Destroyer 032 - Killer Chromosomes

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Killer Chromosomes
Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy
For Sally Newmark-a gracious person, a beautiful woman, and the finest aunt in the whole
world
CHAPTER ONE
They were afraid.
It was so small they couldn't see it with their naked eyes. It had yet to do them any
harm. The nonscientists among them weren't even sure exactly what it did.
But 200 families from the greater Boston area, from as far away as Duxbury and even
southern New Hampshire, pushed their way that rainy summer afternoon into the dirt and
cement courtyard of the Boston Graduate School of Biological Sciences to protest against
its manufacture.
"No. Not manufacture," explained an architect to one of the mothers. "They change it
around but they don't make it new. Nobody can."
"Whatever," yelled the mother. "Stop them."
She knew what they were doing here at BGSBS was bad. They were making monsters that no
one could stop. Horrible things like diseases no one could cure, or mutations that would
come into your bedroom and put their hairy hands all over you and lick you all over and
do things to you. Maybe rape you. And then you would have that horror in your body.
Like the devil copulating with Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby, except here it could be
real. They were so small, these things that could do the horrors, that they could enter
your body without your even knowing it. Go right through your skin. You might not even
have a blemish but you'd be dead.
And your babies would suffer worse. She liked the way one speaker had put it the night
before at the pre-rally rally.
"I'm not going to tell you horror stories. I am not going to drag out some Bela Lugosi
image out here in front of you. I am not going to use some scare tactics like telling
you a mad scientist is laughing insanely over some bubbling test tube that is going to
burn you all to death. I am simply going to give you a scientific fact: life, as you
know it, is probably already over. You are probably already too late. We are not going
to be doomed. We are doomed."
So that was it. Rationally and scientifically, any sane person would know life was over
for good probably.
She saw the television cameramen from Channels 4 5, and 7 shooting down from the roof of
the building and she saw great black cables stretching into a window on the third floor.
That was where the evil scientists made those things and were going to try to prove they
were harmless this day.
Harmless, she would give them harmless. How could something be harmless if everyone was
already doomed? And if nothing else, it could ruin making babies. After all, they were
using the same stuff to make babies.
A speaker rose on a small truck. He was a doctor. And he was worried.
"They are going to conduct their experiment today," he said. "They are going to take our
their test tubes in their laboratory and show some five-minute expert from a newspaper
or television station that what they are doing is safe. Well, it's not safe. And we're
here to tell the world it is not safe. You don't tamper with the forces of life without
danger. You let them make the atomic bomb and now you're living on the brink of nuclear
holocaust. Well, the atomic bomb is child's play compared to this, because with an
atomic bomb you know when it goes off. This damned thing could have gone off already and
no one will know unless we tell them."
The speaker paused. Mrs. Walters loved the speakers in this movement. She cradled her
pudgy child, Ethel, who was now dangerously moist. She was almost four but sometimes
during great excitement accidents occurred. They had told all the mothers to bring their
children and to make them as neat and as pretty as possible to show the world what they
were trying to save. The children. The future. Tomorrow. That was it. They were simply
saving tomorrow.
The thought made Mrs. Walters' eyes water. Something else was wet also. She shifted baby
Ethel, who smiled contentedly at a television camera. The camera did not catch the
moisture dripping down the mother's arms. Mrs. Walters tried to appear as loving as
possible for the media while keeping baby Ethel away from the new print dress that might
stain and stay stained.
The handheld camera came closer to her. A young man with beautifully structured hair and
an immaculate suit and a very deep voice pushed a microphone in front of baby Ethel.
"And why are you here, child?"
"To stop the bad people," said Ethel. And the blue ribbons and the neat pigtails bobbed.
Baby Ethel smiled. She had dimples.
"And you are?" asked the young announcer.
"Mrs. Walters. Mrs. Harry Walters of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and I'm here to protest
what's going on here. I'm here to save tomorrow as the speaker just said."
"Save it from what?"
"From bad things," said Mrs. Walters. Baby Ethel reached out for the microphone. Mrs.
Walters readjusted the heavy, wet bundle.
"Dr. Sheila Feinberg, the scientist who is conducting today's experiments, says that
most of you don't even understand what she is doing."
"I don't understand how the atomic bomb works either but why on earth we ever made one,
I'll never know."
"We were at war," explained the announcer.
"Oh, well, it was an immoral war. We had no business in Vietnam."
