Frameshift

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Do you have a low sperm count? There are procedures—”

  “I have no idea what my sperm count is. I assume it’s normal.”

  “Then why? You have an adequate mind. Why not father a child?”

  Pierre swallowed. “I, ah, carry some bad genes.”

  Klimus nodded. “Voluntary eugenics. I approve.” He paused. “But, you know, once the embryo is eight cells in size, we can usually remove a single cell for PCR and then genetic testing, so—”

  Pierre saw no reason to debate it with the old man. “We’re going to use donated sperm,” he said firmly.

  Klimus shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

  “But we’re looking for recommendations for a clinic. You visited a number of them while doing that article. Is there one you’d suggest?”

  “There are several good ones here in the Bay Area,” said Klimus.

  “Which would be the cheapest?” said Pierre. Klimus looked at him blankly. “We, ah, understand the procedure costs around ten thousand dollars.”

  “Per attempt,” said Klimus. “And IVF has only a twenty percent success rate. The average cost of actually getting a baby through this method is forty thousand dollars.”

  Pierre’s jaw dropped. Forty thousand? It was a huge amount of money, and their mortgage was a killer. He doubted they could manage that much.

  But Molly pressed on. “Do the clinics choose the sperm donors?”

  “Occasionally,” said Klimus. “More often, the woman chooses from a catalog listing the potential fathers’ physical, mental, and ethnic characteristics. And—” He stopped in mid-sentence, completely dead, as though his mind were a million miles away.

  Pierre finally leaned a bit closer. “Yes?” he said.

  “What about me?” asked Klimus.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Pierre.

  “Me. As donor.”

  Molly’s jaw dropped a little. Klimus saw that and held up a hand, palm out. “We could do it here at LBL. I can do the fertilization work, and Gwendolyn Bacon—an IVF practitioner who owes me a favor—I’m sure I could get her to do the egg extraction and embryo implantation.”

  “I don’t know,” said Pierre.

  Klimus looked at him. “I propose a deal: use me as the donor, and I’ll pay the costs for the procedure, no matter how many attempts it takes. I’ve invested my Nobel money well, and have some lucrative consulting contracts.”

  “But…” began Molly. She trailed off, not knowing what to say. She wished there wasn’t the wide desk between them so she could read his mind, but all she could detect was a barrage of French from Pierre.

  “I am old, I know,” said Klimus, without humor. “But that makes little difference to my sperm. I’m fully capable of serving as the biological father—and I’ll provide full documentation to show myself free of HIV.”

  Pierre gulped air. “Won’t it be awkward, knowing the donor?”

  “Oh, it’ll be our secret,” said Klimus, raising his hand again. “You want good DNA, no? I’m a Nobel Prize winner; I have an IQ of one-six-three. I’m a proven commodity as far as longevity is concerned, and I have excellent eyesight and reflexes. Plus, I don’t carry genes for Alzheimer’s or diabetes or any other serious disorder.” He smiled slightly. “The worst thing programmed into my DNA is baldness, and I do confess I was hit with that at an early age.”

  During Klimus’s long statement, Molly had started out by shaking her head slightly back and forth, back and forth, but that had stopped by the time he reached his conclusion. She looked now at Pierre, as if to gauge his reaction.

  Klimus, too, turned his eyes on Pierre. “Come on, young man,” he said, and then his face split in a dry, cold grin. “Better the devil you know.”

  “But why?” asked Pierre. “Why would you be interested?”

  “I’m eighty-four,” said Klimus, “and have no children. I simply wish for the Klimus genes to not disappear from the gene pool.” He looked at each of them in turn. “You’re a young couple, just getting started. I know what you make, Tardivel, and can guess what you make, Molly. Tens of thousands of dollars is a lot of money to you.”

  Pierre looked at Molly and shrugged. “I…I suppose it would be okay,” he said slowly, not at all sure of himself.

