Mount Dragon (34 page)

Perhaps I should explain. The hemoglobin molecule consists of a protein group, called a globin, with four heme groups riding shotgun on it. It collects oxygen in the lungs, exchanges this oxygen with carbon dioxide in the tissues, and then dumps carbon dioxide into the lungs to be exhaled.

A very clever, very complicated molecule.

Unfortunately, hemoglobin by itself is deadly poisonous. If you injected naked hemoglobin into a human being, it would probably be fatal. The hemoglobin needs to be enclosed in something. Normally, this would be a red blood cell.

We therefore had to design something that would seal up the hemoglobin, make it safe. A microscopic sack, if you will. But something that would “breathe,” that would allow oxygen and carbon dioxide to pass through.

Our solution was to create these little “sacks” out of pieces of membrane from ruptured cells. I used a special enzyme called lyase.

Then came the final problem: to purify the hemoglobin. This may sound like the simplest problem of all.

It was not.

We grew the bacteria in huge vats. As the amount of hemoglobin produced by the bacteria built up, it poisoned the vat. Everything died. We were left with a soup of crap: molecules of hemoglobin mixed with dead and dying bacteria; bits of DNA and RNA; chromosomal fragments; rogue bacteria.

The trick was to purify this soup—to separate the healthy hemoglobin from all the junk—so that we would end up with pure human hemoglobin and nothing else. And it had to be
extremely
pure. Getting a blood transfusion is not like taking a tiny pill. Many
pints
of this substance might go inside a human being. Even the slightest impurities, multiplied by those quantities, could cause unpredictable side effects.

It was around this time that we got word of what was going on back in Boston. The marketing people were already studying—in great secrecy—how to market our genetically engineered blood. They assembled focus groups of ordinary citizens. They discovered that most people are terrified of getting a blood transfusion because they fear contamination: from hepatitis, from AIDS, from other diseases. People wanted to be reassured that the blood they were receiving was pure and safe.

So our unfinished product was dubbed
PurBlood
. And the decree came down from corporate headquarters: henceforth, in all papers, journals, notes, and conversations, the product would be called PurBlood. Anyone calling it by its trade name, Hemocyl, would be disciplined. In particular, the marketing decree stated, any use of the word “genetic engineering” or “artificial” was
verboten
. The public did not like the idea of genetically engineered
anything
. They didn't like genetically engineered tomatoes, they didn't like genetically engineered milk, and they
really
hated the phrase “genetically engineered artificial human blood.” I guess I can't blame them, really. The thought of having such a substance pumped into something as inviolate as one's own veins has to be disturbing to a layman.

My love, the sun is growing low in the sky, and I must leave. But I will return tomorrow. I'll tell Brent I need a day off. It's not a lie. If you only knew how pouring out my soul to you on these pages has lifted a great weight from my shoulders.

 

June 13

Dearest Amiko,

I come now to the most difficult part of my story. The part, in fact, that I was not sure until now I could bring myself to tell you. I may yet burn these pages, if my resolve weakens. But it is a secret I can no longer keep within myself.

…So I began the purification process. We fermented the solution to free the hemoglobin from its bacterial prison. We centrifuged it to clear out the refuse. We forced it through ceramic micron filters. We fractionated it. To no avail.

You see, hemoglobin is extremely delicate. You cannot heat it; you cannot use overly strong chemicals; you cannot sterilize or distill it. Each time I attempted to purify the hemoglobin, I ended up destroying it. The molecule lost its delicate structure: it “denatured.” It became useless.

A more delicate purification process was required. And so Brent suggested we try my own GEF filtration process.

I realized immediately that he was right. There was no reason not to. It must have been misplaced modesty on my part that kept it from occurring to me before.

The process I'd been working on in Manchester was a type of modified gel electrophoresis, an electric potential that drew precisely the correct molecular weight molecule through a set of gel filters.

Setting up the process took time, however—time during which Brent grew increasingly impatient. At last, I was able to purify six pints of PurBlood using the gel process.

The GEF process was successful beyond my wildest hopes. Using four of the six pints as samples, I was able to prove the mixture was pure down to sixteen parts per million. Thus, out of one
million
hemoglobin molecules, there were no more than sixteen foreign particles. And probably less.