"We were at war with Germany and Japan."
"Now see how crazy that is," said Mrs. Walters. "They're such good friends. Why did we
need an atomic bomb against good friends? We didn't need the bomb and we don't need Dr.
Feinberg's plagues and monsters."
"What plagues? What monsters?"
"The worst kind," said Mrs. Walters righteously. "The kind you can't see or don't even
know of."
The announcer repeated her name for the camera and sidled around the crowd to an
entrance for newsmen and wondered how he could cut the crowd scenes down to twenty
seconds. The station was attacking Boston potholes again and their humor announcer, who
was as funny as prickly heat, was holding a special summer pothole contest that used up
five minutes of air time every night. The whole station was like the Titanic where the
band played as the ship went down. A New York firm gave them the snappiest theme song in
the country and the station provided the downright stupidest coverage of everything.
Dr. Sheila Feinberg was upstairs under the lights of a rival television station. The
announcer waited for them to finish their interview. He felt suddenly very protective of
this woman even though she was a scientist. She looked so out of place, sitting there
under his channel's lights, waiting for a question. Like the plain, studious girls in
school that you just knew would have to settle for some drip of a husband or never get
married at all.
Dr. Feinberg, thirty-eight, had a strong, manly nose and a pinched, desperate sort of
face, like an overworked accountant who had suddenly forgotten a key set of books and
was about to lose a client over it.
She wore a loose, puffy, white blouse, which hid the absence of womanly roundness on her
chest, and she had a skinny waist and wide hips under a dark-blue, flannel skirt. She
wore plain black shoes with low heals. A desperate cameo brooch on the blouse proclaimed
that she was a woman and had a right to wear such a thing, but it seemed as out of place
as her new hairdo. It was a pert short cut, similar to one made famous by an ice skater,
but on the ice skater it emphasized a cutesy-poo face. On Dr. Feinberg, it looked like a
Christmas tree atop a tank turret-a desperately inappropriate piece of gaiety.
Softly, the announcer asked her to explain the demonstration and what she was doing. He
also told her that it might be better if she didn't pick at her fingernails when she
talked.
"What we're doing here," said Dr. Feinberg, with controlled softness that allowed neck
veins to bulge like suddenly stepped-on, wrinkly blue balloons, "is exploring
chromosomes. Chromosomes, genes, DNA, are all part of the process that determines
characteristics. It is why one seed becomes a petunia and another meets an egg and
becomes Napoleon. Or Jesus. Or Dr. Jonas Salk. What we're dealing with is the coding
mechanism for what makes things the way they are."
"Your critics say that you could create a monster or a strange plague that could get out
of the laboratory and destroy mankind."
Dr. Feinberg smiled sadly and shook her head.
"I call that the Frankenstein syndrome," she said. "You know how in the movies the mad
scientist takes the brain of a criminal, puts it into pieces from many people's bodies
and with lightning jolts the whole damned thing into something stranger than man? Well,
if you followed that process you would have the biggest stink you could imagine. I doubt
if you could get one percent of the tissue to live, much less perform, much less perform
better than an average human being."
"Well, where do people get these ideas from?" asked the announcer.
"From stories and television. They see a man get in an accident and then some
mechanical, electronic wizardry makes him stronger and better-seeing than any man alive.
Well, that is not so. If I tried to put a bionic arm onto your shoulder you'd have
lesions for ten years. It would be super tender, and if the arm by some mechanical skill
is made stronger than the human arm, it would throw you around every time you tried to
use it. I mean, it's ridiculous. Our problem is not keeping some monster under control
but trying to get a very delicate substance to survive. And that's what I am going to
show today."
"How?"
"By drinking it."
"Isn't that dangerous?"
"Yes," said Dr. Feinberg. "For the organism. If the exposure to air doesn't kill it, my
saliva will. You have to understand we're talking about one of the lowliest of all
bacteria. To it we attach chromosomes and genes from other forms of life. In years, many
years, if we've been both talented and lucky, we may understand the genetic causes of
cancer, of hemophilia, of diabetes. We may be able to create inexpensive vaccines to
save the lives of people who today will die. We may be able to create food plants that
draw nitrogen from the air and no longer need expensive fertilizers. But that's years
away and that's why this whole protest is so ridiculous. We're barely able to keep these
organisms alive now. Most of our intricate machinery is painstakingly designed to keep
everything at just the right temperature, just the right acidity. Those people out there
are worried about it conquering the world, and we're worried about trying to keep it
alive under intensive care."
