Читать книгу Loop - Koji Suzuki - Страница 16

5

Among Kaoru’s pleasures in life were his visits to the office of Assistant Professor Saiki in the Pathology Department. Saiki had been a classmate of his father’s in this very university, and now, with his father in this unfortunate condition, Saiki was always ready to lend an ear or some advice. Officially, he wasn’t Kaoru’s advisor, but he was an old friend of the family, someone Kaoru had known since childhood.

These days there was a specific purpose to Kaoru’s regular visits. Cells from the cancer torturing his father were being cultured in Saiki’s lab, and Kaoru liked to come by to look at them under the microscope. To adequately fend off this enemy’s attacks, he felt he needed to know its true visage.

Kaoru left the hospital proper and entered the building containing the Pathology, Forensic Medicine, and Microbiology laboratories. The university hospital was a motley collection of new and old buildings; this was one of the older ones. The Forensic Medicine classrooms were on the second floor, while the third housed Pathology, where he was headed.

He climbed the stairs and turned left into a hallway lined with small labs on either side. Kaoru stopped in front of Professor Saiki’s door and knocked.

“Come in,” Saiki called out. The door was open a crack; Kaoru stuck his head in. “Oh, it’s you.” This was Saiki’s standard response on seeing Kaoru.

“Is this a bad time?”

“I’m busy, as you can see, but you’re welcome to do what you like.”

Saiki was involved in examining cells taken this afternoon from some diseased tissue; he barely looked up. That was fine with Kaoru; he’d rather be left alone to make his observations in freedom.

“Don’t mind if I do, then.”

Kaoru opened the door of the large refrigerator-like carbon dioxide incubator and searched for his father’s cells. The incubator was kept at a constant temperature and a nearly constant level of carbon dioxide. It wouldn’t do for him to keep the door open long.

But the plastic Petri dish in which his father’s cells were being cultured was in its usual place, and he had no trouble finding it.

So this is what immortality looks like, he thought. It mystified him, as it always did.

His father’s liver had been removed—having changed from its normal reddish-pink to a mottled hue covered with what looked like white powder—and was now sealed in a glass jar, preserved in formaldehyde, in another cabinet, where it had been stored for three years now. Sometimes it seemed to squirm or writhe, but maybe that was a trick of the light.

The liver was dead, of course, pickled in formaldehyde. Whereas the cancer cells in the Petri dish were alive.

The dish contained cells grown from Kaoru’s father’s cancer cells, cultured in a medium with a blood serum concentration of less than one percent.

With normal cells, growth stops when the growth factor in the blood serum is used up. And within a Petri dish, they won’t multiply beyond a single layer no matter how much growth factor is added, due to what is called contact inhibition. Cancer cells not only lack contact inhibition, but they have an extremely low dependence on the blood serum. Simply put, they are able to grow and reproduce, layer upon layer, in a tiny space with virtually no food supply.

Normal cells in a Petri dish will only form one layer, whereas cancer cells will form layer upon layer. Normal cells reproduce in a flat, orderly fashion, while cancer cells multiply in a three-dimensional, disorderly manner. Normal cells have a natural limit to the number of times they can divide, while cancer cells can go on dividing forever.

Immortality.

Kaoru was fully aware of the irony in the fact that immortality, the object of man’s deepest yearnings from time immemorial, was in the possession of this primeval horror, this killer of men.

As if to demonstrate their three-dimensional nature, his father’s cancer cells had bubbled up into a spheroid. Every time Kaoru looked they had taken on a different shape. Originally, these had their source in normal cells in his father’s liver, but now it might be more appropriate to see them as an independent life form. Even as their erstwhile host faced his crisis, these cells greedily enjoyed eternal life.

Kaoru set this dish full of concentrated contradiction into the phase contrast microscope. Its magnification only went up to x200, but it allowed easy color imaging. He could only use the scanning electron microscope when he had time to spare.

The cancer cells, these life forms which had gone beyond any moderating influence, presented a peculiar sight. Perhaps there was something actually, objectively grotesque about their appearance, or perhaps they only looked grotesque to him because of his preconceptions about them as usurpers of human life.

Kaoru struggled to abandon this bias, his hatred of the agent of his father’s suffering, as he observed the sample.

Raising the magnification, he could see that the cells were clumping together. The long, spindly, translucent cells grew as a thicket, stained a thin green. This wasn’t their natural color; the microscope had a green filter attached.

Normal cells would have been evenly distributed in a flat, orderly fashion, with no one part sticking out, but these cancer cells revealed, here and there, a thicker green shadow.

He could see them clearly: a multitude of points, bubbling up roundly, shining. These were cells in the process of dividing.

Kaoru changed the dish under the microscope several times, comparing the cancer cells to normal cells. The surface difference was readily apparent: the cancer cells displayed a chaotic filthiness.

But the surface of the cells was all he could examine: an optical microscope wasn’t powerful enough to show him their nuclei or DNA.

Still, Kaoru gazed on untiring. His heart was heavy with the knowledge that he was wasting his time: just what was he going to learn looking at them from the outside? Still, even as he cursed himself for doing so, he examined the external part of each and every one of them.

The cells all looked alike on the surface. Thousands of identical faces, all in a row.

Identical faces.

Kaoru raised his face from the microscope.

Totally out of the blue, he had compared the cells to human faces. But that was what they looked like: the same face thousands of times over, gathering and sticking together in a clump until they formed a mottled mass.

Kaoru had to look away for a while.

That image came to me intuitively. Was it for a reason?

That was the first question to consider. His father had taught him to pay attention to his intuition.

It often happened that Kaoru would be reading a book or walking down the street and suddenly a completely unrelated scene would present itself to his mind’s eye. Usually he didn’t inquire into the reason. Say he was walking down the street and saw a movie star on a poster: he might suddenly remember an acquaintance who resembled the movie star. If he didn’t register having seen the poster, which was entirely possible, it would seem as if the image of his acquaintance had come to him out of nowhere.

If it was a kind of synchronicity, then Kaoru wanted to analyze it to find out what had synched up with what. He’d been looking at cancer cells under x200 magnification, and something had been triggered so that the cells looked to him like human faces. Now: did that mean something?

Pondering it brought no answer, so Kaoru returned his gaze to the microscope. There had to be something which had elicited the comparison in his imagination. He saw narrow cells piled up in three dimensions. Little glowing globes. Kaoru muttered the same thing as before.

No doubt about it, they all have the same face.

Not only that, but it was clearly not a man’s face, not to his imagination. If he had to choose he’d say it was somehow feminine. An egg-shaped, regular face, with smooth, even slippery, skin.

This was weird. In all the times he’d looked at cells through the phase contrast microscope, he’d never thought they looked like human faces.