The Ganymede Project

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  “Ah,” Yuri said with a wink, “but memories have a short useful life span, don’t they? Like butterflies. You chase them down while they’re still alive and fluttering, then pin them, label them and put them in a box.”

  “Sometimes memories live a long time.”

  “Yes,” he said, sipping water slowly. “They do, don’t they? Speaking of memories, how is George Nathan getting along these days?”

  “Say, we could play ‘What-ever-happened-to-old-whatiz-name,’ couldn’t we? George is still there. Don’t usually see him much, except these last two weeks, he’s really been bugging me. He’s getting cantankerous. I think it’s all part of this mental menopause the Company is going through.”

  “You mean the New World Order? No clear-cut enemies?”

  “Something like that. Yeah. Maybe George is trying to relive past glories battling the Ruskies. But I tell you, I don’t see how they’re much of a threat. I think he’s got job security on his mind, with all this stuff about the Russian Embassy.”

  “What stuff?”

  Martha paused for a moment, unsure whether to proceed. No one else was seated at the outdoor tables, but she lowered her voice, anyway. “I’m telling you this only because I happen to know you still have the clearance, and in your present job, I think you have a need to know.”

  Yuri nodded.

  “George got interested in my memory collection. Three weeks ago, I collected one that was full of color, drama and dreams. It has a very long shelf life—unlike most. Something you might enjoy seeing.”

  She took a sip of water, clearing her throat so she could whisper better. “I interviewed a guy who has important background information on Yeltsin. He’s a friend of a famous Russian cello player who emigrated to America, found fame and fortune, then returned to help Yeltsin survive the putsch.”

  “That’s reaching back a couple of years. Not exactly current intel.”

  “Yeah. And I think that’s where George is getting senile. You know? The really good stuff in the report is about Yeltsin. But was George interested in that? No-o-o-o. George was interested in minor background stuff—some underling communications technician who helped Yeltsin. I admit, she’s got a pretty interesting story, too, but if I were a top analyst like George—and I may be one someday—goodness knows, maybe I’ll take George’s spot when his brain finally fails—anyway, if I were the analyst, I’d be much more interested in the big guy. Whattya think? Are my instincts right?”

  “Depends on who the underling is.”

  “Her name’s Katrina Fontanova.”

  At that moment, an older couple sat at the table next to them, adjusting lasagna, salad and drinks in a noisy collision of ceramic plates and glass tabletop. Martha Grimsley mistook the look in Yuri’s eyes as annoyance over an unwanted intrusion. In reality, it was a different set of emotions that screwed his face into a pained, teeth-exposed expression.

  Yuri smiled at the couple. They smiled back. Then Yuri smiled at Grimsley. “I really need to see your butterfly collection, Martha.”

  “No problem. It’s the new specimen, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  Yuri suddenly became an avid lepidopterist. He made an appointment with Martha the very next day to view her classified files and raw notes. She wouldn’t let him take anything away—not until she got final approval on the database entry. That wouldn’t happen for months. So Yuri read quietly in Martha’s office—a bookish, quiet place, home for a forest of house plants, icon of a remembered past.

  Although the office evoked trauma and terror in a younger Yuri Sverdlov, the pain of those demons had diminished with time, like squeeze points on a worn shoe. The place now seemed almost comfortable.

  Martha’s notes portrayed a different Katrina Fontanova than the one Yuri imagined. Certainly she was technically gifted, highly focused, and beautiful—a formidable combination for an enemy. But Martha’s notes revealed other facets, other dimensions of a complex personality.

  Fontanova had risked death for truth and principles. Her rise in the SVR was a reward for bold action and deeply held conviction. Yuri’s mental cartoon of this Russian woman metamorphosed into a flesh and blood human. He mentally dropped her from the suspect list in Jack’s murder. She was a worthy opponent, with values, integrity, passions.

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Yuri experienced a subtle cognitive shift. This shift was one of several that produced a cascade of chaotic action, the way a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can produce hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.

