by John Darnton
Very slowly, Jude closed his notebook. He thanked McNichol for the work he had done, shook his hand and said he might be in touch with him if he had further questions. McNichol asked Jude when he thought the article would run, and Jude replied that he had no idea.
On the way out, a receptionist was sitting at the front desk that had been empty earlier. She was a young woman with sharp eyes who looked intelligent. Jude approached her and asked her the name of the agency that occupied the office.
"A number of agencies share the space—federal, state and local. It's spillover space."
"Law enforcement agencies?"
"Why, yes."
"Including the FBI?"
"Yes, the FBI among others. Why do you ask?"
He didn't answer, and when she demanded to know his name, and why he was there, he didn't answer that, either. Instead, he went to the elevator bank and, as luck would have it, got there just as the doors opened.
¨
Jude called Tizzie from a phone booth on Astor Place and tried to keep calm. He didn't want his voice to sound as worried as he, in fact, was. She did not answer right away. He checked his watch—after five. The secretary would be gone. Was she still there? With each ring, he began tapping the side of the booth with a knuckle, and soon he was urging her to hurry—"C'mon, c'mon. Pick up."
Finally, she did.
"Tizzie. Listen. Skyler's missing. I came down to his place and he's not there. The super said he cut out."
"Why? Where would he go?"
"No idea. The super didn't know—he's not very helpful. At first he thought I was Skyler, and he started yelling at me for going down the fire escape. He said I almost wrecked it, it was illegal to use it, that he didn't want me there anymore. Then I told him we were brothers and my younger brother was a little slow and did he know where he went, but he didn't know anything. Except he said Skyler was scared of something. He said he looked like he was running away."
"What could he be running away from?"
"God only knows, but he was clearly spooked. We can talk about that later. I've got so much to tell you—you won't believe it. Some things are falling into place. But in the meantime, I've got to find Skyler. I'm going to go look for him. Can you wait over at my place, in case he calls? I think he's got the number, at least I hope so."
"Certainly."
"And keep your eyes peeled when you go in. Maybe he'd go there—if he's really scared I don't think so, he'd be afraid they'd look for him there. But you never know."
"Jude. Who are 'they'?"
"Later."
"Don't be so mysterious. You're acting strange, and you sound really upset."
"I'll tell you everything, but not now. I've got to get going."
Tizzie said she'd go right over.
Jude hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to Central Park.
"Whereabouts?"
That was just the problem—Jude hadn't the slightest idea. And since the park ran from Fifty-ninth Street to One hundred and tenth, he didn't have a hope in hell of launching any kind of thorough search. He told the driver to leave him off at Seventy-second and Fifth. He'd just have to take his chances.
He leaned back in his seat. Now, where would I go, if it was me? After all, it almost is me, for Christ's sake. There ought to be some kind of advantage in being... so closely related.
He could not bring himself to use—even in his own inner monologue—the word that had leapt to mind after his talk with McNichol.
¨
In the holding cell of the Seventeenth precinct, Skyler was allowed more than the traditional single phone call. After all, he was not, strictly speaking, arrested.
He had been brought in with all of the construction workers, burly men who had been screaming and cursing at the demonstration, but who had turned notably passive once they were in police custody, herded into a van. On the way to the station house, they'd joked with the cops and exchanged small talk, regular guys out on an adventure. Skyler, sitting in a corner of the van and staring through the wire mesh at the streets whizzing by, had been petrified. He had no idea of what was happening or where he was going or why. His leg throbbed and his head ached, and when he touched the wound on his scalp, he felt his hair caked in blood.
Even before they arrived at the station house on Fifty-first Street, the men in back pointed him out to the cops riding up front and said he had been picked up by mistake. The cops didn't pay them much mind. Once there, the men were herded into two large cells, greeting each other with laughter and whoops of joy, as if the whole thing were a lark. The metal doors were left open, and in no time, a union lawyer appeared on the scene to sort out the charges. He took the men's names, one by one, and when he got to Skyler, he asked him a few questions and then brought him from the cell out front to a white-haired desk sergeant, who listened briefly and told Skyler he was free to leave. Skyler was on the point of walking out the door, when the sergeant looked him up and down and said, "You got any place to go?" Skyler shook his head, and the sergeant offered him the use of a phone. Skyler could think of only one person to call, and the policemen looked up the number and dialed it for him.
"You want to get that head looked at," he said, moments before Tizzie arrived. When she walked in, breathless with her long hair and her white skirt flowing behind, the men who had been let out of the cells whistled and started acting up again.
Jude paced back and forth in his living room while Skyler and Tizzie sat on the couch sipping tea. Skyler told them about lying in bed in the rooming house and hearing someone on the landing, and his flight down the fire escape. He told about running through the streets and seeing the Orderly, or a man who looked like him, and ducking into the place with the naked woman and riding the subway and getting arrested. Jude remained skeptical that his enemies had tracked him down. He said it could have been anyone on the landing, and he doubted that of all the people in the city, Skyler had come across the very people who were hunting him. He said he thought Skyler's imagination was playing tricks on him.
