“Fine,” Victor said, relieved to have the ill feelings dissipate so quickly.
They used Victor’s car, left Chimera, and crossed the bridge over the Merrimack. While Victor was driving he brought up the question of Ramirez.
“I inserted a number of security people into the Chimera payroll,” VJ said. “If you are concerned about the expense, just remember the enormous benefit Chimera is about to accrue from such a small investment.”
“I wasn’t concerned about the payroll,” Victor said. It was the ease with which VJ was able to do whatever he wanted that bothered him.
With VJ’s directions, they soon pulled up to one of the old mills across the river from Chimera. VJ was out of the car first, eager to show Victor his creation.
The building was set right on the river. The clock tower building was in clear view on the other bank. But unlike VJ’s previous quarters, the new lab was modern in every respect, including its decor. It had three floors and was the most impressive setup Victor had ever seen. In the basement were animal rooms, operating theaters, huge stainless-steel fermentors, and a cyclotron for making radioactive substances. On the first floor was an NMR scanner, a PET
scanner, and a whole microbiology laboratory. The second floor had most of the general laboratory space and most of the sophisticated equipment necessary for gene manipulation and fabrication. The third and top floor was devoted to computer space, library, and administrative offices.
“What do you think?” VJ asked proudly as they stood in the hall on the third floor. They had to move frequently as there were workmen everywhere, installing the most recently delivered equipment, doing last-minute painting and carpentry.
“Like everything you’ve done, I’m simply astounded,”
Victor said. “But this has cost a fortune. Where did the money come from?”
“One of my side projects was to develop a marketable product from recombinant DNA technology,” VJ said. “Obviously it succeeded.”
“What’s the product?” Victor asked eagerly.
VJ grinned. “It’s a trade secret!”
VJ then went to a closed door, opened it a crack, glanced inside, then turned back to Victor. “I’ve got one more surprise for you. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
VJ threw the door open and gestured for Victor to go inside. A young woman bent over a desk straightened up, saying, “Dr. Frank! What a surprise!”
For a moment Victor didn’t know what to say. He was looking at someone he’d never expected to see again: Mary Millman, the surrogate who’d carried VJ.
VJ reveled in his father’s shock. “I needed a good secretary,” he explained, “so I brought her in from Detroit.
I have to admit I was curious to meet the woman who gave birth to me.”
Victor shook Mary’s hand, which she’d put out to him.
“Nice to see you again,” he said, somewhat dazed.
“Likewise,” Mary said.
“Well,” VJ said with a laugh, “I really should get back to my lab.”
Victor self-consciously looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go myself.”
The meeting with Ronald Beekman was a waste of time.
Victor had tried to be confrontational about the NGF project to find out whether Ronald knew anything about it. But Ronald had said neither yes nor no, cleverly sensing this was an issue that might provide him with some leverage. When Victor had reminded him that at their last meeting Ronald had threatened to get even and make Victor’s life miserable, Ronald had just brushed it off as being a figure of speech.
So Victor left the man’s office not knowing any more than he had when he’d entered.
The only possible potential benefit of the meeting was that Ronald had indicated a sharp interest in the implantation project, and Victor had promised to put something together for him to read.
Leaving Ronald’s office, Victor headed back to his own.
He’d ask Colleen to arrange a meeting with Hurst. Victor wasn’t looking forward to it.
“Robert Grimes called you from your lab,” Colleen said as soon as Victor entered the office. “He said he has something very interesting for you. He wants you to call him immediately.”
Victor sat down heavily at his desk. Under normal circumstances such a message from his head technician would have made him tingle with anticipation. It would have heralded some breakthrough on one of the experiments. But now it had to be something else. It had to involve the special work that Victor had given Robert, and Victor wasn’t sure he wanted to hear “something very interesting.”
Fortifying himself as best he could, Victor made the call and waited for Robert to be located. While Victor waited he thought about his own experiments and realized that they now held very little interest for him. After all, VJ had solved most of the questions involved. It was humbling for Victor to be so far behind his ten-year-old son. But the good side was what they would be able to accomplish together. That was thrilling indeed.
“Dr. Frank!” Robert said suddenly into the phone, waking Victor from his musings. “I’m glad I found you. I’ve pretty well sequenced the DNA fragment in the two tumors, and I wanted to make sure you wanted me to go ahead and reproduce the sequence with recombinant techniques. It will take me some time to do, but it is the only way we’ll be able to ascertain exactly what it codes for.”
“Do you have any idea what it codes for?” Victor asked hesitantly.
“Oh, yeah,” Robert said. “It’s undoubtedly some kind of unique polypeptide growth factor.”
“So it’s not some kind of retro virus,” Victor said with a ray of hope, thinking that a retro virus could have been an infectious particle artificially disseminated.
“Nope, it’s certainly not a retro virus,” Robert said. “In fact, it’s some kind of artificially fabricated gene.” Then with a laugh he added, “I’d have to call it a Chimera gene.
Within the sequence is an internal promoter that I’ve used myself on a number of occasions—one taken from the SV40
simian virus. But the rest of the gene had to come from some other microorganism, either a bacterium or a virus.”
There was a pause.
“Are you still there, Dr. Frank?” Robert asked, thinking the connection had broken.
“You’re sure about all this?” Victor asked, his voice wavering. The implications were becoming all too clear.
“Absolutely,” Robert said. “I was surprised myself. I’ve never heard of such a thing. My first guess was that these people picked up some kind of DNA vector and it got into their bloodstreams. That seemed so strange that I gave it a lot more thought. The only possible mechanism that I could come up with involves red-blood-cell bags filled with this infective gene. As soon as the Kupffer cells in the liver picked them up, the infective particles inserted themselves into the cell’s genome. The new genes then turned proto-oncogenes into oncogenes, and bingo: liver cancer. But there’s only one problem with this scenario. You know what it is?”
“No, what?”
“There’s only one way that RBC membrane bags could get into somebody’s bloodstream,” Robert said, oblivious to the effect all this was having on Victor. “They would have to be injected. I know that—”
Robert never had a chance to finish his sentence. Victor had hung up.
The mounting evidence was incontrovertible. There was no denying it: David and Janice had died of liver cancer caused by a piece of foreign DNA inserting itself into their chromosomes. And on top of that, there was the instructor from Pendleton Marsha had told him about. All these people were intimately related to VJ. And VJ was a scientific genius with an ultramodern, sophisticated laboratory at his disposal.
Colleen poked her head in. “I was waiting for you to get off the phone,” she said brightly. “Your wife is here. Can I send her in?”
Victor nodded. Suddenly he felt extremely tired.
Marsha came into the room and closed the door forcibly.
The wind rustled the papers on Victor’s desk. She walked directly over to Victor and leaned forward over his
