The Highest Frontier (19 page)

Jenny looked questioningly at Anouk.

“Accept the quest,” Anouk whispered loudly.

She took the key. “We, um, accept the quest.”

“Be warned—beware the Convolvula. It has a copper deficiency.” With that parting shot, the four horses galloped off, tails waving. Jenny was left holding the key, which had a couple of teeth and a curious twig-shaped rune.

Anouk rolled her eyes. “This is worse than Middle Earth.”

“So what next?”

“Observe.” Anouk cast around, looking this way and that over the clumps of grass. She zeroed in on a rock. “Look there.”

The rock had a bronze keyhole. Jenny fitted the key into the hole. The rock began to slide with a grating sound. As it came to a halt, a new object appeared in Jenny’s inventory: a fresh hen’s egg.

Beyond lay dark. So Anouk produced a lit torch. Jenny blinked her inventory and pulled out her torch as well. The torchlight revealed a stairway down. The two students stepped gingerly down the stairs. Jenny scanned the corridor walls, wondering how all this would help find the Queen’s baby.

The students emerged in a forest, no more sunlit savannah. The trees were so dense that only glimmers of sun came through. Birds and insects called unseen. As Jenny’s eyes adjusted, she saw a glowing tablet held up amid a tangle of vines. The tablet showed the genetic code of DNA.

“Convolvula.” Anouk reached for the tablet. “Ow! Jenny!” Anouk was pinned to a tree by the vines. “Keep off,” she yelled as Jenny approached. “
Merde,
every toyworld has a scene like this. Go back and get the torch.”

Jenny hurried back down the stairs and retrieved her forgotten torch, still lit. She brandished it at the vines surrounding Anouk. The vines blackened and smoked with a foul stench, but still clutched Anouk. One snaked around Jenny’s legs and bound her too. Fighting panic, Jenny tried to think.

“It must be something else,” muttered Anouk. “The key! It’s bronze, that includes copper!
Tout de suite!
”

Jenny blinked at her inventory to retrieve the key. Immediately the copper-starved vines let up and converged on the key, tangling around it until it vanished beneath the leaves. Anouk withdrew, the tablet in her hand. As they backed off from the vines, Jenny wondered uneasily how the rest of the class was doing. She clicked Tom’s window.

The window opened. There lay Tom entangled in the vines, with Charlie caught behind him.

“Hi, Jenny,” said Tom, trying to sound unconcerned. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out. How are you doing?”

She smiled. “Give it the key.”

“I can’t—we left the key behind in the stone.”

Anouk gave him a withering look. “Just a minute.” Her eyes scanned back and forth, writing code. Another rune key appeared before Tom. Jenny didn’t ask how, although she suspected this work-around broke the rules.

“Thanks,” called Tom, and Charlie waved heroically. “We’ll see you later.” The window winked shut.

Ahead, a patch of light poked through the trees. A path led to a small wooden cottage. Jenny and Anouk approached cautiously. A broken road sign read,
TORINO 10 KM.

“Italy, of course.” Anouk knocked on the door.

The door opened, revealing a young woman with expressive eyebrows, elegantly coifed hair, and a long floral dress. Her smile was kind, though infinitely sad.
“Buon giorno. Avete portato le uova?”

“Buon giorno,”
replied Anouk, going on in Italian. She told Jenny, “Doctor Levi-Montalcini wants the egg.”

The first Nobel Laureate—long before she won the prize, Jenny guessed. Jenny blinked the egg from her inventory.

“Thank you,” replied Rita Levi-Montalcini in English as she closed the door behind them. “I hope there was a rooster in the henhouse, so the egg will be of use. I wish I could say ‘Welcome to Turin,’ but 1941 is not a welcoming time in Europe.” Her fingers clenched for emphasis. “Now if you’ll both come this way, I have some embryos prepared.”

The chick embryos were set in a glass incubator, with two round openings for arms to manipulate while maintaining the temperature. The incubator stood on a small side table, crowded next to a Zeiss microscope and a microtome. The rest of the room contained a dining table set for four and a china closet.

An elderly man with red-tinged white hair came to the microscope. He adjusted the focus and peered intently at a slide.

“Our great teacher, Doctor Giuseppe Levi,” she introduced. “No relation, but he taught three who won Nobels.” A Nobel Prize from a country dining room.

