Next (14 page)
Authors: Michael Crichton
Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Adventure
H
enry Kendall
parked in the Long Beach Memorial parking lot, and walked into the side door of the hospital, carrying a tissue container. He went down to the basement to the pathology lab and asked to see Marty Roberts. They had been high school friends in Marin County. Marty came out at once.
“Oh my God,” he said, “I heard your name and I thought you were dead!”
“Not yet,” Henry said, shaking his hand. “You look good.”
“I look fat. You look good. How’s Lynn?”
“Good. Kids are good. How’s Janice?”
“She took off with a cardiac surgeon a couple of years ago.”
“Sorry, I didn’t know.”
“I’m over it,” Marty Roberts said. “Life is good. Been hectic around here, but things are good now.” He smiled. “Anyway, aren’t you a ways from La Jolla? Isn’t that where you are now?”
“Right, right. Radial Genomics.”
Marty nodded. “So. Uh…what’s up?”
“I want you to look at something,” Henry Kendall said. “Some blood.”
“Okay, no problem. Can I ask whose it is?”
“You can ask,” Henry said. “But I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure.” He handed Marty the tissue container. It was a small styrofoam case, lined with insulation. In the center was a tube of blood. Marty slid the tube out.
“Packing label says, ‘From the Laboratory of Robert A. Bellarmino.’ Hey, the big time, Henry.” He peeled it back, looked closely at the older label beneath. “And what’s this? A number? Looks like F-102. I can’t quite make it out.”
“I think that’s right.”
Marty stared at his old friend. “Okay, level with me. What is this?”
“I want you to tell me,” Henry said.
“Well, let me tell you straight off,” Marty said, “I won’t do anything illegal. We just don’t do things like that here.”
“It’s not illegal…”
“Uh-huh. You just don’t want to analyze it at your lab.”
“That’s right.”
“So you drive two hours up here to see me.”
“Marty,” he said, “just do it. Please.”
Marty Roberts peered
through the microscope, then adjusted the video screen so they could both look. “Okay,” he said. “Red cell morphology, hemoglobin, protein fractions, all completely normal. It’s just blood. Whose is it?”
“Is it human blood?”
“Hell yes,” Marty said. “What, you think it’s animal blood?”
“I’m just asking.”
“Well, if it’s certain kinds of ape blood, we can’t distinguish it,” Marty said. “Chimps and people, we can’t tell the difference. Blood’s identical. I remember cops arrested a guy worked in the San Diego zoo, covered in blood. They thought he was a murderer. Turned out to be menstrual blood from a female chimpanzee. I had that one when I was a resident.”
“You can’t tell? What about sialic acid?”
“Sialic acid’s a marker for chimp blood…So
you
think this is chimp blood?”
“I don’t know, Marty.”
“We can’t do sialic acid at our lab. No call for it. I think Radial Genomics in San Diego can do it, though.”
“Very funny.”
“You want to tell me what this is, Henry?”
“No,” he said. “But I want you to do a DNA test on it. And on me.”
Marty Roberts sat back. “You’re making me nervous,” he said. “You getting into anything kinky?”
“No, no, nothing like that. It was a research project. From a few years ago.”
“So you think this might be chimp blood. Or your blood?”
“Yeah.”
“Or both?”
“Will you do the DNA test for me?”
“Sure. I’ll take a buccal swab, and get back to you in a few weeks.”
“Thanks. Can we keep this between us?”
“Jesus,” Marty Roberts said, “you’re scaring me again. Sure. We can keep it between us.” He smiled. “I’ll call you when it’s done.”
W
e’re talking
submarines,” the patent attorney said to Josh Winkler. “Significant submarines.”
“Go on,” Josh said, smiling. They were in a McDonald’s outside town. Everyone else in the place was under seventeen. No chance that word of their meeting would get back to the company.