Then Jude told them to sit back and listen. He looked at Tizzie.
"You remember I told you about these guys called Orderlies?"
"God, yes. They sound horrible."
"Well, Skyler says all three of them look more or less the same. I found out myself that at least two of them do when they were tailing me in the subway the night I met him."
"Ah, I see," said Tizzie suddenly. "If there really are three of them and they really are identical, then—then we're in a whole new realm of science."
"I don't get it," said Skyler.
"You can't have identical triplets," said Jude. "At least not in nature. There would have to be human intervention to create that."
Then he told Skyler about taking a sample of his hair to McNichol and providing one of his own and how the DNA testing results showed that they were identical in every respect except for age. And as he sketched the general outline of the theory that he was beginning to espouse, he found that it was not so hard to use the word that he had earlier pushed aside, that in fact he could not say what he was coming to believe unless he used it.
So he took a deep breath and just said it outright. Looking directly at Skyler, he said: "We've been thinking that we're related, that maybe we are brothers. But I think we're closer than that. I think you are my clone."
Chapter 17
Tizzie led the way across the Columbia campus. To the students sunbathing on the steps they must have made an incongruous trio—her striding ahead in the pinstripe suit, Jude slightly disheveled in a corduroy jacket with a reporter's notebook sticking out of the side pocket, and Skyler bringing up the rear, looking oddly hip with his short blond hair and sunglasses.
They took rear seats in the amphitheater and looked at the portly man up front. Dr. Bernard S. Margarite. The science editor at the Mirror hadn't hesitated a microsecond when Jude telephoned to ask for a recommendation. When it comes to genetics, he said, Margarite's your man.
Jude looked him up. He had written papers with daunting titles like "Nuclear Transfer in Blastomeres from 4-cell Cow Embryos."
Luckily, the lecture was for an introductory course. Several dozen summer students in various stages of undress piled their books on the floor and draped themselves across the chairs.
Margarite made a few announcements, warned about a test next week and cracked a joke or two. Then he looked over his notes, walked to the blackboard and drew five careless circles on it. A boy next to Jude opened a notebook and copied the circles.
"As any fool can see," said Margarite laconically, "these are eggs." He paused, as if to admire his handiwork.
"Frog's eggs. Why do biologists love frog's eggs? One simple reason. They're large—about ten times larger than human eggs. And they grow outside the amphibian's body, so you can observe them."
He tossed the piece of chalk across the room. Margarite had a reputation as a showman lecturer.
"Now, you all know what happens when an egg is fertilized. It grows and splits into two, and each of those halves grows and splits again, and so on. And eventually you have a ball of cells, an embryo. And as more divisions occur, the cells become specialized—some become skin, some become eyes, some turn into tail, some into spinal cord and so on. And pretty soon you have a baby frog that will someday grow up and may either be dissected by seventh graders or end up on a Frenchman's table.
"All higher animals go through the same process. We've all done it—though hopefully without the same denouement"—the remark brought some polite tittering—"and we humans do it to an extreme. In adulthood we have about a hundred trillion cells each."
The boy next to Jude wrote out all the zeroes.
"So the first question that the early thinkers had to face was, how does that pattern happen—how do some cells know to become muscle and others to become bone? How do they become differentiated? Why can't a brain cell, say, revert back to an embryo and then become something else? They believed—and it's a logical assumption—that the ability is lost through reproduction. When a cell divides, each of the resulting halves has less information. The original embryo cell can do everything, but its offspring cannot, and the further down the line you go, the less a cell can do. So by the time you're a liver cell, that's it—that's your lot in life.
"For fifty years, proving and disproving that basic hypothesis was the Holy Grail of biology."
And Margarite mentioned a half dozen names and ran through their theories and experiments—zoologists who had split eggs, punctured them with needles, shook them apart inside flasks. Even one—Hans Spemann—who had used tiny hairs from the head of his newborn son to strangle them into new shapes—"the way a clown squeezes a balloon into a duck or a rabbit."
"Then Spemann did something truly ingenious. He took a fertilized salamander egg and manipulated it into a dumbbell shape. The nucleus with the genetic material stayed on one side and began to divide and subdivide normally. While this was going on, Spemann loosened the stricture just enough to let one of the nuclei slip past and end up in the other end of the dumbbell. Then he pulled the noose tight until he severed the two sides. He was left with a developing embryo in one and a single cell in the other.
"What happened? Would the single cell grow into an embryo all by itself—even though its nucleus had already subdivided four times? Would it retain enough genetic information to do that? The answer—of course—was yes. It turned into an identical twin of the bigger embryo.
"Give me a name for what Spemann had done. Class? Anyone?"
No volunteers.
"It comes from a Greek word, and the word in Greek means 'twig.'"
A girl in the front raised her hand and said tentatively, "What he did was make a clone."
"Yes," exclaimed Margarite. "He made a clone. It's crude, it's primitive, you have to use a helluva lot of baby hairs to do it, but he made a clone. He forced a salamander embryo to divest a piece of itself that then turned into an exact replica."