It took two hours for the public demonstration to begin. The protestors insisted on
placing who they wanted where they wanted. The mothers with the babies got the front
rows, right near the television cameras. Not one camera could focus on the experiment
without framing it with babys' faces.
The material was in a long, clear fishtank. There were twelve small, sealed test tubes
submerged in clear liquid in the tank which was set on a black-topped table.
Dr. Feinberg asked everyone not to smoke.
"Why? Because then we'll see how vicious that stuff is? If it isn't dangerous, why do
you have it cooped up in glass and water inside the glass?" called out one man.
"First, we don't have water in this tank. Water transmits variations of temperature too
rapidly. We have a gelatin solution which acts as insulation. These are unstable
elements."
"Unstable. It can blow up," yelled a bald man with a beard. He wore a single love bead
on a gold strand around his neck.
"Unstable... it can die. That's what I mean," said Dr. Feinberg patiently.
"Liar," yelled out Mrs. Walters. Baby Ethel was positively rancid by now. The sweet
dimples hid an odor that even the mother could not stand. It did not bother baby Ethel.
She was used to it.
"No, you don't understand. It really is very sensitive. What we're trying to get, and we
don't even have the correct combination yet, is a very delicate key."
"You're taking the seed of life," yelled out another person.
"No, no. Please listen. Do you know why, when you grow older, your nose stays your nose
and your eyes stay your eyes? Even though every seven years every cell has been
replaced?"
"Because you haven't had a chance to mess with it," shouted a man.
"No," said Dr. Feinberg, trembling. "Because there is a code system in your body that
makes you you. And what we're doing here at Boston Biological is trying to find the key
to that code, so that bad things like cancers won't reproduce themselves. We have in
these test tubes genes of various animals treated with combinations of what we call
unlocking elements. Hopefully we can produce variations that will help us understand why
things are the way they are and how we can help ourselves to make them better. What we
are working on here is the key to unlock closed doors between chromosome systems if you
will."
"Rotten liar," yelled out someone and then the group began the chant of liar and finally
someone challenged Dr. Feinberg to "touch the deadly fluid with your bare hands."
"Oh, come on," she said in disgust and reached into the tank. One woman shrieked and
every mother shielded her child except Mrs. Walters, who let baby Ethel fend her own
smelly way. She waited to see Dr. Feinberg's hand disintegrate.
Out came a test tube. Clear, gooey stuff clung to Dr. Feinberg's hand.
"For those of you who like horror, I have in this test tube the genes from a man-eating
tiger, treated with the unlocking mechanism. Man-eating tiger."
There were gasps from the audience. Dr. Feinberg shook her head sadly. She looked to the
announcer who had been friendly. He smiled at the woman. He understood. There was
nothing more terrible about man-eating tiger genes than about the genes of a mouse. Both
of them could hardly survive outside their carriers. If they were not already dead
anyway.
Dr. Feinberg drank the liquid in the test tube and made a face.
"Would anyone care to select another test tube?" she said.
"They're not real killer chromosomes," yelled someone and that was enough.
"You stupid, stupid, ignorant people," yelled Dr. Feinberg in frustration. "You won't
understand."
Furiously, she rammed her hand into the gelatin insulated tank, snatched another bottle,
and drank it. She drank another. She drooled and drank. She uncorked and drank. She
finished every one of those test tubes and it all tasted vaguely like someone else's
spit. And there she was.
"Here. What do you expect me to do, change into Wolfman? You ignorant, ignorant people."
And then she shivered. And her short haircut shivered. And, like an old bolt of cloth,
she collapsed to the ground.
"Don't touch her. She might be contagious," yelled baby Ethel's mother.
"Idiots," snapped the announcer for the TV station, breaking his code of impartiality.
He called an ambulance and after the unconscious Dr. Feinberg was taken out in a
stretcher, still breathing, one of her colleagues explained it was unfortunate she
passed out because he was sure the genetic matter she swallowed could not have caused
even an upset stomach. She had passed out from the excitement, he said.
"I mean, it is improbable that the genetic material had anything to do with it." he
said.
But no one listened. One of the leaders of the protesting group jumped on the lab table
near the fish-tank.
"Touch nothing. This place is contaminated." When he had silence and was sure the
cameras had stopped panning the milling crowd, he waved his arms and spoke.
