Xeno Sapiens (9 page)

She was so busy she didn’t notice
Clifton as he stood in her open doorway, lit from behind by the
hallway lights. She was bent over her desk, a pencil in one hand,
scribbling away. Her desk lamp made strangely yellow shadows on the
scatter of papers flowing over her work station. Clifton felt a
spooky sense of nostalgia, as if he recalled himself hunched over
just such a desk in the days when he was still an idealist instead
of just another working Joe.

“
How goes it,” he asked.

Ingrid turned in her seat and did the
most natural thing. She smiled. Clifton still wore the white,
plastic baggies over his shoes that were required apparel. His lab
coat had lost its starch and it hung listlessly on his slightly
drooping frame, as if it were tired after its own long
day.

“
Tiring,” Ingrid said. “There’s so
much to do.”

“
Nothing compared to what it’s going
to be. Things will move too fast for comfort now that you’re
actually here.”

He arched his back with obvious relief.
“Mind if I drag up a rock?”

“
Please,” Ingrid said. “Come
in.”

Clifton sat in one of Ingrid’s chairs
The nibs had plush chairs with lots of padding and slanted
backs.

“
You’re still in your work clothes,”
Ingrid said.

“
I just finished some work with the
wringer.”

“
The wringer?”

“
The helix depolarization chamber. We
call it the wringer because it looks like a washing
machine.”

“
I’ve heard they were
dangerous.”

“
They can be, if you’re careless. The
flywheel spins at fifteen thousands rpm’s. That thing comes
whizzing off that tub, you’d better duck pretty quick or you’ll be
looking for your head with your hands. We’ve never had any
problems, though.”

“
Things run pretty smoothly, do
they?”

“
Jon sees to that. He may look like
Santa Claus but he acts like Ebeneezer Scrooge. He’s already put
your nose to the grindstone.” He smiled tiredly.

Ingrid thought she was seeing the real
Alex for the first time.

“
I’m glad you stopped by,” Ingrid
said. “Maybe you can help me.”

“
Give it a rest for tonight, Ingrid.
We can go over it in the morning meeting.” Clifton’s voice was
liberally laced with weariness. “I’m too pooped to talk
shop.”

“
Maybe I should.” Ingrid sensed that
dark circles were popping up under her eyes. They felt puffy. “I
should have met you when you were tired. You’re a lot more
civil.”

“
What you met was Alex Clifton, G-Man.
Now I’m just plain old Alex.” He reached into his pocket and pulled
out a Kent. He lit it while Ingrid rearranged her papers into neat
piles. She had never cared much for smokers, but on Alex it seemed
right.

“
You keep up with that,” Ingrid said,
“we’ll have to cut out a lung.”

Clifton grinned. “No problem. We’re an
RNA lab. We’ll just grow a new one.” He spoke hesitantly. “The
commissary’s closed, but we could pick up a couple of cups of
coffee from the vending machines. How about that? My mother always
said coffee was no good without a cigarette. Did your mother ever
pass any tidbits like that on to you?”

“
My mother died when I was
seven.”

Clifton looked apologetic. “You’re
right. I knew that. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”

“
No need to be. You still want that
cup of coffee?” Ingrid could have made it right in her apartment,
but she wanted to get out of there.

“
Sure.”

********************

They sat at one of the little folding
card tables common to almost all refreshment areas. A Styrofoam cup
of steaming coffee sat before each of them. Clifton poured a pack
of powdered creamer into his coffee and stirred it.

“
You,” he asked, proffering another
pack to Ingrid.

She made a face. “No thanks. I’ll take
it black.”

“
Are you going back to work,” Clifton
asked.

Ingrid thought about it. “Nah, I think
I’ll call it a night, too. I’m beat.”

“
How did you get into genetics.”
Clifton put his forearms on the table and leaned
forward.

“
For the same reason a lot of people
go into medicine. My mother died when I was very young, of course.
You know that. My mother’s illness and death left a deep mark on
me. Even worse than that three ring circus I went through a few
years ago.”

“
You decided to become a doctor to
avenge your mother’s death?”

Ingrid pulled her eyebrows together,
thinking. “Not exactly to avenge it. Maybe I felt like I might
learn to forestall it. How’s that for out in the
stratosphere?”

“
Do you think it was a good reason,
and a good choice?”

“
Aside from a couple of setbacks, yes.
I’ve had few regrets.”

She slurped down the last of the bitter
coffee and stood to get another cup. While her back was to Clifton,
she said, “what brought you into this?” She turned around and sat
back down.

“
Not much to my story,” he shrugged.
“I always wanted to be a doctor. I hated watching people get old
and useless for no good reason I could understand. The body is self
maintaining and self repairing. Why should it break down, or age? I
watched my own father die at age fifty-three. He just ran out of
life. The night he died, I was sitting by his bed and he asked me
to read a little to him from his bible. The book of Jeremiah, his
favorite. It always seemed very gloomy to me, but I can see now why
a dying man could see hope in it.

“
In med school, I got into a special
cytology class that taught me about inborn, genetic limiting
factors. Predisposition to disease, all that. People are born with
their death shrouds written into their genes. I’d like to see if I
can change that.”

