Countdown

by Jerry Ahern

  “Explain, Doctor,” Admiral Hayes said, her face expressionless, her eyes pinpoints of light.

  “Certainly, at least within the limits of my abilities. Cloning as we know, is based on the theory and practice that each cell of a living organism contains the entire genetic fingerprint. A cell from a finger, or almost anywhere in the body, for example, if grown under appropriate laboratory conditions into an entire organism could reproduce the host in complete detail. In my day, it was done with frogs and organisms less complicated than man, but was theoretically possible, in fact the subject of some excellent science fiction. I believe that Dr. Zimmer has perfected this process. Considering his skills, considering the time elapsed since my day and this, and the enormous medical and scientific strides taken, it’s hardly out of the question at all. At the least, my Family faces a personal crisis. In all likelihood, Zimmer and his self-styled son have placed themselves in a position where they will effectively never die. In a worst-case scenario, Zimmer might well have battalions of fighting men who were the subject of special genetic engineering, perfect warriors, each identical to the next and none indispensable because each could be replaced with his own carbon copy.”

  “Carbon?” Admiral Hayes repeated.

  John smiled. “An ancient means by which copies were made. A duplicate, identical in virtually all respects to the original.”

  “What you’re proposing would alter the course of warfare for all time,” General Wilson suggested.

  “Indeed. With his latest scientific weapon, if Zimmer wished, he could mount a war which destroyed the planet to the point where life could not be sustained, then through cryogenic Sleep—which we all know, my Family especially so—and his cloning process, he could awaken in some distant future and go on forever, merely giving armies time to commence growing two decades before his own awakening. He would win, ladies and gentlemen. Zimmer would realize the dream of every conqueror since the dawn of time. He would rule the world and stay around forever to run it, never having to leave it. When one body became worn or diseased, he’d merely download his latest recording from the brain into a waiting body kept in some type of stasis and, in the most literal sense, be born again.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “You’re thinking that’s what has happened to Sarah, aren’t you? That she’s been cloned?” John smiled, shrugged his eyebrows, sipped at his drink. The small bar in the officers’ mess was more elaborate than some of its onshore counterparts where Emma Shaw had shared a drink with a man, but no man like this. John Thomas Rourke was as much the stuff of preposterous tall tales and fact-based legend as Kit Carson, Wild Bill Hickok or Buffalo Bill, as much the heroic historical figure as George Washington, Daniel Boone or Teddy Roosevelt. When he didn’t answer her question about Sarah’s being cloned, Emma Shaw tapped him on the shoulder and he turned and looked at her. She looked him right back, saying, “Don’t you?”

  John’s fingers played with a thin, dark tobacco cigar, his lighter beside his drink. “Yes.”

  “Isn’t there some way you can tell?”

  “Yes, at least I think so,” he answered.

  “Go ahead and light the cigar. You’ve smoked them around me before.”

  “You’re sure you won’t mind?” John asked her.

  “I won’t mind your smoking the damned cigar! But, will you just tell me what’s happening? Please, John?”

  John shrugged his shoulders under the elbow-patched black military sweater he wore. Even though Emma Shaw saw no evidence of the fact, he would, of course, be armed; but, he always was. She was armed as well, which was strictly against regulations, of course. Only with a knife, a switchblade her father had given her, which she kept regularly in a pocket of her flight suit and now carried in the purse that was on the barstool beside them.

  “So, what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About Sarah! How would you tell, I mean?”

  “Very simple, really,” John answered, smiling indulgently at her, his high forehead furrowing just slightly. “If she’s Sarah, regardless of any programming that Deitrich Zimmer might have inflicted upon her, she won’t kill me. If she is a clone, she’ll possibly kill me. Either way, she’ll try. Zimmer wouldn’t have let us get her so easily otherwise.”

  “Easily!”

