Biogenesis

by Tatsuaki Ishiguro

  I ceased all other experiments and focused my concentration on tape recordings from Hokkaido, turning the wheels in my brain as I listened to the recorded voice of Harimoto. An image of the old man, sipping his porridge in the dark corner of his hospital room, floated before my eyes and his final words, “Snapped clean,” rang in my ears. Lost in thought, I stared out the window at the flickering lights of the buildings.

  “The leaves shone brighter than the stems, and the flower brighter still.”

  I stopped the tape. If radiation was causing the midwinter weed to glow by exciting its matter, then the difference in the light emitted might be proof that the uranium was being concentrated via the leaves and flowers of the plant. If the execratory system of the plant’s cells failed to operate properly, it’s possible that the level of heavy metals within the cells would increase, leading to a higher concentration. I had carried back some of the soil from Tomarinai. If the composition of the uranium in the soil and in the midwinter weed matched, then it would be indirect proof of bioaccumulation.

  Carrying the shielded box containing the midwinter weed, as well as the plastic bag full of Tomarinai soil, I immediately went to see Dr. Narumi at his radiation laboratory. I quickly thanked him for his earlier work before eagerly explaining my theory of bioaccumulation to him.

  “It doesn’t sound very realistic, does it?” replied Narumi, calmly. He was shaking one of his test tubes as he spoke. He was right, of course. It sounded almost like a story from some narcotic dream.

  Several days later, Dr. Narumi showed up at my laboratory without warning. He had mapped the plant’s radioactivity. Surprisingly, it was just as I had thought. The radiation was stronger in the leaves and the flowers than it was in the root or the stem. He apologized for scoffing at my ideas earlier.

  “Usually, uranium is composed of two isotopes, with a ratio of 99.3 percent Uranium-238 and 0.7 percent Uranium-235. Uranium-235 is used as an ingredient in nuclear fission. Now, I can’t say why,” he continued excitedly, “but while the composition is normal for the uranium in the soil, the ratio of Uranium-235 in the midwinter weed is significantly higher.”

  When Narumi saw the blank look on my face, he reminded me that nuclear fission occurs when a neutron collides with an atomic nucleus, producing two nuclei and two neutrons and resulting in an exponential elementary chain reaction. But in order to achieve fission, a suitable amount of Uranium-235 had to be enclosed in a limited space.

  “The grass family of flora will sometimes amass a large amount of silicic acid, which accumulates on the cell walls. Once the plant dies, even after organic matter decomposes a portion of the accumulated silicic acid will remain in the soil. A similar phenomenon could be possible with uranium. Even if the DME in the plant prevents local overpopulation, over time the constant cycle of growth and accumulation must have led to a concentrated critical mass.”

  Absorbed from the ground and refined by the midwinter weed, it followed that once the Uranium-235 reached a certain level nuclear fission would occur automatically. If so, not only was Nakarai’s idea of using the plant as fuel, which he invented as an expedient to further his research, correct, but given time the midwinter weed may have resulted in a naturally occurring “nuclear reactor,” or even resulted in a nuclear explosion in Tomarinai.

  All along, it seems that nuclear research had been carried out in the northernmost region of Japan, and not even those involved had known. But for the midwinter weed to grow and proliferate enough to reach critical mass in the first place, a significant amount of blood would have been necessary. Feeding just a few plants had cost Nakarai his life. Even the blood of everyone in Japan may not have been enough to produce a reaction. Narumi stressed the importance of investigating whether any plant life growing in uranium mines had developed similar qualities. I immediately wrote a notice for the Japan Newspaper of Science, describing the situation.

  Despite all the lives sacrificed in building it, the Meiwa train line was soon to be discontinued for being unprofitable. Before that happened I made my way to Tomarinai one last time, distribution map in hand, to search areas where the midwinter weed was likely to grow. Unable to accept the plant’s extinction, I continued to hold on to the idea that at least one midwinter weed continued to grow, somewhere, in hiding.

