"Find out anything new about your natural parents?"
"What makes you say that?" The words sounded as if they'd been ripped out of Jim—the first sign of emotion he'd shown since he'd picked up the phone.
Bingo.
"Just wondering. When we were out to dinner last week, you seemed satisfied that Hanley was your father and said you were going to comb the mansion for the identity of your mother."
Jim's voice was thick. "Yeah, well, maybe I didn't know as much as I thought I knew."
What's that supposed to mean?
"I'm sorry, Jim. I don't get it."
But Jim had leapt off the subject.
"Just a minute," he said. "Did Carol put you up to this?"
"Well, she's worried, Jim. She—"
"It's okay, Bill. I know she's worried. I haven't been playing fair with her. But I'll straighten things out today… I think."
"Can I help?"
"Bill, I don't think anyone can help."
A terrible, crushing sadness flowed across the line.
"Hey, surely—"
"Gotta go, Bill. Thanks. Bye."
And then the line went dead.
Bill sat there and knew with pitying certainty that his old friend had discovered the roots he had quested after for so long, and was being torn apart by what he had found.
3
Gerry Becker drove along Shore Drive to the Hanley mansion. He found the spike-topped wrought-iron gates closed and no car in the driveway. But that didn't mean Stevens wasn't there. He parked at the curb but remained behind the wheel for a while, staring at the huge place as the afternoon sun warmed the inside of the car and Big Dan Ingram yakked between the records on WABC.
He sat a little longer, basking in the clear March sky's preview of spring until Big Dan started playing "Daydream Believer." The Monkees. Perfect. Four jerks grabbed off the street get fame and fortune handed to them. Just like Jim Stevens. What a bummer!
He figured he should stop putting it off and get on with what he had come to do.
It was crow-eating time.
He pushed the gates open, walked up the drive, stepped up on the front porch, rang the bell, and held his breath.
He hated doing this. After all, the jerk had slugged him in the nose yesterday. So maybe it hadn't been in the best of taste to present the fruit of his whole day's research in that particular way. That didn't give Stevens the right to belt him. Did he think he could get away with that sort of shit because he was rich now?
But he had to stay on Stevens's good side. He wasn't going to let this story and the chance of a wire service pickup go blooey over one misunderstanding. If he had to eat a little crow today to ensure his exclusive on the story, well then, pass the mustard.
But after all this was over and the story was in print under his byline, he'd tell Jim Stevens to fuck off.
The heavy oak door swung open and Stevens stood there, staring at him.
"What the hell do you want?" Jim said.
His tone was hostile but his eyes showed something else. Becker wasn't sure what it was.
"I came to apologize."
"It's already forgotten."
"No, really. That was a stupid thing for me to do. Incredibly bad taste."
"Don't give it a second thought." His tone had gone flat, utterly emotionless.
Hey, this was going better than he had ever hoped. This was easy and damn near painless! He wished he could come in out of the cold, but Stevens kept the door almost closed and made no move to invite him inside.
"That's cool. Really big of you, Jim. So, have you turned up anything new we can put into the article?"
That strange look returned to Stevens's eyes. He said, "Don't give the article a second thought, either, Gerry."
Becker went numb. "I don't get it."
"It means I don't want you around anymore."
"We had a deal!"
"You've got your story."
"I've only got half of it!"
"You've got all you're going to get. Forget the rest."
"We were going to find out who your mother was! The story's not complete without it!"
At mention of his mother that strange look in Stevens's eyes deepened.
"Sorry about that. You'll have to go with what you've got. Or better yet, drop the whole thing."
"Not on your life, you son of a bitch! This is my ticket off the Express! You're not robbing me of it!"
"Good-bye, Gerry."
He slammed the door shut.' Furious, Becker gave it a kick, then hurried back through the gate to his Beetle, so angry that he could barely keep from screaming. And then he recognized Stevens's strange look for what it was.
He's afraid of me!
Becker took an immediate liking to the notion. He could not remember another time in his life when someone had been afraid of him. It gave him a good feeling, powerful.
There could only be one reason for Stevens's reaction: He had discovered something in his past he didn't want made public. That had to be it.
Gerry Becker promised himself that one way or another, he was going to ferret out that something.
4
"Jim?"
No answer.
The house seemed empty. Carol had sensed that the moment she stepped through the door, yet she had called out, anyway.
So quiet. Dust motes glowed and swirled in the late-afternoon sun slanting through the front windows. Carol looked around for a note. When she didn't find one, she went directly to the phone to call the Hanley mansion.
She was angry. She'd had just about all she could take now. This should have been a great day. She'd sent a very happy and grateful Mr. Dodd home with his daughters today—he was going to stay with Maureen, Catherine taking him on weekends—and she would have been high as a kite if not for Jim's secretive, erratic behavior.
She was about to dial when she heard a rustle from the study. A single step, a craning of her neck, and she saw him in profile as he sat on the convertible sofa.