  47. BLACK MASS

  13 July 1994

  Vladimir puzzled over the amorphous black mass in the satellite photo. It seemed to ooze like some grainy fluid from points around a spider’s web. Four successive frames taken seconds apart told the story. The circular grid area, surrounded by trucks, initially had a surface that matched the dry lake bed. The second frame showed dark blotches near connecting points on the grid. The third frame clearly showed an amoeba-like mass coalescing inward. In the final frame, darkness covered the entire grid, hiding the small, white concrete pad at the center. Subsequent frames did not include the grid. The satellite had moved too far along its track.

  Another camera on the same satellite acquired simultaneous coverage in the infrared region. This was much more revealing, even though the ground resolution of the IR camera was not as good. It was like peering into an alternate dimension—one in which thermal signatures replaced visual appearance.

  The blob that registered as a black mass on the KVR-1000’s panchromatic film showed up as a warm target on IR film. The mass emitted slightly more heat than the background.

  Vladimir marveled at the information available in these various views from space. Because the panchromatic frames showed the same area from different angles, Vladimir could view the target in stereo. To get a god-like view, he put two 18 centimeter square frames beneath the objective lenses of his stereoscopic viewer. Through a series of mirrors, lenses and prisms, light from each image traveled separately to his two eyes. His brain combined the images into a single, three-dimensional view. It was as if he had a giant head, with eyeballs located hundreds of miles apart, peering down at the Earth from space.

  Looking at the grid in this way gave him the impression that the black mass had a very fine,lumpy structure. Because it moved and shifted from frame to frame, the mass appeared to ‘dance’ like some dark mirage above the desert floor. He knew this was an artifact of target motion and sensor geometry.

  He took his eyes away from the stereoscope and rubbed them. His analysis was limited by crude equipment and by a photographic camera system that was less than state-of-the-art.

  He opened his analytical notebook and described preliminary findings. He also outlined a plan for analysis. He would need to digitize the images at twice the nyquist rate in order to preserve resolution. Then he needed to electronically rectify each image, stretching each into a map-like projection. Then he would have to electronically combine each image. This would significantly improve the ground resolution for static objects.

  But what could he do to get a better look at the fluid black mass? Some two-dimensional Fourier analysis, maybe. Edge enhancements. Play with the gamma. But the best thing would be to get coverage from the real time digital high-res system. This was avery black program. He had been briefed on it once, but had never been given continuing access. Still—he could pull some strings. Getting access would not be a ‘slam dunk.’

  * * *

  Gillford Chisholm slammed the worker’s body hard against the concrete wall of the sewer. He heard a snap as the head bent sharply at the neck. The body slumped into arag doll pile on the catwalk, one arm stretching into the river of liquid waste. There was nothing personal as he flicked open a 12-inch blade and carved the man’s neck open, beginning at the carotid artery.

  It was unfortunate that he had to expend this kind of energy just to keep secrets a secret. He had actually tried to prevent this sort of thing from happe
ning by directing the city to temporarily close this section of sewer. There was always ten percent that didn’t get the word.

  He rolled the corpse into the sewage stream. It would be weeks before they found it. Time enough to place biological materials and equipment needed for the Project Ganymede field test.

  He rarely thought about the impact of his job. They told him what to do and he just did it. But today... It was bad enough they made him work in this stinking place. Bad enough he had to handle animals.

  He had become an animal.

  * * *

  “Sure. I can get you what you want. But it’s a very black program. Close the door, please.”

  Vladimir smiled at Alexander Lysenko’s invitation and complied with his request for privacy. Lysenko was therezident , or chief of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service at the embassy. He was also Russia’s top spymaster in America. His appearance was ordinary in the extreme. An invisible man who could blend into any crowd. He delivered face-to-face conversations with a poker player style, always holding cards close to his intellectual chest. His mouth could laugh, but his eyes could not.