  Visible through the treetops, a light mist was skimming across the lake. The withered tree, which poked out sharply from the surface, remained as always, dead but refusing to decay. Covered with their own mottling of lichen, each tree looked distinct from the others. Nevertheless, as I wandered from the faint footpath in order to trample through the woods, I soon lost my way. Every inch of the scenery before me filled with a sense of déjà vu, and I realized that the complexity of the forest was made from a repetition of simple patterns. The wind rustling in the leaves sounded like the call of the ocean, and I was overcome by the delusion that I had sunk to the depths of a dark emerald sea. The forest was covered in a canopy of leaves, and the light was soft and mist-laden. Over and over again I thought that I had spotted the elusive midwinter weed, but drawing closer I found only local snow rhododendrons and kobaboshi hostas. The white flowers I thought I had seen had been only an illusion.

  Wondering if some seeds might have gotten attached to Nakarai’s logbook, I did a file search in the American National Archives. While a portion of the documents related to the Imperial Japanese Army had been made public, I found no mention of Nakarai’s logbook. I knew that the majority of reports from Unit 731 remained top-secret and unavailable because of their connection to research into biological weaponry. It was possible, then, that Nakarai’s confiscated journal, and any attached seeds, would be treated in the same manner. Unit 731 escaped all wartime accountability, and that might have some bearing on Nakarai’s existence remaining lost to history for so long. Currently, I am using cloning technology in an attempt to reproduce the midwinter weed from surviving DNA. In theory, reproducing an organism from a single set of DNA should be much simpler for plants than for animals, but after such extended irradiation, damage to the midwinter weed’s DNA is just too severe. I regret to admit that the task is impossible at the current stage.

  The Hope Shore Sea Squirt

  Is it so far out of the realm of possibility to think that an ordinary person, neither doctor nor scientist, might discover a new cure for a dangerous disease? It was over twenty years ago that a certain father asked himself this very question as he watched over his young daughter in the throes of pediatric cancer. That father’s name was Dan Olson, and he was a lawyer who had been leading a peaceful existence in the American countryside.

  It was an inauspicious winter morning when misfortune reared its head in the Olson household. The three members of the Olson family were eating breakfast when Dan’s seven-year-old daughter, Linda, suddenly complained that her back hurt. Her cheeks were puffed out with chocolate corn flakes as she spoke.

  “It hurts here,” she said, tracing a line from her back to her right side with her tiny hand. “It’s like I’m being squeezed.”

  “Did you do something funny?” asked Linda’s mother, Mary. The unusual specificity of the complaint left her feeling worried, and she began to fuss over her daughter.

  “It’s probably just growing pains,” said Dan, without looking up from the documents he was perusing. Dan was in the middle of handling a malpractice lawsuit that was beginning to go south, and the case demanded all of his attention. As if to prove Dan right, Linda was her usual, energetic self as she left for school. She had just entered the first grade. All in all, it was a typical morning.

  But the next morning Linda complained of pain in the same spot. And the morning after that. A squeezing pain. Soon even Dan grew alarmed. He asked Mary to take her to the nearby hospital.

  The hospital was located approximately thirty minutes away by car. There they were seen by a young pediatrician. He pressed gingerly on the area that Linda said hurt, then told Mary that he wanted to do an ultrasound. Only after t
he results of a urine test came back did he give Mary his diagnosis. Neuroblastoma. Mary was unfamiliar with the word. At first she was relieved, thinking that, although it was a tumor, at least it wasn’t cancer. The doctor’s ensuing explanation, however, left her speechless.

  “Think of neuroblastoma as a type of cancer. It can be treated if it’s detected early, but in Linda’s case the tumor has already begun to spread. It may be possible to hospitalize your daughter and treat her with drugs, but the chances aren’t good. I’ll need to know how you want to proceed.”

  Mary felt hollow and feverish as they left the building. Linda ran ahead, skipping and jumping, happy to finally be set free from the hospital. Her mother, still struggling to process the doctor’s news, watched her run. How could a little girl, so full of life, have only a year to live? The tears welled up in Mary’s eyes. Confused, Linda drew her tiny body close as if to comfort her mother.

