Frameshift

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Marchenko brought the crowbar down in a gillooly on Pierre’s knees. He screamed as his left kneecap shattered. Marchenko lifted the crowbar again, this time trying to bring it down on Pierre’s head. Pierre squirmed on the ground. His arm reached out, undulating like a snake, and locked onto Marchenko’s ankle, yanking the old man down, the crowbar landing with a cracking of brittle ribs on Marchenko’s side.

  Pierre looked up. The copter was now hovering over the scene, preparing to land, its rotor kicking up grit and debris on the rooftop. The man in the right seat, flying the helicopter—Christ, he was even wearing the same aviator’s jacket and mirrored shades as on Hard Copy. Felix Sousa. The fucking guy wasn’t just a Nazi in his thinking; he was an actual card-carrying member of Ivan Marchenko’s Millennial Reich.

  The copter was descending now, the wind from its rotor slicing into them. Pierre hoped its downward force would keep Marchenko pinned to the ground, but the old man was soon scrabbling to his feet. The copter touched down.

  Pierre glanced back. Another helicopter was approaching. It was hard to see anything in all this wind, but—way to go, Avi! The new copter was clearly marked SFPD—San Francisco Police Department.

  Marchenko loomed over Pierre, clearly wanting to finish him off, but Sousa was gesturing frantically for him to hurry up and get aboard his copter; the police helicopter would be there within minutes. Marchenko’s round head split in a horrible, lopsided grin, his denture still askew, and he spit a contemptuous bloody gob onto Pierre’s face. He then hobbled, holding his cracked ribs, toward the copter, bending low to clear its rotor, which was still revolving counterclockwise at a reduced speed.

  Suddenly Avi Meyer appeared at the top of the stairs. He was panting horribly and red as a beet after climbing forty stories. He reached into his jacket, pulled out a gun, and tried to shoot at Sousa’s copter. But Marchenko was already aboard, pulling the curving door shut, and the copter was lifting up off the roof.

  The SFPD helicopter had closed the distance, though, and was now trying to force Marchenko and Sousa to land by flying directly above them, the downward wind sending grit flying everywhere. Sousa pulled his copter to the north, and it moved sideways a few meters above the rooftop, its body tilted to the side, its rotor barely clearing the lip around the edge of the roof. The police helicopter followed.

  Pierre squinted, trying to watch but also trying to shield his eyes. Avi moved out of the stairwell entrance, and two of his men appeared behind him, also gulping for breath. One was holding his side and grimacing in agony. After a moment, Avi staggered to the south edge of the roof, as far from the noise of the helicopters as possible, and pulled out his cellular.

  Pierre, meanwhile, picked up the crowbar and, using it as a short cane, keeping all weight off his destroyed left knee, hobbled over to the north edge, the pain almost unbearable, fighting nausea and dizziness with every step. When he got to the meter-high lip around the roof, he collapsed against it and brought both hands to his knee. He could hear the pounding of the helicopter blades, out of sight below him, next to the building.

  “This is the police,” said a female voice from a bullhorn on the second copter; the voice was all but lost in the noise from the dueling rotors. “You are ordered to land.”

  Pierre forced himself to his feet, using the lip to support himself. He almost blacked out from the pain; his body shook with agony and chorea.

  Looking down was dizzying: forty stories of sheer glass, leading straight to the asphalt parking lot. Five SFPD squad cars were pulling up outside the building, sirens blaring. A few meters to Pierre’s right, and about ten meters below, was the silver copter with Marchenko and Sousa in it. Marchenko could probably see directly into Craig Bullen’s office, with its redwood paneling and priceless paintings.

  The cockpit was only a short distance away from the side of the tower. The SFPD copter had moved alongside it now, as if trying to get a bead for a shoot-out. Pierre could clearly see the female pilot and her male companion, both uniformed, in the bubblelike cockpit. They seemed to be arguing with each other, and then the police copter started moving away, whichever one of them who felt flying this close to the building was dangerous having won the fight.