"Nothing could happen, they told us. Nothing could harm anyone, they told us. The genes
and chromosomes and whatever life codes these monsters are tinkering with have trouble
enough surviving, they said. Well, at least this time it has struck only the guilty.
Let's stop it before it strikes the innocent."
The protestors, reveling in their good fortune, continued their meeting long after the
news cameramen had left. Babies become cranky and someone was sent out for infant's
formula. Someone else was dispatched for hamburgers and soft drinks for the elders. They
passed fourteen resolutions, all numbered, all labeled Boston Graduate Biological. In
this way, the resolution itself would always bring up the accident that happened in the
lab where no accident could happen.
Baby Ethel went to sleep in her moist pants, soiled backside up, unsmiling face down on
her mother's rolled-up jacket in the rear of the laboratory.
Someone thought they saw a figure paw toward her. Someone else looked around to hear a
very low, grumbling growl that seemed to come from just outside the window leading to
the alley. And then a young child wandered through saying Dr. Feinberg had returned.
"The lady who drank the nasty things," said the child in explanation.
"Oh, God. No," came a voice from the back of the room. "No, no, no."
Mrs. Walters knew baby Ethel was sleeping back there. She bulled her way through the
group, knocking over chairs and people, following a mother's instinct as old as the
caves. She knew something bad had come to her child. She slipped, slamming into the
person who had cried out in horror. She tried to get up but slipped again. She was
wallowing in some oily, red goo. It wasn't oily. It was slippery. It was blood.
She was on her knees trying to get to her feet when she saw the extraordinary pale face
of baby Ethel so deeply, peacefully, in sleep despite the screaming. Then the woman who
called out stepped aside and Mrs. Walters saw her baby had no stomach, as if it had been
eaten out, and the little body had let its blood out all over the floor.
"Oh, God," sobbed Mrs. Walters. "No. No. No. No."
She reached out for the loose head of her baby but she could not keep her balance while
kneeling and slipped again.
The ambulance that was supposed to have taken Dr. Feinberg to the hospital was found
with its front twisted around a tree trunk on Storrow Drive. One driver dead with his
throat torn out and the other babbling.
Detectives pieced together that the last passenger was Dr. Feinberg. She had been in a
coma, but now she was not in the wrecked ambulance. Whoever had killed the driver had
taken her. There was blood in the front seat. There was no blood in the back. The
attendant who lived had a single deep gash near his forehead.
The forensic surgeon asked if they were going to return the attendant to the zoo. He
said the attendant should go back because if he carried that fear of animals with him
for long, the animals would know it.
"He'd better go back tomorrow or he'll never go back at all. He'll be too afraid. That's
what I'm saying. I've treated claw wounds before," the surgeon said.
"He didn't work in no zoo," said the detective. "He was an ambulance attendant who was
knifed. He didn't work in no zoo."
"That on the head is a claw mark," said the doctor. "No knife cuts like that. A knife
doesn't rip like that. That's puncture, then rip."
When the corpse of baby Ethel came in on another case, the doctor was sure there was a
big cat loose in the city.
"Look at the belly," he said.
"There isn't any belly," said the detective.
"That's what I mean. Big cats eat the belly first. It's the best part. If you ever see a
calf, the big cats will eat the belly. The humans eat the steaks from the rump. That's
why I say it was a big cat. Unless, of course, you know somebody who's going around
collecting human intestines."
In a dark loft in Boston's North End, Sheila Feinberg trembled, clutching a rafter. She
did not want to think of the blood on her and the horror of someone else dying and that
there was somebody else's blood on her body. She did not even want to open her eyes. She
wanted to die, right there in the dark, and not think about what happened.
She was not a religious person, never understanding the language in which her father had
prayed. Even if she had, by the age of twelve she felt quite secure in believing there
was an order to things and people should be moral because it was right, not because they
had to do right to be rewarded later on.
Thus, she did not know how to pray. Until this night, when she prayed that God, or
whatever there was that ran the universe, would take her from this horror.
Her knees and forearms rested on the rafter. The floor was fifteen feet below. She felt
safer on this perch, almost invulnerable. And she could see very well now, of course.
A small movement in the corner. A mouse. No, she thought. Too small for a mouse.
She cleaned her hands of the blood by licking them and a feeling of goodness came upon
her body.
Her chest and throat rumbled.
She purred.
She was happy again.
