The Arcturus Man

  In the British tradition, or at least as it was perceived by Professor Krebs, it was vital that the children be inured to pain and discomfort. This would aid in focusing their minds and strengthening their self-discipline. The children were taken out into the Russian winter to stand at attention in the nude in the courtyard. Their small bodies were rubbed with snow, and if there wasn’t the proper response, they were drenched with water. Doctors would stand close by to ensure that they didn’t suffer frost bite or hypothermia. Their core body temperatures were never permitted to fall below critical threshholds. They were beaten with birch switches if they couldn’t accurately recite many pages from the Large Encyclopedia of the U.S.S.R., or even if they failed to stand at attention.

  Professor Krebs was convinced that superior beings didn’t need to sleep. Although he learned through his research in Germany during the war that they still lacked the science to manage complete sleep deprivation, the children at the Institute must not under any circumstances be allowed to sleep more than four hours and once a week they must be kept up all night. Learning to endure hardship and pain would focus their special abilities.

  Krebs admired Hannibal. He kept a small plaster bust of the Carthaginian General at his desk. It was said that the mighty Hannibal never sat down during the day as he prepared his mind and body to challenge Rome. He also slept little. Professor Krebs also studied the Skinyokai mummy at the Dainichibo Temple in Japan. A Buddhist monk had been able to focus his meditations to the point that he mummified himself. His mummy can be seen in the temple to this day. He had traveled to Tibet to study the Tum-mo meditation of Tibetan monks. The monks could sit in a cave all night high on a mountain in winter and have wet sheets placed on their naked torsos. They were able to raise their body temperatures high enough to dry the sheets without experiencing any ill effects from the cold. Scientific measurements confirmed that they were able to raise the temperature of their toes and fingers by as much as seventeen degrees. Kreb’s children learned Tum-mo meditation.

  A few of Krebs’s children died. They were too weak. It was simply natural selection. Krebs admired Darwin and reflected on his writings about those that passed. Many suffered a variety of permanent impairments. They were shipped back to their parents to be cared for. Only Jared wasn’t bothered by the Krebs treatments. The boy could do Tum-mo meditation even though he had never been taught. The cold had no measurable effect on the boy. He needed very little sleep. Krebs suspected that the boy could easily adapt to complete sleep deprivation, but he was unwilling to risk his discovery and the scientific accolades that were certain to follow once his paper was published. The boy’s recuperative powers were unimaginable. Small cuts healed themselves in hours, or at most, in a day. His intelligence was now beyond any known means of testing.

  Despite Jared’ mental age, he was, after all, just a little boy. He was frightened and he missed his parents. He asked about them constantly. At first he was whipped for asking, but the staff soon learned that being beaten had no effect on the boy. No one on the staff had ever seen him cry. It was assumed that he managed to turn off pain receptors in his body at will. He didn’t wince when he was struck. In time they stopped questioning the boy and the beatings stopped. What was the point of beating someone who wasn’t bothered by it?

  Jared lost all privacy. The Krebs Institute was intrusive in every aspect of his life. Even his evacuations were caught and measured. He lost all sense of modesty, not that a boy of five or six really had a notion of what that meant. He was naked with other children for hours at a time every day. That staff noticed that the boy was particularly interested in the girls. Despite his young age, he knew about reproduction and sexual intercourse from his readings.

  Every minute of every hour was managed. Some of the children were much older than him. The girls seemed to have the most difficulty with the total loss of privacy, especially the older ones. A few girls began to menstruate early. Some were in their teens. They would yell at Jared when he stared at them too long. It was difficult for anyone to remember that he was only a little boy—a very little boy. A few of the girls gossiped that he was actually a dwarf pretending to be a little boy.

  Professor Krebs was casually amused by the boy’s curiosity about sex. He arranged for Jared to be intimate with one of the older girls while they observed, but the experiment was quickly abandoned once it was determined that his physical maturity had not yet caught up with his intellectual interest in females. Still, Krebs made a journal entry to redo the experiment periodically to find out when he reached puberty. He was convinced that Jared would reach sexual maturity early.

  Some of the staff secretly sexually abused most of the older girls and a few of the boys. Everyone knew that the children would never tell. They never did. The children knew what the consequences would be. Most of the children never thought of telling. It was impossible to know what was prescribed by Professor Krebs and what was an invention of the staff. The children simply obeyed whatever orders they were given. Krebs knew nothing of the abuse until one of the older girls became pregnant. She was forced to reveal what had been done to her and by whom. Krebs issued a strict memorandum the next morning prohibiting any such conduct in the future and he dismissed the offending staffer. In truth, however, he really didn’t care.

  The only time that Jared had privacy was at night. The children were allowed to sleep from midnight to four in the morning. They slept in small military cots. The cots were no more than six inches apart. They slept directly on the canvas. They were given one pillow and one coarse military blanket. Once in bed, they were not permitted to get up until morning. Not even bath room needs were permitted. They had use the bath room before they slept. If they got up, they were allowed to use the bathroom, but they would receive a beating.