Jude and Skyler exchanged looks. The sound of the word "clone" was still jarring.
"Spemann, incidentally, had what he called a 'fantastical' daydream sixty years ago. What if you were able to take an egg and remove the nucleus from it? And what if you were able to take the nucleus out of another cell—one that was already well developed, that was truly differentiated—and insert it into the egg? What would happen? Would it grow? Would the egg proceed as if everything was normal, even though it was beginning life with an old nucleus that had been around the block a few times?"
"Well, in just another generation, the 'fantastical' was achieved. 'Nuclear transplantation' is its name, and it was done in the early 1950s by Robert Briggs and Thomas King at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia."
Margarite ran through a litany of scientists who had made advances in the field.
"Then, finally, of course, we come to five p.m., July 5, 1996. The world-famous Dolly is born. Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, took a donor cell from the mammary gland of a six-year-old ewe and put it into an enucleated unfertilized egg. The key was sending the cell into a quiescent state, which Campbell did by starving it. That made it more adaptive to its new environment. Dolly will go down in history as the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell.
"The message in all of this," concluded Margarite, looking at his watch, "is never say never. In science, if something can be done, sooner or later it will be done. And that's what I answer when people ask me: 'Will we ever clone humans beings?' I answer: 'If it can be done, it will be done.'
"As Robert J. Oppenheimer said before making the atom bomb: 'When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.'
¨
"So you're convinced that's it—you and I are clones," said Skyler, an undercurrent of aggression to his voice.
The three were sitting at a bar called the Subway Inn on Sixtieth Street. They had a booth, Tizzie and Skyler on one side, Jude on the other. It was dimly lighted, and the jukebox was playing an old Dave Brubeck piece, "Take Five." Tizzie was drinking bourbon. Jude was drinking a Beck's. Skyler had tasted Jude's and ordered the same.
"I'm not saying I know it for a fact," said Jude. "I admit it sounds far-out."
"Far-out?"
"Unusual," explained Tizzie. "Unlikely."
"All I'm saying is that it's the only explanation that makes sense and that accounts for everything. How else can you explain that you and I are so much alike—we look alike and we've got the same DNA, for Christ's sake—and yet we're not the same age."
"Maybe we are the same age. Maybe that guy—what's his name...?"
"McNichol."
"McNichol. Maybe he messed up that test."
"Maybe, but that's not all," said Jude.
"What else?"
Jude took a long sip of beer before he went on.
"The physical exam you took. I called today and got the results."
"And...?"
"And I spoke to my regular doctor, who was back. He was beside himself, totally confused—he thought there must have been some kind of mistake."
"Why?" asked Tizzie.
"First of all, he said"—Jude looked at Skyler—"you'll like this—he said I was in great shape physically, that I hadn't been this good in years. Lean and mean, body of a younger man, and all that. I pass the compliment on to you, since it's rightfully yours."
Skyler's mouth hinted at a smile.
"But he was thrown by my blood. He said that immunizing cells that I had built up from hepatitis, which I had three years ago, had totally disappeared. He found this strange. In fact, he said he first thought that there had been a mix-up of blood samples, but gave up on that because the blood matched in every other way. He was stumped."
"Yeah, well, we know the reason for that—I never had hepatitis. I don't think anyone on our island ever had it. So what?"
"The match of the blood in every other respect was strong enough to over
ride his doubts. So there's one more indication that our makeup is the same, that our genes are the same."
"Which would happen if we were twins."
"Yes, but he also found something indicating an age difference. He spotted it on my X ray—"
"My X ray."
"Yes, your X ray, which he compared to my X ray from a previous visit. He said there was actually a reversal in bone density, that the natural thinning had stopped and reversed itself so that the bones were slightly thicker. As they would have been if I were five or six years younger than I am. He was so surprised, he called in a radiologist, who confirmed the finding. No wonder he's confused. He's beginning to think I'm one for the record books."
Skyler took the information in silence and finished his beer. He looked at Jude.
"You take my hair and have it tested behind my back. You send me to your own doctor. What other little tests do you have planned? What other surprises do you have up your sleeve?"
He stood up and went to the bar to get another beer.
"He's right, you know," said Tizzie. "He has every reason to be upset. He's probably feeling like a guinea pig. This can't be easy for him."
"It's not easy for me, either," complained Jude. "A week ago, I thought I was a normal person like anyone else on this planet. Now I find I'm some sort of freak."
"You're not the one who feels like a freak. He does."
Skyler returned and started talking even before he sat down.
"Ok, let's say it's all true. Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone make clones?"
"I don't know. But I do know that we had strange upbringings, you and I. Both of us. Me, raised up in some kind of group in Arizona, losing both my parents before I knew it. You, there on that crazy island where your every thought and practically your every movement was controlled. Neither of us knows our parents. We look alike. We act alike. But I'm older than you. For God's sake, you come up with an explanation!"
"I can't," said Skyler quietly. "And if it was done the way you say, I hate to think about why. I hate to think of the possibilities."
