Double Helix (7 page)

My father's lips tightened. “Wyatt
would
say that. And it may even be true, but that doesn't mean the work at—that place—would be any more interesting or stimulating than—”

“It wasn't Dr. Wyatt. It was this woman in Human Resources.” I hadn't thought of the cobralike Judith Ryan in days; it was weird to find myself speaking of her as if I'd been flattered by her or something.

“We're off track,” my father said.

“Yes,” I said.

A car came to a stop on the street outside; its engine idled for a few moments and then someone got out and slammed the door, and the car sped away.

“You'll call tomorrow,” my father said. “You'll tell them you've changed your mind. You can talk to Human Resources. There's no need to talk to Wyatt.”

“Did he know Mom?” I said.

My father stared at me.

“Were they lovers?” I said bluntly. “Is that why you're jealous ? Did Dr. Wyatt and Mom . . .” I couldn't find the right verb. I shut up. I couldn't look at my father. I fixed my eyes on the book he'd been reading and was surprised to see that it was one of mine, from English class. Poetry by William Blake.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
.

I could hear my father breathing shallowly.

“I'm sorry,” I said after a while. “That stuff isn't my business. It's private. I shouldn't have asked.”

“No,” said my father.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I mean no,” my father said clearly, “they were not lovers. Never.”

I looked up then. His face was as grim as the day we took her to the nursing home for good.

“And don't go thinking it was some hopeless crush on her part, either. Or anything romantic, on either side.”

I wasn't sure I believed him. “Okay. Then what is it that has you so angry—”

“No! I said I won't tell you, and I mean it. I am simply asking you to quit that job and do something else. Anything else. Will you?”

I thought of my dinner with Dr. Wyatt. I thought of his face as he toasted my high school graduation. I thought of how we had talked for hours, how
he
had talked, about creation and the possibilities of the world we lived in—the scientific possibilities, the real possibilities, the possibilities that would soon no longer be confined to the imagination. I thought of the world that he knew, that I did not, but could. Could. A world that, before, I had barely dared speculate about. Could pain and suffering really be eradicated? Were the possibilities for humanity as limitless as Dr. Wyatt believed?

I thought, too—I must confess—of the high salary I would be earning, and of how adult and in control having this good job made me feel, and of how happy Viv had been to learn of the job. How impressed she'd been to meet Dr. Wyatt today. I'd need something to keep her impressed next year, when she was with all those smart kids at Brandeis and I was a dropout. I wanted to keep Viv—for a while, anyway. Until it was too unfair to her . . .

I had been silent too long.

“This conversation is over,” said my father wearily. “Go do what you want.”

Later on, I would remember that moment as the turning point. Odd, because I'd have thought other moments would feel more decisive. But that was the one that stood out in my memory: the moment in which what I said, what I decided, was the single vital factor. The moment in which I stood with words—important, life-changing words—on my lips just waiting to come out.

I'll quit the job. I'll do what you ask, without any more questions. And you owe me
.

But I didn't say them. Instead, I said, “I'm sorry, Dad. I want to do this. If it had been about Mom—well, I would have quit. But since you say it isn't . . .”

I waited. I gave him a chance to tell me what it was about.

He didn't. After a moment, he simply picked up the William Blake, opened it, and began to read.

I left his room, closing the door behind me. I went to mine. I sat there in the dark, on the edge of my bed.

I was sorry to hurt my father. But I wanted to know Dr. Wyatt. There was at that time no force on earth that could have kept me from getting to know Dr. Wyatt and the world that he was promising to me.

And so, the next Monday, I went to my new job at Wyatt Transgenics.

“IT'S ALL ABOUT MILK, KID,” said my new boss, Larry Donohue, MS Molecular Biology, as he led me down one of the labyrinthine interior corridors of Wyatt Transgenics and past yet another bank of vending machines. Larry had seen fit to inform me within two breaths of hello that he was “working on a PhD at MIT,” but now, half an hour into our tour of the building, I found myself deciding that maybe he wasn't as pompous as that had made me think.

