White Eye

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Diana cut the saddle off a rabbit and defrosted two mice. She stood in front of the perches and turned off the light, while the birds watched her, able to see in the dark by the mysterious illumination within themselves. There was utter silence, then a cool breath caressed Diana’s cheek and ghostly fingers snatched the rabbit meat. From the far side of the mews came crunching noises. Diana held out a slightly warm mouse. The strong, silent wings of the frogmouth brushed past her, and the mouse vanished from her hand.

  The town was asleep and silent when Kerry left his house just after one o’clock the next morning. The only sound, beside the noise of his Land Cruiser, came from a truck far in the distance, whose lights he saw from time to time as it plowed down the highway toward Victoria. He drove to Church Street, which ran parallel to Fig Tree Gully Road, and parked in the grounds of the cathedral. His footsteps sounded loud, but their noise vanished as soon as he reached the riverbank. It was cool down there, in the long, slippery grass. There was less than half a moon, leaving the black sky foaming with stars.

  A dog barked at him but stopped when he left its territory. Three hundred meters along the riverbank, he arrived at the ti-tree fence of his cousin’s aviary. Above him were the hack boxes, where birds could be fed without seeing their keeper. Kerry scribbled his flashlight over the tightly packed gray twigs until he found the gate, then juggled clumsily, trying to find the right key to the padlock.

  Inside, he glanced at the weird paraphernalia: the jesses, creances, hoods, and lures. Seeing these tools of his cousin’s passion was like seeing her naked. This was her little temple, with its ritual objects and pavilioned gods.

  The back door, into the kitchen, was unlocked. He went quietly across the flagstone floor into the hallway and mounted the steps to her office. Her bedroom was upstairs at the other end of the house, a big room with a cedar four-poster bed and an old cedar wardrobe that had belonged to Grandma Larnach. I should’ve got that furniture, he thought. A floorboard creaked. He froze. There was no other sound, and after a moment he continued.

  The office door was open.

  Kerry closed it behind him, went to Diana’s desk, and turned on the lamp. Can I risk the beep from booting up the computer? he wondered. He decided to look at the hard-copy files first.

  There were four tall metal filing cabinets, two on either side of the desk, and it took him a while to work out that the system was divided into Birds, Marsupials, Mammals, and Reptiles. He began looking through Mammals. Under C there was no file on Chimpanzees. He tried M for Monkey, and went back to A for Ape. Then he thought of trying P for Primate Rescue Organization, but there was no file of the newsletters either. He was about to give up when, still in P, he saw PAN TROGLODYTES and remembered that Parker sometimes referred to “the troglodytes” when he was talking about chimpanzees. And there it was in the PAN TROGLODYTES file: legislation about chimpanzees, international protocols, the whole legal rigmarole. Pages of computer printout listed the names of laboratories, zoos, and circuses all over the world where chimpanzees were in use. Each animal’s registration number, age, and sex was recorded, according to country. He flicked quickly to “Australia.” State by state, there were lists of chimps in zoos and circuses; under “Scientific Institutions” there was an entry: “Use restricted in 1984 following implementation of the Wildlife Protection Act. As of February 1993, no record of chimps in use in scientific institutions.” At the foot of each page was the legend “Prepared by the Primate Rescue Organization with assistance from Charles River Laboratories, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, World Conservation Union, TRAFFIC, and CITES.” He knew that TRAFFIC monitored international trade in wildlife and wildlife products and worked hand in glove with CITES.

  Kerry exhaled with relief. This was what Diana—or Carolyn, if it really had been Carolyn who telephoned the food company—was doing: updating the database. This made sense of the questions that had been put to the food supply company.

  After the pages of printout in the PAN TROGLODYTES file, there was a note: “See Hylobates, Pongo, Gorilla.” He flipped to H and found HYLOBATES AGILIS, MOLOCH, AND LAR—Gibbons, with a printout on the world’s captive gibbons. He took a quick look at the PONGO file, which was about orangutans.

  He was almost ready to leave, when a noise outside alarmed him. Downstairs, an engine started.

