“Last week. I've been doing my dog and pony show at parishes around the country, trying to raise money for the ongoing relief program. It's not so easy now that Romania has been out of the news for so long. It's been a busy summer . . . newswise. “
Kate realized how insane the entire year had been in terms of news. First the Gulf War and the national jubilation at its quick resolutionmuch of which she had missed during her Romanian stintand now the upheaval in the Soviet Union. Two weeks earlier, the morning paper had heralded Gorbachev's removal from office because of illness. That night, when she had switched CNN on for the eleven-thirty headline news, word was that Gorbie was a prisoner and that the coup might be in trouble. The next time she took a break from lab work to check the newsWednesday the nineteenth of AugustGorbachev was back in power, sort of, and the old U.S.S.R. was breaking up forever.
Kate now realized that she had never taken time to wonder how all of this distraction and disruption might be affecting the orphanage situation in Romania. “Yes,” she said at last, “it has been busy, hasn't it?”
“How about you?” asked O'Rourke. “Have you been busy?”
Kate smiled at this. She had almost grown used .to the eighteenhour days. It reminded her of her residency, although her body had been much younger and more resilient in those days. “I've kept myself out of trouble,” she said, wondering at why she used that phrase even as she heard herself say it.
“Good. And how is Joshua?”
Kate could hear the anxiety in the priest's voice and realized that it took some courage for him to ask. When she had left the country she had promised to write and keep him informed about the child's welfare, but except for one note in early June, she had not taken time to do so. She remembered how sick Josh had been when they had left the country and realized that the priest must halfexpect to hear of the baby's death.
“Joshua's good,” she said. “Almost all of the symptoms have been stabilized, although he still requires a transfusion about every three weeks.” She paused. “We're doing some experiments on the cause of his problem. “
“Good,” O'Rourke said at last. It was obvious that he had hoped to hear more. “Well, there is a reason for this latenight call.”
Kate glanced at the kitchen clock and realized that it must be almost one A.M. in Chicago.
“I'll be bringing my plea for funds to the Denver Council of Churches next monthon September twenty-sixth, to be preciseand I wondered if you'd like to get together for coffee or something. I'll be in Denver all weekend.”
Kate felt her heart accelerate and frowned at the response. “Sure,” she said. “I mean, I'm awfully busy right now and my guess is that I will be in September, too, but if you'd like to come out to Boulder some evening when you're here, maybe that Friday the twenty-seventh, perhaps you could come up to the house and see Josh.”
“That would be great.”
They talked schedules and directions for a moment. O'Rourke would have the use of a car, so there was no problem with his driving from Denver to Boulder. When that was finished, there was a pause for a second.
“Well,” said the priest, “I'll let you get some rest.”
“You too,” said Kate. She could hear the fatigue in his voice. There was an awkward moment when neither took the opportunity to end the conversation.
“Neuman,” he said at last, “you were lucky to get the baby out when you did. You're aware that the government shut off new adoptions only a week or so after you left. “
“Yes. “
“Well . . . we were lucky.”
Kate tried to put a lightness in her tone. “I didn't think that priests believed in luck, O'Rourke. Don't you believe that everything is . . . pardon the expression . . . ordained?”
She heard a sigh. “Sometimes,” he said, his voice very weary, “I think that the only thing one can believe in and pray for is luck.” She heard him shake the exhaustion out of his voice. “Anyway, I look forward to seeing you and Joshua next month. I'll call when I get into Denver and doublecheck our plans.”
They had said goodbye with as much energy as they could muster. Then Kate had sat in the dark house and listened to the midnight silence.
The RSProject continued on several fronts and each area of investigation thrilled and terrified Kate.
While she was in charge of the overall project, Chandra was the actual boss of the retrovirus search, Bob Underhill and Alan Stevens had taken over the analysis of Joshua's bloodabsorbing “shadow organ,” and Kate herself was trying to unlock the mechanism by which Josh's body liberated the donor RNA from blood and transcribed it to proviral DNA, ready to be distributed to cell nuclei throughout his body. Her second and more immediate goal was to devise a way for this same immunerepair mechanism to work without a massive transfusion of whole blood every three weeks.
Working with Chandra in the ClassVI lab was an education. The HIV specialist had taken less than forty-eight hours to get her “virus factory” up and running at RMR CDC. Kate had given her another three days of uninterrupted work before showing up for a briefing.
“You see,” Chandra had said while showing Kate around the innermost biolab, the two of them in pressurized anticontamination suits and trailing oxygenhose umbilici, “ten years ago we would have had to start from scratch in an attempt to isolate the Jvirus.”
“Jvirus?” Kate had said through her intercom radio.
“Joshua virus,” said Chandra. “Anyway, even five years ago we would have had to cover a lot of ground before we could find a starting place. But with the HIV research of the last few years, we can take some shortcuts.”
Slightly distracted by the hiss of oxygen in the suit and the sight of technicians working with gloves and remote handlers through the clear plastic window behind them, Kate had concentrated on listening.
“You know that retroviruses are just RNA viruses that express their gene products after their RNA is transcribed to DNA by the reverse transcriptase enzyme, which has DNA polymerase and ribonuclease activities,” said Chandra.
Kate did not mind being lectured on the obvious, because she knew it was just the way that Chandra framed her explanations to everyone. She nodded through the clumsy headpiece.
“So,” continued Chandra, “the polymerase makes a singlestranded DNA copy of the viral RNA and then a second DNA copy using the first template. Ribonuclease eliminates the original viral RNA. Then this new invader DNA migrates to the cell nucleus and gets integrated into the host's genome under the influence of the viral integrase enzyme and stays there as a provirus. “
Kate waited.
“Well, we assume that the Jvirus behaves just like any other retrovirus,” said Chandra, lifting a culture dish and setting it closer to a technician's gloved hand. “Only we're guessing that it models itself after the HIV life cycle . . . or perhaps HIV mutated from the Jvirus, we just don't know. At any rate, we're working on the assumption that Jvirus follows the path of least resistance and binds gp120 glycoprotein to CD4 receptors in Thelper lymphocytes, mononuclear phagocytes, and Langerhans cells. Now my research has shown that our old friend HIV never infects cells without CD4, but we don't know that about J. But CD4 is still the obvious place to start. “
Kate had understood immediately. The HIV provirus had infected cells and obstructed the immune response; the Jvirus, according to Chandra's reasoning, broke down RNA the same way, transcribed it to DNA the same way, and invaded cell nuclei the same way, but enhanced rather than inhibited the cell's immune system. “You're assuming the same vector for proviral integration,” said Kate, “but trying to find its footprints after transcription.”
“Of course,” said Chandra. “We can compare the cells after reverse transcriptase to the control cultures and find out just how the little fucker operates.” She glanced at Kate. “The Jvirus, I mean.”