Frameshift

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. And then there’s what happened to you. The attack on you was the first direct connection between the Nazi movement and the genetics work going on at Lawrence Berkeley.”

  “But Chuck Hanratty was a neo-Nazi.”

  “Sure. But a lot of neo-Nazi groups were started by real World War II Nazis. Do you know the name of the leader of the Millennial Reich?”

  “No.”

  “In documents the SFPD has captured, he’s referred to by the code name Grozny.”

  Pierre’s stomach fluttered. He’d been ordered to kill you, Molly had said, having read Chuck Hanratty’s mind as he died, by someone named Grozny.

  “Grozny,” repeated Pierre. “What does that mean?”

  “Ivan Grozny is Russian for Ivan the Terrible. It’s what the people at Treblinka called Ivan Marchenko.”

  Pierre’s head was swimming. “But this is crazy. What could Klimus have against me?” The waitress appeared and deposited Pierre’s Sprite.

  “That’s a very good question.”

  “And what about Joan Dawson? What could Klimus have against her?”

  Avi shook his head. “I have no idea. But if I were you, I’d watch my back.”

  Pierre frowned and looked out at the roiling waters of the Bay. “You’re the second person to say that to me recently.” He took a sip of his drink.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “There’s nothing we can do, until some proof materializes. These cases don’t break overnight, after all; if Klimus is Marchenko, he’s eluded detection for fifty years now. But keep your eyes and ears open, and report anything you find to me.”

  C h a p t e r

  25

  Seven months later

  “Thanks for letting me come,” said Pierre, keeping his hand steady by holding firmly on to the edge of a desk. Although he still felt as though he didn’t really belong here, Pierre could no longer deny the truth: he was clearly manifesting symptoms of Huntington’s disease. The support-group meeting was held in a high-school classroom in San Francisco’s Richmond district, halfway between the Presidio and Golden Gate Park.

  Carl Berringer’s head jerked back and forth, and it was a few moments before he was able to reply. But when he did, his words were full of warmth. “We’re glad to have you. What’d you think of the speaker?” Berringer was a white-haired man of about forty-five with pale skin and blue eyes. The guest speaker had spoken on coping with the juvenile form of Huntington’s.

  “She was fine,” said Pierre, who had tuned out the talk and simply spent the meeting surreptitiously watching the others, most of whom were in much later stages of the disease. After all, besides his father, Henry Spade, Pierre had never really seen anyone else with advanced Huntington’s up close. He watched their pain, their suffering, the contorted faces, the inability to speak clearly, the torture of something as simple as trying to swallow, and the thought came to him that perhaps some of them would be better off dead. It was a horrible thing to think, he knew, but…

  …but there, because there is no grace of God, go I. Pierre’s condition was getting steadily worse; he’d broken dozens of pieces of labware and drinking glasses by now. Still, only those who knew him well suspected anything serious was amiss. Just a tendency toward dancing hands, occasional facial tics, a slight slurring of speech…

  “You work at LBL, don’t you?” asked Carl, his head still moving constantly.

  Pierre nodded. “Actually, it’s LBNL now. They added the word ‘National’ to the lab’s name almost a year ago.”

  “Well, we had a guy from your lab give a talk a couple of years ago. Big old bald guy. Can’t remember his name, but he won a Nobel Prize.”

  Pierre’s eyebrows went up. “Not Burian Klimus?”

  “That’s the guy. Boy, were we lucky to get him. All we can offer speakers is a Huntington’s Society coffee mug. But he had just been appointed to Lawrence Berkeley, and the university was sending him out to speaking engagements.” Carl’s hands had started moving, as if he were doing finger-flexing exercises. Pierre tried not to stare at him. “Anyway,” said Carl, “I’m glad you came. Hope you’ll become a regular. We can all use some support.”

  Pierre nodded. He wasn’t sure he was any happier now that he’d finally relented and come here. It seemed an unnecessarily graphic reminder of what his future held. He looked around the room. Molly, hugely pregnant, was off in one corner sipping mineral water with a middle-aged white woman, apparently a caregiver. She was doubtless hearing what was in store for her.

