Daniel sighed as he watched Stephanie work. Although he felt conflicted over her long-term contribution, there was no question that she was needed in the short term. There were only eleven days left before Ashley Butler’s arrival on the island, and in that time, they had to develop the dopamine-producing neurons from the senator’s fibroblasts to treat the man. They were making progress with the HTSR and the nuclear transfer already done, but there was a long way to go. Stephanie’s expertise with cellular manipulation was sorely needed, and there just wasn’t time to replace her.
Stephanie could feel Daniel’s eyes on her back. She recognized that her sense of guilt and her confusion about the implications of her family’s role in his being attacked made her acutely sensitive, yet he was not acting like himself. She could only guess what it must have been like getting beaten up, but she had expected him to recover more quickly. Instead, he was still acting distant from her in many subtle ways, and although they continued to sleep in the same bed, there had been no intimacy whatsoever. Such behavior raised an old concern of hers that Daniel was either incapable or unmotivated to offer the kind of emotional support she felt she needed, particularly in periods of stress, no matter what the cause or whose fault it was.
Stephanie had followed Daniel’s suggestions to the letter, so that couldn’t be the explanation for his behavior. Despite an aching urge to call and confront her brother, she didn’t. And on the relatively frequent conversations she had with her mother, she made it a point to stress that she and Daniel were in Nassau to work, and they were working very hard, which was certainly true. To back it up, she said they had not gone to the beach to swim even once, which was also true. In addition, on multiple occasions she had emphasized that they would be finished soon and would come home about March twenty-fifth to a financially stable company. She had studiously avoided bringing up the subject of her brother with her mother, although on a call the previous day, she had finally yielded to temptation. “Has Tony asked about me?” she had asked in as casual a voice as she could manage.
“Of course, dear,” Thea had said. “Your brother worries about you and asks about you all the time.”
“What exact words does he use?”
“I don’t remember the exact words. He misses you. He just wants to know when you are coming home.”
“And what do you say in return?”
“I tell him just what you tell me. Why? Should I say something different?”
“Of course not,” Stephanie had remarked. “Assure him we’ll be home in less than two weeks, and I can’t wait to see him. And tell him our work is going extremely well.”
In many respects, Stephanie was thankful about how busy she and Daniel were. It reduced her opportunity to anguish over emotional issues as well as lessened her chance to question the appropriateness of treating Butler. Her misgivings about the affair had increased, thanks to the assault on Daniel and her need to turn a blind eye to the depravity of the Wingate principals. Paul Saunders was by far the worst. She felt he was conscienceless, devoid of even rudimentary ethics, and dumb. The compiled results of the Wingate stem-cell therapy program, which he had touted, were a bad joke. They were merely a collection of descriptions of individual cases and their subjective outcomes. There was not one iota of scientific method involved, and the most disturbing part was that Paul didn’t seem to realize it or care.
Spencer Wingate was another story, but he was more annoying than scary like the mad pretend-scientist Paul. Still, Stephanie would not have liked to be caught unaccompanied in Spencer’s house, as his persistent invitations proposed. The problem was that his lechery was bolstered by an ego that could not fathom his overtures being rejected. At first, Stephanie had tried to be reasonably polite with her regrets, but eventually she had to be blunt with her refusals, especially after it seemed Daniel was indifferent. Some of Spencer’s more blatantly randy invitations had come in Daniel’s company, with no response from him.
As if the personalities and behavior of these maverick infertility doctors wasn’t enough to make Stephanie question the propriety of working at the clinic, there was the issue of the origin of the human oocytes. She tried to make discreet inquiries but was rebuffed by everyone except the lab technician, Mare. Even Mare was hardly forthcoming, but at least she said the gametes came from the egg room run by Cindy Drexler, located in the basement. When Stephanie asked for clarification about what the egg room was, Mare clammed up and told her to ask Megan Finnigan, the lab supervisor. Unfortunately Megan had already echoed Paul by saying the egg source was a trade secret. When Stephanie approached Cindy Drexler, she was politely told that all egg inquiries had to be directed to Dr. Saunders.
Switching tactics, Stephanie had tried talking to several of the young women who worked in the cafeteria. They were friendly and outgoing until Stephanie tried to turn the conversation around to their marital status, at which point they became shy and evasive. When Stephanie then tried to talk about their pregnancies, they became withdrawn and reticent, which only fanned Stephanie’s curiosity. As far as Stephanie was concerned, one didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to guess what was going on, and despite Daniel’s edict to the contrary, she intended to prove it to herself. Her idea was that, armed with such information, she would anonymously inform the Bahamian authorities after she, Daniel, and Butler had long since departed.
What Stephanie needed to do was get into the egg room. Unfortunately, she had not had an opportunity, as busy as she and Daniel had been, although over the next few hours, that was going to change. The current egg she was fusing with one of Butler’s HTSR-altered fibroblasts had been a replacement for one of the original ten eggs that Paul Saunders had supplied. The replaced egg had failed to divide after nuclear transfer. Honoring their warranty, Paul had provided an eleventh egg. The other original nine eggs were dividing fine after receiving their new nuclei. Some were now at the five-day point and beginning to form blastocysts.
The plan that Stephanie and Daniel had devised was to create ten separate stem-cell lines, each comprising cellular clones of Ashley Butler. All ten would contribute cells to be differentiated into dopamine-producing nerve cells. The tenfold redundancy was to serve as a safety net, since only one of the cell lines would ultimately be used to treat the senator.
Perhaps later that afternoon, or more likely in the morning, Stephanie would begin the process of harvesting the multipotential stem cells from the forming blastocysts, but until then she would have some free time. The only problem would be getting away from Daniel but staying within the safety of the Wingate Clinic, and thanks to his emotional detachment from her, she didn’t think that would be an insurmountable problem, although outside the clinic, he refused to let her out of his sight.
“How did the fusion go?” Daniel called out from where he was sitting.
“Looks good,” Stephanie said, peering at the construct under the lens of a microscope. The oocyte now had a new nucleus with a full complement of chromosomes. Following a process that no one yet understood, the egg would now begin mysteriously reprogramming the nucleus from its duties as the controller of an adult skin cell back to a primordial state. Within hours, the construct would mimic a recently fertilized egg. To initiate the conversion, Stephanie carefully transferred the artificially altered oocyte into the first of several activation mediums.