His voice! When Rex got close enough to hear that unmistakable voice, he suddenly remembered the things Victor used to say.
That’s the mistake they make. They set themselves limits.
God created man in his image.
There are times when one should simply accept the facts.
There’s four of them. It’s too many.
He walked past Victor deliberately, in the hope that Victor would be the one to recognise and hail him, as if he wanted to provide himself with an excuse in case anyone should spot them together. But Victor did not approach him. His former colleague didn’t even seem to recognise him when he gave a quick nod as they passed each other.
In the end his curiosity won out. He turned round and said something to him. Victor looked as if he’d just been woken from a trance.
‘Hi! It’s me. Rex Cremer. From the University of Aachen.’
‘You have changed,’ Victor answered dryly.
He hadn’t thought about that. He’d assumed that he was easy to recognise, but in the intervening years he had taken to wearing glasses and had grown his hair.
‘Good observation,’ he answered, instinctively straightening his glasses. ‘But tell me, how are you?’
Victor shrugged his shoulders non-committally. It wasn’t clear if he just wasn’t in a mood to answer, or if the shrug was meant to be the response. He didn’t ask Rex anything in turn, so again it was up to Rex to say something.
‘And what are you up to now? It’s been so long . . .’ He kept the question deliberately neutral. He remembered how evasive his former colleague could be.
‘I’m a GP,’ Victor had said.
‘A GP,’ Rex echoed, rather startled. To cover his surprise, he quickly added, ‘Where?’
‘In Wolfheim.’
‘Wolfheim?’
Victor nodded. That was all. He didn’t bother to explain where that might be. It wasn’t that he was being mysterious or reticent - no, it was more a matter of indifference, as if he and the man facing him had no history together. But his attitude changed when Rex told him that he too had left the University of Aachen. That did seem to surprise Victor. He looked up, very briefly, as if he were about to say something. But there was still nothing forthcoming until Rex let slip a remark that he knew would not leave the doctor cold.
‘I had lost their trust.’
However, his confession had a somewhat different effect from what he’d intended, because Victor, not bothering to lower his voice, said, ‘As I lost yours.’
Rex looked round, embarrassed. Best just to ignore that, he thought to himself; it would only lead to a pointless argument.
‘How did it all come out, in the end?’ he asked. He was expecting an evasive answer, and would have been satisfied with that. It would have put his mind at ease. Yet the answer only raised more questions.
‘It isn’t finished yet.’
He felt a shudder of apprehension. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m starting over again.’
That answer was more reassuring. So the previous experiment had failed. And evidently it hadn’t been a complete fabrication either. It had, simply and logically, ended in failure. Thank God.
And yet he asked one more question. He wanted to have it from the doctor’s own mouth that the experiment had failed. Victor waited, staring at the ground - and then Rex asked the question.
Originally, they had made a date for the day after the technology fair, but Victor had cancelled that morning because something had happened. He had sounded confused; from what Rex was able to gather, something had happened to his housekeeper - an accident or something. Could he possibly come a few days later? Rex had agreed, even though it meant he’d have to curb his impatience a while longer.
What did he know, as of now? That three boys had been born four years ago, and that the fourth embryo had failed to thrive and died. He also knew that all three were clones of the doctor, and that they looked exactly alike, down to the most minute detail. Finally, he knew that the boys were still alive.
All of this he had found out from talking to Victor that morning at the fair. And he, Rex Cremer, had listened open-mouthed.
‘May I see them?’ he had blurted out.
He would be allowed to see them.
He’d had one more question. And the reply to that, too, had startled him. No, had shocked him. He had asked the names of Victor’s children.
Rex Cremer parked his car in front of the villa. He saw the sign on the gate, with Victor’s name and the hours of surgery. As he got out he heard the village clock strike two. He was right on time. Across the street a woman was sweeping the pavement. He nodded at her amicably, but she barely acknowledged him. Victor came out of the house, greeted him with a nod of the head and unlatched the gate.
