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  Killer Chromosomes

  ( The Destroyer - 32 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  What happens when an insane female scientist discovers a genetic link between species - and experiments on herself? She transforms into a tiger - the man-eating kind. Wild, beautiful and deadly, Dr. Sheila Feinberg tests her new savage nature and leaves a trail of mangled male corpses behind. Insatiable, she stalks the only man worthy of her hunger for power, Remo Williams, the Destroyer. Ordered to stop the menace, Remo becomes both hunter and bait for this she-devil and winds up her prisoner, the stud she needs to create a new race. As Remo fights her bloodlust, master assassin Chiun circles in for the final kill to end the threat to humankind!

  Killer Chromosomes

  Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

  For Sally Newmark-a gracious person, a beautiful woman, and the finest aunt in the whole world

  CHAPTER ONE

  They were afraid.

  It was so small they couldn't see it with their naked eyes. It had yet to do them any harm. The nonscientists among them weren't even sure exactly what it did.

  But 200 families from the greater Boston area, from as far away as Duxbury and even southern New Hampshire, pushed their way that rainy summer afternoon into the dirt and cement courtyard of the Boston Graduate School of Biological Sciences to protest against its manufacture.

  "No. Not manufacture," explained an architect to one of the mothers. "They change it around but they don't make it new. Nobody can."

  "Whatever," yelled the mother. "Stop them."

  She knew what they were doing here at BGSBS was bad. They were making monsters that no one could stop. Horrible things like diseases no one could cure, or mutations that would come into your bedroom and put their hairy hands all over you and lick you all over and do things to you. Maybe rape you. And then you would have that horror in your body.

  Like the devil copulating with Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby, except here it could be real. They were so small, these things that could do the horrors, that they could enter your body without your even knowing it. Go right through your skin. You might not even have a blemish but you'd be dead.

  And your babies would suffer worse. She liked the way one speaker had put it the night before at the pre-rally rally.

  "I'm not going to tell you horror stories. I am not going to drag out some Bela Lugosi image out here in front of you. I am not going to use some scare tactics like telling you a mad scientist is laughing insanely over some bubbling test tube that is going to burn you all to death. I am simply going to give you a scientific fact: life, as you know it, is probably already over. You are probably already too late. We are not going to be doomed. We are doomed."

  So that was it. Rationally and scientifically, any sane person would know life was over for good probably.

  She saw the television cameramen from Channels 4 5, and 7 shooting down from the roof of the building and she saw great black cables stretching into a window on the third floor. That was where the evil scientists made those things and were going to try to prove they were harmless this day.

  Harmless, she would give them harmless. How could something be harmless if everyone was already doomed? And if nothing else, it could ruin making babies. After all, they were using the same stuff to make babies.

  A speaker rose on a small truck. He was a doctor. And he was worried.

  "They are going to conduct their experiment today," he said. "They are going to take our their test tubes in their laboratory and show some five-minute expert from a newspaper or television station that what they are doing is safe. Well, it's not safe. And we're here to tell the world it is not safe. You don't tamper with the forces of life without danger. You let them make the atomic bomb and now you're living on the brink of nuclear holocaust. Well, the atomic bomb is child's play compared to this, because with an atomic bomb you know when it goes off. This damned thing could have gone off already and no one will know unless we tell them."

  The speaker paused. Mrs. Walters loved the speakers in this movement. She cradled her pudgy child, Ethel, who was now dangerously moist. She was almost four but sometimes during great excitement accidents occurred. They had told all the mothers to bring their children and to make them as neat and as pretty as possible to show the world what they were trying to save. The children. The future. Tomorrow. That was it. They were simply saving tomorrow.

  The thought made Mrs. Walters' eyes water. Something else was wet also. She shifted baby Ethel, who smiled contentedly at a television camera. The camera did not catch the moisture dripping down the mother's arms. Mrs. Walters tried to appear as loving as possible for the media while keeping baby Ethel away from the new print dress that might stain and stay stained.

  The handheld camera came closer to her. A young man with beautifully structured hair and an immaculate suit and a very deep voice pushed a microphone in front of baby Ethel.

  "And why are you here, child?"

  "To stop the bad people," said Ethel. And the blue ribbons and the neat pigtails bobbed. Baby Ethel smiled. She had dimples.

  "And you are?" asked the young announcer.

  "Mrs. Walters. Mrs. Harry Walters of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and I'm here to protest what's going on here. I'm here to save tomorrow as the speaker just said."

  "Save it from what?"

  "From bad things," said Mrs. Walters. Baby Ethel reached out for the microphone. Mrs. Walters readjusted the heavy, wet bundle.

  "Dr. Sheila Feinberg, the scientist who is conducting today's experiments, says that most of you don't even understand what she is doing."

  "I don't understand how the atomic bomb works either but why on earth we ever made one, I'll never know."

  "We were at war," explained the announcer.

  "Oh, well, it was an immoral war. We had no business in Vietnam."

  "We were at war with Germany and Japan."

  "Now see how crazy that is," said Mrs. Walters. "They're such good friends. Why did we need an atomic bomb against good friends? We didn't need the bomb and we don't need Dr. Feinberg's plagues and monsters."

