by Ben Bova
“So what am I supposed to do?” Jesse asked. “Just let them die?”
“You can’t help all of them,” I said, as reasonably as I could. “It simply isn’t possible, dear. I know you want to, but it’s not physically possible to take care of them all.”
“Then I’ll take care of as many of them as I can. As long as there’s enough light to see by and I can stand on my two feet, I’ll take care of as many of them as I can.”
I had been an utter fool, pushing Jesse into this horrible situation. It had sounded so noble and right, back in New York. Help the poor starving Africans. Volunteer to work for the UN. It was the right thing for the Humanitarian of the Year to do. It would look good in media interviews; it would help bring in donations to the hospital and medical center. But I realized that I didn’t care about the Africans or the UN or anything else. What did they matter to me, compared to my husband? I had pushed Jesse too far; he was close to cracking.
I had created the problem; I would have to help solve it. “You’re right, of course,” I said. “I should have seen that from the outset. Very well, then, I’ll help you.”
Eberly’s brows shot up.
“I’ve had some training in first aid,” I said, rather haughtily, actually. “I’ll stand beside you, darling, and do as much as I can.”
“I didn’t mean that you—”
“No, no, you’re quite right. The problem is overwhelming and we must all do whatever we can to help. I shouldn’t be sitting around like a pampered princess. The captain has his work to do and you have yours. I’ll help you in whatever way I can.”
Jesse smiled at me weakly. “You really are something, aren’t you?”
“I’m your wife, darling, and I’ve been terribly stupid about this entire mission. There’s more than enough work for the two of us, and from now on I intend to do my share.”
It was very hard work. The worst part of it was the endless hopelessness of it all. Of course, it was physically punishing to be attending to patient after patient, hour after hour, all day long in that exhausting, smothering heat. But the emotional drain was even worse. No matter how long we worked, the line was always there, always longer, it seemed. I began to pray for sunset by the middle of the day, pleading with a god I didn’t believe in to hurry the darkness so we could drag ourselves back to our tents.
Day after day we worked in the blazing heat. At night we barely ate a thing, then crawled into our cots for a few pitiful hours of sleep.
I began to hate those sick, starving people who needed so much from us. It wasn’t their fault, I knew, but still I felt as if they were sucking the life out of us, draining us, bleeding us dry. No matter how much we did for them there was always more to be done.
But after several weeks of this, one night Jesse pushed his cot next to mine and then, in the darkness, began fumbling with the buttons of my shirt.
Surprised, I whispered, “Are you going to examine me, Doctor?”
“Thoroughly,” he said.
We giggled like a pair of teenagers and I felt a tremendous surge of relief gust through me. I knew Jesse was going to be all right. Despite it all, he would be all right.
WASHINGTON:
DIRKSON SENATE
OFFICE BUILDING
Franklin J. W. Kindelberger had been a senator long enough to stop wincing at the fact that his office was in one of the buildings known as an S.O.B.
He sat relaxed in the small conference room that was part of his suite of offices, long legs stretched out across the carpeting and a heavy cut-crystal glass of bourbon on the rocks in one massive hand. He had the lanky build of a cowboy, big bones and long limbs, but his eyes were slitted, evasive, with the slightly crafty look of a banker or insurance salesman. He combed his thinning hair forward over his receding hairline. For years he had wanted to grow a beard, but thought it would lose votes, especially among the women. By now it would probably come in all gray, he told himself wistfully.
Kindelberger was relaxing with his three key aides after a tedious morning of meeting constituents and making promises. Most of the others on his staff had gone downstairs for lunch. Kindelberger was skipping lunch, except for his usual bourbon. He sat with his three aides on the comfortable leather chairs in the conference room, watching C-SPAN as a fellow senator made a long and boring speech to the empty senate chamber. Only Kindelberger was drinking.
“This is a waste of time,” he muttered. “She’s making an idiot of herself.”
“Plays well back home,” said Laureen Jarvis, the senator’s chief of staff. She was in her early thirties, round-faced and slightly plump.
Kerry Tate shook his bald head. “They show the empty chamber. Anybody can see she’s talking to herself.”
“It still goes into the record,” Jarvis insisted.
“Let’s get something else on,” Kindelberger insisted.
Ed Bloomfield held the remote control. The most brilliant manipulator of demographic data on Capitol Hill, he was grossly overweight, asthmatic, pasty-looking from spending every possible moment indoors, preferably in front of a computer screen. He clicked away until Headline News came on the screen.
“Aw, hell,” groaned Tate, “we’ve seen the financial report three times this morning. It’s not going to change.” Tate was the senator’s chief political advisor, the most trusted person in the room, the one who had been with Kindelberger from his beginnings as a hungry lawyer in Pocatello. Tate had been bald and nervous even back then.
“I wanna see the latest stock market numbers,” Bloomfield mumbled, his eyes on the screen.
“They might have more on the riot,” Jarvis said.
“Riot?” Kindelberger asked. “Where?”
“Right here,” said Tate. “In front of the Capitol.”
“When?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
Looking a little guilty, Kindelberger said, “I must’ve missed it. Didn’t see the news last night.”
