The Chromosome Game (4 page)

‘Dress it up as an escape ship. They’ll buy that.’

‘You really think it’s come to that? — Getting people out?’

‘That’s what the NATO boys think. So let them go on thinking it.’

‘They don’t think. They panic … And the Russians?’

‘They’ll never have a gimmick like this.’

‘But they are in a panic?’

‘Sure. Hotlines don’t cure everything. Okay, they can take-out ballistic missiles in route. But there’s so much stuff orbiting up there by now —’

‘— Chinese stuff as well as —’

‘— Right. They only have to hit the wrong one.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Ricardo, you have to go to work on Dollenburg before one or other type of those damn Reds hits the wrong damn slice of hardware that’s orbiting up there.’

‘Or hit one of ours.’

‘Same difference. You get this rolling, I’ll push it through the Senate, they scare easy.’

‘Except don’t mention it’s Dollenburg.’

‘Right.’

‘Then who pays, Steve? … Costly project. Several billions.’

‘That’s only a fraction of the Defence Budget. Once this thing gathers impetus, once we get the full deal on Dollenburg’s pilot project —’

‘— We ditch Dollenburg.’

‘Affirmative. Then we take-off with a big whack from industry … Pledge massive government contracts and so forth. Not a doubt about it, they’ll play.’

‘Not if —’

‘— Of
course
we don’t say what the hell it’s for. What do you think I am? — Some kind of a nut?’

‘So we go to —’

‘— Heavy industry. Give it some crumby code name and, the hell, it’ll seem like some big step forward in weapon development. And in a way it is. Maybe the only one that can work. Yeah! Some new doom weapon thing, Ricardo. Keep the automobile industry going like crazy … And aviation. Promise lots of SSTs to keep Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas in the red for even longer. The banks love it. Huge overdraft charges and the power to foreclose. Keeps them in paranoia — nice and healthy.’

‘You’re thinking about leaking the true purpose to other departments? — What about the State Department?’

‘Only the cranks, the fringe people. They’ll nod wisely at a hint dropped on target —’

‘— Without quite knowing —’

‘— what the target is. Keep them guessing. So secret that people get shot, just for thinking about it. We heat them up and get the rest of the bread right here in Washington.’

‘For something unproven, Steve? — No one knows if it’ll work.’

‘Proved. It’s
proved
, Ricardo.’

‘Well, Dollenburg didn’t say a thing to me.’

‘My orders.’

‘That’s why he never published a Paper?’

‘That’s why.’

‘So you kept it back because of this deal?’

‘Yeah, I knew you’d come up with it sooner or later, matter of fact —’

‘— That’s cool! You sit here knowing —’

‘— how your mind works, Ricardo.’

‘That why you did not get onto Dollenburg direct?’

‘Partly. But also, well, I’m in an awkward position —’

‘— This new legislation you’re trying to push through the Senate?’

‘Yeah, but I started that before Dollenburg’s damn Jew-daughter married my son.’

‘I’ve heard they’re happy.’

‘So what? They won’t be when the new laws start working on their kids.’

‘According to you, their kids won’t be around much any more.’

‘Maybe none of us will. Then, again —’

‘— Wish I could read your mind, Steve. Sometimes I —’

‘Main thing is, the basic research is done. Plenty of R and D to implement, but we know it works.’

‘Viable semen good as new after three hundred years?’

‘Sure. Aryan semen is like multigrade. Runs as smooth as silk and no wear and tear.’

‘I never know when you’re joking, Steve.’

‘Nor do I.’

‘And the incubation cubes?’

‘Proved.’

‘Only using rabbits.’

‘Not only using rabbits.’

‘Are you saying? —’

‘Homo sapiens, and no flaws. Not one. Alive and kicking. All adopted. I have the records. No questions. Check it out with the CIA. Here’s a joke: CIA think these guys would make ideal material for their outfit.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they damn-well don’t know where they damn-well came from, that’s why. Scare them about immigration laws. Press-gangs, more or less. Join, or get with the niggers and the jews and the commies.’

‘— Alex Huckman will go out of his mind!’

‘That wouldn’t be hard.’

Ricardo gazed around the room. ‘Sir, I don’t wanna get personal, but you are running a tape on this?’

‘You know I don’t run tapes. They talk.’

‘Odd. I could have sworn … Hell, I get instincts for bugs, Steve. Could have sworn —’

‘— Forget it. What I’m handing you is the most confidential brief in history, and I’ll tell you for why, Ricardo.’

‘Sir?’

‘This Mission we’re discussing. Not quite what it seems. See, we need to make the Reds think we’re panicking. Get what I mean? We commission
Kasiga
and we leak certain … elements of it to the Soviet Union. Their agents check it out — interrogate some of the guys on the project, get what I mean? They then think we have no answer to their new ICBMs so we fix it so they hit the button. Get the idea? With our new intercept system — the one we did
not
leak during the SALT ball-game and its derivatives —’

‘— So they fire first!’

‘Right. End of Russian threat. We destroy their multi-warhead hardware up there in space, then dictate the terms.’

‘Kasiga’s the red herring?’

‘Check. But we have to
believe
in it, Ricardo. We have to be certain that any espionage penetration confirms that we have our sums right.’

‘But surely, they’ll build a duplicate.’

‘By my reckoning, Ricardo, they won’t have time. But they must find no flaw. Futureworld must be technologically perfect. Get that?’.

‘On the nose. Only —’

‘— Only what?’

‘Only your intercept system has to be even more perfect. If that goes wrong, well, the way you’re figuring the strategy,
Kasiga
is for real.’

