Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

  He was about to take another step forward when he saw something in the distance, moving toward them. The shape was large, lumbering, and vaguely familiar. But as it continued toward them, step by massive step, it seemed to keep getting bigger.

  Too big, Quinn suddenly thought to himself.

  Much too big.

  “Christ.”

  “Not this time.”

  “This isn’t possible . . .”

  But Quinn knew better than anyone, that wasn’t true.

  Although more than five years had passed since he’d left the lab—and the team associated with this place at the northern edge of the world—and had rejoined only a week before heading to Russia, he knew that his colleagues had only a few rules that couldn’t be broken: Highest on that list was that the word “impossible” was officially banned.

  During his time at the lab, Quinn had seen enough incredible things to know why. On his return, his colleagues had purposely kept him in the dark as to their progress, wanting him to see it for himself, firsthand. He knew that a thing like this—the creature he was seeing, something that shouldn’t have existed, that hadn’t existed for more than three thousand years—wasn’t simply possible.

  It was inevitable.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Today

  77 AVENUE LOUIS PASTEUR, BOSTON.

  Ten minutes past two in the morning, and the warrenlike lab tucked into the second floor of the glass and steel New Research Building at Harvard Medical School was as alive as the middle of the day. Teams of young postdocs, grad students, and harried fourth-year med students huddled over high-tech workstations, engaged in what appeared to be a highly choreographed dance involving pipettes, Petri dishes, and DNA-sequencing arrays. Gloved hands moved in and out of sterilization chambers and secure specimen freezers, and masked and youthful faces hovered over test tubes, twirling like small tornadoes within chrome-plated centrifuges.

  In the middle of it all, Dr. George Church strolled through the beautiful chaos, a grin painted above his billowing white beard. Science was supposed to be staid, boring, a slow drip of sap running down a tired maple tree. But even on a bad day, Church’s lab was anything but dull, and tonight, the place was running at a hundred thousand RPM. All Church could do was stand back and watch, as his ever-growing litter of young charges raced toward yet another breakthrough of epic proportions.

  One of the running jokes that often moved through the New Research Building was that nobody knew exactly how many people Church’s lab actually employed. Over the years, Church had determinedly gathered an eclectic group of the smartest young scientists from all over the world, but even beyond the kids he’d recruited, his lab had what Church liked to call an “open door policy.” More than once, brilliant thinkers had literally walked in off the street. If they’d been able to make an impression, Church had invited them to stay.

  Whatever the true number was—Church himself put it at ninety-one—his lab was now home to many of the brightest young minds in genetics, biology, and molecular engineering. Furthermore, Church had given them free rein: access to nearly unlimited resources, liberty to chase their ideas wherever they might lead, and most important, the keys to a startling new technology that made reading and editing the DNA of any living creature nearly as simple as cutting paper with a pair of scissors.

  His unique lab was on the verge of another astonishing breakthrough, yet it was a natural extension of the work he had been engaged in for most of his adult life. At sixty-three, he was considered one of the most brilliant forward thinkers around, having been involved in the inception of important scientific endeavors from the Human Genome Project to the current battle to eliminate malaria and to reverse aging by using genetic implants. Physically, he was also impressive: tall, imposing, with his long white beard, and a thick blast of hair rising up from his head like a snow-ridden halo. A towering figure, not just in the rarified world of scientists, Church was also one of the few lab rats to cross over into popular culture. From a recent visit to Stephen Colbert’s television show, in which Church wowed the audience by producing a slip of paper that contained seventy billion copies of his most recent book, which had been converted into chemical code and implanted into a fragment of DNA no bigger than a period, to his recent coverage in the New York Times for organizing a meeting of top biologists who were planning technologies to synthesize a human genome and other large genomes. (The article noted that the meeting was “private,” which was then reported by other outlets as “secret,” leading many scientists to jokingly start calling their own meetings “secret meetings.”) Church was fast becoming the face of the genetic revolution, an area of science that seemed to promise extraordinary advances from designer babies to immortality.

  And now, as Church strolled through his labyrinthine laboratory on the second floor of the New Research Building, well past two in the morning—which was even more impressive because Church was well known to rise every morning at five—one of those breakthroughs was only moments away. Approaching a group of young charges huddled around one of the workstations, he could tell that something incredible was about to happen.

  Church leaned over their shoulders to look at what they were doing. On the table in front of them was a small plastic dish containing a single drop of hemoglobin, suspended in an “organoid” in a sterile saline base. The miniature, three-dimensional conglomeration of cells, grown from a small piece of tissue, had been created specifically to mimic a small interior organ. Through the microscope, Church could see the tiny architecture of a working circulatory system in its micro-anatomy.

  A young Chinese woman placed the dish onto a thin metal tray, then slid the tray into a flash freezer. Within seconds, the temperature in the freezer reached a life-killing freezing point, representing an outdoor air temperature of sixty degrees below zero.

  A minute later, the tray was retrieved, and the dish with the hemoglobin was placed under the lenses of a high-powered microscope. One at a time, the postdocs looked at the sample, a tense silence spreading from their corner to the rest of the lab. Then the young scientists stood aside so Church could take his turn.

