by John Darnton
She looked at her fellow passengers. There were teenagers stalking the opposite sex, gray-haired couples engrossed in books, and families out for a barbecue, the men guarding heaps of utensils and grocery bags, the women chasing after children. Not a suspicious-looking person among them.
She felt a tug at her heart. The sight of the families filled her with an unsettling loneliness. Time was speeding along—almost like those cells in the lab—and passing her by.
She fixed her eyes on Alfred. "So. Up late thinking?"
He turned to her with a look of something akin to hatred.
"I tried the number. I didn't talk to the guy. But it was what you said it was."
"Good. Let's start."
"I don't know anything about that other stuff you were talking about. I only know about the science."
"All right, then, let's talk about the science. Do you have a clone?"
When she put the question starkly like that, on the top of a ferry boat cruising through Long Island Sound on a perfect Saturday morning, it couldn't help but strike her as surrealistic.
"No."
She couldn't tell if he was lying or not.
"Tell me about this, then. You and I have been looking at cells. Some young and healthy, others old and dying. Last night I saw a third kind. They were dying so fast, they looked like they were committing suicide. They were flooded with telomerase. Someone altered these calls, didn't they?"
Albert looked out over the water and sighed.
"You're speaking hypothetically," he said finally. "Understand?"
"Yes."
"We're just talking science here. Abstractions."
"To explain how the telomerase got there. Someone put it there. Someone is working on life extension."
He looked at her blankly, so that she felt compelled to continue.
"It's a natural idea. The idea of adding exogenous telomerase into cells is bound to be appealing. I mean, if cells die because their chromosomes get too short, why not put in extra enzymes to keep them long?"
"Of course," he replied, in a hollow voice. "As a way to restore the normal balance or homeostasis which healthy cells maintain."
"Exactly."
"And how—since we're speaking hypothetically—would one get it there?"
So he wanted to be the one to ask the questions. Okay.
"Injection, probably. That would be the simplest method. That's what doctors do when patients are missing something. Like insulin to treat diabetics. Since the pancreas doesn't produce enough of it, the patient gives himself an injection every day, and so replaces the protein his body doesn't produce.
"It wouldn't be that hard to do," she continued. "First, you'd isolate the gene for the protein. Then you'd put it into a bacterium, which starts making proteins from all of its genes, including the new DNA. It divides, you purify the stuff, and you put it into a serum for inoculation."
"Too unwieldy. Daily injections might work for a while—in fact, they do work—but they're a pain. Don't forget, you're trying to get people to sign on for the long term."
"Sign on?"
"Sign on," he repeated irritably. "Sign up. Agree to pay a lot of money in exchange for the prospect of unparalleled health and life extension. If you want to attract customers, you need something a lot sexier."
"I see," she said quietly. "So what is the answer?"
"Hypothetically?"
"Of course. Hypothetically."
"Gene therapy. Use nature itself. Let the cells do the work."
"How?"
"It's simple enough, if you know what you're doing. The technique of polymerase chain reaction can be used to replicate DNA in a test tube. You make millions of copies from a small segment of DNA. Then you need a vector to deliver the DNA into the cells. Viruses are natural vectors—that's what they do. They make proteins by injecting their DNA into cells, using the cells to make virus proteins and then repackaging the viral proteins. So, you put the gene for telomerase inside a virus, have the virus infect cells, and then the cells will take up the gene and start making telomerase."
Tizzie smiled encouragingly. "You make it sound easy."
"It is easy," he said, looking out at the water and then looking back. "It's very basic. The problem is, it's so basic that if one little thing goes wrong, it throws the whole thing off. The consequences can be devastating."
"Like what?"
