Blood Music

CHAPTER ONE

The rectangular slate-black sign stood on a low mound of bright green and clumpy Korean grass, surrounded by irises and sided by a dark, cement-bedded brook filled with koi. Carved into the street side of the sign was the name GENETRON in Times Roman letters of insignia red, and beneath the name the motto, “Where Small Things Make Big Changes.”

The Genetron labs and business offices were housed in a U-shaped, bare concrete Bauhaus structure surrounding a rectangular garden court. The main complex had two levels with open-air walkways. Beyond the courtyard and just behind an artificial hummock of earth, not yet filled in with new greenery, was a four-story black glass-sided cube fenced with electrified razor-wire.

These were the two sides of Genetron; the open labs, where biochip research was conducted, and the defense contracts building, where military applications were investigated.

Security was strict even in the open labs. All employees wore laser-printed badges and non-employee access to the labs was carefully monitored. The management of Genetron—five Stanford graduates who had founded the company just three years out of school—realized that industrial espionage was even more likely than an intelligence breach in the black cube. Yet the outward atmosphere was serene, and every attempt was made to soft-pedal the security measures.

A tall, stoop-shouldered man with unruly black hair untangled himself from the interior of a red Volvo sports car and sneezed twice before crossing the employee parking lot. The grasses were tuning up for an early summer orgy of irritation. He casually greeted Walter, the middle-aged and whippet-wiry guard. Walter just as casually confirmed his badge by running it through the laser reader. “Not much sleep last night, Mr. Ulam?” Walter asked.

Vergil pursed his lips and shook his head. “Parties, Walter.” His eyes were red and his nose was swollen from constant rubbing with the handkerchief that now resided abused and submissive, in his pocket.

“How working men like you can party on a weeknight, I don’t know.”

The ladies demand it, Walter,” Vergil said, passing through. Walter grinned and nodded, though he sincerely doubted Vergil was getting much action, parties or no. Unless standards had severely declined since Walter’s day, nobody with a week’s growth of patchy beard was getting much action.

Ulam was not the most prepossessing figure at Genetron. He stood six feet two inches on very large flat feet. He was twenty-five pounds overweight and at thirty-two years of age, his back hurt him, he had high blood pressure, and he could never shave close enough to eliminate an Emmett Kelly shadow.

His voice seemed designed not to win friends—harsh, slightly grating, tending toward loudness. Two decades in California had smoothed his Texas accent, but when he became excited or angry, the Panhandle asserted itself with an almost painful edge.

His sole distinction was an exquisite pair of emerald green eyes, wide and expressive, defended by a luxurious set of lashes. The eyes were more decorative than functional, however; they were covered by a large pair of black-framed glasses. Vergil was near-sighted.

He ascended the stairs two and three steps at a time, long powerful legs making the concrete and steel steps resound. On the second floor, he walked along the open corridor to the Advanced Biochip Division’s joint equipment room, known as the share lab. His mornings usually began with a check on specimens in one of the five ultra-centrifuges. His most recent batch had been rotating for sixty hours at 200,000 G’s and was now ready for analysis.

For such a large man, Vergil had surprisingly delicate and sensitive hands. He removed an expensive black titanium rotor from the ultracentrifuge and slid shut the steel vacuum seal. Placing the rotor on a workbench, one by one he removed and squinted at the five squat plastic tubes suspended in slings beneath its mushroom-like cap. Several well-defined beige layers had formed in each tube.

Vergil’s heavy black eyebrows arched and drew together behind the thick rims of his glasses. He smiled, revealing teeth spotted brown from a childhood of drinking naturally fluoridated water.

He was about to suction off the buffer solution and the unwanted layers when the lab phone beeped. He placed the tube in a rack and picked up the receiver. “Share lab, Ulam here.”

“Vergil, this is Rita. I saw you come in, but you weren’t in your lab.”

“Home away from home, Rita. What’s up?”

“You asked me—told me—to let you know if a certain gentleman arrived. I think he’s here, Vergil.”

“Michael Bernard?” Vergil asked, his voice rising.

“I think it’s him. But Vergil—”

I’ll be right down.”

“Vergil—”

He hung up and dithered for a moment over the tubes, then left them where they were.

Genetron’s reception area was a circular extrusion from the ground floor on the east comer, surrounded by picture windows and liberally supplied with aspidistras in chrome ceramic pots. Morning light slanted white and dazzling across the sky-blue carpet as Vergil entered from the lab side. Rita stood up behind her desk as he passed by.

“Vergil—”

“Thanks,” he said. His eyes were on the distinguished-looking gray-haired man standing by the single lobby couch. There was no doubt about it; Michael Bernard. Vergil recognized him from photos and the cover portrait Time Magazine had printed three years before. Vergil extended his hand and put on an enormous smile. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bernard.”

Bernard shook Vergil’s hand but appeared confused.

Gerald T. Harrison stood in the broad double door of Genetron’s fancy for-show office, phone receiver gripped between ear and shoulder. Bernard looked to Harrison for an explanation.

“I’m very glad you got my message…” Vergil continued before Harrison’s presence registered.

Harrison immediately made his farewells on the phone and slammed it on its cradle. “Rank hath its privileges, Vergil,” he said, smiling too broadly and taking a stance beside Bernard.

“I’m sorry—what message?” Bernard asked.

“This is Vergil Ulam, one of our top researchers,” Harrison said obsequiously. “We’re all very pleased to have you visiting, Mr. Bernard. Vergil, I’ll get back to you later about that matter you wanted to discuss.”

He hadn’t asked to talk to Harrison about anything. “Sure,” Vergil said. He rankled under the old familiar feeling: being sidestepped, pushed aside.

Bernard didn’t know him from Adam.

“Later, Vergil,” Harrison said pointedly.

“Sure, of course.” He backed away, glanced at Bernard pleadingly, then turned and shambled back through the rear door.

“Who was that?” Bernard asked.

“A very ambitious fellow,” Harrison said darkly. “But we have him under control.”

Harrison kept his work office in a ground floor space on the west end of the lab building. The room was surrounded by wooden shelves neatly filled with books. The eye-level shelf behind the desk held familiar black plastic ring-bound books from Cold Spring Harbor. Arranged below were a row of telephone directories—Harrison collected antique phone books—and several shelves of computer science volumes. His graph-ruled black desktop supported a leather-edged blotting pad and a computer monitor.

Of the Genetron founders, only Harrison and William Yng had stayed long enough to see the labs begin work. Both were more oriented toward business than research, though their doctorates hung on the wood panel wall.

Harrison leaned back in his chair, arms up and hands clasped behind his neck. Vergil noticed the merest hint of sweat stains in each armpit.

“Vergil, that was very embarrassing,” he said. His white-blond hair was artfully arranged to disguise premature thinning.

“Sorry,” Vergil said.

“No more than I. So you asked Mr. Bernard to visit our labs.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I thought he would be interested in the work.”

“We thought so, too. That’s why we invited him. I don’t believe he even knew about your invitation, Vergil.”

“Apparently not”

“You went behind our backs.”

Vergil stood before the desk, looking glumly at the back of the VDT.

“You’ve done a great deal of useful work for us. Rothwild says you’re brilliant maybe even invaluable.” Rothwild was the biochips project supervisor. “But others say you can’t be relied upon. And now…this.”

“Bernard—”

“Not Mr. Bernard, Vergil. This.” He swung the monitor around and pressed a button on the keyboard. Vergil’s secret computer file scrolled up on the screen. His eyes widened and his throat constricted, but to his credit he didn’t choke. His reaction was quite controlled. “I haven’t read it completely, but it sounds like you’re up to some very suspect things. Possibly unethical. We like to follow the guidelines here at Genetron, especially in light of our upcoming position in the marketplace. But not solely for that reason. I like to believe we run an ethical company here.”

“I’m not doing anything unethical, Gerald.”

“Oh?” Harrison stopped the scrolling. “You’re designing new complements of DNA for several NIH-regulated microorganisms. And you’re working on mammalian cells. We don’t do work here on mammalian cells. We aren’t equipped for the biohazards—not in the main labs. But I suppose you could demonstrate to me the safety and innocuous nature of your research. You’re not creating a new plague to sell to Third World revolutionaries, are you?”

“No,” Vergil said flatly.

“Good. Some of this material is beyond my understanding. It sounds like you might be trying to expand on our MABs project There could be valuable stuff here.” He paused. “What in hell are you doing, Vergil?”

Vergil removed his glasses and wiped them with the placket of his lab coat. Abruptly, he sneezed—loud and wet.

Harrison looked faintly disgusted. “We only broke the code yesterday. By accident, almost. Why did you hide it? Is it something you’d rather we didn’t know?”

Without his glasses, Vergil looked owlish and helpless. He began to stammer an answer, then stopped and thrust his jaw forward. His thick black brows knit in painful puzzlement.

“It looks to me like you’ve been doing some work on our gene machine. Unauthorized, of course, but you’ve never been much for authority.”

Vergil’s face was now deep red.

“Are you all right?” Harrison asked. He was deriving a perverse pleasure from making Vergil squirm. A grin threatened to break through Harrison’s querying expression.

“I’m fine,” Vergil said. “I was…am…working on biologics.”

“Biologics? I’m not familiar with the term.”

“A side branch of the biochips. Autonomous organic computers.” The thought of saying anything more was agony. He had written Bernard—without result, apparently—to have him come see the work. He did not want to hand all of it over to Genetron under the provisions of the work-for-hire clause in his contract. It was such a simple idea, even if the work had taken two years—two secret and laborious years.

“I’m intrigued.” Harrison turned the VDT around and scrolled through the file. “We’re not just talking proteins and amino acids. You’re messing with chromosomes here. Recombining mammalian genes; even, I see, mixing in viral and bacterial genes.” The light went out of his eyes. They became rocky gray. “You could get Genetron shut down right now, this minute, Vergil. We don’t have the safeguards for this kind of stuff. You’re not even working under P-3 conditions.”