  Klimus brought his hands together in a loud clap that sounded like a gunshot. “Wonderful!” he said. “Molly, we’ll make an appointment for you with Dr. Bacon; she’ll prescribe hormone treatments to get you to develop multiple eggs.” Klimus rose to his feet, cutting off further discussion. “Congratulations, Mother,” he said to Molly, and then, in an unexpected display of bonhomie, he came over and laid a bony arm on Pierre’s shoulder. “And congratulations to you, too, Father.”

  “Big trouble,” said Shari, coming into Pierre’s lab and holding up a photocopy. “I found this note in a back issue of Physical Review Letters.” She looked upset.

  Pierre was spinning down his centrifuge. He left it whirling under inertia and looked up at her. “What’s it say?”

  “Some researchers in Boston are contending that although the DNA that codes for protein synthesis is structured like a code—one word wrong and the message is garbled—the junk or intronic DNA is structured like a language, with enough redundancy that small mistakes don’t matter.”

  “Like a language?” said Pierre excitedly. “What do they mean?”

  “In the active parts of the DNA, they found that the distribution of the various three-letter codons is random. But in the junk DNA, if you look at the distribution of ‘words’ of three, four, five, six, seven, and eight base pairs in length, you find that it’s just like what we have in a human language. If the most common word appears ten thousand times, then the tenth most common appears only one thousand times, and the hundredth most common appears just a hundred times—which is very much like the relative distribution of words in English. ‘The’ is an order of magnitude more common than ‘his,’ and ‘his’ is an order of magnitude more common than, say, ‘go.’ Statistically, it’s a very distinctive pattern, diagnostic of a real language.”

  “Excellent!” said Pierre. “Excellent.”

  Vertical frown lines were marring Shari’s otherwise porcelain-smooth forehead. “It’s terrible. It means other people have been making good progress on this problem, too. That note in Physical Review Letters was published in the December fifth, 1994, issue.”

  Pierre shrugged. “Remember Watson and Crick, hunting for the structure of DNA? You recall who else was working on the same problem?”

  “Linus Pauling, among others.”

  “Pauling, exactly—who’d already won a Nobel for his work on chemical bonding.” He looked at Shari. “But even old Linus couldn’t see the truth; he came up with a Rube Goldberg three-stranded model.” Pierre had learned all about Goldberg since coming to Berkeley; he was a UCB alumnus and an exhibition of his cartoons was on display on campus. “Sure, some others have been working in the same area we’re pursuing. But I’d rather you come in here and tell me that there’s good reason to think something meaningful is coded in the non-protein-synthesizing DNA than to say everyone who ever looked at it before has concluded it really is just junk. I know we’re on the right track, Shari. I know it.” He paused. “You’ve done good work. Go home; get a good night’s sleep.”

  “You should go home, too,” Shari said.

  Pierre smiled. “Actually, tonight the tables are turned. I’m waiting for Molly. She’s got a late departmental meeting. I’ll stay here till she calls.”

  “All right. See you tomorrow.”

  “Good night, Shari. And be careful—it’s pretty late already.”

  Shari left the room and started walking down the corridor. She went outside and waited for the shuttle bus to arrive. It did so, and she rode it down to the campus proper. She wanted to run a few errands on campus before heading home, one of which took her near the psychology building, where Pierre’s wife was apparently still working. Just outside it, Shari was unnerved
to collide with a rough-looking young man pacing impatiently back and forth as if he were waiting for someone. He was dressed in a leather jacket and faded jeans, and had closely cropped blond hair and a strange chin that looked like two protruding fists.

  Nasty customer, Shari thought as she scurried away into the darkness…

  B o o k T w o

  The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

  —SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize in literature

  C h a p t e r

  18

  Nighttime. Two police officers, one black, one white. A blood-splattered sidewalk. A man named Chuck Hanratty dead, his body taken away by ambulance. Pierre chilled in the nighttime breeze, his shirt lying in a stiffening wad, soaked with blood.

  “Look, it’s after midnight,” said the black cop to Molly, “and, frankly, your friend seems a bit out of it. Why don’t you let Officer Granatstein and me give you a lift? You can come by headquarters tomorrow to make a report.” He handed his card to her.