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and the man was throwing a punch at him. He was actually throwing a
punch. Remo watched it.
Years before, a punch had been something fast that you ducked or blocked or saw suddenly
at the end of a fist banging into your head with hurt.
Now it was almost ridiculous.
There was this very big man. He was six feet-four inches tall. He had big shoulders and
big arms, a very big chest and drive-hammer thighs. He wore oil-covered dungarees, a
checkered shirt and thick hobnailed boots. He worked driving cut-down trees, forest to
mill in Oregon, and no, he wasn't going to stay for another twenty minutes at the Eatout
Diner stop just so some old gook could finish writing some letter. The faggy guy in the
black T-shirt had better haul that dinky yellow car out of the way or he would run it
over.
No?
"Well then, skinny man, I'm going to pulverize you," said the log driver.
And then the punch started. The man was much bigger than Remo, outweighing him by more
than a hundred pounds. The man awkwardly set his balance and started his bulk toward
Remo, bringing a big, hairy fist ponderously around from behind him, driving with his
legs and throwing his whole body into the blow. People from the diner ran out to see the
skinny fellow with the foreigner get murdered by Houk Hubbley who had already put more
men in the hospital than you could shake a Homelite chain saw at.
Waiting for the punch, Remo pondered his options. There was nothing miraculous about it.
A few top hitters could see the seams of a baseball as it whizzed toward them from the
pitcher. Basketball players could feel hoops they could not see. And skiers could hear
the consistency of snow they had not yet skied on.
These people did it with natural talent that had accidentally been developed to a minor
degree. Remo's skills had been worked, reworked, honed, and blossomed under the tutelage
of more than three thousand years of wisdom so that while average persons with deadened
senses saw blurs, Remo saw knuckles and bodies moving, not in slow motion, but almost in
still photographs.
There was big Houk Hubbley threatening. There was the crowd coming out to see Remo get
pulverized and then began the long, slow punch.
In the back of the yellow Toyota, Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, with skin as wrinkled as
parchment and wisps of white hair gracing his frail-appearing head, leaned over a
writing pad, his long-plumed goose quill pen scratching away. He was creating a great
saga of love and beauty.
Chiun had trained Remo. He therefore had every right to expect peace and quiet and that
undue noise should not be made while he was composing his thoughts. First he imagined
the great love affair between the king and the courtesan and then he penned the words.
The only thing he wanted from outside the car was quiet. Remo realized this and as the
punch came, like a slow train rumbling into a station, Remo gently put his right hand
under the oncoming arm. So that the man would not grunt loudly, Remo compressed the
lungs evenly by thrusting his left arm across the stomach and his left knee behind the
back so that big Houk Hubbley looked as if he suddenly had a skinny human pretzel
wrapped around him.
Houk Hubbley felt explosively peaked. He had swung and now he was out of breath. With
his right fist held up in the air, and like a statue that could not move, he was falling
on that hand, and by jiminy, the hand was being forced open, changing from a fist, to
catch his body, and he was rolling on the ground, out of breath, and there was a foot on
his throat, a black loafer with green gum on its sole to be exact, and the guy in the
gray flannels and the black shirt was standing over him.
"Shhhh," whispered Remo. "You get air for quiet. Quiet for air. It's a trade,
sweetheart."
The man didn't say all right but Remo knew he meant all right. His body meant it. Remo
let some air into the man's lungs as the big face reddened. Then like kicking on an
engine, Remo compressed the lungs gently once more and they opened full, sucking in a
large and blessed supply of oxygen for Houk Hubbley, who lay there still on the diner
driveway.
Hearing the sucking gasp of air, Chiun looked up from his writing pad.
"Please," he said.
"Sorry," said Remo.
"Not everyone can write a love story," he said.
"Sorry," said Remo.
"When a man gives the wisdom of the ages to a coarse gruntling, the least the gruntling
can do is keep a certain quiet about places where important things are being done."
"I said I'm sorry, Little Father."
"Sorry, sorry, sorry," mumbled Chiun. "Sorry for this and sorry for that. Propriety does
not require a sorry. Correctness means never having to say you're sorry."
"So I'm not sorry," said Remo. "I'm out here tending this guy so he won't make noise,
stopping him from starting his truck so it won't make noise, because I want you to be
disturbed. See? I'm cunning about it. I'm not sorry at all. Never have been. I'm
inconsiderate."
"I knew that," said Chiun. "Now I cannot write."
