The Ganymede Project

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  “Equal opportunity,” Stanton said with a smile. “You know, you really irk me. Why is it that whenever people seriously think about pushing the evolutionary envelope, the problem gets all wrapped up in Nazi eugenics? This is America, Fritz. Deal with it. We’re only interested in what works.” He opened the door to the staff car. “Let’s go. We shouldn’t keep the lady waiting.”

  * * *

  Inside a room configured for microsurgery, Doctor Whit Constantine, outfitted in flesh-tight surgical gloves and a green cap and gown, snapped a fluid-filled vial into a special docking ring. He tapped the vial gently with a finger, and watched a bubble float to the top of the thin, grayish liquid. He checked the apparatus for leaks, but found none.More precious than gold , he thought.

  He nodded at his two colleagues in one corner of the lab. They attended the black female patient, partially covered with a sheet, strapped in a bed, legs and feet braced in metal stirrups.

  Constantine saw Stanton and Gottlieb arrive on the other side of the observation window. “How ya doin’?” he said, in a cheery voice muffled by a surgical mask.

  The response came back from Stanton. An external microphone amplified his speech, transmitting it into the chamber. “Just came to watch your magic trick, Doc.”

  “You got it,” Constantine said with a wink. “Magic.” He could see Stanton smiling on the other side of the glass—and Gottlieb pouting. “Well,” he said, “glad you folks could make it. We’re just about ready to start.”

  He adjusted the binocular microscope until he could see the embryo’s beating heart and large, unblinking eye. He spoke in a loud, clear voice—mainly for the benefit of the tape recorder on an adjacent table.

  “I’ve removed the embryo, and have it perfused in a saline bath. It’s in good condition—roughly a Harrison stage 35 or 36. Heart tube has a bulge and twist to the right with distinct, slow pulsation. Looks pretty normal.”

  Constantine twisted the X-Y-Z knobs on a micro-manipulator until a filament-like object moved into view. “Now I’m making an injection into the slight dorsal hump of the hindbrain.”

  Carefully—ever so carefully—he moved the point of the microelectrode, until it made a dimple-like depression in the tissue. The electrode was a hollow glass tube, drawn out on one end to a diameter thinner than a human hair. Electrolyte and the experimental bio-reactant filled the tube’s interior. “Contact,” he said.

  Outside the room, Stanton pressed against the glass. “Exciting, isn’t it?”

  Gottlieb harumphed. “Like watching paint dry.”

  “Ya know, Fritz, you got no spirit. No soul. Don’t you see the poetry in this?”

  Gottlieb harumphed again and crossed his arms. “At least with the human radiation experiments, we have a known objective. Here—”

  “Yeah,” Stanton said. “Rad-hard humans—a noble goal. But you know what? Improving the brain’s even nobler.”

  “You don’t even know what you have,” Gottlieb sneered.

  Constantine’s amplified voice interrupted their conversation. “I’m making the injection.”

  Billy looked back into the chamber, then whispered to Gottlieb, “That’s what experiments are for, isn’t it? Without curiosity, where would we be?”

  On the other side of the glass window, Constantine toggled a switch, stared into the scope, then looked up. “We’ve got flow,” he announced, watching the counter on the flowmeter slowly advance.Easy... easy , he thought, as the meter indexed toward the critical level. After a few seconds, he toggled again. “Now I’ve cut the flow.” He pressed his fingers against the micro-manipulator knobs, beginning a slow rotation. “Backing out.”

  Through the binocular scope, Constantine watched the microelectrode edge upward as he rotated the knobs. The withdrawing filament tugged at epidermal tissue, until the tip finally popped clear of the embryo. Then, the tissue sagged back into place. He could see a faint, gray stain on the other side—evidence of success.

  The rest of the procedure, lasting perhaps 30 minutes, was mainly clean-up. After that, Constantine handed it over to assistants, stepped out of the chamber, and snapped off his gloves. Stanton and Gottlieb met him coming through the door.

