Terminal Event

by Robert Vaughan

  “A review of latest genetic evidence suggests some infectious diseases are tens of thousands of years older than previously thought and that those ancient diseases could jump between species of ‘hominin.’ Researchers are now suggesting that humans migrating out of Africa would have been ‘reservoirs of tropical diseases,’ diseases that resulted in the total extinction of the Neanderthal, who had developed no natural immunity to them.

  “Just as the civilization that placed these biological specimens into a lifeboat cast, not upon the ocean but into the sea of time, our own civilization may be facing a potentially terminal event. Perhaps there will be no negative results of this experiment. But it is also possible that there will be.

  “My question to this committee is, why take the chance?”

  When Damien returned to the hotel that evening, he called Ava.

  “I suppose you saw the hearings,” he said as he watched Ava’s face on his phone.

  “Are you kidding? The whole world watched. You look very good on TV,” Ava said. “And you are poised, and effective. If you ever get tired of being a biology professor, you can have my job as a TV commentator.”

  “Well, coming from you, my dear Ava, I consider that a compliment,” Damien replied with a smile.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Wait a minute, someone’s at the door.”

  “Be careful about answering it, Damien. There are so many kooks out there who are upset about this.”

  Damien carried the phone over to the door and stared through the little viewport. “No, it’s all right,” he said. “It’s Senator Felker.”

  Damien opened the door to invite the senator in, then he held the phone out so Ava could see.

  “Ava, meet Senator Felker,” he said.

  The senator saw Ava’s face and smiled at her.

  “Now there’s a face I’ve seen hundreds of times.”

  “Hello, Senator.”

  “Sir, I thought the hearing was over. Do I need to come back tomorrow?” Damien asked.

  “No, we won’t be needing you anymore. The hearing is over. Our findings will be announced tomorrow, but I thought I might give you a heads up.”

  “Is the news good, or bad?”

  “Good or bad is all a matter of perspective and history,” Senator Felker said. He smiled. “For you, I suppose, it’s good news. For me, as well, since I voted to support you. The finding of the committee is that there be a permanent motion to table the Emerson-Sherman bill. You may continue with this fascinating experiment.”

  11

  Five days later Damien was at The Surrogate House in Ava’s private room, sitting beside her bed. Doctor Scott had said that she would probably deliver today, and indeed, Ava’s labor pains had begun. Damien was holding onto the hand that was extended over the side of the bed.

  “Unhn,” Ava said, grunting as one of the pains struck. She squinted her face and squeezed Damien’s hand.

  “Are you all right?” Damien asked.

  “I was so anxious to do this, that I didn’t even think about this part,” Ava said. “It’s now apparent that I didn’t think this thing through. I’ve changed my mind, I’ve decided not to do it.” She winced as she felt yet another contraction.

  Damien laughed. “A little late for that, sister.”

  “I’d say so,” Ava said. “You’re going to stay with me, aren’t you? I mean, isn’t that what the father does?”

  Damien laughed as well. “Well, since the father of this baby died thousands of years ago, I guess I can stand in.”

  There was a light knock on the door, then Taylor Scott pushed it open and came into the room.

  “I think it’s time to get you into one of the delivery rooms,” he said.

  “One of the delivery rooms? I didn’t know we had more than one,” Damien said.

  “We have two now, with three beds in each room. I’ve called in help, because it looks as if all six will be delivering at exactly the same time.”

  “Exactly the same time? Isn’t that a little strange?” Damien asked. “I mean what are the odds that they would all six be delivering at the same time?”

  “You tell me, Damien, what hasn’t been strange about these pregnancies? Today is exactly twenty-one days after the embryos were implanted. Twenty-one days and you ask me if a little thing like all of them being born at the same time is a little strange?”

  Ava was moved from the bed to a gurney, then pushed down the hall and into one of the two rooms. Even as Ava was being pushed into one of the rooms Damien saw the others also being moved. There was a frenzy of activity among the attending doctors, and nurses.

  He knew it wasn’t right of him to feel so, but he was glad that Dr. Scott would be attending Ava.

  When all six mothers were inside, the doors were closed, and Damien walked back to the waiting room where he saw Adam Lewis and Walt Calhoun.

  “Glad to have you here with me,” Damien said as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

  “Yeah, well, we wouldn’t be any place else. I guess in a manner of speaking, we’re all the fathers in waiting,” Calhoun said.

  “I hope everything goes all right,” Lewis asked.

  “It will,” Damien answered as he added creamer to his coffee.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I don’t think they would wait all these years to be born, and then not make it through the simple procedure of child birth.”

  “My Lord,” Calhoun said. “I can’t imagine this. I just can’t get my arms around the fact that, in a few minutes we’re going to have six human beings who may have started their life’s journey even before recorded history.”

  “It’s fascinating,” Damien agreed.

  Just then, a nurse stepped out and announced that all the babies had been born.

