“I’d have misgivings, but of course I’d cure them. Provided that I was absolutely certain that Drake and his computer were correct, and these really were the stakes, this is a simple trade-off to make. The world’s easiest trolley problem.”
“Trolley problem?”
“You’ve never done any readings on ethics?”
“What part about carefree geek physicist who loves science fiction and working with an alien visitor didn’t you get?”
Erin laughed. “Jeremy Bentham? John Stuart Mill? Those names ring a bell?”
“I’ve definitely heard of Mill,” he said. “But I couldn’t tell you anything about him.”
“These men came up with a theory of ethics called utilitarianism. The goal of which is basically the greatest good for the greatest number. In choosing between courses of action, this should be the guiding principle. A huge series of thought experiments have been constructed over the years to test this out. Many of these involve trolleys. These techniques are actually known as trolleyology.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Yeah, you tell me about an alien visitor and seventeen alien species, in seventeen locations, hanging out together in hollowed-out asteroids, and I’m the one who’s far-fetched. At least you can Google ‘trolleyology’ to confirm it.”
Hansen laughed. “I can’t say you don’t have a point.”
“Anyway,” continued Erin, “these trolleyology problems reveal some interesting facets of human nature.” She stared at him intently. “Let me give you a few examples. Suppose a runaway trolley is out of control and is coming to a fork in the tracks. You happen to be standing by a lever that can switch them. If the trolley stays on course it will kill five workmen standing on the tracks. If you cause it to switch tracks, it will kill a single workman. Do you switch the track?”
Hansen thought about this for a few seconds and finally nodded.
“Most people agree on this one. Even though you’re taking an action that will kill a man, you’re saving five lives at the same time.” She paused. “What if the five were strangers to you, and the lone person on the other track was your mother?”
“Wow,” said Hansen after a few seconds. “I’m not sure I can answer that.”
Erin smiled. “Sure you can. The answer is that in that case, you’d let the five men die, rather than flip a switch that would kill your own mother. Admit it to yourself.”
Hansen nodded, but looked troubled.
“This is what the majority of people say as well. Final one: Suppose you’re now above the tracks standing beside a very heavy guy. The runaway trolley is heading toward five people. You realize two things: if you jump in front of it, you’re too light to stop it. But if you push the heavy guy next to you down onto the tracks, his body will derail the trolley and the five will be saved. Do you push him?”
There was a long silence. Finally, Hansen shook his head. “No. I don’t see myself doing that.”
“Neither do ninety percent of people from around the world. It’s one thing to throw a switch. It’s another to throw someone under the bus—literally. But if you really think about it using pure reason, you should do it. In both cases one person dies so five can live. What’s interesting is that psychopaths are born utilitarians. Emotions or conscience would never come between them and the math. Two researchers named Bartels and Pizarro studied the ten percent of people who said they would throw the heavy guy onto the tracks. They found them to score high on the scales of psychopathy and Machiavellianism.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that for these types of decisions, you’d actually want to have a psychopath in charge. Anyway, this was just an aside. The real point is that the problem you pose is an easy one. I, and anyone else for that matter, would be willing to do anything—anything—if I was convinced I was preventing species extinction. The math in this case easily outweighs my issues of conscience, any possible weighting of right and wrong.” She paused. “But here’s the thing. I have to be absolutely convinced.”
“Makes sense.”
“But as far as I’m concerned, this could still be just a very elaborate hoax. And even if I was convinced Drake is really an alien, we still can’t be sure of anything else. His projections for our species. His motives. To a normal, the motives of a psychopath are impossible to comprehend. So if the minds of psychopaths are totally alien to us, what about the mind of an actual alien? How do we know anything? Maybe the virus is a cold virus to cure psychopathy.” She paused. “Then again, maybe it’s a virus that will wipe out the human species,” she added, raising her eyebrows. “And you’ve been lied to.”
20
HANSEN DIDN’T RESPOND right away.
Erin shifted on the bed, stretching her legs out while he considered what she had said. She continued to be impressed by him. She fully expected he would defend the alien he had worked with for years, but he didn’t do so immediately. She could tell he was searching his mind, and his emotions, and taking her challenge to Drake’s possible motives seriously.
Finally, he fixed a steady gaze on her and said, “All I can tell you is that I’ve come to trust Drake implicitly. And I have confidence that when you meet him, all of your remaining doubt will be wiped away as well.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said. “I really do. And speaking of meeting him, are you ready to finish explaining the instructions in his text message?”
“Yes. I’d read the message back, but I don’t have my phone anymore. Do you remember it?”
“Not the exact wording, maybe, but at least the gist.”
Hansen nodded. “Okay. So Drake wrote something to the effect of get to the MB—molecular biologist—in Colorado. He added that he would contact us there, forty-eight hours from when he sent the text, and that the guy would be expecting us. So Drake must have managed to get a message to him also.”