  The office was at the end of the house closest to the driveway. Kerry tiptoed to the window and looked down. Diana’s yellow van was backing out the drive. Where in hell is she going? Has she seen me? He ran to the desk, snatched the papers on it, and galloped down the stairs, out the back door, and through the garden toward the aviary.

  The noise of his footsteps woke Diana, who thought that the kitchen door must have opened, allowing the wombat, which was missing most of one front paw, to blunder into the house.

  She got out of bed and went downstairs, where the kitchen door was indeed open. But although she walked from room to room, calling “Archie! Where are you?” there was no sign of him. She locked the door and went back upstairs.

  By eight o’clock on Friday morning, Kerry was airborne. Twelve hours later, he helped unload and install the new chimp. It was 11:00 P.M. before he got home again and noticed, on his bedside table, the letters he had taken from Diana’s desk the night before. There were two bills, a check made out to Aboriginal Paintings and Carvings, and a postcard from Fiji from his aunt, Diana’s mother. Underneath these items were paper-clipped faxes and copies of outgoing letters. Kerry leafed through them with one hand as he pulled off his shoes. Diana had written a letter on Monday to the director of the National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Laboratory, Southern Oregon State College, Ashland. She introduced herself as a member of the International TRAFFIC Network and asked the laboratory to identify “the enclosed material.”

  He was about to roll into bed, when he saw the word “chimpanzee.” “It looks to me like chimpanzee hair. I found it in extraordinary circumstances and suspect it may be connected with the illegal importation of chimps into Australia. I would be grateful if you would let me know all you can about it as soon as possible.”

  He let his head fall with a thump onto the pillow. Where had she found the hair? he wondered. In the Cessna? She’d flown to Orange a few weeks ago on some bird business. Had she examined the interior of the aircraft then? He’d have to tell Parker.

  Chapter Ten

  When Joe Miller returned to the Research after his interview with Diana, he sent her fingerprints on the plastic sheet off to the forensic lab in Sydney by special delivery mail. Then he took out a ruler and a pair of calipers and compared the estimated size of the bolt cutters used to cut the lock on the northwest gate with the size of the bolt cutters missing from Kerry Larnach’s toolshed. It could be a coincidence, but the sizes seemed identical.

  He gave a push to the edge of his desk, sending his chair trundling back to the window, where he swiveled the seat and looked out toward the broken gate. It was still and peaceful out there now: sky, mountain, lake. House. With a push, he was back at his desk, where he typed into his computer the code word that would give him access to the list of outgoing calls from telephones in the residential quarters. He had already checked hundreds of calls from the condos but somehow had forgotten the house, out there on its own. He scrolled down the list of private numbers until he reached Sonja’s, then hit the Load key.

  • • •

  To enter the corridor outside Level 2, one had to push hard. The door itself was of normal weight, but negative air pressure made it as heavy as the door to a vault. The corridor had shelves of blue cotton gowns, masks, and booties, and a big box of latex gloves in many sizes. Its only other equipment was an autoclave, where the bodies of all animals, including those infected with White Eye, were pressure-cooked until sterile. There was no difficulty in disposing of rat and rabbit remains, since every biological lab at the Research used rodents. Chimps were the problem. Parker had to cut down a chimp cadaver with the bone saw inside the high-c
ontainment room, then bag the pieces up, cook them in the autoclave, and send off the bags to the industrial incinerator up at the lab complex. Autoclave bags were of tough plastic and were carefully handled: it was a million-to-one chance that a bag containing chimp bits would be torn open and the species recognized. Except, of course, for the teeth: anyone who had taken Zoology I would recognize those teeth. Parker distributed the teeth through the bags he used for rodent cadavers. Like everyone else, he reasoned, biologists saw only the things that interested them, and nobody outside U-1 gave a damn about chimps, so in the improbable event of a tooth being seen, it was unlikely that it would be identified. Even the three technicians who worked right next door to the chimpanzee room seemed to forget the animals’ existence. Each technician had been asked to sign a Commercial Confidentiality contract, agreeing to keep secret the details of work done for Siam Enterprises. None had bridled. In fact, Parker noted grimly, they accepted as natural that commercial interest should override the free flow of scientific ideas. “It’s the decadent attitude one must expect these days,” he told Sonja. Ever since the United States Supreme Court had ruled in 1980 that new life forms could be patented, ethics in molecular biology was doomed, according to him. “The path from Mendel was transformed to gold and now leads straight to Otto Grossmann,” he said. He was sure the technicians knew that the chimps in U-1 were unquarantined, for they were explicitly forbidden to mention the presence of the animals. But they were paid better than any other gel jocks this side of the United States to keep their mouths shut.

