Alchemist

  He squeezed his wife’s cold, sticky hand, but there was no response. He tried again, looked pleadingly at her eyes for some sign but they were closed. He stared wildly around the room: at the anaesthetist who was busy changing a bag on to a drip stand; at the obstetrician who was bleary-eyed from being dragged out of bed at three in the morning.

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’

  Experienced grey eyes stared back at him from above the mask. The voice was deep and soft, with a reassuring tone to it, but could offer little to go on now. A finger pointed to the jagged orange graph-line on the foetal heart-trace monitor. ‘Mr Johnson, that’s showing us the baby is hyperactive, with prolonged episodes of bradycardia. The heart rate is consistently below eighty, and the baby is suffering severe foetal distress.’ A hesitation. ‘We’re going to have to do a Caesarean if we want to try to save the baby, but there’s a real possibility your wife might not survive the anaesthetic; she’s extremely weak. I’m afraid you are going to have to make the decision.’

  ‘Decision?’ Alan Johnson echoed, barely comprehending. He questioned the obstetrician’s calm eyes, and his voice began trembling. ‘Wh-what d-do you – you advise?’

  The obstetrician broke it to him as gently as he could. ‘Mr Johnson, I don’t think your wife has any chance of surviving unless we operate; the baby will kill her if this goes on. There is a chance if we operate that she will live – and that the baby will also.’

  Alan Johnson wrung his hands. Slowly he nodded. ‘Go ahead, please, you’d better go ahead.’

  They allowed him into the operating theatre and he stood at the rear, in a gown, mask and white clogs, beside the anaesthetics machine, his eyes switching from his wife’s motionless face to the dials of the monitors. He was thinking of the cot in the small upstairs room of their home, with the yellow walls and blue skirting board that he’d painted himself, and the paper frieze of nursery rhymes that he and Sarah had put up together … the pram, and the toys and clothes they had bought although they had not known whether it would be a boy or a girl.

  Until the past few months their marriage had been utter bliss. He had never felt so happy in all his life. He should have realized, he knew, that there was a price to pay. God never gave without asking for something in return, although sometimes it was hard to understand the reasons behind His requests. But God was always right, and they knew that whatever pain He put them through, He loved them both as dearly as they did Him.

  God had tested them for the first three years of their marriage by not permitting Sarah to get pregnant, in spite of their regular and passionate love-making. They understood the value of this test was to make them realize that human life could not be taken for granted, nor could the right to create it. Dr Humphreys had prescribed a course of a fertility drug called Maternox, and within three months of starting to take it, Sarah had fallen pregnant.

  Alan could remember the joy as they had sat together in Dr Humphreys’ small surgery and he had confirmed the news that she was indeed expecting a baby. He thought back with tears in his eyes to those early days of her pregnancy. Apart from the small growing bump, Sarah had hardly seemed affected. None of the symptoms you read about, like morning sickness or strange food crazes. Then she had lost colour from her face and suddenly started feeling very tired, drained of energy. Anaemia, the doctor had told them, nothing to worry about; he had prescribed a course of vitamin supplements and for a while afterwards she had seemed fine.

  Fine until she had learned the company she was working for was being taken over and rumours were rife that there would be redundancies. A week later the first attack of the rash had struck. Just a small, localized reaction on the right-hand side of her chest and over the top of her shoulder, which Dr Humphreys had diagnosed as shingles, brought on by the stress of fearing about her job. But even he had been surprised how quickly it had faded.

  It was a few weeks later that she had complained of the first headache; he remembered her lying in bed, clamping her skull between her hands and fighting back tears. Then the nausea and the vomiting. Dr Humphreys had become alarmed. For a month she had been able to hold down very little food and he had suggested she should be admitted to hospital. But Sarah was an independent creature and had not wanted that.