  “I will be forever grateful for your help.”

  “Yes, I know,” he said, smiling easily. “The satellite imagery you ask for is very advanced. The GRU operates it. A mosaic array sensor system—all digital and real time—and in a Molniya orbit.” He searched his desk for a pipe, added tobacco to the bowl in a tedious ritual, then lit up, puffing smoke in Vladimir’s direction. “We normally don’t get any of the material here at the embassy unless it’s by a very special request. After all, the Foreign Intelligence Service is separate from the GRU. They expect us to use our own satellites.” He laughed. “It’s like children wanting their own toys, hmmm? Anyway, I’ve been following your sister’s reports and I think I can make a convincing case.” He puffed some more. “You’re lucky. I’ll be returning to Moscow tomorrow. I’m meeting with Colonel Anatoly Kazikov. He can arrange things.”

  Vladimir’s mouth twitched in a suppressed smile. He knew why Lysenko was returning to Moscow. It wasn’t for any meeting. He was being PNG’d—declared persona non grata. It was fallout from the Aldrich Ames case. After the FBI charged Ames with spying for Russia, the Clinton administration retaliated by expelling Lysenko. It was tit for tat. They gave Lysenko a gentlemanly seven days to get out of town.

  “Here is a bit of career advice for you, Vladimir. I can see you’re ambitious—just like your sister. Do the best you can on this analysis. Operation Majority is starting to get high level attention. Mikhail Barsukov is interested. He has Yeltsin’s ear. A lot of people thought that Operation Majority might just be disinformation. Now they aren’t so sure.” He puffed some more on the pipe. “If you need anything—like special analyses they can do in Moscow—let me know.”

  Vladimir smiled again. “I just happen to have a list.” He handed Lysenko a page from his notebook.

  * * *

  Jafri spoke quietly over a beer. “What if you had in your hands something akin to a miracle—technology from—I dunno—10,000, maybe a million years in the future. And what if, simultaneously, you had this systematic perversion of it.”

  “That’s what sorcery’s about,” Anderson said, trying to humor what he considered his friend’s fantastic ramblings.

  “Yeah. Virtual magic.” Jafri took a swig.

  Anderson swirled the beer in his glass and laughed. “No. I meanactual sorcery. Six centuries ago, Dante believed in it. Lots of people did. So did the Church. The orthodox Christian and sorcerer of the time agreed that after a priest performs the miracle of the consecration of the Host, the Divine Elements are capable of performing further miracles. Perverting the miracles was a sin—the Black Mass.”

  “Black Mass?”

  “Yeah. In a Black Mass the magical Host is intrinsically good or—for the sake of argument—not evil. The Black Mass ceremony uses the Host’s magic to gain some unholy advantage. Dante said it was one of the worst sins. He consigned it to the very bottom of Hell. He probably had in mind Simon Magus, who bargained with Saint Peter for the miraculous powers of the Christians. Peter refused him. But to Simon, it seemed like a natural bargain. Maybe the use of great powers for base purposes constitutes the moral equivalent of sorcery—even if the power is technology.”

  Jafri nodded. “That’s what we’ve got at Groom—a perversion. Let me tell you about some of the things my partner found.”

  48. ONTOGENY

  14 July 1994

  The room buzzed with tech talk as minds raced to interpret data. Doctor Rita Li beamed a buoyant, positive smile toward all members of the group, including John Anderson, who sat with arms crossed at the end of the table. Li was ready to talk science. The din faded.

  “Has anyone seen Margaret Tjan?” Li asked.

  No one answered.

  “Very well, we’ll proceed without her.”

  She turned on the slide projector. On a screen at the front of the room, a picture popped into view of a dead rat on a dissecting surface.

  “This is the animal found dead in the Groom test area,” she said. “Notice the bulge of the skull behind the eyes? Brain volume has been expanded by over fifty percent.”