  The three men started down the hall toward the two rooms that had been converted into delivery rooms. The door to the room in which Ava had been taken to deliver opened, and a smiling Taylor Scott stepped out into the hall.

  Damien raised his eyebrows.

  “She’s fine,” Dr. Scott said, anticipating his question. “In fact, they are all fine, and so are the babies.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “Yes, of course. All of you can come in,” he invited.

  Hurrying into the room, Damien saw three of the women holding babies. Ava was in the most distant bed and she looked up as Damien approached her. If ever the phrase, a beatific smile fit, it was appropriate for the expression on Ava’s face. She was holding the baby in her arms.

  “Damien,” she said. “Come and meet Michael.”

  “Michael, huh?”

  “I named him after my father. I know I won’t be able to keep him, but you and the others did say we could name them.”

  “Indeed we did,” Damien replied. “He’s a cute little thing, isn’t he? When we show their pictures, this should certainly shut everyone up as to whether or not they’re human.” He leaned over the bed and put his finger on the baby’s cheek. “Hello, Michael.”

  The baby smiled up at him.

  “That’s odd,” Damien said. “He smiled at me.”

  Ava laughed. “What’s so odd about a baby’s smile?”

  “This smile was in reaction to my touching him, it wasn’t a reflexive smile. As a reaction smile, it’s about six to eight weeks early.”

  Within minutes after the birth of the babies, the first story appeared, based on leaks from the medical staff to their press contacts.

  ANTARCTIC SIX BORN

  Taylor V. Scott, the presiding physician of the six surrogate mothers, announced the birth of the so called Antarctic Six. In a still unexplained phenomenon, the children were born exactly twenty-one days after the implantation of the embryos which, as everyone in the world now knows, were discovered in a golden canister buried far beneath the ice at the South Pole.

  “The deliveries were without problem,” Dr. Scott stated. “There were three girls and three boys.
The birth weight of each of the babies was exactly seven pounds and eight ounces.”

  By prior arrangement, the babies were separated from their surrogate mothers, and will be raised in a controlled environment where they will be monitored until they are adults.

  “Why do they have to be institutionalized so quickly?” Ava asked the next day. “It seems like I should be able to see Michael and spend some time with him. At least while he’s a baby.”

  “You can see Michael any time you want to, but we ask that you don’t spend any one on one time with him,” Damien said. “It’ll be best for the mothers and for the children if there’s no bonding. It would be particularly hard for the children to develop a dependency on their mothers, then to be taken away. On the other hand, they can’t miss what they never had.”

  “It just doesn’t seem right.”

  “Ava, you knew the ground rules before you came into the program.”

  Ava was quiet for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I knew. It’s just that, what I didn’t know was it would be this hard to walk away from him.”

  “It’s a natural thing,” Damien said. “Even though you have no genetic connection to the baby, you did go through the birthing process. You carried him just as if he were your own, and it stands to reason that you’d think of him as your baby. But consider this. There are surrogate mothers who do this for women who for one reason or another, are unable to carry their own children. They also have to give up the baby as soon as it is born, and in most cases, they never see the child again.

  “At least you and the other surrogate mothers were able to see and hold the babies right after they were born, and you got to name them. And you at least, because you live here, will see Michael as he grows up.”

  “Yes, I will see him, but I won’t be a part of him,” Ava said, obviously disappointed that she was no longer an intimate part of the process.

  The newborn infants were subjected to every intense medical and biological investigation imaginable almost from the very moment they were born. One of the earliest surprises was in the race of the children.

  “All six children appear to be an exact equal distribution of the three races,” Damien reported to the others who were involved with the project.

  “The breakdown is thirty-three and one-third percent white, thirty-three and one-third percent black, and thirty-three and one-third percent Asian.”

  “That sounds almost as if the racial mix was planned,” Stephen Urban said.

  “Oh, I’m sure of it,” Damien said. “I think there was nothing about these babies that was left to chance.”

  There were two other strange anomalies that were discovered.

  Doctor Urban was one of the many staff physicians engaged in monitoring the children, and he was particularly interested in testing the children to determine why there had been such a rapid gestation period.

  “It’s in their endocrine system,” Urban reported. “Their thyroid is producing an enormous amount of thyroxine.”

  “Doctor, you said ‘producing,’ and not produced,” Damien said. “Do you mean their bodies are still being flooded with growth hormone?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think it means they are going to grow at an unbelievably rapid rate.”

  “How rapid?”

  “From what we have seen so far, I would say that three days in the life of these children, would be equal to one year in the life of a normal child.”

  “Good heavens! You are saying that within two months, they’ll be twenty years old?”

  “Chronologically they will be two months old, but biologically, their age and appearance will be consistent with that of a twenty-year-old human.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but what you seem to be saying is that these children may have less than a year to live,” Damien said.

  Urban said, “I fear that may be true.”

  “Will their rate of mental acuity match their rate of growth?” Dr. Logan asked. Logan was another one of the staff biologists who would be monitoring the children.

