Darwin’s Radio

‘Sorry,’ Dicken said.

Voight smiled half-apologetically. ‘Then her “old man” comes in, tells us the real story. Turns out he’s very concerned for her – wants us to know the truth so we can treat her. She’s been letting him get in bed with her and rub up against her … Sympathy, you know. So that’s how she gets pregnant the first time.’

Dicken nodded. Nothing very shocking here – the versatility of life and love.

Voight continued. ‘It’s a miscarriage. But three months later, she comes back, she’s pregnant again. Two months along. Her elderly friend shows up with her, says he hasn’t been rubbing against her or anything, and he knows she hasn’t been seeing another man. Do we believe him?’

Dicken tilted his head to one side, lifted his eyebrows.

‘All sorts of peculiar stuff going on,’ Voight said softly. ‘More than usual, I think.’

‘Did they complain of illness?’

‘The usual. Colds, fevers, body aches. Specifically, I don’t know of anything that matches up with this Herod’s flu, but as I say, we haven’t got our detection kits yet. I think we may still have a couple of specimens in the lab, if you want to look at them. Have you been over to Northside?’

‘Not yet,’ Dicken said.

‘Why not Midtown? Lot more tissue for you over there.’

Dicken shook his head. ‘How many young women with unexplained fever, non-bacterial infections?’

‘Dozens. That’s not unusual either. We don’t keep tests more than a week; if they’re negative for bacteria, we dump them.’

‘All right. Let’s see the tissue.’

Dicken took his coffee with him as he followed Voight to the elevator. The biopsy and analysis lab was in the basement, just two doors down from the morgue.

‘Lab techs go home at nine.’ Voight switched on the lights and did a quick search in a small steel card file.

Dicken looked the lab over: three long white benches equipped with sinks, two fume hoods, incubators, cabinets neatly arrayed with brown glass and clear glass bottles filled with reagents, neatly ordered stacks of standard test kits in slim orange and green cardboard boxes, two stainless steel refrigerators and an older white freezer; a computer connected to an inkjet printer with an ‘Out of Order’ note posted on it; and jammed in a back room behind a Dutch door, rolling stock steel storage shelving in standard gray and putty.

‘They haven’t put these into the computer yet; takes us about three weeks. Looks like we have one left … It’s procedure now for the hospital, we give mothers the choice, they can have a mortician take the tissue and arrange for a funeral. Better closure that way. But we had an indigent through here, no money, no family … Here.’ He lifted a card, walked into the back room, rotated a wheel, found the shelf number on the card.

Dicken waited by the Dutch door. Voight emerged with a small jar, held it up to the brighter light in the lab room. ‘Wrong number, but it’s the same type. This is from six months ago. I think the one I’m looking for may still be in cold saline.’ He handed Dicken the jar and walked to the first refrigerator.

Dicken peered at the fetus: At twelve weeks, about the size of his thumb, curled, a tiny pale extraterrestrial that had failed its tryout for life on Earth. The anomalies struck him immediately. The limbs were mere nubs, and there were protuberances around the swollen abdomen he had not seen before even on severely malformed fetuses.

The tiny face seemed unusually pinched and vacant.

‘There’s something wrong with its bone structure,’ Dicken said as Voight closed the refrigerator. The resident lifted another fetus in a moisture-frosted glass beaker covered with plastic wrap, sealed with a rubber band and marked with a tape label.

‘Lots of problems, no doubt about it,’ Voight said, trading jars and peering at the older specimen. ‘God sets up little checkpoints in every pregnancy. These two did not make the grade.’ He looked upward significantly. ‘Back to heaven’s nursery.’

Dicken did not know whether Voight was expressing heartfelt philosophy or a more typical medical cynicism. He compared the cold beaker and the room-temperature jar. Both fetuses at twelve weeks, very similar.

‘Can I take this one?’ he asked, lifting the cold beaker.

‘What, and rob our med students?’ Voight shrugged. ‘Sign for it, call it a loan to CDC, shouldn’t be a problem.’ He looked at the jar again. ‘Something significant?’

‘Maybe,’ Dicken said. He felt a little creep of sadness and excitement. Voight gave him a more secure jar and a small cardboard box, cotton, a piece of ice in a sealed plastic bag to keep the specimen cold. They transferred the specimen quickly with a pair of wooden tongue depressors, and Dicken sealed the box with packing tape.

