The League of Grey-Eyed Women

by Julius Fast

  Surprisingly. Steve slowed down to 45. "All right. Let's have it."

  "The whole thing is fantastic and I don't know how to begin explaining it, or for that matter even believing it myself, unless you gave me something a hell of a lot stronger than DNA. Look." He unbuttoned his jacket and then his shirt, pulling them both away from his bare chest. "You saw m chest in Montreal. Steve, when you gave me the injection. You even kidded me about it. Did I have a chest like this then? How old am I. Steve? How old do I look?"

  She glanced at him and then back at the road. "Tell me what happened." she said gently.

  He began with his night of drinking and his visit to Anna, and afterwards his night in the park. "I changed. I really changed. It wasn't an illusion, or if it was. then hell, this is an illusion too. Everything is an illusion."

  Slowly, fumbling for the right words, he talked on. telling them of his decision to commit suicide. "Maybe I was just sick and tired and frightened, getting nowhere. I don't know, h seemed, all of a sudden, a much cleaner and more decent way to go. It would at least be my own decision, my own choice made while I was still in control of my mind.

  "Did I jump? I don't really know. I honestly don't. I think I did and I think that halfway down I changed my mind and suddenly, with all my heart. I wanted to live. My body obliged and I became a bird, all hundred and seventy pounds of me. a big-assed, clumsy bird that could hardly fly."

  He told them of the struggle in the water, of his change to a shark, his days in the ocean, joining the pack and attacking the whale. "That was probably the most frightening part of it. As a man I like whales. They seem amusing and friendly animals. As a shark there was no concept of like or friendliness, no emotion such as amusement. I would have torn one of the pack apart if he had been wounded, cannibalized my own kind."

  He told them of his final capture, hooked for a tuna, and then what had happened last night. "I turned back to a man, but the man I might have been if I had grown up with every part of my body perfectly developed, just as I was a perfect shark and a perfect wolf. Steve," he looked at her with burning eyes, "am I crazy? Up in Montreal you hinted about a rat that had changed. I don't know what you meant, but could it have changed into— well, something small enough, or thin enough to escape its cage?"

  She nodded heavily. "Yes, it could and it did. It changed into a snake. It was a wild rat I had given DNA and some chemical treatment. Jack, I believe your story, every part of it. I expected the changes, but I didn't think it would happen this way, or so quickly. I thought we'd have time to come down from Canada leisurely, get settled and look you up before anything took effect. It was a month before it worked on the rat, or ... maybe it was a month before it had any reason to change."

  "But how? That's what I've asked myself a hundred times. How can I change? How is it possible?"

  "You are," Steve said carefully, "in a genetically labile state. I don't know if it's permanent or temporary, I just don't know. What I did, and I might as well be honest about it, was to give you an artificial DNA along with a number of other substances designed to weaken the genetic bonds in your chromosomes. It's an approach that's just being considered theoretically, a form of genetic engineering. We went one better than theory, and we've used it experimentally a hundred times on animals."

  "Stiener knew nothing of the work. I had three women lab assistants who were all ... interested, personally involved even as I was. We were all working without Stiener's knowledge. We were after something."

  "After what? Steve, there's a hell of a lot more behind this than I'm aware of. What is it? What's going on?"

  Steve had pulled off Route 23, and now she turned into Barnyard Road. "Let's have a drink first and then I'll give you a story right back, one to match yours and maybe outdo it."

  They climbed out of the car and Steve stretched and grimaced. "God, I'm old and stiff. That car gets more like a torture box each trip."

  "I told you to buy a civilized car and a late model," Rhoda said in annoyance. "We can afford it, but no, not you. It had to be an antique MG! Come on, Jack. Let's get inside."

  But he paused on the porch and looked around, suddenly aware of where they were, of the country around him and the graceful white house. "This is nice. How long have you been here?"

  "Since Steve started at the Medical Center. Wait till spring and she starts gardening. Back in Montreal we only had a tiny backyard, but here she can really go wild."

