by Brian Stableford
Stevie didn’t want to go to the doctor’s in the first place, even if it meant missing a whole Friday’s school. He didn’t feel ill, and when he took a quick look at himself in the bathroom mirror he couldn’t see why his Mum thought that he looked ill, but she was determined to get an expert opinion, so off they went.
When he listened to Mum telling Dr. Greenlea about his symptoms, though, Stevie began to wonder whether he might have made a mistake. He was “off his food”, apparently, and he was “having trouble sleeping” and he was “becoming withdrawn”. He was quite worried for a minute or two, until he realized what she meant.
One: he’d refused to eat the disgusting curried marrow she’d cooked as an “experiment” on Tuesday, and he’d been careful not to let her see him sneaking the manna-shake and the tropical fruit bar out of the kitchen cupboard afterwards, because she’d begun to get so stroppy about “the quality of his diet” now that his Dad was taking him to Pizza Supreme or Burger Bonanza every weekend, when he went to stay in Dad’s new so-called loft.
Two: on Wednesday he’d gone on playing Ultimate Labyrinth for an hour and a half after he’d been sent to bed, with the sound-effects turned off so Mum wouldn’t hear him, and he hadn’t quite had time to get the headset off and get back under the covers when she looked in on him after going to the loo after the end of the National Lottery Midweek Extravaganza, even though he’d had plenty of practice.
Three: at school on Thursday he’d fallen out with Pete over Suzie and sulked all lunchtime, which wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t tried to take it out on Simon by punching him in the mouth for calling him Pinky in a scornful way just before the bell went, which had caused Mr. Winthrop to give the pair of them the third degree. They’d both clammed up, of course, but that had only made Mr. Winthrop mad—which also wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t happened to catch Mum’s eye when she came to pick him up in the Skoda. It would all have been different if the BMW hadn’t been Dad’s company car and Mum had got custody of it; teachers never seemed to get their knickers in a twist about kids who were picked up by quality motors.
All in all, it was just a run of bad luck.
Stevie nearly managed to interrupt Mum’s account of his symptoms to explain that they weren’t actually symptoms at all, but he hesitated a couple of seconds too long, and by the time he started to protest Dr. Greenlea had already mentioned the fatal words “blood test”, so Mum and the doctor both assumed that he was just trying to wriggle out of having a needle stuck in his arm—which, of course, he would have said anything to avoid.
He tried not to cry, because he knew he was far too big for that sort of nonsense even without his Mum reminding him of the fact, but he couldn’t. He felt so wretched about crying—all the more so after Mum’s complaint that he had “shown her up”—that by the time he got home he really did feel quite ill.
Stevie complained about the whole thing to Dad as soon as he had buckled himself into the BMW the following morning, but sympathy had never been Dad’s strong point. It wasn’t that he didn’t try—he just wasn’t any good at it; these days, everything had to be about him and the injustice of Mum’s treatment of him.
“What’s happening, Stevie,” Dad told him, “is that your Mum’s projecting her own feelings on to you. She feels bad because of what’s happening between us, but she feels guilty about feeling bad, so she tries to let herself off the hook by convincing herself that she’s worried about you when she’s really angry with me. I’m sorry about that, but if she were the kind of woman who didn’t do things like that we probably wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”
“But you should have seen how much blood they took!” Stevie complained, because he knew he couldn’t admit that it was the crying that had really disturbed him. “It was at least an armful. It’ll take me weeks to grow it back.”
“Don’t exaggerate, Stevie,” Dad told him. “I’m in the business, remember. These days, they can get a whole DNA-print from a sample no bigger than a teardrop.”
Stevie knew that Dad wasn’t really “in the business”, although he did work for a pharmaceutical company and was always prepared to go on and on about “making the future happen” whenever Mum charged him with never being home. Mum always replied to that by saying that Dad was just a sales rep who “might as well be hawking soap to corner shops” and that just because he was “conning doctors into overprescribing poison” it didn’t make him a professional himself.
“They took more than that,” Stevie said, defensively.
“Did they?” Dad replied. “Well, they probably have to do lots of different kinds of tests and need a drop for each one. Maybe they need extra for the National Database. Now that the Generalissimo’s given the go-ahead, they’re spectrotyping everybody as the opportunities come up. So much for civil liberties. They’ll get me if I so much as park on a double-yellow. They’ve had your mother for years, of course—she’s always down that bloody surgery.”
Stevie’s father always referred to the prime minister as “the Generalissimo”. It was an insult, although Stevie had never been able to figure out why. Stevie’s father hadn’t voted for the Generalissimo, and didn’t approve of his policies, although Stevie couldn’t quite see why it was a bad thing for everybody in the country to have their DNA analyzed and recorded. That was the way they caught murderers, according to the TV, and Mum had told him that the doctor only knew which medicines to prescribe for her because her DNA spectrotype told the doctor exactly how she’d respond to them.
Stevie began to get worried all over again, because he was sure that his DNA would tell the doctor that there’d never been anything wrong with him in the first place, and that he’d been wasting the doctor’s valuable time. He knew he’d get the blame, even though it had been Mum who had made him go. The fact that he’d tried to interrupt and tell the doctor that there was nothing wrong with him wouldn’t make any difference. Dad was always telling him that nobody ever got credit for trying, only for doing.
“Where do you want to go for lunch, Stevie?”
Stevie knew that he couldn’t say “home” because even if Dad mistakenly thought that he meant the so-called loft it would be a bad answer. Dad didn’t do cooking. He didn’t even try—which, considering the outcome of the “experiments” that Mum felt free to try now that she was no longer catering for Dad, might be a blessing.
Stevie plumped for Pizza Supreme, on the grounds that their ice-cream was better. According to Pete, the Pizza Supreme scientists had genetically engineered cows so that their udders pumped out ice-cream by the liter, ready flavored, but Pete was always making up things like that. It was one of the things that seemed to impress Suzie, so he’d probably be doing it even more in future. Stevie wished that he had enough imagination to invent things like that.
