Mutation

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 blotter, looking him directly in the eye.

“I know you would rather not do anything,” she said. “I know you don’t want to upset VJ, and I know you are excited about his accomplishments, but you are going to have to face the reality that the boy is not playing by the rules. Let me tell you about my latest discovery. VJ is involved with a group of Colombians who are supposedly opening a furniture import business in Mattapan. I met these men and let me tell you, they don’t look like furniture merchants to me.”

Marsha stopped abruptly. Victor wasn’t reacting. “Victor?”

Marsha said questioningly. His eyes had a dazed, unfocused look.

“Marsha, sit down,” Victor said, shaking his head with sad, slow deliberation. He cradled his head in his hands and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. Then he ran his fingers through his hair, rubbed his neck, and straightened up. Marsha sat down, studying her husband intently. Her pulse began to race.