Mutation

“To be honest,” Marsha said, “I’m terrified the same problem might happen again. I thought that if I learned more about the first episode, I might be able to prevent another.”

“I don’t know if I can help that much,” Martha said.

“There certainly was a big change, and it occurred so quickly. VJ went from being a confident child whose mind seemed infinite in its capability, to a withdrawn child who had few friends. But it wasn’t as if he was autistic. Even though he stayed by himself, he was always uncannily aware of everything going on around him.”

“Did he continue to relate to children his own age?”

Marsha asked.

“Not very much,” Martha said. “When we made him participate, he was always willing to go along, but left to his own devices, he’d just watch. You know, there was one thing that was curious. Every time we insisted that VJ

participate in some kind of game, like musical chairs, he would always let the other children win. That was strange because prior to this, VJ won most of the games no matter what the age of the children involved.”

“That is curious,” Marsha said.

Later, when Marsha was driving back to her office, she kept seeing a three-and-a-half-year-old VJ letting other children win. It brought back the episode in the pool Sunday evening. In all her experience with young children, Marsha had never come across such a trait.

“Perfect!” Victor said as he held one of the microscope slides up to the overhead light. He could see the paper-thin section of brain sealed with a cover slip.

“That’s the Golgi stain,” Robert said. “You also have Cajal’s and Bielschowsky’s. If you want any others you’ll have to let me know.”

“Fine,” Victor said. As usual, Robert had accomplished in less than twenty-four hours what would have taken a lesser technician several days.

“And here are the chromosome preparations,” Robert said, handing Victor a tray. “Everything is labeled.”

“Fine,” Victor repeated.

Taking the preparations in his hands, Victor headed across the main room of the lab to the light microscopes. Seating himself before one, he placed the first slide under the instrument. It was labeled Hobbs, right frontal lobe.

Victor ran the scope down so that the objective was just touching the cover slip. Then, looking through the eyepieces, he corrected the focus.

“Good God!” he exclaimed as the image became clear. There was no sign of malignancy, but the effect was the same as if a tumor had been present. The children didn’t die of cerebral edema, or an accumulation of fluid. Instead, what Victor saw was evidence of diffuse mitotic activity. The nerve cells of the brain were multiplying just as they did in the first two months of fetal development.

Victor quickly scanned slides of other areas of the Hobbs brain and then studied the Murray child’s tissue. All of them were the same. The nerve cells were actively reproducing themselves at a furious rate. Since the children’s skulls were fused, the new cells had nowhere to go other than to push the brain down into the spinal canal, with fatal results.

Horrified yet astounded at the same time, Victor snatched up the tray of slides and left the light microscope. He hurried across the lab and entered the room which housed the scanning electron microscope. The place had the appearance of a command center of a modern electronic weapons system.

The instrument itself looked very different from a normal microscope. It was about the size of a standard refrigerator.

Its business portion was a cylinder approximately a foot in diameter and about three feet tall. A large electrical trunk entered the top of this cylinder and served as the source of electrons. The electrons were then focused by magnets which acted like glass lenses in a light microscope. Next to the scope was a good-sized computer. It was the computer that analyzed multiple-plano images of the electron microscope and constructed the three-dimensional pictures.

Robert had made extremely thin preparations of the chromatin material from some of the brain cells that were in the initial process of dividing. Victor placed one of these preparations within the scope and searched for chromosome six. What he was looking for was the area of mutation where he’d inserted the foreign genes. It took him over an hour, but at last he found it.

“Jesus,” Victor gulped. The histones that normally enveloped the DNA were either missing or attenuated in the area of the inserted gene. In addition, the DNA, which was usually tightly coiled, had unraveled, suggesting that active transcription was taking place. In other words, the inserted genes were turned on!

Victor tried a preparation from the other child with the same results. The inserted genes were turned on, producing NGF. There was no doubt about it.