“A virus? That sounds bad.”
“Damn right. Only she didn't know enough to recognise it.” Rick shuddered. “She contaminated one of her samples with viral sequences, then injected it into a hairless rat, to see what it would do.”
“There are hairless rats?”
Rick looked at him in disgust. “Don't you get it, Cole? It's not the hairlessness of the rats—it's the fact she ended up with something that could spread.” He hesitated for a moment. “And insinuate itself into the rat's genome.”
“Wait a minute,” Cole told him. “If this virus came from a plant, then what did the rat have to worry about?”
Rick looked grim. “Rats are frequently used to grow antigens—”
“Anti—what?”
“Anti—virus components for serological testing.”
“Then what's the problem, Dr. Dung?”
Rick sighed. “Usually, the rats put up some resistance. Only they didn't resist the foreign molecules Denaro used. Somehow, she adapted the gene sequences—all of them—to animal cells. In one of her experiments—the one that's contaminated—she was trying to alter the ageing and healing processes in the rats, by introducing some meristematic cells from plants. But she accidentally used samples contaminated with virus.” Cole still looked disbelieving. Rick said earnestly—trying to convince him, “Plant viruses can be spread by something as innocuous as an aphid or a leafhopper—or even a drop of sap. And they reproduce by using the host cell's amino acids and nucleotides. That means the virus may be inseparable from the sequences Denaro was trying to express in animals.”
“Is it dangerous to humans?”
Rick frowned. “If this were a plant we were talking about, I'd say no. But, it's a rat. A mammal.”
Cole still looked sceptical. He looked over Rick's shoulder at the computer screen, trying to make some sense out of the blotchy columns. He said stubbornly, “I don't see how you can get all that from one blotchy picture.”
Rick grinned tiredly. “Several pictures and a lot of writing.” He glanced at Cole. “I guess throwing my Ph.D. in your face won't help, either.” He pointed to the columns on the computer screen. “This is one of the gels she used to check which plant proteins were being expressed in a rat.”
Cole was getting frustrated. “You said something like that already. What I want to know is: how the hell can you tell the damned rat caught a virus? And if it's that obvious—that you can find the answer in such a short time—why couldn't Denaro or Genetechnic?”
“I work in a plant pathology lab, remember? Denaro, for all her genius, isn't a plant scientist. She probably didn't even consider the possibility of a plant virus invading her stock of plants, and—if it were a mild case—she might not have recognised the symptoms. There's a weird strain of WTV infecting clover right now, that doesn't give a positive result with the usual tests. I ran some gels on it, to double-check I was right.”
“About what?”
Rick gritted his teeth in annoyance. “About whether it was WTV.” He pointed to a dark band on a column. “See that? That's the signature of this strain. Not only does this gel have the other eleven proteins—” He pointed them out to Cole, “but it has that one, too.” Rick looked at the screen again, studying the other dark bands—the non-viral ones—that were present in the gel. Then he began to scan the document again, curious to find out what other proteins had been expressed in Denaro's unfortunate rats.
Cole decided he'd better break into Rick's concentration now, before his friend got any more absorbed. He said loudly, “This doesn't make any sense.”
“What? Denaro trying to put plant sequences into animals, or the idea of a plant virus infecting a rat?”
“The idea that anyone would pay her to do this kind of shit.”
“Makes you sick, doesn't it?” Rick shook his head. “You know what makes this so weird, Cole? If it'd been almost any other plant virus, it might have stimulated more of an immune response in its host. But, WTV is a member of the Reoviridae. That's a virus family that can also infect mammals. Even this one—before she played around with it,” he said bitterly, “could multiply inside its vector.” He turned to look at his friend. “Dammit, Cole! Do you know what she's done? We haven't even figured out how to stop the spread of this stuff in plants! It could be, that after being incorporated into animal tissues, this stuff has a real affinity for human cells. Caroline Denaro may have been its first victim.”
“Other than the rats. First—and last?” Cole asked hopefully.
“I don't know. This was only one sample. The others may have been pure.”
