meters to the crater floor, then limped through the fields for Sobieski Park.
In a few minutes he was there, out of breath and sweating. At the fountain he splashed water on his face. He felt his shoulder gingerly, then made his way to the amphitheater. At first he thought the theater was deserted, but then he saw, down on the stage, a couple of women necking, oblivious of him.
He stood in the row where he had spotted Alicia some weeks before. He had hit her. He couldn’t believe he had hit her.
Erno slept in the park and in the morning headed for his biotech shift as if he had never stopped going. No one at the airlock questioned him. Apparently, even though his mind was chaos, he looked perfectly normal. The radiation warning had been renewed; solar monitors reported conditions ripe for a coronal mass ejection. Cousins obliged to go out on the surface were being advised to keep within range of a radiation shelter.
When Erno arrived at the bunker he went to Lemmy Odilleson’s lab. Lemmy had not arrived yet. He sat down at his workstation, signed onto the system, pressed his thumb against the gene scanner and accessed the database.
He tried the general index. There was no file named exposition. Following Tyler’s reference to “gross,” he looked for any references to the number 144. Nothing. Nothing on the gross structures of nucleotides, either. He tried coming at it from the virus index. Dozens of viruses had been engineered by the cousins to deal with problems from soil microbes to cellular breakdowns caused by exposure to surface radiation. There was no virus called exposition.
While he sat there Lemmy showed up. He said nothing of Erno’s sudden appearance after his extended absence. “We’re making progress on integrating the morphological growth genes into the prototypes,” he said excitedly. “The sequences for extracting silicon from the soil are falling into place.”
“That’s good,” Erno said. He busied himself cleaning up the chaos Lemmy typically left in his notes. After a while, he asked casually, “Lemmy, have you ever heard about a virus called ‘exposition’?”
“X-position?” Lemmy said vaguely, not looking up from a rack of test bulbs. “Those prefixes go with female sex-linked factors. The Y-position are the male.”
“Oh, right.”
As soon as Erno was sure Lemmy was caught up in his lab work, he turned back to the archives. First he went to Gendersites, a database he knew mostly for its concentration of anti-cancer modifications. X-position led him to an encyclopedia of information on the X chromosome. Erno called up a number of files, but he saw no point in digging through gene libraries at random. He located a file of experiments on female-linked syndromes from osteoporosis to post menopausal cardiac conditions.
On a whim, he did a search on “gross.”
Up popped a file labeled Nucleotide Repeats. When Erno opened the file, the heading read:
G et
R id
O f
S limy girl S
The sounds of the lab around him faded as he read the paper.
It described a method for increasing the number of unstable trinucleotide re peats on the X chromosome. All humans had repeat sequences, the presence of which were associated with various diseases: spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, fragile X mental retardation, myotonic dystrophy, Huntington disease, spinocerebrellar ataxia, dentatorubral-pallidoluysian atrophy, and Machado-Joseph disease. All well understood neurological disorders.
In normal DNA, the repeats were below the level of expression of disease. Standard tests of the zygote assured this. The GROSS paper told how to construct two viruses: the first would plant a time bomb in the egg. At a particular stage of embryonic development the repetition of trinucleotides would explode. The second virus would plant compensating sequences on the Y chromosome.
Creating the viruses would be a tricky but not impossible problem in plasmid engineering. Their effect, however, would be devastating. In males the Y chromosome would suppress the X-linked diseases, but in females the trinucleotide syndromes would be expressed. When the repeats kicked in, the child would develop any one of a host of debilitating or fatal neurological disorders.
Of course once the disorder was recognized, other gene engineers would go to work curing it, or at least identifying possessors prenatally. The GROSS virus would not destroy the human race-but it could burden a generation of females with disease and early death.
Tyler had led Erno to this monstrosity. What was he supposed to do with it?
Nonetheless, Erno downloaded the file into his notebook. He had just finished when Cluny came into the lab.
“Hello, Professor Odillesson,” Cluny said to Lemmy. He saw Erno and did a double take. Erno stared back at him.
“I’m not a professor, Michael,” Lemmy said.
Cluny pointed at Erno. “You know the constables are looking for him?”
“They are? Why?”
Erno got up. “Don’t bother explaining. I’ll go.”
Cluny moved to stop him. “Wait a minute.”
Erno put his hand on Cluny’s shoulder to push him aside. Cluny grabbed Erno’s arm.
“What’s going on?” Lemmy asked.
Erno tried to free himself from Cluny, but the Earthman’s grip was firm. Cluny pulled him, and pain shot through the shoulder Erno had hurt in yesterday’s spill. Erno hit Cluny in the face.
Cluny’s head jerked back, but he didn’t let go. His jaw clenched and his expression hardened into animal determination. He wrestled with Erno; they lost their balance, and in slow motion stumbled against a lab bench. Lemmy shouted and two women ran in from the next lab. Before Erno knew it he was pinned against the floor.
“Dead Man”
Many of the stories for men were about murder. The old Earth writers seemed fascinated by murder, and wrote about it from a dozen perspectives.
In one of the stories, a detective whose job it is to throw illegal riders off cargo trains finds a destitute man-a “hobo”-hiding on the train. While being brutally beaten by the detective, the hobo strikes back and unintentionally kills him.
The punishment for such a killing, even an accidental one, is death. Terrified, knowing that he has to hide his guilt, the hobo hurries back to the city. He pretends he never left the “flophouse” where he spent the previous night. He disposes of his clothes, dirty with coal dust from the train.
Then he reads a newspaper report. The detective’s body has been found, but the investigators assume that he fell off the train and was killed by accident, and are not seeking anyone. The hobo is completely free from suspicion. His immediate reaction is to go to the nearest police station and confess.
Erno waited in a small white room at the constabulary headquarters. As a child Erno had come here many times with his mother, but now everything seemed different. He was subject to the force of the state. That fucking cow Cluny. The constables had taken his notebook. Was that pro forma, or would they search it until they found the GROSS file?
He wondered what Alicia had done after he’d left the day before. What had she told her friends?
The door opened and two women came in. One of them was tall and good-looking. The other was small, with a narrow face and close-cropped blond hair. She looked to be a little younger than his mother. She sat down across from him; the tall woman remained standing.
“This can be simple, Erno, if you let it,” the small woman said. She had an odd drawl that, combined with her short stature, made Erno wonder if she was from Earth. “Tell us where Tyler Durden is. And about the
