Aftermath (58 page)

"On their way to Washington."

"Excellent. I don't want them going to State, though, I want them here. I'd like you to get on over there, change things so they come to the White House first, and bring the whole bunch of them here with you."

"Yes, sir. Sir, they didn't all survive."

"How many?"

"Three died during orbiter reentry. Four made it back to a safe landing—but apparently two of those are being held prisoner."

"They landed somewhere abroad?"

"No, sir. They landed in Virginia. But they were captured by members of the Legion of Argos."

"
Damn
that woman and her crazy organization. They pop up all over the place. Go over to State anyway, bring the survivors."

He read Yasmin's sudden discomfort, and went on, "If you think they'll give you a hard time over there, ask General Mackay to go with you. They hate her guts, and after their last runaround they're terrified of her."

"Yes,
sir.
"

"And while you're gone, I'll see what I can do to get the other two crew members freed."

As Yasmin left, Saul collapsed into the seat in front of the web controller. It seemed days since he had left it. How did you free members of the Mars crew from the grasp of the Legion of Argos? If you were ruthless and determined you invoked a domestic version of the Pax Americana. You found out where the prisoners were held, and went in with maximum firepower.

And if the prisoners were killed during the liberation process? Well, tough.

We had to destroy the village in order to save it.
Another century, another President, another continent. But that particular disaster would not happen on Saul Steinmetz's watch. You'd have to kill him first.

I have brought myself by long meditation to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.

Now that
was
Benjamin Disraeli. It all came down to purpose and will. Saul saw only one problem. What purpose and will didn't tell you, unfortunately, was
how
to do something that must be done.

40

From the secret diary of Oliver Guest.

Seth Parsigian, I surmise, is a good chess player and a better poker player. I do not mean by this, better than I am. But in the first two days at my house, we both knew who held the high cards. Consider.

He was totally dependent on me to produce a telomere monitoring system, without which his long-term survival was doubtful. Until that work was completed, he dared not kill or injure me. He could, of course, starve and abuse me in order to force my cooperation, but even here his power was limited. I had to be well enough to work.

I, on the other hand, daily gained in strength and confidence. Soon I would reach a point where I could vanish into the faceless multitude rendered homeless and hopeless by Supernova Alpha. I could begin a new life, if not in this country, then abroad. Travel itself might be more difficult, but travel controls and restrictions would surely be less.

All these facts, obvious to an intelligence far less acute than Seth Parsigian's, revealed themselves not in words but in acts. When I was working I could turn my back on him, fully confident that he would do nothing to harm or impede me. For him, on the other hand, constant vigilance was a necessity.

How was such continuous overview possible? The man was tough, but he was human. He had to sleep.

His solution was simple. The subbasement, from which there was no exit but the stairs, became my living quarters. I was locked down there all night, alone. It was the most frustrating situation in the world. Had the clone tanks been in working order, I would have been free to do with them anything I liked. As it was I was obliged to live for twenty-two hours a day with their gutted, useless shells in plain view, and think of what might have been.

Three times a day I ascended to the upper level of the house. There we would eat, go outside into the open air, and stroll around the big yard. Under Seth's watchful eye (and gun) I inspected and deplored the forsaken condition of my garden. I was careful to show no special interest in Methuselah, though it would probably have made no difference had I done so. Seth was, as he said, not big on turtles.

I moved all the equipment that I needed down one floor to the subbasement. There I had light and power and running water. And there I began work. Seth didn't need to be present, but of course he could not bear to stay away. He sat on the stairs, gun in hand, and watched my efforts.

I did not tell him this, but for those first couple of days he needed no gun. I had my compulsions, even as he had his. He had posed a challenging problem, in the central area where my own ego lies: How does one make an efficient device for telomere inspection, without genome scanners or anything else involving microchip technology?

After I had set up my microscope, ultra-centrifuge, electron capture detectors, and projection screen, I turned to Seth.

"As a first step, we are going to inspect the current state of your telomeres. For that, I need two things."

"Anything that helps, you got it."

I handed him two vials. "I require a skin fragment, from anywhere in your body. It can be small, all we need are a few cells. And we must have a semen sample."

Seth looked at the vials doubtfully. "Let me make sure I got this right, before I go an' do somethin' dumb. You want me to jerk off in this little jar?"

"Exactly."

"Mind if I ask why?"

"Not at all. During telomod therapy you were given two drugs. The first inhibited the telomerase enzyme. Without that, the telomeres at the ends of your chromosomes shortened every time a cell divided. The cancer cells in your body divided a number of times, rapidly, and then died. Next you were given a drug that
stimulated
the production of telomerase. This rebuilt the telomeres in your cells. Do you now need inhibitor or stimulant? I do not know. But once I have samples of both your germ cells and your normal body cells, I will use the information to calibrate the present condition of your telomeres."

I again held out the vials, and this time Seth took them. "Suppose I'd been a woman?"

"Then I would have needed an ovum. Think yourself lucky."

He retreated upstairs, and returned within a few minutes. "Here. Scientists, they take the fun out of everythin'."

Without molecular-level manipulators—another casualty of the supernova—it took a while to separate and display a single cell of each kind. While I worked, I marveled at the prodigality of Nature. The skin cell looming large on the projection screen contained the complete genetic code for Seth Parsigian. His body held a hundred trillion such cells. From any one, a copy of Seth's body could be grown. Here was lavish redundancy, on a scale incomprehensible to humans.

