Tom Hyman (40 page)

She remembered having seen a copy of a book with a title something like The Complete Guide to Sherlock Holmes in Goth’s laboratory at the hospital in El Coronado. It was the only book she ever saw in his vicinity that related to anything other than the subject of genetics, and it had surprised her. He had also said something about being a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s. Maybe he had picked his code word from one of Conan Doyle’s stories.

It was a thin reed of hope, but it was better than nothing.

Anne went to the public library and checked through everything available by or about Arthur Conan Doyle. There was quite a list.

She took home half a dozen books, including The Complete Sherlock Holmes, and started reading them.

Anne had never read anything by Conan Doyle, and her only acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes came from snatches from old Basil Rathbone movies she had seen her mother watching on television a long time ago.

After reading a few of the stories, she began to see how Goth might have identified with Holmes. They were both puzzle solvers of sorts, and they were both loners—maverick geniuses who had little patience for society’s conventions.

She thumbed through several guides, reading short summaries of the many tales involving the great detective and his friend Watson. She was sure she was on to something.

Several days and two hundred potential code words later, her optimism faded. She might have narrowed the search, but she had not narrowed it enough. There were still too many possibilities.

She skimmed through Goth’s writings again. They were all about genetics. And they were all written in a dense, turgid style, using language even scholars in the field would have found daunting.

Anne tried another hundred words, but the right one continued to elude her. She shut the door to the study and didn’t go back inside for a week. She spent the entire seven days with her daughter, who had begun to feel neglected.

When the week had passed, she opened the door to the study again, not sure what she intended to do. She glanced around the :lisordered mess of books and papers. Immediately that familiar sensation of frustration and futility began to overwhelm her. She backed out of the room, shut the door again, and walked down the hallway toward her bedroom.

She stopped suddenly. She walked back to the study door, opened it, and peered inside.

The book had caught her eye before but had failed to register its message on her consciousness. Now it did.

It was jammed sideways on top of the tightly packed row of books on the top shelf of the bookcase nearest her desk. Its title was The Double Helix. Written thirty-four years earlier, it described the discovery of the shape of the DNA molecule and opened the door to the eventual breaking of the DNA code itself.

It was a classic in the scientific literature. Anne had read it in college.

There were two authors. One of them was an Englishman named Francis Crick. The other one was an American—a scientific maverick not unlike Goth. Goth had cited him frequently in his own writings. His name was James Watson.

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She felt a slight tingling.

Watson.

The same last name as Sherlock Holmes’s erstwhile companion, Dr. John Watson.

The same initials, too. One had been a medical doctor, the other a scientist. Goth had been both. It could just possibly be, she thought. Simple, obvious. Probably too obvious. And hadn’t she already tried the word “Watson”? She couldn’t remember.

Anne turned on the computer and waited for Jupiter to boot up. She balled her hands into nervous fists. She had been disappointed so many times before.

At the prompt Anne typed “WATSON” and hit Return. “Please let this be right,” she whispered. “Please.”

Nothing unusual happened. The program displayed the identical prompts as it had always displayed. She caught her breath.

Maybe nothing different was supposed to happen.

She worked her way through Jupiter’s long list of options, fed her genome into the database, and repeated the process with Dalton’s genome. When the program finally began printing out its new genome, she was afraid to look at it. She pressed her hands against her eyes and took several deep breaths. She uncovered her eyes, finally, and stared at the printout. This time Jupiter had answered with an exact duplicate of Genny’s genome.

She felt breathless. She had just reproduced the identical blueprint that Harold Goth had used to alter the genetic code of the fertilized egg he had implanted in her womb almost four years ago.

Anne went out to the kitchen refrigerator. It was one o’clock in the morning and she suddenly realized she was ravenously hungry. She opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio and consumed half of it, along with a leftover bean salad that Mrs. Callahan had made, a turkey drumstick, a small carton of yogurt, and a wedge of Camembert.

