Embryo 1: Embryo

by JA Schneider

  Two arms grabbed her and threw her to the ground. She screamed, then felt a medicinal smelling rag clamped hard over her nose and mouth, preventing her from screaming again, preventing her from…

  Breathing?

  She kicked wildly, tore at the knee on her chest, the hands that held her down. Her head began to spin, faster and faster. She felt the rag removed and hands take hold of her throat. She could no longer kick. The hands squeezed harder, blackness closed in, and then all sensation was gone.

  Which was probably just as well. Because the next sensation, of a four-inch needle being plunged into her belly, would have been unbearable if she had been awake to feel it.

  Or for that matter, alive to feel it.

  20

  Amnio specimens had to be sent to Pathology anyway, so at 4:10 Jill went, and found Peter Gregson still bent over his microscope. He smiled at her. “Ah! Your skin cultures!”

  “I’m not disturbing you?”

  “Hell no, I was falling asleep.”

  She sat next to him while he reached into his incubator, brought out the two Petri dishes, and placed them on the counter. “Hey, growing!”

  She stared at the two specimens.

  Maria Moran and tiny Christopher Sayers were dead. Yet here were cells from their bodies, growing, duplicating…alive.

  Her heart thudded.

  “Where do you want to start?” Gregson asked.

  “With the light microscope, I think. I’d like to see them under low power first.”

  He reached for the microscope, a micropipette, and a slide thicker than ones Jill had seen. He held it up and squinted at it. “Special slide for the needs of high magnification. See the square in the middle? Barely visible to the naked eye, but under the ‘scope you’ll see that it’s got a crosshatched counting chamber. Very helpful when you get up to ten thousand power or thereabouts.”

  He used the micropipette to draw up about .01 cc of the specimen and put it on the slide.

  “Go ahead,” he said, pushing the slide to her. “Have a look.”

  Her hands trembling, Jill placed the slide under the microscope. It was the sample from the dish marked number one –Maria Moran’s skin cells. She drew breath; put her eye to the microscope and looked in.

  “See anything?” asked Gregson.

  “Yes. Teeming. Not enough detail, though.”

  “We’ll go to one hundred power.”

  He rotated the lenses at the bottom of the ‘scope barrel while Jill continued to peer in. Maria’s cells grew suddenly larger and brightly translucent. Jill could see cell walls and their nuclei and a few other features, but not well.

  “Okay, one thousand power,” said Gregson, rotating the lenses.

  Her vision filled with a single cell nucleus. At the equator of the nucleus coiled a jumble of what looked like long, thin threads. She got excited. “I can see the chromosomes but they’re indistinct. Can we go deeper?”

  The light in her barrel of vision suddenly flicked off. “For that,” said Gregson, “we’ll have to go to the electron microscope. Bring your slide.”

  She followed him down the long counter. At the end stood a large console with a screen in a metal box on the top. “This EM is the RD model 400,” he said. “It’s the best. That screen up there is an image intensifier, so you can project a picture of whatever the ‘scope is seeing.”

  He took Jill’s slide and inserted it into a metal housing. “We’ll start at ten thousand power.” He clicked on the beam and adjusted some dials.

  “Have a look,” he said, focusing the beam.

  Jill stared at the screen.

  It was unbelievable.

  In the seconds it had taken them to move from one microscope to the other, the cell Jill had been watching had entered a new phase of mitotic division. The chromosomes no longer looked like long, coiled threads; they had untangled and were breaking up into fragments. Each fragment was in the shape of a knobby x with four distinct arms.

  Jill caught her breath. “Look at that. It’s actually happening.”

  Gregson was silent for a moment. “Look normal to you?”

  She peered at the screen. “Seems to.”

  “Look again.”

  He was squinting and his lips were moving; she could tell he was counting.

  “There’s an odd number,” he said. “An extra chromosome. I’d have to cut them out and pair them to be sure, but it looks like a trisomy 14.” He whistled. “I’ve never seen that before.”

