White Eye

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Sometimes he risked asking, in an offhand voice, “And Lek is okay? Not bothering you?”

  To his inquiry about the animals each morning, Sonja answered, “The zoo is doing fine.” She wanted to talk about the murder and the latest gossip on leads. She had already had grilles put on the side windows of her house and was thinking of getting an electronic watchdog—a machine that made barking noises when a beam of light was interrupted. “What in hell use is that?” he muttered. “Everybody knows we’re not allowed to keep dogs at the Research.” In a hurt voice, she answered, “If you weren’t away three or four or even five nights a week, I wouldn’t have to think of ways of trying to protect myself.”

  I should’ve seen that one coming, he thought. On Wednesday night she had telephoned in a state of dudgeon over a remark Larnach had made.

  “Well, did you send the letters?” John asked. He meant it to be jocular, but the moment the words were out, a voice said, You’ll pay for that.

  There was silence.

  He could not help himself. “Is that No?”

  “I’ll see you at the airfield,” she replied.

  “No, no—wait!” he interjected. “You must give Steve a message. Tell him that tomorrow morning he should go into Level 2, remove the frozen aliquot—”

  “The what?”

  She had heard him use this term a thousand times. “A-l-i-q-u-o-t. Aliquot. He knows what it is. He’s to take it out of the freezer, defrost some, and grow it up in broth in the rotary shaker.”

  He heard her mumbling “broth” and “rotary shaker” as if they were words from a foreign tongue, yet when they stayed at Hilary’s house in Sydney, terms like “ribosome” and “RNA” would trip from her lips.

  The Kalunga air terminal was a wooden shed with a weighing machine, old posters of Mediterranean holiday resorts, and, on the linoleum floor, in corners and near walls, the desiccated corpses of blowflies. Near the fence outside, crop-dusting planes were clustered, looking like the larvae of the larger aircraft, itself only a nine-seater, that had just arrived from Sydney. As Parker came down the stairs to the tarmac, Sonja stepped through the terminal’s glass door to greet him.

  He had an impression that she looked different, and he knew he should remark on this, but for the life of him he could not work out what it was that had changed. Of the many things he found offensive in women, one of the most annoying was the endless alterations they made to their hair, their clothes, and their face paint. They expected men to be as fascinated by these vanities as they were: his first wife became hysterical one day when he failed to acknowledge that she had had all her hair cut off. Stupid bitch, he thought. He was glad she was dead. And her Labrador. He would come home and find its muzzle covered in ice cream it had found on the street, or bloody from old meat it rooted out of garbage bins. One day his wife brought the dog into his lab, and while their backs were turned it licked up the contents of a petri dish. He realized what had happened when he noticed the dog wagging its tail slowly, looking pleased with itself and guilty, the hair on its chops strawberry-colored, which was the color of the gel in the dish. There was something sly and tail-wagging about Sonja right now, he thought. He tried to smile, racking his brains as he walked across the tarmac for something to say about her appearance. His opening remark would set the tone of the relationship for the rest of the day and, come evening, for his erection test. There would be storms before bedtime if he couldn’t get it up. Sometimes he wanted to shout, “No! I don’t find you desirable. I used to, for some reason, but I don’t anymore. I have fantasies about that chemist in the rabbit fertility-control program, and the typists who play basketball, and crotch shots in magazines. Leave me alone until morning, and I’ll be able to screw you then.” Sometimes he wanted to howl like a wolf and run up the wall on all fours.

  Her small face turned up for his kiss. Pressing his lips to her forehead, he murmured, “You look utterly delicious—I’m going to rape you this evening.”

  As soon as they were inside the Land Cruiser, she told him about Kerry’s threat to bring in no more chimps and that Diana Pembridge was the Australian representative of PRO. “What will we do?”

  “Kill her,” he said.

  Sonja did not think that was funny.

  “We’ll do nothing,” he added. “Kerry wants more money. I’ll haggle with him. As for the bird woman: what can she do? She can’t get inside—”

  “But she can! If she’s appointed to the Ethics Committee, she’ll have access to the laboratories.”

