Mutation

by Robin Cook

  “Maybe I will.”

  “I think it would be nice,” Marsha said. “I’d like to meet him.”

  VJ nodded.

  Marsha smiled, shifted her weight. “Your father and I are going out for a little while. Is that okay with you?”

  “Sure.”

  “We won’t be gone long.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Five minutes later VJ watched from his bedroom window as Victor’s car descended the drive. VJ stood for a while looking out. He wondered if he should be concerned. After all, it was not usual for his parents to go out on a weekday night. He shrugged his shoulders. If there was something to worry about, he’d hear about it soon enough.

  Turning back into his room, he took his stamp album from the shelf and went back to putting in the mint set of early American stamps he’d recently received.

  The phone rang a long time before he heard it. Finally, remembering that his parents were out, he got up and went down the hall to the study. He picked up the receiver and said hello.

  “Dr. Victor Frank, please,” the caller said. The voice sounded muffled, as if it was far away from the receiver.

  “Dr. Frank is not at home,” VJ said politely. “Would you care to leave a message?”

  “What time will Dr. Frank be back?”

  “In about an hour,” VJ answered.

  “Are you his son?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Maybe it will be more effective if you give him the message. Tell your father that life will be getting progressively unpleasant unless he reconsiders and is reasonable. You got that?”

  “Who is this?” VJ demanded.

  “Just give your father the message. He’ll know.”

  “Who is this?” VJ repeated, feeling the initial stirrings of fear. But the caller had hung up.

  VJ slowly replaced the receiver. All at once he was acutely aware that he was all alone in the house. He stood for a moment listening. He’d never realized all the creaking sounds of an empty house. The radiator in the corner quietly hissed. From somewhere else a dull clunking sounded, probably a heating pipe. Outside the wind blew snow against the window.

  Picking up the phone again, VJ made a call of his own. When a man answered he told the person that he was scared. After being reassured that everything would be taken care of, VJ put down the phone. He felt better, but to be on the safe side, he hurried downstairs and methodically checked every window and every door to make sure they were all securely locked. He didn’t go down into the basement but bolted the door instead.

  Back in his room he turned on the computer. He wished the cat would stay in his room, but he knew better than to bother looking for her. Kissa was afraid of him, though he tried to keep his mother from realizing the fact. There were so many things he had to keep his mother from noticing. It was a strain. But then he hadn’t chosen to be what he was, either.

  Booting up the computer, VJ loaded Pac-Man and tried to concentrate.

  The fluorescent lights blinked, then filled the room with their rude light. Victor stepped aside and let Marsha precede him into the lab. She’d been there on a few occasions, but it had always been during the day. She was surprised how sinister the place looked at night with no people to relieve its sterile appearance. The room was about fifty feet by thirty with lab benches and hoods along each wall. In the center was a large island comprised of scientific equipment, each instrument more exotic than the next. There was a profusion of dials, cathode ray tubes, computers, glass tubing, and mazes of electronic connectors.

  A number of doors led from the main room. Victor led Marsha through one to an L-shaped area filled with dissecting tables. Marsha glanced at the scalpels and other horrid instruments and shuddered. Beyond that room and through a glass door with embedded wire was the animal room, and from where Marsha was standing she could see dogs and apes pacing behind the bars of their cages. She looked away. That was a part of research that she preferred not to think about.

  “This way,” Victor said, guiding her to the very back of the L, where the wall was clear glass.

  Flipping a switch, Victor turned on the light behind the glass. Marsha was surprised to see a series of large aquariums, each containing dozens of strange-looking sea creatures. They resembled snails but without their shells.

  Victor pulled over a stepladder. After searching through a number of the tanks, he took a dissecting pan from one of the tables and climbed the ladder. With a net, he caught two creatures from separate tanks.

  “Is this necessary?” asked Marsha, wondering what these hideous creatures had to do with Victor’s concern about VJ’s health.