  “Emma, he’s probably got a half dozen of each of us—Sarah, me, Annie and Paul, Michael and Natalia. And Wolfgang. If you’d been with us in cryogenic Sleep in New Germany, he’d have a few spares of you lying around. Trust me on that. I’m learning how the man thinks. And, he thinks very well, however twisted his purposes. Either way, though, I suspect he’s counting on the fact that Sarah or her clone won’t succeed, but that I’ll be convinced enough that she is Sarah that I’ll come to him for a deal.”

  “Would you?” Emma Shaw asked him pointedly, picking up his lighter, opening it awkwardly, rolling its striking wheel under her thumb. She fingered the instrument as she closed it, thinking how smoothly, how effortlessly John made the thing make fire for him every time.

  “Yes—go to him, I mean. What I said to you earlier, about loving you. I meant that. And whoever the real Sarah is, she’ll leave me. You see, I’m convinced that the real Wolfgang Mann is the Wolfgang Mann with us. I had him scanned. There aren’t any microprocessors in his head, or at least nothing we can detect. The same for Sarah. And Wolf is too much like Wolf to be anyone else but who he is. It’s a gut-level feeling that I can’t really explain. Forgive my lapse from logic.”

  “Forgiven.”

  “Thank you. But, there is some logic at work. In order to reinforce the idea that Sarah is Sarah, so I’ll trust her and walk into Zimmer’s trap, Zimmer gave us the real Wolfgang. I think the assumption is valid. And Sarah might really be Sarah, or might not. Either way, when she attempts to kill me, and hopefully fails, I’ll have no choice but to go to the scource of her programming. He’ll try to take me, download my mind into one of the clones, at the same time programming the clone to behave with a certain set of responses which will make the clone obey Zimmer’s will. Then kill me, of course.”

  “Oh! Of course,” Emma Shaw said, nodding, not knowing what else to say to someone who so matter-of-factly discussed his impending death. “Then what?”

  “Well, I’d be dead, and he’d have the fake John Rourke run the world for him for a time, I’d suspect. Only logical, if one thinks like Deitrich Zimmer. But, you have to admit that it’s an interesting hypothesis. Would I still be me, only different, with a duplicate body and all of my own memories and thoughts and ideas, just a few extras added? And, if one discounts the extras, would I be me, truly me? Would Zimmer undo his own plans by recreating me?”

  “You lost me somewhere in metaphysics.”

  John laughed, sipped again at his drink, asked, “Sure the cigar’s not bothering you?”

  “It’s not bothering me.”

  “Anyway, it’s not all that into metaphysics. It’s merely advanced biology. I had a friend in the days Before the Night of the War who spoke about cloning sometimes. He was convinced that once we could find a way of dealing with the morality and dealing with the mechanics of recording the brain—and any sort of taped recording is nothing more than the capturing of electromagnetic impulses, which is what the brain runs on, of course—that cloning would eventually bring man immortality. He was right, my friend, that is.”

  “But what about the clones? Don’t they have rights as people instead of spare parts?”

  “If the brain is allowed to grow in a stimulation vacuum, it’s rather like a battery fresh from the factory. The old kind of storage battery.”

  “I know what you mean—about the batteries,” she added.

  “Fine. The battery doesn’t really do anything, nor does it have any capabilities—not even potential energy—until it’s charged. Once it’s charged, then it’s capable of a wide range of activities, depending on how it’s employed, for good or bad.”

  “But, they’re st
ill people.”

  “Well, exactly, but Zimmer doesn’t have to worry about questions like what’s moral, what’s immoral, because he’s amoral, and he has the technology to do what he wants. So, he has clones.”

  “And you think that no matter how he programmed the real Sarah, he couldn’t overcome her natural better instincts?”

  “No, not really. Sarah’s killed in self-defense. I imagine that Zimmer would have worked up some sort of scenario where I’m out to kill Martin, our son. Something like that, giving Sarah a morally acceptable reason to kill, in defense of her child. She’d have to be convinced that somehow I slipped a trolley—”

  “Slipped a trolley …”

  “Old expression—that I wasn’t playing with a full deck, had a few screws loose, like that?”