  “Why,” said Pierre, slowly coming out of shock, “would a neo-Nazi want to attack me?”

  The cop lifted his broad shoulders. “No big mystery. He was after your wallet and her purse.”

  But Molly had read the man’s mind, and knew that this wasn’t a simple mugging—it was a deliberate, premeditated attempt on Pierre’s life. She gently grasped her husband’s hand and took him over to the police car.

  Pierre and Molly lay in bed, Molly holding him tightly.

  “Why,” said Pierre again, “would a neo-Nazi be after me?” He was still badly shaken. “Hell, why would anyone go to the trouble of trying to kill me? After all…” His voice trailed off, but Molly could read the already formulated English sentence: After all, I’ll probably be dead soon anyway.

  Molly shook her head as much as her pillow would allow. “I don’t know why,” she said softly. “But he was after you. You in particular.”

  “You’re sure?” asked Pierre, his voice betraying the faint hope that Molly was mistaken.

  “As we passed him, Hanratty was thinking, About fucking time that frog showed up.”

  Pierre stiffened slightly. “You can’t tell the cops that,” he said.

  “Of course not.” She forced a small laugh. “They wouldn’t believe me anyway.” She paused. “But he’d been ordered to kill you, ordered by someone named Grozny—and he’d apparently already killed several other people for this Grozny, too.”

  Pierre was still trying to digest it all. A man had died right in front of him. Yes, it had been self-defense, but one could nonetheless say that Pierre had indeed killed him. Pierre had come across the continent to the home of the free-love, antiwar movement, and he’d ended up with a human being’s blood spilling out onto his hands.

  A knife slicing into the man’s body; Molly on his back, Pierre tripping him.

  If only Hanratty had dropped the knife. If only…

  Dead.

  Dead.

  He couldn’t shake the horror, couldn’t escape the pain.

  Pierre would take the next day off work—something he had never done before except for his honeymoon.

  “Maybe you should get some counseling,” Molly said. “Ingrid did a study of Desert Storm vets. She could recommend someone who handles posttraumatic stress.”

  Pierre shook his head. They’d also tried to get him into counseling when he’d first discovered that he was at risk for Huntington’s. But counseling seemed a never-ending proposition. He didn’t have time for that.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said, but the words sounded flat.

  Molly nodded and continued to hold him tight.

  Avi Meyer sat hunched over his metal government-issue desk at OSI headquarters in Washington. His window, the vertical blinds angled to block most of the sun, looked out over the gridlock of K Street. It was noon and already his chin felt rough as he supported it with his left hand.

  Susan Tuttle, his assistant, came in. “Pasternak just faxed over a report—you might be interested.”

  “What is it?”

  “A neo-Nazi from San Francisco named Chuck Hanratty was killed two days ago.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Hanratty? Twenty-four—”

  Avi waved an arm dismissively. “Not old enough to be a war criminal. Except that it means there’s one less asshole in the world, why’d Pasternak think I’d care?”

  “Hanratty was killed in a fight while trying to mug a French Canadian named Pierre Tardivel.”

  Avi scowled. “Yes?”

  “And this Tardivel worked at Lawrence Berkeley in the Human Genome Center there, so his boss is—”

  Avi’s shaggy eyebrows lifted. “Burian Klimus.”

  “Exactly.”

  Avi stabbed the intercom button on his desk. “Pam?”

  A woman’s voice. “Yes?”

  “I need to get a flight to California…”

  When Pierre had gone to Berkeley police headquarters to file his report, he’d asked the black man—Officer Munroe, his name turned out to be—for more information about Chuck Hanratty. Munroe really didn’t have much to add. Hanratty had lived, and was most frequently arrested, in San Francisco. After mulling it over for a day, Pierre decided to drive across the Oakland Bay Bridge and try his luck at SFPD headquarters.

