Darwin's Radio Read online

  Baltimore

  Kaye walked with steady confidence from her building to Americol, looking up at the Bromo-Seltzer Tower—so named because it had once carried a huge blue antacid bottle on its peak. Now it carried just the name; the bottle had been removed decades ago.

  Kaye could not shake Mitch from her thoughts, but oddly, he was not a distraction. Her thoughts were focused; she had a much clearer idea of what to look for. The play of sun and shadow pleased her as she walked past the alleys between the buildings. The day was so pretty she could almost ignore the presence of Benson. As always, he accompanied her to the lab floor, then stood by the elevators and the stairs, where everyone would have to pass his inspection.

  She entered her lab and hung her purse and coat on a glassware drying rack. Five of her six assistants were in the next room, checking the results of last night’s electrophoresis analysis. She was glad to have some privacy.

  She sat at her small desk and pulled up the Americol intranet on the computer. It was just a few seconds from the first screen to Americol’s proprietary Human Genome Project site. The database was beautifully designed and easy to poke through, with key genes identified and functions highlighted and explained in detail.

  Kaye plugged in her password. In her original work, she had tracked down seven potential candidates for the expression and reassembly of complete and infectious HERV particles. The candidate genes she had thought most likely to be viable had turned out—luckily, she would have thought—to be associated with SHEVA. In her months at Americol, she had begun to study the six other candidates in detail, and had planned to move on to a list of thousands of possibly related genes.

  Kaye was considered an expert, but what she was an expert in, compared to the huge world of human DNA, was a series of broken-down and seemingly abandoned shacks in a number of small and almost forgotten towns. The HERV genes were supposed to be fossils, fragments scattered through stretches of DNA less than a million base pairs long. Within such small distances, however, genes could recombine—jump from position to position—with some ease. The DNA was constantly in ferment—genes switching locations, forming little knots or fistulas of DNA, and replicating, a series of churning and twisting chains constantly being rearranged, for reasons no one could yet completely fathom. And yet SHEVA had remained remarkably stable over millions of years. The changes she was looking for would be both slight and very significant.

  If she was right, she was about to overturn a major scientific paradigm, injure a lot of reputations, cause the scientific fight of the twenty-first century, a war actually, and she did not want to be an early casualty because she had come to the battlefield in half a suit of armor. Speculation about the cause was not sufficient. Extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence.

  Patiently, hoping it would be at least an hour before anyone else entered the lab, she once again compared the sequences found in SHEVA with the six other candidates. This time she looked closely at the transcription factors that triggered expression of the large protein complex. She rechecked the sequences several times before she spotted what she had known since yesterday must be there. Four of the candidates carried several such factors, all subtly different.

  She sucked in her breath. For a moment she felt as if she stood on the brink of a tall cliff. The transcription factors would have to be specific for different varieties of LPC. That meant there would be more than one gene coding for the large protein complex.

  More than one station on Darwin’s radio.

  Last week Kaye had asked for the most accurate available sequences of over a hundred genes on several chromosomes. The manager of the genome group had told her they would be available this morning. And he had done his work well. Even scanning by eye, she was seeing interesting similarities. With so much data, however, the eye was not good enough. Using an in-house software package called METABLAST, she searched for sequences roughly homologous with the known LPC gene on chromosome 21. She requested and was authorized to use most of the computing power of the building’s mainframe for over three minutes.

  When the search was completed, Kaye had the matches she had hoped for—and hundreds more besides, all buried in so-called junk DNA, each subtly different, offering a different set of instructions, a different set of strategies.

  LPC genes were common throughout the twenty-two human autosomes, the chromosomes that did not code for sex.

  “Backups,” Kaye whispered, as if she might be overheard, “alternates,” and then she felt a chill. She pushed back from the desk and paced around the lab. “Oh, my God. What in hell am I thinking here?”

  SHEVA in its present form was not working properly. The new babies were dying. The experiment—the creation of a new subspecies—was being thwarted by outside enemies, other viruses, not tame, not co-opted ages ago and made part of the human tool kit.

  She had found another link in the chain of evidence. If you wanted a message delivered, you would send many messengers. And the messengers could carry different messages. Surely a complex mechanism that governed the shape of a species would not rely on one little messenger and one fixed message. It would automatically alternate subtle designs, hoping to dodge whatever bullets might be out there, problems it could not directly sense or anticipate.

  What she was looking at could explain the vast quantities of HERV and other mobile elements—all designed to guarantee an efficient and successful transition to a new phenotype, a new variety of human. We just don’t know how it works. It’s so complicated . . . it could take a lifetime to understand!

  What chilled her was that in the present atmosphere, these results would be completely misinterpreted.

  She pushed her chair back from the computer. All of the energy she had had in the morning, all the optimism, the glow from her night with Mitch, seemed hollow.

  She could hear voices down the hall. The hour had passed quickly. She stood and folded the printout of the candidate sites. She would have to take these to Jackson; that was her first duty. Then she had to talk with Dicken. They had to plan a response.

