Mutation (4 page)

     He went over to VJ's bureau and extracted a pair of bathing trunks and tossed them at his son. "Come on, I'll race you."

     Victor walked down to his own bedroom, where he pulled on a bathing suit, then called for VJ. VJ appeared and came down the hall toward his father. Victor noted with pride that his son was well built for a ten-year-old. For the first time Victor thought that VJ could be an athlete if he were so inclined.

     The pool had that typical humid chlorine smell. The glass that comprised the ceiling and walls of its enclosure reflected back the image of the pool; the wintry scene outside was not in view. Victor tossed his towel over the back of an aluminum deck chair as Marsha appeared at the door to the family room.

     "How about swimming with us?" Victor asked.

     Marsha shook her head. "You boys enjoy yourself. It's too cold for me."

     "We're going to race," Victor said. "How about officiating?"

     "Dad," VJ said plaintively. "I don't want to race."

     "Sure you do," Victor said. "Two laps. The loser has to take out the garbage."

     Marsha came out onto the deck and took VJ's towel, rolling her eyes at the boy in commiseration.

     "You want the inside lane or the outside one?" Victor asked him, hoping to draw him in.

     "It doesn't matter," VJ said as he lined up next to his father, facing down the length of the pool. The surface swirled gently from the circulator.

     "You start us," Victor said to Marsha.

     "On your mark, get set," Marsha said, pausing, watching her husband and her son teeter on the side of the pool. "Go!"

     After backing up to avoid the initial splash, Marsha sat down in one of the deck chairs and watched. Victor was not a good swimmer, but even so she was surprised to see that VJ was leading through the first lap and the turn. Then, on the second lap, VJ seemed to hold back and Victor won by half a length.

     "Good try," Victor said, sputtering and triumphant. "Welcome to the garbage detail!"

     Perplexed at what she thought she had witnessed, Marsha eyed VJ curiously as he hoisted himself from the water. As their eyes met, VJ winked, confusing her even more.

     VJ took his towel and dried himself briskly. He really would have liked to be the sort of son his mother longed for, the kind David had been. But it just wasn't in him. Even times he tried to fake it, he knew he didn't get it quite right. Still, if moments like this one at the pool gave his parents a sense of family happiness, who was he to deny them?

     "Mother, it hurts even more," Mark Murray said to Colette. He was in his bedroom on the third floor of the Murray townhouse on Beacon Hill. "Whenever I move I feel pressure behind my eyes and in my sinuses." The precise terms were a startling contrast to the tiny toddler's palms with which the child clutched his head.

     "It's worse than before dinner?" Colette asked, smoothing back his tightly curled blond hair. She was no longer startled by her toddler's exceptional vocabulary. The boy was lying in a standard-size bed, even though he was only two and a half years old. At thirteen months he'd demanded that the crib be put in the basement.

     "It's much worse," Mark said.

     "Let's take your temperature once more," Colette said, slipping a thermometer into his mouth. Colette was becoming progressively alarmed even though she tried to reassure herself it was just the beginning of a cold or flu. It had started about an hour after her husband, Horace, had brought Mark home from the day-care center at Chimera. Mark told her he wasn't hungry, and for Mark that was distinctly abnormal.

     The next symptom was sweating. It started just as they were about to sit down to eat. Although he told his parents that he didn't feel hot, the sweat poured out of him. A few minutes later he vomited. That was when Colette put him to bed.

     As an accountant who'd been too queasy even to take biology in college, Horace was happy to leave the sickroom chores to Colette, not that she had any real experience. She was a lawyer and her busy practice had forced her to start Mark at day care when he was only a year old. She adored their brilliant only child, but getting him had been an ordeal the likes of which she had never anticipated.

     After three years of marriage, she and Horace had decided to start a family. But after nearly a year of trying with no luck, they'd both gone in for fertility consultation. It was then they learned the hard truth: Colette was infertile. Mark resulted from their last resort: in-vitro fertilization and the use of a surrogate mother. It had been a nightmare, especially with all the controversy generated by the Baby M case.

