The Delta Factor Read online

  “I’m all out of ideas, Junior,” Deborah replied, turning onto the farm road. “But that doesn’t stop my mind from reaching.”

  They had scarcely driven a hundred feet before a shout called to them from the fields. Deborah halted at the sight of a young woman with flowing blonde tresses and a loose-fitting dress bounding across the scarred, burned-out stretch toward them. She was waving and laughing and calling, and she carried several stalks of blooming rapeweed.

  Deborah rolled down her window as the woman approached. “Can I help you?”

  “No,” the girl half laughed, half sang. “Can I help you?” With that she thrust the rapeweed stalks into Deborah’s surprised hand, then spun around and raced back. Laughter rang in her wake.

  Deborah looked at the golden blooms in her hand, then at Cliff. “Has the whole world gone crazy today?”

  Cliff took the flowers from her hand. “Let’s go home, Debs. Like you said, I’m all out of ideas.”

  Deborah drove up to the intersection with the county road and stopped. A sudden sense of lightheadedness hit her. Although it was not her usual warning sign, she reacted automatically. She pressed harder on the brakes, slid the car into park, and turned off the motor. A waking nightmare of hers had been to be struck by an abrupt attack when driving at high speed. She opened her mouth to ask Cliff to drive, when a sudden movement at the corner of her vision caused her to look up.

  The stop sign had grown two arms and a pair of eyes and a grand smile, and it was waving her forward.

  Beside her, Cliff let out a strangled cough. But she was suddenly too busy to pay any attention, for out of a clear blue sky it had begun to rain blossoms. Beautiful, delicate, golden, rapeweed blossoms.

  Then the road turned to a living ribbon, a river of rainbow colors, and Deborah found herself suddenly swept away.

  10

  The following evening Cliff drove away from Deborah’s feeling tired, jittery, frustrated, and horrifically hungover.

  The night before, he and Deborah had remained trapped in the jeep for hours. The hallucinations had not relinquished their grip until long after night had fallen.

  Deborah had come to first. When Cliff had finally focused on reality, she was wrapping the rapeweed blossoms in a plastic sample bag.

  A flickering orange glow reflected in the windshield caused Cliff to turn around. Behind him, the rapeweed fields were bordered by numerous bonfires. Shadow figures danced weaving circles around the flames. Through his closed window came the shrill sound of fluting pipes.

  He turned back when Deborah switched on the car’s interior light and inspected the rapeweed stalks through the plastic shield. “What happened?”

  Her brow was furrowed in tight concentration. “Do you want the layman’s explanation or the scientific one?”

  “Layman’s. My mind’s not quite up to speed.”

  “I think we’ve just had a glimpse of the psychedelic world view,” she replied.

  He sighed his acceptance. “And the scientific?”

  “I don’t know,” she said flatly. “I wish I did.”

  Shrill laughter and wordless screams turned him back around. “It looks like a scene straight from my worst nightmare,” he said.

  “Not mine,” Deborah replied, starting the car.

  Cliff kept his attention fastened on the scene behind them. “What could be worse than this?”

  Deborah drove them onto the main road. “To watch it spread.”

  * * *

  Their visit to the sheriff’s office had proven utterly futile. The only two patrol cars had been tied up with a bar-room brawl and a domestic disturbance, and the duty officer had not been ready to wake the sheriff over something like this. Deborah had then demanded where the nearest Highway Patrol office was located.

  “Ma’am,” the officer drawled, “you go spouting off your harebrained story to the Patrol this time of night, and them boys’s liable to lock you up. Now why don’t you two go on home and sleep it off?”

  Calls to the Pharmacon hierarchy proved equally ineffective. Whitehurst and Cofield were both in Washington. No, their wives both stated flatly, they had specifically been told not to give out their number. This was Dr. Givens? What sort of emergency? Deborah bit down on her tongue and hung up. They drove in worried silence back to Deborah’s house and tried to sleep.

