The White Plague (59 page)

UCU – UCC – UCA – UCG

GGU – GGC – GGA – GGG

GCU – GCC – GCA – GCG…

He watched the hand at its work until it stopped after completing five rows of the triplet series, then it went back and added identifying labels opposite each series – Ser, Gly, Ala, Thr, Pro.

A pipe-smoker in a hand-knit blue pullover at John’s left gestured at the board with his pipe stem. “It’s incomplete,” he said. “Incomplete series.” “I’ll give you the rest of it presently,” John said. “I want you to think in groups of five. Order is important, as you indicate. But the choice of five, I believe, is essential. The transmission code is broken into groups of five, allocations being matched to the available chemical bonds at the receptor sites.”

“Those sex-determining sites you postulate?” the pipe-smoker asked.

“Yes. I ask you to imagine flagella, the fibers in a single chain and incomplete, reaching out and locking into living receptors – a penta-plug, you might say, designed for a specific receptacle. It can only be plugged in at a particular site. But when it is plugged in, it will not drop out.” Peard’s staff hitched chairs closer, peering up at John. “Why five?” someone asked.

“Each of these quadratic stacks…” John gestured at the series he had written on the board “… has an open end, a fifth segment that can be allocated as you wish. You shape it to fit.”

“Good God!” the pipe-smoker said. He gave John a look of awe. “Shuts off the living process. How did you hit on it?”

“The simplest required form,” John said.

“Given the plague’s symptoms,” Peard offered.

“How do you determine the side groups?” someone demanded.

“Between the DNA and the RNA, the only chemical difference is the fourth base, thymine for one and uracil for the other,” John said. “The different sequences can be determined by comparing the FD mass spectrums, using stereoisomers, of course. The different shapes of the DNA helixes will tell us the submolecular shapes within them.”

“You’re saying Crick’s Central Dogma is not true,” Peard said.

John nodded. Peard had a quick mind, anyway. He obviously had leaped ahead to the implications in what had already been revealed.

Questions began to bombard John from all sides. “… more than one amino acid substitution?… of the peptide bond? Yes! The carboxyl group and the amino group… But doesn’t it have to be a high polymer? Wouldn’t the phage disintegrate?”

Peard jumped to his feet and waved a hand for silence.

“There has to be feedback from the cytoplasm,” John said, “just as Doctor Peard suggests.”

John put the chalk on its ledge and rubbed a hand across his brow, closing his eyes. He had the beginnings of a headache and his shoulders trembled with fatigue.

Peard touched John’s arm. “Long drive, eh? I’d say a bit of food and rest are indicated.”

John nodded.

“Fits, dammit!” someone said. “Makes all sorts of sense.”

“We’ll meet again tomorrow after Doctor O’Donnell has rested,” Peard said.

John allowed himself to be led off by Peard. He could still hear the people talking in the library, excited voices, some arguments. Was Doheny right after all? Did it only take inspiration? But he had given them an accurate briefing. The penance demanded it.

Peard led him into a brightly lighted kitchen where sandwiches and milk were provided by an old man in a white apron. Peard took him then to a small bedroom with its own bath. A single window looked out across the moon-bathed lough. John heard the door close and the snick of a bolt. He tested the door. Locked. He extinguished the room’s lights and returned to the window. There was a stone-enclosed cattle booley next to the lake, boggy ground with high reeds beyond the enclosure.

I’m a prisoner
, he thought.
Doheny’s doing?

He let fatigue rise up within him as he watched the moonlight pour across the lough and the bogs. What did it matter if he was a prisoner?
The moonlight out there was a haunted thing
, he thought,
the light out of lovers’ past pouring itself away where no love could be
. Bits and pieces of the long ride to this place tugged at his awareness. They had driven interminably in the long twilight, a timeless, droning eternity.