  “Right.”

  “Anyway, God only knows what Zimmer would have told her, but it would have to be something he planted in her as a memory, not just a story, so something wrapped around real events, not faked ones, just seen from a different point of view. He could have dragged Natalia into it, anything. Anyway, the thing about the real Sarah—and maybe a clone, too—is that I can read her moods, her body language well enough that I’ll have a little advance warning and be able to react in time to stop her. Whether she’s really Sarah or the clone, who, in a way, is really Sarah, too. I mean, if there is a soul—”

  “Metaphysics!”

  “Right,” he nodded, smiling, “then it would stand to reason that the soul would accompany intellectual awareness. So, maybe both people would be Sarah.”

  “One soul in two bodies.”

  “Hmm—odd idea,” John said, nodding his head again. “Either that, or the clone wouldn’t have a soul, or the clone would have a different soul. Then, where did it come from? Where did it enter the body? In the petri dish, as it were? Lots of tough questions, both philosophically and morally, represented by the mere concept of cloning. And, if you add the idea that a clone would be kept as a nonsentient spare-parts bank, well, then there’s really a moral dilemma.

  “And,” John continued, his eyes apparently riveted to the glowing tip of his cigar, “there’s another interesting idea. What if two distinctly separate but perfectly identical beings having the same cognitive experiences, etc., were able to function as one? They ever do a remake of The Corsican Brothers? It was an old film with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., I think.”

  “I don’t think so, but I know the story. You mean like that, in the movie?”

  “Not quite,” John told her, his eyes not yet abandoning the study of his cigar’s tip. “But a shared consciousness. If there’s truth to the idea of mental telepathy and similar phenomena, which I know for fact there is, since my daughter seems to have cornered the market on it, then it would only make sense that two identical beings would be able to communicate in such a manner. And that is how we should be able to defeat Deitrich Zimmer, with any luck.”

  Emma Shaw admitted it. “You’ve lost me completely.”

  One nice thing about John was that although he was utterly intelligent, he never rubbed it in. He didn’t now. “Let’s say that Deitrich Zimmer and I have one special thing in common—we both believe that it pays to plan ahead. Whatever he’d call it, however he’d phrase it, the idea is the same. Whether I have the real Sarah or a clone, there’s another Sarah available to him, up and running, fully programmed, all dressed and ready, just in case. Like carrying spare magazines for a pistol, a spare flint for a lighter, be ready for whatever contingency arrives by anticipating it in such a fashion that an appropriate response can be instantaneous. Good, common sense. He has common sense, no morality, no decency, but good common sense. And, so do I.”

  “So you could use Sarah, or her clone, as a telepathic link to Sarah or her clone or another clone, if it wasn’t Sarah in the first place or Sarah were—” She shut up.

  “Dead,” John said very quietly, but not matter-of-factly. “Yes. Communicate with that, that—that Almost-Sarah and reason with her, tell her the truth about whatever lies she’s been fed and gain her help from inside against Deitrich Zimmer. You see, to kill Zimmer, which I must do, the only way is to kill the clones—”

  “Oh, God—just taking innocent lives like that—”

  “I don’t see any choice, God help us, and not just his but—”

  “You couldn’t, John. I know you.”

  “I may have to kill the clones of Sarah and the children and Natalia, and even myself. Without the cloned recipient, even if Zimmer were to be able to download a recording of the genuine article’s mind, he wouldn’t fool anyone. And, without the recordings, the clones would be fully grown infants. I don’t know,” he added, taking a swallow of his drink, then another, draining the glass.