Cole snorted. “As pure as Denaro's motives?”
Rick said grimly, “I hope to bloody hell they were a little more pure than that.”
* * * *
When Sy first looked at the lab, he didn't see anything. It wasn't until she moved that he saw the faded figure of Caro Denaro. “Hi, Caro,” he muttered. “How's tricks?”
He'd been one of the few privy to her deterioration. And, just like he'd told Aaron Solomon, he had over six hundred hours of horrifying images: of Caroline's body becoming warped and mutated; of this other presence that had suddenly shown up; of the disgustingly fragmented vision of its repeated appearances.
When he'd first seen it, he'd thought he was looking at a ghost—until he'd seen the thing re-enter Denaro's body. He'd seen her so often now that he'd almost become immune to the weirdness of her phantom existence, but he still felt relief when he spotted her in her former residence. It was one thing seeing her on the monitor, but he'd always been afraid that he'd accidentally run into her “in the flesh"—or the lack of it. “Time to visit the can,” he said, smiling. For the first time in days, he stepped out of the room without a backwards glance. Not even Caroline Denaro's phantom could be in two places at once.
* * * *
“I need to stay for a while longer.”
Cole looked at Rick's strained, but determined, expression and nodded. “Get it over with.” Interested now, he tipped the books out of a chair and pulled it over to the computer.
“That's two.”
“Two what?”
“Two piles of my stuff you've dumped in the past week. Where's your respect?”
“On the floor, underneath ‘Metaphysical Phenomenon’.”
Rick grinned, his eyes fixed on the computer screen. “Quit breathing down my neck. Go home.”
“Nope. By the way, since when did you start locking your door?”
“Since I picked up Denaro's research. There's another little something that came with it. I'll show it to you later.”
Cole had been thinking about the plant virus-animal infection angle. “There's something I don't get, Rick.”
There was a serious note in his voice. Rick turned to look at him.
“What kind of harm could a plant virus actually do to a human? I mean, we don't exactly have leaves to shed, or roots to curl up and die.”
“It's not only the plant virus, Cole. That could be just the facilitator.”
“Explain.”
“Plant viruses have all sorts of mechanisms built in to secure their transmission, much like human viruses, I'm sure. By accidentally mixing a plant virus into the genetic sequences she was using, Denaro produced something that could be easily transmitted. That means she'd not only introduced plant gene sequences to animal tissues, she'd provided them with a means of latching on to a vector and moving somewhere else.”
“'Vector’ as in carrier?” Rick nodded. Cole went on. “But human viruses don't normally take our DNA with them when they hop from person to person. Or do they?”
Rick shrugged. “I don't know. I only look like a human. Don't expect me to know everything about everything.” He leaned back in the chair. “They use Agrobacterium to introduce new plant characteristics into existing plants. I've done it myself. It works really well. Viruses are just a step further along.” He stopped to think about it, then looked at Cole. “It's one of the ways t
hey do gene therapy with people—by using a virus as a vector. I guess that answers your question about DNA.”
It looked like Cole was still listening, so Rick went on, “Plant geneticists did a lot of experiments in the eighties with virus vectors, for gene transfer, but if you put a virus into a plant, you have to worry about mutation, or the chance of it developing into a severe disease strain.” He added earnestly, and a little apologetically, “I'm reading a lot into some experimental results, Cole. I may be wrong about all of this.”
“Let's hope so,” Cole said grimly. “Besides, it's hard to believe animal cells wouldn't reject something as foreign as plant genes. I mean—think about it: people have to take all kinds of medication to keep from rejecting hearts and lungs—and those things are human.”
Rick turned away to stare at the computer screen once more. “I don't know how the hell she did it, but according to her notes, she successfully mutated at least a dozen rats. ‘Successful’ as in ‘survived it’. Somehow she must've overcome the natural resistance mechanisms—maybe with some of those drugs you were talking about.”
Cole shuddered. “Mutated rats. It doesn't bear thinking about.”