  The next morning, Cliff had risen to the sound of Deborah on the phone. He stumbled into the parlor as she hung up and said, “Blair doesn’t know where the bean counters have holed up. Or why they went to Washington in the first place.”

  He poured himself a cup of coffee, thinking that he had forgotten to call Blair last night. “What do we do now?”

  “Put on your clothes, and let’s go try the sheriff’s office again.”

  The sheriff was a lean, hard-eyed man with a deeply seamed face. He listened in silence to their descriptions of the night before, his expression giving nothing away. When they had finished, he said, “Been getting some complaints from Mrs. Jones across the road about the noise.”

  “Just noise?” Deborah asked.

  “It’s all the duty officer wrote down,” the sheriff replied. “And that’s all the call sheet is ever gonna state. Mrs. Jones is a good friend to us, and we respect her. But it’s been a long hot summer, and there ain’t nothing tougher on a woman than tending a big spread.”

  “She wasn’t imagining things, sheriff,” Deborah said.

  “Ma’am, this whole county is just as grateful as we can be for Pharmacon coming in and building this new plant,” the sheriff replied. “But it don’t give you any call to come bother busy people with things that don’t amount to a hill of beans on a hot day.”

  “Just go out there,” Deborah said. “Check it out.”

  “I got a patrol car swinging by Jude Taylor’s farm twice a day already,” he replied, his patience wearing thin. “Now, I’ll be the first to admit that there’s some bad blood between the Taylors and the Joneses. Don’t ask me why, ’cause I don’t know and don’t want to know. The Joneses are farming some crops for you folks now, ain’t they?”

  “That’s right,” Deborah said worriedly.

  “Well, I think it’s right nice that you’d take up for folks that’re helping you out. But that don’t mean I’ll put up with somebody wasting my time.” He leaned back in his seat. “I seen it happen a hundred times. Them two farms are on the back side of beyond, ain’t got another neighbor in three, four miles. That’s one of the reasons why I let Jude carry on with this nonsense, that and knowing just how hard up the man is for cash. Now you’d think folks that’re so far off the beaten track’d bend over backward to stay friends, wouldn’t you. Nossir. Give ’em the tiniest little reason, they’ll get mad, and they’ll stay mad. That’s a law of human nature, missy. Give folks like that a cause, and they’ll nurse that grudge till kingdom come.”

  “I’ll bet your cars all drive around with their windows rolled up and their air conditioners on,” Deborah said.

  “Just what do you expect my boys to do?” the sheriff asked, his exasperation growing. “It’s a hundred degrees in the shade out there.”

  “The air conditioner would filter out the pollen,” Deborah said, desperation tinting her voice.

  “Ma’am, in case you haven’t noticed, they’re growing rapeweed out there, not marijuana.” The sheriff rose from his chair. “Now Jude Taylor’s got lawful permits for this hippie festival of his, I issued ’em myself. I ain’t in favor of this sort of thing, but in times like these a man’s got a right to earn himself a little extra cash. The permits’ll run out in eight days. You go back and tell the Joneses they oughtta take a little vacation, go on down to the coast for a week if it bothers ’em that much.”

  “Eight days may be too late,” Deborah pleaded.

  “Y’all have just about used up my store of good will,” the sheriff said, pointing at the door. “You better run on outta here before I get testy. Go on, now. Git.”

  * * *r />
  Then, to top the whole mess off, he had argued with Debs.

  They had returned from the sheriff’s office to her home. The stress had begun to play on her, bringing out the fatigue syndrome, so Debs had retired to her wheelchair on the porch, letting Cliff see to sandwiches and Cokes. Over lunch she had tried to explain the process by which she and her team had altered the plant’s molecular structure.

  “The procedure centers,” she told him, “on the restructuring of the plant’s DNA in a plasmid solution, so that the cell is ordered to create a different compound than before.” She paused to take the last bite of her sandwich. “It’s the same basic process as genetic scientists use to strengthen a tomato’s skin against insects or make apples grow bigger.”