“We should contact this molecular biologist right now.”
“Can’t. Drake told me he was working with a genetic engineer in Colorado and had me memorize his address. But he wouldn’t tell me his name or phone number.”
“Compartmentalization?” said Erin.
“Compartmentalization,” agreed Hansen.
Erin pursed her lips in thought. “Drake also said something about starting right away when we got there.”
“Right. This is the guy he’s been working with to have the viral construct ready. Everything is set to go.”
“Does that mean if I were to tell him the proper doses required for each of the eight genes, he’ll know how to engineer them all so they’ll be expressed at precisely these levels?”
“If that’s what set to go means, then yes. I’m not a molecular biologist.”
“So Drake wants us to work with his genetic engineer to finish the virus immediately. Without necessarily waiting for him.”
“Right.”
“Which means he assumed that you could convince me to divulge the combination. He’s confident you’ll get me to overlook his unfortunate Hugh Raborn impersonation and join your efforts.”
“I suppose so,” said Hansen. He stared at Erin and spread his hands out in front of him. “About that,” he continued. “About convincing you. How am I doing?”
“You’re doing great. You’re as persuasive as they come. At this point I think everything you’ve said and believe are probably correct. But the penalty for being wrong about this is too high not to be sure. So I’ll give up the cure. But first I want to at least verify that the virus he’s putting it into is actually a cold virus, and not something more … deadly.”
“And how would you go about doing that?”
“Your molecular biologist in Colorado will have state-of-the-art genetic engineering equipment,” she said. “Which has really come a long way. You can build long chains of DNA to your specifications very quickly, using a device built for just this purpose. It used to be a lot more complicated—you’d have to piece together snippets of sequence fro
m various places, but now you can just synthesize it, base pair by base pair. And there are devices that can do the reverse, take a given stretch of DNA and tell you the composition—break it down to a long stream of A’s, G’s, C’s, and T’s.”
Erin finally noticed Hansen’s knowing nods and stopped. “I’m getting the sense you’re already familiar with this,” she said.
“Given my background, I shouldn’t be. But Drake sent me to a company called Seq-Magic in Houston to check out their new model; the Seq-Magic Ultra. So I actually got to see one of these devices in action. Drake wanted the best equipment available. The Ultra does both synthesis and sequencing.”
“In the same device?”
Hansen nodded.
“The equipment has come even further than I thought.”
“It really is amazing what this thing can do,” agreed Hansen. “It’s fast and insanely accurate.” He paused. “Drake did end up buying one. I only found out recently it had ended up in Colorado.” He gestured toward Erin. “But you were saying…”
“To verify this is on the level, all I’ll need to do is have your genetic engineer give me a sample of the viral construct he’s using. I’ll have your fancy device sequence it. Then I just have to have a computer compare the result to the known sequences of cold viruses, which are called rhinoviruses. There are differences between strains, but they’re slight—just enough to get past your immune system each time so you get a new cold every year. This will verify the virus is what Drake says it is.”
“Sounds easy enough,” said Hansen.
“Well, I oversimplified a bit. The rhinovirus is an RNA virus, not DNA, so the sequence will be the inverse, so to speak, of the DNA sequence. And Drake’s version will have been further engineered. Which means I’ll have to use an algorithm that can compare sequences and allow for interruptions. But the core of the sequence should be identical to known rhinoviruses. And the stretches that aren’t had better not match any known pathogens. If they do…” She paused. “Well, let’s just say that this would be a problem.”
Hansen spent several minutes trying to convince her that this would be an unnecessary waste of time, but he didn’t get anywhere, and finally gave up. “If you insist on testing, we’ll test. But I’m telling you, you have nothing to worry about.”
“Well, I guess we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves anyway. Because verifying the virus will be straightforward. The hard part will be surviving long enough to get to your address in Colorado.”
“I’m not worried about that either,” said Hansen. “Not given your skills,” he said appreciatively. He glanced at his watch. “But with respect to our next move, I think we should lie low for tonight.”
“I agree.”
There was a long silence.
Hansen looked uncertain. “So, um … I guess we’ll be forced to spend the night together in this room, then,” he said awkwardly.
“It’s the only safe thing to do,” agreed Erin.
Hansen blew out a breath. “I’ll sleep on the floor, of course.”
Erin smiled. “Of course,” she repeated firmly.
Erin Palmer had never been the type to sleep with a guy on a first date. Or even a sixth. But there was a first time for everything. And in her heart, she knew that before the night was through, no power on earth would keep her from confirming that Kyle Hansen’s physiology was 100 percent human.
PART TWO
We have here an unusual opportunity to appraise the human mind, or to examine, in Earth terms, the roles of good and evil in a man: his negative side, which you call hostility, lust, violence, and his positive side, which Earth people express as compassion, love, tenderness.