“I’m not messing with reproductive genes.”

“There’s some other kind?” Harrison sat forward abruptly, angry that Vergil would try to bullshit him.

“Introns. Strings that don’t code for protein structure.”

“What about them?”

“I’m only working in those areas. And…adding more non-reproductive genetic material.”

“That sounds like a contradiction in terms to me, Vergil. We have no proof introns don’t code for something.”

“Yes, but—”

“But—” Harrison held up his hand. “This is all quite irrelevant. Whatever else you were up to, the fact is, you were prepared to renege on your contract, go behind our backs to Bernard, and try to engage his support for a personal endeavor. True?”

Vergil said nothing.

“I assume you’re not a sophisticated fellow, Vergil. Not in the ways of the business world. Perhaps you didn’t realize the implications.”

Vergil swallowed hard. His face was still plum red. He could feel the blood thudding in his ears, the sick sensation of stress-caused dizziness. He sneezed twice.

“Well, I’ll lay the implications out for you. You are very close to getting your ass canned and sold for bully beef.”

Vergil raised his eyebrows reflexively.

“You’re important to the MABs project. If you weren’t, you would be out of here in a flash and I would personally make sure you never work in a private lab again. But Thornton and Rothwild and the others believe we might be able to redeem you. Yes, Vergil. Redeem you. Save you from yourself. I haven’t consulted with Yng on this. It won’t go any further—if you behave.”

He fixed Vergil with a stare from beneath lowered eyebrows. “Stop your extracurricular activities. We’ll keep your file here, but I want all non-MABs experiments terminated and all organisms that have been tampered with destroyed. I’ll personally inspect your lab in two hours. If this hasn’t been done, you’ll be fired. Two hours, Vergil. No exceptions no extensions.”

“Yessir.”

“That’s all.”

CHAPTER TWO

Vergil’s dismissal would not have unduly distressed his fellow employees. In his three years at Genetron, he had committed innumerable breaches of lab etiquette. He seldom washed lab glassware and twice had been accused of not wiping up spills of ethidium bromide—a strong mutagen—on lab counters. He was also not terribly cautious about radionucleides.

Most of the people he worked with made no show of humility. They were, after all, top young researchers in a very promising field; many expected to be wealthy and in charge of their own companies in a few years. Vergil didn’t fit any of their patterns, however. He worked quietly and intensively during the day, and then worked overtime at night. He was not sociable, though neither was he unfriendly; he simply ignored most people.

He shared a lab space with Hazel Overton, as meticulous and clean a researcher as could be imagined. Hazel would miss him least of all. Perhaps it was Hazel who had penetrated his file—she was no slouch on the computers and she might have gone looking for something to get him into trouble. But he had no evidence for that, and there was no sense being paranoid.

The lab was dark as Vergil entered. Hazel was performing a fluorescent scan on a gel electrophoresis matrix with a small UV lamp. Vergil switched on the light. She looked up and removed her goggles, prepared to be irritated.

“You’re late,” she said. “And your lab looks like an unmade bed. Vergil, it’s—”

“Kaput,” Vergil finished for her, throwing his smock across a stool.

“You left a bunch of test tubes on the counter in the share lab. I’m afraid they’re ruined.”

“Fuck ’em.”

Hazel’s eyes widened. “My, aren’t you in a mood.”

“I’ve been shut down. I have to dear out all my extracurricular work, give it up, or Harrison will issue my walking papers.”

“That’s rather even-handed of them,” Hazel said, returning to her scan. Harrison had shut down one of her own extracurricular projects the month before. “What did you do?”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather be alone.” Vergil glowered at her from across the counter. “You can finish that in the share lab.”

“I could, but—”

“If you don’t,” Vergil said darkly, “I’ll smear your little piece of agarose across the floor with my wingtips.”

Hazel glared at him for a moment and surmised he wasn’t kidding. She shut off the electrodes, picked up her equipment, and headed for the door. “My condolences,” she said.

“Sure.”

He had to have a plan. Scratching his stubbly chin, he tried to think of some way to cut his losses. He could sacrifice those parts of the experiment that were expendable—the E. coli cultures, for example. He had long since gone beyond them. He had kept them as memorials to his progress, and as a kind of reserve in case work had not gone well in the next steps. The work had gone well, however. It was not complete but it was so close that he could taste success like a cool dean swallow of wine.

Hazel’s side of the lab was neat and tidy. His was a chaos of equipment and containers of chemicals. One of his few concessions to lab safety, a white absorbent mat to catch spills, hung half-off the black counter, one corner pinned by a jar of detergent.

Vergil stood before the white idea board, rubbing his stubbly beard, and stared at the cryptic messages he had scrawled there the day before.

Little engineers. Make the world’s tiniest machines. Better than MABs!

Little surgeons. War with tumors. Computers with hu-capac.

(Computers=“spec” tumor HA!) size of volvox.

Clearly the ravings of a madman, and Hazel would have paid them no attention. Or would she? It was common practice to scribble any wild idea or inspiration or joke on the boards and just be prepared to have it erased by the next hurried genius. Still…

The notes could have aroused the curiosity of someone as smart as Hazel. Especially since his work on the MABs had been delayed.

Obviously, he had not been circumspect.

MABs—Medically Applicable Biochips—were to be the first practical product of the biochip revolution, the incorporation of protein molecular circuitry with silicon electronics. Biochips had been an area of speculation in the literature for years, but Genetron hoped to have the first working samples available for FDA testing and approval within three months.

They faced intense competition. In what was coming to be known as Enzyme Valley—the biochip equivalent of Silicon Valley—at least six companies had set up facilities in and around La Jolla. Some had started out as pharmaceutical manufacturers hoping to cash in on the products of recombinant DNA research. Nudged out of that area by older and more experienced concerns, they had switched to biochip research. Genetron was the first firm established specifically with biochips in mind.

Vergil picked up an eraser and rubbed out the notes slowly. Throughout his life, things had always conspired to frustrate him. Often, he brought disaster on himself—he was honest enough to admit that. But not once had he ever been able to carry something through to completion. Not in his work, not in his private life.

He had never been good at gauging the consequences of his actions.

He removed four thick spiral-bound notebooks from his locked desk drawer and added them to the growing pile of material to be smuggled out of the lab.

He could not destroy all the evidence. He had to save the white blood cell cultures—his special lymphocytes. But where could he keep them—what could he do outside the lab?

Nothing. There was no place he could go. Genetron had all the equipment he needed, and it would take months to establish another lab. During that time, all his work would literally disintegrate.

Vergil passed through the lab’s rear door into the interior hall and walked past an emergency shower stall. The incubators were kept in a separate room beyond the share lab. Seven refrigerator-sized gray enameled chests stood along one wall, electronic monitors silently and efficiently keeping track of temperatures and CO₂ partial pressure in each unit. In the far corner, amid older incubators of all shapes and sizes (gleaned from lab bankruptcy sales), stood a buffed stainless steel and white enamel Forma Scientific model with his name and “Sole Use” scribbled on a piece of surgical tape affixed to the door. He opened the door and removed a rack of culture dishes.

Bacteria in each dish had developed uncharacteristic colonies—blobs of orange and green which resembled aerial maps of Paris or Washington D.C. Lines radiated from dusters and divided the colonies into sections, each section having its own peculiar texture and—so Vergil surmised—function. Since each bacterium in the cultures had the potential intellectual capacity of a mouse, it was quite possible the cultures had turned into simple societies and the societies had developed functional divisions. He hadn’t been keeping track lately, involved as he had been with altered B-cell Lymphocytes.

They were like his children, all of them. And they had turned out to be exceptional.

He felt a rush of guilt and nausea as he turned on a gas burner and applied each dish of altered E. coli to the flame with a pair of tongs.

He returned to his lab and dropped the culture dishes into a sterilizing bath. That was the limit He could not destroy anything more. He felt a hatred for Harrison that went beyond any emotion he had ever felt toward another human. Tears of frustration blurred his vision.

Vergil opened the lab Kelvinator and removed a spinner bottle and a white plastic pallet containing twenty-two test tubes. The spinner bottle was filled with a straw-colored fluid, lymphocytes in a serum medium. He had constructed a custom impeller to stir the medium more effectively, with less cell damage—a rod with several half-helical Teflon “sails.”

The test tubes contained saline solution and special concentrated serum nutrients to support the cells while they were examined under a microscope.

He drew fluid from the spinner bottle and carefully added several drops to four of the tubes on the pallet. He then placed the bottle back on its base. The impeller resumed spinning.

After warming to room temperature—a process he usually aided with a small fan to gently blow warmed air over the pallet—the lymphocytes in the tubes would become active, resuming their development after being subdued by the refrigerator’s chill.

They would continue learning, adding new segments to the revised portions of their DNA. And when, in the normal course of cell growth, the new DNA was transcribed to RNA, and the RNA served as a template for production of amino acids, and the amino acids were converted to proteins…

The proteins would be more than just units of cell structure; other cells would be able to read them. Or RNA itself would be extruded to be absorbed and read by other cells. Or—and this third option had presented itself after Vergil inserted fragments of bacterial DNA into the mammalian chromosomes segments of DNA itself could be removed and passed along.

Every time he thought of it, his head whirled with possibilities, thousands of ways for the cells to communicate with each other and develop their intellects.

The idea of an intellectual cell was still wonderfully strange to him. It made him stop and stand, staring at the wall, until he jerked back to attention and continued his work.

He pulled up a microscope and inserted a pipette into one of the tubes. The calibrated instrument drew up the dialed amount of fluid and he expelled it into a thin circular ring on a glass slide.

From the very beginning, Vergil had known his ideas were neither far-out nor useless. His first three months at Genetron, helping establish the silicon-protein interface for the biochips, had convinced him the project designers had missed something very obvious and extremely interesting.