  “Well, then, I’ll carry you away to the East,” he replied. “You’ll have to live on lotus blossoms and have your feet massaged with perfumed oils.”

  On the drive home she kept taking her eyes off the road to turn and smile at him. Suddenly he realized she would be angry that all he’d brought her was some shampoo and soap and the brass elephant. His gut turned uneasily.

  “What’s wrong, darling?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You look as if you have a pain.”

  “I was pretty sick in Thailand this time. I didn’t want to worry you.…”

  “Oh, my poor love …”

  “I’m almost better.” He gave a brave smile, flushed with relief now that his escape had magically appeared, the twin problems of inadequate gift and flaccid member solved at a stroke.

  They went to his condo first. Sonja always remained standing when she visited her husband’s apartment. She had a special expression that said, I shall say nothing about the way John chooses to live in his private space. It’s no business of mine that it looks like a pigsty and the pot plants are all dead.

  When he pulled the elephant out of his sock, she said, “It’s sweet.” She stood staring at it lying in her palm, as if somehow she could make it turn into an elephant of diamonds and gold. She had intended to tell him what she had discovered about the collage letters and to ask his advice, but she was too upset.

  At her house, she gave him a blue cashmere pullover she had ordered from David Jones as a homecoming present. Parker closed his eyes, which the sweater accentuated handsomely, and kissed her again, while a voice inside him shouted at her, “Stop looking like a dog pleading for a biscuit!” Fortunately, she had to get back to work.

  What she called work was as different from what he called work as marching in place was different from dancing. Parker found it impossible to convey to Sonja the excitement of science—not because she could not understand if she wanted to, but because if she did she would want to degrade it somehow. If he was still at his bench in U-1 at 7:00 P.M., she telephoned every fifteen minutes, asking when he would be coming upstairs for dinner. “You’re not getting overtime for all those extra hours,” she said, sighing. “I don’t do it for money” he told her between gritted teeth. Sometimes, on summer evenings when they sat on the veranda, having a drink, she asked, “Penny for your thoughts, my love.” Almost always he was thinking about DNA. He had a dream in which he traveled over a curving strand of it, looking for a particular sequence. Sometimes the search was leisurely, almost erotic, like moving his hand up a woman’s thigh. Other times it was astonishing. It became like the scene in 2001 when travelers clamber up over the dark side of the moon to encounter: a monolith! He dreamed of antibodies in images like that: suddenly what he needed to know stood before him, as eloquent as an idol on the moon.

  It had taken him three years to modify Vaccine I so that it would both protect against White Eye and render a range of species—rabbit, chimp, and (therefore) human—sterile. Vaccine II now had such a complex structure, it resembled a huge jigsaw puzzle in which, when one piece was changed, all the other pieces tried to rearrange themselves. But developing it to this stage had been via a junkyard of disappointments. Two early versions had worked against White Eye but were unreliable as sterilizing agents. Another version had worked in rat and rabbit but not chimpanzee. A third had snookered chimp zona pellucida but not the acrosomal membrane of chimp sperm. That was his best versio
n so far.

  His challenge now was to simplify: he had to imagine the vaccine as merely Piece A (for the acrosomal membrane) and Piece B (for the zona pellucida and White Eye), and among the hundreds of thousands of pieces, he must touch only Piece A. He had spent months thinking about where he might find Piece A and, having found it, how to mutate it in a way that would not stimulate half a dozen other amino acids to mutate too.

  Then, a month before Christmas, at Sonja’s house, he had had a dream. It was the sort of hot, fertile summer morning when white butterflies danced around her garden, and the sunshine, dragging water from the lake, made the air tropical. In the distance was the rising and falling shrill of cicadas, their song like the sound of a jungle at dawn. Just before waking, he dreamed he was floating above a tropical forest through which flowed a river. Suddenly he realized that the pulsing, myriad lives of the forest represented the millions of possible combinations of genes. The river was a ribbon of DNA. Below him the orange-brown water abruptly flashed bright blue in one section—and that was the spot! That was the region on which he had to work. As he drifted on above the river, he noted landmarks on the bank on either side—then he sat bolt upright, awake, and shot his long white shinbones out of bed.