She went to bed that night in a kind of giddy, astonished euphoria, as if she had just won the Nobel Prize and couldn’t quite believe it.

The excitement of her accomplishment died the next morning.

Despite her discovery of the access code, she realized she still had no understanding at all of how Jupiter achieved its results.

And trying to improve that understanding quickly became as formidable a task as finding the code word itself had been. She spent more weeks analyzing the genetic script of Genny’s genome.

She tried to determine which genes Jupiter had copied whole from one parent, which ones were the result of recombination (a mixture of both parents’ genes), and which, if any, Jupiter had created on its own.

When Anne wasn’t bent over her computer, she was buried behind growing stacks of textbooks and scientific journals. She checked so many volumes out of the medical library at Columbia University that one of the librarians complained about it.

She begged and borrowed sample genomes—normally prohibitively expensive items—from wherever she could. Some came from some of her old biology professors in college and others from people she had worked with at the Vermont laboratory now owned by her husband’s parent company, Biotech.

With these extra male and female “parent” genomes she used Jupiter to create several dozen new “son” and “daughter” genomes. With these additional genetic blueprints she could make comparisons and begin to isolate patterns in Jupiter’s manipulation of gene structures.

Two problems threatened to derail her from the start. First was the tremendous complexity of the subject itself. She frequently felt on the verge of losing her intellectual grasp of it. Her feelings about Goth and genetics in general underwent constant shifts: one day she would be frustrated and confused beyond endurance; another day she would be overcome with awe and admiration at the magnificence of it all. She would marvel at how anything as complex and as elegantly designed as life could ever have come into existence. The more one knew about genetics, she thought, the more necessary it became to believe in God. Chance and evolution alone could not possibly account for such a dazzlingly intricate cascade of miracles.

The second problem was the absolutely staggering amount of data involved. Along the spiral ladders of DNA that made up each human genome there were those three billion individual base pairs of nucleotides. About two billion of them served no known function. The remaining one billion made up the individual genes that determined the sex, shape, size, color, personality, intelligence, and every other aspect of each individual of the animal species Homo sapiens.

b Some of the genes were quite simple and straightforward in the functions they performed. The roles of others were either still hotly debated or unknown. Some genes were quite small, containing only a few thousand base pairs. Others were enormous agglutinations several hundred thousand base pairs in length. And the alteration of a single base—the change of the sequence ATTC to AGTC in a certain location in the overall sequence, for example—could completely alter the functioning of the entire gene, even shut it down altogether. The knowledge of what precise alterations in which genes caused what changes in the function of the genes was the basis of the whole science of genetic engineering. Hundreds of thousands of experiments had been conducted, hundreds of thousands of papers had been written to this ‘,n end, and still so much remained unknown.

Without the high-speed computer and sophisticated software that could catalogue, analyze, sort, crossreference, and manipulate tremendous amounts of data in milliseconds, Anne would not even have been able to begin her quest to understand Jupiter. But even with the help of this advanced equipment, the mysteries of Goth’s program—how he had been able to extract from the human genome the kinds of extraordinary functions she saw in operation in her daughter every day—continued to elude her.

Anne felt reasonably certain that Jupiter must call for some unusual alterations of some genes somewhere, but so far she had been unable to find even one. A special genetics screening program, a copy of which she had borrowed from the lab she once worked for in Burlington, had combed repeatedly through the sequences of Genny’s genes and failed to find any marked alterations in the arrangements of the base pairs. It had also failed to find any in the other Jupiter-created genomes.

Every one of the gene sequences analyzed—and the screening program had analyzed over a hundred thousand—came out as either a duplicate of one of the parent genes or a combination of both, and all were well within the accepted parameters of the patterns of genetic inheritance. It was maddening. Anne couldn’t extract even a hint as to how Genny could possess such extraordinary faculties.