  So Alan had taken time off work to look after her, nursing her night and day, exhausting himself, applying ointment and damp towels to the painful rash that had returned with a vengeance in the past month. And which now lay, like burn blisters, in large swathes across her body. Dr Humphreys had had Sarah examined by a dermatologist, who suspected a virulent form of psoriasis, and had taken a biopsy for laboratory analysis. But the rash matched no known strain of psoriasis. The dermatologist’s final diagnosis was that it was a symptom of an unidentified virus that had infected her. He explained that such viruses attacked at random, and there was no other cure than medical supervision, and time.

  ‘I’ve never seen a viral rash like this,’ the obstetrician said quietly to Alan. ‘Have you been abroad somewhere?’

  ‘No one’s identified it yet,’ Alan Johnson said. ‘The Centre for Tropical Diseases thin –’

  His voice was cut short as his wife’s belly seemed suddenly to stretch in three different directions at once; for an instant the bare skin looked like molten lava bubbling in a volcano. The obstetrician stepped back to her side and the team of medics closed in around Alan’s wife, blocking his view.

  He still stood at the back of the small theatre, fearfully scanning the readouts on the digital gauges. He identified the pulse monitor, watched with sickening despair as the orange waves and troughs seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. He pressed his hands together and closed his eyes, whispering quietly: ‘Please God, don’t let her die, don’t let my darling Sarah die, let her live, please let her live.’

  Then he said the Lord’s Prayer, followed by more prayers, then the Lord’s Prayer again. Prayer sustained him during the next few minutes, then he swayed giddily, and had to steady himself against a tiled wall. Can’t pass out, not now, can’t.

  There was a sudden flurry around the operating table. Two orderlies had wheeled in a large box of apparatus on wheels. He heard the sharp hiss of compressed air. Then again, then a silence. He opened his eyes and the room slid past him as if he were viewing it through a train window. A hand took his arm, he heard the obstetrician’s voice, gentle but weary.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Johnson.’

  He looked down at his wife through tear-filled eyes. One of the nurses was already turning off the drips that had been sustaining her. Another was disconnecting the wires from a monitor. Her belly still thrashed wildly and Alan found himself having to comprehend in a single moment that his wife was dead but that their child was still alive inside her.

  Then the surgeon made an incision down Sarah’s navel. A band of blood followed the blade’s path.

  ‘I –’ Alan mouthed. ‘I – she’s – she’s –?’ His voice trailed and no one noticed that he had spoken; they were all concentrating now, two nurses clamping back the cut skin, the surgeon pushing his gloved hands inside the opening, a third nurse swabbing. His view became blocked.

  Then a surgically gloved hand raised into the air a tiny, wriggling creature trailing a long white cord.

  Alan Johnson’s spirits lifted a fraction. The creature was moving. Sarah’s baby! Their baby. Their baby was born! God had made this bit go right!

  He pushed his way through the forest of green gowns, barely registering the sudden eerie silence, not seeing the frowns above the masks.

  Then he froze. Stared in disbelieving horror. At the creature. The child. His and Sarah’s child.

  No. Oh God, please no.

  The tiny human shape coated in wet blood and vernix was thrashing like a hooked fish. He made himself study the head, where the face should be except there was no face; just a mass of hideously twisted and misshapen flesh; blank skin; no nose, no mouth; just one eye at an odd angle in the centre of what might be
the forehead.

  ‘Jesus,’ someone behind him said.

  ‘It’s alive,’ someone else said. ‘It’s alive.’

  ‘Male.’

  Alan stood transfixed; a cowl. He had read somewhere that babies were sometimes born with one; they would take the cowl off in a moment and it would be fine. He would be fine; their son would be fine.

  The surgeon turned the baby round; its back was dark. As Alan looked closer he realized the skin of the baby’s back was covered in thick matted hair.

  He let out a moan. Someone caught him as his legs buckled. Two nurses helped him towards the door. He tried to walk but his legs would no longer support him. They helped him sit on a chair in the corridor. He saw a fire extinguisher and a hose reel on the wall, felt a cold draught blow on his face. A moment late the obstetrician with bloody gloved hands was standing in front of him, addressing him in a lowered voice.