  “Aw, John …”

  “But the only way to stop Deitrich Zimmer from eventually ruling the world and employing his Nazi concepts of racial purity and totalitarianism, evil winning, the only way to prevent that is to destroy the original, the clones, the recordings of the mind. For that, I’ll need help inside. I’ll go to him, bring the real Sarah or her clone, whoever she is, making him think that despite my best efforts, he’s won, then get him. That’s why I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “I don’t understand, John.”

  “It wasn’t fair to tell you that I love you, because if everything worked out so that I survived, then fine, I could have told you then. But there’s a solid chance that I’ll die, and I mean really die. Taking the clones of myself with me. They have to be destroyed if there’s any chance that Zimmer could triumph. And, I’d have to go. With me dead, he could clone away to his heart’s content and he wouldn’t have my mind, wouldn’t have me, wouldn’t be able to bring about what I’m sure he’s planning. That’s the trouble with making people more important than they really are. All I ever wanted to do was ensure the safety of my family. I had no aspirations toward acclaim, statues like that God-awful thing on top of the Retreat back in what used to be Georgia and is now so vilely called Eden. There’s nothing special about me and there never was. I just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time, and because of that, people think I’m something—”

  “Just a second. Just one damn minute, John Rourke. You are special, damn it! You’re the bravest, the best—”

  “Come on, huh? I thought you really understood who I am and—”

  “I do. You’re the one who doesn’t, John. I’m no student of history, but I know enough about it to know that in the last half of the twentieth century, if there were real heroes, nobody ever learned about them. And there had to be firemen and policemen and teachers and soldiers, men and women who did what they had to do whatever the cost to themselves. But, it was an age when everyone with any power in the media—the dissemination of information—pushed the idea of collectivism, denied that individualism was anything at all, even existed. And, if you tell me that you’re not a hero, John Rourke, then I’ll tell you that you’re full of shit. Because you’d be believing the crap. They’re starting to push it again today, for God’s sake! That individual effort doesn’t count, but collective effort does.

  “My father,” Emma said, starting to light another cigarette, John lighting it (effortlessly) for her, “is a prime example. He just nearly went out and got himself killed doing something by himself, and he’s going to do it again. And I’m not going to try to stop him. My brother wants me to. Eddie’s telling me, ‘Gotta get the old man outa thinking he’s a friggin’ one-man army’ and shit like that. Nuts to that! Things don’t have to be decided by committees as long as there’s a human brain around, and individualism isn’t only the basis for all genuine achievement, it’s the damn basis for all thought! Don’t tell me you aren’t a hero, John. The world needs heroes, like you, because you’re real, and if you can’t look at what you’ve done in your life with any degree of objectivity, I can.

  “Twice, not just once,” she told him, tapping her nails on the bartop for emphasis, “you almost single-handedl
y saved all of humanity from totalitarianism, you survived the end of the world—twice! That damn statue of you on top of your mountain, back in Georgia, John. Whether you like it or not, whether it embarrasses you or not, you really did that! You shot down the last enemy helicopter with a damn .45 automatic! And the American flag was flying in the breeze behind you because you put it there because a friend of yours, a man who was another hero, died trying to do the same damn thing a thousand miles away when you destroyed the enemy’s chance of surviving the fire in the atmosphere! You’re history, living fucking history, John. When you touch me, I have a hard time not fainting! And I’m not the damn fainting type, John. Grow up, huh? Accept yourself for what you are, and realize what you mean to others.

  “If you go and get yourself dead,” she told him, her fists balled up now, her cigarette burning in the ashtray beside his cigar, I’ll be a fucking widow before I’ve ever been—before I’ve ever been fucked, damn it! I love you and so does your Family and you can’t just go off—” And then she shut up. She had to, because he was just what she said he was, a hero.

  John Rourke swallowed hard—she could see his Adam’s apple move. He stubbed out her cigarette and put his cigar into his teeth. “There’s more than an hour before the briefing resumes. I can’t agree with your exalted opinion of me, however flattering it would be, but I see a point you made.”

  “Which one?”

  “About becoming a widow before you’ve ever been—”