Authors: J.A. Konrath,Jack Kilborn
Tags: #General Fiction
“This is Detective Roy Lewis. My partner.”
“Hello, Roy, nice to meet you.” He shook Roy’s hand. “Actually, I suppose this is our first official meeting as well.” He shook Bert’s hand, then Tom’s. “Harold Harper. Welcome to New Mexico. Do you have suitcases?”
“I do.” Bert raised his hand.
“The luggage return is this way.”
The elderly man took off at a quick clip, pointing out which airlines occupied which terminals, and where the restrooms and restaurants were, as if he were giving a tour of the Louvre. Bert’s bags were the first off the carousel, but he insisted on opening them and inspecting the contents before they could move ahead.
“How could anything get damaged in those things?” Roy was referring to Bert’s Samsonite suitcases. “Bet they’re heavy as hell.”
“These are classics. I don’t even know if they make them anymore with a hard shell like this. They’re waterproof, shockproof, and smashproof. Remember the commercial with the gorilla jumping on them?”
Outdoors again, the heat was like a hair dryer. Harold had parked close to the building, in a handicapped spot. He had a wheelchair sticker hanging from his rearview, but Tom couldn’t guess what his ailment might be. The man had more energy that a two-year-old on crack.
The good doctor drove an old Jeep Wrangler with no roof or doors, just a roll bar to protect them from the elements. It was what could charitably be called a four-seater, though the rear two seemed built for embryos. Tom attempted to climb in back but Harold stopped him.
“Please. Do me the honor of sitting up front with me, if you would.”
Roy shot him a look that would fry burgers, but Tom sat up front anyway. Bert played around with a bungee cord for several minutes, strapping in his luggage to the rear rack, while Roy placed his carryon between his feet and carefully positioned his donut. Harold took off before either had a chance to fully settle in. The doctor drove with the same sense of urgency he displayed while on foot. Traffic signals didn’t appear to be applicable to him, and twice he had to swerve to avoid collisions. Tom liked him immediately.
“The ranch is about ten miles out of Albuquerque. Used to be twenty miles out, but the town is growing pretty fast. It’ll reach three quarters of a million within the next few years, at the current rate.”
Tom noted that as America aged, it tended to homogenize. Albuquerque could have been a suburb of Chicago—complete with strip malls, super markets, chain stores, and apartment buildings. The only difference was that every other vehicle was a 4 x 4. Tom checked the rearview, paranoid about being tailed. Rather than black sedans, he saw Bert sock Roy in the shoulder.
Bert grinned. “Slug bug green, no hit backs.”
“Why did you just hit me, fool?”
“Volkswagon bug, right there. Don’t you play the slug bug game? Every time you see a VW Beetle, you hit the guy next to you and say the color.”
“You do that again, we play the physics game. I toss you out of the speeding Jeep and see how many times you bounce.”
Bert folded his arms, glaring. “What is your problem? Why can’t you have fun?”
“I have lots of fun.”
“You act like you have a saggy diaper that leaks.”
“Maybe you need to take your Shut-The-Hell-Up pill.”
“I dare you to stop being a grump ass.” Bert challenged.
“Fine—punch Bronco black.”
Roy slugged Bert in the shoulder. Bert’s eyes got wide. “What the hell was that?”
“I saw a black Ford Bronco, so I punched you.”
“That’s not the game. It’s Volkswagon bugs.”
“Now who’s the one that isn’t fun?”
Bert hit him back. “There. You didn’t call no hit-backs.”
“Fine.” Roy scanned for a car, then he smacked Bert in the back of the head.
“Head whack Cadillac yellow, no hit backs.
Bert elbowed Roy in the ribs. “Rib jab Buick Allegra red, no hit backs.”
“Soon as I see a Toyota, I’m gonna break your jaw.”
Harold leaned over and spoke to Tom out of the side of his mouth. “Are they always like this?”
“Neither of them plays well with others.”
Luckily for all involved, Harold pulled onto a dirt road and they didn’t see another vehicle until they reached the ranch. And a ranch it was. Tom, being Midwestern, assumed the term was used to describe any single floor house. But Dr. Harper owned actual acres of fenced-in property, complete with grazing livestock.
“What in the hell is that thing?” Roy pointed.
“That’s Emma. She’s an Israeli Black Ostrich.”