  He remembered Steve's garden and smiled, then followed Rhoda into the house. The odor of roasting turkey filled it, and he drew in his breath hungrily. "Mmm! That smells good."

  An elderly woman with grey hair and a flowered apron came in from the kitchen. "Back already? Did everything go all right?"

  "Just fine, Allie. This is Jack. Jack, our—housekeeper." She hesitated just a moment over the title, and Allie smiled pleasantly and wiped her hands on the apron. Jack took her hand, frowning at her grey, pleasant eyes.

  After she left, with a vague excuse about the meal, he turned to Rhoda and Steve. "What is this with grey eyes, all three of you?"

  "And thereby hangs our tale." Steve went to the sideboard and took out a bottle. "Scotch all around?"

  "Fine. Look, you tell me your dream. I've already told you mine."

  "Fair enough." Steve handed them drinks, then walked across the room to the windows. "And let me warn you, my dream's a lulu." She took a long swallow and blew out her breath. "That's good stuff." She faced Jack, her back to the window.

  "If you could change so easily..."

  "Easily!"

  "Well, change at all. But let me make a confession first and then tell you a story."

  "A confession?"

  "Which you've probably guessed. The drugs I gave you with the DNA, I gave you only partly because of the cancer."

  He heard the word cancer with something of a shock. It had been so long since he had felt any evidence of it, any pain at all, so long since he had brooded about it that now he found that he couldn't really accept the fact that he still might have it. "I don't know about the cancer," he said with a frown. "I plan to see a doctor about it as soon as possible."

  Looking at him over the edge of the glass, Steve asked, "Have there been any new symptoms? Any bleeding? Has the pain gotten worse?"

  "That's just it. The pain has disappeared, but it's more than the pain. It's my whole..." He reached up his hand in a grasping motion as if trying to take hold of the word. "It's my whole state of being. I feel so different."

  Steve nodded. "You probably are different, not sick any more. Jack, after this period of time the pain should be overwhelming. If it's gone, it means that the cancer's gone too. We'll get you to a doctor tomorrow. I know a good man at Sloan-Kettering, but he'll only confirm what I've said."

  And in his heart he knew she was right. Whatever the change, he was sure it had cured him.

  She chewed her lower lip a moment, then said, "But let me be honest. I only half expected the experiment to work."

  "You warned me of that."

  "Yes, but I didn't warn you that you might change, and I knew it, or should have guessed it."

  He frowned at her. "That's what you mean by genetically labile."

  She drew a deep breath. "I told this story to your friend Clifford a couple of nights ago."

  "You've seen Clifford?"

  "Yes. He looked us up when you were missing, thinking we might have seen you. Let me tell you the story I told him, the story of Rhoda and myself."

  She began to talk then, telling again the story of the death of her father, the strange revelation of her telepathic ability, the Mexican girl and then finally how she found Rhoda—and the others.

  Staring at her when she finished, Jack nodded towards the kitchen and Allie. "She's one of you too? One of your grey-eyed women?"

  Steve nodded. "There are quite a few of us here in the New York area. Somehow or other we drift together, and a lot of us work in the biological sciences. Maybe it's a talent w
e inherit with our eyes, or maybe we're just damned interested in anything that might help. There are almost two dozen of us in microbiology and twice that number in genetics all over the country, but most of us hold other jobs. But enough of us have been involved in science to really work on this DNA problem."

  "But why?"

  "Is that so hard to understand? We are a handful of women, and there is no chance of a man turning up naturally with this mutant gene. We felt that the only answer lay in genetic manipulation."

  Allie came into the living room and switched on a table lamp. "Dinner's ready now. Come in."

  Rhoda went back to the kitchen with Allie to help with the serving, and Jack followed Steve to the table, slightly dazed and bewildered. "I still don't understand what you were after."

  "Do you know anything about genetics?"

  "A little. I know that the chromosomes earn' the pattern of what we are, the blueprint, and that DNA is simply a tremendously long molecular chain. I know that sections of the chain are genes. I guess any schoolboy knows that. I've seen models of the construction of the DNA strand, and that's about it, except for the basic facts of inheritance."