"Like mutant telomerase. Something that goes wrong in the isolation of the original protein or in the creation of hundreds of thousands of copies. Some little flaw, a change in one building block—a base pair substitution or a base pair deletion—and it becomes magnified a thousandfold, a millionfold. You end up with a wild-card enzyme that does the opposite of what you want it to. Instead of adding to the telomere cap, it just sticks there, causing the chromosomes to clump together. The daughter cells don't come out younger and vital with all their DNA. They come out like freaks, with chromosomes missing or, even worse, extra ones added on. And then things really go crazy. The mutant enzyme turns into a cannibal. It actually starts chopping up the DNA, cleaving it in two like a butcher's blade."
Tizzie stopped a moment, to take it all in. It was monstrous.
"That's what I was looking at," she said.
"And then, of course, you can't stop it, because you've created the damn thing to keep going and going. So it goes on and on, until finally there's only one thing that stops it. Cell death. And when you have massive cell death, you have progeria."
"Progeria?"
"Premature aging. Hutchinson-Guilford syndrome."
Alfred turned away, so that his back was to Tizzie and he was staring out at the island now approaching.
"Ironic, isn't it?" he asked. "You set out to increase the human life span and you end up creating Hutchinson-Guilford. You know the average life span of a person with Hutchinson-Guilford?"
"No," said Tizzie. "What is it?"
"From birth to death—12.7 years."
She whistled softly and pressed his arm to make him turn around and face her.
"And have you discovered anything to arrest it. Any vaccine, anything?"
"No."
"So the Lab—the scientists, their children, my father—they're all dying from this."
He nodded yes.
"You bastards."
He was quiet for a while.
"Of course," he said finally, softly, "we're just speaking hypothetically."
"Yes, of course."
"Do you think that's enough?"
"Enough?"
"Enough information. To save me?"
For the first time, she actually felt a flicker of pity for him.
"I think so. Especially if you keep your mouth shut now. Don't tell anyone anything about me. Right?"
"Right. I promise."
Albert looked at the beach, already filled with blankets and people.
"Do you mind if we just take the ferry back?" he asked. "I don't feel like swimming."
¨
Tizzie returned to New York feeling anxious and restless. She didn't know what to do next. She felt it was too dangerous to go on working at the Animal Sciences lab, and besides, she thought she had learned everything she needed to know. She doubted the researchers would get anywhere in the search to tame the mutant enzyme. The stench of failure hung over the place. When she had told Dr. Brody that she thought she'd go back to the city, concocting a cover story about research results she wanted to check out back at Rockefeller University, she wasn't even sure her words registered. He was in the cafeteria, reading a novel, and he waved her off in a distracted way.
She felt herself in a kind of precarious semi-hiding. She didn't want to go back to her apartment. She remembered all too well how Uncle Henry had simply turned up there with no warning. On the other hand, if she didn't go back there, and the Lab checked on her, they'd immediately suspect something. And then they'd hunt her down. So she decided to hide in plain sight—to go home, go to her office, just as she'd
told Brody.
And that's where Skyler found her. She'd only been home a few hours, when there was a knock at the door—the sound practically made her jump out of her skin. When she opened it, there was Skyler, smiling shyly. She ran to him and threw her arms around his neck.
"God, it's good to see you," she said, with a depth of emotion that even surprised herself. "How are you? How's Jude?"
Skyler explained that he and Jude had just gotten back to New York the day before, and were staying downtown under false names at the Chelsea Hotel, hoping to lose themselves among the drifters and rock musicians. Skyler had staked out her apartment and seen her arrive, but waited a few hours to make sure she hadn't been followed.
He told her everything about their trip to the island and meeting Kuta and discovering the shrunken aging children in the Nursery.
"I think I can explain that," she said. "We'll meet with Jude and go over everything together—everything that each of us has found out."
Then she told him about the Animals Sciences lab at SUNY and how she'd escaped from the dog only to fall into Alfred's clutches.
She noticed that Skyler looked pale sitting there, and he put his right hand onto his chest and grimaced.
"You're getting sick again," she said, and it was all he could do to nod.