I was liking Larry. He seemed sort of—sunny. He bounced as he walked, even though he was wearing a pair of Reebok cross-trainers so decrepit that I couldn't believe they had any bounce left to them. The crown of his head barely reached my shoulder at the top of each hop. I tried to guess his age: maybe twenty-eight? Was that young to be doing what he was doing?

“Yep, milk. M-I-L-K,” Larry sang, as if he were in a commercial for the Dairy Association. “Milk from rabbits, mice, cows. Especially rabbits and mice.” He skipped a little bit as we turned a corner, and suddenly I knew that this job was going to be fantastic. Even if I was washing beakers and entering data into a computer.

I looked up and down the carpeted corridor, its stretch broken only by lab and office doors on either side. I sniffed and got only the scent of ammonia cleaner. “Mice and cows,” I repeated. “And rabbits. I see.”

Larry grinned up at me. “Well, of course this facility is mostly just labs and offices. Some of the mice and rabbits are here—the ones we're working with to develop new proteins, not the animals in active production. And we do have a milking room for the rabbits here, in the basement. It's kind of neat; the doe hangs out comfortably in a little sling while this vacuum tube apparatus does the milking by basically imitating the sucking of puppies. But we wouldn't dream of keeping any cows here. The big livestock is kept on the farm and dairy, out west.” He waved an arm to the north. “Near Amherst. Probably you'll get out there one day to see that part of things.”

“That would be great,” I said. “And what do we”—I was surprised to hear how easily that
we
slipped out—“do with the milk?”

“Well, here's the deal.” Larry stopped walking. “It's all about human protein development. Hey, what do you already know about this, so I don't waste your time?” He was too nice a guy to add,
or mine
.

“Pretty much nothing,” I admitted. “Um—you probably know this—I'm just a high school graduate.” I felt compelled to add, “I got this job as a—as a sort of favor, but I promise, I'm going to do my best here.”

“Yeah,” said Larry. “I'd heard that, uh, you were young.” He gave me a sideways look. “You know Dr. Wyatt, I understand?”

I didn't know what to say. I half-nodded and half-shrugged.

“Lucky you,” said Larry mildly. I still couldn't think of anything to say. I didn't have to, though. Larry simply continued talking.

“Well, I'll give you some books and articles to read, but here's the short story. You know what ‘transgenic' means? It's when an organism is altered by having a gene from another species transferred into it. Transgenic research involves studying organisms that have undergone this kind of manipulation. Clear so far?”

We had started walking again. I had a very unscientific urge to mention Spider-Man, who had been bitten by a radioactive spider. X-Men. Behind that silliness was the same idea, I now realized—the transfer of genetic material. Transgenics. Perhaps the very key to the end of suffering that Dr. Wyatt had talked about. “I get it,” I said.

But it was as if Larry had read my mind. “Take the Swamp Thing. You know him? Half-plant, half-man?”

“Yeah,” I said. Then I added gravely: “It was a terrible accident in the laboratory.”

“It's
always
a terrible accident in the lab.” Larry placed a hand over his heart. “Or sabotage.” Then he grinned. “But hey, Eli, did you read the issue where we found out that wasn't
quite
what happened?”

“To tell you the truth, I just saw the movie. Years ago.”

We had reached our own home lab, on the east side of the building. Larry waved me through the doorway and followed, bouncing again. “Oh, and there was a TV series, too. On cable. Anyway, get this. Turns out Dr. Alec Holland actually
died
before he fell into that swamp. His corpse decomposed and got eaten by the swamp plants at the bottom. The plants absorbed the super-growth plant formula—remember, Dr. Holland was covered by it in the explosion?—and the plants became intelligent. Get it? The plants actually figured out how to mimic a human body in plant form. The plant creature thought it was Dr. Holland! So, Swampy isn't a man who's turned into a plant. Swampy's a plant that tried to become a man.”

“Vive la différence,”
said a voice behind us.

“This is relevant, Mary Alice,” said Larry. “Okay, introductions. Mary Alice Gregorian, Eli Samuels. Eli, Mary Alice actually runs this particular lab on a day-to-day basis; sets the schedules and so on, while I focus on directing our research path.”

