He went down Eleventh Avenue and took the Lincoln Tunnel, reflexively checking in the rearview mirror to see if a familiar car was on their tail. Leaving the tunnel and climbing the winding ramp and then cruising the elevated highway through the New Jersey meadowlands, Jude felt better. The city was dropping away behind them. He looked at Tizzie, who smiled, and he realized that it was the first smile he had seen from her in a long time. She had been distant and peculiar since this whole thing began.
"It's good to get away" he said. "Arizona, here we come."
"Three people in search of a deep, dark secret," she said.
Jude peered in the rearview mirror at Skyler, who was gazing out the window at the oil refineries, looking preoccupied and worried.
"C'mon, Skyler. Cheer up. If you behave yourself, maybe I'll take you to see the Grand Canyon."
Skyler caught his eye in the mirror, and by way of response he gave a half smile. Jude felt a small but familiar emotional swell rise up within himself, the desire to take care of Skyler and protect him and make sure that no harm came to him. He was like a younger brother.
Jude drove fast, one arm resting on the open window and his foot solidly on the gas, moving smoothly in and out of the fast lane to pass every car in sight. He wanted to put New York far behind them, but it also felt good, therapeutic even, to command a machine and push it hard, concentrating on little else. They didn't stop for food until they were deep into the Amish country of Pennsylvania. They pulled off the turnpike at an exit and found a roadhouse that served large hamburgers smothered in onions.
Tizzie took over the wheel. She put on her glasses — she was nearsighted. On the way back to the turnpike, they passed a horse-drawn wagon with a rear lantern. Sitting up in the driver's perch was a solitary man dressed in a dark jacket; he did not look at them as they passed.
"Who is that?" asked Skyler.
Tizzie told him about the Amish and their religious beliefs that caused them to shun modernity. He asked her what religion she belonged to; she said she had been raised without any religion in a household of atheists. But lately she had begun to read the Bible, and felt more and more of an attraction to its teachings.
"But I thought science contradicted it," said Skyler. "How can you be someone who believes in science and also uphold religion?"
"There's no contradiction at all," she replied. "A number of great scientists are religious believers. Some of them say that the more they learn and discover, the greater is their belief. Their work reinforces their faith that there is a larger force than ourselves animating the universe."
Skyler contemplated the idea, and finally said: "I'm glad to hear you say that. On the island we weren't allowed to read the Bible ourselves. The only person who talked about it was Baptiste, and he sometimes read passages from the Book of Revelation. He said it depicted the end of the old world and the rise of science."
"It's an allegory. So people turn it into whatever they want."
Jude smiled at the exchange. Tizzie has taken it upon herself to be his mentor and guide, he thought. And I have to admit, he seems to be a fast learner. What was interesting about the thought, he realized, was how proud he himself felt.
Chapter 18
Jude and Skyler waited on a bench in the Animal Services unit of the Agricultural School of the University of Wisconsin. The day before, they had driven straight through to Chicago. Tizzie wanted to see her ailing parents in Milwaukee again, and the two of them had decided to meet another scientist recommended by the science editor, so they had driven to Madison. Jude had called ahead for an appointment; he'd said he needed an interview for a magazine article.
The campus on the edge of Lake Mendota seemed to go on forever. The agricultural school at 1675 Observatory Drive was like a small farm, with a silo and a large red barn connected to animal pens — yet this farm was on the cutting edge of research that was pushing embryology into a new and unknown world.
A young man approached down a corridor, his hair long enough to brush his shoulders; he was wearing a checked shirt, black chinos and cowboy boots. It wasn't until he extended his hand that they realized this was the person they had come to see. Dr. Julian Hartman was an eukaryotic cell biologist so adept at transferring nuclei from one cell to another that he was known as "the man with golden hands." He was also said to have a lock on the Nobel Prize someday soon.
He must have read the surprise upon their faces.
"I know," he said good-naturedly. "Everyone thinks I must be older than I am."
Hartman gave them a quick tour of the lab, which was smaller than they'd expected, consisting of only three rooms. One contained a large freezer modified with twenty small doors and a computer-run temperature-control system. The other two rooms were for lab work. Each had two large double-vision inverted microscopes fitted with hydraulic manipulators for minuscule movements.
Across one wall was an illuminated panel, similar to those used by radiologists, but instead of X rays it displayed blown-up photos of eggs. Most were attached by suction to a blunt-nosed retainer. Some were pierced by a glass pipette sharpened to a point. The pipette looked like a vacuum cleaner hose, and the nucleus it was taking out looked like a ball that just fit inside it.
Hartman provided a narrative of the photos, explaining step by step how the nucleus was removed from an unfertilized egg and another nucleus put in its place, then given a tiny shock—1.25 kilovolts for 80 microseconds — to complete the merger and kick-start the process of cell division.
"Electric shock to start it off. Ironic, isn't it, when you think of Frankenstein? Maybe Mary Shelley was right, after all."
Nearby was a bulletin board pinned with photographs of animals. There were cattle, sheep, rabbits, even white rats. Many came in pairs or triplets or quadruples, and when Jude examined them, he realized that all the animals in each group looked exactly alike. Dates of birth were scrawled below.
"My children," said Hartman, following Jude's glance. "It bugs my wife to no end when I say that."
He pointed at a picture of two sheep looking up rather stupidly from a straw-filled pen.
"Mabel and Muriel. My first success. They're still kicking — in fact, they're mothers themselves now. I didn't produce all of these. There are four or five of us in this line of work around the world, and whenever we have a success, we send off a photo to the others. Bragging rights."
"But why?" asked Skyler. "I don't mean, why do you send photos. I mean, why do it at all? What do you hope to get?"
"The potential applications are almost too numerous to describe," Hartman replied. "For one thing, imagine being able to keep cells frozen to conserve genetic material in endangered species. You could bring them to life whenever you wanted, and create as many or as few as you needed."
He picked up a photo of a sheep. "This is Tracey. She was produced at the Roslin Institute, the same place that gave us Dolly. She has been made to carry a gene for an enzyme known as alpha one antitrypsyn, and she expresses this protein in her milk so you can milk her and extract it. It is extremely important, because it is the protein that is missing in people with the lung disorder emphysema.
"Lots of other work is going on to eliminate diseases and produce pharmaceutical proteins and allow trans-species organ transplantation. Pigs are in many ways ideal as donors, but the human body usually rejects their organs. If we could modify their cells, we would have an endless supply. Do you know that, every year, three thousand people in the U.S. die on the waiting list for organs, and another hundred thousand die before they even make it onto the list?