces the lab so Perun can observe the worker inside. The other walls are wood, but were also covered with glass and sealed with rubber. The sealing is necessary to ensure that whatever is inside, stays inside .
    Perun claims that no one on Earth has colonized as many deadly microbes as he. Dubois does not doubt the claim.
    The atmosphere in the walk-in incubators is so potentially toxic, no one enters unless they are in a deep-sea diving suit. Perun chose diving suits because material that keeps out water on the ocean floor is also impervious to microbes. The suited workers are supplied air pumped through a rubber hose. Their faces are partially visible in the glass portholes of the big metal helmets covering their heads. They leave the incubator rooms through a door at the back where they are thoroughly hosed off before taking off the suits.
    It is dangerous work. They are all anarchist comrades and Perun occasionally loses one to the tiny creatures they are breeding. “Never forget they’re hungry and you are their meal,” he tells them.
    As they toil with the microbe colonies, they remind Dubois of pictures of deep-sea divers harvesting food on the ocean floor in a Jules Verne book he read as a teenager.
    “I’m going to test the toxicity,” Perun says.
    Dubois steps back to the lab table as Perun draws liquid from a culture of botulus into a syringe. He uses a military bullet extractor biologists call a “mouse forcep” to capture a rat from an animal cage. After injecting the animal, he places it back in the cage.
    Perun glances at Dubois as he cleans up his work area. “Botulism kills more slowly if you ingest it in food. Putting