Tom Hyman (2 page)

He forced his tired muscles into motion and stepped outside the laboratory for some *esh air. The moon was just rising. It cast a broad path of silver light across the Caribbean waters below. A tropical breeze was blowing in from the west. He inhaled deeply.

The island was in many ways a beautiful place, blessed with an idyllic climate and topography. Yet Goth did not love it here. He loathed the corruption and incompetence of the local government.

He detested the laziness and insolence of the native population.

He despaired of their poverty and their ignorance. But most of all, he hated the isolation. He was far from everything that was important to him. He was here not by choice but by a perverse twist of fate. He dreamed of the day he would leave the island forever and resume his place among the great scientists of the age.

When forty-five minutes had passed, the doctor returned to the lab and removed the test tube from the incubator. The membrane walls of the billion cells that had turned the mixture cloudy were now dissolved.

The liquid was clear again. It was also viscous-about the consistency of egg white—and sticky to the touch.

Goth poured in a small amount of ethanol and rocked the test tube gently back and forth in his hand to mix it with the liquid.

The transparent solution began turning gray.

He returned the tube to the centrifuge and let it spin for another half hour. When he removed it the second time, the changes were dramatic.

The ethanol, heavier than the liquid, had settled to the bottom. On its way down it had killed all the protein in the cells and caused it to precipitate out of the mixture. The protein now formed a white, coagulated band just above the ethanol.

Using a pipette with a bent tip, Goth painstakingly removed, one drop at a time, the clear, sticky liquid remaining at the top of the test tube and deposited it in a separate tube. He then poured a small amount of pure alcohol into the tube with it. The alcohol floated on top of the liquid. He plunged a thin glass rod through the alcohol and into the mixture and then slowly withdrew it. As the rod broke the surface, it carried with it, suspended from its tip, a long, glistening, gossamer filament.

Goth pushed his glasses up on his forehead and brought the rod up closer to his eyes. In the lab’s flickering fluorescent light the filament glittered wetly, like a thread of translucent fiber. He held his breath, lest his exhaled air disturb it.

The minute filament was composed of hundreds of thousands of individual strands, each vanishingly thin—a few ten-billionths of a millimeter in diameter—and visible by themselves only under the powerful magnification of an electron microscope.

They were fragments of cloned human DNA.

The visible presence of the miracle substance could still, after all these years of intimacy, make the doctor tremble with pleasure.

DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid. Entwined in the form of a double helix within the nucleus of the human cell, it carried the genetic code of life, the instructions that defined the form and behavior of every living plant and creature on earth, from the single-celled protoplasm to Homo sapiens.

Dr. Goth had dedicated his career to the study of this code. He was closer than anyone had yet come to a complete understanding of the immensely complex series of functions and interrelationships that DNA had scripted for the many thousands of genes that determined the genetic destiny of every human being.

Goth could now alter the script for many of those genes, and by so doing, rewrite the basic instructions that governed human life itself.

Such an extraordinarily wide-ranging capability, not thought to be within the reach of microbiologists for decades, had elevated Goth to a unique and lonely position.

He was experimenting in the forbidden zone of the biological sciences: the so-called germ line—the DNA of the human reproductive system.

His quest had been prolonged and difficult. The controversial nature of his work had made it impossible to continue to finance his research through the normal channels of government and academic grants. Indeed, most countries had passed explicit laws banning any kind of tampering with the human germ line; and even in those countries where it was not strictly illegal, it was widely regarded as unethical and dangerous.

No major biologic or medical scientific research facility in the world—commercial, governmental, or academic—dared involve itself with the germ line.

In order to keep his project alive, Goth had exhausted his own personal wealth and resorted to increasingly desperate measures of austerity.

His original staff of six assistants was now reduced to one, and needed supplies and equipment had to be done without. Harassment and spying by government authorities had forced him twice to move his clinic to a different country, costing him precious additional amounts of time and capital.

Despite everything, he had persevered. And he knew the goal he had struggled toward for so long was now, at last, tantalizingly near.

With the eavesdropping devices in place, Joseph Cooper moved quickly from the lab across the dark, weedchoked campus to a small brick outbuilding. The windows were boarded up with thick planks and reinforced with steel bars. The building’s one door was triple-locked.

He took out a penlight from his pocket and shined it on the locks.

There were two pin tumblers and one Medeco high-security—well within his range of expertise.

From his back pocket Cooper extracted a small leather pouch.

It contained a set of eleven basic lock picks that he had fashioned himself from strips of flat, cold-rolled steel, one-fiftieth of an inch thick, and three varieties of tension tools made from thin strips of spring steel.

He attacked the top pin tumbler first. He inserted a tension tool into the keyhole and slid it along the bottom of the keyway as far as it would go. Next he selected a pick with a serrated top and bottom, called a rake, and slipped it into the keyway above the tension tool.

He applied a slight clockwise turning pressure to the tension tool and then, grasping the rake, yanked it back out of the keyhole with a quick, controlled motion, to bounce the tumbler pins back up past the plug’s sheer point. The tension tool twisted the cylinder to the right, free of the pins that had held it in place, and the latchbolt slid back out of the strike box and inside the lock housing.

The second pin tumbler took longer. It appeared to be a newer lock, and the tumbler pins wouldn’t “bounce.” Using a narrow pick with a bent end, and keeping a slight but steady clockwise pressure with the tension tool, he patiently felt out and lifted each pin past the sheer line. When he had raised the last, the plug turned and unlocked.

Predictably, the Medeco gave him the most trouble. He had not had a lot of practice with this type, and its design required that he employ two picks simultaneously at different angles on each pin to raise it.

Holding the penlight in his mouth and steadying his hands against the door with his little fingers, he struggled for ten minutes before the lock finally yielded to his finesse.

