Mutation

Sheila Hobbs came into the room. She was a dynamic woman with bobbed hair. Victor had met her at several of the obligatory Chimera social occasions.

Victor agreed to some coffee, and soon all three were sitting in the living room, balancing tiny Wedgwood cups on their knees.

“I was just thinking about giving you a call,” William said. “It’s such a coincidence that you stopped by.”

“Oh?” Victor said.

“Sheila and I have decided to get back to work,” William said, directing his attention at his coffee cup. “At first we thought we’d get away for a while. But now we think we’ll feel better with something to do.”

“We’ll be pleased to have you back, whenever you choose,”

said Victor.

“We appreciate that,” William said.

Victor cleared his throat. “There is something I wanted to ask you,” he began. “I believe you’d been warned that your son was allergic to an antibiotic called cephaloclor.”

“That’s right,” Sheila said. “We’d been told that before we even picked him up.” She lowered her coffee cup and it rattled against the saucer.

“Is there any chance that your son had been given cephaloclor?” Victor asked.

The couple looked at each other, then answered in unison:

“No.” Then Sheila continued: “Maurice hadn’t been sick or anything. Besides, we’d made sure that his antibiotic allergy was part of his medical record. I’m certain he’d not been given any antibiotic. Why do you ask?”

Victor stood up. “It was just a thought. I didn’t think he would have, but I’d remembered about the allergy . . .”

Back in his car, Victor headed toward Boston. He was pretty certain the Murrays would tell him the same thing the Hobbses had, but he had to be sure.

Since it was the middle of the afternoon, he made excellent time. His major problem was what to do with his car when he got there. Eventually he found a spot on Beacon Hill.

A sign said it was a tow zone, but Victor decided to take the chance.

The Murrays’ house was on West Cedar, in the middle of the block. He rang the bell.

The door was opened by a man in his late twenties or early thirties, sporting a punk hair style.

“Are the Murrays in?” Victor asked.

“They’re both at work,” the man said. “I work for their cleaning service.”

“I thought they’d taken some time off.”

The man laughed. “Those workaholics! They took one day after their son died and that was it.”

Victor returned to his car, irritated with himself for not having called before coming. It would have saved him a trip.

Back at Chimera, Victor went directly to the accounting department. He found Horace Murray at his desk, bent over computer print-outs. When the man saw Victor he sprang to his feet saying, “Colette and I wanted to thank you again for coming to the hospital.”

“I only wish I could have done something to help,” Victor said.

“It was in God’s hands,” Horace said resignedly.

When Victor asked him about the cephaloclor, the man swore that Mark had not been given an antibiotic, especially not cephaloclor.

Leaving the accounting department, Victor was struck by still another fear. What if there was a link between the deaths and the fact that the children’s files were missing?

That was the most disturbing thought of all because it implied that the genes had been turned on deliberately.

Heart pounding again, Victor ran back to his lab. One of his newer technicians tried to ask a question, but Victor waved the man away, telling him to talk to Grimes if he had a problem.

Inside his office Victor bent down in front of a cabinet at the bottom of his bookcase. He unlocked the heavy door and reached in to grasp the NGF data books that he’d written in code. But his hand met empty space. The entire shelf was empty.

Victor closed the cabinet and carefully locked it even though there was no longer anything to protect.

“Calm down,” he told himself, trying to stem a rising tide of paranoia. “You’re letting your imagination run away with itself. There has to be an explanation.”

Getting up, he went out to find Robert. He tracked him down in the electrophoresis unit, working on the task that Victor had earlier assigned him. “Have you seen my NGF data books?” Victor asked.

“I don’t know where they are,” Robert said. “I haven’t seen them for six months. I thought you’d moved them.”

Mumbling his thanks, Victor walked away. This was no longer some fantasy. The evidence was mounting. Someone had interfered in his experiment, with lethal results. Deciding to face his worst apprehensions, Victor went over to the liquid nitrogen freezer. He put his hand on the latch and hesitated. Intuition told him what he would find, but he had to force himself to raise the hood. He kept hearing Marsha telling him that he had to destroy the other five zygotes right away.

Slowly he looked down. At first his view was blocked by the frozen mist as it floated out of the storage container and spilled silently to the floor. Then it cleared, and he saw the plate that contained the embryos. It was empty.