  Lek’s small eyes had flashed with anger when Parker smacked her for playing with the rabbit. Her defiant expression made him want to spank her properly, but right now he had more urgent matters.

  “I need the three vaccinated bucks,” he said. “And Lucy. I’m taking them all in to Level 2.”

  Lek gave a sullen shrug and, standing on tiptoe, began to haul a rabbit from the fixed cages against the walls. These rabbits, which were supplied by the breeding house up at the lab complex, were not the timid creatures of the field but whopping big animals, unafraid of humans. They were pure white, with ruby-colored eyes. When irritated, they thumped, crashing their hind legs on the cage to make a sound like a gong. Parker watched as Lek, whose head reached only to his chest, struggled to pull a buck from its cage. The willpower of animals intrigued him. “If you want to study determination, just watch a donkey, or a hungry dog, or a cat in heat,” he would say. The enormous, blind, unreasoning willpower of animals lived on in humans, obscured a little by intellect but in no way defeated. Sex and staying alive were the two great levers of animal will—and he alone could manipulate both of them, anywhere on earth.

  After a few moments it became clear that Lek was not tall enough to catch the second rabbit, which was crouched in the back of the cage, hanging on with its claws. Parker caught it and a third one, lifting them over her head and lowering their kicking bodies into a carrying cage.

  In the Big Lab, he paused for a moment to take a long sniff of its air. The ethanol and bacteria pong of the place always delighted him. “The smell of science,” he liked to say. “I’m going to bang some bacteria into the bunnies,” he called to the technicians.

  Steve had been in the high-containment room that morning to take the frozen aliquot of White Eye from its tank of liquid nitrogen, defrost a tiny bit, and put it in a tube of broth in the shaker, to grow. Now, six hours later, the bacteria would be ready to use.

  Lek traipsed after Parker as far as the changing corridor outside Level 2.

  “Go back and get Lucy,” he said. “Put her in the crush cage and wheel her in here. I’ll be out to collect her in a few minutes.”

  It took another heavy push against the negative air pressure to open the door into the high-containment lab itself. Once inside, Parker turned on the warning light in the corridor outside, then he approached the rotary shaker where his White Eye was growing.

  He took extreme care whenever he handled the unfrozen bacteria, always working with it inside a negative-airflow cabinet. An eye splash, he suspected, even for someone with his immunity, could be blinding. After drawing some of it into a syringe, which he laid at one end of the cabinet, he took the first rabbit he could grab from the carrying cage. His intention was to hold the rabbit inside the cabinet, give it a jab, then push it down the ramp at the side of the cabinet to a negative-airflow pen, where vaccinated animals had to stay until their antibodies had killed the bacteria. Or until they were dead. These rabbits (and Lucy) would, of course, show no effects of White Eye. In forty-eight hours they could be mated with fertile partners. If conception did not occur, Vaccine II would be ready for testing on humans.

  Parker realized that the rabbit he was holding was so frisky he would either need an extra pair of hands to hold it down or have to knock it out. He dropped it back into the cage and went to the other side of the room to make up enough anesthetic for all three.

  When the rabbits were lying asleep inside the cabinet, he pricked each one inside a nostril, administering a minute dose of White Eye, and while they were still unconscious lowered the soft, limp bodies into the infection pen. There were two negative-airflow pens in the Level 2 lab. The second one was for a chimpanzee, but the chimps hated it. To get a chimp into the pen, the crush cage was a necessary first step. The crush cage pinned its occupant against a wall, where it was easy to put to sleep. It was then transferred to the pen and infected while it was still unconscious.

