Even before they arrived at the station house on Fifty-first Street, the men in back pointed him out to the cops riding up front and said he had been picked up by mistake. The cops didn't pay them much mind. Once there, the men were herded into two large cells, greeting each other with laughter and whoops of joy, as if the whole thing were a lark. The metal doors were left open, and in no time, a union lawyer appeared on the scene to sort out the charges. He took the men's names, one by one, and when he got to Skyler, he asked him a few questions and then brought him from the cell out front to a white-haired desk sergeant, who listened briefly and told Skyler he was free to leave. Skyler was on the point of walking out the door, when the sergeant looked him up and down and said, "You got any place to go?" Skyler shook his head, and the sergeant offered him the use of a phone. Skyler could think of only one person to call, and the policemen looked up the number and dialed it for him.
"You want to get that head looked at," he said, moments before Tizzie arrived. When she walked in, breathless with her long hair and her white skirt flowing behind, the men who had been let out of the cells whistled and started acting up again.
Jude paced back and forth in his living room while Skyler and Tizzie sat on the couch sipping tea. Skyler told them about lying in bed in the rooming house and hearing someone on the landing, and his flight down the fire escape. He told about running through the streets and seeing the Orderly, or a man who looked like him, and ducking into the place with the naked woman and riding the subway and getting arrested. Jude remained skeptical that his enemies had tracked him down. He said it could have been anyone on the landing, and he doubted that of all the people in the city, Skyler had come across the very people who were hunting him. He said he thought Skyler's imagination was playing tricks on him.
Then Jude told them to sit back and listen. He looked at Tizzie.
"You remember I told you about these guys called Orderlies?"
"God, yes. They sound horrible."
"Well, Skyler says all three of them look more or less the same. I found out myself that at least two of them do when they were tailing me in the subway the night I met him."
"Ah, I see," said Tizzie suddenly. "If there really are three of them and they really are identical, then — then we're in a whole new realm of science."
"I don't get it," said Skyler.
"You can't have identical triplets," said Jude. "At least not in nature. There would have to be human intervention to create that."
Then he told Skyler about taking a sample of his hair to McNichol and providing one of his own and how the DNA testing results showed that they were identical in every respect except for age. And as he sketched the general outline of the theory that he was beginning to espouse, he found that it was not so hard to use the word that he had earlier pushed aside, that in fact he could not say what he was coming to believe unless he used it.
So he took a deep breath and just said it outright. Looking directly at Skyler, he said: "We've been thinking that we're related, that maybe we are brothers. But I think we're closer than that. I think you are my clone."
Chapter 17
Tizzie led the way across the Columbia campus. To the students sunbathing on the steps they must have made an incongruous trio — her striding ahead in the pinstripe suit, Jude slightly disheveled in a corduroy jacket with a reporter's notebook sticking out of the side pocket, and Skyler bringing up the rear, looking oddly hip with his short blond hair and sunglasses.
They took rear seats in the amphitheater and looked at the portly man up front. Dr. Bernard S. Margarite. The science editor at the Mirror hadn't hesitated a microsecond when Jude telephoned to ask for a recommendation. When it comes to genetics, he said, Margarite's your man. Jude looked him up. He had written papers with daunting titles like "Nuclear Transfer in Blastomeres from 4-cell Cow Embryos."
Luckily, the lecture was for an introductory course. Several dozen summer students in various stages of undress piled their books on the floor and draped themselves across the chairs.
Margarite made a few announcements, warned about a test next week and cracked a joke or two. Then he looked over his notes, walked to the blackboard and drew five careless circles on it. A boy next to Jude opened a notebook and copied the circles.
"As any fool can see," said Margarite laconically, "these are eggs." He paused, as if to admire his handiwork.
"Frog's eggs. Why do biologists love frog's eggs? One simple reason. They're large — about ten times larger than human eggs. And they grow outside the amphibian's body, so you can observe them."
He tossed the piece of chalk across the room. Margarite had a reputation as a showman lecturer.
"Now, you all know what happens when an egg is fertilized. It grows and splits into two, and each of those halves grows and splits again, and so on. And eventually you have a ball of cells, an embryo. And as more divisions occur, the cells become specialized — some become skin, some become eyes, some turn into tail, some into spinal cord and so on. And pretty soon you have a baby frog that will someday grow up and may either be dissected by seventh graders or end up on a Frenchman's table.
"All higher animals go through the same process. We've all done it — though hopefully without the same denouement" — the remark brought some polite tittering—"and we humans do it to an extreme. In adulthood we have about a hundred trillion cells each."
The boy next to Jude wrote out all the zeroes.
"So the first question that the early thinkers had to face was, how does that pattern happen — how do some cells know to become muscle and others to become bone? How do they become differentiated? Why can't a brain cell, say, revert back to an embryo and then become something else? They believed — and it's a logical assumption — that the ability is lost through reproduction. When a cell divides, each of the resulting halves has less information. The original embryo cell can do everything, but its offspring cannot, and the further down the line you go, the less a cell can do. So by the time you're a liver cell, that's it — that's your lot in life.
"For fifty years, proving and disproving that basic hypothesis was the Holy Grail of biology."
And Margarite mentioned a half dozen names and ran through their theories and experiments — zoologists who had split eggs, punctured them with needles, shook them apart inside flasks. Even one — Hans Spemann — who had used tiny hairs from the head of his newborn son to strangle them into new shapes—"the way a clown squeezes a balloon into a duck or a rabbit."
"Then Spemann did something truly ingenious. He took a fertilized salamander egg and manipulated it into a dumbbell shape. The nucleus with the genetic material stayed on one side and began to divide and subdivide normally. While this was going on, Spemann loosened the stricture just enough to let one of the nuclei slip past and end up in the other end of the dumbbell. Then he pulled the noose tight until he severed the two sides. He was left with a developing embryo in one and a single cell in the other.
"What happened? Would the single cell grow into an embryo all by itself — even though its nucleus had already subdivided four times? Would it retain enough genetic information to do that? The answer — of course — was yes. It turned into an identical twin of the bigger embryo.