Double Helix

by Sigmund Brouwer

  This brunch, however, had no such peace, not when beside Del’s plate rested a sheet of paper with fifteen names neatly printed in Louise’s handwriting. And not one of those names had a matching address close to the Seven Springs area. All but one were locals, and each of them checked out negative. Their jobs ranged from automotive mechanic to legal secretary, and none was likely to be connected in any way to spooksville. The nonlocal was a Slater Ellis, whose social security number and driver’s license placed him on Fifth Street in Kalispell, Montana.

  “All right then,” Del said, “what about the other list?”

  Louise looked Del square in the face.

  “Sorry,” he said when he caught the look, “that came out rougher than I meant.”

  “Sure. And your omelet’s still gathering flies.” Married to a ex-military man this big, Louise had learned early not to let him intimidate her. It helped that Del had a set of rules he followed like a code; part of the code was that no man ever hit or yelled at a woman.

  She decided he looked more worried than angry. She stood, knowing he liked seeing her outlines in the red cashmere sweater. Louise Silverton, nee Bourne, had been a college cheerleader and had lost none of her brunette prettiness since. She moved around behind Del and leaned forward. She knew he liked that, too, when her hair fell over his face.

  “Hon, I promise I’m working on the staff list. Trouble is it’s longer, and my connection in the computer department doesn’t feel comfortable printing it all out at once. Is Tuesday soon enough?”

  Tuesday. Another delay, along with waiting for the feds to report back to him on the fingerprints he’d liked from the pay phone and enlarged and faxed to the bureau.

  Maybe in the meantime he’d run Slater Ellis through Montana’s department of motor vehicles. Only because he hated doing nothing, not because he thought it was likely to help.

  Coming from Montana, this Ellis as a tourist – even if he was the one who’d reported the kid – was no doubt long gone and wouldn’t be part of a local spooksville organization anyway. Add to that the admission records report: Ellis had a head wound, explained by the overindulgence of beer followed by careless walking. The report appeared honest – most people looked for any plausible excuse to hide the alcohol influence. Numbers, too, were against Ellis. Fifteen emergency cases on Wednesday morning, versus three hundred possible staff, any one of whom could have made the call before crossing the parking lot to the hospital.

  Louise rubbed the bunched muscles of Del’s shoulders. “Hon, are you sure all of this is as simple as you told me? I can feel a lot of stress here.”

  He considered – briefly – telling her. Everything. He’d begun the marriage determined to start a new life. Until the photographs had been placed in his lap to bring back his old life, he’d done a good job of being an honest husband. But to tell her would be to risk dragging her into spooksville, and although love was a word he used with reluctance – in thought or conversation – he loved her fiercely, and it would kill him to dirty her, let alone put her life in jeopardy.

  The telephone rang, interrupting whatever thoughts each was not sharing with the other.

  “I’m out of my chair anyway, hon. Let me get it.”

  Louise went inside, leaving Del with the faraway horizon and a noisy cricket beneath the veranda. Louise had made a point of answering all the phone calls lately. That bothered Del.

  Seconds later, Louise reappeared, portable phone in her hand.

  “For you.”

  “Business?”

  Louise nodded.

  Del took the phone. “Yeah.” He listened. “All right.”

  Del set the phone on the table beside his breakfast plate. He swigged the last of his coffee, rose, and hitched his pants.

  “Gotta run,” he said. “But you already figured that out.”

  “No problem. I’ll be here when you get back.”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be. Some hikers found a body in a tent. Probably a heart attack, but they want me out there just in case,”

  “Sure hon,” she said. “Drive safe.”

  Minutes after the dust had settled in their driveway and the insects and birds had resumed their clatter in the wake of Del’s departure, the phone rang again.

  Louise set her coffee down and reached across the table for the portable.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Five, eight, three, four.”

  Louise’s hand tightened over the receiver. Although Del had left the house, she couldn’t shake the instant nervousness of conversing with the eerie, strained voice on the other end.

  “Five, five, eight, eight, three, three, four, four,” she said, doubling each number as she’d been instructed to confirm her identity.

  “I want a full report,” the voice said. The voice didn’t ask if she could speak freely. It never did. Somehow, the calls only arrived when she was alone.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I want everything you know he’s done in the last week,” the eerie voice continued, “even down to clipping his fingernails. And if you think that’s too much to ask, just remember that file folder of photos.”

  ***

  Van Klees rarely lowered himself to simple tasks that any first-year science student could perform after a day’s training. It was ludicrous, however, to allow any but a select few researchers on the sixth floor of the Institute. And this task, simple as it was, dared far too much and promised the same.

  During these moments – as he had once noted in his daily journal – Van Klees reined in his far-ranging mind and focused solely on the concrete application of theory.

  He wore jeans and a simple white T-shirt. Over that, a hip-length lab coat. It gave him great pleasure to think of the irony. He was casting stones into the waters of the future, and his ripples would change humankind forever. And, unlike foolish blundering scientists in the past, he knew full well the implications of his experiments even as he threw the stones. Why not dress down for the occasion?