  By seven that morning, Parker had been seated at his computer with MacVector up and running. By eight, he had constructed the sequences of synthetic oligonucleotides he would need. He was so excited, he had to go upstairs and walk around Sonja’s bottle brushes and grevilleas for a few minutes, forcing himself to slow down, not to rush ahead but to check the oligo design and make certain it would modify specifically where he wanted it to. What I’m doing will change the course of history, he repeated to himself. I will be as revered as Alexander and Saint Paul and Pasteur. At the moment when, five years earlier, the idea of politically painless mass sterilization had occurred to him, Parker had felt his inner being vibrate like a harp string. But right now he had to concentrate on the annealing temperature. With a change in temperature, one could have the sequences go somewhere else as well, and the whole thing could mutate, like a piece of music suddenly switched from a major to a minor key.

  Verification of the design took another few minutes. The technicians had arrived by the time he was finished, but he was too excited even to say hello.

  The oligonucleotide synthesis machine was in a separate, smaller room that smelled of organic solvent and oil from machinery run by vacuum pumps. With the letters of the sequences jotted in his lab book, Parker went in, closed the door, and dialed in the codes. By the time he was finished, his shirt was wet. He closed his eyes for a moment and saw a huge stage bathed in lights, and beyond it an enormous crowd roaring applause. He was alone in the center of the stage. The day Inspiration had plucked the strings of his soul, it whispered, “John, your vaccine against White Eye can be used to stop the human race from breeding itself to death.” “How?” he had demanded. Even now, to remember that answer made his legs quake.

  It would be twelve hours before the machine had done its work. Then he would have to put the oligos through the HPLC machine to purify overnight.

  At eight the next morning, Parker began the preparation of his target DNA for the polymerase chain reaction machine.

  In the fridge in the Big Lab in an Eppendorf tube was the DNA from his last attempt at Vaccine II, the version that had not acted on the acrosomal membrane. He took it out and put it on the bench, then gathered the buffers, the oligos, and the enzyme he needed for the PCR machine. The next step was to put the purified oligos, the inadequate Vaccine II DNA, buffers, enzyme, and other oligos in a tube and to mix them with AmpliTaq enzyme. He had decided on AmpliTaq because, coming as it did from a bacterium of sulfur pits—“bacteria from hell” it was called—AmpliTaq would work at temperatures of up to 100 degrees Celsius. He pipetted the mixture into small tubes and placed them in the machine. What he proposed to do was so simple: what the Australians wanted to do to their rabbits, he would do to the human race. After preliminary PCR, he set up the final reaction, would which result in the designed mutation.

  By noon, Parker had the DNA for perfect Vaccine II. He was halfway there.

  Next he had a lot of cloning to do.

  He was fast at cloning. “Con brio,” the technicians said. “A blind man could do it,” Parker told them. “It’s just pipetting and shaking.” (Fifteen years ago, when he had first tried to isolate DNA, he could not do it at all. He had tried twenty times, and nothing happened. One day a doctoral student came and sat at the bench beside him with a Pipetman and a set of Eppendorf tubes. They used the same solutions, the same conditions, running every step at the same time. The student’s worked. His did not. As a scientist, that still defeated him: he often found himself brooding about what it could mean, but although many possibilities occurred to him, none seemed satisfactory.)

  The next step was to ligate the new DNA into a vector. That night, Parker transferred his new, cloned DNA into bacteria cells, and by the third morning he had colonies of bacteria dotted across a plate.

  He spent a long while looking at them before choosing twelve. “Twelve,” he murmured. His mind was making connections that fascinated him by their magical simplicity. Twelve disciples, he thought. Twelve tribes of Israel. Twelve months of the year. Twelve signs of the zodiac. Twelve inches to the foot. Twelve pennies to the shilling. The list jingled through his head as he inoculated each colony he wanted into a separate test tube of liquid broth growth medium. He would let it grow up for five hours in a cupboard set at 37 degrees Celsius. By the afternoon, he was ready to isolate and verify the DNA, which he did in an hour, at the bench.