“Don’t worry too much about them getting your DNA, Stevie,” Dad assured him, even though he couldn’t possibly know that Stevie had worried about it at all, let alone why he’d worried. “I dare say they’ll have everybody’s by the end of next year, including mine. All these bloody CC-TV cameras watch our every move anyway. Used to be that if you didn’t want to be good you could be careful instead, but not any more. It won’t be such a bad world to grow up in, though, and you won’t miss what you’ve never had. You’ve always been a good boy—all you have to do is hold on to the habit.”
* * * *
Holding on to habits wasn’t that easy for Stevie, given that so many of his old ones had been worked around a Mum and Dad who were living together. Even though half the kids in his class had parents who weren’t together any longer, if they’d ever been together in the first place, Stevie had somehow never thought of it as something that was likely to happen to him. He’d just taken it for granted that things would stay as they were, simply because that was the way they were. He knew that he was always changing—growing older, moving up to year six, discovering new computer games and putting old ones behind him—but he’d never really thought that the world around him was changing in any significant sense, even though it would have been obvious enough if he had thought about it. The Generalissimo had been elected. Suzie had come between him and Pete. Simon had started using his obsolete nickname as if it were an insult. Mum had bought a Skoda after Dad had left.
Because of what his Dad had said to him that Saturday Stevie had already begun to reflect on such matters before things began to get crazy, so when things did begin to get crazy on the following Wednesday he was almost ready for it.
Unfortunately, almost wasn’t enough.
Stevie only heard the doorbell ring because he was playing Blitzkrieg with the sound turned off, concealing the fact that he wasn’t doing his homework—although, of course, if he had been doing his homework he’d have heard it anyway, and would probably have crept to the head of the stairs in exactly the same way so that lie could eavesdrop on the caller’s conversation with Mum. Dad had begun to ask him questions about Mum’s callers, and always seemed reluctant to accept Stevie’s assurance that she didn’t have any. Next time, Stevie thought, he’d be able to provide a more satisfactory answer.
“You want what?” his Mum said, while holding the door ajar so that she could shut it in a hurry. “No, Jack doesn’t live here any more. That’s none of your business.”
Because the door was in the way the caller’s questions were muffled, but they were obviously making Mum more and more annoyed.
“Why the hell would we need an agent?” she demanded, in a louder voice. “How the hell did you find out about his DNA anyway? What the hell happened to patient confidentiality?” Mum was always telling Stevie not to use words like hell, although it was very mild by playground standards, but she had stopped wondering aloud where on Earth he picked them up since he had been visiting Dad’s loft on weekends.
This time, apparently, the visitor’s reply was more interesting, because it went on for at least a minute and a half before Mum said: “You have got to be joking.”
But the man at the door obviously wasn’t joking, because it only required another minute and a half of inaudible reassurances to make Mum open the door a little wider, and then all the way. Then she shouted, unnecessarily loudly, for Stevie to come down.
Stevie waited until he had counted ten before showing himself, so that it would seem that he had been concentrating had on his homework before being rudely interrupted. “What is it?” he asked, as he came down the stairs. The man who had come into the hallway wasn’t quite as tall as Dad but he was thinner and older, and there was something in the way his eyes fixed themselves on Stevie that made him seem like a man who liked to get things done, and never gave credit for trying.
“It’s about that blood test you had,” Mum said.
She sounded so serious that Stevie thought that he must be ill after all. That was good, he thought, because he wouldn’t get the blame for wasting the doctor’s time—but it might also be bad, if he turned out to have something nasty, so he didn’t know how he ought to react. He settled for going into the living room and sitting down on the couch without saying anything at all. Mum and the mystery man took the two armchairs.
“This is Mr. Keyson,” Mum said to Stevie. “He wants to be our agent.”
Stevie knew from having watched so much TV that there were lots of different kinds of agent. There were secret agents and estate agents, and actors and footballers had them too, but he hadn’t expected to acquire one of his own while he was still in school, especially as he hadn’t yet moved up from the primary.
“May I explain?” Mr. Keyson asked Mum. He was only pretending to be polite, because he didn’t wait for an answer. His eyes were still fixed on Stevie, in a way that Stevie didn’t entirely like.
“You see, Stephen,” Mr. Keyson said, “the analysis of the DNA in the blood sample you gave the doctor last week has some unusual features. Features that we...lots of people, in fact...have been on the lookout for, ever since they became alert to the possibility. Strictly speaking, the people at the lab should only have told your doctor and the government’s chief medical officer, but there’s been a bit of a fuss about the new government’s National Database policy and...well, to cut a long story short, the information leaked in our direction. It’s a good thing it did, from your point of view, because it allows you and your mother to get proper representation. The principle of informed consent requires me to inform you both as fully as possible as to what’s going on. Have you done any genetics at school yet?”
Stevie didn’t get a chance to say no to this, although Mr. Keyson clearly expected him to, because Mum butted in: “The divorce isn’t actually finalized yet,” she said. “Does that make a difference? To my being able to sign a contract, I mean?”
Mr. Keyson frowned at that. He hesitated before replying. “Well,” he said, eventually, “it is a complicating factor—but it might make it all the more necessary that Stephen should have independent representation. There might be a conflict of interest, you see. It’s possible that Stephen’s gene is a novelty—a mutation—but it’s much more probable that he inherited it from his father.”
“Or from me,” Mum was quick to put in.
“Well, no,” said Mr. Keyson. “Your DNA spectrum is already on file. Mr. Pinkham’s hasn’t been added to the National Database as yet.”
Stevie observed that the tall man was shifting uncomfortably in his seat, although it was a perfectly good armchair. According to Pete, you could tell when people were lying or hiding things if you could read their body-language, but Pete hadn’t been able to go into details as to how the trick was worked.