  The rotor on Sousa’s copter was a circular blur below Pierre. The noise was deafening, but it would be only a matter of seconds before Sousa would head away from the building. He could make a beeline out into the Pacific, out over international waters, beyond the SFPD’s—or even the DOJ’s—jurisdiction, perhaps landing on a boat and sailing down to Mexico or beyond; surely there was more to Marchenko’s escape plan than just the helicopter.

  Pierre hefted the crowbar, gauging its weight. It probably wouldn’t work—probably would just be deflected away. But he wasn’t about to stand by and do nothing—

  Pierre closed his eyes, summoning all the control and all the strength he had left. And then he threw the crowbar as hard as he could, spinning it vertically end over end, down into the helicopter’s twirling blades, aiming for the outer edge of the rotor disk.

  He was prepared to stagger back, in case the crowbar was sent flying up toward him.

  It hit with a horrible clanging sound. The helicopter began vibrating, tipping toward the building, and—

  —the blades touched glass, sending a shower of sparkling shards down toward the ground below—

  —and then the blades began slicing through the metal frame of the curtain wall between two windows, dicing the metal into small fragments, sparks flying everywhere as each successive pass brought the blades into contact at a slightly different angle.

  The copter was traveling forward now, and the rotor disk hit the wall between adjacent offices, the tips of the blades splintering the redwood paneling with a buzz-saw sound, then digging into the concrete firewall behind. The tips of the rotor were immediately ground off, and more and more of them sheared away with each revolution, the blades shortening, metal bits flying like confetti.

  Then the jagged edge of the rotor dug into the concrete, sending powdery chunks of it airborne until, with a shriek of tortured metal, the rotor came to a dead halt.

  The copter tipped forward again, the bird itself now rotating slowly clockwise, its tail rotor swinging into the side of the building, more windows shattering and office furniture splintering.

  The copter’s turbines were screaming; smoke poured from the engine compartment and flames shot from the exhausts. The cockpit tipped forward, and the whole vehicle began to drop, story after story after story.

  Pierre could see people far below scattering, trying to get out of its way.

  Pierre heard footfalls, all but drowned out by the thunder of the police copter. Avi was running across the rooftop.

  Sousa’s chopper continued to fall, almost as if in slow motion, its foreshortened blades now revolving lamely, providing a small amount of lift. It passed floor after floor, diminishing in apparent size, until—

  Hitting the pavement like an egg, metal and glass splashing everywhere—

  —and then, like a flower opening, flames expanding outward from the crash as the copter’s fuel exploded. Soon a pillar of black smoke rose up to the fortieth floor and beyond.

  The SFPD copter circled around, surveying the scene, then descended for a landing in the far parking lot.

  Pierre looked down at the inferno below, ringed by spectators, illuminated by low, red sunlight and roaring flames reflecting off the windows, and by revolving lights on the police cars. At long, long last, Ivan Grozny was dead.

  Pierre staggered back a step, turned around, and collapsed in agony against the short wall around the roof’s edge.

  “Are you okay?” asked Avi, leaning in to look at him after seeing his fill of the carnage below.

  Pierre’s hands were on his shattered knee again. The pain was incredible, like daggers being jackhammered into his leg. Wincing, he shook his head.

  Avi flipped open his cellular phone. “Meyer here. We need medics on the roof right
away.”

  Another OSI agent appeared from the stairwell—but this one wasn’t out of breath. He jogged over to Avi and Pierre. “We’ve got one of the elevators working again,” he said. “They were all locked off on the fortieth floor, but with the fireman’s key we were able to reactivate one of them once we pried its door open.”

  “What happened?” asked Avi.

  The agent glanced briefly at Pierre, then looked back at Avi. “It seems a crowbar was dropped from up here into the blades of the helicopter. It caused it to crash.”

  Avi nodded and then waved the agent away. When they were alone, he leaned in to Pierre, holding Pierre’s shoulders with his arms. “Did you drop the crowbar?”

  Pierre said nothing.