This may sound pure. And it is pure enough for most drugs. But, in this case, it was not. The FDA had decided, with typical capriciousness, that 100 parts per billion would be safe. Sixteen parts per million was not. The number 16—it will haunt me forever. In scientific terms, a purity of 1.6 × 10
^-7
.

Please don't misunderstand. I believed—and I still believe—that PurBlood is much purer than that. I just couldn't
prove
it. The difference is crucial. But to me, the distinction was unfair and artificial.

There was one test for purity—the ultimate test—that I had not performed, because it was discouraged under FDA regulations. I secretly performed that test. Please forgive me, my love—one night, in the low-security lab, I opened a vein in my arm and bled out a pint. Then I replaced it with a transfusion of PurBlood.

It was rash, perhaps. But PurBlood passed with flying colors. Nothing happened to me, and all medical tests proved it was safe. Naturally, I couldn't report the results of that test, but it satisfied
me
that PurBlood was pure.

So I did something else. I infinitesimally diluted my last pint of PurBlood with distilled water, two hundred to one, and ran the array of tests that automatically calculated and recorded purity. The result was, of course, a purity of 80 parts per billion. Well within the FDA safety range.

That was all I had to do. I did
not
make a report, I did
not
change figures or falsify data. When Scopes downloaded the test results that night, he knew what they meant. The next day he congratulated me. He was beside himself.

The question I now ask myself—the question you may ask me—is why did I do it?

It wasn't for the money. I have never really cared that much about money. You know that, my darling Amiko. Money is more trouble than it's worth.

It wasn't for fame, which is a terrific nuisance.

It wasn't to save lives, although I have rationalized that this was the reason.

I think perhaps it was pure, naked desire. A desire to solve this last problem, to take that final step to completion. It is the same desire that led Einstein to suggest the terrible power of the atom in a letter to Roosevelt; it is the same desire that led Oppenheimer to build the bomb and test it not thirty miles from here; it is the same desire that led the Anasazi priests to meet in this stone chamber and exhort the Thunderbird to send the rain. It was the desire to conquer nature.

But—and this is what haunts me, what has driven me to commit this all to paper—the success of PurBlood does not alter the fact that I cheated.

I am only too well aware of this. Especially now…now that PurBlood has gone on to large-scale production, and I am banging my head against another, even more insoluble problem.

Anyway, dearest one, I hope you can find it in your heart to understand. Once I am free of this place, I will make it my life's resolve never to be apart from you again.

And perhaps that will be sooner than you think. I'm beginning to suspect certain people here of—but more on that some other time. I had best end this for today.

You will never know what being able to speak this secret has done for me.

 

June 30

It took me a long time to get here today. I had to take a special route, a secret route. The woman who cleans my room has been looking at me strangely, and I don't want her following me. She'll talk to Brent about it, just as my lab assistant and the network administrator have done.

It's because I've discovered the key. And now I must be ceaselessly vigilant.

You can tell them by the way they leave things on their desks. Their messiness gives them away. And they are polluted with germs. Billions of bacteria and viruses hiding in every crevice of their bodies. I wish I could speak of it to Brent, but I must continue as if nothing had happened, as if all were normal.

I don't think I had better come here again.

Carson was silent. The sun settled toward the horizon, its shape ballooning in the layers of air. The old stone walls of the ruin smelled of dust and heat, mingled with the faint scent of corruption. One of the horses whinnied with impatience, and the other answered.

At the sound of the horses, de Vaca started. Then she quickly stuffed the journal in the container, placed it into the sipapu, covered the hole with the flat rock, and smoothed the warm concealing sand over the spot.

She straightened up, brushing off her jeans. “We'd better get back,” she said. “There'll be questions if we miss the emergency drill.”

They climbed out of the ruined kiva, mounted their horses, and reined slowly in the direction of Mount Dragon.

“Burt, of all people,” de Vaca muttered as they rode. “Faking his data.”

Carson was silent, lost in thought.

“And then using himself as guinea pig,” de Vaca went on.

Carson roused himself, startled by a sudden realization. “I guess that's what he meant by ‘poor alpha,'” he said.

“What?”