  “You must be Dr. Gottlieb,” he said, shaking Gottlieb’s hand. Then to Stanton, he asked, “Is he cleared for—”

  “Only MAJIC Five.”

  “Ah.” Constantine relaxed his grip. The MAJIC Five clearance level allowed Gottlieb to view certain activities, and discuss certain aspects of the project, but the fundamental technology would have to remain a secret. Gottlieb didn’t have aNeed-to-Know . “Well, anyway,” he continued, “I’m pleased to meet you Dr. Gottlieb, but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait now in our reception area.”

  Billy winked at Constantine. “Let’s get some coffee, huh? We’ll drop Fritz off, then we need to talk about your message.”

  Billy Stanton smiled cryptically as they escorted Gottlieb down the corridor.Compartmentalization of official secrets puts you in control. Gottlieb only knew certain things. Constantine only knew certain things. The female host—wife of a U.S. Navy serviceman—knew almost nothing. If things went wrong, compartmentalization provided bureaucratic firewalls. Billy knew he would get credit for success, and could plausibly deny responsibility for any failure.Yessir, a great system .

  * * *

  The interior of room G-25 illuminated with theclack of a light switch. Constantine opened the door, and led Billy past a slate-topped bench with a metal device containing jaw-like clamps. “That’s our stereotaxic rig,” he said. “We use it for brain mapping.” He walked to the animal cages and equipment racks on one end of the lab, where the stench of rat urine and sawdust seemed overpowering.

  Billy rubbed his nose. “Whew, you oughtta clean some cages.”

  “You authorize more clearances for this place and maybe we can get a janitor or technician,” Constantine said. “My whole crew was in that chamber today. We figured that was higher priority than house cleaning. Anyway, these animals are pretty hardy.”

  He tapped two cages on opposite ends of a metal shelf. The rats jumped in unison and raced around the cages. Then they each came to a dead stop, reared up on hind legs, and froze. “These are the guys I told you about in the message. I’ve named ‘em ‘Yin’ and ‘Yang’. As you can see, they’re a little high strung.”

  Billy peered into one of the clear plastic boxes. Coal-black eyes stared back.

  “We constantly monitor activity in all of the animals,” Constantine continued. “The cages are wired with sensors. That’s what alerted us to the anomaly.”

  He removed a roll of strip chart paper from a shelf above the cages and spread it out on a work bench, weighting down one unruly, curling end with a hemostat. “Yin and Yang received the implants in embryo,” Constantine said. “The procedure was similar to the one we did this evening. The other animals on the shelf are controls—some have had just surgery, others have received implants of placebo.”

  Billy slid a finger down the squiggly lines on the chart. Two of the traces seemed to follow each other closely. “I’ll be damned. So the top and bottom—”

  “You got it—Yin and Yang. These particular piezo-electric sensors just show gross activity inside the cages. But it made us curious. At first we thought we were getting cross-talk in the amplifier, but we started finding all sorts of correlations in other sensors. We were able to rule out equipment anomalies. The effect is biological.”

  “So Yin and Yang—”

  “Yeah. Somehow, they’re connected. It’s telepathic.”

  * * *

  Gottlieb, Constantine and Stanton watched the ambulance back-up into the helipad. Constantine’s assistants removed the stretcher carrying the sedated female subject. With help from corpsmen aboard the CH-53, they put her into the helicopter, then returned to the ambulance. Someone hit the strobes, ringing the craft in a moving circle of light.

  A crewmember looked toward the cockpit, caught the pilot’s eye
and made a spinning motion with his hand. Rotor blades turned slowly, accompanied by the high-pitched whine of turbines. The engine roared to life, blasting everyone on the ground with a shock of high velocity wind.

  Constantine, hair whipped to a frazzle, informally saluted Stanton, then returned to the ambulance, hands in his pockets.

  Stanton hugged his clipboard, grabbed Gottlieb by the arm and motioned to his staff car. They got in and closed the door.

  “Now it’s your turn to shine,” Stanton said, handing the clipboard to Gottlieb. “Sign the ticket, please.”

