Blood Music Read Free Page A

spiral-bound notebooks from his locked desk drawer and added them to the growing pile of material to be smuggled out of the lab.
    He could not destroy all the evidence. He had to save the white blood cell cultures—his special lymphocytes. But where could he keep them—what could he do outside the lab?
    Nothing. There was no place he could go. Genetron had all the equipment he needed, and it would take months to establish another lab. During that time, all his work would literally disintegrate.
    Vergil passed through the lab’s rear door into the interior hall and walked past an emergency shower stall. The incubators were kept in a separate room beyond the share lab. Seven refrigerator-sized gray enameled chests stood along one wall, electronic monitors silently and efficiently keeping track of temperatures and CO2 partial pressure in each unit. In the far corner, amid older incubators of all shapes and sizes (gleaned from lab bankruptcy sales), stood a buffed stainless steel and white enamel Forma Scientific model with his name and “Sole Use” scribbled on a piece of surgical tape affixed to the door. He opened the door and removed a rack of culture dishes.
    Bacteria in each dish had developed uncharacteristic colonies—blobs of orange and green which resembled aerial maps of Paris or Washington D.C. Lines radiated from dusters and divided the colonies into sections, each section having its own peculiar texture and—so Vergil surmised—function. Since each bacterium in the cultures had the potential intellectual capacity of a mouse, it was quite possible the cultures had turned into simple societies and the societies had developed functional divisions. He hadn’t been keeping track lately, involved as he had been with altered B-cell Lymphocytes.
    They were like his children, all of them. And they had turned out to be exceptional.
    He felt a rush of guilt and nausea as he turned on a gas burner and applied each dish of altered E. coli to the flame with a pair of tongs.
    He returned to his lab and dropped the culture dishes into a sterilizing bath. That was the limit He could not destroy anything more. He felt a hatred for Harrison that went beyond any emotion he had ever felt toward another human. Tears of frustration blurred his vision.
    Vergil opened the lab Kelvinator and removed a spinner bottle and a white plastic pallet containing twenty-two test tubes. The spinner bottle was filled with a straw-colored fluid, lymphocytes in a serum medium. He had constructed a custom impeller to stir the medium more effectively, with less cell damage—a rod with several half-helical Teflon “sails.”
    The test tubes contained saline solution and special concentrated serum nutrients to support the cells while they were examined under a microscope.
    He drew fluid from the spinner bottle and carefully added several drops to four of the tubes on the pallet. He then placed the bottle back on its base. The impeller resumed spinning.
    After warming to room temperature—a process he usually aided with a small fan to gently blow warmed air over the pallet—the lymphocytes in the tubes would become active, resuming their development after being subdued by the refrigerator’s chill.
    They would continue learning, adding new segments to the revised portions of their DNA. And when, in the normal course of cell growth, the new DNA was transcribed to RNA, and the RNA served as a template for production of amino acids, and the amino acids were converted to proteins…
    The proteins would be more than just units of cell structure; other cells would be able to read them. Or RNA itself would be extruded to be absorbed and read by other cells. Or—and this third option had presented itself after Vergil inserted fragments of bacterial DNA into the mammalian chromosomes segments of DNA itself could be removed and passed along.
    Every time he thought of it, his head whirled with possibilities, thousands of ways for the cells to communicate