Mendel's Dwarf Read Online Free PDF Page B

before making my way along the corridor and up the back stairs to where the biology laboratory lay at the rear of the building, overlooking a car park and a supermarket warehouse. It was but the work of an instant to let myself in and lock the door behind me.
    The microscopes were in a locked cupboard, but I knew all about that. The key lived in Mr. Perkins’s desk. In a few moments (dangerous moments, for the cupboard was within view of the glass panel in the door) the best of the microscopes (Czech optics, I remember) was in my grasp. I set the thing up in a corner, away from the door. I got a box of slides and another of cover slips. I found a beaker and a teat pipette.
    I was—am—a born research worker. Single-minded, patient, prepared, determined; like Great-great-great-uncle Gregor himself. I had chosen the photograph, a particular favorite, with care. In a boudoir suffused with rose light, a honeyed girl, bedewed and as soft as angora, bent over and presented her backside to the camera and, by proxy, to my hungry eyes. She glanced behind, as though at her behind, while one hand reached back to part her buttocks and reveal the magic of golden pubescence and the mystery of moist, rubescent, pleated flesh. I told you I am a born researcher. No inhibition stands in my way. I propped the picture on a desk and fumbled with my clothing. In a few moments I felt the familiar spasm of delight and had a cupped palmful of nacreous liquid.
A million million spermatozoa
All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive .
    Author? Aldous Huxley: grandson of Thomas Huxley, the champion of Darwin against the clergy, and brother of Julian Huxley, Sir Julian Huxley, sometime professor of zoology at King’s College, London, sometime director-general of UNESCO, sometime leading eugenicist …
    I pipetted a drop of glutinous fluid onto a slide and lowered the cover slip with consummate care; then I arranged the light and slid the slide onto the stage. Low power … medium power. Ipeered, adjusted the diaphragm, turned the nosepiece to the big lens. It locked into place.
    One million million spermatozoa, all of them alive. Small exclamations of blind and culpable intent! Interrogation marks asking what absurd question? A thousand periods, each bearing its potent, muddled message … They shimmered and shook, nosing toward God knows what dimly perceived ovum, and I knew, oh, I knew that of every thousand that I saw within that brilliant circle of light, five hundred carried the command for height, for normality, for happiness and contentment; and five hundred bore the curse.
    But which?
    Was that an epiphany? Was that the moment when something, someone—the bleak and austere muse of science—spoke to me? Was my future research determined then, just as my future life had been determined seventeen years before, when a sperm such as one of these had nosed its way up my mother’s fallopian tube and encountered a wandering, wondering ovum with its delicate cumulus of follicular cells? Forget about copulation. The moment of true penetration is when the lucky sperm, the poor Noah, nudges against the ovum and explodes its capsule of digestive enzymes. The tail is shed and the head enters. For a moment two sets of chromosomes, one from the egg, one from the sperm, lie alongside each other in uneasy juxtaposition. And one of them carries my curse. The chromosomes, intricate spools of nucleic acid and protein, move together into a single, fateful conjunction; and Benedict Lambert has begun. Chromosomes that were once my mother’s and my father’s are now mine. I have begun. And I am cursed.
    And Gregor Mendel, was he cursed too? A moment of coupling in the massive bed in the peasant cottage at number 58, Heinzendorf, a village at the foot of the Sudety Mountains in Austrian Silesia, not far from the Polish border. It is October 22, 1821, more or less. There is a square tiled stove against one wall,around