Bert whacked him. “Israeli black ostrich, no hit-backs.”
Roy hit him back anyway.
“You raise ostriches?” Tom regretted the stupid question as it left his mouth. They passed a dozen more birds before coming to a stop at the house.
“Largest of the ratites. Their meat is red, 80% leaner than beef. One egg is the same volume as two dozen chicken eggs. Shells and feathers fetch top dollar, and the leather is softer than lamb. Plus, they’re a hoot to have around.”
One of the birds walked up to the truck and stared at Roy, its head only a foot away from his face. Roy recoiled.
“No need to be afraid,” Harold said. “She just wants her head scratched.”
The bird’s head bobbed up and down, seemingly in agreement.
“I don’t like it. Make it go away.”
Bert reached over and patted the ostrich.
“See? Very docile animal. You can even ride some of the larger ones. Perhaps you’d like to try it later.”
The bird cocked its head and chirped. Then pecked Roy in the nose.
“Docile my ass.”
Roy took out his gun. The ostrich screamed, then turned its tail and ran off.
“Oh, they hate guns.” Harold got out of the Jeep. “We had some poachers here, years ago, killed four of the birds. Whenever they see a gun or hear a bang, they head for the barn.”
There were two structures on the property, the house and the stable. Both had a rough hewn, rustic quality to their design, with unfinished log trim and cedar shingles. Bert unstrapped his luggage and Harold led them into the larger of the buildings.
Tom frowned when he wasn’t met with air conditioning. Two fans spun lazily in the high, vaulted ceiling, pushing around the heat. In keeping with the log cabin concept, various pine support beams made crisscross patterns throughout the great room. There was a large chandelier, made from several dozen antlers, hanging between the two fans, and a bearskin rug, complete with head, on the floor.
“Welcome to the Harper Ranch. Anyone for coffee? Nothing beats the heat like a hot beverage.”
There were no takers.
“I’ll just be a moment. Old man, need the caffeine.” Harold left for the kitchen and Tom gave his partner a nod. Roy removed the Foxhound from his pocket and turned it on.
“What is…?”
Tom slapped a hand over Bert’s mouth and put a finger to his lips. Roy worked the room, waving the Foxhound’s antenna this way and that. He was quick but thorough.
“Clean.” He put the bug detector away just as Harold came back.
The doctor was holding an oversized mug of steaming coffee. He took a sip and set it on the table. Tom caught the aroma and had to admit it smelled pretty damn good.
“Fine, then let’s sit down, shall we? Plenty to discuss, that’s for sure.”
Harold ushered them onto two sofas. Tom sat and stared at the ceiling-high stone fireplace. Why the house needed it was beyond his reasoning. Harold took the floor before them.
“The easiest way to do this, I think, is to start from the beginning. Forty years ago. I was one of only a handful of scientists trying to attempt in vitro fertilization—fertilizing an egg outside of the womb. My team worked with gametes from mice, then cows, and then finally with human sperm and ova.”
Harold paused to sip some coffee.
“The work was funded in secret, done privately. We did it in Mexico. Not that we were breaking any US laws, per se, but pure science is always easier without regulation, and we had a doozy of a problem to solve. My first success took place right before we landed on the moon—this was almost ten years before Louise Brown, the first official test tube baby, was born.”
“Who was funding you?”
“We’ll get to that in a moment. But imagine, if you will, how excited we were that we’d created a person in a lab. And yet we couldn’t publish, we couldn’t go public. It was all very hush-hush. I found out why later. Our benefactor, it seems, was looking for more than reproductive technology. After proving that sexual reproduction was possible in vitro, he next wanted us to prove that asexual reproduction was possible in humans.”
“Cloning?”
“Sort of. Asexual reproduction is having offspring with only one parent. This usually results in an exact genetic copy. Many things reproduce in this way—protozoan, fungi, seaweed, coral, insects, fish, lizards, even some birds under artificial conditions. The word
clone
comes from the Greek word for twig. Cut off a twig, plant it, grow a new tree. In theory, anyway.”
The doctor was pacing before them, gesturing with his hands. He was talking at a terrific clip, the words coming out so fast they ran together. Tom thought of a champagne bottle, finally uncorked after decades in a cellar.