While Mum was digesting the implications of what the agent had said to her, Mr. Keyson switched his attention back to Stevie. “The thing is, Stephen,” he said, “that you possess a rare version of an important gene, which hasn’t previously been identified. The significance of the chromosomal locus and the gene’s variant intron-scheme were discovered several years ago, and the proteins normally produced with the involvement of that locus are hedged around with a whole raft of patents, even though the drug-derivatives are still in clinical trials. All the variant intron-schemes so far discovered produce proteins that are less effective than the standard set, but the imaging software suggests that your variant might be even more effective. The difference is probably slight, but it’s always the top-performing drug that earns the big money. So, to cut a long story short, your DNA might be worth a lot of money to a company that could obtain patents on a manufacturing process for the mass-production of the protein. Patent law is a mess, of course— it wasn’t designed to cope with modern situations like the Genome Project fallout—but even if the law eventually goes sour, the window of opportunity ought to last for five or ten years, so....”
“He’s eleven years old, for Christ’s sake,” Mum burst out. “He doesn’t understand the first thing about genetics, let alone patent law. You might as well be talking Russian.”
Stevie would have loved to be able to contradict her, but he couldn’t. Actually, according to Mr. Winthrop, who was very keen on moving with the times, he was supposed to know the first thing about genetics, and maybe the second thing too, but he hadn’t managed to get the hang of them just yet, and probably wouldn’t for quite a while if he didn’t start paying more attention to his homework. He took a keen interest in the practical aspects of SexEd, but the scientific aspects were still a little beyond him.
“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Keyson, although he didn’t seem sorry to Stevie. “I have to try...just for the record, you understand.”
“What record?” Mum asked. “Are you taping this?”
“Of course not,” Mr. Keyson replied. “But in the unlikely event that this ever goes to court, we both need to be able to testify that I did my best to explain the situation, in all its aspects.”
“Well, he obviously can’t understand you. Neither can I, for the matter. How the hell can anyone patent Stevie’s genes? They can hardly charge him a fee for using his own genes.”
Stevie knew that the last remark was a joke, but Mr. Keyson didn’t seem so sure. “No one can patent a gene as such,” the unwelcome visitor said. “Obviously, Stevie has an inalienable right to employ the natural protein-production mechanisms of his own genes. Until further legal judgments are made, though, preliminary patents can be granted on the processes by which particular genes are identified, isolated and subjected to artificial reproduction with a view to the mass-production and commercial exploitation of the proteins whose genetic code they bear.”
Stevie thought that he could understand what Mr. Keyson was getting at, but he thought that he’d be able to understand more if the agent would only stick to practical matters. “What does it do?” he asked, when his mother lapsed into exasperated silence.
“What does what do?” Mr. Keyson countered, warily.
“The gene I’ve got.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Keyson. “I shouldn’t have left that out, should I? It collaborates in making a subspecies of proteins—only in certain kinds of cells, although we don’t know why it only operates in those particular tissues—whose function is to ameliorate and repair damage caused by free radicals.”
Stevie had guessed by now that Mr. Keyson wasn’t really trying to help them understand, but Mum hadn’t. She looked utterly bewildered, and angry too. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.
As it happened, though, Stevie did recognize the phrase “free radicals”, and he seized the opportunity to demonstrate that he wasn’t as stupid as everybody seemed to think. “Four processes of ageing,” he recited, wishing that he could remember the other three just in case he was challenged. “Number four is free radical damage. Mr. Winthrop said it gave him wrinkles.”
“Not just wrinkles, Stephen,” said Mr. Keyson, trying to sound suitably impressed but not succeeding. “Although preventing wrinkles is a far more immediate selling point than most of the others, given the world we’re living in just now.”
Mum showed off her own emergent wrinkles by frowning deeply. “Ageing?” He said. “Are you saying that Stevie’s DNA might hold the secret of immortality?”
“Hardly,” said Mr. Keyson. “And to be perfectly honest, even if it did have a marginal effect on longevity, it wouldn’t begin to pay off in time to make it economically interesting. Wrinkle prevention and brain-cell preservation, on the other hand...but you can see why you need an agent, don’t you, Mrs. Pinkham? We need to get moving on this as soon as possible. The window of opportunity might not be there for long. Will you let me represent you?”
Stevie could see that his mother was “getting into a state”, and suddenly realized why that was. This was the kind of decision she’d always handed over to her husband, but Dad wasn’t here any more, and the responsibility was all hers. She was scared—frightened that she might do the wrong thing, and even more frightened by the fact that she didn’t know how to handle the situation, given that she hadn’t a clue what the right thing to do might be. Stevie wanted to help, but he knew that he couldn’t. Whatever he did, neither Mum nor Mr. Keyson would see it as “help.” He watched Mum closely, willing her to find a way to get out of the mess without blowing her top or breaking down in tears. In the end, somewhat to Stevie’s relief, she stood up abruptly, stuck out her hand, and said: “Thanks very much for coming round. If you leave me your card, I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve made a decision.”
Mr. Keyson didn’t seem at all pleased, and Stevie thought for a moment that he was going to persist—but he was already uncomfortable. Eventually, the agent’s hand extended itself, rather mechanically, to grasp Mum’s. That was signal enough for Stevie to leap up and open the door, as if he were being polite.
That put a smile of Mum’s face. “Tomorrow,” she promised the agent. “I’ll call you then.”
“It really would be better to get things moving as soon as possible,” Mr. Keyson said, rather weakly. “I live nearby—I can bring the papers over at a few minutes notice.”
“Tomorrow morning,” Mum promised. Stevie thought that she probably meant it—but he figured that it probably wouldn’t matter when he peeped through his bedroom curtains a few minutes later and saw the BMW pulling into the parking-spot that Mr. Keyson’s black Peugeot had vacated only a few minutes before.
* * * *
Stevie knew better than to go down immediately to greet his father. It was safer to wait until he was sure that he wasn’t about to step into a battlefield. It was as well that he waited; within two minutes of the living-room door being closed he heard the row beginning, and knew that it was going to be a big one.
He crept down the stairs to the half-way point, directly opposite the living-room door, although the voices were raised so high that he could have heard them well enough from the top.
“What the hell do you mean, independent representation?” Dad said. “He’s my son, for Christ’s sake. It’s my gene we’re talking about. Mine and his. Father and son. The bastard should have come to me.”