  None of the equipment in Level 2 was left running when not in use, and Parker had only just turned on the negative-airflow cabinet. When he switched on the chimp infection pen, there was a bump and a flash.

  “Blast!” he muttered. Electrical Maintenance would take a day to fix it.

  In the corridor, he degowned, demasked, and debootied, and strode back into the Big Lab. “Okay, who knows something about wiring?” he asked the boys.

  Two of them nodded.

  “Right,” he said. “I’ve got a job for you. And Lek—let Lucy out to play again for a while.”

  It took the three men almost an hour to dismantle the metal casing around the pen so they could look for the location of the electrical fault. Then it was another hour of fiddling, trying to push a pair of pliers up into a space made for a small hand, before one of the boys could pull out the damaged wires. The working day was over by the time they had the pen fixed and reassembled. Lek entered diffidently to say that Lucy wanted to go to bed.

  “Let her sleep, then,” Parker said. “I’m too jiggered to do anything else tonight.” He and the boys were hunkered down, switching the chimp pen on and off to reassure themselves it was working properly.

  Lek, meanwhile, was peering at the rabbits.

  “Off you go,” Parker added over his shoulder. He hated the way she stared and fingered things. But she ignored him and continued squinting through the glass of the rabbit pen. In her own good time, she left. “Disobedient bitch,” he murmured, and straightened up. For some reason he glanced at the spot where Lek had stood a moment ago. What he saw made the hair stand up on the back of his head.

  In the negative-airflow pen, the bodies of the dying rabbits made feeble twitching movements. Their ruby eyeballs had turned a creamy white from the purulent discharge that was the eponymous symptom of White Eye. One was already dead. The others, gasping for breath, took only a few minutes longer. In small animals, the bacteria killed in two or three hours; in larger ones it took half a day.

  For a moment Parker thought he would burst into tears. “That fucking PCR machine!” he bellowed.

  The technicians glanced at each other. “I’d say we got a mutation we didn’t want,” Steve murmured.

  “Gremlins in the PCR again,” Phil replied. The Polymerase Chain Reaction machine, housed out in the Big Lab, did continuing cycles of amplification and in the course of two hours would generate a new gene. But PCR could create unprogrammed mutations: every four hundred nucleotides, on average, the AmpliTaq made a mist
ake.

  Parker’s mind raced. As soon as he saw the rabbits, he realized Vaccine II was junk. But why? The river of his dream appeared before him: there had been an upstream and a downstream to it. Downstream was the White Eye section, Piece B. He had not touched that. The front of the protein, upstream, was the only area he had manipulated.

  “There is Piece A, for sterility, and Piece B for White Eye,” he said aloud. “I changed Piece A—and I lost Piece B. Fucking machine!”

  He had only guessed that the PCR machine had let him down, but now that he had visualized the ribbon of DNA, he could grasp exactly what had gone wrong. The Polymerase Chain Reaction machine must have introduced a stop codon, a triplet of bases, probably just after his mutated acrosomal membrane gene or maybe even within the gene for the acrosomal membrane. The stop had told the translational machinery to go no further. Since all of this was at the front of the piece of protein—upstream in the river—what he had made was a tiddly little bit of protein that would probably cause infertile sperm, and that was all. The raison d’être of the vaccine, its ability to combat White Eye, had never been translated.

  “I didn’t sequence the amplified material,” he muttered. He stared down into the pen, where the disgusting final phase of White Eye was playing itself out. Because of negative airflow, no odor escaped, but seeing it was bad enough. He would now have to go through the loathsome procedure of removing the bodies, putting them in autoclave bags, and cleaning the pen. “I’d better put on a moon suit, and you two had better leave,” he said. It was sheer luck the chimp pen had broken down. Had it been working properly, Lucy would be dying from White Eye by now.