by Julie Smith
Jacob’s big shoulders sagged a bit. He seemed diminished, somehow. A very worried man.
He said: “I tried to get you yesterday. There isn’t much time, I’m afraid.”
I found that a bit on the bewildering side. “I returned your call. I even came out to your office. The receptionist said you weren’t there.”
“Oh? Well, I went in the back door. Maybe she didn’t realize.”
“Somebody cut my brake lines while I was waiting for you.”
“Oh, no! Not the best of neighborhoods, I’m afraid. I apologize.”
The waitress brought coffee and we ordered man-sized breakfasts, both of us.
I waited for Jacob to speak again. I couldn’t figure him. Did he really think cutting brake lines was garden-variety vandalism? He might. It would be just like a hotshot scientist not to know how a car works. But there was another possibility— maybe he was using his trademark vagueness to cover up the fact that he nobbled my car himself. The person who did it, I figured, had probably followed me to Kogene from the Chronicle. How else would they know what my car looked like? Jacob could easily have done that and then gone in the back door he’d just mentioned. “I’ve decided,” he said at last, “to make a public appeal for information about Terry’s whereabouts.”
“Let me be sure I understand,” I said. “You’ve decided, after all, to go public with the story of the kidnapping?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask what prompted your decision?”
“Time’s running out. Terry’s very ill, Mr. Mcdonald.” The lines around his mouth were about ten feet deep. “She has an incurable disease.”
“Leukemia?”
“Why do you think that? Because it’s a well-known childhood killer? It’s not, you know. In this country it hits more than twenty thousand adults every year, but only about twenty-five hundred children.”
“I didn’t really guess it at all. Joan told me.”
“Joan?”
“Lindsay’s sister.”
“Oh, yes, Joan. She would know, of course.”
“Inspector Blick thought Lindsay might have taken Terry to an ‘alternative’ cancer specialist.”
Koehler winced. His eyes were so full of pain there didn’t seem to be room for more. But when I said that, he looked even more hurt. “I know. I can’t believe it.” His voice broke and for a moment I panicked. Women crying were bad enough, but a giant Nobel laureate who looked more like a god than a man— that I couldn’t handle. Especially not at breakfast.
But Jacob got control of himself and went on. “I don’t think she’d do a thing like that.”
“She must not have,” I said. “The police weren’t able to find her at any of the obvious places.”
“Oh.” Apparently, Blick hadn’t bothered to tell him.
“Blick said you told him Terry wasn’t sick.”
He looked embarrassed. “I thought it best at the time.”
“How so?”
“Terry doesn’t know how sick she is. I mean, she doesn’t know she could die. So I— Marilyn and I— thought we shouldn’t tell the police.” He looked very confused, as if he couldn’t quite remember his own reasoning process. “We thought she might find out, somehow.”
“But how would she find out?”
“The police might tell her. Just somebody might.”
“But if the police didn’t think she was sick, they wouldn’t have looked for her and her mother at the cancer quack hospitals. And they might have passed up a chance to find her.”
“But she wasn’t there.” Jacob looked almost belligerent. He attacked his eggs instead of me.
“Where do you think she is, then?”
“Mr. Mcdonald, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be talking to you. I wouldn’t have hired Jack Birnbaum. I’d have Terry back.”
So far that was about the only thing he’d said that made sense.
“Okay,” I said, “I understand. But if you were afraid the cops were going to tell Terry she has leukemia, why are you telling me for a newspaper article?”
Jacob crashed his coffee cup on the table. Coffee went everywhere. “You can’t put that in the story!”
He looked like a cornered lion, I thought. He had the mane and the presence and even the sinews. It was very sad to see such a magnificent beast so distressed.
I held up a hand to placate him. “Okay. I won’t. But I thought the reason you told me was because you wanted me to.”
“Oh. No. I just wanted you to know why there isn’t much time. I have to have her back right away.”
“I understand. I’m sure any father would feel that way.”
“You don’t understand. I’m not just any father, don’t you see that?”
“Well, of course, I—”
“Terry is perfect. A genetically perfect child. She was meant to be perfect. Lindsay and I created her.” The terrible hurt in his eyes was replaced by something bright and excited— the kind of avid glint people get when they start on their favorite subject.
I kept quiet and he kept talking.
“The gene pool is in serious trouble, you know. All the wrong people are reproducing.”
“The wrong people?”
“Absolutely. The very people who ought to be eugenically sterilized.”
“But who are they, exactly?”
He looked as if he’d never encountered ignorance on such a massive scale. “The genetically inferior. Can’t you see that? All the brightest people, the ones who really ought to be reproducing, aren’t. They’re the very ones who get vasectomies or practice contraception.” He banged his fist on the table. “The irony of it! It’s incredible, isn’t it?”
I nodded. I admit I was stringing him along a little. It was an argument I’d heard before— and not always from arch-conservatives, either. It’s amazing the number of otherwise decent people who believe in their own genetic superiority. But somehow I didn’t expect it to pop out of Jacob’s mouth. I wanted to see how far he’d go, so I pretended this was all virgin turf to me.
