“Goodbye, Hans,” she said, and snapped the phone shut. Annie touched her hand, almost shyly, almost as if she didn’t really mean for Elizabeth to have gone through with it. “You okay?”
Elizabeth nodded. She looked around as her heart sank. The crowd at the cafe’ had thinned. It was near dusk and a mist was rising from the lake. Gulls and ducks splashed in for landings near moored boats and the last ferry was tying up at the quay. All at once Elizabeth wanted to be home. “You did the right thing,” said Annie.
“I know,” she lied.
“You keep telling yourself that, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” said Elizabeth. For the moment, she meant it and believed it. Fiercely. How long her resolve would last, though-years, months or minutesshe hadn’t the faintest idea.
WHITE SANDS-THE FOUNTAIN COMPOUND
Outside the faceless sprawl of government buildings, a layer of snow lay on the mesquite bushes. The guards were zipping up their parkas and hunkering closer to the fires dancing out of the empty fifty-five… gallon drums scattered around the perimeter. There was more security today than the Fountain Compound had ever seen, and more vehicles-Humvees, Avis and Hertz four-wheel-drives, even a mud encrusted Lincoln Town Car, as well as an Army Cobra helicopter, its plexiglass blister shrouded in protective canvas. Inside the largest Fountain building, in the largest of the briefing rooms, Frederick Wolfe was holding court in lab whites, his spidery silhouette drifting in the twilight of flickering video images. Before him sat a half-dozen scientists of high rank and even higher clearance, and as many military officers, none of whom, save for Oscar Henderson, was in uniform. “As we all know,” Wolfe was saying, in a voice so calm, so devoid of emotion that it sent a chill through the room, “nothing can be achieved without the ability to reunify a severed spinal column. That’s always been the barrier, impenetrable, unscalable. That’s square one of what we need to accomplishreversal of a complete transection of the human spine.” He directed his laser-pointer toward a high-resolution video screen, which showed an anesthetized white rat in clinical close-up. A quick incision laid open its shaved back, revealing the spine from tail to shoulders. Surgical scissors slipped beneath the white thread of nerve and bone, and the spine was unceremoniously snipped in two. Several of the men, including the battlehardened, flinched audibly. Henderson’s deep-set eyes lit up in anticipation. Nearby, Beatrice Jance watched from the shadows, every muscle frozen. She neither looked away nor winced, despite the pitiful spurt of blood and fluid. In her five decades as a neuroscientist, she had seen far worse. What shone in Beatrice’s eyes was different from the visiting officers’ revulsion or Henderson’s unseemly rapture. It was of such preternatural intensity that under more ordinary circumstances and in a lighted room it would have turned every head. But no one was looking at Beatrice; all eyes were on the screen. “Admittedly, our methods were crude at first,” Wolfe went on. “But the fact is that any attempt at reconnection until quite recently was both crude and in vain.
He gestured toward his grandson, Alex, seated at a bank of cornputers and image generators linked to the screen. Alex punched his keyboard and the picture switched to a microscopic shot of the severed spine, the cut end tipped toward the camera. “Even a small mammal’s spine is composed of an immensely delicate and complicated network of bone, fluid, membrane and nerve bundles. Worse, once cut, the spine tends to self-destruct around the breach, compounding the problem. It’s as if nature is programmed to finish the job and put the individual down permanently, to save an unnecessary burden on the species.” The observers watched-each according to his own threshold of queasiness-while a series of shots showed increasingly complex attempts to rejoin the severed ends of various lab animals’ spines. It was a wretched parade of suture and wire splices that invariably rendered the creatures twitching and incapacitated. Henderson’s eves never left the monitors. Something big was in the air, and he was waiting for It with unabashed attention. “But then,” announced Wolfe, pausing for effect, “we had a breakthrough. Building on work begun in Sweden at the Karolinska Institute, we were able to remove a full quarter inch from the spines of our rats, then use nerve fibers from their chests to bridge the gap.” “Why nerves from the chest?” one of the officers asked, in a voice so faint Henderson had to repeat the question. “Any place but from the spine, actually, would have worked as well,” replied Wolfe. “It’s just that the chest fibers were longer. The essential point is, only’ spinal nerve fibers selfdestruct when injured. Those from other parts of the body tend to grow back. For instance. If an arm is cleanly severed, it can be sewn back on and the nerves will regenerate. But until we postulated it,” he went on, letting his eyes Come to rest on Beatrice, “no one had dreamed of using nonspinal nerve fibers to rebind a severed spine. When we tried it, we found the fibers did indeed bridge the cut in the spine. Not always, and not perfectly, but they definitely did so with a remarkable amount of regularity, and for the first time in medical history we were getting movement from animals in their hindquarters after their spines had been severed. Alex?” Alex punched more keys.
