by John Darnton
He dashed across the street just as a wall of cars was beginning to move forward, and he instinctively leveled a football straight-arm to hold them at bay. He made it to the other side just in time, past a line of blaring horns. He was totally winded. A door was open, a Korean grocery, and he tore inside, swiveling to look through the window. There on the other side of the street was the Orderly, bouncing up and down, looking for a hole in the traffic. He spotted Jude. The sight made him spring forward onto the street, dodging cars, his arms upraised. He looked lost, confused by all the vehicles speeding by, the horns sounding. He spun around, stepped back just as a car swerved to avoid him, then scooted ahead into the path of another. There was a screech and a thud, a scream.
People mobbed the front of the store, looking out onto the street. The cars stopped, a crowd sprang up out of thin air, a circle of babble. Jude stepped outside. He walked over and waited several minutes, then pushed his way through to the front. A woman in a suit was bending on one knee, holding the wrist of the downed man. Another man was talking into a cell phone, calling for an ambulance.
But it was clearly too late. The figure sprawled on the street, his arms akimbo, was clearly dead. Blood was rushing out from behind his head, a little fountain of red that poured into a widening puddle. It had already reached the woman's shoe, and she replaced the victim's arm upon his chest and stepped back.
Jude stared at the inert body, the feet pointing outward, the puddle of blood. What struck him, what intrigued him, was the face and the head. For the body appeared to be the body of a youngish man. But the face was already wrinkled, like an old man's, and the top of his head, where there once had been a streak of albino hair, was now totally white.
That's why he couldn't catch me, thought Jude.
He's aged.
Chapter 29
Jude was badly thrown by the killing of Raymond. He came back to the Chelsea shaking, and he had trouble telling the story coherently. Skyler had never seen him like that and went down the hall, where some musicians were staying, and came back with a bottle of Jack Daniel's.
"Here, take this," he said, pouring Jude a stiff drink.
He took one himself.
Jude told the whole story again. He said it was strange, how natural Raymond looked on the bench, what a shock it was when his body fell forward.
"The thing is, I should have trusted him. I doubted him—I admit it."
"You think it was an Orderly who killed him?"
"No. I think it was the first guy I saw. He took the file. The Orderly was probably following me."
Jude took a healthy swig.
"And that's another thing—tell me why the Orderly looked so old all of a sudden, when he was lying there dead. I got a glimpse of him on the subway—or at least one of them—and I promise you, that one was years younger. Somehow it all fits in with those kids on the island—but damned if I know how."
"Tizzie knows—or thinks she does," said Skyler.
Jude was taken aback. Emotions flooded through him.
"You've seen her? How is she? Is she all right?"
"Yeah, she looks okay—tired, though. The important thing is, she's found out some stuff. She wants us to meet at her office tomorrow. To go over everything."
"Her office—at Rockefeller? I don't know, is that safe?"
"She says the place will be quiet. We just have to be careful how we get there, make sure we're not followed."
"Okay. Tizzie! Christ, it'll be good to see her." He looked at Skyler. "You were gone a long time. Were you with her the whole time?"
"Yes. I, uh, I had a little relapse."
"What? What happened? Skyler, are you okay?"
"No, no, I'm fine. It wasn't much. In fact, the timing was good, as it turned out. Tizzie made some calls, and arranged for me to get some more blood. They put that medicine in it—what's it called?—urokinase."
"Did you have to give your name to get the blood?"
"No. We went to some clinic in Brooklyn. The doctor called himself an alternative medicine practitioner. He said he was willing to bend the rules 'for the sake of my health.' He also wanted to be paid in cash—in advance."
"But you're okay now? You certainly look better."
"Best I've felt in days."
"Good." Jude lay down on the bed.
"Christ. What a day."
Jude closed his eyes to go to sleep, and Skyler stayed up for a while, watching over him.
Jude and Skyler traveled separately to Tizzie's office, and arrived within five minutes of each other. Tizzie didn't have any trouble signing them in; because of her twins research, the guards were accustomed to look-alike visitors.
She unlocked her office.
"I believe this is the time to put everything on the table," she said. "Everything we know. We can analyze it, think about it and then hopefully come up with some idea of what to do to get out of this mess alive."
She fixed them coffee. As Jude sat in a chair, looking at the African sculptures, he couldn't help but think back to the first time he had met her. The memory carried a small ache, like an echo of a happier time, which didn't surprise him. So much had happened since then, so much had changed, things that he never would have believed.
He felt like laughing to himself. But they were real: just look how his life had been turned upside-down. Back then he had been worried about intangibles like career and relationships. Now he was worried about being knifed in the street.
He looked at Skyler. Again, he was struck by the thought of how much he had grown, how much older and in command he seemed.
Skyler and Tizzie sat side by side on the couch. They looked natural together. To Jude, it suddenly seemed obvious that they had reached a new intimacy. He wondered if they had slept together. He wondered, too, if he was fighting back jealousy—he thought of probing his emotions to find out, like jabbing a tooth with a tongue to check for a cavity. The problem with looking for emotions was you had to know what to do with them once you found them.
