Professor Norman Rumble sat in an easy chair listening to Holst, The Planets, through the headphones of his iPod. He stared again at the clock, which he’d been doing now for the past few hours.His gaze fell upon the framed photograph which hung on the wall ‘Soon’, he thought, “and at last the world will give us the recognition we deserve. It will be good to get out of here and live a normal life, instead of the life of a mole’. He stared again at the black and white photograph of himself as a young man, alongside an older woman, both smiling, and holding microscopes.
Rumble looked around his office at other photographs on his wall. Many were of a younger Norman with a pretty olive brown skinned lady with round brown, sparkling eyes, and a young boy of similar complexion, but with deep blue eyes that resembled Rumbles. His eyes flitted to other photos in the room that showed the same people, but at different times. The last photograph showed a young man in an academic robe, holding a diploma in computer science.
Rumble smiled with pride when he saw this photo of his son and, with as tears weld up in his eyes he looked at an old faded colour photograph of just the woman.
“Sorry my darling I was just too late” he said aloud to the photograph and as he wiped the tears from his eyes said. “But soon, I promise we will be back together again”.
Norman smiled at the photo.
The Planets concerto reached its climax as the door burst open.
“Norm,” said an agitated professor Boran Ngem.
Norman immediately removed his headset and asked
“Is the process complete?”
“Yes, the process is complete, but you had better come to take a look”.
“Why?” said Rumble, “what’s the matter old friend?”
“Please, just come and look” repeated Ngem.
The two professors walked down the brightly lit, clinically white corridor in silence. They entered an adjoining corridor and walked past a glass screened room.
Rumble stared into the large room where a man lay on a bed in a foetal position with his back turned away from the window. Inside the room, bitmap machines, infusers, ventilators, scanners and other machines bleeped and lights flashed intermittently. Several orderlies in the room had started to take away stained sheets and cleaning, what appeared to be a large rubber electric blanket, which incorporated thousands of fine needles that coated the underside, with strands of fibre optic cables leading to some of the machines. At the side of the bed a woman spoke to the unresponsive figure, Rumble and Ngem entered the room, which had an odour of Hycaline and the smell of a maternity theatre, post birth. Handel’s Water Music softly filled the room. The woman, still speaking to the figure in ancient Indian-Pali language, fell silent when the two men entered.
“He doesn’t appear to understand,” said the woman in Khmer.
The man on the bed then turned to face the professors. A look of shock came over the face of the usually composed professor Rumble
“What the hell?” said a shocked Rumble, in English.
The figure started to sit up, as if he’d understood what the professor had said. He rubbed his eyes and looked around the room, bewildered and confused and lay back down and fell asleep. The two professors stared at the figure in a blissful slumber. The woman mumbled something in Khmer to the orderlies and they left the room.
“What has happened Norm?” said Ngem.
“I don’t know old friend,” replied Norman.
“Shall we wake him?” asked Boran, “maybe he has the answers.”
“No let him sleep for now, we will have plenty of time for that later. Now if you will excuse me”
Rumble left the room, leaving a puzzled Boran Ngem to set, and check the monitors.
Norman headed back up the corridor and into his large office. He went over to his desk, removed a key chain from around his neck, unlocked a drawer and removed a small object, which he studied for a moment.
‘You have more to tell than we thought,’ he uttered at the object, ‘what other secrets do you hold I wonder?’
He picked up his mobile phone off the desk and found a number in his contact list and dialled.
“Hello Norm,” said a voice on the other end.
“Tighe, we have a problem and it looks like we will be requiring your services again, could you come down and meet me?” said Rumble.
“Sure,” said the voice on the other end, “I will be with you in a couple of hours.”
“No rush today, in the morning will be fine” said the professor.
“It is morning Norm, That’s the problem with living underground you don’t know night from day,” chuckled Tighe.
Norm laughed
“I will see you soon, son” said Rumble as he hung up the phone and picked up the object again, still confused.
‘Now we are all sons of bitches’ he thought, quoting from Oppenhiemers assistant after he’d created the A-bomb.
Professor Norman Rumble was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1938. His parents had been wealthy land owners. He developed a passion for science and chemistry from an early age, and at 14 his parents and teachers, realising he was a genius, sent him to Cambridge University, where he became the youngest PhD in the history of the university. He came to the attention of Rosalind Franklyn, a brilliant and innovative scientist, whose work in x-ray diffraction for sequencing and pairing *DNA and the connection between DNA and RNA had sent the scientific world into a buzz in the early 1950’s.