  She changed the slide to show an electron micrograph. It was a 10-micron square image of the cerebellar cortex. At the center of the image was a large circular structure. It looked like a love object caressed by spindly tentacles of protoplasm. Li recognized them as Golgi axon endings and dendritic protrusions.

  “Many of you have already seen this electron micrograph. The spherical object is what I am now calling theDevice . It’s a huge, 4-micron doped fullerene, with a lattice of holes—a scaffolding that could be used to filter or recognize other molecules.”

  The audience was silent. Their attention riveted on the slide. At the front of the room, Doctor Li’s body wiggled in excitement over the discoveries.

  “I have to admit I was overwhelmed with curiosity,” she said. “I had many questions. Are these structures active or inert? Do they influence nerve cells? If so, how, and for what purpose? How are they associated with anomalous neural development? In order to get answers, I requested a series of measurements, observations and experiments. Karen will summarize.”

  Doctor Karen York—small, thin, agitated, still wearing a lab coat—pushed the button for the next slide, and began. “We used chick embryo as a culture, and put a bit of rat tissue infected with devices on top of the growing spinal cord. It stimulated new growth. Here we see a trace of electrical activity in a nerve cell before it contacted a Device. Notice the upward spikes. This means that the direction of travel for neural signals is toward the growing tip of the cell. The bottom trace shows electrical events after contact with a Device. We see both upward and downward spikes. That is, signals flow both toward and away from the Device. These results were confirmed in twenty other samples. Nerve cells begin with all of the standard properties of growing nerve fiber. After contact with the Devices, they transform into bi-directional communications links. The modified nerve cell can be triggered by the Device or it can feed a signal into the device.”

  “The Device sends signals?” Anderson asked in astonishment.

  “Yes, John,” Li replied. “Let me sum up. What follows is informed speculation, you understand. However, it is at least consistent with experimental results. My working hypothesis is that the Devices are ‘Great Attractors’ which strongly influence and modify embryonic development. The interior of the device is a nano-machine—in effect, an artificial cell.”

  Karen York expanded: “We speculate that the Device uses some sort of computational process—similar to a genetic algorithm—to probe its environment. It develops a complete biochemical blueprint of the host.”

  Li observed the frowning faces of her colleagues. “I know what you’re thinking. It far exceeds state-of-the art bioengineering.”

  “I’m not a geneticist, Rita,” Anderson said. “What do you mean?”

&nbs
p; “The first timeever that an entire free-living organism was genetically sequenced wasthisyear .Mycoplasmagenitalium took three months.Hemophilusinfluenza took about a year, but it’s slightly bigger. The human genome will take decades—at least using the best currently known techniques—those of Craig Venter’s over at the Institute for Genomic Research. They use some pretty heavy duty equipment for that—ultrasound, some industrial strength software analyzers, gene sequencers. But now, it seems, we have some pinpoint-sized artifact inside an embryo which sequences entire gene structures in a matter of days.”

  “I’ve got a question for you,” Anderson said. “If the Device is artificial, then there is a reason—a purpose—behind it. What is it?”

  “Yes, purpose!” Li replied, emphatically. “Knowing the biochemical blueprint, the Device can modify the body plan of the host in order to achieve a certain objective—the influence or control of an organism’s nervous system.”

  Doctor Anderson sat back in his chair, rubbed his eyes and whistled in amazement.

  * * *

  Margaret Tjan moved a hand against her head, trying to neaten a mop of dark, frizzled hair. She nudged her way past the stream of departing people and found Rita Li.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Had a class.”

  “Too bad. I just briefed everyone on the findings. We can go over it later, in my office. What about your biopsychology experiments with the rat pup? Anything conclusive?”

  “Not conclusive, butvery suggestive. We infected a rat embryo with neural tissue from the Groom rat. The neural seeding operation was fairly simple. I got a lot of help from Karen York. Once we had a rat pup inoculated—if that’s the word—I monitored its behavior.”