  Allie and Rhoda brought the food to the table, the turkey already sliced on a platter, and they both sat down and started passing the food around. Remembering the telepathy Steve had talked about, Jack watched the almost flawless way that one woman would reach for a plate before the other woman had quite passed it. He could easily believe in an undercurrent of communication, a level he had no part of

  "What you know about the gene is correct," Steve picked up the conversation as she ate. "The DNA molecule is just a long chain made of different combinations of rings of phosphoric acid, a sugar called deoxyribose and purines and two pyrimidines. The purines and pyrimidines can be arranged in practically an infinity of different combinations."

  "Have some squash," Rhoda said. "Allie baked it with brown sugar and pineapple."

  He helped himself, and Steve said, "Ordinarily the DNA chain is pretty tight and needs something like radiation to break it and rearrange it, to produce what we call a mutation, a mutant gene. Actually, there are two types of genes, the primary genes which determine the structure of enzymes and other proteins and the regulatory genes, which control the activities of the primary genes. When we need the products that these genes manufacture, enzymes for example, the body is able to regulate their action, turn them off or on. No one knows how the body regulates this, but we've worked on the principle that certain chemical agents, some hormones, are the regulating agents. They can repress the activity of an undesirable gene and reactivate a desired gene."

  She paused to help herself to more turkey, and Allie handed Jack a plate of tiny buttered carrots. "Try these, they're glazed with gelatin." He helped himself liberally, realizing that for the first time since he had been "hooked" he had no nausea at the taste of food.

  "We've developed a fine mixture of hormones and chemicals," Steve went on, "that can repress and reactivate at will. We've redesigned and synthesized primary and regulatory genes too, and we've even incorporated them into chromosomes. That's genetic engineering. But the controlling factor, the factor men use unconsiously to 'work' their genes, that's escaped us. We haven't isolated it yet. We can make an organism genetically labile, but we could never control the change. You have that control."

  "Me?" He put his fork down and stared at her. "You mean that's why I can change? When I came out of the ocean, I could only think of lycanthropy."

  "What's that?" Allie asked.

  "Changing into a wolf. It's the old superstition that there were once werewolves. Maybe they were your genetically labile people, Steve."

  She shrugged. "Werewolves are fairy tales. This is science."

  Rhoda said, "Maybe nature did create people who could change from man to wolf. It's a fascinating idea. Maybe you're just tracking down something nature has already done, Steve."

  Steve waved it aside. "There's no point in that. What we've done is to give Jack the ability to change, or we've freed that ability if it's latent in everyone." She tapped her fingernail against her teeth absently. "It throws some fascinating evolutionary concepts open, but never mind that now. Under great stress you reacted by changing your chromosomal pattern and with it your body. You changed into any form necessary for your survival."

  "I'll have just a little more of the gravy," Allie said. "Rhoda, I think the turkey is too dry. Next time we must use aluminum foil."

  "It steams it. It's just not the same as roasting," Rhoda said.

  Jack nodded at Steve. "I figured that out, that I changed to survive, when I wasn't sure I was going mad."

  Rhoda reached over and patted his arm and he smiled at her briefly. "But you weren't in danger when you changed to a wolf," she said. "It wasn't a matter of survival."

  Steve brushed that aside. "But there was stress. That's the point. Great stress and emotional turmoil."

  "I also figured out," Jack said slowly, "that in my chromosomes I carried patterns for all the species man had ever gone through in his evolutionary climb."

  Steve looked up at him. "There's no evolutionary line from man to bird, or for that matter from man to wolf or shark. You underestimate your chromosomes."

  "What do you mean?"

  She shrugged. "Bird, shark, wolf—they're all at the end of a long evolutionary line, just as man is. Man doesn't have any birds in his ancestry. They separated into different branches back at the archaeopteryx or before. The birds are the end product of millions of years of evolution, and so are men, but they're different evolutions. The same is true of the wolf. The branch-off there was before the marmosets. Marmosets, lemurs, tarsiers—that's man's line. I forget what the wolf line is, but your theory is all shot—thank God."

