Adopted Son Read online

  “Well, ye see, there might be a bit of a problem with that,” said Gaffee. He rubbed the back of his greasy neck with his meaty, nicotine-stained hands and looked down at the concrete. He inhaled through his teeth. “Some folks on the Board have been thinking that you may want to keep a closer eye on little Jim here than we can really provide here at George Austin. Maybe you’d consider home schooling.”

  “But I got this letter,” Lorraine said dejectedly. She again held up the letter from the county clerk.

  “Yeah, the letter. That was a mistake from the clerk’s office, someone over there hadn’t done their homework. I’ll take care of the clerk’s office, don’t you fret about that. There are just some people here in town that are a might uncomfortable having a child with your son’s ‘condition’ here at the school with their kids.” Beads of sweat formed on the fat man’s forehead. He wasn’t used to being so politic.

  Lorraine stiffened. “What condition is that Mr. Gaffee?” said Lorraine in an indignant voice.

  “You know, the whole... condition.” Mr. Gaffee was obviously uncomfortable talking about this, especially in front of the child. He waved his hands up and down hoping to give visual clues as to what ‘the condition’ was. Lorraine caught on quickly to the situation.

  “Go wait in the car Jim,” she said to her child sternly. Jim Miller, happy to be free of this strange place, didn’t wait for her to confirm her request. He immediately took off in a waddly run towards the truck. “Mr. Gaffee, regardless of my son’s ‘condition’ I will have him educated. That is his right as a citizen, isn’t it?”

  “umm, yes ma’am, that’s true, and I would agree with you. I wish all parents were as concerned with their children’s education as you seem to be. I admire you for that. But you see, the thing is, ... how can I put this... we’ve gotten complaints.”

  “Complaints?”

  “Yeah, you see there’s a lot of people here in this town, good people, who are a bit... touchy about all the ‘HS’ stuff going around. You’ve heard what they’ve been saying on TV about it. People are starting to get worried. They don’t want their children to be infected.”

  “Mr. Gaffee, there is no evidence that HS can be passed on like a cold. And even so, it don’t affect people who’ve already been born, it can’t turn anybody else’s kids into... into...,” Lorraine hesitated. Just what did the HS virus turn people into?

  “I understand that Mrs. Miller, I really do. If it was up to me, I would have no problem with this, but it’s not up to me Mrs. Miller. I have to report to the Superintendent and the school board and the PTA. As I said, people are pretty durn edgy about this whole thing. You’ve heard what Senator Johnston’s been saying haven’t you?”

  “No, I don’t listen to Senator Johnston,” Lorraine said coldly.

  “Well Mrs. Miller, the people around here do, and they’re worried, and dammit, they’ve got a right to be. Nobody knows what’s going on here, and they’re scared. I just don’t want there to be any... incidents.”

  “Is that a threat Mr. Gaffee?” She stared at him. He wiped his head with his shirt sleeve. It was hot today.

  “Mrs. Miller, I understand your situation, I’m a parent myself, you know, but I hope that you’ll try to see this thing from the point of view of the community. Having Jim in school is going to be disruptive. Kids aren’t going want to study, they’ll be staring at him. Parents won’t send their kids to school, teachers won’t teach him. No one wants to catch this disease Mrs. Miller and frankly I don’t blame them. And besides, I’m not just doing this for the community, I’m asking you to reconsider things from Jim’s perspective. I mean look at him, the spindly little thing. He ain’t gonna be able to play sports with those scrawny arms. He don’t have any hair. How do you think he is going to do here in school, especially with all the parents telling their kids all sorts of stories about this HS thing? If you sent him here, he’d be miserable, he’d be a pariah. A kid like that just ain’t gonna fit in, and let me tell you Mrs. Miller, kids who don’t fit in come out poorly.”