‘We can stop those Soviet fireworks like Miss World stops the traffic. We have to trust each other, Ricardo. You do your thing, I’ll do mine. Then, finally, we stop crawling up Russia’s ass.’

‘Unless they have a counter-weapon, Steve.’

‘Ricardo. What do you think the CIA is for? — checking-out your downtown whores? … We act. Now.’

‘They won’t see through it?’

‘Not unless they can see through two inches of armour plate.’

‘Okay, Mr President. But until the planned leak is ripe on the tree, better not let this get out of the Oval Office.’

*

A.D. 2293 FEB 3 0001 55

The glow from the crystal display of the startime clock is green; and the only new development on this apparatus is that the last two digits, having hit zero in the first place, now count forwards. Flick … flick … flick …

There is poetry in all that ensues. It is as if the creators of this huge shipboard laboratory have been forgiven their shortcomings through the purging process of Time itself. A wandering shadow, in some way miraculously permitted to view and experience what is to follow, would experience only the sheer creativity in those who had, so long before, devised the miracle.

Miracle it is. For if there could ever be loveliness in electronically controlled machinery it is here. Indeed, we, the unseen shadow, are conscious only of love — the essence of procreation, the minutes spent by lovers before they conjoin.

Nothing less than this is to be synthesized, except that those who wanted children so much in their own era that they were prepared to die and be forgotten hundreds of years before they had issue … these men and these women were not present.

Instead, their spermatozoa and ova were sealed within a kind of honeycomb, an array of cube-trays which now lie, rather like a miniature high-rise building tipped on its side, in vivid perspective. Over each cube is formed a mucus-like substance, an artificial chrysalis steeped in organic chemicals. These are in a state of suspended animation; the double-helix of Real Life development will wind around itself once the nucleic acids held inert are released as a basis for each initial life-cell.

But first, the tiny, gelatinous partition between male and female cell shall be melted away. Live sperm in each cuboid compartment will travel less than a millimetre, and mate.

Much must happen before then.

It has begun. The last of the electric batteries — the much larger element in the sequence which has run for so long — has been triggered. This module generates just enough current to switch on the first of the micro-processors; and if this one fails then the next will do.

The first micro does not fail. It issues simple orders and these include the starting up of a miniature nuclear reactor right down the far end of the deck.

It will take some while for this reactor to go critical and provide power — not in the form of steam for cumbersome turbines, but pure electromagnetic energy which, by conversion, will emerge as nothing more nor less than a domestic electricity supply of modest power.

The multi-matings cannot occur just yet. Temperatures must be exact; humidity control perfect to within 0.001 per cent; the viscosity of the pseudo-membrane guarding each cube and promising the micro-chemical conversions that will produce RNA/DNA reactions must be maintained as exactly.

We, the unseen shadow, notice something else. The first of the larger computers — the one that had displayed the first unblinking green light — is propagating intricate instructions so that the pre-mating environment is curiously erotic. The effect is spacial, as if an entire universe has been compressed into an operating theatre.

The central processor of this — the smaller of the three fullscale computers — is mobilizing its arithmetic aids and peripherals. Magnetic-tape decks, much like tape recorders in appearance but manufactured from some of the most expensive alloys ever to be produced on Earth, are undergoing secret processes. What in fact is happening behind the front panels is the breaking of lubrication sachets by razor-edged solenoids. The recording heads, for so long cocooned in vacuoseal, are now exposed to the air and cleaned with drips of Iso Propyl. This must have two minutes in which to dry.

Shadowlike, we have a little time to explore prior to the next chain of events. We can go where we like, unimpeded by the enormous banks of hardware and storage units.

We cannot but be amazed. One section of ZD-One, fully a hundred metres long, is packed with freeze-dried food. This monumental storehouse is capable of preparing sustenance, not just in bulk, but in a sequence corresponding to the age in months and years of each pre-incubated Being in every one of the cubes; so that these initial food supplies are, in fact, arrayed in several dimensions: They can serve the numbers required at the specified times; they can pre-prepare the next meal to follow the ones already dispensed; they can vary the diet not just in time-sequence in tune with growth-rate, but, via feedback mechanisms implicit in the Genesis Program, according to individual needs. Who shall be vegetarian? — Which is allergic to normal flour? — How many will yawn at the sight of porridge?

There are the milk tubes, intricately valved, that run to the bank of incubators which occupy almost the entire length of the ship. These are in turret-wheels, rotatable so that the gentle handling devices, the articulated arms — at present in their sheaths — which will tend them can reach any of the cradles without disturbing any others. First these arms will use tiny tweezer-grips to lift out embryo-cubes and place them in the larger incubators. Umbilical supply tubes attached via synthetic membrane to each embryo must be handled with the delicate touch equivalent to the sensitive processes within a living woman. Such precision will be needed for this oft-repeated operation that the arms will be guided electronically by the intersection of four guide-eye laser beams. Yet these beams, however weak in energy, must not penetrate the forming embryos with energies exceeding just a few photons — a near impossibility … but Technology solved it.

We, the moving shadow, cannot help being awed. Curiously, we are not chilled by what we see. Our emotions are tuned to the expectation of newly-forming life. Oddly, we feel embarrassed; and soon we realize why. We are voyeurs, probes viewing the processes that occur inside a mother. All that is happening is healthy. We may not carp at the efforts made to overcome the absence of the human parents.

Once given life, real mothers will emerge from all this and foster the next generation … women — some strikingly beautiful, others rather plain. Some will have powerful intellects; others not. Some will lead whilst others will follow. Most will be viewed as potential mates. Among the men, some will possess specialist qualities; some a capacity for command; others an obstinacy to obey, or refusal to learn.