I again held out the vials, and this time Seth took them. “Suppose I’d been a woman?”
“Then I would have needed an ovum. Think yourself lucky.”
He retreated upstairs, and returned within a few minutes. “Here. Scientists, they take the fun out of everything”
Without molecular-level manipulators — another casualty of the supernova — it took a while to separate and display a single cell of each kind.
While I worked, I marveled at the prodigality of Nature. The skin cell looming large on the projection screen contained the complete genetic code for Seth Parsigian. His body held a hundred trillion such cells. From any one, a copy of Seth’s body could be grown. Here was lavish redundancy, on a scale incomprehensible to humans.
The skin cell on the screen was suspended in a dichroic solution. That allowed me to color-code and zoom in on the chromosomes, and then amplify further the end section of one. I froze the display at a level of magnification where the individual molecules of the nucleotide bases could be seen.
“Look at that,” I said. “There you have a telomere. One of yours, but of course any vertebrate animal’s telomere would look the same.”
It helps when you have seen something a thousand times before. Seth was staring at a display of the end units of a DNA molecule’s curved double helix, but I could see from the expression on his face that to him it was a meaningless jumble of blurry dots. In fact, adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine molecules have quite different structures, and their electron density distributions as seen by a scanning probe microscope are readily distinguished by an experienced eye.
“See,” I said. “We start from the end there. The same sequence repeats, over and over. T-T-A-G-G-G. And again. T-T-A-G-G-G. When you were born, that would repeat about eight hundred times. The number of repeating sequences gets less all your life. Now let’s count.” Under my control, the scanning probe traveled steadily along the molecular chain. I was counting out loud, for Seth’s benefit rather than my own. I already saw the general picture.
“I hope you’re not expectin’ me to learn to do that,” Seth said. “All those gizmos look the same to me.”
We were moving along the chromosome into the subtelomeric region. The regular repeating pattern T-T-A-G-G-G was breaking down.
I froze the display again. “Let me make a guess,” I said. “You were due to be given a shot of telomerase stimulator in less than two months.”
“How’d you know that?”
“The telomere is quite a bit shorter than it should be. Not dangerously so, but it needs rebuilding. Now let’s check the sperm cell.”
It was of course haploid, containing only one half of his genetic code. The other half required for a complete diploid individual came from the mother. However, each chromosome of the sperm was intact. Its telomere should have been completely rebuilt, which meant that the nucleotide sequence ought to repeat about fifteen hundred times.
This time I did not bother to count for Seth’s benefit. I could see where random elements began to enter the sequence. The telomere was far too short, no more than a few hundred repetitions of the same pattern of the six nucleotide bases.
“So I’m in trouble,” Seth said when I explained to him what we were looking at.
“Not at all. You just need to monitor this for yourself and learn when you need a telomerase inhibitor or stimulator.”
“I already told you, everythin’ looks the same to me. It’s one big garbage can. I’d never learn to read it, and there’s no way I could carry all this display stuff around with me.”
“You won’t have to do either of those things.” I had made my point that he was dependent on me — more than ever, because he was close to needing treatment. “I’m going to package a set of wet chemistry tests for you. Then all you’ll need to do is run through them with a skin sample and a semen or menstrual blood sample, and from the output you’ll know what treatment you need.
Making telomerase inhibitor and telomerase stimulator isn’t hard for any biochemical supply house. I’ll write that out for you.”
“Great.”
I went across to where he was sitting. “But before I start,” I said, “I think we need to talk.”
He didn’t gape or frown or offer some other bogus pretense of lack of understanding. As I say, in his own disgusting way Seth Parsigian deserved lots of respect.
“I’ve been thinkin that, too,” he said. “Of course, before it was worth talkin’ I needed to see evidence that you could do something for me. Now you’ve just given me that.”
“Should I summarize how things stand, or will you?”
“Let me take a stab at my side, then you have a go at yours. Why don’t you sit down — over there. I’d hate to have to shoot you.”
From where I stood in front of him, I could, just conceivably, have made a dive for the gun. He was not to know that such a move on my part was most unlikely. My skin already contains a satisfactory number of apertures.
I went to sit down on a stool by the bench, and he continued, “Let’s talk about what I want. I think that one’s easy. I want the package you say you know how to make, something enough to last me a couple of years ’til things start gettin’ back to normal, an’ somethin’ like the Institute’s back in business. Actually, I want at least three of them packages. And I want you to explain exactly how to work ’em, so I can tell the other two.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You surprised? You shouldn’t be. I could never have got to the Q-5 facility and yanked you out of there without help. We got common interests, me and the other Lazarus Club members. We’re all different, an’ I got my own life to live, but chances are good that I’ll need their help again. I scratch their backs, they scratch mine. You have a problem with that?”
“Not in the slightest. The real tragedy of the commons is that it need never have happened. A logical basis for group-level altruism in terms of individual genetic advantage was provided more than forty years ago.”
“That right? I guess it didn’t make it yet to West Virginia, ’cause I’ve no idea what you’re talkin’ about. Anyway, now you know what I want. What do you want?”
I had to be careful. Some of what I wanted was absolutely none of his business. It was also more than he could possibly offer.
“I want to vanish. I want to disappear from the face of the Earth, as completely as if I had never existed. As a matter of fact, that was my plan had I not been caught and sentenced. Some distant isle, some quiet beach.”
“That right?” His tone implied not skepticism, but indifference. That I was speaking the exact truth was not relevant.