  Lorraine turned and glanced back at the truck. Little Jim was sitting in the passenger seat bouncing up and down on the cushion. He looked so innocent. She lowered her eyes and turned back around, shoulders slumped in resignation. She wasn’t used to fighting for things, especially not against the perceived authority of a Principal. He did have a point about...

  “I knew you’d see it my way Mrs. Miller,” said the principal, smiling again. “But I don’t want to just dump all this on you and leave you stranded. In this folder I’ve got a pile of information on home schooling, take it.” He passed the file over to Lorraine. “And if you’ve got any questions or problems, I want you to call me personally, my card’s in the folder. I might even be able to convince the Board to pay for a private tutor. We’ll get through this together Mrs. Miller. You’ll see, this is what’s best for Jim, and best for Tyler, you’ll see.”

  She held the folder limply in her hand as she walked back to the truck, biting her lip to keep it from quivering, trying to maintain a brave face for Jim.

  The Senate Chambers of Ray Johnston (R-NY), almost three years after his inauguration.

  The rumpled figure of Senator Johnston is sitting at his desk. The only light in the room is the desk lamp. He has been there since before dusk and the loss of sunlight was too slow for him to notice enough to get out of his large padded chair and turn on the room lights. A few cars can be heard crossing the street, sloshing in the rain. The only other sound is that of a lone trumpet player eerily playing the same six bars of “Happy Days are Here Again” over and over for weary Metro riders on their way home. All of Ray’s staffers have left for the day. They were off celebrating the passage of another bill to increase funding for HS research. At this moment they are scurrying about the bars of Capitol Hill furtively flirting with each other and drinking enough courage to talk to the interns who were spending their summer shuffling papers for prestigious people.

  Ray was reading over the text of the speech he was scheduled to give to the American Medical Association next week. It promised more governmental assistance for scientific research in general. Did it have enough references to HS? Did it have too many? Ray knew that he was elected as a single-issue candidate. If he had learned one thing in his years on the hill, it was that you couldn’t stay a single-issue candidate, not if you wanted to get re-elected. He didn’t want to alienate his core constituency (he chuckled gruffly at the pun), but he needed to sound more broad if he wanted to stay in the Senate and accomplish his mission. He rubbed his forehead a bit and started to make changes to the page with his pencil.

  After a few minutes of scratching and erasing, he sat back in his chair. He tossed off his reading glasses and closed his eyes. It wasn’t working. He was mad at himself. Mad for becoming just like the damn bureaucrats he hated. Here he was, with the biggest threat to the human race looming on the horizon, and he was writing speeches. He did nothing. He no longer was on the front lines, defending America. Now all he did was deliver speeches imploring other people to spend their money to hire people to solve the problem. What the hell had happened to him, to his dream? The Senate was too out of the loop for his tastes. He needed something to happen, some breakthrough. The research hadn’t been going too well. The scientists kept asking for more money, the people clamored for more results. Nothing was happening. Ray wished that there was someone he could shoot to solve the problem. That was the way he had always been trained to handle things. Get out there and force the issue.

  A phone is ringing. It wakes Ray from his self-incrimination. At first he didn’t think that it was for him. As a Senator, he had people answering the phone for him going on three years now. He was used to having a secretary tell him when he needed to be on the phone. After four rings, he realized that he was alone in the office. No one was going to answer the phone except him. “Well, at least this is something that I can do,” he thought as he reached for the blinking button on line 2.
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  “Hello?” he said cautiously into the phone. It was unusual to get a call this late. Most everyone that would call his office knew that Senators aren’t in the office after about three pm. He was so unused to phone edict that he didn’t even know the proper greeting that his office staff answered the phone with.

  There were a few seconds of silence on the line. Suddenly, a furtive voice spoke, almost in a whisper, “Hi, um I want to speak to Senator Johnston.”

  “This is Senator Johnston.” The Capitol Hill security staff would have had a heart attack if they had heard that. There had been briefing after briefing about not identifying yourself to potential stalkers and psychos. Of course, Ray had never bothered to attend those briefings. He had more important things to do.

