Zera and the Green Man (12 page)

After a brief stop to check out Theodore’s new office (a half-size version of Langston’s with a just-as-awesome refreshment bar), the two men took the executive elevator to the roof. A helicopter waited, motor running, blades rotating slowly and powerfully. The men clutched their briefcases, bent down, and ran. Langston’s hair and clothes whipped about, but Theodore’s usually unkempt hair stayed put, thanks to the massive amount of styling gel applied that morning by André. 

They got into the helicopter and shut the door to — silence.

“Isn’t it great?” said Langston, running his fingers through his hair. “Totally sound-proof.”

“First rate,” said Theodore, trying to admire the leather seats and the roomy interior, while at the same time thinking how he was about to get lifted up into the sky — in a helicopter.
That’ll sure put my new deodorant to the test.

A tanned and muscular man with a blond crew cut sat at the front of the chopper, behind the controls. As he turned to face his passengers, Theodore noticed the name Cooper Davies embroidered atop the planet Earth/VCC logo
patch on his pocket.

Langston introduced the square-jawed pilot, adding, “Coop’s
an ex-Marine. But now he’s in VCC’s branch of service.”

Coop shook Theodore’s hand. “It’s an honor, sir.” Theodore
made an effort not to wince.
Now I know what a grip of steel is. This guy is ripped.

Moments later they were sky borne, whirling through L.A. smog and looking down onto an endless landscape of concrete and cars.

After a buzz over the city, the chopper headed toward the desert. As they traveled east, the vegetation became sparse and the temperature so hot that waves of heat visibly radiated from the land below. Forty-five minutes later the Void Research Facility building came into view. Langston pointed to it, a spot of green on the horizon amid a beige landscape of mesquite, clumps of pale grass, and dry, cracked earth. 

The chopper hovered like a dragonfly over a low, sand-colored building about the size of a football field. The grounds, which covered twice that much land, consisted of an asphalt parking lot enclosed by a twenty-foot-high electric fence topped with razor wire. Guard towers stood at each corner of the property and Theodore’s skin crawled when he saw the glint of laser guns flashing from their windows. The thought came to him that the complex would be identical to a maximum security prison if not for one detail: the entire rooftop of the building was a sparkling jewel of glass and greenery. Sixty-six pyramid-topped
greenhouses, connected together, six deep and eleven long, covering the entire surface. 

“You’ve got some pretty heavy security,” Theodore said.

Langston shrugged. “Got to. The building alone cost over $150 million, and the projects we’re working on are literally priceless.”

“It’s nothing like BioTech Multinational.”

Langston’s mouth tightened. “Make no mistake, Theodore; you’re in the big leagues now.”

The helicopter circled to the rear of the building and hovered above a landing pad, also painted with the VCC-Earth logo. Coop set the chopper dead center and cut the motor. 

A door to the building opened and Troy Sylvan stepped outside. Theodore hadn’t seen him since dinner at The Posh, though he’d heard a lot of good things about him from Langston these last three days.

Troy jogged over to the chopper. “How was the ride, Theodore?” he asked. Grinning, he pumped Theodore’s hand.

“Great.” 

“Everything running smoothly?”
Langston asked Troy.

“You know it.” Troy turned to Theodore. “Congrats! Finally, you’re one of the team. Wait till you see what we’ve got going here,” He stroked his black goatee excitedly. “You’re gonna flip.”

They entered the building, and Troy directed them down the hall to the clean room/dressing room where they donned white laboratory coats, plastic shoes, safety glasses, latex gloves, and what looked like blue shower caps. Before entering the laboratory, Langston paused to look at himself in a full-length mirror, above which hung the sign, “ARE YOU CLEAN?”

Langston slipped up his safety glasses with the thumb and forefinger of one gloved hand and surveyed his
not-quite-so-debonair self. “The only thing I hate about this place is the
attire.
” To the two men he said, “Ready? Then let’s go.”

Langston pressed a black button on the wall opposite the entrance. A set of elevator-like doors slid open, and the three stepped into an immense, brightly-lit laboratory buzzing with activity. A hundred pairs of eyes turned toward the door and all talking stopped. Theodore’s pulse raced.
They know that the boss — no, the BOSSES
— are
here. Just last week I was in their position; now I’m the one to be noticed.

Theodore scanned the room to find row upon row of tables, each holding thousands of round glass Petri dishes and plant specimens. Dozens of lab technicians were involved in various tasks: transplanting tiny plants to the dishes, transferring larger plants to pots, working under microscopes with tiny syringes, injecting plants with bacterium laced with the DNA of other species, typing notes on electronic notepads.

“This is where the newest and most promising ideas in the fields of agriculture and cosmetics are tested,” explained Troy. In a low voice he added, “The ones that aren’t top secret, anyhow.”  

Troy keeps mentioning “top secret.” They must have something really big going on. Probably a new fruit or vegetable combined with a mammal, like the burg-fry.
Excitement stirred within him; he couldn’t wait to find out.

A printout banner taped to one wall read “MATERNITY WARD.”

Theodore pointed. “Clever.”

“Not very professional,” Langston frowned, “but apropos, don’t you think?”

Troy led them to a table where a small, mousy woman rapidly transplanted large seedlings into plastic pots filled with soil and fertilizer pellets. She seemed surprised and a little self-conscious to see Langston, but she continued her task. Theodore watched, transfixed. Tiny leaf buds swelled and began to open as she moved them into the bigger pots. Roots and stems grew before his eyes.
This is incredible, much more than I expected.