  When Dan arrived home he was in high spirits. The jury on the case had decided in his favor. The color drained from his face almost instantly when Mary gave him the bad news. Hospital outpatient hours were nearly closed for the day, but Dan drove off in a rush to speak to Linda’s pediatrician. The explanation he received was almost exactly the same as the one the doctor had given Mary only hours before. As proof of his diagnosis, the doctor pointed out the location of the tumor on the CT scan and handed over the urinalysis results. But Dan refused to accept the diagnosis, asking over and over again if it wasn’t some mistake, until finally the young doctor finally lost patience with Dan.

  That night Dan spoke with a fellow lawyer friend who was well versed in medical matters. The friend, in turn, referred him to a Professor Dokić, a leading authority on pediatric oncology at Stanford University. The next day Dan canceled all of his work, traveling by plane to San Francisco and then catching a train to Palo Alto where the university was located. The university’s medical center was situated toward the center of campus. At the time of his appointment he was shown into a consultation booth to wait for Professor Dokić. The professor was a fat man in his late fifties with a ruddy face. Dan briefly introduced himself and then handed over the CT scans and urinalysis results. It only took a short glance for the professor to confirm the results. If there was any mistake, he said, it was that Linda likely only had six months remaining, and not a year.

  “I wouldn’t expect treatment to have much success in a case this advanced,” he said. “In fact, it’s very likely that you would only increase her suffering. I would recommend against any aggressive approach for your daughter. Instead, why not let her enjoy herself during this time? Make her happy. Do some of the things she likes.”

  Even after Professor Dokić confirmed the results, Dan found it difficult to resign himself to the notion that, in a matter of mere months, his baby daughter would be gone.

  “Why didn’t you realize there was something wrong with our daughter sooner?”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Every night, after Linda went to bed, Dan and Mary rehashed the same argument over whether or not to pursue chemotherapy.

  “Even if the chance is small, shouldn’t we take it?”

  “And if it just causes her more suffering?”

  As dawn came, they found themselves no nearer to a decision.

  Dan lost interest in work and began turning to booze, cracking open the bottle as soon as he woke. Mary, meanwhile, developed an overpowering, insomnia-induced neurosis. They had to bring in a home helper to manage the housework and look after Linda.

  One day, Linda asked why she didn’t have to go to school anymore.

  “Mrs. Brady said we have to come to school every day,” she said, looking up into Dan’s face with her bright round pupils. “She says if we don’t we’ll be in trouble when we get older.”

  Linda knew that she was sick, but as far as she understood, it was just an ordinary back pain. The fact that she was being kept home from school every day must have seemed baffling to her.

  “Did you have a teacher when you were young, too, daddy?”

  “I did.”

  “What kind of teacher?” she asked.

  “A very strict one,” said Dan.

  The innocent expression on Linda’s face left no doubt that she believed a tomorrow was still out there, waiting for her. When Dan first began studying law, he had studied under an elderly professor who had been fond of repeating a favorite maxim to his students. Dan recalled it now. You’d be better to not do a thing at all, the professor had said, than to do it and expect defeat. No one has ever learned anything by giving up easy.

  Dan finally stopped drowning his sorrows and began to think in earnest over what he could do to make the situation better. His first problem was that he actually knew very little about Linda’s illness. Before any big case, a lawyer always researched his foes. He went to the local library, where he spread out several medical texts he found in search of sections on his daughter’s disease. There, he discovered a twenty-page passage on neuroblastoma in a book entitled Pediatrics. Unfortunately, he understood almost nothing of its contents. Not only did Dan lack basic medical knowledge, he had barely even studied high school biology. Each new term he encountered was its own perplexing code. For each clinical term, he had to read dozens of pages on pathology, and for the histological terms he encountered in these new texts he had to read yet dozens more on anatomy. It took him three weeks to finally understand what neuroblastoma was, but even then the only knowledge he had acquired was what was written in that one book, and that book was already five years old. In order to obtain updated information he did an article search for “neuroblastoma” on the library’s computers. The results showed 1,520 articles published on neuroblastoma in the last five years alone. Not wanting to waste precious time, he hired a student part-time to copy out the relevant articles, which he then pored through one at a time. He was waiting outside the library an hour before it opened every morning and was the last to depart every night, only leaving when one of the librarians chased him out the door. He was like a man possessed. Even after returning home at night he continued to bury himself in the articles. Twenty hours each day he grappled with the difficult texts, stopping only for brief and fitful periods of sleep. One day stretched into the next, and all the while, his only sight of Linda was of her sleeping face.