  Victor didn’t answer. He came down the stepladder, balancing the tray. Marsha took a long look at the creatures. They were about ten inches long, brownish in color, with a slimy, gelatinous skin. She choked down a wave of nausea. She hated this sort of thing. It was one of the reasons she’d gone into psychiatry: therapy was clean, neat, and very human.

  “Victor!” Marsha said as she watched him impale the creatures into the wax-bottomed dissecting pan, spreading out their fins, or whatever they were. “Why can’t you just tell me?”

  “Because you wouldn’t believe me,” Victor said. “Be patient for a few moments more.” He took a scalpel and inserted a fresh, razor-sharp blade.

  Marsha looked away as he quickly slit open each of the animals.

  “These are Aplasia,” Victor said, trying to cover his own nervousness with a strictly scientific approach. “They have been used widely for nerve cell research.” He picked up a scissor and began snipping quickly and deliberately.

  “There,” he said. “I’ve removed the abdominal ganglion from each of the Aplasia.”

  Marsha looked. Victor was holding a small flat dish filled with clear fluid. Within, floating on the surface of the liquid, were two minute pieces of tissue.

  “Now come over to the microscope,” Victor said.

  “What about those poor creatures?” Marsha asked, forcing herself to look into the dissecting pan. The animals seemed to be struggling against the pins that held them on the bottom of the tray.

  “The techs will clean up in the morning,” Victor said, missing her meaning. He turned on the light of the microscope.

  With one last look at the Aplasia, Marsha went over to Victor, who was already busily peering down and adjusting the focus on the two-man dissecting scope.

  She bent over and looked. The ganglia were in the shape of the letter H with the swollen crosspiece resembling a transparent bag of clear marbles. The arms of the H were undoubtedly transsected nerve fibers. Victor was moving a pointer, and he told Marsha to count the nerve cells or neurons as he indicated them.

  Marsha did as she was told.

  “Okay,” Victor said. “Let’s look at the other ganglion.”

  The visual field rushed by, then stopped. There was another H like the first. “Count again,” Victor said.

  “This one has more than twice as many neurons as the other.”

  “Precisely!” Victor said, straightening up and getting to his feet. He began to pace. His face had an odd, excited sheen, and Marsha began to feel the beginnings of fear. “I got very interested in the number of nerve cells of normal Aplasia about twelve years ago. At that time I knew, like everyone else, that nerve cells differentiated and proliferated during early embryological development. Since these Aplasia were relatively less complicated than higher animals, I was able to isolate the protein which was responsible for the process which I called nerve growth factor, or NGF. You follow me?” Victor stopped his pacing to look directly at Marsha.

  “Yes,” Marsha said, watching her husband. He seemed to be changing in front of her eyes. He’d developed a disturbing messianic appearance. She suddenly felt queasy, with the awful thought that she knew where this seemingly irrelevant lecture was heading.

  Victor recommenced his pacing as his excitement grew. “I used genetic engineering to reproduce the protein and isolate
the responsible gene. Then, for the brilliant part . . .” He stopped again in front of Marsha. His eyes sparkled. “I took a fertilized Aplasia egg or zygote and after causing a point mutation in its DNA, I inserted the new NGF gene along with a promoter. The result?”

  “More ganglionic neurons,” Marsha answered.

  “Exactly,” Victor said excitedly. “And, equally as important, the ability to pass the trait on to its offspring. Now, come back into the main room.” He gave Marsha a hand, and pulled her to her feet.

  Dumbly she followed him to a light box, where he displayed some large transparencies of microscopic sections of rat brains. Even without counting, Marsha was able to appreciate that there were many more nerve cells in one photograph than the other. Still speechless, she let him herd her into the animal room itself. Just inside the door he slipped on a pair of heavy leather gloves.

  Marsha tried not to breathe. It smelled like a badly run zoo. There were hundreds of cages housing apes, dogs, cats, and rats. They stopped by the rats.

  Marsha shuddered at the innumerable pink twitching noses and hairless pink tails.