But the new situation, whatever it was, did seem to make for a certain awkwardness. It struck him that both of them appeared overly solicitous of him—she poured him coffee and he brought it to him. And Jude kept noticing little things he didn't particularly want to—like how they seemed to lean toward each other ever so slightly when they talked on the couch.
He caught himself. I've been a little off ever since Raymond, he thought. Next I'll be looking for her handkerchief in his pocket.
Tizzie took charge. She moved over and sat behind her desk and asked Jude to tell her everything from start to finish—the trip to the island, meeting Raymond on the railroad tracks, finding his body in Central Park. He recounted it all, including fleeing from the Orderly and seeing him dead as an old man on the street. Then she told them about her reports to Uncle Henry and her time in the SUNY lab and her ferry ride with Alfred.
"Let me ask you something," said Skyler. "What did he look like?"
She made a face. "Repulsive-looking."
"Beak nose—right? Flaming red hair?"
She was astonished. "How did you know?"
He laughed out loud. "I knew his other half—on the island. A Gemini named Tyrone. He was just as bad—he was a snitch, too."
"Christ," said Jude. "We ought to check all these people out with you. You grew up with them, so you know what they're going to do before they do it."
It occurred to him that the remark applied to Tizzie, too.
After coffee Tizzie turned serious, got up and walked around and then sat down opposite Skyler.
"Yesterday, when I asked you about inoculations on the island, you said you didn't always know what they were for. I want you to explain that."
Skyler leaned back, cleared his throat.
"Well, there were the regular weekly injections. Everyone got them—vitamins, I think. At least, that's what we were told. Sometimes gamma globulin, things to keep you generally healthy. Plus all kinds of vaccinations against disease.
"How many got this special treatment?"
"I think there were six of us. The group included Raisin and"—Skyler looked down uncomfortably—"Julia. Me and three others."
Jude looked at Tizzie. "What are you getting at?" he asked.
But she didn't answer directly.
"I want to show you something."
Her voice was grave.
She led them out of her office and down the hall, where she unlocked a door. Inside was a laboratory, banks of workstations with thick Formica tops, computers and thin hoses for gas and water. The overhead lights were already on—she had been there only minutes before they arrived.
She led them to a corner, where a microscope was set up. Next to it was a tray of slides. She slipped one in and turned on the power, looked through the eyepiece, turned some knobs and made other adjustments. Then she stepped back and let them look.
It took a while to find the focus point through the long cylinder, but soon they saw it clearly enough—a blob of jelly-like substance contained in a near-perfect circle. A single human cell. She then showed them three more slides, highly magnified so that it was difficult at first to figure out what they were looking at. She provided a narrative.
"The first one shows the chromosomes of a normal average-age cell. Look at the tips. Those little squiggles you see there are telomeres, which shorten each time the cell divides. The next one is an old cell. It has divided the requisite fifty times and is approaching senescence. See—the telomeres are practically down to nothing. The last looks much the same. The telomeres are short, the cell is dying. The difference is that, in this one, the aging is premature—it comes from a boy who is, in chronological years, only thirteen. He has a disease that is causing his cells to die."
"The kids on the island—the Nursery," said Jude.
"Precisely. See how dark the last slide is. That indicates a superabundance of telomerase. Telomerase is supposed to be beneficial. Its job is to cap the chromosomes with protective sequences of DNA. But put it in cells where it doesn't belong, and put in a mutant variety to boot, and you've got a problem."
"And that's what they did?"
"Yes. Think of it. They've already established a procedure for organ transplants, which is the first step on the road to longevity. But old age involves much more than your organs breaking down. It's the whole system giving out—your blood, your cells, your brain, the marrow of your bones."
"I understand."
"You don't have to be a scientist to figure out that human life is complicated. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You can't just plug in one organ for another and sit back and think you've solved mankind's quest for immortality. You have to do something more. And these guys are top scientists—they've already solved cloning."
"So what do they do?"
"Once they've created clones, they've got access to a bank of organs. But they need to take it to the next level. So they go back to primary research. The structure of cells, cellular immortality, telomeres. A lot of legitimate research is going on in these areas as it is. The journals can't keep up with it all. So it makes sense that the researcher in the Lab would be attracted to it. And, of course, they've got one great advantage that other researchers don't."
"Which is...?"
Tizzie looked at Skyler.
"Which is that they have a group of ready-made guinea pigs. Human guinea pigs. I'm sorry for this, Skyler, but you should know."
Skyler nodded.
"What do legitimate researchers do when they want to test a vaccine? They use it on a prison population. And that's what happened here. They achieved a breakthrough. They isolated the enzyme telomerase. And they had to test it. Don't you see? Everything was falling into place for them. If cells die because their chromosomes get too short, why not put in extra enzymes to keep them long? How do you do that? The simplest way is by injection. And who do you inject it into? The clones."