  Peering through the microscope, he could clearly see: The hemoglobin cells in the organoid were still active, still able to release oxygen. Still alive.

  Sixty degrees below zero, deep winter temperature in the Siberian tundra.

  At such a below-freezing temperature, most animals’ blood would have long ceased functioning optimally for oxygen release.

  “It worked,” the young woman said, her tone characteristically terse. She was in her midtwenties, and English was not her first language. In fact, she had learned English in Church’s lab. As unique a setting for linguistic education as it might seem, given her history, it made perfect sense. More than half of her life had been spent in labs and lablike classrooms of various shapes and sizes, on both sides of the world. Science practiced to such an extreme might appear like magic to the uninitiated, but to her it felt routine. Still, despite her stoic tone, she knew as well as Church that what they had accomplished was extraordinary.

  The cells in the dish represented a sea change in the process of science itself.

  Science was no longer confined to studying, understanding, and explaining the natural world. It was no longer limited to reading the secrets and mysteries hidden within nature. Science was now capable of writing those secrets, down at the cellular level. Biology and genetics had gone from passive observation to active creation.

  Whether the young woman realized it or not, it was a shift George Church had been working toward his entire life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Early summer 1959

  DAVIS ISLAND, TAMPA, FLORIDA.

  A few minutes past noon, the mercury was well over ninety-six degrees, the air so thick and humid it seemed to flow from the sun in shimmering waves. George Jordan—two months beyond his fifth birthday, one stepfather removed from his birth name, George Stewart McDonald, and still another stepfa
ther away from the last name he would finally settle upon as an adult, Church—stood knee-deep in mud, hands jammed into the pockets of a frayed pair of overalls.

  “You’re gonna need to step back a little farther, George. I don’t want to have to explain to your mom why you’re missing a piece of your head.”

  George shifted his feet backward through the murk, his boots making a sucking sound as they splashed brackish water, painting cauliflower streaks up the denim covering his legs. The older boy, Charlie, watched him from the small clearing a half dozen yards away, already bent forward over a quartet of plastic cowboys, a shiny Bic lighter gripped between the fingers of his right hand. Charlie’s clothes were even more tattered than George’s, and his shirt was two sizes too small; his jeans had holes in them big enough for a rattlesnake to slither through—a real possibility, considering where the two of them had spent most of their time since Charlie had moved in with George and his mother and stepfather, not three months earlier. The shirt—along with most of his clothes, shoes, toiletries, and whatever else could be considered personal property—were hand-me-ups from George, part of the shared, bunk-bed-style life the two kids lived, and a constant topic of humiliation, which George certainly understood. At nine, Charlie was a veritable adult in the rural culture of the swampy backwoods surrounding Tampa, and compared to George, he seemed positively worldly. In three months, he’d already taught George how to shoplift cowboys from the locked bins at the local grocery store, how to steal cigarettes from George’s stepfather’s medicine cabinet, and even how to hot-wire their neighbor’s pickup truck, though they hadn’t yet dared to take the thing for a joyride.

  Charlie also knew a lot about fireworks.

  “This is an M-80. A Class C explosive, illegal in every state. It’s got the power of an eighth of a stick of dynamite, so when it goes off, you might want to cover your ears.”

  George felt a familiar spike of anticipation move through him as he watched Charlie flick the lighter open, the little flame arching up through the hazy air of the swamp. The plastic cowboys strapped around the red, cylindrical firecracker seemed resigned to their fate, subjects in what George and Charlie liked to call one of their many “experiments for the greater good of humanity.” Two years earlier, the Russians had launched Sputnik—the world’s first satellite, an event that still dominated newspapers—and it was the least George and his older housemate could do to further the cause, by studying the effects of sudden combustion on plastic action figures.

  Even at five years old, George was on his way to becoming a scientist. Although nearby Tampa was the second-largest city in Florida, George had not grown up in an urban or even suburban environment. He was a child of the canals, mudflats, bays, and swamps of the surrounding islands. Independent from almost the moment he could walk, he’d cut his teeth in the wild forests and high reeds, among the strange animals and insects that turned every inch of mud seeping around his boots into ecosystems of their own.

  Most days, before Charlie had entered his life, George could be found down on his hands and knees in that mud, digging up bugs, crustaceans, even scorpions and snakes. Just six months earlier, he’d met his first rattler. More thrilled than scared, he’d sat in awe as the thing coiled in front of him, its tail a blur of sound and motion. He’d wanted nothing more than to understand how and why it could make such a sound, why it lived in this swamp, how it interacted with the world around them. A short time later, he’d found an insect graveyard in a clearing behind a mudflat, full of discarded exoskeletons hanging from vines and the limbs of low trees. At home that night, he’d used a set of encyclopedias to teach himself about metamorphosis, to try to understand what had happened to the insects, why they had left part of themselves behind.