“He should not,” Mum retorted—although Stevie knew that if he had understood the fruits of his earlier eavesdropping correctly, it was indeed Dad that Mr. Keyson had come to see, because the agent had had no way of knowing about the separation and the loft. “The agent said that it could be a mutation—something new. In which case, I’m the one who’ll decide what to do. I’ve got custody, remember.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! Do you know what the odds are against a spontaneous mutation? Of course you don’t! You can’t even add up a restaurant bill. And you don’t have custody either, because the divorce hasn’t even got to the decree nisi yet. It’s my gene—he got it from me. He’s got to be part of the package. If he goes to someone else, it won’t just cut the value of what we’ve got in two, you know. This is a very complicated risk calculation for the drug company—a monopoly is one thing, but it can’t be halved. A race without opposition is a walkover, but competition changes everything. I’ve got a nice deal here, Stacy, and I’m not going to let you foul it up. It’s not just me you’ll be fouling it up for, but for Stevie as well. You have to let me handle this. You have to.”
“I’ve let you handle things for far too long! No more. From now on, I go my own way. I won’t be bullied. I’ll decide what’s best for Stevie. You can’t cut me out.”
“I’m not trying to cut you out, you daft cow! I’m trying to make sure that we all get what we can from this. It’s a chance in a million, and if you fuck it up it’ll cost us all. I’ve got the biggest pharma company in Europe begging me to take a promotion, but I have to be able to commit for both of us. The last thing we need is some sleazebag agent coming between us, skimming twenty or thirty per cent off the take and dropping me in the shit with the company. I can get a big step up here, if I play my cards right. It’s not just money, it’s my career.”
“If you hadn’t been so fixated on your bloody career we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. I don’t care whether they want to make you executive vice-president in charge of overwork, and I don’t want to sell exclusive rights to Stevie’s DNA to some multinational corporation. I just want the two of us to have some semblance of a normal life, and if Mr. Keyson can get that for us....”
“You’re crazy, you know that? Normal life? This could be the jackpot, Stacy. This could be a ticket to the good life for all of us, but you have to let me handle it. What the hell do you know about business? I’m a salesman, for God’s sake—a professional! Do you really think that appointing some shark to act for you will safeguard Stevie’s interests? It won’t. He’ll get ripped off, you’ll get ripped off and I’ll be stuck where I am in Deadend Street. I need him, Stacy, and he needs me. You have to let me take care of this.”
“Now you need him! For eleven years he’s been a toy you’ve picked up when you wanted to play and handed back when you finished. For eleven years he’s been my job, my responsibility, my entire bloody world, but now you need him. Well, you can’t have him, Jack. You can take him out on weekends and fill him full of all the junk food he can eat, but his body and soul are mine. I gave birth to him and I brought him up, and I’ll decide what’s best for him...and me.”
“It’s my bloody gene, you stupid bitch!”
“It’s not your bloody gene, Jack. I didn’t understand much of what Keyson was saying, but I understood that. The only thing that’s patentable is a manufacturing process for the protein. The gene is God’s, or Mother Nature’s, or Stevie’s, but it’s not yours.”
Stevie felt a tear rolling down his cheek—which surprised him a little, because he hadn’t been aware that he was about to start crying. He wanted to go into the living-room and throw himself between the two of them, and make them understand that he had a voice in this too, but he knew from long experience that it wouldn’t work. Separately, they were manageable; together, they were impossible. Whatever he tried to do now—except for creeping back up the stairs and putting himself to bed—would only make things worse.
Tomorrow, on the other hand, would be another day.
Stevie wiped away the tear. Then he went to bed—but not to sleep.
Maybe, he thought, Dr. Greenlea would be able to help. Or Mr. Winthrop. Or the Citizens’ Advice Bureau. Someone must be able to point him in the direction of a middle way, which would at least prevent his parents from going to war with one another, even if it couldn’t bring them back to being on the same side.
* * * *
It was already getting light when Stevie was shaken awake by his Dad. He opened his mouth to ask what was going on, but his Dad clamped a gnarled hand over his face and said: “Quiet, Stevie. We have to be very quiet.”
It was at this point that Stevie realized that he was being what TV newsreaders called “abducted”—or would be, if he didn’t prevent it. Did he want to prevent it, though? Which would be worse, all things considered: being abducted, or trying to stop himself being abducted?...”trying” being what Dad always called “the operative word.”
“Dad,” he said, his voice muffled by the restraining hand. “I have to go to school.”
“You have to be quiet, Stevie,” Dad said, giving not the slightest indication that he had understood what Stevie had tried to say, or the calm reasonableness that lay behind the words. “Get dressed.”
In order to get dressed, Stevie had to push his Dad’s hand away, which Dad consented to let him do, but that didn’t mean that Dad was ready to listen to reason.
His school clothes were neatly laid out on the chair, as they always were. They weren’t the clothes Stevie would have chosen to run away in, but he knew it would only cause trouble if he asked whether he could get his jeans and sweatshirt out of the drawer. He decided to play for time by getting dressed slowly. While he buttoned his clean shirt reverently he said: “I really should go to school, Dad. I’ll get behind.” Actually, he was more concerned about leaving Suzie a clear field to continue her seduction of poor misguided Pete, but he certainly wasn’t going to mention that to Dad.
“We’re not divorced yet,” Dad whispered. “I’m not breaking any laws. I’m just looking out for you, Stevie. We have a chance here, you and me, if we stick together. We’re two of a kind, Stevie—the only two there are, with luck. You’re a chip off the old block. We have to stick together.”
“It’ll only make Mum mad,” Stevie said, as he pulled his pants on, although he knew that he was stating the obvious. “If you could just patch things up with Mum....”
“It’s beyond patching, son,” Dad murmured, with a slight catch in his voice. “The state she’s in, she’d sign a deal with the Devil just to shaft me. The only way that we can salvage anything is to cut her out. If there were any other way....”
By now, Stevie was fastening the shoelaces on his black Oxfords, regretting that he hadn’t taken the opportunity to reach under his bed to get his trainers. “I ought to pack a few things,” he said, hopefully, as he reached out for the mobile phone on the bedside table.
