Next: A Novel (45 page)

“It’s worse at night.”

“Do you want a pill?”

“I already took one.” He inhaled deeply. “Does Robbins know what the hell this is?”

“I think so.”

“Did he tell you?”

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

“He didn’t tell me, Jack.”

“Christ.”

The limousine sped through the night. Watson stared out the window, breathing hard.

The hospital clinic was deserted at this hour. Fred Robbins, thirty-five and handsome as a movie star, was waiting for Watson with two younger physicians, in a large examining room. Robbins had set up light boxes with X-ray, electrophoresis and MRI results.

Watson dropped heavily into a chair. He waved to the younger men. “You can go.”

“But Jack—”

“Tell me alone,” Watson said to Robbins. “Nineteen fucking doctors have examined me in the last two months. I’ve done so many MRIs and CAT scans I glow in the dark. You tell me.” He waved to the woman. “You wait outside, too.”

They all left. Watson was alone with Robbins.

“They say you’re the smartest diagnostician in America, Fred. So tell me.”

“Well,” Robbins said, “it’s as much a biochemical process as anything. That’s why I wanted—”

“Three months ago,” Watson said, “I had a pain in my leg. A week later the leg was dragging.

My shoe was worn on the edge. Pretty soon I had trouble walking up stairs. Now I have weakness in my right arm. Can’t squeeze toothpaste with my hand. It’s getting hard to breathe.

In three months! So tell me.”

“It’s called Vogelman’s paresis,” Robbins said. “It’s not common, but not rare. A few thousand cases every year, maybe fifty thousand worldwide. First described in the 1890s, by a French—”

“Can you treat it?”

“At this point,” Robbins said, “there are no satisfactory treatments.”

“Are there any treatments?”

“Palliative and supportive measures, massage and B vitamins—”

“But no treatments.”

“Not really, Jack, no.”

“What causes it?”

“That we know. Five years ago, Enders’s team at Scripps isolated a gene,BRD7A , that codes for a protein that repairs myelin around nerve cells. They’ve demonstrated that a point mutation in the gene produces Vogelman’s paresis in animals.”

“Well, hell,” Watson said, “you’re telling me I’ve got a genetic deficiency disease like any other.”

“Yes, but—”

“How long ago did they find the gene? Five years? Then it’s a natural for gene replacement, start the coded protein being made inside the body…”

“Replacement therapy is risky, of course.”

“Do I give a damn? Look at me, Fred. How much time do I have?”

“The time course is variable, but…”

“Spit it out.”

“Maybe four months.”

“Jesus.” Watson sucked in his breath. He ran his hand over his forehead, took another breath.

“Okay, so that’s my situation. Let’s do the therapy. Five years later, they must have a protocol.”

“They don’t,” Robbins said.

“Somebody must.”

“They don’t. Scripps patented the gene and licensed it to Beinart Baghoff, the Swiss pharma giant. It was part of a package deal with Scripps, about twenty different collaborations.BRD7A wasn’t regarded as particularly important.”

“What’re you saying?”

“Beinart put a high license fee on the gene.”

“Why? It’s an orphan disease, it makes no sense to—”

Robbins shrugged. “They’re a big company. Who knows why they do things. Their licensing division sets fees for eight hundred genes that they control. There’s forty people in that division.

It’s a bur eaucracy. Anyway, they set the license high—”

“Christ.”

“And no laboratory, anywhere in the world, has worked on the disease in the last five years.”

“Christ.”

“Too expensive, Jack.”

“Then I’ll buy the damn gene.”

“Can’t. I already checked. It’s not for sale.”

“Everything’s for sale.”

“Any sale by Beinart has to be approved by Scripps, and the Scripps office of tech transfer won’t consider—”

“Never mind, I’ll license it myself.”

“You can do that. Yes.”

“And I’ll set up the gene transfer myself. We’ll get a team in this hospital to do it.”

“I really wish we could, Jack. But gene transfer’s extremely risky, and no lab will take the chance these days. Nobody’s gone to jail yet over a failed gene transfer, but there have been a lot of patient deaths, and—”

“Fred. Look at me.”

“You can get it done in Shanghai.”

“No, no. Here.”