  Jill’s lips parted. A third year Path resident and he’s never seen this before?

  He adjusted the beam to a tighter focus and stepped closer to the screen. “I think I see something else. Look at that.” He pointed. “Your patient has a translocation, too. See this number twelve chromosome? It’s missing an arm.”

  He was right. Number twelve looked like a half-eaten starfish.

  “And see here?” He pointed to a chromosome at the lower corner of the screen. “The missing arm is here. It’s attached itself to chromosome seventeen. It’s a 12-17 translocation. This is incredible.”

  He turned to her. “Who is this patient? Some Chernobyl victim you’re treating down there?”

  Jill tensed. Like any scientist he was seeing something extraordinary and getting excited about it. His fascination would lead him to Obstetrics, and they would know she was snooping. She hated having to make up a story but had no choice. “As a matter of fact we’re looking into the possibility of radiation exposure,” she improvised.

  Gregson nodded slowly. “We’ve got a mammography technician case we’re working on.” He shook his head. “You should see those specimens.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Oops, I gotta go. You can keep using the EM. Just flick off this switch when you’re done and put the cover back on.”

  She looked at him gratefully. “Peter, thanks a million for all your help.”

  He grinned and shrugged. “Come any time. Path residents get lonely for live company.”

  After he left Jill sat for a long moment, welcoming the silence. Only now did the real stab of discovery hit.

  She looked at the lit screen. The chromosomes had straightened out again. Xs had stretched into long bars which divided into two groups, each group sliding along invisible tracks toward opposite cellular poles. In a few minutes the cell – Maria’s living skin cell – would divide, and then divide again, each new cell replicating the same damaged chromosomal set.

  Back up, Jill thought. Rethink this.

  Maria had died of abruptio placentae, which was an accident, right? No tie-in with chromosomal abnormalities.

  So where did this come from?

  Maria hadn’t been walking around all her life with that bomb in her cells. She would not have survived infancy.

  So the abnormality came from her unborn baby.

  A ruptured placenta. Fetal cellular material had poured into the large uterine vessels and seeded out into every cell of Maria’s body.

  Would her baby have been born like…?

  Jill looked back down the counter.

  She removed Maria’s slide and went back to the incubator for the second Petri dish. She pipetted out .01 cc of Christopher Sayers’ growing skin cells, put the drop on the EM slide and hurried back to the console.

  The light on the screen was bright. She focused and waited, scarcely breathing as she watched the chromosomes do their dance: slide to the center, coil, uncoil, pull apart. They fragmented; the screen filled with pulsating, odd-shaped little Xs.

  Jill stepped closer. Her index finger traced across the screen, counting…

  She stopped. There it was. The extra chromosome: trisomy 14.

  “Can’t be,” she whispered. She tried to count faster. Damn. The chromosomes were already starting to move into their next stage.

  Her finger stopped suddenly over a shape that looked like three mangled fingers, spread wide apart.

  That was it.

  The number 12 chromosome, missing an arm
.

  And down in the corner was number 17. With five arms. Gregson’s 12-17 translocation. The limbless Christopher Sayers and Maria’s unborn baby …

  Both of them?

  It didn’t make sense!

  Abruptio placentae. Phocomelia. Two different tragedies; both babies with the same chromosomal abnormality.

  What in God’s name was going on?

  21

  It was 5:09.

  In street clothes she’d brought with her that morning – a white blouse and chino skirt – Jill stood under the hospital portico and made a call.

  A real person answered on the third ring. “Madison Museum of Anthropology.”

  “Office of the curator, please.”

  “One moment.”

  There was a click. Then a voice, liltingly British, came on.

  “Margaret Haywood speaking.”