  Avi exhaled. “Damn it, Pierre—we don’t cut corners in the OSI. Not anymore. Danielson hadn’t even been charged yet.”

  Pierre shrugged slightly. ‘“Justice,”’ he said, his breath coming out raggedly as he quoted another Nobel laureate—at that precise moment, he couldn’t remember which one—‘“is always delayed and finally done only by mistake.’” He took his right hand off his knee and held it up in the air. Although they were sheltered from the wind here by the low wall, his arm moved back and forth as if blown by a breeze only it could feel. “Blame it,” said Pierre, “on my Huntington’s.”

  Avi’s eyes narrowed and then he nodded, turned, and leaned back against the wall, exhausted not just by the climb but also by years of chasing Ivans and Adolphs and Heinrichs. He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, waiting for the medics to arrive.

  C h a p t e r

  42

  As soon as visiting hours began, Molly came into Pierre’s room at San Francisco General Hospital. Pierre looked up at her from the bed. The left side of his face was bandaged, and his legs were in traction.

  “Hi, honey,” said Molly.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” said Pierre. He gestured at all the equipment hooked up to him. “After you left yesterday, somebody said my total hospital bill is going to be in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars.” He managed a grin. “I’m sure glad Tiffany talked me into the Gold Plan.”

  “I brought you a newspaper,” said Molly, pulling a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle out of the canvas bag she was carrying.

  “Thanks, but I don’t feel much like reading.”

  Molly said, “Then let me read it to you. There’s a front-page story by that man we met, Barnaby Lincoln.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh.” She cleared her throat. “‘Officials from the California State Insurance Board, escorted by eight state troopers, today seized control of Condor Health Insurance, Inc., of San Francisco, in the wake of startling revelations made last week. “Condor is out of business, as of today,” said Clark Finchurst, State Insurance Commissioner. “The industry’s emergency fund, which was established to handle such things, will take care of current claims until Condor’s policies can be handed over in an orderly fashion to other insurers.”’”

  “All right!” said Pierre.

  “It says there’s going to be a full inquiry. Craig Bullen is cooperating with the authorities.”

  “Good for him.”

  “Oh, and I picked up that printout you wanted.” She took a two-inch-thick pile of fanfold computer paper out of her bag and placed it on the table beside his bed.

  “Thanks,” said Pierre.

  Molly sat down on the edge of the bed and took one of Pierre’s dancing hands in hers. “I love you,” she said.

  “And I love you, too,” said Pierre, squeezing her hand. “I love you more than words can say.”

  Pierre lay in his hospital bed that night. His six minutes of CPU time on LBNL’s Cray supercomputer had at last become available, and the simulation he and Shari had coded had finally been run. Pierre started wading through the 384 pages of printout.

  When he was done, he operated the hand control that lowered the motorized back of his bed. He stared at the ceiling.

  It made sense. It all fit.

  The existence of codon synonyms did indeed allow additional information to be superimposed on the standard A, C, G, T genetic code. Yes, AAA and AAG both made lysine, but the AAA form also coded a zero into what Shari had already dubbed, in a note jotted in the margin, “the gatekeeper function,” which governed the correction or invocation of frameshift mutations. Meanwhile, the AAG version coded a one.

  But that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were four valid codons that made proline: CCA, CCC, CCG, and CCT. For these, the final letter indicated a base-sixteen order of magnitude shift of the splicing cursor, which marked the position where a nucleotide would be added or deleted from the DNA, causing a frameshift. The CCT form moved the cursor sixteen nucleotides; the CCC form moved it 162, or 256 nucleotides; the CCA form 163, or 4,096 nucleotides; and the CCG form moved it 164, or 65,536 nucleotides.

  Other synonyms performed different jobs: GAA and GAG both made glutamine, but they also set the direction of the splicing cursor’s movement. GAG set it moving to the “left” (in the direction leading from the three-prime carbon to the five-prime carbon in each deoxyribose), and GAA set it moving to the “right” (the five-prime to three-prime direction). Meanwhile, TTT, which made phenylalanine, coded for a nucleotide insertion, while its synonym TTC was the instruction for a nucleotide deletion. And the four codons that made threonine—ACA, ACC, ACG, and ACT—indicated by their final letter which nucleotide would be inserted at the splicing cursor.