—Star Trek, “The Enemy Within” (Spock)
Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton
21
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, Captain Ryan Brock felt like shit as the helicopter he was in banked to the north to continue its trip back to Palm Springs. He was pretty sure he had taken more electricity in a sixty-second period than the entire power grid of the Eastern Seaboard. Four jolts in quick succession from a Taser set to maximum power wasn’t something he was eager to try again.
And now Steve Fuller was in his vision, projected in front of the lower part of his eye as a tiny image in the specialized glasses he was wearing under his headphones. Like bifocals, when he looked straight ahead his view was unobstructed, but when he shifted his eyes downward the tiny imagine of Fuller, only centimeters away, looked like it was projected on an eighty-inch screen made of air.
Big Brother? Very Big Brother, with a face the size of a car tire.
But even if Fuller’s face had been tiny, Brock would have no trouble telling that the man was not happy. Not happy at all. Probably worried about Brock’s health after the unfortunate Taser incident, he thought wryly to himself.
Fuller was in the back of a stretch limo, using a section of the lacquered bar as a table for his laptop, which showed Brock’s image and transmitted his own. Not unexpectedly, Fuller wasted no time on pleasantries. “Please tell me I’ve been misinformed,” he said icily, barely above a whisper. Brock had never known the man to explode or even raise his voice. It was when the opposite happened you knew you were in trouble. The quieter and colder his voice got, the more infuriated he was. If you had to lean forward to hear him, you weren’t going to enjoy the outcome. “Please tell me you didn’t lose everybody? Tell me that on the most critical mission you’ve ever led, with unlimited resources at your disposal, you and your teams didn’t go oh-for-three. Or was it oh-for-four? I may have lost count.”
Brock knew it was a rhetorical question, but he also knew it called for a response—and one that ignored the sarcasm of the question. “We were unsuccessful in all of our mission objectives,” he said simply.
“Let’s recap, shall we?” said Fuller, absently swirling a glass of unknown liquid in his right hand. “You let this girl, this Ph.D. student named Erin Palmer, escape from your men in San Diego. No, escape isn’t the right word. I think the word I’m looking for is overpower. She overpowered your men. And outmaneuvered them. She was playing chess and they were playing checkers. It was supposed to be the other way around.”
Brock fought to keep his face impassive. Yes, they had been outplayed at the heliport in San Diego, but their mission briefing had been woefully inadequate. Not just in describing the extent of Erin Palmer’s fighting skills but in the very nature of the assignment. It was presented to be as routine as a walk on the beach. She had agreed to an interview and was willingly, and happily, coming on board the helo.
But given the secrecy Fuller operated under, Brock rarely knew the reason for what he was asked to do. Which was just plain stupid. Why did Fuller have such a hard-on for this girl? Understanding what was going on, the bigger picture, helped a team understand the motivations of the people they were trailing or trying to capture, and enhanced their own motivations. It allowed them to anticipate the unexpected in many cases, or react better to it if they couldn’t anticipate it. Turning Brock into a pair of remote hands, without a brain, was crippling.
He had been told nothing other than Erin Palmer’s name, background as a scientist, and that she was not to be harmed. So when things changed, when the mission went to hell and the rug was pulled out from under, it would have been nice to know what the fuck was really going
on. Otherwise, Fuller had to know the options open to Brock’s team had been limited to the point of being nonexistent.
“Then your team let her disappear in LA,” continued Fuller, still barely above a whisper. “Just disappear. You knew exactly where she landed—in real time. You had more people hunting for her than hunted for bin Laden. And she just slipped through like Houdini. This is a fucking grad student, not Carlos the fucking Jackal.”
Brock didn’t respond.
“So I make that oh-for-two. But that isn’t the end of the world, is it? Because we know exactly where she’s going to be. And we even learn that Drake is sending a surrogate to the meeting. We even get you deep background on the surrogate.”
The helicopter Brock was in banked again and continued cutting through the cloudless blue sky.
“And both of them got through your trap? Both of them?”
“Yes, sir. I’m afraid so.”
“You’re afraid so. What we need to find out is if she’s just that good, or if you’re just that bad. Did I not make it clear just how fucking important this was?” he whispered, and if Brock hadn’t turned the volume of his headphones to their maximum level, he couldn’t have begun to make this out. “I know I didn’t tell you why they were important. But am I given to fits of hyperbole? Do I seem the type to alarm easily? To cry wolf?”
Brock shook his head, but didn’t reply.
“How many men did you have on site at the student union?” asked Fuller.
“We had ten,” came the reply. Brock had almost said, “ten of my best,” but had stopped himself from walking into that particular verbal trap.
“Ten,” repeated Fuller. “And how many in direct visual contact with the targets?”
“One. Only me.”
“Only you. So what genius decided that would be a good idea?”
The question this time didn’t deserve a response. Fuller knew full well it was Brock’s operation and he had made this decision.
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