When O’Neill’s howling had ceased, he had felt the removal of a weight. The steel slit in the side of the armored car had framed a view of a hilltop bathed in orange sunset, remnant black shadows up there where an ancient ring fort, a rath, had stood.
That had been a place of life
, he thought.
Now, it was a silent relic
. He felt that the occupants of the armored car might fade just as easily into empty relics, bones and rusty metal. The ride was far different from the tramp over the countryside.

Sparring with Herity had become almost an instinctive thing in the months of their slow passage. Doing their laundry in running water, digging food out of buried caches, killing feral pigs and cows. What a land it was! John recalled a small stream at his feet, water winding through reeds, the ground boggy along the edges. The current had tipped the reeds in a careless rhythm – down, up, down, up… It had been movement like their walking feet. There had been freedom in it. Yes – freedom: their possessions on their backs. An odd feeling: He had been liberated there with Herity, the priest and the boy, experiencing a freedom from the things of the world that perhaps only the migratory hordes of the nomad ages had known – those people of foot and horse and tents. Not until oxen and carts had possessions begun to subdue that kind of freedom. It was a thought John felt he would have liked to discuss with Gannon.

We took only what was useful to a nomad’s life….

As John stood in the darkness of his room staring at the moonlit lough, he grew aware of movement below him. A dark figure had come out of the shadows on the other side of the original castle ramparts. John recognized Father Michael from the walk. The priest moved aimlessly out to the edge of the paved area and then onto the lawn at the top of the lake. The priest there reminded John of the penance – help them find a cure. He faced away from the window, turned on the room’s lights and undressed for bed. Help them find a cure. Yes, he would have to do it.

Father Michael was facing the building when John’s light went on. He glimpsed John’s profile, the vague movements, saw the light go out.

John’s confession had left a paradoxical residue in Father Michael – an awful weight and a sense of emptiness. The priest was reminded of the moment when he had bid goodbye to another period in his life – the years when he had occupied a corner house in Dublin’s Coombe, serving as spiritual advisor in the Catholic school. He had seen the very house that morning from the armored car when the driver detoured out of the city – the row houses all sadness, everything gone to weed and empty windows. The Church school had been reduced to a granite ruin, its interior emptied by flames.

What he missed most, Father Michael decided, was the boys and girls spewing forth from the school, the noisy romping of their play in that interlude of freedom between classrooms and home. Whenever he closed his eyes and thought about it, Father Michael could summon back their shouts, the loud calls of derision and display, the brief gatherings of faces, the outcries with plans for later, the complaints about chores.

Father Michael looked up at John’s darkened window recalling the effect of the silent boy upon that poor man up there. Doheny had constructed that effect with efficient malice. The boy had been a good choice. He represented an essence of something to be seen in the few boys to be glimpsed in this Irish world. None of the old vigor remained. Was it that boys did not make as much rumpus in the absence of girls? There had been a special kind of happiness under all of that noise that Father Michael feared this world would never again experience. It was not just the boys who had lapsed into something reminiscent of those stone-faced houses in the Coombe – each individual ultimately hidden behind a blank exclusion that tried to betray no hint of the griefs concealed within.

John’s confession changed nothing, Father Michael decided, unless it led the man to right in some small way the terrible wrong that had been done.

And what if there is no cure?

Father Michael felt that his own thoughts had betrayed him. It was an unprincipled thought, not worthy of him. God could not intend such a thing! This was one more example that the old principles were gone, erased by one man’s actions. Father Michael’s newly restored faith stumbled.

Principles!

That was one of those words like responsibility. Such words were private passions exposed, like a corner of yard goods on a shop table, not revealing at all what lay under the stack. Synonyms for things quite different, they were. Faith went about disguised as Principle.

Faith.

It was a grab-bag word, one of those little red-and-black signs bought at a cheap shop. It said:
Keep Off the Grass. It said: No Trespassing. It said: Restricted Area – Authorized Personnel Only.

Father Michael buried his face in his hands.

God, what have we done?