The attorney said, “You had me search for patents or patent applications related to your so-called maturity gene. I found five, going back to 1990.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Two are submarines. That’s what we call vague patents that are applied for with the intention of letting them lie dormant until somebody else makes a discovery that activates them. The classic being
COX-
2—”
“Got it,” Josh said. “Old news.”
The
COX-2
inhibitor patent fight was famous. In 2000 the University of Rochester was granted a patent for a gene called
COX-2
, which produced an enzyme that caused pain. The university promptly sued the pharmaceutical giant Searle, which marketed a successful arthritis drug, Celebrex, that blocked the
COX-2
enzyme. Rochester said Celebrex had infringed on its gene patent, even though their patent only claimed general uses of the gene to fight pain. The university had not claimed a patent on any specific drug.
And that was what the judge pointed out, four years later, when Rochester lost. The court ruled that Rochester’s patent was “little
more than a research plan,” and ruled that its claim against Searle was invalid.
But such rulings did not alter the long-standing behavior of the patent office. They continued to grant gene patents that included lists of vague claims. A patent might claim all uses of a gene to control heart disease or pain, or to fight infection. Even though the courts ruled that these claims were meaningless, the patent office granted them anyway. Indeed, the grants accelerated. Your tax dollars at work.
“Get to the point,” Josh said.
The attorney consulted a notepad. “Your best candidate is a patent application from 1998 for aminocarboxymuconate methaldehyde dehydrogenase, or
ACMMD
. The patent claims effects on neurotransmitter potentials in the cingulate gyrus.”
“That’s the mode of action,” Josh said, “for our maturity gene.”
“Exactly. So if you owned
ACMMD
, you would effectively control the maturity gene because you would control its expression. Nice, huh?”
Josh said, “Who owns the
ACMMD
patent?”
The attorney flipped pages. “Patent filed by a company called Gen-CoCom, based in Newton, Mass. Filed for Chapter 11 in 1995. As part of the settlement, all patent apps went to the principal investor, Carl Weigand, who died in 2000. Patents passed to his widow. She is ill with terminal cancer and intends to give all the patents to Boston Memorial Hospital.”
“Can you do anything about that?”
“Just say the word,” he said.
“Do it,” Josh said, rubbing his hands.
R
ick Diehl
approached the whole thing like a research project. He read a book on the female orgasm. Two books, actually. One with pictures. And he watched a video. He ran it three times, and even took notes. Because, one way or another, he had sworn he would get a reaction from Lisa.
Now he was down there between her legs, hard at work for the last half hour, his fingers stiff, tongue aching, knees sore—but Lisa’s body remained completely relaxed, indifferent to his every attention. Nothing the books predicted had occurred. No labial tumescence. No perineal engorgement. No retraction of the clitoral hood. No change in breathing, abdominal tension, moans or groans…
Nothing.
He was exhausting himself, while Lisa stared at the ceiling, zoned out like she was at the dentist’s. Like a person waiting for something vaguely unpleasant to be over.
And then…wait a minute…her breathing changed. Only slightly at first, but then distinctly. Sighing. And her stomach was tensing, rhythmically tensing. She began to squeeze her breasts and moan softly.
It was working.
Rick redoubled his efforts. She responded strongly. It certainly was working…working…she was grunting now…gasping, writhing, building strongly…her back arched…And suddenly she heaved and screamed,
“Yes! Yes! Brad! Yessss!”
Rick rocked back on his heels as if he had been hit. Lisa threw her
hand over her mouth and twisted away from him on the bed. She shuddered briefly, then sat up, pushed the hair out of her eyes, looked down at him. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes dark with arousal. “Gee,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”
At this awkward moment, Rick’s phone rang. Lisa lunged for it on the bedside table and handed it to him quickly.
“Yes, what is it?” Rick snapped. He was angry.
“Mr. Diehl? It’s Barry Sindler here.”
“Oh. Hi, Barry.”
“Something wrong?”
“No, no.” Lisa was off the bed, getting dressed, her back to him.
“Well, I have good news for you.”
“What’s that?”
“As you know, last week your wife refused to undergo genetic testing. So we got a court order. Came through yesterday.”