The table jarred as Giuseppe Levi rose too fast, bumping into it. He lifted his large hands.
“Scusi, starò più attento.”

Levi-Montalcini reached into the incubator and held a large magnifier above one of the culture dishes. Upon the egg yolk grew an embryo, a red disc of twining blood vessels and limb buds. “In the chick embryo, I cut out a wing bud and saw the loss of nerve growth, an experiment devised by my German friend Viktor Hamburger. Viktor thought that removing the wing bud stopped new cells from becoming nerves.”

Giuseppe Levi raised his arms and spoke excitedly, his arm waving perilously near the microscope.

“Yes, dear,” she assured him, “of course we thought differently.” Her hands rose and fell as if conducting an orchestra. “I argued that the nerve cells degenerate, in the absence of a signal—”

From outside, overhead, came a whining sound. The whine fell in pitch, like distant fireworks, ending with a muffled explosion.

Her eyes flew open. “Extinguish your torch,” she hissed. “And crawl under the table.” Grabbing the Zeiss microscope, she cradled it protectively and climbed under the dining table.

The torch would not go out; Jenny fumbled, fearing to burn herself or set the cottage on fire. Anouk whispered, “Return it to your inventory.” With a wink the torch vanished, and Jenny joined them under the table. Another descending whine, and an explosion shook the floor. The explosions continued, growing in intensity and tumbling one upon another. She froze in panic, trapped like the ultra in the tree. A final explosion deafened her; it must surely have destroyed the house. But afterward, all was still.

“As non-Aryans,” Levi-Montalcini explained under the table, “we had to hide in the country to pursue our work. Here, I found the first clues for a signal to grow nerves. Nerve growth factor.” Her eyes widened at Jenny, scrunched by the table leg. “Nerve growth factor grows, when your life changes. For instance, when you fall in love.”

Startled, Jenny looked away.

Rita Levi-Montalcini climbed nimbly out from the table, helping the two students up. “After the war, Victor invited me to your country, the University of Washington, St. Louis.”

Light flooded the room, which was now a comfortable laboratory with several microscopes and incubators. Outside the window, a bell rang twice. In the city street a trolley car rolled by, while men in top hats and women in long dresses strolled the sidewalk. Levi-Montalcini now had lines in her forehead, and she wore a lace blouse with pearls.

“In St. Louis, we began our experiments to isolate the mystery signal that made nerves grow.” She gave Jenny and Anouk a closer look at the chick embryos, each with a head, a long curving backbone, and limb buds, all pulsing with new blood vessels.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jenny saw something move. A large black handbag sat by the incubator. She couldn’t help notice that the handbag was moving and stretching; something was happening inside.

“We asked: Can a foreign tissue producing the right signal make a nerve grow?” The doctor drew out a set of slides and placed the first one under a microscope. “I used my new technique of silver staining to mark nerve axons in the chick embryo. In this embryo, I implanted a source of the signal: a mouse tumor.”

“A mouse tumor in a chick embryo?” wondered Jenny.

Anouk shrugged. “Mouse and chick DNA are two-thirds the same.”

“I learned that much later,” observed the doctor, “though in retrospect, I’m not surprised. Tell me: What do you see in this embryo?”

A tangle of nerves blackened by silver grew everywhere. Jenny could scarcely make sense of it. She and Anouk took turns at the microscope.

“Any nerves in the mouse tumor?” hinted the doctor.

“Not in the tumor,” said Jenny. “But here, in the chick veins just outside the tumor, there are lots of new nerves.” Bundles of axons, creeping out from the neurons. “Where you wouldn’t expect nerves to be.”

Anouk was ticking numbers in a column of the lab notebook from her inventory. “You must compare numbers with the control, which lacks the tumor. A t-test shows the growth of chick nerves is significant.”

“Excellent,” observed the doctor. “The nerves grew. But what signal caused this growth? I had to isolate the signal from mouse tumors.” She opened her handbag. Out of the handbag crept two white mice. The mice sniffed the edge of the bag and cast their noses this way and that as if discovering a new world. Each mouse had a large misshapen lump on its back.

Levi-Montalcini pointed to each tumor. “Extracts of these tumors contain a signal that makes nerves grow. But this experiment was hard to do in the whole chick; we had to use chick neuron clusters in tissue culture. I had no tissue culture facility in St. Louis, so I boarded a plane with the mice hiding in my handbag—to visit my friend Hertha Meyer in Rio.”

