“Looks like this nut didn’t fall far from the tree. Your dad was the same way, just as smart as could be. One helluva guy. You know you look a lot like your dad; tall, fit, same hair, but your eyes have the same shape as your mother’s.
“I wanted to spend time with you and show you around myself today, but I have an important meeting with some customers. I’m sure Robert knows more about this place than I do anyway, so you’ll be in good hands.”
“No problem, Phillip,” Robert replied. “I didn’t bring him here to put a crimp in your day. I’ll give him the tour. I just wanted you guys to meet face to face before John goes back to school next week.”
We walked around the whole building. Most of it was boring offices, but on the third floor was the laboratory. Stepping off the elevator, we walked down a long hallway. Halfway down the hall were gray metal doors on each side. We stopped at the doors, and Uncle Robert swiped his card at the door to the right. A buzzer sounded and we walked in. It was one large room with tables gathered in groups in different areas and desks lined against the wall next to the windows. Men were working at different tables with equipment or computers. Ethan was there but at the far end of the long room. What he was doing wasn’t very clear, but he looked focused on the task at hand.
“This is where all the real work gets done for the company. We don’t want to bother any of these guys; I just wanted you to see it.” Robert opened the door again and we walked out into the hall. I pointed to the other gray door across the hall.
“What’s in there?”
Uncle Robert swiped his card across the door’s pad and we stepped in. It was a large empty space, as large as half of the building, with a dirty, gray cement floor, unlike the white linoleum in the lab across the hall. It was dark and cold; a group of five narrow windows in the center of the far wall let in the only light.
“This is where we hope to expand one day.” Robert’s voice echoed. “If you come up with the right idea, it can be yours.” I looked around the large, hollow space. Uncle Robert didn’t know it, but I already had an idea for the space. That day I was introduced to two things that would change my life: the future home of my new lab and Ethan Shinwell.
There are a hundred things that make me think of her. Some don’t occur very often, but some do. Just the name Ethan Shinwell reminds me of the first time I saw her.
HOLIDAY PARTY
John stepped off the elevator and walked down the same third-story hallway as he had every day for the past three years. When he got to the gray metal door, he swiped his access card. A buzzer sounded. Upon his entry, the overhead fluorescent lights hummed to life. John approached a large table covered with computer circuit boards and computer screens. He removed his coat and jacket and draped them over a chair. The lab was on his way to the party. Dr. Jones wouldn’t take any excuse this year. John usually spent the holiday season in Europe. Not this year. There were pregnant monkeys to keep an eye on. He loosened his tie, looked at his watch. I have enough time for a quick check.
John passed a long row of tables covered with equipment. He passed his cloning device and the two freezers that kept their contents at eighty degrees below zero. At the far end of the lab, he swiped his card at another door and stepped into the primate area. Again, the overhead lights came on automatically.
To his right was a separate room with a large, glass window. An operating table occupied the center of the room. Surgical equipment in unopened packaging lay organized on tray carts lined against the wall. In the main room, stacked against the wall, were a half-dozen empty cages, two feet high by two feet wide and three feet long, solid metal, except for the barred front door. At the other end of the room, through a Plexiglas wall, a large metal apparatus with numerous ropes for the rhesus monkeys to climb on stood in the center of the confined space. A skylight lit the area with sunshine during the day. Sitting about, calmly grooming themselves or one another, were five female rhesus monkeys. Each had been implanted with an embryo the week before.
As John approached the glass wall, one of the monkeys, whom he had named Petri, came to a metal platform just inside the small glass door in the center of the wall. She had come to John’s laboratory from the lab at Harvard University when she was three years old. She had never known life outside of a laboratory and looked to humans as caregivers. She had developed an attachment to John. He enjoyed spoiling her with treats he kept in his pocket. He unlatched the thick Plexiglas door and opened it. Petri hopped through and climbed on John’s arm.
“How are you this evening, Ms. Petri?” John reached into his pocket, removed an almond and gave it to her. She quickly devoured the morsel. It had taken John three years to get to this point. These five primates were about to prove that he could clone a perfectly healthy primate 100 percent of the time. In the beginning, it took over one hundred attempts to produce just one embryo suitable for implantation. By the end of the second year, he had refined the technique so that every embryo was a good candidate. When he tried the first ten implantations, one produced a clone: Petri’s clone. Now he believed his device was perfected; it was going to be 100 percent successful. John gave Petri his last almond and opened the Plexiglas door again.
“I must be going; I don’t want to be late for the company holiday party.” John placed his hand on the bottom edge of the doorway and Petri ran down his arm, back onto the platform inside.
From his lab, it was a short drive through the snow-plowed streets of Boston to the Four Seasons Hotel. When he got to the crowded conference room, the party was going strong. John looked around. Not a single familiar face. These people worked in the same building he did, but he knew only a dozen of them by face and a handful by name. Everyone else in the room was a stranger. John jostled through the crowd till he was at the bar. The bartender stood waiting.
“Old Fashioned,” John said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Angostura Bitters, please.”
“Yes, sir.”
John looked back at the expanse of tables in the room. That was when he first noticed her. She was halfway across the room, walking through the crowd. A full-length black evening dress fit her form well. Not too tight. Bare shoulders of unblemished alabaster skin, like a satin sheet. The dress narrowed to her dainty waist and flowed over her hips to the floor. Ink-black hair fell to mid-back. She came closer. John faced the bar. The bartender came from the far end with his drink. As the bartender arrived, so did the woman, now standing beside him.
“Water, please,” she said to the bartender. John looked at her. She noticed and smiled at him. Her eyes were a dark chocolate brown and her smile very polite and sexy at the same time.
“I don’t believe we’ve ever met. I’m John.”
She reached out with her hand as John extended his. Hers seemed half the size of his.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Amira.”
“I’ve never seen you around the building. But I work in a lab on the third floor and don’t get out very much.”
“I don’t work at the company. If you work in the lab, you probably know my husband, Ethan Shinwell?”
“Yes. I know Dr. Shinwell. I don’t work in his lab, I work in one across the hall.”
The bartender returned with her water. “Thank you,” she said, taking a sip. Her eyes widened a bit.
“You work in the new lab near my husband?”
“Yes. Right across the hall.”
“You must be Dr. John Numen, the son of the man who started the company?”
“Yes, I am,” John said.
“Dr. Numen, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” She smiled wider.
“Please, call me John.”