Fred Robbins bit his lip. “Jack, you have to face reality. There’s less than a one percent success rate. I mean, if we had done five years of work, we would have the results of animal tests, vector tests, immunosuppressive protocols, all kinds of steps to increase your chance of success. But just shooting from the hip—”

“That’s all I have time for. Shooting from the hip.”

Fred Robbins was shaking his head.

“A hundred million dollars,” Watson said. “For whatever lab does it. Take over a private clinic out in Arcadia. Just me, nobody knows. Do the procedure there. It works or it doesn’t.”

Fred Robbins shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, Jack. I really am.”

CH094

The overheadlights came on in the autopsy room, bank after bank. It made a dramatic opening shot, Gorevitch thought. The figure in the lab coat was distinguished-looking in a severe way: silver hair, wire-rim glasses. He was the internationally renowned primate anatomist Jorg Erickson.

Using a handheld camera, Gorevitch said, “Dr. Erickson, what are we doing today?”

“We are examining a world-famous specimen, the putative talking orangutan of Indonesia. This animal is said to have spoken in at least two languages. Well, we shall see.”

Dr. Erickson turned to the steel table, where the carcass was draped in a white cloth. He pulled the cloth away with a flourish. “This is a sub-adult or juvenilePongo abelii, a Sumatran orangutan, distinguished by its smaller size from the Borneo orangutan. This specimen is male, approximately three years of age, in apparent good health, with no external scars or injuries…All right, now we begin.” He picked up a scalpel.

“With a midsagittal incision, I expose the anterior musculature of the throat and pharynx. Note the superior and inferior belly of the omohyoid, and here, the sternohyoid…Hmmm.” Erickson was bent over the animal’s neck. Gorevitch found it difficult to maneuver for a shot.

“What do you see, Professor?”

“I am looking now at the stylohyoid and the cricothyroid muscles, here, and here…And this is quite interesting. Ordinarily in Pongo we find the anterior musculature poorly developed, and lacking the fine motor control of the human speech apparatus. But this creature appears to be a transitional case, bearing some features of the classic pongid pharynx, and some features more characteristic of the human neck. Notice the sternocleidomastoid…”

Gorevitch thought, Sternocleidomastoid. Jesus. They would have to dub in a voice-over.

“Professor, perhaps you could say it in English?”

“No, the terms are Latin, I don’t know the translation—”

“I mean, can you explain in layman’s terms? For our viewers?”

“Ah, of course. All these superficial muscles, most of which attach to the hyoid—that is to say, the Adam’s apple—these muscles are more human than ape-like.”

“What could account for that?”

“Some mutation, obviously.”

“And the rest of the animal? Is it more human, as well?”

“I have not seen the rest of the animal,” Erickson said severely. “But we will get there, in due time. I shall be especially interested to inspect any rotation of the axis of the foramen magnum, and of course the depth and arrangement of sulci of the motor cortex, to the extent that gray matter has been preserved.”

“Do you expect to find human-like changes in the brain?”

“Frankly, no. I do not,” Erickson said. He turned his attention to the top of the skull, running his gloved hands over the sparse hair of the orang’s scalp, feeling the bones beneath. “You see, in this animal, parietal bones slope inward, toward the top of the cranium. That is a classic pongid or chimp finding. Whereas humans have bulging parietal bones. The top of their heads are wider than the bottom.”

Erickson stepped back from the table. Gorevitch said, “So you are saying this animal is a mixture of human and ape?”

“No,” Erickson said. “This is an ape. It is an aberrant ape, to be sure. But it is merely an ape.”

JOHN B. WATSON INVESTMENT GROUP

For Immediate Release

John B. “Jack” Watson,world-famous philanthropist and founder of the Watson Investment Group, died today in Shanghai, China. Mr. Watson was internationally lauded for his charitable work and his efforts on behalf of the poor and downtrodden of the world. Mr. Watson had been ill for only a short time, but he suffered from an extremely aggressive form of cancer. He checked into a private Shanghai clinic and died three days later. He is mourned by friends and colleagues around the world.

STORY, DETAILS TK

CH095

Henry Kendall was surprised that Gerard could help Dave with his math homework. But that wouldn’t last long. Eventually, Dave would probably need special schooling. Dave had inherited the chimp’s short attention span. He found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the other kids in class, particularly in reading, which was agony for him. And his physical prowess put him in another league on the playground. The other children wouldn’t let him play. So he had become an excellent surfer.

