Double Helix Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  THE WARNING

  Eli,

  It’s clear to me now that somehow you’ve gotten to know Quincy Wyatt, and that your new job is with Wyatt Transgenics. I don’t want to know the details of how that happened. I don’t care. I simply ask you not to take the job. In fact, I ask you not to let this man be in your life in any way.

  I can’t tell you why, Eli. But I am begging you to do what I ask, and to do it immediately and without question.

  Love, Dad

  An ALA Best Book for Young Adults

  A Booklist Top Ten Mystery for Teens, 2004

  A School Library Journal Best Book of 2004

  A Booklist Editors’ Choice

  OTHER BOOKS YOU MAY ENJOY

  SLEUTH

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2003

  Published by Sleuth, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2005

  Copyright © Nancy Werlin, 2004

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE DIAL EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Werlin, Nancy.

  Double helix / Nancy Werlin.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-57739-4

  [1. Genetic engineering—Fiction. 2. Bioethics—Fiction.

  3. Huntington’s chorea—Fiction. 4. Science fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.W4713Do 2004 [Fic]—dc22 2003012269

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my father, Arnold Werlin, a quiet hero

  CHAPTER 1

  IT WAS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE for me to sit still—but I had to. I - couldn’t be pacing frantically back and forth across the rich gray carpet of Wyatt Transgenics’s expansive reception area when Dr. Wyatt—the Dr. Wyatt—

  But he’d send an assistant to get me, wouldn’t he? To escort me to his office? He wouldn’t come himself.

  My knuckles were tapping out a random jumpy rhythm on the arm of the chair. I clenched my fist to stop it. I shifted my legs.

  The chair I sat in was small and hard and low to the ground. Obviously, whoever designed the corporate reception area had been focused not on the comfort of visitors, but on showcasing the enormous double-helix staircase that dominated the atrium with its depiction of DNA structure. And though anyone would find the chairs uncomfortable, they were particularly bad for me. My knees stuck up awkwardly, making the pant legs of my borrowed suit look even shorter than they were. There was nothing I could do about that—my father was only six foot three. His jacket, also, was too tight across the shoulders on me.

  I tugged at my tie. I suspected—no, I knew I looked ridiculous. The suit didn’t even make me look older. And I now thought it had been completely unnecessary. In the time I’d been sitting here, at least a dozen Wyatt Transgenics employees had moved purposefully across the mezzanine area at the top of the double-helix staircase, and they’d all been wearing casual clothes. Sneakers. Jeans. T-shirts under lab coats. The only people in suits were the two security guards.

  I could hear Viv’s voice in my ear. Philosophical. Well, who knew? We both thought you ought to wear a suit.

  We had. Viv had at first tried to convince me to buy a suit in the right size from a store. She’d been appalled when I explained the cost of a man’s suit, and, undeterred, had spent all yesterday afternoon dragging me through used clothing stores in Cambridgeport. Excuse me, but do you have any suits that would fit my boyfriend?

  When she’d failed to find one, she’d burst into tears. Right in the middle of Central Square.

  Viv. If she weren’t in my life . . . well. I couldn’t imagine how lonely I would be.

  Guilt stirred in me, though. Viv thought this was a job interview of some kind. A summer internship. I hadn’t lied to her. I never lied to Viv. I had just, as always, kept quiet and let her think whatever she chose.

  Of course, I could have kept it a secret that I was coming. But I’d felt as if I would burst if I couldn’t say something. And who was there but Viv to confide in, even a little? I wasn’t going to tell my father.

  Once more I caught myself fidgeting, looking at the clock. My appointment had been for twenty minutes ago. I’d checked in with the receptionist ten minutes early, so I’d been here half an hour. I tried to work up irritation at being kept waiting. Dr. Wyatt was a busy man, an important man, a Nobel Prize winner, probably one of the most important scientists alive today—but it was he who’d invited me. He who’d set the date and time. I’d had to duck out of school an hour early to get here by bus. It was rude of him to keep me waiting so long.

  But the truth was, I didn’t care. I was consumed by curiosity . . . and anxiety. I’d wait all afternoon if I had to.

  Bottom line: I had no idea why I was here. Why I’d been . . . summoned. The woman who called me had simply said: We got your email. Dr. Wyatt has read it. He would like to meet you.

  She did not say it was a job interview. She had not asked me to send, or bring, a résumé or a school transcript or any teacher recommendations.

  We got your email.

  I had emailed Dr. Wyatt. I had found his address on the Wyatt Transgenics website and I had written to him. That was a fact. Three weeks ago. But it had been a big mistake, a drunken impulse that had embarrassed me seconds after I’d clicked Send, and certainly it had never occurred to me that Dr. Wyatt himself would read my message. It was inconceivable that it had caused an invitation—no, my earlier word was more accurate: a summons.