Why limit oneself to silicon and protein and biochips a hundredth of a millimeter wide, when in almost every living cell there was already a functioning computer with a huge memory? A mammalian cell had a DNA complement of several billion base pairs, each acting as a piece of information. What was reproduction, after all, but a computerized biological process of enormous complexity and reliability?

Genetron had not yet made the connection, and Vergil had long ago decided he didn’t want them to. He would do his work, prove his point by creating billions of capable cellular computers, and then leave Genetron and establish his own lab, his own company.

After a year and a half of preparation and study, he had begun working at night on the gene machine. Using a computer keyboard, he constructed strings of bases to form codons, each of which became the foundation of a rough DNA-RNA-protein logic.

The earliest biologic strings had been inserted into E. coli bacteria as circular plasmids. The E. coli had absorbed the plasmids and incorporated them into their original DNA. The bacteria had then duplicated and released the plasmids, passing on the biologic to other cells. In the most crucial phase of his work, Vergil had used viral reverse-transcriptase to fix the feedback loop between RNA and DNA. Even the earliest and most primitive biologic-equipped bacteria had employed reverse transcriptase as “encoders,” ribosomes as “readers,” and RNA as “tape.” With the loop in place, the cells developed their own memory and the ability to process and act upon environmental information.

The real surprise had come when he tested his altered microbes. The computing capacity of even bacterial DNA was enormous compared to man-made electronics. All Vergil had to do was take advantage of what was already there-just give it a nudge, as it were.

More than once, he had the spooky feeling that his work was too easy, that he was less a creator and more a servant…This, after having the molecules seem to fall into their proper place, or fail in such a way that he clearly saw his errors and knew how to correct them.

The spookiest moment of all came when he realized he was doing more than creating little computers. Once he started the process and switched on the genetic sequences which could compound and duplicate the biologic DNA segments, the cells began to function as autonomous units. They began to “think” for themselves and develop more complex “brains.”

His first E. coli mutations had had the learning capacity of planarian worms; he had run them through simple T-mazes giving sugar rewards. They had soon outperformed planarians. The bacteria—lowly prokaryotes—were doing better than multicellular eukaryote! And within months, he had them running more complex mazes at rates—allowing for scale adjustments comparable to those of mice.

Removing the finest biologic sequences from the altered E. coli, he had incorporated them into B-lymphocytes, white cells from his own blood. He had replaced many intron strings—self-replicating sequences of base pairs that apparently did not code for proteins and that comprised a surprising percentage of any eukaryotic cell’s DNA-with his own special chains. Using artificial proteins and hormones as a method of communication, Vergil had “trained” the lymphocytes in the past six months to interact as much as possible with each other and with their environment—a much more complex miniature glass maze. The results had been far better than he expected.

The lymphocytes had learned to run the maze and obtain their nutritional rewards with incredible speed.

He waited for the sample to warm up enough to be active, then inserted the eyepiece into a video pickup and switched on the first of four display screens mounted in the rack over the counter. There, very clearly, were the roughly circular lymphocytes in which he had invested two years of his life.

They were busily transferring genetic material to each other along straw-shaped tubes rather like bacterial pili. Some of the characteristics picked up during the E. coil experiments had stayed with the lymphocytes, just how he wasn’t yet sure. The mature lymphocytes were not reproducing by themselves, but they were busily engaged in an orgy of genetic exchange.

Every lymphocyte in the sample he was watching had the potential intellectual capacity of a rhesus monkey. From the simplicity of their activity, that certainly wasn’t obvious; but then, they’d had it pretty easy throughout their lives.

He had talked to them on as high a level of chemical training and had built them up as far as he was going to. Their brief lives were over—he had been ordered to kill them. That would be simple enough. He could add detergent to the containers and their cell membranes would dissolve. They would be sacrificed to the caution and shortsightedness of a group of certifiable flatworm management-types.

His breath grew ragged as he watched the lymphocytes going about their business.

They were beautiful. They were his children, drawn from his own blood, carefully nurtured, operated upon; he had personally injected the biologic material into at least a thousand of them. And now they were busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on…

Like Washoe the chimp teaching her child to speak in American Sign Language. They were passing on the torch of potential intelligence. How would he ever know if they could use all their potential?

Pasteur.

“Pasteur,” he said out loud. “Jenner.”

Vergil carefully prepared a syringe. Brows knitted together, he pushed the cannule through the cotton cap of the first tube and dipped it into the solution. He pulled back the plunger. The pastel fluid filled the barrel; five, ten, fifteen cc’s.

He held the syringe before his eyes for several minutes, knowing he was contemplating something rash. Until now, he addressed his creations mentally, you’ve had it real easy. Life of Riley. Sit in your serum and fart around and absorb all the hormones you need. Don’t even have to work for a living. No severe test, no stress. No need to use what I gave you.

So what was he going to do? Put them to work in their natural environment? By injecting them into his body, he could smuggle them out of Genetron, and recover enough of them later to start the experiment again.

“Hey, Vergil!” Ernesto Villar knocked on the doorframe and poked his head in. “We’ve got the rat artery movie. We’re having a meeting in 233.” He tapped his fingers on the frame and smiled brightly. “You’re invited. We need our resident kludge.”

Vergil lowered the syringe and looked off into nothing.

“Vergil?”

“I’ll be there,” he said tonelessly.

“Don’t get all excited,” Villar said peevishly. “We won’t hold the premiere for long.” He ducked out of the door. Vergil listened to his footsteps receding down the hall.

Rash, indeed. He reinserted the cannule through the cotton, squirted the serum back into the tube and dropped the syringe into ajar of alcohol. He replaced the tube in the rack and returned it to the Kelvinator. Before now, the spinner bottle and pallet of tubes had had no Label but his name. He removed his name from the pallet and replaced it with, “Biochip protein samples; lab failures 21–32.” On the spinner bottle he placed a label reading, “Rat anti-goat lab failures 13–14.” No one would mess with an anonymous and unanalyzed group of lab failures. Failures were sacred.

He needed time to think.

Rothwild and ten of the key scientists on the MABs project had gathered around a large-screen projection TV in 233, an empty lab currently being used as a meeting room. Rothwild was a dapper red-haired fellow who acted as a controller and mediator between management and researchers. He stood beside the screen, resplendent in a cream-colored jacket and chocolate brown pants. Villar offered Vergil an avocado-green plastic chair and he sat at the rear of the room, legs crossed, hands behind his head.

Rothwild delivered the introduction. “This is the breakdown from Team Product E-64. You all contributed—” He glanced uncertainly at Vergil, “And now you can all share in the…uh, the triumph. I think we can safely call it that.

“E-64 is a prototype investigator biochip, three hundred micrometers in diameter, protein on a silicon substrate, sensitive to forty-seven different blood fraction variables.” He cleared his throat. They all knew that, but this was an occasion. “On May 10th, we inserted E-64 into a rat artery, closed the very small incision, and let it pass through the artery as far as it would go. The journey lasted five seconds. The rat was then sacrificed and the biochip recovered. Since that time, Terence’s group has ‘debriefed’ the biochip and interpreted the results. By putting the results through a special vector imaging program, we’ve been able to produce a little movie.”

He gestured to Ernesto, who pressed a button on the projector’s video recorder. Computer graphics flashed by—Genetron’s animated logo, stylized signatures from the imaging team, and then darkness. Ernesto switched off the room lights.

A pink circle appeared on the screen, expanded, and distorted into an irregular oval. More circles appeared within the first. “We’ve slowed the journey down six times,” Rothwild explained. “And to simplify things, we’ve eliminated the readouts on chemical concentrations in the rat blood.”

Vergil leaned forward in his chair, troubles momentarily forgotten. Streamers appeared and shot through the fluctuating tunnel of concentric circles.

“Blood flow through the artery,” Ernesto chimed in.

The journey down the rat artery lasted thirty seconds. Vergil’s arm-hair prickled. If his lymphocytes could see, this was what they would experience, traveling down a blood vessel…A long irregular tunnel, blood smoothly coursing, getting caught in little eddies, the artery constricting—smaller and smaller circles, jerks and nudges as the biochip bounced against the walls—and finally, the end of the journey, as the biochip wedged into a capillary.

The sequence ended with a flash of white.

The room filled with cheers.

“Now,” Rothwild said, smiling and raising his hand to return order. “Any comments, before we show this to Harrison and Yng?”

Vergil bowed out of the celebration after one glass of champagne and returned to his lab, feeling more depressed than ever. Where was his spirit of cooperation? Did he actually believe he could tackle something as ambitious as his lymphocytes, all by himself? So far, he had—but at the expense of having the experiment discontinued, perhaps even destroyed.

He slid the notebooks into a cardboard box and sealed the box with tape. On Hazel’s side of the lab, he found a masking tape label on a dewar flask—“Overton, do not remove”—and peeled it off. He applied the label to his box and put the box in a neutral territory beside the sink. He then set about washing the glassware and tidying his side of the lab.

When the time came for an inspection, he would be the meek supplicant; he would give Harrison the satisfaction of victory.

And then, surreptitiously—over the next couple of weeks-he would smuggle out the materials he needed. The lymphocytes would be removed last; they could be kept for some time at his apartment, in the refrigerator. He could steal supplies to keep them viable, but he wouldn’t be able to do any more work on them.

He would decide later how he could best continue his experiment.

Harrison stood in the lab door.

“All clear,” Vergil said, properly repentant.

CHAPTER THREE

They watched him closely for the next week; then, concerned with the final stages of MABs prototype testing, they called off their watchdogs. His behavior had been beyond reproach.

Now he set about the last steps in his voluntary departure from Genetron.