“Picture on page one of the Post this morning,” Tate said.
“Didn’t get a chance to see the paper, either,” the senator muttered defensively.
They had to wait until the end of the half hour, after the sports report. The Colorado Rockies had lost to the Cincinnati Reds after beating them two straight. “Broke their winning streak,” Bloomfield quipped.
Then came the footage of the scuffle between the wheelchair-bound paraplegics and the sign-bearing religious picketers. Kindelberger muttered, “Bunch of nuts,” but it was not clear which side he meant. Reverend Simmonds appeared on the screen briefly, his eyes piercing beneath their shaggy brows.
“These godless scientists must be stopped before they destroy us all,” he intoned. “We must draw the line here and now.”
Kindelberger nodded.
The coverage went on to show Arthur Marshak’s stormy testimony and his threat to walk out of the hearing.
“What hearing is that?” the senator asked. “I don’t recognize anybody there.”
Jarvis said, “It’s not a regular hearing. It’s that science court thing.”
The news report ended and commercials came on. Bloomfield muted the sound.
“It’s getting a lot of people worked up,” said the senator.
“A few religious zealots,” Tate scoffed. “And some motorcycle thugs.”
“It’s more than that,” said Bloomfield. He always sounded breathless, as if each word were an effort.
“What do you mean?”
“This could be bigger than abortion rights.” He sucked in air noisily. “They’re talking about growing a new heart inside you . . . when your old one starts to fail.” Bloomfield sank back into his leather chair, mouth hanging open from the exertion of talking.
Laureen Jarvis took over. “The scientists think they can grow new organs inside your body when you need them. Regenerate amputated limbs, stuff like that.”
Kindelberger grunted thoughtfully. “Can they grow new hair?”
Everyone l
aughed, except Tate.
“Is there something in here for me?” the senator asked.
Bloomfield raised a hand and ticked off his fat fingers. “Religious vote. Senior citizens. Stem cells. Abortion rights. Insurance industry. Birth defects. Health care.”
“Which adds up to the women’s vote,” Jarvis added.
“And no two of them on the same side,” grumbled Tate.
“What’s AARP say about this?”
Jarvis shrugged. “They haven’t come out with a position yet.”
“Nobody has,” said Bloomfield. “Too early.”
“I’ve never seen people so worked up about scientific research,” Kindelberger said.
“Stay out of it,” Tate snapped.
The senator gave him a quizzical look. “You always say stay out of it, Kerry. Hell, you wanted me to stay out of the health insurance fight.”
“You were lucky then.”
“Maybe I could get lucky again,” Kindelberger said. “After all, I am on the Human Resources Committee.”
Tate shook his head vehemently. “This is a no-win situation, Franklin. If you go with the scientists the religious right will attack you as pro-abortion. If you go against the scientists the AARP will crucify you. And who the hell knows which way the insurance and medical lobbies will jump? They don’t know themselves, yet.”
“Stem cells are a trigger issue,” Bloomfield said. “Gets everybody hot, one way or the other.”
Kindelberger slumped back in his seat and took another sip of his bourbon. The room fell silent. The news was back on the television, but it was still muted.
“I’ve got to face that sonofabitch Maklin next November,” Kindelberger muttered. “And he’s got the governor behind him.”
“All the more reason to avoid slitting your throat over this issue,” warned Tate.
“Good TV coverage,” Bloomfield suggested. “Better than speeches on C-SPAN.”
Tate scowled at him.
“Suppose he just sits in on the hearings?” Jarvis suggested, pushing back a stray lock of hair that had fallen over her face. “As an interested member of the Senate. A concerned senator.”
“Yeah!” Kindelberger brightened. “I wouldn’t have to take a stand, just say I’m there to see for myself what this is all about. I’ll look smart and be on TV.”
“If they continue to cover the hearings,” Tate pointed out. “The TV crews were there yesterday only because it was the first day. Nobody expected the demonstrators.”
“This Dr. Marshak,” said Jarvis, “the guy who threatened to walk out of the hearing. He looks like good TV material to me.”
Kindelberger shrugged. “We could check and see if the demonstrators intend to keep it up. Get in touch with that reverend.”
“We could make certain the networks know that the senator will sit in on the hearing,” Jarvis said. “That will guarantee news coverage, at least for the first day you show up.”
“Right. And if they stop covering the hearings I’ll stop attending.”
Tate still glowered, unconvinced.
“It’ll give us some time on the tube that we wouldn’t get otherwise,” Jarvis urged.
“Make him look like he’s on top of a coming issue,” Bloomfield agreed.
Very reluctantly, Tate said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it could be a plus.”
“So set it up for me, Laureen,” said the senator eagerly.
“But don’t say anything at the hearing,” Tate insisted. “Don’t you open your mouth.”
Kindelberger grinned at him. “I’ll be quiet as a li’l ol’ mouse.” Then he added, “In the meantime, get ahold of that guy Simmonds for me.”
ARTHUR
In the months after I first learned that Johnston was negotiating to sell off Grenford Laboratory to the Japanese, I couldn’t seem to decide what to do about it. I toyed with the idea of visiting Japan and meeting the people who were attempting to buy the lab, but I hadn’t been able to work up enough enthusiasm for the idea to actually put it into motion. Neither had I braced Johnston with the fact that I knew what was in the wind.