  The really bad cases weren’t even here; they would be bedridden at home or in a hospital. He looked around, counted eighteen people: seven obvious Huntington’s patients, seven more who were clearly their caregivers, and four whose status wasn’t easy to determine. They could have been recently diagnosed as having the Huntington’s gene, or they could have been caregivers for patients too ill to attend the meeting themselves. “Is this the normal turnout?” asked Pierre.

  Berringer’s head was still jerking, and his right arm had started moving back and forth a bit, the way one’s arm does when walking. “These days, yes. We’ve lost five members in the last year.”

  Pierre looked at the tiled floor. Huntington’s was terminal; that was the one unshakable reality. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “We’d expected some of them. Sally Banas, for instance. In fact, she’d held on longer than any of us had thought she would.” Berringer’s head movements were distracting; Pierre fought the irritation growing within him. “Another one was a suicide. Young man, only been to a couple of meetings. Recently diagnosed.” Berringer shook his head. “You know how it is.”

  Pierre nodded. Only too well.

  “But the other three…” Berringer had reached his left arm over to help steady his right. “World’s a crazy place, Pierre. Maybe it’s not so bad up in Canada, but down here…”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, they were all pretty new members—only recently manifesting the disease. They should have had years left. One of them—Peter Mansbridge—was shot. Two others were knifed to death, six months apart. Muggings, it seems.”

  “God,” said Pierre. What had he done, coming to the States? He’d been assaulted, Joan Dawson had been murdered, and every time he turned around he heard about more violent crime.

  Berringer tried to shake his head, but the gesture was obscured by the jerking motion. “I don’t ask for pity,” he said slowly, “but you’d think anyone who saw one of us moving the way we do would leave us in peace, instead of killing us for the few bucks we might have in our wallets.”

  C h a p t e r

  26

  At last, the long-awaited day came. Pierre drove Molly to Alta Bates Hospital on Colby Street. In the Toyota’s trunk, as there had been for the last two weeks, were Molly’s suitcase and a video camcorder—an unexpected gift from Burian Klimus, who had insisted to Pierre and Molly that videotaping the birth was all the rage now.

  Alta Bates had beautiful delivery rooms, more like hotel suites than hospital facilities. Pierre had to admit that one thing missing from Canada’s government-run hospitals was any touch of luxury, but here—well, he was just thankful that Molly’s faculty-association health plan was covering the expenses…

  Pierre sat on a softly padded chair, beaming at his wife and newborn daughter.

  A middle-aged black nurse came in to check on them. “Have the two of you decided on a name yet?” she asked.

  Molly looked at Pierre, making sure he was still happy with the choice. Pierre nodded. “Amanda,” she said. “Amanda Hélène.”

  “One English name and one French,” said Pierre, smiling at the nurse.

  “They’re both pretty names,” said the nurse.

  “‘Amanda’ means ‘worthy of being loved,’” said Molly. There was a knock at the door, and then, a moment later, the door swung open. “May I come in?”

  “Burian!” said Molly.

/>   “Dr. Klimus,” said Pierre, a bit surprised. “How good of you to come.”

  “Not at all, not at all,” said the old man, making his way across the room.

  “I’ll leave you alone,” said the nurse, smiling and exiting.

  “The birth went well?” asked Klimus. “No complications?”

  “Everything was fine,” said Molly. “Exhausting, but fine.”

  “You recorded it all on videotape?”

  Pierre nodded.

  “And the baby is normal?”

  “Just fine.”

  “A boy or a girl?” Klimus asked. Pierre felt his eyebrows lifting; that was usually the first question, not the fourth.

  “A girl,” said Molly.

  Klimus moved closer to see for himself. “Good head of hair,” he said, touching a gnarled hand to his own billiard-ball pate, but making no other comment about the child’s paternity. “How much does she weigh?”

  “Seven pounds, twelve ounces,” said Molly.

  “And her length?”

  “Seventeen inches.”

  He nodded. “Very good.”

  Molly discreetly moved Amanda to her breast, mostly hidden by her hospital robe. Then she looked up. “I want to thank you, Burian. We both do. For everything you’ve done for us. We can’t begin to say how grateful we are.”

  “Oui,” said Pierre, all his fears having dissipated. His daughter was an angel; how could she possibly have a devil’s genes? “Mille fois merci.”