“No time,” Dad retorted, as he gripped Stevie’s wrist and pulled it away from the phone. “Best leave that behind, don’t you think? Downstairs now—quiet as a mouse. I know you can do it.”
It was now or never, Stevie, thought. If he was going to make a racket and wake Mum up, now was the time. But what would happen then? Another row? A fight? He might still end up in the BMW, leaving Mum wailing on the stairs, or bleeding, or worse. If he did as he was told, though, he’d have a chance to talk—to make Dad see sense. Mum would think he’d betrayed her, but it was the best way...the only way to be sure that everyone would be safe. It was a pity about the mobile, though; he ought to have tried to sneak it into his pocket while Dad wasn’t looking.
“Okay,” he said, resignedly.
“Good boy,” Dad whispered, smiling broadly. “I knew I could rely on you, Stevie. A chip off the old block.”
So they made their way downstairs, and out of the front door, and round the corner to where Dad had parked the BMW, without causing any alarm.
When the car got to the main road, though, it didn’t turn right in the direction of the loft. It turned left, and headed for the motorway.
There was still ninety minutes to go before rush hour, so they made it on to the motorway in less then ten minutes. There was no queue as yet for the London-bound carriageway.
“Where are we going?” Stevie asked.
“HQ” Dad replied, tersely.
“What’s HQ?”
“Headquarters. We’re in the big league now. There’s nothing to worry about. We’re just going for a check-up. A few tests.”
“Blood tests?”
“Among others.”
“I already had that. Why do they have to do it again?”
“It’s nothing to be scared of, Stevie. It won’t take long. Once they know what they need to know...well, I’ll be a lot more use to them than you will, given your age. We just need to make absolutely sure that you’re on side. It’s just as well, in hindsight, that we’re both only children, although...well, if your Granddad hadn’t died in that car crash....”
Stevie could tell that his Dad was worried about something, but figured that he must be anxious about the police car that had just overtaken the BMW. “Dad...,” he began—but he didn’t know how to carry on.
“Good job you were ill, too,” Jack Pinkham went on. “Could have been years before the Generalissimo got around to forcing me to get profiled. By that time the divorce would have gone through and we might have been living in different continents.”
“I wasn’t ill,” Stevie said.
“No? Faked it for the sake of a long weekend, did you? Don’t worry, son—I used to do that myself. Two of a kind. Got to do your schoolwork, mind. Can’t get any sort of job without a degree these days, and anything short of an upper second is a ticket to Deadend Street...unless you turn out to be sitting on a gold-mine without even knowing it.”
“It was Mum,” Stevie said. “She got overanxious.”
Dad laughed out loud. “Well,” he said, “I guess that qualifies as ironic. We’ll send her a postcard to say thanks.”
A postcard! How far, Stevie wondered, was Dad thinking of taking him? Had his reference to different continents been more than a figure of speech? Stevie wanted to ask, but he didn’t dare.
When they reached the junction with the M25 the BMW eased into the slip-road, then took the clockwise carriageway heading north-east.
“Mum’ll be up by now,” Stevie observed. “She’ll be worried.”
“She’ll work it out,” Dad said, curtly.
“I should have brought my mobile. Can I borrow yours?”
“No. We have to remain incommunicado, for today at least. You can phone her tonight, if everything works out. Just be patient, for now. It’ll all be all right. I promise you that.”
Stevie didn’t doubt that his Dad meant the promise, although he knew that he could have found reasons enough to doubt it if he’d cared to think back to earlier promises that had gone unfulfilled. What he did doubt, even without the aid of hindsight, was that Jack Pinkham’s definition of “all right” was anything like his. That was what scared him—but he knew that being scared wasn’t going to help. He had to be patient, just as his Dad said. And he had to be tough, because he had to put crying behind him now. And above all else, he had to be clever, no matter how little homework he’d done by way of preparation. He was, after all, the one with the gene that might provide a cure for wrinkles—which might, if luck was with him, turn out to be a mutation that was his alone and not a chip off any old block.
Who, he thought, grimly, would be in the driving seat then?
* * * *
HQ turned out to be a complex of ultramodern buildings set among green fields and enormous carparks. Stevie’s Dad cursed a few times as he drove around a hideously complicated one-way system looking for the correct approach-route to the building he was aiming at. Stevie was impressed by the almost total absence of graffiti which would have been total if someone hadn’t defaced the plague mounted beside the main doors. The plaque had been intended to proclaim that Dad’s company were duly-certified INVESTORS IN PEOPLE, but someone with an aerosol can had inked over PEOPLE and scrawled PILLS AND POTIONS above the splotch.
It was cool inside the building, and very quiet; it reminded Stevie of the time Gran had taken him to church. They had to wait for quite a long time in reception before a white-coated young man arrived to lead them through the double doors into a maze of corridors. Stevie found the maze of corridors interesting. It wasn’t just Ultimate Labyrinth that was full of mazes—these days, three in every five computer games had a level you couldn’t get to without solving a maze.
They ended up in a room that made Dr. Greenlea’s consulting-room look woefully underequipped, where even the chairs looked threatening in their shiny black imitation-leather upholstery. Three people were waiting there, all of them much younger than Dr. Greenlea—and, for that matter, Stevie’s Dad. Stevie had to sit down in an uncomfortable chair, but he didn’t have to roll up his sleeve immediately, because the doctors were busy looking things up on computer screens and talking in low voices. It seemed to take a long time for any of them to acknowledge that he was there—and even then, it was only one of them: the only woman in the party. She had blonde hair like Suzie’s, and didn’t look old enough to have children of her own. She came over to Stevie, leaving her fellows in conference with Dad, knelt down beside his chair and said: “Hello, Stephen. I’m Evie—short for Evelyn.”
“I’m Stevie,” Stevie said. “We rhyme.”
“So we do. Don’t worry, Stevie—we’re not going to hurt you.”
“Yes you are,” he said. “You’re going to stick needles in me. Dr. Greenlea already took an armful of blood, and that was only on Friday. It’ll take me ages to grow it back.”
