that?
“No sir,” Lexy replied. “Never heard of it.”
The guards stood around for a little while longer, talking in low voices. Lexy and Anne remained with their hands against the wall.
, “Can we go now?” Anne demanded.
I “Yeah. I guess it was a false alarm. But hey, if we need to get in touch with you—” “Just call Macro-peripherals,” Anne snapped.
“Yeah. Okay.” Martin eyed Anne up and down with a knowing grin.
“Hey, next time I might not let you off so easy.”
Lexy picked up their handbags from the floor. “And next time, bozo, we’ll report your behavior to Stewart Biotech and to your boss,” she said.
Anne grabbed her friend’s arm and steered her toward the front exit.
“Never mind, Alice. Never mind.”
Out on Fifth Avenue, they dashed to the curb to hail a cab.
Lexy pulled up her fur collar. “Jesus Christ, I never thought about triggering a remote burglar alarm system. And I thought for sure they’d check out our IDs. That was a close call.”
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” Anne said.
“Are you kidding? We pulled it off, didn’t we? And you were great!
Sorry you got molested like that, though. That Martin bastard barely felt me up at all. That really pissed me off.”
Ambassador Mishima accepted the applause with a bow and a self-deprecating smile. “I welcome you to the glamorous metropolis of Mikasa,” he said.
Appreciative laughter rippled through the room. Mikasa was anything but a metropolis. It was an isolated mountain village, a few kilometers inland from the small city of Sapporo, on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido.
His audience, twenty-five men and twenty women, was gathered in a conference room on the second floor of a new building that housed the most modern genetic research facility in the world. Beyond the tightly drawn window blinds of the laboratory building were clusters of cottages and dormitorylike structures and a small pedestrian square with a variety of shops and stores, all spread out in a park-like setting of trees, lawns, and gardens.
These buildings had all once been part of the Olympic Village, built to house the athletes at the 1972 Winter Games in Sapporo.
Only the laboratory building was new—that and the double rows of high-security cyclone fencing that now encircled the entire village, separating it from the outside world.
The forty-five individuals in the audience had been carefully selected by a special government committee appointed by the prime minister.
They were among the very best microbiologists and geneticists in the nation. Together with a staff of several hundred technicians and support personnel, they would live and work in the self-contained isolation of this village for an undetermined
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length of time. Contact with the outside world would be severely limited and carefully monitored.
All the participants had volunteered for the project—not just because the pay and the benefits were extraordinary but because serving in the project had been presented to them as a matter of patriotic duty.
There was a third attraction. Although no one yet knew the details of the project, the word was out in Japanese scientific and academic circles that it was to be on the cutting edge of bioge netics. Working on the project would almost guarantee its participants extraordinary professional and academic stature—and a
1-very secure future.
,u Today, they were to be formally introduced to their work.
Ambassador Mishima coughed gently and began the introduction. He pressed a button on the remote-control unit in his hand, ‘; and on a big screen at the front of the room there appeared two black-and-white photographs of an old automobile—a front view and a side view.
“Does anyone know what this is?” he asked.
After a puzzled silence, a young man at the back of the room raised his hand. “It’s an American automobile,” he said. “A Ford sedan.
Nineteen fifty-one, I believe.”
Mishima grinned. “Your father must have been in the auto business.”
“No. But I was a teenage car nut.”
The others laughed and applauded.
“Well, my teenage car nut, your answer was very good, but it was also wrong. The car you see up there on the screen certainly does resemble an American Ford four-door sedan, manufactured in Detroit in 1951. But in fact, this automobile was built in Osaka, Japan, in the year 1952.”
Mishima paused to let the surprise sink in, then continued. “Of all the autos ever built in our country, this one is perhaps the most important—because it was assembled in a very unusual manner. In a project sponsored by our government, a dozen American Fords were purchased anonymously in the U.S imported to Japan, and brought to a small shop outside Osaka. At the shop a trained crew of industrial technicians dismantled the autos piece by piece and examined them exhaustively. Every part was tested, weighed, measured, photographed, and analyzed.
When the technicians had learned everything they could, they put the cars back together again. Then they tore them apart again, and put them back together again. They repeated this process over and over, until they knew how to assemble a Ford sedan in their sleep.”
Mishima observed his audience closely as he talked. The tense, concentrated expressions on their faces told him that they were trying very hard to anticipate what possible connection his tale could have to their present circumstances. He was happy that they were so attentive—and so mystified.
“These men then built their own automobile,” he continued.
“It was identical to the car they had so thoroughly studied. Building it was a very difficult task, because in our country at that time there did not exist the specialized and sophisticated machine tools and dies necessary to manufacture such a product. In 1951 we were a long way from state of the art in any endeavor, but particularly in automobiles.