  "What plagues? What monsters?"

  "The worst kind," said Mrs. Walters righteously. "The kind you can't see or don't even know of."

  The announcer repeated her name for the camera and sidled around the crowd to an entrance for newsmen and wondered how he could cut the crowd scenes down to twenty seconds. The station was attacking Boston potholes again and their humor announcer, who was as funny as prickly heat, was holding a special summer pothole contest that used up five minutes of air time every night. The whole station was like the Titanic where the band played as the ship went down. A New York firm gave them the snappiest theme song in the country and the station provided the downright stupidest coverage of everything.

  Dr. Sheila Feinberg was upstairs under the lights of a rival television station. The announcer waited for them to finish their interview. He felt suddenly very protective of this woman even though she was a scientist. She looked so out of place, sitting there under his channel's lights, waiting for a question. Like the plain, studious girls in school that you just knew would have to settle for some drip of a husband or never get married at all.

  Dr. Feinberg, thirty-eight, had a strong, manly nose and a pinched, desperate sort of face, like an overworked accountant who had suddenly forgotten a key set of books and was about to lose a client over it.

  She wore a loose, puffy, white blouse, which hid the absence of womanly roundness on her chest, and she had a skinny waist and wide hips under a dark-blue, flannel skirt. She wore plain black shoes with low heals. A desperate cameo brooch on the blouse proclaimed t
hat she was a woman and had a right to wear such a thing, but it seemed as out of place as her new hairdo. It was a pert short cut, similar to one made famous by an ice skater, but on the ice skater it emphasized a cutesy-poo face. On Dr. Feinberg, it looked like a Christmas tree atop a tank turret-a desperately inappropriate piece of gaiety.

  Softly, the announcer asked her to explain the demonstration and what she was doing. He also told her that it might be better if she didn't pick at her fingernails when she talked.

  "What we're doing here," said Dr. Feinberg, with controlled softness that allowed neck veins to bulge like suddenly stepped-on, wrinkly blue balloons, "is exploring chromosomes. Chromosomes, genes, DNA, are all part of the process that determines characteristics. It is why one seed becomes a petunia and another meets an egg and becomes Napoleon. Or Jesus. Or Dr. Jonas Salk. What we're dealing with is the coding mechanism for what makes things the way they are."

  "Your critics say that you could create a monster or a strange plague that could get out of the laboratory and destroy mankind."

  Dr. Feinberg smiled sadly and shook her head.

  "I call that the Frankenstein syndrome," she said. "You know how in the movies the mad scientist takes the brain of a criminal, puts it into pieces from many people's bodies and with lightning jolts the whole damned thing into something stranger than man? Well, if you followed that process you would have the biggest stink you could imagine. I doubt if you could get one percent of the tissue to live, much less perform, much less perform better than an average human being."

  "Well, where do people get these ideas from?" asked the announcer.

  "From stories and television. They see a man get in an accident and then some mechanical, electronic wizardry makes him stronger and better-seeing than any man alive. Well, that is not so. If I tried to put a bionic arm onto your shoulder you'd have lesions for ten years. It would be super tender, and if the arm by some mechanical skill is made stronger than the human arm, it would throw you around every time you tried to use it. I mean, it's ridiculous. Our problem is not keeping some monster under control but trying to get a very delicate substance to survive. And that's what I am going to show today."

  "How?"

  "By drinking it."

  "Isn't that dangerous?"

  "Yes," said Dr. Feinberg. "For the organism. If the exposure to air doesn't kill it, my saliva will. You have to understand we're talking about one of the lowliest of all bacteria. To it we attach chromosomes and genes from other forms of life. In years, many years, if we've been both talented and lucky, we may understand the genetic causes of cancer, of hemophilia, of diabetes. We may be able to create inexpensive vaccines to save the lives of people who today will die. We may be able to create food plants that draw nitrogen from the air and no longer need expensive fertilizers. But that's years away and that's why this whole protest is so ridiculous. We're barely able to keep these organisms alive now. Most of our intricate machinery is painstakingly designed to keep everything at just the right temperature, just the right acidity. Those people out there are worried about it conquering the world, and we're worried about trying to keep it alive under intensive care."

  It took two hours for the public demonstration to begin. The protestors insisted on placing who they wanted where they wanted. The mothers with the babies got the front rows, right near the television cameras. Not one camera could focus on the experiment without framing it with babys' faces.

  The material was in a long, clear fishtank. There were twelve small, sealed test tubes submerged in clear liquid in the tank which was set on a black-topped table.

  Dr. Feinberg asked everyone not to smoke.

  "Why? Because then we'll see how vicious that stuff is? If it isn't dangerous, why do you have it cooped up in glass and water inside the glass?" called out one man.

  "First, we don't have water in this tank. Water transmits variations of temperature too rapidly. We have a gelatin solution which acts as insulation. These are unstable elements."

  "Unstable. It can blow up," yelled a bald man with a beard. He wore a single love bead on a gold strand around his neck.

  "Unstable... it can die. That's what I mean," said Dr. Feinberg patiently.