“Subsequently we moved up to rabbits,” said Wolfe, “hoping the larger operating areas would make our attempts easier… A murmur of disappointment rose from the front row. The screen was showing only a procession of dead animals. “All ended up nonviable,” said Wolfe, relishing the emotional effect his chalk-talk, carefully planned and even more carefully rehearsed, was having on these military yahoos. “The increased complexity of their neurology actually worked against us.” Henderson noisily cleared his throat. “If you can’t do a bloody rabbit, how can you expect us to fund a project that-” He broke off, silenced by Wolfe’s pointing finger, indicating the screen. There was something new there now. One rabbit had finally managed to struggle to its feet. The hapless creature wasn’t really hopping, but it wasn’t dragging itself either. It sort of lumbered, like a little furry Frankenstein. “Eventually, after much trial and error,” Wolfe continued, his voice rising just perceptibly, “we finally were successful in these more complex animals, to the extent that there was not only a lack of mortality but partial recovery as well.” He smiled thinly. “We don’t usually name our animals, but we called this one Duracell.” From the labcoats, predictably, came a small burst of laughter, but Henderson didn’t crack a smile, and the rest of the brass followed his lead. “Obviously;” said Wolfe, somewhat hurriedly, “we had to move on to something even more complex.” At this, Alex keyed his control panel and the screen bloomed with the sight of the lively pig Beatrice had witnessed trying to make its escape. There was a lariat around its neck now held by the grinning wrangler, Perkins. “We found working on larger animals brought us a certain advantage,” Wolfe declared. “Despite the fact that the spinal architecture of pigs is an order of magnitude more complicated-the axons and dendrites are made up of several million interwoven nerve fibers- their increased size makes them easier to see and thus easier to splice.” Henderson was nodding slowly now, as if to indicate to the other honchos his grasp of Wolfe’s presentation. What fools these mortals be, thought Wolfe, and lowered his voice dramatically “But we still were looking at only partial recovery using nerve fibers from other parts of the body. What we needed was a way to fuse the spine back together, original submicroscopic element to original submicroscopic element.” And with this he turned to the only woman present-Beatrice. “This is when my colleague, Dr. Beatrice Jance, lent her astonishing discovery-one of truly Nobel Prize caliber.” Henderson heaved a sigh. “Hopefully,” he said, “we can cut to the chase and find out what that was?” Beatrice stood. The men all turned their eyes to her. Wolfe smiled. She was regal; she stopped them in their impatient tracks, she had such presence. “Beatrice, I’m sure, can explain it much better than I,” he said. Beatrice crossed to the screen, with the barest glance at Henderson, who sat up straighter. Inwardly, Wolfe smiled. “You’ll like this news, Colonels,” he said. “You might even get a star out of it.” Henderson acted like he didn’t hear.
“This is what I’ve discovered,” Beatrice began, in a voice so full of dignity, gravity and downright drama that fully half the onlookers edged forward in their seats. “During postoperative autopsies on higher animals in which spinal breaches had been effected, the subjects were actually mounting attempts at healing the wounds, attempts specific to and emanating from the spinal columns themselves.” “What kind of attempts?” Henderson asked guardedly. “Secretions,” said Beatrice. “Of hitherto unnoticed and unidentified enzymes and trace DNA materials, which at submicroscopic levels had begun a discernible repair process. “Repair, as in healing?”