  The microscope he looked through – German-made and untouched in precision by any other – cost forty thousand dollars. Its magnification allowed him to bring a single cell into such clear focus that the nucleus of the cell appeared like a dark egg, suspended near the center of the cell itself, a larger, transparent two-dimensional egg.

  To the right of the microscope was a small mechanical arm, the micromanipulator. It held a glass tube – the length and diameter of a pencil – in a viselike grip. The glass tube was nothing more than an elaborate needle, handmade here in the lab through a simple process in which the technician heated the center of a longer tube over a flame. When pulled apart, the molten center separated like a strand of taffy, leaving two shorter tubes. The taffy strands at the ends cooled to long, hollow needles narrower than human hairs.

  No human hand could hold the tube steady enough to be in focus beneath the 1,000X magnification of the microscope lenses. The micromanipulator, then, was designed to hold and move the needle. One dial moved the needle horizontally, another vertically, and, much like the focus knobs on a microscope, made incredibly minute adjustments. Van Klees would have to spin the dial a dozen times for an infinitely small adjustment of the needle.

  Mechanical assistance was provided in one other area: injections. The large end of the glass tube was attached to a small rubber hose linked to an electric pump that, once triggered, blew a tiny, measured, and regulated pulse of air, forcing the contents of the tube out through the hollow needle of the other end.

  Microscope, mechanical arm, and air pump combined were worth perhaps fifty-thousand dollars. Van Klees needed no other equipment for his simple task.

  He did, however, need strings of DNA.

  Again, procurement of the strings took nothing more than the routine lab work of a technician or first-year science student. In fact, all of it was so elementary, he covered most of it in his introductory lectures at the university.

  “DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid, life’s
building block,” he would begin as he strolled back and forth in front of the podium, confident – as he was of all subjects – without his lecture notes.

  “Why life’s building block?” he would continue. “Look at yourself in a mirror. You are the monumental task ahead of the single cell created when sperm meets egg to become the human embryo at the one-cell stage, a cell consisting of little more than a nucleus with chromosomes – tufts of DNA – and the food to sustain that cell.” At that point, Van Klees would pause artfully, because he knew that the reproductive process always caught the attention of first-year students.

  “Yes, you were once a single cell,” he would then say, “the result of the primitive, inefficient fumblings of two much larger creatures.” Invariably, his students would laugh at this, and, having established a sense of fun and cynicism, he had them for the rest of the lecture. And he would explain the rest.

  The task of that first cell? To replicate a trillion times, the number of cells in an adult human, and, as one trillion was too abstract for lesser beings to comprehend, Van Klees let them understand that a trillion oranges would fill a box 250 miles long, 250 miles wide, and 250 miles high.

  That got their attention.

  Then he would instruct the students to consider how these trillion cells work together. Some grow hair, others teeth, some produce hormones, others hemoglobin. Some cells kick in at puberty, then cease to function after. Others begin or end at mid-life. Yet all these cells function in coordination as a single entity.

  What caused them to replicate? What caused each to differentiate so precisely? What programmed them to begin and cease activity at the prescheduled time in an organism that might live as long as one hundred years?

  The answer: those very first tufts of DNA in that very first cell, half supplied by the sperm, half by the egg. As the cell divided and replicated, so did the chromosomes that contained the original DNA. The DNA of the first cell was exactly copied in each new cell. Thus, each of the trillion cells contained the entire and exact same genetic code of the original cell. Each cell triggers its specific portion of the DNA, so that hair cells, for example, do not become or attempt the work of blood cells.

  The incredible beauty of it was in the simple structure of DNA.

  “Imagine a ladder,” he would tell his students. “Now twist your imaginary ladder so that it is spiraled. Like a staircase. You then have the double helix form of DNA.

  “Each rung of this double helix contains one of two base pairs of nucleotides – a protein molecule called adenine opposite thymine, or guanine opposite cytosine. Those are the rungs: A-T or G-C.

  “In a human, the DNA ladder in a single cell contains three billion rungs. At the scale size of a real ladder, those three billion rungs would circle the earth more than twice. Section after section of the ladder forms gene after gene – some genes as long as three thousand of the ladder-rung base pairs. Each gene has a specific task. A gene for baldness. A gene for hemoglobin manufacture. For bone marrow. Eye color. On and on and on. In short, this staggeringly long string of base pairs dictates all of the programming of the human species. Computer buffs can think of DNA as the software that commands the hardware formation of the almost infinite number of protein combinations.

  “Because DNA is shaped in the double helix, it is able to replicate itself unerringly. As the cell divides, enzymes – specialized proteins – coax the DNA to unzip itself down its entire length. Since an A on one half always seeks to pair with a T on the other, and G always seeks C, the two sides of the unzipped ladder each recombine with appropriate opposite base pairs, and both new ladders are identical.

  “What causes enzymes to initiate the unzipping of DNA? Coding within the DNA structure.”