  “Ms. Haywood?” Jill checked over her shoulder and spoke rapidly. “I’m Dr. Raney from Madison Hospital, and I’m calling to inquire about one of your students, Mary Jo Sayers – ”

  “Mary Jo! Oh, I’m so glad you called! I’ve been terribly worried…”

  Minutes later Jill was racing up First Avenue to the Gothic-towered Victorian mansion which was the museum. Over the years the med center had expanded into the old mansion’s land and now appeared to be actually squeezing it off hospital property. The worst offender was the Sturdevandt Research Wing. Five stories, it stretched from the tall new buildings to a point where it stood shoulder to shoulder with the museum.

  That’s the hospital for you, Jill thought. If it’s in the way throw it out.

  She hurried up the old marble steps and up a curved staircase to the second floor.

  “So glad you’ve come! So very glad!” Margaret Haywood, with pale orange hair set as neatly as the Queen’s, rushed forward to greet her.

  Haywood re-seated herself behind an antique desk, and Jill took a visitor’s chair, deeply carved with lion head hand rests. She weighed her words carefully. “I should begin,” she said, “by requesting that whatever is said in this room be held in strictest confidence.”

  Margaret Haywood clasped and unclasped her hands. “Not necessary,” she said. “I’ve felt that something was wrong for two days. You see, Mary Jo and I had an appointment for Monday morning, and she always keeps her appointments. You could practically set your clock by that girl.” Haywood shook her head worriedly. “One of our most dedicated grad students.”

  “Monday,” Jill prompted.

  “Yes. Well. She called to say she was having pains, and that instead of stopping by she was going to see her doctor. She also said she’d call later to reschedule.” Haywood waved a plump hand. “I don’t know her doctor’s name, he’s at the Med Center.”

  “Yes,” Jill said. “She was a patient in the clinic.”

  “Well, she never called back. By Tuesday I was concerned. Called her apartment, got her machine, then called the hospital. They told me that only next of kin were privy to information, and I told them that Mary Jo didn’t have any next of kin – ”

  Jill’s hands clutched the lion heads. “No next of kin? Ms. Haywood, was Mary Jo married?”

  “I should say not. A short-lived marriage ended badly three years ago. To my knowledge, she hasn’t seen the chap since.”

  “I think the hospital was confused about that.”

  “Oh, they’re so sloppy. My sister – well, that’s another story.” Haywood said that she next tried a different tactic. Called a bit later, said that she was Mary Jo’s aunt, and demanded to be informed of her condition. She was told that the patient had gone home.

  “Signed out by her husband, they told me! Well I couldn’t very well say I didn’t know of any husband after I’d just said I was an aunt. I then called her apartment, still just the voice mail…I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Did you consider calling the police?”

  A helpless gesture. “Yes. And no. I thought, well, perhaps Mary Jo did have a boyfriend she’d never mentioned. Then that bothered me because she’d often complained of loneliness. I think I was on the verge of calling the police when you called.”

  Jill studied the older woman’s features. Margaret Haywood seemed a person of reliability and compassion.

  She inhaled.

  “Ms Haywood,” she said slowly. “On Monday around two o’clock, Mary Jo delivered a son four months prematurely. The child suffered from a serious developmental problem. He did not survive. On the following morning, though grieving, she was able to talk to me. She said…strange things. She somehow seemed to connect the tragedy with the work she was doing. She used the words ‘they’ and ‘they promised.’ Then would draw back, insist it was a…secret and she couldn’t divulge any more.” Jill wiped her hands on her skirt. “She seemed convinced she’d been betrayed.”

  The curator stared at Jill. Her eyes filled. She took a linen handkerchief from her purse and wiped her eyes.

  “There had been trouble,” she said finally.

  “Trouble?”

  “Yes.” Haywood picked up a small jade elephant and began turning and turning it in her hands..

  “The problem began when the university’s anthropology department refused to okay her thesis.” Her hands stilled, and she gazed up at some faded angels painted on the ceiling.

  “Mary Jo believed,” she continued, “that we humans have come to an evolutionary dead end; that we’re finished, as good as extinct unless someone figures out a way to speed up human evolution.”

