Double Helix (24 page)

Dr. Wyatt's voice, high and frightened, intertwined with mine: “Kay—” His words were cut off by a noise that was strange to me and yet was unmistakable: the thud of his body smashing into the back wall of the elevator. It was followed immediately by another sound that I'd never have dreamed I'd recognize: the crunch of bone.

I knew she meant to kill him. I shoved the trembling Foo-foo safely aside and scrambled to my feet. Two seconds later I, too, was inside the elevator.

Dr. Wyatt was a small heap in the corner, curled into a fetal position on the floor, one arm positioned as if to protect his head, the other hanging at an unnatural angle. His cane lay abandoned a few inches away from him. He was emitting—not a scream, but a weird keening noise.

Kayla stood above him, heel swinging viciously downward to land a sickening smash that quite audibly shattered his chin. She raised her foot again—

I grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms, and lifted her right off the floor. “That's enough,” I panted. I turned, staggering out of the elevator with her, back into the corridor.

I knew I couldn't hold Kayla long. She was fighting—kicking, bucking—but not speaking, instead focusing all her energy on breaking my hold. I concentrated on controlling her. Then her foot hooked snakelike around behind my knee, pulling me off balance. I couldn't have stayed upright even if I'd thought that was a good idea. We tumbled down to the carpet and rolled, landing pressed up against the wall—and it was only by good fortune that I was the one on top.

I used my full weight, my full strength, to try to hold her down. I pinned her legs with mine, her arms with my hands. I yelled, “You can't kill him, Kayla!”

Her eyes caught mine for a moment, and I swear that there was no rationality behind them. She was now the one fueled by rage and righteousness and despair. I could feel her left wrist twisting free—her knee inching up—

And then all at once she collapsed beneath me like a popped balloon. Distrustful, I stared down into her eyes, finding them suddenly again alert and intelligent. “What was that noise?” she hissed into my face.

“What?” I stilled, listening—and then recognized the whir of the elevator's motor. Without my willing it, my muscles slackened for a second.

Kayla shoved me violently off of her and rolled to her feet, hurtling herself back toward the elevator. I turned my head just in time to see the door close an instant before Kayla got there.

Her hand slapped the Up button. “Open, damn you, open!” she yelled. But the elevator, with Dr. Wyatt in it, did not reopen.

I climbed painfully to my feet and watched, with Kayla, as the numerical indicator above the elevator door gave evidence of Dr. Wyatt's escape. Finally, it stopped on the ground floor, and stayed there, even though Kayla pounded and pounded on the button.

“He's locked the elevator upstairs,” I said.

Kayla gave me one look. “No kidding,” she said. “Your fault.”

“I couldn't let you kill him,” I said. “It would ruin your life. This isn't so bad—hell, I can just use my cell phone to call for help. Call my dad. The police. Whoever. It's over for him, no matter what. It's over, Kayla.” I gestured at the cardboard box that contained the computer hard drives. “We have everything we need to get him, and he knows it.”

“Use your cell phone, then,” said Kayla. Her voice was weary, hopeless.

“Kayla . . .” I stopped. I didn't know what to say.

She was moving away from me now. She walked steadily back down the corridor to where Foo-foo was cowering against the wall. She picked Foo-foo up. She held her.

“Is the rabbit all right?”

“She's scared,” said Kayla. “But she'll be okay.”

“What about you?”

Kayla didn't answer. She kept her back to me, and finally—my cell phone didn't work underground, but the phone in the office did—I called my father.

I KNOCK ON THE WOODEN DOOR of the office.

“Come in!”

I enter as a small, gray-haired woman looks up from her computer. “I'm Eli Samuels,” I say. “Sorry I'm late, Dr. Fukuyama.”

Rosemary Fukuyama nods toward the window as she removes her half-glasses and lets them dangle from a chain around her neck. “The blizzard of the decade's beginning out there, so I'm impressed you came at all. Though it certainly helps on this campus that we have the tunnels.” Then she takes in the fact that my coat and hat are coated with snow. “I guess you didn't use them to get here from your dorm.”

