The Angel Maker (32 page)

Rex heard Victor’s story with growing astonishment, and when he had finished, he told him that all scientific discoveries hinged on such flukes: quirky coincidences that then had to be turned into verifiable fact.

Victor replied, ‘I’ve got the hang of it now. It won’t be long.’

‘How much longer, Victor?’

A firm date would help the dean to placate the other members of the faculty, who were running out of patience.

‘Before the end of the year.’

It was July 1983.

‘That’s just six months from now.’

‘Six months from now,’ Victor echoed, and from his tone it was impossible to tell if he considered that to be plenty of time, or not.

 

Victor, in the meantime, had contacted the women again. But before ringing them he’d put down on paper what he wanted to say. Literally. Word for word. He had even read the sentences aloud to himself, to try to make them sound as natural as possible.

He would like them to come to Aachen. Just to talk. More than that he would not say. Of course they were bound to ask him what he wanted to talk about. About the past, he would answer them. But also the future. He would tell them that science had made great strides in the past few years. He would not mention the part he had played in it. He would also tell them that what used to be quite impossible was now merely difficult. And what had proved to be difficult before, was now much easier. He thought that sounded quite good.

One of the women answered the phone, and he told her his name and asked how she was and how her friend was doing. The whole thing was written down on the slip of paper next to the phone. But then she gave an answer that didn’t fit in with his scenario. Her friend had run off with someone else. Not too long ago. It had only been a month or two.

He had no idea what to say. He couldn’t think of the right words. Fortunately for him, she immediately started pouring her heart out. She rambled on for quite a while, and so all he had to do was make sympathetic noises.

Finally she stopped in mid-sentence and apologised - said that she shouldn’t be bothering him with this. And then she asked what she could do for him. She probably just meant to ask about the reason for his call, but Victor Hoppe did not interpret it that way. He took it literally. So, apparently she wanted to do something for him. The very thing he wanted, in fact.

‘I want you to come here,’ he said. It wasn’t a question and sounded more like a demand.

She replied that she was experiencing financial difficulties, that she couldn’t afford the trip; and a hotel room was out of the question.

He told her that he would reimburse her for any expenses. Money was no object.

Then she asked what he wanted to talk to her about, which finally gave him the opportunity to consult his notes.

He had no trouble persuading her. There was her injured self-image. There was her jealousy. And her loneliness. All of it had been fermenting inside her for the past two months. As it happened, his proposal had come at a very good time. A baby would re-establish her womanhood. It would be a thorn in her ex-lover’s side. And it would put an end to her loneliness. What’s more, it was going to be a girl - a girl who would look just like her.

 

The wind that had sprung up in Philadelphia three years earlier and that had, over time, increased to hurricane strength reached the European mainland at the end of February 1984. That was when an article appeared in the journal Science entitled, ‘Instability of mouse blastomere nuclei transferred to enucleated zygotes to support development in vitro’. The authors were David Solar and James Grath, and their article discredited Dr Victor Hoppe’s findings. Solar and Grath had followed his method of cloning mouse embryos to the letter, and they had not once succeeded in culturing an embryo that survived. They had gone over Victor Hoppe’s report with a razor-sharp knife and mercilessly eviscerated almost every point he had made. Their conclusion was as terse as it was unequivocal: ‘The cloning of mammals by transferring a cell nucleus to an egg is impossible from a scientific standpoint.’

Even more important was what could be read between the lines. The article suggested that Victor Hoppe’s work was worthless and, even worse, that he had committed fraud.

 

Rex Cremer barged into the lab without knocking. He was holding the issue of Science, and from a distance waved it at Victor, who was seated at his desk.

‘Have you read it?’

‘They’re incompetent bunglers,’ Victor said quickly.

‘That’s what they are accusing you of.’

‘Oh, who cares what they say?’

‘They have a reputation, Victor! And they are leaders in the field!’

‘It doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘It means everything, because what they say is immediately taken as gospel.’

‘They’re bunglers, nevertheless.’

