Once inside the doors I relocked them by slipping the catches back and went across the reception area to the door labelled RESEARCH 2. The air was cool and scented faintly of floor polish. The clock stood at 6.12. I took my identity card from my wallet and slotted it in the decoding unit. The power, of course, was off, so I flicked the battery switch. A green light came on and the door opened with a buzzing noise. Retrieving my card I entered, switching on all the emergency power. The door closed behind me and dim lights flickered on along the corridor. Hidden air conditioners began to hum. I went down the passage, turned right and descended to the door labelled SECURE UNIT. My card opened this door too. Antiseptic white light flooded down from panels in the ceiling. I felt stale and grubby as I walked along the inner corridor to my room, the polished lino sucking at the flecks of tar under my shoes.
Everything was as I had left it two days earlier when I went on leave. My desk, chair, books were all in their usual places. The air here was cold and I switched off the circulator. Partly from habit, partly to keep warm, I put on a white coat over my shirtsleeves and went to the research lab.
All the security devices had been no protection against the Effect. Every biological specimen and experimental animal had disappeared, even Atkinson’s collection of insects, the Drosophila melanogaster on which all his research had been based. The dead ones, of course, were still in their transparent plastic cases. The dead had survived. I wrinkled my nose at the laboratory-formaldehyde smell and sat down in front of Perrin’s half-completed three-dimensional genetic model. To the left there was the great double helix of the Watson–Crick DNA structure, spotlit by a special lamp like an icon in the sanctuary of a temple dedicated to mysterious rituals. Which, in a sense, it was. I had felt sure that Perrin worshipped it. He had claimed to be working towards a new understanding of the relationship between the ribonucleic acid molecule and the chromosome evolutionary model which he was constructing. He spoke of this in almost religious terms, a mystery revealed only to one who had been prepared to sacrifice. ‘Nobody finds out anything without sacrifice,’ he once said, pompously, just after I had begun to work here. It was one of his catchphrases. He was not a very sympathetic character. Perhaps none of us were. We didn’t have to be. I suppose we all had our eccentricities. As a research assistant I was very involved in what we called Section 2 Special Project, of which Perrin’s work was a part.
It would not have been easy to explain to an outsider what we were trying to do, even if the project had been taken off the secret list. Joanne thought I was treating her badly because I was so involved in the work and yet unable to tell her anything about it. But I was sure we were on the verge of a breakthrough in one of the basic problems of biomolecular genetic research and we were going into areas which strictly speaking were marginally beyond what we were supposed to be doing and for me that was very exciting and challenging and all-absorbing. I was the youngest member of the team, in my late twenties, and it was a chance I might not get again.
Perrin was investigating dormant genes. It had been discovered that within all species of living creatures there were some individual members—very rare, about one in a million for human beings—whose genes contained an inactive, apparently useless ‘pair’, chromosomes without any discernible function. Scientists had been trying to activate these. Atkinson had been using fruit flies, Drosophila, because of their simple genetic structure and rapid rate of reproduction. Perrin had extended the experiments to include mice, rats, dogs and rhesus monkeys. We were using radioactivity plus low-frequency sound waves. The problem was to energise the dormant genes without destroying the others at the same time or producing lethal factors which would cause the organism to self-destruct. Nature had been very careful here. A whole complex of natural prohibitions existed which ensured that mutants and abnormalities failed to reproduce at a basic cellular level, or aborted, or were suicidal, or fell mysteriously into recessive or lethal phases, or, if they survived at all, turned out to be sterile. And usually the radiation would produce abnormalities or sterility.
Perrin wanted to use the sound waves to induce a ‘resonating effect’ on the ribonucleic chains which would confuse the ‘alarm systems’ and at the same time protect the basic proteins from the bad effects of the radioactivity being used to activate the dormant genes.
All this research had originally sprung from simple experiments in stockbreeding, always well funded in New Zealand. Officially we were hoping to make farm animals genetically more efficient and productive. We had been given rather more remote and secret facilities when we started using radioactive isotopes. The government didn’t want us pestered by some unholy alliance of anti-nuclear protestors and animal lovers. At least that was the official, or rather, unofficial, reason for all the security. But of course secrecy had bred secrecy, and it had become difficult for a research assistant such as myself to find out, to know exactly, the full range of activities even in our own department. We were investigating the dormant genes ‘because they were there’. It was pure research. Nobody knew why dormant genes existed. We were going to shake them awake from the thousand million years in which they’d mysteriously coasted through evolution as an unworking elite. It would be an achievement beyond Rutherford’s dissection of the structure of the atom, which had been started in an even more rudimentary way in a cellar in Christchurch.
Naturally we did not trumpet our project, not even to our funding agencies. There was a general feeling that they would stop us. As Atkinson had remarked with his usual dryness, we would be poor scientists if we could confuse the incredibly subtle and complex alarm systems inside proteins, yet not be able to do the same for the alarm systems of a few thick-headed politicians and bureaucrats.
I sat in the empty laboratory staring at the DNA spiral. It was a tangled helter-skelter of different coloured plastic marbles curving round in chains of partners, held in midair by steel rods on a frame; a frozen dance, infinitely elegant. I remembered Perrin standing by it one day, when I’d said, ‘What do you think will happen?’—meaning, when we resonate the cells at the correct frequency to wake the dormant genes. He had peered at me, resettling his steel-rimmed spectacles on his nose with his forefinger.
‘Evolution,’ he said; ‘the next phase. A quantum leap. We have some idea. The timing can’t be accidental.’
‘Timing?’
‘If there’s intelligent life out there’—gesturing not at Auckland but up at the universe—‘it probably follows the same pattern as ours. Nuclear physicists develop the ability to destroy the planet. We risk being destroyed because our moral and ethical development has lagged behind too far. We’re moral cretins playing with hydrogen bombs. But the odds are, that every civilisation which can unravel the atomic nucleus will also unravel the protein chains of evolution at the same time.’ He paused, and put his hand on the DNA model. ‘Nuclear fallout leads to radioactive mutations. The clue for waking up the dormant genes. It’s a coding system. They’re there to save us. From ourselves.’
He knocked the DNA structure with his knuckles, gently, making it vibrate.
‘But we can’t be sure,’ I said. I could hardly grasp the full implications of what he’d been saying. Perhaps he was trying out an elaborate patronising joke on me, I thought. They sometimes did. No, he was serious. I had seen him reach out his hand and knock on the next billion years; the chains of protoplasm trembled. I had been thinking of unravelling a secret from the past, as Watson and Crick had done with DNA. Ideas about the future had not occupied much space in my mind. A quantum leap. He was supremely assured. He looked at me, his glasses reflecting the gleam of the spotlight.