She paused for a moment to look at them. Then she resumed.
"They chose three subjects. One was Skyler. He was disposable, in a sense, because he was your clone and you had already left the group. The other was Raisin. We know they devalued him because he was an epileptic. The third was my clone, Julia. Why? I don't know, but one reason might be that my parents had already made it known that they were opposed to inoculations. So I was already marked down—in their minds, in Rincon's mind—as someone with a lesser life span. The other three were a control group. They probably got placebo injections."
"I have to admit," said Jude. "What you say makes sense."
"It's the most natural thing in the world to them. They were used to thinking of the clones as objects, to dehumanizing them. Skyler said they would sometimes give them shots against disease. What for? Why protect them from diseases if you know they are never going to leave the island, which is presumably disease-free? The answer is that they wanted their parts and their blood to carry immunization for the day when they would be used by the prototypes."
"Prototypes?" asked Jude.
"That's you."
Tizzie paused.
"One thing I can't figure out is why the regime of inoculations ended. Skyler said they did it for a while and then stopped."
"What's your theory?" asked Jude.
He knew her well enough to know that she would have already come up with an explanation.
"They achieved another breakthrough. This one was a breakthrough of tremendous proportions. It's called gene therapy, and it's brilliant. You don't inject the protein or enzyme directly. Instead, you give the DNA that encodes it. Once you get the DNA into the cell, the person's normal protein-production machinery takes over. The new DNA is read, along with the preexisting DNA, and the sequences are converted into proteins."
Jude watched her in admiration. Skyler was riveted on every word.
"Gene therapy is used now for a number of diseases, particularly genetic diseases. One is cystic fibrosis. Children who have it lack a protein that allows normal functioning of the lungs. Biotech companies are using aerosolized DNA to try to get the necessary gene into the lungs of CF patients.
"That guy, Alfred, up at Samuel Billington virtually admitted that they used it. The advantage of gene therapy, if it works, is you only do it once. The disadvantage is it's hard to control. It's more likely to go haywire."
"What happens then?"
"For one thing, you'd probably end up with a mutant protein. Normally, cells make mistakes when they read their DNA and convert it to proteins. The mistake is usually discovered during what's called the 'proofreading' phase of protein synthesis. But the novel genes inserted during gene therapy probably wouldn't undergo such proofreading, so that mutations wouldn't be caught.
"What happens then? There're a number of possibilities. One is that the mutant variant attaches to the end of the chromosome and just sticks there without adding the cap. This would prevent the so-called good telomerase from doing its job—keeping the ends long. So you have a paradox: instead of extending life by keeping the natural degradation at bay, the mutant would speed the chromosome shortening and trigger premature aging.
"There's another possibility that could affect offspring. Let's say gene therapy leads to an excess of telomerase in the germline—the cells that reproduce to create new life. The mutant enzyme seems to make the ends of the DNA sticky, causing the chromosomes to clump together. During replication, the chromosomes must separate into the daughter cells. If the mutant causes the ends to stick, the daughters might end up with missing chromosomes or extra chromosomes."
"So the offsp
ring could be freaks?" asked Jude.
"Well, they could be damaged in some way."
Sometimes Tizzie was alarmed at how insensitive Jude could be.
"Your theory explains why they stopped giving me injections," said Skyler.
They both looked at him.
"Why?" Tizzie asked.
"If they made a breakthrough using gene therapy, they would surely want to measure it the best way possible. Why use young men and women? It would make more sense to use children. They would show the results more clearly, because the aging process is more visible, and so, more measurable."
"That's it," said Jude. "They switched to the Nursery. And it backfired and caused that disease—what's it called?"
"Progeria," replied Tizzie.
"It might explain something else," continued Skyler. "If Raisin was a member of the original experimental group, then they would certainly want to analyze his tissue after death. They would need to know if anything was going wrong. That's why there was the break-in at the autopsy office in New Paltz."
"Yes," said Jude. He remembered Raymond reaching the same conclusion, but this was more compelling.
The recollection triggered another one.
"How about those bodies that have been turning up?" he asked. "In Georgia and elsewhere. They're mutilated, so no one can identify them—so we can assume they were clones. But their insides are missing, too."
"There is a possible explanation," said Tizzie. "But it's pretty damn gruesome, and it would take a monster to think of it and carry it out."
"Go on," said Skyler.
"It's possible that the organs are required for something. Let's say the prototypes of the clones got the original rejuvenation treatment, that they underwent gene therapy. For a while, everything was going along great. They've arrested aging—they're feeling younger than ever. Then it started turning bad—it triggered premature aging. They try everything. A crash program in research, experiment with monkeys, experiment with child clones—you name it, they'll do it. The people they've sold this bill of goods to are turning ugly. But they come up empty-handed. One way to try to stop it, a last-ditch desperate measure, would be some kind of massive replacement of body parts. Not just heart or lung or kidney, but everything. It's called an organ block transplant. It's rare. The chances of success are not good. But... if you're desperate enough—"