They had destroyed innocence for all time
, he thought.
That was what they had done
. He realized then that there must have been an innocence about John Roe O’Neill before tragedy shattered him. Not a perfect innocence, because even then O’Neill had played with terrible powers, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice trying an incantation while the Master was absent. Was God not in His heaven then? Was the loss of innocence God’s intent? There could be no going back from such a loss. That was the most terrifying thing of all. You could not return to virginity.

Father Michael knelt on the wet grass below John’s window then and prayed aloud:

“God restore us. God restore us. God restore us.”

Peard, returning from conferring with Doheny, heard the voice from the lakeside and paused in the shadows between the buildings to stare out at the kneeling figure. The moonlight was bright and Peard recognized Father Flannery. The priest had not yet been told about the little marriage chore in wait for him. Peard debated whether to go out and bring up the subject immediately, but the priest obviously was praying. Peard was of that school which thought of prayer as an extremely personal thing, not to be shared with others. Watching someone pray embarrassed him. Whenever he was in church he only mouthed the prayers silently, aware of all the listeners around him.

It’ll wait until morning,
Peard thought.

He hurried off to his quarters, his mind full of what had passed between him and Doheny. It had been a fascinating conversation. Doheny had already been in his office, having sped the short route to Killaloe in a fast convoy with motorcycle outriders. He had been on the phone, talking to Wycombe-Finch, an oddly one-sided conversation with the Englishman apparently not speaking much. Doheny had written on a pad for Peard to read: “Something’s happening over there. Someone’s listening to us and Wye is upset by it.”

“I tell you, Wye, the man’s personality changed in front of our eyes.” Doheny pointed to Peard and gestured at the TV monitor on the corner of the desk, its camera still focused on the library and the position where John had performed at the blackboard. Doheny’s lips formed the words silently: “I watched it.”

Peard nodded.

Wycombe-Finch apparently said something noncommittal or disagreed with Doheny. The latter scowled at the phone.

“The driver watched in the mirror,” Doheny said. “The priest heard his confession, yes. Whatever it was, Father Michael’s absolutely crushed by it.”

Doheny motioned for Peard to take the chair across the desk from him. Peard obeyed, wondering why Doheny dared share this information with the Englishman. It was dangerous. Anyone could be listening.

“Five, yes,” Doheny said. “He says the base series continues to be divisible by four.”

Doheny listened for a moment, then: “What’s unnatural about it? We’ve had it right from the horse’s mouth.”

Wycombe-Finch apparently said something that Doheny found amusing. “Why should he trick us? Anyway, this is beautifully simple: five single extensions to the double helix, all set to lock in at the receptor sites. It’s quite elegant. I tell you, Wye, the man standing there explaining all this to us knew what the hell he was talking about.”

Doheny sounds British when he’s talking to Wycombe-Finch
, Peard thought.
He was so damned open about this collaboration! It does smack of treason.

Doheny listened, rolling his eyes, then: “Yes, the implications are mind-staggering. Talk to you later, Wye.” He replaced the phone in its cradle before looking up at Peard. “Adrian, have you really considered the kind of tiger we have by the tail?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you considered where this knowledge may lead?”

“We can put the world back together,” Peard said.

Doheny aimed a lidded gaze at the shadows beyond Peard. “Back together? Oh, no, Adrian. Humpty Dumpty is broken beyond repair. Whatever we put together, it won’t be our old world. That one’s gone. Forget it.”

“Two generations, three at the most,” Peard said.

“Don’t talk stupid, Adrian!” There was anger in Doheny’s voice. “Knowledge has always been power but never before to this extent. If we’re not careful we may create a world that’ll make these plague times seem like a country fair by comparison.”

Peard blinked. What did Doheny mean? The world would be short of women for a time, certainly. But if they cured this plague, many diseases might be erased. A black shadow could be removed from mankind’s future.

“I’m for some sleep,” Doheny said. “Our guest is all safely tucked away for the night?”

“Locked in and a guard posted.”

“If he asks about the lock tell him I ordered it,” Doheny said. “The guard isn’t obvious, is he?”

“All very normal. In mufti and an excuse for being in the halls.”