All our factories had been destroyed by the bombing. So before these men could make this Ford, they had first to invent the tools to do it.
It took them an entire year, but they ultimately succeeded. And there, in those photographs, is the fruit of their labor. It looked like a Ford, it drove like a Ford, but it was not a Ford. It was a Japanese copy of a Ford.”
Mishima watched the faces. He saw they were beginning to get the point.
“Well, not quite exact,” he continued. “The Japanese Ford got five miles more to the gallon, generated more horsepower, had better brakes, a smoother shifting mechanism, a more reliable engine, better bumpers, and a more stable suspension system. The shop in Osaka made only that one copy. Because, of course, they could not mass-produce something so obviously stolen from an American design. No, they did something much better. They took their experience and went out to design and manufacture automobiles for Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi, Subaru, and Nissan.”
His listeners had become very quiet, hanging on every word.
Mishima beamed selfconsciously and went on.
“Those of you in this room today are faced with a very similar challenge-Instead of a Ford sedan to learn from, you will have the complete computer printouts of three human genomes, obtained from hair samples. One comes from a man, another from a woman, and a third from their young child. In this instance, the child is the 1951 Ford. Your task will be to construct the computer program that will duplicate her genome under the same set of circumstances. Your task is far more difficult than that faced by the men who copied that old Ford. The technologies involved are thousands of times more complex. But in many ways your task is similar. You will be given a product—the girl’s genome—to take apart and analyze. And from that analysis, you will work backwards—you will endeavor to reconstruct, by crossreferencing the girl’s genome with those of her parents, a copy of the same program that produced those results. It won’t be easy.
But you have some powerful advantages. You have superior knowledge, superior experience, superio
r technical skills, and the best computers in the world.”
Mishima paused and looked around the room. A woman in front raised her hand.
“Are we to assume that such a program actually exists?”
“Such a program did exist. And the girl is the first and only human being, as far as we know, to have had her germ line altered according to this program’s blueprint.”
“Did exist?”
“Yes. It was developed by Dr. Harold Goth, a Nobel laureate, whose name, at least, you are probably familiar with.”
Mishima heard some loud groans.
“Dr. Goth died in a fire in his laboratory on the island of El Coronado, in the Caribbean, on New Year’s Eve, 1999. We believe that all his records, including this genetic program, were destroyed in the fire. But we’re not sure. There is some recent evidence that a copy may have survived. An American and a German company may be collaborating on an effort to fieldtest it.”
“Can’t we get a copy?”
“We’re trying. But if a copy has indeed survived, it may well be flawed. It may not work at all, for many reasons. And as responsible scientists, you would hardly want to rely on a pirated copy of something as important as this. The whole point of our undertaking here is to reach a deep understanding of how this girl’s genome was created, so that we may construct our own working version of Goth’s program. And like the copy of the Ford, we will make one that will be better than the original.”
An older male on the right side of the room raised a hand.
“What results has Goth’s program produced in the girl?”
Mishima nodded. “That’s an essential question. I cannot answer it accurately now, but we’ll do our best to supply you with information as time and the success of our intelligence efforts permit. All I can give you at this point is a general answer. The program has apparently produced a child of markedly superior health and intelligence. That’s all we know at the moment.”
“Do we know this girl’s name? Or anything about her family?”
“For the time being, we consider that irrelevant.”
Mishima answered a few more questions, then closed his presentation with a strong dose of chauvinistic appeal:
“You all know, because each of you has been extensively interviewed about joining this project, that our government places the highest priority on the successful outcome of this endeavor.
Despite our success in building a peaceful, prosperous, and enlightened society, Japan remains a small island nation in a brutally competitive and increasingly hostile world. The enormous economic boom of the postwar period is well behind us now. We have become a mature, rich, and stable industrial democracy-one of the strongest on earth. But our preeminence is by no means assured. In fact, it may be dangerously fragile.”
Mishima turned the projector switch on again, and the Ford sedan was replaced by a new slide. It was a chart listing eighteen categories of productivity.
“I thought you might be interested in seeing how the three great industrial nations of the world—Germany, the United States, and Japan—presently stack up against each other in the key areas of national productivity. These figures may surprise you. Germany t leads in only one of the eighteen categories: finance, insurance, and real estate. Japan leads in four: chemicals, plastics, and synthetics; cars, planes, and transportation; steel, aluminum, and opper; and electric machinery and electronic equipment. The United States leads in all the rest—thirteen out of the eighteen i categories.”
There was an awkward silence. Mishima wasn’t sure whether t, it was because his audience was stunned by this revelation or because they considered his patriotic appeal heavy-handed. The last thing in the world Mishima wanted was to be thought of as heavy-handed, but the occasion demanded that he lay it on pretty thick. The government needed these scientific types to understand that this was a national emergency. They had to hit the deck running on this one. One lost day could make a difference.