     Colette slipped the thermometer from Mark's lips, then rotated the cylinder, looking for the column of mercury. Normal. Colette sighed. She was at a loss. "Are you hungry or thirsty?" she asked.

     Mark shook his head. "I'm starting not to see very well," he said.

     "What do you mean, not see very well?" she asked, alarmed. She covered Mark's eyes alternately. "Can you see out of both eyes?"

     "Yes," Mark responded. "But things are getting blurry. Out of focus."

     "Okay, you stay here and rest," Colette said. "I'm going to talk with your father."

     Leaving the child, Colette went downstairs and found Horace hiding in the study, watching a basketball game on the miniature TV.

     When Horace saw his wife in the doorway, he guiltily switched it off. "The Celtics," he said as an explanation.

     Colette dismissed a fleeting sense of irritation. "He's much worse," she said hoarsely. "I'm worried. He says he can't see well. I think we should call the doctor."

     "Are you sure?" Horace asked. "It is Sunday night."

     "I can't help that!" Colette said sharply.

     Just then an earsplitting shriek made them rush for the stairs.

     To their horror, Mark was writhing around in the bed, clutching his head as if in terrible agony, and screaming at the top of his lungs. Horace grabbed the child by the shoulders and tried to restrain him as Colette went for the phone.

     Horace was surprised at the boy's strength. It was all he could do to keep the child from hurling himself off the bed.

     Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the screaming stopped. For a moment, Mark lay still, his small hands still pressed against his temples, his eyes squeezed shut.

     "Mark?" Horace whispered.

     Mark's arms relaxed. He opened his blue eyes and looked up at his father. But recognition failed to register in them and when he opened his mouth he spouted pure gibberish.

     Sitting at her vanity, brushing her long hair, Marsha studied Victor in the mirror. He was at the sink, brushing his teeth with rapid, forceful strokes. VJ had long since gone to bed. Marsha had checked him when she'd come upstairs fifteen minutes earlier. Looking at his angelic face, she again considered his apparent ploy in the pool.

     "Victor!" she called suddenly.

     Victor spun around, toothpaste foaming out of his mouth like a mad dog. She'd startled him.

     "Do you realize VJ let you win that race?"

     Victor spat noisily into the sink. "Now just a second. It might have been close, but I won the contest fair and square."

     "VJ had the lead through most of the race," Marsha said. "He deliberately slowed down to let you win."

     "That's absurd," Victor said indignantly.

     "No it's not. He does things that just don't make sense for a ten-year-old. It's like when he was two and a half and started playing chess. You loved it, but it bothered me. In fact, it scared me. I was relieved when his intelligence dropped, at least after it stabilized at its high normal. I just want a happy, normal kid." Tears suddenly welled up in her eyes. "Like David," she added, turning away.

     Victor dried his face quickly, tossed the towel aside, and came over to Marsha. He put his arms around her. "You're worrying about nothing. VJ's a fine boy."

     "Maybe he acts strange because I left him with Janice so much when he was a baby," Marsha said, fighting her tears. "I was never home enough. I should have taken a leave from the office."

     "You certainly are intent on blaming yourself," Victor said, "even if there's nothing wrong."

     "Well," Marsha said, "there is something odd about his behavior. If it were one episode, it would be okay. But it's not. The boy just isn't a normal ten-year-old. He's too secretive, too adult." She began to weep. "Sometimes he just frightens me."

     Leaning over to comfort his wife, Victor remembered the terror he'd felt when VJ had been born. He'd wanted his son to be exceptional, not abnormal in any kind of deviant way.

3. March 20, 1989

Monday Morning

     Breakfast was always casual at the Franks'. Fruit, cereal, coffee, and juice on the run. The major difference on this particular morning was that it wasn't a school day for VJ so he wasn't in his usual rush to catch the bus. Marsha was the first to leave, around eight, in order to give her time to see her hospital patients before starting office hours. As she went out the door she passed Ramona Juarez, the cleaning lady who came on Mondays and Thursdays.

     Victor watched his wife get into her Volvo station wagon. Each exhale produced a transient cloud of vapor in the crisp morning air. Even though spring was supposed to arrive the next day, the thermometer registered a chilly 28 degrees.