“Here,” Troy said, “we are working on designing a superfast-growing oak tree. Waiting one hundred years or more for a mature oak is unacceptable. And soon it’s going to be a thing of the past. What we’re doing here will eventually provide raw building materials — oak for floors, furniture, cabinets — in a fraction of time. Not one hundred years, but ten. Teresa is potting up our solution, a combination of mice growth genes inserted into the DNA of the oak. These seedlings are two hours old.”

Theodore’s eyes widened behind the safety glasses. “So it’s a success?”

“Well, let’s put it this way, we’re still working on getting a few of the squeaks out.”

The men guffawed and the lab technician, up to her elbows in plants, smiled politely. Theodore thought she looked like she’d heard that joke many times before.

They walked to the next row of tables, full of microscopes, as a technician arrived at his station. The young man, who looked to be in his late teens, appeared startled when Theodore caught his
eye. He quickly pulled his cap down over his of hair, wisps of which were going everywhere, turned, and took off at a fast clip down the aisle. Although he left quickly, Theodore could swear the young man’s hair was turning from blond to blue, the same color as the plastic cap. He was moving away so fast, but his skin seemed to be lightening too, becoming paler.
Weird.

Langston noticed. “What’s with that guy?” he asked Troy.  

So he saw it too
.

“That’s Dubson,” said Troy in a low voice, giving Langston a knowing look.

“Oh,” said Langston.

Theodore moved closer to the men. “Did I just see what I thought I saw?”

Troy sighed, frowned. “We weren’t going to tell you about Dubson until later. That kid is from our Youth Volunteer Scientist Program, a program where young people who get into a scrape with the law can work off their debt to society, so to speak, by putting in time at the lab, taking part in a few harmless experiments. It’s all legal, I assure you. He signed a waiver.” Langston looked around, and his voice dropped. “We’ve developed a cream that’s applied to the skin. The cuttlefish gene spliced to some stem cells. The cream is applied before the cells die, and is absorbed into the skin. The results are fantastic. Short term, but incredibly promising.”

“You’re doing
human
experiments?” Theodore’s voice rose, and several lab techs looked over. This was unheard of. His mind raced.
Cuttlefish
. They were related to octopi, known for their amazing camouflage techniques, their ability to change the pigmentation of their skin to their surroundings. Is
that
what he saw? And this guy was running around the lab? He felt color rising to his cheeks, a flash of something that was akin to anger. This was too much! He had a million questions.

Langston saw his irritation. He took him by the arm and led him away from the tables. “Theodore, it’s inevitable that man will take the genetic engineering work to the next level. That is what we ourselves are genetically designed to do, to find out how far our minds, our research, can take us. VCC is just the first one to do it. Dubson was happy to volunteer. He thought it was marvelous to see if he could have this camouflage ability. Can you imagine? It’s like the closest thing to
human invisibility
. The applications are incalculable and the military is very interested, as you can imagine. And this program, with these volunteers — it’s a great way to keep that bottom line down.” 

Contradicting thoughts battled in Theodore’s mind: 
This isn’t right — they are using these kids —
fought hard against —
Human invisibility? That is the coolest thing ever!
Langston was staring, trying to read him. Theodore swallowed hard.
I’ll sort it out later
. “This is some cutting edge work, that’s for sure,” Theodore said in a husky voice. An inkling of the possibility of what might be in the top-secret lab teased his mind.
I’m in
, thought Theodore,
I signed the papers. Either it’ll be me or someone else as president of the Biotech Division. I’ve always wanted this.

Langston smiled. “There will be plenty of time to talk about this later. We should get on with the tour.” Troy led the way to a
part of the lab where technicians sat at benches hunched over Petri dishes. He explained that the fingernail-size sections of choco-cane, a previously engineered combination of sugar cane and the cacao tree, had been placed in a nutrient mixture. To this mixture the lab technicians added, by syringe, a solution of a disease bacterium.

Troy explained that the bacterium had a gene
, the milk-producing gene of a cow, spliced into its DNA. “We’re going for a milk chocolate plant. Can you imagine the money we’ll make?” he said. “Instant chocolate!”

Although his mind was still fixated on the cuttlefish and Dubson, Theodore watched the technicians perform a process he knew well. This was how all genetic engineering work began. The bacterium invaded the plant, entered the plant cell’s nucleus, and inserted some of its own DNA, while at the same time smuggling in the foreign DNA — in this case, a cow’s. Then the scientists would wait until the slips of plants grew roots. They’d pot the plants, move them to the
greenhouse, and from there, wait until the newly created life-forms matured. Soon they would find out whether the experiments succeeded or failed. Most failed. Theodore knew that science hadn’t advanced to the point where they could predict exactly where in the genome the new DNA would land, so the procedure had to be performed thousands upon thousands of times. If the gene landed in the right place, the company hit the jackpot; there would be new products to patent in the world market. If the gene landed in the wrong place, the combination might not show up, might show up weakly, or the plant could be a freak. There were a lot of throw-aways in genetic engineering; one of the problems was collateral damage to genes near the target area (making for even more mutations), but a single success more than made up for it in the sales department.

He took a deep breath.
“Very impressive.” 

Next to a wall, they visited a thin man whose face showed a lot of razor-stubble. He stood in front of a “gene gun,” a steel- and safety-glass enclosed contraption about the size of a small microwave oven, covered with dials and hoses. Troy explained that th
is project involved inserting a disease bacterium containing the gene of a walrus into the nutrient mixture holding a tomato cutting. Troy introduced this man as Max Albright.

“Max was one of our brightest interns,” Troy said, “and now he’s one of our most devoted scientists. He developed this little idea himself, the walato. It’s a tomato/walrus combination that will allow, we hope, the popular temperate-climate fruit to be grown in the Arctic, year-round.”

“Exciting,” Theodore said. He meant it, it
was
exciting, but he couldn’t get his mind off Dubson.