I remove my coat and hang it up, then, at her invitation, sit down on the other side of her crowded but tidy desk. “I don't live on the MIT campus, Dr. Fukuyama. I live with my father over near Central Square.”

“That's a little unusual.” Dr. Fukuyama raises an eyebrow. “Most freshmen want to move away from their families.”

I shrug. “There wasn't dorm space for me, even if I'd wanted to live on campus.” Which I hadn't; I'd wanted to stay with my father this year at least. “I wasn't originally going to be in this class at all,” I tell her. “I applied and was admitted at the last minute, in August, on an exception basis.”

“I know.” Dr. Fukuyama waves a hand toward her computer. “I was just reading your file. I was particularly intrigued by the letter from Larry Donohue. He was a student of mine.”

“Yes,” I say. “He was the one who told me to move heaven and earth to try to get into your seminar this semester. He told me he'd email you about it.”

Her eyes are intent on me now. “I wouldn't have seen you at all otherwise. My bioethics seminar is exclusively for seniors and graduate students, and I can only admit eight students.”

“I want to be one of them,” I say. It's only half the truth. What I most want is to know Dr. Rosemary Fukuyama, whose three books on bioethics my father, Viv, Kayla, and I have all read. And, through her, to meet other scientists like her.

“You worked for Larry last summer at General Transgenics ?” says Dr. Fukuyama. Her voice lingers an extra moment on the new name of the company. “Tell me about that.”

So I tell her about the transgenic rabbits, and the proteins expressed in milk, and my ordinary duties around the lab. But I have the impression that she is only listening on the surface; that she—like most people in biogenetics this past year—can't think of General Transgenics without compulsively wondering about Dr. Wyatt and the incidents of last spring.

Wyatt Transgenics is dead, of course, but General Transgenics lives on without Dr. Wyatt. He disappeared along with Judith Ryan and three high-ranking scientists on the day that Kayla attacked him in the elevator. Things moved rapidly after that. The federal authorities arrived, the board of directors met, and three days later, the company was reorganized, with a businessman who had a stellar background in the pharmaceutical industry appointed as the new CEO.

Of course, rumors spread like fire around the building and the industry. One popular guess about Dr. Wyatt and the others was that they had participated in an illegal experiment involving human cloning. Even more popular was a theory that they'd embezzled company funds. Indeed, in the weeks that followed the reorganization, accountants swarmed the building like insects. But in the end, the cover-up—or whatever it was—was too tight for anyone to be certain about anything. And, perhaps strangely, and certainly unlike many other major business scandals, there were no public charges filed.

I had no inside information, either, although the federal authorities talked to me and Kayla, a little bit, at the start of the investigation. It had begun with us, after all; begun with my father calling the police after I telephoned him from the subbasement. But soon enough, the authorities had nothing more to say to us. “We'll handle this,” we were told by an impassive, skinny bald man in a blue suit. “It's our job, not yours. Go back to your lives.”

So we were left with more unknowns than we could count.

Dr. Fukuyama leans forward. It's become almost standard small talk in the biotech industry to speculate about Dr. Wyatt's whereabouts, so I'm not surprised when she says, “Do you have a theory about where Wyatt is and what he's up to?”

I frame a careful reply. “They told us at General Transgenics that he'd been tracked to Europe before the authorities lost sight of him.” I pause and then add, “I wonder if he might have set up a lab in another country.”

There are many places in this world, my father says, in which a moneyed scientist can do whatever work he wants, without government oversight, without ethical guidelines, and even, in some cases, with government approval. There are countries where Dr. Wyatt and his research will be welcome. It might even be that his research is actually welcome here, in the U.S. . . . covertly.

“And what do you think Wyatt's doing?” asks Dr. Fukuyama.

“Presumably, whatever it was he was doing at Wyatt Transgenics before he ran,” I say.

“Do you subscribe to the theory he's involved in human cloning?”

I shake my head. “No,” I say. “That wouldn't be my guess. His primary interest was always transgenics.”