Vergil hadn’t been the only one to step beyond the bounds of Genetron’s ideological largesse. Management, again in the person of Gerald T. Harrison, had come down on Hazel just last month. Hazel had gone off on a sidetrack with her E. colt cultures, trying to prove that sex had originated as a result of the invasion of an autonomous DNA sequence—a chemical parasite called the F-factor—in early prokaryotic life forms. She had postulated that sex was not evolutionarily useful—at least not to women, who could, in theory, breed parthenogenetically—and that ultimately men were superfluous.

She had gathered enough evidence for Vergil, peeping into her notebooks, to agree with her conclusions. But Hazel’s work did not meet the Genetron standards. It was revolutionary, socially controversial. Harrison had given the word; she had stopped that particular branch of research.

Genetron did not want publicity or even a tinge of controversy. Not yet. It needed a spotless reputation when it made its stock public and announced it was manufacturing functional MABs.

They had not been concerned with Hazel’s papers, however. They had allowed her to keep them. That Harrison had retained his file bothered Vergil.

When he was certain their guard was down, he went into action. He requested access to the company computers (he had been put on restriction indefinitely); quite properly, he said he needed to check his figures on structures of denatured and unfolded proteins. Permission was granted, and he logged onto the system in the share lab one evening after eight.

Vergil had grown up a little too early to be classified as an eighties whizkid, but in the last seven years he had revised his credit records at three major firms and made an entry into the records of a famous university. That entry had practically guaranteed his getting the Genetron position. Vergil had never felt guilty about these intrusions and manipulations.

His credit was never going to be as bad as it had once been, and there was no sense hi being punished for past indiscretions. He knew he was fully capable of doing Genetron’s work—his fake university records were just a show for personnel directors who needed lights and music. Besides, Vergil had believed—until the past couple of weeks—that the world was his personal puzzle, and that any riddlings and unravelings he could perform, including computer hacking, were simply part of his nature.

He found it ridiculously easy to break the Rinaldi code used to conceal Genetron’s confidential files. There were no mysteries for him in the Gödel numbers and strings of seemingly random digits that came up on the screen. He slid into the numbers and information like a seal into water.

He found his file and switched a key equation for the code in that section only. Then he decided to play it safer-there was always the possibility, however remote, of someone being just as ingenious as he was. He deleted the file completely.

Next on his agenda was locating the medical records for Genetron employees. He altered his insurance designation and hid the alteration. Queries from outside sources would find him fully covered even after his termination, and there would never be any question about his not paying premiums.

He worried about such things. His health was never completely satisfactory.

He thought for a moment about other mischief that could be worked, and decided against it. He was not vindictive. He shut the terminal off and unplugged it

Surprisingly little time—two days—passed before the deletion was noticed. Rothwild confronted him in the hall early one morning and told him his lab was off limits. Vergil protested mildly that he had a box of personal belongings he wanted to take with him.

“Fine, but that’s it. No biologicals. I want to inspect everything.”

Vergil calmly agreed. “What’s wrong now?” he asked.

“Frankly, I don’t know,” Rothwild said. “And I don’t care to know. I vouched for you. So did Thornton. You’re a great disappointment to us all.”

Vergil’s mind raced. He had never removed the lymphocytes; they had seemed safe enough disguised in the lab refrigerator, and he had never expected the boom to be lowered so quickly. “I’m out?”

“You’re out. And I’m afraid you’re going to find it hard getting employment in any other private lab. Harrison is furious.”

Hazel was already at work when they entered the lab. Vergil picked up the box in the neutral zone beneath the sink, covering the label with his hand. He hefted it and surreptitiously removed the tape, balling it up and dropping it into the trash basket “One more thing,” he said. “I have some lab failures laced with tracer that should be disposed of. Properly. Radionucleides.”

“Oh, shit,” Hazel said. “Where?”

“In the fridge. Not to worry—just carbon 14. May I?” He looked at Rothwild. Rothwild gestured for the box to be put on a counter so he could inspect it “May I?” Vergil repeated. “I don’t want to leave anything around that could be harmful.”

Rothwild nodded reluctantly. Vergil went to the Kelvinator, dropping his lab coat on the counter. His hand brushed over a box of hypodermics, palming one.

The lymphocyte pallet was on the bottom shelf. Vergil kneeled and removed a tube. He quickly inserted the syringe and drew up twenty cc’s of the serum. The syringe had never been used before and the cannule should therefore be reasonably sterile; he had no time for an alcohol swab, but he had to take that risk.

Before he inserted the needle under his skin, he wondered briefly what he was doing, and what he thought he could gain. There was very little chance the lymphocytes would survive. It was possible that his tampering had changed them sufficiently for them to either die in his bloodstream, unable to adapt, or do something uncharacteristic and be destroyed by his own immune system.

Either way, the life span of an active lymphocyte hi the human body was a matter of weeks. Life was hard for the body’s cops.

The needle went in. He felt a dull prick, a brief sting, and the cold fluid mixing with his blood. He withdrew the needle and lay the syringe in the bottom of the refrigerator. Pallet of tubes and spinner bottle in hand, he stood and shut the door. Rothwild watched nervously as Vergil put on rubber gloves and one by one poured the contents of the tubes into a beaker half-filled with ethanol. He then added the fluid in the spinner bottle. With a small grin, Vergil stoppered the beaker and sloshed its contents, then placed it into a protected waste box. He slid the box across the floor with his foot. “It’s all yours,” he said.

Rothwild had finished turning through the notebooks. “I’m not sure these shouldn’t remain in our possession,” he said. “You spent a lot of our time working on them.”

Vergil’s idiot grin didn’t change. “I’ll sue Genetron and spread dirt hi every journal I can think of. Not good for your upcoming position in the market, no?”

Rothwild regarded him with half-lidded eyes, his neck and cheeks pinking slightly. “Get out of here,” he said. “We’ll send the rest of your stuff later.”

Vergil picked up the box. The cold feeling in his forearm had passed now. Rothwild escorted him down the stairs and across the sidewalk to the gate. Walter accepted the badge, his face rigid, and Rothwild followed Vergil to the parking lot.

“Remember your contract,” Rothwild said. “Just remember what you can and cannot say.”

“I am allowed to say one thing, I believe,” Vergil said, struggling to keep his words dear through his anger.

“What’s that?” Rothwild asked.

“Fuck you. All of you.”

Vergil drove by the Genetron sign and thought of all that had happened within those austere walls. He looked at the black cube beyond, barely visible through a copse of eucalyptus trees.

More than likely, the experiment was over. For a moment he felt ill with tension and disgust. And then he thought of the billions of lymphocytes he had just destroyed. His nausea increased and he had to swallow hard to keep the taste of acid out of his throat.

“Fuck you,” he murmured, “because everything I touch is fucked.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Humans were a randy bunch, Vergil decided as he perched on a stool and watched the cattle call. Mellow space music powered the slow, graceful gyrations on the dance floor and flashing amber lights emphasized the pulse of packed bodies, male and female. Over the bar, an amazing array of polished brass tubing hummed and spluttered delivering drinks—mostly vintage wines by the glass—and forty-seven different kinds of coffees. Coffee sales were up; the evening had blurred into early morning and soon Weary’s would be turning off and shutting down.

The last-ditch efforts of the cattle call were becoming more obvious. Moves were being made with more desperation, less finesse; beside Vergil, a short fellow in a rumpled blue suit was plighting his one-night troth to a willowy black-haired girl with Asiatic features. Vergil felt aloof from it all. He hadn’t made a move all evening, and he had been in Weary’s since seven. No one had made a move on him, either.

He was not prize material. He shambled a bit when he walked—not that he had left the stool for any purpose but to go to the crowded restroom. He had spent so much time in labs the past few years that his skin was the unpopular shade of Snow White. He didn’t look enthusiastic, and he wasn’t willing to expend any amount of bullshit to attract attention.

Mercifully, the air conditioning in Weary’s was good enough that his hay fever had subsided.

Mostly, he had spent the evening observing the incredible variety—and underlying sameness—of the tactics the male animal used on the female. He felt out of it, suspended in an objective and slightly lonely sphere he wasn’t inclined to reach beyond. So why, he asked himself, had he come to Weary’s in the first place? Why did he ever go there? He had never picked up a woman at Weary’s—or any other singles bar—in his life.

“Hello.”

Vergil jumped and turned, eyes wide.

“Excuse me. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

He shook his head. She was perhaps twenty-eight, golden-blonde, slender to the edge of skinny, with a pretty but not gorgeous face. Her eyes, large and clear and brown, were her best feature—except possibly for her legs, he amended, looking down on instinct.

“You don’t come in here often,” she said. She glanced back over her shoulder. “Or do you? I mean, I don’t either. Maybe I wouldn’t know.”

He shook his head. “Not often. No need. My success rate hasn’t been spectacular.”

She turned back with a smile. “I know more about you than you think,” she said. “I don’t even need to read your palm. You’re smart, first off.”

“Yeah?” he said, feeling awkward.

“You’re good with your hands.” She touched his thumb where it rested on his knee. “You have very pretty hands. You could do a lot with hands like that. But they’re not greasy, so you’re not a mechanic. And you try to dress well, but…” She giggled a three-drink giggle and put her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. You do try.”

He looked down at his black and green checked cotton shirt and black pants. The clothes were new. What could she complain about? Maybe she didn’t like the Topsiders he was wearing. They were a little scuffed.

“You work…let’s see.” she paused, stroking her cheek. Her fingernails were masterpieces of the manicurist’s art, thick and long and shiny bronze. “You’re a techie.”

“Pardon?”

“You work in one of the labs around here. Hair’s too long to be Navy, and they don’t come here much anyway. Not that I’d know, you work in a lab and you’re…you’re not happy. Why’s that?”

“Because—” He stopped. Confessing he was out of a job might not be strategic. He had six month’s unemployment coming; that and his savings could disguise his lack of gainful labor for a while. “How do you know I’m a techie?”