“I don’t think we’ll need any more blood today. Maybe in future—but we’ve got your Dad’s results back now, and they look promising. If everything goes smoothly, we can probably put you on ice for a year or two.”
“On ice?” Stevie queried.
Evie smiled. “Not literally,” she said. “You should be glad, you know. A gene like that’s a good thing to have. You’re practically a national treasure. If you were a year or two older...but that’s okay. You’ll grow. And in the meantime, nobody’s going to hurt you.”
“Will I have to go to a special school?” Stevie asked.
Evie smiled again. “No,” she said. “In a year or two, you’ll be able to understand....”
She broke off abruptly and stood up. A man with grey hair had just come into the room. He was obviously Evie’s boss, but he didn’t even spare her a glance as he grabbed Dad by the elbow and took him to one side in order to whisper something to him.
“What do you mean, a problem?” Dad said, loudly enough to be heard in the next lab but one. “Are you trying to tell me that he didn’t get the gene from me?”
“No,” said the grey-haired man in a normal voice, obviously taking the view that if Dad felt no need to whisper he didn’t have to either. “That result’s final. The problem’s practical.”
“I signed the contract,” Dad said. “It’s legal. Stacy can’t do anything about it. I’m his father. We’re not divorced.”
“It’s not that kind of practicality.” The white-coated man glanced in Stevie’s direction with a slight show of reluctance, but went ahead anyhow. “It’s your sperm-count, Mr. Pinkham.”
Stevie pricked up his ears at that. Sperm-counts were always in the news, because they were said to be falling all over Europe, and Mr. Winthrop had taken the trouble to explain it because he “believed in moving with the times”, especially in SexEd.
Meanwhile, Evie’s boss continued: “It’s...well, the bare fact is, Mr. Pinkham, that we’re not going to be able to harvest copies of the gene that way. Given that Stevie’s only eleven, we’re....”
Dad’s interruption was explosive. “Shit!” he said, loudly enough to be heard all along the corridor. “You told me it was safe! You told me that there’d be no lasting side-effects!”
The other man seemed very confused for a few moments. “I didn’t....” he began—but then he stopped and began again. “Oh, I see. You don’t mean me personally. You mean us. The employee clinical trial program. No, Mr. Pinkham, I can assure you that your problem doesn’t have anything to do with any aspect of your work for this organization. It’s a very common problem nowadays, almost certainly connected with diet and general environmental pollution. In fact, we have some very interesting projects in house which are aiming to find a solution....”
“Okay, okay,” Stevie’s Dad said, speaking in a more moderate tone now that he had collected himself. “Facts are facts. No point in looking for someone to blame. We still have the gene, don’t we? If you can’t get copies that way, you can get them another. No problem.”
“Just a little practical difficulty,” The white-coated man agreed. “The technique will be a little more invasive, but the ultimate goal is the same. We have to contrive a source of totipotent stem-cells, but there’s more than one way to produce an embryo. We won’t have to wait for Stephen to grow older...although we’ll have to use him as the source, given the problems with your own DNA.”
Stevie didn’t like the sound of that at all, and he took note of the fact that Evie didn’t want to met his eye—as if she’d just found out that her promises were worthless. Stevie decided that he didn’t want to be a “source”, especially if it was going to involve needles.
Fortunately, the grey-haired man in the white coat was interrupted at this point by the chime of his mobile phone. Stevie was proud of himself, because he was able to recognize and put a name to the chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The big cheese and Mr. Winthrop obviously had more in common than was immediately obvious.
The grey-haired man seemed very annoyed to be interrupted, but his mood became a good deal worse when he heard what as being said to him. “You have got to be joking,” was his response—but Stevie knew that people only said that when whoever was talking to them was very serious indeed.
As soon as Evie’s boss closed his phone with an audible snap he rounded on Stevie’s Dad. “Your wife is in reception,” he said, coldly. “She’s got a man named Keyson with her.”
“Shit,” was Dad’s response—not very loud, all things considered. “That was fast. How the hell did she know where to come? And how the hell did she get through all the traffic? It ought to be gridlock out there by now”
“Mr. Keyson is an agent,” the grey-haired man said, even more coldly than before. “He seems to have done his homework. It wouldn’t require a great detective to deduce that you’d come directly to HQ, once your wife told him what had happened—which she seems to have done as soon as she found that Stephen had gone.”
Stevie nodded his head understanding, although no one was watching. Mum might have dithered indefinitely over whether or not to call Mr. Keyson, but Dad had made up her mind for her.
“You’ve got a properly-signed contract,” Dad said to Mr. Martindale, trying to sound as if everything were under control. “Stevie’s right here in the room. Possession is nine points of the law, isn’t that right? What’s she going to do—have us both arrested for assisted truancy?”
“There seems to be one thing we haven’t got,” the Beethoven fan retorted. “One little thing you forgot to mention.”
“What’s that?”
“When Stevie was born, you and your wife requested that the umbilical cord be kept in cold storage.”
Stevie saw his Dad’s face grow pale. “Oh shit,” he said, again. “The bastard has done his homework. Stacy would never...but it’s not a problem, right? I mean, it’s Stevie’s, not hers. The genes....” He trailed off, before beginning again. “It was the sensible thing to do...forward-looking...covering every eventuality...it was company policy, for fuck’s sake!”
While he was speaking the grey-haired man had gone to one of the computer terminals, and had set his fingers dancing on the keyboard. “Except that you didn’t take advantage of the company scheme, did you?” he said, when he’d seen what he wanted to see. “You made a direct deal with the hospital. Or, to be strictly accurate, your wife signed the contract that the hospital gave her, in your absence.”
“I was at work,” Stevie’s Dad whispered. “I was at work.”
“Well, we’d better see if anything can be salvaged, hadn’t we?” the white-coated man said, bitterly.
Stevie was anxious for a minute or two that the two of them might go off together and leave him to the tender mercies of Evie and the other two young doctors, whose promises not to hurt him were just so much hot air—but he acted quickly to avoid that possibility. When he slipped his hand into his Dad’s, his Dad clutched it hard, the way a Dad should, and drew him away from the overequipped room, back into the maze.