  Cliff asked, “What was that word you just used, plasmid?”

  “Plasmids are DNA that have been extracted from a cell.” Deborah wiped mayonnaise from her upper lip. “We can create them now. Well, not actually create. We clone them. But we can rearrange the DNA before cloning to basically come up with any sequence we want. When we create plasmids and we cut the DNA sequence, we pull in additional DNA letters and form the sequence we plan to repeat.”

  Something began to niggle at him, a worry below the surface of conscious thought. “How do you cut something that small?”

  “By chemical reaction. We run electrophoresis gels into the solution, which allows us to read the DNA structure using what is called a sequence analyzer—the full name is fluorescent detecting automated sequencing machine. This gives us a computer printout that looks a lot like the thin sheet of squiggles you get in analyzing sounds. After a while, you get so you can read it like a stockbroker reads his morning ticker tape.”

  “Maybe you can.”

  “When we’ve identified the section we want,” Deborah continued, “we cut it with restriction enzymes. These cut the amino acid letters only at specific points, at the start and stop codons.”

  He passed a hand over his head, and made the sound of a jet taking off.

  She smiled. “Don’t feel bad, Junior. I meet scientists all the time who don’t understand this stuff. There are a few of them wandering the halls of Pharmacon. That’s what happened to Cofield, by the way. He just couldn’t keep up.”

  “I was wondering why he was so bitter.”

  “Bitter and jealous. He’s a hard man to work with.”

  “So you make these new genes. Then what?”

  “Then we attach to it a promoter sequence, usually from a bacteria, since they’re plentiful and easy to work with. We can set up DNA chains now to make the plant produce more of a certain protein; we do that by adding the growth instruction to the protein producer instruction. So what I did was first change the protein producer code so that the new compounds included a marker molecule. Then I combined those with growth instructions.”

  “Wait a minute. You mean this promoter sequence is the same in bacteria as it is in humans?”

  “Yes.” She looked at him. “Is that a problem?”

  “I’m not sure.” He struggled to make sense of his worries. “So does a DNA genetic sequence mean the same in humans as in plants?”

  She gave her head a decisive shake. “Extremely rare to never. It doesn’t even work between species, like between roses and daffodils. There are only four DNA amino acid letters, but they can be arranged in an infinite number of variations, since there is no limit to the size of each word, or gene.”

  “But you just said the promoter was the same.”

  “Sure, but it’s sort of like saying a period at the end of a sentence has the same meaning in different languages.”

  “Still, it could be possible, couldn’t it?”

  “I suppose so. Theoretically, yes. What are you getting at, Junior?”

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly, wishing he himself understood the sense of rising unease. “Anyway, you were saying about attaching a promoter sequence.”

  “This new chain can be replicated through TAQ technology. Again, we’re talking state of the art. But this synthesis is the key to the future.”

  “But how do you get it into the plant?”

  Deborah shrugged. “Usual manner. We redesigned a viroid.”

  Cliff set down his glass. “You did what?”

  “Don’t look so alarmed. It happens all the time. It’s a basic technique of genetic engineering.”

  “I can’t believe you would do this.”

  “Calm down, Junior.”

  “You of all people, creating a virus.”

  “Viroid,” she corrected.

  “Viroid, virus, what’s the difference?”

  “Only about ten million molecules.”

  “Don’t get technical on me. You always hide behind data that doesn’t matter when you’re trying to avoid something.”

  “I’m not avoiding a thing,” she said defensively. The words were more clipped now, the tone terse. “I knew exactly what I was doing.”

  “But a virus, Debs. A virus is what’s crippled you.”

  “Maybe a virus, remember? And if it is a virus, it’s a very different one.”

  “You’re so sure of that? What makes you so certain this one couldn’t get out of control?”

  “We changed the vector so that the virus could not replicate.”

  That slowed him down. “You can do that?”