  ‘I’m afraid the baby is terribly deformed. The little chap doesn’t have a face at all. It’s a version of a rare malformation caused either by an extra chromosome or possibly the deletion of a small chromosome segment. We don’t have sufficient knowledge of DNA to understand the exact cause yet.’ He paused for a moment. ‘It’s called Cyclopism, or Cyclops Syndrome.’

  ‘Just a cowl. Isn’t it just a cowl? Can’t you remove it?’

  The obstetrician shook his head slowly. ‘I’m afraid it’s not a cowl. I wish it was. Cyclopism happens very occasionally and we can’t pick it up from the scans. He’s alive now but once we sever the umbilical cord he’ll be unable to sustain himself. I think it would be kinder to let him die rather than put him on to life support.’

  Alan Johnson shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘Can’t you do anything? Plastic surgery – can’t you –’ He was rambling, he knew, clutching at straws.

  ‘It would be best not to do anything,’ the obstetrician said quietly but firmly.

  Alan sank his face into his hands. He tried to imagine what Sarah would have wanted if she were still – still – he pictured the baby turn in the gloved hand, saw the vernix, the blood, the thick hairs on its back. A tremor shook him, then another. He looked at the surgeon helplessly pleading, beginning to weep, silently at first, then with deep gulping sobs.

  10

  London. Tuesday 25 October, 1994

  At eight in the morning beneath a flinty sky Conor Molloy, harassed after getting lost and taking longer than anticipated, turned his small new BMW across the traffic flow along the Euston Road. He joined one of the lines of cars crawling through the metal security gates alongside the Bendix Building, and showed his ID card to the guard who nodded him through into the car park. In spite of the early hour, it was almost full.

  He climbed out of the car, casting a cursory eye over the immaculate grey paintwork. It would be several days before he needed to worry about getting it washed, he thought, mindful of the penalty that Charley Rowley had warned him about.

  Rules and regulations. This place had more rules than an institution, and it seemed like every few minutes he discovered another one. He had spent most of his first day at work, yesterday, encountering and learning them whilst getting to know the geography of the building under Charley Rowley’s guidance. He had not appreciated when Rowley had met him at the airport that he was the Sectional Manager of Genetics, rather than just a mere colleague. But after only one day with him, Rowley felt even more like a colleague than a boss, and Conor fully intended to cultivate their budding friendship.

  He had learnt that Bendix Schere was organized into five directorates: Production, Marketing, Research and Development (R & D), Finance and Secretariat (F & S), and Security – with a maze of sub-divisions within each. Leisure facilities consisted of a luxurious staff canteen, and a very impressively equipped health hydro in the basement, complete with personal training programmes, squash and tennis courts, and an Olympic-size pool.

  Rowley had taken him to almost every floor, except for the top three which were off-limits: the forty-ninth was the Directors’ enclave, and the two below, which Rowley called the Pentagon, housed the global command centre of security for the entire Bendix Schere Foundation.

  Conor had been introduced to a number of heads of department, and he had privately assessed each one as to whether he thought they were loyal company people, or potential rebels like Charley Rowley. To his disappointment almost all of them struck him as zealously dedicated to the Bendix Schere ethos. With a few exceptions within his own department, Group Patents and Agreements, almost all the employees he’d met seemed to be sharply dressed males and females who greeted him with power handshakes accompanied by piercing eyeball contact, and glib phrases of welcome delivered like a foreign language learned by rote.

  He noticed also that there seemed to be no unattractive, handicapped or overweight employees, and that the only non-whites were either in Security or menial jobs. There was a uniformity, as if everyone had been hired from a restricted intellectual, personality and appearance band. Or maybe it was the artifice of the building’s interior that had this effect on employees after a length of time?

  Although just at the start of his second day, Conor had already begun to doubt whether anyone other than Charley Rowley, and a long-haired lab technician called Jake Seals, had any spark of individuality about them. If the science of cloning were more advanced, it wouldn’t take a big leap of imagination for him to believe almost everyone else had been cultured in a laboratory from a specific formula.