  Victor stopped by a specific cage and unhooked the door. Reaching in, he pulled out a large rat that responded by biting repeatedly at Victor’s gloved fingers.

  “Easy, Charlie!” Victor said. He carried the rat over to a table with a glass top, raised a portion of the glass, and dropped the rat into what appeared to be a miniature maze. The rat was trapped just in front of the starting gate.

  “Watch!” Victor said, raising the gate.

  After a moment’s pause, the rat entered the maze. With only a few wrong turns the animal reached the exit and got its reward.

  “Quick, huh?” Victor said with a satisfied smile. “This is one of my ‘smart’ rats. They are rats in which I inserted the NGF gene. Now watch this.”

  Victor adjusted the apparatus so that the rat was returned to the start position, but in a section that did not have access to the maze. Victor then went back to the cages and got a second rat. He dropped it inside the table so the two rats faced each other through a wire mesh.

  After a moment or two he opened the gate and the second rat went through the maze without a single mistake.

  “Do you know what you just witnessed?” Victor asked.

  Marsha shook her head.

  “Rat communication,” Victor said. “I’ve been able to train these rats to explain the maze to each other. It’s incredible.”

  “I’m certain it is,” Marsha said with less enthusiasm than Victor.

  “I’ve done this ‘neuronal proliferation’ study on hundreds of rats,” Victor said.

  Marsha nodded uncertainly.

  “I did it on fifty dogs, six cows, and one sheep,” Victor added. “I was afraid to try it on the monkeys. I was afraid of success. I kept seeing that old movie Planet of the Apes play in my mind.” He laughed, and the sound of his laughter echoed hollowly off the animal-room walls.

  Marsha didn’t laugh. Instead she shivered. “Exactly what are you telling me?” she asked, although her imagination had already begun to provide disturbing answers.

  Victor couldn’t look her in the eye.

  “Please!” Marsha cried, almost in tears.

  “I’m only trying to give you the background so you’ll understand,” Victor said, knowing that she never would. “Believe me, I didn’t plan what happened next. I’d just finished the successful trial with the sheep when you started talking of having another child. Remember when we decided to go to Fertility, Inc. ?”

  Marsha nodded, tears beginning to roll down her cheeks.

  “Well, you gave them a very successful harvest of ova. We got eight.”

  Marsha felt herself swaying. She steadied herself, grabbing on to the edge of the maze.

  “I personally did the in-vitro fertilization with my sperm,” Victor continued. “You knew that. What I didn’t tell you is that I brought the fertilized eggs back here to the lab.”

  Marsha let go of the table and staggered over to one of the benches. She wanted to faint. She sat down heavily. She didn’t think she could stand hearing the rest of Victor’s story. But now that he had begun she realized he was going to tell her whether she liked it or not. He seemed to feel he could minimize the enormity of his sin if he confined himself to a purely scientific description. Could this be the man she married?

  “When I got the zygotes back here,” he said, “I chose a nonsense sequence of DNA on chromosome 6 and did a point mutation. Then, with micro-injection techniques and a retro viral vector, I inserted the NGF gene along with several promoters, including one from a bacterial plasmid that coded for resistance to the cephalosporin antibiotic called cephaloclor.”

  Victor paused for a moment, but he didn’t look up. “That’s why I insisted that Mary Millman take the cephaloclor from the second to the eighth week of her pregnancy. It was the cephaloclor that kept the gene turned on, producing the nerve growth factor.”

  Victor finally looked up. “God help me, when I did it, it seemed like a good idea. But later I knew it was wrong. I lived in terror until VJ was born.”

  Marsha suddenly was overcome with rage. She leaped up and began striking Victor with her fists. He made no attempt to protect himself, waiting until she lowered her hands and stood before him, weeping silently. Then he tried to take her in his arms, but she wouldn’t let him touch her. She went out to the main lab and sat down. Victor followed, but she refused to look at him.

