He definitely looked concerned.
"A person could do a lot of time for something like that. You're already in enough trouble as it is."
"Who are you working for?"
He was slurring his words. Time for another drink all around, she thought, signaling the bar maid.
"I wish I could tell you. I really do. They make us sign things, you know. We're pledged to secrecy. But I see a certain doubt in your eyes. I have a number you can call to check it out. The contact's name is Raymond. You don't have to talk to him. Just see who answers the phone. See if there's anyone there by that name."
On a cocktail napkin, she copied Raymond's number. It was time to twist the knife.
"Things could be pretty tough for you in prison, you know, with your red hair. Hair color like that attracts attention. Gets you a reputation. Some of those guys in there — it'll be like waving a flag at a herd of bulls."
He staggered off to the men's room. When he came back, he looked dreadful.
I think I've got him, she thought.
"You know," she said. "Maybe you were the lucky one tonight. Finding me there might have been the best thing that ever happened to you."
He stared at her, angry, confused, uncertain.
"I may just turn out to be your lifeline," she added.
She stood up, almost knocking over the water glass of vodka on the floor.
"There's no need to do anything, no need to say anything," she added, in a voice that had a certain element almost of solicitousness. "Let's just go back to the Homestead and sleep on it. Maybe in the morning, when you've got a clear head, you can call that number. Then we'll get together — see what we can work out."
They left the roadhouse, and she held her hand out for the car keys.
"Alfred, I better drive. You've had too much."
At breakfast the next morning, she was happy to see that Alfred looked horrible. His hair, ordinarily so meticulously combed, was disheveled, and his clothes, usually crisp and pressed, looked as if he had slept in them. She looked closely; he had—they were the same shirt and pants he'd been wearing last night. His eyes were bloodshot.
She let him eat in peace and then suggested a Saturday morning outing. He meekly agreed. They drove to a tiny harbor downtown filled with bobbing sailboats. On a pier, they purchased two tickets and boarded a ferry that would take them to Island Beach, a mile out in Long Island Sound.
It was a glorious July day. They sat on the upper deck and felt the sun warming their skin. The sky was a crystalline blue, speedboats purred by heading for the open water, and on both sides of the harbor, Gatsbyesque mansions dominated hills that sloped down to rocky jetties and were covered with lawns the color of billiard felt.
She looked at her fellow passengers. There were teenagers stalking the opposite sex, gray-haired couples engrossed in books, and families out for a barbecue, the men guarding heaps of utensils and grocery bags, the women chasing after children. Not a suspicious-looking person among them.
She felt a tug at her heart. The sight of the families filled her with an unsettling loneliness. Time was speeding along — almost like those cells in the lab — and passing her by.
She fixed her eyes on Alfred. "So. Up late thinking?"
He turned to her with a look of something akin to hatred.
"I tried the number. I didn't talk to the guy. But it was what you said it was."
"Good. Let's start."
"I don't know anything about that other stuff you were talking about. I only know about the science."
"All right, then, let's talk about the science. Do you have a clone?"
When she put the question starkly like that, on the top of a ferry boat cruising through Long Island Sound on a perfect Saturday morning, it couldn't help but strike her as surrealistic.
"No."
She couldn't tell if he was lying or not.
"Tell me about this, then. You and I have been looking at cells. Some young and healthy, others old and dying. Last night I saw a third kind. They were dying so fast, they looked like they were committing suicide. They were flooded with telomerase. Someone altered these calls, didn't they?"
Albert looked out over the water and sighed.
"You're speaking hypothetically," he said finally. "Understand?"
"Yes."
"We're just talking science here. Abstractions."
"To explain how the telomerase got there. Someone put it there. Someone is working on life extension."
He looked at her blankly, so that she felt compelled to continue.
"It's a natural idea. The idea of adding exogenous telomerase into cells is bound to be appealing. I mean, if cells die because their chromosomes get too short, why not put in extra enzymes to keep them long?"
"Of course," he replied, in a hollow voice. "As a way to restore the normal balance or homeostasis which healthy cells maintain."
"Exactly."
"And how — since we're speaking hypothetically — would one get it there?"
So he wanted to be the one to ask the questions. Okay.
"Injection, probably. That would be the simplest method. That's what doctors do when patients are missing something. Like insulin to treat diabetics. Since the pancreas doesn't produce enough of it, the patient gives himself an injection every day, and so replaces the protein his body doesn't produce.
"It wouldn't be that hard to do," she continued. "First, you'd isolate the gene for the protein. Then you'd put it into a bacterium, which starts making proteins from all of its genes, including the new DNA. It divides, you purify the stuff, and you put it into a serum for inoculation."
"Too unwieldy. Daily injections might work for a while — in fact, they do work — but they're a pain. Don't forget, you're trying to get people to sign on for the long term."
"Sign on?"
"Sign on," he repeated irritably. "Sign up. Agree to pay a lot of money in exchange for the prospect of unparalleled health and life extension. If you want to attract customers, you need something a lot sexier."
"I see," she said quietly. "So what is the answer?"
"Hypothetically?"
"Of course. Hypothetically."
"Gene therapy. Use nature itself. Let the cells do the work."
"How?"
"It's simple enough, if you know what you're doing. The technique of polymerase chain reaction can be used to replicate DNA in a test tube. You make millions of copies from a small segment of DNA. Then you need a vector to deliver the DNA into the cells. Viruses are natural vectors — that's what they do. They make proteins by injecting their DNA into cells, using the cells to make virus proteins and then repackaging the viral proteins. So, you put the gene for telomerase inside a virus, have the virus infect cells, and then the cells will take up the gene and start making telomerase."
Tizzie smiled encouragingly. "You make it sound easy."
"It is easy," he said, looking out at the water and then looking back. "It's very basic. The problem is, it's so basic that if one little thing goes wrong, it throws the whole thing off. The consequences can be devastating."
"Like what?"
"Like mutant telomerase. Something that goes wrong in the isolation of the original protein or in the creation of hundreds of thousands of copies. Some little flaw, a change in one building block — a base pair substitution or a base pair deletion — and it becomes magnified a thousandfold, a millionfold. You end up with a wild-card enzyme that does the opposite of what you want it to. Instead of adding to the telomere cap, it just sticks there, causing the chromosomes to clump together. The daughter cells don't come out younger and vital with all their DNA. They come out like freaks, with chromosomes missing or, even worse, extra ones added on. And then things really go crazy. The mutant enzyme turns into a cannibal. It actually starts chopping up the DNA, cleaving it in two like a butcher's blade."