  The old man nodded and looked away. “It was nothing.”

  Je ne suis pas fou, thought Pierre, a month later. I’m not crazy.

  And yet the frameshift was gone. He’d wanted to do more studies of the DNA sequence that produced the strange neurotransmitter associated with Molly’s telepathy. He’d used a restriction enzyme to snip out the bit of chromosome thirteen that coded for its synthesis. So far, so good. Then, to provide himself with an unlimited supply of the genetic material, he set up PCR amplification of it—the polymerase chain reaction, which would keep duplicating that segment of DNA over and over again. Needing nothing more than a test tube containing the specimen, a thermocycler, and a few reagents, PCR could produce a hundred billion copies of a DNA molecule over the course of an afternoon.

  And now he had billions of copies—except that, although the copies were all identical to each other, they weren’t the same as the original. The thymine base that had wormed its way into Molly’s genetic code, causing the frameshift, hadn’t been incorporated into the copies. At the key point, the snips of DNA produced through PCR all read CAT CAG GGT GTC CAT. Just like Pierre’s own did; just like everybody’s did.

  Could he have screwed up? Could he have misread the sequence of nucleotides in that original sample of Molly’s DNA he’d extracted from her blood all those months ago? He rummaged in his file drawer until he found his original autorad. No mistake: the thymine intruder was there.

  He went through the long process of making another autorad from another piece of Molly’s actual original DNA. Yup, the thymine showed up there, too—the frameshift was present, shifting the normal CAT CAG GGT GTC CAT into TCA TCA GGG TGT CCA.

  PCR was a simple chemical procedure. It shouldn’t care if the thymine really belonged there or not. It should have just faithfully duplicated the string.

  But it had not. It—or something in the DNA reproduction process—had corrected the string, putting it back the way it was supposed to be.

  Pierre shook his head in wonder.

  “Good morning, Dr. Klimus,” said Pierre coming into the HGC office to pick up his mail.

  “Tardivel,” said Klimus. “How is the baby?”

  “She’s fine, sir. Just fine.”

  “Still have all that hair?”

  “Oh, yes.” Pierre smiled. “In fact, she’s even got a hairy back—even I don’t have a hairy back. But the pediatrician says that’s not unusual, and it should disappear as her hormones become better balanced.”

  “Is she a bright girl?”

  “She seems to be.”

  “Well-adjusted?”

  “Actually, for someone just a month old she’s rather quiet, which is nice, in a way. At least we’re managing to get some sleep.”

  “I’d like to come by the house this weekend. See the girl.”

  It was a presumptuous request, thought Pierre. But then—dammit, he was the child’s biological father. Pierre felt his stomach knotting. He cursed himself for thinking anything this complex would end up not being a source of problems. Still, the man was Pierre’s boss, and Pierre’s fellowship was coming up for renewal.

  “Um, sure,” said Pierre. He hoped Klimus would detect the lack of enthusiasm and decide not to pursue the matter. He took his mail from its cubbyhole.

  “In fact,” said the old man, “perhaps I’ll come over for dinner Sunday night. At six? Make an evening of it.”

  Pierre’s heart sank. He thought of something Einstein had once said: Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing. “Sure,” Pierre said again, resigning himself to it. “Sure thing.”

  The old man nodded curtly, then went back to sorting through his mail. Pierre stood still for a few moments, then, realizing he had been dismissed, took his own mail and headed on down the corridor to his lab.

  C h a p t e r

  27

  Burian Klimus sat in Molly and Pierre’s living room. Amanda didn’t seem to take to him at all, but, then again, he didn’t make any effort to hold her or baby-talk to her. That bothered Pierre. The old man had wanted to see the girl, after all. But instead of playing with her, he just kept asking questions about her nursing and sleeping habits, all the while—to Pierre’s astonishment—scrawling notes in Cyrillic in a pocket-size spiral-bound notebook.

  Finally, it was time for dinner. Pierre and Molly had both agreed that although tonight was Pierre’s turn to cook, the evening would probably go better with something more elaborate than hot dogs or Kraft dinner. Molly prepared chicken Kiev (Klimus was Ukrainian, after all), potatoes au gratin, and Brussels sprouts. Pierre opened a bottle of liebfraumilch to go with it, and the three adults made their way to the table, leaving Amanda—whom Molly had breast-fed earlier—contentedly napping in her bassinet.

