‘Look, Dr Annand, I have a quick question I want to ask you. If you have an embryo sexed, what are the percentage chances of getting it correct?’
‘You mean like selecting a male or female?’
‘Exactly.’
‘That’s done regularly on people carrying sex-specific disease genes. It would normally be done through pre-implantation genetics – when you are creating the embryo. When it gets to eight cells, you take a single cell from the blastocyst of the developing embryo, and the embryo doesn’t notice. You have it sexed. It’s very simple.’
‘What margin of error is there?’
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ she said.
‘Let’s say a couple want a boy. They have pre-implantation genetics to select the sex – but later they discover they are not having a boy, but a girl. How likely is that to happen?’
She sounded adamant. ‘Extremely unlikely. Any error on the sexing of a foetus is remote – it’s so basic.’
‘But it must happen? Surely?’
‘You look at the chromosomes, look at the numbers. There’s no way you’re going to make a mistake.’
‘There are always mistakes in science,’ John said.
‘OK, right, you can get a mix-up in a lab, sure. That happened recently. A fertility clinic mixed up the embryos of a black couple and a white couple – they put back the wrong embryo – the white couple had a black baby. That can happen.’
‘The wrong embryo?’ John echoed.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You are saying that’s the only way it could happen?’
‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ Dr Annand said. ‘I have to rush – I’m really late.’
‘Sure, appreciate your time, thanks.’
‘Call me later if you want to talk this through further,’ she said.
‘I may do that. So – just to get this right – the wrong embryo – that’s the only way? The entire wrong embryo?’
‘Yes. That would actually be more likely than getting the sex wrong.’
22
Somehow John got through his lecture. He fielded the barrage of questions from students that followed, answering them as briefly as possible, then hurried back to his office and closed the door. He sat down and checked his voice mail.
There was a message from Naomi. Her voice sounded tearful and panicky. ‘Call me, John,’ she said. ‘Please call me as soon as you get this.’
He put the phone down. What the hell was he going to tell her?
He called Dr Rosengarten, insisting to the secretary he had to speak to him right now.
After several minutes on hold, listening to Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, Dr Rosengarten came on the line, sounding his usual hurried, irritable self.
‘The diagnosis you gave us about the sex of our baby,’ John said. ‘How certain are you that it is a girl?’
The obstetrician put him on hold again while he checked his notes, then came back on the line. ‘No question about it, Dr Klaesson. Your wife is having a girl.’
‘You couldn’t have made a mistake?’
There was a long, chilly silence. John waited, but the obstetrician said nothing.
‘In your diagnosis,’ John added, a little flustered, ‘is there any margin for error?’
‘No, Dr Klaesson, there is no margin for error. Anything else I can do for you and Mrs Klaesson?’
‘No – I – I guess. Thank you.’
John hung up, angered by Rosengarten’s arrogance. Then he tried Dettore once more. Still the voice mail. He rang both of Sally Kimberly’s numbers again but this time left no message. Then he rang Naomi.
‘John.’ Her voice sound strange, trembling. ‘Oh God, John, have you heard?’
‘Heard what?
‘You haven’t seen the news?’
‘I’ve been giving a lecture. What news?’
He heard the rest of her words only intermittently, as if he were catching some bulletin on a badly tuned radio station.
‘Dr Dettore. Helicopter. Into sea. Crashed. Dead.’
23
‘We have this eyewitness report from a yacht off the coast of New York State earlier today.’
John stared at the newsreader with his sharp suit and solemn face. Naomi sat beside him on the sofa, gripping his hand tightly. The camera cut to a static picture of a Bell JetRanger helicopter, identical to the one that had flown them to Dettore’s clinic.
A man’s voice, a clipped New England accent, came through, crackly and intermittent on a ship-to-shore radio.
‘Watched the…’ Sound lost then restored. ‘Flying low, just below the cloud ceiling…’ Sound lost again. ‘Just erupted into a ball of fire like a flying bomb…’ Sound lost again. ‘Then it came back and, oh God…’ His voice was choked. ‘Was horrible.’ Sound lost again. ‘Debris in the sky. Came down about three miles away from us. We headed right over…’ Sound lost again. ‘Nothing. Wasn’t anything there. Nothing at all. Just the eeriest feeling. Horrible sight, I tell you. Just gone. Gone.’
The picture of the helicopter was replaced with a photograph of the Serendipity Rose, which now became the backdrop behind the newsreader.
‘The billionaire scientist was returning to his offshore floating research laboratory and clinic, where he offered the prospect of designer babies for those able to afford his six-figure prices. Dr Dettore had this past weekend delivered a no-holds-barred paper to a Union of Concerned Scientists conference in Rome, in which he denounced the Vatican’s latest call for international regulations against experimentation on human embryos as a crime against humanity.’
The newsreader paused and the backdrop changed to a recent photograph of Dettore on a podium behind a bank of microphones.
‘No stranger to controversy, Dr Dettore has had his work compared to Hitler’s eugenics programme, and had featured on the front cover of Time magazine.’
John hit the mute button on the remote and stared grimly at the screen, feeling in a state of shock.
‘What do we do now, John?’
‘I called the clinic six times today, hoping I could speak to someone else – his colleague, Dr Leu. I got a number not in service message. I emailed twice. Both times the emails got bounced back, not able to be delivered.’
‘We have to get a second opinion.’
‘I spoke to Dr Rosengarten.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He was adamant he had not made a mistake.’
‘He’s hardly going to admit it, is he?’
‘No, but-’ He hesitated. Naomi, white as a sheet, looked terrible. How could he tell Naomi what Dr Annand had told him? That Dettore had most probably made a mistake, but not over the gender – over the entire embryo?
How could he tell her she might be pregnant with someone else’s child?
‘Why would a helicopter explode, John?’
‘I don’t know. Engines can go wrong – jet engines can blow up sometimes.’
‘The man said it was like a bomb.’
John stood up, walked the few paces across the small room to the Deco fireplace and looked at a photograph of Halley sitting in a toy police jeep, beaming happily. One of those rare moments of respite in his short little life. He felt angry, suddenly. Angry at Dettore for dying – irrational, he knew, but he didn’t care. Angry at the loss of the chance of the funding for his own research that Dettore had discussed with him. Angry at Dr Rosengarten. Angry at God for what he did to Halley. Angry for all the shitty hands he seemed to be picking up in life.
He heard what Naomi was saying; the implication was loud and clear.
Bomb.
There were plenty of crazy people out there. Fanatics who hated progress, who believed only their way was right. And irresponsible scientists, too, who believed the whole world was their laboratory and that they could do what they wanted, blow up small Pacific atolls, design generation after generation of biological weaponry, tamper with the germ line of the human species, all in the name of progress.
And in between were people who just wanted to live their lives. Some of them innocents like Halley, born into a living hell.