"You haven't written for a month on that thing. You just stare at it, day after day.
You're using everything for an excuse. I stopped that track and this guy just so you'll
face the fact that you're not a writer."
"There are no good love stories around today. The great day dramas of your television
have degenerated into nothing. They have violence, even sex. This is a pure love story.
Not cows and bulls reproducing. But love. I understand love because I know and care
enough not to disturb people at productive work."
"Not for a month, Little Father. Not a word."
"Because you make noise."
"No noise," said Remo.
"Noise," said Chiun and tore up the pad with a flurry of his sharp fingernails. He slid
his hands into the sleeves of the opposite arms of his kimono. "I cannot compose while
you carp."
Remo massaged Houk Hubbley's chest with his foot. Hubbley felt a lot better. Well good
enough to get to his feet. Good enough to take another poke at the skinny guy.
Skinny guy hardly noticed him. Just a little bit. Enough to be where the punch was not.
It was the strangest thing. Skinny guy didn't duck, didn't dodge, didn't block a punch.
Just wasn't there when the fist was.
"Even if you got it down on paper, which you won't, nobody's interested in love stories
in this country. They want sex."
"There is nothing new to sex," said Chiun. "Sex does not change from emperor to peasant,
from Pharaoh to your cab drivers. Babies are made very much the same as they have always
been made."
"Well, still Americans like to read about it."
"Why? Can't they do it? You people seem to breed well enough. There are so many of you.
Almost all of you with meat on your breath and insults on your tongue, making noise."
"You want to sell a book, Little Father, write about sex."
"That takes up less than one page," said Chiun, his eyebrows furrowing in worry. "The
seed meets the egg and a baby happens. Or the seed does not meet the egg and a baby does
not happen. This is a subject for a book? The white mind is mysterious."
Remo turned back to Hubbley who was still throwing punches. The crowd on the diner steps
now was cheering Remo on and laughing at Hubbley.
"Enough. No more games," said Remo to Hubbley.
"All right, you sumbitch, I'll show you what no more games is."
Big Houk Hubbley went to the cab of his truck. From underneath the seat, he pulled out a
sawed-off shotgun. It could shiver a telephone pole in two. Or mutilate a wall. At close
range, sawed-off shotguns made people chopped liver.
The folks on the porch stopped laughing at Houk Hubbley. That made him feel better. That
was what he wanted. Respect. And he was going to get it from that skinny fellow too.
"Put that away," said Remo mildly. "You can hurt with that. That's not nice playing."
"Apologize," said Houk Hubbley. So he would do a few years in the state pen if he had to
for sausaging the guy. So what? Lots of loggers had done time. Time didn't make a man no
different. Time nowadays was just about the same as not doing time, now that they had
you out in the forests working. You could also get yourself a woman in prison if you had
the right connections and you kept your smarts. So why not kill the guy? Unless, of
course, he apologized.
But then an even stranger thing happened. Sure, it was mighty peculiar that the skinny
guy couldn't be hit by a punch. Not even right up close, sometimes so close the knuckles
felt the black T-shirt and they had the chest right there in the path of a good punch
and then it was gone. That was peculiar enough, but now something even weirder happened.
And Houk Hubbley would swear for many a year afterward that this thing really happened.
As soon as he had decided he was going to pull the trigger, without saying anything
different, without making any special move, the old Oriental lifted his head as if he
were a mind reader. The skinny white guy stopped his conversation with the Oriental and
also looked. At the very same time, as if both of them knew instantly what had gone on
inside Houk Hubbley's mind.
"No," said the white guy. "Better not."
Houk Hubbley didn't threaten, didn't smile, just stood there with his right trigger
finger cradling that deadly strip of metal that could send a wall of shot out at the
yellow Toyota and the two men.
It was a quiet moment. Then suddenly the old gook wasn't in the seat anymore and Houk
Hubbley could swear all he did was try to get a peek at where the old guy was and then
he didn't see anything.
There was this bright light up above and this fellow with a green mask and the place
smelled of ether. If this was the diner driveway, why was there a ceiling above him? His
back was on a very hard thing and someone was talking to a nurse, and there were now
three people with green masks and green caps looking down at him and someone was saying
something about a local anesthetic and someone was coming to.
Houk Hubbley realized that it was he who was coming to. The people looking down at him
were doctors. He could hear their problem. Something about rectal canals. And two
unfired shells in the chamber. And the trigger guard being inside. They would have to
cut to it, because a yank might explode the shells.