“If something isn’t done, the next generation won’t be fit to cope with the world they’re going to inherit. We must breed a super-race, a race of genetically perfect specimens.”
I said, “You’re Jewish, aren’t you, Dr. Koehler?”
He nodded. “Yes, of course. But the Jews aren’t the only ones with good genes. Look at Lindsay. She—”
“That isn’t what I was getting at. I was thinking that it was this kind of thinking that got six million Jews killed.”
Again he pounded the table. The avid glint turned into a slightly mad one. “Don’t you see? Can’t you see? That’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. It entirely proves my point. Can’t you understand that?”
I spoke softly, hoping to defuse him a little. “I’m afraid you’re making a leap I can’t quite follow. Maybe there’s something wrong with my genes.”
Of course there was. He’d forgotten that. He was a genetically superior specimen and sometimes he failed to allow for the poorer caliber of lesser brains.
The realization showed in his face and in his softer, more professorial, and distinctly more condescending voice as he explained: “That’s what happens when knowledge and power fall into the wrong hands. There was nothing wrong with Hitler’s thesis except for one thing— the Germans are not the super-race. It’s that simple.”
“Oh. Well, then, who is?”
“I’m not saying they don’t have some good genes. Excellent in some areas. But they don’t have everything. Imagination, for instance. Creativity. Very lacking there. But excellent physical specimens. Excellent.” He shrugged. “Anyway, they got a good idea, and because they didn’t have the genetically coded ability to understand it, they wound up destroying some of the very finest genes in all the world. A terrific loss to the pool.” He spread his arms at the shoulders, like a professor making a point. “That’s what happens when inferior specimens get out of control.”
“But
who are the superior specimens? I mean, any particular group?”
“Of course not. We need the best traits from all racial and ethnic groups. We need to breed like dogs.”
Breed like dogs. That was not the cliché as I knew it. I was still struggling with it when he saw that again he’d failed to make himself clear to an inferior specimen.
“I mean, we need to breed people like we breed dogs,” he said. “We need to establish breeds for specific purposes. Why not? We do it not only with dogs, but with other animals as well— cows, horses— why not humans? It’s the obvious evolutionary step.”
“You mean that if for some reason we needed extremely tall geneticists, we would just cross Kareem Abdul Jabbar with, say, Marilyn?”
I used the example of his own wife deliberately and rather harshly, I thought. It was my experience that people who thought they knew exactly what was right for other people frequently didn’t see any reason to apply their panaceas to themselves and their families. But if I wanted to see Jacob trip all over himself explaining why my idea was lousy, I was disappointed.
He looked as if he were finally making progress with a C-minus student. “Exactly! The thing could have all sorts of applications in every area of human endeavor. Do you see that, Mr. Mcdonald? There is nothing, no job, no chore, no task, no condition, that we couldn’t very specifically breed people for.”
“Isn’t this a bit like Brave New World?”
“What?”
“The novel by Aldous Huxley. About the future.”
“Never heard of it. Lindsay would know— she’s the literary one.”
“Lindsay? You mean Marilyn.”
“Of course not. When would Marilyn have time to read novels? She’s like me. I mean, mentally she’s like me. Not nearly so good a physical specimen. Good idea to cross her with a basketball player.”
“You mentioned Lindsay as if you were still married to her.”
“Lindsay’s my mate. Perfect mate. Perfect complement. I looked for her until I found her and then I married her. And we bred.” His eyes actually got misty.
“What about Marilyn?”
“Marilyn? What about her?”
“Isn’t she your mate now?”
“She’s my wife. I needed one— mostly for Terry, you know. But how on earth could she be my mate? I could never breed with her. Don’t you understand? Marilyn has one of the top scientific minds in the country, but she lacks creativity. And beauty. And athletic ability. How could I possibly breed with her? I wanted a perfect child.”
“And Terry is a perfect child?”
“Perfect.” He got all misty again. “She was talking at eight months. Eight months, Mr. Mcdonald! Do you know much about children? Eight months! She could say whole sentences in perfect syntax. I taught her to read when she was three. And math, of course. She takes after me in that respect. She’s seven now and she can do calculus. But she takes after Lindsay, too. She had short stories published in children’s magazines before she started school— official school, I mean. We taught her at home, of course. Or I did.”
I didn’t know much about children, but it occurred to me that Terry was probably an unbelievably unhappy little girl, with a stage father like this guy.
“Is she beautiful?” I said.
“A perfect physical specimen. Always at least a head taller than the other kids her age. Way ahead of most kids in how fast she learned to sit up and walk and all that stuff. Extremely superior child. Just like I planned it.” He took a breath. “You probably wonder why I do what I do when clearly this is the most important work in the world today— establishing human breeding patterns. I’ll let you in on something— I’m not going to be doing it forever.”
“No?”
“I had to establish credibility first. I’ve won one Nobel and I’m going to win another for the work I’m doing now. Count on it. It’s a certainty. I had to have those credentials before I could get on with my real work. But I’ve been working on it all along. I found Lindsay and then we bred and then I started Project Terry.”