Mishima turned off the projector, and the chart disappeared
; from the wall. “For a while we were winners,” he said. “But no longer. We coasted on our success through the nineties. Our economic triumphs made us fat and complacent. Now our economy and our standard of living are on the decline. Part of the reason
. for that decline can be blamed directly on the United States—on its increasingly hostile attitude toward the Japanese people, and
- on the punitive actions that a series of U.S. administrations has
: taken—trade barriers, product quotas, tariffs, and all the rest. I need not bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, we are now in a bitter race for our survival as a first-class world power. Since
‘ the Communist collapse back in the early nineties, we have witnessed an increasingly belligerent United States doing all it can to sabotage Japan’s effort to compete in the world’s markets. The psychology of the United States is such that it seems to require an enemy. And now that the Soviet Union is gone, that enemy has become Japan.
“To put it bluntly, we are once again at war with the United States.
It’s a new kind of war-not the deadly military folly of the past but an economic struggle. The battlefield may seem far more benign and the suffering far less, but the longterm consequences are the same. The loser ends up in the ash bin of history.
“But we are not going to lose. We are a proud and industrious people, capable of rising to a great challenge. Fifty years ago, a previous generation rose from the ruin and despair of a humiliating military defeat to make us one of the richest, most productive societies on earth. We can repeat that miracle again. And this time the task falls to you, the men and women in this room, to lead the way.
It will demand commitment and sacrifice, intelligence and hard work.
But if you are successful, the reward will be priceless. It is not an exaggeration to say that the re-creation of this genetic program will ensure the Japanese race a place of leadership in the world for many generations to come.”
Mishima sensed that his audience was getting restless. It was time to wrap it up.
“The prime minister and the emperor have both asked me to pass on to you their warmest personal appreciation and their deep conviction that once you know the importance of the task before you, you will not let the Japanese people down. I join them wholeheartedly in those sentiments. Now, I thank you very much for your time, and I understand that there will be several more speakers who will answer the many questions I know you must have, and lay out for you in more detail the specifics of the project.”
Mishima left the conference hall in a thoughtful mood. He wondered whether this effort was really an example of Japanese foresight and longterm planning, or if it was the beginning of another great folly.
If this genetics project was successful, what would the government do?
Cash in on it by franchising it worldwide? This is what the prime minister had told him Japan intended to do. But Mishima didn’t believe it. Mishima thought it likely that his country would use the program on itself—initiate a nationwide eugenics program to improve the quality of the Japanese race.
This would be a dangerous course, Mishima thought—a thoughtless plunge into a medical, social, and moral wilderness.
No one could predict where such a course might lead the Japanese people, but of one thing he was sure. The rest of the world would never forgive them.
It would probably be better if the project failed.
Unfortunately, his reputation depended on its success.
Anne sat crosswise on a chair in the corner of Paul Elder’s office, her head resting against the wall and her legs draped over one of the chair’s arms. She was reading a thick textbook called Modern Genetics.
She had been at it for most of the past three hours and had reached only page 15. Still, she hardly minded. She felt quite happy.
Indeed, she felt almost blissful, curled up in this cozy, cluttered little office, alternating her attention between
the book in her lap and the man hunched over his desk a few feet from her.
Elder suddenly banged the desk with his fist and let out a howl of frustration. “Damn it! I just can’t make any sense out of it!”
He was stationed in front of a powerful desktop computer he had borrowed through a friend from a nearby hospital research lab. For the last three hours he had been exploring the copy of Goth’s Jupiter program. Anne could see that he was exhausted.
It was after eleven r.M and his day had started at five. He swung his chair around and rubbed his eyes. Anne shut the book and looked at him.
“Something’s missing,” he said. “But I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is. Either I don’t understand the genetics or I don’t understand the program—or both. Probably both.”
“Please don’t try to do any more tonight.”
“I’d like to accomplish something.”
Elder had explained to her what he was doing each step of the way. He had started out with what he thought was the most traightforward approach. He had obtained from one of his labs 271 several disks with copies of what the lab called “generic” genomes—ones that didn’t come from anyone in particular but were useful as test models. He had fed the data from a genome into the program’s software as it instructed him to do, and then asked it to alter the genome’s DNA code according to its master plan.
“This is the third time I’ve gotten the same result. I feed the genome data in, the program grinds away on it for a few minutes, then produces a new genome—exactly like the one I just fed it.
Somehow I don’t think that’s what it’s supposed to do.”
Anne had been thinking about the problem herself. She wanted to make a suggestion but felt intimidated.
Elder was studying her. “What?” he asked.
She looked at him, confused. “What?”
“You wanted to say something. What?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing.”
He grinned. “Yes you do. Tell me.”
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