“Yes…”
“And confronted with the order, your wife fled rather than submit to testing.”
“What do you mean?” Rick said.
“She’s gone. Left town. No one knows where.”
“What about the kids?”
“She abandoned them.”
“Well, who’s taking care of them?”
“The housekeeper. Don’t you call your kids every day?”
“Yeah, usually I do, but it’s been busy at work—”
“When was the last time you called them?”
“I don’t know, maybe three days ago.”
“You better get your ass over to your house right now,” Sindler said. “You wanted custody of your kids, and you got it. You’d better show the court some parental responsibility.”
And he hung up. He’d sounded pissed.
Rick Diehl leaned back on his knees and looked at Lisa. “I gotta go,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry. See you.”
B
ail was set
at half a million dollars. Brad Gordon’s attorney paid it. Brad knew it was his uncle’s money, but at least he was free to go. As he was leaving the courtroom, the funny-looking kid in the Dodgers jacket sidled up to him and said, “We need to talk.”
“About what?”
“You were set up. I know exactly what happened.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. We need to talk.”
The kid had booked an interview room in another part of the courthouse. It was just Brad and him. The kid shut the door, flipped open his laptop, and waved Brad into a chair. He turned the laptop so Brad could see it.
“Someone accessed your phone records.”
“How do you know?”
“We have contacts with the carrier.”
“And?”
“They accessed your cell-phone records when you were
off
work.”
“Why?”
“As you probably know, your phone contains GPS technology. That means your location is recorded whenever you make a call.” He tapped a key. “Graphing your locations over a thirty-day period, we find this.” The map showed red dots all over town, but a cluster of dots in one part of Westview. The kid zoomed in. “That’s the soccer field.”
“You mean they knew I went there?”
“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Somebody knew that two weeks ago.”
“So this
was
a setup,” Brad said.
“That’s what I have been telling you, yes.”
“What about the girl?”
“We’re working on her. She’s no ordinary teenager. We think she’s a Philippine national. She’s appeared on a webcam, masturbating for money. Anyway, what’s relevant now are the inconsistencies in her story. If you look at the hotel security camera”—he tapped another key—“you see here that she turns her body away from the camera while waiting for the elevator, opens her purse, and touches her face. We think she is putting drops, or some irritant, in her eyes. When she gets in the elevator a moment later she is visibly crying. But notice: as a supposed rape victim, crying in the elevator, apparently very upset, she doesn’t go right to the hotel desk to report that she has been raped. You have to wonder why not.”
“Uh-huh,” Brad said, eyes narrowing.
“Instead, she goes straight through the lobby to her car. Security camera in the parking lot shows her driving away at five-seventeen p.m. Depending on traffic, the drive from the hotel to the hospital is between eleven and seventeen minutes. She doesn’t show up until six-oh-five p.m. Forty-five minutes later. What was she doing during that time?”
“Injuring herself?”
“No. We’ve had several experts look at the pictures from the hospital, and the nurse who examined her was an experienced trauma nurse. The pictures are very clear. We think she met an accomplice who produced the injuries for her.”
“You mean, some guy…”
“Yes.”
“Then he would have left his DNA, right?”
“He wore a condom.”
“So at least two people were involved in this.”
“Actually, we think a whole team was involved,” the kid said. “You were very professionally set up. Who would do this to you?”
Brad had been thinking about that while he sat in his jail cell. And he knew there was only one answer: “Rick. The boss. He’s wanted me out of there ever since I started.”
“And you were trying to boff his girl…”
“Hey. I wasn’t trying. I was doing it.”
“And now you’re suspended from your job, you’ve got nine months, minimum, before you go to trial, and you’re looking at ten to twenty if you lose in court. Nice.” The kid flipped his laptop shut, and stood.
“So what happens now?”
“We’ll work on the girl. If we can get a prior history, maybe some video of her on the Internet, we can press the DA to drop the charges. But if this thing goes to trial, it’s not good.”