  A command?

  What was I doing here? Was this truly a job interview with Quinc
y Wyatt himself?

  “Eli Samuels?” The voice from the mezzanine level was pitched normally, but it carried down to me as clearly as if the speaker were using a microphone.

  My head jerked up. I found myself scrambling out of my chair. Staring up.

  And . . . there he was. Dr. Quincy Wyatt, the man himself, twenty feet above me, standing at the top of the spiral of the double helix. He looked exactly like he did in the photographs. That big head with the tight, grizzled, reddish-white hair. The round black-rimmed glasses. The steel cane clenched in his left hand.

  Viv’s voice again. He’s a legend, Eli! I mean, from seventh-grade biology class—Gregor Mendel, Watson and Crick, Quincy Wyatt. We had to learn all that stuff, remember?

  I remembered, all right. I remembered, for reasons I’d never told Viv—and never would, either.

  I stared up the stairs at him. He at least was wearing a suit—a cream-colored linen suit, with a beige shirt. His fit him better than mine did me. I was suddenly very conscious of my ankles, sock-clad but otherwise exposed to the world in the gap between the hem of my father’s pants and my shoes.

  Then Dr. Quincy Wyatt lifted one hand and beckoned. And, though I made no conscious decision to move, I found myself walking.

  I crossed the reception area. I mounted the stairs. I felt his gaze on me, piercing, bright, interested. And when I reached the mezzanine, I stood quite still—it didn’t even occur to me to put out my hand in an offer to shake—and he examined my face for two full minutes. I stood patient as a statue as his eyes took me in, missing—I knew—nothing. Not the ill-fitting suit, not the bulge of the book in my pocket, not the backpack dangling from my hand. Not even—I’d have sworn—a grain of my skin.

  The most acute mind on the planet, he’d been called.

  I wondered if he could see my soul. My lies to Viv. The drunken disaster I’d been that endless horrible spring night, after it had become clear to my father that no college acceptances or even rejections had arrived, and I told him the truth: They would not, because I had applied nowhere.

  I thought that maybe I wouldn’t mind if Dr. Wyatt could see everything.

  At last, he nodded. “Eli Samuels,” he said again. There was a tone to his voice—as if I were a specimen now satisfactorily labeled and classified—that reinforced my idea that he understood me better, somehow, than anyone else ever had, or would.

  “Hello, Dr. Wyatt,” I said. The words came out a little croaked; I had to clear my throat. And then I heard myself add inanely: “Here I am.” I wanted to disappear; I felt so stupid.

  But: “Indeed, Eli Samuels,” said Dr. Wyatt. “Here you are.”

  Then he smiled directly at me. He smiled the way Viv’s mother does when I come home with Viv after school. The smile caused his cheeks to lift into little mountains on his face. And somehow I knew that I didn’t need to be nervous or afraid anymore.

  I smiled back. I was too relieved to do it well.

  Dr. Wyatt lifted his steel cane a fraction of an inch from the floor, just enough to gesture with it. “Come with me into my office,” he said, and turned. He limped a little as he moved, but he used the cane deftly, and I followed him in the same way that, as a child, I’d toddled confidently after my mother.

  CHAPTER 2

  DR. WYATT’S OFFICE WAS NOT what I would have expected. First, the placard beside the door said only: Quincy Wyatt. No “President,” no “Chief Scientist”—no simple “PhD,” even. Then we stepped inside, and I felt my eyebrows literally lift with surprise.

  The room was the size of a large closet. It had no windows. Two cheap folding tables were set against the walls, the right-hand one heaped with teetering stacks of papers, journals, and magazines. The stacks covered the entire surface except a dusty little clearing around a framed photograph of a gorgeous catamaran. The left-hand table held a computer monitor and keyboard, two opened bottles of root beer—both half full—and a large canister of Tinkertoys with a few sticks and spools scattered out on the table. The single chair was a standard office swivel, but with a dangerously jagged piece of metal where one of its arms ought to be.

  “We’ll need another chair,” said Dr. Wyatt. I wanted to offer to get it—he used a cane to walk, after all—but I didn’t know where to go, and I didn’t want to offend him, and anyway he was back again in an instant, wheeling a maroon chair that looked considerably more comfortable than the one already in his office. It also possessed both arms. He pushed this chair in my direction and I caught it.

  “Sit down, young Eli,” he said. His tone was one of command—I thought of how he’d beckoned me up the double-helix staircase a few minutes ago—and I felt a moment of reflexive rebellion. But after I’d maneuvered the chair into the office between the folding tables, I did sit.

