Free Xeno Sapiens by Victor Allen Page B

me.”
    “ What?”
    “ It’s true,” Clifton swore. “I’m
‘numbah one Joe’. He doesn’t like Merrifield much, though. Jon
doesn’t even rate a ‘numbah ten Joe’. He’s ‘numbah have a
no’.”
    “ It seems a lot of people don’t like
Jon.”
    “ He’s alright,” Clifton said
comfortably. “Just jolly him along a bit and you’ll have no
problem. Screw up and you’ll have to get a tourniquet for your ass
because he’ll chew it bloody.”
    “ Even my ass?”
    Clifton thought it over. “You’re his prize acquisition. You
do your job well. That’s all Jon wants. Even so, I don’t think
even your ass is entirely safe.”
    Ingrid snorted.
    “ Once we really get rolling,” Clifton
said, “we’ll all be putting in sixteen and twenty hours a
day.”
    “ Long hours don’t bother
me.”
    “ They might after a year or so of
them.”
    Ingrid let out a resigned
sigh.
    “ Speaking of long hours,” Clifton
said, “I’ve already put mine in. I believe I’ll drag myself home
and go to bed.”
    “ I’ll see you in the morning, then.
Can you get home alright through this snow?”
    Clifton shrugged. “I will or I won’t.
Beyond that, why worry?”
2
    Jimmy Sunners spoke to Ingrid when she
came into the codon sequencing lab.
    “ We’ve taken the liberty of mapping
out a few sequences for you, Miss Milner.”
    He wore a white, non-porous jumpsuit, a
mask over his nose and mouth and goggles over his eyes. His hair
was swept beneath a tight plastic cover and his feet were clad in
the same material of his jumpsuit. Ingrid was dressed similarly.
The room smelled of cold, filtered air. Ingrid heard the quiet hiss
of the ventilation system, the screeing, low volume hum of high
voltage machinery at the ready.
    On the video screen in the corner of
the room, a three dimensional projection of a small section of a
DNA strand hung suspended. Ingrid was fascinated.
    The three foot, prism shaped screen
showed the familiar double helix pattern of phosphates and sugars
that made up the backbone of the DNA molecule. The projection spun
slowly, the holograph defying the law of gravity. Along the strands
of the backbone, was the raw material of this spiral sandwich: the
pyrimidines and purines that formed the triplet instructions that
ordered cells to construct specific amino acids. The “bread” in
this particular sandwich was the stuff that truly
mattered.
    “ Beautiful,” Ingrid whispered.
“Beautiful,” The model pulsated with blaring, psychedelic color.
The silky-hiss of the furnace kicking into life blew the few loose
hairs which had tumbled from beneath her cap. The lights above her
buzzed like nascent insects.
    “ What is it?” she asked, never looking
away from the screen.
    “ A retinal gene from none other than
Alex Clifton,” Sunners said. His mask hid his grin.
    “ How did you manage that?”
    “ We let the computer track it down,”
Sunners said. “Clifton has about the best eyesight of anyone we’ve
run across. Those glasses he wears are just for show. He thinks
they make him look wiser. We thought we’d map his genes, but we
never believed we’d get a usable trait. Notice anything different
about the bonding?”
    Ingrid looked more closely. In a
moment, after the projection completed another rotation, she saw
it.
    “ There’s an extra hydrogen bond on the
substrate.”
    Sunners raised his eyebrows,
impressed.
    “ Boy, that’s sharp. The computer ran
down ten thousand different triplet combinations before it came
across this thing. The extra hydrogen keeps the triplet from
unraveling during replication, We constructed a chain from your
average retinal gene and aged it chemically. After two days, the
Arginine lost a side group and was replaced by Proline. Merrifield
almost shit his pants. We might have found what causes eyesight to
diminish. Alex can still read a book two inches from his nose,
which most people can’t do after they turn six years old. We always
thought it was because