  “I’m sorry,” Victor said again. “Believe me, I never would have done it unless I was certain it would work. There’s never been a problem with any of the animals. And the idea of having a super-smart child was so seductive . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “I can’t believe you did something so dreadful,” she sobbed.

  “Researchers have experimented on themselves in the past,” he said, realizing it was no excuse.

  “On themselves!” cried Marsha. “Not on innocent children.” She wept uncontrollably. But even in the depths of her emotion, fear reasserted itself. With difficulty, she struggled to control herself. Victor had done something terrible. But what was done, was done. She couldn’t undo it. The problem now was to deal with reality, and her thoughts turned to VJ, someone she loved dearly. “All right,” she managed, choking back additional tears. “Now you’ve told me. But what you haven’t told me is why you want VJ to have another neuro-medical work-up. What are you afraid of? Do you think his intelligence has dropped again?”

  As she spoke, her mind took her back six and a half years. They were still living in the small farmhouse and both David and Janice were alive and well. It had been a happy time, filled with wonder at VJ’s unbelievable mind. As a three-year-old, he could read anything and retain almost everything. As far as she could determine at the time, his IQ was somewhere around two hundred and fifty.

  Then one day, everything changed. She’d gone by Chimera to pick VJ up from the day-care center, where he was taken after spending the morning at the Crocker Preschool. She knew something was wrong the moment she saw the director’s face.

  Pauline Spaulding was a wonderful woman, a forty-two-year-old, ex-elementary-school teacher and ex-aerobics instructor who had found her calling in day-care management. She loved her job and loved the children, who in return adored her for her boundless enthusiasm. But today she seemed upset.

  “Something is wrong with VJ,” she said, not mincing any words.

  “Is he sick? Where is he?”

  “He’s here,” Pauline said. “He’s not sick. His health is fine. It’s something else.”

  “Tell me!” Marsha cried.

  “It started just after lunch,” Pauline explained. “When the other kids take their rest, VJ generally goes into the workroom and plays chess on the computer. He’s been doing that for some time.”

  “I know,” Marsha said. She had given VJ permission to miss the rest period after he told her he did not need the rest and he hated to waste the time.


  “No one was in the workroom at the time,” Pauline said. “But suddenly there was a big crash. When I got in there VJ was smashing the computer with a chair.”

  “My word!” Marsha exclaimed. Temper tantrums were not part of VJ’s behavioral repertoire. “Did he explain himself?” she asked.

  “He was crying, Dr. Frank.”

  “VJ, crying?” Marsha was astounded. VJ never cried.

  “He was crying like a normal three-and-a-half-year-old child,” Pauline said.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” Marsha asked.

  “Apparently VJ smashed the computer because he suddenly didn’t know how to use it.”

  “That’s absurd,” Marsha said. VJ had been using the computer at home since he’d been two and a half.

  “Wait,” Pauline said. “To calm him, I offered him a book that he’s been reading about dinosaurs. He tore it up.”

  Marsha ran into the workroom. There were only three children there. VJ was sitting at a table, coloring in a coloring book like any other preschooler. When he saw her, he dropped his crayon and ran into her arms. He started to cry, saying that his head hurt.

  Marsha hugged him. “Did you tear your dinosaur book?” she asked.

  He averted his eyes. “Yes.”

  “But why?” Marsha asked.

  VJ looked back at Marsha and said: “Because I can’t read anymore.”

  Over the next several days VJ had a neuro-medical work-up to rule out any acute neurological problems. The results came back negative, but when Marsha repeated a series of IQ tests the boy had taken the previous year, the results were shockingly different. VJ’s IQ had dropped to 130. Still high, but certainly not in the genius range.

  Victor brought Marsha back to the present by swearing that there was nothing wrong with VJ’s intelligence.

  “Then why the work-up?” Marsha asked again.

  “I . . . I just think it would be a good idea,” Victor stammered.

  “I’ve been married to you for sixteen years,” Marsha said after a pause. “And I know you are not telling me the truth.” It was hard for her to believe she had anything worse to discover than what Victor had already told her.