  “We were careful, Junior. We were more than careful. What we wanted was a means of inserting one series of genetic instructions inside the plants. We used a viroid, a virus without the external protein shell, as a sort of carrier for our commands. This particular viroid attaches itself to a plant’s root systems.”

  “I know the word, viroid,” Cliff said. “But I’m not sure I really understand what you just said.”

  “As far as we know, the viroid is the structural bridge between life and nonlife, between inert substance and living essence. By removing the viroid’s ability to replicate itself—I won’t even call it reproduction, because we’re not sure if a viroid truly lives to reproduce or is simply a complex molecular structure that carries with it the ability to draw other molecules together, like a magnet does iron shavings—”

  “You’re getting technical on me again.”

  “Sorry.” She sipped at her Coke. “By halting its ability to replicate, we both kept it from spreading and we held it in the realm of nonliving substances.”

  “So did this viroid of yours have a name?” he asked carefully.

  “Delta,” she replied. “We named it the Delta viroid.”

  “Delta is the symbol for change, isn’t that right?”

  “Very good, Junior,” she replied. “You remember your lessons.”

  “Okay, so this Delta viroid was made. What then?”

  “Well, first we changed the DNA structure of cells in an already existing echin plant,” Deborah persisted. “I hope you’re listening to me, Cliff.”

  “Of course I’m listening. If I wasn’t listening to you I wouldn’t be so worried.”

  “This means that the inserted genes are restricted to the plant we were actually working on. They can’t be passed to future generations.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She nodded. “Then we mixed it in with the fertilizer and sprayed it onto the fields.”

  “Simple as that.”

  “Nothing about it was simple, Cliff. But it worked. That’s the most important thing. It worked.” She examined his worried features. “Why does this bother you so?”

  “I don’t know, I just feel like you’ve let loose the hand of chaos.”

  “The hand of chaos,” she repeated, watching him. “And you say you’re not a believing man.”

  “I don’t know what I believe. I do know that you’ve created something too close to life for me to be comfortable with it. I just don’t like this whole idea of shifting genes around. It gives me the creeps.”

  “Tough. It’s the wave of the future, and it may prove to be the safest way to cure ill
ness that man has ever discovered.”

  “How can you say that?” he cried. “We’ve just spent six hours totally out of our skulls. Do you call that safe?”

  “We don’t know for sure the two things are connected,” she snapped.

  “Oh come on, Debs,” he said, growing hot. “What, you think a field of rapeweed just happened to mutate all by itself and turn into a giant mental pyrotechnics clinic?”

  Her voice tightened. “Right as we speak, there is a major project going on called the Human Genome Initiative. It is a worldwide scheme to isolate and identify every single human gene. We calculate that there should be about one hundred thousand of them.”

  “How utterly thrilling,” he said sarcastically.

  “Oh, pull yourself out of the last century,” she bristled. “Try and think what this will mean. In ten years there will be a compendium available with the entire genetic makeup of the human body.”

  “You know what happens after that, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Genetic selection to order. People will go visit some gene doctors to have their babies made up according to whim and taste. Not to mention prejudice.”

  “Why are you mister gloom and doom?” Her face was as angry as her tone. “Why don’t you look at the good side? We’ll be able to identify every single genetically linked disease and diffuse it before it even appears—Down’s syndrome, certain forms of blindness and deformity, Alzheimer’s, hundreds of problems that have plagued mankind down through the ages.”

  “And then what happens, Debs?” Cliff felt as though a weight of sorrow was settling upon his shoulders. “Do you kill all the babies who don’t measure up?”

  “Of course not,” she snapped. “Don’t talk crazy.”

  “But where do you draw the line? And who keeps the fad- conscious nuts from stopping a pregnancy just because they don’t like a child’s sex or hair color?”

  “The alternative,” she said, biting off the words, “if you’d just stop and think for a moment, is to alter the genetic coding before the fetus has grown to the point of being born ill or malformed.”