  Or, as he would tell his students with a confident grin, an experimental scientist, cutting and pasting at will along the three billion rungs of an unbelievably complex molecule.

  It was so simple now, he assured them. It had taken the discovery of molecular scissors – restriction enzymes – that would cut the DNA at a target-specific area. Scientists could then decide which part of the three billion rung ladder to unzip.

  The second advance was a technique that allowed pieces of DNA to mindlessly replicate again and again and again. It gave scientists an easy supply of material to paste back into an unzipped portion of the ladder.

  All of this was old hat. The structure of DNA had first been discovered in 1953 and techniques for cutting and pasting during the next thirty years. Experiments on viruses, bacteria, worms, frogs, and cattle had led to the bizarre, the wondrous, and the freakish in gene mutations.

  At this point in his lecture, Van Klees would smile a knowing smile that some co-ed always chose to take as a special smile for her.

  Her mistake. No woman could compete with the headiness of discovery and research that gave Van Klees the smile at thinking of his special task, the same smile he now graced upon the world as he bent over his microscope on the sixth floor of the Institute.

  Beneath the lenses of the microscope, he guided the tip of the needle to the edge of the cell. The needle prodded, and the cell wall resisted, much like a balloon’s skin indents to the push of a finger. Slowly and carefully, Van Klees moved the dials of the mechanical arm, forcing the needle tip farther into the wall, until the needle finally poked through the cell wall into the guts of the cell. He did not stop there but guided the needle now to the nucleus of the cell and violated it in the same manner.

  Finally, with the needle inside the nucleus, he triggered the mechanical pump, which blew an infinitesimally soft breath into the glass tube. And the equally infinitesimal contents of the hollow glass tube gushed into the center of the nucleus.

  Yes, any first-year science student, any lab technician, even a reasonably smart high-school student could perform the task Van Klees had just performed – injecting restriction enzymes to unzip the mother strand, along with the injection of foreign strands of DNA.

  The entire process was so commonplace it was boring.

  Yet no one in the world had ever chosen this DNA and this species of a single cell as recipient; no one in the world had reason to smile as Van Klees did.

  After all, DNA truly was the immortal thread, slowly unwinding from generation to generation, so slowly that over tens of thousands of generations, humans had changed very little in structure. Because it replicated so faithfully, the coils of the double helix – the unbroken descent since the very first human, the very instructions for human life, the history of the human species – were preserved in every cell of every person.

  Other scientists, even with the technology so readily available, might be cowards to challenge this immortal thread.

  Not Van Klees. He had no God to tend, no superstitious fear of defying a power greater than he.

  Yes, Van Klees always smiled when he lectured about the example of the human embryo because he was the only scientist with the courage and vision to challenge the embryo of the species Homo sapiens, the single cell that he was now prodding.

  At his command, human evolution vaulted into the vast, exciting unknown.

  ***

  Shortly before midnight, the slam of the garage door woke Slater Ellis from light sleep. Not until then – sitting upright in bed and rubbing his face – did Slater realize his trap had one major flaw.

  Sure the kid was inside, unless by bad luck a coyote had jumped into the trip wire, but how was he going to get the kid out? Whack him across the head with a baseball bat?

  Slater shook his head and mocked himself with a wry grin lost in the darkness of the bedroom. He’d been so focused on the perfect trap.

  As he slipped into jeans and a cotton shirt, Slater made a list of what he knew about the kid. He didn’t speak English. Had rejected Slater’s first offers of help. Could run like a deer in darkness. Seemed to have supernatural strength. Had knocked Slater unconscious. Robbed the 4 x 4. Scavenged from the surrounding cabins. The kid wasn’t exactly a candidate for Su
nday school extra merits.

  Slater considered the matter further as he walked down the hallway to find his boots.

  What kind of mood would this kid be in? Trapped inside to discover some guy, the same guy who had chased him through the woods, is calling him to step outside with his hands up and be a good boy about it?

  Yep, there’s the basis for a good, trusting relationship, Slater told himself as he reached for his boots and shook his head in self-admonishment again. If he doesn’t speak English, it’s not like I’m going to be able to explain myself.

  And, of course, there was the one major flaw in this entire set-up. With the overhead door as heavy as it was, the only way in or out of the garage was through the locked side door. Given his previous behavior, the kid would probably attack as soon as Slater opened it. If the kid didn’t immediately attack, did Slater dare step inside and lock the door behind him? Because once cornered, the kid would be sure to fight. Either way, Slater could expect a battle. Which led to one of two possibilities. The kid won. Or Slater won. If the kid won, he’d be gone again. If Slater won, the kid could be hurt, maybe badly, depending on how hard the fight went.

  Slater laced up his boots, feeling his way from eyelet to eyelet. He hadn’t turned on any lights in the house and had no intention to. At this point, he didn’t want his neighbors – especially Josh and Joyce – to have any reason for curiosity.

  At the back door, Slater took his flashlight from the ledge above the coat hooks. He still had no idea how he was going to deal with the boy.