‘Follow me,’ he said. He was already halfway up the garden path.
Rex felt as if he was just another patient coming for a check-up, a feeling that was reinforced when he saw that he was being shown into the examination room. Victor sat down behind his desk and invited Rex to take a seat across from him. Rex immediately noticed the framed photograph on the corner of the desk that was half-turned towards him, almost as if it were on purpose.
‘Is that them?’ he asked.
Victor nodded.
‘May I?’ He stuck out his hand.
Victor nodded again and said, ‘It’s an old photo.’
Rex picked up the frame and noticed that his hand was shaking. He was still somehow hoping that the whole thing had only been a figment of Victor’s imagination, and even though just a glance at the photo clearly showed the uncanny resemblance between the three boys, he was still not completely convinced they were indeed clones. They could be a set of identical triplets, and had simply inherited Victor’s characteristics: the red hair and . . .
Every cleft palate is unique.
He could still hear him saying it, although it had been several years ago. He stared at the mouths of the three children in the picture, but the print was not clear enough to make out fine details. Besides - this was something he was able to see - the upper lips had been repaired. But the doctor would certainly have saved photographs of the children prior to surgery, even though that kind of proof was no longer necessary. A British scientist had recently found a way to dissect and read the genetic code unique to every human being. A DNA test would determine unequivocally if the children were indeed identical copies of Victor Hoppe.
‘They must have changed quite a bit,’ Rex began, as neutrally as he could. ‘How old are they in this picture? About one?’
‘Just a year old,’ the doctor replied. ‘They have changed - you are right.’
‘I can’t wait to see them.’
He was eager to see the children straight away, but when Victor began speaking again, he realised that his patience would be put to the test.
‘I have tried to slow it down.’ It didn’t sound like a justification. Victor was simply giving Rex a piece of information.
‘What have you tried to slow down?’
‘It’s been too rapid.’
‘What . . . I don’t follow.’
‘The telomeres on some of the chromosomes are much shorter than normal.’
Rex looked at him nonplussed, but the doctor took his look to mean something else.
‘You do know what telomeres are, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Of course I know what telomeres are. I just don’t know what it has to do with all this.’
But as he said it, it did begin to dawn on him. Telomeres were long chains of building blocks at the end of every chromosome in the nucleus. These telomeres were somehow responsible for providing the energy required for cell division. With every division, a number of these telomeres disappeared for good, because the cell could not manufacture replacements. The more frequently a cell split, the fewer chromosome telomeres were left; in short, the older the person, the shorter the telomere chain.
‘Soon after the boys were born,’ Victor explained, ‘I discovered that the telomeres of the fourth and ninth chromosome were much shorter than those on the other chromosomes.’
Rex didn’t really want to hear the rest. The more he found out, the more involved he would be. But he already had a strong suspicion that he knew what the doctor was trying to tell him. One of the questions biologists frequently asked themselves, a riddle that hadn’t yet been solved, was what the actual age of the clone would be. Since the cell providing the donor nucleus had come from an adult, the clone’s cells would, by definition, be much older than the cells arising from normal insemination. Was that it? Had something gone wrong on that front?
He felt his anxiety rise. ‘Does that mean—’ he began.
‘I have tried to slow it down,’ the doctor interrupted, raising his voice slightly. There was despair in that voice. It was the first time Rex had noticed anything like that in Victor. Or . . . perhaps not: it had happened once before, when Victor had begged him on the phone for his help because it turned out that as many as four cloned embryos had implanted themselves.
‘But I’m not giving up,’ he heard Victor declare stubbornly, all trace of despair gone. Then he fell silent again.
‘Dr Hoppe, you mentioned the telomeres of the fourth and ninth chromosomes,’ he began. ‘You said they were much shorter. How much shorter?’
Victor stared at the photograph Rex was still holding.
‘Less than half,’ he said mechanically.
‘Less than half. That is . . . Were there any consequences, for the children?’
‘They are ageing very rapidly.’
Rex’s worst suspicion had been confirmed, although he wasn’t sure what this meant on a practical level.
