Perfect People

  ‘Darling, that isn’t—’

  She interrupted him. ‘You brought up this whole idea in the first place and you talked me into it. I’m not blaming you; I came to this with my eyes wide open; I’m as responsible for the decision as you are. What I’m saying is that I’m not walking away from this. Maybe whatever is going on – Dettore screwing up on the gender – maybe this is Mother Nature’s way of keeping some kind of a lid on the sanity of the world. I think the day mothers start aborting their babies at the first sign that they’re not turning out how they expect them to be, that’s the start of a very slippery slope.’

  John sat up too. ‘If you’d known about Halley – about his condition – before he was born – would you have gone ahead and brought him into the world knowing what future he faced?’

  She said nothing. Then, turning to look at her, he saw a tear trickling down her cheek. He dabbed it with his handkerchief. Her face was all clenched up in misery.

  ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’

  There was no reaction.

  Easing himself out of bed again, he pulled on his towelling dressing gown, padded out of the bedroom and across the narrow corridor, feeling even worse than a few minutes ago. Entering his den, he stepped carefully around the piles of papers, box of discs, cables, camera lenses and stacks of unread magazines, switched on the desk lamp and sat down. His laptop was still in the bag where he had dumped it when he came in. Removing it, he set it on the desk, opened it, and logged into his computer at the university. Then he checked his email.

  Fifteen new ones, including a chiding one from his online chess opponent, Gus Santiano in Brisbane. The man had a nerve, he thought. Santiano regularly used to take up to a week to move. But if John took longer than a couple of days over his own turn, the Australian would start chasing him. You’ll have to wait, he thought, blearily watching the rest of the email headers appear one after the other. Then suddenly he was wide awake.

  Dr Leo Dettore – response.

  This is an automated reply to your email from the office of Dr Leo Dettore. Dr Dettore is away at a conference in Italy, returning on 29 July.

  The twenty-ninth of July was tomorrow, he realized. Or rather, today.

  He hurried back into the bedroom. ‘Dr Dettore’s been away, darling. There’s an email. He’s back tomorrow!’

  But instead of acknowledging this she remained motionless, tears still trickling down her face. After a long silence she finally spoke, very quietly.

  ‘Is Sally Kimberly a good screw?’

  21

  John arrived in his office shortly after nine, cold and shivery, with a maelstrom of bad stuff going on inside his head. He sat at his desk with a cup of black coffee and a cup of cold water, prised two Tylenol capsules from their foil and swallowed them.

  Rain rattled against the window. It was blowing a gale outside, his jacket was damp, his chinos were soaked and clinging to his legs, and his loafers were sodden after stepping off the sidewalk into a deep puddle.

  At eleven o’clock he had to give a lecture to thirty students, in which he was to talk about the areas where the advances of medicine were having a bad impact on human evolution. Because of a whole range of scientific and medical developments during the past few thousand years, from primitive dentistry and optical lenses, through to organ transplants and new controls for chronic killer diseases like diabetes, it was no longer the fittest or best-adapted humans who survived.

  Once, the gene lines of people with no teeth would have died out because they couldn’t eat, and similarly those with bad vision would have more easily fallen prey to wild animals or enemies, and died out also, but this was no longer the case. These people survived with their defects and continued breeding, passing the defects to their offspring. Likewise people with the genes for organ failure or chronic diseases survived and bred. Every year more defective people were coming into the world rather than fewer. Science was already, stealthily and unwittingly, taking over from Darwinian principles of natural selection.

  John had done experiments with his students on computer models of evolution with and without the impact of medical advances. Left unimpeded, humans would have evolved, naturally, into a far stronger species than they were now. He told his students that in the next experiment they designed they would add something new into the equation: genetic engineering. That was the only way to counteract the gradual erosion of our species by medicine. Without genetic engineering, over the next hundred thousand years – a mere three hundred generations’ time – the computer models had shown that those people who lived in affluent societies would be dangerously weakened.

  He had been looking forward to this talk, but now with the events of the past twenty-four hours, he had lost all enthusiasm. He just wanted, desperately, to try to sort everything out.

  Naomi’s accusation really hurt him. He buried his head in his hands. She was in a state and would calm down; he hadn’t done anything other than talk to the reporter, he had a clear conscience about that. But just what the hell had he said to her?

  The reporter had lied about their friendship. Why? To get him to talk?

  Off the record. It had been off the record. Hadn’t it?

  He dialled Dr Rosengarten, then logged on to his email while the phone was ringing. The obstetrician’s secretary answered. Dr Rosengarten was in theatre all morning. She took down John’s number and told him she would have him call him back when he was free.

  He glanced down the fresh list of emails in his inbox. He’d put a few speculative feelers out to a number of universities and institutions over the past weeks, but there were no responses this morning. In a year’s time if he didn’t get tenure here, he would be out of a job. With almost all his savings gone on the baby Naomi was now carrying, he was feeling panicky. His book would still take another year to finish – and in any event he would not make anything like enough from it to live on. He faced the very real possibility that he might have to move out of his field altogether and take a research and development job in some place like Silicon Valley with a computer company. Not a prospect he relished.