‘I’ve never managed to repeat your experiment either,’ said Rex dryly. ‘Not once, in three years.’

This time there was no response. Victor would not look up.

The dean continued. ‘I’ve always backed you’, he began calmly, ‘and I would like to come to your defence again, but this time you’ll have to cooperate. The rest of the faculty is furious.’

‘It’s no business of theirs,’ Victor muttered into his beard.

‘It certainly is very much their business. The entire department is affected. Even the vice chancellor has had to field unpleasant questions. It is urgent that we come up with a response.’

‘I won’t respond to slander.’

‘This isn’t slander! Can’t you get that through your head? It’s the result of years of research by two highly respected scientists. If you won’t defend yourself, then it’s over.’

‘What is over?’

‘All of it. The entire experiment. The subsidies will dry up and the department will be cut back, perhaps even eliminated.’

Still Victor wouldn’t look up. He was breathing heavily. ‘There’s more,’ he said finally.

‘What did you say?’

‘That there’s more.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can prove them wrong.’

‘Then you should do just that.’

‘It’s too soon.’

‘You promised you’d be finished in six months. It’s been seven months now. I was really hoping you’d have come up with something, Victor.’

Rex sighed. He realised that he had been much too trusting and that he would end up having to pay the price for his naivety.

Behind the desk Victor folded his hands and lifted his head. ‘I have finished,’ he said. ‘But now I’ve got to wait.’

‘What do you mean, Victor? Stop speaking in riddles. This really isn’t the time.’

‘I’ll show you.’

He stood up and walked over to the table that held the binocular microscope used for the cell-injection process. Surrounding it were piles of papers and journals and racks of empty test tubes. A quick glance told Rex that there was notepaper everywhere, all over the lab, but apart from that there was no other sign of Victor’s work. He saw no test equipment, no Petri dishes nor mouse cages anywhere. It did indeed look as if Victor had completed his experiment, as he claimed, and that he was now killing time reading magazines, like a watchman on the night shift.

Victor returned with a stack of cards and started flipping through them. As though getting ready for a round of poker, he removed five cards from the stack and placed them on the desk top, under Cremer’s nose. Five identical photographs, each marked with the same date and a different three-digit number. They were pictures of microscope slides. Not providing any explanation, Victor next slapped down another five photos on the desk top. These too were identical, and were barely different from the first five pictures. Each photograph showed the tip of a pipette piercing a cell wall. Just above this row of ten images Victor spread another series of five pictures, each showing a cell after the first cell division - the date was one day later than the previous photos. Not saying a word, he went on to a fourth, then a fifth set of images, each showing the next stage in the growth process of an embryo.

So far Rex was not particularly impressed. What Victor was showing him was no different from photos he’d taken himself. The next series too, with eight-cell embryos - at the stage, therefore, when they were ready to be implanted into the uterus - wasn’t anything new.

‘What do you want—’ he began.

‘Wait,’ said Victor, dealing out another couple of series of five pictures, planting down his thumb hard on each photo, as if stressing its importance. Rex now saw that in every new set of pictures the embryo seemed to be growing. From eight cells to sixteen cells to thirty-two cells. That, as far as he knew, had never been accomplished artificially without resulting in all kinds of abnormality. By the next set, you couldn’t even count the cells with the naked eye, but there had to be sixty-four, and when Victor spread out the last set, so that the entire desk top was covered from corner to comer, the dean knew that the embryo in the photo had grown into one hundred and twenty-eight cells.

‘How did you do it?’ he asked excitedly. ‘And why let them grow to this stage?’

‘When a fertilised egg travels in the normal way down the Fallopian tube to the uterus,’ Victor explained, ‘it arrives when it has grown to the size shown in this photo. Five or six days after conception. ’

Tapping his finger on one of the photos in the last series, he continued, ‘The chances of an artificially fertilised egg implanting itself in the uterus are likewise greatly increased if it is transferred at a much later stage than has been done before now.’

‘But no one has ever managed to produce embryos this far along.’

