Cheung glanced around the table, having surprised himself that he had been able to put the second project so far out of mind while concentrating on realizing the first objective. However, now that the scientists had achieved the production facilities to create space cruisers, the council had easily shifted their attention to the nuclear missile project, a scheme proposed by the Quebec Council. They had suggested launching a missile from the Neptune airspace towards the large alien flagship that still remained in a stationary orbit on the far side of Charon.
"No questions, Tipler, but I'm still opposed to the idea, as I said before." Captain Kansier spoke calmly, leaning back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest.
"May we know why, Captain?" The council representative, Ian Tipler, did not share Kansier's composure, although he did not appear displeased by the objection.
"For the same reason as I gave at the last meeting."
"Tell me, Captain Kansier, how would it be possible for any force to withstand the impact of a nuclear warhead that could just as easily destroy the moon?"
"Well, you're assuming that the missile will detonate against its target." Kansier looked up, his eyes flashing with contained amusement.
"You know the remote possibility of error better than any of us on this council, Captain. Thanks to your team's weapons research, those creatures won't even know what's hit them until it's too late. Now, are you going to sit there and tell me that you don't have any faith in your own R & D team?"
"I have complete faith in them, but as to whether or not I believe in this plan of yours, well, I'll be the first to congratulate the council if it succeeds." Kansier shrugged.
"When we succeed." Tipler corrected him, only slightly irritated by Kansier’s behavior. "Frankly, I'm a little concerned about your pessimism, Kansier. So, what do the rest of you specialists think of our new attack strategy?"
Cheung listened while Zhdanov expressed a farce of conservative optimism and Knightwood hesitated to agree. Cheung remained silent, pretending not to take issue with anything anyone had said. Luckily, Tipler ignored him; Cheung knew the man did not consider him the top authority on the topic and thus treated him as an irrelevant participant. Still, he didn't mind. Neither Tipler nor any of the other council representatives were really interested in any point of view outside their own, and at least he had not been forced to give his support to their venture.
"Well, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to have to cut this meeting short." Kansier said casually, but he pushed his chair back decisively. "The Stargazer will be departing soon enough, and I have a few things to do before I leave." He went on.
"I'll send the Security Council Chief a progress report once the crew arrives. And I'll have the scheduler in the Cargo Bay set up a meeting time for us to discuss the Stargazer's assets and liabilities, Zhdanov, Knightwood... Professor Cheung. Perhaps then we can meet each other properly and discuss more thoroughly your concerns and contributions to our endeavor, Dr. Cheung. Until then." Kansier made eye contact with each of them in turn, his gaze self-assured but not arrogant.
Glancing at a clock on the wall, Cheung groaned inwardly and fixed his attention on Mr. Tipler. The session had only just begun.
Chapter Fourteen
“I do love the water,” Cameron thought again. “But I never thought I would miss Quebec.”
Dr. Cameron had been living in the ancient British Columbia region ever since he left the UESRC. He had taken an apartment in New Vancouver there, ample enough in size for him to continue his research work and satisfy his scientific curiosity without any interference from the council. For the past two months he had enjoyed the leisurely pace of life in the urban zone; he took walks by the enclosed riverfront, where he fed bread crumbs to the squirrels that still lived under man's shadow beside the Fraser River, where also swans drifted endlessly over the water. At around two o' clock each day, he would return to his laboratory and begin his work. On an average day, he spent six or seven hours working, then took a light dinner before retiring.
He hadn't expected a visit from anyone, at least not until Christmas, when Zhdanov had promised to stop by with a gift for Cameron's mother. However, one afternoon Cameron returned from his daily routine and discovered Richard Mathieson and Sasha Blair waiting for him with their youngest daughter, Erin, asleep already on the living room sofa.
"How did you get in here?" he asked, coming inside his apartment.
"Don't you remember Doctor?" Mathieson's brows furrowed as his face took on an unsettled expression.
"Enlighten me," Cameron directed absently.
"You gave me your entry code when I helped you move your experiments from the UESRC." Richard answered.
But Mathieson, too, hadn't been in the mood to discuss old times.
“That still doesn’t explain why you’re here,” said Cameron.
Then Sasha and Richard explained Erin's illness to Cameron and told him the diagnosis given by Dr. Bredesen, a man Cameron did not much admire, but he still didn't understand why they had come all this way to see him. There were plenty of good doctors at the UESRC.
“All right, I’ll take a look at her,” Cameroon reluctantly agreed. I have a lab next door, which is rudimentary, but sufficient for my needs.”
“Can you look at her today, Doctor?” asked Richard.
“Today?”
“Yes, we’re technically in New Vancouver on official business for the Security Council and have to attend a meeting at the Victoria Base scheduled to begin within the hour.”
“All right, then, if that’s all the time I have. I suppose I can look at her while you’re at the meeting.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Sasha and Richard said, relieved looks on their faces.
“We’ll be back in a few hours,” Richard said, leading little Erin, who stood among them, over to take Dr. Cameron’s hand.