And by now, the truth was out. There had been a particularly distressing article inPeople magazine, “The Modern Family,” which said, “The most up-to-date family is no longer a same-sex family, or a blended family, or an interracial family. That’s all so last century, says Tracy Kendall. And she should know, because the Kendall family of La Jolla, California, is transgenic and interspecies—creating more excitement in the household than a barrel of monkeys!”

Henry had been called to testify before Congress, which he found a peculiar experience. The congressmen spoke to the cameras for two hours. Then they got up and left, pleading urgent business elsewhere. Then the witnesses spoke for six minutes each, but there were no congressmen there to hear their remarks. Later, the congressmen all announced they would soon deliver major speeches on the subject of transgenic creation.

Henry was named Scientist of the Year by the Society for Libertarian Biology. Jeremy Rifkin called him a “war criminal.” He had been excoriated by the National Council of Churches. The pope excommunicated him, only later to discover that he wasn’t Catholic; they had the wrong Henry Kendall. The NIH criticized his work, but the replacement for Robert Bellarmino as head of genetics was William Gladstone, and he was much more open-minded and less self-aggrandizing than Bellarmino had been. Henry now traveled continuously, lecturing about transgenic techniques at university seminars around the country.

He was the subject of intense controversy. The Reverend Billy John Harker of Tennessee called him “Satan incarnate.” Bill Mayer, noted left-wing reactionary, published a long and much-discussed article in the New York Review of Books entitled “Banished from Eden: Why We Must Prevent Transgenic Travesties.” The article failed to mention that transgenic animals had been in existence for two decades already. Dogs, cats, bacteria, mice, sheep, and cattle had all been created. When a senior NIH scientist was asked about the article, he coughed and said,

“What’s the New York Review ?”

Lynn Kendall ran the TransGenic Times web site, which detailed the daily life of Dave, Gerard, and her fully human children, Jamie and Tracy.

After a year in La Jolla, Gerard began to make dial-tone sounds. He had done it before, but the tones were mysterious to the Kendalls. Evidently they were the tones of a foreign telephone exchange, but they failed to identify which country. “Where did you come from, Gerard?” they would ask.

“I can’t sleep a wink anymore, ever since you first walked out the door.” He had become enamored of American country music. “All you ever do is bring me down.”

“What country, Gerard?”

To that, they never received an answer. He spoke some French, and he often talked with a British accent. They assumed he was European.

Then one day one of Henry’s graduate students from France was having dinner at their house, and he heard Gerard’s tones. “My God,” he said, “I know what he is doing.” He listened for a moment. “There is no city code,” he said. “But otherwise…let’s try.” He pulled out his own cell phone, and began to key in numbers. “Do it again, Gerard.”

Gerard repeated the tones.

“And again.”

“Life is a book, you’ve got to read it,” Gerard sang. “Life is a story and you’ve got to tell it…”

“I know this song,” the graduate student said.

“What is it?” Henry said.

“It’s Eurovision. Gerard, the tones.”

Eventually, Gerard did the dial tones. The graduate student placed the call. His first guess was to try Paris. A woman answered the phone. He said in French, “Excuse me, but do you know of a grey parrot who is named Gerard?”

The woman began to cry. “Let me speak to him,” she said. “Is he all right?”

“He is fine.”

They held the phone by Gerard’s perch, and he listened to the woman’s voice. His head bobbed excitedly. Then he said, “Is this where you live? Oh, Mother’s going to love it here!”

Gail Bond arrived to visit a few days later. She stayed a week, and then returned alone. Gerard, it seemed, wanted to stay. For days afterward, he sang:

My baby used to stay out all night long,

She made me cry, she done me wrong,

She hurt my eyes open, that’s no lie,

Tables turn and now her turn to cry,

Because I used to love her, but it’s all over now…

All in all, things were working out much better than anyone expected. The family was busy, but everyone got along. There were only two worrisome trends. Henry noticed that Dave had developed a few gray hairs around his muzzle. So it was possible that Dave, like most other transgenics, might die earlier than usual.