     Upending his coffee mug in the sink, Victor turned his attention to VJ, who was alternately watching TV and leafing through one of Victor's scientific journals. Victor frowned. Maybe Marsha was right. Maybe the boy's initial brilliance was returning. The articles in that journal were fairly sophisticated. Victor wondered just how much his son might be gleaning.

     He debated saying something, then decided to leave it alone. The kid was fine, normal. "You sure you want to come to the lab today?" he asked. "Maybe you could find something more exciting to do with your friends."

     "It's exciting to come to the lab," said VJ.

     "Your mother thinks you ought to spend more time with kids your own age," Victor said. "That's the way you learn to cooperate and share and all that kind of stuff."

     "Oh, please!" VJ said. "I'm with kids my own age every day at school."

     "At least we think alike," Victor said. "I told your mother the same thing. Well, now that we have that cleared up, how do you want to get to the lab-ride with me or bike?"

     "Bike," VJ answered.

     Despite the chill in the air, Victor had the sunroof open on his car and the wind tousled his hair. With the radio turned to the only classical station he could get, he thundered over an ancient bridge spanning the swollen Merrimack River. The river was a torrent of eddies and white water, and it was rising daily thanks to winter snow melting in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a hundred miles to the north.

     On the street before Chimera, Inc., Victor turned left and drove the length of a long brick building that crowded the side of the road. At the end of the building, he took another left, then slowed as he drove past a manned security checkpoint. Recognizing the car, the uniformed man waved as Victor passed under the raised black and white gate onto the grounds of a vast private biotechnology firm.

     Entering the nineteenth-century red-brick mill complex, Victor always felt a rush of pride that came with ownership. It was an impressive place, especially since many of the buildings had had their exteriors restored rather than renovated.

     The tallest buildings of the compound were five stories high, but most were three, and they stretched off in both directions like studies in perspective. Rectangular in shape, they enclosed a huge inner court which was spotted with newer buildings in a variety of shapes and sizes.

     At the western corner of the property and dominating the site was an eight-story clock tower designed as a replica of Big Ben in London. It soared above the other buildings from the top of a three-story structure built partially over a concrete dam across the Merrimack. With the river as swollen as it was, the millpond behind the dam was filled to overflowing. A thunderous waterfall at the spillway in the center of the dam filled the air with a fine mist.

     Back in the old days when the mill turned out textiles from southern cotton, the clock tower building had been the power station. The entire complex had been run by waterpower until electrification had shut the main sluice and quieted the huge paddle wheels and gears in the basement of the building. The Big Ben replica had chimed its last years before, but Victor was thinking of having it restored.

     When Chimera had purchased the abandoned complex in 1976, it had renovated less than half of the available square feet, leaving the rest for future expansion. In anticipation of growth, however, all the buildings had been equipped with water, sanitation, and power. There was no doubt in Victor's mind that it would be easy to get old Big Ben going again. He made a mental note to bring it up at the next development meeting.

     As Victor pulled into his assigned parking spot in front of the administration building and pulled the sunroof shut, he paused to review his day. Despite the pride the expansive site evoked, he recognized he had some mixed feelings about the success of Chimera. In his heart Victor was a scientist, yet as one of the three founding partners of Chimera, he was required to assume his share of the administrative responsibilities. Unfortunately, these obligations were increasingly taking more time.

     Victor entered the building through the elaborate Georgian entranceway, replete with columns and pediments. The architects had paid painstaking attention to detail in the restoration. Even the furnishings were from the early nineteenth century. The lobby was a far cry from the utilitarian halls of MIT where Victor was teaching back in 1973 when he first started talking with a fellow academician, Ronald Beekman, about the opportunities afforded by the explosion of biotechnology. Technically, it was a good marriage, since Victor was in biology and Ronald was in biochemistry. They had combined forces with a businessman by the name of Clark Fitzsimmons Foster, and in 1975 founded Chimera. The result was better than their wildest expectations. In 1983, under the guidance of Clark, the company went public and they'd all become enormously wealthy.