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms and some viruses (The cake)
Ribonucleic acid or RNA is a nucleic acid made from a long chain of nucleotide units. (The recipe)
Franklyn took the young 17 year old Rumble under her wing and acquired him a research post alongside her in the John Randall department at, Kings College, London.
Norman excelled in the field of genetic research and, over several years came into contact with many top scientists within the same field of research. He and Rosalind discovered forms A & B of DNA and they developed an ingenious method to separate the two forms, which provided the first DNA crystals pure enough to yield interpretable diffraction patterns and the all important missing piece of the puzzle the secret of heredity itself.
Two other scientists in particular stood out to Rumble. James Watson and Francis Crick both brilliant in their field and Rumble had many discussions with the pair about the project that he and Rosalind were currently working on. These discussions went on long into the small hours of the morning and joined in by the new prodigy on the team, Ian Wilmut, who although slightly younger than Norman, enjoyed each other’s theories especially about cloning and the possibility of one day cloning a human and they became great friends.
Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy of an existing or previously existing human. The term is generally used to refer to artificial human or replicant.
Watson and Crick published a paper in the mid-fifties, when Norman read it, he knew it to be the information that he had shared with the two scientists’ about his and Rosalind’s research, which these two shysters had copied and declared as their own work.
Rosalind Franklin never knew how Watson and Crick had gotten access to her research and wasn’t bitter about their deceit, however Rumble was.
Rosalind Franklin died of cancer in 1958 and the 20 year old Rumble went deep into his shell. His mentor and best friend had gone, so he threw himself deeper into his research of the human genome.
Rumbles parents both died in a car crash in 1960, the same year that he was awarded a professorship at Kings College. Norm returned to New Zealand and sold his family’s holdings which made him a very wealthy man. Norman wasn’t interested in money; he’d dedicated his life to science. While in New Zealand, he met another scientist, an archaeologist named Boran Ngem, a Cambodian national who came to New Zealand to research the possible connection between the ancient Mori-ori tribes, and the ancient Khmers. Boran and his archaeological team had found crude wall paintings and faded parchments in an inner chamber of Angkor Wat, in recently discovered catacombs. One wall painting depicted two men stood together. One man appeared dark skinned and wore clothing that bore striking similarities to the traditional clothes and decoration wore by the modern day hill tribes of Ratanakiri province, Northern Cambodia.
The other man on the drawing appeared to be a native and adorned in tribal decoration, this they’d assumed to be a Mori Ori, and the figure held what appeared to be a dead kiwi bird, which he appeared to be handing it to over to the tribesman. There was also a large drawing of a lizard, which they identified as a Tuatara, a species indigenous to New Zealand.Also, one parchment showed pictures of boats painted with symbols. These strange markings had been recently found on wall designs at Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat
Mori-Ori’s were the first known people to have inhabited New Zealand and its islands, before the Maori tribes came from the Polynesian islands and ate them all
This puzzle left the Cambodian team who discovered the catacombs in 1960 stunned, could Cambodians have sailed to New Zealand as early as the 12th century and bring back the Mori-Ori, or did the Mori-Ori arrive in Cambodia to escape being washed down with a fine Claret, as it was widely believed that Mori-Ori could make, sail boats, and navigate,?
This quandry intrigued Boran and, at his own expense funded an expedition to the South Islands of New Zealand. The fruits of his labour paid off by the find of clay skulls of dogs, cat’s birds all laid out in monument form and dating back about 650 years, pre Maori, but unfortunately found no sign of a Khmer connection there, so now had to assume the latter.
Norman and Boran first met at a luncheon party, and they became friends and when Boran had gone back to Cambodia, he and Rumble kept in contact.
The year was 1962, and one day as Norman worked in his large recently purchased laboratory, he heard something on his radio, which t made his blood boil. Watson and Crick had just received the Nobel Prize for physiology and Medicine for their ground breaking works in the discovery of DNA. Although Franklyn had been briefly mentioned for her input, she would not receive the award as it could not be given posthumously. Rumble was never mentioned.
It would be several years before Boran and Norman would meet up again, and give Rumble the opportunity to exact his revenge.