Rick sighed. “No kidding. Wait'll I tell you what else she had in mind. Mutated rats are just the beginning.”
Chapter Five
I wonder what the hell she's doing. Sy Morgan had returned from the toilet, only to find that Denaro was still lingering in her private lab. “I guess you don't have much else to do,” he muttered, as she drifted across the screen.
As he watched, the translucent flesh of Denaro's forearm and hand began to take on more substance. Fascinated, he stared while she fought with the handle to a drawer—her would-be flesh at times dissolving into the metal, while at others actually forming a grip on the handle. Finally, with a growl of success, she slid the drawer forward—enough to permit her fading tissues to tug a brown file folder through the gap.
It was as far as she got. The file flopped loosely on to the tiled floor, its contents scattering. Morgan, curious now, focused on the top sheet—bringing in the zoom until he could read the words: “Molecular Manipulation of Phytogenesis in Animal Tissues".
He wasn't the only one reading it. Caroline Denaro was still there—and as she read, she forgot to maintain the substance that had won her the document now lying on the floor. Sy forgot his own reading in his horror at watching her dissolving substance. He stared as patches of skeletal framework, muscle and sinews began to appear in her would-be skin. He'd seen her disappear before, but it had all been rather sudden. Never this slow dissolution of mortality that made his stomach churn.
Something in her remaining substance told him just how angry she was. She was quivering with fury; any solidity that was left to her shivering in wavery glimpses of misconstrued flesh; a gruesome parody of existence. What made it all worse was Sy's sudden realisation that Denaro somehow knew he was there, watching. He remembered how it had become a joke with him—no sooner would her private lab be wired for video than Caroline Denaro would be up there with wire nips to cut the wires. It was a small rebellion against Genetechnic's intrusiveness, but Sy Morgan had always applauded it.
But, it wasn't the Denaro he remembered who faced the camera now—who drifted forward to glare into the camera's eye. This creature was frayed and skeletal—its skull-like visage and gaping mouth patchily dressed in shreds of flesh—almost as though Denaro had momentarily forgotten what it was like to look human.
There was nothing questionable in her anger, however. She glared into the camera, and as he watched, the malevolent look in her eyes was replaced by the no-less-daunting spectre of gaping eyeholes. Sy was certain, in that moment, that Denaro hated him. Not for what he was, but for what he did. And the fact that she'd used up all her strength, in removing that file from the drawer—that she no longer had the power to cut the camera's umbilicus to Genetechnic—only added to her rancour. Sy felt he was looking death in the face.
At that moment, Caroline Denaro faded from view. Sy scanned the lab desperately, in hopes of finding some sign of her drifting presence. “Let her be there,” he murmured. “Anywhere but here.”
He heard a sound behind him. A soft rasp of movement; a barely heard whisper. Sy closed his eyes, and buried his face in his hands. “Don't hurt me!” he pleaded. “I just work for them—”
He never expected her to answer him; never expected her to reply to his words. “I just work here!” he yelled.
“Yes,” came a rasping voice, so close to his ear that his heart skipped a beat. "So—did—I—"
* * * *
“Oh, shit.” Rick was staring at the screen, his expression appalled. “She actually did it, Cole! I don't believe it!”
“I know I shouldn't ask—did what?”
“Successfully produced a goddammed, transgenic, photosynthetic rat. Unbelievable!”
“You're right. I don't believe it,” Cole said flatly. “Unless Genetechnic can find a market for hairless, mutant rats, then what the hell's the point?”
Rick chuckled. “The point is, her experiment worked, you moron.”
“Oh, I get it! Take a normal rat—which is bad enough—and turn it into a mutant super rodent. What I want to know is, if these rats exist, then where are they all, and why did Denaro get sick when the rats didn't?”
“Hold on—I'll see if there's any info on that—” Rick pushed his chair back from the terminal and started paging through Denaro's address book.
“The rats have an address?” Cole asked sarcastically. He looked over Rick's shoulder. “Just how mutated are they?”
