Monster (23 page)
“But Burkhardt seems to think you can.”
“He’s wasting a lot of money.” The anthropologist caught himself again. “I didn’t say that.” He continued, “Anyone can lay human DNA beside chimp DNA and sort out the similarities and differences, even quantify them.”
“As in, ‘We’re 98 percent chimpanzee’?”
“You can’t embarrass me, Cap. I didn’t coin that phrase, though I’d be a richer man if I did. But as you pointed out—and I agree with you—we can find patterns in the DNA. We can even ascertain what creature or plant the DNA came from, but we can’t create the code in the first place, nor can we rewrite it. It’s far, far too complex.”
Cap was surprised to find Baumgartner so full of concessions. “Wait a minute. No argument in favor of site-directed mutagenesis?”
Baumgartner laughed. “Do I detect sarcasm?”
“You’ve argued for it, remember?”
“In
reverse
, Cap.
Reverse
mutations. If we can identify the mutation that knocked out a healthy gene, we can use site-directed mutagenesis to restore the original gene and rescue the mutant, returning it to normal. You’ve seen that for yourself.”
“Okay. That’s one for you.”
“Thank you. For that you get a bonus.” He lowered his voice as if enemies might be listening. “
However
: In all the years of mutating, we have never actually
improved
anything. We have never produced an individual more fit than the original.”
“Another concession?”
“Delivered in private, in confidence.”
“Well, given that, what about the argument that insects mutate and develop resistance to insecticides?”
Baumgartner glared at him in mock anger. “So this is how you return my generosity!”
Cap lifted an eyebrow. “You’ve used that argument on me in public. Now that we’re off the record . . .”
Baumgartner took a prolonged sip of his latte, apparently trying to build up the willingness to say it. “You’re right about that too. As long as the toxin is present, then of course selective pressure is going to favor those mutants that are resistant, at which point it’s tempting to cut short all observation and conclude a beneficial mutation. But all you have to do is remove the toxin and keep observing, and you’ll find that the resistant mutant has so many other weaknesses that it can’t compete with the normal insects and it dies out. It’s a bad trade, like someone with sickle-cell anemia being immune to malaria but dying from the anemia. There’s no real benefit.” He flopped back in his chair, smarting from his own words. “If you were still the least bit respected in the scientific community, I would never have given you that. But since no one will listen to you . . .”
“I’ve always appreciated your honesty.”
Baumgartner relaxed, the worst over, then he said, “Tampering with DNA is like a child trying to fix a high-tech computer with a toy hammer. It’s always an injury, never an improvement, and we have boxcar loads of dead, mutated fruit flies and lab mice to prove it.
”
Cap paused and watched the sprinklers for a moment himself. “You understand what you’re saying?”
Baumgartner nodded. “Something I would never attempt to publish.”
“That mutations are not beneficial?”
“No, that would be plagiarizing
your
work. I’m only saying that tampering with DNA would be injurious. If you try to alter the genetic code of a chimp, for example, you would get one of three results: a normal, unchanged chimp; a deformed, retarded chimp; or a dead chimp.”
Cap was startled. “Why would you concede that?”
“Because we achieved all three.” He sipped from his coffee cup, effectively hiding behind it.
For Cap, that was news. “You tried to alter chimpanzee DNA?”
Baumgartner squirmed as if he’d overstepped. “We tried it; we learned; and we abandoned the project. For professional and legal reasons, there’s nothing more to be said about that.”
“What about Burkhardt?”
“I won’t go there either.”
“I suspect he didn’t abandon the project,” Cap offered.
Baumgartner shot him a correcting look.
“Okay. Okay.” Cap lifted his hands in the air.
Baumgartner finished his coffee. “By the same token, I have nothing to say about your DNA results, except to repeat my position: what you’re suggesting is impossible—and I think we’ve proved that, at great cost.”
“So would you care to comment on the scuttlebutt I got from the protestors—” Baumgartner laughed derisively. “Well, they said that some chimps were being taken off campus, away from the Center—”
“Cap. We can pretend that you never had a clue as to how things are run on that campus. We can pretend that you hung yourself in total innocence, that you didn’t know the damage you could do to science. We can pretend you haven’t noticed that you are now, for all intents and purposes, unemployable, but, Cap, make no mistake: I have noticed. All your former colleagues have noticed, and there is, of course, the confidentiality agreement. I can’t help you any further.”
Cap took the blow, then nodded. “It’s a matter of survival, I suppose.”
Baumgartner agreed with Cap one last time. “I suppose.” Then he looked away, seemingly interested in the rest of the world beyond their conversation—his way of signaling that the conversation was over.
“I’m just trying to find out why my best friend’s wife is missing . . .” Cap shrugged. He knew it was a low blow, but it was the best he had. He reached to close down his computer.
Baumgartner put out a hand and stopped him. “However, I might pose a rhetorical question—and it is only that, a question.”
Cap left the computer turned on. “Pose away.”
Baumgartner looked away again, as if he were talking to someone else. “What if you were Burkhardt, and you had Merrill breathing down your neck demanding results, because
he
had big backers breathing down
his
neck demanding results? And what if a certain Dr. Capella’s published contention that ‘evolutionists have no ultimate basis for being honest’ is in fact true?”
Cap didn’t know quite how to answer. If Baumgartner was cutting him a break, he didn’t want to ruin it. “Could you, uh, expound on your question just a little?”
Baumgartner would not look at him—apparently his way of having the conversation without really having it. “Well, just for the sake of discussion, if you were expected to, say, bridge that 2 percent gap between humans and chimpanzees to demonstrate how we originally diverged from a common ancestor through mutations, how many base pairs would you have to change, rearrange, correct, or mutate, in precisely the right order, using site-directed mutagenesis alone?”