She led him out of the kitchen, through the windowless study piled with books, and into the bedroom. There, she took off his shoes and put him to bed, puffing up the pillows behind him so that he could get a view of the street through the iron grille of the fire escape. She felt his forehead—perhaps a slight fever.
She leapt up and went to the bathroom. Looking in the medicine chest, she found aspirin and gave him three, then leaned over to kiss him gently on the forehead and covered him with a blanket up to his chin. She went out for supplies, bringing a prescription pad with her. Down the block was a drugstore, where she got more aspirin and a thermometer, cotton swabs and alcohol, and a bottle of nitroglycerin tablets. At a grocery store nearby, she bought two bags of food, including four cans of chicken soup.
When she returned, he was asleep. She woke him, gave him the nitroglycerin, took his temperature—it was one hundred—and then brought him a bowl of steaming soup and crackers on a tray. She fed him spoonfuls. Afterward, he felt better. He sat up in bed and smiled at her.
"I don't know what I would have done without you," he said.
She felt good, better than she had felt for a long time, and she hardly knew how to explain it, given the desperateness of the situation.
She stood up with the dishes and gazed down at him. "Just lay back," she said, "and get some rest." Something was poking at the back of her mind. What was it?
A few minutes later, while she was washing the dishes, she walked back into the bedroom, holding a dish towel in one hand and the soup bowl in the other.
"Skyler," she said. "When you were on the island, growing up, you said they gave you inoculations."
He said they did.
"Did they tell you what they were for?"
"Not always."
She finished drying the bowl and went back into the kitchen.
¨
Jude hadn't expected to hear from Raymond so soon. He found a brief message on his answering machine. No name—Raymond was counting on voice identification. Jude never called from the Chelsea. He checked the machine in his old apartment from various pay phones around the city. He hadn't seen anyone tailing him since he'd returned from the Delaware Gap, but he didn't want to get cocky.
"Call me, quick," was all Raymond said.
From a phone booth ten blocks away, he called Raymond's office. The secretary gave him another number and told him to call it in ten minutes. On the first ring, Raymond picked up. Jude could tell he was at a booth, too, from the sounds of Washington traffic in the background.
Raymond cut to the chase.
"You win. Let's meet. I'll bring the file, you give me whatever other names you have. Right away."
"I thought you said the file was hopeless."
"Not hopeless, just thin. Plus, I've got something new on your friend Rincon that I think will interest you."
They fixed a time that evening and a place in Central Park.
"Don't be late," chided Raymond.
"Yeah, I know. The park's dangerous at that hour."
"Very funny."
He hung up.
Jude entered the park off Fifth Avenue, south of the Metropolitan Museum. The sky was a deep dark blue, and the streetlights were coming on. The footpaths at the edge of the park weren't deserted, but everyone on them was leaving, walking briskly. No one, other than Jude, was entering.
He took the wide walkway that curved north, passing Cleopatra's Needle, and soon the foliage blocked out the twilight and made him feel as if he were in a forest. There was no other soul in sight. It was amazing how quickly the city dropped behind; even the sounds were at first muffled and then seemed to disappear altogether. His footsteps echoed. He felt a breeze come up, rustling the leaves overhead.
The path narrowed a bit and curved gently southwest, aiming for a tunnel that went under the East Drive. As he approached, he could hear the cars humming above and the clip-clop of a horse-drawn hansom cab. At the other end of the tunnel was a circle of light.
But then within the light, he saw something move, a shadow disturbing it, something vertical wavering from side to side. It was a person inside the tunnel, striding toward him. The movement of darkness against light seemed exaggerated, which made the figure appear large and phantasmagoric, like a specter bursting out of a starry well.
Even from a distance he could tell it was a man, and he knew his reaction was crazy—it could be anyone, after all—but Jude retreated. He drifted to the right side of the path, where there were some bushes and a tree, and slipped behind them, moving slowly. He hid, hoping the man had not seen him, and waited, barely breathing. The footsteps resounded against the pavement, getting louder. Seconds later, the figure loped into view as it passed him. It was running, carrying something in one hand.
