TRICK OR TREAT!!! After a very hurried Wednesday morning of getting her saguaro experiment's data printed out and onto transparencies, and being dragged out to the car by her brother Jason, Mary Lou now found herself surrounded by throngs of people in the lobby of Nirvana's World Hotel along Atlantic City's Boardwalk. With deep concern, Mary Lou didn't know what to do with the new, high-fashion, Italian leather overnight bag her parents had just given her for her 21st birthday. It was a fine piece of work with "Casa Vermicelli" discretely branded on it. The group had just arrived, but it was too early for check-in. Despite protestations by her brother Jason, she gave it to a bell hop to check it. The group then went off to buy some costumes for the Microbiology Conference party to be held the next evening after the group had reported their saguaro findings to the assembled membership of the virology section. Speaking of findings, they returned with costumes that were all the same - slices of a pumpkin - which, when they all huddled together, fit together to make a complete pumpkin! By this time, they could check-in, and Mary Lou put an elbow in her brother's ribs: "See, nothing happened to my leather bag - it's sitting right over there. The remainder of the evening was spent wandering around the curio shops, and stuffing themselves with junk food.
In the middle of the night Mary Lou awoke with a headache. Not wanting to disturb Cheryl by turning on the light, she groped around in the dark, found her new leather bag, and in that, she hoped to find her bottle of pills - but her fingers felt an unfamiliar rectangle of paper. But then she remembered her pills were in her purse. Soon, closed in the bathroom, she switched on the light. To her amazement she found the paper to be a $100-bill. How nice of her mother to have slipped her some extra spending money for her birthday! The next morning, she told Cheryl about it, and opening her bag for the first time in the light, both girls' eyes just about bugged out of their sockets: the bag was full of C-notes! Mary Lou started to lift the stacks of bills out, when at the bottom her fingers felt something heavy in a plastic bag - a pistol! It wasn't long before the guys were called and all clustered to the room,. The group was anxiously spectulating what this was all about. And what they should do about it! And whom they could trust - "security"? -the police?
The plan: at a newstand off the lobby, Prof. Bengston exchanged one C-note for twenties, and bought 50 copies of America Today. These were cut up into bill-sized pieces, which were sandwiched in little packets with C-notes top and bottom. The authentic looking doctored stacks were put into one of the shopping bags in which the costumes had come. As a decoy, the bag was left next to the open overnight bag. The gun in its ziplok baggie was placed at the bottom of the wastebasket with the usual empty plastic garbage bag reinstalled over it. The real money was divided up among the group, who stuffed it in their clothing and nervously set out for the meeting. As they walked down the Boardwalk for the convention site, they noticed two guys in Hawaiian shirts and shades following them. These guys even wore their shades during one of the group's slide presentations on a radioisotopic method for demonstrating semi-conservative replication of DNA. And how those guys stood out in the crowd: those gaudy Hawaiian shirts - and in New Jersey no less!
Jimmy's presentation, jointly co-authored with Mary Lou, was about how 35S-labelling both of virus-free and of infected "lysogenized" when the cells were growing in cell cultures at 35° and at 45°. Then the cells were frozen and their brittle cellulose-cases were easily disrupted by grinding in alumina (aluminum silicate forms a grit that has lots of sharp points and edges). The lysates were then electrophoresed on polyacrylamide gels and later autoradiographed. In this latter procedure a piece of X-ray film is laid on the surface of the gel, and anything in the get that is radioactive will send out radiation that will expose the film in that area. Mary Lou slipped on the first transparency, which was a composite of the gel stained for proteins (faint lines), and that of the autoradiogram (dark lines):
In alternating virological subjects with bacteriological one, the presentation immediately after theirs was on the mechanisms of the Gram-stain. Dr. Spangler went on at length conjecturing that the difference between G(+) and G(-) went this way: both types of cells when heat dried, readily soak up the crystal violet dye and become rehydrated. Because of the much thicker cell wall, the subsequent alcohol application does not rinse or leech out the dye from the thicker walls of the G(+) cells, while it is rather readily extracted from the much thinner G(-) walls.
As they were later trekking across the hotel lobby on their way back to their rooms to get ready for the party, they were stopped by a nice looking guy in a suit. He showed them a police badge and asked them nonchalantly whether they had had any problems with their luggage. Mary Lou blurted out that what they were most concerned about were those two Hawaiian guys, who were at the moment trying to hide behind a pillar at the other side of the lobby. Cheryl grabbed Mary Lou by the arm and hustled her onwards along with the remainder of the group. "I'm suspicious: how would that guy know we had luggage problems." "But he's a cop!" responded Mary Lou. "A good cop, or a bad cop?" came the counter-response.
When the girls got back to their room, they saw immediately that the shopping bag was missing, but the gun was still in its place. Just then the guys came to the room to say that their room had been ransacked. Someone out there now knew they had been tricked, and were probably not very happy about it, and were likely to return to make a deal that "couldn't be refused." They sat around for sometime mulling various plans over. Wilbie absentmindedly flipped the pages of Mary Lou's notepad, then noticed something and grew very quiet. "I think we're going to let Dr. Spangler hold the loot - unknowingly." And he whispered his plan.
They had just gotten into their costumes, when a knock on the door revealed the cop. He was just about to push his way into the room when the two Hawaiian shirts came into sight from around a distant corner. The group saw their chance: six boisterous slices of pumpkin pushed out into the hall, down the elevator and out onto the Boardwalk - with two Hawaiian shirts and a star-on-a-suit in pursuit. Just outside the main door, three pieces of pumpkin went one way, and three the other way! They raced around the block to meet up again. Then all huddled together so that the slices fit back together to make a whole pumpkin, and then they split up again, and ran off in different directions, trying to get the person holding the money free from being followed by either the "shirts" or the "suit". After a few more splits, mergings and re-splits, two pumpkin slices followed by two shirts and a star showed up at the costume party, and four pumpkin slices showed up unfollowed to trick-or-treat at Dr. Spangler's door and supposedly to discuss some findings:
- What did the polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis picture demonstrate?
- How will the two escape at the end of the party?
- Where will the body show up?
- Will Jason ever find happiness with Cheryl?
- Will Nirvana Crump keep custody of her daughter Cartier?
- Or will Ronald Crump and Darla Oakes get Cartier?
I want to go to the TOP OF PAGE or ESCAPE! or go back to the Virology Home Page!