He was staring off into space. He looked so lost, so utterly miserable that she wanted to cry for him. As she started forward she saw his eyes close and his head sag back against the cushion. His breathing became slow and rhythmic, the tension eased from his face. He was asleep.
Carol watched him for a few minutes. She didn't have the heart to awaken him. For the moment, at least, he had escaped whatever demons were pursuing him.
And then she saw the source of those demons—the journals from the safe, lying on the cushion next to him. Her first impulse was to grab them and find out for herself what could upset him so, but she hesitated. What if he woke up and found her sneaking out of the room with them? What would he think then about her respect for his privacy?
But damn it, this affected her too!
She tiptoed over to the sofa and gently slid the books off the cushion. There was a bad moment as she was lifting the pile away from him when the smaller black one almost slid out of her hands and onto Jim's lap, but she steadied it and slipped from the room without waking him.
She took them to the bedroom and, with trembling fingers, began flipping through one of the gray journals.
5
Gerry Becker pulled into the curb across the street and about fifty feet up from the Stevens place. Earlier he had followed Jim on his walk back from the mansion, resisting the urge to gun the engine and run him down. That would end this whole shitty deal. He could close his exclusive article with an obituary.
But that would leave too many unanswered questions.
So he had driven around for a while after Stevens's wife had come home, and now that it was good and dark, he was back. He had decided to sit here in the cold and watch the house until it looked like everyone was tucked in for the night. Then he'd be back at the crack of dawn with a thermos of coffee, watching, cruising, not letting Stevens out of his sight, waiting for a slip, waiting for him to give something away.
He lit a joint, wrapped himself in the wool blanket he had brought alon
g, and watched the lit windows. He knew his chance would come if he hung around long enough. And he was sure it would be worth the wait.
6
It had been hours and Jim was still sound asleep. Probably his first sleep since Monday morning. A good thing, too, because Carol wasn't getting anywhere. She shook her head in frustration as she pored over another of the gray journals. There was too much here. And with no idea of what she was looking for, she could spend all night deciphering the crabbed handwriting without learning a thing.
She opened up the black journal to the middle and gasped at the salutation on the first page of text. Instinctively she knew she had found what she sought.
She began to read.
Eleven
January 6, 1963
Dear Jim—
It's your 21st birthday. I'm going to spend the next few days writing this letter to you. It's a letter I pray you never get to read.
But if you have this in your hands, it means that something has gone dreadfully wrong.
I'm sorry about that.
You were never supposed to learn about yourself. You were supposed to lead a normal, happy, productive life, and then maybe—maybe—after I was long gone and after you had died a natural death, what you are about to learn would be made public.
But if you are indeed reading this, it means I'm dead and so is Derr, and that all my plans have gone awry.
That's why I'm writing this. To set the record straight. In the locked-away journals you will find the same story unfolding on a day-to-day basis in far greater detail but with little or no perspective. (Backthen, if T d had the perspective I have now, I can't imagine that I would have gone so far.) This letter will give you the whole story in a nutshell.
What you are about to read will strain your credulity to the breaking point. If you do not choose to believe it, that is fine with me. Take these journals and this letter and burn them now without reading any further. Your secret will be safe. But since I know you better than anyone, I'm sure you will never settle for that. I know you will search and dig and chase and harry until you have all the answers.
That, after all, is just what I would do.
It started for me in 1939.
I'm sure the government had been mulling the idea for a few years before that. You didn't have to be Jewish to be uneasy about Hitler's saber rattling during the thirties, and his endless harangues about a Thousand-year Reich led by a purebred Aryan Master Race. They were upsetting to a lot of people in this country, myself included. The topic of eugenics (a term that has fallen out of usage these days but which refers to the improvement of the human race through selective breeding) was much on my mind then and, I imagine, the subject of not a few conversations at State Department cocktail parties.
Somewhere along the way the idea of researching the possibility of breeding a perfect (or, at the very least, superior) American soldier began to brew. It probably never would have amounted to anything if I hadn't written a letter to President Roosevelt on the subject in the summer of 1939, and if Hitler had stayed within his own borders.
I don't want to toot my own horn too much here, Jim, but I was quite a fellow in my heyday. I was born in 1901, so that meant I was not yet forty at the time, but I'd already made a fortune (and this was in the Great Depression, mind you) off my patented diagnostic procedures for commercial labs. I also had caused quite a stir among the biologists of the time with my papers on genetic manipulation through selective breeding and my private experiments on the in vitro fertilization of primate ova.
Oh, I was a cocky bastard back then. And why not? The world was my oyster. I'd never been poor, but by hard work and intuition I'd become independently wealthy while other people all around me were falling into financial ruin. It was a time when one man's mind could arm itself with all (and I do mean all,) the available knowledge in a field such as genetics and forge across the frontiers into virgin territory.
I had money, fame, and notoriety, and I lived the life of the rich bachelor to the hilt. So when I became concerned enough about Hitler cleaning Germany's genetic house (so to speak) on a national scale, I didn't contact any intermediaries. I wrote directly to the president. I told him that America could probably develop a genetically superior soldier without pogroms and detention camps. All it took was sufficient funds, commitment, and the right man to head the project: Roderick C. Hanley, Ph.D.