Genny’s eyesight, for example. Anne knew from the tests Paul Elder had administered that her daughter could see across a broader band of the light spectrum than normal. Yet none of the genes that controlled Genny’s eyesight showed any abnormalities.

In fact they were exactly the same as Anne’s, base pair for base pair.

Logically, then, Genny’s eyesight should be within the normal range, the same as Anne’s. But it wasn’t.

No unusual sequences of base pairs—or evidence of any additional sequences—appeared on the genes responsible for the functioning of Genny’s other senses, either.

Anne considered one last possible solution to the mystery. She had read that widely separated and apparently unrelated genes, sometimes even located on separate chromosomes, frequently worked in collaboration. So it was plausible that Genny’s extraordinary capacities were the result of new and unknown combinations of genes working together.

Checking this theory out quickly proved to be a practical nightmare.

Every one of Genny’s 150,000-plus genes had to be compared against a series of genetic models that covered the known human genetic range.

After a month of exhausting labor, Anne managed to process only ten thousand of Genny’s genes. The results: zero. She had uncovered irregularities in coding, but that was normal; human DNA was enormously repetitive and redundant. But in the crucial areas of protein coding and control sequences, nothing unusual or suspicious had turned up.

At the rate she was progressing, she realized, it would take at least two years to analyze the entire genome. There must be a better way.

Lexy dropped in frequently, and occasionally they went out for lunch or dinner. But Anne was always impatient to get back to work.

“You’re turning this into an obsession,” Lexy told her.

“I have to know.”

“Why? What good will it do you?”

“Genny’s not even three years old yet. Her development’s only beginning. Something could go wrong. I’ve got to be prepared for it if it does.”

“Give yourself a break. You’ve getting dark purple circles under your eyes. You look like your mascara slipped.”

“I don’t use mascara.”

“And you’re losing weight.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“Listen, Annie. You’ve lost at least fifteen pounds in the last three months. Your ribs are beginning to show. Make the damned thing public. Go to the press. Lay it out. Tell them about Genny.

Tell them what happened. They’ll eat it up. Or go to the NIH.

Get the government involved. Let the scientists who’re supposed to know what they’re doing slave away on it for a while.”

‘ “I’m doing fine by myself. And going public would be crazy. I have to protect Genny. And I want to stop Jupiter, not promote it. It’s immoral to manipulate the design of human beings like this. Not to mention dangerous.”

“You’ve told me that a thousand times. I’m beginning to believe it.

But how does what you’re doing prevent Dalton and that kraut Valkyrie Baroness Brunnhilde von Mauser from developing it?”

Anne smiled.

“Is that supposed to be a gloating expression?”

“Jupiter won’t work the way they’re using it.” She revealed to Lexy her discovery of the silent access code.

Lexy shrugged. “How do you know somebody at Biotech or Hauser hasn’t figured that out already?”

“I seriously doubt they could.”

“Well, let’s celebrate, then. You need some serious air and refreshment. There’s a new Italian restaurant on Bank Street.

Let’s go try it.”

Anne looked wistfully at her computer screen, its rows of glowing amber letters beckoning to her. “I’m really not that hungry, Lexy.”

“Damn it, do I have to force-feed you? Come on!”

Anne made the breakthrough by accident. Blurry-eyed and groggy one evening after staring at the computer monitor for hours, she suddenly realized that she could no longer understand the information on the screen in front of her.

. She typed out “HELP.” She did it as a desperate joke—as a protest at the ordeal Jupiter was putting her through. Even though her knowledge of the field of genetics had vastly increased from what it had been only months before, it was mostly still so new to her that she frequently found it necessary to stop what she was doing and consult some reference or other in order to refresh her memory about a process or a term. The job was made all the more timeconsuming and discouraging by the fact that Jupiter had no manual to explain how it worked. Considering the size and sophistication of the program, it was something of an accomplishment that she had learned how to operate it at all. But she constantly wondered if there might not be other things it could do for her, if only she knew how to ask.