  At first, Dan was lucky to get through even one article per day. Before long, however, he was working through ten per day, and soon nearly a hundred. The more Dan learned, however, the harsher the truth became. Medical knowledge, as it stood now, could offer Linda no salvation. To make matters worse, Dan’s newly acquired knowledge had robbed him of the luxury of denial. He also learned that much of the research out there wasn’t geared towards curing patients. Most of the so-called specialists that Dan had been reading struck him as no more than stragglers on the field of a losing battle. Just as chasing after old precedent does not lead to the establishment of new law, it became clear to Dan that innovation would not be found in the medical status quo. But he was under no misapprehensions that as a layman he might somehow stumble upon a breakthrough. Regret gnawed at him. Time was precious and he had been wasting it.

  Wouldn’t it have been better for him if he had spent more time with Linda these past two months? As her father, surely it would have been the right thing to do. After weeks of near-absence, he finally returned home. His daughter lay in a slight daze from the painkillers she was given. Kissing her on the forehead, he asked if there was anywhere she would like to go. She picked up a book that was lying by her pillow and opened its pages to show Dan. The book, entitled Ratta’s Tropical Island, described a place known as “Hope Shore.”

  “Hope Shore?”

  “It’s where the fairies live. People who go to Hope Shore get to make any wish they want. If we went to Hope Shore, I could ask the fairies to make me better.”

  They had not told Linda how serious her illness was. Dan’s eyes misted over. Turning the next page, he found a picture. It w
as of a sprawling blue ocean, with white clouds floating in the distance. It was the kind of place that people always talk of visiting, but never really do.

  The next morning Dan visited a travel agency with the children’s book in hand. He was hoping to find a place that resembled the picture. But the travel agent did a search and, as it turned out, a place called Hope Shore actually did exist. It was on Canda, the smallest of the U.S.-held Mile Islands, and likely received few, if any, tourists. There were certainly no pamphlets. Dan wasn’t sure if it was wise to bring his sick daughter to such a far-flung place, but if that was Linda’s wish, then Dan was going to grant it.

  Mary was attempting to soothe Linda, who had begun to grow restless from the long flight. Four hours had passed since they embarked from their layover in Los Angeles, and the plane was finally touching down at a small island airport surrounded by lush palm trees. From the airport they travelled another thirty minutes by taxi. There they found Hope Shore, waiting for them, just as they had been told. But despite its evocative name there was nothing very exceptional to recommend the place. It was just a dull, rock-strewn coastline, the narrow beach that lay beyond the coastal road barely wide enough for a stroll. The few locals out walking their dogs were the only people they passed by. Yet, Linda was happy just knowing that she was there, at the honest-to-goodness Hope Shore. She spent hours bounding back and forth with the lapping waves and playing with the shore crabs that scampered in and out of gaps among the rocks.

  She was so engrossed in her play that they remained until the evening air began to grow chilly, at which point Dan picked her up and left the beach. Linda usually developed a fever in the evening that lasted into the night, and the pain would grow worse as well. The three entered a restaurant named Il Castello, located a short walk away along the road, but Linda’s strength was beginning to ebb. Other than her juice and licks of ice cream she barely touched the food her parents ordered. Dan scanned the menu, hoping to find something that might whet her appetite. That was when he spotted the oddly high-priced “Hope Shore sea squirt in wine sauce,” a dish that was “subject to availability.”