“I can tell. Your shirt pocket—” She slipped her ringer into it and rugged gently. “Looks like it should hold a nerd pack of pencils. The kind you twist and the lead pokes out.” She smiled deliciously and thrust the pink tip of her tongue out to demonstrate.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And you’re wearing argyles. Only techies wear argyles now.”

“I like ’em,” Vergil said defensively.

“Oh, so do I. What I’m getting at is, I’ve never known a techie. I mean…intimately.”

Oh, Lord, Vergil thought. “What do you do?” he asked, immediately wishing he could suck the words back.

“And I’d like to, if you don’t think that’s being too forward,” she said, ignoring his question. “Look, the bar’s dosing in a few minutes. I don’t need any more to drink, and I don’t much like the music. Do you?”

Her name was Candice Rhine. What she did was accept advertising for the La Jolla Light. She approved of his Volvo sports car and she approved of his living quarters, a two-bedroom second-floor condominium four blocks from the beach in La Jolla. He had purchased it at a bargain price six years ago—just out of medical school—from a UCSD professor who had departed to Ecuador shortly after to complete a study on South American Indians.

Candice entered the apartment as if she had lived there for years. She draped her suede jacket on the couch and her blouse on the dining table. Her bra she hung with a giggle on the chrome and glass light fixture over the table. Her breasts were small, amplified by a very narrow rib cage.

Vergil watched all this with awe.

“Come on, techie,” Candice said, standing naked at the bedroom door. “I like the furs.” He bad a baby alpaca rug over his California king-sized bed. She posed with her finger tips delicately pressed near the top of the door jamb, one knee cocked wide, then rotated on one heel and sauntered into the darkness.

Vergil stood his ground until she turned the bedroom lamp on. “I knew it!” she squealed. “Look at all the books!”

In the darkness, Vergil thought all too clearly of the perils of sex. Candice slept soundly beside him, the sleep of three drinks and making love four times.

Four times.

He had never done so well. She had murmured, before sleep, that chemists did it in their tubes and doctors did it with patience, but only a techie would do it in geometric progression.

As for the perils…He had seen many times—most often in textbooks the results of promiscuity in a well-and frequently-traveled world. If Candice was promiscuous (and Vergil couldn’t help but believe only a promiscuous girl would be so forward with him) then there was no telling what sort of microorganisms were now setting up shop in his blood.

Still, he had to smile.

Four times.

Candice groaned in her sleep and Vergil jerked, startled. He would not sleep well, he knew that much. He wasn’t used to having someone in his bed.

Four.

His brown-speckled teeth gleamed in the dark.

Candice was much less forward in the morning. She solemnly insisted on making breakfast He had eggs and Beefstrips in his antique round-cornered refrigerator and she did an expert job on them, as if she had once been a short-order cook-or was that simply the way women did things? He had never caught the knack of frying eggs. They always came out with broken yokes and crackling seared edges.

She regarded him with her wide brown eyes from across the table. He was hungry and ate quickly. Not much on delicacy and manners, he thought. So what? What more could she expect from him—or he from her?

“I don’t usually stay the night, you know,” she said. “I call a lot of cabs at four in the morning when the guy’s asleep. But you kept me busy until five and I just…didn’t want to. You wore me out”

He nodded and wiped up the last perfection of semisolid yoke with the last bite of toast. He didn’t particularly care to know how many men she had been to bed with. Quite a few, by the sound of things.

Vergil had had three conquests in his entire life, only one moderately satisfactory. The first at seventeen—an incredible stroke of luck—and the thud a year ago. The third had been the satisfactory one and had hurt him. That was the occasion that had forced him to accept his status as a hell of a mind but not much for looks.

“That sounds horrible, doesn’t it?” she asked. “I mean, about the cabs and everything.” She kept staring at nun. “You made me come six times,” she said.

“Good.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-two,” he said.

“You act like a teenager-in bed, I mean. Stamina.”

He hadn’t done nearly so well as a teenager.

“Did you enjoy it?”

He put his fork down and looked up, musing. He had enjoyed it too much. When would the next time be? “Yes, I did.”

“You know why I picked you out of the crowd?” She had barely touched her single egg, and now chewed the end from her lone Beefstrip. Throughout the night, her nails had emerged unmarred. At least she hadn’t scratched him. Would he have liked that?

“No,” he said.

“Because I knew you were a techie. I’ve never screwed—I mean, made love with a techie before. Vergil. That’s right isn’t it? Vergil Ian Ull-am.”

“Oo-lam,” he corrected.

“I would have started sooner if I’d known,” she said, she smiled. Her teeth were white and even, if a touch large. Her imperfections endeared her to him even more.

“Thank you. I can’t speak…or whatever for all of us. Them. Techies. Whoever.”

“Well, I think you’re very sweet,” she said. The smile faded, replaced by serious speculation. “More than sweet. Honest to God, Vergil. You’re the best fuck I ever had. Do you have to go to work today?”

“No,” he said. “I work my own hours.”

“Good. Done with your breakfast?”

Three more before noon. He couldn’t believe it.

Candice was sore when she left. “I feel like I’ve just trained a year for the pentathlon,” she said as she stood at the door, coat in hand. “Do you want me to come back tonight? I mean, to visit?” She looked anxious. “I couldn’t make love any more. I think you’ve brought on my period early.”

“Please,” he said, reaching for her hand. “That would be nice.” They shook hands rather formally and Candice walked out into the spring sunshine. Vergil stood at the door for a while, alternately smiling and shaking his head in disbelief.

CHAPTER FIVE

Vergil’s taste in food began to change a week into his relationship with Candice. Until then, he had stubbornly pursued sweets and starches, fatty meats and bread and butter. His favorite food was a garbage pizza; there was a parlor nearby that cheerfully loaded pineapple and prosciutto on top of the anchovies and olives.

Candice suggested he cut down his intake of grease and fat—she called it “that oily shit”—and increase his greens and grains. His body seemed to agree.

The amount of food he ate also declined. He reached satiety faster. His waistline diminished perceptibly. He felt restless around the apartment.

Along with his changing taste buds came a change in his attitude toward love. Nothing unexpected there; Vergil was savvy enough about psychology to realize that all he really needed was a fulfilling relationship to correct his nervous misogyny. Candice provided that.

Some nights he spent exercising. His feet didn’t hurt quite so much. Everything was turning around. The world was a better place. His back pains gradually faded, even from memory. They were not missed.

Vergil attributed much of this to Candice, just as adolescent rumor attributed the improvement of bad skin conditions to the loss of virginity.

Occasionally the relationship became stormy. Candice found him insufferable when he tried to explain his work. He approached the topic with barely concealed anger and seldom bothered to simplify technicalities. He almost confessed about injecting himself with the lymphocytes but stopped when it became obvious she was already thoroughly bored. “Just let me know when you find a cheap cure for herpes,” she said. “We can make a bundle from the Christian Action League just to keep it off the market.”

While he no longer worried about venereal disease—Candice had been up front about that and convinced him she was clean—he did break out in a rash one evening, a peculiar and irritating series of white bumps across his stomach. They went away by morning and did not return.

Vergil lay in bed with the smooth white-sheeted form breathing softly next to him, fanny like a snow-covered hill, back unveiled as if she wore a seductive low-cut evening gown. They had finished making love three hours ago and he was still awake, thinking that he had made love to Candice more times in the past two weeks than he had with all other women in his life.

This caught his fancy. He had always been interested in statistics. In an experiment, figures charted success or failure, just as in a business. He was now beginning to feel that his “affair” (how strange that word was in his mind!) with Candice was moving over the line into success. Repeatability was the hallmark of a good experiment, and this experiment had—

And so on, endless night ruminations somewhat less productive than dreamless sleep.

Candice astonished him. Women had always astonished Vergil, who had had so little opportunity to know them; but he suspected Candice was more astonishing than the norm. He could not fathom her attitude. She seldom initiated lovemaking now, but participated with sufficient enthusiasm. He saw her as a cat searching for a new house, and once finding it, settling down to purr, with little care for the next day.

Neither Vergil’s passion nor his life-plan allowed for that kind of sated indifference.

He was reluctant to think of Candice as being his intellectual inferior. She was reasonably witty at tunes, and observant and fun to be around. But she wasn’t concerned with the same things he was. Candice believed in the surface values of life—appearances, rituals, what other people were thinking and doing. Vergil cared little what other people thought, so long as they didn’t actively interfere with his plans.

Candice accepted and experienced. Vergil sparked and observed.

He was deeply envious. He would have enjoyed a respite from the constant grinding of thoughts and plans and worries, the processing of information to glean some new insight. Being like Candice would be a vacation.

Candice, on the other hand, undoubtedly thought of him as a mover and shaker. She led her own life with few plans, without much thought and with no scruples whatsoever…no bites of conscience, no second thoughts. When it had become clear that this mover and shaker was unemployed, and not likely to be employed again soon, her confidence had remained strangely unshaken. Perhaps, like a cat, she had little comprehension of these things.

So she slept, and he ruminated, going back and forth over what had happened at Genetron; chewing at the implications, the admittedly weird behavior of injecting his Lymphocytes back into his bloodstream, his inability to focus on what he was going to do next.

Vergil stared up at the dark ceiling, then scrunched his eyes to observe the phosphene patterns. He reached up with both hands, brushing Candice’s bottom, and pressed his index fingers against the outer orb of each of his eyelids to heighten the effect. Tonight, however, he could not entertain himself with psychedelic eyelid movies. Nothing came but warm darkness, punctuated by flashes as distant and vague as reports from another continent.