“Fucking Rick.”
“Yeah. You owe him, buddy.” He headed for the door. “Just do yourself a favor, okay? Stay away from that soccer field.”
From
Science
magazine’s “News of the Week”:
Neanderthal Man: Too Cautious to Survive?
Scientist Finds a “Species Death Gene”
An anthropologist has extracted a gene from Neanderthal skeletons that he says explains the disappearance of this sub species. “People don’t realize that Neanderthals actually had larger brains than the modern Cro-Magnon men. They were stronger and tougher than Cro-Magnons, and they made excellent tools. They survived several ice ages before the Cro-Magnons came on the scene. Why, then, did Neanderthals die out?”
The answer, according to Professor Sheldon Harmon of the University of Wisconsin, was that the Neanderthals carried a gene that led them to resist change. “Neanderthals were the first environmentalists. They created a lifestyle in harmony with nature. They limited game hunting, and they controlled tool use. But this same ethos also made them intensely conservative and resistant to change. They disapproved of the newcomer Cro-Magnons, who painted caves, made elaborately decorated tools, and who drove whole herds of animals over cliffs, causing species extinction. Today we consider the cave paintings a wondrous development. But the Neanderthals regarded them as so much graffiti. They saw it as prehistoric tagging. And they viewed the elaborate Cro-Magnon tools as wasteful and destructive of the environment. They disapproved of these innovations, and they stuck to the old ways. Eventually, they died out as a species.”
However, Harmon insists that the Neanderthals bred with the modern Cro-Magnons. “They unquestionably did, because we have identified this same gene in modern human beings. This gene is clearly a Neanderthal remnant, and it promotes cautious or reactionary behavior. Many of the people who today wish to return to the glorious past, or at the very least to keep things as they are, are driven by this same Neanderthal gene.” Harmon described the gene as modifying
dopamine receptors in the lateral posterior cingulate gyrus and in the right frontal lobe. “There’s no question about its mode of action,” he said.
Harmon’s claim has provoked a firestorm of criticism from academic colleagues. Not since E. O. Wilson published his sociobiology thesis two decades ago has such furious controversy erupted. According to Columbia University geneticist Vartan Gorvald, Harmon was injecting politics into what should be a purely scientific inquiry.
“Not at all,” Harmon said. “The gene is present in both Neanderthals and modern humans. Its action has been confirmed in scans of brain activity. The correlation between this gene and reactionary behavior is indisputable. It’s not a matter of politics, of left or right. It’s a question of basic attitude—whether you are open to the future, or fearful of it. Whether you see the world as emergent, or deteriorating. We have long known that some people favor innovation and look positively toward the future, while others are frightened of change and want to halt innovation. The dividing line is genetic, and represents the presence or absence of the Neanderthal gene.”
The story was picked up in the
New York Times
the next day:
NEANDERTHAL GENE PROVES ENVIRONMENTAL AGENDA
Fears of ‘Rampant Technology’ Justified
STUTTGART
, Germany – Anthropologist Sheldon Harmon’s discovery of a Neanderthal gene which promotes environmental preservation “proves the need for sound environmental policy,” said Greenpeace spokesperson Marsha Madsden. “The fact that Neanderthals lost the battle for the environment should serve as a warning to us all. Like the Neanderthals, we will not survive unless we take radical global action now.”
And in the
Wall Street Journal
:
CAUTION KILLED THE NEANDERTHALS
Is the ‘Precautionary Principle’ Lethal?
Oppose Free Markets at Your Peril, Club for Growth Notes
B
Y
S
TEVE
W
EINBERG
An American anthropologist has concluded that Neanderthals died from a genetic predisposition to resist change. In other words, “Neanderthals applied the Precautionary Principle so dear to illiberal, reactionary environmentalists.” That was the view of Jack Smythe of the American Competitive Institute, a progressive Washington think tank. Smythe said, “The extinction of Neanderthals serves as a warning to those who would halt progress and take us back to a life that is nasty, brutish, and short.”