The skin cell on the screen was suspended in a dichroic solution. That allowed me to color-code and zoom in on the chromosomes, and then amplify further the end section of one. I froze the display at a level of magnification where the individual molecules of the nucleotide bases could be seen.

"Look at that," I said. "There you have a telomere. One of yours, but of course any vertebrate animal's telomere would look the same."

It helps when you have seen something a thousand times before. Seth was staring at a display of the end units of a DNA molecule's curved double helix, but I could see from the expression on his face that to him it was a meaningless jumble of blurry dots. In fact, adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine molecules have quite different structures, and their electron density distributions as seen by a scanning probe microscope are readily distinguished by an experienced eye.

"See," I said. "We start from the end there. The same sequence repeats, over and over. T-T-A-G-G-G. And again. T-T-A-G-G-G. When you were born, that would repeat about eight hundred times. The number of repeating sequences gets less all your life. Now let's count." Under my control, the scanning probe traveled steadily along the molecular chain. I was counting out loud, for Seth's benefit rather than my own. I already saw the general picture.

"I hope you're not expectin' me to learn to do that," Seth said. "All those gizmos look the same to me."

We were moving along the chromosome into the subtelomeric region. The regular repeating pattern T-T-A-G-G-G was breaking down.

I froze the display again. "Let me make a guess," I said. "You were due to be given a shot of telomerase stimulator in less than two months."

"How'd you know that?"

"The telomere is quite a bit shorter than it should be. Not dangerously so, but it needs rebuilding. Now let's check the sperm cell."

It was of course haploid, containing only one half of his genetic code. The other half required for a complete diploid individual came from the mother. However, each chromosome of the sperm was intact. Its telomere should have been completely rebuilt, which meant that the nucleotide sequence ought to repeat about fifteen hundred times.

This time I did not bother to count for Seth's benefit. I could see where random elements began to enter the sequence. The telomere was far too short, no more than a few hundred repetitions of the same pattern of the six nucleotide bases.

"So I'm in trouble," Seth said when I explained to him what we were looking at.

"Not at all. You just need to monitor this for yourself and learn when you need a telomerase inhibitor or stimulator."

"I already told you, everythin' looks the same to me. It's one big garbage can. I'd never learn to read it, and there's no way I could carry all this display stuff around with me."

"You won't have to do either of those things." I had made my point that he was dependent on me—more than ever, because he was close to needing treatment. "I'm going to package a set of wet chemistry tests for you. Then all you'll need to do is run through them with a skin sample and a semen or menstrual blood sample, and from the output you'll know what treatment you need. Making telomerase inhibitor and telomerase stimulator isn't hard for any biochemical supply house. I'll write that out for you."

"Great."

I went across to where he was sitting. "But before I start," I said, "I think we need to talk."

He didn't gape or frown or offer some other bogus pretense of lack of understanding. As I say, in his own disgusting way Seth Parsigian deserved lots of respect.

"I've been thinkin' that, too," he said. "Of course, before it was worth talkin' I needed to see evidence that you could do something for me. Now you've just given me that."

"Should I summarize how things stand, or will you?"

"Let me take a stab at my side, then you have a go at yours. Why don't you sit down—over there. I'd hate to have to shoot you."

From where I stood in front of him, I could, just conceivably, have made a dive for the gun. He was not to know that such a move on my part was most unlikely. My skin already contains a satisfactory number of apertures.

I went to sit down on a stool by the bench, and he continued, "Let's talk about what I want. I think that one's easy. I want the package you say you know how to make, something enough to last me a couple of years 'til things start gettin' back to normal, an' somethin' like the Institute's back in business. Actually, I want at least three of them packages. And I want you to explain exactly how to work 'em, so I can tell the other two."

"Really?"

"Yeah. You surprised? You shouldn't be. I could never have got to the Q-5 facility and yanked you out of there without help. We got common interests, me and the other Lazarus Club members. We're all different, an' I got my own life to live, but chances are good that I'll need their help again. I scratch their backs, they scratch mine. You have a problem with that?"

"Not in the slightest. The real tragedy of the commons is that it need never have happened. A logical basis for group-level altruism in terms of individual genetic advantage was provided more than forty years ago."

"That right? I guess it didn't make it yet to West Virginia, 'cause I've no idea what you're talkin' about. Anyway, now you know what I want. What do you want?"

I had to be careful. Some of what I wanted was absolutely none of his business. It was also more than he could possibly offer.

"I want to vanish. I want to disappear from the face of the Earth, as completely as if I had never existed. As a matter of fact, that was my plan had I not been caught and sentenced. Some distant isle, some quiet beach."

"That right?" His tone implied not skepticism, but indifference. That I was speaking the exact truth was not relevant.

"Now, of course, the matter is much more difficult. I know that I will be hunted. It may not happen at once, but it will surely happen. When the time comes, I cannot afford to have left a trail. After you and I separate, I don't want you to know where I'm going. I don't want
anyone
to know where I'm going."

"That's fine with me. I don't work for judicial control, it's not my job to do theirs for 'em. But we hafta work out the mechanics. Once you make me the telomod kits, you're a free man. But if you don't want me to know where you are, I can't just leave you here."

"Of course not."

"So what do we do?"

"The place that you're going to meet your two friends. Where is it?"

My fishing was no more successful than it had been a few days earlier. Seth smiled and said, "I don't recognize a need to know there, as my old spook buddies tend to say. Why are you askin'?"

"Is it in a city, or somewhere off in the country? That's all I want to know. If it's in the city, I don't want to go there. If it's out in the wilderness, that would be fine with me. I'd give you your telomod kits and take off from there."