Beyond rumination, isolated from childhood tricks and still wide awake, Vergil settled into watchfulness, watching nothing, and thought with no object

really trying to avoid

—waiting until morning.

trying to avoid

thoughts of all things lost

and all recently gained that could be

lost

he isn’t ready

and still he moves and shakes

losing

On the Sunday morning of the third week:

Candice handed him a hot cup of coffee. He stared at it for a moment. Something was wrong with the cup and her hand. He fumbled for his glasses to put them on but they hurt his eyes worse. “Thanks,” he mumbled, taking the cup and lurching up in bed against the pillow, spilling a bit of the hot brown liquid across the sheets.

“What are you going to do today?” she asked. (Look for work? implied, but Candice never stressed responsibility, and never asked questions about his means.)

“Look for work, I suppose,” he said. He squinted through his glasses again, holding them by one flopping temple piece.

“I,” she said, “am going to take ad copy down to the Light and shop at that little vegetable stand down the street. Then I am going to fix dinner by myself and eat it alone.”

Vergil looked at her, puzzled.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

He put the glasses aside. “Why alone?”

“Because I think you’re beginning to take me for granted. I don’t like that. I can feel you accepting me.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” she said patiently. She had dressed and combed her hair, which now hung long and shining across her shoulders. “I just don’t want to lose the spice.”

“Spice?”

“Look, every relationship needs a scratch of the kitten now and then. I’m beginning to think of you as an available puppy-dog, and that’s not good.”

“No,” said Vergil. He sounded distracted.

“Didn’t sleep last night?” she asked.

“No,” Vergil said. “Not much.” He looked confused.

“So what else?”

“I’m seeing you just fine,” he said.

“See? You’re taking me for granted.”

“No, I mean…without my glasses. I can see you just fine without my glasses.”

“Well, good for you,” Candice said with feline unconcern. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Don’t fret.”

“Oh, no,” Vergil said, squeezing his temples with his fingers.

She closed the door softly behind her.

He looked around the room.

Everything was in marvelous focus. He hadn’t seen things so clearly since the measles had stricken his eyesight when he was seven.

It was the first improvement he was positively convinced he could not attribute to Candice.

“Spice,” he said, blinking at the curtains.

CHAPTER SIX

Vergil had spent weeks, it seemed, in just such offices as this: pastel earth-colored walls, gray steel desk surmounted by neat stacks of papers and in-out baskets, man or woman politely asking psychologically telling questions. This time it was a woman, zaftig and well-dressed, with a friendly, patient face. Before her on the desk was his employment record and the results of a psych profile test. He had long since learned how to take such tests: When they ask for a sketch, avoid drawing eyes or sharp, wedge-shaped objects; draw items of food or pictures of pretty women; always state one’s goals in sharp, practical terms, but with a touch of overreaching; exhibit imagination, but not wild imagination. She nodded over his papers and looked up at him.

“Your record is remarkable, Mr. Ulam.”

“Vergil, please.”

“Your academic background leaves a bit to be desired, but your work experience could more than make up for that I suppose you know the questions we’ll ask next”

He widened his eyes, all innocence.

“You’re a bit vague about what you could do for us, Vergil. I’d like to hear a little more about how you’d fit in with Codon Research.”

He glanced at his watch surreptitiously, not looking at the hour, but at the date. In a week there would be little or no hope of recovering his amplified Lymphocytes. Really, this I was his last chance.

“I’m fully qualified to perform all kinds of lab work, research or manufacturing. Codon Research has done very well with Pharmaceuticals, and I’m interested in that, but I really believe I can help out with any biochip program you’re developing.”

The personnel manager’s eyes narrowed by the merest millimeter. Bullseye, he thought. Codon Research is going to jump into biochips.

“We aren’t working on biochips, Vergil. Still, your record in pharmaceutical-related work is impressive. You’ve done extensive culturing; looks to me like you’d be almost as valuable to a brewery as to us.” That was a watered-down version of an old joke among vat culturists. Vergil smiled.

“There is a problem, however,” she continued. “Your security rating from one source is very high, but your rating from Genetron, your last employer, is abysmal.”

“I’ve explained about the personality clash—”

“Yes, and we normally don’t pursue these matters. Our company is different from other companies, after all, and if a potential employee’s work record is otherwise good—as yours appears to be—we allow for such clashes. But I sometimes have to work on instinct, Vergil. And something’s not quite right here. You worked in Genetron’s biochip program.”

“Doing adjunct research.”

“Yes. Are you offering us the expertise you acquired at Genetron?” That was code for are you going to spill your former employer’s secrets?

“Yes, and no,” he said. “First of all, I wasn’t at the heart of the biochip program. I wasn’t privy to the hard secrets. I can, however, offer you the results of my own research. So technically, yes, since Genetron had a work-for-hire clause, I’m going to spill some secrets if you hire me. But they’ll be part and parcel of the work I did.” He hoped that shot landed in some middle ground. There was an outright lie in it—he knew virtually everything there was to know about Genetron’s biochips—but there was truth, also, since he felt the whole concept of biochips was obsolete, stillborn.

“Mm hmm.” she flipped back through his papers. “I’m going to be straight with you, Vergil. Maybe straighter than you’ve been with me. You’re a bit wizardry for us, and a loner, but we’d jump at the chance to hire you…if it weren’t for one thing. I’m a friend of Mr. Rothwild at Genetron. A very good friend. And he’s passed on some information to me that would otherwise be confidential. He didn’t name names, and he couldn’t possibly have known I would ever face you over this desk. But he told me someone at Genetron had broken a handful of NIH guidelines and recombined mammalian nuclear DNA. I strongly suspect you’re that individual.” She smiled pleasantly. “Are you?”

No one else had been fired or even let go at Genetron for over a year. He nodded.

“He was quite upset. He said you were brilliant, but that you’d be trouble for any company that employed you. And he said he threatened you with blacklisting. Now I know and he knows that such a threat doesn’t really mean much with today’s labor laws and the potential for litigation. But this time, just by accident, Codon Research knows more about you than we should know. I’m being up front with you, because there shouldn’t be any misunderstanding. I will deny saying any of these things if pressed. My real reason for not hiring you is your psychological profile. Your drawings are spaced too far apart and indicate an unwholesome predilection for self-isolation.” She handed back his records. “Fair enough?”

Vergil nodded. He took his records and stood up. “You don’t even know Rothwild,” he said. “This has happened to me six times.”

“Yes, well, Mr. Ulam, ours is a fledgling industry, barely fifteen years old. Companies still rely on each other when it comes to certain things. Cutthroat out front, and supportive behind the scenes. It’s been interesting talking with you, Mr. Ulam. Good day.”

He blinked in the sunshine outside the white concrete front of Codon Research. So much for recovery, he thought.

The whole experiment would soon fade away to nothing. Perhaps it was just as well.

CHAPTER SEVEN

He drove north through white-gold hills dotted with twisted oaks, past cerulean lakes deep and dear with the past winter’s rains. The summer had been mild so far, and even inland, the temperature hadn’t gone over ninety.

The Volvo hummed over the endless stretch of Highway 5 through fields given over to cotton, then through green nut groves. Vergil cut across 580 along the outskirts of Tracy, his mind almost blank, the driving a panacea against his worries. Forests of pylon-mounted propellers turned in harmony on both sides of the highway, each great swinging arm two thirds as wide as a football field.

He had never felt better in his life, and he was worried. He had not sneezed for two weeks, in the middle of a champion allergy season. The last time he had seen Candice, to tell her he was going to Livermore to visit his mother, she had commented on his skin color, which had changed from pallid to a healthy peach-pink, and his freedom from sniffles.

“You’re looking better each time I see you, Vergil,” she had said, smiling and kissing him. “Come back soon. I’ll miss you. And maybe we’ll find more spice.”

Looking better, feeling better—and no excuse for it. He wasn’t sentimental enough to believe that love cured all, even calling what he felt for Candice love. Was it?

Something else.

He didn’t like thinking about it, so he drove. After ten hours, he felt vaguely disappointed as he turned onto South Vasco Road and motored south. He hung a right on East Avenue and drove into downtown Livermore, a small California burg with old stone and brick buildings, old wooden farmhouses now surrounded by suburbs, shopping centers not unlike those in every other town in California…and just outside of town, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where, among many other researches, nuclear weapons were designed.

He stopped at Guinevere’s Pizza Parlor and forced himself to order a medium garbage pizza and a salad and Coke. As he sat down to wait in the pseudo-medieval dining area, he wondered idly whether the Livermore Labs had any facilities he could use. Who was the more Strangelovian—the weapons folks, or good ol’ Vergil I. Ulam?

The pizza arrived and he looked down on the cheese and condiments and greasy sausage. “You used to like this stuff,” he said under his breath. He picked at the pizza and finished the salad. That seemed to be enough. Leaving most of his meal on the table, he wiped his mouth, smiled at the young girl behind the cash register, and returned to his car.

Vergil did not look forward to visits with his mother. He needed them, in some uncertain and irritating way, but he did not enjoy them.

April Ulam lived in a well-maintained century-old two-story house just off First Street. The house was painted forest green and had a Mansard roof. Two little gardens fenced in with wrought iron flanked the steep front steps—one garden for flowers and herbs, the other for vegetables. The porch was screened-in, with a wood-frame screen door mounted on squeaking hinges and reined in by a complaining steel spring. Entrance to the house proper was through a heavy dark oak door with a beveled-glass window and lion-faced knocker.

None of these commodities were unexpected when attached to an old house in a small California town. But then his mother appeared, svelte and dressed in flowing lavender silks and high-heeled gold shoes, her raven black hair barely touched with at the temples, coming through the oak door and the screen door and stepping into the sunshine. She greeted Vergil with a reserved hug and led him through the parlor, thin cool fingers lightly gripping his hand.