  As the other children slept, Jared would pull the blanket over his head and form a small hidden tent. It was his secret space. Sometimes he wrote words in the air in this secret space. These were private words and thoughts that no one else could see and no one knew they were written. Sometimes he worked on mathematical problems. Sometimes he wrote entire letters to his parents. Sometimes he cried, but these were silent, dry, private moments that no one else would ever know about. For a while he prayed just as his father taught him, but in time he stopped praying. It had no demonstrable affect on his life. He decided it wasn’t rational. He never made a sound in his secret space beneath the blanket, but he would speak in his mind. Gradually, he learned that he could hear the secret thoughts of the other children. They all had secret places they hid in.

  Jared especially liked mantras. Professor Krebs taught him mantras, but Jared had his own. He would recite a Latvian folk poem his father taught him. He recited it hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times.

  “Burn a candle, burn a splinter, dark is my little room. In comes my loving mother; now bright is my little room.” And then Professor Krebs made a life-changing mistake. He was increasingly impatient with his inability to measure the boy’s intellectual level. He now had no doubt that, at the very least, he had another Newton under his control. Perhaps the boy would surpass Isaac Newton. Jared had just turned six and had independently invented the calculus. Krebs wasn’t certain how independent it was since someone may have shown him a text book, but no one in the faculty would admit that it had ever happened. Perhaps it was independent. What did it matter? Newton was in his twenties when he developed infinitesimal calculus. Krebs’ prodigy was barely six. What wonders would the boy discover by the time he was in his early twenties?

  The problem was that the boy’s abilities began to exceed the academic abilities of his meager faculty. They were lazy dullards. His requests for better faculty were ignored by Moscow. He heard about a new program at M.I.T. in the United States that specialized in educating very gifted children. If the children passed testing, they could even be admitted to the university. If he sent the boy to a Soviet university, his discovery would certainly be stolen by jealous rivals. Worse, it wa
s well known by anyone with eyes that the program committees were controlled by Jews. He was certain he could manage the boy in America. He couldn’t have been more wrong. He applied for an exchange program and his application was approved by Moscow and Boston. Krebs’ visa to the United States was not.

  He led the Americans to believe that the boy was the product of Soviet genetic engineering. He claimed the credit for the program and submitted a spurious scientific article for publication about his accomplishments. It was a foolish boast and was the single reason why he lost control over the boy. The Americans believed Krebs and now refused to return him to the U.S.S.R. for further experimentation. The parents were deceased and the Soviet Union could not produce any living relatives. Krebs’ vanity had been his undoing. It eventually cost him his career and his apartment in Vilnius. Krebs was discredited by his peers. Krebs died in poverty in 1988 in a small room he rented in Vilnius. He was 83 years old.

  By the time that Leningrad was renamed St. Petersburg in 1991, the name of Krebs had been expunged from virtually every record. It was like he had never existed. But, of course, all of his children remembered him for the rest of their lives. Jared remembered him the most.

  Russia –December, 2002

  Latvia gained its independence in 1991, In 2002, Jared—he was no longer Jorens—returned to Latvia for the first time. He visited his parents’ graves. He reclaimed his father’s farm. It was a lengthy legal process, but now Jared had money and hired a renowned Latvia lawyer, Peter Jurjans, to handle it all. He accepted a Latvian passport to establish his identity and that he was born in Latvia. That was an essential step in the inheritance process. Getting a farm that had been a collective was not an easy matter.

  On the same trip he took a train to St. Petersburg and found the stone building that had been the Krebs Institute. It had been converted to apartments. All traces of the horrible experiment were gone now. He visited some of the neighbors on Grazhdanskiy Prospect, but no one would talk about Professor Krebs. The Institute was something they wanted nothing to do with. Moreover, they didn’t want Jared to tell them anything about it. As far as they were concerned, Krebs and the Institute never existed. Jared could find no trace of Krebs.

  Jared didn’t fully understand the concept of hate except in its strictly intellectual sense. But if he had been capable of feeling white hot hate, Professor Krebs was hated. Krebs had stolen his youth and had stolen his parents. He made Jared the man he was far more than his biological father. He hated him for that. Jared could turn off pain when he willed it, but it was far more difficult to deal with emotions. He had no difficulty in mimicking feelings and all common human sensibilities, but to feel true emotions was extremely difficult for him. When he did feel, such as at his parent’s graves, it was like there were two Jareds. One Jared didn’t understand why it was important. He hadn’t seen these people for more so many years. Although his memory was vivid back to an age of one, his memories of Karlis and Erika were only for a brief four year period. The other Jared grieved. The other Jared cried silent, dry tears as he remembered the love and kindness of these two people. He longed for the warm embraces of his mother and the safety and security of being in the arms of his father. The two Jareds were ripping him apart.