  "Liar," yelled out Mrs. Walters. Baby Ethel was positively rancid by now. The sweet dimples hid an odor that even the mother could not stand. It did not bother baby Ethel. She was used to it.

  "No, you don't understand. It really is very sensitive. What we're trying to get, and we don't even have the correct combination yet, is a very delicate key."

  "You're taking the seed of life," yelled out another person.

  "No, no. Please listen. Do you know why, when you grow older, your nose stays your nose and your eyes stay your eyes? Even though every seven years every cell has been replaced?"

  "Because you haven't had a chance to mess with it," shouted a man.

  "No," said Dr. Feinberg, trembling. "Because there is a code system in your body that makes you you. And what we're doing here at Boston Biological is trying to find the key to that code, so that bad things like cancers won't reproduce themselves. We have in these test tubes genes of various animals treated with combinations of what we call unlocking elements. Hopefully we can produce variations that will help us understand why things are the way they are and how we can help ourselves to make them better. What we are working on here is the key to unlock closed doors between chromosome systems if you will."

  "Rotten liar," yelled out someone and then the group began the chant of liar and finally someone challenged Dr. Feinberg to "touch the deadly fluid with your bare hands."

  "Oh, come on," she said in disgust and reached into the tank. One woman shrieked and every mother shielded her child except Mrs. Walters, who let baby Ethel fend her own smelly way. She waited to see Dr. Feinberg's hand disintegrate.

  Out came a test tube. Clear, gooey stuff clung to Dr. Feinberg's hand.

  "For those of you who like horror, I have in this test tube the genes from a man-eating tiger, treated with the unlocking mechanism. Man-eating tiger."

  There were gasps from the audience. Dr. Feinberg shook her head sadly. She looked to the announcer who had been friendly. He smiled at the woman. He understood. There was nothing more terrible about man-eating tiger genes than about the genes of a mouse. Both of them could hardly survive outside their carriers. If they were not already dead anyway.

  Dr. Feinberg drank the liquid in the test tube and made a face.

  "Would anyone care to select another test tube?" she said.

  "They're not real killer chromosomes," yelled someone and that was enough.

  "You stupid, stupid, ignorant people," yelled Dr. Feinberg in frustration. "You won't understand."

  Furiously, she rammed her hand into the gelatin insulated tank, snatched another bottle, and drank it. She drank another. She drooled and drank. She uncorked and drank. She finished every one of those test tubes and it all tasted vaguely like someone else's spit. And there she was.

  "Here. What do you expect me to do, change into Wolfman? You ignorant, ignorant people."

  And then she shivered. And her short haircut shivered. And, like an old bolt of cloth, she collapsed to the ground.

  "Don't touch her. She might be contagious," yelled baby Ethel's mother.

  "Idiots," snapped the announcer for the TV station, breaking his code of impartiality. He called an ambulance and after the unconscious Dr. Feinberg was taken out in a stretcher, still breathing, one of her colleagues explained it was unfortunate she passed out because he was sure the genetic matter she swallowed could not have caused even an upset stomach. She had passed out from the excitement, he said.

  "I mean, it is improbable that the genetic material had anything to do with it." he said.

  But no one listened. One of the leaders of the protesting group jumped on the lab table near the fish-tank.

  "Touch nothing. This place is contaminated." When he had silence and was sure the cameras had stopped panning
the milling crowd, he waved his arms and spoke.

  "Nothing could happen, they told us. Nothing could harm anyone, they told us. The genes and chromosomes and whatever life codes these monsters are tinkering with have trouble enough surviving, they said. Well, at least this time it has struck only the guilty. Let's stop it before it strikes the innocent."

  The protestors, reveling in their good fortune, continued their meeting long after the news cameramen had left. Babies become cranky and someone was sent out for infant's formula. Someone else was dispatched for hamburgers and soft drinks for the elders. They passed fourteen resolutions, all numbered, all labeled Boston Graduate Biological. In this way, the resolution itself would always bring up the accident that happened in the lab where no accident could happen.

  Baby Ethel went to sleep in her moist pants, soiled backside up, unsmiling face down on her mother's rolled-up jacket in the rear of the laboratory.

  Someone thought they saw a figure paw toward her. Someone else looked around to hear a very low, grumbling growl that seemed to come from just outside the window leading to the alley. And then a young child wandered through saying Dr. Feinberg had returned.

  "The lady who drank the nasty things," said the child in explanation.

  "Oh, God. No," came a voice from the back of the room. "No, no, no."

  Mrs. Walters knew baby Ethel was sleeping back there. She bulled her way through the group, knocking over chairs and people, following a mother's instinct as old as the caves. She knew something bad had come to her child. She slipped, slamming into the person who had cried out in horror. She tried to get up but slipped again. She was wallowing in some oily, red goo. It wasn't oily. It was slippery. It was blood.

  She was on her knees trying to get to her feet when she saw the extraordinary pale face of baby Ethel so deeply, peacefully, in sleep despite the screaming. Then the woman who called out stepped aside and Mrs. Walters saw her baby had no stomach, as if it had been eaten out, and the little body had let its blood out all over the floor.