David Dun - Necessary Evil

"So I've got to live with you because I can't live without you. That's what you're saying. So what are the odds of an epidemic of some sort?"

"I have no idea." He paused. "Those guys were killing each other before the jet crashed, right?"

She nodded.

"There was a firefight in that plane."

"Okay," she said with a reluctant tone. "And you're going to say the grenade guy feared Tillman enough to die killing us-or just to keep a secret, or for some other damn reason. So we ought to be a lot more afraid of those guys who'll kill us instantly than a disease that will take time, and that we may not even have. That's your point?"

"Something like that."

For a time Jessie didn't say anything more. Finally, "What makes no sense is the private army. How did they know this jet would crash in these mountains?"

Kier shrugged.

"I think this decision making needs to follow democratic principles."

"I think that before I let you kill yourself we're going to have a serious fight."

"I've got a gun."

"That's my point. To win you'd have to use it."

He watched her bite her lower lip.

The square-hewn beams of Douglas fir that ran from the eaves to the ridgepole at the peak of Kier's cabin shone golden in the soft light of the propane lanterns. Simplicity gave the place an elegant look. A large oval carpet adorned the board floor. In the center of the carpet stood a black oak dining table that gleamed with innumerable coats of varnish. Six cane chairs surrounded the table. On the walls pine bookcases held an assortment of fiction, from Hemingway to modern thrillers, as well as books on all manner of biological subjects, a stack of Scientific American magazines, and a collection of National Geographic.

An old rocker was centrally located beside an irregularly shaped coffee table crafted from a redwood burl; a long-stemmed carved pipe with a pouch of tobacco lay on it beside a picture of a smiling brunette. On one wall next to the bookcases hung perhaps a hundred pictures of Indian kids, all in the mountains, all in camping settings. On another stretch of wall pencil sketches of native villages and landscapes were on display.

Jessie began pacing the moment they stepped in. ''How long do we dare stay here?"

"Right here? Only a few minutes. Underneath us is a cellar of sorts. We can stay there for an hour or two, then we gotta go. We can't risk them finding us."

"It's got to take them a while. The way we sneaked here, hiding the car, walking a half mile, and crawling through the damned brush-"

"Don't forget in a raging, deadly blizzard," he said with a sly smile-the first she had seen since the barn.

"How could I?" She and Kier had beaten a trail through the snow to the creek in back. Next, they had set about leaving tracks haphazardly behind the place. "I've frozen my ass off in it three times now."

While Jessie read over his shoulder Kier flipped through the laboratory binders, skimming only certain small sections of the voluminous work. Occasionally, he glanced at his watch, concerned about their pursuers.

"Waited as long as we dare," he said, finally rising to fill a pack with food.

Jessie continued flipping through the binders. "What do these small print tables in Volume One mean? Row after row of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs?"

"You're probably reading a decoded gene or segments of it." He finished in the kitchen and leaned the pack against the wall. "'A' stands for adenine, 'T' for thymine, 'G' for guanine, and 'C' for cytosine. Those four molecules, the nucleic acids, go together in pairs to make a DNA strand."

"Do all vets know this stuff?"

"Certainly the ones who keep up a little on their biology do."

Kier knew the basics cold. A gene was a unit of DNA. Each gene specified the sequence of amino acids that defined a specified protein. Each gene was therefore responsible for the production of a unique protein, proteins being the building blocks of the body.

DNA was structured like a ladder twisted in a corkscrew shape. Each rung on the ladder was a nucleotide base pair. A nucleotide base pair can be adenine/thymine or cytosine/ guanine.

"Everything genetic is determined by the order of those four paired nucleic acids. You could safely say that the order and placement of the nucleic acids in your genes account for your good looks."

"I think we can dispense with the compliments."

Kier did his best to give her a look of mystified innocence.

"Look, I don't mean to be rude, but-"

"You're still pissed about the telephone."

"I'm pissed because I don't think you take me seriously. There is this definite undercurrent that you're the damned chief and I'm the Indian."

"I'm not going to let you kill yourself, taking off into a blizzard trying to find a phone booth."

"So either I've got to do what you want or shoot you. I know. Let's get back to genetics."

"Okay. Now, the DNA of a virus has, say, tens of thousands of base pairs. A bacteria like tuberculosis probably has one or two million. The plans to the whole of every creature down to even bacteria and the lowly virus are in the form of these nucleic acid pairs. These guys found a new way to read those blueprints. On a human they have to read three billion nucleic acid base pairs to fully map all forty-six chromosomes. The government's Human Genome Project is mapping our DNA, but Tillman's group did that years ago. Some other private groups have rough maps. But Tillman's done a lot more than that."

"How did you get all that out of the fine print?"

Kier came over and put his finger in the text to a spot he had marked by dog-earing the page. "You see this paragraph where they're talking about deciphering genetic code-

'' 'The scanning, tunneling, atomic force microscopy working in combination with the Cray Sequencing Program produces outstanding results, accurately sequencing one hundred million base pairs per hour. Our early autosequencing technology sequenced only 100,000 base pairs per day. Methodologies available to the government still produce only about 100,000 base pairs per year for each electrophoretic processor.' "

"What's that mean?"

"They're talking, I think, about how fast they can read a strand of DNA using new electron microscope technology, combined with some processing technology they developed. This is phenomenally fast if it's what I think it is. Imagine a horse and buggy and the space shuttle. That's about the difference between what these guys say they have and what the rest of the world has."

"But what does it do for them?"

"If they can map a human's chromosomes down to each of three billion nucleotide pairs in thirty hours… If they knew which genes did what… But whether they would know that, I don't know.. "He trailed off.

"They're doing the same thing as the Human Genome Project. Right?"

"It begins with that But it will take everybody else years to do a crude job on one hypothetical human. Tillman can do an individual human, distinguishing him from all other humans, in about thirty hours. That's phenomenal."

"So they're figuring out what makes each human unique," she said. "So why are people killing each other over this?"

"You want a wild guess? All right. But remember we're speculating here."

"Yeah. Yeah."

"The whole idea behind this research is to figure out the function of each human gene. Knowing the genome map is only the first, tiny step. To really know enough to alter a person's genetic makeup intelligently you've got to understand the function of each gene and how they interrelate."

"I've read Time magazine too. If I knew how to alter genes I could, let's see, grow human organs, cure cancer, make designer babies, fix birth defects. I guess if I really had that ability I'd about own the world, and that's maybe what the guy with the diary meant, when he said he hadn't made Tillman God, but he had put him at God's right hand. But that's a lot of ifs."