  Jared knew better than any scientist or doctor who had ever examined him or tested him who he was and what he was not. For the first time since the dawn of man, since the Southern Man, since Australopithecus erectus emerged, a man was born who was a new species of human. There was no one else like him. He was alone. He had genetic memories that went back eons, but he had no irresistible drive to procreate. The programming that kept the human race going for millions of years has now missing. Jared didn't select women on the basis of a subliminal urge to find a woman who could best bear his children and ensure the survival of his DNA. Feminine pheromones still fired up his libido, but reproduction played no part in his decisions to have sex. He knew who he was. He knew he represented a colossal leap in human evolution. Although the Krebs Institute had no understanding of genetic engineering, Jared could speak the language of his own DNA.

  One time he traced his mitochondrial DNA and compared it with a world data base. His many mothers had lived in the Baltic region for many centuries. A yet older mother had come from an island off the coast of Greece, Euboea. He attempted to trace his Y chromosomes, but the data base was still being developed. He was curious but otherwise was detached from the findings. But the other Jared pined for his heritage and to know his roots. The unfeeling Jared was certain that his was the first great leap since the Southern Man walked the plains of Africa. But he felt no kinship with that little primate. Jared knew that he was totally alone. Both Jareds were alone and would forever be.

  Chapter Four – A Small Town

  Bonn, Germany – 25 May 2013 Late Afternoon

  Sasha Sergeyevich Penkovskiy left the Bonn train station in a hurry. A light spring rain had just stopped. The streets were glistening. It was a relatively short train ride from Frankfurt but he had been traveling for two days since he left Moscow. He was tired. He had been, however, looking forward to a trip to the Rhein Valley.

  He liked Germany and Germans. For better or worse, they were a people who changed the course of the river of history from time to time over the past three thousand years. Sasha prided himself on his impeccable German and used his language skills whenever he could. He often dreamt in German.

  Sasha was the First Political Secretary of the Russian Embassy in Berlin. Officially, he was on vacation. It was a little chilly in Bonn. He wore a heavy Russian suit, poorly sewn but very warm. The Rhein Valley didn’t get satisfactorily warm until the beginning of summer. His top coat was an old Commissars coat. It had been his father’s. Sasha was a man in his early fifties who knew how to be thrifty. He wasn’t the least bit sentimental. Russians are notorious for being sentimental—but not Sasha. Sasha was from the privileged class and they never get over-romantic. It just wasn’t done.

  He stopped at a store front window from time to time to look into the reflection to see if he was being followed. He would never turn his head to look behind. Never! His tradecraft was second nature to him. It came as easily as breathing.

  “ Gott sei Dank,” he muttered. He was thankful that the walk to Kaiser Strasse was only a few minutes. He was tired.

  “Krieg sei Dank, Sasha,’ said a voice behind him.

  “I was wondering who was following me.”

  Sami ignored him. “There is Konditorei few doors away. We should buy pastries for meeting,” said Sami in bad German.

  “I don’t think we have time for that Sami. I’m sure we will be able to find something sweet in the club. Anyway, how have you been?” asked Sasha.

  “Not well. My heart. Doctors idiots. All of them. Man who is only seventy-four should not have to worry about heart. My father lived to be well over hundred.” “I am sorry to hear that.”

  Sami knew that Sasha’s wife was a doctor. Russia had more doctors than peasants, or so Sami would say. Sami Zhidov was a Bulgarian Jew who survived all of the anti-Semitic purges in Russian, going back to the Stalin era in the early 1950s when he was a street hooligan. He killed off his persecutors. By hand! If there was time, he tortured them before the Coup d' Gras. In dealing with his enemies, he always started by first killing children and wives. Then he would hide. This didn’t intimidate the target, it emboldened them for vengeance. He counted on that. Blood feuds were common in that region. Sami knew all this. It was carefully calculated and patient terror. When he came out of hiding, he would kill off another family member and then hide again. In time, he would finally kill the target. This cycle was repeated for years until, eventually, everyone was afraid to challenge him. They knew what Sami would do. He hides no more.

  Now he was almost 75. He was short, corpulent, hirsute, and old, but Sami didn’t feel old. His father didn’t stop farming until he was 91 and only then after he had a major stroke. His father continued to help out on the far
m until he died at 103. Sami was no farmer. Rather, he had wanted to be a great wrestler. He had a pantheon of famous Bulgarian wrestlers to emulate, especially Nikola Petrov the Great. Sami excelled at wrestling the short time he was in school, but being not quite five feet six inches, there were limits to his physical abilities as he took on opponents in increasingly heavier weight classes. He was both scolded and admired for being a dirty fighter. He was briefly admitted to the State Wrestling School in Sofia but was later rejected for being too small, if not for gouging out the eye of a schoolmate. He worked hard at bulking up. He was proud of being heavy. He never regarded himself as being fat. Wrestling was a good breeding ground for being a thug, and at that, he excelled and prospered.

  Today, his crime realm stretches across six time zones, not quite reaching the Pacific… yet. Barely educated, Sami had a natural understanding how threats and extortion can make any business prosper. Image is everything. He weighed almost three hundred pounds and sweated profusely no matter the temperature. He was morbidly ugly but turned his appearance into a professional asset. His body odor was something that people who had to deal with him learned to get used to. He enjoyed making people uncomfortable and worked at it. His grotesqueness was a well-honed weapon.