  Pierre tried all sorts of polite topics for conversation, but Klimus rose to none of them, so he finally decided to ask the old man what he was working on.

  “Well,” said Klimus, after taking another sip of wine, “you know I’m spending a lot of time at the Institute of Human Origins.” The IHO was also in Berkeley; its director was Donald Johanson, discoverer of the famous Australopithecus afarensis known as Lucy. “I’m hoping to make progress with Hapless Hannah’s DNA in resolving the out-of-Africa debate.”

  “Great film,” said Molly lightly, really not wishing to see the conversation devolve into shoptalk. “Meryl Streep was excellent.”

  Klimus raised an eyebrow. “I know Pierre knows about Hannah, Molly, but do you?”

  She shook her head. He told her about his breakthrough with extracting intact DNA from the Israeli Neanderthal bones, then paused to fortify himself with another sip of wine. Pierre got up to open a second bottle.

  “Well,” said Klimus, “there are two competing models for the origin of modern humans. One is called the out-of-Africa hypothesis; the other is the multiregional hypothesis. They both agree that Homo erectus started spreading out from Africa into Eurasia as much as one-point-eight million years ago—Java man, Peking man, Heidelberg man, those are all specimens of erectus.

  “But the out-of-Africa hypothesis says that modern man, Homo sapiens—which may or may not include Neanderthals as a subgroup—evolved in east Africa, but didn’t expand out of there until a second migration from Africa just one or two hundred thousand years ago. The out-of-Africa proponents say that when this second wave caught up with various erectus groups in Asia and Europe, they defeated them, leaving Homo sapiens as the only extant species of humanity.”

 
He paused long enough to let Pierre pour him another glass of wine. “The multiregional hypothesis is quite different. It says all those erectus populations went on evolving, and they each gave rise independently to modern man. That would explain why Homo sapiens seems to appear in the fossil record pretty much simultaneously across all of Eurasia.”

  “But surely,” said Molly, intrigued despite herself, “if you have isolated populations, you’d end up with different species evolving in each area—like on the Galápagos Islands.” She rose to start clearing the dishes.

  Klimus handed her his dinner plate. “The multiregionalists contend that there was a lot of inbreeding among the various populations, allowing them to evolve in tandem.”

  “Inbreeding from France all the way to Indonesia?” said Molly, disappearing into the kitchen for a moment. “And I thought my sister got around.”

  Pierre laughed, but when Molly returned she was shaking her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “This multiregional stuff seems more like an exercise in political correctness than good science—an attempt to avoid Felix Sousa’s which-race-came-first question and say, ‘Hey, we all evolved together at once.’”

  Klimus nodded. “Ordinarily, I should agree with you, but there are excellent sequences of skulls going all the way from Homo erectus through Neanderthal man and into fully modern humans in Java and China. It does look like independent evolution toward Homo sapiens went on at least in those locations, and possibly elsewhere, too.”

  “But that’s evolutionarily absurd,” said Molly. “Surely the classical model of evolution says that, through mutation, one individual in a population spontaneously gains a survival advantage, and then his or her offspring, because of that advantage, outcompete everyone else, eventually creating a new species.”

  Pierre got up to help Molly serve dessert—a chocolate mousse she had made. “I’ve always had a problem with that method,” he said. “Think about it: it means that a few generations down the road, the entire population is descended from that one lucky mutant. You end up with a very small gene pool that way, and that tends to concentrate recessive genetic disorders.” He handed a glass bowl to Klimus, then sat down. “It’s like Queen Victoria, who carried the hemophilia gene. Her offspring inbred with the royal houses of Europe, devastating them. To suppose that whole populations are reduced to a single parent every time a major mutation-driven advantage occurs would make life extraordinarily precarious. If an accident didn’t kill off the lucky mutant, his or her offspring might die off anyway through genetic diseases.” He sampled the mousse, then nodded, impressed. “Now, if evolution could somehow occur simultaneously across widely dispersed populations, as the multiregionalists are suggesting, well, I suppose that would avoid that problem—but I can’t think of any mechanism that would allow that kind of evolution, although—”