Reeder said, “Sertoli and follicular cells regulate sperm and eggs. They knock out all the ones whose DNA isn’t perfect. A five-month-old female fetus has seven million germ cells—sort of pre-eggs. At birth there are only two million. At puberty, less than a million. Only about five hundred will be allowed to mature.”
Keith said, “So these Sertoli proteins are really good at finding the cells with damaged genes and killing them. And if you could somehow apply that to cancer cells…”
“Bingo,” Reeder said. Then he let himself get excited. “It’s been thought of before, but the obstacles are huge. But the drawings Hannah did Wednesday and today… I think the pribir are giving us the genetic code to create synthetic proteins that will kill all cancers all the time.”
“Well, that should certainly counterbalance the first bad impression they made by killing the SkyPower workers.”
He was surprised at his own cynicism. So, apparently was Reeder, who said stiffly, “That seems a pretty trivializing way to view a cure for our major killer of people over forty.”
Which only showed how quickly the first impression was being counterbalanced. The pribir obviously knew what they were doing.
Andrews now swarmed with doctors. Keith watched the medvac helicopters airlift terminally ill patients into Malcolm Grow. Three, four a day. It was too big to muffle; the newsnets had it within a week.
The drawings continued to flow, one or two a day. Someone in Maryland reported seeing a “tiny rocket” descend from the sky and then break open, presumably scattering pribir molecules, but there was no way to confirm or deny this. Air tests at Andrews continued to turn up nothing anomalous in the air. Neither did radar.
A school was finally organized. Lillie resumed algebra.
A few more parents left, forced out by the pressures of ordinary life. Keith had begun spending his free time, of which he had too much, with a psychologist divorcee from Connecticut. Her son was part of the bunch of kids Lillie hung around with. She was warm and funny and pretty, but both of them recognized that the surreal circumstances permitted nothing real to develop between them.
The day she left to go home, she came by the bungalow to say goodbye. “I’ve left my other son with his father too long, Keith. That bastard’s not fit to take care of a gerbil, and Lenny’s only seven. David is thirteen, he can fend for himself better, and this place cushions the kids more effectively than I’d dare hope.”
“I’ll keep an eye on him, Jenna.”
“Thank you. I hoped you say that. You know…”
“What?”
She smiled wanly. “Anna Freud said something once about motherhood. She said, ‘A mother’s role is to be left.’ I believe that. But not like this, Keith. Not like this.”
He kissed her regretfully, not contradicting.
That night one of the doctors—there were so many that he had trouble keeping them straight—made a formal call on Keith. Lillie was at a basketball game at the youth center.
“Mr. Anderson, we’d like your permission to do an experiment with Lillie.”
“An experiment on Lillie?”
“Not ‘on’—‘with.’ We asked for volunteers and Lillie immediately raised her hand, but of course we wouldn’t go forward without your consent.”
Keith didn’t like this. Why was Lillie such an adventurer? He said warily, “Go ahead.”
“You realize, of course, that the pribir’s communication with the children is one-way. They supply inhalant molecules that—”
“Have you captured any of those molecules?” Keith asked. Might as well take advantage of temporarily being sought after.
The doctor hesitated. “Well, no. Olfactory molecules must be dissolved in the lipids in the nose in order to be smelled, so after inhalation they don’t last long.”
“I see.”
“The pribir supply information to the children through the molecules, but there’s no way for the kids to supply information back. They’re just receptors.”
Keith didn’t much like this description of Lillie, but he nodded.
“What we’d like to do is take Lillie, and three others, into a negative-pressure room for two days. Air cannot come in from the outside. We want to see if they draw anything, if any drawings still match the kids’ outside. Also, see what changes occur in her neural firing patterns.”
Keith thought it over. “The things you do to her will be noninvasive?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then if Lillie wants to go, I’ll give my consent.” It couldn’t hurt to have her out of the pribir’s olfactory clutches for a while.
“Good. Thank you,” the doctor said. “We’re not publicizing this test, by the way.”
“I understand,” Keith said.
Lillie and two other children disappeared for two and a half days. Theresa wasn’t one of them. In the negative-pressure building, the test subjects drew nothing. Neural activity in Lillie’s “anomalous brain area” subsided to nearly quiescent. The children on the outside produced three drawings.
“I’m glad that’s done,” Lillie told Keith, Theresa, and Carlo when she returned. “It was boring. And I missed the pribir.”
“Of course you did,” Theresa said.
The media (and probably the FBI) had torn apart the life of Timothy Allen Miller. Reporters found huge numbers of irrelevant details, and no further information than Jamal had about why Miller had been selected by the pribir to create the “pribir children,” or how, or to what ultimate end. Depending on the channel, Miller was portrayed as a monster, a traitor, an egomaniac, or a Christ figure. The last came about because the pribir genetic construct derived from Sertoli cells did indeed prove to cure all cancers, all the time.
More drawings, and more genetic knowledge, followed over the next few months. Sometimes a concept took twenty drawings to clarify; apparently cancer had been an easy problem. Huntington’s chorea, that terrible loss of brain cells leading to dementia and death, came with a person’s genes. The pribir sent detailed directions for how to keep affected brain cells from disintegrating. It involved, as Keith understood it, stimuli to switch on genes that switched other genes on or off that affected more genes making different proteins… He couldn’t follow the details. The effect was that those genetically fated to get Huntington’s would not get it at all.
They identified and rectified the complex chemical imbalance responsible for schizophrenia.
They gave instructions for the Holy Grail of tropical medicine, an immunity to malaria. The World Health Organization set about preparing to save a million lives every year.
“I’ll tell you what bothers me about the pribir,” Dennis Reeder said to Keith. Reeder was preparing to move back home and resume his medical practice. Hannah, like a growing number of the other “pribir children,” would live in a supervised dormitory at Andrews. For Hannah’s safety or the medicos’ convenience? Probably both.
“What bothers you about the pribir?” Keith asked. A lot about them still bothered him.
“If they wanted to give all these ‘genetic gifts’ to humanity, and if they did once have Timothy Miller upstairs on some craft to engineer our kids, then why not just give the ‘gifts’ directly to Miller? He was a geneticist, he would have understood what he was looking at a hell of a lot better than Hannah does.”
“I don’t know,” Keith said.
“It makes me wonder what else the pribir have in store for our children.”