  Gottlieb removed a pen from his pocket and scrawled his name. The ‘ticket’ transferred operational responsibility to Gottlieb.

  “Thank you, sir,” Stanton said, taking back the form. “You get the lady for psycho-programming. We expect you to take good care of her. And when she gives birth, we get the child.”

  Gottlieb said nothing for a moment. He watched Stanton’s face alternate from a featureless dark shadow to an expression of triumph and determination in the blinking of the strobe light—on, off, on, off. Then Gottlieb nodded, opened the door to blasting wind and walked briskly to the waiting helicopter.

  As the CH-53 turned on its lights and lifted slowly from the pad in a storm of dust, Stanton thought,Yessir .Project Ganymede’s the ticket. My ticket to success .

  He watched the helicopter dissolve to a pinpoint of pulsing light. When he blinked, the aerodynamics seemed to change. He saw a craft that zigzagged like an errant, high-speed firefly against the blackness of night. He blinked again, and discovered the fixed star, Sirius, centered in his field of view.

  “Hmph,” he said, aloud. “Phi-phenomenon.”

  3. NURSERY

  September 1969

  Groom Dry Lake Base, Nevada

  Dr. Whit Constantine raced down the two-tone green-and-white corridor, stethoscope dangling from his neck like a rock-and-rolling tentacle. Marianne, his white-smocked lab assistant, tried to keep up. “Hurry!” she shouted. “I didn’t want to go in there. I couldn’t. It’s terrible.”

  He yanked against the steel vault door with a violent, but ineffectual tug, remembered procedures, then tried to work the cipher lock with shaking hands. He pulled at the door, failing to move it. “Shit,” he muttered, trying again. It still didn’t open. He strained against the massive handle. “What’s the matter with this damn thing?”

  Marianne finally caught up, herded him aside, and took two deep breaths. Then she pushed her fingers against the round buttons on the surface of the lock, clicking them rhythmically as she entered the proper combination. The door buzzed and unbolted. They both pulled hard, easing it outward, then rushed past the entry vestibule into the brightly lit vault, where they huffed and puffed, bodies pumping adrenaline, surveying the damage.

  The observation area was perfectly intact, except for a wall phone where a broken handset drooped from a spiral plastic cord. But behind the thick wall of safety glass, the nursery was a scene of chaos and death. The bodies of seven children sprawled on the floor like discarded rag dolls. Blood pooled near their faces and necks. Only one child remained alive and untouched. The black-skinned figure stood near the center of the nursery with a cookie.

  Constantine tried to speak in a calm voice—a voice that was soft and reassuring. But when words left his mouth, they squeaked like a mis-played piccolo. “Hello, Richard.”

  The boy barely looked up, continuing to eat the cookie.

  “We’re going to come in now. We just want”—he tried out the words—”to do a few tests.”

  The boy walked to the glass door, inches away from Constantine and Marianne, tilting his head, eyes burning like coal-black cinders. As they watched in horrific fascination, he crouched on all fours, tugged at one of the bodies lying like a broken heap near the door, and carefully nibbled on the head. He pulled with one hand, tore away a flap of cheek, and put it in his mouth.

  Constantine clenched his jaw and shoved the door. It didn’t move.

  On the other side, Richard smiled. Red liquid from the meat bubbled down his chin.

  Constantine squinted in disgust.

  “It’s locked,” Marianne said. “From the inside.”

  * * *

  Fort Dietrick, Maryland

  “I flew here right away,” Constantine said, clicking open his briefcase. “We’ve got to put an end to this. Here. Look.” He handed Billy a sheaf of photographic prints.

  Billy scanned them, looked away, and covered his mouth, seized by a hacking cough. “Sorry,” he said, finally, clearing his throat.

