proving that high intelligence does not necessarily correlate with good
table manners.
“Silky,” Bobby said. “Simple name. A cat name. Silky.”
As we ate pizza and drank beer, the three flickering candles provided
barely enough light for me to scan the pages of yellow lined tablet
paper on which my father had written a concise account of the
activities at Wyvern, the unanticipated developments that had spiraled
into catastrophe, and the extent of my mother’s involvement. Although
Dad wasn’t a scientist and could only recount-largely in layman’s
terms-what my mother had told him, there was a wealth of information in
the document he had left for me.” ‘A little delivery boy,”‘ I said.
“That’s what Lewis Stevenson said to me last night when I asked what
had changed him from the man he’d once been. ‘A little delivery boy
that wouldn’t die.” He was talking about a retrovirus. Apparently, my
mother theorized a new kind of retrovirus . . . with the selectivity
of a retrotransposon.”
When I looked up from Dad’s pages, Sasha and Bobby were staring at me
blank-eyed.
He said, “Orson probably knows what You’re talking about, bro, but I
dropped out of college.”
“I’m a deejay,” Sasha said.
“And a good one,” Bobby said.
“Thank You.”
“Though You play too much Chris Isaak,” he added.
This time lightning didn’t step down the sky but dropped straight and
fast, like a blazing express elevator carrying a load of high
explosives, which detonated when it slammed into the earth.
The entire peninsula seemed to leap, and the house shook, and rain like
a shower of blast debris rattled across the roof.
Glancing at the windows, Sasha said, “Maybe they won’t like the rain.
Maybe they’ll stay away.”
I reached into the pocket of the hanging on my chair and drew the
Glock.
I placed it on the table where I could get at it more quickly, and I
used Sasha’s trick with the paper napkin to conceal it.
“Mostly in clinical trials, scientists have been treating lots of
illnesses -AIDS, cancer, inherited diseases-with various gene
therapies.
The idea is, if the patient has certain defective genes or maybe lacks
certain genes altogether, You replace the bad genes with working copies
or add the missing genes that will make his cells better at fighting
disease. There’ve been encouraging results.
A growing number of modest successes. And failures, too, unpleasant
surprises.”
Bobby said, “There’s always a Godzilla. Tokyo’s humming along, all
happy and prosperous one minute-and the next minute, You’ve got giant
lizard feet stamping everything flat.”
“The problem is getting the healthy genes into the patient.
Mostly they use crippled viruses to carry the genes into the cells.
Most of these are retroviruses.”
“Crippled?” Bobby asked.
“It means they can’t reproduce. That way they’re no threat to the
body.
Once they carry the human gene into the cell, they have the ability to
neatly splice it into the cell’s chromosomes.”
“Delivery boys,” Bobby said.
“And once they do their job,” Sasha said, “they’re supposed to die?”
“Sometimes they don’t go easily,” I said. “They can cause inflammation
or serious immune responses that destroy the viruses and the cells into
which they delivered genes. So some researchers have been studying
ways to modify retroviruses by making them more like retrotransposons,
which are bits of the body’s own DNA that can already copy and slot
themselves into chromosomes.”
“Here comes Godzilla,” Bobby told Sasha.
She said, “Snowman, how do You know all this crap? You didn’t get it
by looking at those pages for two minutes.”
“You tend to find the driest research papers interesting when You know
they could save your life,” I said. “If anyone can find a way to
replace my defective genes with working copies, my body will be able to
produce the enzymes that repair the ultraviolet damage to my DNA.”
Bobby said, “Then You wouldn’t be the Nightcrawler anymore.”
“Goodbye freakhood,” I agreed.
Above the noisy drumming of the rain on the roof came the patter of
something running across the back porch.
We looked toward the sound in time to see a large rhesus leap up from
the porch floor onto the windowsill over the kitchen sink.