Somewhere in the building a door clanked open. Pax jerked upright, turned toward the door. Well shit, he thought. Hard clacking steps came down the hallway. Pax moved toward the door, stepped back. He put his hands by his sides. Act natural, he thought.
Dr. Fraelich walked into the room, her eyes down as she tucked something into her pants pocket.
“Hi there,” Pax said.
The woman seemed to leap without leaving her feet. Her hands went up and she grunted like she’d been punched. “What the hell are you doing?” she yelled.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I was just, I had to pee-”
“What are you doing in my office?”
“I saw the light on. I called out; I didn’t think anybody was here.”
She looked around at the papers on the desk, the screen of the laptop. “Have you been looking at my files? These are confidential.”
“No! I mean, yes, I saw them, but I wasn’t reading them.”
She pushed past him and snapped down the lid of the laptop. “You need to go back to your room, Mr. Martin. Obviously you’re feeling better.”
“Hey, have you been smoking?” he asked.
She stared at him. Her hair was down around her shoulders, and she seemed younger, less imposing. It was that Sexy Librarian trick women could do. He wasn’t attracted to her-he wasn’t attracted to most women, or most men either-but he could see now how someone could be. Theoretical sex appeal.
He said, “I haven’t smoked in eighteen months, but I could really use one right now.”
“I’m not giving a patient under my care a cigarette.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“Out, Mr. Martin.”
“Wait, what are you doing here so late? It’s like, what, two in the morning?”
She looked at her watch. “Three-thirty. I’m working.”
“You’re here to watch me?”
“That’s part of it. But I often do paperwork at night. I don’t need much sleep.”
“I guess not.” He was conscious of his dork smock, his bare feet, his greasy hair. He nodded at the stacks on top of the cabinets. “You want me to help? I could file those. No, probably not. Confidentiality.”
“Why are you still here?”
“I don’t think the dopamine crash has happened yet. I’m achy, but mentally I’m kind of wired. Maybe this is what it feels like right before you slide off the cliff.”
“I should have left you tied up,” Dr. Fraelich said. She sat at the desk and began moving stacks of paper to the side of the desk farthest from him.
He sat down on a chair. “So all these forms, you’re kind of in charge of these research studies?”
“I’m just the field administrator. I help them collect their data.”
“I kind of expected more scientists to be living in town,” he said. “When I was a kid, right after the Changes, there were doctors and scientists all over the place.”
“You don’t need to live in Chernobyl to study radiation poisoning,” she said.
“Is that what you think? It was radiation?”
“That was a metaphor, Mr. Martin.”
“Please stop calling me that. It’s Pax. And you are?”
“Dr. Fraelich.”
He laughed, hurting his throat. “You know, you’re not very warm for a doctor.”
“Have you met any doctors?”
He laughed again, and she looked away. Had he gotten her to smile? Not quite. But he’d come close.
“Okay, so what caused it?” Pax asked. “The Changes. I’m a little out of touch with the latest theories.”
“You all are,” she said. In the newly cleared space in front of her she rolled a pen under her palm. “The people in Switchcreek seem so incurious about what happened. I just don’t understand it. You’re in the middle of one of the great scientific mysteries of the century and all of you act as if the Changes were, I don’t know, a hurricane or something. Bad weather. An act of God.”
“What are we supposed to do? We’re not scientists,” he said. “And they couldn’t tell us how it happened anyway. Sure looked like an act of God. So we just went on with our lives.”
“You don’t have to be scientists to show some interest,” she said. “TDS is a completely new class of disease-a cancer that’s not just trying to replicate its own cells, but hijack the transcription process to rewrite an entire genome, while keeping the host alive. Not just alive, but healthy. Hox genes start spitting out new instructions, adult stem cells start acting like embryonic stem cells-it’s unprecedented. Yet none of you even seem to wonder how this happened to you. The only one of you who seemed at all curious is-” He felt sure she was about to say “dead.” She waved a hand. “Never mind.”
“Are you talking about Jo Lynn? Did you know her?”
“Of course I did. I was her doctor.” There was something too casual in her voice.
“You were friends.”
Dr. Fraelich said nothing.
“I didn’t see you at the funeral,” he said.
“And I didn’t see you.”
“I came in-” He didn’t want to say “late.” “Well, there were a lot of people. All those betas. I met her daughters, and their father.”
The doctor frowned. “Tommy’s not their father. The betas reproduce through parthenogenesis.”
“Yeah, I know that.” Though he’d never understood exactly what the word meant: sex without sex, he supposed. “I just thought that the beta women-some of them, right?-had already had sex before the Changes, and that they’d stored up the sperm. Or the eggs. Later they released them when-what?”
The doctor was shaking her head. “Nobody’s thought that for years. They had to toss out that theory with the first guaranteed virgin birth. There was a girl who was eight when she changed, with no evidence of previous sexual activity. She had twins when she was thirteen. Definitely no sperm involved.”
“But there are male betas,” Pax said.
“There are no ‘male’ betas, not really. Only men who contracted TDS-B during the Changes. Males who caught the B strain died at much higher rates than females. The men who survived, chemically and hormonally are practically female. TDS didn’t make them grow ovaries, but it halted their sperm production completely. Penises shriveled, testicles receded. They’re sterile and impotent.”
“Jesus,” Pax said. He felt a twinge of sympathy for Tommy Shields. “Okay, no male betas, but there’s sex with other people-”
“What other people?”
“The other clades,” he said. “Or, uh, skipped people.”
He felt his face flush. The doctor looked at him oddly. “Clades can’t breed with the unchanged, Pax. And they can’t interbreed either. We’ve known this for a decade. Charlies breed with charlies, and argos-well, we’re not sure what’s happening there.”
“But if there’s no sperm at all, then how are they-how does it work? And don’t say, ‘When a beta loves herself very, very much…’”
The doctor didn’t laugh. “No one knows. All women are born with all the eggs they’re ever going to have. The Changes allowed beta women to fertilize those eggs somehow. Or maybe they’re like aphids, born pregnant. Parthenogenesis happens in sharks and lizards and who knows how many other species, but nobody knows how it works exactly. It’s just a Greek word for ‘We don’t know what the hell is happening.’”
Paxton sat back, rubbed a hand across his face.
She said, “You look… lost.”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” He stood, thinking of Jo’s daughters. For some reason he was disappointed. When he was sent away from Switchcreek, Pax had thought that the girls were his, or maybe Deke’s, or maybe both of theirs. And later, when people on the news started talking about parthenogenesis, he’d held on to the theory that maybe, just maybe, he was still the father. It was stupid, he knew.
He said, “I better get back to bed.”
Dr. Fraelich tapped the pen against the desk. “We’ll do one final checkup in the morning, but I think you’re good enough to go home. I’ll call the Chief and tell him you’re ready for pick-up.”