* * * *
This time, they ended up in a much friendlier room, where the chairs were kitted out in orange rather than black. There was even a sofa, where Stevie could have sat between his mother and father, except for the fact that they obviously weren’t in a sitting mood, and probably wouldn’t have wanted to sit on the same item of furniture if they had been. Stevie sat there anyway, carefully taking a central position in case they wanted to join him later.
The grey-haired man introduced himself to Mr. Keyson as John Martindale, and didn’t even pause for breath before trying to seize the conversational initiative. “I’m sorry there’s been some slight confusion,” he said. “But we shall, of course, be requisitioning the umbilical cord at the earliest opportunity. Just a formality, of course, given that Mr. Pinkham has already granted us an exclusive option on all the produce of his DNA.”
“I don’t see that there’s any confusion at all, Dr. Martindale,” Mr. Keyson said, smoothly. “The contract between the hospital and Mrs. Pinkham relating to the storage of the umbilical cord clearly establishes her entitlement to negotiate its future disposal.”
“Even if the cord as an object might be regarded as joint property,” Dr. Martindale countered, “the stem cells contained within the cord are obviously Stephen’s. We have a contract with Mr. Pinkham that grants us exclusive rights to the exploitation of Stephen’s DNA. Any contract you might have made with Mrs. Pinkham is quite irrelevant, even if it were signed before ours—which I doubt.”
“I agree entirely that the cord constitutes an item of the assets of the marriage,” Mr. Keyson came back. “For exactly that reason, the allocation of all rights pertaining to it must be the prerogative of the divorce court. Given the existence of competitive contracts—and I also agree with you that the timing of the signatures is irrelevant—I must ask you to desist from all further violations of the person of Stephen Pinkham, pending the decision of the divorce court as to the disposal of the rights to exploit his DNA.”
“What’s that going to achieve?” Dr. Martindale snapped. “We still have the father. We can do anything we like to him.”
“Anything except monopolize his genes,” Mr. Keyson said, his tone remarkably similar to the one Pete used whenever he won a playground game.
It only needed a brief pause in the main event to let Dad and Mum get in on the act. “How could you do this to me?” Dad wailed, while Mum was yelling: “You kidnapped him, you bastard!”
Dr. Martindale had his second wind now, though. “You know full well that we can tie up the divorce court for years,” he said. “This is a race, and you can’t win. Even if you could take the kid out of the equation, there’s no way you can deliver that cord to anyone else. We have everything we need to get the project rolling—we only have to stall the opposition.”
Stevie was impressed by the smile that Mr. Keyson put on before responding to that one. It was a weirdly wicked kind of smile he’d only ever seen in movies. “Really?” said the agent. “Everything you need? Including a healthy sperm count?”
Dr. Martindale turned red, but clamped his mouth shut. It was Stevie’s Dad who said: “How the hell did you know about that? I didn’t know myself until fifteen minutes ago!”
Stevie had watched enough TV to know that his Dad had just fallen into a classic trap. Mr. Keyson had been guessing, although he’d probably interrogated Mum while they were dodging the traffic in Mr. Keyson’s Peugeot as to whether Stevie had been planned as an only child.
Dr. Martindale was sweating now, in spite of the air conditioning. “That’s not an insuperable problem,” he said. “There are other ways of producing embryos.”
“Nuclear transfer technology?” Mr. Keyson retorted, with a scornful leer borrowed from the same sort of movie as his wicked smile. “Bone-marrow tissue culture? Don’t make me laugh!”
Nobody was laughing—least of all Stevie, who figured that they’d be back to referring to him as “the source” any minute. He slipped off the sofa, but nobody turned to see what he had to say, so he took a step towards the door—and then another. Everybody else was so busy matching angry stares that they didn’t see him leave.
* * * *
To an Ultimate Labyrinth player of Stevie’s experience the corridors were child’s play; there weren’t even any zombies to shoot. He found his way back to the lab with the black imitation-leather chairs with no difficulty at all.
Evie and the other two junior doctors were still there. They didn’t seem surprised to see him, although they did look expectantly at the door for someone who might be following him.
“Can I ask you a question?” Stevie said to Evie
“Sure,” she said, nodding her blonde head a little too vigorously.
“In private,” Stevie added. He’d seen it done on TV but he’d never dared try it himself, for fear that it wouldn’t work.
It nearly didn’t, but Evie backed him up. “Give us a minute, guys,” she said.
It was just like Suzie talking to Pete. They meekly did as they were told, as if hypnotized. They went out, and politely shut the door behind them.
When they were alone, Stevie felt his heart skip a beat, but he knew that this was no time to wimp out. “In a year,” he said, “or maybe two, I’ll be able to masturbate....”
He hadn’t even got to the question yet, but the effect was electric. Evie started, and her eyes grew wide. “Jesus, Stevie,” she said. “Is that what they teach you in SexEd these days? Shouldn’t you be talking to your Dad about this?”
“No,” said Stevie. “Definitely not. And that’s not the question. Mr. Winthrop believes in moving with the times, and he already covered that. What I want to know is, no matter what anyone’s signed, and no matter which bits of me anyone thinks they own, when I turn thirteen...even though I won’t be old enough to sign any contracts...will anyone be able to stop me asking Dr. Greenlea for a case full of specimen bottles, filling them up any way I want to, and taking them anywhere I want to?”
Evie swallowed hard. “Jesus, Stevie,” she said, again. “Why ask me?”
“Because you’re the only person around here who doesn’t think they own me,” Stevie told her, forthrightly. “I can ask Mr. Winthrop tomorrow, if Dad lets me go back to school, but if I know now, I might be able to talk some sense into Dad. Or Mum. Or even both.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well...well, no, I guess. I mean, the law’s the law and all that, but no—no one would be able to stop you. They might be able to stop other people using the gene as a manufacturing base, but...oh! I see what you mean! You’re not thinking wrinkles, are you?”
“That’s another thing I wanted to ask you about,” Stevie said. “Mr. Keyson wasn’t really trying to explain, but I’m not stupid. If this gene I’ve got is supposed to prevent wrinkles, how come my Dad looks so old?”