  “What scares me is that these early years—years one through six—are the most critical ones for personality development. But I’m afraid—”

  “What? That you’re not being a good parent? That the child will turn out badly?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Wa-a-al, shucks,” Billy said, reverting to a heavy twang, “ain’t nothin’ like this ever happened before, so don’t blame yourself.” He tossed the pictures back on the desk, where Constantine stared at them—pictures of horribly mutilated infants. “See,” Billy continued, “we’re plowin’ new ground.” He shuffled through the photos, finally dwelling on one. “Richard doesn’t even look normal. So maybe normal rules don’t apply.”

  Constantine held the picture—a black, one-year-old child, muscular, four-and-a-half feet tall, with blood smeared on his hands and mouth.

  “His physical and mental age exceeds his chronological age,” Constantine said. “It was a mistake—my mistake—to put him in a nursery with playmates of the same age. I thought socialization was important, but now, I’ll have to re-think—”

  A train of thought steamed its way across Billy’s brain, de-railing Constantine’s input. “Didn’t you say the lab animals exhibited identical behavior?”

  “Yes. Similar behavior. We ran experiments to find out how Yin and Yang—the two experimentally treated rats—performed in a social context. We had plenty of food in their area, but access was somewhat limited due to the number of animals. Yin and Yang systematically killed twenty other rats before we could stop them.”

  Billy got up from his desk and walked, hands in his pockets, to the window, where he looked out on the grounds of Fort Dietrick. “But the animals showed adaptive behavior. What they did seems natural, given their intelligence and unique abilities. They had a problem and they solved it—brutally by our standards, but they solved it, nevertheless”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Constantine said. “In the long run, there’s an evolutionary advantage to using all your assets. But in a natural environment, members of the same species are usually equipped with equal abilities. There’s a balance. Their interactions are tuned to each other.”

  In a patch of sky visible from the window, Billy watched a flock of birds launch from the ground, fly in formation, then, abruptly, change direction in near-unison.

  “Which happened first?” he asked. “The rat killings or the infant killings?”

  “They happened at nearly the same time. I’d say within a minute or two. We use different chronometers in the lab and nursery to time-stamp data, so—”

  “Wa-a-a-l, what we’ve got here is only a blip in the program. I don’t think there’s goin’ to be a long term problem. Do you? After all, you’d expect primitive thinking and behavior to precede more sophisticated, civilized behavior.”

  “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”

  “You got it. He’ll grow out of it.”

  “Meanwhile?”

  “Kill the rats,” Billy said. “We can replicate that experiment later. But Richard... he’s our most valuable asset.”

  Constantine nodded, slowly. “What about the dead infants?”

  “You got ‘em on ice?”

  “Yeah, but their parents—”

  “Think we borrowed ‘em for psychological testing. They get paid every day we keep ‘em. A pretty handy addition to their welfare checks, don’t you think? They won’t mind waiti
ng. Still—you’re right, we gotta act quickly.” He thumped his nose thoughtfully. “How many of your folks know about this?”

  “Well—everyone. I put ‘em all to work cleaning up the mess, autopsying the bodies, cataloging wounds, freezing specimens and taking care of Richard. They know everything.”

  “They’re pretty shook up?”

  “Yeah. Very. But they’re professionals.”

  “Maybe you need a completely new crew. Let’s give your people psychological counseling and therapy—for the trauma. Gottlieb knows how to finesse this sort of thing. I’ll give him a call, put him in touch with you. He can help with the parents of the children, too.” Billy smiled and patted Constantine on the arm. “Sometimes we need to forget. Sometimes it’s the right thing to do.” He sighed a long sigh and shook his head. “Relax, Whit. You’re doing the best you can. We both are. We’ve got noble goals, you and I. That’s what counts. Don’t let the piss-ants get us.”

  He escorted Constantine to the door and shook his hand. “One more thing,” he said. “Some of the folks at Los Alamos think they can duplicate the bio-active material. I’ve got funding for that effort. I’d like you to be part of it.”

  “I’m… really… honored,” Constantine stammered. “Of course. The chance of a lifetime.”

  “Good,” Billy said. “You’ll need a few more clearances. I can take care of that. And I want you to come to one of the Majestic meetings.”