Several minutes after Sasha and Richard had gone, Cameron settled down to work on Erin’s bloodwork, turning off the computer analyzers and starting fresh with a barrage of simple blood tests and his own microscanner.
What he soon discovered made him shudder.
* * * * *
After taking several blood samples, Cameron had only to conduct a preliminary analysis of the blood sample to realize that something extraordinary was at work; as time passed, he came to dismiss all possibility that the child Erin was suffering from an unknown disease. The answer was both simple and infinitely complicated on its own.
She was not human at all!
“Well I’ll be damned!” he laughed out loud. “She isn’t human!!!”
At first, he made the discovery that her blood was a new type unlike any other in any circulatory system he had yet encountered, but with certain similar features to the human variety he knew. What Cameron couldn't understand was how the blood screen and genetic grid analyzer had missed the anomalies. However it had happened, when Cameron used old-fashioned, obscure methods of analysis, the red blood cells in the Mathieson child's system appeared to contain small nuclei but lacked hemoglobin, instead containing a substance that appeared to have a comparable affinity to bind with oxygen.
Visually, Cameron could detect no platelets in Erin’s blood, and his sample showed an absence of plasma. He would have to repeat that experiment later, he decided. How could the girl's blood clot when she was wounded without plasma or platelets?
His first sample yielded an abnormally low count of the white blood cell lymphocytes, neutrophils, and monocytes, almost equivalent to the number of eosinophils and basophils, the latter of which should have been present in lesser amounts. As it was, the cells were hardly recognizable.
“It’s like she has no immune system, or one more advanced than ours,” he thought out loud.
Instead of a healthy count of white blood cells, he found gigantic tri-nuclear cells in Erin’s blood sample, perfectly spherical in shap
e, circulating faster than the sluggish erythrocytes. These cells had remained clear despite the stain he had used, and the swirling motions going on in the cell made it virtually impossible to distinguish any cellular organelles. All of this should have been impossible. At first, he was inclined to dismiss what he had seen as hallucination, but the bizarre did not end there.
“Is she a plant, or part plant?” he wondered, finding the same chloroplasts encasing her cell membranes.
In the skin sample he had taken, Cameron soon recognized the same tri-nuclear cells lying dormant between the lower dermal layers and near the capillaries, yet the motions within these cells made his eyes sore as he turned up the power of his electro-bioscan microscope to try to observe them.
“Tri-nucleated cells are impossible! The basic foundation of life exists in a single-nucleated cell! How and why on Earth is this all possible!” he kept wondering to himself.
Once his preparations for his scanning and electron microscopes had been sliced, he waited a few moments while the machines processed a photo and then retrieved them. In both the blood and skin, the tri-nuclear cells remained masked by streaks of motion, yet the composition of the other cellular materials was revealed.
Aside from the cellular organelles he had expected to find, Cameron observed small squarish sacs that appeared similar to chloroplasts again, though at least ten times smaller. At high resolution, each nucleus contained two dark round "buds" branching off from the nucleus yet still encompassed by the nuclear envelope.
He had not been hallucinating this time. They were the same cells he had studied shortly after the girl's arrival to the UESRC. Tri-nuclear cells could not exist! he had told himself to prove that he had been wrong. He held on to his former conviction—only a single nucleus had ever been viable in the life found on Earth. The implication of this could only mean one thing.
And that was making him shake all over.
* * * * *
“Time to conduct genetic tests,” Cameron thought, setting up the process for DNA fingerprinting. Isolating the tri-nuclear cells, he discovered with alarm that none of his restriction enzymes could break the circle of DNA composing the cell. In fact, as he inspected the sample again under the electro-bioscan microscope while adding the enzymes a second time, he watched the cells engulf the enzymes, producing a brief flash of detectable energy.
Energy emissions???
He was not so easily thwarted.
This result prompted Cameron to set up a micro-ECG to measure the electrical energy emitted by the bioprocesses in his patient. The nervous system and circulatory system were by far the most energetic, releasing almost ten times as many electrons as those in an ordinary human being.
Further proof that Erin wasn’t a human being! He was delirious. However, though Cameron's curiosity immediately encouraged him to jump ahead to observations of the patient's brain, he hadn't yet finished his analysis of the circulatory system.
He set to work again on that. Taking sections of ordinary cell lymphocytes and "cancerous" lymphocytes, Cameron again mixed in the restriction enzymes, and happily found partial success among the "cancerous cells" as well as complete success with the functioning cells. Adding his solution, which contained bromophenol blue as a dye, he waited impatiently a few minutes for Endelmann's Agerose-Electophoresis Device to sift the DNA and speed up the process of digestion.
As the ethidium bromide stage occurred, Cameron hurriedly initialized the sequence on the console to request sample extracts. In a rush, he took these to the microscope, but unfortunately the dye had only affected the cut DNA. The DNA fragments from the "cancerous cells" did not appear to have reacted to the ethidium bromide, a strong DNA mutagen that should have affected them.
