Donald Westlake - Smoke

"So far," Merrill agreed. "But it is about to become your area of expertise. Every cell of your body contains a complete strand of your DNA, the chain of information — the instruction manual, if you will — that went into constructing you in the first place. Genetic scientists — which is what you two are about to become — have begun to pick apart that chain of information, the human genome, and have learned how to isolate sections of it for study. The Human Genome Project is financed by the United States government, through the National Institutes of Health. They tried to patent a few genes a couple of years ago, but the patent office turned them down, on the basis that they couldn't describe what the things they'd discovered were good for. Read Cook-Deegan on the subject. So far, they've—"

He broke off, and frowned at them. "Shouldn't one of you," he asked, "be taking notes?"

Instantly, David and Peter both lunged into their inner jacket pockets, but then Peter said, "David, I'll do it," and David subsided, smoothing his jacket again, watching Merrill Fullerton, wondering where the man was headed, convinced that somehow or other, wherever this would lead, he and Peter would hate it. And what then?

"The genetic scientists," Merrill was saying, "can study your genes and tell you the percentage of likelihood that a child of yours will get Huntington's disease. Or one form of Alzheimer's. Or cystic fibrosis. They're working to identify the piece of chain that indicates breast cancer. Or homosexuality. Or alcoholism. Eventually, if it all turns out the way they expect, the Genome Project will be able to describe the probable health history and time and cause of death for every human being in the world, in embryo, in the womb. In the first trimester. If Junior is going to be the runt of the litter, you'll know in plenty of time to off him." Merrill Fullerton's smile was as thin as his eyes were cold. "What a healthy race we're going to be," he said. "The Aryan dream come true at last."

"It sounds horrible," David said.

"And marvelous," Merrill told him. "Horrible and marvelous. Knowledge. How much we want it, and how we're afraid of it. You, for instance, might want to know all about my future health history, and I might want to know all about yours, particularly if I were thinking of hiring you or marrying you or going into business with you, but neither of us would be comfortable seeing our own genetic report card."

Peter said, "Is this science, or science fiction?"

"Fact," Merrill answered. "You'll read the literature, of which there isn't as yet much. And you'll see that, like your friend here, the scientific part of the project is already well hemmed in by emotional and moral and ethical doubts. Will the project break the DNA code entirely, and then will the government do its best to keep us from that knowledge, for our own good? In a survey not long ago, eleven percent of the respondents said they would abort a fetus if they learned the child carried the gene for obesity. You can see that this is not going to be a simple ride."

"Not at all," Peter said. He was on, David noticed, the second page of his notebook.

"Whatever the government may do," Merrill told them, "to hem in this new knowledge, to confine it the way they confined the information about the atom bomb for so long, I want it. Already they're shrouding the project in secrecy, and I need to penetrate that shroud. I want the information, and I want to be able to lead the research, or at the very least influence the research into areas of interest to me. "

"I'm sorry," Peter said, tapping his pen against the notebook. "I don't see what all this has to do with you at all."

"You don't?" Merrill smiled. "I want you both to prepare yourselves on this subject," he said. "I want you to know as much about it as the scientists in the project themselves. I want your invisible man in their laboratories, in their discussions, in their diaries and workbooks, bringing back to you every bit of information they have. I want to guide their research away from breast cancer and chronic liver disease, matters that I don't give one shit about."

It was astonishing, David thought, how through this whole tirade the woman just sat there, beside Merrill Fullerton, and read her book.

Merrill leaned forward, his eyes now hot ice. This was the gist, at last. "I want the code for lung cancer," he told them. "I want the code for emphysema. I want the code for congestive heart failure. I want the codes that tobacco taps into. And then I want a reeducation program, aimed directly at our consumers, not just here, but around the world. Abort the lung cancer cases! Abort the emphysema cases! Never let the little bastards see the light of day!"

David and Peter both blinked. Merrill sat back, as though after an orgasm, and smiled. "We've spent the last forty years," he said, "trying to make cigarettes safe for the human race, and we failed. We can spend the next forty years making the human race safe for cigarettes!"

A flunky informed them, midway through the interminable mumbling graveside ceremony on its breezy knoll with its one old oak tree and its green views of Connecticut and the purple haze over New York far away, that they would not be traveling back to the city with Merrill Fullerton and the woman of mystery, but in a different car. "Why am I not surprised?" Peter said, sounding peevish.

The flunky shrugged — what did he care? — and said, "You'll be in car nineteen," and went away.

David felt relieved, and said so. "Peter, you don't want to travel with that man again. God knows what he'll say next."

"He's already said too much," Peter agreed. But then he looked past David and murmured in his ear, "People are leaving."

What? David looked toward the grave, and the mound of earth next to it covered by that horrible Easter-basket-green tinsel fake grass they always use, a sort of Hawaiian welcome mat to the next world, and the minister was still mumbling over there, people were still standing around in attitudes of grief or boredom or paralysis, the service was certainly still going on.

But then he turned his head the other way, down the slope behind them, and he saw a car discreetly purr away along the gravel road toward the exit, leaving the line of waiting limos and cars, in which there were several gaps, suggesting that other cars had already departed. Between here and there, two women and a man, all in black, picked their way quietly down over the grass toward the cars. An exodus had begun.

"We've done our part," Peter murmured in David's ear, like Satan suggesting a new and interesting sin. "This Fullerton doesn't want to talk to us anymore, and we never even knew the other one."

"You're right," David whispered, and at once they faded back from the oval of mourners, turned in their pale gray suits, and headed for the cars.

They never did find car nineteen, because standing next to car eleven was George Clapp, who grinned when he saw them and said, "My doctors. Best doctors in the world. You wanna go back to town?"

David said, "We're supposed to be in car nineteen."

"Oh, don't worry bout that," George told them. "These systems always break down, people work it out. Climb aboard here, I'm ready to call it a day myself."

Car eleven was not a limo, but was what was known as a town car, being an ordinary sedan, but with black leather seats. David and Peter slid into the back, George shut the door behind them, and as they grinned at one another and looked up the hill at the people still standing there, outlined beside the oak tree against the sky as though the passing of Jack Fullerton the Fourth were meaningful in some way, George trotted around to get behind the wheel and drive them out of there.