‘If you have any more like these, let me know immediately, okay?’ Dicken asked.

‘Sure.’ In the elevator, Voight asked him, ‘You look a little funny. Is there something I might like to know about early, some little clue to help me better serve the public?’

Dicken knew he had kept his face deadpan, so he smiled at Voight and shook his head. ‘Keep track of all miscarriages,’ Dicken said. ‘Especially this type. Any correlation with Herod’s flu would be dandy.’

Voight curled his lip, disappointed. ‘Nothing official yet?’

‘Not yet,’ Dicken said. ‘I’m working on a real long shot.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Boston (#ulink_c811aa35-9a5b-530c-ba26-0815de3a021a)

The spaghetti and pizza dinner with Saul’s old colleagues from MIT was going very well. Saul had flown in to Boston that afternoon, and they had gathered at Pagliacci. Talk early in the evening in the dark old Italian restaurant ranged from mathematical analysis of the human genome to a chaotic predictor for dataflow systole and diastole on the Internet. Kaye filled up on breadsticks and green peppers even before her lasagna arrived. Saul picked at a piece of buttered bread.

One of MIT’s celebrities, Dr Drew Miller, showed up at nine o’clock, unpredictable as always, to listen and throw in a few comments about the hot topic of bacterial community action. Saul listened intently to the legendary researcher, an expert on artificial intelligence and self-organizing systems. Miller moved several times, and finally tapped the shoulder of Saul’s old roommate, Derry Jacobs. Jacobs grinned, got up to find another seat, and Miller placed himself beside Kaye. He picked up a breadstick from Jacobs’s plate, stared at her with wide, childlike eyes, pursed his lips, and said, ‘You’ve really pissed off the old gradualists.’

‘Me?’ Kaye asked, laughing. ‘Why?’

‘Ernst Mayr’s kids are sweating ice cubes, if they’ve got any sense. Dawkins is beside himself. I’ve been telling them for months that all that was needed was another link in the chain, and we’d have a feedback loop.’

Gradualism was the belief that evolution proceeded in small moves, mutations accumulating over tens of thousands or even millions of years, usually detrimental to the individual. Beneficial mutations were selected for by conferring an advantage and increasing opportunities to gather resources and reproduce. Ernst Mayr had been a brilliant spokesman for this belief. Richard Dawkins had eloquently argued the case for the Modern Synthesis of Darwinism, as well as describing the so-called Selfish Gene.

Saul heard this and got up to stand behind Kaye, leaning over the table to hear what Miller had to say. ‘You think SHEVA gives us a loop?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Complete circle of communication between individuals in a population, outside of sex. Our equivalent of plasmids in bacteria, but of course more like phage.’

‘Drew, SHEVA only has eighty kb and thirty genes,’ Saul said. ‘Can’t carry much information.’

She and Saul had already gone over this territory before she had published her article in Virology. They had spoken to nobody about their particular theories. Kaye found herself a little surprised that Miller should be bringing this up. He was not known as a progressive.

‘They don’t need to carry all the information,’ Miller said. ‘All they need to carry is an authorization code. A key. We still don’t know all the things SHEVA does.’

Kaye glanced at Saul, then said, ‘Tell us what you’ve been thinking, Dr Miller.’

‘Call me Drew, please. It’s really not my field of endeavor, Kaye.’

‘It’s not like you to be cagey, Drew,’ Saul said. ‘And we know you’re not humble.’

Miller grinned from ear to ear. ‘Well, I think you suspect something already. I’m sure your wife does. I’ve read your papers on transposable elements.’

Kaye sipped from her almost-empty glass of water. ‘We can never be sure what to say to whom,’ she murmured. ‘We might either offend or give away the farm.’

‘Don’t worry about original thinking,’ Miller said. ‘Someone out there is always ahead of you, but they usually haven’t done the work. It’s someone who’s working all the time who will make the discovery. You do good work and write good papers, and this is a big jump.’

‘We’re not sure it’s the big jump though,’ Kaye said. ‘It may just be an anomaly.’

‘I don’t want to push anybody into a Nobel Prize,’ Miller said, ‘but SHEVA isn’t really a disease-causing organism. Doesn’t make evolutionary sense for something to hide this long in the human genome, and then express just to cause a mild flu. SHEVA is really just a kind of mobile genetic element, isn’t it? A promoter?’