Darwin’s Radio

‘Five out of five pregnancies, sir.’

Augustine leaned forward. ‘You went to Turkey because your contact said they had a virus that might abort babies. But why Georgia?’

‘There was an outbreak of miscarriages in Tbilisi five years ago. I couldn’t get any information in Tbilisi, nothing official. A mortician and I did a little drinking together – unofficially. He told me there had been an outbreak of miscarriages in Gordi about the same time.

Augustine had not heard this part before. Dicken had not put it in his report. ‘Go on,’ he said, only half-interested.

‘There was some sort of trouble, he wouldn’t come right out and say what. So – I drove to Gordi, and there was a police cordon around the town. I did some asking around in a few local road stops and heard about a UN investigation, Russian involvement. I called the UN. They told me that they were asking an American woman to help them.’

‘That was –’

‘Kaye Lang.’

‘Goodness,’ Augustine said, and pressed his lips into a thin smile. ‘Woman of the hour. You knew about her work on HERV?’

‘Of course.’

‘So … you thought somebody in the UN was on to something and needed her advice.’

‘The thought crossed my mind, sir. But they called on her because she knew forensic pathology.’

‘So, what were you thinking about?’

‘Mutations. Induced birth defects. Teratogenic viruses, maybe. And I was wondering why governments wanted parents dead.’

‘So there we are again,’ Augustine said. ‘Back to wild-eyed speculation.’

Dicken made a face. ‘You know me better than that, Mark.’

‘Sometimes I haven’t the slightest idea how you get such good results.’

‘I hadn’t finished my work. You called me back and said we had something solid.’

‘God knows I’ve been wrong before,’ Augustine said.

‘I don’t think you’re wrong. This is probably just the beginning. We’ll have more to go on soon.’

‘Is that what your instincts tell you?’

Dicken nodded.

Mark drew his brows together and folded his hands tightly on the top of the desk. ‘Do you remember what happened in 1963?’

‘I was just a baby then, sir. But I’ve heard. Malaria.’

‘I was seven years old myself. Congress pulled the plug on all funding for the elimination of insect-borne illnesses, including malaria. The stupidest move in the history of epidemiology. Millions of deaths world-wide, new strains of resistant disease … a disaster.’

‘DDT wouldn’t have worked much longer anyway, sir.’

‘Who can say?’ Augustine peaked two fingers. ‘Humans think like children, leaping from passion to passion. Suddenly world health just isn’t hot. Maybe we overstated our case. We’re backing down from the death of the rain forests and global warming is still just a simmer, not a boil. There haven’t been any devastating world-wide plagues, and Joe Sixpack never signed on to the whole Third World guilt trip. People are getting bored with apocalypse. If we don’t have a politically defensible crisis soon, on our home turf, we are going to get creamed in Congress, Christopher, and it could be 1963 all over again.’

‘I understand, sir.’

Augustine sighed through his nose and lifted his eyes to the ranks of fluorescent lights in the ceiling. ‘The SG thinks our apple is still too green to put on the President’s desk, so she’s having a convenient megrim. She’s postponed this afternoon’s meeting until next week.’

Dicken suppressed a smile. The thought of the Surgeon General faking a headache was precious.

Augustine fixed his gaze on Dicken. ‘All right, you smell something, go get it. Check miscarriage records in US hospitals for the last year. Threaten Turkey and Georgia with exposure to the World Health Organization. Say we’ll accuse them of breaking all our cooperation treaties. I’ll back you. Find out who’s been to the Near East and Europe and come down with SHEVA and maybe miscarried a baby or two. We have a week, and if it’s not you and a more deadly SHEVA, then I’m going to have to go with an unknown spirochete caught by some shepherds in Afghanistan … consorting with sheep.’ Augustine mocked a hangdog expression. ‘Save me, Christopher.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#ulink_bd3a5b1f-2e60-58bb-9ccb-daa203dbfc2c)

