Mutation

“Listen,” Victor said. “I took some of VJ’s blood back to the lab. I’m going to have chromosome six isolated. If it hasn’t changed, I’ll be perfectly satisfied. And you should be as well.” He reached out as if to pat her thigh but she moved her leg away. Victor let his hand fall back to the bed.

“If VJ has some mild psychological problems, well that’s something else and we can get him some therapy, okay?” He wanted to reassure her further, but he didn’t know what else to say. He certainly wasn’t about to mention the missing files.

Marsha took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll try to relax. You’ll tell me about the DNA study as soon as you look at it?”

“Absolutely,” Victor said. He smiled at her. She managed to smile back weakly.

Victor raised his journal and tried to read. But he kept thinking about the missing files. Victor wondered again if he could have deleted them. It was a possibility. Since they weren’t cross-referenced, it was unlikely someone else could have deleted all three.

“Did you find out what caused the death of those poor babies?” Marsha asked.

Victor let the journal drop once more. “Not yet. The autopsies aren’t complete. The microscopic hasn’t been done.”

“Could it have been cancer?” Marsha asked nervously, remembering the day David got sick. That was another date that Marsha would never forget: June 17, 1984. David was ten, VJ five. School had been out for several weeks and Janice was planning to take the children to Castle Beach.

Marsha was in her study, getting her things ready to take to the office when David appeared in the doorway, his thin arms hanging limply at his sides.

“Mommy, something is wrong with me,” he said.

Marsha didn’t look up immediately. She was trying to find a folder she’d brought from the office the day before.

“What seems to be the trouble?” she asked, closing one drawer and opening another. David had gone to bed the night before complaining of some abdominal discomfort, but Pepto-Bismol had taken care of that.

“I look funny,” David said.

“I think you are a handsome boy,” Marsha said, turning to scan the built-in shelves behind her desk.

“I’m getting yellow,” David said.

Marsha stopped what she was doing and turned to face her son, who ran to her and buried his face in her bosom. He was an affectionate child.

“What makes you think you’re turning yellow?” she asked, feeling the first stirrings of fear. “Let me see your face,”

she said, gently trying to pull the boy away from her. She was hoping that he was wrong and there would be some silly explanation for his impression.

David would not let go. “It’s my eyes,” he said, his voice muffled against her. “And my tongue.”

“Your tongue can get yellow from a lemon candy,” Marsha said. “Come, now. Let me see.”

The light in her study was poor, so she walked him into the hall where she looked at David’s eyes in the light streaming through the window. Marsha caught her breath. There was no doubt. The boy was severely jaundiced.

Later that day a CAT scan showed a diffuse tumor of the liver. It was an enormously aggressive cancer that destroyed the child’s liver within days of making the diagnosis.

“Neither baby seemed to have cancer,” Victor was saying, rousing Marsha from her reverie. “The gross studies showed no signs of malignancy.”

Marsha tried to shake away the haunting image of David’s yellow eyes looking at her from his gaunt face. Even his skin had rapidly turned yellow. She cleared her throat. “What do you think the chances are that the babies’ deaths were caused by the foreign genes you inserted?”

Victor didn’t answer immediately. “I’d like to think the problem was unrelated. After all, none of the hundreds of animal experiments resulted in any health problems.”

“But you can’t be sure?” Marsha asked.

“I can’t be sure,” Victor agreed.

“What about the other five zygotes?” Marsha asked.

“What do you mean?” Victor asked. “They are stored in the freezer.”

“Are they normal or did you mutate them too?” Marsha asked.

“All of them have the NGF gene,” Victor said.

“I want you to destroy them,” Marsha said.

“Why?” Victor asked.

“You said you were sorry for what you’d done,” Marsha said angrily. “And now you are asking why you should destroy them?”

“I’m not going to implant them,” Victor said. “I can promise you that. But I might need them to help figure out what went wrong with the Hobbs and Murray babies. Remember, their zygotes had both been frozen. That was the only difference between them and VJ.”

Marsha studied Victor’s face. It was a horrible feeling to realize that she didn’t know if she believed him or not. She did not like the idea of those zygotes being potentially viable.

Before she could argue further, a crash shattered the night. Even before the sound of the broken glass faded, a high-pitched scream reverberated from VJ’s room. Marsha and Victor leaped from the bed and ran headlong down the hall.

7

Later Tuesday Night