  Conformity, Conor thought as he buttoned his coat against the biting wind and hurried across the lot. Science was about discipline; about systematic observation, experiment and measurement. And yet medicine was always acknowledged as being such an inexact science. By dressing the company up with strange rules and tough procedures, perhaps Bendix Schere felt it could convey the impression to the world that its particular knowledge of medicine was more exact than it really was.

  He glanced up at the sculpted windowless edifice of the building, and felt a certain respect despite himself. Then he walked up the marble steps, through the electronic doors and into the white marble interior of the lobby atrium, which was almost deserted. He showed his ID to another guard, swiped his smart-card on a security turnstile and walked across to the lifts.

  They were all in use, and as he stood waiting he tried to make out his reflection in the burnished copperplate of a lift door, and checked the knot of his paisley tie.

  He was dressed smartly but conservatively, in a plain navy double-breasted suit, white shirt, and navy Crombie greatcoat. His hair had been rearranged by the wind and a couple of gelled locks were standing vertically. As he smoothed them down with his hands, he was suddenly conscious of being stared at by a young woman in her late twenties. She was standing beside him, watching him with a look of amusement.

  He shuffled his feet and dug a hand in his coat pocket awkwardly. She was quite a bit shorter than him, with a fashionable frizz of long blonde hair and an assertively pretty and intelligent face. A lift announced its arrival and they stepped in; several more people followed. The young woman smiled at him a little triumphantly as if she knew she had caught him out, but there was a hint of interest also. As the crowd jostled them closer together, he smelled the musky scent she was wearing and found it distinctly sensuous.

  He looked at her again. Gorgeous greeny-blue eyes full of warmth and humour. She stood out, she was definitely from a different mould. ‘Rebellion’ was stamped all over her.

  The lift stopped on the fifth floor and two men in white overalls got out. The doors closed again. Conor found himself trying to sneak a glance down at her legs but her trench coat blocked his view. ‘Like it here?’ he asked her.

  ‘In the lift?’

  He was slow this morning, the jet-lag seemed to be knocking him and it was a second before he got the joke and grinned. ‘Sure – I guess the lift’s pretty special. How about the rest of the place?’

  ‘So far. We’re still just moving in at t
he moment. My father and I.’ She had a nice voice, confident, punchy.

  A couple of people frowned at them. Staff were advised not to converse in the lifts. Security; you never knew who might be in there with you.

  She glanced away from him, distracted by some thought that seemed to be troubling her, then caught his eye again and they exchanged a brief silent smile. He shot a surreptitious look at her hands and noticed she was wearing no wedding or engagement ring. Then they stopped at the eighth floor, one of the genetics labs, he remembered, and he watched her step on to the green carpet and walk jauntily away, his eyes staying on her until the door closed. Nice, he thought. Very, very nice. Sparky and approachable.

  The car began to rise and a few seconds later halted at the twentieth floor, which was to be his home for the foreseeable future. The door of the lift opened on to a small reception area staffed by an attractive but frosty young woman who was seated behind a row of monitors on a console, typing.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Molloy,’ she said, without even looking up from her screen. Good looks, but cold as ice. He smiled and tried to sound as pleasant as possible.

  ‘Good morning – ah –’ Her name momentarily escaped him. Then he remembered. ‘Miss Paston.’

  Bendix Schere operated a system of anonymous secretaries. Some offices were already equipped with voice-activated word-processor systems, but most correspondence and document generation was produced by secretarial pools with whom the rest of the staff rarely had contact.

  The system, Rowley had explained, was simple. There was a dictation icon on your computer terminal screen. You clicked on it and dictation controls appeared. You then dictated a letter or document the usual way, before keying in a command to send it down to the secretarial pool. A short while later, the typed letters or documents would come up on your screen and you could key in any changes or corrections yourself. Any letters would be automatically signed for you by the computer and your copy would be stored on disk.