  “No, kidding? Is this really the Senator? Holy cow. It’s an honor to meet you Mr. Senator. I’ve been a fan of yours for years.”

  “What do you want son.”

  “Mr. Senator, oh geez, “ said the voice, “I can’t believe that I’m talking to you.” The boy on the other end of the line seemed a bit giddy, he giggled. Then all of a sudden, he snapped into seriousness. “Mr. Senator, I have some information for you, there’s something that you need to see. I’m a Real American sir, just like you are. That’s why I joined the Air Force sir. I want to serve my country just like you’re doing. We all respect to you sir, that’s why I’ve got to tell you something they’re covering up over here sir. I just want to be a patriot, just like you.”

  The boy told Ray about the terrible secret. Ray listened intently. He wasn’t sure to believe at first, but the more the boy spoke the more it became apparent that he made sense. It was all there waiting to be broken out into the open. It really made perfect sense, thought Ray, once you think about it. Of course that’s what those morons who run the country would do in this case. President Michaels was no different than that oaf Dillon was. They were so worried about public perceptions and campaign contributions from industry that they would never release this sort of information. No one had the guts to do what needed to be done– no one except Ray Johnston. For the first time in a long time Ray felt that he could make a difference again. That he could actually do something positive. He reassured the Airman that he would do something about this information immediately.

  As soon as the line was disconnected he called his Chief of Staff’s cell phone. There was bar noise in the background. “Steve, get everyone into the office right now, we’ve got an emergency mission. I need plane tickets for tomorrow morning to Ohio. I need the media notified. Give Senator Walker a call at home, I need him too. Press coverage, I need press coverage. We’re going to blow the lid off this thing!” He smiled, knowing that something big was going to happen. For the first time in a while, his mission was clear.

  Two weeks before the mysterious phone call. Johns-Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

  “So in conclusion, HSLV uses several lines of attack against the host cell genome. First, it uses methyl-transferases to irreversibly methylate genomic promoter sequences thereby stopping expression of certain human genes. Second, it uses intronases to modify human genomic RNA before translation into cellular proteins. And third, HSLV uses integrases to write its own genes into the human genome, thereby utilizing the host’s own cellular machinery to create mutant proteins. The combination of the post-translationally modified human proteins, the inserted viral proteins, and the lack of expression of key human proteins leads to the visible symptoms known as Handel’s Syndrome. Any questions?”

  At the request of Dr. Lee, Dr. Mensen was addressing a graduate seminar on virology. Interest in microbiology had skyrocketed since HSLV was isolated, and the number of applicants to Johns-Hopkins biochemistry program had more than tripled in the previous year. Dr. Lee had invited his colleague to speak to fulfill student demand for cutting edge HSLV information, and to give himself a bit of a break from the tedium of lecturing.

  “Dr. Mensen, how many unique genes have been isolated in HSLV?”

  “We originally thought that there were about five hundred genes, based on the amount of DNA present in the virus. But the more we look, the more genes we find. HSLV is very efficient and quite tightly packed. The proteins it forms are small compared to most human proteins with homologous function. The current estimate is about one thousand genes, of which we’ve isolated around two hundred.

  Another student raised his hand. “Dr. Mensen, you say that your laboratory has isolated no less than forty methyl-transferases that attack specific human promoter sequences.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Isn’t that a little hard to swallow. I mean, one or two would be believable, but how could a virus develop that many host-specific sequences all at once? I mean, it doesn’t make sense. There should be a pile of similar viruses that have smaller numbers of human-specific methyl-transferases. There don’t seem to be any viruses similar to HSLV, yet this one is so perfectly tuned that it doesn’t make sense that it could have evolved unnoticed. Shouldn’t there be similar viruses with a less perfect fit?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “What I’m getting at Professor, is that, looking strictly at the morphology of course, it seems that the chance that such a virus would develop through natural, evolutionary means, is incredibly slim. What are your thoughts on Senator Johnston’s claim that the virus was engineered?”