And then a doctor noticed Houk was aware of what was going on.
"Mister," he said, "would you mind telling us how you got a sawed-off shotgun, loaded,
into your intestinal tract? I mean, how did you do it without the thing going off? I
know this model. It's got a hair trigger. How did you do it?"
"You won't believe it but I think it was because I had a nasty thought."
In downtown Portland, Remo waited by a telephone booth, looking at his watch. He did not
need it to tell time but he needed it to make sure that upstairs was telling time
correctly. In one hand he had a dime and in the other hand he had a telephone number. He
was no good at this code thing and the only time it worked for people was when they were
code people themselves. Remo suspected that every intelligence agency or secret
organization had a code nut. Nobody else understood what the code nut was up to, except
other code nuts, often in competing services. These code nuts made their codes more and
more complicated to prevent other code nuts on the other side from understanding them.
Meanwhile, the people who had to use those things went stumbling along, guessing at what
was what. If Remo understood what upstairs wanted, then the third number in the
telephone number was the number of times he should let the number ring before phoning
back and the fourth number was the time of day he should phone. The third number was two
and the fourth number was five.
Remo made a mental bet with himself. The bet was three to one he would not reach
upstairs correctly.
A man with a blue snap-brimmed hat and eyeglasses was using the phone. He carried a cane
over his arm.
"Sir," said Remo. "I'm in sort of a rush. Would you let me use the phone, please?"
The man shook his head. He said to someone on the other end of the line to go ahead, he
was in no hurry.
Remo hung up for him. He wedged the head and the hat between phone box and wall. The
eyeglasses popped up to the man's eyebrows. He grunted. He could not make clear sounds
because his jaw was wedged open. He sounded like he was in a dentist's chair.
Remo dialed the number, waited for two rings, hung up and dialed again. He was sure it
wasn't going to work.
"Yes," came the acidic voice. It had worked.
Remo unwedged the man's head.
"Sorry," he said. "You're going to have to hobble away. I need privacy. I didn't think
I'd reach my party, but you know, I did. Thanks."
He gave the man back his cane and told him to work his jaw and the pain would go away.
"Who was that?" asked the voice on the other end of the line. The voice was that of
Harold W. Smith, head of CURE, and to Remo, a man who worried too much about too many
things.
"Somebody who got his head caught between the phone and a wall."
"This is not the sort of conversation that should be carried on in public."
"I'm alone. He's gone."
"Did you kill him?"
"What is this? C'mon. What's the message?"
"You might not want to leave so many bodies around."
Remo quickly scribbled on a pad. This new system for messages was supposed to have been
simplified so that he could understand it. By transposing words instead of letters and
every word at a different integer on his card, to be translated into another word, he
was now supposed to be able to get quickly and easily a coded message that no one else
could interpret.
He had the card and his pencil out, along with a piece of notepaper.
He put the message together.
"What do you want me to do in Albuquerque?"
"That wasn't the message," said Smith. "Here is the message."
"Jerk," mumbled Remo.
"Blue bellies Boston Globe 19 and Zebra. Got it?"
"Yep," said Remo.
"Does it make sense?"
"Not at all," said Remo. "Not even slightly."
"All right. Fifty-four dancers break three dowels."
"Gotcha," said Remo. "I'll be there."
He hung up and put the code card in his rear pocket. It looked like a bank calendar with
descriptions of very peculiar loan rates. He was to meet Smith at the Logan Airport
shuttle room in Boston.
Chiun was in the Toyota. He was busy not writing his tale of the king's love. How could
he be expected to compose beauty with Remo ramming dimes into a telephone?
"We're going to Boston," said Remo.
"That is the other side of your country."
"Right."
"How can I write when we go shifting from one side of this country to another?" asked
Chiun.
On the flight to Boston, he mentioned seven times how a true artist could not write
while travelling, how if he were not travelling he would have completed his novel by
摘要：

KillerChromosomesRichardSapirandWarrenMurphyForSallyNewmark-agraciousperson,abeautifulwoman,andthefinestauntinthewholeworldCHAPTERONETheywereafraid.Itwassosmalltheycouldn'tseeitwiththeirnakedeyes.Ithadyettodothemanyharm.Thenonscientistsamongthemweren'tevensureexactlywhatitdid.But200familiesfromthegr...

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