Kaye was exhausted, felt like a queen, had been treated for the past week with the respect and friendly adoration of colleagues saluting one who has after some adversity been recognized as having seen farther into the truth. She had not suffered the kind of criticism and injustice others in biology had experienced in the last one hundred and fifty years – certainly nothing like what her hero, Charles Darwin, had had to face. Not even what Lynn Margulis had encountered with the theory of symbiotic evolution of eucaryotic cells. But there had been enough –

Skeptical and angry letters in the journals from old-guard geneticists convinced she was chasing after a wild hare; comments at conferences from faintly superior, smiling men and women convinced they were closer to a big discovery … Farther up the ladder of success, closer to the brass ring of Knowledge and Acknowledgment.

That was fine by Kaye. That was science, all too human and better for it. But then there had been Saul’s personal dust-up with the editor of Cell, stalling any chances she had of publishing there. She had gone to Virology instead, a good journal, but a step down the ladder. She had never made it as far as Science or Nature. She had climbed a good distance, and then stalled out.

Now, it seemed, dozens of labs and research centers were eager to have her see the results of the work they had done to confirm her speculations. For the sake of her own peace of mind, she chose to accept invitations from those faculties, centers, and labs which had shown her some encouragement in the past few years – and in particular, the Carl Rose Center for Domain Research, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Rose Center stood on a hundred acres of pines planted in the 1950s, a thick forest surrounding a cubical lab building, the cube sitting not flat on the earth but elevated on one edge. Two floors of labs lay underground, directly beneath and to the east of the elevated cube. Funded in large part by an endowment from the enormously wealthy Van Buskirk family of Boston, the Rose Institute had been doing molecular biology for thirty years.

Three scientists at Rose had been given grants by the Human Genome Project – the massive, heavily funded, multilateral effort to sequence and understand the sum total of human genetics – to analyze archaic gene fragments found in the so-called junk regions of human genes known as introns. The senior scientist managing this grant was Judith Kushner, who had been Kaye’s doctoral advisor at Stanford.

Judith Kushner stood just under five and a half feet high, with salted and twisted black hair, a round, wistful face that seemed always on the edge of a smile, and small, slightly protuberant black eyes. She was known internationally as a true wizard, someone who could design experiments and make any apparatus do what it was supposed to do – in other words, to fashion those repeatable experiments necessary to make science actually work.

That she spent most of her time nowadays filling out paperwork and guiding grad students and postdocs was simply the way of modern science.

Kushner’s assistant and secretary, a painfully thin young redhead named Fiona Bierce, led Kaye through the maze of labs and down a central elevator.

Kushner’s office lay on the zeroth floor, below ground level but above the basement: windowless, concrete walls painted a pleasant light beige. The walls were crammed with neatly arranged texts and bound journals. Four computers hummed faintly in one corner, including a Sim Engine supercomputer donated by Mind Design of Seattle.

‘Kaye Lang, I am so proud!’ Kushner got out of her chair, beamed and spread her arms to embrace Kaye as she entered. She gave a little squeal and waltzed her former student around the room, smiling in professorial joy. ‘So tell me – who have you heard from? Lynn? The old man himself?’

‘Lynn called yesterday,’ Kaye said, blushing.

Kushner clasped her hands together and shook them at the ceiling like a prize fighter celebrating victory. ‘Wonderful!’

‘It’s really too much,’ Kaye said, and at Kushner’s invitation, took a seat beside the Sim Engine’s broad flat display screen.

‘Grab it! Enjoy it!’ Kushner advised lustily. ‘You’ve earned it, dear. I saw you on television three times. Jackie Oniama on Triple C Network trying to talk science – wonderfully funny! Is she so much like a little doll in person?’

‘They were all very friendly, really. But I’m exhausted from trying to explain things.’

‘So much to explain. How’s Saul?’ Kushner asked, doing well to hide some apprehension.

‘He’s fine. We’re still trying to pin down whether we’ll be going into partnership with the Georgians.’

‘If they don’t partner with you now, they have a long way to go before they can become capitalists,’ Kushner said, and sat beside Kaye.