  Jill stared. “Speed…evolution?”

  “Yes. Intellectually, that is. The interesting thing is that her hypothesis was grounded in reason. Exploding technology versus declining literacy; diminishing food supply versus exploding populations increasingly dependent on increasingly powerless governments. Very scary, no argument there. But, the speeding up evolution part, Mary Jo consistently refused to divulge her sources! All she’d say was that there was somebody – some group or study program – and that ‘they’ were working on something very breakthrough. But you can’t write a thesis and refuse to divulge your sources. It’s simply not valid.”

  “Yet she persisted…” Jill said.

  “More determined than ever. And became rather secretive. Never even mentioned her pregnancy until a few weeks ago. It didn’t show.”

  Somebody – some group or study program… Jill’s heart thudded. She asked, “Do you have any idea who the father might have been?”

  The older woman shook her head. “No. After her divorce she decided she wasn’t cut out for relationships…didn’t want them, only wanted to study. But she did want a child. It would have been like her to be artificially inseminated.”

  Jill inhaled deeply. She rose. “You’ve been most helpful.”

  Haywood rose too. “Do keep me informed, won’t you? I care sincerely about that girl. She wanted to make the world a better place. I say! It’s almost six! I’m leaving too.”

  They left the office and walked down the curving stairway. Haywood mentioned that on Wednesdays the guard didn’t close till 6:30 and suggested that Jill take a look around.

  “It’s really quite fascinating, and you must see the hominids, our earliest ancestors. The hominid room was Mary Jo’s world. It’s in the basement, unfortunately. We’re bursting at the seams in this old place – a hundred years ago it was part of the med school, did you know that? For influenza, diphtheria, infectious diseases. Anyway the dioramas upstairs are wonderful. Are you also interested in the art of Oceania?”

  They had reached the marble floor of the vaulted entrance hall. To Jill’s left the oaken entrance doors stood open, admitting the first faint breeze of evening.

  “I go that way,” said Margaret Haywood, indicating the street. “And you, if you’re interested, go that way.”

  To Jill’s right, beyond the wide arch, stretched a long gallery. It was empty of visitors and beginning to fill with shadows. Squinting, she could make out giant glass cases housing hu
manlike figures.

  “It does look intriguing,” she said.

  “Splendid!” said Margaret Haywood. “What’s fascinating is, the further toward the rear you go, the further back in time you get. In fact, why don’t you begin in the basement - the hominid room? Sorry the lighting’s so wretched down there, but I believe they’re still working. The stairs are over there.” She pointed.

  “Who are they?” Jill asked.

  “You’ll see,” Haywood said brightly.

  With that she extended her hand, said something urgent about staying in touch, and departed, leaving Jill staring uneasily into the darkening gallery beyond.

  I’ll make it quick, she thought. I’ll see this hominid place and there’ll be a few minutes to spare for the first floor exhibits.

  She found the door, opened it and looked down the stairs. They were dim and smelled musty. She wrinkled her nose; was about to close the door when she thought she heard voices. Then found a light switch. Flicking it on she started down, thinking: See it. This was Mary Jo’s world.

  At the bottom a line of bulbs lit a wide passageway lined with closed doors and, at the end, one open door from which emanated a wash of light and the hum of working voices.

  Approaching, she knocked on the doorframe. A man turned, and for a moment she forgot where she was.

  He was middle-aged and wore a long white coat. Held a scalpel in one hand and calipers in the other. The harsh light from the studio fixtures flashed off his glasses.

  “Hello! Come in!” he said.

  She did, hesitantly. Around her stretched work tables covered with paint and clay and plaster. The man’s white coat was smeared with plaster. So, too, were the aprons of his two male assistants sweeping up clumps of Styrofoam and animal skin scraps. The place smelled of bonding cement. On one side was a table lined with bone fragments, a femur, skulls, several jaws, and miscellaneous bone pieces. Jill blinked at the skulls.