Jude did a double-take. Something about the man was menacing—his build, the way he carried himself, a look of cruelty. Jude froze in fear. Was that a file folder the man was carrying in his hand? Then, involuntarily, he backed away behind the tree, gliding backward like a shadow. He leaned against the trunk and felt the bark against his hands, not looking anymore but only listening, waiting for the footsteps to fade. It seemed to take a long time.
He waited until his heart stopped thundering in his chest, then stepped back out on the pathway and looked carefully in both directions. No one in sight. He listened—only the whirring of the cars overhead. He took a deep breath, released it slowly, and set out for the tunnel. He ran through it, his footsteps sounding doubly loud to his own ears, and felt a burst of relief when he came out into the blue-black air on the other side.
He decided to keep running and followed the path as it skirted Belvedere Lake and mounted toward the castle way up on a bluff. Just the way Raymond had told him. The steepness of the grade slowed him, but he kept running, not caring now about the noise he was making, wanting only to arrive and find Raymond there. At the top of the rise, he came to a narrow path off to the left, hemmed in on both sides by bushes, just as Raymond had said, and he took it. The path curved and straightened, opening into a small bower with a bench to one side. Raymond was sitting on it in the shadows.
Jude felt the flush of fear leave him, the warming glow of relief. He looked again. Raymond was out of his FBI suit, wearing a suede jacket and a scarf or maybe an ascot. He pretended not to notice that Jude was there, remaining seated.
Jude sat down next to him, caught his breath, was about to speak about the man he had seen. Then it struck him—the odd fact of it, Raymond not talking like this, not moving. He poked him with his elbow. Raymond seemed to stir, rise upright a bit more, then, teetering in slow motion and lunging downward, he fell face forward into Jude's lap. Jude looked down. N
ot a scarf. It's blood! Raymond's throat was covered with sticky red liquid, and for a moment Jude just stared in disbelief. When he raised the head gently, straightening the body, he pulled his hand away and saw that it, too, was covered in blood. He saw a knife on the ground.
Raymond was dead! He's been murdered!
Jude stood. Raymond's body began to slide again, and he stopped it, propped it back up. He didn't want him to fall on the ground. He wanted him to remain upright in a sitting position. And then he heard a sound in the dark, someone coming behind him on the pathway. He bolted. He ran straight through the woods, into the bushes, past the briars that ripped his sleeve. And when he was out of the underbrush and past another pathway and running across an open field, he turned. And he saw that he was being pursued. A man was just tearing out of the bushes, coming after him. A streetlight cast a funnel of light downward, and as the man ran into it, Jude could see him better, and the sight made panic well up inside him like an explosion in his gut. An Orderly! That hideous whiteness glowed under the light like a snowy top.
Jude darted across the field, flying so fast that his feet barely touched the ground. He did not turn to look behind him, but he knew that the man was still there, still coming after him. The field gave way to a grove of trees, and then another pathway, which he took. He ran so hard that his feet slapped the pavement and began to ache. It seemed to him that he heard an echo of footsteps, the banging retort of his pursuer. He turned and looked. He was right. But the man had not gained on him; if anything, he had fallen behind. He was slower than Jude. This made Jude run even faster.
He came to a waist-high wall of stone that bordered the street, and vaulted it, landing on the pentagonal cobblestones of the sidewalk. Two or three pedestrians looked at him, startled. He ran across Central Park West and down a side street, and just as he turned the corner, he threw a look back. The man had spotted him. He was still coming.
Jude had thought that he would feel safer out of the park, that the sidewalks would be bustling with people. But the side street was riddled with shadows; it was anonymous-looking and frightening. The few people he saw recoiled from him, and he knew they would not help him; he was very much alone. He ran up the street, came to Columbus Avenue. This was a little better, some stores, more lights, bigger sidewalks.
