“And what happened then?”
“I suspect its conception triggered several complex chemical responses in Rowan. That’s why the amniotic fluid is full of all kinds of nutrients. The fluid was dense with proteins and amino acids. There is some evidence that a substantial yolk remained with this developing creature long after the embryonic stage. And the breast milk. Did you know there was breast milk? It’s not normal density or composition. It contains infinitely more protein than human breast milk. But again, it’s going to take me months, maybe years, to break all this down. It’s a whole new type of placental we are dealing with here. And I barely have what I need to begin.”
“Rowan was normal,” said Lark. “Rowan carried a package of apparently useless genes. When conception occurred these genes were switched on to start certain processes.”
“Yes. The normal human genome functioned consistently and well in her, but she had these extra genes intertwined within the double helix, waiting for some sort of trigger to cause their DNA to begin its instructions.”
“Are you cloning this DNA successfully?”
“Absolutely. But even at the rate that these cells multiply it takes time. And by the way, there is another curious aspect to these cells. They’re resistant to every virus I’ve hit them with; they’re resistant to every strain of bacteria. But they are also extremely elastic. It’s all in the membrane, as I said before. It’s not human membrane. And when these cells die-in intense heat or intense cold-they tend to leave almost no residue at all.”
“They shrink? They disappear?”
“Let’s say they contract, and there you have one of the most provocative aspects of this thing. If there are others like it on this earth, they have left no evidence in the fossil record for the simple reason that the remains tend to contract and disintegrate much more quickly than human remains.”
“Fossil record? Why are we suddenly talking about a fossil record? One minute we have a monster…”
“No, we never had a monster. We have a different sort of placental primate, one with enormous advantages. Its own enzymes dissolve it at the moment of death, apparently. And the bones, that is another whole question. The bones don’t appear to have hardened. I don’t know for sure. I wish I had a team of men working on this. I wish I had the entire Institute-”
“Is this stuff compatible with our own DNA? I mean can you split the strand and combine it with our-”
“No. God, you surgeons are geniuses. Forty percent similarity isn’t enough. You can’t breed rats to monkeys, Lark. And there’s some other violent reaction going on. Maybe just too much conflicting genetic instruction being given by its DNA. Damned if I know. But they sure as hell don’t combine. I haven’t been able to culture it with any human cells. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. The thing might have come about because of very rapid repetitive mutations inside of nucleotides in a given gene.”
“Back up, I can’t follow that. Like you just said, I’m a surgeon.”
“I always knew you guys didn’t really know what you were doing.”
“Mitch, if we did know what we were doing, how could we do it? When you need us, and pray you never do, you’ll bless us for our ignorance and our sense of humor and our sheer nerve. Now…this thing…it can’t breed with humans?”
“Not unless they’re like Rowan. They have to have the dormant forty-six chromosomes. Which is why we must reach Rowan, and test her in every way that we can.”
“But this thing could breed with Rowan, couldn’t it?”
“With its mother? Yes. It probably could! But surely she’s not crazy enough to try that.”
“She said it had already impregnated her and she’d lost the offspring. She suspected she had been impregnated again.”
“She told you this?”
“Yes. And I have to decide whether or not I can tell this to the family, the Mayfair family, the family that is about to build the largest single neurosurgery and research center in the entire United States.”
“Yes…Rowan’s big dream. But to get back to this family. How many of them are there? Are we talking brothers and sisters who can be tested? What about Rowan’s mother? Is she alive? Is her father alive?”
“There are no brothers and sisters. The father and the mother are dead. But there are many many cousins in this family, and inbreeding has been rampant. No, inbreeding has been almost calculated, and these people are not exactly proud of it. They don’t want genetic testing. They’ve been approached in the past.”
“But there could be others carrying this extra chromosomal package. What about the father of the creature…the man who impregnated Rowan! He has to have the ninety-two chromosomes.”
“He does? The man was her husband. You’re certain of that?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“We’ll get to him in a minute. There’s lots of data on him. Talk to me about the creature’s brain. What did you see in the CAT scans?”
“It’s one and one-half the size of a human brain. Phenomenal growth took place in the frontal lobes between the scans done in Paris and those in Berlin. I would bet it has immense linguistic and verbal abilities. But that’s just a guess. And there is something also extremely complex about its hearing. Superficially there is every indication it can hear sounds humans can’t hear. Rather like bats, or sea creatures. In fact, that’s a very important point. Its sense of smell is also highly developed, or at least there is room for it to be. One never knows. You know what’s so marvelous about this thing? That its phenotype is so similar to others. It evolved in a wholly different way, requiring three times the protein of a normal human being, creating its own type of lactase which is far more acidic, and yet it ended up looking pretty much the way we do.”
“How do you sum it up?”
“I don’t. Let’s get back to the man who impregnated Rowan. What do we know about him?”
“Everything we could want to know. He lived in San Francisco. He was famous before he married Rowan. San Francisco General tested him in every conceivable way. He just suffered a severe heart attack in New Orleans. His latest records can be accessed immediately. We can do it without asking him, but we’re going to ask him. If he has the ninety-two chromosomes…well, if he-”
“He has to have them.”
“But Rowan said something about an outside factor. She said the father was normal, she even said she loved the father. He was her husband. She started to get upset on the phone. That’s about the time she ended the conversation. Told me to contact the family for money, and then rang off. I’m not sure to this day whether she and I were not cut off.”
“Oh, I know who this man is! Of course. Everyone was talking about this. This is the man Rowan rescued from the sea.”
“Exactly, Michael Curry.”
“Yeah, Curry. The guy who came back from death with the psychic power in his hands. Oh, how we wanted to run some tests with him. I even tried to call Rowan about it. I saw the articles on the guy in the papers.”
“Yes. That’s the man all right.”
“He went back to New Orleans with Rowan.”
“More or less.”
“They got married.”
“Definitely.”
“Psychic ability. Don’t you realize what that means?”
“Well, I know Rowan was supposed to have it. I always thought she was a great surgeon, but other people insisted she had a healing gift and a diagnostic gift and God knows what. No, what does psychic ability mean?”