Evie laughed at that. She seemed more at ease now he’d impressed her a little. “He’s not such a bad specimen, for his age,” she said. “That’s one of the things we’ve got to figure out before we can turn theory into practice. The gene you have is only expressed in certain kinds of cells, and we don’t know why. It doesn’t seem to be switched on in skin cells, or brain cells—which is where it would do the most good, from our point of view. It’s obviously something to do with differential effects of natural selection in different tissues— but however good your Mr. Winthrop is at moving with the times, he won’t have covered that in Elementary Genetics. If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, though, it’s not likely to be a problem for you. We can only deal in extracts—you’ve got it built in, and you’re already eleven years old. That’s a long head start over any potential competition.”
Stevie frowned as he tried to figure out what the less obvious parts of the long speech meant, but now that Evie was convinced that he was an intellectual superstar he wasn’t going to blow it by looking stupid. “That’s what I thought,” he said, nodding his head the way he’d seen clever detectives do in movies when they’d figured out the plot.
“Your Mum and Dad won’t like it,” Evie pointed out.
“I know,” Stevie said. “But while they’re both trying to sell bits of me, they’ll always be at war. This way, I get to decide who gets a cut, and how big the cut is—and if they both get mad at me...they’ll have something in common, won’t they?”
“You really think you can get them back together?”
Stevie thought about that for a moment, and then said: “No. But it doesn’t have to be blitzkrieg. They could ease up—for my sake.”
The blonde woman laughed again at that. “Good luck, Stevie,” she said. “You’re going to need it.”
* * * *
Evie was right about him needing luck. It wasn’t nearly as easy to talk some sense into his father as he’d hoped, and it was even harder to get his mother to see his point of view.
While he’d been away, Mr. Keyson had persuaded Dr. Martindale that it would save an awful lot of hassle if he and Dad made a new contract cutting Mum in—and, of course, Mr. Keyson. Dad was still smarting about that when he drove Stevie back home, because he was convinced that he’d lost a wonderful opportunity to ingratiate himself with the board and secure his future career track, and he wasn’t really in a mood to listen to what seemed to him—at first—to be blackmail. In time, though, he began to see the sense of it, especially when Stevie assured him that there was no one else in the world he would trust—especially Mr. Keyson—to act as his agent.
That didn’t go down too well with Mum, of course, and she had the further disadvantage of having done SexEd in an era when a teacher who’d been moving with the times wouldn’t have been nearly as advanced as Mr. Winthrop. In the end, though, when she’d consented to be enlightened by Dad—who understood elementary genetics well enough, even though he was only a salesman—she had to admit that no matter how obscene it sounded, it just might work.
All in all, it was the best evening the family had had since Dad had gone to live in the loft.
The next day was, in its way, even better, because he got to tell Pete, and Simon, and Suzie. He didn’t rush into it—in fact, he let them come to him.
“Another day off, eh?” Pete said. “You’ll be getting a reputation. Playing truant was it? Or emotional distress caused by your Mum and Dad splitting up?”
“Actually,” Stevie said, “I was at the headquarters of the largest pharmaceutical company in Europe. They were doing a few tests. It turns out that I’m a national treasure.”
“A what?” said Pete.
“A national treasure.”
“Pull the other one, Pinky,” Simon said, putting up his hands as if in anticipation of being smacked in the mouth—but Stevie just looked at him contemptuously.
“From now on,” he said, “It’s Stephen. I’ve got this rare variant gene, you see, which ameliorates and repairs free radical damage. They’ll find more people with it, of course, now the National Database is growing, but that will take time.”
“What’s it got to do with a pharmaceutical company?” Suzie wanted to know. “My Mum says they’re evil—making money out of suffering.”
“They want to develop drugs based on the protein made by the gene,” Stevie explained, airily. “They’ve bought all kinds of patent rights off my Mum and my Dad—my Mum’s even got her own agent—but they’re only interested in short-term things, like getting a slightly better anti-wrinkle cream on to the market before the opposition finds something even better.”
“Big deal,” said Simon. “I don’t call that a national treasure.”
“Nor do I,” Stevie said, agreeably. “But companies have to take the short view, because that’s where the profits are. People, on the other hand, can think in terms of much longer-term investments.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pete wanted to know.
“It means that I’m going to be a commercial sperm-donor,” Stevie said. “It means that I’m going to advertise my sperm to women with infertile husbands—who, as Mr. Winthrop told us only the other week, are as common as brass buttons nowadays—as the carrier of a gene which might offer built-in protection against ageing.”
“Might?” echoed Simon, skeptically.
“Might,” Stevie agreed. He drew in a lungful of air, ready to deliver the speech he had carefully prepared and rehearsed, with the aid of the explanations his Dad had spent half the night trying to get across to his Mum, while Stevie listened avidly. “Might’s not enough for drug companies, of course, because they have to go through clinical trials—but when you’re thinking of having children, all you have is mights, and you have to think in lifetimes. Mights sell, my Dad says—and he also says that we’re learning more every day about how to activate genes in tissues where natural selection never found any profit in activating them, so the parents of tomorrow ought to be prepared. But it’s not just about making money. It’s about making sure that the children of the future are as fortunate as we can help them to be. What I have is a gift from nature, but it’s not really mine. It happens to be in me, but that only means that it’s up to me to make sure that as many other people get the benefit of it as possible. It’s not just a matter of investing in pills and potions, you see—it’s a matter of investing in people. That’s what my Dad says, and he’s a salesman. He’s in the business, my Dad. Mum has her own agent, but my Dad’s my agent.”
“I still don’t understand what it’s all supposed to mean,” Suzie complained.
“I do,” Pete said. “You lucky bastard, Stevie. I’m getting my Mum to take me down the doctor’s as soon as possible, just in case.”
“What it means, Suzie,” said Stevie, putting a companionable hand on Pete’s shoulder, the way a best friend could and should, “is that I won’t even have to wait until I leave Secondary School to be in the Biotech business. Next year, or the year after, I’ll be busy making the future, just like my Dad—only much, much better.”