“Teece told me that Burt has been raving about ‘poor alpha, poor alpha.' I guess he meant himself, as the alpha test subject.” He shrugged. “I wouldn't call him a guinea pig, though. Making himself the alpha was very much in character. A man like Burt wouldn't deliberately risk thousands of lives on unproven blood. He was under incredible time pressure to prove its safety. So he tested it on himself. It's not unheard of. It isn't exactly illegal to do something like that, either.” He looked at de Vaca. “You have to admire the guy for putting his life on the line. And he had the last laugh. He proved the blood was safe.”

Carson fell silent. Something was teasing the back of his mind; something that had surfaced as they read the journal. Now it remained just out of the reach of consciousness, like a forgotten dream.

“Sounds like he's still having the last laugh. In a nuthouse somewhere.”

Carson frowned. “That's a pretty callous remark, even for you.”

“Maybe so,” de Vaca replied. Then she paused. “I guess it's just that everyone talks about Burt like he was larger than life. This is the guy who invented GeneDyne's filtration process, synthesized PurBlood. Now we find he faked his data.”

There it was again
. Suddenly, Carson realized what it was in the journal that had raised an unconscious flag. “Susana, what do you know about GEF?”

She looked back at him, puzzled.

“The filtration process Burt invented when he was working at Manchester,” Carson went on. You just mentioned it. We've always simply
assumed
the filtration process works on X-FLU. What if it doesn't?”

De Vaca's look of puzzlement turned to scorn. “We've tested X-FLU again and again to make sure that the strain coming out of the filter is absolutely pure.”

“Pure, yes. But is it the
same
strain that went in?”

“How could the filtration process change the strain? It makes no sense.”

“Think about how GEF works,” Carson replied. “You set up an electrical field that draws the heavy protein molecules through a gel filter, right? The field is set precisely to the molecular weight of the molecule you want. All the other molecules are trapped in the gel, while what you want emerges from the other end of the filter.”

“So?”

“What if the weak electrical field, or the gel itself, causes subtle changes in the protein structure? What if what comes out is different from what went in? The molecular weight would be the same, but the structure would be subtly altered. A straightforward chemical test wouldn't catch it. All it takes is the tiniest change in the surface protein of a virus particle to create a new strain.”

“No way,” said de Vaca. “GEF is a patented, tested process. They've already used it to synthesize other products. If there was anything wrong, it would've shown up a long time ago.”

Carson reined in Roscoe and stood motionless. “Have any of the tests for purity we've done looked at that possibility? That
specific
possibility?”

De Vaca was silent.

“Susana, it's the only thing we haven't tried.”

She look at him for a long moment.

“All right,” she said at last. “Let's check it out.”

The Dark Harbor Institute was a large, rambling Victorian house perched on a remote headland above the Atlantic. The institute counted one hundred and twenty honorary members on its rolls, although at any given time only a dozen or so were actually in residence. The responsibility of the people who came to the institute was to do only one thing: to think. The requirements for membership were equally simple: genius.

Members of the institute were very fond of the rambling Victorian mansion, which 120 years of Maine storms had left without a single right angle. They especially liked the anonymity, since even the institute's closest neighbors—mostly summer visitors—did not have the vaguest idea of who those bespectacled men and women were who came and went so unpredictably.

Edwin Bannister, associate managing editor of the
Boston Globe
, checked out of his inn and directed the placing of his bags into the back of his Range Rover, his head still throbbing from the effects of the bad bordeaux he'd been served at the previous evening's dinner. Tipping the porter, he walked around the Rover, eyeing as he did so the little town of Dark Harbor, with its fishing boats and church steeple and salt air. Very quaint. Too damn quaint. He preferred Boston, and the smoke-filled atmosphere of the Black Key Tavern.

He slid behind the wheel and consulted the hand-drawn map that had been faxed to him at the newspaper. Five miles to the institute. Despite the assurances, a part of him still doubted whether or not his host would really be there.

Bannister accelerated through a yellow light and swung onto County Road 24. The car lurched over one pothole, then another, as it left the tiny town behind. The narrow road headed due east to the sea, then ran along a series of high bluffs over the Atlantic. He rolled down the window. From below, he could hear the distant thunder of the surf, the crying of gulls, the dolorous clang of a bell buoy.

The road ran into a stand of spruce, then emerged at a high meadow covered with blueberry bushes. A log fence ran across the meadow, its rustic length interrupted by a wooden gate and shingled guardhouse. Bannister stopped at the gate and powered down his window.