The doctor went to the window, drew the blind shut, then thrust it up again. A cacophony of music filled the room, as if several bands competed in the street. The street was full of dancers in colorful costumes, adorned with outsized masks and mock genitals. “I believe Rio’s Carnival inspired an exuberant growth of nerves. Look!”

In each dish treated with the tumor extract, a black halo of nerves surrounded each chick neuron cluster. An urgent outgrowth, relentless like Convolvula. It made Jenny’s hair stand on end. If plants, now, grew such nerves—if they escaped, what then?

Anouk said, “The replicates look good. But where’s the control?”

“The control—good question. There’s a problem.” Levi-Montalcini produced several more dishes. “Instead of a tumor, this embryo was treated with a control: plain snake venom.”

A hissing sound. Jenny looked up. Levi-Montalcini withdrew a snake from a nearby terrarium. To her horror, Jenny saw it was a rattlesnake. With gloved hands, Levi-Montalcini held the snake’s head by a covered beaker. The head lunged, its fangs struck the cover, squirting venom through.

“It’s just a control,” Levi-Montalcini assured her. “Snake venom has an enzyme we use to degrade contaminants. It’s always around the lab; a good control. Compare the tumor-treated embryos with these controls, treated only with snake venom.”

They observed one dish after another. Anouk concluded, “The tumor works best, but the venom controls all grew some nerves.”

“Precisely. Even snake venom contains this nerve growth factor. The signal is made by many different animal tissues. Of course—many kinds of tissue need nerves, do they not?”

Chick embryos, mouse tumors, snake venom. All made the same signal, the same protein made by the same gene. And always told the neuron’s DNA to grow an axon. Axons that made your brain do a hundred different things—even fall in love.

The doctor rose and checked her watch. “I wish you could stay, but at last I came back to Rome, where I was named Senator for Life. The assembly is about to open.” Outside the cottage window rose a sunlit building with marble columns and statues. Levi-Montalcini’s face was now lined, like Rosa Schwarz when she became president; her hair white, her eyes keen as ever.

Jenny swallowed. “Could this protein … make nerves in a plant?”

“That comes after my time. Meanwhile, this will help you.” The white-haired senator gave Anouk and Jenny each a bag full of coins imprinted with polygons. “How does the signal work? It tells DNA to make RNA. You will traverse half a century now, so hold on tight.”

Wishing she could stay, Jenny put the coins up in her inventory. “Could I come back sometime?”

In her inventory quivered something new. It was a mouse with a lump on its back, curiously sniffing around her toybox. “Certainly, my friend. Just send me sarcoma thirty-seven.”

The cottage was already dissolving. Jenny hurried out after Anouk, and she blinked in the bright sun.

An enormous model of a molecule towered in the blue sky. The molecule looked much like DNA, but only a single strand that doubled back on itself in fiendish helical twists.

“It’s RNA,” exclaimed Anouk. RNA was the long chain of atomic “letters” that copied the gene to make a protein. “It must be the RNA to make proteins that grow the nerve.”

This RNA was not a straight line of bases, like she recalled from high school. Its bases doubled back to pair in short DNA-like helices. The helices made hairpin turns and hunched-over loops, forming helices to pair as many bases as it could. From the nearby end of one strand hung a car with little seats and bars to hold down the rider. With growing horror, Jenny realized what it was: a roller coaster.

Anouk took her hand. “Just hold on tight.”

“But—all those turns and loops.”

“
Enfin,
keep your eyes shut.”

They got into the nearest car, and pulled down the bar. The car started out slowly, chugging its way up the exposed strand. Then it took its first sickening plunge into a helix. The car looped over and over again, coming out just long enough to veer in another direction, into an even longer helix. Anouk laughed. “I’ll make Rafael ride this someday.”

After endless loops and turns, the car came to rest at the far end. Jenny knew she was still, although the world still rushed around her head. As her head came together, she became aware of a wooded hill and a large hospital complex. Beyond the hill, a brick-colored seawall held back the blue Pacific.

From one of the hospital towers, a woman in jeans came running out to meet them. Nancy Ng, the author of their homework paper—she’d won her Nobel the year Jenny started high school. “Welcome to San Francisco,” said Ng. “UCSF always needs good grad students. Hope you’ll consider us.”

The elevator took them up to the lab on the fifty-fourth floor. “My postdoc Lee Howell,” Ng introduced him.