Free Winter Study by Nevada Barr

room.
“Generator
time,” Jonah said. “Since the good Adam, first man on Earth and not on
time even once in the ensuing millennia, has not yet returned, firing
it up falls to me.”
Anna’d
not noticed the light going. Her nose was scarcely four inches from the
slash in the wolf’s throat. She laughed. “I just figured I was going
blind.”
“Let there be light,” Jonah said and left.
Five
minutes later the lights came on. Since Katherine showed no indication
she was finished, and Anna had nothing better to do, she stayed and
watched.
“I’ve
got a new toy,” Katherine said, more at ease with the men gone. She
lovingly removed a box about the size of two toasters from a duffel bag
stacked with other bags and boxes on the unused cot in the corner of
the kitchen. “They’ve been around for a while, but this is of a new
generation.” With obvious pride, she removed the top half of the
Styrofoam packing to reveal a machine that looked like a cross between
a computer and an adding machine.
When no explanation was forthcoming, Anna asked: “What does it do?”
“It’s
a PCR,” Katherine said. “A polymerase chain reaction machine. It’s
brand-new technology.” Katherine stroked its plastic face. “American
University bought it for this trip. The wolf/moose study is a kind of
rock star in animal research studies.”
Anna’d
known that. In a world where the denizens hyperventilated over the
discovery of a new kind of fruit fly larva, wolves would be glamour on
paws. It was also the longest-running project of its kind in America
and, despite how it seemed at the dinner table, one of the touted
examples of how scientists and the Park Service worked and played well
together.
“The
lab at Michigan Tech does the original fingerprinting,” Katherine went
on as she set the PCR on the counter. “ISRO’s samples are sent there.
They extract DNA using a Qiagen extraction kit. Then the sample is
visualized, using a Beckman-Coul fragment analyzer. They do it at a
bunch of different microsatellite loci in the genome.”
It
would have fallen to Katherine, as Menechinn’s graduate student, to
teach the basic classes. Anna felt a twinge of pity for her students.
Katherine’s mind moved in higher stratospheres of science, and it
sounded as if her trips back to Earth had been infrequent.
“You lost me at ‘Qiagen,’” Anna said.
Katherine
looked sheepish, oddly juxtapositional to the technically precise
language she’d been spouting. “Sorry.” She bobbed her head in the
birdlike way Anna’d noticed her first night on the island, the
ducking-under-the-wing gesture when Bob had praised her graduate work.
Katherine
took a deep breath and looked into the corner behind Anna’s head.
“Okay. The Qiagen… Okay. No. Okay, let’s go to the gel. No. Not yet…”
Anna waited patiently as she struggled her way back to total ignorance so she might begin to help Anna understand.
“Tiny
fragments of the DNA are taken,” Katherine finally said, and her gaze
came back to eye level. “From a lot of different places — not on the
sample; from different places on the genome from the sample. All these
tiny pieces have different weights. The fragments are… uh… squirted…
into tubes of gel… like Jell-O, you know?”
“I know Jell-O,” Anna said gravely.
“Good.
Good. So each little piece of DNA is in its own tube, and the tubes are
all in a line like…” She groped mentally, probably through a bag of
metaphors that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody without at least a
master’s degree.
“Like a bowling alley?”
“Yes!” she said gratefully. “Like a bowling alley, but tiny. Very, very small. Small. Smaller than small—”
“Tiny,” Anna helped her out.
“Tiny.
So each tiny bit is in its own tiny tube of gel in the tiny bowling
alley. All in a line like the lanes.” She was warming up to the bowling
alley and waited till Anna nodded her understanding before she went on.
“Then the little bits are pushed