  Even before he knew what the word meant, George had fallen in love with science. But he was facing an uphill battle; he didn’t have any scientists in his life. While attending Miami Law School, his mother, Virginia, had met, married, and then divorced his father, Stewart McDonald, a pilot, race car driver, and barefoot water skier. Born on MacDill Air Force Base, George had been reared by a strong, independent woman who was essentially math and science phobic. Even so, she couldn’t deny his obvious interest in and aptitude for numbers and the scientific process. Every night, George came home babbling about another adventure, about his hours spent digging in the mud. Then he’d head straight for whatever books he could find, matching pictures to whatever he’d seen that day. Although he was mildly dyslexic—he had trouble seeing letters in their proper places in words—he could quickly teach himself from the pictures. Once, he’d found a large insect submerged in a pond, which he described as a “submarine with legs.” He’d sealed it in a jar, but the next day it had disappeared. It wasn’t until he’d opened the jar that he’d noticed the enormous dragonfly hiding under the lid. Even though he couldn’t read the words in any of the books his mother had gotten him from the library, the pictures taught him what had happened: The submarine with legs had been the larva of the dragonfly. The thrill of that discovery had been so intense that George became convinced he had found what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

  But for the time being, as George’s mother worked to establish herself in the legal profession, her son’s classroom remained the swamps. When George was three, his mother had remarried, giving him a new last name and a half sister; she’d also begun to make it a habit of taking some of her legal work home with her, which culminated in her delivering to George a new playmate, Charlie—a nine-year-old juvenile delinquent whom a judge had been unable to place in a foster home. Charlie had immediately taken George under his wing, and the swamp-classroom became a place for progressively more adventurous “experiments.”

  “Ready?” Charlie shot George an evil grin, and the younger boy took another step back, putting his palms over his ears. Then he gave a little nod.

  “Blastoff!” yelled Charlie as he touched the flame to the firecracker’s wick, then charged back through the swamp to where George was standing. There was a brief pause—and then a flash of light, bright enough to bring tears to George’s eyes. A loud crack echoed through the air, and pieces of plastic rained down into the swamp. Something hot touched George’s shoulder, and he slapped at it with his hand, sending a tiny, smoking cowboy hat splashing into a puddle at his feet.

  “Total annihilation!” Charlie shouted, clapping his hands together. But George was too far gone to respond. In his mind, the mini cowboys still raining down into the swamp were miniature Sputniks caught in the complex math of forced acceleration and gravity. He could almost see the numbers dancing in the air. For him, the real fun came after the smoke had cleared. For George, the best part of their experiments was trying to understand the how and why of them.

  Although looking at the licks of flame, the melting plastic, and the small crater the M-80 had left behind, George had to admit—sometimes it was fun just to blow things up.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  December 23, 2006

  SAKHA REPUBLIC, NORTHERN SIBERIA.

  A twisting stretch of highway, somewhere between Irkutsk and Chersky.

  Nikita Zimov hunched over the steering wheel of his borrowed two-door pickup truck, the muscles in his forearms tight as metal ropes as he fought to stay near the center of the serpentine swath of packed mud. The road—more of a path, because nothing out here truly qualified as a road—cut between steep inclines of craggy rock and jutting promenades of heavily tangled forest. The beams of orange from the truck’s waning headlights were like sickly pale fingers trying desperately to reach out through the inky blackness—the sort of complete dark found only in a place that did not see sunlight for months on end.

  “This is crazy, isn’t it? I mean even to you? Or does this feel normal?”

  Nikita did not pull his eyes from the front windshield to look at the young woman sitting in the seat next to him, instead keeping his focus on the snowflakes that flew, horizontally, across the weak beams from the headligh
ts. Her face was pressed against the glass of her side window, and she was desperately trying to make out anything beyond the shadows of trees and cliffs.

  “The fact that it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s not also crazy,” he answered, trying to sound more confident than he was.

  Anastasiya was barely twenty years old, the same as Nikita. A classmate of his at the University of Novosibirsk, she was also much more than a classmate. Nikita would never have invited a simple classmate to this place, above the ring of the world.

  “You get used to the darkness, and the snow, and the cold. It’s the polar bears that keep you on your toes.”

  Anastasiya glanced at him and he laughed, and then she was laughing, too. It was good, the laughter; it masked the fear ricocheting through his veins. His anxiety didn’t have to do only with the terrain and the conditions—although to be sure, it was kind of like piloting a submarine through a swamp. His fear had more to do with where they were going and why they were going there.

  He was on his way home.

  That thought alone would have been enough to twist his nerves into a spiral, but there was also the fact that he wasn’t coming home alone.

  Before he’d left Chersky and the Northeast Science Center five years earlier, Nikita could have counted the number of girls he had ever met on one hand. After escaping Chersky to attend one of the country’s best science-focused high schools in Novosibirsk—then continuing to the university—he certainly had not expected to find someone whom he’d felt strongly enough about to chance bringing her to this place. Over the entire journey, he had half expected her to turn around and run. A girl who had never seen snow in her life, she had landed at that little airport in Irkutsk in the middle of the winter, then headed down the road with him into all this blackness.