  The coding based on synonyms moved the cursor, but the timing of when frameshifts would be invoked was governed by certain of the seemingly endless stuttering sequences in the junk DNA. On the smaller scale of the individual, it had already been demonstrated that the number of CAG stutters set the age at which Huntington’s would first manifest itself, and, as Pierre had pointed out to Molly, the number of repeats does change from generation to generation in a phenomenon called “anticipation”—an ironically prophetic name given what Pierre and Shari’s model showed.

  Indeed, the computer simulation suggested promising lines of research into manipulating genetic timers—research that ultimately might cure Huntington’s and related ailments. Certainly, no sudden breakthrough was likely, but, at a guess, inside a decade, controlling individual aberrant genetic timers might be possible. It had come full circle: by deliberately choosing not to pursue Huntington’s research, Pierre might have, in fact, made the discovery that would eventually lead to a cure for the disease.

  If that had been all that his research suggested, he might have been pleased intellectually, but still profoundly sad, crushed by the cruel irony: after all, anything but an immediate cure would be too late to help Pierre Jacques Tardivel.

  But Pierre didn’t feel sadness. On the contrary, he was elated, for the genetic timers pointed to something beyond his personal problems, beyond the problems—however real, however poignant—of the one in ten thousand people who had Huntington’s. The timers pointed to a truth, a fundamental revelation, that affected every one of the five billion human beings now alive, every one of the billions who had come before, and every one of all the untold trillions of humans yet to be born.

  According to the simulation, the DNA timers, incrementing generation by generation through genetic anticipation, could go off across whole populations almost simultaneously. The multiregionalists were more right than they’d ever guessed: Pierre’s research proved that preprogrammed evolutionary steps could take place across vast groups of beings all at once.

  A quote came to Pierre, from—of course—a Nobel laureate. The French philosopher Henri Bergson had written in his 1907 work Creative Evolution that “the present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.” The junk DNA was a language, just as that article Shari had found had suggested: the language in which the master plan for life had been written by its designer. Pierre’s heart was pounding with excitement, and adrenaline was coursing through h
is system, but finally he drifted off to sleep, the printout still resting on his chest, dreaming of the hand of God.

  Molly pushed the office door open and barged in. “Dr. Klimus, I—”

  “Molly, I’m very busy—”

  “Too busy to talk about Myra Tottenham?”

  Klimus looked up. Somebody else was passing by in the corridor. “Close the door.”

  Molly did so and sat down. “Shari Cohen and I have just spent a day at Stanford going through Myra’s papers; they’ve got stacks of them in their archives.”

  Klimus managed a weak grin. “Universities love paper.”

  “Indeed they do. Myra Tottenham was working on ways to speed up nucleotide sequencing when she died.”

  “Was she?” said Klimus. “I really don’t know what this has to do—”

  “It has everything to do with you, Burian. Her technique—involving specialized restriction enzymes—was years ahead of what others were doing.”

  “What does a psychologist possibly know about DNA research?”

  “Not much. But Shari tells me that what she was doing was close to what we now call the Klimus Technique—the very same technique for which you won the Nobel Prize. We looked through your old papers at Stanford, too. You were flailing about in completely the wrong direction, trying to use direct ion-charging of nucleotides as a sorting technique—”

  “It would have worked—”

  “Would have worked in a universe where free hydrogen didn’t bond to everything in sight. But here it was a blind alley—a blind alley you didn’t abandon until just after Myra Tottenham died.”

  There was a long, long pause. Finally: “The Nobel committee is very reluctant to award prizes posthumously,” said Klimus, as if that justified everything.

  Molly crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I want your notebooks on Amanda. And I want your word that you will never try to see her again.”

  “Ms. Bond—”