“It was hard work. How can you create life without a sperm and egg? We knew about chromosomes. Humans have forty-six, getting half from the mother and half from the father. But what if there was no father? Could we fool an egg into thinking it was a zygote, that it had been fertilized, using only the chromosomes of one parent?”
Harold shook his head sadly.
“Set backs. Years of setbacks. We were trying to implant a karyoplast into the cytoplasm of a zygote. Nuclear transfer. Forcing a morula or blastocyst without two haploids.”
“I don’t know what the hell you just said.” Roy got off the sofa. He gave Tom a look of intent, patting the Foxhound in the pocket. Off to check the rest of the place out. “Anyone want some water?”
“Kitchen is through there. How about you two? Am I going too fast?”
Tom ventured a guess. “You were scraping out fertilized eggs and adding your own genes?”
“Exactly. But it didn’t work. We couldn’t get the enucleated egg and the donor cell to fuse. We tried the Sendai virus, electrofusion—nothing worked. Then, as a control, I tried it with a non fertilized ova. It fused into a zygote like magic.”
“So all you did was put a human cell in an empty egg and it grew?” Bert seemed surprised.
“Well, my boy, you make twenty years of research sound simple. Actually, it was much more difficult than that. You had to actually put the donor cells in the gap-zero phase by starving them. You see, cells go through phases—”
“Doctor.” Tom held up his hand. “You might as well be speaking Martian. We believe you when you say it was hard work.”
“Darn tootin’. And we finally did it—grew an embryo in agar and transplanted it into the uterus of a woman, who successfully gave birth to a healthy baby. We did it many times, in fact. You can imagine how excited we were. But again, it had to be kept quiet, and again, it wasn’t enough. Our next miracle was to bring dead cells back to life. Which, of course, is impossible.”
“It can’t be impossible.” Bert leaned back and crossed his legs. “Because here we are.”
“Oh, but it is impossible. Once tissue is dead, it’s dead. Frankenstein’s monster will forever remain in the realm of fiction. My team did enough work on that to settle the debate forever.”
“So how…?”
“Are you sure no one would like some coffee? You can’t imagine how wonderful it is to tell this, after so long. I don’t even have access to my notes. There won’t be any memoirs, any posthumous Nobel Prize. He took everything.”
“Who did?”
“We’ll get to that in a moment. Anyhoo, once we proved that regenerating dead tissue was impossible, we did the next best thing. We copied it.”
Tom raised an eyebrow. “You cloned it?”
“No, you can’t clone dead tissue. The cell has to be alive, in the dormant G-zero phase, before we can take out the DNA. In a dead cell, the DNA won’t replicate. It’s a shell, a corpse. But since all DNA is simply building blocks made up of protein, all we had to do is reconstruct a dead person’s genetic code. Rebuild it out of raw material, so to speak, in the exact same way as the original.”
Roy came back with a glass of water. He shook his head at Tom and sat down carefully on his donut.
Tom puzzled over Harold’s latest words but couldn’t get them to ring true. Even with today’s technology, it was impossible to build a strand of DNA from the ground up. There was just no way.
“Doctor, I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
Bert shrugged. “I got lost right after he mentioned the twigs.”
Tom continued. “Maybe I can believe you doing all of these reproductive experiments years ahead of the scientific community, and I can even believe that you cloned a person from a live cell. But human DNA wasn’t even completely mapped until a few years ago, and that took a decade, using the biggest super computers. I read the article in Time. Even then, it was only mapped—that’s just the general picture. To get an exact replica, it needs to be sequenced, and that’s still a long way off.”
“You’re right. We didn’t have the technology back then to sequence the entire human genome. Let alone the genomes of the ten people that we cloned. There are over 50,000 genes in a human being, made up of billions of base pairs. We never could have sorted them all out and put them in the right order.”
Tom leaned forward, arms on his knees. “So how did you do it?”
Harold’s face lit up. “We took a picture. A very special picture. And from the picture we made a living cell.”
“Please explain.”
“In 1953, Watson and Crick used X-ray crystallography to discover the structure of a DNA molecule. They bounced radiation off of DNA and formed an image on photographic film, coming up with the double helix configuration. How much do you know about DNA?”
Tom thought back to high school biology, over twelve years ago.
“It’s made up of four bases. They match up with each other in special orders. When the DNA replicates, it unzips, and then free floating proteins match up with the each side of the zipper and make a carbon copy.”