  Cleaving came next. If people were not so selfish, cruel, and irrational, all this would not have been necessary, he thought as he worked. In a test tube, he cleaved the isolated DNA with restriction enzymes, then ran the fragments out on a gel to confirm that the DNA had the right general pattern.

  It was already dusk outside when he put on a mask and took the new DNA for Vaccine II to the UV light box. As he stooped over the box, he saw in his imagination the blue stretch of river once more, but now it ran between straight banks, tamed. Fluorescent bands of deoxyribonucleic acid glowed against an orange-red background. “I’ve done it!” he said. He had mutated the gene that caused the acrosomal membrane to pop off the top of a sperm so it could fertilize an egg. Now the membrane could not pop off. The sperm—all the millions of sperms—would remain sealed and useless. It occurred to Parker that he had just succeeded in doing what every man, secretly, would like to do: he had created a vaccine that could sterilize all the other men on earth.

  For a moment he wondered if he should check the new sequences to make sure no additional mutation had crept in, but he decided not to. He was bone weary. In the past seventy-two hours he had managed to sleep only three hours a night, his mind churning in the dark even more vigorously than when he was fully awake.

  The next step was rote, and starting it could wait until tomorrow: it was to transfer the DNA into mammalian cells in a flask, where they would produce large quantities of the protein. He would then isolate this protein and give it to the lab boys for hybridoma technology.

  The protein isolation took a week, and on the second Sunday of Advent, the boys began their hybridoma work. They labored through Christmas and New Year, all of January, and half of February. On Saint Valentine’s Day, there was a ceremony in U-1. Steve, wearing his swimming trunks, lipstick, and someone’s high heels, handed Parker a heart-shaped card and a rack of Eppendorf tubes of purified monoclonal antibodies. The timing was exquisite: in four weeks Parker was leaving for Bangkok. He could inject test animals—some buck rabbits and the female chimp—with the antibodies that afternoon. In five weeks, when he returned to U-1, their immune reaction would have developed to a point where they would be fully immune to the disease, plus totally sterile. As soon as he returned from Bangkok, he could inject them with White Eye.

  The first test for Vaccine II had now arrived. He hur
ried down the wooden steps from Sonja’s veranda that afternoon, snapping his fingers with excitement.

  The original architectural plans for the Research had the old stock dam near the lake converted into an underground area for housing a generator, a water-treatment plant, and other facilities. The first task of the engineering team had been drainage, excavation, and extension of the dam site, and installation of a concrete shell. Then a directive came from Canberra, saying that the whole complex must be moved farther from the lake to protect the birds. All the plans had to be redrawn, and the underground generator and water-treatment room was left without a purpose, until somebody realized that its concrete construction was ideal for the advanced air-filtering system that creates a high-containment lab. High-containment air-conditioning/filtering was installed, plus electricity and plumbing. But when it was finished, nobody wanted the inconvenience of working out there. There was a small, well-equipped high-containment laboratory in the main complex. When Parker offered to use U-1 on contract for his work for Siam Enterprises, it was a godsend to the Accounts Department, for although Parker was paying the equivalent of a peppercorn rent, at least U-1 was generating some income, and that allowed it to be moved to the cash flow side of the balance sheet.

  Despite jokes in the staff canteen, there was no danger of contamination to occupants of the house perched above U-1, or to people who stayed in the garden flat.

  The entrance to the laboratory was an ordinary plywood door next to Sonja’s laundry. An Inclin-ator for carrying heavy pieces of equipment ran beside the stairs. At the bottom, there was a staff room with table and chairs, a fridge, a microwave oven, and a television/video unit. The staff room led through two sets of doors into the Big Lab, which smelled of ethanol and E. coli. From the Big Lab there were three doors: one led to the Animal Room, one to the room for the sequencing, HPLC, and other machines, and one to the Biohazard Containment Room, known as Level 2. Outside Level 2 was a corridor for changing into gowns, masks, booties, and gloves before entering. Inside Level 2, in a liquid-nitrogen tank, there was a frozen aliquot of White Eye bacteria.