Cooper opened the door cautiously and played the light around. Inside was a long, windowless storeroom. Shelves of large glass jars lined both walls. The air was heavy with the stale odor of formaldehyde.

Cooper walked slowly along between the rows, flicking his narrow beam of light back and forth. The jars glowed a ghostly, transparent amber.

Each one contained the remains of a human baby. Some were fetuses—physically grotesque ones, with missing body parts, gross skeletal abnormalities, enlarged or distorted features, excess numbers of limbs, and other defects not apparent to Cooper’s untrained eye.

But many of the jars held what appeared to be newborn infants. Some were white; most were black. They were intact and looked relatively normal. Stillborn, he guessed.

Each jar was labeled with cryptic information that he couldn’t decipher. Only the dates were apparent to him. The contents of some jars were ten years old. The newest was dated from eighteen months earlier.

For the next hour Goth busied himself preparing the strands of DNA for sequencing. He removed tiny amounts of the DNA-rich liquid from the test tube with a micropipette and mixed them in several small glass vessels with a series of biochemicals called dideoxy compounds. He then placed the vessels into a series of wells at the top of a sequencing apparatus, a clear plastic slab containing a thin gel sandwiched between sheets of glass.

When he was satisfied that everything was in order, he turned on the sequencer’s heating element to start the separation, a process that would take all night to complete. In the morning the gel, with its newly acquired coating of the DNA-rich broth from the vessels, would be hardened into a plasticlike sheet. Goth would remove the sheet, treat it with special chemicals to fix it, and then expose it to X-ray film.

The film would make visible about four hundred base pairs along a segment of the DNA, whose sequence he could then read. He would need to repeat this process sixty times to get a readout of the entire strand of DNA that concerned him. It was an outdated, timeconsuming, and laborious method, but in his reduced circumstances he had no other way to do it.

He checked the thermostat that regulated the temperature of the sequencer to make certain that it was operating properly. A faulty mercury switch in an earlier one had ruined several gels and cost him a week’s work.

Goth cleaned up the work area, picked up a folder containing the day’s notes, and extracted the RCD—the removable cartridge disk—from the computer. He locked the folder and the hard disk in a cheap vinyl attache case, turned off the computer and the lights, and left the lab, carrying the case with him. There was nothing more he could do until the morning.

He knew he was very close now. These results would have to be tested and retested, confirmed and reconfirmed, before he could lay all lingering uncertainties to rest. But he was close.

He locked the lab door and retreated down the narrow corridor to the small pair of rooms in the back of the building that he had converted into living quarters.

He removed a small cotton blanket from an ancient floor safe that sat in one corner of his bedroom, opened the safe, and slid the attache case in alongside stacks of his research notes and a backup copy of the RCD. He closed the door and spun the dial to lock it again.

He had been thinking a lot about his future these past few weeks.

Fifteen years ago, he had stood on a stage in Stockholm in a rented tie and tails and received the Nobel Prize in biology.

He was only forty-five—one of the youngest scientists ever to have received the prize. How his spirits had soared that day-how invincible he had felt.

Would he ever again be so rewarded for his achievements? He knew it was unlikely, at least in his own lifetime. And yet the research for which he had won that Nobel Prize paled in significance next to his present work.

It was only months after receiving the prize that he began his work on the germ line. No one had supported his effort. On the contrary, everyone had condemned it. His colleagues had warned him that it would be professional suicide. His friends had deserted him, and so had his wife of twelve years, herself a prominent geneticist.

But Goth was not dissuaded. His motivations were complicated, but one reason dominated all others: the simple glory of the quest. He saw a unique chance to make an extraordinary contribution to science and to the future of the human race.

Someday, he thought, his accomplishments would set him apart as a man of the ages, as a name to be spoken in the same breath as Mendel or Pasteur, or even Einstein.

He stepped to the window and pulled back the edge of the shade. The medical school’s deserted buildings looked like a ghost town in the moonlight. Behind them loomed the crumbled towers of the old Spanish fortress.

Goth folded back the sheet of the narrow cot that had been his bed for the last five years and slipped under it. He looked at the two novels on the small steamer trunk he used as a night table.

Both were Sherlock Holmes pastiches. He had read them once and found them thin; nothing, unfortunately, compared with the master. But he had read Arthur Conan Doyle through so many times over the past decades that he knew all the Holmes stories by heart. It was a shame there were no more. They had been his only escape from reality.

He took in a deep breath and let it out in a long, ragged exhalation of exhaustion and despair. There were stark realities to be faced. He needed money desperately. He was half a million dollars in debt. He had long ago liquidated all his possessions.

And no one he knew of—no individual, no institution—was willing to extend him any more credit. If he did not get some financing soon, he would have to close the lab and abandon his work.

Eventually, somebody somewhere else would make the same discoveries he had made and reap his rewards—and his immortality.

His effort would be wasted.

And his dream would die.

Goth removed his glasses, folded them carefully, and placed them beside the books on the steamer trunk. He turned out the light and lay back against the pillow, his eyes wide, his brain far from sleep.

There was only one possible way he could think of to get the money he needed. The thought of it made him shudder with disgust. But he really had no choice. He would have to do it.

Cooper pulled a small point-and-shoot camera from his pants pocket, checked the film, adjusted the flash, and began firing away. He moved quickly along the rows of jars, crouching and shooting, until he had photographed everything in the storeroom.

The 35 mm lens took in a wide field, but the camera was loaded with a special high-density black-and-white film whose negative could be enlarged tenfold with no loss of definition.

Cooper would normally use several rolls of film and photograph everything two or three times, just to cover himself against any possible failure. But a nameless menace seemed to lurk in the thick, foul air. After only one roll Cooper began to tremble and sweat.