“Project Terry?”
“That’s what I call it. Don’t ever say it around Lindsay. She hates it.” He shrugged his genetically perfect shoulders. “But she’ll have to get used to it, I suppose. That’s what I’m going to call the book.”
“You’re writing a book about your daughter?”
He nodded. “Of course. I’ve kept detailed notes from the first. I’ll publish it sometime in the next five years, when she has the equivalent of a college education, maybe a few stories in the New Yorker. Who knows? She may have won her own Nobel by then. I’ve already got her working with me, you know. By the time she’s ten, she’ll be an above-average scientist, and a couple of years after that, she’ll be top caliber.”
“What about her illness?” I didn’t see any way to avoid bringing up the subject.
He looked infinitely miserable. He nodded. “Yes. She has… the susceptibility. Something went wrong.”
“You mean the susceptibility to the disease?”
He nodded again. Unbelievably sad. “Something went wrong. She should be a perfect specimen.”
“But surely a susceptibility of leukemia isn’t in the genes.”
“Officially, science doesn’t really know. But suppose it is? Then I’ve failed. Project Terry is a failure. She isn’t a genetically perfect child.”
As I might have mentioned, reassuring people isn’t my greatest talent, but this posed a particular challenge. Here was a guy whose daughter was dying and the thing he seemed upset about was that her dying interfered with his pet theory. What in creation was I supposed to say?
Before I could decide, Jacob started up again. “I have to fix her. That’s why it’s so important that I find her. Don’t you see that?”
I was beginning to. “The work you’re doing that you mentioned. Is it a cure for leukemia?”
“Yes, yes, of course. Of course it is. I’m the only one who can help her. The only one in the world.” This time the sad eyes overflowed and I was indeed stuck with a crying genius. I pretended it wasn’t happening.
“Your cure is ready? I knew Kogene was working on something big, but I didn’t realize it was quite this far along.”
“It’s there. The animal testing is done. We can’t market it until we do the human testing— but it works. Of course it works. I’d know, wouldn’t I? I’m Jacob Koehler. If I don’t know, who does? It works. It’s the answer— the smart bomb.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That’s how it works— it’s a smart bomb.”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
He waved a hand. “It’s not important. I doubt you could follow it, anyway.”
“You’re using it to treat Terry?”
“Of course, Mcdonald, of course. You don’t think I’d deprive my own daughter, do you? The FDA can’t come right in a man’s home and tell him what to do about his daughter.”
“Is she getting better?”
“Certainly.” He smiled. “She really is, you know that?” And then he remembered what had happened. “I mean, she was. She’s missed two treatments already. That’s why you can help me. If I make this public plea and someone has seen her, then I can get her back. Do you see how important it is?”
For such a handsome guy, he could really look pathetic sometimes. Could he really be so attached to an idea that he could get this miserable about it, or did he have some human feeling for his daughter, deep down? I didn’t figure now was the time to ask.
“I’ll be glad to do what I can, Dr. Koehler. But tell me something. Did Lindsay know you were treating Terry?”
“I haven’t seen Lindsay much lately. Usually Marilyn deals with her.”
“You didn’t tell her about the treatments? After all, she is the child’s mother.”
“We did talk about it. I remember. We talked about it the last time I saw her— when she brought Terry back.”
“That was the first tim
e you talked about it?”
“I think so. Yes. Yes, it was. She asked me a lot of questions about it, as if she hadn’t heard of it before. I remember I was surprised I hadn’t told her.” He smiled again, for the second time in our interview. “I guess I’m a little absentminded.”
“Did Terry’s doctor know about the treatments?”
“I’m her doctor.”
“I mean her pediatrician. She must have gone to one originally, when she first became ill.”
“Oh, yes, of course she did. Dr. Morgan Rumler at the medical center. Good doctor.”
“Did Dr. Rumler know about the treatments?”
“Of course not. What would be the point?”
“I was just wondering. Let’s talk about the news story a little. I presume everything we’ve said here today is off the record?”
“Definitely. I just want to make an appeal.”
“We’ll have to explain all about Lindsay and the kidnapping. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Why? All we have to do is say if anybody’s seen Terry, they should bring her back.”
I knew he was going to say that before he said it. I knew it partly because he was a genetic engineer and used to being the smartest guy around. But also because in the newspaper business everybody wants to tell you your job. Everyone knows exactly what should be in a story and what shouldn’t. The fact that you’ve written six or eight newspaper stories every day of your life for the past fifteen years and they’ve never written one cuts absolutely no ice. They also think that if a newspaper agrees to interview them, they’ve just been offered a public forum for their ideas or a free ad for their business or a guaranteed press release that’ll get them a better job. If the story doesn’t come out that way, they get pissed off.
I told Jacob we couldn’t tell people to bring Terry home without first saying she was missing and he said he didn’t see why not and we went around for a while. That’s the way it always is.
Finally he saw that nothing was going to get in the paper unless he gave in a bit, and so he did. That’s also the way it always is, and it’s very trying, all that wasted energy.