‘Was it obvious?’ he asked. ‘I mean, could you tell just by looking at them?’
He hoped that the doctor would now suggest that they go and see the children, but Victor just nodded, staring at the photo.
‘There didn’t seem to be anything wrong at that stage,’ he said. ‘But then . . .’ He was quiet again.
‘Then what?’
‘They suddenly went bald. That was the start of it.’
Rex looked at the picture. The boys’ red hair was already thinning at that stage, so it wasn’t hard to imagine the hair completely gone.
‘Was there nothing you could do?’ he asked.
‘I tried.’
‘And what about now?’
‘The telomeres of the fourth and ninth chromosomes are all used up.’
That made Rex sit up, startled.
The doctor confirmed his fears: ‘Since then the cells have stopped dividing, and the cells that are left are slowly dying.’
‘Which means that the ageing process has become irreversible?’
Victor nodded. ‘But all’s not lost,’ he said, finally. He straightened himself, his hands on the armrests of his chair, as if he were about to stand up.
‘Not lost?’ asked Rex, surprised.
‘It was a mutation. Simple as that. Now that I know about it, I can look out for it the next time, in the embryo-selection process.’
Rex didn’t know where to look.
‘It is our task, after all,’ Victor went on stolidly. ‘It is up to us to correct the mistakes which He in his haste has wrought.’
Rex’s eyes were almost popping out of his head by now.
‘A mutation is nothing more nor less than an error in the genes,’ Victor went on in a monotone. ‘Just as this was an error in the genes.’ Raising his hand to his upper lip, he ran his finger over the scar.
Rex did his best not to stare.
‘And by correcting those congenital errors, we correct ourselves,’ said Victor firmly. ‘That is the only way to beat God at his own game.’
This startling pronouncement transported Rex back in time, back to the day when he had written to congratulate Victor Hoppe on his article, before they had even met.
You have certainly beaten God at his own game.
And as he thought about it, it dawned on him that it was he, Rex Cremer, who had set the whole thing in motion with that one ostensibly innocent phrase.
‘Shall we?’ Victor had pushed back his chair and was getting to his feet. ‘You wanted to see the children, didn’t you? Come with me. They are upstairs.’ Not waiting for an answer, he walked to the door.
Rex stayed in his seat a few seconds longer, completely flummoxed. When he stood up, he felt dizzy. He blinked his eyes a few times and took a deep breath.
‘Dr Cremer?’ he heard from the corridor.
‘Coming,’ he replied. As he followed Victor up the stairs, he tried to focus his mind on what he was about to be shown, but the words he had just heard kept spinning round in his head.
It is up to us to correct the mistakes which He in his haste has wrought.
This isn’t possible, he thought. He’s just provoking me. Victor Hoppe is trying to get my goat. He is pulling my leg. Next he’ll probably tell me that he made the whole thing up; that he just wanted to see how I’d react. That’s the reason he asked me to come. So that he could make fun of me. Because people used to make fun of him.
As Victor opened the door, Rex was still hoping that the whole thing was an elaborate sham. Even when Victor stepped into the room and Rex heard him say, ‘Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, there is someone—’
The voice broke off in mid-sentence. Rex, hearing it from the stairs, cleared the last three treads in one stride. Two more steps and he was standing in the doorway, peering inside.
He didn’t immediately realise that it was a classroom. His glance was first drawn to the blackboard, where Victor was heading with long, rapid strides. Storming up to the board, he snatched the eraser and began wiping the surface clean. Rex just caught a glimpse of a drawing the full height of the blackboard. It was a drawing of a person - a man or a woman. With one swipe the doctor had already erased the face. What was left was the hair, pinned up in a bun. So then it was a woman. The bun was white, and was surrounded by a yellow radiance. That was next to go - the knot and the yellow glow around it, which Rex suspected was supposed to represent a halo, because the woman had also been endowed with a pair of wings. White wings, depicted as large oval shapes on either side of the torso.