“This is Denaro's notebook. She used an address book so Genetechnic wouldn't notice it.” He flicked over a few more pages. “Here's a reference: she sacrificed them—”
“Is that a nice way of saying she killed them?”
“Yep. My guess is she didn't want Genetechnic to know just how well she'd succeeded. Or, maybe the rats did get sick, and she didn't want anyone to think she'd failed. Apparently, her daily reports covered a lot of after-the-fact shit. I think she hoped to sell the big stuff—for more than a mere paycheque.”
“Nice lady.”
But Rick was already thinking about something else. “There's something I can't understand,” he muttered.
“What?” Cole asked impatiently.
Rick quickly flicked through the pages again. “Why did she wait so long to sacrifice them? You'd think any sickness in the rats would have shown up sooner. If her only motivation was to hide the evidence, she waited a helluva long time.”
“Maybe she needed to see how long they'd live—being mutated and all.”
Rick nodded. “You're probably right—” he started to say, then suddenly paged back to the information on the rats, as something occurred to him. “She destroyed them all several days before she got sick.” He held it out so Cole could see the notation. “See? Here's the date, and—” he turned several pages so Cole could see Denaro's final entries, “here's where she got sick, and her suspicions that it ‘might be related to her work’.”
Cole took the book and started reading through it, while Rick turned back to the computer. “What are you looking for now?” Cole asked.
“For the date of mutagenesis. The day she inoculated the rats with the contaminated solution.” Rick found it, and did a quick calculation. “Forty-eight days from inoculation to sacrifice.”
“Remind me never to come back as a rat,” Cole said.
“She sacrificed all the rats—” Rick said, feverishly scanning Denaro's computerised records as he sought some description of the rats’ symptoms. “Here it is: ‘displaying numerous tumours, especially at sites of even mild wounding’.” Rick stood up and began to pace. Cole noticed how shaky he was, but avoided saying anything. “Thirty to forty-five days is the incubation period for WTV in a vector, Cole! Caroline Denaro must have suspected it was the rats that made her sick. Which means she probably developed a little physical evidence of her own t
o suggest it to her.” Feeling a little guilty now, about suggesting that Denaro's efforts were driven solely by greed, he went on more quietly, “She must have been scared. That's why she destroyed them, and hid her notes—so Genetechnic wouldn't try to repeat her experiment.”
“Don't you think you're crediting her with a little too much altruism? If you ask me, it was probably because she was hoping she'd get better, and didn't want anybody else getting their hands on her research.”
“I wonder if there's a way to help her.” Rick was remembering the expression in Denaro's eyes the first time he'd seen her. She'd thought her illness was a product of lab error—that somehow she'd been infected with some of the meristematic gene sequences she'd been trying to instil in the rats. Maybe one of the rats bit her, Rick thought. I know I would, if somebody tried to mutate me.
Cole said incredulously, “You still believe she's alive, don't you?”
Rick's eyes met his. “I'm sure of it. But not for long.” He rubbed the back of his neck. He'd almost become accustomed to the dull ache in his lungs, but now the glands in his neck were hurting, and his throat felt raspy. “I have to go to the lab, and check that this is really WTV we're talking about.” He looked thoughtfully at the cupboard, where the vials of serum rested. “I need to run a gel.” With a helluva lot of sterile technique.
“Hold it!” Cole looked confused. “What lab are we talking about here? Yours, hers, or theirs?”
Rick smiled. “Mine. At Entadyne. I'll sneak in tonight.”
“I don't think so,” Cole said slowly, looking at him. “You've told me yourself that tired scientists make mistakes.” Rick was getting that stubborn look again, so Cole added, “Besides, what the hell are you going to use your little gel on? A computer image? Or did you find Denaro's body at the same time you picked up her research?”
“None of the above. There's something else I have to show you.”
“Rick,” Cole said seriously, “after what you've found out, I think it's time someone else took over. If this is as much of a hazard as you think it is, then we have to let people know.”
Light Play: Book One of The Light Play Trilogy Page 9
