Peter James - Perfect People

God, I hope he has made a mistake.

And there’s something else that’s on my mind. Sally Kimberly. He says she told him we were friends. That’s rubbish. It’s true that we worked together, and normally I get along with most people. But she was a bitch. Hard as nails. We disliked each other intensely and made no bones about it.

In fact, there are very few people I’ve ever disliked quite so much as Sally Kimberly.

And now her lipstick is on John’s face.

Naomi was awake; John could hear the faint crushing sound of her eyelashes as she blinked. The light from his alarm radio seemed intense, bathing the room with a spectral blue glow that was irking him. Outside in the distance a siren skirled, a familiar mournful solo, the discordant music of a Los Angeles night.

His head was pounding. He needed water, tablets, sleep. Desperately needed sleep. He swung his legs out of the bed, carried his empty glass to the bathroom, ran the cold tap, swallowed two Tylenol and padded back into the room.

‘What’s going to happen to us?’ Naomi said suddenly as he got back into bed.

John felt for her hand, found it, squeezed it, but there was no pressure back. ‘Perhaps we should think about termination – an abortion?’

‘It never mattered to me, John, whether it was a boy or a girl. All I wanted was for our child to be healthy – I would have been perfectly happy not knowing the sex, like a lot of other people, just knowing that he or she is normal. I don’t want an abortion, that would be ridiculous – you can’t make a decision to abort your baby because you wanted a boy and you are getting a girl.’

There was an uncomfortable silence. The issue was far deeper than that and they both knew it.

‘Ships have communication problems sometimes,’ he said. ‘They rely on satellites and can’t always get a link – I’ll try again in the morning.’

There was another siren out there now, and the bass horn blasts of a fire truck.

‘I don’t want you to have an abortion,’ he said. ‘Not unless it’s-’

She waited some moments and then she prompted, ‘Unless it’s what?’

‘There are some tests that can be done now in labs here in the States – they can pick up all kinds of stuff about the foetus.’

She snapped the bedside light on and sat up, angrily. ‘This isn’t some disposable product, John. This isn’t some lab experiment in a Petri dish or a bell jar – some – some fruit fly or something.’ She pulled the duvet up and crossed her arms protectively over her belly. ‘This is my child – our child – that’s growing inside me. I’m going to love her, or him, no matter how he – it – turns out. I’m going to love this creature whether she grows to four feet tall or seven feet. I’m going to love her whether she’s a genius or retarded.’

‘Darling, that isn’t-’

She interrupted him. ‘You brought up this whole idea in the first place and you talked me into it. I’m not blaming you; I came to this with my eyes wide open; I’m as responsible for the decision as you are. What I’m saying is that I’m not walking away from this. Maybe whatever is going on – Dettore screwing up on the gender – maybe this is Mother Nature’s way of keeping some kind of a lid on the sanity of the world. I think the day mothers start aborting their babies at the first sign that they’re not turning out how they expect them to be, that’s the start of a very slippery slope.’

John sat up too. ‘If you’d known about Halley – about his condition – before he was born – would you have gone ahead and brought him into the world knowing what future he faced?’

She said nothing. Then, turning to look at her, he saw a tear trickling down her cheek. He dabbed it with his handkerchief. Her face was all clenched up in misery.

‘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?’

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.