  After all, no one had forced me to keep this appointment. I had come of my own free will, come in this silly suit and tie, because I wanted—hoped—

  I contained myself.

  Dr. Wyatt closed the door and moved his chair directly in front of it before sitting down himself. Then he looked at me, and I looked back at him—the large head, the squat body in the expensive linen suit—and felt shame and anxiety descend fully upon me again.

  The email I’d sent to him—a man I didn’t even know. The begging undertone. I hadn’t been able to bear to think of it, but now—

  Okay, wait. I had options. I could take control of this situation immediately. Get the embarrassment over up front. I could almost hear myself speaking.

  Dr. Wyatt, about that email. Let me just say that I’ve been under some stress. Family stuff. My mom is—I searched for a good, neutral word—sick nowadays, but when I was a kid, she mentioned you . . . and I got drunk one night—just that once, my father and I had just had a fight about something—plus I’d found this stupid letter that made me angry at him, and the letter mentioned you . . . and I’ve always been interested in biology . . . and I’m putting off college . . . and anyway, I wrote that email asking for a job. It was an impulse and a bad one. I’d like to apologize. I know it was out of line.

  Would that work? Or would all the half-truths and evasions be obvious? Viv I could deceive—she loved me, she was willing to be deaf, dumb, and blind when I needed her that way—but a stranger, a scientist . . . Or maybe it would be better if I waited to hear what he had to say first. Maybe that would actually give me more control.

  Sometimes—no, often—I hated being a teenager. Hated not having the full control I wanted. Even by the time you’re eighteen, adults don’t take you seriously. Even at eighteen, you’re considered a kid.

  All these thoughts flashed through my head in seconds, but I could feel Dr. Wyatt watching me the whole time, and it was uncomfortable. I felt a bead of sweat form on my forehead near my hairline, and I prayed it wouldn’t trickle embarrassingly down. The tiny airless office, this narrow chair, my borrowed suit—I felt trapped.

  Why didn’t he say something? Was it to force me to speak first? I wouldn’t.

  And this chair was too short.

  Well, to hell with that. My hands reached beneath the office chair and located the knobs to adjust it. I pressed and prodded, and miraculously the chair shot up to its full height. My knees shifted from chest level to a more normal position. Suddenly I could breathe more easily, and the panic receded.

  “Better?” said Dr. Wyatt conversationally.

  I nodded.

  He leaned forward. “I’m wondering, Eli: How tall are you exactly?”

  Now this was a conversation I had practically every day, and was quite comfortable with. “I’m six foot seven.”

  “And you’re only what—eighteen?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does your doctor say about your final height?”

  I shrugged as if I didn’t know. But the truth was that I - didn’t like to say because people make too much of it. And maybe because my mother used to do imitations of Dr. Kaplan for her friends. Get ready, Mr. and Mrs. Samuels, he’s headed f
or seven feet. But with a little luck there’ll be college basketball scholarships, which will more than compensate for the clothing and shoe bills.

  Dr. Wyatt was squinting at me. “Six eleven,” he muttered. “But not seven feet.”

  I felt shock at his near-accuracy. He barreled on like some long-lost uncle: “How about school? You’re about to graduate here in Cambridge? It would be public school, right? Rindge and Latin High?”

  “Yes.” Hope surged in me. He was acting like this really was some kind of job interview.

  “How’d you do? All A’s? Are you the valedictorian, Eli?”

  “No.” I felt a secret spurt of satisfaction.

  “Salutatorian, then?”

  I was astonished. “Uh, yeah . . .”

  “Well, don’t tell me you couldn’t have been valedictorian if you wanted. You held back—why? Do you have some guilt at having done well in the genetic lottery?”

  I blinked. What a very strange way to put it—and how had he guessed that I had, in fact, held myself back?

  Viv was to be class valedictorian. She was thrilled. And as for me, well, anything Viv wanted, assuming it was in my power to give, she would get. Even if, as in this case, she couldn’t know I had given it. It was one of my secret rules to help things go well with us.

  “That’s my own business,” I said.

  Dr. Wyatt reached across the table for the Tinkertoy canister. He dumped some of its contents out and said, “Well, whatever your reasoning, it was a foolish move. You shouldn’t let any award or recognition slip away, particularly not out of some misplaced delicacy about others’ feelings. Awards can be useful to you. And people simply accept, though they don’t necessarily like, the plain fact that intellectual resources are distributed unequally.” He shrugged. “That’s life, Eli.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Dr. Wyatt picked up a red Tinkertoy stick and fitted it into the central hole of a wooden spool. He placed the spool flat on the table, with the spoke sticking up, and regarded it. Without looking up, he continued: “What are your college plans?”