In the living room, she sat on a gray velvet chaise lounge, her gown flowing lightly over the sides. The living room suited the house, being furnished with items an elderly woman (not his mother) might have gathered over a long and moderately interesting life. Besides the lounge there was a blue flower-print overstuffed couch, a brass round table with Arabic proverbs stamped in concentric circles around abstract geometries, Tiffany-style lamps in three corners and in the fourth, a decayed Chinese Kwan-Yin statue carved from a seven-foot teak log. His father—simply “Frank” in all conversations—had brought the statue back from Taiwan after a merchant marine tour; it had scared three-year-old Vergil half to death.

Frank had abandoned both of them in Texas when Vergil was ten. They had then moved to California. His mother had not remarried, saying that would cut down on her options. Vergil was not even certain his mother and father had divorced. He remembered his father as dark, sharp-faced, sharp-voiced, not tolerant and not intelligent, with a thundering laugh brought out for display at moments of perverse anxiety. He could not imagine even now his mother and father going to bed together, much less living together eleven years. He had not missed Frank except in a theoretical way—missing a father, the imagined state of having a rather who could talk to him, help him with homework, be a touch wiser when he was having trouble with being a child. He had always missed having that sort of father.

“So you’re not working,” April said, surveying her son with what passed for mild concern.

Vergil had not told his mother about his dismissal and didn’t even question how she knew. She had been much sharper than her husband and still could match wits with her son, usually overmatching in practical or worldly matters.

He nodded. “Five weeks now.”

“Any prospects?”

“Not even looking.”

“You were let go with prejudice,” she said.

“Almost with extreme prejudice.”

She smiled; now the verbal fencing could begin. Her son was very clever, very amusing, whatever his other faults. She was not sorry he had no job; that was simply the state of affairs, and he would either sink, or swim. In the past, despite his difficulties, her son had usually stayed on the surface, with much splashing and poor form, but still, on the surface.

He hadn’t asked for money from her since leaving home ten years ago.

“So you come to see what your old mother’s up to.”

“What’s my old mother up to?”

“Her neck, as usual,” she said “Six suitors in the past month. It’s a pain being old and not looking it, Verge.”

Vergil chuckled and shook his head, as he knew she expected. “Any prospects?”

She scoffed. “Never again. No man could replace Frank, thank God.”

“They fired me because I was doing experiments on my own,” he said. She nodded and asked if he wanted tea or wine or a beer. “A beer,” he said.

She indicated the kitchen. “Fridge is unlocked.”

He picked out a Dos Equis and wiped the condensation on his sleeve as he returned to the living room. He sat in a broad-backed armchair and took a long swallow.

“They didn’t appreciate your brilliance?”

He shook his head. “Nobody understands me, Mother.”

She stared off over his shoulder and sighed. “I never did. Do you expect to be employed again soon?”

“You already asked that.”

“I thought maybe rephrasing would bring a better answer.”

“Answer’s the same if you ask in Swahili. I’m sick of working for somebody else.”

“My unhappy misfit son.”

“Mother,” Vergil said, faintly irritated.

“What were you doing?”

He gave her a brief outline, of which she understood little but the most salient points. “You were setting up a deal behind their backs, then.”

He nodded. “If I could have had a month more, and if Bernard had seen it everything would have been just sweet.” He was seldom evasive with his mother. She was virtually unshockable; tough to keep up with, and even tougher to fool.

“And you wouldn’t be here now, visiting your old, feeble mater.”

“Probably not,” Vergil said, shrugging. “Also, there’s a girl. I mean, a woman.”

“If she lets you call her a girl, she isn’t a woman.”

“She’s pretty independent.” He talked for a while about Candice, about her brazen overtures at the beginning and her gradual domesticating. I’m getting used to having her around. I mean, we’re not living together. We’re on a sort of sabbatical right now, to see how things work out. I’m no prize in the domestic department.” April nodded and asked him to get her a beer. He retrieved an unopened Anchor Steam.

“My fingernails aren’t that tough,” she said.

“Oh.” He returned to the kitchen and uncapped it.

“Now. What did you expect a big brain surgeon like Bernard to do for you?”

“He’s not just a brain surgeon. He’s been interested in AI for years now.”

“AI?”

“Artificial intelligence.”

“Oh.” She smiled radiant understanding. “You’re unemployed,” she said, “maybe in love, no prospects. Gladden your parent’s heart some more. What else is going on?”

“I’m experimenting on myself, I think,” he said.

April’s eyes widened. “How?”

“Well, those cells I changed. I had to smuggle them out by injecting them into my body. And I haven’t had access to a lab or doctor’s office since. By now, I’ll never recover them.”

“Recover them?”

“Separate them from the others. There’s billions of them, Mother.”

“If they’re your own cells, why should you worry?”

“Notice anything different?”

She squinted at him. “You’re not so pale, and you’ve changed to contact lenses.”

“I’m not wearing contacts.”

“Then maybe you’ve changed your habits and aren’t reading in the dark any more.” She shook her head. “I never have understood your interest in all this nonsense.”

Vergil stared at her, dumbfounded. “It’s fascinating,” he said. “And if you can’t see how important it is, then—”

“Don’t get snippy about my peculiar blindness. I admit them, but I don’t go out of my way to change them. Not when I see the world in the shape it’s in today, because of people with your intellectual inclinations. Why every day, over at the Lab, they’re coming up with more and more doomsday—”

“Don’t judge most scientists by me, Mother. I’m not exactly typical. I’m a little more…” He couldn’t find the word and grinned. She returned the grin with the slight smile he had never been able to decipher.

“Mad,” she said.

“Unorthodox,” Vergil corrected.

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Vergil What kind of cells are these? Just parts of your blood you’ve been working on?”

“They can think, Mother.”

Again, unshockable, she didn’t react in any way he could perceive. “Together—I mean, all of them, or each one?”

“Each one. Though they tended to group together in the last experiments.”

“Are they friendly?”

Vergil looked up at the ceiling in exasperation. “They’re lymphocytes, Mother. They don’t even live in the same world we do. They can’t be friendly or unfriendly in the way we mean the words. Everything’s chemicals for them.”

“If they can think, then they feel something, at least if my life experience is any good. Unless they’re like Frank. Of course, he didn’t think much, so the comparison is not exact.”

“I never had time to find out what they’re like, or whether they can reason as much as…as their potential.”

“What is their potential?”

“Are you sure you’re understanding this?”

“Do I sound like I’m understanding?”

“Yes. That’s why I’m doubtful. I don’t know what their potential is. It’s very large, though.”

“Verge, there’s always been method to your madness. What did you hope to gain by doing this?”

That stopped him. He despaired of ever communicating on that level—the level of achievement and goals—with his mother. She had never understood his need to accomplish. For her, goals were met by not ruffling the neighbors’ feathers too often. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Forget it”

“It’s forgotten. Where shall we eat dinner tonight?”

“Let’s eat Moroccan,” Vergil said.

“Belly dancers it is.”

Of all the things he didn’t understand about April, the real topper was his childhood bedroom. Toys, bed and furniture, posters on the wall, his room had been preserved not as he had left it, but as it had been when he was twelve years old. The books he had read had been pulled out of boxes in the attic and lined up on the shelves of the single bookcase that had once sufficed to hold his library. Paperback and book dub science fiction vied with comics and a small, important cluster of science and electronics books.

Movie posters—no doubt very valuable now—showed Robbie the Robot clutching a much amplified Anne Frances and stalking across a jagged planetscape, Christopher Lee snag-snarling with red eyes, Keir Dullea staring in wonder from his spacesuit helmet.

He had taken those posters down at age nineteen, folded them and stashed them in a drawer. April had put them back up after he left for college.

She had even resurrected his checked hunters-and-hounds bedspread. The bed itself was worn and familiar, seducing him back to a childhood he wasn’t sure he had ever had, much less left behind.

He remembered his pre-adolescence as a time of considerable fear and worry. Fear that he was some kind of sex maniac, that he had been responsible for his father’s exit, worry about measuring up in school. And along with the worry, exaltation. The light-headed and peculiar joy he had felt on half-twisting a strip of paper, pasting the ends together and manufacturing his first Möbius strip; his ant farm and Heathkits; his discovery of ten years’ worth of Scientific Americans in a trash can in the alley behind the house.

In the dark, just as he was on the edge of sleep, his back began to crawl. He scratched abstractedly, then sat up in bed with a whispered curse and curled the hem of his pajama top into a tight roll, drawing it up and down, back and forth with both hands to ease the itch.

He reached up to his face. It felt totally unfamiliar, somebody else’s face-bumps and ridges, nose extended, lips protruding. But with his other hand, it felt normal. He rubbed the fingers of both hands together. The sensations weren’t right One hand was far more sensitive than usual, the other almost numb.

Breathing heavily, Vergil stumbled into the upstairs bathroom and switched on a light His chest itched abominably. The spaces between his toes seemed alive with invisible ants. He hadn’t felt so miserable since he had had chicken pox at eleven, a month before his father’s departure. With the unspeculating concentration of misery, Vergil stripped off his pajamas and crawled into the shower, hoping for relief under cold water.

The water spluttered in a weak stream from the old plumbing and rippled across his head and neck, over his shoulders and back, rivulets snaking down his chest and legs. Both hands were exquisitely, painfully sensitive now, and the water seemed to come in needles, warming and then cooling, burning and then freezing. He held his arms out and the air itself felt bumpy.

He stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, sighing with relief as the irritation subsided, rubbing the offending areas of his skin with his wrists and the backs of his hands until they were angry red. His fingers and palms tingled and the tingling diminished to a low, blood-pumping throb of returning normality.

He emerged and toweled off, then stood naked by the bathroom window, feeling the cool breeze and listening to crickets. “God damn,” he said slowly and expressively. He turned and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. His chest was splotchy and red from scratching and rubbing. He rotated and peered over his shoulder at his back.

From shoulder to shoulder, and criss-crossing down his spine, faint pale lines just beneath the surface of his skin drew a crazy and unwelcome road-map. As he watched, the lines slowly faded until he wondered whether they had been there at all.