  Twenty past nine, Los Angeles time. The East Coast was three hours ahead. Twenty after midday. Dettore might be back by now. He dialled his number.

  Four rings and then the voice mail again: ‘You’ve reached the Dettore Clinic. Please leave your name, number – don’t forget your country code – and any message, and someone will call you back shortly.’

  He left another message, and replaced the receiver. His secretary came in with a pile of mail and he asked her if she’d go get him another cup of water. Then he fished Sally Kimberly’s card from his wallet and dialled her direct line.

  It didn’t even ring. Instead he heard her recorded voice. ‘Hi, you’ve reached Sally Kimberly. I’m out right now, but leave a message, or reach me on my cellphone.’

  He left a message asking her to call him urgently, then dialled her cellphone, but her voice mail kicked in instantly on that, too. He left a second message.

  Then, as he hung up, he realized what it was that had been bugging him last night – the feeling he’d had that there was something missing from the room: it was the photograph of Naomi that was normally on his desk. One of his favourite pictures of her, taken a couple of years back when they’d revisited Turkey. She was tanned, her fair hair bleached almost blonde by the salt and sun, standing on the prow of an elderly gulet, sunglasses pushed up on her head, arms outstretched, doing a parody of Kate Winslet in the film Titanic.

  He stood up and looked around. The photographer must have moved it last night; he’d rearranged a load of stuff. But where the hell had he put it?

  His secretary came in. He asked her about the photograph, but she assured him she had not touched it. Then he sat back down and sipped the water, switching his thoughts to Dr Rosengarten.

  What he needed to understand was, if Rosengarten had been right and it was a girl, just how easy would it have been for Dettore to h
ave got the sex of the child wrong? Was it harder than the other genes that he had altered – or easier? Was it just one slip, or was their baby a total mess?

  He called up his addresses file, typed in a key word, and a name and a phone number came up. Dr Maria Annand. She was an infertility specialist at Cedars-Sinai. He’d been to see her with Naomi six months ago for tests, at the request of Dr Dettore, before being accepted by him. Dettore had wanted confirmation that it was still viable for Naomi to conceive, before putting them to the expense of coming to see him.

  He dialled the number. By luck, he caught her just as she was leaving for an appointment.

  ‘Look, Dr Annand, I have a quick question I want to ask you. If you have an embryo sexed, what are the percentage chances of getting it correct?’

  ‘You mean like selecting a male or female?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘That’s done regularly on people carrying sex-specific disease genes. It would normally be done through pre-implantation genetics – when you are creating the embryo. When it gets to eight cells, you take a single cell from the blastocyst of the developing embryo, and the embryo doesn’t notice. You have it sexed. It’s very simple.’

  ‘What margin of error is there?’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s say a couple want a boy. They have pre-implantation genetics to select the sex – but later they discover they are not having a boy, but a girl. How likely is that to happen?’

  She sounded adamant. ‘Extremely unlikely. Any error on the sexing of a foetus is remote – it’s so basic.’

  ‘But it must happen? Surely?’

  ‘You look at the chromosomes, look at the numbers. There’s no way you’re going to make a mistake.’

  ‘There are always mistakes in science,’ John said.

  ‘OK, right, you can get a mix-up in a lab, sure. That happened recently. A fertility clinic mixed up the embryos of a black couple and a white couple – they put back the wrong embryo – the white couple had a black baby. That can happen.’

  ‘The wrong embryo?’ John echoed.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You are saying that’s the only way it could happen?’

  ‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ Dr Annand said. ‘I have to rush – I’m really late.’

  ‘Sure, appreciate your time, thanks.’

  ‘Call me later if you want to talk this through further,’ she said.

  ‘I may do that. So – just to get this right – the wrong embryo – that’s the only way? The entire wrong embryo?’

  ‘Yes. That would actually be more likely than getting the sex wrong.’

  22

  Somehow John got through his lecture. He fielded the barrage of questions from students that followed, answering them as briefly as possible, then hurried back to his office and closed the door. He sat down and checked his voice mail.

  There was a message from Naomi. Her voice sounded tearful and panicky. ‘Call me, John,’ she said. ‘Please call me as soon as you get this.’

  He put the phone down. What the hell was he going to tell her?

  He called Dr Rosengarten, insisting to the secretary he had to speak to him right now.

  After several minutes on hold, listening to Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, Dr Rosengarten came on the line, sounding his usual hurried, irritable self.

  ‘The diagnosis you gave us about the sex of our baby,’ John said. ‘How certain are you that it is a girl?’

  The obstetrician put him on hold again while he checked his notes, then came back on the line. ‘No question about it, Dr Klaesson. Your wife is having a girl.’

  ‘You couldn’t have made a mistake?’

  There was a long, chilly silence. John waited, but the obstetrician said nothing.

  ‘In your diagnosis,’ John added, a little flustered, ‘is there any margin for error?’

  ‘No, Dr Klaesson, there is no margin for error. Anything else I can do for you and Mrs Klaesson?’

  ‘No – I – I guess. Thank you.’