  "Why thank God?"

  "Because of what we want." She put down her silverware. "Because of what we grey-eyed women, as you call us, want. No, Jack. I think you have an almost infinite series of possible DNA blueprints in your body." "I don't understand that."

  "It's not so difficult. You have the potential for all possible forms of DNA. Remember, none of them use more than two purines and two pyrimidines. It's the arrangement of the four in sequence that's infinite. Somehow, I'm not completely sure how, you have the ability to pattern your DNA after every life form. It's an evolutionary thing, I'm sure, but it's not necessarily a function of what's in your evolutionary background. I think every living creature has all these patterns, they have stored blueprints for all life as it has existed and as it will exist. Under certain circumstances they change. Maybe bursts of cosmic radiation caused the change in evolution. With you it's the chemicals I inoculated into you."

  The concept staggered him and he shook his head. "I can't accept that. The storage alone would be impossible, the amount to be stored."

  "That's the smallest part of it. One cell carries enough taped information to make a man. Have you any idea how many cells there are in your body, how many cells alone in the unused portion of your mind? No, storage is no problem. The problem of retrieval, however, is staggering. How could your mind ever retrieve those stored tapes or put them to work?" "But it did? You think it did?"

  "It did, and it will again." Steve toyed with her dessert as Rhoda and Allie cleared the table and brought out coffee. "Let me tell you about us."

  "This I don't understand. How can I help you?" Rhoda, with a sudden eagerness in her face, stopped on her way to the kitchen and said, "Do you mean that?"

  Bewildered, he asked, "Mean what?"

  Rhoda came back to the table. "Do you mean that you want to help us, that you will help us?"

  Jack frowned. "That's not what I said. I said, how could I help you!"

  Steve nodded. "I know that's what you meant. Let me tell you about ourselves. We are mutants, born with a telepathic ability, and with grey eyes linked to it. There are eighty genes involved, and at least one of them on the X chromosome."

  Jack interrupted. "I don't know
much about genetics, but I know that while a mutation of eighty genes may be possible, the mutation of the same eighty in more than one woman is hard to believe."

  Steve smiled. "Flatly it's impossible. One gene mutated. I said eighty genes are involved, maybe more. The new gene causes telepathy and affects other genes which in turn affect our eye color, the laying down of pigment. There may be some skin effects associated with it that I haven't fully understood, and I'm sure that ear shape, in some way, is affected. You know, there's a balance among genes. When one changes, the others change, sometimes in minor ways. The influence goes back and forth. The one mutant gene affects seventy-nine others that I'm sure of, maybe more. They modify eye color, but also the structure of the pineal gland. You know that in our evolutionary past the pineal gland was once a third eye."

  "I've heard that, but the whole thing is bewildering."

  "In us the pineal gland, I'm sure, is the organ of telepathy. The mutation of this one gene on the X chromosome has happened many times in history, I'm sure, but it's a recessive gene. You know what that means?"

  "I think it means you must have two of them for it to work."

  "That's about it, simplified. Blue eyes are recessive, and so is blond hair. If two blond-haired people marry, all their children will be blond. Since the gene is recessive, to be blond you must have two genes for blondness on matching chromosomes. Do you follow?"

  He sipped his coffee. "Through a hazy fog, but go on."

  "Genetically, we call having two matching genes like that being allelomorphic. Each of a human's chromosomes, incidentally, has a matching partner."

  "Except the X chromosome, the one that determines sex."

  "Right, and therein lies our problem."

  Rhoda brought a bottle of brandy and four big-bellied snifters to the table. She looked questioningly at Jack and he nodded and took the glass, inhaling the deep, rich odor as he listened to Steve.

  "Men have a Y chromosome as a partner for the X. Women have two X's. But the Y isn't as long as the X. Only part of it matches up. Because of that there are many genes on the X chromosome which aren't matched by ones on the Y. If they're dominant, they work anyway. If they're recessive, like the telepathy gene, they don't work in a man, even if he has one on his X chromosome."