Heart pounding heavily in his chest, Vergil sat on the lid of the toilet and stared at his feet, chin in both hands. Now he was really scared.

He laughed deep in the back of his throat

“Put the little suckers to work, him?” he asked himself in a whisper.

“Vergil, are you all right?” his mother asked from the other side of the bathroom door.

“I’m fine,” he said. Better and better, every day.

“I will never understand men, as long as I live and breathe,” his mother said, pouring herself another cup of thick black coffee. “Always tinkering, always getting into trouble.”

“I’m not in trouble, Mother.” He didn’t sound convinced, even to himself.

“No?”

He shrugged. “I’m healthy, I can go for a few more months without work—and something’s bound to turn up.”

“You’re not even looking.”

That was true enough. “I’m getting over a depression.” And that was an outright lie.

“Bull,” April said. “You’ve never been depressed in your life. You don’t even know what it means. You should be a woman for a few years and just see for yourself.”

The morning sun illuminated the filmy curtains covering the kitchen window and filled the kitchen with subdued, cheerful warmth. “Sometimes you act like I’m a brick wall,” Vergil said.

“Sometimes you are. Hell, Verge, you’re my son. I gave you life—I think we can X out Frank’s contribution—and I watched you grow older for twenty-two years steady. You never did grow up, and you never did get a full deck of sensibilities. You’re a brilliant boy, but you’re just not complete.”

“And you,” he said, grimacing, “are a deep well of support and understanding.”

“Don’t rile the old woman, Verge. I understand and sympathize as much as you deserve. You’re in real trouble, aren’t you? This experiment.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep harping on that. I’m the scientist, and I’m the only one affected, and so far—” He closed his mouth with an audible snap and crossed his arms. It was all quite insane. The lymphocytes he had injected were beyond any doubt dead or decrepit by now. They had been altered in test-tube conditions, had probably acquired a whole new set of his to compatibility antigens, and had been attacked and devoured by their unaltered fellows weeks ago. Any other supposition was simply not supported by reason. Last night had simply been a complex allergic reaction. Why he and his mother, of all people, should be discussing the possibility—

“Verge?”

“It’s been nice, April, but I think it’s time for me to leave.”

“How long do you have?”

He stood and stared at her, shocked. “I’m not dying, Mother.”

“All his life, my son has been working for his supreme moment. Sounds to me like it’s come, Verge.”

“That’s crazier than horseshit.”

“I’ll throw what you’ve told me right back at you, Son. I’m not a genius, but I’m not a brick wall, either. You tell me you’ve made intelligent germs, and I’ll tell you right now…Anyone who’s ever sanitized a toilet or cleaned a diaper pail would cringe at the idea of germs that think. What happens when they fight back, Verge? Tell your old mother that.”

There was no answer. He wasn’t sure there was even a viable subject in their discussion; nothing made sense. But he could feel his stomach tensing.

He had performed this ritual before, getting into trouble and then coming to his mother, uneasy and uncertain, not sure precisely what sort of trouble he was in. With uncanny regularity, she had seemed to jump onto a higher plane of reasoning and identify his problems, laying them out for him so they became unavoidable. This was not a service that made him love her any more, but it did make her invaluable to him.

He stood and reached down to pat her hand, she turned it and gripped his hand in hers. “You’re going now,” she said.

“Yes.”

“How long do we have, Vergil?”

“What?” He couldn’t understand it, but his eyes suddenly filled with tears and he began to tremble.

“Come back to me, if you can,” she said.

Terrified, he grabbed his suitcase-packed the night before-and ran down the steps to the Volvo, throwing open the trunk and tossing it in. He rounded the car and caught his knee on the rear bumper. Pain surged, then dropped off rapidly. He climbed into the bucket seat and started the engine.

His mother stood on the porch, silk gown flowing in the slight morning breeze, and Vergil waved at her as he pulled the car away. Normality. Wave at your mother. Drive away.

Drive away, knowing that your father never existed, and that your mother was a witch, and what did that make you?

He shook his head until his ears rang, somehow managing to keep the car going in a straight line down the street.

A white ridge lay across the back of his left hand, like a tiny thread glued to the skin with mucilage.

CHAPTER EIGHT

An uncharacteristic summer storm had left the sky ragged with clouds, the air cool, and the apartment’s bedroom window flecked with drops of water. The surf could be heard from four blocks away, a dull rumble topped with hiss. Vergil sat before his computer, heel of one hand resting against the edge of the keyboard, finger poised. On the VDT was a twisting, evolving molecule of DNA surrounded by a haze of protein. Flickering separations of the double helix’s phosphate-sugar backbones indicated high-speed intrusions by enzymes, spreading the molecule for transcription. Labeled columns of numbers marched along the bottom of the screen. He watched them without paying much attention.

He would have to talk with somebody soon—somebody besides his mother, and certainly besides Candice. She had moved in with him a week after he returned from his mother’s house, apparently intent on domesticity, cleaning up the apartment and fixing his meals.

Sometimes they shopped together, and that was enjoyable. Candice enjoyed helping Vergil pick out better clothes, and he went along with her, even though the purchases drained his already low bank account.

When she asked about things she didn’t like, his silences grew prolonged. She wondered why he insisted they make love in the dark.

She suggested they go to the beach, but Vergil demurred.

She worried about his spending time under the new lamps he had bought.

“Verge?” Candice stood in the bedroom doorway, wrapped in a terrycloth robe embroidered with roses.

“Don’t call me that. My mother calls me that.”

“Sorry. We were going to ride up to the animal park. Remember?”

Vergil lifted his finger to his mouth and chewed on the nail. He didn’t seem to hear.

“Vergil?”

“I’m not feeling too well.”

“You never go out. That’s why.”

“Actually, I’m feeling fine,” he said, turning in his chair. He looked at her but offered no further explanation.

“I don’t understand.”

He pointed to the screen. “You’ve never let me explain it to you.”

“You get all crazy and I don’t understand you,” Candice said, her lip quivering.

“It’s more than I ever thought possible.”

“What Vergil?”

“The concatenations. The combinations. The power.”

“Please, make sense.”

“I’m trapped. Seduced but hardly abandoned.”

“I didn’t just seduce you—”

“Not you, sweetums,” he said abstractedly. “Not you.”

Candice approached the desk slowly, as if the screen might bite. Her eyes were moist and she chewed her lower lip. “Honey.”

He jotted down numbers from the bottom of the screen.

“Vergil.”

“Hmm?”

“Did you do something at work, I mean, before you left, before we met?”

He swiveled his head around and looked at her blankly. “Like with the computers? Did you get mad and screw up their computers?”

“No,” he said, grinning. “I didn’t screw them up. Screwed them over, maybe, but nothing they’ll ever notice.”

“Because I knew this guy once, he did something against the law and he started acting funny. He wouldn’t go out, he wouldn’t talk much, just like you.”

“What did he do?” Vergil asked, still jotting numbers.

“He robbed a bank.”

The pencil stopped. Their eyes met Candice was crying.

“I loved him and I had to leave him when I found out,” she said. “I just can’t live with bad shit like that.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I was all ready to leave you a few weeks ago,” she said. “I thought maybe we’d done all we could together. But it’s just crazy. I’ve never met anyone like you. You’re crazy. Crazy smart, not crazy shit-headed like other guys. I’ve been thinking if we could just loosen up together, that it would be really wonderful. I’d listen to you when you explain things, maybe you could teach me about this biology and electronics stuff.” She indicated the screen. “I’d try to listen. I really would.”

Vergil’s mouth hung open slightly. He drew it shut and looked at the screen, blinking rapidly.

“I fell in love with you. When you were gone to visit your mother. Isn’t that weird?”

“Candice—”

“And if you’ve done something really awful, it’s going to hurt me now, not just you.” She backed away with her fist tucked under her chin, as if she were slowly hitting herself.

“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” Vergil said.

“I know. You’re not mean.”

“I’d explain everything to you, if I knew what was happening myself. But I don’t. I haven’t done anything they could send me to jail for. Nothing illegal.” Except tamper with the medical records.

“You can’t tell me something isn’t bothering you. Why can’t we just talk about it?” She pulled a folding chair from the closet and snicked it open a couple of yards from the desk, sitting on it with knees together and feet spread.

“I just said, I don’t know what it is.”

“Did you do something…to yourself? I mean, did you get some disease at the lab or something? I’ve heard that’s possible, doctors and scientists get diseases they’re working with.”

“You and my mother,” he said, shaking his head.

“We’re worried. Will I ever meet your mother?”

“Probably not for some time,” Vergil said.

“I’m sorry I…” She shook her head vigorously. “I just wanted to open up to you.”

“That’s all right,” he said.

“Vergil.”

“Yes?”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes,” he said, and surprised himself by meaning it, though he did not look away from the screen.

“Why?”

“Because we’re so much alike,” he said. He was not at all sure how he meant that; perhaps both were destined to be failures, or at least never amount to much—to Vergil that was the same thing as failure.

“Come on.”

“Really. Maybe you just don’t see it.”

“I’m not as smart as you, that’s for sure.”

“Sometimes being smart is a real pain,” he said. Is that what they’re finding out, his little lymphocytes? The pain of being smart, of surviving!

“Can we go for a drive today, go someplace and have a picnic? There’s cold chicken from last night.”

He jotted down one last column of numbers and realized he now knew what he had wanted to know. The lymphocytes could indeed spread their biologic to other types of cells.

They could very easily do what it seemed they were doing to him. “Yeah,” he said. “A picnic would be great”

“And then, when we come back…With the lights on?”

“Why not?” She’d have to know sooner or later. And he could find some way of explaining the stripe patterns. The ridges had gone down since he had begun the lamp treatments; thank God for small favors.

“I love you,” she said, still in the chair, still watching him.

He saved the computations and graphics and turned off the computer. “Thank you,” he said softly.