  She pulled her coat from the drying rack and slipped it on. She was about to leave when Jackson stepped in from the hall. Kaye looked at him with some shock; he had never come down to her lab before. He looked tired and deeply concerned. He, too, held a slip of paper.

  “I thought I should be the first to let you know,” he said, waving the paper under her nose.

  “Let me know what?” Kaye asked.

  “How wrong you can possibly be. SHEVA is mutating.”

  Kaye finished the day in a three-hour round of meetings with senior staff and assistants, a litany of schedules, deadlines, the day-to-day minutiae of research in a small part of a very large corporation, mind-numbing at the best of times, but now almost intolerable. Jackson’s smug condescension at the delivery of the news from Germany had almost goaded her into a sharp rejoinder, but she had simply smiled, said she was already working on the problem, and left . . . To stand for five minutes in the women’s rest room, staring at herself in a mirror.

  She walked from Americol to the condominium tower, accompanied by the ever-watchful Benson, and wondered if last night had just been a dream. The doorman opened the big glass door, smiled politely at them both, and then gave the agent a brotherly nod. Benson joined her in the elevator car. Kaye had never been at ease with the agent, but had managed in the past to keep up polite conversation. Now, she could only grunt to his inquiry about how her day had gone.

  When she opened the door at 2011, for a moment she thought Mitch was not there, and let out her breath with a small whistle. He had gotten what he wanted and now she was alone again to face her failures, her most brilliant and devastating failures.

  But Mitch came out of the small side office with a most pleasing haste and stood in front of her for a moment, searching her face, estimating the situation, before he held her, a little too gently.

  “Squeeze me until I squeak,” she said. “I’m having a really
bad day.”

  That did not stop her from wanting him. Again the love was both intense and wet and full of a marvelous grace she had never felt before. She held on to these moments and when they could go on no more, when Mitch lay beside her covered with beads of sweat and the sheets beneath her were uncomfortably damp, she felt like crying.

  “It’s getting really tough,” she said, her chin quivering.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “I think I’m wrong, we’re wrong. I know I’m not but everything is telling me I’m wrong.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Mitch said.

  “No!” she cried. “I predicted this, I saw it happening, but not soon enough, and they aced me. Jackson aced me. I haven’t talked with Marge Cross, but . . .”

  It took Mitch several minutes to work the details out of her, and even then, he could only half follow what she was saying. The short form was that she felt new expressions of SHEVA were stimulating new varieties of LPCs, large protein complexes, in case the first signal on Darwin’s radio had not been effective or had met with problems. Jackson and nearly everyone else believed they were encountering a mutated form of SHEVA, perhaps even more virulent.

  “Darwin’s radio,” Mitch repeated, mulling over the term.

  “The signaling mechanism. SHEVA.”

  “Mmm hmm,” he said. “I think your explanation makes more sense.”

  “Why does it make more sense? Please tell me I’m not just being pigheaded and wrong.”

  “Put the facts together,” Mitch said. “Run it through the science mill again. We know speciation sometimes occurs in small leaps. Because of the mummies in the Alps, we know SHEVA was active in humans who were producing new kinds of babies. Speciation is rare even on a historical time scale—and SHEVA was unknown in medical science until just recently. There are far too many coincidences if SHEVA and evolution in small leaps aren’t connected.”

  She rolled to face him, and ran her fingers along his cheeks, around his eyes, in a way that made him flinch.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It is so marvelous that you’re here. You restore me. This afternoon—I have never felt so lost . . . not since Saul was gone.”

  “I don’t think Saul ever knew what he had, with you,” Mitch said.

  Kaye let this lie between them for a moment, to see if she quite understood what it meant. “No,” she said finally. “He wasn’t capable of knowing.”

  “I know who and what you are,” Mitch said.

  “Do you?”

  “Not yet,” he confessed, and smiled. “But I’d like to try.”

  “Listen to us,” Kaye said. “Tell me what you did today.”

  “I went to the YMCA and cleared out my locker. I took a cab back here and lounged around like a gigolo.”

  “I mean it,” Kaye said, gripping his hand tighter.

  “I made some phone calls. I’m going to take a train to New York tomorrow to meet with Merton and our mysterious stranger from Austria. We’re getting together at a place that Merton describes as a ‘wonderful, thoroughly corrupting old mansion upstate.’ Then I’ll take the train to Albany for my interview at SUNY.”

  “Why a mansion?”

  “I have no idea,” Mitch said.

  “You’re coming back?”

  “If you want me to.”

  “Oh, I want you to. You don’t need to worry about that,” Kaye said. “We’re not going to have much time to think, much less worry.”

  “Wartime romance is the sweetest,” Mitch said.

  “Tomorrow is going to be much worse,” Kaye said. “Jackson is going to make a stink.”

  “Let him,” Mitch said. “In the long run, I don’t think anybody is going to be able to stop this. Slow it down, maybe, but not stop it.”

  55

  Washington, D.C.

