That remark about her underwear still rankled. How embarrassing. Had he been spying on her? Well, turnabout was fair play.

She'd give the plate number over to the agency and let them run with it. In a matter of hours they'd know everything there was to know about this man. His life would be an open book.

Smiling, she pulled away.

John Robertson, or whoever he really was, had made his last snide remark. He'd rue the day he dared to cross swords with Julia Vecca.

6

After driving in a meandering loop that brought them to a construction site, Levy parked on a dead-end street in the growing development. Apparently the workers had the weekend off.

"Well," Jack said, peering around. "This is intimate."

"I work for suspicious people. Now, tell me where you heard about—"

"Uh-uh. You first, remember?"

Levy sighed. "Very well…"

Very well? Who said very well?

"One of the fallouts of the human genome project has been the realization of how much—ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent—of our DNA is noncod-ing. In other words, junk. Or at least seems like junk. Since we can't find any useful purpose it serves, we call it that. But that doesn't mean it was never useful. Most of us think it's mainly leftovers from viruses and the evolutionary process."

Jack was disappointed. He'd heard of junk DNA. But Levy seemed too interested in oDNA for it to be junk.

"I don't buy oDNA as just junk."

"It is and it isn't. Some junk DNA is oDNA, but not all oDNA is junk."

"Thanks for clearing that up."

"I know it's confusing. Let me go back to the beginning. Back in the eighties I began working on an NIH-funded project that was looking to identify genetic markers for 'antisocial' behavior. This was all very hush-hush because of the controversial nature of the work."

"What's so controversial about that?"

"Politics, my boy. Politics. A number of NIH conferences on the subject were canceled because of protests. They're all afraid that if these markers are identified and confirmed beyond doubt, how will the information be used? Specters of the eugenics movement and the holocaust get invoked and everyone shrinks away. And then come the religious fanatics: it's original sin, not God-given DNA that causes mankind to break the Commandments."

"The good old creationists, sabotaging knowledge wherever it rears its ugly head."

"Recently they've tarted up creationism with some pseudoscientific gob-bledygook and are trying to slip it into schools as 'intelligent design,' but it's still creationism." He snorted. "Intelligent design! It's laughable. Look at the cetaceans—creatures that must live, feed, and mate in a medium they can't breathe."

Jack nodded. "Yeah. If that's intelligent design, God must be a blond."

Levy laughed. "Exactly. And has anyone who pushes intelligent design ever looked at the human genome? It's a mess—an absolute mess."

"But it somehow gets the job done."

"That it does, using only one or two percent of what's there. Back in those days, we hadn't yet mapped out the genome. The Human Genome Project was just a dream. But I did find consistent markers in certain violent criminals. Not all of them, but in enough to keep the funding going. Adapting a fluorescent antibody test developed by Julia Vecca allowed me to stain nuclei to show the presence of this DNA variant.

"Once we had that, we needed a criminal population to test. We collected samples from all the federal prisons, and the ones who scored highest were moved to Creighton, which became dedicated to researching the variant."

"Were they all violent?"

"The top scorers, yes, though some white-collar criminals were up there too. But just because they were locked up for nonviolent crimes didn't mean they weren't violent. We could only go on their convictions. We didn't know how they treated their wives or kids or the family dog."

"The closet sadists."

"Right. But with the explosion of knowledge and investigational techniques in the late nineties and early aughts, we found a subset of pseudogenes among the junk."

"Fakes?"

"How do I put this? They're ancient ancestors of functioning genes, but they have no coding ability. They fall under the junk umbrella. But these particular pseudogenes are so unique that you could almost say they indicate a variant strain of humanity… another evolutionary line… another human race that got pushed aside."

Jack held up a hand. "Just a sec. I don't know a lot about evolution but I do know the evolutionary tree has a lot of dead branches."

"Yes. But this is different. These genes are so distinct that it almost looks as if they were—I hesitate to say this—manipulated."

Jack had two hands up now. He'd heard this kind of talk at the SESOUP convention last year. It had sounded crazy then, and it sounded crazy now.

"Whoa there! You don't happen to be into UFOs, do you? You're not going to start telling me one of those nut-job theories about aliens playing with our DNA."

"Of course not. But I can make a circumstantial case that somewhere along our evolutionary line something happened to it. I mean, this stuff's that different. So the big question is—where did this DNA come from? It's not found in chimps or any of the apes. It's not found in daffodils or butterflies, or sharks—humans share DNA with all of those, believe it or not—or even bacteria or viruses—and we have tons of viral DNA in our junk. How did it skip every other species since the dawn of time and land in ours and ours alone? If I were an intelligent design dolt I might say it's proof of God's guiding hand in evolution, but it was more likely the devil's. It's completely other. That's why I named it oDNA—other-DNA."

There it was, right out in the open: other.

Had the Otherness stirred something of itself into the human gene pool way back when—back in the First Age, when the Compendium was supposedly written? Or was this unrelated?

No… too much of a coincidence. And there'd be no more coincidences for him.

But to what purpose? A cosmic time bomb, set to explode… when?

Damn, he wished he still had that book. It might be able to tell him something.

"Why did you pick 'other' rather than 'alien' or something like that?"

"Because when you say 'alien,' people think of flying saucers and little gray men with big black eyes. We've got apes in our genome because we have a common ancestor. The Cro-Magnons live on in our genes, and there's recent evidence that Neanderthals do too. I suspect something happened in our ho-minid past to split off a subspecies from the main line. It developed this 'other' genome, and then was reabsorbed back into the main line, either by crossbreeding or some sort of introgression. I'm guessing about the how, but I'm sure of the what: We've all got a little oDNA in us."

A tingle ran over Jack's skin.

"All?"

Levy nodded. "To widely varying degrees, but yes. All. Summing up: At some time in the past another human race with altered DNA merged with ours. The DNA of the other race—the 'loser' race—joined the junk pile of the present human genome. You've heard of 'gone but not forgotten'? This oDNA is forgotten but not gone—and not necessarily junk."

The Otherness… part of the human gene pool… the implications staggered him.

He wondered if he should tell Levy what he suspected. But that would mean going into all the background he had gleaned over the past year about the ageless, ceaseless cosmic shadow war between two unimaginably huge and unknowable forces—one indifferent, and one, the Otherness, decidedly inimical—waging around them with Earth as one of the many marbles in play.

Yeah, that would go over well. Levy would stamp NUT across Jack's forehead.