‘Sometimes what seems impossible is merely difficult,’ Victor said, almost mechanically.

‘But then how, Victor?’

‘It’s just a matter of discovering the right equation. It’s chemistry, that’s all it is. I’ll write the whole thing up for you.’

‘Well, you’d better do it quickly,’ said Rex, who was starting to feel hopeful again. He picked up one of the last photos and read the date: 10 February 1984. Counting on his fingers, he said, ‘It’s been nearly three weeks. So you should be expecting the mice to be born any time now?’

He saw Victor shaking his head.

‘Did it go wrong?’ he asked. ‘Did they abort after all?’

Again Victor shook his head.

‘What, then, Victor?’ exclaimed Rex impatiently.

‘It’s going to take about nine months,’ said Victor, staring into space.

About nine months. The words swam around in Cremer’s mind. Nine months. He gulped, hoping that the thought that had just come into his head was wrong. With a sick feeling he turned to look at the photograph in his hand, even though he knew it wouldn’t make him any the wiser. Most mammalian embryos looked almost identical at that stage.

‘Are they . . .’ he began, but could not get the words out.

‘Human embryos,’ Victor asserted.

Rex buried his head in his hands.

 

If anyone actually did commit fraud in this whole affair, as was the charge, it was Rex Cremer, when he found out that Victor was in the process of cloning a human being. He certainly knew what he was doing, but felt he had no choice. It was the only way he saw left to him to rectify the situation. His decision may have been overly short-sighted, or coloured by self-interest; perhaps it was pure panic, but in any case it was his own decision. It was true that Victor had presented him with a fait accompli, but the scenario that came next was all down to Cremer. He prevailed upon Victor to go along with it, though he did have to resort to a stratagem to make him come on board. For starters, he told Victor to clone some adult mice as quickly as he could, since that was the experiment he was supposed to be working on. Victor might consider it a step in the wrong direction, but at least he’d be able to rebut Solar and Grath’s criticism that way and, even more important - and Rex said this with great emphasis - he would also convert the rest of the unbelievers. Besides, it would give Victor a chance to prepare people for the news about the human cloning, which would otherwise smite mankind like a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky.

Convert the rest of the unbelievers. Prepare the people. Smite mankind. A thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky. Rex Cremer used those words deliberately, and they did not fall on deaf ears. The dean also suggested that they pretend the photos he’d just seen were of mouse embryos rather than human ones.

‘I’ve got to show the others something,’ he explained. ‘That’s the only way to convince them at this stage.’

‘Of what?’ Victor asked.

‘Of the righteousness of your work.’

Again he had been deliberate in his choice of words, but he also meant what he said. He sincerely believed that Victor had achieved as much as he claimed he had, although he was somewhat dubious about the experiment’s eventual outcome - more dubious, in fact, than about the experiment itself. For the moment, anyway. He was secretly hoping that the embryos had not implanted themselves in the woman’s womb, or that they would still end up being rejected. It would spare him a good deal of guilt, although that wasn’t his first concern.

‘What if they want to know where the embryos are?’ Victor asked.

‘Then we’ll tell them that they were aborted. I can show them some abnormal embryos from my own research.’

‘We? You’re saying that “we” will tell them . . .’

‘Yes, Victor, that’s right: we. You and I. We’ll have to get our story straight. Later, when the time is ripe, we’ll tell them the truth. And then they’ll understand. Right now we’re just playing for time. We must prepare the world for what is to come.’

Victor nodded, and Rex had the feeling that he had convinced him. He’d been right to think it was possible to steer Victor in a certain direction by using the right words. Victor could be influenced through rhetoric. He seemed to hold the word in greater esteem than he held knowledge. Or perhaps he considered the word to be the higher form of knowledge - Rex wasn’t quite sure which, but it didn’t really matter. Either would suffice to explain why Victor did not attach much importance to scientific papers, for papers were about data, less about words, and bombastic language was totally taboo. It was the content that mattered, not the aesthetics.