  It was raining. The bridge turned into the 101, and headquarters was just south of that at 850 Bryant, between Sixth and Seventh Streets. Pierre furled up his umbrella, entered the building, and made his way down the short corridor that led to the desk sergeant, a burly white man with curly black hair atop a loaf-shaped head. He had a computer screen mounted at an angle beneath his desk, visible through a glass window on the desktop. He was reading something on it, but looked up when Pierre cleared his throat. “Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”

  Pierre wasn’t sure where to begin. “I was mugged a few nights ago.”

  “Oh, yeah? You want to fill out a report?”

  “No, no. I’ve already done that, over in Berkeley. I was just looking for more information. The guy who mugged me lived here, and, well, he died during the attempt. Fell on his own knife.”

  “What’d you say your name was?”

  “Tardivel. T-A-R-D-I-V-E-L.”

  The sergeant typed on his keyboard. “Can I see some ID?”

  Pierre opened his wallet and found his Quebec driver’s license. The sergeant looked at it, nodded, and turned back to his monitor. “Well, sir, I don’t know what kind of info you’re looking for. If he died in the attempt, it’s not like we’re still looking for suspects in the mugging.”

  “I understand that,” said Pierre, nodding. “I was just interested in other cases this same guy was involved in.”

  The sergeant eyed Pierre suspiciously. “Why?”

  Pierre figured the truth was the simplest approach. “The officers over in Berkeley said Hanratty had been a member of a neo-Nazi group. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what such a person would have against me.”

  “You Jewish?”

  Pierre shook his head.

  “But you are a foreigner. The skinheads aren’t keen on immigrants.”

  “I suppose, but…well, I was wondering if I could see the file on him.”

  The cop looked at Pierre for a time. “Hardly,” he said at last.

  “But—”

  “We’re not running a library here. Your case is closed. If your insurance company needs some paperwork to substantiate a claim, they can contact us or the Berkeley PD through normal channels. But otherwise, forget it.”

  Pierre thought briefly about trying to push the point but realized it was hopeless. He laid a sarcastic ‘Merci beaucoup’ on the man and headed back to the lobby. It was still raining, so he stopped just inside the front doors to get his umbrella ready. As he was doing so, his eyes happened to glance over the building directory, made of little white plastic letters slid into a black board with slots in it, cov
ered by glass.

  Forensics, 314.

  Pierre’s eyebrows went up. He looked back. The sergeant had his head tilted down, reading. Pierre turned around, walked past him, and entered the elevator.

  He got off on the third floor and found room 314. There was a sign on the door that said Forensics. Beneath it were two names in smaller letters: H. Kawabata and J. Howells. He pushed the door open and stuck his head in. “Hello?”

  A tall, fortyish Asian woman appeared from behind a room divider. She had frosted blond hair cut in a pageboy style, three rings on her right hand, a chain-link bracelet on her right wrist, a matching choker, and two small studs in her left ear. She wore a white lab coat, unbuttoned, over a pink pantsuit. Her lipstick matched the suit. “Can I help you?” she said in a rapid-fire voice.

  Pierre didn’t like to make assumptions, but this one seemed a safe bet. “Ms. Kawabata?” he said.

  “That’s me.”

  Pierre smiled and entered the room. “Forgive me. I was in the building on other business and I couldn’t resist stopping by. I know I should have made an appointment, but—”

  The Asian woman’s voice hardened slightly. “All purchasing is done through the office on the fourth floor.”

  Pierre shook his head. Maybe he needed to acquire better taste in sports jackets. “I’m not a salesman,” he said. “I’m a geneticist. I’m with the Human Genome Center at Lawrence Berkeley.”

  She touched a hand to her lips. “Oh, I’m sorry! Come in, come in, Mr…?”

  “Tardivel. Dr. Pierre Tardivel.”

  “I’m Helen,” said the woman, extending her hand. “I did my graduate work at UCB. Say, I hear you got that Nobel winner running things now, what’s his name…”

  “Burian Klimus,” said Pierre.

  Helen nodded. “The Klimus Technique, right—wonderful method; we’re starting to use it here. How is he to work for?”

  Pierre decided to be honest. “He’s a bear. Fortunately, he’s spending a lot of time at the Institute of Human Origins these days; he’s gotten interested in Neanderthal DNA.”