Cap already knew the answer. He and Baumgartner had publicly debated this topic several times. “The human genome contains some three billion base pairs. Two percent of that would be sixty million.”
Baumgartner nodded quietly, seemingly amused by the numbers. “Sixty million. That would be a lot of changes to make even if you had the four million years we all think we had, and of course every single change would have to be beneficial. Imagine how daunting that job would be to an ambitious anthropologist in his midforties.”
Baumgartner finally turned his eyes to the computer screen as if to confirm something. “Given all this, if you were Burkhardt, would you attempt to cheat? Would you, perhaps, entertain the possibility of moving wholesale amounts of DNA, even whole genes, the quickest way possible?”
Suddenly Cap knew where Baumgartner was going, and it was so obvious it was embarrassing. He leaned toward the computer and began to see in those myriad, confusing lines a pattern he hadn’t put together before. “Viral transfers.”
Baumgartner pointed out some of the lines himself. “Your ‘junk DNA’ may not be the junk you thought it was.” He leaned back in his chair again, acting aloof. “Then again, maybe it is. Huge, horizontal transfers can get messy. You’re never quite sure where the new information is going to land or how the organism is going to turn out.”
Cap grabbed up his computer. “Emile, you just might be a real scientist one day, you know that?”
He waved it off. “I was only posing a
question
!”
For one fleeting moment, Beck felt a sweet happiness. She was home with Reed and they were talking and laughing with each other in whole sentences. Sunlight streamed into their living room through an open front door, and strangely, she felt no urge to close it. Whether someone was coming to visit or she and Reed were going to venture out for a walk, either prospect was just fine, maybe for the first time in her life.
But that fleeting moment was in a dream, and when she jerked awake under a dark canopy of serviceberry, the dream slipped from her, image, by image though she struggled to keep it, until nothing remained but a sad sense of loss.
It was morning again. She couldn’t remember what day it was or how many days she’d been lost in this place, wherever this place was. But as she shook off sleep, one thing felt different, enough to make her look around the thicket, searching for old and familiar company.
It seemed she was alone.
She looked about discreetly, stealthily. She listened. Were they gone? Had they left her?
She felt her ankle, then put some weight on it. With a crutch, or perhaps a brace of some kind, she could walk on it—for a while. She was on a mountain slope. They hadn’t traveled very far since leaving their footprints at that baiting site. If she could make her way down the mountain and find that dry streambed, it might lead her to the baiting site and from there, to people.
It was now or never.
She crawled quietly, pressing through the fine and brittle branches, looking about, hopeful. So far, the forest was silent, as if—
“Hmph,” came through the tangle to her right as the ground heaved into a reddish mound obscured by needles and leaves.
Beck stopped crawling, closed her eyes, and sighed, her head dropping. So much for that little hope.
I can’t outrun her.
A quiet stirring beyond the thicket drew her eye, and she saw Jacob sitting with his back against a pine tree, eyes half-open. He looked rather smug. Leah was combing and picking meticulously through the hair on his head and neck, pulling out pine needles, leaf fragments, and an occasional bug, which she ate, a tip for the beautician.
With no escaping in her immediate future, Beck thought of her own hair. Just trying to run her fingers through it told her it was a mess. She pushed free of the entangling undergrowth and settled down on the soft humus, taking the folding hairbrush from her jacket pocket. She brushed slowly, finding snags, tangles, twigs, and needles, but it felt great, almost spiritual. It was something she could do for herself because she wanted to, a way to restore a small measure of order to her ridiculous world—and it was something
human
for a change.
Having brushed out the last tangle, she pitched her head forward to gather her hair into one strand and deftly tied her hair into a neat knot on top of her head. There! Neat, brushed, and out of the way.
She thought she heard Rachel gasp. An ape, gasping? She looked toward the bushes. Rachel stared at her as if she were a stranger with two heads, antennae, and one big eye in the center of each forehead.
Beck’s hand went to her head. “Hmmm?”
What’s the matter? It’s just me.
Not good enough. Rachel approached in a cautious, sideways gait, head cocked with curiosity and alarm as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Gently, but with the firmness of a corrective mother, Rachel took hold of Beck’s head—
Beck screamed and fought back, squirming, kicking, swatting, trying to free herself, struggling for her life.
Rachel didn’t kill her. She examined Beck’s head and then, with a gentle but irresistible cradling embrace, pulled Beck in close, sitting her down, like it or not, scolding her with pig grunts.
Still alive, with head and neck intact, Beck put her screams and kicks on hold, but she couldn’t control her trembling. In scurrying thoughts she reminded herself that Rachel had never yet harmed her. Maybe if she went limp and played dead, Rachel would be satisfied. Maybe if she remained calm, Rachel would calm down as well. Maybe if—
With Beck properly positioned in front of her, Rachel went to work, poking, pulling, and yanking the knot on top of Beck’s head. It hurt.
“Oww!” Beck dared to reach up.
Rachel huffed and batted her hands away.
Beck reached up again. Rachel batted her hands away more sternly, then picked her up and sat her down with a bump as if to say,
You sit still, young lady!
There was nothing to do but grimace until Rachel undid the knot. Beck’s hair tumbled to her shoulders.
With the issue resolved, Beck’s terrifying brush with death was over. Rachel gave Beck’s hair several gentle combings with her fingers and let her go. Beck hobbled away, hair untangled, groomed, and free in the breeze. She sat in the grass, trying to calm herself.
It wasn’t easy. What was the big problem? If Rachel was so obsessed with appearances, she could certainly give a little more attention to her own appearance!