As Cameron pondered the significance of his findings in a state of wonder, the EAED finished processing the DNA fingerprint, verbalizing a reedy "Process Completed" that interrupted Cameron's train of thought.
A brief observation of the fingerprints sent a chill down Cameron's spine, and they were deeply disturbing.
* * * * *
“I see, I see now,” said Cameron, in a fuddle. But the truth was, he did not, and he was only beginning to fathom any of his data. However, the analysis of the nucleotide sequences was finished for sure.
The simple sequence DNA, which served as structural and protective sequences for a DNA strand and were typically present at the telomeres and centromeres, extended further in the sequence he held than in ordinary human DNA, accounting for about 24% of the genome rather than the usual 10%.
“How odd,” he thought. Perhaps having something to do with the aging process?
The intermediate sequence DNA, which were dispersed throughout the arms of the chromatid and which functioned in replication and protein coding such as histones, were also present in a larger percentage of 48% of the genome, rather than 20%.
No explanation—yet.
The remaining 28% of the genome belonged to the slow, single-copy DNA sequences. This normally accounted for 70% of the human genome, such as those responsible for protein coding, and those "leftover" remnant sequences of evolution. Remnant sequences remained forever a non-functioning part of the highly conserved DNA, sometimes even as a “leftover” of long ago evolutionary adaptations.
This intrigued Cameron's imagination.
“Can Erin’s DNA rearrange itself? Maybe it can utilize sequences that, although, still likewise present in human genetic coding, are no longer necessary or useful…”
It was almost as if—she could rearrange her own genetic structure!
That could mean—she could become mutate and change her own body in different environments! How amazing!
It was while scrutinizing these sequences and noting a decreased amount of introns gene interraptions that Cameron noticed the random dark patches that appeared in different places on each DNA fingerprint.
These, he soon discovered, were not sequences of paired nucleotides, but rings of nucleotide "radicals" wrapped in a ring around positively charged granules of glycoproteins and histones and a bit of pseudo-nuclear material that was too small for him to identify.
More evidence of genetic flexibility! What could it all mean?
In the cancerous cells, Cameron made a remarkable discovery: these nucleotide rings were situated in between the intermediate and slow sequences. He soon discovered that the slow sequences programmed genetic traits the computer could not analyze.
Cameron's imagination appeared to have been insightful. The slow nucleotide sequences seemed almost to have been altered to form more interactive intermediate sequences. Vice versa, the intermediate sequences were changed into specialized long gene codes by the rings where the old sequences had long since become obsolete in genetic evolution.
How Cameron wished he could show this to Knightwood!
The way these two forms of gene sequences were reacting through the medium of gene circles suggested a complexity of information exchange, though the original mechanism was conserved, and the information appeared virtually unaltered despite its vacillations between sequences.
Thus could one alter one’s genetic structure and perhaps return to normal again! Maybe she could change her face and genetic structure to look like anything or anyone!
However, just how these rings of nucleotides managed to alter the base pairs of nucleotides in the sequences was something that eluded his imagination. If he could witness his hypothesis in action, would the changes appear spontaneous, or would the rings take time to break the covalent bonds in the sequence and alter the genetic code? And how did this process manage to continue without destabilizing the genome?
He knew that ordinary human lymphocytes were known to rearrange at the level of DNA, but not by such radical processes of mutation or recombination that would alter the information or destabilize the genome such as had evidently occurred in these unusual fingerprint
s, not at least without causing the termination of the lifeform in question.
Yet Erin was still alive.
* * * * *
An hour passed as Cameron continued to examine various aspects of the DNA samples. More shocking than anything else, in light of the alien nature of Erin's DNA, was the discovery that Erin's cells contained a virtually identical form of the protein cytochrome that was present in human beings, a signature amino acid sequence that linked human development to the evolution of all life on Earth over hundreds of millions of years. And there were other close similarities in the homeobox, a segment of DNA that regulated genes crucial to pattern formation in Earth creatures.
How, how could Erin—clearly an alien—also have adaptations that belonged to the Earth and its creatures? his heart demanded to know.
That would only mean one thing—that someone had created her race and the human race from some common ancestor or amino acid sequence. And that, like everything else, had to be impossible!
When other strange related anomalies began to appear, Cameron nearly stopped his investigation, too distressed and overwhelmed by the implications. How could such an alien life form seem to be related not only to human beings but to every form of life on Earth?
In order to calm himself, Cameron returned to examine the cell samples he had taken. Between cell divisions of the ordinary cells, Cameron suddenly noticed that the telomeres that capped the gene sequences remained constant where they should have shortened. The number of cell divisions of every living creature he knew had been encoded in its genes with a finite limit. As an organism lived and its cells divided, the telomeres at the ends of its gene sequences diminished, aging the organism on a microscopic as well as macroscopic level. With only a brief span of time to make observations, Cameron had traced no reduction in the telomere function.
All of this meant that Erin's body was not aging.
Yet it had to be!
With great reluctance and disappointment, Cameron felt obliged to dismiss his findings; he had observed the girl grow and develop, subject to the same human clock that defined the stages of life.