54

Baltimore

Kaye walked with steady confidence from her building to Americol, looking up at the Bromo-Seltzer Tower—so named because it had once carried a huge blue antacid bottle on its peak. Now it carried just the name; the bottle had been removed decades ago.

Kaye could not shake Mitch from her thoughts, but oddly, he was not a distraction. Her thoughts were focused; she had a much clearer idea of what to look for. The play of sun and shadow pleased her as she walked past the alleys between the buildings. The day was so pretty she could almost ignore the presence of Benson. As always, he accompanied her to the lab floor, then stood by the elevators and the stairs, where everyone would have to pass his inspection.

She entered her lab and hung her purse and coat on a glassware drying rack. Five of her six assistants were in the next room, checking the results of last night’s electrophoresis analysis. She was glad to have some privacy.

She sat at her small desk and pulled up the Americol intranet on the computer. It was just a few seconds from the first screen to AmericoFs proprietary Human Genome Project site. The database was beautifully designed and easy to poke through, with key genes identified and functions highlighted and explained in detail.

Kaye plugged in her password. In her original work, she had tracked down seven potential candidates for the expression and reassembly of complete and infectious HERV particles. The candidate genes she had thought most likely to be viable had turned out—luckily, she would have thought— to be associated with SHEVA. In her months at Americol, she had begun to study the six other candidates in detail, and had planned to move on to a list of thousands of possibly related genes.

Kaye was considered an expert, but what she was an expert in, compared to the huge world of human DNA, was a series of broken-down and seemingly abandoned shacks in a number of small and almost forgotten towns. The HERV genes were supposed to be fossils, fragments scattered through stretches of DNA less than a million base pairs long. Within such small distances, however, genes could recombine—jump from position to position—with some ease. The DNA was constantly in ferment—genes switching locations, forming little knots or fistulas of DNA, and replicating, a series of churning and twisting chains constantly being rearranged, for reasons no one could yet completely fathom. And yet SHEVA had remained remarkably stable over millions of years. The changes she was looking for would be both slight and very significant.

If she was right, she was about to overturn a major scientific paradigm, injure a lot of reputations, cause the scientific fight of the twenty-first century, a war actually, and she did not want to be an early casualty because she had come to the battlefield in half a suit of armor. Speculation about the cause was not sufficient. Extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence.

Patiently, hoping it would be at least an hour before anyone else entered the lab, she once again compared the sequences found in SHEVA with the six other candidates. This time she looked closely at the transcription factors that triggered expression of the large protein complex. She rechecked the sequences several times before she spotted what she had known since yesterday must be there. Four of the candidates carried several such factors, all subtly different.

She sucked in her breath. For a moment she felt as if she stood on the brink of a tall cliff. The transcription factors would have to be specific for different varieties of LPC. That meant there would be more than one gene coding for the large protein complex.

More than one station on Darwin’s radio.

Last week Kaye had asked for the most accurate available sequences of over a hundred genes on several chromosomes. The manager of the genome group had told her they would be available this morning. And he had done his work well. Even scanning by eye, she was seeing interesting similarities. With so much data, however, the eye was not good enough. Using an in-house software package called METABLAST, she searched for sequences roughly homologous with the known LPC gene on chromosome 21. She requested and was authorized to use most of the computing power of the building’s mainframe for over three minutes.

When the search was completed, Kaye had the matches she had hoped for—and hundreds more besides, all buried in so-called junk DNA, each subtly different, offering a different set of instructions, a different set of strategies.

LPC genes were common throughout the twenty-two human autosomes, the chromosomes that did not code for sex.

“Backups,” Kaye whispered, as if she might be overheard, “alternates,” and then she felt a chill. She pushed back from the desk and paced around the lab. “Oh, my God. What in hell am I thinking here?”

SHEVA in its present form was not working properly. The new babies were dying. The experiment—the creation of a new subspecies—was being thwarted by outside enemies, other viruses, not tame, not co-opted ages ago and made part of the human tool kit.

She had found another link in the chain of evidence. If you wanted a message delivered, you would send many messengers. And the messengers could carry different messages. Surely a complex mechanism that governed the shape of a species would not rely on one little messenger and one fixed message. It would automatically alternate subtle designs, hoping to dodge whatever bullets might be out there, problems it could not directly sense or anticipate.

What she was looking at could explain the vast quantities of HERV and other mobile elements—all designed to guarantee an efficient and successful transition to a new pheno-type, a new variety of human. We just don’t know how it works. It’s so complicated...it could take a lifetime to understand!

What chilled her was that in the present atmosphere, these results would be completely misinterpreted.

She pushed her chair back from the computer. All of the energy she had had in the morning, all the optimism, the glow from her night with Mitch, seemed hollow.

She could hear voices down the hall. The hour had passed quickly. She stood and folded the printout of the candidate sites. She would have to take these to Jackson; that was her first duty. Then she had to talk with Dicken. They had to plan a response.

