Tizzie was dropped off at a locked gate in the center of the fence. The chauffeur popped the trunk, put her small suitcase on the ground next to her and motioned toward a buzzer attached to an intercom. Then he drove off.
A disembodied voice asked for her name and told her to wait. After several minutes, a portly man wearing a guard's cap came to the gate, checked her against a photograph that he carried and admitted her. He took her immediately into a small room off the main entry. A bank of monitor screens identified it as the security room.
"First thing, we gotta get you credentialed," he said, seating her before a Polaroid and snapping her picture. "You're going to be a clearance three."
"What's that?"
"Not very high, I'm afraid. In point of fact, it's the lowest. But it gets you into your building and the canteen."
She looked quickly at the monitors. There seemed to be four cameras — three were trained on the outside grounds, the fourth inside somewhere, pointing at a door that had a keypunch lock.
He tossed over a laminated card with her picture on it, already strung with a metal necklace.
"You have to wear it at all times."
She was led out the back door and across a courtyard and into a three-story white stucco building. There was a peculiar smell of urine inside.
"That'll be the monkeys," explained the guard. "They're on the second floor, which is a restricted area. You'll be working on the first. Don't worry — you get used to the smell after a while."
It hadn't escaped her notice that in escorting her, the guard had left his office. Despite the cameras and the ID badges, security was not very tight, she concluded.
The guard knocked on a door; a sign outside indicated it was the office of Dr. Harold Brody — the head of the animal sciences laboratory. The guard left.
"Come in" said a soft voice.
She expected to find Dr. Brody reading scientific papers or going over lab reports, but instead he was seated at his desk, his back to the door and his arms folded behind his head, staring through half-closed venetian blinds at a desolate landscape — a lawn with bald spots leading to the fence. His posture was one of a man sunk in depression.
His handshake was weak, and his mind seemed elsewhere. After fifteen minutes of small talk — so small it was practically nonexistent — he took her up to what he called her "work station." There he introduced her to a co-worker — a young man with bright red hair named Alfred. He gave her some perfunctory instructions and left.
Tizzie took an instant dislike to the carrot-topped Alfred, who was about her age. He was both officious and sycophantic — he had all but prostrated himself before Dr. Brody. To top things off, he was hardly welcoming to her and quickly made it clear he regarded her as his lowly assistant. He kept looking at her badge, until finally she looked at his and figured out why: he had a clearance one, which allowed him access to every floor. She pretended not to notice. Why give him the satisfaction?
"How about a cup of coffee?" he said.
"I'd love one."
"No — I mean, how about getting me one?"
When she brought it, she was tempted to throw it in his lap, but she reminded herself that a good spy will do anything, even debase herself, for the cause.
Tizzie rapidly fell into a routine over the next three days. There were moments when she was not altogether unhappy, though why this should be was somewhat of a mystery — for the most part, she missed Skyler and Jude, worried about her father and wondered how she would ever figure out what was going on.
She worked hard and long and spent every working hour inside the cramped laboratory. The job itself was routine and tedious, far below her skills. She stained and classified cells on slides for hours on end, then passed them on for analysis to Alfred, who received them as if they were offerings from a peon. Everything about him galled her: the pens lined up so neatly in his pocket, the way he took notes in a book that he locked inside a drawer, the unctuous tone he used in talking with his superiors when they ate together in the canteen. She half expected him to rub his hands together like Uriah Heep, and once actually caught him doing it.
At dusk, she and the others knocked off and were taken in a bus to an old New England inn, the Homestead, in the nearby town of Greenwich, Connecticut. The lodgings were comfortable, but she rapidly tired of the food, which ran to large portions and heavy sauces. In the evenings, she strolled along the leafy streets past the manicured lawns of the mansions in Belle Haven or read in her room — Agatha Christie and Jane Austen.
Some of the co-workers, including Alfred, were also staying at the Homestead. When she joined them for dinner or a drink at the bar, they never talked about the job they were doing. When she asked them what they did, she got curt answers. Even with her medical background, they shed little light on the overall project; they said they worked in nephrosclerosis or hyperlipidemia or the accumulation of lipofuscin deposits in kidney and liver. That kind of thing.
Yet work seemed to be the subject on everyone's mind, and she derived the sense — as much from what was not said as what was said — that there was an urgency about it. They were all engaged in some grand overriding endeavor. Perhaps for that reason, conversations about every other topic seemed forced and unnatural, filled with long pauses. After a while, she stopped trying to socialize. It was less of a strain.
From what she was able to piece together, she had little doubt that the endeavor was what Uncle Henry had suggested — they were trying to come up with some kind of vaccine to conquer the illness that had consumed her mother and was eating away at her father. She suspected that others, too, were at risk.
And so, while keeping her eyes and ears open, she vowed to do her own bit, hunching over the high-powered microscope for so many hours at a stretch that her back ached almost all the time.
The slides appeared as if by magic in a box set in a wall. It had a sliding door on either side, and it mystified her that she never saw the opposite door open or anyone putting the slides in; she eventually discovered, when her door would not open, that the box itself prevented this.
She examined the cells — or more precisely, the fibroblasts, the basic unit of connective tissue fibers in humans. She dealt with them in assembly-line fashion, classifying them by appearance, photographing them, staining them with dyes, and, above all, testing the resilience and strength of their collagen, the protein that made skin thick and healthy, before passing them on to Alfred.
By the second day, she had become proficient. She also saw a pattern. The fibroblasts in the cultures divided roughly into two groups — healthy and sickly. She watched the healthy ones producing collagenase to expel the damaged collagen, enthralled by the ineffability of the process. Sometimes the fibroblast was forced to divide to do its work, to produce new collagen. She saw that each time, inside the fibroblast, as the chromosome lined up to split so that it could form two new cells, a little piece at the end of the chromosome got just a little bit shorter. The telomere.
The unhealthy cells were old cells — so perhaps it was a misnomer to call them sickly; they were just tired. The problem was not that they were inactive; quite the contrary. They seemed to turn out huge amounts of collagenase, but instead of clearing out only the collagen in need of repair, the strange part was that it seemed to attack all the collagen directly. Their telomeres were badly shrunken.