  Dr. Mensen chuckled. “Senator Johnston is not a biologist. He doesn’t understand what he is talking about. The people in this room all know about viral mutation rates and how quickly viruses adapt. All I can say is that ‘life is wondrous.’” Dr. Mensen waved his hands over his head in a mock celebration of nature. “It certainly would seem to the layman that it is impossible for such a virus to evolve naturally, but I ask you to look at other viruses, and other life-forms in general. The more we learn about biochemistry and cell biology, the more amazed we are at how life actually works. Is it possible that HSLV was engineered? Sure, anything is possible. Is it probable that HSLV was engineered? I’d have to say no. The amount of intimate knowledge that would be required to develop a virus as complex as HSLV is astronomical. It would take decades, if not centuries of our best scientists and our most powerful computers to develop something on this scale.”

  “What about aliens?”

  Dr. Mensen looked over to Dr. Lee, who was sitting in back, taking notes. “Dr. Lee, I thought that I was invited to give a lecture on viral morphology, not on science-fiction writing.”

  The morning after Ray’s mysterious call, Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, OH

  As with most military bases within the States, Wright-Pat AFB was not under any imminent threat of attack. The base guards performed a mostly ceremonial function. Right white glove to the temple for a passing officer, left white glove to the chest for a civilian. Pass, pass, pass. The perfunctory job is often performed by the low end of the totem pole, people who don’t have the smarts it takes to drive tanks or fold laundry. That may have been why the airman on duty didn’t know how to do anything but let the entourage pass.

  And quite an entourage it was for that early in the morning. There were television cameras and vans from a dozen stations, a number of other journalists, local and state police officers, two Senators who had come along in support, a selection of scientists who advised the Senator on HS issues, and a few senate staffers that had been lucky enough to be allowed to tag along. At the center of this maelstrom was Senator Johnston himself. He moved purposefully, not like the ineffectual legislator he had become, but like the powerful intelligence officer he once had been. He rode triumphantly in the front seat of a black jeep. The airman didn’t even try to stop the convoy as it drove through the gates. It was too much for him. He simply went into his little booth and called his sergeant. The sergeant called the lieutenant, the lieutenant called the captain, and so on up the chain.

  The convoy made its way across the base to its target destination. It was pretty obvious to those base pe
rsonnel in-the-know where Johnston was headed, given his interest in aliens and HS. By the time he reached the hangar, a crowd had gathered. Word of mouth spread quickly around here. Some had come simply because they heard that a famous Senator was on base. Some came because they figured that there would be a ruckus of some sort. Some had come because they were bored with their menial tasks and could take this opportunity to slack off for a few moments. A few had come because they knew the truth. But, for whatever reason, there was a crowd of about a hundred people lingering around the entrance to Hangar 18 as the Senator and his media entourage came up the road. Some people even started to clap and cheer as the jeep came to a stop. Some people did not.

  One of those clearly not in the mood to cheer was Colonel Hankerton, the base commander. He had gotten word from the front gate that a media frenzy was approaching. Col. Hankerton had gone through this drill many times before. Wright-Pat was used to dealing with the media for a variety of reasons. The base was often home to roll-outs of new aircraft, the hosting of summits, and other publicity-intensive projects. Occasionally people came by asking about aliens. Mostly kooks, but the base had a policy of always attempting to answer their questions as thoroughly as possible, without violating security of course. Hankerton had just been sitting down for his morning muffin when word came that Senator Johnston was approaching. The Colonel knew that there was only one place that he could be heading, only one place that could be of interest to him. The fact that the Senator had not called ahead and scheduled his visit was disturbing. It seemed that Johnston would not be satisfied with the platitudes and canned briefings that had persuaded the other members of the legislature to keep their nose out of classified Air Force programs. He had immediately straightened his jacket and drove to the hangar entrance. This party needed to be cut off, and cut off quickly.