  “I don’t know if it will or not, but that’s a good question. There’s something else unusual that both Dr. Scott and I noticed in our examinations,” Urban said. “When we saw it in the first child, we thought it might be some sort of abnormality. But we have found the exact growth on all six of them.”

  “Growth? What do you mean?” Damien asked.

  “Here, I have a picture of it,” Dr. Urban said. “This is the somatosensory cortex. It is the receptor for all sensory input, but this,” he pointed to a small ridge on the somatosensory cortex, “is not a normal part of the brain. As I said, at first we thought it was an aberration in their brain development, but it’s present in all six of the children. And, because of that, our thinking is that it may be something specific to this particular species.”

  “Species, Doctor?” Damien asked.

  “I have no doubt but that they are human, but they are definitely not human, as we know human. I think that’s obvious by their rapid growth as well as this intumescence on the somatosensory cortex.

  “It may be that they were genetically altered in some way,” Damien suggested.

  “If so, by who, and why?” Scott asked.

  “Obviously by whoever it was who left them for us,” Damien said. “We all agree that these embryos weren’t buried as some sort of end-of-life ritual. They were carefully protected, and buried in an atmosphere which would allow the cold to keep them viable. They were meant to be found. And they were meant to be found to leave a message.”

  “What sort of message?” Stephen Urban asked.

  “I think it was a message to let us know that there was someone here before us.”

  “That seems to me like a pretty haphazard way of sending a message, doesn’t it?” Scott asked. “When was the Amundsen expedition? Around 1910? 1920? What if someone in the Amundsen party had found the canister? They would have had no idea what they had found, they would not have been able to get them back in viable condition, and even if they had, they would not have been able to bring them to term.”

  “Yes, but neither did the Amundsen expedition have the capability of extracting the canister from the depth it was buried,” Damien said. “No, gentlemen, there was a great deal of thought given to this. Whoever left this message for us, and I have absolutely no doubt but that it is a message, purposely left the embryos so deep that it was reasonable for them to assume that whoever would have the wherewithal to excavate them, would also have the technical ability to cause them to be born.”

  12

  As there had been very little time to bond with the children, and because the women had signed in advance that this would be required of them, it wasn’t all that difficult to convince the surrogate mothers to leave. Their departure was also made somewhat easier by a payment of one hundred thousand dollars to each of them, the money provided by the North Star media billionaire, Marcus Worley.

  The very next day after they were born, the babies were moved from the Surrogate House to the Six House, a dormitory on campus that had been set aside as a nursery just for them.

  It quickly became obvious that a nursery was inappropriate, for within a month of their birth, the six children were the size of ten-year-olds. They not only advanced, physically, they were acquiring acuity and knowledge which greatly exceeded a normal ten-year-old. One of the things that caught the immediate attention of the observers was their facility for language.

  “I’m going to quit saying amazing,” Dr. Calhoun said. “That word is going to lose its meaning. But I don’t know how else to describe children who are chronologically only one month old, and who should still be in the new-born stage, but are walking around and communicating.”

  “What’s truly amazing is the fact that they can communicate with each other without speaking,” Lewis said. “I’ve seen experiments conducted with people who have shown interesting hints of telepathy, but tele
pathic communication between these subjects requires no tests, it is very obvious.”

  “Subjects, Adam?” Damien said.

  “Well, we can hardly call them children, can we?”

  “I see what you mean. I think we need to keep this quiet,” Damien said to the others. “It was bad enough that they were born within less than a month. If it gets out that they are aging at a rate of one year every three days or so, the riots we had at the beginning would be like Sunday school picnics, compared to what we might see.”

  “What about Ava?” Lewis asked. “She hasn’t seen them for a while but she’s still in St. Louis, and she is still a television commentator. Do you think we’re going to be able to keep her quiet?”

  “She has been anxious to see the children,” Damien said. “I’ve managed to put her off, but it’s getting increasingly more difficult. We’re going to have to let her see them before too much longer.”

  “Why should we do that?” Calhoun asked. “She’s a journalist, for crying out loud.”

  “That’s precisely why we should let her see them,” Damien said. “If we take her into our confidence, then swear her to secrecy, she will honor that pledge. But if we keep her on the outside, she’s going to start probing around, and we don’t want that to happen.”

  “I think Damien’s right,” Lewis said. “It’s as LBJ once said, ‘it’s better to have someone in your tent pissing out, than to have someone outside, pissing in’.”

  The others laughed.

  “Ava Glennon isn’t our only concern,” McElwain said. “We also have Marcus Worley to deal with.”

  “Why does he have to know?” Lewis asked.

  “Come on, Adam,” Calhoun said. “There is no way this project isn’t going to wind up costing us a lot of money—money that the university doesn’t have. And I can’t see us getting government grants for it without making a lot of things public. And if we make everything public, then there would be so much blow-back that I doubt we would even get a grant. Worley is our only source, and we owe it to him to keep him informed of everything.”