Clifton lit another cigarette. He had
actually been involved in research to discover the function of
introns; ostensibly genetic junk with no protein coding function.
It was theorized they were either part of our genetic past or
future, or simply latent instructions placed there by -for lack of
a better word- God. Who knew what these genes would do if unlocked?
Somehow, the body knew to skip over these instructions. Clifton had
succeeded in reactivating these genes and had been astounded to
discover that some of these genes were instructions for complex
hormones that seemed to activate psychic abilities. The best
thinking was that they were programmed to either switch on or off
at some time in human evolution, a process called punctuated
equilibrium. Whether these genes created very old or very new
abilities was a question still very much up in the air.

“
Everybody against what we do,”
Clifton continued, “seems to abide by the old saw ‘do the ends
justify the means’ or, worse yet, are the ends justifiable? If I
subscribed to that kind of thinking, I would have been drummed out
of the corps long ago with my name tag clipped off my jacket and my
sleeves ripped from my lab coat.”

“
Do you see anything as off
limits?”

Clifton considered briefly. “Not much.
Not really. Progress is when the improbable becomes commonplace. I
guess what I’m really doing is looking for God.”

“
Do
you believe in God,” Ingrid
asked.

“
Actually, I do. I don’t have all the
answers, you don’t have all the answers. We never will. That’s why
I have no reservations about discovering my own little piece of the
unknown. The more I find out, the more I realize I don’t
know.”

“
You won’t take anything on
faith?”

Alex smiled. “My faith is
weak.”

“
Faith is the only leg on which
religion can stand,” Ingrid said. “Nobody I know has ever seen God,
except for crazy Retty in the trailer park, but she also saw
leprechauns in sunhats riding pink dragons. All we have is
unshakable faith, scriptures of dubious origin, and this immutable
ideal. ‘Daddy said God was a Baptist. That’s all I know and all I
need to know’.”

“
You sound like you don’t put much
stock in religion.”

“
I grew up with the usual Sunday
School lectures, showing up in my pink dress and black shoes. But
after I started my love affair with biology, I asked myself some
hard questions. When I saw the disease and illnesses and birth
defects all around me, and thought about my mother’s death, I knew
God didn’t have all the answers, either.”

Clifton rubbed his hand across his
raspy, two am beard shadow. All their previous meetings had been
conducted with Clifton sharp as a razor and clean as a pin. He was
silent for a few seconds, then spoke in a rush as if what he had
meant to say all along was coming out.

“
Look, you might want to think about
getting an apartment in town. Take my word, this place will get to
you after a while. I know you’ve only been here a few days, but I
thought I would suggest it before you really settle in.”

“
I don’t want to think about that now.
If I need to get away sometime, I’ll deal with that
then.”

“
I have a place in town,” Clifton
said. “If you do decide you want a place, I can talk to my
landlord. You surely can’t plead poverty.”

“
I’ll stick it out here awhile longer.
I’ll be alright as long as I can stay away from that Randy Bare.
Isn’t that an
awful
name to be stuck with?”

“
You don’t have to worry about Randy.
He’s scared to death of women. He might even be a member of the
brown grommet club. The fella you
will
have to worry about is Kim Hyung. Little Korean
guy about four foot six. He’s an absolute whiz with numbers,
though. Just tell him we’re a hot item and he’ll leave you alone.
I’m his idol. He wants to be just like me.”

“
What?”

“
It’s true,” Clifton swore. “I’m
‘numbah one Joe’. He doesn’t like Merrifield much, though. Jon
doesn’t even rate a ‘numbah ten Joe’. He’s ‘numbah have a
no’.”

“
It seems a lot of people don’t like
Jon.”

“
He’s alright,” Clifton said
comfortably. “Just jolly him along a bit and you’ll have no
problem. Screw up and you’ll have to get a tourniquet for your ass
because he’ll chew it bloody.”

“
Even my ass?”

Clifton thought it over. “You’re his prize acquisition. You
do your job well. That’s all Jon wants. Even so, I don’t think
even
your
ass is entirely safe.”

Ingrid snorted.

“
Once we really get rolling,” Clifton
said, “we’ll all be putting in sixteen and twenty hours a
day.”

“
Long hours don’t bother
me.”

“
They might after a year or so of
them.”

Ingrid let out a resigned
sigh.

“
Speaking of long hours,” Clifton
said, “I’ve already put mine in. I believe I’ll drag myself home
and go to bed.”

“
I’ll see you in the morning, then.
Can you get home alright through this snow?”

Clifton shrugged. “I will or I won’t.
Beyond that, why worry?”

Jimmy Sunners spoke to Ingrid when she
came into the codon sequencing lab.

“
We’ve taken the liberty of mapping
out a few sequences for you, Miss Milner.”

He wore a white, non-porous jumpsuit, a
mask over his nose and mouth and goggles over his eyes. His hair
was swept beneath a tight plastic cover and his feet were clad in
the same material of his jumpsuit. Ingrid was dressed similarly.
The room smelled of cold, filtered air. Ingrid heard the quiet hiss
of the ventilation system, the screeing, low volume hum of high
voltage machinery at the ready.

On the video screen in the corner of
the room, a three dimensional projection of a small section of a
DNA strand hung suspended. Ingrid was fascinated.

The three foot, prism shaped screen
showed the familiar double helix pattern of phosphates and sugars
that made up the backbone of the DNA molecule. The projection spun
slowly, the holograph defying the law of gravity. Along the strands
of the backbone, was the raw material of this spiral sandwich: the
pyrimidines and purines that formed the triplet instructions that
ordered cells to construct specific amino acids. The “bread” in
this particular sandwich was the stuff that truly
mattered.