‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’
There was no reaction.
Easing himself out of bed again, he pulled on his towelling dressing gown, padded out of the bedroom and across the narrow corridor, feeling even worse than a few minutes ago. Entering his den, he stepped carefully around the piles of papers, box of discs, cables, camera lenses and stacks of unread magazines, switched on the desk lamp and sat down. His laptop was still in the bag where he had dumped it when he came in. Removing it, he set it on the desk, opened it, and logged into his computer at the university. Then he checked his email.
Fifteen new ones, including a chiding one from his online chess opponent, Gus Santiano in Brisbane. The man had a nerve, he thought. Santiano regularly used to take up to a week to move. But if John took longer than a couple of days over his own turn, the Australian would start chasing him. You’ll have to wait, he thought, blearily watching the rest of the email headers appear one after the other. Then suddenly he was wide awake.
Dr Leo Dettore – response.
This is an automated reply to your email from the office of Dr Leo Dettore. Dr Dettore is away at a conference in Italy, returning on 29 July.
The twenty-ninth of July was tomorrow, he realized. Or rather, today.
He hurried back into the bedroom. ‘Dr Dettore’s been away, darling. There’s an email. He’s back tomorrow!’
But instead of acknowledging this she remained motionless, tears still trickling down her face. After a long silence she finally spoke, very quietly.
‘Is Sally Kimberly a good screw?’
21
John arrived in his office shortly after nine, cold and shivery, with a maelstrom of bad stuff going on inside his head. He sat at his desk with a cup of black coffee and a cup of cold water, prised two Tylenol capsules from their foil and swallowed them.
Rain rattled against the window. It was blowing a gale outside, his jacket was damp, his chinos were soaked and clinging to his legs, and his loafers were sodden after stepping off the sidewalk into a deep puddle.
At eleven o’clock he had to give a lecture to thirty students, in which he was to talk about the areas where the advances of medicine were having a bad impact on human evolution. Because of a whole range of scientific and medical developments during the past few thousand years, from primitive dentistry and optical lenses, through to organ transplants and new controls for chronic killer diseases like diabetes, it was no longer the fittest or best-adapted humans who survived.
Once, the gene lines of people with no teeth would have died out because they couldn’t eat, and similarly those with bad vision would have more easily fallen prey to wild animals or enemies, and died out also, but this was no longer the case. These people survived with their defects and continued breeding, passing the defects to their offspring. Likewise people with the genes for organ failure or chronic diseases survived and bred. Every year more defective people were coming into the world rather than fewer. Science was already, stealthily and unwittingly, taking over from Darwinian principles of natural selection.
John had done experiments with his students on computer models of evolution with and without the impact of medical advances. Left unimpeded, humans would have evolved, naturally, into a far stronger species than they were now. He told his students that in the next experiment they designed they would add something new into the equation: genetic engineering. That was the only way to counteract the gradual erosion of our species by medicine. Without genetic engineering, over the next hundred thousand years – a mere three hundred generations’ time – the computer models had shown that those people who lived in affluent societies would be dangerously weakened.
He had been looking forward to this talk, but now with the events of the past twenty-four hours, he had lost all enthusiasm. He just wanted, desperately, to try to sort everything out.
Naomi’s accusation really hurt him. He buried his head in his hands. She was in a state and would calm down; he hadn’t done anything other than talk to the reporter, he had a clear conscience about that. But just what the hell had he said to her?
The reporter had lied about their friendship. Why? To get him to talk?
Off the record. It had been off the record. Hadn’t it?
He dialled Dr Rosengarten, then logged on to his email while the phone was ringing. The obstetrician’s secretary answered. Dr Rosengarten was in theatre all morning. She took down John’s number and told him she would have him call him back when he was free.
He glanced down the fresh list of emails in his inbox. He’d put a few speculative feelers out to a number of universities and institutions over the past weeks, but there were no responses this morning. In a year’s time if he didn’t get tenure here, he would be out of a job. With almost all his savings gone on the baby Naomi was now carrying, he was feeling panicky. His book would still take another year to finish – and in any event he would not make anything like enough from it to live on. He faced the very real possibility that he might have to move out of his field altogether and take a research and development job in some place like Silicon Valley with a computer company. Not a prospect he relished.
Twenty past nine, Los Angeles time. The East Coast was three hours ahead. Twenty after midday. Dettore might be back by now. He dialled his number.
Four rings and then the voice mail again: ‘You’ve reached the Dettore Clinic. Please leave your name, number – don’t forget your country code – and any message, and someone will call you back shortly.’
He left another message, and replaced the receiver. His secretary came in with a pile of mail and he asked her if she’d go get him another cup of water. Then he fished Sally Kimberly’s card from his wallet and dialled her direct line.
It didn’t even ring. Instead he heard her recorded voice. ‘Hi, you’ve reached Sally Kimberly. I’m out right now, but leave a message, or reach me on my cellphone.’
He left a message asking her to call him urgently, then dialled her cellphone, but her voice mail kicked in instantly on that, too. He left a second message.
Then, as he hung up, he realized what it was that had been bugging him last night – the feeling he’d had that there was something missing from the room: it was the photograph of Naomi that was normally on his desk. One of his favourite pictures of her, taken a couple of years back when they’d revisited Turkey. She was tanned, her fair hair bleached almost blonde by the salt and sun, standing on the prow of an elderly gulet, sunglasses pushed up on her head, arms outstretched, doing a parody of Kate Winslet in the film Titanic.
He stood up and looked around. The photographer must have moved it last night; he’d rearranged a load of stuff. But where the hell had he put it?
His secretary came in. He asked her about the photograph, but she assured him she had not touched it. Then he sat back down and sipped the water, switching his thoughts to Dr Rosengarten.
What he needed to understand was, if Rosengarten had been right and it was a girl, just how easy would it have been for Dettore to have got the sex of the child wrong? Was it harder than the other genes that he had altered – or easier? Was it just one slip, or was their baby a total mess?
He called up his addresses file, typed in a key word, and a name and a phone number came up. Dr Maria Annand. She was an infertility specialist at Cedars-Sinai. He’d been to see her with Naomi six months ago for tests, at the request of Dr Dettore, before being accepted by him. Dettore had wanted confirmation that it was still viable for Naomi to conceive, before putting them to the expense of coming to see him.
He dialled the number. By luck, he caught her just as she was leaving for an appointment.