Mary Alice was a middle-aged woman with a long braid of hair. She had a pair of plastic goggles dangling around her neck. We shook hands. “I'll show you the rabbits,” she said. “We'll put you on feeding, care, and milking rotation after you learn how to work with them.”

“Rabbits,” I said. Well, it wasn't cleaning beakers. “Huh.”

“Try to contain your enthusiasm,” said Larry. “You'll like them. They're cuddly, and, well, you get used to the pellets.”

“They are
sooo
cuddly,” said Mary Alice. “But it's important to remember they're research subjects, and very valuable. They're not pets.”

“I was actually just explaining our research to Eli,” Larry said to Mary Alice. “Swampy came up in passing.”

“He always does.” Mary Alice directed my attention to the far wall. Above a computer desk hung a Swamp Thing poster, meticulously matted and framed. On it, a giant leafy hand was emerging from murky water; above that were the words:
Too intelligent to be captured. Too powerful to be destroyed
.

“So much weirder than Batman,” murmured Mary Alice.

Larry practically choked. “Mary Alice, you don't understand this and you never will. Batman's nothing to do with transgenics. He has no genetic enhancements. He's just plain psychotic.”

Mary Alice rolled her eyes. “Sorry.”

“You should be.” Larry sat down. Then I saw a secret smile creep over both their faces and realized I had been watching a little routine between them, a skit that they both enjoyed and probably repeated regularly, whenever there was a new audience—like me.

“Anyway,” Larry said to me. “As I was saying. Here at Wyatt, we're using transgenic technology to develop human proteins outside of humans—proteins that can then be harvested and used in humans. The potential medical and therapeutic benefits are mind-boggling. It's not a unique idea. Other companies, like Genzyme, are doing it, too—although - they're really into working with goats. But we think we've got the inside track right now, especially with rabbits.”

Mary Alice said, “We give the transgenic genes—genes that originate in humans—to the animals. The genes cause the animals to express certain human therapeutic proteins in their milk. Then we milk the animals, and purify the proteins out of the milk. The resulting proteins can then be used in a variety of medical applications.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Treatments for arthritis,” said Larry. “Cancer. Several conditions that attack the immune system. And that's only for starters—once you begin thinking about the potential, well, your brain starts to reel. And even the animal rights people can't complain—I mean, we're talking
milk
here. Our animals lead good, useful lives. They're valuable to us, and we treat them well. We're lucky; so many areas of biogenetic research are fraught with controversy, but ours hasn't really had to take those kinds of PR attacks.”

I nodded. I couldn't think of any reason why this sort of work shouldn't be done, either. It certainly wasn't full of the kind of potentially treacherous moral issues that I'd been discussing with Dr. Wyatt the other night, as we spoke about free will and human genetic destiny. “It's pretty impressive, what you do here,” I said, and meant it.

In actual fact, Larry and Mary Alice hadn't told me anything that I didn't already know, from researching Dr. Wyatt and from reading the company's promotional literature on their website and in my employment packet. But it was different, hearing it from the people who worked there, hearing it while standing in the lab where I myself was going to work.

I belong here, I thought. I really do. Larry is even interested in the same superhero stuff that Viv and I talk about. I bet Viv would like to talk to him sometime about her soul theories.

I was full of eagerness and excitement.

“Come meet the rabbits,” said Mary Alice. “And I'll explain to you about the specific proteins that we're hoping to get them to express.”

“Let's go,” I said.

IT WAS A GOOD WEEK, a rare week. I found myself springing from bed each morning like a piece of toast from the toaster, and my legs seemed to have made an independent decision to run all the way to work. On Thursday, after two consecutive mornings of waiting outside our lab door for someone to arrive and unlock it, I was presented with an access card key of my own, and the next morning, well before nine a.m., I had fed all of the Flopsy, Cottontail, MarchHare, Foo-foo, and Bugs rabbits (there were several with the same names, distinguished by numerical suffixes), recorded the weight of their feces, and set aside sections for routine analysis. In the late afternoon, I had to be shooed out, and I had so much to tell Viv, I thought I would explode before I could see her.