I procrastinated. I put off any decisive action because I truly couldn’t decide which course of action might be best. I saw Johnston regularly, but the CEO gave me no hint that the lab was on the block. I saw Nancy Dubois almost every Monday evening, and—despite everything—we spent most of those Monday nights in bed. She was acting as if she expected it; she wasn’t going to let loose of me until she got the promotion she was after. If then.
Indecision ruled my life for months, and I hated it. I felt testy, tense all the time. I’ve got to find a way through all this, I told myself constantly. Yet the weeks drifted past, one after another. Even my fencing fell off; I wasn’t good enough to make the tournaments and for the first time since I had taken up the sport I really didn’t care.
All that time, the scientific work went extremely well. Darrell Walters acted like a gangling paterfamilias over an enthusiastic research team that included Vince Andriotti, Zack O’Neill, and several of the younger staffers.
O’Neill was doing especially spectacular work then. If he had been at a university he would be heading for a Nobel Prize. He took the existing work on stem cells and carried it further, engineering a family of peptides that he playfully dubbed “regentides.” Properly inserted into a somatic cell, the regentides could lock onto the cell’s DNA and alter gene expression by binding both to key repressor genes and to the enzymes that control the regulatory genes. The cells actually reproduced almost the way they did in the womb. In effect, he was able to regress normal body cells so that they became pluripotent, like adult stem cells.
We were on the right track. Zack was already starting to plan experiments to use his regentides to regenerate specific organs instead of merely making cells multiply in a culture dish.
While all this was going on, I received a phone call from Jesse. Phyllis came to the door of my office with a big grin on her face and told me to pick up the phone.
“Hi, Arby!” he said brightly. “How’s it going?”
“Jesse!” I almost jumped out of my chair. “Where are you?”
“London. We’re on our way home.”
I felt a huge surge of relief that Jess and Julia had made it safely through that pesthole. “How are you? How’s Julia?”
“Julia’s pregnant!” The joy in my brother’s voice came bubbling through the phone connection.
It felt like a shock in the pit of my stomach. “That’s wonderful,” I managed to say. “Congratulations.”
“You have no idea what an achievement it was,” Jesse prattled on, “doing it on Army cots and all that.”
“What’s it going to be,” I forced myself to ask, “a boy or a girl?”
“Too early to tell. We just arrived in London last night and confirmed it this morning. We’ll wait until we get back to the States for a sonogram.”
“Julia’s all right?”
“She’s terrific!”
“And you’re in good health? You didn’t catch anything while you were in the bush?”
“Naw, I’m fine, Arby. Couldn’t be better. Lost a few pounds, that’s all. A couple of English trifles and I’ll be right back where I was.”
“When will you be back home?”
“Don’t know yet. We’re going to hang out here in London a couple days, relax, get used to civilization again. I’ll give you a call.”
“Have you called Momma?”
“Not yet. Can you give her a ring for me?”
Telephone calls to Momma were difficult, of course. She needed a nurse there to hold the phone and speak the words she tapped out on her keyboard.
“I’ll run up and see her,” I said tightly.
“How is she?”
“About the same. She’ll be happy to hear about Julia.”
“Yep. She’s going to be a grandma after all.”
It almost made me smile. “Yes, that’s right, isn’t it?”
“Wait!” I almost shouted. “When will you be back here? When can you come up to the lab and see the progress we’ve made?”
“Progress?”
“On the regeneration work.”
“Oh, that.”
“We’ve developed a set of peptides that can regress cells to their pluripotent state,” I told him. “Differentiated cells like bone or muscle start to reproduce just like they did when they were in the zygote stage.”
“You can make somatic cells reproduce?”
“Like they do in the womb,” I said.
“In vivo?”
“No, in a culture dish. But we’re starting to plan experiments to reproduce specific organs in vitro. Then we’ll go on to actual animal experiments.”
“Not bad,” was all that Jesse would say.
“I want you to be part of this, Jesse,” I said. “It’s your idea as much as mine. We could use your expertise on this.”
He laughed carelessly. “Like I don’t have enough to do.”
“Well, if you’re going to be a father, it wouldn’t hurt to have a consulting fee coming to you, would it?”
That made him think, at least for a moment or so. “No, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt, at that. But where would I get the time to come up there and work with your people?”
I waved a hand in the air. “We’ll figure that out once you get back. But I want you working with me on this, Jesse. I really do.”
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll talk about it when I get back.”
“Fine,” I said.
For a long while after Jesse hung up I sat at my desk, thinking. Not about Jesse’s coming to work with us at the lab. About Julia’s pregnancy. With his baby. And I had to go down to Sunny Glade and tell Momma about it.
I don’t know how long I sat there, staring at nothing, my thoughts spinning. Julia had conceived a baby with Jess. He sounded so goddamned happy about it. She let him do it to her. She wanted him. She’d been doing with him all the things we had done together. All the—
Phyllis buzzed on the intercom. I shook my head, trying to clear it of the images that I was seeing.