  Dicken stood on the Capitol steps. It was a warm evening, but he could not help but feel a little cold, listening to a sound like the sea, broken by waves of echoing voices. He had never felt so isolated, so distant, as he did now, staring out over what must have been fifty thousand human beings, stretching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument and beyond. The fluid mass pushed against the barricades along the bottom of the steps, streamed around the tent pavilions and speakers’ stands, listened intently to a dozen different speeches being delivered, milling slowly like stirred soup in a huge tureen. He caught bits and pieces of breeze-tattered speeches, incomplete but suggestive: bits of raw language charging the mass.

  Dicken had spent his life hunting down and trying to understand the diseases that affected these people, acting as if in some way he were invulnerable. Because of skill and a little luck he had never caught anything but a bout of dengue fever, bad enough but not fatal. He had always thought of himself as separate, a little superior perhaps but infinitely sympathetic. The self-delusion of an educated and intellectually isolated fool.

  He understood better now. The mass called the shots. If the mass could not understand, then nothing he did, or Augustine did, or the Taskforce, would much matter. And the mass quite clearly understood nothing. The voices drifting his direction spoke of outrage at a government that would slaughter children, voices angrily denouncing “morning-after genocide.”

  He had thought about calling Kaye Lang earlier, to regain his composure, his sense of balance, but he hadn’t. That was done with, finished in a very real way.

  Dicken descended the steps, passing news crews, cameras, clumps of office workers, men in blue and brown suits and dark glasses and wearing microphones in their ears. The police and National Guard troops were determined to keep people away from the Capitol, but did not prevent individuals from joining the crowd.

  He had already seen a few senators descend in a tight-packed group and join the mass. They must have sensed they could not be separate, superior, not now. They belonged with their people. He had thought them both opportunistic and courageous.

  Dicken climbed over the barricades and pushed into the crowd. It was time to catch this fever and understand the symptoms. He had looked deep inside himself and did not like what he saw. Better to be one of the troops on the front line, part of the mass, ingest its words and smells, and come back infected so that he could in turn be analyzed, understood, made useful again.

  That would be a kind of conversion. An end to the pain of separation. And if the mass should kill him, maybe that was what he deserved for his previous aloofness and his failures.

  Younger women in the crowd wore colored masks. All the men wore white or black masks. Many wore gloves. More than just a few men wore tight-fitting black jumpers with industrial fume masks, so-called “filter” suits, guaranteed by various enterprising merchants to prevent the shedding of “devil virus.”

  People in the crowd at this end of the mall were laughing, half listening to a speaker under the nearest pavilion—a civil rights leader from Philadelphia sounding out in deep, rich tones, like caramel. The speaker talked of leadership and responsibility, what the government should do to control this plague, and possibly, just possibly, where the plague had arisen, inside the secret bowels of the government itself.

  “Some cry out it has its birth in Africa, but we are sick, not Africa. Others cry out it is the devil’s disease that strikes us, that it is foretold, to punish—”

  Dicken moved on until he came under the more frantic voice of a television evangelist. The evangelist was brightly illuminated, a large and sweating man with a square head wearing a straining black business suit. He pointed and danced around his stage, exhorting the crowd to pray for guidance, to look deep inside.

  Dicken thought of his grandmother, who had liked this sort of thing. He moved on again.

  It was getting dark, and he could sense a growing tension in the crowd. Somewhere, out of earshot, something had happened, something had been said. The dark triggered a change of mood. Lights turned on around the mall, casting the crowd in etched and lurid orange. He looked up and saw helicopters at a respectful
altitude, buzzing like insects. For a moment, he wondered if they were all going to be tear-gassed, shot, but the disruption was not from the soldiers, the police, the helicopters.

  The impulse came in a wave.

  He experienced an expectant hunger, felt its advancing tide, hoped whatever was disturbing the crowd would reveal something to him. But it was not really news at all. It was simply a propulsion, first this way, then that, and he walked with the tight-packed crowd ten feet north, ten feet south, as if caught in a bizarre dance step.

  Dicken’s survival instincts now told him it was time to cut the personal angst, cut the psychological crap and get out of the flow. From a speaker nearby, he heard a voice of caution. From the man next to him, dressed in a filter suit, he heard, muffled through the filters, “It’s not just one disease now. It’s on the news. There’s a new plague.”

  A middle-aged woman in a flower print dress carried a small Walkman TV. She held it out for those around her, showing a tiny framed head speaking in tinny tones. Dicken could not hear these words.

  He worked toward the edge, slowly and politely, as if wading through nitroglycerin. His shirt and light jacket were soaked with sweat. A few scattered others, born observers, like him, sensed the change, and their eyes flashed. The crowd smothered in its own confusion. The night was deep and humid and stars could not be seen and the orange lights along the mall and around the tents and platforms made everything look bitter.

  Dicken stood near the Capitol steps again, within twenty or thirty people of the barricades, where he had stood an hour before. Mounted police, men and women on beautiful brown horses now rich amber in the unreal light, moved back and forth along the perimeter, dozens of them, more than he had ever seen before. The National Guard troops had pulled back, forming a line, but not a dense line. They were not ready. They did not expect trouble; they had no helmets or shields.

  Voices immediately around him, whispering, subdued—

  “Can’t”

  “Children have the”

  “My grandchildren will”