She pulled her coat from the drying rack and slipped it on. She was about to leave when Jackson stepped in from the hall. Kaye looked at him with some shock; he had never come down to her lab before. He looked tired and deeply concerned. He, too, held a slip of paper.

“I thought I should be the first to let you know,” he said, waving the paper under her nose.

“Let me know what?” Kaye asked.

“How wrong you can possibly be. SHEVA is mutating.”

Kaye finished the day in a three-hour round of meetings with senior staff and assistants, a litany of schedules, deadlines, the day-to-day minutiae of research in a small part of a very large corporation, mind-numbing at the best of times, but now almost intolerable. Jackson’s smug condescension at the delivery of the news from Germany had almost goaded her into a sharp rejoinder, but she had simply smiled, said she was already working on the problem, and left...To stand for five minutes in the women’s rest room, staring at herself in a mirror.

She walked from Americol to the condominium tower, accompanied by the ever-watchful Benson, and wondered if last night had just been a dream. The doorman opened the big glass door, smiled politely at them both, and then gave the agent a brotherly nod. Benson joined her in the elevator car. Kaye had never been at ease with the agent, but had managed in the past to keep up polite conversation. Now she could only grunt to his inquiry about how her day had gone.

When she opened the door at 2011, for a moment she thought Mitch was not there, and let out her breath with a small whistle. He had gotten what he wanted and now she was alone again to face her failures, her most brilliant and devastating failures.

But Mitch came out of the small side office with a most pleasing haste and stood in front of her for a moment, searching her face, estimating the situation, before he held her, a little too gently.

“Squeeze me until I squeak,” she said. “I’m having a really bad day.”

That did not stop her from wanting him. Again the love was both intense and wet and full of a marvelous grace she had never felt before. She held on to these moments and when they could go on no more, when Mitch lay beside her covered with beads of sweat and the sheets beneath her were uncomfortably damp, she felt like crying.

“It’s getting really tough,” she said, her chin quivering.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I think I’m wrong, we’re wrong. I know I’m not but everything is telling me I’m wrong.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Mitch said.

“No!” she cried. “I predicted this, I saw it happening, but not soon enough, and they aced me. Jackson aced me. I haven’t talked with Marge Cross, but...”

It took Mitch several minutes to work the details out of her, and even then, he could only half follow what she was saying.

 The short form was that she felt new expressions of SHEVA were stimulating new varieties of LPCs, large protein complexes, in case the first signal on Darwin’s radio had not been effective or had met with problems. Jackson and nearly everyone else believed they were encountering a mutated form of SHEVA, perhaps even more virulent.

“Darwin’s radio,” Mitch repeated, mulling over the term.

“The signaling mechanism. SHEVA.”

“Mmm hmm,” he said. “I think your explanation makes more sense.”

“Why does it make more sense? Please tell me I’m not just being pigheaded and wrong.”

“Put the facts together,” Mitch said. “Run it through the science mill again. We know speciation sometimes occurs in small leaps. Because of the mummies in the Alps, we know SHEVA was active in humans who were producing new kinds of babies. Speciation is rare even on a historical time scale—and SHEVA was unknown in medical science until just recently. There are far too many coincidences if SHEVA and evolution in small leaps aren’t connected.”

She rolled to face him, and ran her fingers along his cheeks, around his eyes, in a way that made him flinch.

“Sorry,” she said. “It is so marvelous that you’re here. You restore me. This afternoon—I have never felt so lost...not since Saul was gone.”

“I don’t think Saul ever knew what he had, with you,” Mitch said.

Kaye let this lie between them for a moment, to see if she quite understood what it meant. “No,” she said finally. “He wasn’t capable of knowing.”

“I know who and what you are,” Mitch said.

“Do you?”

“Not yet,” he confessed, and smiled. “But I’d like to try.”

“Listen to us,” Kaye said. “Tell me what you did today.”

“I went to the YMCA and cleared out my locker. I took a cab back here and lounged around like a gigolo.”

“I mean it,” Kaye said, gripping his hand tighter.

 “I made some phone calls. I’m going to take a train to New York tomorrow to meet with Merton and our mysterious stranger from Austria. We’re getting together at a place that Merton describes as a ‘wonderful, thoroughly corrupting old mansion upstate.’Then I’ll take the train to Albany for my interview at SUNY.”

“Why a mansion?”

“I have no idea,” Mitch said.

“You’re coming back?”

“If you want me to.”

“Oh, I want you to. You don’t need to worry about that,” Kaye said. “We’re not going to have much time to think, much less worry.”

“Wartime romance is the sweetest,” Mitch said.

“Tomorrow is going to be much worse,” Kaye said. “Jackson is going to make a stink.”

“Let him,” Mitch said. “In the long run, I don’t think anybody is going to be able to stop this. Slow it down, maybe, but not stop it.”