  John hung up, angered by Rosengarten’s arrogance. Then he tried Dettore once more. Still the voice mail. He rang both of Sally Kimberly’s numbers again but this time left no message. Then he rang Naomi.

  ‘John.’ Her voice sound strange, trembling. ‘Oh God, John, have you heard?’

  ‘Heard what?

  ‘You haven’t seen the news?’

  ‘I’ve been giving a lecture. What news?’

  He heard the rest of her words only intermittently, as if he were catching some bulletin on a badly tuned radio station.

  ‘Dr Dettore. Helicopter. Into sea. Crashed. Dead.’

  23

  ‘We have this eyewitness report from a yacht off the coast of New York State earlier today.’

  John stared at the newsreader with his sharp suit and solemn face. Naomi sat beside him on the sofa, gripping his hand tightly. The camera cut to a static picture of a Bell JetRanger helicopter, identical to the one that had flown them to Dettore’s clinic.

  A man’s voice, a clipped New England accent, came through, crackly and intermittent on a ship-to-shore radio.

  ‘Watched the . . .’ Sound lost then restored. ‘Flying low, just below the cloud ceiling . . .’ Sound lost again. ‘Just erupted into a ball of fire like a flying bomb . . .’ Sound lost again. ‘Then it came back and, oh God . . .’ His voice was choked. ‘Was horrible.’ Sound lost again. ‘Debris in the sky. Came down about three miles away from us. We headed right over . . .’ Sound lost again. ‘Nothing. Wasn’t anything there. Nothing at all. Just the eeriest feeling. Horrible sight, I tell you. Just gone. Gone.’

  The picture of the helicopter was replaced with a photograph of the Serendipity Rose, which now became the backdrop behind the newsreader.

  ‘The billionaire scientist was returning to his offshore floating research laboratory and clinic, where he offered the prospect of designer babies for those able to afford his six-figure prices. Dr Dettore had this past weekend delivered a no-holds-barred paper to a Union of Concerned Scientists conference in Rome, in which he denounced the Vatican’s latest call for international regulations against experimentation on human embryos as a crime against humanity.’

  The newsreader paused and the backdrop changed to a recent photograph of Dettore on a podium behind a bank of microphones.

  ‘No stranger to controversy, Dr Dettore has had his work compared to Hitler’s eugenics programme, and had featured on the front cover of Time magazine.’

  John hit the mute button on the remote and stared grimly at the screen, feeling in a state of shock.

  ‘What do we do now, John?’

  ‘I called the clinic six times today, hoping I could speak to someone else – his colleague, Dr Leu. I got a number not in service message. I emailed twice. Both times the emails got bounced back, not able to be delivered.’

  ‘We have to get a second opinion.’

  ‘I spoke to Dr Rosengarten.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He was adamant he had not made a mistake.’

  ‘He’s hardly going to admit it, is he?’

  ‘No, but—’ He hesitated. Naomi, white as a sheet, looked terrible. How could he tell Naomi what Dr Annand had told him? That Dettore had most probably made a mistake, but not over the gender – over the entire embryo?

  How could he tell her she might be pregnant with someone else’s child?

  ‘Why would a helicopter explode, John?’

  ‘I don’t know. Engines can go wrong – jet engines can blow up sometimes.’

  ‘The man said it was like a bomb.’

  John stood up, walked the few paces across the small room to the Deco fireplace and looked at a photograph of Halley sitting in a toy police jeep, beaming happily. One of those rare moments of respite in his short little life. He felt angry, suddenly. Angry at Dettore for dying – irrational, he knew, but he didn’t care. Angry at the loss of the chance of the funding f
or his own research that Dettore had discussed with him. Angry at Dr Rosengarten. Angry at God for what he did to Halley. Angry for all the shitty hands he seemed to be picking up in life.

  He heard what Naomi was saying; the implication was loud and clear.

  Bomb.

  There were plenty of crazy people out there. Fanatics who hated progress, who believed only their way was right. And irresponsible scientists, too, who believed the whole world was their laboratory and that they could do what they wanted, blow up small Pacific atolls, design generation after generation of biological weaponry, tamper with the germ line of the human species, all in the name of progress.

  And in between were people who just wanted to live their lives. Some of them innocents like Halley, born into a living hell.

  Science could prevent the tragedy of little children like Halley. Progress could one day eliminate diseases like his. Dettore was right when he said that preventing scientists from being able to do their research on embryos was a crime against humanity.

  ‘Don’t ever forget why we’ve done this, Naomi,’ he said, his voice raised in anger that was spawned from utter, helpless frustration.

  Naomi stood up and walked over to him and put her arms around his waist. ‘You’ll love our baby, won’t you? Whatever happens, you’ll love her?’

  He turned and kissed her lightly on the lips. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I love you and I need you.’

  She looked so scared, so vulnerable. His heart felt wrenched. ‘I need you, too.’

  ‘Let’s go out tonight – some place cheerful.’

  ‘What do you feel like? Mexican? Chinese? Sushi?’

  ‘Nothing spicy. How about that place Off-Vine?’

  He smiled. ‘That was the first place I ever took you to eat in LA.’