Charles Sheffield - Aftermath

“Look at that,” I said. “There you have a telomere. One of yours, but of course any vertebrate animal’s telomere would look the same.”

It helps when you have seen something a thousand times before. Seth was staring at a display of the end units of a DNA molecule’s curved double helix, but I could see from the expression on his face that to him it was a meaningless jumble of blurry dots. In fact, adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine molecules have quite different structures, and their electron density distributions as seen by a scanning probe microscope are readily distinguished by an experienced eye.

“See,” I said. “We start from the end there. The same sequence repeats, over and over. T-T-A-G-G-G. And again. T-T-A-G-G-G. When you were born, that would repeat about eight hundred times. The number of repeating sequences gets less all your life. Now let’s count.” Under my control, the scanning probe traveled steadily along the molecular chain. I was counting out loud, for Seth’s benefit rather than my own. I already saw the general picture.

“I hope you’re not expectin’ me to learn to do that,” Seth said. “All those gizmos look the same to me.”

We were moving along the chromosome into the subtelomeric region. The regular repeating pattern T-T-A-G-G-G was breaking down.

I froze the display again. “Let me make a guess,” I said. “You were due to be given a shot of telomerase stimulator in less than two months.”

“How’d you know that?”

“The telomere is quite a bit shorter than it should be. Not dangerously so, but it needs rebuilding. Now let’s check the sperm cell.”

It was of course haploid, containing only one half of his genetic code. The other half required for a complete diploid individual came from the mother. However, each chromosome of the sperm was intact. Its telomere should have been completely rebuilt, which meant that the nucleotide sequence ought to repeat about fifteen hundred times.

This time I did not bother to count for Seth’s benefit. I could see where random elements began to enter the sequence. The telomere was far too short, no more than a few hundred repetitions of the same pattern of the six nucleotide bases.

“So I’m in trouble,” Seth said when I explained to him what we were looking at.

“Not at all. You just need to monitor this for yourself and learn when you need a telomerase inhibitor or stimulator.”

“I already told you, everythin’ looks the same to me. It’s one big garbage can. I’d never learn to read it, and there’s no way I could carry all this display stuff around with me.”

“You won’t have to do either of those things.” I had made my point that he was dependent on me — more than ever, because he was close to needing treatment. “I’m going to package a set of wet chemistry tests for you. Then all you’ll need to do is run through them with a skin sample and a semen or menstrual blood sample, and from the output you’ll know what treatment you need.

Making telomerase inhibitor and telomerase stimulator isn’t hard for any biochemical supply house. I’ll write that out for you.”

“Great.”

I went across to where he was sitting. “But before I start,” I said, “I think we need to talk.”

He didn’t gape or frown or offer some other bogus pretense of lack of understanding. As I say, in his own disgusting way Seth Parsigian deserved lots of respect.

“I’ve been thinkin that, too,” he said. “Of course, before it was worth talkin’ I needed to see evidence that you could do something for me. Now you’ve just given me that.”

“Should I summarize how things stand, or will you?”

“Let me take a stab at my side, then you have a go at yours. Why don’t you sit down — over there. I’d hate to have to shoot you.”

From where I stood in front of him, I could, just conceivably, have made a dive for the gun. He was not to know that such a move on my part was most unlikely. My skin already contains a satisfactory number of apertures.

I went to sit down on a stool by the bench, and he continued, “Let’s talk about what I want. I think that one’s easy. I want the package you say you know how to make, something enough to last me a couple of years ’til things start gettin’ back to normal, an’ somethin’ like the Institute’s back in business. Actually, I want at least three of them packages. And I want you to explain exactly how to work ’em, so I can tell the other two.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You surprised? You shouldn’t be. I could never have got to the Q-5 facility and yanked you out of there without help. We got common interests, me and the other Lazarus Club members. We’re all different, an’ I got my own life to live, but chances are good that I’ll need their help again. I scratch their backs, they scratch mine. You have a problem with that?”

“Not in the slightest. The real tragedy of the commons is that it need never have happened. A logical basis for group-level altruism in terms of individual genetic advantage was provided more than forty years ago.”

“That right? I guess it didn’t make it yet to West Virginia, ’cause I’ve no idea what you’re talkin’ about. Anyway, now you know what I want. What do you want?”

I had to be careful. Some of what I wanted was absolutely none of his business. It was also more than he could possibly offer.

“I want to vanish. I want to disappear from the face of the Earth, as completely as if I had never existed. As a matter of fact, that was my plan had I not been caught and sentenced. Some distant isle, some quiet beach.”

“That right?” His tone implied not skepticism, but indifference. That I was speaking the exact truth was not relevant.

“Now, of course, the matter is much more difficult. I know that I will be hunted. It may not happen at once, but it will surely happen. When the time comes, I cannot afford to have left a trail. After you and I separate, I don’t want you to know where I’m going. I don’t want anyone to know where I’m going.”

“That’s fine with me. I don’t work for judicial control, it’s not my job to do theirs for ’em. But we hafta work out the mechanics. Once you make me the telomod kits, you’re a free man. But if you don’t want me to know where you are, I can’t just leave you here.”

“Of course not.”

“So what do we do?”

“The place that you’re going to meet your two friends. Where is it?”

My fishing was no more successful than it had been a few days earlier. Seth smiled and said, “I don’t recognize a need to know there, as my old spook buddies tend to say. Why are you askin’?”

“Is it in a city, or somewhere off in the country? That’s all I want to know. If it’s in the city, I don’t want to go there. If it’s out in the wilderness, that would be fine with me. I’d give you your telomod kits and take off from there.”

“Could be. Let me think about that.”

“I assume that we would require ground transportation. “

It was more fishing on my part, but Seth’s casual, “Don’t worry your head none about that. I’ll find whatever we need,” told me that the information was not particularly useful.

“Let me think about it,” he said. “It might work, you goin’ with me. I’ll be back at dinnertime, and we can talk things over some more.”