She nods. “I agree.” Abruptly, she pushes back her chair and turns to stare through the window at the blizzard. I watch her profile. We are quiet for a while, and then she says, “We are standing at a crossroads. At least, I hope we are. I hope we haven't already gone past it while we—as a society, I mean—weren't paying enough attention.” She pauses for a second and then says, “Mr. Samuels, I want to tell you a story.” She turns back to face me.

She pulls up to her desk again. “Many years ago, I was at a national conference on biogenetics. It wasn't purely a scientific conference; it was open to the public. The idea was that - people from all walks of life—intelligent, thoughtful people—would discuss our dreams about what this technology might do for us. There were panel discussions on the eradication of MS, and Parkinson's, and Lou Gehrig's disease, and on and on. We'd identify the genetic flaws, and no one would suffer from them ever again.

“It was tremendously exciting, because there was a feeling that we really would have the potential to eradicate all human suffering from the earth. There was a feeling almost of becoming godlike. It was electrifying, Mr. Samuels.

“I was as exhilarated as anyone. But then, on the last day of the conference, a young man stood up in the audience. We had all been listening to a speech about how prenatal testing was showing promising signs of making it possible to eliminate Down syndrome. And . . .” Dr. Fukuyama leans across the desk, her eyes intent on mine. “Mr. Samuels, the young man who stood up in the audience to talk had Down syndrome himself. He was the head of a self-advocacy group of adults with Down syndrome.”

I nod.

“We were all a little taken aback,” says Dr. Fukuyama. “But this young man stood up, Mr. Samuels, and he said the following. I have never forgotten it.

“ ‘I don't understand. We don't make any trouble. We don't steal things or kill people. We don't take the good jobs. Why do you want to kill us?' ”

For a few seconds I cannot breathe. I stare at Dr. Fukuyama. She stares back at me. Then she smiles, a little sadly. “That moment changed everything for me. My excitement disappeared. I got a glimpse of the world we really might create, with our high-flying ideas about the eradication of suffering. A world in which so many people are found lacking. Are considered unfit even to be born.”

My mother, I think. Kayla.

“There's a difference,” Dr. Fukuyama says softly. “That is my point, Mr. Samuels. There's a difference between using gene therapy for the treatment of existing medical conditions, and using our growing, but far from perfect, knowledge of genes—or of humanity—to declare that we absolutely know who has—and who hasn't—a right to life at all.”

How a couple chooses to go about having a baby—or indeed, in the future, the genetic makeup of that baby—should be entirely their own business and their own choice
.

I lean closer to Dr. Fukuyama. “I don't trust us,” I say. My voice cracks. “I don't trust us to be able to decide. Even with the best of intentions—we might think we're eradicating suffering, but are we? We're only human—we don't know what'll happen even tomorrow. How can we make decisions that will affect all our descendants forever? How can we possibly know what's best?” I am clenching my hands in my lap.

Dr. Fukuyama and I look at each other for a moment in silence. Then she says, “I think you should take my seminar, Mr. Samuels. Come to the first class, next Monday at three o'clock.”

I nod. I loosen my fists and breathe. “Thank you,” I say. I collect my coat and prepare to go. But then, at the door, I turn back. “Dr. Fukuyama?” Suddenly my voice is okay again.

“Yes?”

“This stuff you're talking about—it shouldn't be discussed only in small groups of graduate students. Exclusivity amounts to secrecy, and I think it's a mistake. It should be discussed everywhere. With everyone. Especially with kids. We ought to try harder to make that happen.
You
ought to.”

Dr. Fukuyama's eyes flicker in surprise. I leave.

Outside, the weather is worsening, the wind picking up, the snow falling thick and wet. I trudge back through the storm - toward our apartment. I wonder if the weather will keep Viv from coming over for dinner tonight. I wonder what Kayla is doing right now. I think about Dr. Fukuyama's story about the conference and the young man with Down syndrome.

And I wonder what Dr. Fukuyama would think if she could read Dr. Wyatt's research notes about Kayla.