Little did I know that Albert Einstein was simultaneously writing a similar letter to Roosevelt regarding the development of an atom bomb.
As I said above, it all would have come to naught if Hitler had behaved. But his attack on Poland in September of that year spurred Roosevelt into initiating two secret research projects. The atomic project was code—named "Manhattan" and given over to Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, and Bohr. The eugenics project was assigned to yours truly and a very bright young M.D. named Edward Derr. Our project was called "Genesis."
I did not receive much in the way of funding, but that didn't matter. When the government appropriations fell short, I supplemented them with my own funds. I wasn't in this for the money. I had more than I could spend. I was in it for the doing!
It is so very important to me that you understand that part of my persona, Jim. This was new ground, virgin territory, terra incognita, like Roald Amundsen leaving the first human footprints in the snow at the South Pole. I wanted to be first. Some might call it the pioneer spirit, some might call it monomania. Call it what you will, I wanted to do what no man had done before.
Once I get started on a project, there is no stopping me. The Genesis Project was no exception. I even infected Derr with my mania. We worked like automatons, sometimes going days without sleep, weeks without stopping. The government wasn't pushing us. Pearl Harbor was still two years away. There was no time limit. We created our own pressure.
You see, in a way, we were trying to reinvent the wheel. Early on we looked at natural selection, which is the way Nature came up with the fittest species for an ecological niche, and tried to transpose that onto a fighting man. We quickly developed theories and possible solutions to the problem of breeding the supersoldier, all of which would take generations to prove.
So we discarded them.
I was dissatisfied with the very idea of breeding, anyway. At root no doubt in that dissatisfaction was my impatient nature. I wanted results now, not generations hence. But even more so, the capriciousness of genetic mixing seemed an unscalable barrier.
Let me give you a few basics.
Each human cell is diploid, which means it has 46 chromosomes. The combination and arrangement of genes on these chromosomes makes up the genotype, which in turn determines the phenotype, the physical expression of those genes; that is, the bodily characteristics of each individual person: sex, skin color, body type, even personality to some extent. If the presence of one gene was all that was required to make a supersoldier, there would be no problem— eugenics would give us a high success rate.
Unfortunately that is not the case. A supersoldier phenotype can only result from a highly specific and extraordinarily complex genotype, providing such characteristics as a large-framed skeleton, strong musculature, agile limbs, quick reflexes, high threshold of pain, an obedient, aggressive personality, and so on.
Here's where the whole breeding approach falls apart. You see, we mammals reproduce by joining a female gamete (an ovum) with a male gamete (a spermatozoon). Each gamete is haploid, meaning it has only 23 chromosomes (half the normal complement). When they join together, they form a brand-new 46-chromosome (diploid) person. The stumbling block for us would-be breeders is that when a diploid cell breaks up into two haploid gametes, we have no way of controlling which genes go into which gamete. The process is random. So anything is possible. This is a wonderful means of providing the human race with nearly endless variety within the parameters of our species, thereby allowing us to adapt to various environments and situations. But it is pure hell to someone trying to produce the same ge
notype and phenotype over and over.
So to give you an example, let's take Attila the Hun and mate him with Joan of Arc. We could get a strong, brave, ferocious, idealistic supersoldier. Or we could get a 98-pound anemic accountant. Attila and Joan, no matter how strong and brave and aggressive they each may be, have recessive anemic accountant genes hiding on their chromosomes. If we take from each a haploid gamete rich in recessive anemic accountant genes and pair them, we will get an anemic accountant. The pairing of any two random gametes from each could result in anything between the two extremes. The odds can be skewed in your favor by rigorous investigations of the family trees, but it's still a crapshoot. And since humans don't breed like mice or rabbits, it would take lots of luck and many generations to breed a supersoldier army.
What was needed was a way to move a desirable genotype intact (the word intact cannot be overemphasized here) from generation to generation. In other words, we had to find a way of creating identical twins (or triplets or quints, or what have you) a generation removed from the original.
We needed to produce a series of beings genetically identical to their parent. (Note the singular, please.)
Clones, if you will.
We had to learn how to clone a human being.
Now, when you remove yourself from the fray and sit back and consider it without emotion, that is a pretty frightening concept. But Derr and I were in the thick of the fray. We were filled with the passion and fervor of discovery. Nothing frightened us. Questions of ethics or responsibility were far from our minds.
The only question that mattered was: How?
A tissue culture was out. A human body is a complex system of many different tissues. We could not culture out individual organs and patch them together like a modern Frankenstein. What we needed was a way to induce a human ovary to form an egg with a nucleus that was diploid instead of haploid. The result would be cloning by parthenogenesis, and only females would result, but it would be a start.
Then a chance remark by Derr set us on the right track. He said, "Too bad we can't just get hold of some ova and plop the genotype we want into them."
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