Part 17 (2/2)
Caleb tried to jerk away, but the back of his head pushed against the wood wall of the house. A gust of snow blew over them.
”He found medicine for Lily. If we get to San Francisco he can . . . oh,” he buckled over, hands on his knees. Mack crouched down beside him, his palm still pressed to Caleb's frozen eye.
”Now, we spoke about this, Caley. I don't know how many times.”
”He's got something for the baby. Can you get them to San Francisco? If I know they're there, I can . . . I can focus.”
Caleb felt a crackle of fission inside his cornea, and Mack took his hand away, studied his eye. Above, Caleb saw the floating presence of a ferruginous hawk.
”Are you negotiating with me, Caley?”
”No.”
”Kind of sounds like, if I say yes, you'll focus, and if I say no, you might not?”
”That's not what I mean.” He felt confused. But as he blinked, his eye started to feel normal.
”Your energy is building up again. Look how fast you're healing. Most people would go to the hospital for something like that.” Mack took a step back, looking into him. ”You were so depleted, dude. But since I pulled you away from June and Lily, your training is astronomical. Everything I'm coaching you to do is working. After Yosemite you're going to be one of the elite athletes in our sport. And you're back obsessed with them?”
For the first time he could recall since he was a boy, Caleb felt tears running down his skin.
”Okay, Caleb. I'll bet you were a d.a.m.n good consultant. Here's a counteroffer. I think if Lily and June are off with your brother, you'll be thinking about them even more than you are now. You'll be wanting to know what's going on, wanting to call them. And you will fail at Yosemite. So my offer is this: they stay here. You keep staying away from them. Think about nothing but the Slam. Win it. After that, if Lily's not one hundred percent better, I'm not getting it done. You take them out to San Francisco and focus on them. Take as much time as you need. And then come back, open arms. Okay?”
He took a shaky, deep breath. ”Okay.”
”In the meantime, nothing will happen to Lily under my care. She's starting to crawl and move, which means she's building up her stores of kinetic energy. Which I can build on.” Mack wiped Caleb's tears with his thumb. ”However. You just had your last day working in Boulder. You're on lockdown until Yosemite. For the next six months, I don't want you distracted by anything.”
Caleb nodded.
”So we don't need to discuss this again?”
”No, Mack. I get it.”
”Well, then. It's a deal.”
Mack went past him, inside the house. When the door opened, Caleb heard the joyful sounds of his housemates, laughing, dancing, turning up the reggae on the ancient black boom box. He stayed out in the starlit snow, his whole body shaking, a shaking that would not go away, not even after he went back inside, no matter how close to the fire he could get.
On the Monday after Thanksgiving, Prajuk committed his first crime.
Sitting in his small office, he casually slipped a thumb drive into his computer, exported the Airifan section of his gene library, and dropped the drive into his pants pocket.
All afternoon he wondered how the rest of the world could not see it there, burning through the cotton. His hand slipped down into his pocket again and again, turning it over with his fingers like a nervous groom with a ring.
At seven, his s.h.i.+rt damp with sweat, he drove down the highway to Greenway Plaza and pulled into a five-story-tall concrete building. He lit a Parliament and smoked it in his strange manner, holding it in his fist and sucking at the air. Then he stepped onto the elevator for the first time. On the third floor he emerged into a dim corridor and opened a door to Lab 301.
He almost ran into a heavyset cable technician walking out. Broadband had been successfully installed. He glanced around the room. It was over-air-conditioned, and the sound of the giant ducts echoed through it. He could see that equipment was trickling in sporadically, and that Shane was not quite sure what to do with it all.
The incubator had arrived first. It was refrigerator-white, square, small. Water baths, gel apparatuses, shakers came next. Ice buckets. Bunsen burners. Lab gloves.
Shane had come straight from work to find them left in a pile by the locked door to Lab 301. He stacked them against the wall of the small room.
The Promega gene kit arrived two days later. A heavy box called a centrifuge, which looked to Shane like a miniature was.h.i.+ng machine. He opened the top and peered down at the round hole. Some miracle might take place there. He worried about contamination and quickly shut it.
Metal stools came in next. Something called a flow hood, which Shane carried to a table and out of curiosity plugged in, revealing a purple light. He lost track of time in the windowless room, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the wheels onto three Aeron chairs long past Nicholas's bedtime. Prajuk saw him removing a water bath from a rental box and looking around for the proper place to put it.
”Here,” he offered, taking it to the long metal working counter, ”like this.”
Shane grinned at him. Already he had found himself growing emotionally attached to this room, its unused double sinks, its off-white walls.
Prajuk slid the thumb drive into the rented Mac and exhaled shakily as his gene library appeared on its monitor. Then he surveyed the lab, his arms crossed.
”This is how it will work.”
A sense of approaching motion hung in the air.
”This thing, alpha-one ant.i.trypsin deficiency, is caused because the child was born with a gene switched off. We will isolate the protein that flips that switch on. Clone it. Grow it here. Make it therapeutic and inject it into the child. It will alter her DNA so that it instructs the gene to switch on. It's not complicated.”
”Of course not.”
”This thing will be taught in sixth-grade biology cla.s.s by the time your son is six.”
”My sixth-grade biology teacher was a hippie slide guitarist,” Shane informed him.
”They let anyone teach in American schools, don't they?” Prajuk walked around the room, examining equipment. ”Proteins march through our bodies like workers going into a city, flipping switches as they go. And the body responds. Many terrible diseases are simply workers flipping the wrong switch. Did the slide guitarist explain this to you?”
”I might have been dissecting a fetal pig that day.”
”Apologies. We did not have the luxury of using pigs for children's experiments in my school.”
”So, how do the genes know which switches to flip?”
”The brain follows simple instructions in our DNA. You would guess this recipe for human existence is quite complicated, with millions of different steps?”
”Sure.”
”But there are only four.”
Shane blinked.
”T, C, A, and G are the only four nucleotides in DNA. Depending on the pattern of these four letters, you can grow a fin, glow, you can process logic, you're a cat. And so on.”
Shane leaned back, listening.
”In an alpha-one ant.i.trypsin deficient patient, there is a random disruption of the pattern in the DNA. Fixing it is fairly simple. We splice out the extra nucleotide, restoring the pattern that was intended.”
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